Body Images

Embodiment as Intercorporeality

Gail Weiss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135225346
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Drawing on relevant discussions of embodiment in phenomenology, feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, queer theory and post-colonial theory, Body Images explores the role played by the body image in our everyday existence.

{1}
Body Image Intercourse

A Corporeal Dialogue between Merleau-Ponty and Schilder

---

I cannot understand the function of the living body except by enacting it myself, and except in so far as I am a body which rises toward the world.

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962:75)

There is no question that there are from the beginning connecting links between all body-images, and it is important to follow the lines of body-image intercourse.

—Paul Schilder (1950:235)

It is arguable that their respective discussions of the body image are two of the most important contributions Merleau-Ponty and Schilder have made to phenomenology and psychoanalysis, respectively. Schilder's monumental work, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body, is the first full-length study of the body image as a physiological, libidinous, and socially structured phenomenon.¹ While Merleau-Ponty does not devote an entire text to the body image, his interest in and discussions of this “corporeal schema” extend over two decades from his earliest book, The Structure of Behavior, to his final and unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible.² Although both Schilder and Merleau-Ponty develop their own understandings of the body image by drawing upon the research findings of neurologists such as Head, Gelb, Goldstein and others who worked with patients suffering from lesions in the cerebral cortex, what is distinctive about Merleau-Ponty's and Schilder's accounts is that they extend our understanding of the centrality of the body image in all aspects of experience for “normal” as well as physiologically impaired subjects.

It was Sir Henry Head who first introduced the expression “the postural model of the body” to refer to the body image. This term emphasizes what many view to be the body image's primary function, namely, to offer what Merleau-Ponty calls “a global, practical, and implicit notion of the relation between

Paisaje de ensueño, Muriel Hasbun (gelatin silver print, 1987)

our body and things, of our hold on them”³ (Merleau-Ponty 1962:75). As a postural model, the body image informs us from moment to moment and in a largely unthematized way, how our body is positioned in space relative to the people, objects, and environment around us. What this requires is not only a frequent reorientation of one's own mobile body in reference to other, often mobile, bodies (both animate and inanimate), but also the coordination of the body's limbs, organs, muscles, neural pathways, etc. to permit their integrated functioning and the maintenance of an upright posture. Head is also the first to stress the schematic nature of this postural model. Two of the most salient characteristics of the postural schema identified by Head are first, its plasticity, that is, the constant changes the body image undergoes in response to changes in the body and/or the situation. Second, the dynamic organization of the postural model offers a certain equilibrium throughout these changes that enables it to serve as a “standard, against which all subsequent changes of posture are measured” (quoted by Tiermersma 1989:109). In calling attention to the simultaneous adaptability and stability provided by the postural model, Head set the stage for a more comprehensive understanding of the body image and the role it plays in perceptual experience, an understanding which quickly outstripped Head's own view of the postural model as a neural mechanism functioning independently of psychical processes.

Most notably, as both Merleau-Ponty and Schilder stress in their own work, it must be recognized that the body image changes not only in response to actual, physiological changes in the body and/or physical changes in the situation, but is greatly (and often lastingly) affected by psychical and social changes in the body/situation that need not be grounded in or tied to a current state of affairs. As Merleau-Ponty notes, “the normal person reckons with the possible, which thus, without shifting from its position as a possibility, acquires a sort of actuality” (Merleau-Ponty 1962:109). While Merleau-Ponty is primarily thinking here about future actions and how they can be corporeally anticipated in and through the body image, Schilder emphasizes the role that fantasies and the imagination play in constructing and reconstructing the body image:

It is one of the inherent characteristics of our psychic life that we continually change our images; we multiply them and make them appear different. This general rule is true also for the postural model of the body. We let it shrink playfully and come to the idea of Lilliputians, or we transform it into giants. (Schilder 1950:67)

Indeed, Schilder goes on to claim that each individual has “an almost unlimited number of body-images,” a startling and provocative claim whose implications have been largely undeveloped and one which could be especially useful in feminist theorizing about the body.

