pain

Phenomenological accounts of pain invariably regard pain as abnormal and aberrant. Perhaps my own life experience, of nearly constant physical pain, makes me a bad phenomenologist of pain, but I find the move to “abnormalize” pain is made just a bit too quickly. Ultimately, I agree that an appropriate way to interpret the experience of physical pain phenomenologically would draw from the analysis of normal and abnormal perception, but I think this has to be very carefully brought into discussion.

Drew Leder discusses pain in The Absent Body, a book whose basic point of view I have some trouble with already. His analysis of pain focuses on (1) the abnormality of pain; (2) the felt alienness of the body in pain; (3) the disruption of ongoing embodied projects by pain; and (4) the search initiated by pain for restored meaning, restored projects.

As I was reading, I was brought into acute awareness of several pains happening at once. This morning I had blood drawn, and I can feel a slight irritation at the point of the needle prick. My arms are sore from a little over-straining in the pool yesterday. The tip of my tongue is sore from being burnt by hot coffee we bought after the blood test (it was a fasting test).

First, as to normality and abnormality. Because I am in almost constant pain, and almost constantly aware, at least in some marginal way, of pain, the normal feeling of my body involves pain — normal here meaning, accustomed, ordinary, but also normal in the phenomenological sense: normal as concordant with an ongoing act, of perceiving, or of moving in some goal-directed way. The pain that Leder discusses seems always to intervene and disrupt such an ongoing act, rather than being a concordant moment of it. That’s simply not my experience of such ordinary activities as walking. That said, I am susceptible to abnormal pain, in both the disruptive and non-concordant senses. In the former, more mundane sense, I am able ordinarily to distinguish the pain in my feet from walking and from not walking, from having cramped recently and from being about to cramp, etc. I have a sort of mental catalog of foot pain and register the changes in feeling by its general categories. All of these pains are “normal” in the sense of being concordant, as well. What’s abnormal in the mundane sense is the disruption caused when a cramp pain intervenes in a walking pain, for example – then my project of walking is interrupted, canceled out, etc. But an abnormal pain in the phenomenological sense would have to be one that is non-concordant, a pain that does not fit any longer as a moment in the ongoing synthesis of an act — unexpected and disruptive, yes, but also unaccountable, unassimilable.

There are pains that are abnormal in that phenomenological sense, but Leder’s analysis seems to me to conflate mundane and phenomenological description. That he does indeed conflate the two becomes clearer when we turn to the notion of pain as a felt alienness of the body. Elaine Scarry suggests this as well, and Leder cites her. As an ordinary experience, if a part of my body that does not ordinarily experience pain suddenly does present pain, then, yes, I might feel that part as alien, as we express when we say “my arm is hurting me,” e.g. But the phenomenological sense of alien means something more like “outside the sphere of what I can relate to my ‘I can’ and its normal range of activity, meaning, etc.” The alien presents itself to me as having come from a region of meaning that I cannot find meaning in. Again, no doubt, some pain may present itself this way, but very much of my daily pain does not. I am at home in my painful feet, I am accustomed to them, and they are as familiar to me, as painful, as any other part of me. Not so the burnt tongue, I’m finding. This is alien in the phenomenological sense, because it disrupts the ongoing meaning-synthesis of my oral/tasting life. It is alien, furthermore, in that it issues a sort of demand to re-orient my oral/tasting life. Ice cream would really hurt right now, for instance, so if my oral/tasting life were to propose ice-cream-eating activity, the I can taking up this project would endure a very difficult experience to orient around a normal, or the oral/tasting values it holds so dear.

If I want to undertake a clarification of pain, I think I’d want to distinguish normal from abnormal pain, “home” pain from alien pain, and finally, the pain that accompanies projects from the pain that disrupts them.

how about a periphenomenology of perception?

I'm back to Shaun Gallagher's book How the Body Shapes the Mind. He seems to be doing what Michel Henry forbids, namely, taking clues from natural science in order to understand human embodiment and perception. Strangely, there's some similarities regarding their conclusions about perception, even if the language is totally different. I think Gallagher is easier to understand and has his head screwed on right, whereas I'm increasingly of the opinion that Henry was a kook. Some samples of Gallagher, on proprioception and perspectival perception:

More specifically, proprioceptive awareness is not itself a perception of the body as an object; for if it were, it would require an ordering system, a spatial frame of reference, that was independent of the body. Generally speaking, the proprioceptive spatiality of the body is not framed by anything other than the body itself. In other words, proprioception is a non-perspectival awareness of the body. (137f)

Proprioceptive awareness does not organize the differential spatial order of the body around an origin… Proprioception operates within a non-relative, non-perspectival, intra-corporeal spatial framework that is different from both egocentric and allocentric frameworks. Neither proprioception nor kineasthesia offers a perceptual perspective on my body. If they did, they would require a second body, or perhaps a homunculus that would act as an index. Our pre-reflective, kinaesthetic-proprioceptive experience thus plays a role in the organization of perception, but in a way that does not require the body itself to be a perceptual object. (138)

If the body itself is doing the perceiving, then such prenoetic operations provide specific conditions that shape perceptual consciousness. The body and its natural environment work together to deliver an already formed meaning to consciousness. (139)

Both Henry and Gallagher claim that proprioception is not perception and that the body as perceiver is not an object. But where Henry argues for a dualistic ontology where the subject as absolute life is always separate from the entire realm of the world and objects, Gallagher's understanding doesn't require taking any stance at all on that kind of metaphysical issue. Instead, as implied by his taking clues from neuroscience, he's more or less just describing and interpreting what we could call facts.

Both positions seek to reduce, or explain, what Merleau-Ponty left ambiguous, in particular given that, in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty continued to use the language of Cartesian dualism - the whole business of the body being subject and object, e.g. There's a lot to be said for being more clear about this, but there's still ambiguity in experience.

