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Journal of Visual Culture
DOI: 10.1177/1470412905050889
2005; 4; 39Journal of Visual Culture
Suzannah Biernoff
Carnal Relations: Embodied Sight in Merleau-Ponty, Roger Bacon and St Francis
http://vcu.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/4/1/39
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journal of visual culture
Carnal Relations: Embodied Sight in Merleau-Ponty,
Roger Bacon and St Francis
Suzannah Biernoff
journal of visual culture
Copyright  2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 4(1): 39-52 [1470-4129(200504)4:1]10.1177/1470412905050889
Abstract
This article attempts a medieval Christian rereading of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty's enigmatic and unfinished text, The Visible and the
Invisible. Along the way, it complicates current notions of ocularcen-
trism, as well as the idea of an embodied gaze. The privileged term in
these historical fragments is flesh: in Merleau-Ponty and in medieval
Christianity, a carnal presence insinuates itself into the relations
between bodies, between things and thoughts, self and world. In the
end, the speculative encounter between the two central studies offers
a new perspective on debates about the historiography of vision and
the peculiar potency of the visual world.
Keywords
body schema  embodied vision  flesh  gaze  incarnation 
ocularcentrism  optics
We can imagine a disembodied mind having visual experiences but not
tactile ones. Sight does not require our being part of the material world
in the way in which feeling by touching does.
(G.N.A. Vesey, `Vision', The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1967: 252)
True philosophy consists in re-learning to look at the world, and in this
sense a historical account can give meaning to the world quite as
`deeply' as a philosophical treatise.
(Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, 1962: xx)
Vision is often imagined (L. imaginare, `to picture to oneself') as an
intellectual act, and ocular metaphors dominate our accounts of knowledge
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and understanding. I will say `I see what you mean' if I have understood you,
or I might question the clarity of your ideas (from the Greek idein, `to see').
Seeing and knowing are linguistically and symbolically entwined in Indo-
European cultures (Tyler, 1984). The mind has its own `eye' with which to
inspect and to speculate (L. specere, `to look at or observe') and I can try with
this interior `eye' to put things `in perspective': to take a step back, remove
myself from the scene, and survey the situation more `objectively'.
This ancient constellation of metaphors helps to explain why sight has so
often been characterized as the least bodily of the senses. In the Aristotelian
tradition, vision was associated with cognition, while touch was the sense most
fundamental for survival (Aristotle, 1984). There is almost an evolutionary
logic to the classical sensory hierarchy, with sight representing the human
potential for knowledge, the capacity to transcend the particular through
reason; and touch, the primordial sense, signifying the animal nature we
share with the beasts. Keller and Grontkowski summarize the epistemologi-
cal formula of western philosophy in a sentence: vision `connects us to the
truth as it distances us from the corporeal' (1983: 209).
This article aims to complicate recent accounts of ocularcentrism or the
primacy of vision by comparing two moments in a more intimate and
distinctly corporeal history of vision: one premodern, the other modern ­
albeit with a postmodern afterlife (for example, Busch and Gallagher, 1992;
Dillon, 1991; Foti, 1996). The resonances between medieval visual theory
and Merleau-Ponty's account of embodied vision are not evidence of a
continuous history, and scientific developments during the intervening
centuries produce very different ideas about the nature of visual `contact'.
Nevertheless, remarkable similarities emerge from the encounter imagined
here: most importantly, a relational understanding of vision, embodiment
and subjectivity; and the role of the flesh in figuring these relationships.
My first set of examples is drawn from the later medieval period in Western
Europe, beginning around 1200. In terms of the broader histories of vision
and visuality, the 13th century is interesting because scientific attention to
optical theory and empirical observation coincided with a more general
reorientation and discursive elaboration of sight, as a perceptual process but
also as a means of social communication and spiritual communion. To para-
phrase Umberto Eco, one might speak of a perceptual shift from symbolism
to naturalism during this period: instead of looking through the visible world
towards a higher, invisible reality, many people (among them scientists and
artists) looked attentively at nature (Caviness, 1991; Eco, 1988). They also
looked at God. As Gothic churches were being adorned with painted altar-
pieces, crucifixes, fresco cycles and liturgical objects, devotional practices
were becoming increasingly focused on the visual perception of the sacred
as well as on techniques of interior visualization. An emphasis on private
devotion from the 13th century onwards provided the impetus for the
production of illuminated manuscripts; small, affordable devotional
paintings and sculptures; and the construction of family chapels. The later
Middle Ages also saw the popularization of `indulgence images' associated
with the remission of sin, and a proliferation of miracle-working images.
