SOURCE: Coyne, Margaret Urban. “Merleau-Ponty on Language: An Interrupted Journey toward a Phenomenology of Speaking.” International Philosophical Quarterly 20, no. 3 (September 1980): 307-26.

[In the following essay, Coyne discusses Merleau-Ponty's attempts to create a “gestural” theory of linguistics.]

At Merleau-Ponty's untimely death in 1961, his published works reflected a growing preoccupation with language and meaning as a central problem of philosophy. Indeed, his ambitious attempt to recapture the peculiar significance of the act of speech and the status of language as a unique cultural instrument seems to become the main focus of his larger project, the reconstruction of western philosophical thought on a truly phenomenological foundation. Perhaps it is no exaggeration to say that the problem of the ground and power of language had eventually become coincident for him with the problem of philosophy itself; for in the final and posthumously published work, The Visible and the Invisible, we find the tangled and unanswered question:

… whether philosophy as the reconquest of brute or wild being can be accomplished by the resources of the eloquent language, or whether it would not be necessary for philosophy to use language in a way that takes from it its power of immediate or direct signification in order to equal it with what it wishes all the same to say.¹

In a century dominated by linguistic philosophies and philosophies of language, the emphasis is not surprising. But in just such a period it is all the more disappointing that Merleau-Ponty's suggestive work on the focal question of language seems to remain unknown except to specialists in phenomenology. Difficulty of style is surely insufficient explanation. Many who are not phenomenologists are aware (however dimly) of Heidegger's later, forbiddingly obscure work on language. And the work of Wittgenstein, early and late, remains unvisited by no one who is seriously interested in contemporary philosophy of language, as vexing and idiosyncratic as that author's style can be. My own view is that Merleau-Ponty's writings on language attempt to generate perspectives and open avenues of inquiry in the philosophical investigation of language for which the time has only recently come. The hegemony of syntax and semantics (as the studies of the internal formal structure of language, and of the words-world relations, respectively) in the philosophy of language has delayed a full flowering of pragmatics: the orientation toward speech as an individual act or performance in a concrete context, and toward the speaker-audience relation.² Further, a general (but often covert) bias towards solipsistic mentalism in the theory of meaning has conspired against the emergence of viewpoints that presume intersubjectivity and the shared world as background.³

It is not my purpose, however, to defend these claims about the recent state of the art. Rather, I propose to rejoin and examine Merleau-Ponty's attempt at founding a “gestural” theory of linguistic expression, and to urge, in conclusion, a re-appreciation of the validity and vitality of some of its principal guiding themes. I shall suggest that several directions signalled (although not adequately developed) in Merleau-Ponty's work on language are just now coming to prominence, in necessarily more rigorous forms, as major themes in current theoretical work on language.

I. SPEECH AS ACT AND EVENT

It is in Chapter 6, Part One, of The Phenomenology of Perception⁴ that Merleau-Ponty begins to develop the richly suggestive but always naggingly elusive philosophy of speech to which he will return again and again, with growing urgency, throughout later essays. I propose here a brief and highly synthetic exposition of the phenomenology of lived speech initiated in The Phenomenology of Perception, and further deepened and embellished in remarks, both central and parenthetical, in a number of later essays.⁵ Perhaps it is misleading to speak of an “exposition.” The term “critical interpretation” is more to the point. Merleau-Ponty is indeed “the philosopher of ambiguity” and there is no more convincing justification of his claim to that title than his excursions into philosophy of language. One might say that, rather than a perspicuous theoretical presentation, Merleau-Ponty offers us, in the way of a philosophy of speech, something unfinished and something puzzling, even slightly cryptic. This must be seen as an essential rather than circumstantial fact. For as we will see, genuine speech (of which true philosophizing is an instance) is, for Merleau-Ponty, not in the nature of an equation, in which stable, known quantities make possible the discovery of an unknown. Instead, only in sensing a direction, anticipating a solution, do we begin to see the firm contours and the convergence of the elements provided. We are offered a puzzle, the pieces of which are not finely honed in advance. It is this peculiar quality of Merleau-Ponty's reflections on language that makes them interesting and inviting. Whether they are satisfactory or true remains to be seen, but that these reflections are consummately faithful to the principles they attempt to establish is, I think, quite clear.

In the opening paragraph of “The Body as Expression, and Speech” in The Phenomenology of Perception (p. 174), Merleau-Ponty is refreshingly direct in the announcement of his intention, “to describe the phenomenon of speech and the specific act of meaning.” His words are well chosen: it is upon speech as a phenomenon (occurrence, event), and meaning as an act (accomplishment, performance) that he will place his emphasis. In so doing he implicitly assumes what he will later (PL [“On the Phenomenology of Language”], p. 85) specifically identify as the phenomenological point of view, that of “the speaking subject who makes use of his language as a means of communicating with a living community.” The objective or scientific viewpoint which, by contrast, directs itself to language as the stock of acquired meanings already accomplished by past speech acts, misses, he suggests, the central and important fact of the “fecundity of expression” (PL, p. 85), or, to put it another way, the originating act of linguistic meaning. This return to the phenomenon of speech as lived and as originating event, then, moves in two related directions. On the one hand, it proposes to identify speech as a truly “originating realm” (PP [The Phenomenology of Perception], p. 174) in which the speaker takes possession of a previously mute signification only by incarnating it in words. But such a perspective also leads to a renewed awareness of the immediacy, the close and encompassing presence of speech as a medium in which and through which we move without explicit consideration in our daily lives; a use of the body, at once as spontaneous and as heavily implicated in our total repertoire of roles and positions as any other. In taking as themes the originary nature of the verbal signification and the concrete facts of our use of language and the way in which we acquire it, Merleau-Ponty is reinstating the speaking subject slighted or ignored so frequently by philosophical and classical psychological accounts of language.

II. CRITIQUE OF EMPIRICISM AND INTELLECTUALISM

Merleau-Ponty's attack upon what he feels are the existing alternatives in philosophy of language is ambitious. Among the theses he intends to counter are these: that speech is a structure of psychic or physical elements or facts causally related; that speech is the essentially external motor accompaniment of a self-contained intellectual operation; that genuine significations exist alongside speech or in its absence. In The Phenomenology of Perception, however, Merleau-Ponty identifies his opponents more simply as the two great and mutually hostile camps of empiricists and intellectualists. As usual, Merleau-Ponty's method of attack is to expose the shallowness of a seemingly deep antinomy by his characteristic application of something like what another writer has nicknamed “Ramsey's Maxim”:

In such cases [apparently antithetical positions neither of which is satisfactory] it is a heuristic maxim that the truth lies not in one of the two disputed views but in some third possibility which has not yet been thought of, which we can only discover by rejecting something assumed as obvious by both the disputants.⁶

In the case at hand, what is it that is “assumed as obvious” by both of the contending parties?

For the empiricist (according to Merleau-Ponty, PP, pp. 174-5), speech is not a genuine action, for there is no speaking subject in any meaningful sense. Instead, there is some depersonalized phenomenon called “speech” which consists of traces left (in a psyche or nervous system) by words heard or seen, traces which can be reactivated by the presence of an appropriate stimulus and/or associations. The word becomes just one more item in the causal network; the “meaning” is reduced to some psycho-physical “verbal image” or to an “appropriate response.” The word does not bear a meaning, it functions as a psychological or physical lever. Even the intellectualist (PP, pp. 175-6) is willing to relegate a certain type of speech to the category of third-person processes—that type of speech that might be called “concrete language,” the ability to use words in affectively charged contexts related to specific purposes. It is for another case, that of “distinctively human” speech or intentional language that the intellectualist reserves his favored explanation. “Disinterested denomination” (what might be called elsewhere a genuinely cognitive use of language) requires an intellectual operation—categorial thought—as its foundation. Again, meaning lies not in and with the word but, as it were, behind the word, in the thought. The word becomes a merely external sign for (what is of real importance) an intellectual operation the presence of which it alerts us to. Merleau-Ponty's critique and rebuttal can now gain hold by applying itself to the fundamental kinship and shared assumption of the seemingly unreconcilable positions of “empiricism” and “intellectualism”: that the word has no meaning. The intellectualist renders meaning external to and independent of the word; the empiricist finds neither place nor need for meaning in the nexus of stimuli and responses.⁷

To this he will respond, with initially deceptive simplicity, that the word has meaning. His rejoinder is not in the form of an argument, but of an attempt to recall, faithfully and lucidly, the actual facts of the act of speaking. Rather than anything new or unusual, he exhorts us to remember to pay attention to something very familiar—what it is like to express ourselves verbally. He reminds us of the way that thought seems to tend toward or seek out its verbal expression, that crystallization into speech is the sole way we can possibly lay hold of thought. The usual theoretical accounts, particularly the intellectualist ones, would have us believe in sequential or parallel processes—meaning/expression, recognition/denomination, thinking/saying, stimulus/response—rather than recognizing a really indivisible movement in which the meant, “a precise uneasiness” (Int [Introduction to Signs], p. 19), irrupts into the said. Speech cannot presuppose thought, for speech is the very thing which accomplishes thought. To speak of thought and language as of two distinct, positive orders is to speak “thoughtlessly.” The deficiency of parallelism is that it “provides itself with correspondences between the two orders and conceals the operations which produced these correspondences by encroachment to begin with” (Int, p. 18). Parallelism mistakes the product for the source. Parallelism is as inadequate to understanding operative speech as representational theories are to an understanding of physical mobility; we make use of words in speaking as we find our arms and legs in moving. By the same token, conversation is not the mutual action at a distance of two self-enclosed subjects operating through a third medium distinct from both. The process of communication is not one of coding and decoding, with meaning residing in two discrete subjects on either side of a great divide which is the word as visual or acoustical event. As the words themselves are laden with meaning, we take up someone else's thought in and through his speech. The act of communication is itself a sort of encroachment by one embodied and speaking being upon another, “making the other speak, think, and become what he never would have been by himself” (Int, p. 19). The yet unthematized signification erupts from within one field of personal existence into the word and through the word irrupts into someone else's world. Yet, as we will see, the word does not bear a meaning as a messenger bears a letter. To resort to an odd but appropriate figure, meaning is a systematic contagion in the interpersonal intentional field. But these are the most general and bold of descriptive outlines. The more specific development of verbal expression as gesture, employing the body as an analogue and prototype, is yet to come.

III. ORIGINARY VS. SECOND-ORDER SPEECH

Before proceeding, however, it is necessary to note an important dichotomy utilized and accepted throughout Merleau-Ponty's writings on linguistic expression. Oddly enough, the introduction of this ponderous distinction is first heralded rather inauspiciously in two footnotes to “The Body as Expression, and Speech” (PP, p. 178, note 1; p. 179, note 1). In this relatively parenthetical way, Merleau-Ponty introduces a strikingly Heideggerian proviso. The theory of speech being developed is directed at a singular and supposedly primitive realm of discourse: authentic, as opposed to what Merleau-Ponty calls “second-order,” expression. The latter (also called “empirical”), which makes up the general run of daily language use, is the “opportune recollection of a pre-established sign” (IL [“Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence”] p. 44). In this sense, it is “speech about speech” (PP, p. 178, note 1). The all important former category (alternately referred to as “literary,” “productive,” “operative” or “creative” speech) finds its most dramatic instances in the speech of the child, the lover, the poet or philosopher. It is most adequately defined in The Phenomenology of Perception:

Anterior to conventional means of expression, which reveal my thoughts to others only because already, for both myself and them, meanings are provided for each sign, and which in this sense does not give rise to communication at all, we must recognize a primary process of signification, in which the thing expressed does not exist apart from the expression, and in which the signs themselves induce their significance externally.

(p. 166)

Merleau-Ponty, not uncharacteristically, overspeaks himself here in denying that discourse the meaning of which is antecedently well-defined and fixed by convention is communication at all. In such cases, which are indeed the usual ones, something is imparted and understood. What is crucial in this passage is the insistence on a “primary process of signification” that will ground the original possibility of conventionally determined language use, as well as the ever-present possibility of semantic innovation. Merleau-Ponty's address to the problem of “the origin” will be examined later in some detail. For the present, we note that that empirical use of language is founded upon its creative use. Further, only operative or authentic speech has the previously discussed density that does not allow a real separation of thought and language.

The status of this creative/empirical distinction is a bit puzzling, and even suspicious. The descriptions of “authentic” speech are identical with Merleau-Ponty's description of the phenomenon of speech itself. In a later essay (IL, p. 44) he directly states that “speech in the sense of empirical language … is not speech in respect to authentic language.” Is Merleau-Ponty not open to accusations of blatant circularity, or is he at least guilty of surreptitiously introducing an evaluative judgment into a supposedly descriptive account? These allegations are tempting, but not, I think, warranted. The distinction between two radically different types of expression emerges as the initial outcome of a faithful return to the speaking subject; it is proffered not as a requirement of the descriptive analysis, but as the result of it. We do not assume that speech is an originary power; we discover it. And it is this discovery that begins to explain to us the importance of the fact that man speaks, and to render intelligible the basis of our esteem for certain pre-eminent types of human communication, such as literature and philosophy. For the same reason, the distinction itself does not represent an evaluative or ethical claim, although it could perhaps be used as a partial foundation for some evaluative canon, aesthetic or otherwise.

IV. SPEECH AS GESTURE

In his critiques of intellectualist and representational theories of speech Merleau-Ponty's antipathy to conceiving of the speaking subject as a disembodied consciousness is apparent. It is not surprising that his own phenomenology of speech takes root in the conception of the human speaker as a body, that speaking is identified as a bodily activity, and hence that speaking will be analagous to other uses of the body in certain fundamental ways. The body in general is the best analogue for the speaking body. As Merleau-Ponty says, speech is “an eminent case of these ‘ways of behaving’ which reverse my ordinary relationship to objects and give certain ones of them the value of subjects” (PL, p. 94). This location of speech alongside other behavior is the initial move in articulating the theory of speech as a gesture.

We are to look at speech in the context of action, speech as it is used, and as it is acquired. Merleau-Ponty's remarks in “The Child's Relations with Others” are helpful here. The acquisition of language takes place not by an intellectual operation, but by a sort of “habituation, a use of language as a tool or instrument” (CR [“The Child's Relations with Others”], p. 99). Assimilation of the language system is comparable to the acquisition of any habit; it involves learning a structure of conduct, a way of being-in-the-world and being-towards myself and others. And again, “To learn to speak is to learn to play a series of roles, to assume a series of conducts or linguistic gestures” (CR, p. 109). Of the word once learned, I retain its style of form and sound as a possible use of my body, a “motor essence” (PP, p. 181). The word, as it were, sinks into the background, but remains in my repertoire of potential bodily projection into the world. This thoroughgoing habituation thus renders possible the spontaneity we experience in speaking. A language learned is in relation to my power to speak, as my limbs are to my power to move: never explicitly thematized or represented, but always immediately ready at hand for my use.⁸ But describing the situation in terms of “use” is cumbrous and actually somewhat misleading. I no more “use” my language than I “use” my body, as if I were a person who manipulated and directed my physical mass, all the while remaining distinct from it (the dangerous metaphor of the mind as the captain of a ship which is the body). “It would seem that in order to have something signified before us … we must stop picturing its code or even its message to ourselves, and make ourselves sheer operators of the spoken word” (Int, p. 18). We find adequate testimony to this fact in our humblest everyday experience. To concentrate on the words we use rather than on what we wish to say is to stutter and falter in speaking. This is a part of the significance of Merleau-Ponty's unsettling statement that we do not have speech—speech has us (Int, p. 19).

Understanding speech as a spontaneous use of the body and recognizing the descriptive inadequacy of all thought/language parallelisms is only the initial step in Merleau-Ponty's theory of speech. It provides a corrected perspective on the general way in which the subject functions in his linguistic activities. What is now needed is an account of how the act of speaking, the subject's appropriation of the linguistic instruments, is able to capture and convey a sense or meaning. To answer this question about the power of speech, we look to the suggested analogue, the power of gesture. “Gesture” is here understood in its broadest sense, which includes both physical movements, signals and pantomimes which are essentially communicative, (e.g., pointing, winking, making a face), and less pointed but nevertheless clearly purposive behaviors (e.g., heading for the door, going for one's wallet, striding confidently or skulking along).⁹ Understanding how non-linguistic gestures bear their meanings is, Merleau-Ponty admits, a very difficult proposition. To understand how it is that gestures are understood requires at the limit nothing less than a rehabilitation of the total experience of the other. But this much is clear: a gesture is not typically understood by a cognitive operation, its meaning is not typically intellectually deciphered. Instead, the gesture I witness “outlines an intentional object,” brings “certain perceptible bits of the world to my notice, inviting my concurrence” (PP, p. 185). The meaning of the gesture is, not alongside or behind it, but “intermingled with the structure of the world outlined by the gesture” (PP, p. 186). Rather than examining the gesture and decoding it, I seize upon the meaning which is embodied or expressed in the very movement or structure of the behavior itself. I experience a sort of blind recognition, in which the meaning takes me up as much as I take up the meaning. At this point, once again, Merleau-Ponty's penchant for hyperbole wants tempering. We might capture the point more carefully thus: while at some level of stylization and conventionalization, gestures may indeed be objects of a conscious process of “translation,” there must be a more fundamental layer of gestures (i.e., of behavior) for which interception of meaning is immediate, and the immediacy of which grounds the very possibility of more conventionalized communication.

What is the foundation of this semantic magnetism of the body? Unhappily, the solution is as intriguing and perplexing as the question. The power of human expression is founded in a thorough but not easily explainable reciprocity among all embodied beings. In seizing the meaning of a gesture it is “as if the other person's intention inhabited my body and mine his” (PP, p. 185). Communication is always between speaking subjects with certain styles of being, and with particular “worlds” at which their aims are directed (PP, p. 183). To understand the other is to, in effect, “synchronize” my existence with his, being drawn into the other's world and likewise drawing him into my own, as if “by invisible threads.” Clearly, Merleau-Ponty is here noting what needs to be explained, without explaining it. Still, the move here in programming the order of explanation is significant. So used are we to viewing linguistic communication as a means of coordinating our thought and behavior that we are all too apt not to see that the possibility of this deliberate collaboration is ultimately and continuously underlain by an unconstructed intuitive capacity for “reading” and “following” others' mute behavior. Here again we uncover the insistence on a primary process of signification, from which the success of empirical or second-order expression is derivative: “But conventions are a late form of relationship between men; they presuppose an earlier means of communication, and language must be put back into this current of intercourse” (PP, p. 187). Further, as will be elaborated later, this originary process is a continual possibility, even within the context of a fully established, conventional system of symbols, i.e., a language.

In The Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty emphatically declares that “The spoken word is a genuine gesture, and it contains its meaning in the same way as the gesture contains its” (p. 183). And again, the “The spoken word is a gesture, its meaning, a world” (p. 184). In later writings, however,¹⁰ this position is slightly modified, as Merleau-Ponty gives fuller recognition to the peculiar power and destiny of language, to allow for the abiding acquisition and reiterability of significations through sedimentation, to go beyond itself toward what it signifies. Because of these crucial differences, “mute” forms of expression (gesture, painting) are only analogous to, but not in the same class with language. Still, the analogy is appropriate and informative. Like the gesture, the word bears within itself, is infused with, its meaning; the meaning is not some categorical intellectual performance of a disembodied transcendental ego, a clearly distilled but wordless thought which is translated into an already existing and closed system of notation. Like a pattern of behavior or gesture, which discloses a world by endowing certain objects or persons with special significance, speech is the subject's taking up of a position in the world and brings about, for both the speakers and the hearers, a “modulation” of existence, a “structural co-ordination of experience” (PP, p. 193). “[Speech] tears out or tears apart meanings in the undivided whole of the nameable as our gestures do in that of the perceptible” (Int, p. 17).

The word “secretes” what we can now call a gestural meaning which is immanent in it, which can be “read” in the very texture of the linguistic gesture, which arises from the “I am able to” rather than the “I think” (PP, pp. 88-9). It is from this gestural meaning that we finally abstract and distill the purified conceptual meanings which we usually think of when we think about the meanings of words. In our usual description of linguistic meaning we tend to view thought and speech as if frozen. Expression viewed as a fait accompli can only reveal meanings already effected and established, the kind that the lexicon offers. In viewing speech as a phenomenon, an event in the present and as it occurs, we see what is prior to the fixed and stable definitions of the lexicon—that original restructuring of a world that constitutes action in general, and speech, in particular. The discovery of a gestural meaning sets to rest the paralyzing notions that speech is a sign, an envelope, or a handy notation for the inscription of thoughts previously and independently constituted. Such theories can now be seen as not so much false, but premature. They represent a failure to clear the way back to speech as original, to the genesis of a signification which cannot become present in the phenomenal world except through and in the word. (“The body expresses existence … in the sense in which a word expresses thought.”) (PP, p. 166). Lastly, it is important to note the ontological and epistemological implications of the theory of speech as gesture. We have noted that understanding a speech act is not a cognitive translation, but an insinuation of myself into the world constituted or outlined by the speech, a “synchronizing” of my existence with that of the speaker. But language discloses not only to the listeners, but to the speaker as well. The harnessing of a signification in language endows both with “a new sense organ” (PP, p. 182), and opens for both new fields of experience. Thus “my spoken words surprise me myself and teach me my thought” (PL, p. 87).

V. SPEECH AS FIGURE ON A GROUND

Merleau-Ponty himself proposes two possible objections to the above-summarized description of the relation between the linguistic gesture and its meaning (PP, p. 186). A scrutiny of these two problems and of what I believe to be Merleau-Ponty's responses to them will offer a schematic way of recapitulating and further developing the theory of speech as a gesture. The problems are the following.

(1) The gesture outlines or projects a relationship between a subject and the perceptible world, available to all appropriately placed witnesses. Hence the directness of the gesture toward the perceptible, that is public, sensible world allows the “intentional object” outlined by the gesture to be offered to the spectator at the same time as the gesture itself (PP, p. 186). The point of speech, however, is precisely to direct us toward what is not already there, given for its own account, as objects are for the perceiving; speech aims at bringing into the world a newly constituted sense. For Merleau-Ponty: “Speech is the surplus of our existence over natural being” (PP, p. 197). The problem: what, for speech, functions as the common background in terms of which it might be understood? What stands in relation to the act of speech as the perceptible world stands to the gesture?¹¹

2) The “immanence” of the meaning in the gesture, the concrete “embodiment” of the former in the latter seems somehow straightforward in a large number of cases of mute gesture. In emotional expressions, in particular, the community of meaning and gesture seems most pronounced. The very rhythm of a dejected posture is the dejection itself. In language, however, the word-sign appears to be only conventionally or accidentally related to its meaning. The word as acoustical event does not appear, in itself, to resonate with its significative import. The problem: doesn't speech grow pale by comparison with gesture? Isn't the relation between linguistic signifier and signified an external relation, unlike that between gesture and its meaning?

I would like to suggest that Merleau-Ponty's replies to these two questions reveal two moments in his theory of speech act as gesture, and I would like to describe these two mutually complementary and really indivisible moments by using twin metaphors. One moment I shall call the speech act as a figure on the ground of (already established) language. The second, the speech act as a figure on the ground of silence. The first moment answers to question (1), the second, to question (2).

In response to problem (1), the need for a commonly shared ground against which speech can emerge as directed and inherently meaningful, Merleau-Ponty offers the established cultural background of already constituted and hence publicly available meanings and structures of language as a solution. Authentic speech is “playing modulations on the keyboard of acquired meanings” (PP, p. 186), “an operation of language upon language which suddenly is thrown out of focus towards its meaning,” (IL, p. 44), a “coherent deformation” of available significations (PL, p. 91) which makes the available instruments say what they have never said.

… it is a matter of realizing a certain arrangement of already signifying instruments or already speaking significations (morphological, syntactical, and lexical instruments, literary genres, types of narrative, modes of presenting events, etc.) which arouses in the hearer the presentiment of a new and different signification and which inversely, (in the speaker or writer) manages to anchor this original signification in the already available ones.

(PL, p. 90)

Thus, linguistic conventions, ranging from the phonological, syntactical and semantical constraints constitutive of the language as a system, to those defining illocutionary acts, literary forms, and conversational appropriateness, form a shared backcloth for the linguistic gesture analogous to the field of perception for the non-linguistic one. The collectivity of conventions of all types defines, as it were, the logical space of averagely intelligible discourse, providing the structure upon which deformations can be wrought. When familiar meanings or established structural or stylistic components “link up in accordance with an unknown law” (PP, p. 183), a novel sense is born. This crystallization is the simultaneous constitution of speech and thought, or, to speak more carefully, of thought in speech. Authentic, creative speech, then, requires the established linguistic system as its necessary condition.

The second moment, speech as a figure on the ground of silence, speaks to problem (2), the question of whether the relation between word and meaning is not merely conventional. This second problem can now be seen to grow out of the solution to the first. Given that the creative use of speech is founded upon an already established system of significations, how did these available structures themselves come to be constituted? Here Merleau-Ponty begins to come to terms with what he describes as the “always insistent problem” of the origin of language (PP, p. 186).

We have already noted that the institutionalization of language is both a necessary condition for the authentic act of speech and viciously deceptive when we attempt to penetrate that creative act. The appearance of language as a ready-made calculus with fixed points of reference concealed from us precisely what we needed to re-discover in order to see speech as an originating gesture. We must find “beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence …” and “describe the action which breaks the silence” (PP, p. 184). So long as we are mesmerized by the chatter, the second-order expression, the “speech about speech,” the “meanings” we are bound to think of are the sedimented, conceptual meanings of the lexicon. Content with this, and avoiding a more radical reflection on the genesis of meaning, the relation between word and meaning cannot appear as anything but external or conventional.

But for Merleau-Ponty, these conceptual meanings (and all the structures of a particular language) have a history; and a history has beginnings. The beginnings lie, I suggest, in those “primary processes of signification” invoked previously, when I interpreted one strand of Merleau-Ponty's view as insisting on the spontaneous eloquence of the living body as the non-conventional ground of the development of conventional meanings (a sui generis power of expression which invokes immediate comprehension). The “action which breaks the silence” is, originally, the mute but spontaneously expressive comportment of the living body, the unconstructed capacity to evoke interception of intention, and hence, to signify. Out of this broad capacity, and the (undeniably) narrow repertoire of intuitively decipherable gestures, grows, by successive internal articulation, a conventionalized system which is a language. The significance of mute gestures, however, is neither arbitrary nor conventional.

But the theme of the gestural (i.e., communicative) capacity of the living body works on two planes: the eloquence of mute behavior is both the actual primitive source and original kind of communication, and an analogue for understanding the continuous possibility of originary linguistic expression, whose mode of meaning is similarly neither arbitrary nor conventional. To complete the account we need to see the notion of silence unfolded on its second plane: not as the prehistory of speech, but as its constant concomitant.

VI. SILENCE AND SEDIMENTATION

The account of speech as gesture outlined thus far is substantially present in “The Body as Expression, and Speech,” although not precisely in the order and form in which I have chosen to present it. The dual perspective on speech, as it emerges at once upon the backgrounds of constituted language and of silence, also appears in this earliest of Merleau-Ponty's attempts to effect a truly radical description of the speech event. But the interacting poles which we might now call “silence” and “sedimentation” are outlined rather dimly. I have called these two aspects of Merleau-Ponty's descriptive enterprise “moments,” thus suggesting their mutual necessitation within the whole. We need now to elucidate these complementary concepts more adequately, to envision more fully that tension which binds them. For this task, the later essays provide, short of an answer, a sense of direction.

The theme of silence is perhaps the most arresting feature of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of speech. In those later essays which deal with speech and language, his increasingly frequent resort to the idea of silence is evidence of his own continuous and growing fascination with the fertility of a theme which appears, to the casual glance, altogether negative and barren. However, his initial flirtation with the concept in “The Body as Expression, and Speech” lacks the depth and coherence of later reflections. For the “insistent problem” of the origin of speech, which he there proposed to speak to, is ambiguous; and this ambiguity threatens any simple interpretation of silence, which is that origin or, to return to our metaphor, the ground upon which the act of speech is discernible as a figure. The “origin” of speech could refer to, among other things, the historical/factual circumstances that explain its occurrence, or the co-present necessary conditions separate from which the authentic speech act is unthinkable. In “The Body as Expression, and Speech” Merleau-Ponty is indeed addressing both problems simultaneously. He asks both: (1) how is it that we can say something? and (2) how is it that we can say something new? Or alternately: (1) how can language start? and (2) how can language grow? His single answer is the theory of speech as gesture. But the subtle internal structure of this answer, the way in which it unifies and responds to both questions at once, remains incomplete before the later essays where the notion of silence is further articulated.

With increasing clarity, in the later work, silence is not just the prehistory of speech. The silence which represents one pole of his philosophy of language is not a stillness that knows nothing of significant expression, but a sort of vacuum which teeters on the moment of an imminent plenitude; it is the empty which awaits saturation, not just a void, but a void-with-respect-to … ; not a non-existence pure and simple, but a privation. The silence to which Merleau-Ponty wants to draw attention is alive—an absence whose presence weighs almost tangibly upon us who can speak, which at once generates, propels, and magnetizes discourse. “Signification arouses speech as the world arouses my body, by a mute presence which awakens my intentions without deploying itself before them” (PL, p. 89). It is signification, or meaning, itself. Merleau-Ponty refers to silence in many ways: as “speech before it is spoken,” a “mute presence,” “a lack asking to be made good,” “a determinate gap.” This last description is perhaps the clearest. Silence is a “gap,” something felt to be missing, what could or should be expressed or said. And yet this is a quite determinate emptiness, its boundaries described, however sketchily, by all that has already been expressed or said, all signification that has previously found a certain visibility through gestural or linguistic embodiment. Silence, then, is the lurking signification that has not found its voice. We can also call it, with Merleau-Ponty, an “idea.” He welcomes the inevitable Kantian overtones; ideas are “the poles of a certain number of convergent acts of expression which magnetize discourse without being in the strict sense given for their own account” (PL, p. 89). They are the “secret axes” of our spoken words, the “centers of our gravitation, this very definite void which the vault of language is built around” (Int, p. 20). Hence “knowing an idea” is not some sort of static or contemplative mental state nor a finished performance; it is the power to organize discourse in a coherent way.

This admittedly difficult, tensive conception of silence as it is dialectically paired with expression and speech bursts with implications in several directions. First, it gives substance to Merleau-Ponty's conviction that creative expression is always incomplete, and incapable of completion, a conviction that most of us probably share at least with respect to great works of literature, poetry, philosophy, or mythico-religious texts. For Merleau-Ponty, such masterpieces are the paradigm cases of vital, operative expression in presenting us with “matrices of ideas,” “symbols whose meaning we never stop developing” (IL, p. 77). The hallmark of authentic speech is that, rather than representing an accomplishment, it inaugurates a continuing dialogue. Second, Merleau-Ponty's description of meaning in this privative yet positive way makes us sympathetic to the elusiveness of explanations of linguistic meaning which forswear both the moribund route of lexical definition and the sterility of behavioristic schemas. It also infuses with much-needed life rather bloodless idealistic accounts, while preserving the essential correctness of their direction. Thirdly, the delineation of meaning-in-birth against the necessary background of meanings-accomplished foreshadows another of Merleau-Ponty's cherished insights about the nature of language, and one that I will touch upon shortly. It is that speech proceeds and gains its way through the constant operation of differences, that elements of the speech apparatus have a value which is thrown into relief only through their opposability to other values. Without the background of silence which surrounds speech, it would say nothing (IL, p. 46).

Lastly, with Merleau-Ponty's peculiar construal of silence somewhat understood, we can now see the tension which binds the afore-mentioned two moments of his discussion of speech together. The idea of the significative intention as a determinate gap, a pressing silence, allows us to see why speech as a figure on the ground of silence and speech as a figure on the ground of established language are mutually necessitated moments, rather than facts in chronological sequence. Silence in this sense cannot exist before there are determinate possibilities of expression, but is an incessant condition once the possibility of expression is realized. But the possibility of expression resides already in the mute comportment of the living body. Still, the possibility of expression is enormously, incalculably enriched and focused with the advent and growth of language. So there is always silence; not only antecedent to language, but behind the already formed calculus of language, beneath the usual chatter, between the words of the lexicon and all the structures of language; there is always the yet-unmeant, yet-unthought, and that is to say, the yet-unsaid. The “insistent problem” of the origin of language is no matter of discovering some obscure historical fact. It is the immense and ponderous task of understanding this one particular case of our always present and open-ended possibility of creating new meanings and conveying them, which Merleau-Ponty calls an “irrational power” (PP, p. 189). The genesis of language for man represents a new epoch in an infinite project that demands its own continuation, and nourishes itself along the way:

Each act of philosophical or literary expression contributes to fulfilling the vow to retrieve the world taken with the first appearance of a language, that is, with the first appearance of a finite system of signs which claimed to be capable in principle of winning by any sort of ruse any being which might present itself.

(PL, p. 95)

This last remark is significant, for in it Merleau-Ponty equates the appearance of language not with the appearance of some isolated linguistic gesture, but with the genesis of a system of signs. Armed with the conception of language as a systematic whole, and wielding in imaginative (if not quite accurate) style the Saussurian idea of the diacritical meaning of signs, he finds reinforcement for his descriptive unravelling of the indirectness of linguistic meaning, and implications for the way in which linguistic gesticulation is understood in its shallows and in its depths. He interprets De Saussure's insight to mean that signs taken singly do not directly express a meaning, but rather mark a divergence of meaning between themselves and other signs. “The learned parts of a language have an immediate value as a whole, and progress is made less by addition and juxtaposition than by the internal articulation of a function which is in its own way already complete” (IL, p. 40). This presumably applies not only to the phonemes and morphemes of a given language, but to its syntactical structures, semantic components, and even its literary genres. At any level of language, a linguistic component is appreciated by our awareness, brute or articulated, of its essential difference from any and all of those others that might have taken its place, and hence to which it is opposable (and even, in a sense, from those to which it is not). If “we always have to do only with sign structures whose meaning, being nothing other than the way in which the signs behave toward one another and are distinguished from one another, cannot be set forth independently of them” (IL, p. 42), then the meaning of the ordinary speech act is always oblique or indirect, and a living, burgeoning meaning is never neatly isolable from its linguistic incarnation. Thus, to understand what is said, we have to “lend ourselves to its life, to its movement of differentiation and articulation” (IL, p. 42), and to “feel the way in which [another expression] might have touched and shaken the chain of language in another manner” (IL, p. 46). Such attunement to the melody of discourse, to the sum of its internal differences, is at work as much in our rather unreflective but adequate grasp of the common run of conversation, as when we weigh, test, and savor, word by word, phrase by phrase—even syllable by syllable—the highly honed pronouncements of the philosopher or poet. Even as we glide along on the “topcoat of meaning” which sticks to every word, it is the sensed difference amid the homogeneity that guides our attention in the appropriate direction, as in music we feel the difference between a major scale and a minor one in the differences of tonal distance between the ascending degrees.

Merleau-Ponty's elucidation of speech as a gesture, analogous to other expressive uses of the body is a richly profitable one. But the assimilation of the act of speech to the broader category of bodily performances has its limits. The fact is that speech is peculiar among expressive performances, and to this peculiarity it owes its unmatched power as well as its ever-present vicissitudes for those who speak and those who reflect upon the act of speaking. Speech once effected can become fixed and sedimented, and thus reiterable; significations once harnessed verbally acquire a substantiality of their own, they become the acquisitions of a culture, a public. This acquisition, in the form of a constituted system of vocabulary and syntax in turn, as we have seen, makes possible the ever-new, creative act of speaking by providing the familiar materials susceptible of a “coherent deformation.” The immense importance of this transformation, in which a process becomes an institution, is too obvious to require elaboration here. A common tongue unites—perhaps defines—a cultural community, insures reliable communication, enables historical awareness: it thus makes possible, in a sense, all that is distinctively human. The eventuality of sedimentation, however, has another side: it allows speech to “lose sight of itself as a contingent fact,” stultifying our attempts to penetrate its generative momentum, and nourishing the misleading “ideal of a thought without words” (PP, p. 190).

Language, in use by the authentic speaker, somewhat paradoxically renews and outstrips itself at the same time. Speech surges out toward what it signifies. It is “not content to sketch out directions, vectors, a ‘coherent deformation’ or a tacit meaning on the surface of the world” (IL, p. 81), but wants to lay claim to the things themselves. Yet the effort remains quixotic. For although language itself “becomes something like a universe, and it is capable of lodging things themselves in this universe,” it can do so only “after it has transformed them into their meaning” (IL, p. 43). And that is not, of course, exactly what it had intended. We want to understand reality, but what we grasp are meanings, and meanings are never entirely extricable from the intercourse of signs. This is, I think, the impact of Merleau-Ponty's initially startling contention that language is uncommunicative of anything other than itself (PP, p. 188).

VII. THE CONTINUING VITALITY OF MERLEAU-PONTY'S PERSPECTIVES

Merleau-Ponty was indeed moving on several fronts in the bold strokes of a phenomenology of speech just rejoined and explored. He sought a foundational understanding of the human expressive capacity that would subserve elaboration of such diverse problems as the abiding fecundity of literary, philosophical, and mythic texts; the inexhaustible lode of novel significations that await capture by the symbolizing resources of the embodied human consciousness; the continuity and reciprocal modification of linguistic and non-verbal behavior; the co-structuration of our world through a dialogue of bodies fated to communicate. The result is a colorful and tangled skein of hints, intuitions and suggestions. Still, three lines of emphasis are dominant, however programmatic and incomplete they may be: (1) the continuity of meaningful speech with the spontaneous gestural capacity of the body; (2) the fecundity of this capacity as a permanent analogue for the continuous possibility of originary speaking; (3) the power of speech in the ongoing mutual organization of ontology and community. I believe that this peculiar nexus of themes constitutes the uniqueness and originality of Merleau-Ponty's reflections on language, but that these themes have not been popular ones, especially in the contemporary analytic tradition that has devoted so much of its energies to the philosophy of language. Of late, however, two developments in theoretical work on language seem to me to reaffirm the vitality of those perspectives that Merleau-Ponty urged us to adopt.

The first concerns themes (1) and (2). Merleau-Ponty's writings on language are contemporaneous with the ascendancy of Wittgenstein's post-Tractarian views on the nature of language as a rule-governed activity embedded in and expressive of “forms of life,” and with the Austinian theory of speech acts. While these developments appear to be movements in the direction of subsuming theory of linguistic behavior under the broader theory of action, a consistent pre-occupation in most quarters with underscoring the rule- or convention-bound essence of linguistic communication renders mysterious the domain of authentic or originary speaking which Merleau-Ponty proposed to explore. Put simply, if a necessary condition of a linguistic communication is its conformity to an already shared structure of rules or conventions which alone enable us to succeed, wherein lies the power to create utterly novel domains of sense and understanding that in turn create further resources for expression? And how is it possible to install the requisite semantic conventions (on various levels) ab initio? We have seen Merleau-Ponty's address to this. If in the body itself does not abide an already subtle pre- and non-linguistic power to display intention and spontaneously evoke its interception by others, the eventual sedimentation of the shared structure that undergirds an instituted language system would seem inexplicable.¹² Further, would not this native, mute gestural power of the motile body as a meaning-bearing figure on the ground of shared perceptual reality then be ever our analogue and prototype for the immanent possibility of the “coherent deformation” of an established language system in pursuit of the never-yet-meant? Thus the given phonemic, morphemic, syntactic and semantic resources, would be, as it were, our “body”; the ways of thinking and expressing embedded in the given linguistic system and established repertoire of uses would be the “shared world” against which we move.

Significantly, some recent work in the Anglo-American tradition (i.e., not Merleau-Ponty's own) is moving in this direction (although not, of course, in the language of phenomenology). Influenced importantly by H. P. Grice's restoration of interception of speaker's intention as fundamental to the sort of meaning associated with linguistic utterance,¹³ contemporary analytic philosophers such as David Lewis and Jonathan Bennett have lately taken up for discussion, in their own ways, the business of “reading” behavior and synchronizing intentions as both possibly and necessarily prior to the kind of full-blown conventional behavior that speaking a language is. Lewis develops a theory of convention which shows that because convention need not presuppose language, the view that language behavior is conventional is not circular; but in doing so Lewis demands a highly articulated level of non-linguistic mutual receptivity to the suggestion and postulation of intentions.¹⁴ Bennett, incorporating Lewis's views, tries to show the power and viability of the approach he labels “meaning nominalism”: the view that singular (non/preconventional) instances of successful communication can and must be prior in the explanatory order to the phenomenon of language-using proper.¹⁵ In these efforts, the essential continuity of language with the primitive gestural capacity of the body is indeed being recognized and explored. Without being able to expand upon it here, I suggest that the acceptance of singularities of meaning as foundational for conventions of meanings is, in germ, the key to a further elucidation of Merleau-Ponty's “primary process of signification” and thus of ordinary discourse not only anterior, but posterior to the establishment of language.

The other important trend is one which richly confirms the suggestion that each uttering is gestural in its implicit attempt at co-structuration of the common world, at once a constellation of objects and a matrix of interacting subjects (theme [3]). While philosophers of all ideological stripes have been most concerned with syntax and semantics, there is arising a body of theory, largely in the hands of theoreticians and practitioners of psychotherapy, which is seizing a territory into which Merleau-Ponty invited us, but where professional philosophers have hardly trod. This new theoretical terrain is the pragmatics of communication, for which every uttering is an attempt at ordering, re-ordering, or confirming both a system of modelling the world, and a system of interpersonal relations in the world-as-modelled.¹⁶ The “invisible threads” invoked by Merleau-Ponty as a metaphor for the co-structuration of our ongoing experience of self-others-world are gaining visibility in a theory that draws powerfully across disciplinary lines to illuminate the structure of “interactional systems”: pairs or groups of communicants in the process (and oftimes, struggle) of defining the nature of their relationship. One axiom of this approach is that each interpersonal linguistic manoeuvre has not only the “content” aspect, which has been the main object of study for philosophers of language, (the “what is said” which is comprised of propositional content as well as illocutionary force), but a (or several) “relationship” aspect(s) which are “metacommunications” (of the general forms “This is how I see you,” “This is how I see you seeing me,” etc.). This is, to my view, yet another aspect of the experience of the speaking subject to which Merleau-Ponty alluded in speaking of interpersonal linguistic gestures as an (attempted) “synchronizing” of the existence of speaker and hearer, a “structural coordination” of experience.

Perhaps other examples could be adduced of developments in the study of human communication that seem confirming of Merleau-Ponty's idée-mère of speech as gesture, with its several distinct thematic components. Those I have mentioned seem particularly promising. They suggest that although Merleau-Ponty's foray into a true phenomenology of speaking was an interrupted journey, it was not, for all that, an unimportant one.

Notes

1. Trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 102-3.

2. That Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on the priority of the concrete speech act to language as a system is considered deviant with respect to prevailing trends in linguistics and philosophy is noted (although not approvingly) by James Edie in his Foreword to Merleau-Ponty's Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, trans. Hugh J. Silverman (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973), p. xxxii.

3. An interesting essay in this regard is Hilary Putnam's “The Meaning of ‘Meaning,’” in Mind, Language and Reality, Vol. 2 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975). Putnam persuasively alleges two specific philosophical tendencies as underpinning current and past views of meaning: “the tendency to treat cognition as a purely individual matter and the tendency to ignore the world, insofar as it consists of more than the individual's ‘observations’” (p. 271).

4. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), hereafter referred to in the text as PP.

5. The essays involved are: (a) “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” and (b) “On the Phenomenology of Language,” included in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1964), as well as (c) the Introduction to that collection; and (d) “The Child's Relations with Others,” included in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1964). Hereafter, selections (a)-(d) will be referred to in the text as IL, PL, Int, and CR, respectively.

6. Renford Bambrough quotes F. P. Ramsey's The Foundations of Mathematics (pp. 115-6) in “Universals and Family Resemblances,” in Wittgenstein, ed. George Pitcher (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1966), p. 198.

7. Lest Merleau-Ponty's criticism seem dated or irrelevant in the contemporary philosophical milieu, one need only recall that intellectualism thrives in the works of linguist Noam Chomsky and his philosophical allies, particularly Jerry Fodor and Jerrold Katz. See, for example, Chomsky, Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1968) or Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge: M. I. T. Press, 1970), especially Chapter 1. Or, J. Fodor, “The Appeal to Tacit Knowledge in Psychological Explanation,” in Journal of Philosophy, 65 (October 24, 1968). For the empiricist camp, certainly Charles Morris (Signs, Language and Behavior (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953)) and B. F. Skinner (Verbal Behavior (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957)) come to mind. But perhaps the most sophisticated and influential standard-bearer is W. V. O. Quine, whose major work in philosophy of language, Word and Object (New York: Wiley, 1960) bears a title suggestive of his career-long attack on the probity and usefulness of the very notion of meaning.

8. Readers familiar with the later Wittgenstein will note a remarkable similarity to Wittgenstein's claim that induction into a use of language involves initiation into a “form of life,” and that linguistic facility is ultimately founded on training, which accounts for the unreflected, spontaneous character of much of our language use.

9. Admittedly this covers a lot of ground, gestures both intentional and unintentional, conscious and unconscious, specifically declarative and vaguely suggestive. Yet I feel convinced that Merleau-Ponty wishes to keep the idea of “gesture” as inclusive and plastic as possible, in keeping with his tendency to assimilate various different types of human activity—mobile, verbal, sexual, etc.—to the single over-arching category of “being-in-the-world.” We must be able to see in every exercise of the human individual's potentiality for assertion a meaning, and thus, from the point of view of the observer, a display. Every stirring within a human life is an articulation of a unified, internally intelligible project that is the individual's existence.

10. Most notably “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.”

11. The way in which this question is framed seems to run counter to the broad sense that I have previously stipulated for the term ‘gesture’ (note 9). There I suggested that the ultimate elasticity of the meaning of ‘gesture’ was necessary for the strength of the proposed analogy, and consistent with Merleau-Ponty's more comprehensive projects. ‘Gesture’ was to apply equally to purposive movements directly centered upon objects, persons or states of affairs (e.g., heading for the door) and to less clearly defined ways of comporting one's self, where meaning must be identified less tangibly with a certain texture, rhythm, or “melody” of the behavior (e.g., striding confidently). The question as stated here now seems to limit ‘gesture’ to the former kind of case. I am not overly alarmed at this discrepancy. Merleau-Ponty uses the statement of these problems largely as a rhetorical device, a springboard for continued elaboration of his conception of gestural meaning. This is now I use them here. In addition, the apparent inconsistency throws into relief the way that the body's multiple powers of expression fall along a continuum from the very explicit to the highly allusive, from pointing, for instance, to painting. The linguistic gesture is in a class by itself, sharing certain characteristics of each.

12. There is an issue here of “innateness” hypotheses à la Chomsky: that there is a biologically given species-specific/human language-specific program which provides the essential structural constraints for the infinitely proliferating novelties of language. There are, however, good reasons to be suspicious of such claims. See, for example, Hilary Putnam's “The Innateness Hypothesis and Explanatory Models in Linguistics” and Nelson Goodman's “The Epistemological Argument” in John Searle (ed.), The Philosophy of Language (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971). See also, numerous rejoinders to Chomsky in Sidney Hook (ed.), Language and Philosophy (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1971), Part II.

13. H. P. Grice, “Meaning,” Philosophical Review, 66 (1957), 337-88; “Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning,” Foundations of Language, 4 (1968), 225-42; “Utterer's Meaning and Intentions” Philosophical Review, 78 (1969), 147-77.

14. David Lewis, Convention (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969).

15. Jonathan Bennett, Linguistic Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976).

16. A central text is P. Watzlawick, J. Beavin, and D. Jackson, Pragmatics of Human Communication (New York: Norton, 1967). Also, R. Bandler and J. Grinder, The Structure of Magic (Palo Alto, Cal.: Science and Behavior Books, 1975), and R. Bandler, J. Grinder, and V. Satir, Changing with Families (Palo Alto, Cal.: Science and Behavior Books, 1976).