Keller, Kurt Dauer

English

Meaning and institution (Presented at the Corporeity and affectivity conference in Prague Sept-Oct 2008)Kurt Dauer KellerUniversity College of Northern Denmarkkurtdkeller@gmail.comThe course on institution that Merleau-Ponty gave at the Collège de France in 1954 (Merleau-Ponty 2003) fills a gap in the reception of his social philosophy and helps to clarify the gradual development of his philosophy of perception into a philosophy of being. Introducing a new concept of institution, he proposes a philosophy of culture that combines the (Husserlian) basic idea of Stiftung with the socio-historical and anthropological notion of established structures.	Established ideas of institutions as thing-like objectivity and independent, imperative reality (Durkheim 1999) were challenged by Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of corporeal meaning and lived experience as the actual substance of institution. This new notion was closely associated with what historicity is all about. Thus, in his treatment of Mauss and Levi-Strauss, Merleau-Ponty (1964) could reject idealism as well as functionalism, and point out the culture-historical as well as structural character of institutions. Merleau-Ponty’s conception of institution was appreciated - but not really applied - by Castoriadis (1987) and Lefort (2000), since they both retreated to a traditional dichotomy of individual bodily being and rule-based sociality.	Let us look upon this concept of institution in the light of a distinctive theme in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, that of meaning as bodily and fleshly intentionality. 1. The notion of corporeal intentionalityThe concept of corporeal (i.e. bodily and fleshly) intentionality matured through Merleau-Ponty’s comprehensive and recurrent analyses of elementary coherences between bodily experience and sociocultural meaning. It is a latent, operative intentionality with which we are never simultaneous as conscious beings. Bodily and fleshly intentionality structures time and space, things and the various forms of human identity. As experiencing bodies we are, therefore, spontaneously located in the midst of the social and physical events that occupy us. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of corporeal intentionality points to the elementary formation of meaning in three complementary dimensions: a structural, a generative and a dialectic dimension (Keller 2001, 2005). Structurally, intentionality is regarded as the meaningful directedness of figure-background perspectives in any kind of experience, manifested for instance as the coherence between a presence and a lifeworld. Generatively, intentionality is the dynamic and vertical structuring, which makes meaning and order by taking up an event or a situation, including things as well as our own anonymous, personal and collective existences. Finally, there is a Spiel in any experience, which indicates a particular dimension of intentionality: It consists in different kinds of dialectic transcendence - namely reversibility, chiasm, responsiveness and hyperdialectic.2. The phenomenological concept of institutionIn the introduction of his course on institution, Merleau-Ponty right away indicates that the institution he has in mind is a phenomenological substitute for the primacy of the consciousness. He presents the philosophical content of the concept of institution through a definition of the personal life as an instance of the subject of the field of presence. Personal life is not immediate presence (like perception), but a project: an opening towards the world’s density (epaisseur), which starts from the intention to live that wasn’t chosen or decided by any subject. The subject of the field of presence is actually a subjectivity of instituted-instituting relations in the intersubjective field of a culture.	Characteristic to the institution of life, even an organism finds a fecundity and utility of occurring events. Though limited by the species, the territory and the event, this leads to fixation of new ‘organic schedules’. There is history and institution in the sense of ‘reference to sense’. As further explicated in the later courses on nature (Merleau-Ponty 2003), animals have quasi-freudian displacements of sense and temporalities that border on that of the sleepwalking. 	The oedipal phase is immature, imaginary integration of the past and the future, i.e. failed institution. The institution of the latency phase that follows is the genuine modus of human temporality, says Merleau-Ponty: a turning back to oneself and the development of social techniques as well as of yourself, but also a digression on the way to the puberty, where the all-encompassing, vital drama of love and personal identity is taken up again, but this time in a realistic way where everything can succeed. This is characteristic to the human institution: the human being is both more bound by its past and more open to its future than an animal is. Merleau-Ponty’s description of the institution of emotion starts by claiming that love is impossible; it always fails! That is because we construct the other as the loved one. Our illusion is a negative reality and an effective alienation. Still, love – and life – gives us something else than what we expected, something that isn’t accidental, but wanted in an unknown way. It is the reality of the presence of the loved one that creates new meaning, and as an institution love is in a common field that does not appear to consciousness. Love is created, neither by conditions nor by decision, but consists in a coherence of questions and answers. We mediate much more meaning than we possess to the field and the events with which we are involved, and this is precisely what makes possible the institution’s re-centring of a contingent historical situation.	The institution of a work of art is personal as well as public. The act of painting is similar to writing and research in being a personal institution that answers a collective institution. The history of the painting art is a metamorphosis, where the singular painter experiences again - without knowing it - this whole history. This recreation is supported by the perceptual world as a blind and indirect logic. The telos of this entire history is never fully acquired and never a possession of the goal, but itself a special case that calls for generalisation. In similarity with the creativity of an emotion, the painting grants more meaning than expected, by activating a Weltgefühl. 	The institution of language, as the site of knowledge and truth, cannot integrate the past and the future completely. Knowledge does not entirely detach itself from persons and from the previous history. “The lekton [the spoken, what can be said] does not lean on a logos independently of ‘the aesthetic world’.” Behind the institution of intellectual knowledge, there is always the situated sense making in relation to practical problems, which offers a surplus of meaning to cover the problematic deficiency of an intellectual field. Thus, the institution of knowledge indicates the very core of historicity, the simultaneous sedimentation and forgetting of the creation of sense, with which new steps appear as orders and insights that rest in themselves. This point is also examined in Merleau-Ponty’s course on Husserl’s The origin of Geometry (Merleau-Ponty 2002).	The section called ‘The field of culture’ contributes to this conception of historicity with Merleau-Ponty’s new notion of an idea, which is discussed further in The Visible and the Invisible. Many of the characteristics of an institution are summed up and clarified with this notion of an idea. It is a cultural field of continuous creation that does not contain objects, but instigates a teleology and appeals to a raise of consciousness. The idea starts from the decentred corporeal intersubjectivity that also draws our sedimentary acquisitions of meaning into forgetfulness. It is not an explication of something contained in the past, but a new step of immediate understanding and practical certainty, evidence and resoluteness. The idea is the norm of a future, an anticipation of a dimension of development. As an institution it is “not the possession of a concept, but of a being, or the opening of a field”, and it emphatically produces the surplus of sense that we find in a field.	In the course notes’ last section, Merleau-Ponty concludes that a socio-historical field instituted in this intersubjective interiority-exteriority can bring up and solve problems. There is a real dialectic of historical events in the sense of the creation of meaningful ‘social things’, patterns and symbolic systems. Different epochs can communicate within a common historical horizon, as elucidated by Gadamer. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty indicates a critical stance that associates to Weber’s institutional analysis of christianity and capitalism (Merleau-Ponty 1973) and to contemporary social philosophy: Though there cannot be a perfect or ‘true’ society, some societies better than others support people in attaining social balance and interplay by allowing for the meaning and significance - the a priori and spirit - of institution.3. The vertical structure and generative meaning of institutionIn Merleau-Ponty’s conception, the institution is a historicity of the human life itself. It is a structuring of aesthetical and emotional meaning that precedes social distinctions between private and public, or individual and collective.The notion of corporeal intentionality clarifies these compact course notes, but is also itself sharpened with Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the institution as a practical-anthropological opening of dimensions and fields of personal and public experience. While the human institution resumes the temporal, existential and sexual experience of bare life as the perception and expression of sense, events and orientations, it is at the same time characterized by an order of integration and mediation, which is psychodynamic symbolism, i.e. not linguistic representation, but the mythological-emotional organization of an existence that is thoroughly sociocultural as well as bodily. The sociocultural fields and institutions are a density of corporeal experience in which decentred historicity remains alive as intentionality: vertical resumption, horizontal re-centring and dialectic question-response play.	Obviously, the concept of institution is particularly important to the understanding of the vertical dimension of intentionality, whereas the combination of the instituting and the instituted implies the whole theme of sublimation and sedimentation. But precision is also added to the other dimensions. Horizontally, it is emphasized that the very model of the institution is the temporal figure-ground relationship of the field of presence (a ‘now’ associated with a trans-temporal density) and that the institutional re-centring takes place in the de-centredness of corporeal experience. As to the dialectic, Merleau-Ponty talks about not only nuclei of cultural meaning that call for our participation and the mutual relationship between different historical events, but also fields that raise and solve problems.  	The course notes offers a solid conception of the interplay between sociocultural fields and bodily praxis through institutions that tend to produce a surplus of sense and meaningfulness. Rooted in the elementary structuring of meaning - i.e. in corporeal intentionality - institutions are formations out of our own coherence with the life and with the world. Clearly, Merleau-Ponty’s conception of institution as the very coherence of sociocultural identity and field - or of social actors and structures - offers a wealth of insight that was not fully adopted in Foucaults discussion (2000) of the culture historical self as ethics and socio-technic or in Bourdieus understanding (1990) of habitus as a sociocultural identity interplaying with its field. References:P. Bourdieu (1990): The logic of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.C. Castoriadis (1987): The imaginary institution of society. Oxford: Polity Press.E. Durkheim (1999): The rules of sociological method. London: Macmillan.M. Foucault (2000): Ethics. Essential works of Foucault 1954-1984. Volume 1. Edited by Paul Rabinow. London: Penguin Books.B. Flynn (2005): The philosophy of Claude Lefort. Interpreting the political. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.C. Lefort (2000): Writing. The political test. Durham: Duke University Pres.M. Merleau-Ponty (1964): Signs. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.-	(1968): The visible and the invisible. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.-	(2003): L’institution. La passivité. Notes de cours au Collège de France (1954-1955). Éditions Belin.PAGE  7

Meaning and institution

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