I think that all the nerves and muscles can serve [memory], so that a lute player, for example, has a part of his memory in his hands: for the ease of bending and disposing his fingers in various ways, which he has acquired by practice, helps him to remember the passages which need these dispositions when they are played.
—Descartes, Letter to Mersenne, April, 1640
The centrality of body memory comes home to us most vividly precisely when such memory fails us. This is evident even in comparatively trivial cases. When I settle into the chair in which I have been accustomed to do most of my reading and writing for the past several years, I am shocked to discover a different cushion pressing against me: suddenly my ongoing existence is destabilized, disoriented. So too, I am perplexed upon finding that the keyboard of the typewriter I have used for the last decade has lost its felt familiarity after I have been away for a month in a place where I was forced to rent a different machine. As I fumble to reacquaint myself with the keyboard, I feel myself to be a different person in the circumstance—an awkward being, unable to perform efficiently even a quite simple mechanical operation. Indeed, it is often in the suspension of just such a basic and taken-for-granted operation—a suspension whose significance for our sense of instrumentality has been singled out by Heidegger1—that we are reminded of how pivotal and presupposed body memory is in our lives. These lives depend massively on the continued deployment of such memory. Even someone as deprived of the normal functioning of every other kind of memory as is an extreme temporal lobe epileptic is still able to find his way around the hospital to which his brain-damaged state has consigned him.2 As proper names are usually the first items to be systematically forgotten by almost everyone following mid-life, body memories are among the very last to go. This suggests that their role in our remembering is at least analogous to that of space and time in Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic: a priori in status, constantly at work in one capacity or another, never not operative. Just as eliminating space and time as the indispensable parameters of our intuition would mean the undermining of human experience itself, so the absence of body memory would amount to the devastation of memory altogether.
I speak of “body memory,” not of “memory of the body.” Body memory alludes to memory that is intrinsic to the body, to its own ways of remembering: how we remember in and by and through the body. Memory of the body refers to those manifold manners whereby we remember the body as the accusative object of our awareness, whether in reminiscence or recognition, in reminding or recollection, or in still other ways. The difference is manifest in the noticeable discrepancy between recollecting our body as in a given situation—representing ourselves as engaged bodily in that situation—and being in the situation itself again and feeling it through our body. Nevertheless, the difference is not always easy to discern or to maintain. What Jonas calls the “nobility of sight”3—the tendency of vision to reassert itself at every turn, including the visualization that subtends most acts of recollection—has the effect of blurring the distinction between body memory and memory of the body. Indeed, at a number of points in the present chapter I fall prey to the all too natural temptation to substitute a recollective consciousness of the body as I remember it “objectively” for the way the body itself, in its sinews and on its surface, remembers its own activity.
Submission to this temptation has been indigenous to Western philosophy. It is a quite remarkable fact that there has been no sustained recognition of body memory from Plato through Kant. Bergson is the first philosopher to have devoted concerted attention to it; but he took a part of such memory (i.e., “habit memory”) for the whole of it.4 Merleau-Ponty, very much inspired by the example of Bergson, speaks of the body as “habitual” in the Phenomenology of Perception;5 and yet the otherwise admirable project of this book—which succeeds in according to the body a prominence that it has never before received in philosophical treatments in the West—fails to underline the importance of body memory as such. If Merleau-Ponty fills the void left gaping in Heidegger’s Being and Time—where the role of the body, though implicit throughout, is never thematized—his own text exhibits a no less glaring lacuna in its bypassing of body memory.
This chapter proceeds by first distinguishing three major types of body memory (and thus avoids Bergson’s pars pro toto approach), followed by a discussion of the overall significance of body memory (in this way attempting to compensate for Merleau-Ponty’s silence on the subject). In so doing, I am not proposing that the body is a cause, directly or indirectly, of human memory generally: whatever the merits of such a claim, it is the proper concern of physiologists, not of philosophers. But I am proposing that the body is of centralmost concern in any adequate assessment of the range of remembering’s powers. For this reason, we cannot afford to neglect it any longer. If the body is indeed “the natural subject of perception” and the “point of view on points of view,”6 body memory is in turn the natural center of any sensitive account of remembering. It is a privileged point of view from which other memorial points of view can be regarded and by which they can be illuminated.
Consider a concrete instance of such remembering:
I am on an isolated island in northern Sweden with several other people. The only available means of transportation is a 1926 Model T Ford. Although I have been assured that this ancient automobile is in “mint” condition, I cannot make any sense of how to drive it. The situation looks bleak. What to do? Suddenly, a friend, “JH,” stations himself in the seat, and begins to drive off—to the astonishment of all the rest of us. Later JH confesses that he had driven the Model T frequently in the past—in the course of several summers a decade or so ago, just after the car had been thoroughly rehabilitated.
What is particularly striking in a case like this is not only the sudden, unpremeditated return of the relevant body memory—for which no express relearning or review was required—but the fact that no explicit recollection of past learning was called for. Even if my friend had happened to recall specific occasions on which he had learned (or relearned) to drive the Model T, specific recollections were not necessary to his successful driving.7 Nor was there required even a minimal re-familiarization at the level of the ready-to-hand: JH did not have to become reacquainted with the odd assortment of levers and knobs when his hands went unhesitatingly to the correct instruments at the right moments. If the habitual body memory is suitably active, one need not have recourse to other levels or kinds of experience beyond that in which one is presently engaged. All that is called for is that one exist bodily in the circumstance where a given body memory is pertinent.
This sort of bodily remembering might usefully be termed “performative” remembering. My friend’s habit-based remembering of how to drive a Model T just was the performance of such actions as: cranking the engine; adjusting the hand choke; releasing the handbrake; putting the car into gear; etc. This remembering does not consist in the various mental manoeuvers (some of which may even be expressly mnemonic) which may accompany the bodily movements that effect turning on the ignition, shifting gears, braking, blowing the horn, and so on. Even if certain mental operations were in fact constant accompaniments of such movements, this is in no way required for the remembering which the body’s spontaneous actions execute. Nor would the occurrence of such operations constitute an adequate indicative sign of this remembering;8 JH might possess an appropriate set of thoughts (including perfectly accurate recollections of past bodily executions) and yet utterly fail to remember how to drive the car.
It is evident from this example and many others like it that habitual body memories are at once pre-reflective and presupposed in human experience. As pre-reflective, they form a tacit, pre-articulate dimension of this experience. My friend neither reflected on nor articulated his body memory of driving a Model T; he simply enacted it. As presupposed, habitual body memories serve as our familiaris in dealing with our surroundings—as a constant guide and companion of which we are typically only subliminally aware. They are always already in operation in our ongoing lives. We could not initiate actions, much less continue them, unless we could count on such memories. Even the most probative, trial-and-error operations call for them—much as the body itself is presumed in all higher-order cognitive acts. We may even say of them that they constitute “the body of the body,” the connective tissue of the corporeal intentionality that ties us to the world in the first place. As such, they provide the actual ontological ground for Kant’s forms of intuition and are not merely analogous to them.
The privileged position of habitual body memory did not emerge in earlier discussions of remembering in its act phase. There, remembering-how was only one in a series of act-forms.9 This is an expectable result of any purely eidetic enterprise, which seeks a listing of the basic structures of experience without regard to their genesis, goal, or comparative importance. So too the treatment of mnemonic modes in Part Two refused to address the question of whether some modes are more fundamental than others. When we come to habitual body memory, we can no longer afford to be so neutral on this particular issue. For such memory establishes just how we are in the world—much as place memory determines where we are in it. Even if explicit body memories vary greatly in terms of detail and frequency of occurrence, such memories are continuously at work in our experience and are constitutive of its very fabric.
Reflection on the above example and its implications suggests the following compact definition of habitual body memory:
an active immanence of the past in the body that informs present bodily actions in an efficacious, orienting, and regular manner.
Let us explicate this formula by looking closely at its three major parts:
(1) Habitual body memory involves “an active immanence of the past in the body.” In such memory the past is embodied in actions. Rather than being contained separately somewhere in mind or brain, it is actively ingredient in the very bodily movements that accomplish a particular action. It is undeniable that JH’s habitual body memory was deeply rooted in the past period during which he learned the action of driving a Model T. Otherwise, except by sheer random luck, my friend could not have successfully executed this action. Without prior experience or practice, there would be no body memory at all, for there would be nothing to be re-enacted. In the case in point, a moment of instruction preceded—both logically and chronologically—the current capacity to drive the car successfully. But the past thus presupposed became active only as a sedimented force in the immanent present of habitual bodily movement.
The activity of the past, in short, resides in its habitual enactment in the present. This means that the habitual is far from passive in character: as we can see from JH’s alert responsiveness. Beyond such a readiness to respond, in what does the active being of habit consist? Hexis, the Greek root of “habit,” connotes a state of character for which we are responsible, especially in its formative phases.10 In fact, the early stages in the creation of anything habitual—whether it be character or virtue,11 or body memories themselves—are definitive for establishing the form that will be continually re-enacted. Not unlike the “primacy effect” that favors the retention of the first members of a list of items to be remembered,12 the habitual in human affairs represents the continuing triumph of the early-established: not just its survival but its active continuance at later stages when its thorough establishment will help to guarantee its ongoing power.
That habitual action is an active matter is also evident from the Latin root of “habit”: habēre, to have, to hold.13 To be habitual is to have or hold one’s being-in-the-world in certain ways, i.e., those determined precisely by one’s settled dispositions to act in particular patterns. The presence of these dispositions means that our habitual actions help to constitute us as reliable actors within the world—to be counted on by others as well as to count on ourselves. Habituality means consistency in action, the ability to stay the same over time. Thus, my friend, thanks to an intact habitual body memory, remains a driver of his Model T over decades, even gaining part of his identity for others from this fact.
(2) The active immanence of the past also “informs present bodily actions.” A “habitude” (as we may call any habitual tendency toward re-enactment)14 becomes an active ingredient in what we are doing in the present. This means that the habitude in-forms present bodily action: it gives to this action an immanent form, an identifiable character as an action of a certain kind. Part of the very activity of habitual body memory consists in this information, a subtle structuring of behavior along the lines of a personal or collective tradition that becomes readily reinstated in certain circumstances. My friend’s behavior behind the wheel of a Model T was not a matter of aleatory motion. It was an action that exhibited its own local history—a history that helped to shape its precise form of bodily movement. The same is true of other habitual body memories. They reflect their origins by their precipitation into a quite particular present action.
(3) Habitual body memories operate in “an efficacious, orienting, and regular manner.” Let us consider each of these three characteristics, (a) If such memories were not efficacious, they would be dead or frozen habits, routines of a sheerly repetitive sort: a matter merely of “going through the motions.” Such routines are not without utility; indeed, taken together, they constitute an entire “second nature” on which we count for the ongoingness of our being-in-the-world. But by “efficacious” I mean having a quite determinate impact on the circumambient world as well as being inherently effective within the immediate ambiance of the actor himself or herself. While the circumambient or outward effects create differences in the world—e.g., the driving of the Model T versus its inertial undriven condition—the immediate or inward effects15 seek to salvage sameness in the face of change. How is such sameness achieved by habitual body memories? It is achieved by their acting in concert to constitute my lived body as a coherent and customary entity. In this way habitual body memories constitute an “effective-history” within my lived body and are as integral to it as its tissues and organs. Indeed, it is only through habitual memories that my body can have any history internal to itself.16 The role that “tradition” plays in the constitution of cultural history is here paralleled by a set of habitual body memories that are the unique possession of a given individual.17
(b) Habitual body memories are also deeply orienting. It is striking that when we arrive in a new place to stay even for a short visit, we tend without any premeditation to establish a group of fledgling habits such as putting the drip grind coffee in a particular spot, our laundry in another, books in still a third, as well as rising at a certain hour, reading the newspaper at a certain time, etc. These are habituating actions: they help us to get, and to stay, oriented. They establish a base of assurance and ease upon which more complicated, or more spontaneous, activities can freely arise. But their value is more than purely utilitarian: they allow us to discern the sense of a situation, to “get the lay of the land,” quite apart from practical results to which they may give rise. Getting the lay of the land is a matter of realizing our being in the world in terms of what I shall call its “landscape” character in the next chapter. For now, I want only to point to the basic ways in which such ground-level orienting occurs via habitual body memories.
The main function of orienting is to effect familiarization with one’s surroundings. To be disoriented, or even simply unoriented, is to find these same surroundings unfamiliar, unheimlich: “Not to know where we are is torment, and not to have a sense of place is a most sinister deprivation.”18 In particular, it is not to know which way to go or to turn—which route to follow. Getting oriented is to learn precisely which routes are possible, and eventually which are most desirable, by setting up habitual patterns of bodily movement. These patterns familiarize us with the circumambient world by indicating ways we can move through it in a regular and reliable manner. Without such patterned movements, we would be lost in an unfamiliar world.
If such path-finding operations are to be more than means of becoming familiar—if they are also to serve as ways of staying so—they must be more than fortuitous outcomes. In other words, more than what Merleau-Ponty calls the “momentary body”19 needs to be mobilized. To remain oriented in a given circumstance, the formation of new habits must give way to consistent habitual responses: the unsettlement of the unknown is only finally vanquished by the acquisition of settled propensities to act. And for these latter to inhere in our behavior, habitual body memory is required. How else are we to carry forward our newly gained orientation into other similar circumstances? Lacking memory, we would be in the immensely demanding circumstance of having to rediscover or to reforge pathways on every subsequent occasion. All of our time would be spent in getting oriented again and again: say, each time we enter a Model T.
In its orienting role, it is clear that the operation of habitual body memory consists in its being a reactivatable link between situations that call for consistent behavior. Such memory subtends these situations, allowing them to become familiar scenes in which we feel at home. Or more exactly: it allows them to become sufficiently familiar to be areas of free action. For habitual body memories liberate us from the necessity of constant reorientation. In their very regularity, they allow us to undertake actions lacking regularity—free and innovative actions difficult to predict, much as an organist adjusts quickly to a new organ and performs creatively on it without any sense of inhibition.20
(c) “Regularity” names a last basic aspect of habitual body memory, which is efficacious and orienting in a regular way. To be a link between spatially and temporally disparate circumstances—to be the very ground of their felt familiarity—such memory cannot be irregularly operative, i.e., unpredictable and merely wayward. But it also need not be restricted to rote repetition, which simply reinstates the same action again and again—as in a strictly controlled stimulus-response learning situation of maximum reinforcement. Nor need it be bound by induction alone (by the inference of like outcomes from like circumstances); induction calls for an extra-cognitive operation of a highly reflective sort that is inimical to the spontaneous functioning of habitual actions. As I have observed, habitual body memory functions at a deeply prereflective level—which is why it so often occurs without premeditation or particular preparation. But it is at the same time something quite regular. How can this be so?
Consider for a last time the example which has served as a prototype in this discussion. JH’s successful body memory arose effortlessly in the circumstance, although his friends’ hopes that he might be able to drive the ancient car may have helped to prompt his remembering—and his being actually seated in the driver’s seat helped even more. Still, the action of driving itself was not necessitated by these encouraging factors. It came back on its own in the circumstance, as if it were re-visiting my friend from a far-away point in time. It was as if his customary body had suddenly merged with his momentary body. Habitual body memory in fact represents the fusing of the settled and the spontaneous in a re-enactive synthesis. The remembering thereby realized is characteristically sudden and precipitate—and yet quite complete. Habitual body memory typically arises totum simul, as when the full action of driving a Model T (or doing the breast stroke or whatever) returns unbidden, in a flash.21
This structure of habitual body memory goes hand in hand with its regulated character. Rather than opposing spontaneity and regularity, we should realize that the unpremeditated and the regulated are natural allies. As in the comparable case of what Freud called “primary process” thinking, each calls for the other: the spontaneity of dreaming, far from being utterly unruly and chaotic, is made possible by formal rules of condensation, displacement, and symbolization. As Stravinsky has said, “In art, as in everything else, one can build only upon a resisting foundation. . . . My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself.”22 The free movements of dreams and art find their analogue in the unrehearsed return of habitual body memories, which also accomplish their full freedom only within a “narrow frame.” Thus the action of driving a Model T, if it is to be at all successful, must proceed in accordance with certain rules of sequence and of timing:
rule of sequence: give gas by operating a choke; turn on ignition; engage clutch; shift into first or reverse; depress accelerator, etc.
rule of timing: do not allow too long a period to elapse between turning on the ignition and engaging the clutch; and similarly between this latter and shifting into gear.
Thanks to its habitual memories, the lived body effects such sequence and timing in a regularized way. And it does so all the more successfully as it does not have to focus on, much less to formulate, the rules at play. Indeed, to focus or formulate would not only impede spontaneity; it might well lead to a misperformance of the activity itself. So too might a concentrated effort to recollect scenes of instruction in which these rules were first propounded and learned. Where propositional formulation and pictorial representation (the two main forms of rule-articulation) are of immense value in the cases of memorizing or reconstructing—indeed, they often complement and strengthen each other in just these cases—they are second-level and often quite superfluous in habitual body memory. The peculiar efficacity and orienting capacity of such memory is most freely exercised in its being thoroughly regular and yet not expressly formulated in words or images, much less concretized in recollections.
A second major type of body memory is traumatic in character. Traumatic memories assume many forms, ranging from those that are strictly psychical in status (e.g., memories of painful thoughts) to those that are thoroughly interpersonal (as in memories of perceiving someone else in distress). Traumatic body memories, however, arise from and bear on one’s own lived body in moments of duress. They are themselves multifarious in type, since they include anything from memories of severe injury to alleviating memories of fleeting pleasure. Rather than setting forth a survey of this striking variety, I shall once again focus on a single instance:
Each time my tongue passes over my right lower molar tooth these days, distinct memories of being in a dentist’s chair and, somewhat less frequently, of chewing on a hard kernel of popcorn still earlier, are elicited. In particular, I recall biting down on the kernel and feeling immediately afterward parts of something very hard lying loose in my mouth: at first I wasn’t sure whether these were bits of kernel or bits of tooth. I also remember, from a period about a month later, being in a dentist’s chair and experiencing acute pain as my dentist drilled deeply into the broken tooth as part of the procedure of crowning it.
Notice, to begin with, how particularized this example of remembering is. In both of its closely related incidents, it bears on highly specific body parts—not only my mouth but a discrete part of it lying within a definite region. This part is, of course, my lower right molar, and my remembering is entirely engrossed in it and its fate: its sudden demolition and its subsequent rebuilding. Such a determinate entity gives to my remembering a point of particular attachment. Rather than being identified with an action or movement that links up smoothly with the surrounding world as in so many habitual body memories, this remembering possesses a content centered on a single object whose very breakdown separates it from the world of ongoing action, forcing my memorial consciousness literally inside myself.
Notice, too, that this object, my afflicted molar, is being remembered bodily as subject to events which are unique and which alter its career in time radically. Neither the initial trauma nor the attempt at dental restoration has anything habitual or repetitive about it. Each is strictly episodic and is remembered as such. Each impinges on and interrupts the amorphous history of my body and renders what is indefinite and undated in this history diachronically distinct: first the breakdown, then the crowning activity several weeks later. As with all genuinely diachronie events, the sequence is irreversible, consisting as it does of episodes existing in what Kant calls an “objective succession.”23 This succession ensures in turn the datability of these episodes, though only in units appropriate to the circumstance: here week and month (I remember the trauma’s occurring about two weeks ago, sometime in mid-July) rather than hour or year.
Despite the isolating concentration on the fate of a single tooth, which became a discrete object for me only at the moment of breakdown, there was a discernible setting in both incidents as remembered. The initial trauma occurred in the context of eating popcorn, and is recalled as situated in this context. Likewise, the pain of drilling is set in the dentist’s chair: it does not float free of this circumstance. Neither setting need be remembered in any considerable detail; as the bare location of a traumatic event, each can be quite minimal. Yet even when I remember the point of most intense pain during the drilling, my body is not brought back as locusless; this pain was happening somewhere, however denuded its description may be.
The emotionality of both incidents is also vividly conveyed: the shock of realizing that my mouth contained bits of tooth as well as bits of popcorn, the peculiar dread that accompanies deep drilling (I asked myself, “Will this pain, already bad enough, become still worse?”). Although I had no desire to re-experience these feelings—quite the contrary!—I found that they nonetheless afforded access to the original scenes of which they formed such a painful part. A few weeks after the drilling had occurred I was in a service station and heard a pneumatic bolt tightener at work. The shrill grinding sound almost immediately evoked the dread of being the hapless subject of my dentist’s drill; I felt myself stiffening in anticipation of worse to come just as I had done in the dentist’s chair: ushered in by the dread, my body was itself remembering the trauma. This led in turn to a vivid recollection of the scene—which was, I suspected, a defense against a still more engaging body memory than I had so far allowed myself to undergo. Here is an illustration of how recollection is not consistently primary in its operation; indeed in this case it assumed the decidedly secondary role of helping to keep at bay a recently painful body memory.
Another facet of the particularizing proclivity of traumatic body memories has to do with the fragmentation of the lived body. Where habitual body memory typically concerns the body as a coordinated whole—indeed, constitutes it as a single compositum—a traumatic body memory bears on what Lacan has called “le corps morcellé.”24 This is the body as broken down into uncoordinated parts and thus as incapable of the type of continuous, spontaneous action undertaken by the intact body (“intact” thanks precisely to its habitualities, which serve to ensure efficacity and regularity). The fragmented body is inefficacious and irregular; indeed, its possibilities of free movement have become constricted precisely because of the trauma that has disrupted its spontaneous actions. Body memories of this trauma will necessarily reflect the same fragmentation, as will the terms descriptive of such memories: e.g., “particularization,” “isolation of object,” “concentration.” Such terms can be viewed as giving dimensions of the traumatized body, especially as it acts to inhibit action. Although this inhibition is more dramatically evident in cases of, say, dire back pain, it is still quite manifest in my own tooth trauma, which served to inhibit mastication. Much of the trauma and its associated affect consisted in this very inhibition: or, more precisely, in the realization that “I will henceforth not be able to eat as freely as before.”25 The disabling nature of body trauma here stands in stark contrast with the enabling character of bodily habitudes; and just as the former implies the dissolution of the intact body, so the latter implies its continual re-synthesis.
An aspect of traumatic body memory which the above example does not adequately illustrate is what could be called the phenomenon of “afterglow.” This refers to the way that some quite traumatic body memories—which may have been devastating at the moment of origin—will come in the course of time to seem acceptable and even pleasurable to remember. As Virgil says in a passage I have cited before, “Someday, perhaps, it will be a joy to remember even these things” (Aeneid, I, 203). My molar matter was too recent to be regarded with anything like pleasure. Yet even if I never take a positive pleasure in remembering it in the future, it is at least likely that I will be able to view it with equanimity and perhaps even with humor or irony. The same holds true for many body traumas, including almost all those that stem from childhood: e.g., my falling down the basement steps just before traveling to my grandparents’ home for Christmas many years ago. Although in this latter instance I hit my head against a steel girder, none of the pain associated with this fall survives. So, too, with such other traumatic experiences as being assailed by friends, shot in the leg with a B.B. gun, etc.
This is not to deny that some traumatic body memories never lose their painful and even devastating sting, especially when they are accompanied by some form of humiliation of one’s own person—of which a ghastly limiting case would be memories of having been in a concentration camp. Precisely such memories, however, we try to repress, replace, or at least bowdlerize. It remains the case that the pain and poignancy of most traumatic memories recede with time. How does this happen?
One main way it happens, as one might well suspect by now, is that a tendency sets in to transform these memories into reminiscences and recollections. All of my childhood memories cited just above were of precisely this nature: they have become stories I tell to others or recollections in which I indulge when I am alone. Doubtlessly defensive in origin, these transformations have attained an autonomy sufficient for me to take independent pleasure in reactivating them in just these comparatively innocent forms. Closely related to this distancing tendency is the operation of what I called “ruminescence” in chapter 2. When memories, even very painful ones, have become remote from their own point of origin, they often acquire a domesticated quality that encourages our ruminating over them—instead of simply replaying or radically repressing them (i.e., the two most likely ways of treating the memories of recent traumatic events). When we reminisce about them as well (e.g., by narrating them to ourselves or to others), we enter into a ruminescent state; and in turning them over in our minds in this way, we tame them yet further—to the point where they become our own re-creation.26
The phenomena of after-glow and ruminescence strongly suggest that many body traumas remain threatening to us even, or rather precisely, as remembered. The return to the initial trauma that their bodily remembering entails brings with it an at least minor trauma of its own, which may in turn have to be defended against.27 One way to do so is to channel the return of the trauma into a specifically somatic form, e.g., as a hysterical conversion symptom. This is an instance of a quite general strategy of containing a trauma, whereby we act to restrict its content and scope to a limited part of one’s body. Thus, even if the original trauma was an all-consuming fever, we may remember it as it became focused in a particular form such as dizziness. A second strategy for dealing with the revival of trauma is situating it, where the effort is to tie down the trauma by locating it fairly precisely in terms of place or time. In situating, the implicit psycho-logic can be formulated in this way: “if the trauma I am now remembering occurred there and then, it cannot have such a devastating effect on me here and now as I remember it.” Such an attempt to situate the original occurrence is a salient feature of many traumatic body memories and serves to distinguish them once more from habitual memories. These latter tend to be expansive rather than constrictive and, above all, nonepisodic, hence not pinned down as to date and place of origin: just where or when I acquired or reacquired a certain habitual bodily skill is normally a matter of indifference as I come to enact it subsequently. But I am far from indifferent as to the place and moment when I first underwent the body trauma I am now remembering.
The body retains memories of pleasures as well as of pains. Scrutinizing traumatic body memories, as has just been done in section 3, risks neglecting the fact that we remember many pleasures in and through our bodies. From among these pleasures I shall concentrate on specifically erotic ones—not because these are paradigmatic of all bodily pleasures (they are at once characteristic and exceptional in this regard) but because their memorial recapture is especially revealing for our purposes.
Let me begin once more with a leading example:
My shirt rubs against my shoulder one warm afternoon and I am suddenly reminded of the way a certain person used to place her hand on my shoulder while we were making love. The touch of her hand combined insistence with tenderness, and intimacy with a certain aloofness. The touch was warm but not oppressively hot, and it took place by a gentle grasping action involving the whole hand. I now experience the remembered touch as being subtly thrilling in its immediacy and in its positioning on my shoulder (it fits my shoulder in a very precise way). This particular body memory brings with it a vivid sense of the affection we once felt for each other. It also, by the closeness which it embodies, serves to dissolve the distance that now separates us.
Especially noteworthy in such an erotic body memory are the following features:
(1) There is a sensuously specific source of bodily pleasure as remembered. This pleasure occurs at a quite definite site: i.e., the upper surface of my shoulder. This ties the experience down not only to a particular part of my body but to a special sensory modality, since it is my shoulder as touched that is at stake in this body memory.
(2) The bodily remembered touch is intrinsically pleasure-giving: the pleasure does not follow the experience but belongs to it as ingredient in it. Whereas I can often separate the performance of a skill from the exact movements of the body parts that effect it, it is not an easy matter to identify remembered erotic pleasure in separation from the precise place in which it occurred—a “place,” moreover, which may coincide with my body as a whole.
(3) In the same vein, it is difficult to draw any strict dividing line in such a memory between myself-as-being-touched by the other and the other-as-touching me. The two of us form a dyadic pair who collaborate in the experience as it was once lived and is now being remembered. The members of this dyad are so intimately interlocked that I cannot say for sure where one leaves off and the other begins: the touched and the toucher merge in a phenomenon of interpersonal “reversibility.”28 Each of us share in a genuinely common process that cannot be remembered without including both of us. Such dovetailing of self and other is rarely accomplished in other types of body memory.
(4) An important aspect of erotic body memory is found in the way in which this particular body memory arose: namely, by what we could call “memorial mimetism.” Just as two lovers often imitate each other’s gestures—a move of one calls for a like move of the other—so a non-erotic body experience seems suddenly to resemble an explicitly erotic experience of the body. Thus being touched on the shoulder by my shirt was immediately assimilated to being touched by a lover in the same place. In our natural eagerness to re-experience sensual pleasure we tend to draw together even quite disparate experiences or entities (here a shirt and a hand), provided only that the same part of the body is at play (in this case the shoulder) or at least the same sense of how it is experienced.
