SOURCE: Margolis, Joseph. “Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernism.” In Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, edited by Thomas W. Busch and Shaun Gallagher, pp. 241-56. Albany: State University of New York Press.

[In the following essay, Margolis discusses Merleau-Ponty's legacy to postmodernism.]

One cannot report the relationship between postmodernism and the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty: there is none, certainly there is none in the ordinary sense in which Jean-François Lyotard embraces postmodernism and Jürgen Habermas rejects it.¹ Furthermore, even under the constraint of philosophical relevance, postmodernism is as much a puzzle as a would-be resolution of deeper puzzles; there is no single formula defining postmodernism that identifies it both accurately and in a philosophically productive way—certainly not Lyotard's notorious jibe:

I will use the term modern [he says] to designate any science that identifies it with reference to a metadiscourse … making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth. … Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives,²

and certainly not in Habermas's implied acceptance of that sort of definition (not, of course, the doctrine that it signifies).³ The fact is that Lyotard pirates the right to impose an authoritative reading on postmodernism rather than define the form it actually has. To be entirely candid, however, it has only the form it is compellingly assigned.

There are many such indeterminate notions—philosophical categories, preeminently—and no single interpreter can hope to fix their meaning by main force. The meaning of “postmodern” depends primarily on its having been first introduced or appropriated in a public way by some deliberately rhetorical flourish, and then, secondly, on the dialectical history it acquires once it is released into the stream of public thought. In this sense, Lyotard has done remarkably well in defining the notion in a way philosophy has come to favor—and more or less convincingly attached to other views, Richard Rorty's, for instance, even where such authors have the good sense (though not the right) to deny the diminished standing the label entails.⁴ There are other loosely formed acceptances of the notion in other conceptual neighborhoods, in architecture, for instance, in film, painting, literature, culture at large,⁵ that similarly tempt one to treat postmodernism's doctrine as settled enough to justify a straightforwardly matter-of-fact finding of a larger sort. (Also, of course, such verbal acceptance says nothing about the resolution of the conceptual puzzles it merely rearranges.)

As it happens, there is at least one sustained attempt to explore affinities and oppositions involving Merleau-Ponty and postmodernism—on the reasonable assumption that the phenomenon antedates the dynamiting of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis (1972) and that Merleau-Ponty's philosophical themes were clear and pertinent enough in his own time to justify extrapolation now for our own purposes. Gary Madison, who makes the attempt, has, however, somewhat homogenized the promising affinities and oppositions that could have been drawn out, so that classical pragmatism (possibly because of Rorty's work) now appears (pejoratively) to be a sort of postmodernism, and Merleau-Ponty himself is made out (approvingly) to favor Habermas, in being committed to the uncoerced universality of a rational consensus and to political liberalism.⁶ Both of these last claims are less than helpful, except in that extravagant sense in which, after all, they do mark an important site where correction and clarification may be invited. In any case, Madison's effort to place Merleau-Ponty in the company of Husserl, Heidegger, Marxism, pragmatism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism certainly sets the stage for those principal players, even if, in doing that, we risk losing the precise definition of what Merleau-Ponty's originality comes to. Also, Madison's interpretation has the distinct virtue of assembling some of the best clues to Merleau-Ponty's philosophical objective. To propose to reorder these in another way is at least to acknowledge that debt, and more.

Admirers of Merleau-Ponty ought, also, to admit that his principal undertaking was not merely not finished, but also not sufficiently well worked out by the end of his life. We can define his place, of course—something of his intention. But we cannot be sure of its full improvisational possibilities: that would require a second Merleau. We cannot rightly vindicate or discount his project if we cannot rightly establish what it can recover. Its sheer boldness baffles the most sympathetic imagination. In a fair sense, therefore, in linking Merleau-Ponty to the prospects of postmodernism, we play a slippery game: we reshape the latter to favor Merleau-Ponty's pertinence, and we project the powers of the former in order to decide the fate of postmodernism itself. Both maneuvers belong to that twilight rhetoric in which we cannot claim to have merely found the decisive facts of the matter. We insinuate ourselves in a process in which, though originally surrogates, we become the principal players: a little like playing chess with oneself, with inherited boards of several abandoned games now made to yield a single homogenized contest already in play. There is nothing for it, as we begin, but to admit the inescapable bias of the philosopher's interpretation; otherwise, there would be no contest at all. There would be no way of understanding our own intellectual history.

I

What we need for form for ourselves, at the start, is a sense of Merleau-Ponty's essential, or at least most mature and promising, themes that might enable us to solve at one and the same time the puzzle of his place among phenomenologists (and perhaps pragmatists and hermeneuts) and the puzzle of how best to construe his contribution to the quarrel regarding modernism and postmodernism (and perhaps Marxism and liberalism as well). It seems a large order, but an effective argument may be drawn from the following remarks:

[A]. description is not the return to immediate experience; one never returns to immediate experience. It is only a question of whether we are to try to understand it;

(PhP [Phenomenology of Perception] 30)

[B]. the becoming-nature of man … is the becoming-man of nature;

(VI [The Visible and the Invisible] 185)

[C]. Man is a historical idea and not a natural species. In other words, there is in human existence no unconditional possession, and no fortuitous attribute. Human existence will force us to revise our usual notion of necessity and contingency, because it is the transformation of contingency into necessity by the act of carrying forward.

(PhP 170)

These are fair samples of Merleau-Ponty's cryptic vision. They do not easily fall into a single felicitous pattern. They resemble postmodernist incursions a little because they do subvert the philosophical canon. But they are not postmodernist, in the straight sense that they are meant to facilitate a deeper and suppler recovery of philosophy than the canon would ever care to support: they are opposed to abandoning the philosophical enterprise. Furthermore, that recovery cannot be expected to be won by appealing to a consensus among those already committed to the canon (Habermas, say) or to those who, “postmodernly,” reject the canon together with everything it admits to be a legitimate question (Rorty, for instance). In a word, Madison cannot be right on either count, for Merleau-Ponty intended to radicalize philosophy by transforming its governing vision, not by restoring the canon with minor adjustments (Habermas) and not by repudiating it altogether (Lyotard and Rorty).

The essential clue cannot be instantly fathomed; we shall have to return to it a number of times. But it may be put this way: what is most radical and problematic in The Visible and the Invisible, that still claims philosophical continuity with the boldest features of Phenomenology of Perception, depends on what cannot be determinately specified at all—spoken—but can be located with regard to our (or any) orderly, spontaneously effective conceptual system. If that alone is true, then Madison's interpretation cannot but fail, because, in banking on Merleau-Ponty's attention to the liberal and consensual in the political world (hence the perceived affinities with Habermas), Madison commits his reading to the steady extension (or progressive improvement) of conceptual distinctions already in use; whereas, surely, Merleau-Ponty had narrowed his entire effort, approaching the end of his life, to the task of illuminating the subterranean source of all discovery and the legitimation thereby of discovery that takes a discursive form.

It is only in being drawn to such an option that we are instructively attracted as well to the possibility that Merleau-Ponty was a sort of proto-postmodernist. This is not to suggest that Madison takes him to be a postmodernist. Of course, he does not. He treats him as a “postmodern” thinker but not as a “postmodernist”: Merleau-Ponty accepts, Madison correctly notes, a “postmodern conception of reason [that] 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. Merleau-Ponty never suggested that ‘reason’ is nothing more than the idea-product of our particular historical tradition, merely a cultural bias of Western man.”⁷

