Lived Body (Body Schema)

Definition

The lived body (le corps propre, the body-subject, the phenomenal body) names Merleau-Ponty's central thesis that the body is not an object in the world — a mechanism to be known from without — but the very subject of perception and the "vehicle of being in the world." It is "our general medium for having a world": the tacit, sedimented, pre-objective ground out of which space, things, others, language and time arise. The related body schema (schéma corporel, body image) is the body's "total awareness of my posture in the intersensory world" — a system of equivalences and potential actions ("the laying down of the first co-ordinates") that is not an association of images but an open, dynamic intentional structure. Two corollaries follow: motility is basic intentionality (consciousness is first of all an "I can," not an "I think"), and habit is incorporation — the body extends itself into its world by absorbing instruments (the blind man's stick, the car, the organ) into the schema. The lived body is the concept that grounds the haptic/embodied turn in architecture.

Key Thinkers

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty — the founding account: the body as "vehicle of being in the world," the body schema, motility as "I can," habit as incorporation, the body "comparable to a work of art."
• Juhani Pallasmaa — the architectural transmission: the "thinking hand," haptic vs. "architecture of the eye," "I am my body."
• Christian Norberg-Schulz — the body's "existential foothold" and existential space.
• Pierre Bourdieu — the sociological cognate, habitus: the body as a socially informed, knowing repository of dispositions.

Related Concepts

• Embodiment — the broader thesis that the body is a knowing entity; the lived body is Merleau-Ponty's specific articulation of it.
• Dwelling — being-at-home as an embodied, existential condition; the body as the locus of habitation.
• Atmosphere — the pre-intellectual, haptic impression of place felt through the lived body.
• Habitus — the socially incorporated dispositions that generate practice; the sociological parallel to the lived-body schema.
• Everyday Life — the habitual body in organized space and time.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Being and Time (Heidegger 1927) — the ontological foundation of Being-in-the-world as dwelling; "Being-in" derives from "innan" (to reside, dwell); the lived body is the vehicle of this Being-in.
• Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1945)
• The Thinking Hand (Pallasmaa 2009)
• Architectural Atmospheres (Borch ed. 2006)
• Building Dwelling Thinking (Heidegger 1971)
• Genius Loci (Norberg-Schulz 1980)
• Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu 1977)
• Embodied Spaces in Digital Times (Wagiri et al. 2024)
• Warped Space (Vidler 2000) — the anxious, phobic subject against the lived body's oriented space.

Open Questions

• Does the later "flesh of the world" (The Visible and the Invisible) revise the lived body into a general ontology of intercorporeality, and what would that mean for architecture's concern with the built body?
• Is the haptic/lived-body turn a critical alternative to the spectacle and the parametric/digital paradigm, or a recuperable, potentially nostalgic form of resistance (cf. Douglas Spencer, the noopolitical critique)? See Phenomenology.
• Can the lived-body account (rooted in existence, not design) be operationalized as a normative criterion for making buildings without domesticating it?