journal of visual culture 4(1)40
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Visual metaphors and ocular desires pervade 13th-century scientific and
theological texts, sermons, folklore and the literature of courtly love. Sight is
celebrated as the foundation of empirical knowledge and the means by
which Christians can understand God's divine nature as well as his humanity.
A look could harm or caress; it could reveal the mathematical structure of a
walnut or the mystery of the sacred wounds; it could serve the spirit or the
flesh, idle curiosity or philosophical reflection. All of these beliefs and prac-
tices might be described as ocularcentric, but this would be to suggest that
the privileging of sight amounted to a coherent discourse rather than a set of
ideas and behaviours that were often in conflict. W.J.T. Mitchell is right to
question some of the assumptions that have informed recent discussions of
ocularcentrism, particularly its association with modernity. He maintains
(and I agree) that the `notion of vision as hegemonic or non-hegemonic is
simply too blunt an instrument to produce much in the way of historical or
critical differentiation' (2002: 174). Instead of a unified `regime' of vision,
one finds in the Middle Ages a deep ambivalence towards vision and the
visible and also, unsurprisingly, an ambivalence towards the body. It is this
particular nexus of vision and embodiment that I wish to explore here. In the
heterogeneous texts and images that bear traces of medieval ways of seeing
and knowing, two distinct tendencies or traditions can be discerned, and
each is articulated in relation to the body or flesh.
The more familiar tradition ­ to which I have alluded already ­ privileges
empirical observation and intellectual insight. Roger Bacon's Perspectiva,
one of the most influential western medieval texts on optics, opens with the
claim that optical science is `the flower of the whole of philosophy'. Through
optics, `and not without it, can the other sciences be known' (1962, Vol. 2:
420). Bacon (c. 1214­92) studied at Oxford and Paris, and joined the
Franciscan Order in 1257. By the time he began his major works in the 1260s,
he had access to translations of a wealth of Arabic material on optics that had
not been available to his predecessors, and it is the synthesis of Greek and
Arabic learning for which he is most famous (Lindberg, 1976, 1983). Optics
was to be the key that would unlock the natural world. As well as being an
object or field of study, perspectiva was a way of seeing, a discipline in both
senses of the word: the verb perspicere means to survey or scrutinize, to
investigate thoroughly, to `see through'. Geometrical abstraction functioned
something like an X-ray, enabling the `perspectivist' to discern the underlying
structure of the natural world. If this sounds like a chapter in the progressive
rationalization of sight, it is worth pausing over some of the affinities
between medieval science and theology. Steven Goldman (1982) has argued
that modern science shares with medieval Christian thought a certain
symbolic or `iconic' tendency. Instead of displacing the symbolizing sensibil-
ity of Augustine and his medieval followers, geometrical optics could be said
to have extended that mentality into the equally symbolic language of math-
ematics. Well practised in reading nature as `a book whose author was God'
(Goldman, 1982: 10), medieval scholars such as Bacon were fluent when it
came to the elaboration of physical or geometrical `allegories'. Seen in this
way, scientific naturalism ­ like its pictorial equivalent ­ must be regarded not
in fact as natural, inevitable and universal, but as cultural and semiotic.
Biernoff Carnal Relations 41
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The other reason to be sceptical of allusions to a singular (objectifying,
disembodied, dispassionate) `scientific gaze' is that medieval science para-
doxically contributed to a broader cultural investment in bodily experience.
