Trace Fossils

A living body, seen at too close quarters, and divorced from any background against which it can stand out, is no longer a living body, but a mass of matter as outlandish as a lunar landscape.

(Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception)

The human body finds itself thrown into a historical world. There, it finds itself amidst an alien horizon, surrounded on all sides of its flesh by a culture that predated the birth of its own being. Amid sprawling cities, arid deserts, and swelling oceans, the human body is invited to navigate through a constellation of different cultures and worlds, all of which have a persistence that is entirely autonomous from the perceiving body. Before the birth of a particular human body—my body—the anonymity of time, together with the “raw material and adumbration of a natural self,” continues to persist in the void of pre-natal existence (Merleau-Ponty 2006, 404). But this wild materiality does not cease with the birth of the human body. Nor does the human body sublimate the history of its own genesis with its own flesh.

Looking inward, I discover a “time which pursues its own independent course, and which my personal life utilizes but does not entirely overlay” (404). The body belongs to the order of the present, to a subject that has temporarily found a place to dwell on this planet, earth. But the organic life of the human body is short, and its finite experience of lived time remains incommensurable with the anonymous existence that brought human subjectivity into this world in the first place. As such, the human body is never entirely in possession of its own being, both temporally and materially. Turning inward, something evades my reflection. Touching my left hand with my right hand, perception falls short and the body recedes into darkness, a darkness from which, no reason can reach.

That I am never truly in possession of myself, but instead the summonation of a prehistoric, prepersonal agency that possesses me is something to be understood in conceptual terms alone. We do not, after all, experience the other self first hand, but only indirectly; that is to say, as a trace. How can we begin to understand this relation between the trace of a past which has never been present and a body that is instantiated in that past? Already in the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty gestures toward a corporeal ontology that allows us to map these different modes of embodiment together. In one especially significant passage, he turns to the theme of perception:

When I turn towards perception, and pass from direct perception to thinking about perception, I re-enact it, and find at work in my organs of perception a thinking older than myself of which those organs are merely the trace (Merleau-Ponty 2006, 410. Emphasis added).

What is striking about this passage is Merleau-Ponty’s usage of the term “trace.” On a first reading, it may appear as though he is relegating the organs of perception to a mere shadow of the thought that governs those organs. On this reading, trace would mean the recession of a visible presence, thus reducing the phenomenal status of the source of the trace to a fragment of the imagination. Is the body no more than a phantom or a spectre of a body that has ravished in space and time? Far from being “merely” a trace or otherwise a deficient relic, the organs of the body in fact allow perception to re-enact a thinking older than myself. In this gesture of re-enacting a prehuman world, the organs of perception position the body in the role of medium as opposed to residue. Thus, the trace is not empirical evidence etched into the materiality of the objective body. Its presence is not manifest in the visible flesh. Rather, the trace is activated in and through the body’s perception of things, thus bridging altering times and places into the same zone of impersonal corporeal existence. To this end, perception coincides with re-collection, each aspect another side of bodily intentionality. Put another way, the body becomes elevated to, in Platonic terms, the midwife of perception.

This sense of the body as a medium able to commune with the prehistoric, prehuman past is reinforced if we take the notion of re-enactment as a form of bodily re-collection, taking “re-collection” to refer to the retrieval of an original past. This implicit allusion to Platonic amnesias and bodily recollection is supported insofar as at times Merleau-Ponty will speak of the body as containing a “latent knowledge” of things (270). That such knowledge emerges as a synthesis is thanks, not to the “epistemological subject,” but to the prelogical body by way of a “phenomenon of synergy” (270). Situating re-collection in the body, it is the notion of the trace that binds the phenomenal subject with latent knowledge lodged in the personal body. Thus, if the trace of the prepersonal remains invisible, then it is nonetheless re-collected in the act of perception. As an echo, the body awakens to a world that is both familiar and strange, both inside and outside corporeality, and fundamentally the bearer of an uncanny prehistory. This conflation of the strange and familiar is evident in that the echo resonating in the chamber of our bodies is in some sense us. Only now, it is a subjectivity that has transcended space and time, carrying with an immemorial spark ignited in the personal self.

