Bodies in code interfaces with digital media

Like Krueger before him, Penny values the evolutionary accomplishment of embodiment and deploys it as the basis of his work and his larger philosophy of mediation.

Unlike Krueger, however, Penny is in a position to benefit from the marked advancement in computer technology that is supporting our seamless entry into an exposed mixed reality environment. (In an email to the author (1/3/06), Penny notes that his vision system was built from the ground up, using a standard desktop computer (a 166 MHz pentium 2), and that it owes its effectiveness to "good, clear design, some very clever coding by Andre [Bernhardt], and very economical video processing solutions." It does, however, take advantage of the technicallyadvanced CAVE, which ran on "turbocharged" SGI hardware and which formed an enabling background for Penny's bricolage.) Thus, in contrast to Krueger's technically crude, floor-embedded motion sensors, Traces uses a sophisticated camera system to "capture the full extent of the user's body as usable input data" (Penny et al.). This difference yields a vast expansion in the scope of what is synchronized with the computer. Now the entire body schema—the coupling of body proper and environment—is generated by the technical system.

One interesting result of this progress, which is indissociably technical and aesthetic, is that synchronicity becomes artifactual—that is, it becomes describable in technical terms and necessarily bound to concrete technical apparatuses.xiv In Traces, the artifactuality of synchronicity appears with Penny's strategic gambit (closely related to his repudiation of visual illusionism) to eschew spatial resolution in favor of temporal resolution. At a rate of fifteen captures per second, Traces manages to sustain a sensorimotor verisimilitude that is responsible for conferring reality on the wholly sui-generis experience it offers. Only present latently in Krueger's Videoplace, this explicit temporal threshold comprises the minimal condition on which a technically generated deployment of the body schema can become creative: although “of a low spatial resolution," the real-time body model developed in Traces is “of a high temporal resolution" with the result that "the user experiences no latency,' or lag, between their [sic] movements and the virtual structures created" (Penny).

Penny's strategic gambit has significance well beyond the Traces project. Indeed, it exposes nothing less than the general condition—a minimal temporal threshold—for all technical (re)deployments of the body schema. This condition marks a crucial break with the (restricted)

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vision of technics central to Merleau-Ponty's embodied phenomenology. Whereas the blind man's stick merely extends the spatial range of the body schema (and of the motor intentionality it yields), Traces fundamentally redeploys the body schema—that is, the temporality of embodied enaction—toward the purpose of creating a world out of the primary data of bodily motility.

Traces thereby reveals that the power of the body schema to disclose a world—and along with it, the entire ontological register of the "phenomenal" body with its privileged operational standpoint and orientation via proprioception and intermodal communication—is a temporal power, or better, a power that can be exercised only within certain temporal boundaries. Because temporal boundaries are necessarily set into place by artifactual technologies—by those technologies that support the being in the world of time today, including the time of consciousness—Traces demonstrates that the disclosive power of the body schema is an essentially technical power, that it simply cannot be dissociated from or thought independently of its concrete technical support, and that, in the end, it emerges only through the technology that makes it possible in the first place.

Obviously, such a general condition for the technical (re)deployment of the body schema calls for a more radical thinking of technics than we find in Merleau-Ponty's vision of prosthetics in the Phenomenology. Perhaps the best way to capture what is at stake here is to return, briefly, to the relation (and differences) between body image and body schema. Once again, Shaun Gallagher proves an insightful guide insofar as he manages to explain how prosthetics function to disjoin the unconscious body schema from any consciously experienced, intended (or noetic) body image.

When the body does appear in consciousness, it often appears as clearly differentiated from its environment. Body image boundaries tend to be relatively clearly defined. The body schema, in contrast can be functionally integrated with its environment, even to the extent that it frequently incorporates certain objects into its operations—the hammer in the carpenter's hand, the feather in the woman's hat, and so forth. Under these circumstances one's perception of body boundary may end at one's finger tips even when a particular schema projects itself to include the hammer that one is using. (Gallagher and Cole, 372)

It is interesting that this perceptual differentiation between self-representation (body image) and enactive spatialization (body schema) can no longer be made in virtual environments like that of Penny's Traces. The reason is not simply that the prosthetic function is so fundamental that it has an impact on the visual or representational body image as well as the motile body schema,x but rather that the difference between them—and with it, the role of representation—has been entirely effaced. Put another way, in such environments, whatever experience one has of one's body proper does not take the form of a (representational) image, but rather emerges through the representative function of the data of body movement, the way these data (“naturally, as it were) represent one's body.

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The experience of one's body proper is thus given through the same material as is one's experience of motility: namely, traces of body movement captured at or above a minimally sufficient temporal speed. Here, then, we encounter a body-in-code in a completely literal sense, meaning a body image that is indiscernible from a technically generated body schema. Describing the networked model of his project, Penny perfectly captures this productive technical fusion of image and schema. In the networked Traces, he explains:

Each CAVE will use multi-camera machine vision to build real-time body models of participants. These body-models will then be used to generate abstracted graphical bodily traces in the other CAVEs. If, for instance, three CAVEs are networked, then a participant in CAVE A will interact in real time with image traces of participants in CAVEs B and C. These traces will not ... be accurate sculptural representations but will be used to drive complex algorithmic processes which will give rise to changing 3D graphical traces which indicate the presence, gesture and movement of the remote participants. Hence a person may be represented as a moving ghostlike, transparent and wispy trace. (Penny)

If a similar algorithmic procedure underlies the self-described dimension of “user experience" in the Traces system, it not only witnesses the collapse of the body image and body schema, but also exposes this collapse as the condition of possibility for the creative deployment of the technically enactive body schema.

Not surprisingly, the experience proposed by Penny and his collaborators for users of Traces is designed specifically to accommodate the gradual adjustment of the body schema to its total technical mediation. A first phase of interaction, "Passive Trace," places users into feedback with traces that passively follow their movements and that gradually float and fade away. A second phase, "Active Trace," allows users to build their own structures; still generated as traces of user movement, these traces are amplified by a cellular automaton algorithm that, in the words of the designers, makes them "sparkle.' Finally, in a third phase, "Chinese Dragons," the user's movements throw off small abstract creatures (resembling Chinese dragons), which initially maintain the momentum of the movements that generate them but eventually begin to behave autonomously, flying through the space and chasing behind the viewer. (Penny notes in an email (1/3/06) that the “Chinese Dragons" interaction was a very early, if not the first, attempt to utilize basic life behaviors (flocking, etc.) in an immersive interactive 3D context.)

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In the passage through these phases, the user's body schema—the means of access to, indeed of production of, this virtual world—undergoes progressive deterritorialization, bringing home the fact that this feedback with the traces of one's bodily movement is an enactive representative of the body, is the body image. In this scenario, one simply cannot differentiate the boundaries of a body proper from the entire interactional domain generated through bodily movement. The functions informing a consciously experienced body image that would be separate from the interactive coupling of the body schema simply do not apply in this world.

To appreciate this technically facilitated fusion of image and schema, we would do well to follow Alphonso Lingis when he conceives of the body image (in a well-nigh Bergsonian manner) as an “emanation" from the postural (body) schema, rather than a separate and distinct representation of the body. Lingis suggests:

What psychologists have improperly named "body image" is not something projected by an act of imagination when we detach our perception from things; it emanates from the mobilized posture and extends about it. The body in mobilizing into a posture situates the levels where other viewing positions lie and emanates an “image” of itself as something visible, tangible, audible in that space.11

In this respect, the body image is distinctly derivative—it is a minimally distanced (and predominately visual) apprehension of the self, paradigmatically performed by the other, but also, of course, by the self confronting itself, as it were, as an other (that is, from an observational perspectivexvi).

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This characterization of the body image as an emanation (along with the differentiation of image and schema it supports and derives specifically from Merleau-Ponty) helps to clarify Paul Schilder's claim that we perceive our body image in the same way as others perceive it. For Schilder (the psychologist par excellence of the body image and the source for much of Merleau-Ponty's analysis), this is almost an analytical postulate, insofar as it is (or seemed to him to be) necessary to ward off the specter of Einfühlung and projective identification:

The perception of the bodies of others and of their expression of emotions is as primary as the perception of our own body and its emotions and expressions. Our own body, as all the previous discussions show, in sensory perception is not different from the sensory perception of the bodies of others.... Just as we have rejected the idea of “Einfühlung" we have to reject the idea that we arrive at the knowledge of the bodies of others and their emotions by projecting our body and our feelings into other personalities.... [T]here is a continual interchange between our own body-image and the body-image of others.12

Conceiving of the body image (as it is used here) as an emanation from the body schema allows us to grasp the extent of Merleau-Ponty's philosophical break with empirical psychological theory. From his perspective, the noetic, representational body image is a derivative of—an emanation from—a more primitive, prenoetic bodily activity. Although it is true that there is continual interchange between our body image and the body image of others, the reason is far more profound than Schilder imagines. Body images (to the extent they exist as separable representations) enjoy such interchange only because they are emanations of body schemas which operate in a common, intercorporeal interactional domain. The (representational) commonality of the body image is an emanation from the (enactive) commonality of the body schema.

If an appreciation of this profound structure of intercorporeality is missing from Schilder's analysis, the reason is that Schilder lacks any understanding of the operational privilege that defines the phenomenal body on Merleau-Ponty's account. For him, everything takes place at the level of observation, meaning ultimately that he lacks the resources to differentiate embodiment as an ontological operation from its representation in the form of an image. (In this respect, Schilder's theory resonates with the concept of psychasthenia that will be central in Chapter 2.) This lack explains Schilder's failure to differentiate the body image from the body schema in any principled, categorical manner, as well as the waves of confusion that have ensued as this failure was perpetuated by his successors and, in the process, gradually effaced.

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Because of its explicit concern for the problematic of perspective, Penny's Traces comprises a perfect occasion to confront this confusion and to demonstrate, specifically, how the technical deployment of the body schema makes its exposure all the more urgent. Penny's description of the “user experience" dimension of the project makes clear the centrality—indeed the privilege—accorded the operational perspective in the production and perception of the world and, specifically, of whatever body image it may sustain:

The user enters the CAVE. A small cubic virtual room with an hemispherical dome is rendered exactly onto the walls of the CAVE in simple shading. This enclosure immediately negates the illusion of infinite space found in many virtual worlds. It is a cozy space. As the user moves, volumes appear in the space which are representations of the space passed through by the body parts of the user. These volumes have a life span, they become more transparent over a period of about a minute, then disappear. After a minute or two, another set of volumes appear in the space. These are volumes created by the remote user. Users can create volumes in response to each other. After a while, this volume-building behavior changes. The user can create self-contained floating volumes, blobs or particles. Simultaneously, a small four-paned window appears in the back wall of the CAVE. Beyond this window the user can see another room exactly like the one she is in. In it is a very abstract moving anthropomorphic volume. 'This is the body model of the remote user, perhaps also with some blobs. The wall between the spaces dissolves, leaving the two users in a longer room. The users find that their blobs can be thrown and have a trajectory. They bounce off the walls. Slowly the blobs or particles begin to have their own dynamic, graphical and acoustic behavior. The particles can traverse the whole space, while the users are confined to their original part. The particles interact with each other with some sort of gravitational behavior. The space becomes populated with swarms of autonomous chattering things. Slowly it becomes more difficult to generate particles, and they die off. Projection intensity dims and the experience is over. (In an email to the author (1/3/06), Penny clarifies that this description belongs to his proposal for the Cyberstar 98 Competition and does not represent the project as realized. It does, however, eloquently, even poetically, express the privilege of the operational perspective that, willy nilly, does inform the actual project.)

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This third-person description manages to capture the transductive identity between the user's bodily action in the environment and the (algorithmically processed) imaging of the traces of his or her movement. Not only does neither one exist without the other and outside of their relation (the definition of transduction, according to Gilbert Simondonxvii), but also, as the description of the interaction's cessation makes clear, both are wholly dependent on the environment's technical deployment of the body schema—that is, the operational perspective of the user. This is precisely why the artist only discovered the significance of the problematic of perspective during the exhibition of Traces. As Penny notes:

An amusing aspect of the graphics development was the transition from the 3rd person view (while developing off-line) to the first person view in the CAVE. Solutions which were very satisfying in the simulation mode were useless in first person. For example, if a person is moving forwards, the trace is developing behind her and she can't see it! Worse, if she moves even a voxel backwards, her head is encased in a form which is the head location at the previous time step, so she can't see anything! (Penny et al., citation modified)

This discovery taught Penny that, at the limit, all descriptions of the environment (including the user's description of her body image within it) depend on (and are subordinate to) the bodily activity of the user. For this reason, it seems, Penny is able to appreciate the significant ergodic dimension of the work, a dimension linked directly to the demands made on the body schema of the user.xvii

1. SPECULARITY BEYOND THE MIRROR-IMAGE

Conceptualizing the body image as an emanation from the body schema asserts the derivative status of the body image (and of the image, per se, as an ontological categoryxix) and—even more importantly for our present concerns—puts the category of the visual (the “nobility of vision, to use Hans Jonas' felicitous term) into question. I shall return to Jonas critique of vision in Chapter 2; in the present context, Merleau-Ponty's derivation of vision from touch is my ultimate concern. Indeed, what follows can be understood as an effort to explicate the following passage from one of the most enigmatic but also most pregnant working notes of The Visible and the Invisible:

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The flesh is a mirror phenomenon and the mirror is an extension of my relation with my body.... To touch oneself, to see oneself, is to obtain ... a specular extract of oneself. I.e. fission of appearance and Being-a fission that already takes place in the touch (duality of the touching and the touched) and which, with the mirror (Narcissus) is only a more profound adhesion to Self.13

What is the meaning of this primacy apparently granted touch as the originary source of the fission of Being and its "specular extract"? In what sense can we say that the mirror image, far from being the source of fission, rather belongs to touch, expands its originary self-belonging/ self-differentiating across an essential distance?

Given the correlation of the body schema with the later conception of the fleshx and the more general continuity it marks between the exploration of the ontological power of the “phenomenal body" in the Phenomenology and the later, explicit turn to ontology, we would do well to explore such questions—and the apparent privilege of touch—beginning from Merleau-Ponty's analysis of child development in his seminar on "The Child's Relations with Others." Merleau-Ponty's analysis in this seminar is guided by his conviction that the child's visual apprehension of her body—that is, the visual image of the body presented in the mirror, neither exhausts the child's experience of her body nor directly concerns the ontological dimension of such experience. "The child's visual experience of his own body is,' Merleau-Ponty observes, "altogether insignificant in relation to the kinesthetic, cenesthesic, or tactile feeling he can have of it."14

To explain the fact that the child nevertheless does assimilate the visual image of her body to the interoceptive image of it and also, more generally, that she “comes to identify as bodies," indeed as “animated ones," her body and the bodies of others, Merleau-Ponty invokes a certain commonality of experience that comes simply from the fact of embodiment: "If I am a consciousness turned toward things [it would be better to say a body turned towards things, MH], I can meet in things the actions of another and find in them a meaning, because they are themes of possible activity for my own body" (117).

Just as this presupposes a "reform" in the notion of the psyche (which can no longer be viewed as something accessible only to myself and not seen from the outside), it also requires a reform in our conception of our body: "If my body is to appropriate the conducts given to me visually and make them its own, it must itself be given to me not as a mass of utterly private sensations but instead by what has been called a postural' or corporeal' schema" (117). This capacity is what Henri Wallon calls "a postural impregnation' of my own body by the conducts I witness". Thus, explains Merleau-Ponty:

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I can perceive, across the visual image of the other, that the other is an organism, that that organism is inhabited by a "psyche," because the visual image of the other is interpreted by the notion I myself have of my own body and thus appears as the visible envelopment of another "corporeal schema."(118)xxi

This ontological privileging of the body schema over the visual image of the body ultimately informs Merleau-Ponty's refunctionalization of Lacan's famous "mirror stage" and, with it, the entire role of the specular (of which the mirror image is only a particular concrete dimension). Lacan, as is well known, posits the mirror stage—the concrete experience of seeing in the mirror image—as the crucial moment in the complex transition of the infant from a "fragmented body image" into an “orthopaedic" totality.xii This accomplishment yields a net gain in organization and a concomitant development of the ego (and super-ego); however, it also marks, or at least prefigures, the advent of “paranoic alienation," the alienation of the imaginary ego that occurs as this latter is "deflect[ed] ... into the social"—that is, subjected to the symbolic order (Lacan, 5). From this point onwards in Lacan's picture, the subject enters into a perpetual struggle for recognition in the eyes of others which is equally to say, a struggle against its lack, its dependence on the symbolic, and, finally, its fundamental or essential incompleteness.

In his comments on the specular image and on Lacan's theory specifically, Merleau-Ponty makes clear the extent of his agreement with Lacan: he too recognizes that self-alienation arises in the passage from the fragmented body to the unified body image, the body image as form or gestalt. What distinguishes Merleau-Ponty's commentary, however, is his effort to understand this alienation, not as an inaugural source of paranoia, but as a productive and ongoing dimension of the phenomenal body—what I have earlier called the imaging power of the organism.

Two principles are fundamental in Merleau-Ponty's analysis—the nonidentity between the interoceptive and the specular and the primacy of the former as the source of their relation. Not surprisingly, these two principles emerge as the "solutions" to two concrete problems faced by the infant as she seeks to understand the discord between her "natural" and necessarily incomplete view of her body and the complete view given by the mirror imagexxii:

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It is a problem first of understanding that the visual image of his body which he sees over there in the mirror is not himself, since he is not in the mirror but here, where he feels himself; and second, he must understand that, not being located there, in the mirror, but rather where he feels himself interoceptively, he can nonetheless be seen by an external witness at the very place at which he feels himself to be and with the same visual appearance that he has from the mirror. In short, he must displace the mirror image, bringing it from the apparent or virtual place it occupies in the depth of the mirror back to himself, whom he identifies at a distance with his interoceptive body. (1964, 129, first and last emphases added)

Far from comprising a wholesale displacement of identification from the interoceptive to the specular self and from the body as a "collection of confusedly felt impulses" to the unified body image, the specular image rather marks the advent of a more complex self-relation, one that requires the recognition of a certain doubling of the self and compels a massive spatial extension of the body's primary tactility.xxiv The child must learn to recognize the specular image "as being of oneself, yet not identical to oneself," to employ the felicitous distinction suggested by feminist philosopher Gail Weiss, and the means to do so is a bodily occupation of the visible, a “touching" across an essential distance.15

What is at stake in the specular image is, accordingly, less a drama of identification, as Lacan suggests, than a particular stage in a process that is, from the very beginning, defined by schism, "fission," écart. Instead of marking a fundamental trauma that at once or continuously gives birth to the subject (as Lacan, Butler, and a host of feminist critics following in their wake have variously contended), the mirror stage belongs within a broader developmental trajectory and concretely instances the more fundamental experience of essential separation that Merleau-Ponty will increasingly identify with embodied (human) being With this in mind, it is important to emphasize that, far from occasioning some transcendence of primary tactility (bodily feeling), the mirror stage not only is ontologically rooted in it but also comprises a concrete valence of its power (i.e., imaging power).

Although he insists on situating the schism of the mirror stage as an instance of a broader developmental trajectory of the phenomenal body, Merleau-Ponty is also, like Lacan, keenly attentive to the specific accomplishments, to the well-nigh existential leap, it makes possible. Yet whereas, for Lacan, the schism yields the fundamental, desire-generating alienation of the specular “I" into the social "I," for Merleau-Ponty it allows the child to enter into a space of intercorporeality: "What is true of his own body, for the child, is also true of the other's body. The child himself feels that he is in the other's body, just as he feels himself to be in his visual image" (134). For Merleau-Ponty, that is, the specular image and the "gaze of the other" belong together as an integral phenomenon. Far from occasioning paranoiac alienation, then, the specular image facilitates a vast expansion in the child's embodied agency precisely because it allows the child to enter into the space of the social and into social relations with others. Weiss explains how this happens:

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