Maurice Merleau-Ponty in
The Visible and the Invisible (1969) :
“In a sense, if we were to make completely explicit the architectonics of the human body, its ontological framework, and how it sees itself and hears itself, we would see that the structure of its mute world is such that all the possibilities of language are already given in it. Already our existence as seers (that is, we said, as beings who turn the world back upon itself and who pass over to the other side, and who catch sight of one another, who see one another with eyes) and especially our existence as sonorous beings for others and for ourselves contain everything required for there to be speech from the one to the other, speech about the world. And, in a sense, to understand a phrase is nothing else than to fully welcome it in its sonorous being, or, as we put it so well, to hear what it says (l'entendre). The meaning is not on the phrase like the butter on the bread, like a second layer of “copy reality” spread over the sound: it is the totality of what is said, the integral of all the differentiations of the verbal chain; it is given with the words for those who have ears to hear” (p.155).
The articulations of the flesh are primitive expressions inflected by emergent dynamical-structures. The elements speak through our gestures and intentions. "Once a body-world relationship is recognized, there is a ramification of my body and a ramification of the world and a correspondence between its inside and my outside, between my inside and its outside" (pg.136). We dance the world
as Being.
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6 comments:
The expressive word does not simply choose a sign for an already defined meaning, as one goes to look for a hammer in order to drive a nail or for a claw to pull
it out. It gropes around a significative intention which is not guided by any text, and which is precisely in the process of writing the text. If we want to
do justice to it, we must evoke some of the other words that might have taken its place and were rejected, and we must feel the way in which they might have touched and shaken the chain of language in another manner and the extent to which this particular word was really the only possible one if that meaning was to come into the world. In short, we must consider
speech before it is pronounced, the background of silence which does not cease to surround it and without which it would say nothing.
Or to put the matter another way, we must uncover the threads of silence with which
speech is mixed. In already acquired expressions there is a direct sense
which corresponds point for point to figures, forms, and instituted words.
Apparently, there are no gaps or speaking silences here. But the sense of expressions which are in the process of being accomplished cannot be of
that sort; it is a lateral or oblique sense which runs between words. It is another
way of shaking the linguistic or narrative apparatus in order to tear a new sound from it. If we want to understand language as an originating operation, we must pretend never to have spoken, submit language to a
reduction without which it would once more escape us by referring us to what it signifies for us, gaze at it as deaf people look at those who are speaking,compare the art of language to the other arts of expression, and try to see it as one of these mute arts.
Merleau-Ponty, "Indirect language and the voices of silence". In The Merleau-Ponty Reader. pp.247-248.
found this via yer twitter would be interested in what you make of it:
http://side-effects.blogspot.ca/2013/03/xenophenomenology-at-dust.html
-dmf
http://anthem-group.net/2013/03/27/erin-manningthe-shape-of-enthusiasm/
http://traumwerk.stanford.edu:3455/symmetry/746
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bodysphere/the-sick-man-in-medical-cosmology/4592966
http://www.closertotruth.com/video-profile/What-Things-are-Conscious-Alva-Noe-/636
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