Body, Liquidity, and Flesh: Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, and the Elements of Interpersonal Communicatio

Jan 29, 03:57 AM

The theme of "embodiment" has emerged over the last two decades as a highly prominent topic in the human sciences. Much of this discourse has been developed from the work of Foucault, some of it is derived from Merleau-Ponty, and other points of view have contributed by way of anthropology, feminism, and psychoanalysis. Though this discourse has energized contemporary discussions of power and agency, there is a difficulty that this thinking must eventually encounter as it addresses the experience of embodiment as an intersubjective encounter with its own otherness. More specifically, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, as it unfolds in The Visible and the Invisible challenges reflective consciousness to open itself up to a genuinely "post-Cartesian" experience of spirit and substance. ' It is not at all clear to me that this post- Cartesian challenge has been sufficiently taken on by the human sciences. Phenomenology awakened the modern mind to the possibility of embodied subjectivity, of reason grounded in the experience of a vital, fleshly consciousness. Yet, for all of the discourse generated on the body as a site of power and contest, the concept of the body still seems too often discussed as a creature of organic autonomy, as a soft, at times bony tissue that encloses a shell of subjective experience and existence. It is my belief that an attentive reading of Bachelard's reflections on air, water, and dreams can offer a unique possibility for revisiting the thought of Merleau-Ponty-of awakening postmodern and post-Cartesian consciousness to a much richer encounter with the phenomenology of the body and the experience of the flesh.

Merleau-Ponty defines "flesh" as chiasm, as an interlacing of a being with, potentially, all other beings. As a complex tissue of 'experience and in experience, flesh cannot, thus, be encountered as a familiar "thing." It is continually in process, continually alive and dying, made up of flows and vapors, presenting itself to everyday perception as an illusion of substance and a deception of material stability. I will argue that flesh might best be understood as an intersubjective plasma, as a complex of fluid elements that are just as capable of hardness as they are of liquidity. "Assets" of memory and experience become "liquid" in moments of communicative intimacy and psychological transformation. As such, this essay will consider the concept of the body not as a medium of communication but as communication itself, as communication entered and exited by way of liquidity and crystallization.

The Conditions of Embodiment

What is my body?-this body that writes and speaks these words? Is it merely a bio-mechanical thing? My eyes that gaze upon my arms, my legs, my face in the mirror: they too are "of this body, this body upon which they are focused like alien and mysterious cameras. That which gains the attention from the modern psychiatrist and neuroscientist-in other words, my brain-still, through their investigations, continues to earn the full academic credit for thinking about this body, my body. Yet it too is entirely of this body. This place of thought, where Descartes once began, is also the place of feeling and sensation. I am conscious of my body and its parts. And by way of my body and its thinking and reflective properties, I am also conscious of being conscious-as I am also aware of what coming-to-consciousness feels like, especially of moving from sleep to awakening, or of being jarred to attention from reverie.

Conscious of my body, conscious of my consciousness, and of even my capacity for self, I remain somewhat baffled-especially in this context-about the comfortable certainty exhibited currently across academic fields that my mind is embodied.2 There is still so much to be discovered regarding the limits and conditions for both my body and this entity that has been named "mind." In German, the preferred term for "mind" is Geist, which is customarily translated as "spirit" (or its Anglo-Germanic cognate equivalent "ghost"). Yet Anglo-American thinkers have long gravitated instead toward the word "mind." Our science seems so much more comfortable with it. While spirit refers, etymologically speaking, to something a body does- that is, "to breathe"-mind, etymologically, refers, simply, to "mental activity." The name "mind," thus, is not even referential; it resists the essential task of metaphor: it resists being seen in terms of something other. Nevertheless, my mind is not a closed, containable, "embodiable" system any more than my body is reducible to my skin, organs, teeth, and bones.

Somehow I cannot escape the possibility of thinking that the existence of "mind" (especially in its Anglophone semantic incarnation) is merely a wish that Western consciousness has been making with its heart since the age of Descartes and Spinoza. It relieves the body of so much responsibility. The body, with its carnality, with its need for food and water, with its urinary and bowel activity, with its hormones, with its reproductive urges and orgasms, with its burps and farts, its aching feet and its need for sleep-how can it maintain accountability for serious mental activity? But half a millennium after Descartes, psychiatry and neuroscience, just as much as cultural studies and cognitive science, seem poised to implicate the body yet again.3

The brain is the organ of consciousness, feeling, and all other mental activities, we are told, with all sorts of scientific evidence to locate consciousness, yet again, in an organ of the body. According to Anthony Damasio, interpreting Spinoza, the brain is a body part and the mind is a refined, internal element of that body part.4 In the breath of this one idea, contemporary psychiatry and neuroscience have returned to the work of seventeenth century anatomists. Though it has come as a consequence of the anatomizing of moods and anxieties, the many people who have witnessed the benefits of contemporary psychopharmacology are no less grateful for the elevated focus on brain activity in psychiatry and neuroscience. Nevertheless, irrespective of that which can be said with conviction (if not certainty) about mind, spirit, or ghost, the discourse of the scientific and medical community very much seems to have taken physical ownership of all of it and has placed its narrative under the same sort of analysis applied to the study of the spinal cord or the optic nerve.

A full and satisfactory concept of the body, however-regardless of the mind and its imaginative breath, breadth, and energy- remains, at least in terms of modernity, an empirical chimera. Does my physical body include the oxygen I am about to inhale and, on the same token, should I include the air I am about to exhale? What about my hair, some of which is certain to be washed down the drain with tomorrow morning's shower? What about the water I know I am going to need for my system's continued health? I know that I am going to need it a week, a month, perhaps, if I am still blessed with life, a year, a decade from now. I know that I shall consume it. It must be a part of me. But where should I draw the line? Is the water, now flowing into the reservoir, already a relevant feature of my body?

The mind is not a thing, consciousness is not a thing, and, importantly, the body is not a thing. Or, if we must insist that it does indeed possess sufficient qualities of thingness and that it exists as a recognizable entity in time and space, we must at least admit that the body is not a bounded entity, that its existence has meaning precisely to the extent that it transforms and projects itself through time and space. It is not enough to say that my body exists as a biological thing, as a carbon-based life form, that it has a life and a half-life. It must also be said that my body is not an autonomous thing. It is entirely contingent, and I am (living through my body as myself), as well, entirely contingent. Not only is my body contingent upon the well being of other bodies (not to mention the bodies from which it was conceived and the female body from which it was given birth), it is contingent on the earth. It is contingent on all elements of what philosophers and scientists have long chosen to call "nature": earth, wind, fire, and water.