So, proprioceptive awareness isn't perspectival, but it is through proprioceptive awareness that our perspectives become intelligible as perspectives. I don't see myself seeing (as Henry says), yet when I see, the point from which I see is tacitly present. Or, to use Merleau-Ponty's famous/notorious example of the hand-touching/hand-touched, I don't feel my touching, but when I touch something, the posture of my touching, since it makes all the difference in the experience of touch, comes into awareness. Gallagher's argument regarding the non-perspectival character of proprioception is airtight (and "non-relative" hints of what Henry called the "absolute" knowledge the body has of itself), and it leaves us with the implication that, ultimately, neither neuroscience nor phenomenology can tell us why we have experience and not just sense data. Again, Gallagher's attitude toward this seems to be that meaningful experience is just how it is for human beings.

A bit further on the ambiguity of perception and proprioception: if the body's proprioception is its way of structuring pre-given meaningful perception, then, I would argue, we may not be able to take a perspective on perspective-taking, but we can get a feel for it, sort of peripherally.

notes toward a do-it-yourself transcendental phenomenology of embodiment

I finished reading Michel Henry's Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body. The conclusion very unhelpfully develops a theological position on the finitude of the body and the infinity of the transcendental life (i.e., the body that I am as a transcendental subject) in relation to the Christian concept of sin. Henry seemed particularly miffed about sexuality being taken as a naturally occurring need that, as subjects, we can't determine actively.

What I am able to take away from reading this thing is his challenge to the more received view of embodiment in phenomenological philosophy circles. I have come to agree with Henry that the typical view is fairly confused. For instance, taking Husserl's position to be transcendental idealism, very like Kant's - which it is, in the first book of Ideas - the body appears to be an object of experience. This makes it very difficult to (1) resolve Cartesian dualism, which seems to be an important goal, and (2) understand why my body is experienced differently than anything else.

The typical reading of the phenomenological tradition leaves Husserl right there, staring at his Albrecht Dürer woodcut in confusion, and turns to Merleau-Ponty as the so-called "philosopher of the body." Merleau-Ponty very cleverly kept reading Husserl, and even more cleverly re-wrote much of the second book of Ideas and some of the passive synthesis lectures, under the new title Phenomenology of Perception. There, Merleau-Ponty interprets subjectivity as always embodied, as the very famous "body-subject" that is ambiguously subject and object, both for myself and for others. For instance, when, while slicing a peach for arugula-white peach-pignola-chevre-white pepper salad, I cut into my finger, I have an ambiguous experience of my finger as profoundly me (cuz the pain is mine ineluctably), and as a weird sort of object, obtrusively getting in the way of the perfectly fine plan I had all worked out, and bleeding on my peach like the stupid fleshy blood-filled sack of stupid bloody flesh my stupid finger is.

Henry, by asserting that the transcendental phenomenological ego (the "one who experiences" that is at the origin of everything that a consciousness undergoes) is not a ghost in a machine, but is instead living flesh itself, takes up Merleau-Ponty's later re-conception of the ambiguous body-subject, and pushes it, in a way, an ontological step backward. Now this "life," or "absolute life" is the living body itself. Henry has thus resolved the ambiguity of the body-subject being a subject and an object by denying the objectivity of the (transcendental) body.

This is a great move, because it forces us to reconsider the starting point of phenomenological philosophy, consciousness, as living instead of thinking, as affectivity instead of cognition, and so corrects the idealist tendency of Husserl's earlier work. Henry makes this move at great theological expense that I am unwilling to pay, however, and he makes dogmatic and altogether unhelpful stipulations about the ontology of this transcendental body. What I've decided is necessary is to begin phenomenology all over again (and damn, does it creep me out how Husserlian that is), and just start with a phenomenological reduction to embodied consciousness.

Here's what you'll need for this project:

* a body (that is, a living body, yours, currently occupied by you, and I assume preferably only by you)
* consciousness

Now...

Wait, something's missing here. Henry has us re-open phenomenology on the basis of the ontological origin of experience in the transcendental life of this embodied consciousness. But for this kind of life to experience, to have meaning, it can't be alone, can it? The fundamental thing about embodiment is just that: it's never alone. The transcendental body is just as much an idealism as the allegedly disembodied transcendental ego, unless that body is not only always already an embodied consciousness, but also always already a body in the world. And that's where Henry seems obviously to go wrong: his "life" exists ab aeterno and sui generis, and it is very hard to imagine how that body could find itself unless already in a world - otherwise, nothing would ever happen to it.

So I think we need:

* a world
* others

And now we have Merleau-Ponty's set-up from the Phenomenology. Or, you could just say, we need to understand life as flesh that is of the flesh of the world itself, as in The Visible and the Invisible.

All that is to say, Merleau-Ponty had something essentially right with ambiguity.

the ambiguity of embodiment and the paradox of the transcendental subject

I've been poring over Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, Michel Henry's weird, insinuating, slantways critique of the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. These are rambling notes, but I wanted to post them anyway because it's been driving me crazy today.

Henry seems to interpret “classical” phenomenology as making the body an instrument of the ego’s act of perception, as though (I think) the ego reflects upon the body’s sensuous engagements with the world and thus comes to perceive. The ego that would “constitute” the body, he suggests, would be disengaged from the world by that constitution, and the body would be disconnected from the ego, and a mere thing among things. His solution is to assert that the transcendental ego is already a transcendental body: the body is immanent to the transcendental ego and vice-versa, in the form of transcendental life. “Absolute subjectivity” must be already a body and life, rather than to “have” a body as a mere mass, or else, he says, it’s impossible to understand how a subject could move a body. This of course is the problem Descartes’ dualism leaves behind. But I think that, as a critique of Husserlian phenomenology, this attacks a straw man. Furthermore, in Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, Henry doesn’t provide a very clear argument, and rarely provides a concrete enough phenomenological description, to make his case very compelling. Instead, he takes up ambiguities in certain phenomenological accounts of embodiment (implicitly, Merleau-Ponty’s as well as Husserl’s), and pushes them to become paradoxes — that is, he imposes an interpretation on the ambiguities that insinuates their authors asserted the two sides of the ambiguity as each an ultimate and exclusive truth. Further, he takes up the paradoxes in their thought and pushes them to become outright absurdities — that is, he takes what they express with profound perplexity as paradoxes their thinking has led them to, and insinuates that they merely contradict themselves.