Let us consider certain still more general structures of erotic body memories:
INTERSENSORY EQUIVALENCE
Merleau-Ponty observed that various bodily parts can stand in for one another to the point of becoming symbolic equivalents. This is dramatically illustrated in many erotic body memories, where there is a fluid interchange of parts of the body and an open movement between them. The interchange occurs to a much more considerable degree than in habitual body memories, which allow for only a limited substitutability of parts: e.g., right hand for left hand, a leg for an arm, etc. It also contrasts with traumatic body memories, in which the focus is often on a single component or aspect of the lived body. Neither in habitual nor in traumatic body memories is there anything like the free transfer of libido that occurs in erotic body memories, in which one body part can be exchanged with almost any other part in a virtually unfettered fashion.
A closely related facet of erotic body memories is the way in which movement between bodily parts can be summative and not merely substitutive. In such memories a shoulder can give rise to a hip and the latter to a breast in an exquisitely additive fashion. Instead of existing in competition with, or as compensation for, each other, these bodily parts constitute an erotic chain of heightening delight as their interconnections are taken up again in memory. How can this be? It is due to the fact that erotic pleasure arises from multiple sensory modalities: touch, sight, odor, hearing, etc. These modalities become genuinely intersensory in erotic activity, which serves to connect what might remain merely disparate in habitual or traumatic situations. This is not to deny distinct personal preferences in sensory modality; but it needs to be underlined that such preferences are subserved by a network of intersensory nodal points encountered in the course of erotic activity. These nodal points—i.e., particular touches, sights, and sounds—allow for variation in the pursuit even of the most preoccupying erotic aim, including orgasm itself, one of whose primary pleasures consists precisely in the fact that it is not reached by a single sensory route alone.
REMEMBERED EROTIC PLEASURE
It is crucial to keep in mind the distinction between erotic bodily pleasure as it was originally felt and the pleasure we are now taking in remembering this proto-pleasure. However vivid the original pleasure may have been, it is exceedingly difficult to recapture. This is apparent in the sense of loss and attendant nostalgia to which we are prone when we remember making love with someone to whom we were formerly close. Thus the “after-pleasure” of an erotic body memory cannot claim to be an adequate replication of its prototype. Such dependent and late pleasure is a pleasure in and by deferment.
Erotic body memory here resembles traumatic body memory insofar as both call for a distinction between a primary and a belated phase. But erotic memories rarely exhibit any significant analogue of the reversal from pain to eventual pleasure that we observed in traumatic memories. Rather than such a reversal (or its opposite, from pleasure to pain), the original pleasure in an erotic experience tends to sustain itself in its bodily remembrance—though it is certainly subject to dilution or even to suspension (e.g., when the personal relationship on which it is based has gone awry). But for the most part traumatic body memories convey to us a diminished sense of well-being, while erotic body memories serve to underscore our sense of robust intactness.
INTERPERSONAL ASPECTS
Erotic body memories have the peculiarity that they offer two distinct possibilities so far as the self/other relationship is concerned. On the one hand, they may evoke an explicit sense of the other’s bodily presence, which is remembered and valued as such: just this posture in foreplay, just that thigh, just those sighs when excited, etc. In such cases, my memories focus explicitly on the other, and I tend to recall this person in terms of distinctive differences between us, whether these differences spring from basic differences of gender, personality, or whatever. On the other hand, instead of focusing on the other qua other in my erotic body memories, I may concentrate on the relationship itself: on just how it felt to be with the other in various activities and postures. In this event, the particular contours of the other matter mainly as contributing to a situation of mutual satisfaction. Similarly, my own positions and movements are not remembered in isolation but only as part of the interpersonal complex designatable as “myself-cum-other-in-erotic-interplay-together.” A double transcendence—of myself and the other as separate erotic entities—is effected in the realization of this complex. The result is a bivalent remembering that escapes the radical singularization of so much nonerotic remembering. In its characteristically dyadic and diffuse manner, erotic body memory is located midway between the alienation inherent in an individual’s self-safeguarded recollections and the community realized in a group’s genuinely collective remembering.
ANTICIPATORY DIMENSION
One of the most distinctive features of erotic body memories is their actively anticipatory aspect. They propel us forward toward a future of possible sensual satisfaction that is patterned on satisfaction in the past. We rarely bask in such memories idly or innocently: even when they are not being employed expressly as a means of self-arousal, they evoke in us the projection of a possible repetition. This inbuilt futurism contrasts with the implicit temporality of traumatic body memories, where our concern with a point of origin often reflects a dread of recurrence—and thus a future to-be-avoided rather than one to-be-sought. Erotic body memories are in this respect more like habitual body memories, which are realized by the body in the process of carrying out various particular projects—say, swimming the breaststroke, driving a Model T around an island, speaking in a foreign language.29 The difference is found in the fact that the aim to be achieved in habitual body memories is strictly defined by a practical context of swimming, driving, speaking; the habitual body is exclusively engaged in what Heidegger has called an ‘in-order-to’ (um-zu) relation: I am doing this (activity, practice) so as to accomplish that (aim, goal).30
Erotic body memories are not easily subsumed into any such manifestly instrumental roles in the pursuit of practical projects. Instead of the in-order-to, their characteristic relation is the ‘just-as’: just as this past pleasure was remarkably (or moderately, etc.) good, to experience it again would be just as good (or still better). The future of re-enactment or continuation is not a final stage in an instrumentally defined process; rather than being valued for its actuality, it is esteemed for its status as a possibility: as leading us into an open future of possible pleasures of the same or similar type. We aim at these pleasures in their very possibility, and we do so out of our remembering of past prototypes—which provide for us the “repeatable possibilities” of our erotic existence.31 These possibilities are multiplied not only because of the unknown status of the future but also because of the ready transposability of erotic pleasures from one part of the body to another. If we do not know just what to expect, we can eagerly anticipate new avatars of combination and interchange.32 The anticipatory dimension of erotic bodily memories means, in short, that the actual cedes place to the possible, the habitual to the novel, the uniquely traumatic to the indefinitely pleasurable.
RECENT VERSUS REMOTE ORIGINS
We tend to divide erotic body memories into those that are recent and those that are more remote in origin. The two kinds present themselves to us as distinctively different. Recent erotic memories often still resonate or “tingle” in us. No revival is needed, much less any recollection: they are the bodily equivalent of primary memory, both forming an active fringe around the living present. It is as if an entire recent episode were still happening at some margin of our corporeal life; consequently, much of its affective and sensory specificity is also felt to be continuing. Long-term erotic memories, on the other hand, tend to lack such specificity and even to become stereotypical in status: “myself kissing Jan Stewart on the outskirts of Abilene.” Such memories can certainly be forceful and enduring—as is this Abilene memory, which happened over twenty-five years ago—but it lives on only in an emblematic format, characteristically compressed into just one episode: kissing Jan on a moonlit night while the two of us were standing by the car I had borrowed for the evening. In view of the paucity of detail in such a case, it is not surprising that we seek to supplement what we remember bodily by conventional recollections, recourse to diaries, and other sorts of testimonial evidence.33
NARRATIVITY
The three types of body memory so far distinguished differ decisively with regard to this last characteristic. Habitual body memories are largely indifferent to a narrative account: their being resides much more in their current efficacity than in any narratizable historicity which they may possess. Their strongly repetitive character, moreover, discourages interest in the kind of historical account that calls for narration. Traumatic body memories, on the other hand, call naturally for a narration of their history. This is due partly to their highly episodic character and partly to our concern about their exact origins. As a result, we often find ourselves recounting an experience of body trauma in narrative terms: telling its story from the moment of the original trauma up to the present moment of remembrance.
Neither of these extremes—one deeply resistant to narration, the other insistently calling for it—is characteristic of erotic body memories. These do not resist narration in any tenacious way; indeed, they often suggest stories and may be woven effectively into larger narrative units. Nevertheless, there is no implicit imperative to narrate them, since they are often fully satisfying precisely in a fragmentary format. In fact, the content of much such remembering consists in fragments: this sense of being touched on the shoulder, that move in foreplay, a given body aroma, a particular perception of bodies interacting. Each of these suffices in itself, indeed is the memory in question, and does not call for a supervening narrative structure. The detail, in other words, is memorable just as detail and not because the detail is part of some more encompassing story. Even when we suspect that it does belong to such a story, our primary interest does not reside in knowing precisely how it does so: we leave any such concern to situations of reminiscence or recollection.
It is becoming clear that body memory is by no means the same thing as the memory of the perception of the body, which is a highly mixed form of remembering that includes among other things a component of recognizing (e.g., when one remembers perceiving oneself as younger in some particular physical aspect). This is not surprising: given that the human body is such a richly expressive vehicle, its perception will be anything but simple. The body as perceived, and hence the body remembered-as-perceived, will incorporate multiple layers of meaning and structure, calling for a complex mode of apprehension. Not only recognition but also recollection will figure into such remembering; so too will place memory inasmuch as bodies are always perceived as occupying particular places. Here we do not encounter anything distinctively different from other situations of remembering in which mixed modes are called for—say, in remembering paintings one has seen or books one has read.
