In endorsing the description of what is, after all, a shift from perception to affection, from vision to tactility, Caillois effectively opens the way for a deployment of psychasthenia beyond the body-image. Indeed, his interpretation of Minkowski underscores the capacity of tactility to operate the psychasthenic indifferentiation as an incorporation of touch, a passage from the domain of exteroception where touch (like vision) operates as an interchange with the environment to the undifferentiated experience of tactility as dynamic self-movement.
In this respect, Caillois's account of psychasthenia makes common cause with our earlier analysis of Merleau-Ponty's final project. Indeed, the displacement of the "body schema" that underwrites Merleau-Ponty's final ontology—its dissolution into the “indivision" of the flesh—parallels the conceptualization of psychasthenia beyond the body-image. It does so to the precise extent that such a conceptualization necessarily displaces vision, as well as the division it supports, in favor of an undifferentiated ontology of dynamic self-movement. In this sense, what is important is what takes the place of the body-image, or more precisely, what can take place once the body-image is dethroned as the mediator of all bodily experience.
On this score, moreover, the conception of psychasthenia as an affirmative activity of the body finds support in recent neuroscientific research. Thus, for example, Antonio Damasio's differentiation between static and “on-line" body images makes salient just how much our experience of our bodies owes to direct real-time monitoring of its continuously changing states.20 Although it is undeniable (as Damasio admits) that we do experience static images of our bodies, the fact that these provide scant information about our actual embodied states suggests just how much richer the (misnamed) body-image is than a mere representation of the body.
Because it gives a detailed account of spatiality as a constitutive modality of bodily experience (and not simply an effect of representations, even bodily representations), Merleau-Ponty's work helps us to correlate psychasthenia with an ontology of embodiment (of the flesh). In this way, it serves to highlight the insufficiency of the ontology of projection that forms the correlative of Grosz's deployment of the body image as mediator between body and environment and that is derived, as we observed in Chapter 1, from a certain misreading of Freud's claim that the “ego is first and foremost a bodily ego ... the projection of a surface." Eschewing such a projective ontology from the very outset of his development of the "phenomenal body" in the Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty shows himself to be concerned with articulating the specificity of his conception of the body-schema against other, reductive understandings, most notably, the body-image. The body-schema, specifies Merleau-Ponty, is more than simply a “continual translation into visual language of the kinaesthetic and articular impressions of the moment."21 It is also more than a de facto synthesis of a particular set of bodily components, “a superimposed sketch of the body" (99). Rather, as we have seen, it is a "total awareness of my posture in the intersensory world, a form' in the sense used by Gestalt psychology" (100); or, more precisely still “a way of stating that my body is in-the-world," a “third term, always tacitly understood, in the figurebackground structure" (101).
EMBODYING VIRTUAL REALITY
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