The Sensation of Transmission: Merleau-Ponty's Indirect Perceptions and Deleuze's Open Differential Organs

by Corry Shores
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The Sensation of Transmission:
Merleau-Ponty's Indirect Perceptions and Deleuze's Open Differential Organs

What does the direction or indirection of sense organs got to do with us?

We might think of ourselves as sensing a world whose parts are interwoven like the fabric of a blanket. But like a blanket, such a world might lull us and be non-phenomenal. Or, maybe our world is always interesting, because it is always made up of parts which do not glue with the others, despite them all being forced together in our perception. Our world might be far more exciting than we normally realize.

Brief Summary

For Merleau-Ponty, our sense organs do not just blindly transmit what they sense in a one-to-one fashion.

Points Relative to Deleuze

Yet for Deleuze, our sense organ does directly admit the affective sensation.


[Quotation:]

The sensory apparatus, as conceived by modern physiology, is no longer fitted for the rôle of 'transmitter' cast for it by traditional science. (Merleau-Ponty 10a/ fr. 31bc)

For Merleau-Ponty, what we perceive is often more than the mere sum of the parts of our perception [see this entry on optical illusions and this entry with more on Gestalt.] So our sense organs are not mere direct one-to-one transmitters of the objects they perceive; instead they are part of a synthetic and generative process as well.

Now consider Deleuze's theory of sensation. The world around us affects our body. It does so in a continuously varying way. Our bodies ourselves are continuously varying as well. Consider if our body temperature is high from being outside on a hot day, and we enter an air-conditioned building. Think closely about that moment of initial contact. Our still hot body is undergoing operations to work under the heat, like sweating. But there was a variation in the world around us; it went from hot to cold. The variation of temperature-drop contacts our inner heat-operation variations, like the sweating. This gives us a noticeable sensation of cold, even though everyone else in the room is comfortable. There was a contact between our inner variations with the external ones. We in a way make a direct affective contact with the world in this manner, and we have a phenomenal sensation. In a sense, our skin opens-up to the world around us. But the shock is not just tactile. It throws all our systems into imbalance. It can even affect our imaginations, if we imagine the winter season upon entering the room. So all throughout our body we are making contact with the cold. It is not just one organ, in a way, it is like an indeterminate organ of sensation, something that is not touch, seeing, and so forth, but a strange conglomeration of many different ways of being affected. But it is not that we are exposed everywhere to the cold. It is sort of like a 'region' or 'domain' of our body's operation that is affected. So that domain, in our simplified example, the temperature-systems of our body, is like the organ of sensation, the part of our inner workings that is being directly affected by the cold. And because different systems are being affected, and in different ways, the part of our workings that is affected at any given moment can be different with each sensation. So in a sense, when we have a sensation, we do so by means of an indeterminate provisional organ that directly transmits the phenomenal difference that we sense.

For a more detailed explanation of these sorts of organs, see this entry on the body without organs.

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.