Merleau-Ponty on Cézanne

...It is Cézanne's genius that when the overall composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to impression of an emerging order, an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes. In the same way, the contour of an object conceived as a line encircling the object belongs not to the visible we but to geometry. If one outlines the shape of an apple with a continuous line, one makes an object of the shape, whereas the contour is rather ideal limit toward which the sides of the apple recede in depth. Not to indicate any shape would be to deprive the objects of their identity. To trace just a single outline sacrifices depth—that is, the dimension in which the thing is presented not as spread out before us but as an inexhaustible reality full of reserves. That is why Cézanne follows the swell of the object in modulated colors and indicates several outlines in blue. Rebounding among these, one's glance captures a shape that emerges from among them all, just as it does in perception.
-"Cézanne's Doubt," in Sense and Non-Sense

This is just a spot-on description of what it is like to look at a Cézanne. The play going on in the painting is not some proto-Cubist mind game: what Cézanne's getting at is always more basic. Thus to say he is bringing the medium to the fore, or bringing the spatiality of the objects to the fore--I've heard both explanations--by producing, especially in his late paintings, the various planes of color that makes up a landscape--all this misses the point. Finality of form, and its multiple possibilities based on the odd reciprocity between the embodied gaze or intention and the landscape: this is closer, I think, to what the experience of a Cézanne is getting at. On this note, one might take a little issue with how Merleau-Ponty says that Cézanne "indicates several outlines." Cézanne surely does not give us many lines instead of one. But what is being described is not a line itself but an "outline:" that is, Cézanne gives us several ways in which an object can finalize its form, stand out of itself and before us, and yet also reset itself back into the whole of which it is a part. Merleau-Ponty could be clearer about this: the phrase is not well-crafted. But it helps if you know that for Merleau-Ponty, the line itself is always the least important part of the thing, a mere beginning point beyond which and through which one moves. A solid black line, for Merleau-Ponty, isn't significant in how it constructs a boundary, but rather how it itself has depth within it, how it indicates a plane stretching into itself and beyond it. Cross-hatching, for him, completely misses the point, though it is precisely trying to effect depth through the mere use of lines. Merleau-Ponty would counter that it is doing it already: the line is a virtuality, indicating a presence of which it is the mere extension or outer shell. Obviously there is a lot that is questionable about this. But in his descriptions of some of the more complicated and yet more fundamental aspects of Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty's viewpoint is an invaluable resource.

The technical relation

In a televised interview (printed in Echographies of Television, 113-7), Bernard Stiegler asks Jacques Derrida a brilliant question about some lines Derrida said in the above film:

In the film, in which you play yourself, you say to Pascale Ogier, your partner: "To be haunted by a ghost is to remember what one has never lived in the present... Modern technology, contrary to appearances, increases tenfold the power of ghosts." Might you elaborate on this statement: "the future belongs to ghosts?"

Derrida replies with the following:

...Phantom preserves the same reference to phainesthai, to appearing for vision, to the brightness of day, to phenomenality. And what happens with spectrality, with phantomality... is that something becomes almost visible which is visible only insofar as it is not visible in flesh and blood. It is a night-vision [translation modified]. As soon as there is a technology of the image, visibility brings night. It incarnates in a night body, it radiates a night light. At this moment, in this room, night is falling over us. Even if it weren't falling, we are already in night, as soon as we are captured by optical instruments which don't even need the light of day. We are already specters of the "televised." In the nocturnal space in which this image of us, this picture we are in the process of having "taken," is described, it is already night. Furthermore, because we know that, once it has been taken, captured, this image will be reproducible in our absence, because we know this already, we are already haunted by this future, which brings our death. Our disappearance is already here. We are already transfixed by a disappearance or disapparition which promises and conceals in advance another magic "apparition," a ghostly "re-apparition," which is in truth properly miraculous, something to see, as admirable as it is incredible, credible or believable, only by the the grace of an act of faith [translation modified]. Faith which is summoned by technics itself, by our relation of essential incompetence to technical operation. (For even if we know how something works, our knowledge is incommensurable with the immediate perception that attunes us to technical efficacy, to the fact that "it works:" we see that "it works," but even if we know this, we don't see how "it works;" seeing and knowing are incommensurable here.)

Appendix to Williams

I just realized I left out a part of my argument in the post below, though I ended up hinting at it in what's there.
It is the explicit connection of the repetition I find in the lines of Crabbe to the anxieties over memory in Goldsmith, and the connection is made thus: Williams thinks Goldsmith's observational discourse, beyond being just an experience of memory, is also an experience of anxieties about tropes in poetry. In a way, Goldsmith wonders whether with the disappearance of the village, the ability of poetry to say anything unique (i.e. without turning what it observes--in this case village life--into a trope) is also lost. I find the repetitions of Crabbe, far from being some sort of evocation of the state of mind of the villager-turned-laborer, are instead instances of this sort of anxiety about tropes: the repetitions function at the most basic level to push any line of the poem towards troping itself. The anxiety in Goldsmith that gets concretized in this folding back of the poem on itself (and, we should note, not because "all poems are troping themselves," or something like this) functions as the only way that Crabbe can describe the villagers--i.e. functions in its turn as the element of the poem that reflects or instantiates Crabbe's own anxiety. This anxiety is more total (for lack of a better word) than Goldsmith: it has to do with the ability of poetry to turn what it observes into inspiration for itself, even in its resisting of itself (i.e. being a counter-pastoral). It is a question about not the constitution or being (we'll find this in Cowper) but the role of the past that Goldsmith discovers.
Hopefully all this (which should probably go right after where I read the repetition in Crabbe closely) will make the transition between Goldsmith and Crabbe (as Williams generally sees it) clearer, and show more clearly how Williams' approach sees things at the specific level of poetic form connected to the movements of history within that form.