After a foray of appreciation in David Graeber’s account of the contemporary art world, I return to the first draft of my book in the philosophy of the visual arts. In my previous posts I began the exploration of the sources and mechanisms of artistic meaningfulness in the human body, especially as conceptualized by Edmund Husserl in Ideas II, and ended by indicating that I’ll seek the basis of artistic meaningfulness is ‘projection’, and will try to develop the relevant conceptualization of projection through consideration of recent work in pragmatist philosophy and especially cognitive linguistics. To begin to get the topic into focus, I start with an extended quotation from the key and much-discussed section of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception entitled “The Spatiality of the Body and its Motricity:
“Within the busy world in which concrete movement unfolds, abstract movement hollows out a zone of reflection and of subjectivity, it superimposes a virtual or human space over physical space. Concrete movement is thus centripetal, whereas abstract movement is centrifugal; the first takes place within being or the actual, the second takes place within the possible or within non-being; the first adheres to a given background, the second itself sets up its own background. The normal function that makes abstract movement possible is a function of “projection” by which the subject of movement organizes before himself a free space in which things that do not exist naturally can take on a semblance of existence.” (Merleau-Ponty, p. 114)
In the extended quotation Merleau-Ponty is tentatively exploring how to describe the fundamental elements wherewith a human being does not live, move, and act simply as a kind of reflex to an indifferent outer world, but rather does so always within a space of possibility (I do not think it is possible to describe and evoke such primordial features of human existence without recourse to metaphors and quasi-poetic expressions (‘space of possibility’), and in any case I won’t attempt to). Merleau-Ponty’s way of putting it here, by contraposing concrete movement within a given background to abstract movement against a background that the agent seems to create for herself, seems to make him vulnerable to the philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s forceful objection. Adopting from Aristotle the conception of the senses as kinetic operations (as mentioned in a previous post), and Husserl’s analysis of bodily kinesthesia (likewise discussed in an earlier post), Sheets-Johnstone claims that Merleau-Ponty misses the fundamental phenomenon of what she calls ‘primary animation’, the sense that from infancy human beings orient themselves to the world, sense objects, situations, and environments, and grasp things all through self-movement. (Sheets-Johnstone (2011), pp. 209-13) Merleau-Ponty’s formulation suggests that at the most basic level of analysis there is the embodied person engaged in concrete movements, and abstract movements, their background and their possible environments supervene upon that primordial layer through a process of projection. As Sheets-Johnstone puts it, Merleau-Ponty affirms a basic bodily unity with the world, but “a unity achieved not by way of constituting consciousness, that is, not by way of building up of knowledge through experience, but by an already intact and functioning “motor intentionality”—a body that “projects” itself into the world” (ibid, pp. 210-11).
It seems to me that Sheets-Johnstone is right in thinking that Merleau-Ponty’s formulation here almost irresistibly suggests that he understands concrete movement as basic and abstract movement as derived, but it seems likewise that it is open to a follower of Merleau-Ponty to treat concrete and abstract movement as equiprimordial, that is, that there is never concrete action (something conceptually richer than movement) without a sense of possibility, that is, a sense of alternatives and of different envisioned outcomes. Further, one could add the point (much stressed by the philosopher Charles Taylor in his various accounts of expressivism (see my earlier blog post on Taylor’s recent book)) that the agent gives itself further definition, an elaborated sense of who she is, in projection. Put alternatively, one could say that the agent who projects is not quite the same person, and does not quite live in the same world, as she was and did prior to the projection. If one adds these two points to Merleau-Ponty’s account—that concrete and abstract movement/action are equiprimordial, and that the agent gives further definition to herself in projection—then Merleau-Ponty’s account seems at least consistent with accounts of animation such as Sheets-Johnstone’s, and accounts that begin with the embodied agent-in-an-environment-and-world such as Eugene Gendlin’s.
Can anything determinate be said about ‘projection’ beyond the sense given by Merleau-Ponty and modified here in response to Sheets-Johnstone? More precisely what are the tactile-kinesthetic invariants invoked by Sheets-Johnstone (as discussed in an earlier post) and what role do they play in forming the bases of artistic meaning? To answer these questions, I turn now to work in cognitive linguistics and pragmatic philosophy from recent decades, starting with a dissertation written by Joseph Grady in UC Berkeley’s Department of Linguistics in the late 1990s. Grady starts from a question posed by the path-breaking work of the cognitive linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson in their book Metaphors We Live By. Lakoff and Johnson noticed and analyzed a remarkable phenomenon: that there are an indeterminately large number of basic metaphors that pervasively structure human thought. Striking examples of such metaphors include ‘Up is More/Down is Less’ (e.g. ‘prices went up’) and ‘Temporal Orientation is Spatial Orientation’ (‘we’ve put that behind us’; ‘we’re looking forward to our vacation’). Grady asks how such metaphors are possible, and how is it that they are pervasive and automatically understood. He suggests the following analysis:
1. Human beings share a range of cognitive abilities and structures. Likewise, there are an indeterminately large number of basic events that occur routinely in everyday human life; Grady’s examples are “we often lift objects, we often see particular colors, we often bend our knees, we often perceive similarities between objects, we often move from one location to another, we often gain information through visual observation of a scene” (Grady, p. 20).
2. Some of these basic events become salient for us because they relate to our everyday actions and goals; such events matter to us. So, for example, the basic event of pushing something heavy matters because it is part of a sequence of actions wherewith one attempts to roll a boulder up a hill. Such basic events are salient for agents under particular descriptions, with specific granularity and from particular points-of-view. So there is, say, I Sisyphus rolling this immense boulder up a hill in Hades. The basic event, conceptualized as part of a typical narrative, of a particular granularity, and from a particular point of view, then gives rise to what Grady calls ‘the primary scene’, which “are minimal (temporally-delimited) episodes of subjective experience, characterized by tight correlations between physical circumstance and cognitive response. They are universal elements of human experience, defined by basic cognitive mechanisms and abilities, which relate in some salient sense to goal-oriented interaction with the world” (p. 24).
3. Because basic events and primary scenes occur frequently, they come to be associated with other experiential elements that co-occur. For example, heaviness in the primary scene mentioned comes to be associated with the sense of straining. When such associations occur automatically and as it were below the level of conscious awareness, Grady says that there is ‘conceptual binding’.
4. Given primary conceptual binding, with its pre- or un-conscious aspects, there will be subsequent learning processes wherein the clusters of elements bound conceptually come to be distinguished and perhaps articulately so. One will, for example, come to realize that not all heaviness is bound to a sense of strain; the fifty-pound weights that I strain against in the circuit room will be as nothing to a weight-lifter. Grady calls such elaborations of primary scenes ‘deconflation’ (p. 25).
5. Grady is now in a position to make sense of the basic metaphors that Lakoff and Johnson noticed. Human beings seek to extend their understanding to new situations. In doing so, they correlate their primary senses with other senses (pp. 25-6). It is this correlation, so I’ll argue, that gives determinate sense and structure to the unanalyzed ‘projection’ posited by Merleau-Ponty, and likewise to Sheets-Johnstone’s conception of tactile-kinesthetic invariants. The ‘projective’ correlation of tactile-kinesthetic invariants will for us form the basis of the possibility of artistic meaningfulness.
In my next post I’ll go into much greater depth of the character of these invariants, as conceptualized in particular in the work of Lakoff and Johnson.
References:
Aristotle, De Anima/On the Soul (mid-4th century B. C. E.)
Eugene Gendlin, A Process Model (2017)
Joseph Grady, Foundations of Meaning: Primary Metaphors and Primary Scenes (1997), Dissertation in Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy II (1913-28)
Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (2007)
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980)
--Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (1999)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (2012)
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement (2011)
Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (2024)