Merleau-Ponty

Space, Place, Architecture

Patricia M. Locke, Rachel McCann, Patricia M. Locke, Rachel McCann

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780821445365
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Phenomenology has played a decisive role in the emergence of the discourse of place, now indispensable to many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and the contribution of Merleau-Ponty's thought to architectural theory and practice is well established. Merleau-Ponty: Space, Place, Architecture is a vibrant collection of original essays by twelve eminent philosophers who mine Merleau-Ponty's work to consider how we live and create as profoundly spatial beings. The resulting collection is essential to philosophers and creative artists as well as those concerned with the pressing ethical issues of our time.

Each contributor presents a different facet of space, place, or architecture. These essays carve paths from Merleau-Ponty to other thinkers such as Irigaray, Deleuze, Ettinger, and Piaget. As the first collection devoted specifically to developing Merleau-Ponty's contribution to our understanding of place and architecture, this book will speak to philosophers interested in the problem of space, architectural theorists, and a wide range of others in the arts and design community.

Contributors: Nancy Barta-Smith, Edward S. Casey, Helen Fielding, Lisa Guenther, Galen A. Johnson, Randall Johnson, D. R. Koukal, Suzanne Cataldi Laba, Patricia M. Locke, Glen Mazis, Rachel McCann, David Morris, and Dorothea Olkowski.

PART I

Liminal Space

CHAPTER ONE

HEARKENING TO THE NIGHT FOR THE HEART OF DEPTH, SPACE, AND DWELLING

Glen A. Mazis

I. SPACE AND DEPTH IN THE INTERRELATEDNESS OF BODILY SITUATION VERSUS THE HIGH ALTITUDE SPATIAL GRID

The work of Merleau-Ponty subtly shifts the sense of our perceptual relations with the world into another key, so the space we inhabit comes to appear anew. As if in hearing a symphony we were used to hearing, we are startled with new pacing, intonation, and by being transposed into another key. Merleau-Ponty takes our experience of depth, the night, and dwelling, as well as other aspects related to the sense of space, and articulates them in startlingly transposed ways. In Merleau-Ponty’s work, space becomes continually dynamic, alive with tensions, and reciprocally open among what had seemed sealed boundaries in such a way that architecture, as described by Catherine Ingraham, which “has always required something like a free passage between inside and outside; some vital movement from protected to open air,” is given new philosophical ground for understanding and exploring possibilities.¹

Most original and transformative of our sense of space in Merleau-Ponty’s work is his reworking of the notion of depth. Additionally, depth, as Merleau-Ponty articulates it, opens a bridge from its spatial sense toward integration within a nexus of relations among persons with nature, culture, things, and animals. Merleau-Ponty discovered that by articulating another sort of depth in perception, a displacement occurs of the traditional philosophical and cultural understandings of the ontological, epistemological, and ethical status of the many types of beings of the world. Space is a bodily space for Merleau-Ponty. Space emerges through the way the body inhabits the world, lodged within the many vectors of activity that surround it continually. Within this lived, bodily space of interrelation, depth for Merleau-Ponty is manifest beyond subject-object dualisms and beyond linear time and space. Depth is the phenomenon that opens up “the flesh of the world.” As Merleau-Ponty says in a “working note” of The Visible and the Invisible: “It is hence because of depth that the things have a flesh” (219). Depth allows flesh to become manifest, and, in doing so, depth is reciprocally intensified in its sense. This means, as Edward Casey points out, that “built places, then, are extensions of our bodies.”² Architecture becomes an art of this fleshly enmeshment of body and world.

Merleau-Ponty’s “indirect ontology,” as he called it, articulates a space of envelopment in which perceiver and perceived fold back within each other as they unfold and intertwine, undercutting traditional dualisms of subject/object, self/other, mind/matter, and passivity/activity. This notion of depth has another kind of logic as a “dehiscent inclusiveness” that preserves duality while simultaneously overcoming dichotomy. In turn, this sense of phenomena can emerge only from a striated space that folds back into itself from myriad discrete vectors, as they become situated in that space but simultaneously loop back into its ongoing originary sense, rather than a traditionally conceived homogeneous space. This makes manifest another kind of space, which might be used to undergird architecture’s reckoning with space. Depth in Merleau-Ponty’s sense is equally about time. The depth of time contains myriad interplays among its varied times that burst forth to enfold one another in manifesting an ongoing becoming. It is not a linear, progressive becoming, but rather a riddled becoming of a primordial depth where all particular spaces and times are enjambed. This sense of time also gives another dimension to the dwelling that architecture can employ.

