Space through the body: The body in space:
The Chiasmic Structure of Embodiment
In this chapter, the term embodied architecture is defined as having two aspects: the internal: the self’s spatial experience and the external: how this personal spatial experience manifests itself in physical architecture. These two entities form a chiastic structure, möbius like topology which while appearing to exist on two separate sides are in fact one. The binding element of the two is the human body which mediates all experiences. Ultimately to understand embodied architecture the uniqueness or haecceity of the unity of these two aspects needs to be appreciated. I will explore this notion of absolute embodiment principally through the writings of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze.
Merleau-Ponty’s writings embrace the importance of the body, stressing the importance of the phenomenonal, placing it at the centre of human subjective experience, while Deleuze describes the structures involved in the embodied experience of space.
Internal embodied architecture can be described as our internal cognitive map which creates our sense of self in relation to the world outside. The external on the other side is the manifestation of this sense of self: physical architecture, the work of art, through which the fully embodied experience comprised of the two can be reflected upon, altered and furthered. The simultaneous experience of these two aspects defines our embodiment within the world as corporal, fleshy, subjective creatures in constant symbiosis with our environment.
The Architecture of Embodied Cognition/Internal Embodied Architecture/Internal Embodiment
How we consume space via our bodies to create our sense of reality defines cognitive embodiment. It is this key relationship between the self (subject) and the world (the objects that comprise it) that Merleau-Ponty redefined. He rejected the objectivist viewpoint which sought to
“to gain access to an object free of all human traces, just as God would see it”
and which split the mind and the body, viewing the mind as acting and perceiving inside the transient shell of the body.
In Merleau-Ponty’s Primacy Of Perception he established a significant turn in the development of phenomenology from Husserl by arguing that experience is always mediated through a person and is thus always subjective. Husserl while emphasising the importance of phenomenon in experience still divided the subject and object into distinct entities the mind being conscious of a separate object. Merleau-Ponty argued that the scientific experiment still relies on the cognitive faculties of the scientist, thus the act of perceiving cannot be passive. By the self-subject perceiving the world, it is affected by the world, thus changing the subject’s future perception of the world. Merleau-Ponty argues that this dynamic symbiotic relationship cannot be fully defined and expressed by laws of physics as it is indescribable by equations or formulas.
However, although opposed to a purely scientific analysis of the world, Merleau-Ponty still strongly advocated the use of science in furthering the knowledge of the cognitive process through the biology of the body. Drawing delight from scientific discoveries that uncovered new methods of thought, in particular that of quantum mechanics which unlike Newtonian science included the observer as an essential part of any experiment.
Within Phenomenological discourse of the subject-object, self-world relationships, exists the term ‘intersubjectivity’ which analyses the existence of multiple, subjective individuals sharing the same subjective experience. Thus the subject while observing the objects in the world, grows to understand that some of the objects are perceiving, active agents of their own. A key element of intersubjectivity is empathy and the ability to see oneself as the Other from another perspective, one that is not your own. Intersubjectivity allows a communal subjective experience and language is one of its key elements.
At this point the Lacanian concept known as the mirror stage is pertinent.
This stage which is categorised within psychoanalysis happens when a child is between six to eighteen months. The key element within this concept is that before this stage, the subject does not reflect upon themselves or the world, their “subjectivity is formless, shapeless and otherwise fragmented” but after it “the infant thinks of herself as a separate being in a world of objects. She also identifies with another main image that she sees: that of her Mother.” “The mirror stage also charts the movement from the realm of the Imaginary, to that of the Symbolic: for Lacan, the Imaginary is pre-linguistic and image-based whereas. the Symbolic is linguistic and cultural.”
This key stage defines the process by which cognition takes place, by the objects surrounding the baby taking significance and meaning beyond their physical attributes, she is able to start creating her own cognitive map of experience, through which she will define the world.