This happened largely through the influence of Aristotelian thought from
around 1200, with its valorization of the body as the foundation of knowl-
edge. Following Aristotle, Bacon insists that sensation occurs in the organs
of sense: the eyes, the nerves of the skin and surrounding flesh, the internal
organs of the brain. In the Aristotelian Middle Ages there was no mind­body
`problem' (Putnam and Nussbaum, 1994). The images of the visible world
reproduced in the eyes and brain are, for Bacon as for Aristotle, material
images. The idea of a disembodied mind having visual experiences is an oxy-
moron in this context because the sensitive soul is embodied; its perceptions
and emotions `enmattered' (Aristotle, 1984: 1.1.403a25).
This Aristotelian understanding of the body-subject coincided with a new
devotional emphasis on the bodily (especially visual) experience of an
increasingly human God. As with the abstractive, `symbolizing' tendency in
medieval religion and science, this seemingly contradictory privileging of
material bodies and images suggests a cross-fertilization of medieval science
and spirituality. I will focus on just one point of confluence here: the theory
of sensible species and its significance for the devotional ideal of imitatio
Christi. From a modern point of view the theory of species is one of the more
peculiar details of premodern science. The term comes from the Indo-
European spek: `to see'. In its archaic sense, it simply meant `aspect, form, or
exterior appearance' (Lindberg, 1983: liv), but by the later Middle Ages
species had become the foundation of neo-Aristotelian physics. Following
Aristotle and his Arabic commentators, Bacon claimed that species radiated
from everything in the physical world to produce effects (Lindberg, 1983: lv).
Sensible species were responsible for perception. Sight, said Bacon, occurs
when the species of an object `impresses' its form on the responsive matter
of the eye and brain: not in the superficial way that a seal is reproduced in
wax, but a deeper impression that produces a transformation `in the interior
of the recipient' and not just `in a surface' (Bacon, quoted in Lindberg, 1983:
45). When we talk of being affected or `moved' by something, we are using a
figure of speech that derives ultimately from this Aristotelian principle that
sensation is a `qualitative alteration' (Aristotle, 1984: 2.4.415b). To perceive
or sense (there is no distinction between sensation and perception for
Aristotle or Bacon) is to be materially altered.
The medieval phenomenon of imitatio Christi shares a number of basic
principles with Bacon's optics, most importantly the conviction that sight
entails a physical transformation of the spectator. St Francis of Assisi's conver-
sion before the crucifix `proved' that seeing was not only believing, but being
assimilated with Christ's flesh and blood through a visual interaction. In the
official biography of St Francis, Bonaventure's Legenda maior, the saint's
identification with Christ is described in the most detailed and naturalistic
terms. Written between 1260 and 1263, the Legenda was used by Giotto for
his frescoes of the life of St Francis in the upper church at Assisi. Francis's
flesh becomes `wax', moulded into the image of the crucified Christ:
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As the vision disappeared, it left in his heart a wondrous glow, but on
his flesh also it imprinted a no less wondrous likeness of its tokens. For
his hands and feet seemed to be pierced through the midst with nails,
the heads of the nails shewing in the palms of the hands, and upper
side of the feet, and their points shewing on the other side; the heads
of the nails were round and black in the hands and feet, while the
points were long, bent, and as it were turned back, being formed of the
flesh itself, and protruding therefrom. The right side, moreover, was ­
as if it had been pierced by a lance ­ seamed with a ruddy scar, where-
from ofttimes welled the sacred blood, staining his habit and breeches.
(St Bonaventure, 1904: 139­40)
The `image' of Christ received by St Francis is more than a pictorial likeness;
it is a sculptural reproduction. In fact, Bonaventure (1904) mixes his
metaphors. God is the divine sculptor, fashioning the image of Christ out of
flesh; but he is also the Word, writing his creation into existence. St Francis
bears the marks of the crucifixion `written on his members of flesh by the
finger of the Living God' (1904: 141). This ambiguity surrounding the mode
of representation (writing or sculpting) is not confined to theological discus-
sions of imitatio Christi. Mary Carruthers (1990) has shown that metaphors
of writing/reading and picturing/viewing were central to medieval discus-
sions of memory. Whether written and read or pictorially represented and
viewed, memory was conceived as a physical process; a bodily imprint as real
as St Francis's stigmata. In this sense, the devotional practice of identification
with Christ mirrors (and no doubt exploits) the medieval `art of memory',
with its emphasis on bodily sight, interior visualization, and the mnemonic
articulation of memory images (see Bennett, 2001). To gaze, like Francis, at
a crucifix, or to meditate on scenes from the Passion, would have been to
enter into this fabric of associations and expectations.