True enough, though even that requires fine tuning. He did, you will remember, say that man was not “a natural species” (PhP 170) [C]. But it would be a mistake to conclude, as Madison pretty well does, that that signifies a commitment to the possibility of a universal progressivism via the self-corrective work of reason as it seeks a completely open consensus. That would make Merleau-Ponty out to be a sort of phenomenological Peircean, and hence, an ally of Habermas. “He was [Madison says] most definitely not opposed to the traditional and, in particular, Enlightenment stress on rationality. … By ‘rationality’ Merleau-Ponty understood basically what might be called ‘reasonableness’: the attempt to reach uncoerced agreement with others by means of unrestricted dialogue. This is a conception of reason that, interestingly enough, is remarkably akin to the conception of reason that a thinker such as Jürgen Habermas has in recent years diligently labored to articulate and which he refers to as ‘communicative rationality.’ It is a properly hermeneutical conception of reason.”⁸

One reason this reading is not likely to be right is simply this: Habermas never risks anything like Merleau-Ponty's extreme daring—precisely with respect to the nature of rational discourse. How is it possible, therefore, that, as Merleau-Ponty reaches for the most complete formulation of his obsessing vision, he should prove to have simply joined hands (by an idiosyncratic detour) with Habermas's modernist recovery of Enlightenment reason—against, of course, the genuinely subversive (postmodernist) possibilities of the Frankfurt School? Something is wrong here. Certainly, Adorno's negative dialectics suggests an affinity between the Frankfurt radicalizing of Marxist thought and Merleau-Ponty's (and Heidegger's quite different) radicalizing of phenomenology.⁹ Let it be said at once, however, that the required correction must pass through something like Madison's original labor.

We must try to make a little more transparent the sense of our specimen remarks. For example, in [A], Merleau-Ponty clearly repudiates any form of cognitive privilege, any form of foundational access to the noumenal order of things: we cannot effect a “return to immediate experience,” he says; and yet we must “try to understand it.” What could that possibly mean? Surely it is the same point that, in the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception, proves to be Merleau-Ponty's abiding puzzle—which, of course, he almost always formulates in a deliberately aporetic way. “The whole universe of science,” he says, “is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we are to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression” (PhP viii).

That single carefully selected term, “second-order,” cannot fail, now, to recommend (to the unwary) an intention to recover some form of cognitive privilege. The entire passage playfully insinuates just the reverse of what is meant. The “second-order” is of course the range of all ordinary sensory perception and discourse in which the canonical “objectivist” construes his science: in fact, it marks in a sly way what is “first-order” for the objectivist. Merleau-Ponty is following Husserl here—according to his own lights: he is returning to the “things themselves,” to what “is a matter of describing, not of explaining or analyzing” (PhP viii). The “things themselves” cannot be the objects of the latter talents (“explaining and analyzing”), because the “world as directly experienced” is not yet languaged, not yet normalized by the categories of knowledge, consciousness, languaged thought: “To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language” (PhP ix).

The “world” is that, beyond language and beyond languaged perception, “of which knowledge always speaks.” Hence, science is “second-order.” Merleau-Ponty is entirely explicit here: he is recovering Husserl's attack on objectivism. But already in the Phenomenology of Perception, he recovers Husserl in a way Husserl could never approve: for, “description is not the return to immediate experience,” to what a deeper reflection might fathom. Could anything be more explicit? The puzzle that remains concerns just how the collecting theme of the late Merleau-Ponty affects and alters the theme of the early Merleau-Ponty.

Merleau-Ponty cannot return to the “world,” to “things themselves,” in the cognitional way (in either the objectivist's or the idealist's way). That's just what [A] concedes. (Presumably, that's what makes Merleau-Ponty “postmodern.”) Hence, if to “describe” the world that “second-order” discourse speaks about is to describe what is not, and can never be, described in such second-order discussion, then there is no way to be right about it in the second-order way that rightly captures propositional truth (the objectivist's and the idealist's way—Husserl's in particular). That's what [B] darkly intimates. Discourse always says more than it knows, “speaks” more than it can say, and is more than it can speak. The “wild” nature of the human being is chiasmatically implicated in the “wild” nature of the world. We seek to fathom what is unsaid (“unspeakable”) in what is said, and in attending to such disclosures, we discover ourselves as well as the world we inhabit (“unspeakably”). “The real [says Merleau-Ponty] does not await our judgement before incorporating the most surprising phenomena, or before rejecting the most plausible figments of our imagination. Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a deliberate taking up of a position; it is the background from which all acts stand out, and it is presupposed by them. The world is not an object such that I have in my possession the law of its making; it is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and my explicit perceptions” (PhP xxi).

