Expression and Expressiveness according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty

1 Introduction

Maurice Merleau-Ponty considers the issue of subjective expression with regard to individual activity, but also with regard to receptivity. He understands human subjective expression very broadly as all corporeal and mental activities of the human being – the embodied and incarnated subject (sujet incarné), particularly its “significant gestures” (gestes signifiants) – i.e. corporeal and linguistic gestures. According to Merleau-Ponty, receptivity turns out to be a certain form of expressiveness, as he defines receptivity (partly after Edmund Husserl) as a certain form of activity of the subject in its relation towards the world and Others by means of gestures (actively and reactively). One can say that Merleau-Ponty considers the perceptive and receptive subject as a causal, performative subject.

In this article, I analyse the broad concept of expression, proposed by Merleau-Ponty, primarily in the Phenomenology of Perception (originally published in French, 1945). I ask a detailed question about the status of expression with regard to the issue of receptivity and passivity^[1] of the existing and cognising subject (sujet existant et connaissant). I make an attempt to define not only the status of expression, but also the status of expressiveness – a specific category in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy that allows us to consider the human being as a performative being, even when it is not an active being.

2 Expression and Expressiveness

It would be necessary to consider expressiveness in connection with the category of expression and the expressive function of transmissions of culture (as elements of communication – Roman Jakobson). The category of expressiveness appears in literature concerning aesthetics and is combined with the category of style in general or individual style. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (and Roland Barthes) discussed the style of particular artists. However, it is an epistemological category at the same time. One can easily notice that it is a category of colloquial thinking and colloquial language, the meaning of which is not specified clearly enough. The category of expressiveness is used for the characteristics of various representations – cultural representations, opinions of particular persons, but also communicated information that makes a claim to objectivity. It is the combination of what is subjective and what is objective that would make the category of expressiveness different from the category of expression – the expression of subjectivity. This is why Roland Barthes recognises in photography as punctum not so much what is expressive as what is perceptually distinct, sharply outlined – honest towards the photographed object and, at the same time, an honest relationship between the subject and the object of perception.

It is easy to notice that the category of expressiveness can be found in tradition as the term “expressis verbis”; this term serves as a point of reference for considerations presented in the text. However, the point of reference for considerations on expressiveness should be the issue of expression. A specific concept of expression considered with respect to expressivity,^[2] as bodily but also verbal expression in the form of poetic speech, or literary speech in general, was proposed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty’s semiotic and aesthetic concept serves as a very good example of the grasp of expression that is similar to the category of “expressiveness” – a category that is present in common thinking, but has not been problematised in research. Merleau-Ponty reformulated not only what is expressive, but also what is impressive – the issues of reception, which he understood also as a certain creative and productive process (as a certain cognitive construction referring to phenomenology, but also to the theory of Gestalt).

The issue of expressiveness – expressivity contained in a verbal or visual representation (also in personal images constructed for the media) – is linked to the topics of authorship of the work and the definition of the creator’s subjectivity, the indication of its subjective features. Theses from the second half of the 1960s characterised this moment in culture and the works created during that period as a time of the end of authorship, subjectivity, and previous anthropology. In their works from the late 1960s, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault wrote about these conceptual changes. Lyotard devotes particularly much attention to differentiated conceptions of expression and points, among others, to Merleau-Ponty as a thinker who spoke out in the debate on the authorship of a work, the subjectivity of the creator, and modern anthropology.

3 Expressive Gestures of Body

Maurice Merleau-Ponty does not limit the concept of language and speech to spoken language, but comprehends it in the context of the body, perception, and bodily expression. “For speech is the vehicle of our movement toward truth, as the body is the vehicle of our being in the world.”^[3] Expression, like perception, is subsumed within the totality of experience. The body’s gestures and facial expressions cannot be captured as a means of expressing an implicit intention, the source of which would be consciousness. The body, in its reactions to impulses from the world, inscribes itself, as it were, in the content drawn from the world. At the same time, behaviour as a certain holistic reaction, together with gestures, the “speech” of the body, has a certain meaning for me and for the Other, because behaviour treats the cognitive relationship between the subject and the object as a whole, with an indication of mutual conditions.

Perception is, at the same time, entangled in relations of sense, signification, and meaning.

