Silvia Stoller

International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol.
17(5), 707737
Phenomenology and the Poststructural Critique of Experience

Silvia Stoller
Univ.-Doz. International 10.1080/09672550903301762 RIPH_A_430350.sgm 0967-2559 Original Taylor 2009 0 5 17 000002009 and & Article Francis (print)/1466-4542 Francis DDr. Journal Silvia ofStoller, Philosophical (online) Department Studies of Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy and Education, University of Vienna, Universitaetsstr. 71010 Vienna, Austria
Abstract
Phenomenology is considered a philosophy of experience. But in the wake of French post-structuralism beginning in the 1970s, the concept of experience within phenomenology has fallen under heavy critique. Even today, in the context of feminist philosophy the phenomenological concept of experience has yet to recover from the poststructuralist critique. In this article, I will closely examine the poststructuralist critique of the concept of experience within the context of feminist theory. I will thereby refer first and foremost to the poststructuralist theorist Joan Scott, and her influential text Experience. In my examination of the poststructuralist critique of experience, the leading question will be whether or not this critique, down to its details, can in fact be applied to phenomenology. My thesis is that phenomenology is able to withstand the poststructuralist critique of experience. Further, I will argue that post-structuralism and phenomenology have more in common as regards the concept of experience than is usually admitted. For several reasons, it seems as I will maintain that both poststructuralist feminism and phenomenology are equally interested in a strong concept of experience and thus do not promote doing away with the concept. Keywords: Experience; post-structuralism; phenomenology; feminist philosophy; Joan Scott; Judith Butler
Phenomenology is considered a philosophy of experience.1 But in the wake of French poststructuralism beginning in the 1970s, the concept of experience within phenomenology has come in for heavy criticism.2 As a consequence, experience has increasingly fallen into disrepute. Experience became something of a dirty word, as Elizabeth Grosz aptly, albeit somewhat drastically, put it in the 1990s (Grosz, 1993: p. 40). This did not change even as the influence of poststructuralist feminism grew. In fact, the sceptical and dismissive attitude of poststructuralist philosophy toward phenomenology was transferred directly onto poststructuralist feminism and served to
International Journal of Philosophical Studies ISSN 09672559 print 14664542 online 2009 Taylor & Francis http://www.informaworld.com DOI: 10.1080/09672550903301762
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES
discredit phenomenology (Alcoff, 2000: p. 42), which concurred with the discrediting [of] experience (2002: p. 44). A great rift has damaged the relationship between phenomenology and poststructuralism ever since. Even today, the phenomenological concept of experience in feminist philosophy has yet to recover from the poststructuralist critique. In the following, I will closely examine the poststructuralist critique of the concept of experience within the context of feminist theory. I will refer first and foremost to the poststructuralist theorist Joan Scott, who has addressed the concept of experience more explicitly than almost anyone else. Her early 1990s text Experience has had a major influence on feminist debates about the concept of experience and should be regarded as a key text in the poststructuralist critique of experience.3 In my examination of the poststructuralist critique of experience, the following question will guide my examination: does this poststructuralist critique in its general movement, as well as in its specific claims strike at the heart of phenomenology as such, or does it wholly miss its mark?4 My thesis is that phenomenology is able to withstand the poststructuralist critique of experience. Further, I will argue that poststructuralism and phenomenology have more in common with regard to the concept of experience than is usually admitted. For several reasons, it seems as I will maintain that poststructuralist feminism and phenomenology are equally interested in a strong concept of experience and thus do not promote doing away with the concept. If that is correct, then this new encounter implies several productive consequences for feminist phenomenology. Feminist phenomenology would then be transformed into a philosophy of experience that from the perspective of feminism was now capable of accounting for the poststructuralist critique. In the context of feminist philosophy, this could, in turn, contribute to the rehabilitation of the much-maligned concept of experience. 1 Epistemological Foundationalism
One of the main criticisms launched by the poststructuralist critique of the philosophy of experience concerns the practice of positing experience as an origin or source of knowledge and insight. This critique is aimed at epistemological foundationalism, understood here as a recourse to experience as the source or foundation of knowledge. The poststructuralist critique of this understanding of experience can be summarized as follows. Insofar as experience is taken as a source of knowledge and is, therefore, understood as a given, it represents an unquestioned precondition (Scott, 1992: p. 26). Because experience is taken to be an unquestioned given, this understanding of experience asks neither whether or not there may be another origin underlying the original experience nor whether or not these underlying conditions may in fact be the cause of a particular experience. This critique raises the legitimate question of why, for example, a particular experience 708
PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE POSTSTRUCTURAL CRITIQUE
arises at a certain historical moment and not another, in one context rather than in another. This critique positions poststructuralism as an adversary of empiricism. To put it simply, empiricism is based on the epistemological assumption that all knowledge has its origin in experience. It is true that, for Husserl, experience is a legitimizing source of cognition (Husserl, Ideas I, Collected Works, Vol. II, p. 44).5 And in an apparent reference to Husserl, MerleauPonty writes that experience is the most immediate source and the last measuring stick of all experience (PP 23). But despite its recourse to experience, phenomenology is ultimately not an empirical science. Diltheys dictum Empirie, nicht Empirismus (GS XIX, 17) is also valid for phenomenology insofar as phenomenology works with the concept of experience but does not, like empiricism, foreshorten the concept empiricistically. In other words, phenomenology is not a science based in experience, but a science derived from experience (Lembeck, 1994: p. 26). Experience is not the starting point of knowledge; it is a subject addressed by phenomenology. In contrast to empiricism, phenomenology does not take experience as the foundation of knowledge and insight; instead, experience and its structures constitute an object of phenomenological investigation. The objection that theories of experience are based on an ungrounded concept of experience may be launched against empiricist theories of experience, but cannot be launched against phenomenology for the simple reason that phenomenology is not an empirical philosophy in the sense of empiricism.6 2 The Ahistoricity of Experience
The charge of epistemological foundationalism proceeds along the same axis as the accusation according to which the concept of experience is deemed ahistorical. According to poststructuralists, the concept of experience is ahistorical when a certain experience is imagined to be independent of time and space and analysed without reference to the categories of temporality and spatiality, thus leaving the conditions of its emergence unexamined. In contrast, Scott speaks of the necessity of historicizing experience (Scott, 1992: pp. 33ff.). But phenomenology has addressed the historicity of experience in various ways. The most prominent example is Heideggers analysis of the historicity of Da-sein in Sein und Zeit (Heidegger, 1996: pp. 3548). But evidence of phenomenologys examination of the historicity of experience can already be found in Husserls phenomenology. The poststructuralist objection to phenomenologys allegedly ahistorical concept of experience can be defused by referring to the horizon structure of experience. The fact that phenomenology posits experience as bound to a given subjects horizons of experience demonstrates that it acknowledges the historicity of experience. Scotts demand that experience be historicized thus parallels phenomenologys 709
insistence that experience always bears a relation to the horizons of experience. In what follows, we will pursue this idea in the context of phenomenological theories of perception and time. But before doing so, we should begin by distinguishing historicity in its general sense from historicity in a more narrow sense. The phenomenological theory of perception centres on the thesis that an object is always perceived in relation to the horizon in which it is embedded and from which it stands out.7 In contrast to moments of perception that are actually perceived, horizon refers here to the unperceived yet nevertheless incidentally perceived aspects of the object of perception.8 For phenomenology, these incidentally perceived aspects are constitutive of perception in general because although perception is always limited to a certain perspective, the object of perception is nevertheless always perceived as such, and not simply in one of its aspects. For example, when observing a house I may perceive only the front of it, but I nonetheless have a perception of the house as a whole and not just the front of a house. Through my coconscious-having of other sides (Analysis Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, p. 40), I implicitly know about the other sides, and it is this implicit knowledge that ensures the unity of my perceptive experience and prevents my perception from breaking up into fragments of distinct experiences. This incidental consciousness of other possible perceptions is predicated on the reference structure inherent in any given perceptual experience: there belongs to every external perception its reference from the genuinely perceived sides of the object of perception to the sides also meant not yet perceived, but only anticipated and, at first, with a non-intuitional emptiness (Cartesian Meditations, p. 44).9 This reference structure is an essential aspect of experience: that is to say, experience encompasses not only that which is experienced at a given moment, but also that which can be potentially experienced, that significant part of the experience that is not simply added on but is constitutive.10 This means that perception (in its narrow sense) is partial and depends upon a certain perspective, while that which is phenomenally apparent refers far beyond the apparent (Waldenfels, 1993: p. 266) and is characterized by an excess issuing from experience. Experience always implies more than what it is in and of itself; it refers to a surplus of experience, to more than experience itself can reveal in a given experience. At the level of basic perception, we find that this is already the case: Things seen are always more than what we really and actually see of them. Seeing, perceiving, is essentially having-something-itself [Selbsthaben] and at the same time havingsomething-in-advance [Vor-haben], meaning-something-in-advance [Vormeinen] (Crisis, p. 51). In addition to its thematization of the horizon constituted by spatiality, phenomenology also addresses the horizon marked out by temporality, a horizon that determines the historicity of experience in a far narrower 710
sense.11 According to phenomenology, this temporal horizon encompasses all that passes between past, present and future. In the present, experience refers back to past experiences and forward to future experiences. In the first instance, past experiences do not represent experiences that are merely past and gone, but instead, refer to those experiences in the present that are experienced incidentally, those experiences whose presence is not to be thought of as a concrete presence to the mind. The fact that I was once born remains a fact of my life for ever, even though I cannot actually remember my birth. In the second instance, future experiences refer to experiences that have not yet been realized; in our present experience, they constitute possible experiences that have yet to take concrete shape. The horizon of the past and the horizon of the present thus have the phenomenological structure of no longer and not yet.12 Experience is only possible on the basis of this dual time-reference structure that proceeds from present experience. These temporal horizons guarantee not only the unity that obtains in our perception of objects, but also the very possibility of unified experience as such. But the temporal and spatial horizons of experience cannot be disentangled as though either time or space alone could be constitutive of a given experience. Both are integral parts of every concrete experience that can become the object of a phenomenological description. Furthermore, it is important to distinguish between a narrow and a broad concept of horizon. The temporal and spatial horizons described above belong to a narrow concept of horizon. By contrast, the concept of a horizon is extended to the world at large in phenomenology, a situation in which it becomes appropriate to speak of a broad concept of horizon. Husserl calls this horizon the world-horizon (Crisis, p. 143): that is, the horizon of possible experience in the broadest sense, the horizon of all horizons, encompassing the experiences of animate and inanimate nature, as well as experience in the social world and the world of ideas (ibid.). Husserls move constitutes a decisive extension of the meaning of experience: experience comes to signify experience of the world; it must, therefore, be understood as a relationship to the world.13 In an existentialist gesture, Merleau-Ponty interpreted experience even more widely than Husserl, defining experience as relationships with the world (PP xiii), or being-in-the-world (tre au monde) (PP xiii) and positing the world as the natural setting of, and field for (PP xi) all experience, as the very field of our experience (PP 406).14 In order to reply to the poststructuralist reproach according to which the phenomenological concept of experience is ahistorical, we should insist on according to the notion of horizon a far more comprehensive sense than those poststructuralists are wont to do and inscribe within experience as such the properly historical moment thought lacking by poststructuralists. As we have seen above, experience is always historicized in phenomenology because it is embedded in a reference structure of spatial and temporal horizons. That which we are confronted with in our experiences is always 711
bound to structures of spatiality and temporality. And because experience is always embedded in a comprehensive horizon of experience that extends to the world at large, experience cannot possibly be considered ahistorical. 3 The Immediacy of Experience
An additional poststructuralist critique of phenomenology concerns the purported immediacy of perceptual experience. This critique aims at the assumption that in the act of perception an object can be experienced in an immediate way and that this object of perception can, in turn, be described in an unmediated way. In the first instance, it is assumed that perceptions are independent of the perceiving subject. In the second instance, it is assumed that perceptual experience can be described in an unmediated way. By contrast, poststructuralist critique proceeds from the dual assumption that objects of experience do not appear to us immediately and that our experience cannot be relayed in an unmediated way. The first critique, aimed at the presumed immediacy of experience, i.e., the notion that experience as posited by philosophies of experience is unmediated and uninterpreted, can be countered by pointing to the intentionality of experience formulated by phenomenology, wherein intentionality is understood as a basic property of experience.15 In relation to experience, intentionality refers to the fact that a given something is always experienced as something. Husserls distinction between the how of a given object and the object itself (Hua XIX/1, 414), i.e., that which is later described by Heidegger in Being and Time as the hermeneutic as (Als) (Heidegger, 1996: p. 140) and which Waldenfels calls the signifikative Differenz (Waldenfelds, 1980: p. 86), lies at the heart of the phenomenological concept of experience. Emphasizing the distinction between the what and the how generates a number of additional differences, such as those that obtain between something as a given and the manner of this givenness, between that which is apparent and that which is meant, between an object and its meaning, between a fact and the way it is accessed, etc. While the caricature of phenomenology created by poststructuralism claims that an object is merely apparent, a richer understanding of phenomenology teaches us that an object is always apparent in a particular way. Als Theorie der Erfahrung befat Phnomenologie sich nicht direkt, sondern indirekt mit dem, was sich zeigt, indem sie es so nimmt, wie oder als was es sich zeigt (Waldenfels, 1998: p. 21). The phenomenological approach to an object thus cannot be reduced to the maxim look and describe what you see, but is, instead, comparable to the formula look and tell me why you see what you see. This approach is far removed from the type of picture-book phenomenology (Waldenfels, 1980: p. 19). Husserl had already warned of and which one could rightly refer to as a simple description of that which is nakedly apparent. Because it claims to describe the how of objects, phenomenology 712
does not fall prey to the kind of theoretical trivialisation of immediacy to which poststructuralism has rightly made us sensitive. The idea that phenomenology merely describes objects is, therefore, incorrect as if an object could ever be described in its entirety or present its visibility to the phenomenological observer in its totality. It has rightly been objected that Husserls phenomenology is one-sidedly oriented toward intuition (Anschauung) and thus toward perceiving the mere thing. But this should by no means lead to the conclusion that phenomenology only grasps that which, in an object, can be immediately perceived. In this context, I would refer our opponents to the principle of all principles determining Husserlian phenomenology: the principle of all principles: that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily (so to speak, in its personal actuality) offered to us in intuition is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there (Husserl, Ideas I, Collected Works, Vol. II, p. 44). That is, something presents itself, but only within certain limits (ibid.), such that what is apparent to us through experience is necessarily incomplete and as such never either completely or directly accessible. In order for an experience to be described by the phenomenological method, it is necessary not only to describe what is given but also to offer an analysis and reconstruction of that which is not given, of that which eludes our experience. Phenomenology is, in fact, far removed from a theory of immediate experience, a situation that is further confirmed by the specific method employed by phenomenology. As a method, phenomenology begins with the idea that we relate to the world and its objects in various ways. In our everyday life, we seem to have a very natural and unbroken relationship to the world: we experience the world as perceptible, apparent to us, immediate. In general, we do not doubt the world we believe in it and all we encounter in it.16 This relationship to the world, which is characterized primarily by our faith in it, is called the natural attitude (Ideas I, Collected Works, Vol. II, p. 51) by Husserl, and the fact that we entertain a natural relationship to the world is regarded as the general positing which characterizes the natural attitude (ibid., p. 57). It is at this point that phenomenology becomes critical; this is where the actual philosophical work of phenomenology begins. In a first step, the natural attitude is critically examined, which is to say that it is identified as such. Only by drawing attention to the natural attitude does it become possible to consider methodically how that attitude might be changed so that we no longer remain at the level of a pure description of the reality apparent to us (ibid., p. 56). The first methodological step taken by phenomenology occurs when we direct the natural attitude toward the world and carry through the work of phenomenological epoche (ibid., 312), i.e., the attempt to suspend all judgment about what is, to be impartial as regards that which is, i.e., being itself. This proceeds
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with the method of parenthesizing (ibid., p. 60). According to Husserl, that which is apparent to us in the natural attitude should not be negated according to the axiom of universal doubt, as with Descartess method of doubt, but instead merely parenthesized.17 In the next step, the being that is bracketed in the phenomenological epoch e is traced back to its appearance via phenomenological reduction.18 What remains is that which phenomenology calls phenomena. In the words of Waldenfels, we can define reduction as die Rckfhrung dessen, was sich zeigt, auf die Art und Weise, wie es sich zeigt (Waldenfels, 1992: p. 30). What this means, of course, is that after the phenomenological epoch e and the phenomenological reduction have been performed, experience is, in a certain sense, transformed into an artificial phenomenon, i.e., experience is robbed of its naturalness and apparentness: experience is placed in quotation marks19 and reduced to the sense of experience.20 Phenomenological work begins with the transition from the natural to the phenomenological attitude (Ideas I, Collected Works, Vol. II, p. 66). But the transition from one attitude to the next does not occur seamlessly. It is, instead, dependent upon a break with the naturally, i.e., unmediated, experienced world.21 The above remarks on the phenomenological method should suffice to demonstrate that phenomenology does not settle for a description of our nave relationship to the world but requires, instead, a reflective attitude toward the unmediated experience assumed in the natural attitude.22 The phenomenologist is not a nave describer, but a philosophical sceptic: Als die Welt Wahrnehmender glaubt er, als reflektierender Skeptiker traut er diesem Glauben nicht, er macht ihn nicht mit (Erste Philosophie, Zweiter Teil, Hua VIII, 93). This is the practical task of phenomenology, a task which contains, at the same time, an inherent paradox: making evident the self-evidence of that which appears self-evident.23 This means that phenomenology does not long for a theory of immediate experience but, instead, problematizes according to its methodological means that very theory in a way that should satisfy poststructuralist challenges to the concept of experience. Husserls late philosophical works, which have been described as genetic phenomenology,24 serve as further evidence that phenomenology is not simply a naked description of the nave content of experience. His genetic questioning (Husserl, Experience and Judgment, p. 41) confirms that phenomenology is not only a description of immediate experience. In his late work Crisis, the methodological principle of phenomenology is understood in terms of a regressive inquiry (Rckfrage), which is to be accompanied by a recall and return to a previous state.25 But what does regressive inquiry mean here? Where does this inquiry return to, where does it lead? That is the question. In this case, regressive inquiry refers to an asking back, or return inquiry, issuing from the world of science to the life-world. In Experience and Judgment, Husserl delineates the life-world as the world in
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which we have always been living: The retrogression to the world of experience is a retrogression to the life-world, i.e., to the world in which we are always already living and which furnishes the ground for all cognitive performance and all scientific determination (Experience and Judgment, p. 41).26 This retrogression refers to our experience of the life-world. Husserl develops the idea of a philosophical regressive inquiry in terms of a phenomenological critique of science. This critique applies to the world of science and questions the assumptions of that world, that is, the world it presupposes and employs in its practice this presupposed world is, for Husserl, the life-world itself. With the emergence of modern science and the primacy of objectivity, this life-world has, however, disappeared. Modern science, and the natural sciences in particular,27 are indebted to objectivity and have become abstracted from the life-world; and yet, as Husserl argues, science nonetheless maintains a certain relationship to the life-world (Crisis, p. 130). This relationship is, in part, inevitable because scientific practice depends upon the demonstrative world and our experience of it via the senses.28 Thus, the electron microscope, for example, which allows us to see a world invisible to the naked eye, nevertheless relies on our view through that microscope or the projection of that view onto a screen. The objective sciences remain further dependent upon the life-world insofar as they require a scientific practice carried out by scientists. That is to say, scientists are more than mere subjects of knowledge; they are also private individuals embedded in a life-world that does not end at the door to their laboratories: selbst Wissenschaftler sind nicht immer in wissenschaftlicher Arbeit (ibid., p. 128).29 Scientific practice and theory maintain a constant and indissoluble relationship to prescientific life (Crisis, p. 50), to the extrascientific lifeworld (ibid., p. 76). In this context, the task of recovering the life-world as a subject for scientific investigation (ibid., p. 122) laid out by Husserl in Crisis also requires questioning that which constitutes scientific truth at a given historical moment so that the evidence and truths the sciences advance are shown to be historically bound. The objectivity that commonly defines modern science, as well as its corresponding invocation of precision and measurability, are, for Husserl, the result of an historical development, an historical idea that can be reconstructed through historical reflection (Besinnung) (ibid., p. 16) and thus made visible.30 If the goal of genetic phenomenology is to recover a life-world buried by history but not, on that account, irretrievably lost, the path to recovery must pass through todays scientific norms. This goal has certain consequences for the methods of phenomenology. Because the life-world has always been overlaid by scientific constructions, it can only be recovered by a methodically directed regressive inquiry (Waldenfels, 1985: p. 16), that is to say, recovered indirectly and by way of dominant epistemological constructions. It is thus clear that in his late work on genetic phenomenology, Husserl was fully cognizant of the 715
problem posed by an unmediated view. In his debate with Husserls Crisis, Ricur has established that the life-world can only be indirectly retrieved in the form of asking back: die Lebenswelt [fllt] niemals in irgendeine direkte Anschauung, sondern ist nur indirekt zugnglich auf dem Umweg ber eine spezifische Methode der Rckbesinnung, die genauer als Rckfrage zu charakterisieren ist (Ricur, 1978: p. 209). Because our knowledge of the world is always shaped by epistemic knowledge, we can only gain doxic knowledge of the world which is not congruent with our epistemic knowledge by way of the epistemes. This is what is meant by indirect access to our experience of the life-world.31 In this methodological recall or asking back, phenomenology is, in a certain sense, similar to that archeological approach in which buried origins are sought and sedimented layers of experience are gradually laid bare, as well as to that genealogical approach that traces the genesis of particular experiences. 4 Uninterpreted Experience
Poststructuralism assumes that experience has always already been interpreted, that in and of itself, experience is an act of interpretation: Experience is at once always already an interpretation and is in need of interpretation (Scott, 1992: p. 37). Poststructuralist critics maintain that the philosophies of experience they refer to have not taken into account the aspect of experience according to which experience is always already an interpretation. But on this point, phenomenology concurs with poststructuralism. Phenomenology assumes that experience is by necessity already interpreted. The claim that experience is understood as uninterpreted in phenomenology can be easily refuted by repeating the structure of the above-mentioned intentional character of experience, in which experience is always an experience of something as a certain something. The concept of experience in phenomenology is, consequently, never free from interpretation; on the contrary, it is always characterized by a specific sense of experience. Experience could only be understood as uninterpreted if the subject of a given experience did not intervene through interpretation; if, for example, the experiencing subject behaved passively or as a mere receptacle in relation to the object of experience. But Husserls phenomenological theory of perception includes several analyses that demonstrate the very impossibility of this model so that experience, for Husserl, always requires activity on the part of the subject of experience.32 Experience is, as I have shown above, always embedded in a field of experience. Although vision stipulates a field of vision, this does not imply that everything is visible; the visible is surrounded by a field of the invisible. What I see ultimately depends on my own position within this field of experience. If I open my eyes and my view is directed straight ahead, I must turn around in order to see what is behind me. But even that which I see within my field of vision requires a certain 716
intervention on my part, insofar as all visible objects can be seen neither at the same time nor in the same way. I see, for example, the computer screen in front of me, but need not simultaneously see the table on which it stands. I see the books on the shelf, but not the spaces between the books. The seizing-upon is a singling out and seizing; anything perceived has an experiential background (Ideas I, Collected Works, Vol. II, p. 70, my italics). A certain degree of advertence (Zuwendung) (ibid.) must be paid to an object in order for us to register it. By paying attention to one thing over another within my field of experience, I take on a constitutive role in a process of interpretation in relation to the field of experience. The same is true for our sense of touch. Touching and feeling require action on the part of the body: la sensation de lisse ou rugueux sobtient par un mouvement explorant la surface; sans movement du corps qui cherche obtenir un renseignement tactile, il ny pas de sensation du toucher (Merleau-Ponty, 1988: p. 180, my italics). The ambiguous patterns often referred to in perception psychology demonstrate the role of interventionist participation in perception. This can be illustrated when one attempts to perceive one of two images. One can never perceive both images at the same time; seeing one often requires intense internal concentration one image can quickly turn into the other. Whatever I eventually see, if only for a brief time, depends on the perceptive participation of my vision, a participation directed toward what is in front of me. The original meaning of the Latin intentio, which Husserls concept of intentionality refers back to, addresses this very kind of directedness. In Husserls understanding, the word connotes a directedness (Sichbeziehen) (Logical Investigations, Vol. II, p. 561) to an object.33 Merleau-Ponty has emphasized the interpretive character of experience in a way that is perhaps even more explicit than Husserl. He speaks of the violence of experience, a violence located at the level of perception. As he writes in Phenomenology of Perception, perception is a violent act (PP 361).34 Its violence stems from the fact that perception is only able to access one object by excluding another.35 But this violence does not constitute a destructive act; instead, it represents a productive moment, which requires that we describe this form of violence in terms of a transcendental violence.36 This kind of violence in perception does not indicate a deficiency because its violence is also productive: it enables perception.37 This is the price for there being things and other people for us, not as the result of some illusion, but as the result of a violent act which is perception itself (ibid.). Additionally, this violence is not to be understood as instrumental because it cannot be employed in one instance and not another every perception has a violent character. The violence of perception is pre-instrumental because it cannot be intentionally employed by an active subject it precedes, or serves as the basis for, every intended act. The violence of experience Merleau-Ponty understands as founded in perception thus 717
represents a form of interpretation contained within the very process of experience because its violence is responsible for the structuring and meaningfulness of the experiential world. Because experience does not passively take up whatever it is offered in the field of experience but, instead, always intervenes in the field of experience so as to structure that experience, the phenomenological concept of experience is always already thought of as interpreted experience.38 5 The Reproduction of Ideological Systems
The next poststructuralist critique we will examine lends to that critique a far more pronounced political import than those we have dealt with above. According to poststructuralists, recourse to experience requires the reproduction of ideological systems; or, in the words of Scott, it reproduces rather than contests given ideological systems (Scott, 1992: p. 25). This argument namely, that recourse to an experience that is inevitably embedded in a particular society will reproduce but not challenge that society is based on the principle of repetition. By invoking various experiences, phenomenology is said to repeat certain experiences constantly without subjecting them to questioning, thus reinforcing those experiences. And that which is merely repeated cannot be new. A mere repetition reproduces meaning, but it does not produce a new meaning. According to this critique, we must therefore ask ourselves whether or not a concept of experience is capable of imagining change within a theory of the political. The critique according to which the invocation of experience entails the reproduction of existing experiences contradicts the postulate of an openness of experience that is so central to phenomenology. An openness of experience means that experience is not closed off to the world but open to change so that it is never clear from the beginning what, in ones own experience, will indicate other possible experiences. This openness in experience is due to the above-mentioned horizon structure of experience. The horizon represents an area of experience that must be closely determined so as to lead to other experiences.39 Characteristic of this openness is the impossibility of exhaustively determining the horizon because each new experience opens up new areas on the horizon. If I turn around, what I saw before establishes the no longer visible horizon of what I am now seeing anew. As I keep turning this way and that, whatever I see is always followed by something I have not yet seen. Consequently, the horizon can never be determined in its totality. It represents only an area of possible determination, not a complete or final determination, which is why Husserl speaks of the horizon as an open indeterminateness (Experience and Judgment, p. 125) or a determinable indeterminacy (Analysis Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, p. 42) that cannot be filled out in just any manner (ibid.).40 It is this anonymous, unknown horizon that makes experience an 718
open experience:41 it leaves the object as incomplete and open as it is indeed, in perceptual experience (PP 70). This openness of experience is not, however, interpreted as a problem that must be overcome but is, instead, regarded as a positive phenomenon. In fact, this indeterminate horizon guarantees that our experience does not disintegrate into singular and unrelated individual experiences, but is, instead, generally perceived in terms of a unity. The poststructuralist critique according to which recourse to experience merely reproduces experience, repeating experience without changing it, thus does not apply to phenomenology. If we consider the indeterminate horizon structure of experience, it is incorrect to speak of a simple repetition of experience within phenomenology because it is inherent in the horizon of experience as such that other, changed experiences are also possible. Even in the concrete case of an experience repeating itself (in, for example, the repeated perception of one and the same object of perception), the repetition does not necessarily produce the same horizon of experience. Because of the historicity of experience, the temporal structure of perceptual experience points to changed temporal horizons. A repeated perception is not simply another perception, but one that has already been perceived in the past. If we were to turn this into an equation, we would not say that it corresponds to the perception of one object multiplied by two, but to one and the same object perceived twice over. It is, of course, a perception of the same object, but it is not the same perception. Because the phenomenological analysis of experience emphasizes the open structure of experience, it cannot be accused of contributing to the reproduction of ideological systems. On the contrary, the methods of phenomenological description demonstrate that experience is not inherently inclined to mere reproduction. In addition, it should be mentioned that even poststructuralists are unwilling simply to do away with repetition, as might be assumed given the above characterization of repetition as mere reproduction. If we turn to Judith Butler and her concept of performative politics, we see that repetition is a prerequisite and means for changing experience (Butler, 1993). What is, however, open to debate is how and/or to what extent the existing order can actually be changed; or, more precisely, how resistance against the hegemonic norms of a given society can be imagined. Butlers preferred example of social hegemony is the norm of heterosexuality. If we assume that no one can simply escape from the given norms, then even a vehement refusal to conform to a norm inevitably represents a reinforcement of this norm. Thus, Butler concludes, we can do nothing other than reaffirm the reigning norms and more or less repeat them (ibid., pp. 1234). And this lack of alternatives, this compulsion to repeat, is not understood by Butler as a drawback, but rather as a chance. In other words, the fact that repetition must occur does not in and of itself mean that change is impossible; in fact, 719
Butler posits that repetition is itself the prerequisite for change. Her argument proceeds in the following way: anything that so desperately requires repetition must be inherently unstable, and anything that is fundamentally unstable opens up the possibility of change. Repetition is thus a sign of constitutive instability (ibid., p. 218), which structurally allows for the possibility of change.42 Butlers notion of constitutive instability thus parallels the concept of openness of experience in phenomenology. What Butler refers to as the instability implied in repetition corresponds to the phenomenological principle of openness of experience. Both are understood as prerequisites for the possibility of change. Repetition and experience represent inevitable moments, perhaps even inevitable conditions, for change. While Butler would say: You cannot not repeat, a phenomenological perspective would add: You cannot not experience. 6 Authentic Female Experience
Because of the gender neutrality and androcentrism presumed by the field of philosophy, feminist critics have often invoked the concept of experience in order to address the different experiences of men and women. Poststructuralists criticized the category of womens experience that emerged from this situation and claimed that to assume women have an experience distinct from that of men and common to all women an authentic feminine experience, as it were is to universalize the identity of women, as Joan Scott put it (Scott, 1992: p. 31). According to Scott, the idea of an authentic female experience cannot be reconciled with the fact that women have very different individual identities. The poststructuralist argument that the concept of womens experience excludes the idea that women have very different, unique identities is convincing. The critique of so-called womens experience has made visible a political mechanism of exclusion that can no longer be tolerated in light of modern gender theory and its insistence upon both the complexity of gender identity and womens unique individual identities.43 In the course of the transformation of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology into existential phenomenology (a transformation characteristic of the French tradition), phenomenology has come to posit experience as situated and bound to concrete subjects of experience. This situated experience implies the physical anchoring of all experience in the body, a development that owes much to Merleau-Ponty. If experience is understood as situated in the bodies of concrete subjects of experience, then it is possible to describe not only the experiences of subjects of different genders, but also the collective experiences of women in comparison to men, as well as the extraordinarily different gender experiences that vary from woman to woman on the basis of unique gender identities. Thus an applied phenomenology of 720
