In recent decades, a revival of aesthetic interests in Merleau-Pontian
phenomenology of body-subject and embodied perception has extended into fields including neuroscience, performance art, cognitive science, and studies on mind, among others. Such a turn to the body may partly root from the digitalization of civilization. Our sensual experiences are usually analytically dichotomized, or they simply vanish without notice. However, the sought-after bodily “encounters” are highly observable in Kaili Blues. Through Bi’s directorial maneuvres, the film
displays the possibilities to restore our primordial engagement with the world through
“ruinous” forces. In this regard, before we delve further into the heightened sense of
bodiliness in modern ruins, we should begin with how Merleau-Ponty contrives the
notion of “embodiment,” and the significance of the role of body in it.
For Merleau-Ponty, both scientific and intellectualist accounts put us under risks of mistaking our surroundings as subjected to theoretical explanations. Traditional dichotomy supposes that our bodily capacities involve in no way with our daily experiences, and that our mind represents the omnipresence commanding our behaviors. The mode of our interactions with the world resembles that of a
stimulus-response mechanism, and the surroundings are always passive and exterior to us. As the rejection to such Cartesian thoughts, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes an elemental cohesion among all the living and non-living forms, proposing the
co-existence of body and mind as the constituting subject (not body as a physiological object). Our body should be understood as the “lived body,” which is “necessarily
ambiguous, since it is both material and self-conscious” (Carman 25), and it remains in a “lived” relation with the world that is not taken for granted. Merleau-Ponty later describes such latent connections through the notion of “flesh” in The Visible and the
Invisible (see Chapter Three). Thus, to hold cognitive processes or biological
functions accountable for our perceptual experiences is to deny the innate paradoxes of human existence. The word “embodiment” demonstrates an ontological modality
referring to the body-mind unification and its primordial inherence within the world.
The notion of embodiment, therefore, calls for the attentions to the innate
ambiguity of our body and the world, and the natural connections therein.
Merleau-Ponty’s vision of embodied human experiences thus refers to a diversity of dissolving oppositions between inter/ outer, subject/ object, etc. Through the
elaborations, Merleau-Ponty constantly revisits and accentuates on the role of the body. He argues that the experience of one’s own body actually
reveals to us an ambiguous mode of existence ... [it is] always rooted in nature at the very moment it is transformed by culture; it is never self-enclosed but never transcended ... I have no other means of knowing the human body than by living it, that is, by taking up for myself the drama that moves through it and by merging with it. Thus, I am my body, at least to the extent that I have an acquisition, and reciprocally my body is something like a natural subject, or a provisional sketch of my total being. (204-05)
Here, Merleau-Ponty reiterates the fundamental obscurity prevailing in the everyday contact with the world. The crude differentiation of perception and consciousness does not indicate our lived experiences, but only diminishes or restricts the
potentiality we can bring into full play. What renders the notion of “I am my body”
comprehensible lies in, for instance, how we are not required to locate my left hand to reach a book on my left side. Merleau-Ponty describes the pre-reflective knowledge
as our “body schema,” and explains how our body, at the exact instant when we have
an intention, tacitly forms a bodily movement responsive to the present tasks. At this primitive level, we can understand that Merleau-Pontian body-subject exerts an ontological significance, for our body possesses equal power for understanding a meaning through the organic inter-sensory synthesis (the field of vision and touch etc.) that is always in connection with the present. Such a concept explains how body
schema represents “a way of stating that my body is in the world” for Merleau-Ponty.
As Merleau-Ponty suggests, the body establishes “levels” through everyday
perceptual experiences. Or, in the case of space, our spatial orientation through bodily intentionality manifests “a certain possession of the world by my body, a certain hold
my body has on the world ... the constitution of a spatial level is only one of the
means of the constitution of an integrated world” (261). An objective space and a lived space are always in a form of “dialectics.” However, we should not recede to the
intellectualist side and negate the realist positions of objects in a place. Instead, what Merleau-Ponty argues for is to enliven the primitive mode of existence by full bodily immersions into the milieu through perceptual acts. Such a phenomenon also explains why Merleau-Ponty describes the body as “an expressive space” because our actions or expressions fundamentally exhibit our body as residing in transitions with the transformative world. The primacy of perception should hence be considered as the
route to what Merleau-Ponty claims to be the real phenomenal world. Or, as Dillon describes it, “... the primacy of perception invites us to attend to the phenomenon as it
appears in its richness and multi-determinability,” which “underlies Merleau-Ponty's thesis of the intrinsic ambiguity of phenomena” (53). For Merleau-Ponty, it is by
devoting to this perceptual world that all knowledge can be attained, and we can interpret the process of every perceptual contact as explicit or implicit expressions that display the qualities of our existence and the world. Such interactions then further explicate on the collaborative structure lying under. In this way, we can continue to state that through perception, our body indicates a certain viewpoint toward the world, and the world equally expresses itself through our body. For example, standing at a windy levee with our eyes closed, we still seem to “see” the sound of the ocean waves.
Depending on each individual, we may later compose a song, write a poem, or draw a painting with different approaches. Such phenomena not only explain how
subjectivity sets in and becomes a personal style, but also how the world is always
“inexhaustible” for Merleau-Ponty. The pieces of information presented within a space represent not simply targets of tasks, but oftentimes appear “affective” in
dialogue to our phenomenal body.
In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty repetitively turns to the theme of our pre-cognitive interactions with the world to emphasize a “bodily attitude.” In
the words of Merleau-Ponty,
If I draw the object closer to me or turn it round in my fingers in order
“to see it better,” this is because each attitude of my body is for me,
immediately, the power of achieving a certain spectacle, and because each spectacle is what it is for me in a certain kinaesthetic situation. In other words, because my body is permanently stationed before things in order to perceive them and, conversely, appearances are always enveloped for me in a certain bodily attitude. (316)
The notion of a bodily attitude uncovers the communicative relations between the perceived and the body-subject, and the flexibility and variation we see is indebted to the essential paradoxes of our body and the world. The visceral connectivity, therefore, reveals the significance of perception and a bodily perspective, by virtue of which we do not need to wholly depend on laws or theories to grasp a certain circumstance.
Meanwhile, it is imperative to bear in mind that our body can not be approached as without limitations. As Dillon addresses it, “This is the mistaken thought that the
body functions for Merleau-Ponty as the transcendental ego does for Kant and Husserl, that it is to be conceived as the agency underlying the organization of experience”
(146). We should be attentive that our lived body itself also exists as a phenomenon placed among all other phenomena in the world. Our bodily occupation in a specific
location undeniably indicates a type of limitation. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the functions of the body that are oftentimes attributed to consciousness. For instance, in order to gain a fuller observation of the extraordinary flower in the dark forest, I move, through what Merleau-Ponty describes as corporeal reflexivity, in response to the appearances of all the phenomena around me, which exist not only as invitations or demands to my entrance, but also as possible hostility to my intrusion. I cut down the
thorns, dodge the snares, or build up a wooden bridge to cross the river as if the flower “requires” the same attention from me. What Merleau-Ponty proposes is the
recognition of the transcendental dimension of our body, namely, its power to arouse investigation and to constitute meanings. That is, Merleau-Ponty calls for the
incarnation of consciousness (perceptual consciousness), which operates as the
“complicit” mode of perceptual experiences in the phenomenal world. The sense of
bodiliness thus falls neither at the end of pure internal sentimentality, nor outer physicality, but lies in between. The body certainly has limits, but reflection would not construct the whole content of our perceptual experiences either.
Therefore, to examine the concept of embodiment in a certain space entails our openness to the opaque existential and natural boundaries. Such an emphasis in fact gives rise to the recent surge of interests on the embodied sense of space in the research fields such as interior design, architecture, and urban landscape. Influenced
by Merleau-Ponty, the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa suggests that an ideal
building “renders possible an intense experiential and existential self-knowledge” (91).
A place, therefore, offers the perceiver opportunities to (re-)experience joy, anxiety, desires, or fears. Through specificities on texture, lighting, color, and spatial
utilization, the embodied dimension of a place can be revived through its built expressions reciprocal with human elements. In this aspect, to resort to a
phenomenological treatment to a certain space is to understand that lived spatiality fundamentally demonstrates our Being in the world in that we are already “shapes” in
a space, as Merleau-Ponty will name it. We are not required to consciously envision a
point-by-point route from top to bottom or left to right to “see” a house because our body and the world share the same uncertain “kinship” of interiority and exteriority.
To achieve an embodied level in the experiences of a place, we simply need to remind ourselves the significance of primordial pre-theoretical bodily contact with it.