How might we recognize that which may, or may not be cognizable? Does re-cognition demand, or require an original cognition? Or, can our recognition fulfill itself in a deferral to the possibility of a future cognition? In the quote above, Merleau-Ponty suggests that we attend to the factuality, rather the ultimate factuality, of this “open and indefinite power” which is donative in that it bestows a sense[i] that can be both apprehended and communicated in turn. Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion, however, is suggestive in a different sense, in that we obviously don’t need to recognize this power in order for it to remain operant. That is, this power we have is ultimately not founded upon its cognizability, and while Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion points to the possibility that it be subjected to a kind of viewing, it does not require it in order to function. This power, which it is our task to recognize, is simultaneously that by which man outstrips himself into novel modes of habitus, new ways of being towards others and himself, and that which constitutes a sense into a community of speaking subjects. This power is a corporeal power, which can be lived, and/or we can try to understand it through recourse to the auxiliary verbs of ‘being’ and ‘having.’[ii] The examination that follows will engage with this power, insofar as it is manifest in the movement of expression and in the case of acts of speech (parole). It will furthermore deal with the most important gestures Merleau-Ponty makes in the chapter “The Body As Expression and Speech.” In the first place he maintains, in opposition to the tradition, that “the word has a meaning”[iii], that is that the word has both a gestural meaning (sens) and a cognitive one. In the second place, he argues that there is not a series of words, which we might view from above from some third person standpoint, but rather, a speaking subject who is always a particular way, or ‘style’[iv] of speaking the words. Merleau-Ponty argues, that it is not thought which subtends, or immediately precedes the speaking subject’s act of speech but, rather a silence, a motility, which he comes to refer to as the ‘tacit cogito.’ Furthermore, that speech[v] is exemplary in that it is an act, which constitutes and sediments a new sense into a fabric of constituted language, which in turn rearranges the linguistic field. In other words, speech acts are both constituted, in the form of a new sense, and at the same time constitutive of all subsequent attempts to say, think, express something further. It is therefore the case that the new sense of sense, as constituted, takes its place within, and unfolds as the movement of a tradition. As such the paper that follows will maintain that this relation between the body’s motility and the body’s intelligence which Merleau-Ponty calls fundierung[vi] is this strange power and ‘irrational’ power of the body to be simultaneously apprehending and conveying, appropriative and bestowing, creative and traditional. The new sense of sense that emerges from the movement of expression, is simultaneously a response, or a reaction, to an existing tradition and the creating of a new sediment within a tradition. Speech acts, therefore are traditionalized/traditionalizing movements.
Motor Intentionality and the Paradox of Existence
It seems to be the case that one the most important developments of The Phenomenology of Perception is, in the first place, that we rid ourselves of the primacy of the conceptual order and come to see that there is something already at work in advance of our attempts to conceptualize the content of experience. Merleau-Ponty presents us with a clear statement a kind of manifesto of the project at hand, when he says:
“The task for us is to conceive, between the linguistic, perceptual and motor contents and the form given to them or the symbolic function which breathes life into them, a relationship which shall be neither a reduction of form to content, nor the subsuming of content under an autonomous form” (RKP 145).
If, as Merleau-Ponty says, “The task for us is to conceive, between the linguistic, perceptual and motor contents and the form given to them…a relationship…”[vii] and come to the realization that whatever this “relationship” might be, it is not solely conceptual, and neither is it purely motor and neither should the conceptual be our privileged mode of engagement with it.[viii] We must recognize that the conceptual order—or the symbolizing power of abstraction and generalization—is founded upon a perception, or the pure apprehending of motor phenomena. The Phenomenology of Perception makes a departure from the tradition of phenomenology, in that it no longer seeks the “explanatory invariant” in the form of the transcendental ego.[ix] Rather, Merleau-Ponty locates a motor intentionality, [x] a motor power, or a movement, which is simultaneously an active apprehending and a passive appropriation. Herein we find the important notion of fundierung, which names the relation between content and form[xi]. In this relation it becomes possible to say that the visual contents of perception are appropriated and sublimated by a symbolic function, which is simultaneously founded upon these contents and beyond them. What we have, therefore, is a kind of dialectical movement between content and form, which is constitutive of sense. Merleau-Ponty proposes firstly, that this movement is a contradiction, and secondly, that it can make sense only as a lived relation. It is important to note that we live the world before we come to see it as something questionable, and that this motor, or operant, intentionality gives us a motor significance upon which our capacity for generalization and the conceptual order are based. This intentionality is non-ideational, yet meaningful in that it deploys a certain field of experienceablity. Although pre-conceptual, our affective life as embodied beings, is no less rich than the conceptual, or secondary, way of existing. Furthermore, the fact that our existence is as embodied, makes us simultaneously “an object for others and a subject for myself”[xii]. This conceptual paradox disappears at the level of lived experience. Existence, therefore, is but another name for the dialectic between content and form, or the[xiii] fundierung, the “ambiguous setting”[xiv]wherein they intersect and overlap. As such, fundierung, perhaps deployed in order to gesture toward a certain space, cannot possibly name the space towards which it gestures, rather it is the apprehension of a movement, between the body’s motility and intelligence, a movement which is either everything, or nothing, or perhaps is already everything and nothing.
The Sense of the Word
Merleau-Ponty’s account of expression refutes the tradition “by simply saying that the word has a meaning”[xv]. This statement is definitive in its radicality, that is, it allows for a genuine departure from the empiricist and the intellectualist who are united in that they both maintain that the word is without meaning. For the Empiricist, the word is solely an appendage to the objective world; it stands for an association made in the objective world. For the intellectualist, the word is simply the external container of some internal thought, which was already accomplished in advance. Words, for Merleau-Ponty, are not “passive shells”, but active gestures in that they point, just as a bodily movement would point out something to oneself, or to another. There is not a thought before the movement of speech, but rather, this gestural sense is immanent in the movement of speech itself, and is that from which the conceptual sense of the word is derived.[xvi] There is beneath, or subtending “the conceptual meaning of words, an existential meaning” which inhabits the words themselves.[xvii] The body has these words as so many possibilities of itself, as orientational devices, which it can draw from and deploy in the achievement of some intention to express, or to mean something or other. These words, for Merleau-Ponty are centers of an incredible power that brings with it the entirety of the past forward in the movement of speech: “words into which the history of a whole language is compressed, and which effect communication with no absolute guarantee, dogged as they are by incredible linguistic hazards.[xviii] As such, these words are both natural and cultural, in that they are capable of gesturing toward the novelties of the perceptual world, but retain within themselves the cultural backgrounds from which they have emerged as former acts of expression. Each word is the result of a speech act, an accomplished intention to signify, to speak, to say, to articulate, a point of view, a perspective of the world, into the world of previously constituted speech and gestures. Language cannot be made to behave like any particular object; rather, it becomes meaningful when a speaking subject is engaged in it with others.
Apprehension and Appropriation
I am, at first, struck by the ‘style’ of that which unfolds before me. In the movement of coming to understand it conceptually, I am moved by its rhythm, its tempo, the harmonious flow of its melody. Provided I have ears, which can hear it, I can attend to the suggestion of its harmonics, to the reverberations of sound, which envelop me such that I cannot attend to anything else. I can attend to these rhythms because I share them; they are my rhythms, the sounds of the world that I live alongside others. My body is my capacity to attend in this manner, my capacity to be moved and to move, to partake in the movement of something that transcends me. This gestural significance of the word presents us with a ‘style’ of signification, which constitutes a first draft of meaning. As part of our movement, we are faced with the task of taking up this ‘style’ of expressivity in a paradoxical process of appropriation. This movement of appropriation is paradoxical in the sense that my intention, seeking realization, must come to expression through a sedimented linguistic tradition of already meaningful speech, that is, through a speech, through words, that already have a given sense. The apprehension of a gestural sense, “is not given, but understood, that is, recaptured by an act on the spectators part.”[xix] The gesture arises as a question upon my horizon, as an indeterminate something that solicits my attention, and my bodily capacity to move and to bring myself into accordance with it and the other whose gesture inhabits me. The body is that which converts “a certain motor essence” into phonation by deploying the articulatory style of a word, taking up its past, and projecting it in an effective intentional gesture.[xx] A comprehension of the object has been appropriated when, through the movement of concordance between my intention and that of the other, “the powers of my body adjust themselves to it and overlap it.”[xxi] The word therefore, “has a meaning ” perhaps even meanings, which points once again to the relation between these senses:
“…there are different layers of significance, from the visual to the conceptual by way of the verbal concept. These two ideas will never be simultaneously understood unless we cease to vacillate between the notions of ‘motility’ and ‘intelligence,’ unless we discover a third notion which enables us to integrate them…”(RKP 227).
