- ALL EXTERIORIZATIONS ARE EXTERIORIZATIONS OF THE SKIN
If the self-exfoliation of the phenomenal body occasioned by the specular image is a thoroughly technical process, it does not, however, introduce technics into embodiment as if for the first time. No more a fall into technics than (pace Lacan) a fall into social alienation, worldly specularization merely instances the concrete technical conditions for the phenomenalization of embodiment at any given historical moment in what philosopher Bernard Stiegler has called the history of the supplement.xvii If there is a history of specularization, that is precisely because embodied life is “essentially" technical, because the generalization of specularity always already implicated in the concrete operation of the body schema finds its enabling sensible-transcendental or infraempirical condition in the écart constitutive of sensibility. We could equally say that technologies are always already embodied, that they are in their own way "essentially" embodied, if by this we mean that they mediate—that they express—the primordial fission, the gap, within the being of the sensible.
Such an understanding of the primordial technicity of life as sensible écart resonates in interesting and productive ways with the psychoanalytical conceptions of the skin ego (Didier Anzieu) and the primary, passive containing function of the skin (Esther Bick). Part of an effort to unpack the domain of transcendental sensibility underlying and conditioning Kleinian object relations, Anzieu and Bick (working simultaneously but separately!) invest the skin as a kind of primary passivity that, long before the advent of the mirror-stage and even before the incorporation of the mother's breast, serves to bind together "parts of the personality not as yet differentiated from parts of the body."i6 "The thesis," explains Bick, "is that in its most primitive form the parts of the personality are felt to have no binding force among themselves and must therefore be held together in a way that is experienced by them passively, by the skin functioning as a boundary" (55). However, she abruptly notes:
This internal function of containing the parts of the self is dependent initially on the introjection of an external object, experienced as capable of fulfilling this function.... Until the containing functions have been introjected, the concept of a space within the self cannot arise.... The stage of primary splitting and idealization of self and object can now be seen to rest on this earlier process of containment of self and object by their respective “skins." (55–56)
BODIES IN CODE
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