Elements of Existential Embodiment: Nature and Flesh

It is certainly not my intent, through this discourse, to simply reinvent the work of Merleau-Ponty, particularly his revolutionary explication of corporeality as the ground of perception, consciousness, and thought. The Phenomenology of Perception succeeded in closing the book, so to speak, on the dialectic of body and mind that served as the fundamental metaphysical puzzle of the second millennium. As well, the Platonist's "heaven" of ideas, having survived the Christian era in the West, becomes, with Merleau- Ponty, contextualized as a function of embodied consciousness, along with Descartes' cogito. My intent is to join with Merleau-Ponty's thinking with regard to the flesh of this body, of my body-that is, its thickness and texture, its intensity and expression.

In The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty writes of "the emergence of the flesh as expression,"5 enabling dialogue, perhaps intimacy with things and others in particular habits and modalities. The point where I feel most fully connected with Merleau-Ponty's discourse can be found in the following passage: We understand then why we see the things themselves, in their places, where they are, according to their being which is indeed more than their being- perceived-and why at the same time we are separated from them by all of the thickness of the look and of the body; it is that this distance is not the contrary of this proximity, it is deeply consonant with it, it is synonymous with it. It is that the thickness of the flesh and the thing is constitutive for the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his [or her] corporeity ; it is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication.6

In this critical passage, Merleau-Ponty addresses the event of communication and proximity as a matter of thickness, perhaps viscosity. He continues: "The thickness of the body, far from rivaling that of the world, is on the contrary the sole means I have to go unto the heart of things, by making myself a world, and by making them flesh.7

To reiterate what I am finding as the critical feature of this passage through conjunction and emphasis: "the thickness of the flesh and the thing ...is their means of communication." For Richard Lanigan, an American Merleau-Ponty scholar whose work is fundamental to a phenomenological philosophy of semiotics and human communication, The Phenomenology of Perception was absolutely essential to the emergence of a theory of existential communication.8 On the other hand, what Merleau-Ponty undertakes in The Visible and the Invisible is to give this theory substance-that is, to explicate not merely a dialogue between things and bodies in their givenness (their proximity, their correspondence, or their narrative coextension), but a communion: a relationship of gravity and of density and, hence, an opportunity for intimacy and mutual transformation.

Whatt I am presenting here, written with my body, murmured silently, and even spoken out loud, the communion I seek is with my patient listeners. I am, with and through my body-experience, speaking outside my body, speaking both to and with your body. The thickness that I present, my gravity and density, is not a superficial matter, nor is it merely a matter of the language that I speak or the existential distances and barriers that separate you from me. It is precisely my thickness, my density as you perceive it that serves as the source of your curiosity. It is everything about this moment that serves as a source of amusement, fascination, or frustration. It is everything that is, at this moment and through the arteries of perception, not yet known. It is what remains to be seen, the not as yet visible.

Merleau-Ponty rightly cautions that his use of the word "flesh" ought not to be taken in its customary literal sense. And so, in this regard, it ought to be fairly obvious that one should not interpret a philosophy of the flesh to mean, as so many Anglophone speakers might be inclined to think, a philosophy of human skin or, worse, of naked (and naughty) human skin. On this very point, Veronique Foti remarks that Merleau-Ponty's use of the word "flesh" has "fostered either a certain literalization and Dionysian license, or else consignment to obscurity."9 This is to imply that rather than evoking an erotics of intellectual depth, adventure, and, in this context, pleasure, the notion of flesh since its articulation in The Visible and the Invisible has provoked a callow, perhaps fetishistic discourse regarding sex and power, desire and satisfaction, sensuousness and fantasy, obscenity and victimage.

What I have found notable, however, is that this sort of discourse has arisen more from the cultural turn toward "the body"- ironically, a turn taken, for the most part, with but scant reference to Merleau-Ponty-than from any invocation of a philosophy of the flesh. The turn has indeed been significant, emerging perhaps as the most prominent focus of Anglophone "cultural studies," and it has been taken largely through various ideological interpretations and political applications of Foucault. It seems at least plausible that the turn in this direction was inevitable, that the politics of social theory was bound and determined to arrive at the most personal levels of expressive engagement, resistance, liberation, and self-identity. It may even be said that this turn, earnestly and openly beginning in many ways with the investigations of Freud, was not only inevitable but that it was going to happen despite Merleau- Ponty's admonitions-that it was, in effect, going to happen over Merleau-Ponty's dead body.

A query into sexuality is not simply a matter of prurient probing but a style of searching for truth. Moreover, as Foucault has famously professed, this particular search for truth has been ongoing since antiquity and has been largely governed in the West, at least up to this point, by the various ruptured narratives of Christianity. And especially through its most recent incarnation it has been very much a search for a particular kind of truth: the truth of human subjectivity. In his introduction to the published memoirs of Herculine Barbin, Foucault plainly articulates the nature of this ongoing hermeneutics of the sovereign (yet anatomically categorical) sexual body in the voice of the modern inquisitor:

Wake up, young people, from your illusory pleasures: strip off your disguises, and recall that every one of you has a sex, a true sex. And then, we must also admit that it is in the area of sex that we must search for the most secret and profound truths about the individual, that it is there that we can best discover what he is and what determines him. And if it was believed that it was necessary to hide sexual matters because they were shameful, we now know that it is sex itself which hides the most secret parts of the individual: the structure of his fantasies, the roots of his ego, the forms of his relationship to reality. At the bottom of sex, there is truth.10

And along these same lines, the most important thing I have come to conclude from the last several decades of postmodern thinking on biopower, sexualized bodies, and ideologies of resistance is that the hermeneutics of subjectivity as a search for truth from within the narrative of the body's sexual experience can only arrive at an intellectual cul-de-sac when it jettisons, along the way, the phenomenology of intersubjectivity. It is precisely at this juncture that Merleau-Ponty's dead body must breathe again. And it is precisely here that I seek to reawaken its flesh, and in turn my flesh, to an elemental phenomenology of embodiment on the other side of Foucault.

