Merleau-Ponty, Theatre and Dance

Merleau-Ponty, Theatre and Dance

 
Contents
Introduction    1
The popular understanding of the world    2

Problems with Objectivist Thought    3

Merleau-Ponty's Thoughts    3

Primary of Perception    3

The nature of phenomena    4

Consciousness    5

Motor intentionality    6

Intersubjectivity    6

Lived Space    7

Sex    8

Dance/Theatre    9

Didactic ideas    9

Thematic Ideas    9

Summary    10

Bibliography    10

Contact    10


 

Introduction

To talk of theatre or of dance, is to say nothing more than to talk of politics. They are arenas, discourses which encompass many differing and conflicting approaches.
To lay my stall out: my theatre and dance is predominantly that which enhances my life, which moves it on, which enriches my engagement with myself and the world. Theatre at its best is the embodiment of idea; it is a real book which touches all of your senses. Dance at its best is the enriching of my body, my conduit to and my construction of the world.
Merleau-Ponty seems highly relevant to the world of theatre and dance for the following reasons:

1. The world is primarily accessed via perception which is an embodied event. Rational reflection, that creates the world of science is derivative of this
2. Perception is motor-intentional, i.e. the object of perception is action. We perceive and that perception holds within it a call to action, which we may act on or ignore
3. Consciousness is not external, but in the world, embodied. Thus to perceive is to see myself
4. As we perceive then we connect in that perception to the totality of the world, which includes myself and the world
   
    

In this paper then I will begin with a refutation of the popular held belief of the world which is called Objectivist thought, then I will flesh out the banner headlines of Merleau-Ponty's thought then I will attempt to put this into application in theatre and dance. Although hopefully Merleau-Ponty's thoughts will stimulate your ideas in the arts, to greater heights.
I worry that some of my prose may be awkward, I worry that some of the ideas won't be justified, but what I can assure you of is there are some diamonds in there.

The popular understanding of the world

I'll start at the beginning, like all good stories do, however this is an assumed beginning. My assumption is that the currently held belief of the nature of the world and perception is something like this. I'll describe it as Objectivist Thought and shorten it to OT when it seems right.
We live in geometrical space. So if we could see from Gods eye view, then there would be this big box called the universe in which there is the earth, every place has a dot, which is a co-ordinate in space. At any moment in the box there is a scene, called now. Now changes and when it is now no longer, we call it past, and there is also the now not yet that the current now will change into, called the future. Hope this sounds familiar.
So in this great box are subjects and objects. The subjects, hell lets call them humans, have minds which contain mental substance which is where thoughts\emotions and images lie. Then there is physical substance which is what a humans body is made of, and what the rest of the world is made of.
Science is held to give us best knowledge in the box, is the biggest tool you can have, it gives you power and status and all sorts of good stuff. Indeed some would see science as being the new god.
The model of scientific perception is two fold. The world is distinct, measurable and true, and if we make error in our perception, then the error is within us. The mode of scientific knowledge is to abstract from perception and to break things down into atomic facts\aspects and then to relate them causally.
Science attempts to give a theory of everything starting with the big bang (pop!) and taking us through time with the theory of evolution which attempts to give some mild purpose to the process.
We experience the world which is at different co-ordinates within the box by rays of light bouncing off them and creating ideas in our heads. These ideas generally represent the thing that they bounced off, but really, if we think about it, we can't be certain, as we only have our ideas not the objects themselves. Maybe we could pop outside the box and have a look, oh no we can't that's only for God, and he's sort of been killed off really
Science aims to explain everything, in the way god did before it, it aims to explain our beginnings, our middles and our ends, in short Science aims at omniscience.

Problems with Objectivist Thought

What are the alternatives? What are the fallacies in this approach? Hmm well, to start off with science attempts at universality, true for all time and all situations. So what it does is to take the scientist's experience, abstract all subjectivity out of that, then try to make an objective proposition. So the first point is the raw material for objective beliefs are subjective experiences, perceptions.
Secondly whilst science is undoubtedly useful, its abstractions don't describe human experience . As we are engaged with the world there is a two stage process one of being aware, or using and engaging with the world, which can be called the pre-reflective, the second stage is the reflective where I think of myself as having these experiences. Human arts should encompass the first motion, Science the latter.
So a refutation of Objectivist Thought within a paragraph will be a bit tricky but let's give it a go. Maybe 2 paragraphs...
So firstly there is incredible weakness in the model that has the notion of idea mapping out onto an object in the box. How could you ever tell that you had a true representation? In this space, how do you ever recognise something as something. So you see a rabbit, and the OT's model would be all the light rays come onto your retina and then you see it as a rabbit. But how would you recognise it as a rabbit, unless you already knew what a rabbit looked like. Then that leaves how did you recognise your first rabbit. I suppose the killer blow to OT's is that there are certain things that are assumed but never seen. The geometric box for one thing, causality and the notion of subject and object. If you just focus on the phenomena as received none of these exist, they are theorised. As i focus on my dear rabbit, all there is seen as rabbit, the whole of consciousness can be fully immersed in his floopy ears and button nose. Sure afterwards I can think of myself seeing the rabbit, but at the time all there is is flopsey.

 

Merleau-Ponty's Thoughts

 

Primary of Perception

The world as it confronts me is a combination of horizons and themes, or objects of focus. As I look at the desk in front of me, it stands out from the horizon of the room, which supports it, the horizon which I take my gaze away from to be aware of the desk. The 3 dimensions of the room are not given by geometry rather by my engagement with it, as I stand near the wall then I can see the back of the desk. If I stand in front of the desk, then I experience the desk having a back, as if I stood near the wall, even though I can't see the back of the desk. If geometrical space was to be believed, then I would experience anything out of sight as a void, a blackness, a cavern of nothingness, as there is nothing affecting my retina. However I don't and I give objects that I only partially see, the perspectives I have had of them, or imagine I would have from past experience.
Indeed at the edge of my field of vision objects get blurred and indistinct and my perceptual engagement of this is that there is a world outside my vision, that extends off in all directions. The world then that is perceived although absent is a dynamic one and expresses my current way of being in the world. Thus if stressed outside my field of vision is the room next door, that needs hovering and a hook hanging on the wall, and outside this is a street full of things that need to be attended to by someone. Whilst this is a simplistic example if you think of the world that exists outside your perceptual field then it will represent you in all your distinctness and ambiguity and current affective state.
As much as the horizons that I can perceive objects through are spatial so they are temporal. Any object that I perceive has a past and a future, even if I don't know what it is, known as pretention and retention. As with the world outside of my field of vision these are dynamic and again reflect my current being in the world.
The spatio-temporal horizons that I see are engaged with by two other key aspects : the body and the affects, i.e. emotion\mood\feeling etc.
As I perceive objects in a room, they are understood not in terms of concepts but in terms firstly of the body. The body is the conduit I have to the world. The desk that I see, I understand in terms of how my body engages with it, how my body knows it, how it would fall under and respond to my touch, I see the table in all of my senses, my ears, my nose . As I look at a glass I understand it through knowing the sound that it would make if it fell to the floor and broke, I know it by the taste of it as my tongue touches the rim and my hand holds the stem. In short I know it by the grasp that my body has had with it. We can see how the body operates in this fashion as we drive. A competent driver drives. They have no consciousness of the complex interactions of their hands and feet when they are a competent driver, rather their body drives. The only time this doesn't happen is when something goes wrong, the clutch is sticky, or they miss a gear, then consciousness and awareness of their action comes back.
Affective states are adverbs, how we act in the world, how we view the world. When I am happy the world looks differently to how it does when I am sad. When happy the objects within my world dance to my touch, when sad they appear slow and weighty. As much as my affective state colours the world and my interactions with it so does perceived actions of others as well as cultural phenomena. Thus when I see a person wronged, that would make me angry, then an aspect of my horizon can take on an angry hue. Likewise there are cultural events, such as an oncoming storm, or a birthday party that can give an affective hue to an environment. Of course I don't need to respond to what I see as a gloomy scene gloomily, but it is a factor in the overall affective state of me and the environment.

