Side Effects

Out Now: "The Memory of Place"

2012-01-17T08:10:00.007Z

It gives me a special sort of pleasure to announce that "The Memory of Place" is now out through all the usual outlets. As is customary with these things, it is invariably the author who is the last to receive a physical copy of the book. This publication is no different. (I would expect it to be stock in the Eurozone anyday now.) Luckily, Tim Morton has been able to verify the empirical existence of the book and has written a glowing first impression, my favourite part of which is:

"On a scale of 1 to Fucking Good, where would you put this book?

—Oh, Fucking Good, definitely. "

Big up to Tim for that. Now we just need to get Tim's scale adopted as the way to review academic books. I appreciate also that he picks up on the relation between place and the weird, which is a theme throughout the book, even - or especially - when the book is dealing with such innocuous places as Brooklyn supermarkets and motorway service stations.

Addendum

I'm pleased to be able to confirm the material existence of the book. It arrived this morning and is a joy to behold. Christopher Saunder's fine painting on the cover has come out splendidly.

Alien Phenomenologies – Uncanny Bodies

2012-01-04T16:22:00.003Z

“Corporeality and alienness,” so Bernhard Waldenfels begins the fourth chapter of his recently published The Phenomenology of the Alien, “are intimately connected.” Why? Because the body is perfectly aligned between presence and absence, it is both thing and spectre together. Precisely because the body necessarily belong to the living subject is its mass of materiality at the same time distant to the subject. Here is a body, it is alive: – the body is the world, it is the source from which life and perception unfold. And yet: it is also flesh. It barks and recoils from the world, it wants what it lacks and then grows tired with those things. All of this takes place quite apart from “our” experience of things. The body has a freedom that is untouched by history; it belongs to neither culture nor society, and instead lodges itself in a realm beyond phenomena.

But the body exerts its presence from this anonymous realm, it becomes personal and in turn a voice speaks from the flesh that is both singular and irreducible to its own materiality, as Waldenfels writes: “Our bodily experience would then exceed by far the experience of the body.” Waldenfels prepares the ground for an alien phenomenology. He does this by placing the body at the heart of alien phenomena, accenting the body’s strange relationship to intentionality. Long before Freud, Lovecraft, Merleau-Ponty, and Schopenhauer, Waldenfels identifies Plato as marking the origins of this uncanniness: “It was Plato who was the first to insist that it is not our eyes that see, but rather our soul that sees by means of our eyes.” Here, a fundamental truth has been articulated. The truth of the body is its anonymity, its captivity in another realm, of which our personal access is severely limited. The soul speaks through the eyes, but whose eyes are employed as the instrument of sensibility? Thus, a breakage occurs, whereby the body becomes more than its own materiality.

The critical question in this discussion can be formulated as such: is thingness necessarily alien and inversely, is alienness necessarily a thing? Applied to the human body, the question would be reformulated in the following way: does the fact that subjectivity is extended into the world entail a relation of anonymity to that materiality? Sartre will speak of nausea in this regard, while Merleau-Ponty will talk of ambiguity. Husserl meanwhile, will only make a distinction between the lived and the physical body without drawing an affective distinction between the two. Waldenfels, for his own part, is almost certainly right to introduce the body’s biological being into the question of its thingnness, remarking that “blood pressure, hormone balance, firing of neurons and last but not least the functioning of ‘my brain’” all become critical in the tension between corporeal and cognitive intentionality. Several years before Waldenfel, it is Richard Zaner who pre-empted the biological basis of the bodily uncanny in his work, The Context of Self.

For Zaner, the key to the alienness of the body lies in the uncanny. As with Waldenfels, he begins with the intentionality of the prepersonal body, he writes: “...whether I like it or not, there are some activities, postures, gestures, sensory encounters, and sensory refinements, etc, which are just not within my bodily scope...” This division between the agency of the body and the agency of the self sets in place an inescapable structure to the body, in Zaner’s terms. The body is a limit, it is a border, against which the self is both placed and displaced. Were one to entirely transform oneself from one body to another, then the same limitations and inescapable structure would reappear, only now in a different guise.

Coupled with this inescapable limit, the body for Zaner also implicates the subject. I remain at the “mercy” and “disposal” of the body. The body, being “more ancient than thought,” implicates me – quite by chance – in its immemorial existence. The body brings me into life, and will in time, prevent me from life. I like Zaner’s language of implication and disposal very much. What I especially like about his onus on the body as implicating the self is twofold.

First, if one is to speak of a tacit dualism in this thought, then the question is not: can the mind exist without the body, but instead: for how long has the body existed without the mind? We who have bodies – that is to say, all human subjects – remain delimited to a world into which we as personal subjects are transitory visitors. Whatever Gnostic implications this entails, the fundamental point is that the body is ontologically prior to the self.

The second aspect that I admire in this thought is Zaner’s inclusion of the affectivity of bodily implication. He writes: “Finding myself thus implicated in whatever can and does happen to my embodying organism, not only its contingency but also its tenuousness vis-à-vis the ways in which things can and do impact it, my embodying organism is experienced as a kind of ‘chill’”.

The chill. It seems to me, if I can put it rather hyperbolically, that every phenomenology of the body can be measured in terms of how successfully it engenders itself toward the this moment of self-alienation, this beckoning of the strange facticity of there being a body in the first place, without which the body would be taken for granted in its pre-reflected unity. The chill is emblematically uncanny insofar as it forces us into an ecstatic relation with our bodies. We stand outside the flesh and for a brief moment the flesh stares back at us.

The chill of the body, the shivers crawling upon one’s back, and the hairs that stand on their ends when the body is experienced in its material phenomenality attests to the distance between the subject and the body. The distance folds back into the homeostatic operation of the body, as a thing that presents itself in the world as having its own set of ends to accomplish. Heraclitus is right here: nature loves to hide. Nowhere is this clearer than in the body, whose secrets are resistant to all modes of empirical investigation. Of the biological automatism of the body, Zaner writes: “Deeply familiar (what is more familiar?), my own body is thus at the same time curiously veiled and obscure.” Becoming aware of the processes that run the body does nothing to hamper the effectiveness of those functions. Unlike the self-consciousness of subjectivity, the gaze of the other as experienced by the liver, heart, and lungs remain insulated by an agency that plays no part in intersubjective life. Put simply, the body goes on.

The body is an alien life. This alienness is predicated not on the incursion of a foreign force from the beyond, but instead through the mutual estranging of self and body. The alien is alien precisely through already establishing a relation with the non-alien, and then retaining that relation through its alienation. In this respect, to speak of an “alien phenomenology” means to speak of being a body, and as Waldenfels, Zaner, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre demonstrate, no alien phenomenology that is in fact a phenomenology can take place without the body. The things that surround bodies – feel free to compile your own list of arbitrary and disjoined objects here – have an alien quality only insofar as they conform or fail to conform to an already established relationship to the body, which precedes all things, even the “chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”

The real Cape Kennedy is inside your head

2011-12-23T04:23:00.000Z

Following my recent post on Darkspace and cosmic anxiety, readers who find themselves in need of more planetary hauntings may find winter solace in an article by me on J.G. Ballard, Max Ernst, and outer space, which is published in 3:AM Magazine. It just remains for me to wish you all festive joy during this time of warmth and repose.

The Memory of Agoraphobia

2011-12-22T19:00:00.003Z

L'écluse de l'Arsenal, Paris. By DT.

A city unfolds, at once closing and exposing itself to the broader world. Streets and roads flood in from afar. In them, human beings emerge in this mass of materiality; there they find their way in the world, building homes that protect life from the world. Here, people live; they are alive and occupy a definite place within this world. The city grows, it has life. The wilderness will flourish in the middle of this dense world. A diverse eco-system spreads its way through the city, generating a rich atmosphere that is fed back into the people who live within its embrace.

Yet every now and then, empty squares punctuate the landscape, vast columns of unpopulated space float in the middle of the city’s pulse. For a while, you could not enter those empty squares without simultaneously entering another realm. There, your body would come to a standstill, frozen like a monolithic relic. Back then, there was no small danger that you would be unable to make it from one corner of the square to the other without collapsing in the middle of the great space. And so you remained in place, hovering on the border of the square so that an escape would be readily available should the urge to flee strike you. The square, however, was only a beginning that would soon spiral into the surrounding world.

For sixteen years, you could not enter a building. Buildings were prohibited for you. They were portals to a realm that you didn’t understand, a realm that didn’t coincide with your worldview. And so they fell to the wayside, all of them no longer accessible to your body. During this time, you withdrew from the world of buildings and enclosed spaces. Borders, doorways, and windows were your native haunts. There you would dwell, bridging the outside world to the terror of confined space. Closed windows and doors were an abomination to you. Very often, your vision of the world would be diminished when a door would close. Losing sight of your surroundings, you compensated with other senses, principally touch. In the absence of an open door, you would assemble a series of chairs around your body to generate the impression of a space contained within a space. The chairs were your companions in those dark hours; they would fend off the outside world from you, enclosing you within a sacred space no longer accessible to the public. And so you waded through the darkness with a chair by your side.

Without the chair, you made your way in the world with the assistance of other methods, above all else, a pathological attachment to the superstition of rituals—or, the rituals of superstitions. A set of circumscribed practices enabled you to cohere in the world, and without them, the world no longer made sense to you. If you were unable to hold a small metallic object in your left palm, then the world would assume a foreboding sense of general horror. For you, the small metallic object was a talisman of peace in a world marked by change, contingency, and violence.

Your disease was not only activated by space alone. For twenty-seven years, you could not voice certain words without reliving the meaning of those sentences in your body. Very frequently, you were reduced to a mute state. You remember a hallway and a conversation. Somewhere, the word “collapse” was mentioned, and you swiftly proceeded to fall to the floor in a state of slumbering stupefaction. Everywhere, people looked down at your lumbering body, possessed by the magic of inertia. Your body had given way, and since then you have exercised special caution about saying and hearing certain words. Words such as “frailty,” “blood,” and “flesh” are extremely hazardous to you, and you will think very carefully about your surroundings before you mention them.

Today, you must exert considerable effort to remember such episodes. They are buried in time, now assuming a photographic stillness devoid of their terror. But the experiences have not left your body. When crossing the street, you still feel that latent hesitation that comes with the phobic worldview. Beneath the electric lights of the world, you sense the vibrations that are otherwise invisible. Touched by the madness of phobia, you are unable to re-enter the world of things.

Today, a different emptiness unfolds. In the dreadful hours that plagued your phobia, you achieved the serenity of having a centre, around which the world would freely revolve. You termed that centre, “home.” Around it, you would construct your life, feeling its great influence cast a reassuring presence on your skin. In the mysterious aisles of supermarkets and in the wilderness of city bus journeys, your mind would forever be haunting the home, which was left behind. It was your declaration against the world, against life.

Today, the centrality of the home has been dispersed into the world: it no longer binds you to the enclosed spatiality of your past. Ever since you made your way across a small bridge overhanging a polluted river, your body has adjusted to the fact that there is a world in the first place. Soon after the bridge, the world lost its foreboding quality, and the boundaries attaching you to your home loosened. Finally, you were free. In the heady days that followed your liberation from the disease, you ventured far out. From the homogeneity of airports to the elaborate maze of shopping malls, the world shone with the dizzying lightness of a place untouched by anxiety. For you, the black demons that had accompanied your 56 years on this planet were delivered of their hold.

And yet, for all this freedom, the world now assumes a deadened appearance. On the other side of the visitation, the disease has left you damaged. Soon after the initial liberation, a grey bewilderment set in. Lacking a moral purpose, you are now unable to justify the existence of the home. Far from a beacon of meaning in the midst of a meaningless world, it has now become a continuation of the world without value—an empty space, glowing in the flat landscape of a desensitised and derealized world.

Visitor to a Museum

2011-12-11T22:41:00.001Z

"In a post-apocalyptic world, in which a large part of the population consists of demented and deformed mutants being kept in reservations, a man embarks upon visiting the ruins of a museum buried under the sea which can only be accessed during low tide."

Written and directed by Konstantin Lopushansky

Black Metal & Black Holes

2011-12-06T10:13:00.010Z

In perfect synchronicity with the discovery of our future homeworld, Kepler 22-b, readers with a predilection for black metal, sci-fi horror, and speculative astrophysics (that's most of the philosophical blogsphere, right?) might be interested in a piece I've written on Darkspace for The Liminal.

As if that wasn't enough, stay tuned for a very exclusive interview with Darkspace, which will also appear at The Liminal shortly...

Counter-Earth

2011-12-03T23:21:00.013Z

The Earth’s Moon. Taken from Rue de Rivoli, Paris.

15:26, 02nd December 2011. By DT.

Concerning its [the earth’s] position there is some divergence of opinion. Most of those who hold that the whole universe is finite say that it lies at the centre, but this is contradicted by the Italian school called Pythagoreans. These affirm that the centre is occupied by fire, and that the earth is one of the stars, and creates night and day as it travels in a circle about the centre. In addition they invent another earth, lying opposite our own, which they call by the name of “counter-earth”

(Aristotle on Philolaus)

And the Pythagoreans called the moon the counter-earth, in so far as it is also an “earth in the aither,” and since it blocks the light of the sun, which is a peculiar characteristic of the earth, and since it marks the end of the heavens just as the earth marks the end of the region under the moon.

(Aristotle on Philolaus)

Philolaus [says] that there is fire in the middle around the center which he calls the hearth of the whole and house of Zeus... And again another fire at the uppermost place, surrounding [the whole]. [He says] that the middle is first by nature, and around this ten divine bodies dance: heaven, planets, after them the sun, under it the moon, under it the earth, under it the counter-earth, after all of which the fire which has the position of a hearth about the center.

(Fragments of Philolaus)

From the outset, at any rate, they considered ten the perfect number, but seeing that, in what appears to the eye, the moving spheres are nine in number - seven spheres of the planets, an eighth that of the fixed stars, ninth the earth (for they thought, in fact, that the earth too moves in a circle around the stationary hearth, which, according to them, is fire) - they themselves added in their theory a counter-earth as well, which they assumed to move opposite the earth, and for this reason to be invisible to those on earth.

(Aristotle on Philolaus)

Philolaus the Pythagorean [says] that fire is in the middle (for this is the hearth of all), and that the counter-earth is second, the inhabited earth is third and lies opposite to and moves around with the counter-earth. Accordingly, those on the counter-earth cannot be seen by those on this earth.

(Fragments of Philolaus)

“After the counter-earth this earth itself also moves around the middle, and after the earth the moon,” for this is what he himself reports in the treatise on Pythagoreanism. But the earth, since it is one of the stars moving around the middle, makes day and night according to its position relative to the sun. But the counter-earth, moving about the middle and following on this earth, is not seen by us because the body of the earth is always in our way.

(Aristotle on Philolaus)

Philolaus [says] that destruction [of the world] is twofold, on the one hand when fire rushes in from the heaven, and on the other from lunar water when it is poured out by the revolution of the air. And the exhalations of these are nourishment for the cosmos.

(Fragments of Philolaus)

Screen-shots from "Another Earth" (2011) and "Melancholia" (2011)

Winnicott and Agoraphobia

2011-11-27T13:32:00.003Z

(Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, Paris. By DT)

In a passage from A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze writes the following:

A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of the chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip; it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. There is always sonority in Ariadne’s thread. Or the song of Orpheus.

How does the child’s song speak through the darkness? Does the song substitute the formlessness of the dark with the form of a discernable melody? That does not seem correct, as it would imply a causal relation between the two: before there is a melodic structure to the world, there is not chaos but the occupancy of other people’s songs. “It is territorial, a territorial assemblage,” as Deleuze goes on to say. The child’s song does not suppress the darkness, but bridges the light of inner experience with the nocturnal world. Seen in this way, the song is what Winnicott would term a “transitional object.”

For Winnicott, the notion of a transitional object is predicated on an intermediate reality. Between the reality of subjective experience and objective world outside of that reality, an intermediate space opens up. Winnicott cites the infant’s caressing of external objects—cloth, wool, string, teddy bear, etc—as emblematic of a “defence against anxiety, especially anxiety of a depressive type” (Playing and Reality, 5). The transitional object and phenomena coincide, each aspect dependent on the other, and each emerging with greater intensity in times of insecurity.

Winnicott provides the reader with a list of the special qualities of the relationship between the baby and the object. The characteristics range from a will to destroy the object, an insistence on its permanence, a total possession of control, and a sense of it as having an autonomous life. Eventually, the baby outgrows the object and it becomes relegated to “limbo,” now deprived of its meaning, and yet still remembered. Having survived and testified to the destruction of the object, the infant proceeds to an ontologically secure place in the world, now able to experience his own autonomy without the need to possess or be possessed by the things and people around him.

Winnicott’s ideas have a particular appeal to an understanding of agoraphobia. If we—as I have previously suggested—are to understand agoraphobia as having a special relationship with the inability to cultivate a sense of home, then from a Winnicottian perspective, this inability gravitates toward the home as an intermediate reality. Psychoanalytically, there is, of course, a relation between the home and mother’s breast, insofar as both constitute a first point of contact with the world and the source of primordial nourishment. From a phenomenological perspective, “home” is not a geometric site in the world, nor is it a construct of the subject’s internal landscape. Instead, it is a relational mode of being-in-the-world: it is the bridge enabling one to set foot in the world.

It seems to me that in the case of agoraphobia, the “disorder” is a failure to negotiate or create the transitional space between self and world. Let us return to the relationship between the breast and the home. When the baby cries, the breast appears in the world, giving the impression that the baby’s will creates the breast to materialize. In turn, the mother submits herself to the needs of the baby. Once other objects are introduced into this dyadic relationship, the baby slowly begins to recognise objects as being “not me.” In time, the mother herself distances herself from the needs of the baby, and with the mother’s guidance, the baby enters the transitional space between subjective and objective realities. If all goes to plan, then the frustrations met in this phase are adapted to and the baby begins to find a place in the world.

In the case of agoraphobia, the anxiety experienced has its roots in the subject’s inability to will a state of familiarity instantly. For the agoraphobe, the experience of anxiety is primarily an experience of radical alterity: the world becomes hostile by dint of its unfamiliarity, and the one thing the agoraphobe lacks, is the ability to establish familiarity outside of his circumscribed sense of “home.” Panic ensues as the sensations the agoraphobe undergoes are interpreted as a threat to his already vulnerable sense of self.

In turn, the reliance on transitional objects within the transitional space becomes a pathology. Only now, those objects are not teddy bears and pieces of cloth—though they may well be—but instead particular modes of bodily comportment and navigation. Recall this from “victim” of agoraphobia:

I see a man hobbling past my house on crutches, a cripple for life, and I actually envy him. At times I would gladly exchange places with the humblest day laborer who walks unafraid across the public square or saunters tranquilly over the viaduct on his way home after the day's work.

Hobbling, crutches, umbrellas, tying one’s shoe laces, holding to the wall, sunglasses, hats—these are all props equivalent to the “trusted other” that enable the agoraphobe to get from one point to another. They are modes of retaining control over a world that does not spontaneously produce, in Winnicottian terms, the primordial shelter of the mother’s breast. Lacking ontological security in the world, the experience of intermediate space is not interpreted as a “potential space” of creation and growth, but as a space divested of all familiar attributes and so opposed to the singularity of the I. Indeed, in the failure to navigate the terrain of the intermediate space successfully, what the agoraphobe experiences is the reality of internal experience confront the external world, without anything to link them.

The Memory of Place: a Preview

2011-11-11T18:33:00.003Z

In order to entice any potential readers into buying my forthcoming book, "The Memory of Place" (official release date: 15/01/12), Amazon.com have a limited preview of the contents online. If you are - for some unfathomable reason - not won over by such evocative chapter titles as "The Dark Entity," "Memories of the Flesh," and "This Place is Haunted," then perhaps the index listings will convert you. There, you will find an exciting range of entries, ranging from The Golden Nugget (casino) to 19th century occultist, Eliphas Levi, with all the usual suspects contained therein.

More here.

The Face of Milly

2011-11-10T19:23:00.004Z

Some subjects can come near to blindness without changing their ‘world’: they can be seen colliding with objects everywhere, but they are not aware of no longer being open to visual qualities, and the structure of their conduct remains unmodified.

(Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception)

You went blind at the age of 6. Slowly, a cloud appeared in the crystalline lens of each of your eyes. At first, the silvery blue sheen that speckled your eye was vague and only visible in certain lights. You could see movements, but you were unsure of the precise origin and nature of those movements. For a while, it was possible for you to walk amongst us unaided by your powerful nostrils. Fearing a loss of contact with you, I would hold my finger in the air, move it from left to right, and measure how much of the movement you could detect with your eyes.

Over time, the cloud grew larger and those movements soon transformed into shadows that cast the world in a blackened haze. We watched it happen as helpless witnesses. We saw frequently that you would stumble nervously in the sunlight. When you knocked your head on rocks and edges, I felt the organs of my body contort themselves in agony. Increasingly, you would make your way in the world by sniffing the corners of each wall you would pass. In the midst of sprawling crowds, you came to a standstill, and I would often pick you up, cover you in my black scarf and guide you to a less densely populated part of our shared world. There, I would see that you had the freedom to roam unobstructed by rapidly moving objects and creatures both taller and larger than you. You had lost your sight, and now, an intense film of blue covered your eyes, masking the brown eyes behind the cataracts.

When the eyes withdrew from your face, where was your vision of the world? Did the world of those that love you simultaneously vanish alongside your eyesight, now consigned to a memory, the affective tone of which no human being can experience from the outside? Prior to your blindness, we saw one another from time to time through touching foreheads, feeling the heat in each other’s bodies. Back then, the eye contact would be full of expression and the focal point of our communication. Often, I might give you a particular look to indicate that now was the time to be fed or walked. Our glances would exchange and a common language would be established in a non-verbal gesture. Today, the same look remains on your face, but there are no eyes to initiate the reflex. And yet: your speech has remained inscribed in your face. True, the visible realm is no longer your priority, and in your blindness, you journey through the world upon different senses. But your face sees through the blindness. In its obscurity, your face continues to call to those around you, to summon their presence. Your face assumes an authority upon human life in spite of its blindness. Know that the silent call is heard.

The Face of the Dog

2011-11-07T16:33:00.005Z

("Stalker," Andrei Tarkovsky. 1979)

Levinas’s article on Bobby the dog—the so-called “Last Kantian in Nazi Germany”—raises several critical issues regarding the limits of Levinasian ethics. The article, “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” is an autobiographical meditation on a dog that befriended Levinas during his occupation in camp 1492 (“the year of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain,” Levinas reminds us ironically). Levinas documents the situation accordingly:

There were seventy of us in a forestry commando unit for Jewish prisoners of war in Nazi Germany… The French uniform still protected us from Hitlerian violence. But the other men, called free, who had dealings with us or gave us work or orders or even a smile - and the children and women who passed by and sometimes raised their eyes - stripped us of our human skin. We were subhuman, a gang of apes. A small inner murmur, the strength and wretchedness of persecuted people, reminded us of our essence as thinking creatures, but we were no longer part of the world. Our comings and goings, our sorrow and laughter, illnesses and distractions, the work of our hands and the anguish of our eyes, the letters we received from France and those accepted for our families - all that passed in parenthesis. We were beings entrapped in their species; despite all their vocabulary, beings without language.

Into this bleak world, a world in which man—now stripped not only of his "human skin" but also his language—is reduced to animal, “a wondering dog entered our lives…we called him Bobby, an exotic name, as one does with a cherished dog.” The arrival of Bobby thus appears to redeem Levinas from an inhuman status, giving back an ethical responsibility that was otherwise lacking.

At the outset, then, it is hard to know where we ought to be placing Bobby. Earlier on in the essay, Levinas warns us against reading “the name of a dog in the figurative sense,” declaring boldly: “Enough of allegories!” At the end of the essay, this allegorical hazard is reprised again, when Levinas points to Ulysses and the return from the Odyssey. But this allegorical opening is swiftly closed down, Levinas remarking: “Here, we were nowhere,” with the implication being that Bobby was a kind of freak anomaly totally prised apart from the realm of civil humanity.

The place of Bobby hinges upon a tension in Levinas’s treatment of non-human life and (the face of) life more broadly. Of clear concern to him is the danger of anthropomorphising Bobby in a place where anthropomorphising gains an especially offensive air. Bobby is the materiality of a dog, and any expression of Kantian loyalty in his behaviour is by dint of an accident alone; without, that is to say in Levinas’s blunt formulation, “the brain needed to universalize maxims and drives.” Does the resistance toward anthropomorphising lead to a wordless and silent dog, to phrase it in Heideggerian terms? Indeed, the general tone of Levinas’s paper is if not quite sublime awe, then something pointing to bafflement that a dog might attain the level of ethical responsibility that Bobby has done under the present conditions. Bobby survived in a “wild patch,” the name Bobby, an “exotic” token of his uncanny presence in the horror of the camp. All the more uncanny was Bobby’s apparent enthusiasm at the sight of Levinas and his fellow prisoners, there Bobby “jumping up and down and barking in delight.”

One might argue that Bobby’s uncanny presence in Levinas’s essay is due to a fundamental weakness in the notion of face-to-face ethics. This is especially clear given that Levinas never defines the significance of the face in its material presence. We know that the face is not reducible to perception. The face is more than flesh, more than countenance assumed on the human form. Yet at the same time, the face as an ethical injunction relies on the destitution of the skin and the life that is expressed within that skin. “The face speaks,” as Levinas tells us time and again. The face enters into discourse, and doing so, establishes an “authentic relationship” with the other. Coupled with this onus on discourse, the face assumes a height. The face speaks to me from above, it “orders and ordains” me, as he says in Ethics and Infinity. That Levinas experiences respect in the presence of Bobby is thus a paradox. For in Levinas’s formulation, Bobby, unable to speak, has no face. As such, the dog becomes reduced to the “wild animals,” “gang of apes” and other “subhumans” mentioned in Levinas’s essay.

In the camp, Levinas experiences respect, yet it is a respect that cannot be reciprocated. Faceless, Levinas is never able to gesture back to Bobby, except through the guise of astonishment. Here, there is no language that can be shared between Levinas and Bobby, not even in the liminal terror of their shared situation. The animal is pure lack, a presence without a face, and for all his civility, in the end it amounts to nothing more than a mechanised Kantianism, an accident in the ethical order. What Levinas purportedly sees in Bobby is a cruel residual afterlife of a world that predated the camp. In his affections and loyalty, the entropy of brute and stupid habit outlives the inhumanity of industrial murder.

Recall: Levinas was “stripped…of our human skin. We were subhuman, a gang of apes.” What is this skin that enables the human to fend off the ape within? Is the dog already divested of the “human skin” that confers an ethical responsibility upon Others? What does Levinas see in Bobby that is concealed in “human skin”? Such questions remain necessarily unanswerable, as Levinas does not provide us with the resources to establish a dialogue with non-human faces. Instead, they are without a face.

In an interview from 1986, Levinas’s thoughts on non-human faces have altered slightly. Here, he has the following to say on dogs.

One cannot entirely refuse the face of an animal. It is via the face that one understands, for example, a dog. Yet the priority here is not found in the animal, but in the human face. We understand the animal, the face of an animal, in accordance with Dasein. The phenomenon of the face is not in its purest form in the dog. In the dog, in the animal, there are other phenomena. For example, the force of nature is pure vitality.

If Bobby gestures toward having a face, then that face nevertheless remains resistant to ethics. As with Kant, our treatment of animals gains an ethical structure to it only in light of our treatment of humans: at best, the animal serves as a conduit to our treatment of humans. In any case, the face of the dog appears only as a sort of play of light, a fortuitous emergence that will soon be foreclosed by the dog’s purer vitality, “the force of nature.” Here, the face of the dog, already tenuous and diminished, is sculpted in the shape of the human face. Lacking a heterogeneous face of its own, the dog’s face mirrors the face of Dasein in its non-human skin, a face that does less to elevate the dog to a moral status and more to degrade its vitality as an ethical being.

Chronos

2011-10-26T16:14:00.001Z

("Chronos," by Ron Fricke, 1985)

Ghosts of Mars (Extract)

2011-10-10T10:01:00.015Z

(Martian Landscape, as taken by the Mars Viking 1 Lander, 1976)

North-west of Coombs Hill and just beyond the Mawson Glacier, a group of hills are to be found in the wilderness of Antarctica of unprecedented importance. Named after Professor R.S. Allan of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, Antarctica’s Allan Hills are the site of countless meteorites buried in and around the Transantarctic Mountains. Of these meteorites, one has assumed a particular significance. On December 27, 1984, a team of US meteorite hunters from the ANSMET (Antarctic Search for Meteorites) project chanced upon what looked another Martian meteorite devoid of life. Lying buried in the frozen wastelands for 13,000 years, the meteorite would be classified as AH84001.

This was not the first Martian meteorite to be found on the surface of Earth. Already in 1865, the Shergottite family of meteorites fell in Shergotty, India. The precise time was 9am on the 25th August of that year. Some 46 years later, on June 28th 1911, another meteorite shower fell from deep space, this time landing in the village of El Nakhla El Bahariya, east from Alexandria, Egypt. Here, too, the meteorite arrived at 9am. These cosmic fragments were heavier than the Shergottites, and during the re-entry a chunk of Martian rock was reported to have landed on the spot where a farmer’s dog was resting, vaporising the creature instantly and leaving a green fragment in the dog’s place.

Although it is impossible to establish a strict chronology of the dates leading to the arrival of the Nnakhla meteorite in the village of Nnakhla El Baharia at 9am on June 28th 1911, scientists have established the following: an asteroid would have collided with the surface of Mars some 11.5 million years ago, in the process blasting chunks of solidified magma of the surface of the planet into space. Escaping the gravitational field of Mars, the Nnakhla artefact would orbit the sun and collide with other rocks. Back on Earth, prehistoric ancestors of the Nnakhla dog were in the process of evolving, while Homo sapiens had yet to distinguish themselves from gorillas. And so the Nnakhla meteorite would have to wait silently for millions of years before being carried into the atmosphere of Earth, our planet. There it would fall to surface of the Earth, leaving a column of white smoke in the morning’s sky before landing on the spot where the farmer’s dog would rise from the night.

Along with the Chassignites found in Chassigny, France on October 3rd, 1815 (this time at 8am), the Shergottite and Nnakhla relics all had a crystallization age of 1.3 billion years. Through a process of deductive elimination, the artefacts were found to be of Martian origin. Following the 1976 NASA Viking missions, trapped gases were found in Shergottite that were also found on Mars by the Viking Landers, thus confirming the intergalactic relation between Earth and Mars.

The so-called SNC group of Martian meteorites (after the Shergottite, Nnakhla, Chassignites group) has an anomaly, and the anomaly is AH84001. Although similar in appearance and mineralogy to non-Martian meteorites, AH84001 has some significant differences, amongst which is its age. Whereas the SNC group of meteorites dates to around 1.3 billion years ago, AH84001’s origins are 4.5 billions years old, thus making it one of the oldest bits of the solar system. Moreover, whereas AH84001 is similar to basalts and lherzolites, it cannot be classified as this type of rock. There is another substantial difference between AH84001 and the other SNC meteorites: within its grey core, fossilized organisms bearing the existence of extraterrestrial life in ancient Mars have been found.

(Martian microbes in AH84001)

Led by scientist David McKay and his team at the NASA Johnson Space Center, the dissection of AH84001 on Earth revealed a biomorphic worm like organism. 15 years have passed since McKay and his team made the announcement in 1996. Since then, McKay’s team have amassed further evidence for exobiological phenomena in AH84001, placing it in the Noachian epoch of Mar’s geological history, during which time Mars was covered in vast oceans, thus generating the necessary conditions for life.

Until recently, the study of biopoesis has centred on the idea that organic life may have been sparked by electrical lightning or otherwise formed in the sea, thus producing elementary lifeforms such as the prokaryotes. The earliest form of life on Earth occurred 3.5 billion years ago, 1 billion years after the existence of AH84001. At that point, the Earth was devoid of predators, yet evolution was already in process. The critical question in the discovery of AH84001 is not the question of life on Mars, but whether or not that life forms a xenobiological legacy on Earth. A gulf of space separates us from Martian life. Yet on a molecular level, Martian life is already with us, or rather, in us.

(A comparative photo of Earth and Mars taken by the Mars Exploration Rover)

We would like to have a dialogue with the Martian fossils found in the Antarctica in the winter of 1984. There, we would inquire about the intergalactic exchange of life between each planet. We recognise that if a link is established between Martian and Earth organisms, then our understanding of genuine extraterrestrial life is curtailed. For what we would find in AH84001 is not the genesis of life from Mars, but the prenatal evidence of life on Earth. On this discovery, our cosmic negation in the universe would be accented while our discovery of the fossilised remains of Martian ghosts would be a mutual discovery of our contorted reflection gazing back at us from beyond the sanguine atmosphere of the planet Earth.

Nightmare at 20,000 Feet

2011-10-05T08:50:00.009Z

"It's claustrophobia. they'd rather fall to the ground, than stay abroad!"

Oddly, I was not aware of The Twilight Zone episode, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," when I wrote a post on flying anxiety and the supernatural a couple of weeks ago. Having encountered it by chance, I cannot resist posting the episode by way of an addendum to the previous post. As with so much of The Twilight Zone, the articulation of an uncanny aesthetic is perfect, with the division between imagination and reality blurred in the mania of anxiety. In "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," the uncanny centres on an unnatural horror, which in turn plays on the submission of control that comes with flying and the sense that once aboard, anything is possible.

There are two versions of the episode available. One from the original 1963 series with William Shatner and another version that materialised in the 1983 film with John Lithgow in the lead role. If the earlier version is somewhat kitsch in its depiction of the "thing on the wing," then it counteracts that with Shatner's understated portrayal of nervous anxiety. Lithgow, on the other hand, accents the sheer visceral horror and Lovecraftian madness of the anxious flyer. They are both compelling in their own right, and thus worthy of a comparative viewing. For your viewing pleasure, I have uploaded each version. Enjoy.

"The Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" - 1963 Version

"The Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" - 1983 Version

Trace Fossils

2011-09-27T16:07:00.006Z

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

2011-09-17T12:17:00.005Z

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.

The Creature of Another Species

2011-08-29T12:56:00.002Z

[Cézanne, "Le Lac d’Annecy." 1896]

We live in the midst of man-made objects, among tools, in houses, streets, cities, and most of the time we see them only through the human actions which put them to use. We become used to thinking that all of this exists necessarily and unshakably. Cézanne’s painting suspends these habits of thought and reveals the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself. This is why Cézanne’s people are strange, as if viewed by a creature of another species. Nature itself is stripped of the attributes which make it ready for animistic communions: there is no wind in the landscape, no movement on the Lac d’Annecy; the frozen objects hesitate at the beginning of the world. It is an unfamiliar world in which one is uncomfortable and which forbids all human effusiveness.
(Merleau-Ponty, Cezanne’s Silence).

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it.
(H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu).

Philosophies of Nostalgia

2011-08-21T16:24:00.006Z

[Max Klinger, "Adam." 1880]

Philosophy’s treatment of nostalgia remains curiously overlooked. To my mind, there have been only three substantial papers dealing with the topic head on. First, we have Edward Casey’s 1987 article “The World of Nostalgia” in what used to be called Man and World but now comes under the more prosaic title Continental Philosophy Review. Before this, James Hart wrote an exemplary paper in 1973, also in Man and World, “Toward a Phenomenology of Nostalgia.” More recently, Steven Crowell contributed to the topic in his “Spectral History: Narrative, Nostalgia, and the Time of the I,” published in 1999 in Research in Phenomenology. We can now add to these three papers Jeff Malpas’s recent treatment of the topic, “Philosophy’s Nostalgia,” to be found in Contributions To Phenomenology (thanks to AnySpaceWhatever for providing access to the Malpas article).

Maplas’s paper is important in several respects. One, he takes issue the common presentation of nostalgia as a pernicious term, especially as it is employed with respect to a philosophical position. Two, he takes issue with the temporal-centric perspective of nostalgia, as it is given in the mood of nostalgia (and includes my earlier work [The Aesthetics of Decay] in this trend).

Crucial to his argument is the centrality of the home in the nostalgic’s worldview, as he writes: “Understood precisely as a pain associated with desire for home – and as home is neither a space nor a time, but a place that holds a space and time within it – so nostalgia can never be understood as spatial or temporal alone” (88). Against his position, “‘nostalgia’ has come instead to signify a condition usually taken to involve, first and foremost, temporal dislocation” (Ibid.). This temporal dislocation is set in a cultural and historical context, in which the “cure” for nostalgia was originally thought of as simply returning to the homeland. Post-Freud, (and to some extent, post-Kant), this spatial emphasis has been supplanted with a concern with lost time. All of which is easily demonstrated by returning to a place from one’s past. The accompanying sense of derealization is due to breakage in the temporality of self rather than in the materiality of place.

This, I realise, is to some extent a false division, and Malpas is largely correct to assign “place” as that which binds space and time. I agree. But nevertheless, it seems to me that one can quite easily accent certain structural and affective dimensions of the mood of nostalgia over other aspects. That indeed, seems the point Malpas makes in the following comment: “Although Dylan Trigg argues that nostalgia and homesickness are essentially temporal in character (Trigg 2006: 54–55). The apparent shift here is presumably, on this account, a shift only in how nostalgia and homesickness are viewed, and not a shift in the character of nostalgia as such” (Ibid). If there is a shift in view, then it is perhaps a question of placing onus on the spatial or temporal aspects of the character of nostalgia itself. Along with home, nostalgia is a consolidation of spatio-temporal aspects of the lifeworld. Time is not, after, at the expensive of place.

Malpas also remarks notably on the affective emphasis of nostalgia, arguing that the history of nostalgia has moved from “suffering and estrangement” to “familiarity and comfort” (Ibid.). For him, the polemical stance against nostalgia is rooted in this over emphasis on nostalgia as a mode of retreat from the world, characterised by the absence of critical thinking and a reactionary response to change. In this way, nostalgia takes place against a broader backdrop of insecurity and instability. Philosophically, as Malpas argues, Heidegger is often presented as the central figure in this line of thought. In a footnote, Malpas writes:

Dylan Trigg is especially critical of what he terms “Heidegger’s spatial-centrism” (Trigg 2006: xvi), claiming that “Heidegger’s musings on homelessness persistently reference the geometrical spatial field, and so revert to the pre-reflective diagnosis of nostalgia as geographical displacement, and that alone. His failure to grasp homesickness in temporal terms is especially striking given the attention time receives in Being and Time. The omission is further heightened, since temporality is at the structural core of nostalgia” (Trigg 2006: 54), although Trigg’s criticisms sit rather oddly with some of his discussion of Heidegger elsewhere in the book, especially in chapter 15, 199–207, where the issue of ‘spatial-centrism’ disappears, and there is instead a stronger appreciation (or so it seems) of the centrality of place in Heidegger’s account. (91).

I suspect Malpas is right about the inconsistency in my treatment of Heidegger (I would certainly never devalue him as a philosopher of place. My criticism was pointed at the notion of place as a static and stabilizing category in his account, for example, of dwelling). I think the bigger worry is whether or not Heidegger is emblematic of philosophical inquiry as a mode of recovering the past or a mood confronting loss. Elsewhere in the paper, Malpas points to a more spectral reading of Heidegger: “In Heideggerian terms, this means that the remembrance of being always has the character of nostalgia in that it remains a return that is never completed, but is essentially disjoint, spectral even. The homecoming that Heidegger so often evokes is thus a homecoming that is never completed, and that cannot be so completed. It is a homecoming that returns us to a questionability that is at the very heart of our being-in-the-world” (98-99). I am sympathetic to Malpas’s reading of Heidegger, and it seems to me that a broader characterization of the role of estrangement in Heidegger’s thinking on materiality and memory would be of benefit (Robert Mugerauer may have already achieved that with his recent book on the topic).

Malpas’s other contribution to this debate is to emphasis a point made in Casey’s 1987 book on remembering: that memory always involve an appeal to the worldhood of place, Malpas writes: “Since nostalgia is itself a certain form of autobiographical memory – or, at least, incorporates autobiographical memory within it – so nostalgia takes the form of a remembrance of, and a longing for, a certain being-in-place that is also, of course, a certain being-at home” (94). I would be interested to hear more on Malpas’s idea of home more broadly. Is home reducible to place, or is it a relational way of being-in-the-world or to one’s own self? Inversely, is the absence of home understandable as a discontinuity between self and world?

Re-engaging with my own treatment of nostalgia from reminds me that while I agree with the basic stance outlined in The Aesthetics of Decay, the account is lacking in several respects. Above all else, nothing is done with the body of nostalgia (Having said that, around the time of the book’s publication, I was working on the rough basis of a more bodily account of nostalgia in the idea of spatial morphology). In The Memory of Place, a far more extensive and body centred account of nostalgia is given, in both its spatial and temporal forms. There, the notion of spatial (and bodily) morphology forms a central theme. Morphology simply refers to the way the world is augmented in order to retain the unity of the I - it thus forms an extension of Merleau-Ponty's "intentional arc." My argument in The Memory of Place is that in the nostalgic world, this augmentation is pathologised to the extent that two different worlds are engineered simultaneously. The result of this is a doubling of experience - spatial, temporal, and fundamentally, corporeally. Between space and time, it is the body, especially when experienced through the uncanny, the spectral, and in the figure of the doppelgänger, that acts as the mediator and the manifestation of the past in both its presence and absence.

(For an indication of how this train of thought is developed, see my paper, “The Body of a Ghost.”)

The Birth of the Mesozoic Era

2011-08-17T13:54:00.007Z

[Image courtesy of Florian Gerbaud]

“What lost knowledge could have brought pictures of the Palaeozoic or Mesozoic landscape into these primitive fables, I could not even guess; but the pictures had been there.” (Lovecraft, Shadow Out of Time)

“Man came silently into the world.” (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man)

“Thickness of the past, Grundbestand of the real body.” (Merleau-Ponty, Nature)

Our recent work into the archaeology of the human body led to the discovery of a series of fossils contained mostly in the torso and head of the body. Varying in weight and size, our excavation of the body, all carried out under the strictest zoological, archaeological, and ethnographic supervision, established the evolutionary role these fossils played in shaping human life on the planet earth. It was only later—indeed, much later—that we established that these fossils were termed “organs” and that they were required for the homeostatic operation of life.

Thanks to the late work of Merleau-Ponty, we are now able to provisionally conceptualise this work. We can achieve this by placing the existence of the human body in relation to the fossils, of which the former is composed. “The body-object,” so writes Merleau-Ponty in his lectures on nature, “is only a trace—Trace in the mechanical sense: present substitute of a past that no longer is—the trace for us is more than the present effect of the past. It is a survival of the past, an enjambment” (276). Merleau-Ponty inverts the materiality of the body, revealing to us its collision of absence and prehistory in the flesh that has outlasted the passing of time. The body as a substitute, a token gesture for a history that cannot be fathomed by any finite thing.

Deep time has assailed us, and we are placed now in Mesozoic era. It is an era in which we witness the birth of the primate: “The trace and the fossil: ammonite” (Ibid.). This is the alternative history of the human body, a history that is told from dark spaces inaccessible to the flesh alone. For in the flesh, we confront only that which “is no longer there but it is almost there; we have the negative of it” (Ibid). Merleau-Ponty thus assigns a ghostly presence to the still forming, still living human body. Doing so, he breaks the sovereignty of the body as the rational subject. “Humanity” is an outgrowth of an indifferent libido, which, were it not manifest in this bipedal entity we have termed the “human body,” then might just as easily find expression in the rodent faced aye-aye of Madagascar.

But the human body has evolved, and until now has carefully resisted extinction from the known plant we inhabit. What does the body want from this world? Or rather: what does the earth want from this human body? The question must be posed, not at the particular body that actually has life in the phenomenal realm. Of that body, we know only of a transient movement, the value of which is illuminated in the glare of what Merleau-Ponty terms “the genesis of a wake” (277). The invocation of birth as a continuity of a prehistory is where the future of the body lies. What we see in the genesis of life on earth is not the development of one form over another, but the folding back into a deep history that is only disclosed in the fleeting moments where a thing comes into being, before receding into the darkness of living time once again. In that birth, the Mesozoic Era lives alongside the contemporary world. Here, a symbiotic body is established, in which prehistoric alien life gazes tentatively at the fossils implanted in the human torso and head, each indirectly recognising one another in their mutual familiarity and strangeness.

The Return of the New Flesh

2011-08-03T16:47:00.005Z

Readers might be interested to know that the new issue of Film-Philosophy is now available here. Amidst a content of interesting looking papers, you will find my treatment of Cronenberg’s The Fly, read through the prism of Merleau-Ponty’s account of the phantom limb. The embryonic germs of what I (rather hyperbolically) call “onto-necrology” are conceived in this paper. It is an idea I develop in “The Memory of Place” as a phenomenological rejoinder to the intellectual pollution caused by the hauntology industry. In a word, the idea concerns putting the body back in the ghost and likewise putting the ghost back in the body. I hope you enjoy.

The Return of the New Flesh: Body Memory in David Cronenberg and Merleau-Ponty

From the “psychoplasmic” offspring in The Brood (1979) to the tattooed encodings in Eastern Promises (2007), David Cronenberg presents a compelling vision of embodiment, which challenges traditional accounts of personal identity and obliges us to ask how human beings persist through different times, places, and bodily states while retaining their sameness. Traditionally, the response to this question has emphasised the importance of cognitive memory in securing the continuity of consciousness. But what has been underplayed in this debate is the question of how the body can both reinforce and disrupt the grounds for our personal identity. Accordingly, by turning the notoriously “body conscious” work of Cronenberg, especially his seminal The Fly (1986), I intend to pursue the relation between identity and embodiment in the following way.

First, by augmenting John Locke’s account of personal identity with a specific appeal to the body, I will explore how Cronenberg’s treatment of embodiment as a site of independent experience challenges the idea we have that cognitive memory is the guarantor of personal identity. Cronenberg’s treatment of the “New Flesh” posits an account of the body that undermines the Cartesian and Lockean account of personal identity as being centred on the mind. In its place, I will argue that Cronenberg shows us how the body establishes a personality independently of the mind.

Second, through focusing explicitly on body memory, I will explore how we, as embodied subjects, relate to our bodies in a Cronenbergian world. Approaching this relation between memory and embodiment via the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, I will argue that memory is at the heart of Cronenberg’s vision of body horror. I will conclude by suggesting that far from generating unity, Cronenberg’s vision of embodiment and identity is diseased (often literally) by a memory that cannot be assimilated by cognition. The result of this failure to assimilate body memory, is that memory itself occupies the role of the monster within.

Organic Repression

2011-07-21T16:28:00.000Z

Our work is archaeological, and our body is “more ancient than thought.” There is a human body, and it has been forced to survive for tens of millions of years on the planet Earth. The survival has not only been a case of physical persistence through different continents, time-zones, and landscapes: it has also been an issue of dwelling alongside a prehistoric body, which is both human and inhuman concurrently. How has (in)human life achieved this? The key has been in the term, “organic repression.” The phrase binds the late work of Freud with the early work of Merleau-Ponty. It appears several times in Civilization and its Discontents and at least once in Phenomenology of Perception. The term is critical for both thinkers. Talking of the body’s refusal to accept mutilation, Merleau-Ponty speaks of “an organic repression” (89). By it, he refers to the body’s ability to augment its structure to the external environment, to deny what the world has inflicted upon the body. In turn, this power to repress the world is used against the body itself. Only now, it is a body that is no longer recognisable as mine. Several pages later, the insight comes: “These moments can be no more than moments, and for most of the time personal existence represses the organism to its existential self, or itself to the organism” (97). Here, phenomenology becomes not only a hermeneutics of the body, but also an archaeology of the body. The body is transformed from a site of experience to an archaeological dig site, out of which “another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here” is excavated (296).

I am no longer Mallarmé

2011-07-21T14:54:00.004Z

I have seen the frost that coats the human body. Its texture is smooth and changes in the light. Over time, the frost develops cracks and falls to the earth, in the process revealing the inhumanity of the body we grow inadvertently attached to. In a letter, I once read how the body can decompose and yet remain present, leaving the residue of a ghost in its wake: “I am now depersonalized; I am no longer Mallarmé, but simply a means whereby the spiritual universe can become visible and can develop through what was once me.” From this letter, I take seriously the notion of the human body as an impersonal manifestation of a prehistoric, blind force, which could at any time revert to such a primordial state, reducing the body to a channelling device for another time and place.

Fossilized Duration

2011-07-21T14:48:00.002Z

The finest specimens of fossilized duration concretized as a result of long sojourn, are to be found in and through space.

(Gaston Bachelard)

The Language of Hauntings

2011-07-15T13:39:00.004Z

(Léon Spilliaert, "Self-portrait in front of a mirror." 1908)

The unconscious is that chapter of my history that is marked by a blank or occupied by a falsehood: it is the censored chapter. But the truth can be rediscovered; usually it has already been written down elsewhere. In monuments: this is my body. That is to say, the hysterical nucleus of the neurosis in which the hysterical symptom reveals the structure of a language, and is deciphered like an inscription which, once recovered, can without serious loss be destroyed.
(Lacan Ecrits. p.38).

How do you know the first thing about the meaning of a facial expression inherently inhuman?

(John Campbell, Who Goes There? p. 45).

Leon Spilliaert is haunted by his own reflection. In a self-portrait, his gaze can be seen staring back to the viewer through a series of mirrors. Leon Spilliaert’s mouth is open and his eyes appear to have been replaced with glassy orbs slotted in the flesh of his face. Through those eyes, the viewer cannot be sure if there is indeed a subject — Leon Spilliaert —peering from beyond the wall of the face. The face is frozen and mute; the pitiful expression of the mouth, less a scream of agony and more a final gasp gently collapsing inwards. Where Leon Spilliaert’s teeth once existed, a dark opening now appears, the flesh of the upper and lower lip held in place through the bones of the upper cheeks. The face is hollow and sullen, as if held in some glacial landscape. The artist confronts himself, and what he sees is already dead. In the mirror, Leon Spilliaert encounters his ghost, prematurely present in the world of the living. The ghost, ostensibly thought of as inhabiting the realm of the dead (if not the undead), has come too soon, thus rendering the still living Leon Spilliaert a specter of his own corporeality.

How can we begin to understand the inflections and gestures of the human body? How can we begin to “read” the haunted face of Leon Spilliaert? The question hints at the problematic relation between speech, thought, and gesture. Leon Spilliaert has a face, and it is a face that comes to us as a particular style of being. How do we understand this face? How does it allow itself to be understandable? Who gives the face its understanding—the viewer or the painter? And finally, what is expressed in this face: a disclosure of the facticity of being haunted, or, a symptom that cannot be withstood by Spilliaert, the self-conscious subject?

By making recourse to Merleau-Ponty’s account of bodily expression, two initial options can be discerned. One, we can rely on a language of representation that enables us to place Spilliaert’s gestures in a conventional context. If this is the case, then the defining gestures of his face—the hollow eyes, the gawping mouth, and the skeletal bone structure—would have a meaning independent of the face itself. Transplant those gestures to another context and their meaning is retained. As Merleau-Ponty has it in his criticism of the empiricist’s account of speech and thought: “There is no speaker, there is a flow of words set in motion independently of any intention to speak” (MP 2006, 203). If we take the gestures of his face as structurally parallel to speech, then we are forced to view bodily gestures in third-person terms: the lived relation between the specificity of Spilliaert and the corporeality of his gestures is lost.

The second way to think how Spilliaert’s body can be understood is through internalizing its meaning. Here, consciousness would confer upon those gestures their meaning and significance. From such a view, Spilliaert’s thought forms in advance of his face, and his face only gains the significance it does through the fact of having a “state of mind” that gives the body its form (205). For Merleau-Ponty, both of these accounts fall short, and his refutation assumes a simple form: “The word has a meaning” (206).

The word has a meaning. With this claim, Merleau-Ponty is in a position to intertwine thought and speech into a singular entity. Does speech presuppose thought? For Merleau-Ponty, the question has no bearings, as there is no causal relation between thought and speech. Instead, he argues that meaning requires expression. Phrased another way, the teleological structure of thought is orientated around some form of articulation. Speech is not the afterthought of thought: it is thought itself in the act of thinking.

To the body of Spilliaert, to the body of those who are haunted, and to symptoms that have no rational place within the scheme of the subject: when the body of the human turns to the mirror and finds another self gazing back, then the experience of surprise is only because the body is unable to think in advance of its expression. Indeed, part of the horror written into Spilliaert’s face is as much a horror of being haunted by the premature arrival of a ghost, as it is the horror that the ghost was there all along. How does this expression come into the world? Is there a silence into which a fortuitous circumstance — Spilliaert being placed between two mirrors in a particular room — allows the expression to take shape? Finally, is this gloomy environment simply the means by which the inner world of the haunted gains a voice?

Merleau-Ponty raises doubts over this inner silence, a silence that pre-exists expression. “In reality,” he writes, “this supposed silence is alive with words, this inner life is an inner language” (213). That human beings are able to enter into the world of Leon Spilliaert’s face is only possible because we too share in that world, a world that has its origins in a “primordial silence,” which renders meaning possible (214). The concrete unity between Spilliaert the haunted subject and the Spilliaert the haunted body attests to Merleau-Ponty’s conviction that bodily gestures are not a mode of recalling or representing an already existing thought, but are themselves the manner in which thought is giving life. This is what we see in the painting: Spilliaert creating a particular world through the discourse of language, a language that is interwoven with the ambiguity of being a bodily subject.

Darkspace

2011-07-14T10:12:00.003Z

In boundless space countless shining spheres, about each of which, and illuminated by its light, there revolve a dozen or so smaller ones, hot at the core and covered with a hard, cold crust, upon whose surface there have been generated from a moldy film, beings which live and know… This is what presents itself to us in experience as the truth, the real, the world.

Yet for a thinking being it is a precarious position to stand upon one of those numberless spheres moving freely in boundless space without knowing whence or whither, and to be only one of innumerable similar beings who throng and press and toil, ceaselessly and quickly arising and passing away in time, which has no beginning and no end; moreover, nothing permanent but matter alone and the recurrence of the same varied organic forms, by means of certain ways and channels which are there once and for all.
(Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation).

Agoraphobia and the Other

2011-06-24T15:23:00.004Z

Back from Berlin. The last time I was there, I was undergoing my viva defence in front of Ed Casey. This time, things were a little more relaxed, despite the routine insomnia that comes with homogeneous hotel rooms, two day meetings, and the metaphysical horror of airflight. Back in Paris, and now beginning work on the Film-Philosophy conference paper. In the interim, I've uploaded my Berlin paper to Academia.edu. It's a brief look at the role of the "trusted other" in the lifeworld of the agoraphobic person, very much in a draft stage, but might be of interest to some readers.

Agoraphobia as Homesickness

2011-06-06T19:18:00.003Z

The fear begins as soon as the houses leading to an open area increase their distance from him. ... A feeling of insecurity appears, as if he were no longer walking secure, and he perceives the cobble stones melting together. ... The condition improves by merely approaching houses again.
(Carl Westphal 1871).

Already in Westphal’s original description of agoraphobia, the critical issue is not the objective features of space—openness or closeness—but the relational distance to home. As Westphal’s patient leaves the confines of his zone of safety, so his body opens up to a different way of being. Now, movement is stifled and vertiginousness, the very materiality of the world suffering from a lack of reality. Into this abyssal unreality, open space becomes problematic, not because of the space, as such. But instead, because certain aspects of the environment serve to divide the home from the non-home. Crossing the square—the archetypal agoraphobic motif—the danger is not of the square itself, nor even of the public eyes that descend upon the agoraphobe. To be sure, all of these things contribute to the agoraphobe’s concern, but the kernel of his anxiety is the question of how he finds his way back in the world. The abysmal quality of the agoraphobic world centres on the pathological need to be orientated at all times, where only disorientation and distance are possible.

Of the relation between orientation and the uncanny, Freud writes: “The better oriented he was in the world around him, the less likely he would be to find the objects and occurrences in it uncanny” (Freud 2003, 125). For the body of the agoraphobe, orientation is only possible within a severely constricted world, around which the home is not only the centre of physical life, but also the centre of all that is real. No wonder, then, that outside the home, the agoraphobe feels his world turn unreal. In the high vaulted aisles of city streets and across the populated avenues that divide the space into atomised segments, the agoraphobe’s body loses its grip on the world. That there is such a world outside of his home, for him, is an affront to his ontological reality.

Far from “mere neurosis,” the sense of impending doom is entirely consistent with the affective energy he has implanted into a small spatial canvas on this planet, which he will term “home.” Only now, that home has become less the framework against which he projects himself into the world, and more the barrier that prohibits the world from entering him. The agoraphobe’s topophilia is equally topophilic. In his love and hate of place, what he is ultimately lacking is the resources to find home, not simply in the immediate place beyond his frontier of safety, but within the world itself.

To speak of “distance,” therefore, is to speak of an ontological homesickness. It is a homesickness, not only in the agoraphobe’s failure to dwell in place (as Kirsten Jacobson has it), but also a failure of being in place. At no point is the agoraphobe truly present, spatially or for that matter temporally. Even—especially—within the interior of his own home, he is paradoxically, the most distant from home. Why? Because home is a relational way of being-in-the-world, rather than an attachment to a specific site. In the place he knows as home, this relational imbalance is amplified. Seeking at all times to be swallowed by the materiality of the homeworld, he thus conceives of himself in terms of a subject with no agency, whose only salvation is the sickness he is able to nourish behind the borders of the closed home.

