SOURCE: Lanigan, Richard L. “Rhetorical Criticism: An Interpretation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 2, no. 1 (winter 1969): 61-71.

[In the following essay, Lanigan discusses Merleau-Ponty's influence on the study of rhetorical inquiry.]

Traditional methods of rhetorical criticism are being echoed in the contemporary analytic and descriptive techniques of critics who focus upon the structural and stylistic elements of discourse¹ or upon the “rhetorical situation.”² In either case, the causal paradigm for investigation and prediction is an account of “audience” attitude and demography. Thus, the functional critic approaches the communicative act as an empirical schema of effects primarily reflected in the “audience” with little concern for the creative impact of the speaker and his expression. The synthetic process of discourse often emphasizes a greater concern with the “subjective” and is consequently eschewed by the more empirically minded critic.

The “objective” preference in rhetorical criticism cited above utilizes a technique contrary to that of the existential, phenomenological approach. For example, Bemis and Phillips suggest that a critic might develop his method of inquiry remembering that “the theory must depend on a subjective frame of reference for its investigation although using the discoveries of objective inquiry.”³ In addition to this recommendation, Gregg specifically argues that the critic must seek the “images which the rhetor constructs through his discourse and the methods he uses to construct them.”⁴ In short, the existential phenomenologist asserts that criticism must proceed by examining the individual man speaking in a situation. By “speaking” is meant the intentional psychological and physical structuring of a unique, meaningful situation by the rhetor's act of communication with his auditors.⁵ The speaker creates the rhetorical act and thus calls the situation into being. This is to say, he constitutes a phenomenon wherein meaning is “bracketed” within a Gestalt.⁶ How this phenomenon occurs relates directly to the problematic method that a critic must employ in assessing the value elements in public address or interpersonal communication. This method is best enunciated through an interpretation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's theory of existential, phenomenological expression as the critic might use it.⁷

I

Merleau-Ponty first provides the critic with a method of inquiry and judgment that moves from authentic speech to empirical speech, thus examining the impact of the speaker in constituting the rhetorical situation. Such bracketing is a method opposed to mere description of the objective situation in which the speaker's presentation is viewed as coincidental to the impact of the meaning in the situation per se. Merleau-Ponty calls for a dialectical, reductive description of the speaker's decisive role in bringing meaning to the situation through the interaction of personalities (body-subjects) by means of their speaking in a situation. This subjective-objective confrontation of self and other selves is a process not susceptible of either a correlation or delineation of factors resulting in the rather sterile biographic-historic “right man in the right place” who thereby utters effective discourse. “The linguistic relations among men should help us understand the more general order of symbolic relations and of institutions, which assure the exchange not only of thoughts but of all types of values, the co-existence of men within a culture and, beyond it, within a single history.”⁸

A second standard for critical inquiry and judgment is the sedimentation of the signifying and the signified in the intentional speaking in a situation. The critic should view the speaker as expressing intentionality to create self-awareness for himself and others in a value situation that requires the risk of commitment. This critical approach is more than the descriptive re-creation of a problem-solution paradigm for others to consume. In short, intentional speech is not mere participation in the Weltanschaaung. Further, the rhetorical act of any speaker cannot be isolated by the critic from the life-world (Lebenswelt) which the rhetor and his auditors personally construct or affirm by their intercommunication.

Third, the critic must interrelate all the situational elements of the rhetorical act in order to confirm that his dialectical criticism is the “emergence of a positive assertion which is already there.”⁹ This is to say, the critic may add constructively to his and our understanding of a situation when his inquiry establishes the constituents of the expressive act that in fact gave that very act its meaning in the particular situation. The heuristic critic must himself “see” and judge the situation as the speaker and his auditors created it. Obviously, a complete and total critique is not possible—this is the nature of the human condition.

II

For Merleau-Ponty speech is that “moment when the significative intention (still silent and wholly act) proves itself capable of incorporating itself into my culture and the culture of others—of shaping me and others by transforming the meaning of cultural instruments.”¹⁰ The distinction between empirical and authentic speech is made by the speaker's intentionality in a given situation. When the speaker recalls for his auditors a “pre-established sign” or recurring denotation, he is making use of empirical speech. Empirical speech exists as a sedimentation from which the speaker draws pre-established signs that will have the desired meaning in his auditors. Authentic speech is that which “signifies,” which is to say that the speaker (to express his thoughts) uses language to formulate and create unique, yet intentional, meaning for a specific auditor(s) experiencing a given condition of human time and space.¹¹ Thus, a “rhetorical situation” for Merleau-Ponty could only be a Gestalt in which the speaker is a phenomenal creator of authentic speech.

It should be apparent that empirical speech is a dialectical development from and out of authentic speech. But, in this process of enlargement one witnesses a growth of pseudo-intentionality (objects are named) with a corresponding loss of meaning (the name must be used in the presence of the object, at least initially).¹² In sum, the existential signs give way to essential signs (actually sediments or pre-established signs). And, the intrinsic relationship of the two types of speech provides speculative criteria for “rhetorical criticism.”

The critic should evaluate authentic and empirical speech as they occur in the rhetorical situation. The singular consideration of empirical speech is precisely the Aristotelian approach to rhetoric that has been up-dated and specified by the “audience-situation” approach to criticism.¹³ Such a procedure tends to underestimate the true, authentic, meaningful base that gives rise to the pre-established meaning of the empirical data. The commonplaces used by a speaker may be catalogued and labeled, especially with respect to their “effect” on the audience. Yet, this method has minimally a non-vital meaning for us who were not present to perceive the speaking subject and who did not share the intentionality of the “commonplace” as it existed in the value context of the original rhetorical situation. Hence, the empirical speech is at best an artificial “shell” over a subjective reality of authentic speech. Unless one can secure from the critic a reductive description of what the speaker intended (what he was signifying) and what the auditor perceived (that which was being signified), criticism is historic and biographic generalization or speculation without merit. From this type of criticism, one gains a conception (a sedimentation) of a situation, but not a perception of the value-constituents that constitute the primordial act of speaking with intent.

The difficulty of digging beneath the empirical sediment of speech is a major problem for criticism. “We live in a world where speech is an institution. For all these commonplace utterances, we possess within ourselves ready-made meanings. They arouse in us only second-order thoughts; these in turn are translated into other words which demand from us no real effort of expression and will demand of our hearers no effort of comprehension.”¹⁴ Thus, by tradition, does the Aristotelian critic view the speaker's empirical discourse as a “unique” statement because it was uttered in a given situation that was later judged by the critic (an absent perceiver) to be a singular, effective value-paradigm. In contrast, the existential, phenomenological critic treats empirical speech as second-order data and looks beneath it to determine why the rhetor and his speaking (as risked commitment) are intentional, existential, and significative to his auditors (and thus authentic) when previously the case was to the contrary.

In short, empirical speech constitutes data that can be used to explain how the speaker achieved his discursive effect, namely persuasion. This is an important part of any criticism, but it is only the generalized, historic part. The critic's first task is to ascertain why the speaker's intentionality moved to signify (or “bracket”) ideas, thoughts, and values so as to create meaning. That is, the critic should perceive anew the creation of an original and unique structure of meaning which replaces silence by existential signification. The critic should discover and evaluate the spoken words that have “an existential meaning which is not only rendered by them, but which inhabits them, and is inseparable from them.”¹⁵

III

“For the speaking subject, to express is to become aware of; he does not express just for others, but also to know himself what he intends.”¹⁶ In turn, the re-expression of concepts, ideas, values and so on are the commonplaces that exist as empirical speech and which have only a secondary meaning. Because the critic cannot personally recall why a speaker's speech was constitutive of certain data, he also cannot remember how these data were constituted directly—as intentional expression—for the speaker and auditors in the situation. Primary meaning as originally present in the communicative act is lost. The critic has only the situation that was the context of the meaning and this only by way of the partial empirical speech. Thus, the persistent critic is forced to “dig” beneath the contextual situation to the authentic meaning as originally present. Merleau-Ponty views this process as being analagous to anthropological techniques.

