Chapter 6 - Motor Intentionality and Our Landscapes

Summary

This chapter is devoted to Merleau-Ponty’s account of motor intentional movement as silhouetted by the Schneider case (that of an injured soldier suffering psychological blindness, cognitive rigidity and impaired motility outside habitual action situations). I show how Merleau-Ponty insightfully understands motor intentionality or motor projection as the work of the body schema organising both our postural changes and our phenomenal fields towards habitual or novel outcomes in a horizonal and context-sensitive manner. Without this sub-reflective projection of somatic action solutions and routes to realisation, we would have an agency-neutral body and a congealed spatiality. I maintain that imagined actions supposing skill transpositions can be extrapolated from Merleau-Ponty’s theory, showing that we are not locked into habitual actions or milieus. I go on to argue that he neglects little acts of reflection that compensate for threats to the flow of ‘skilled coping’, while contending that this shortcoming is easily rectified.