Body memory itself, however, is a unique form of remembering and not a mere composite entity. It has its own comparatively autonomous operation;34 it is not a substitute for another kind of remembering or a stage in the realization of some overarching mnemonic telos. However much its specific schemata may change over time, and however much it is vulnerable to the incursions of accident or disease,35 it is present throughout life. It is thus not just something we merely have; it is something we are: that constitutes us as we exist humanly in the world.
If this is indeed the case, we should expect body memory to possess its own set of types and its own group of general traits. That it has its own typology has already emerged in the preceding delineation of habitual, traumatic, and erotic body memories. What has not yet emerged is any sense of general traits which qualify these types by subtending each in some significant respect. Let us therefore proceed to consider such traits. Their consideration will help to knit together much that has so far remained scattered.
Marginality
Body memories tend to situate themselves on the periphery of our lives so as not to preoccupy us in the present. By “periphery” I do not mean to imply that such memories are of peripheral importance; on the contrary, they are of quite central significance: we could not be who we are, nor do what we do, without them. But the fact remains that bodily remembering assumes for the most part a marginal position vis-à-vis our most pressing concerns—and is all the more effective for doing so. A body memory works most forcefully and thoroughly when, rather than dominating, it recedes from the clamor of the present. As marginal, it belongs to the latent or tacit dimension of our being. In the language of Gestalt psychology, it is a field factor, part of the ground of our experience rather than an explicitly highlighted figure. How this is so will become evident upon a brief review of the three types of body memory identified in preceding sections:
HABITUAL BODY MEMORIES
These are perhaps the most fully marginal memories we possess. Part of the very meaning of “habitual” is to be so deeply ingrained in our behavior as not to need explicit recalling. To become habitual is to become part of the stock of our resources on which we can draw effortlessly. Such is the fate of most of our habits and thus of the habitual body which supports them. Merleau-Ponty speaks of the habitual body as an “incontestable acquisition,” a “general function.”36 Particular bodily activities can be regarded as condensations or precipitations out of the habitual body, which provides a pervasive background layer to our lives. If such a background were to be explicitly remembered, it might well become intrusive and disorienting—whereas, precisely as marginal, it is the immediate basis for all becoming-oriented in the world as well as for all stabilization there. Whether we take the habitual to be the strictly habit-bound or the merely recurrent—or, as Dewey suggests, as the innovatively habituating37—the remembering associated with it is in every case an implicit activity working in ways of which we are barely conscious: hence the inappropriateness of applying to it any strictly mentalistic model such as that of act intentionality. Only in situations of breakdown or when expressly retraining ourselves are we brought face to face with the exact form of its operative intentionality. The very efficacity and regulated character of this intentionality prosper in a situation of twilight consciousness—when we remember very well how to undertake certain actions without necessarily remembering that we did so successfully on any particular occasions in the past.
TRAUMATIC BODY MEMORIES
These are marginal for the readily understandable reason that making them thematic is to remind ourselves of pain once undergone—and perhaps undergone again upon its very remembrance. It is only too natural that we seek to avoid the full replay of such memories by confining them to the most peripheral position possible in our conscious life. Or we may attempt to transform their initial sting into an after-glow that calls for a complacent contemplation. Either way, we try to forestall a situation in which such memories might become preoccupying; a set of defenses, and sometimes an elaborate system of avoidances, is constructed so as to isolate, deny, split, project, or outright repress the painful content of these memories: all of which can be considered strategies of marginalizing.38
EROTIC BODY MEMORIES
These, it would seem, have no basis for being or remaining marginal. Why would we wish to hold in abeyance anything so inherently pleasurable as these memories? I have already remarked on how much less overtly defensive we are toward erotic activity as remembered—indeed, often less so than toward such activity as currently encountered! Nevertheless, apart from those occasions on which such memories would be distractions from work or other concerns, there is one important sense in which they are indeed marginal: a sense that leads us to expand the scope of marginality itself. I am thinking of the fact that erotic body memories have more to do with the possible than with the actual. They bear, as I have tried to indicate, on what is indefinite and undetermined in erotic experience. Rather than merely recapitulating what has gone before, they suggest to us new dimensions and new directions in our bodily being: this is why, beyond their purely pleasurable aspect, they can play a liberating role. Their comparative indifference to questions of efficient historical causality, most directly manifested in the spontaneity of their contents, makes possible that anticipatory dimension that we found to be so critical in our experience of them; and this dimension is itself arrayed with branching possibilities. For erotic body memories lead us into the marginal qua possible: into a horizon of the not-yet encircling our actuality-bound lives. In contrast with the margin provided by the habitual—a deeply sedimented layer of the permanently possessed—the margin adumbrated by the erotic (indeed, by the hedonic broadly speaking) is projective of the still-to-come: the always-already-there is supplemented by the marginality of the ahead-of-ourselves, where certain possibilities might be realized. Much as I enjoy basking in erotism already accomplished, this very basking takes me into a future of so far unfulfilled pleasure.
A general remark suggests itself here. In the realm of body memory almost everything is marginal from the very start. Even if the lived body is the center of our active experience, as remembered it is continually being displaced into a dim backland of apprehension. The paradox is that body memory is rarely of the body as an explicit focus memorius. Contrast this situation with that obtaining in recollection, which is often expressly aware of itself as an act of mind. Even when such self-awareness is itself marginal, little else is. It is a striking fact that only one aspect of what I called the “mnemonic presentation” in Part One is marginal in status: namely, the “aura.” The aura alone is permitted to be radically indistinct, whereas the expectation is that the remainder of what we recollect will be lucidly set forth before us in clear mnemonic consciousness. This is a far cry indeed from the circumstance we encounter in body memories, which are pervaded by marginality at every significant level.
Density and Depth
Closely related to marginality is the singular fact that most body memories come to us as notably dense in felt quality: as bearing a high specific gravity. This density is experienced in such qualities as the massive, the opaque, the involuntary, the inarticulate. It is as if the density of body memories, their rootedness in the heft, the thick palpability of the lived body, rendered them mute. My own efforts above attest that they can be put into words, but it is also evident that they do not lend themselves to facile verbalization.
One basic reason why it is so difficult to tease out the structures of body memory—and a reason why the subject has been so conspicuously neglected by writers on memory—lies in their initially inchoate form as well as in their recalcitrance to further specification. Now we must confront their very mutism, which is a feature in its own right and not merely the absence of articulate speech.
To begin with, the felt density of body memories is itself a direct reflection of the body’s own densely structured being. Quite apart from its role in memory, the lived body possesses an inner opaqueness in all of its activities. Never wholly transparent to itself—even when it is self-focused—it is so deeply engaged in its various involvements as to be virtually self-transcending and thus unknown to itself. Consider only the way in which my hands and entire upper body are just now involved in typing these words: They seem to belong more to the typewriter than to my own torso. Even if these bodily parts become expressive for an observer or for myself on reflection, they do not take themselves to be such. They are so absorbed in the activity of typing itself that they are not felt to have any identity separate from that which their task calls for. Except in illness—when I am forced to pay attention to the body in and by itself—my body is continually engrossed in the world in much the same self-effacing way. This leaves it as an unreflective core at the heart of its own actions.39
Body memories share in this sense of self-opacity which does not even know its own name. Their remove in time from the moment of origin does not endow them with any reflective advantage, much less any tendency to articulate their specific content in words. But their density is not entirely without direction or structure. It is felt as a density in depth. Body memories manifest themselves as continually vanishing into the depths of our corporeal existence—and just as continually welling up from the same depths. This is particularly evident in the case of habitual body memories, which arise from and disappear into the dark interiority of our own bodies. But it is also true of erotic and traumatic memories, each of which exhibits an underside of depth: hence the sense of mystery that attaches to the origin of erotic impulses as well as to the unchartable course of a given trauma. Body memories of all sorts possess an essential dimension of depth.
By “depth” is not meant Berkeley’s notion of the distance which we infer we would have to travel to reach a predesignated point.40 This is the external depth through which our physical body moves. What is at stake in the density of body memory is the interior depth in which the lived body resides—in short, its own depth. Such depth, as Erwin Straus says, “is not a purely objective phenomenon.”41 It is a felt or phenomenal dimension that is not measurable in any metric units; it is, in Merleau-Ponty’s formulation, “the dimension in which things or elements of things envelop each other.”42 In the case of body memory, the enveloping occurs within the lived body and its immediate ambiance. Here depth supplies a vaguely determined but firmly felt inner horizon for the remembering of habitual movements, erotic play, traumatic injuries—and all else that belongs properly to body memory.
If the lived body’s movements through depth-as-distance can be described as “horizontal” in their sweeping action, its own intrinsic depth is vertical and is remembered as such. As upright beings we engage in an upward and downward delving into depth: an etherealizing tendency and a gravitating propensity, normally mixed in a delicate balance of aspiring and anchoring. Habitual body memories can be said to draw mainly on the downward-moving direction of bodily depth—in contrast with erotic memories, which are characteristically upward-moving (“exciting,” “thrilling” are words we apply to them). Between the opposed poles of verticality thereby established, traumatic and other kinds of body memories (e.g., of health and illness) come to be situated. Actual or remembered movement toward either pole represents a mode of self-transcendence out of and into depths which the mind in contemplation or recollection can neither fathom nor abide.
In its density, body memory is therefore incurably depth-oriented and depth-affording. In this basic respect it once again differs dramatically from recollection. In recalling, I do not actively connect with the depth of the scene being called back to mind. Instead of moving into its depths, I contemplate its projected, quasi-pictorial distance from myself as a voyeur of the remembered. No such voyeurism occurs in body memory, which takes me directly into what is being remembered. In such remembering, I leave the heights of contemplative recollection and enter the profundity of my own bodily being. It is a matter of immersion in memorial depths beyond—or rather, beneath and before—the two-dimensional flatlands of recollected scenes.
