In Kaili Blues, Chen, as a poet, an ex-con, and a local doctor, leads his life in a remote village in China. The dim clinic, the timeworn air-raid shelter, the underpass, and the overall gloom emitted from the prevalent debris altogether envelope the film with hues of historicity. The world in Kaili Blues is fundamentally composed of architectural remains, and such space settings can be considered as the crucial
groundwork for later narrative development. From such an aspect, the discussions will begin from the (re)-evaluations of modern ruins. First, we can examine a volume of essays, Ruin Memories: Materialities, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent
Past, edited by Bjørnar Olsen and Þóra Pétursdóttir. This collection approaches ruins
with an anthropological method, and its introduction corresponds to my thesis motive, namely, mass-production in the era of technological advancement. It offers versatile
topics dealing with the multi-dimensional features of ruins, such as their sense of
“trusted vagueness,” the mapping of time, the recovered memories, the artistic
valorization, and the ontology of space. In addition, this volume presents the diverse
attitudes toward modern ruins, as compared to those in response to the classical ones, and questions the general negative reception of urban derelicts. All in all, the collected essays provide refreshing explorations and reassessments on (modern) ruins,
presenting theoretical discourses on how we should reflect not only the cultural significance of ruins, but our blurred and somehow swaying identities nowadays as
well. Second, Ruins of Modernity, edited by Julia Hells and Andreas Schönle, and Nick Yablon’s Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity
1819-1919 are two publications that put specific emphases on modern ruins. Ruins of
Modernity investigates the hidden dimensions of natural disaster locations,
imperial/colonial debris, or factories abandoned by economic recesses to bring out the complexities of identity rendered by the fast-pacing technological advancement.
Post-war constructions and industrial ruins, such as the ones in Detriot, are topics among the discussions pertinent to modernist architecture. In the latter publication, Yablon describes several types of “untimely” ruins that are triggered by American urbanism; they are completed not in the form of intact buildings, but emerge already as ruins before completion. Through the inspections on American culture in different eras, Yablon also offers cross-examinations in literary works from other countries.
From the initial surging of urban growth, the antebellum times, to the modern technology that brings out the diversity of interactions, this publication details the
processes of geographical transitions and the changes of our way of life.
Following the discussions on the values of modern ruins, we continue to observe such spaces through Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodiment. The explorations begin as in how the sense of “bodiliness” in modern ruins may be
expounded through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approaches to space, place, or architectural design. First, Rethinking Aesthetics: The Role of Body in Design, edited by Ritu Bhatt, can be considered as a collection that draws on many of
Merleau-Ponty’s conceptions to delineate the role of the body. Bhatt brings together vibrant essays that restate the importance of bodily perception in a particular place.
The themes of embodied aesthetics, place identity, body conscious in design, and environmental embodiment are integrated into the discussions, and guide us to rethink our bodily relationship in a particular space. Ruins, however, are not specifically addressed, but the correlations between perceptual experiences and everyday places still provide key concepts for starters. The second book and third book, on the other hand, are based on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology: Jonathan Hale’s Merleau-Ponty
for Architect, and Merleau-Ponty: Space, Place, Architecture, a volume of essays
edited by Patricia M. Locke and Rachel McCann. Hale’s book locates architectural
design in crucial Merleau-Pontian thinking. The embodied space, the thickness of time, the depth of space, the architecture of empathy, and the language of experiences
together present discourses that inter-disciplinarily interpret Merleau-Ponty’s conceptions on perceptual experiences and the primacy of perception in the construction of our world view. As for the second collection, while it is devoted to Merleau-Ponty, it also speaks to other philosophers such as Irigaray, Deleuze, and Piaget. The book introduces cross-border thinking on the experience and expression
of space on manifold levels, and brings together the understanding of lived space, psychological depth, imagined landscapes, and space’s relation with time and memory.
Both of the latter publications, in short, delineate the pivotal matters in
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, and infuse them with the field that is academically considered to be under-theorized. To summarize, modern ruins can be viewed of as contributive to a much higher extent of embodiment. Through the understanding of the hidden forces of modern ruins and the possible relations our body can attain with it, the explications serve as the foundation for the subsequent discussions on
Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “situation” and “flesh.”
With regard to Merleau-Pontian scholarships, we can begin from Samuel B.
Mallin’s Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy. In this book, Mallin states that “situation”
functions as the most comprehensive term Merleau-Ponty uses to “express the ultimate unity of man with his surroundings, and thus it is fundamental to the discussion of all aspects of his epistemology and metaphysics” (Mallin 7). By
addressing the logic of situation, Mallin extends its significance to that of primordial contact, perception, cognition, being, and inter-subjectivity. Mallin elaborates on several of Merleau-Pontian ideas on the axis of the ontology of situation; in such a
manner, this book should be deemed not only as the insight into the profundity of
“situation,” but the re-accentuation on the mutual dependency of the overall
Merleau-Pontian conceptions. The second book from which we can examine is Donald A. Landes’s Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression. Landes
establishes Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy as gestural of paradoxical expressions, and
such logic can be seen in the example of time: “perfectly familiar to each other, but that none of us can explain it to the others” (VI 3). According to Landes,
understanding such a paradox is an imperative step in addressing Merleau-Ponty’s
diverse accounts on human perception. The notion of “situation” is addressed in similar discussions, and Lande’s accounts can be valuable when it comes to
comprehending both of the implicit and explicit uses of paradoxical expressions from Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical perspectives.
Moving on to Merleau-Ponty’s idea of flesh, we can take a further look at Taylor Carman’s Merleau-Ponty, M. C. Dillon’s Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, Gary Brent Madison’s A Search for the Limits of Consciousness: The Phenomenology of
Merleau-Ponty, and Monika M. Langer’s Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of
Perception. First, Carman and Dillon’s books can be juxtaposed together for the
detailed inquires they have provided specifically into Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of flesh, or the ontology of flesh. While the former targets more on body, with emphases on body schema, motor intentionality, flesh/ chiasm, and self/ others, the latter
contributes to the explications from the ontology in Phenomenology of Perception to
that in The Visible and the Invisible, offering a trajectory with precise examples.
Madison and Langer’s works, on the other hand, present a more general outlook on
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. Langer’s book begins from classical prejudice, and moves forward to demonstrate the problem of the body, and then enlarges it to the scope of the perceived world and the others, and ends the books with the idea of being-for-itself and being-in-the-world. Madison’s book then re-constructs Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical conceptions by dissecting them into Being in the World, Painting, Language, Philosophy, and Field of Being, each presented with further clarifications and analyses. These two productions can be viewed of as the comprehensive and necessary handbooks on the overall Merleau-Pontian philosophy.
After the explorations on the characteristics of modern ruins and the bodily reverberations to such poetic situations, we now proceed to the poetics of flesh.
Edited by Dorothea Olkowski and James Morley, Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and
Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World is an essay collection that explores the
fundamental unitary tissue of body/mind, the field of inter-subjectivity, and our body’s relation with the surroundings. This volume integrates themes that are useful for understanding Mearleau-Ponty’s point of view on the exterior/ interior, and idealism/
empiricism. By means of the investigations on the blurring of body-mind distinction, one of the essays, titled “Merleau-Ponty and the Unconscious: A Poetic Vision,”
written by David E. Pettigrew, even describes the opening of flesh as “a poetic disclosure.” Our body is thus representative of the site for a form of expression that
shares similarity with poetry. Then, Glen A. Mazis’s Merleau-Ponty and the Face of
the World: Silence, Ethics, Imagination, and Poetic Ontology comes as one
production that provides an overall consideration into Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical features. Mazis especially traces the power of silence in Merleau-Ponty’s works, and brings together his understanding of imagination from Bachelard to build a dialogue with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the lived body. Mazis also specifically regards Merleau-Ponty’s writing as poetic. All in all, in a concise and also poetic style, Mazis offers enriching discussions on a dimension of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of flesh that oftentimes goes unnoticed or less underscored.