Prosthetic touch?
Whilst watching Ichi, a 2008 movie about a blind swordswoman, it occurred to me that the relationship between prosthetics and sensation was never explicitly addressed in this text. In this movie, the protagonist proclaims,
While we do see her learn about the world around her through touches other than that produced by the blade of her katana, rarely are they not filtered through prostheses of various kinds. This got me thinking about both the relationship between knowledge and sensation/perception, if they can indeed be parsed, as well as the mediation of sensation through other objects. Aristotle writes of the sense organ of touch as being interior rather than the skin, which is rather the medium through which the sensation is made detectable. As such, all touch is prosthetic for Aristotle, and he was perhaps the first to arrive at the concept that Derrida referred to as the body’s “originary technicity”.
“It is in the imperceptible space between that which touches and that which is touched that the body can be felt, no matter how closely, to be different from another” (Heller-Roazen 2009: 27). With regard to the very perceptible spaces of material aids does the body simply extend?
January 21, 2010 at 11:46 am
I think the question of prostheses extension is very interesting. There has been much about the idea of cognitive extension (I think of the work of Andy Clark and Robert Logan in particular), but I’m aware of much less regarding the extension of sensory capabilities, at least in the Heller-Roazen sense of an ‘inner touch.’ In regards to the question of whether “the very perceptible spaces of material aids does the body simply extend?” I would suggest that it does. Such would be the conclusion one could draw from brain plasticity studies I would imagine. Although I recognize that this question is a lot more nuanced once we explore deeper, into the “sense of sensation itself” and the holistic experience. Indeed, I think it’s interesting to consider the role that vision perception (as well as tactile) might play in extending and defining these spaces. The effectiveness of the mirror box treatment for phantom limb developed by V. S. Ramachandran (and perceptual feedback itself) is an intriguing example. Which I think also speaks to Derrida’s notion of the body’s “orginary technicity” you mentioned.
January 21, 2010 at 11:50 am
In a related note, in the last chapter in Heller-Roazen’s book, he includes an excerpt from Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible . In the excerpt Merleau-Ponty explains how in touching one’s own body–one is never really touching it. Touching involves the person doing the touching and the thing (or other person) that is touched. One can never be “touched” when one is also doing the touching. No matter how “intimately they may be joined in a tactile act committed by one body onto itself” the two never coincide (p.296). The distance between my left hand for example, as it touches my right hand is imperceptible simply because I’m not sure where one ends and the other begins (because I sens both hands as well as the rest of my body). What is the medium that transmits the touching? The medium (“the untouchable”) Heller-Roazen insists “no matter how subtle it may seem, must separate the two tactile terms, even as it grants them the element in which they may meet” (p. 296).
In the case of material aids or prosthetics it would seem that there is a definite distinction between one body and another body. I don’t think the body would simply extend–for it would be perceived as being a separate part. I think the imperceptible to which Heller-Roazen refers is the demarcated line between what is part of the body and what is not.