Multimodal Considerations

and the same radical contingency which threatens it with discord also rescues it from the inevitability of disorder and prevents us from despairing of it”⁶². A relation that would understand the presence of violence in this open system or the necessity to seek an over-coming of institutions that facilitate his ever-presence, and finally that would recognize as crucial the goal of reducing violence by attacking it “at its source”.

tradition. There is nothing whatsoever in Marxism that is new outside the material world and of which no future description is revealed through it:

Nothing is further from Marxism than positivistic prose: dialectical though is always in the process of extracting from each phenomenon a truth which goes beyond it, waking at each moment our astonishment at the world and at history. This

“philosophy of history” does not so much give us the keys of history as it restores history to us as permanent interrogation. It is not so much a certain truth hidden behind empirical history that it gives us; rather it presents empirical history as the genealogy of truth. It is quite superficial to say that Marxism unveils the meaning of history to us: it binds us to our time and its partialities; it does not describe the future for us; it does not stop our questioning – on the contrary, it intensifies it. It shows us the present worked on by a self-criticism, a power of negation and of sublation, a power which has historically been delegated to the proletariat⁶⁵.

His main reason behind this sort of view is that the view of the communist orthodoxy assumes a mechanistic tendency toward social, political, and economic revolution. Moreso, the more appropriate reasons remain that there is no automatic movement of history, the seeds of which are in socio-economic events or the human essence and its drive toward freedom. There may well be certain tendencies in certain socio-economic structures but there is no fixed logic of future development. Moreover, human nature is malleable enough to accept a variety of social, political, and economic conditions and, subsequently, is not predestined for any one of them. We have learned from history what does

work. Hence, Marxist doctrine has become increasingly dogmatic and intolerant – rigidly mechanistic in its account of historical change, blindly optimistic and intolerant of dissent in the face of evidently diminishing prospects of revolutionary social transformation.

Although, he has always denied Marxism the crutch of empirical determinism or rationalist necessity, yet in the immediate postwar period he has still believed that the proletariat may possibly fill the lofty role assigned it by the theory. But (by 1955), this hope has been replaced by distrust. It is not only the absence of militance among contemporary workers that bothers him; it is also the seemingly unavoidable degeneration of revolutionary favor into bureaucratic torpor.

However, Merleau-Ponty feels that classical Marxism has rested on the

“ferment of negation” being “materially” incarnated in actual historical force.

According to him, Marxism can only maintain its ultimate verity on this real historical basis, the proletariat conceives as a self-transcending being and the agent of universal history through meaningful negation. But he now argues that the party and proletariat necessarily navigate within the plenitude of a positive world; the proletariat can therefore never exist as pure philosophical negativity, but only as one positive institution among others. This circumstance in turn encourages a set of fateful identifications: “The proletariat is the revolution, the party is the proletariat, the heads are the party --- as being is being”⁶⁶. Even if a

transcendence toward a better society seem dim: its negativity will surely be corrupted by bureaucratic institutionalization. Merleau-Ponty thus comes to hold that negativity only descends into history at privileged moments: for the most part, even revolutionary policies are represented by mere functionaries, who cannot help but corrupt the aims of the movement. What appears to him as a process that may create humane relations among men now seems more a vicious cycle of unsuccessful attempts to seize institutional power.

Merleau-Ponty in other words asserts that Marxism cannot be considered true – “certainly no longer true in the sense it was believed to be true”⁶⁷. The options according to Merleau-Ponty are simple. One either remains a dogmatic Marxist, owing allegiance to Communism as a movement, or one opted for a powerless, skeptical radicalism, without immediate political efficacy, but also without intellectual compromises.

It is clear that a revolutionary politics cannot be maintained without its pivot, that is, proletarian power. If there is no „universal class‟ and exercise of power by that class, the revolutionary spirit becomes pure morality or moral radicalism again. Revolutionary politics was a doing, a realism, the birth of a force. The non-communist left often retains only its negations. This phenomenon is a chapter in the great decline of the revolutionary idea----.

Its principal hypothesis, that of a revolutionary class, is not confirmed by the actual course of events⁶⁸.

At its inception, Merleau-Ponty‟s adherence to Marxism has depended on an essentialist view of history and the proletariat: the latter provisionally incarnates

feels that history could no longer sustain such a conception. It is also reasonable to summarize that Merleau-Ponty abandons the hope of revolutionary politics because he was fully aware of the growth of a large middle class in western societies by the mid 1950‟s and that social allegiances may be formed along a variety of lines other than that of class, as he argues that revolutionary movement loses its revolutionary momentum once it becomes institutionalized and transformed into a regime.

Endnotes

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, Translated by John O‟Neill, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, p. 98.

2. Ibid., P. XXXIII 3. Ibid., P. XV 4. Ibid., P. 29

5. Ibid., P. XXXIV, 185 6. Ibid., P. XIII

7. Ibid., P. XV 8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., P. XVII 11. Ibid., P. XVIII

12. Ibid., P. IX - X 13. Ibid., P. XXI 14. Ibid., P. X 15. Ibid., P. 1 16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., P. 2 18. Ibid., P. 14 19. Ibid., P. 15 20. Ibid., P. 16 21. Ibid., P. 20 22. Ibid., Pp. 18-19 23. Ibid., P. 13 24. Ibid., P. 25 25. Ibid., Pp. 26-27 26. Ibid., P. 27 27. Ibid., P. 29 28. Ibid., P. 42 29. Ibid., P. 43 30. Ibid., Pp. 50/54 31. Ibid., P. 45 32. Ibid., P. 46

34. Ibid., P. 40 35. Ibid., P. 60 36. Ibid., P. 94 37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., P. 96 39. Ibid., P. 98 40. Ibid., P. 153 41. Ibid., P. 144 42. Ibid., P. 95 43. Ibid., P. 96 44. Ibid.

45. Ibid., P. 102 46. Ibid.

47. Ibid., P. XXIV 48. Ibid., P. 104 49. Ibid., P. 107

50. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. Indianapolis:

Hacket, 1993, P. 36.

51. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, Op. Cit., P. 109 52. Ibid., P. 111

53. Ibid., P. 115 54. Ibid., P. 117

56. Ibid., P. 187 57. Ibid., P. 149 58. Ibid., P. 154 59. Ibid., P. 153 60. Ibid.

61. Ibid., P. 109 62. Ibid., P. 188

63. Taylor Carman, Merleau-Ponty‟s.. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group:

London and New York, 2008, P. 178.

64. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, Translated by Joseph Bien. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Pp.

72-73.

65. Ibid., Pp. 56-57.

66. Ibid., P. 89.

67. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994, P. 9.

68. Ibid., P. 329

CHAPTER FIVE

VIOLENCE AND DEMOCRACY IN SOCIO-POLITICAL SURVEY: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS