Frederick B. Mills “A Phenomenological Approach to Psychoprosthetics”, summary

summary by Corry Shores
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Frederick B. Mills

“A Phenomenological Approach to Psychoprosthetics”

Summary

 

Brief Summary

The integration of prosthetic devices into users’ bodies and activities can be seen in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body.

Abstract [Quoting]

The phenomenology of human embodiment can advance the practitioner’s understanding of the lived human body and in particular, what it means to incorporate a prosthetic device into one’s body. In order for a prosthesis to be incorporated into the lived body of the patient, the prosthesis must arguably be integrated into the body schema. This article uses the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others to identify three of the necessary conditions of embodiment that determine the body schema: corporeal understanding, transparency and sensorimotor feedback. It then examines the structure of each of these conditions of embodiment and how they impact the lived body’s incorporation of prostheses and other artifacts. (Mills p.1)

Summary

Introduction

The aim of Mills’ article is to “offer an interpretation of how some of the insights about embodiment contained in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work relates to the relatively new health science field of psychoprosthetics. These insights show the value of the phenomenological method to the understanding of human embodiment and introduce practitioners to the practice of phenomenology.” (1Ac)

Methodological considerations

Mills draws from Gallagher et al.’s definition of psychoprosthetics. Psychoprosthetics is “the study of ‘the psychological aspects of prosthetic use and of rehabilitative processes in those conditions that require the use of prosthetic devices’” (1Bd). Psychoprosthetics is concerned with “prosthetic technologies and the behavior and experience of the prosthesis user” (2Aa). Psychoprosthetics makes use of two complementary methodologies: 1) (object-orientation) evidence-based empirical research, which is thus mostly concerned with measurable outcomes; and 2) (subject-orientation) phenomenological efforts, normally concerned more with the qualitative lived experiences of the prosthesis user, and it “includes the systematic use of introspection, testimonials and questionnaires as research tools. Such phenomenological research, when applied to psychoprosthetics, is inter-subjective, empathetic, and focuses on what it is like to be the user of an artificial limb as he or she progresses through the rehabilitative process”. (2Aa.b)

Mills notes the importance of phenomenology in the work of Craig Murray, who  claims that clinical intervention that is informed by phenomenological research will make it more likely for prosthesis users to not give up until their device becomes integrated into their body schema; “until the prosthetic device is integrated into their bodies. This is because the qualitative experience of prosthesis use determines to a significant degree whether a prosthesis is really being progressively integrated into the user’s body. The work of Merleau-Ponty is relevant to this task because it helps us to systematically identify and study the basic experiential features of the incorporation of artifacts into the lived body.” (2Ab citing Murray 2008)

Merleau-Ponty does not ignore the importance of empirical research, and he deals with the question of what about human nature that opens it to both subjective and objective study. Merleau-Ponty breaks with the Cartesian substance dualism of mind and extension, which “poses an irresolvable problem of how the activities of the mind and body are nevertheless systematically correlated.” (2AD)

Merleau-Ponty thinks we need to “reach back to our lived experience prior to reflecting about our bodies as objects, we do not find ourselves divided into two separate worlds (a mind and a body) but as living, sensing and moving bodies.” (2Ba)

Our everyday experiences tell us that we do not normally separate mind and body, as for example when we see someone smile, we do not see it merely as flesh moving nor merely as an imperceptible emotion. “With this expressive nature of human behavior in mind, we can engage in a phenomenological investigation into the basic features of human embodiment and its extension in artifacts and in particular, prostheses.” (2Bb)

Basic features of embodiment

The body image and the body schema

Human embodiment’s structure includes both body image and body schema. There is no consensus on their meanings, but Mills will work through some distinctions and relations between them. (2Bc)

Our body image is the way we think we look to others. (2Bc)

Body image is also important for prosthesis integration, but this paper focuses more on body schema. (2Bd)

Shaun Gallagher defines body schema as ““a system of sensory-motor processes that constantly regulate posture | and movement – processes that function without reflective awareness or the necessity of perceptual monitoring” (Gallagher qt in Mills pp.2|3)

Mills broadens this definition. Body schema is the general idea of schema and body schemas are the system or plurality of schemas. Mills also broadens the concept of body schemas to include “processes of which we can be marginally and even focally aware.” (3Aa)

Body schemas are what allow us to engage skillfully with the world. Neuronal descriptions are not enough to describe this; we need to see how the structure and meaning of phenomenal experience correlates with neurophysiological processes in the brain. (3Ab)

Body image helps in the development of our body schema. (3Ac)

To elaborate the concept of body schema, Mills quotes Merleau-Ponty from Phenomenology of Perception [p.160-167]

A movement is learned when the body has understood it, that is, when it has incorporated it into its ‘world’, and to move one’s body is to aim at things through it; it is to allow oneself to respond to their call, which is made upon it independently of any representation. (Merleau-Ponty qtd in Mills 3Ac)

Mills gets three basic features of the body schema from the paragraph this quote comes from: 1) corporeal understanding, 2) transparency, and 3) sensory-motor feedback.

Corporeal understanding

Corporeal understanding is not reflexive because “unless we are learning a new skill, we do not normally represent a situation to ourselves prior to enacting the intended behavior; we merely aim at our purpose and the behavior unfolds in | its very enactment”. (3A-B) But our corporeal understanding is not reflexive either, because our behaviors are normally not mechanical responses to stimuli but instead “Objects call our attention because they have a certain value for us. We are active players in generating our behaviors.” (3Ba)

Corporeal is not something cognitive but is more like as Hubert Dreyfus calls it ‘know how’. We know how an action comes about in the context of a wider activity, like hitting the ‘h’ key while typing, even though we do not have an explicit visual map of the keyboard. (3Bb)

We need to reenact a behavior to recall it, because “corporeal understanding is activated at the lived body-world interface. At the body-world interface, we do not experience our bodies per se, as separate from the world; we experience our bodies as joined with and challenged by the world.” (3Bc)

Transparency (absence and presence)

Cognitive understanding requires that the part of the body that is perceptually and kinesthetically engages with the world be transparent to us. Drew Leder notes that insofar as our body brings some part of the world to presence, revealing it to us, the part of the body that does the revealing withdraws from our view, like our our eyes are absence from our field of vision. (3Bc)

Mills quotes Merleau-Ponty to elaborate [Phenomenology of Perception p.104]:

I observe external objects with my body, I handle them, examine them, walk round them, but my body itself is a thing which I do not observe; in order to be able to do so, I should need the use of a second body which itself would be unobservable. (3Bd)

Transparency is a part of all our kinetic and perceptual behaviors. (3-4)

Michael Polanyi notes how our the motile and perceptive parts of our body recede and in a sense become transparent; Drew Leder “calls this type of absence focal disappearance”. (4Aa)

Also, according to Leder, we experience the background disappearance of our body; through most of the day we have just a marginal awareness of it. Mills will use ‘transparency’ to refer to both kinds of phenomenal absence. (4Ab)

Intentionality is thinking’s manner of being directed towards objects. For Merleau-Ponty, it is the whole lived embodied person who does the thinking, perceiving and behaving.

As living bodies, we are both perceptually and kinesthetically directed towards and engaged with the world. Merleau-Ponty conceptualizes the ways in which we are directed towards our world as rays of intentionality projecting out of the body schema. These rays constitute our many purposes and invest our surroundings with the meaning of possible behaviors. The door is the way out of the room. The keyboard is the potential to enter data. The light switch is the potential to turn the lights on or off. The road is the way out of the neighborhood. The rays of intentionality are correlated with a network of utilitarian relationships between objects in the world. Merleau-Ponty refers to the totality of these rays as an “arc of intentionality” (4Ac)

Normally much in our arc of intentionality remains below our thematic awareness until something brings them into focus. (4A.B)

Things can come into focus for a variety of reasons, depending on the context. (4B.ab)

Changes of thematic awareness can be like Gestalt figure/ground shifts. (4B.b)

Sensorimotor feedback

From the physiological perspective, “sensations are neural events and sensorimotor feedback is a dynamic relationship between the adaptive body and environmental stimuli”; but from the phenomenal perspective “sensations are qualitative experiences.” Mills will focus on the phenomenal aspect. (4B.c)

Sensorimotor feedback can be marginal and focal and involve more than one perceptual Gestalt at a time. (4D) This helps us attend to multiple tasks at one time. (5Aa)

Incorporation of artifacts into the lived body

On these bases will will conceptualize the incorporation of artifacts, such as prosthetic devices, into the lived body.This requires a modification of the three basic features of embodiment. (5Ab)

Incorporation of artifacts involves integrating them into our body schema.

When an artifact is integrated into the body schema such that it modifies the corporeal understanding, the body and artifact merge in such a way that together they interface with the world to generate behaviors that are neither reflexive nor conceptually guided but rather skillful or habitual. This means that the body schema comes to include the artifact in its arc of intentionality. (5Abc)

Incorporation also involves a change in the absence presence dynamic where the artifact becomes absent or transparent.

Ideally the prosthesis can become a part of the body from which a worldly gestalt becomes present and a skillful or habitual behavior becomes possible. Such integration can occur when sensorimotor feedback appears to come from the interface between body-artifact as a unified whole and the world rather than the interface between the body and the artifact. (5Ac)

Examples of the embodiment of artifacts

Merleau-Ponty uses the examples of the walking stick and the typewriter. [At the end of this entry we look at the examples and the passages they come from.] Mills quotes Merleau-Ponty [Phenomenology of Perception 165-166]

The blind man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight. In the exploration of things, the length of the stick does not enter expressly as a middle term: the blind man is rather aware of it through the position of objects [p.165 | p.166] than of the position of objects through it. (5Ba)

So the walking stick eventually is incorporated into the arc of intentionality and becomes like an extension of her body.

The user literally extends her reach, the stick being lived as part of the extended arm. The stick becomes transparent because the blind person is not focused on her grasp of the walking stick; she is directed towards the ground through the hand-stick combination. Sensorimotor feedback is experienced not as a relation between the hand and movements of the stick but rather as an experience of the texture and location of the ground and other items through the stick as if it were an extension of her arm. (5Bb)

Mills also quotes Merleau-Ponty’s typewriter example [Phenomenology of Perception 166-167]

It is possible to know how to type without being able to say where the letters which make the words are to be found on the banks of keys. To know how to type is not, then, to know the place of each letter among the keys, nor even to have acquired a conditioned reflex for each one, which is set in motion by the letter as it comes before our eye. If habit is neither a form of knowledge nor an involuntary action, what then is it? It is knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, and cannot be formulated in detachment from that effort. The subject knows where the letters are on the typewriter as we know where one of our limbs is…. When the typist performs the necessary movements on the typewriter, these movements are governed by an intention, but the intention does not posit the keys as objective locations. It is literally true that the subject who learns to type incorporates the key-bank space into his bodily space. (5Bb.c)

The key, the finger, and other aspects of the body’s positioning and behavior fall into the background. (5Bc)

The corporeal understanding of the skilled typist is not reflexive, because the keys are not stimuli causing her fingers to move. And the typing does not involve representation, because the typist does not make use of a mental model representing the keyboard. “The corporeal understanding is in the hands.”  (5Bc.d)

Embodiment of prosthetic devices

So the incorporation of prosthetic devices requires a modification in our corporeal understanding, transparency, and sensorimotor feedback. (5-6) Mills draws from Craig Murray’s empirical studies of prosthetic incorporations.

For there to be transparency, the device must be affixed properly so that no pain or discomfort is felt, for otherwise it will be noticed rather than disappear from awareness. Practice is as well critical for attaining transparency. [Following first quotes Mills, then has Mill’s quote of Murray 2004]

Murray notes that some respondents testify that with practice, walking starts to become natural again:

Walking becomes pretty intuitive after the age of three or four; you don’t think about it, you just do it. Now, I do have to think occasionally, such as when I stand up from a chair. I have to think which foot, is that foot in the right position, is it going to hit anything? You do still have to check for things like that. Occasionally, I’ll get it trapped under a chair as I stand up. So a couple of times it brings it back to you that you have a problem there. But once moving, in general, it’s pretty much a matter of well I want to go from here to there, and I just walk. It’s intuitive now. (6Abc)

Mills continues [again first Mills then Murray 2004]

The prosthesis, in one report, became so transparent, that the user got up from bed without realizing that the artificial limb was not on: “I fell on the floor, landing on the distal end of the stump. It was a very frightening thing. Scary. It hurt like hell, and I stayed off it for about a week. So I guess I have reached a point where I am capable of such foolish acts as that and forget my leg was not on.” (6Ad)

Incorporation could be more likely if sensorimotor feedback occurs “at the interface of the prosthesis and the environment”. (6Ad) Mills notes [second is quote from Murray 2004]

One user in the Murray study reported: “I do sense it [the ground] with the prosthesis on. It is a general awareness of the ground. As I walk, I can feel my heel land, and the foot move forward to the toes”. (6Ba)

There are technologies that can make the feedback appear to come from the environment.

For example, prosthetics fixed to bones rather than fitting in sockets tend to give better feedback. [citing Hagberg et al.]

For example, the sensorimotor feedback provided by boneanchored (osseointegrated) prostheses (OI), osseoperception, seems to be more vivid and detailed than that attained by socket technology. In one study, several patients reported more control over their artificial limb (than with a socket style prosthesis) and the ability to identify the material of the surface they are walking on. Other users report that the osseointegrated prosthesis feels more like a part of the body than did the socket prosthesis. (6Bb)

Another technique for enhancing sensorimotor feedback is targeted re-innervation, which “improves the communication of the surface of the prosthesis with intact nerves on the residual limb.” (6Bb) [When a limb is amputated, it seems in these cases that the nerves of that limb are removed and reattached to the remaining limb nerve channels, so that sensations normally given in the limb are still givable through these nerves. Then, sensors in the prosthetic limb create signals that stimulate the attached nerves so that the user feels as if the sensation is coming from within the prosthetic device.]

There are a variety of technologies that seek to improve the communication of the surface of the prosthesis with intact nerves on the residual limb to improve sensorimotor feedback. One of these strategies is targeted re-innervation. In a 2010 study conducted at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and led by Paul D. Marasco, an artificial sense of tactile sensation was created for a prosthetic limb so it felt, to the user, as though sensations were coming from the prosthesis and not merely mediated by the prosthesis. Here is how it works. Sensors are placed on the artificial hand. These sensors send a message to a robotic device that is located on the residual limb in proximity to areas sensitized by the re-innervated nerves. The robotic device responds to the sensor information by stimulating “surgically redirected cutaneous sensory nerves... that once served the lost limb”. I want to emphasize that Marasco used both evidence-based medicine and phenomenology. In particular, he made use of questionnaires and testimony as well as temperature changes in the residual limb. He found that the illusion that sensations were coming from the prosthesis were vivid. Marasco suggests that “this may help amputees to more effectively incorporate an artificial limb into their self image, providing the possibility that a prosthesis becomes not only a tool, but also an integrated body part”. If we couple this technology with recent advances in the kinesthetic response of prosthetic devices, users may benefit even more from enhanced sensorimotor feedback. It is likely that the more such devices mimic organic limbs and provide sensorimotor feedback, the more a corporeal understanding and a natural feel can be achieved. [Mills 6Bb citing Marasco et al.]

Conclusion

Not all prosthesis users attain transparency. “However, in those cases where integration is the goal, the insights of Merleau-Ponty on the lived body help us to understand what it means for a prosthetic device to be incorporated into a patient’s lived body.” (6Bd)

Mills concludes “Those rehabilitative strategies that begin to make the prosthesis more transparent to the user; provide finer grained sensorimotor feedback as coming from the (body-prosthesis) – world interface; and restore increasingly more skillful functionality are likely to achieve the maximal prosthetic incorporation.”  (7Ab)

Frederick B. Mills. “A Phenomenological Approach to Psychoprosthetics.” Disability & Rehabilitation, 2012; Early Online: 1–7 © 2012 Informa UK, Ltd. ISSN 0963-8288 print/ISSN 1464-5165 online

Gallagher P, Desmond D, MacLachlan M. Psychoprosthetics: an introduction. In: Gallagher P, Desmond D, MacLachlan M, editors. Psychoprosthetics. London: Springer-Verlag Limited; 2008. pp 1–10.

