Temporality and Cogito in Phenomenology of Perception [Merleau-Ponty]
‘Pieds Noirs’ is the name that was given to the non-native French in Algeria during the period in which Algeria was a colony of France. For 130 years, immigrants became French citizens under French law, and participated in the colonial culture of the time. Once an end to the colonial war was reached, more than a million Pieds Noirs fled Algeria for France, fearing a backlash from the newly sovereign Algerian nationalists. The Pieds Noirs were colonial occupiers, but they were also victims to the newly sovereign Algerians, and immigrants to a France which no longer wishes to maintain ties to a colonial history.
Today, the Pieds Noir wish to have their narrative affirmed by France as French citizens, and with it, their cultural identity and minority status. At the same time, to publicly affirm the victims with the memorial museum is to affirmation of the image of Pied Noir as colonial oppressors.
France is being forced to confront both perspectives in the form of debates over the public museums. Is it possible for French Algerian to be assimilated into a national identity while the historicity of colonialist oppressor is not? The problem seems to have to do with the nature of subjectively constituted identity vis-a-vis the nature of cultural identity. Politically, it seems impossible to retain a multiplicity of identify while asserting a singular historical narrative.1
Modern societies function as bureaucracies in which individuals are understood by the state by their categorical definition. If politics is executed by the state by way of public policy, identity also becomes an issue of public policy.
It seems difficult to retain the ‘multiplicity’ of woven historicity in public policy, for one must allocate dollars to particular categorical concerns: do we affirm or deny colonialism? Do we put money towards a museum that has to do with colonialism? Do we put more money towards feminism?
It is a prerogative of the modern states to preserve and cultivate new identities for their citizens, both as a way to quell historical contention and to ensure allegiance to the state. If individuals only identify with being a ‘citizen’ and also a member to a ‘nation-state’, we can imagine that very strong links are in developed between the individual and the state. It seems expedient, in political terms, to let the old, unwanted identities whither, and hope that they are eventually forgotten.2 This seems to be the case with colonial history.
“The efforts to empower the forgotten French Algerians, to affirm their presence in France proper and their colonial history, is one that is being met with contention. Many feel that to bring this history to light is to affirm a colonialist past, which many are willing to forget altogether.”
From the position of Cogito, Merleau-Ponty meets temporality as a relation between time and subjectivity, a property of being present in the world. History is understood not as an objective, causal narrative, but as an eternity from which we abstract a historicity by way the dialectic of time – time as a structure of consciousness. “Time analysed provides a time structure”3.
Time as a structure of consciousness renders events as causal in their relation to subjectivity. It is by our being present that we know time in its intuitive, naive fashion. Through a phenomenological study of temporality, we reach a time not objective, but as a subjective stance that we take to the world. Consciousness “deploys or constitutes time.”4 Temporality is the relation between time and subjectivity.
Merleau-Ponty asserts that is it the “action of common sense” which “thematizes or objectifies” the “intuition of time’s permanance.”5 The ‘naive consciousness’ finds signification in a subjective historicity abstracted by way of time, and construes this historicity as a correlate of the permanence of History.
“The past… exists only when a subjectivity is there to disrupt the plenitude of being in itself – to adumbrate a perspective, and introduce non-being into it. A past and a future spring forth when I reach out towards them.”6
To accept a narrative is to accept temporalization as “something ready made”, as a multiplicity of psychic facts among which one tries to establish causal relations. “passivity… is being encompassed, being in a situation –prior to which we do not exist – which we are perpetually resuming and which is constitute of us.”7
It is this resuming of a history, this constituting of history in the present, which is at work in the public discourse over the Pied Noirs. Individuals insert themselves into a ‘passive’ historicity - as it is already there – and ask to be affirmed in the present – that “one single time which is self-confimatory which can bring nothing into existence unless it has aleady laid that thing’s foundations as present and eventual past, and which establishes itself as a stroke.” It is ‘naive’ for it correlates the constituted historicity as History, without regard for History itself. It is problematic for the same reason.
History, prior to intellection, seems non-other than an atemporal ‘nature’; that which resides outside of particular causal historicities and provides the ground from which historicities are abstracted, according to perspectival significance dialectics. The problem with the competing historicities of the Pied Noir seems to be a logistical problem with thinking time, and no problem at all, if one properly understands the difference between ‘being for itself’ and ‘being in itself’.
“If the ‘for itself’, the revelation of self to self, is merely the hollow in which time is formed, and if the world ‘in itself’ is simply the horizon of my present, then the problem is reduced to the form of temporalization.”8
The problem is an argument over the perspectival quality of the ‘for itself’ without consideration of the ‘in itself’. Purely considering the ‘in itself’, there seems no need for “a synthesis externally binding together the tempora into one single time…because the ‘cohesion of a life’ is given with its ek-stasis.” By virtue of being, one has history. Nothing more is needed for its constitution.
Yet alongside politics arises the motivation for the revival of ‘passive’ history. The “external bindings” attribute a certain significance, and in this case, the significance becomes an object of political instrumentation.
The ‘passive synthesis’ of the intentional act to create a national narrative is to create an ‘ultimate consciousness as ‘timeless’.9 In the sense that the national narrative is not intratemporal”10 it is not reducible to all subjective time, therefore, certain historicities simply cannot be reduced to the narrative.
Merleau-Ponty concludes the chapter on a positive note: “two temporalities are not mutually exclusive as are two consciousnesses, because each one knows itself only be projecting itself into the present where they can interweave. The living present opens “upon a past which I nevertheless am no longer leaving through, and on a future which i do not yet live, and perhaps never shall, it can also open on to temporalities outside my living experience and acquire a social horizon, with the result that my world is expanded to the dimensions of that collective history which my private existence takes up and carries forward.11
It seems only positive in regard to temporality – in the sense that the present is the ground for the emergence of an instant woven of subjective acts in a inter-subjectivity. This is no solution to the problem of the history of the Pied Noir. Perhaps the insight that this is not a ‘historical’ problem at all, but ‘imminent’ in the sense that it remains constituted and held in subjectivity. And so long as individuals constitute themselves according to a ‘passive synthesis’ of history, they will continue to live the conflict of that history.
1 A political utility of the state used to for unifying purposes.
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