Rethinking diasporicity: embodiment, emotion, and the displaced origin

Abstract

This paper explores how Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology can be used to articulate an account of the lived experience of diasporicity that contrasts sharply with the abstract formulations of post-structuralism and post-colonialism. Becoming displaced from an originary time and space is the characteristic of being human. Therefore, Merleau-Ponty's philosophy provides the outline of a universal diasporic experience. The question that arises is how this ontological diasporicity relates to the field of discourse, the optics of racialized power relations and the lived experience of the black diaspora. The work of Franz Fanon is introduced in order to explore how the fundamental black diasporic moods of melancholia and nostalgia can be thematized in such a way that both pre-discursive and discursive elements can be incorporated.

Keywords:

• diasporicity
• embodiment
• emotion
• Merleau-Ponty

In this article, I will explore how Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology can be used to articulate an account of the lived experience of diasporicity. Rather than an abstract conceptualisation which stakes its claim somewhere between essentialism, anti-essentialism, and anti-anti-essentialism, an existential phenomenological account enables an understanding of origin that is continually re-inscribed within the spatio-temporal terms of the lived present. This incorporated thematisation of identity, emotion and the facticity of displacement contrasts sharply with post-structuralist and post-colonial celebrations of hybridity. In the case of the black diaspora, the lived experience of displacement has significant ramifications for how we think through notions of ancestral memory and the disrupted present.

I want to emphasise that diaspora should not be taken to be an abstract relation concerning the spacing of the subject across time. Rather, diasporicity is at work in every gesture and movement of diasporic being. Diasporicity concerns the lived experience of embodied beings and bodily practices which have been (actual or by association) ‘rooted’ in a place, and which by being uprooted and re-routed to another place produce a sort of dis-positioning and re-positioning. Embodied orientations are dis-oriented, and bodies of culture can no longer continue as they did. Or rather, they have to be reoriented and remobilised afresh in each new location. I want to explore how this imperative to rework a cultural patterning according to its pluralising new contexts always involves a relationship between the remembrance of traces of the ‘old’ practices and the process of engagement, and interaction with the new situation. This means that theorising black diasporic identity and expressive agency needs to be grounded in affective social practices, experiences, relations of power, and habits of bodily being. This existential phenomenological perspective allows us to understand more deeply how on a physical and psychic level the effects of uprooting, rooting and re-routing can be experienced with mixed emotions and responses. Ontology, or at least a social ontology, the study of the ‘being’ of diasporic agents, allows for a contextualisation of emotions that is more than just psychologistic or individualistic. The emotional schemas of diasporic existence are in this way diagrams of the deep intertwining between dis-placement and its effects on reflective and pre-reflective formations of the self. That is, constructions of the self or the community of being are affected by the emotions or moods produced through displacement.

‘Emotion’, according to M.L. Lyon and J.M. Barbalet ‘is precisely the experience of embodied sociality’ (1994, p. 48). On a philosophical level then, I will sketch out an ontological structure to diaspora. Connecting ontology and existential realities allows us to make a general claim about a construction of subjectivity and identity that is neither rooted in essentialist fixity nor dissipated as a form of deterritorialised nomadism. Moreover, when we begin to understand the evolution of the black diaspora as an ontological condition, the full force of the damaging consequences and violence of transportation, enslavement, colonialism, and indifference to black humanity comes into sharp relief. On a discursive level, bodies are encoded into a world and ways of being that organise it. For the diasporic black body, this organisation bears a distanced and deferred relation to a (real or an imaginary) home. Despite this distance and hiatus, many diasporic subjects often yearn for an originary past which will anchor their identity, providing emotional stability in a world which disrupts their existence prior to any form of agency or expression.

(In)habiting the body

Moving away from the philosophical privileging of a disembodied consciousness in the production of meaning and identity, the existential phenomenological theory of Maurice Merleau-Ponty stresses active embodied relations between human consciousness, thought, knowledge, and the world. ‘Consciousness,’ Merleau-Ponty writes, is not only embodied, it ‘is in the first place not a matter of “I think that” but of “I can”’ (1962, p. 137). Incarnated intentionality refers to the body's capacities to act in the world prior to conscious or reflective thinking according to the demands of a situation. For Merleau-Ponty, my bodily capacities are acquired through habits formed out of practice. These capacities are, of course, limited by physiological constraints, previous attitudes, and movements in the context of a world-historical and cultural positioning. All these factors, together with my communications with others, condition the way I comport myself and inhabit the world around me.

Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, as embodied subjects, our actions are constituted, limited, and empowered by an interaction between our habitat, history, and other cultural and biological inheritances. It is within this ‘already constituted’ space, to use Merleau-Ponty's term, that we take up our place in the world, interact with others, and make ourselves feel at home or are made not to feel at home. The intentional body is therefore always constituted spatially (‘a link between a here and a yonder’) and temporally (‘a now and a future’) (1962, p. 140). This is what it means to inhabit the body. The body acquires habit through a vital relation to the habitus that gives it pointers and suggestions in a world-place that precedes the agent. The capacity to act in the world1 involves perception and ‘motility’. Action and experience in the world is grounded in forms of habit that are repeated and re-established with each bodily involvement. Habits are, therefore, ‘not long established custom’ (1962, p. 146), but the continued corporeal practices of a culture. However, as I will show shortly, in providing an account of a common incarnated habit, Merleau-Ponty has been rightly accused of neglecting the ways in which habitual bodies are formed and exist in relationship to power, differentiation and discrimination (Sobchack 1992, Young 1989, Radhika 1999).

E-motion, origin, and freedom

We are already gesturing towards an embodied conception of the body's relation to movement and diasporicity. Embodied agents are always grounded in their lived experience precisely because they ‘inhabit’ their body in specific ways: inscribed and circumscribed, social and self-generated. The body referred to here is not the physical body conceptualised as an ‘object’, it is ‘not a collection of adjacent organs’, nor is it a thing that exists in the here and now in a discrete set of spatio-temporal slices. Rather, the existential phenomenological body is ‘the congealed face of existence’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 234), that ‘gives significance … to cultural objects like words’ (p. 235), ‘the potentiality of a certain world’ (p. 106), ‘the systems of anonymous “functions” which draw every particular focus into a general project’ (p. 354). The body is neither the subject, nor the object of experience. It is prior to both. It lies between and yet prior to inner and outer worlds. Through the temporal flow of lived experience, the body as self and the body as world folds and unfolds.

This expressive, situated body, like the world itself, involves a complex set of processes that continuously reveals the self anew in relation to other bodies, new situations and new roles. This means that the body in motion and the knowledge it bears is always shifting and indeterminate. Movements in the world affect our state of being and the way we commune with the world. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment can therefore be seen as the prelude to a situated theory of emotions. In this sense, it is possible to say that all motion is at the same time the horizon of e-motion, and to hold that location and dislocation have affective force. This is precisely the claim posited by Sue Cataldi in her excellent book Emotion, Depth and Flesh: A Study of Sensitive Space (1993). She writes that ‘Emotional experiences involve perceptions of meaningful change “in” a situation and “in” ourselves in relation to that situation’ (p. 91). Motility always involves emotional shifts and the generation of ‘another emotional stance “position”’ (p. 91). Conversely, emotional experience always requires motility, or a background of some prior sense of orientation (or disorientation) in the world. Examples of this from everyday life are easy to find: the movement of arms whilst engaged in a telephone conversation; the sense of becoming emotionally empty after too many nights in an hotel room away from home. In more general terms, we can think of the use of a spatialised vocabulary in the expression of emotions: ‘he said he needed space’; ‘she said she felt empty’, etc. Another example of spatial emotionality is captured in the phase ‘I need to get away from x’ as both a physical and emotional description. Any form of displacement from the locus of significance (the ‘home place’) can lead to a shift in mood because bodies no longer feels connected to a familiar geography which grounded their identity and gives them meaning.

Far from the remit of a psychological taxonomy, emotion is therefore another name for a specific form of being-in-the-world and ‘being-to-the-world’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. viii). Cataldi's account refuses to reduce emotionality to pure interiority; our emotions reveal the dynamic of relations between self/other and world rather than being merely modes of the individual psyche. Different emotional responses therefore are the expression of changing relations to a changed world. Rather than emotions being simply the ‘objects’ of our experience, they are the forms of our existence, revealing the fundamental way in which we orient ourselves within it.

The suggestion is that ontologically and phenomenologically diasporicity is not simply an experience of movement or displacement, but an experience that inevitably induces profound emotional responses: danger and fear, loss and grief, joy and pain. The primacy placed on embodied experience draws us into ‘a deeper awareness of the sociality of being and emotion’ (Lyon and Barbalet 1994, p. 62) within the black diaspora, and brings with it an explanatory power that has been largely missing from much recent work. For example, the continuous tension between the so-called essentialist accounts of the black diaspora, and the anti-essentialists and anti-anti-essentialists, can be resolved by a return to an embodied account of the relationship between emotion and motion. This return helps to position these different theorisations of diasporicity in terms of divergent affectively generated responses to dislocation from a familiar setting and conditions of oppression.

It is with this background of the expressive, e-motional body that we can begin to understand the relation between conditions of embodiment and freedom. If we understand the body not as a biologically fixed entity and more as a fundamental synthesising agency that brings the world into existence as it is brought into being by the world, then the body becomes a gathering of the past in the present that enables the emergence of different possibilities, to create new beginnings and new futures. But this is only the active side of a two-sided story. The body's capacity to bring the world into being is based on its passive relation to a pre-existing world. This might at first sound paradoxical. It appears that the body is both the origin and paradoxically not the origin of the world's existence. The world at one and the same time appears to originate with and yet precede embodiment. However, the contradiction disappears when the relation between my body and the world is seen to be one of mutual interdependency that is non-oppositional. Embodiment allows a world that is always already there to come into being again. The body therefore renews the world through a sort of ‘eternal return’. The body takes up the possibilities offered by the world and repeats and transforms them. Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘The synthesis of both time and space is a task that always has to be performed afresh’ (1962, p. 140). The body-world relation then is one of incorporation, improvisation, and innovation. In short, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology reveals the moment of freedom to be utterly corporeal.

This Merleau-Pontyian co-conditional horizon of the body's relation to the world has far-reaching implications for thinking origin, displacement, and subjectivity. For Merleau-Ponty, whenever the body takes up the terms of the world, it necessarily transforms it in the process. To begin, the body's emplacement in the world means that the world exists as ‘always “already constituted”, and we shall never come to understand it by withdrawing into a worldless perception’ (1962, p. 252). The world we are located in has already been marked out by others; it is always already imbued with values, traces, and forms of significance that precede our occupation. The world therefore has a sort of intentionality that is prior to our own subjective intentions or free will. And yet, the world only has significance when its sedimented values are taken up afresh in practice by each embodied community or being. For instance, although the judicial power of white supremacy in the United States has been abolished, many white people still benefit and unwittingly perpetuate it. According to Charles W. Mills, the founding narratives of white supremacy are still ‘maintained through inherited patterns of discrimination, exclusionary racial bonding, cultural stereotyping, and differential white power deriving from consolidated economic privilege’ (1998, p. 102). In this instance, if freedom is the capacity to act and realise my intentionality, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, I, as an individual, have the choice and power to either persist with an oppressive practice or help to change that practice. Freedom to reject oppressive practices as well as contribute to their perpetuation is, however, grounded in socio-historical processes which are the bases for the formulation of our choices. Merleau-Ponty writes,

The fact remains that I am free, not in spite of, or on the hither side of, those motivations, but by means of them. For this significant life, this certain significance of nature and history which I am, does not limit my access to the world, but on the contrary is my means of entering into communication with it. (1962, p. 455)

Anti-racist struggles, affirmative action policies, and alternative cultural practices are attempts to question and demolish hegemonic power structures (Alcoff 1999) that endure through the habitus of history encoded within schemas of bodily being. The lived body is therefore the site for the reassertion of a world that is always experienced anew across and within different groups. The lived body is therefore the site of an originary contestation of the meaning of the world. Although it may sound odd and initially contrary to common sense, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology shows that the world's origin is constituted and re-constituted through each event of embodied agency. In effect, the world is always gathered through a dynamic of differential repetition. The notion of ‘origin’ is therefore relativised – we have no absolute origin or ‘home’. The movement that is injected into the world through each somatic dance is therefore the source of a fundamental ‘homelessness’ at work.

Merleau-Ponty's account points towards consciousness, emotion, representation, knowledge, and thought in general being secondary to an embodied communication with the world. It is as intentional, situated, and inter-corporeal beings that we have a world and are free to act. And it is through this ‘worlding’ of our embodied communication that we take up stylistic gestures, features, and habits that are specific to our cultural, geographical, economical, and historical situation. Moreover, this communication does not happen once and for all. Although it is the origin of bodily being and the world, the communication is always renewed through each encounter and each event. Here then, Merleau-Ponty offers a radically different way of thinking about both origin and freedom. Paradoxically, origin is always repeating itself, through difference. That is, ‘origin’ itself is already always constituted by difference. The origin is fated, perpetually to become a stranger to itself.

Freedom, for Merleau-Ponty is not a return to an I that can impose its will upon the world; rather, freedom, is the ‘lived body's ability to structure its world and to realise the potentialities informed by its social history’ (Diprose 1994, p. 107). Freedom and origin are thus generated through the interaction between embodied subjects, their situation and interactions with others. The origin is incessantly forgotten or at least dis-placed through the active work of its creation. The force of Merleau-Ponty's account works precisely because he demonstrates that ontology is constituted by difference. It is thanks to the primordiality accorded to difference that as embodied subjects we give birth to the world and new possibilities are generated.

The limit of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology

Although Merleau-Ponty's corporeal and sensuous phenomenology has many implications for a fresh investigation into the terms of diasporic experience, here I want to focus on just two pathways forwards. First, his work can be used to show that the experience of diasporicity is grounded in embodiment. Because for Merleau-Ponty, the body and the world are closely interwoven and because the body acts as origin to a world that already precedes it, the body therefore is always already situated in place. At the end of his career, in his posthumously published work, The Visible and the Invisible (1968) this insight is taken to its logical conclusion. He argues in effect that there is no absolute ontological distinction between body and world. The body is a place, a repository for a certain view of the world, for ways of moving, for ways of recognising and interacting with others, and so on. In its turn, a place is a form of the body: a unifying site of historical and cultural forces. We can never say that a body is not a place or a place is not a body. Merleau-Ponty calls this intertwining relation the ‘flesh of the world’.2

If possessing a body entails being possessed by a world or being-in-place, being displaced or being out-of-place may have serious experiential and existential consequences for diasporic subjects. Because one is no longer in a geographical setting that is familiar, one can easily lose a deeply felt habitual connection to the world. Dislocated from the familiarity of place, the diasporic subject can therefore experience quite acutely the pain of being elsewhere. This pain, according to the philosopher Ed Casey, goes beyond an emotional response. Casey writes, ‘Entire cultures can become profoundly averse to the places they inhabit, feeling atopic and displaced within their own emplacement’ (1993, p. 34).

Painful or pleasurable, if the grounding of diasporic experience in the emotionally situated body remains unthought, a problematic alignment presents itself whereby the historically constituted diasporic subject is compared to the globe-trotting, multi-passported world traveller. In this situation, the diasporic subject is associated with the elite of nation states: entrepreneurial and intellectual jet setters who are able to celebrate the commodity fetishism of their global access. Such consummate consumers of hybrid experiences may often express a quiet violence in their display of their ability to cross borders with ease and consume difference without regard for those they encounter and without significant emotional impact on their lives, let alone emotional destabilisation. Because of these cultural and border crossings by both third world and metropolitan elites, historically constituted diasporic communities may uncritically cling ever more to the allure of cultural and racial purity.

In this fashion, a diasporic ideal is constructed which celebrates the trans-national and hybrid. Once this discursive framework is internalised by those who have been genuinely displaced, their own diasporicity is rendered unproblematic. There is seen to be a joy and intrigue of diasporicity that is available for appropriation. The subject is neither absolutely without home, deterritorialised, nor boxed into a certain form of identity, and a form of freedom is apparently established. However, what such alignment fails to show is that for those whose entry into the New World has been one of violent negation of the freedom of the corporeal schema, the celebration of the hybrid and the ‘international beige’ are in fact rife with conflict and unspeakable agony. These conflicts involve positionings, crises of identity, alienation, and the unstated feeling of being always out of time and off key. All these crises are existential crises of embodiment; crises of being in the world where one habitus lies in direct conflict to another; the crisis of feeling that one is in two places at once, of hopping between various languages and not finding solace in any. Diasporic subjects are immediately forced to realise that their place in the world is a ‘house of difference rather than the security of any particular difference’ (Lorde 1982, p. 226). Despite this recognition of difference, many still yearn for a stable, coherent ground to support the self. In its absence, there is created the dilemma of being continually jostled by feelings of alienation from the body – being estranged by race, gender, generation, language, and geography. This conflict can be so devastating that it renders itself incapable of expression. In this case, diasporic agents can remain forever lost in translation, cut adrift in the interstitial. I am suggesting that the dis-placed diasporic body can be, and is often, a site of conflict and despair and not this wonderful consumerised, global mish-mash of difference and transgressive hybridity that is celebrated in contemporary theory and popular culture.

The second implication of Merleau-Ponty's account is that through thinking the deep significance of the body-place relation, he offers a radical way of thinking about origin. His model of origin refutes a naïve ‘efficient’ causality of embodied habitus as that which happens once and only once. In the naïve model, the embodied subject would be seen to acquire competence from a repetition of bodily acts grounded in an invariant/static culture. Within this model, any account of cultural change would involve what we might call purely external factors. In contrast, the origin for Merleau-Ponty is a momentary event that is always renewed and reconstituted in the embodied moment of the present. As was shown above, although the world is always already constituted, it has no value or significance of itself until it is incorporated into the body of the present. It is at this point that the ‘subject’ of tradition may become an ‘agent’ of change, both personally and in terms of the tradition itself. Movement away from an original locus means that the origin itself is always being reconstituted according to its new context. In terms of thinking phenomenologically about diasporicity, Merleau-Ponty's insight is that rather than seeing diasporicity as a result merely of factual changes in location and culture, it is instead the outcome of transformatory dialogues between the embodied being, through time and displacement. Thus, Merleau-Ponty allows us to think diasporicity as always already ontological and therefore a general condition of bodily being, rather than being simply an empirical-historical event or accident. Ontologising diaspora implicates difference within embodiment. Just as we tell changing stories of our childhood as we age, the agent's relation to home and origin is always one fractured and structured by a diasporicity of sorts. Home opens itself up to be reworked in the present. Through this disruption of linearity, home and subjectivity are imbued with new traces. The embodied situation, thought from the space of the present suggests a new way of thinking origin: an origin that oscillates between being-at-home and being-not-at-home, and a non-linear temporal form to being-in-the world.

As such, Merleau-Ponty's thought offers something like a transcendental ethics of diasporicity. Instead of the diasporic situation being understood as static and unresolved, his thought creates the possibility of an active agency that takes up the pre-constituted diasporic complex through the work of the present. This is a project that can be undertaken, or simply avoided. The diasporic situation is therefore, through Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological lens, no longer fixed or unchangeable; the state of ‘subjection’ is rethought as a form of agency. In this way, we can begin to see that paradigms of lament and pain are not a necessary condition of diasporicity. That is, because origin itself is a differential repetition, it means that the negative emotionality associated with displacement is open to the play of differences. It is in such an instance that we can begin to talk about the humour, the creativity and the joy of diasporicity. As Blanchot (1969) has noted of the Jewish diaspora in the context of becoming Jewish, while it is important to emphasise the exilic conditions of the Jews, it is also necessary to highlight the positive and productive history of these diasporic communities.

One such form of situatedness that can be activated lies in the body's relation to a particular tradition. For example, a black female dancing body can have a complex relationship to a given tradition of dance. Rather than merely taking up that form of dancing and repeating it, it is possible to see that the dance itself is already complexly imbued with traces of other times and other places, ‘more ancient than thought’. Merleau-Ponty's thought therefore injects transformativity into what appears as the simple given. Each new time of dancing involves a communication with the history or tradition of that dance and at the same time gives rise to the potential in that act to reconstitute and re-energise that tradition. The tradition itself encourages absorption from other sources for its continuity. However, at this point in the text I would like to note a difference that has opened up between Merleau-Ponty's notion of ‘a communication more ancient than thought’ and my o wn model of embodied diasporic agency.

If we took what Merleau-Ponty writes uncritically, it would seem that each time any black female dancer dances, then the tradition in which she places herself is necessarily transformed. I think this model is too strong. I suggest that each act of dancing in the present has only the potential to transform the tradition. Ritual is required, a framework or practice to stop embodied agency's transformation being only accidental. The origin of any particular dance form is never an origin in the sense of something that just began at a certain time and maybe repeated in future. This is because the dance's origin is itself always being transformed through its performance. As Ralph Ellison (1955) suggests, a jazz musician achieves creativity and innovation by being thoroughly immersed and versed in the musical tradition of jazz. Within the frame of the tradition, the artist is able to assert and insert his or her own vision. In this way the tradition is continually energised and transformed.

To talk about tradition or origin does not therefore necessitate origin conceptualised as pristine time from a spatio-temporal past. Tradition need not be inherently conservative or rigid. Rather, origin and tradition become the motile source that is always taken up within each performative moment of the body's condensation or secretion of the past and present in the refashioning of the future. As Merleau-Ponty aptly writes:

In every focusing movement my body unites present, past and future, it secretes time, or rather it becomes that location in nature where, for the first time, events instead of pushing each other into the realm of being, project round the present a double horizon of past and future and acquire a historical orientation. My body takes possession of time; it brings into existence a past and a future for a present; it is not a thing, but creates time instead of submitting to it. But every act of focusing must be renewed, otherwise it falls into consciousness. (1962, p. 240)

Merleau-Ponty therefore enables us to think about an embodied diaspora that is at the very heart of what it is to be human. There is, however, a serious problem with this position. We can only accept wholeheartedly a generalised and metaphysically positioned diaspora if we disregard the question of how we are positioned by, and take a position in relation to others (Diprose 1994, p. 18). Being positioned and taking up position means that we have to enquire about the status of different forms of embodiment; about diasporas of ontological space-time differentiation versus historically constituted diasporas. Although Merleau-Ponty's theory provides an account of the important role others play in the constitution and reconstitution of the development of the corporeal schema, he does not provide an analysis of variations within the social field. And it is thus that factors of gender, race, class, generation, location, and language insert themselves within the warp and woof of diasporicity.3

Merleau-Ponty's ethics of active transformation of cultural-historical origins comes up against its limits most succinctly when we ask the question: ‘Can you be a diasporic subject and not know it?’ The French philosopher would have to answer in the affirmative. Within his model it is possible to be unmindful of one's diasporicity due to the absence of a conscious dialogue about how one's origins are being reworked through embodiment. That is, retention does not necessarily reveal itself as such, even as it operates within every gesture, speech pattern or movement. The force of Merleau-Ponty's work is its opening up of the pre-conscious dynamics of embedded and embodied agency, and tacit knowledge not the divergences orchestrated upon the subject's consciousness by the world. If one is brought up in a world that has certain sets of vocabularies, norms, and discourses, one does not necessarily have a critical relationship to the surrounding discourses. For instance, at least until recently, the heterosexual, white, male living in cultures which take whiteness and hetero-maleness as normative, rarely questions his manner of being-in-the-world because his existence is continuously affirmed and legitimatised by the socio-economic order. Consciousness of his mode of being-in-the-world only comes when it is challenged in inter-subjective encounter (such as when he moves into another social or cultural space where whiteness is not normative) and even then it is doubtful that the challenge will cause any profound emotional upheaval of the type so characteristic of historically constituted diasporic subjects.

The very question that Merleau-Ponty suggests we answer with an affirmative ‘Yes’ proves more complicated when we recognise the fixing power of categories such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, age, and so on in the formation of identity (Ang 1994). The power of being positioned permits us to understand that the construction of subjectivity is not solely the work of the embodied subject itself. Although the body is both ‘subject’ and ‘object’ for Merleau-Ponty, he does not explicitly acknowledge the other's work of objectification in social relations. Again, Merleau-Ponty avoids an account of objectification imposed from the outside (Weiss 1999, Young 1990, Fanon 1967) by stressing the bodily capacities of agents as a powerful medium. However, what is required to complete such an account is the recognition that as a positioned subject, there is always a moment when the self is constructed through the externalising power of the other and that ontology is first of all social. In such a moment one can only experience the self through the gaze of the other; the body is no longer both subject and object in Merleau-Ponty's sense. Rather, the body tends, through the visual and perceptual sphere, to become objectified or named. The body as subject no longer exists for itself, but does so as object to others. Here, we are reminded of the unbridgeable difference between the for-itself and the in-itself in the work of that other French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. For Sartre, the gaze of the other attempts to fix the subject in its being, as if the subject is an object. That is, it is only when I take account of how I appear to others that I experience my body as other to me. Feeling of alienation and separation from the other is located precisely in this othering process (Freleigh 1987). Any full account of subjectivity must negotiate between auto-constructions of subjectivity and those imposed from the outside rather than set them up as opposed. While how I appear to others might be limiting and conditions my habits of being in the world, my whole corporeal trajectory need not be determined by these external limitations or the limitations wrought by my body. Through my power of choice and action I can create myself. As Thomas Slaughter reminds us in his discussion of black agency:

Certainly racism wounds – it can often mutilate individual self-respect, but this is not the same thing as saying that it conditions an entire community's perception of itself. Moreover, what is left out of this image is the group's actual history. This history is not one in which passivity was the name of the game. (1983, p. 106)

From the above discussion, what opens up is three ways of conceptualising diasporicity: as an ontological event, as an achievement and imposition. Some are born diasporic, some achieve diasporicity, and some have it thrust upon them. For all Merleau-Ponty's uses in providing something like an ethics of diasporic redemptive transformative agency, the limits of his work are that it can only account for the first of these three possibilities. By refusing to analyse the differences at work in the social field, Merleau-Ponty's thought risks concealing the power relations that constitute it, setting his work adrift as an abstract ontology rather than a concrete social ontology. In terms of applying his thought to the theorisation of black diasporic experience, the ‘dangerous alignment’ mentioned above looms large, as a generalised ontological diasporicity threatens to swamp empirical-historical forces of fixity.

Merleau-Ponty's notion of embodiment allows us to distinguish two forms of historicity. On the one hand, there is a conservative version, whereby the historical is that which is merely past and cannot be changed. In this instance ‘origin’ refers to a once only inaugural moment. On the other hand, a transformative historicity is uncovered whereby the embodied subject transforms what is given as the world through acts of motility. Merleau-Ponty assumes that the latter notion of transformation is pre-discursive.

However, with Frantz Fanon in ‘The Lived Experience of the Black’, we see that what is needed in addition is a discursive and reflective form of historical transformativity. Fanon's account shows that the pre-discursive form is only comprehensible within the sphere of its inter-relationship with the discursive field. Fanon shows then that embodied transformativity cannot simply be pre-discursive. Freedom and ‘dis-alienation’ from the prison of appearance involves a reflective account of how ‘the other’ positions the diasporic subject and attempts to naturalise this positioning through an over-investment in the visual register. This discursive and visualised contestation is the framework within which diasporic black agents negotiate their search for freedom and different modes of being beyond white supremacist logic.

With both Merleau-Ponty and Fanon in mind we can see how it is possible to bridge the gap between different existential modes and moods of diasporicity – namely the pre-conscious and the discursive. I want to close this paper by suggesting that a cleavage between these two moments is unnecessary and wholly untenable if we acknowledge that through embodiment, that the two moments are mutually implicated and are necessary for comprehending why diasporicity can be a source of both affirmative celebration and of melancholia and nostalgia.

Melancholia and nostalgia have their clearest articulation in various forms of afrocentric discourses and some strands of black popular music with their interest in a static and pure origin, the ‘where you're from’. This position relates to the experience of diasporicity from a purely temporal and embodied connection to a bygone, unmediated past. This embodied relation to time fails to attend to the difference spaces and places of the present make for the diasporic subject, and therefore occupies a pre-conscious horizon of black diasporic being. The other celebratory mood entails an affirmative relationship to diasporicity as a transgressive and hybrid experience. This position discursively celebrates the possibilities and the plural character of the diasporic embodied presence. This presence implies the body's implantation in a given place and the way this place structures modes of being and seeing in the world. It is only by confronting the conflict of diasporicity openly that we can begin to understand how the two moments in diasporic discourses are in fact intertwined. Both the pre-reflective horizon of an African origin, and the reflective celebration of becoming-plural are essential components of the lived experience of being part of the black diaspora. It is only when we choose to avoid privileging one over the other, and ground both in an existential conception of identity's relation to body, place, and memory, that we can begin to access and engage with the full spectrum of emotions within the black diaspora.

Conclusion

With both Merleau-Ponty and Fanon in mind we can see how it is possible to bridge the gap between different existential modes and moods of diasporicity – namely the pre-conscious and the discursive.

Notes

1. The world for Merleau-Ponty refers to an horizon which can never be completely articulated or achieved, just as a ‘real’ horizon can never be reached. As an open system, the world is perpetually unfolding into new possibilities. It is in this sense infinite. The relation between the body/place, habitus is horizonal. They unfold each other, into each other.

2. The French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray (1984) also makes similar point in her essay ‘Place interval’. She extends the place-body relation to women's double emplacement. For Irigaray, women do not only exist in a place, but are also a place – a container. Although twice emplaced, in social and political discourses women are deprived of a proper place.

3. For an exploration and critique of Merleau-Ponty's blind spot around social and historical differences see Bibi Bakare-Yusuf (2000) and Frantz Fanon and Jeremy Weate in Bernasconi (2001).