Chapter One (2,500)

Chapter One: Space through the body: The body in space: The Chiasm of Embodied Architecture

In this chapter, the term embodied architecture is defined as having two aspects, the internal and the external (try to come up with better terms for these). These two entities form a Möbius like topology which while appearing to exist on two separate sides are in fact one. I will explore these two notions principally through the writings of Merleau-Ponty and to a lesser extent Deleuze.
Merleau-Ponty’s as the forerunner of embodiment studies has been described as being the main explorer of the subject:
“It is doubtful that any other philosopher, phenomenologist or otherwise, has ever paid such sustained attention to the significance of the body in relation to the self, to the world, and to others. There is no relation or aspect of his phenomenology which does not implicate the body, or what he terms the body-subject … and significantly, his descriptions allow us to reconceive the problem of embodiment in terms of the body's practical capacity to act, rather than in terms of any essential trait.”

As already described briefly in the introduction, the internal embodied architecture can be described as our internal cognitive map which creates our sense of self in relation to the world outside. Merleau Ponty’s rejection of an objectivist standpoint in understanding perception defines this and places the individual body at the centre of experience.
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 role of art in understanding reality.
Within these aspects lie a vast world of thought which speculates on our existence within the world as corporal, fleshy subjective creatures in constant symbiosis with our environment.

The Internal aspect of Embodied Architecture:
Firstly, the interior notion of Embodied architecture: how we consume space via our bodies; how the translation from sensory input from an outside world is transformed via the medium of our bodies (including brain) into a sense of experience of reality, of a being existing in space.
The Subjectivity Of Space: The Inadequacy Of An Empirical /Objectivist Standpoint
Merleau-Ponty redefined the dualistic relationships of subject and object and the self in the world.
“He argued that the significance of the body, or the body-subject as he sometimes referred to it, is too often underestimated by the philosophical tradition which has a tendency to consider the body simply as an object that a transcendent mind orders to perform varying functions.”
In Merleau-Ponty’s Primacy Of Perception' which can be summarised as "all consciousness is perceptual consciousness" he established a significant turn in the development of phenomenology by arguing that experience is always someone’s no matter how scientifically observed. The scientific experiment still relies on the cognitive faculties of the scientist, thus the study and exploration of this perceptual process takes supremacy over the conventional acceptance of the objectivity of science; thus the act of perceiving cannot as the objectivists and materialists state be passive. By the self perceiving the world, the subject is affected by the world, thus changing their (the subject’s) future perception of the world. Likewise, the subject and objects relationship is dynamic:(more definition needed here). Merleau-Ponty argues that these dynamic symbiotic relationships cannot be fully defined and expressed by laws of physics and chemistry as they have innate individual and mental qualities indescribable by equations or formulas.
He disputed the objectivist method due to its reliance on the tools of empiricism and intellectualism in deciphering reality, methods which attempted to be uncontrolled by perspective:
“If science aims at knowledge, it must seek to describe the world in that objective way, it must aim ‘to gain access to an object free of all human traces, just as God would see it’”
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
Not five senses - one sensing ; the holistic way we consume space and reality
“For him, perception is not merely the result of the functioning of individual organs, but also a vital and performative human act in which "I" perceive through the relevant organs. Each of the senses informs the others in virtue of their common behavioural project, or concern with a certain human endeavour, and perception is inconceivable without this complementary functioning. Empiricism generally ignores this, and Merleau-Ponty contends that whatever their efficacy in explaining certain phenomena, these type of scientific and analytic causalities cannot actually appraise meaning and human action. As one critic points out, "if we attempt to localize and sectionalize the various activities which manifest themselves at the bodily level, we lose the signification of the action itself"
“We are creatures that both see and move about among other creatures and things. The visible world and the world in which we move are intertwined—they are parts of our world and cannot be separated from one another.”

The topology of the Chiasm / Reversibility : The Past inside the Present
Chiasmic topology describes an eternal loop of feedback between environment and subject through time. One that can physically be visualised by the Möbius Strip.
“Rather than maintaining a traditional dualism in which mind and body, subject and object, self and other, and so forth, are discrete and separate entities, in The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty argues that there is an important sense in which such pairs are also associated. For example, he does not dispute that there is a divergence, or dehiscence, in our embodied situation that is evident in the difference that exists between touching and being touched, between looking and being looked at, or between the sentient and the sensible in his own vocabulary. On the contrary, this divergence is considered to be a necessary and constitutive factor in allowing subjectivity to be possible at all. However, he suggests that rather than involving a simple dualism, this divergence between touching and being touched, or between the sentient and the sensible, also allows for the possibility of overlapping and encroachment between these two terms.”
Reversibility:
“Touching and touched are not simply separate orders of being in the world, since they are reversible, and this image of our left hand touching our right hand does more than merely represent the body's capacity to be both perceiving object and subject of perception in a constant oscillation”
The Folded Body:
“To be an embodied subject then is to be an active being with needs which motivate actions and in relation to which elements in the surrounding environment are meaningful. It is to be in a world which is in this way partly a world of one’s own: one does not create the things in the world in the sense of bringing them into existence, but one’s needs and thoughts about the world rooted in one’s nature as a biological organism give a unity of meaning to those objects which make them into a single 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. If it was not already past at the same time as the present, the present would never pass on. The past does not follow the present that is no longer, it coexists with the present it was. The present is the actual image, and in its contemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror. According to Bergson, ‘paramnesia’ (the illusion of déjà-vu or already having been there) simply makes the obvious point perceptible: there is a recollection of the present, contemporaneous with the present itself, as closely coupled as a role to an actor. ‘Our actual existence, then, whilst it is unrolled in time, duplicates itself along with a virtual existence, a mirror image. 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.” i.e. subjectivity and plasticity and intersubjectivity (to be summarised clearly)

(lots to be done to this bit)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.”
The shifting relationship between subject and object through the ages can be seen clearly manifested in the art and architecture of the time.
Pre perspective:
Cartesian perspectivalism:
Otherwise known as one point perspective which came from southern European Renaissance ideas, it exemplified the Renaissance endeavor to incorporate science into all aspects of life. Although the word Cartesian stems from its association to René Descartes, Jay sees Cartesian perspectivalism as being contrary to Descartes philosophy . Jay quotes Richard Rorty from his 'Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" (1979) "In the Cartesian model the intellect inspects entities modeled on retinal images...In Descartes' conception - the one that became the basis for 'modern' epistemology - it is representations which are in the mind."

Jay finds fault in a number of areas with this method of vision, which assumes a fixed and singular eye / viewing point. Jay argues that that both viewer and painter are disembodied, writing that "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. He writes

"In Norman Bryson's terms, it followed the logic of the Gaze rather than the Glance, thus producing a visual take that was eternalised, reduced to one"point of view" and disembodied." (p.7)

He also notes that this de-eroticises the art: "The moment of erotic projection in vision - what St Augustine had anxiously condemned as "occular desire" - was lost as the bodies of the painter and viewer were forgotten in the name of an allegedly disincarnated, absolute eye."
(More on architecture’s representation needed)
Baconian perspectivalism: The Northern European painting technique: Vermeer
As a sub group of Cartesian perspectivalism occuring in Northern Europe, in 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..." (p.13 - quoting Svetlana Alpers. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth century p.44) Modern day photography and video are described as being the descendants of these method of vision.
The Baroque:
Jay is most interested and excited by this model of vision which he describes as "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."

Using the writing of the French philosopher Christine Buci-Glucksmann, La Raison Baroque of 1984 and La folie du voir of 1986, he sets up this third model as the one most relevant and appropriate to the reality of vision in the modern age. There are many comparisions to be made in the way in which he describes this vision with the writings of the deconstructivists such as Derrida. He writes, "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 coherant essence."

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."
This notion of baroque sense of space first represented in the 17th century, has far reaching links to the contemporary, postmodern space we now inhabit as described by the shifting, dynamic relationships of Deleuze’s crystal image and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodiment.
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Merleau-Ponty’s deep and complex analysis of the role of art in deciphering philosophical experience leads to the further questioning of how to further these explorations. But what if this process/tool to explore the contemporary sense of space within a specific timeframe is applied to today as the context. What medium is best suited. This will explored in detail in Chapter 3.