Phenomenology, Epoché and Art

Since phenomenology is the study of intuitively lived experiene and perception/cognition of objects, it’s natural that it’s both highly general and yet quite easy to understand when we are presented with good examples. Today I was thinking of the process of “bracketing”, or epoché, whereby the phenomenologists temporarily suspends belief in the world [as presented to us] and attempts to gaze upon it without prejudice. Just as when we watch a movie or participate in a role-playing game, we suspend disbelief in order to recognize murders as representations and DIY sheets as heroic capes, phenomenological bracketing can be an attempt at whittling away preconception and seeing things as they are. Does this sound pretensious or impossible? Well, I don’t blame you. But there is quite a lot of reason behind the exercise. Even though we can’t overcome all of our biases, we can at least be self-aware and reflexive and make adjustments accordingly. But if we look to perception, we see – as Husserl describes – objects, which we impart and [crucially] perceive as having certain characteristics, such as extension in space and temporal permanence. That is, when I look at a chair,  I don’t really have the experience of looking at a particular angle of the chair; I’m not painfully aware that I might only be seeing ‘the trunk of the elephant’ and forgetting its tail. Rather, I simply look and think “oh, a chair”*. In reality of course, what I am seeing is a little sliver of it. The chair from a limited perspective, just one angle. I can move around and have moving eyes, which allows me to get more pictures of the chair into my brain, but I have to mentally compile them into a cohesive, permanent object that I can then deal with.

Consider the fact that infants don’t seem to grasp the concept of “object permanence” (over time), which is why peek-a-boo is a fun for game for them, since they see objects vanishing and reappearing every time. There seem to be mental procedures for compiling disconnected sensory impressions into cohesive objects. Blind people who gain or regain their vision are often unable to cope with the visual impressions they experience; objects appear to be actually shrinking as they move further away, rather than being perceived as more distant; faces are unrecognizable fleshy landscapes that talk and blink, and objects need to be consciously interpreted to be recognized (“OK… it’s about the length of my hand. It’s … shiny grey… I guess that’s metal. Four little things stick out from them, and they’re thin, parallel and seem to be pointed. … is it a fork?”). It’s mentally demanding.

We see the process reflected very closely in art. In children’s art, but equally in all art before the development of naturalistic perspective, drawings are reproductions not of sights-as-seen, but of objects-as-experienced. Houses are drawn symbolically, with impossible perspectives showing their relevant parts: the back door as well as the front door, the chimney and the apple tree in the back yard, all seen as from an imaginary angle. The intentional, object-oriented angle. The same applies to human figures, whether in children’s drawings or in pictograms. Learning how to draw realistically requires — in addition to obvious technical skills, hand-eye coordination, etc. – the ability to properly conduct epoché; to record the actual visual impression on your retina, as you see it in a non-conceptualizing way, and record that. Drawing what you see, not what you think. It’s incredibly difficult. I can’t, which is why it takes a skilled artist to realistically draw perspective, but it is certainly possible.
*Or rather: “Oh, a place for me to sit”

Thoughts on phenomenology and property

In the course of my reading and studies I’ve once again come across the philosophical movement of phenomenology, considered by some (e.g. Zahavi, whose books I’ve been reading in lieu of the originals) to be the most influential school of thought in 20th century European philosophy — second, I presume, only to the analytic philosophy of thinkers like the early Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, and presumably only second in the Anglosphere.

Let me cite the Standard Dictionary of Philosophy:

Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions.

It’s fascinating, and weird stuff, and tends to be written either in dense German prose, effervescent French philosophese or in even worse English translations marred from the need to break up German compounds into long, right-branching noun chains themselves connected ever-so loosely by multiple iterations of the word “of”, which renders a perfectly reasonable word like Subjektphilosophie  as “the Philosophy of the Subject”, etc.I thankfully have a passing knowledge of German, but more importantly, I can read wonderful Danish translations that tend to be much closer to the German original, since our languages are so close. Anyway, the topic of this entry was not supposed to be the translation of philosophical prose, but phenomenology itself.

Phenemonology deals, as far as I’ve understood it, in the first-person experience of being-in-the-world. It might be something as simple as how we look at a pen, which is an example I’ve seen repeated several places. Depending on the specific mode of intentionality under analysis, a phenomenological examination of looking-at-pens might describe how the various sensory impressions of the pen (crucially, the fact that we cannot see the pen from more than a single angle, because objects in space have orientations and subjects) present themselves to our minds as a single, coherent object. It’s equally crucial that we are not oriented toward the sensory impressions themselves, which aren’t salient, but toward the pen itself, which is then “given to us” as a transcendental object (i.e. an object that transcends sensory detection and is, in principle, knowable and observable to other subjects).

So there are objects (pens), subjects (pen-gazers) and intentionalities (gazing), and phenomenological analysis (/phenomenologically informed analyses in other sciences). Another mode of intentionality might be “remembrance”, “longing for” or “hatred”, but equally “imagination” and “conception”. We can equally intend fictional objects, which seems strange, but is the reason we can paint pictures of unicorns and goblins as easily as horses and chimps.

My interest in phenomenology goes ‘all the way’ back to my Bachelor essay, in which I contrasted various modes of interacting with (/intending) the same class of objects. I think it’s interesting how interactionally dead objects in our daily lives really are, in the sense that their proper use, purpose and meaning aren’t inscribed into them physically, but intersubjectively, so objects change their use and purpose according to context, and a cultural practice can exchange almost all of its constituents and somehow still remain recognizable.

My essay was about “special beers” in the Danish market, which refer to both local microbrewery beers and imported craft beers (e.g. Belgian ones). The interesting thing is that the beers themselves aren’t the most important part of the craft beer movement, since the beers change from place to place and time to time. Nor is it important who does the drinking; the most important factor seemed to be the mode of consumption, whereby beer is consumed, described and interacted in a new way. We starting drinking new beers, but the real import object wasn’t beer but the idea that beer didn’t have to be a low-class, cheap, industrial product, but could be enjoyed, savored, in the same way as wine. So the intentionalities change and pre-existing, shared intentionalities (‘savoring’, as opposed to ‘guzzling’) are retasked in a social process.

Now, I’ve moved on to considering everyday life in more detail. In particular, I’m interesting what one might call the phenomenology of possession. That is, how we experience ownership, property, possession and perhaps even attachment or co-belonging with objects. It’s often said that we consume and take into possession for reasons of identity and self-expression. How does that really work? Why is it that we would assume that other people knew how [insert quality] we are when we buy or own [insert object]? It isn’t just an external thing either; I am quite convinced that we genuinely do alter ourselvesthrough our object-interactions.*

But tons of other authors have studied consumption, often critically, and spatial belonging, etc. I haven’t read that much about our attachment to objects. Why is it, e.g., that theft angers us? Why are some forms of taking – above all visible ones, like the re-possession of a house – more distressing to us than more discrete ways of taking, such as taxation? Why is it natural to refer to things we’ve borrowed as “ours” (as in, “Whose book is this? / It’s mine, well, uhm, Bob’s, but…”), or even just things we’ve been given that we would never describe as “owning”, at least  not in the formal/legal sense: the food on “your” plate at a dinner party, “your” children, one of those children’s rooms (“No grown ups allowed”). I know for a fact that the squatters in Copenhagen I blogged about a couple of years ago felt a profound sense of ownership over ‘their’ house, even thought it had been lent to them and the courts ultimately found that they didn’t have a claim to it.

Behind these different senses of ownership – some momentary, some long-standing - there seems to be a common denominator, a concurrent way of thinking about  and interacting with these things, people and places, which isn’t really ownership, or actual possession, or desire, but … something like attachment, or “property” in some very literal sense of an object having been appropriated to a subject, or an etymological sense:

[early 13c., "adapted to some purpose, fit, apt," from O.Fr. propre (11c.), from L. proprius "one's own, particular to itself," from pro privo "for the individual."

Possession and belonging are not the same as legal property; legal property is an attempt at formalization and codification of [pre-existing]property [relations], e.g. in the case of issuing deeds to prior owners and residents, claiming ownership over land or titles held since time immemorial (for such a long time that no other claimants can reasonably be expected to turn up).

Property rights and courts are, I guess, tools for 1) deciding cases of overlapping feelings of possession/belonging/attachment to something and 2) allowing for the dis-possession of objects in order for them to be sold, transferred, etc., which – cf. Marcel Mauss – seems to have been impossible for some forms of property / “objects possessed”. Property rights equally tie down property by connecting them to a particular person or entity, and free it up for transfer, trade, lending and leasing, which is important. Property rights also lessen the need to guard one’s property jealously, since there is a record and a legal framework to rely on. But, of course, personal, lived ownership isn’t the same as having a formal claim to property; everyone owns things without having a legal document to prove it, and we take possession of and own things socially without ever looking to formal laws and obligations. We take take possesion of a particular part of the beach when sub-bathing or a particular spot in the woods for camping, which we don’t own, but do feel some sense of ownership toward.

