David Morris on a late paper by Merleau-Ponty entitled "Institution and Passivity"
Apologies for posting the following too-lengthy extract before paring it down to manageable length; I simply don't have time to do that now, but will come back and do so later.
extract:
"Reversibility is a central concept of Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy, especially “Eye and Mind” and The Visible and the Invisible.2 Yet, as Merleau-Ponty himself admits, this concept is enigmatic.3 The enigma is only amplified by MerleauPonty’s near poetic writing; by the fact that reversibility takes Merleau-Ponty into a radically new philosophy, yet his thoughts about it are never fully clarified, because cut short by his early death; and by an unfortunate, consequent temptation to discuss reversibility by way of repeating the examples and language that Merleau-Ponty has left us. This paper contributes to the project of clarifying reversibility4 by showing how elements of his earlier philosophy speak to reversibility and the problem underlying it. This is the problem — continuous across Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy—of the genesis of sense, of how meaning comes into the world, not by being drawn from some already given origin (a ready-made world, whether empirical or transcendental), but through a sort of creative operation within being, an operation of being that generates new sense.5 The first section traces and conceptualizes reversibility in terms of the later philosophy, in order to introduce the enigma of reversibility and some key points behind it. The second section seeks to clarify reversibility by showing how it is linked with and can be understood in terms of a theme that runs from the earlier to the later philosophy and back, namely an interrelation in which activity and passivity reverse to one another.6 The third section deepens this by studying a passage on touch in the Phenomenology’s7 chapter on “Sensing.”8 The passage indicates that what is passively given a posteriori is in fact actively operative in creating the a priori of perception; in turn, this a priori actively shapes the activity through which we are passive to and thence perceive things.
1
Altogether this gives insights for conceptualizing perception and sense not as products of the perceiver merely but of an operation beyond the perceiver wherein the field of perception internally diverges into active and passive moments. Reversibility is a sign of this divergence and is thus a sign of a sort of gap or excess in being that allows for a genesis of sense, a creative operation, within being itself. This last issue becomes apparent through overlaps between the Phenomenology’s passage on touch, discussions of radical reflection in the Phenomenology, and the method of interrogation in The Visible and the Invisible.
1) The Enigma of Reversibility and the Internal Incongruence of Being “Eye and Mind” and The Visible and the Invisible repeatedly emphasize a fact demonstrated by perception, namely that to see something is to inherently also be a being who can be seen. The seer is inherently seen, in something like the way that a front inherently has a back. The seen is in this sense the reverse, an inherent flip side of the seer. Similarly with the toucher and the touched, and the perceiver and the perceived generally. This relation is what Merleau-Ponty first of all indicates with his concept of reversibility. In terms of traditional analyses of perception, this initial point might be converted into one about the condition of perception: perception is conditioned by the perceiver’s being part of and open to the perceived world. This is already a central theme of the Phenomenology, which repeatedly argues that we do not gaze on the world from on high as a transcendental subject or cogito, rather we are being in the world (être au monde), such that the sense we find in the world is not a product wholly
constituted by us but is already oriented to and by the world. The concept of reversibility, though, goes far beyond mere claims about the perceiving subject and conditions local to it or to its ontology, or even local to the subject’s embeddedness in the world. Reversibility takes the perceptual fact just discussed as echoing and licensing a deeper claim about the ontology of being in general, in which (for example) “the world is made of the same stuff as the body” (OE 19/163), things and I are made of the same ““element”” (VI 184/139) and “[t]hings have an internal equivalent in me” (OE 22/164). That is, we might think that the sole emphasis of reversibility is on our being seen as a condition of seeing. And we might think that this condition is wholly fulfilled (as it might seem to be in the Phenomenology9) by our being in the world as a body that can be seen, specifically a unique kind of lived body that is unlike other things around us. Reversibility, though, goes further than this by insisting that we see things only because they are in fact made of the same stuff as the body and we are made of the same stuff as them. Ontologically, we are not made of a unique subjective or even bodily stuff absolutely different from things around us. More than that, things around us are not made of a special stuff absolutely different from us and devoid of meaning. For things ring perception in us only by already being nonneutral, by having a tendency, orientation, or sense that already has its “internal equivalent” in us. This sense informs our relation to things and it is what becomes express in perception.10
While it may be easy to grasp the first point that the flip side of the seer is a thing seen (since the seer obviously is a visible body of some sort), the enigmatic point just broached is that the thing seen has, as its reverse flip side, as its lining (“doublure”11), 2 something like a seer, something that (latently at least) makes sense of the world. This is explicit in Merleau-Ponty’s strange claims, in “Eye and Mind,” that things look at us, to which claims we return below. The seer and the seen are thus the ontological reverse of one another, they are different shapes or inflections of one and the same being. “Reversibility” designates this phenomenal and ontological complicity of the seer and the seen and the perceiver and perceived in general, and designates this complicity as a function of being (not merely the perceiver): it is being that is reversibly perceiver and perceived.
In other words, reversibility famously shifts the emphasis of Merleau-Ponty’s life-long study of perception from the sphere of the perceiver, to being as a whole, for it is the perceiver and perceived, as the reverse of one another within being, that accomplishes perception. Hence a double enigma of reversibility: First, how, contra our experience that it is the subject who accomplishes perception (an experience crystallized in Descartes’s cogito), can we conceptualize perception as an operation of being as a whole, including things outside us? Second, how exactly does this operation work, what is its ontological underpinning? To begin, we must note something important about the ontological structure of reversibility. The seer and the seen are not the reverse of one another like two opposite sides of a coin. In the coin, each side, heads or tails, is identified by information it carries on its own, on its own side of the coin (even if each side always comes fused with an opposite flip side, even if the information on each side shares a common material substratum). In the coin, then, the operation that would reveal heads and tails as one another’s flip side would be a rotation (a coin-flip) in a higher order space external to their identities; or reversing heads into tails would be a matter of striking new information on each side of the coin independently. This would not involve internal operations of the sides, or of their interrelation, it would work on the coin from the outside. This is not the case, though, with the reversibility of the seer-seen or the touchertouched. “Eye and Mind” and The Visible and the Invisible emphasize how the hand, in the very activity of touching, inherently opens itself to being passively touched by things, such that the touching hand can reverse to a passive thing touched and the thing can reverse to something active. In the famous case where the thing touched by my hand is my other hand, the reversal in question is one in which my touching hand itself reverses to a thing touched. (See, e.g., OE 16-21/162-3, VI 183-196/139-149) Contra the coin, where the reversal from heads to tails is by way of an external operation, the very being of touch internally opens a sort of internal convulsion that reverses from toucher to touched. The perceiver and perceived are not like reverse sides of a coin, they are closer in kin to right- and left- hand figures or gloves (but not the sort of glove that can be fit on either hand). Kant calls such figures “incongruent counterparts”12; in geometry each such figure is called an enantiomorph. Like enantiomorphs, the perceiver and the perceived are incongruent because the one cannot be collapsed to or take the place of the other. (Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that the toucher and touched never fully coincide (VI 194-5/147-8), and we will see below that perception and the very concept of passivity entail that activity and passivity never become congruent.) They are counterpart so far as they are always found together and are made of the same stuff. Yet, in the case of gloves, a right-hand glove reverses to its left-hand “incongruent counterpart” when turned inside out. For example, when everted, the blue, right-hand dish glove, lined inside with white flocking, turns to a left-hand, white-flocked glove, lined with blue rubber. Reversibility implies a similar latitude or openness of being, wherein being, by an internal convulsive operation (like eversion) reverses from perceiver to perceived. The perceiver and perceived are made of the same stuff, so their divergence (écart) into incongruent counterparts is by way of this internal operation of being. That is, the perceiver and perceived are not merely ontologically complicit in one another, they are not two separate folds of being that merely happen to fold into one another (com-plicare). The perceiver and the perceived are inflections of one being whose internal fold or hollow13 gives it the latitude to be in divergent ways. It is absolutely crucial to Merleau-Ponty’s ontology that the perceiver and perceived are not two different appearances of one being, but two divergent ways in which being is.14 Being itself is reversibly perceiver and perceived—like a glove itself being reversibly right- or left- handed by way of being turned inside-out. The perceiver and the perceived are thus two inflections of being that at once line and follow one another: they are ever so close, yet in that very closeness they are irreducibly divergent in sense—but nonetheless reversible to another. (As in the glove, where the flocking that lines the right-hand glove, when reversed inside-out, has a left-hand sense incongruent with that of the right-hand glove.) It might seem that a geometrical model of enantiomorphs is too formal to illuminate anything like ontological divergences between things as different as the perceiver and the perceived. But we should note that in chemistry the chirality (handedness) of otherwise identical molecules can make the difference between drug and poison. While the right-hand version of Thalidomide
tempers morning sickness, its left-hand version causes mutations; disastrously, the human body can reverse the right-hand cure delivered in the pharmacist’s pill into the left-hand poison. (Derrida shows that meaningful difference in fact depends on a supplement that opens a shifting latitude of sense; pharmakon, as reversing between cure and poison, exemplifies this latitude.15) And in general “biochirality” is key to living phenomena.16 Chirality matters. Further, Merleau-Ponty himself links chiral enantiomorphs, reversibility and the internal divergence of being, most prominently in a passage from a working note that begins “Reversibility: the finger of the glove that is turned inside out” (VI 317/263).17 While it focuses on inside-out, not left-right, reversibility, the passage’s point seems to be that an external standpoint is not needed to grasp that the glove can reverse from left- to right- handed or inside to out; the glove internally indicates its possible reversal into divergent, incongruent, counterparts. (It does so in the way that a curved Riemannian space internally indicates its curvature. The space’s curvature need not be measured in a higher order space, it can be sensed by traversing a triangle within the space and adding up its internal angles.) The inflection point that indicates the divergence between the senses of inside and outside, or left- and right- handedness, is right there in the convolutions of the glove (even if the glove cannot be both left- and right- handed at once). There is a doubling of being, which Merleau-Ponty suggests when he writes of the curvature of the glove as a “double “representation”.”18 The implication seems to be that being’s divergence is similarly internal to being, in virtue of an internal reversibility that enables being to be in two internally counterpart yet incongruent ways. Being is not a fusion in one point of two
4
separable, mutually external, opposites: being itself is reversibly one way or another. To capture the point another way, in The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty writes that he is seeking a new and heretofore unnamed element of being, which he calls flesh (VI 193/147). In biology and chemistry, chirality is generative of crucial, living differences. With reversibility we can think of Merleau-Ponty as conceiving chirallike inflections—a kind of internal incongruence of being—as elemental to being. What is elemental to ontological differences is thus not some primal substance or process, nor even a unity or dialectic of opposites, but a kind of chirality or handedness, in virtue of which being internally diverges into different senses— not by way of opposites that can be set over against one another as repelling or collapsing into one another, but by way of an operation that opens or plays in a peculiar gap between reversible terms. This reversible gap and incongruence between terms is central to all that follows.19
2) Perception and the Reversibility of Activity and Passivity We now have a sense of what is at stake in the concept of reversibility, but the enigma remains: How does reversibility work, and how is a reversible being beyond the perceiver operative in perception? This section reveals a nexus between perception, activity and passivity that runs like an underlying seam through Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy and back to the Phenomenology, thus showing how the reversible relation between the perceiver and perceived has its ontological underpinning in activity and passivity as ontologically incongruent counterparts that reverse to one another. This prepares for the next section, which returns to the Phenomenology’s
analysis of touch for further insight into the enigma of reversibility. To work back to the nexus of activity,
passivity and perception from a late formulation, Merleau-Ponty’s summary of his 1954-55 lecture course on passivity begins with the following question: How are we to conceive that the subject never encounters obstacles? If the subject has posited them itself, then they are not obstacles. And if they truly resist the subject, then we are brought back to the difficulties of a philosophy which incorporates the subject in a cosmic order and treats the functioning of the mind as a particular case of natural finality. It is this problem that every theory of perception runs up against, consequently the explication of perceptual experience must make us acquainted with a genus of being with regard to which the subject is not sovereign, without yet the subject being inserted in it.20 This question and its structure, especially given the reference to the theory of perception, should immediately remind us of central issues that emerge in the Phenomenology’s dialectical engagement with intellectualism and empiricism (to which we will return). The question in the passivity lectures is how the subject can always make sense of things, find a sens, a meaningful way through the world, such that it need never encounter things as explicit obstacles to sense. Philosophical and scientific analysis may show us how perception grapples with outside things which thus (from the point of view of the analyst) operate as obstacles, but the perceiver never encounters them as such within perception. At most the perceiver encounters difficult or ambiguous perceptual objects that are hard to sort out, but never notices or encounters utter obstacles, or completely senseless things, as such. If we
5
go the intellectualist route and explain this by saying that the subject is wholly active and constitutes everything, the entire issue of obstacles, encountered or not, is moot, and we cannot even pose the question. On the other hand, an empiricism that renders the subject passive to inputs given wholly in advance of and apart from the subject undoes the sense making activity in virtue of which the subject appears as crucially different from the cosmic order. If we tried to repair this problem by anchoring the activity and difference of the subject in the subject, then we would relapse into intellectualism—or (to strike to a core issue) into an activism that posits the subject as wholly active and thus betrays our rootedness in the world. Yet this does not mean that we can lapse into a passivism in which the subject is wholly passive and thence inserted into the cosmic order. With this beginning, the passivity lectures emphasize how the Phenomenology’s route between intellectualism and empiricism demands an account of a ‘passivity without passivism’. As we shall soon see, the need for a ‘passivity without passivism’ is already apparent in the Phenomenology. Nonetheless, the passivity lectures give new focus, depth and centrality to an account of passivity and activity that would go between passivism and activism without lapsing into either. This is apparent throughout the passivity lectures but especially, for example, in passages where Merleau-Ponty criticizes Sartrean “activism” (IP 199) or “actualism” and writes of the “binary dialectic” (which splits terms into wholly polarized opposites) as “madness: madness of activism, madness of passivism” (IP 160), or writes that we need “a) a passivity, b) without passivism” (IP 157), that is, a passivity that would neither be utterly devoid of nor disconnected from activity.