The Subjective Sensory unity of Perception
Although Merleau-Ponty agreed with the empirical notion of John Locke, that the sensory organs worked in conjunction with one another to create the experience of each of our senses, he argued the passivity of this exchange, stating that the individual subject whose organs provide the information, determine the way in which the outside world’s data is processed and thus experienced.
“’Nature is on the inside’, says Cezanne. Quality, Light, colour, depth, which are cover there before us, are only because they awaken an echo in our bodies and because the body welcomes them.”
The topology of the Chiasm: Flesh, Reversibility
“Language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests. And what we have to understand is that there is no dialectical reversal from one of these views to the other; we do not have to reassemble them into a synthesis: they are two aspects of the reversibility which is the ultimate truth.”
Husserl’s comment on the nature of philosophy and how it reveals the world, points to the use of language as the method by which to know things, however, in Cezanne’s doubt, Merleau-Ponty extends this notion, so that in place of simply language the oeuvre, the work of art plays an even more significant role in revealing truth. As all experience is subjective, ‘the ultimate truth’ can only be found in the structure of the subject itself, rather than an objective reality, which can never be proved.
This structure can be described by Chiasmic topology. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty discusses “his new conception of the body, as a ‘chiasm’ or crossing over, which combines subjective experience and objective experience. His term for this new conception of the body is ‘flesh’ and he insists it is an ‘ultimate notion’, a concrete emblem of a ‘general manner of being’ which provides access both subjective experience and objective experience.” It describes an eternal loop of feedback between environment and subject in time, through and with the body. One that can be physically visualised by the Möbius Strip. One that at once, touches and is touched. "I can identify the hand touched in the same one which will in a moment be touching... In this bundle of bones and muscles which my right hand presents to my left, I can anticipate for an instant the incarnation of that other right hand, alive and mobile, which I thrust towards things in order to explore them. The body tries... to touch itself while being touched and initiates a kind of reversible reflection " Thus this chiasm is the embodied subject.
“The body interposed is not itself a thing, an interstitial matter, a connective tissue, but sensible for itself.”
To further understand the notion of the embodied subject, one must address the temporality inherent in experience and thus memory. How is one influenced by the world? If one did not exist within time, subjectivity would cease to have meaning (in so far as we currently define it). It is the constantly updated palimpsest of experience that we store and use to create our internal perception of the world that gives us our sense of reality. It is through our ability to exist within both the past and the present in this sense that we gain comprehension of the world.
Deleuze’s recollection-image or mnemosign: defined as “a virtual image which enters into a relationship with the actual image and extends it” further describes this chiasmatic topology. When an image is experienced in the present, the memory of the past experience sets up a relating virtual image, these merge to form a constant experience.
Deleuze furthers this concept with his definition of a Crystal-image or Hyalosign as “the uniting of an actual image and a virtual image to the point where they can no longer be distinguished.”
“…the indivisible unity of an actual image and ‘its’ virtual image…the image has to be present and past, still present and past, still present and already past, at once and at the same time… The present is the actual image, and in its contemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror... Every moment of our life presents the two aspects, it is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and recollection on the other…Whoever becomes conscious of the continual duplicating of his present into perception and recollection…will compare himself to an actor playing his part automatically, listening to himself and beholding himself playing.””
The External aspect of Embodied Architecture:
The external aspect of embodied architecture is one of the most valuable tools available to man to understand reality and ‘to make visible how the world touches us’.
Embodied architecture can be understood as the manifestation of an internal sense of reality. The production of buildings and spaces that represent, illuminate and allow reflection upon what the changing types of cultural and cognitive space of an era inhabits.
These spatial creations are then inhabited and consumed by individuals and cultures thereby going on to influence and affect the people who exist within them, further changing their notions of space and thus exhibiting a cyclical loop of progression of embodied space.
