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# Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media

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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:

This ["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)

Vision, 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.

If 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).

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The passage from touch to vision is, for all that, less of a shift from one to another sense than a complexification of sensation that inaugurates vision at the same time as it extends the scope of touch. That is how Merleau-Ponty explains the “captation of the tactile body by the visual image." Addressing Paul Schilder's example of my sensing the contact of my pipe in my hand in the mirror, Merleau-Ponty speculates on the

place of the imaginary of seeing: By seeing and its tactile equivalents, the inauguration of an inside and an outside and their exchanges, of a relation of being to what is however forever outside: The spatiality of the body is an encrustation in the space of the world (I find my hand starting from its place in the world, not starting from the axis of coordinates of my body ..). (278)

In effect, the coordination of vision and touch expands the Tastwelt so that my hand gives access to a felt space there where it is, with this space becoming incorporated as part of the reciprocity of touch. In so doing, this coordination facilitates the construction of situation-specific boundaries between inside and outside that need not coincide with the skin and that, accordingly, open the body to technical expansion

Yet, if the body can be thus opened to technical expansion—whether via the mirror of specular vision or the expanded Tastwelt of what (with Massumi) we might call “movement-vision"—it is only because embodiment is essentially and orginarily technical. To see why, we have only to pass from the correlation-in-fact between touch and vision (which institutes an empirical technicity) to their correlation-in-principle (which entails an originary technicity). In the wake of such a passage, we begin to see that the transductive correlation of touching-touched and seeing rests upon a yet more primordial transduction, a transduction that, for the human as form of life, is entirely originary: the transduction of the écart as condition of embodiment and as source for the technical.

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Embodiment and technicity thus comprise two divergent, yet entirely complementary (indeed, strictly correlated) expressions of the negativity of (human) being as Merleau-Ponty understands it. If neither one is the cause of the other (which is just what transduction here means), then neither one can be understood as a fall or a contamination (or even a humanization) of the other, as traditional and (now) posthumanist accounts would, variously, have it. Indeed, they each occasion an originary form of transcendence and thus, together, furnish the (double) condition for the emergence of the human as a form of life—that is, as sensing sensible," that part of the flesh endowed with “Empfindbarkeit, the capacity to sense (224).

Although the shift to vision may in fact expose the essential technicity of being in a particularly clear manner, it manifestly does not inaugurate that technicity. This is crucial if we are to grasp the correlation of embodiment and technicity in its full originity. Along with embodiment, technicity is there from the origin (which is equally to say that it inhabits primordial tactility) and, like embodiment, is a dimension of the essential specularity of the sensible being of the flesh. That is why the strict correlation of the two distinct, empirical senses of vision and touch comprises nothing other than a manifestation of this originary correlation. As a being conditioned by the transduction of embodiment and technicity, by the double écart of primordial tactility, the human is and will always remain split, inhabiting the two separate, incompossible yet superposed worlds of the tactile and the visual.

Only because humans are embodied beings are they able to conjoin these divergent worlds of sense: embodiment is the condition for a phenomenalization of being (for a form of the living) that emerges in the gap between touch and vision. Here, then, is the deep reason why we must not simply oppose touch and vision, but rather must attempt to think their transduction and, most crucially, must assume the consequences of its emergence out of the originary transduction of the écart as condition of embodiment and source for the technical.

For if vision does mark a massive expansion of exteriorization, we must remember that it does so not by breaking with touch, but rather by extending touch beyond the boundary of the skin. Likewise, if touch gives rise to interiority, it also—and for this very reason-inaugurates the relation to the outside constitutive for all exteriorization. To say that the human is split between the tactile and the visual is, in a certain sense, to say that the human is, from its origin, embodied and technical; the proto-origin of tactility and vision is the écart, the hinge or gap in which embodiment is conjoined with technicity, interiority with exteriorization.

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As the compression of its title announces, Agnes Hegedüs's Handsight (1992) proffers a performative allegory of this transductive coupling of vision and touch. Handsight comprises three separate elements: a hand-held “eyeball" interface that tracks hand position; a transparent sphere with an iris-shaped opening for the hand; and a round projection screen, initially displaying an image of an eye, that opens into a virtual world. Functioning as a single, integrated visual system, Handsight requires the viewer to initiate and control the operation of vision through the hand; only by manipulating the eyeball interface within the transparent sphere is the viewer able to access the virtual world projected in the eye-shaped screen on the wall in front of him or her (see Figure 1.7).

By routing the function of vision through the instrumentality of manual manipulation, Hegedüs compels the viewer-user of her work to see with the hand, thus foregrounding—in a particularly enactive way—the presence of tactility in vision. And by coupling this form of tactile vision with the virtual, Hegedüs displaces the focus from the differences and similarities between the physical and the virtual worlds, revealing instead how the virtual comprises an extension of the essential technicity of embodied life. If the work carries out "the reembodiment of the senses," as Hegedüs contends, the reason has everything to do with the transductive coupling of vision and touch.22 Handsight is able directly to map virtual vision on tactility precisely because it channels vision through an interface—the tactilely manipulable eyeball—that correlates to a visual point of view within the virtual world it views. "Hand motions," explains Hegedüs, "are translated instantly (i.e., in ‘real time') into a moving-point-of-view like an ‘endoscopic eye (endo—within, e.g., capable of penetrating an interior space) exploring a virtual world."23 The sphere (and the work as such) ultimately provides the viewer “an endo-spatial enclosure whose manual exploration maps directly into the representation of the virtual domain" (Hegedüs, “Handsight”).

