Phenomenology and Phaneroscopy: A Neglected Chapter in the History of Ideas
'I am here', Abraham said: Emmanuel Levinas and anthropological science
Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology
Reviewed by: Michael Blezy
Introduction
What exactly Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks contributes to the field of phenomenology is difficult to pin down. Although the text conveys its insights in the distinct vocabulary of phenomenology and its description and analysis of experience recognizably parallels the efforts of phenomenologists such as Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, it is not immediately clear how Fanon’s work is supposed to relate to these thinkers or the phenomenological tradition he draws from.
For instance, does Fanon take himself to be merely applying, say, Husserlian or Sartrean phenomenology to a new or underexplored domain of phenomena while leaving the basic tenants of their phenomenology intact? Or is Fanon’s work much more ambitious, aiming not only to expand upon or supplement the work of his fellow phenomenologists, but to offer a fundamental challenge to their work? And if Fanon is offering a fundamental challenge to traditional phenomenology, is this challenge supposed to bring about an immanent transformation of phenomenology? Or is it supposed to call into question the very phenomenological enterprise and what it is capable of achieving?
Due to the lack of clarity on these basic issues, scholarly assessments of Fanon’s contribution to phenomenology vary widely. Reaction to Fanon’s phenomenological work ranges from complete neglect (Fanon’s name is not even mentioned in Moran’s (2000) Introduction to Phenomenology) to disparaging (consider Macy’s (2012, p. 132) assessment that “Fanon is not a terribly sophisticated phenomenologist”), to Fanon’s work being celebrated for its importance and originality and for moving the field of phenomenology in an exciting new direction. For instance, Karera (2020), speaking for a number of contemporary scholars that utilize phenomenology to explore issues of race, gender and politics (Guenther 2020; Weiss, Murphy, & Salamon 2020), heralds Fanon as one the key figures whose work ushered in a new era of politically-informed, “critical” phenomenology.
It is with a longstanding interest in precisely pinning down Fanon’s relationship to phenomenology that I eagerly dove into Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology, a collection of essays organized around Fanon’s contribution to a number of contemporary philosophical topics. In particular, I was encouraged to see that the editors and contributors took Fanon’s relation to phenomenology seriously, and that one of the editors’ main motivations for bringing together the collection was to shed light on the nature of Fanon’s phenomenology:
[A] rigorous exploration of Fanon’s distinctive uses and forms of phenomenology emerged as one of the foremost motivations for this edited collection. As we began the literature review that formed the first research task of this book, it quickly became apparent that there have been a number of excellent studies of Fanon’s uses of phenomenology (many of which we have been fortunate enough to include in the pages that follow). The problem with this literature was not its content, but its distribution: Without dedicated searching and access to suitable academic databases and libraries, this literature remained so scattered and inaccessible that it has seemed, historically, as if it had almost completely fallen through the cracks of Fanon studies … [The] the appeal to experience, and more directly yet, the appeal to the lived experience of the Black man, is an absolutely irreducible and crucial aspect of Black Skin, White Masks. At the risk of being dramatic: There would be no Black Skin, White Masks without this method of description and engagement. Fanon’s uses of phenomenology – which, as several of the following chapters show, did not leave phenomenology unchanged – proved a condition of possibility for that book, and, extending our argument, for much of what was most compelling, visceral, and innovative within it. (2022, p. 7-8)
In what follows, I want to draw upon the contributions to Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology in order to say a bit more about how it is Fanon stands vis-a-vis phenomenology. I will not offer a summary of each of the articles in the collection. Not only would this be tedious for the reader, but the editors of the collection give an overview of the text and succinctly sum up each of the individual contributions in their introduction (p. 1-10). Instead, I want to specifically draw upon the contributors’ accounts of Fanon’s phenomenology and, further, critically evaluate these accounts, so as to bring new clarity to the relationship between Fanon and phenomenology.
Phenomenology and the Search for Structure
More than simply the fact that scholarly work on Fanon’s phenomenology has been scattered or inaccessible, it is the inherent difficulties with interpreting Fanon’s descriptions of experience and longstanding ambiguities and confusions regarding phenomenology itself that has resulted in a lack of clarity regarding Fanon’s contribution to the field. Black Skin, White Masks in particular, with its semi-autobiographical, fragmented, stream of consciousness way of proceeding, requires a large amount of philosophical reconstruction if something like arguments or positions are to be derived from it (including phenomenological ones).
Fortunately, for my purposes here, an overview of the ways in which Fanon’s phenomenology is characterized by the contributors to Fanon, Phenomenology, and Phenomenology will allow me to quickly get to the heart of the matter. By outlining the ways in which the contributors of the collection characterize (and, unfortunately, mischaracterize) Fanon’s phenomenological approach, the points of contact between Fanon and the phenomenological tradition he engages with will quickly be established.
Before setting off on such a task, however, I think it will be useful for the reader if I briefly offer an account of how it is I understand phenomenology. By clarifying some of the key characteristics of phenomenology, as well as providing some philosophical distinctions that will allow me to more precisely differentiate between phenomenological accounts, Fanon’s relationship to phenomenology can be more accurately assessed.
In the Introduction to the recently published 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, the editors open the text in the following way:
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception begins with a question: ‘What is phenomenology?’ Nearly three-quarters of a century later, this question remains unanswered. (2020, p. xiii)
Despite the inherent difficulties involved in definitively characterizing a field of philosophical investigation that is continually transforming as it critiques itself and finds new areas of application, I think the above claim is an exaggeration. And, frankly, I don’t believe the editors truly ascribe to it. A few pages later in the Introduction to 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, we are offered the following account of phenomenology which, at least in broad outline, marks out some of the key characteristics that belong to phenomenology:
One of phenomenology’s … methodological commitments is the refusal to accept the taken-for-grantedness of experience. This commitment entails the perpetual interrogation of the most familiar features of our everyday experience, not to deny them but in order to know the better … Phenomenology is marked by a faith that such descriptions can disclose the most basic structures of human existence … as these structures are brought into relief, our understand of our own experience is transformed, and our deepest assumption about our very being in the world may be challenged. (Ibid.)
Besides the regrettable characterization of phenomenology as marked by a “faith” that its description can disclose fundamental structures (there is no such faith, phenomenology is committed to its descriptions yielding such structures), this account nicely outlines at least three central features of phenomenology. In general, it can be said that phenomenology:
I think the main challenge offered by Fanon to traditional phenomenology revolves around a disagreement about how exactly the structures outlined in (2) are to be understood. However, before elaborating on (2), I want to briefly say something about (1) and (3).
Boldly stated, phenomenology’s goal of revealing structures of experience proceeds by way of an interrogative description of experience that concretely makes these structures apparent to the phenomenologist. For this reason, the task of providing better or more accurate accounts of what experience is like is not primary motivated by the goal of simply providing us with more nuanced or insightful accounts of our experience. Rather, phenomenology proceeds with an eye to reveal what makes experiences, and, indeed, experience as such, possible.
I want to suggest that this is the case no matter how important or meaningful the experiences interrogated may be to us. Indeed, “applied” phenomenology may offer us valuable clarifications and correctives regarding everything from what it like to undergo an emotional state to what it is like to sail a boat, to fall in love, play a video game or even give birth. However, such descriptions of what experience is like, although achieved by a descriptive turn to experience itself, do not necessarily satisfy the phenomenological aim of getting at the underlying phenomenological structures that make these experiences or experience itself possible. Indeed, it is the unearthing of structure that ultimately distinguishes phenomenology from mere psychological description, first-person reporting, or what an artist, poet, novelist or naturalist does when they attempt to depict or faithfully describe some aspect of our being in the world. In each of these instances, there is a turn to “things” or “matters” themselves – and in a loose sense, these things or matters provide the standard by which we judge the description – but they are not strictly speaking “phenomenological” in that the uniquely philosophical aim of exhibiting the underlying structures can fail to be undertaken.
We can begin to understand phenomenology’s transformative dimension ((3) above) by noting that it can operate at two levels. First, it is common knowledge that undergoing experiences – philosophical or otherwise – results in a change in our relation to experience. Colloquially, we describe experiences as “marking us” or “giving a new perspective on life,” where what we are saying is that undergoing certain experiences transform who and what we are, and to such a degree, that they inform how it is we come to be disposed toward our experience. For instance, illness, the death of a loved one, the profound realizations we have in the face of art or nature – these experiences recontextualize lived experience in such a way that features and dimensions of the world are revealed to us that we had not experienced before. In a similar way, engaging in phenomenological descriptions – casting off our assumptions and theories about experience and paying heed to what it is experience itself offers or makes available to us – can occasion an experiential shift, perhaps even an irreversible shift, in how it is we experience ourself and the world.
However, phenomenology’s transformative power can also operate at a second, deeper level. Insofar as phenomenology is not solely concerned with descriptions of what lived experience is like, but interrogates experience in order to unearth structures, phenomenology involves a methodological maneuver that recontextualizes our relation with experience in a way that is not typically experienced when we are dealing with experience on the first level. Whether this maneuver is Husserl’s epoché, Heidegger’s destructive-hermeneutic analytic of Dasein, Sartre’s unearthing “the being of phenomenon” by descriptively mapping out the parameters of the existential situation (the “phenomenon of being”), or Merleau-Ponty’s expounding the worldly correlates of our bodily flesh, phenomenology involves a methodological re-orientation that, more than simply providing a unique kind of philosophical experience, fundamentally transforms our relation to experience itself.
What I am stressing here is that phenomenology reconstrues our relation to experience by turning it into a special field of philosophical investigation: experience as such and its possibility. By so transforming our relation to experience, the possibility arises not only of securing a whole new source of knowledge (that is, a phenomenological knowledge that would simply exist alongside the forms that concern objects found in experience). Rather, what we discover about ourselves and the world can bring about a change in how our experience of the world at the first level is to be understood, and so potentially motivate us to transform the very way we occupy or navigate such a world.
That what phenomenology interrogates is experience as such and its possibility nicely leads to a discussion regarding the all-important second feature of phenomenology ((2) outlined above): that its main aim is to disclose the structures of experience. Indeed, thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty have provided different philosophical accounts regarding how exactly it is that phenomenological structures are to be understood (coming down differently on issues such as how it is the structures and what they structure is to be conceived of, the basis or ultimately ground of such structures, the connection between the structures and ontology, etc.). However, each of these phenomenologists are committed to the phenomenological discovery of structures, where these structures are supposed to account for how certain experiences are possible or, more fundamentally, the very possibility of experience.
Fanon and Phenomenology
Phenomenology takes up the task, arguably first initiated and pursued by thinkers like Descartes and Kant, of expounding the conditions of the possibility of experience, where this is to be understood as expounding the a priori conditions of possibility that allow for there to be something like experience as such and without which there would be no experience (and not just the absence of this or that experience). Whether it is such structures as the intentional nature of consciousness or the unity of apperception in Husserl, “attunement” in Heidegger, the “Look” which Sartre’s argues defines our being with others or Merleau-Ponty’s account of the objectivizing structure of perception, phenomenology aims to reveal the fundamental structures that allow for experience (e.g., intentionality, temporality, affectivity, intersubjectivity, perception, language, etc.) and which enables us to navigate the world.
Now, to a certain extent, many of the contributors to Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology recognize that the search for such structure is the ultimate aim of phenomenology and that Fanon provides his descriptions of experience in order to ultimately reveal such structure. Miraj. U. Desai, for instance, proposes to read Fanon “phenomenologically,” where this involves, crucially, an “attention to structure”: namely, the “invariant” structures that Fanon himself claims to have discovered in Black Skin, White Masks and which Desai’s article proposes to unearth and interrogate anew (2022, p. 75).
However, it is worth noting that when it comes to actually saying something about these structures, Desai (1) narrowly conceives of them as structures that underlie and make possible particular ways of engaging with objects found in experience (specifically, Desai has in mind the experience of creating an artwork or composing a piece of writing) and (2) identifies phenomenological structures with a range of material determinates (historical, social, political and even geographical) that create personal identity, without clarifying in what sense these determinates are “invariant” or what (if anything) they have in common or how they might work together to make experience possible (Ibid., p. 74). The result is that the account of structure here remains merely at the level of objects of experience and the generation of particular sorts of psychological states, without clarifying the nature of the “invariant” conditions that would underpin these very material determinates. Consider the following passage:
Fanon’s greatest originality came from examining colonialism via the lens of psychopathology and personal identity via the lens of colonial violence. Hook (2005, 2012) articulated Fanon’s ‘materialist psychology’ that demonstrated how racist encounters and gazes strip away a person’s embodied subjectivity and resources for personal and cultural identity … social ills like poverty, antisemitism, racism, and colonialism [are not to be] minimized to mere mental states. As was suggested above, Fanonian investigations necessarily connected psychological structures to political, socioeconomic, and geographical ones. (Ibid., p. 80)
To be perfectly clear: Fanon is keen to demonstrate that various social-historical determinates structure experience and lie at the basis of our psychology and personal identity, as well as bring into being different forms of psychopathology. Additionally, phenomenology can be concerned with the structures that inform particular kinds of intentional states and show how concrete, material reality provides intentionality with the matter to occasion its various states. However, at the deepest level, these structural determinates are not to be understood, following Derek Hook’s interpretation (which Desai quotes approvingly above), in straightforward materialist terms. If Fanon was simply interested in straightforwardly enumerating the material conditions that create our identities in a particular social-historical situation, then (1) his account would be far too specific (and so lack the necessary “invariance”) to be strictly phenomenological, and (2) would risk eliding the phenomenological task of articulating the structural conditions that underlie, inform, and govern any and all instances of material reality. Indeed, as Nelson Maldonado Torres points out, the more basic structures that phenomenologists seek to discover—e.g., embodiment, intersubjectivity, language, etc.—are what make possible our very experience of “being,” regardless of its material makeup in any given point in history or social organization:
[Specific] cultural and structural analyses are not enough to [exhaustively] explore the … formation of subjectivity … and [in particular] of [phenomenological] structures. For this, Fanon takes a philosophical approach that considers … the formation of subjectivity as subjects relate to basic aspects of human experience: embodiment, intersubjective contact (via language and love), time, and space … Time, space, embodied subjectivity, and intersubjectivity play a key role in the formation of what is often defined as Being. (Ibid., p. 91)
A Torres stresses, these deep phenomenological structures cannot be straightforwardly identified with concrete material conditions. If Fanon’s descriptions of his lived experience are to be understood “phenomenologically,” then the relation between the phenomenological structure and material reality, as well as the sense in which the latter relate to the former, needs to be exhibited.
If a materialist interpretation of Fanonian structural determinates overlooks and presupposes the fundamental structures that his phenomenology is after, then a Hegelian account also fails to help us see what Fanon is up to. First, Fanon does not conceive of the discovery of phenomenological structure as the outcome of a dialectical process whereby consciousness’ one-sided descriptions of thought/being continually force it to reconstrue itself until it is resolved in identity. Second, for Fanon, capturing the basic phenomenological structures does not necessarily result in consciousness that is capable of overcoming its alienation from being—especially, if overcoming alienation does not simply involve consciousness’ overcoming of its distinction from being, but, ultimately, forms of social alienation and oppression. Consider the following passages from Jean Khalfa and Lou Tuner:
Black Skin, White Masks could be read as a phenomenology of the colonized consciousness. ‘Phenomenology’ in a Hegelian sense first: It is the narration of the various stations and figures of consciousness through which mind, in history at large as well as in the history of an individual, first experiences and then endeavors to resolve the various forms of its own alienation. (Ibid., p. 49)
[Hegel allows us to see that] the ‘fact’ of Fanon’s ‘black skin’… doesn’t remain at the level of perception, but is instead elevated, in the sense of its determination to appear, and reflected back in the look of the very subject whose bodily schema had been racialized. Internal intuition breaks down the ontology of the colonial or racialized situation into a process of becoming wherein the inherent defects of the Manichean world are also [to quote Hegel] ‘endowed with the impulse of self-development’ … This, in Fanon’s terms, represents the agency of the Negro, or that which becomes the revolutionary process of decolonization in his later works. Internal intuition, in short, is the method and means by which Fanon’s comprehension of the ‘colonial situation’ entails both the logic of its existence, i.e., its phenomenology, and the dialectic of its overcoming. (Ibid., p. 68)
Although these two scholars draw on very different aspects of Hegel, they are both in agreement that Fanon’s phenomenology should be understood in a Hegelian register. The passages suggest that (1) consciousness in Fanon (or rather a particular form of consciousness, colonized consciousness) will work through various stages until it grasps its experience and, moreover, (2) this process will occasion consciousness’ to overcoming its social alienation, which is to say, that there is an impulse to (revolutionary) self-development built into this process.
Although what consciousness’ comes to learn about its experience by the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit may overlap in certain respects with Black Skin, White Masks (e.g., it may be the case that, say, what we now call discourse is essential dimension of consciousness’ grasp of the world, including how we interpret skin color), the specific way Fanon reveals these structures via phenomenological description, however, bears little to no resemblance to Hegel’s progressive, dialectical account of consciousness’ overcoming its alienation. What is more, coming to knowledge of phenomenological structures for Fanon does not necessarily awaken in consciousness an impulse, much less a social-political program, to achieve recognition of other subjects.
While Fanon certainly argues that colonial situations are unacceptable and ought and can be transformed, he is not committed to the idea that his phenomenological depictions of the colonized subject’s experience are necessarily “endowed with the impulse of self-development.” Indeed, it may be the case that recognizing the structures that underpin experience as such may give us clues or suggest strategies as to how we can bring about such a transformation (e.g., new forms of representation, the reconsidering of language and its importance). However, there is no clear connection between unearthing phenomenological structures and the transforming of the cultural coordinates that imprison consciousness in certain pernicious social forms and self-conceptions. Indeed, it is entirely possible that a transformation of the culture or political situation informed by a knowledge of its underlying structures may come to imprison subjects in new pernicious forms.
Body and Discourse
If Fanon’s phenomenology is not limited to shedding light on a particular material, social-political set up and what it is like to live in such a set up (with its forms of social and political oppressions and accompanying pathologies), but attempts to lay bare the underlying structural conditions that make experience possible (a knowledge that does not necessarily point in any straightforward manner the way to overcoming an intolerable social-political situation), then what exactly is his contribution to this field of knowledge? And what, if any, are the ramifications or consequences this phenomenological account has for politics (broadly construed) if it doesn’t tell us how to overcome social and political forms of alienation and oppression?
These are big questions to tackle, and I will certainly not be able to provide satisfying answers here, especially when it comes to the thorny issue regarding the relation between phenomenology and politics. However, I think an answer to the first question begins to take shape by taking a look at how some of the contributors to Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology helpfully characterize Fanon’s account of two inter-related phenomenological structures in particular: the body and discourse.
Fanon is certainly not the first phenomenologist to make the case that the body is to be counted amongst the transcendental conditions of experience. Husserl, Sartre, de Beauvoir and, of course, Merleau-Ponty each have offered accounts of the body and its role in structuring the world. More than any other phenomenologist, however, it is clearly Merleau-Ponty that has cast the greatest shadow over Fanon’s thinking about the body. This influence comes through in the very conceptual tools Fanon uses to articulate his insights, as well as in the way scholars depict Fanon’s account of living in a black body under a system of colonialism. Consider the following passages from Jean Khalfa, Derek Hook and Athena V. Coleman:
[T]he body [is] not only … a thing within the world but also as a ‘posture’ or as a condition for a primordial interrogative relationship to the world, a condition for the constitution of the given as world … The system of racism leads to the real loss of this interrogative body, revealed by phenomenology, which is instantly turned into a thing. (p. 49-51)
In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema … the black man suffers from his body quite differently from the white man. (p. 117)
In contrast to the universality of the corporeal schema, Fanon discovers a multiplicity of schemas that shape those subjects and moments excluded by the corporeal schema … Fanon’s rereading of phenomenology and psychology opens up the question of [what is responsible for] structuring schemas, which structures … our connections to others. (p. 133)
The main idea is that Fanon, following Merleau-Ponty, is committed to the idea that the body plays a structural role in making our experience of the world possible. The body, understood along these lines, is not to be strictly identified with a thing or with anything thing-like. Things are found in or occupy the world opened up by the body. “Corporeal schema” (sometimes translated as “body schema” or “bodily schema”) is Merleau-Ponty’s term for the fundamental “posture” of bodily being that allows for an openness to the world insofar as it enables an array of possible movements and mobilizing projects that extend from us to our surroundings; a pre-reflective structure that lets the world meaningfully appear as the bodily correlate we competently navigate and in which we discover things that we can seamlessly take up and utilize (“interrogate”).
But not only that. This structure, as condition opens us to a world and lets it be experienced, also opens us up to and exposes us to others, that is to say, to the perspective of other similarly constituted bodily beings. To claim then that Fanon’s account of the black body under colonialism demonstrates (1) that the corporeal schema encounters difficulties in its development, and (2) that the bodily perspective that, fundamentally, opens up the world of things is itself made thing-like, is to draw attention to one of the main conclusions of Black Skin, White Masks: the body, or more precisely, the corporeal schema, despite being a condition of possibility of having a world, cannot be straightforwardly universalized.
It is here that the bodily schema needs to be seen as bound up with another condition of possibility: discourse. Although bodily being is pre-reflective in that the bodily integration and engagement with our surroundings does not necessarily involve the intellectual contribution thinkers such as Kant and Husserl would ascribe to it, the body is in each case bound up with a particular discursive context that delimits and shapes the body’s mobilizing projects. “Discourse,” as I am using the term here, is not limited to the linguistic or conceptual; it does not simply refer to a societies’ possibilities of talking or thinking. It extends to the material deposits of a greater symbolic order: images, spatial arrangements, print media, as well as gestures, comportments and other forms of social signifying all contribute to discourse.
