As Gallagher suggests, the phenomenal body expresses the complexity of the body schema as an intermodal, pre-experiential potentiality:
The body schema consists of certain functions that operate across various parts of a complex system responsible for maintaining posture and governing movement. The first set involves the input and processing of new information about posture and movement that is constantly provided by a number of sources, including proprioception. A second set involves motor habits, learned movement patterns (“motor schemas" or programs). The final set of functions consists of certain intermodal abilities that allow for communication between proprioceptive information and perceptual awareness, and in integration of sensory information and movement. (Gallagher and Cole, 376)
As the expression of the body schema, the phenomenal body fully invests in the ontological power of proprioception, as it has been conceptualized generally by recent scientists and philosophers and linked specifically to the body schema.x
Because it is responsible for linking protosensory bodily sense (proprioception) with perception and motility (and indeed for correlating these latter), the body schema is a source of embodied potential. Such a realization is central to Merleau-Ponty's analysis in the Phenomenology; it renders that analysis more interesting and far more continuous with the later ontology of the flesh than even the best of Merleau-Ponty's commentators have been willing to admit.xi The host of functions encompassed in the body schema facilitate what Merleau-Ponty names "potential movement"—- that is, the capacity of the normal body to relate simultaneously to a series of potential situations and to exist, in a sense, beyond its actuality, in virtuality. Thus:
Each stimulus applied to the body of the normal person arouses a kind of "potential movement," rather than an actual one; the part of the body in question sheds its anonymity, is revealed, by the presence of a particular tension, as a certain power of action within the framework of the anatomical apparatus. In the case of the normal subject, the body is available not only in real situations into which it is drawn. It can turn aside from the world, apply its activity to stimuli which affect its sensory surfaces, lend itself to experimentation, and generally speaking take its place in the realm of the potential. (108–109)
Merleau-Ponty even goes so far as to associate the normal experience of embodied enaction with a certain actualization of the potential: "The normal person reckons with the possible, which thus, without shifting from its position as a possibility, acquires a sort of actuality" (109). Because of the ontological work performed by the body schema, human beings experience the virtual as a kind of "fringe" of the actual; they “live" the potentiality of their embodiment outside the empirical space of simple actuality.
BODIES IN CODE
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