Intersubjectivity
in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty as described by AMELIA JONES, in
Body Art:Performing the Subject
"In the 1940’s and 1950’s, it was Merleau-Ponty and Lacan
who most vigorously began to theorize (through philosophy and psychoanalysis)
the splitting or dissolving of the Cartesian subject. Merleau-Ponty’s
observations about the contingency and reciprocity of the self/other,
and his emphatic critique of vision-oriented theories that polarize subject/object
relations, seem to relate closely to Goffman’s paradigm but go far
beyond its instrumental--more Sartrean and rigidly oppositional--dimensions:
"The behaviour of another expresses a certain manner of existing
before signifying a certain manner of thinking. And when this behaviour
is addressed to me, as may happen in dialogue, and seizes upon my thoughts
in order to respond to them...I am then drawn into a coexistence of which
I am not the unique constituent and which founds the phenomenon of social
nature as perceptual experience founds that of physical nature."
Amelia Jones quotes Merleau Ponty, from Ponty’s "The Structure
of Behaviour, 1963" cited in Martin Jay’s "Downcast Eyes"
"Merleau-Ponty’s antiempiricism and his insistence on the fully
embodied nature of intersubjectity enables him to conceptualize intersubjectity
as imbricated rather than oppositional (as in Sartre’s existentialist
model), as intersubjective and embedded rather than simplistically staged
in a discrete social environment (per Goffman). While Sartre sustains
in his phenomenological work a more strictly Hegelian view of self/other
relations as structured by conflict, Merleau-Ponty posits the self/other
as reciprocal; not in the sense of oscillating poisitionalities but in
terms of simultaneous subject/objectification--one is always already both
at the same time. And Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on embodiement
and on going beyond vision-oriented models of self and other differentiate
his work from Lacan’s theories of self, at least as the latter have
been popularized in contemporary cultural discourse in the United States
(where, as noted, the subject is staged through a disembodied--if psychically
invested--sense of vision that produces her/him as image).Merleau-Ponty’s
writings seem singularly interesting in relation to body art in that they
articulate an understanding of intersubjectity as dramatically intercorporeal:
as embodied as well as contingent."
—AMELIA JONES. Body Art: Performing the Subject, p. 40/41
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"The relation to the self, the relation to the world, the relation
to the other; all are constituted through a reversibility of seeing and
being seen, perceiving and being perceived, and this entails a reciprocity
and contingency for the subjects in the world...The body/self is simultaneously
both subject and object; in the experience of dialogue (or, in our case,
the production and reception of works of art) the two subject involved (art
maker, art interpreter) "are collaborators for each other in consummate
reciprocity."
—Merleau Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception
Intersubjectivity- A major concept in phenomenology...the creation of meaning
is an active result of intentionality, And each individual proposes his
own interpretation of the world, through his language and actions, to a
world of counter subjects. Thus the world of intersubjectivity is continuously
built up and held in being. An individual's ‘intentional hypotheses’
are ‘fulfilled’ if the world confirms or endorses them, and
remain ‘unfulfilled if refused. Intersubjectivity is thus very much
a local cultural creation, [that is it takes place in direct contact/proximity
between subjects] and thinkers following Weber, like Alfred Schutz, have
tried to describe the model of interpretation we need to grasp the conventions
of intersubjective understanding.
—Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought |