Monday, April 21, 2008
Since becoming acquainted with the word ostranenie, I've been dying to put it down here, dying to talk about it. The other night I was watching Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love and it occurred to me that all of Wong's films are saturated in ostranenie, or, to hew to the particular, in Mood ostranenie is the doorway where desire passes languishingly. Anyway, Wong's films are a topic for another day. Today I want to talk about a certain "gap in experience" that Giorgio Agamben deduces from his brief examination of poetry and experience (Infancy and History, Chapter Three). He says, "It is experience that best affords us protection from surprises, and the production of shock always implies a gap in experience. To experience something means divesting it of novelty, neutralizing its shock potential" (p. 41). I disagree. Experience can't fully divest a thing of its potential to surprise without becoming something other than experience. Of course one must question what a thing is and what it means to experience a thing, and so we approach the question of what it means to be surprised by a thing. We have to imagine that this being surprised by could be other than a discovery of the surprising essence of a thing or one of its surprising qualities, that the potential for surprise may be something vested by experience. Yeah, well we haven't settled what a thing is, and that's a problem here.
Agamben may be well aware of my commonplace thoughts about experience, the ones I carry close to me without allowing them to be examined too closely. After all his essay means to destroy experience (for reasons that would matter to me to the degree I care about dialectics). It's hard to say to what degree I've been anticipated. In any case I'll try to keep alive for a moment the idea of a gap of experience and relate it to ostranenie. Agamben says, "Estrangement, which removes from the most commonplace objects their power to be experienced, thus becomes the exemplary procedure of a poetic project which aims to make of the Inexperiencible the new 'lieu commun', humanity's new experience" (p.). A quibble: estrangement does not remove from things a potential to be experienced so much as it makes the experience of things strange, or, since we have things on the back burner, makes strange experience itself. We oughtn't forget that the work of estrangement is foremost making strange, or perhaps more precisely a drawing into the strange. Quibbles aside, it occurs to me that I may have in the depths of my soul taken the Inexperiencible as experience. Just a thought.
A final detour, if you please. I recall from my readings that László Tengelyi, for whom an element of surprise is very much essential to experience, holds that experience, in its primary sense, has a characteristic poignancy. I'd like to say then that ostranenie intensifies the poignancy of experience, or even that it reminds us of the poignancy of experience. Would a gap in experience intensify the poignancy of experience, or function as a space for remembering the poignancy of experience?
Agamben's "gap in experience" may serve as a corrective to the notion that experience covers everything at all times equally. Why, even were we to agree that experience were downright essential to all that there is, we might still want to allow for gaps in experience, if only to keep some modicum of distance between you and me, for example. Quite possibly being is intermittent, which is to say, being lets go now and then. It allows for betweenness. In light of this intermittency what then would we want to say of experience, our way of being, if I may presume for a moment? Would we want to say under any circumstances that experience refuses to let go? Well, I couldn't naysay somebody who sensed a resistance there, a pull in experience against the intermittency of being. If the poignancy of experience arises from its resistance to intermittency, would that mean that experience would somehow be posterior to being? It's a vicious circle, I'm sure. Or a silly circle. Take your pick. In either case it may be that a gap in experience remains a gap in experience, that it is something that experience, however painfully, relinquishes.
Labels: Agamben, experience, ontology, Passages, Tengelyi, Wong Kar-Wai
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Nancy thinks that freedom must be thought in its absoluteness, which means that it must be distinguished from every concept of freedom that would be opposed to, and therefore relative to, anything like fatality (The Experience of Freedom, p. 110). In the course of exploring this idea Nancy thinks the temporality of surprise in a way that put me in mind of Tengelyi's idea of a present that has never been future. However, whereas Tengelyi thinks such temporality as belonging to a destinal event, Nancy wants us to imagine a suddenness of time that would happen without happening in time. The time of the surprise seems to be a time outside of time that, if it belongs to anything, belongs to freedom. "This is the structure of surprise (and it will form the exact reverse of the structure of the present): it takes place without having happened; it will therefore not have taken place, but will have opened time, through a schematism of the surprise whose 'I' would surprise itself" (p. 114). Nancy doesn't explain what "the structure of the present" means, so I am a little fuzzy on what he means by its reversal. I note his consistent use of the future perfect tense to talk about the time of the surprise, and wonder if it's something paradoxical like a future that has never been present, but, then again, the sudden time doesn't really happen according to Nancy, which is another kind of paradox. He offers a few concrete ways of thinking about the time that happens without happening in time, the open time. "Open time could be the time of astonishment and upheaval, or that of interrogation and explanation" (ibidem).
"Freedom always surprises when there is no longer or not yet time. That is, when there is no longer or not yet time for time, and for the oppostion of a 'freedom' and a 'fatality,'" says Nancy, returning to his theme of freedom's absoluteness (p.115, Nancy's emphasis). He says, "Freedom separates itself from resignation and revolt not in order to do nothing, but in order to open up this separate place, which is that of the free act in its proper and revolutionary force" (p. 116). He argues that freedom is neither free will nor destiny, but an exposed existence. And, importantly, he says that surprise does not determine existence but exposes it "as an infinte generosity to time's finitude" (p. 117).
Does the revolutionary force of the free act pertain to anything that actually happens, or is it completely outside of happenings? Is it vulnerable? Exposure connotes vulnerability, and I can easily imagine the vulnerability of the giver. Does existence possess revolutionary force or any agency that would have within it or about it revolutionary force? Would "I" be surprised to find a revolutionary force at the heart of "my" exposure?
When I really start to imagine a free time, I imagine a floating time, time unmoored, dipping in and out of the course of events, giving birth to rhythm. The forces that touch upon the rhythm of events, do they have a quality of irreality? We need more ways of talking about reality. Alloreality and spasmoreality. Spasmoreality is a revolutionary force that touches upon the course of events, a force of reality sustained not by belief but by surprise.