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Coupled in this way with “the endo-spatial enclosure," the virtual is positioned as the payoff, not of some autonomous technical accomplishment (as so many recent discussions seem to maintain), but rather of the transductive coupling of vision and touch. If the virtual here comprises a deterritorialization of the visual via its exteriorization of the body's interiority, like vision, it is deeply bound up with embodiment. Indeed, the virtual is less a new domain of vision proper than a technical extension of sensation that serves to expose tactility's role in inaugurating the coupling of interiority and exteriorization and, with it, the essential technicity of sensation.

What the work exteriorizes, then, is not some autonomous domain of the visual, but, as Hegedüs insists, the domain of interiority: the work transforms “an ordinarily inaccessible interiority or psychic space of transcendence ... into an externalized virtual space that can be entered and explored" (Hegedüs, [Description]). Given our earlier discussion of the transduction of interiority and exteriorization, it is interesting that this passage to exteriorization is doubled by the inverse movement, as Anne-Marie Duguet explains:

[The eye, an object in the exterior, becomes a detecting subject in the interior of the sphere where it executes the points of view that are given to it by the hand. One is thus confronted with an extraordinary mobility and instability of the look; the scene regresses [se retourne] to a simple game of digits, the objects turn around and traverse one another without resistance.²4

Duguet's analysis helps to underscore how Handsight, by making the hand into the operator of the eye's movement, introduces a distancing into tactility and thus allows reflection on the transduction—and perhaps, ultimately, on the indifferentiation—-between tactility and vision.

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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?

8. 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.

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What follows from this reinscription of the body schema in the flesh of the world is a conception of intercorporeity that eschews the mediation of the image of the other in favor of a generality of sensibility, a sensible commons that is not simply a common sense:

But as a result, the corporal schema is going to be not only a relation to the things and to an Umwelt of things, but also a relation to other corporal schema. Among the things, there are living "similars." These are going to insert themselves in the circuit of my hand to my hand. The coupling of my two hands = recognition of a “behavior" in which appears a "thing"; the active hand lives at a distance from the other. Likewise, the coupling of my hand and the hand of another: my corporal schema as an animal of conducts lives at a distance in the living exterior. There are [sic] among them a carnal relation, an extension of the narcissism of the body. This narcissism is also an opening to generality: I live the offered behaviors as my own, and I see them animated by a corporal schema. The flesh also resolves the problem here: it is because I perceive that the other is possible for me as an other perceiving the same sensibles that I perceive. Massive flesh of esthesiology, flesh of co-perception made subtle, of identification between corporal schemas. My corporal schema is projected in the others and is also introjected, has relations of being with them, seeks identification, appears as undivided among them, desires them. Desire considered from the transcendental point of view = common framework of my world as carnal and of the world of the other. (224–225)

This sensory generality furnishes a deeper foundation for what had earlier been the basis for intercorporeity: namely, the image of the other. Just as the elucidation of primordial tactility as a protoreversibility deepens, rather than displaces, the role of vision and its complex articulation with technicity, the sharing of body schemata serves to ground the commonality of the visible. It thus explains why the visual experience of the other (of the other's image) can yield intercorporeity. For this reason, Merleau-Ponty can invoke "an opening of my body to other bodies: just as I touch my hand touching, I perceive others as perceiving. The articulation of their body on the world is lived by me in the articulation of my body on the world where I see them." What is more, this sharing of embodied schematism introduces a reversibility at the heart of intercorporeity: "my body is also made up of their corporeality. My corporal schema is a normal means of knowing other bodies and these know my body. Universal-lateral of the co-perception of the world” (218).

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Because this reciprocity between my body and the body of the other comprises an emanation from the protoreciprocity of primordial tactility, it operates an extension of the écart into the domain of collective experience. Just as the écart marks a failure of reversibility between the hand as touched and as toucher—a failure which expresses the originary form of the écart as transduction of embodiment and technics—it likewise opens an irreducible asymmetry in the reversibility between my body and the body of the other. And just as the duality of sensation (and of primordial tactility) brought with it a fundamental chance—the chance for a coupling with the flesh of the world and with things—the asymmetry that informs collective intercorporeity (the sensory common) opens the chance for an at once more concrete and more generalized coupling with technics.

Accordingly, the very means facilitating my body's opening to the flesh of the world and to things give concrete expression to the transductive correlation of primary tactility, to the écart as condition of embodiment and source of technicity. Today's digital technologies and the mixed reality aesthetic that they support thus function to actualize the potential of technicity to be a medium for being. Through them, the transduction constitutive of primary tactility—the transduction of embodiment and technics, of interiority and exteriorization—becomes actualized as a technically specific and technically facilitated intercorporeal commonality.

