Grounding Agency in Depth: The Implications of Merleau-Ponty's Thought for the Politics

of Feminism
Author(s): Helen Fielding
Source: Human Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Apr., 1996), pp. 175-184
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20011103
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Human Studies 19: 175-184, 1996.
? 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Grounding agency in depth: The implications of

Merleau-Ponty5 s thought for the politics of feminism

HELEN FIELDING
Programme in Social and Political Thought, York University, North York,
Ontario M3J183, Canada

Abstract. While poststructuralist feminist theorists have clarified our understanding of the
gendered subject as produced through a matrix of language, culture, and psycho-sexual
affects, they have found agency difficult to ground. I argue that this is because in these
theories the body has served primarily as an inscribed surface. In response to this surface
body, particular to this age, I have turned to Merleau-Ponty's concept of depth which allows
us to theorize the agency crucial to feminist politics. While the poststructural i sts' rejection
of depth is largely due to its roots in Cartesian rationality, depth is much more than this.
Rather than allowing for the impossibility of political action, depth means that as bodily
moving and acting subjects we are part of Being, and thus part of the questions raised in
this age, even if it is a mark of this age that this tends to be forgotten.

There is a direct connection between an alienation that many women are expe?
riencing with respect to their bodies and the direction of some current feminist
theory. This historically situated connection is not unrelated to the technologi?
cal and scientific advances of the late Twentieth Century that have been guided
by an emphasis on rational and empirical knowledge; it is an emphasis that is
characteristic of the Modern Period, and eclipses the value of intuition and
experience. And so, I argue, there is a need to go back to the body to recapture
a new meaning for the political, not in terms of ambiguity, that has already
been well discussed (Finn, 1992), but rather in terms of the depth that sup?
ports and makes possible ambiguity and contingency. It is indeed depth, as
explored through Merleau-Ponty's alternative articulation, that gives us a
clearer understanding of our participation in the world, and more specifically,
leads us to a concept of agency. If we approach agency from the perspective of
our embodied being, it is not necessary to revert to the humanist subject of
Western philosophy that has come under attack in poststructuralist critiques;
at the same time it is possible to overcome the problems of the post-humanist
subject who is the product of discursive relations, but has no essential self that
precedes that production. Indeed, it is in the debates over agency that the
poststructuralist theories of subjectivity have been most critically attacked.
In feminist theory, the issue of agency has played a particularly crucial

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 176

role; feminists need a theory that places women as more than mere puppets
on a political stage. North American postmodern feminist theory has left
itself open to this critique as it tends to read the body as a discursively pro?
duced text, socially acted upon and not dependent upon bodily essences.
While we are indebted to poststructuralism for our understanding of the
gendered subject as produced through a matrix of language, culture, and psy?
cho-sexual affects, the poststructuralist body has served primarily as a text,
as an inscribed surface. This has two consequences: first, the fleshy body is
not prescribed a role in the production of the subject. Second, experience can
no longer be trusted as a basis for truth or knowledge; experience is to be
considered in terms of its "discursive nature" and "the politics of its con?
struction" (Scott, 1992: 37). What distinguishes postmodern feminist theo?
rists is that they do not deny agency; however, agency has been difficult to
ground, in part because of the emphasis on social construction, but in par?
ticular because they have not addressed our bodily being. While the empha?
sis on the discursive releases the feminine essence from its political moorings,
the body of experience, the phenomenal body, has been sacrificed.
It helps to situate the concept of depth historically. In her book, Body Criti?
cism, Barbara Stafford (1991) explores the metaphors used in medicine and
art during the Eighteenth Century. Depth, which she associates with the medi?
cal endeavours to go beneath the skin, was equated with that which was not
visible. It was prioritized over the visible or surface, represented in her book
by art. For Cartesians and Newtonians, sight could not be trusted; thus a
rational approach guided by the mathematical method of inquiry would lead to
truth; even though, paradoxically, "optical demonstration and visualization
were central to the process of enlightening" (Stafford, 1991: 1). Thus depth,
the privileged invisible, was accordingly relegated to explorations that would
render it knowable through a process of uncovering. This mapping of the
unseeable, our inheritance from the Cartesians, has been exaggerated to such
proportions in the late Twentieth Century that it marks a radical shift in how
we experience, and in how we come to know the world. For example, there is
now access to ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) which can
probe the body "noninvasively".2 Some of these technologies can be used on a
pregnant woman's womb. If the practices that surround pregnancy provide an
index for the experiences of corporeality of a culture, as Barbara Duden ( 1991 )
argues, then we should look to how the interior of women's bodies, in particu?
lar their wombs, have been opened to medical scanning technology. It is not
that I necessarily want to condemn technology per se, but many of the so
called advances are corporeally alienating for women. Although the myriad of
tests to which women can now submit are supposed to give them more control
over their lives and the decisions they make, this control is falsely conceived
(Gregg, 1993). If, in this age, "reality" is only that which can be shown (Duden,

