The Authenticity in Ambiguity: Appreciating Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Abductive Logic as Communicative...

The Authenticity in Ambiguity:Appreciating Maurice

Merleau-Ponty’s Abductive Logicas Communicative Praxis

Deborah Eicher-CattDepartment of Communication Arts & Sciences

The Pennsylvania State University, York

Thisarticle is a readingofMauriceMerleau-Ponty’s “AnUnpublishedText” (1964a),asan exemplar of communicative praxis. As a poetic, “stylistic” account of the body of hislife’s work, this text self-signifies his potential as an “authentic” scholar. Employing amotivated logic that is abductive (Peirce, 1955), he argued for an appreciation of ourphenomenological and semiotic circumstances of existential ambiguity. Furthermore,from this phenomenal ground, he articulated the pragmatic conditions of authenticitythat inhere within every communication engagement with an Other. My interpreta-tion of the Etre Au Monde of his philosophy depicts authenticity as human potentialityin the context of an existential dialectic between personal consciousness and socio-cultural experience. We find that ambiguity and authenticity implicate one another asphilosophical issues and thus remain highly relevant for a postmodern philosophy thatproblematizes our constitution as communicative beings.

As we know it, the world is not without boundaries. We are compelled, as semioticcreatures, to participate in a world of representations and classifications that weshare and negotiate with others. These actions and the benefits of them are takenfor granted. Our socially constructed (Berger & Luckmann, 1967) worlds appearwith a clarity and rationality that makes discursive relations seem less problematicthan they might otherwise be. Life assumes a sense of “everydayness” (Heidegger,1926/1962) that eases the existential anxiety routinized existence might induce.Consequently, a quickened “impulse toward symbolic precision” (Levine, 1985, p.2) in our writing and speaking feeds much of our theoretical and practical pursuits.However, as postmodern theorizing informs us, boundaries, whether material or

ATLANTIC JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, 13(2), 113–134Copyright © 2005, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Deborah Eicher-Catt, Department

of Communication Arts & Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University, York, 1031 Edgecomb Avenue,

York, PA 17403–3398. E-mail: [email protected]

semiotic, only appear rigid and static as immutable signs. Instead, between the reit-eration and iteration of discourse there is a “slippage” (Carlson, 1996) or “blurring”of the boundaries (Conquergood, 1991) that necessitates reflection and choicemaking. On occasions when circumstances are “right,” this slippage of languageand discourse produces discursive and nondiscursive transformations (Foucault,1972). As Merleau-Ponty advocated in his writings published posthumously as TheProse of the World, we must appreciate this slippage for its literary or creative poten-tial because, for him, “…language is never the mere clothing of a thought whichotherwise possesses itself in full clarity” (1968/1973, p. xiii). Rather, for him the ac-complishment of consciousness is always an aesthetic performance that, whenproperly understood, never disavows the inextricable link with our experience of it.

In addition, there exists a prereflective, prelogical world, that is, the phenomenalworld, where bodies have a “habit” of existence that “pulls” consciousness in their“wake” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962). Bodies are not mere objects in the world butour existential points of personal and cultural mediation. Bodies, that is, our “pivotsto theworld,”give rise toa synthesisof consciousness (semiotic structures)andexpe-rience (phenomenological acts) at the boundaries of life as we know it (Eicher-Catt,2001). This embodied synthesis is always comprised, according to Merleau-Ponty, of“open inexhaustible” horizons of experience that make our fundamental relation tothe world inherently ambiguous (1964a, p. 5). In his “Unpublished Text,”Merleau-Ponty (1964a) depicted the irony of this semiotic and phenomenologicaldialectic as inescapable. For Merleau-Ponty, we must take notice of the existential,albeit ambiguous, boundary condition such a dialectic instantiates. That is, ofcourse, if we are to appreciate fully our existence as embodied, social creatures thatpossess the potential to actualize our “Worlds.” Hence, at the boundary of the sign ofperson and the person that is signed is a contest of conscious experience and the ex-perience of consciousness that enables the condition of lived ambiguity. And, it is inthis ambiguous tension between person and sign, body and culture, experience andconsciousness, thatboththeproblemandpotentialityofauthenticexistence isborn.

Between the world of signs and the embodiment of signs lies the essential prob-lematic of authenticity. At this threshold of existence, we question what it meansto live authentically. Given an apparent preexistent, fixed-world of representa-tional meaning that seemingly overdetermines, semiotically, our modes of beingand relating, we question how we might live authentically. How, in other words,can we live with a personal sense of freedom, integrity, and self-fulfillment thatdoes not promote self-indulgence or eclipse the well-being of “Self” and “Others?”How do we creatively “craft” a sense of Self not premised on “false needs” or “re-pressive satisfactions” (Bartky, 1990, p. 42)?1 We wonder how we might actualize

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1According to Sandra Bartky (1990, p. 42), “repressive satisfaction fastens us to the established or-

der of domination, for the same system which produces false needs also controls the conditions under

which such needs can be satisfied. False needs…are needs that are produced through indoctrina-

tion…they are needs whose possession and satisfaction benefit not the subject who has them but a so-

cial order whose interest lies in domination.”

an authentic existence that no longer appeals to modern romanticized, idealizedinterpretations of its contours. We wonder if authenticity is even relevant in apostmodern world. Is it possible? I concur with Anton’s (2001) claim that the cen-tral issues of selfhood and authenticity are best interrogated as communication is-sues. Moreover, I agree that these issues should be framed in terms of embodiment,sociality, symbolicity, and temporality, as he suggested. However, given that thesedomains of experience are lived through communicative praxis, they are best expli-cated from a pragmatic synthesis of both phenomenological and semiotic perspec-tives. Although Anton (2001) provided an excellent explication of the existentialrelations between selfhood and authenticity on the issues of embodiment, sociality,and temporality, his discussion of symbolicity, or “senorousness,” is chieflygrounded in phenomenological not semiotic theory or literature. Although notabandoning the issues of embodiment, sociality, and temporality, I explicate howwe might interrogate the authentic constitution of the Self through the specifictheoretical insights of semiotics; the very sign conditions, by the way, thatMerleau-Ponty recognized in the corpus of his phenomenological work(1960/1964c).

