Hermann Schmitz (Kiel, Germany)

The Felt Body and Embodied Communication

Abstract: In the 4th and 5th centuries B.C. the most significant paradigm change in
Western intellectual culture occurred, later affecting Christianity and subsequently
science. In the interest of personal empowerment over spontaneous stirrings, a
private inner sphere, a so-called soul (psyche) was ascribed to every conscious
subject which was taken to contain their whole experience, like a house, conceived
of as an inner world in which reason was to be the master of spontaneous impulses;
the empirical external world between these inner spheres was cleansed of all
gripping forces and, for this purpose, ground down to a few elegantly selected types
of features and their carriers (atoms, substances): the remainder of this grinding-
down was deposited in the souls or overlooked to nonetheless be found in the
souls in changed form. Man was dissected into body and soul. In the transposition
into the soul’s huge amounts of life experience were forgotten. Among them can be
counted the felt body which disappeared between body and soul as in a crevasse,
even though it is the closest thing to human experience.

Everyone knows head and stomach aches, hunger, thirst, lust, disgust spiritedness
and tiredness. Everyone has felt anger welling up in themselves, has been brought
down by grief, has been lifted by joy. Such experiences give man the assurance
that it is she who is experiencing them. But this certainty is obfuscated by the fact
that such events and states often occur in places where man finds parts of his body
or believes them to be. They are transposed into the body, since they occur to the
body. Thus they are removed from their immediate certainty, for man can take a
step back from his body, look at and investigate it, use and style it, while she has
to suffer her hunger, his pain and relief himself.
Through the two words ‘Leib’ (the felt body) and ‘Körper’ (the material body),
it is easy for us Germans to distinguish the felt body from visible (and otherwise
perceptible) material body. Other languages need to resort to cumbersome para-
phrases. It takes the felt body [Leib] to be the epitome of everything that someone
can feel of themselves (as belonging to themselves) in the vicinity (not always
in the bounds) of their material body without drawing on their five senses and
perceptual body scheme, i. e. the habitual image of one’s own body gained through
experience (in particular vision and touch). This epitome of embodiedness I divide
into four types of embodied stirrings: first, there are merely embodied stirrings

Translated by: Rudolf Owen Müllan

https://doi.org/10.1515/yewph-2017/0004

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10 | Hermann Schmitz

such as fright, fear, pain, anxiety, itches, tickles, disgust, lust, relief, hunger, thirst,
spiritedness, tiredness, animalistic contentment. The second group are the em-
bodied stirrings by means of which emotions take hold of an affectively involved
person in such a manner that they become their own emotions, felt by themselves.
In this sense raging anger as a force that takes hold of one differs from anger as
an embodied stirring by means of which anger imbues someone with expressive
authenticity (flashing eyes, clenched fists, a sharp voice etc.). Such feeling needn’t
exhaust itself in the embodied stirring, but may also contain a personal stance
to the involvement in the form of surrender or resistance. Both groups are forms
of affective involvement. The following two groups I have counted as embodied
stirrings, because both with a view to spatial extension as well as with a view to
dynamism and embodied communication (this will yet be dealt with) they belong
in the same category, even though they do occur without any notable affective
involvement. Third are felt motor skills, both intentional and spontaneous, as in
shivering, twitching, sneezing. Fourth are irreversible embodied directions, party
tied to movement such as breathing out, swallowing, the channels of the embodied
motor scheme, partly without motion, as in a gaze or glance.
It is an error to conceive of these embodied stirrings as felt states of the body.
In so doing one would overlook the difference in the manner of spatial extension.
The body of a human or an animal is constantly extended, limited and divisible
by surfaces, with various positions and distances of its elements. Anything em-
bodied, however, is surfaceless. One cannot feel surfaces in one’s own felt body,
while one can look at and feel one’s own material body. The difference is easily
dor de cabeça
illustrated using the example of a headache. It shares its location with the head, a
three-dimensional mass divisible by sections. A headache is spatially extended
in a different manner, as a diffuse contracting and contracted mass, not clearly
delimited, yet shaped by dynamic accents (pounding, hammering, banging) but
nowhere divisible and thus not decomposable into parts. The space of the felt body
is a surfaceless space just like the space of sound with its spatially manifesting
suggestions of motion, which take hold of dancing and marching felt bodies as
being far and near, as having direction, expansive and pointed shapes, but without
points, distances and surfaces. Spaces of impressive places (festive, stifling or
gently invigorating ones), of the weather, of the unnoticeable background that is
continuously presupposed in small backwards-directed movements, the space of
impacting headwind with a motion without a change of location which one notices
in the direction of its origin as long as one does not re-interpret is as air in motion
and the space of water for a swimmer who struggles to get ahead or who gently
floats are equally surfaceless spaces.
Surfaceless spaces do not have geometrical dimensions, since such are only
accessible in ascending to or descending from a surface. But they do have dynamic

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 The Felt Body and Embodied Communication | 11

volume due to the intertwinement of contraction and expansion, of which we will

speak later. This can be seen in the case of sound in the difference of deep, dark
tones and noises which are expansive and slow but loose from tones which are
dense, contracted, pointed and high-pitched. In the case of the felt body, one is
dealing with islands of embodied space. The felt body commonly unfolds in a
surge of diffuse islands, some of which are constant, but most come and go. One of
the islands is that of breathing and is formed and dissolved with each breath. It is
lead, at first, by an expanding swelling which gradually but within seconds shifts
to a predominance of contracting tension to the point where it seems to become
intolerable and is released into expansion by the irreversible embodied direction of
breathing out. In a similar manner, the volume and the calm of water is dynamic for
a swimmer. Another example would be a headache which is a contracted, pressing
but nonetheless diffuse island of embodied space.
There can be no relative locations in surfaceless spaces which mutually deter-
mine one another by positions and distances and enable saying where something
is. The reason for this is that positions and distances can only be read off of irre-
versible connections which are only enabled by surfaces. Surfaceless spaces can,
however, secondarily be transposed into a system of relative locations, for instance,
sound to the sources of sound, a swimmer can optically visualize his position and
islands of embodied space can be ascribed to locations in the body by means of the
perceptual body scheme. But by themselves, surfaceless spaces do not come with
relative locations. Embodied space makes up for this lack by absolute locations
which are, without relation of position and distance, determined in themselves
(as such). Such an absolute location is experienced in a startled fright reaction or
when receiving an unexpected phone call. Without being in an absolute location
one could not elegantly evade a threateningly approaching mass, be it merely a
snowball. In such a case, one does not see one’s own body and thus cannot, ac-
cording to position and distance, adapt it to the imposing danger; rather, the gaze,
an irreversible embodied direction latches on to the suggestion of motion which
indicates the course of the approaching object and transmits this information into
the embodied motor scheme and directs the elegant evasion. The person affected
can only do this because they know themselves to be in an absolute location. There
are also absolute locations of individual islands of embodied space. Let me illus-
trate this using the example of an insect bite. If an itching or stinging sensation
seems to indicate the presence of a parasite on an area of skin, the dominant hand
instantly and securely finds the area affected in order to drive the insect away or
squash it. It need not be found in any relative location and it finds its target, even
if it was not previously registered in the perceptual body scheme. This observation
brings to light that there is a system for orienting in one’s own body, dispositionally
available at any time and which is more original than the perceptual body scheme:

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12 | Hermann Schmitz

the embodied motor scheme which, by means of irreversible directions, mediates

between absolute locations. It performs highly complex feats in balancing in order
to compensate an imminent fall and is indispensable for fluid motions. By means
of the embodied motor scheme the felt body directs the body in a manner that
remains opaque to us.
The perceptual body scheme misleads one to draw the false inference from
the fact that embodied stirrings are commonly (not always) located in a part of
the body to the conclusion that they happen in the material body as events in
it which are merely experienced in a unique way. This would be as though the
sound of a voice were an event in the vocal tract of a singer and not something
incomparably different emanating from it. The divide between different spatial
structures is overlooked by such false inferences. But the peculiarity of the felt
body in contrast to the visible and otherwise perceptible material body of man not
only concerns spatial structure but also embodied dynamism and the embodied
communication resulting from it. I now turn to these topics.
Embodied dynamism has two dimensions, the dimension of contractedness
and expandedness and the dimension of protopathic and epicritical tendency.
In the present context, especially for embodied communication, the dimen-
sion of contractedness and expandedness is important. All embodied stirrings
find a place in it. In itself, expandedness is not dynamic; conversely, in each
contractedness the effect of a contracting, limiting force is also felt which is
opposed by a tendency to return towards expandedness. Thus results a com-
petition of contractedness and expandedness, which in their intertwinement,
at the same time inhibiting and stimulating one another, form the vital drive.
If contractedness comes loose from the intertwinement, as in shock, the drive
is torpid or paralyzed; if expandedness comes loose from the vital drive, as
in falling asleep or dozing or after ejaculation, it is lax; in this it can be seen
that it consists in the intertwinement of the two impulses. I call it “vital” be-
cause in its basic form, which can, for instance, be observed in breathing in,
it is without direction, but is complemented to full vitality, to actively directed
usability in virtue of its receptivity to stimuli. In the intertwinement of the vi-
tal drive I refer to contraction as tension and expansion as swelling in order
to have suitable names for the reserve of contraction and the urge of expan-
sion.
Contraction and expansion can partly come loose from their intertwinement;
then I call them privative contraction and privative expansion respectively. But if
their separation is complete, consciousness, which is kept awake by the vital drive,
fades. In the vital drive embodied stirrings can be distinguished in three respects:
according to strength, according to the distribution of weight and according to the
form of binding of tension and swelling. The form of binding can be compact or

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 The Felt Body and Embodied Communication | 13

rhythmical: compact in such a manner that tension and swelling stick together
tightly or rhythmical in such a manner that a dominance of tension and a domi-
nance of swelling alternate at short intervals, while it might still be one of the two
competing impulses that gives the entire stirring its character.
I now demarcate the scope of expansion and contraction in the dimension of
embodied contracted- or expandedness with prominent examples of embodied
stirrings.
Fear and pain are closely related as conflicts of tension and swelling with a
dominance of tension. They are expansive impulses which are resisted by over-
powering inhibition, I speak of a stifled impulse “Away!”. Fear is less entangled
than pain. It consists in a search of a way out of oppression in an embodiedly
contracting manner. Here the impulse “Away!” is successful in that the fear gets
going and takes the oppression along, for instance, in panicked flight but no less
so in simulating being dead: one is paralysed and, while one doesn’t want to leave
one’s relative location, but one’s absolute one by undercutting the entire situation
with the absolute location at its center by means of switching off or coming loose.
Something similar is impossible in the case of pain. Its expansive impulse can only
be released symbolically, in a cry that instead of the person suffering escapes into
expandedness, and in rearing-up which immediately collapses. In fear one can
become absorbed as in rage or enthusiasm, but not in pain; it confronts. For pain
is both a state of one’s own which one wants to escape as well as an imposing
enemy with which one has to deal. The Janus-faced nature of pain is mirrored in the
oppositionality of the associated, partly contracting and party expanding gestures:
screaming, moaning and rearing up are attempts to escape into expandedness,
clenching one’s fists and one’s jaw and lips, on the other hand, are contracting
attitudes with a view to defending against the pain in close combat. Both are not
compatible: one cannot escape one’s opponent by approaching them. The form
of binding of tension and swelling is rhythmical in the case of fear and compact
in the case of pain. For this reason, someone in fear pants: swelling sets in in
breathing, is broken by inhibiting tension and sets in again. No one pants in pain.
The oppression by pain as an enemy is too massive for the elastic oscillations of
the rhythm.
As conflicts of tension and swelling in the vital drive, fear and pain are ag-
onizing. They thus differ from fright which is otherwise similar in virtue of its
dominance of contraction over expansion. But in fright this dominance is so
strong that the vital drive, as a bond of contraction and expansion in privative
contraction tends towards contractedness. In fright one becomes motionless, not
in fear or pain. Fright is embarrassing or annoying as an interruption of the vital
drive which has to be re-connected, not as the friction between opposing tenden-
cies.

