Transforming Politics with Merleau-Ponty: Thinking beyond the State, ed. Jérôme Melançon (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), 2021
The designation of divisions in the geologic time scale might typically seem to be a relatively t... more The designation of divisions in the geologic time scale might typically seem to be a relatively trivial matter of scientific nomenclature, but the proposal to name our current geological epoch the “Anthropocene” has generated unusually vigorous interdisciplinary debate. The controversy has focused largely on the perceived political and ideological assumptions framing the very idea of the Anthropocene, especially who counts among the “we” of Anthropos, with implications for understanding the root causes of global environmental problems, to whom responsibility should be assigned for these problems and their causes, and the role of technological and management approaches in addressing them. Less attention has been paid to claims by proponents that the Anthropocene marks a unique historical transformation of the relation between “humans” and “nature,” a transformation in which “we” displace nature, for better or worse, as drivers of the planet’s future. Paul Crutzen, the Nobel-Prize winning scientist credited with popularizing the notion of the Anthropocene, along with journalist Christian Schwägerl, famously remarks that “We humans are becoming the dominant force for change on Earth. A long-held religious and philosophical idea---humans as masters of planet Earth---has turned into a stark reality. . . . It’s no longer us against ‘Nature.’ Instead, it’s we who decide what nature is and what it will be. . . . [I]n this new era, nature is us.” As Jeremy Baskin notes, this rhetoric plays a double game, claiming to re-insert humans into nature while elevating them as its masters. More importantly, such claims to our post-natural status raise central philosophical questions about the autonomy of nature, the relation between human and geological temporality, and on what basis humanity can be considered as a collective in the absence of any “nature” in common.
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Articles by Ted Toadvine
Resumen: El mundo, como un nexo de signi-ficado unificador, es intrínsecamente precario y está constitutivamente destinado a su propio desenredo. Nuestra fascinación por un futuro final del mundo enmascara nuestra compren-sión de que el mundo como totalidad común y unificada ya se está desintegrando. Lo que queda después del fin del mundo es también lo que lo precede, los elementos geomateriales, que con-dicionan el mundo sin ser reducibles a las cosas dentro de él. A través de nuestra participación en la materialidad elemental, nos encontramos con el vértigo abismal del tiempo profundo como una ruptura anacrónica del tiempo vivido e histórico. La memoria geológica de la piedra lo sitúa en el umbral del mundo y del no mundo, mientras que nuestra responsabilidad ante una prehistoria inmemorial nos sitúa en la intersección de dura-ciones inconmensurables, tanto del pasado ancestral como del futuro apocalíptico.
The second ancient insight into nature rejuvenated by phenomenology would seem to be in tension with the first. This second insight is that nature is fundamentally musical, or even that it is music. If this idea seems less germane to us today, this is perhaps because we are so quick to equate music with patterned waves of air pressure, rather than appreciating what it could connote more broadly. Yet the link between nature and music is equally long and convoluted, and just as subject to reinterpretation in the light of changing conceptions of its terms. From the Pythagoreans—who, Aristotle reports, held “the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number” (Metaphysics I.5)—to Boethius and Kepler, the most influential versions of this thesis have been variants of Musica universalis, the positing of harmonious proportions in the movements of celestial bodies. Since these proportions paralleled musical intervals, celestial movements were considered “music” in their own right, even if they did not produce audible sounds. As the seventh-century encyclopedist St. Isidore of Seville summarized it, “Without Music, there could be no perfect knowledge, for there is nothing without it. For even the universe is said to have been put together with a certain harmony of sounds, and the very heavens revolve under the guidance of harmony.” This characterization of the cosmos as musical goes beyond mere metaphor, since worldly, audible music is understood to be a derivative imitation of the cosmic harmony. For those unwilling to go this far, more modest proposals have also appeared, to the effect that the structures of music share certain parallels with the structures of nature—not only in terms of harmony, but also, for example, insofar as they are fundamentally relational and change over time. This view that music and nature are structurally isomorphic finds new champions today, as when Jeremy Leach and John Fitch, scholars of algorithmic composition, posit a common event structure of music and nature based on the fractal distributions of their temporal changes.
Just as phenomenology has rediscovered, on its own terms, a sense of the withdrawal of nature, so it has also given new meaning to the notion of Musica universalis, now inspired by ecological relationships, the “melodies” of organic behaviors in “counterpoint” with their environments, rather than the harmonies of celestial motions. Phenomenologists first uncovered the link between life and music through the contribution of Gestalt theorists such as Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler, for whom melody serves as a privileged example of a temporal gestalt. Inspired by Köhler’s descriptions of chimpanzee behavior as “melodic,” for example, Merleau-Ponty relies on the figure of melody to describe the unity and form of organic life in The Structure of Behavior, often referring to the organism’s dialectical relation with its environment as a “melodic development” or a “kinetic melody.” Nowadays, the description of organic behavior as melodic is more frequently associated with the writings of Estonian ethologist Jakob von Uexküll, whose work was also influential on phenomenology and is currently attracting new interest from scholars of animal studies and posthumanism. For Uexküll, nature is fundamentally composed of meanings that emerge in the exchange between organisms and their Umwelten, their environments, and this process can be literally described as a kind of music-making in which contrapuntal meanings replace sonic harmonies. Uexküll’s version of Musica Universalis is therefore the intricately composed score of meanings constituting the interlocking environments of all living things—amounting, in Giorgio Agamben’s estimation, to a “radical dehumanization of the image of nature.”
a tension exists between these two ancient ideas about nature—first, that nature loves to hide, as manifest in its resistance to and withdrawal from reflection; and, second, that nature is a kind of all-encompassing symphony of ecological niches, perpetually singing itself into existence through the meaning-making activity of organic life. If both of these claims concern one and the same nature, and if both have a genuine foundation in experience as phenomenologically described, then what is their relation? More precisely, how can the music of nature, if this is more than a mere metaphor, be the event both of nature’s disclosure and of its withdrawal?
human animality to bare life. Merleau-Ponty differentiates himself from Scheler, in The Structure of Behavior, by insisting that life cannot be integrated into spirit without remainder. Merleau-Ponty’s later work thinks this remainder as the ineliminable gap and delay in the auto-affection of the body and as a chiasmic exchange that anticipates Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming animal.” This remainder of life within consciousness is the immemorial past of one’s own animality. It follows that our “inner animality” is neither singular nor plural but a kind of pack that speaks through the voice that I take to be mine. Furthermore, in the exchange of looks between myself and a non-human other, the crossing of glances occurs at an animal level that withdraws from my own reflective consciousness.
To Gasquet, Cézanne remarks: “I have my motif...(He clasps his hands together.) A motif, you see, it is this . . . .”
“What?” Gasquet asks?
“Oh, yes!” Cézanne replies. “(He repeats his gesture, separates his hands, spreading his fingers apart, and brings them slowly, very slowly together again, then joins them, clenches them, intertwining his fingers.) That’s what you have to attain. . . . Try to understand, I guide my entire painting together all the time. . . . Nature is always the same, but nothing about her that we see endures. Our art must convey a glimmer of her endurance with the elements, the appearance of all her changes. It must give us the sense of her eternity. What is beneath her? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything. Everything, you understand? So, I join her wandering hands . . . .”
réside cependant pas dans un retour à la parenté et à la communauté avec l’animal, mais plutôt dans l’intensifi cation du paradoxe constitutif qu’est notre animalité interne – paradoxe qui est celui du sujet corporel anonyme de la perception, pour autant qu’il vit selon une temporalité différente de celle de la conscience en première personne.
Ceci donne accès à un domaine tout à fait différent pour penser la rencontre avec les ‘autres’ non humains : un domaine où ils parlent à travers nos propres voix et regardent à travers nos propres yeux. On développe tout d’abord ce point par le biais d’une analyse de la proximité des premiers travaux de Merleau-Ponty avec ceux de Scheler, lesquels réduisent, d’une manière paradigmatique, l’animalité de l’homme à la simple vie. Merleau-Ponty se sépare de Scheler, dans La structure du comportement, en soulignant que la vie ne peut pas être jointe sans reste à l’esprit. Son oeuvre ultérieure pense ce ‘reste’ comme écart et empêchement inéliminables eu égard à l’auto-affection corporelle, et comme échange en chiasme, ce qui anticipe sur le concept du « devenir animal » chez Deleuze et Guattari. Ce ‘reste’ de la vie au sein de la conscience constitue
le passé immémorial de notre propre animalité. Il s’ensuit que notre « animalité intime » n’est ni singulière ni plurielle, mais qu’elle est plutôt l’ensemble de ce qui parle par la voix que je considère comme la mienne. Plus encore, dans l’échange de regards entre moi et un ‘autre’ non humain, le croisement des regards a lieu à un niveau animal qui s’écarte de ma propre conscience reflexive.
productions of sexual difference. This positive account of the excess of hetero-affection reconciles phenomenology with evolution and offers a figure for thinking the thickening and
multiplying of the differences between human and non-human, living and nonliving, corporeal and cosmic.
Resumen: El mundo, como un nexo de signi-ficado unificador, es intrínsecamente precario y está constitutivamente destinado a su propio desenredo. Nuestra fascinación por un futuro final del mundo enmascara nuestra compren-sión de que el mundo como totalidad común y unificada ya se está desintegrando. Lo que queda después del fin del mundo es también lo que lo precede, los elementos geomateriales, que con-dicionan el mundo sin ser reducibles a las cosas dentro de él. A través de nuestra participación en la materialidad elemental, nos encontramos con el vértigo abismal del tiempo profundo como una ruptura anacrónica del tiempo vivido e histórico. La memoria geológica de la piedra lo sitúa en el umbral del mundo y del no mundo, mientras que nuestra responsabilidad ante una prehistoria inmemorial nos sitúa en la intersección de dura-ciones inconmensurables, tanto del pasado ancestral como del futuro apocalíptico.
The second ancient insight into nature rejuvenated by phenomenology would seem to be in tension with the first. This second insight is that nature is fundamentally musical, or even that it is music. If this idea seems less germane to us today, this is perhaps because we are so quick to equate music with patterned waves of air pressure, rather than appreciating what it could connote more broadly. Yet the link between nature and music is equally long and convoluted, and just as subject to reinterpretation in the light of changing conceptions of its terms. From the Pythagoreans—who, Aristotle reports, held “the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number” (Metaphysics I.5)—to Boethius and Kepler, the most influential versions of this thesis have been variants of Musica universalis, the positing of harmonious proportions in the movements of celestial bodies. Since these proportions paralleled musical intervals, celestial movements were considered “music” in their own right, even if they did not produce audible sounds. As the seventh-century encyclopedist St. Isidore of Seville summarized it, “Without Music, there could be no perfect knowledge, for there is nothing without it. For even the universe is said to have been put together with a certain harmony of sounds, and the very heavens revolve under the guidance of harmony.” This characterization of the cosmos as musical goes beyond mere metaphor, since worldly, audible music is understood to be a derivative imitation of the cosmic harmony. For those unwilling to go this far, more modest proposals have also appeared, to the effect that the structures of music share certain parallels with the structures of nature—not only in terms of harmony, but also, for example, insofar as they are fundamentally relational and change over time. This view that music and nature are structurally isomorphic finds new champions today, as when Jeremy Leach and John Fitch, scholars of algorithmic composition, posit a common event structure of music and nature based on the fractal distributions of their temporal changes.
Just as phenomenology has rediscovered, on its own terms, a sense of the withdrawal of nature, so it has also given new meaning to the notion of Musica universalis, now inspired by ecological relationships, the “melodies” of organic behaviors in “counterpoint” with their environments, rather than the harmonies of celestial motions. Phenomenologists first uncovered the link between life and music through the contribution of Gestalt theorists such as Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler, for whom melody serves as a privileged example of a temporal gestalt. Inspired by Köhler’s descriptions of chimpanzee behavior as “melodic,” for example, Merleau-Ponty relies on the figure of melody to describe the unity and form of organic life in The Structure of Behavior, often referring to the organism’s dialectical relation with its environment as a “melodic development” or a “kinetic melody.” Nowadays, the description of organic behavior as melodic is more frequently associated with the writings of Estonian ethologist Jakob von Uexküll, whose work was also influential on phenomenology and is currently attracting new interest from scholars of animal studies and posthumanism. For Uexküll, nature is fundamentally composed of meanings that emerge in the exchange between organisms and their Umwelten, their environments, and this process can be literally described as a kind of music-making in which contrapuntal meanings replace sonic harmonies. Uexküll’s version of Musica Universalis is therefore the intricately composed score of meanings constituting the interlocking environments of all living things—amounting, in Giorgio Agamben’s estimation, to a “radical dehumanization of the image of nature.”
a tension exists between these two ancient ideas about nature—first, that nature loves to hide, as manifest in its resistance to and withdrawal from reflection; and, second, that nature is a kind of all-encompassing symphony of ecological niches, perpetually singing itself into existence through the meaning-making activity of organic life. If both of these claims concern one and the same nature, and if both have a genuine foundation in experience as phenomenologically described, then what is their relation? More precisely, how can the music of nature, if this is more than a mere metaphor, be the event both of nature’s disclosure and of its withdrawal?
human animality to bare life. Merleau-Ponty differentiates himself from Scheler, in The Structure of Behavior, by insisting that life cannot be integrated into spirit without remainder. Merleau-Ponty’s later work thinks this remainder as the ineliminable gap and delay in the auto-affection of the body and as a chiasmic exchange that anticipates Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming animal.” This remainder of life within consciousness is the immemorial past of one’s own animality. It follows that our “inner animality” is neither singular nor plural but a kind of pack that speaks through the voice that I take to be mine. Furthermore, in the exchange of looks between myself and a non-human other, the crossing of glances occurs at an animal level that withdraws from my own reflective consciousness.
To Gasquet, Cézanne remarks: “I have my motif...(He clasps his hands together.) A motif, you see, it is this . . . .”
“What?” Gasquet asks?
“Oh, yes!” Cézanne replies. “(He repeats his gesture, separates his hands, spreading his fingers apart, and brings them slowly, very slowly together again, then joins them, clenches them, intertwining his fingers.) That’s what you have to attain. . . . Try to understand, I guide my entire painting together all the time. . . . Nature is always the same, but nothing about her that we see endures. Our art must convey a glimmer of her endurance with the elements, the appearance of all her changes. It must give us the sense of her eternity. What is beneath her? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything. Everything, you understand? So, I join her wandering hands . . . .”
réside cependant pas dans un retour à la parenté et à la communauté avec l’animal, mais plutôt dans l’intensifi cation du paradoxe constitutif qu’est notre animalité interne – paradoxe qui est celui du sujet corporel anonyme de la perception, pour autant qu’il vit selon une temporalité différente de celle de la conscience en première personne.
Ceci donne accès à un domaine tout à fait différent pour penser la rencontre avec les ‘autres’ non humains : un domaine où ils parlent à travers nos propres voix et regardent à travers nos propres yeux. On développe tout d’abord ce point par le biais d’une analyse de la proximité des premiers travaux de Merleau-Ponty avec ceux de Scheler, lesquels réduisent, d’une manière paradigmatique, l’animalité de l’homme à la simple vie. Merleau-Ponty se sépare de Scheler, dans La structure du comportement, en soulignant que la vie ne peut pas être jointe sans reste à l’esprit. Son oeuvre ultérieure pense ce ‘reste’ comme écart et empêchement inéliminables eu égard à l’auto-affection corporelle, et comme échange en chiasme, ce qui anticipe sur le concept du « devenir animal » chez Deleuze et Guattari. Ce ‘reste’ de la vie au sein de la conscience constitue
le passé immémorial de notre propre animalité. Il s’ensuit que notre « animalité intime » n’est ni singulière ni plurielle, mais qu’elle est plutôt l’ensemble de ce qui parle par la voix que je considère comme la mienne. Plus encore, dans l’échange de regards entre moi et un ‘autre’ non humain, le croisement des regards a lieu à un niveau animal qui s’écarte de ma propre conscience reflexive.
productions of sexual difference. This positive account of the excess of hetero-affection reconciles phenomenology with evolution and offers a figure for thinking the thickening and
multiplying of the differences between human and non-human, living and nonliving, corporeal and cosmic.
to be discovered as a matter of kinship, participation, or oneness, whether this is founded on ecological or phenomenological descriptions, since "man's relationship with the other is better as difference than as unity."1 The Other transcends me in a radical way, disrupts my sensible enjoyment of the world, and calls into question my very right to exist. And since the Other is beyond being, no revision of ontology, however radical, will provide us with insight into the nonworldly source of ethical orientation. Levinas's approach seems to completely reverse the efforts to ascribe an "intrinsic value" to nature that have dominated much environmental discourse. As he writes, "moral consciousness is not an experience of values, but an access to external being: external being is, par excellence, the Other" ( DF 293 ). Yet this approach hints at the further possibility that nature confronts us with an ethical command by its very externality, by the radicality
of its own alterity. Rather than cataloging morally relevant similarities, perhaps we should hearken to nature's unfathomable depths, to the way its power outstrips us, to the alienness of a nonhuman gaze. If the alterity of the human Other can put our egoistic enjoyment into question so absolutely, is not nature even more radically resistant
and aloof? For the environmental philosopher, the appeal of Levinas's ethics is its apparent promise for recovering a certain anarchical natural sublime, thereby breaking definitively with pragmatic and utilitarian anthropocentrisms.
in his philosophy, it is useful to clarify the general meaning of the term, the concept's role within the philosophical tradition, and its significance within the contemporary
context. In English, the term chiasm is a shortened form of two words with apparently distinct meanings, one biological (chiasma) and one rhetorical (chiasmus). Each of these terms has its own distinct etymological origin in Greek, khiasma and khiasmos, although they share as their common root the verb khiazein, to mark with an X (khi). Within physiology, a chiasma is the point where anatomical structures, such as nerves or ligaments, cross. A paradigmatic example would be the optic chiasma, where the fibers of the optic nerves cross at the base of the brain, which has long been thought to play a major role in synthesizing monocular images into stereoscopic vision. The term has also been used in cytology since the early twentieth century to name the point where genetic material is exchanged between two chromatids during sexual cell division (meiosis). In rhetoric, on the other hand, a chiasmus
is a figure of speech formed by a repetition of structure in reverse order. In classical rhetoric, the term chiasmus is reserved for an inverted grammatical order in two or more parallel clauses, without repetition of the same words or phrases, in the pattern A-B/B'-A': "By day the frolic, and the dance by night" (Samuel Johnson).
concerns the aesthetic appreciation of the world in its
entirety, including both the natural and built environments,
and is consequently the broadest category of
aesthetics. This area of study emerged as a distinct
field in the latter half of the twentieth century, although
its historical roots may be traced to eighteenth century
British and Scottish theories of natural aesthetics, especially
their treatment of the picturesque in landscape
painting, which culminated in Kant’s analysis of the
beautiful and sublime in nature. During the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, aesthetic theory tended to
focus almost exclusively on artworks and other objects
of human design. But encouraged by increasing concern
with environmental issues among philosophers
and the general public, a new interest in the aesthetics
of nature and its relationship to the built environment
has emerged over the last several decades. Ecological
aesthetics today incorporates studies of the aesthetics
of nature, including natural objects and larger wholes
such as ecosystems, gardens and landscape architecture,
environmental and earth art, architecture and
urban planning, and the relations between the different
modes of aesthetic appreciation appropriate to these
different domains. This extension of aesthetic consideration
to both natural and built environments has led
to a reconsideration of traditional aesthetic categories
and of central tenets of aesthetic theory.
