Gallagher goes on to explain how the operations of the body schema "provide specific conditions that constrain perceptual consciousness." Not only does he thereby situate it as the condition of possibility for phenomenologically accessible experience, but also—more importantly for our purposes—he makes it available as a source for the indirect modification of that experience.
One crucial consequence of Merleau-Ponty's principled and philosophical distinction between body image and body schema is, as Gallagher points out, a methodological limitation on the phenomenological method: “The prenoetic role of the body schema is impenetrable to phenomenological reflection" (233). If this limitation requires a (nonreductive) appeal to the empirical sciences, as Gallagher suggests, it also, more consequentially, marks the operation of a “transcendental sensibility’ at the heart of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment and, specifically, of his concept of the “phenomenal body."
This is just what is at issue in Merleau-Ponty's characterization of the body schema as a “law of [the body's] constitution": such a characterization is meant to capture the fact that
The spatial and temporal unity, the inter-sensory or the sensorimotor unity of the body is, so to speak, de jure, that it is not confined to contents actually and fortuitously associated in the course of experience, that it is in some way anterior to them and makes their association possible."8
This is equivalent to saying that the motile or "phenomenal" body, the body as body schema, precedes and informs the constitution of the objective domain (including the body as object, or the body image) and the correlative demarcation of the subjective:
Our bodily experience of movement is not a particular case of knowledge; it provides us with a way of access to the world and the object, with a "praktognosia," which has to be recognized as original and perhaps as primary. My body has its world, or understands its world, without having to make use of my “symbolic" or "objectifying" function. (140, emphasis added)
BODIES IN CODE
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