What's in a name?

One of the ideas that Merleau-Ponty presents in his discourse on Cezanne is much related to Ferdinand Saussure's concept of the signifier (sound image) and the signified (concept).

According to Merleau-Ponty, "Cezanne did not think he had to choose between feeling and thought, as if he were deciding betwen chaos and order. He did not want to separate the stable things which we see and the shifting way in which they appear...."

Thus we have the infamous views of Mont Sainte-Victoire.

"...it is Cezanne's genius that when the overall composition of the picture is seen globally, persepctival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to the impression of an emerging order, an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes."

This takes us to Saussure. Things are not necessarily what they seem or ought to be.

According to Stanford's philosophy website on Saussure: "The sound image (signifier) and the concept (signified) must be what they are, not in reference to ‘the piece of furniture that one sits on’, but in reference to other signifiers and signified within the same language. If there were a motivated relationship between the word and the concept, then one word would be more or less adequate; this is, in fact, not the case since there are many different languages."
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/merleau-ponty/#5



Thus, Joseph Kosuth's work such as One and Three Chairs, 1965 embodies the Cezannesque vision and perspective while re-addressing Saussure's challenging notion of the langue.

See you in class,
Julie