Reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty's The Phenomenology of Perception (original) (raw)
Related papers
On Thinking, 2009
Cognitive semio-linguistics studies the relations between signs and language, between semiological and linguistic structures, as expressions of, and as causes of, the cognitive activities involved in thinking, here called epistemic activities. This short essay displays a leveled analysis of the relations holding between semio-linguistic and epistemic structures active in the human mind.
The role of speech in the construction of reality
Semiotica, 1980
The discipline of semiotics and its discovery that the world is a perfusion of signs threatens essentialisms and universalisms. Essences, which, in the Platonic-Cartesian economy, are noumenal and ultimate explanans, become, in the Peircean economy, merely another level of phenomenal explananda. Explanations, in the semiotic economy, are never ultimate but always provisional, so that the process of explanation becomes as unlimited as semeiosis itself. The full impact of this semiotic doctrine has not yet been felt in the human science. Linguistics and anthropology, to consider just two facets of the human science, still run, for the most part, according to the essentialist economy. Anthropologists ascribe an ultimately explanatory value to the logic of human decision making, to universal mental structures, and to a psychic unity which is said to unite the human species. Linguists talk of the innate and universal capability to acquire a language, and they appeal to that capability to account for patterns of grammatical diversity. For both the anthropologist and the linguist, a diversity of behavior and knowledge is to be explained by a singularity of human essence, by an unconditioned, plenipotentiary, transcendent human Self. The present essay is directed at this heaviest investment of human science in the essentialist doctrine that Self is the ultimate unconditioned source of thought, meaning, and independently, of language/ speech. When reconsidered in the light of semiotics, Self turns out to be, not an unchangeable human essence, but a conditioned product of semeiosis (Peirce 5.383), and, as such, Self must be defined in terms of semiotic structures (Eco 1976:319). Speech turns out to be a major condition on the semiotic construction of Self. These theses will be discussed prospectively and retrospectively. Prospectively, I will describe some aspects of a theory of speech in the semiotic economy and consider the details of the thesis that speech is a condition on the construction of Self. Retrospectively,
Review of Hasan, R. & Jonathan J. Webster (2005)Language, society and consciousness
Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 2007
In this book, the editor Jonathan J. Webster presents the first of seven volumes of The Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan. In this first collection of papers the focus is on understanding the links between Language, Society and Human consciousness. The book is divided into three sections, each introduced by the editor. What transpires across the three sections is Hasan's making of a transdisciplinary theory, driven by her search of points of contact as well as discrepancies between the works of Bernstein on semiotic sociology, of Vygostky on sociogenetic psychology, and of Halliday on sociological linguistics. The result is an accomplished tour de force which provides an introduction as well as a profound insight/critical analysis of the works of these three scholars, enriching for both the novice researcher as well as the erudite on the topics covered. Section one of the book, introduced by the editor as The Sociosemiotic Mediation of Mind, is a series of chapters in which Hasan explores first Bernstein's early preoccupations with codes and consciousness, and later the sociology of pedagogy and the forming of consciousness as a concept. Within her discussion of Bernstein's work, Hasan proposes two ways of understanding theory-making: from an endotropic stance and an exotropic stance. Endotropic theories are centred on themselves and isolate their object of study, whereas exotropic theories are 'cosmoramic' in that they are in dialogic relationships with other theories, hence creating open-systems of enquiry as opposed to closed systems. The author elaborates on the need for an exotropic theory to have its core internal logic well-established before it can be shared without losing essence. She then moves on to a discussion of Vygostky's approach to the development of human mental functioning and language development which integrates both the natural and the social whilst giving a central role to semiotic mediation. She examines the shortcomings of this approach. Throughout the papers of section 1, Hasan skilfully argues that no theory on its own can grasp the complex and multilayered links between language, society and consciousness. In the last paper of this section she brings together the contribution of Bernstein, Vygostky and Halliday-all representative, in her view, of exotropic theory, hence all calling for completion which can be met through theoretical dialogism. BOOK REVIEWS 24.1
Human Studies, 1999
In recent years, various attempts have been made to advance a project sometimes characterized as "discursive psychology". Grounded in what its proponents term "social constructionism", the discursive approach to the elucidation of 'mental' phenomena is here contrasted to an ethnomethodological position informed by the later work of Wittgenstein. In particular, it is argued that discursive psychology still contains Cartesian residua, notwithstanding its professed objective of expurgating Cartesian thought from the behavioral sciences. One principal issue has been the confusion of "conceptual analysis" with the empirical study of speech practices. If these distinct enterprises are conflated, the critical achievements of conceptual analysis are obscured or even misconstrued. A different picture of how best to analyze human conduct and mentality emerges if the lessons of Wittgensteinian grammatical analysis are preserved and extended, one more compatible with several themes in ethnomethodology.
The Origin and Definition of Language in the Phenomenology of Perception
The question of the origin of language and the question of its definition, as Merleau-Ponty discusses them in the Phenomenology of Perception, both condition and complicate one another. The definition conditions the origin, because we need to know what it is that appears in order to know the conditions of its appearance. On the other hand, the origin does not distinguish language, but identifies it with other forms of expression. So we have origin and similarity on one hand, and definition and singularity on the other. This is a tension that we find in Merleau-Ponty's text, and perhaps a general problem concerning origins. In the Phenomenology Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the relation of language to other forms of intentional meaning-expression, starting out from the view that " the word is indissolubly something said, heard, or seen " (245; or touched, we might add)1 , and that " it is the body that speaks " (203).2 Hence, whatever we say about language, we also claim by implication as a capacity of the body. Thus, words are not abstract phenomena for Merleau-Ponty, they are a vital part of embodied, perceptual and affective existence in an intersubjective world that has a history. This view reveals how language is grounded in the senses and the pre-linguistic gesture.
All our higher mental functions are mediated processes, says Vygotsky (1986), and signs are the basic means used to master and direct them. But how can this be if our words and other signs work only in a purely representational, ‘picturing’ fashion, for they still need interpreting as to their meaning? The ‘inner observation’ problem remains unsolved. Our significant expressions must also work on us in another way: by the living expressions of others producing spontaneous bodily reactions from us. Thus the relation between thought and language is not to be found in patterns discoverable in transcripts of already spoken words, but in the dynamic influences exerted by our words in their speaking. Vygotsky (1986) speaks of our utterances as having an affective-volitional intonation in their voicing, while Bakhtin (1993) talks of them as having an emotional-volitional tone. This means, as I will elaborate in my talk, that not only it is possible to possess a transitional understanding of ‘where’ at any one moment we are placed in relation to another person’s expressions, but to possess also at that moment an action guiding anticipation of the range of next ‘moves’ they may make. Thus, as I see it then, thinking and consciousness is a socially responsive elaboration of our animal sensitivities to, and awareness of, events occurring in our relations to the others and othernesses in our surroundings. Thus, far from it being a special, private, inner theater or workshop of the mind, its emergence depends completely on the dynamical intertwining or intermingling of our ‘inner lives’ with the ‘inner’ lives of those around us. This view of thinking chimes in with Goethe’s [1749-1832] views quoted below, as well as with his account of a special kind of thinking he calls exact sensorial imagination. In this view, our thinking and consciousness becomes no more strange to us than the fact of our ‘livingness’ – a fact that is at once both ordinary, in the sense of being very familiar to us in our daily practical lives, as well as being quite extraordinary to us in our intellectual lives, due to the current inappropriateness of our academic modes of thought and talk. My talk, then, will be just as much concerned with an exploration of the move away from mechanical modes of thought to those appropriate to living processes, as it will be about thinking and consciousness.