This means that Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment is, from the beginning, a philosophy of embodied technics in which the excess constitutive of embodiment—the horizon of potentiality associated with the body schema—forms a ready conduit for incorporating the technical at the heart of human motility. Accordingly, one of our pressing tasks here will be to think this “originary" technics as it might have been (but was not) developed by Merleau-Ponty, to think this technics beginning from but moving well beyond Merleau-Ponty's limited conception of prosthetics as the extension of bodily habit. In doing so, however, we must never lose sight of the fact that Merleau-Ponty—with the ontological conception of the body schema and its later extension– dissolution in the concept of the flesh—himself gives us the means to do so.
More than any other commentator on the philosopher, Shaun Gallagher emphasizes the centrality of the body schema-body image distinction for Merleau-Ponty's break with "classical" (Husserlian) phenomenology. According to Gallagher, the distinction correlates with the task of thinking “the human body on both sides of the intentional relation"; thus, the body image designates the body as the object or content of intentional (or noetic) consciousness, whereas the body schema characterizes the body as a “prenoetic" function, a kind of infraempirical or sensible-transcendental basis for intentional operation. "In contrast to the intentional (and sometimes conscious) nature of the body image, a body schema involves an extraintentional operation carried out prior to or outside of intentional awareness." More explicitly still,
[It] involves a system of motor capacities, abilities, and habits that enable movement and the maintenance of posture. The body schema is not a perception, a belief, or an attitude. Rather, it is a system of motor and postural functions that operate below the level of selfreferential intentionality, although such functions can enter into and support intentional activity. The preconscious, subpersonal processes carried out by the body-schema system are tacitly keyed into the environment and play a dynamic role in governing posture and movement. Although the body-schema system can have specifc effects on cognitive experience, it does not have the status of a conscious representation or belief.7
BODIES IN CODE
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