ix. Head emphasizes how the body actively modifies “the impressions produced by incoming sensory impulses in such a way that the final sensations of position or of locality rise into consciousness charged with a relation to something that has gone before” (cited in Gallagher, 227).
x. According to Cole and Paillard:
The term “proprioception" has come to be used, among British physiologists, for those sensory signals that arise from the moving parts of the body, including the head segment and the vestibular apparatus of the inner ear. The visual sense, in contrast, is generally considered as being mainly devoted to exteroception ... Proprioceptive information is necessary for updating the postural body frame (or schema), whereas exteroceptive multimodal information, mainly visual, underpins the central representation and percept of the body image (Jonathan Cole and Jacques Paillard, “Living without Touch and Peripheral Information about Body Position and Movement: Studies with Deafferented Subjects," 247; 254).
See also Brian O'Shaughnessy, "Proprioception and the Body Image," especially 190–191.
xi. Here I am thinking of Renaud Barbaras, who puts much emphasis on Merleau-Ponty's admissions, in the Working Notes to The Visible and the Invisible, of the dead end or fundamental impasse of his earlier project. See Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomology of Perception, tr. P. Milan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
xii. According to Gil:
If there is no ideal posture, there is an abstract posture in the same sense [as there is] the abstract figure. 'This abstract posture is not a form (but each concrete posture has one, which can be described in terms of the position of the body before the throw, cardiac rhythm, degree of concentration, and so on), but a "form" of forms, which enables it to move from the one to the other, from one concrete posture to another.... the posture of the body "contains" the point situated at x + k meters. But in this case the bodypoint relation is established via an exfoliation, a leaf/lamina of the space of the body. This is not just any lamina and not just any surface. It is built up progressively with the elimination of contingent and heterogeneous contextual factors. It concentrates its own energy, it is rhythm, because instead of an objective space around a point, only the point exists; instead of aleatory corporeal and psychic elements, the abstract posture implies the reduction of any other thing that relates to anything apart from lining up the point. This exfoliation is a rhythmed space that results from two forms being placed in an energy-based relationship: the body and the space of the point. It is a form of forms and a rhythm of forms. So if the notion of abstract posture is generalized, if all relations that could thus be made between the body and objects are considered, then we have an abstract body.... The infralanguage is the abstract body.... In the same way that an abstract posture allows the passage from one point to another, the abstract body, capable of elaborating abstract rhythms or figures from different contexts, allows the translation of one context into another. (135–136)
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