Thinking between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty

Judith Wambacq

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780821446126
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Thinking between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty is the first book-length examination of the relation between these two major thinkers of the twentieth century. Questioning the dominant view that the two have little of substance in common, Judith Wambacq brings them into a compelling dialogue to reveal a shared, historically grounded concern with the transcendental conditions of thought. Both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze propose an immanent ontology, differing more in style than in substance. Wambacq's synthetic treatment is nevertheless critical; she identifies the limitations of each thinker's approach to immanent transcendental philosophy and traces its implications—through their respective relationships with Bergson, Proust, Cézanne, and Saussure—for ontology, language, artistic expression, and the thinking of difference. Drawing on primary texts alongside current scholarship in both French and English, Thinking between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty is comprehensive and rigorous while remaining clear, accessible, and lively. It is certain to become the standard text for future scholarly discussion of these two major influences on contemporary thought.

CHAPTER ONE

THE AREPRESENTATIONAL CONCEPTION OF THINKING THOUGHT IN MERLEAU-PONTY AND DELEUZE

One of the first things one notices when reading Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty side by side is that both distinguish between an original and a nonoriginal form of thought: the latter limits itself merely to repeating or applying acquired ideas and argumentations, while the former is truly creative. The concepts and lines of argumentation of original thought cannot be considered secondary with respect to what they express, the preceding ideas, because it is in and through the search for concepts and connections between concepts that the ideas take a new shape. And so, just as Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between speaking speech (parole parlante) and spoken speech (parole parlée), we can formulate this difference as a difference between “thinking thought” and “thought thought”; or, in Deleuzean terms, between “thought” or “learning” and “knowledge” (DR, 204–6). Needless to say, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze believe that only what we are calling “thinking thought” merits the title of philosophy. True or proper philosophy cannot limit itself to offering a survey of already existing ideas, or simply to rearranging them, or changing a detail here, another there.

In what follows I will examine how both authors develop this difference between two kinds of thought. It will become clear that both consider “thought thought” to be grounded upon representation. “Thought thought” is nonoriginal because it understands its activity as representing an already existing (ideal or concrete) reality. Deleuze, for example, introduces eight postulates to describe “thought thought,” the central one being the postulate of representation. He also claims that the “history of the long error is the history of representation” (DR, 374).¹ Although Merleau-Ponty never explicitly mentions representation as the object of his criticism, he repeatedly stresses that the “object” of his philosophy, indeed, of (true) philosophy in general, cannot be represented: “What I want to do is restore the world as a meaning of Being absolutely different from the ‘represented,’ that is, as the vertical Being which none of the ‘representations’ exhaust and which all ‘reach,’ the wild Being” (VI, 253).

The idea that thinking thought is not about representing reality goes hand in hand with the idea that the access to reality—traditionally said to happen through perception and thought—cannot happen via representations. In the following sections, we will see how both authors explain this access, and thus what their alternatives for representational thought are. Since this criticism of “thought thought,” or “representational thought,” as I will call it from now on, also implies an attack on a specific conception of philosophy, we should see this chapter as a chapter on the nature of philosophical thought according to Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. However, for an expanded discussion of this topic, I refer the reader to the third chapter, where I situate their views of philosophical thought in the broader history of philosophy.

MERLEAU-PONTY’S CRITICISM OF REPRESENTATIONAL THOUGHT

In order to describe Merleau-Ponty’s theory of thought, we can take his early theory of perception as our point of departure, since “knowledge and the communication with others” continue “our perceptual life even while transforming it” (PriP, 7). Moreover, Merleau-Ponty holds that perception cannot be considered simply a condition of possibility of the act of thinking, since for him perception and thinking share the same basic structure: perception is an “originating knowledge” (PP, 43).²

A central question of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception turns on how to explain the existence of perceptual constants. We perceive the surrounding world as a collection of determinate entities, continuous over space and time. However, the functioning of the senses with which we perceive these entities is not continuous: the eyes make saccadic movements; we blink; the head and body move up and down to the rhythm of our breathing, and so on. Moreover, we always perceive from one specific point of view, determined by the position of our body. How, then, are we to determine which viewpoint reveals the true nature of an object? How are constant perceptual qualities to be explained when de facto there is only a multitude of different sensations? Are these perceptual constants constructions or are they immanent to the perceived world? In other words, is perception a mediated process, or not?

Before delving into these questions, it should be noted that Merleau-Ponty is not interested in the question of whether or not we have access to the world in itself. As this question cannot be answered—it is impossible to say something about the world beyond our experiences—he limits his examination to studying the nature and the condition of our perceptual interaction with the world as we live it, the so-called “lived world.” As an introduction to Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception, it is helpful to give a sketch of the theories from which he distances himself.