As Juhani Pallasmaa the Finnish architect and academic wrote: “The task of architecture is 'to make visible how the world touches us', as Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote of the paintings of Paul Cezanne. In accordance with Merleau-Ponty, we live in the `flesh of the world', and architecture structures and articulates this existential flesh, giving it specific meanings. Architecture tames and domesticates the space and time of the flesh of the world for human habitation. Architecture frames human existence in specific ways and defines a basic horizon of understanding. We know and remember who we are and where we belong fundamentally through our cities and buildings.”
Merleau-Ponty deals with the production of the oeuvre, the work of art as a method of philosophical discourse that both is created by the era and the philosophy it exists within but then also alters it, personalises it and creates further reflection.
He writes of the stages of pespectival representation, from the ‘spherical, visual field of the ancients, their angular perspective which relates the apparent size not to distance but to the angle from which we see the object’ to its successor perspectiva artificialis and its various incarnations in Italian Renaissance art to the Northern European painters. In each case he argues that “The language of painting is never instituted by nature; it is to be remade over and over again” that each new mode of representation is “only a particular case, a date, a moment in a poetic information of the world which continues after it.”
Martin Jay approaches the notion of a combined vision made up of various scopic regimes. In his essay, there are parallels to Merleau-Ponty’s perceptual view of the world as one, which is created by the subject. In Jay’s essay, he discusses some of the ‘regimes’ such as Cartesian perspective and the baroque, but at each instance the interest lies in the regime as a product of the subjective experience of the era it is grounded in and its subsequent life beyond it.
Jay like Merleau-Ponty finds fault with Cartesian perspectivalism, arguing that it disembodies both viewer and painter, "the bodies of the painter and the viewer were forgotten in the name of an allegedly disincarnated, absolute eye." It is unnatural, not accounting for normal binocular vision or the dynamic, saccadic motion of the human eye. This form of representation while still holding merit today was at its zenith in the 1600’s and 1700’s. It was particularly absorbed at Descartes’ time as it fitted so well with an objectivist mode of thought.
However, the evolution of the perspectiva artificialis Northern European painting which adds to our modern sense of vision /perception, extends the notion of the technique, exemplified by the Dutch 17th century painters like Vermeer, in which the eye of the observer ceases, the frame is removed and the work is based around the objects existing independently of a viewer.
"The projection is, one might say, viewed from nowhere. Nor is it to be looked through. It assumes a flat working surface." The emphasis is on the fragmentary nature of reality, "attention to many small things versus a few large ones; light reflected off objects versus objects modelled by light and shadow; the surface of objects; their colours and textures, dealt with rather than their placement in a legible space..."
The third regime of vision Jay alludes to is the Baroque, which he describes as the "more radical alternative". Although introduces 'the baroque' by its conventionally understood context in the 17th century and its links to the Catholic counter Reformation, he goes on to state that "it may also be possible to see it as a permanent, if often repressed, visual possibility throughout the entire modern era."
He himself compares it to other philosophical systems: "Leibniz's pluralism of monadic viewpoints, Pascal's meditations on paradox, and the Counter Reformation mystic's submission to vertiginous experiences of rapture might all be seen as related to baroque vision."
"The baroque self-consciously revels in the contradictions between surface and depth, disparaging as a result any attempt to reduce the multiplicity of visual spaces into any one coherent essence."
This notion of baroque sense of space first represented in the 17th century, has far reaching links to the contemporary, post-modern space we now inhabit as described by the shifting, dynamic relationships of Deleuze’s crystal image and Merleau-Ponty’s symbiotic notions of flesh and reversibility which see the world as embodied, fluid and in flux.
If architecture as oeuvre is to represent and cause reflection on the reality of existence, what is its most appropriate form today? In Chapter Three, I address the notion of an evolving technique of representation to ‘to make visible how the world touches us’. One that references the Baroque sensibility Jay writes of in a contemporary context, using the tools, discoveries and knowledge available to us today. The following chapter explores a new modern context in understanding embodiment, one which I feel extends and progresses the notions of the self, embodiment and reality put forward by both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze.
