[In the following essay, Silverman examines Merleau-Ponty's role in postmodernist theory.]

In Merleau-Ponty's day, there would not have been a discourse about the question of Postmodernism.¹ In Merleau-Ponty's day, there would not have been an issue about his relation to Deconstruction. In Merleau-Ponty's day, the issue of a post-hermeneutics or even a post-structuralism would not have occupied any attention at all. When Merleau-Ponty died in 1961, his most significant accomplishment had been to establish a link between phenomenology (as he practiced it) and structuralism (as he understood it). The question to be posed now is not only whether there is a relation between Merleau-Ponty's thought and postmodernism but also what that place should be. While the first part of the question will not be difficult to establish, what remains in dispute is the status of the second. In other words, while the relation between Merleau-Ponty and postmodernism is a compelling question and most distinctly one that cannot be overlooked some three decades after his death, what that relation means is currently undergoing serious debate.

I. THE PLACE BETWEEN

To address the first issue, one needs to consider where Merleau-Ponty stood on questions that have been raised about and concerns that preoccupy what goes under the name of “postmodernism.” A variety of related terms seem to be current. The idea of a postmodernism, namely an approach, a mode of thinking, an attitude, or a general artistic-cultural-literary-philosophical movement, covers a broad domain that designates a shift in orientation of thought. This shift comes most notably in connection with what is generally called “modernism.” Postmodernity (as in the title of Gary Madison's The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity²) designates the appearance of a new world—something like the age of postmodernity, an age that succeeds modernity, an epoch that has come into its own most definitively at the turn of the 1990s. Further, Madison introduces a third term along with “postmodernity” and “modernity,” namely “postmodernistic”—as in “impressionistic”—which he uses in a derogatory way to distinguish it from “postmodernity,” and which appears to be an inevitable outcome of our present age. A fourth term “posthermeneutic” is invoked by Martin Dillon in Merleau-Ponty's Ontology.³ Here too the name is introduced to indicate a decline, a degeneration in thought, an attitude that Dillon associates with “skepticism.” Poststructuralism has already become démodé—though I shall want to say more about its currency. Deconstruction, however, must necessarily be regarded as a specific form of critical thinking that occupies a definitive space in the general orientation now known as postmodernism.

Considering each of these six terms (“postmodernism,” “postmodernity,” “postmodernistic,” “posthermeneutic,” “poststructuralist,” and “deconstruction”) in detail, the place occupied by Merleau-Ponty will become evident.

(1) Postmodernism sets a frame to modernism. It delimits the modernist enterprise, based in the subject which provides an outlook onto the material, objective, empirically elaborated world. In modernism, the subject is given a foundational, inaugurating, grounded, centered, and focal status. Modernist mentality seeks to elaborate an ego-based subjectivity (or self-constitution) from a position that elaborates its own rules, its own formations and then seeks to regard them at the same time as elaborated in the “objective” world. Postmodernism places such a Westanschauung in question. Postmodernism seeks to enframe a dualist, subject-object based account of human experience, human enterprises, or human activity. Postmodernism is the critical questioning of the modernist dream.

(2) Postmodernity describes the place to which the contemporary epoch has moved. Postmodernity is the present age: contemporaneity itself. Postmodernity is not an attitude, a philosophy, an outlook, a position, an orientation, or a theory. Postmodernity is a cultural, historical, and epochal description. Modernity has come to an end—whether it is fully recognized as such or not. These are no longer “modern times.” Modern times are bygone times, times worthy of nostalgia, times to look back upon as the “good olde days.” Postmodernity is the place from which modernity can be viewed, like viewing a film or a television serial. From postmodernity, pieces of the classical or the modern, the romantic or the real can be looked upon with delight or despair, hope or obliviousness. Postmodernity is something like Foucault's epistemé of the human sciences, prophetically described in his 1966 Les mots et les choses⁴ as the epistemé following the age of “man” or the “empirico-transcendental doublet.”⁵ Foucault did not then know to name it “postmodernity” or what Lyotard calls “the postmodern condition”⁶ but it is as good a term as any to describe the epoch that succeeds modernity and the reign of the anthropological age, the Kantian reconciled antinomy of rationalism and empiricism, the hegemony of the subject (characterized by its various forms of Ich Denke, cogito, transcendental ego, and id-ego-superego complex), the preoccupation with streams of consciousness delved, explored, and fathomed, and the effective shocks of the new. In postmodernity, the classical might be juxtaposed with the romantic, the modern with the neoclassical, the surrealist with the naturalist (and so forth). There is nothing new in this, and yet the juxtaposition marks off the new, delimits it, and circumscribes it.