What can also be said about the hermeneutics of the subject is that, despite its infinite regress and its occasional participation in rhetorics of ressentiment, it nonetheless demonstrates a yearning for depth in the invisible and anxious domains of human expressive contact. Recent family-systems oriented applications of psychoanalytic theory been inclined to argue that this particular hunger for insight is at once a yearning for depth by way of intimacy." It is in this light that I can fully sense what Merleau- Ponty means when he maintains that "a philosophy of the flesh is the condition without which psychoanalysis will remain anthropology."12 A philosophy of the flesh is not merely a philosophy of human communication, it is a phenomenology, perhaps a theology, of communion. The blind psychoanalytic impulse that Foucault parodies is not in error because it is psychoanalytic or even psychiatric, but because it cannot grasp that its object of analysis is poetry and not prose. To reiterate Merleau-Ponty's own words once again: "the thickness of the flesh and the thing ... is their means of communication."u It is the thickness, the density, the interconnectedness, the complexity that gestures beneath the thin pellicle of what is known that draws us in-that begins to give a voice to our anxieties about all that we do not know, all that remains just beyond our grasp and cannot yet believe.

Bachelard, Foucault, and Merleau-Ponty

"The flesh is not matter," Merleau-Ponty writes, "[it] is not mind, [it] is not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term 'element' in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire___The flesh is in this sense an element of Being."14 In this passage, Merleau-Ponty invites a discourse to situate itself within the inarticulate interstices of what might well be called a scientific and philosophical stammer. This discourse itself might well be called a dreamwork of human elemental being-not a scientific reverie necessarily, but, perhaps, a reverie upon the poetic interlacings of how the language of nature is brought to bear on the matter of human experience.

It is at this very crossing point that work of Gaston Bachelard arrives ready-to-hand. I can say with complete conviction that no twentieth century thinker, certainly not a philosopher of science, can come close to the capacity of Bachelard to offer a discursive entryway into the phenomenology of flesh. Bachelard's intellectual legacy is an admixture of insights from the natural sciences, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and literary theory. Although he did not set out to accomplish this set of tasks as a carefully outlined program, Bachelard took up the matter of the four elements of nature as a lifelong intellectual pursuit. He was part of a distinguished Parisian intellectual group during the pre- and post-World War II period, having submitted his doctoral thesis to the University of Paris in 1927. Foucault has remarked that Bachelard, with Georges Canguilhem, fell onto one side of a dichotomy in mid-century French philosophy, a split that drew attention to a dividing line that separated "a philosophy of experience, of meaning, of the subject, and a philosophy of knowledge, of rationality and of the concept."15 On the other side of the divide was Sartre and MerleauPonty.'6 It was not that Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard were working at cross- purposes, it was that for much of his career MerleauPonty's perspective on human experience was part of a new Hegelian consciousness (centered on experience, the dialectic of history, and to unseen patterns of unfolding historical events) initiated by Kojeve during the mid1930s, while Bachelard's intellectual development was far less concerned with the politicalhistorical sweep of the existentialist movement and focused much more closely on epistemology, the history of concepts, and the history of science. Sartre, by the 1950s, was very much at the furthest end of this continuum, especially after his break from Merleau-Ponty, which is also to say that Merleau-Ponty was himself moving away from, if not abandoning, the anthropological and political fixations of his earlier intellectual development.

In Merleau-Ponty's lectures at the College de France, he time and again took up the question of "nature" and began a move toward the development of his thinking that resulted in The Visible and the Invisible. In these now published lecture notes, there are important references to Bachelard-not many, but somethat demonstrate an accord with Bachelard on the articulation of scientific voice. From the outset, Merleau-Ponty maintains that nature cannot be conceived as "the idea of an entirely exterior being, made of exterior parts, exterior to man, and to itself, as a pure object."17 By the close of the lectures, in 1960, he clearly envisions the being of the human, body and flesh, as situated in between nature and logos, necessitating a scientific discourse sufficient to articulate the quality of this enmeshment.

At the time Foucault completed his doctoral thesis under Canguilhem (a version of which is published as Madness and Civilization), Foucault's intellectual sympathies had grown much closer to the work of Bachelard. David Macey (1993: 69) comments: "For Foucault, Bachelard goes some way towards capturing the lived reality of the imagination."18 Moreover, for Foucault, "there were two Gaston Bachelards. The Bachelard who theorized epistemological breaks and whose work, like that of Canguilhem, had such an impact on Foucault's vision of the history of the sciences, was also the author of quasi-psychoanalytic studies of the imagination. Foucault admired this Bachelard too, and saw him as an author who had unleashed a surprising dimension of epistemology."19

Now that much of the dust has settled on the various ruptures of twentieth century Continental thought, from Husserl's crisis of the European sciences to the twilight of modern anthropological "man," reading Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty side by side should, by now, seem wholly unproblematic. To the extent that Merleau-Ponty invites his readers to interrogate the existential nature of flesh, how it is experienced, how it summons and energizes perception, how it makes visible the imaginary of transformative experience, I find it incumbent upon my own development as theorist of communication to feel to the poetic pulse of flesh. It is through the anima and animus of flesh that we touch and are touched. I seek to understand how such a quality as thickness mediates and enables communicative encounter.

Thickness implies a texture as well as a complexity, a density, an opaqueness. Thickness serves the architect and builder as both a strength and a reinforcement. As well, it implies an intensity, as one might observe in a word or phrase thickly underlined on the page. But these are all semiotic modalities of encoding and decoding information. Communication and information are wholly distinct elements of semiotic moments. Information is that which is transmitted. Greimas and Courtes define information as "any element that can be expressed with the aid of a code."20 Communication, on the other hand, necessarily entails information but it is not reducible to the code or even to what might be interpreted as the psychological intentionality of the code. Communication entails a transformation in the system function of an organism. However it cannot be sufficiently grasped as an essentially quantitative or digital phenomenon. Deleuze and Guattari note, after Nietzsche and MerleauPonty: "things are interactions, bodies are communications."21