What we mean is not before us, outside all speech, as sheer signification. It is only the excess of what we live over what has already been said. With our apparatus of expression we set ourselves up in a situation the apparatus is sensitive to, we confront it with the situation, and our statements are only the final balance of these exchanges. Political though itself is of this order. It is always the elucidation of an historical perception in which all our understandings, all our experiences, and all our values simultaneously come into play—and of which our these are only the schematic formulation.¹⁷

Merleau-Ponty is suggesting that the critic who looks at just the arguments, the commonplaces, or, in particular, at just the persuasive effects of a speaker, will not find any primordial meaning in the rhetorical situation. The critic will be able to collect the empirical “hard data,” the schematic formulation to which he can add meaning by his value judgments, for example: the syllogistic form of the argument was persuasive, the applause showed significant overt agreement, the use of analogy was compelling, and so on, as most traditional rhetorical studies run. The prevalence of such traditional analysis is precisely what leads Merleau-Ponty to assert that a critic has little to evaluate unless he sees that “the orator does not think before speaking, nor even while speaking; his speech is his thought. In the same way the listener does not form concepts on the basis of signs.”¹⁸ Unless the critic describes the synthetic perceptions made by the speaker and the auditors, he cannot fairly judge the worth or merit of a communicative act. The critic should reduce the speech in a situation to its basic, self-evident completeness. That is, he should scrutinize and synthesize the empirical evidence until it is possible to signify the primordial or existential meaning that is no longer contingent on the schematic formulation or on the situation that per se has generated the structure of expression.

The critic, to a certain extent, must be self-reflective enough to recall that “speech is able to settle into a sediment and constitute an acquisition for use in human relationships.”¹⁹ Why? Because this type of speech, that which becomes sediment, is empirical and has lost its existential meaning. It has lost the values and philosophic presuppositions that were created and specified by the dialectic intentionality of the communicator and his audience. As has been noted, such empirical speech is useful to the critic who only wishes to describe individual factors as they have “settled” into the historical record or the popular mind (as commonplaces). However, the critic who would go further should describe his perception of the communicative act in addition to indicating the act's relevance to a Lebenswelt: a life-world that embodies a set of values and philosophic judgments of man per se. This is to argue that a critic's exegesis of the communicative act should display the existential condition of man as the creation of human values by that very rhetorical act. “Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin, so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silence. The spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.”²⁰

IV

Merleau-Ponty provides the critic with a clear understanding of the act of speaking as the data to be investigated by evaluative inquiry. The method of this investigation prescribes that the critic first perceive the communicative act as jointly empirical and existential and as constituting meaning in a Gestalt. Necessarily the critic should employ phenomenological description through a reduction and synthesis of the situation into psychological and physical factors as mutually embodied in the persons (body-subjects) of the speaker and his auditors. Of course, a complete reduction is not possible. Authentic meaning is found only in the intentionality that is defined by the relationship of the signifying and the signified in the speaking that creates a phenomenon. The interaction of the people in creating meaning is a dialectical process that begins with reduction and synthesis (authentic expression) and temporally-spatially regresses to empirical data capable of unspecified re-use (empirical expression).

The critic has to rebuild the structural intentionality of the rhetorical act and attempt to relieve the human vitality of personal risk and commitment that exists therein. He must rediscover the value-presuppositions that generated the act of spoken awareness. “The meaning of language, like that of gestures, thus does not lie in the elements composing it. The meaning is their common intention, and the spoken phrase is understood only if the hearer, following the ‘verbal chain,’ goes beyond each of its links in the direction that they all designate together.”²¹

Unless the critic so proceeds, he will not comprehend what his history and biography mean, that is, what they mean apart from that which he is attempting to criticize. He can always impute to these demographic and attitudinal factors a meaning that he, on the basis of his experience as a scholar or researcher, suspects to belong to them. Yet, such a method is obviously and blatantly to use the value judgments and commonplaces of his culture and age to define another set of “commonplaces” in the material being studied (if the subject under investigation is past history). However, the same error of equivocation occurs when a critic uses the standards and commonplaces of a previous age to judge his own contemporary rhetorical situation. Thus, for example, the artificiality of using the dictums of Campbell's The Philosophy of Rhetoric to evaluate the philosophic and value-presuppositions of the contemporary speaking of H. Rap Brown.

Perhaps it will now be clear why Merleau-Ponty suggests that criticism should, as noted earlier, be the “emergence of a positive assertion which is already there.” If a critic is concerned with understanding why and how a communicative situation has meaning, his conclusions will be “positive” or constructive when they advance an existential meaning. This is to say, the critic must phenomenologically discover that primordial meaning which is unique when it is used by the speaker. Primordial meaning breaks the silence and literally creates meaning when thought or perception become unitary with speaking by reflecting that primordial meaning. The speaker becomes the agent of reduction and synthesis in a situation that is full of ambiguity; he takes the anxiety of that ambiguity and forces meaning from it. The rhetor can “see” that he and his auditors are committed in a situation that is explosive with tensions of various types. He can understand that the tensions are a “silence” where there are no apparent answers or solutions—anomie, if you will. Hence, the ambiguity and anxiety increase in a circle of escalating risk approaching self-destruction: physical or psychological. Where the rhetor fails to enter the situation or where he does enter without meaning, naked irrationality usually breaks the silence by eliminating it with chaotic action. Or, the original alternative remains available to the rhetor and his listeners, i.e., the choice of silence wherein a lack of decision affirms the status quo as an uninterrupted meaning. With the latter choice, speech continues to be sedimented.

Yet, history and contemporary experience are areas of tension in which the speaker has entered with some success. Why then is a certain speaker meaningfully successful (authentic) while others fail to be? He is existential in creating meaning because he breaks the silence, not with empirical meaning derived from past experience, but with an authentic meaning born of the ambiguous tension itself. The speaker is successful because he brings his present intentionality, a private act, into public being. Others then perceive in the structure of the intentionality an answer to their ambiguity. It is the act of speaking that risks self-commitment to others. Ironically, the empirically oriented critic cannot understand this subjective phenomenon (a phenomenal ontology) and refers to it as a “charisma”—that undefinable, meaningless term applied to speakers who have not utilized the commonplaces of yesteryear to create existential awareness.

The rhetorical critic must inquire with a “radical reflection” or reductive dialectic to see in a total speech situation (Gestalt) that a speaker provides meaning because his speaking is authentic. By way of illustration, one can talk about such speakers as Thomas Aquinas, Lord Chatham, or Winston Churchill who entered situations that can be fairly described as filled with tension, ambiguity, and anxiety. They did not quote the commonplaces of the generations that preceded them, but spoke in words that created new meaning, new understanding, and new purpose. Their speech was authentic because it was primordial, unique, and as yet unexpressed in their current situation. For the existential phenomenologist, then, a speaker is “effective” when he achieves meaning, immediate or long-range. This is to say, the rhetor is authentic when he achieves his end which is always to create meaning for himself and others.

On the other hand, when Lincoln speaks at Gettysburg and Edmund Burke speaks to the Electors of Bristol and Henry Grattan speaks against the Irish Act of Union, a set of thoughts is expressed in words—unique, signifying words—to an audience encircled by tension, ambiguity and anxiety. These words are not perceived as authentic speech, but as empirical speech, not as speech signifying, but as speech signified. There is no existential meaning because the intentionality of the communicator in his speaking does not penetrate the silence of the situation in which the audience exists. A new cultural value is not created; a new awareness of identity or commitment fails to emerge. Obviously, the speaker's words remain subjectively and privately authentic—his self-awareness is still genuine and so on. Either because the speaking is authentic per se or because, in the course of cultural time and circumstance the empirical has given way to the pseudo-authentic, a sign can become a pre-established sign recalled. Thus, the speaking of Lincoln, Burke, and Grattan has come to mean today what we in our subjectivity would accept as the commonplaces to embody our ideas and values. In sum, the critic must be quick to separate his values and judgmental assumptions as a contextual “situation” from the authentic meaning that may be present as the intentionality of the speaking being analyzed.