Now it should be clear that Merleau-Ponty's theorization of technics—limited to the conception of discrete prosthesis—fails to grapple with the technical “essence” of the human that, as I have suggested, lies at the heart of his conception of primary tactility and the structural coupling of the flesh of my body and of the world. To grasp this dimension of technics, then, we must turn to Gilbert Simondon, the French "bio– techno-phenomenologist" and student of Merleau-Ponty's, whose work takes up the thread of the latter's unfinished final project and discovers, as the necessary correlate of a complex theory of physico-bio-social individuation, a convergence of the biosocial with the technical.

On Simondon's understanding, individuation is an ongoing and interminable process, ranging from the physical (the process of crystallization is his key example) to the social; in all cases, it crucially involves a relation to the "preindividual," the domain of “"metastable" potentiality.

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With his specific distinction between the subject and the individual within the process of human individuation, Simondon develops an account of the human as a living being constitutively in excess of itself and necessarily endowed with a collective dimension. Schematically put the subject is the individual viewed from the standpoint of its ongoing individuation (or genesis) and thus through its constitutive relation to the metastable domain of the “preindividual"; the individual, by contrast, is the subject frozen at a specific moment of this individuation and cut off from the source of its (hetero)genesis, from the domain of potentiality.

The subject and the individual are connected via a disjunction: The subject encompasses the individual which in turn forms an element in the subject's individuation. This means that the individual and the subject exist at different levels of being and that, because they do, the subject can undergo a (relative) “disindividuation" which, far from marking its dissolution as a subject, comprises the condition of possibility for the discovery of its latent collective dimension. With this discovery, the subject is able to resolve the tension generated by its constitutive excess over itself (experienced as affectivity) and, by putting itself in question through a confrontation with the preindividual it carries within it, can undergo a new (collective) individuation. Indeed, on Simondon's account, every psychosocial individuation requires a relative disindividuation of the already individuated beings that comprise its elements. This disindividuation is simply the condition of possibility for the nonindividuated potential (the preindividual) they each contain to be freed for a subsequent, higher order individuation. Not only does the subject perdure through these stages of individuation, but also—as one of their constitutive elements—it evolves in and through them.

What renders Simondon's conceptualization a crucial continuation of Merleau-Ponty's excavation of the technicity of the living is his correlation of individuation with technics understood as a quasi-autonomous domain of being—what Bernard Stiegler has called “organized, inorganic matter"—between the organic and the inorganic.25 On Simondon's account, technical objects are like living beings in that they must be understood from the perspective of their genesis or progressive individuation; yet, they differ from living beings in that, far from being given initially as concrete individuals, they only tend toward the concrete.

Nonetheless, by establishing that technical objects are the ever changing bearers of a genesis, Simondon accords them a certain autonomy from the human. Though never entirely separable from human evolution, their evolution occurs through relations internal to the domain of technicity and is only punctuated by human intervention. For this reason, technical objects are able to constitute a medium for the biologically and psychically individuated human being to interpenetrate nature, as Simondon claims:

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[Tlhrough technical activity, the human creates mediations, and these mediations are detachable from the individual who produces and thinks them. The individual expresses itself in them, but does not adhere to them. The machine possesses a sort of impersonality which allows it to become the instrument of another human. The human reality that it crystallizes in itself is alienable, precisely because it is detachable.... The technical object, conceived and constructed by the human, does not limit itself to creating a mediation between the human and nature.... It accords its human content a structure similar to that accorded natural objects and permits the insertion of the natural effects of this human reality into the world.... A convertibility of the human into the natural and of the natural into the human is instituted through the technical schematism.26

Put in Merleau-Pontyian terminology, this mutual interpenetration of the human and the natural could be said to actualize the écart of primary tactility—the gap between embodiment and technicity—that yields the asymmetrical interpenetration of the flesh of my body and the flesh of the world.

In fact, this connection to the primordial écart is precisely why technics can facilitate the convertibility that allows biologically and psychically individuated human beings to participate in a transindividual collective individuation:

[T]he technical world offers an indefinite affordance [disponibilité] of groupings and connections. For it is the result of a liberation of human reality crystallized in the technical object. To construct a technical object is to prepare an affordance ... beyond the interindividual relation which is not maintained through an operational activity, a mental and practical universe of technicity is instituted, in which human beings communicate through what they invent. The technical object understood according to its essence—the technical object such that it has been invented, conceived and desired, and taken up by a human subject—becomes the support and the symbol of that relation we want to call transindividual.... By the intermediary of the technical object, an interhuman relation is thus created that forms the very model of transindividuality. What is meant by this is a relation that does not place individuals into relation by means of their already constituted individuality, ... nor by means of what is identical in every human subject, ... but by means of the charge of preindividual reality, of this charge of nature that is conserved with the individual being and that contains potentials and virtuality. (246–248)

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