In a striking passage, Merleau-Ponty writes about a patient who, when “asked to point to a part of his body, such as his nose, only succeeds if he is allowed to grasp it. If the patient is directed to interrupt the movement before it reaches its goal, or if he is only allowed to touch his nose with a wooden ruler, then the movement becomes impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This suggests that \u2018grasping,’ \u2018touching,’ and ‘pointing,\u2019 are all corporeally different. He continues: “my body appears to me as a posture toward a certain task, actual or possible,\u201d which suggests there are different sorts of spatiality for the body, such as situational spatiality versus positional spatiality. And with the example of slapping one-self unerringly \u2014 and unthinkingly \u2014 where one\u2019s bitten by a mosquito, where the performance of the slap is not mediated by metrical observation and cognitive logic, we understand that the body \u201canchors itself\u201d in its objects and its activity situation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a different vein, Madeline Gins, working with Shusaku Arakawa, in a wonderful speculative experiential book, Architecture Body<\/em>, suggests embodied experiments that put into question whether it makes sense to ask: \u201cWhere does my body end and the world begin?\u201d In particular Arakawa and Gins conjure architectural-spatial experiments to sense and comprehend what they call “perceptual landing spots.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taken together, such observations and experiments show that while my body clearly conditions how I move, make sense of my transfinitely multiple relations to self, other, and ambient, no physical sensor based on relative or absolute geometry begins to measure what is in play with my embodied experience, and embodied enactive engagement with my ambient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite this, how can we co-articulate sense in non-predetermined ways with others and with our ambient hybrid analog-algorithmically-augmented environments?<\/p>\n\n\n\n