SPIRITUAL BOYFRIENDS IV
Digital culture; Body and consumer society
Political / economic power
Metaphorically speaking, the internet has come to be understood as a kind of collective intelligence, as a space of desire, of release of impulses, as a drug or a collective psychotropic, as the realization of the dream world, as a world of liberties where there is the possibility of sexual extravagant realizations, where there is a relaxation of moral norms, where the soul (understood as a divine entity, volatile, virtual, informational, energetic, not contained by physical form) liberates from the materiality of the body. Within these virtual spaces, power operates through a more sophisticated form, which is no longer based on the control of disciplined bodies but operates through the excitation and stimulation of desires. The control-repression binomial would thus be replaced by the control-stimulation binomial, through which it is attempted to unleash a desire that can be supplied through consumption(1).
Spiritual practices, such as yoga in relation to the welfare society and the culture of therapy and beauty, through cyberspace have found a new means of immaterial existence that transcends the limits of space and time and that materializes in consumer products on one's own practice, discipline and on all the objects that revolve around them.
This contradiction that maintains the virtual space of materializing and dematerializing the body, is what makes the modern yoga practitioner can also be understood as a kind of cybernetic transmutation of the "self", which the scientific historian Donna Haraway calls hybridization of the cyborg(2). For the cyborg, the boundary between organism and cosmos becomes blurred, the body becomes material and immaterial through cyberspace, and this contradiction allows for an ironic and blasphemous understanding of the relationship between fiction and physical reality, subverting the culture-nature binomials. , organic-inorganic, animal-machine, truth-fiction, soul-body, material-immaterial.
Soto Flechas, Lisandro (2014) El ciberparaíso: magia, espiritualidad y misticismo de internet
Alter, Joseph S. 2004. Yoga in Modern India. the body between Science andd Philosophy. Princeton University Press. Princeton and Oxford.