Caleb Faul

In this article, I argue that interior design is paradigmatic for our understanding of art more broadly. Key to my argument is the phenomenological structure of inhabitation, for what distinguishes interior design as an artform is the fact that its products are inhabited rather than, say, looked at or listened to. Though he rarely discusses domestic dwelling as such, Maurice Merleau-Ponty is helpful in explicating the phenomenological structure of inhabitation. In Part 1, therefore, I investigate Merleau-Ponty’s repeated reliance on terminology having to do with inhabitation, showing that this terminology is used to describe phenomena as fundamentally interactive. In Part 2, I investigate interior design and domestic inhabitation themselves to reveal a similar structural interactivity: The spaces I inhabit are both shaped by and shaping of my quotidian habits and patterns of embodied activity. Finally, in Part 3, I argue that the co-shaping or mutual expression that we find in the relationship between inhabitant and inhabited space in interior design is also at work in our relationship to other artworks such as paintings. When we perceptually dwell with them, paintings, too, have the power to interactively restructure our manner of embodied engagement with the world, even as our engagements with paintings shape the continually developing sense of those very paintings. Thus, I ultimately argue that, at the deepest level of experience, we do not so much look at paintings as we inhabit them.

In this article, I argue that paintings are transformations of the perceptual world, transformations that the world itself elicits but does not determine, thus undercutting the subjective-objective divide in art. First, I describe Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of institution, according to which sense develops only by changing, that is, by being taken up and coherently deformed. Next, I use this notion to argue that paintings develop the perceptual sense of the world by coherently deforming it. In other words, paintings are transformations of the perceptual world that are called for by the world itself. To make my case, I analyze Susan Rothenberg’s painting Three Heads, a work that develops and furthers the perceptual sense of horses only by taking it up and changing it. Finally, I suggest that this view of painting motivates an interactive ontology according to which things are not self-contained but interactive, fundamentally opening onto things beyond themselves.

The underlying claim of this paper is that phenomenology is well-situated to re-orient the philosophy of music, a discipline too often concerned with logical wrangling over the ontology of musical works. By starting with the experience of music itself in its many forms, we can see how both work music and non-work music comes to have sense for us. Specifically, I contend that Merleau-Ponty’s notion that sense develops through what he calls “institution” accurately describes the sense of music, and I attempt to bear this out through careful description of multiple modes of musical experience.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari frequently discuss Western classical music, referencing such diverse traditions as medieval polyphony and 20th century modernism. In their work, however, they have an intense focus, common among philosophers, on composition, with very little consideration given to performance. Nevertheless, I find that their work resonates with questions of performance in important ways. In this paper, I bring Deleuze and Guattari’s work to bear on the practices and processes of musical interpretation and performance, transposing into this musical domain the concepts of the smooth and the striated that they explicate in A Thousand Plateaus. The basic claim is that there exist smooth and striated methods of interpreting and performing music and that these concepts allow us to articulate afresh important differences in performance practice. Ultimately, I claim that the smooth is perhaps the privileged term, but that a good performance necessarily includes both smooth and striated elements.