Abstract
This paper addresses issues of agency and self-identity on the basis of a phenomenology of embodiment. It considers a tension in accounts of embodiment between, on the one hand, the body as the locus of subjectivity, lived experience, and agency, and, on the other hand, the body as constructed, as the site where discursive regimes of power are inscribed. In exploring this tension I consider Frantz Fanon’s and Sarah Ahmed’s phenomenological accounts of racism to illustrate the ways in which social power and violence come to be implicated in these conflicts within our embodied identities. I also consider Foucauldian “power” in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “institution.” I argue that only the phenomenological concept of institution, by drawing our attention to the ambiguities of lived embodiment, succeeds in offering us resources for thinking about the interplay between passivity and agency in the life of the subject, and, in particular, about a form of agency not wholly reducible to the effects of power.
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Notes
Merleau-Ponty distinguishes, in this connection, between what he terms the “actual body” and the “habitual body” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, p. 84).
In speaking of “transformative efficacy” here I am using language from Coole (2005) and endorsing her claim that such efficacy is a necessary feature of agency. This means that, minimally, and without assuming that it would be a property of a discrete voluntary subject, agency would be discernable as a certain capacity to resist the determining effects of power. The issue I am identifying here could be seen as a version of the classical agency-structure debate in the social sciences. But for rich philosophical treatments of the issue of agency, invoking the tension between phenomenological and Foucauldian accounts, see Allen (2002), Butler (1989, 1988), Grosz (1993), McNay (1991), and Werhle (2016).
As Merleau-Ponty writes: “Bodily space can be distinguished from external space and it can envelop its parts rather than laying them out side-by-side because it is the darkness of the theatre required for the clarity of the performance, the foundation of sleep and the vague reserve of power against which the gesture and its goal stand out, and the zone of non-being in front of which precise beings, figures, and points can appear.“(Merleau-Ponty 2012, p. 103)
See Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the body schema in the context of his account of “the spatiality of one’s own body and motricity.” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, p. 102ff)
As Merleau-Ponty writes: “My own ‘psyche’ is not given to me in any other way”; we must “recognize the articulation and the melodic unity of my behaviors as originary givens of inner experience and […] recognize that introspection, reduced down to its positive content, […] consists in making explicit the immanent sense of a behavior” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, pp. 58–9).
The concept of Stiftung, variously translated as “foundation,” “establishment,” or “institution,” appears regularly through Husserl’s corpus and is of particular significance to the accounts of embodiment and passive synthesis developed in Ideas II, the unpublished manuscript of which was familiar to Merleau-Ponty (Husserl, 1989, 120).
See Sartre (1984), pp. 340–400.
The term l’intercorporéité appears in Merleau-Ponty’s writings from the 1950’s (e.g., he uses it in his discussion of intersubectivity and Husserl’s account of embodiment [in Ideas II] in “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” in Signs (Merleau-Ponty 1964), but the idea is implicit in his discussions of intersubjectivity in Phenomenology of Perception.
Husserl (2001), p. 444; p. 582
This logic of retroactive identification with an instituting act is developed in Kym Maclaren’s account of emotion as institution. According to Maclaren, Merleau-Ponty’s account of institution continues the account of embodiment of Phenomenology of Perception in which “we find an argument for the relative passivity of the embodied subjects, which, by virtue of being caught up in, dispossessed by, or exposed to meaningful vectors in being that outstrip it, while also taking up or resuming (‘reprendre’) those transcendent meanings, helps realize new ways of making sense of the world and of being itself” (Mclaren, 2017, p. 53)
The concept as Merleau-Ponty uses it goes well beyond the sense of the term as deployed in the work of Sir Henry Head and in the traditions of psychology and neurology (Head 1920). In these contexts it is typically understood to be a kind of mental representation of the body and its various parts.
And, in any case, in the 1962 Colin Smith translation of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty’s “schéma corporel” is translated as “body image.”
See Weiss (1999), esp. Chapter 1
The term “surface of inscription” is used by Elizabeth Grosz to summarize a Foucauldian account of the body (1993)
Ahmed (2007), p. 161
A similar concern is voiced by Maren Wehrle (2016, p. 60): “Foucault’s detailed description of the docile body […] seems to suggest the possibility of a non-docile body. It seems implicit that before all of these mechanisms are exercised upon it, there is a wild and rebellious body, a body that bears the possibility of resistance against a restrictive power and forced embodiment of norms. The implication here is that there somehow must be an original or natural body, hidden behind the normalized one.”
This understanding of personal history as haunted by “refractory shreds” of sense that can never be absorbed in the unity of narrative is also the basis for Tengelyi’s compelling challenge to Paul Ricouer’s narrative theory of personal identity. For Tengelyi what defines personal being is at once the narratability of a story and the haunting of experience by that which the story excludes: “Every lived experience may be said to include a variable polysemy which can never by completely exhausted by a narrative, however rich it may be. A story necessarily curtails and impoverishes the experience it is designed to express: by unifying and homogenizing its multifarious shreds of sense, it deprives it of its ever changing ambiguity. However, the discarded shreds of sense do not disappear without leaving at least some traces behind, which may be rediscovered if new challenges find some resonance in them. That is why experience always has some elements in store for a rectified story” (Tengelyi 2004, p. 48).
I would like to express my thanks to two anonymous reviewers for Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences whose very insightful suggestions led to some significant revisions in the expression of my argument. I would also like to thank the organizers and participants at the conference “Phenomenology and Personal Identity” at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague (November 29–30, 2018). Many provocative questions and thoughtful discussions at that lively gathering helped to inform my thinking in the final version of this paper.
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This paper was first presented as a keynote at the conference Phenomenology and Personal Identity. Nov. 28-30, 2018. Charles University, Prague.
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Marratto, S. Identity as institution: power, agency, and the self. Phenom Cogn Sci 20, 387–405 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-020-09707-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-020-09707-w