Merleau-Ponty says we often “substitute for our actual perception what we would see if we were cameras” when we talk about visual phenomena. We imitate machines and abstract representations, living by reference to “concept” rather than our own experience. Merleau-Ponty’s take on Cezanne is that Cezanne does the opposite, not showing the visual worl... See more

And that’s why art is, in a sense, truer than science — because nobody can actually know how the world is, only how it is experienced.

I joy, that in these straits I see my west;

For, though their currents yield return to none,

What shall my west hurt me? As west and east

In all flat maps (and I am one) are one,

So death doth touch the resurrection.

The map, like a poem or film, requires a form of imaginative engagement to express anything to us. Such an engagement can’t be thought of as a “choice” to believe, because we never see a thing without making some form of imaginative investment.

But when you close read a meme and see it from a phenomenological or literary way, what you learn about capitalism (or anything else) is never a clean answer. Art lives in ambivalence, like we ourselves do. Literary texts are not factual accounts. Instead of learning how the world is, we learn about how it is experienced by others and ourselves.

It is in the process of perception that the work of art lies rather than in its product.