There be a link between territoriality and possession; they might even be the same thing. Anyway, I need to think some more about it, and I think I might have to read some Locke. Inalienable, non-transferable property (legally:  property held in fee tail) might have been the original mode of ownership for some classes of objects, which I guess makes sense in a context when trusteeship, feudal title and collective agricultural practices prevail, and needs to be examined as well.

I see some potential for interesting descriptions of various conflicts, maybe a way to link identity and object use, and the potential for insights into questions like nationality/territoriality, and a social-phenomenological description of private property rights that is less programmatic, less declaratory, and more descriptive. There isn’t a shred of doubt in my mind that all people experience senses of ownership, so the question isn’t whether they do but how, why, and what the implications are. Conflicting senses of ownership are an almost inevitable source of social conflict, and it goes beyond the legal sphere; I think developing a terminology and analysis of the phenomenon of possession itself might be useful.

It might also explain some cross-cultural differences: Do you, e.g., “own” your spot in a line at a store? What does that mean? Cutting in line is condemned in some countries(gloriously described in Watching the English, quoted here), while it’s acceptable to pile around in others. In Denmark, you’d probably be silently condemned if you cut in line at a counter or in an office, criticized in a bar (usually indirectly by some third party ["Excuse me, I think these people next to me were first..."]), but we’d never stand in line at bus stops, which I’ve heard the English do. Presumably, both Englishmen and Danes are miffed when people break into their houses and take their stuff, but why do Danes only take ownership of their spots in some kinds of lines and not others?

Sine I’m interested in food and public spaces, I’d like to look at food sharing and seating arrangements as well. Hmm.

* [Major digression] “Your true self” / “deep-down” isn’t really something I subscribe, at least not anthropologically. I don’t mean to say that “you are what you own”, but I do mean to say that you probably are what you do, think and say. At least as far as empirical science is considered. When people say “It was so unlike me…”  that usually means “I wish I hadn’t…” or “That was so unlike what I theoretically wish I were”. It’s more specific, too:

Stuff changes us, and everything is on record. Becoming an alcohol changes you. Some of the changes might be reversible, but some won’t be. Fat people aren’t slim (i.e. unmarked, regular, neutral) people somehow “inside” their actual bodies, and when you’re in a great mood and act out of the box, you aren’t ecstatic (“out-standing, outside of yourself”), you’re probably something more like immersed: absorbed in your immediate temporal/social/spatial surroundings, even to the point of later (of socially/spatially/temporally removed) embarrassment.

If you’d spent years poring over self-help books, you’ve changed. I’m not always entirely sure that there is anyone “deep down inside you” that is your true self, at least I don’t know how you’d access it and I’m definitely not sure that I quite understand why a theoretical self-image should take precedence over the thoughts, actions, feelings, choices and dispositions that you actually have. I usually take issue with self-help books, quizzes, magazines, and “self-realization”, “self-discovery”. The self is a quantum particle; looking at it changes it. Self-discovery is self-direction, self-alteration. [/Major digression]

Et par hurtige konservative argumenter for at sænke skatten — set værdimæssigt, ikke snævert økonomisk

Jeg synes, de tekniske og økonomiske argumenter for skattelettelser er gode, men de økonomiske argumenter bygger jo også på nogen moralske og sociale principper. Her er nogle argumenter for skattelettelser ud fra konserative principper, bare for at slå fast med syvtommersøm, at skattelettelser ikke handler om rødvin eller erhvervsfremme, men om værdier:

Konservative grunde til at sænke skatten:

• Skatterne finansierer et monstrum af en stat, der blander sig i stadigt flere anliggender, der burde tilfalde familien, virksomheder, foreninger, individer, kirker og andre civilsamfundsinstitutioner at afgøre. Skatten muliggør formynderiet og alle anliggenders politisering.

  Dvs., Skatterne betaler for kulturkampen mod alt, der er godt og sundt og velforankret, i den sociale rationalismes navn.
  

• Skatten bruges som et våben mod velstand, som et tungt redskab til at udjævne og nivellere samfundet. Skatterne sætter lighedsstræberi over reel omsorg for fattige. Skatteudjævning institutionaliserer misundelse og klassekamp (frem for social harmoni), og er et anslag mod menneskers egen evne til at disponere over deres egen penge, herunder hvordan man aflønner sine ansatte.
  
  Dvs., Skattepolitikken fører en jacobinsk krig mod konservative idealer om opsaring, opbygning af et familieværk, den sociale stratifikations naturlighed.

