Bodies in code interfaces with digital media

By combining these two distinct kinds of movement in a single interactive installation, Schiphorst is able to deploy the tension between two perspectives—the observational and the operational, the “statistical body" and the “incommensurable body”—to catalyze a potentialization of the body rooted in the function of the body schema beyond or beneath vision. As she explains, the “tension between these coexisting polarities or conditions (one imposed from without, and the other mute, subversive, willed from within) construct maps that define the path of possible inhabitable and inhabited regions of body space."

In this way, Bodymaps effects a direct interface not simply with the image of the other's body (which, recall, was sufficient to ground intercorporeality on Merleau-Ponty's account), but with the very traces of movement that constitute the direct expression—indeed, the very activity—of other's body schema. This has a significant impact on the constitution of intercorporeality because, rather than having to infer the embodiment of the other and fill in or incarnate the visual distance by bringing the image back to the (feeling) body, the embodied viewer here is confronted with the other's schema directly—that is, independently of its body image.

Schiphorst goes so far as to attribute movement-that is, motile activity—to the technically inscribed body: thus the viewer, in her vision, "enters the field of consciousness of the body, where the body's image becomes aware of the viewer's gaze and physical presence." A body with such awareness (which can no longer be a mere “consciousness") can, obviously, no longer be a mere image. What this means is that the normally dominant (the most noble) sense of vision becomes purely instrumental—a mere means to a deeper, fundamentally tactile and proprioceptive (which is to say, amodal) interface; vision is bypassed as (an essential dimension of) the constitution of (inter)corporeality qua generalized and common medium. That is why Bodymaps can aptly be described as a “tactile dialogue with the image."xxxv,19

1. PRIMORDIAL TACTILITY

Bodymaps exemplifies the capacity of tactility to effectuate the concrete potentialization of the body schema—the becoming-common of the phenomenal body. What exactly is it about tactility that allows it to be the medium (and not simply the privileged sense, that is, one sense among others) for the partial regression back to the primordial skin formation as concrete, infraempirical operator of the écart of the sensible? The answer to this question will come in the wake of yet another differentiation, one which is, from the (infra)empirical perspective, opened by the sensibletranscendental écart, certainly the most fundamental of all: namely, the differentiation of touch as a distinct sense from touch as a protosensory (amodal) power, of touch proper from primordial tactility.

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In his development of the skin ego as the “agent” of a generalized anaclisis, Anzieu privileges the tactile precisely as the point of oscillation, the pivot, between the sensible-transcendental écart and the infraempirical ground of experience:

In relation to all the other sensory registers, the tactile possesses a distinctive characteristic which not only places it at the origin of the psyche, but allows it permanently to provide the latter with something which one might also call the mental background. This is the backdrop against which psychical contents [contenus] stand out as figures, or alternatively the containing envelope which makes it possible for the psychical apparatus to have contents. (84)

In this figuration, the tactile comprises the modality for the reversibility of psychic life, for a higher order reversibility grounded in the primordial anaclitic indifference of the skin. Yet, to function as a kind of privileged über-sense, an “infrasensory sense," the tactile must continue to harbor something of the more primordial skin container function. Thus, tactility is at once the most primitive sense formation and the sensible-transcendental origin of the sensible per se; it must simultaneously instance two divergent ontological formations and must also bridge the gap between them, forming some kind of passage across the empirical-transcendental divide.

This is precisely why Anzieu furnishes two apparently incompatible accounts of the tactile, both of which, however, serve to foreground the reflexivity of sense. On one hand, there is the reflexivity of touch as a distinct sense:

The skin possesses a structural primacy over all the other senses and this is true for a least three reasons. Firstly, it is the only sense organ that covers the whole body. It itself also contains several distinct senses (heat, pain, contact, pressure ...) whose physical proximity entails psychical contiguity. Lastly, as Freud allusively remarks (1923), touch is the only one of the five external senses which possesses a reflexive structure: the child who touches the parts of its body with its finger is testing our two complementary sensation[s], of being a piece of skin that touches at the same time as being a piece of skin that is touched. It is on the model of tactile reflexivity that the other sensory reflexivities (hearing oneself make sounds, smelling one's own odor, looking at oneself in the mirror), and subsequently the reflexivity of thinking, are constructed. (61)

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On the other hand, there is the protoreflexivity—the protoreversibility—of the primordial skin, which only gradually gives rise to the sensible as a differentiated field structured above all through sensory doubleness or reversibility:

The skin, which is a system of several sense organs (perceiving touch, pressure, pain, heat) is itself closely connected with the other organs of external sense (hearing, sight, smell, taste) and with the awareness of body movement and balance. In small babies, the complex sensitivity of the epidermis (to touch, heat and pain) remains for a long time diffuse and undifferentiated. Subsequently, however, it transforms the organism into a sensitive system that is capable of experiencing other sensations of the skin (the associative function) or differentiating them and localizing them as figures emerging against the background of the overall body surface (the screen function). (14)

Rather than relating to each other as abstract transcendental condition and organ of possible experience, as they would on a Kantian approach, these two determinations demonstrate how tactility—primordial tactility—forms the sensible-transcendental condition of its sensory function, how it, in effect, bootstraps itself into experience. This is what I mean by "primordial tactility," and, given the peculiar dissolution of the empirical-transcendental divide it performs, it is entirely fitting that it has, as its distinct phenomenality, the intersensorial domain normally experienced only by synaesthetes and very young infants, but that, as Brian Massumi has shown, every so often ruptures the smooth fabric of the actual, thus reminding us of its constitutive coupling to the virtual.

Anzieu, for his part, unpacks the psycho-physio-genetic basis of the so-called “fringe of the virtual," thereby tracing the manifest privilege that touch enjoys in empirical life directly and irrevocably back to the anaclitic function of the skin:

The Skin Ego is a psychical surface which connects up sensations of various sorts and makes them stand out as figures against the original background formed by the tactile envelope: this is the Skin Ego's function of intersensoriality, which leads to the creation of acommon sense ... whose basic reference is always to the sense of touch. (103)

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What is decisive about Anzieu's contribution here is his insistence on the necessary integration of primary tactility as the medium of the amodal. Far from a hidden transcendental cause, primary tactility is necessarily at work in every sensory event; as the source for the differentiation of the senses, it is also the glue that gathers them into a system, the system of the sensible:

[T]he repressed primary tactile communications are not destroyed (except in pathological cases), but are preserved as a backcloth upon which systems ofintersensory correspondences come to be inscribed; they constitute a primary psychical space, into which other sensory and motor spaces may be fitted; they provide an imaginary surface upon which the products oflater operations of thought may be set out. Communication at a distance through gestures and subsequently by the spoken word requires not only the acquisition of specific codes, but also the preservation of this original echotactile backcloth to communication, and its more or less frequent reactivation and reuse. (152–153)

Anzieu's insistence here allows us to demarcate a domain of the infraempirical more primordial than the infralanguage (Gil): namely, the infratactile or infratactility. “Echotactile communication," he tells us, “remains the original source of semiosis," which means that primordial tactility— infratactility—demarcates a prelinguistic domain and function beneath the operation of the infralanguage. The latter, accordingly, can be no more than a metaphoric extension or transformation (rather than the sensible-transcendental source of metaphor). "Feedback loops with the environment" are formed very early in the infant's development, insists Anzieu: These are audio-phonological in nature; they relate to crying in the first instance and then to vocalizations ... and are the first stages in the acquisition of semiotic behavior. In other words, the acquisition of pre-linguistic signification (of crying and then of sounds during babbling) precedes the acquisition of infralinguistic signification (of mimicry and gesture) (165, emphasis added).

Recognizing that chronological succession need not imply structural derivation, we can nonetheless affirm Anzieu's insistence here for the precise reason that it follows directly from the generalization of the anaclitic function by which, as we have seen, the sensible is revealed to have always already been specular—that is, constituted on the basis of a fundamental écart. For its part, the derivation of language (and of the infralanguage) from a more primordial infratactility supports the reciprocal coupling of embodiment and technics that we have located at the heart of the sensible. If language is a specification of technics, a historicotechnical specification of différance (as Stiegler puts it), then it is only fitting that it emerge from out of the infratactile, the protodifference of the sensible.

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1. SEEING THROUGH THE HAND

As a premodal or amodal dimension of the infraempirical that bootstraps itself into phenomenological existence, primary tactility or infratactility comprises a kind of primitive or not yet differentiated, virtual, or potential reversibility out of which arises not simply the division of the senses, but more fundamentally, the divisions that comprise sensation per se (activity-passivity, experiencing-experienced, subject-object, etc.). Infratactility would thus seem to furnish a source for the reversibility that, according to Merleau-Ponty's famous analysis of the chiasm, characterizes the “flesh." Indeed, it helps us to understand the apparent inconsistency in Merleau-Ponty's conception of reversibility, its teetering in the balance between something that cannot quite occur in fact and yet must, by right, be possible:

To begin with, we spoke summarily of a reversibility of the seeing and the visible, of the touching and the touched. It is time to emphasize that it is a reversibility always imminent and never realized in fact. My left hand is always on the verge of touching my right hand touching the things, but I never reach coincidence; the coincidence eclipses at the moment of realization, and one of two things always occurs: either my right hand really passes over to the rank of the touched, but then its hold on the world is interrupted; or it retains its hold on the world, but then I do not really touch it-—my right hand touching, I palpate with my left hand only its outer covering. (1968, 147–48)

By what right, however, is the reversibility always imminent? What agency, what materiality, what form of being supports this imminence? This is a crucial question precisely because it foregrounds the divide separating the phenomenal domain, in which reversibility occurs as the experience of“double sensation," from the infraempirical domain, where reversibility remains in potentia.

If we follow Merleau-Ponty in making the move from imminence to double sensation as experienced, we obtain a certain conceptualization of the écart (the "fission," "gap," or "spread") constitutive of sensation. Specifically, the écart would seem to comprise the fundamental principle of the body's belongingness to the world (and of the complementarity of phenomenalization and ontology):

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But this incessant escaping, this impotency to superpose exactly upon one another the touching of the things by my right hand and the touching of this same right hand by my left hand, or to superpose, in the exploratory movements of the hand, the tactile experience of a point and that of the “same" point a moment later, or the auditory experience of my own voice and that of other voices—this is not a failure. For if these experiences never exactly overlap, if they slip away at the very moment they are about to rejoin, if there is always a "shift," a “spread” [écart], between them, this is precisely because my two hands are part of the same body, because it moves itself in the world, because I hear myself both from within and from without. I experience—and as often as I wish—the transition and the metamorphosis of the one experience into the other, and it is only as though the hinge between them, solid, unshakeable, remained irremediably hidden from me. But this hiatus between my right hand touched and my right hand touching, between my voice heard and my voice uttered, between one moment of my tactile life and the following one, is not an ontological void, a non-being: it is spanned by the total being of my body and by that of the world.... (148)

The écart in this sense is a marker of reversibility as a necessary condition of phenomenal experience, of sensation per se. It is nothing other than the fundamental dehiscence that explains the body's need for the world (and also the world's need for the body, being's need for manifestation or phenomenalization). As such, écart also prevents the body from achieving pure immanence; it is that which renders it an essentially incomplete "unity;" a process of individuation that will never be fully accomplished.

The necessity for such an understanding of the body-world coupling and of its rootedness in the experience of the écart has been demonstrated by Renaud Barbaras in The Being of the Phenomenon. The divergence between touching and touched is the condition for the being of the tangible world (and something similar can be said for vision and for hearing—that is, those other senses characterized by doubleness):

[T]he touch is produced only insofar as it is immersed in a body; it advents only as this very corporeality. The touch is itself, that is, sentient, only to the degree that it is unaware of itself in or as the world that it reaches. The incarnation of touch corresponds to the fact that its object is not clearly laid out in front of it but is given only as the obscure presence of a tactile world, the presentation as tactile world of a dimension that is non-presentable by itself. The absence of this dimension to the world responds to the absence of touch to itself, that is, to its carnal being. ... touch can proceed only from a subject which is its own absence, which is outside of itself.xxxvii,20

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This understanding of the necessary correlation of body and world— and thus of the écart—as a function of the reciprocal impossibility of pure reflexivity and pure corporeity goes together (at least on Barbaras's account) with a privileging of vision as the most noble of the senses. Indeed, Barbaras begins his reconstruction of The Visible and the Invisible by positing the “primacy of vision." He claims:

Vision alone gives us access to the world as world... In hearing or touch, the object does not have access to this exteriority and autonomy: in touch, occurring through physical contact, the thing is experienced “at the tips of the fingers" rather than outside of the one sensing, and I hear the sound “in the ear" rather than situating it in space. In the two cases, the perceiving body is referred back to itself; it fails to forget itself in favor of a pure exteriority. (149)

Things are otherwise in the case of vision: "there is," claims Barbaras, "more world’ in vision, since the sensed is given vision only as split off from sensibility, as resting in itself." (149)

As compelling as such an analysis would appear to be, it does not fully accord with the role Merleau-Ponty assigns touch—or, rather, the double sensation of tactility—in some of the final working notes included in The Visible and the Invisible. Thus, despite his insistence that vision and touch are fundamentally divergent, that they disclose or construct distinct, nonsuperposable universes, Merleau-Ponty accords to both an irreducible openness, a fundamental access, to the world as world:

To touch oneself, to see oneself ... is not to apprehend oneself as an object, it is to be open to oneself, destined to oneself (narcissism) Nor, therefore, is it to reach oneself, it is on the contrary to escape oneself, to be ignorant of oneself, the self in question is by divergence (d’écart), is Unverborgenheit of the Verborgen as such, which consequently does not cease to be hidden or latent. (249)

In both cases, moreover, this openness or access to world as world emerges because of the asymmetry that lies at the heart of the reversibility constitutive of double sensation. That is why the écart is the condition for the transduction of body and world that informs Merleau-Ponty's conception of the flesh. "In fact," continues the same working note:

I do not entirely succeed in touching myself touching, in seeing myself seeing, the experience I have of myself perceiving does not go beyond a sort of imminence, it terminates in the invisible, simply this invisible is its invisible, i.e., the reverse of its specular perception, of the concrete vision I have of my body in the mirror. The self-perception is still a perception, i.e., it gives me a Nicht Urpräsentierbar (a non-visible, myself), but this it gives me through an Urpräsentierbar (my tactile or visual appearance) in transparency (i.e., as a latency). (249-50)

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In a vet more radical reflection on the transduction of body and world, Merleau-Ponty clearly positions the écart constitutive of touch, the écart between the touched and the touching, as the source for the opening of the world, for the “untouchable," and, by extension, for the “invisible”:

To touch and to touch oneself (to touch oneself = touched-touching) They do not coincide in the body: the touching is never exactly the touched. This does not mean that they coincide “in the mind” or at the level of “consciousness." Something else than the body is needed for the junction to be made: it takes place in the untouchable. That of the other which I will never touch. (254)

In this further rumination on the imminence of the reversibility of double sensation, Merleau-Ponty lays bare the true ontological basis for the failure of the body to coincide with itself: Noncoincidence or "embodied alterity" is simply a primary condition of the being of the body. This ontological fact is precisely what makes the body part of the flesh and also, of course, what grounds the body's self-transcendence, its fundamental adherence to the world. Beneath the reciprocity of pure reflexivity and pure corporeity, activity and passivity, consciousness and matter, lies the primordial écart of tactility which, as Merleau-Ponty's descriptions attest, must be understood as a first (and “originary") embrace of alterity, an original of the elsewhere, a Selbst that is an Other" (254).

The fundamental self-alterity of the body goes together with a triangulation of self, things, and world, and it informs a primordial negativity of tactility, or put otherwise, tactility as the source of the body's negativity (and hence of its transcendence in immanence, its self-transcendence toward the world):

To touch is to touch oneself. To be understood as: the things are the prolongation of my body and my body is the prolongation of the world, through it the world surrounds me—If I cannot touch my own movement, this movement is entirely woven out of contacts with me—The touching oneself and the touching have to be understood as each the reverse of the other—The negativity that inhabits the touch (and which I must not minimize: it is because of it that the body is not an empirical fact, that it has ontological signification) ... is the other side or the reverse (or the other dimensionality) of sensible Being.... (255)

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This ontological signification of the body explains why the radicalization of the body-world transduction that is constitutive of the flesh—which is also a radicalization of the écart—coincides with a passage back from the phenomenal domain of sensory separation (common sense) to the infraempirical domain. As the protodivision of primary tactility, the écart generates a protoreversibility—a reversibility prior to and independent of any actual terms to be reversed—that forms the sensible-transcendental condition for sensation.

In the wake of this radicalization of the flesh and of the écart of primary tactility, Merleau-Ponty is led to abandon the parallelism of touch and vision that holds sway throughout the chapter on the chiasm and the working notes directly related to it. Although this appears only by implication in the working notes, it emerges as a decisive motif of Merleau-Ponty's exploration of the human body in the third and final lecture course on Nature. What is firmly established in the working notes, however, is the derivation of vision from tactility on which the lectures build.

Thus, for example, we see Merleau-Ponty continuing the same note just cited (and cited earlier at the beginning of Section 5) by correlating vision with touch (or better, with tactility as the agent of embodied selfaffectivity). He observes:

The flesh is a mirror phenomenon and the mirror is an extension of my relation with my body. Mirror = realization of a Bild of the thing, and I-my shadow relation = realization of a (verbal) Wesen: extraction of the essence of the thing, of the pellicle of Being or of its “Appearance"—To touch oneself, to see oneself, is to obtain such 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. (255–256, some emphases added)

We can now understand this passage in its full profundity: it expresses the rootedness of touch and vision as differentiated (and nonoverlapping) senses from a more primordial self-relation of the body that is at the same time (because of its noncoincidence) a self-transcendence: primary tactility.

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In Nature, the double sensation of touch is explicitly accorded the ontological task of opening the body onto the world, and vision is explicitly positioned as a (higher order) derivation from it. What emerges as the crucial component of this more profound understanding of tactility is the demarcation of a bodily interiority, which is certainly significant in light of our previous exposure of the correlation of the skin boundary and primary tactility. Asking how the body can “have a reference to something other than itself," Merleau-Ponty quickly comes to what is distinctive about tactility: its boundedness "within" the body:

It [the body] is open in a circuit with the world, but it is open. It sees itself; it touches itself. The hand that I touch, I sense, could touch that which touches it. And this is no longer true past the limits of my skin. The block of my body thus has an “interior" which is its application to itself. By this application, it has not only affective states closed on itself, but also correlations [?]—the sensibles and the world. The flesh (the touching touched, as an innate body) as the visibility of the invisible (the touching hand, the look).21

This delimitation of a bodily interiority and a skin boundary comprises the payoff of Merleau-Ponty's deepening of the Phenomenology's analysis of the body as our access to the world as such. To say that the body is “the measurement of the world” or a “standard of things" is, simply, to recognize that its specificity, its singularity, as a kind of being (and as a part of Being) comes from its interiority, from its application to itself (its self-affection), which is, simultaneously, the agency for its openness to the world (hetero-affectivity). This complex self-relation, moreover, informs the duality of sensation characteristic of touch and vision as differentiated (nonoverlapping) senses.

Thus, when Merleau-Ponty discovers the condition of possibility for the duality of sensation “in the relation of the body to itself," noting that it is here that there is the touched-touching," he is simply unpacking the significance of primary tactility's role as the strict correlative to the skin boundary and the primordial interiority it demarcates (223). Primary tactility is that in virtue of which sensory reciprocity can "break down" or collapse"; it is the source of the “identity of touching and touched" that, as the analysis from The Visible and the Invisible made clear, can never appear in actuality, in the realm of empirical life, even as it expresses the ontological principle of bodily life as fundamentally noncoincident with itself, as sundered by its essential openness to the world.

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