Gallagher S. How the body shapes the mind. New York: Oxford University Press; 2005.]

Hagberg K, Häggström E, Jönsson S, Rydevik B, Brånemark R. Osseoperception and osseointegrated prosthetic limbs. In: Gallagher P, Desmond D, MacLachlan M, editors. Psychoprosthetics. London: Springer-Verlag Limited; 2008. pp 131–140.

Leder D. The absent body. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press; 1990.

Marasco PD, Kim K, Colgate JE, Peshkin MA, Kuiken TA. Robotic touch shifts perception of embodiment to a prosthesis in targeted reinnervation amputees. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain; 2011, January 20.

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

Murray CD. An interpretative phenomenological analysis of the embodiment of artificial limbs. Disabil Rehabil 2004;26:963–973. 3.

Murray CD. Embodiment and prosthetics. In: Gallagher P, Desmond D, MacLachlan M, editors. Psychoprosthetics. London: Springer-Verlag Limited; 2008. pp 119–129.

Butchering Merleau-Ponty's Flesh: Chiasm, Intertwining and a Deleuzean Alternative

by Corry Shores
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Butchering Merleau-Ponty's Flesh:
Chiasm, Intertwining and a Deleuzean Alternative

What does the chiasmic flesh of the world got to do with us?

We walk around our world. It stays in its place. We seem to be separate. No wonder we pollute the world so much. It seems to be outside us. But we were only able to walk around the world because we could see it or sense it in some manner. The fact that we sense the world puts us in touch with it. Now consider for example when our hands feel something hot, they themselves become hot. Or when our ears hear a certain frequency, parts of our ear mechanisms are also vibrating at that same frequency. Those points of contact where we have our sensations are sort of like places where our bodies and the world overlap. Because we feel a surface with our hands, we feel its roughness, it is as though the roughness were touching our hands, all while we touch are touching this roughness. To sense something in the world is to overlap with it. All the overlappings in the world in a way make up a fabric or a flesh. It is chiasmic in the sense of the chiasmic structure ABBA. We are the A on the left side. We sense the other A by means of the contact of our surfaces (the B's), which overlap. But both sides are A, because we are inherently interwoven, even though in another sense we are separate so to feel one another. So when we pollute our world, we are creating a world that will not feel so good to us. And we will have to overlap with it in this way; we will have to merge with the world we modify. To pollute is not just to destructively modify something outside us, it is also to destructively modify our own bodies.

Brief Summary

Our body and the world overlap by means of sensation which bridges us and other things around us, through a reversing relation: we feel the world because it is feeling us. In this way, we and the world are intertwined, just as everything in the world is intertwined. And this is chiasmic, because of the overlapping in the mediating zone of contact.

Points Relative to Deleuze

Instead of the world being flesh, it is more like meat. The parts of the world are butchered to pieces, and these parts are forced together like a Frankenstein's monster. But this explains our hypersensitivity to the world. When we have a sensation, we undergo differential variations within our body. This happens when we are in a differential relation with something else that is affecting us and that we are affecting. Our vulnerabilities are much more pronounced than Merleau-Ponty's theory suggests. When we come into contact with something that affects us, we do not melt together into something that makes us less discernible from what we are sensing. We both retain our full differences. But the situation forces us into shocking contact, like electrical current shot through dissected muscle, causing it to spasm and twitch.




Seeing things gets us in touch with them, as if we are making intimate contact with the thing we see. We are intertwined with the things in our vision. In fact, it is only on the basis of our vision's already being intermixed with things it sees that it is able to see them. So it is not as though things are completely independent to us, and then we see them. Instead, we are already in touch with them from the beginning. We in a sense share the same flesh.

It is as though our vision were formed in the heart of the visible, or as though there were between it and us an intimacy as close as between the sea | and the strand. And yet it is not possible that we blend into it, nor that it passes into us, for then the vision would vanish at the moment of formation, by disappearance of the seer or of the visible. What there is then are not things first identical with themselves, which would then offer themselves to the seer, nor is there a seer who is first empty and who, afterward, would open himself to them - but something to which we could not be closer than by palpating it with our look, things we could not dream of seeing “all naked” because the gaze itself envelops them, clothes them with its own flesh. (130-131)

This flesh is what makes up the fabric of the world around us. Consider if we look at just one quality of something, like the red of an object. But the red of this object looks red in its particular way only on account of how it relates to the reds around it. We might not explicitly perceive these other shades at the moment, but they are hovering on the horizon of our awareness. We saw with the example of the moon on the horizon that it obtains its size from its relations to the other things in view. When our vision moves from this red to another, the next red will have its look because our current one, which becomes the next one's predecessor, is now on the future one's horizon and conditions how this next red looks. Any time we look at something, it has its particular appearance on account of the other things simultaneous to it on its perceptual horizon and also successive with it, on its temporal horizon. Depending on which part of the relational network we find ourselves looking at, the red will have its particular look.

We must first understand that this red under my eyes is not, as is always said, a quale, a pellicle of being without thickness, a message at the same time indecipherable and evident, which one has or has not received, but of which, if one has received it, one knows all there is to know, and of which in the end there is nothing to say. It requires a focusing, however brief; it emerges from a less precise, more general redness, in which my gaze was caught, into which it sank, before - as we put it so aptly - fixing it. And, now that I have fixed it, if my eyes penetrate into | it, into its fixed structure, or if they start to wander round about again, the quale resumes its atmospheric existence. Its precise form is bound up with a certain woolly, metallic, or porous [?] configuration or texture, and the quale itself counts for very little compared with these participations. Claudel has a phrase saying that a certain blue of the sea is so blue that only blood would be more red. The color is yet a variant in another dimension of variation, that of its relations with the surroundings: this red is what it is only by connecting up from its place with other reds about it, with which it forms a constellation, or with other colors it dominates or that dominate it, that it attracts or that attract it, that it repels or that repel it. In short, it is a certain node in the woof of the simultaneous and the successive. It is a concretion of visibility, it is not an atom. The red dress a fortiori holds with all its fibers onto the fabric of the visible, and thereby onto a fabric of invisible being. A punctuation in the field of red things, which includes the tiles of roof tops, the flags of gatekeepers and of the Revolution, certain terrains near Aix or in Madagascar, it is also a punctuation in the field of red garments, which includes, along with the dresses of women, robes of professors, bishops, and advocate generals, and also in the field of adornments and that of uniforms. And its red literally is not the same as it appears in one constellation or in the other, as the pure essence of the Revolution of 1917 precipitates in it, or that of the eternal feminine, or that of the public prosecutor, or that of the gypsies dressed like hussars who reigned twenty-five years ago over an inn on the Champs-Elysées. A certain red is also a fossil drawn up from the depths of imaginary worlds. If we took all these participations into account, we would recognize that a naked color, and in general a visible, is not a chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being, offered all naked to a vision which could be only total or null, but is rather a sort of straits between exterior horizons and interior horizons ever gaping open, something that comes to touch lightly and makes diverse regions of the colored or visible world resound at the distances, a certain differentiation, an ephemeral modulation of this world - less a color or a thing, therefore, than a difference between things and colors, a momentary crystallization of colored being or of visibility. Between the alleged colors and visibles, we would find anew the tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which | for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things. (131c.133a)

When we look at the world, we see that it is organized into parts, into things. Because it is not a total chaos, we know that these things give themselves to us rather than we construct them entirely from chaotic sense data. On account of its organization, when we look at some part of it, the parts we are not aware of are somehow like questions in what we do see. They are implied, suggested, because there is an integrated order to the flesh of the world. Our searching look through the world is like us interrogating it, but we do this because it is as though the world constantly is posing us questions. When our vision asks the world what else it can show, this is because the world asks our vision to look deeper into it. In a way, we are intertwined with a world that is all itself intertwined. This is because our senses must make direct contact with the things they sense, and be vulnerable and susceptible to them, in order to sense them, to be sensitive to them. We can see this better in our sense of touch. When we touch something rough, our hand itself must have feelings of roughness, as if sympathizing with the sensed thing. And it is also like a matching of systems. The system of variations on the rough thing's surface maps one-to-one with the system of sensations we feel in our hand, as if we are a sensitive recording device that cares about fidelity to what imprints it.

If we turn now to the seer, we will find that this is no analogy or vague comparison and must be taken literally. The look, we said, envelops, palpates, espouses the visible things. As though it were in a relation of pre-established harmony with them, as though it knew them before knowing them, it moves in its own way with its abrupt and imperious style, and yet the views taken are not desultory - I do not look at a chaos, but at things - so that finally one cannot say if it is the look or if it is the things that command. What is this prepossession of the visible, this art of interrogating it according to its own wishes, this inspired exegesis? We would perhaps find the answer in the tactile palpation where the questioner and the questioned are closer, and of which, after all, the palpation of the eye is a remarkable variant. How does it happen that I give to my hands, in particular, that degree, that rate, and that direction of movement that are capable of making me feel the textures of the sleek and the rough? Between the exploration and what it will teach me, between my movements and what I touch, there must exist some relationship by principle, some kinship, according to which they are not only, like the pseudopods of the amoeba, vague and ephemeral deformations of the corporeal space, but the initiation to and the opening upon a tactile world. This can happen only if my hand, while it is felt from within, is also accessible from without, itself tangible, for my other hand, for example, if it takes its place among the things it touches, is in a sense one of them, opens finally upon a tangible being of which it is also a part. Through this crisscrossing within it of the touching and the tangible, its own movements incorporate themselves into the universe they interrogate, are recorded on the same map as it; the two systems are applied upon one another, as the two halves of an orange. It is no different for the vision - except, it is said, that here the exploration and the information it gathers do not belong "to the same sense." (133a.d)

As we noted before, touch and vision both have their own way of sensing things (distance for example), but these different ways of sensing all come together in a common unified act of sensation, where it becomes impossible to think of each sense being different entirely. Instead, they are already given interwoven with each other from the start.

Already in the "touch" we have just found three distinct experiences which subtend one another, three dimensions which overlap but are distinct: a touching of the sleek and of the rough, a touching of the things - a passive sentiment of the body and of its space - and finally a veritable touching of the touch, when my right | hand touches my left hand while it is palpating the things, where the "touching subject" passes over to the rank of the touched, descends into the things, such that the touch is formed in the midst of the world and as it were in the things. Between the massive sentiment I have of the sack in which I am enclosed, and the control from without that my hand exercises over my hand, there is as much difference as between the movements of my eyes and the changes they produce in the visible. And as, conversely, every experience of the visible has always been given to me within the context of the movements of the look, the visible spectacle belongs to the touch neither more nor less than do the "tactile qualities." We must habituate ourselves to think that every visible is cut out in the tangible, every tactile being in some manner promised to visibility, and that there is encroachment, infringement, not only between the touched and the touching, but also between the tangible and the visible, which is encrusted in it, as, conversely, the tangible itself is not a nothingness of visibility, is not without visual existence. Since the same body sees and touches, visible and tangible belong to the same world. It is a marvel too little noticed that every movement of my eyes - even more, every displacement of my body - has its place in the same visible universe that I itemize and explore with them, as, conversely, every vision takes place somewhere in the tactile space. There is double and crossed situating of the visible in the tangible and of the tangible in the visible; the two maps are complete, and yet they do not merge into one. The two parts are total parts and yet are not superposable. (133-134c)

So we cannot be separate from the world. We can only look at the world because we have opened ourselves to an integrative contact with the world which makes us visible as well.

we know that, since vision is a palpation with the look, it must also be inscribed in the order of being that it discloses to us; he who looks must not himself be foreign to the world that he looks at. As soon as I see, it is necessary that the vision (as is so well indicated by the double meaning of the word) be doubled with a complementary vision or with another vision: myself seen from without, such as another would see me, installed in the midst of the visible, occupied in considering it from a certain spot. [...] he who sees cannot possess the visible unless he is possessed by it, | unless he is of it, unless, by principle, according to what is required by the articulation of the look with the things, he is one of the visibles, capable, by a singular reversal, of seeing them - he who is one of them. (134-135)

So it might seem that our vision lets us stand back at a distance from the world we see. But since our vision is what intertwines us with the world, it in fact is what places us within the same fabric or flesh.

We understand then why we see the things themselves, in their places, where they are, according to their being which is indeed more than their being-perceived - and why at the same time we are separated from them by all the thickness of the look and of the body; it is that this distance is not the contrary of this proximity, it is deeply consonant with it, it is synonymous with it. It is that the thickness of flesh between the seer and the thing is constitutive for the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his corporeity; it is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication. It is for the same reason that I am at the heart of the visible and that I am far from it: because it has thickness and is thereby naturally destined to be seen by a body. (135b)

So think about our sense of touch. On the one hand, our feeling of a surface is our own. It is on our side of things. It is subjective. But our hand is being touched by the surface. It is like an object at the same time, in the same act. So on the one hand we might say that we are made of two layers, but on the other hand it is one same body that is reaching out to touch the world all while the world is reaching out to touch it, in a double-poled mutual process of sensation.

our body is a being of two leaves, from one side a thing among things and otherwise what sees them and touches them; we say, because it is evident, that it unites these two properties within itself, and its double belongingness to the order of the "object" and to the order of the "subject" reveals to us quite unexpected relations between the two orders. It cannot be by incomprehensible accident that the body has this double reference; it teaches us that each calls for the other. For if the body is a thing among things, it is so in a stronger and deeper sense than they: in the sense that, we said, it is of them, and this means that it detaches itself upon them, and, accordingly, detaches itself from them. It is not simply a thing seen in fact (I do not see my back), it is visible by right, it falls under a vision that is both ineluctable and deferred. Conversely, if it touches and sees, this is not because it would have the visibles before itself as objects: they are about it, they even enter into its enclosure, they are within it, they line its looks and its hands inside and outside. If it touches them and sees them, this is only because, being of their family, itself visible and tangible, it uses its own being as a means to participate in theirs, because each of the two beings is an archetype for the other, because the body belongs to the order of the things as the world is universal flesh. One should not even say, as we did a moment ago, that the body is made up of two leaves, of which the one, that of the "sensible," is bound up with the rest of the world. There are not in it two leaves or two layers; fundamentally it is neither thing seen only nor seer only, it is Visibility sometimes wandering and sometimes | reassembled. And as such it is not in the world, it does not detain its view of the world as within a private garden: it sees the world itself, the world of everybody, and without having to leave "itself," because it is wholly - because its hands, its eyes, are nothing else than - this reference of a visible, a tangible-standard to all those whose resemblance it bears and whose evidence it gathers, by a magic that is the vision, the touch themselves. To speak of leaves or of layers is still to flatten and to juxtapose, under the reflective gaze, what coexists in the living and upright body. If one wants metaphors, it would be better to say that the body sensed and the body sentient are as the obverse and the reverse, or again, as two segments of one sole circular course which goes above from left to right and below from right to left, but which is but one sole movement in its two phases. And everything said about the sensed body pertains to the whole of the sensible of which it is a part, and to the world. If the body is one sole body in its two phases, it incorporates into itself the whole of the sensible and with the same movement incorporates itself into a "Sensible in itself." (137b.138bc)

What we should keep in mind is that we, as integrated with the things in the world, we ourselves are on their horizon. To see an object is to indeterminately have our own selves on the horizon of our awareness, because we are implied in the object we see, just as any object implies the others on its horizon. So, when we see something, that thing is being reflected in us, in our vision. But what we are seeing is already a reflection of us. So in a sense, we see ourselves. But in another sense, it is like two mirrors facing one another, creating an infinity of diminishing images. But this infinite image is different than the two parts. And yet it is made of no more than the two parts.

(Thanks demruth.com)


(Thanks pilar.homelinux.org)

The flesh that we all belong to is like this. It allows us to be distinct on the one hand, all while being fully interwoven, fully interconstituted with everything else.

