Imagining Bodies: Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Imagination

Introduction

I n t r o d u c t i o n 1 1 Introduction E very year on one of the hottest weekends of the summer, a small town is transformed into a festival of sound and light. The usually quiet main street of shops and cafés becomes a stage for buskers who sing and dance, swallow knives, and juggle balls and flaming torches. Farther down the street, a mime quietly performs her art. She is dressed in a black leotard, her face is painted white with exaggerated make-up on her lips and around her eyes, and her hair is tied back away from her face. With sweeping gestures she creates the illusion of a wall or a tiger, magically changing her immediate surroundings into a palace with kings and queens, or a dangerous jungle filled with lions and tigers. How is it that the mime, so simple in dress and appearance, can communicate so clearly and “audibly” to her audience? The observer can tell instantly what the mime is experiencing. He feels her fear, senses the approaching tiger, shares her lust for power or her disdain for the criminal. The spectator is drawn into each of these illusions through the mime’s skillful use of various techniques. By stretching her body as she pulls down on the imagined rope, the mime makes him feel the tension of climbing the rope. By moving her hands to the left while her abdomen moves to the right, she causes him to feel the tension between herself and the imagined wall, creating the illusion of action and space. The mime is aware of a number of gestures that bear an immediate significance for her 2 I n t r o d u c t i o n audience, and by using these she is able to tell a story without making a sound.1 The secret of the mime’s skill in storytelling is rooted in her capacity to make explicit what is implicit in the embodied experience of every individual. Each time a person speaks, his words are accompanied by gestures and facial expressions that add meaning to what he has said. The red face of a blush, the intense flush of anger or jealousy, and the drooping posture of timidity are all examples of how the body expresses feelings even in the absence of words.2 From birth we find ourselves in a world of silent meanings . Young children in particular seem keenly aware of their bodies , making use of their natural gestures to communicate feelings and needs before they can do so with words. As we mature and are encouraged to find our voice and make ourselves heard, the language of the body often recedes into the background, with the ability it has to communicate increasingly taken for granted. From the quiet street corner, the mime encourages those who gather around her to recall the creative power of embodiment. Like the mime, Merleau-Ponty challenges his readers to reconsider the expressive capacity of the body and the imagination. His commitment to this task is most clear and apparent in his philosophy of the body. From his earlier writing on perceptual experience to his later ontology of flesh and vision, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is a celebration of the body. In his first two books, The Structure of Behaviour and Phenomenology of Perception, he is particularly concerned with how the body changes natural gestures into elaborate and personal modes of expression. Gesticulations and the simple skills of balance and posture are developed through practice into personal styles of living, and these shape the way that a person feels about herself and interacts with others. To understand the body as a whole structure of existence, Merleau-Ponty argues, it is important to recognize at the heart of embodiment an imaginative ability to modify the natural skills of the body into free and creative modes of existence. I n t r o d u c t i o n 3 Merleau-Ponty does not address the imagination of the body in a detailed or explicit manner. He focuses, instead, on embodiment in general and its role in perception, psychopathology and social relations. Within these contexts a theory of the imagination can be found, but most commentators on his earlier works fail to even discern Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on the creativity of the body. They tend to...