On Phenomenology

preface: this post is provisional and part of ongoing effort to clarify what phenomenology means for me. it is important to note that my own phenomenological practice is a bit of a bastardization of the tradition handed down to us through academia. all this and more will become clear as i work through what will be a general statement on the topic.

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Phenomenology does not explain it describes. Explanatory knowledge is secondary to a more basic awareness situated in the diffuse agency of the lived-body. At its best, phenomenology in the widest possible sense is an exploration of the total field of our experience: it is a practice or injunction and method of attending to what is ‘given’ to us and opened up by the body through a suspension of biases and categorical judgments (epoché) – and only later a ‘tradition’ or school of thought.

“Phenomenology provides us with an account of what needs to be explained, but is not in and of itself an explanation.” – Levi R. Bryant [source]

Phenomenological investigation is descriptive in that it affording much needed primary perceptual distinctions, and not explanatory which requires secondary associations and semantic assembly. therfore, some kind of phenomenology is the beginning of naturalism but never its endgame.

“Part of Husserl’s ambition is to provide an adequate phenomenological description of consciousness. He is not concerned with finding room for consciousness within an already well established materialistic or naturalistic framework. In fact, the very attempt to do the latter, thereby assuming that consciousness is merely yet another object in the world, might very well prevent one from disclosing let alone clarifying some of the most interesting aspects of consciousness, including the true epistemic and ontological significance of the first-person perspective. For Husserl, the problem of consciousness should not be addressed on the background of an unquestioned objectivism, but in connection with overarching transcendental considerations. Frequently, the assumption has been that a better understanding of the physical world will allow us to understand consciousness better and rarely, that a better understanding of consciousness might allow for a better understanding of what it means for something to be real” (Zahavi 2004: 5-6)

As Husserl writes in an early lecture course (1906–7):

“If consciousness ceases to be a human or some other empirical consciousness, then the word loses all psychological meaning, and ultimately one is led back to something absolute that is neither physical nor psychical being in a natural scientific sense. However, in the phenomenological perspective this is the case throughout the field of givenness. It is precisely the apparently so obvious thought, that everything given is either physical or psychical that must be abandoned” (Husserl 1984, 242).

I believe that a basic phenomenology is where philosophical thought begins not where it ends. Phenomenology assists us in engaging ground zero of perception: where self and world meet. But where philosophy or theory migrates or ends up is to be determined in relation to and in the context of specific projects and goals.

[[ to be expanded at a later date ]]

Apology, Context, Use – or, how being a jerk can teach us about words

I have some apologizing to do. It is true. I used the word ‘cunt’ rather randomly to refer to a man who I believe to be cranky and petty on the internets. Now before anyone starts to sling arrows at my misfortunate choice of pejoratives, let me say that I fully understand the history and volatility associated with this ‘term’. Only in a culture which underappreciates the feminine and institutionally oppresses its females (not to mention all the gender blends in between) in favor of males is such a word deployed. Does this word evince an underlying hatred or resentment for women percolating under the course skin of Western society? Perhaps. Quite simply and without qualification I apologize for using such a word. The word is disgusting and nothing good can from its use.

Yet, despite accusations to the contrary, I do not believe that I am misogynist in any stable sense of the term. I was raised by a single mother who I witnessed first-hand struggle with discrimination, and I am raising two daughters of my own – one of which already self-identifies as a feminist – both of which I often coach on dealing with patriarchy directly. I fully support women's rights and follow the their lead in all things having to do with improving their lot in all cultures. I certainly hold no ill-will against women, nor do I hate vaginas generally speaking. So then why did I use the word? What was my reasoning? In retrospect I think it was quite simply an absence of reasoning. I chose that word for its vulgarity and impact without the sensitivity to historical-cultural context I would normally want to cultivate and advocate. In short, i wasn’t thinking. I was purposely being aggressive and offensive (an “asshat” as my intended target so astutely observed).

Now all this leads me to reflect on two things: 1) like any other human on this planet I am capable of stupid behavior and expressions socially gleaned, and 2) just how much words are artifacts that can and do get used in ways not originally intended for via misappropriated denotation. Words and concepts get deployed and redeployed in various ways and for various purposes creating alternative contexts of utterance and reference. There are no stable assoications. Hence the type of ‘random mutation’ we witness with all languages. Mutant sentences as speech-acts and sequential strings of words and associative meanings can and do arise. Pace Derrida.

When I called the person a "cunt" my intention was to point out this person’s (self-admitted) tendency towards rudeness, pettiness and condescension, completely unrelated to its association with the female body. This much should have been obvious as the person  in question is male. By choosing such a vulgar and alarming word I meant to covey an intense distaste for the manner in which this person tends to communicate. Regardless, using that word in such a manner failed to deliver any intention I may have had. What I meant was not what I said.

So my question is this: if my intention was not to attack any particular female (or females in general), but to simply signify strongly my aversion, should such intentions excuse or at least explain this unfortunate choice of words? Or is my word choice so inappropriate and culturally toxic that intention matters little? Let me know what YOU think dear readers...

My original statement is included below.

S.C Hickman on Hope and the Dystopic Impulse

The brilliant and always concise S.C Hickman has another insight-full post up at Noir Realism in which he writes:

The breakup of the Platonist view of reality and discourse that has, as Wittgenstein suggested, held us ‘captive’ within a Cartesian/Lockean picture that seeks both an objective essence and a cohesive, coherent, self has been replaced in our time by a “Darwinian account of human beings as animals doing their best to cope with the environment – doing their best to develop tools which will enable them to enjoy more pleasure and less pain (p. xxiii, Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope).” Among those tools is language, words, which are no longer seen as ‘representations’ of an objective truth/reality, but as tools by which the human animal negotiates the complex horizon of social relations. Rorty sees this break with the idea that reality can be ‘represented’ as abandoning the correspondence ‘theory of truth’, which means that we no longer need to insist that truth, like reality is one and seamless.

The post-nihilist impulse unabashedly rejects discourses motivated by sentimental allusions to universals. The advent of hypermediation via communication and digital technologies has combined with what Ray Brassier has called "the negative consummation of the enlightenment", as well as the ever-expanding assaults on the living flesh and ecological stability of humans everywhere to create a crisis of legitimacy for every existing linguistic and normative institution on the planet. We do not inhabit a modern or even ‘postmodern’ world, we subsist in an advanced industrial calamity. The future of our species will depend entirely upon the willingness of people to abandon our previous and varied delusions for intensely reflective strategies of praxis and collective habitation. We have to design new delusions for vastly more pragmatic ecologies. The all too human project of becoming, being and coping-with happens between and often beyond both hope and despair.

Read the rest of Hickman’s post: HERE

NOTE: This post will be expanded and updated very soon.

Coexistence and the Work of Revolution

In “A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse”, anthropologist David Graeber asks an extremely important question:

What is a revolution? We used to think we knew. Revolutions were seizures of power by popular forces aiming to transform the very nature of the political, social, and economic system in the country in which the revolution took place, usually according to some visionary dream of a just society. Nowadays, we live in an age when, if rebel armies do come sweeping into a city, or mass uprisings overthrow a dictator, it’s unlikely to have any such implications; when profound social transformation does occur—as with, say, the rise of feminism—it’s likely to take an entirely different form. It’s not that revolutionary dreams aren’t out there. But contemporary revolutionaries rarely think they can bring them into being by some modern-day equivalent of storming the Bastille.

What is revolution? This might be the core political question of our time. In contemporary conditions where all hitherto categorical distinctions (between nature and culture, subject and object, etc.) and conventional boundaries (between human bodies and machines, between nation-states and corporations) are bleeding into each other or melting away, what resources are we to call upon in order to begin forging more humane and positive political commitments?  The very context of our lives and social actions has never been so ambiguous and massively distributed, and yet so manipulated, managed and massaged. Where do we begin?

In The Phenomenology of Perception Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote:

“In all revolutions there are members of the privileged class who make common cause with the revolutionaries, and members of the oppressed class who remain faithful to the privileged. And every nation has its traitors. This is because the nation and class are neither versions of fate which hold the individual in subjection from the outside nor values which he posits from within. They are modes of co-existence which are a call upon him. Under conditions of calm, the nation and the class are there as stimuli to which I respond only absent-mindedly or confusedly; they are merely latent. A revolutionary situation, or one of national danger, transforms those pre-conscious relationships with class and nation, hitherto merely lived through, into the definite taking of a stand; the tacit commitment becomes explicit. But it appears to itself as anterior to decision.” (p.423)

Here Merleau-Ponty accepts the conditions in which political bodies are both determined and self-determining, however haphazardly such agency might seem. It is the gathering up, positioning and self-organizing power of individuals in situ - the ‘taking a stand’ in the world – that links their imaginations and motivations to lived contexts and affords them the opportunity to transform pre-reflective conditionings into explicit revolutionary commitments. In this sense, the work of being and becoming human is always a revolutionary act in that what is latent or merely possible in us, and circulating throughout our dynamic modes of existence, is always in the process of being expressed and assembled. The very act of becoming and being human contributes the co-invention of worlds. And so political situations are always ecological and cosmological.

