By correlating transindividual individuation with technics, Simondon crucially expands Merleau-Ponty's conception of intercorporeity as a "commonality” of the body schema, as a “common framework of my world as carnal and of the world of the other” (Nature, 217/225). Indeed, the connection between the body schema and technics—the “technical schematism" as a medium for the mutual convertibility of human and nature—is precisely what conditions Merleau-Ponty's extension of the body schema to the point of its dissolution, to the point where it no longer serves to specify the boundaries of the body's interiority but rather to mark its ontological interpenetration with the flesh of the world.
Fittingly, this extension comes at the end of the final course on Nature, at the moment when the human relation to technics would (perhaps) “naturally” arise:
The corporal schema as incorporation. The corporal schema is that. Finally thus (above all by the vision of the self) a relation of being between:
• My body and the world
• The different aspects of my body; a relation of ejection
• Introjection, a relation of incorporation
It can be extended to the things (clothing and the corporal schema). It can expel a part of the body. It is thus not made of determined parts, but it is a lacunary being (the corporal schema is the hollow on the inside)—includes accentuated, precise regions, and other vague regions. (The hollow and the vague regions are the point of insertion of imaginary bodies.) Sensoriality (above all by vision) intentionally implies incorporation, that is, a functioning of the body as a passage to an outside, by its “orifices." Other consequence: As my image captures my touching, the visual image of the others captures it also: they are also the outside of me. And I am their inside. They alienate me and I incorporate them. I see by the eyes of the other → the world. (278–279)
In this culminating recapitulation of the various elements of our previous excavation of primary tactility (note especially the complex imbrication of vision and touch as the foundation of intercorporeity), Merleau-Ponty affirms the essential technicity of the bodily schema. By doing so, he furnishes a conception of the commonality of being that can embrace what Simondon has shown to be its necessary technical expression.
BODIES IN CODE
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