Far from being a mediator between the subject and the environment that would condition bodily activity (as it is for Grosz), the body-schema is thus cosubstantial with the activity of the body as a whole and is dynamically constitutive of the spatiality of the world. We might say that the body schema, like touch in the higher office accorded it by Jonas, comprises an infraempirical form: one that is immanent to bodily life without being reducible to its empirical contents and that, as we have seen, intertwines vision and touch in an irreducible cofunctioning that, in and of itself, indicts the more abstract, visual conception of the body-image.
The introduction of the body schema already makes clear the vast divide between Merleau-Ponty's motor-centered understanding of the body and the representationalist conception. Correlative with this divide is a vast difference in the role of space: whereas Grosz's (and Olalquiaga's) understanding of psychasthenia portrayed space as a geometrical, visual domain in which the subject fails to locate itself, for Merleau-Ponty (as we have seen), such a space is abstracted from a more fundamental space: the space constituted by the motor-intentionality of the body.
If, in one sense, this can be taken to mean that the body holds a certain priority over space (at least on the ontology at issue in the Phenomenology), it also means that the body does not stand opposed to space, as Caillois' analysis suggested. Rather, from the beginning in Merleau-Ponty, body and space are dynamically coupled so that changes in bodily motility (e.g., the blind man's stick) necessarily correlate with changes in lived spatiality, the sum of which is expressed in the body schema. With respect to psychasthenia, what Merleau-Ponty's analysis affords, then, is an account capable of explaining how the dissolution of the (representational) boundaries between body and space nonetheless accords with a certain bodily activity that functions to ground the recursive correlation of embodiment and technics within self-movement.
BODIES IN CODE
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