If tragedy can be imagined according to a spasmoreality of the free time, the time of the question among other things, without opposing free will to destiny, what then becomes of destiny? On the side of freedom, we have not leveled a skepticism but instead pursued a radicalization of freedom. Do we likewise pursue a radicalization of destiny? Might that lead into a synthesis of freedom and destiny that wouldn't compromise freedom? Or do we abandon destiny to its fate? If freedom and destiny aren't spasmoreally opposed, does destiny surprise itself, as if it will have become unrecognizable? According to Nancy we are born to and die to freedom. They are verso and recto of the infinite generosity that is existence, in which we infinitely accede to freedom (p. 119). The generosity of existence is surprising, and for this reason "destination" and "liberation" say too little, because they mark conscious, willed action (p. 120). Should we be surprised by the generosity of the tragic hero?
What, concretely, is a politics of generosity? Just throwing it out there.
Labels: astonishment, freedom, generosity, Nancy, reality, surprise, temporality, Tengelyi
Sunday, October 07, 2007
I want to follow up on one of Nancy's ideas in a sober voice. He says that in the experience of freedom that is thinking as freedom, we know that in every thought there is an other thought, which is the burst of freedom (The Experience of Freedom, p. 59). This reminds me of Tengelyi's discussion of the wild sense, the spontaneously emerging shard of sense that appears as other than belonging to one's life history determined according to a retroactive fixation of sense. Dylan, who has begun reading Tengelyi's The Wild Sense, notes a difficulty in the distinction Tengelyi has drawn between singularity and self-identity. Nancy, of course, has had a few words to say about singularity, but so far his thinking is a little opaque to me. It's fair to say that his thinking about singularity is existential. Ex-istence, he says, "signifies simply the freedom of being, that is, the infinite inessentiality of its being-finite, which delivers it to the singularity wherein it is 'itself'" (p. 14, Nancy's emphasis). If we put these two ideas together, the argument would seem to be that singularity is given by that which is other in thought, an other that is not thought but that thinks thought itself. (This strikes me as a thinkerly way of approaching existential singularity) Nancy speaks of a hither side of difference: "a difference of being in itself, which would not simply convert being into difference and difference into being (since precisely this type of conversion between pure substances would become impossible), but which would be the difference of its existence, and in this existence, inasmuch as it is its own essence, the difference and division of its singularity" (ibidem). Nancy's singularity is tied to essence, and even though essence is understood existentially, it appears to be a markedly different approach than Tengelyi's. And yet Nancy speaks of the division of the singularity of existence. So far in this work he has not thematized plurality, but the idea seems to be nascent, presaging a dominant theme of Being Singular Plural. This idea of a division or a difference in singularity does not seem far from what Tengelyi means by the positionality of singularity, despite the noticable differences between their two approaches.
In the last decade or so the problem of singularity has been noticed in many corners, but the thoughts around it still appear to be inchoate. The later Nancy (along with Adriana Cavarero) insightfully conjoin the problem of uniqueness with the problem of plurality, and I believe this conjuncture is an implication of Tengelyi's approach as well. Of course Luce Irigaray deserves credit for treating plurality as an ontological problem, though her works are not cited by these other authors. (I mean to take up To Be Two again before too long). The question of finitude seems to be a problem for plurality; can a world consist of as many nows as it takes to make a world? I'm sure I'll be rereading Being Singular Plural again too.
Labels: Cavarero, freedom, Irigaray, Nancy, plurality, Tengelyi, Trigg, uniqueness
Thursday, October 04, 2007
A theme of surprise has surfaced in my recent readings. Nancy talks of the surprise of freedom, Tengelyi of the surprise of new sense, and now Corradi Fiumara speaks of the emergence of something with an "almost unhoped-for spontaneity" when we properly listen to the philosophical tradition (The Other Side of Language, p. 76). I think that something is meaning. All three authors discuss meaning in some way, but whereas Nancy and Tengelyi thematize experience as the opening onto meaning, Corradi Fiumara's discussion of experience (pp. 120-123) connects the surprise of the experienced event to an attitude of not listening, rather than aligning listening directly with the unexpected. In Corradi Fiumara's existential hermeneutics the "almost" is key.
Something "speaks," in Corradi Fiumara's opinion, if it is listened for, rather than their being something said that one would subsequently listen to (p. 72). Does her thinking take us beyond the hermeneutic circle? It's not an easy question. She speaks of a "connubial listening propensity" (p. 75) and a "propensity for conjunctions, possibly similar to Heidegger's concept of 'dwelling by something'" (p. 78). I feel that "dwelling by something" is not the best guide for the problem of coexistence Corradi Fiumara's work poses. The idea of the connubial, if wed to an idea of the experience of listening as that which surprises, might offer an alternative to a paradigm of meaning according to which an interpreter constructs meaning out of an engagement that requires a prior understanding of the whole of the engaged. That is, while Corradi Fiumara takes notice of coexistence, and will thematize dialogue, I'm not sure she fully appreciates plurality as it relates to meanings. Perhaps she almost does. Perhaps she will surprise me.