In speaking, in routinized discursive acts, one must reflect on what signals what is not captured by any utterance or usual perception but amplifies it, as if from beyond, compellingly from the “world” that is not yet tamed by such discourse. That is the marvellous lesson of [C]; there must be a sense in which, in the lived world that forms the background of our explicit (profoundly contingent) discourse, disclosures are glimpsed (not by cognitive privilege but by a sort of necessity in the very process of life, by a certain salience or irresistibility that wells up) that affects both what we propositionally affirm and, in what we affirm, what we would legitimate. That sense is the same in which history is the brute medium of human life (and the world), in which the deep contingencies of objective science and experience and their transcendental legitimation entail a “transformation … into necessity by the act of carrying forward.” The “necessity” cannot be discursive or formal in the logical sense. It is historical; for, if it were logical or conceptual, invariantly compelling within its own fixed historical interval, it would simply reinstate the idealism Merleau-Ponty marks as the weakness of his own mentor, Husserl. Also, it must be “contingent” in a deeper sense than that already recognized in discourse, for it lies beyond the closure of any (contingent) conceptual scheme we employ, and it “was” (already) the source of whatever propositionalized necessity we now claim to find in our operative categories. That, at any rate, is very close to the lesson of the Phenomenology.

History, then, is Merleau-Ponty's clue to overcoming the entire Cartesian world and the deep failure of Husserl's idealism. For Husserl had already blinked, philosophically, in the Crisis volume, when, partly responding to what he took to be Max Weber's challenge to the supposed relevance of phenomenology to historical existence, he failed utterly and finally to draw the needed connection between history and subjectivity:

Our first historical reflection [says Husserl at the beginning of the manuscript] has not only made clear to us the actual situation of the present and its distress as a sober fact; it has also reminded us that we as philosophers are heirs to the past in respect to the goals which the word “philosophy” indicates, in terms of concepts, problems, and methods. What is clearly necessary (what else could be of help here?) is that we reflect before all decisions, for a radical self-understanding: we must inquire back into what was originally and always sought in philosophy, what was continually sought by all the philosophers and philosophies that have communicated with one another historically; but this must include a critical consideration of what, in respect to the goals and methods of philosophy, is ultimate, original, and genuine and which, once seen, apodictically conquers all.¹⁰

Husserl's mention of the “apodictic” conveys two ironies: first, it provides an explicit illustration of a sense of universal reason and consensus that is as distant from Habermas's proposal as it is from Merleau-Ponty's; secondly, it actually identifies what, in Husserl's idealist reclamation of the canon, Merleau-Ponty could not accept.¹¹ Certainly it is clear that Husserl uses “history” to prime a completely ahistorical exercise of reason; he does not construe reason itself as radically historicized. That is the meaning of [C].

Still, there is a clue in Husserl's failure that shows the way to a suppler recovery, shows the permanent limitation of philosophy as well as its proper viability. Hence, the resolution of his essential puzzle counts, for Merleau-Ponty, toward reconciling in a novel way naturalism and phenomenology (all would-be dualisms of ontology and epistemology, in fact) and also (by an extravagance of applied reading) it counts toward overcoming the extravagances of both modernism and postmodernism.

This needs some amplification. But the clue is this: Merleau-Ponty's “return” to the “things themselves” signifies the redirection of philosophy's work beyond objectivism and (idealist) phenomenology and toward our reclaiming a wild but unitary world that informs all our discourse but remains beyond it.

It is a redirection of thought, it is not the capture of a privileged source of knowledge. It is forever implicated in what we claim to understand and know of the world. But we cannot understand in any cognitional sense the linkage between the two: that cannot be rendered in any way that might yield improved criteria of the cognizing sort. It is the world's unity, its “flesh” (to which we belong, at a level of existence deeper than discourse can penetrate), that resists discourse but informs it—a world already dualized yet prior to any dualism.

That too exposes Husserl's failing. Rightly grasped, it shows at a stroke the impossibility of ordering first- and second-order (legitimative) discourse in the canonical way—whether by Descartes's or by Kant's or by Husserl's lights; and it shows, by locating effective discourse itself in the context of what we are calling “history,” that there cannot be any hierarchized order between such first- and second-order activity and that neither can exhibit an ultimate necessity that discourse could specify or legitimate. That is a far cry from abandoning philosophy (postmodernism) and from restoring the proper ordering of the levels of discourse between what may rightly be claimed about the world and what may be claimed about all claims about the world (modernism). Madison, as we were saying, sees the danger of the first, but he does not grasp the novelty of the second theme.

II

Madison's mistake is an important one, not at all easy to dislodge. He is right, for instance, to reclaim Merleau-Ponty's insistence on the link between philosophy and the political relevance of its recovery under historical circumstances: for instance, as in the reflection on the relevance of Marxism as philosophy, at the end of the fifties. But Madison is also much too sanguine in his oddly clever reading of Merleau-Ponty's texts. He says that “the conclusion [of Merleau-Ponty's reflection on history] is a prudent and reasonable belief in the possibility of a certain progress”; and he grounds that prospect in a textual way in a remark (among similar-sounding remarks), in Signs, to the effect that, in spite of the confusions and deadends of history, living societies are able “to pick out the truth of their past in the present” (S [Signs] 73-74).

Perhaps this does signify a sort of progress—or, better, a sort of energy apt for projects that might redeem us from the errors of what we once claimed to have correctly perceived in history. But what Madison fails to weigh sufficiently is the simple fact that Merleau-Ponty is speaking precisely of the self-understanding of Marxism, now that it has failed. Merleau-Ponty says very plainly: “The relationship between philosophy and history is less simple than was believed” (S 13). Certainly it is not as simple as Habermas supposes; and certainly it would be too tepid to maintain, as Madison does, that “[t]o affirm history in this way [Habermas's way, now ascribed to Merleau-Ponty,] amounts to a recognition that there is no definitive solution to human problems.”¹²

These two remarks are worlds apart: in the first (Merleau-Ponty's), one finds at least part of the dawning vision that bridges the difference between the Phenomenology and The Visible and the Invisible. (There is no parallel in Madison's gloss.) When he speaks of “the greatness of a doctrine” (the “classics”—Madison notes the usage), Merleau-Ponty is thinking expressly of Marx's own work; and, in that spirit, he says: “The history of thought does not summarily pronounce: This is true; that is false. Like all history, it has its veiled decisions. It dismantles or embalms certain doctrines, changing them into ‘messages’ or museum pieces. There are others, on the contrary, which it keeps active. These do not endure because there is some miraculous adequation or correspondence between them and an invariable ‘reality’—such an exact and fleshless truth is neither sufficient nor necessary for the greatness of a doctrine—but because, as obligatory steps for those who want to go further, they retain an expressive power which exceeds their statements and propositions. … We are saying that a re-examination of Marx would be a meditation upon a classic” (S 10-11).

This line of thinking leads directly to specimen [C], which, let it be noted, is found in the Phenomenology. The theory of the “classics” is very close to the central role Merleau-Ponty assigns “perception” in his early work. It is, for instance, very close to the theme, in “The Primacy of Perception,” that “perception is a nascent logos”—which is to say, that experience moves us to “assist … at the birth of … knowledge [in the process of knowledge as it takes form, in order to teach us] to recover the consciousness of rationality [rather than merely the ‘things, truths, values’ that ‘are (thereby) constituted for us’]” (PhP 25).

