On the other hand, there is the protoreflexivity—the protoreversibility—of the primordial skin, which only gradually gives rise to the sensible as a differentiated field structured above all through sensory doubleness or reversibility:
The skin, which is a system of several sense organs (perceiving touch, pressure, pain, heat) is itself closely connected with the other organs of external sense (hearing, sight, smell, taste) and with the awareness of body movement and balance. In small babies, the complex sensitivity of the epidermis (to touch, heat and pain) remains for a long time diffuse and undifferentiated. Subsequently, however, it transforms the organism into a sensitive system that is capable of experiencing other sensations of the skin (the associative function) or differentiating them and localizing them as figures emerging against the background of the overall body surface (the screen function). (14)
Rather than relating to each other as abstract transcendental condition and organ of possible experience, as they would on a Kantian approach, these two determinations demonstrate how tactility—primordial tactility—forms the sensible-transcendental condition of its sensory function, how it, in effect, bootstraps itself into experience. This is what I mean by "primordial tactility," and, given the peculiar dissolution of the empirical-transcendental divide it performs, it is entirely fitting that it has, as its distinct phenomenality, the intersensorial domain normally experienced only by synaesthetes and very young infants, but that, as Brian Massumi has shown, every so often ruptures the smooth fabric of the actual, thus reminding us of its constitutive coupling to the virtual.
Anzieu, for his part, unpacks the psycho-physio-genetic basis of the so-called “fringe of the virtual," thereby tracing the manifest privilege that touch enjoys in empirical life directly and irrevocably back to the anaclitic function of the skin:
The Skin Ego is a psychical surface which connects up sensations of various sorts and makes them stand out as figures against the original background formed by the tactile envelope: this is the Skin Ego's function of intersensoriality, which leads to the creation of acommon sense ... whose basic reference is always to the sense of touch. (103)
BODIES IN CODE
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