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# Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media

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Given Videoplace's eschewal of "visual similarity" as a criterion of function, it is hardly surprising that the payoff of its functional dissolution of the Turing paradigm would be a capacity for coupling motor activity to graphic symbols and effects that bear no direct resemblance to the human body. In this respect, Videoplace realizes a degree of flexibility unprecedented in aesthetic mediations of the body (even within Krueger's work): by coupling the motile body with graphic elements that do not visually imitate or simulate it, Videoplace opens a disjunction between the body image and the body schema. More exactly, by deploying sensors to capture the movement of the body through a concrete space and in conjunction with a virtual element, it displaces the body image-that is, a predominately visual representation of the body, a primary resemblance—and offers in its place a new, representative but not representational “image," a graphic symbol that attains its force only through its inclusion within the body schema, through its motor coupling with embodied enaction.

For Dan Cameron, this displacement explains how Krueger is able to bring “a new category of beauty" into the world. By “making the body proprioceptively aware of itself, and of its relation to the artwork and to other viewers," Krueger manages to “reconfigure” the “representation” of the “human image" in a decisive way (Cameron, 24). In sum, the displacement of the body image by the generative activity of the body schema is what makes Krueger's art so powerful an intervention into digital culture. In stark contrast to the fatalism of critics like Baudrillard and Kittler for whom the abstract generality of digital code marks a fundamental and irremediable departure from the phenomenological ratios governing human experience, Krueger places human embodiment in a position to constrain the “referencelessness of digital code," thereby installing it as the agent whose action actualizes the (abstract) potential of code.vi

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We are now in a position to see why Krueger's work, perhaps more than the work of any other digital artist, exemplifies the twofold movement informing the concept of the "body-in-code." Although Krueger's environments subordinate computer code to the more supple codings of human interaction, thus introducing a significant element of flexibility, they also deploy computer code to trigger or catalyze expansions of embodied agency. On this exemplary model, a body-in-code can be defined as a body whose (still primary) constructive or creative power is expanded through new interactional possibilities offered by the coded programs of“artificial reality."

Because of the way in which it challenges our received conceptions of embodiment-most significantly, by refusing to oppose embodiment to technics and by conjoining the two in a highly productive, functional manner—Krueger's work not only exemplifies the way in which technologies support the world-constituting function of embodiment in the world today, but also urges a fundamental reassessment of phenomenology in light of technics. In so doing, Krueger's work does not so much stand against phenomenology as guide us in the task of assessing the radically creative scope of embodiment in our highly technologized world. Like the art it inspired (directly and indirectly) Krueger's environments give us impetus to challenge the more conservative assumptions informing phenomenology and in this way help to bring out its more radical promise for thinking what I elsewhere call “technical life."

2. BODY SCHEMA AS POTENTIALITY

Notwithstanding the truly disastrous mistranslation of schema corporel by "body image," Merleau-Ponty's chapter on "The Spatiality of One's Own Body and Motility" from The Phenomenology of Perception offers an account of the body schema as a flexible, plastic, systemic form of distributed agency encompassing what takes place within the boundaries of the body proper (the skin) as well as the entirety of the spatiality of embodied motility. In so doing, as we shall see, Merleau-Ponty opens the possibility of categorically distinguishing the body schema from the body image and thus of putting the former-hitherto a mere object of scientific exploration—to properly philosophical work.

The distinction runs as follows: Whereas the body image characterizes and is generated from a primarily visual apprehension of the body as an external object, the body schema emerges from what, with autopoietic theory, we have called the operational perspective of the embodied organism. As such, it encompasses an “originary," preobjective process of world constitution that, by giving priority to the internal perspective of the organism, paradoxically includes what is outside its body proper, what lies in the interactional domain specified by embodied enaction. Three important consequences follow from this distinction: first, the body is always in excess over itself; second, this excess involves the body's coupling to an external environment; and third, because such coupling is increasingly accomplished through technical means, this excess (which has certainly always been potentially technical) can increasingly be actualized only with the explicit aid of technics.

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This means that Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment is, from the beginning, a philosophy of embodied technics in which the excess constitutive of embodiment—the horizon of potentiality associated with the body schema—forms a ready conduit for incorporating the technical at the heart of human motility. Accordingly, one of our pressing tasks here will be to think this “originary" technics as it might have been (but was not) developed by Merleau-Ponty, to think this technics beginning from but moving well beyond Merleau-Ponty's limited conception of prosthetics as the extension of bodily habit. In doing so, however, we must never lose sight of the fact that Merleau-Ponty—with the ontological conception of the body schema and its later extension– dissolution in the concept of the flesh—himself gives us the means to do so.