Labels: Corradi Fiumara, experience, Heidegger, listening, meaning, Nancy, surprise, Tengelyi
Monday, September 24, 2007
Should we speak of desire in the singular or the plural? Tengelyi may be able to shed some light on this problem, but first let's take a look at the Ethics of Spinoza (the latin is here), which is a starting point for some of the ideas Tengelyi considers. Part III, Proposition VII, reads, "The endeavour, wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being, is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question" (Conatus, quo unaquaeque res in suo esse perseverare conatur, nihil est praeter ipsius rei actualem essentiam). In the note to Proposition IX, Spinoza explains that conatus when refered to the mind alone may be called will, and when it is refered to the mind and body together it may be called appetite. Appetite is essentially the same as desire (cupiditas) except that in desire there is a consciousness of appetite, and it is therefore the correct term to apply to humans. Spinoza says, in the beginning of his discussion of the emotions, "Desire is the essence of humans themselves, insofar as it is conceptualized as determined to some agendum by howsoever given affection of itself" (C u p i d i t a s est ipsa hominis essentia, quatenus ex data quacumque eius affectione determinata concipitur ad aliquid agendum). Elwes has translated affectione as "modification," which captures one meaning of the word, but obscures some others. The Lewis and Short entry for affectio offers two main definitions: (1) "the relation to or disposition toward a thing produced in a person by some influence," and (2) "a change in the state or condition of body or mind, a state or frame of mind, feeling (only transient, while habitus is lasting)." They note under the second definiton that affectio can especially mean "a favorable disposition toward any one, love, affection, good-will." Is the conative desire to persevere in one's own being equivalent to desire determined to some agendum by some affection of itself? Is perseverance in ones own being an agendum one must take a (temporary or permanent?) disposition towards? Is one affected towards one's own perseverance the same way one is affected towards objects?
In Tengelyi's discussion of conatus, chiefly covering the works of Paul Ricoeur and Jean Nabert, the conative desire is shortened to a "desire to be." In the words of Ricouer, "I posit myself as already posited in my desire to be" (De l'interprétation: Essai sur Freud, p. 443, IN The Wild Region, p. 146). This is the basis for speaking of "wounded" cogito. This shortening of the conatus, however, cuts off the question of what it means to abide by one's own being. When we pull desire out of the realm of the subject, which is where Tengelyi is leading us, the affection of and towards one's own perseverance is more intriguing than a simple desire to be. Let me put it this way: must we imagine the endeavor to abide by one's own being as a persistence of the same? Is there not also a sense of the be-coming of being implied by the endeavor to persevere in one's own being? And isn't self-preservation, especially in the case of humans, a matter of assuefaction? In our endeavor to persevere "our" affections are precisely a problem for us.
Tengelyi makes a partial appropriation of Lacan. He takes up the idea that the law of discourse creates a split in desire (p. 152). "The shift in meaning that necessarily occurs in a diactritical system of the demand's signifiers [Lacanian metonymy] results, at the same time, in the continuous transformation of the object of the desire as well. Desire wanders from one object to the other" (p. 154, Tengelyi's emphasis). I'm tempted to say that the conative desire also wanders. However, if we allow that the object of desire has never never actually been lost, is our desire to persevere in our own being likewise a search to find what has never been lost? Is there a Wiederholungszwang ("compulsion to repeat," Tengelyi renders this as "constraint of repetition") expressed in the desire to find again the lost object? I feel that this would be misleading conceptualization of what it means to desire to abide by one's own being, but I'm throwing it out there. Would it be desire itself that wanders in our endeavor to persevere or would it be the consciousness of an appetite to persevere that wanders? It will take a minute to work through that last question.
As I said, Tengelyi only partially appropriates Lacan. In addition to, or in contradisctinction to, desire as lack, Tengelyi offers Bernhard Waldenfels' idea of the responsive desire. Here we are speaking of the Levinisian desire of the appeal: "an alien appeal, which has its origins precisely in desire, will not restrict my desire but will–almost literally–appeal to it: the appeal will turn to and count on it. Thus the response we may give as a reaction to an alien appeal grows necessarily out of desire" (p. 160, Tengelyi's emphasis). Thus for Levinas there is a split in desire, but it is the split between all of the self's desires and the desire of the other. "Desire, it might be claimed, gets multiplied because it does not 'arise purely by itself' but as a result of appeals coming from alien desires, or to put it more simply, it arrives as a response to the desire of the other" (p. 161). There is then a sense in which responsive desire involves a desire for the undesirable: "our desires, constantly marking out the lack of complete satisfaction, keep shifting and transforming along the lines of associations of linguistic origin, but also . . . here desire bumps into something which is nondesirable" (p. 162, Tengelyi's emphasis). Now I'd like to think this split or any split in desire in terms of a Levinisian fissibility of the self. Tengelyi writes:
Indeed, where no orginal unity can be taken for granted, there can be no question of an orginal scission, either. However, it is not difficult to see that the idea of an original unity of consciousness does not apply to the relationship between appeal and response. This relationship may rightly be characterized as an intertwinement, an entrelacs, that is, as a connection which, precisely, does not take away the heterogeneity of its elements. In addition, here the connection of the elements is made by reply and correspondence rather than by a synthesis. It is only afterward that appeal and response can be united in a single consciousness; at the moment when they arise they are separated from each other by an unbridgeable gap.
(p. 181, Tengelyi's emphasis)
If there is no orginal unity of consciousness, does it make sense to speak of an original unity of desire in Spinozist terms, even of the desire to persevere in one's own being? We can also question the orginal unity of an appetite for living. Certainly our affections testify to a certain mutability of our desires, probably including our desire to persevere. My feelings about abiding by my own being differ from day to day. Why would I think of my endeavor to persevere as a constant desire, or as testifying to a constancy? Spinoza rightly says (Part III, Proposition VIII) that the conatus involves an indefinite time. Being open to this indefiniteness implies a desire other than the desire to conserve one's own being, if that's what the conatus amounts to. The difficulty here is to think the fissibility of desire without obliterating the heterogeneity of its elements.
At this point I think we are past the notion that desire resides exclusively in the self. I don't know whether that helps us decide whether desire should be spoken of in the singular or in the plural. My inclination is to want to think desire in the plural, but the idea of scission in desire, and thus the postulation of an orginal desire is not something I can rule out entirely. All I have are questions.
Labels: desire, Lacan, Levinas, Nabert, Ricoeur, Spinoza, Tengelyi, Waldenfels
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Tengelyi's discussion of the experience of alterity is a little thin (The Wild Region, chapter 3). I would have liked to have read some description of how alterity is experienced, and what connection this has to the aleatory, to the surprising. (I note in passing that it's easy to profess an openness to the aleatory, but hard to practice.) Nevertheless Tengelyi presents a few ideas about the experience of alterity that are worth going over.
Can experience be owned? Taking direction from Merleau-Ponty, Tengelyi forgoes the Husserlian ownness reduction (which we have encountered before). He says flat out that no experience can be owned in its entirety (p. 100). He says that "one's own experience involves an otherness which is neither proper nor alien but is characterized by a 'strange encroachment,' 'reversibility,' or 'intertwining' of what is one's own and what remains foreign" (p. 102, Tengelyi's emphasis). This wild alterity of Tengelyi's presents a dilemma. If one's own experience involves an alterity, it is still one's own experience. How can we talk about its deconstruction (I mean this loosely) without talking it into existence?
Let's follow Tengelyi a little further into his argument. Still interpreting Merleau-Ponty, he says:
[T]he immediate experience one gains of the other in his or her bodily appearance presupposes an "intercorporeity" which, far from belonging to any "primordial sphere of ownness" is rather characterized by a "primordial anonymity" and is to be considered, therefore, as an entirely disowned, or dispossessed, "intermonde," an "intermundane space," a no-man's-land. Merleau-Ponty describes this intermonde as a "wild world" which–"behind or beneath the cleavage of our acquired culture"–is inhabited by a "wild Being."
(p. 103)
Do we own any experiences in common? Do we have a primordial sphere of our own own? On what basis is this not a question for phenomenology? I'm not happy with the thought that my own ownness and anonymity exhaust all the possibilities of owning experience, including possibilities of not owning experience. I wonder if the insight that we cannot experience the other person in her entirety hasn't led to a misconstrual of the experience of being with others.
Returning to the problem of how we interpret the appearance of other body's, Tengelyi endorses Levinas' idea that we see in the gestures of other bodies the expression of an alien sense "which proves to be irreducible to any sense bestowal based upon one's own experiences" (p. 110). Is the alien sense, however, reducible to a sense in the making? Perhaps. Tengelyi says that "the relationship between oneself and the other is embedded in the process of the emergence of sense rather than in the process of the unfolding of being" (p. 112). I would have expected at this point for Tengelyi to elaborate on his thinking of singularity. Although he does make a brief nod to the idea of positionality (p. 115), he doesn't develop the idea of singularity that was promised in the preface. We may conclude that for Tengelyi singularity is not an issue of the unfolding of being. Regarding the relationship between singularity and experience, however, I find it provocative that Tengelyi cannot avoid saying "one's own experience." The association of a sphere of anonymity with the disowned is problematical, because the disowned suggests a prior ownership. There may be a sense in which taking up a positional singularity requires a disowning of experience and the acknowledgement of an alien sense as well as a wild alterity within one's own experience. This is a problem that could be further explored.
Labels: alterity, experience, senses, singularity, Tengelyi
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Tengelyi, following Marc Richir, speaks of vibrations of sense exhibiting a constant surplus of meaning, a boundless multitude that can be referred to as apeiron (The Wild Sense, pp. 80-81). Presumably then Tengelyi would translate apeiron as "infinite." However, he says that the most significant characteristic of newly emerging shards of sense is their undecidedness (p. 85). What sort of temporality does the indefiniteness of sense in the making imply? Tengelyi reviews Husserl's idea of the primal impression as presented in the Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, and as interpreted by Emanuel Levinas and Michel Henry. (See Dylan Trigg's post here for a quick visualization of Husserl's analysis). Tengelyi is concerned with the primal impression's strangeness to consciousness, and its quality of initiality. In his interpretation of Husserl's analysis of temporality the quality of initiality is evident in the primal impression's disruption of "the order of time organized by intentionalities" (p. 59).
The time of the reality which becomes available as a destinal event gets unfolded along the lines of the conflict between. . . the retrospective and the progessive temporalization. Consequently, this reality appears as present which has never been future, since only after this reality has commenced and has thwarted the previous expectations do the expectations start to take any shape at all–those expectations which are able to harmonize with it.
(p. 84, Tengelyi's emphases)
In a similar vein, he argues that if time is determined by intertwinement of the exigency of the past and the promise of the future, Marc Richir's chiasmus of retention and protention, then a third thread must be added: the belief that reality may at any time rip up the texture of intentional time, creating a space for a present that has never been future because it conforms to neither exigency nor promise, but precisely thwarts. This belief is an "empty horizon" that, when a destinal event takes place, "will be rich in premonitions which can be grasped in their reminiscences" (p. 88).
So what does Tengelyi mean by "destinal event"? He also describes this as a radical turn in life history. I wonder if "critical event" wouldn't capture his meaning, but he means to understand the destinal event in terms of a process of sense formation and its temporality. The "radical turn" or "destinal event" in life history "designates a sense formation which starts by itself, takes place without any control, as if it happened "underground," creating, simultaneously, a new beginning in life-history" (p. 81, my lack of emphasis). Sense formation creates a new beginning in life history by shaking or shattering "the dominant sense fixations which carry our self-identity, thereby giving rise to a split in the self, while, simultaneously, it makes a new sense available, which in turn will make it possible to anchor self-identity anew" (p. 82, Tengelyi's emphases). Not every event of sense is capable of shattering a dominant sense fixation. To become a destinal event a new sense must cross a certain threshold of difference (p. 88). It must be not merely strange, but really strange.
I had begun to think, clumsily, that possibility was contained in practice. Another way of approaching the problem is to say that possibility is contained within the real, or, perhaps, that the real exceeds its possibility. Following Levinas, we can ask whether a reality that precedes every protention (a present that was never future) also precedes its possibility. Reality here is meant in a special sense. We might call it the strangely real.
The "real" (le réel): it is by no means accidental that this word is put between quotation marks. The "real" is not talked about in the sense of an ordinary realism. Primal impression proves to be "primal source," "primal generation," or "primal creation" insofar as it gains significance and prevails in opposition to the "spontaneity" of the intentionality of consciousness constituting time. This "in opposition" does not only express a kind of contrast but a belonging together as well. What is real for us is real in consciousness. Husserl is right: the idea of a reality independent of consciousness is the product of a mere abstraction, or even of our forgetting about ourselves. Yet he is still not right: consciousness reveals a reality which prevails in opposition to the interplay of the intentions of consciousness, thwarting all expectations, countering all designs, "preceding and surprising the possible"; in consciousness–to put it in another way–such a reality gets organized whcih declares its independence from consciousness in this very consciousness itself.
(p. 72, Tengelyi's emphases)
When Tengelyi speaks of the initiality and the undecideness of the really strange sense (my words) being submerged, buried or pushed aside, I can't help but think of the traumatic experience and the psychological strategies for coping with trauma. Tengelyi means, however, to emphasize the other side, as it were, of the newly emerged sense, the side that is met with initiative, undertaking and adventure. The to be open to the really strange in experience is to be ready for adventure, to be open to allowing one's fixations of sense to be shattered. Why not go the distance and claim that reality is strange, staking out an extraordinary realism of the undecided?
Husserl says that "where there is a new experience a new science must arise." Perhaps the really strange–I hesitate to say the impossibly strange–rather calls for a poetics; however, the estrangement of the real from the subject of sense formation suggests yet another approach may be necessary. We'll see whether Tengelyi's diacritical method of phenomenology sheds any light on the strangely real when we tackle his thinking on the experience of alterity.
Labels: Anaximander, Henry, Husserl, Levinas, phenomenology, Richir, strangeness, temporality, Tengelyi, Trigg
Sunday, September 09, 2007
As we've seen, László Tengelyi favors Sinnbildung over Sinngebung, and Erfahrung over Erlebnis. His discussion of an experiential sense in The Wild Region of Life-History touches on a few more ideas I'd like to consider. The first of these is a broadened concept of sense.
Tengelyi draws a distinction between linguistic meaning and extralinguistic sense, and he claims that "all lived experience is related to the spontaneous emergence of a dispossessed sense, whereas the conceptual and linguistic expression of this sense is necessarily based on a retroactive fixation of sense" (p. 3). This is a little confusing, because Erlebnis is often rendered into English as "lived experience," yet Tegnelyi seems to want to talk about Erfahrung. He regards Erlebnis as the product of a static analysis, whereas Erfahrung refers to "the emergence of a new insight" (pp. 18-19). The conclusion I draw is that Tengelyi also means to investigate Erfahrung as it is lived. He departs from Husserl by intending to provide a phenomenology of experience that includes what takes place "behind the back of consciousness," which Tengelyi equates with the interintentional and the spontaneous.
Tengelyi makes a keen observation about intentionality. He says that it has the structure of "the consciousness of something as something" (p. 13, Tengelyi's emphasis). He notes that the German Etwas als Etwas ("something as something") is often translated into French, for instance by Levinas, as ceci en tant que cela ("this as that"), pointing to the concept of difference that is inherent in the idea (p. 5). One could easily become entangled in conceptual paradoxes of the indentical and the different, of sameness and alterity. Tengelyi sees this as a deceptive shortcut to grasping experiential sense. The task for phenomenology, which he regards as true for Hegel as well as for Husserl, is not to conceive experience dialectically, but to conceive dialectics in terms of experience (p. 6).
Taking a cue from Gadamer, Tengelyi imagines experience in its poignancy.
[E]xperience always touches a sore point; it cuts to the quick, it strikes home; it has, in other words, its characteristic poignancy. That is why experience, in its original form–as the experience one gains–is one's own lived experience, which belongs to one's own life-history and is properly expressed in the first-person singular.
(p. 7, Tengelyi's emphases)
I want to clarify a distinction Tengelyi makes between primary and secondary notions of experience before offering a criticism. According to Tengelyi, shared experience is a secondary notion of experience, a dispositional and sedimented kind of experience, whereas experience in its primary sense of an event of poignancy is always singular. I'm unhappy with this distinction. There are examples of shared experience that are not in the third-person, but the first-person plural. Erotic experiences would be the example par excellence (though of course there are phenomena of autoeroticism). If you've read this far, I assume we are sharing some kind of experience, an experience that goes beyond my solitary act of writing and enters into conversation. There is a possibility of discovering poignancies together, of furthering a discussion into poignancies that are not mine alone. My commentary may surprise you, and it may surprise me as well; I expect the same is true of your commentary, should you choose to offer any. If the event of poignancy is a sense without signs, it by no means follows that we can't experience a poignancy together. Even silences, heavy with poignancy, may be shared. The move from Sinngebung to Sinnbildung suggests this possibility, yet in emphasizing the spontanteous generation of sense, Tengelyi seems to foreclose on the reality of the plural interior of experience. We are exposed to the bite of the world, capable of sharing events of poignancy, a fact I am sure of because of the way I experience my body. Is empathy spontaneously generated? Is that the word?