Transcorporeal politics, then, is fundamentally about developing, tinkering with and contesting distributed modes of generation wherein social assemblages and agentic bodies of all ontic varieties are engaged and politicized at the different levels of material and expressive organization appropriate to their functioning. Each complex matrix of possibility is a composite of material flows, associations and proximities affording different political moves, tactics and forms which includes but are never limited to symbolic representation and discursive exchanges. We always co-determine our world with other humans and non-humans (and in-humans) through reciprocal but often uneven exchanges of properties, powers and capacities – setting the very conditions for what then becomes possible. And within this simultaneously wild  and contingent field of compound possibility what we do, as one kind of being among others, affects the capacities and sustain-ability of a myriad of other entities, communities and tangible networks. The work of the revolutionary thus becomes the engagement of whole worlds: an ecological praxis enriched through sapient and sensitive explorations which flow into deliberational alterings of the very modes of our relative becoming. Revolution is co-evolution always and forever.

[[ hat tip to Adam Robbert and Jeremy Trombley on the Graeber piece ]]

Manuel DeLanda - Deleuze and the Use of the Genetic Algorithm in Architecture

April 9, 2004, 'Art and Technology Lecture Series' 

at Columbia University: 

Manuel DeLanda (b. in Mexico City, 1952) is a philosopher, media artist, programmer and software designer. After studying art in the 1970s, he became known as an independent filmmaker making underground 8mm and 16mm films inspired by critical theory and philosophy. In the 1980s, DeLanda focused on programing, writing computer software, and computer art. After being introduced to the work of Gilles Deleuze, he saw new creative potential in philosophical texts, becoming one of the representatives of the 'new materialism'.

Manuel De Landa is the Gilles Deleuze Chair of Contemporary Philosophy and Science at the European Graduate School EGS, and former Adjunct Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University (New York). He is the author of War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997), Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002), A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006), Deleuze: History and Science (2010), and Philosophy & Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason (2011) 

Politicizing the Real: Borromean Critical Theory and Material Phenomenology

Below is Levi Bryant's recent lecture at York University in Toronto talking about onto-cartography and what he has been calling 'Borromean Critical Theory'. My comments follow.

 

I have been a supporter of Levi Bryant's work for years. I certainly have moments when I grumble about this or that technical-theoretical issue but in the main I'm fascinated by how Levi's framework balances a consideration of the substantial existence of assemblages or units ("objects") with an appreciation for the complex subsistence of things, as they partake of and interface with a wider field of materials, forces and processes. Levi's recent turn to "machines" as a technical concept designed to code the compositional activity or powers of things offers a refreshing Deleuzean option for moving beyond the false antagonisms of those who privilege objects over process, or visa versa.

In the lecture above Levi re-works Lacan's borromean knot formulation to tease apart three distinct but interacting ontological registers which - when appropriately mapped and respected on their own terms and for how they contribute the fabric of the world - call for a more inclusive critical and political theory. Note that Levi deviates from Lacan's own usage of the three registers by recoding 'the Real' with a more materialist and naturalist resonance.

As Levi has written previously:

The three orders are phenomenology (or the Imaginary), semiotics (or the Symbolic), and the material (or the Real). Phenomenology or the Imaginary investigates the lived experience of human and nonhuman entities such as bats, octopi, computers, queer bodies, and so on. It investigates the openness, through channels, of various beings to a broader world. Semiotics explores various structures of coding where they exist. Materialism and naturalism (the Real) investigates the features of materiality and how they influence assemblages (natural geography, physics, neurology, the speed at which communications can travel, the calories needed to live and work, and so on)...  

With Borromean Critical Theory we thus get three reductions (in the Husserlian sense), because certain things can only be understood within each of the three orders. With the Imaginary we get the “phenomenological reduction” which consists in observing the observer, or how particular entities such as tardigrades, wolves, rocks, and satellites encounter the world about them. With the Symbolic we get the “semiotic reduction” which attends to how discourse, narrative, language, signs, and the signifier structure the world. Here we bracket the referent (the Real) and the lived (the Imaginary), and instead just attend to the diacritics of language in parsing the world. Finally, we get a “naturalistic reduction” in the domain of the Real that brackets meaning and the signifier (the Symbolic) and lived experience (the Imaginary), instead adopting what Husserl called the “natural attitude” and attending to the constraints of chemistry, physics, neurology, physiology, natural geography, and so on. There are certain things that can only be understood and know within the natural attitude, which is why we must here bracket lived experience and semiotic analysis. Paradoxically, we today live in a theoretical context where we need the resources to return to the natural attitude to discern the power that materiality exerts on life. [source]

To relate Levi's project here to some of my recent posts I suggest that discerning differences between 'the Symbolic' and 'the Real' is roughly equivalent to my proposed separation between epistemic relations (semiotic activity) and structural relations (material-energetics). Corresponding to the mode of openness that humans are there we experience a structural presentness between things prior to their being inscribed in epistemological regimes of truth. As complex assemblages with emergent capacities our mode of openness is both bodily (structural/corporeal) and reflective (epistemic), but never entirely one or the other.

Where things get tricky in the translation between Levi's model and my own distinctions here is where each of us might suggest phenomenal experience or 'the Imaginal'  fits in. To do justice to this topic I would need a separate and much longer post, but in general I will suggest that 'subjectivity' or human experience is wholly Real: which is to say, material and therefore does not require 'its' own register. Our situated animal experience is generated from the sensual-material opening of our bodies among other bodies, and as an activity-in-the-world without ontological remainder.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among others, was rather clear about the fundamental corporeal nature of subjectivity. In The Phenomenology of Perception he wrote, "the body is our general medium for having a world" (p.169).  Worlds open up viz. bodies. And this sensual-tangible horizon is entirely of the material-energetic plane of existence. When we perceive and experience the world we do so as sensitive-coping bodies vulnerable to being affected and able to affect the Real precisely because we partake in the consistency of structure and force that is matter-energy. We are experientially open to the world as Real because we are of it:

"Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world. We are true through and through, and have with us, by the mere fact of belonging to the world, and not merely being in the world in the way that things are, all that we need to transcend ourselves" (p.153).  

And as Evan Thompson (2011) notes:

"Merleau-Ponty rejects the idea that conscious experiences are interior states of the mind or brain that stand as causal or epiphenomenal intermediaries between sensory inputs and motor outputs. Consciousness is rather a form or structure of comportment, a perceptual and motor attunement of the whole animal to its world. In our human case, this attunement is primarily to an environment of meaningful symbols and the intentional actions of others." [source]

Comportment is how we take a stance in the world as structured beings among actual assemblages and material flows. Merleau-Ponty borrows the notion of comportment from Martin Heidegger, who wrote:

Comportment stands open to beings. Every open relatedness is a comportment. Man’s open stance varies depending on the kind of beings and the way of comportment. All working and achieving, all action and calculation, keep within an open region within which beings, with regard to what they are and how they are, can properly take their stand… (Essence of Truth)

And this experiential-bodily comportment is entirely of the order of the Real (material-energetic), just as 'consciousness' is nothing other than the dynamic expression of vibrant materials in action and milieu.

For me the point at which Levi's Borromean framework breaks down is precisely where subjectivity as phenomenal experience is abstracted from our fundamental way of being-open-in-the-world, of being sensitive material-energetic systems.  As interesting as a neo-Lacanian ontology is for all sorts of projects (as Levi demonstrates above)  I believe bracketing out the phenomenological from the material is a fatal mistake. It is fatal in two senses: first, it reinforces an explanatory gap between 'consciousness' [sentience] and materiality that evokes and supports all sorts Cartesian conceptual dead-ends and confusions about how embodied experience, intentionality and animal judgement emerge and operate in the world; and secondly, it generates all sorts of epistemological problems in terms of how we might traverse registers and gain access to the Real (issues of knowability).

In short, I think there are pragmatically more productive ways to conceive of the existence and relationship between the material-structural, semiotic-epistemic and human sentience that do not reinforce traditional metaphysical dualisms that produce their own philosophical impasses. Instead I propose a deflationary view of hominid phenomenology where 'the clearing' (or emptiness) that is situated biological perceptual awareness can be understood as an immanent feature of the Real, and radically open to the affective forces of elemental life. We need to re-cognize the sensitivity, sense-ability and sense-making nature of flesh beyond the binary of subject and object in order to become more fully conscious of the practical consequences of embodiment and our lived situations. Our practices, sciences and politics are now demanding of us something other than traditional categories.

