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Abstract
Phenomenology is considered a philosophy of experience. But in the wake of French post‐structuralism beginning in the 1970s, the concept of experience within phenomenology has fallen under heavy critique. Even today, in the context of feminist philosophy the phenomenological concept of experience has yet to recover from the poststructuralist critique.
In this article, I will closely examine the poststructuralist critique of the concept of experience within the context of feminist theory. I will thereby refer first and foremost to the poststructuralist theorist Joan Scott, and her influential text “‘Experience’”. In my examination of the poststructuralist critique of experience, the leading question will be whether or not this critique, down to its details, can in fact be applied to phenomenology. My thesis is that phenomenology is able to withstand the poststructuralist critique of experience. Further, I will argue that post‐structuralism and phenomenology have more in common as regards the concept of experience than is usually admitted. For several reasons, it seems – as I will maintain – that both poststructuralist feminism and phenomenology are equally interested in a strong concept of experience and thus do not promote doing away with the concept.
Notes
1 On phenomenology as a philosophy of experience, see Waldenfels, Citation1980: p. 13.
2 To name a few examples: Jacques Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence, Michel Foucault’s critical examination of the concept of experience from the perspective of discourse analysis, Louis Althusser’s stand on the question of experience in the context of his Marxist critique, or Jean‐François Lyotard.
3 Scott Citation1992. A longer version of this article appeared in Critical Inquiry a year earlier under the title ‘The Evidence of Experience’ (Scott, Citation1991). See also Scott, 2001. The theorist lurking in the background of Scott’s poststructuralist critique of experience is Michel Foucault, who has also criticized the concept of experience in phenomenology. On Foucault’s concept of experience and his changing understanding of experience see in particular Gerhard Unterthurner’s seminal study (Unterthurner, Citation2007).
4 This question seems all the more pressing given that Scott’s widely received and well‐recognized critique does not directly address the literature of phenomenology, despite the fact that its criticisms are often aimed against phenomenology. This seems to suggest that contemporary poststructuralist feminism’s scepticism about the phenomenological concept of experience is largely the product of misunderstandings.
5 For Husserl, this source is none other than ‘sensuous experience’ (Ideas I, Collected Works, Vol. II, p. 82). Perception represents, in Husserl, a ‘primal experience’ (ibid.).
6 On Husserl’s critique of empiricism, with regard to Locke, Hume and Berkeley in particular, see Husserl’s Erste Philosophie, Erster Teil (Hua VII). See also the critique of empiricism that follows his examination of psychologism in Logischen Untersuchungen (Hua XVIII) and Ideen I, Hua III/1, 39–55.
7 See Husserl’s analysis of perception in his Analysis Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis (Collected Works, Vol. IX). For commentary on Husserl’s analysis, see Buck, Citation1989: pp. 60–82.
8 See Husserl’s distinction between what is ‘genuinely perceived’ and what is ‘not genuinely perceived’ in Analysis Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, Collected Works, Vol. IX, p. 40.
9 Husserl speaks of a ‘horizon of reference’ (Cartesian Meditations, p. 44), or a whole ‘system of referential implications’ (Analysis Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, Collected Works, Vol. IX, p. 41).
10 See Waldenfels Citation1998: pp. 220–1.
11 On the phenomenology of temporality in Husserl’s work, see Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, Hua X. On temporality and the consciousness of time in Husserl, see Bernet, Kern and Marbach, Citation1989: pp. 96–107.
12 See Bernet, Kern and Marbach, Citation1989: p. 98.
13 According to Max Müller, this expanded concept of experience is characteristic of the twentieth century, in contrast to that of the nineteenth century (see Müller, Citation1971: p. 223).
14 Cf. Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology and his analysis of the historicity of the ‘being‐in‐the‐world’ in his Being and Time. On Heidegger’s analysis of the being‐in‐the‐world see Dreyfus, Citation1991. Although Heidegger’s analysis of the historicity is extremely important, in this text I will mainly, though not exclusively, focus on Merleau‐Ponty and Husserl.
15 For Husserl, intentionality is, in fact, a ‘basic characteristic of consciousness’ (Logische Untersuchungen, Hua III/1, 303), but in the following I will refrain from the use of the term ‘consciousness’ because that term has specific philosophical and historical connotations and is, therefore, semantically limited. I understand intentionality here in the wider sense of a basic characteristic of every experience. Merleau‐Ponty argues similarly in Phenomenology of Perception (PP 258, n. 1). This corresponds to the widespread understanding today of phenomenology as a ‘philosophy of experience’ (Waldenfels, Citation1980: p. 13). Like Roland D. Laing, I understand consciousness, but also conceptualization, fantasy, memory and perception, etc. as ‘modalities of experience’ (Laing, Citation1990: Ch. I. 1, ‘Experience and Evidence’).
16 One of the lasting contributions of phenomenology is that this area of life‐world doxa has increased its philosophical status in comparison to scientific epistemes (see Waldenfels, Citation1985: pp. 38–40). In feminist philosophy, a radical status gain for doxa is not in sight.
17 In contrast to Descartes, our natural experience of the world remains intact in Husserl. It is not negated, as with Descartes, but perhaps only neutralized.
18 The different forms of reduction cannot be addressed at length in this context (see Bernet, and Kern and Marbach, Citation1989: Ch. 2).
19 Husserl himself has pointed to this: ‘Obviously the inverted commas are significant in that they express that change in sign, the correspondingly radical significational modification of the words. The tree simpliciter, the physical thing belonging to Nature, is nothing less than this perceived tree as perceived which, as perceptual sense, inseparably belongs to the perception’ (Ideas I, Collected Works, Vol. II, p. 216).
20 On the ‘sense of experience’ as the result of phenomenological reduction, in contrast to that which has been experienced, see Husserl, Erste Philosophie ( Citation 1923 /24), Zweiter Teil, Hua VIII, 436.
21 Klaus Held emphasizes that the interest (of the phenomenologist) in the proof of being in objects is ‘broken’ (Held, Citation1985: p. 35), and Merleau‐Ponty speaks of a ‘break with our familiar acceptance’ of the world (PP xiv) as a necessary beginning to phenomenological thought. On Husserl’s motto ‘To the things themselves!’ and the possible misunderstanding of the call to return to the ‘immediate apparentness of things’, see Vetter, Citation1997: pp. 48ff.
22 Cf.: ‘the phenomenological analysis has the character of a reflection’ (Held, Citation1985: p. 35).
23 On the paradox of phenomenology see Husserl, Crisis, p. 180.
24 See above all the following: Cartesian Meditations (§§37–9), Crisis and Experience and Judgment. Husserl himself spoke of ‘genetic phenomenology’ as a general term for the method of phenomenological description, the ‘nucleus’ (Keim) of which he saw, with hindsight, as already present in Logischen Untersuchungen (Experience and Judgment, p. 75).
25 I am referring here to Husserl’s Crisis as well as Experience and Judgment (p. 50), which was published in 1938. On the method of ‘regressive inquiry’ in Husserl’s late work, see Ricœur, Citation1978, Waldenfels, Citation1985: pp. 13ff., Sepp, Citation1997: pp. 16ff.
26 On the different understanding of life‐world in Husserl’s work, see Waldenfels, Citation1985: pp. 13ff.
27 Husserl was thinking here primarily of logic, mathematics, geometry and physics, but also the experimental psychology of his time. Today we would have to take into consideration all sciences that observe strict objective criteria, including informatics, genetic research and modern reproduction technologies, among others.
28 Cf. Husserl, Crisis, p. 123.
29 Cf.: ‘If we cease being immersed in our scientific thinking, we become aware that we scientists are, after all, human beings and as such are among the components of the life‐world’ (Crisis, p. 130).
30 For Husserl, the historicity of the sciences is not limited to the natural sciences, but also includes philosophy.
31 An artificial separation of these two areas of knowledge, in the sense that doxa and epistemes are two areas of knowledge independent of one another, does not, however, seem realistic.
32 I place ‘activity’ in quotation marks because it cannot be equated with the activity posited in the dominant theories of action, insofar as activity here does not refer to conscious or arbitrary acts.
33 Cf.: ‘Das sich auf den Gegenstand Beziehen ist eine zum eigenen Wesensbestande des [intentionalen, S. St.] Akterlebnisses gehörige Eigentümlichkeit’ (p. 413). Heidegger similarly posits that intentionality in the literal sense is a ‘Sich‐richten‐auf’ (Heidegger, Citation1994: p. 37).