So, I want to get back to a basic level, and back to the things themselves. What about the embodiment of subjectivity/consciousness presents problems for phenomenological philosophy? One is, the constitution of objects, on the basis of what must be, for embodied consciousness, a series of passively traced adumbrations. A familiar problem. One that I think is more à propos to Henry’s work, is the relationship between consciousness and sense perception. The reason sense perception is so difficult (especially if you either impose the metaphysics Henry claims Husserl presupposes, or else presuppose the metaphysics Henry does), is that sense perception appears in our ordinary mundane experiences to be both under the command of consciousness itself, and also subject to “external” forces. (The overwhelming use of vision as a metonym for sense perception obscures this — another story for another day.) In my daily life, my sense of hearing is both under the command of my consciousness in my attending to particular sounds, i.e., “listening,” and subject to the “external” forces of noise. I can’t have one without the other: unless I am subject to noise, I can’t listen. (Here belongs all kinds of stuff about affect, desire, and so forth, that I’ll skip over for now.)

I interpret this, as a starting point, from Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the ambiguity of embodiment. As embodied, my consciousness/ego is subject and object, an active perceiver and a passive receiver. This obviously doesn’t go far enough, because it doesn’t say how this is possible. Merleau-Ponty later went back to Husserl’s later work, and found there, I believe, the clue to working this out more fully: passive synthesis. Husserl seems to have regarded the passive synthesis as an underlying, pre-conscious or unconscious, affectivity whereby consciousness has something to perceive. To get back to my example: I can’t listen unless there’s a field of sound for me to listen into for that which, already as I begin listening, is attracting my attention. That ongoing passive unity of the field of sound is what I have been calling my subjection — affectively, it subjects me both to desire and to “revulsion,” to what I would constitute as melodious, euphonious, and to what I would constitute as noise. But here’s the paradox: those unities within the field of sound draw my attention as sounds already anticipated “to-be-melodious,” and those others strike me as already anticipated “to-be-dysphonious.”

I can’t see any way for Henry’s account of the absolute subject as transcendental life to adequately address this twofold relation that hearing establishes, let alone the subjection to the passively synthesized field of sound already having an affective dimension. The subjection I’ve described would, I think, have to fall to Henry’s category of the merely objective body — I would be subjected to noise insofar as my body is an object among objects, and my capacity for listening would have to be more properly “mine.” Or else, in his other mood, he would have to say that such an account asserts as equally absolute a subject whose body is itself and who listens, and a subject whose body is, absurdly, an object, and thus declare the whole account absurd.

intentionality and receptivityMichel Henry is in my pants!

Regular readers of this feature, and some people who just know me, and a few people whom I've grabbed at random and told about it, know that for several years I've been trying to work out a phenomenology of subjection. What I mean by subjection are all the ways that the conscious active subject or ego is susceptible to suffering and affectivity of all kinds. In relation to the phenomenology of consciousness or intentionality, what I've been poking around with is what Husserl called the "givenness" of sensation, or, elsewhere, passivity, and even, most weirdly, "pregivenness."

A standard, unhelpful, criticism of Husserl is that his idealist resolution of epistemology means that his phenomenology cannot account for the materiality of givenness. That the senses are materially conditioned by biological bodies seems to disappear from his explanation of consciousness. This is part of Michel Henry's criticism, and the impetus for Henry's ontological inquiry. I say this is wrong because Husserl speaks directly to givenness of sensory "hyle" in both Ideas II and in the analyses of passive synthesis (presented as lecture courses in the 1920s - and the spot where he coins the bizarre term "pregivenness"). Henry ignores this outright. However, part of Henry's and others' criticism of Husserl still seems right to me, in that Husserl's concern in the passive synthesis lectures is not to account for passive synthesis in any extensive or thorough way, but to use it to show how consciousness can have intentional objects and proceed to make judgments and to know them. In other words, Husserl's analysis is directed always toward the teleological endpoint of knowing, presuming, as he does throughout his work, that consciousness is a little knowing-machine.

That seems obviously false to me, or else trivially true. Either Husserl means that knowing in a serious, scientific way (and that seems to be the case), and he's wrong that consciousness primarily aims at knowing; or else Husserl means knowing in a very thin way, as in, e.g., judging merely that the keyboard is there, and judging merely that the letters I'm typing are showing up on my screen (and he doesn't seem to mean this), and then indeed every act of consciousness aims at a kind of knowing, but it's a trivial sort of knowing. In my view, consciousness does all sorts of things that aren't knowing, and even most often engages in non-knowing acts. Most of my wakeful consciousness is spent thinking about food, sex, and music (in approximately that order), not in a judicative way, but more in a state of generalized lust.

(If you think that's too much information, then you clearly have not been reading this blog, or don't know me, or aren't one of the random passersby I've grabbed and talked phenomenology at.)

Henry's answer to this problem is provocative, but ultimately can't be cashed out phenomenologically. He says the basic foundation of consciousness, that would explain what Husserl leaves unexplained about "pregivenness," and would counter Husserl's teleology, is Life. Life is characterized by its pathos (a notion I have deep affinity for): to be a living conscious subject is fundamentally to be a living subject, which is a hungering, suffering, loving, etc., subject, rather than a judging, knowing one.

Yet there's all kinds of problems with Henry's critique, and he smuggles in a whole lot of metaphysical baggage. Plus, I don't think the foundationalist move Henry makes is either necessary or a good solution to the gaps Husserl leaves. Henry is too eager to fill those gaps, and Husserl is too eager to leave them behind. I want to explore them, and the dilemma I have at the moment is a startling one: I don't know whether what I'm doing fits into phenomenology (Husserlian or otherwise), but I don't know what method other than phenomenology would provide any kind of rigor for exploring subjection. I do not want to be caught up in ontological speculation, and wouldn't be caught dead adopting a theological explanation (like Henry does). I'm not sure where that leaves me. It's unsettling.

album of the day: Dire Straits

Dire Straits were, of course, a seminal post-punk, roots-revival band, at least in the first phase of their history. Their first album was released in 1978, when the top-selling album in the US was the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever. That is to say, Dire Straits came on the scene at the height of, and at the beginning of the end of, disco. Good timing, boys!

It's hard to imagine an album more diametrically opposed to everything disco. Apart from a couple of double-dubbed guitars, every cut on the album is just four instrument tracks and vocals, the basic kit of rock. And unlike punk, Dire Straits obviously featured Mark Knopfler's virtuoso guitar work and odd impressionistic snapshot lyrics.

I didn't know any of that when I bought my first Dire Straits album (in fact, the less well-regarded second album, Communiqué), or even when I went back and bought this one. All I knew was Douglas Adams had recommended them in the only sex scene in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. That's a weird connection, because although the music is gorgeous on this record, it's not what I would call sexy, since a lot of Knopfler's stuff is kinda morose. That probably says more about Douglas Adams than about me.

As for me, I took instant liking to Dire Straits, because I was developing my taste for mopey music back then.

And with the exception of "Southbound Again" and "Setting Me Up" - neither of which is really joyful - this is a pretty damn mopey record. Not everything is a gem, of course. "In the Gallery" is a somewhat heavy-handed criticism of trendy arty types and a lament for the artists and art they ruin. I also have the nerve to think the giant hit "Sultans of Swing" is a tad overwrought - but I read it as moping over how unrewarding and uninspired the pub rock scene can be, especially for true artists yearning to breathe free.

My favorites are, as I've tipped my hand already, the contemplative portrait pieces: "Lions," "Wild West End" and "Down to the Waterline" (despite being uptempo), and, when I can get past the artistic-struggle vibe, "Sultans of Swing." Here's a representative stanza from "Lions":

Church bell clinging on just trying
To get a crowd for Evensong
Nobody cares to depend upon the chime it plays
They're all in the station praying for trains
the Congregation late again
It's getting darker all the time these flagpole days
Drunk old soldier he gave her a fright
He's a crazy lion howling for a fight

(Line breaks, and indeed lyrics, are approximate, as Knopfler was at the time a strict adherent to the mumble-something-approximating-what-you-wrote school of folk-rock singing.) While the song pretty clearly tracks a working woman through her commute home, we get a picture of her somewhat vulnerable, and certainly lonesome, state of mind, by way of atmospheric details - as though the city was the outward expression of her emotional state. And that's just cool.

Something else that really strikes me about this album is Knopfler's range as a musician. I mean, duh, right? He's easily one of the 10 best guitarists in rock music of the era - and for pure musicianship, just out-and-out being able to make his guitar do anything, I'm not sure anyone's better. On Dire Straits he's all over the place - tight grooves, anthemic melody lines, lilting, definitely some weepies - and it's absolutely perfect, not a note out of place, not a note too many or too few.

the disappearing body

As I've been thinking about how big my body is, and especially about the phenomenon of feeling myself to be taller than normal, I've hit on two fundamental difficulties of phenomenological description of embodiment. One is the huge issue of accounting for a norm in experience. I'm working out something on that. The other is the ambiguity of embodiment.

One way it is often put, that I don't find particularly helpful, is by distinguishing "having" a body from "being" one's body. In general, it is said, we go around "having" or "owning" a body: wakeful conscious life consists of just going out and doing stuff, and "the body" is an instrument of that conscious life. "I use my body" to take out the trash or to type a blog post about embodiment. "The body" is said to disappear for me in those circumstances, because the focus of my attention is on the action at hand. That is, I am not aware of or attentive to the movement of my hands and arms and torso and legs and feet as I bend over, grab the extended flappy things on the garbage bag that you tie at the top, and proceed to bind off the bag, etc., etc. I just go and do it, and my consciousness spends its time worrying about the bag's structural integrity.

On the other hand, when conscious attention is drawn to the body itself, this is most often in a situation of dysfunction, disease, or pain (or, drawing from an intriguing analysis I read yesterday, when traits of that body subject me to social stigmatization). If, as I'm pulling the bag out of the trash can to carry it out to the dumpster, the weight and the twist of the plastic top of the bag presses against the index finger of my left hand that I cut last night paring a peach, then I experience myself as "being my body." Its direct affect on me is, in a moment like that, obtrusively palpable, my embodiment reveals itself as inescapable, etc., etc.

Obviously, the body only nearly disappears from us, and can always come back into the forefront of awareness, mostly by the unbidden event of the passivity or suffering of the body. But the normal condition, according to this standard phenomenological analysis, is of the body's relative disappearance.

Two things about this bug me. First is that I can't ever quite understand what is meant by saying we "own" our bodies. This phrasing comes into phenomenological writing in English, I believe, by way of translating Merleau-Ponty's term "corps-propre" as "my own body" or even (as I've seen it) "the owned body." Maybe I'm just weird, but I can't think of my body as owned in any but a weakly analogical way to the way I own other things. My everyday experience of embodiment is more intimate than that. Even taking out the trash, I have a strong sense of my body's presence in the action.

Like I said, perhaps I'm just weird. There could be autobiographical or physiological reasons for my having more constant everyday awareness of my embodiment, which would line up well with the common phenomenological analysis I laid out above. Since early in elementary school I've had a kind of body dysmorphism, and for as long as I can remember I've had pain caused by the bony skis I have instead of feet. I'm pretty constantly aware of my posture and movement as a result.

In any case, I don't know how normal it is for our bodies to "disappear" into the background of our actions. But even to the extent they do, what's interesting about this is not the disappearing, but that even the disapparent body (my coinage, as far as I know; I suppose I could say disapparated?) is still co-present in those actions. Even if I don't consciously feel the weight of my arms in lifting the trash bag, I do feel the muscle contractions that are the bracing of the weight and force of my arms against the weight of the bag. To me, that co-presentation, always passively synthesized into the action, is the point of interest. That's the sense in which embodiment is ambiguous, and I object that the "having/being" dichotomy obscures that ambiguity by superimposing that hermeneutic binary on the phenomenon.

In other words, one reason I'm interested in the phenomenon of suddenly-feeling-taller is that it tells me something about the constant co-presentation of the background phenomenon of my height. I always have a height, even in the everyday when no one is specifically asking how tall I am or when I'm not specifically reaching for something up high, etc. It is constant in my perspective on everything.

the ethics of teaching ethics

I had an interesting, brief conversation with one of the proprietors of the horse trail ride outfit we patronized in Sonoma County yesterday, about what I do for a living. He said he thought everyone should take a course in ethics, that people needed it, he said, in order to understand that what they do matters and that they should always be thoughtful about what they do. That sounds about right to me, I said. I mentioned my great experiences with nursing students in Professional Ethics and Bioethics, and he mentioned his own great experiences at UCSF hospital.