"The Daemon of Rain"

2011-06-06T10:50:00.004Z

“The daemon of rain is present in each drop which falls after the incantation, as the soul is present in each part of the body. Every ‘apparition’ (Erscheinung) is in this case an incarnation, and each entity is defined not so much in terms of ‘properties’ as of physiognomic characteristics.” (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 338)

"Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim"

2011-05-31T13:56:00.003Z

(Ordinary People, 1980)

"I am now in mid-life and I have not seen a well day since I was about twelve years of age. Before I experienced any of the symptoms of agoraphobia I recall that a strange affliction came over me, an affliction that seemed to baffle the country doctors who were consulted. I was taken suddenly with 'spells' which lasted about thirty minutes. During these attacks I was entirely conscious and rational. As I remember the affliction, a sort of chill came over me-not like an ordinary chill, but a sort of 'coldness' that produced a very unusual sensation, or perhaps, a lack of sensation would describe it more accurately.

Later, perhaps a year or so, I commenced having a dread of wide fields, especially when the fields consisted of pasture land and were level, with the grass cropped short like the grass on a well-kept lawn. I likewise commenced to dread high things, and especially to ascend anything high. I even had a fear of crowds of people, and later of wide streets and parks.

I have outgrown the fear of crowds largely, but an immense building or a high rocky bluff fills me with dread. However the architecture of the building has much to do with the sort of sensation produced. Ugly architecture greatly intensifies the fear.

It is not pain that I feel, but it seems to me that it is more than a dread. I am not nervous, as some people whom I know -I mean in the same way, but it certainly is a case of 'nerves.' Let me illustrate:- I enter a home and sit in an arm-chair chatting with my friend; I soon find myself gripping the arm of the chair with each hand. My toes curl in my shoes, and there is a sort of tenseness all over my muscles.

Usually I feel better in the evening than in the morning, partly because the darkness seems to have a quieting effect upon me. I love a snow storm a regular blizzard, and feel much less discomfort in going about the town or riding on a train on such days, probably because one's view is obstructed. In fact I welcome stormy days, strange to say, with a zest that is hard to appreciate; in short, some of the most stormy days of the hard winters of this region stand out as bright spots in my life. On such days I make it a point to be out and about the town.

When I think of the agony which I have experienced for many years I am astounded at the endurance of the human spirit. Let me illustrate:- I have such a dread of crossing a long bridge on foot that it would require more courage for me to walk to the part of my town situated across the river than it would to face a nest of Boche machine guns. And yet day after day, month after month, and year after year I have carried in my soul the dread of such an eventuality.

I see a man hobbling past my house on crutches, a cripple for life, and I actually envy him. At times I would gladly exchange places with the humblest day laborer who walks unafraid across the public square or saunters tranquilly over the viaduct on his way home after the day's work."

From "Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim" by "Vincent" (1919)

Far From Home

2011-05-17T20:21:00.002Z

Another life takes place; it is spread unevenly across the land. I experience the world move from place to place, with each movement in space anchored by the invisible boundaries binding me to a homeworld. I move through the world, crossing the terrain of different environments. At times, this anchor reaches a threshold, at which point the human body comports itself in the world differently. Suddenly, the body cease to belong to the world and instead experiences itself as a zero gravity plot of materiality with no discernable sense of orientation. To be far from home. What this does not mean is to be far from the nest, womb, or sanctuary. To be far from home one need not even travel beyond the home. The nocturnal murmuring of some homeward displacement begins in the very midst of an already established placement in the home. The home grips the body, and in return, the body opens itself up to the dense materiality structuring the walls, ceilings, and floorboards, all of which constitute the physical space termed “home.” The body is dizzy in the human home. A human subject must grip the walls of the home in order to move from one room to another. Another life takes place in the basement, still another in the dinning room. There is no reconciliation between these rooms; they are cast into an anonymous world with no relation between them. Frozen, the human body stands between a series of rooms, caught in a fractured limbo, and thus finding reprieve only in the ambiguous space that separates one room from another.

Announcing: The Memory of Place: a Phenomenology of the Uncanny

2011-05-13T16:35:00.004Z

I’m pleased to say that The Memory of Place is now available for pre-order for publication in January 2012 through Ohio University Press. The suitably desolate painting used as a cover image comes courtesy of Christopher Saunders. Expect further marketing posts in the months to follow. In the meantime, here's the book’s blurb and an endorsement from Edward Casey.

From the frozen landscapes of the Antarctic to the haunted houses of childhood, the memory of places we experience is fundamental to a sense of self. Drawing on influences as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and J. G. Ballard, The Memory of Place charts the memorial landscape that is written into the body and its experience of the world. Dylan Trigg’s The Memory of Place offers a lively and original intervention into contemporary debates within “place studies,” an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of philosophy, geography, architecture, urban design, and environmental studies. Through a series of provocative investigations, Trigg analyzes monuments in the representation of public memory; “transitional” contexts, such as airports and highway rest stops; and the “ruins” of both memory and place in sites such as Auschwitz. While developing these original analyses, Trigg engages in thoughtful and innovative ways with the philosophical and literary tradition, from Gaston Bachelard to Pierre Nora, H. P. Lovecraft to Martin Heidegger. Breathing a strange new life into phenomenology, The Memory of Place argues that the eerie disquiet of the uncanny is at the core of the remembering body, and thus of ourselves. The result is a compelling and novel rethinking of memory and place that should spark new conversations across the field of place studies.

Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University and widely recognized as the leading scholar on phenomenology of place, calls The Memory of Place “genuinely unique and a signal addition to phenomenological literature. It fills a significant gap, and it does so with eloquence and force.” He predicts that Trigg’s book will be “immediately recognized as a major original work in phenomenology.”

Embodying Neurosis

2011-05-04T11:59:00.000Z

Looking for one thing or another, I stumbled across a note from mid 2008:

This is how it will end one day, so I tell myself in the car park of Tesco’s. This is how it will end: listening to Peter Gabriel’s “San Jancinto” on infinite repeat while waiting for an egg sandwich. I hold the line. How many times have I sat in this car park? The history of this place stretches all the way back to an ex-girlfriend's plum and red 2CV, the gearstick of which you would have to pull toward your chest and turn in one fluid motion. The car had no radio, but I would often journey with a portable music player which sat below the dashboard.

Minutes later, I’m in the basement of a private medical centre. The radiologist is applying a cool gel to my body and pressing an ultrasound device against my chest. In the corner of my right eye, I see images of my internal organs flash up on the screen. The world of flesh has a platform. But I’m afraid to look. And so I feel the presence of this screen force itself against me, my own body televised as an alien organism, inspected by a consultant expert. “Cellular death,” the radiologist says within two seconds. I involuntarily grip his wrist. “Toxic damage.” The radiologist is explaining this landscape of damage, outlining the counters and speckled aspects of my interior life. I think back. I am recalling my childhood in Florida. 1992, Sanibel Island. During that time, I was attacked by a stingray, the poison launching itself into me with the power of …

As it turned out, I had suffered some kind of toxic damage to my liver, probably due to something innocuous as aspirin. Symptomatically, this reaction took the shape of extreme lethargy, intense migraines, and what I described at the time as “my hand going unconscious.” For a while, I could not leave my flat without feeling vertigo. Very frequently, I would have to hold on to a physical object, such as a railing or umbrella, in order to walk. When teaching, I would have to hold fast to a chair and stare into the distance to maintain balance. Part of this dizziness was no doubt a response to a series of physical symptoms that were mediated by a latent anxiety condition. After all, many people experience tiredness simply as a physical depletion of energy rather than a threat to their self. In my case, the vulnerability that comes with being ill carries with a pronounced sense of the world as both contingent, other, and nauseating.

Before long, I regarded the outside world as an anathema to health. Incorporating that dizziness into my bodily schema, the incipient germs of an agoraphobic relation to the outside were born long after the physical illness had subsided. Despite being discharged from the medics, my bodily relation to the world as a nauseating and nauseous place remained in place. I was anxious, but the threat was a phantom of my habits, and thus solidified a way of being-in-the-world that no longer aligned with the physical structure of my body. When I was unable to leave the confines of my street in 2009—let alone be somewhere as alien as a supermarket—without experiencing an apocalyptic sense of dread, then my body was comporting itself to a world that only had a validity in 2008. The various agoraphobic attacks that took place during that time—all compelled by the primordial urge to flee—were attuned to a no longer existing world, the threat my body faced a spectre of another time.

Today, the temporality of my body has been reconciled with the spatiality of the world: my body, through a series of interventions, has moved on. Afforded this distance, I reflect on this memory not by way of some affirmation of the body’s marvellous ability to reinvent itself. No, what interests me is the genesis of bodily neurosis: how, in particular, the habits we adopt when physically ill can in turn become constitutive of a broader way of being. (I should say that what I’m describing here is a very specific anxiety, phobic in structure and bodily in expression. Although this anxiety is exposed to a multiplicity of readings—not least an existential one—at its core, the issue is a behavioural one of how human bodies comport themselves in the world.) The curious thing about bodily practices and neurosis is hence that they are valid only when in a specific context. When ill, the body prepares itself to experience the world in a particular way. Once that illness has passed, that mode of embodiment is no longer needed, and if it persists, then there is a sense in which it can be considered “neurotic.”

This usage of neurotic is inspired in part by John Russon’s treatment in his excellent Human Experience. For Russon, a neurosis is structured by a burden to some “compulsion of familiar narratives that function in one’s life as crippling, in articulate moods in which one finds oneself launched into patterns of behaviour that stand at odds with the patterns one would other choose” (85). It is a venerable description, as it highlights the experience of one’s neurosis as having an agency of their own—a point that is rendered viscerally clear in the experience of phobic people who regard themselves as “possessed.” If a neurosis has an agency of its own, then whom does it belong to? Ruling out some kind of spiritual intervention, the “other” for whom my neurosis belongs is at the same time me. Only, it is me as a memorial entity, statically frozen in time. Speaking of a woman with an eating disorder, Russon writes: “Her behaviour enacts a memory—or rather, it is the memory—of who she is, but it is out of step with the self she has become. Her memory is a remembering of originary events…but it remembers them as static inasmuch as these strategies are no longer living” (87).

Is neurosis primarily a dialogue with oneself, then? Clearly not: the reduction of neurosis to a habit that has outstayed its welcome does not account for the communicative role bodily neurosis play in shaping our relation with others. After all, being ill or being neurotic can in many ways be existentially purposeful to an individual. This folds back to my question regarding a hermeneutics of agoraphobia – and in particular how we can understand what our bodies are communicating if the “I” is somehow absent? Agoraphobia is a manner of being-in-the-world—it is an appraisal of the world—that stands apart from the aetiology that established the condition. Russon writes: “The very nature of neurotic compulsions is to enact communicative gestures the significance of which stands at odds with their manifest self-presentation” (116). Russon’s account of neurosis as an “insincere” mode of communication points toward an explanation of how compulsions can be both instinctual and alien simultaneously. In its indirect mode of communication, the neurotic response to the world expresses a bodily relation that is ontologically prior to verbal communication, and thus embodies a truth that is, in its initial appearance, necessarily indecipherable.

An Agoraphobic Hermeneutics

2011-04-22T13:10:00.006Z

(Face to Face, 1976. Bergman)

In my previous post, I suggested that agoraphobic “symptoms” have an internal coherence to them if they are situated within the context of an agoraphobic mood. If this is the case, then why do those same sensations assume an uncanny appearance, as though possessed by an inhuman agency? The question points to the hermeneutics of phobia: how can we understand the context against which particular bodily sensations occur? Central to this question is the dissonance between cognitive and bodily experiences of the same environment. Let me return to Allen Shawn on the empty road. Standing at the frontier to the empty road, Allen Shawn’s body belies his rational appraisal of the situation, with physical reactions including “feeling my heart beat twice the normal rate, getting extremely warm and sweaty and feeling like discarding my coat and jacket, finding my vision growing dark and blurred, feeling my face grow cold, and my legs tremulous, weak, and then extraordinarily stiff” (117). The itinerary of bodily sensations should indicate that what is dreadful to the phobic’s experience is less the sensations themselves, but more their irrational placement in the circumstantial scheme of things. Despite being in the midst of the experience, the agoraphobe’s ability to understand the logic of the experience is undermined by the fact that the core of any phobic reaction takes place in the pre-reflective body, of which abstract thought has limited access.

To make sense of the mood of phobia, must we interpret a teleology working behind the scenes, and if so, does this mean making recourse to psychoanalysis? Ultimately, psychoanalysis is of little help in our understanding of the world of the agoraphobe. At stake is not the damaged psycho-biography of an individual’s history, but what Merleau-Ponty speaks of in relation to space as an “expression of the total life of the subject, the energy with which he tends towards a future through his body and his world” (330). Even if the agoraphobe is alienated from his bodily sensations, then those same sensations are nevertheless constitutive of his total being. The agoraphobe’s body is always already in the world long before the self-conscious “I” inhabits that same terrain.

How to interpret the language of the agoraphobe’s body if the “I” has disappeared? This question can be asked within the context of everyday embodiment. If I experience overwhelming lethargy each time I am obligated to meet a friend from my past, then there is nothing mechanical in this response. Lethargy is a physiological experience that carries with it an evaluative framework. Indeed, the accompanying sensations of tiredness and indifference are structured by an intentionality that is directed toward the old friend. If I experience a withdrawing of my body in the company of this person, then this is also a withdrawing of my world from this person. If this person attempts to rouse me from a state of indifference, then I experience this as a violation of a boundary that I have constructed in my bodily being. My body’s refusal to engage with this person is the means by which this relationship works in the first place. Thus, if I am walking or sitting with this person, then I will do so with certain restrictions and limitations, so as to avoid establishing a reciprocal space between us. At all times, the relationship is mediated by an asymmetry in our bodily comportments. In this way, the body is the principle manifestation for values in the inter-subjective/inter-corporeal world. The body is a sensing and thinking organ: in its flesh, values manifest themselves. Indeed, it is only through the body that the felt experience of value is possible.

The transparency underscoring this relation between value and embodiment is disarmed in the agoraphobic situation, given that the agoraphobe can rationally appraise an environment as being unthreatening and yet maintain disbelief that reason is absolute. The inclusion of the eponymous “and yet” points to the need to constantly revaluate what lies beneath the contingency of appearances. That there is such a hesitancy in the movement of the agoraphobe, as though possessed by some foreign body, reinforces not only a lack of trust in the materiality of the world, but also a lack of trust in the body. Because of this, the phobic response causes a rupture in the unity of selfhood, marking a dissent from the classical phenomenological subject as grounded in “one’s own body.” The language of the agoraphobic mood is ultimately unhomely, uncanny, ill at ease in the world of logic and reason. It is a language constituted by spectres and apparitions, a phantom language that alerts us to the shadows and drones that are ordinarily visible only at dark.

The Mood of Agoraphobia

2011-04-19T16:17:00.002Z

If Heidegger is right to think of mood as a given of experience that lies between being and world, then where does the body fit into this relation? Heidegger tends to speak of the affective character of mood in broadly immaterial terms, as though the body were a backdrop to the disclosure of the world. Indeed, when speaking about the “place” of mood, then Heidegger hints at this backdrop without naming it: “[Mood] comes neither from ‘without’ nor from ‘within,’ but rises from being-in-the-world as a mode of that being” (129). In other words, mood is neither solely the province of the psyche nor of the world. It is somewhere in-between, existing in a relational dynamic. The in-between status of mood invites the body to the foreground. Yet that invitation is never accepted in Heidegger.

In the case of mood’s that accent the materiality of the world, this omission of the body’s mood is all the more apparent. Thinking through the phenomenology of the agoraphobe’s experience of the environment, as I am presently doing on this hot Tuesday afternoon, the need to address the role of the body in shaping and affecting the experience of the world becomes an urgent issue. Why? Because the experience of agoraphobia presents us with a clear illustration of how the world can become augmented in accordance with the interpretive mood of the body’s being. The world becomes a phobic environment, with each discernable object transformed through the body’s prepersonal intentionality. Detailing the genesis of this agoraphobic world requires addressing the structure of the body’s moods.

In the memoirs of his multi-phobic history, composer Allen Shawn give an account of walking down an empty road: “I couldn’t be convinced," so he writes, “that I could continue to walk despite whatever symptoms I felt and that if I did so, I would in fact get to the end of the road and still be the person I was four-tenths of a mile back” (117). How is an innocuous environment interpreted in such a way so as to present a threat of total destruction? This is not a causal question of what lies “beyond” the mood of agoraphobia. Rather, it is a question of how this particular mode of being-in-the-world is opened up the agoraphobe—a world that is seemingly at odds with a rational assessment of how it is manifest: i.e., as non-threatening. The phobic dimension of this episode emerges from lack of tangible threat in the environment. The empty road comes alive, and yet there is no agency animating it. The body of the phobic falters at some invisible threshold, like a “horse who refuses to walk over a rotten bridge” (117). Where does the threat exist: in a fault in perception or in a perception of something that is ordinarily silent?

Merleau-Ponty gives us a clue: “The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to be intervolved with a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to them” (94). As the vehicle of our being-in-the-world, the body is the material reality of our values. At no point is the body an empty, homogenous vessel deprived of an affective and interpretive structure. In its instincts, habits, and desires, the body’s being only has a reality in relation to the world. And the same is true in reverse: the materiality of the world—its particular affective tone—is only animated in light of the body. Each aspect gives the other their life, and this life is given context by the body’s mood.

The mistake in approaching phobic responses to the world is to treat the phobia as a deviation or a rupture from the self, as though the “symptoms” were a mechanical response to the world, and thus somehow alien. Turning back to Shawn’s account of walking down an empty road, then what we find is that a particular localised part of the body—in this case, the legs—becomes the focal point of an existential struggle: “I couldn’t seem to get past the point at which I would be closer to the destination than to the point of origin …. I was convinced that when I reached the midpoint, my legs would not move at all and that I would be trapped in place there. I had a vivid picture of myself standing at the centre of emptiness, screaming” (118-119). This focused intentionality—what Merleau-Ponty calls “pain-infested space”—is only possible against a larger backdrop, of which mood is the foundation (107). Mood is the context in which the phobic’s bodily sensations are able to take place, and those sensations spring from the pervasive grip the mood has upon lived experience.

Lumen

2011-03-22T18:22:00.000Z

(Image by Daniel Gustav Cramer)

Readers may be interested in a new journal that has just appeared, Lumen (edited by Edwin Mak & Matthew Flanagan). The first issue is dedicated to the theme of forests and, in addition to some fascinating content, is beautifully designed. Among other papers, there is an article by me on Herzog, Merleau-Ponty, and the flesh of the forest.

Anxiety as Atavism

2011-03-01T10:57:00.005Z

“You made it real, you can make it unreal.”
(Altered States, 1980)

If Freud is right—and I think he is—to claim that we never truly rationalise our anxiety over supernatural entities, such that despite the “rationality” of thought, the “old [beliefs] still live on in us,” then what can be said about anxiety as an expression of the body’s refusal to accommodate rationality? From an evolutionary perspective, anxiety has a legacy attached to it that has remained untouched since the Stone Age. Because the structure of anxiety has remained intact since primate hunters were roaming the planes of Africa tens of thousands of years ago, its persistence through time is literally ill-at-home in the world.

Of course, from an existentialist view, anxiety retains an ethical value and its philosophical significance cannot be overstated. But this ethical dimension is really an afterthought to the experience of anxiety itself. The biology of the human body does not seek a way to redeem itself from an inauthentic mode of being-toward-death. Anxiety is there all along: it occupies a history “more ancient than thought.”

In its history of finding a home for anxiety, phenomenology may have been misguided. After all, what phenomenology presupposes in its treatment of anxiety is that contains a teleology peculiar to human beings of a particular era. For Kierkegaard, anxiety’s calling was faith; for Heidegger, it was authenticity; for Sartre, it was freedom. In each case, anxiety is being summoned in a specifically personal fashion, as though anxiety can lead an individual from a nadir in their life to a state of redemption. In each case, philosophy seeks to justify the ethical existence of anxiety, and thus confer upon it a rational teleology.

Yet if the distance between the modern era and the Stone Age is, considered in evolutionary terms, minute, then would it be possible to plot the moment at which anxiety became less concerned with the actions of our ancestors hunting in the planes of Africa and more with modern human beings confronted with post-industrial societies? To establish a division whereupon anxiety gains a new teleology at odds with its history would be arbitrary and absurd. After all, given that human beings have spent 99.5% of their time as hunter-gathers, it is hardly surprising that much of the body’s genetic structure fails to reconcile with the world in which we accidently find ourselves.

To this end, it seems to me that the anxious body carries with it an atavistic quality to it that is played out in the materiality of the living world. I would even go so far to suggest that the body’s anxiety in the world can be deciphered as transmissions of a prehistoric era, which, through accident and persistence, have survived in the phobic personality. This, of course, is a speculative thought, but there is some empirical research that backs it up (cf. R. Nesse. “An Evolutionary Perspective on Panic Disorder and Agoraphobia,” Ethology and Sociobiology, 73-83, 1987). Freezing with impending doom in the supermarket aisle, crossing a bridge with extreme vertigo, feeling a violent urge to flee from an office block, and experiencing a loss of directional clarity while being on public transport may appear emblematically banal as “symptoms” of modernity, but the structure is prehistoric rather than an idiosyncrasy of personal “neurosis,” and that alone.

Indeed, it would not be farfetched to construct a series of corresponding parallels between contemporary phobia and the threats faced by hunter-gathers in Stone Age, with each interwoven by genetic memory. If the agoraphobic anxiety concerning getting from one place to another and then back again lacks logic, then this is only because we are forgetting that for our ancestors being lost in-between places would have meant certain death. Similarly, if the phobic body feels the world closes in with imminent darkness while on a train from one city to another, then this is only because we are forgetting that the body’s primal mode of orientation is with respect to light and the earth’s magnetic field. For this reason, the compulsion to resist fleeing from such surroundings, banal as they may be, would literally be going against nature. The body’s deep history is immune to the logic of natural reason.

From the wilderness of prehistoric Africa to the aisles of urban supermarkets, the human’s "phylogenetically endowed" (Freud) anxieties materializes as remnants of a lost world. All that has (largely) changed from the Stone Age is the objective absence of danger: what remains in place is the body’s attunement to threat, its commitment to fight or flight in the face of a threat that is no longer there. Heidegger was right on one thing, therefore: anxiety discloses the fact that not-being-at-home is primordial. Only his neglect of the body led his reason astray. The anxious body is the principle manifestation of a body that is responsive to a phantom world, stored deep in the anonymous structure of its genetic history and thus resistant to cultural and sociological changes, yet never immediately accessible to the experiencing self. For the phobic, anxiety is an outgrowth of a response that no longer serves any strict purpose. To phrase phobia as a “pathology,” therefore, is patently absurd: it is not that the experience of phobia or panic is somehow “irrational” or “illegitimate.” Rather, if “healthy” anxiety corresponds to tangible threat, then what is “atypical” about phobic anxiety is that it corresponds to a no longer existing world. This is the uncanniness of the uncanny body: uncanny because the experience of anxiety is both of the body but simultaneously other than the body.

After Disappearing

2011-02-18T14:23:00.003Z

Some further sketches on the issue of disappearances. Above all, the question that concerns me is whether phenomenology can speak of the experience of disappearing. In the language of ruins, memories, and ghosts, much can be said about the resonance of things that are no longer present. Indeed, phenomenology’s strength is its ability to discern the “resolutely silent other” lurking within natural world (Merleau-Ponty). This requires an attention to what remains after things in the phenomenal world have either been destroyed or modified such that they are no longer recognizable as being the same. In a word, disappearing tacitly involves a theory of identity, be it personal or otherwise. To think in terms of the experience of the bodily self as disappearing, however, is a different task, as it requires a strange variant of phenomenology to enter the scene. Strange because: phenomenology must simultaneously concern the lived experience of the body while at the same time attending to the absence of that experience.

Here, Heidegger acts an intermediary. What appears after the self experiences its self as disappearing? Heidegger poses the question in relation to anxiety: “Anxiety reveals the nothing.” And the revelation of the nothing is only possible because the “I” has slipped away from itself, leaving the “pure Da-sein” of the “one” in a mode of unhomely persistence (I am compressing the details for the sake of brevity…) Unfortunately, Heidegger does not tell us what becomes of the (still) living body as the “I” slips, instead: “Beings as a whole become superfluous.” But the gaps in his sketch can be augmented with an appeal to Sartre’s concept of nausea.

Without wishing to conflate anxiety with nausea, it nonetheless seems to me that each bodily mood share two basic invariant traits. Each of them offering an insight into the experience of disappearing. One, in nausea and anxiety, the materiality of the world, including the body, loses its assurance as being both unequivocally “real” and thus “mine.” Two, because of this unreality, boundaries demarcating the body from other things becomes ambiguous, the limits of the flesh now exposed to a porous blurring.

Take the first point. How can the materiality of the body lose its status as being “real”? How, that is, can I experience my body as anything less than real? Taken from a phenomenological angle, the question has a peculiarity to it, given that the lived body is thought of as being the “absolute here” of spatiality. Thus in Merleau-Ponty, nausea becomes less a matter of the dissolution of the self and more a “vital experience…of our contingency” (296). Even in this “horror,” the bodily subject remains intact. The difference between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre’s account of nausea hinges upon the broader difference in their philosophies of the body.

Against Merleau-Ponty, Sartre will put forward a view of the body that accents its radical contingency and vulnerability (“Anything can happen, anything”). If Merleau-Ponty characterises the relation between body and world in organic terms, then in Sartre—at least the Sartre of 1938— this relation is subject to massive disruption, in which the “resolutely silent other” becomes trapped in a “lunar world.” In the mirror, Antoine Roquentin recognizes his face only in terms of the parts it is composed from. Rather than being a unified face, it is “a geological embossed map.” The face seen is through a “dumb, organic sense.” The increasing detachment of the body in Nausea is reflective of a fundamental lack of trust in the materiality of the body. (It is notable that in Being and Nothingness, Sartre will write about the experience of vertigo in the following way:

Vertigo is anguish to the extent that I am afraid not of falling over the precipice, but of throwing myself over. A situation provokes fear if there is a possibility of my life being changed from without; my being provokes anguish to the extent that I distrust myself and my own reactions in that situation.

Here, there is no anonymous body working behind the scenes, as there is in Merleau-Ponty, to bring the human body back from the abyss. Instead, the materiality coincides with its reality/unreality. As such, entering into a pathological relationship with the body means subjecting selfhood to continuous doubt. It is as though the simple fact of having a body is not enough to assure the experience of being embodied. Something remains unresolved in the body of Antoine Roquentin, an excess of doubt that remains after the lived body has partially disappeared, a “plenum that man cannot leave behind.”

The second point. If the materiality of the body undergoes a loss of reality in the face of nausea, then the bodily boundaries experienced from the inside-out simultaneously suffers a parallel erosion. Time and again, the experience of nausea returns us to the image of things in their hostility encroaching upon the porousness of the nauseated self. Losing the vital genesis needed to insulate the body from things in the world, those same things become possessed with a subjectivity, in which “one’s own body” becomes a voided space, Sartre: “The nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me...I am the one who is within it.” The sense of the body as becoming undifferentiated—at one with the walls—is at the heart of nausea’s disturbing affectivity: it is a mood, from which the subject is irreversibly altered having undergone it.

It is for these two reasons that nausea is literally brutalizing. (Incidentally, beyond the alchemical relation between prima materia and chaos, there is surely some kind of Heideggerian path that can be taken up here involving an etymological analysis of brutal and raw matter. On this point, Michael Brogan’s analysis of Sartre and Levinas on brute existence is especially good. He also reminds me of the significant role Levinas on insomnia plays in this discussion of disappearances and brute existence). What is there after the disappearance? In a passage I don’t immediately have access to (travelling) Levinas writes of the experience of putting a shell to one’s ear only to hear “rumbling” from within. An emptiness, which although immanent to the shell, has now become realized. (In this way, both Sartre and Levinas are fundamentally right to treat anxiety as a disclosure rather than, in the Freudian treatment, a closure of something behind anxiety). This shadow of an undifferentiated world in the midst of embodiment repeats itself in the “dull and inescapable nausea [that] perpetually reveals my body to my consciousness” of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Here, anxiety/nausea as the philosophical mood par excellence is justified. In the nauseated body, the revelatory moment of being attests to a dynamic of appearance and dis-appearing. As the material body reveals itself, so the singularity of the subject disappears. From a discrete entity in space and time, the subject becomes an anonymous constituent of that metaphysical framework.

To Disappear

2011-01-27T13:45:00.003Z

Long after the human body expires, as its heart ceases to beat, its lungs atrophy with the lack of air, and its eyes grow pale with the absence of life—long after this end of life, the body goes on. In the months and years that follow the death of a human being, the life of the body flourishes in the soil and dust where its remains now thrive. Over worm inhabited fields and shipwrecked lined seabeds, human bodies begin again, their cosmological orientation now in reverse.

Only the body remains. This strange expression hints at the problem central to a phenomenology of disappearances: with it, a tacit criteria is established, in which phenomenal things can become more apparent than others. The phenomenal plane suffers damage when a human being dies, their “sprit” leaves the flesh of the body leaving an empty shell in the place where life once stood. Nothing remains. But to think of disappearing phenomena in this way means conferring an ethical value upon the movement of disappearances. There are remains that outlive things of the world, and their importance cannot be overlooked.

If the human being dies, leaving only the body in its place, then the same is true in reverse: sometimes, the body remains in place while the self disappears. Here, there is a body, fully responsive to the stimulus of the world, indeed hyper alert to its dangers. Beyond the walls of the eyes, however, there is an uncertainty as to what lurks within. The self retreats from the world, as the body blindly persists in the darkness, its organs and internal structure maintaining homeostatic balance. Only now, at the service of a self whose identity is not entirely clear.

“There is someone in this room.”

2011-01-17T11:51:00.005Z

“It is the Other’s being-there; i.e., that concrete, historical event which we can express by the words, ‘There is someone in this room.’”

(Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 277).

Wading from one hallway to another in a series of homogenous hotels, offices, and transit terminals, it is sometimes the case that human beings find themselves in rooms populated with other people. Such experiences can occur in a range of environments, from hospital rooms to seminar rooms, from off-world space stations to deep-sea submarine bases. In each case, there is a moment of hesitation at the threshold from one room to another. The body necessarily pauses at the doorway leading to a room, the active intentionality of the body taking time to ingest the facticity of a new room. And the pause in movement is a moment of precarious uncertainty. When I stand at the threshold of a room, my body reaches out into this foreign landscape long before “I” have set a foot in it. My body will assess this room in advance of the “I” who experiences it. As to its new findings, often I will only be in a position to survey the work of the body retroactively, once the room is seized as a partial memory. Until then, every act of entering a room is form of blindness, in which human beings must rely on a tacit faith that the room will mould itself to the contours to the body.

Here is a room and a doorway. I have seen it before. Inside it, a large plant, some cupboards, a window that overlooks a grey cityspace, and a woman sitting behind a small desk, her head held in the palm of her hand. Still at the threshold to this room, my body is nonetheless in the midst of a dynamic correspondence with the irreducible aura permeating from this corner of the world. The woman is not looking at me, and yet the room’s being stems from her presence. Everything within the room occupies a specific relation to the woman, and her presence is foreground in this field of intentionality despite her being objectively less visible. More than one thing among many, the woman commands the room without even raising her eyes in the general direction of the room’s spatiality. Things in this room revolve around the body of the woman, such that if she were removed, then those same things would lose their bearings and thus become inanimate.

The dynamic interplay of the women in the room does not limit itself to things she possesses within the room. The reason being: when I enter this room, then I do so knowing that the act of orientating myself in the room must in the first instant involve a dialectical standoff between the spatiality of my-self and my-other. Sartre writes: “We are dealing with a relation which is without parts, given at one stroke, inside of which there unfolds a spatiality which is not my spatiality; for instead of a grouping toward me of the objects, there is now an orientation which flees from me” (254). Sartre’s point makes it clear that space is not homogenous, but forever marked by a tacit claim of ownership achieved by the look. Even without directly looking at me, the women in the room seizes the room in the same way as “when there is a rustling of branches, or the sound of a footstep followed by silence, or the slight opening of a shutter, or a slight movement of a curtain” (257). The look possesses. In other words, the woman directs the spatiality of the room, such that I am brought into her own sphere of being while recognising “a decentralization of the world which undermines the centralization which I am simultaneously effecting” (255).

This relationship between a centralized and decentralized world means that the look carries with it an estranging affect. In entering a room, the universe slides away from me. Doing so, a new bodily mood is conceived, which has less to do with getting placed in objective terms and more to do with adjusting to the material conditions under which the look is presented. To be looked at is to commit to a dialogue not only with the other but also with the environment in which that exchange takes place. The look means recognising that “I am vulnerable, that I have a body which can be hurt, that I occupy a place and that I cannot in any case escape from the space in which I am without defence—in short, that I am seen” (259). At the heart of this disturbing affectivity is the non visual perception of both the room and the other’s look, each of which have contribute to the other’s agency. In each case, it becomes possible to speak of being seen by eyes without a face, a look that is taken up as much in the posture of the woman as it is in the décor of the room.

Getting (Dis)placed

2011-01-12T12:32:00.004Z

I am beginning to make inroads into the research at the Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée that lies ahead. As with any new project, the difficulty is one of getting placed, of establishing orientation amidst a labyrinth of different ideas, all of which are framed between the themes of embodiment, inter-subjectivity, and agoraphobia. My point of departure is the following question: how can the gaze of the other make me disappear? I have skirted around this question in various ways before, mostly through considering Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety and the Nothing. But the question is deserving of a far broader analysis than metaphysics alone. After all, the question invites several different perspectives: that of clinical psychopathology (as a “fault” in the subject); that of neurology (as an experience to be explained in causal terms); that of cultural studies (as a “symptom” of late modernity); and that of environment studies (as when the subject is unknowingly affected by the materiality of the world).

Central to each of these perspectives is the mediation of the world via the other. It is not, for instance, that there is a world, in which other people populate. But that the facticity of the world is already constituted by others long before others are perceived in the world. This is the “interworld” of which Merleau-Ponty speaks of in relation to intersubjectivity. It is a world, in which the anonymity of the prepersonal body is bound with all other bodies, thus producing a bodily synthesis. It seems to me that in non-pathological instances of embodiment, this interworld is taken for granted as a structure of the lifeworld. Being in the world means being exposed to inter-corporeality of bodily interaction. In certain atypical instances, however—anxiety, illness, phobia—the experience of the interworld assumes a foreground presence, affecting a disturbance in the stability of selfhood, such that the idea of the body as autonomous loses its certainty. Such a loss would, I think, be felt more acutely were it the case that the body in question refused to accommodate the existence of the other as other. In my understanding, agoraphobia is an exemplary instant of this refusal.

All of which is a thematic preview of things to come. In the first instance, what will be required is a microcosmic examination of the experience of entering a room. The reason being: entering a room presents us with a series of topographical contrasts, each of which edify how the gaze of the other affects and augments the experience of the world. In particular, entering a room populated by other people sets in place a circumscribed illustration of how embodiment, spatiality, and otherness work together to produce what is peculiar to both the typical and atypical body. More on that later.

The Nesting

2011-01-11T16:59:00.002Z

Suddenly the landscape was removed from me by a strange power. In my mind’s eye I thought I saw below the pale blue evening sky a black sky of horrible intensity. Everything became limitless, engulfing. . . I knew the autumn landscape was pervaded by a second space, so fine, so invisible, that it was dark, empty and ghastly. . . . It was wrong to speak only of space because something took place in myself; it was a continuous questioning of myself.

(Schizophrenic patient cited in Karl Jaspers, A General Psychopathology)

We are the Martians

2010-12-23T15:51:00.001Z

I believe in the human body, and the inhumanity of its prehistory. I believe that the human body’s prehistory pre-empts the existence of our shared planet, Earth. In the human body, a germ has been deposited, and the germ allows a communion with its own ancestral inhumanity. Of access to this ancestral body, we must recognise that the human body is the history of the planet in which it finds itself. The genesis of the body coincides with the birth of the known universe, its flesh and blood a microcosm of the solar system. If I were to open my body up in the chest cavity, then what I would see is a narrative that has been carved in the materiality of the planet Earth for centuries. If I was to remove my eye from its socket and examine it with my other eye, then what I would see is the genesis of vision itself, the very possibility of light and darkness encountering one another.

Yet the prehistory of the body is not simply the origin of the body’s anonymous organs working behind the scenes of perception. Rather, the prehistory of the body takes flight in the phenomenological reflection of the body’s uncanny facticity. That there are bodies in the first place: with this thought, a hyper-reflection (in Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term) occurs, such that the body’s anonymity begins to reflect upon its own history. As such, the archaeological work to be carried out on the human body must be a return to the genetic memories never experienced, but nonetheless constitutive of humanity. The only question that matters is: how do we resuscitate and conjoin the living and the dead into the same organic body?

One does not need to travel too far from the homeworld in order glimpse at the quiet world lying beneath the surface of familiar movement. After all, even in a book as domesticated as Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, traces of a genetic prehistory are found in the hearth of the house: “The finest specimens of fossilized duration concertized as a result of long sojourn, are to be found in space” (9). The notion of “fossilized duration” is instructive. With it, Bachelard points to the retentive powers of materiality—its ability not only to retain the past but also to reanimate it. But what he overlooks in this topophilia is the body’s role in reanimating the fossilized duration stored in space.

Cinematically, the inhumanity of the pre-historical body finds its perfect expression in the film Quatermass and the Pit (1967). If this film is thought of as the prototypical Lovecraftian film, then in the same light, it can also be viewed as the Merleau-Pontean film par excellence. The reason is evident in the plot: an ancient spacecraft, with its own intelligence and history, is discovered buried beneath the streets of London, which has covertly been influencing the birth and development of human life on Earth. A discovery takes place: prehistoric locusts are found in the tomb of the spacecraft, their bodies frozen in time. The locusts travelled to Earth 5 million years ago, their dying planet, Mars, no longer hospitable to organic life.

In need of a new colony, they ventured to our planet and buried themselves in strategic locations so that they might one day again rise in a more intelligent form – a “colony by proxy,” so the Professor says with Lovecraft’s “Shadow out of Time” resonating. And so, the influence of these uncanny entitles emerge as having a troubled history with human life, their reason for populating the planet to interbreed with prehistoric hominids. (Curiously, the structure of this interbreeding is far from science fiction. As recently as yesterday evening at 18:03 GMT, “ancient humans, dubbed “Denisovans” [have been found to] interbred with us.”)

