Embodiment is an important concept brought to us by phenomenology, but in the hands of analytic philosophers or cognitive scientists it often becomes reified. The reason for this is, on the one hand, that the very terminology of “embodiment” has already turned the concept into a fixed term (I don’t like this term, especially its Chinese translation); on the other hand, some scholars have given “body” a reified understanding, focusing their attention on the slab of flesh there before them in reality, and thereby turning the problem of embodiment into a problem “about the body.”
Thinking of the analyses of time by phenomenologists such as Husserl and Heidegger, we must distinguish the time discussed in phenomenology from objectively measured time. “Inner time-consciousness” is not “consciousness about time”; before “time” becomes an objective object measurable in minutes and seconds, it is, as something primitive within consciousness, precisely the transcendental condition that makes the measurement of time and other kinds of objective knowledge possible.
Just like temporality, phenomenology’s “body” works in a similar way. As a fleshly body with an objective location and fixed boundaries, it is of course something worth paying attention to, but what is more important is bodily character in a more originary sense. This bodily character is roughly analogous to the place that temporality occupies in relation to consciousness. Following Stiegler’s line of thought, we try to place “technology” in a position even more fundamental than “time.” And technology, as the “extension of the body,” comes before the body becomes an objective object with definite boundaries. The body’s extension has not yet been interrupted; the boundary between technology and body is not yet clear. In this sense, originary technicity is originary bodily character.
Senior brother Sheng mentioned the distinction between the phenomenal body and the object body, but he thinks Western medicine studies the object body while Chinese medicine studies the phenomenal body, and I cannot agree with that. The phenomenal body is something pre-scientific and pre-theoretical, whereas theorization inevitably comes with objectification and reification, whether the theory employed is physics and chemistry or yin-yang and the five phases.
The bodily character involved in what is called “embodiment” does not mean “about the body” or “with the body involved.” On the contrary, embodiment in a certain sense is precisely the withdrawal of the object body. For example, when I play the piano, if I am constantly paying attention to my fingers, then the piano has not yet become embodied for me. When fencing with a sword, if I am constantly paying attention to my hand movements and footwork, that is also not sufficiently embodied. Embodiment refers to the skillful use of a technique to the point that it becomes “like one’s own body.” But the “body” in this “like one’s own body” is not the object body, but the pre-objective body.
In Chinese there is the phrase “to use one’s fingers as though they were directed by one’s arms” (如臂使指) to describe mastery and ease in using some technique or exercising control. In this expression, it is the arm that directs the fingers, but in the movement of the fingers, the arm is withdrawn, unnoticed by consciousness. I wiggle my fingers; objectively speaking, I am directing my fingers through my arm, but in my consciousness, my intention crosses over the arm and extends directly into the fingers. The withdrawal of the arm is the condition for the “bodily-ization” of the fingers. It is precisely because my consciousness can skip over the arm and “directly” guide the fingers that the fingers become my body. And when a disabled person tries to use his arm to control mechanical fingers, his consciousness may only be able to extend as far as the arm; although objectively speaking, he too is “using the arm to direct the fingers,” his arm never withdraws, his consciousness lingers in the arm and does not reach the fingers, and so it is hard for him to regard the mechanical fingers as his body. Of course, we can imagine that once he has used this mechanical finger very skillfully, he too will be able to “use it as though it were directed by the arm”; his consciousness will no longer stop at the arm, but will withdraw from it and directly command the mechanical fingers. At that point this technical object seems to have become an extension of his body; this is what we mean by “prosthetization” or “embodiment.”
In other words, the embodiment of technical objects is precisely manifested in the withdrawal of the body: consciousness skips over the body and directly dominates the technical object. This allows us to see what mistake Ihde and others have made regarding the embodiment of the internet (see Wu Ningning): in internet practice, in so-called virtual experience, a person’s consciousness precisely “withdraws from itself” and immerses itself in online activity. This is actually one of the most striking “embodying” technologies in history. Although every technology can become embodied, there are almost no technologies that make embodiment easier than the internet and virtual technologies. The many cases of internet addiction, and the fact that children and adolescents more easily master the internet and virtual technologies, bear this out—I will later discuss in detail why children are better at learning certain skills, such as language and literacy. This is not to say that adults’ learning ability objectively gets worse, but rather that children are better at internalizing what they learn as part of their own bodies. This is precisely because children’s “body schema” has not yet fully taken shape and still has greater room, whereas adults’ “body schema” has basically solidified, and when a new set of skills is inserted into it, one often has to pry open the existing structure.