Silence and the Illusion of Thought Before Speech
There is not a thought before speech, but rather a “silence… alive with words.”[xxii] Even further the silence is alive with feelings. The chapter on “The Body in its Sexual Being” points to this ambiguous life which subtends the conceptual order, it is a field of sexuality which is an original intentionality. Merleau-Ponty declares that “the body expresses existence at every moment, that is, in the sense in which the word expresses thought.”[xxiii] This silence, which precedes speech, is our opening onto the world, our feeling our way about in the world and with others, it is the excess, the overflow of our being, which always allows us to go further, to transcend the here and the now that we are as embodied beings. It is not a thought that precedes speech but rather, what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the tacit cogito, the body’s motility, which is our silent presence in a world, which is always constituted in advance.[xxiv] The illusion of thought before speech resides in the fields of sedimented language wherein the tacit cogito resides. Secondary speech, or the sedimentations of spoken speech (parole parlé) comprises the totality of exchanges having taken place in a language, which have determined the language in precisely the way it is encountered. The language itself, however, encountered in the realm of meaningful silence, opens up as a field of possibility for the tacit cogito which seeks to realize itself as a cogito through the movement of the speaking cogito. Pure thought, therefore, as Merleau-Ponty says “reduces itself to a certain void of consciousness, to a momentary desire.”[xxv] This “signicative intention,”[xxvi] which precedes expression, is the “lack,” or a kind of “blind expectation” which reshuffles the given sense in a movement of appropriation towards a sense of its own which it will be able to express in a subsequent speech act. It is precisely for this reason that Merleau-Ponty points toward the writer who begins his work in ignorance of what he will “put into it,” or the thinking subject who is ignorant of his thought until his has expressed it in writing, or in speech.[xxvii] The word is not in the first place a word offered to a consciousness composed of words, but rather a motor word soliciting a silent desire to express. We are, as it were, presented with a meaningful silence in speech, a silence interwoven in the fabric of words. We must attend to, or engage with this overflow of significance, this silence, which is present in a kind of absence. When a ‘gesture’ is made, it forces us to reckon with “a certain structural co-ordination of experience, a certain modulation of existence, exactly as a pattern of my bodily behavior endows objects around me with a certain significance both for me and for others.”[xxviii] Our motility, therefore, appears to be a kind of living history, such that the past is present in my being towards the world, informed as it is by the acquisition of successful practices and habits. It seems to be the case, therefore, that the world is mediated by these habits[xxix], which are cultivated, that is incorporated, or perhaps, even appropriated pre-reflectively. Our motility, therefore, seems to be an informed historical movement and my reflective access to it is necessarily marked by ambiguity. It is furthermore the case that we are never truly an object for ourselves, but rather an opening, we are never what we have been, rather we are an excess over what we have already come to understand, such that we remain, so long as we are alive, in a constant movement beyond ourselves.