(3) Madison's adjective “postmodernistic” has a novel ring to it. Presumably, it is to resonate with “impressionistic,” or some similar vagary. “What is interesting from our present-day point of view” writes Madison, “is that this properly postmodern conception of reason has nothing postmodernistic about it, by which I mean that it in no way involves a rejection of reason or a disavowal of the overriding importance that the Western tradition has always placed on reason” (Madison 71). Madison appeals to the “postmodernistic” in order to show that Merleau-Ponty was not a precursor of this sort of “postmodernistic thinking,” that Merleau-Ponty did indeed offer an account of reason that would keep him out of the “ranks of postmodernistic thinkers” (Madison 72). Madison claims that Merleau-Ponty refused “utopianism” and rejected “the possibility of some kind of definitive resolution of the differences and conflicts that separate people” (Madison 72). He therefore suggests that “postmodernistic” thinking is “utopian” offering a resolution to all differences and conflicts. This description is indeed curious and, I submit, has nothing to do with anything that would be called “postmodern” per se—either as a feature of postmodernity or as a tenet of postmodernism.⁷ This suggests then that what Madison is calling “postmodernistic” is simply his term for all that new theoretical “stuff” that he rejects, while at the same time holding onto the term “postmodernity” for what is good in the present age. This is fine, but then why call it “postmodernistic”—especially since it has nothing to do with the idea of “postmodernism” either. Indeed, Madison seems to have invented the term “postmodernistic” in order to describe what he thinks he does not like in postmodernism, and from which he wants to be sure to save Merleau-Ponty.

(4) “Posthermeneutic” is employed by Martin Dillon as part of a similar denigratory complex, namely, what he calls “post-hermeneutic skepticism.” Dillon weighs heavily on this idea in his otherwise solid account of Merleau-Ponty. Unfortunately, Dillon appeals to “posthermeneutic skepticism” in order to collect together a wide range of contemporary, and, dare I say, “postmodern thinking” that he regards as pernicious. The position goes something like the following: if as Heidegger claims, “language, which grounds our understanding of things, is itself grounded in an abyss, an Ab-grund, an absence of ground” (Dillon 180), then there is a grave danger of skepticism and nihilism. However, Heidegger has provided a way out. Heidegger, in his later thought, gives stronger credence to his notion of Er-eignis. Ereignis, Dillon claims, might provide a ground—a way out of the abyss. Without it, Heidegger remains in skepticism and nihilism. According to Dillon, Heidegger is without grounds or Ereignis is without a ground (and while I suspect that this is indeed the case, or at least it is not close enough to what Dillon wants), it means that Heidegger is a skeptic and a nihilist like those who follow in his wake and who, Dillon feels, have also denied a place for ground, logos, reason. In short, post-hermeneutic skepticism is a groundless or foundationless philosophy—something along the order of what one finds in postmodernism broadly and in deconstruction more specifically. Fortunately, according to Dillon, Merleau-Ponty, through his notion of Fundierung has escaped the pitfalls of the errant Heidegger and the even more worrisome postmodernists and deconstructionists.

(5) As a kind of companion to “posthermeneutic skepticism” is Dillon's term “semieological reductionism.” By this he seems to mean that the reduction to structures is based in a signifier-signified which limits all knowledge to structures and sign systems. As he puts it, “semeiology is the science of signs. Semeiological reductionism is the attempt to reduce all science to semeiology” (Dillon 181). Hence for Dillon the form of semiology that takes its concern as the limits of knowledge is ipso facto reductionist. This could well be the case for early forms of semiology, taken in a narrow sense, however de Saussure certainly refused the universality that Dillon describes. There may have been semiologists or even formalists who took the further step that Dillon suggests. However, this is hardly the case with “poststructuralism.” Just as what Dillon is calling post-hermeneutics, which presumably follows from Gadamer and Ricoeur and rereads Heidegger in what he would consider “groundless,” poststructuralism follows after de Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, and Lacan and rereads the semiological tradition without affirming anything like a reduction to structures and sign systems. Poststructuralism, which gained momentum after Merleau-Ponty's death in 1961, took hold in the late 1960s with the publications of Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and others. It reacted against the reductionistic, limited features of structuralism. Until the mid-1970s, poststructuralism was not yet postmodernism, and not even deconstruction in any full-bodied sense. Poststructuralism was still very much a reaction to both structuralism and phenomenology (not so much in Merleau-Ponty's sense, but more as propounded by Husserl, a certain Heidegger, and Sartre). Embedded within poststructuralism was also a postphenomenology (though this name came much later). Poststructuralism then was the transition from structuralism to postmodernism and deconstruction. As a transition, it was still much more of a reaction to that which it sought to reread. But since poststructuralists tended to remain rather silent with respect to their teacher, and perhaps the dominant philosopher in France, namely Merleau-Ponty, their reaction was directed elsewhere. What needs to be understood, however, and what if often simply misunderstood, is that poststructuralism was not an attempt to wipe the slate clean, to reject all that was valuable and effective in structuralism and phenomenology—or psychoanalysis, for that matter. Poststructuralism tended to reread Husserl, Freud, de Saussure, Heidegger, and so on, to examine the dominant features of modernism and to show that they operate sets of limited and limiting binary conditions, that they ultimately present themselves as texts—in spite of themselves. This does not mean that the realities that they describe are thereby reduced to texts, rather the accounts themselves, the philosophical or theoretical narratives circumscribe themselves and concommittantly establish what lies outside their formulations. Poststructuralists read these theoretical elaborations in the context of epistemological frameworks, archives, textual practices, ecritures, and so forth. Poststructuralists did not deny what was at issue in these various formulations. Hence poststructuralism was not at all reductive in the sense that Dillon suggests and Madison intimates.

