Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, depth, and the body, continued (more)

Continued from last time:

As Merleau-Ponty says in “Eye and Mind,” “the enigma is that my body simultaneously sees and is seen. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize, in what it sees, the ‘other side’ of its power of looking” (“EM,” 162). This indeed is how vision itself visible, but we need to describe the process more precisely than as some sort of “recognition.” Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible thinks of the problem this way: what we see in the world, the visible, is not a random assortment of stimuli, but, as he says above, “things themselves,”—by which he means primarily (that is, excepting the Husserlian registers of this phrase, which of course he is trying to refigure or transform by using it this way) that “I do not look at chaos, but at things” (VI, 133). This fact—so marveled at throughout Kant’s third Critique—reveals that if vision is going to occur, it presupposes that the visible be precisely that which is able to accommodate vision, or itself be, qua visible or viewed, the prefiguring of vision itself. In other words, though they seem like they are at a distance from us, things can be said to see, in the sense that they are not just viewed when vision or a look lands upon them, but instead are active participants in the view itself: they hold the gaze or push it elsewhere, and this is because they themselves only have existence—as we have noted above—as the visible that is currently within a particular vision. The redness of a dress is thus not “sensory datum,” when it as a thing gets translated into the realm of what is made correlative to the faculty of sight: the red dress itself is a “talisman of color” that “makes it, held at the end of the gaze… much more than a correlative of my vision, such that it imposes my vision upon me as a continuation of its own sovereign existence” (VI, 131). In short, the visible participates in vision in its prepossession of vision, as Merleau-Ponty says:

The look… envelops, palpates, espouses the visible things. As though it were in a relation of pre-established harmony with them, as though it knew them before knowing them, it moves in its own way with its abrupt and imperious style, and yet the views taken are not desultory—I do not look at chaos, but at things—so that finally one cannot say if it is the look or if it is the things that command. What is this prepossession of the visible, this art of interrogating it according to its own wishes, this inspired exegesis? (VI, 133).

He answers himself with the following:

Since vision is palpation with the look, it must also be inscribed in the order of being that it discloses to us; he who looks must not himself be foreign to the world that he looks at. As soon as I see, it is necessary that the vision (as is so well indicated by the double meaning of the word) be doubled with a complementary vision or with another vision: myself seen from without, such as another would see me, installed in the midst of the visible, occupied in considering it from a certain spot (VI, 134).

This last sentence will require more explication, but what is stressed here we can fully understand: the visible must have a sort of being that can flip or reverse itself into what has vision, into what undertakes seeing when the vision of the body lands upon it. It must be able to participate in the gaze as well as maintain its own provisional independence from that gaze, such that this visible is actually vision “installed in the midst of the visible.” As he says in “Eye and Mind:”

Vision happens among, or is caught in, things—in that place where something visible undertakes to see, becomes visible for itself by virtue of the sight of things; in that place where there persists, like the mother water in crystal, the undividedness (l’indivision) of the sensing and the sensed (“EM,” 163; OE, 19-20).

This undividedness, this reversible being, is what connects the body to the things around it—Merleau-Ponty calls it “flesh.” This term brings out how all vision is bodily, but how, because the body is like a thing or rather is of them, all visible things have the possibility of answering to vision as visible. Thus, as he remarks in “Eye and Mind:” “things are a prolongation of [the body]; they are incrusted into its flesh, they are part of its full definition,” and it is in this sense that, as he says immediately after this, “the world is made of the same stuff as the body” (“EM,” 163).

While we do not yet understand the opposite phenomenon that is really in question above—how vision itself turns into the visible—we can only approach it if we further develop this conception of how the visible turns itself into vision. In order to do so, we can turn to an example Merleau-Ponty gives, one that will begin to show us how painting is already extremely relevant to our discussion of the body (indeed, it is in “Eye and Mind” as well as in The Visible and the Invisible that this example is given). It is the example of tiles seen at the bottom of a pool—literally one of depth:

When through the water’s thickness I see the tiling at the bottom of a pool, I do not see it despite the water and the reflections there; I see it through them and because of them. If there were no distortions, no ripples of sunlight, if it were without this flesh that I saw the geometry of the tiles, then I would cease to see it as it is and where it is—which is to say, beyond any identical, specific place. I cannot say that the water itself—this aqueous power, the syrupy and shimmering element—is in space; all this is not somewhere else either, but it is not in the pool [that is, if one considers “in” as a spatial relation of containment between two masses, as one would in physics]. It inhabits it, it materializes itself there, yet it is not contained there (“EM,” 182).

What makes the water a visible thing is the thickness or depth that separates the surface from the bottom of the pool. This thickness is precisely the flesh of the visible and vision. What the thickness does to vision is pull and push it around—it is not passive—and it accomplishes this precisely by developing its own visibility. In other words, it does not leave its visibility behind to become this “syrupy and shimmering element,” and then return to it, but as visible, flips or switches into a thing that can also participate in gazing or vision—in the sense that it does push and pull on one’s sight. If were not to do this, it would merely be a distortion and deviation from sight considered within mathematical space. But then it precisely would not be depth, even in the sense in which we are talking about the depth of a pool—that is, in the sense of a mere spatial relation. What would be the depth of a pool as merely the difference between two points in space—even if we think of this space in terms of its fluid dynamics or how it is distorting light? Because the difference in space is precisely something with a sort of consistency in its potential to be meaningful in the context of a vision of a pool—because we cannot reduce the way it pushes and pulls upon our vision to Cartesian space—we must think of it differently. If we do this—and this is precisely thinking of it as flesh—it becomes a sort of spatial meaning (of the visible turning into vision, into our vision that we are seeing when looking at it) that takes place materially as the water itself. Thus this thickness or flesh of the water that includes it in our gaze as that through which and only through which we see is depth. “Depth” indeed still signifies the difference between the surface and the bottom of the pool, then: it just does not cut out everything that is qualitatively significant about the visible and which we now understand as the visible turning into vision.
The reason why this example is so important for us is that the depth of the visible in any vision, according to Merleau-Ponty, is the same way as the depth of the water. The interval between the vision and the visible, precisely as a relation of material space, is a positive thickness like the water—and this thickness is flesh, the way this space continually becomes part of the vision. And, as Merleau-Ponty continues to say, “this internal animation, this radiation of the visible is what the painter seeks under the name of depth” as well (“EM,” 182).