Thus, it turns out that we—human life—are nothing more than a manifestation of a lifeform alien to our own flesh, as a government minster says in the film: “You realise what you are saying? That we owe our existence here to the intervention of insects!” The human body itself a mutant of the most ancient order of organic life, its network of memories and experiences rooted in the materiality of the flesh, but forgotten by abstract thought in its quest for civilization. The unearthing of the spacecraft—a literal case of Freud’s “return of the repressed”—triggers an event that was hitherto buried not only in space, but in time, too. One engineer visits the burial site only to come out with telekinetic powers, his body now a medium for some uncanny agency.

Experiments are established to record the visions of those possessed by their own unclaimed past. “What you are about to see…is a memory.” It is a memory of brutality, of “stored killing,” of colonization that now risks being activated in the finitude of the human body. The attempt to “rationalise” the artefact as a relic of German warfare fails: in view of the media, the thing comes alive, the lights of the spacecraft emitting an eerie blue light. Public panic ensues.

Thus, the Lovecraftian climax of the film sees the populous of London reanimated, their cavernous memories of an ancestral time playing out in the surface of the streets of London. Violence and madness ensue: a madness that centres on the disbelief that humanity, with its morality, traditions, and laws of judgment, are aliens to their own native planet. In the final scene, as the credit’s begin to roll, the professor and his assistant stand motionless before a ruined London, traumatised by their confrontation with the abyss from beyond.

As for the Merleau-Pontean dimension of Quatermass, it is clear that the idea of the human being as being an alien in both its own flesh and world aligns with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it” (PoP, 296). (See here for an elaboration on Merleau-Ponty and the anonymity of the body). The “captive spirit” at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s subject mirrors the disquiet in Quatermass, whereupon the surface of the body, in its familiarity and homeliness, is the reverberation of an immemorial time, of which human life is still attached. As the professor says while examining the possessed engineer: “Perhaps it was always in him, in all of us….I think what he gave us now was a vision of life on Mars five million years ago.” What is uncanny about the sight of artefact on Earth is that it is a literal embodiment of the anonymity lurking within the body, an anonymity that is at the same time invisible to the body.

At stake, here, is the simultaneity of experience. The “visions” seen in Quatermass coincide with the perception of the present, thus forming an overlapping relation between each realm. Central to the logic of the uncanny, this shared experience fulfils the conjunction of the living and the dead occupying the same organic body. In both Merleau-Ponty and Quatermass a double vision is taking place, which is only activated in moments of trauma, disintegration, and nausea. For Merleau-Ponty, such an experience “is the awareness of our contingency, and the horror with which it fills us.” Phenomenally, the simultaneity of experience destabilises the unity of the “I,” its claim to ownership now comprised by the presence of "a world more ancient than thought" (296).

Earth Alienation

2010-12-04T19:04:00.003Z

In 1957, an earth-born object made by man was launched into the universe, where for some weeks it circled the earth according to the same laws of gravitation that swing and keep in motion the celestial bodies—the sun, the moon, and the stars. To be sure, the man-made satellite was no moon or star, no heavenly body which could follow its circling path for a time span that to us mortals, bound by earthly time, lasts from eternity to eternity. Yet, for a time it managed to stay in the skies; it dwelt and moved in the proximity of the heavenly bodies as though it had been admitted tentatively to their sublime company.

This event, second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom, would have been greeted with unmitigated joy if it had not been for the uncomfortable military and political circumstances attending it. But, curiously enough, this joy was not triumphal; it was not pride or awe at the tremendousness of human power and mastery which rilled the hearts of men, who now, when they looked up from the earth toward the skies, could behold there a thing of their own making. The immediate reaction, expressed on the spur of the moment, was relief about the first "step toward escape from men's imprisonment to the earth." And this strange statement, far from being the accidental slip of some American reporter, unwittingly echoed the extraordinary line which, more than twenty years ago, had been carved on the funeral obelisk for one of Russia's great scientists: "Mankind will not remain bound to the earth forever."

(Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition)

So, at 3.35pm on April 29, 2008, the Zeus IV appeared in the Californian sky. Accompanied by six chase planes, the space-craft swept down to a perfect landing, guided by its on-board computer to within 50 meters of President Quayle's reception podium. The stunned silence was broken by an immense cheer when two of the astronauts were glimpsed in the observation windows. The crowd surged forward, waiting for the hatches to open as soon as the landing checks were over.

Despite the warmth of this welcome, the astronauts were surprisingly reluctant to emerge from their craft. The decontamination teams were posed by the airlocks, ready to board the spaceship and evacuate its atmosphere for laboratory analysis. But the crew had overridden the computerized sequences and made no reply over the radio link to the urgent queries of the ground controllers. They had switched off the television cameras inside the craft, but could be seen through the observation windows, apparently tidying their cabins and changing into overalls. Dr. Valentina was spotted in the galley, apparently sterilizing her surgical instruments. A rumour swept the review stands, where President Quayle, the Congress and invited heads of state sweltered in the sun, that one of the crew had been injured on re-entry, but it soon transpired that Dr. Valentina was merely making soup. Even more strangely, Professor Kawahito was seen setting out six parallel chessboards, as if preparing for another tournament.

(J.G. Ballard, "The Message From Mars")

"What happened? I did not die."

2010-12-01T23:47:00.003Z

Re-watching Sidney Lumet’s film “The Pawnbroker” recently, I was reminded of its exemplary treatment of the relation between embodiment and trauma. Two brief things to say. One, Lumet’s film gives us a clear articulation of Cathy Caruth’s notion of an “unclaimed experience.” The film does this by privileging the body as the vehicle of expression for a past that cannot be resolved in spoken language. Instead of being the locus of all movement and orientation, Sol Nazerman’s body is a manifestation of what Caruth terms “the missing of experience.” Indeed, the use of flashback editing in the film is a literal stamp placed upon the body of Sol Nazerman. In his skin, Nazerman’s body becomes a porous opening to a past that has yet to be brought to abstract unity. The body undercuts this cognitive shortcoming through its mute articulation of Nazerman’s history of trauma. In its incongruities and disruptions, the body speaks a language that is peculiar to the experience of trauma. What is striking about Lumet’s treatment of trauma memory in the film is the sense of the simultaneity of the past and the present. Here, Merleau-Ponty offers some guidance on this tension:

Our body does not always have meaning, and our thoughts. . . do not always find in it the plenitude of their vital expression. In the cases of disintegration, the soul and the body are apparently distinct; and this is the truth of dualism (Merleau-Ponty 1965, 209).

The importance of this passage, it seems to me, is twofold. One, a tacit duality is acknowledged despite the fact that phenomenologically speaking, there is nothing metaphysically true about dualism. Two, beyond metaphysics, the phenomenal appearance of the body during disintegration can no longer be said to be strictly “mine.” Instead, a process of dissociation takes place, such that the normal functioning of the body comes to a standstill. The mute body memories of Sol Nazerman testify to the body’s propensity to “hide” from the self. In this way, the body of traumatic memory occupies a destabilising relationship not only to cognitive memory but also to the cognitive perception of the body as held through the prism of self-consciousness. This is the strangeness of the traumatized body: it carries with it its own shadowy other beneath the surface. In effect, two bodies occupy the same space at the same time. Nazerman’s body defies phenomenology: in it, Merleau-Ponty’s “truth of dualism” is announced, as Nazerman says:

It's just that there have been memories that I had, well, I thought that I had pushed them far away from me and they keep rushing in, and then they're words, words that I thought I had kept myself from hearing. . . . And now they flood my mind.

The other tangential point: at the heart of traumatic memory is the essence of body horror. Indeed, Lumet’s film is as much an account of the horror of the body as one would find in the early work of David Cronenberg. The reason for this is that what Lumet’s film shows us is a “self” that has become the ghost of the bodily experience that endures merely through a sort of blind persistence (a horror, which, incidentally, Christopher Hitchens spoke of recently in relation to cancer). Where is Nazerman in the midst of his body? His response to this question, a counter-question: "What happened? I did not die.'" Yet in some sense the “I” did die, and what now remains is the anonymity of a body being encroached upon by an experience that is not only unclaimed by the traumatised subject but also opposed to that subject.

"And Suddenly the Memory Returns"

2010-11-07T16:41:00.003Z

In an effort to document the spatio-temporal facticity of (my) everyday life, I have started a Tumblr page.

Moving to Paris

2010-11-02T14:10:00.000Z

Interested parties might be interested to know that from January, I will be taking up a postdoctoral fellowship at Center de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée, Paris. I’ll be working with Dorothee Legrand on a project titled “Narcissus & Echo: self-consciousness and the inter-subjective body”. My contribution to this work will be to investigate the phenomenology of anxiety and agoraphobia, focusing on what these experiences disclose about embodiment, selfhood, uncanniness and intersubjectivity. These are themes I’ve been circling for the last few years, albeit in a fragmented way, and it will be gratifying to think through them in a more systematic way. Incidentally, it always seemed to me that, despite being born in Germany, agoraphobia's spiritual home was in Paris in the anxiety of Baudelaire (“Paris may change, but in my melancholy mood nothing has budged”) and the labyrinthine arcades of Benjamin (“Street names are like intoxicating substances that make our perceptions more stratified and richer in spaces. One could call the energy by which they transport us into such a state their vertu évocatrice”). Not to mention the uncanniness of André Breton's Paris, the oneirism of Gérard de Nerval's Paris, and above all else, the "superimposed boxes" of Bachelard's claustrophobic Paris. The list could go. But in short: having the chance to work on the phenomenology of agoraphobia with this history in the background will be invaluable.

Merleau-Ponty on Bodily Intersubjectivity

2010-10-19T14:25:00.003Z

[Image from Elena Dawson]

One of the great strengths of Merleau-Ponty’s account of inter-subjective relations is that it avoids arguing for the existence of the other by analogy or indeed any other method that takes the personal self as its point of departure. After all, the tendency of philosophy in its response to the problem of other minds, from Mill to Hegel, has been to employ the other as a vehicle to reinforce the “I,” rendering the other a variation of the self. This egocentric view on others maintains a focus on the personal horizon of phenomenal life, it thus treats others as appearances in that realm, and that alone. Merleau-Ponty’s genius is to account for the existence of the other through an appeal to the “hither side” of the human body, an anonymous, prepersonal realm that ultimately confuses the distinction between self and other.

He does this by providing an account of the self that is not transparent to itself. The reason being: human subjectivity is embodied, and being a body means being placed in a world that avoids absolute interiority. The body is in the world. This transcendental embodiment is a given of experience. At the same time, the body is of the world, but remains attached to the world. This ambiguity between immanence and transcendence sets in place a layering of experience, in which “my” experience of the world is simultaneously not my own, as he says: “I am never quite at one with myself” (347). Never at one with myself, my experience of having one’s own body thus never coincides with the anonymity of what it is for there be a body in the first place. There is much that is perceived by my body, of which the “I” is blind.

Of that which the body perceives on its terms is the atmosphere of otherness in the world. In a brilliant passage, he writes: “An Objective Spirit dwells in the remains and the scenery. How is this possible? In the cultural object I feel the close presence of others beneath a veil of anonymity. Someone uses the pipe for smoking, the spoon for eating, the bell for summoning…” (405). The invitation of things to invoke the anonymity of the other leads Merleau-Ponty to form a common language linking self, other, and thing. This common language is possible thanks to the fact the world belongs to a prepersonal, anonymous subject that is common to all bodies. For every human body that is in the world, there is a common ground insofar as each body partakes of the same prepersonal anonymity. Through the fact of having sensory functions and a visual field, I am already in touch with other living bodies that also have sensory functions.

For this reason, “when my gaze meets another gaze, I re-enact the alien existence in a sort of reflection” (410). This is a reflection that takes place beyond the realm of personal experience. My recognition of the other as an other is not a decision or a dialectic procedure that takes place on a self-conscious level. The other is not for me an opportunity to exercise my ego or to “know myself” through the gaze of other’s response to me. All of this is far removed from Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the prepersonal and the anonymous bond linking bodies with each other.

Irrespective of the whims and neurosis of the personal ego, with its fortifications against other people and its retreat from the outside, being a body means being open to others. In the study of agoraphobia and other disorders of bodily dwelling, this has serious implications. If the human body, owing to neurosis, experiences itself as disappearing under the gaze of the other, then ontologically speaking, this is an error. Only in the obstinacy of the “I” is there a distance between self and other. Such a distance would have to overlook the “interworld” that connects the impersonality of the I with the Thou, “eliminating the individuality of perspectives” (414). The other is not simply in front of me, in the midst of a face-to-face encounter that induces anxiety in the myth of autonomous subject. The other is not a discernable person in the world, but a field of force orchestrated by the fact of being embodied.

Notes on the Human Body

2010-09-26T14:47:00.001Z

There is a body that moves through the world, a body that is the bearer of all sensations, the zero point of all movement. More than one object among many, we take it in good faith that the body is the absolute here, a privileged phenomenal thing that occupies this known planet, we call “Earth.” The human body is recognised as more-than-a-thing through the power of sensation. It feels its way through the world, thinking in advance of cognition. At the same time, it is raw biology, a physio-chemical unity in action. Flesh, bone, blood—this melancholy hum of life. The body is nature. Merleau-Ponty in Nature: “Before being reason, humanity is another corporeity” (208). Disquiet is the result of this thought. Why? Because human life sediments itself in the patina of arrogance, refusing to contend with its prepersonal materiality—my body, no longer me. As such, phenomenology must become bio-phenomenology as it maps this unfolding of life within life.

Where am I in this flesh-world? Clearly I am not here, have yet to arrive. “The concern is to grasp humanity first as another manner of being a body” (Ibid.). How does the human body find itself? There are other bodies around me, some similar, others different in their silence. How does the human body distinguish itself from other biological bodies, each of which plays a part in this umwelt? It would be arbitrary to assign one particular element—reason, memory, self-consciousness—that gives “life” to the human body. But this is what Max Scheler appears to do. Scheler talks of “spirit,” by which he means he the capacity for an affective relationship to the world—love, kindness, wonder, bliss, anxiety, despair, etc. Thanks to spirit, so he argues, the human body is “existentially liberated from the organic world.” For Scheler, the dignity of the human body is evident through its ability to transform the world. Even the body itself becomes objectified in the human gaze, such that philosophical detachment is afforded. The animal, meanwhile, “is involved too deeply in the actualities of life,” a melancholy state that deprives it of a genuine “self.” Thus Scheler joins Heidegger in assigning a loss of world to non-human bodies. Not being able to sense the world “as world,” the non-human body remains “immersed in [the world] ecstatically.” Scheler’s move toward spirit is too advance, too ready to confer an ethical value upon the term “human.” After all, the impression one gets from reading him is no less different than reading Hegel: spirit is the teleology of human life, and the physical body—this flesh—is incidental to that project.

Scheler is premature in his commitment to spirit. The problem faced is that he speaks of the body on the one hand, and the spirit as descending into that object. Merleau-Ponty suggests an alternative in the form of a “wrapping of a body-object around itself, or rather, a truce of metaphors” (209). This is the brute, wild being that Merleau-Ponty will speak of as being prior to the personal body, with its dramas and affective states. It is the body that coincides with the late rather than the early Merleau-Ponty, the body as belonging to the flesh. Already this incipient body is involved in the world, already directional in its brute structure: “But the eye is entirely external finality made for what is absent made for a future vision” (209). There is a temporal duration to the biological body. More than movement, it occupies a bodily schema, projecting and introjecting the world it finds itself in. This is “the miracle of sensation” Merleau-Ponty talks about, which he will later identify with the libidinal body.

The Animal is Silent

2010-09-11T23:12:00.007Z

The animal is silent, and we do not share the same language. Who does the animal speak to in his silence? To those who share in this language, which is invisible to the human being? The animal’s body is full of pathos and expression, its eyes and ears caught up in the texture of the world, yet its voice is mute. There is a silence that takes place with the animal, but a silence through which communication is dependent. Heidegger will speak of this silence in terms of poverty, an inability to see the world as world. A line is drawn in Heidegger’s analysis, a refusal to meet the animal face-to-face. For him, the silence of animal is an opportunity for Dasein to define its ontology, a model that is created from the inverse ontology of the animal. The animal’s silence is worldless, a life with no no existence, a pure facticity. But melancholy intervenes in this silence, a void opens in the expression of animal. Heidegger doesn’t acknowledge it, but it’s there, wedged between the gaze of the human and the animal. After all, is one ever alone when in the company of animals? Or, in the muteness of the animal, isn’t there already an imperative to be heard? The animal becomes an invitation to an unhomely sadness, in whose eerie presence the intimacy between human and animal is amplified.

The pressing question, and one that Alice Kuzniar asks in her outstanding book on the topic, is: Whose sadness is at stake in the animal’s uncanny silence? Whose yearning takes place in the void between animal and human? Asking this question, the human becomes detached, and so alienation and philosophy ensue, the products of what Max Scheler calls “spirit.” Distance, detachment: the world as world, but also as other. In turn, human life ceases to be a member of this planet in the solar system. For the human, the otherness of the animal, with its silent vigilance over the world, becomes the Heideggerian void, a boundary from which no two ontologies can occupy the same time and space. The animal’s silence is conceived in the human’s spirit, a silence that is as much metaphysical as it is from the voice of the animal itself.

Revisiting "The Aesthetics of Decay"

2010-08-27T23:29:00.005Z

With space and time now open, I am able to think through Aurelio Madrid’s review of The Aesthetics of Decay with the attention it deserves. Given that I have not thought about urban ruins nor decay for a few years, some of the ideas that Madrid deals with are themselves fairly fresh to me. This is a good thing: it amplifies the strengths and weaknesses of the book with greater clarity. It is also a vaguely uncanny experience re-exploring these ideas, given that for me, they are as much bound with personal circumstances as they are abstract concepts themselves. Each chapter is a vessel of memory, a different way of responding to the same experience. I would even say that everything in this book, for all its “ambition,” is essentially a response to the experience of holding a suitcase in one’s hand while having no place in particular to go.

Interestingly, since 2006, the topic of decay has grown, now assimilated in a broader theoretical environment. Much of this leaves me cold and affirms what the book warns against: the Romantic appropriation of decay to fulfil a particular human need. This is as evident in the politics of decay as it is in the employment of decay in conjunction with the words “blackened,” “dark,” “Lovecraftian,” and “speculative” – all words that are in danger of becoming boring, interchangeable, and affixed to a gloss of sterile “beauty.” In each of these instances, decay has become fetishized by a co(s)mic vision decidedly remote from unromantic reality of physiological decay (Notably, somewhere [I cannot remember where] Schopenhauer warns us against aestheticising the world by spending time in a hospital). To be sure, while architectural decay certainly affords an “aesthetic distance,” enabling one to gaze toward the world from afar, the rot of the human body is of a different order. As a book, The Aesthetics of Decay is incapable of attending to this pressing human situation, which requires an altogether different approach where aesthetics plays no part.

Thus, Madrid is right to suggest that I want to stay clear of an “advocacy of ruins as places to be restored, adored & monumentalized.” It is precisely that veneration of decay that seems to be taking place in today’s philosophical landscape. And this is problematic for the reason that veneration confers a monumental quality to decay, and the philosophical value of decay is its resistance against representation and stasis. In concrete terms, this would mean conferring a value upon ruins in advance of experiencing them, so deploying them as token gestures of an already established aesthetic. For this reason, in The Aesthetics of Decay, ruins are not mentioned until the reader gets to the 100th page or so.

