bodies in code, or how primordial tactility
5. ALL EXTERIORIZATIONS ARE EXTERIORIZATIONS OF THE SKIN
If the self-exfoliation of the phenomenal body occasioned by the specular image is a thoroughly technical process, it does not, however, introduce technics into embodiment as if for the first time. No more a fall into tech-nics than (pace Lacan) a fall into social alienation, worldly specularization merely instances the concrete technical conditions for the phenomenaliza-tion of embodiment at any given historical moment in what philosopher Bernard Stiegler has called the history of the supplement.xxviii If there is a history of specularization, that is precisely because embodied life is “essen-tially” technical, because the generalization of specularity always already implicated in the concrete operation of the body schema finds its enabling, sensible–transcendental or infraempirical condition in the écart constitu-tive of sensibility. We could equally say that technologies are always already embodied, that they are in their own way “essentially” embodied, if by this we mean that they mediate—that they express—the primordial fission, the gap, within the being of the sensible.
Such an understanding of the primordial technicity of life as sen-sible écart resonates in interesting and productive ways with the psycho-analytical conceptions of the skin ego (Didier Anzieu) and the primary, passive containing function of the skin (Esther Bick). Part of an effort to unpack the domain of transcendental sensibility underlying and con-ditioning Kleinian object relations, Anzieu and Bick (working simulta-neously but separately!) invest the skin as a kind of primary passivity that, long before the advent of the mirror-stage and even before the incorporation of the mother’s breast, serves to bind together “parts of the personality not as yet differentiated from parts of the body.”16 “The thesis,” explains Bick, “is that in its most primitive form the parts of the personality are felt to have no binding force among themselves and must therefore be held together in a way that is experienced by them passively, by the skin functioning as a boundary” (55). However, she abruptly notes:
This internal function of containing the parts of the self is depen-dent initially on the introjection of an external object, experienced as capable of fulfilling this function.… Until the containing functions
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have been introjected, the concept of a space within the self cannot arise.… The stage of primary splitting and idealization of self and object can now be seen to rest on this earlier process of containment of self and object by their respective “skins.” (55–56)
In his commentary on Bick, Anzieu brings out the fundamental dif-ferentiation—the presence of a primordial sensory écart—that informs Bick’s conception of the passive integrating function of the skin:
But this internal function of containing the parts of the Self is depen-dent initially on the introjection of an external object capable of ful-filling the function. This containing object is usually constituted in the process of feeding [in its dual aspect of nipple in mouth and touching of skin]…. The containing object is experienced concretely as skin. If the containing function is introjected, the baby may acquire the concept of a “space within the self ” and accede to a splitting of Self and object, each being contained in its respective skin.17
If we substitute “skin” for “containing object” here, we encounter, in an only apparent tautology, the most fundamental form of the écart con-stitutive of the being of the sensible: “the skin [= introjected containing object] is experienced concretely as skin.” In the mode of primary pas-sivity, the infant thus experiences the skin from the “inside” (the feeling of having “a space within the self ”) and from the “outside” (though via the introjection of the skin as boundary), as “agent” and as “patient.” This happens without support from—and thus prior to—the series of dif-ferentiations (self–other, inside–outside, psychic space–objective space, etc.) that such experience would seem to require but will in effect per-formatively produce.
Because of this fundamental, preobjective, prespatial duality or reversibility, the skin constitutes the locus and support for a primordial materialization of the sensible, for the most basic form of the écart of the sensible. Recalling our earlier comments on primary narcissism, it is important to emphasize once again (with Merleau–Ponty) that this basic form of écart—the skin as the locus and support for primary nar-cissism—is always already differentiated, but differentiated amodally, prior to sensory differentiation (at a more basic level than the separation of the distinct senses).
As this primordial differentiation of the skin, the sensory écart is essentially technical. Viewed from the perspective of the human being of today (the normal adult as it has evolved, genetically and cultur-ally, up to the present), this essential technicity can (perhaps only) be
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understood through the trajectory of exteriorization it makes possible and which constitutes the “epiphylogenetic” evolution of the human.xxix It can (perhaps only) be understood, that is, as the sensible–transcenden-tal ground for exteriorization as such.