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 177

1991: 108), then it is understandable that the decisions women make are
usually dictated by the results of these tests; but test results are also a con?
structed reality, and they are read in accordance with criteria of normality
and abnormality, whereby the standards of normality become narrower and
narrower (Qu?niart, 1992: 165?166).
This process of mapping the body, of projecting images that are supposed
to represent the corporeal interior, tends to flatten the body to an image on the
screen, or a medical diagram on the page. The Cartesians regarded the body
as a room, a container with a strict boundary between the inside and the out?
side, and this sentiment of body as container is now culturally predominant.3
Barbra Duden demonstrates, however, that this corporeal experience is his?
torically situated. In her book, Geschichte unter der Haut (1987), she de?
scribes the bodily sensations portrayed by women who were the patients in the
praxis of a doctor in the German town of Eisenach in the early Eighteenth
Century. First it is notable that the doctor administered to his patients based
on their descriptions of what they were experiencing. He conducted no physi?
cal exams of his patients. Second, the very descriptions reveal that these pa?
tients experienced their bodies differently than I, for example, experience mine.
The women described their bodies in terms of intensities and flows. The body
was not regarded as an object of possession, separate from the spirit; accord?
ing to Duden, "the language of the blood was a language of the soul" (1987:
152).4 Similarly, like flowing blood, the body was described in terms of fluxes;
for example, to halt the oozing of a sore would be to stop up a necessary
outward flow that, without release, would harden and cause further illness.
Moreover, the skin, as the barrier between the inner body and the influences
of the outer environment, was a fragile boundary (1987: 144). The flows that
transgressed this boundary maintained a delicate balance. Thus, the doctor
kept careful histories of the life events and situations of his patients, as these
could be directly related to their medical complaints. Duden points out that
although the doctor did, occasionally, cut into a corpse, at that time, the liv?
ing body was not cut open and examined; thus, the anatomical observances
that a dissection offered did not connect to the doctor's living patients. There
was no correlation between the inner body as observed and the body as lived.
In the late Twentieth Century, however, the technology that allows us to
make the depths visible does not result in a tendency towards experiencing
boundaries as fluid; rather, boundaries have been absolved. Bodily thickness
has been collapsed, mapped out on a computer screen is a slice or a truncated
version of that which was formerly not visible. As bodily depths become
objectively observable, they also become just another lateral sign system onto
which the visible sign systems can spread. The body itself becomes an exten?
sion of the very technology used to map it. In a recent study of the experiential
aspects of pregnancy, Anne Qu?niart found that women submitted to the am

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 178

niocentesis test during their pregnancies because they found it impossible to

live with the uncertainty that the fetus might be abnormal.5 While the women
of Eisenach might have visited the doctor when they were pregnant, they only
sought his advice if they were in pain; and it was their pain as they described
it to which he administered (Duden, 1991: 76-77). In our current medical
system, it is the fetus and not the woman who is treated as the patient. The
woman's body becomes a support system and the object construct of tests
(Duden, 1991: 56). Indeed, Qu?niart attributes the feelings of solitude that
the pregnant women in her study experienced to the manner in which they
were treated as body/objects and not as body/subjects (1992: 171; see also
King, 1992; Hubbard and Landall, 1988: 104). This corporeal alienation, I
argue, affects the way that we think, act, and make decisions, an alienation
that, accordingly, has political consequences.
Despite its implication in a Cartesian prioritizing of the rational, depth, as
Merleau-Ponty shows us, offers much more than our Cartesian inheritance of
this term.6 In Phenomenology of Perception, for example, Merleau-Ponty be?
gins with the distinction between objective and primordial depth. The former
is that which is the measure of the relationship between objects detached from
experience. But primordial depth is that experienced by a "subject involved in
the world" (1962: 256-7). My perception of my surroundings, the relative
sizes of the objects that inhabit them, as well as my own understanding of my
sensed and sentient body, is not carried out through geometric calculations.
Rather, I have a certain sense of spatiality, "a 'lived' distance" that binds me
to things and that "measures the 'scope' of my life at every moment" (Merleau
Ponty, 1962: 286).
This sense of spatiality is derived from the union of things with the body, a
union that is provided through perception. Perception can be understood to en?
compass the senses that open onto the world; but, for Merleau-Ponty, the dis?
tance that is inherent to vision helps to exemplify the significance of depth. For
one, we see depth through the interrelatedness of objects in our view, the hiding
of one object behind another. And yet, we know that objects are not actually
defined by this overlapping; rather, it demonstrates "my incomprehensible soli?
darity with one of them-my body" (Merleau-Ponty, 1964:173). My observa?
tion of overlapping relations presupposes a depth that I have encountered from
the beginning. Correspondingly, my observation of the relational quality of the
objective world is also dependent upon the sedimented structures that allow me
to comprehend an object's size and constancy because I have experienced the
objective world from varying distances and proximities. In that sense, our phe?
nomenal understanding is as much evaluative as descriptive which means that
our evaluations will rarely be exact but rather will be based on our past experi?
ences and on our expectations for the present and future.
Our observation of colour also illustrates how perception reveals depth. If,

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 179

as Merleau-Ponty shows us, colour can never be perceived apart from objects,
then blue can only be the woolly blue of the carpet, the reflecting surface of
the lake. C?zanne, Merleau-Ponty reminds us, would use colour to present the
objective world. For the painter, a picture could contain "within itself even the
smell of the landscape". That is,

the arrangement of colour on the thing .. .signifies by itself all the responses
which would be elicited through an examination by the remaining senses; that
a thing would not have this colour had it not also this shape, these tactile
properties, this resonance, this odour .. .(Merleau-Ponty 1962: 318-19).

Thus colour is not merely surface but is, in fact, supported by and inherent
to the depth that cannot be seen. Colour is an opening of depth onto the world.
Essential to our observation of colour, to vision, is lighting. There is a
certain logic to lighting that we understand through our sedimented structures.
Indeed, lighting provides the level of a situation. It underlies relations, high?
lights and casts shadows. Thus, when we observe lighting as a material ob?
ject, as we might in an ill-wrought painting, it does not delineate the relations
between other objects, it does not lead our gaze but rather arrests it (Merleau
Ponty, 1962: 310). The lighting becomes a determinate object rather than
something more amorphous, rather than something that illuminates. It is light?
ing that establishes and that throws into relief the interrelatedness of objects
and beings ? an interrelatedness that is always situational, never absolute,
and that is inherent to depth.
Similarly, the boundaries between myself, things and others are amorphous
and vague. I am linked to others through their contingencies, moods, emotions
and activities that spread into my own and move beyond (Mallin, 1990: 233).
Thus this lived depth, this primordial depth is more than the third dimension,
more than mere breadth; breadth is interchangeable with height and width.
But this Cartesian approach to depth is only applicable to a god who can see
everything from all points of view at the same time. Primordial depth, how?
ever, is dependent upon the situatedness of being-within-the-world.
But it is not merely the situatedness of my body that grants a correspond?
ingly situated vision of the world. My body as both sensible and sentient,
brings me to the things themselves; this includes both a sense of the thick?
ness of my body, as well as my tactile interaction with the world (Merleau
Ponty, 1968:136). However, this interaction with both things and with others
is never immediate and absolute. In my contact with others there is a coming
close, a contact with the more determinate qualities, but this is accompanied
by a spreading and a fading away of our backgrounds, our pasts and our
futures. Others always remain distant from me in their own depth. Thus my
relation to other beings is not one of "possession" but rather of "disposses?
sion" (Mallin, 1990: 232). Perhaps the example of pregnancy followed by

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 180

childbirth best illustrates the coming into being of a chiasmic relation be?
tween mother and child through the dispossession of the labour itself. In
Merleau-Ponty's description of the three dimensions of touch. The first two,
the touching of the thing, and the "passive sentiment of the body", situate a
body in the world; but it is the third dimension, the right hand touching the
left hand as it touches things, "where the 'touching subject' passes over to
the rank of the touched'" (1968: 133-134), that situates our bodies as ac?
tively engaged, as participating in the world. For it is in that passing moment
when the touching becomes the touched, in the spread, the ?cart, that differ?
ence in its indeterminateness and hence depth can be found. Similarly, the
chiasmic relation of mother and child is the touching and the ?cart of two
bodies-in-depth and not the fusing together oneness of two separate beings
(Wynn, unpublished).
Implied in this third dimension of touching, this engagement with the world,
is the necessity of motility; indeed, the body's movement is to touch what
lighting is to vision (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 315). But it is the intertwining of
the separate senses of vision and touch that can also be used to critique the
"logic of vision" that bifurcates subject and object (see Chow, 1992: 105).
We understand the depth that we see because we are in the world. I only
come to understand the relational terms, above, below and beside, with re?
spect to my kinaesthetic body. This is my orientation to the world that is
mapped out through an intertwining of vision and movement. Indeed my eye
visibly moves as the object of vision shifts. Thus, our ability to move through
space is essential to depth. The temporal and spatial nature of our motility
further illustrates the distance and hence dispossession that accompanies my
relations in the world. Accordingly, we do not come to know something
through possessing it; rather we have to let it be in its surroundings, in con?
text. Studying something away from its background minimizes distance and
collapses space, both of which are essential to depth. In a world where "un?
certainty is no longer tolerable" (Qu?niart, 1992: 166), it may seem contrary
to remind that we will always see situationally. It is depth that expresses how
the thing begins to slip away from our powers of grasping it. As I look to the
horizon, I do not see an abrupt point where the visible ends; rather there is a
fading as the outlines begin to blur (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 261). To reduce
the visible to the quale, to sense datum or to representation, which is what a
mapping of the body does, is to flatten the body's depths, its past and present
linkages and living bonds, and thus its possibilities, and its participation in
the world. Indeed, as Duden points out, when we view the results of internal
"photography", what we are looking at is a collage taken from ten thousand
submicroscopic measurements that produce an image (1991: 29). While the
image is there, that which is represented by the "photo" was not illuminated
by light. The image that we see is a creation. While depth is of the visible, it

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 181

is not possible to reduce depth to quale. For, as Merleau-Ponty points out,

even "to speak of leaves or of layers is still to flatten and to juxtapose, under
the reflective gaze, what coexists in the living and upright body" (1968: 138).
Thus, when women's bodies are treated as objects out of the context of their
lived experience, the subsequent observations only shed light on medical
practices.7 Just as depth is always situational, that is, the spreading and fad?
ing, the bending towards and away from always occurs in the relational atti?
tude of beings, the meaning women create from their embodied existences
will be directly affected by the instrumental and objectifying practices. It is
through such practices that we can lose our sense of orientation within the
world.
This tension between medical prognosis and the body as experienced is
evident in Gladys Hindmarch's A Birth Account (1976). It should be noted
that this phenomenal diary of the author's experiences of pregnancy, miscar?
riage, a second pregnancy, and labour, was written twenty years ago, before
the most recent medical advances. Still, the emphasis on determinate knowl?
edge that characterizes current Western medical practices also shaped
Hindmarch's experiences. In her account, she describes the weeks leading up
to her miscarriage, and how she did not feel movement in her womb; she did
not sense life although the pregnancy test was positive. Even after a sensation
of "little jumps" of "jerks", she writes: "Shinwa is alive, but I don't sense
(s)he is, maybe, perhaps, but it is not the same as knowing, really knowing"
(1976: 26). It is not clear at this point whether knowing would be bodily
sensed or medically reconfirmed. However, in her second pregnancy, she gradu?
ally recognized this knowing bodily and only some time after she had been
tested positively: "I felt you there reaching up . . .you little four-incher, red
cells growing oxygen blood ears organs hands feet, miniature of what you will
be, laid out already" (1976: 44). Full confidence of a growing life came only
with the first kick (Wynn, unpublished).8 Hindmarch writes about the rhythms
of her body that draw her inwards; these rhythms create circles that flow
outwards, the inner and outer horizons merging into one another. She writes:
"You weigh almost nothing, salt water holds you up, two salt-waters, the one
you're in, and the one I'm in" (1976: 58). This is an account of a lived-deep
and fleshy body that is also culturally engendered. It is from her embodied
situation that Hindmarch acts; that involves feeling bodily that she is preg?
nant; but feeling, at the same time, dependent upon medical reassurances. We
cannot escape Western medical science, nor should we: still, while tests can
inform, if they replace being-in-depth, what remains is nihilism.
Accordingly, if experience is seen only as shedding light on the politics of
construction, as is theorized in much postmodern feminist theory, then we will
come no closer to understanding embodied subjectivity and agency as corre?
spondingly situated, contingent, and ambiguous but ultimately gathered to

