Meet Animal Meat - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

means I have to go unto the heart of the things,
by making myself a world and by making them
flesh” (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible).
However abstract in its formulation,
Merleau-Ponty ‘s working out of materiality as flesh
must not be either literally or poetically
interpreted. Unequivocally, the flesh of things is
relationally constituted within the perceiving bodysubject,
permeating the inner recesses of his
subjectivity “so that the seer and the visible
reciprocate one another… It is this Visibility, this
generality of the Sensible in itself, this anonymity
innate to Myself that we have previously called
flesh” (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible).
This “anonymity innate to myself”, that
unseen antruthful material belonging of me-as-abody
within the world, this one reflection of my
continuity and unity with it that only the Other
realizes, but that I always miscarry by thinking I am
contiguous to the world as a subject, means the
flesh. As such, it also is a gap (écart, in French),
visible everywhere in the world between my own
corporeality and me as a subject. Measures of
this gap only exist in my self-reflection, and in my
projection of a world of objects around me. My
body ignores it, for it knows pre-reflectively — that
is perceptually — how to be in equilibrium as a
mortal and temporal being. But insofar as I can’t
reflect on my body’s pre-reflective knowledge, my
body remains unknown to myself albeit present to
itself: it is phenomenally inconsiderable
(“infigurable”, in French). And yet, as an earlier
quote from Merleau-Ponty already suggested, it is
both what conditions my freedom and my
servitude: it is my liberty to be in the world (“être au
monde”, in French), to move in it and to act upon
it. Inasmuch as it situates me in time and space, it
intercedes for my being of the world, and
therefore alienates me to be with it while leading
me astray from my immediacy and my own
presence. This is my ambiguity, and only
ambiguously am I given to myself: “I know myself
only insofar as I am inherent in time and in the
world, that is, I know myself only in my ambiguity”
(Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception).
There is no elucidating it, one can only know it,
and thus only by accepting my ambiguity — not
coinciding with my body, living in the chiasmic
permanence of its écart, namely being a bodysubject
— can I come into terms with my own
finitude.
With those bare existential aspects in mind,
one cannot but think of the raw meat displayed in
each photograph of the Mammal Thoughts series
as a pictorial equivalent for Merleau-Ponty’s
concept of flesh. Several other fundamental
connections reinforce such a reading, having the
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series firstly function as a portrayal of individuals
cogitating, and even more so reflecting on the
possibility of being just their own bodies.
Consequently, the series’ photographic
momentum is essentially about grasping bodysubjects
approaching their elemental gap, or just
the same constantly falling on one side of
Merleau-Ponty’s Chiasm. Each individual has
therefore been “seen”, meaning here “seen not
seeing”, while the camera presence subjected
them to the very vision they were seeking, and
reflected their question as to who and how they
are manifestly, or one should say phenomenally,
as finished subjects: mammal thinkers,
chiasmically photographed, absorbed in the
unthinkable reflection of pieces of meat that
trapped them and freed them all in the same
gesture.
Visually speaking, the raw meat “appears”
in the true Heideggerian sense of Erscheinung —
apparition — from the material world to the
investigating subjectivity. It is exactly “what” the
body-subject can’t reflect — or measure — of
himself while bent on itself. Or in other words, it is
“where” the mind slips and falls back into the
world, again away from itself. As the lexical
symbol of Merleau-Ponty’s flesh of the visible, the
meat represents what is yet invisible in each
portrait: the coincidence of the thought of being
material with the envisioning of that thought.
Importantly, the theoretical role assumed
by the meat in this work echoes the larger
problematic of understanding visuality in its
dialectical relationship with materiality, as found in
Merleau-Ponty’s later aesthetic philosophy. As we
now know, he conceived of visual depiction as
grounded in a complex engagement with the
material environment. But the constitutive position
of the seer is fundamentally emphasized beyond
pure perception in The Visible and the Invisible,
along the idea that “the thickness of flesh
between the seer and the thing is constitutive for
the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his
corporeality” (Merleau-Ponty. The Visible and the
Invisible). In other words, things are only visible for
an embodied subject, which in return gives the
world its visibility. Clearly, there is no visibility, no
tangibility nor sensibility without a being-sensible, a
being-tangible and a being-visible. But the
necessary condition and mutual conditioning that
materiality is, that co-founding of coincidental
flesh, appears here most ambiguously as visuality.
For if corporeality really conditions the visibility of
the world indeed reciprocally the significance of
seeing is to be found in the materiality of the seer.
However, according to Merleau-Ponty and his
theorization of the body-subject, subjectivity is