Phenomenological Reviews

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:

• Does not accept as true any claim about the nature of our experience unless it is demonstrated by a means of a descriptive interrogation of experience. In part, this is the meaning of Husserl’s call to return to the “things” or “matters” themselves. Only what can be exhibited through the interrogation of experience should be philosophically adhered to.
• Offers a descriptive interrogation of experience that does not simply lie content with more accurate, or perhaps even more rich and nuanced, descriptions of experience. Its descriptions are undertaken with a certain aim in mind: to reveal the “structures” (indeed, the most fundamental structures) of experience. I will say more about this below.
• Concretely brings to light the structures of experience – an undertaking that transforms our relation to experience.

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)