Depth as understood by Merleau-Ponty is not one dimension of space, but rather the dimension of dimensions. In other words, “if [depth] were a dimension, it would be the first one,” as stated by Merleau-Ponty in “Eye and Mind” (180). In the philosophical tradition that he confronted, depth is the “third dimension,” after length and breadth, a rational and linear concept built up from simple givens in order to complete a rationally determinate and quantifiable grid of location and orientation (180). The title of Kandinsky’s 1926 book, Point and Line to Plane, about a very different sense of space of relations than the traditional progressive building up of space, nevertheless expresses well the traditional sense of the genesis of space. Using the Cartesian method of thought that starts with the most simple constituents, space was seen as the progressive adding from the simple spatial given of a point, to connecting them to form lines, to then projecting lines into planes, and yielding a uniform space and sense of depth that not only can be plotted on a Cartesian grid as projected into a third dimension, but renders a certain intelligibility to depth that erases its most ontologically significant sense, according to Merleau-Ponty—the going together of incompossibles. Depth, for Merleau-Ponty, calls for a new logic of relations. This is why Casey warns in Getting Back into Place that “finding ourselves in built places is no straightforward matter.”³ Casey warns, “The thoughtful architect or builder is aware of these diverse modalities of the in-out relation.”⁴

The traditional notion of depth expresses several errors at once, all of them being examples of the “experience error,” as Merleau-Ponty phrased the tendency to posit the outcome of rational analysis and reconstruction as being the source of phenomena and their central sense (PhP, 5). One might at first think the rearticulating of the traditional notion of depth is chiefly another example of Merleau-Ponty’s undermining the atomism and intellectual constructionism that has plagued Western thought, in order to replace it with a more Gestaltist one. Although Merleau-Ponty’s conception of depth does achieve this, it is more about taking on a style of thinking that in the first place is a “survey from above” in the sense of a “second order” rational reconstruction of a determinate world that forgets its natality in the shifting ambiguous way that things, events, and meaning come to announce themselves in embodying being.⁵ In terms of painting, sculpture, film, and other arts, and certainly in terms of architecture, the traditional conception harbors a palpable detachment that influences the style of the work to be achieved. In other words, depth as traditionally conceived is an abstraction “away from” the teeming matrix of perception and concrete existence.

In the second place, the notion of depth that emerges from this abstracted understanding is at the same time a felt spatial trajectory inscribed in our sense of the world, as are all our understandings of the world once we grasp Merleau-Ponty’s sense of space. It is literally a kind of aerial perspective, a privileging of vision from “on high” and a hovering in the impossible and thus illusory infinitude of everywhere and nowhere “outside” an anchorage in lived space. To say this sense of space is illusory as an originary description of the world is not to say that it is not vital for certain purposes, nor is it to deny that through sedimentation it shapes the sense of what we assume of the orientation of our world. Yet, there are consequences of dwelling within a “high altitude” culture, especially for practices such as architecture or painting, that might be based upon this assumed mode of spatiality as the primordial one.

The arts have been in this quandary since Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise On Painting, which gave a set of imperatives and a method for the rational construction of depth and space for Renaissance painting that paradoxically expressed the aim of achieving both a “high altitude” perspective in its rational abstraction away from the indeterminately lived experience of the painter, and a way to render the concrete things, people, and scenes around the artist. This method attempts to achieve this rendering by a literal placing of a grid of uniform spatial elements upon what is seen before the painter, who must screen himself or herself from his or her envelopment in what is being painted. It is also the assertion of the dominance of a certain kind of airy, floating, capacious, and yet thoroughly civilized, tamed, orderly kind of space. The lines of force that move within this space conflate the height of transcendence taking up the depth that animates primordial perception that is at the heart of our lived sense of the world. It is as if one sort of space can be fully encompassed by the other.

This coming to space from above, however, precedes Enlightenment and Renaissance thought in the medieval relationship with space as embodying the spiritual sense of the human place on earth. Yi-Fu Tuan says in Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values: “Medieval ideals in Europe find their most exalted architectural expression in the cathedral. The vertical cosmos of medieval man is dramatically symbolized by pointed arches, towers and spires that soar.”⁶ Roland Recht suggests that the urgency of this need to ascend to another realm has a dramatic effect on architecture: “The unceasing emphasis on verticality in the architecture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries taken to the point where the material is close to disintegrating . . . is the concrete and measurable expression of a world ordered bottom upwards.”⁷ The towering interiors of some of the great churches of Europe are a kind of verticalized depth, a depth projected upward and outward to become permeated with expansiveness in order to open the space of a vision to the enclosed mortals below. The mortals experience both this subjugation to the power on high of a divinity looking down upon them potentially from everywhere and also their emplacement within the rationalized world of progressively unfolding dimensions that echoes his power and order, including emanations from those who are his representatives on earth within these churches. However, the subjects to this divinity also are granted the promise of simultaneously elevating themselves through a limited or asymmetrical reversibility felt in the uplift of identifying in the most blessed portions of their being, their immortal souls, with the ascendant all-seeing eye above.⁸ This partial identification is with an “essence” within them, a soul, whose true home is on high, escaping from the existence that is mired in history in the struggle to survive and caught within social oppression and foreclosed economic possibilities. The depth of the soul and spirit within this world rebounds from its material depths toward a release in the immaterial, infinite heights suggested by the architectural lines of the majestic churches.

This sort of architectural space, however, instantiates Merleau-Ponty’s notion of space as expressing the cultural and historical tensions of the time. It is a “motivated sense of spatiality,” in Merleau-Ponty’s use of that term (PhP, 270),⁹ as a trajectory of flight away from their embodying being caught in onerous circumstances and as being offered an avenue of escape from the life of the painful sensation, of suffering emotions, and of crushed imagination experienced in witnessing dying offspring, the vexing struggle for bread, the weary muscles of overwork, and the cramped feeling within the dingy, dark, smoke-filled quarters with no change in life circumstances that could be envisioned. It is offered to the population by the powers of that time as a compensation for their oppressed existences and therefore as a way to maintain the status quo. As Merleau-Ponty’s analysis reveals, this sense of space, as any sense of space, is inseparable from the political, historical, and social structures of that time and cannot be taken as a universal sense of space to ground architecture or any other of the arts.

The formal structure of this notion of spatiality is appropriated by the Renaissance in its assumption of the place of power formerly granted to divinity as usurped by humanity through the power of science. Space is “first captured by the grid in the Renaissance,” says Ingraham.¹⁰ It moves into the vacated space above the everyday, embodied, enmeshed space, but transformed from realm of spirit to realm of mathematical precision: “Architecture captures ‘objects in the world’ in the Renaissance by means of spatial coordinate systems . . . in a way that accounts for almost everything about architectural objects: their meaning, construction, placement on a site, design, authority as artistic objects, and status as theoretical objects. Part of the claim of the object in the Renaissance is to be mathematically ‘known’ in space.”¹¹ The Albertian or Cartesian space that emerges in this transition remains the commonsense conception of the American and European cultures, where space is conceived of as the emptiness between things―the container of isolated objects, the measurable “span” among discrete beings, the infinite set of points demarcating possible locations in a grid of projected orientation. This sense of space leads to architectural structures replete with right angles and rectilinear spaces, expressing the regularity of mathematical reason’s progress in the logical mastery of the world. Ingraham asserts that architecture since the Renaissance has been captured by the grid of a rationalized Renaissance sense of visual and mathematical space, which she asserts still makes its presence felt in the tendency of architecture to create what she calls “space-box and perspectival cages.”¹²

II. PULSING SPACE AND AN ENJAMBED TIME AS THE DEPTH OF INHABITATION

The Enlightenment “high altitude” approach to space, as Merleau-Ponty called it, is an intellectual screen analogous to the physical screen Alberti imposed between painter and what is being painted. This notion of space screens out the primordial, perceptual sense of depth as enveloping and also screens away that space is equally “existential” in being “a direction of significance,” and therefore has cultural and personal sources of its ...