The nature of phenomena

So the thing about the objects of phenomena that we have is firstly they are given, secondly they are incomplete and thirdly they are ambiguous as their meaning comes out of the many horizons and affective states of which they take place....thank god I can't think of a fourthly or that would sentence would end up really cumbersome.
I've got to point out, if it is needed the stark difference to the objects of science. For science there are determinate objects, truth resides in objects and error resides in humans. Reminds me a lot about God really, God is objects (i.e. omnipresent) and true (i.e. omniscient), humans are consciousness and the source of error. Combined with the universality that requires God's eye view to validate the connection between idea and object, all I can say is praise be science, for it is God in different clothes!
For Merleau-Ponty error exists in phenomena, phenomena are real and incomplete, and are not representational of any world outside them. The incomplete and ambiguous nature of phenomena is due to the given-ness and their infinite relations with their current context their and their protentive\retentive chains.
The sense of perception being given to us in the pre-reflective space, all there is, is awareness of something giving and something receiving with a space between these points. There is no primacy here and to use subject/object terminology that isn't appropriate here, it's not certain whether the world thinks in us, or we think of the world. The giving and receiving is all there is, there is no primacy on either side.
The crazy aspect of this is that as we perceive the world with our affective states we see the world how we feel, as we give our objects of experience with protentive\retentive chains, as we fill in the gaps in our perception, the world that exists outside of our field of vision , the parts of objects we don't see, then what we have is the totality of our life. As we perceive so we see the world and ourselves in its entirety. To understand yourself its a question of looking out, not it.

 

Consciousness

The history of thought seems to have fallen foul of a technique the ancients used to use. Primitive animism saw spirits in all objects and through giving the spirit a name it freed it. Buddha, Socrates and Christ have all done this where they have named the soul/psyche. What they have done however is taken human experience away from its world, taken it from its corporeal reality. The strangest thing then in this space, is when we turn to look at ourselves, when we self reflect, in therapy or in the bath, we are actually taking a perspective of ourselves from a distance. We are thinking about ourselves as an object, an ego, which we are not, we are corporeally embedded in the world. We are reflecting on ourselves, so we are abstracting from our phenomenal roots in the world. It has often been said that the objects closest to us are the ones we know least well, I think there is some irony when you think about access to yourself.
When we do look at ourselves as an object, as something determinate like this we taken on the same qualities that objects have in the world, they arise from their horizontal background, they connect out to the rest of the world, they are ambiguous and incomplete. This view of human as object is in stark contrast to the ideas that the human sciences have where the human represents something that can be known causally and in time definitively.
There has within this view of the human psyche been a cost in making primary reflection rather than perception. It has spawned the duality of mind and body and the distance of subject and object, and these have come with a cost.
Embarrassment and shame are the emotional costs of denying the anonymous perception that is the body. These are the emotional tools that are used to individuate babies such that they move from their blissful unity in the world, to understand themselves as different from mother and father and the world around. Alienation, separateness and forlornness are the cost of the subject object split. With in-authentic lives being one of the costs of the mind/body split, as the mind is used to be the place that directs lives. The mind body split also leads to the freewill\determinist argument which again has led to some twisted lives. I couldn't help myself...I had to be free....etc. Indeed it is more than possible that our emotional life is directly tied up with our engagement with the world in terms of subject and object...I am depressed because I don't like myself, or Im not being treated well. Distress can in someways be seen as the gulf between how you want yourself to be and how the world is responding to you.
In Merleau-Ponty in phenomenal experience the mind and body are just two different necessary aspects of the same phenomena.

Motor intentionality

For Merelau-Ponty to perceive is to have the world call us to action and we will respond to that in some way. When we speak to a friend, then our discussion draws the words from us and quite literally the discussion speaks. Of course we may from time to time think before we speak, where we will talk to ourselves but generally and in fact even in this situation we find that as we are speaking our words are drawn forth. Likewise as I want to have a cup of tea, I may think this and as I enter the kitchen I see it as a place to make tea, and without thinking I move to the kettle and make tea. In other words the kitchen is not seen as a static place, but rather something that calls me in certain ways, dependent on how I see it.
When I play tennis, I don't see geometric space, rather I see opportunities arising in front of me to play the game. Indeed my body shapes itself to do this and responds naturally to its environment when things are going well. There is quite a strong aspect of the fact that tennis plays me, although this sounds quite an outlandish statement, it can be justified by thinking how the hours of practice effectively go into to show you how to perceive situations as opportunities to win tennis, and how your body has learnt this.

Intersubjectivity

Primal experience, perception before we start abstracting is a composite of the awareness of psyche and the body, it is anonymous, general embodied awareness. The body has knowledge, I can touch type, but yet I don't consciously know where the keys are, but my body does. Likewise the organist, who can learn on one organ, go to another and very quickly start playing it, even though it might be a different set up. The body is that which transforms ideas into things, it is embodied consciousness. When we start to see that our foremost being, our identity is the lived body then it puts a whole different slant on how can I know other people. Standardly the question is how can I know other people when I am myself because of my consciousness. With Merleau-Ponty the phenomenon on which we base our lives are anonymous and general. So the question here becomes how can I construct an identity out of this generality.
There is a word, it's not a pretty word but it's syncretic, which means indistinction of perspectives . The phenomenal space which is syncretic can be seen in babies. If you have many babies in a room and one starts crying the others will join in too, likewise you can smile at a baby and it can smile back, you can put your finger in your mouth and they will do the same. This mimesis ( mimicry) is testament to the fact that the baby is experiencing their world perceptually and they cannot distinguish between them having an experience and another. When a baby cries because another baby cries it thinks it is in pain, as it hears the cries knows that's what happens when it's in pain and then cries. The base phenomenal experience that we have explains the mimetic ability of babies.
The other amazing things that babies do with mimicry is to learn about the world, and to produce prehensile, i.e. knowledge how to grip objects, by watching others. As a baby watches a spoon being picked up it is without perspective, there is no ego or other here, there is merely the hand picking up the spoon, sometimes at a distance (the other), sometimes close up (mine). Thus the baby learns about the world from a distance at times, through not distinguishing its experience from the others.
The question then remains is why does a baby emerge from this blissful and complete state, why would they want to leave Eden? I don't think they do really, however the adults wants them to, it's through a series of failures in their world; the withdrawn breast, the sharp word, the being roughly handled. There are a series of type of events that start forging out the individual ego, the words of pride or shame from the significant carer, the mirror, where there is a gradual dawning of the relation between the body of the subject, and the body of the object, in other words to see the body in the mirror is to see an object, to form an ego is to also think of that as the subject. It is doubtful that the ego would emerge with purely the mirror, the interpretation of the adult is paramount, the pride and the shame that tells the baby what sort of baby they are is vital, as this provides a strong emotional cache, as the baby is chided for their faeces or congratulated for their eating.
Thus the crazy thing is that I am born through objectification, pride, shame and embarrassment, via the objectification of the other, that alienates me from myself and leaves me alone in the world. We originally were in communion with others as babies, our original experience in perception is in communion, and we have forgotten or ignored this fact, and then seek to retrieve them through football stadia, orgies, dance parties and the like.
It's a shocker, the whole nature of individuation, or people having characters, egos, psyches etc is an abstraction on primary experience. It is true that science is the same, which obviously has benefit, so I think with the human sciences whose results are not so determinate as the physical sciences, then we can see them as true, in so far as they are useful nothing more, and indeed a good deal of work could and should go into the phenomenal experience we have every day that makes us who we are, instead of focussing on the abstracted notions of experience.

 

Lived Space

Merleau-Ponty's world is not geometrical rather it is a lived space. The world that we have around us, our living room, our street is composed out of a combination of all those ways that we can interact with the objects. Our bodies have this knowledge as it glided over the pavement and sits on the wall of our neighbours without worry. The space then becomes an existential space, which is engaged with dependent on the perspective of where I am, that is to say, my emotional state and my physical state as well as my perspective. If I have hurt my leg, then I see and engage with the world in a different way to when this is not the case. Strong emotional states can change what the world looks like inordinately, or to be more accurate what the world is.
There is another strange aspect to lived space, in that there is a major split between concrete space and abstract space. To illustrate and justify this, there is the case of a poor guy called Schneider. This guy was injured in the head, during the war I think. Anyway the outcome of this was that he could perform concrete movement, say blow his nose, but he couldn't point to it. The former being something concrete that is required in the current space, the latter being an abstract gesture, which can form part of the possibilities of space.
The idea out of this, is that the lived body constructs our space, by interpreting that which it finds into two aspects I can and I may, the former being concrete the latter abstract, both forms of spatial engagement\construction can through sedimentation, this is in other words, the body learning. Thus with concrete movements they become fluid after more practice, and likewise the abstract movements. In the case of Schneider, the damage to his body prevented his engagement with abstract space. He understood the words, that he must salute but the only way he could do this was via imagination and forcing himself to believe that an officer was in the room, however if an officer was in the room, he would salute with aplomb...
To bring this split between abstract and concrete ability again shows how abstract grows out of the concrete, reflection out of perception.

