Alphonso Lingis - The Inner Experience of Our Body

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Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

ISSN: 0007-1773 (Print) 2332-0486 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbsp20

The Inner Experience of our Body

Alphonso Lingis

To cite this article: Alphonso Lingis (2009) The Inner Experience of our Body, Journal of theBritish Society for Phenomenology, 40:1, 83-88, DOI: 10.1080/00071773.2009.11006667

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2009.11006667

Published online: 21 Oct 2014.

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Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 40, No. 1, January 2009

DISCUSSION NOTES ON MERLEAU-PONTY

THE INNER EXPERIENCE OF OUR BODY1

ALPHONSO LINGIS

Our bodies are not material systems simply reacting to the impact of

chemical, physical, and electromagnetic stimuli; they execute organized and

integrated operations. Motor diagrams take form in them, organizing themovements of the limbs, provoking adapted changes in respiration, blood

circulation, glandular operations. Kinaesthetic and affective sensations are part

of the formations of these motor diagrams. A kinaesthetic and affective

awareness gives our body a distinctive inner experience of itself.

Central to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the body’s awareness of

itself is the postural schema. This is a dynamic Gestalt that positions the parts

of a body in an integrated and equilibrated way; it generates a holistic

kinaesthetic sense of itself. On a stepladder, reaching for an object on the top

shelf, our body has a sense of how its legs are positioned, without having tolook at them, and a sense of the systematic shift each leg has to make to reach

further to the right or to the left without losing balance on the ladder.

Our body’s posture is oriented toward a task or an objective. Thus our

body’s sense of itself is simultaneously a perception of a layout in its

environment. Merleau-Ponty finds physical movement in the receptivity of the

senses: to see an object we have to focus our eyes upon it and circumscribe its

contours and to see its colours we have to move across a minimal area of it

with our look; to feel the rough, the bristly, and the sticky we have to move

across them with a certain pressure and pacing of our touch; to hear what the

clerk is saying in the noisy store we have to position our ears at a suitable

distance and angle. Every perception of things in our environment involves a

kinaesthetic sense of how our bodies are positioned before them. By turning

to stop the alarm ringing, then heading to the bathroom, then reaching for and

putting on our clothes, the postural schema of our body also centres its sensory

organs and surfaces upon a task or an objective. Its postural schema is the

agency of intersensorial integration.

Merleau-Ponty mentions, but does not explore, the affective sense our bodyhas of itself. A headache, a backache can fill out a zone of our body’s space

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These non-intentional movements are not spasmodic; they elaborate, as

they go, an internal organization and integration that Luria called a “kinetic

melody.” They are not oriented toward an objective, an end, but are essentially

repetitious. This repetitiousness continually engenders variations. The

variations may, like a musical composition, come to a resolution, which is not

the objective: after making the rounds of the house, the morning bathroomablutions, the kitchen and breakfast, checking the view from the living room

and the front window, we may settle into a chair on the deck. There bobbing

our hair, throwing back our head to breath in the morning air, stretching our

legs this way and that from time to time.

These non-teleological movements that are not initiatives to take hold of

objectives are activated from within, by the excess energies our body generates

over and above its intermittent needs. These excess energies have an affective

quality; they are euphoric, the happy sense of having energies to burn, and the

rhythmic, periodic movements are blissful, that feeling of it being good to bealive.

These kinetic melodies that activate our bodies contain not only a euphoric

sense of themselves, but also a sense of the outlying environment. Not as a

layout of implements, paths, obstacles, and objectives, but as a free space, a

playing field or dance floor. This space is not empty, but filled with mellow or

brilliant light, languid warmth or brisk cold, damp or aridity, darkness filled

with mellow glows and insubstantial forms. And filled too with forest

murmurs or breaking waves, beats and rhythms, wandering melodies. The

rhythms and periodicities of our body’s kinetic melodies pick up, join with the

forest murmurs, the songs of the winds in the trees, the music of the spheres.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks has exhibited the fundamental nature of our

body’s generation of kinetic melodies within itself and of our body’s aptitude

to capture in its kinetic melodies the melodies of nature’s music and human-

performed music. He has observed the most striking cases of victims of stroke,

of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, or people deeply neurologically

damaged from birth or as a result of accidents, people with extreme tourettism,

whose bodies can be activated with movement, agility, skill, ease, and a senseof happy integrity, by music.

Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that perception is perception of something, an

object, an organized Gestalt, is clearly wrong, unless we want to restrict the

term “perception” to that, and call with some other term—“sensibility,” or

“sensuous perception,” maybe—the contemplation of the sky, the sense of the

winds, the absorption with the blue of the lake, viewing the amber glow of

streetlights in the fog or the rain that pass by the car window, viewing with

abandon that streaming rain.

Merleau-Ponty, like Husserl before him, treats the background of theperceived focal figure as a horizon of virtual objects, but he also finds that,

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besides figure and background, there are “levels.” We do not see, look at the

light, but look with it; we do not look at the levels but according to them. Like

the dominant in a melody, from which the notes acquire their pitch and volume

by the degree that they vary from the dominant, the colours of illuminated

things acquire their hue and intensity from the degree to which they diverge

from the level of the light. Our ears adjust to the level of babble in a room toattend to the rise and fall of the voice of our partner in conversation. Our

feeling adjusts to the level of ambient cold or warmth, taking it as neutral, to

then feel as hot or cold the things we touch. In standing upright we align

ourselves with the walls and the trees that establish an up-down level in the

perceived field, and things are located relative to that level. Our body’s

postural schema is not only oriented toward an objective in the environment,

but also aligned to its spatial and sensory levels.

We also loosen our hold on any focal object and switch into a sensuous

attentiveness to the light itself, the fathomless blue of the sky across whichdrift clouds whose shifting shapes we do not circumscribe, the tropical warmth

of a summer evening, the forest murmurs where we distinguish no particular

patterns. These are not things; we do not grasp them by surfaces or profiles,

they extend indefinitely in depth. They resonate within us, spreading a

looseness and ease within our bodies, which do not assume a posture or take

up positions before them. The experience of the environment as unshaped,

unbounded qualitative depths is sensory and also sensuous and affective; it

resonates as tranquillity, enjoyment, ease. Here we can also think of our

experience of the ground as indefinitely extending depth of support, whose

stability our bodies take up when they take a stand. But we also loosen and

relax that stand, settle into rest, no longer maintaining our position but lying

on the ground, giving over to the ground all responsibility for maintaining

ourselves there. Here too our body is experienced as an affective zone; the

release of tensions is felt as ease and contentment.

It is not true that we experience our bodies in and through movement only;

when we remain still we have a distinctive experience of our bodies. For

twenty-five years, starting in 1982, the sculptor Antony Gormley made plastercasts of his body, then, when the cast was cut open, welded thick lead sheets

around the space vacated by his body. He knew hundreds of hours holding

himself immobile while the plaster hardened. Knowing that his wife would cut

him free of the cast when it had hardened, Gormley did not experience anxiety,

but instead experienced his body as a zone of unharnessed inner potentialities

and energies, and experienced his release from the cast each time as a birth. It

was an experience he had known as a young man practicing Vipassana

meditation for two years in India, and, he realized, as a child, remaining awake

in the dark in his bedroom. Gormley held himself in an inexpressive positionfor these casts, hands at his side, feet together, and when he materialized the

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space left by his body with the lead sheets, he smoothed out the facial features

making them inexpressive and anonymous. The sculptures then are utterly

unlike the statues sculptors have made since ancient times for public places,

statues that stand in heroic poses and with rhetorical gestures. The viewer is

not held on the exterior, inexpressive, anonymous forms of Gormley’s

sculptures, but gets a sense of the inner space of the body inside these leadcases, gets a sense of that inner space of that body in his or her own body. This

experience by our body of its inner space is full, vibrant, can absorb one

completely, but it is devoid of the sense of postural schema and body-image

that Merleau-Ponty wrote of.

