My body is a melody

On Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenology of musical experience, style as existence, and the body as a "strange signifying machine"

0.

If you have ever observed a stranger dance from the sidelines of a dance floor, you may have had the curious experience of — after enough time spent soaking in their dance — feeling like you know something about that person¹, something very intimate … a particular personality, a certain way of being, expressed through the specific manner in which their body turns music into shapes and gestures. But why is that, why is it that we can’t help but express when we experience?

1.

The theory of perception that Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945)² develops is one of embodied perception. With his concept of the lived body, Merleau-Ponty argues against the idea that the human body is a mere collection of biological parts maintaining the functions of life. For him, it is impossible to reduce the human body to empirical observations, because the body is that through which any human subject perceives. It is nothing like any object in the world, since it is always present to us as the locus of all of our perceptions.

Any and all of our knowledge is based on the fact that we have a body that is able to perceive and intuitively respond to its surroundings. From this follows that there is no possible neutral perspective from which one could perceive, to see means to always see from somewhere. And that somewhere is my body, the pivot of a world that is not an abstract space external to me, but that which within I exist, the place that I inhabit, the primordial horizon of my existence that my body is always oriented towards.

This towards is informed by the tasks and possibilities that the world lays out in front of me, things for me to do, questions and problems to solve. This concerns even the most basic ways in which we orient ourselves within the world — standing up or sitting down, picking something up, walking towards something. When I see a familiar object in my vicinity I intuitively, instantly, know how my body can interact with it, without any need for active reflection. For Merleau-Ponty, consciousness at its most fundamental is really an I can, rather than an I think, since the world is only intelligible to me because I know through my body that I am capable of action by taking on the myriad of tasks and situations that the world presents me with:

[the body is] an open system of an infinity of equivalent positions in different orientations … [it is] this immediately given invariant by which different motor tasks are instantly transposable [Phenomenology of Perception, p. 142].

To illustrate, Merleau-Ponty gives the example of a woman with a feather in her hat. She moves as if the feather were a part of her body, instinctively ducking in doorways to protect the feather, without any need for conscious coordination. The feather is no longer a mere object, but has become transposed into the instrument of her body, an instrument imbued with the innate capacity to improvise and play along with the scales and registers of the world. In other words, there is something fundamentally melodic about this account of perception:

When I perceive this table, the perception of the top must clearly not be unaware of the perception of the legs, otherwise the object would come apart. When I hear a melody, each moment must clearly be tied to the following one, otherwise there would be no melody. And yet, the table certainly has external parts, and succession is essential to the melody [p. 430].

For embodied perception to be meaningful, it has to melodically form a perceptual whole. Each part of the sequence has to relate to the whole through a projection into both the past and the future — bringing it in relation with what has already sounded and what will come to sound — in order to form a unified melody “with its strong and weak beats and with its characteristic rhythm or flow" [p. 134]. It is really this sense of rhythm and flow that ties together the individual beats of perception. We make sense of the world by performing and interpreting the rhythms and melodies of perception in our unique and particular ways — all perception is perception in a certain style.

2.

For Merleau-Ponty, perception is not something innate or static. It is perpetually subject to change as our bodies encounter new situations and form new habits over our lifetime. Just because one has eyes and ears doesn’t mean that one already knows everything about how to perceive. Being able to really see a painting or really hear a piece of music isn’t something we are born with, but a matter of learning how to (re)organize and develop the habits of our body as it encounters novel perceptions and situations. This is why the experience of music and art can have such a profound impact on our sense of self — perception is a habitual process that modulates our subjectivity as embodied beings. This process always draws from an already existing repertoire of bodily and perceptual habits. As Merleau-Ponty notes, when learning a new kind of dance³, we always make use of already established patterns that are then re-composed to create new gestures and shapes:

Sometimes, playing upon these first gestures and passing from their literal to their figurative sense, it brings forth a new core of signification through them — this is the case of new motor habits, such as dance [p. 147-148].

Dance is grounded in our capacity to play, to explore gestures and movements that do not strictly correspond to what is necessary or immediately useful. Merleau-Ponty also refers to this kind of playful movement as abstract movement: “Abstract movement hollows out a zone of reflection and of subjectivity, it superimposes a virtual or human space over physical space” [p. 114]. In abstract movement, the human body becomes a “strange signifying machine” that is able to produce an excess of meaning beyond bare biological life, creating its own virtual space — a situation that only exists during the play of abstract movement and expresses something that could not exist outside of it. It is not limited to dance, but encompasses all forms of embodied creativity, as Merleau-Ponty illustrates with the example of an organist:

In fact, his [the organist's] rehearsal gestures are gestures of consecration: they put forth affective vectors, they discover emotional sources, and they create an expressive space, just as the gestures of the augur define the templum [p. 146-147].

Musical gestures lend the world new expressive sense that it did not possess previously, giving something new to the world, while also drawing that something from the world — “the sensible gives back to me what I had lent to it, but I received it from the sensible in the first place” [p. 222]. Expression always exists at this intersection between body and world, this exchange of what has been taken and what will be given.

3.

Whenever we encounter a piece of music, our body takes on a position of anticipation towards that music:

I offer my ear or my gaze with the anticipation of a sensation, and suddenly the sensible catches my ear or my gaze [p. 219].

Long before any cognitive response, my body has already assumed an anticipatory attitude through specific motor responses — the tapping of feet, the play of fingers, the bobbing of heads. While this structure is universal, the style in which we anticipate varies significantly. In a room full of people listening to the same piece of music, everyone will have their own distinct way of anticipating and attuning themselves to the sound as it relates to the current state of their body. When I am feeling tired and lethargic, I may find energetic music to be too much as my body can’t keep up. When I am feeling excited, I may in turn find calm and slow music to be “too slow”, its rhythms fail to find a resonance with the rhythms of my body.

However, at other times, there can also be strong resonances between sound and body, to the point where it almost feels like it is really my body that is "directing" the music, as if the music were a direct product of my body's affectations that exists only for me — “the sonorous element disappears and becomes a highly precise experience of a modification of my entire body” [p. 236]. The body creates an excess of sense that is more than is given within the music itself, is augmenting the music through its corporeal articulation:

… shaking the hips in double time added a layer of articulation to the song that is not otherwise manifest, sonically or gesturally [Rachel C. Elliott, Collaborative Temporality, p. 33].

This is not only a reaction to what has already sounded, but also of what will come to sound. We always form certain predictions and expectations about the music’s future trajectory. If a pattern keeps repeating, I attune myself to its continuance, when there is a change or shift, I adjust my horizon of anticipation accordingly. In general, human beings are quite good at anticipating the trajectory of rhythmic and tonal patterns. When a drummer plays a repeating rhythmic pattern, we are able to roughly anticipate where the pattern’s hits will fall, we know where the kick will land, we know where the snare will land, and so on — without this capacity, it would be impossible to ever get into the groove of any music.⁴

And yet, a key part of what makes music perceptually engaging to us is also the fact that there is often some kind of discrepancy between what we anticipate and what comes to happen. A drummer's playing will never be perfect, every hit will be off just slightly from where it “should be”, not far enough to really consciously register as being off-beat, but enough for our body to take note, which is much more sensitive to such subtle variations than the ear.⁵

Similar phenomena of perceptual nuance also exist with respect to parameters like pitch, volume and timbre, and we enjoy such variations precisely because they play with our sense of anticipation — a “funky” drummer is one that responds to our anticipations, while also leaving enough space for variation and nuance. When a DJ brings in a new track that changes up the rhythmic flow of a set, the crowd will respond through the surplus of expressiveness that is the movement of their bodies, in turn prompting a response from the DJ, forming a reciprocal expressive dialogue.

While the human body’s general capacity to respond to nuance is innate, clearly not everyone is able to always perceive the same degree of nuance. A trained pianist will be able to hear nuances in the tone of different pianos that will sound identical to a layperson, but may be unable to hear similar nuances in other instruments. Such personal habituations are of course also shaped by cultural and historical factors. When talking about the perception of color, Merleau-Ponty is keen to point out that the way we perceive a color like red is inherently interwoven with a rich tapestry of cultural and historical associations — nobody can objectively perceive red “as it is” because we always encounter it within a pre-existing world of colors full of cultural and historical significations.

Is this not also true in the case of music? Non-Western traditions centered around microtonal scales often sound alien and unnerving to Western ears, while they sound perfectly natural to people who have grown up within that tradition. Such affinities and dissonances for certain sounds and tunings have been ingrained into us from early childhood through cultural osmosis; not as an intellectual dogma, but as bodily habits and attitudes, certain ways of moving and perceiving that have become institutionalised. Culture is a bodily institution.⁶

4.

In Merleau-Ponty, so much of the dynamics of how we orient ourselves within the visual are driven by the interplay between figure and ground — the scanning patterns our eyes make as they zoom in and out, pulling objects in and out of focus, traversing the visual terrain set against the horizon as the structuring distance against which all things recede and fade. In the auditory world, there is no such absolute horizon defined by its distance. Even something very distant can easily take over the auditory scene in an instant. When a siren starts going off in the distance, it immediately takes over my attention — sound is three-dimensional and enveloping, it surrounds us within an auditory world that carries sound far across its indefinite and diffuse expanse, penetrating spaces and bodies. Even if I plug my ears, my body will still be affected by the lower frequencies resonating throughout my body. More so than in the visual world, we are at the mercy of the auditory’s capacity to affect us.

And yet, I am also not just a passively suffering recipient of sounds. I am able to cut through the soundscape of the world by means of my sonic intentionality. When focusing on the voice of the announcer in a busy train station, my auditory world is instantly transformed as the voice becomes figure and everything else recedes into the hiss of a blurry background. A musical performance heard in a very noisy space can still be musically intelligible to its live audience, while a recording of that performance might turn out be entirely unlistenable, since a microphone listens “objectively” without any intentional focus.⁷ It is because we listen to the world from an embodied and subjective perspective that we can make sense of the world as it is heard.

5.

Since all perception is grounded by our being in the world, and since there is only one world, the different senses are necessarily subject to an existential overlap. What I hear influences what I see, and vice versa — “it becomes difficult to restrict my experience to a single sensory register: it spontaneously overflows toward all the others” [p. 236]. As modalities of existence, the auditory and the visual are interwoven echoes of the same polyvalent world:

We see the rigidity and the fragility of the glass and, when it breaks with a crystal-clear sound, this sound is borne by the visible glass [p. 238].

There is a fascinating lack of hierarchy here. The glass is not any one of its characteristics, it is everything all at once, as its look, texture, feel and sound are all mutually expressive of the same “crystal clear” character that is its being. Much like a human in dance, every one of the glasses characteristics is expressive of every other characteristic, coming together as the unique stylistic accent of its being:

The unity of the thing, beyond all of its congealed properties, is not a substratum, an empty X, or a subject of inherence, but rather that unique accent that is found in each one, that unique manner of existing of which its properties are a secondary expression. For example, the fragility, rigidity, transparency, and crystalline sound of a glass expresses a single manner of being [p. 333].

We have now arrived at a place that is quite far removed from sober phenomenological analysis.⁸ At the core of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is a deeply Catholic ontology in which each being has a unique style that expresses what it is in essence. For Merleau-Ponty, there is nothing contingent about style, because style is not an expression of “creativity” but of creation — of the fact that the world exists, and that our body exists, irrevocably bound to each other within the fleshy texture of existence by a reciprocal transubstantiation. Every body is a world-altering signifying machine that expresses the world in its own way. My body, a melody; this melody of the world.

1. I remember being at Berghain years ago, standing at the side of the dancefloor, just watching this one woman dance while being totallly mesmerized — not necessarily because of any one thing, but because of the whole gestalt of it, the way each shape and movement came together as one singular expression of how her body was being affected by this music.

2. To give a bit of historical context, while Merleau-Ponty was quite institutionally successful during his lifetime, he was part of a generation of French philosophers that generally didn’t leave nearly as big of a mark on intellectual history as the post-structuralist generation that followed them. And so while Deleuze and his ilk absolutely burgled the Phenomenology for all it’s worth — there is hardly a page here that doesn’t contain the germ of some later Deleuzian or Foucauldian thought — to great success, Merleau-Ponty’s own reputation mostly remained confined to the realm of specialist phenomenology for a long time. With a general rise of interest in questions of embodiment and embodied perception this situation has somewhat changed in recent years however, and there is now a renewed interest in his work.

3. Surprisingly, the topic of dance actually only comes up on two or three pages of the 500+ pages of the Phenomenology. I find this genuinely puzzling because Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is pretty much uniquely equipped to conceptualize it. While references to music are more numerous, they are generally quite fleeting and don’t come together as any kind of systematic account. As such, the second, third and fourth sections of this piece feature a decent amount of my own conceptual reconstruction, while the first and fifth sections are pretty close to the text of the Phenomenology. While I don’t explicitly cite the late work (e.g. The Visible and The Invisible) here, it is definitely present in its spirit, especially in the last section.

4. The discussion of groove and nuance in this section was inspired by Tiger C. Roholt’s Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance, which also features an interesting account of rhythmic entrainment.

5. This also applies to electronic music. Famously, a lot of the funk of 90s dance music was down to the rather large MIDI jitter of many old-school drum machines, which made for similar variations in micro-timing. Today, many producers working with computers deliberately insert a bit of variance and instability into the rather precise world of modern software.

6. A good example would be the way in which the most elemental electronic sounds — white noise and sine waves — have become culturally institutionalised as the “sound of the future” because of their frequent use in early sci-fi media. I have written more on this phenomenon in my 2023 piece “Sine Waves”.

7. This example is taken from Don Ihde’s Listening and Voice, which also inspired the general contour of this section. There are actually very few books that primarily and explicitly deal with the phenomenology of sound, and Listening and Voice is probably the most substantial of them.

8. There is a kind of bizarre structure to the Phenomenology where almost every section starts out with very sober and technical analysis — rich in footnotes, often drawing on cases from clinical psychology — but then gets progressively looser, until the end of the section, when all rules are out of the window and things dive straight into weird speculative metaphysics. While working through the book with a friend, I (only half-jokingly) hypothesised that this structure must have been the result of a wonderfully French writing process where he would start a new section each morning all clear and sober, but then would crack open a nice bottle of red in the afternoon, first one glass, and then another and another, until it is close to midnight and he’s just absolutely sloshed, manically scribbling about the existential style of his wine glass until he blacks out — rinse and repeat the next day.

For what it’s worth, the professional scholarship tends to generally ignore these weirder sections since they conflict with the commonly held view that Merleau-Ponty is basically a traditional phenomenologist that is primarily making claims about experience in this book. I personally don’t think that this view holds up if you actually take what is written on these pages seriously — the whole reason why he gets entangled with weird speculative metaphysics in the first place is that perception itself is weird and messy and metaphysical! You try to paint a tree, and the tree will stare right back at you — “In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me …” [The Merleau Ponty Reader, p. 358].