What is the status of dualisms in Merleau-Ponty? In several ways this question has emerged for me recently (not least the question session following my paper on David Cronenberg last week, but also in large-scale writing projects, [which have been the cause of my absence]). On the one hand, I have been thinking through the prejudice against dualism in general, at least from a phenomenological perspective. There is a kind of trend, long established in cultural studies, to rally against dualisms because they exploit a set of binary divisions, each of which is involved in an interplay of power. Fine. Phenomenology, of course, is similarly resistant to dualisms, especially those which house the “subject” in an autonomous relation to the “world.” I worry, however, that the prejudice against dualisms is itself contrary to a phenomenological orientation. Too often, it seems, the concern is a reflex action inspired by an already existing socio-political agenda—which, in my estimation, is a second-order of experience. Phenomenology should not be the spokesperson of a social policy.
But beyond the academic-social context, there is another worry. Central to this overcoming of dualisms is the body, particularly the body-subject of Merleau-Ponty. Indeed, the very idea of “one’s own body” entails a reversible fluidity between cognition and corporeality. No mere mass of materiality contingently inhabited, the body is a perceiving organ, both physical situated in the world but also lived from the inside-out. Agreed. But one thing, for me, stand out in this great tradition of embodied subjectivity. One: the body is not a machine mechanically responding to stimuli in the world. Two: how I experience the world is through my body as an intersensory whole, with cognition and embodiment overlapping into a shared realm. Three: cognition and embodiment is not strictly identifiable with one another, and to demonstrate this, Merleau-Ponty explicitly speaks of “motor intentionality.” (P.127).
How does “motor intentionality” fit into this tradition? Merleau-Ponty views it as “something which is an anticipation of, or arrival at, the objective and is ensured by the body itself as a motor power, a motor project, a motor intentionality in the absence of which the order remains a dead letter.” In other words, motor intentionality is a field of force that is precognitive, working in an anticipatory way to guide oneself through the world. This is the “bodily point of view,” as Edward Casey puts it. This is the view of world, as taken from the primacy of the body, yet to be abstracted as a concept—a transcendental body-subject. What this means is that some of our experience is “presented to us anonymously.” He says: “If I wanted to render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought to say that one perceives in me, and not that I perceive.” (p. 250). And yet: the “one” who perceives in me is this anonymous body, this prepersonal self.
At this point, I find it hard to see how we can avoid veering into some tacit dualism between the cognitive self and the anonymous body operating behind the scenes. True, much of this backstage work is to bring about unity and the coherence of the “absolute here.” To this end, so long as the perceiving “one” aligns with cognition, then any sense of the body dissenting need not be an issue. But where is self-consciousness in this operation? What is my body for, as both an object and the source of all experience? How do I experience my own motor-intentionality as a phenomenon in the world of Things? Merleau-Ponty has a striking passage: “Every sensation carries within it the germ of a dream or depersonalization such as we experience in that quasi-stupor to which we are reduced when we really try to live at the level of sensation.” (P. 230). A strange confession: isn’t the “quasi-stupor” which Merleau-Ponty refers to a moment of collision in which our body becomes an issue for us? And why does every sensation give itself over to depersonalization? The answer: because the body’s work is autonomous from self-consciousness, and the visual sight (since it would always be a case of “catching sight” of one’s body) of that process necessarily entails contact with a force paradoxically outside of myself.
An appendix on Cronenberg: I think the seeds of “body horror” have already been implanted in this seemingly benign distinction between motor and mental intentionality (See here and here). This may sound like a rash move, but how else to conceive bodily disturbances as involving anything less than the motor intentionality of the body becoming sentient—of becoming too sentient. Here, we can think of certain auto-immune disorders, in which the body’s regulating activity goes awry, harming the very thing it was sent to protect. But what is the horror of the body? Yes, the sense of the body as not simply decaying—that is easily rationalised within the narrative of life—but the body as disembarking from the project of self-consciousness. Horror is not simply the facticity of the body as occupying space and time, and then being forced to depart from that world—tragic though that is. Rather, horror begins with the idea of the self as a body-subject, unified in its opacity, only to discover that that “I” am not wholly identifiable with my body: but that something more than my lived experience dwells alongside me.
But beyond the academic-social context, there is another worry. Central to this overcoming of dualisms is the body, particularly the body-subject of Merleau-Ponty. Indeed, the very idea of “one’s own body” entails a reversible fluidity between cognition and corporeality. No mere mass of materiality contingently inhabited, the body is a perceiving organ, both physical situated in the world but also lived from the inside-out. Agreed. But one thing, for me, stand out in this great tradition of embodied subjectivity. One: the body is not a machine mechanically responding to stimuli in the world. Two: how I experience the world is through my body as an intersensory whole, with cognition and embodiment overlapping into a shared realm. Three: cognition and embodiment is not strictly identifiable with one another, and to demonstrate this, Merleau-Ponty explicitly speaks of “motor intentionality.” (P.127).
How does “motor intentionality” fit into this tradition? Merleau-Ponty views it as “something which is an anticipation of, or arrival at, the objective and is ensured by the body itself as a motor power, a motor project, a motor intentionality in the absence of which the order remains a dead letter.” In other words, motor intentionality is a field of force that is precognitive, working in an anticipatory way to guide oneself through the world. This is the “bodily point of view,” as Edward Casey puts it. This is the view of world, as taken from the primacy of the body, yet to be abstracted as a concept—a transcendental body-subject. What this means is that some of our experience is “presented to us anonymously.” He says: “If I wanted to render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought to say that one perceives in me, and not that I perceive.” (p. 250). And yet: the “one” who perceives in me is this anonymous body, this prepersonal self.
At this point, I find it hard to see how we can avoid veering into some tacit dualism between the cognitive self and the anonymous body operating behind the scenes. True, much of this backstage work is to bring about unity and the coherence of the “absolute here.” To this end, so long as the perceiving “one” aligns with cognition, then any sense of the body dissenting need not be an issue. But where is self-consciousness in this operation? What is my body for, as both an object and the source of all experience? How do I experience my own motor-intentionality as a phenomenon in the world of Things? Merleau-Ponty has a striking passage: “Every sensation carries within it the germ of a dream or depersonalization such as we experience in that quasi-stupor to which we are reduced when we really try to live at the level of sensation.” (P. 230). A strange confession: isn’t the “quasi-stupor” which Merleau-Ponty refers to a moment of collision in which our body becomes an issue for us? And why does every sensation give itself over to depersonalization? The answer: because the body’s work is autonomous from self-consciousness, and the visual sight (since it would always be a case of “catching sight” of one’s body) of that process necessarily entails contact with a force paradoxically outside of myself.
An appendix on Cronenberg: I think the seeds of “body horror” have already been implanted in this seemingly benign distinction between motor and mental intentionality (See here and here). This may sound like a rash move, but how else to conceive bodily disturbances as involving anything less than the motor intentionality of the body becoming sentient—of becoming too sentient. Here, we can think of certain auto-immune disorders, in which the body’s regulating activity goes awry, harming the very thing it was sent to protect. But what is the horror of the body? Yes, the sense of the body as not simply decaying—that is easily rationalised within the narrative of life—but the body as disembarking from the project of self-consciousness. Horror is not simply the facticity of the body as occupying space and time, and then being forced to depart from that world—tragic though that is. Rather, horror begins with the idea of the self as a body-subject, unified in its opacity, only to discover that that “I” am not wholly identifiable with my body: but that something more than my lived experience dwells alongside me.
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