Speech and the Movement of Expression
In the case of speech, Merleau-Ponty maintains: “it cannot be said of speech either that it is an ‘operation of intelligence,’ or that it is a ‘motor phenomenon’: it is wholly motility and wholly intelligence.”[xxx] That this is the case can be demonstrated through recourse to pathologies of speech, such as aphasia[xxxi] and alexia,[xxxii] or specifically in the case of Schneider[xxxiii] who seems to be incapable of projecting himself into a situation of any kind. His experience never seems questionable, thus it never tends toward speech. His language is no longer an instrument, but rather presents him with a kind of self-evidence such that he never seeks to go beyond himself.[xxxiv] In short language is a living relation with the world and other which manifests as an open situation, which can seemingly close, if only for a moment, before re-opens of its own accord. For Schneider, the situation is already closed, his language is fixed, no questions come to mind because nothing is questionable. In the non-pathological case, however there is a linguistic field from which we all borrow in order to combine an intentional desire with a speech act in the constitution of an object for ourselves and for others, thereby accomplishing thought by conveying a certain ‘style’ into a community of speakers. The movement of expression sediments its acts and constitutes a world of shared contextualities and experiences and becomes the shared background from which all sense is made. The movement of expression, which attempts to express the previously unexpressed, brings about a new sense, through “an organism of words, establishing it in the writer, or the reader as a new sense organ, opening an new field or a new dimension to our experience.”[xxxv] This new sense is apprehended in the world it opens up, in the possibilities it makes manifest, in the ways it reorganizes the past in terms of itself and a future it seems to make possible. It is not literally there contained in the words it uses, but rather is contained in the space between the speaker and the listener, between the gestural and conceptual meanings, between words and the world. It is precisely in this sense that Merleau-Ponty declares that “The spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.”[xxxvi] Authentic expression takes aim at the unsayable, the previously unexpressed, otherwise it remains in the sedimentations of already spoken speech. However, all the same this authentic expression requires the sediment in order to go further, in order to forget the contingency involved in its own achievement. An authentic speech act brings something new before us, something above and beyond what we already had at our disposal, we must reckon with its novelty in order to go further. In order to understand what was said, we must come to appropriate it into a fresh movement of our bodily motility. This movement between motility and intelligence is our movement, the movement of the body, such that it is the body, which, in order to express, “must in the last analysis become the thought or intention that it signifies for us.”[xxxvii]
Language and the New Sense of Sense
Language, like sexuality, is an originating realm, that this realization comes late, is due in no small part to the sense of language itself. Language is peculiar in what it affords, and the movement it makes possible. Language is a traditionalized/ traditionalizing structure, in that it alone “is able to settle into sediment and constitute an acquisition for use in human relationships.”[xxxviii] In short, speech acts re-organize the fabric of the linguistic totality, such that speech becomes the basis upon which further acts of speech are made possible. Speech serves to ground itself upon itself, such that we may have speech about speech in ways that “it is impossible to paint about painting.”[xxxix] In each case the contingencies involved in particular acts of speech get covered over in a functioning that conceals itself in its acts. It therefore, becomes true to say that we treat linguistic virtualities, contingent developments of speech, as necessary abstractions in the development of our linguistic edifices. In our attempts to express our perception, say who and what we are, or to engage in a cultural space, we are, as it were, faced with these linguistic virtualities which we come to treat as idealities.
“Speech is the surplus of our existence over natural being. But the act of expression constitutes a linguistic world and a cultural world, and allows that to fall back into being which was striving to outstrip it. Hence the spoken word enjoys available significance as one might enjoy an aquired fortune. From these gains the other acts of authentic expression—the writer’s, artist’s or philosopher’s—are made possible.”[xl]
Ultimately, we find ourselves in the midst of traditionalized structures, which further their agendas through our acts, or whose agendas we thwart through our acts. There are traditions we are aware of other than we are not, in any case, our explicit awareness is not necessary in order for them to function, as it were, behind our back and in our wakes. We might be amidst a revolution, or part of a reformation, or a rectification, whose environs we are scarcely aware of, and whose results have yet to be written, as if they could ever be settled permanently. We live in fields of fields and upon histories, which we do not choose, but reckon with in each and every movement of our bodily existence.
