From Ferguson, Missouri to Mexico City political demands move hand in hand with cultural movements reflecting aspects of what art critics since the 1990s have called relational aesthetics. Contesting the value of the museum artifact as well as the autonomous self, these movements produce art as acts of collaboration with social goals.  What rappers term flow and call-response constitute the corporeal and affect-driven ethico-aesthetic dynamics of urban lives across the US/Mexican border.  Creative practices in multimedia art, rap, and popular music counter the negative charges and territorial markings of the geopolitical map drawn by the American drug wars with the rhythms and tones of change.

Among the many fascinating issues in Heraclitus’ discourse, this paper focuses on two: the predominance of the theme of wakefulness in contrast to “those asleep,” and the striking predominance of the hearing metaphor for knowing, largely replacing for Heraclitus the already more common sight and grasping metaphors.  By putting the two together, the paper will attempt to show what a different conception of philosophic thinking Heraclitus is proposing, and even what a different experience of the world he espouses.

"Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Natural Time"

Like Bergson and Heidegger before him, Merleau-Ponty argues for an intimate link between time and our distinctive character as finite, historical beings.  Merleau-Ponty likewise holds that our familiar conception of objective or clock time—a uniform, quantifiable time that purports to be indifferent to and independent of our lived experience—is in the end founded upon the temporality peculiar to the internal dynamics of experience itself.  However, Merleau-Ponty arguably adds a distinctive new layer to this phenomenological approach to thinking about time.  For in the Phenomenology of Perception there are the traces of a phenomenology of the cyclical time of nature, and this cyclical time is arguably different from, and irreducible to, both objective time and the uniquely historical time characteristic of human experience. 

My goal is to offer a basic reconstruction of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of natural time, and to show that it shapes Merleau-Ponty’s account of human experience in substantial and interesting ways.  It turns out, for instance, that on Merleau-Ponty’s account we are always experiencing the present “now” in terms of different time-scales:  while, from certain narrower time scales, the present is historically unique and neatly individuated (as in typical empiricist conceptions of experience), there are also broader, more cyclical time scales operative within experience, and these abstract from individuated details and capture only the more generic, repeating structures at play in the phenomenal world.  For Merleau-Ponty, I suggest, the most fruitful way to understand the link between human subjectivity and the natural world is to explore the ways in which human experience itself negotiates these differing ways of engaging with time that are internal to it.