{"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":77,"pdf_page":90,"physical_index":90,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"59ead6fd675b778e5aa2c6762646f57c8c7baf02ada303afa86350e77efdce88"},"chapter":"bodies in code","content":"In Nature, Merleau-Ponty explicitly recognizes the asymmetry between touch and vision and the resultant need to modify this understanding if it is to fit the case of vision. If this recognition marks a break with the procedure of The Visible and the Invisible, that is precisely because it makes way for an introduction of technicity into the heart of the flesh (the being of the sensible). For what now becomes distinctive about vision is its explicit dependence on a technical artifact, as Merleau-Ponty's analysis makes clear:\n\nThis [\"that-is-openness to things\" constitutive of the flesh] has been analyzed in the order of touching—there would be changes to make in order to apply this to vision. The eye cannot see the eye as the hand touches the other hand; it can be seen only in a mirror. The gap is larger between the seeing and the seen than between the touching and the touched. A segment of the invisible is encrusted between the eye and itself as a thing. It is maybe only in the other that I see the eye, and this meditation means that the eye is above all seeing, much more seeing than seen, a more subtle flesh, more nervous. But if it were not visible, it would not see, because it would not be a point of view, it would not have planes, depths, orientation.... (223–224)\n\nVision, in other words, is of a different nature than touch, and this difference is captured by the fact that vision requires a technical artifact—the mirror—in order to attain the reflexivity that is, on Merleau–Ponty's understanding, characteristic of sensation. Recalling (from our earlier analysis of “The Child's Relations with Others\") that the mirror image cannot be equated with the specular image, we can now appreciate the derivative nature of vision and of the mirror as a technical mediation of sensation. Because of its dependence on the technical artifact (the mirror), vision cannot be originary; indeed, the passage from touch (as a distinct sense) to vision represents a concrete exteriorization (and a technical artifactualization) of the specular whose initial, more primary phenomenalization occurs as and in the duality of embodied self-relation (touched-touching). In a certain sense, we can say that the mirror takes the place of the embodied hand, with all the modifications attendant upon this shift, of which the most important is certainly the fact that reciprocity is no longer embodied as interiority, but rather supported by the gaze of the other.\n\nIf touch maintains a privileged relation with primordial tactility, that is precisely because the specific reciprocity it involves remains within the body (even when the body is extended through prostheses, at least of the sort Merleau-Ponty envisions and discusses). In a sense, the experience of collapse, the \"kaleidoscopic change\" that ensues as the moment of identity approaches, harbors within itself some trace of the primordial écart of the sensible, of the reciprocity constitutive of primordial tactility. As if in direct proportion to its disenfranchisement within ordinary (adult) perception, touch would seem to enjoy an immediacy, a unity, that owes more to bodily interiority than to the body's coupling to a world: \"Touching immediately touches itself (the ‘bipolarity' of the Tastwelt).\" By contrast, “vision breaks this immediate (the visible at a distance, outside the limits of my body) and reestablishes the unity by the mirror, in the world\" (278).\n\nBODIES IN CODE\n\n77","previous_page":76,"next_page":78}