TECHNICS AND THE DISSOLUTION OF THE BODY IMAGE If the key question, as Gil suggests, is the “essential way the body ‘turns

bodies in code, or how primordial tactility

3. TECHNICS AND THE DISSOLUTION OF THE BODY IMAGE If the key question, as Gil suggests, is the “essential way the body ‘turns

onto’ things,” then technics can hardly be excluded from the primary operation of the phenomenal body. Merleau–Ponty seems to grasp this crucial point in his analysis of the blind man’s stick. Like the feather in the woman’s hat or my unreflective sense of my car’s width, the stick does not function as an explicit, cognitively assessable enhancement of the body image, but rather as an immediately practical, unthematizable expansion of the body schema:

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

Merleau–Ponty concludes that habit “expresses our power of dilating our being-in-the-world,” which today more than ever means “changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments” (143). Lodged in the

“body as mediator of the world,” habit comprises a “rearrangement and renewal of the corporeal schema,” the “motor grasping of a motor sig-nificance” (145/142/143). Importantly, what happens in such schematic rearrangement is a passage between the body proper and the world of things, an increase in power and scope of the body’s coupling to (and indifferentiation from) the environment. This is what Gil means when he speaks of the body “turning onto” things: at stake is a “transplan-tation” of the body into things and an “incorporation” of things into body that, with each new habit and thus each new prosthesis, leaves the boundary between them that much less discrete.

It can hardly come as a surprise, then, that the “general bodily syn-thesis” carried out by habit perfectly describes, in its function as hinge linking the motor and the perceptual,^xiii the accomplishment of human–

computer synchronicity in Krueger’s Videoplace. By transforming the perceptuomotor coupling in a way that is immediate and in a certain sense transparent, Krueger’s environment can be said to achieve a bodily synthesis, a “rearrangement and renewal of the corporeal schema” in its motor and its perceptual dimensions. Like Merleau–Ponty’s description of the blind man’s stick, what is crucial here is the total and seamless inte-gration of the technical element into the perceptuomotor body schema:

But habit does not consist in interpreting the pressures of the stick on the hand as indications of certain positions of the stick, and these as signs of an external object, since it relieves us of the necessity of doing so. The pressures on the hand and the stick are no longer given;

the stick is no longer an object perceived by the blind man, but an

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instrument with which he perceives. It is a bodily auxiliary, an exten-sion of the bodily synthesis. (152)

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

In his virtual reality environment, Traces (1998–1999), Austra-lian media artist Simon Penny presents us with just such a situation.

A project originally designed for networked CAVEs (computer-assisted virtual environments), Traces generates a world—that is, a space of sensorimotor interaction—out of the three-dimensional traces of body movement captured by four cameras mounted in the four corners of the CAVE (see Figure 1.5). In this way, it privileges the “bodily, temporal, and kinesthetic sensibilities” of the participant over the illusionism of traditional virtual reality spaces as the vehicle for achieving immersion and the conferral of reality. For Penny, this confrontation with mainstream VR research is necessary to probe

FIGURE 1.5 Simon Penny, Traces (1998–1999), networked interactive virtual reality environment. (Courtesy of the artist.)

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the promise of new technology and to pinpoint its humanistic basis.

As he explains,

Traces is an immersive art project which uses the CAVE stereo-immersive environment for an unorthodox purpose. While most virtual worlds are based on a paradigm of virtual navigation through texture mapped worlds, Traces has no “world” and no navigation.

The aesthetic/theoretical goal of Traces is to focus the attention of the user onto their [sic] own sense of embodiment through time. The bodily behavior of the user generates real-time graphics and sound.

The technical goal of Traces is wireless full-body interaction without the use of standard trackers, joysticks and wands, and without icons, menus or graphical pointers of any kind.⁹

With this nod to Krueger’s legacy of “unencumbered VR,” Penny forth-rightly announces his well-nigh philosophical (indeed properly phenom-enological) commitment to constructing virtual reality on the basis of our evolutionarily acquired power of embodiment.

This commitment imposes several constraints that form the very strengths of his project. First, he must eschew the use of illusionist tricks and software tools built according to the simulation paradigm: “Unlike other VR projects, I have no interest here in illusionistic texture mapped models, the illusion of infinite virtual space or building ‘virtual worlds.’

All attention is focused on the ongoing behavior of the user.”¹⁰Second, he must forego the illusion of proximity in his realization of a telematic, networked experience; unlike the work of Paul Sermon (which achieves telematic copresence through the superposition of video images of par-ticipants’ bodies), Traces emphasizes “the highly technologically medi-ated nature of the communication. The users never see each other, only the results of each other’s behavior. The user interacts with gossamer spatial traces which exhibit the dynamics and volumes of bodies.…”

(Penny). Finally, and perhaps most consequentially, Penny must move away from the default perspectival interface of VR environments, the reduction of the user’s body to a “single point, a viewpoint, or the end of a “pointer,” which, he notes, “effectively erases the body from the computational system”:

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

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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 pro-cessing solutions.” It does, however, take advantage of the technically-advanced 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 environ-ment—is generated by the technical system.

One interesting result of this progress, which is indissociably tech-nical 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 syn-chronicity 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 thresh-old 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 phenomenol-ogy. 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 “phe-nomenal” body with its privileged operational standpoint and orienta-tion via proprioceporienta-tion and intermodal communicaorienta-tion—is a temporal power, or better, a power that can be exercised only within certain tem-poral boundaries. Because temtem-poral 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 conscious-ness—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 opera-tions—the hammer in the carpenter’s hand, the feather in the wom-an’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. (Gal-lagher and Cole, 372)

It is interesting that this perceptual differentiation between self-representation

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(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,^xv 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 expe-rience one has of one’s body proper does not take the form of a (representa-tional) 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.

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 move-ment 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 rep-resentations 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, transpar-ent and wispy trace. (Penny)

If a similar algorithmic procedure underlies the self-described dimen-sion 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 col-laborators for users of Traces is designed specifically to accommo-date 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

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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 gener-ate 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.)

In the passage through these phases, the user’s body schema—the means of access to, indeed of production of, this virtual world—under-goes progressive deterritorialization, bringing home the fact that this feedback with the traces of one’s bodily movement is an enactive rep-resentative 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 func-tions 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 repre-sentation 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 mini-mally 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 obser-vational perspective^xvi).

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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 emo-tions is as primary as the perception of our own body and its emoemo-tions 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 “Einfüh-lung” 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 per-spective, 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 represen-tations) 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 repre-sentation in the form of an image. (In this respect, Schilder’s theory

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