In an analysis that anticipates and coincides with Gil's treatment of the body as the “spatializer of space," Merleau-Ponty goes on to derive from the ontological dimension of embodied potentiality a conception of movement and, by implication, of space as fundamentally abstract:
Abstract movement carves out within that plenum of the world in which concrete movement took place a zone of reflection and subjectivity; it superimposes upon physical space a virtual or human space. Concrete movement is therefore centripetal whereas abstract movement is centrifugal. The former occurs in the realm of being or of the actual, the latter on the other hand in that of the virtual or the nonexistent; the first adheres to a given background, the second throws out its own background. (111)
Its apparent dependence on actual or concrete movement notwithstanding, abstract movement expresses an ontological power—the power of the phenomenal body—that lies at the origin of, and therefore conditions, all concrete spatial experience. In this sense, abstract movement parallels Gil's conception of bodily exfoliation, whereby the body expands its “abstract posture" to occupy concrete space and transform it into abstract space.xii Indeed, Gil's term, "abstract posture," perfectly captures the productive plasticity of the body schema in Merleau-Ponty's analysis because, in both cases, a fundamental dedifferentiation of the boundary separating the body from space, a double invagination of inside and outside, is at issue.
- TECHNICS AND THE DISSOLUTION OF THE BODY IMAGE
If the key question, as Gil suggests, is the “essential way the body turns onto' things," then technics can hardly be excluded from the primary operation of the phenomenal body. Merleau-Ponty seems to grasp this crucial point in his analysis of the blind man's stick. Like the feather in the woman's hat or my unreflective sense of my car's width, the stick does not function as an explicit, cognitively assessable enhancement of the body image, but rather as an immediately practical, unthematizable expansion of the body schema:
BODIES IN CODE
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