That is why I have emphasized the coupling of embodiment and technics: the technologies that saturate our contemporary world, in this respect no different from the earliest flint chipping tools used by protohumans, are so many exteriorizations of our fundamental sensory écart. What Bick’s and (particularly) Anzieu’s work on the skin helps us to see, however, is that this epiphylogenesis of the human, its evolution through means other than life, is made possible by the primordial écart and, more specifically, by the fundamental anaclitic indifferentiation of the écart, its occupation of the cusp between the biological and the psychic prior to their actual differentiation.
A concept describing the way that psychic functions “lean on” bio-logical functions (Freud’s word is Anlehnung, literally “leaning on”),
“anaclisis” is central to Freud’s conception of psychoanalysis insofar as it depicts the psyche in continuity with the body and with the biologi-cal functioning of the organism. If anaclisis is, for Anzieu, arguably the most fundamental principle of the Freudian revolution, this commit-ment has the effect of making psychic phenomena intrinsically techni-cal or, perhaps more exactly, of rendering the passage to the psychitechni-cal nothing less than the sensible–transcendental condition for technical exteriorization as a “transcendence” of genetic law.
In contrast to Jean Laplanche, who reserves anaclisis for explaining how organic functions of self-preservation provide a support for sexual drives, Anzieu generalizes its application to the entirety of psychic life:
“The psychical apparatus develops through successive stages of breaking with its biological bases, breaks which on the one hand make it possible to escape from biological laws and, on the other, make it necessary to look for an anaclitic relationship of every psychical to a bodily func-tion” (96). As the most diffuse and primitive organic (sensory, or better, protosensory) locus—the locus for the “attachment drive” (following John Bowlby’s ethology-inspired broadening of early infant experience beyond the oral phase of the sexual drive)—the skin encompasses the entirety of biological and psychical function, initially (as we have seen) in an undifferentiated state (a state of virtual differentiation). It thereby forms the basis for a conception of the ego, the skin ego, that is far more primitive than Lacan’s mirror stage, Winnicott’s analysis of the mother’s
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face, and Klein’s introjection, and is primitive, categorically, because it designates the (in)differentiation of the psychical and the biological.
Indeed, Anzieu defines the skin ego as a transitional stage between the psychical and the biological—the psychic and embodied inhabita-tion of the caesura of their fundamental (dis)juncture. It is a
mental image of which the Ego of the child makes use during the early phases of its development to represent itself as an Ego contain-ing psychical contents, on the basis of its experience of the surface of the body. This corresponds to the moment at which the psychical Ego differentiates itself from the bodily Ego at the operative level while remaining confused with it at the figurative level. (40)
As Victor Tausk’s analysis of the “influencing machine” attests,xxx the skin ego comprises a stage in which the operational function of anaclisis is ahead of its properly psychic function—a stage in which the body oper-ates through a fundamental differentiation that it does not yet experience as such. It thus marks the fundamental sense in which, as Freud put it, the ego is “first and foremost a bodily ego,” “not merely a surface entity,”
but “the projection of a surface,” the projection of “bodily sensations … springing from the surface of the body” (Freud, 16).
The skin, in sum, is the most primordial locus and expression of the indifferentiation of the biological and the psychical marked and overcome by the function of anaclisis. That is why it supports the proto-origin of specularity, of self-relation/heterorelation, as the fundamental sensible écart. This écart is essentially technical because it is the sen-sible–transcendental condition for all exteriorization. As it is expanded and deepened by Anzieu, the Freudian theory of anaclisis shows that the passage to exteriorization is only possible because of a passage within embodied being, the passage opened by anaclisis and the primordial indifference it marks as well as overcomes, indeed marks in the very process of overcoming.
By helping us discover the essential technicity of the skin ego as the primordial support of anaclisis, Anzieu’s analysis refunctionalizes Bick’s conception of the “second muscular skin,” uncovering its non-pathological generality and, more importantly, making it speak to our contemporary technogenesis and the challenges it poses to our efforts to understand our agency in the world today.xxxi From Bick’s more nar-row clinical perspective, the second muscular skin, or “‘second-skin’
formation,” occurs when there is a “‘disturbance in the primal skin function”; in this formation, “dependence on the object is replaced by a
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pseudo-independence, by the inappropriate use of certain mental func-tions, or perhaps innate talents, for the purpose of creating a substitute for this skin container function” (56).
Given our investment in the body schema as the empirical agent of generalized specularity, it is extremely consequential that “this faulty skin-formation produces a general fragility in later integration and organizations. It manifests itself in states of unintegration as distinct from regression involving the most basic types of partial or total unin-tegration of body, posture, motility, and corresponding functions of mind, particularly communication” (59). Indeed, its correlation with the body schema is so fundamental that Bick is led to characterize it as a “muscular shell” (59).
Clearly discerning the correlation of this second muscular skin with technics—it is variously referred to as a “substitutive prosthesis,” an
“ersatz muscularity,” a “protective prosthesis” (193/195)—Anzieu modi-fies Bick’s theory by proposing a more generalized, normative function of the second-skin formation:
The second muscular skin is abnormally overdeveloped when it has to compensate for a serious insufficiency of the Skin Ego and to fill in the faults, fissures and holes in the first containing skin. Yet everyone needs a second muscular skin, as an active protective shield supple-menting the passive protective shield constituted by the outer layer of a normally constituted Skin Ego. (195, emphasis added)xxxii
Anzieu gives the example of sports and clothing, noting in particu-lar the penchant of patients to protect themselves from psychoanalytic regression through pre- and postsession work-outs. Bearing in mind the technical function of the second muscular skin, however, we might do better to connect it with the specter of “psychasthenia” precisely as it has been linked to contemporary media culture.xxxiiiFaced with the assault of media images that aim precisely to “confuse … the space defined by the coordinates of the organism’s own body … with represented space,”
it makes perfect sense that the organism would adopt a muscular skin, a protective shield, in order to ward off the dissolution of its identity that comprises the contemporary condition of generalized psychasthenia.
Our discovery of the essential technicity of the skin as the indif-ferentiation of the biological and the psychical (as the primordial écart of the sensible) allows us to differentiate another genealogy of technics that diverges fundamentally from this muscular model. The muscu-lar apparatus of the generalized second-skin formation is driven by
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aggressivenessxxxiv—as is, obviously, the massively predominant view and deployment of technology in our culture; however, the fact that today’s technologies are nonetheless exteriorizations of the skin means that, underneath the (still) pathological cathexis of aggressiveness, these technologies are necessarily correlated with the self-preservative, attach-ment-centered technical genealogy of the skin as primary containing function. Indeed, in light of the anaclitic indifference instantiated by the primary skin function, we can understand the second muscular skin formation as, first and foremost, an expression of the fact—defin-ing a perfectly general technical condition—that all exteriorizations are exteriorizations of the skin.
Accordingly, what the psychoanalytic perspective helps us appreci-ate (and here it supplements phenomenology, as Merleau–Ponty was well aware) is the concrete (infra)empirical operation, in the life of the adult, of the first containing skin. Indeed, the origin of the skin ego, the first containing skin, in the undifferentiated, protosensory écart constitutive of the sensible entails its essential withdrawal from phenomenological manifestation. Such a withdrawal characterizes adult life first and fore-most only because it is a purely general, sensible–transcendental condi-tion of all life, of life as such.
Confronted with an artwork that expressly stages a regression from the muscular model of media consumption to some kind of (re)inhabitation of the primary skin as the core of our essential technic-ity, we thus have due cause to be wary, but also to be intrigued. How can a reversal of the phylogenetic trajectory of embodied life ever lead us back to that which is by definition phenomenologically inscrutable?