(6) What deconstruction provides is a set of strategies, a modus legendi which is neither reductive nor groundless. Deconstruction does not deny grounds, reasons, intelligibles, or the like. Rather it situates them. Grounds need to be understood in relation to abysses—much as Dillon has attempted to do. Reasons need to be understood in relation to emotions or irrationalities. Intelligibles need to be explored in relation to sensibles or unintelligibles. In no way does Derrida, for instance, deny that there is anything outside the text. Anyone who has read Heidegger, will know about the es gibt, or in French the il y a. When Derrida writes: “il n'y a pas de hors texte,” he is not denying that there is nothing outside the text, rather he is affirming that what is never given is that which is outside the text. Once given, once affirmed as there, once articulated, whatever is under investigation is already a text, already available for a reading, for an enterprise of some sort that will bring out its features, elements, marks, limits, etc. Once it is affirmed as outside the text, affirmation brings it inside. This is not to say that there is no outside any more than there is no inside. Quite the contrary, if one tried to give an account of the inside qua inside, it would correspondingly affirm and establish the outside. Missing this point makes it impossible for readers of deconstruction to understand that ultimately, the place between—between the inside and the outside, the text and the context, the intelligible and the sensible, the subjective and the objective, etc.—is what is of interest. But the interest does not reify the between—this was Heidegger's lesson in his account of the onticoontological difference. The Being of beings does not reify the relational difference, it only discloses it, and therein, for Heidegger, lies the truth. Furthermore, as both Dillon and Madison would be quick to admit, reversibility is not coincidence (Madison) and yet reversibility does establishes the place of “flesh,” of one's relations to oneself, to Others, and to worldly things, and of the phenomenonal field (as articulated in the Phenomenology of Perception). Rather reversibility—the logic of the chiasmatic or intertwining—establishes itself in relation to the very sort of binary, or dualistic pairings that deconstruction re-marks.

II. THE MEANING OF THE RELATION

One likely reason for the non-invocation of Merleau-Ponty in poststructuralist, postmodernist, posthermeneutic, and deconstructionist writings is that Merleau-Ponty was too close conceptually and strategically and yet epochally of another time. While a Foucault could claim that Nietzsche and Mallarmé were threshhold figures signalling and marking an epistemological break with the concept of man as an empirico-transcendental doublet, and indeed announcing the death of man before its time, he could not, or would not, dare to give such a status to Merleau-Ponty. Similarly Derrida's explicit citings of Merleau-Ponty are extremely rare. Julia Kristeva has recently admitted to the importance of Merleau-Ponty, but she too has devoted more ink to Husserl, Freud, Frege, and so forth than to any significant invocation of Merleau-Ponty.⁸ Indeed for any serious account of the role of Merleau-Ponty in this complex of postmodernist and related theories, one has to look to North American “Continental philosophers” for further elaboration in this direction.

Yet even here, there is disagreement. It should already be evident that neither Dillon nor Madison are willing to admit that Merleau-Ponty was a guiding voice in the background of what has come to be known as postmodernism. Indeed in contrast to my own position, they both want to resist the link, though Madison appears to be more willing than Dillon, yet he too seems to be afraid to recognize the importance of Merleau-Ponty in the writings of Derrida et al. He sees more of an affinity between Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer or Ricoeur, even though Gadamer's Wahrheit und Methode did not actually appear until the year before Merleau-Ponty's death. While the mainstream of Gadamer's post-Wahrheit und Methode writings have appeared almost contemporaneously with and in significant awareness of developments in postmodernism and the like, his track has been significantly other. And although this otherness has not denied dialogue and conversation—the temperament nevertheless remains predominantly within the frame of modernist thought. More needs to be said about this, but not here.⁹

What Merleau-Ponty stressed again and again—and this comes out in both Dillon and Madison as well as in my own writing¹⁰—is Merleau-Ponty's strong reaction against dualism of many sorts. Merleau-Ponty laboured long and hard to examine the dominant dualisms of the modern age—and he attempted to show their limitations. Dillon effectively chronicles the rejection of both empiricist and intellectualist excesses. And while Dillon offers an account of the reversibility thesis, he does not focus on the role of ambiguity in the response to these divergent positions. Nor does he develop at length, though it is certainly part of his account, the reiteration and revision of his earlier formulation of ambiguity in terms of the chiasm or the intertwining, the respect in which Merleau-Ponty both refuses the binary concepts of body and soul, sensible and intelligible, objectivity and subjectivity, without offering a hegelian synthesis. While Dillon sees in some recent developments, postmodernist, deconstructionist, and in short posthermeneutic writing, the appeal to “language” as a tertium quid, what he does not see is that just as language was not a third thing for Merleau-Ponty, so it was also not a third thing for the later Heidegger and certainly not for Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Kristeva, et al. Just as Merleau-Ponty carefully developed the in-between (what Heidegger called the Inzwischen), so too Derrida marks off the differences between speaking and writing, the intelligible and the sensible, meaning and reference, the literal and the figurative, the text and its context, and shows strategically that neither side has priority, neither side can be rejected totally and conclusively. At the slash or mark, the space or hinge, the deconstructive activity takes place—not as a third thing, but as a strategy that marks the differences. As hinge, edge, of margin, the in-between has no independent status. The marginality itself, the edging, the marking of the between is equally without any independent, separable, self-supporting status.

For Merleau-Ponty, the experience of ambiguity in gesture, touching, seeing, speaking, and acting is not just the co-givenness of many meanings in tension and all at once. The experience of ambiguity is also the marking of a dispersal, a dissemination, a multiplicity. This multiplicity crosses out the univocity that is sought for in a certain scientific thinking. Semiology is not of this order and as Lacan has shown—but not without complexity—the signifying chain of a semiotics is almost never reducible to univocity. Merleau-Ponty was as committed to plurivocity and a polylogos as Deleuze, Derrida, and Kristeva. Later in his life—as in The Visible and the Invisible and as in “Eye and Mind”—he transformed this earlier formulation into an account of visibility, of the relation between the visible and the invisible, of the interweaving of seeing and the seen, of touching and the touched, of hearing and the heard, etc. Visibility is multiform and multivalent. Its intertwining opens up into a framed multiplicity of visual, tactile, auditory, but also (and not independently) conceptual complexes.

Postmodernism operates—as Gianni Vattimo has said—with many voices,¹¹ and those voices all call out in the spaces of difference, in the margins, in the between, in, what Merleau-Ponty called, the “chiasm.” Merleau-Ponty's logic of visibility cannot be read now independently of Derrida's logic of supplementarity.¹² The visible and the invisible are no more independent existences than were the older ideas of body and soul. They are interwoven, reversible, intertwined. They mark a place of difference, and that place of difference both brings them together, tears them apart, marginalizes the one in relation to the other, incorporates the one while instantiating the other. There are differences between Merleau-Ponty and postmodernism but the differences lie in the gathering of the differences and in their dispersal or dissemination, their continued sewing and being sewn, their writing and their publication.

Notes

1. In the 1960 interview entitled “The Philosophy of Existence,” in Merleau-Ponty: Texts and Dialogues, eds. Hugh J. Silverman and James Barry Jr. (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1991), Merleau-Ponty describes the end of an era, the end of the age of existentialism. While this is not the inauguration of postmodernism per se, it is clearly a new beginning.

2. Gary Madison, The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989?), pp. 61-71. Henceforth cited in the text as “Madison.”

3. M. C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty's Ontology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988?).

4. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. anon. (New York: Vintage, 1970).

5. For a more detailed account of Foucault's position, see Hugh J. Silverman, Inscriptions: Between Phenomenology and Structuralism (London and New York: Routledge, 1987), especially chapters 14 and 18. See also inter alia James Bernauer, Foucault's Force of Flight (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1990).

6. Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

7. See, for instance, my own account of postmodernism in “Introduction to the Philosophy of Postmodernism” in Postmodernism—Philosophy and the Arts [Continental Philosophy—III] (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 1-9.

8. See, however, my essay “The Text of the Speaking Subject: Merleau-Ponty/Kristeva” in M. C. Dillon, ed. Merleau-Ponty Vivant (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).

9. See, for instance, Hugh J. Silverman, ed., Gadamer and Hermeneutics [Continental Philosophy—IV] (New York and London: Routledge, 1991).

10. See Hugh J. Silverman, Inscriptions: Between Phenomenology and Structuralism, especially chapters 5-9 on Merleau-Ponty.

11. A notion that resonates with Kristeva's and Derrida's idea of the “polylogue.” The point appears in many of Vattimo's recent lectures and essays.

12. See Hugh J. Silverman, “Interrogation and Deconstruction,” Phänomenologische Forschungen, Band 18 “Studien fur neueren französischen Phänomenologie” (Freiburg: Karl Alber Verlag, 1986), pp. 113-127.