The Sense of Space

CHAPTER 3 THE TOPOLOGY OF EXPRESSION

CHAPTER 3 THE TOPOLOGY OF EXPRESSION DURING THE COURSE OF development, the infant moves from kicking legs and arms together in one overall movement of the body, to walking, an asymmetrical two-beat movement of arms and legs in counterpoint. A fold, a constraint in movement, folds into a new fold. The symmetrical one-beat movement of the infant curls the body into itself, perceptually involves the body with itself and its place. Walking breaks this curl into a line that advances into new places through a body that twists its hips and stretches legs and arms into a linear stride orthogonal to the body’s front. A curl around the hips unfolds into a line twisted out from the body, and the infant begins moving in a very different way, indeed in a very different world—the world of the toddler. When the infant toddles into walking, her or his presence spreads out into new places—things must be put away, the stairs become a danger zone, and so on. A fold in movement generates a new wrinkle of sens. But how does sens emerge in folds of movement? How is there sens in movement for the infant herself? The answer requires a study of expression, habit, and learning, and takes us to the concept of a topology of expression—a constraint on learning specified by the spread-out logic of a body that moves by growing, grows by moving, a constraint that shapes sens. EXPRESSION AND SENS SENS IN MOVEMENT One of Merleau-Ponty’s greatest discoveries in the Phenomenology of Perception is that of sens in movement. “[W]hat we have discovered through the study of motility [motricité],” he writes, is “a new sense [sens] of the word 81 82 THE SENSE OF SPACE ‘sense [sens].’ ” If the empiricists were wrong to cobble sens from “fortuitously agglomerated contents,” the rationalists and idealists were wrong to constitute sens through the act of a pure ‘I.’ Such an act could not account for the “variety of our experience, for that which is non-sense [non-sens] within it, for the contingency of its contents.” Rationalism could not account for what I have called the lability of experience, or the way that sens crosses into a world prior to sens, into an “unreflective fund of experience.” On the contrary , “Bodily experience forces us to acknowledge an imposition of sens which is not the work of a universal constituting consciousness, a sens that clings to certain contents.” Everything said so far leads to the conclusion that the contents in question arise in movement: sens clings to folds of bodyworld movement.1 Sens in movement is central to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy and its future. As we have seen, Merleau-Ponty’s concept of sens plays on multiple meanings of the French word: sens is not a meaning abstracted from the world, it is meaning directed toward and fit with the world. It has this character precisely because it is in movement; and sens could not have the lability discussed in the introduction if it were not in movement. It is because sens is first of all in movement, and thence speaking and thinking as elaborating sens are first of all in movement, that Merleau-Ponty can later write (in the Phenomenology) of a tacit cogito, an “I think” that tacitly exists before it comes to explicitly reflect upon itself, and thus root thought in corporeal soil. And what is the project of The Visible and the Invisible if not an effort to trace sens in movement to its ontological depths, to think of sens not as insinuated into being by a reflective consciousness interrogating it from the outside, but as arising in the sinews and folds of a being that opens itself to question in a movement that Merleau-Ponty speaks of as chiasm?2 As Leonard Lawlor (1998) shows, Merleau-Ponty’s discovery of a new sense of sens anticipates Deleuze’s attempt to find a transcendence within immanence , to find sens as an expression that is not outside that which is expressed yet is nonetheless distinct from that which is expressed. But the connection between Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze (and the Bergsonian background of this connection) must be put aside for the moment. We saw that body-world movement folds into structure. But this just shows from the outside that it looks as though the body is behaving in a meaningful way. The crucial question...