{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title":"Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0415970164","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","uuid":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title":"Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media","normalized_title":"bodiesincodeinterfaceswithdigitalmedia","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0415970164","isbns":["0415970164","0415970156","9780415970167","9780415970150"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":348,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Bodies%20in%20code%20%20interfaces%20with%20digital%20media","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/search"},"page":{"printed_page":135,"pdf_page":148,"physical_index":148,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"52b2a0c62d035d8ed7c46d232896058c368c1c78c9cf6ca6daa888f14f95cbd9"},"chapter":"bodies in code","content":"Ultimately, this understanding of the dynamic coupling of body and space undermines the function of the body schema as such, in the sense that it can no longer function to demarcate the body from the environment. That is why, as we have seen, the problematic of the body schema more or less falls away in Merleau-Ponty's final work as his interest shifts from the phenomenological-existential problematic of the body as source of space (and world) to the ontological problematic of the flesh and the body's immanent belonging to the world.\n\nMore important in the present context, however, is the resonance of this final dissolution of the body schema with Caillois' account of psychasthenia: Merleau-Ponty's final work furnishes a conception of the body's spatiality that can account for psychasthenia as an affirmative modality in which the indifferentiation between the body and the environment, the oneness of the flesh, is opened to experience. Indeed, in a much-cited passage from his chapter on “The Chiasm,\" Merleau-Ponty states:\n\nThe body unites us directly with the things through its own ontogenesis, by welding to one another the two outlines of which it is made, its two lips: the sensible mass it is and the mass of the sensible wherein it is born and upon which, as seer, it remains open. It is the body and it alone, because it is a two-dimensional being, that can bring us to the things themselves, which are themselves not flat beings but beings in depth, inaccessible to a subject that would survey them from above, open to him alone that ... would coexist with them in the same world.... What we call a visible is ... a quality pregnant with a texture, the surface of a depth, a cross section upon a massive being, a grain or corpuscle borne by a wave of Being.22\n\nAs immanent to the world, the body is penetrated by the world in a fluid interchange. This interchange, as we have seen, is why Merleau-Ponty's final work is concerned with the problem of thinking the indifferentiation, the indivision, between body and world. Moreover, it perfectly expresses the condition, the indivision, of psychasthenia, as the (no doubt) rhetorical question orienting Merleau-Ponty's entire investigation makes altogether clear: \"Where,\" he asks, “are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?\" (138).\n\nBy way of conclusion, let me now suggest in more concrete terms how Char Davies' Osmose and Ephémère function to catalyze an experience of psychasthenia and the oneness of the “flesh.\" Both environments are designed to effectuate a restoration of the power of embodied agency in the face of the \"danger\" of technically facilitated psychasthenia. By taking virtual reality as a laboratory for exploring the function of perception in a situation where there simply is no material, external world and hence no demarcation between self and environment, Davies in effect embraces the psychasthenic condition full-on. Thus, in contrast to Grosz (and Weiss), whose work attempts to restore some clear demarcation between body and environment, Davies seeks to catalyze a more primitive, undifferentiated form of self-movement as the activity that confers reality as such. By effectively drawing attention to the fact that all reality is virtual reality, her environments exemplify the way in which virtual reality technologies can support the constitution of a certain body-in-code and thereby participate in the aesthetic—mixed reality-—that seemed to announce their obsolescence.\n\nEMBODYING VIRTUAL REALITY\n\n135","previous_page":134,"next_page":136}