Given our investment in the body schema as the empirical agent of generalized specularity, it is extremely consequential that "this faulty skin-formation produces a general fragility in later integration and organizations. It manifests itself in states of unintegration as distinct from regression involving the most basic types of partial or total unintegration of body, posture, motility, and corresponding functions of mind, particularly communication" (59). Indeed, its correlation with the body schema is so fundamental that Bick is led to characterize it as a “muscular shell" (59).
Clearly discerning the correlation of this second muscular skin with technics—it is variously referred to as a "substitutive prosthesis," an ersatz muscularity," a “protective prosthesis" (193/195)—Anzieu modifies Bick's theory by proposing a more generalized, normative function of the second-skin formation:
The second muscular skin is abnormally overdeveloped when it has to compensate for a serious insufficiency of the Skin Ego and to fill in the faults, fissures and holes in the first containing skin. Yet everyone needs a second muscular skin, as an active protective shield supplementing the passive protective shield constituted by the outer layer of a normally constituted Skin Ego. (195, emphasis added)xxii
Anzieu gives the example of sports and clothing, noting in particular the penchant of patients to protect themselves from psychoanalytic regression through pre- and postsession work-outs. Bearing in mind the technical function of the second muscular skin, however, we might do better to connect it with the specter of“psychasthenia” precisely as it has been linked to contemporary media culture.xxxii Faced with the assault of media images that aim precisely to “confuse ... the space defined by the coordinates of the organism's own body ... with represented space, it makes perfect sense that the organism would adopt a muscular skin, a protective shield, in order to ward off the dissolution of its identity that comprises the contemporary condition of generalized psychasthenia.
Our discovery of the essential technicity of the skin as the indifferentiation of the biological and the psychical (as the primordial écart of the sensible) allows us to differentiate another genealogy of technics that diverges fundamentally from this muscular model. The muscular apparatus of the generalized second-skin formation is driven by aggressivenessxxxiv—as is, obviously, the massively predominant view and deployment of technology in our culture; however, the fact that today's technologies are nonetheless exteriorizations of the skin means that, underneath the (still) pathological cathexis of aggressiveness, these technologies are necessarily correlated with the self-preservative, attachment-centered technical genealogy of the skin as primary containing function. Indeed, in light of the anaclitic indifference instantiated by the primary skin function, we can understand the second muscular skin formation as, first and foremost, an expression of the fact-defining a perfectly general technical condition—that all exteriorizations are exteriorizations of the skin.
BODIES IN CODE
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