To my mind the fullest articulation of the experience of human communication has been offered by Georges Bataille. Bataille follows both Nietzsche and French Hegelianism into the depth of human connectedness. As a consequence of human interaction, that is, as a body, Bataille remarks: "'Communication' only takes place between two people who risk themselves, each lacerated and suspended, perched atop a common nothingness."22 The system transformation that is necessarily implied in this consequence of interaction is described as follows: "Thus 'communication,' without which nothing exists for us, is guaranteed by crime. 'Communication ' is love, and love taints those whom it unites."23 A few paragraphs later, Bataille concludes: "A fundamental principle is expressed as follows: 'Communication cannot proceed from one full and intact individual to another. It requires individuals whose separate existence in themselves is risked, placed at the limit of death and nothingness; the moral summit is the moment of risk taking, it is a being suspended in the beyond of oneself, at the limit of nothingness."24

In more concretely Merleau-Ponty-like terms, Bataille contends that communication violates the everyday presupposition of the visible, that we are in fact separate subjectively-conscious beings. Bataille's assertion that "love taints and unites" articulates the interactional reality of flesh. When we experience love, we become energized with a consciousness that we are interlinked and intertwined, enmeshed, webbed, and consubstantiated and at an overpoweringly fundamental level. We are constituted of the same energy, the same elements, the same Grund-and the fact of our speech and the simultaneous consciousness of a world made manifest in the semiotic constitution of our minds brings us to the threshold of a new vision. Something is conceived and born between us. This something is not seen with our eyes, but in the ecstasy, the ek- stasis of this moment everything that is addressed in our eyes affirms the substance of being. And then, over time, we can, through consciousness and memory, take account of its thickness and viscosity.

The essence of eros resides, I fully believe, in the charged, electric currency and vital flow of intimate communication. Maurice MerleauPonty's well-known aphorism on intersubjectivity articulates the dimensions of this experience: "To the extent that what I say has meaning, I am a different 'other' for myself when I am speaking; and to the extent that I understand, I no longer know who is speaking and who is listening."25 As such, the experience of eros is lived as a vanishing point for ego. In authentic communication, one forgets who one is; the inhibitions that serve as boundary markers for what shall constitute the self's concept of intimacy lose their active presence. We give up control and let the event define itself. It is in this light that I see both eroticism and communication entailing what we live as the core of our "genetic" experimentation- which, I would argue, is what accounts for the pleasure of the polymorphous power that circulates through us when we first take the risk to hold hands with a person who at that very moment sufficiently fulfills our love-object fantasies. In such moments we become real to ourselves for the first time. Human erotic contact is no longer at that point a mere abstraction-a story we read about, a movie that we may wish to emulate. We do not hold it in memory. To the contrary, it holds us, and holds us passionately and meaningfully with thick muscled arms, by way of our embodied memory of this experience.

So much of our psychological existence is carried out as a struggle between our separateness and our mutuality, our individual genius and the fundamental contingency of human consciousness. We present ourselves to the world of our social existence as solids. We tan, tone, tint, bejewel, even tattoo the contours of our flesh to symbolically mark our faith, a faith that is often fragile, in the quietly aging truth of our individual, embodied identities. What Calvin Schrag identifies as the "space of intersubjectivity"26-the experiential interstice of psychological ambiguity for the mind still wrestling with Descartes-is the flesh. It is the flesh, subdued in the pedagogy of Western consciousness, taught to speak in a voice and gesture of self-sufficiency. Strength is not merely thickness, this voice speaks, it is solidity and hardness. A mature person, ultimately, cannot be thin-skinned. From Aristotle's Rhetoric onward we have found ourselves the pupils of a pedagogy for the discipline of a mind increasingly impervious to the appeals of pathos. After all, it is the emotion that honors the fallacy, is it not? It may well be said that logos has long been a fetish for a cultural consciousness quietly committed to a certain type of rigidity. The stoic silence of numbers and neutral nomenclature is the authorized, schoolbook language of elements and motion, and the voices that inquire into the nature of beings and objects must be taught to ask questions that are legitimately answerable.

Bachelard comments: "The eye itself, pure vision, becomes tired of looking at solids. It needs to dream of deforming."27 Which, for me, is to say that that the character of mind, the experience of time, and the movement of an object in space (which may well be the only way that the experience of space truly "matters") is one of fluidity. A being disengages from fixity and re-centers itself, redefining if not reenchanting everything that circulates about it. Systemically and organismically, this is not a matter of impulse but a critical sign of life. It is flow and fluidity that satisfies the existential measure of interaction, and it is liquidity that offers a semiotic feature of communication having occurred, or on its way. This feature resides within the context of another dynamic, a dynamic that Bachelard describes: "Hard and soft are the primary qualifiers of the resistance of matter, the initial dynamic existence of the resistant world."2* It is uncertain what so many communication theorists specifically have in mind when they reaffirm the famous axiom that a "person cannot not communicate,"29 for it is only true in a limited way. Human beings are strikingly resistant to communication. We transfer and project information everywhere we can. The cell phone has become an appendage of the anatomical body. Our communicative actions are a feature of our desires for social recognition and relational control. Information of a certain type flows our way and we soften. But information flows against us or perhaps misses us entirely and we find ourselves hardening.

Yet there is, for me, no convincing pattern of signs to suggest that the flood of information technology has enhanced our emotional connectedness to others. Information technology expands, but so does the sophistication of military technology. The flow of people through technologized urban centers and traditional Western cities bottlenecks in our time because of an anxious awareness and vicious talk about the ever presence of foreigners, strangers contaminating the social body, outsiders who do not belong, with whom a vocal plurality resists communication. Contemporary terrorism is, without doubt, a grossly violent assault on flows and interactional patterns; it kills people and makes others move in different ways. It hardens societies. The current war on terror is in its essence turning out to be a war on fluidity itself. It affirms and rigidifies all hardness.

Transformative intimacy, which is certainly inclusive of the notion of erotic intimacy, entails a softening of substances as well as surfaces. A softening is not the same thing as a weakening. Solidity and hardness have their purpose, but they are not necessary or sufficient features of strength. Liquidity is necessary for mixture. The syntagmatic axis of language is presented by Jakobson as an axis of combination. On this axis, signs are linked in space, and they are linked in flow. It is a habit of mind to address a sign as an object, as a thing. In its thingness, we reason with it as a bounded entity. We treat it as though it has solidity, as though a sudden ambiguity or morphing would constitute a crime against rational thought. On the syntagmatic axis of language, signs mix and flow. They liquefy in thought and expression. Bachelard maintains that "murmuring waters teach birds and men to sing, speak, recount... there is, in short, a continuity between the speech of water and the speech of man. . . . Organically, human language has a liquid quality, a flow in its overall effect, water in its consonants ... this liquidity causes a special psychic excitement that, in itself, evokes images of water."30

Perceptual unity entails an intimate relationship between the objects held within the gaze of the perceiver. Reminiscent of the melting clocks in Dali's paintings, the objects transform into retinal images that, like the signs and images of any language, flow together without marked boundaries of differentiation. For one another, we are each signs. Our relations can be discussed as a kind of grammar. In neurotic anxiety, we can feel held in place by this grammar. We are, in this instance, signs that are far too carefully read, defined by others, unable to go with the flow, unable to mix, unable to find our element. Socially, we harden. We congeal. Bachelard underscores the significance of this phenomenon for communication: "I cannot emphasize too much how important the experience of fluidity and pliability is to an understanding of the psychology of the creative unconscious."31 Schnarch's important work on intimacy and eros reminds us that intimacy is not a commitment to a certain place at a certain time. Syntagmatically or paradigmatically, it is not a "death sentence." Instead it is a commitment to the process of transformation. More than that, intimacy defines the process of change in interpersonal communication systems.32

In a transformation of self, flesh becomes real while remaining obvious only to memory and the imagination. For Merleau-Ponty, this was embodied subjectivity giving itself over to presence-that is to say, the present moment, the present self, the presence of things, new experience happening now. He writes in "Eye and Mind" that a painting constituted a "second-order" visibility.33 It is not "the image of an image" but constitutes "the visible itself which is seeing itself in the vision of the painter, and afterwards, in that of the spectator."34 As such, the "first-order" visible does not consist of the external reality of the socalled things themselves but, just the opposite, consists instead of an awakening inside of my being, as Merleau-Ponty writes: "Since things and my body are made of the same stuff, vision must somehow take place in them; their manifest visibility must be repeated in the body by a secret visibility. 'Nature is on the inside,' says Cezanne. Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them."35 And within this welcoming body, it might be argued, there is not simply a softness but a liquidity-a liquid center, if you will. Here, Bachelard's comments on dreaming prove useful: "There is still water at the bottom of all memory. And in the universe, still water is a mass of tranquility, a mass of immobility. In the still waters, the world rests."36

In an intimate flow of liquidity, I would argue, the world comes alive. Hardware becomes entirely dependent upon software. Liquidity becomes both message and medium simultaneously, and we no longer know who is speaking and who is listening. Bachelard speaks again: "If the reader can be convinced that there is, under the superficial imagery of water, a series of progressively deeper and more tenacious images, he will soon develop a feeling for this penetration in his own contemplations. ... He will recognize in water, in its substance, a type of intimacy that is very different from those suggested by the depths of fire or rock."37 When one is immersed in water, the liquid medium becomes as much a nothingness as the air that occupies the ostensibly unoccupied space in everyday object perception. But it is through the wind of speech that the seemingly separate objects at different positions in the geometry of my gaze become fully interconnected. The fluidity of language serves as the enabling condition of the vowel and voice of that which is spoken. The elements of our being are the Grund of all being, and these elements are always in motion.

What I have thus far argued is not fully sufficient, at least in terms of what I had intended, to make clear how the thickness of the flesh and of the body gets us to "the heart of things." Speaking from the standpoint of systems psychotherapy, Schnarch maintains that the normal pattern of communication in human relationships entails a resistance to intimacy.38 Intimacy in human relationships entails nurturing that which is born between us. It is not merely a matter of "closeness," nor is it the feeling of fusion that occurs to lovers overwhelmed with sudden raptures of desire and infatuation. To nurture that which is born between us is to live through it-at a minimum to acknowledge that this vitality exists and that it holds the potential to engage us further into the flow of being and into the otherness of our inhabited world. To nurture that which is born between us is to speak and perceive differently.

None of what I have come to grasp through Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard suggests that this potentiality is reducible to a strategy of language. There is nothing abstract about flesh and, so, there is nothing that can be articulated ideologically or structurally that entails a route to the secret residing in the visible habits of embodied subjectivity. Martin Dillon makes this point quite straightforwardly: "MerleauPonty ... set out alone to do what none before him-or since him-could think to do: first he made the soul a thing, a body, and then he incarnated all things into Flesh. His successors have yet to appear. Those who follow him in time are still resisting incarnation: they are still trying to make the Flesh become word; they are still seeking to obtain release from the world by transforming it and themselves into a text."39 Articulating Merleau-Ponty's concept of flesh in terms of Bachelard's poetics of elemental being is to express a potentiality. Foucault identifies the nature of this task explicitly in terms of Bachelard's work: "For Bachelard, studying the concept of fluidity does not, for example, imply studying the equations of fluid mechanics. ... It means something very different. It also means showing all that fluid can be, all it represents in people's imagination, in the imagination of the masses."40

Interpersonal Communication and the Moisture of Intimacy

I am told that at an earlier time in the American Southeast it was not altogether unexpected during a moment of rising temperature or tension (perhaps erotic, perhaps merely anxious), to hear a Southern woman speak of getting "the vapors." Perhaps this is a mere fiction of Southern talk, perhaps it is mere legend sustained by the ghosts of Stephen Foster and Tennessee Williams, and perhaps not. In either case the metaphor is perfect. A diminishment of the capacity of cool reason correlates with the increasing presence of steam and moisture. Along similar lines, I have heard it spoken on a number of occasions that Southern women do not perspire-instead, they "glisten." Glistening moisture, vapors emanating not merely from flesh but as flesh: liquidity surfaces as the sign of a communion beyond the control of conscious intentionality. Humid and humor possess the same linguistic root. A sense of humor is a sense of flow, and by extension this momentary semantic phenomenology leads us to conclude that both currency and curricula are humorous affairs. We have a capacity to elementally experience liquidity. We can experience liquidity as a textural modality of our flow through the continuum of our intersubjectivity. Liquidity as tears, liquidity as sweat, liquidity as salivation, liquidity as sexual arousal-flesh not simply as a medium of liquidity but as liquidity itself. What I am seeking to explicate here is that our intimate and interpersonal communication is damp, if not wet, in its essence. A chaste kiss is a dry kiss, and though it succeeds in communicating something, it is barely memorable. In the clinches and in one another's clutches, we moisten. Vision is itself awash in liquidity. Ocular vision occurs through a process of light filtered through the aqueous humor of the eye. Tears wash dust and other obstructing, potentially irritating, particles from the cornea. The lubricating effect of moisture is essential to the essential dynamic of an Augenblick; that is, the eyelids must be able to glide over the cornea to enable the moment of vision to occur within the field of an undifferentiated gaze. Der Augenblick, the transformative moment of vision, depicted as it was initially via Luther, and then Kierkegaard and Heidegger,41 is what enables us to see that Being's oceanic repose has a shoreline and, again, that all habitable space is surrounded by water. A moment's vision is possible to the extent that the vital and fundamental punctuation serving as the enabling condition for a sign to emerge as such (namely, the mere blink of an eye) is only possible by the liquid element of lubrication. That which becomes visible is named and numbered among other signs. Gary Madison's reading of The Visible and the Invisible makes this point quite clearly:

As soon as one takes notice of the existence of this "extraordinary overlapping" between vision and the visible in the body itself one must say that it recognizes in what it sees the "other side" of its visionary powers. Precisely because the body which sees is itself a thing, a visible, because it is "a thing among things," it must be said that in the body it is the visible which sees itself and that the body and the world are thus 'made of the same stuff'.42

Liquidity enables the "blink," and the blink differentiates intentional consciousness, making possible the image, the sign, and the visible world-all of which come to being as objects set apart from the oceanic and inarticulable.

In cold weather, as well as during periods of anxiety, our skin tightens and our mouths dry. Of course, "skin" is not what Merleau- Ponty means by flesh, but skin is also more than merely a sign or entailment of flesh. It is the outward marker of my organic and organismic presence; it is the water's edge of my intending consciousness-not the limit of its reach but, to the contrary, the symbol of its potential for isolation. In cold weather we can see our breath-which is to say that we can, during such moments, visually isolate the vapor that has always been present with each exhale. Intimate talk may warm us and perhaps burn, but it arrives with a quotient of moisture.

Communicative expression that inhibits or limits the reach of trust essential to the experience of intimate exchange is, thus, "dry." It can be a dry but "cool" exchange (perhaps social pleasantries or business transactions) or a "cold" exchange (distancing, aloof, bitter, disdainful), or even a hot exchange (perhaps angry, fierce, severe). In any case, the dryness either instills or perpetuates a separateness, perhaps a splitting, of my embodied position from what I take to be your positioned, projected and intentional consciousness.

The rupture in our posed and presupposed separateness occurs from novel perception. Again, the Augenblick, the moment of discovery, dissolves the presupposed limit condition. The liquidity of tears enables the eyelids to blink and a long look is punctuated. It can possibly be said that the visible emerges as a sight for sore eyes. With a flux of intimate exchange now possible, our mutuality is enabled as a current, and I am drawn outside of what I thought to be Self. The flesh of the body given life between my listener and me- hopefully between you and me-is composed of all four elements. And the tissue that makes up the nerves, the fat, the sinew, the muscle and bone of my biological anatomy is an explication of earth, wind, fire, and water. Humors flow through me. Or perhaps it might better be phrased that the thawed, saturated, and liquid element of flesh humors me. It moves the projection of my awareness and carries me right along, carrying me to the relative stillness of pooled waters, or perhaps carrying me into the eye of its storms. Blood flows through me and expresses the pulse of my anxious heart as it nourishes the tissues and matter of my working systems. It is a barely contained fluidity that will flow from lacerated tissue until clotting, coagulation, and thickening get this flow back within the anatomical order of things. All organic ruptures are by nature temporary; organisms adapt and then settle.

Medical science does not agree on a specific percentage, but the consensus that has emerged is that 50 to 65 percent of the adult human anatomical body is composed of water.43 It is generally agreed that babies have the most, being born at around 75 to 80 percent. The human brain, it is generally agreed, is composed of approximately 70 percent water and the lungs are nearly 90 percent water. What can be immediately summarized is that we are more liquid at birth than as we mature. (By about one year of age, the proportion of water drops down to about 65 percent.) There is a wonderful irony in that the organic entity that Western culture has come to associate with dry reason is far more liquid than the body taken as a whole. And for me, it is not the least bit surprising that the organic entity that is essential to the "hot air" of verbal communication is by far and away the body's most liquid asset.

The Medium of Communicative Embodiment

There is both an economy and an ecology to the communion of verbal communication. Assets that we may have insisted are wholly personal are released into a flow of culture, of time and space, of context and contact. Having held them behind a thickness of opaque textures they are now released into the plasma of an intermingled consciousness. The flow of my life out from my private accounts, expressed through my anatomy and into the world of others, the flow of your life into the sensitive, sensual domain of my fragile reality-this flow enables human culture to be understood as a congress of pooled assets, and it is the essential liquidity of the concept of "body" and the oceanic tide of what we still nervously refer to as "soul." This flow enables the potentiality of lingering images and impressions, glistening memories, foggy recollections, cloudy, perhaps dark and ominous storms of agony and paralyzing dread.

The opening of my world to the currency of that which is both elemental and extraordinary about you is the source of the communicative moment in which subjectivity can become witness and apprentice to a vital and powerful flesh, a flesh that now exceeds and informs the "individuality" that Western consciousness still seeks as the narrative illusion of our lives. The opening of my world, however, is not and cannot be a permanently sustained condition of flesh. My argument is that flesh, as with the anatomical body, is more liquid than solid-not that liquidity ought be taken as the absolute condition of flesh. The possession of assets is the skeleton and sinew of subjectivity; we cannot both exist as beings on the one hand and give everything away on the other. The possession of assets held in common trust is the fundamental architectural condition of intersubjectivity. But the private confidence of that which can only belong to one person at a time, and which makes name (identity) and character so psychologically and culturally vital, is also that which makes such an event as an intersubjective experience possible. There can be no pleasure and no ek-stasis in intimate communication if we have no experience of consciousness outside it. Yet once the notion of liquidity is held in the imagination as the substantive attribute of flesh in the body's intimate communication with other bodies, we gain a clearer sense of what Merleau-Ponty was seeking in a philosophy of chiasm. The "humorous" element of flesh that I have endeavored to explicate in this essay is, ultimately, the medium of the fundamental transformation of consciousness that surfaces and comes to pass from intimate communicative contact. Please allow me to linger on this thought a bit longer: the humorous, namely, the liquid element of earthly being is the principal medium of the communicative body. Now of course the body must dwell in all four of the primary elements: earth, wind, fire, as well as water. And, as well, flesh is derived from all four elements. Or to return to Merleau-Ponty's reflection that "to designate it [i.e., flesh], we should need the old term 'element'" and that "the flesh is . . . an element of Being,"44 it may perhaps best be said that talk of flesh resists the sort of technical specificity that characterizes modern scientific prose. In the domain of Bachelardian poetics, talk of the elements sustains the reversibilities, contradictions, overlaps and interconnections in what can be read as a four-term semiotic square of scientifically symbolic (yet psychologically quite real) elements that emerged from archaic scientific discourse. And in the discursive context in which we are presently imagining the communicative body, it can be claimed that communication has been experienced as a drift into new consciousness-or, in other words, that consciousness takes note of an elemental feeling that something is different. In this regard, philosophical reflection emphasizing aspects of communicology and psychoanalysis can venture where technical scientific discourse cannot. Bachelard notes: "Dreams, even more than clear ideas and conscious images, are dependent on the four fundamental elements."45 Alchemy is possible in poetics. Not only is it possible, it happens all the time. In the flow of poetic humors, we can be amused by the expression of an idea both true and false, both imaginatively viable and scientifically impossible-a tennis-playing folk song, a pat of butter writing detective novels. As I take it, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology seeks to understand the flesh as, itself, such an alchemy. Flesh, like mud or plasma or steam or modeling clay, is not describable as solid matter. Though bones and teeth exhibit none of the viscosity of skin and organic tissue, they are as much entailed (and given meaning) by the currency and flow of fleshly activity as the air we breathe and the fire that warms us and lights our visible world.

Understanding the activity of flesh in, with, and amid the communicative body animates thought about the body's regard for its own life. In communicative exchanges that liquefy and soften, moisten, perhaps saturate, quench, lubricate, marinate, bathe, shower, immerse, or flood, the fixed connection between ego and belief can begin to dissolve, enabling the consciousness to entertain images and thoughts of all sorts. What seemed foolish impulses and dumb ideas just moments before can be entertained in the humors of a consciousness suddenly beside itself. It is by way of a liquid medium that the concept of influence (in-fluence) can be more clearly understood for what it is and how it works. Liquidity is a medium of currents and waves. Liquids can gel, dry out, and harden. They can evaporate from the heat and freeze in the cold. But their presence changes things. As Bachelard maintains: "One cannot bathe in the same river twice because already, in his [or her] inmost recesses, the human being shares the destiny of flowing water. Water is truly the transitory element. It is the essential ontological metamorphosis between fire and earth. A being dedicated to water is a being in flux."46

Conclusion: The Dream of Mind and the Course of Flesh

Thus far, the post-Cartesian discourse of body and spirit sought by Merleau-Ponty (not just in The Visible and the Invisible but throughout his life and works) has not, for the most part, been very well served by the building interest in "embodiment," particularly as it has manifested in cultural studies and cognitive science. For a genuinely post-Cartesian discourse to emerge, a critical mass of human scientists will need to be roused from the notion that "the body" is something contained within the outer epidermal layer of the skin. As such, assertions that "mind" is embodied, assertions that on the surface might seem "phenomenological" to a reader insufficiently literate in Continental philosophy, can only further perpetuate the positivist/behaviorist assumption that "mind" (fully entailing spirit, subjectivity, consciousness, and will) is somehow, somewhere, housed in organic tissue (probably the brain) belonging to an individual. Not only will consciousness remain a cosmic (and in many ways, comic) mystery to any scientific or philosophical enterprise committed to such assumptions, but the limit conditions for what constitutes "body" will continue to pass without careful scrutiny. Living bodies are never finished in their development and adaptive changes, and must actively draw upon the earth's resources to sustain themselves. But this is not to say that we are, in our essence, "consuming beings," actively eating and drinking and taking and using for the survival of our consumptive species.

Human life is clearly not restricted to material forms of desire and survival for its own sake. We are creatures who dream and imagine, yet reason carefully with one another, often arguing over details, definitions, and inaccuracies. We crave novelty, change, and laughter, yet we fear madness (especially our own) and will choose stability and security during periods of anxiety and uncertainty-periods when change is likely to be a system's most adaptive response. Decades of psychoanalytic and psychiatric research in attachment theory have produced convincing evidence that we enter the world with as strong an appetite for communication and contact as we have for any and all other forms of sustenance.47 Our childhoods are spent gaining approval and validation from the very same parental authority from whom we will later seek to detach, and which we might later become. Just as our bodies are never sufficient unto themselves, our Selves are never independent of their families, cultural origins, communicative contexts, other selves with whom we come into contact, or other selves whose being remains foreign to us. As such, the notion of an "individuated Self" becomes, forme, as phenomenologically difficult as the notion of an embodied mind.

Commenting on the shapelessness of contemporary life, Zygmunt Bauman has employed the metaphor of "liquidity" as a means to critique habits and patterns of modern social interaction.48 On first blush, it might appear that his thesis runs contrary to the one I have argued here. But Bauman's position is in fact remarkably compatible with the theme of liquidity as elemental to communicative experience. His critical position concerns sedimentation, memory, and community rather than the experience of flesh and the transformation of consciousness in interpersonal communication. Bauman's perspective is significant because we can only live "in the moment" for so long. Moments are significant inasmuch as they are ek- static. The fiction of "extending" such a moment (which Bauman sees as the myth of modern techne) has the effect of washing the ecstasy of such moments beyond the reach of cultural perception. My argument is that without a consciousness of flesh, reflection on the body and its experience is condemned to a thinking about objects: limited objects, objects whose subjectivity may well be the subject of fanciful speculation (in literature, the arts) but whose activity and pragmatics are reducible to all that can be objectively recorded about their survival and their biological species-being.