Therefore, to explicate the communicative implicature of authenticity and am-biguity, I propose a reading of “An Unpublished Text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: AProspectus of His Work,” that appears in The Primacy of Perception (1964a). It wastitled posthumously by editor James Edie.2 Drawing on the philosophical insights ofstructural linguistics and semiotics (in particular, the influences of Ferdinandde Saussure, Roman Jakobson, and Charles Sanders Peirce), in this text,Merleau-Ponty articulated the function of ambiguity within his phenomenology oflanguage and discourse. Often touted as the “Philosopher of Ambiguity” (see, inparticular, de Waelhens, 1951/1967), he recaptured for philosophy an appreciationfor the ambiguity of human existence. This text was originally presented byMerleau-Ponty as he announced his candidacy for the Chair of Philosophy at theCollege de France in 1951. As such, the text offers us a “stylistic” account of thebody of his life’s work while forecasting his proposed philosophical pursuits. As oneof the few texts in which he actually articulated his position on ambiguity (Spiegel-berg, 1984), this text also serves to articulate, through its form and structure, thatto which it refers, that is, a choice of context for his professional existence. That is,by addressing his central philosophical problematic; namely, the reconciliation ofinterior consciousness with exterior experience, he “entices” us to experience, withhim, his quest for self-fulfillment as a philosopher. In this text, he poetically yetpragmatically theorized an appreciation for the existential, albeit ambiguous, com-municative conditions by which his authenticity as a scholar might emerge. By ex-plicating Merleau-Ponty’s text on ambiguity, we come to a fuller appreciation of

THE AUTHENTICITY IN AMBIGUITY 115

2Throughout my discussion, I, like Merleau-Ponty in his text, make occasional references to other

writings of his that contextualize the ideas included in the “Unpublished Text.” Merleau-Ponty would

argue that it would be futile for me to do otherwise. As his text, in particular, demonstrates, texts are so-

cially-situated.

how he problematizes the authentic constitution of the Self through his phenom-enological semiotic performance.

As we see, he writes a distinctive text that is at once aesthetic and“self-conscious.” It is a text, in other words, that is “…concerned above all to drawattention to its own nature, its own sound-patterns, diction, syntax etc. and not torefer primarily to some ‘reality’ beyond itself” (Hawkes, 1977, p. 86, author’s ital-ics). Hence, the form of his text is as important as the substance of his thought. Al-though his text functions both referentially, as it factually describes his qualifica-tions and accomplishments to assume the Chair of Philosophy, and rhetorically, asit seeks the adherence of his particular audience to his candidacy, its predominantfocus lies in the “stylistic” form and structure of its message, that is, its poetic func-tion (Jakobson, 1960) by way of an abductive logic (Peirce, 1955, outlined later).That is to say, the abductive logic of his text structures or “stylizes” its rhetoricalfunction and value as an aesthetic while it articulates the potentiality of communi-cative praxis as authentic.3 However, we must not presume that his text is “inno-cent,” as semiotician Roland Barthes defined it. It is not free, in other words, ofcode conditions or “…agencies…which modify, determine and, most importantly,generate meaning in a manner far from innocent, far from untrammeled…”(Hawkes, 1977, p. 110, author’s italics). As Barthes reminded us, “…any text willreveal, when properly analyzed, not a simple reflection of reality, but the sort ofmultiplicity which Todorov recognizes as distinctive” (cited in Hawkes, 1977,p. 110, author’s italics). Merleau-Ponty’s “Unpublished Text,” is no different in thisregard. As I demonstrate, like any other artifact of communicative praxis, this textemploys a “motivated logic,” that is, an internal logic that seeks to motivate or con-strain our particular reading and interpretation of it. Distinctive ofMerleau-Ponty’s text, however, is his pragmatic use of abductive logic (Peirce,1955) to structure an argument for how we negotiate our life worlds lived authenti-cally, that is, the pragmatics of existence. In other words, he articulates the existen-tial, abductive conditions by which we may openly, meaningfully, and authenticallyengage with Others.4

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3In his opening paragraph, Merleau-Ponty laid out the problematic of critical thought that he be-

lieves represses “…our contact with the perceived world which is simply there before us, beneath the

level of the verified true and the false” (1964a, p. 3). For him, although inductive and deductive logics

are typical methods of this verification, they do not speak adequately to the “…positive steps of thinking

or its most valid accomplishments” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, p. 3). They do not, in other words, ade-

quately interrogate an issue like authenticity.4I aim to show how the ambiguity of existence possibilizes authenticity as an abductive accomp-

lishment. Although the logics of induction and deduction are the most familiar, I argue that

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of ambiguity acknowledges the importance of abduction as the operating

logic when authenticity is the central problematic. Consequently, although reading his text abductively

may appear to some of my readers as an incorrect imposition of a logical framework, I argue that his

“Unpublished Text” is an excellent example of his use of abduction to enhance his case that he is, in-

deed, a scholar seeking authenticity.

On his very model, my reading of his text is abductively designed and intendedas a performance of the semiotic and phenomenological synthesis of his essay. I alsoillustrate the communicative performances by which we routinely negotiate mean-ing, regardless of the text we encounter. In the end, both his work and mine are“writerly texts,” (Barthes,1970/1974). That is, they “…require us to look at the na-ture of language itself, not through it at a preordained ‘real world’…[and] involve usin the dangerous, exhilarating activity of creating our world now, together with theauthor, as we go along” (Hawkes, 1977, p. 114, author’s italics). UnderstandingMerleau-Ponty’s text in such a way creates an appreciation that meanings we as-sign texts or any communicative encounter are always generated by the syntheticact of consciousness and experience as pragmatic communicative performance(Lanigan, 1988).5

My analysis proceeds by way of the abductive logic that informs his text. As ex-plained herein, abductive logic demonstrates that the “rule” plus the “result”equals the “case” (Lanigan, 1992, p. 221, explained in more detail later). Conse-quently, my article is organized into three sections that represent each of these as-pects of logic. To forecast briefly, I begin at the microlevel of analysis by reading histext as an artifact of his experience as he perceives and forecasts his body of work,that is, as a text to be lived, as a rhetorical act (parole parlante) or speech speaking(Ferdinand de Saussure, 1906–1911/1966).6 This level of analysis depicts the logi-cal “rule” of experience as a predicate of authenticity. In addition, at this first levelof analysis, I also mark for my reader the internal abductive logic inherent withinhis text. (Recursively, this section of the article also demonstrates that the “rule”plus the “result” equals the “case.”) Next, on a macrolevel of analysis, I read histext as an artifact of consciousness as it is represented to an external body of subse-quent readers and interpreters, that is, the situated, now published, “UnpublishedText.” It is, in other words, a text lived, a rhetorical event (parole parlee) or speechspoken (Ferdinand de Saussure, 1906–1911/1966). This level of analysis depictsthe logical “result” from the contiguous relations of consciousness and experienceas a predicate of authenticity.7 The third level of synthesis is labeled the Etre AuMonde of his philosophy and subsequently presents his synthetic “case” or insightregarding the relations of ambiguity and authenticity as a semiotic phenomenology.Taken together, both microperspectives and macroperspectives offer an analogueof the syntagmatic-diachronic and paradigmatic-synchronic (de Saussure,1906–1911/1966) space-time relations concerning his “body” of work as it is pres-