The Chiasmic Structure of Embodiment
In this chapter, the term embodied architecture is defined as having two aspects: the internal: the self’s spatial experience and the external: how this personal spatial experience manifests itself in physical architecture. These two entities form a chiastic structure, möbius like topology which while appearing to exist on two separate sides are in fact one. The binding element of the two is the human body which mediates all experiences. Ultimately to understand embodied architecture the uniqueness or haecceity of the unity of these two aspects needs to be appreciated. I will explore this notion of absolute embodiment principally through the writings of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze.
Merleau-Ponty’s writings embrace the importance of the body, stressing the importance of the phenomenonal, placing it at the centre of human subjective experience, while Deleuze describes the structures involved in the embodied experience of space.
Internal embodied architecture can be described as our internal cognitive map which creates our sense of self in relation to the world outside. The external on the other side is the manifestation of this sense of self: physical architecture, the work of art, through which the fully embodied experience comprised of the two can be reflected upon, altered and furthered. The simultaneous experience of these two aspects defines our embodiment within the world as corporal, fleshy, subjective creatures in constant symbiosis with our environment.
The Architecture of Embodied Cognition/Internal Embodied Architecture/Internal Embodiment
How we consume space via our bodies to create our sense of reality defines cognitive embodiment. It is this key relationship between the self (subject) and the world (the objects that comprise it) that Merleau-Ponty redefined. He rejected the objectivist viewpoint which sought to
“to gain access to an object free of all human traces, just as God would see it”
and which split the mind and the body, viewing the mind as acting and perceiving inside the transient shell of the body.
In Merleau-Ponty’s Primacy Of Perception he established a significant turn in the development of phenomenology from Husserl by arguing that experience is always mediated through a person and is thus always subjective. Husserl while emphasising the importance of phenomenon in experience still divided the subject and object into distinct entities the mind being conscious of a separate object. Merleau-Ponty argued that the scientific experiment still relies on the cognitive faculties of the scientist, thus the act of perceiving cannot be passive. By the self-subject perceiving the world, it is affected by the world, thus changing the subject’s future perception of the world. Merleau-Ponty argues that this dynamic symbiotic relationship cannot be fully defined and expressed by laws of physics as it is indescribable by equations or formulas.
However, although opposed to a purely scientific analysis of the world, Merleau-Ponty still strongly advocated the use of science in furthering the knowledge of the cognitive process through the biology of the body. Drawing delight from scientific discoveries that uncovered new methods of thought, in particular that of quantum mechanics which unlike Newtonian science included the observer as an essential part of any experiment.
Within Phenomenological discourse of the subject-object, self-world relationships, exists the term ‘intersubjectivity’ which analyses the existence of multiple, subjective individuals sharing the same subjective experience. Thus the subject while observing the objects in the world, grows to understand that some of the objects are perceiving, active agents of their own. A key element of intersubjectivity is empathy and the ability to see oneself as the Other from another perspective, one that is not your own. Intersubjectivity allows a communal subjective experience and language is one of its key elements.
At this point the Lacanian concept known as the mirror stage is pertinent.
This stage which is categorised within psychoanalysis happens when a child is between six to eighteen months. The key element within this concept is that before this stage, the subject does not reflect upon themselves or the world, their “subjectivity is formless, shapeless and otherwise fragmented” but after it “the infant thinks of herself as a separate being in a world of objects. She also identifies with another main image that she sees: that of her Mother.” “The mirror stage also charts the movement from the realm of the Imaginary, to that of the Symbolic: for Lacan, the Imaginary is pre-linguistic and image-based whereas. the Symbolic is linguistic and cultural.”This key stage defines the process by which cognition takes place, by the objects surrounding the baby taking significance and meaning beyond their physical attributes, she is able to start creating her own cognitive map of experience, through which she will define the world.
The Subjective Sensory unity of Perception
Although Merleau-Ponty agreed with the empirical notion of John Locke, that the sensory organs worked in conjunction with one another to create the experience of each of our senses, he argued the passivity of this exchange, stating that the individual subject whose organs provide the information, determine the way in which the outside world’s data is processed and thus experienced.
“’Nature is on the inside’, says Cezanne. Quality, Light, colour, depth, which are cover there before us, are only because they awaken an echo in our bodies and because the body welcomes them.”
The topology of the Chiasm: Flesh, Reversibility
“Language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests. And what we have to understand is that there is no dialectical reversal from one of these views to the other; we do not have to reassemble them into a synthesis: they are two aspects of the reversibility which is the ultimate truth.”
Husserl’s comment on the nature of philosophy and how it reveals the world, points to the use of language as the method by which to know things, however, in Cezanne’s doubt, Merleau-Ponty extends this notion, so that in place of simply language the oeuvre, the work of art plays an even more significant role in revealing truth. As all experience is subjective, ‘the ultimate truth’ can only be found in the structure of the subject itself, rather than an objective reality, which can never be proved.
This structure can be described by Chiasmic topology. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty discusses “his new conception of the body, as a ‘chiasm’ or crossing over, which combines subjective experience and objective experience. His term for this new conception of the body is ‘flesh’ and he insists it is an ‘ultimate notion’, a concrete emblem of a ‘general manner of being’ which provides access both subjective experience and objective experience.” It describes an eternal loop of feedback between environment and subject in time, through and with the body. One that can be physically visualised by the Möbius Strip. One that at once, touches and is touched. "I can identify the hand touched in the same one which will in a moment be touching... In this bundle of bones and muscles which my right hand presents to my left, I can anticipate for an instant the incarnation of that other right hand, alive and mobile, which I thrust towards things in order to explore them. The body tries... to touch itself while being touched and initiates a kind of reversible reflection " Thus this chiasm is the embodied subject.
“The body interposed is not itself a thing, an interstitial matter, a connective tissue, but sensible for itself.”
To further understand the notion of the embodied subject, one must address the temporality inherent in experience and thus memory. How is one influenced by the world? If one did not exist within time, subjectivity would cease to have meaning (in so far as we currently define it). It is the constantly updated palimpsest of experience that we store and use to create our internal perception of the world that gives us our sense of reality. It is through our ability to exist within both the past and the present in this sense that we gain comprehension of the world.
Deleuze’s recollection-image or mnemosign: defined as “a virtual image which enters into a relationship with the actual image and extends it” further describes this chiasmatic topology. When an image is experienced in the present, the memory of the past experience sets up a relating virtual image, these merge to form a constant experience.
Deleuze furthers this concept with his definition of a Crystal-image or Hyalosign as “the uniting of an actual image and a virtual image to the point where they can no longer be distinguished.”
“…the indivisible unity of an actual image and ‘its’ virtual image…the image has to be present and past, still present and past, still present and already past, at once and at the same time… The present is the actual image, and in its contemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror... Every moment of our life presents the two aspects, it is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and recollection on the other…Whoever becomes conscious of the continual duplicating of his present into perception and recollection…will compare himself to an actor playing his part automatically, listening to himself and beholding himself playing.””
The External aspect of Embodied Architecture:
The external aspect of embodied architecture is one of the most valuable tools available to man to understand reality and ‘to make visible how the world touches us’.
Embodied architecture can be understood as the manifestation of an internal sense of reality. The production of buildings and spaces that represent, illuminate and allow reflection upon what the changing types of cultural and cognitive space of an era inhabits.
These spatial creations are then inhabited and consumed by individuals and cultures thereby going on to influence and affect the people who exist within them, further changing their notions of space and thus exhibiting a cyclical loop of progression of embodied space.
As Juhani Pallasmaa the Finnish architect and academic wrote: “The task of architecture is 'to make visible how the world touches us', as Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote of the paintings of Paul Cezanne. In accordance with Merleau-Ponty, we live in the `flesh of the world', and architecture structures and articulates this existential flesh, giving it specific meanings. Architecture tames and domesticates the space and time of the flesh of the world for human habitation. Architecture frames human existence in specific ways and defines a basic horizon of understanding. We know and remember who we are and where we belong fundamentally through our cities and buildings.”
Merleau-Ponty deals with the production of the oeuvre, the work of art as a method of philosophical discourse that both is created by the era and the philosophy it exists within but then also alters it, personalises it and creates further reflection.
He writes of the stages of pespectival representation, from the ‘spherical, visual field of the ancients, their angular perspective which relates the apparent size not to distance but to the angle from which we see the object’ to its successor perspectiva artificialis and its various incarnations in Italian Renaissance art to the Northern European painters. In each case he argues that “The language of painting is never instituted by nature; it is to be remade over and over again” that each new mode of representation is “only a particular case, a date, a moment in a poetic information of the world which continues after it.”
Martin Jay approaches the notion of a combined vision made up of various scopic regimes. In his essay, there are parallels to Merleau-Ponty’s perceptual view of the world as one, which is created by the subject. In Jay’s essay, he discusses some of the ‘regimes’ such as Cartesian perspective and the baroque, but at each instance the interest lies in the regime as a product of the subjective experience of the era it is grounded in and its subsequent life beyond it.
Jay like Merleau-Ponty finds fault with Cartesian perspectivalism, arguing that it disembodies both viewer and painter, "the bodies of the painter and the viewer were forgotten in the name of an allegedly disincarnated, absolute eye." It is unnatural, not accounting for normal binocular vision or the dynamic, saccadic motion of the human eye. This form of representation while still holding merit today was at its zenith in the 1600’s and 1700’s. It was particularly absorbed at Descartes’ time as it fitted so well with an objectivist mode of thought.
However, the evolution of the perspectiva artificialis Northern European painting which adds to our modern sense of vision /perception, extends the notion of the technique, exemplified by the Dutch 17th century painters like Vermeer, in which the eye of the observer ceases, the frame is removed and the work is based around the objects existing independently of a viewer.
"The projection is, one might say, viewed from nowhere. Nor is it to be looked through. It assumes a flat working surface." The emphasis is on the fragmentary nature of reality, "attention to many small things versus a few large ones; light reflected off objects versus objects modelled by light and shadow; the surface of objects; their colours and textures, dealt with rather than their placement in a legible space..."
The third regime of vision Jay alludes to is the Baroque, which he describes as the "more radical alternative". Although introduces 'the baroque' by its conventionally understood context in the 17th century and its links to the Catholic counter Reformation, he goes on to state that "it may also be possible to see it as a permanent, if often repressed, visual possibility throughout the entire modern era."
He himself compares it to other philosophical systems: "Leibniz's pluralism of monadic viewpoints, Pascal's meditations on paradox, and the Counter Reformation mystic's submission to vertiginous experiences of rapture might all be seen as related to baroque vision."
"The baroque self-consciously revels in the contradictions between surface and depth, disparaging as a result any attempt to reduce the multiplicity of visual spaces into any one coherent essence."
This notion of baroque sense of space first represented in the 17th century, has far reaching links to the contemporary, post-modern space we now inhabit as described by the shifting, dynamic relationships of Deleuze’s crystal image and Merleau-Ponty’s symbiotic notions of flesh and reversibility which see the world as embodied, fluid and in flux.
If architecture as oeuvre is to represent and cause reflection on the reality of existence, what is its most appropriate form today? In Chapter Three, I address the notion of an evolving technique of representation to ‘to make visible how the world touches us’. One that references the Baroque sensibility Jay writes of in a contemporary context, using the tools, discoveries and knowledge available to us today. The following chapter explores a new modern context in understanding embodiment, one which I feel extends and progresses the notions of the self, embodiment and reality put forward by both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze.
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