The account of passivity and a way between activism and passivism is a strong underlying theme of the institution lectures as well. (Merleau-Ponty taught these two courses in parallel, with the institution lectures given on Thursday and the passivity lectures given on Monday.) In the very first page of the passivity lectures, MerleauPonty writes “No introduction: cf. other course” (IP 157). It is as if the problem of passivity is already implicit in the very concept of institution. And it is. Institution precisely names a process that generates sense without yet constituting it in a wholly active manner. Merleau-Ponty conceives institution as a temporally protracted development in which events are resumed, taken up, by the perceiver, in such a way as to “endow experience with durable dimensions” (IP 124). Examples include the maturation of the body, which, in resuming ‘pre-maturational’ instincts or habits, generates new senses of the body as, for example, sexually active in a new way after puberty. An example that powerfully exposes the theme of passivity in the institution lectures is birth. Merleau-Ponty writes that birth “is an act, and, like all acts arises from nothing”; that is, like all acts, birth does not constitute its own conditions of activity— activity is not devoid of passivity. He then writes that “Birth [is not an act] of constitution but the institution of a future. Reciprocally, institution resides in the same genus of Being as birth and is not, any more than birth, an act.” (IP 37)21 As in the initial passage from the passivity lectures, birth leads Merleau-Ponty to seek a new “genus of being,” beyond activism and passivism. But in the institution lectures we can understand his point about birth not merely in terms of being, but in light of an earlier remark about time, namely that “Time is the very model of institution: passivityactivity….[time] is total because it is partial,
6
it is a field.” (IP 36) That is, birth is a process in which the act of birth and the one ‘doing’ this act always ‘arrive’ later in that very process. Birth as process is passive to a temporality not constituted in that act: birth is passive to a not-yet-already accomplished ‘pre-birth’ that must precede birth’s accomplishment; and it is also passive to the yet-to-be accomplished birth. And yet, birth, even in this passivity, is an act. Indeed its very character as act depends on its interrelation with a prior and posterior passivity—birth builds on a pre-birth and towards birth as accomplishment, even though those terms are not yet fully given. The act of birth is thus not devoid of passivity. Time is the very model of this interrelation of activity and passivity: of activity as not being devoid of passivity; of passivity not being devoid of activity; of passivity and activity as incongruent counterparts. This is because time happens, it acts, yet not as something already given. (Merleau-Ponty, like Heidegger, is always criticizing the concept of time as an already given dimension.) We must wait for time to ‘happen’. Time is what it is only by being partially what it is. The very act of time is to not yet be given, to not be a fixed dimension, to not yet be ready to act: time is always waiting to be born, we could say. And this ‘birth-character’ of time precisely depends on an incongruence between past and present, present and future, in which these incongruent moments are counterpart and reverse to one another in highly complex ways. With the above sketch of the ‘operation’ of passivity and its centrality to phenomena such as institution, perception, or birth, we can now tease out certain ontological characteristics of passivity, to expose its interrelation with activity as exemplary of—and in fact underpinning— reversibility. First let us note that if passivity
is in fact crucial to the ‘operation’ of institution, perception, or birth, then passivity must be taken seriously in its own terms. If we are to escape activism (and passivism), we cannot conceptualize passivity as a mere absence or deficit of activity. Passivity entails its own genus of being, in which we are non-sovereign, nonactivist, yet not reduced to inertness. For Merleau-Ponty sleep is a key example of the irreducibility of passivity to an absence of activity, a point that goes back to a passage in the Phenomenology: leep comes when a certain voluntary attitude suddenly receives from outside the confirmation for which it was waiting. I am breathing deeply and slowly in order to summon sleep, and suddenly it is as if my mouth were connected to some great lung outside myself which alternately calls forth and forces back my breath. (PhP 245/211, also see 191/163) We are active and voluntary in trying to go to sleep, but only to the extent of