That theme might possibly have led us, in some remote way, to suppose that Merleau-Ponty was a conventional phenomenologist or a precursor of Habermas. But if there is a sense of progress there, it rests with the recovery of the lesson of that logos—in effect, it helps us to gain an escape from the snares of discursive truth—not the progressive improvement (à la Habermas) of the particular “things, truths, values [therein] constituted for us.” For Merleau-Ponty, there is no progress there.

Still, wherever Merleau-Ponty means to capture the ontology of speaking without yet saying (the logos theme), what (by parity of rhetoric) he ultimately collects, particularly in The Visible and the Invisible—concerns the deeper theme of the ontology of being, without yet speaking. It is this second theme, not the first, that tempts us to read Merleau-Ponty as a postmodernist; the first might only tempt us to read him as a poststructuralist. For the first is genuinely concerned with the “other” (l'autre), in a sense not altogether distant from the master theme of poststructuralism.¹³ Yet even that is not entirely accurate; for, unlike the poststructuralists, Merleau-Ponty places the first theme in the context of the second—even, incipiently, in the Phenomenology. There's the baffling novelty he intends. Consequently, in eclipsing Marxism, in construing Marx in a serious but essentially educative or heuristic way (that is, as a “classic”), Merleau-Ponty cannot merely move on to recover the progressivism of a liberal imagination. He can avail himself of that all right—as, indeed, the poststructuralist often does—but he already senses, there, the deeper lesson of the second theme (which, of course, he never managed to put in final form).

One sees this, for instance, in the Introduction to Signs (which Madison draws on), where, having introduced the question of the link between the philosophy and politics of Marxism, Merleau-Ponty explicitly adds the second theme: as if to say, that too is needed to understand what is gained by reclaiming Marx. The issue is introduced in a way that cannot fail to remind one of Heidegger's alternative. Surely, Merleau-Ponty is offering here another option as a way of recovering Husserl's announced purpose: “The philosopher who maintains that the ‘historical process’ passes through his study is laughed at. … Now, as before, philosophy begins with a ‘what is thinking?’ and is absorbed in the question to begin with. No instruments or organs here. It is pure ‘It seems to me that.’ He whom all things appear before cannot be hidden from himself. Nevertheless, in the dark night of thought dwells a glimmering of Being” (S 14-15). He offers us a jeu, a serious parody of (an alternative to) Heidegger. It agrees with the posing of Heidegger's own question but only in its own sweet way: to make a question of oneself is to call humanism into question; hence, once again, it is to raise an issue that cannot be reconciled with a “liberal” metaphysics (which is not the same, remember, as a liberal politics detached from Merleau-Ponty's second theme). “Man,” as he says, “is a historical idea and not a natural species” [C]. To speak thus is not to repudiate humanism (as Heidegger does) in the name of a higher calling, but it is to force humanism to acknowledge its insurmountable limitation.

That the second theme is already present in Signs is suggested by the phrase, “No instruments or organs here.” But the sequel leaves no doubt:

Take others the moment they appear in the world's flesh. They would not exist for me, it is said, unless I recognized them, deciphering in them some sign of the presence to self whose sole model I hold within me. But though my thought is indeed only the other side of my times, of my passive and perceptible being, whenever I try to understand myself the whole fabric of the perceptible world comes too, and with it comes the others who are caught in it. Before others are or can be subjected to my conditions of possibility and reconstructed in my image, they must already exist as outlines, deviations, and variants of a single Vision in which I too participate. For they are not fictions with which I might people my desert—offspring of my spirit and forever unactualized possibilities—but my twins or the flesh of my flesh. Certainly I do not live their life; they are definitely absent from me and I from them. But that distance becomes a strange proximity as soon as one comes back home to the perceptible world, since the perceptible is precisely that which can haunt more than one body without budging from its place.

