Cézanne and the Phenomenon: Painting Divergences in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze [Video Embedded] (original) (raw)

" Deleuze is often considered an anti-phenomenologist. He even writes disparagingly of phenomenology’s ‘paltry’ lived-body, which we find in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. Nonetheless, Deleuze still generated an original theory of phenomena. So rather than determining whether Deleuze was a phenomenologist or an anti-phenomenologist, we might instead attempt to formulate what a Deleuzean phenomenology would be. For Merleau-Ponty, phenomena are possible on account of three levels of harmonic integration: among the parts of the phenomenal world, among our body parts functioning in sensation, and between our body and the world enveloping us. All these overlappings bind us into the flesh of the world. Yet, a Deleuzean phenomenology would be based on precisely the opposite principles: the phenomenal world consists of incompatible differences shockingly forced upon us, all while our body functions disjunctively within itself and with our surroundings. Both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze express their different views through their divergent readings of quotations attributed to Cézanne, in some cases they read the exact same quotation in opposite ways. We will look then at these Cézanne passages to see how Merleau-Ponty’s and Deleuze’s philosophies of painting exhibit their very different phenomenal theories; and, we will consider the possibility that not only is a Deleuzean phenomenology possible, it may also be a superior means to account for the phenomenality of phenomena. Consider when Cézanne speaks of painting his ‘motif’ while rendering Mont Sainte-Victoire. He approaches his visual world as if his eyes were seeing it for the first time, which causes him to encounter a chaos of colors and forms that gradually organize into discernable perceptions. For Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne’s motif is his rendering not just what he sees, but also the way his visual data dynamically organizes by means of his immediate immersion in the world and through the intimate integration of his senses. In this way, he joins the ‘wandering hands’ of nature. To emphasize this, Cézanne clasps his hands together, declaring “this is a motif.” He continues to say that if his painting properly brings together all the visual elements in a way loyal to his activity of perceiving them, then his “painting joins its hands together.” For Merleau-Ponty, this intertwining weaves our organized body into the fabric or flesh of the world. Deleuze likewise speaks of Cézanne’s motif as an ‘intertwining.’ But it is a different sort. Cézanne says that the painter must decipher the ‘text’ of nature by painting his experience of sensing it. These texts are ‘parallel:’ nature seen (out there) and nature felt (inside us). Like Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze also notes how Cézanne approaches the chaos of sensations with the eyes of a newborn child. But for Deleuze, for the painter to render and convey a sensation, this would not arise if the painter’s inner workings were organizing the sensations into recognizable objects. Note how on our routine journey to work each day, we might recognize everything but arrive without noticing anything. Only if something out of the ordinary happens, like a traffic accident, will we take note of what we sense. But also, Deleuze is not interested merely in depicting the raw chaos of what is given to us, so a mess like Pollock will not produce sensations either, perhaps like how radio static soon fades from our attention. What interests Deleuze more is the way that our sensory systems modulate the sensory givens, rendering them under a varied form, putting them together in ways that are not implied in how they are given. Cézanne developed his technique of rendering not what he saw, but the way its parts modulated into a new field of visual differences. Hence Cézanne once painted a grey wall green. For Deleuze this is because when we have sensations, it is not because our perceptions organized into coherent objects. We have sensations when we shockingly encounter a world that impresses differences on us, which because of the disorganization of our perceptual faculties, we then vary into a new set of differences. Hence Cézanne’s motif, for Deleuze, is the mechanism that injects differential forces of variation into our sensation. We and the world do not intertwine in the sense of interlacing fingers. Cézanne clasping hands are more like a sudden clap sending shock waves throughout his body. Such shocks are what make things phenomenally stand-out in their appearance. "