adopting a certain pose and acting to cease certain activities. This active cessation and adopting of a pose do not yet actively accomplish sleep. Rather they invite our being taken over by something, by a movement that is not yet our activity and that we cannot bring off ourselves. If we could actively and fully make ourselves go to sleep, then it would not be sleep. So the passivity of sleep is not merely what is left when we remove a certain activity, it is something else. And there is a peculiar gap, then, between waking and sleeping: they are part of one life or way of being, such that the one reverses to the other as its inherent counterpart—yet these counterparts remain incongruent. The transition between sleep and waking, waking and sleep, is abrupt and discontinuous, as between the left-hand glove and its eversion into a right-hand glove, or between past and present.
7
Notice the ontological structure of the relationship between activity and passivity. Activity is not devoid of passivity, in the sense that an act such as birth or waking draws on and resumes a passivity that that act could not itself generate. Similarly, passivity is not devoid of activity, since falling asleep or dying draw on activities (waking and birthing) that are not generated in these forms of passivity themselves. Passivity and activity are internally related, they are counterparts. This crucially challenges the traditional dualism of activity and passivity, the view that activity and passivity are disjoint, yet in such a way that we could make one or the other term primary, as in intellectualism’s reduction of all perception to a constituting activity, or empiricism’s reduction of everything to a receptive passivity. Yet, in showing us that activity and passivity are inseparable, that you cannot give either an activist or passivist account of perception, MerleauPonty is also precisely showing us that activity and passivity are not inseparable in the way of different points along one continuous scale. Passivity is not merely a void or absence of activity; activity is not merely a void or absence of passivity. You do not fall asleep by easing your wakefulness down to the zero point of a scale—a leap to something different is involved. You do not wake up by ratcheting your sleepiness down to zero—here too there is a leap to the different. But this differential leap is not between domains that have nothing to do with one another, it is between counterparts that remain incongruent. Let us now see how this ontological incongruence, this gap, is at play in perception. Crucially, in the above passage in the Phenomenology Merleau-Ponty deploys the gap between waking and sleeping precisely to illustrate the relation between the senser and the sensed. He thus
anticipates the point in the passivity lectures that perception entails passivity, that is, an exposure to an operation beyond us that visits something in us in the way that sleep visits us in the night. (The language of respiration in this passage also echoes a passage in OE, cited below, that conceptualizes the reversibility of seer and seen, activity and passivity, in terms of a “respiration in Being” that inspires something in us.22) This link between passivity-activity and perception—and thence reversibility— becomes apparent in “Eye and Mind,” once we notice that passivity is a central theme in it too. “Eye and Mind” begins with the remark that “Science manipulates things and gives up living in them. It makes its own limited models of things…it comes face to face with the real world only at rare intervals. Science is and always has been […] admirably active….” (OE 9/159) That is, scientific activism eschews any kind of passivity (methodological or experiential) to the world and to this extent it ends up betraying the phenomena, talking about the scientist’s activist construction of things, rather than things themselves. The scientist claims to already know how to know or think; the scientist, we could say, does not have to endure being born into the world, but already constitutes herself as the agent of the scientific task. (In “Eye and Mind” the scientist is never far from the Cartesian cogito.23) In contrast, the painter must wait to be born as the one who can see the specific things (this mountain, this snow) she wants to paint. To do this, the painter must ““take his body with him”” (OE 16/162, citing Valery), be passive as a body in its engagement with things, yet be active with his body. Simply put, the painter learns how to be a seer, by installing herself as the reverse of, and as guided by, the seen and its sens: the painter “draws upon” a “fabric of wild meaning [sens brut]”—a sense outside
8
A Place for Consciousness Studies in Academia? Professor Helps Pave the Way
