The Question of Painting

Rethinking Thought with Merleau-Ponty

Jorella Andrews

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781472574305
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Since the latter half of the 20th century, committed art has been associated with conceptual, critical and activist practices. Painting, by contrast, is all too often defined as an outmoded, reactionary, market-led venture; an ineffectual medium from the perspective of social and political engagement. How can paintings change the world today? The question of painting, in particular, fuelled the investigations of a major 20th-century philosopher: the French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907-61). Merleau-Ponty was at the forefront of attempts to place philosophy on a new footing by contravening the authority of Cartesian dualism and objectivist thought-an authority that continues to limit present-day intellectual, imaginative, and ethical possibilities. A central aim of The Question of Painting is to provide a closely focused, chronological account of his unfolding project and its relationship with art, clarifying how painting, as a paradigmatically embodied and situated mode of investigation, helped him to access the fundamentally "intercorporeal" basis of reality as he saw it, and articulate its lived implications. With an exclusive and extended conversation about the contemporary virtues of painting with New York based artist Leah Durner, for whom the work of Merleau-Ponty is an important source of inspiration, The Question of Painting brings today's much debated concerns about the criticality of painting into contact with the question of painting in philosophy.

PART ONE

Painting – Rethinking thought beyond dualism and positivism

FIGURE 1.1 Barbara Kapusta, Still from O’s Vocalization, 2016, HD 16:9 video transferred to PAL 4:3, sound Chra, 10:56 mins. Courtesy Barbara Kapusta.

FIGURE 1.2 Pieter de Hooch, A Woman Carrying a Bucket in a Courtyard (Eine Magd mit Eimer in einem Hinterhof) c. 1658–60, oil on canvas, 44 × 42 cm. Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe. Credit: bpk / Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe / Wolfgang Pankoke.

Chapter ONE

‘Nature’ and ‘consciousness’ – Merleau-Ponty’s critical encounter with dualism

Broken?

In free fall

we meet,

O and (.

Our bodies

move – thrown,

gravity pulling us.

Time slows down, O.

In slow motion

we start to move

to turn, and to crack.

Our bodies open

and break into parts,

into pieces.

We begin to hum

and to beat … .¹

These are some of the words that accompanied Barbara Kapusta’s short black-and-white film O’s Vocalization (see Figure 1.1)² when it was shown as part of her installation for the Kunsthalle, Vienna’s 2016 exhibition, The Promise of Total Automation. I have turned to them, in the first instance, because they convey a scene akin to that found in Merleau-Ponty’s early writing: a scene of breakage – in his case, breakage from philosophical tradition – from which an emphatically generative energy is gently released. Usefully, too, Kapusta’s words connect us with a set of contemporary concerns and a contemporary art practice through which to consider Merleau-Ponty’s initial attempts at reformulating philosophical thought in non-dualistic, non-linear and non-causal terms. They also connect us with early Merleau-Pontean insights gleaned from his considerations of painterly interrogation, understood as resolutely inter-corporeal, in terms of its situation, outlook, methods and ethical implications.

The Promise of Total Automation – to begin with this – was a group venture in which artists reflected on a pressing topic: How might the shifting relations between machines, nature, humans and objects be understood in a cybernetic age in which processes of production, communication and the circulation of capital are increasingly driven by algorithms whose speeds of calculation and execution exceed unaided human apprehension?³ At issue here is a focus on communication and control theory – whether referencing artificially constructed or coded mechanical-electrical systems on the one hand, or, on the other hand, the automatic control systems operative within non-human as well as human physical and psychological functioning. The latter include what Merleau-Ponty would refer to in the Phenomenology of Perception as the ‘habit-body’ as well as the deep structures of so-called anonymous being in which embodied beings are also involved. As I will show, these concerns provide an apt backdrop against which to consider The Structure of Behavior’s key themes (Merleau-Ponty’s comparative explorations of the ‘syncretic’, ‘amovable’ and ‘symbolic’ forms of behaviour, for instance, to which I will return in the following chapter) and his motivations for writing it. For although cybernetics was then not yet a named field as such – Norbert Wiener’s inaugurating book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine would be published some years later, in 1948⁴ – it was precisely within the context of analogous phenomena, and their implications for learning, change and freedom, that Merleau-Ponty’s early philosophical thought and his first sustained engagement with painterly practice took place. Indeed, a notable feature of The Structure of Behavior is the fact that his philosophical arguments, and his discussion of El Greco’s art practice in the book’s penultimate chapter, entitled ‘Naturalism’, occur alongside close and prolonged readings of work carried out in the field of ethology, the scientific study of animal behaviour, where explorations of the involuntary reflex, the conditioned reflex and causation were central. Merleau-Ponty engaged with the work of Pavlov and others and, as Brett Buchanan argued in his 2008 book Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty’s thought was shaped in important ways by the legacy of the ‘father’ of ethology, the Swiss biologist Jakob Johann Baron von Uexküll (1864–1944). Significantly, where notions of causality were concerned, Uexküll’s work sought to navigate a route between a Darwinian reduction of biological processes to physical mechanisms on the one hand and, on the other hand, the then-proliferating critiques of Darwinism found in vitalism.⁵ Uexküll was also the originator of the term Umwelt – the environing or surrounding world – which would become so important within phenomenology. About half way through The Structure of Behavior, when discussing ‘the vital structures’ (structures of awareness that are located somewhere between reflex actions and symbolic functioning in terms of their flexibility), Merleau-Ponty cited an evocative quote by Uexküll as recorded in the psychologist F. J. J. Buytendijk’s 1930 essay ‘Les Différences essentielles des fonctions psychiques de l’homme et des animaux’ (‘Essential differences in the psychic functions of man and animals’): ‘Every organism is a melody which sings itself.’⁶ More fundamentally, when contextualizing his own philosophical position and aims at the beginning of The Structure Behavior, Merleau-Ponty referred overtly to the fact that within the intellectual milieu of his time – the late 1930s – an attachment to two rival control systems, defined by him as ‘consciousness’ and ‘nature’, were in problematic coexistence. Each system, an offspring of Cartesian dualism,⁷ tended to present itself as indubitable and complete. Within this context he also drew attention to the then-conventional but problematic philosophical and scientific habit of associating ‘nature’ with classical notions of causality and reflex behaviour:

