Introduction to Session 8

Hello,

I am sitting by the first fire of the season in my house. Our heat is off and I spent about an hour clearing a pile of bricks and a trashbag full of dirt out of the chimney--what a messy way to plug up an unused fireplace.

Kyle has asked me to relay to you two things. First, the "An Event in Sound" reading is optional, as it is detailed beyond the scope of our class. Personally, I do look forward to reading it, as part of my research into "the Apollonian eye and the Dionysian ear" (there's a fascinating paper if you google that). Second, if you haven't yet, please email Kyle a question about phenomenology. He will be drawing on these questions to inform/inspire the midterm questions on Tuesday.

I found our other reading this week very helpful in situating phenomenology in relation to other fields, and in helping me develop a stance towards phenomenology. Since our first class, I have been troubled by what at first seemed to be an uncritical acceptance of "essences" in phenomenology. Essentialism is incompatible with poststructuralism, because it is based upon reducing one thing to another (to create/identify structures). I value poststructuralism because it seems like the best available framework from which to dismantle... oppressive structures?

However, through discussions with Kyle and through our readings, it quickly became apparent that essences in phenomenology are far from unproblematized. First of all, it seems most or all phenomenologists are not granting essences any objective truth- or ontic-vale--they are presumed to be merely models or tools, at most subjective truths. And, as Martha emphasized, the understandings that are built from a phenomenological inquiry are (at least for her) acknowledged to be ungeneralizeable and fully context-dependent. Our reading this week emphasized how intensely ruminative phenomenology is as a field, constantly reflecting on and questioning its own methods and assumptions. So essences are not being used uncritically or without an awareness of their tenuous ontological status.

So, while I am still not convinced that the phenomenological reduction is not the distasteful "project of efficiency and management" leading to a "commodification of experience" that some of my poststructuralist colleagues make it out to be; the way phenomenology is practiced, I really don't see what the big deal is. It seems to be one of the most healing and vivifying discourses available, the other one of this caliber being critical theory. So I will continue my attempts to force phenomenology into compatibility with poststructuralist critical theory, a possibility intriguingly alluded to in our reading as "postphenomenology."

It likely means giving up or deeply rethinking the phenomenological reduction--in principle, poststructuralism opposes all reduction of one thing to another, preferring instead dispersion and proliferation. I have been describing the phenomenological reduction as "basting a turkey in its own juices." Perhaps this suggests a direction for a postphenomenological dispersion--"basting a turkey in juices from arbitrary sources." The ways of reading could be mixed from any approach, and the essences concocted decanted for many undreamt purposes. Of course, who says it has to be a turkey?

Anders