What is critical phenomenology?
âCritical phenomenologyâ is a term that currently and more or less simultaneously is turning up in many different connections and different disciplines â it involves in all cases, in one way or another, seeing thinking as a practice that is embodied as well as socially and politically situated. Let us here just illustrate the range of ideas that are connected to the term by way of introducing a few of those authors specifically using the term. For example, JĂŠrĂ´me Melançon (2014) localizes this thinking in the shared field of philosophy and social sciences. Taking his starting point as the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu, he emphasizes reflexivity, that is, thinking about our own situation and those of the people who surround us by a constant confrontation of what unites and separates us, from our body to our most abstract thoughts â a radical attempt to understand our lives through those of others. The geographer George Revill (2015) sees it as an approach that theorizes the spatio-temporal specificity of experience, the ontologically generative qualities of that experience and the politics articulated by particular distributions of the sensible. Eric Mohr (2014) connects the term to phenomenologyâs relevance for ideology critique. For him, critical phenomenology means putting the findings of phenomenology to work for the sake of social critique. For this purpose he draws on the German value phenomenologist Max Scheler to develop an ideology critique as a critique of the ways in which social organization institutionalizes value-delusions and/or value-inversions. Finally, Lisa Guenther offers a longer definition worth quoting in its entirety:
By critical phenomenology, I mean both a philosophical practice of reflecting on the transcendental and material structures that make experience possible and meaningful, and also a political practice of ârestructuring the worldâ in order to generate new and liberatory possibilities for meaningful experience and existence. As a philosophical practice, critical phenomenology rejects the absolute priority of a singular transcendental ego, both to the world and to a more complex sense of transcendental intersubjectivity. It also questions the priority of the transcendental to the material, without foregoing a transcendental analysis of experience altogether. As a political practice, critical phenomenology is a struggle for liberation from the structures that privilege, naturalize, and normalize certain experiences of the world while marginalizing, pathologizing, and discrediting others. (2017: 49)
We can assent to all these definitions and also find inspiration in them. For us, then, critical phenomenology involves specific choices within a phenomenological literature, seeking definitions that are open to social analysis and politics but also a combination of phenomenology with other critical social theories. The starting point is taken from a group of phenomenologists whose work has been known as âasubjectiveâ and second- or third-generation phenomenology and which addresses questions of intersubjectivity, ethics and politics. That includes authors such as Merleau-Ponty, PatoÄka, Waldenfels, Levinas and Arendt, amongst whom our starting point is Merleau-Ponty and his embodied phenomenology. The version of critical phenomenology we embark on, however, also has strong affiliations to feminist theory, critical race theory, postcolonial thinking and the unorthodox Marxism of Henri Lefebvre. These choices rely on our theoretical reflections but also on the empirical field in which we have been working. Combining phenomenology with feminist theory and postcolonialism is of course not a new exercise (see Fanon, 1967a; de Beauvoir, 1972; Alcoff, 1999, 2006; Ahmed, 2000, 2006; Young, 2005, just to mention a few). The basis for the connection is the common interest in embodiment and embodied experiences, and it is in this connection that the critical potential of phenomenology in particular has been exposed. Our initial reflections on critical phenomenology can then be summarized in three points:
First, it is a critical theory that emphasizes experience.1 Most critical theory focuses on inequalities and oppression as rooted in structural and systemic relations â and in many cases for good reasons. There is, however, more to it than that. It is insufficient to describe the worldâs general structures without also attending to the way they are experienced from within â that is, including the experiences of those who are finding themselves in and suffering from situations of oppression. This is where Merleau-Pontyâs phenomenology has an invaluable role to play. It offers an epistemology and a descriptive method that eschews rationalism and objectifying mindâbody dualisms, and instead invites a focus on embodied, situated and often more affective forms of experience. In phenomenology, the account of the world is not an objective one; it is the way it is experienced. Phenomenologically speaking, âa worldâ is a taken-for-granted, context-giving horizon from within and against which our lived experiences emerge: âThe world is not what I think, but what I live throughâ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: xviâxvii). Merleau-Ponty describes our existence and our lifeworld in the light of the fact that we are experiencing bodies.2 In his thinking, the question of the world is far from any solipsistic ideas of private worlds; he advocates a radical intersubjectivity, which he theorizes as an opening onto otherness and into a common space where our worlds overlap and intertwine â in this way seeing the world as an âintermundane spaceâ (1968: 269). Furthermore, he was adamant that phenomenology eschews any return to experience in some naĂŻve and uncritical sense. It is exactly because experience is already infused with layers of cultural sedimentation, saturated with habit and inertia, and interwoven with power and obfuscation, that it must be ceaselessly interrogated and opened up to experiments (Coole, 2001: 20). In this way, he anticipates and escapes later âpoststructuralistâ critique claiming that experience is presumed to be âauthenticâ and offering a self-evident truthfulness.
