D. Olkowski-Flesh to Desire- Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, Deleuze(Art)(Q)

7/25/2019 D. Olkowski-Flesh to Desire- Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, Deleuze(Art)(Q)

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Strategies, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2002

Flesh to Desire: Merleau-Ponty, Bergson,

Deleuze

Dorothea Olkowski

Affectivity, the feeling of pleasure and pain, and its relation to thought as wellas to social or cultural life have, for some time now, been theorized nearlyexclusively within the domain of psychoanalysis. From the psychoanalyticperspective, affectivity or feeling arises from instinctual sources whose deeper

origins are likely to be physiological. Thought or consciousness also arises outof this physiological basis as the redirection of libidinal energy into culture forthe sake of preserving the individual if not the species. Yet, philosophers whoare not strictly psychoanalytic or who argue against the psychoanalytic in-terpretation of feeling as instinctual and physiological have also concernedthemselves with the relation between the body and consciousness. Thesephilosophers are interested in how the inclusion of affectivity in a philosophy ofembodiment alters our conceptions about mind and body, life and desire. Thisis particularly the case if, as Gilles Deleuze argues, theorizing existence in terms

of desire necessitates certain kinds of reective and embodied practices that arethe condition of the possibility of any concepts, not only those directly relatedto pleasure and pain.

Undoubtedly, the work of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty,whose conception of embodied consciousness is a sustained attempt to over-come mindbody dualism, continues to be a signicant part of this philosophicaltradition. However, although Merleau-Pontys ontology of the esh purports toconnect the embodied life of the individual with a kind of cosmological embodi-ment and to connect embodiment with language, I will maintain that his effortsin this direction in the end do not succeed without the intervention of somethinglike Bergsons analysis of affective life. From there, I will turn to Deleuzesmultifaceted conception of positive desire in order to constitute a practice and atheory of positive desire, which I call, following Bergson, resonance. Althoughthis analysis will begin with Merleau-Pontys philosophical investigation ofperception, and move from there to Bergsons analyses of affection and duration,to the question of creation and desire in concrete human actions in its readingof Deleuze, the point is not to trace a progressive movement from one to thenext. Rather, it is by interweaving certain of their ideas that I will develop thenotion of resonance and explore its manifestations in embodied life.

Such interweaving is fruitful even though Deleuzes philosophy of creativedesire deliberately eschews any ties to phenomenology. Nonetheless, Deleuzeswork always plays with and upon the notion of desire, and desire turns uponDeleuzes conception of the body, so that when the connections between esh,feeling, and desire are examined in terms of the body, the relationship betweenMerleau-Ponty, Bergson and Deleuze begins to reveal itself to be as deep as itis broad. Merleau-Ponty addresses Bergsons ideas frequently throughout his

ISSN 1040-2136 print/ISSN 1470-1251 online/02/010011-14 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/10402130220127825


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12 Strategies Vol. 15, No. 1

own work in chapters, essays, and commentaries found inIn Praise of Philosophy,The Visible and the Invisible, and La Nature, to name three of the most signicant.ThePhenomenology of Perception may even be considered a rewriting of BergsonsMatter and Memory from the point of view of spatiality and pure perception inorder to contest the very existence of an independent affective life, which

Bergson calls duration. Likewise, Gilles Deleuzes lifelong fascination with anduse of Bergsonism begins with the essay La conception de la difference chezBergson, and continues with the bookBergsonismas well as extensive theoreticaldevelopments in Difference and Repetition, Cinema I, Cinema II, and the twovolumes ofCapitalism and Schizophrenia. The two books on cinema can also beread as an extended engagement with the Merleau-Pontean perception-imageand the Bergsonian affection-image.

Undoubtedly, Bergson is an important link between Merleau-Ponty andDeleuze and further motivation for bringing these three together, insofar as

Bergsons conception of affective duration presents a formidable challenge toMerleau-Pontys phenomenology of perception, which is grounded in spatiality,and also provides a theoretical basis for the development of Deleuzes ideasabout creation and desire in relation to the perception-image and the affection-image. In this way, the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty can be characterized interms of a movement that begins with making sense of the body in relation toconsciousness and ends with revealing the body in relation to esh, a muchbroader concept that includes relations between self and world and betweenoneself and others.

This task begins, for Merleau-Ponty, withThe Structure of Behavior, which seeksa way out of the dilemma of positing consciousness as either the transcendentalego, the container of emotions, structures, and states or, as reducible topseudo-physical processes from which consciousness arises as the conglomer-ation of physical or quasi-physical states. Thus, Merleau-Ponty begins to developan account, not of consciousness, but of the structure and organization of theembodied being whose relations to the world are organic, psychological, andsocial. The task becomes one of seeking a theory that does not view embodiedbeings as entities that exist on a sea of processes of which we know andexperience nothing.1 Merleau-Ponty argues that no human behavior can poss-ibly be the result of only organic functions or of consciousness because theso-called impersonal life is permeated by personal, meaningful, and symbolicbehavior. In fact, he will argue that every bodily act is psychological, notphysical, mechanical or transcendental, so that even the physical world mustalways be made sense of on the basis of experience.

Thus, the human order of existence, which is bodily and psychological, iswhat has to be accounted for rst, and this can only be done, for Merleau-Ponty,

through a phenomenology of perception which values both the physical bodyand consciousness and which explains how it is that we experience themtogether as an indistinguishable, existential process operating in every humanactivity. The experience of the body and consciousness as integrated rather thanseparated from one another occurs because humans have the unique capacity tovary their relations to things in the world by moving their own bodies and/ormoving objects in the world. Human beings can free up any situation from itsconcrete dependence on the mechanical or physical present by imaginativelyprojecting it into the future. Unlike a chimpanzee, who cannot use a stick to pull


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down fruit from a tree unless the stick is already set in the right position for use,human beings can gure out how to make and use tools of all kinds, sometimeseven fashioning them merely for play. It is this understanding of human activityfull of possibilities that guides Merleau-Pontys thinking.

Merleau-Ponty worked his entire life to nd a meeting ground for the body,

which expresses our instinctual nature and the consciousness, which choosesand acts. Claiming that physiology is permeated by personal, meaningful, andsymbolic behavior, Merleau-Ponty analyzes the manner in which seeminglynatural, physiological structures of behavior undergo imperceptible changesand are elevated to the level of human acts. Likewise, he leaves open thepossibility for the disintegration of human behaviors into what he thinks of asmere habits, without meaning or reference. This is possible because, as he triesto show, the physical and the psychic are intimately intertwined in existence.

Nevertheless, this intimacy of the physical and physiological with the psycho-

logical and cognitive is built upon an understanding of the nature of therelations between consciousness and nature, or as Freud would say, life anddeath, which although it seeks to break free of physiological determinism,remains fettered by precisely that system of ideas. In the example referred toabove, when Merleau-Ponty describes a chimpanzee which fails to use availableobjects as instruments for reaching desirable food, he ascribes this failure to asort of animal physics immanent in behavior, according to which animalsremain subject to the unvarying needs of the species.2 For human beings, theworld is much less a natural material plenum of juxtaposed parts than it is astaging ground for behavior; it is the outward projection of internal possibilities.Nonetheless, using an existential model, Merleau-Ponty argues that consciousactivity, which always posits the other as the object of my perception or action,must cease in order for the other to be recognized by any agent. This seems toimply that consciousness is an impediment to a shared intersubjective humanworld and brings into question once again the interconnection between thephysical and the psychological worlds.3

Each species, according to Merleau-Ponty, has a distinct structural reality andphysics must concede that rather than existing as an objective mechanism thatoperates according to unvarying principles, the natural world consists of amilieu and environments in which natural stimuli count and play a role onlyinsofar as they belong to the structural reality of that species. Ultimately,Merleau-Ponty thinks that we can divide the world into three distinct orders:quantity or matter, order or life, and signication or minds. They are differenti-ated, he argues, only as a matter of degree, that is, each of these ordersrepresents a different degree of integration between matter and mind in ahierarchy that aims for progressive individuation in the direction of

signication. It is precisely with this idea that we encounter the limits ofMerleau-Pontys conception of the relationship between matter and mind, bodyand world.

If matter, life, and mind coexist as different degrees of integration or disinte-gration of an organized world, they do so, for Merleau-Ponty, because they arehomogenous and hierarchized. Physical laws are possible only within a realitysupported and maintained by the complete ensemble of relations in the physicaluniverse; thus physical laws operate within a structure but structure must alsooperate within those physical laws, to constitute those laws. This is the case


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because even though science uses numbers and mathematics to characterize itsobjects, when it speaks about the physical universe, it must express its laws interms of concrete perceived wholes, that is, in terms of the interests and actionsof human beings. Ultimately, the distinction between physical and vital orinorganic and organic life is not as great as it might at rst appear to be. At each

level, equilibrium between living beings and their environment is sought andmaintained, yet Merleau-Pontys notion of equilibrium seems to have beenmodeled on the physical worlds constraint of equilibrium. This appears to bethe case when Merleau-Ponty argues that the living or phenomenal body withits gestures and attitudes must have a proper structure, an immanentsignication, a certain type of behavior that can be traced to the unities and aprioris of biological science.4

Merleau-Pontys reformulation of nature and consciousness into physical,vital, and human structures whose differences are differences of degree brings

him directly into contact and conict with the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Inarguing for the superiority of his own conception of structure, Merleau-Pontyaccuses Bergson of acts of magic. Specically Merleau-Ponty attacks the idea ofan elan vital, the temporal and explosive force of life, characterized in humanbehavior as a zone of indetermination in which one can choose to act or torefrain from action. For Merleau-Ponty, Bergsons claim that the interval pro-duces the new is simply not possible because it would amount to a break in thechain of physical causality. Merleau-Ponty wants to insist that the physical,material world establishes an equilibrium with respect to the forces in themilieu. Likewise, the animal equalizes instinct and need with milieu, and ahuman being also establishes an equilibrium between itself and the physico-chemical stimuli that make up its world in order to carry out its activities. Thepoint, for Merleau-Ponty, a point which he believes Bergson misses, is thatalthough each of these worlds strives for equilibrium, only human acts havetheir own signicance. So, for example, a face perceived upside down deprivesthe face and features of signicance because it is no longer part of a system ofpossible actions dened by task and situation.

This is evidence, for Merleau-Ponty, that perceptions are relevant to ourbodies because they give us a world. We participate in the world by activelyselecting what interests us in our perception and acting upon it. Thus, Merleau-Ponty will argue, we respond to the world as it calls upon the body. None of thiswould be possible if we were tied either to physiology or to the transcendentalego constituting the world. That is, there would not be several ways for a bodyto be a body and a consciousness to be a consciousness; there would be onlyone.5 This is why psycho-physical phenomena such as sexuality or repressioncannot be reduced to physiology. Sexuality is not simply a release of energy and

repression, not merely a technique for the reduction of psychic pain. ForMerleau-Ponty, vital, instinctual, and physiological behavior disappear as isolat-able when they are integrated into a whole that is a structure of behavior.

In fact, I want to emphasize the argument that, for Merleau-Ponty, sexualityand desire play a signicant role in perception, that they are fundamental to ourbeing-at-the-world (etre-au-monde). Let us try to see how a thing or a beingbegins to exist for us through desire or love and we shall thereby come tounderstand better how things and beings can exist in general.6 As Marc Vanden Bossche sees this, Merleau-Ponty posits the existence of a fundamental erotic


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perception. There must be an Eros or a Libido which breathes life into anoriginal world, gives sexual value or meaning to external stimuli and outlinesfor each subject the use he shall make of his objective body.7

A body is not perceived as an object only, the perception has a ground in a more

fundamental kind of perceptionMerleau-Ponty calls it secret: the visible bodyis carried by a sexual scheme, which is strictly individual. This perception iserotic and has nothing to do with a cogitatiothat aims at a cogitatum Throughits embodiment, the perception aims at another body and this is executed in theworld, not in consciousness. According to Merleau-Ponty, a comprehension (unecomprehension) exists which does not belong to the domain of understanding(lentendement). For understanding catches an experience in an idea, while desirecomprehends blindly through its connecting a body with another body.8

Nonetheless, while I want to recognize the signicance of positing a funda-

mental erotic perception, I want to question the ontological basis of Merleau-Pontys analysis of this blind comprehension. I will argue that it continues topresuppose the existence of two separate worlds bordering one another. One isa mechanical or organic realm of forces, while the other is that of an activesubject engaged with the world. Merleau-Pontys dialectic of existence remainstoo much of an idealization because the embodied world is structured too muchfrom the perspective of what is said, thought, and perceived. As such it turns outto be little more than the realm of the pre-discursive, the pre-reective, andperhaps even the pre-perceptual, a realm whose positive and generative charac-teristics are often only vaguely articulated. This is to say that there are greatdifculties in positing a body of impersonal existence facing off a consciousnessof personal acts. It is, in fact, the recognition of this dualism which leadsMerleau-Ponty to posit a philosophy of esh according to which the bodysensed and the body sentient are conceived of as the obverse and reverse of oneanother. Merleau-Ponty is lead to extend the concept of esh so that it alsocharacterizes the relation between the impersonal and personal body, and therelation between bodies and world. Flesh is then the name of the passiveactivenature of the body, the body as seen and seer, as touched and touching and itis the name for the world.

Flesh is the world, for Merleau-Ponty, when each of these distinctions come tobe understood as differentiations out of one integrated reality and not asindependent and positive phenomenon. Thus, Merleau-Ponty envisages theimpersonal body, that level of physiological, instinctual life, not as an invisiblecause of visible actions, but as something that is present in every perception ofthe world, thus as something we can apprehend in terms of both our interestsin the world and our actions in that world. In short, to make sense of the

objective or physical world, we must look to experience, insofar as it is theorder of the phenomenal which is precisely to be justied and rehabilitated asthe foundation of the objective order.9

From a Bergsonian perspective, however, Merleau-Pontys primacy of percep-tion is spatialized, thus homogeneous, insofar as within the perceptual eld,behavioral differences are characterized as differences of degree and not of kind.For Bergson, the difference between objective, material relations and meaningful,human and social relations is not merely a matter of degree. The differencebetween determination and freedom is not, again, merely a matter of degree.


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Bergson agrees with Merleau-Ponty that perception tends to divide up matteraccording to our needs, thereby facilitating action. Yet this would require not anormative equilibrium like that of natural phenomena, not even a structure ofbehavior, but something else. It requires that perception be continually revisedand revisable as our interests and needs change. When we imagine, as Merleau-

Ponty does, that there is a normative mode of perception, guaranteed by thespatiality of the body, without which there will be no signication, such a viewpresumes the existence of a spatialized equilibrium which guarantees thosenorms with respect to both behavior and meaning.

Against this, Bergson argues that extensity and not abstract space is the mostsalient quality of perception but that our perception of space as homogeneousconceals this qualitative aspect of spatial experience, and that the qualitativeaspect is what produces change because it is change. Quality, by expanding andextending itself, gives rise to extensity and ultimately to spatiality, homogenous

units of homogeneous space. However, quality is not spatial nor homogeneous;thus it requires philosophical intuition, the search for differences in nature orkind rather than mere differences of degree. The parameters of this method arequite distinct from ordinary philosophical analysis. Intuition avoids oppositionsand divides experience into two tendencies, instinct and intelligence, time andspace, which are differences in nature or kind, each of which usually containssome elements of the other.10 This is in contrast to the Hegelian notion wherebya thing differs rst of all from what it is not, making difference into contradic-tion. In the Hegelian conception, a thing differs from what it is not; it thus differsfrom what is located elsewhere in space, whereas for Bergson, a thing must rstof all differ from itself; it must have internal, qualitative differences and this iswhere the recognition of quality begins.

Like Merleau-Ponty, Bergson also begins with perception but does not focuson the objects of perception, that is, the actual perceptual eld. Rather, workingonly with images, without theories of matter and spirit or mind, Bergson asksabout the conditions in which sensory images are produced. He discovers thatmost perceptions are of the world, but one particular perception is given fromwithin, through affections, and that one unique perception is the perception ofones own body. Between the multiplicity of excitations received from withoutand the movements executed in response to those excitations, there is an intervalof affectivity, in which one feels the inuence of the world upon ones body. ForBergson, perception is one tendency and affection is another, and he willcharacterize the former in terms of space and quantication and the latter interms of time and the affective awareness of qualitative differences. Perceptionorients the living being towards matter, spatiality, and the world; it prepares oneto act, while affection moves in the direction of temporality, memory, and mind,

the durational ow of life in which differences are qualitative and so invitereection. Thus, between these two directions there is a difference in quality,nature, or kind. Without affective life, the body would be a purely impersonalexistence, a thing among things in the world. However, affectivity is notrestricted to human beings. Everywhere in the world, every living being withthe power of mobility engages in the dual functions of perception and affection.The former is related directly to action in the world, while the latter is theimmediate contact with and the inuence of the world upon any body. Theformer induces speed since it involves ready-made actions in a pre-made world,


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while the latter, because every aspect of it is differentiated both from itself andfrom any other affective process, slows things down, opening up an interval forreection. For human beings, the interval in which affections arise constitutes abreak between the perception and our response to it. This interval makes itpossible for us to reect and act differently or to choose not to act at all. This

means that affective life is a moment of freedom, a moment of indetermination.And because in this moment of hesitation between a stimulus and a response wemay reect and insert new images into the present perception, it is also a matterof the creation of new modes of existence.

Bergson argues that the simplest forms of life are often indiscernibly physical,chemical and vital. This is because, for Bergson, life begins to evolve inaccordance with the habits of inert matter, entering into it in order to draw itout. Thus, the rst animate forms were extremely simple, minute masses ofprotoplasm. Even so, they possessed the internal push that eventually raised

them to the highest forms of life. This push or eclat is a splintering that can beunderstood not as a magical force, but as contraction of the outside to the inside.As that which is outside the body is contracted into it, it inuences the body andso changes it, whether this outside is another organism or something nonor-ganic.11 This does not mean that life is merely an effect of environmental factors.If it were, living things would be purely mechanical. What advances life in thecontraction of the outside is a special kind of passive synthesis in which theliving thing is literally is affected by what touches it and either ees from it ortakes into itself either some actual thing or a sensation. This affective contractioninuences the body and so organizes it temporally, literally creating a temporalduration such that the contraction of each new present (from outside to inside)is simultaneously the upsurge of the bodys past and future. This is why eachcontraction is followed by the impulse to expand, to grow, and to scatter.

As Gilles Deleuze articulates this, every organism is, in its receptive andperceptive elements, but also in its viscera, a sum of contractions, retentions, andprotentions. At the level of this vital, primary sensibility, the lived presentalready constitutes in time a past and future.12 Each new moment is, for theliving being, a complete reinterpretation of the past and the creation of a newfuture. Change is constant and inevitable. This is why Bergson suggests thatrather than conceiving of experience in spatial terms, as a matter of normativestructures that adhere to certain physical a prioris, we might begin withaffectivity, the nervous system that is open to a succession of qualitative changeswhich permeate one another so as to constitute our pure duration, our temporal-ity. If every being is a contraction, retention, and protention of fundamentalelements on the plane of sensibility, then every being is a living presentconstituting the past and future from out of that present. This indicates that with

respect to life, time is more fundamental than space; time is the form ofeverything living, everything that moves and changes.The transformation of this perceptual and affective structure into an account

of interesting and remarkable human actions comes about, principally, in thework of Gilles Deleuze. If affection-contraction always takes place in the present,and past and future emerge out of the present as our continually altering pointof view, then the past is never a former present but is always simultaneous withthe current present. Thus, a trauma produced by a childhood experience is nota sign of a past wound; it is a past that only emerges in the present as the


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present experience of having had a trauma or wound. This is what Bergsonmeans when he says that the entire past coexists with each new present and thatthe actual present is nothing but the entire past in its most contracted state,brought to bear upon the present in the moment of reection between aperception and our response to that perception.

When the affective past contracts into the present, it emerges as memory-im-ages that ll up a present perception. If one does not hesitate and reect, ahabitual memory-image will complete the perception. You will see, hear, taste,touch, and feel what you have always seen, heard, tasted, touched, or felt. Butif, in the interval between perception and action, you reect upon the multipleand heterogeneous memory-images that make up the affective ontologicalunconscious, bringing a new image to bear upon the present, then the percep-tion can be completely new and so it can give rise to a completely novel action.This is because the memory preserved in the bodys motor mechanisms is

habitual, but the qualitative memory-images of the ontological unconscious areconstantly undergoing change. Attentive, reective perception stops the habitualresponse of the body and reinterprets the present perception from the point ofview of memory-images, thereby creating something new. In Deleuzes terms, itopens the being to desiring production.

Freud had certainly made it possible to conceive of desire as polymorphousperversity, but what is different for Deleuze (with Felix Guattari) is that desireis no longer taken to be the desire for something in particular. This would meanthat the erotic body of desire has to be transformed as well and, for Deleuze andGuattari, it becomes the desubstantialization and demystication of sexuality,such that the signicance of desire is no longer strictly determinable. It is notable to be regulated by social norms because what desiring production does,unstoppably, is make connections. If desire is repressed by social forces, this isbecause, as Deleuze and Guattari claim, every position of desire, no matter howsmall, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society. Notthat desire is asocial; on the contrary, it opens up all social avenues as well asavenues into the natural world. This, I argue, is due to affective life, whichmanifests itself ontologically as resonance, what Deleuze and Guattari also calla desiring-machine. Resonance is the ever-present, ongoing affective relationbetween all living things with mobility. But it is explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled which cannot also demolish entire socialsectors.13 Thus desiring production is commensurate with creation; it is the veryprocess of affective creation, that explosive and disruptive production of what isnew which is always and everywhere at risk of being captured, organized,hierarchized, exploited, and subjected to repetition of the same, the habitual, thecommon. If such resonance can be argued to exist, it accounts for Merleau-

Pontys insight that erotic perception is fundamental to our being-at-the world.For resonance would be precisely that erotic perception, the affective perceptionmaking connections, instinctual (in Bergsons use of the term) or machinicconnections, which, no matter how apparently insignicant, nevertheless havethe capacity to demolish social sectors.

On the ontological level, resonance operates between all things with mobility.As such, it could be claimed that erotic perception is ontological (a structure ofthe world) and unconscious (instinctual in a very limited and precise sense ofthe term). On the human level, instinctual connections constitute desiring-ma-


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Olkowski 19

chines; they are the passions and actions of bodies. Taking a cue from Bergson,instinct can be redened not as a physical, material process, nor as an innerdrive, but as a mode of organization of life. As a mode of organization, it issimply the tendency to connect whatever invariable instruments are at hand. Itis, as Deleuze and Guattari conceive of it, the domain of free syntheses [of]

nonexclusive disjunctions, non-specic conjunctions, partial objects and ows,in short, that realm of duration in which everything outside can be and isconnected with and contracted to the inside.14

