Page 111 - Contribution To Phenomenology

104 MAXINE SHEETS-JOHNSTONE

Portmann's examples are many—cannot be denied their intercorporeal
understandings.
When we look at Portmann's work itself, we see that he emphasizes
over and over again both visual powers and the morphological charac-
ters—^what he calls the "organs"—that go with them. These "organs" may
be patterns such as ocelli, they may be appendages, or, as suggested
earlier, they may be postures or colorations, but regardless of their
specific character, all of them act upon the eye of the beholder; they are
"organs of social relationship."'^ Innumerable instances in the literature
on nonhuman primates and other nonhuman social animals support
Portmann's insight; they clearly suggest intercorporeal experiences of
inwardness, recognitions of another as an Other. The experiences are
implicit in instances in which one creature understands what it is to be
seen by another, for example, or what it is to be fixed by the gaze of
another.^' On the one hand, these recognitions underscore the fact that
there are nonhuman animals who understand, just as we do, that vision
itself has power, and indeed, that, in a Foucauldian sense, on the other
side of any optics of power, there is the power of optics itself.'^ On the
other hand, they indicate that there are nonhuman animals who
understand, just as we do, that morphological aspects of animate form
are expressive. Surely, then, given these understandings of morphology
and vision, it is no great leap to acknowledge that in the world of
animate form, morphological organs may be eyes themselves. Indeed, what
are the eyes of another for my beholding eye if not mystic circles leading
to a body I do not feel but whose depths I can fathom as a density of
being? Eyes are indeed morphological organs in exactly the sense
Portmann specifies. They are doors opening onto an experience in which
inwardness is adumbrated, an experience that is grounded in the sensory-

'^ Portmann, Animal Forms and Patterns, 197. It is important to note what
Portmann himself emphasizes, namely, that his concentration on visual form should
not make us forgetful of "how great the social importance of stimuli of touch may
also be in animals; nor how powerfully scents and sounds may act on ourselves as
well as on animals." Animal Forms and Patterns, 185.
'^ Perhaps the most immediately telling examples are those in which one animal
deceives another by enacting a behavior within the species's normal repertoire but
for other than "normal" purposes. See A. Whiten and R. W. Byrne, "Tactical
Deception in Primates," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1988): 233-273.
^* For a discussion of this relationship, see Sheets-Johnstone, The Roots of
Power: Animate Form and Gendered Bodies, especially Chapter 1.