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14 | Hermann Schmitz

An approximate balance between tension and swelling in the vital drive is

achieved in exertions of force such as lifting, pulling, climbing; in those cases the
form of binding is compact. A dominance of swelling over tension is the mark of lust
and rage. Lust is passionate dominance of swelling, while it is engaged in pushing
through against the resistance of inhibiting tension. Its most prominent form is
that of sexual lust, but lust also has many non-sexual forms, for instance, as mild
lust in having a stretch, as intense lust in battling the elements or wrestling, even
more so as the lust of sucking and slurping out of voracious thirst and scratching
an intense itch. The stronger the form of binding of lust, it becomes rhythmical
in that swelling reaffirms its dominance over inhibiting tension. For this reason
it can, in conjunction with the also rhythmically bound vital drive of fear, blend
into lusty fear-lust [Angstlust], for instance, in thrilling sensations in watching a
horror movie or riding a roller coaster. As an activation of the vital drive with a
dominance of swelling, lust is similar to rage or, more precisely, embodied raging,
only that it is not as lustful and the form of binding of tension and swelling is not
rhythmical but compact, perhaps with the rare exception of inhibited rage.
Lust and rage ascend to apices in which the dominance of swelling breaks
the resistance of tension and merges into free flow. In sexual lust this would be
an orgasm, in rage an act of revenge. On this apex swelling turns into privative
expansion, into an ecstatic release leading to flaccidity and relief. Relief, also in
the case of grave worry, as a separation from the vital drive, stands to lust and
rage as fright to fear and pain, only that it takes an inverted direction: towards
expandedness. Another example of privative expansion is beneficial tiredness.
A further bracket, other than the vital drive, conjoins contractedness and
expandedness of the felt body in the form of an embodied direction which irre-
versibly leads from contractedness to expandedness but can drag contraction
along, for instance, as a gaze, as breathing out which counterbalances the domi-
nance of tension at the end of breathing in by leading to expandedness, also as
swallowing. In the material body swallowing quickly moves food and drink from
mouth to stomach along a narrow and short path. In the felt body swallowing is
like breathing only without the phase of dominant swelling at the beginning of
breathing in: a tense contraction if followed by a release of embodied direction
into expandedness, here as the spatial depth of a surfaceless space. A constant
network of embodied directions runs through the body and guides, for instance,
along the ruts of gestures, in the form of the already mentioned embodied motor
scheme. That these directions by means of which the felt body [Leib] directs the
material body [Körper] trough islands of embodied space [Leibesinseln] is seen in
the following manner: in order to functionally use one’s body, a constant order,
encompassing it, is required which determines that the right hand always is the
right hand, the right foot is always the right foot and that it is lower than the knee

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 The Felt Body and Embodied Communication | 15

etc. for all movable body parts. A confusion could have nasty consequences. This
order encompasses a point of reference relative to which something is right or
left, higher or lower etc. From this point of reference all movable body parts can
easily be found and activated in their place, but it is impossible to find this point
of reference by mere inversion of this direction from the limbs. For the perceptual
body scheme, however, it is absolutely no problem to invert the connection from
head to foot into that of foot to head.
I will be satisfied to merely cast a brief glance at the second dimension of
embodied dynamism, i. e. that of protopathic and epicritical tendency. I have
adopted the terms from the English neurologist Henry Head. The tendency towards
what is muffled, blurred and reaching out diffusely is protopathic, whereas the
tendency towards what is pointed and sharp is epicritical. The felt body, as a surge
of islands of embodied space, and the vital drive in its basic directionless form
are protopathic, whereas the higher forms of vitality, receptivity and fastening
of the drive require epicritical tendencies for their selectivity. In the case of pain,
dull intestinal pain is protopathic, whereas a sharp toothache is epicritical. The
mild lust of gentle sensations of touch is more protopathic, whereas the stinging
sensation sending shivers down one’s spine in a thrilling experience of horror is
rather epicritical. Hunger is protopathic contractedness, the feeling of an addled
head after a few drinks too; epicritical expansion, on the other hand, encourages
a cheerful and fresh start into the day with a light springy step. Although the
protopathic tendency is more inclined towards expansion and the epicritical more
towards contraction, there are consequently opposed pairings. So both dimensions
need to be distinguished.
From the embodied [leiblich] dynamism of the individual felt body I now turn
to embodied communication by means of which embodied dynamism more or
less extends beyond the felt body of an individual. From the word go, embodied
dynamism is communicative, for the vital drive intertwines the two opposed im-
pulses of contraction and expansion in a kind of dialogue. This dialogue becomes
a conflict among partners in pain which, as an imposing enemy stifles the expan-
sively swelling impulse “Away!” and confronts it. Pain is not only an intruder into
the felt body, but also its own state; merely intruding opponents which, like pain,
are only felt in one’s own body but aren’t noticeable as external objects such as the
wind and an overpowering sense of gravity if one falls and only catches oneself
at the last minute. Pain, wind and overpowering gravity like a voice or various
other things, are half-things which differ from common things in two respects: they
come, go and return without it making sense to ask where they have been in the
meantime and they take effect immediately without distinction between cause and
[Einwirkung]. This immediacy gives them an imposing quality by means of which
they squeeze into the vital drive. Thus results a joint drive, as between partners

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16 | Hermann Schmitz

acting in concert, sometimes in opposition, sometimes in harmony, sometimes

fighting. This embodied communication in the channel of the vital drive I term
incorporation. It takes the form of antagonistic incorporation if at least one of the
partners turns to another or that of solidary incorporation if a joint drive takes
hold of many felt bodies as in singing together, rowing together or in mass panic if
a collective impulse towards flight makes people so blind to others that they push
them aside like dead objects or trample them to death.
Incorporation into half-things is the most primitive form of antagonistic in-
corporation. But it also takes the form of incorporation into shapes of all kinds,
even into problems which on is pondering, but at first as incorporation into the felt
bodies of other humans or animals. An important shape of such incorporation is
exchanging gazes. The gaze of the other hits me contractingly, I cast my gaze back
which, in turn contracts the other and thus a joint drive of tension and swelling is
balanced out. Because of its antagonistic structure exchanging gazes is always a
struggle for dominance, even without any desire for power, quite contrarily: the
most submissive gazes, the loving one and the devoted one, are the most dominant
because they touch and the person touched can no longer resist because by being
touched they lose their footing. Animals, such as big cats and apes, submit to a hu-
man’s gaze or become enraged because they are hit by it, as it confronts their desire
to impress. That is how effective embodied dynamism is in visual communication
without physical influence [Einwirkung].
Antagonistic incorporation can be one-sided or mutual. The difference concerns
the distribution of the dominant role in the joint drive. It is always played by
the possessor of contractedness, the center of contraction since the embodied
directions of incorporation emanate from it by which the partners may be captured.
If this dominant, contracting, concentrated role always stays on one side, the
incorporation is one-sided. This is the case if people are captivated by something
they cannot get away from, for instance, if their attention is fixed by a balancing
act or a football match or, as mentioned earlier, a bulky impeding mass onto which
the gaze latches. In a similar manner, a ponderer is bound to their problem in one-
sided incorporation. Antagonistic incorporation becomes reciprocal, if dominance
fluctuates between the partners, as in exchanging glances while talking. The joint
drive then has the rhythmical form of binding of tension and swelling, as with
fear and lust. This binding is elevated to leading one another on mutually which I
term the Eugenia-effect after a scene from Goethe’s drama The Natural Daughter
if the partners mutually intensify the joint drive and, in so doing, symbiotically
become a double creature in an I-you relationship like horse and rider (as in the
case of Eugenia). This might also apply to driver and motorbike or car. This triggers
an – oftentimes illusory – evidence of another whom one takes to be a conscious
subject.

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One has commonly explained this evidence of another as a projection in which

the person believing to be dealing with another projects or transfers something
of themselves into an object, be it by analogical inference from self to other, be it
more spontaneous by empathy (Lipps) or apperception (conception as something
on the basis of signs, Husserl). These projection theories have all been attacked
with good reason. The theory of analogical inference, in the difficult refutation
of which I participated, simply fails due to the fact that you-evidence happens
just as commonly between humans and animals as it does between humans and
humans. In the former case the analogy has less of a foundation in fact. The theory
of apperception cannot really explain the belief in the genuine existence of other
conscious subjects. One can apperceive an actor as a felt character but will not,
for this reason, believe that the figure portrayed, perhaps from Antiquity, is really
present. As a matter of fact, you-evidence does not result from a projection of myself
into the other, but from a form of involvement in the sense that something is done
to me. i. e. by entanglement in the joint drive of reciprocal incorporation in which
the partners confront one another with the same armor of tension and swelling. But
this holds true only for the original certainty of having another conscious subject
before one as a partner; this certainty may be deceptive and in order to critically
examine such deception, analogical inference, empathy and apperception can be
used.
So far, I have almost exclusively treated antagonistic incorporation as a rela-
tion between embodied [leiblich] creatures, humans and animals. But it reaches
further and encompasses anything that has expressive content in the sense that it
spontaneously speaks to the affected individual, as a polysignificant impression
which indicates something to them. This extension of incorporation also to things
without a felt body [Leib] is mediated by bridging qualities close to the felt body
which can both be felt in one’s own body but also be perceived in objects. Here
we are dealing with suggestions of motion and synesthetic character. suggestions
of motion are previous sketches of motion which go beyond the extent of the en-
acted motion if it even takes place in moving and unmoving figures and motions.
Synesthetic character denotes intermodal properties, spread out across the objects
of various senses, which often but not always have the names of specific sense
qualities but may also occur without such qualities, for instance, the breadth, the
weight and density of festive silence. An example of how such bridging qualities
may occur equally in perceived objects as well as they may be felt in one’s own body
is one’s gait. It may be fast, sprightly, springing or also sluggish, slurping and also
slack or forceful. In the former case tension and privative expansion are expressed
which are held together by embodied directedness in the form of a transition from
contractedness to expandedness and are adorned by epicritical features; in the
other case of sluggish and slurping movement we are dealing with a protopathic,

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18 | Hermann Schmitz

compact vital drive which is weak if slack and strong if forceful. This embodied
dynamism is equally felt by the person walking as well as it is perceived by others
in suggestions of motion and synesthetic character by others.
Suggestions of motion imbue gestures with gestural meaning by means of
which, for instance, a blink of the eye becomes a gesture of request, of seduction,
of submission or of irony, pointing at a bystander a kind of dagger that stabs them;
just slightly tilting one’s head backwards, by its suggestion of motion, becomes
a prominent gesture of pride. Rhythm is the suggestion of motion of sequence
as such, possibly loaded with further, for instance, tonal suggestors of motion
and synesthetic character; for this reason poems that “get under your skin”, i. e.
ones which grasp the listener in an embodied manner, take verse form (often also
rhyming) rather that of less rhythmical prose. The rhythm survives translation from
the optical to the acoustic and to the embodied medium without loss. A domain of
suggestions of motion and synesthetic character in which they can unfold partic-
ularly well is the acoustic medium, in particular music together with rhythmical
sounds such as calls, clapping, drumming. For this reason this medium has such
a strong effect on the integration of solidary incorporation in singing, dancing,
marching and mass ecstasy. Synthetic character may, for instance, be gentle, soft,
hard. Spring air can be just as gentle as the sound of a voice, protopathic with
little tension and a little more swelling. “Hard”[Hart] sounds hard, “soft” [“weich”]
sounds soft without there being an obvious reason for transfer from the tactile to
the acoustic domain. What overlaps here is rather the epicritical or protopathic
tendency of embodied dynamism. Synesthetic character of taste or olfactory quali-
ties carry constellations of embodied dynamism which may determine peoples’
composure, likes and dislikes, even their life forms and can take effect, for instance,
in choosing from a menu: soft, sweet, fatty is protopathic and low in tension, bit-
ter, grainy and coarse are epicritical with heightened tension. Mozart’s music is
epicritical and marked by tension and privative expansion which is mediated by
embodied direction, just as in a springy step. In terms of its synesthetic character it
corresponds to the color yellow and the vowel “i”, whereas Beethoven’s music with
its protopathic swelling is related rather to the color red. Suggestions of motion
and synesthetic character also determine the character of a city, as I have shown
in my book Atmosphären.
So far, I have dealt with embodied communication as incorporation. Finally,
I cast a brief concluding glance at another form the channel of which is not the
vital drive but the privative expansion of the felt body. Here we are dealing with
excorporation. It is a dream state in which the contractedness of the felt body is
subjected to shapeless expandedness so that there is no more clear object refer-
ence but a sinking into something. This sunkenness becomes productive if after
dedifferentiation of the details of the circumstances by connection with one-sided

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 The Felt Body and Embodied Communication | 19

incorporation leads to encounters with pure forms (such as sound, light, scent,
warmth), to the naked presentation of elementary impressions which are only
briefly touched upon in the complexity of day-to-day commerce but get lost.

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