Now I have to clarify what Tengelyi means by "interintentional," because his meaning is not the same as Kojima's interintentionality. For Kojima, interintentionality points to an orginal plurality of the transcendental consciousness. For Tengelyi, on the other hand, interintentionality refers to "shreds of sense on a path running from one intentional experience to another. We may describe these shreds as interintentional moments of a spontaneous sense formation, adding that the phenomenon of 'interintentionality' gives its precise meaning to the expression 'behind the back of consciousness'" (p. 19, Tengelyi's emphasis). Now, there is a sense in which Kojima's interintentionality also occurs, so to speak, behind the back of consciousness. Which of these approaches offers more insight into the everyday experience of empathy? We'll see how Tengelyi deals with these problems when he turns his attention to the experience and ethics of alterity.
Labels: experience, Kojima, Tengelyi
Saturday, September 08, 2007
Like Hung Wai-Shen, László Tengelyi argues that the tacit cogito of the Phenomenology of Perception was superseded by Merleau-Ponty's later phenomenology (The Wild Region in Life-History, p. 33; I will unpack Tengelyi's discussion more fully in a later post). Tengelyi alerts us to the following passage in The Prose of the World:
In the "I speak" psychology rediscovers for us an operation, a dimension, and relations which do not belong to thought in the ordinary sense. "I think" means there is a certain locus called "I" where action and awareness of action are not different, where being confounds itself with its own awareness of itself, and thus where no intrusion from outside is even conceivable. Such an "I" could not speak. He who speaks enters into a system of relations which presuppose his presence and at the same time make him open and vulnerable.
(p. 17)
Having begun to reread The Prose of the World, I now feel that my previous objections to Hung were not well thought through, and my understanding of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of language was inadequate. However, I still feel that the obliteration of the tacit cogito is not complete. I will explore Merleau-Ponty's thinking about the speaking subject, language and expression with an eye to how his thinking might overcome the limitations of the Cartesianism of the tacit cogito, such as it is.
"We now regard language as the reverberation of my relations with myself and with others" Merleau-Ponty announces (p. 20, my emphasis). Tengelyi argues that Merleau-Ponty approaches language as a diacritical system, a system in which the "I speak" is included. This is true as far is it goes; however, Merleau-Ponty's descriptions of this system frequently make use of musical metaphors, metaphors of gesture suggestive of dance, and of course the analogy with painting. Modern structural linguistics is only one model he uses to investigate the phenomenon of language. Language is embodied. Language is expressive. The expressive "system of harmony," operating through the locution that touches on sedimented significations to make them yield strange sounds (p. 13) belongs to another interior system of the relation between self and other:
[S]peech and understanding are moments in the unified system of self-other. The substratum of this system is not a pure "I". . . but rather an "I" endowed with a body which reveals its thoughts sometimes to attribute them to itself and at other times to impute them to someone else. I accommodate the other person through my language and my body. Even the distance which the normal subject puts between himself and others, as well as the clear distinction between speaking and listening, are modalities of the system of embodied subjects. . . . As an embodied subject, I am exposed to the other person, just as he is to me, and I identify myself with the person speaking before me.
(p. 18, Merleau-Ponty's emphasis)
Although Merleau-Ponty here talks of the other "before" me, he is in fact inclined to regard the essential relation between speaking subjects as lateral. He claims that "the other is never present face-to-face" (p. 133). The other is, instead, "always on the margin of what I see and hear, he is this side of me, he is beside or behind me, but he is not in that place which my look flattens and empties of any 'interior'" (p. 134). The other is decentered because the self is decentered; the embodiment of the speaking subject means that it is open and vulnerable, and that, counterintuitively perhaps, it can be generalized. "From the first time I relied on my body to explore the world, I knew that this corporeal relation to the world could be generalized" (p. 136). For Merleau-Ponty, the world has a bite, and we empathize with everybody exposed to its bite as we are. "As long as it adheres to my body like the tunic of Nessus, the world exists not only for me but for everyone in it who makes gestures toward it" (p. 137). In a footnote, Merleau-Ponty discusses style in terms of a "nonconstituted rationality of the thing-axis" and he says that "a nonconstituted rationality is possible only if the thing is nonfrontal, ob-ject, but what bites into me, and what I bite into through my body; if the thing is, itself too, given through an indirect grasp, lateral like the other person–such a rationality has decentering as the ground of meaning" (p. 45, Merleau-Ponty's emphasis). When Merleau-Ponty says that "[t]he signification of signs derives initially from their configuration in current usage, from the style of human relations that emanate from them" (p. 36), I take this to mean that its meaning is grounded in a decentering. "There can speech (and in the end personality) only for an "I" which contains the germ of a depersonalization" (p. 19). In a footnote he explains that this depersonalization is founded on an originary fusion of the embodied subject and her world, and he notes that "[t]his foundation does not prevent language from coming back dialectically over what preceded it and transforming the purely carnal and vital coexistence with the world and bodies inot a coexistence of language" (p. 20).
In the Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty defines the tacit cogito as "the presence of oneself to oneself, being no less than existence" (p. 404). In The Prose of the World he is concerned with this same relation of self to self. He asks, "How can the cogito emigrate beyond me, since it is me" (p. 134)? His answer is that "there is a myself which is other, which dwells elsewhere and deprives me of my central location" (p. 135, Merleau-Ponty's emphasis). Thus the tacit cogito is in one sense superseded by a decentered self, by a bodily coexistence. Yet nobody who has read Phenomenology of Perception would be utterly surprised to find bodily coexistence inhabiting the decentered self.
"The tacit cogito is a cogito only when it has found expression for itself," Merleau-Ponty says (Phenomenology, ibidem). By arguing, in The Prose of the World, that the cogito does not speak (and I find its lack of personality most interesting), it appears that Merleau-Ponty has left behind the tacit cogito as well. On the other hand, there is a tacit dimension to the speaking subject, the "strange expressive organism" (p. 14) for whom speaking and listening are but two modalities of the same expressive life. And, Merleau-Ponty says that speech "never quite pierces the 'eternal silence' of private subjectivity" (p. 43). "[W]e should consider speech before it has been pronounced, against the ground of the silence which precedes it, which never ceases to accompany it, and without which it would say nothing. Moreover, we should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven" (pp. 45-46). Thus it seems that the only thing Merleau-Ponty has left by the wayside is the cogito itself. The relation of oneself to oneself, and the silence of the speaking subject are intact. Does Merleau-Ponty thereby free himself from a problem of Cartesian subjectivity? I'm not sure. It would be fair to say, I think, that the problem has been decentered.
Labels: Hung, language, Merleau-Ponty, silence, Tengelyi
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
László Tengelyi's The Wild Region in Life-History teems with ideas. (Daniel Dahlstrom offers good review.) Here I will be reading the prelude to the book and honing in on the idea, recovered from Merleau-Ponty and rehabilitated by Tengelyi, of a "wild sense" (sens sauvage). I will examine Tengelyi's sens sauvage in relation to the problem of cadacualtez, a problem which Tengelyi understands though he lacks the word "cadacualtez." To begin with the latter, Tengelyi points to Heidegger's discussion of Jemeinigkeit and cautions against conflating self identity with life history. In his view the two are inseparable but not interchangable. Tengelyi defines life history as a "region where a spontaneous formation of sense takes place," whereas self identity is what is at stake "in every attempt at a retroactive fixation of a spontaneously emerged sense" (p. xxvii, Tengelyi's emphasis). The spontaneously emerged sense is a dispossesed sense, beyond the control of a subject (p. xxvi.) Tengelyi says, "experience shows that the process of sense formation repeatedly escapes from our grasp, challenging over and over again even our rectified stories and breaking up, from time to time, the supposedly hard core of our identity" (pp. xxvi-xvii).
Although Tengelyi departs from Husserlian phenomenology in attending to a Sinnbildung (development of sense) instead of a Sinngebung (bestowal of sense) by a subject (p. xxiii), he values phenomenology for its first-person access to concrete experience, and he proposes a method he calls "diacritical phenomenology." The field of investigation is not the self-identity of the subject, but a no-man's land of the "wild" sense (p. xxxiii). On the one hand this means Tengelyi will pursue a kind of phronesis that may be opposed to a dialectics; on the other hand, it means he will offer an interpretation of difference, a "diacritical difference" that is like the difference that is found in langue, "the system of differences on which the cohesion of meaningful expressions is based" (p. xxviii). Tengelyi means to employ this method, in the footsteps of Merleau-Ponty, without committing to a structuralism.
Tengelyi is not talking about a system of fixed differences, or differences between fixed values, but a "proliferating multiplicity. . . of heterogenous sense formations" (p. xxxii). He talks about the emergence of new sense thwarting expections and opening up new beginnings in life history (p. xxx), and he says that "sense in the making is always a multiple and fluctuant sense, containing, in itself, some refractory shreds, which are discarded by the retroactive fixation of sense without, however, being prevented thereby from exerting an underground influence" (p. xxxi). He makes a series of claims on this basis:
First, we may claim that a spontaneously emerging sense is accompanied by a continuous formation of a surplus. Second, it may be added that this process cannot be regarded as an accumulation of any well-defined and accomplished ingredients of sense, but it must be interpreted rather as a proliferation of some inchoate, fluctuant, and indeterminate shreds of sense [here Tengelyi cites Marc Richir]. Third, it may be asserted that, at every moment, these germs of sense are integrated into a diacritical system by their differential interrelations with each other, as well as with the already fixed sense. Finally, we may reply to Merleau-Ponty's question [about "my being set up on a universal diacritical system"] by pointing out that the reason we are not in a position to consider the totality of these differential interrelations from the outside (why, in other words, we find ourselves always already included in this diacritical system) is that we adhere, from the outset, to some meaningful sequences of life events, and whenever we see ourselves constrained to abandon or modify them, we single out, once again, some of the inchoate and fluctuant shreds of sense, discarding at the same time all others, in order to construct and fix another meaningful sequence of the same life events.
(p. xxxii, Tengelyi's emphases)
Tengelyi holds that "we are struck by the repeated occurence of an inchoate shred of sense" (p. xxxii). We are astonished. We should not see the return of the same as the source of our astonishment, as an unambiguous manifestation of self-identity–Tengelyi has already mapped out a notion of ipseity that "has sufficiently been separated from the identity and permanence of substantial entities" (p. xvii)–rather, our astonishment is related to the emergence of a dispossessed sense, and, he adds, "the supposition of a hidden unity in life-history is attached to this astonishment rather as a reassuring belief" (p. xxxiv). The retroactive fixation of sense is literally a fix, a response to something that is "broken." In Tengelyi's view the emergence of sense is most evident in experience at times of crisis, in "critical situations" or "stances of crisis" (p. xxii). It would seem that Tengelyi means a "crisis of identity," yet he doesn't mean to point to self identity by its lonesome, but to the critical rift between self identity and a life history devoid of closures (p. xxiii).
Returning now to the problem of cadacualtez, Tengelyi explains his commitment to the first person singular of phenomenology not as a commitment to the cogito or to any notion of ipseity, but rather as an expression of the difference between oneself and another. This difference, he claims, does not rest on any personal characteristics, and is therefore not substantive but merely positional (p. xxxiv). This is an interesting way of formulating the problem. It overcomes an impasse we face when we recognize that self-identity is mutable and to a large extent co-authored. Yet I wonder what kind of existential reality resides in the merely positional. Tengelyi leans on a Levinasian notion of singularity. He says that self identity "is neither the main source, nor an indispensable condition of our singularity, i.e., our irreplacable unicity. It is our singularity that finds its expression in the purely positional fact that we remain ourselves even if we do not remain the same as we were" (p. xxxv, Tengelyi's emphases).
To sum up, the theory of narrative identity may be charged with a certain confusion of self-identity and singularity. However, this confusion may be the result of an illusion one often falls victim to in one's quest of narrative identity. From time to time, we find ourselves compelled to reconsider and rectify the narratives by which we have fixed the identity of ourselves. In most cases, we cannot help thinking that it is our singularity, our irreplacable unicity, which is at stake in vital situations, in crisis-stricken moments. It is important to know that this is not the case; it is important to know this, lest we lose sight of the drama of life, which besides, or even, before narration, calls for acting as well.
(p. xxxvi, Tengelyi's emphases)
I have to point out the difference in language between Tengelyi's singularity and Crocco's cadacualtez. The latter is "circumstanced," the former is "positioned" within a "diacritical system of intersubjectivity" (p. xxxvi). Nevertheless I see both ideas as covering much the same territory, and I am intrigued by Tengelyi's designation of this territory as a wild region in life history, not the least for its accessibility to thought. I do have some questions though. As I read Tengelyi's account of this region, will I be allowed to be astonished at my irreplacable unicity? What thoughts can I have about my position? And if my position as a singularity is related to a diacritical system of coexistence, what relation is there between this system and the system that includes my fluctuant, indeterminate shreds of sense? Is the reality of these shreds of sense something other than positional?
Labels: cadacualtez, meaning, narrative, phenomenology, singularity, Tengelyi
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
László Tengelyi, whose The Wild Region in Life History I have yet to read (see this review by Daniel Dahlstrom), has kindly put some of his papers online, including Experience, Action, and Narration (pdf). Here are his conclusions:
We may sum up the considerations presented in this paper by formulating some theses. First, it may be held that it is solely experience which is grasped by, and expressed in, narratives. However, it must be added, secondly, that experience can never be exhausted by stories expressly narrated; it always involves some shreds of sense that may be said to wait for being recounted without exhibiting, or even fitting in well with, the explicit structure of narratives. The perception of these inchoative sense-moments may encourage us to embrace Ricoeur's idea of a pre-narrative structure of experience. But it is with caution that this notion is to be made use of. For nothing prevents discarded, or even repressed, sense-arousals from transcending the narratives which are, in each case, designed to capture them. That is precisely why, thirdly, they may be supposed to prepare unprecedented actions which put into question the stories accepted as characteristic of one's life and of one's self. Such a conflict between actions and narratives may, fourthly, be said to lead to a crisis in which an unavoidable split of the self comes to the fore and becomes manifest. It must, fifthly, be emphasized, however, that this split of the self does not inevitably degenerate into a pathological phenomenon because it is normally counter-balanced by a dynamic equilibrium inhering in experience, which, from time to time, re-arranges and re-organizes the relationship between acting and recounting. Thus, it is experience that mediates between the two attitudes the self is divided into.
(p. 16)
Tengelyi's conclusions rest on a certain notion of experience, and some interesting thinking about the relationship between experience and reality. To begin with, Tengelyi challenges a Husserlian conviction that experience is the product of a consciousness that bestows sense upon the objects of experience. If we are not going to adopt the naive empiricist position that objects identify themselves as real, how then are we to understand the connection between experience and reality? There is room here for a radical phenomenology of perception such as Barbaras has embarked upon; however, that's not the path that Tengelyi follows. Though he seeks to break the bond between transcendental idealism and phenomenology, Tengelyi retains the idea that the relationship between experience and reality can only be conceived from the perspective of one's own consciousness. He borrows from Fichte, Hegel and Schelling a notion that something in experience occurs behind the back of consciousness, so to speak, which is designated as the in itself. He sees an insight here that can be applied without the "mythology" of an unconscious. His claim is that "all experience is the experience of the in itself. It is sufficient for this claim to conceive of experience as of an event that thwarts previous expectations, frustrates conceptual identifications and calls for modifying conceptual schemes. Thus interpreted, experience makes it evident that sense-bestowal by consciousness is from time to time shattered, put into question and urged to renew itself by impulses coming, so to speak, from outside the conscious life" (p. 4). Sense, in Tengelyi's view, is not so much bestowed by consciousness as it is processed by experience. The whole idea of reality has to do with the fact that refutation and confirmation go hand in hand in experience . All experience is an encounter with a mind-independent reality, though, it must be said, the lessons of this encounter are necessarily interpreted from the perspective of a consciousness. (p. 5).
Is it time to go "hmm"? Well, there's one more idea to explore. If we're not talking about a dubious notion of the unconcsious, how do we account for the behind the back of consciousness quality of the in itself? Tengelyi proposes a genetic analysis of experience as opposed to a static analysis, an approach that would acknowledge, if I read him correctly, Erfarhungen rather than Erlebnisse ("lived experiences") (p. 6). What he notices is that in moving from one intentional experience to another, there are shreds of sense left in the wake, in the transition between experiences. He calls these shreds of sense "inter-intentional moments of spontaneous sense-formation," and these moments correspond to a behind the back of consciousness (p. 7). Now I will go "hmm."
My readings in European philosophy have taught me that idealism is deeply unpopular, and that consciousness is regarded with suspicion. I'm not sure why I, as a reader, should adopt these same beliefs and attitudes. I think there is an opinion that consciousness does not account for everything that thinking ought to account for, and this leads to a search for other concepts, and a broadening of concepts like meaning (which we see in Husserl, btw), or experience. The notion that consciousness should be broadened looks like a dead end to many European thinkers. So that's why I go "hmm."
Labels: egology, experience, meaning, narrative, Tengelyi, the unconscious