Our goal is to understand the relations of consciousness and nature: organic, psychological or even social. By nature we understand here a multiplicity of events external to each other and bound together by relations of causality. … [A]mong contemporary thinkers in France, there exist side by side a philosophy, on the one hand, which makes of every nature an objective unity constituted vis-à-vis consciousness and, on the other, sciences which treat the organism and consciousness as two orders of reality and, in their reciprocal relation, as ‘effects’ and as ‘causes’.⁸

I will return to The Structure of Behavior shortly and to how Merleau-Ponty intervened in and cha llenged this state of affairs. But if we reflect on our own early twenty-first-century contexts, and return to Kapusta’s film O’s Vocalization in particular, its significance is that at a visual and thematic level it is doing something akin to what Merleau-Ponty was also seeking to present as philosophically viable: it immerses us in an inter-corporeal scenario in which classical notions of causality seem to have lost their dominance. In Kapusta’s film, the inter-corporeal scenario is focused around objects and their interactions. In other words, although we cannot pretend that human subjectivity and agency were not involved in the making of this artwork, agency at its most active is presented as having been displaced from the human realm to that of things – in the exhibition’s documentation these things are referred to as ‘fictitious object-persons’ – not in an anthropomorphic sense but with the intention that our conventional ideas about agency, action and interaction might be extended.⁹

In visual terms, Kapusta’s film opens with a field of black. Were it not for the sound accompanying this blackness, we might assume that nothing was happening; that nothing – rather than this rich something – was there. The soundtrack is difficult to describe. Sourced from a composition by the Austrian musician, DJ and founder of the label Comfortzone, Christina Nemec aka Chra – a piece called Il_Liquid created for Spectral Sounds, a site-specific sound art exhibition held at the Musikpavillon in Innsbruck’s Hofgarten during January 2016¹⁰ – it is rhythmic rather than melodic. But its texture has a rather disrupted quality. It is somewhat like an electronic sea, its acoustic tides surging in and out unevenly, between dimensions. Or it is like the slightly wavering pulse, beat or breath of a part-industrial, part-organic being. Or it is as though we are in an echo chamber or positioned against some kind of sound barrier witnessing a strange mechanical transmission fade in and out.

But then, abruptly, the black screen erupts into activity, albeit in mesmerizing slow motion; O’s Vocalization was filmed at a high speed of up to 1,500 frames per second. We see a cluster of c-shaped, oval and circular forms surge upwards with anti-gravitational force as if of their own accord – whether they are links removed from once-existent chains or the components of not-yet-existent ones is undetermined. A few of these elements appear to be awkwardly joined but most exist as independent entities. Nonetheless they appear to act with mutual awareness and as something of a cohort. In the sequences that follow, the familiar downward force of gravity has been restored and, over and over again, falling links glint against that surrounding blackness, so continuous that it is difficult to establish precise spatial references. Again, most of the links descend singly although a few are interconnected. To begin with, they are presented as if somewhat at a distance, then up-close, and it is evident that several are not the mass-produced, metallic objects we might have anticipated but have a handcrafted look. At the very least they seem to be partially machined or cast and partially handmade – they were in fact individually created from unfired, painted clay. In The Promise of Total Automation similarly crafted clay objects were on view, positioned here and there, as part of Kapusta’s installation.

