In a second section, I shall widen the divide separating a tactile aesthetic from a visual one by returning to the topic of the body image. Specifically, I shall enlist Davies' work in a continuing critique of the reduction of bodily experience—here, paradigmatically, of the body's fluid interface with space——to the body image. Insofar as it opens a nonrepresentational and nonvisual affective and proprioceptive experience of the body, Davies' work once again brings to material fruition research in science and philosophy—in this case, by illustrating concretely how the living body exceeds the boundaries of the skin and encompasses parts of the environment.
For this reason, I argue that Davies' work expands the concept of worldskin" in a way that addresses the complexity of our embodied experience of coupling to the contemporary technosphere. Specifically her work deploys the confusion of self and space constitutive of the condition of “psychasthenia" in a way that counters its contemporary cultural currency as a simulational or image-based "disorder"iv; accordingly, in Osmose, this confusion becomes the catalyst for a reworking of the correlation between bodily and environmental space—a reworking that teaches us how to orient ourselves without needing to see ourselves (or to let the gaze of the other see us) as a point in space. Far from illustrating a confusion of the organism with the representations that surround it, the process triggered by Davies' work spurs a fluid, ongoing, and active interchange with the environment that has the effect of "transcending" the limited (representational) function of the "body schema" (its reduction to the body image). In this way, Davies'work concretely embodies the capacity of technics to facilitate an experience of the “indivision" of the flesh that Merleau-Ponty discovers at the heart of Being and that our previous discussion has now associated with the “originary" technicity (the écart) of primordial tactility.
BODIES IN CODE
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