Up The Wooden Hill
Above all, it ought to be obvious to all that C.P is no kind of Career
Path. Children, if you want to grow up to be a professor or a cultural
analyst, you had better make sure you stay `in the true', as Foucault puts
it. You're going to need theory, method, routine, and clean living. Doing
cultural phenomenology is not a matter of making yourself into a cultural
phenomenologist, through vigil, the taking of vows, or other forms of
intellectual indenture. In fact, doing cultural phenomenology is probably
more like going to sleep than it is prudent for me to admit. I actually have
in mind here something quite specific: the arresting account offered by
Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception of how to go to sleep,
as we know, a tricky matter if you see it as a conscious exercise of will:
So you invoke sleep by pretending to be a sleeping person, knowing, but of
course, pretending not to, that the point at which you start forgetting to
pretend to be a sleeper is the point at which sleep will have a chance to
enter in. This quotation will doubtless put the tin lid on things for those
who find everything I have been saying woozy, irrationalist, irresponsible,
reactionary, anti-theoretical, New Ageist apostasy. I am trying to do the
sort of conjuring trick that Merleau-Ponty describes, though not exactly
in the way he describes it. Needless to say, this that you have been reading
is not itself supposed to be cultural phenomenology, or I don't think so.
I am trying to counterfeit something into existence, to succeed in becoming
what I was trying to be. The point is to suggest that there are intellectual
possibilities as well as existential conditions which you can come at just
as well sideways or from underneath as frontways and from on
top.
|
| Steve Connor | English and Humanities | Birkbeck College |