ABSTRACT
This chapter is an attempt to read across two contemporary subcultural responses to the body: those to be found in body-modification practices (especially so-called ‘modern primitivism’) and those associated with cyberpunk and posthumanism (so-called ‘high-tech subcultures’).1 My argument is simple: that at the start of the twenty-first century, we are caught between two contradictory impulses, or forms of ‘norm transgressing body work’ (Pitts 1998: 82), figured in the embodied practices of these subcultures – the dream of ‘leaving the meat behind’ and living as pure bits and bytes in cyberspace, versus a nostalgic reembodiment which stages the modified body as an expressive and sensuous medium of communication and reflexivity. As Tiziana Terranova (2000: 271) puts it, in the future ‘[the] human species will move either in the direction of an intensification of bodily performativity or towards the ultimate flight from the body cage’.