Your surface is

covered with

dents and scratches

and fingerprints.¹¹

Midway through the film – which has a total duration of around eleven minutes – there is a thematic shift and a point of temporary climax: individual links now reappear in the form of a long, flexible chain, swinging and twirling, like a necklace, swaying as if lifted from an invisible display box or as if hanging from an invisible neck. As a consequence, too, the film’s black background suddenly obtains a new sense of texture and suggestiveness; it is now reminiscent of the soft, dark velvet against which jewellery is often both protected and displayed. But darker associations also now come to the fore: those which connect chains with heavy industry and heavy labour (notably slavery) and with the conditions of bondage, weight and constraint. Forms of social brokenness, in other words, that are at once hidden by, embedded in and facilitated by a structure – the chain – that may nonetheless also be described as conveying forms of connectivity, flexibility and coherence.

In the film’s final portion, a fragile loop of chain falls and spreads out onto the black ground. Then, once again, we are in the realm of discrete, falling bodies as individual c-shaped, oval and circular links slowly descend, land and bounce upwards, sometimes breaking but nonetheless spinning, twisting and turning in what might most appropriately be described as a carefree choreography of bits and pieces in potentially endless recombination.

Regarding her own motivations in relation to this film, Kapusta has said that she was interested in ‘the point and moment where things start to come into our focus and become visible’. Then, shifting her references from the visible to the audible, she continued: ‘The title points to the moment of vocalization, the change of a sound into a vowel and in general to speech, communication and exchange.’¹² In order to facilitate this, she created a filmic Umwelt in which it became possible for the capacities, actions and desires of these objects – or ‘object-persons – to come into ear- and eyeshot in ways that have not already been predetermined by their human counterparts. There is space and time for revelation, surprise and mutual adjustment, with Kapusta’s role, and ours too, closest to that of witness-facilitators. As indicated, this type of sensibility is one that is also generally extended and encouraged by Merleau-Ponty’s own approach to seeing, thinking and writing.

Within the context of my introduction to, and interest in, Merleau-Ponty’s The Structure of Behavior, I am particularly drawn to the fact that in Kapusta’s film our attentiveness is directed towards a communicative scenario that is organized around and animated by the debris of broken chains. For this is also how Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical venture might be described – not only in broad terms but also as it is expressed in this early and still relatively disregarded philosophical text. As already noted, it is immediately clear from the opening lines of this book that Merleau-Ponty is setting out to break chains of philosophical and scientific argumentation in which, to repeat, ‘nature: organic, psychological or even social’ [is erroneously understood as] ‘a multiplicity of events external to each other and bound together by relations of causality’.¹³ It is this erroneous understanding, and the unresolvable contradictions to which it had given rise, that Merleau-Ponty sought to counter in this, and subsequent, writings. But in so doing, of course, he was dismantling long-established rational infrastructures for thought that were regarded as foundational and indubitable if not sacred. In this sense, therefore, Merleau-Ponty was breaking philosophy. And it is for this reason that he has frequently been described by commentators as a non-foundational thinker, a post-structuralist avant la lettre, and a non-philosopher.¹⁴ Therefore – and here I am returning to an issue already opened up in the introduction to The Question of Painting – a key question that his work provokes, and which he specifically sought to address, is this: What kinds of thinking and learning, what transformations, if any, become possible if the dualisms and linear causalities that form the infrastructures for traditional philosophical and scientific thought are dismantled?

Eighty years later – again I am repeating a point already made in the introduction – the traditional infrastructures challenged by Merleau-Ponty have tended to remain in place largely due to their clear (but arguably deceptive) logic and their (arguably fraudulent) ease of application in a range of practical contexts. Thus Merleau-Ponty’s broad concerns in this regard remain current and are shared by a variety of differently positioned thinkers today. One of several possible contemporary expressions of concern, for example, may be found in the ‘realist metaphysician’ Graham Harman’s 2007 essay ‘On Vicarious Causation’. Harman (whose object-oriented ontological thought was grounded in but then relocated outside of the domains of Heideggerean – rather than Merleau-Pontean – phenomenology) opened his essay by claiming that ‘causality has rarely been a genuine topic of inquiry since the seventeenth century’ and needs urgently to be re-examined and reformulated. He con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of images
• Introduction – Painting as thought
• PART ONE Painting – Rethinking thought beyond dualism and positivism
• PART TWO Painting – Rethinking thought as perceptual and embodied
• PART THREE Painting – Rethinking thought as ‘silence’ and ‘speech’
• PART FOUR Painting – Rethinking thought as ‘secret science’
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright