1 Introduction

The development of the embodied mind thesis has primarily been associated with the project of “naturalizing phenomenology” in an attempt to bridge the “explanatory gap” between neurophysiological processes and the phenomenological account from a first-person perspective.Footnote 1 As part of this endeavor Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the body as both physical and phenomenal has been a popular point of departure for positing a fundamental continuity between the scientific (physical) explanation and phenomenological description of consciousness.Footnote 2

The question of naturalization is controversial among phenomenologists not least because phenomenology was introduced as an anti-naturalist approach to consciousness.Footnote 3 In this context Merleau-Ponty’s work stands out as a phenomenological approach aiming to establish a constructive dialogue with the sciences. Although he shares his predecessor’s critical stance toward science characterizing it as “naïve,” “dishonest” and a “second-order expression,”Footnote 4 he recognizes it as a phenomenological task to scrutinize the experience immanent to the scientific knowledge. For this reason Merleau-Ponty’s work is often highlighted as a viable program toward constructing a continuity between phenomenological description and scientific explanation. In the groundbreaking book The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience Varela, Thomson and Rosch write:

We invoke him [Merleau-Ponty] because in our Western tradition he seems to be one of the few whose work was committed to an exploration of the fundamental entre-deux between science and experience, experience and world.Footnote 5

In this perspective Merleau-Ponty can be seen as a forerunner for the current phenomenological aspiration to “bridge the gap” through the embodied mind thesis. As a consequence Merleau-Ponty’s embodied perspective has invited philosophers to reinterpret the anti-naturalist point of departure of phenomenological investigation. As Zahavi explains:

Rather than making us choose between either an external scientific explanation or an internal phenomenological reflection, a choice which would rip asunder the living relation between consciousness and nature, Merleau-Ponty asks us to reconsider the very opposition, and to search for a dimension that is beyond both objectivism and subjectivism.Footnote 6

In my view, what is striking about this current animation of the phenomenological embodied perspective in the search for a dimension beyond objectivism and subjectivism is a remarkable lack of interest for the role of art and aesthetics. Following Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s critique of phenomenology, the proposition that I want to put forth is that “phenomenology needs art”Footnote 7 to explore the concept of sensation. In other words, the phenomenological approach cannot ignore the question of art and aesthetics without loosing touch with sensation as a primary condition for perception. Perhaps some will immediately refute this argument as ridiculous, simply pointing to the fact that the founding father of the phenomenological tradition, Edmund Husserl, never gave significant attention to the questions of art or aesthetics. Nevertheless, this does not mean that there is no aesthetics relevant to art present in Husserl’s work.Footnote 8 Further, one could point to Husserl’s continual return to melodies in his analysis of time consciousness as an expression of this necessity.Footnote 9 Clearly the question of art and aesthetics becomes more difficult to ignore in the work of the most prominent followers of Husserl. In line with phenomenologists such as Martin Heidegger and Hans Georg Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty gives art a central position in his thinking. In his address to the Société Française de Philosophie following the publication of Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945) Merleau-Ponty is asked whether there is a scale of values in different forms of experience to which he answers:

Assuredly for me there is a scale. This does not mean, however, that what is at the bottom is to be suppressed. It seems to me, for instance, that if we make it our goal to reach the concrete, then in certain respects we must put art above science because it achieves an expression of the concrete man which science does not attempt.Footnote 10

Although he goes on to emphasize that the research of perception should not be hierarchized but concentric (i.e. following the phenomenological dictum zu den Sachen selbst), the intensified interest in the philosophy of language in his later work has a clear tendency toward the study of the “expression of the concrete man”Footnote 11 in art and literature. So one of the central arguments that Merleau-Ponty seems to be following in his later works is that the bodily pre-reflective intentionality, which is the foundation for language, is shaped in literary and artistic practice. As he explains in his essay Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.

Precisely because it installs itself and installs us in a world we do not have the key to, the work of art teaches us to see and ultimately gives us something to think about as no analytical work can; for when we analyze an object, we find only what we have put into it.Footnote 12

Consequently, in the course Notre etat de non-philosophie at the Collège de France in 1959 he states that philosophy is in crisis and that philosophy should find help in art and poetry.Footnote 13 Nevertheless, the animation of Merleau-Ponty’s embodied perspective in the current efforts to naturalize phenomenology is remarkably void of this perspective. Strictly speaking, the syllabus of the philosophers working with the embodied mind thesis seems to contain selective and almost exclusive readings of Merleau-Ponty’s early work in La Structure du comportement (1942) and Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945). In pointing this out I am not suggesting that the preoccupation with art in his later work should be seen as a break from his search for a continuity between phenomenology and natural science. The continuity Merleau-Ponty is looking for in his dialogues with both science and art both belong to phenomenology or philosophy proper. As Gallagher and Zahavi remarks in relation to science and phenomenology, “it isn’t simply a question of how phenomenology might constrain positive science. On the contrary, Merleau-Ponty’s idea is that phenomenology itself can be changed and modified through its dialogue with the empirical disciplines.”Footnote 14 Implied in this approach is that science as a non-philosophical thinking is a condition for philosophical thinking, and consequently, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological dialogue with science could paradoxically be seen as a continuation of Heidegger’s famous rejection of scientific thinking in his 1951–1952 lecture course Was heißt Denken? Here Heidegger argues that science does not think, but he also asserts that “most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking.”Footnote 15 In other words, he contends that not thinking is immanent to the process of thinking. Instead of characterizing this task for thinking as “the end of philosophy” like Heidegger, science becomes the forcing non-philosophical condition for Merleau-Ponty’s work. In this view his critical dialogue with science can be seen as a constructive struggle with a non-philosophical element immanent to philosophy proper. However, what Gallagher and Zahavi do not mention or consider is that Merleau-Ponty’s dialogue with art is also a constructive element relevant to the embodied phenomenology and not at all isolated from his dialogue with science. By introducing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in this discussion I will argue that the aesthetic perspective of the embodied mind as found in the dialogue between art and philosophy reveals an intensive relation between sensation, movement and expression that is not accounted for by the current phenomenological discussion of the embodied mind. In other words, immanent to Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology in dialogue with art there is a radical consequence in thinking about movement that is exposed more profoundly in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Thus drawing on Deleuze’s work, I will argue that placing art at the center of thought reveals a domain of sensation as an infinite movement that is paradoxically both immanent to phenomenology and beyond the phenomenological notion of sense experience.

2 Art, thinking and movement in Merleau-Ponty

Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodiment is closely related to his dialogue with art. When Merleau-Ponty points to the embodied dimension beyond objectivism and subjectivism in the last part of La Structure du comportement he uses the example of the renaissance artist El Greco (1541–1614) who some theorists suppose suffered from astigmatism causing distorted vision because of his depictions of elongated bodies. Merleau-Ponty argues that even if one supposes that El Greco suffered from a physiological eye condition it still does not explain the expressive element of his paintings. In this context he explains: “Bodily events have ceased to constitute autonomous cycles, to follow the abstract patterns of biology and psychology, and have received new meaning.”Footnote 16 The question of the relation between artistic expression and embodied knowledge in El Greco can be seen as a precursor to Merleau-Ponty’s famous dialogue with the painter Paul Cézanne’s work that reveals some quite radical consequences of the embodied perspective. As Merleau-Ponty explains in Phénoménologie de la Perception:

The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art. In a picture or a piece of music the idea is incommunicable by means other than the display of colours and sounds. Any analysis of Cézanne’s work, if I have not seen his pictures, leaves me with a choice between several possible Cézannes, and it is the sight of the pictures which provides me with the only existing Cézanne, and therein the analyses find their full meaning.Footnote 17

What Merleau-Ponty suggests here is that there is something in the experience of the work of art, here in particular in Cézanne’s work, which brings forth a domain beyond the tired dichotomy of the subjective and objective. Or in Merleau-Ponty’s words, “we experience in the world a truth which shows through and envelops us rather than being held and circumscribed by our mind.”Footnote 18 In Merleau-Ponty’s work the domain experienced in art is indeed also a non-philosophical element that “calls for thinking,” and what he is trying to capture in his dialogue with Cézanne’s work is exactly what is yet to be thought philosophically. In his last published text L’Œil et l’esprit (1961) he asserts that “this philosophy, which is still to be made, is what animates the painter—not when he expresses opinions about the world but in that instant when his vision becomes gesture, when, in Cézanne’s words, he ‘thinks in painting’.”Footnote 19 Thus Merleau-Ponty’s references to works of art not simple exemplifications of phenomenological or perceptual givens. On the contrary, they pose a challenge to the philosophical construction making art the enaction of conceptual thought.

It is thus through the work of Cézanne that Merleau-Ponty takes up the question of the relationship between movement and expression. What fascinates Merleau-Ponty about Cézanne’s work in particular is the capturing of nature, not the habitual or visible characters of human nature, as we know it through psychological science, but the “inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself.”Footnote 20 By taking seriously Cézanne’s paintings and his apparently strange statement that “the landscape thinks itself in me,”Footnote 21 Merleau-Ponty encounters a “depth” which is not reducible to the features of “visual givens” in perspective, color or line, but is rather described as a pursuit of a combustion or “deflagration of Being.”Footnote 22

Pictorial depth (as well as painted height and width) comes “I know not whence” to germinate upon the support. The painter’s vision is no longer a view upon an outside, a merely “physical-optical” relation with the world. The world no longer stands before him through representation; rather, it is the painter who is born in the things as by the concentration and the coming-to-itself of the visible.Footnote 23

In this way “depth” introduces an idea of “Being” as a coming-to-itself—a movement that cannot be referred to as a configuration of relations or positions in the given perceptual space. Rather than expressing or representing an already given idea, image or concept of the world, the painter becomes with the world he creates on the canvas. Merleau-Ponty notes that perceptual space of height, width and depth is always an abstraction of “a voluminosity we express in a word when we say that a thing is there”Footnote 24 and because this task of expressing what exists is embodied it is also endless.Footnote 25 We experience this movement of Being when gazing at a painting or drawing, “for I do not gaze at it as one gazes at a thing, I do not fix it in its place. My gaze wanders within it as in the halos of Being. Rather than seeing it, I see according to, or with it.”Footnote 26 It is in this way that “thinking in painting” becomes a constitutive principle in Merleau-Ponty’s embodied notion of the “chiasm” or “flesh”—the idea that the subjective act of perceiving is folded into the dimension of being a subject of perception. The movement between seeing and being seen (the visible) is not a movement between two dimensions of Being. It is the reversibility between the two dimensions that reveals an invisible dimension of infinite movement as the foundation of Being.

Since things and my body are made of the same stuff, it is necessary that my body’s vision be made somehow in the things, or yet that their manifest visibility doubles itself in my body with a secret visibility. “Nature is on the inside,” says Cézanne. Quality, light, color, depth, which are over there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our bodies and because the body welcomes them.Footnote 27

The embodied subjectivity in all art is to be found in the “chiasm” (the intertwining)Footnote 28 of the body as sensing and being sensed. In other words, the work of art reveals self and world as irreducible to each other, but intertwined or passing into each other in perpetual movement.

It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. To understand these transubstantiations we must go back to the working, actual body—not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement.Footnote 29

Consequently, there is a close affinity between the body and the artistic expression in painting in the sense that they function as openings toward the invisible world of “depth” or the “voluminous flesh” of Being. This implies that there is always an expressive element immanent to lived experience in the regard that perception (recognition) of the world through the senses is shaped or “styled”Footnote 30 by our position in the world or our existential horizon. Accordingly, this implies a primacy of bodily movement as Merleau-Ponty explains:

The characteristic operation of the mind is in the movement by which we take up our corporeal existence and use it to symbolize instead of merely to coexist. This metamorphosis lies in the double function of our body. Through its “sensory fields” and its whole organization the body is, so to speak, predestined to model itself on the natural aspects of the world. But as an active body, active insofar as it is capable of gestures, of expression, and finally of language, it turns back on the world to signify it.Footnote 31

In relation to the question of expression Merleau-Ponty thus gives privilege to aesthetics of bodily movement as the foundation of a being-in-the-world. Just as the artist makes the materials expressive we move our bodies without knowing the “inhuman secret of bodily mechanism.”Footnote 32 However, this also implies that the way in which the question of bodily movement and expression is taken up is highly depending on what kind of aesthetics or rather what theory of sensation is asking the question. By relegating sensation to the infinite movement or folding of the “flesh,” expression becomes associated with the “mystery” of self-movement. The “I move” is, in other words, immanent to the differentiation of seeing and being seen as the existential foundation of Being. “Here the spirit of the world is ourselves, as soon as we know how to move and gaze. These simple acts already enclose the secret of expressive action.”Footnote 33 The expressive act in self-movement thus becomes the limit of classical phenomenological investigation because it cannot presuppose a “natural” perception. In different terms, because self-movement or gesture marks an instance of radical unified consciousness of movement it is “an incommunicable quality which can tell us nothing about movement.”Footnote 34 In the discussion of the role of bodily movement and the effort to naturalize the concept of the embodied mind this represents a source of controversy.

3 Expression and the phenomenological nature of movement

To the current attempts to naturalize phenomenology this “incommunicable” element presents itself as a problem hard to address—an ontological or existential dead-end. One of the most common ways of conceptualizing embodiment within the sciences of mind has been through the description of the relationship between body schema and body image.Footnote 35 Expression in these terms of embodiment has primarily been treated as a question of describing the bodily basis of language as the intricate relations between the system of sensory-motor capacities (body schema) and the intentional states of perception, beliefs and attitudes (body image). Referring to Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “motor-intentionality” the central argument behind this effort is that language is a modality of the human body generated by bodily movements.Footnote 36 In his book, How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005), Shaun Gallagher criticizes instrumental versions of this argument, which generally suggest that the relation between body image and body schema is representational or that language originates in instrumental movement. On the basis of critical reviews of the famous experiments with neonate imitation by the psychologists Meltzoff and MooreFootnote 37 and his own involvement in experiments on gesture with a person lacking body schema (without the sense of touch and proprioception),Footnote 38 Gallagher argues that gestures are expressive acts and as such irreducible to movements controlled exclusively by body-schema or body-image processes.Footnote 39 The fact that a person with a deficient body schema is able to gesture without seeing his own hands and that neonates are capable of imitation (expressive movement) can be said to emphasize Merleau-Ponty’s point with the chiasmically intertwined notion of the flesh. As Gallgher argues:

The body materializes language by means of movement that is already expressive. Like language itself, expressive movement must be both natural and conventional, shaped by innate mechanisms that allow for the onset of communicative behavior, and by cultural determinants that define different languages and linguistic practices. Although speech and gesture depend on movement as a necessary condition, they nonetheless transcend motility and move us into a semantic space that is also a pragmatic, intersubjective intercorporeal space.Footnote 40

Thus heavily inspired by Merleau-Ponty, Gallagher proposes that expressive movement consists of an integration of innate motor and communicative capacities. The communicative in this sense does not mean that expression necessarily implies communicating something internal, mental or already thought. Rather, expression is considered a fundamental condition of possibility for communicative action—the enacting of an intercorporeal and intersubjective world of meaning. However, as Gallagher suggests by the question implied in the title of the last section of the chapter on the body in gesture, the dialogue with experimental psychology does not conclusively answer the phenomenological mystery and utmost relevant question: “Expression From the Beginning?”Footnote 41 Where Merleau-Ponty relegated the primacy of expression to the mystery of the incommunicable quality of embodied self-movement, Gallagher seems to consign the mystery of expression to the embodied primacy of intersubjectivity.

The relation between embodiment and language, however, is a self-reciprocating, self-organizing one only if there is another person. The body generates a gestural expression. It is, however, another person who moves, motivates, and mediates this process. To say that language moves my body is already to say that other people move me.Footnote 42

Not far from Merleau-Ponty’s intercorporeal world of flesh, expressive movement, according to Gallagher, amounts to an enaction of a self-organizing and intersubjective setting of communication in which language moves the body at the same time as the body’s innate capacities makes language possible in the first place. Consequently, expressive bodily movement in gesture reveals that language is not simply a means of transmitting thought. Rather, following Merleau-Ponty, Gallagher argues that language accomplishes thought. “Gesture as language may serve as communication with others, but it may at the same time accomplish something within ourselves, capturing or generating meaning that shapes our thought.”Footnote 43 In this context Gallagher’s question of the primacy of expression reveals a phenomenological limit in the sense that expression as “the beginning” is associated with the moment consciousness can be attributed to being. In different terms, what is incommunicable in Gallagher’s view is the fact that we can never get behind the perpetual movement of expressing and being a subject of expression.

Nevertheless, to the phenomenologist Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Gallaghers speculations appears as “possibilities” from “a laboratory hat”Footnote 44 and is at the expense of the experiential insights of the phenomenological method proper. Following Husserl’s point of departure this implies a wholesale rejection of the project of naturalizing phenomenology. In her book, The Primacy of Movement (2011), Sheets-Johnstone criticizes the project of relating embodied intentionality to instrumental accounts of innate motor capacities. Rather than exploring the body as an object in motion she argues that we should investigate self-movement through our direct access to it in the introspective experiences of kinesthesia. She asserts that self-movement plays a central but largely unexplained role in Merleau-Ponty’s concept of embodied perception. Reanimating Aristotelian aesthetics she criticizes Merleau-Ponty for ignoring the qualitative aspect of self-movement and subsequently for trivializing kinesthesia.Footnote 45 Movement is not a mystery or something that can be relegated to speculations of innate capacities that we are strangers to. It is rather “our mother tongue”Footnote 46 in which we can discover our own origin in learning to move oneself.

In sum, we learn our bodies by moving and in moving both create and constitute our movement as a spatio-temporal dynamic. If we look more deeply into the matter, we discover that movement is the originating ground of our sense-making, in phenomenological terms, the originating ground of transcendental subjectivity; we constitute space and time originally in our kinesthetic consciousness of movement.Footnote 47

Thus self-movement is an experiential qualitative dynamic on its own and the possibilities of this original mode of thinking cannot be consigned to secondary modalities like body schema or body image or even a “chiasmatic relationship.”Footnote 48 From the common phenomenological assertion of a primacy of movement Sheets-Johnstone can be said to draw the opposite conclusions of Merleau-Ponty. It is exactly because self-movement always is just “there” that we must continuously give it primacy in our descriptions and not just consign it to mystery. On this account, Gallagher’s devotion to innate motor capacities and proprioception is heavily criticized for proposing a pointillist notion of movement as a change in position that ties self-movement to an object in motion, rather than a dynamic experiential quality. Thus Sheets-Johnstone’s critique of Gallagher should be seen as a consequence of her critique of Merleau-Ponty. In her view, the relationship between sensation and movement as expressed in his analysis of Cézanne’s “thinking in painting” is only an approximation or opening up into what she terms “thinking in movement” at the core of perception. In this effort she associates the difference between Cézanne’s “thinking in painting” and “thinking in movement” to the difference between choreographed dance as artistic product and improvisational dance as artistic process. Cézanne’s effort with hand and brush is here comparable to the choreographers work with other bodies, but thinking in movement in this way “is not only turning “vision into gesture,” but also gesture into vision”Footnote 49 in the sense that the “inner” phenomenon of self-movement is always immanent to the choreographer’s perceptual absorption in the movement of moving bodies. The improvisational dance without the outside eye of the choreographer’s “thought about action” thus fleshes out a process of “thought in action” or “kinetic thought” that forms the basis of our experience.Footnote 50 The foundation of our epistemological construction of the world is thus formulated in these terms: “In effect, movement forms the I that moves before the I that moves forms movement.”Footnote 51 In a Husserlian spirit of kinetic free variation Sheets-Johnstone subsequently identifies four primary qualitative structures of movement relating to force, effort, space and time. What Sheets-Johnstone suggests with her critical account of Merleau-Ponty’s embodied ontology is that asserting the primacy of expression in movement amounts to an affirmation of the primacy of self-movement and a primordial kinesthetic world.