We have to ask ourselves what exactly we have found with | this strange adhesion of the seer and the visible. There is vision, touch, when a certain visible, a certain tangible, turns back upon the whole of the visible, the whole of the tangible, of which it is a part, or when suddenly it finds itself surrounded by them, or when between it and them, and through their commerce, is formed a Visibility, a Tangible in itself, which belong properly neither to the body qua fact nor to the world qua fact - as upon two mirrors facing one another where two indefinite series of images set in one another arise which belong really to neither of the two surfaces, since each is only the rejoinder of the other, and which therefore form a couple, a couple more real than either of them. Thus since the seer is caught up in what he sees, it is still himself he sees: there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision. And thus, for the same reason, the vision he exercises, he also undergoes from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things, my activity is equally passivity - which is the second and more profound sense of the narcissism: not to see in the outside, as the others see it, the contour of a body one inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen. It is this Visibility, this generality of the Sensible in itself, this anonymity innate to Myself that we have previously called flesh, and one knows there is no name in traditional philosophy to designate it. (138-139c)

In a way, the flesh is like an element. Seer and seen cohere in the same element. But what about times when we see that we were mistaken by what we saw? Would that not be a moment of us incohering to what we see? Merleau-Ponty says no, because the break is really a new and better vision taking the former's place, a stronger glue between us and what we sense.

if there is flesh, that is, if the hidden face of the cube radiates forth somewhere as well as does the face I have under my eyes, and coexists with it, and if I who see the cube also belong to the visible, I am visible from elsewhere, and if I and the cube are together caught up in one same "element" (should we say of the seer, or of the visible?), this cohesion, this visibility by principle, prevails over every momentary discordance. In advance every vision or very partial visible that would here definitively come to naught is not nullified (which would leave a gap in its place), but, what is better, it is replaced by a more exact vision and a more exact visible, according to the principle of visibility, which, as though through a sort of abhorrence of a vacuum, already invokes the true vision and the true visible, not only as substitutes for their errors, but also as their explanation, their relative justification, so that they are, as Husserl says so aptly, not erased, but "crossed out."… (140a.bc)

It may seem that each of our senses has its own object. Even each of our hands its own object that it senses, because it gives its own distinct data. However, all our senses are integrated in one body and hence they sense one sole world.

while each monocular vision, each touching with one sole hand has its own visible, its tactile, each is bound to every other vision, to every other touch; it is bound in such a way as to make up with them the experience of one sole body before one sole world, through a possibility for reversion, reconversion of its language into theirs, transfer, and reversal, according to which the little private world of each is not juxtaposed to the world of all the others, but surrounded by it, levied off from it, and all together are a Sentient in general before a Sensible in general. (142a)
There is a circle of the touched and the touching, the touched takes hold of the touching; there is a circle of the visible and the seeing, the seeing is not without visible existence (143a)
the flesh we are speaking of is not matter. It is the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the tangible upon the touching body, which is attested in particular when the body sees itself, touches itself seeing and touching the things, such that, simultaneously, as tangible it descends among them, as touching it dominates them all and draws this relationship and even this double relationship from itself, by dehiscence or fission of its own mass. This concentration of the visibles about one of them, or this bursting forth of the mass of the body toward the things, which makes a vibration of my skin become the sleek and the rough, makes me follow with my eyes the movements and the contours of the things themselves, this magical relation, this pact between them and me according to which I lend them my body in order that they inscribe upon it and give me their resemblance, this fold, this central cavity of the visible which is my vision, these two mirror arrangements of the seeing and the visible, the touching and the touched, form and close-bound system that I count on, define a vision in general and a constant style of visibility from which I cannot detach myself, even when a particular vision turns out to be illusory, for I remain certain in that case that in looking closer I would have had the true vision, and that in any case, whether it be this one or another, there is a true vision. The flesh (of the world or my own) is not contingency, chaos, but a texture that returns to itself and conforms to itself (146a.c, copied from Julie Heyward's Unreal Nature)

From Working Notes, 'The chiasm'

The chiasm is what allows us all to belong to the same world, to the same body, all while we maintain our opposing relations (the "for-Oneself for-the-Other antithesis"): "there is the Being as containing all that, first as sensible Being and then as Being without restriction." Thus "Chiasm, instead of the For the Other: that means that there is not only a me-other rivalry, but a co-functioning. We function as one unique body". (215a) Chiasm is also the bond linking us and the world we perceive, and it seems to include the intentional relational of our bodily or conscious awareness to the thing it senses or is aware of. "The chiasm is not only a me other exchange (the messages he receives reach me, the messages I receive reach him), it is also an exchange between me and the world, between the phenomenal body and the "objective" body, between the perceiving and the perceived: what begins as a thing ends as consciousness of the thing, what begins as a 'state of consciousness' ends as a thing." (215b)



Let's now try to understand why Merleau-Ponty calls this sort of flesh/intertwining 'chiasmic', and let's also compare it to a Deleuzean model. Here are the features of our chiasmic relation with the world, according to Merleau-Ponty
1) there is an overlapping (of both sides of the relation, of all sides of all relations, an interweaving of the parts),
2) there is an individuality of the parts (because the parts are found on different sides of the relation), but
3) there is ultimately an integration of the parts (into an interwoven fabric or 'flesh' of the world).

Often times the chiasmic structure is characterized as: ABBA

In Merleau-Ponty's case, there is an overlapping. Let's draw from the diagrams in Barry Dainton's Time In Experience: Reply to Gallagher. He gives an amazing account of different forms of continuum, and we will return to it in a forthcoming post. For now, let's consider this diagram.

Overlapping by Superposition and Shared Parts, by Barry Dainton

("Time in Experience." Thanks Barry Dainton)

In one sense, Merleau-Ponty is saying that when we sense the world, we are sharing a part of us; we are sharing that part that sympathizes with the things we are sensing. For example, we share the surface of our skin with the texture we are touching, since it replicates and recordes the tactile features of the surface. However, this contact Merleau-Ponty says is also like two mirrors facing one another. On our side of the sensation, we 'map' the topological features of the surface we are feeling. So perhaps the overlap by superposition will be slightly more helpful. [The parts here in Dainton's image have temporal meaning. So both parts B are distinct but happen at the same moment. We are not now using this diagram temporally, so it is not a superposition in our interpretation, but rather a criss-crossing].

Overlapping by Superposition, by Barry Dainton

("Time in Experience." Thanks Barry Dainton)

We could instead use a representation with the two B's side-by-side, like in ABBA. But we choose the overlapping, because the parts are 'interwoven'. So they are touching intimately and reaching inside one another, in a sense, but still retaining their individuality.

But now in Merleau-Ponty's chiasm, this interweaving brings the two sides, the sensing and the sensed, together into one flesh. We are already from the beginning integrated with the world. And we see this in the two poles in the motion of the sensing event. Just as we are touching the world, the world is already touching us so to give us our sensations of it. Recall that he writes:

If one wants metaphors, it would be better to say that the body sensed and the body sentient are as the obverse and the reverse, or again, as two segments of one sole circular course which goes above from left to right and below from right to left, but which is but one sole movement in its two phases. And everything said about the sensed body pertains to the whole of the sensible of which it is a part, and to the world. If the body is one sole body in its two phases, it incorporates into itself the whole of the sensible and with the same movement incorporates itself into a "Sensible in itself." (138b, emphasis mine)

So let's consider this possible rendition.

Merleau-Ponty's Organic Intertwining Chiasmic Flesh

(Image my own, made with OpenOffice Draw)

One difference in our rendition is that we have 'A' on both sides. This is because the dual 'motion' of the sensation interweaves both sides into one flesh, marked with a 'C'. So the two sides are different by being on either pole of the relation. But they are not distinguished insofar as they are both already of the same flesh. It is in this way that we might keep the chiasmic structure's representation as ABBA. The A's are the sensor and the sensed, both interwoven into the same flesh. The B's then are the sympathizing places of contact where one mirrors the other. And finally, their double motion of sensing and being sensed weaves them together into one flesh, C.