5Because my claim is that positive ambiguity possibilizes authenticity as Merleau-Ponty understands

it, then my reader needs to experience some ambiguity in the reading of my text as a condition of any au-

thentic explication on my part.6This perspective announces, of course, his future orientation or operating “rule” that frames his

pursuits.7This perspective announces a comparison between his past work and his future orientation that

signifies a “result” of contiguity.

ently cast within the “body” of knowledge we call philosophy. We arrive at an un-derstanding of his text as an embodied, that is, phenomenological, process ofsemiotic interpretation not unlike any text we might read. That is, we understandit as an “authentic” synthesis of expression and perception by an author–reader aspragmatic communicative performance. By offering such a synthesis of thoughtand action, my reading presents a pragmatic discourse that is an exemplar of thepositive ambiguity inherent within philosophical and practical enterprises, an am-biguity that Merleau-Ponty seeks so ardently in his career to expose.8 It also recaststhe concept of authenticity as a communicative, that is, semiotic andphenomenological, abductive phenomenon. Hence, we learn the value of readingMerleau-Ponty philosophy of ambiguity through the pragmatic lens of Peirciansemiotics.9

THE “UNPUBLISHED TEXT”AS AN ARTIFACTOF EXPERIENCE: THE RULE

As originally presented in its unpublished form (parole parlante, speech speaking),the text constitutes an artifact of his experience as a body-subject as he intends theWorld. At the very least, the text constitutes a rhetorical act of expression (eitherin his written or spoken form). He speaks about the body of his work contextualizedwithin a particular space and time. This leads him to a description of lived experi-ence in terms of the Self-Other-World relationship. He views this interrelationshipas essentially semiotic, that is, as playing out within a complex matrix of signifyingsystems that acts to both constrain and possibilize linguistic and discursive choices.

As mentioned earlier, he employs an abductive logic in the rhetorical presenta-tion of his ideas. That is, he begins his recollection and forward extension with aninterpretation of the body-subject (Self) as “incarnate mind” and then radically re-flects on the Self–Other relationship as it structures our conscious awareness of ev-eryday life. The concept of abduction is best described by semiotician and logicianCharles Sanders Peirce (1955). To Peirce’s way of thinking, abduction is the hy-pothesis generating activity itself which, of course, precedes any ensuing proposi-tional statements made by science, that is, results or cases. With abduction, Peirce

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8Merleau-Ponty recognizes that a “positive ambiguity” exists when it is phenomenologically instan-

tiated through the inherent reflexive and recursive movements of expression–perception. Because of

this inherent recursive aspect of sign processes in the process of reading, my overall argument develops

recursively from more concrete levels of analysis to more abstract ones. I begin identifying in concrete

terms what constitutes an abductive logic, that is, the “rule,” plus the “result,” equals the “case,” to

more abstract connotations of these categories (artifact of experience, artifact of consciousness, and the

authenticity in ambiguity). As an added recursive step, I also explicate the operating rule, result, and

case at the microlevel of my analysis—within the artifact of experience.9Such a reading interrogates, although not comprehensively because space does not allow, the issues

of embodiment, sociality, symbolicity, and temporality as flagged by Anton (2001).

captures what he believes is a method of thinking whereby we institute “new” ideasby the process of bringing “old” ones in contiguity. He interrogates the very processof producing “insight” as an emergent property of experience and consciousness,which he labels semiosis. Some define this process as metaphorical thinking (Bate-son, 1979; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), although Peirce is attempting to account spe-cifically for the sign processes by which metaphors are constituted.10 Peirce showsthat, contrary to inductive or deductive inferences that follow logically from casespresented, abductive inferences, on the other hand, are already operative as we be-gin any thinking process, that is, as we encounter the World with Others. Hence,we begin with a “rule” or idea about a particular phenomenon. This “rule” signifiesa paradigmatic choice from those possible, and, according to Jakobson (Holen-stein, 1974,1977), reflects metaphorical thinking. This he considers Firstness. Tothis idea or rule we add variations of observable experience (what we consider “re-sults”) as we attempt to compare and determine how the phenomenon under in-vestigation functions within a scheme. Hence, the “results” signify a choice incombination, syntagmatically speaking, and reflect thinking that is metonymic.This he calls Secondness. Eventually, Peirce theorizes, we arrive at what we call“facts” or propositions about why we think the phenomenon reveals itself to us as itdoes, (these “facts” being labeled cases). He calls this Thirdness. So, cases are prod-ucts of the selection and combinatory functions of language and discourse as signprocesses. Of course, these propositions are then tested and verified by science us-ing inductive or deductive logic. In short, abduction demonstrates that the “rule”plus the “result” equals the “case” (Lanigan, 1992, p. 221). Translated inMerleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language, abduction demonstrates that “expe-rience” plus “consciousness” equals an interpretation of “reality” as an analoguelogic that is both phenomenological and semiotic. To help clarify Merleau-Ponty’suse of abductive logic in this particular essay, the following explication is structuredaccording to these three components of logic.11 Therefore, we begin with his inter-pretation of the body-subject as an artifact of experience that portends hisphenomenological semiotic. His interpretation constitutes the “idea” or operating“rule” for what he identifies as a positive ambiguity of existence.

The Rule: Incarnate Mind and the Intuitive Body

In our pursuit of a philosophical understanding of human rationality,Merleau-Ponty advises us to avoid the extreme opposing positions that nature andculture or body and mind often exemplify. Careful to avoid the trappings of Carte-sian dualism, his position emphasizes the ambiguous interrelationships betweenand among Self-Other-World realized and actualized as lived conscious experi-


10His semiotic theory is built, consequently, on the triadic relations among what he calls Firstness,

Secondness, and Thirdness. For details on his theory, see Peirce (1955).11I signify these logical components as I go along by “marking” them with underlines.

ence. He argues against epistemology that nourishes only critical thinking or ratio-nalism. Such epistemology mistakenly privileges either the interiority of an autono-mous consciousness or the exteriority of bodily experience (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a,p. 4). He finds that in philosophy’s attempts to arrive at an ontology of being hu-man, it has become “unconscious” of “the contribution of perception to our idea oftruth” and allows the “absorption” of the body into the world (Merleau-Ponty,1964a, p. 3). This position is precisely his critique of phenomenologist EdmundHusserl’s work (1913/1962). He rejects the transcendental position Husserl ad-vanced. Instead, he wants to reestablish the concept of mind (consciousness) as an“incarnate mind,” in which the body is fully recognized as the point of existence(experience) in and of the World. As he explains, it is only through the body, afterall, that we come to “grasp” the world (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a).