The reason why such especially embodied technologies are regarded as especially non-embodied technologies is undoubtedly an objectifying way of thinking. From an objective point of view, the finger is moved by the arm, and the sword is waved by the hand, but in online communication, the objective body of the person seems to be sitting there without moving much, and it looks as if they are participating less. Yet this is precisely because the technology is too “embodied.” In fact, since any consciousness or experience is inseparable from bodily character, just as with temporality, the reason internet experience does not require much cooperation from the objective body is precisely because this technology itself already contains sufficient bodily character.
Imagine that I could attain, like the martial arts heroes in wuxia novels, the state of unity of man and sword, using qi to command the sword, sitting still while my intention moves and causes the treasured sword to fly up and down at will. Would this sword be more embodied or less embodied? Would it be more like a part of my body or less like one? Obviously, “the intention leaving the body” precisely means the advancement, not the halting, of “embodiment.” And the internet and virtual technologies are precisely this kind of “flying sword” that can extend intention. Its “leaving the body” is exactly what proves its “embodiment.”
As for the structure of “inner bodily consciousness,” I have not yet quite figured it out. Roughly speaking, one can also refer to “inner time-consciousness,” and even directly borrow the two concepts of “retention” and “protention,” or call them “reception” and “projection,” or feeling and control. Our bodily feeling is nothing other than these two dimensions or directions: in terms of time, they are the before and the after; in terms of the body, they are the inner and the outer. The point where feeling from outside to inside and control from inside to outside converge is the “interface” presented by the body or by embodied technology, and also the place where consciousness resides.
Human consciousness is not a little sprite hiding behind the retina and watching a movie. People often “live” outside the body, and consciousness operates at the interface. The interface separates self and object; the self extends at the point where feeling and control converge. For example, when looking in a mirror, recognizing the image in the mirror as oneself is different from recognizing a picture or a name as “mine.” The self in the mirror image is an extension of the self. I recognize the self in the mirror not because I remember what it looks like, but because I can control it. I raise my hand, and the image in the mirror also raises the corresponding hand; only then do I confirm the extension of the self. When a person wakes from confusion, he may look at his hand or pinch his face, feeling the movement of his hands or the pain in his face, and confirm that he is alive, awake. This is precisely because he finds the existence of the self at the intersection of feeling and control.
And at this intersection, feeling and control are not two clearly distinct sides; rather, within this “halo,” they permeate each other. When using a hammer, the hammer does not completely withdraw from feeling: heaviness and resistance constantly feed back to me, and through these subtle sensations I continuously adjust my control, only then being able to reach the state of using it as though directed by the arm. On the other hand, when I am sensing some thing—for instance, merely coldly observing a bottle in front of me—the ability to control it still operates as the background of feeling. For example, I can move to the other side of the bottle, I can pick it up, I can pour water into it… These abilities of mine have all sedimented into my body, determining what I feel the bottle to be.
Every sensation contains control. Touch is the sense in which the interplay of feeling and control is most evident: touching is both feeling and control, which is why we often take the skin as the boundary surface between self and external things. But control is also present in other senses: focusing in vision, bias in hearing, are all abilities of control. And feeling and control do not necessarily, or rather usually do not, converge within a single specific sense; more common is the convergence of multiple senses—for example, looking with one’s eyes at one’s own moving hand.
We attribute feelings that are difficult to control to the other or to foreign matter. Even when such feelings originate within our flesh itself (for example, “something stuck in the throat”), they still count as a kind of “foreign-body feeling.” The “foreign body” is not unrelated to control; on the contrary, it is precisely because it obstructs control that it draws attention. And when some thing completely deprives a sense of its power of control, that sense may simply be cut off altogether, and the thing is no longer felt. For example, the eyes can go blind in a pure white world where they cannot focus, and the ears or nose can screen out stubborn background noise or smell.
To be continued
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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