This point also means that phenomenology is not a return to a simple level of description. It sticks close to experience, but experiences and events have to be interpreted as they emerge within the tissue of ideal and material connections of existence. This is an interpretive and creative act as well as a discovery. In critical analysis it also involves particular knowledge interests. For this part we have drawn inspiration from what Sandra Harding (1998) calls borderlands epistemology. She characterizes it as a form of standpoint epistemology using practices and experiences in âborderlandsâ as starting points for analysis. Harding further traces the intellectual background of standpoint epistemologies to a specific reading of Hegelâs ideas about the master/slave relationship. It emphasizes how knowledge about the relationship achieved from the standpoint of the slaveâs life is preferable to the more distorted understanding available from the masterâs perspective. From the latter, everything the slave does appears to be a consequence either of the masterâs will or of the slaveâs brutish nature â s/he does not appear fully human, while the same activities from the slaveâs perspective can be understood as human (tactical) actions performed in relation to his/her conditions of life. These reflections have since informed Marxism as well as feminism, anti-racism and postcolonialism.
Harding maintains that borderland epistemologies are not only about experiences of marginal lives. Research has to start off from such positions in order to understand the relationship between those lives, and other social and cultural relations. The approach is âgroundedâ, but not conventionally so. It is not just neutral conceptualizations, but theoretical reflections around them. What the borderlands thinking claims is that all knowledge attempts are socially situated and some of these positions are better than others as a starting point for knowledge production.
Second, critical phenomenology is a phenomenology that is sensitive to difference. The principal figures in the phenomenological tradition (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and various others) have been targets of criticism for not paying adequate attention to the question of difference, not least formulated within feminist literature. Much of this critique has been aimed at Merleau-Ponty, probably because his work is, at the same time, attractive to feminism. His ontology, with its emphasis on human embodiment and lived experience, is very obviously congenial to any approach interested in embodied difference. On closer inspection, however, the critique is not that straightforward; it actually covers two (connected) discussions.
The first discussion concerns ontological and ethical questions and has come from authors such as Levinas, Foucault and Derrida, who shared the suggestion that in affirming context, phenomenology (including Merleau-Ponty) allows the other to disclose only that which the subject has prepared for (Reynolds, 2004) â that it pays only minimal attention to the other conceived of as irremediably different and thereby precludes the possibility of something being âabsolute otherâ. Levinas (1987) tightens up this assertion with the phrase âimperialism of the sameâ. As regards Merleau-Ponty, this critique partly seems unfair and partly a question of genuine disagreement. First, many of his discussions actually do emphasize how interaction with others can both result in appreciation of their alterity and allow us to surprise ourselves and move beyond our horizons. Surprise and disorientation disrupt already acquired meanings and expectations. In other words, his understanding of others on the one hand does not reduce them to the same. On the other hand, however, neither does it see their alterity as so radical that it precludes all mutual understanding. This latter point in particular appears in The Visible and the Invisible (1968) in which he advances an ontology of a field where self and other are understood as emergent singularities within an interworld and as both equivalent and non-identical. Self and other are at the same time intertwined and divergent, and alterity is something that is created in encounters; accordingly, there can be no such thing as âabsoluteâ alterity.
The second discussion has a more social character and is about gender/sex/race differences. âThe otherâ is criticized for being abstracted from particular others. This critique hits phenomenology broadly (including Levinas, see Ahmed, 2000), but the feminist critique of Merleau-Ponty can be seen as seminal. For example, Iris Marion Young shows that his formulations can be read as taking as norm a masculine style of inhabiting lived space, and that the traditional western style of feminine bodily comportment, viewed in the light of this norm, can be defined as an âinhibited intentionalityâ and an âambiguous transcendenceâ (Young, 1990a). Similarly, Judith Butler (1989) criticizes him for naturalizing his own historical situation of gender relations by taking the traditional masculine, heterosexual experience as paradigmatic of normal bodily intentionality. Both arguments are parallel to the earlier work of Franz Fanon on race, in which he implicitly charges Merleau-Pontyâs theory of a normative corporeal schema with being based upon European man, a white man (Fanon, 1967a; Mahendran, 2007).
If we look at Merleau-Pontyâs specific examples, he might be found guilty as charged. However, even if he did not make deep explorations of differences in terms of class/gender/race relations, later developments have shown that there is nothing within his larger phenomenology that precludes such reformulations. Amongst his contemporaries, it had already been done by Simone de Beauvoir on gender and Franz Fanon on race. In The Second Sex de Beauvoir insists on the experiential realities of sexual difference. Citing Merleau-Ponty, she writes: âI am my bodyâ and âif the body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp of the world and the outline for our projectsâ (2010: 46). De Beauvoirâs argument has been attractive because, by in this way conceiving the body as lived and as oneâs phenomenal âsituationâ, she escapes the objectivist reduction of sex to âraw biological materialâ without entering into the opposite reduction of sexual difference to a mere structural or discursive effect (see also Moi, 1999; Kruks, 2012, 2014). In Black Skin White Mask (1967a), Fanon, as mentioned, criticizes Merleau-Pontyâs phenomenology of perception, but he also appropriates it in his critical theorizing of race and racism. He discloses how colonization shapes not only the social and political structures of a society, but also the psychic life and lived experience of both the colonized and the colonizer. He also develops a phenomenological account of the lived experience of âthe black manâ who comes to experience himself as fixed and objectified in the ubiquitous white racist gaze. For Fanon, this gives rise to a feeling of ânon-existenceâ of the black man (1967a: 139). He does not and cannot exist as a black man â only as a failed white or honorary white â as long as colonial structures remain in place.3
In the wake of these works a bulk of literature taking a phenomenological approach to difference has appeared, in particular in the twenty-first century, when there seems to be a renewed blossoming of phenomenological thinking. A range of axes of difference has been treated â such as class, gender, race, sexuality, age, disability and religion â even if gender and race seem to be the dominant ones. Iris Marion Young has been a ground-breaking feminist phenomenologist. Her essay Throwing like a girl appeared in 1990 and was followed by other texts addressing experiences emanating from the facticities of female physiology and analysed as ânormatively disciplined expectations imposed on female bodies by male-dominated societyâ (2005: 5). Others explore more than one axis of difference. Linda Alcoff in Visible Identities (2006), for example, employs phenomenology to grasp the nature of gendered and racialized identities, claiming that âThey are most definitely physical, marked on and through the body, lived as a material experienceâ (2006: 102). And Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006) takes up the phenomenological notion of âorientationâ to explore both queer and non-white experience. Finally, as a preliminary illustration of the growth of this phenomenology of alterity and difference, we shall draw attention to two edited collections (published in 2011 and 2017, respectively). The first is called Phenomenologies of the Stranger: Between Hostility and Hospitality (edited by Richard Kearney and Kascha Semonovitch, 2011), the second one Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters (edited by Luna Dolezal and Danielle Petherbridge, 2017). As the titles suggest, both books collect papers that explore both the lived experience of our relations with others and the importance of phenomenology when considering questions of social justice and critique that hinge on the textures of lived experience and ethical and political relations growing out of them.
This leads us to the third and final point in our characterization of critical phenomenology; it is that it involves a politics that emphasizes co-existence. Again, we can start from the political thinking of Merleau-Ponty. It might seem surprising because, even if his embodied phenomenology has attracted increasing attention in the aftermath of the linguistic turn of many social sciences, few have engaged in the political aspects of his thinking. Exceptions are Sonia Kruks (1977, 1981) and Diana Coole (2001, 2007a). As they show, there are strong political elements in Merleau-Pontyâs thinking, which is closely connected to his participation in political discussion in the France of his age. He identified a crisis of modernity rooted in a common dualistic structure within Cartesian ontology, modern epistemologies and political regimes: the rationalist regimes were existentially violent, failing to realize their own ideals, and rationalismâs failure to grasp the dialectics of collective life rendered potentially progressive action impotent. In the two books Humanism and Terror (1969, orig. 1947) and Adventures of the Dialectic (1974, orig. 1955), Merleau-Ponty used this insight to criticize the dominant political ideologies of his time: liberalism and communist Marxism. Even if these publications were a picture of the period, the ideas they were built on have more lasting relevance. As Coole argues:
Since we still inhabit the ruins and crisis of a faltering modernity that calls for interpretation and intervention, his critique and his method of undertaking it retain considerable resonance, especially in the light of the political dead end of so-called postmodernism. (Coole, 2007a: 9)
Merleau-Ponty basically thought about politics as a set of practices and processes within everyday life in which coexistence ineluctably involves power and conflict as well as reason and communication. For him, politics was primarily about collective life and he rooted it in an ontology of the interworld, conceived as a thick intersubjectivity or a field of forces where struggles for coexistence are performed. Methodologically, he argued for an interpretive work beginning from a feeling for oneâs times, their lacunae and possibilities. Specific political regimes should be understood and judged on the ways in which they tackle the dilemma of coexistence, and this is how he himself approached the comparison of liberal and communist alternatives. In this way, Merleau-Pontyâs political thinking can prov...
