Introduction to the Special Issue, People on Streets. Critical Phenomenologies of Embodied Resistance

The last few years have seen the emergence of critical phenomenology as an exciting paradigm in phenomenology and beyond, spanning disciplines such as anthropology, urban studies, gender studies and literature, with ‘founding mothers’ like Alia Al-Saji, Lisa Guenther, Gayle Salamon, and Gail Weiss. Puncta, the journal of critical phenomenology, was established in 2018; in 2019, the programmatic volume 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology was published. Ever since, apart from many articles, several monographs and edited volumes have been published and conferences held under this heading.

Even if the very term, ‘critical phenomenology,’ is relatively recent, it is certainly not an entirely novel project, as evidenced by the overlap between its current proponents and its predecessors. Critical phenomenology, as we know it today, does not have a single point of origin. It can be traced back not only to its beginnings in early twentieth century phenomenology (most notably the work of Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty) but also to feminist phenomenology and critical phenomenology of race that were first established in the mid-twentieth century, in the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon respectively, and, from the 1970s, developed by Iris Marion Young, Sandra Bartky, Gloria Anzaldua, Maria Lugones, Linda Alcoff, George Yancy, Robert Bernasconi, Lewis Gordon, Sara Ahmed, Henri Rubin and Gayle Salamon—to name but a few feminist, queer, trans, critical race, and intersectional phenomenologists.

Like any paradigm, field of inquiry, or methodological frame in-the-making (to use a phrase coined by Latour), critical phenomenology has not yet reached provisional closure, such as consensus about its method. Hence, we will not even try and provide a definition. Instead, we approach critical phenomenology more indirectly. To illuminate the methodological challenges involved, we will unpack two foundational debates, pertaining to the key questions: “What is phenomenological about critical phenomenology?”¹ and “What is critical about critical phenomenology?” Subsequently, we will point to its relation to social and political struggles and protest.

Foundational Debates

Regarding the question of what is typically phenomenological about critical phenomenology, it should be noted that critical phenomenology shares several methodological and conceptual features with any other phenomenological approach, irrespective of “any specific philosopher’s incarnation” of it.²

First, like any phenomenologist, critical phenomenologists aim at providing rich descriptions of lived experience or first-person perspectives of subjectivity, selfhood or Dasein. In the case of critical phenomenologists, this is typically embodied experience. Similar to classical phenomenology, critical phenomenology pursues an inquiry into the conditions of possibility and basic structures of lived experience and the lifeworld in which it unfolds. Husserl’s transcendental method, his way of exploring a priori structures both in what is thought (noema) and in the act of thinking (noesis), proceeds via two so-called ‘reductions’: the phenomenological and the eidetic reduction. In his contribution to this special issue, Rasmus Dyring makes an original contribution to the phenomenological method by suggesting adding a third, “anarcheological,” reduction for critical purposes. Critical phenomenologists are typically attentive to embodied differences and to empirical social structures that are open to change and to the way these differences and contingent structures impact on lived experience. As a consequence, they are usually reluctant to fully accept the assumption of the existence of immutable essences, as it is seen as symptomatic of false neutrality, which in practice all too often amounts to masculinist and white supremacist bias. However, their commitment to disclosing something general by investigating lived experience does not set them apart from other phenomenologists.

Second, critical phenomenologists share the general phenomenological predisposition to distance oneself from—i.e. suspend or ‘bracket’—the preconceived ideas, prejudices, and biases contained in the natural attitude: our everyday lived experiences, habits, acting and interacting in the world, as well as our theoretical presuppositions. Following in the footsteps of Merleau-Ponty, who famously asserted the impossibility of a complete epoché, critical phenomenologists are faithful, if not always to the actual practice of the epoché, then to its spirit: the methodological predisposition to denaturalize the natural attitude (Husserl), and to uncover the everyday practical world that “normally” (i.e. usually) operates in the background (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty). As Ann O’Byrne puts it: “rejecting the natural attitude is the first move of any phenomenological investigation, and that means encountering the world otherwise, undermining all at once the processes of naturalization that work to enforce the conviction that how things are is the only way they can be and/or the way they ought to be.”³

There is a lively debate among critical phenomenologists about the adoption of the transcendental method and about the question of whether one can abandon transcendental subjectivity and still ‘do’ phenomenology at all, as opposed to, for example, qualitative empirical social science. Critical phenomenologists typically explore how social and political—that is, empirical and historically shifting—structures and cultural norms impact differentially on variously situated people: cis and trans women, men, intersex and non-binary people, black and white people, disabled or able-bodied people, etcetera. These empirical structures and embodied differences are persistent yet contingent. Lisa Guenther favours a quasi-transcendental—or historico-transcendental—approach that unhinges the transcendental-empirical divide itself. Structures like patriarchy and racism, are contingent yet constitutive for lived experience. As Johanna Oksala puts it, critical phenomenology is attentive to the “constitutive importance of culture, language and historicity” for subject formation.⁴

Third, critical phenomenologists typically assume that the predisposition to denaturalize the natural attitude presupposes that one takes a first-person perspective, a “perspective from within,” or a “point of view” as a starting point for inquiry, in contrast to the predominant social scientific, constructivist and materialist accounts of, say, gender and race that mostly take a “perspective from without” that do not inquire into the very background beliefs that enable such accounts.⁵ Critical phenomenologists tend to grant priority to intersubjectivity over subjectivity, to the first-person plural over the singular, and to co-existence over existence. Lisa Guenther puts it this way:

By critical phenomenology I mean a method that is rooted in first-person accounts of experience but also critical of classical phenomenology’s claim that the first-person singular is absolutely prior to intersubjectivity and to the complex textures of social life … the method of critical phenomenology … both continues the phenomenological tradition of taking first-person experience as the starting point for philosophical reflection and also resists the tendency of phenomenologists to privilege transcendental subjectivity over transcendental intersubjectivity.⁶

Fourth, critical phenomenologists align themselves with a relational or interactive ontology. According to a general phenomenological assumption, self, others, and the world are intertwined, fundamentally related.⁷ This follows from the basic phenomenological principle of intentionality: our consciousness is always consciousness of something, which means that it is not something inside us that is separate from the external world. The subject or self always gestures beyond itself. Existential and hermeneutic phenomenologists such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Beauvoir represent a modification of the principle of intentionality, broadening it beyond Husserl’s focus on consciousness. They posit that the self is embodied and always “in the world”—that is, embedded in a historical, cultural, and social world comprised of other people and things. Even if, with the obvious exception of Beauvoir, these phenomenologists themselves are not committed to critical phenomenology, their work is often felt to lend itself better to productive appropriations in the service of critical theory than Husserlian phenomenology. By partially or entirely abandoning the epoché and focusing on humans’ practical and embodied “being in the world,” they throw into relief the self’s irrevocable social situatedness. This opens up the possibility of accounting for social, political and cultural norms and structures as more than merely empirical restraints.

In addition to methods, the phenomenological tradition also offers a repository of conceptual resources that have been creatively appropriated and reworked for understanding and challenging social structures.⁸ Phenomenological concepts that have successfully been put to use for critical phenomenology include the “lived body” (Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Fanon), “habit” (Merleau-Ponty), the Leib-Körper distinction and “orientation” (Husserl), “being in the world” (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty), “horizon” and the figure/ground structure of perception (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer), “situation” (Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty), “historicity,” “facticity”, “thrownness” (Heidegger), “natality” (Arendt), etcetera.

Overall, we agree with the authors of the first Introduction to critical phenomenology (discussed in the book review by Tris Hedges in the present issue), Elisa Magrì and Paddy McQueen, who argue that the divergence between critical and classical phenomenology should not be exaggerated.⁹ However, if critical phenomenology is considered as one of the latest branches of the phenomenological tree, then what constitutes the uniqueness of this branch? This question brings us to the second foundational debate, about the nature of the critical aspect of critical phenomenology.¹⁰ Critical phenomenologists suspend the natural attitude, which includes the—historical, contingent—social structures and norms informing experience that we usually take for granted in everyday life. Typically assumed to be shot through with power relations, these structures and norms are considered both exclusionary and constitutive at the same time. Critical phenomenologists “not only [to] make visible ‘normal’ experiences of embodied beings but also [to] do so without parsing out that which makes ‘normal’ experiences possible.”¹¹ The aim of the subsequent phenomenological description is to interrogate these norms and structures. In the words of the editors of 50 Concepts, critical phenomenology “mobilizes phenomenological description in the service of a reflexive inquiry into how power relations structure experience as well as our ability to analyze that experience.”¹²

Uncontroversially, critical phenomenology is a normatively engaged project, that delves into social structures and norms that are seen as unjust, oppressive, or exclusive. It discloses how hegemonic norms foster some embodied forms of life, while foreclosing or troubling others—mostly by naturalizing the former. Critical phenomenologists uncover what has been obscured because it presents itself as normal or natural, as it constitutes the horizon or background of lived experience without itself appearing, such as systemic structures of oppression. They reveal, more or less systematically, commonplace pre-understanding, including gender-based prejudices and racialized or racist bias. As such, these constitutive structures and pre-understandings are made available as objects of critical scrutiny—and hence to the possibility of change, amelioration, or repair. Description itself may thus weaken the normative hold of these structures. For example, uncovering the habitual nature of sexist and/or racist perception robs the sexed and racialized body of its naturalness and opens up practices of perceiving the social world and the bodies inhabiting it otherwise.

Thus, critical phenomenology is a project of social critique. However, there is no agreement as to how critical phenomenology relates to transformative social or political action. More precisely, scholars take different stances with respect to Marx’s 11^th thesis on Feuerbach. Some view phenomenological description as a build-up to “changing the world,” that is, to ultimately acting into and transforming the political and social structures and norms that the critical phenomenologist describes and interrogates. A case in point is Lisa Guenther, who concludes her chapter in 50 Concepts with a reference to Marx’s thesis: “The ultimate goal of critical phenomenology is not just to interpret the world, but also to change it”.¹³ Others, such as Alia Al-Saji, renounce such an ‘activist’ approach. She develops a phenomenology of racialized affect that proposes dwelling on the wounds of colonial duration.¹⁴ Gayle Salamon helpfully recalls the phenomenological imperative to “describe what one sees in order to see it anew.”¹⁵ In other words, perhaps we should consider phenomenological description itself to be a mode of action. This is what the editors of 50 Concepts, in their Introduction, call “transformative description”—to re-describe the world to disclose it in a novel way.¹⁶ As Anne O’Byrne puts it: “Change requires interpretation, which requires attentive experience, which at its best broadens and deepens our sense of the world.”¹⁷

Critical Phenomenology and Embodied Resistance

There is an intimate relation between critical phenomenology and social struggles: critical phenomenology may itself be qualified as a mode of transformative social or political action. Yet another relation pertains to the genetic or historical ties that connect critical phenomenology with social struggles and movements. Critical phenomenology is largely a continuation of feminist phenomenology and critical phenomenology of race that were first established, in the mid-twentieth century. Each of them engages in phenomenological description of first person lived experience of oppression, domination, or exclusion, against the background of patriarchal, racist, and capitalist societies, along with the progressive social struggles aiming at transforming or subverting them. Today, embodied differences are no longer thought just along the lines of sex, gender and race, but are increasingly extended to include other differences that reflect the development of new struggles and social movements, such as those related to health and dis/ability, neurodiversity, age, to queerness, and trans- and cis-embodied experiences, and even to species, that is, to the so-called ‘anthropological difference’ between human and non-human animals.¹⁸

The contributions to the present special issue originate from the conference “People on Streets. Critical Phenomenologies of Embodied Resistance” that took place in May 2022 at Paderborn University and was organized by Maria Robaszkiewicz, Marieke Borren, Katja Čičigoj and Sara Cohen Shabot. These papers make explicit the genetic relation between critical phenomenologies and embodied protests; the authors delve into various causes, struggles, and movements across the globe, providing new perspectives on the spectrum from liberal democracies to illiberal populist and autocratic regimes. The contributors tackle struggles such as anti-government protests in autocratic regimes (Dyring, Shchyttsova), anti-Black racism (Borren, Corrias), queer activism (Herrmann), feminism (Robaszkiewicz), the early labour movement (Smyth), climate activism (Herrmann), and more. The geographical diversity of the papers, set in locations ranging from Argentina and Poland to the US, Tunisia, and Belarus, reflects the global relevance and resonance of critical phenomenology.

The issue brings different, more or less canonical, strands within phenomenology to bear on the project of critical phenomenology—hence more aptly, critical phenomenologies, in the plural—such as Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology (Dyring, Hermann), Waldenfels’ responsive phenomenology (Corrias, Dyring), Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment (Borren, Smyth), Patocka’s phenomenological account of the “solidarity of the shaken” (Shchyttsova) and Arendt’s political phenomenology (Borren, Herrmann, Robaszkiewicz). In addition, it is informed by insights from critical theory, in particular by Butler’s work on vulnerability and the performative politics of assembly (Borren, Herrmann, Shchyttsova) and borrows from other traditions in philosophy, such as speech act theory, legal philosophy and aesthetic theory (Corrias, Shchyttsova). Finally, critical phenomenologies bear the legacy of political activists-cum-theorists such as Luxemburg (Smyth), Gandhi and Thoreau (Herrmann), Gago (Robaszkiewicz) and a variety of BLM protagonists (Corrias).

The present issue explores the basic structures of human existence and co-existence as disclosed in social and political protests, particular in relation to embodiment, bodily intentionality and intercorporeality. The authors delve into embodied phenomena such as the habitual body (Smyth), corporeal spontaneity (Borren, Smyth), vulnerability (Borren, Shchyttsova), the body in its capacity as ζωή vs. βίος (Robaszkiewicz), the capable or skilled body (Smyth, Borren) and bodies in alliance (Borren, Robaszkiewicz, Shchyttsova), etcetera.

Other basic structures of protest that are explored in this collection include temporality (in particular unprecedentedness as a quality of protest development: Borren, Shchyttsova, Smyth), language (passionate utterance: Corrias), motility (walking: Borren), spatiality (the space of appearances: Borren, Herrmann, Robaszkiewicz; the legal order: Corrias), among many others.

What phenomenology illuminates about protests, as evidenced in these papers, pertains most of all to the meaning and experiential structures of protest and critique, and the values it embodies, such as justice, freedom, and peace. Issues that are addressed include the dynamics of its development: how, for instance, do vulnerable, passive bodies (ζωή or ‘life itself’) get mobilized, transformed and politicized into βίος, when collectively brought into the public sphere (Robaszkiewicz, Shchyttsova)? Where lies the subversive quality of “critical experience” (Dyring)? What do “passionate utterances” such as the BLM rallying cry “No Justice, No Peace” reveal about the nature and origins of the legal and political order (Corrias)? How is political agency interrelated with experiences and phenomena to which it is usually considered antithetical, such as spontaneity (Smyth), and vulnerability (Shchyttsova)?

As guest editors to this special issue, our purpose has been to contribute to the foundational debates in critical phenomenology outlined above, while also providing new insights into the phenomenon of protest and embodied resistance. Whether the articles collected in this issue furthermore succeed in enacting social and political protest in and of themselves will be up to the reader to find out.

Notes

1 As reads the title of an article by Laferté-Coutu.

2 Davis, “The Phenomenological Method,” 3.

3 O’Byrne, “Book Review of 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology,” 28.

4 Oksala, “A Phenomenology of Gender,” 237.

5 Within feminist phenomenology this feature of phenomenology has been valued for a long time. See for instance Fielding, “A Feminist Phenomenology Manifesto,” Oksala, “A Phenomenology of Gender,” 239–241. The focus on the “perspective from within,” incidentally, is what has drawn trans studies scholars to phenomenology, beginning with Rubin, “Phenomenology as a Method in Trans Studies.” Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s work, Gayle Salamon writes in a programmatic piece on the use of phenomenology, especially the notion of the lived body, in trans studies: “The phenomenological claim that the body is not just something I have or use, not merely an object I haul around, but is rather something that I am allows an understanding of the body as defined and constituted by what I feel and not simply what others see.” (Salamon, “Phenomenology,” 154)

6 Guenther, Solitary Confinement, xiii, xv.

7 Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood; idem, “Intersubjectivity,”; Heinämaa, Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference.

8 Many of the contributions in 50 Concepts follow this type of appropriating phenomenology. Also see Dickel’s recently published monograph, Embodying Difference.

9 Magrì and McQueen, Critical Phenomenology: An Introduction, 23.

10 “What is Critical about Critical Phenomenology?” is the title of an article by Salamon in the inaugural issue of Puncta; also see Guenther, “Six Senses of Critique for a Critical Phenomenology” and Magrì and McQueen, Critical Phenomenology, Chapter 1.

11 Cohen Shabot and Landry, “The Water We Swim In,” 2.

12 Weiss, Murphy and Salamon, “Introduction: Transformative Descriptions,” xiv.

13 “Six Senses,” 16.

14 Al-Saji, “Frantz Fanon,” 208.

15 Salamon, “What is Critical About Critical Phenomenology?,” 12.

16 Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon, “Introduction: Transformative Descriptions.”

17 O’Byrne, “Book Review 50 Concepts,” 35.

18 Respectively, e.g., queerness: Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology; trans embodiment: Salamon, The Life and Death of Latisha King, Rubin, “Phenomenology as Method in Trans Studies;” health: Cooper, Dolezal and Rose, COVID-19 and Shame; disability: Reynolds, The Meaning of Disability, Garland-Thomson, “Misfits”, Hall, “Limping Along: Toward a Crip Phenomenology”; age: Eilenberger, Halsema and Slatman, “Age Difference in the Clinical Encounter”; neurodiversity: Chapman and Carel, “Neurodiversity, Epistemic Injustice, and the Good Human Life,” Fernandez, “From Phenomenological Psychopathology to Neurodiversity and Mad Pride;” species: Dufourcq, The Imaginary of Animals, Veit and Browning, “Phenomenology Applied to Animal Health and Suffering.”