Finally, let us consider the intense experience of our body in lust and in

orgasm. As the aroused body becomes orgasmic, it loses its postural

integration, its limbs, dismembered, lie or roll freely, are moved with repetitive

movements and convulsions. Its stances and positions arrayed for objectives

dissolve, become dissolute, the hand that caresses moves aimlessly, notknowing what it is seeking, not gathering information, not moving itself

intentionally but moved, agitated by the torments and pleasures that surface in

the other.

Lust is the posture become dissolute, the bones turning into gum. Sinews

and muscles become gland. Our body tenses up, hardens, gropes and grapples;

then it collapses, melts, gelatinizes, runs. The mouth loosens the chain of its

sentences, babbles, giggles; the tongue spreads its wet over the lips. There is

left the coursing of the trapped blood, the flush of heat, the spirit vaporizing in

exhalations. The supreme pleasure we can know, Freud said, and the model for

all pleasure, orgasmic pleasure, comes when an excess tension built up,

confined, compacted, is abruptly released; the pleasure consists in a passage

into the contentment and quiescence of death. Is not orgasm instead the

passage into the uncontainment and unrest of liquidity and vapour—pleasure

in exudations, secretions, exhalations? Lust is the dissolute ecstasy by which

our body’s ligneous, ferric, coral state casts itself into a gelatinous, curdling,

dissolving, liquefying, vaporizing, radioactive, solar and nocturnal state.

These convulsions and transubstantiations are provoked by the body of another divested of its socially coded uniforms, its body armour, its

performative posture, dissolving in musks and sighs and torments of pleasure.

It is provoked by the hard edges of reality radiating in twilight halos and

perfumes, landscapes flowing into mists and languor, leaves incarnating into

glands, rocks and sands liquefying and vaporizing, beams of sunlight

caressing like fingers. The communication with the other that is in lust is not

a communication with the idealized signals nor with the postures of things but

with their material states, a materiality freed from information and even from

the formation into states. A materiality not holding its own forms, undergoingtransubstantiations, suffering.

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Encrusting one’s body with stones and silver or steel, saturating one’s skin

with creams and lubricants till they glisten like mucous membrane, sinking

into marble baths full of champagne bubbles or into the soft mud of rice

paddies, feeling the grasses of the meadow or the algae tingling one’s flesh

like nerves, dissolving into perfumed air and into flickering twilight, lust seeks

the transubstantiations of matter with a body in transubstantiation.Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception is decisively

oriented toward establishing a truth to the perceived field upon which the

objective truth of the diverse natural sciences is built, and is also marked by a

Marxist emphasis on the practical character of the field of perception, where

things are discovered by action and manipulation. There are so many other

distinctive experiences of our bodies: the mobilization of skills not for tasks

that have objectives, but for the experience of speed, thrills, exhilarations,

terrors. These occur in pure form in extreme sports, but small movements in

these directions do occur in odd moments of our prosaic days. The kind of abandon that leads us further and further into melancholy, ennui, cynicism.

The body tortured by torturers, or by disease, or by its own compulsions. The

body fascinated by, seeking out, the bungling, the inexplicable, the absurd, the

unknowable. Clinical psychologists have recorded on video and analyzed the

eye movements, gestures, body shifts that accompany thinking, questioning,

puzzlement, insight; these are external indices of distinctive inner body

experiences when we are thinking. Psychiatrists have recorded the body

symptoms that result from traumatic emotions, obsessive ideas, shamanist

healings, conversions. They have hardly begun to study the transformations of

body experience that result from major insights into the nature of the

environment, or illuminations of destiny. Nietzsche divided thoughts into

healthy and morbid, healing and sickening, and doctors and health care

workers do also. There is a distinctive experience of the body by itself when

thought, memory, and imagination are engaged in sublime pathways.

Exploring these different inner experiences of our body will lead us to break

up, broaden, and differentiate Merleau-Ponty’s account of the perceived

environment about our bodies.Pennsylvania State University

Reference

1. See with respect to this essay my earlier “The Body Postured and Dissolute”, in: Veronique

Foti, ed., ‘Merleau-Ponty – Difference, Materiality, Writing’, (New Jersey: Humanities Press

1996) pp.60-71.

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Alphonso Lingis - The Inner Experience of Our Body