In the end, Handsight works by reorienting attention from the virtual world to which it allows access to the means of access; thus, Hegedüs concludes:
[Tlhe “endoscopic eye" or virtual camera is inducted symbolically into the mind itself, not in order to reveal some objective reality, but to display parts of a symbolic system laden with historical and personal resonance. Once entered, this virtual space becomes larger than its apparent container, seemingly monumental, offering a subjective point-of-view onto precipitous declines and vertiginous shifts of position governed by the visitor's own hand. (cited in Duguet)
What can this virtual space be, if not the capacity of embodied human life to exteriorize its interiority, and thus, equally, an expression of the latter's essential and originary technicity?
- WORLDSKIN
The transductive correlation of vision and touch that emerges in Merleau-Ponty's final lectures on nature entails a fundamental transformation of the closely intertwined conceptions of the body schema and of intercorporeality. Putting into question the distinction between the body as a thing and as my point of view on things, Merleau-Ponty would now appear to be capable of moving beyond the impasse presented by the écart (the failure of reversibility). Eschewing the alternative that informs reversibility, he insists that the body is "both: thing-standard as flesh" (Nature, 224). This means that the body schema has now become something more than simply the agent of the body's access to the world: if “to sense my body is also to have its posture in the world” (224), this is because the flesh of the world is only phenomenalized in the flesh of the body (or, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, because “the flesh of the body makes us understand the flesh of the world” [218]).
The corporeal schema has, accordingly, been transformed from an organization of the individual body into a form of generality or commonality that directly characterizes the flesh of the world, the world as flesh:
The relation with the world is included in the relation of the body with itself. The relation of my two hands = the exchange between them; the touched hand is given to the touching hand as touching; they are the mirror of each other—something analogous in the relation with the things: they "touch me" just as much as I touch them. Not surprising: They are that on which the synergy of my body opens; they are made of the same stuff as the corporal schema; I haunt them at a distance, they haunt me at a distance. I am with them in a relation of Einfühlung: my within is an echo of their within.
BODIES IN CODE
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