Bodies in Motion
The philosopher Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception has an interesting discussion of the embodied processes at work when we drive a car. We possess detailed knowledge of the gear shifts, turn signals, steering wheel, brakes–yet most of this knowledge exists outside consciousness. It is embedded as habit in our bodies and for the most part functions automatically, only irrupting into conscious thought when something unexpected happens and requires us to make a decision. According to Merleau-Ponty, when we drive we become one with the car. It becomes an extension of our body and vice versa: our bodies become an extension of the car. You may believe you are driving the car, but actually the car is driving you.
It’s a particularly telling example of the ways in which our bodies are organized socially, crisscrossed with habits acquired through the specific postural schemas we incorporate into ourselves from the world around us. When that external world changes, then so do our bodies. This all came to mind recently when I read an article somewhere (I thought it was in the Chicago Tribune, but I can’t find it there now; there are similar recent articles here and here) about how today’s teenagers are increasingly likely to delay getting their driver’s licenses. It’s just not worth the bother or the expense, they say.
As the father of an 18-year-old who doesn’t drive,I found this interesting. Thirty years ago, when I was a teenager, a driver’s license meant freedom: freedom of movement and, more importantly, freedom from your parents. Today’s kids apparently don’t value that as much–because, of course, they have a different kind of freedom of movement, virtual movement through the Internet and through video games. It isn’t so urgent for them to get away from the home. I suspect this also says something about the changing nature of parent-child relations.
Following Merleau-Ponty, this also means that today’s teenagers are acquiring different sorts of bodies than my generation did. They aren’t acquiring as second nature the habitual embodied practices of being driven by a car. Rather, they are uploading postural schemas largely through the repeated patterns of movement of their fingers across various kinds of keypads as they sit hunched over a screen. The mouse and the touch screen have replaced the steering wheel as the prosthetic devices that open our bodies up onto a broader world. The results of this change are still unfolding, and whatever they may be, they will be written into our very flesh.
