Art, Language and Figure in Merleau-Ponty

Excursions in Hyper-Dialectic

Rajiv Kaushik

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441142214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Art, Language and Figure in Merleau-Ponty: Excursions in Hyper-Dialectic considers Merleau-Ponty's later ontology of language in the light of his "figured philosophy, " which places the work of art at the centre of its investigation. Kaushik argues that, since for Merleau-Ponty the work of art actualizes a sensible ontology that would otherwise be invisible to the history of dialectics, it undermines the fundamental difference between being and linguistic structures. Art, Language and Figure in Merleau-Ponty takes up the radical task of the figured philosophy to render sensible and linguistic spaces prior to the thought of their separation. Kaushik situates Merleau-Ponty's criticisms of Saussure's linguistic system, as well as a more general repudiation of the act of inscribing in favour of an abstracted textual meaning, in this context. Following the artists most important to Merleau-Ponty's own writings on art, such as Paul Klee and his fascination with hieroglyphics, and extending these analyses to more recent 21st Century artists such as Cy Twombly, Kaushik takes an excursion into the places where art and language, image and text, drawing and writing, figure and discourse, are interlaced in Merleau-Ponty's last ontology. In view of these intersections, Kaushik ultimately argues, the work of art gives us the spaces where the possibilities of philosophy, both past and future, reside. As the first sustained treatment into the relationship between art and language, this is an important contribution to Meleau-Ponty's philosophy and scholars of aesthetics.

1

The Original Figure

While submitting naïve reflection to a hyper-reflection that indexes an original mode of being, Merleau-Ponty sees that this being exceeds thought. Hyper-reflection thus forces the acknowledgement of an ontology that would be prior to and incomprehensible by means of reflection alone. Yet the artwork, Merleau-Ponty thinks, is an actualization of this being such that it can take on certain contours. It is artwork, in this case, that fulfils the promise of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to exhibit the very concrete and incarnate ground that makes reflection possible, prior to its being taken up by a tradition of thinking. Thus, in ‘Eye and Mind’ he proposes a ‘figured philosophy’ that is adequate to the task of disclosing an original mode of being.¹ The first section of this chapter discusses in greater detail the figured philosophy and the form of being with which it is concerned. There I want to equate the figure with that which remains incomprehensible to reflection. The figure, I will say, marks a movement from the human and towards the ‘pre-human way of seeing’ where being precedes reflection and arises from out of itself for the sake of this reflection.² This deep movement between human and being is grasped by taking seriously the thesis of the primacy of perception and following it into its farthest conclusions until it is no longer perception or even any one specific articulation of the sensible but rather the sensible as such – aisthēsis itself – at its most basic and incarnate moment in the act of its formation.

Thereafter, the chapter outlines the various vicissitudes of figuration in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology – from a transfiguration of the sensible into thought, to the prefiguration of this sensible and finally into what Merleau-Ponty calls an autofiguration that subtends both transfiguration and prefiguration and describes the ontological movement between them. In this autofigure, we discover the basic moment of a sensible being that behaves reflexively and yet is indifferent to the dialectic between interiority and exteriority. A figured philosophy, I want to say finally, arrives at the operations of sensible being itself. This sensible being ultimately autofigures itself, and from its point of view, the difference between reflection and being is usurped. After uncovering the deepest moment of figuration in this chapter, the next chapter will focus on how the work of art, for Merleau-Ponty, actually discloses this autofiguration and is thus a remedial to the limitations of reflection without also requiring the propositional.

The figure and the incarnate sensible

In ‘Eye and Mind’, Merleau-Ponty claims that the artwork gives us a ‘figured philosophy of vision’, which returns to a ‘seeing-visible [voyant-visible]’ body in the midst of ‘a reflexivity of the sensible’.³ A figured philosophy is a philosophy that at last returns to the way in which we inhabit the sensible as well as exposes the way in which this sensible behaves prior to any cognition of it. The figured, in this case, not only discloses the sensible aspect of the phenomenon encountered by the subject prior to any active reflective engagement with it, but also exposes and leaves untouched this sensible as the possibility for reflection. Thus, a figured philosophy is not concerned merely with how a subject actively knows its object; it is nothing short of a disclosure of the origins of the birth of this truth from within the sensible. A figured philosophy, we might say, is what for Merleau-Ponty hyper-reflection ultimately seeks after – to unhide a previously hidden region of being (the Unverborgenheit of Verborgenheit), to disclose a primal presentation of being in its original sense (Urpräsentierbar of the Nichturpräsentierbar). It is a proposal for a radically new form of investigation that exposes an archaic and architectonic sensible over the categories of knowing. Here, as Marc Richer explains, we would grasp the visible in terms of the simultaneous decentring of both ‘correlative poles’ between the givenness of every phenomenon and being:

. . . the first, that of an illusion of the centralization [phenomenon] on itself that allows it to be seen, in a coincidence of centre with centre (i.e., of the centre of vision, that is the eye, with the centre of the phenomenon), like an indivisible individual. And the second, that of an illusion of universal centralization that would allow it [phenomenon] to be seen, but as decentred in a contingent way in relation to this universal centre, as a particular case of a simple factual illustration of an idea.⁴

Replacing the two corpuscular and untouched ‘centres’ of phenomenon and being, what Merleau-Ponty wants to grasp instead is their establishment as ideas around which entire philosophical systems are built. This establishment would not itself abide by conceptual distinctions such as between matter and form or between the appearing and that which appears. Whereas philosophy tends to think of phenomenon and being in terms of the a posteriori and a priori, Merleau-Ponty would like to uncover that which institutes and is prior to such distinctions. His phenomenology is thus necessarily also an ontological one in which we are invited to think of relations in a non-substantial way. Here, conceptual oppositions would be neither originally opposed nor reducible to one another. Speaking of the visible things in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Richer describes them as a ‘specular extract’ of being.⁵ In this regard, a figured philosophy eventuates in what Merleau-Ponty calls a ‘mirror phenomenon’ where the appearance reflects a more basic sensible logic that, rather than a hypostatic foundation, is likewise reflexive with respect to itself and comes into appearance from out of itself.⁶ Hence, a figured philosophy ends not in the reflexivity of the human but in the sensible as such. It shifts away from the indissoluble unity both of things and being where it encounters, internal to the sensible, a meaning that was previously insensible.

With respect to an immediate presence to this extract of the sensible, Merleau-Ponty says in the above reference to the figured philosophy that there is the ‘seeing-visible’ body prior to any intellectual engagement with visible things.⁷ The first thing to note here is that, in understanding the figure as bodily, Merleau-Ponty appears to invoke a primary sense of ‘figure’, which describes the bodies of both humans and animals with respect to their being physical and having limitations on their extension such that they are given shape. The figure would ultimately refer to the contours of all kinds of bodies. But if a figured philosophy begins from the standpoint of human vision, and if this vision ends by grasping the origins of knowing itself, one can immediately wonder if such a philosophy is not more than a new iteration of a tradition of thought that emphasizes human sight as bound up with ideation. On this view, a figured philosophy cannot but see human vision as an ontological aberration that is in the unique situation of grasping truth. When Merleau-Ponty begins a figured philosophy by investigating human vision, it is because he cannot simply begin his analysis by auto-positing a new philosophy. He sees that once the thought of the subject and its ideation apart from being has been announced, it cannot simply be annulled and thus we need to move through this thought in order to come to grasp the region of intersection between subject and being. Just as Merleau-Ponty’s hyper-reflection reflects on the way in which subjectivity came to be thought as a separate category of existence apart from being in order to destabilize such categorization, his figured philosophy focuses first on human vision in order to return it to something prior. Here, he thinks, a figured philosophy will discover a new notion of ground from out of which this seeing arises, at which point we can give up the standpoint of human sight as the absolute source of truth.

The figure begins in seeing, it begins from the standpoint of the activity of human sight, but Merleau-Ponty also reminds us that this activity requires being visible and available to a standpoint other than itself. He describes the ‘seeing-visible’ in terms of the ‘axes of a corporeal system of activity and passivity’ in which there is ‘an open circuit [that goes] from seeing body to visible body’.⁸ The act of sight, in other words, is at once also unreflective, passive and possible only because it is held up to something other than it. The figure in Merleau-Ponty’s sense ultimately refers to a basic structuration of the human body in which its unity and active ability ‘to see’ also requires an alternative side of this vision such that it is passively held up ‘to be seen’. Since these are not two separated moments of figuration, Merleau-Ponty also points out that they each include an intermediary form of seeing, a ‘letting oneself be seen’, which he calls the ‘open circuit’. He describes this circuit in The Visible and the Invisible in the following way:

If one wants metaphors, it would be better to say that the body sensed and the body sentient are as the obverse and the reverse, or again, as two segments of one sole circular course which goes above from left to right and below from right to left, but which is one sole movement in two phases.⁹

This circuit simultaneously allows for both the activity and passivity of vision. There is no position of priority from within the circuit since both moments of vision refer back to it before there is someone seeing and something to be seen. Not only is one’s body opened up such that its seeing requires that it be seen but each term must index a common region that passes between both and forms their basis. At this juncture, the figure is a region of appearing prior to both seeing and seen. It is a constellating structure of the sensible from out of which the activity and passivity of vision are constantly refracting against each other until they are indistinguishable. It allows the body to see, to take on certain contours and to be available to others. It snatches up all modalities of the body, and indeed all bodies, into its own activity of formation.

