Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Barbaras carries forward Merleau-Ponty's critique of Sartrean intersubjectivity, a critique which easily applies more broadly. The first point to make almost goes without saying. Barbaras writes that the reality of the other is inescapably missed "as soon as the other is understood as a unity of sense constituted in me, as an analogon of the ego" Being, p. 131). It's my feeling that the ego, rather than presenting a model or a vehicle for approaching the other, in fact distances the self from the other, conceptually at first, but with actual consequences for the relation to the other. This distance is not the distance of the detour so much as that of the wrong path. This is not to say that the goal of meeting the other is the obliteration of all distances. Nonetheless, the possibility of approach structures any encounter, and the encounter with others is no less primeval than the experience of self. The journey through the ego abridges the encounter.
Merleau-Ponty's concept of laterality corrects a theoretical misapprehension of how the encounter with the other actually plays out. As Barbaras says:
The other is given to me only laterally; it envelops me rather than looks at me. And the face-to-face from which a victor must emerge represents only the most radical modality, which is never completely realized, of this primary "laterality."
(p. 136)
Perhaps the critique goes to far, stretching the meaning of laterality to the point where it can mean just about any worldy contact. We should question the sense in which contact with other people is always mediated by the world. In any event, laterality remains a powerful conceptual corrective.
"The experience of the other is that of an encounter," Barbaras declares. "It is not to be asked then, how knowledge of the other is possible, as one need only clarify the meaning of this encounter" (p. 128). Are we allowed to ask then how it is possible to clarify meanings? Anyway, Barbaras continues his riff, asking us to "discover, in the heart of consciousness as it is lived, a dimension which throws it back out toward the exteriority of the other. Because the relation of consciousness to the other is a relation of being rather than of knowledge, its lived immanence does not entail a the negation of all transcendence" (ibid.). How do we know this? How does the body of knowledge that attests to the beingness of the relation to the other support the distinction drawn here between being and knowledge? As for the main clause, why should transcendence be affirmed or denied at the point where the actuality of the relation to the other becomes evident? Do we know that transcendence isn't an irredeemably egological concept, illsuited for a discussion of coexistential laterality?
Labels: Barbaras, encounters, intersubjectivity, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre
Barbaras continues a critique of Sartre:
Phenomenality is just as much negation of determination as it is negation of the in-itself. One has to say instead that phenomenality stops short of both affirmation and negation. It is a negation that not only does not dissolve into the positivity of essence but still negates every form of positivity, so that it also cannot affirm itself as pure, univocal negation nor abolish itself in favor of fully positive being.
(Being, p. 123, Barbaras' emphasis)
Instead of "phenomenality" I would say epoché. The question I'll ask relates to whether one makes a commitment to the study of, or even the worthy living of, phenomenality. Could an encounter with the phenomenal be compromised by a prior commitment to understanding the phenomenal? This goes towards a critique of the instant. How does one declare an allegiance to the instantaneous without doing violence to the instant? Conversely, how does one maintain absolutely no affinity for the instantaneous and yet be able, at the drop of a hat, to live in the instant? Must the instant be unbearable? Well, this perhaps suggests a reason why the instant is thought of as precisely not experienced in any temporal, mundane or ordinary sense. On the other hand the difficulty of sustaining an enthusiasm for the mundane suggests that duration too may be as unbearable as the instant. We live in the to-and-fro between these unbearable states, between duration and instantaneousness. If this movement is bearable, does that mean that the instantaneous as well as the mundanely temporal therefore become bearable?
Labels: Barbaras, encounters, epoché, rhythm, Sartre, temporality, the instant
Friday, December 28, 2007
Sartre spells out what the imaginary means for an existential phenomenological ontology:
We are now at the point of understanding the sense and value of the imaginary. The imaginary appears 'on the ground of the world', but reciprocally all apprehension of the real as world implies a hidden surpassing towards the imaginary. All imaging consciousness maintains the world as the nihilated ground of the imaginary and reciprocally all consciousness of the world calls and motivates an imaging consciousness as grasping the particular sense of the situation. The apprehension of nothingness cannot occur by an immediate disclosure, it is realized in and by the free succession of consciousnesses, the nothingness is the matter of surpassing the world towards the imaginary. It is as such that it is lived, without ever being posited for itself. There could be no realizing consciousness without imaging consciousness, and vice versa. Thus imagination, far from appearing as an accidental characteristic of consciousness, is disclosed as an essential and transcendental condition of consciousness. It is as absurd to conceive of a consciousness that does not imagine as it is to conceive of a consciousness that cannot effect the cogito.
(The Imaginary p. 188)
If ontology is worth discussing then I too want to talk about how nothingness is lived. It's not that easy. When I examine my own experience of imagination I'm not sure whether I encounter anything like nothingness. Sartre says I don't apprehend it directly, but I'm unsure about the hidden surpassing towards the imaginary and whether that must proceed by a negation of the real world. If I accept that there is something like transcendence, does that really commit me to recognizing such an apprehension of nothingness? Most surpassings towards the imginary in my life are inchoate, and probably my grasp of the real is pretty loose. I desire a beautiful woman, which Sartre says I can't do; I am not routinely nauseated by the real.
A day went by. One of the days as the year dwindles down, neither belonging to the new year nor possessing the feel of the old, neither a holiday nor a workday, neither brilliant nor dismal. Staring out on the horizon, I might have been nauseated had I learned of a tsunami on the other side of the world, or an assassination. But there on that shore on that day I was not nauseated.
Indoors again, I imagined a trawler out on the horizon. In fact I imagined imagining a trawler on the horizon before I sat down and imagined one. I knew I would be confronting this issue of nothingness, trying to apprehend it, or what it means for the trawler as imaged to be absent. So my imagination of the trawler is suspect. And again, my imagination is not static. There is a crew on board the trawlers, characters. One of them is a Jack Kerouac-like figure peeling potatoes. Jack Kerouac was a romantic figure in my youth, yet he was also a real person who wrote stories about his friends and their travels. Everything about my imagination is suspect, infused with snippets of memory, culture, film, psychology, an ethos of compassion for all living things that is hard to live up to. What is the imagination itself? How would that differ from the imagination as it is lived?
I want to agree with Sartre that "the existence of a psychic phenomenon and the meaning it has for consciousness are one" (p. 19), yet I become aware that consciousness is something I must allow to happen, and that if I don't allow it to happen I am not really conscious, my conscious life has no meaning. Should I be nauseated at the discovery of a moment of meaninglessness? I have no reason to believe meaninglessness is benign. To feel its repulsiveness, though, I have to imagine this meaninglessness is Reality, or that the taste of nothing is really the taste of my own death, a death I am morbidly living. Morbidity may be the ultimate Neither/Nor, or the one we learn to live with. What then should we take from convalescence? It should be possible to imagine a meaningless one encounters as other than Real without being Irreal; it should be possible to recognize a situation as not yet having sense without meaning that one is therefore mired in or threatened by morbidity. Is the not-yet-sense of a situation really lived? Is the just-was-sense of a situation lived?
When I say that consciousness must be allowed to happen or that, pace Sartre, an imaginative consciosness may be surprising, while at the same time maintaining the Sartrean position against the existence of an unconscious that would bestow upon consciousness any meaning other than its own, it seems as if I must entertain the thought of a pre-existing morbidity, of a consciousness that is not all there, not healthy, not meaningful. This idea is perplexing because it is hard to fully grasp the truth that the not-yet-sense is pluripotent and senses are plural; we are not fully aware of the many ways we have of allowing consciousness to happen. The free succession of consciousnesses–which must too be allowed, and which also may then have its senses and its non-yet-sense–reveals neither nothingness nor a neither/nor that could be assigned to either morbidity or convalescence; rather it testifies to the abundance of consciousnesses, and that abundance is what's at issue in the as such. (It was a mistake, then, to think that allowance of a consciousness was preceded by a morbid consciousness.) This means that the cogito should not be conflated with the vivo, and one should avoid choosing one type of consciousness as a model for consciousness in general; the model of consciousness as it is lived is the free succession of conscious moments, and there may well be no consciousness in general or consciousness as such. I am taking a stand then against the existence of annihilation as such, and I am doing so on the basis of the abundance of the as such as such. I think we misrecognize the abundance of the as such as annihilation because fundamentally we identify consciousness with our vital existence. Well, to be honest, I would have an attitude about annihilation as such even if I weren't aware of the abundance of the as such. I am curious to know what it means to be conscious. It's still a little mysterious to me.
Labels: imagination, nothingness, Sartre
Thursday, December 20, 2007
It's looking like my efforts to imagine and Sartre's depiction of the imaging consciousness will not be reconciled. Sartre writes, "Goethe claimed he could produce a flower as a bud, make it grow, blossom, open, close, shed its petals, etc. But it seems to me that these affirmations that contradict my thesis are not absolutely sincere" (The Imaginary, p. 134). Why would Sartre question Goethe's honesty? When I read that sentence I suddenly became suspicious of Sartre, as if only a dishonest person would accuse Goethe of lying about his own imagination. We're on dubious ground here, but since the topic of the imagination fascinates me, since Sartre has a few things to say on the matter, and since I assume you can put some of these ideas to the test by imagining things for yourself, let's turn to another idea of Sartre's. He emphatically insists that strictly speaking there is no imaginary world (p. 167). He explains this position:
When we speak of the world of irreal objects, we use an inexact expression for greater convenience. A world is a dependent whole, in which each object has its determinate place and maintains relations with the other objects. The very idea of the world implies for its objects the following double condition: they must be strictly individuated; they must be in balance with an environment. This is why there is no irreal world, because no irreal object fulfills this double condition.
(p. 132)
It is very easy for me to imagine a world around Goethe's flower. I imagine many possible worlds, many incarnations of the flower. I can fix in my mind one flower, a tulip, and its world, from the stones in the foundation of the house outside of which the bulb was planted to the lace pattern of the doily under the vase where it spent its final days. And there are feelings, loosely attached, but they too could become fixed. I must conclude then that in the case of imagining Goethe's flower it is possible that the irreal object has a world, and that this world is also irreal or imaginary.
Is Sartre then mistaken about the imagination, or is he mistaken about what it takes to make a world? Is he lying? It must be asked. He might be lying if, for instance, he wanted to say something about being-in-the-world being related to freedom and decision, and he had already decided that the imaginary "world" was the "inverse of freedom" (p. 169), so rather than contradict himself he chose to lie. However, he didn't have to back himself into this corner where insincerity seemed like the least worst option to him; had he let his imagination flow and let this activity suggest what can be said about the image, he might have discovered a capacity for surprise–again this would be hard to reconcile with an idea that consciousness (and only consciousness) is existence while at the same time consciousness must also be an act. Well, have you ever been surprised by your own actions, your own capabalities? Sartre could have imagined action otherwise than he did. He could have imagined the world otherwise, and that of course brings up the other possibility, that Sartre is simply mistaken about what it takes to make a world. I don't have a problem with a world enveloping objects in indeterminate places, with a world of vague objects, or worlds of objects in various states of equilibrium or disequilibrium. It would be fruitless at this point to compare my experiences with mescaline to Sartre's, my dreams to Sartre's, or my psychotic episodes to Sartre's descriptions of psychotic cases. If you can imagine Goethe's flower then you can say whether it is worldless, or, upon reflection, whether it would be possible for it to have a world.
Labels: Goethe, imagination, Sartre, sincerity
Thursday, December 13, 2007
∞
Jean-Paul Sartre traces a figure eight with his finger and he sees an eight, as if ink poured out of his finger and the figure hung before his eyes. He has a kinesthetic impression of the figure, and an affectivity towards it, but the kinesthetic impression is feeble in comparison to the visual image which totally dominates his consciousness. The differences between Sartre's imagination and my imagination are so great that I question whether anything can be determined about the imagination in general. To begin with there's the proposition that in actuality movements, knowledge and affectivity are one in the imaging consciousness (The Imaginary, p. 92). The image is a synthetic consciousness, not composed of parts like a physical mixture, but equally kinesthetic, affective and intellectual. Perhaps the image shows us a "a certain way that an object has of being absent within its presence" (pp. 72-73). In Sartre's work there is no unconscious, but rather a profusion of consciousnesses, and a metaphysics of presence (and absence). "If we start from knowledge," he says, "we see the image born from an effort of thought to make contact with presences" (p. 67). I'm unsure of whether my imagination will confirm this, or confirm anything Sartre says about the imagination.
I trace a figure eight with my finger, and I don't see an eight as if ink poured out of my finger. I keep tracing. I feel the eight. I see a young woman skating a figure eight, but she is not directly superimposed on the eight traced by my finger. From this angle she looks like she's skating a figure of infinity, though the image is unstable. She skates towards me. She appears vague to me, but I can make out little pompoms, the blue lines of the design on her sweater, the edge where the skate cuts the ice, her powerful calves. It is Terpsichore. I hear her skates. I cease tracing the figure eight with my finger. The sound of her skates persists. It is slow to fade. I can still see a figure, her hands moving behind her back. Just a blur. She becomes more vivid if I shut my eyes, but she fades. The whole of the image, anything but stable, anything but given all at once, fades into the snow. I can still feel the eight in my arms. Hours later I can still feel the eight in my arms and it helps me recall the sound of her skates. I am skating vicariously, and I feel it in my muscles, and in my sense of balance.
Why is it that Terpsichore smiles upon me and not, apparently, upon Jean-Paul Sartre? Is it her being as a presence I contact in my hearing, in my sense of balance? It feels more like she contacts me. The effort is hers, not mine. My effort was misdirected. Sartre's muse did not come to me when I needed to imagine a figure eight. Sartre says that "the existence of a psychic phenomenon and the meaning it has for consciousness are one" (p. 19). Here we must distinguish between the image of Terpsichore and the muse herself. How is the muse's presence like the presence of anything else that appears to consciousness? I may grant that muses are psychic, but are they phenomena? What could they themselves mean? What knowledge can I have of the muses? Their moods are mysterious to me. They come and go as they please, like and dislike whom they will. Perhaps they have a way of being absent in their presences, but I couldn't say what that might mean. The muses are neither consciousnesses nor unconsciousnesses, neither to nor of nor from but perhaps for consciousness. They are visitors with stories of travels far and wide. The best one can do is to be hospitable, to cultivate a hospitality of the imagination.
Labels: imagination, Sartre, Terpsichore
Sunday, December 09, 2007
Do you see a human face in the above schematic drawing? Sartre says that "the representative elements in the consciousness of a schematic drawing are not the lines properly so called, but the movements projected onto these lines" (The Imaginary, p. 34). To imagine a face in these lines it is absolutely required that the body "adopts a certain attitude, plays a certain mime to animate this ensemble of lines" (p. 31; Sartre's ensemble of lines differs slightly from the one I've presented, but the point remains the same.) To see a face the white space on the left of the top lines must be different from the white space on the right; an absent line, in this case the line of a jaw, is enacted to separate figure from ground, to make the face appear as a face. This argument applies not just to schematic drawings but to all imagination. The image, according to Sartre, is "an act that aims in its corporeality at an absent or nonexistent object, through a physical or psychic content that is given not as itself but in the capacity of 'analogical representative' of the object aimed at" (p. 20, Sartre's emphasis).
Do you have to have a feeling about the face in order to imagine it? Can it be imagined without feeling? Sartre is concerned with something called "intuituion," and he says, speaking specifically of an affective sense that unites the signs of an imitation, though he means to make a broader point about imagination, that affectivity substitutes itself "for the intuitive elements peculiar to perception in order to realize the object as imaged" (p. 29). Sartre identifies two correlative elements of the mental image: matter and knowledge. The matter in the case of the face seen in the schematic drawing above would be something like a quasi-face. What of the knowledge? Sartre says:
Knowledge is not substituted in its ideational form for the failing matter. As such, it cannot fill the gaps in intuition. It must undergo degradation, to which we will return. It passes to the intuitive in the form of mime; it flows in movements. An new phenomenon appears: symbolic movement, which, by its very nature as movement, is on the side of intuition and, by its signification, on the side of pure thought.
(p. 51, Sartre's emphasis)
Perhaps it's telling that Sartre regards symbolic movement as a degraded form of knowledge (as I read him), and he didn't identify feeling as a primary element of the mental image. Would he be saying also that feeling is a degraded form of knowledge?
I very much like the idea that the body imagines. However, I've been playing around with the idea for a few days and I'm not sure it holds up. I imagine music all the time. It's easy for me to hear irreal sounds. I don't think my ears move to imagine music the way my eye moves to enact a face in a schematic drawing. When I try to hold perfectly still and imagine music, perhaps there is movement in my lungs, but it is not obvious. I will have to reflect on it some more.
Labels: body, feeling, imagination, Sartre
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Jean-Paul Sartre claims that introspective reflection on the imagination yields a statics of the image and nothing more (The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans. Jonathan Webber, Routledge, 2004, p. 15). Based upon my own intropection I dispute this claim, and therefore I also question some of the distinctions Sartre has drawn between imagination and perception which presume that images in their rawest form are isolated and static.
Imagine a chair. I imagine a chair like an egg cut on the bias with a pedastal or base. The base narrows, and then widens to encompass the whole of the body of the chair. It narrows again. The chair swivels on the base, then it wobbles, then it is fixed. The base is black, then off-white like the chair. It emerges from the wall instead of the floor, and then the ceiling. It is a net. It is an electrogravitational field of some sort. The chair materializes when Pierre drops his butt into it. It is ecru, egg-shell, winter white, bright white, mushroom white. The chair is a mushroom. The chair is an off-white recliner. The sections drift apart and spring back. It is soft as a baby's bottom. Pierre is embarrassed that I spotted him carressing the upholstery. It has little bumps. The arms of the chair are flanges, wings. The chair flaps its wings. They are flanges again. A control panel is set in the right flange to adjust the chair's dopamine levels. A wicked thick needle emerges from the head rest. An internet jack at the base of the skull. On the flange is a tray for the dental equipment. A bright light shines in Pierre's open mouth. Molars you could sit in. The chair trembles. It rattles. It clasps Pierre's ankles and wrists and then lets go. Hoppity hop chair. Bouncing pony saddle with gold stirrups. And so on.
Did I imagine one transmogrifying chair or forty different chairs? (The number forty is rhetorical. It could have been forty thousand. This is important when one considers the putative infinite inexhaustibility of perception and how this compares to the repletion of the imaginary. If forty won't cover it, perhaps forty thousand will.) Does the imagination deal in static images, or does it deal in imagery, projects of imagination, or, indeed, phantasmagoria? I think it's easier to imagine that the image is wrested from the phanstamagoric flow than to imagine that the phantasmagoric is composed of pasted-together static images. Is the consciousness of the chair as imaged static or dynamic? To answer such questions I can only recommend that you yourself imagine a chair and study your imagination.
Some further questions arise from Sartre's investigation of the image. He says, "An image is not learned: it is organized exactly as the objects that are learned, but, in fact, it is given whole, for what it is, in its appearance" (p. 9). By learning objects he means multiplying possible points of view on them. (Hmm.) He says that things in the perceptual world are characteristically overflowing while things in the imaginary world are impoverished. The image, he says, contains only what is put there by consciousness. Perhaps there is some truth to this, but I would question whether imaginative putting is typically exhausted in a single act, like a snapshot.
Let's hone in on the immediacy of the image according to Sartre. He says that in imagining something that moves "there will never be the smallest time-lag between the object and the consciousness. Not a second of surprise: the object that is moving is not alive, it never preedes the intention. But neither it is inert, passive, 'worked' from the outside, like a marionette: the consciousness never precedes the object, the intention reveals itself at the same time as it realizes itself, in and by its realization" (p. 11, Sartre's emphasis). Sartre remarks in an endnote that hypnagogic imagery may be an exception to this, that hypnagogic images resist consciousness. I wonder though whether hypnagogia doesn't teach us something essential about the imagination, and whether we have in our wakeful lives the capacity to be surprised by our imagination. I believe that if I allow my imagination free rein (again with the horses) I can be surprised by images. Since digging into Sartre's study of the imagination I can't be certain about whether this is true for others.
Now Sartre says something about the imagination that I think must be partially true (or, in fact, mutably true). He says that the imaging consciousness "is spontaneous and creative; it supports, maintains by continuous creation, the sensible qualities of its object" (p. 15, my emphasis). Of course in this post I am questioning whether or how the imagination maintains or conserves the object as imaged. I would argue that precisely because it does operate by continuous creation the imagination does not have conservation or maintenance as its goal, and because the image springs from a "deep spontaneity that cannot be assimilated to the will" (p. 18, my emphasis) it has surprise as one of its possibilities. However, I must confess that my imagination of the chair this morning is in part a remembering of an episode of imagination that occurred on Thanksgiving, an episode that has been relived, in parts, since then. Though I am able to imagine newly–at this moment for instance the chair is a red button–I also imagine oldly, which suggests that indeed the imagination does maintain sensible qualities and in various aspects conserve the object as imaged. Remembering is generally part of my writing process, as I often think in bed, in the shower, while reading, exercising or otherwise occupying my mind away from the computer, and I typically write in the mornings when my mind is clear and strong, as far as that goes. So there does appear to be an element of maintenance involved in the imagery of the chair I've given. Is this the work of memory completely separate from the work of imagination, or do the imagination and the memory operate on the same wave lengths? Do they produce the same sort of results? Sartre says that imaging consciousness "feels itself to be consciousness through and through and homogenous with other consciousnesses that have preceded it and with which it is synthetically united" (p. 14, my emphasis). I remain uncertain about the relationship between imagination and memory.
(I will take the opportunity to announce here that I will be devoting some thought to Mnemosyne, and thinking memory as a mindfulness of something other than la même, though perhaps la même cannot be avoided.)
Finally, does the imaged object give itself as a nothingness? Well, Sartrean nothingness may be especially replete. It may make sense to speak of irreality and a transversal consciousness that has no object. I don't know what this nothingness has to do with certainty though, and it is certainty that Sartre is claiming to uncover in these opening chapters. I don't doubt that Sartre was imaginatively conscious of some objects or that he reported honestly on what he observed. Nevertheless, I can't share his confidence in the certainty of the data of introspection. I am certain about the imagery of the chair that I've had, and I suspect that my imagination does traffic in uncertainties, but I have no illusion that I therefore know how the imagination works in every instance, for everybody. What is the relationship between the phantasmagoric faculty that I've discovered and your own imagination of a chair? And how would such a faculty actually relate to memory or to other consciousnesses? Is perception really the arena of inexhaustibility, or is it the imagination that supplies the forty thousand aspects of a thing?
Labels: chairs, imagination, introspection, Sartre, surprise