To begin his explication of the philosophy of communication as an analoguelogic of consciousness and experience, he offers an interpretation or acta (Lanigan,1988) of the human being as ontological. In other words, he argues for the incorpo-ration of body and mind as the source of “Being,” described by fellow phenomen-ologist Martin Heidegger (1926/1962) as ek-stase (existential being). It is at thispoint of existence, where we realize (as a conceptual act) and actualize (as an em-bodied act) time and space as relational dimensions, that we come, in other words,to “grasp” the world. As Merleau-Ponty asserted, “…these relations are differentways for external stimuli to test, to solicit, and to vary our grasp on the world, ourhorizontal and vertical anchorage in a place and in a here-and-now” (1964a, p. 5).Adhering to an abductive logic, in his essay he sets forth his phenomenology withone basic rule: the idea that mind is an incarnate logic, housed in corporealitywhich always intends the world. Being is an “intuitive body” which always precedeslanguage or discourse. It is by our acts of intending (understood in the phenom-enological sense of “intentionality”) that we structure consciousness, form experi-ence, and “stylize” our universe through discourse and action.

An important point to remember regarding the Self as “intuitive body” is the re-alization of our capacity to “possibilize” the world. Through the conscious act of in-tending a world, he reminds us that “we experience a perception and its horizon ‘inaction’ rather than by ‘posing’ them or explicitly ‘knowing’ them” (Merleau-Ponty,1964b, p. 12). It is the performance of Self in relation to the World which allows acontinual “birth” or change of perspective through the reflexive process of humanconsciousness and experience. Herein lies the inherent existential ambiguity; for itis the transformative characteristic within the semiotic process constituted by thephenomenological interrelationship of Self and World that possibilizes a positive or“good ambiguity” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, p. 11) As clarified by theorist RichardL. Lanigan (1988), positive ambiguity is produced by the synergism of dia-chronic-paradigmatic and synchronic-syntagmatic diacritical values as a labor ofdiscourse. Thus, it is out of positive ambiguity that “true” knowledge arises(Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, p. 9). Hence, we move away from more traditional philoso-phies such as objectivism, which has us appealing to “some permanent, ahistorical

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matrix or framework … in determining the nature of rationality, knowledge,truth…” and relativism, which has us seeking a “conceptual scheme, theoreticalframework, paradigm, form of life, society or culture” on which to base rationalityand truth claims (Bernstein, 1988, p. 8).

Merleau-Ponty agrees conditionally with Sartre’s dictum, “we are condemnedto freedom,” but only to the extent that we experience freedom in the continualambiguity that the perception and expression dialectic comports and through thecontinual reflexivity of consciousness and experience. More important to his phi-losophy of language and communication is his dictum, “we are condemned tomeaning” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962, p. xix). This is the exemplification of the in-herent existential conditions posed by language in our struggle to make sense of theWorld. Meaning is a derivative of the continual combinatory acts of expression andperception and is what both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty called a “synthesis of tran-sition” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, p. 15).

The Results: Self–Other Relationships

To begin to understand exactly how we structure our perceived world, how wecome to future possibilities of meanings or interpretations of the world,Merleau-Ponty said we employ, “a process similar to that of an archaeologist”(1964a, p. 5). In short, we must examine the results manifest by the contiguity ofconsciousness and experience. These results, for Merleau-Ponty, are infused withinSelf–Other relationships. He testified (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, p. 3), after all, thathis work requires that he “… show how communication with others and thought,take up and go beyond the realm of perception… ” from which induction and de-duction verification typically operate. Here, he advocated a procedure that re-quires a radical reflection on the Self–Other relationship, a reduction of conscious-ness to essential structures that reveal judgments or choices of contexts asboundary-setting criteria for knowing this salient relationship. Again, drawingfrom Peircian terminology in regard to abduction, we can assert that it is preciselythe interrelationship between Self and Other (comparison of Self-same, Other-dif-ferent) that fosters acknowledgement of the Self, that is, the result of the contigu-ous relationship between awareness and experience of that awareness. At thispoint in his analysis, we arrive at a definition of the Other (alterity) in relationshipto the Self as the existential condition of being human. As representative of asynchronic moment in time (one particular instance of speaking and writing), wecan reach an understanding of the Other in relation to the Self as an Other Beingwho also “takes” perceptually from the world (capta) and expresses a Self. It is atthis juncture in his essay that he incorporates Husserl’s notions of immanence andtranscendence as a way of explicating this dialectical phenomenon. As he explainselsewhere, we can experience an event (perceive it) as a transcendence of our ownintentions of subjectivity. We can also experience an event (express it) as an imma-nence of our own subjectivity expressing itself (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962).


The meanings we arrive at on reading a given text are the result of choice makingbetween alternatives, both at the individual level and as re-inscriptions of societalcodes and prior performances (langue). Merleau-Ponty understood, as Jakobson(1990, p. 93) later qualified, that parole is not merely the individualized event ofspeakingandreading inexclusionof the social codesused for interpretation. Instead,parole is, foremost, a bilateral, interpersonal phenomenon. Created between au-thor–reader is thecommunicative space thatpossibilizesboth inscriptionsandtrans-gressions of langue.12 Merleau-Ponty awards language an ontological status on thebasis of this dynamic capability. He refers to language as “thought’s body.” The move-ment of thought is accomplished through the movement of language in speech. Byvarying the modality of language (through variations of experiences and conscious-ness), we can be “enticed” to meaning (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, p. 8). For him, wemust also appreciate the art of expression, the signifying system offered through lan-guage as revelatory of our cultural heritage and future tendencies. We are able,throughour intersubjectiveexistence, tocometoconscious recognitionofour same-ness and difference as cultural participants.

The Case: Our World As Aesthetic Logos

This brings me to the final phase of his essay interpreted as an artifact of experi-ence, that is, his “case.” At this point, our attention is directed to a description ofthe Self–Other dialectic in its relationship to the World. Merleau-Ponty classified itas, “the general problem of human interrelations…the exchange not only ofthoughts but of all types of values, the co-existence of men within a culture and,beyond it, with a single history” (1964a, p. 9). Foremost, history is not a disembod-ied entity or “external power” to Merleau-Ponty. Instead, history is a successive de-velopment of thought (discourse) which becomes the symbol in a culture of what itmeans to be humane. An axiological framework is detailed as valence systems arecontinually generated and modified by society. Rationality is thereby produced, butnot one that is disembodied from consciousness and experience.

According to Merleau-Ponty, our Worlds are experienced as examples or casesof a preexistent logos. We perceive the World as given (data), as an objectificationseparate from ourselves, as a gestalt. Yet, we need to recognize that the logos or ex-ternal speech (either written or spoken) is nothing more than a reflection of ourculture’s thinking or mythos. The world appears transcendent to us, but it isthrough our acts of expression that it reflects immanence. His final assertion em-phasizes the necessity for philosophy to look not to nature and reason to discoverwhat it means to be humane, but to look to the experiential body at the moment ofrepresentation to discover the seeds of an ontology. Nature and reason, the bodyand the mind, intermingle at the “…experienced moment, the moment when an

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12Texts so conceptualized become rhetorical art as opposed to mere rhetorical artifacts.

existence becomes aware of itself, grasps itself, and expresses its own meaning”(Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, p. 11).

As expressed in his “Unpublished Text,” his existential phenomenology expli-cates how the incarnate mind is the preeminent condition of the Lebenswelt (lifeworld). He is important to the study of rhetoric and communication because of hiscontributions to the further understanding of not only the primacy of embodiedperception, but also for the primacy he affords language and speech as “thought’sbody.” In this way, he highlights the contributions both expression and perceptionmake in manifesting discourse as rhetorical gesture. As described by RichardLanigan (1984, p. 2), “he … concentrates on the speaking [writing] person as thekey to the philosophical and semiotic explication of communication.”

To summarize the discussion of his text as an artifact of experience (at themicrolevel of my analysis), Merleau-Ponty takes us through a semiotic phenomen-ology of the Lebenswelt. Employing an abductive logic to argue his rhetorical case,he clarifies how the act of consciousness or the intentionality of the body-subjectstructures experience on the individual level as well as on the intersubjective level,the Weltanschauung (culture). Inherent in consciousness and experience as livedare the ambiguous dialectical pairings of the following: (a) perception and expres-sion, (b) immanence and transcendence, (c) presence and absence, and (d) paroleparlante and parole parlee as reciprocal and reflexive, rhetorical acts. Such is our ex-istence actualized at the boundary between person and sign.

THE “UNPUBLISHED TEXT” AS AN ARTIFACTOF CONSCIOUSNESS: THE RESULT

We are now in a position to situate this particular discourse on a macrolevel ofanalysis that is more conceptually abstract. In other words, we can now investigatethe published text in its represented form (parole parlee-speech spoken) as an objectof perception by a community of interpreters, constituting a cultural consciousnessthat is absent to the text’s original expression. As an artifact of cultural conscious-ness, the text is perceived from the point of view a “body” of interpreters mighttake, that is, as a text lived.13 Presently situated within what is considered by manyto be postmodern discourse (which is, of course, confined to its own “stylized” per-ceptions of the World that resist modernist notions,) the text is taken up as a rhe-torical expression concerning the possibility for “authentic” Being. As an expres-sion, overall it constitutes a particular code condition concerning authenticexistence (understood semiotically) that is subject to de-coding.

As a code condition, his text introduces a positive ambiguity inherent in dis-course. It does this when we question its relevance to our present intersubjective un-


13Although now at the macrolevel, this perspective announces a comparison between his past and

his future orientations.

derstanding of the rhetorical or communicative process. It does this when we seekfurther evidence of its applicability within the present “body of knowledge” we callphilosophy. And, because our existential being (ek-stasis) is inherently ambiguous,we must determine within postmodernity new boundary conditions for what itmeans to be an authentic being in a World replete with fragmentation, multiplicity,and plurality. No longer are we able to appeal to an objectivist illusion of authenticitythat accepts its existence as an a priori static category. Instead, a new perspective onauthentic existence is warranted; one that takes into account, as he outlines, the am-biguity of lived experience as a phenomenological semiotic instantiation.

In reflecting on Merleau-Ponty’s published text as an artifact of cultural con-sciousness, we begin to ask how we come to understand this particular text authen-tically through our synthesizing act of intending its meaning. Understanding thereversible, reciprocal, and reflexive relation between Merleau-Ponty’s expressionand our perception, how do we account for the ambiguous interrelationships ofSelf-Other-World and arrive at coherent meaning? Merleau-Ponty’s analogue logicadvises us that we need to accept the positive ambiguity the text may entail as wesituate it within postmodern discourse. And, he also wants a reader to realize thatbeing “open” to the ambiguity allows for the possibility of an authentic, yet “styl-ized” way of being and relating to the text; in the same manner in which he relatesstylistically to his life’s work and attempts to remain open to its future entailments.The key issue, therefore, is how we “stylize” our existence within cultural con-sciousness. The following is offered in explanation.

As previously mentioned, it is by our acts of intending (understood phenom-enologically) that we structure consciousness, form experience, and stylize ouruniverse through discourse and action. Another way of understandingMerleau-Ponty’s perspective regarding the stylizing of being is through his conceptof “aesthetic logos.”14 In brief, he asserts, of course, the primacy of perceptual expe-rience; but he argues for a different conceptualization of perception than is tradi-tionally accepted. He wants us to be aware that perception is more than a meregathering of sense data. Perception, rightly conceived, is inherently axiological, im-bued with an aesthetic as we stylize our World. Perception is primary, precedingeven linguistic activity. Consequently, by the time we reach awareness at the levelof signification (semiotically speaking), the logos is aesthetically constituted.Hence, perception is aesthetically “authentic” because of its primordial, creative,and existential characteristics. Perception “speaks” to us aesthetically and awakensus to a World that we constitute. This World is complete with its cultural richness(distinctiveness) and redundancy (sameness) as sign functions. At its roots, thephenomenon of perception is, therefore, communicatively based.

Linguist and semiotician Roman Jakobson also referred to this process of cou-pling consciousness and experience at the sign in his model of communication

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14It is in this concept that his phenomenological semiotics is most apparent.

(1960, pp. 350–377). He labeled it the poetic function of language in communication.To explain, Jakobson theorized that all communication entails the poetic functionof language and discourse which is correlated to the element known as the “mes-sage.”15 Conceptualized as the dialectical movement between selection of linguis-tic units (the paradigmatic axis of language) and combination of linguistic units(the syntagmatic axis of language), the poetic function reveals the creative natureof language and discourse (see Holenstein, 1974/1977). Through the continualcoding process of selection and combination, we come to recognize the “redun-dancy features” signified in language which allow for intersubjective understandingof a code. And yet, we also recognize, through the free play of signifiers, what hetermed distinctive features, which operate metaphorically and allow for theintersubjective understanding of messages. Hence, the potential creativity of lan-guage and discourse are possibilized through this semiotic dialectic that operatesrhetorically. Understanding Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the aesthetic logos (usingJakobson’s model of communication) helps us to acknowledge the inherent ambig-uous relationship between Self and World as phenomenologically and semioticallyconceived. We necessarily live “in,” that is, embody, multiple systems of significa-tion that create conditions of cultural possibility and constraint. Realized as both afreedom and a constraint, our linguisticality influences our conscious experienceand the dialectic of expressive and perceptive discourse as rhetorical performance.Jakobson’s model emphasizes the importance Merleau-Ponty gives to the semioticrealm. As a semiotic process that is phenomenologically conceived, we begin tocapture the meaning his text presents as an artifact of cultural consciousness.Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological semiotics explicates how we come to embodyyet stylize cultural consciousness; how, in other words, a plurality of meanings in-digenous to postmodernity are constituted, distributed, and reconstituted.

THE ETRE AU MONDE OF MERLEAU-PONTY’SPHILOSOPHY: THE CASE

(The Authenticity in Ambiguity)

Read as both a unique artifact of experience and consciousness, his text, like alltexts, represents an opportunity for us to lend an aesthetically-derived logos (inter-pretation) that is authentically constituted. In this case, we understand the dialec-tic operating between his expression and our perception where the problem of“truth” and the possibility for authenticity surface. This truth is cast in a differentlight, however, from one grounded in universalities such as those professed byPlato. Rather, the essence of truth and knowledge is formed through the under-standing of conscious experience and the experience of consciousness as an


15Poetry, per se, reveals this function in its extreme manifestation.

intersubjective process. For Merleau-Ponty, intersubjectivity is “knowledge mak-ing” and is only accomplished through the interplay of both perception and expres-sion as reflexive embodied acts of speaking-rhetorical subjects. As he explained,“knowledge and communication sublimate rather than suppress our incarnation,and the characteristic operation of the mind is in the movement by which werecapture our corporeal existence and use it to symbolize instead of merely to coex-ist” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, p. 7). Similarly, he wants us to be aware of the trans-formative characteristics inherent within this dialectic that foster creative oppor-tunities for change and reconfiguration of meaning as we are “called,” rhetoricallyto respond to the World.

Most assuredly, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy serves as a reminder of the ambigu-ous paradox in which we continually live as speaking-rhetorical subjects. Althoughhe argued for the primacy of perception, he admonished us not to reify perception.As a unifying act of Self-Other-World, perception so conceived would result ina “bad ambiguity” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, p. 11), that is, life lived as a“readerly-text” (Barthes, 1970/1974, p. 4) produced by evidentiary “factums”which would lead to relativism. This is merely a life lived within a predeterminedweb of representational meaning, similar to what Heidegger (1926/1962) describedas “everydayness.” Instead, he asserted the need for a “good ambiguity”(Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, p. 11) by recognizing the salient function of expression as aself-evidentiary component of this dialectic. In expression, we find a “spontaneity”that offers the possibility of authenticity, that is, the possibility of speaking and lis-tening imaginatively, poetically, yet with integrity. This functions to create a lifelived as a “writerly text” (Barthes, 1970/1974, p. 5). This type of text relies notsolely on representational modes but also “self-signifies” (Lanigan, 1984, p. 14).Foremost it signifies a life that requires the recognition and participation of theOther for its meaningful semiotic completion. It is within the existential ambiguitycomprised of such a “poetry of human relations” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, p. 9) thatwe find the conditions from which authenticity and ethical communication mightarise. The premise for ethics and authenticity inheres within an aesthetic gestaltthat fills us with a “wonder” toward the world. As he described it (Merleau-Ponty,1964a, p. 11), “To establish this wonder would be metaphysics itself and would atthe same time give us the principle of an ethics.”

For me to produce an authentic interpretation of his now published, “Unpub-lished Text,” as an account of his life’s work, I must remember to be open to fur-ther reflection. I must keep him positioned as “an-Other,” that is, the sign of per-son-text, that will advance my attempts to integrate the textual form andsubstance of his work. In my reading, I must, in other words, attempt to free“…the meaning in the thing [text] by rendering present an ‘insight’ which freesthe meaning captive in the thing” (Lanigan, 1984, p. 14). As Merleau-Ponty’swords remind us, we should “…not define a philosopher’s thought solely in termsof what he had achieved. We should have to take account of what until the veryend he was struggling to bring to reflection” (1953/1963, p. 182). Arguing

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against such a metaphysical closure of a text-person, Merleau-Ponty’s work ischaracteristically postmodern.

We find that an authenticity of speaking is possible when we reconfiguremeaning within a system of signs, thus reflecting primordial existential meaning(Lanigan, 1984). For Merleau-Ponty, we are living an authentic existence whenwe are free to “integrate” fully our consciousness and experience of theSelf-Other-World relationship as rhetorical phenomenological acts of signification.It is only through an acknowledgement of the inherent ambiguity of lived experi-ence that is continually bound by open-ended signifying systems, that we canpossibilize an “authentic” voice, an authentic way of Being-in-the-World as a com-municating subjectivity. An authentic life is one that mirrors the “style” of an au-thentic text, a text that integrates both form and content into an aesthetic wholethat transverses time and space while it self-signifies. The authentic voice rings“true” in a text or discourse in the fleeting moment(s) when an-Other’s perceptionbecomes my expression and vice versa; when the instances of “aesthetic consum-mation” (Bakhtin, 1979/1990) of embodied discourse between Self and Other areactualized as sociocultural performances. As Merleau-Ponty articulated it, my inte-gration or authenticity of Being is interdependent with an-Other’s embodied, cul-tural signification of me. When we become the sign of a unique person to or foreach Other, then we make authentic being possible. We begin to understand au-thenticity not merely as a motivation to separate ourselves from “traditions andbackdrops of significance,” (Anton, 2001, p. 7) that detach us from the “theyness”of everyday life, as in Heidegger’s treatment. Instead of accepting Heidegger’s“…dubious vision of communal life,” (Smith, 2003, p. 99), we come to appreciatefully the semiotic or communicative events of everyday life that instantiate thenecessary boundary condition from which we may authentically speak. We see thatour social “engagement” with the sign of the Other is the very ground from whichwe might stylize an authentic existence and from which our competency as authen-tic beings is ultimately judged. The “reality” of the Self-Other-World relationship isthat it always contains the possibilities for authentic existence as a semiology andphenomenology of discursive functions activated at the boundary of person and“Sign.” Said differently, with Merleau-Ponty, we understand that ambiguity is aninherent property of language and existence whereas authenticity is an inherentphenomenological capacity in discourse to speak and listen at that boundary with“insight.”

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language and semiotics of discourse providesan insightful ground from which to appreciate the boundary condition establishedby the sign of person and the person that is signed as a reflection of humansymbolicity and corporeal existence. Like other postmodern thinkers, especially


hermeneutic and existential phenomenologists, Merleau-Ponty offers us anothermode of inquiry into the temporality and corporeality of human existence,“…where deviation from one’s univocal track [of inquiry] leads not to disavowalbut to the exploration of novelty and the mature encounter with Otherness” asrhetorical art (Levine, 1985, p. 141). Addressing both the ambiguities of languageand thought (consciousness) and the ambiguities of life (embodied experience), his“Unpublished Text” synthesizes both and interprets them, foremost, as communi-cative praxis. As existential horizons that shape corporeal existence, he wants us toappreciate that both consciousness and experience are always perceived and ex-pressed indirectly and incompletely, and consequently, enhance the relative, con-tingent, and ambiguous contours of life. Consequently, for him, any “flight fromambiguity,” (Levine, 1985) represents a desire to escape the very nature of humanexistence itself and our capacities as communicative beings. As he demonstratesthe performance of textual interpretation by interpreting the “body” of his life’swork, he also foregrounds a positive, “good” ambiguity (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, p.11) that is produced by the dialectical movement between pursuing evidence in atext (construed as representational) and being “open” to further questioning (ourability to self-signify). Or, as he suggested, it is “the movement which leads backwithout ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge”(Merleau-Ponty, 1953/1963, p. 5). This movement, whether interpreting any textor an-Other as a text or Sign, reveals the “mystery of the world and of reason”(Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962, p. xxi). Consequently, he asserted that, “…among thegreat it [ambiguity] becomes a theme; it contributes to establishing certitudesrather than menacing them” (Merleau-Ponty, 1953/1963, p. 5). He thematizes astructural ambiguity that is inherent in the analogue of conscious experience andthe experience of consciousness by explicating the dialectical relation of expressionand perception manifest in the body as lived. He guards “…against the separationof a phenomenology of speaking from a semiotics of meaning” (Schrag, 1997, p.16). Merleau-Ponty insightfully observed the following: “I know myself only in myinherence in time and in the world, that is, I know myself only in ambiguity”(1945/1962, p. 345).

With Merleau-Ponty, we come to understand that our conditions of ambiguityactually problematize and yet make possible the authentic Being in speech and dis-course. Through our acts of self-signification or acts that seek to disrupt thetaken-for-grantedness or mere referential aspects of everyday life, we instantiatethe phenomenal ground from which authenticity may emerge and possibilize ethi-cal conditions for speaking and listening (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a). He admonishesus to appeal neither to an interior consciousness nor to an exterior experience inour attempts to authentically understand, interpret, and speak a World. We mustnot, in other words, equate perception and expression (speech) only with its“sedimented” characteristics (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962, p. 190), that is, with itsability to represent or recollect “…a pre-established sign” (Merleau-Ponty,1945/1962, p. 184). At times, when exigencies necessitate a fitting or ethical re-

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sponse, we would, unfortunately, only re-instantiate a preexistent ethic, that is, an“ethical rhetoric,” where an “ethic as value choice predicates diction (Lanigan,1988, p. 4, author’s italics). As a response to the Other as person that is signed, eth-ical rhetoric forecloses discursive choice, possibilities, and the use of abductivelogic, and consequently, allows for the full mediation of consciousness by culture(Lanigan, 1992). Such a prescribed stance toward the Other imposes a distan-tiation from the immediacy of interpersonal engagement. Ethics, so construed, ismerely “instrumentalized or codified” (Smith, 2003, p. 101) and leads to the pro-duction of more discourses framed as ethical.

In attempting authentic understanding and communication, we must, instead,recognize the body-subject as the source of an incarnate, aesthetic logos institutedby means of an abductive logic. As a source, the body-subject provides the condi-tions of possibility for communicative praxis to be accomplished as an art. In thisway, we might actualize “authentic speech,” that is, speech that is “…primordial,creative, and expressive of existential meaning…” (Lanigan, 1984, p. 14). Such anorientation to the Other as sign instantiates a fitting or ethical response as a “rhe-torical ethic,” that is, “…rhetoric as speaking [that] refers to ethics as human val-ues” (Lanigan, 1988, p. 4). As a response to the sign of the Other, a rhetorical ethicis one that emerges from within the discourse and is self-signifying of the unique re-lationship so presented. In this case, such a stance toward the Other facilitates anintegration that possibilizes an ethic that is rhetorically constituted authentically.It allows for the full mediation of cultural experience by consciousness (Lanigan,1992), and subsequently, enables what Smith (2003) described as a “phroneticethos.” That is, it enables a rhetorical ethic understood as a “movement of disclo-sure…that strives to inhabit the everyday in a way that enables the intensificationof the questionable-ness, uncanniness, open-ness…alterity, and, it is hoped, possi-bilities for things to become otherwise” (Smith, 2003, p. 101, my italics). It is anethical stance that is rhetorically constituted through the reflexive, reciprocal, andreversible acts of expression and perception realized within the ambiguous tensionthat comprises human thought and action.

As demonstrated here, authentic existence is best reconceptualized withinthe parameters of a semiology that appreciates both its sociocultural situatednessand capacity for originary sign action. Although Heidegger’s authentic Being isactualized through our “resoluteness” to our finitude (Zimmerman, 1981),Merleau-Ponty’s authentic Being struggles against the apparent finitude of theSign. What Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy reveals, however, is that, ironically, theauthentic Being also needs the function of signs to instantiate authenticity. Con-cerning the nature and scope of authentic existence from a semiotic phenom-enological perspective, I believe Merleau-Ponty would concur with Taylor(1991), who specified that

…authenticity (A) involves (i) creation and construction as well as discovery, (ii)originality, and frequently (iii) opposition to the rules of society and even potentially


to what we recognize as morality. But it is also true…that it (B) requires (i) opennessto horizons of significance (for otherwise the creation loses the background that cansave it from insignificance) and (ii) a self-definition in dialogue. That these demandsmay be in tension has to be allowed. (p. 66)

In consequence, Merleau-Ponty believes that our etre au monde (presence-in-theworld) involves risk and ambiguity, but this existential boundary condition neces-sarily implicates us in the discourse of Others and makes authentic communicationpossible. For him, life must remain an ambiguous “open text,” lived and yet to belived, “published and unpublished.” The irony of such an existence testifies to thefact that “the human subject, the person, [is] an ontological instance of the prac-tice of discourse,” (Lanigan, 1992, p. 110). To be authentic is to acknowledge andappreciate that “instance” for its potential to Self and Others as rhetorical beingsand to recognize that relationship is integral to the process of constituting a mean-ingful authentic existence.

