xiii. According to Merleau-Ponty:
[H]abit in general enables us to understand the general synthesis of one's own body.... every habit is both motor and perceptual, because it lies, as we have said, between explicit perception and actual movement, in the basic function which sets boundaries to our field of vision and our field of action. Learning to find one's way among things with a stick, which we gave a little earlier as an example of motor habit, is equally an example of perceptual habit. Once the stick has become a familiar instrument, the world of feelable things recedes and now begins, not at the outer skin of the hand, but at the end of the stick. (1962, 152)
xiv. For an interesting, if somewhat more general, discussion of the artifactuality of“real-time" teletechnologies, see Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television. The problematic of “real-time” is the focus of The Politics of Presencing, the final volume of my trilogy on new media.
xv. Gallagher rightly discerns that, on Merleau-Ponty's account, the body image may in certain cases ultimately be affected by prostheses just as the body schema is: "This distinction [of image and schema in the case of technical extensions of the body] is not absolute, however, and may involve a temporal component. More permanent attachments to the body—such as prosthetic devices—can become incorporated into both the image and the schema of the body affecting our bearing and approach to the world in both conscious projection and movement” (Gallagher and Cole, 372–373). The crucial point here is that the body schema remains the basis for the eventual prosthetic modification of the body image; by first affecting the schema a prosthesis can come to modify the body image.
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