Theory Seminar I: Phenomenology and Hermeneutics

Professor Alberto Perez Gomez

25th, October, 2011

Menatallah M.A. Hamdy Master of Architecture

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The Primacy of Perception

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)

Eye and Mind

Written in August, 1960 Translated by Carleton Dallery in 1964, Northwestern University Press

Science manipulates things and gives up living in them. Modern science objectifies things and creates a world of limits and definitions, operates within them, and believes that this world it has created is, beyond doubt, the absolute one, except at those very rare instances when their predefined world collides with the real one. But it has not always been that way, when science was youngerwhat we call classical science, it was still too awed with life than to assume to know better, was still feeling the opaqueness and precedence of the world, and instead of objectifying it and presuming that it is all there for us to exploit and yet has nothing to do with us, classical science sought a way back into that world to which it belongs through itself. Modern science effectively severed itself from the experiential world, that w0rld from which it originated. Becoming deliberately autonomous and abstract, it reduced itself to data collection and controlled experiments. Science must recognize its origin, which is that brute, existent world, the primacy of which is so blindly denied, even at such moments when science fails to justify itself, like wondering why a flawlessly designed and manufactured apparatus works sometimes and not others.
If this kind of thinking were to extend its reign to man and history; if, pretending to ignore what we know of them through our own situations, it were to set out to construct man and history on the basis of a few abstract indices (as a decadent psychoanalysis and culturalism have done in the United States)then, since the man really becomes the manipulandum he takes himself to be, we enter into a cultural regimen where there is neither truth nor falsity concerning man and history, into a sleep, or nightmare from which there is no awakening, page 160.

To avoid this destination, science must attempt to re-ground itself, and stop arrogantly dismissing the sensible world and being who have created it, so it can once more become philosophy Art, and only art, draws on the fabric of brute meaning which activism chooses to ignore and it does it in full innocence. In painting in particular, the artist is free to observe the world and contemplate existence without taking a stand, without having to shackle down his feelings with words. So free are painters from the obligations of the men of words, who are always expected to make a conclusion and have an opinion or an advice. Music on the other extreme is beyond the sensible world that it goes straight to representing the few outlines of being which it can its ebb and flow, its growth, its upheaval and its turbulence. Everything I see is in principle within my reach, at least within the reach of my sight, and is marked upon the map of the I can. I have to acknowledge my inherence in the world that I perceive and that perceives me; that I too am on anothers map of their I can, that I am being seen by the world at the same time that I see the world. It is not the seeing that is the dialogue, it is the looking, it is me opening myself and my awareness to some things and not others, and then shifting my eyes along to different things, just the same as the others touch or see me then move on to another. Vision is a fascinating phenomenon, although presumed a stationary act, it is no such thing, being directly linked to movement; we can only see by the act of directing and moving our eyes towards something and choosing to look at it. All things we see arouse a carnal knowledge of their presence within us, they are instances of what we know them to be even without seeing. It would be incorrect to say that we look at a painting as we do at any other thing or object, because when looking at it, we cannot fix our eyes in it and fix it in its place, contrary to a thing, our eyes wander through a painting as if we were inside of it or it inside of us. A painting is the artists world, to look at a painting is to see the world according to it. The artists eye sees what the world is missing in order to become a painting; and then sees the colors the painting needs to become itself; then sees on its completion the world he sought to create, the answer to what was missing, the bridge between the visible and the invisible, giving a visible body to the invisibility of things in the world, and sees in the work of others a different bridge, and different answers.
The eye is an instrument that moves itself, a means which invents its own ends; it is that which has been moved by some impact of the world, which it then restores to the visible through the offices of an agile hand, page 165.

It is through painting that the distinction between ones place in the world as seen or seer becomes blurred, this alternative duality has caused many painters to say that while working they feel that the things are watching them; that the painting dictates itself to them; that they only have to listen, to open themselves to the world and let it go through their eyes to their hands onto the canvas. The result of this operation is a most profound and carnal essences of the world which they perceive; only open to the painter, full of mute meanings and effective

likenesses. Self portraiture is always fascinating this way; to see the artist seeing himself and to see what he sees manifesting itself through his own hand. Resemblance is the result of perception, and not its source. Descartes in his work rarely spoke of painting; he only mentioned copper engravings briefly, which he preferred because they preserved the forms of things, or at least sufficient signs for us to understand what the thing is. Descartes concept of vision is modeled after the sense of touch. In doing so, he discarded all aspects of the vision like color and reflections and shadows that help us interact with things.
A Cartesian does not see himself in the mirror, he sees a dummy, an outside, which, he has every reason to believe, other people see in the very same way [] if he recognizes himself in it, if he thinks it looks like him, it is his thought that weaves this connection. The mirror image is nothing that belongs to him, page 170.

A painting, Descartes says, is in fact an artifice; presenting us with things, the same way things would normally present themselves to us. It creates space on a flat two dimensional surface, just like a mirror, and creating the illusion of depth where there is none by offering signs of its presence. For instance through making objects appear to be hiding behind one another and becoming smaller in size as they recede into the represented space. Unlike the classical, modern painting attempts contain more metaphysical significance. No longer concerned with accurate likeness, their quest is to capture and release the spectrum of meanings that is in everything and in them. In a sense, the infinite reinterpretations of an artwork in history, is still given by the work itself, it has always been there; and everything written about the French revolution for example is not imposed on it, but part of the event, waiting to reveal itself at this moment in time or at another to this person or to that. It is the work itself that open the field from which it appears in another light. Depth is a fascinating phenomenon. It is precisely because of depth that we are able to perceive space in the world or in a painting. This enigma of depth, represented by line and form, becomes even more problematic with color; that with itself, color brings to the table a whole new set of dimensions: texture, materiality, quality, difference and identity. And although color brings us closer to the heart of being than space, neither actually is that heart, neither is the key to the enigma, but merely removing another of the many veils, which in their translucent overlapping make up of things and the world.
Art is not construction, artifice, the meticulous relationship to a space and a world existing outside. It is truly the "inarticulate cry," as Hermes Trismegistus said, "Which seemed to be the voice of the light." And once it is present it awakens powers dormant in ordinary vision, a secret of preexistence, page 182.

Other primary elements in artwork are line and movement. The line is commonly defined as property of the object it traces. But how then can we explain the line where the meadow meets the field? It belongs to neither, yet is shared by both, without them this line would not exist in

that particular way to convey the relationship and locality of the meadow and the field. Latent movement, if we may say so, is movement without bodily displacement, which is exactly what happens in art, as in the works of Duchamp and Marey. A human movement for example, or the suggestion of movement, is represented to the viewer on the canvas surface by painting the different members of his body in unsynchronized time and place; the arms each at a different place, one foot behind the other and in opposite direction from the knees, thus making the painted body capture temporality conveying the same effect and meaning of motion which all people can understand equally through personal experience. The world to a Cartesian, in contrast to a painter, is not the visible one, and the only light is that of the mind, and the only vision is in and through God.
Now perhaps we have a better sense of how much is contained in that little word "see." Seeing is not a certain mode of thought or presence to self; it is the means given me for being absent from myself, for being present from within at the fission of Being only at the end of which do I close up into myself [] The eye accomplishes the prodigious work of opening the soul to what is not soulthe joyous realm of things and their god, the sun, page 186.

It is because of this rich world of the visible that in art there cannot be distinct problems and solutions, there cannot be any conclusions, it is precisely because of this that an artist can repaint the same subject any number of times and get a different meaning out of it each time, therefore nothing can be completely captured, everything is in a constant state of metamorphosis.

Theory Seminar I: Phenomenology and Hermeneutics

Professor Alberto Perez Gomez

25th, October, 2011

Menatallah M.A. Hamdy Master of Architecture

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Sense and Non-Sense

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) First published in Paris by Les Editions Nagel, 1948 Translated later by Hubert Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus in 1964, Northwestern University Press

Authors Preface

Human intellect revolted against institutionalism in unison since the beginning of the century, yearning for freedom and spontaneity, reclaiming the fervor of the moment, the explosive brilliance of an individual life, the premeditation of the unknown. Unfortunately, that reclaimed freedom was voluntarily deserted again, under new, more colorful labels, such as newly revealed religions or communism. It would seem that communion between man and his power to choose cannot be long endured On encountering a true work of art, we must admit that through such contact something happens, and that it is irreversible. A message, whether intended by the artist or not, was passed on and made itself part of the public, and will continue to do so forever.
The meaning of the work for the artist or for the public cannot be stated except by the work itself: neither the thought which created it nor the thought which receives it is completely its own master. Cezanne is an example of how precariously expression and communication is achieved. Expression is like a step taken in the fogno one can say where, if anywhere, it will lead, page 3. Likewise, if we are to rediscover a system of morals, we must find it through contact with the conflicts revealed by immoralism, page 4.

The rise and fall of the Marxist promise>>

Czannes Doubt
Essay, written in 1945

He lived to paint; it took him 100 sittings to complete a still life and 500 for a portrait, at the age of 64 his paintings sold at twice the price as Monets. Yet on his deathbed all he could think of was how little he has done, and how far he is from his goal. His unusual approach in painting was ridiculed by his contemporaries, even once called the painting of a drunken privy cleaner by a critic. If anything this contributed to his own self doubt, he even suspected a faulty vision might be the reason why his work is so different. He was terrified of life and terrified of death; ridden by a confidence that he would die soon, he started to practice religion later in his life, so attempting to sooth his fears. As he grew old, Czanne became more distrustful and isolated; so worried about people getting their hooks into him, he would motion to his friends from afar to not try to approach him, severing all ties with the human world and alienating his own humanity. Today this may be interpreted as a psychological illness or even schizophrenia, but whatever it was, it was also a significant part of his genius. Although Czanne dedicated most of his life in painting and repainting nature, it because of the impressionist movement that he abandoned the idea of representing dreams and imagined scenes and directed his complete attention to nature as it appeared to him. However, he soon decided that impressionism was not suitable for him either and perused his own way of painting. Impressionism, being about capturing how nature appears in a matter of moments and how it strikes our senses in instantaneous perception, more concerned with the light and air that holds the objects together than with the objects themselves. This entailed the absence of contours and lines, as well as the exclusion of the color ochre, sienna and black from the palette, and allowing only the use of the seven colors of the spectrum. Instead of using light and dark to illustrate contrast, impressionists manipulated the color wheel and used complimentary tones instead. He found this problematic, because this resulted often in submerging the objects. In a sense Czanne wanted to represent nature in its richness without abandoning the impressionist methods that he believed were more honest.
Of nature he said The artist must conform to this perfect work of art. Everything comes to us from nature; we exist through it, nothing else is worth remembering, [] his paining was paradoxical: he was perusing reality without giving up the sensuous surface, [] this is what Emile Bernard called Czannes suicide: aiming for reality while denying himself the means to attain it, page 12.

By abandoning science, intelligence, perspective and ideas, Czannes real aim was to confront science with nature, bring it back to that from which it came. He discovered what modern science calls the lived perspective: when compared to the pictorial or scientific perspective, far objects are larger and near objects are smaller than they would appear in film or photograph.

We live in a man-made world, which we take for the natural world. Humanity came upon nature and installed itself in it. Cezannes work penetrates this human imposed world and jumps right to the origin of things, it suspends these habits in a way that is rather disturbing, it strips the viewer from the comfort of familiarity in such a way that upon seeing painting by others after seeing his work, one feels somehow relaxed, just as conversation is resumed after a period of mourning mask the absolute change.
The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness, Czanne, page 17.

Even though mans life does not explain his work, the two are inevitably connected; it took this life and events for this work to be done. Just as Czannes illness is profoundly present in his work; his schizoid temperament enveloped his work with a metaphysical quality that resulted in a somewhat disturbing stillness, his painted world is devoid of expression, suspended; his landscapes were windless, his portraits almost lifeless and alien to the viewer, as if seen by something inhuman, except that only a human being is capable of such a vision which penetrates right to the root of things beneath the imposed order of humanity. That eternal Czanne, that meaning which had immerged and imposed itself on the human Czanne, shaping his behavior and attitude, and brought upon him his life which appear to be happening to him, is it free in respect to itself?
If I am a certain project from birth, the given and the created are indistinguishable in me, and it is therefore impossible to a single gesture which is merely hereditary or innate, a single gesture which is not spontaneousbut also impossible to name a single gesture which is absolutely new in regard to that way of being in the world which, from the very beginning, is myself, page 21.

The dual nature of freedom is that we are never determined yet never change, since looking back on what we were, we can always find hints of what we have become.
The psychoanalysts hermeneutic musing, which multiplies the communications between us and ourselves, which takes sexuality as a symbol of existence and existence as a symbol of sexuality, and which looks in the past for the meaning of the future and in the future for the meaning of the past, is better suited than rigorous induction to the circular movement of our lives, where the future rests on the past and the past on the future, and where everything symbolizes everything else. Psychoanalysis does not make freedom impossible; it teaches us to think of this freedom concretely, as a creative repetition of ourselves, always, in retrospective, faithful to ourselves, page 25.