Fanon’s idea is that the discursive milieu established by colonialism – with its binaries, asymmetries, and exclusions – ends up carving up, categorizing and segregating bodies along the lines of colonized/colonized or black/white. This comes to be internalized not only at the level of individual psychologies or self-conceptions, but actually informs the very way bodies come to orient themselves and establish relations with things and people in space. Specifically, the black body, having its exploration of space be in each case mediated through an awareness of how it stands vis-à-vis a white world and its occupants – an awareness, mind you, that does not necessary extend in the other direction. The result is not only that the possibilities for bodily exploration and usage are frustrated or limiting, but continually forced to fold back on itself in consideration of a hostile, yet mostly indifferent, white other. As Helen Ngo puts it:
[R]acism not only becomes interiorized but ‘epidermalized’- or in phenomenological terms, lived and inhabited bodily … embodiment becomes marked by a kind of bodily schema fragmentation … Everything is anticipated, thought out, demonstrated, made the most of. (p. 194-5)
Indeed, Fanon not only uses his phenomenology to put pressure on the notion of a universal bodily schema, his descriptions of bodily being under colonialism also call into question how it is we should characterize the struggle for recognition: to be for the other as fellow subject and not object or thing. The black body is forced to continually turn its gaze back on itself insofar as its bodily being is one that is shaped through a discursive context that forces it to consider itself in relation to a white other that does not repay it in kind. Everything from lighting a cigarette to finding a seat on a bus becomes conditioned by the asymmetrical colonial relationship that reifies the colonized black as it acknowledges the white. Under such social-political conditions, the struggle to be recognized as a subject via the other is not characterized by the unfolding of any sort of progressive logic, but is already predetermined at a level of the body and its worldly conditioning. The discourse of colonialism seemingly precludes the very possibility that the colonized can initiate a relation between subjects with the colonizer. As Lewis R. Gordan nicely puts this point:
[The] racialized schema below the [vicissitudes and outcomes of the] Hegelian [lordship/bondage relation] addresses contradictions that are not of a dialectical kind. The call for [a distinctly] Black Consciousness already demands addressing a ‘lived reality’ … but one that has not been acknowledged as such … The consequence is the retort: At least the other is an other. To become such initiates ethical relations. (p. 223)
Das Wertproblem in der Philosophie der Gegenwart. Aufsätze zu Wert und Sinn
Philosophische Bibliothek
Felix Meiner Verlag
2024
Paperback
275
https://meiner.de/philosophische-bibliothek/h/hartmann/das-wertproblem-in-der-philosophie-der-gegenwart.html
Die Grundfragen der Werttheorie und Wertethik haben Nicolai Hartmann über sein ganzes akademisches Leben hinweg begleitet. Entsprechend sind im Laufe der Zeit neben seiner monumentalen Ethik verschiedene Aufsätze entstanden, in denen sich Hartmann mit einschlägigen Einzelphänomenen befasst, seinen eigenen Gesamtentwurf umreißt oder sogar aktualisiert. Hier formuliert er seine berühmte These von Werten als „Problem“, reflektiert das Verhältnis von Werten und kulturell vermittelten Wert- oder Sinnerfahrungen und beschreibt Wertphänomene im Bereich des Ästhetischen. Zentral ist auch die Frage nach der Beziehung von Werterfahrung und „sittlichen Forderungen“, die er zudem mit Blick auf historische Vorläuferfiguren und Gegenentwürfe einordnet. Insgesamt ergibt sich das Bild eines reichen wertphilosophischen Denkens, das ausgehend von heutigen Debatten schon deshalb attraktiv ist, weil es die Frage nach Werten nicht auf moralphilosophische Probleme reduziert und angesichts von Erfahrungen von Geschichtlichkeit und kultureller Vielfalt sprachfähig ist.
In seiner ausführlichen Einleitung ordnet der Herausgeber Moritz von Kalckreuth die verschiedenen Texte in den Kontext des Gesamtwerks Hartmanns, der philosophischen Debatten zu seinen Lebzeiten und der heutigen philosophischen Diskussion um Werte ein.
Event and Subjectivity: The Question of Phenomenology in Claude Romano and Jean-Luc Marion
Studies in Contemporary Phenomenology, Volume 25
Brill
2023
Hardback €153.70
x, 317
Incarnation, Pain, Theology: A Phenomenology of the Body
Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
2024
Paperback
256
The Phenomenological Image: A Husserlian Inquiry into Reality, Phantasy, and Aesthetic Experience
De Gruyter
2024
Paperback
247
Reviewed by: Marina Christodoulou
(Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-5721-833X
Rozzoni’s book is a work of double value, as should any book of philosophy be about: at first it has the value of serving as a secondary literature text, that is, offering comments and references to its various primary sources, which include works mainly by Husserl, but also Merleau-Ponty, and others, and various other artistic works (paintings, photographs, films, installation pieces, etc.). However, being a secondary literature text, it has the unique capacity of not sustaining/conforming/limiting the reader between its 247 pages, but motivating one to visit the sources, that is, the primary texts it deals with. This is a virtue that only seldomly do works labelled as secondary literature possess. This is why, Rozzoni’s book gains a double-acquired value, which is that it can serve as a work that can be labelled primary literature as well, as it can also be read as a work that in itself offers an original approach to both philosophy, and especially aesthetics (in both its meanings, as a discourse on the senses and thus on perception and experience, but also as a discourse on artistic works/experiences), and also to art, literary theory, and film theory and criticism. It offers to both aesthetics and art/literary/film criticism a new perspective and even a new method or approach, through phenomenology, but also it offers to phenomenology a new aesthetic and artistic/literary/cinematographic dimension. At last, it also introduces, but profoundly so, a so far neglected work of Husserl, only translated in 2005, and, so far, not much studied or researched. The aforementioned work of Husserl are the Nachlass manuscripts on Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory, published in 1980 in Husserliana XXIII in German, based on his 1905 course in Göttingen.[2]
Thus, Rozzoni’s The Phenomenological Image: a Husserlian Inquiry into Reality, Phantasy, and Aesthetic Experience is a work of multiple values and uses. Firstly, as a study of Husserl’s so far unnoticed Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory. Secondly, as a philosophical commentary on Husserl’s phenomenology in general, and more specifically his aforementioned work, as well as a commentary on the of aesthetics and phenomenology, a study on phantasy and/in phenomenology and the different forms of experience in phenomenology. And thirdly, as an original work on phenomenological aesthetics, or even aesthetic phenomenology, and more specifically on new approaches to art, literature, and film theory and criticism. In other words, it is a source offering new (phenomenological) ways towards film theory and criticism.
It is an indispensable book for philosophers already working in phenomenology, or on experience, on phantasy, fiction, reality and other relevant subjects. It is, in general, an excellent book regarding a philosophy of experience (phenomenology’s major preoccupation is experience, but in this book, it becomes even clearer), and more specifically perceptual experience, aesthetic experience etc.
However, it can be read even by audiences that have no familiarity with phenomenology or even philosophy, since Rozzoni is doing a great job explaining in simple words every new term or concept that he is using (such as intentionality and many other), thus, every next page of the book is already prepared by the previous ones. Thus, it is an indispensable book for artists, art criticism and filmmakers and film theorists and critics, as well.
For that reason, it is a self-contained and self-sufficient work that offers both an introduction to phenomenology, but at the same time an advanced study of it with original insights spanning further than phenomenology or even philosophy itself. What can serve as an introduction to phenomenology can simultaneously function as a further redefinition of it, which is an important philosophical methodological trait, that is, that a philosopher always clarifies the definitions they are working with and makes no pre-suppositions. Thus, Rozzoni’s definitions and descriptions (as well as normative depictions) of phenomenology are important not only for their pragmatic function but predominantly for the meta-philosophical or rather meta-phenomenological one. I quote some passages so as to make my points clearer:
Phenomenological description must be capable of rendering a satisfactory account of the different modes in which our acts (and, correlatively, their objects) and our objects (and, correlatively, their acts) are given to consciousness. When we say our acts are intentional, it implies the necessary corollary that there can be no “consciousness” that is not a “consciousness of.” The relationship between consciousness and object manifests itself in different ways depending on the particular act involved—for example, perception of a tree, phantasy of a tree, etc.—and such relationships are “expressed by the little word ‘of’” (Hua XVI, p. 12; Hua I, p. 33). (Rozzoni 2024, 15)
He continues a bit later in clarifying the different “modes of consciousness” which are important both for understanding phenomenology (“phenomenology must…”), intentionality (which is core to phenomenology), Husserl, phantasy, image, and this book in general:
These initial considerations are enough to suggest that Husserl’s primary interest lies in discerning qualitative differences between our experiences, a question that drives him to seek out an essential distinction between what he calls “modes of consciousness.” Perception is only one such mode; objects are given to us in several other modes as well—such as when we see objects either through images or, as they say, “in our minds.” As indicated, phenomenology must be able to provide an account of the essential differences among these modes of consciousness as well as of the particular nature of each mode’s inherent intentionality—the essential correlation between its subjective and objective poles. After dedicating his efforts to the perceptual dimension in the first two parts of the course, Husserl uses the third part to attempt to define the eidetic differences that distinguish phantasy consciousness from perceptual consciousness. (Rozzoni 2024, 16)
When analyzing phantasy through a phenomenological lens, we are soon confronted with a phenomenon that will prove challenging: it seems that any description of the ways in which phantasy manifests itself must necessarily involve the notion of image. Indeed, it is in this context that Husserl comes to examine the issue of defining the particular type of manifestation pertaining to image and the related form of intentionality called “image consciousness.” In the third part of the Göttingen course, when seeking to define the nature of intentionality pertaining to phantasy acts, Husserl begins by describing this intentionality in terms of “pictorialization [Verbildlichung]” (see, for example, Hua XXIII, § 8). Let us remark that he had already adopted this approach in an 1898 text devoted to “phantasy and representation in image” (see Appendix 1 to Hua XXIII, pp. 117– 152)—a text that did, indeed, serve as a starting point for his later Göttingen analysis. (Rozzoni 2024, 17)
Moreover, the constant use of simple examples (e.g. the photograph of a friend) render the book even more accessible and the concepts and terms explored easier to understand.
Adding to the preciseness and clarity, Rozzoni systematically and precisely clarifies terms/concepts, as it is already shown, both in English and how terms have distinct meanings in German: for example, reality [positionality] – phantasy, fiction, phantasy [Phantasie] – imagination [Einbildung] – imaginatio, perception [Perzeption] – perceptio – Wahrnehmung. For example, he writes concerning the latter distinction, and the different choices of words in the original (by Husserl), but also by Rozzoni in the English translation:
Perzeption is Wahrnehmung without belief, and, as Husserl says, any Wahrnehmung that does not take (nimmt) something as true (wahr) is no longer Wahrnehmung in the proper sense of the word. It is legitimate to say that an object given perceptually (wahrnehmungsmäßig) is also given as complying with perceptio (perzeptiv), but the converse is not true: we cannot state that what is given when complying with perceptio (perzeptiv) is automatically given perceptually (wahrnehmungsmäßig). Though these terms may overlap in some cases, this does not change the fact that such a distinction can be rightfully (and not pleonastically) introduced in the English translation, thus allowing the reader to feel the distinction between Wahrnehmung and Perzeption that plays a seminal role in these analyses. This is why Husserl’s references to illusion claiming the status of reality are not, in principle, cases of phantasy complying with perceptio (perzeptiv), but rather of perceptual (wahrnehmungsmäßig) illusions that, once discovered, become canceled perceptions (Wahrnehmungen)—canceled realities only apprehended après coup as perzeptive Phantasien. Accordingly, we can also think of perceptio as a genus encompassing the species of positional perceptio (or Wahrnehmung) and positionless perceptio (or perceptio in the strict sense). (Rozzoni 2024, 17, n. 11)
At last, in a further way to be precise and clear, Rozzoni makes sure that he prevents possible misconceptions and misunderstandings, as for example in the sub-chapter 1.7: A Potential Misunderstanding: The “Image-Theory”, concerning “the unction Husserl assigns to the image object”. (Rozzoni 2024, 28)
Rozzoni engages in an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary dialogue with artists (painters, installation artists, cinematographers), literary writers (Proust, Kafka), and philosophers (Plato, Nietzsche, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze). It furthermore offers numerous references to scholars dealing with relevant subjects such as imagination, phantasy, film theory and criticism etc. In this way, Rozzoni’s book can also serve as a reference book towards further researching the main topics it discusses (image, phantasy, imagination, reality, fiction, film, experience, perception, belief, time consciousness, epoché, content-form/style, etc.).
