Brian Irwin
Stony Brook University
Situating Speech : Merleau-Ponty on Language in The Visible and the Invisible
Experience, for Merleau-Ponty, is innately situated. We are always oriented within a spatial milieu. At the same time, we are characterized as a species by our linguistic capacities. If we are always spatially situated, then, language too must be situated, or situating. In what sense is this the case? In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty explores the role of language in the context of the chiasmic relations between self and world. What emerges from this discussion is an image of language as at once determining and determined by the landscapes of our spatial milieus: language opens up the world to us in its multifarious aspects, and in turn its own possibilities for expression are unleashed by the ways in which the world is present to us. Following this line of thought, rather than reducing linguistic meaning either to abstracted truth conditions, or to a level of signification that remains at an ostensive remove from the world, we can see it as continuous with and an expression of our embodied and embedded existence. It also allows us to see that, given the intersubjective character of linguistic meaning, our situated spatial existence is an enactment of our social being; our language community speaks through us in our inhabitation of space, and in our acts of inhabitation we speak back to others. We can thus take a step past the traditional philosophical image of subject and world positioned in ontological opposition, and instead think situated, intersubjective existence as that through which the world speaks.