Deleuze's sort of relations between parts would not be like Merleau-Ponty's. Parts are forced together, and yet they maintain their differential relation. It is nothing like a mirroring or overlapping. The two parts butt against one another despite their incompatibilities. Think of when we force together two magnets, north-to-north ends. It requires the greater force of our hands to overcome the differential force pushing apart the magnet ends. Let's examine this in phenomenological terms. What we see is an infinity of phenomenal parts, none of which are gluing to one another on their own. But then why do we see objects, like a tree? This is because in that context, all the variations making up what we regard as the tree entered into stronger relations of difference with something in the background, the sky for example. If we wanted to chop down the tree, we look at the trunk and phenomenally speaking we regard there being a crack near the bottom. The very bottom of the tree and the top part are still together. But as soon as we swing the ax, right just before the moment of impact, the tree's parts were phenomenally severed. So first consider all the differences within the tree. We push them all together, because we are looking at the sky behind it. So the difference between the tree's parts and the sky's parts forced together all the differences of the tree. But when we chop the tree, all the differences at the base of the tree come to differ strongly with those higher up the trunk. So if there is any sort of organization or constitution in Deleuze, especially in this phenomenal sense, then it is completely based on differential forces and not on compatibilities or adhesion. The parts of the world incohere, to borrow a term from Clifford Duffy. The same holds for our relation with the world. We sense something only on the basis of our differential relation with it. If our skin is perfectly sympathetic to the hot air inside, then we get used to the heat. We stop sensing it. It ceases to be a phenomenon. Then when we walk into an air conditioned building, we feel the cold. This is because we were not sympathetic to the cold air. The cold appeared to us only because our sensation was based on a break between us and the world, a differential relation between the two. But the sensation forces itself so strongly on us because we have been so strongly forced into this experience of difference. So let's consider this image for a Deleuzean sort of conglomeration.

Deleuze's Grouping Not by Something Shared but by Stronger Differential Forces

(Image my own, made with OpenOffice Draw)

Here the parts B and A could be two parts of our phenomenal world or it could be us and the part of the world we sense. C is like the stronger force that forces us into those sensed differences, or that forces together sensed differences in our field of perception. As we see, the world is not a fabric or flesh for Deleuze. If it is anything like flesh, then it is like butchered meat, with shocks jumping from cut-to-cut.


Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes. Transl. Alphonso Lingis. Ed. Claude Lefort. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

Image sources:

vertical mirrors
http://pilar.homelinux.org/~mcphailb/photos/galleries/01/20021231/bigimages/DSC00275.jpg
(Thanks pilar.homelinux.org)

square mirrors
http://www.demruth.com/recursiveSpace2.htm
(Thanks demruth.com)

Barry Dainton. "Time In Experience: Reply to Gallagher"
Psyche 9 (12), 2003.
http://web.mac.com/barrydainton1/Research/Papers_files/Reply%20to%20Gallagher%20v2.pdf
Barry Dainton
http://philpapers.org/s/Barry%20F.%20Dainton

Some quotations taken gratefully from:
Unreal Nature
http://unrealnature.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/blackness-of-milk/
Thanks
Julie Heyward
http://unrealnature.wordpress.com/about/

Breath of Color: Merleau-Ponty on Painting and Cézanne in Eye and Mind and Cézanne's Doubt

by Corry Shores
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[Other entries in the Merleau-Ponty phenomenology series.]


[Note: all boldfaces in quotations are my own modifications. Quoted citations come from PDF translations on the internet (see works cited). Page citations give PDF number, then 'see ...' for the printed text page citation.]

Breath of Color:

Merleau-Ponty on Painting and Cézanne
in Eye and Mind
and Cézanne's Doubt

(Thanks awesome-art.com)

What does the phenomenology of painting go to do with you?

Painters are sensitive to the way things appear to us. But what if things appeared to us because we were completely meshed with the world, rather than it be the case that we stand before the world and the objects around us stand over against us? Then the painter could tell us more about how we are inherently mixed-in with the world we perceive.

Brief Summary

Our senses integrate us with a world that is integrated within itself. Painters like Cézanne have insights into how this integration works.

Points relative to Deleuze:

Deleuze also thinks that painters can teach us about phenomena. However, Deleuze thinks we learn much different lessons. Painters show us that our contact with the world is not one of integration, but of us facing a world of difference that is itself different from us. [See this entry for more.]

Merleau-Ponty:

From Eye and Mind

Our bodies are integrated into the fabric of the world and into what gives it meaning [see this entry on horizonal integration as meaning, from Phenomenology of Perception]. Painters are able to live purely in this enmeshment with the world and express it visually in their works. This is their 'secret science' (Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, 2c, see 161d).

We first note how our vision and movement in the world indicates our integration with it. We move about the world by means of our vision. Because we see the world, we can interact with it, relate to it, move around through it. (see 162b.c)

Now, we are not just able to sense the things in the world around us. We can also sense our selves. But there is more. We can notice that we are seeing something. In other words, we can see our selves seeing. (see 162d)

So we move through the world in an integrated way with it. The fact that we are moving around it tells us we are somehow apart from it, but the fact we are always integrated indicates that we are also somehow a part of it. [See this entry from the Phenomenology of Perception for more on our integration with the world. There is the famous example of the walking stick. A stick from a tree might seem like a part of the world that is not a part of us. But when a blind person learns to walk with a stick, she soon begins to be able to actually feel the world with the stick, as if her nerve endings extended through the wood to the farthest side that does the feeling. So in a way, parts the world are parts of us.] [And also note the sympathy our sense organs have with the world. Parts of our ears for example vibrate at the same frequency of the sound wave they are receiving. So we profoundly get in touch with the world around us, and it becomes ambiguous who is the sensor and who is the sensed.]

Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are incrusted in its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the very stuff of the body. (3c, see 163b)
The body's animation is not the assemblage or juxtaposition of its parts. Nor is it a question of a mind or spirit coming down from somewhere else into an automation— which would still imply that the body itself is without an inside and without a "self." A human body is present when, between the see-er and the visible, between touching and touched, between one eye and the other, between hand and hand a kind of crossover occurs. (4a, see 163d)
Our organs are not instruments; on the contrary, our instruments are added-on organs. Space is not what it was in the Dioptrics, a network of relations between objects such as would be seen by a third party, witnessing my vision, or by a geometer looking over it and reconstructing it from outside. It is, rather, a space reckoned starting from me as the null point or degree zero of spatiality. I do not see it according to its exterior envelope; I live it from the inside; I am immersed in it. (12c, see 178ab)

We in a way are integrated with the things around us by means of our vision. Our body has a certain affinity for them which allows us to see them. They have a sort of 'secret visibility' within us. Painting is faced with the task of depicting this inner secret visibility of the external world, based on our bodily affinity and integration with it.

Once this strange system of exchanges is given, we find before us all the problems of painting. These problems illustrate the enigma of the body, which enigma in turn legitimates them. Since things and my body are made of the same stuff, vision must somehow come about in them; or yet again, their manifest visibility must be repeated in the body by a secret visibility. "Nature is on the inside," says Cézanne. Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our bodies and because the body welcomes them. (4a, see 164a)

When we see things, we take them into us, in a sense. And painters must be very sensitive to how our vision takes in the world. We might even say that it is a matter of letting the world see us, that is, to penetrate us the way our gaze penetrates it. It is like our inhalations are the worlds exhalations [we discussed this metaphor in this entry from Phenomenology of Sensation].

We speak of "inspiration," and the word should be taken literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of Being, respiration in Being, action and passion so slightly discernible that it becomes impossible to distinguish between who sees and who is seen, who paints and what is painted. We say that a human being is born the moment when something that was only virtually visible within the mother's body becomes at once visible for us and for itself. The painter's vision is an ongoing birth. (6c, see 167d)

Mirrors help us see the "metaphysical structure" of our our entwinement with the world. We see an image of ourself. We also sympathize with it. It is as if we doubly feel what we are feeling and what the image is feeling. And the image of us will be seen by others. They too might sympathize with what they see. In this way it is as if we and the world share the same flesh. (see 168a.c)

Let's also note how when we see something, we see a world that is integrated with itself. He offers two excellent examples. The first is Rembrandt's Nightwatch.

The hand pointing toward us in The Nightwatch is truly there only when we see that its shadow on the captain's body presents it simultaneously in profile. The spatiality of the captain lies at the intersection of the two perspectives which are incompossible and yet together. (6a, see 167a)

We might use this example to illustrate another point he made in Phenomenology of Perception about the integration of the parts of the world, how to see the front of an object is also to have on the horizon of our awareness the way that things behind it would be seeing the back side. The Nightwatch example also shows us how when we see something from one perceptive, we see it from all the others, because the way it looks from all the other perspectives influences the way we see it from our own point of view.

Rembrandt. De Nachtwacht (The Night Watch) 1642

(Thanks www.students.sbc.edu)

We see the shadow of the pointing-man's hand cast upon the captain's body. On the one hand, we see what his hand looks like from the front.

Rembrandt. De Nachtwacht (The Night Watch), detail

(Thanks russianpaintings.net)

So far, we might regard the images before us two-dimensionally. However, the shadow shows us the profile of the arm, as if we were at the same time viewing it from the side.

Rembrandt. De Nachtwacht (The Night Watch), detail

(Again, thanks russianpaintings.net)

So we also see how his hand looks from objects standing to his right, all while we look at him from the front. The parts of our world are all coherently interwoven. Another great example is seeing the bottom of a pool. We might think that we are seeing the bottom, even though the water is obscuring it. But in fact, the water is the very reason we can see it. The water is what is letting the light waves through. And when we look to the trees above the pool, we see a reflection of the ripples. The tree has it appearance only because it is integrated with the water motion.

When through the water's thickness I see the tiled bottom of the pool, I do not see it despite the water and the reflections; I see it through them and because of them. If there were no distortions, no ripples of sunlight, if it were without that flesh that I saw the geometry of the tiles, then I would cease to see it as it is and where it is—which is to say, beyond any identical, specific place. I cannot say that the water itself—the aqueous power, the syrupy and shimmering element—is in space; all this is not somewhere else either, but it is not in the pool. It inhabits it, is materialized there, yet it is not contained there; and if I lift my eyes toward the screen of cypresses where the web of reflections plays, I must recognize that the water visits it as well, or at least sends out to it its active, living essence. This inner animation, this radiation of the visible, is what the painter seeks beneath, the words depth, space, and color. (13-14; see 182a.b)

There is something else we noted before in Phenomenology of Perception. Each sense senses things differently. But what they sense is always analogous between the different senses. Our vision has a sense of space. So too does our vision. They are not the same, but the two mesh together in one act of space-perception. Merleau-Ponty in Eye and Mind says something similar. He notes how painters also make good sculptures, for example. This is because what we gain in knowledge of sight translates into knowledge of analogous things in the other senses.

Anyone who thinks about the matter finds it astonishing that very often a good painter can also produce good drawings or good sculpture. Since neither the means of expression nor the creative gestures are comparable, this is proof that there is a system of equivalences, a Logos of lines, of lighting, of colors, of reliefs, of masses—a nonconceptual presentation of universal Being. (15b; see 182c)

So our vision allows us to see things from all perspectives, or at least to have all these other perspectives on the horizon of our awareness. He has us also consider when we look straight down a set of train tracks. They converge on the horizon. But it is only because they converge that we know they remained parallel even at the furthest extent we see. In a way, we are indirectly seeing their being parallel down there by viewing them as convergent from here. So in a sense, when we see the train tracks, we see also something invisible from our perspective, which is their remaining parallel throughout. An invisible absence is given in the visual presence. But we might say there is another sort of invisibility that is given to us. That would be our entwinement with the world, our already being a part of it and enmeshed with it as one flesh.

We must take literally what vision teaches us: namely, that through it we touch the sun and the stars, that we are everywhere at once, and that even our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere—"I am in Petersburg in my bed, in Paris, my eyes see the sun"—or freely to envision real beings, wherever they are, borrows from vision and employs means we owe to it. Vision alone teaches us that beings that are different, "exterior," foreign to one another, are yet absolutely together, are "simultaneity"; which is a mystery psychologists handle the way a child handles explosives. Robert Delaunay says succinctly, "The railroad track is the image of succession which comes closest to the parallel: the parity of the rails." The rails converge and do not converge; they converge in order to remain equidistant farther away. The world is in accordance with my perspective in order to be independent of me, is for me in order to be without me, to be a world. The "visual quale" gives me, and is alone in doing so, the presence of what is not me, of what is simply and fully. It does so because, as a texture, it is the concretion of a universal visibility, of one sole Space that separates and reunites, that sustains every cohesion (and even that of past and future, since there would be no such cohesion if they were not essentially parts of the same space). Every visual something, as individual as it is, functions also as a dimension, because it is given as the result of a dehiscence of Being. What this ultimately means is that the hallmark of the visible is to have a lining of invisibility in the strict sense, which it makes present as a certain absence. (17-18b; see 187a.c)
There is that which reaches the eye head on, the frontal properties of the visible; but there is also that which reaches it from below—the profound postural latency whereby the body raises itself to see—and that which reaches vision from above like the phenomena of flight, of swimming, of movement, where it participates no longer in the heaviness of origins but in free | accomplishments. Through vision, then, the painter touches both extremities. In the immemorial depth of the visible, something has moved, caught fire, which engulfs his body; everything he paints is in answer to this incitement, and his hand is "nothing but the instrument of a distant will." Vision is the meeting, as at a crossroads, of all the aspects of Being. "A certain fire wills to live; it wakes. Working its way along the hand's conductor, it reaches the canvas and invades it; then, a leaping spark, it arcs the gap in the circle it was to trace: the return to the eye, and beyond." There is no break at all in this circuit; it is impossible to say that here nature ends and the human being or expression begins. It is, then, silent Being that itself comes to show forth its own meaning. (18c, see 187-188)

Merleau-Ponty:
Cézanne's Doubt

According to Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne painted things in a distorted way, but this is because he knew how our minds would reconfigure them to have the effect of seeming normal. When we look at something, it is not as though our eyes are photo cameras. Our eyes are constantly shifting. And contextual factors alter the way things look [see this entry for the example of the moon on the horizon.] In a sense, Cézanne paints what we really see and not just what we would see if our eyes were cameras.

This is the reason for his difficulties and for the distortions one finds in his pictures between 1870 and 1890. Cups and saucers on a table seen from the side should be elliptical, but Cezanne paints the two ends of the ellipse swollen and expanded. The work table in his portrait of Gustave Geffroy stretches, contrary to the laws of perspective, into the lower part of picture. In giving up the outline Cezanne was abandoning himself to chaos of sensation, which would upset the objects and constantly suggest illusions, as, for example, the illusion we have when we move our heads that objects themselves are moving—if our judgment did not constantly set these appearances straight. (2; see 13a)
Cezanne did not think he had to choose between feeling and thought, as if he were deciding between chaos and order. He did not want to separate the stable things which we see and the shifting way in which they appear. He wanted to depict matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization. He makes a basic distinction not between "the senses" and "the understanding" but rather between the spontaneous organization of the things we perceive and the human organization of ideas and sciences. We see things; we agree about them; we are anchored in them; and it is with "nature" as our base that we construct our sciences. Cezanne wanted to paint this primordial world, and his pictures therefore seem to show nature pure, while photographs of the same landscapes suggest man's works, conveniences, and imminent presence. (4a, see 13c.14a)
By remaining faithful to the phenomena in his investigations of perspective, Cezanne discovered what recent psychologists have come to formulate: the lived perspective, that which we actually perceive, is not a geometric or photographic one. The objects we see close at hand appear smaller, those far away seem larger than they do in a photograph. (This is evident in films: an approaching train gets bigger much faster than a real train would under the same circumstances.) To say that a circle seen obliquely is seen as an ellipse is to substitute for our actual perception what we would see if we were cameras: in reality we see a form which oscillates around the ellipse without being an ellipse. In a portrait of Mme Cezanne, the border of the wallpaper on one side of her body does not form a straight line with that on the other: and indeed it is known that if a line passes beneath a wide strip of paper, the two visible segments appear dislocated. Gustave Geffroy's table stretches into the bottom of the picture, and indeed, when our eye runs over a large surface, the images it successively receives are taken from different points of view, and the whole surface is warped. It is true that I freeze these distortions in repainting them on the canvas; I stop the spontaneous movement in which they pile up in perception and tend toward the geometric perspective. (4b, see 14a.c)
Similarly, it is Cezanne's genius that when the overall composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to impression of an emerging order, an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes. In the same way, the contour of an object conceived as a line encircling the object belongs not to the visible we but to geometry. If one outlines the shape of an apple with a continuous line, one makes an object of the shape, whereas the contour is rather ideal limit toward which the sides of the apple recede in depth. Not to indicate any shape would be to deprive the objects of their identity. To trace just a single outline sacrifices depth—that is, the dimension in which the thing is presented not as spread out before us but as an inexhaustible reality full of reserves. That is why Cezanne follows the swell of the object in modulated colors and indicates several outlines in blue. Rebounding among these, one's glance captures a shape that emerges from among them all, just as it does in perception. (4d, see 14-15)
the world is a mass without gaps, a system of colors across which the receding perspective, the outlines, angles, and curves are inscribed like lines of force; the spatial structure vibrates as it is formed. (5a, see 15b)