What I find most intriguing in the quote above is Levi's claim that we now require the conceptual resources to "return to the natural attitude" which takes materiality seriously. I obviously believe this to be true, and attempting to understand and track why this is so continues to be a major pre-occupation. In a world where the ecological degradation of all systems capable of sustaining human life is accelerating, becoming and being more sensitive and responsive to our own materiality and the transcorporeality of the conditions of our existence is vital. We must become better at sensing, relating, coding and communicating about 'the Real', material-energetic tangible structureality of things if we are to be capable of coping, adapting and changing our relationships, politics and socioeconomic systems and arrangements within the current and ever shifting planetary (dis)order.

“From the vantage point of a philosophy of immanence set in a sensibility of care for this world, a pressing need today is to negotiate deep, multidimensional pluralism within and across territorial regimes” (William Connolly 2011: 83).

So while I have some reservation of the Borromean ontology Levi is working with here, I welcome his exploration of any discursive move that respects both the phenomenological  and semiotic aspects of contemporary existence while also strongly emphasizing the need for critical reflection on how we understand and more importantly interface with the non-linguistic, non-conceptual potency of matter-energy at both personal and political levels.

Dance As A Way Of Knowing - Alva Noë

"The world is its best representation." - Rodney Brooks

Alva Noë is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. The main focus of his work is the theory of perception and consciousness. 'Externalism' about cognition and mental content is a pervasive theme in his work. In addition to these problems in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, he interested in phenomenology, the theory of art, Wittgenstein, and the origins of analytic philosophy. He is the author of the books Varieties of Presence (2012), Out of Our Heads (2009) and Action In Perception (2004).

I highly recommend all Noë's work as it mixes an exquisite blend of scientific rigor with highly sophisticated philosophical consideration. Noë argues that the way we frame the question of consciousness - the notions of 'mind', 'meaning' and neural substrates - muddles our understanding of what is basically an activity generated in the "complex causal dynamic interaction between brains, bodies and environments".  Noë work shows how sentient agents are never self-contained units of awareness but rather open living systems which only ever enact conscious experience in conjunction with the affording dynamic circumstances in which they exist. This understanding of sentience has major implications for  how we conceptualize the autonomy of agents and challenges the basis of contemporary politics and social design.



Noë from 'Home Sweet Home: Finding Ourselves', NPR, May 28, 2011:

“Consciousness isn’t something that happens; it is something we do or make. And like everything else that we do, it depends both on the way we are constituted — on our brains and bodies — but also on the world around us.

Looking for consciousness in the brain is like looking for dance in the legs. (…)  

Both Cartesian dualism, with its insistence that the mind is separate from the body, and the contemporary dogma that that the thing inside us that thinks and feels is the brain, share a common premise: that there is a thing inside that thinks and feels and decides and is conscious. It is this assumption, shared by dualist and most neuroscientists alike, that really holds us captive. (…)  

There is as of yet no consensus on what a science of human or animal experience should even look like. I propose that what limits us, and what limits our science, is a dual misunderstanding. The first I have already indicated: we suppose that mind is in the head. No, we need to get out of our heads to understand the workings of the mind, to look at the way the animal is closely coupled to and involved with its environment. (…)  

We confuse the fabulous success of modern physics with grounds for believing that we live in the world that physics describes. And then we are confronted with the fact that the world of the physicist is a world devoid of colors and sounds and textures and odors and all the other qualities that fill up our experience. This tends to throw us back on our brains again: if the world isn’t really the way we experience it as being, then our experience must be something we confabulate, or that our brains confabulate for us. Back to the Cartesian capsule! (…)  

The basic laws of physics that support life are well understood; but this does not imply that we understand, in the terms of physics, how there is life!  

The thing is: we do not live in the world of physics. If that were so, then there would be no biology at all. No, humans and other animals live in niches. They, or rather, we, occupy landscapes of values — worlds made up not of quantum lattice structures, but of opportunities and obstacles, affordances and hinderances. Life, including our experiential lives, happen not in clouds of atoms, but on level ground, with others, surrounded by hiding places, food, friends and enemies.  