Such figurations of vision preclude the possibility that it is purely active and that it is representational. Representational vision involves notions of verisimilitude, resemblance, image, simulation, etc. These notions adopt the view that the processes of seeing are disembodied and happen for a subject independent of the objects that are seen. The assumption of a representational notion of vision is that, because it is abstracted from our practical relationships with the world, it has a special veridical quality. This assumption is given credence by the fact that at every instance vision reveals a segment of the world containing objects at a distance. This already abstract character of vision lends itself to a further abstraction in which the world itself is objectified: ‘perfect in its genus, clear, manageable, and homogeneous – which our thinking glides over without a vantage point of its own: a being which thought reports entirely in terms of three rectangular dimensions’.¹⁰ Representational vision relies on idealized notions of space, depth, height, etc. It assumes that, in reality, the phenomena are occurrences defined by a set of qualities allowing them to relate to the various angles from which they are seen. Such is the Euclidean notion of space, which thinks of perspective as a point occupancy system and thus having to do with these angles. On this view, when objects seen at a distance do arouse one’s interest even before one begins to move towards them, this is an instance in which feeling announces itself only after a certain judgement of sight has taken place from a map of perspective. One might think in this case that the arousal of interest arrives after a disinvestment of vision, and that this arousal is a form of spontaneous investment on the part of the subject independent from seeing and even before any possible practical relationship the subject may take up with its objects.

In a certain sense, Merleau-Ponty points out in ‘Eye and Mind’, Renaissance illusionism, which looks for a perspectiva artificialis capable in principle of founding an exact construction, attempts to convey a disinvestment of vision.¹¹ But, citing Erwin Panofsky’s analyses of Renaissance notions of perspective, Merleau-Ponty also points out that illusionism inevitably understood that even a perspectiva artifiacialis refers back to a standpoint and is thus founded by a perspectiva naturalis in which ‘space, or exterior distance, is stipulated as well within the natural pact that unites them’.¹² A rigorous analysis of this natural standpoint affirms Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the figures of the circuit. If what I see is taken to have an objective reality independent from me, this is only because of the way in which both thing and my seeing of the thing have a mutual and diachronic structure. The seen thing appears, after all, only because it can give its aspects in different ways in the context of my specific movements. Here, the thing’s appearing does not initially indicate an ideal object in advance of my seeing of it, but a potentially limitless horizon in which is contained the various concatenations of its appearing. At this point, vision is not ‘everywhere and nowhere’ but neither is it merely punctual. It has its birth in the limitless locations from out of which the multitude of things appear and where the possibility for all my movements exist. Because my seeing is in the first instance always aspectual, taking place within the horizon of these aspects into and through which I can move, I ‘cannot forget in this case that it is through the body that I go to the world’.¹³

Seeing and the thing seen are placed at a specific intersection such that vision predelineates both terms and becomes as much bodily and tactile as it is visual. This original context of intersection is neither objective nor even subjective, but rather at some locus prior to either term wherein the appearing of a thing before a seer is just beginning to form. This incarnated structure of vision reveals the human not as an aberration from the being of the phenomena but as transcending out into the formation of this being as it becomes phenomena. Vision in this case is not merely available to what is other than it. It retrieves, recuperates and reorganizes a region in which it has already inhabited. Merleau-Ponty can go so far as to say that this vision is neither pure identity nor pure difference but rather a location from out of which the distinction arises. At its deepest level, then, vision implies an availability to difference. It takes place in the midst of the act of the formation of a difference between seeing and the seen. In the context of vision, this formation cannot now be raised to the level of a separate category of existence. It always remains an incomplete commonality for vision, since its unity is only in connection to, not independent from, the appearance of specific things in the act of their appearing. The appearance of specific things, in this case, does not differ from the foundation of those things, and this foundation also sustains all the other possible ways in which things could appear. The actual world does not in principle negate its other possibilities. It is only what it is insofar as it has an indeterminate series of what Husserl, referring to ‘unicity’, calls ‘potentiabilities’.

In the first few pages of The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty describes these potentiabilities in terms of a ‘figured enigma of things whose massive being and truth teem with incompossible details’.¹⁴ The term ‘incompossibility’ likely comes to Merleau-Ponty through Leibniz and his thesis of maximization meant to explain how possible worlds are made actual. There i...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Original Figure
• 2 The Excluded Figure
• 3 The Devolution of Language
• 4 Klee and Hand: Colour, Line, Word, Writing, Discourse
• 5 Themes of a Figured Philosophy in the Works of Cy Twombly
• Concluding Remarks
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright