Flow & Phenomena: Motivation and Horizon in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze

by Corry Shores
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Flow & Phenomena:
Motivation and Horizon in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze

What does phenomenal motivation got to do with any of us?

Our attention is constantly being turned this way and that. It seems like each turn is initiated by something we want to know more about by exploring it further with our awareness of it. Looking at a thing, we see a flash in the corner of our eye, and we turn to see what caused it. Could it be, then, that our attention is being driven by lacks, by lacks of knowing, by something mysterious or concealed that we want uncovered? In that case, we would be constantly dragged toward voids or ambiguities in our awareness; we sense something missing somewhere, so we turn to it so that it fills our awareness of it. But then upon becoming aware of it, we again sense something else in the periphery of our awareness that now pulls us somewhere else. Under such a view, we would regard our awareness as getting pulled around in certain directions by our curiosity.

Or perhaps at any given instant, our attention is pulled in every direction. And this would not be because we are missing knowledge of everything, but because what we are attending to now is already different from everything else. But for one reason or another, some of these other differences jump out to us more than others. What this means for our everyday living is that we need not feel like our attention is constantly being pulled around by one continuous string of movement. We can realize that our attention has every reason to turn in any possible direction. We are never reacting to what is missing in our attention. Everything is already fully there, because all we can attend to are differences. So we can instead go about our lives realizing the full range of possibilities to what we attend to next. The movement of our attention need not be mindless and automatic; it can be adventurous and fun.

Brief Summary:

The way we perceive something is conditioned by contextual factors that motivate that particular way things are appearing at that moment. Also the turning of our attention is motivated by other elements in our awareness which lie just at its current boundaries on its 'horizon.' For Merleau-Ponty, there is something concealed and curious on our awareness' horizon that serves to pull our attention in its direction. This is always the case, so there is continually a flow of new phenomena that rearrange how we are organizing the relations of our world.

Points Relative to Deleuze:

But for a Deleuzean phenomenology, our horizon is unlimited; our attention could go any which way whatsoever. The motivation is not determined at all: the way we turn our attention might be conditioned in part by chance factors or unforeseeable influences. And because phenomena result from instantaneous flashes of difference between incompatibilities in our awareness, there is not a flow of phenomena, but rather phenomena are given in durationless instants where time does not pass.



We will look at Merleau-Ponty's concept of the flow of phenomena that we experience, which results from our attention being continuously motivated to see new parts of the world and see the organization of the world in new ways.

This entry will pick-up after our previous discussion on the child's first experiences of color. Merleau-Ponty wrote that the child first sees colors not distinctly but indeterminately. The more determinate forms that they later learn are originally only on the horizon of their awareness. However, after the determinate form enters their awareness, they no longer see the colors in their previous indeterminate way.

We will now discuss the how 'motivation' factors into this process, and that will lead us later to the idea of phenomenal flow.

We find reiterated in the following passage the idea that the new phenomenal organizations and structures of our awareness were only pregiven as horizons of our attention. The new configurations 'overthrow' the older ones.

To pay attention is not merely further to elucidate pre-existing data, it is to bring about a new articulation of them by taking them as figures. They are preformed only as horizons, they constitute in reality new regions in the total world. It is precisely the original structure which they introduce that brings out the identity of the object before and after the act of attention. Once the colour-quality is acquired, and only by means of it, do the previous data appear as preparations of this quality. Once the idea of an equation has been acquired, equal arithmetical quantities appear as varieties of the same equation. It is precisely by overthrowing data that the act of attention is related to previous acts, and the unity of consciousness is thus built up step by step through a ‘transition-synthesis’. The miracle of consciousness consists in its bringing to light, through attention, phenomena which re-establish the unity of the object in a new dimension at the very moment when they destroy it. (35b.c / fr. 54-55)

The new organization was originally given in an indeterminate horizon. It was not fully there, but on the verge of being there, and somehow being called-for prior to its being made explicit. So there will be something in our attention that we find ambiguous. Let's see if we can make an example with color acquisition. Consider the child seeing color indeterminately. She sees what is a red apple and a green one. Both of them have colors, but the color difference between them is not distinct. The child takes a bit from each. The flavors are different. Here is an ambiguity: 'how can two things whose appearances I do not distinguish also have very different tastes?' The child then in a holistic way organizes her world and its relations in a new way, where green apples and red apples are different, and the colors are what visually indicate or 'mean' this difference in flavor. So at first the colors were indeterminate, but there was a phenomenal ambiguity. The contrary properties involved in this ambiguity were then explicated, leading to a new form of awareness, one that now sees red and green as determinately different colors.

The ambiguity of the distinguished flavors from undistinguished colors calls the child to reexamine the color variations more closely. So this horizonal phenomenon motivates the child's act of awareness to turn toward certain details and rearrange the holistically integrated network of relations in her world.

Merleau-Ponty also offers the example of seeing the moon as enlarged when it lies near the sky's horizon. If however we look at it through a card-board tube, it will cease to look so large. The reason it looks larger when seen on the horizon with our bare eyes is because all the other elements in our field of vision motivate us to see the moon as larger. If you can, please see this interactive pictorial demonstration of the size constancy phenomenon. It has us move the little man back-and-forth up-and-down the hallway. The whole time, the image of the man remains the same size. But he appears to shrink when we draw him nearer, and expand when we move him backward.

Size Constancy Phenomenon, by How Stuff Works

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This could help explain the phenomenal motivation for seeing things differently. The visual context of the man in the front motivates us to think that he is small in comparison to the walls, but when he is further back, he looks larger in comparison to the walls. In the case of the moon, the visual elements around it for some reason motivate us to see it as larger.

Thus attention is neither an association of images, nor the return to itself of thought already in control of its objects, but the active constitution of a new object which makes explicit and articulate what was until then presented as no more than an indeterminate horizon. At the same time as it sets attention in motion, the object is at every moment recaptured and placed once more in a state of dependence on it. It gives rise to the ‘knowledge-bringing event’, which is to transform it, only by means of the still ambiguous meaning which it requires that event to clarify; it is | therefore the motive and not the cause of the event. But at least the act of attention is rooted in the life of consciousness, and one can finally understand how it emerges from its liberty of indifference and gives itself a present object. This passage from the indeterminate to the determinate, this recasting at every moment of its own history in the unity of a new meaning, is thought itself. ‘The work of the mind exists only in act.' The result of the act of attention is not to be found in its beginning. If the moon on the horizon appears to me no bigger than at the zenith, when I look at it through a telescope or a cardboard tube, the conclusion cannot be drawn that in free vision equally its appearance is invariable. (35c-36b/ fr. 55)
When I look quite freely and naturally, the various parts of the field interact and motivate this enormous moon on the horizon, this measureless size which nevertheless is a size. (36d / fr. 56)

We now turn to another sort of illusion. Consider a person whose eyes become paralyzed. Yet still she sees some scene before her. Normally her eyes would move around the scenery for some reason. So forgetting her eye cannot move, she intends to move her eye. What she sees is the scene moving to the left, even though her eye does not move. This is because the scenery does not lose it motivating factors, which in this case motivate her awareness to move perhaps to the right (so that the scene moves to the left.) So in the case of the size changes with the hallway-man or the moon, our perception alters on account of the contextual motivating factors. Hence it should only be expected that even a still image will alter also given its phenomenal motivating factors. The part that is doing the motivating is already there in the scene. It is sort of like something concealed but present to the attention. Because there is always this motivating concealed part of every phenomenon, there is a flow of phenomena resulting from a continual alteration of motivation.

A subject whose oculo-motor muscles are paralysed sees objects moving to his left whenever he believes that he is turning his eyes towards the left. (55a / fr. 74)
the phenomenological notion of motivation is one of those ‘fluid’ concepts which have to be formed if we want to get back to phenomena. One phenomenon releases another, not by means of some objective efficient cause, like those which link together natural events, but by the meaning which it holds out—there is a raison d’être for a thing which guides the flow of phenomena without being explicitly laid down in any one of them, a sort of operative reason. Thus the intention to look to the left and the fact that the landscape remains stubbornly fixed in one’s gaze bring about the illusion of movement in the object. To the degree that the motivated phenomenon comes into being, an internal relation to the motivating phenomenon appears; hence, instead of the one merely succeeding the other, the motivated phenomenon makes the motivating phenomenon explicit and comprehensible, and thus seems to have preexisted its own motive. (57-58 / fr. 76)

Let's wonder now how these concepts would appear in a Deleuzean phenomenology. In the first place, we would consider everything appearing to us to be made entirely of differential relations; they are microperceptions of imperceptibly small differences [see this entry on differential perception]. Consider the example of the scene observed by an immobilized eye. From the Deleuzean perspective, every part of the scene differentially relates to every other part. Our eye will want to go to the part that is the most different, the part that stands-out the most, that is, the part that most catches our eye. But since everything is differentially related, our eyes are pulled in all directions at once. However, for reasons that vary for each instance, some sets of differential relations will pull our eye more strongly. That does not absolutely determine our eye motions. There may be internal forces of the body which resist phenomenal forces or which create motivational forces of their own. And perhaps some of the motivation is not determined by anything other than chance factors, like the chance operations that our brains naturally make. The point is that at any moment, we really cannot say what the motivation is. After the fact we might be able find some cause for why our attention turned to its new direction. But at any moment, the turning of our attention is not determined at all. In Deleuzean phenomenology, this would be motivational freedom. Our awareness can take any of an infinity of different and incompatible turns. What is on the horizon is not what comes to be made phenomenally explicit. What is on the horizon is every possible variation in our attention and resulting change in the world. In Deleuzean phenomenology this would but limitless horizonality, or maybe universal horizon. It is not that these other things in our awareness are concealed. They are fully there, because they are what is creating the differential relations that are pulling our attention. The phenomena are not the things we are now looking at and will look at. Rather, the phenomena are the differential relations between them; that is to say, the Deleuzean phenomena are all the microperceptions between every infinitely small part of our awareness, creating a full field of nothing but differences.

So let's summarize the distinctions we are making between Deleuze's and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenal motivation: for Merleau-Ponty the horizon contains something vaguely or ambiguously, but for Deleuze the horizon contains everything implicitly. And for Merleau-Ponty, the motivating phenomena on the horizon determine where our attention turns. Yet for Deleuze, nothing is determined, rather there are a competition of forces with the outcome decided partly by chance factors.

The next difference between them is that for a Deleuzean phenomenology there would be no flow of phenomenon. Each phenomenon is instantaneous. It is like a flash of difference. When something just catches our eye, the phenomenon is not that other thing or the thing we currently look at; rather, the phenomena are the differential relations between the parts of each which cause both sets to resonate and shake from the shocking difference communicated to one another. This resonance we experience as the shock-wave of differential disturbance shot through our bodies [see this entry on Spinoza and rhythm for more on these continuous variations of affection].



Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Transl. Colin Smith. London/New York: Routledge, 1958.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945.


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