Modernism and Phenomenology

Literature, Philosophy, Art

Ariane Mildenberg

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780230289369
• eBook ISBN: 9781349592517
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Braiding together strands of literary, phenomenological and art historical reflection, Modernism and Phenomenology explores the ways in which modernist writers and artists return us to wonder before the world. Taking such wonder as the motive for phenomenology itself, and challenging extant views of modernism that uphold a mind-world opposition rooted in Cartesian thought, the book considers the work of modernists who, far from  presenting perfect, finished models for life and the self, embrace raw and semi-chaotic experience. Close readings of works by Paul Cézanne, Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, Paul Klee, and Virginia Woolf explore how modernist texts and artworks display a deep-rooted openness to the world that turns us into "perpetual beginners." Pushing back against ideas of modernism as fragmentation or groundlessness, Mildenberg argues that this openness is less a sign of powerlessness and deferred meaning than of the very provisionality of experience.

© The Author(s) 2017

Ariane MildenbergModernism and PhenomenologyModernism and...https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-59251-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Phenomenology, Modernism and the Crisis of Modernity

Ariane Mildenberg¹

(1)

School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

Ariane Mildenberg

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Braiding

In his course notes on Edmund Husserl’s ‘The Origin of Geometry,’ the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty draws upon Husserl when characterising his own notion of the ‘chiasm’ as ‘Verflechtung,’ which, as Leonard Lawlor notes, ‘is translated into French as entrelacement or enchevêtrement, and into English as “interweaving” or “entanglement.”’ ¹ One might pause for a moment and wonder about these translations, since Verflechtung in German stems from flechten, meaning to braid. There is a difference between weaving and braiding. Weaving uses two distinct sets of elements: warp threads and weft threads. Weft threads can be on a shuttle to weave in and out of the warp threads. While the warp and the weft remain separate in weaving, in a braid the thread works as both the weft and the warp. Braiding structures are produced by crossing three or more strands in various zigzagging ways so that the warp becomes the weft and vice versa: there are no distinct sets of elements. ² This zigzagging or trading of strands, which can be laces or twines, may also be referred to as interlacing or intertwining.

This consideration is of paramount value. In his last, unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes:

What makes the weight, the thickness, the flesh of each color, of each sound, of each tactile texture, of the present and of the world is the fact that he who grasps them feels himself emerge from them by a sort of coiling up or redoubling, fundamentally homogeneous with them: he feels that he is the sensible itself coming to itself and that in return the sensible is in his eyes as it were his double or an extension of his own flesh. ³

Just as the warp becomes the weft and vice versa in braiding, the body-subject, according to Merleau-Ponty, has a twofold being: the seer can also be seen, the toucher can also be touched so that a certain reversibility or crossing takes place. We are at once seeing/sensing subjects and seen/sensed objects in a world of others just like ourselves. Collapsing any distinct entities of objectivity and subjectivity and inside/outside polarities, Merleau-Ponty braids rather than weaves selves, others and world into one thick, intersubjective texture. Citing Husserl, he notes that the three strands ‘man, language, world (lived world, and objectified, idealized world)’ are verflochten into a single braid and ‘given in one package.’ ⁴ Merleau-Ponty called this package ‘the flesh of the world.’ ⁵

Braiding, interlacing or intertwining multiple strands of literary, art-historical and philosophical reflections, and thus undermining the distinct subject-object reasoning that informs Cartesian rationalism, the underlying thesis of this book’s argument is that phenomenology, modernism and modernity are inextricably verflochten. ⁶ It contends that the ‘sickness’ of European Man identified by Edmund Husserl in ‘Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man,’ ⁷ ‘accepting man per se and, in consequence, taking his origin for granted,’ ⁸ lies at the very centre of the crisis of the modernist subject, and that this is expressed in the literature and art of the time. Just as Husserl proposed that philosophy could only be recovered by ‘reversing’ the naïve acceptance of taken-for-granted existence, modernist literature and art provide evidence of this sickness of modernity and present us with new artistic models embodied in a shift of perspective, uncovering what Merleau-Ponty thought of as a ‘primordial faith’—from Husserl’s Urdoxa or Urglaube, a ‘primary belief (Urglaube) or Protodoxa (Urdoxa)’ ⁹ —that is, a faith in a pre-reflective contact with the world as the foundation for artistic inquiry. ¹⁰

Phenomenology as Pre-theory: Reduction and Historicity

In this book, I am less interested in using phenomenology as a theoretical tool for analysing selected texts or artworks than in bringing into dialogue modernism and phenomenology. Neither is it the purpose of the following pages to pinpoint a certain influence of phenomenology upon specific modernist writers and artists, but to highlight a kinship of method and concern between modernism and phenomenology, bringing the two into conversation and thus eliciting a questioning and examination of the structure of experience, which is central to both the phenomenological and modernist projects. My aim, then, is not to impose phenomenology upon texts and artworks, which would clash with the inherent openness to the world that the phenomenological lived body displays. Rather, the key to this book’s structure, and the starting point for phenomenological inquiry, is what Merleau-Ponty termed ‘primordial faith’: faith in the interrogation of perceptual experience as an encouragement to such openness, where there is pre-reflective ‘coexistence’ or ‘communion’ between the embodied subject and the world. ¹¹

Ironically, the common use of phenomenology as a theoretical tool through which to understand more clearly a text, a piece of music, an artwork or aspects of architecture is a non-phenomenological practice. ¹² It jars with the fact that phenomenology first and foremost returns us to the pre-reflective and therefore taken-for-granted dimension of experience. This ‘return’ to the ‘non-theoretical activity of perceiving’ itself, ¹³ as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty would think of it, merely suspends objective or theoretical notions about the world, thereby leading us back to the ‘phenomenological standpoint’ that, according to Husserl, ‘renders pure consciousness accessible to us,’ ¹⁴ exposing the world as phenomenon and ‘allowing us to focus more narrowly and directly on reality just as it is given—how it makes its appearance to use in experience.’ ¹⁵ Phenomenology is not a theory, it is a practice.

The Husserlian method of epoché and the heart of phenomenological practice—an abstention from preconceived notions about experience also referred to as ‘bracketing’—inaugurates reduction. The word ‘reduction’ stems from the classical Latin word re-ducere meaning to lead or bring back. In its root sense, then, the act of reduction indicates a leading back to—a ‘return’—to a more primordial dimension of experience, as Husserl writes in Ideas: ‘we start from that which antedates all standpoints: from the totality of the intuitively self-given which is prior to any theorizing reflection.’ ¹⁶ Stepping back in epoché, and abstaining from our taken-for-granted attitude to the world in which we live, phenomenology never replaces one aspect of reality with another—reduction, then, is not a narrowing down of world view—but tests our pre-reflective experience and reflective expression of the world against one another. It suspends any notions of the world ‘as a pregiven source of validities’ not to reject those validities but to refuse ‘to use them as premises, or modes of explanation, in philosophical reflection.’ ¹⁷ Etymologically, phenomenology is the logos of the phainómenon, the task of which is to ‘formulat[e] an experience of the world.’ ¹⁸ This formulation begins with Husserlian bracketing:

We do not abandon the thesis we have adopted, we make no change in our conviction…. And yet the thesis undergoes a modification—whilst remaining in itself what it is, we set it as it were ‘out of action,’ we ‘disconnect it,’ ‘bracket it.’ It still remains there like the bracketed in the bracket, like the disconnected outside the connexional system. We can also say: The thesis is experience as lived (Erlebnis), but we make ‘no use’ of it. ¹⁹

In reduction, the ‘thesis we have adopted’—the underlying commitment to conventional preconceptions and expectations, which Husserl also thought of as the ‘natural attitude’—thus remains there ‘like the bracketed in the bracket’: it is never abandoned...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Phenomenology, Modernism and the Crisis of Modernity
• 2. On Apples, Broken Frames and Fallenness: Phenomenology and the Unfamiliar Gaze in Cézanne, Stein and Kafka
• 3. Earthly Angels and Winged Messengers: Experience and Expression in Hopkins, Stevens and Klee
• 4. Virginia Woolf’s Interworld: Folds, Waves, Gazes
• 5. Hyperdialectic: A Modernist Adventure
• Correction to: On Apples, Broken Frames and Fallenness: Phenomenology and the Unfamiliar Gaze in Cézanne, Stein and Kafka
• Back Matter