V

The existential, phenomenological critic of rhetoric has an obligation to judge the speaker, the auditor, and the speaking as correspondent, transcendent parts of a Gestalt where authentic meaning is a created phenomenon. Merleau-Ponty is interpreted to suggest that the critic's function is to help the reader discover anew the existential communication that exists among the diverse philosophic elements of man speaking in a Gestalt. The critic's heuristic function is to bring into existence a meaning that has been obscured by the structural ambiguity, tension, and anxiety of the situation. Indeed, the critic must not be content with mere situational history and biography. In short, “we require a history of phenomena, not simply more phenomena of history.”²² The existential, phenomenological critic should demonstrate that “in speech the self-existent singleness of self-conciousness comes as such into existence, so that its particular individuality is something for others.”²³

Notes

1. See Wayne E. Brockriede, “Dimensions of the Concept of Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, LIV (February, 1968), pp. 1-12, esp. 7-9.

2. See Lloyd F. Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy & Rhetoric, 1 (January, 1968), pp. 1-14, esp. 11; cf., the existential “situation” of risk as described by Maurice Natanson, “The Claims of Immediacy,” in Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Argumentation (University Park, Pennsylvania, 1965), pp. 11-12. Also, a scientism may be observed in most contemporary journal articles applying quantitative research techniques to “rhetoric,” e.g., see Larry L. Barker, Robert J. Kibler, and Francis J. Kelly, “Effect of Received Mispronunciation on Speech Effectiveness Ratings and Retention,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, LIV (February, 1968), pp. 47-58, esp. 48.

3. James L. Bemis and Gerald M. Phillips, “A Phenomenological Approach to Communication Theory,” Speech Teacher, XIII (November, 1964), p. 268.

4. Richard B. Gregg, “A Phenomenologically Oriented Approach to Rhetorical Criticism,” Central States Speech Journal, XVII (May, 1966), p. 89.

5. Literary critics often utilize the phenomenological concept of structuring, but not with the existential implications as Merleau-Ponty uses it. The general basis of Merleau-Ponty's approach is found in Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York, 1962), pp. 318-322. Cf., David Funt, “Roland Barthes and the Nouvelle Critique,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XXVI (Spring, 1968), pp. 329-340, esp. 330.

6. Cf. Douglas Ehninger, “On Systems of Rhetoric,” Philosophy & Rhetoric, I (Summer, 1968), pp. 131-144, esp. 142.

7. At the time of his death on May 4, 1961, Professor Maurice Merleau-Ponty held the chair of philosophy at the Collège de France. He had previously taught at the lycée de Saint Quentin, the Université de Lyon, and the Sorbonne. In 1952, he was elected and named to the Collège de France where he succeeded Louis Lavelle in the chair which Henri Bergson once occupied. He was an important contributor to L'Express and, with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, he was a co-founder of the successful and influential review Les Temps Modernes.

8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, Illinois, 1964), p. 9.

9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, Illinois, 1964), p. 106.

10. Ibid., p. 92.

11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “What is Phenomenology?” trans. John F. Bannan, Cross Currents, VI (Winter, 1956), p. 67. This same article appears as the “Preface” in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York, 1962).

12. James Daly, “Merleau-Ponty's Concept of Phenomenology,” Philosophical Studies, XVI (1967), pp. 160-161.

13. See the references in note 2 above.

14. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 184.

15. Ibid., p. 182.

16. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, p. 90.

17. Ibid., p. 83. The philosophic assumptions about the nature of a Gestalt that Merleau-Ponty relies upon here are explained further in his The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Illinois, 1968), pp. 204-206.

18. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 180.

19. Ibid., p. 190.

20. Ibid., p. 184.

21. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, p. 8.

22. R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York, 1967), p. 143.

23. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York, 1967), p. 530.