gendered experience might demonstrate, for example, that womens experience of being subject to male violence because of their gender may leave traces in their physical manner. But if phenomenological analysis is limited to individual womens experiences, it may be demonstrated that all women do not share this experience. The problems entailed by either an exclusion or an assumption of a universalized gendered experience (problems that have been rightly pointed out by poststructuralist feminism) are not, therefore, specific to philosophies of experience. They are, instead, the result of a false application of the concept of experience. Even if it were the case that gender-specific experience has been either ignored or inadequately accounted for in phenomenological descriptions of concrete human experience within the classical texts of phenomenology, this does not necessarily imply that the phenomenological concept of experience is as such invalid. If gender-specific behaviour has been left out of phenomenological analyses, that does not mean that gender cannot be integrated into the phenomenological analysis of experience. The problem is not that there is a flaw in the theory, but rather that a flaw in its application has frustrated its success.44 In other words, the phenomenological theory of experience is not wrong in and of itself just because it has not been applied to gender experience.45 In the same way, it cannot be said that phenomenology is inherently incapable of addressing the different gender experiences of one sex or the other. But there is yet another issue that deserves attention in this context. Before abandoning the word authenticity, it is necessary to analyse what authenticity might mean in the context of the phenomenology of gender experience.46 If we understand the word as describing certain experiences of women that are perceived to be real, it does not make sense to claim that womens perceptions are mistaken. If many women are scared to walk alone at night for fear of male violence, the poststructuralist rejoinder that this fear is either abetted by or the mere product of discourses of fear does not bring us very far in terms of a philosophical understanding of this very real perception of fear. It may be correct that discourses of fear can intensify or even produce feelings of fear, but this does not tell us anything about fear as it is experienced by a given subject.47 At that poststructuralist limit, phenomenology offers a method for analysing fear as a concrete experience that includes, in particular, how fear is experienced by individual subjects and/or how fear manifests itself in the concrete experience of fear. In this context, it is irrelevant whether or not the fear is justified or based on an illusion or produced by discourses; the causes of the fear are not at issue here. A phenomenological examination of fear is, instead, interested in analysing experience as a phenomenon; or, in the case of fear, in describing how fear manifests itself to the subject experiencing it. From the standpoint of the phenomenology of experience, the experience of fear is never an illusion or an inauthentic experience for the subject. 721
Phenomenology can contribute to this situation by lending to experience a philosophical meaning that does not simply gloss over it or treat it as a pure contingency. 7 Prediscursive Experience
The final poststructuralist critique we will examine here functions as the primary weapon poststructuralists will use against experience we are, of course, talking about the concept of discourse. According to this critique, conceptualizations of knowledge based on experience do not explore the discursive character of experience; in other words, they promote the notion of a pre-discursive experience, which is regarded by poststructuralist theorists as an inherent flaw. From the standpoint of poststructuralism, every experience is a discursive experience, which Joan Scott equates with a linguistic event (Scott, 1992: p. 34), i.e., an experience produced by language.48 Not only is experience a linguistic event, but the fact that the subject is embedded in a plethora of discourses leads to the poststructuralist supposition that the subject of experience is also constituted discursively (ibid.). For brevitys sake, I will limit my discussion here to the first element of this critique. The critique that philosophies based on experience fail to recognize the discursive character of experience possibly represents the most serious poststructuralist challenge to phenomenology. To the extent that the discursiveness of experience is understood as the production of experience through language as Scott seems to believe it must be admitted that phenomenology is not particularly interested in this aspect of experience. Husserl was not very concerned with how certain experiences are influenced by language or the execution of language. This may be due to the fact that he underestimated the full significance of language as a constitutive, normative element that creates meaning in his analysis of experience.49 Additionally, phenomenology does not address the metatheoretical question of the extent to which discourses are ultimately responsible for producing that to which they refer, and/or what effect certain dominant terms in a discourse will have, that is, what these categories mean and how they operate (ibid., p. 25). In Bodies that Matter, for example, Judith Butler pays a great deal of attention to what it means when one has recourse to certain concepts (such as the materiality of the body) within a philosophical discourse of the body, and interrogates the assumptions underlying the invocation of these concepts and terms. At this metatheoretical level, poststructuralists are not concerned with materiality as materiality (which would be the approach of phenomenology), but with what it means to take an analysis of materiality as materiality as the object of our research.50 In this context, we need to ask whether or not a philosophy of experience in this case, phenomenology must necessarily 722
pursue this type of metatheoretical consideration, i.e., need the analysis of experience exclusively function as an analysis of the discursiveness of experience? Might we, instead, regard an analysis of the discursiveness of experience as one among many tools with which we can analyse experience? To these questions, I would reply that the fact that philosophies of experience can be analysed at a metatheoretical level need not invalidate a phenomenology of experience. Because poststructuralism and phenomenology have different epistemological interests, their philosophical approaches to analysing experience are necessarily different. It is to poststructuralisms credit that it points to problematic tendencies within the philosophy of experience at the same time as it expands the analysis of experience to include an understanding of the discursiveness of experience. It is to phenomenologys credit that it has sharpened our philosophical focus on aspects of experience that remain obscure in poststructuralist discourse theory, like that of the lived experiences of concrete subjects. Analysis of the structures of lived experience does not in any way preclude analysis of the discursive construction of experience (and vice versa). If we concede that phenomenology has grappled less with the question of the discursiveness of experience than poststructuralism, this admission need not thereby imply that phenomenology should defend in toto a theory positing experience as pre-discursive. On the basis of his phenomenology of perception, Merleau-Ponty would never claim that, for example, the perception of the colour red is independent from knowledge of a colour scale that differentiates between different colours and must be learned in order to tell them apart. Additionally, he would never claim that experience is to be situated in a realm either preceding or beyond language. In the context of his phenomenology of language, Merleau-Ponty clearly argues that all forms of speech necessarily presuppose a language system, which he calls constituted language (langage constitu) (La Prose du monde, p. 219), i.e., a language system containing all available meanings in a given language that are binding for a given language community. But he also claims that, in addition to the constituted language, there is also a constitutive language (langage constituant) (La Prose du monde, p. 22) that is not identical to the former.51 This second term refers to the actual execution of language, its making use of a constituted language it is nevertheless distinct from. It is this living speech (parole) that lends the constituted language its concrete meaning in space and time and is capable of contributing to the transformation of meaning. Butler advances a similar argument when she claims that the effectiveness of existing language rules and norms are dependent upon their concrete application. It is not the mere presence of a language system that creates meaning, but the concrete use of that language; or, to use the language of Jacques Derrida, its citation (Butler, 1993: pp. 2246).52 Like 723
Merleau-Pontys parole parlante, which must have recourse to parole parle, the citation that requires a text represents, for Butler, an area of language production responsible for the creation of a very particular meaning. Although all currents of phenomenology can in no way be so easily linked with the interests of poststructuralist theorists like Scott and Butler, Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of language seems particularly well suited to a productive dialogue with poststructuralism. The objection may nevertheless be raised that phenomenology often refers to pre- and ur-domains that correspond to the type of pre-discursive realm criticized by poststructuralists, a fact that would therefore contradict the discursive nature of phenomenological experience advanced thus far. Husserls frequent reference to an Ur-Ego, Ur-sensuality, Ur-being or pre-being or even an Ur-constitution justifiably leads to the suspicion that phenomenology does not integrate discursiveness. In Experience and Judgment, Husserl expounds a theory of pre-predicative experience that would certainly provoke scepticism in light of the poststructuralist critique of pre-discursiveness. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty also defends the concept of pre-predicative experience, a concept central to his own phenomenology. He speaks, for example, of primordial (PP 242), prescientific (PP 301), pre-objective (PP 267), pre-conscious (PP 242), mute (PP 219) or non-thetic (PP 258) experience. Poststructuralisms scepticism about presumed origins and pre-domains could thus potentially find in phenomenology an easy object of scorn.53 But if that is the case, then it may very well be that poststructuralism equates pre-predicative with pre-discursive experience.54 On this point, however, I insist that the prepredicative in phenomenology cannot be equated with the pre-discursive debunked by poststructuralism. In other words, pre-predicative experience in phenomenology is first and foremost non-predicative; but this nonpredicative is not, at the same time, beyond discursiveness. In the following, I will explain what is meant by this.55 In doing so, I will refer to Husserls fundamental distinction between pre-predicative and predicative experience in Experience and Judgment.56 For Husserl, pre-predicative experience is based on predicative experiences, in the sense of a foundational relationship. Pre-predicative and predicative experience do not represent two fundamentally different kinds of experience, but two different modes of the experiential relationship. In pre-predicative experience, one has a direct relationship to the object of experience. In this particular mode, the objects of an experience are experienced in an unmediated way. The subject of experience is thus a more or less willing recipient in relation to the objects of an experience; this is the case in perception, for example.57 The unity of the object is grasped through the senses and does not contain the type of determined unity we ascribe to unity in its logical sense. To be more precise: in contrast to pre-predicative experience, predicative experience is characterized by a predicative 724