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 182

gether by the conscious subject. There is much that is never articulated, that
recedes in depth, but, at the same time, that supports and flows into the con?
scious daily and specified decisions that we do make; we understand agency
as being characteristic of the conscious self, and this is where the
poststructuralist critiques have been useful in undermining the supremacy of
the Cartesian cogito. However, taken to an extreme, these theoretical approaches
can only account for the unconscious, the semiotic and the constructed; para?
doxically, however, they are accounts of the unconscious as articulated in the
field of representation.
Up to this point, we have considered depth in terms of beings, but for
Merleau-Ponty, depth was also equivalent to Being. While Being is not gener?
ally discussed in relation to politics, especially with relation to agency, it is the
particular quality of Merleau-Ponty's thought that allows for such a discus?
sion. Accordingly, we can start with the specific, that depth is also present in
the idea, that is, the idea "is not the contrary of the sensible", but is "its lining
and depth" (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 149). The idea as depth is "not a de facto
visible, like an object hidden behind another", nor is it "an absolute
visible .. .rather, it is the invisible of this world, that which inhabits this world,
sustains it, and renders it visible .. .the Being of this being" (Merleau-Ponty,
1968: 151). Thus we can move from the concept that the idea as depth is
chiasmically related to the visible, to the concept of flesh which is not sub?
stance but rather "the concrete emblem of a general manner of being"
(Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 147).
This anonymous "generality that constitutes my body" also constitutes other
bodies and, accordingly, dictates the issues of an age, of a "global 'locality'"
(Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 180). It is around these issues that arise from this
generality that we become politically engaged. And if this generality inhab?
its us as corporeal beings, then the body, as Foucault has shown us, must be
at the centre of the political; but not, I would argue, at the centre as a text to
be read. Rather, we must turn to the experiential nature of embodiment. It is
not that our embodiment is not culturally formed, our experiences not so?
cially mediated. Rather it is that "this human manner of existence .. .must
be constantly reforged .. .through the hazards encountered by the objective
body" (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 170). Thus, if we consider some of the issues
that have occupied the feminist political arena, for example, reproductive
rights and genetic engineering, we will learn more about the political ques?
tions of this age, and the alienation from our embodiment that we experience
as the generality characteristic of this particular period.
This generality is not incompatible with Foucault's discursive practices.
However, while Foucault's subject is a product of these practices, Merleau
Ponty is able to account for an embodied subject who encounters the world
through depth, and is granted agency. While the postmoderns' rejection of

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 183

depth is probably dependent upon depth's implication in Cartesian rational?

ity, depth is much more than this. Discursive practices are part of the visible
and the invisible that inhabit all of us, as we are all of universal flesh. But
rather than allowing for the impossibility of political action, depth means
that we are part of Being, part of the questions raised in this age; for within
Being we are bodily moving, acting subjects, even if it is a mark of this age
that this tends to be forgotten. Merleau-Ponty is referring to this when he
writes that "human existence will force us to revise our usual notion of ne?
cessity and contingency, because it is the transformation of contingency into
necessity by the act of taking in hand" (1962: 170). Thus one of the political
questions of this age is this firm boundary posited between subject and ob?
ject, between visible and invisible, between experience and agency. It is from
such questioning that our politics emerge.

Notes

1. This paper was first presented at the Nineteenth Annual Conference for the Merleau
Ponty Circle in Rome, Georgia, September 22, 1994.
2. Other non-invasive medical visualizing technology includes computed tomography, x
ray imaging (CT), and positron emission tomography (PET) (Stafford 1991: 26).
3. Merleau-Ponty writes: "A Cartesian does not see himself in the mirror; he sees a dummy,
an "outside," which, he has every reason to believe, other people see in the very same
way but which, no more for himself than for others, is not a body in the flesh. His
'image' in the mirror is an effect of the mechanics of things" (1964: 170).
4. This is my translation from the German text: "Die Sprache des Gebl?ts ist eine Sprache
der Seele".
5. These women underwent the amniocentesis test knowing the risk of miscarriage that it
incurs: "'it is worth taking a chance in order to be sure the baby is normal'" (Qu?niart
1992: 168; See also Kolker and Burke 1993).
6. As Merleau-Ponty writes: " .. .three centuries after Descartes, depth is still new, and it
insists on being sought, not 'once in a lifetime' but all through life" (1964: 174). (For
more on Merleau-Ponty and depth see Casey 1991; Mazis 1988; and Steinbock 1987).
7. For example, Hubbard writes that medical practitioners have lost the skills that enabled
them to know "what goes on inside from outside, by feeling a woman's distended belly
and putting [an] ear or a stethoscope up against it. Instead, they now put her under a
machine and the practitioner and her partner, if she has one, look away from her, at a
screen, to see the fetus, watch it move etc. It's no longer going on inside her; it's happen?
ing out there, on the screen. One doesn't have to feel, and listen to, her body to find out.
She is no longer the person in whom the fetus moves. She is the barrier that makes it
difficult to see the fetus and examine it properly, a barrier that must be made transpar?
ent" (1988: 103).
8. Some women experience their pregnancies as tentative until after they have the results
of the tests. There is also evidence that some women are not open to experiencing the
"physiological evidence" of being pregnant before knowing the test results (King 1992:
7). This experience of the physiological changes in the pregnant woman's body was
referred to as quickening (see Duden 1991).

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 184

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