Why have emptiness , communication , visualization and body been permanent topics of interest ever since the end of the 1980s? Are these words only metaphorical concepts for postmodern theoreticians when they want to argue about the works derived from various cultural theories? Obviously, emptiness and communication, visualization and body are closely related. But they are neither binary oppositions nor in the dialectical sense of the synthesis of contradictions. Their connection stems from the structural fourfold of the media age. Fourfold here simply designates the cluster of postmetaphysical terms/words. The identity of the contemporary world is determined by the place (topology) of difference. We should be able to say that the same in the differences hence makes the concept of identity an empty concept (flatus vocis). So the term might be empty when a real object is missing. If it is possible to enumerate anything covering a word such as culture, then it might take the fluid markings of a group’s or individual’s lifestyles.

One of the most important novels of the twentieth century, Musil’s The Man without Qualities, already in the title describes what is at stake here (Musil 1995–1996). The term emptiness signifies that the subject in the new relationship has squeezed the substance. That matter of things, therefore, means that the concept of a man now no longer has its substance. He is “without qualities” as soon as his spiritual substance is taken away. It focuses on how in a postmodern age the man should be considered and thought of: he is simply the mental-bodily subject of social relations and the cultural order of meaning. From this perspective, the identity is just that amazing search for the lost ground under the feet. Although the subject denotes etymologically what is sub-taken, and the substance that is sub-divided, the subject without substance seems like a body without a “spiritual eye”. No doubt it is visually fascinating, but at the same time its new identity might be nakedness with no other “core”.

When we ask what makes the identity of a contemporary nation, the answer will always be the same and performed by listing its attributes: language, religion, art, customs, myth, memory. So the essence of the human in the world lies in the process of being disassociated from all of this and is dependent on its political subjectivity. Without this, he was deprived of his right to be present in the world. The power of political construction (the subject) decides on the deconstruction of national features at the time of the global order of nation-states. In the global order, identities are social and cultural constructions. They are not historically immutable, but change guarantees their survival. With respect to these facts, identity should be constructed in the process of developing its differences. The same or dialectical enframing evolves to a higher degree of equivalence in differences, or shows in all of that which Heidegger calls “stability in change”.

Precisely, we can say that the same (identical), which is the very concept of identity referring to the impossibility of further sharing, might be represented by a figure of the prism. Through it, light passes through different angles. The observer no longer sees the whole of the light, but only the reflection in objects. No doubt, reflections like fractals of light constitute a whole picture that opens to the observer. But it is not someone who constitutes a picture; rather, they might be constituted by it. The image of a man in Greece, the Middle Ages and in our digital age could be the same as that of a man as a being who creates images related to a subject. Obviously, regarding the way in which such an observation works, there are only two strongly conditional “analogous” views—“subject” and “object”. It will be clear from this point that the image and the cognitive turn are respectively taking the place of the contemporary image of the world. The phenomena are not shown directly, and the observer could not be in the position of a mere observer. Therefore, the subject is completely changed by the act of perception. We know from the representatives of quantum theory that observing at the same time changes the observer, and from theoreticians known as epistemological constructivists in their current investigations concerning the role of technoscience and cognitive patterns in shaping the mental scapes of the Third Culture.

The emptiness makes the underlying ontological structure of the Being in the time of the “eternal present” (Paić 2007a). In any case, the implosion of information in the digital age creates the necessity of interactive communication between beings. They have a role of active participants in the network of events. Communication becomes, in addition, informatically and technically produced. The condition of communicative capability should be the visualization of information. A picture that is generated by a technical or digital means designates an artificial image immersed in virtual reality. It does not appear in “living bodies” as living images at the beginning of the process of developing new media (film). The body of life might be constructed in mediascapes. It could be named the virtual body of life itself as the emptiness of visual communication that precedes all other forms of human social and cultural relations (Paić 2008). The fourfold of emptiness, communication, visualization and the body corresponds, by analogy to the fragmentary identity of the contemporary age of the image of the world, to an empty place of the imaginary, symbolic and Real in the construction of the world of the media age. The scheme includes the imaginary, symbolic and Real because it has a direction to Lacan’s notion of the structural relationship between the unconscious and the language that articulates the world as the horizon of meaning (Lacan 1996). Imagination is always representing merely the pure empty fantasy. So the symbolic might be the empty meeting point of the signifier, the sign and the signified all the way. From that viewpoint, reality does not mean a distorted image in the mirror as in a camera obscura, as Marx has conceptually visualized the notion of ideology (Mitchell 1987: 168–172), but the virtually generated space–time events of anything that exists. The matrix of the image precedes any possible imagination, because the generated circuit of infinitely multiplied information is performed by a “new” technological reality.

As in the age of global equilibrium of all cultural differences, the question of identity in a certain way becomes a question of overcoming the boundaries in the logical, historical and real world of events, so undoubtedly the locution of what we call the world at the same time refers to the complex recombination of concepts–metaphors from physics, information theory and information technology. Additionally, it relates to something self-explanatory that simultaneously gets contoured, which is the most difficult to contemplate regarding the status of the world’s worldliness. It goes beyond all limits of the logical-historical order of meaning. One cannot even ask about it in a traditionally metaphysical way. Nothing can be expressed about its uncanny nature, there is nothing to learn from that what, because metaphysics on all its historical occasions performed that something determined as accidental, mere second substance (e.g. res extensa, as philosophically articulated by Descartes) or an extension of nature, shape, matter. No doubt, it was always defined as something accomplished, never autonomous and never having a relationship with a higher order of meaning in which soul (psyché) and spiritual are operative.

This shows what emptiness, communication and visuality are in the contemporary age—the body as an image or medium. We do not assume that the body is not here a set of physiological properties and organs. It is neither an automatic nor a mechanical circuit, as it has been considered by modern rationalist metaphysics from Descartes to Malebranche, and it has been based too on a notion of nature and especially of animals. Subjectivity, in the philosophical sense, denotes the act of self-expression of the mind as a constructive power to exclude all other determinants. So the body does not think, though the brain has the role of the central organ of thought in the body. Hence it seems obvious that the body always signified only the surface, the externality, the object, the mediation between the spirit and the soul, the visible field of manifestation of the so-called inner forces and processes. Instead, nowadays we are witnessing, at full scale, the ecstasy of emotionality. With the help of cognitive psychology, contemporary emotional intelligence should be considered more important than intellectual development as a logical-abstract network of learning the symbolic structure of the world. It can all be justified in the rebellion of a disdained body and its historically “lower” functions in understanding the world at large (Damasio 2005).

Indeed, it will not be uncommon to argue that the word/concept body in the 1980s has been completely depleted from the speech of the basic words/notions of metaphysical history, as it were the spirit and the soul (Assmann 2008: 93). If the spirit (logos, mind, Geist) lies in the centre of philosophy to its end in allocution in the positive sciences, and the word soul (psyché, soul, Seele) descends into the inner, dark and unrecognizable field that was the beginning of the age of psychology and psychoanalysis, then the body gained its ecstasy beyond the meaning of the new order of the social and cultural practices of the repressive desublimation of the 1960s. The body is, after all, exceptionally articulated as a series of discursive practices. In that sense, the word as the basis of the text signified the beginning of a “metanarrative” about the body in Western culture as the outcome of modernity. We can talk about several different discursive practices. The new concept of culture as an identity by using them is immersed in the world itself. It should be emphasized that the term “world” has always been linguistically articulated in the medium of society and culture. The world is revealed in the horizon of meaning through language. In this way, the world marks openness as far as the possibility of a singular change of assemblage of matter (environment, beings, things) is concerned. Having a world does not mean, however, to be a disposition to some outside space–time of the world as its mere function or service to someone outside the world. To be open in the world means to have its “nature” that is not predetermined by externality, which is autonomous per se.

The “world” of contemporary art from the moment of the appearance of the historical avant-garde in the first half of the twentieth century is reduced to the social revolution of life. We must not forget that this turn does not diminish to create a new world, but only to the problem of the social revolution of the world of life. The difference between the world and what belongs to the fragments of society is therefore almost ontological. However, art wants to create a “new society” rather than a “new world”. Until today in the works/events of contemporary art, society appears with the object and the reference field of its activity. Even today, many contemporary artists unproblematically use the early avant-garde procedures to bring something subversive to an artistic event such as the performance of a living body, replacing classical notions of aesthetics such as beauty and the sublime. To prove this assumption, it will be sufficient to refer to the usability of the key syntagm of the neo-Marxist theoretician and contemporary artist Guy Debord, the society of the spectacle. As we know, it encompasses a society of commodity fetishism of capitalist production, with the disappearance of the usable value of goods in favour of their exchange or symbolic value. The sign of identity in the society of the spectacle constitutes the media, which means the visual communication between objects as a mutual exchange enables the assemblage of things. Who is the subject of the society of the spectacle? The answer is no one else and nothing else than the body as the spectacular posture of what is left of the human (Debord 1994; Best and Kellner 2001). The remainder remains i...