In this respect, decay is actually a side-effect of the book’s real concern: the experience of nothingness, which as Madrid, notes, is to be approached in a dialectic of silence and presence. My concern in this book is the dynamic experience of nothingness, a felt experience that seems to point to both a micro and macro-cosmic level. A nothingness full of contrasts, swirling voids, and banal plateaus – banal because it is only in the context of everydayness that nothingness has value, not in an aestheticized cosmic dystopia. Sartre was right, therefore, to situate nothingness in cafés and so forth, but his situatedness is structural and fails to incorporate the specific spatiality of the café into his account.

Similarly, Heidegger’s account of nothingness remains incomplete for the reason it neglects the microcosmic realm. Heidegger’s conflation of nothingness and anxiety is unconvincing, and will remain so, so long as embodied experience is left on the wayside. Reading through Madrid’s review, I am reminded of the body’s lack of presence in my own book. So far as the phenomenological descriptions of nothingness go, they tend to focus more on the visual perception of spatiality than on their corporal reality. Smells, sounds, and the sensuous touch of materiality are mentioned, but they are invariably subordinated to the sheer sight of ruination. Like much writing from the past, the omission is an oddity from the present.

“Trigg discerns a palpable silence as having a distinctly mournful quality & from this mournful quality we are urged to utilize memory, as a method of understanding an access point to the experienced ruin at hand.” Madrid is right. Mourning is a privileged mood, inasmuch as it links one realm to another. In turn, this establishes a liminal realm that is neither present nor absent. Mourning sets in place an attunement to the Heideggerian Nothing, thus involving the totality of the remembering self.

“So for Trigg, we should see a Bergsonian memory as bifurcated & dualistic. This dualism causes memory to place itself outside of a timely measured vantage, to then place pure memory away from its habitual comfort into a kind of exile, where the habit memory & the pure memory do not match-up.” Madrid again does a wonderful job of clearing up my verbose writing. I have not surmounted the problem this passage presents us with, namely: to what extent does a Bergsonian account of time present a challenge to our self-consciousness experience of time? I detect estrangement in the Bergsonian durée, a kind of melancholy weight that does less to unite the self and more to divide it.

And the estrangement establishes a logic of nostalgia, as Madrid puts it: “The impossibility of rectifying a glorified past becomes a glaring revenant of the ruin, because the ruin’s past could also be idealized to a revivified fault of never matching the present. With nostalgia, the present is deficiently reflected in the ruin.” Madrid clearly identifies the movement of micro to macrocosm that runs through the book, from the singular to the general. Why is nostalgia so important? Because I claim that experiences only have a unity in their receding absence, when they are sufficiently close to the present but at the same time already expired. Given this structural importance, nostalgia also folds over into the future, creating a pre-emptive nostalgia that overrules the discontinuities of the present. Nothing is immune from this logic, not even the writing of nostalgia itself.

The problem of nostalgia – as irresolvable as the other problems in the book – takes place on a cultural level, manifest above all in moribund remains of postmodernity: “Lyotard sought to answer a theme of relativism by reaching for micro-narratives that vie for hierarchy on their own accord & enabling the decentered world of post-modernity.” As we know, postmodernism is an impasse, marking a strange presence that even writing about it now I can’t be sure if what I’m writing about is merely the cultural residue or a more defined philosophy. In any case, Madrid summarises: “It is suggested that the Dadaists were for Trigg, purer in their chaotic agenda because they didn’t seek a re-positioning of an ‘epistemological foundationalism’ as did Lyotard. Surprisingly we have Dada’s defiant insouciance obviated away from any of its philosophical responsibilities.” This sets in place a historical struggle to negotiate with the dissolution of reason, where “reason” refers to a tendency toward assimilating the past into the preset with no remainders therein. Madrid puts it better than me: “We are shown an idea that rationality has a claim to permanency & order. Reason in the shadow of decay is transient. Rationality doesn’t always neatly allow for the un-pure ruin, entropy & eventual decline. That reason ‘should’ flourish is what the ruin contradicts, a ruin stands as a testament for the irrational & the soon to be post-rational.”

And so we get to part two, the aesthetic analysis of ruins. As Madrid indicates, the movement from a historical argument to a phenomenological one is a little bit Hegelian in fashion. Hegel’s aesthetic relies on the idea that the “spirit” of a dynamic culture expresses itself in surface form through aesthetic artefacts. This is an attractive idea, and one that I try to bring to urban ruins in the early 21st century. If I may be as distasteful as to quote myself: “Aesthetic contemplation of the decayed object will allow the progressive nature of decline to resound.” This is the idea in any case.

Madrid does a good job of outlining the philosophical history of decay that I plot in the opening of part two, which finally settles on the Symbolists who fascinates both Madrid and myself in equal measure (a shame I was not familiar with Leon Spilliaert when I wrote the book, as he would have proved inspirational). Madrid writes: “The Symbolists are usually peripheral to the Impressionists of the same time, due to their love of the mythic/mystic underbelly of culture, with its themes of silence, solitude, death &c. These motifs pervade an artistic range of vision marked by severity, the unknowable, the mysterious, and the bizarrely affected.” The importance of the Symbolists is contained in their use of nostalgia as a weapon against modernity. The flight into imagination takes shape in the memory, establishing a mood that absorb decline as a motif to be aesthetically revered.

A shift takes place in the 10th chapter owning to a break in the writing, and a more explicitly phenomenological approach is advanced. “A sense of place is never really forgotten & the possible reading of space as reflected by our remembering of home as place, is a feature of what place is. When we are thrust into a space that is ruinous, it’s in contrast to our home. Experience brings about a displacement of space within Trigg’s ruin that challenges us in a spatially unfamiliar way.” Madrid has it right, but on hindsight, my formulation between space and place is in the wrong. The reason being, I rely on a dualistic, causal relation between space and place, framing the former as homogenous and the latter as heterogeneous. The same can also be said of my use of Casey’s “site,” which despite my acceptance of it here has become a major source of criticism for me. In the book, I don’t think too much hinges on this dualisms between space and place, or site and place, and I am hardly concerned about general inconsistencies between this book and other bits of work (see here for an indication of my distance from the spatial model used in the book, all of which is expanded in the next book to a much greater extent).

By the time of chapter 11, I attempt to apply my analysis of runs to the sublime directly: “Kant’s sublime openly discards the beautiful, & the beautiful is seen by Trigg as holding itself up in utter exhaustion in today’s contemporary art practices. Trigg would do well to write about the current art-world with its numerous manifestations of un-reason & its open mocking of rationality. Trigg’s ‘absence of reason’ & his notions of the ‘post-sublime’ could effortlessly be carried over to post-millennial art appreciation.” Thanks for the suggestion, I will certainly explore some of those avenues in the current art-world. In fact, along with Kancheli’s use of musical space, Gregor Schneider seemed (the past tense might be important, as he seems now to be nothing more than a marketing machine for some vacuous drivel), exceptional in his creation of the sublimity of irrational space.

Madrid’s response to the chapters on the alleyway and staircases is appreciated. I warm to this part of the book quite a bit. In particular, the alleyway chapter, I think, does a good job of attending to the dynamism between intimacy and immensity, to paraphrase Bachelard. “The use of the alley as a designated space for the discarded allows us to see it as a space for the salacious. The alley is a marker for what is not meant to be seen aesthetically.” In many ways, this is where phenomenology excels – in its ability to discern structures of experience from the overlooked details of everyday experience. “Clearly for Trigg the stoop is fraught with memory.” Very true, and it appears once more in The Memory of Place, a formative place which I cannot seem to leave behind.

The final two chapters are an attempt at bringing together phenomenology with critical history. Madrid: “Where does one go after the fragmentation & undermining of rational progress?” To the question of how we ought to live beside ruins. What follows is an ethic of forgetfulness, an ecology of non-human centeredness, in which process takes precedence, thus challenging the Heideggerian emphasis on dwelling. In the final analysis, this is the value of ruins, as Madrid puts it lucidly: “Memories, remembering, nostalgia, forgetting & memorializing are of principle concern for understanding Trigg’s ruins. Memory imbricates with time in the temporal ruin. Rational thinking wants to place the memory into a neat linearity that excludes unreasonable anomalies such as the forgotten structure.” The final thesis is a plea to a Nietzschean re-evaluation of the use of history, a re-evaluation that is facilitated by the ruin as a manifest expression of the shape of history, to phrase it in the language of the book.

I thank Madrid for his review. His exposition of the book’s ideas is gratifying to read, and all the more so given that those ideas are received with enthusiasm. It is also strangely enjoyable re-experiencing the ideas of the book, now surrounded in their own halo of nostalgia. Despite the relative lack of temporal distance between writing the book and revisiting it, distance intervenes and those ideas are now placed in an era that is inaccessible and remote.

Anxiety (3): “I forgot myself at the Ice Carnival the other night”

2010-08-23T20:26:00.004Z

It has taken me longer than I expected to recover from moving house, from moving away. Perhaps this is due to the amount of times I moved in my twenties, the constant reorientation establishing an insecurity of dwelling in my sense of self. With no centre, the surrounding world falls prey to a nauseating equality – every place is on the same ontological level, with no inside and out to speak of. Thus the privacy of the home becomes a site of invasion from the outside world, a grotesque outcome. I now concede that Bachelard is right: "Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home." These days, I am now distanced from crowds, cities, and all modes of community: my future a prolonged convalescence in unpopulated landscapes. Not being found is spiritually renewing. My body can breathe in this remote space, its bridges to the past life of “things” gently vanishing.

Through this, I have returned to a thought from R.D. Laing. One thought concerns me. Speaking of ontological insecurity, he adds: “A further factor is the discontinuity in the temporal self. When there is uncertainty in time, there is a tendency to rely on spatial means of identifying oneself” (p. 109). Laing’s claim attests to a desire on behalf of human life to presuppose linear duration in the sense of self. The self is thought of as an arc, in whose folds, past experiences neatly dovetails into the present. But there is spillage, fragmentation, and the residue of a past that falls short of the present. Great beacons of spatial mass come to the foreground, their sheer bulk a reminder that there is a self in the first place. Included in this nostalgia for continuity is the body itself. A patient of Laing's tells us:

I forgot myself at the Ice Carnival the other night. I was so absorbed in looking at it that I forgot what time it was and who and where I was. When I suddenly realised that I hadn’t been thinking about myself I was frightened to death. The unreality feeling came. I must never forget myself for a single minute (Ibid.).

This report, the logic of which is easy to identify with, reminds us of the narcissism of anxiety. Without self-presence, time loses its relationship to the world, and the existence of the “I” suffers from radical fragmentation. Constant vigilance over self-consciousness ensures that the self is “seen” by its own self. More than this, however, the passage points to a loss of trust in the reality of time. For the patent, turning away from the self constitutes a different rhythm, and thus the origins of a discontinuous self.

As I have done in the past, I am again thinking through this relationship between anxiety, time, and selfhood. The strange clump of mass - the "I" - that finds itself in the present seeks to organise itself with respect to its past. Here, the body turns on itself, its memories a source of disruption. In this turn to anxiety and time, I returned to Gaston Bachelard’s The Dialectic of Duration. I admire this book very much. Its emphasis on the spiritual value of rhythm and repose is vital. Here, for instance, is Bachelard’s pre-emptive gesture toward existential psychotherapy: “A sick soul – especially one that suffers the pain of time and of despair – has to be cured by living and thinking rhythmically, by rhythmic attentiveness and rhythmic repose.” And here is the striking thing: against Bachelard’s gentle nostalgia in The Poetics of Space, in this earlier book, his tone is unforgiving toward “false permanence and ill-made duration,” his polemical thrust directed toward Bergsonian duration, above all else. In a word, Bachelard’s “cure” for the sick soul is live alongside the lacunae in one’s life, discerning even “Baudelairean correspondences” in the dark night of the soul. Is the self a product of neurosis? This is the question that Bachelard forces me to ask (myself). The only way to answer this question would be to indirectly observe the phenomena that outlasts the self when that same self forgets itself, such as that of the Ice Carnival the other night.

Aurelio Madrid on "The Aesthetics of Decay"

2010-07-19T09:21:00.004Z

(“untitled” by Aurelio Madrid )

Aurelio Madrid has written a lucid, rich, and extensive commentary on my The Aesthetics of Decay. Among his many incisive points, he does an admirable job of translating the book’s main ideas into a more digestible format. To this end, I’m indebted to him. Madrid is also right to have read the book alongside Robert Sokolowski’s very fine Introduction to Phenomenology, given that much of the “methodology” of the book remains implicit—an issue I hope to have resolved in the next book. I will respond to his commentary soon (in the middle of a move), but for now I wanted to thank him for spending the time to read The Aesthetics of Decay with such attention and care. Hard to think this book came out 4 years ago, almost to the day…

Anxiety (2): Self-Consciousness

2010-07-13T16:17:00.005Z

You have a morbid phobia of standing in queues. In the supermarket checkout, you feel oppressed from every angle by the facticity of other people. You experience the flesh loosening its grip on the bone beneath the skin, with every pore of the human body a recipient of the world’s uncertainty, danger, and chaos. At times, you are frozen by the anxiety of being “spotted” in public, as though your human body were a magnet inviting the eyes of the world to gaze at it. In the shopping mall, the materiality of the floors and the solidity of the walls becomes amorphous, its density gives way to an uneven, jagged surface. You cling to the walls, your heart is beating rapidly and your throat is dry. Fearing imminent collapse, very often you will suddenly leave the place you are currently in, so that you may find a safe place to faint. You hold your palm to the side of your face in order to ensure your head is still a thing of the world. No words can reassure you that you are a thing of this world, no place dark enough to shield you from the anxiety of your everyday life.

Anxiety is narcissism and narcissism is anxiety. Far from being dispersed, the anxious, ontologically insecure self not only persists but is amplified in the world. This is the strange logic of anxiety: it simultaneously fragments the unity of the self while also placing that fragmentation at the centre of things. Indeed, anxiety’s “threat” to self is at the same time a vindication of the self as a centre, a fundamental commitment to the narcissism of selfhood. Because of this fragmented centre, the world of the anxious subject takes as its point of departure an exaggerated, hyper-real view of things, in which perception and attention are drawn back to the anxious subject. R.D. Laing approaches this double-bind in terms of master-slave dialectic with no resolution. For him, the anxious subject must become an object in the world in order to vouchsafe his own reality. At the same time, “since his world is unreal, he must be an object in the world of someone else.” Only through being depersonalised does he lose his visibility and so find his place in the world. To this end, the anxious subject’s striving toward a state of annihilating invisibility entails a flight into their own non-being, a deliberately forestalled dialectic in which self-consciousness remains mute and a primitive consciousness takes over.

*(Photo from Gerald Kargl’s "Angst," 1983)*

Anxiety (1): Ontological Insecurity

2010-07-06T21:56:00.003Z

What to think about the place of anxiety as an ontologically privileged mood in philosophy? Its origin, clearly articulated in Pascal and then Kierkegaard, has its roots in contingency of human life. This contingency is not only the province of the human as a thing in the world—Pascal: “I am afraid and wonder to see myself here rather than there”—but so too of the world the human creates. The world does not come preformed to perception, but unfolds as an event, spontaneous and indeterminate. For Heidegger, this disclosing of the world as a world coincides with the mood of anxiety. For him, anxiety has double intentionality to it: on the one hand, the value human existence confers upon the world “sinks into indifference.” On the other hand, through this recession, anxiety accents its positive structure: through it, the nothing is revealed. The revelation of the nothing is anxiety’s gift to metaphysics.

All of this is perfectly familiar to any introduction to existentialism, and in existential therapy circles, anxiety has been harnessed as a pathway to the disclosure of value. Thus in the work of Ludwig Binswanger, Rollo May, R.D. Laing, and Medard Boss, anxiety assumes a hermeneutic aspect to it. For them, anxiety is not something to be “cured,” but a mood to be read. More of this later perhaps. For now, I am again thinking through the experiential aspect of anxiety, which has been curiously overlooked. More broadly, I am concerned, above all, with the relationship between the unreality of the world and the loss of self, each of which is an expression of anxiety.

On this point, R.D. Laing remains especially insightful. The strength of Laing is that he gives flesh to Heidegger’s conceptual structure, inserting the body where Heidegger’s da-sein analytic leaves us disembodied. Laing’s visceral account of “ontological insecurity” signals a subjectivity “more dead than alive” whose loss of identity is marked by a lack of temporal continuity, a feeling of being insubstantial, estranged from his body, and a fundamental insecurity with regard to other people, such that relation to others is a matter of being “preoccupied with preserving rather than gratifying” the self. Here, Laing’s Hegelian influence is directed toward the ontologically insecure person, for whom no dialectic reconciliation between self and other is possible.

In the impasse, the stability of the embodied self is consistently put in question, and the anxiety marking ontological insecurity is orientated toward the preservation of the self. This is the “engulfment,” which Laing regards as the threat to the autonomy of the self. Alongside engulfment, “impingent” is the term Laing applies to “the full terror of the experience of the world as liable at any moment to crash in…” This sets in place the germs of an agoraphobic experience of the world: for the ontologically insecure person, movement is stifled from all directions by a need to retain spatio-temporal continuity, and thus preserve an intensely delimited “reality.” Far from a liminal state, Laing is right to recognise the incipient presence of impingement in the everyday: “Even a slight fever, and the whole world can begin to take on a persecutory, impinging aspect.”

Where is the self in this de-realised world? Failing to reconcile self and world, time and other, he nevertheless persists both spatially and temporally. Life goes on, as Laing says. Central to this experience of the world-as-anxious, for Laing, is the disunity between mind and body. As with Merleau-Ponty, the normal experience of embodiment takes as its point of departure an ownership of “one’s own body.” One’s body is “mine.” Complete identification with my body, not only as a physical thing, but as a centre of experience, means that being orientated in the world coincides with being secure. By way of contrast, Laing speaks of the unembodied self as placing the body as secondary to the “mind.” I am not entirely convinced by this. It seems to me, that far from privileging mind over matter, the anxious experience of the world encounters the body as all too real, all too present. Too present, the anxious body protrudes into the world, its flesh a mass of contingency and anonymity—leading to the problem of self-consciousness. But that’s for next time.

The Non-Human in Merleau-Ponty

2010-06-13T12:48:00.002Z

Something uneasy about the relationship between Merleau-Ponty and “correlationism" (see here and here). Above all: a slightly condescending view of Merleau-Ponty as a “gifted stylist,” with some “striking formulations,” but whose ontology is nevertheless lacking in originality and radicality. In a word, a thinker whose attempt to overcome Kantianism remains locked within a human-centric divide between world and human (granted that Merleau-Ponty himself remains aware of this divide, noting that “if we try to describe the real as it appears to us in perceptual experience, we find it overlaid with anthropological predicates” (PP. 58). Even—especially?—in his late philosophy, the supposed innovation of the “flesh” remains confined by a dualism contained within a monism. True, there is a layer of Merleau-Ponty which privileges the pairing of the human body and world, but much of the “objet-orientated” critique of Merleau-Ponty either overlooks other aspects of his philosophy or simply caricatures it as a purporting to be a bit “avant garde piece of continental philosophy.” My sense is that presenting Merleau-Ponty as being a “time-bomb” that failed to explode, thus securing the thinker in the history of ideas, is a bit of conceit (Harman’s analogy is itself a bit dubious, given that it presents philosophers as commodities with expiration dates).