Co-immanence of Past and Present
We must pay close attention to the way that the past relates to the present in which body memories are actualized. On the one hand, the past can be regarded as overwhelming this present, captivating it to such an extent that the present seems to be its mere repetition. This is precisely Bergson’s view of “habit memory,” which so completely reinstates its own past that it ends up merely repeating it. On this view the present is the tip of a vast pyramidal past brought to bear upon it,43 and it becomes, in effect, its own past. On the other hand, there is the complementary view that the past exists to become present in body memories. Now the pyramid is inverted, and the main directionality flows outward from the present rather than into it. Here the emphasis is not on how the past insinuates itself into the present but on how it is deployed there and carried on into the future. If habitual body memory seems to exemplify the first model, whereby the past invades the present, erotic body memory appears to illustrate the second situation, in which the past, rather than taking over the present from within, is material for the present (and its future).
Once more it is instructive to contrast body memory with recollection—and with verbal reminiscing as well. In these latter two activities, we peer resolutely backward toward a past that is felt to have its own independent being: hence the effect of significant distance from the present in both cases. At the most, the act of recollecting and the recollected content, the reminiscing and the reminisced-about can be said to intersect at certain critical points. But by and large there is precious little interfusion of past and present when we represent the past in mental images or words. Of this past Bergson said that it is “essentially that which acts no longer.”44 In body memory, at least in its habitual forms, we have just the opposite circumstance: here the past is fully enacted in the present. As Bergson also remarks, habit memory “no longer represents our past to us, it acts it; and if it still deserves the name of memory, it is not because it conserves bygone images, but because it prolongs their useful effect into the present moment.”45
This suggests that in matters of body memory we should speak of immanence rather than of “intersection” between past and present. Instead of taking up a perspective on the past—getting a clearer “view” of it as we often attempt to do in recollection or in reminiscence—in body memories we allow the past to enter actively into the very present in which our remembering is taking place. Moreover, such immanence is a two-way affair: it is an immanence of the past in the present and of the present in the past. Carried to an extreme—an extreme which fully habituated body memories approach—the co-immanence verges on an identity of past and present. But if the two were to become strictly identical, we could no longer speak meaningfully of memory, which calls for the presence, however slight, of some décalage or differential between past and present. How are we to conceive concretely of this requirement?
The co-immanence operative in body memory can be formulated as an “effective ingredience within.” This means that in body memories the past is a direct constituent of the present, a constituent mediated neither by image nor by word. By the same token, the present is effectively at work on the past’s very ingression into its own realm: instead of simply repeating this past, it modifies it by extending intentional threads to ever-changing circumstances, much as a pianist extends his or her already acquired skills in playing new and more difficult pieces. In this way the past is prolonged, given a new lease on life. Yet it does not merge entirely with the present into which it is sedimented, since it is modified by this very same present. Perhaps the most apt metaphor for the two-way immanence in question is that of enchevêtrement, complication or entanglement by an overlapping of elements. These elements overlap in such a way as to leave a residue or remainder which maintains difference in the very context of sameness. It is a matter, in short, of a mutual com-plication of past and present in each other’s fate.
This is not to deny important differences in the degree of overlap exhibited by various types of body memory. In habitual body memory we encounter a virtual coincidence with very little remainder (though it would still be mistaken to speak of “repetition” here), whereas in traumatic body memory there is much less overlap (hence the closely associated phenomena of defense and narration, both of which emphasize a greater separation of past from present). In between, we find erotic body memories, which carry the past more resolutely into the future. Despite such differences, we can say of all body memories that the enchevêtrement that they display acts as a cohesive internal bonding in which past and present accomplish unique and lasting forms of intimacy with each other. As the inner and outer horizons of the lived body act to draw its actions into the dense center of its own memories in depth, so the co-immanence of past-cum-present binds this body together in the realm of its self-remembrance.
VI
“Density and depth,” “co-immanence of past and present”: these phrases designate respectively the spatiality and temporality of body memories. I have just discussed them as if they were neatly separable—as if they could be given the kind of precise analysis which they receive at the level of world-space and world-time (at which level they are independent variables according to a Newtonian world-view). But is this so? Are the spatial and temporal features of body memories so readily separable from each other? Consider, to begin with, that even the comparatively exact preliminary descriptions given in Part One of this book—where memorial space and time were simply juxtaposed within the “world-frame” of the mnemonic presentation—no longer obtain at this point. In the case of body memory, there is nothing like a limpid plane of presentation, much less a coherent world-frame: these are the very features that we must leave behind as we move from a model in which recollection is paradigmatic to one that allows for the peculiarities of non-recollective remembering. In the latter, spatiality and temporality cannot be held apart any more; they intertwine, realizing a version of that reversibility that has been encountered above in the touched/touching dyad of erotic body memories.
An emblematic example of this active intertwining of space and time occurs in the opening pages of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. The narrator, describing his tendency to fall asleep in various postures and to awaken in a state of confusion, offers the following observation:
When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth’s surface and the time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks.46
The “ordered procession” is that of place and time in the waking world, where “chain,” “sequence,” and “order” are preserved and where position and date can be directly “read off” as from a presentation to one’s lucid consciousness. But on waking from sleep—itself a species of dense bodily experience—one does not gear easily into such an ordered world of space and time. The liminal state of awakening brings with it a disarray in which space and time are not only disordered but difficult to distinguish from each other: “For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything revolved around me through the darkness: things, places, years.”47 Precisely as revolving around the narrator in the darkness, things, places, and years have begun to merge into a confused spatio-temporal mixture in his dawning awareness.
It is at just this moment that the narrator’s body memory comes most effectively into play. Only in and through this memory, not through the recollections of daytime consciousness, can significant connections with past things, places, and years arise:
My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would endeavour to construe from the pattern of its tiredness the position of its various limbs, in order to deduce therefrom the direction of the wall, the location of the furniture, to piece together and give a name to the house in which it lay. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, its knees, its shoulder-blades, offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept, while the unseen walls, shifting and adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirled round it in the dark. And even before my brain, lingering in cogitation over when things had happened and what they had looked like, had reassembled the circumstances sufficiently to identify the room, it, my body, would recall from each room in succession the style of the bed, the position of the doors, the angle at which the sunlight came in at the windows, whether there was a passage outside, what I had had in mind when I went to sleep and found there when I awoke.48
Here body memory precedes any concerted “cogitation” over ordered existence—a cogitation which results in the certain identification of things in space and time. Before such identification can occur, familiarity must obtain. Familiarization is the distinctive work of body memory, which is not concerned with the exact identities of things nor with their precise locations in time or space. It is a matter of the approximate positioning of things in experience. (And “things” are not physical only; the narrator’s body recalls what he had had in mind when he went to sleep: here body memory encompasses memory of mind itself!) Far from such approximation being a deficiency in memory, it is for Proust the very condition of the kind of exact remembering that is aimed at in recollection. Only when the narrator’s body memories of past things, places, and years have been allowed to run their course is he in a position to enter the world-frame of recollection, that is, the content of the novel itself:
My memory had been set in motion; as a rule I did not attempt to go to sleep again at once, but used to spend the greater part of the night recalling our life in the old days at Combray with my great-aunt, at Balbec, Paris, Doncières, Venice, and the rest; remembering again all the places and people I had known, what I had actually seen of them, and what others had told me.49
In this citation, “memory,” “recalling,” and “remembering” all refer to recollecting, the more or less exact reconstitution in one’s conscious mind of past scenes. Proust ingeniously inverts the usual order of proceeding from the psychical to the physical in matters of memory by showing that the richest route into recollection is through body memory. If so, the latter can no longer be considered derivative or trivial in status; nor can it even be seen as second-best (as it is for Bergson). Not only does it have its own validity and uniqueness, but it ushers in recollection itself in the most auspicious way—as we learn from the narrator’s remembrances of his childhood at Combray, remembrances that begin immediately after the above passage: “At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should have to go to bed and lie there, unsleeping. . . .”50
The past that Proust’s body memories brings back is at once spatial and temporal. Before the specific recollections of Combray set in—recollections that carry with them a separability of date and place51—the narrator’s body is remembering how it was to lie sleepless in his bedroom at Combray: where the “how” precedes the “that” of that it was so as well as the “when” of when it was so. Notice how, in the following passage, the narrator’s body memory merges place and time to the point of inseparability:
The stiffened side on which I lay would, for instance, in trying to fix its position, imagine itself to be lying face to the wall in a big bed with a canopy; and at once I would say to myself, “Why, I must have fallen asleep before Mamma came to say good night,” for I was in the country at my grandfather’s [i.e., at Combray], who died years ago; and my body, the side upon which I was lying, faithful guardians of a past which my mind should never have forgotten, brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the night-light in its urn-shaped bowl of Bohemian glass that hung by chains from the ceiling, and the chimney-piece of Siena marble in my bedroom at Combray, in my grandparents’ house, in those far distant days which at this moment I imagined to be in the present without being able to picture them exactly, and which would become plainer in a little while when I was properly awake.52
Not being able to picture means, in this context, not recollecting via visualized scenes; it also means not being able to affix an exact date: hence the vagueness of the text’s references to “years ago” and to “those far distant days.” The narrator’s body, here felt through its “stiffened side,” acts as guardian of a past which is not dated on any calendar and which is at once spatial and temporal. The canopied bed, the night-light suspended in an urn-shaped bowl, the marble chimney-piece: these are not simply discrete objects located in an indifferent space. Nor are they, or the narrator’s original experience of them, situated in a strictly temporal interval with an exactly designatable beginning and end. Any such interval and its concrete contents, not to mention the narrator’s remembered experience of these contents, are so deeply implicated with one another that their spatial and temporal dimensions have become inseparably interconnected. It is the narrator’s body memory that has made this extraordinary situation possible: extraordinary precisely from the separative standpoint of recollective memory.
The present chapter is in effect an extended tribute to the importance of body memory, which has not often been singled out for detailed description of the sort that has been offered in these pages. In and through this description, I have been attempting to show just how—in which precise ways—body memory is important in human experience. But we have not yet confronted the more general question of why body memory is so crucial in human experience. It is only in providing a satisfactory answer to this rather sweeping question that such purely descriptive efforts will receive their full justification.
To sharpen the issue and to set the stage for this answer, let me state baldly that there is no memory without body memory. In claiming this I do not mean to say that whenever we remember we are in fact directly engaging in body memory as it has been discussed in this chapter. Rather, I am saying that we could not remember in any of the forms or modes described in earlier chapters without having the capacity for body memory. But it remains far from clear how this can be so. How can body memory, which is typically so reticent and so submerged, be so basic for all memory? In what does its peculiar importance consist?
A possible answer to such questions emerges when we consider once more what I have called the “marginality” of body memory. If such marginality is interpreted as assuming a position at the margin of any given memory, then it might seem plausible to claim that all remembering involves taking up some such stance: that is, some bodily perspective on an object, scene, or fact remembered. This would even appear to work for most recollections. Do we not recall events from a particular point of view that is, at least implicitly, defined by our bodily position at the time of the original happening? I say “at least implicitly,” for it is evident that we need not explicitly call back to mind the bodily position itself—either its exact contour or even the way it felt to assume it at the time. With this proviso, we can reliably assert that all recollection—and all reminiscence as well—does include or at least imply a bodily point of view. Yet “a bodily point of view” is not necessarily equivalent to a body memory, much less a memory of a body. Even if we can afford to omit an express representation of our own witnessing body while still claiming its immanent-marginal presence in all recollections, this still does not prove the actual ingredience of body memory within all recollective memory. Nor, for that matter, does it begin to account for any such ingredience of body memory in other memorial phenomena such as semantic memory (i.e., the recall of sheer information in which there is no representation of a memory episode at all), reminding, recognizing, remembering-on-the-occasion-of, primary memory, dream memory,53 etc. This list could go on almost indefinitely, so numerous are the types of memory that do not appear to include, or even to imply, a bodily stance of the rememberer at their margin.
As promising as the notion of bodily point of view is, it cannot therefore fully cash in my primary claim that there is no memory without body memory. Nor will it suffice to say that taking the body (including its own memory as an intrinsic feature of it) as a necessary condition of all human experience allows us to deduce body memory as a necessary condition of all memorial experience. Even if true as a form of transcendental deduction, this assertion rings hollow for our purposes. Its formality fails to capture the particularity of the situation; it does not tell us in just what way body memory is inherent in all memory. If point of view is too specific in its role and if condition of possibility is too general, where are we to turn?
I suggest that we turn to Whitehead’s notion of causal efficacy as providing the most promising basis for understanding the deep ingrediency of body memory in memory generally. Whitehead has written that memory is “a very special instance of an antecedent act of experience becoming a datum of intuition for another act of experience.”54 The paradox is that Whitehead, while regarding memory (along with “visceral feelings”) as an altogether “obvious” example of causal efficacy,55 does not say much about memory itself, much less about the manner in which it is “a very special instance” of such efficacy. For this reason we shall have to construct from Whitehead’s occasional remarks the outlines of a theory that is illuminating in the present context and yet not incompatible with his overall cosmology.
The systematic setting for the notion of causal efficacy is supplied by Whitehead’s view of time. In the context of a critique of time regarded as pure succession (i.e., such as we find in Hume and Kant), he argues that “time in the concrete is the conformation of state to state, the later to the earlier; and the pure succession is an abstraction from the irreversible relationship of settled past to derivative present.”56 This means that the immediate present comes into being by conforming to the immediate past, which it reproduces as objectified in the present itself.57 Crucial here is the notion of the past as to-be-conformed-to precisely because it is “settled and actual.”58 Such a past implodes in the present as a “stubborn fact” that refuses to go away, with the result that “the man-at-one-moment concentrates in himself the colour of his own past, and he is the issue of it.”59 Once this much is granted, causal efficacy follows forthwith. As one of the two “perceptive modes” of experience, it is definable as “the hand of the settled past in the formation of the present.”60 In contradiction to Hume and Kant, Whitehead holds that causal efficacy precedes “our immediate perception of the contemporary external world, appearing as an element constitutive of our own experience.”61 Where presentational immediacy (i.e., the other major perceptive mode) gives us “a world decorated by sense-data,” causal efficacy shows the world as “vague, haunting, unmanageable.”62
But what has all this to do with memory and more particularly with body memory? Thus far, we might seem to be talking at most of the mere reproduction of the past in the present, its sheer “repetition” or “reproduction” there.63 But surely, as I have argued against Bergson, memory involves more than mere repetition of the past. What else does it involve? The Whiteheadian answer, though Whitehead himself does not put it quite so brazenly, is body and more particularly the body as experiencing its own organs. For the body is “our most immediate environment”;64 it is that with which we live, in contrast to the more remote environment of the physical world around us. Living with it, we conform to it: “we conform to our bodily organs and to the vague world which lies beyond them.”65 But conformation, as we have just seen, is the basic action of causal efficacy. To experience our body qua set of organs is precisely to experience the causal efficacy of these organs and, through them, that of the external world as it impinges on us.66 Put otherwise, the actions of these organs form the settled past to which we conform in the present of perception:
For the organic theory, the most primitive perception is ‘feeling the body as functioning’. This is a feeling of the world in the past; it is the inheritance of the world as a complex of feeling; namely, it is the feeling of derived feeling.67
“The feeling of derived feeling”: here we come to the nub of the doctrine of causal efficacy as it bears on memory. Derived feeling is feeling felt as a direct legacy from the past; it is “a feeling of the world in the past.” For human beings, such derivation or inheritance could not occur except by way of the lived body, which is at once a transmitter of the inheritance of the external world and itself an inheritance for perception in the present.68 What seems strangest in this view is just what makes it most valuable for our purposes. It is strange to think that we feel the body feeling its circumambient world.69 The sense of strangeness is not altogether mitigated by Whitehead’s efforts to consider the body as merely a somewhat more specialized and more intimate part of the environment: “in principle, the animal body is only the more highly organized and immediate part of the general environment for its dominant actual occasion, which is the ultimate percipient.”70 What Whitehead calls “bodily efficacy” is the unmediated feeling of the body’s causal efficacy qua “withness”; given as an “objective datum,” it is “feeling the body as functioning”—functioning as efficacious in its own right and not as a mere means.71 To be efficacious in its own right is at once to be capable of producing further feelings on subsequent occasions and to re-enact prior feelings in memory.72
But if we thus feel the body feeling the world—i.e., feel the world in feeling “with” our own body—one level of feeling does not simply lead to another. Nor does one level reflect, represent, or even express another level; the first level always includes the second (and vice versa), whether by anticipation or by conformation. And if this is paradoxical for an act-intentional view of feeling—which has difficulty admitting a second feeling as the content or “object” of a first feeling—it is quite compatible with the notion of operative intentionality in terms of which (following Merleau-Ponty) we have construed bodily behavior. According to this notion, the lived body is the operative force in human projects, including the project of remembering. As such, it is the natural—and certainly the most immediate—site for causally efficacious action. Moreover, this action is felt as such: felt in its very bodily efficacy. It is also remembered as such—though rarely in recollection, which typically forgets it. It is remembered instead in “primary memory,” the unique vehicle for knowledge of the immediate past. For the “direct knowledge” of the causal efficacy contained in the body’s withness is a knowledge of something that, though actual and settled, has just occurred. Whitehead sometimes refers in this connection to a temporal interval of micro-seconds73—which would accord with Husserl’s view that primary memory is sub-instantaneous.
What is most valuable in Whitehead’s view of primary memory—and what serves to distinguish it from Husserl’s conception—is the idea that such memory is just as bodily as it is mental in its operation. If “bodily efficacy”74 seems at first a puzzling notion, it is the source of an insight that we cannot afford to overlook: an insight into why body memory plays such an important role in all remembering. It does so because of the working of causal efficacy itself. If the latter is indeed the primordial perceptive mode—is presupposed by presentational immediacy as well as by conceptual analysis—and if it is the privileged point of connection with a settled past (whether recent or remote), then its own bodily basis, i.e., the concrete feeling of bodily efficacy, will be intrinsic to any connection with any past. In other words, it will be intrinsic to any memory of any kind. Or to put it slightly differently: if my lived body always functions as an objective datum for the feeling that an experience has become past, then it will be an indispensable ingredient in remembering that experience as past—whether the experience be directly of my own body or of the external world by means of (that is, with) this same body. In this way recognition is bestowed upon the lived body as an internal and necessary ingredient in all remembering. This is done without having to invoke a new kind of memory—other than “body memory” itself. And the lived body’s role, far from being merely formal, has become a material condition of possibility for remembering: it is this body as actually felt in causal efficacy that gives to it its seminal importance in matters of memory.