Merleau-Ponty presents us with a sense of the body as both present and absent, timely and untimely concurrently. At once an “eloquent relic of existence” (406), immersed at all times in a “world more ancient than thought” (296), the body is also a horizon of unmediated personal presence. This paradoxical disjunction of the specificity of the present and anonymity of the past sets in place a corporeal ontology, which is distinguished by the body’s role as mediator of an original past. In this way, the body’s communion with prehistory serves not only to document the origin of life, but also to reanimate that prehuman origin in and through perception.

Final Destination

Nowhere is the human vulnerability to superstition and supernaturalism clearer than in the anxious experience of flying. On a prereflective level, we might assume that the phobia of flying extends to nothing more than a fear of objective danger. That is to say, engine failure, turbulence, terrorism, or any other contingent event in the empirical world. But as anyone who has seen the opening of the otherwise dubious “Final Destination” knows, the danger concerns less the events in the world and more the body’s ability to foresee or otherwise exert influence upon those events. To clarify this thought, consider the following points, each of which elicits the relation between uncanniness and phobia.

First, very often with any phobia, the phobic subject will slowly scan the immediate environment for cues portending to his or her fate in the world, as though that fate were already inscribed in the world and only now required deciphering. This overproduction of meaning in the environment marks a departure from everyday experience, where meaning remains tacit rather than amplified. Typically, this act of scanning for meaning takes place before the phobic has braced him or herself for the object that arouses anxiety. In this way, scanning can be seen as a mode of anticipatory anxiety, and like all anticipatory anxiety, demonstrates an urge to control one’s surroundings through a series of performed rituals.

Indeed, the eternal “what if” that accompanies anxious embodiment is at heart a need to reduce the otherness of the world into the sameness of the subject. Asking “what if the plane’s mechanical function isn’t properly checked before departure” is essentially the same as asking: what if the world departs from the meaning that I have already constructed in an inner landscape called the “self.” And it is, I think, this self-conflict and departure from a rigidly embalmed life-world that is central to phobic anxiety. If the first stage in air flight concerns an over production of meaning in the world, then what is striking is that once aboard the plane, it is not the world that exerts meaning upon the subject but the subject who yields a supernatural control of the destination of meaning.

As ever, my body has become the laboratory for a series of phenomenological experiments. On a recent flight to Poland, I became conscious about looking at the wing of the Airbus A320 that I was travelling in. Fearing that the wing might fall off if I looked at it, I immediately shut the window, hoping in the process to yield control of my newfound telekinetic powers. The anxiety is real; it is felt in the flesh. The phobic subject no longer trusts his gaze, fearing that his greatest anxieties will be materialised through an act of inverse willing. In effect, the body of the anxiety subject comes undone, while the “I” of personal identity is reduced to total passivity and loss of control.

If the example has an appeal to the irrational, then it is only because the cognitive “I” is no longer at the foreground of subjectivity. In its place, a set of primitive thoughts surfaces from a repressed world. After all, what is really occurring when I look at an airplane wing and fear my gaze will cause the wing to fall off is an anxiety around what my body is capable of. Air flight sets in place this primal anxiety over what I am: it renders me a subject with no agency, save for my own brute materiality.

Here, the uncanny rises to the surface in the midst of the plane cabin. If the phobic subject ordinarily represses a belief in providence, supernaturalism, fatalism, and the power to manipulate the world by thought alone, then all of these primitive tendencies are given space to breathe during flying, given that the sovereign rational self is surmounted by the materiality of a body that is no longer of the self but comes from beyond. As Freud writes of beliefs that have not been fully domesticated by civilization:

Yet we do not feel entirely secure in these new convictions; the old ones live on in us, on the look-out for confirmation. Now, as soon as something happens in our lives that seems to confirm these old, discarded beliefs, we experience a sense of the uncanny, and the this may be reinforced by judgements like the following: “So it’s true, then, that you can kill another man just by wishing him dead, that the dead really do go on living and manifest themselves at the scene of their former activities,” and so on.

(Freud, "The Uncanny." p. 154).

The old ones live on in us. Freud might also be talking here about a phylogenetic memory, which has outlasted the colonization of reason and primal repression. Where am I during air flight? The answer is objectively here, yet experientially absent. The absence of the active I sheds light upon a world that is only accessible in the liminal realm, whereupon the self literally takes leave of its senses, thus giving voice to a memory of being that is both immemorial, anonymous, and thus uncanny.