Already when I name the perceived or when I recognize it as a chair or tree, I substitute the subsumption under a concept for the experience of a fleeting reality; even when I pronounce the word ‘this,’ I already relate a singular and lived existence to the essence of lived existence. But these acts of expression or reflection intend an original text which cannot be deprived of meaning. The signification which I find in a sensible whole was already adherent in it. When I ‘see’ a triangle, my experience would be very poorly described by saying that I conceive or comprehend the triangle with respect to certain sensible givens. The signification is embodied^[4]

wrote Merleau-Ponty in his early (1942) book La Structure du Comportement, and the theses about the embodiment of meaning were developed in subsequent works. Merleau-Ponty captures individual cognition and self-cognition as entangled in the understanding of the totality of the individual’s experiences together with the “lived body,” marked by the physiological, but also the body framed in the context of tradition, embedded in culture and in history. As he writes in the Phenomenology of Perception, “the thinking subject must have its basis in the subject incarnate. The phonetic ‘gesture’ brings about, both for the speaking subject and for his hearers, a certain structural co-ordination of experience, a certain modulation of existence, exactly as a pattern of my bodily behaviour endows the objects around me with a certain significance both for me and for others.”^[5]

It can, therefore, be said that Merleau-Ponty conceives of the world as a site of experience, thanks to which the subjective finds itself. This is why Merleau-Ponty defines the subject as a “project of the world”:

We do not say that the notion of the world is inseparable from that of the subject, or that the subject thinks himself inseparable from the idea of his body and the idea of the world; for, if it were a matter of no more than a conceived relationship, it would ipso facto leave the absolute independence of the subject as thinker intact, and the subject would not be in a situation. If the subject is in a situation, even if he is no more than a possibility of situations, this is because he forces his ipseity into reality only by actually being a body, and entering the world through that body.^[6]

At the same time, this is a clarification of the “embodied” subject – the conception of the subject proposed by Merleau-Ponty.

Expression, like perception,^[7] presupposes being in the world as a certain co-presence, and so the expressive gesture is a certain communicative fact directed towards the world, towards Others, who are assumed by the intention of expression and gesture as a communicated message. According to Merleau-Ponty, it is the body as directly participating in the world – perceived and perceiving – that has the ability to grasp and bestow sense. It is at the same time the intentional ability to transcend towards the Other, to transcend past experiences framed by one’s own and the community’s history.

In the dialectical relationship between the subject-body and the world, mediated by experience, the gesture of individual expression – bodily expression, but also verbal expression – is important as a possibility of the individual’s influence, of confirming subjectivity in the area of intersubjectivity, including the social and cultural. Dialectics is also connected with transcending the existing situation in acts of expression and – as a process – is entangled in history and unfinished, because the perspective towards the future is open.

Merleau-Ponty recognises art as a legitimate source of such an experience, which is both an individual’s adjudication of himself and of the world, but also a specific sensation. In his later texts devoted to art, including L’oeil et l’esprit (published in 1961), Merleau-Ponty cites the example of the art of painting, which he considers to be a source of legitimate knowledge concerning individual experience in general and the body’s connections with the world. This knowledge would be given exactly through the experience of creating a work of art (the painting gesture) and the receptive intercourse with the art of painting.

4 Expressive Gestures of Language

According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it is particularly language-speech, alongside other sign systems (e.g. bodily gestures embedded in cultural systems of communication – signs and meanings) that constitute the possibility of (1) representing a given previously sense (this is “empirical language”), but also (2) expressing this sense – the disclosure or manifestation of the sense in a creative act, for example, in poetic speech (this is “transcendental or authentic speech”^[8] as a condition of empirical – everyday language, and its relation to consciousness).

In the texts of the volume The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty wrote about the “corporeality of the body,” but also about the “corporeality of language.”^[9] The French philosopher notes there that what he calls “the silent cogito” is “impossible,” because all thinking, but also consciousness, requires words, language,^[10] and he juxtaposes the “tacit Cogito,”^[11] silent, and the “cogito langagier,” linguistic.^[12] It must be stressed that Merleau-Ponty assumes, like the structuralists, that language is not an instrument of thought and of communicating thought, but it is a certain condition for thinking, that we always think in a certain language,^[13] which he particularly emphasises in his late works. However, in the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty describes a certain primordiality of experiences and lived experiences in relation to what is linguistic, and therefore a primordiality of what is pre-predicative. It can also be said that Merleau-Ponty recognises a certain pre-priority of the sensory intention and along with it – of the bodily gesture and even of the “emotional gesticulation,”^[14] the “emotional pantomime”^[15] as a certain reaction to the semantic intention and the gesture of speech (e.g. the “verbal gesticulation” of a human being^[16]).

Merleau-Ponty indicates the existential meaning, not explicitly presented, as something found in the conceptual meaning of words, pertaining to existence itself. It would be an expression of existence itself,^[17] such as the “existential mimicry.”^[18] In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty indicates a “gestural or existential significance in speech.”^[19] Such an existential meaning is linked by him to the semantic intention (e.g. of a body gesture and a linguistic gesture, i.e. an utterance). Additionally, he links the semantic intention: (1) to the perceptual and sensory intentionality of individual subjects, (2) to intentionality understood as the interaction of (embodied) subjects with each other, and (3) to the relations of subjects and what is objective (things, representations of things, products of other subjects – the intentional bonds of the body-subject with the environment). Therefore, with this “existential” meaning: Merleau-Ponty also associates the primary “meaning of things,” given to us in natural attitude and natural experience. He defines this meaning as “the core of primary meaning round which the acts of naming and expression take shape,”^[20] which are at the same time the introduction of these things, objects into our human world – into the world of culture.

It should be recalled that, according to Merleau-Ponty, we are both beings submitted to what is physiological, included in nature,^[21] and beings that create and produce our own environment – the social and cultural environment, that is, the intersubjective world given to us in experience and cognition. Therefore, we are submitted to the passage of nature’s time, while in reflective reference to ourselves, to our existence and to the world of culture that is invoked, we capture our experience within the framework of time, considered as the time of history. Merleau-Ponty wrote “Everything is both manufactured and natural in man”^[22] – in all human beings. Signs and meanings (in particular spoken language) are also both natural and cultural, “because in man there is no natural sign.”^[23] It is precisely the term “existential meaning” that indicates the duality of existence itself on the borderline between the natural and the cultural, and to the duality of this “existential meaning” which emerges from what is natural in the sense of physiology to manifest itself in what is natural for human beings – in the sphere of culture, in the intersubjective world of coexistence and shared meanings. It must be emphasised that it is not a question here of meaning containing some abstract knowledge about existence, but of meaning considered to be the manifestation of individual, particular existences in this communal intersubjective world, where each subject can expressively mark both its own belonging and the distinctiveness of its own, always individual existence.

Merleau-Ponty, following Husserl, defines signifying, significative intention as empty, but notes that it also brings a certain “excess” of what the author, the creative individual, wants to say, in relation to what has already been said or what is being said. “The words and turns of phrase needed to bring my significative intention to expression recommend themselves to me, when I am speaking,”^[24] Meaningful, significative intention leads us from the meanings we dispose of to the meanings we are in the process of constructing and acquiring for ourselves, from the obviousness of meanings given intersubjectively to the discovery of the peculiarity of one’s own understanding and the meanings given along with it. “There is a ‘languagely’ [langagière] meaning of language which effects the mediation between my as yet unspeaking intention and words, and in such a way that my spoken words surprise me myself and teach me my thought.”^[25]

Merleau-Ponty notes that “the meaning swallows up the signs,”^[26] for example, in the gesture of an actor, who becomes invisible himself, and so we attribute to meaning a certain immediacy of influence or even a certain sourcehood, which also pertains to meaning in speech. Merleau-Ponty writes about a certain surplus of “gestural meaning” which would be “immanent in speech,”^[27] since speech is also a type of gesture.

It can be said that Merleau-Ponty was interested in the relationship of colloquial language, used in everyday life, not so much to the system, but to the individual use, to individual speech acts. He repeatedly emphasised the role of Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics, but at the same time juxtaposed his conception of the system of language (la langue) with Edmund Husserl’s conception of “a universal grammar” or a certain semantic eidetics, hidden behind everyday language practices.^[28] In his texts concerning the phenomenology of speech, Merleau-Ponty pointed out exactly the inadequacy of referring colloquial, everyday language (le langage) to a system and accused de Saussure of a certain trivialisation of the individual use of language (la parole).

Therefore, in his reflection on language, he postulated research studying the connections between colloquial speech and individual speech acts. Merleau-Ponty repeatedly considered individual speech acts as acts of expression that do not refer to presumed “pure meanings,” although they direct the users of speech and participants in communication towards a certain transcendence of meaning. Meaning would emerge in the form of the signified element (signatum) of the linguistic sign, and this emergence is owed to the very act of utterance, to the individual expression, because for “the speaking subject, to express is to become aware of.”^[29] At the same time, Merleau-Ponty redefined Ferdinand de Saussure’s terminology, considering what is synchronic – not the system or structure of relations (la langue) that determines the individual uses of a given language, but precisely those individual uses, individual speech acts (la parole), that appear synchronically.^[30] The diachronic, on the other hand, would be the language (le langage) in development, i.e. the individual speech acts that make up the intersubjective code of a given language (e.g. the vocabulary and its resources), which is shaped and submitted to change.

It should be noted that Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between two types of expressive uses of language – “militant” expression and literary expression.^[31] “Struggling” expression would, as it were, establish meaning anew, transforming “spoken” speech, which is given together with culture and its meanings. Literary expression, on the other hand, would aim to individualise the everyday use of language in “speaking” speech (parole parlante), to extract meanings hiding beneath spoken speech (parole parlée). In literary expression, a certain “oversignification” emerges, which should be distinguished from non-sense,^[32] which escapes spoken speech – the hitherto state of language and its meanings within a given culture. “In basing signification upon speech, we wish to say it is essential to signification never to appear except as the sequel to a discourse already under way”^[33] and it is precisely this condition that “oversignification” fulfils – an expressive departure from the previous use of language, confirming both the creative power of language and the creative powers of its users.

At the same time, Merleau-Ponty considers the question of understanding and meaning also in relation to a specific case of language – to the language of mathematics, to algorithmic expressions together with their uniqueness.^[34] It is in mathematical expressions and algorithms that Merleau-Ponty finds, presented in the most complete way, a synchronic –structural, systematic sort of manifesting signs and their relations. This is because Merleau-Ponty considers the number – unlike Husserl – not as a carrier of a certain essence, an eidos, which is ideal, but – like the structuralists – as a sign constituting an element of a certain system structure.^[35]

According to Merleau-Ponty, the truth that emerges from mathematical operations, like the operation of signs (speech) in general, requires the emergence and participation of something new in what is already there, for example, the emergence of a new pattern based on previously existing ones. This is why Merleau-Ponty examines mathematical operations and the algorithm, or formula defining mathematical (numerical) regularities, as a certain type of expression.

At the same time, he distinguishes not only between perceptual structures (“I can”) and cognitive structures (“I think”),^[36] but he also indicates some “mathematical entities”^[37] within the latter. One can say that Merleau-Ponty separates “perceptual” thinking, based on experience data, from certain “cognitive constructions” characteristic of analytical and exact cognition, which is also creative and expressive (“mathematical thinking” is “creative,” and this also applies to “formalised mathematics”^[38]). Merleau-Ponty writes in his late works: “The thing thought is not the thing perceived”^[39] and has a creative aspect, so Merleau-Ponty emphasises here the limited character of what is perceptual. In the case of speech, there are connections mediated by sensations, bodily perception and articulation, that is, the signifying element of the sign, turns out to be important. In contrast, “the expression leaves nothing wanting and appears to us to contain meaning its very self. The jumbled relations of transcendence” give way to the pure relations prevailing in “a system of signs.”^[40] On the other hand, language-speech captures perceptions belonging to the sphere of events, always temporally entangled, and diachronically determines the cause–effect relations in their succession.

Merleau-Ponty writes that “the structure propels itself toward its transformations,”^[41] that is, it would be a dynamic structure, and this changeable character of restructuring would be proper to speech. In the case of mathematics and its essential methodological features, “a structure is decentered, opens up to questioning, and reorganises itself according to a new meaning which is nevertheless the meaning of this same structure.”^[42] We “omitted” mention of “the structure’s transcendence toward its transformations,”^[43] but “this transcendence is always possible in principle.”^[44] It is thanks to restructuring and transformation that not only a new meaning appears, but the sense in general turns up, emerging from the structure.

It is necessary to highlight those distinctions made by Merleau-Ponty among specific gestures, which are gestures of language. It would be a distinction between transcendental (“authentic”) speech, in which sense appears sourcefully and anew thanks to individual expression, and empirical language.^[45] Empirical language, that is, the language used every day, together with its rules of grammar and word formation, would be close to colloquial language. According to Merleau-Ponty, this language does not require creation, but is a certain confirmation of the natural attitude, a reproduction of the senses typical of colloquial thinking, which are hastily recognised as unambiguous and obvious. Merleau-Ponty emphasises that when we ask about language, the presupposed “first speech was not established in a world without communication, since it emerged from forms of conduct that were already common and took root in a sensible world.”^[46] Both speech and communication cease to be something obvious, and we begin to ask about the very possibility of communication, not stopping at merely practising it.

It could be said that Merleau-Ponty here considers speech as a certain making present of the speaking subjects and the beings they speak about, as well as the sense of those beings. This would therefore be a thesis considering the sign as a representation of being, but at the same time as a certain making present of it, and not the sign in its substitute role for being and things. The concept of the sign as a representation-presentation must be related to the later research proposal of Gilles Deleuze, who considered such a representation as virtual. It can be said that, according to Merleau-Ponty, this representation-presentation (i.e. the virtual) would be a relationship between the presence of being and the presence of its representation. In contrast, the concept of the sign appearing as a substitute for the being, the thing, requires forgetting about the sign, about the representation, in order to see the being, the thing represented (the concept of a transparent sign). This would be the dialectical intertwining of being and its representation in their presence and absence, in their appearance and disappearance in our cognition, in positivity and negativity. The second conception of sign and representation was described by de Saussure, among others, but it is also characterised by Merleau-Ponty with respect to the relation of sign and sense.

5 Individual Expression and Expression of Sense

One can admit that Maurice Merleau-Ponty treats sense as a source – as a certain transcendental sense-making condition of finding and assigning a meaning. He wrote that “everything has meaning, and we shall find this same structure of being underlying all relationship,” and, thanks to reflection, we “reach the unique core of existential meaning which emerges in each perspective.”^[47] At the same time, this primary sense is de facto cognitively inaccessible to us, because, as something originally, primordially connected with what is related to existence, it eludes what is existential. Merleau-Ponty treats the emergence of sense as something enigmatic, which would be connected with the order (“structure”) of what is related to existence, from which it emerges. It is necessary to point out the distinctness of “source sense” and expression of sense as the “sense effect,” which is indicated by Merleau-Ponty. Thus, the “sense effect” can be considered with regard to Merleau-Ponty’s concept as (1) a manifestation of sense and as (2) a representation of sense.

That is why the semantic intention can be characterised as an expression of sense (as the primary sense effect) in individual subjective corporeal and mental acts considered to be an appearance of sense (expression). At the same time, sense is made present in its linguistic and semiotic representations in general (given in the intersubjective cultural order) – i.e. a transformation of a corporeal appearance of sense into a semiotic representation of sense, when a gesture becomes an element of the entire system of meanings – when it functions in the cultural order of distinctions and differences.

Thus, the author of the Phenomenology of Perception treats sense as something primary and, at the same time, cognitively inaccessible, which determines conditions for the assignment of meaning. This assignment of meaning is connected with a subjective and individual semantic intention deriving from the original perception of what is natural as something that is meaningful. According to Merleau-Ponty, one of the aims of human activities is expression – i.e. the constitution of a sense conditioned by this original, primordial sense (for example, transcendental, internal speech) in human practice (in particular, artistic practice); however, its recognition is inaccessible to us. This original sense can be compared to Husserl’s ideal meaning (Bedeutung), but it lacks the qualities of an ideal sense in the case of Merleau-Ponty. This would rather be a sense submitted to idealisation due to, among others, its cognitive inaccessibility and its assumption as a transcendental condition of the constitution of meaning (in acts of expression and cognition). One can, therefore, say that, according to Merleau-Ponty, the subject can recognise “sense effects” rather than sense itself.

Therefore, sense would be appear primarily as a sense effect in corporeal acts of expression. Merleau-Ponty considers both mental manifestations of sense and cultural representations of sense in signs, together with their meanings, as being derivative towards mental manifestations. Merleau-Ponty connects the concept of meaning with cultural representatives, with signs and, therefore, also with cognitive processes and activities that take place by means of language. His analyses of the semantic intention concern mainly speech in its creative, productive aspect (“speaking speech,” i.e. poetic speech) and re-productive aspect (“spoken speech,” which is submitted to the principle of “re-presentation” as a repeated presentation, the repeatability of semiotic structures, languages, codes, and signs themselves).

Merleau-Ponty writes about “speech’s apparent property of extracting the meaning of signs,”^[48] as he admits that there is always a certain manifestation of sense that assumes a particular and specific form. Sense is given to us thanks to its individual appearance – a realisation that reveals the presence of the presumed source sense, but does not provide full access to it. An example of such a gesture is a significant expression (l’expression significatif).

A specific example of a relationship between the body subject (corps-sujet), i.e. the “incarnated subject,” and sense is “speaking speech” (parole parlante), but also the image (l’image) as the result of our perception – an internal image that is represented by a painting image and – according to Merleau-Ponty – a photographic image and a film image (film shot). It is worth noticing that in his theses concerning visibility and, primarily, Cézanne’s painting and film, Merleau-Ponty postulates a certain autonomisation of the image – a visual cultural representation towards the spoken word and the written word. He considers the image – a visual representation – as a source of information and knowledge not only about presented objects and persons; he regards the image as something that intermediates in communication relationships between the body subject and the world, and other people. Both the painting image and the photographic image (film shot) are considered by him to be a record of the individual perception of the author of this representation. It also gives the possibility of uncovering presumed regularities of the perception itself (the frequently discussed example of Cézanne’s painting,^[49] for example, in Cézanne’s Doubt), including its existential aspect, as the image confirms the being-in-the-world of the author as well as persons and things presented in it. Considered in this way, the image turns out to be not so much a guarantee of the realness of the presented world, but rather a confirmation of its existence in the captured and presented figure that emerges from the background of the world being experienced here and now (an example of a close-up and a detail in a film^[50]).

Merleau-Ponty combined his postulates concerning direct experience and its capturing in a representation with postulates of direct recording of experiences in a film.^[51] This is because he considered the film not so much as a sign, representation or record of events, but rather as a recording of someone’s individual experiences of which the recording itself is a part. It is easy to notice the relation of his concept of the direct experience and direct character of a film recording to much later realisations of the “personal film.” Merleau-Ponty considers the film as a recording of a natural gesture of the existing and cognising subject – as a record of intentional gestures of persons being observed through the camera and as a record of the camera operator’s gesture. According to Merleau-Ponty, “the meaning of a film is incorporated into its rhythm just as the meaning of a gesture may immediately be read in that gesture.”^[52] The film is particularly predestined to show the relationship between the mind and the body and between the mind and the world and to express one through the Other. It shows ties of consciousness with the world and the “engagement” of consciousness “in the body”: “Movement and rest distribute themselves in our surroundings not according to the hypotheses which our intelligence is pleased to construct but according to the way we settle ourselves in the world and the position our bodies assume in it.”^[53]

Therefore, according to Merleau-Ponty, subjectivity is not a source of sense or meaning – it is just the possibility of expression of sense, a certain condition for the possibility of revealing sense in a method that is cognitively accessible to individual reflexive consciousness and the Other One in the area of intersubjectivity. In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty wrote: “significances now acquired must necessarily have been new once. We must therefore recognise as an ultimate fact this open and indefinite power of giving significance – that is, both of apprehending and conveying a meaning – by which man transcends himself towards a new form of behaviour, or towards other people, or towards his own thought, through his body and his speech,”^[54] which is a condition for self-cognition and knowledge about the sense of one’s own existence.

Merleau-Ponty points out certain paradoxes in the understanding of expression:^[55] As he writes, “the will to expression itself is ambiguous,” because it is connected with “twin but contrary demands of expressiveness and uniformity”^[56] (the text Science and the Experience of Expression). Always individual, expression is a fulfilment of a certain semantic intention in the creator’s gesture – in the fulfilment of the author’s creative possibilities here and now. However, expression is still prospectively open towards the future, towards the possibility of supplementing it through gestures – further fulfilments, so “the idea of a finished expression is chimerical.”^[57] This term would rather define “successful communication,” which occurs when the listener “resumes the other’s linguistic gesticulation and carries it further.”^[58] In the opinion of Merleau-Ponty, the gesture “goes beyond itself toward a meaning” and “suppresses itself,”^[59] thus becoming similar to a transparent sign – it does not focus our attention on itself, but refers to something else – towards a meaning the emergence of which is conditional upon it (the text Dialogue and the Perception of the Other).

The paradox of expression also refers to the relationship between I and the Other, because “at the moment of expression the other to whom I address myself and I who express myself are linked without concession on either side”^[60] (the text The Internal Language). In the paradox of expression, one can also notice a certain paradox or dialectic of the present moment that is indicated by Merleau-Ponty. According to him, the present moment is a combination of: (1) realisation, activities being carried out here and now as a certain necessity that fulfils itself, and (2) future activities as a certain possibility that awaits its future fulfilment-updating.

At the same time, individual expression always refers to what is supraindividual and intersubjective – to signs and meanings that form the tradition and heritage of the given culture. Referring to de Saussure’s theses, Merleau-Ponty writes, “a single act of speech is not significant by itself but only as a modulation of a general system of expression and insofar as it is differentiated from other linguistic gestures of which language is composed.”^[61]

Merleau-Ponty links the issue of expression (which is always individual) also with Hegel’s issue of history, because the paradox of expression refers to its individual aspect in combination with the supraindividual (universal or general) aspect, which Merleau-Ponty regards as something that is intersubjective. According to Merleau-Ponty, Hegel’s concept of history is an attempt to capture what is intersubjective in its supraindividual becoming. However, unlike Hegel, Merleau-Ponty defines the aspect of necessity attributed to historical becoming not as a certain necessity considered in connection with the Spirit of Universal History, but as the necessity of the mediation of what is individual and subjective by what is supraindividual and intersubjective and, more importantly, the mediation of what is intersubjective, universal, and general by what is subjective and individual.^[62] This necessary combination occurs exactly in the act of individual expression, because an entity can express itself – fulfil a creative, expressive semantic intention – only by referring to the intersubjective resource of meanings of the given culture and community and to the primary sense, which is always transcendent and manifests itself in every being and in its existence. “There is in all expression – even in linguistic expression – a spontaneity that will not tolerate commands, even those I would like to give to myself.”^[63] An entity owes expression to what is transcendent towards it – the generality of the transcendent primary being and the source sense and the generality of what is intersubjective (the cultural and social manifestation of sense in the form of meanings^[64]).

Claude Lefort emphasises that, according to Merleau-Ponty, being is what requires us to create so that we could experience it.^[65] Thus, expression as something always individual manifests itself also in the interpretation of meanings and senses, in the extraction of sense from representations of being, and in the showing of sense in beings encountered in the world to me. Merleau-Ponty combines the issue of expression, among others, with the issue of style, improvisation, or projection. He understands “style” as expressiveness, i.e. the identification of a figure from the background,^[66] already thanks to the original primary expression of a subject in its corporal gesture-based reactions towards the world^[67] (expression primordiale). Style understood as subjective expressiveness is, therefore, an indication of his own individual distinctness by the existing and cognising subject, particularly thanks to constant elements of our corporeal responses to objects being encountered in the world.^[68] However, “conventional” expression is regarded by Merleau-Ponty as “emphasis” within the scope of agreed conventional meanings.^[69] On the other hand, “improvisation occurs,” because “perception itself is never finished, since it gives us a world to express,”^[70] since our perspectives give us the world that connects and transcends them for expression and thinking. Merleau-Ponty also uses the term “projection” taken over from psychology. This term indicates not so much expression, but rather its understanding; it aims to describe communication, in which the “other’s words” are heard, and the listener becomes the one to whom he is listening.^[71] What occurs is communication and understanding, which is, however, not so much the adoption of someone’s point of view or way of thinking, but rather putting oneself in someone else’s “situation.”

One can ask, however, what occurs when an individual is tired of responses being given so far and has a feeling of senselessness in his actions and expression. In such a case, he resorts to withdrawing from reaction, which means that – according to Merleau-Ponty – he becomes a silent subject (tacite) and his refraining from gesture is a significant gesture in itself in the territory of the world in relation to Others. And the creation of new senses is regarded by Merleau-Ponty as a special case, a sort of return to the situation of a source gesture that constitutes a sense. Creation is the re-constitution of a sense anew and, at the same time, the indication of distinctness of an individual towards the world; this is also the specific and dialectically considered insertion of an individual in the intersubjective world – the world of common senses and meanings.

6 Expression and Impression

In moving towards a conclusion, it is worth referring to the basic paradox of expression once again. Expression is the fulfilment of a semantic intention – fulfilment as something that is finished (realised) at the given moment, but with the assumption of infinity of the act of expression itself. This infinity would be a certain power of expression contained in the given (verbal or visual) representation, which, however, goes beyond the given moment of expression. We can, therefore, ask: where does expression become fulfilled – in an act of creation, or in an act of communication (which involves the sender and the recipient)? We must also ask: is expression always an act of creation? According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it is not always an act of creation, because meanings given in culture so far are made present and current thanks to expression as a repetition, i.e. thanks to an act of re-production or imitation. Such was the case of works regarded as academic, which were juxtaposed with works of the first avant-garde painters by Merleau-Ponty. One can say that Merleau-Ponty somehow removes the opposition of creative vs re-productive in favour of expression as a category combining both of these aspects of an individual’s actions that are considered to be creative (even if to a varied extent). This is because expression is mainly the constitution of sense – the extraction and manifestation of the objective sense. At the same time, this is the fulfilment of a semantic intention, which is always subjective and individual and gives the possibility of expression of the existing subject and also its existence, i.e. a certain sense of the existence itself – what is objective, not subjective.

One can say that Merleau-Ponty juxtaposes subjective individual expression with objective expressiveness (i.e. the expressiveness of the given thing, existence or sense), which is always given thanks to and in a certain representation (mental representation – for example, in an observation, or cultural representation – for example, thanks to the language that expresses something expressis verbis). However, this would also be certain expressiveness of a person, objectively given to a certain subject and depicted in a representation – in a portrait painting, or in a photograph. Such expressiveness is not connected with the intention of the subject – the portrayed person, but is depicted thanks to the author of the work, who would also be a keen observer – a sort of recipient of senses carried and presented by the portrayed person (not always consciously). For this reason, Merleau-Ponty used the category “style” for defining a style of life – the existence of particular individuals that mark their expressiveness – uniqueness towards the world and Others – more or less consciously. Works of art created by the given person are a special case of style as an expressive indication of one’s own existence by an individual. With such understanding of style – expressiveness, the issue of expression of an individual, as, for example, going beyond an artistic or aesthetic standard, emerges. Thus, expression would be related to the formation of the author’s individual style, and it turns out to be typical of modernity as such. However, Merleau-Ponty indicates that in modern times (from the nineteenth century) style is understood as a category used for the description of the individual’s creative work and of implied style that is typical of the moment and area of the given culture.

It must be stressed that Merleau-Ponty considers the assignment of a meaning, i.e. an intentional and signitive gesture, in its impressive function. Following Edmund Husserl, he refers to the concept of passive synthesis and to the concept of primary original sense (source sense) manifested by our intentional signitive acts that assign a meaning. One can notice that Merleau-Ponty assumes some originality of reception towards every creation, but he considers reception also as an act of creation, as it is a certain subjective construction – constitution of the object of cognition and its objective sense.

7 Expressiveness of a Sense of the Invisible

It should be emphasised that it is in the concept of sense that Maurice Merleau-Ponty reveals his assumptions concerning creative, expressive existence in its relationship with the primordial, original Being, called in the texts that make up the book The Visible and the Invisible as “wild” or “brute” Being.^[72] One could say that the French philosopher proposes not so much theses on existence presented explicitly as assumptions implicitly inscribed in the theses on the existing and cognitive subject, on the “embodied” subject and on the situation of the individual in the world (in the environment, in the always cultural and social intersubjectivity that determines the individual’s specific “environment,” apprehended rather culturally than naturally). Merleau-Ponty does not propose his own definition of the notion of “existence,” but refers to the current conceptions of existence, primarily to Martin Heidegger,^[73] but also criticising Jean-Paul Sartre.^[74]

In his late works, Merleau-Ponty defines the original Being, or the “brute” Being (wild Being, vertical Being),^[75] as the condition for the possibility of thinking and knowing what exists. At the same time, this “Source Being” as such would not be an object of cognition that could be fully grasped. The “brute” Being would be given as a certain possibility to be conceived, not as a necessary condition of possibility, as in the case of Kant’s transcendental conditions of possibility.^[76] Merleau-Ponty also uses the term “wild world” (le monde sauvage): “We can consider this wild world as nature,” which “makes possible a variety of cultural constructs.”^[77] “The wild world” would even be “the source from which all cultures grow, and is perceived through them.”^[78] Merleau-Ponty here distinguishes between the “vertical dimension of being” – primordial, brute, and “horizontal being of the world.”^[79]

However, the brute Being appears in the “field of perception” – in the area of the visible, as the invisible, as a place, an unrecognised space, which sends our cognition beyond the horizon of the field of perception and the field of existence towards what is invisible. Merleau-Ponty conceives the Invisible as something which itself is not submitted to sensory recognition, although perception and sensory data lead us towards it. It is non-perceptible, but it is nevertheless given to cognition as a certain transcendence vis-à-vis the immanence of the embodied subject – vis-à-vis both its corporeality and its consciousness. One can easily notice that the First and Invisible Being is – thanks to its invisibility – somehow hidden from us, but at the same time it is present, existing here and now, and expressive in its influence and impact, affecting our real, factual world. This type of expression would be comprehended as expressiveness of what is objective, not subjective, and seems to be primordial and unconditional.

8 Conclusion

It must be remembered that, according to Roman Jakobson, the expressive function (one of the functions of language in communication) is also understood as an emotive function. On the other hand, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, emotiveness and emotionality is also connected with what is impressive and information-oriented (strictly cognitive). It is easy to notice the difference between Merleau-Ponty’s and Jakobson’s approaches concerning expressive, impressive, and informative functions, as well as relations of these Jakobsonian functions to what is evocative in a work – with means used for conveying or extracting given contents in the best possible manner. This is where we come across the issue of not so much subjective expression, but rather objective expressiveness – a meaning recognised in the object as a certain content being extracted and presented in its representation (verbal, painting, or photographic representation). And it is this evocative – adequate extraction of the objective content in individually created subjective representations that absorbed Merleau-Ponty’s attention so much in his reflections on gesture, sense, and expression. The evocative function or value was indicated as relevant to a work in his later studies, but it would not be directly related to the issue of expressiveness. It must be stressed that the evocative function or value of a work would combine objective expressiveness and subjective expression and would indicate expressiveness as a quality of representation itself (e.g. expressis verbis of language contained in the given utterance or work).