The notion that mediates Merleau-Ponty and McLuhan’s nuanced metaphors of narcissism and anxiety is the shared assumption that existence is inherently ambiguous and anxious, yet, with positive regard. For, ambiguity and anxiety permit for and invite opportunities for perception, expression and understanding (see Arnett, Fritz and Bell 113).8 For example, Merleau-Ponty and McLuhan similarly suggest a primordial need for good anxiety as an order, and not strictly a disorder, of experience, for the affective experience of good anxiety and
narcissism alerts us to our bodily, vital and social “need for the other as other” (Merleau-Ponty IP 30). In technical milieux reflexively promoting ambivalence, we easily forget that the
presence-absence of self-other is a call to participation, i.e., responsibility, to courageously assume the anxious ambiguity of otherness and the mediative between, amidst limits, challenges, risks and possible errors.
Thus, I suggest that Merleau-Ponty and McLuhan share similar assumptions about our lived experience of anxiety and narcissism as a synoptic order of experience. On one side is the
good, opening anxiety and narcissism of mediative contact, responsibility, acknowledgement and
response; on the other side is the bad, closing anxiety and narcissism of bi-polar voyeurism, connection/division and silence. Yet, as we are embodied and embedded being-becomings Merleau-Ponty and McLuhan each maintain faith that we are able to mediate this synopsis of good-pathological anxiety and narcissism. For, as perceptive-expressive bodies we have the power and ability to choose a variety of comportments to better understand self-other-world.
As previously stated, Merleau-Ponty and McLuhan both desire dynamic equilibrium through bodily, perceptive-expressive mediation of extremes. Our body is a primordial layer of dynamic ground that we must constantly traverse, i.e., mediate, amidst the ambiguities of existence. For Merleau-Ponty, we must navigate, negotiate and mediate the synoptic poles, i.e., ambivalence, in order to understand and acknowledge the valuable burden of good ambiguity (Lanigan Phenom.). In complementary fashion, McLuhan describes how particular media forms, which are both implicative material objects and metaphors for guiding cultural narratives, encourage the eclipse of ambiguity, minimizing mediation and perpetuating ambivalence.
For McLuhan, as for Merleau-Ponty, if we are to faithfully hope for balance through synoptic resonance and reversibility, we ought to engage forms of experience that encourage the spatializing, temporalizing and opening experience of good anxiety and narcissism. Grounded amidst the situated yet ambiguous corporeal space and time of self-other-world, which is the
flesh of history, language and people, moments of opening, situating perceptive-expressive
mediation rest upon the resonance between self-other, through which the abyss of
incommensurable distance, and the overwhelming proximity of its depths, becomes instead a chiasmic opening of actuality-possibility (VI; LOM). This opening as a space of praxis, which depends on the bodily, perceptive self-mediation and expressive, communicative mediation of
proximity-distance, allows us to discern distinctions while also remembering our situatedness, thus encouraging mediation of self-other and private-public rather than tending to extremes. Tending toward and resting upon the comfort of ambivalent extremes is simple; tending toward ambiguous dynamic equilibrium requires labor, vigilance and courage.
Similar to Paul Tillich’s suggestion of ontological courage and Christopher Lasch’s suggestion of avoiding pathological narcissism by accepting limitations, Merleau-Ponty suggests we must do both. As stated previously, Merleau-Ponty views good anxiety as courage – as the difficult choice to acknowledge and accept ambiguity, limitation, responsibility and a lack of control. We are assaulted, perpetually, by the ambiguity of existence. The limiting spatiality of the body offers the ambiguity of perception (PhP). Our temporal embedment offers the
“aggressive” ambiguity of the future and tacit ambiguity of the past amidst the present (PrP 112) as well as the ambiguous lack of control associated with the prospect of nonbeing, i.e., death (Tillich). The experience of self-other, private-public mediation offers an ambiguity, which challenges my particularity by introducing me to other landscapes, questioning my being-
becoming and calling for intentional participatory responsibility despite my lack of control of the situation at hand (Macke Intra. 51; Merleau-Ponty PhP; Dillon Desire 152; 155). Self-other relating also offers the threat of transition, change, and transformation, which can rip us from the comfort of ambivalence (Macke). To resist the paradoxical comfort of ambivalent extremes, at which Merleau-Ponty indicates, “existence perishes” (SNS 40), we may courageously accept ambiguity, openness, our freedom to, and our limits by paying attention (WP 87) and by assuming, “that we can[not] function without regard for the Other” (Arnett, Fritz and Bell 17).
McLuhan offers similar sentiments. His metaphor of Narcissus-Narcosis suggests that when tending to the extremes, existence is numbed (UM; LOM 128). He also suggests that
resisting perceptive-expressive closure requires the courage of our “willingness to pay attention” via interested, situated participation (LOM 128). The choice to participate is anxious, requires great courage and reflexively depends upon a multiplicity of elements contributing to the complex and layered grounds of existence. As Dillon reminds us of Narcissus, he has “two faces” (Desire 161). McLuhan encourages us to resist Narcissus’ ironically comfortably numb pathological face of fragility and forgetfulness, by remembering the Narcissus “who searches for” self “in the eyes of a face whose beauty is not of his making” (Dillon Desire 161) as he attends to the anxiety of otherness called forth through his bodily, perceptive-expressive, being- becoming with others.
As Arnett, Fritz and Bell indicate, by accepting ambiguity, we may see difference, attend to distinctions and read the grounds of self-other-world as well as the goods we protect and
promote through our discourse together. A posture open to persistent mediation of synoptic
tensions, endemic to the figure-ground structure of human experience, enables possibilities for the exercise of our responsibility to respond. Thus, per this interweaving of McLuhan’s and Merleau-Ponty’s nuanced interpretations of anxiety and narcissism, we ought to respond to
Americanitis by assuming, tacitly and expressly, a posture of openness to otherness, by
remembering the importance of our situated limits, and by learning to read the grounding- grounds of our milieu.
Yet, though we are able to respond, we ought to also acknowledge that possibilities for closure and ongoing suffering with Americanitis persist. As such, we should not hope for perpetual states of comfort achieved through resolution of our ills. Rather, we may hope for the taming of, i.e., the mediation of, bad, pathological anxiety and narcissism with good, opening
other, private-public, abstract-concrete and proximity-distance. Though we may not be free from the plight of anxiety and narcissism, we are free to undertake the taming of our ills. Thus, I consider the taming of Americanitis further below.