What Is It That It Is?
What do I mean by cultural
phenomenology? Here, at least, is what I think it could do. Cultural phenomenology
would aim to enlarge, diversify and particularise the study of culture.
Instead of readings of abstract structures, functions and dynamics, cultural
phenomenology would home in on substances, habits, organs, rituals, obsessions,
pathologies, processes and patterns of feeling. Such interests would be
at once philosophical and poetic, explanatory and exploratory, analytic
and evocative. Above all, whatever interpreting and explication cultural
phenomenology managed to pull off would be achieved in the manner in which
it got amid a given subject or problem, not by the degree to which it got
on top of it.
`Cultural Phenomenology' strikes me as a good name for the work I have
in mind because it would inherit and preserve from the phenomenological tradition an
aspiration to articulate the worldliness and embodiedness of experience
- the in-the-worldness of all existence. It would aim to sidestep the out-of-body
experiences of cultural studies and even cultural materialism, attending instead to the affective, somatic dimensions of cultural experience, numbed and
masked as these usually are by our ubiquitous, compulsory talk of `the
body'.
(Maxim number one: cultural
phenomenology is not corporal punishment.)
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