Conclusion
If we return to the quote provided at the start of the current examination, having gone through the movement of expression, we might have something further to say about it. This awesome power we have to “give significance” and to appropriate and convey this significance into a community of speaking subjects is nothing more than the power of our existence itself. The attempts to say what it is, presupposes that this power is a thing that we might arrest and cognize. It seems that our language allows us to grasp things whose truth does not truly reside in the order of things, but in the movement of living. This is simply part of the awesome power of language and the significance of sense bestowal. We live in and contribute to a world of shared meaning, which emerge out of and shape our speech acts. Our lived body draws together this ‘motility and ‘intelligence,’ these diverse fields of experience. The motility of our being is such that it acts out its acquisitions, in patterns of behavior and speech. Our own body gives us others, a world, a particular ‘style’ of being; it expresses an attitude; bridges distances, and reduces gaps, between itself, others and the world. Gaps remain, allowing us to go further, to transcend ourselves and our apprehensions, allowing us the capacity to go beyond the previously said, or the already acquired. We live in the wake of thoughts given to us by our contemporaries and our predecessors, our movement is to appropriate them. We give meaning to ourselves, borrowing from and giving to others, and live in accordance with these meanings. The body is that lived unity which cannot be understood reflectively, rather requires that it be lived.
Endnotes
[i] I would like to maintain the ambiguity of the French word <
[ii] If we are attentive to the quote at the onset the chapter on “The Body as Expression and Speech” we are therein provided with the clearest account of what these verbs are intended to show. “…being, the weak sense of existence as a thing, or that of predication…’having’ for the relation which the subject bears to the term into which it projects itself…” Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2002. P. 202.
[iii] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 206.
[iv] ‘Style,’ for Merleau-Ponty, denotes the immanent affective impact of gestures. In other words, style would be the originary pre-conceptual encounter with meaning. His best accounts of style appear on Ibid., p. 208, 212.
[v] We must be careful to note Merleau-Ponty’s footnote which makes an important distinction between an ‘authentic speech’ and a secondary speech. Ibid., p. 207.
[vi] Fundierung, already part of the phenomenological tradition pre-dating Merleau-Ponty, appears to be a first draft of the important idea of reversibility that occupies him in his later works. See M.C. Dillon. Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. Evanstown: Northwestern University Press, 1988. p 206.
[vii] Ibid., p 145. My italics
[viii] If there are certain tensions involved in the argument of The Phenomenology of Perception, perhaps an implicit privileging of the conceptual over the pre-conceptual, this is only in light of the trajectory we can see at work in the general movement of Merleau-Ponty’s thought as a whole. That is the contingent developments of the work undertaken in The Phenomenology of Perception can appear as mistaken, or essential, only when we reflect upon them in the light of his later work. If he appears too Cartesian in this work it is only in relation to how effectively he resolves his Cartesian tensions in the later works.
[ix] Merleau-Ponty seems to be searching for a kind of invariant in flux an invariant simultaneously capable of variation. Ibid., 139
[x] Merleau-Ponty attributes this discovery to Edmund Husserl and equates ‘motor intentionality’ with the movement of existence. Husserl’s treatment of it appears only in his posthumous works. Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 140.
[xi] Ibid., p. 146
[xii] Ibid., p. 194
[xiii]
[xiv] Ibid., p. 193
[xv] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 206
[xvi] Ibid., p. 208.
[xvii] Ibid., p. 212.
[xviii] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 218.
[xix]Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 215.
[xx] Ibid., p. 211.
[xxi] Ibid., p. 215.
[xxii] Ibid., p. 213.
[xxiii] Ibid., p. 192.
[xxiv] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 470.
[xxv] Ibid., p. 213.
[xxvi] In the later works Merleau-Ponty expresses a similar thought by using the terms <
[xxvii] Ibid., p. 206.
[xxviii] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 225.
[xxix] These habits lurk behind and contribute to the things we simply take for granted. They determine in advance our sense of ontics.
[xxx] Ibid., p. 226.
[xxxi] Aphasia is a loss in the general ability to comprehend and produce language, it is a motor phenomenon in that it does not manifest as an intellectual deficit.
[xxxii] Alexia is word blindness resulting in a loss in the ability to read and recognize printed words in general.
[xxxiii] A patient of Gelb and Goldstein whose pathology, stems from an injury to the occipital region of his brain, has impaired what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the ‘intentional arc’
[xxxiv] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 228.
[xxxv] Ibid., p. 212.
[xxxvi] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 214.
[xxxvii] Ibid., p. 230.
[xxxviii] Ibid., p. 221.
[xxxix] Ibid., p. 221.
[xl] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 229.