That got me thinking about the conclusion of The University in Ruins and my feeling that Bill Readings' postmodern excesses needed to be amended with something more substantive, more concrete, even - dare I say it - more practical. (Afflicted as he was with the 1990s pomo academic disease, he wasn't able to come out and say anything for fear of being accused of having said one thing to the exclusion of the other thing, or, still worse, of having pretended to have said everything! Lawd, help us! I digress.)

Readings says, as I mentioned before, that under the regime of "excellence," that is, in ruined universities, teachers have an ethical obligation to students, something related to justice, but which cannot be determined in advance. Removing the pomo posturing, what I think this boils down to is: college faculty, as teachers, have ethical obligations to our students. What exactly is the nature of these ethical obligations?

I think I know what it can't be.

(1) It can't be an obligation to prepare students for a career. Many folks in higher ed, especially in administration, and most folks who form public higher ed policy (most often, in blissful ignorance), would be absolutely scandalized by that remark. I remember well the radio program we heard once on a trip somewhere. A high-tech industry bigwig and a CSU exec were both on, talking about the way higher ed serves or fails to serve industry needs. The exec said that by the time skills and knowledge bases are taught at universities, they're outmoded, but that wasn't the problem. The company will train employees in the new stuff. But what they really need from the universities are to educate students in how to think for themselves, how to interact and communicate clearly with others, and in particular, how to communicate with non-experts. In turn, the CSU exec said he felt that industry needed the CSU to train future employees in the most up-to-date skills and knowledge bases, so they could jump right into the front lines.

The broader lesson, at least as far as I'm concerned, is that university education is not reducible to, and not even an appropriate place, for career training. Not even my PhD program trained me to be a faculty member. It credentialed me, but I learned how to be a faculty member on the job, the way everybody else learns to do a job, by doing it.

(2) It can't be an obligation to lead students to become specialized experts in a field of knowledge. Many students seem to expect this, and some (especially first and second year students) think they are wasting any minute of time outside of major courses. There's two reasons university education should not make people experts in a field of knowledge. First of all, any reasonably complex field of knowledge is too immense and evolving for four years (or so) to make anyone an expert. Second, I think it's naïve to the point of preposterousness to imagine that an expert should or can know only one narrow field - not out of some "well-rounded person" silliness, but because it's epistemologically naïve.

(3) It can't be an obligation to serve humankind.

(4) It can't be an obligation to serve the good of the nation.

(5) It can't be an obligation to serve Truth.

I won't comment further on these three. They're the subject of Lyotard's and of Readings' critiques.

(6) It can't be an obligation to liberate students. This would scandalize bell hooks and other Freireans, I suppose, and it hurts my soul a bit to say so, too, but I think it's the truth. First of all, as Readings actually pointed out nicely, taking this stance is just a leeeetle bit messianic, eh? Professor with a Christ-complex? I've slipped into this now and then, and it's embarrassing in retrospect. First of all, 99% of my students would have to be hit over the head with a club and dragged by their hair toward liberation. Secondly, the remaining 1% generally don't need my help to be liberated, and of the few who might be helped along in their own project of liberation by my teaching, I can't say I benefit any of them by giving them help.

(7) It can't be an obligation to model, and to provide opportunities, for virtue, or for citizenship. Who the hell am I to present myself as a paragon of anything - virtue or vice? Most of the time, I have to ask my students what day it is. (Okay, that's exaggerated for comic effect: 40% of the time, I have to ask my students what day it is.)

Okay, that's fairly complete. So, what's the content of the ethical obligation teachers have to students? The terms I want to use strike me as overly aesthetic, and I'm deeply suspicious of aestheticized politics, so with that caveat . . .

Meeting classes. The Cow State Santa Claus faculty handbook actually specifies that faculty have an obligation to meet classes. This is a policy initiated by a 1969 Chancellor's Office Executive Order (really! You can look it up!). But I'm taking it in an extended sense: we have an obligation to meet our students in the sense of acknowledging them, acknowledging their humanity, their difference from us, that they are not us, but them; we have an obligation to be present in a full sense in class, for reasons I may cash out in a later post; we have an obligation to be there.

Challenging students. By "challenge," I don't mean "make the class hard." I also don't mean "make the class intellectually demanding," at least, not to the exclusion of other challenges. We can, and should, challenge assumptions, challenge beliefs, and especially to challenge comforts - of all kinds. This is extremely difficult, in my opinion, for both students and faculty, and it can only happen if faculty abide by the obligation to . . .

Honesty. Here, I don't mean "telling the truth." In fact, you can be more honest while lying, sometimes. I mean honesty with regard to what we know and don't know, what we think and what we think no one should think, even if we don't have very good reasons for it. If you challenge students without honesty, you're bullshitting them, and yourself, and you're doing tremendous damage to everyone involved. I can't think of anything that shuts students down more than dishonesty.

Humility/Compassion/Not Being An Asshole. You'd think this would go without saying, unless you've been to college. The title of expert conveys a sense of self-importance that academia encourages academics to deploy in every arena as a weapon. A classroom is no place for a weapon. More than that, though, teaching, as I am trying to articulate it, can't happen in the context of the presumption that what the teacher is saying or doing is the most important thing in the room, let alone the world. What I do is far less important than what my students do, if what I want to do is teach. This is also hard, because ego defenses are just that. Between this obligation and honesty, I prescribe a lot of exposure to potentially painful experiences as the key to teaching and learning. (Oh, did I mention students have the same obligations? Cuz they do.)

Surprising. This might simply follow from challenging. Surprise here means saying or doing the instructively unexpected. You can't just spring out from behind a lectern yelling "Surprise!" - it has to offer something to think about. The surprise can't be dismissible as your insanity or quirkiness; it has to lead to wonder beyond that.

**

Is there some overall purpose to all this? It certainly makes life more interesting, which might mean it makes life more fulfilling. It might help people develop mental and emotional flexibility and strength. But I don't have a grand narrative to organize and give a foundation to this. I don't know where it leads, necessarily, since, for instance, surprise is essentially open-ended, and not being an asshole doesn't have a direct object. I'm also short on argument here. I just think I'm right.

logic and paradox

Husserl's lectures on passive synthesis (which is what everybody calls them) were actually entitled Lectures on Transcendental Logic. What he's trying to get at in them is the source of meaning and truth. Big time stuff.

What I was reading today included a remarkable section on the paradox Husserl saw at the heart of knowledge of all kinds, but especially scientific knowledge. He says that we accept, as the regulatory norm of knowledge, a logic of truth (I'll call it; I'm being freer with language rather than stick to technical terms). That is, we accept that something is known truly when we can provide evidence of its intuitive meaning and logically connect the evidence to the judgment we make. For instance, the knowledge judgment that "the pencil my sister made for me is sitting on my table" would be truly known iff I have evidence of its truth and can demonstrate the logical validity of the judgment I've made (that is, that the evidence is evidence of the truth of the judgment).

Our judgments, and the logic of truth implicit in those judgments, is never met with perfect evidence, in part because every act of perception aimed at some object is incomplete and incomplete specifically as presenting evidence. Whenever I look at the pencil, I do so from some angle, which is to say that I never see the whole pencil. Even a series of looks at the pencil exhaustive of all possible angles (which of course is not something I could actually achieve) is not exhaustive or final seeing of the pencil, because the series has to be held together for consciousness by way of retained experiences - that is, by merely figural intentions of the pencil that are not filled in with evidence. The glance I had from the front is not the perspective I have now, and all I have is the trace of that glance, not the full evidence of that perspective. Furthermore, the traces themselves are held together in that series of glances "passively," by perception itself, as it were, since we're just not capable of holding them all actively in consciousness at once.

In short, our judgments always exceed their warrant in perceptual evidence, and the logic of truth that binds them together itself lacks direct evidence, because of the passivity of the series of retained evidence. Husserl puts it in hyperbolic terms: there's nothing to say that the series of evidences couldn't just run right off the rails at any moment, and just utterly fail to continue to provide concordant ratifications of the series. After all, we sometimes make errors in our perceptual judgments, and we experience those errors just that way: the series stops continuing.

So when I make the judgment that "the pencil my sister made for me is sitting on my table," my consciousness writes a check my perceptions can't cash. This is essential to every external perception and every judgment about matters of fact in the external world. That could be a recap of Hume's skepticism, except for the turn Husserl makes, which is to say that, despite all that, we really do know. The question isn't whether or not we know, the question is, how is it that there came to be something to know, for a critter whose perceptions are always incompletely evidentiary, inchoate, dependent?

One of the pleasures of philosophy is to be able to sit down with a thought like that and let the weirdness of it wash over you. Husserl's not everybody's cup of joe, I realize, but for my money, he gives good weirdness.

how big is my body? - the temporary feeling of being taller

Here's an initial description of the experience of my own body feeling taller to me.

The other day, walking home through downtown Turlock, I had an experience of my body as taller. As I’ve mentioned, I love this feeling, and I was able to focus some attention on it and possibly prolong it. We were walking along the south side sidewalk on Mitchell Avenue, from Denair Avenue to Palm. The sidewalk there is uneven, mainly from tree roots lifting the slabs of concrete – though I don’t believe this is a necessary feature of the experience, since it happens on even sidewalks as well. Suddenly, in a single step, I felt about a head taller.

Having a proprioceptive sense of being taller is a paradoxical experience. In my ordinary physical dealings with the world, my height is appresented to me. It is concomitant with my reaching for something on a shelf, or my walking gait, or through the fit of clothing or furniture. When I feel taller for myself and to myself, I feel as though this relation has shifted, that I am stretched. Specifically, I feel the stretch in my legs, arms, neck, and particularly visually. The ground looks further away. This is almost never unnerving or uncomfortable, and does not cause any difficulty in my ongoing activity. (It almost always happens when I am walking.) I don’t feel as if I no longer “fit” the world or my clothing, or my body for that matter. Only that I am taller.

At the same time (this is the paradoxical part) I continue to move and project into the world as usual, and the distortion of my felt sense of proportion does not make much difference in the way I feel that I can move. The feeling is only of being taller. (It is not a view from above, as in some kinds of out-of-body experience. I do not feel in any way disconnected from our outside of my body.)

The feeling rarely lasts more than a few seconds, and sometimes just a split second (though sometimes it recurs several times in quick succession over the course of a few seconds). The other day, it lasted about 10 seconds or so, in part because as it happened I directed my attention on it and attempted to will it to continue. I think that may have been effective, but I have never successfully voluntarily willed it to begin.

I have written that my limbs feel longer. This is complex. When the moment of taller-ness happens, I tend to look down at the sidewalk, because it’s the best way to experience it. I walk on, watching the sidewalk ahead of me, and see my moving legs and feet peripherally. They look further away, and at the same time my legs feel longer to the hips. As I shift my gaze to look further ahead, though still down at the sidewalk – say, 15 to 20 feet ahead – my gaze feels lifted higher. The enjoyment of the experience comes in part from a feeling of overseeing, even commanding the environment. There’s undoubtedly a cultural dimension to this, but to me it’s more of a physical sensation of bodily capacity.

How is this experience given? How is my body’s height given, and even pre-given, in my experience of walking in general, such that this experience of taller-ness can arise? It is very much a visually constituted experience (part of me wonders if my poor vision is largely responsible; my astigmatism makes depth perception tricky), but not exclusively. I feel taller-ness in my legs, especially, and to a lesser degree in my arms and in the top of my head. I described it above as a stretch, and that’s exactly it: my legs stretch down further. Sometimes the feeling is of my legs stretching through the surface I’m walking on, falling further into the ground somehow. The muscles feel more taut, as when stretching a limb out to reach, and the success of the reach is evident in the feeling – each step a successful striving to hit the far-away ground. Meanwhile, my head floats higher above, and I see from greater elevation, everything seeming to be below my eyes.

Let me emphasize again the paradox: at the same moment I sense my body as taller and as “normal” in height, or, so to speak, I know better, and my proprioceptive sense of my body is unstable, un-fulfillable – I have equivocal senses of my own body’s size that I cannot fully mesh together. This is also rather pleasant, almost the way being puzzled can be pleasant.