34 This aspect of violence in experience in the work of Merleau‐Ponty has been explored at length by Martin Schnell in his study entitled Phänomenologie des Politischen (Schnell, Citation1995: pp. 109–21).
35 This violence in perception or experience has its counterpart in Heidegger’s thought, where truth is understood as emerging from a struggle between shedding light on something and concealing it (see Heidegger, Citation1980: pp. 39ff.).
36 On transcendental violence, see Waldenfels, Citation1990: pp. 103–19.
37 This form of productivity in perception in Merleau‐Ponty’s work can be compared with Foucault’s notion of the productivity of power.
38 In his lectures on the sciences at the Sorbonne between 1949 and 1952, Merleau‐Ponty stresses the ways in which science intervenes with its object and applies this intervention to the social field. As he tries to formulate a phenomenology of the child and explore the logic of ‘l’expérience enfantine’ (Merleau‐Ponty, Citation1988: p. 244), he not only rejects the idea of ‘true objectivity’, but also posits that every observation is an ‘intervention’: ‘Wenn es sich um Lebewesen handelt – und erst recht um menschliche Wesen – gibt es keine bloße Beobachtung: jede Beobachtung ist bereits eine Intervention’ (ibid., p. 102).
39 Husserl hints at the possibility of a ‘further determination’ (“Näherbestimmung”) and a ‘determination as otherwise’ (‘Andersbestimmung’) (Cartesian Meditations, p. 45). Both terms signify that experience has a fundamental changeability, a fact that distinguishes this notion of experience from a substantialistic conception. Husserl can, however, be critiqued for orienting the whole of his phenomenological analysis toward fulfilment, and thus not focusing on the possibility of failure or even radical indeterminacy. This has apparently played a role in Foucault’s critique of phenomenology, in which he emphasizes – following Nietzsche, Bataille and Blanchot – the possibility of limit‐experiences from which the subject emerges as a changed being (Foucault, Citation1996: p. 27). Gerhard Unterthurner has shown that the focus on limit‐experiences risks becoming a ‘pathos of limit‐experience’ and can lead to the levelling of everyday experience (Unterthurner, Citation2007: p. 263).
40 For Gerhard Gamm, this aspect of indeterminacy in determinacy is not only the central idea in Husserl’s phenomenology, but also constitutes the most essential characteristic of modern philosophy as such, insofar as modern philosophy avoids a logic of determinacy (Gamm, Citation1994: p. 19).
41 Husserl understands the horizon as the ‘realm [Spielraum] for these possibilities’ (Experience and Judgment, p. 36) that has yet to be realized and as an ‘open possibility’ (p. 96).
42 While Butler’s Gender Trouble links productive repetition with certain forms of performance, namely, parody (Butler, Citation1990: pp. 185ff.), her next work, Bodies that Matter, expands the possibility of change through repetition to include other acts that are not explicitly ‘staged’ performances (Butler, Citation1993).
43 Judith Butler also critiques this point in Gender Trouble, its articulation occuring in the context of politics and representation (Butler, Citation1990: pp. 1–6), as well as in a critique of the matriarchy thesis (pp. 35–8).
44 See Linda Fisher (Fisher, Citation2000).
45 In her studies on gender‐specific behaviour, Iris Marion Young has shown that the phenomenological concept of experience can be applied in a gender‐specific manner (see Young, Citation1990).
46 Within the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the concept of authenticity was a key concept. Autobiographies and other experiential narratives by women were considered authentic self‐descriptions of women living within a patriarchal society and served as a medium of communication and mutual understanding (see Metzler Lexikon Gender Studies / Geschlechterforschung).
47 It is well known that patients with anxiety disorders can develop a feeling of fear simply by invoking fear itself.
48 The automatic equation of discourse and language that is often found in poststructuralism has not been sufficiently questioned. Also problematic is the lack of clear definitions for the terms ‘language’ and ‘discourse’ themselves in poststructuralist literature, and the fact that the different understandings of language and discourse within poststructuralist approaches are often ignored.
49 This does not imply that Husserl did not devote enough attention to language or the creation of meaning. His early work on phenomenology and epistemology, which includes a theory of meaning and expression, can be read as an outline for a phenomenology of language (see in particular Logical Investigations).
50 I have elsewhere addressed Butler’s approach to this issue in greater detail (see Stoller, Citation2002).
51 The distinction between a constituted and a constitutive language corresponds to Merleau‐Ponty’s distinction between a spoken language (parole parlée) and a speaking language (parole parlante) (translated in the Phenomenology of Perception as the ‘spoken word’ and the ‘speaking word’ (PP 197); see also PdW 34, 36 and 107).
52 Concerning Butler’s understanding of language, and particularly in relation to Derrida’s concept of language, see Vasterling, Citation2001. While Vasterling by and large shares Butler’s understanding of language, she is critical of the fact that the language action Butler defends as a generator of meaning leaves out the factor of intentionality (ibid., p. 139) – and this, despite the fact that she finds intentionality in the phenomenological sense to be quite important for a theory of gender identity (see Butler, Citation1993: pp. 282–3, n. 11). At this juncture, phenomenology and poststructuralism might enter into a productive dialogue.
53 Quite often prefixes such as ‘pre‐’ and ‘ur‐’ are rejected in an exaggerated and unobjective manner, a phenomenon that can be traced back to a lack of conceptual understanding, as is often the case with the terminology of classic phenomenology.
54 One recent concrete example of this equation established between pre‐predicative and pre‐discursive experience can be found in the work of Shusterman. For Shusterman, primordial experience in Merleau‐Ponty’s work is experience ‘below the level of language and concepts’ and is, therefore, situated on a ‘non‐discursive level’ (Shusterman, Citation2003: p. 708). Although Shusterman refers to the American pragmatism of James and Dewey in his critique of Merleau‐Ponty, the way he equates pre‐predicative and pre‐discursive is not dissimilar to the manner of poststructuralists.
55 I have explored this point further in Stoller, Citation2005.
56 In this text published in Prague in 1938, Husserl is concerned with the determination of predicative judgment (Gr. apophansis) in the context of formal logic and the foundations of this determination in pre‐predicative evidence, in the sense of a phenomenologically oriented ‘genetic theory of judgment’ (Experience and Judgment, p. 27). The first part of this study is devoted to ‘the being and structure of pre‐predicative experience’; the second focuses on characterizing ‘predicative judgment’; the third explores the constitution of the general thingness of the world at a higher level of logical judgment.
57 According to Husserl, receptivity is the characteristic trait of pre‐predicative experience, in contrast to the spontaneity of predicative experience (see, for example, Experience and Judgment, pp. 198–9). This does not mean, however, that the subject of experience behaves completely passively in pre‐predicative experience. In order to perceive an object as an object intended in one particular way or another within the field of perception, in what Husserl calls the ‘referential way of observing’, a certain amount of activity on the part of the perceiving subject must be present at the level of pre‐predicative experience, for example when the subject’s observational ‘specific interest’ is directed to this particular object rather than another (p. 152).
58 With a vague reference to Austin’s theory of language, Butler calls a statement such as ‘I am a girl’ a ‘performative statement’, and what occurs in this performative statement she calls a ‘naming’ (Butler, Citation1993: p. 232), i.e., something is called by name.
59 Studies on language development in children today assume that language development does not begin at the level of words, but earlier. The kind of babbling infants engage in at the sixth to twelth month of life cannot simply be considered pre‐language; it is instead a type of polymorphous language. Merleau‐Ponty concentrated on children’s language acquisition from a phenomenological perspective (see Merleau‐Ponty, Citation1988, chapter ‘La conscience et l’acquisition du langage’).
60 Husserl considered judgments in the broader sense of the word, as opposed to judgments of predicative experience, to be judgments in the true, narrower sense of the word (Experience and Judgment, p. 61).
61 Doing away with the concept of experience in the field of history, for example, would mean doing without oral history, which would imply a significant loss of qualitative research for the field.
62 I would like to thank Veronica Vasterling, Gerhard Unterthurner and an anonymous referee for the International Journal of Philosophical Studies for extensive comments as well as Ida Ĉerne for her assistance with the final version of this text. My sincere thanks also go to the Institute for Gender Studies at the Radboud University Nijmegen, which has financed the English translation.