In moving along, it is interesting to notice that behind the differences in these phenomenological explorations of the nature of embodied movement and expression there is a fundamental agreement concerning the relation between sensation and thought. In these accounts of embodied thought, sensation is tied to sense experience and thus presupposed as the “natural” activity of perception—in essence presupposing a fundamental nature behind “natural” perception. The unexamined idea seems to be that behind the differential subjective appearances and experiences there is a fundamental identity or unity that can account for the “natural.” As Sheets-Johnstone describes it, “the world may be unfamiliar, but there is a familiar point of origin, that is, a familiar way by which one goes about making sense of it in the beginning.”Footnote 52 In this way she suggests that the strangeness of the invisible movement of the “flesh” is only apparent, and by introspective attention to our kinesthetic felt sense in movement we can disclose the familiar root of this strangeness. The same familiarity with the world is found in Gallagher’s primacy of intersubjectivity, which suggests that due to an innate capacity for communication or motor intentionality we perceive directly the expressive movements of others. The dialogue with science here becomes the means of giving access to the actual manifestations of these innate capacities. Differences aside, both accounts seem to build upon the presupposition of a fundamental ontological identity or harmony to be unraveled either through introspection or critical scientific dialogue. However, more importantly in the context of this article, none of these phenomenological approaches give noteworthy significance to the role of art.

Returning to the dialogue with art that spawned this exploration into the nature of sensation, thought and movement in Merleau-Ponty, one could ask what the role of art would be in Gallagher’s necessarily communicative setting. If expression is understood in terms of innate capacities for communication in an always already intersubjective world, art is reduced to a sophisticated means of representation or mediation of an already given relation. Artistic or aesthetic expression in this sense does not seem to able to create genuinely new worlds of sensation in the way Merleau-Ponty wants to suggest in his analysis of Cézanne.

Sheets-Johsntone’s “thinking in movement” does take up the dialogue with the artistic expression in dance, but only as a means of discovering “that fundamental creative patterning of thought that is founded upon a kinetic bodily logos.”Footnote 53 It is here, she continues, that “we discover mindful bodies, thinking bodies, bodies that, in improvisational dance, break forth continuously into movement and into this dance, bodies that moment by moment fulfill a kinetic destiny and so create kinetic meanings.” In other words, artistic expression is only a magnification of the “cardinal structures” or the very nature of thinking in movement—an instance of disclosing the familiarity of the foundational kinetic units of animate life. On this account art can take many different forms but never go beyond what is already given in movement and what is common to the infant learning to move, everyday experience and the artist improvising movement. Consequently, although Sheets-Johnstone ingeniously wants to challenge cognitive and brain science by situating the discussion of consciousness within a natural history of animate form,Footnote 54 her conclusions of universally given cardinal structures in perception and movement immediately closes the possibility of a natural history of sensation through art. It is here that Merleau-Ponty’s dialogue with Cézanne’s art in itself becomes interesting, because it, contrary to the current studies of embodiment, sets off as an exploration of art as a creative force in the relation between sensation and thought that, to a certain extent, does not presuppose nature as given in artistic expression. It is this intimate relation between sensation and thought in expression that leads to more radical conclusions in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s work.

4 Deleuze and the critique of phenomenology

As the philosopher John Protevi has pointed out, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s thinking resonates in many ways with the current phenomenological and enactive explorations of the embodied, embedded and extended mind. However as Protevi admits, the effort to reach conceptual correspondence between them is at the expense of what he calls “the performative effect of their writing.”Footnote 55 I agree with Protevi on this matter and I find his animation of Deleuze and Guattari in the scientific dialogue with enactivism, dynamic system theory and phenomenology of mind highly relevant. However, in relation to movement and expression what is at stake is exactly the “performative” element, which Brian Massumi has precisely termed “a shock to thought”Footnote 56 in Deleuze’s thinking.

Even though Deleuze on the one hand appraises Merleau-Ponty’s effort to analyze sensation as something that stands on its own,Footnote 57 on the other hand he does not find that the phenomenological notion of flesh is an adequate account of sensation in relation to the art it wants to think with. According to Deleuze and Guattari, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh is only an approximation or “thermometer”Footnote 58 of sensation. As they critically remark: “A curious Fleshism inspires this final avatar of phenomenology and plunges it into the mystery of the incarnation. It is both a pious and a sensual notion, a mixture of sensuality and religion, without which, perhaps, flesh could not stand up by itself.”Footnote 59 Deleuze’s opposition to the phenomenological concept of sensation can be seen as an extension of his critique of the “dogmatic image of thought,” which he describes as the presupposition of a relation of recognition between sensation and thought. The critique is most clearly formulated against Immanuel Kant’s idea of common sense (sensus communis).Footnote 60 In Kant’s transcendental philosophy, the external senses of the subject are passive receivers of intuitions of a given object. The recognition of a sensed object presupposes an active synthesis or accordance of the internal faculties: understanding, reason and imagination. Each faculty has its own way of acting towards an object, but to recognize it as an object a faculty must find it identical to that of another. That is, the object that can be sensed must be identical to what can be imagined, remembered, conceived, etc. The synthesis of sensation and the cognitive faculties is possible due to the imagination’s creation of a transcendental schema composing the formless manifold of sensuous intuitions according to the a priori concepts or categories. The result of the different faculties’ total relation to the transcendental form of a given object is what Kant refers to as common sense, which is not to be understood as a common understanding or a psychological disposition, but the universal condition for subjective judgment. What Deleuze points out is that this presupposes an unexplained or mysterious harmony or accord between the external relations of sensation and the concept as thought. In other words, according to Deleuze the “dogmatic image of thought” assumes a “good nature” of the subjective faculties and thinking as a natural process that formally leads to truth and thus presupposes a correspondence between what is determinable in thought and the act of thinking in the determinant concept.Footnote 61 This is also what leads to representational thought. Even though Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological critique of intellectualism also can be said to address this issue by calling for a redefinition of transcendental philosophy “in such a way as to integrate with it the very phenomenon of the real,”Footnote 62 Deleuze argues that the phenomenological solution in the concept of lived experience is not radical enough to break with the model of recognition and the dogmatic image of thought.

Phenomenology wanted to renew our concepts by giving us perceptions and affections that would awaken us to the world, not as babies or hominids but as, by right, beings whose proto-opinions would be the foundations of this world. But we do not fight against perceptual and affective clichés if we do not also fight against the machine that produces them. By invoking the primordial lived, by making immanence an immanence to a subject, phenomenology could not prevent the subject from forming no more than opinions that already extracted clichés from new perceptions and promised affections. We will continue to evolve in the form of recognition; we will invoke art, but without reaching the concepts capable of confronting the artistic affect and percept […] But, by invoking art as the means of deepening opinion and of discovering original opinions, will philosophy find the path that leads to the concept? Or should we, along with art, overturn opinion, raising it to the infinite movement that replaces it with, precisely, the concept? [my italics]Footnote 63

What Deleuze and Guattari points out is that the phenomenological idea of the perceived world and lived experience as “the foundation of being”Footnote 64 refers to a correspondence between the given state of a subject (external perception) and the movement from one state to another (internal affection). In short, when phenomenology explores sensation as sense perception or experience it is presupposing subjectivity as a consciousness of sensation, not sensation. Thus in Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of Cézanne the concept of flesh comes to express a proto-opinion, urdoxa or pre-established foundation of the sensible being. But as they critically remark, “flesh is not sensation, although it is involved in revealing it.”Footnote 65 It is in this perspective that Deleuze argues that Merleau-Ponty needs Cézanne and that “phenomenology must become the phenomenology of art”Footnote 66 in order to deepen the experience of sensation as a being-in-the-world (original opinion). In other words, phenomenology turns the immanence of sensation into immanence to a subject (lived experience) and therefore it “must turn opinion into a proto-opinion in whose constitution art and culture are involved and that is expressed as an act of transcendence of this subject within the lived (communication), so as to form a community of friends.”Footnote 67 The phenomenological idea of lived experience as the foundation of being-in-the-world is inseparable from the presupposition of knowledge and communication as the preservation of the primary intersubjectivity implied by the reversibility of seeing and being seen.Footnote 68

Consequently, what Deleuze and Guattari oppose is not Merleau-Ponty’s animation of Cézanne’s work in his philosophical endeavor, but rather the idea of relegating the sensations immanent to the work of art to lived experience (original opinion), which implies the transcendence of a subject and consequently the reduction of expression to a communicative function. Their critique is not to be misunderstood as a sweeping rejection of phenomenological description as such, but rather a critique of the phenomenological tendency to consign art to original perception or feeling based on general ideas of sensation.

5 Sensation, expression and movement in Deleuze

What Deleuze and Guattari propose instead is an approach to art that preserves or confronts what they call the infinite movement of sensation. This implies a primacy of sensation that unites the Kantian aesthetic dualism between the theory of sensibility as the form of possible experience (i.e., the transcendental aesthetics) and the theory of art as reflection of real experience (i.e., aesthetic judgment).Footnote 69 In different terms, there are no general conditions of possibility given for an object of sensation, only a mutual determination of the object in the encounter between contradictory forces of sensation. As Deleuze formulates it in Difference and Repetition:

Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. What is encountered may be Socrates, a temple or a demon. It may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed. In this sense it is opposed to recognition. In recognition, the sensible is not at all that which can only be sensed, but that which bears directly upon the senses in an object which can be recalled, imagined or conceived.Footnote 70

Heavily inspired by Nietzsche’s ontology of the will to power,Footnote 71 sensation is presented as a result of differential relations or encounters between opposing forces (i.e., sensations), which are the fundamental genetic (intensive) conditions for subjective thought. Thus sensation is in itself a symptom of an encounter that gets its meaning from differences immanent to the existing dominant forces. In this sense objects of sensation are not subjective qualities but expressions of quantitative differentials produced by immanent relations of force that stand on their own. The subjective qualities of perception or affection are thus only secondary products of the intensities immanent to the autonomous sensations. According to Deleuze it is these differential forces of sensation outside the subject that are fundamentally produced and explored through aesthetic or artistic experimentation. Thinking with art thus acquires a new meaning compared to that of Merleau-Ponty since the work of art is not primarily a subjective quality but a sign. As Deleuze asserts “it is not a sensible being but he being of the sensible.”Footnote 72 On this basis Deleuze and Guattari define art as one of three great forms of thought along with philosophy and science. Not unlike Heidegger’s assertion of “not thinking” as that which “calls for thinking” and Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of art as the non-philosophical future of philosophical thinking, Deleuze and Guattari argue that what defines thought is a process of production through “throwing a plane over chaos.”Footnote 73 Here chaos should not be thought of as a disorder or accidental appearance of things, but rather as “a void that is not a nothingness but a virtual, containing all possible particles and drawing out all possible forms, which spring up only to disappear immediately, without consistency or reference, without consequence. Chaos is an infinite speed of birth and disappearance.”Footnote 74 Science, philosophy and art thus share the common endeavor of conquering the chaotic multiplicity or the virtual (the not yet thinking that thought pre-supposes) through the production of thought. What separates the three forms of thought is what they produce. Philosophy is the production of concepts, science is the production of referential functions and art is the production of sensations. Apart from this separation of what they produce there is an affinity between art and philosophy in the virtual domain that they want to explore and create. According to Deleuze and Guattari, scientific function slows down or “relinquishes the […] infinite speed, in order to gain a reference able to actualize the virtual.”Footnote 75 They frequently portray this slowing down or actualization of the infinite speed as the plotting of a coordinate system where the abscissa sets up a plane of reference for the function of the following ordinates. This is what they term a “plane of reference.” Another way of expressing this is to say that science always refers to states of affairs, things or propositions. Contrary to this, philosophy wants to save or capture the virtual domain of infinite speed by giving it consistency or setting up a “plane of immanence” that works as a sieve for chaos. In this perspective the creation of concepts is the assemblage of differential components or intensive ordinates that capture the chaotic multiplicity of the infinite in specific events. Deleuze and Guattari give the example of Descartes’ concept of self, the cogito, which is made of three components—doubting, thinking and being. The components create zones of indiscernibility that constitute an inseparability or consistency of the infinite movement of the “I” that passes through the components.Footnote 76 Art lays out a “plane of composition” to “create the finite that restores the infinite.”Footnote 77 As already mentioned the infinite or virtual domain of art is the creation of sensations, which are defined as fundamental encounters of differential or intensive forces. The infinite or virtual movement of sensation is not the psychological state of perception and affection but the percepts and affects, which are differential or intensive conditions for qualitative subjective experiences. As Delezue and Guattari explain:

Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived. They could be said to exist in the absence of man because man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas, or by words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects. The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself.Footnote 78

When Deleuze and Guattari criticize phenomenology for drawing the wrong conclusions, they are basically arguing that phenomenology slows down or actualizes the virtual domain of sensation by making it a subjective function of the lived. In their view, the aim of art is to wrest free the percept from perceptions and the affect from affections to extract a bloc of sensations that stands on its own. The work of art is not a representation, recognition or contemplation of original opinions but rather the production of sensibility and, as such, a necessary condition for subjective thought. As Deleuze formulates it, “the two senses of the aesthetic become one, to the point where the being of the sensible reveals itself in the work of art, while at the same time the work of art appears as experimentation.”Footnote 79 It is also in this sense that a dialogue or rather an encounter with art becomes a necessary condition for engaging in the virtual domain of sensation.

Consequently, the role of art to thinking is not to animate original perceptions of a sensible being but rather to capture or produce the being of the sensible through experimentation. From this point of departure the exploration of aesthetics of bodily movement cannot be consigned to a being, which represents the already established, but must address the infinite possibilities or intensive forces of a becoming. It is here that Deleuze and Guattari can be said to take a more radical consequence of the affinity between art and embodied thought. As opposed to the phenomenological assertion of embodied thinking as a relation between man and world—implying that it is man who thinks, not the brain—Deleuze and Guattari hold that art captures or produces the virtual as that which makes sensation stand on its own. This results in a more radical interpretation of Cézanne’s thinking in painting than Merleau-Ponty’s:

Will the turning point not be elsewhere, in the place where the brain is “subject,” where it becomes subject? It is the brain that thinks and not man—the latter being only a cerebral crystallization. We will speak of the brain as Cézanne spoke of the landscape: man absent from, but completely within the brain. Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject, Thought-brain.Footnote 80

Rather than considering the brain as the substratum of man as a thinking being, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the brain should be seen as a process of becoming in which the thinking being emerges as expression. In many ways the scientific aspect of this virtual perspective resonates with the current development of the embodied mind thesis in the neurophenomenological and enactive schools in so far that the nervous system can be seen as a virtual field that produces embodied subjectivity.Footnote 81 However, as in the case of Merleau-Ponty the question of sensation is most often relegated to a function of the lived or natural perception as a given. As opposed to this, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the movement in Cézanne’s thinking in painting is not a question of revealing a pre-established foundation of man’s being in the world, but rather experimenting with the virtual forces of infinite movement in which thinking is actualized. This is also what they famously term the “Body without Organs.”Footnote 82 which they, symptomatically of the central role of art in their thinking, take from a poem by Antonin Artaud. To make oneself a body without organs through art is at once the dismantling of subjectivity or the self through experimentation and that which forces a production of new possibilities of subjective sensibility: “It is not at all a notion or a concept but a practice, a set of practices”Footnote 83 that expresses a freeing of sensation from the actual or already embodied organizations. As Deleuze argues in his book, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Footnote 84 in order to create or find openings toward forces of sensations still to be sensed, the artist must remove or overcome the already subjectively given ideas of sensibility and the bodily habits in the act of artistic expression. In this context the making of a body without organs through art expresses the chiasmic in-between movement in itself escaping both the subject and object of sensation to create the “pure sensation.”Footnote 85 This idea of sensation should not be understood as a rejection of phenomenological attention to qualitative states of perception and affection, but rather a critical pointing out that sensation as an expressive or creative process is at the limit of the phenomenological concept of the lived body. As Deleuze writes:

Sensation has one face turned toward the subject (the nervous system, vital movement, “instinct,” “temperament”—a whole vocabulary common to both Naturalism and Cézanne) and one face turned toward the object (the “fact,” the place, the event). Or rather, it has no faces at all, it is both things indissolubly, it is Being-in-the-World, as the phenomenologists say: at one and the same time I become in the sensation and something happens through the sensation, one through the other, one in the other. And at the limit, it is the same body which, being both subject and object, gives and receives the sensation.Footnote 86

It is at the limit of the lived body of perception that the body without organs happens through sensation as a self-organizing emergent force. In this context the body without organs could be termed a “body of sensation”Footnote 87 in contrast to Merleau-Ponty’s body of sense perception. Thus sensation is the forces exerted upon the body, but since it is the same body that gives and receives the sensation it is not a matter of internal and external sensations, but rather something happening through it—the body as an event. As Ronald Bogue explains:

When the eye views an apple, the apple is not to be taken as an external force impinging on the corporeal eye. Rather, in sensation apple and eye are part of a body without organs, such that when Cézanne paints an apple with what D. H. Lawrence calls the “applynes of the apple,” he paints the body. The distinction finally is not between external forces and internal sensations, but between invisible forces and visible bodies, the body of sensation rendering visible the invisible forces that play through bodies.Footnote 88

The body of sensation then is not a material spatial structure, but a virtual process of actualizing imperceptible forces of sensation. Thus art as a creation of a body of sensation is at once dissolution of the actual (scientific) understanding of the body, but also a virtual opening producing potentials for new bodily relations, new ways of becoming or “new varieties to the world.”Footnote 89 Consequently, in this image of sensation aesthetics of bodily movement cannot be founded on the notion of sensation as the experience of natural perception or subjective primary qualities given in self-movement, but must be composed from a process of experimentation with a pre-individual field on which the body can become expressive. In this way the body without organs or the production of sensation in art is an aesthetic effort to free the concept of the body from its own idea. This is an instance of what Brian Massumi has termed the “primacy of expression” or that “[t]he world does not exist outside of its expressions”Footnote 90 in Deleuze and Guattari. In this perspective Gallagher’s unanswered question of expression from the beginning becomes an affirmative point of departure that, however, goes beyond the idea of expression as communication of a primary intersubjectivity. Sheets-Johnstone’s statement that “movement forms the I that moves before the I that moves forms movement”Footnote 91 does offer an approximation of a pre-individual field to some extent, but by returning this movement to introspection of sense experience and four primary qualities the movement never leaves the already established function of the lived. As Massumi explains in relation to the expression in Deleuze and Guattari:

Formation cannot be accounted for if a common form is assumed, whether between content and expression or subject and system. If the world exhibits conformities or correspondences they are, precisely, produced. To make them the principle of production is to confuse the composing with the composed, the process with the product.Footnote 92

6 Concluding the infinite movement

The aesthetics of the embodied mind found in Deleuze and Guattari thus points to a domain that is rarely touched upon in the current phenomenological dialogue with scientific disciplines. Indeed Sheets-Johnstone’s qualitative structures in self-movement, Gallagher’s primordial intersubjectivity or Merleau-Ponty’s reversibility of the flesh are possible structures of sensibility in this purely relational virtual domain. Nevertheless, the contribution of Deleuze and Guattari is to point out that sense perception and lived experience always presupposes a pre-individual field of sensation that makes itself available to be lived through. It is here that the encounter with art and study of aesthetics become central to the understanding of the relation between expressive movement and embodied minds. Merleau-Ponty’s dialogue with art is a good example of this, but consigning his taste for the sensations available in works of art to a question of the foundation of being does not capture the particular process of production that makes sensation stand on its own. Another way of saying this would be to state that art creates or captures expressions available for subjective sense experience and, perhaps more importantly, teaches us that sensation can never be considered a given, but must be genuinely created in the concepts that want to capture the infinite movement of a particular becoming-body. This does not mean that the scientific study of embodied phenomena is impossible, but rather that the continual process of production of sensations through art makes it problematic to base this approach on naturalized or general ideas of the body and its potential for movement and sensation. Like Sheets-Johnstone’s natural history of consciousness, sensation has its own “natural” history intimately linked to art and aesthetic practices, which constantly unfolds or actualizes new potentials for sensibility. In this perspective what is needed to proceed from Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with the entre-deux between art and a phenomenological science is to move beyond the corporeally prepositioned dialogue toward Deleuze’s and Guattari’s more direct encounter with art, perpetually forcing us to rethink the body in terms of infinite movement, difference and potential change.