Contrary to the allegation that “…phenomenology does not seem to fit with thecurrents of contemporary philosophy in general, nor with the emergent issues thatface philosophers today,” (Ormiston, 1986/1991, p. 5), Merleau-Ponty’s phenom-enological semiotics proves highly relevant to our postmodern theorizing regardingrhetoric and the philosophy of communication. Few nowadays would disputeLyotard’s (1979/1991) contention that the postmodern condition has witnessedthe substitution of “metanarratives” of culture and society with more “petite” onesthat derive their legitimacy through localized determinations. Merleau-Ponty’sphilosophy explicates how such conditions of postmodernity are created as an“amalgam of discourse and action” (Schrag, 1986). Furthermore, through his the-ory of ambiguity as existentially and semiotically conceived, he accounts for thecontingent, unstable nature of our “social constructions,” (Berger & Luckmann,1967) as “stylized” presentations of conscious experience and the experience ofconsciousness understood as The Prose of the World (Merleau-Ponty, 1968/1973). Ibelieve the work he projected for himself in the future was aimed at explicating thisvery phenomenon. As he stated, “…I shall elaborate the category of prose beyondthe confines of literature to give it a sociological meaning” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a,p. 9). Hence, for Merleau-Ponty, petite narratives, the multiplicity of meanings,and the plurality of language games, indigenous to postmodernity, are natural con-ditions of being human in a world with Others, conditions that have been height-ened by our global community. In our efforts to create and substantiate a meaning-ful existence with Others, he wants us to appreciate our capacity for an abductivelogic when interacting with Self and Others that is truly “generative” in scope as wecome to “grasp” the World.

Additionally, as a postmodern philosopher (Madison, 1988), Merleau-Pontyrecognizes the inherent irony of contemporary life. As he was proposing just priorto his untimely death, we actually have in postmodern life, with its theoretical andpractical fragmentation and plurality of being, an increased capacity for authentic-

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ity. For, when we truly recognize the alterity or “otherness” of the many Others insociety (persons, texts, events), our acknowledgement of this Otherness sets inmotion the communicative and rhetorical dialectic, explicated herein. Under suchconditions, we have an increased possibility to affirm the presence of Others astruly “distinct” or “different” and to appreciate that difference for what it portends.This Being-in-relation with a “distinct” Other possibilizes an affirmation of bothSelf and Other. In that affirmation we make possible a “spontaneity” that “stylizes”or expresses an existence from which authenticity may emerge. For him, this is acondition of “good ambiguity” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, p. 11). So the more we per-ceive “difference” between Self and Other, the more authentic we may possibly be-come.

On the other hand, in its postmodern state of fragmentation and multiplicity,everyday life may also be perceived as a repetition of difference that becomesmerely “more of the same.” This produces a presencing of many Others (persons,texts, events) as a redundancy of cultural consciousness. When perceived and in-terpreted as a mere cultural redundancy, we struggle to “stylize” a Self not by af-firming the Other but by negating the Other, perceived as really the “same” (Porter& Catt, 1993). As Taylor (1991) explained, this notion of authenticity provesappealing to the normalizing aspects of typical cultural experience. In this light,authenticity comes to signify an individual’s right within society to pursueself-fulfillment, self-realization, or personal development, and to see this as a natu-ral “calling” to distinguish oneself. Taylor (1991) theorized that such a perspectivehas produced a “culture of authenticity,” complete with its “boosters” and knock-ers.“16 Such a culture is viewed as egoistic in nature. From this perspective, the Selfis theorized in isolation from Others. It should come as no surprise that, under suchconditions, we see one another as self-serving and indulgent. For Merleau-Ponty,under these circumstances, we produce a condition of “bad ambiguity” (1964a, p.11). That is, the more we perceive cultural “sameness,” the more inauthentic wemay actually become.

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical project offers promise in understanding how aSelf might respond to the World of Others authentically. His philosophy of lan-guage and discourse provides us a means by which to appreciate a notion of au-thenticity that resides within the ambiguous dialectic between personal conscious-ness and sociocultural experience. His philosophy offers, in other words, anontology of being humanely authentic that recognizes a notion of authenticity thataligns with originality, poetic and artistic accomplishment as communicative


16At issue in this debate is whether such a culture is “ethical” because it seems to promote a narcis-

sistic individualism that appears to be self-serving, and, in the end, perhaps amoral. Does this notion of

authenticity lead us, in other words, “… into degraded, absurd, or trivialized modes of existence…”

(Anton, 2001, p. 4), as the knockers claim? Or, does it provide its members with possible freedoms from

the tyranny of sociopolitical institutions that overdetermine personal experience, as the boosters would

have it?

praxis. And, it provides a notion of authenticity that acknowledges its potentialityfrom within relational or social performances (acts of parole). Unlike theoreticalspeculations that place the beginnings of postmodernity in the “…various back-lashes against phenomenology (Madison, 1988, p. xi, my italics), I concur withMadison’s claim regarding the beneficial implications of Merleau-Ponty’s legacy toour appreciation of postmodern life. As Madison (1988) stated

In their rush to bury their philosophical progenitor and to liquidate his[Merleau-Ponty’s] intellectual estate, these writers [poststructuralists, in particular]turned a conscientiously blind eye to the decisive contribution that Merleau-Pontyhad made toward dissolving the epistemological-metaphysical project…Merleau-Ponty himself was simply radicalizing a beginning [Husserl’s project] thathad already been made. (p. xi)

In his “Unpublished Text,” Merleau-Ponty depicts the inescapable ironic tensionbetween the semiotic and phenomenological elements of our existence from whichour potentiality as authentic beings might arise. By reading his “Unpublished Text”as communicative praxis, we come to appreciate his ontology of being authentic asa pragmatic abductive process, imbued with a logic that actualizes for each one ofus the possibility of real life lived as The Prose of the World (Merleau-Ponty,1968/1973).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An earlier version of this article was presented at the International Communica-tion Association. The current version was presented at the 2004 National Com-munication Association Conference in Chicago.

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