Vignettes

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.