By Mona Sakr
Getting to grips with the philosophical approach of phenomenology
When you work with/in embodiment, you come across so many concepts that feel almost impossible to get a true grip on. Beautiful ideas, like phenomenology, roam free and can be intimidating as a result. In my role at MODE, I am currently contributing towards a glossary of terms that are used in embodiment research. It’s a fantastic way of working out what’s really important when you’re first engaging with a new concept or approach. After writing the first draft of the glossary entry for ‘Phenomenology’, I decided to test myself. Without looking at a single book, paper or webpage, what could I say that I knew about phenomenology? The result was the following:
10 things I know about phenomenology
- Phenomenology is the study of lived experience.
- The founder of phenomenology was the German philosopher Husserl, who lived and wrote at the turn of the twentieth century.
- Heidegger, Husserl’s student, was fundamental in developing the field of existential phenomenology.
- In 1927, Heidegger wrote Being and Time, a central text in phenomenology.
- In Being and Time Heidegger made the distinction between tools that are ‘present-at-hand’ and ‘ready-to-hand’. Tools that are ‘ready-to-hand’ can be used without thinking, without awareness. Although familiarity usually leads to tools becoming ‘ready-to-hand’, our awareness of them may be drawn back to them if they suddenly stop working (Heidegger uses the example of the pen that breaks while you are writing).
- In 1945, Merleau-Ponty wrote a book called Phenomenology of Perception. It is another central text in phenomenology.
- In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty presents the body as the hub of all meaning-making. Physical touch represents a ‘chiasm’ (a crossing-over) between subjectivity and objectivity. Bodies are both capable of touching and are tangible.
- Dreyfus (1992) built on Heidegger’s ideas towards technology use in his critiques of artificial intelligence. He has argued that AI algorithms and devices only make sense through the implicit and tacit knowledge that a user brings to them. Studying interactions with technology are therefore as much about studying the user as they are about studying the object.
- How do you collect data as a phenomenologist? Phenomenologists typically access lived experience through interviews and participant reflections (either written or oral). An interview approach called Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is one example of a methodological framework that uses phenomenology as its starting point.
- Phenomenological enquiries are likely to foreground the lived experience through four ‘lifeworld existentials’ (Veletsianos and Miller, 2008): body, time, space, relations with others.
At the end of this exercise, the questions I’m left asking are:
What are the glaring gaps in my breakdown of phenomenology?
Is this a positive exercise or does it lead to the reduction of ideas?
What concepts/approaches in embodiment would I struggle to do this exercise for?
Interesting post Mona, i wrote about phenomenolgy in conclusion of a paper about virtual worlds
“The metaverse pioneers and the colonization of OpenSimulator”
http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Article,id=13480/
but paused at the implications of trying to demonstrate in an academic framework the phenomenolgical aspect of virtual worlds . Here though is the final paragraph of my paper –
“Fundamentally the experience of the virtual space is phenomenological. Phenomenology is concerned with the systematic reflection on and analysis of the structures of consciousness and can be contrasted with the purportedly objective orientation of positivist theories of psychology. Phenomenology instead explores the phenomenon of subjectivity and concerns itself with experiences such as judgements, perceptions, and emotions. Experience in the virtual world is fundamentally one of perception, based on visual stimulus and words written as text and where the relationship with other avatars is essentially primeval, often sceptical and sometimes driven by irrational fear and compounded by bleed. These experiences are entirely subjective given that the handler’s relationship is more akin to theatre than the ‘real world’, and an individual’s experience is a product of the mind rather than a response to ‘real’ sensory data. The handler/avatar relationship therefore raises further questions of what in Husserl’s conception is the lived body, that is – the lived body is your own body experienced by yourself, as yourself. Importantly then, to what extent does the phenomenological nature of the virtual space, as a mirror subjective experience, allow theorisation about substantive sociological questions? ” Hagerty 2012
Further to my earlier post I have just published a book of photographs ‘Bleed’ at http://arklo.com/books.htm My introduction is extremely brief as i want the photographs to speak for ‘themseslves’ as a visual artwork/book. Another discussion could however be raised if ‘Bleed’ was read in the context of this thread
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