Semiotic Phenomenology and Intercultural Communication Scholarship: Meeting the Challenge of Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Difference¹

1. I would like to thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their excellent responses to an earlier version of this work. I would also like the thank the students in my Fall 2005 Queer Theory seminar, who engaged in this work robustly and provided essential insight into my own thinking and experiencing.

Abstract

The present work considers how semiotic phenomenology can meet challenges presented in the effort to study the complexities of racial, ethnic, and cross-cultural difference and what is required for the potential of semiotic phenomenology to be adequately realized as a research methodology that can fully engage questions of historical context and the trajectories of power inherent in efforts to build cross-cultural knowledge. A focus on Martin and Nakayama's (1999) dialectical perspective provides the major context for this discussion. A focus on C. S. Peirce's (1958) categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness allows for the specification of the theoretical and practical terms in which the dialectical perspective can be successfully implemented and thus realized in the actual conduct of our scholarly research efforts.

Keywords:

• Cultural Difference
• Dialectical Perspective
• Intercultural Communication
• Race and Ethnicity
• Semiotic Phenomenology

Notes

1. I would like to thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their excellent responses to an earlier version of this work. I would also like the thank the students in my Fall 2005 Queer Theory seminar, who engaged in this work robustly and provided essential insight into my own thinking and experiencing.

2. Edmund Husserl is considered the founder of the phenomenological movement (Spiegelberg, 1982). Ever since he first used the term, phenomenology has been characterized by large debate and disagreements over its nature, scope, and potential. My own use of phenomenology follows the trajectory from Husserl, through Heidegger's critique of Husserl (1927/1962), and to the reinterpretation and extension of both offered by Merleau-Ponty (1945/1981). This particular trajectory, and its relevance to the study of human communication specifically, is detailed in the work of Lanigan (1988) as semiotic phenomenology. It is in my own work, however, where the emphasis on interrogating the genesis of one's critical perspectives concerning racial/ethnic and sexual identities as they are connected to the particularities of one's experience and sensibilities as a human being emerges (Martinez, 2003 2000; see also Lyman & Embree, 1997).

3. Phenomenology has a substantial presence in communication scholarship. Lanigan (1972 1984 1988 1992) should be recognized as the major contributor. Deetz's (1973 1981) work also represents important contributions to our discipline's understanding of phenomenology. Phenomenology has been considered most extensively in the context of rhetoric and argumentation (e.g., Hyde, 1980; Hyde & Smith, 1979; Lanigan, 1984 1996; Plummer, 2001; Tucker 2001; Warnick, 1979), intercultural communication (e.g., Kanata, 2003; Kristjánsdóttir, 2003; Martinez, 2000 2003; Orbe, 1994), and media studies (e.g., Haynes, 1988; Peterson, 1987; Wilson 1996). Phenomenology has also been used as the context for organizational communication (e.g., Bradac, Sandell, & Werner, 1979; Kellet, 1996), health communication (e.g., Bauer & Orbe, 2000), performance studies (e.g., Langellier, 1994; Langellier & Hall, 1989; Langellier & Peterson, 2004), and interpersonal communication (e.g., Cooks & Descutner, 1994). These contributions to the study of communication generally fall within two broad categories: works that apply phenomenology as a qualitative research methodology (e.g., Hyde, 1980; Orbe, 1994; Peterson, 1987) and those that take up specific philosophical/theoretical questions relative to communication (e.g., Orbe, 1995; Tucker, 2001; Warnick, 1979). Nelson (1989) is particularly noteworthy for the excellent discussion of the explication of interviews in phenomenological research.

4. See Martinez (2003) for a discussion of this point in the context of postmodernism, queer theory, and qualitative research methodology.

5. See Lugones (2003) and Cordova (1998) for excellent discussions of the limits of liberal pluralism, liberal multiculturalism, and what is required to achieve a genuine pluralism within postcolonial contexts.

6. I am also wary that the value of a practical philosophy and research methodology like phenomenology can adequately come to bear without researchers becoming “enmeshed” in it—that is to say, without something much more than the effort to bring phenomenology in as one of two or more paradigms without serious and sustained attention to phenomenology as a complex philosophical and human science movement entailing more than a century-long history.

7. C. S. Peirce is known as one of the key figures in the development of U.S. American pragmatism (Menand, 2001). There is an important connection between Peirce and Husserl. As Lanigan (1997) points out, we have a “fascinating historical parallel” (p. 106) where two thinkers on different continents are working out the same issues independently—a conjunction of semiotics and phenomenology. In citing Peirce's Collected Papers, I use the customary system: (CP volume number paragraph). Thus, (CP 5.511) refers to volume 5, paragraph 5111.

8. Consider the conceptualization of “social science” in Latin America, for example, where a keen awareness of development, democratization, the power of the social elites as connected to the United States, has resulted in the social sciences assuming “an obligation to take on problems that were posed initially in the humanities, particularly in advanced literary and cultural theory” (Beverley & Oviedo, 1995, p. 6).

9. This is also one of the greatest insights of Kaplan's (1964/1998) classic work, The Conduct of Inquiry. Kaplan relies on Peirce throughout this work (see pages 7, 17, 24, 29, 43, 85, 86, 146, 233, 254, 312, 330). Kaplan discusses phenomenological theory on page 58. See also Kaplan's “The Life of Dialogue” (1969) for a direct consideration of human communication.

10. Other times, reflexivity is reduced to the notion that in proceeding reflexively, authors ask readers to accept their account “itself as authentic, that is, as a conscientious effort to ‘tell the truth’ about the making of the account” (Gergen & Gergen, 2000, p. 1028). Nothing could be further from the way in which phenomenology approaches reflexivity (see Ihde, 1986).

11. This is, of course, one of the greatest insights of Anzaldúa's (1987) work, that living at war across borders of difference does not make for a viable future.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jacqueline M. Martinez

Jacqueline M. Martinez (PhD, 1992, Southern Illinois University) is Associate Professor of Communication, Arizona State University.