In the context of a discussion about Damasio's thinking on mind, brain, and body, Ian Hacking insightfully observes that "Descartes, Leibniz, and Hume 'deanthropomorphized' conatus and causation."49 In this context, it may well be said that Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the flesh begins as a conscientious effort to reanthropomorphize conatus and causation. Hacking suggests that the internalist, mind- in-the-brain movement afoot in psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience (of which Damasio's work has emerged, of late, as a highly prominent exponent) is an attempt to bypass, if not eliminate, the significance of subjective experience. As he phrases it: "The concept of the mind as a complex piece of metabolism seems to have mislaid the 'I'."50

So, for Hacking, the issue of the embodiment of consciousness as it surfaces in the context of neuroscience suggests the problematic of "'I' and mind," whereas for Merleau-Ponty the problematic emerged as one of "eye and mind." For a philosophy of the flesh, as I have attempted to explicate it here, there is no elemental difference. Merleau-Ponty maintains: "Thought is a relationship with oneself and with the world as well as with the other; hence it is established in the three dimensions at the same time. And it must be brought to appear directly in the infrastructure of vision."51 It is not simply enough to say that the body is involved in thought, it is that the body is thought. Madison, in a close reading of a closing fragment of The Visible and the Invisible, makes the case quite directly: "'States of consciousness' and 'acts of consciousness' and all of the rest of the positivist 'bric-a-brac,' Merleau-Ponty says, are 'differentiations of one sole and massive adhesion to Being which is the flesh'."52 Madison continues: "'I' am there precisely when the flesh of the world prepares in itself a 'hollow,' an 'interior.'"53

Rather than a positing consciousness as a succession of ideas, William James proposed the concept of a "stream of thought"-an idea that slipped into the discourse of psychology and psychiatry over a century ago and which is essentially taken as a given in all aspects of contemporary clinical work. Streams of thought, streams of consciousness, the liquidity of mind, the flow of spirit all participate in the particular energy that serves as the life of flesh. It cannot say precisely where it is because it has no certain empirical location. In Richard Lanigan's important explication of Foucault's theory and methodology in the case of Herculine Barbin, the tragic nineteenth-century French hermaphrodite,54 he concludes his monograph with the observation that in the authentic speech of a person whose mortal embodiment functioned as a repudiation of the context and code of cultural discourse "somebody is nowhere."55 In an important way what the inconvenient fact of Barbin's life demonstrates is that in the ecstatic discovery of the flesh, some body is always already nowhere. It is "nowhere" for the same reason that we cannot step in the same river twice. What we find on any map is the trace of the river's movement: the geographical interstice marked by primordial geological formations and sedimentary deposits of earth, the banks that enable us to engineer bridges to cross over a flow that might engulf us if we are not sufficiently amphibious, if we are not powerful and attentive. The liquidity of flesh is experienced through its flow. No one gets to keep it. We can only feel its current and let it speak through us. And perhaps at some point neuroscientific speculation may come to realize that the power of a river's current cannot be sufficiently comprehended by studying the chemical composition of its banks. Mercer University, Macon, GA 21207

ENDNOTES

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston,: Northwestern University Press, 1968).

2. In cognitive science, there are two highly prominent works featuring this concept. The first is George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1998); the second is Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). Both texts exhibit diffidence, if not resistance, to the theory and method of phenomenology. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch make reference to Merleau-Ponty's work, but draw a clear line separating their intellectual commitments from Merleau-Ponty's explication of intersubjective experience and the corps propre. In cultural studies, prominent and influential works-most notably Bryan Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), and Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory. 2nd rd. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage 2003)-feature discourse about the body principally addressing matters of textuality and the exercise of strategies, regimes, and technologies of biopower. Matters of "mind," "spirit," or "consciousness" are deferred back to modernist assumptions, exhibiting no philosophical commitment to the notion that "flesh" might be something other than "skin."

3. For a comprehensive summary of key aspects of this emerging movement in neuroscience and psychiatry, see Eric Kandel, Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and the New Biology Of Mind (New York: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2005), and In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006). See also Joseph Ledoux, Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (New York: Penguin Books, 2003).

4. See Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harvest Books, 2000), Descartes ' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Penguin 2005). and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Harvest Books, 2003).

5. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 145.

6. Ibid., 135. my emphasis.

7. Ibid., my emphasis.

8. Richard L. Lanigan, Speaking and Semiology: Maurice Merleau- Ponty's Phenomenological Theory of Existential Communication (The Hague: Mouton, 1972).

9. Veronique Foti, Vision's Invisibles: Philosophical Explorations (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), 69.

10. Michel Foucault, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, trans. R. McDougall (New York: Pantheon, 1980), x-xi.

11. See Murray Bowen, Family Therapy in Clinical Practice (New York: Jason Aronson, 1985); Michael E. Kerr and Murray Bowen, Family Evaluation: An Approach Based on Bowen Theory (New York: Norton, 1988); and Michael Kerr, "Chrionic Anxiety and Defining a Self," The Atlantic Monthly 262 (September 1988): 35-58.

12. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 267.

13. Ibid., 135.

14. Ibid., 139-40.

15. Foucault, "Introduction," in Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn Fawcett (New York: Zone Books, 1978), 8.

16. Ibid.

17. Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the College de France, ed. Dominique Seglard, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 8.

18. David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 69.

19. Ibid.

20. A. J. Greimas and J. Courtes, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary, trans., Larry Crist et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 156.

21. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 123.

22. Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone (New York: Paragon House, 1992), 20-21.

23. Ibid., 18.

24. Ibid., 18-19.

25. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 97.

26. See Calvin Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

27. Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Edith R. Farrell (Dallas: The Pegasus Foundation, 1983), 106.

28. Gaston Bachelard, Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Kenneth Haltman (Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications, 2002), 13.

29. This axiom has become entrenched in the discourse of the academic field of communication studies since the 1960s. Its most prominent initial publication appeared in Paul Watzlawick, Janet Helmick Beavin, and Don D. Jackson, Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes (New York: Norton, 1967). Since then, it has been reiterated in virtually every college textbook on communication theory and praxis.

30. Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 15.

31. Ibid., 13.

32. See David Schnarch, Constructing the Sexual Crucible: An Integration of Sexual and Marital Therapy (New York: Norton, 1991).

33. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," in The Primacy of Perception, ed. J. M. Edie, trans. C. Dallery (Evanston Body, Liquidity, and Flesh: Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, and the Elements of Interpersonal Communicatio
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