Baerveldt, Merleau Ponty and Saussure

8/10/2019 Baerveldt, Merleau Ponty and Saussure

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Merleau-Ponty and Saussure: situating the subject of perception in historyCor Baerveldt, University of AlbertaFebruary 2007, Friday afternoon seminar

After MP was appointed to a chair at the Collge de France in 1952 he seems to have been working on

two larger projects. The first one was a book on literary language and it was to be calledIntroduction tothe Prose of the World. MP would never finish the project and although the unfinished manuscript wasposthumously published in 1969 (under the title The Prose of the World), according to his friend (and

the editor of the manuscript) Claude Lefort it is likely that MP had abandoned the project and wouldnot have completed it. Yet, large parts of the manuscript would end up in the long essayIndirect

Language and the Voices of Silence, the essay we read for our seminar. The second project, publishedasAdventures of the Dialectic,is MPs attempt to revisit and revise his earlier political thought,

especially as outlined inHumanism and Terror. Together these projects seem to have been part of anattempt to bridge the gap between two of the most important ideas in MPs philosophy: that of the

primacy of perception and that of the historical nature of all human conduct. The work in the yearsafter the PP was an attempt to show how perception is transposed into a world of common signs and

how common meaning was transformed and institutionalized in history. In other words, without givingup his fundamental idea about the primacy of perception, MP wanted to understand the passage from

perceptual faith to the common truth of a socio-historical world and he hoped that this passage could beunderstood in terms of a theory of expression. The reasons he abandoned the first project are relevant, I

think, but I wont go into that right now. It seems, however, that in order to reconcile perception andhistory MP became increasingly imbued with the necessity to revise critical aspects both of his

philosophy of perception and of his philosophy of history. It is in the light of this, I will argue, that hispeculiar enthusiasm for Saussure can be understood.

In order to bridge the gap between perceptual meaning and historical meaning MP must demonstrate

not only that both have a sense, but also that the perceiving subject of the PP is at the same time the

historical subject for whom there can be a sense to history (and hence to its own actions as part of thathistory)

1. Or, to state the problem differently, if history is to have a sense, for that sense to be consistent

with the always partial and perspectival sense of the subjects perceptual world, this historical sense

cannot be a sense that comes out only in the context of the entirety of history moving in only onedirection (like in Kojves interpretation of Hegel in which the end of history is the state in which

laboring servants will acquire recognition), neither can it be something that exists only for those wholive to see the end or fulfillment of history. Or, to say it yet again with slightly different words: the

sense of history can neither be a sense that is already given in advance (as an already known final stateto which it is inevitably moving), nor can it be something that becomes evident only in hindsight once

this final state is reached (as a now all this finally makes sense). It has to be a sense somehow realizedin the lives of actual subjects, in their meaningful actions and expressions right here and now and in

their always only partial freedom. Partial, because as MP has pointed out in response to Sartre, afreedom that would be absolute in all of my actions would be a meaningless freedom and a history that

would be a chain of totally unprecedented choices would be a history without structure. In my freedomI always also realize the pre-reflective projects that come with my being born into a particular society,

class, gender position etc. and hence I derive the sense of my own life from culture an history while atthe same time contributing to it. Yet, if it is impossible to fully understand the senseof history, how

1One should keep in mind here that sense in French carries the connotation both of a meaningand a

direction.


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can my own actions make sense, then, relative to that history? Or to put it slightly differently: how can

my personal actions and expressions be normative, if not through a comprehensive conceptual grasp ofthe normativity of the institutions within which my actions and expressions are embedded? It is here, of

course, that language as understood by Saussure can be seen as to constitute a paradigm case. Languageis a system with an internal logic, whose rules, although enacted by each of its speakers are

nonetheless neither fully known, nor consciously and intentionally followed by those speakers. Rather,

speakers appropriate a language as a generic styleof functioning, of expressing themselves, of being inthe world. Language is a paradigm case for rule governed conduct, that is, conduct whose irreduciblenormative nature can only be understood relative to the total normative system of which each single

action is both a reflection and an enactment.At this point I deliberately throw in the word normative again, because I think it is vital to

recognize that for MP the problem is indeed that of the normative structure of our individualperception and expression as much as that of the normative structure of our history and culture. The

notion of style, that in my view plays a key role in MPs later work, is a normative notion and in this itdiffers remarkably from a much more formalist interpretation of structure. It is precisely in

elaborating a notion of stylethat MP hopes to bridge the gap between perception and history, throughexpression. MPs notion of style is part of what he hopes can become a synchronic understanding of

parole, hence praxis, whereas for Saussure the parole is notably not (and cannot be) part of asynchronic linguistics. Already in the PP we find a distinction that only superficially seems to resemble

Saussures distinction between langueandparole, namely that between the spoken word(parole parl)and speaking word(parole parlant). The parole parl is the already constituted speech after the

decisive step of expression has been taken, but according to MP our understanding of language willremain superficial if we fail to go back to its origin, so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of

words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action that breaks the silence. Thespoken word is a gesture, and its meaning the world (PP, p. 184)

2.

We are reminded here of MPs discussion of Cezanne, who exemplifies for him the artist whois unwilling to remain in the realm of the already constituted in which civilized men are content to

dwell (I dont have the precise quote here right now). Talking about Cezanne MP says that hisdifficulties are those of the first word. Any originary act of expression is necessarily an act in the

realm of doubt and ambiguity, because we can never be certain that our expression will be anythingmore than a symptom of our individual lives, that is, we can never be sure that our expression will take

root in the consciousness of others. It is in the light of this that the struggles and doubts of the paintercan be understood. For the painter to express himself most authentically is to express the visible in how

it demandsto be seen. The painter attempts to capture the visible in its normative structure. Yet, at thesame time he can never be sure that the expression he finds will be compelling to others. For his most

personal expression to have normative significance, for it to be indeed a genuine vision, the paintermust seek a generality not so much of idea or concept, but of style. InIndirect LanguageMP says:

For each painter style is the system of equivalences that he makes for himself which manifeststhe world he sees. It is the universal index of coherent deformation by which he concentrates

the still scattered meaning of his perception and makes it exist expressly (S. p. 74).What becomes of central importance for MP is the way in which expression, in gesture, in language, in

art, is unified by a style and most importantly- the way in which style brings together the personaland the cultural, or subject and history. But in order for style to serve this function of a bridge, MP

must elaborate the notion of style beyond the one he articulated in the PP. In the PP style serves theslightly more modest role of securing the unity of perception, given that our perception is never just a

2There are indications that at that time of writing the PP Merleau-Ponty was aware of Saussure, but it

seems that he didn't address Saussure in any level of detail until the period 1945-1950, when he wasteaching at the Sorbonne on Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language.


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snapshot of a world that remains unchanged, but rather an ongoing flow of adumbrations(to use the

translation of Husserls term Abschattungen) or temporal perspectives or profiles, each of which initself is always incomplete and imperfect. I walk into a room and I see a table with a fruit basket on top.

However, the table and the fruit basket do not present themselves as mere objective presence, but onlyas a flow of appearances (remember, however, that according to Husserl it is precisely in the

appearances and not in their conceptual idealization that the essenceof an entity is presented).

Moreover, there is always a synaesthetic quality to my perception of a thing. In the PP MP talks aboutthe perception of a piece of wood:Everything appears to us through a medium to which it lends its own fundamental quality; this

piece of wood is neither a collection of colors and tactile data nor even their total Gestaltbutsomething from which there emanates a woody essence; these sense data modulate a certain

theme or illustrate a certain style which is the wood itself and which creates round this piece ofwood and the perception I have of it a horizon of significance. (PP, p. 450)

My relation to the world is therefore always one of perceptually guided action, whose style ornormativity secures the thing to be seen in its suchness(e.g. its woodiness, its fruitiness etc.) and by the

same token it is the expressive gesture of the painter that may serve to orient us to a particular suchnessas a genuine vision of the world (remember, for example, how Cezanne painted the thickness and

density of a material object like an apple, but also how he painted objects rather by capturing whatsurrounds them). Style secures a unity of perception that cannot be guaranteed by a concept, since, as

MP would later say it in The Visible and the Invisible,every concept is first a horizontal generality, agenerality of style (VI, p. 234). We can now also understand why in Silent LanguageMP says that

perception already stylizes (S., p*).

So what does MP gain by turning to Saussure? For one thing, Saussure seems to have reminded MPthat no act of signification can be understood separately from the cultural systemin the context of

which signification is indeed signification. This idea is not new, but it does serve, as I will argue in amoment, as a corrective to a theory of meaning and expression that still has one leg in a

phenomenology that privileges individual experience. As we discussed in our seminar, what Saussureallows MP to see is that signs given by themselves cannot be understood as to well up from

primordial or prelinguistic expression. Instead, what is characteristic of human expression is that everysignification is necessarily part of a total system of significations and that it is a means of self-

differentiation rather than a means of direct reference. In MPs later work his earlier idea of aprelinguistic tacit cogito is replaced by the idea of an originary language, a language of pure self-

reference. Unique about MPs interpretation of this originary language, however, is his insight that it isnot in spite, but by virtue of this self-reference that expression of the world is made possible. This is, I

think, the relevance of MPs comments about the shift in the development of the child from pre-linguistic babbling to linguistic signification. What is acquired by the child in the process of learning to

talk is not a code for making reference to internal or external states of affairs, but a principle ofdistinction (presumably this principle of distinction is in some sense already present in the childs

prelinguistic babbling, if only by virtue of the fact that this babbling always already takes place in afully human world of expression in which the sounds the child makes are interpreted as partly linguistic

or distinctive in nature). This, then, is the true meaning of language: to enter the world of language isto enter the world of human expression, a world in which each action and each expression is stylized

according to the internal logic of a normative system of self-differentiation. It is in the light of this thatMP can draw parallels between language and other forms of human or stylized expression like painting.

What all those expressive forms have in common is indeed a generic style, a style that makes each actor expression part of a human history and a human future.

So again, what precisely, is gained by this shift to a synchronic and diacritical understanding of human


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expression? In spite of his recognition of the importance of history and culture, what kept haunting

MPs theory of expression after it had been outlined in the PP is the idea that at the basis of the gestureor the sign lies somehow a primordial (pre-cognitive, pre-linguistic) realm of meaning which the sign

or gesture then projects into a world shared with others3. This, of course, is in an important sense the

legacy of phenomenology, but it is also precisely the idea that was dismissed by Saussure and the

structuralists in his footsteps. Similarly, in the PP MP spends a whole chapter on the tacit cogito, the

idea of myself as experienced by myself, but in the notes published with the unfinished The Visibleand the Invisible MP criticizes himself on grounds that he failed there to connect the chapter on thetacit cogito with the chapter on speech and expression. The tacit cogito, he would argue later, is

already an expressed cogito and the phenomenological reduction required to bring it to light isnecessarily a procedure that relies on language. What MP attempts, in my view, follows from his

original insight that the subject of perception is always at the same time a subject fully embedded inhistory. If that is to be the case, even the carnal roots of my expression and even my tacit, yet not fully

articulated hold on the world must be fully in history, but in such a way that they dont cease to bemine. In the PP MP says:

To exist for an embodied and historical being is to exist in a particular manner: I am apsychological and historical structure and have received with existence a manner of existing, a

style. All my actions and thoughts stand in relation to this structure.This notion of style, I argue, is taken up and extended within a normative notion of language and it is

MPs aim to understand history itself through a synchronic understanding of language as stylizedspeech or expression.

Charles Taylor has pointed out that both MP and Saussure (but also, for example, Heidegger and

Derrida) can be seen as to stand in a tradition of holistic understandings of language. Language isseen, in this tradition, as always involving the total system of language, such that it cannot be seen as to

be built up from single or isolated meaningful units of significations (see for this Taylors argument onHerder vs. Condillac, in which the latter wants to see language as to have started from single word

linguistic expressions that found their origin in the emotional sounds naturally symptomatic of fear,surprise, joy etc.). We will have to return to this point, since in contrast to Saussures structuralist

interpretation of this linguistic holism, I think it means for MP that in some sense all acts of humanexpression (understood here as all acts of expression within the irreducibly normative realm of self-

differentiation) imply all other acts of expression/signification. As I would like to argue, this idea iscentral to MPs discussion of advent, but this is something that I would like to take up later. Let it be

said, however, that there is an obvious relation between MPs idea of advent in Silent Languagesandhis idea of an intentional arcin the PP. Just like the particulars of our expressive performances are

subordinated to our intentional relation to the world into which those performances project us, so areindividual eventsin the history of human expression subordinated to an adventor promise in the history

of expression: the quasi-eternity of art is of a piece with the quasi-eternity of incarnate existence.At this point -but at the risk of running too much ahead of myself- let me quickly point out

some other implications that will only be more fully worked out in MPs later but unfinished work. Ifhuman expression is indeed to be humanexpression and if for expression to be human it has to find its

roots in an originary language of pure self-reference and self-differentiation, a clear implication is thatlanguage concerning the world (and that includes all referential language) is always in its origin

purely expressive language. By purely expressive I mean here that what this expression meanscannotin any way be understood by reference to anything outside the total realm of expression as self-

3In fact, I think MPs theory of language as gesture is subtler than I make it out to be here, but I think

my characterization serves the purpose of pointing out some of the problems MP himself would cometo have with his earlier philosophy later on in his life.


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differentiation. In other words, if originary expression means or signifies this can only be because

expression isits meaning (rather than stands for or refers to a meaning that can be found outside thisexpression). Originary expression means in the way a painting, a musical piece, or a dance means: not

by virtue of a referential relation to an external meaningful reality, but by virtue of what it expresses ina truly creative sense, but always by some kind of modulation of former (hence recognizable) acts of

expression, that is, always in some kind of relation to the total human world of expression. But if

expression iswhat it means and if no pregiven meaningful world can precede our expression, theradical ontological implication is that the world is always and necessarily the world as expressed. Thisis indeed the implication MP will attempt to work out in his later life and it is in his ontology of flesh

that MP will try to bring his notion of style and expression to its full ontological implications.Therefore, let me conclude, for the moment, with a quote from the notes with MPs unfinished work

The Visible and the Invisible:The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should need the old

term element, in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in thesense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of

incarnate principle that brings a styleof being wherever there is a fragment of being.(VI p. 139, my italics)

Together with the idea of advent MPs ontology of the flesh and the motif of the chiasm will revealmore fully were MP tries to take the idea that the unity of human reality must always be a unity of

style.

Baerveldt, Merleau Ponty and Saussure

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