It seems axiomatic to say that vision is crucial to visionary mysticism.
However, little has been written on the subject beyond the observation that
religious images frequently served as a stimulus and focus for visions (for
example, Hamburger, 1990, 1992; Ringbom, 1969). Julian of Norwich's
`showings' are typical in this respect. Completed in around 1393, the diary of
her 16 revelations is marked by the seemingly ubiquitous presence of a
crucifix. For example, the Second Revelation begins with the words: `I looked
with bodily vision into the face of the crucifix which hung before me, in
which I saw a part of Christ's Passion ...' (1978: 193). Jesus appears before
her bodily eyes, and it is his corporeal, visible presence that precipitates her
own physical and emotional `passion'. It is possible to explain St Francis's
encounter with Christ in terms of an intense psychological identification or
read Julian's visions as hallucinations, her pains and paralysis as psychoso-
matic symptoms. The alternative is to approach visionary literature in its
historical context: to ask why imitatio Christi was so plausible and com-
pelling as a spiritual goal. Julian and Francis would not have explained the
changes in their bodies in psychopathological terms, but they would certainly
have thought of sight ­ ordinary or miraculous ­ as a physical interaction. My
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argument is that miraculous visions and mystical revelations merely amplify
the corporeal effects of ordinary sight as understood by Bacon and his
commentators. Similarly, the functions and significance of medieval images
(both mental and extramental) reflect a specifically medieval understanding
of vision.
Vision, in the medieval world, did not leave the viewer untouched or
unchanged. The consequences of looking when one should not were well
rehearsed; but one could also expect to be positively changed by judicious
looking. If (following Aristotle) perception is defined as assimilation (Bacon,
in Lindberg, 1983), the objects of one's attention are of critical importance.
Devotional texts repeatedly instruct their readers to visualize the Virgin with
her child, to recollect every detail of Christ's life and death; to gaze at his
wounds and, through extended meditation, to identify with his suffering and
with his mother's sorrow (see Despres, 1989). Interpreted in light of
medieval (rather than modern) theories of perception, the visual apprehen-
sion of Christ's self-sacrificing love or the Virgin's grief emerges as something
other than a process of verbal or non-verbal `communication'. In semiotic
terms we are dealing with a special kind of language: a corporeal text or
somatic sign that is `read' by the viewer's body. Sacred images, such as the
miraculously transformed bread and wine of the mass, were no longer merely
symbols of a transcendent reality. They might contain doctrinal lessons, or
make the stories of the Bible come alive. They could engender feelings of
remorse or compassion, or enable the viewer to identify with Christ's suffer-
ing or the Virgin's sorrow; but in addition to these sanctioned roles, devo-
tional images staged an affective encounter with a God made flesh. Studying
historical accounts of embodied vision helps us to make sense of the power
that images have exercised. It also sheds light on their prohibition.
Iconoclasm and iconophobia confirm the transformative potency of images ­
not primarily as communicative media, but as objects that inexplicably and
irresistibly affect our feelings and behaviour.
There are intriguing parallels between medieval descriptions of embodied
vision and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's account of perception in his last unfin-
ished work, The Visible and the Invisible (1968). Merleau-Ponty's insistence
on the mind's incarnation (in a generalized `flesh' that exceeds individual
bodies) and his metaphor of perceptual intertwining recall the kind of recip-
rocal, corporealized sight described by Bacon and others in the later Middle
Ages. In both scenarios vision has an ambiguous character: it is `of' the body
(in the sense that our gaze feels like an extension of ourselves), yet at the
same time it seems to originate in the world. In the final part of this article I
will discuss some of the similarities and differences between Merleau-Ponty's
phenomenological account of embodied sight and the corporealities of
medieval spirituality and Aristotelian natural philosophy. Such distant and
empirically unconnected sources are not brought often into dialogue, but I
think it can be a valuable strategy for several reasons. Approaching medieval
visual culture from a phenomenological perspective raises questions about
the prioritization ­ and denigration ­ of bodily experience historically.