Cézanne: Still Life with Apples (1890-94)

(Thanks dl.ket.org)

Cézanne. Still Life, Fruit and Pitcher on Table

(Thanks awesome-art.com)

Cézanne: Gustave Geoffrey


(Thanks en.easyart.com)

Cézanne: Portrait of a Woman in Green Hat (Mme Cézanne) (1894-95)


(Thanks www.dl.ket.org)

In other words, things appear to us as dynamically deformed. Just moving a little bit will change how the things in a scene before us appear. But that is how we look at things, by moving our eyes around it. But our mind is able to synthesize all the differences together into a perception of something more organized and seemingly stable. This is what a photograph presents to us, the finished product. But Cézanne's paintings give us the experience of seeing the actual things. He knows that even though they might look deformed when compared to a realistic rendition, they will appear natural. They will appear as if we had Cézanne's eyes while he was in the act of seeing the objects.

So all the different ways the object appears are synthesized coherently and holistically so that we properly perceive their visual features. But also, all our senses are together involved in the sensation. They begin already as integrated.

Cezanne does not try to use color to suggest the tactile sensations which would give shape and depth. These distinctions between touch and sight are unknown in primordial perception. It is only as a result of a science of the human body that we finally learn to distinguish between our senses. The lived object is not rediscovered or constructed on the basis of the contributions of the senses; rather, it presents itself to us from the start as the center from which these contributions radiate. We see the depth, the smoothness, softness, the hardness of objects; Cezanne even claimed that we see the odor. If the painter is to express the world, the arrangement of his colors must bear within this indivisible whole, or else his painting will only hint at things and will not give them in the imperious unity, the presence, insurpassable plenitude which is for us the definition of the real. (5a, see 15c, boldface mine)

Cézanne came before an indeterminate scene where its parts are given together, but in a way that allows us to ignore certain aspects in favor of others. So Cézanne tried to present these aspects as interwoven together. Cézanne called this phenomenally rich scene he painted his motif (we discuss Deleuze's interpretation of Cézanne's motif here.) The painter's job is to produce a recognizable image by means of the synthesis of the scene's parts.

He went to the Louvre every day when he was in Paris. He believed that one must learn how to paint and that the geometric study of planes and forms is a necessary part of this learning process. He inquired about the geological structure of his landscapes, convinced that these abstract relationships, expressed, however, in terms of the visible world, should affect the act of painting. The rules of anatomy and design are present in each stroke of his brush just as the rules of the game underlie each stroke of a tennis match. But what motivates the painter's movement can never be simply perspective or geometry or the laws governing the breakdown of color, or, for that matter, any particular knowledge. Motivating all the movements from which a picture gradually emerges there can be only one thing: the landscape in its totality and in its absolute fullness, precisely what Cezanne called a "motif." He would start by discovering the geological foundations of the landscape; then, according to Mme Cezanne, he would halt and look at everything with widened eyes, "germinating" with the countryside. The task before him was, first, to forget all he had ever learned from science and, second, through these sciences to recapture the structure of the landscape as an emerging organism. To do this, all the partial views one catches sight of must be welded together; all that the eye's versatility disperses must be reunited; one must, as Gasquet put it, "join the wandering hands of nature." "A minute of the world is going by which must be painted in its full reality." His meditation would suddenly be consummated: "I have a hold on my motif," Cezanne would say, and he would explain that the landscape had to be tackled neither too high nor too low, caught alive in a net which would let nothing escape. Then he began to paint all parts of the painting at the same time, using patches of color to surround his original charcoal sketch of the geological skeleton. The picture took on fullness and density; it grew in structure and balance; it came to maturity all at once. "The landscape thinks itself in me," he would say, "and I am its consciousness." Nothing could be farther from naturalism than this intuitive science. Art is not imitation, nor is it something manufactured according to the wishes of instinct or good taste. It is a process of expression. Just as the function of words is to name—that is, to grasp the nature of what appears to us in a confused way and to place it before us as a recognizable object—so it is up to the painter, said Gasquet, to "objectify," "project," and "arrest." [...]
We, forgetting the viscous, equivocal appearances, go through them straight to the things they present. The painter recaptures and converts | into visible objects what would, without him, remain walled up in the separate life of each consciousness: the vibration of appearances which is the cradle of things. (6a.c, see 17a.17d; 17-18)

Cézanne as a painter is sensitive to the way we are visually affected by the world, and his job is not so much to paint the world as much as it is to paint our relation with the world, the way it affects us.

Cezanne's difficulties are those of the first word. He thought himself powerless because he was not omnipotent, because he was not God and wanted nevertheless to portray the world, to change it completely into a spectacle, to make visible how the world touches us. (7d, see 19d)

Consider when we see a new painting that really impresses us. We need look at it in a way we have never looked at something before. It teaches us a new way to see the world. And we learn this new way of seeing through the process of our novel encounter with the work. It somehow simultaneously teaches how to 'read a new text' if you will, by means of the new language of that text which we still need to learn.

It is not enough for a painter like Cezanne, an artist, or a philosopher, to create and express an idea; they must also awaken the experiences which will make their idea take root in the consciousness of others. If a work is successful, it has the strange power of being self-teaching. The reader or spectator, by following the clues of the book or painting, by establishing the concurring points of internal evidence and being brought up short when straying | too far to the left or right, guided by the con-fused clarity of style, will in the end find what was intended to be communicated. The painter can do no more than construct an image; he must wait for this image to come to life for other people. When it does, the work of art will have united these separate lives; it will no longer exist in only one of them like a stubborn dream or a persistent delirium, nor will it exist only in space as a colored piece of canvas. It will dwell undivided in several minds, with a claim on every possible mind like a perennial acquisition. (8a, see 19d)

Merleau-Ponty. "The Eye and Mind." Transl. Carleton Dallery. in The Primacy of Perception and other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics. Ed. James M. Edie. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

Quotations come from the PDF, obtained very gratefully from Timothy Quigley's course page
http://homepage.newschool.edu/%7Equigleyt/vcs/em-text.pdf

Merleau-Ponty. "Cézanne's Doubt." Transl. Hubert L. Dryfus & Patricia Allen Dreyfus. In Sense and Non-Sense. Chicago: Illinois University Press, 1964.

Quotations from the PDF also obtained with all my gratitude from Robert Innis' course page:
http://faculty.uml.edu/rinnis/cezannedoubt.pdf

Images

Cézanne: Gustave Geoffrey
http://en.easyart.com/canvas-prints/Paul-Cezanne/Gustave-Geffroy-354053.htm

Cézanne: Still Life with Apples (1890-94)
http://www.dl.ket.org/webmuseum/wm/paint/auth/cezanne/sl/apples/index.htm

Cézanne. Still Life, Fruit and Pitcher on Table
http://www.awesome-art.com/awesome/shop/category.aspx?catid=44&page=1&sortby=
(Thanks awesome-art.com)

Cézanne: Portrait of a Woman in Green Hat (Mme Cézanne) (1894-95)
http://www.dl.ket.org/webmuseum/wm/paint/auth/cezanne/portraits/mme/index.htm

Rembrandt's Nightwatch
http://www.russianpaintings.net/doc.vphp?id=753