What is decisive about Anzieu's contribution here is his insistence on the necessary integration of primary tactility as the medium of the amodal. Far from a hidden transcendental cause, primary tactility is necessarily at work in every sensory event; as the source for the differentiation of the senses, it is also the glue that gathers them into a system, the system of the sensible:
[T]he repressed primary tactile communications are not destroyed (except in pathological cases), but are preserved as a backcloth upon which systems ofintersensory correspondences come to be inscribed; they constitute a primary psychical space, into which other sensory and motor spaces may be fitted; they provide an imaginary surface upon which the products oflater operations of thought may be set out. Communication at a distance through gestures and subsequently by the spoken word requires not only the acquisition of specific codes, but also the preservation of this original echotactile backcloth to communication, and its more or less frequent reactivation and reuse. (152–153)
Anzieu's insistence here allows us to demarcate a domain of the infraempirical more primordial than the infralanguage (Gil): namely, the infratactile or infratactility. “Echotactile communication," he tells us, “remains the original source of semiosis," which means that primordial tactility— infratactility—demarcates a prelinguistic domain and function beneath the operation of the infralanguage. The latter, accordingly, can be no more than a metaphoric extension or transformation (rather than the sensible-transcendental source of metaphor). "Feedback loops with the environment" are formed very early in the infant's development, insists Anzieu: These are audio-phonological in nature; they relate to crying in the first instance and then to vocalizations ... and are the first stages in the acquisition of semiotic behavior. In other words, the acquisition of pre-linguistic signification (of crying and then of sounds during babbling) precedes the acquisition of infralinguistic signification (of mimicry and gesture) (165, emphasis added).
Recognizing that chronological succession need not imply structural derivation, we can nonetheless affirm Anzieu's insistence here for the precise reason that it follows directly from the generalization of the anaclitic function by which, as we have seen, the sensible is revealed to have always already been specular—that is, constituted on the basis of a fundamental écart. For its part, the derivation of language (and of the infralanguage) from a more primordial infratactility supports the reciprocal coupling of embodiment and technics that we have located at the heart of the sensible. If language is a specification of technics, a historicotechnical specification of différance (as Stiegler puts it), then it is only fitting that it emerge from out of the infratactile, the protodifference of the sensible.
BODIES IN CODE
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