Merleau Ponty comes closer to the truth of language

Code and the pentecostal condition by Rich on Fri 17 Nov 2006 10:53 AM PST Permanent Link (since any attempt at a cross-epochal, hermeneutics founded upon The Future Poetry must begin with a consideration of language, so here again is chapter 1) Disappearances
chapter 1 (code and the pentecostal condition) by Richard Carlson

In contrast to Derrida who argues that both oral and written language are the same Abrams argues: “Derrida does not notice some of the most glaring differences between alphabetic and non-alphabetic modes of thought differences that make themselves evident in our experience to the animate earth. While Derrida assimilates all language to writing (l'ecriture) my approach has been largely the reverse, to show all discourse, even written discourse such as this is implicitly sensorial and bodily, and hence remains bound like a sensing world that is never exclusively human. (Abram 1987 p 289)

Abram claims phenomenologist Merleau Ponty comes closer to the truth of language and phenomena as he explored the mystery between the rules of language la langue and its creative expression la parole. In the following passage he describes and how Merleau Ponty's perspective diverges from Saussure and Derrida.

“Sassure's distinction between the structure of language and the activity of speech is ultimately under mind by Merleau-Ponty who blended the two dimensions (langua, parole) back together into a single ever evolving matrix. While individual speech acts are surely guided by the structural lattice of language, the lattice is nothing other than a sedimented result of previous acts of speech, and will itself be altered by the very activity it now guides. Language is not a fixed or ideal form but an evolving medium we collectively inhabit, a vast topological matrix in which speaking bodies are generative sites, vortices where the matrix itself is continually being spun out of the silence of sensorial experience.

What Merleau Ponty retains from Saussure is his notion of any language as an interdependent, web like system of relations. But since our expressive bodies are for Merleau Ponty necessary parts of this system -since the web of language is for him a carnal medium woven from the depths of our perceptual world that is relational and web like in character, and hence that the organic , interconnected matrix of sensorial reality itself. Ultimately it is not human language that is primary , but rather the sensuous , perceptual life-world, whose wild, participatory logic ramifies itself in language”.. (Abram 1997 p84)