Det verkningsfulla språket : Bidrag i frågan om Maurice Merleau-Pontys retoriska relevans

Sammanfattning: The following essay seeks to explore Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of expression in order to tease out a perspective on language and communication that might be of interest for contemporary rhetoric. The point of departure is located in Merleau-Ponty’s claim that language (in the way we use it) is inherently meaningful and a privileged aspect of the human being-in and orientation-towards the world. Furthermore, »what we do with words« cannot be reduced to the implementation of already constituted sets of meaningful expressions, ready-at-hand ideas or the obvious assembling of unambiguous words, but must, according to Merleau-Ponty, be acknowledged as a response to a particular horizon of possibilities within which the speaker finds herself. By employing the already established language at hand she is able to conjure a meaningful expression as a response to the (rhetorical, if you will) situation, with more or less creative astuteness. Consequently the speaker always already finds herself within a denominated world, a cultural-historically structured context – i.e. within »the nameable and the sayable« – yet this world bears within it an ever present possibility of renegotiation, and the as of yet unforesayable. To speak then, according to Merleau-Ponty, is to form an expression between the lines of repetition and invention. Or in his own words: »the operative Word is the obscure region whence comes the instituted light«.  Drawing most importantly from Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between »speaking« speech (parole parlante) and »spoken« or empirical speech (parole parlée), I approach some rhetorical notions of both classic and modern kind. I argue that the creative dimension Merleau-Ponty ascribes to our linguistic abilities, offers interesting perspectives on both Doxa and Topoi, as well as it problematizes the classical distinction between Inventio and Elocutio, and that the gestural dimension of expression that Merleau-Ponty is recurringly talking about can be read as an elaboration on Actio. From a more modern rhetorical perspective I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of expression, and its modes of (or interplay between) institution and conquest, may offer a fruitful ground for understanding the creation and sedimentation of social meaning, taken in a broader sense. Lastly, if we wish to follow Merleau-Ponty’s account of how language is a fundamental part of the way in which we inhabit our world, rhetoric must recognize not only persuasion (in a shallow sense of the word), but the deep reaching, existentially (and culturally) transformative dimensions that are at play in our creating, exchanging and appropriation of meaning – linguistic or otherwise.