It is there, where we find ourselves, that we find the stage of our active lives and our active experience. We actually have the resources we need to understand ourselves. It is two dogmas of now antiquated modern science — that mind is in the head, and that the world is devoid of meaning unless we, or our brains, give it meaning — that creates the illusion — a meta-cognitive illusion! — that there is a hard problem of consciousness we are unable to solve.”

Sonorous Beings

Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible (1969) :

“In a sense, if we were to make completely explicit the architectonics of the human body, its ontological framework, and how it sees itself and hears itself, we would see that the structure of its mute world is such that all the possibilities of language are already given in it. Already our existence as seers (that is, we said, as beings who turn the world back upon itself and who pass over to the other side, and who catch sight of one another, who see one another with eyes) and especially our existence as sonorous beings for others and for ourselves contain everything required for there to be speech from the one to the other, speech about the world. And, in a sense, to understand a phrase is nothing else than to fully welcome it in its sonorous being, or, as we put it so well, to hear what it says (l'entendre). The meaning is not on the phrase like the butter on the bread, like a second layer of “copy reality” spread over the sound: it is the totality of what is said, the integral of all the differentiations of the verbal chain; it is given with the words for those who have ears to hear” (p.155).

The articulations of the flesh are primitive expressions inflected by emergent dynamical-structures. The elements speak through our gestures and intentions. "Once a body-world relationship is recognized, there is a ramification of my body and a ramification of the world and a correspondence between its inside and my outside, between my inside and its outside" (pg.136). We dance the world as Being.

Michel Foucault on Truth and Subjectivity

On October 20 and 21, 1980, Michel Foucault presented the Howison Lectures in philosophy at UC Berkeley. The subject for his talks was "truth and subjectivity":

  

LISTEN TO MORE: HERE

We Are Bodies: Contra Husserl

Husserl’s “veritable abyss” is a temporal illusion of ocular sensitivity and factical depth. Reality is In-der-Welt-sein (etre au monde) without ontological remainder - and the origins of ontography are in thinking just how this is so. It is about the sensitive recursions of reflective corporeal bodies. 

From Carman & Hansen’s introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty:

I am constantly told that everything I enjoy about Merleau-Ponty's work can be found in Husserl, but I have never found this to actually be the case. The ideas I find most interesting in Merleau-Ponty's books often seem more like subtle departures from his predecessor than the mere reframing of old phenomenological questions.

The terminological boxes into which we press the history of philosophy often obscure deep and important differences among major figures supposedly belonging to a single school of thought. One such disparity within the phenomenological movement, often overlooked but by no means invisible, separates Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception from the Husserlian program that initially inspired it. For Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology amounts to a radical, if discreet, departure not only from Husserl’s theory of intentionality generally, but more specifically from his account of the intentional constitution of the body and its role in perceptual experience (Carman 1999: 205).

For example, in his posthumous works Husserl mentions the role of the body in perception, but the body inevitably appears as a kind of ‘phenomenological anomaly’ (Carman 1999: 206) where the body is neither internal to my consciousness nor external to me in the environment, but is “a thing ‘inserted’ between the rest of the material world and the ‘subjective’ sphere” (Ideas II, 161).

Yet in Merleau-Ponty – and from what I can discern in my own phenomenological practice – we find that it is precisely the body which anchors us in the world opening up the possibility of perspective and thus allowing for the very real actuality of self-affective states and material orientation. At no point is our body merely a thing observed, inserted between our experience (cogito) and the world, but is instead an ever-present nexus of auto-affective activity and tangibility. The sensitive and sustaining materiality of the body is the very source of our reflective activity.

As Carman suggests:

Unlike Husserl, but like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty looks beyond the subject/object divide to try to gain insight into the concrete structures of worldly experience. But whereas Heidegger does little more than mention the problem ofembodiment in passing, Merleau-Ponty bases his entire phenomenological project on an account of bodily intentionality and the challenge it poses to any adequate concept of mind. Embodiment thus has a philosophical significance for Merleau-Ponty that it could not have for Husserl (1999: 206).

Taking the problem of embodiment and corporeality seriously entails a radical reassessment of the very conceptual distinctions on which Husserl’s fame rests. Indeed, “the distinction between subject and object is blurred in my body (and no doubt the distinction between noesis and noema as well?)” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 167). Our bodies do not appear to us through some kind of pure ideation where we might then take ownership, our bodies are always present as the constitutive matrix from which our ideas begin to cohere and take structure. Which is to say, 'we' do not have bodies, rather we are bodies: “we are in the world through our body, and insofar as we perceive the world with our body” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 206).