What Is So Bad About Phenomenology?
Phenomenology has of course
been subject to various forms of attack and discrediting. It is sometimes
said that phenomenology is too passive and normalising. Even in its mode
of genial, slightly stoned amazement, phenomenology has seemed to many
to many to place far too much trust in our apparent intuitions about the
way things unalterably are, for us or for others, and to be not nearly
self-conscious enough about the constitutive role of language, representation
and ideology in making things the way they are. As a result, phenomenology
cannot lead us anywhere but back into our own warmly wallowing-in-the-world
selves, and does not offer us any prospect of transcending or transforming
that in-the-worldness, not to say the world itself. To the degree that
phenomenology may appear merely to accommodate us to the way things appear
necessarily to be, reestablishing the continuity between man and world
that metaphysics and modernity between them have viciously severed, it
can be said to be quietist, naturalist, unhistorical and antihumanist.
Depending on your choice, the attempt to yoke phenomenology and Marxism
to be found in the work of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre is then brought forward
as either a confirmation or a triumphant refutation of this claim. At any
rate, I am wagering that there is another path for phenomenology to take,
or be taken, than the forest path into mystified quietude.
As one might hope and expect, feminist scholars
have been quick to object to the specifically masculinist forms of embodiment
offered as general forms of corporeal entailment by certain phenomenologists.
Another line of attack on phenomenology concentrates upon its attempts
to investigate the structures of consciousness. The terms of this objection
are, roughly, that phenomenology assumes and sets out to recreate the transcendental
authority of the ego. These are the terms in which foundational phenomenology
is attacked by Foucault, Lacan and Derrida, as well as in the work of that
great, and also hugely overrated, anti-phenomenological phenomenologist
Levinas. But I do not feel rattled by, say, Derrida's attack on Edmund
Husserl, largely because I do not feel implicated in it. I am not Edmund
Husserl nor was I meant to be, least of all when I am supposing myself
into being a cultural phenomenologist. But, even if it were important for
me to defend my brand of imaginary phenomenology against such attack, resources
would, I dream, be on hand to do so. Don Ihde, for example, a phenomenologist
whom I admire considerably when he is saying the illuminating things he
does about perception, as opposed to weaving daft reveries about the return
of the gods to modern life, suggests that Derrida's attack on phenomenology
is really only an attack on the transcendentalist and foundationalist brand
of it practised by (early) Husserl. And anyway, what Derrida brings to
bear on Husserl is, in part, a tradition of openness to the contingency
and relatedness of being which derives from a post-Husserlian phenomenological
tradition (Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty). One of Ihde's telling
examples is the prominence of the metaphors of margins, frames, spaces
and spacing in Derrida's writing. Ihde sees this as an effect of a phenomenological
refusal to edit out the experience of the physical or material conditions
of reading - the fact that text is always presented to us against a background
of whiteness or emptiness.  He might have pointed
to other phenomenological features of Derrida's writing, especially the
extraordinary capacity to think through things (in the Sartrean
sense) evidenced in his work: his odd obsession with legs and locomotion
in his reading of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, for example;
his willingness to derive a theory of sexuality and writing from a remark
of Nietzsche's about an umbrella; or his readiness to allow a pair of boots
to lead him into some far-reaching reflections on modernity and the Holocaust.
This seems to me to be in a tradition of philosophical meditation through
mundane objects that has analogies with Jean-Paul Sartre's mock-heroic
discussions of skiing at the end of Being and Nothingness. I think
that Ihde is right to suggest that what post-structuralism objects to is
transcendental and not existential phenomenology, and that it objects to
transcendental phenomenology largely with the arguments and procedures
of existential phenomenology. Existential phenomenology in fact makes it
much easier to insist on the primacy of the lived, rather than the primacy
of the liver.
However, the biggest problem with taking phenomenology as a starting-point
for writing about cultural phenomena is most likely not its vulnerability
to contemporary objection, but rather its immense, muffling inviolability,
the fact that phenomenology represents so strong, so self-conscious, and
self-propelling a tradition. By calling oneself a cultural phenomenologist,
one is at risk of seeming to sign up to this widespread and still hugely
going philosophical concern. I share David Trotter's excitement at the
possibilities for contemporary cultural work to be found in the early work
of Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and am puzzled that this work should have been so entirely forgotten by this
current generation of writers about culture formed through post-structuralism.
But I do not think of cultural phenomenology as an extension, or correction
of the phenomenological project as it continues grandiosely to be conceived
and inchingly to be prosecuted in books, journals and conferences around
the world. For this reason, I think I may want more from cultural phenomenology,
or I might just as well mean less, than `that surpassing towards and of
ontology which can be understood to take place in historical event and
historical utterance' of which David writes. There is no doubt that a lot
of phenomenological categories could do with being historicised (just as
a lot of history could do with a more phenomenological curiosity about
what things might have been like as well as what made them happen and what
they must have meant). But I don't aim to talk history or literary and
cultural studies into a phenomenological make-over, such that we would
all start discussing Entfernung, nausea, the il y a and the
thinking of the body, in place of textuality, power, ideology and cultural
identity. I can understand very well what Merleau-Ponty means when he writes,
in the celebrated preface to his Phenomenology of Perception, that
`phenomenology can be practised and identified as a manner or style of
thinking, that existed as a movement before arriving at a complete awareness
of itself as a philosophy'.
However, I would
prefer to think of the philosophical responses to the phenomenological
impulse, by Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Freud, Husserl and the rest, not
as the making manifest of a pre-existing movement of thought, but as different
scratchings of the phenomenological itch by philosophy, which are always,
in the end, both premature and precipitate. It is the philosophical dissatisfaction
with philosophy to which phenomenologists have severally responded that
strikes me as a source of renewal, rather than the specific ambitions and
accomplishments of phenomenology itself.
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