Making Room for the Solution: A Critical and Applied Phenomenology of Conflict Space

ABSTRACT

This essay discusses the normative significance of the spatial dimension of conflict events. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted with political actors – politicians, officials, and activists – and on Heidegger’s account of spatiality in Being and Time, I will argue that the experience of conflict space is co-constituted by the respective conflict participants, as well as the location where the conflict unfolds. Location and conflict parties’ (self-)understandings ‘open up’ a space that enables and constrains ways of seeing and acting. Yet, a purely transcendental phenomenology will remain oblivious to the quasi-transcendental, societal structures of power that shape a person’s conflict experience. To illuminate these facets of the phenomenon, phenomenology has to join forces with critical theory. Introducing Garland-Thomson’s feminist distinction of fit/misfit, I will illustrate how power shapes conflict space in manifold ways. The essay thereby fills a gap in the philosophical literature that rarely analyses political conflict as a phenomenon sui generis.

KEYWORDS:

• Conflict
• space
• critical phenomenology
• applied phenomenology
• Heidegger
• Garland-Thomson

Acknowledgments

For comments on earlier drafts of this essay, I would like to thank Fabian Freyenhagen, Jörg Schaub, Matt Burch, Irene McMullin, Robin Celikates, Sean Irving, Felix Schnell, Johanna Amaya-Panche, Béatrice Han-Pile, Wayne Martin, and Timo Jütten. I owe special gratitude to Matt Burch, Fabian Freyenhagen, and Wayne Martin for inviting me to give guest lectures on the topic at their seminars. Their students’ feedback was much appreciated. Further, I received helpful comments at the 2022 conference of The British Society for Phenomenology, the ‘11^th Congress for Practical Philosophy’ in Salzburg, the 2022 MANCEPT workshop ‘Equality and Space’, and the University of Essex’s SPAH Philosophy Colloquium. Research on the essay was funded by The German Academic Scholarship Foundation, the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England, and the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I am aware of the (ethical) tension in drawing on Heidegger’s work and critical theory. I do not, however, share the conviction that Heidegger’s appalling political positions necessarily render his philosophy invalid. Instead, one has to reflexively engage with his work and let it be interrogated by the theories and testimonies of people from marginalized groups. For a meditation on the role of the White philosopher, including my own, in tackling racism and other forms of oppression, see Rautenberg (2023, 2–4).

2. Similar approaches can be found in recent sociological research on space (e.g. Löw 2008). See also the ‘spatial turn’ in the field of peace and conflict studies (e.g. Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel 2016; Björkdahl and Kappler 2017; Brigg and George 2020).

3. For further discussion, see Rautenberg (2023, 3–4, fn. 1).

4. Critics may hold that 13 interviews are insufficient to allow for my data to be representative. In a first defense, I would argue that such a quantitative claim is very much at odds with qualitative research; since it is the point of my method to arrive at rich descriptions of conflict experience, 13 interviews can more than suffice to arrive at the desired goal. That being said, I do not claim that my findings are final and comprehensive; instead, they invite for further research and intersubjective corroboration (Gallagher and Zahavi 2010).

5. Contrary to my approach however, Køster and Fernandez are only interested in the modes of these invariant structures, and not these structures themselves (2023).

6. All names changed.

7. Further information remains undisclosed to respect Monika’s request for anonymity.

8. I here follow Wrathall’s and Murphey’s interpretation of Heidegger’s care structure (2013, 20). Similar interpretations can be found in Blattner (2019); Dreyfus (1991, 244); and Haugeland (2013, 227–30). See Mulhall (2005, 163–4) and Crowell (2013, 179ff.) for different accounts.

9. Throughout the remainder of the chapter, I refer to the German original Sein und Zeit. When quoting in English, I quote from the Stambaugh translation of Being and Time ((1927) 1996), indicating first the page number of the German original and then of the English translation.

10. Wrathall distinguishes these two forms of de-distancing into the ‘differential of usability’ – nearness of objects for use – and the ‘differential of mattering’ – nearness of objects that matter or are important (2017, 230). Cerbone criticizes Heidegger for not clearly distinguishing between the two, resulting in what he deems a problematic ambiguity in his account of spatiality (2013, 139–41).

11. Indeed, recent phenomenology of online sociality shows that digital worlds are not always deficient with respect to direct other-understanding (empathy), embodiment and intercorporeality, and also should be considered in spatial terms. e.g. see Ekdahl and Ravn (2022), Osler (2021), Osler and Krueger (2022).

12. For other accounts of thrownness, see (Dreyfus 1991; Mulhall 2005; Wrathall 2005; Wrathall and Murphey 2013). Crowell (2003, 110–1) and Withy (2011) argue that there is also the more fundamental sense of Dasein’s sheer existence, its being-there, that it is thrown into. While I agree with Crowell and Withy on this picture of thrownness or facticity, it suffices here for me to focus on the more derivative sense of thrownness into a concrete situation.

13. In his later essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ ((1951) 2001), Heidegger renders the location even more emphatically into a normative entity in its own right. Yet, given the ongoing controversy over the compatibility between Heidegger’s early and late philosophy, and the related question of whether the late Heidegger is still involved in a phenomenological project, I shall limit my analysis to his early phase. This suffices to defend the point I intend to make.

14. Spearheaded by critics Sartre and Levinas, there is considerable debate if Heidegger’s ontological existential of being-with (Mitsein) and its related existentials can provide the foundation necessary to explain how we ontically meet concrete others in the lifeworld. I disagree with this view; see McMullin (2013) for a detailed rebuttal.

15. This also implies that space, normatively understood, does not have some form of stable integrity. Locations, as physical and architectural structures, do. But Dasein experiencing space as normative means that it is aware of changes that occur in the range of possibilities that are available to it, for instance, when the composition of the conflict participants changes. This is what I meant when I wrote that space is a dynamic phenomenon. Further, I thank Timo Jütten for asking me in a conversation if my approach amounts to a metaphorical sense of space, if I take experience of space to be experience of a space of affordances. I like to think so, especially because this understanding is tied closely to the (physical) entity that are locations. Our dwelling takes place somewhere in quite a literal sense.

16. Mensch’s later paper (2012) on the matter is much more critical of Arendt’s position; still, his account lacks a clearer distinction between space and location.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England (CHASE); The Royal Institute of Philosophy; Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes.