The World of Perception as the World of the Political
Merleau-Ponty's 1948 lectures on French radio's National Programme have recently been translated and released under the title The World of Perception, a compilation of seven short pieces in which, in a particularly interesting moment, the French existential phenomenologist discusses the difference between the absolute space of Newtonian physics and the relative space that comes into being with works of Einstein. Considered politically, we could say that the world of absolute space is the violently cartography of 'the map', the abstraction through which 'longitude' and 'latitude' were introduced, thus transforming a world of many worlds, in which the relativity of lived experience prevailed, into one of total adminstration and global governmentality, in other words, the 'one world' celebrated primarily by the United States, the G8 and the International Financial Institutions. The work, which is not expressly political, is particularly interesting to me in regards to how it might apply a propos postcolonial/anticolonial theory, especially insofar as that could entail a demapping of colonized space and a rediscovery of the body, as well as the world of perception that it hold within. How for instance, might 'Hawaii' reappear to those of us living here, if the Einsteinian conception of space as relative (and thus lived experience as intersubjective), would finally come to prevail over the Newtonian map-world that so many of the military and academic people living here seem to continue to unproblematically move within?




FA-18 Hornet creates a visible shock wave as it breaks the sound barrier.



If we were to rediscover the sensory world, that which is always prior to the objectifying technoscientific ideology that is the dispensation of late modernity, I would suggest that, as in much the same way that, as a professor of mine likes to point out, LSD takes one off autopilot, everything we see, smell, taste, touch and hear would take on a radically different character than it typically does, one that we probably cannot really even fathom at this point. Think for instance of the 'emergency warning sirens', sponsored by the ever-protective Oahu Civil Defense Agency, that go off in some three hundred separate locations on the island of Oahu alone the first Monday of every month at 11:45 am, creating a simultaneity and territoriality of sound. Like the village bells that created a sense of identity and place in medieval France, these terrifyingly loud and invasive technologies interpellate our bodies in ways that, despite the shock that they produce, ultimately come to seem 'natural' and 'legitimate' after a certain period of time, one simply integrates them into daily experience and forgets that they are there in the background; then, as Nietzsche said, we forget that we forgot, and the governmentalization of sensation is complete. Thus, Merleau-Ponty argues, "the world of perception is, to a great extent, unknown territory as long as we remain in the practical or utilitarian attitude...much time and effort, as well as culture, have been needed in order to lay this world bare and...one of the great achievements of modern art and philosophy...has been to allow us to rediscover the world in which we live, yet which we are always prone to forget (39)".