One interpretation of Merleau Ponty holds that he endeavoured to avoid the dualisms of the Western tradition. Whether that be in his affirmation of an embodied intelligence, or the transformational possibilities that perception has for him, Merleau-Ponty has consistently embarked upon the type of project that Kirby is now delineating in only slightly different terms. Rather than being able to separate perception from culture, Merleau-Ponty insists that perception “already stylises,”and in the The Visible and the Invisible he also suggests that what we have termed the object, always encroaches upon us, just as we encroach upon it. Rather than being brute facts in the world objects are capable of the same transformation that are commonly associated with out understanding of culture.

This is the interpretation of Jack Reynolds here in Contretemps.