Describing her computer sound and video installation, Bodymaps:
artifacts of touch (1996), artist Thecla Schiphorst announces her desire to create a sensory interface with the human capacity for amodal tactil-ity, the operation of which is logically, if not per force chronologically and developmentally, prior to the differentiation of the senses (see Fig-ure 1.6). Noting the work’s technical infrastructFig-ure—its use of “a spe-cially designed sensor surface … which can detect touch, pressure, and the amount of forced applied” to it—Schiphorst explains its function:
[T]hese sensors lie beneath a white velvet surface upon which is pro-jected images of the artist’s body. The surface yearns for contact and touch. Its rule base is complex and subtle, impossible to decode. Its effect is disturbing, erotic, sensual and subjective. The intention of the work is to subvert the visual/objective relationship between the object and the eye, between click and drag, between analysis and
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power, to create a relationship between participant and technology that transgresses rules of ownership and objectivity and begs ques-tions of experience, power and being.… The work … constructs a space inhabited by the body as mediated by technology. The Body-maps installation employs electric field sensor technology, in which the viewer’s proximity, touch, and gesture evoke moving sound and image responses from the body contained and represented within the installation space. Images of the body …of the artist … are projected onto a horizontal planar surface. The opaque projection surface is a container for the body, and is the site and source for the physical and cultural conditions and objects or artifacts which reference this containment. The surface is covered in white velvet creating a sen-sual and unexpected texture which leaves “traces” of the hand prints that are left behind, creating a relationship to memory, an inability to escape the effects of one’s touch. As the viewer places their [sic] hands closer to the surface or skin of the installation, a complex soundscape responds to their proximity and movement. The image shudders. The viewer becomes participant through the sense of touch. There is no escape from entering the “third space” between objective seeing and subjective feeling.… This work invites relationship through an expe-rience grounded in proprioceptive knowledge, skin sense feeling, listening through touching, seeing through hearing, together inte-grated through attention.18
Bodymaps assembles all of the topics we have been discussing here—the mirror-image, the image of the other’s body, technics, touch, the skin—
and configures them so as to underscore the productive potentiality the FIGURE 1.6Thecla Schiphorst, Bodymaps: artifacts of touch (1996), computer sound and video installation. (Courtesy of the artist.)
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body schema offers for restoring a tactile interface with the world. The
“third space” at issue here is not some intermediate space that somehow splits the difference between operational and observational perspec-tives, but rather is more like the sensible–transcendental spatiality—the power to spatialize—that Merleau–Ponty, Gil, and Massumi all accord the phenomenal body.
Bodymaps opens such a third space by reversing the psychogenetic process through which the child comes to acquire a normal adult per-spective on the world. Accordingly, whereas Bick correlates the devel-opment of body schema function with a healthy first containing skin, Bodymaps exploits the (relative) primordiality of the body schema within the register of empirical experience (recall its prenoietic dimension) as a means to disempower vision as the dominant sense (a necessary pre-requisite) and thereby to create what we might call (thinking of Ong’s
“second orality”) a “second primary tactility,” a partial restoration of the primordial dimension of the skin. This is why the work instances the experimental, as Massumi would put it, somewhere in between—that is, beneath the division between—the analog and the digital. Bodymaps uses technics to “connect and interfuse different spheres of activity on the same operational plane.” Yet, if it thereby creates “startling effects”
by “using proprioception as the general plane of cross-referencing,”xxxv it does so in a way that underscores the primordial technicity of embodi-ment (and the originary embodiembodi-ment of technics).
Bodymaps, we can now specify, exemplifies the use of technics to expose the originary technical element of being, the écart constitutive of the being of the sensible. This technical exposure is accomplished through Schiphorst’s use of technics to set the embodied enaction of the viewer into feedback with its sensible–transcendental grounding.
Bodymaps, explains Schiphorst, “uses video images of my own body and images of a digital body whose movement is ‘captured’ from my own movement.” It thus uses—indeed interfaces—two distinct kinds of image: images of the body in movement and images of the movements of the body. Schiphorst clarifies her aim here:
I am especially interested in how the knowledge of movement and of the body can affect and inform the design of electronic computer technology and the works created with (or through) that technology.
All movement in the video images … was created from within the body, as was dictated by elemental states such a[s] drowning, float-ing, shiverfloat-ing, crawlfloat-ing, uncoverfloat-ing, hiding. This technique used
All movement in the video images … was created from within the body, as was dictated by elemental states such a[s] drowning, float-ing, shiverfloat-ing, crawlfloat-ing, uncoverfloat-ing, hiding. This technique used