It is time to indicate several consequences of this importance as well as to look at some of its larger implications. There are two immediate consequences that need noting. First, if Whitehead is right, experience is always in the process of becoming past. What Dewey would call “an experience”75 is something that is always already becoming settled—settled enough to be an immediate past immediately remembered. Just as there are no moments out of time, so there are no moments not settling into, or already settled in, a past to be remembered. Second, time-lapse is adventitious in memory; despite the fact that we often pride ourselves on accurately determining the exact elapsed time inherent in a given (typically recollective) memory, the lapse itself is “an abstraction from the more concrete relatedness of ‘conformation’”76—that is, from the very relation to the past which is the work of causal efficacy and which lies at the heart of all remembering dependent thereon.
The large-scale implications are also two-fold. First, all that we call “the person,” “personal identity,” and the like—everything, in short, that pertains to an individual’s life-history—is rooted ultimately in body memory as construed in the above manner. If it is true that “the enduring personality is the historic route of living occasions which are severally dominant in the body at successive instants,”77 then this body’s inherent memories of its own “historic route” will themselves be constituent features in the ongoing makeup of our lasting personality. The conformation realized in such memories will supply the critical connective tissue that binds together this personality and its route alike. A second implication bears on the role of mind and mentality. Although Whitehead considers it “a matter of pure convention as to which of our experiential activities we term mental and which physical,”78 he maintains, nonetheless, that the bodily pole enjoys priority over the mental pole in a decisive way. For one thing, only the mental pole (in its intellectual phases) calls for conceptual analysis, which is itself a supervening mode of experience.79 For another, causal efficacy in its primal form is robustly corporeal; and since bodily efficacy precedes presentational immediacy as well as conceptual analysis, bodily being has a distinct primacy. If this is so, then that form of memory indigenous to corporeality will also possess a primacy among forms of memory; and in particular, body memory will take precedence over recollection or secondary memory.80
Causal efficacy is said to be “a heavy, primitive experience” which occurs most saliently when we undergo “a reversion to some primitive state.”81 Furthermore, “such a reversion occurs when either some primitive functioning of the human organism is unusually heightened, or some considerable part of our habitual sense-perception is unusually enfeebled.”82 What we then experience is indeed “vague, haunting, unmanageable.”83 Suddenly we are reminded of the hapless and sleepless narrator in Remembrance of Things Past:
But for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness; I was more destitute than the cave-dweller; but then the memory—not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived and might now very possibly be—would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse centuries of civilization, and out of a blurred glimpse of oil-lamps, then of shirts with turned-down collars, would gradually piece together the original components of my ego.84
It is surely striking that Proust calls the experience he is describing “heavy” and that this experience, one of disorientation upon awakening in the middle of the night, is an experience of reversion: indeed, what else is sleeping and its twilight state but reversionary (“regressive” in Freud’s word)? It is also telling that the very terms by which Proust’s narrator comes to describe this experience—“rudimentary,” “destitute,” “the abyss of not-being,” “blurred glimpse,” etc.—express that vagueness which Whitehead ascribed precisely to causal efficacy. Striking as well as the reference to the “cave-dweller,” that is, someone to whom primitivity is unhesitatingly imputed; and closely associated with this image is the sense of existing that “may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness,” recalling Whitehead’s “animal body”85 and the general metaphorics of depth in his descriptions of causal efficacy. If Proust’s narrator is indeed piecing together “the original components” of his ego, Whitehead finds in causal efficacy the original components of human experience itself. And just as the narrator’s ego is linked with civilization, so presentational immediacy is held to be “the experience of only a few high-grade organisms”86 and to be “vivid, precise, and barren”87 in much the same way as “shirts with turned-down collars” and other accoutrements of civilized, daylight life are seen as epitomes of barrenness in Proust’s nocturnal vision.
Most striking of all, however, is the way that vivid and precise memory—the recollection of particular places in detail—comes to supervene on the dimness of the bodily state from which the narrator is slowly emerging in the above passage. As presentational immediacy stands out from causal efficacy like a flare in the night, so recollective memory in its very vividness is illuminated against the vagueness of body memory. In both cases, the original components of the more primitive experience, heavy in its dense implications for all subsequent re-membering, are superseded by the pictorial precision of a secondary state—by something presentational or representational, lacking therefore the body of a primary experience with its primary memory. Body memory gives way to its recollective successor not only as causal efficacy gives rise to presentational immediacy but, still more crucially, as—just as—such efficacy, realized in the body, emerges into such immediacy, and is manifested in mind.
It cannot be emphasized enough that body memories are located in the body—not just the objective body of sinews and fibers but much more particularly the phenomenal body. This latter is what I have been calling the “lived body” (after Leib in Husserl). Such a body acts as a receptacle of memories by virtue of two of its basic capacities. First of all, it is composed of manifold organs—by which I mean not physiological parts per se but those aspects of its being that aid in the execution of its actions—and can itself be considered as an “organ” qua totality.88 Construed thus as organismic, the lived body possesses, in its very being, an efficacious operative intentionality animating all of its ongoing maneuvers. This intentionality is quite sufficient to account for the purposiveness of these maneuvers and does not require recourse to the act intentionality of consciousness for the completion of a given “intentional arc.”89 As a direct consequence, many body memories (above all, habitual ones) need not be accompanied by consciousness in any explicit form. Second, and closely affiliated with this first feature, is the fact that the body as a memorial container—as itself a “place” of memories—furnishes an unmediated access to the remembered past: unmediated, that is, beyond its own withness. No intercalation of representations, imagistic or verbal, is required; no mediation by mind and its machinations is called for. For such “memory can be understood only as a direct possession of the past with no interposed contents.”90 It is for this reason that so much body memory arises spontaneously and without premeditation and that it is so rarely inferential or in need of further evidence. Because it re-enacts the past, it need not represent it; its own kinesthesias link it from within to the felt movements which it is reinstating; as a way of “dilating our being in the world,”91 body memory includes its own past by an internal osmotic intertwining with it.
The result of the locatability of memories in the body via its organismic and direct link to the past is exemplary of what I shall be discussing in chapter 11 as “thick autonomy.” Although such autonomy is at work in every kind of memory—even in imagistic recollection—it is doubtless most manifest in body memories. The very density of the remembering/remembered body and the way in which it provides an original past for remembering as a whole help to make these memories a peculiarly effective expression of thick autonomy. The nimble and mercurial powers of mind—as evidenced in instantaneous “flashes” of recollection or recognition—cede place to a more stolid and stable modus operandi whose paradigm is the working of habitual body memory in its reliably consecutive and consistent deployment. But the same thick autonomy of the bodily is evident in alleviated forms in erotic and traumatic body memories as well. In all of these otherwise so different cases there is at work a sure sense of the thickness of the flesh, of its durable and enduring qualities, of its subdued but obdurate being.92
Along with the memory of places, things, and other human beings, body memory forms part of the general project in which this Part of the present book is engaged: making memory cosmic rather than strictly mental, psychological, or neurological. It is a matter, in short, of returning memory to the world. Places will take us most resolutely out into the circumambient world, since they regionalize this world and literally give it local habitations. As its most concrete denizens, material things and other people act as well to fill up the world around us. But the lived body is the truly pivotal member of this quaternity of cosmic terms. It is always in or from or through93 this body that the other items are grasped or met, witnessed or transformed: There is no getting around the body. As Husserl said:
In a quite unique way the living body is constantly in the perceptual field quite immediately, with a completely unique ontic meaning.94
Itself felt as unmediated, thanks to its self-felt bodily efficacy, the body is the mediator, the pervasive with-operator, of everything else in human experience. It is “the general medium for having a world”95 in that only in its terms and by its intervention can anything appear at all to us. If things appear to us in constant succession, this can only be due to the fact that the kinesthesias (and synesthesias) by which they are apprehended are actively attuned to this same succession, partly reflecting it and partly constituting it.96
The recognition of the body’s pivotal position was first explicitly acknowledged by Bergson in his descriptions of the body as a continual “center of action” and as that “ever advancing boundary between the future and the past.”97 The lived body is a center which refuses to be decentered, a central boundary that will not become peripheral, precisely because this body already encompasses the marginal within its own arena of activity: it creates its own margin even as it brings about its own modes of immanence and movement. Echoing Bruno and Pascal, we can speak of it as an entity whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. The lived body is the incessant center of its multifarious maneuvers—maneuvers without any perimeters other than those which it imposes on itself as it moves in a depth of its own making. Dense itself, the lived body is always in the thick of things; and as remembered, it continues to be concentric for the world which it has come to inhabit. What Merleau-Ponty calls the “Memory of the World”98 is very much the memory of being bodily in the world, being a central memorial presence there.
Despite its memorious density, the lived body remains “a place of meeting and transfer.”99 Its very bulk and volume—its thickness and heft—have a borderline aspect as well. The body as lived and remembered is crucially interstitial in status. The basic borderline it occupies is traced between mind and place: it is their middle term, their tertium quid. On the one hand, body is contiguous with mind through the level of immediate kinesthetic experience; if my mind’s intentions are to be enacted, they must achieve expression in a felt movement which itself represents the overcoming of separation between body and mind.100 On the other hand, the lived body is conterminous with place because it is by bodily movement that I find my way in place and take up habitation there. My body not only takes me into places; it habituates me to their peculiarities and helps me to remember them vividly. It does all this in various particular ways which we must now begin to explore.