Important to note that even in the problematic work of the earlier Merleau-Ponty (i.e., The Phenomenology of Perception), phenomenology already faces its own anthropomorphic edge. Already in this early stage, Merleau-Ponty is aware of the tension between experience and transcendence: “The question is always how I can be open to phenomena which transcend me and which nevertheless exist only to the extent that I take them up and live them” (PP, 417). In turn, this tension is approached by Merleau-Ponty’s radicalising of phenomenology, a process from which space and time as being “for us” is no longer the case. The reason being: the human body does not assume to be the centre of the world, around which reality revolves. Instead, Merleau-Ponty will speak of a body that ceases to have personal attributes, a point I have laboured here and elsewhere. It is neither of the world nor of the body, and thus not “for us.”

The principle implication being that while human and world correlate with another in a pregiven and personal sense, this relationship is not ontologically absolute. There is, after all, a “non-human element” prior to “my” experience of the world, which is “hostile and alien, no longer an interlocutor, but a resolutely silent Other” (PP, 372). Against Harman’s characterisation of the flesh as the “world looks at me just as I look at it,” even in the early Merleau-Ponty the ontology of the world as alien, hostile, and non-human is prior to my correlation with it in the first place. There is no cosy alliance of world and body in Merleau-Ponty, despite the ecological approbation of Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh” as leading toward a crude form of animism (cf. David Abram). As Ted Toadvine writes in his excellent Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature: “[The] resistant and aloof aspect of the thing is precisely what gives it the status of an in-itself in our experience, what rejects the body’s advances even while remaining, in some sense, correlated with it” (58). The ambiguity between the perception of the world and the world’s resistance to perception undercuts human experience, and gives an autonomy to the realism of the world. Flesh is not dialogue, flesh is not a synthesising unity—flesh is prior to human affectivity: it is only through the experience of a personal world that terms such as “unity” and “dialogue” become affixed to philosophical structures.

The Ghost in Me

2010-06-03T07:41:00.003Z

I'll be speaking at "Traces: Thinking Through Remains" at UCL on Friday, June 4th. Below is my abstract, which builds on material in the previous post.

[UPDATE: I have now uploaded the paper to Academia.edu should it be of interest. The paper is based on material from the forthcoming book, so treat it as a transitional draft.]

The Ghost in Me: Toward a Phenomenology of the Doppelgänger

Why do the dead return? It has been customary to respond to this question in one of two ways. First, ghostly apparitions-ranging from benign phantoms to ominous spooks-have tended to be treated as a defect in imagination, the implication being that such phenomena are merely a projection of the contents of consciousness on the world. The alternative trajectory has been to reduce ghostly matter to a "blockage" in memory. In such a reading, to "see" ghosts would mean to unconsciously remember that which is dead but has yet to move on, with the experience of being haunted traceable to a debt the dead still owe to the living.

In this paper, I will formulate a way to commune with the dead which seeks to avoid reducing ghostly phenomena to an offspring of psychic activity. I will do this via the lived body. Two thoughts will be pursued. On the one hand, with recourse to Merleau-Ponty, I will argue that our embodied experiences are never unequivocally "mine," but forever doubled by an anonymous presence, a trace of a pre-personal body folding into my personal body. Drawing out this theme of doubling, I will develop a phenomenological theory of the Doppelgänger, which attends to the ambiguity of the body as being an object possessed and subject possessing. Phrasing the space between subject and object a site of abjection, I will conclude by aligning the immateriality of the ghost with the materiality of the lived body.

The Body Out of Time

2010-06-01T13:16:00.003Z

For all its overexposed saturation, H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Out of Time” remains an exemplary lesson in the liminal phenomenology of the human body. In particular, by mirroring Lovecraft against Merleau-Ponty, a mode of phenomenology is conceived, which foregrounds the un-naturalism of the body. Already in Merleau-Ponty, this incipient weirdness is announced as the “prepersonal body”—this other “subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it.” (More on this idea here). What remains unsaid in Merleau-Ponty, however, is how this anonymous subject materialises in the flesh of the body. All that we are left with is the fleeting impression that “when I am in danger…my human situation abolishes my biological one…my body lends itself without reserve to action.” Beyond these liminal experiences, the “impersonal existence,” of which the “I” is composed, is repressed into the organism, the body. Here a question forms: if my body is subjected to another self, and a self whose ends are unknown to me, then do I retain possession of my body? After all, do I really “experience” the prepersonal body that forms a double of my own presence? Here, Lovecraft can help us address Merleau-Ponty’s lacuna.

“My head was aching, and I had a singular feeling—altogether new to me—that some one else was trying to get possession of my thoughts.” So begins Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee’s experience of being possessed by another species of life. In this case, it is The Great Race, a collection of disembodied minds, who journey through the universe in search of finite bodies to dwell in so that they may extend their knowledge. And the possession is phenomenologically telling. For what takes place in this second life is not simply the seizure of Peaslee’s mind, as though thought were the province of the head and its cognitive faculties—but a disordering of the whole body, and thus identity itself.

“Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsily and gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had laboriously learned English language from books.” Merleau-Ponty tells us that speech is an “originating realm,” whose expression is dependent less on the words themselves and more on how they are used (pp.202-203). For him, speech is an attitude, a manner of being-in-the-world. Philosophy, too, is the organ of language, whose understanding calls upon “feeling my way into its existential manner, by reproducing the tone and accent of the philosopher.” What Lovecraft presents us with is a speech that becomes increasingly incomprehensible the more an “unknown sort of knowledge” is articulated. “The pronunciation was barbarously alien,” Lovecraft writes. This conflation of estrangement and knowledge points to the body becoming at once constitutive of self while simultaneously exposing itself to being the host of another subject.

Merleau-Ponty writes of “another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it.” This body is “more ancient than thought”: it is the transcendental condition of there being a body in the first place, and thus necessary that it possesses me in order for my personal body to persist. Though anonymous, the body is within me. I am it, it is me. As ancient, my body—its corpus of flesh, bone, and memory—is absorbed with the immateriality of a spirit manifest in and through my own materiality. In a word, I am the organ of the waking dead, whose agency employs my body to summon a different age.

The disordering and disjoining of different bodies pushes the body beyond time, placing it beyond a linear concept of time altogether. Speaking through Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, Lovecraft writes: “My conception of time—my ability to distinguish between consecutiveness and simultaneousness—seemed subtly disordered; so that I formed chimerical notions about living in one age and casting one’s mind all over eternity for knowledge of past and future ages.” Through the body, time has been put out-of-joint, divested of all its human elements, and thus “seized with a strange secondary life and leading for a greater or lesser period an utterly alien existence typified by vocal and bodily awkwardness.”

Lovecraft and Merleau-Ponty are both bound with an implicit sensitivity toward the anonymity lurking beneath personal identity. In both case, the body becomes the site of abjection, a space for the disordering of time and materiality. Thus, Lovecraft poses a question: “Had something been groping blindly through time from some abyss in nature?” Faced with the “alien civilization” of our own planet, Merleau-Ponty responds to Lovecraft, speaking of an “amorphous existence which preceded my own history”: “I have only to look within me that time which pursues its own independent course, and which my personal life utilises but does not entirely overlay.” We are faced with a body that by its very nature is the genetic recipient of a memory necessarily outside of its own existence. With this influence, the world of bodily things—“roads, plantations, villages, streets, churches, implements, a bell, a spoon, a pipe” [a future nod to Latour]—becomes imbued with a strange, depersonalised quality. The body does not end with its own materiality, nor does the prepersonal subject incubating within the self. Both direct themselves to the flesh of the world, with its anonymity and alienness. Eventually, the gaze of the prepersonal body turns inwards, in the process revealing a body held captive not by the Great Race, but by the very banality of there being a body in the first place.

Agyrophobia

2010-05-03T15:59:00.004Z

At times, boundaries between places can act as thresholds from one experience to another. From inside to out, from door to hallway, window to table, a world’s terrain is explored, thick in its detail and rich in its depth. Once inhabited, those boundaries become porous, and the experiences undergone in one place become incorporated into the body as a whole. And it is true: space is an extension of us, but the reverse is also the case: we are an extension of space. Within this dialectical interplay, the body as “holding-sway,” is thought of as being the “zero point” of orientation, from which notions of being “at home” spring forth (Husserl). More than this, the body as the locus of experience is never left behind, never entirely expired, even when consciousness has ceased to be conscious of the body. The body continues even when—especially when—we experience a rupture between self and world.

In the street, a kind of murmur completely envelops him; similarly he feels deprived of his freedom as if there were always people present round about him; at the café there seems to be something nebulous around him and he feels to be trembling; and when the voices are particularly frequent and numerous, the atmosphere round him is saturated with a kind of fire, and this produces a sort of oppression inside the heart and lungs and something in the nature of a mist round about his head (Minkowski, cited in Merleau-Ponty).

Murmuring, freedom, nebulousness, trembling, fire, oppression, midst: each of these terms mentioned in Minkowski’s account of anxious spatiality, points to a collision between the lived experience of the world and the formal, objective characteristics occupying the same space. Space becomes transformed by the subject’s placement in the street: equally, the subject himself undergoes transformation as his body becomes enveloped by the street. Both are caught in the prism of an anxious being-in-the-world. But does the experience of bodily anxiety arise prior to being in the street? Does the street touch upon an experience that is already coiled within the subject’s body? The question hinges on a phenomenological analysis of thresholds, of crossing the street.

Structurally, the street as an emblem of anxiety is marked by its identity as being between places. As proof of this, the threshold demarcating the street from the pavement is not determined by the objective fear of risk, such as being hit by a car. Rather, it is within the structure of the street (quite apart from its contents) that anxiety literally takes place. Between places, the street assumes a level of uncertainty assuaged only by proximity and attachment to the aligning pavements. Proximity and distance from is a dynamic that depends in large on the admission of finality. Less a “crossing,” the opening becomes more a leap dividing worlds. This is the impasse of vertigo and claustrophobia I spoke about previously. In the street, vertigo becomes a horizontal experience, understood as the sense of swaying on land. And rightly so: for if we take the bodily experience of being “at home” to refer to a mode of being-in-the-world that is fluid and coherent, then where that unitary phenomenon is disordered, the materiality of space loses both stability and orientation.

Existentially, the street is held apart from the rest of the world in its strained phenomenality. Consider the experience of looking outside of a window from your bedroom: the materiality of the world is not only cast in a different atmosphere, but its very reality is of a different order, somehow more susceptible to dis-appearing. Recall Freud, too: “According to the evidence of my senses, I am now standing on the Acropolis, but I can’t believe it.” Disbelief coincides with a loss of reality, and a loss of reality sets in place a different kind of materiality—beyond touch, beyond perception, forever evading the body that crosses it. The very stuff of being—a street linking places—is no longer enough to secure the validity of the external world, no longer enough to prove the idea that there is a world in the first place.

Pascal’s Abyss

2010-04-24T13:56:00.002Z

Pascal had his abyss that moved along with him.
(Baudelaire, “The Abyss”).

Shortly after he was nearly thrown into the Seine in his coach, Pascal became fixated with the idea that he saw an abyss on his left hand. The incident had scarred his bodily awareness of space, such that the geometrical proportions of a room took on a renewed significance, now endowed with a “great hole leading who knows where; I see only the infinite through all windows” (Baudelaire). How is space moved from the materiality of its geometrical proportions, delineated through reason and abstraction, to space as an expression of “the eternal silence” felt through the contours of the body?

In Léon Spilliaert’s drawing, “Vertigo” (reproduced above), this collision of geometry and anxiety produces a supra-real landscape. Contours become punctuated with massive voids, angles lose their solidity, while the exposure leading from above to below becomes a plight of terror. The face of the human in the drawing is darkened, an amorphous hole where the eyes should be peers out from beneath the hood. There is motion in the person’s movement, the scarf caught in the breeze. In this scene of movement and deformed geometry, Spilliaert depicts tremendous hesitation in her movement. Indeed, more than hesitation, the figure is frozen between steps, with her body orientated toward the top, from where her “spirit, haunted by vertigo, envies non-being in its insentience” (Baudelaire). Baudelaire’s characterisation of Pascal’s abyss establishes a dilemma that the figure in Spilliaert’s drawing viscerally confronts: to commit to descent, would risk exposure to the precipice separating one place from another. Whereas, remaining stationary eschews one phobia for another, claustrophobia: the pathology of having no place to escape to.

How will phenomenology contend with Pascal’s abyss? How, that is, will phenomenology contend with the abyssal experience that is no longer reducible to the objective components of space? Of course, phenomenology has already accounted for the experience of space, which is less reliant on points, grids, and measurements, and more concerned with the affective relation we have with the intimacy of the “home.” Phenomenology’s orientation toward being “at home” in the world thus attests to a relationality bridging experience and world into a unitary phenomenon. That this relationality tends to privilege “felicitous” instances of dwelling does not, however, preclude the relation being redirected toward the experience of abyss. For what is at stake in this relation, is the animism of space, the very birth of place’s genius loci. More of which next time.

Home-Body

2010-04-18T03:09:00.002Z

An apartment in Brooklyn. Your body is pressed against the cooker. Rice is boiling on the stove, and your brow has begun to excrete half-a-dozen beads of sweat against your dark skin. The life of fire and warmth has been lit in your kitchen. Your body is animated, and your kitchen is alive. I am watching from the corner of the room, my head is directly under the entrance demarcating the kitchen from the hallway. I remember nothing, except for the moment I enter the kitchen. I brush by your body, you flinch, and I retreat: we have shown one another the ending that lies in wait. Our bodies have met in space, but not touched one another. Your body is alien to me, its mass of flesh and bone carved beside the American cooker, a monument of an era now consigned to archives. Your body is inhospitable, no longer of this home: at certain times, it is no longer clear where your body ends and where the anonymous ruins of this Brooklyn apartment begin.

When, asks Anthony Steinbock, is a home a home? In time, an answer forms: “The homeworld…is a privileged world since it is not merely one world among others, and our homecomrades are not simply individuals who happen to occupy the same space” (P. 232). We are (re)turning to Bachelard’s “inhabited space,” only now thrown into an intersubjective, experiential realm of spatiality, in which, after all, space is not enough. (Cf. Heidegger: “the real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a lack of houses.”) Other creatures are met in the hallways and rooms of the places, in which we sometimes dwell. And now these bodies must confront their fate: do they exchange glances in order to reciprocate the other's corporeal being or objectify one another? If we are lucky, then a transformation takes place, beginning with the body which, for Steinbock, “takes on the styles and habitualities of comportment unique to our cultural values….Indeed, this is so much so the case that it might not be too strained to speak of the lived-body precisely as a ‘home-body’” (P. 232-233).

Home-body: You have left the apartment and I am lying motionless on your floor. My body is home-less in this place you call “home.” My body falls through this place, circumvents the brown bricks, dark doors, and iron railings leading to this point in space and time. Way above me, the sky has turned dark and my back is arching toward the ceiling. From this angle, I can see the grooves that your shoes have made in the floor, the scratched surface a testimony to your commitment to this corner of the planet. You have been here longer than I have. Your body is attuned to this place. The shadow of your body pours into the depths of this furniture and cutlery: when I move to the kitchen in your absence, then I can taste your skin on the knife I use to slice bread into smaller pieces. Here your body lingers where you yourself have long since departed.

At Home

2010-04-14T21:17:00.004Z

Bachelard: “All really inhabited space bears the essence of home” (p. 5). Much remains unsaid in this important claim. Much is already contained in this phrase, chunks of which can be disproved with recourse to empirical experience. After all, it is manifestly not the case that inhabited space is a necessary and sufficient condition for what we would term being “at home.” There are occasions in which unity, harmony, belonging can occur in the glance of an eye, when moving from place to place. Conversely, a prolonged inhabitation of space need not result in the experience of being “at home.” Over a long duration of time, the feeling of being a visitor in one’s “home” is symptomatic of a rupture exceeding temporality, from which no inhabitation can resolve.

“All really inhabited space bears the essence of home.” This formulation must be returned time and again. From whence does the feeling of being “at home” emerge? Anthony Steinbock’s reading of the generative emergence of homeworld/alienworld in Home and Beyond is a good place to begin plotting this emergence. The critical question here is: is familiarity to be identified with normality, and thus home? (p. 175). Steinbock turns to Maurice Natanson, who “notes that what is typical for myself is immediately familiar to me, that is, has its roots in my life in ‘silent familiarity’” (p. 174). Silence is also a mode of inconspicuousness: nothing protrudes in this familiarity, but instead reinforces the bond between silence and typicality. Here, too, others and other things become incorporated into my lifeworld, all serving to place me within a normal context. Husserl writes: “Everyone newly emerging into my circle is apperceived according to my likeness, and now he is called normal when the general prefiguring of the horizon…accords to me in the general structural style” (Ibid.). This is a telling passage. At first sight, it looks as though “normality” gains its normative dimension through the egocentric focus of the “I,” a point that Steinbock is critical of. Things become incorporated through an already perceptive reciprocity. Only then, is the formation of the “alien” (unhomely) possible, given its co-dependence on the normative centre, as Steinbock writes: “The ability to typify is the essential means of human normality to ensure against the existential shock of having to the see the world the way it is” (sic, p. 175). Unfamiliarity is the condition of familiarity, and the dialectic of inside and out (which Bachelard would speak) is the basis upon which the hold of the lifeworld forms. Ultimately, Steinbock will point to an account of being at home that places intersubjectivity central.

In any case, the co-constitution of familiar/unfamiliar and home/alien points to what Steinbock terms “liminal” notions, liminal in the sense of being “mutually delimited” (p. 179). Without venturing into Steinbock’s discussion of “appropriation” and “transgression,” a distinction to Bachelard’s onus on “inhabited space” is already evident in this discussion. We have moved from a static account of home, as figures large in phenomenological architecture. Take Juhani Pallasmaa as an example:

Home is an individualized dwelling, and the means of this subtle personalization seem to be outside our notion of architecture. Dwelling, a house, is the container, the shell for home. The substance of home is secreted, as it were, upon the framework of the dwelling by the dweller.

Home is an expression of personality and family and their very unique patterns of life. Consequently, the essence of home is closer to life itself than to artefact.

Reflection on the essence of home takes us away from the physical properties of a house into the psychic territory of the mind. It engages us with issues of identity and memory, consciousness and the unconscious, biologically motivated behavioural remnants as well as culturally conditioned reactions and values. (Via).

I remember hearing Pallasmaa express similar sentiments in 2007 in Haifa. I looked down, and realised I was clenching my fist in a non-conscious act of resistance. It is a seductive mode of thought that would sooner retreat into a myth of primordiality than contend with the ambiguity joining the indifference of materiality with the human patina applied to that materiality. “At home” must also face its antithesis, its awkward birth in the alien and unhomely. No longer being at home, exile. The home marked by the residue of memory, the rupture of dreams that have been transposed from night to day: a waking alienworld, from which the phrase "I remember" damages the structure of experience. “Because we are home we ‘belong to’ to the alienworld in the process of co-constitution, but again, precisely by not belonging to the alien as being ‘home’” (Steinbock, p. 181). Home implicates alien, and vice-versa, establishing a porousness of borders, from which the question emerges: is it possible to be an alien in one’s “home” without already being “at home” amid that alien environment?