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Merleau-Ponty and Saussure: situating the subject of perception in history

Cor Baerveldt, University of Alberta


February 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 called Introduction to
the Prose of the World. MP would never finish the project and although the unfinished manuscript was
posthumously 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 would
not have completed it. Yet, large parts of the manuscript would end up in the long essay Indirect
Language and the Voices of Silence, the essay we read for our seminar. The second project, published
as Adventures of the Dialectic, is MPs attempt to revisit and revise his earlier political thought,
especially as outlined in Humanism and Terror. Together these projects seem to have been part of an
attempt 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 years
after 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 giving
up 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 be
understood 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 and
history 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 his
peculiar 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 that
history)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 one
direction (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 who
live 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 state
to 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 realized
in 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, a
freedom 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 freedom
I 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 at
the same time contributing to it. Yet, if it is impossible to fully understand the sense of history, how
1

One should keep in mind here that sense in French carries the connotation both of a meaning and a
direction.

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 of
the 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. Language
is 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 style of functioning, of expressing themselves, of being in
the world. Language is a paradigm case for rule governed conduct, that is, conduct whose irreducible
normative 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 individual
perception 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 it
differs remarkably from a much more formalist interpretation of structure. It is precisely in
elaborating a notion of style that MP hopes to bridge the gap between perception and history, through
expression. 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 a
synchronic linguistics. Already in the PP we find a distinction that only superficially seems to resemble
Saussures distinction between langue and parole, 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 will
remain 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. The
spoken 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 who
is 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 his
difficulties 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 anything
more 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 painter
can be understood. For the painter to express himself most authentically is to express the visible in how
it demands to be seen. The painter attempts to capture the visible in its normative structure. Yet, at the
same 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 painter
must seek a generality not so much of idea or concept, but of style. In Indirect Language MP says:
For each painter style is the system of equivalences that he makes for himself which manifests
the 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 personal
and 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 the
slightly more modest role of securing the unity of perception, given that our perception is never just a
2

There 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 was
teaching at the Sorbonne on Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language.

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 in
itself 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 only
as a flow of appearances (remember, however, that according to Husserl it is precisely in the
appearances and not in their conceptual idealization that the essence of an entity is presented).
Moreover, there is always a synaesthetic quality to my perception of a thing. In the PP MP talks about
the 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 Gestalt but
something 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 of
wood 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 or
normativity 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 suchness
as 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 what
surrounds 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, a
generality of style (VI, p. 234). We can now also understand why in Silent Language MP says that
perception already stylizes (S., p*).
So what does MP gain by turning to Saussure? For one thing, Saussure seems to have reminded MP
that no act of signification can be understood separately from the cultural system in the context of
which signification is indeed signification. This idea is not new, but it does serve, as I will argue in a
moment, 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 Saussure
allows 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 every
signification is necessarily part of a total system of significations and that it is a means of selfdifferentiation rather than a means of direct reference. In MPs later work his earlier idea of a
prelinguistic tacit cogito is replaced by the idea of an originary language, a language of pure selfreference. Unique about MPs interpretation of this originary language, however, is his insight that it is
not 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 prelinguistic 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 of
distinction (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 a
fully 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 is
to 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 that
MP 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 act
or 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

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 gesture
or 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 Visible
and the Invisible MP criticizes himself on grounds that he failed there to connect the chapter on the
tacit 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 is
necessarily 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 in
history. 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 be
mine. In the PP MP says:
To exist for an embodied and historical being is to exist in a particular manner: I am a
psychological 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 stylized
speech 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 is
seen, 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 on
Herder 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 human
expression (understood here as all acts of expression within the irreducibly normative realm of selfdifferentiation) imply all other acts of expression/signification. As I would like to argue, this idea is
central 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 Languages and
his idea of an intentional arc in 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 are
individual events in the history of human expression subordinated to an advent or 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. If
human expression is indeed to be human expression 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 that
language 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 means cannot
in any way be understood by reference to anything outside the total realm of expression as self3

In 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 come
to have with his earlier philosophy later on in his life.

differentiation. In other words, if originary expression means or signifies this can only be because
expression is its meaning (rather than stands for or refers to a meaning that can be found outside this
expression). 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 in
a 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 is what it means and if no pregiven meaningful world can precede our expression, the
radical ontological implication is that the world is always and necessarily the world as expressed. This
is 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 the
sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of
incarnate principle that brings a style of 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 reveal
more fully were MP tries to take the idea that the unity of human reality must always be a unity of
style.

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