Sex

Here's a funny one, I think there is a general sense that we find people attractive and that is what raises our sexual temperature, in other words someone in the world, can produce a sexual response in me and therefore they are the production of my sexuality. Merleau-Ponty has another explanation of sex than this. Merleau Ponty sees sexuality not as an autonomous cycle but rather something bound up with our cognitive and bodily being. It is a way of being open to the world and not something found in the world.
Again with Schneider, he had no sexual desire, images, ideas could produce no sexual arousal, no engagements with people who he would find attractive or repulsive could trigger sexual attraction or revulsion. He had lost a way of being open to the world, and that was his sexual way of being open.
Sexuality is the way of being with the body of another, this subsumes desire, revulsion, control, submission, flirtation, passion, in fact as you roll it out it pretty much encompasses the basis drama of inter human life. Thus sexuality is the term for our basic opening to the co-existence of the other.
I've had problems with such statements before, when Freud says everything is sex, then surely nothing is, or everything is and it seems an empty statement. I think the way I got around this is to have sex as one aspect of sexuality, and to see that as we mould our world around us, the same passion and desire that sees us with this person, the same revulsion and hate that doesn't see us with that person, colours both the aspect of sex, and the aspect of our co-created world.
To quote Merleau-Ponty "The importance we attach to the body and the contradictions of love are, therefore, related to a more general drama which arises from the metaphysical structure of my body, which is both an object for others and a subject for myself"
There is a fusion between sexuality and existence, such that in any action it is impossible to label one thing sexual and one thing non-sexual, as has been said before in light of the multiplicity of meaning, there is an indeterminacy about existence.

Dance/Theatre

So all this is very well and good but how does it affect the worlds of theatre and dance? Hopefully some ideas have emerged automatically out of the above. However I suppose there are two approaches to this, one would be performance that didactically articulated the previous points, although I wonder if that would be rather pedestrian, and if you want to explain an idea probably better in a book or in a lecture theatre. Although theatre is a rich medium, and maybe direct speech is a good way to do that

Didactic ideas

If that was the case then to summarise then ideas that get me going are

1. Our communal existence
   1. One person shouts in anger, the other person thinks they are angry
2. Space as created by body, as non geometrical
3. Space as existential, a combination of I can and I may
4. The construction of individuals through pain, their loss of Eden
5. Knowledge\Reflection as abstraction.
6. The incomplete and ambiguous nature of phenomena
7. The multiplicity of horizons being the ground for phenomena
8. Mimicry, being part of our living outside ourselves
9. Motor intentionality
10. The externality of the self, given in its entirety in the world

Thematic Ideas

So how would Merleau Ponty emerge in a performance, what would it be like to see the space in which the performance happen, be created and changed by the performers? What would it be like for a horizon, or stage and performers allow themes to emerge and have this horizon graduate to another in an explicit way to show another theme?
What would it be like to see a person be led by the intermingling of their body and mind, indeed for a person's identity to exist in that space?
The general understanding of the world is the future is progress as is shown by science and technology. There is a space here that Merleau-Ponty opens up where to fully understand human experience it's a question of going back, back to our perceptual roots, back to the roots of our childhood and to open this space up.
I suppose again something I find quite striking is the sense of the cost and pain of creating the individual out of communion. I get an image of the blacksmiths hot iron forging. Again in terms of theme as you move from the communal to the individual there can be this concomitant cost
The other thing that I love and seems to have legs is the fact that our bodies are subject and object, immament and transcendent and that they hold knowledge and intention themselves. I suppose this goes straight to physical theatre, but again there is a sense in physical theatre of the physical being used instead of the verbal, there does seem some mileage in the bodily overcoming, or showing its independence from the conscious.

 

Summary

I hope I've stimulated you. Merleau-Ponty has some quite striking ideas, that I think fit very well into the physical performance that is theatre and dance. I have struggled to make the connection with dance and theatre, but I know its there, I feel it, and whilst I'm better skilled and experienced with philosophy than arts, I felt compelled to write something for you, as when you spoke in class it triggered loads of connections in me.

Bibliography

Romdenh-Romlucs: Merleau Ponty and the Phenomenology of perception (If youre going to read one book about MP read this one)
Dillon Merleau-Ponty's Ontology
Merleau Ponty Phenomenology of Perception

Contact

Rob Thomson:
thoughts@RobThomson.co.uk