Despite many feminists' concerns with the limitations of phenomenology and psychoanalysis in general for an adequate characterization of female corporeality, and despite the fact that both Merleau-Ponty's and Schilder's understandings of the body have been justifiably critiqued for the “invisible” ways in which a masculine body provides the norm for their accounts of embodiment, I am convinced that there is much that is productive in both Merleau-Ponty's and Schilder's accounts of the body image, and it is the productive aspects of their thought, rather than a comprehensive analysis or critique of their positions, that I would like to focus on in this chapter.⁴ Specifically, in the sections that follow I will examine Merleau-Ponty's and Schilder's respective understandings of the body image as: a developmental “Gestalt”; developing from a fragmented set of experiences to a more or less coherent phenomenon through the mirror stage; already emerging narcissistically prior to the mirror stage; consistently seeking to establish an always temporary equilibrium; generating its own body image ideal; and, lastly, as revealing its own constitutive otherness or alterity from one moment to the next.

By developing the lacunae and critically extending the implications of these aspects of Merleau-Ponty's and Schilder's accounts of the body image, a richer feminist understanding of how racial, gender, class, age, and cultural differences are corporeally registered and reproduced can be achieved. Without an adequate understanding of the crucial role that the body image plays in reflecting and sustaining individual, social, and political inequalities, there is a danger that positive social and political changes will not address the individual's own corporeal existence in the intimate manner necessary to move successfully towards the eradication of sexism, racism, classism, ageism, and ethnocentrism. Although this book does not propose a direct course for such changes, I do believe that the plasticity and stability of the body image can serve to maintain an oppressive “status quo” and that a greater awareness of the “body power” we have at our disposal through this very plasticity and stability can result in new, perhaps subversive, body images that can be used to fight oppression on a corporeal front.

The Body Image as a Gestalt

According to Merleau-Ponty, the body image exhibits an intersensory, spatial, and temporal unity that is not “the straightforward result of associations established during experience, but a total awareness of my posture in the intersensory world, a ‘form’ in the sense used by Gestalt psychology” (Merleau-Ponty 1962:99–100). This unity is not founded upon an inner or internal unity of the body's organs, muscles, bones, nervous system, and skeletal structure (although these latter are indeed incorporated within the body image) rather, it derives from the world within which the body is always situated and in reference to which the body continually orients and reorients itself: “the body not only flows over into a world whose schema it bears in itself but possesses this world at a distance rather than being possessed by it” (Merleau-Ponty 1973:78, my emphasis).

To say that the body bears the schema of the world in itself is to indicate that the body does not impose any sort of pregiven structure upon the world, but is itself structured by its world, which in turn implies that the body image reflects from the start the particularities and generalities of a given situation, not merely the idiosyncracies of its own physiological or genetic makeup and psychical constitution. Nonetheless, Merleau-Ponty is careful to avoid any characterization of the world as a “body-constituting” force, since it is the body which “possesses this world at a distance rather than being possessed by it.”⁵

The primary means by which the body “possesses” the world are through perception and the bodily motility which makes our perceptual “grasp” on the situation possible, and it is through perception and bodily motility that the body itself “flows over into a world.” This reciprocal, reversible relationship between body and world whereby the body “flows over” into a world whose “schema it bears in itself,” gives rise to an increasingly complex understanding of the gestalt and the role(s) it plays in perception. For, according to Merleau-Ponty, not only is the body image itself a gestalt but what we perceive are also gestalten, that is, forms, which produce “a certain state of equilibrium, solving a problem of maximal coherence and, in the Kantian sense, making a world possible.” Unlike Kant's understanding of form as an a priori, Merleau-Ponty's form:

is the very appearance of the world and not the condition of its possibility; it is the birth of a norm and is not realized according to a norm; it is the identity of the external and the internal and not the projection of the internal in the external. (Merleau-Ponty 1962:60–61, my emphasis)

The schematic organization of both the body image and perceived objects does not predate the phenomena themselves but their schematic organization does not come about on an ad-hoc basis either. Rather, the body image and the perception of discrete objects are progressively developed and refined, with the body image first appearing during the “mirror stage” (from 6–18 months of age) as a corporeal schema which requires, but cannot be reduced to, the infant's awareness of her/his specular image as an image of her/his own body. The developmental nature of perception is in turn clearly implied in the latter's dependency on the efficacy of the body image, since, as Wallon recognized:

[Perception] presupposes a minimal bodily equilibrium. The operation of a postural schema—that is, a global consciousness of my body's position in space, with the corrective reflexes that impose themselves at each moment, the global consciousness of the spatiality of my body —all this is necessary for perception. (quoted in Merleau-Ponty 1964:122)

Regarding the development of the body image, Merleau-Ponty stresses that “the consciousness of one's own body is thus fragmentary [lacunaire] at first and gradually becomes integrated; the corporeal schema becomes precise, restructured, and mature little by little” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964:123). The visual image of the body presented to the child in the mirror cannot, Merleau-Ponty asserts, be equated with the child's own experience of her/his body, and yet, the perception of the specular image as a discrete, unified image of the child's body is precisely what facilitates the necessary restructuring and maturation of the child's bodily awareness into a unified postural schema.⁶ To understand properly the significance of the mirror stage for the development of the body image (and consequently, as we have seen above, for perceptual development), we must turn to Merleau-Ponty's own account of the mirror stage, an account that displaces (rather than disavows) Lacan's emphasis upon the mirror stage as leading “to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development” (Lacan 1977:4).

The Mirror Stage

Lacan characterizes the development of the child in the mirror stage as a complex transition from a nonunified body image to the construction of the body image as an orthopaedic totality:

The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation —and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic…. (Lacan 1977:4)

Merleau-Ponty, like Lacan, recognizes that there is a process of self-alienation that paradoxically accompanies the move from a fragmented body image to the body image as a gestalt. What is paradoxical is that the necessarily alienating acceptance of the specular image as an image of oneself, somehow facilitates rather than disrupts the development of a coherent body image out of two, seemingly disparate experiences: seeing one's body “from the outside” in the mirror, and being introceptively aware of one's body “from the inside.” For Merleau-Ponty, there are two spatial problems that must be resolved in order for the child to work through this paradox:

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; and second, he must understand that, not being located there, in the mirror, but rather where he feels himself introceptively, 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 introceptive body. (Merleau-Ponty 1964:129)

The first problem is rendered even more complicated for the child because the initial failure to recognize the specular image as an image of oneself must eventually give way to a recognition of the specular image as being of oneself, yet not identical to oneself.⁷ It is precisely this schism between the “of oneself” and “to oneself” that is internalized in the resolution of the second problem and which henceforth becomes an integral (alienating) aspect of the body image. Although this schism is not overcome and remains a source of alienation throughout an individual's life (insofar as the specular image will never be equivalent to one's own, more fluid body image), both Lacan and Merleau-Ponty emphasize that it is this very schism that makes it possible for the child to project and extend her/his own bodily awareness beyond the immediacy of her/his introceptive experiences by incorporating the perspective of the other toward one's own body—a perspective one actively participates in —rather than having it thrust upon one from the outside. Thus, for Merleau-Ponty:

The specular image, given visually, participates globally in the existence of the body itself and leads a “phantom” life in the mirror, which “participates” in the life of the child himself. 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. (Merleau-Ponty 1964:133–134)

While Lacan invokes the “paranoic alienation, which dates from the deflection of the specular I into the social I” (Lacan 1977:5), I would argue that Merleau-Ponty acknowledges the alienating character of the specular image without viewing it as a source of paranoia since the specular I is not “deflected” into the social I but the two are one in the same. That is, the specular image offers the child a new perspective not only on her/his own body and her/his being-for-others (what we may call an “outside-in” perspective) but simultaneously allows the child to project her/himself outside of her/his body into the specular image and, correspondingly, into the bodies of others (an “inside-out” perspective).⁸ Although the former may indeed be a source of profound alienation, it is the latter, especially, that provides the ground for strong identifications with others, identifications that expand the parameters of the body image and accomplish its transition from an introceptive, fragmented experience of the body to a social gestalt.⁹ In emphasizing the child's new understanding of visibility and spatiality, Merleau-Ponty displaces Lacan's emphasis on the temporal conflation of a future, complete “I” with the present incomplete sense of self, a fundamental méconnaissance that is, for the latter, the source of the deception that provides the necessary basis for the constitution of the “I.” What Merleau-Ponty offers instead is the development of an intracorporeal spatiality accomplished through the mirror stage that provides a more positive and productive account of the formation of the body image (and of the I) as an intersubjective phenomenon that need not be grounded in deception.

These identifications, however, do not offer an alternative to alienation since they are themselves m...