Freudians theorize that such connections are infantile only, as when the babytakes the breast, but for Deleuze and Guattari, they are found everywhere adirect connection occurs and opens affective, durational ows. The body turnstoward a source of warmth, the eye connects with the movement a body slidingpast it, the ear is lost in the sound of the chime. Each of these connectionsengages a sensory element and even though they are each direct and singular,

each begins with the passive reception or resonance of the moving element andeach connection is acted out as the response to that resonance. For connectivedesire, passion or contraction gives way to a singular act that afrms theresonance and so afrms the connection. Yet, there is also choice; any conscious,living being may hesitate before choosing from among several different connec-tions. Thus, desiring production (what was earlier referred to as erotic percep-tion) is not blind, as Merleau-Ponty claims; rather it is singular, an effect ofchoice regarding specic pleasures and pains. The specialization or singularityof each desiring resonance precludes their being subject to an organizingsignier. Nonetheless, when life organizes it does so by means of such desiringconjunctions or associations which connect elements, but which have becomehighly specic, even predictable. The disjunctions take over, excluding oneelement of each connective pair. So, for example, anything may be said toengage in actions or passions, pleasure orpain, instinctor intelligence but neverboth because rather than conceiving of them as qualitative tendencies, each oneof which may contain some of the other, they have become exclusive categories,conceived spatially as separable and therefore necessarily separate. This order-ing of desire has the advantage of creating stable patterns and habits, but it alsoleads to stasis.

As freely owing connections or associations, desire has no object or objects.It is qualitative connectivity and not a desire for something in particular. That is,there is desire because there is resonance, hesitation, choice and connection.So-called erotic perception is, in fact, fundamental to being-at-the-world. Butwhen intelligence emerges as a different tendency or direction from that ofinstinct, its emergence signals the inception of a kind of spatialized thinking.Intelligence, exhibiting a difference in nature from instinct, does not connect

qualitatively but quantitatively, by means of homogeneous, spatial relations.Thus intelligence links like to like, cause to effect, attribute to subject, treatingeverything like inert matter, stopping ows and imposing spatial discontinuity.When connections or conjunctions become habitual, when disjunction imposesthe rule of exclusion (either this or that), then intelligence is at work in the realmof desire. This is both benecial and limiting.

When affective ows are stabilized and made habitual, then intelligence canbegin to construct tools, patterns, organs with determinate functions. Thesedeterminate functions, if maintained, will block the creation of anything new.


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However, if intelligence reects, pauses in the interval between perception andaction, then it may fall back upon newly made qualitative connections which canfree up the habits and patterns intelligence relies on, once again making itindeterminate and open to change. In this way, a tool, a habit, an organ destinedfor one particular function can be wrested from its original use and be reoriented

to carry out another function. This is the very meaning of creativity and there isno question but that intelligence is at the very core of such creativity. A majorlanguage that has become the organ of authority, for example, may suddenly bereoriented, put to use against itself, and all its orders and imperatives reused inthe context of expressing sentiment or passion. The result surely is humorousand clumsy, witty and awkward, mad and emotional, thus inclusive rather thanexclusive. But such reorientation does break down the habitual order andauthority of the language, opening it up to a completely new affective life,unhinging it from its restrictive ordering and functioning.

It is this orientation of desire that Deleuze and DeleuzeGuattari open up forthe rst time as an ontology of change. It differs in particular from Merleau-Pontys ontology of esh in that it differentiates between affective, qualitativelife (which includes extension) and pure spatiality, the physical imperative thatall differences are nothing but differences of degree. In doing so, it recognizesthat not only human acts are creative, but that the entire cosmos is involved ina creative becoming. But, on the human level in particular, there are certainpowerful social and political forces that mitigate against change. That is, whenintelligence does not leave open the affective and reective interval betweenperception and action, precisely when it excludes the rest of the world except asan object of action, then it circumscribes all cultural life in a manner whichstabilizes hierarchically or which continuously destabilizes society only in orderto subject it to greater limitations. Thus, it is absolutely necessary to ask if eroticresonance still plays any role in our experience. Or, have we already beenoverrun by images of ourselves that are policed by predetermined narrativestructures, while all desiring ows have been subjected to capitalist capture inwhich market value and the system of exchange ruthlessly undermine andeliminate all traditional meanings and any existing social codes, not in order toopen affective connections, but only in order to impose the axiomatic ofquantication?

Nowhere in the work of Deleuze is this conict so completely worked out asin his analysis of lm. That lm would play such a large role may at rst seemcurious, but when we consider how important the perceptual element in lm is,then we can begin to make sense of this. Deleuze argues that in lm, as inperception, the camera and the perceiver often pass from one object to anotherby means of associations that remain on the same plane. Such a sensory-motor

image characterized by spatial extension brings together two kinds of move-ment-images, the perception-image and the action-image.15 These two types ofimage, along with the affection-image, are three aspects of what Deleuze refersto as the movement-image in lm, and it is the rst two forms of movement-im-age in particular that encourage reading lm images through a prescribednarrative. For Merleau-Ponty the world forms the horizon of the bodys sensory-motor intentions (the perception-image) to which the human being as a center ofindetermination or choice reacts. This secondary operation is characterized byDeleuze as the action-image. Now, this center is only capable of actingin the


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Olkowski 21

sense of organizing an unexpected responsebecause it perceives and hasreceived the excitation on a privileged facet, eliminating the remainder.16 Whatis grasped is the virtual action of things on the subject and the possible actionof the subject on things.

This, however, is as far as Merleau-Ponty will take his analysis of perception.

He explicitly denies the existence of a third sort of experience, which wouldconstitute a third image, that of affect, and so named, the affection-image.Merleau-Ponty argues that the notion of sensation, understood as the way inwhich I am affected and the experiencing of a state of myself, is completelyconfused and corresponds to nothing in our experience.17 The gure on aground, he maintains, is the simplest sense-given available to us, for anythingthat could be perceived must form part of a eld whereas a pure impressionwould be undiscoverable, imperceptible, and so, inconceivable.18 This is why heargues, later in the Phenomenology, that perception bypasses the color and goes

straight to the thing. So-called qualities are properties of objects whichthemselves are made up of bits of matter and have spatial points that areexternal to one another. A color appears only in virtue of an object as an elementin a spatial conguration, occupying an area of a certain size, and carryingmeanings that reside in it.19 Any pure sensation would amount to no sensationbecause consciousness must always be consciousness of something.20 At most,we may have an indeterminate sensation, but we always perceive something orother.21

For his part, Deleuze offers up a different perspective. According to Deleuze,privileging the sensory-motor image produces an image that is stabilized andmade determinate by narration, when in fact, narration is not primary in images(including lm images). The reproblematization of this dilemma lies at the heartof Deleuzes analysis of lm but also at the heart of this concept of creation. Theanswer to this dilemma is met by the idea of movement, and the link betweenmovement and lm is the notion that image is movement.22 The analysisderives from Henri Bergson who, as we have seen, posits the material world asa system of closely linked images. Every body is an image among othersinsofar as each body transmits movement and receives movement back fromother bodies. This is an exceedingly interesting characterization of experienceand it consequences are many and of the utmost importance.. Most importantfor our purposes here is, rst, that movement is not, as in mathematics, a matterof varying the distance from points of reference, and, second, that every image,in principle, resonates with every other image by means of the transmission ofmovement.23

When we represent, that is, when we narrate a series of actions, Bergsoninsists, what we do is constitute permanence in the form of bodies and we

represent changes among those bodies not as the transmission of motion but bymeans of homogeneous movements in space. What such narration or representa-tion entirely circumvents is the sensation of movement, the rhythms of thetransmission of movements. Nonetheless, for Bergson, the sensation of move-ment is a reality insofar as something is really happening and we grasp thatreality as a change of state or of quality; the sensation of movement is then a realchange of quality and, Deleuze maintains, it is changes of quality that modernlm images directly express.

Deleuze writes that in certain lm images, Some characters, caught in certain


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pure, optical and sound situations, nd themselves condemned to wander aboutor go off on a trip, these are pure seers, who no longer exist except in theinterval of movement.24 What has occurred in such situations is that time is outof joint, which means time is not the measure of movement, it is not thesequential tracking of solid bodies in uniform space. Rather, the image consists

of pure optical and sound situations rather than of bodies moved predictably inspace; it is virtual. Like the movement-image, it is real, but unlike themovement-image, which can only indirectly represent time through changes inthe movements of bodies, it is not actualized in a homogeneous spatiality. Howis such an image possible at all, especially in lm? The movement-image passes,by association, from one object to another, yielding an indirect image of time,but of homogenous, that is, sequential time, a time for action.

In an example of this kind of image, lm theorist Andre Bazin describes howa camera passes from a hungry man to the food he desires and back to the

hungry man who is now busy eating. As Deleuze notes, everything happens onthe same plane, nothing occurs that is not accessible through the sequentialseries of camera shots. But what would happen if the camera were able to passthrough different planes? What would it mean to pass through differentplanes? It means according to Deleuze that rather than insisting on the imageas the representation of what interests uswhat in this sense is habitual, whatwe expect, what is customary, regular, or routine in such cases, what ishabitually inscribed in our sensory-motor associations of one object with another(like, for example, a hungry man who encounters a table full of food andeats)the time-image is instead a matter of pure optics and pure sound, lackingany intrinsically habitual association; the time-image is completely new.

The time-image arises out of a zone of recollections, dreams, or thoughts thathabitual or inscribed perception never has access to. This is because, as we haveseen in Bergson, there are two forms of memory and so two forms of presentexperience. The rst consists of the sensory-motor system of the living body, thehabitual body that responds to the world in pre-established ways that advanceits interests in the world but which are nearly completely predictable andsocially circumscribed. The second manner in which the past subsists is asvirtual, that is, in the form of independent memory-images that are the effect ofour affectivity, our affective as opposed to our active lives. Affection is the actionof the body upon itself. It is localized, evidence that the action of external causesdoes threaten to disintegrate the body, but evidence also that the bodys surfaceis both perceived and felt.25 In the perceptual struggle with an external object,some of the action is absorbed as affection while, the rest is reected back intothe world as perception and action. Such affections are then memory-images, butthey are not a past that has once been present. Memory-images subsist as virtual,

each memory-image subsists as the contraction of the entire past from a certainplane, a certain point of view, but the whole of this affective memory swells andgrows with the ow of becoming, always available to answer the call of attentiverecognition and in this process to be transformed into something completelynew.26

Under the conditions of attentive recognition, this second memory, ladenwith the whole of the past, responds to the appeal of the present state [by]translation, by which it moves in its entirety to meet experience, thus contractingmore or less, though without dividing.27 Such translation is the process of


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Olkowski 23

creating out of ontological memory, with its multiple, perhaps innite virtuallevels or regions, each of which is the whole past in a more or less contractedstate, but from a particular plane or point of view. Emerging into the present,this whole diverges and dissociates, producing a powerful optical and sonoroustime-image. The affective past coexists with itself as a whole at various levels or

planes, and in various degrees of contraction and relaxation. Each level or planeis a different interpretation of the entire past from the point of view of aparticular present, a plane of existence. Joining with a present perception, any ofthese planes may contract so as to constitute a present image and to constitutea subject, a receptive being, who experiences motion and who is thereby madea subject by that durational ow. When a habitual memory is precluded fromimmediately lling up the image of a present perception, then there is aninterval for passive (one could say unconscious) reection from which thein-itself of affective or ontological memory emerges, to ll the perception, as a

past that has never been present, in this pure form of time, the memory-imageis always differentiated insofar as the passive ego is given its own thought andlives it like an other within itself. This is the form of interiority that splits thesubject so that it can never be wholly integrated.

As passive, we are always thrown back upon our stock of memory-images.We are subjected, made a subject by our own past, and if we are able to live itlike an other within ourselves, then and only then, in the repetition of a past thathas never yet been present, something new emergesspirited, creative life. Timesurges forth, the image emerges, the past is transformed into something totallynew. As if the gestator of the new world were being swept along and dispersedby the shattering of that which it gave birth to in the multiple.28 What is reallygoing on in the image is in some sense left to each spectator. Each viewing, evenby the same person, each circuit, obliterates and creates a new object.29 Theconstant making and remaking of the image indicates that subjectivity hasemerged in the image; subjectivity is in this sense spiritual, meaning creative,memory is constantly at play with matter, and such play, I would argue, is thework of desire, the free ow of affective, qualitative life that explodes into thepresent as the creation of something new.

Notes

1. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1968) The Visible and the Invisible, Alphonso Lingis (trans.)(Evanston: Northwestern University Press), p. 232.

2. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1967) The Structure of Behavior, Alden L. Fisher (trans.)(Boston: Beacon Press), p. 115.

3. The Structure of Behavior, p. 157.4. The Structure of Behavior, pp. 125126.

5. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1962) Phenomenology of Perception, Colin Smith (trans.),Forrest Williams (ed.) (New York: Routledge Press), p. 124.

6. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 154.7. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 156.8. Van Den Bossche, Marc (2000) Merleau-Pontys Erotic Perception, read at the

International Merleau-Ponty Conference, George Washington University, September.9. The Visible and the Invisible, p. 209.

10. Deleuze, Gilles (1956)La conception de la difference chez Bergson in Les Etudes Bergsoni-ennes 4, pp. 83, 85.


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11. Bergson, Henri (1944)Creative Evolution, Arthur Mitchell (trans.) (New York: ModernLibrary), p. 99.

12. Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, Paul Patton (trans.) (New York:Columbia University Press), p. 73, translation altered.

13. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattarti, Felix (1983)Anti-Oedipus, Robert Hurley, Mark Seem

and Helen R. Lane (trans.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 138.14. Anti-Oedipus, p. 63.15. Deleuze, Gilles (1989)Cinema II, The Time-Image, Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta

(trans.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 45.16. Deleuze, Gilles (1986) Cinema I, The Movement-Image, Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara

Habberjam (trans.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 64.17. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 3.18. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 4.19. Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 45.20. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 5.

21. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 6.22. Cinema I, p. 58.23. Bergson, Henri (1988)Matter and Memory, N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (trans.) (New

York: Zone Books), p. 193.24. Cinema II, p. 4.25. Matter and Memory, pp. 56, 57.26. Olkowski, Dorothea (1999) Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (Berkeley:

University of California Press), pp. 110112.27. Matter and Memory, pp. 168169.28. Difference and Repetition, pp. 8990.

29. Cinema II, p. 46.

Documents

D. Olkowski-Flesh to Desire- Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, Deleuze(Art)(Q)