The Sense of Space

CHAPTER 4 ENVELOPING THE BODY IN DEPTH

CHAPTER 4 ENVELOPING THE BODY IN DEPTH I AM WALKING DOWN the hill toward my house. As I move toward it, it turns different faces toward me. First I see only its west side, with the north face tucked in behind, hidden, although obviously there. As I get closer, the north face swings into view, and the west side contracts behind until all I see is the north face; and then the east side makes an appearance, and so on, as I move past and around the back of my house. For my moving, seeing body, the house is not there all at once, its faces dance by, swallowed up and enveloped in one another. This experience belies the traditional claim that visual depth perception reconstructs, from two-dimensional arrays of data, spatial properties of a fully present solid object in space. And it belies the claim that the object of perception is a fully present solid thing. Within perception, a fully present object is mythical. As Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and others point out, we never perceive a thing as fully present all at once; things are present through limited perceptual aspects. Does this mean we are never presented with solid things? No, it just means that some form of quasi-absence inheres in solidity. In fact, MerleauPonty argues that this quasi-absence is definitive of perceived solidity: solidity is manifest as an inexhaustible quasi-absence that is continually replenished during perceptual explorations. My house is solid, I live in it, it is there at the bottom of the hill. But I am a small, finite being-in-depth, I perceive the house from the limited place of my body, I cannot encompass the house all at once. So my house has hidden sides, sides that are quasi-absent, but are nonetheless present as the sequel to visible sides. The hidden sides belong to the perceptual envelope of the house. Imagine that my house is replaced with a film-set façade. At the top of the hill I see the west side, but as I move closer the envelope of my house sadly fails to unfold into something more 107 108 THE SENSE OF SPACE since it is just a façade. But the west side of my real house unfolds into the north face, there is a sort of continual peristaltic movement in which sides unfold into new sides and consume sides past. This is palpably revealed in a stop motion or overcranked film of a house or a building going by: the faces of the building rhythmically swing into and swallow one another, giving a sense of a solid building spinning in space around its corners, like a dancer spinning around feet that periodically tamp down into the ground. I perceive my house as solid not because I see all of it at once, but because it inexhaustibly hides and reveals itself in a peristaltic flow that couples with my movement around it.1 Our perception of unified solid things in depth does not refer to replete geometrical solids, but to the envelopes of things, to what Edward S. Casey calls, following William James, their voluminousness. We perceive either the outside envelope of a thing’s volume, as when we see a house from the outside, or the inside envelope of a thing’s volume, as when we perceive a room from the inside. And we perceive such envelopes as a flow of parts that continually unfold into and envelop one another in movement. The flowing, voluminous envelope through which we perceive the solid pith of things is key to depth perception, since depth perception is a matter of perceiving solid things that are separate from us. Place is also key, since it enables our explorations of the inexhaustible envelopes of things. I show that the way that parts of things envelop one another is correlative to and constrained by the way body parts envelop one another in movement, and is further constrained by the larger place in which movement happens. Together these two constraints specify what I call the topology of enveloping : if we look into the point in which the body crosses with the world, we find that it has a topo-logic of parts that envelop one another in relation to larger place. Our movement with the world is folded through this topology and thence expresses a sens of depth, in the way that a shock folded through the gesture expresses a...