Introduction: Jérôme Melançon: Situating Merleau-Ponty and Political Philosophy: Relations, Institutions, and Transformations
Chapter 1 Dorothea Olkowski : On the Limits of Perception for Social Interaction in Merleau-Ponty
Chapter 2 Emily S. Lee: The Possibility of Emotional Appropriateness for Groups Identified with a Temperament
Chapter 3 Martín Plot: Societies without Bodies and the Bodies of Society: Equality and Reversibility in Lefort and Butler’s Encounters with
Merleau-Ponty
Chapter 4 Paul Mazzocchi: Homo Utopicus: Merleau-Ponty and the Utopian Body
Chapter 5 Ann V. Murphy: Vulnerability as Revolt: Hunger Strikes, Temporality, and the Contestation of Social Death
Chapter 6 Laura McMahon: The “Great Phantom”: Merleau-Ponty on Habitus, Freedom, and Political Transformation
Chapter 7 Bryan Smyth: Freedom’s Ground: Merleau-Ponty and the Dialectics of Nature
Chapter 8 Ted Toadvine: Ecophenomenology after the End of Nature
Chapter 9 Dan Furukawa Marques: Political Phenomenology as Ethnographic Method
Chapter 10 Jérôme Melançon: Toward a New Balance and Interdependence: Merleau-Ponty on Colonialism and Underdevelopment
Chapter 11 Emmanuel de Saint Aubert: The Perceptual Foundation of Care
a compelling interpretation of the development of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking as a whole but, more importantly, an engagement with what it leaves unthought, with what it expresses only obliquely, in filigree, and with what is perhaps
essentially inexpressible. Tracing expression, in other words, also involves marking its limits, and it is perhaps in this direction that Fóti’s investigation could be extended. Describing the irreducibility of expression, she notes that “the refusal of any identity, ground, center, or origin” in Merleau-Ponty’s
ontology “is what renders expression both ineluctable and pervasive” (121). This conclusion follows from Fóti’s characterization of expression in diacritical terms. Yet this diacritics of expression, we will suggest, must also account for
the immemorial past, the autonomy of transcendence, and the elements beyond the world. The ethical moment of expression may well emerge, on this view, in a diacritics of the inexpressible.
22 June 2015, University of Idaho
http://www.aslebiennialconference.com/
This seminar investigates the intersection of geomateriality with deep time, both past and future. Ecocriticism and the environmental humanities have reawakened attentiveness to
the agency, resistance, and haecceity of the material elements, their sensuousness, sedimentations, petrifications, disintegrations, eddies and flows. The alterity of this geological world is perhaps best expressed through its obdurate and abstruse temporality, its unwinding in a “deep time” that remains fundamentally asynchronous with the timescales of human cultures and narrative personal histories. The emerging cultural awareness of this profound geological past is mirrored by our speculative reach into the horizons of the deep future, such as in our confrontation with the epochal legacies of
climate change and nuclear waste. This rupture of temporal horizons drives efforts toward “global sustainability”: motivated by the specter of future generations, international policy seeks to leverage our knowledge of the deep past for the prediction
and management of earth’s future on a millennial scale. Our encounters with geomateriality therefore entangle us in “the emerging field of complex, stratified, nonlinear temporality” (Wood 2007, 6).
How do we think and write the temporality and monumentality of geomorphs, their histories and futures, their agency as memorials and time capsules? “Deep Times” attempts to deepen ecotheoretical approaches to the interrelationship between history, culture, and embodiment by exploring how earth/l/y agents bear material imprints of the past as well as intimations of an unknowable future. Thinking with and through this geological imaginary – literary, lithic vectors that cross the boundaries of genre and periodization – offers us an invitation to imagine vaster timescales of encounter, ontoecological becoming, and ethical responsibility that the Anthropocene hopes to constrain. The geo- (from Greek gē, “earth”) not only bursts the limits of historicism but of
anthropocentricity altogether, reconceiving reality as “a single matter-energy undergoing phase transitions of various kinds,” refusing mere sedimentation via its dynamic, nonlinear loops of “accumulated ‘stuff,’” settling into vibrant geologies that may both mineralize and recrudesce at any time (De Landa 1997, 21).