• Familiernes mulighed for at råde over deres eget forringes, jo flere af deres ressourcer forvaltes af staten
  
  Dvs., Valg flyttes fra civilsamfund til konsulenter i strid med konservativ tiltro til beslutninger baseret på traditioner, værdier, fælles forståelser og tavs viden. Abstrakt, rationalistisk planlægning sættes over det nære og konkrete.

• Den progressive beskatning af indkomst besværliggør arbejdsdeling ml. ægtefæller og tilpasning af arbejdsmængden til livssituationen, fordi man straffes for at arbejde mere i nogen perioder og mindre i andre
  
  Dvs.,: Det gøres sværere at have et helhedsperspektiv på sit familie- og arbejdsliv over en livstid.

•  Afgifter på alkohol, chokolade og andet ‘usundt’ er formynderiske – de anerkender ikke menneskets ret til at disponere over deres liv, til at sammensætte deres egen kost ud fra tradition, personlig præference og andre ikke-politiske motiver.

  Dvs., Borgeren repræsenteres ikke, men forvaltes. Sund fornuft, diskretion og respekt for privatlivets fred sættes over styr.

• Skattepolitikken besværliggør pensionsopsparing, og fører til, at mennesker vælger pensionsplaner ikke ud fra det økonomisk mest forsvarlige, men det skattemæssigt mest gunstige.

  Dvs., Konservative idealer om selvforsørgelse, ansvar for egen opsparing og sin families ve og vel, tilsidesættes eller gøres umulige at leve efter. Der hersker usikkerhed og tvivl om økonomien, og man tvinges ud i afhængighed af staten, frem for selvstændighed.

Public Opinion and the State (shorter version)

Public Opinion and the State

Last summer in far-away Denmark, the Prime Minister’s Office spent approximately 1 million dollars (in a nation of 5.4 million) on a campaign endorsing a constitutional amendment. The issue—whether to abolish male-preference primogeniture in the royal family—might seem minor, but it was indicative of a style of heavy-handed politics that should be of major concern.

The campaign largely consisted of a TV-spot that satirized opponents of the amendment. The backlash that followed focused whether public monies should be spent telling the citizens how to vote, and was quite unexpected, since the amendment itself was essentially non-controversial. However, it failed to trigger a larger debate, which is shocking, since the government spends millions every year promoting all sorts of causes — so many and so often, in fact, that it took a nation-wide campaign telling the citizens how to vote in an upcoming referendum for the line to be crossed.

Publically funded canvassing is a key tool in the extensive Danish welfare system, and usually comes in the form of anti-smoking, anti-drinking or anti-obesity campaigns. While Denmark took little part in the world wars, its state information campaigns are reminiscent of the information campaigns used in wartime recruitment drives, and share a common origin in the mass education, vaccination and sanitation attempts of the time. Nowadays, they come in all shapes and sizes (but not persuasions, mind you) — in one memorable case, the Ministry of Taxation paid for dramatic posters of the run-down schools and closed hospitals Denmark would have if people failed to pay their taxes (which currently amount to about 50% of GDP).

Private actors help to legitimize this information policy, such as when newspapers order polls and immediately call for officials to launch campaigns, when the public fails to live up to the standards of liberal propriety. Progressives, always more comfortable with state-driven modernization, seize the day, and sympathetic members of the general public will ask politicians to run an anti-smoking campaign – for its own sake. Thus, these campaigns have become regular features of public policy.

Participants in the public debate — citizens — discuss what the citizens think, ought to think and how they could be made to think what they ought. Real politics are sidelined by meta-politics, the politics of politic. One wonders, in the words of Bertolt Brecht, if it “wouldn’t be easier for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?” Or preferably: if democracy does not imply that public opinion should guide policy, and the not the other way around?

Conservatives and libertarians should question whether the state ought to be the prime motor in shaping public opinion. While it is true that all governments try to influence public opinion –it is an unavoidable aspect of statecraft – it is equally true that that can also undermine faith in democracy: If the citizens can’t be trusted to have the right opinions, how can they be trusted to vote?

Et in Europa Ego

Konservative tanker om samtiden

I middelalderen, hvor samfundet var præget af hård standsopdeling og hierarki, var der samtidigt en fascination af det makabre og morbide, som kom til sit kraftigste udtryk i dødedansen, hvor konger, kejsere og bisper dansede sammen med simple bønder og Døden med sin le.  I døden var alle lige. Formålet var at opildne fyrster og potentater til pligttro og ydmyghed; det var bitter medicin mod arrogance og magtfuldkommenhed.