Empiricist and Intellectualist Accounts of Perception

Empiricists reduce perception to the possession of sensual qualities impressed upon the body by neutral stimuli. In this view, a perceived object is naught more than the sum of sensual qualities, and perception the function of the senses. However, empiricism explains the fact that we often perceive things or aspects of things for which there is no stimulus available—the back of a vase, for example—by appealing to attention and memory to complement the senses. In the case of an absent stimulus, the actual sensation is associated with a remembered sensation on the basis of resemblance. For example, the vase I see in front of me now is perceived as being similar to the one I saw from behind yesterday, and so I supplement the lacking sensation with the sensation from my memory.

Merleau-Ponty argues that this explanation cannot be correct because, for a sensation to be perceived as similar to a remembered one, the sensation already needs to make sense. In principle, any sensation can be compared to any other in one respect or another. But for it to be compared with the “right” property, meaning the property that will allow us to identify it, the sensation already needs to have a particular sense. Hence, empiricism does not explain how we can perceive meaningful things but presupposes meaning or sense.

It is fair to say that the intellectualist account of perception thrives on empiricism’s failure to explain perceptual “illusions.” The fact that we sometimes perceive aspects of things for which there are no physical stimuli indicates that perception is a matter not of the senses, but of the mind, of judgment. Perceiving something as a square, for example, would require deciding which of the different perspectives on the geometric figure is the correct one, the frontal view, or the rotated view, in which it appears as a diamond. In the intellectualist account, this unconscious decision is the outcome of an algorithmic processing of the information about how the position of our body transforms the spectacle in front of us. It is important to note that intellectualism recognizes that in order for one perspective to be connected with another—the frontal and the rotated view of the geometric figure—the first already needs to possess a structure or sense, which the second can complement. Since intellectualists consider the sensual givens to be merely physical, they believe it is consciousness that constitutes the whole intelligible structure of what is perceived: we perceive with our mind.

Like empiricism, intellectualism presupposes what it needs to explain, namely, the fact that we perceive the geometrical figure, now as a square, then as a diamond. Before examining how we settle upon the right perception, we need to explain how we have perceptions in the first place. Moreover, intellectualism presupposes that perception is determinate or, more specifically, that it can be decomposed into a variety of determinate elements. It claims, for example, that our perception of the size of an object is determined by an algorithm that takes into account its apparent size, the retinal image, and the distance between the perceiving body and the object. But in practice, we do not make this distinction between the size something appears to have and its actual size: we immediately perceive it as being, not seeming, big. If we correct our perception—if we realize that the object is not so big—that is not because we returned to the apparent size of the object and recalculated its relation to the retinal image and distance, but because the object makes more sense if seen as small. Moreover, intellectualism presupposes that the elements upon which perception is decided are quantifiable because they can be processed. However, experiments designed to test our ability to determine the color of an object seen in colored light have shown that we can recognize a difference in the color of objects even when the numerical equivalents of both colored objects are equal. Intellectualism, in sum, seems to adhere to an atomism that contradicts daily experience, which always “sees” indivisible and nonquantifiable entities. This atomism also implies that the atoms that compose a perception are neutral and relative. They are theoretically exchangeable because they differ from one another only numerically. But this relativism is not present in perception. It is hard to make out the content of a photograph held upside down. “Up” and “down,” in other words, do not seem to be relative, and easily exchangeable, notions. However, the algorithm that calculates what is seen by taking into account the position of the body should give the same result whether the photo is held right side up or upside down. A last problem with intellectualism is that when perception is considered to be a judgment, when a pure impression is considered to be inexistent, it becomes very difficult to determine the dividing lines between perception and thought.

Merleau-Ponty thinks that, despite their surface differences, empiricist and intellectualist accounts of perception share the same presupposition: both regard perception as a construction in which different, determinate elements are brought together into a meaningful whole that is clearly separated from the perceiver, because the meaningful whole is situated opposite him. This separation between the perceiver and the perceived allows for objectivity. Whether these elements are understood as reflections of what is given in nature or as subjective constructions, they are atoms, that is, absolutely exterior parts (partes extra partes) that bear no intrinsic relation to one another or to the perceiver. Nothing in one element refers to another. They are neutral or, as we said, relative or exchangeable. The determinacy of the elements further indicates that empiricism and intellectualism see the world as being ready-made (PP, 47) and perception as a timeless process. Empiricism thinks perception is definite because it is limited to reflecting what is already there in nature, and intellectualism thinks perception reveals only what has already been constituted by consciousness.

For Merleau-Ponty, empiricism’s conception of consciousness is too poor, and intellectualism’s too rich: “Empiricism cannot see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we would not be looking for it, and intellectualism fails to see that we need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or equally again, we should not be searching” (PP, 28). As perceptual “illusions” indicate, perception cannot be limited to a sensory activity (whether combined with memory or otherwise), nor can it be reduced, as the example of the photograph held upside down makes clear, to a mental processing of neutral and determinate elements. How, then, are we to understand perception?

Merleau-Ponty’s Account of Perception

Merleau-Ponty, for his part, does not understand perception as a construction based on neutral, determinate elements.³ In his account, it is more as if the subject always immediately sees what it perceives, as if the meaning of what is perceived is already present in the world to be perceived. The perceiver seems to have a direct access to the world: “I have in perception the thing itself, and not a representation”; “the thing is at the end of my gaze and, in general, at the end of my exploration” (VI, 7). How is this possible? Let’s illustrate with an example.

When we perceive a mountain as high, we do not compare the perceived size of the mountain with the perceived size of the house at the foot of the mountain and then estimate the size of the mountain on the basis of our knowledge of the average size of a house. We perceive the mountain as high because it occupies a lot of space in our visual field, because it overwhelms us. Something is high because our body cannot reach it, because it towers above our body. Similarly, we describe an object as being far away because it presents fewer, and less identifiable, points on which our eyes can fasten. It is less variegated, less strictly geared to my powers of exploration. My gaze cannot get a grip on it. In other words: the position, the size, and the shape of a perceived object are not determined by the interpretative comparison and synthesis of various determinate, perceptual qualities, but, respectively, by the orientation, scope, and hold that the body has on the object (PP, 266, 261).

However, sometimes objects can occupy a lot of space in our field of vision, as when an object is held right in front of our eyes (PP, 300), and we still do not describe them as being big. If that is so, it is because the context of perception is always included in the perception itself. However, this context can never be identified in terms of angles, or of distances between body and perceived object; this context has to be identified, instead, in terms of the kind of hold upon the object it allows. I perceive a line as horizontal, not because it is perpendicular in relation to the verticality of my standing body, but because it forms, with my body, a unity that is perfectly balanced. The tension between my body and the line is distributed in such a way that it gives rise to a certain stability. Similarly, “the distance from me to the object is not a size which increases or decreases, but a tension which fluctuates round a norm” (PP, 302). In Merleau-Ponty, consequently, the hold our body takes upon the world does not involve neutral elements but qualities. The right distance from which to look at a painting, for example, is not determined by the relation between the size of the canvas, the size of the perceiver, and how good or bad the eyes of the perceiver are, but by the perceiver’s grip on the painted spectacle: the right distance is the distance from which the perceiver has the best grip on the painting (PP, 267). Moreover, this distance is not a neutral and measurable quantity—it is not determinate—but a quality that forces itself upon the perceiver.

It is clear that describing perception in terms of the hold our body takes upon the object differs from the empiricist description of the perceiver as merely passive. And it also differs from an intellectualist, as well as from a Husserlian, account in the sense that it does not imply that the hold is constituted by the body or, more generally, by the perceiver. Merleau-Ponty (PP, 216–17) argues that perception takes place within a field, which means that the perceiving activity is distributed over all the elements of the field.⁴ How so? A field is a structure—for more on the notion of “structure,” I refer the reader to chapters 2 and 7—in which each element owes its significance to the general configuration of the other elements of the field (PP, 313). In the case of perception, this field consists, first, of all the sensual qualities of one object. This implies that a sensual quality of an object is determined by the other sensual qualities attributable to the same object. The color of a carpet, for example, is determined not only by the color of the yarn, but also by the woolly touch of the carpet, its dusty smell, the way it absorbs sounds, and so on.

Second, the perceptual field also comprises the sensual qualities of things related to the perceived object. Our sensation of the blue of the carpet, for example, is also determined by our sensation of the blue of the sky we see when we look out the window of the room, and by the blue of the ocean of our dream from the night before. Our sensations always take place against the background of other actual or virtual (past or future sensations, fantasies, etc.) sensations. One consequence of this intertwinement is that sensual qualities imply one another. When I see and touch the floor covering, I can imagine what it will sound like. Also, my perception of the carpet can already imply the perception of a room with a certain intimacy and coziness. The coziness is “perceived” through sight. In other words, every sense leaves its proper domain as it seizes onto qualities it cannot theoretically access.

For Merleau-Ponty, this intertwinement of sensations is the result not of an intellectual correlation constructed over time, but of an intertwinement that is built into our very body. Were we to appeal to an intellectual correlation, we would have to explain how the mind produced this correlation, and that would lead straight back to the sensations and confront us anew with the question of how something in one sensation can possibly refer to another one. Therefore, the “unity and identity of the tactile phenomenon do not come about through any synthesis of recognition in the concept, they are founded upon the unity and identity of the body as synergic totality” (PP, 316–17). The fact that the color of a thing is codetermined by what is actually and virtually heard, smelled, and felt at that same moment presupposes an exchange between the different senses: it presupposes the body as a synergic system. And so, for sensual...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Arepresentational Conception of Thinking Thought in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze
• 2. Ontology in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze
• 3. Deleuze’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Transcendental Projects
• 4. Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, Readers of Bergson
• 5. Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, Readers of Proust
• 6. Cézanne in Deleuze’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophies of Art
• 7. Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, Readers of Saussure
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index