More than any other commentator on the philosopher, Shaun Gallagher emphasizes the centrality of the body schema-body image distinction for Merleau-Ponty's break with "classical" (Husserlian) phenomenology. According to Gallagher, the distinction correlates with the task of thinking “the human body on both sides of the intentional relation"; thus, the body image designates the body as the object or content of intentional (or noetic) consciousness, whereas the body schema characterizes the body as a “prenoetic" function, a kind of infraempirical or sensible-transcendental basis for intentional operation. "In contrast to the intentional (and sometimes conscious) nature of the body image, a body schema involves an extraintentional operation carried out prior to or outside of intentional awareness." More explicitly still,

[It] involves a system of motor capacities, abilities, and habits that enable movement and the maintenance of posture. The body schema is not a perception, a belief, or an attitude. Rather, it is a system of motor and postural functions that operate below the level of selfreferential intentionality, although such functions can enter into and support intentional activity. The preconscious, subpersonal processes carried out by the body-schema system are tacitly keyed into the environment and play a dynamic role in governing posture and movement. Although the body-schema system can have specifc effects on cognitive experience, it does not have the status of a conscious representation or belief.7

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Gallagher goes on to explain how the operations of the body schema "provide specific conditions that constrain perceptual consciousness." Not only does he thereby situate it as the condition of possibility for phenomenologically accessible experience, but also—more importantly for our purposes—he makes it available as a source for the indirect modification of that experience.

One crucial consequence of Merleau-Ponty's principled and philosophical distinction between body image and body schema is, as Gallagher points out, a methodological limitation on the phenomenological method: “The prenoetic role of the body schema is impenetrable to phenomenological reflection" (233). If this limitation requires a (nonreductive) appeal to the empirical sciences, as Gallagher suggests, it also, more consequentially, marks the operation of a “transcendental sensibility’ at the heart of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment and, specifically, of his concept of the “phenomenal body."

This is just what is at issue in Merleau-Ponty's characterization of the body schema as a “law of [the body's] constitution": such a characterization is meant to capture the fact that

The spatial and temporal unity, the inter-sensory or the sensorimotor unity of the body is, so to speak, de jure, that it is not confined to contents actually and fortuitously associated in the course of experience, that it is in some way anterior to them and makes their association possible."8

This is equivalent to saying that the motile or "phenomenal" body, the body as body schema, precedes and informs the constitution of the objective domain (including the body as object, or the body image) and the correlative demarcation of the subjective:

Our bodily experience of movement is not a particular case of knowledge; it provides us with a way of access to the world and the object, with a "praktognosia," which has to be recognized as original and perhaps as primary. My body has its world, or understands its world, without having to make use of my “symbolic" or "objectifying" function. (140, emphasis added)

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Elsewhere, Merleau-Ponty speaks of the body schema as a "system of equivalents," an “immediately given invariant," a “general medium for having a world" (141; 146).

This conception of the phenomenal body as a kind of primary access to the world (a world that includes the body) resonates with the privilege of the operational perspective granted the living (human) organism in autopoietic theory. Specifically, it establishes the phenomenal body and its operational perspective, not as a correlate of the objective body and the observational perspective, but rather as the source of both perspectives, indeed of the very possibility of having a perspective as such:

It is not a question of how the soul acts on the objective body, since it is not on the latter that it acts, but on the phenomenal body. So the question has to be reframed, and we must ask why there are two views of me and of my body: my body for me and my body for others, and how these two systems can exist together. It is indeed not enough to say that the objective body belongs to the realm of “for others," and my phenomenal body to that of “for me," and we cannot refuse to pose the problem of their relations, since the “for me” and the “for others” coexist in one and the same world... (106, emphasis added)

As the primarily active potential that gives the “for me" and the “for others," the phenomenal body thus constitutes a (preobjective and presubjective) ontological figure that exceeds the scope of the Phenomenology's stated objective of rethinking consciousness through embodiment and consequently anticipates the perspective of Merleau-Ponty’s final ontology of the flesh. Indeed, because of the use to which it puts the scientific concept of the body schema, the phenomenal body comprises something more akin to Massumi's "body without an image"vii or philosopher José Gil's "infralinguistic body"viii than to any version of the body image, including the mirror image and the famous “mirror stage."

Like the body without image and the infralinguistic body, the phenomenal body specifically draws on the intermodal or infraempirical dimension of the body schema, following Henry Head's original definition, as an unconscious postural model of the body underlying and conditioning exteroceptive sensory experience and preceding the reign, and even the differentiation, of the visual as a distinct (exteroceptive) sense.ix

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As Gallagher suggests, the phenomenal body expresses the complexity of the body schema as an intermodal, pre-experiential potentiality:

The body schema consists of certain functions that operate across various parts of a complex system responsible for maintaining posture and governing movement. The first set involves the input and processing of new information about posture and movement that is constantly provided by a number of sources, including proprioception. A second set involves motor habits, learned movement patterns (“motor schemas" or programs). The final set of functions consists of certain intermodal abilities that allow for communication between proprioceptive information and perceptual awareness, and in integration of sensory information and movement. (Gallagher and Cole, 376)

As the expression of the body schema, the phenomenal body fully invests in the ontological power of proprioception, as it has been conceptualized generally by recent scientists and philosophers and linked specifically to the body schema.x

Because it is responsible for linking protosensory bodily sense (proprioception) with perception and motility (and indeed for correlating these latter), the body schema is a source of embodied potential. Such a realization is central to Merleau-Ponty's analysis in the Phenomenology; it renders that analysis more interesting and far more continuous with the later ontology of the flesh than even the best of Merleau-Ponty's commentators have been willing to admit.xi The host of functions encompassed in the body schema facilitate what Merleau-Ponty names "potential movement"—- that is, the capacity of the normal body to relate simultaneously to a series of potential situations and to exist, in a sense, beyond its actuality, in virtuality. Thus:

Each stimulus applied to the body of the normal person arouses a kind of "potential movement," rather than an actual one; the part of the body in question sheds its anonymity, is revealed, by the presence of a particular tension, as a certain power of action within the framework of the anatomical apparatus. In the case of the normal subject, the body is available not only in real situations into which it is drawn. It can turn aside from the world, apply its activity to stimuli which affect its sensory surfaces, lend itself to experimentation, and generally speaking take its place in the realm of the potential. (108–109)

Merleau-Ponty even goes so far as to associate the normal experience of embodied enaction with a certain actualization of the potential: "The normal person reckons with the possible, which thus, without shifting from its position as a possibility, acquires a sort of actuality" (109). Because of the ontological work performed by the body schema, human beings experience the virtual as a kind of "fringe" of the actual; they “live" the potentiality of their embodiment outside the empirical space of simple actuality.

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In an analysis that anticipates and coincides with Gil's treatment of the body as the “spatializer of space," Merleau-Ponty goes on to derive from the ontological dimension of embodied potentiality a conception of movement and, by implication, of space as fundamentally abstract:

Abstract movement carves out within that plenum of the world in which concrete movement took place a zone of reflection and subjectivity; it superimposes upon physical space a virtual or human space. Concrete movement is therefore centripetal whereas abstract movement is centrifugal. The former occurs in the realm of being or of the actual, the latter on the other hand in that of the virtual or the nonexistent; the first adheres to a given background, the second throws out its own background. (111)

Its apparent dependence on actual or concrete movement notwithstanding, abstract movement expresses an ontological power—the power of the phenomenal body—that lies at the origin of, and therefore conditions, all concrete spatial experience. In this sense, abstract movement parallels Gil's conception of bodily exfoliation, whereby the body expands its “abstract posture" to occupy concrete space and transform it into abstract space.xii Indeed, Gil's term, "abstract posture," perfectly captures the productive plasticity of the body schema in Merleau-Ponty's analysis because, in both cases, a fundamental dedifferentiation of the boundary separating the body from space, a double invagination of inside and outside, is at issue.

3. TECHNICS AND THE DISSOLUTION OF THE BODY IMAGE

If the key question, as Gil suggests, is the “essential way the body turns onto' things," then technics can hardly be excluded from the primary operation of the phenomenal body. Merleau-Ponty seems to grasp this crucial point in his analysis of the blind man's stick. Like the feather in the woman's hat or my unreflective sense of my car's width, the stick does not function as an explicit, cognitively assessable enhancement of the body image, but rather as an immediately practical, unthematizable expansion of the body schema:

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The blind man's stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself: its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight. In the exploration of things, the length of the stick does not enter expressly as a middle term: the blind man is rather aware of it through the position of objects than of the position of objects through it. The position of things is immediately given through the extent of the reach which carries him to it, which comprises besides the arm's own reach the stick's range of action.... To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to convert them into the bulk of our own body. (143)

Merleau-Ponty concludes that habit “expresses our power of dilating our being-in-the-world," which today more than ever means "changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments" (143). Lodged in the body as mediator of the world," habit comprises a “rearrangement and renewal of the corporeal schema," the “motor grasping of a motor significance" (145/142/143). Importantly, what happens in such schematic rearrangement is a passage between the body proper and the world of things, an increase in power and scope of the body's coupling to (and indifferentiation from) the environment. This is what Gil means when he speaks of the body “turning onto" things: at stake is a "transplantation" of the body into things and an “incorporation" of things into body that, with each new habit and thus each new prosthesis, leaves the boundary between them that much less discrete.

It can hardly come as a surprise, then, that the “general bodily synthesis" carried out by habit perfectly describes, in its function as hinge linking the motor and the perceptual,xiii the accomplishment of humancomputer synchronicity in Krueger's Videoplace. By transforming the perceptuomotor coupling in a way that is immediate and in a certain sense transparent, Krueger's environment can be said to achieve a bodily synthesis, a “rearrangement and renewal of the corporeal schema" in its motor and its perceptual dimensions. Like Merleau-Ponty's description of the blind man's stick, what is crucial here is the total and seamless integration of the technical element into the perceptuomotor body schema:

But habit does not consist in interpreting the pressures of the stick on the hand as indications of certain positions of the stick, and these as signs of an external object, since it relieves us of the necessity of doing so. The pressures on the hand and the stick are no longer given; the stick is no longer an object perceived by the blind man, but an instrument with which he perceives. It is a bodily auxiliary, an extension of the bodily synthesis. (152)

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Taking up Krueger's project of extending the body schema into the uncharted terrain of “artificial reality," we might well ask what happens when the entirety of the perceptuomotor environment becomes virtual—that is, when the technical extension of the body schema is so massive that it affects every aspect of our access to the world?

In his virtual reality environment, Traces (1998-1999), Australian media artist Simon Penny presents us with just such a situation. A project originally designed for networked CAVEs (computerassisted virtual environments), Traces generates a world—that is, a space of sensorimotor interaction—out of the three-dimensional traces of body movement captured by four cameras mounted in the four corners of the CAVE (see Figure 1.5). In this way, it privileges the "bodily, temporal, and kinesthetic sensibilities" of the participant over the illusionism of traditional virtual reality spaces as the vehicle for achieving immersion and the conferral of reality. For Penny, this confrontation with mainstream VR research is necessary to probe the promise of new technology and to pinpoint its humanistic basis. As he explains,

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Traces is an immersive art project which uses the CAVE stereoimmersive environment for an unorthodox purpose. While most virtual worlds are based on a paradigm of virtual navigation through texture mapped worlds, Traces has no “world" and no navigation. The aesthetic/theoretical goal of Traces is to focus the attention of the user onto their [sic] own sense of embodiment through time. The bodily behavior of the user generates real-time graphics and sound. The technical goal of Traces is wireless full-body interaction without the use of standard trackers, joysticks and wands, and without icons, menus or graphical pointers of any kind.º

With this nod to Krueger's legacy of “unencumbered VR," Penny forthrightly announces his well-nigh philosophical (indeed properly phenomenological) commitment to constructing virtual reality on the basis of our evolutionarily acquired power of embodiment.

This commitment imposes several constraints that form the very strengths of his project. First, he must eschew the use of illusionist tricks and software tools built according to the simulation paradigm: “Unlike other VR projects, I have no interest here in illusionistic texture mapped models, the illusion of infinite virtual space or building virtual worlds.' All attention is focused on the ongoing behavior of the user."1o Second, he must forego the illusion of proximity in his realization of a telematic, networked experience; unlike the work of Paul Sermon (which achieves telematic copresence through the superposition of video images of participants' bodies), Traces emphasizes “the highly technologically mediated nature of the communication. The users never see each other, only the results of each other's behavior. The user interacts with gossamer spatial traces which exhibit the dynamics and volumes of bodies...." (Penny). Finally, and perhaps most consequentially, Penny must move away from the default perspectival interface of VR environments, the reduction of the user's body to a "single point, a viewpoint, or the end of a "pointer," which, he notes, "effectively erases the body from the computational system":

My goal is to build a system with which the user can communicate kinesthetically, where the system comes closer to the native sensibilities of the human, rather than the human being required to adopt a system of abstracted and conventionalized signals (buttons, mouse clicks, command line interface ...) in order to input data to the system. (Penny)

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