So far, we have understood our body as equally “intelligent.” For Merleau-Ponty, body schema demonstrates the “motor cognition” that guides us to a set of bodily
responses as our original grasp of a certain situation, and such a pre-reflective grip derives from the process of “sedimentation” that renders our body “habitual”. Unlike
a mechanistic system, our body possesses the pre-personal kinesthetic awareness of our confrontation with the environment, and the unnecessity to call for contemplative decisions is indebted to this bodily power to digest previous experiences. In
Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty illustrates how we are immediately
capable of knowing the way around in a dark house and how we do not need to
retrace previous conversations with a friend in reference to his or her personality.
However, while the phenomenon of sedimentation seems to “contract”
knowledge for our way around the world, Merleau-Ponty reminds us that “my
acquired thoughts are not an absolute acquisition; they feed off my present thought at each moment … The acquired, then, is only truly acquired if it is taken up in a new movement of thought, and a thought is only situated if it itself assumes its situation”
(132). Here, Merleau-Ponty addresses how our phenomenal body truly exists among
all regions that are familiar, certain, strange, or confusing, and how sedimentation must simultaneously involve acquisition so that the two reciprocally “generate” each
other. In fact, our worldly experiences point to constant revisions of ourselves, and the
layeredness of our lived body then explains the genesis of “a physiognomy of
questions, and intellectual situations such as research, discovery, and certainty” (131).
For Merleau-Ponty, we are situational individuals in that the modality of existence allows for alterations from the sedimented principles. Thrown into the mystery of life, we mold ourselves to locate the optimal expressions to the problem, and to prepare ourselves for interrogation and projection. Such a phenomenological notion further sheds light on the way our body-subject varies from other people, for when each one of us possesses different history, we adopt different methods to adapt to different
situations. While human bodies occupy the same space and temporality, there are ultimate differences as in “how (and whether) certain syntheses are performed, and thus, the perceptual norms that human beings develop will vary as well” (Weiss 213).
The disparities explicate certain situations where some people fail to complete a task despite the full awareness of all possible solutions. That is, even if we reside in a similar place, we are still perceptually engaged at varying levels. An embodied space
is not necessarily experienced within the same set of standards.
The term “situation” in the contexts of Merleau-Ponty’s elaborations thus no
longer simply refers to the factual analysis on the external factors in a specific
location. As Mallin states it, “... when Merleau-Ponty says that a man is in a particular
situation ... he means that the subject or some state of the subject is thoroughly
intertwined with the object, body, other person, or general milieu that is indicated” (8), and “... thoughts, meanings, emotions, and actions, as well as sensations, properties, objects, and space are ultimately situational” (10). To attain an adequate grasp of the
issue at hand, therefore, is to determine something out of the objective/ subjective relations of our present involvement with the circumstance. The practical dimension influences the affective one, and the two resides in a field of collisions where different levels of judgment can be made, depending on the subject. The significance of the Merleau-Pontian “situation” thus rests at the correlation and oscillation between the objective and subjective aspect of everything involved5. The sense of equilibrium in our daily experiences indeed emerges from the collaboration and mutual-affirmation of our bodily operations and self-consciousness.
The indefiniteness of such a modality consequently implies our Being as
perspectival, acquisitive, and transcendent. As Merleauu-Ponty argues, it is primarily because both the perceiving and the perceived possess a “style” of existence that they
allow for mutual elicitations and inquiries. That is, the corrigibility of a situation does
not originate solely from subjective manipulations. In fact, the body-subject “couples”
with the “landscape” of the sensible, and they reciprocally condition each other.
Merleau-Ponty’s concept of embodied experiences thus takes into consideration the
5 See Samuel B. Mallin’s Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy for more detailed discussions on the subjectivity and objectivity of “situation.”
diverse “levels” where the multi-dimensionality of body-subject reversely uncovers the same variant appearances of things. Or, in the words of Monika, “The thing’s
objectivity is inseparable from its open-ended nature and hence also from that
fundamental ambiguity which is involved in the richness of perception” (96). In other words, when Merleau-Ponty addresses perception “as our inherence in things” (366),
he also argues for the disclosing power of perception to enliven our bodily potentiality to act and to be “summoned” by things. The underlying inseparability hence renders the world as composed of “situations” that not only recognize the autonomy from the
parties involved, albeit the different nature, but exhibit the very creating-created processes of perception itself. Thus, Merleau-Ponty’s discussions on our situatedness suggest the body-subject’s capabilities to claim a responsive viewpoint toward a particular circumstance through our bodily combinative force of sedimentation and spontaneity. The strength to initiate dialogues represents the “enactive” dimension of perceptivity to react to the thingness or affordances of the surroundings. Meanwhile, since there is always something to understand, and the things we encounter always points to something extra (or already there), our grasp toward the world are never complete, absolute, or flawless, but always aims for the maximum.
In Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy, Samuel B. Mallin has noteworthily described Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy as the “ontology of situation.” While Merleau-Ponty
does not specifically address it with such a statement, and focuses more on the primacy of perception and the role of body, the notion of our embeddedness in the world can be easily comprehended as the crucial reasoning behind his overall philosophical thinking. It is in this regard that modern ruins in Kaili Blues can be further explored as a type of distinctive realms that bring about certain bodily
reactions. As a world composed of modern ruins, Kaili Blues presents “ruinous situations” that harbor the characters’ ruinous physical and mental status. The
spatial-temporal proximity and the evasive inner-outer structures of modern ruins induce an uncanny atmosphere in which the unusual hypersensitive engagement with the surroundings resembles the confrontations to our own existential unpredictability.
In this dimension, modern ruins exemplify the ontological paradoxes in the
architectural form of the convergence of the seen and the unseen, and it is from such a perspective that we continue to envision modern ruins to “permit” the
equally-intriguing responses from the perceiver. Or, we can also say that certain
actions almost only occur in modern ruins (or in places with similar attributes).
As discussed in Chapter Two, a diversity of “transgressions” abounds and lurks
all over the spectacles in modern ruins, leading to the instantaneous modifications of viewpoint. Moreover, the fact that modern ruins are being reused by the characters suggests the intersections between the historicity of the ancient buildings and the
memories of the inhabitants. Past, present, and future emerge less in the form of
successive points, but interrelations with the dwellers and the surroundings. A sense of oddity is laid bare from the bodily closeness to the “texture” of temporalities when modern ruins turn to be “intimate” spaces. From this aspect, ruinous situations in
Kaili Blues imply not only the labyrinthine topographical intricacy, as in the
arbitrariness of the entrance and exit, but also desires, struggles, and personal growth.
The reuse of the dilapidated buildings and their adjacency to the natural environment have collectively modeled the everyday ruinous situations in the film, and appear to guide Chen toward a way of life in resonance with this process of becoming.
The observations we should make in the ruinous situations of Kaili Blues thus lie in the uniqueness of certain bodily operations that can justify themselves as ruinous responses. As a starting point, it is from within an equally non-dualistic mindset that embodied spaces like modern ruins can be recognized and that their potentiality can be aptly appropriated. Here, the mysterious encounters in Dangmai can be considered as one prime example, the significance of which will be explored later through the notion of flesh. Chen puts on the promised shirt from Guang Lian when he notices and hairdresser woman. Later in the hair salon, he firstly holds his hands back in the way of a sinful person will do (based on the hairdresser woman’s statement), and then reenacts the flashlight scenario between Guang Lian and Ai Ren. Later at the concert,
Chen proceeds to perform Little Jasmine for the hairdresser woman, for, in the disco scene with his wife, Chen once sternly refuses to sing. When they are bidding farewell after the performance, Chen makes the final symbolic gesture as he transfers the cassette to the hairdresser woman. Wearing the piece of memorial shirt, finalizing the unsung song, and relaying the cassette, Chen seems to depart for Zhenyuan with some angst settled, some concerns soothed, and some hope to carry on with.
The transference of the items indicates Chen’s optimal grasp to the mystic situation. Upon the first encounter, the hairdresser woman does not seem to think of Chen as someone she knows of (but she appears to care for Chen based on some of
her expressions). The encounter, therefore, bears connotative significance only from Chen’s subjective perspective. However, Chen proposes no intention to inquire her
identity, nor does he seek to carry himself as someone she should pay attention to.
Instead, it is as if Chen has sedimented a multitude of ways to compensate his late wife’s suffering, for his reactions emerge as highly instinctual and spontaneous. While
the singing may appear as a direct attempt to recover what has been lost in the past, the entrusted items become special agencies: he not only “completes” Guang Lian’s
love to Ai Ren by wearing the piece of shirt and by giving the cassette to the hairdresser woman, but “relives” a memorial part of their story. In this dimension, Chen’s taking up of the conundrum displays the ruinous attributes in terms of his
recognition and responsiveness to the non-discursive aspect of the memorial fragments, his instinctive reflex of letting his bodily movement speak for his mind, and his conversion of the times past to the episodes impending.
Another example from which we can examine the elements of the ruinous
situations, along with its narrative significance, lies in the employment of the neon ball. The neon ball appears as a reminder of Chen’s marriage, appearing in Weiwei’s house and Chen’s balcony in Kaili. Since Chen is positioned in the film as a man who
once serves in prison and loses his mother and wife during the sentence, the neon ball represents an element that introduces Chen’s despairing past during the first half of
the film. However, after the encounters in Dangmai, the neon ball makes its iconic
climactic entrance in the prolonged shot that reveals the appearance of Zhang (which is not presented to us previously in the flashbacks). At this instant, Chen’s actions turn
from nonsensical to comprehensible. His employment of the entrusted items manifests his responses that echo with the massive signifying system of modern ruins embedded with figurative and elusive fragments. The insertion of the neon ball at different timings demonstrates not only the metaphorical narrative purposes of the film, but
implies the image of life as a circle, referring to the impression of “starting over.”
From such an aspect, the neon ball, as a fragment of Chen’s ruinous past, further
represents the poetic expression endowed with deeper meanings through his nomadic
bodily attempts to “understand” the situation. It is within such a realm of hybridity
that we can comprehend Kaili Blues as a perceptually-engaging world, where the landscape unexplored and the things invisible continue to “assemble” our being.
Such entangling mutual implications provide us to examine the case of Dangmai further through Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh. As Merleau-Ponty suggests,
perceptual experiences serve as drives for us to (re)gain the primordial hold of the world through situations taken up, especially in our very ordinary life. It is such emphases on the triviality of our daily experiences, the appreciation of the richness of our surroundings, and the human ventures to seek ideal articulations in life that Kaili