determination in the sense of a logical judgment. Predicative experience is a logical judgment that can be expressed in a statement. Under the term judgment in the sense of traditional logic is always understood the predicative judgment, which finds its linguistic expression in the apophansis, in the declarative statement. Indeed, wherever a thing is designated by a name, even if only in the context of practical life, this already presupposes not a mere prepredicative apprehension but an act of predicative judgment, an operation of sense already carried out (Experience and Judgment, pp. 601). If we understand this Husserlian determination of predicative experience as a particular form of judgment, the following characterization necessarily follows. Predicative experience, we must then say, implies the determination of an experience as expressed through a language act. What was experienced solely through the senses in pre-predicative experience is given a name and identified through language in predicative experience. This naming is expressed in a logical judgment in the form of S is p. And in contrast to the receptive character of pre-predicative experience, predicative experience is further characterized by spontaneity: the subject of experience is not simply receptive, but, instead, spontaneous in relation to the object of experience. This implies a different epistemological interest on the part of the subject. According to Husserl, predicative experience follows a very specific cognitive will (Erkenntniswillen) (ibid., p. 207): the ego wishes to know the object to pin it down once and for all (ibid., p. 198). The aim of this will is the apprehension of the object in the identiy of its determinations (ibid.). If we compare phenomenology with poststructuralism, we find that the poststructuralist notion of discursive experience appears related to the phenomenological notion of predicative judgment because predicative judgment addresses that aspect of experience so central to the poststructuralist project namely, language. In predicative judgment, the moment of naming emphasized by Husserl appears to come particularly close to the poststructuralist understanding of the discursiveness of experience insofar as this phenomenological moment responds to the main poststructuralist argument against experience being posited as pre-discursive: experience is always produced by language. The production of experience through language is usually thought in terms of a naming through language, as it is, for instance, in the example often quoted by poststructuralists wherein gender ascription is shown to be a function of language, i.e., with the birth of a child. The statement uttered by medical personnel during the birth of a child or the performace of an ultrasound Its a girl or Its a boy represents an apophantic statement of the type S is p, which is, for Husserl, indicative of predicative experience.58 But from the perspective of phenomenology, the objection must be raised that ones relationship to an object of experience does not always take the form of a predicative judgment. Instead, predicative experience and/or 725
predicative judgment represents only one very particular way of relating to an object of experience. Although poststructuralist approaches to discursive experience may do justice to the discursiveness of experience, these same approaches do not offer the kind of differentiated consideration of the various modes of experience found in Husserls or Merleau-Pontys phenomenology. Precise distinctions between the different modes of experience are not part of the epistemological interest of poststructuralists and thus eluded their philosophical analysis of experience. But the decisive question whether or not pre-predicative experience is pre-discursive has not yet been answered. Husserls distinction between pre-predicative and predicative experience offers us a clear starting point in answering this question. In light of what we noted above, the conclusion that pre-predicative experience should not be characterized as either nondiscursive or pre-discursive appears justified insofar as discursiveness is understood in the Husserlian sense of predicative judgment as a predicate qua apophansis. This is due to the fact that pre-predicative experience cannot be equated with a language act of judgment of the type S is p. In pre-predicative experience, certain qualities are identified, certain individuals are recognized (as is the case, for example, with colour qualities such as red or green or the individuals called man and woman), but this occurs in a less explicit and less distinct manner than it does with predicative judgment. Does this imply that pre-predicative experience is completely independent of either discourse or language? Let us demonstrate that this is not at all the case. In what follows, I claim that pre-predicative experience is nondiscursive to the extent that one understands this to refer to experience that is not expressed through language. But this does not mean that pre-predicative experience is completely independent of language and discourse. I claim that pre-predicative experience does maintain a connection to language and discourse, but in an as yet unelaborated manner. In other words, the discursive part of a (pre-predicative) experience cannot be reduced to the fact that an experience is expressed in a statement, i.e., it cannot be reduced to either a statement of the above-described apophantic type or to any other spoken or written statement. The relationship between pre-predicative experience and language is indirect; the language conventions and the conventional meanings in a given culture have an indirect effect on pre-predicative experience. Language conventions affect experience even when experience is not articulated through language. Language has a background effect and need not make its appearance in the form of speech or text. To take some examples, in the case of a group playing with green and red Lego bricks or when working with a number of men and women, we do not place these activities outside cultural norms or language-based meaning despite the fact that they occur at the level of pre-predicative experience. At 726
the level of pre-predicative experience, perceptions of red or green or man and woman take place within a given culture more specifically, a culture that finds it necessary to distinguish between colours and genders that differentiates, via language, between different colours and genders. Thus, it may be the case that the meanings that are valid in this culture are not always manifestly present. But even when cultural meanings are not explicitly stated, they can be implicitly registered, i.e., meanings can be distinguished even if they have not been clothed in a language act. When a small child learns to distinguish between red and green blocks while playing, this initially occurs with the aid of primary caregivers who introduce the words red and green in a game. The child thus learns to distinguish between the two colours even though it may not be explicitly aware of the colour scale or even capable of uttering the words red or green yet.59 A child gathers knowledge of its mother or father from the very beginning, before it is even able to say the words papa or mama a child will, for example, recognize the voices of its parents and thus acquires a knowledge of the world that is indirect. Husserl repeatedly emphasized that pre-predicative experience is not completely free of knowledge and judgment. He spoke, for example, of prepredicative apprehension (Experience and Judgment, p. 61, my italics), i.e., he admits that pre-predicative experience is also an act of knowledge, even if only an act of knowledge in the broader sense (ibid.). Even if these pre-predicative judgments represent a lower level of ego-activity, judgment nevertheless occurs at the level of pre-predicative experience (ibid.).60 The difference is that in pre-predicative experience the object of experience is non-linguistically presumed as something, while in predicative experience the object of experience is expressed through language. And that which is presumed in pre-predicative experience cannot be presumed independently of cultural or language-based meaning because we always presume a given thing as something. We can conclude as follows. The poststructuralist critique of prepredicative experience implicitly assumes that we can draw an equivalence between the pre-predicative and the pre-discursive. The pre-predicative is presumed to be prior to language. Prior to language thus means, in this context, beyond language, i.e., independent of language. But this way of equating pre-predicative and pre-discursive does not, as we have shown above, seem to hold for the type of phenomenology we have examined. Husserls distinction between pre-predicative and predicative experience does not correspond to the distinction between language and something prior to language. Instead, as the words imply, it is about predication and prepredication; in this instance, predication is a very particular language act, namely, the statement, while pre-predication refers to an experience that is not congruent with an apophantic expression but nonetheless bears an indirect relation to language and language-based meaning. Pre-predicative 727
and predicative experience thus cannot simply be equated with the discursive and the pre-discursive. If we assume that an experience is language-based or discursive when it is expressed in a statement that constitutes a predicative judgment then we can describe pre-predicative experience as pre-discursive. But if the pre-discursive is not reduced to a statement of this kind which might be interpreted as a foreshortening of the meaning of pre-discursive then it becomes possible to understand pre-predicative experience as discursive. Husserls distinction between pre-predicative and predicative experience can help us to understand experience as related to language in many different ways instead of in just one particular way. Concluding Remarks In responding to the main points of critique launched by poststructuralism against the concept of experience, I have argued that the basic tenets of the poststructuralist critique do not apply to phenomenology. (1) Concerning the critique of epistemological foundationalism, I have argued that phenomenologys criticism of classical empiricism implies a sceptical attitude toward the idea of using experience as a foundation for knowledge. Although experience is fundamental for phenomenology, it does not have recourse to experience as an unquestioned starting point, but takes experience as a subject of phenomenological analysis by making visible the structures of experience and describing their phenomenological content. (2) The phenomenological concept of the horizon demonstrates that the historicity of experience is taken into account in phenomenology; that is to say, it accounts for historicity in the narrow sense of the word (temporal horizons) and historicity in the broader sense of spatial horizons, as well as the wider horizon of the world. (3) The issue of immediate experience is addressed by phenomenology in its very methodology insofar as it necessarily problematizes the idea of immediate experience. In phenomenology, experience is neither immediate nor capable of being described in an unmediated way. (4) The concept of intentionality corresponds to a basic tenet of poststructuralism according to which experience is always already interpreted experience. Regarding the interpretive component of experience, phenomenology further posits that the subject of experience is not a passive recipient of experiential input, but an active participant in the creation of experience. (5) Starting with the phenomenological concept of the openness of experience, I have shown that the claim that phenomenology contributes to the reproduction of ideological systems by having recourse to experience is wholly unjustified. (6) Because phenomenology posits experience as situated and based in the body, it opens up the possibility for a phenomenological description of different gender experiences, including womens experience, as well as the different experiences among women. (7) And (8), even the objection that phenomenology relies on a concept of pre-discursive 728
experience must be carefully examined. If we understand pre-discursive experience as prior to language, as Scott and Butler seem to, then approaches to the phenomenology of language such as that of MerleauPonty demonstrate the very opposite of what poststructuralism claims to be the property of phenomenology. From the arguments advanced above, devoted as they are to reconciling phenomenology and poststructuralism with regard to the concept of experience, the following conclusions can be drawn. I find it important to point out that to take seriously the poststructuralist critique of experience does not imply that we must do away with the concept of experience altogether. The dominance of the poststructuralist critique of experience has fed the presumption that poststructuralism shuns the concept and finds it unsuitable for the aims of feminist philosophy. But nowhere among the writings of poststructuralist feminists do we find an explicit demand that the concept of experience be left behind. It would, in fact, be illogical to claim that experience is an unsuitable concept for pursuing insights in the social sciences. Such a position would deny to a significant portion of research in the social sciences its very own object of study.61 When Scott understood the pressing need to respond to objections made to her critical remarks on experience in the context of feminist history, she clarified her position: The task [] is not to drop the concept of experience, but to historicize it, to ask what constituted experience for the subjects [] and for us (Scott, 2001: p. 74). If we take Scott at her word, this means that she does not advocate abandoning the concept of experience, but merely wishes to find an appropriate way to apply the term. That is to say, experience itself is not objectionable to Scott, but only some of the ways in which the term is applied. It is not that, as a result of critically re-examining the concept of experience, we must therefore get rid of it; we must, instead, transform the concept. This leads to the conclusion that poststructuralism and phenomenology are not as far apart as it seems. They share a common interest in a critical concept of experience. Both warn against a nave, uncritical understanding of experience. They thus both represent, in their own way, a critical counterweight to empiricist concepts of experience. While poststructuralism primarily emphasizes the discursive conditions of experience, phenomenology focuses on an analysis of experience within a discourse of concrete subjects. The different perspectives on experience offered by these two inquiries do not simply represent oppositional positions; instead, they are both expressions of a critical understanding of experience. In this sense, both phenomenology and poststructuralism contribute to the critical re-examination of experience. Rehabilitating the concept of experience in the context of feminist philosophy requires that we first take seriously the poststructuralist critique of experience. But contrary to the widely held assumption that poststructuralism and phenomenology represent two irreconcilable philosophical approaches to the concept of experience, I have demonstrated that we need 729
not abandon phenomenology as a philosophy of experience because phenomenology shares several critical impulses with poststructuralism. The insight that phenomenology and poststructuralism are equally interested in a critical concept of experience is linked to the hope that this insight will enable a rehabilitation of the phenomenological concept of experience in the context of feminist philosophy. A feminist phenomenology might then represent a phenomenology of gender experience capable of incorporating the poststructuralist critique of experience. And where the discourse analysis of experience comes up against its limits when describing gender experience as gendered experience, in particular phenomenology can be a useful complement to poststructuralism.62 University of Vienna, Austria Translated by Christina M. White Edited by Ryan Crawford Notes
1 On phenomenology as a philosophy of experience, see Waldenfels, 1980: p. 13. 2 To name a few examples: Jacques Derridas critique of the metaphysics of presence, Michel Foucaults critical examination of the concept of experience from the perspective of discourse analysis, Louis Althussers stand on the question of experience in the context of his Marxist critique, or Jean-Franois Lyotard. 3 Scott 1992. A longer version of this article appeared in Critical Inquiry a year earlier under the title The Evidence of Experience (Scott, 1991). See also Scott, 2001. The theorist lurking in the background of Scotts poststructuralist critique of experience is Michel Foucault, who has also criticized the concept of experience in phenomenology. On Foucaults concept of experience and his changing understanding of experience see in particular Gerhard Unterthurners seminal study (Unterthurner, 2007). 4 This question seems all the more pressing given that Scotts widely received and well-recognized critique does not directly address the literature of phenomenology, despite the fact that its criticisms are often aimed against phenomenology. This seems to suggest that contemporary poststructuralist feminisms scepticism about the phenomenological concept of experience is largely the product of misunderstandings. 5 For Husserl, this source is none other than sensuous experience (Ideas I, Collected Works, Vol. II, p. 82). Perception represents, in Husserl, a primal experience (ibid.). 6 On Husserls critique of empiricism, with regard to Locke, Hume and Berkeley in particular, see Husserls Erste Philosophie, Erster Teil (Hua VII). See also the critique of empiricism that follows his examination of psychologism in Logischen Untersuchungen (Hua XVIII) and Ideen I, Hua III/1, 3955. 7 See Husserls analysis of perception in his Analysis Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis (Collected Works, Vol. IX). For commentary on Husserls analysis, see Buck, 1989: pp. 6082.
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8 See Husserls distinction between what is genuinely perceived and what is not genuinely perceived in Analysis Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, Collected Works, Vol. IX, p. 40. 9 Husserl speaks of a horizon of reference (Cartesian Meditations, p. 44), or a whole system of referential implications (Analysis Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, Collected Works, Vol. IX, p. 41). 10 See Waldenfels 1998: pp. 2201. 11 On the phenomenology of temporality in Husserls work, see Zur Phnomenologie des inneren Zeitbewutseins, Hua X. On temporality and the consciousness of time in Husserl, see Bernet, Kern and Marbach, 1989: pp. 96107. 12 See Bernet, Kern and Marbach, 1989: p. 98. 13 According to Max Mller, this expanded concept of experience is characteristic of the twentieth century, in contrast to that of the nineteenth century (see Mller, 1971: p. 223). 14 Cf. Heideggers hermeneutic phenomenology and his analysis of the historicity of the being-in-the-world in his Being and Time. On Heideggers analysis of the being-in-the-world see Dreyfus, 1991. Although Heideggers analysis of the historicity is extremely important, in this text I will mainly, though not exclusively, focus on Merleau-Ponty and Husserl. 15 For Husserl, intentionality is, in fact, a basic characteristic of consciousness (Logische Untersuchungen, Hua III/1, 303), but in the following I will refrain from the use of the term consciousness because that term has specific philosophical and historical connotations and is, therefore, semantically limited. I understand intentionality here in the wider sense of a basic characteristic of every experience. Merleau-Ponty argues similarly in Phenomenology of Perception (PP 258, n. 1). This corresponds to the widespread understanding today of phenomenology as a philosophy of experience (Waldenfels, 1980: p. 13). Like Roland D. Laing, I understand consciousness, but also conceptualization, fantasy, memory and perception, etc. as modalities of experience (Laing, 1990: Ch. I. 1, Experience and Evidence). 16 One of the lasting contributions of phenomenology is that this area of life-world doxa has increased its philosophical status in comparison to scientific epistemes (see Waldenfels, 1985: pp. 3840). In feminist philosophy, a radical status gain for doxa is not in sight. 17 In contrast to Descartes, our natural experience of the world remains intact in Husserl. It is not negated, as with Descartes, but perhaps only neutralized. 18 The different forms of reduction cannot be addressed at length in this context (see Bernet, and Kern and Marbach, 1989: Ch. 2). 19 Husserl himself has pointed to this: Obviously the inverted commas are significant in that they express that change in sign, the correspondingly radical significational modification of the words. The tree simpliciter, the physical thing belonging to Nature, is nothing less than this perceived tree as perceived which, as perceptual sense, inseparably belongs to the perception (Ideas I, Collected Works, Vol. II, p. 216). 20 On the sense of experience as the result of phenomenological reduction, in contrast to that which has been experienced, see Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Zweiter Teil, Hua VIII, 436. 21 Klaus Held emphasizes that the interest (of the phenomenologist) in the proof of being in objects is broken (Held, 1985: p. 35), and Merleau-Ponty speaks of a break with our familiar acceptance of the world (PP xiv) as a necessary beginning to phenomenological thought. On Husserls motto To the things themselves! and the possible misunderstanding of the call to return to the immediate apparentness of things, see Vetter, 1997: pp. 48ff.
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22 Cf.: the phenomenological analysis has the character of a reflection (Held, 1985: p. 35). 23 On the paradox of phenomenology see Husserl, Crisis, p. 180. 24 See above all the following: Cartesian Meditations (379), Crisis and Experience and Judgment. Husserl himself spoke of genetic phenomenology as a general term for the method of phenomenological description, the nucleus (Keim) of which he saw, with hindsight, as already present in Logischen Untersuchungen (Experience and Judgment, p. 75). 25 I am referring here to Husserls Crisis as well as Experience and Judgment (p. 50), which was published in 1938. On the method of regressive inquiry in Husserls late work, see Ricur, 1978, Waldenfels, 1985: pp. 13ff., Sepp, 1997: pp. 16ff. 26 On the different understanding of life-world in Husserls work, see Waldenfels, 1985: pp. 13ff. 27 Husserl was thinking here primarily of logic, mathematics, geometry and physics, but also the experimental psychology of his time. Today we would have to take into consideration all sciences that observe strict objective criteria, including informatics, genetic research and modern reproduction technologies, among others. 28 Cf. Husserl, Crisis, p. 123. 29 Cf.: If we cease being immersed in our scientific thinking, we become aware that we scientists are, after all, human beings and as such are among the components of the life-world (Crisis, p. 130). 30 For Husserl, the historicity of the sciences is not limited to the natural sciences, but also includes philosophy. 31 An artificial separation of these two areas of knowledge, in the sense that doxa and epistemes are two areas of knowledge independent of one another, does not, however, seem realistic. 32 I place activity in quotation marks because it cannot be equated with the activity posited in the dominant theories of action, insofar as activity here does not refer to conscious or arbitrary acts. 33 Cf.: Das sich auf den Gegenstand Beziehen ist eine zum eigenen Wesensbestande des [intentionalen, S. St.] Akterlebnisses gehrige Eigentmlichkeit (p. 413). Heidegger similarly posits that intentionality in the literal sense is a Sich-richten-auf (Heidegger, 1994: p. 37). 34 This aspect of violence in experience in the work of Merleau-Ponty has been explored at length by Martin Schnell in his study entitled Phnomenologie des Politischen (Schnell, 1995: pp. 10921). 35 This violence in perception or experience has its counterpart in Heideggers thought, where truth is understood as emerging from a struggle between shedding light on something and concealing it (see Heidegger, 1980: pp. 39ff.). 36 On transcendental violence, see Waldenfels, 1990: pp. 10319. 37 This form of productivity in perception in Merleau-Pontys work can be compared with Foucaults notion of the productivity of power. 38 In his lectures on the sciences at the Sorbonne between 1949 and 1952, MerleauPonty stresses the ways in which science intervenes with its object and applies this intervention to the social field. As he tries to formulate a phenomenology of the child and explore the logic of lexprience enfantine (Merleau-Ponty, 1988: p. 244), he not only rejects the idea of true objectivity, but also posits that every observation is an intervention: Wenn es sich um Lebewesen handelt und erst recht um menschliche Wesen gibt es keine bloe Beobachtung: jede Beobachtung ist bereits eine Intervention (ibid., p. 102). 39 Husserl hints at the possibility of a further determination (Nherbestimmung) and a determination as otherwise (Andersbestimmung) (Cartesian Meditations, p. 45). Both terms signify that experience has a fundamental
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40
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43 44 45 46
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50 51
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changeability, a fact that distinguishes this notion of experience from a substantialistic conception. Husserl can, however, be critiqued for orienting the whole of his phenomenological analysis toward fulfilment, and thus not focusing on the possibility of failure or even radical indeterminacy. This has apparently played a role in Foucaults critique of phenomenology, in which he emphasizes following Nietzsche, Bataille and Blanchot the possibility of limit-experiences from which the subject emerges as a changed being (Foucault, 1996: p. 27). Gerhard Unterthurner has shown that the focus on limit-experiences risks becoming a pathos of limit-experience and can lead to the levelling of everyday experience (Unterthurner, 2007: p. 263). For Gerhard Gamm, this aspect of indeterminacy in determinacy is not only the central idea in Husserls phenomenology, but also constitutes the most essential characteristic of modern philosophy as such, insofar as modern philosophy avoids a logic of determinacy (Gamm, 1994: p. 19). Husserl understands the horizon as the realm [Spielraum] for these possibilities (Experience and Judgment, p. 36) that has yet to be realized and as an open possibility (p. 96). While Butlers Gender Trouble links productive repetition with certain forms of performance, namely, parody (Butler, 1990: pp. 185ff.), her next work, Bodies that Matter, expands the possibility of change through repetition to include other acts that are not explicitly staged performances (Butler, 1993). Judith Butler also critiques this point in Gender Trouble, its articulation occuring in the context of politics and representation (Butler, 1990: pp. 16), as well as in a critique of the matriarchy thesis (pp. 358). See Linda Fisher (Fisher, 2000). In her studies on gender-specific behaviour, Iris Marion Young has shown that the phenomenological concept of experience can be applied in a gender-specific manner (see Young, 1990). Within the womens movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the concept of authenticity was a key concept. Autobiographies and other experiential narratives by women were considered authentic self-descriptions of women living within a patriarchal society and served as a medium of communication and mutual understanding (see Metzler Lexikon Gender Studies / Geschlechterforschung). It is well known that patients with anxiety disorders can develop a feeling of fear simply by invoking fear itself. The automatic equation of discourse and language that is often found in poststructuralism has not been sufficiently questioned. Also problematic is the lack of clear definitions for the terms language and discourse themselves in poststructuralist literature, and the fact that the different understandings of language and discourse within poststructuralist approaches are often ignored. This does not imply that Husserl did not devote enough attention to language or the creation of meaning. His early work on phenomenology and epistemology, which includes a theory of meaning and expression, can be read as an outline for a phenomenology of language (see in particular Logical Investigations). I have elsewhere addressed Butlers approach to this issue in greater detail (see Stoller, 2002). The distinction between a constituted and a constitutive language corresponds to Merleau-Pontys distinction between a spoken language (parole parle) and a speaking language (parole parlante) (translated in the Phenomenology of Perception as the spoken word and the speaking word (PP 197); see also PdW 34, 36 and 107). Concerning Butlers understanding of language, and particularly in relation to Derridas concept of language, see Vasterling, 2001. While Vasterling by and
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large shares Butlers understanding of language, she is critical of the fact that the language action Butler defends as a generator of meaning leaves out the factor of intentionality (ibid., p. 139) and this, despite the fact that she finds intentionality in the phenomenological sense to be quite important for a theory of gender identity (see Butler, 1993: pp. 2823, n. 11). At this juncture, phenomenology and poststructuralism might enter into a productive dialogue. Quite often prefixes such as pre- and ur- are rejected in an exaggerated and unobjective manner, a phenomenon that can be traced back to a lack of conceptual understanding, as is often the case with the terminology of classic phenomenology. One recent concrete example of this equation established between pre-predicative and pre-discursive experience can be found in the work of Shusterman. For Shusterman, primordial experience in Merleau-Pontys work is experience below the level of language and concepts and is, therefore, situated on a nondiscursive level (Shusterman, 2003: p. 708). Although Shusterman refers to the American pragmatism of James and Dewey in his critique of Merleau-Ponty, the way he equates pre-predicative and pre-discursive is not dissimilar to the manner of poststructuralists. I have explored this point further in Stoller, 2005. In this text published in Prague in 1938, Husserl is concerned with the determination of predicative judgment (Gr. apophansis) in the context of formal logic and the foundations of this determination in pre-predicative evidence, in the sense of a phenomenologically oriented genetic theory of judgment (Experience and Judgment, p. 27). The first part of this study is devoted to the being and structure of pre-predicative experience; the second focuses on characterizing predicative judgment; the third explores the constitution of the general thingness of the world at a higher level of logical judgment. According to Husserl, receptivity is the characteristic trait of pre-predicative experience, in contrast to the spontaneity of predicative experience (see, for example, Experience and Judgment, pp. 1989). This does not mean, however, that the subject of experience behaves completely passively in pre-predicative experience. In order to perceive an object as an object intended in one particular way or another within the field of perception, in what Husserl calls the referential way of observing, a certain amount of activity on the part of the perceiving subject must be present at the level of pre-predicative experience, for example when the subjects observational specific interest is directed to this particular object rather than another (p. 152). With a vague reference to Austins theory of language, Butler calls a statement such as I am a girl a performative statement, and what occurs in this performative statement she calls a naming (Butler, 1993: p. 232), i.e., something is called by name. Studies on language development in children today assume that language development does not begin at the level of words, but earlier. The kind of babbling infants engage in at the sixth to twelth month of life cannot simply be considered pre-language; it is instead a type of polymorphous language. Merleau-Ponty concentrated on childrens language acquisition from a phenomenological perspective (see Merleau-Ponty, 1988, chapter La conscience et lacquisition du langage). Husserl considered judgments in the broader sense of the word, as opposed to judgments of predicative experience, to be judgments in the true, narrower sense of the word (Experience and Judgment, p. 61). Doing away with the concept of experience in the field of history, for example, would mean doing without oral history, which would imply a significant loss of qualitative research for the field.
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62 I would like to thank Veronica Vasterling, Gerhard Unterthurner and an anonymous referee for the International Journal of Philosophical Studies for erne for her assistance with the final version extensive comments as well as Ida C of this text. My sincere thanks also go to the Institute for Gender Studies at the Radboud University Nijmegen, which has financed the English translation.
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International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol.

Phenomenology and the Poststructural Critique of Experience

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE POSTSTRUCTURAL CRITIQUE

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