just as, in the experience of gravity, range of motion, the contractile activity of the heart and gut, and the distensive pressure of ingesta on the gut wall, we enter into a tactile relationship with the body.
Contrast this earlier passage:
… appeals to the conceit that when it comes to our explorations of the world our body is something we have a privileged relationship with. The body represents, as it were, well-surveyed country. This is a view I do not share.
Was I wrong earlier? Is the body known country?
Perhaps I have come to regard my body as a kind of familiar: something that is always there, at the edge of my awareness, but for all that a source of puzzlement.
In characterizing things, in representing them as present to themselves, we make them more present, perceptually and conceptually, to ourselves and our interlocutors.
But this is a two-way process. Recall Santos-Granero, the constructional view of life, that which
conceives of all living beings as composite entities, made up of the bodies and parts of bodies of a diversity of life forms, among which artifacts occupy a prominent place.
This is what I’ve been trying to describe: a receptivity, a porousness, a process in which aspects of world, by their presence to us, characterize us, color us in, make us present. Certainly gravity does this, as does the anisotropic (directed) pressure of a viscous medium, as when you are swimming in cross currents. As does sound.