In the passage through these phases, the user's body schema—the means of access to, indeed of production of, this virtual world—undergoes progressive deterritorialization, bringing home the fact that this feedback with the traces of one's bodily movement is an enactive representative of the body, is the body image. In this scenario, one simply cannot differentiate the boundaries of a body proper from the entire interactional domain generated through bodily movement. The functions informing a consciously experienced body image that would be separate from the interactive coupling of the body schema simply do not apply in this world.
To appreciate this technically facilitated fusion of image and schema, we would do well to follow Alphonso Lingis when he conceives of the body image (in a well-nigh Bergsonian manner) as an “emanation" from the postural (body) schema, rather than a separate and distinct representation of the body. Lingis suggests:
What psychologists have improperly named "body image" is not something projected by an act of imagination when we detach our perception from things; it emanates from the mobilized posture and extends about it. The body in mobilizing into a posture situates the levels where other viewing positions lie and emanates an “image” of itself as something visible, tangible, audible in that space.11
In this respect, the body image is distinctly derivative—it is a minimally distanced (and predominately visual) apprehension of the self, paradigmatically performed by the other, but also, of course, by the self confronting itself, as it were, as an other (that is, from an observational perspectivexvi).
BODIES IN CODE
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