It is a book one can read multiple times, each time focusing on a different subject/topic, and each time feeling that they are reading a new book, since new perspectives and connections are opened at each reading, depending on the shift of focus.
Chapter 1 focuses, as it is already evident from its title, on the “Phenomenology of Image and Phantasy”, by visiting concepts such as reality, perception, imagination, phantasy, images, consciousness of reality, consciousness of fiction, etc., and also re-setting their inter-connections.
Chapter 2 entitled “The Aesthetic Consciousness”, evidently focuses on the nature and qualitative originality of aesthetic experience and consciousness, while also “deepen[ing] the originary phenomenological distinctions elucidated in the first [chapter]”. (Rozzoni 2024, 3) In more detail, I quote:
The second chapter deepens the originary phenomenological distinctions elucidated in the first but with a specific focus on the nature of aesthetic experience. Too often, the type of consciousness associated with aesthetic experience is confused with other modalities of consciousness which, despite possibly overlapping with aesthetic experience in some ways, must nonetheless be kept distinct as regards their originary sense. Specifically, the term “aesthetic” is often used interchangeably with terms like “fictional,” “artistic,” or “iconic,” thereby creating confusion that can fundamentally undermine research outcomes. Through the Husserlian manuscripts, I attempt to trace the roots of the “aesthetic” back to a consciousness which, though it may indeed have seminal connections to the associated terms listed above, ultimately possesses its own qualitative originality that cannot be reduced to any of those terms. (Rozzoni 2024, 3)
Moreover, it expands Husserl’s phenomenological re-appropriation of Kant’s “aesthetic disinterest”, through a phenomenological inquiry into the nature of this disinterest, emphasizing, as did Kant, “the moment of the “how” rather than the “what” of a manifestation”. (Rozzoni 2024, 4):
Despite entailing disinterest in something’s existence in the general sense (in other words, disinterest in whether something actually exists or not), aesthetic experience does involve another form of interest: though “existentially disinterested,” it is “axiologically interested.” In aesthetic experience, axiological interest manifests itself through the sphere of feeling—we experience a particular value, an appreciation for the manner in which something is given, and it is necessarily given in a feeling interrelated with this value.
Clearly, talking about the “how” of manifestation, the manner of appearing, might carry the risk of reintroducing the dichotomy between content (what) and form (how) into the discussion of aesthetic experience. […] In aesthetic experience, even the most ordinary object can emerge in the value of its manifestation—and strictly speaking, all manifestations can be aesthetically “expressive” in principle: a “zero degree” of aestheticity is only a limit point. (Rozzoni 2024, 4)
In more detail, Rozzoni discusses in the subchapter 2.6: Constituting the “How”: Stylistic Manifestations (pp. 110-112), this habitual dichotomy between style/form (how) and content (what), which is unfairly conceived as a dichotomy or a binary, as well as content is unfairly conceived as of being hierarchically superior (I would name it as a certain hegemony of the “what” in philosophy, which takes the dimensions of essentializing the philosophical discipline to a “science” -not even, at least, an “art”-, of the content, and allocating to other sciences or arts the “burden” of occupying themselves with the “lesser” “how” of the style or form.) This intra-hegemony of content over form, is a reflection of the general (meta-)philosophical inter-hegemony and supra-hegemony on all other disciplines and forms-of-thinking, found in its most systematized depiction in François Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy.
As Rozzoni observes, “the distinguishing element in aesthetic experiences is the particular mode of manifestation in which the phenomenon is given (among many possible such modes).” Afterwards, he is talking about the “precise phenomenal modalities whose specific manner of appearance yields an aesthetic effect” (Rozzoni 2024, 110). These “precise phenomenal modalities”, in my understanding, are another formulation for style or form, since, in the following paragraph, he proceeds to give an example from a film, where the director makes “specific stylistic choices […] when depicting one man killing another allow[ing] us to feel not only the what— […] —but also the how”. (Rozzoni 2024, 110) He then mentions the notion of “rhythm”, which is an important stylistic element, on which he also has a reference to Merleau-Ponty, on the “relationship between the how (style, rhythm) and value in cinema”. (Rozzoni 2024, 110, n. 123)
I quote this extended passage since I think it touches on important points concerning the aesthetic experience and style:
To sum up, with belief-acts of each of these four types, we have an essential, eidetic option to transform them into (modified) phantasy acts, rendering them neutral in terms of possible reference to actual existence. Crucially, however, the resulting phantasies do not yet constitute aesthetic experiences merely by virtue of having left reality out of play; rather, the distinguishing element in aesthetic experiences is the particular mode of manifestation in which the phenomenon is given (among many possible such modes). To continue with Husserl’s example, an iconic phantasy of one man killing another may take the form of a mere iconic presentification of a quasi-fact—with no attention to its mode of manifestation—or it may employ precise phenomenal modalities whose specific manner of appearance yields an aesthetic effect. (Rozzoni 2024, 110)
For example, in the duel scene near the end of For a Few Dollars More (Per qualche dollaro in più, 1965), the specific stylistic choices Sergio Leone makes when depicting one man killing another allow us to feel not only the what—the quasi-occurrences on-screen that could just as easily be recounted through a purely iconic sequence, advancing the plot without artistic pretensions—but also the how, the value of this particular scene as it unfolds. Our aesthetic experience is affected by the fact that the different phases of the duel are depicted in this particular way, with this specific “rhythm.” Husserl rightly takes care to emphasize what may seem like an obvious point, namely that things are always given in accordance with a mode of manifestation (in the aesthetic sense just described), a mode that may or may not elicit aesthetic pleasure or displeasure—what we might describe as “positive” or “negative” aesthetic valence.
Further on, quoting from Husserl’s Text 15, he refers to phrases such as “object’s manner of appearing”, “mode of presentation [Darstellung]”, and “mode of manifestation”, which all put style, form, and in general the “how” of an object, in the spotlight, apart from its “objective position taking” and “the consciousness of an object as such” (the “what”). (Rozzoni 2024, 111, quoting Husserl in Hua XXIII)
Chapter 3, entitled “Toward Perspectival Images”, investigates “some of the ways that art can become a domain for broadening the notion of aesthetic experience to encompass the possibility of producing a perspective aesthetically (in a contemporary development of the Kantian notion of ‘aesthetic idea’).” Here the potential of art or artistic experience to “transform our conception of the world” (Rozzoni 2024, 4) is explored, “altering the perspectives in which we always live.” (Rozzoni 2024, 5) Thus, here, Rozzoni dares the intimate but neglected connection between art (artistic experience), ethics (how we live), and philosophy:
These transformations can be connoted either positively (by enlightening us to previously unknown facets of the world) or negatively (by concealing, anesthetizing, or speciously “spectacularizing” reality).
More fundamentally, I seek to demonstrate how, by acting upon sense as the foundational element of a (real or fictitious) world, art can operate in a dimension “refractory” to the distinction between documentary and fiction—sub specie sensus—and can even explore the thresholds between these two polarities in multiple directions; […]. Art recipients thus become participants in perspectives that force them to think at a cognitive-emotional-axiological level, whether or not they believe in the factuality of what they are seeing.
Artistic images can vary and deform reality— not so much to offer a diversion from it as to allow new essences to emerge and thereby create possibilities for expressing new perspectives.
The third chapter examines this concept in detail, specifically in relation to cinematographic images. (Rozzoni 2024, 5)
[…] If, as I propose, the condition of a world’s possibility for manifestation is the essential connection among narrative (perspective stricto sensu), values, and emotions, these authors think of cinematography as a privileged field that, though purely presentificational in nature, can create new perspectives directly affecting our perpetually perspectival comprehension of what we call “the world.”
In fact, cinematography can also provide an avenue through which to experiment with experiences we typically cannot or would not seek out in real life. (Rozzoni 2024, 6)
Proceeding to give some sample tastes of the possibilities of (attempting/essaying) thinking that it offers, à la Nietzsche’s sisyphean (sapere–sapio) method of philosophical thinking, that tastes over (thinking) possibilities, I will start from the first line of the Preface, which in a philosophical but mostly a psychoanalytical wording talks about a “return to […] the image”, in the same way that Lacan spoke of a return to Freud, or Aristotle of a visiting or a return to names (etymologies). This is the clear core purpose of the book “to promote a return to a description of the image that starts from its fundamental characteristics, its essential features.” (Rozzoni 2024, 1). Furthermore, “[t]he fundamental question that such lines of inquiry soon raise concerns whether there are structural differences between our image experiences and phantasy experiences—or, in phenomenological terms, between image conscious- ness and phantasy consciousness.” (Rozzoni 2024, 1) In the attempt to answer this Rozzoni takes different tastes of Husserl’s work, in discussion, as said, with commentators and scholars as well as other philosophers, artists, literary writers, filmmakers, etc. More specifically, to focus on Husserl, in his course from 1905 attempted to define the nature of image based on his inquiry on the nature of phantasy. Thus, it already becomes evident that in Husserl there is a direct correlation between imagery and phantasy. This is the key question here as Rozzoni locates it, “whether phantasy consciousness is ultimately founded upon image consciousness. […] In other words, does phantasy need images in order to represent absent objects, or is our ability to produce and see images instead grounded in phantasy consciousness?” (Rozzoni 2024, 2)
The Husserlian answer to this, which Rozzoni will keep analyzing, is a reversal of the hypothesis that “phantasy needs images”: I quote:
[…] his phenomenological inquiries yielded the result that phantasy need not necessarily be founded on the capacity to pro- duce mental images. In Husserl’s view, the capacity for phantasy (as an originary modality of consciousness) need not be grounded in images proper; rather, phantasy consciousness is what underlies the capacity to recognize and produce physical images. He determines that phantasizing is not projection of an image medium acting as a representative for an absent object but rather is perception in the as-if, quasi-perception carried out by a quasi-subject—hence the possibility of distinguishing between real and phantasy egos from a phenomenological standpoint. In this sense, phantasy is the originary mode of consciousness that, in more strict phenomenological terms, can be called presentification. We can then further distinguish between “private presentifications” (quasi-perceptions without images) and presentifications in image. (Rozzoni 2024, 2)
As part of his analysis, which involves further original questions inspired by this Husserlian answer, he is asking whether the usual distinction or even dichotomy between images pertaining to phantasy, and perception pertaining to reality, shall be further “tried” in terms of thinking: “in other words, that proper images (presentifications in image) are eo ipso considered nonreal, whereas perception involves things ‘in the flesh’ and thus taken as real.” (Rozzoni 2024, 2). This is the main inquiry of Chapter 1 entitled “Phenomenology of Image and Phantasy”:
[…] perception per se is no guarantee of reality, nor does the image per se guarantee unreality: it is possible for perceptual experiences (or, more precisely, experiences complying with perceptio) to pertain to phantasy and for image experiences to force associations with reality. Though the image in itself is “unreal” in the sense of its presentifying nature (it shows something not present in the flesh), this is not to say that the sujet— the thing or person we see by “looking into the image”—cannot or should not be considered real. In short, we can have phantasies in the flesh and images imbued with belief.
[…] The image in itself makes no absolute guarantees concerning belief or lack thereof: context is what motivates the emergence of a documentary or fictional consciousness in relation to any given image. The same can apply to perceptual, noniconic experiences: we can experience them either in a consciousness of reality (as occurs constantly in context of going about our everyday lives) or a consciousness of fiction (as is the case, to mention one paradigmatic example, when we watch events upon a theatrical stage, which represents one possible context in which fictional worlds can comply with perceptio). (Rozzoni 2024, 2-3)
Rozzoni’s methodological insights, appearing, apart from the Preface, in more detail under Chapter 1, Sub-chapter “Again and Again” (1.1) are interesting themselves. It seems to me that he is consciously or unconsciously following a Deleuzian methodological-creative approach regarding the definition of philosophy as a creation of concepts. I think that this creativity can only spring from a synthetic openness, a wide and broad variety of interests within a field, an interdisciplinary openness, and a personal passionate investment to the topic of the research, as much as a “diagnosis” of an issue that is critical for the spatiotemporal milieu of one’s living experience. Rozzoni’s project/book incorporates all of the aforementioned elements or criteria, which render it significant, and original. In more detail, the three criteria that Deleuze has set for the worth-writing book/work (“bon ouvrage”) are the following: at first, spotting an error in books on the same or neighbouring subject (polemical function), then adding something that you think was ignored or forgotten on that subject (inventive function), and, at last, creating a new concept (creative function).
Hence, Rozzoni starts by spotting an “error”, or rather an omission, concerning Husserl’s manuscripts, on which his study is rooted upon, which are the manuscripts on Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory, elaborated over a period of 20 years, and published in 1980 in Husserliana XXIII in German. Their importance according to Rozzoni is that they “serve as testimony to the father of Phenomenology’s style of work—evidence that is all the more significant because it concerns themes Husserl considered crucial to the destiny of the entire phenomenological project, despite having devoted comparatively little space to them in works published during his lifetime.” The fact that a manuscript is not published by a philosopher/writer shall “not mean that they are not of great importance: they offer valuable insights into published passages devoted to phantasy and image consciousness, offering beneficial context through which we can appreciate their relevance more fully.” (Rozzoni 2024, 10)
Thus, he is spotting an error in the research around these manuscripts and their corresponding thematic units and concepts (polemical function), and he is adding something that he thinks was ignored or forgotten on that subject (inventive function), which is the “underappreciated theme”, in Husserl’s corpus, of the phenomenology of (the) image (Rozzoni 2024, 11). The reasons for this underrepresentation and underappreciation are given as follows:
Whereas Husserl’s phenomenological analyses concerning theory of judgment, logic, perception, and time are well-known, his contributions toward a phenomenology of phantasy and image might be described as relatively unknown, or at least lesser known until recently. One reason for this is the aforementioned lack of space devoted to the topic in Husserl’s published works (see, for instance, Hua I; Husserl 1939, especially §§39–42), even though Husserl famously declared that “feigning [Fiktion],” exercised by our “free phantasy,” “makes up the vital element of phenomenology as of every other eidetic science” (Hua III/1, p. 160). Moreover, Husserliana XXIII, which collects the bulk of Husserl’s unpublished work on Phantasy and Image Consciousness (Hua XXIII), was only published in 1980, and John B. Brough’s English translation was not released until 2005. Now, however, several aspects previously overlooked or misunderstood by many contemporary theories of image can be addressed more thoroughly with the help of these richly complex writings, and these implicit potentialities are on the verge of finally taking their rightful place within philosophical debate on the subject (Brough 2012; Ferencz-Flatz/Hanich 2016; Wiesing 2005). (Rozzoni 2024, 11)
He continues by clearing up this lacuna (inventive function), and from the matrix of the lacuna to, then, proposing a new potential arising concept, or field of study, for new phenomena (of image) in phenomenology and in philosophy in general (aesthetic and other experiences), as well, as we will see in the following chapters, in art and in film. Thus, these phenomena pragmatically extend in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary ways, rendering them a concept:
[…] the Nachlass writings shed light on the specific (and difficult) genesis of some of the most significant results Husserl published within his lifetime, and even directly explore the complex (and problematic) nature of these processes of perpetual development. Another seminal aspect immediately relevant to our work is that these manuscripts on image and phantasy (and, more generally, on reality and unreality) invite others to embark upon their own explorations of these topics. (Rozzoni 2024, 10)
Though the Nachlass represents a corpus of posthumous manuscripts, it would be a mistake to discount the enormous potential within these pages for that reason alone. Rather than construing this as some insurmountable obstacle to the contemporary revival of such research, let us think of it as a precious—albeit complicated —opportunity to develop a new field of study concerning new types of descriptions for new phenomena. (Rozzoni 2024, 11)
The further pragmatic importance of studying these phenomena, apart from establishing a new field of study or a new concept (thus rendering this book a primary source), through which readers “embark upon investigative processes of their own” (Rozzoni 2024, 11), is that if we cast light on Husserl’s corpus, and read this book as a secondary source this time (as said, it has this double function), these unpublished philosophical manuscripts can have the value of revealing a “seminal role in shedding light on the genesis of an author’s published corpus and providing a treasure trove of new avenues through which to explore and develop the author’s thoughts.” (Rozzoni 2024, 11-12)
To emphasize it once more, as does Rozzoni, this does not mean that this study is limited to what I call its secondary function, namely, as commentary of the manuscripts of Husserl, thus merely opening up an horizon of study within Husserl’s scholarship, or what Husserl would also call a “regional ontology” or “ontological region”, but, and according to Husserl’s methodological insights on the phenomenological method, [thus studying these new horizons that these phenomena open up to, that is, the “essence of images”, based on Husserl’s phenomenological method; a cyclical meta-textual process, which constitutes another originality of this book], also opening “new horizons and descriptions such an approach could potentially reveal today, and how we might use Husserl’s legacy—which he encouraged others to test “again and again [immer wieder],” especially through variations—as a starting point for new inquiries.” (Rozzoni 2024, 11)
Such horizon-openings can be extended to phenomena which were not already there when Husserl was writing, but which are prominent nowadays (“phenomena that Husserl did not specifically describe”) (Rozzoni 2024, 10), that is on our own Umwelt, such as “image material found on the various electronic devices that have now become part of our everyday lives […].” (Rozzoni 2024, 10-11) If we were “to insist on subjecting any phenomena that Husserl did not specifically describe […] to static limits defined before such phenomena existed, it would betray the very spirit of phenomenology.” (Rozzoni 2024, 10-11)
Moreover, despite admitting that “[t]he present study does not pretend to be all-encompassing regarding the different ways in which such a task might be undertaken” (Rozzoni 2024, 12), that is, the different possibilities of horizons, a further horizon that Rozzoni’s book can achieve to open out is to “yield retrospective potential for new dialogues between Husserl and [these] philosophers, thereby opening up novel possibilities for interpretation, development, and critique that can and must serve as an avenue toward productive perspectives on our contemporary understanding of images.” (Rozzoni 2024, 12) This is due to the late publication of these Husserlian manuscripts in 1980, and the fact that philosophers that were influenced by Husserl, such as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and others, did not have access to it when forming their own concepts.
Such expansion of horizons and new conceptualizations (“paths”) “are never easy” as he admits, “and worse yet, they are perennially menaced by aporetical results.” (Rozzoni 2024, 10) This latter phrase, “perennially menaced by aporetical results”, I find to be a quintessential phenomenological but also philosophical “feeling” and disposition, or even a stylistic and a methodological philosophical act of epoché, dictated by the affirmation of aporia within a philosophical tendency and thinking, as it was also set to be in Ancient Philosophy, re-set by Friedrich Nietzsche’s method of ephexis, and systematized in François Laruelle’s non-philosophical methodology, abstaining from or suspending from arriving at a (final) decision, thus having the philosophical courage to stay and remain “menaced” by aporias; as much as posthuman feminists advocated on the virtue of “staying with the trouble”, against the totalitarian modern or positivistic (or “scientifistic” as I would prefer it) reflex or tendency (or rather obsessional or even psychotic tendency that in combination seek for a certainty-safety-trust nexus regarding an “unmovable earth” or ground of thinking, -to borrow Husserl’s phrase on the immovability of the earth-) of arriving at a final unmovable result. I quote from Rozzoni:
Such paths are never easy, of course—and worse yet, they are perennially menaced by aporetical results. Despite treading arduous ground, however, the material in these manuscripts offers us a unique opportunity to describe the iconic and imaginative dimension of our time in the spirit of phenomenology. Echoing a well-known Merleau-Ponty essay, this would mean striving to develop the “shadow” (Merleau-Ponty 1959) of Husserl’s legacy—a shadow that still looms large today, inviting us to take up the challenge and shed new light on these elusive domains (while simultaneously generating new and productive obscurities, as an essential counterpart of every process of clarification (Franzini 2009, pp. 37–47)). (Rozzoni 2024, 10)
At this point, I would like to raise three further points from this book which, I consider, at least from my own horizon/“regional-ontology”/“situated point of view”, as highlights that can motivate further thought.
The first, concerns what I would call the “Heideggerian colonization” of Continental Philosophy, and especially the “Heideggerian colonization” of the philosophers that Heidegger mostly deals with, as is the case of Husserl. Although Rozzoni does not either explicitly or implicitly make such a statement, I think this can be deducted as a comment, not only from various other instances of reading authors such as Plato, Schelling and others, from the point of view that Heidegger has read them, so that they become, in a way, more of a Heidegger’s Plato and a Heidegger’s Schelling than themselves as themselves, but in addition here from the fact that Heidegger happened to edit “the well-known ‘lectures on time consciousness’ in 1928 in Volume 9 of the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung.” (Rozzoni 2024, 12-13) These lecturers are only the fourth part of the Principal Parts of the Phenomenology and Theory of Knowledge (Hauptstücke aus der Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis), which is a course that Husserl taught in Göttingen in 1904/05. I think that it is not completely irrelevant that Heidegger edited the fourth part of these lectures into a published volume, and this same fourth part gained the most notoriety out of the three other parts, where the first and second were devoted on the phenomenology of perception and attention, and the third on “a phenomenological description of phantasy as he considered it a necessary and complementary step to its account of perception.” As Rozzoni further explains: “He set out to uncover the essential differences between perception and phantasy, eventually finding them to be two originary modes of manifestation marked by an irreducible temporal difference (hence his devotion of the fourth and final part of the course to seminal investigations of time consciousness).” (Rozzoni 2024, 1) Thus, Rozzoni’s book comes to fill this lacuna in Husserlian studies and re-emplace the importance of all four parts, but especially of part three (on phantasy), within Husserl’s experiential strata comprising his “science of knowledge” or gnoseology, and their respective forms of intentionality. Maybe this bias that was taken up by Heidegger, was already initiated by Husserl, who, as he
explains at the beginning of this seminal course, [he] initially intended to devote the lectures exclusively to “the superior intellectual acts, […] the sphere of the so-called ‘theory of judgment.’” Later, however, he felt compelled to instead conduct an analysis at a “lower level,” i.e., of “those phenomena that, under the somewhat vague titles of perception, sensation, phantasy representation, representational image, memory, are well known to everyone, yet have still undergone far too little scientific investigation” (Hua XXXVIII, p. 3). This testifies to Husserl’s belief that a “science of knowledge” would inherently entail analyzing the “aesthetic ways in which this knowledge is articulated” (Franzini 2002, p. XIV); in this sense, this third Hauptstück may provide a capital contribution to the study of aesthetics as gnoseologia inferior.
It is in this context of inquiry into the lower experiential strata that Husserl confronts the challenging task of providing an account of the concept of phantasy, which he considered a necessary counterpoint to the account of perception he gave in the first two parts of the course (see Hua XXIII, p. 1). This would ultimately prove crucial to defining the particular form of intentionality pertaining to phantasy and image consciousness under scrutiny in this book. (Rozzoni 2024, 13-14)
Despite the fact that Husserl, as a philosopher critical to himself, changed his mind and made a four-part lecture onto experience/gnoseology, his commentators and editors were still biased towards the “superior intellectual acts”, as did Philosophy for most of its history, and especially philosophers that made it to the (hegemonic) canon, such as Heidegger.
The second point that I would like to highlight, concerns a possible connection, which I formed based on Rozzoni’s writing, between phenomenological epoché and psychoanalysis. This is not a connection that Rozzoni implies in any sense, but through the way he describes the phenomenon of Ichspaltung (ego-splitting) (in 1.10: Phantasy Ego, pp. 38-44), based on Husserl’s Text no. 15, he paves a connection between it and phenomenological epoché, which if thought further, since Ichspaltung can also concern psychopathology and psychoanalysis, then it might be said that there is a possible connection between phenomenological epoché and psychoanalysis to be additionally elaborated on. To further unveil this thought, towards a possible future elaboration, Rozzoni explains, starting from the aforementioned section, that “the phenomenon of Ichspaltung” is “the division of the ego into the real ego and the phantasy ego” (Rozzoni 2024, 38). The corresponding footnote is the piece of text which inspired this connection to me: “The phenomenon of ego-splitting (Ichspaltung) does not concern the relationship between real and phantasy experiences exclusively. It goes to the very heart of the possibility of the phenomenological epoché.” (Rozzoni 2024, 38, n. 38) If the Ichspaltung is a presupposition or a precondition for the phenomenological epoché, then how could we connect both non-pathological (construction of the phantasy experience/intentionality) and pathological cases of ego-splitting (such as psychosis) with the methodological act of epoché? And also, could there be a linkage between epoché and pictorial arts and film (since they are, in a way, a parastasis of the phantasy experience/intentionality)? Which new methodology can we derive from these, which new insights into phantasy and psychosis, as well as which new insights from phantasy and psychosis concerning each other as well as the phenomenological epoché? These will remain open questions for the moment.
A last, the third point to highlight concerns style/form (how) and content (what), as already aforementioned in the presentation of Chapter 2. Such a stylistic emphasis is rarely found in philosophy, especially within academia and secondary literature on philosophers-but it is nearly always found in the work of all philosophers, which consists a paradox-, and thus I think it is always important to highlight it when an author/philosopher reserves some lines or pages on philosophical stylistics or the aesthetics of philosophical style.
There are further innumerable both systematic but also aphoristic points that one can locate in Rozzoni’s The Phenomenological Image, thus rendering it a work that can be read at and from multiple “places” and multiple times, offering different perspectives to not only phenomenologists or philosophers, but also to artists, filmmakers, art and film theorists and critics, literary theorists, but also to anyone seeking to see, in action, how philosophy operates, since, in my view, it is a book concentrating some of the best philosophical methodologies and traits one can use, as demonstrated in this review.
[1] This paper is prepared as part of my postdoctoral research project “Ontological Exhaustion: Being-Tired, and Tired-of-Being: a philosophy of fatigue, exhaustion, and burnout” at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, implemented with the financial support of the National Programme “Early-stage and Postdoctoral researchers” – 2, Stage 1, 2022–2024.
[2] Husserl, Edmund (1980): Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung. Zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwärtigungen. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898–1925). Ed. Marbach, Eduard. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff; – Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925). Eng. transl. ed. by Brough, J., Dordrecht: Springer, 2005.
Split and Splice: A Phenomenology of Experimentation
The University of Chicago Press
2023
Paperback $30.00
256
Reviewed by: Aloisia Moser (Katholische Privat-Universität Linz)
How to not cut nature at its joints or malapropisms in science
Those who have followed the discussions on metaphor and model may find it difficult to see what is new in Rheinberger’s book “Split and Splice.” His main claim being that in order to gain new knowledge there must be an unforeseen or rogue element in the research process. Metaphor specialists have made a similar claim about language and meaning. Max Black (Black 1955; 1981) and Mary Hesse (Hesse 1963) have proclaimed that what brings us to new meaning in metaphor and models is something that comes on top of using words to refer to something literally. Meaning, especially new meaning, comes from the way we constellate words in new and unforeseen ways, for example using a term that does not refer to a thing instead of another. They also pointed out that sometimes the very materiality of words, for example their sound, creates new meaning, especially but not only in poetry. Metaphor specialists like Hesse have compared the way metaphor works with how models work in science. Models in science must be represented or made visible in a similar way to how language refers to things that do not yet have a name. You cannot do that literally.
When we use language metaphorically, we are not following the theory that we share, we are going against it. “Juliet is the sun” is a sentence that is obviously not true according to how literal language works, but we get its meaning: that Juliet is bright and shining and warm and life-giving, just like the sun. Metaphor specialists tell us that by using language like this we learn something new about Juliet (and by juxtaposing it with Juliet, the sun becomes a little more like a woman called Juliet). If Rheinberger were simply to say that this is also true for scientific models, he would not be saying anything new.
But Rheinberger is not just saying that scientific theories or models are like metaphors – he goes one step further, as does Donald Davidson in his famous paper on malapropism. Davidson claims in this paper that we do not need to use language properly at all, we can basically make nonsensical propositions and they still bring out new meaning, namely through the materiality of the words strung together, through the sounds, or even through similarity of the letters in written language. Rheinberger calls this facet of randomness of the juxtaposition of words in their materiality as “serendipity” – it is malapropism inserted into the experiment. What Rheinberger is claiming is that the scientific method works like a malapropism, which is a much stronger claim than the one that says that models work like metaphors.
A malapropism is a use of language that is not literal and where there is no intention on the part of the author or speaker. With malapropism we are entering a different kind of territory, and Davidson struggled with this in his essay “A nice Derangement of Epitaphs”(Davidson 2005) because he had to explain how meaning could be created even though the speaker was not using words literally and her intentions were not aligned with the words that she used to say something. In fact, in some types of malapropism, the opposite of what is meant is being said and the meaning is still conveyed. Often in a malapropism the speaker makes a mistake, as in a Freudian slip. Or the speaker uses one word instead of another simply because it sounds similar and there was not enough time for the speaker to correct and use the correct word. Davidson goes on to explain that the listener can still deal with this. Whereas language theorists claim that the hearer must “shar[e][ing] a complex system or theory with the speaker” (Davidson 2005, 93), “an interpreter has, at any moment of a speech transaction, what I persist in calling a theory” (ibid. p. 100). But Davidson goes on to say that “as the speaker speaks his piece the interpreter changes his theory, enters hypotheses about new names, changes the interpretation of familiar predicates, and revises previous interpretations of particular utterances in the light of new evidence.” (Davidson, ibid.) So, the speaker starts with an initial theory of interpretation, that she thinks the interpreter shares with her. Then she can consciously dispense with it, and the interpreter must modify her initial theory into an incidental or passing theory. At the end of his paper on malapropism Davidson concludes that there is no such thing as language as philosophers have assumed. There is no clearly defined common structure. Nor is there communication by appeal to convention.
Rheinberger makes a point about scientific theories and methods in Split and Splice that is very similar to the one made about language and understanding in Davidson’s malapropism essay. We need to imagine that the ‘speaker’ in this model is that which we are investigating in a particular investigation, and how that presents itself to or affords itself to us. Things are not simply given. “Data” as Rheinberger aptly says in the first part of the book are not, as the word suggests, simply given, they are already configured from the traces, that the scientific investigator measures. Rheinberger’s point is that there is something rogue about the process of investigation in science, something akin to what happens in malapropism. The experiment is an event, and the scientific process is not literal and unambiguous, but fragmentary and subject to serendipity. And that this is the method by which we arrive at new knowledge.
In a text called Postscriptum (Rheinberger 2022) to the workshop and special issue On Epistemic Times: Writing History 25 Years after Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube Rheinberger writes not so much a conclusion, but an outlook on “Conjunctures, Traces and Fragments.” He points out that the title of his book Spalt und Fuge, English Split and Splice was chosen because spalten, to split and fügen, to splice are the two cardinal activities of experimentation and he deliberately avoids using the terms analysis and synthesis. The latter are the logical categories that he claims have been imported into the practice of experimentation. But they did not grow out of them, and they suggest too neat of a division and fusion. Rheinberger writes:
[…] experimentation, as a process of finding one’s way into the unknown, needs more practice-oriented categories in order to apprehend its moves. If you split a log, the wood resists, and the products of your wedging activity will show uneven faces, depending on the knots and inner structure of the trunk. The same holds true for the object of your experimental inquiry. Knowledge of these structures is of the utmost importance for experimental exploration. If you splice a rope or if you graft a twig onto your vine, the points of suture will remain visible as signs of a mutilation. So will the pieces of your experimental activity, if joined to form a whole again. And it is indeed of utmost epistemic importance for the ongoing experimental process not to forget that these sutures always are—and will have to be—provisional. The title of this phenomenology of experimentation, Split and Splice, aims at calling to mind these epistemic uncertainties, inherent in the life of epistemic things. (Rheinberger 2022, p. 517)
Rheinberger emphasizes the “movement of the aleatic” (p. 518), which allows us to see the unforeseen as materialized. A conjecture is triggered by something small but has great consequences. These events, or what Bachelard calls “life-worlds” as “cultures”, provide access to emergence. (Cf. Ibid.) And Rheinberger goes on to call this “serendipity,” like actors who claim that to have been in the right place at the right time. According to Robert K. Merton, serendipity becomes the term for the “eventfulness of the research process.” (Ibid.). In Split and Splice, such conjunctures are treated as grafting activities. They are generally concerned with the interface between instruments and the objects of research, epistemic things. Rheinberger argues that these interfaces are the main loci of resistance and surprise in the research process, which is what the constellation of words in their materiality/sound was in malapropism. He concludes the section on conjunctures with the phrase “Glückliche Fügungen“ – “Happy Splices” (this was the title of one of the papers presented at the workshop). Experiments are subject to happy splices, and we need them. At the end of Split and Splice, Rheinberger points out that the only way scientific experiments can produce new knowledge only if they pay attention to the splits and splices of their experiments and do not whitewash them into neat analyses and syntheses.
The book Split and Splice therefore aims to present a phenomenology of experimentation, which for Rheinberger means that we are looking at the “shapes and contours that scientific experimentation has acquired historically” (p. 1). Here we see the same focus on the materiality of the whole movement of experimentation, not just the individual experiment. It is particularly important for Rheinberger that experimentation is seen as a knowledge-generating process. The various facets of the shapes of the experience are examined both from an “infrascopic” and from a “suprascopic perspective” (ibid.) These shapes shape the form of the book, by looking below and beyond the threshold of perception.
1. The Infrascopic
In the first part of the book, called “the infrascopic” Rheinberger investigates the micrological aspects of experimentation, such as the production of traces, the construction of models, ways of making things visible, grafting and note-taking. These are aspects of the experimental infrastructure and its materialities. Central here is the difference between the experimental space of traces and that of data, as Rheinberger introduces it, the difference between “the order of the graphematic and the order of representation.” (p. 519). Traces that result from the interface between apparatus and target must be made permanent or stored in order to serve as data and to be manipulated in this space, outside of the temporal constraints of the experiment. “Here the traces undergo a change of medium”, Rheinberger writes, “from the medium of the experiment to a medium of a different grain and materiality, be it wire, paper, or the digital” (Ibid.). While he speaks of traces in the experiment, the French word “trace” also means track, path, or mark, and this is what must be kept in mind when reading “trace”. What the trace amounts to is that the meaning of a sign is generated by the difference it has from other signs, and this means that the sign also contains a trace of what it does not mean. In this sense, “trace” becomes a term for a “mark of the absence of a presence, an always already absent present.” (Of Grammatology, Spivak xvii). What then is the notion of trace in Rheinberger’s experiment? Like the meaning of the sign, the epistemic thing gradually gains significance and becomes reified step by step. The most pertinent observation here is that neither “the traditional epistemological conception of induction nor that of deduction will be of help to us” – indeed, Rheinberger thinks that even Charles Sanders Peirce’s notion of abduction will not do, even though it comes close and is usually credited with novelty in the process of scientific investigation. What we get is a notion that Rheinberger calls “subduction.” Abduction differs from deduction and induction in that it does not begin with a general from which the individual is deduced or from individuals which are generalized through induction, abduction is the assumption of a general hypothesis, usually from a singular, which leads to the truth through conjecture or guesswork. In subduction, finally “novelty can come about inadvertently, [that] the unprecedented can be made to happen.” (p. 11) And the space in which this happens is “between the agents of knowledge and their objects of their interest.” (ibid.).
Rheinberger starts with the notion that the original gesture of the modern sciences was to “try[ing] to make the invisible visible.” We try to reveal and make accessible to our senses things that cannot be observed immediately or unmediatedly. And here we see that an “instrumentally mediated disturbance” is needed to make contact with the material. Like the documentary filmmaker who tries to show how the life of a person “is,” she cannot help but interfere with that life through the camera. In the same way, we interfere with our scientific measurements through the instruments that we use and that lead us to new knowledge in the first place.
The point is that this media/technological landscape is the only way in which science exists, and more importantly, this landscape has emerged from the process of knowledge generation itself, Rheinberger writes. Traces are a form of “material manifestation—a form of palpability” (ibid.). They are more rudimentary than what we call a representation, their nature is indexical, it is the primary manifestation of an epistemic thing, and it predates the distinction between writing and imaging. Rheinberger adds here that writing and imaging are our traditional forms of representation, but the trace is their raw material, the raw material of the experimental semiosis. In this sense, the trace is asemic, it is not yet semantic, it does not yet have meaning. But this makes it a puzzle. A trace is a trace of something, but that something is always absent (ibid. p. 13). The trace convinced Derrida that there could be no simple origin. To put it in scientific terms, the supposed origin of the trace is absent “not only in the sense of no longer being here, but in a much stronger sense: it ever was before. We cannot catch the thing that generates the trace in flagrante. Were this possible, we could save ourselves the whole experimental effort” (p. 13.).
The central task is to reflect on the epistemic and technical constitution of trace-generating experimental systems and the experimental environments or landscapes that they form. And this is where Rheinberger’s harsh criticism of the sciences comes in: he argues that this has not found its place in the self-perception of the sciences. What counts for them is the result, the finding. Instead, Rheinberger focuses on the occurrences and events of the experiment. There is neither a knowing “I” nor completed knowledge, the book is positioned in between. And this in-between consists of the traces that are created. There are paths and trajectories in which this happens. Rheinberger points out that all experimentation moves along two different epistemic axes, “depending on whether it is about the exploration of spatial structure or the determination of temporal sequences” (p. 14). In short, what is too big must be miniaturized, what is too small must be enlarged. Processes must be sped up or slowed down. And these procedures are the instructions for generating traces and providing ways of transforming them into data., i.e. ordering and condensing them, so that patterns can emerge that give contours to the phenomenon under investigation. (Cf. Ibid.)
It is time to give an example of such a trace. Rheinberger chooses radioactive substances. Radioactive substances can be measured because they indicate the path they take through the body, and a small amount of the substance can indicate the whole. In short, the system produces and simultaneously registers the traces. But these sequence gels or other experimental traces are transient. They disappear after some time. To capture them, an additional manipulation is necessary, also to make visible what is happening. Here we make the change from medium to data. The invisible intensity pattern is transferred to a sensitive film. In this way, fleeting traces can be transformed into permanent data. Rheinberger uses a word play on data here: “unlike what the name suggests, nothing is “given”—it is all the result of a process. (p. 19).
This is what Rheinberger’s book is about: how experimentation can lead us to new knowledge. And it is the wilder and more material splitting and splicing rather than the controlled and intellectual analysis and synthesis that gets us there.
In the next chapter we come to the model as a figuration that originates in the space of data. In addition to models, we can have lists, filters, orders according to variable criteria, storage, curating, and so on. The data space is quite malleable, writes Rheinberger, because we no longer have to deal with “resistances of the materiality of the experimental process.” However, Rheinberger emphasizes that the data manipulation comes with its own set of complications. We have seen a growth in data space that has been unprecedented in the last half century. This brings with it a new dynamic, that makes it appear as a real space in its own right. Data space now has its own materiality and an inherent unruliness of its own practices. We need to pay attention to this, too, Rheinberger argues.
What makes models both strong and weak is the simplification they offer. Their weakness is that we can forget for a moment that they are illusions. and their strength is that they can be easily reconfigured even as the data changes. (Recently, an Internet meme showed about 10 different kinds of model possibilities for the same kind of data, one of which was the shape or outline of a gorilla). Rheinberger points out that we oscillate between models of and models for. While science is concerned with models of, models for are found in art and architecture. Models of can be divided into functional and structural models. The example of a model organism comes from molecular genetics, we look at ribosomes, which are model organisms. The term “model organism” did not appear until the second half of the 20thcentury and played a decisive role in the development of molecular biology. The ideal model organism has material consequences because of its ideality. Why is that? Because one has to intervene in order to standardize the organism (cf. p. 27). The model organism has been modified and this “determines their character as a research tool” (ibid.). In that the model organism embodies previously acquired knowledge and becomes less an object of investigation than a technical condition of the experimental system. The models served in such a way that a picture “could be grasped at first sight and that suggested further, experimentally accessible questions on the basis of these synoptic premises” (p. 32). Rheinberger argues that the models, in their pictoriality, have the character of affordances, a term we know well from actor network theory and neo-materialistic philosophies. The model as an image becomes a kind of actant. The connection of this production of an illusion or image is not a deficiency of the model, but instead Rheinberger shows that it is an advantage. This is where the English translator curiously called or translated the restriction as malapropism, which triggered the analogy I made at the beginning of this review and my comparison of what Rheinberger does with Donald Davidson’s essay on malapropism. It is all about the new meaning in the metaphor as well as the new meaning that comes from the experiment found in the model. Because of this imaginary fiction, it is easier to formulate expectations and to address them experimentally. We have entered fully into the circularity between model and experiment full on, Rheinberger writes: “The model serves as an indirect source for an iterative process of producing of new experimental traces that, when transformed into data, can be reexamined for their compatibility with the existing model.” Rheinberger goes on to quote Alan Badiou from his early book the Concept of Model, in which he argues that the model, as a transitory aid is destined to deconstruct itself in the scientific process. What Rheinberger wants to point out is that the model represents under a specific synopsis and neglects aspects that do not come into view under the given experimental conditions. But new questions are generated, and the attempted answers continually modify the model.
There is so much more Rheinberger has to say about models; when he distinguishes structural models from functional models, it turns out that the latter attempt to associate functional states with components or regions, while structural models operate away from primary traces or data collections to a mediated form at the level of synopsis. This leads to feedback not only between models and experimental data production, but also between models themselves that refer to the same epistemic object (cf. S. 39). We are not dealing with the question of what the model means and what its reference is, but with a relation between different representations. It is nice how Rheinberger invokes Frege’s distinction between sense and reference by noting that the model either makes sense or it does not. Structural models are thus determined by two main parameters underlying their construction: “the external shape in three-dimensional space” as well as the “Internal articulation and positioning of dozens of macromolecular components with respect to each other” (p. 37). They are not primarily representational models, but rather “a tool of further knowledge production” (p. 39).
Finally, Rheinberger looks at computer graphics models, the latest addition. Here, too, the potential for gaining knowledge lies in the comparison of different models that alternative visualization technologies give us using different data sets. The different technologies are indeed different interferences, since they require different preparation procedures for the probes. “Native, untouched particles, however, cannot be seen or made visible, which makes the manipulation of their stature unavoidable. The only possibility of gaining a robust assessment of their shape is a permanent triangulation between the different results of such manipulations” (p. 44).
Rheinberger concludes the chapter on models with a brief excursion into computer simulations. As epistemic entities they are qualitatively different from other models in that they do not result from experimental traces transformed into data, accompanied by the change of medium in the transformation to data. Simulations operate on self-generated data. This gives them the advantage of allowing us to visualize origins and futures that are inaccessible in real experiment. Since we have computers, simulations have opened up additional space for experimentation that now makes models themselves the object of research. At the end of the chapter, Rheinberger points out something quite fascinating: that we are used to the precession of the simulation type of model from the fields of art and architectures. There, the models are not models of, but models for. “Here, the relation between the model and the modeled is inverted from the start” (p. 45). What this means for the relationship between the sciences and the arts is unfortunately beyond the scope of Rheinberger’s book, but it is widely discussed today, especially since we have begun to talk about artistic research.[1]
Chapter 3 of Split and Splice is entirely devoted to the trope of “making visible.” We have been circling this since the beginning of the book when we talked about synopsis and the imagery of models. Rheinberger believes that making visible is “the fundamental gesture of the modern sciences in their entirety,” and that it speaks directly to the moment of making inherent in the process. But “visualization is always bound to variegated forms of intervening,” (p. 46), Rheinberger continues.
The trace marks the beginning of the process of making something visible and lives from its proximity to the material and its proximity to the tools that bring it into being. “It therefore precedes the critical distinction between image and writing” (Ibid.). Even the practice turn in sociology, history and the philosophy of science has not yet looked closely enough at “what goes on in the space between the knower and the object of knowledge.” Meanwhile Goethe considered contemplation important and pointed to the middle ground. In his study of Newton’s theory of color, he refused to let the mediated quality of knowledge simply evaporate and to pretend that there was direct or immediate transparency. The chapter discusses examples of forms of visualization in the laboratory. We have moved from models to the actual procedures of visual representation that underlie models and preparations. Rheinberger discusses “configurations,” which are procedures of spatial and temporal compression and expansion. The second are procedures of enforcement or enhancement, and the third are procedures of schematization, in order to draw up a typology of visualizations in the sciences.
An exemplary form of compression is the map. Another is the curve, which can synoptically represent a whole series of measurements of one or more variables. This makes patterns visible. Enhancement means that structures, and even processes are made visible by coloring or placing contrasts. The means of enhancement become part of what is to be represented. Deformations must be inherent to the process. This was the earlier example of radioactive marking. One type of enhancement is particularly interesting: biological agents that are introduced to expand. We do not see the bacteria and viruses, but the space occupied by the destroyed bacteria and multiplied viruses. This is certainly not representation by depiction, but it does make the processes in question accessible for further study (cf. p. 60). Finally, schematization is used when processes are too complex. The umbrella term for the schematization is “diagrammatic,” which has recently received a great deal of attention from cultural studies. A pictorial language is developed, a kind of „image regime“ (p. 61). Rheinberger quotes Hertz, a student of Helmholtz, who is said to have said that the sciences produce “internal simulacra” of the things of the world, making possible “different images of the same objects”. Admissible, correct, and useful are the three terms he uses to describe the technical side rather than the epistemological side of experimentation. It is about “the insertion of new apparatus or procedures in already existing experimental setups (p. 67).
Most systems are transformed by apposition. Since with Rheinberger we also are dealing with the translator of Jacques Derrida, who has used the concept of grafting dealing with writing, we find a subchapter on the “Graft of Writing” which beautifully makes the connection between the natural science and the humanities. If grafting is a process of manipulation in which a new connection is made between two separate entities, then we can compare it to nomadic movements as Isabelle Stengers has described them, prerequisites for illuminating the differences in cultural techniques. Derrida spoke of the transposition of linguistic particles from one discursive context to the other, which he called an “iteration”.
Dissemination and grafting characterize the heteroclite and heteronomous, which he considered a crucial feature of the cultural technique of writing. What he meant by this was that meaning spreads like a disease, erratically through the body. Meaning is not linear and cannot be accurately depicted. Grafting is the insertion of something foreign, something that does not emerge from the pre-existing structure. But it requires the pre-existing structure to articulate itself as this other (cf. p. 70) For Derrida, to write is necessarily to graft. Bachelard used the concept of graft in the context of poetic work and images of the elements. The graft adds something new, that cannot be derived from it in the sense of an imaginative derivation. It is “material imagination” as a result of an apposition. Interestingly, the graft is here not understood as a metaphor, he takes it at face value, Rheinberger argues, and it is a figure of “material imagination” (p. 71).
After the grafts come the interfaces, the sutures between the grafted new technology and the pre-exiting technologies. There is also hybridization, which merges two independently established into a new construct. Grafting and hybridization are crucial to the iteration of experimental systems.
The last chapter of Part One deals with the protocols that must be written as an integral part of every experiment. Why are these primary written notes and records important? Because they constantly accompany the experimenter. Notes convey the concrete processes of knowledge formation. They are not an authoritative voice that knows where to go, they are tentative. And that is why they are productive and mostly neglected. As Friedrich Kittler said: “A writing system is an indispensable space of notation for emergent knowledge” (p. 95).
2. The Supra-Scopic
The second part of Rheinberger’s book is as fascinating as the first, because it is about time, but not as time as an object of experimentation, but the temporal course that epistemic processes can take. George Kubler was an art historian, a thinker in terms of structures like Thomas Kuhn, and obsessed with material objects. And with Rheinberger, Kubler is aligned with Derrida as concerned with the “diachronic flow structures of the historical process and its conceptualization” (p. 100). Time is not a fow, but a structure composed of units, each of which carries its own temporality. He departs from the distinction between longue and courte duree of biology and the individual development. He wants to focus on the characters and properties of the objects of culture, the things with which the arts are concerned. In short, he is interested in “figures of temporal condensation of a medium range that he calls “shapes” (p. 101).He wants to see the processes common to art and science in the same historical perspective, without blurring the differences between artistic and scientific things. Utility and beauty are, after all, very different. But the genesis of epistemic things and works of art is not entirely different, since they share at least the trait of invention, change, and obsolescence at least. (Cf. Ibid.) No wonder Rheinberger is interested in Kubler, but not in returning to the “genius religion” of the great man-inventors. Novelty may be an idea, but the sudden inspiration of gifted brilliance is not the answer. Rather, it is the “unprecedented result of a retrojection,” Kubler suggests. Here is the example: An artist and a miner are digging for ore. They can assess the tunnels dug, still there is no guarantee what direction to take. Both artists and scientists move in a terrain of materiality. They are scarred by the paths that have been trodden before. They must confront the materials head on. Like Kuhn Kubler sees the arts as moving towards no goal. We move toward what we want to know. We seize the moment in the given circumstances of possibility. We create a series or a sequence.
Rheinberger then thinks about epistemic trajectories in terms of Kubler. He repeats what Fleck thought, namely that experiments tend to be “carried along by a system of earlier experiments and decisions,” recalling Kubler’s imagery of tunnels and shafts. Rheinberger then lists five kinds of trajectories or sequences that can be specified in the empirical sciences: frames for the production of experimental traces and data. To demonstrate this, he takes a model organism, the flour moth Ephestia kühnella, and shows us how it was used as an object of study to study its spread and learn how to eradicate it. But he also shows how it was eventually replaced by other model organisms because its genetics were too complicated to read.
Epistemic and artistic matters are therefore similar in that what we call the “ingenious ideas” are mainly the researchers who become aware of an option that such a system offers and usually through a new technique or a signal that surfaced in a hidden corner. Cultural novelty, Rheinberger concludes the chapter, is realized in history as the history of things and are closely tied to the materials and the options that emanate from them (cf. p. 114).
The second chapter of Part II is about experiential cultures, which are the specific forms of spatial expansion of experimental systems. Such systems may form ensembles or bundles, in which case they are called experimental cultures. Here we have an interesting glitch in the otherwise excellent translation. Rheinberger writes that the concept of “Sich-Teilen-in” is central, which means literally, “To-Divide-Oneself-Into.” But the translation uses the word “sharing,” which is not the best choice because it brings the meaning too close to the symbolic. Culture is usually tied to the symbolic, but Rheinberger wants to focus on the “materialities of the scientific work in process.” And this is why it is a self-splitting, not a sharing, a division that is material. Rheinberger says the Sich-Teilen-in contains the core of why we speak of cultures here. Aspects of experimentation that are similar are called styles of scientific thought or practice, as well as ways of knowing or doing. But the notion of culture underscores the aspect of material interrelation between experimental systems, a meaning that only emerges as these systems emerge.
Most importantly, Rheinberger does not want to discuss experimental cultures as part of a history of disciplines that looks at institutions. Instead, he wants to define scientific communities in terms of their shared paradigms, and to try to characterize them in terms of shared experimental life forms. This explains at least why the translator has chosen the term “sharing” earlier. Such a shared culture or life form of experimentation is then presented by looking at “in vitro” – the biological test tube culture. The transition from a living system to a test tube system was not simply a transition from biology to organic chemistry – but it was the replication of life under different conditions. The question is: “do we still see nature in the mirror?” In a chapter on culture as an epistemological concept, we get a discussion of the modern use of the term, the distinction between man-made and naturally occurring things (cf. p. 126).
Chapter 8 is called Knowing and Narrating. Reflection of modern science in its own activity. The metaphor of the legibility of the world is used here, and that the letters of the book of nature are inherent in nature and all we do is look for them to be revealed. The image tells us that the scientific discourse is transparent and unadulterated by the media through which it is represented. Against this background, Rheinberger asks: do scientific texts narrate or not? Or are they really descriptive or hypothetico-deductive as we would like to believe. He brings up the distinctions between explanation and understanding, nomothetic and idiographic, knowledge of nature and knowledge of history.
First comes the question of authorship, the question of narrative. Experimental systems embody and realize a narrative structure. Since the experimental order is in a constant state of reorientation, experimental systems not only tell stories, but also change them (p. 136).
This is how we arrive at the poetology of research. Polanyi’s ideas about the agency of things are introduced. What we see here to is that epistemological acts allow us to take the next step in given research situations and that it is the “unexpected impulses” that determine the “course of scientific development” (Polyani p. 141). An experiment must introduce unintended effects, or unexpected results. In a chapter on epistemicity and experimentality knowledge things are characterized as things that leave something to be desired. Their relationship to the world is a search for knowledge. Quoting Claude Bernard, Rheinberger suggests that experimenters arrange situations so that finding becomes possible. He writes “One could describe such searching as a game of eventuation. It is an engagement with the material world that requires, first, an intimate acquaintance with the things at hand, and second (and at the same time) a distancing, the ability to let things appear strange” (p. 143). At this point the term “Serendipity” comes up again, and it stands for the serendipity of research, the fact that a serendipitous byproduct has effects on a theory and produces questions that could not have been asked before. It is about an epistemology of the unprecedented (ibid.)
And finally, towards the end of the book Rheinberger comes to the fragment. Traditionally, the fragmentary has been regarded as a deficient state of things to be repaired by a view from the whole. I recently heard the Slovenian writer and Ingeborg Bachmann Price Winner Ana Marwan, reading from her latest book, Zabubljena, in German “Verpuppt” (Marwan 2023) make the same eulogy or declaration of love for the fragmentary. She said about her novel that she did not want to write a narrative, a whole story that makes sense, but to give priority to small pieces of life. To the momentary beauty of a fragment in time and constellation with other people, and not to the implementation of that piece into a larger whole of a life that makes sense. She argues that this is closer to the way life is and feels as lived, as fragmentary.
Rheinberger wants the fragmentary to be a driving force of the research process and believes that it characterizes “both the natural sciences and the historical humanities” (Postscriptum p. 520). Again, he distinguishes between the scientific activity of dissecting materials in order to gain knowledge of their fine structure and the relations between the parts, and the kind of dissection and fragmentation that for the historical humanists has always been done by time. The humanist finds her material already in a fragmented state and must reconstruct it. For the biological and physical sciences of the past, we have a similar fragmentation by time.
Both epistemic intervention and representation (a distinction made by Ian Hacking) are built on the fragmentary. Our mappings of the world are based on intelligent economy.” Rheinberger gives the example of Borges’ scientist who wanted to make a 1:1 map, without leaving anything out, he wanted to represent the whole, not just a fragment, but such a map would make no sense. Fragments allow for a “resistance to plenitude: gaps, leftovers, omissions” and especially the thing that is absent but left its imprint and is thus an absent presence “at the point of contact as an absent origin.” Here we clearly hear Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, the translator of Jacques Derrida.
In conclusion, Rheinberger presents a book on scientific method that deals in the first part with the spatial and in the second with the temporal problems of discovering any new epistemic object in science. Since we are finding our way into the unknown we need to take epistemic uncertainties as part of the process. Resistance and the influence of our experimental activity are part and parcel of the life of epistemic things.
[1] See the workshop Zufall und Einfall. Medien der Kreativität in Wissenschaft und Kunst. November 9-11, 2023 at KU Linz. The collected papers will be published with Transcript in 2024.