Why do some cultures, institutions and traditions censor or repress bodily
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experience, while others privilege and elaborate it? What are the ethical, legal
and spiritual implications of these two positions: one in which human sub-
jectivity is imagined as essentially disembodied (mind, soul, consciousness);
the other in which self, agency, memory and intersubjectivity are embodied?
Do these contrasting versions of the self engender different visual, spatial
and social practices; different aesthetic sensibilities?
These are of course vast questions, and their answers lie beyond the modest
scope of this article. My aim here has not been to interpret medieval visual
culture from a modern phenomenological perspective. Reversing the more
usual order of interpretation I have instead approached Merleau-Ponty from
a medieval Christian perspective. One of the effects of this exercise has been
to illuminate (if not elucidate) a key term that Merleau-Ponty reappropriates
from Catholicism: flesh. I have argued elsewhere (Biernoff, 2002) that flesh
(caro) and body (corpus) are terms with quite different associations, and
distinct genealogies.1 In medieval sources, and in Merleau-Ponty's writings,
`flesh' exceeds the visible body. Sight lends the flesh an intersubjective
dimension; it literally carries carnality outside the viewer's corporeal envelope
and into the world. In his Confessions (written c. 400) St Augustine admits
to `dwelling externally in the eye of my flesh' (1953: 60). Of course, in the
context of the `sins of the flesh' the term denotes human bondage rather than
communion, but nonetheless there is a sense of the flesh being something
held in common. Flesh has a generic quality. The redemptive flesh of Christ
is shared by communicants during the ritual of the Eucharist and becomes
the communal foundation of the church. Meister Eckhart (c.1260­1327) uses
the marital imagery in Genesis 2:24 ­ `They were two in one flesh' ­ to
elucidate the relationship between matter and form, or `the sense faculty and
the sense object' (Meister Eckhart, 1981: 105).
For Merleau-Ponty flesh is `the formative medium of the object and the sub-
ject' (1968: 147). At times visible, but often invisible, this flesh is no ordinary
thing. It is a `possibility, a latency' ­ not an object or idea, but an `atmos-
phere' or `element' (1968: 84, 139). Every interaction between myself and
my environment, every idea, sensation, movement or act of communication
is a `carnal relation' (1968: 84). The perceptual encounter, for example, is
likened to the meeting of sea and strand, distinct and yet fluid. My gaze
`envelops' things; like the incoming tide it `clothes them with its own flesh';
but in the process it also reveals things: `veiling them, it unveils them' (1968:
130­1). Thought and language are `sublimations' of the flesh; `less heavy,
more transparent' than the flesh of the body (1968: 153). The formative,
elemental `flesh of the world' is described as a `primordial One' (1968: 84, n.
15), yet it gives birth to alterity through its `folds' and `invaginations' (1968:
141, 149). Merleau-Ponty rejects the Cartesian model of the self as a centred
and autonomous consciousness (for which the body serves as a container or
instrument). Rather it is the body ­ itself a fold in the `landscape' of the flesh
­ that provides unity because it `assembles into a cluster the "consciousnesses"
adherent to its hands, to its eyes' (1968: 141, 149). The mind is simply `the
other side of the body', a depth or dimensionality that `overflows' into
the body, `encroaches upon it, is hidden in it ­ and at the same time needs
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it, terminates in it, is anchored in it' (1968: 259; working notes dated June
1960).
There is something at once originary and redemptive about the flesh in The
Visible and the Invisible. As an `incarnate principle' (1968: 139) it reprises
the central Christian mystery of `God made flesh'. Both incarnations are
essentially enigmatic because they enact an intertwining of opposites: visible
and invisible, immanent and transcendent, spirit and matter, unity and
multiplicity. Theologians might insist on the miraculous reconciliation of
opposites in the incarnate Redeemer, but there is a real sense in which
personal spirituality ­ as well as bitter theological debate ­ has often been
animated by the unsettling paradoxes of the Incarnation. In `Faith and Good
Faith' Merleau-Ponty paraphrases Pascal's comment that `the dogmas of the
Incarnation and Original Sin are not clear but are valuable because they
reflect man's contradictions of body and soul, nobility and wretchedness'
(1964: 175). His own desire to reveal the `strange and paradoxical' nature of
the world through phenomenological reduction is not so dissimilar to the
discipline of religious contemplation (1962: xiii, 43). The `indirect' dialecti-
cal method is a `negative philosophy' akin to `negative theology' (1968: 179).
Merleau-Ponty was raised in a devoutly Catholic family. Simone de Beauvoir
recalled that early in their friendship he described himself as a `quiet unbe-
liever' but nevertheless insisted that truth must be sought within one's own
social and religious boundaries. It was the first of many disagreements, and
she recounts her embarrassment at discovering that her `best friend' at
university was a member of the `Holy Willies', a group of left-wing Catholic
intellectuals (Bair, 1991: 124). Merleau-Ponty became disillusioned with the
church as a young man, frustrated by its lack of political engagement. This
rejection of Christianity as an institution took place against the backdrop of
the Second World War, and `precisely during the period when he was seek-
ing an alliance with Marxism in some institutional form' (Rabil, 1967:
215­18, original emphasis). By 1945 when Phenomenology of Perception
was published, he was openly critical of mainstream Catholicism. What he
objected to was the idea of God as an absolute consciousness or being, a
separate totality: `if God exists', he wrote in 1947, `then perfection has
already been achieved outside this world; since perfection cannot be
increased, there is, strictly speaking, nothing to do' (1964: 174). Often
described as an atheist, his position was more equivocal than that (Bannan,
1966; Rabil, 1967). In his inaugural lecture at the Collge de France in 1953,
he reserved a place for the sacred within philosophy, not as a totality but as
a relation:
If one remembers the history of the word atheism ... we must admit
that all thinking which displaces, or otherwise defines, the sacred has
been called atheistic, and that philosophy which does not place it here
or there, like a thing, but at the joining of things and words, will always
be exposed to this reproach ... (Merleau-Ponty, 1963: 46).
If the sacred is to be found between words or things, so too is the self. For
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me, this is the most significant parallel between Merleau-Ponty's ideas and
the medieval understanding of embodiment, subjectivity and vision. One
finds in both a relational definition of self, perception and meaning; a
fluidity of being that undermines the modern ideal of centred, bounded and
autonomous subjects.2 In The Visible and the Invisible the poetic terrain of
the maternal body confounds the binary thinking that opposes self to other,
body to mind, and sensation to thought. We are bound to being by an
`umbilical bond', a `continuous tissue that joins us vitally to the things and to
the past' (1968: 107, 125). Our primary reality ­ the pre-linguistic experience
that Merleau-Ponty is attempting, paradoxically, to articulate ­ is one of
`perpetual pregnancy, perpetual parturition, generativity and generality'
(1968: 115).
Carnality is difficult to think precisely because it does not resolve into empiri-
cal or logical categories. The same conceptual difficulty is a feature of
medieval discussions of carnality (which, coincidentally, also exploit
feminine metaphors: see Biernoff, 2002: 31­4). The flesh is both visible and
invisible, an attribute of bodies and thoughts, gazes and shadows: Alan of
Lille, writing in the 12th century, referred to the flesh as a `fog' (1980: 183­4).
Flesh transgresses the boundaries separating inside from outside, visible
from invisible. In the Middle Ages, the vicissitudes of the flesh often gave rise
to theological anxiety and hostility, and also to fantasies of transcendence.
For Merleau-Ponty the ambiguities of carnality denote the generative `flux of
perceptual life' (1968: 32). In The Visible and the Invisible, the poetic land-
scape of the flesh becomes a dialectical field: `that which admits reciprocal
actions or interactions ... [and] cannot be contemplated from without and in
simultaneity, but must be effectively traversed' (1968: 89­90). Dichotomies
are abstract, static and essentializing, promising the `whole view' in one total-
izing sweep. The dialectical journey must be traversed at close range and
believed in at every turn.
For Christians, of course, the road is not (it is usually hoped) endless. At the
point, finally, where Christianity offers answers to life's questions, our two
case studies diverge completely. As Merleau-Ponty argued in his `Lecture on
Montaigne':
The value of religion lies in this, that it reserves a place for what is
foreign to us, and that it knows our fate to be enigmatic ... As a ques-
tioning, religion is justified as long as it remains without answers.
(quoted in Bannan, 1966: 348­9 n. 16; see also Merleau-Ponty, 1964:
174­8)
The `hyperdialectic' that Merleau-Ponty (1968) preaches refuses the imag-
ined comforts of heaven (synthesis, resolution, rest) and instead courts
ambiguity and plurality. However, there is a further disagreement between
our case studies. As models of embodied vision they rely on very different
understandings of visual `contact'.
Bacon regarded the active visual force as an extension of the embodied soul.
As an organ of the soul, the eye `passes over the separate points of a visible
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object', `grasp[s] its surface and contain[s] its extremities' (1962, Vol. 2: 440,
468). This is a long way from the modern understanding of vision: while we
regard the gaze as an active force, with psychological and social effects, we
do not think of it as having any physical existence. A look or a stare might be
tender or threatening, but these perceptions are not believed to have any
physical basis. As Teresa Brennan notes, the gaze is `immaterial, symbolic
indeed, "metaphorical"' (1996: 219). Was Merleau-Ponty then merely using a
figure of speech when he wrote that `the things attract my look, my gaze
caresses the things' (1968: 76)? What happens, exactly, when visible objects
`arouse in me a carnal formula of their presence' (1993: 125)? Clearly,
Merleau-Ponty did not believe that our visual contact with the world was
physical in the medieval sense, although he admitted `a sort of truth in
the nave descriptions of perception: eidola or simulacra, etc' (1968: 209).
So what kind of contact does sight allow? In a note dated April 1960 the
sensation of being looked at is described as a sort of `telepathy':
One feels oneself looked at (burning neck) not because something
passes from the look to our body to burn it at the point seen, but
because to feel one's body is also to feel its aspect for the other. One
would here have to study in what sense the other's sensoriality is impli-
cated in my own ... (1968: 245)
Merleau-Ponty only hints at the extent of this corporeal and sensory
`interimplication', but it evidently builds on the idea that our bodies are a
hinge between self and world. We experience them as both subject (for itself)
and object (for the other). We are `passive-active', `sensible-sentient' and
`visible-seeing' ­ although we are never conscious of both sides of the
hyphen or hinge simultaneously (1964: 162­63; 1968: 137, 271). As soon as
I become aware of being watched or catch my reflection in a window, my
body acquires a `halo of visibility' (1968: 244, original emphasis) and my
interior world recedes. The reversibility of vision is treated as universal by
Merleau-Ponty: my body has evolved as `an organ to be seen' (1968: 244); but
the illustrations he uses raise unexplored questions. A `woman in the street
feeling that they are looking at her breast, and checking her clothing' (1968:
189) is not interchangeable with her male (imagined or real) observers. The
bodies of observer and observed may be interimplicated ­ on one side a side-
long look or subtle change of gait, and on the other side an involuntary flush
of embarrassment and checking of buttons ­ but the parts they play in this
mundane drama are not reversible. To rephrase Merleau-Ponty, one would
have to study the extent to which our sensoriality (in this case our sense of
being visible) is inflected by gender, race, class and age.
Returning to the burning neck, the gaze that `burns' (or protects, or caresses)
has become part of my body ­ my skin, my self-conscious gestures, my quick-
ened pace. My empirical limits are also disrupted by my own gaze, which
feels like an extension of my sentient body as it `rests on' things, `holds'
another's eyes or `searches' a crowd. Either way, seeing and being seen are
part of the subject's schema corporel: our non-conscious, `tacit understand-
ing' of our bodies in relation to concrete situations and specific tasks.
journal of visual culture 4(1)48
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Objects (and gestures, places or people) are perceived against the `double
horizon' of one's own body schema and the external world (Merleau-Ponty,
1962: 101). My body schema is the `background' of all my thoughts, feelings
and actions. Shaun Gallagher uses the phantom limb phenomenon to clarify
the difference between body image and body schema in Merleau-Ponty's
writing: while the patient's body image is a conscious and empirically `true'
representation of his postoperative condition, the `phantom remains part of
the body schema, part of the practical attunement of the body to its environ-
ment' (Gallagher, 1998: 226).3 Born of our relations with our physical and
social environment, our body schema `cannot be mere physiology or mere
consciousness' (1998: 237).
Vision, finally, is relational for Merleau-Ponty because it reveals the intertwin-
ing of perceiver and perceived: on the one hand, the act of seeing seems to
take us outside our bodies into the world; yet on the other hand, what we
see is inside us, somewhere `behind' our eyes. `My vision is at the thing
itself', but it is also `my own or "in me"' (1968: 29). Although informed by
different scientific paradigms and separated by some 700 years, there are
compelling structural similarities between Merleau-Ponty's `perceptual faith'
and Bacon's synthesizing approach to the visual theories of his day. For
Bacon, sight was both passive and active: we are physically altered by things
that we see (a process known as `intromission'); but our eyes are also
channels for a radiant power of vision (the theory of `extramission'). The
synthesis of extramission and intromission produces a dynamic perceptual
relationship, and this reciprocal `gaze' is echoed in discourses of carnal and
spiritual sight.
What are the implications of these intimate visions for the study of visual
cultures? Art history as a discipline could be said to have its empiricist origins
in modern ocularcentrism. Its clear delineation of spectator and image; the
delimitation of more or less discrete stylistic or symbolic entities; more
recent attempts to view these objects in their historical, cultural or economic
`perspective': these ways of making sense of visual artefacts are also ways of
seeing. The question is, might other ways of seeing generate different forms
of knowledge and methods of inquiry? To what extent does Merleau-Ponty's
perceptual `intertwining' (or Bacon's synthesis of extramission and intromis-
sion) translate into the practices of historiography and criticism?
One of the things that Merleau-Ponty offers is a challenge to rethink the
`object' of historical (or any other kind of) knowledge as a dynamic interac-
tion. In the case of a devotional image, for example, where the visual and
affective encounter traverses the visible frame, it is necessary to shift one's
focus ­ and perhaps one's disciplinary skills ­ so as to try and elucidate the
historical significance of that encounter. I have attempted to do this here by
returning to the fundamental question: what is vision? If seeing is a cultural
(and gendered) practice as well as a physiological process, then it cannot
provide a historical common ground or the basis of a shared aesthetic experi-
ence. History and philosophy can play a similar role in defamiliarizing the
familiar.
Biernoff Carnal Relations 49
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Notes
1. The significance of the terms caro and corpus within the medieval archive is
discussed at length in Biernoff (2002). The following commentaries provide a
varied introduction to the debates and historical sources: Bynum (1995), d'Avray
(1994), Le Goff (1992), Lochrie (1991) and Welton (1998).
2. Bynum argues that medieval bodies seem more ambiguous and `elastic' than
their modern counterparts (1991: 108­9, 114, 218­22). Similarly, Laqueur
highlights instances of biological fluidity. Prior to the Enlightenment, he
contends, `Culture ... suffused and changed the body that to the modern
sensibility seems so closed, autarchic, and outside the realm of meaning' (1992: 7).
3. Although Merleau-Ponty does not explicitly differentiate body image and body
schema, Gallagher (1998: 232) argues that he uses these terms consistently to
mean different things. The distinction is lost in the English translation of
Phenomenology of Perception where schema corporel is confusingly translated as
`body image'.
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Suzannah Biernoff is a research fellow and lecturer in visual culture at
Middlesex University. Drawing on the ideas of Augustine, Grosseteste, Roger
Bacon, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault, among others, her work uses premodern
and postmodern texts and images to explore genealogies of the flesh, vision
and affect. She is currently working on a social and phenomenological
history of war machines, focusing on technology and embodiment in the
First World War.
Address: Suzannah Biernoff, Art, Philosophy and Visual Culture, Middlesex
University, Cat Hill Campus, Barnet, Herts, London EN4 8HT, UK. [email:
s.biernoff@mdx.ac.uk]
journal of visual culture 4(1)52
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