By combining these two distinct kinds of movement in a single interactive installation, Schiphorst is able to deploy the tension between two perspectives—the observational and the operational, the “statistical body" and the “incommensurable body”—to catalyze a potentialization of the body rooted in the function of the body schema beyond or beneath vision. As she explains, the “tension between these coexisting polarities or conditions (one imposed from without, and the other mute, subversive, willed from within) construct maps that define the path of possible inhabitable and inhabited regions of body space."
In this way, Bodymaps effects a direct interface not simply with the image of the other's body (which, recall, was sufficient to ground intercorporeality on Merleau-Ponty's account), but with the very traces of movement that constitute the direct expression—indeed, the very activity—of other's body schema. This has a significant impact on the constitution of intercorporeality because, rather than having to infer the embodiment of the other and fill in or incarnate the visual distance by bringing the image back to the (feeling) body, the embodied viewer here is confronted with the other's schema directly—that is, independently of its body image.
Schiphorst goes so far as to attribute movement-that is, motile activity—to the technically inscribed body: thus the viewer, in her vision, "enters the field of consciousness of the body, where the body's image becomes aware of the viewer's gaze and physical presence." A body with such awareness (which can no longer be a mere “consciousness") can, obviously, no longer be a mere image. What this means is that the normally dominant (the most noble) sense of vision becomes purely instrumental—a mere means to a deeper, fundamentally tactile and proprioceptive (which is to say, amodal) interface; vision is bypassed as (an essential dimension of) the constitution of (inter)corporeality qua generalized and common medium. That is why Bodymaps can aptly be described as a “tactile dialogue with the image."xxxv,19
- PRIMORDIAL TACTILITY
Bodymaps exemplifies the capacity of tactility to effectuate the concrete potentialization of the body schema—the becoming-common of the phenomenal body. What exactly is it about tactility that allows it to be the medium (and not simply the privileged sense, that is, one sense among others) for the partial regression back to the primordial skin formation as concrete, infraempirical operator of the écart of the sensible? The answer to this question will come in the wake of yet another differentiation, one which is, from the (infra)empirical perspective, opened by the sensibletranscendental écart, certainly the most fundamental of all: namely, the differentiation of touch as a distinct sense from touch as a protosensory (amodal) power, of touch proper from primordial tactility.
BODIES IN CODE
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