Matriz de Impacto de Estrategias

The question that we therefore need to ask is how the divergent styles of trompe l‟œil and Cubism are able to produce a similar effect. But in order to do this, I think it is necessary to separate out the issue of style from that of our visual experience, for even though a Cubist picture and a trompe l‟œil painting may have a very different compositional structure, this is not to say that their tactile effect does not arise from one and the same source. And more specifically, if we say that these styles are comparable in a phenomenological sense, this may be because – while they look very different – they nevertheless invite a similar type of visual engagement which is more deeply rooted in our capacity to see. This claim, insofar as it implies that our aesthetic responses derive their content from our broader perceptual abilities, is reminiscent of Willats‟ assertion that „picture perception [is] parasitic on real scene perception‟111. But it also suggests more. In other words, I am not simply arguing that our ability to understand pictures depends on our hard-wired capacity to interpret real views (as Willats is claiming). In addition I am proposing that the types of experience structured by representation can be continuous with – because they are arrived at in the same way as – the kinds of experience that we have when confronting real scenes.

But this inevitably leads us to ask what our visual experiences are „normally‟ like and how, more specifically, they are able to evoke the sensation of movement and touch. One thing that philosophers have made apparent about seeing is that it has intentional content: we do not organise our sensations first

111

and then interpret their meaning second (or if we do, this does not become a conscious feature of perception). Rather, our visual experiences are always about

something – they always hone in on meanings, objects and events – whether or not these are real or imaginary, lucid or confused. Thus, the visual field is always „pregnant with meaning,‟112

that is, we always anticipate a world full of significance because perception is primed to deliver salient configurations or „gestalt‟. And so, another way of expressing our earlier formulation is to say that the intentionality of pictures – what they are understood to be about and how they are experienced – is derived from the intentionality of real scene perception.113

But in order to say how perception is intentional (and therefore how the experience of pictures may be too), it is useful to distinguish between two different interpretations of this notion by two important twentieth-century philosophers: Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I wish to focus more fully on the views of the latter, but it is instructive to preface this discussion by considering the ideas of Husserl, for it is to the gaps in his philosophy which Merleau-Ponty‟s theory responds.

Husserl‟s major contribution to twentieth century thought was to develop the method of phenomenological reflection, a process whereby the philosopher

112

I borrow this phrase from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who uses it many times over in his works. For example, in the Phenomenology of Perception he states that, „When we come back to phenomena we find, as a basic layer of experience, a whole already pregnant with an irreducible meaning: not sensations with gaps between them…but the layout of a landscape or a word, in spontaneous accord with the intentions of the moment…‟ Phenomenology of Perception

translated by Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 25. This concept is undoubtedly derived from the philosopher‟s study of Gestalt psychology, an approach which he praised but felt had not adequately grasped its own results.

113

This point is made, albeit in a somewhat different way, by Marc Jacob and Pierre Jeannerod in Ways of Seeing: The scope and limits of visual cognition (Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 4.

brackets out prior assumptions and attempts to describe the nature of appearances as such. Thus, by adopting this procedure he drew attention to the intentional structure of perception and argued for its integration into the wider intentional network of all conscious experience.114 To use Sartre‟s phrase, his achievement was therefore to show that „all consciousness is consciousness of something‟.115 Nevertheless, many of his followers found fault with this logic, and in particular, they saw in his philosophy a residual commitment to Kantian idealism116 which led him to erroneously equate perception with thought.117 Essentially, therefore, his system was condemned for subjugating the concrete world to the activities of the mind, confusing percepts with theoretical constructs and positing perception as a purely mental feat.

For Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, perception is pre-eminently a bodily phenomenon and accordingly this forms the premise of his most famous

114

However, the notion of intentionality was first revived from scholastic philosophy and reintroduced into modern thought by Franz Brentano, who discussed this concept in works such as Psychologie vom Empirischen Standpunkte (Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint) of 1874.

115

Jean-Paul Sartre, „Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl‟s Phenomenology‟ (1939) reprinted in The Phenomenology Reader, ed. Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 389.

116

Put crudely, this is the view that the mind actively constitutes the perceptual world rather than the external world simply supplying the contents of perception. This idea was expounded in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and is often referred to as „transcendental idealism‟. The first sustained critique of this notion – and by implication of Husserl‟s thought – from within the phenomenological tradition was advanced by Martin Heidegger in his 1927 lecture course, Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Heidegger‟s rejection of this facet of Husserl‟s thought is later echoed and expanded by important twentieth century thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Jean- Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Derrida. For a summary of the views of these various philosophers see Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000).

117

This more accurately describes the view developed in Husserl‟s early works such as Logical Investigations (1900 – 1901) and Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1913). In his later works (and in particular his unpublished manuscripts which were a major source of inspiration to Merleau-Ponty) he began to reject this classical metaphysics of subjectivity. However, the extent to which he actually freed himself from the legacy of Kant is a point of contention in philosophical discourse. In Husserl’s Phenomenology, for example, Dan Zahavi argues against this „reductive‟ view of his work (California: Stanford University Press, 2003), while in his essay „The Flesh of Perception‟ A. D. Smith claims that Merleau-Ponty develops the implications of Husserl‟s thought rather than radically reworks its premises (as is commonly assumed), see Reading Merleau-Ponty, ed. Thomas Baldwin (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 1 –22.

work, the Phenomenology of Perception (1945). The starting point of the

Phenomenology is the contention that the mind/body problem generated by Cartesian thought creates two equally untenable philosophical positions. On the one hand, „Intellectualism‟ posits the subject as an absolute consciousness with the world as a merely contingent construct of mind; on the other hand, Empiricism posits a world of independent objects, accessible to the subject through the senses and imparted meaning by judgement and association. So, for the Intellectualist, a pure consciousness creates its own reality and presides over it like God; for the Empiricist the body is but one object among others and consciousness becomes an enigma buried under a causal chain of stimulus and reflex.

Rallying against the reductions implicit in both positions, Merleau-Ponty attempts to return focus to the mutual dependencies of body and world – or of subject and object – which he claims are apparent in the pre-objective experience of phenomena, that is, before appearances are ascribed a determinate, conceptual meaning. To this end, his phenomenological project involves demonstrating the primacy of perception as opposed to the primacy of thought and describing its relation to a deeper, more primitive stratum of human experience. Therefore, pace Husserl, the guiding principle of the Phenomenology is that „all

consciousness is perceptual‟118

; in other words, perception precedes and underpins the organisation of experience into fixed categories and concepts. Thus the crucial corollary of this is that one‟s own body (le corps propre), insofar as it

118

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, „The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences‟, in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed James M. Edie (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 13.

is the subject of perception, is posited as the a priori ground of all conscious experience.119 Or, to put this more simply, every thought we think is made possible by our bodily insertion into, and sensory engagement with, the perceptual world. In short, consciousness is founded upon embodied perception.

But what, then, is this „lived‟, or „phenomenal body‟? According to Merleau-Ponty, it cannot be the transcendental subject of Intellectualism as it only affords a „point of view upon the world‟120

and hence it cannot be that which fully constitutes the appearance of objects. But neither can it be the „collection of adjacent organs‟121

studied by science and posited by Empiricism for it is „that by which there are objects‟122

and must therefore be more than a sum of physical parts. Instead, the philosopher claims that the pre-objective body is essentially a „motor power‟ or „a „motor intentionality‟123

which carves out the phenomenal field in terms of its plans and activities. And furthermore, since the boundaries between body and world are blurred at this pre-objective level, familiar objects can become internally related to our bodies through the „intentional threads‟ woven around us by our habitual movements and gestures. Consequently, Merleau-Ponty claims that visual objects speak to us as „poles of action‟124

rather than merely as bits of visibilia or as abstract entities of conceptual thought. And so, to summarise these ideas with a phrase from the

119

The body as an a priori principle of consciousness was replaced in later works such as The Visible and the Invisible with the notion of „Flesh‟. Merleau-Ponty performed this volte-face because he felt that the idea of the body formulated in his earlier work remained too closely tied to the consciousness / object distinction. Merleau-Ponty says of Flesh that it „is not matter, is not mind, is not substance…[it is] a sort of incarnate principle that brings style of being wherever there is a fragment of being‟ (The Visible and the Invisible, ed Claude Lefort (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 139.)

120

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 70.

121 Ibid, p. 272. 122 Ibid, p. 92. 123 Ibid. p. 127. 124 Ibid, p. 122.

Phenomenology, „Consciousness is being-towards-the-thing through the

intermediary of the body…and to move one‟s body is to aim at things through it‟.125

2.5 THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF TOUCH AND THE AESTHETICS OF