(S 15)

Here, Merleau-Ponty makes a number of telling points, always in the spirit of his immense loyalty to Husserl. First of all, he disallows Husserl's idealism with regard to man's phenomenological powers—the pursuit of the apodictic: my thought “is indeed only the other side of my times.” Secondly, the cognitive powers I exercise function only insofar as each of us, others, and the things of the world belong together as distinct precipitated presences within one inclusive Nature: they are all, then, part of “the world's flesh,” “flesh of my flesh.” Thirdly, all our discursive distinctions function as before, though perhaps with even a heightened sensibility: “I do not live their life [the life of others].” And fourthly (and most important), I need not have thought of them, these “others,” or “recognized” them, in order that they should “exist,” they are already as much present “in the world's flesh” as I am, and I myself cannot “exist” or function as I do, except for their influencing presence: they are “my twins,” “flesh of my flesh,” the very power of the encompassing world to draw from me uniquely what appears most intimately my own.

III

It remains true enough, however, that Merleau-Ponty does not quite reach the completion of his vision before The Visible and the Invisible; and there, it is not yet fully or felicitously fashioned. The question still nags: What, finally, is gained and lost by that late conception? The details are not our concern, only the right approach to the (second) conception already noted.

In Signs, one may say, Merleau-Ponty “places” himself between Heidegger and Sartre (and in that way “recovers” Husserl). The early version of the vision he tests there succeeds in avoiding Heidegger's bankrupt noumenalism, on the one hand, though it experiments with Heidegger's daring, and repudiates Sartre's disastrous insistence on the total absence of structure in subjectivity, on the other, though it introduces its own bottomless abyss. “The flesh of the world” ensures the co-presence of all articulable things at any moment in which the “I,” any “I,” is present, does function in the way it does, inquires, understands, produces all the changes it effects in things and others: “things are said and are thought by a Speech and by a Thought which we do not have but which has us” (S 19).

This is not the same philosophical act as Heidegger's abandonment of Dasein, in the “Letter on Humanism,” or the Kehre by which pure structureless noumenal Being “speaks” in its own “language” to certain gifted human mediums. Merleau-Ponty means here to assign thought and speech—as it determinately obtains in our perceived world—to the entire “body” of the “world's flesh.” The salient possibilities of an objective science and of intersubjective communication are assured in that pronouncement but not by means of it. (So it affords another clue to Madison's mistake.) It claims no privilege. Certain words are said, certain thoughts are thought. “Said by whom? Said to whom? [Merleau-Ponty asks]. Not by a mind to a mind, but by a being who has body and language to a being who has body and language, each drawing the other by invisible threads like those who hold the marionettes—making the other speak, think, and become what he is but never would have been by himself” (S 19).

Here, the first theme is being welded to the second, so that it is itself transformed. But not quite fully enough. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty replaces Sartre's deliberate ontological evacuation of the self's structure (its nonbeing) with a profoundly historicized structure—that, once again, invokes the world's flesh: “As a matter of principle,” says Merleau-Ponty, “fundamental thought is bottomless. It is, if you wish, an abyss. This means that it is never with itself, that we find it next to or setting out from things thought, that it is an opening out—the other invisible extremity of the axis which connects us to ideas and things. Must we say that this extremity is nothing? If it were ‘nothing,’ the difference between the nearby and the far (the contour lines of all existence) would be effaced before it. Dimensionality and opening would no longer make any sense. The absolutely open would be applied completely to an unrestricted being … the present […] would no longer mean anything” (S 21). (The lesson is indistinguishable from that of one of the Working Notes that belong to the text of The Visible and the Invisible (VI 237).

All the chiasmic replacements of the standard dualisms of philosophy—that Husserl should have effected but did not—are, finally, caught up in the world's “unicity”: in the sense of the two conceptual lessons Merleau-Ponty promotes. This is what he means, finally, by the “historicity of truth” that he finds animating both Husserl and Marx (VI 166)—the counterpart of the historicity of man himself [C]. Even that has its own duality; for, it is the artifactual nature of truth that accounts for the extravagance of Descartes's “infinite horizon of science” as well as of phenomenology and Marxism; and it is the source of our own understanding of truth's nature that purges us of the plausible disorders of the other.

You will have noticed that our specimen [B] was the only one drawn from The Visible and the Invisible: it was, plainly, more difficult than the others. What Merleau-Ponty is getting at there, what he is heroically testing, may seem to involve the rejection of any philosophically serious conception of truth (the postmodernist's maneuver once again). But that would be a mistake to encourage. Nor can Merleau-Ponty be said to have been theorizing about the symbiosis of subject and object that “precedes” their standard opposition in Western philosophy. He was experimenting rather with the conceptual fruitfulness of attributing to “subjects” what in our discursive practice is normally attributed to “objects,” and vice versa, as a consequence of treating the whole of the world as genuinely one, indivisibly such, but not for that reason undifferentiated. Thus:

Define the mind as the other side of the body.

(VI 259)

like the chiasm of the eyes, the [chiasm] is also what makes us belong to the same world—a world which is not projective, but forms its unity across incompossibilities such as that of my world and the world of the other.

(VI 215)

my body is made of the same flesh as the world (it is a perceived), and moreover … this flesh of my body is shared by the world, the world reflects it, encroaches upon it and it encroaches upon the world (the felt at the same time the culmination of subjectivity and the culmination of materiality.

(VI 245)

The trick is not to test the mere propositional truth of all these utterances one by one. It is rather to allow oneself to entertain them as hints of the infinitely open possibilities of alternative conceptual idioms that may prove fruitful. What Merleau-Ponty is doing, ultimately, is introducing us to a kind of fluency we could familiarize ourselves with—that affords the great initial benefit of eliminating the dualisms that have generated all the puzzles of philosophy, and that, in addition, demonstrates just how easy it is to imagine disengaging our thought from the formal tyranny of the idiom the old dualisms subtend. He captures all this by improvising a master vision of the “world's flesh,” an “ontology” that lies beyond both what we can say and what can be spoken but not said. It is meant to enable us to approach the creative source of whatever—variably, piecemeal, horizontally, contingently and historically, and generally in a regimented way—we finally systematize in thought and language. This is perhaps the meaning of the full passage in which [B] appears:

It is not we who perceive, it is the thing that perceives itself yonder—it is not we who speak, it is truth that speaks itself at the depths of speech—becoming-nature of man which is the becoming-man of nature—The world is a field, and as such is always open.

(VI 185)

There you have the final chiasm. You may object to such a philosophy. But it is neither modernist not postmodernist. It is an ontology that sets a limit to both.

Notes

1. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); and Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” New German Critique, XXII (1981).

2. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, pp. xxiii-xxiv.

3. Of course, Lyotard has Habermas specifically in mind in formulating his distinction between the modern and the postmodern: particularly, Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1971).

4. See Richard Rorty, “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity,” in Richard J. Bernstein (ed.), Habermas and Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985).

5. The following provides a fair sample of the prominent uses of “postmodern” outside of philosophy: Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn; Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987); Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987); Charles Newman, The Post-modern Aura: The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1985); Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernists Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985); Charles Jencks (ed.), The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 4th ed. rev. and enl. (New York: Rizzolie, 1984); Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988).

6. G. B. Madison, The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity: Figures and Themes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), Ch. 4, particularly pp. 61-62, 71-73.

7. Madison, The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity, p. 71.

8. Madison, The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity, pp. 71-72.

9. See Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1975).

10. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 17-18.

11. Cf. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, the rest of p. 18; also, pp. 69, 186, for a brief amplification of Husserl's sense of his own undertaking.

12. Madison, The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity, p. 73.

13. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. George Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).