""According to Merleau-Ponty, perception operates through a certain principle of dislocation, for the more fixedly I stare at an object, the more it begins to vibrate––to lose its solidity. If I wish to grasp a sense of the object as stable, I must, paradoxically, keep my gaze in motion by, in effect, looking at the object in several different moments in time. Just as our Cartesian wished to annihilate depth by looking at the landscape before him or her from several different positions in space, the Renaissance painter must look at the object from several disconnected "positions" in time. And just as the Cartesian would aspire to view from which no aspect of the landscape would be hidden––the view of God––the Renaissance painter would likewise try to reach a synthesis of various perceptions of the object across time, resulting in the representation of one solid object placed in relation to a single vanishing point, fixed within the constraints of the canvas. Therefore, what the technique of perspective achieves is not only to be regarded with respect to the realm of space; what it achieves is also a conflation of time. 'The whole scene is in the mode of the completed or of eternity,' writes Merleau-Ponty. Contrary to the primary experience of perception, where the world offers up a depth of teeming, changing things (our access to which is meditated through noncoincidence), the scene that is represented in the Renaissance painting appears comprehensible and immediate, organized according to the positivity of geometric lines and planes: 'Landscapes painted in this way have a peaceful look, an air of respectful deceny, which comes of their being held beneath a gaze fixed at infinity. They remain at a distance and do not involve the viewer.'"
pg. 16
"...binocular vision presupposes a kind of unity between the world of myself, as subject, and the world of the tree, as object. Merleau-Ponty writes, 'The thickness of the body, far from rivaling that of the world, is on the contrary the sole means I have to go unto the heart of the things.' I see the tree in its depth because I, too, exist in depth; I see the world according to the insertion of my body into that world––according to the formula that binocular perception elucidates. The phenomenon of depth is proof that I am not kosmotheoros."
"On the surface, the notion of the 'sensible sentient' as articulated by Merleau-Ponty might appear to be somewhat simple––in fact, to amount to nothing more than a rather poetic description of our proprioceptive ability. Yet to think according to the flesh––according to 'the sensible sentient'––is to necessitate the development of what Merleau-Ponty describes as an entirely 'new ontology,' calling for a remarkable transformation in Western philosophical thought. Merleau-Ponty makes this clear when he writes, 'It is imperative that we recognize that this description also overturns our idea of the thing and the world, and that it results in an ontological rehabilitation of the sensible."
pg. 25
"...in the work of Cezanne (not unlike that of Debussy), there is no hard edge, no finite boundary, no fixed outline. The line is freed. Its function now is not to contain volume; rather, the line serves as a membrane through which a certain depth or volume radiates."
pg. 53
"The deep blue lines that reverberate against the flesh of the bather's body are thus like living tissue. These lines do not mark an "end" to space; rather, they evoke a certain promiscuity of flesh and space. The sense of the bather does not stop at an edge; it inhabits and lives as a dimension that spills over to the unseen vapors of the atmosphere."
pg.54
"Like the interval of silence that binds together the articulated notes of a rhythm, the line on Cezanne's canvases is not 'a positive attribute' or a 'property of the object itself.' It is a negative; it offers an opening through which space gathers and organizes itself."
pg. 56
"The first painter brought forth something that was otherwise never there—a 'carnal essence,' or, as Merleau-Ponty writes in The Visible and the Invisible, 'a possibility that is not the shadow of the actual but is its principle, that is not the proper contribution of a 'thought' but is its condition, a style.'
This style, not as a shadow or imitation of the world but as its very expressive principle, is exhibited through the seeming movement and vitality of the horses, lions, and other creatures that populate the wall of the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave. The Panel of the Horses in the Hillaire Chamber, which features a bison sketched in multiple lines that trace out his hindquarters and hooves, and the Panel of Rhinoceros in the End Chamber, which includes a rhinoceros whose single horn is indicated by multiple dashes, are extraordinary with respect to the way that their repetitive lines generate a sense of animal movement. One has the feeling, as with Cezanne's outlines in blue, of a visual space that secretes its own rhythms of space and time—and of an artistry that seeks to express the wonder of dimension and overflow of the sensible world."
pg. 57
"That is to say, what Cezanne pursues is a style—a carnal essence—of color, not color merely as a property of an object. It is not an imitation of something else; it is, itself, a 'something.' It arises 'from itself to itself,' like the resounding of movement.
In a curious way, then, operating through a cohesion of incompossibles, color serves as an emblem of what Merleau-Ponty describes as the 'universality of the sensible'—a universality that would be not removed from the particularity of the world but would arise as a transformative dimension through that very particularity: universality as a carnal essence or style."
pg. 59
The Rhythm of Thought
Jessica Wiskus
2013 by The University of Chicago
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