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body to be the ground for all perception, and in that I also take the sensuous life
of the body to be at the heart of thought (a position that allowed Merleau-Ponty
to eliminate the dichotomy between mind and body in his work Phenomenology
o f Perception^^). In what follows, however, I depart some distance from
Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, and move instead toward the theoretical
position on the sensing body articulated by Michel Serres in his 1998 work Les
Cinq Sens {The Five Senses)}^
In this work in particular, and in earlier works that precede it in general,
Serres takes his point of departure from Merleau-Pontian and Heideggerian
phenomenology. Serres finds the work of these theoreticians repellent, almost
revolting, for what he takes to be their “bodilessness.”^^ Serres takes offence at
Merleau-Pontian phenomenology in particular; because, he says, it consists of
“lots of phenomenology and no sensation.”^^ Serres is of this mind because he
believes Merleau-Ponty to have taken for phenomena to be explored not the
experience of the body in the world at all, but instead the language that
describes the experiences of bodily sensation. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty’s
Phenomenology o f Perception opens with these words: “At the outset of the
study of perception, we find in language the notion of sensation”^® (my
emphasis).
It may well seem as though Serres’s accusations are unfounded; this
was certainly my own impression when I read Les Cinq Sens for the first time.
However, when one closely inspects Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the senses,
one is forced to at least consider being less dismissive of Serres’s words. When
Merleau-Ponty describes sensual life in all of his phenomenological work, he
does so with reference to a kind of zone of indeterminacy in that he honours the
idea that in attending carefully to one sensual phenomenon, other sensual
phenomena escape close attention. In order to describe this one sense, MerleauPonty must render it still in that he must remove it from a lived context in which
it is much more usually and inextricably intertwined with all of the other senses.
He does this for the benefit of language; the sense is held still, out of its more
usually intertwined place, so that it can be clearly described. This is what Serres
means when he says that Merleau-Pontian phenomenology is conducted entirely
“via language.”^^ The major difference between Merleau-Pontian
phenomenology and Serresian renderings of the body in the world, then, pivots
on Serres’s recognition of the habitually multisensual life of the body.
Multisensuality in Performance
Hearing, in effect, as Serres insists, is a naked faculty, a sense waiting
for a project. In rehearsals, hear ing certainly has a project: to hear tiny
component noises in routine musical conversation, component parts that render
musical conversation nonsensical. But in performance, hearing has a different
kind of project, in which it is deafened—by itself Connor describes this hearing
as “autistic acoustics,” suggesting that during performances band members do