I don’t know if anybody else has experiences like this. If anybody coming across this does and wants to make a comment, please do. Or if you’d rather say something privately, please email me.

de-legitimation and purposeless universities

Bill Readings makes what I think is the right argument regarding the de-legitimation of higher education in The University in Ruins. Previous structurally legitimating notions of the university were rational (the Kantian model) and cultural (the Humboldtian model), but these have collapsed under the weight of the university’s core function as a bureaucratic corporation.

His analysis of the bureaucratic university as an administrative institution is spot-on. Universities are measured by scales that have no referents and that are essentially meaningless – among them, rankings like that performed by US News, institutional research data like graduation rates, time-to-graduation, etc. The very concept of excellence is devoid of meaning.

Readings does not lament this. Although the post-modern university (he prefers not to use this term, but it’s what he means) has no legitimation, the nostalgic drive to re-legitimate it would only restore one or another of the not-terribly-noble legitimations of the past. Instead, he argues that the university should be treated as a ruin – a potentially interesting place to be, that still has some remaining resources to do some interesting things. He says that the university without a purpose should instead be organized around the rhetorical and ethical obligation of the relation of pedagogy, which is to say, universities should be places where teaching happens.

Now, if the teaching and other activities of university faculty are only measured via what boil down to reputation surveys, what would make teaching one thing versus another the right thing to do? Readings’ answer is: nothing. So teaching is not about disseminating knowledge, or of producing it, or of reproducing culture, or anything related to some content. Instead, it’s an ethical relation between teacher and students. So far, so good, I think.

We can’t say in advance what ethical obligations that relationship creates, because those obligations arise from and are inherent to that relation itself. What can we say about it in general? As a teacher, Readings says, my conduct should be focused on justice.

Here’s where he loses me. What we have up to this point looks like Socratic education (Socratic, not Platonic). It is not in service to the state, to the economy, to the church, or to any particular, given set of ideals or any particular, given ideology. After all, what else did Socrates do but raise questions about all of that? Instead, Readings writes something not much different from gibberish:

The referent of teaching, that to which it points, is the name of Thought. Let me stress that this is not a quasi-religious dedication. I say "name" and I capitalize "Thought" not in order to indicate a mystical transcendence but in order to avoid the confusion of the referent with any one signification. The name of Thought precisely is a name in that it has no intrinsic meaning. In this sense, it is just like excellence. However, Thought differs from excellence in that it does not bracket the question of value. (159)

Oh, for fuck’s sake! How 90s-tastic can you get?

Anyway, the actual idea he's presenting here, as far as I can tell, is something like what I've outlined above. Since (a) nobody's actually watching what I teach, and (b) the only measure of what I'm doing that anybody cares anything about is an arbitrary notion that boils down to customer satisfaction, and (c) this is the case universally in universities, (d) because their purposes are referent-less - that is, there is no legitimating narrative for university education and it serves structural economic and social purposes not linked meaningfully to any particular activity taking place within them, it follows (e) that teaching has no purpose and no essential content. From this we can conclude (f) that teachers who so choose would be able to teach according to a notion of ethical responsibility that would be, from the standpoint of the administrative apparatus of the institution, immeasurable, unknowable, unacknowledged, and unnoticed.

What disturbs me about this is not the idea that university education is, for most intents and purposes, bullshit (that is to say, everyone involved could - and many do - treat it as bullshit with no discernible effect on the function of the system). What disturbs me is not the idea that teaching is a contentless activity related to an inchoate and non-referential concept of justice. As I said, those together fairly well describe Socrates wandering around Athens making people upset. I'm fine with that.

What disturbs me is that, if universities are ruins, and there is no purpose for ruins, there's no reason to maintain them. Again, I think that's probably true, and is certainly characteristic of the long-term trend of higher education. There are very few places where it's safe to do this crazy thing Readings calls teaching. There are fewer where it's safe and remunerative. And getting fewer by the hour. I admit it: what upsets me is the likelihood that I won't have my job much longer.

Then again, maybe I will. Just because universities are purposeless doesn't mean the capitalist economic system will liquidate them. Capitalism runs on consumption, and universities are spectacular sites of consumption.

album of the day: Nine Objects of Desire

The last year I spent in Pittsburgh I was in the habit of listening to Harry Shearer's weird weekly radio program, Le Show, every Sunday night on the local NPR station (which happened to be a unit of Duquesne). In between Shearer's bits of satire and tongue-in-cheek reading of bits from the LA Times "hot property" column and trade publications, there were delightful musical fills. Among other qualities, Shearer has excellent taste in music.

He started playing stuff that I didn't recognize as Suzanne Vega for some time. The songs were sharp, had an interesting sense of language, and often some good jazzy rhythm guitar. It turned out the songs were all from this album, which the All Music Guide has no patience for.

I dig their criticism, even if I don't agree with their overall judgment. There are some spiffy songs here. The best of them are probably "My Favorite Plum," "Head Shots," "Stockings" and the very nice "Caramel" - all of which Shearer introduced me to. Aside from "Head Shots," these all seem to describe states of desire - which has always suggested to me that the title of the album is hardly an accident, even if we can't quite call it a themed album. "Caramel" compares love to food, something I think we should always do. "My Favorite Plum" might do the same thing, and if so, it's subtly lascivious, and I approve, or else it really is just Suzanne Vega obsessing over a tree fruit, and I approve. "Stockings" would seem to be about very nearly falling into a lesbian crush, and once again, I approve (although almost none of my lesbian crushes have achieved very much).

"Head Shots" is just kinda creepy. I don't know what it's about, except seeing pictures of a boy's head all over the place. Vega does creepy so well, it's creepy. I don't think she's creepy, I just think she has a creepy ability to express being creeped out by creepy stuff. Maybe her ability being creepy, and the prevalence of creepy themes in her work, means she is in fact sorta creepy, but I'm not yet prepared to render that judgment.

Of the rest, I like "Lolita," "No Cheap Thrill" (which Shearer also played) and "Thin Man" a lot. Lauren really likes "Tombstone," which is about why tombstones are so great - namely, that they weather well. There's only one song on here I really could do without, "World Before Columbus," and even that has a nice guitar line.

A guitar line that is, unfortunately, obscured by the over-production and (AMG got this right) muddy engineering that mar the record. For my money, Vega's song-writing here is clever and smart and shines through despite the production, and that makes it worthwhile.

philosophy and the de-legitimation of education

This week I finished reading a 90-year-old book, and wondering why I had read it, and what it had to do with philosophy today. The feeling scraped at a previously acquired irritation regarding philosophy in the academic setting.

During my recent conference travels, I ended up in a conversation about maintaining currency in the field of philosophy. I said something about feeling like I should read people like Badiou or Agamben, even though I can't see what people find so compelling about them (which is a nice way to put it). The person I was talking to said that didn't matter, that as philosophers, we specialize, and we don't need to take account of present day or contemporary philosophers, even within our so-called continental tradition.

I wonder. Perhaps philosophy does not "progress" in the way we seem to think sciences do: contemporary philosophers, even in taking account of previous philosophers in "the tradition" do not necessarily or even usually claim to be improving the state of human knowledge or wisdom. Why would that be? And if that's true, why do we expect our elite academic philosophers to publish "new" or "original" philosophical works? What would "new" contribute to a body of knowledge that does not "advance"?

One possible answer, that academic philosophers shouldn't approve of, is that the professional academic business of publishing is a sham. What that could mean about philosophy itself is a further question: What does academic philosophy have to do with philosophy?

On the other hand, what warrants philosophy as an undertaking at all? The last philosopher I can think of who claimed that philosophy was not only scientifically rigorous, but the model of scientific rigor itself, was Husserl. That is, Husserl claimed that philosophy had to do with truth. Other than a handful of very seriously addicted Husserl scholars, I don't know of anyone who continues to uphold this claim. In any case, if you have the truth, you don't have to read anyone who isn't telling the truth, and so, you can exclude contemporary pretenders. Isn't that convenient and cute?

If philosophy isn't warranted on the basis of a special access to truth (a method, or an insight - a low or royal road), then what does warrant philosophy? I believe that most academic philosophers practice philosophy as, basically, a sub-discipline of literature, with a canon of texts not grouped by nationality, but by a peculiar style and content. What academic philosophers do, in that case, is a form of literary criticism of these texts. Since there is no specific insight or method, it is harder to say why you should read some practitioners of philosophy and not others. You could say that you specialize in a particular major figure, and then your practice should involve staying current on what other specialists write about that figure's works - just like, say, Chaucer studies.

There once was a cultural warrant for this activity, but the legitimacy of that warrant ran out by the 1950s or so (as Bill Readings cogently argues), so now the only warrant for this practice is that it somehow serves capital accumulation. For instance, somehow, the practice of (to take a random name) Heidegger scholarship has the effect of preparing you to be able to train students either in some "critical thinking" or "communication" skill salable in the job market, or else to be able to produce consumers of Heidegger scholarship (i.e., graduate students). This leaves academic philosophy tremendously vulnerable to market demands for either salable skills or scholarship, and moreover, to the discovery that someone other than academic philosophers can provide the necessary products at a cheaper price - someone in another academic discipline, or someone off the street who happens to be a decent, and fairly logical, writer.

A final option is that philosophy is not warranted in any of these ways, and can only be the practice of radical questioning and doubt. No particular methodological commitment is important to this notion of philosophy, because methods are merely techniques of radicalism. There is no objective reason whatsoever to narrow or to broaden the scope of the philosophy you read, no objective reason to remain current in the published record of academic philosophy. There are subjective reasons, namely, that someone's method or book seems to work for what you're trying to do, or turns you on.

In this case, philosophy as practiced in academic institutions is completely at odds with philosophy itself. In fact, the aim of academic philosophy is almost entirely destructive of philosophy itself, for the simple reason that academic philosophy could not afford to be scandalized in this way in the contemporary university. It would be all too clear that the emperor has no clothes - that the system of credentialing and awarding of authority practiced in academia has no connection to philosophy as a practice of radicalism, and in fact works to eliminate radicalism. A "radical philosophy department" is a contradiction in terms, unless somehow a group of people have managed to extort or otherwise commandeer institutional resources in service to its own destruction. That would be very weird.

For myself, I've come to think that the last two answers are mutually compatible and close to the truth of things. It makes my status - a Phd in philosophy, teaching in a university - not very comfortable, yet - given my tenuous-track employment, in a university whose public support has rapidly diminished - more understandable.

I'm speaking of all this in terms that are far too totalizing. Obviously not every class taught in every philosophy department is either so dogmatic, or cynical, or nihilistic, as my discussion suggests. A few philosophers working in academic settings probably do manage to get away with being radical. Until one of them commits a serious felony, though, we're not likely to know their names.

Ideas II

In the end, I’m a little disappointed in Ideas II. Some of the most difficult issues Husserl raises with regard to the lived Body he either resolves to my dissatisfaction or doesn’t resolve at all. From my previous experience of reading the lectures on passive synthesis, I’m pretty sure that’s where I need to go next. Meantime, I should state what I think are the key issues.

Husserl’s discussion in Ideas II is framed by Modern philosophy, ultimately by Descartes and Descartes’ metaphysical (substance and attribute) dualism. This leads Husserl to continue to work on the mind-body relation, despite his constant refrain that there isn’t a mind-body problem to solve: for the lived Body, or the personal Ego, or the living I, consciousness or spirit is always embodied, even though we have phenomenological insight of the separability of consciousness. Consciousness as such is separable from the Body, but to be a living I, that consciousness or spirit or soul (he uses spirit and soul interchangeably) is dependent on the Body.

All well and good. But the way this dependence is experienced, and why it’s significant, are not sufficiently explored by Husserl, in my opinion. This is the main thing that disappoints me. I chalk it up to the Cartesian frame of the mind-body issue in philosophy, and that disappoints me a second time (though not as much), because it doesn’t seem very phenomenological to take up the Cartesian frame of the issue. Why shouldn’t, or couldn’t, Husserl have gone through epoché and reduction of lived Body in order to reach the same ontological region, and thereby totally escaped Cartesianism? (I’m not meaning to say that Husserl is Cartesian, since he clearly isn’t. Again, I refer to the Cartesian framing of the issue.) On the other hand, would philosophers have been thinking about minds and bodies at all, or in anything like this way, unless Descartes had come along? Would it have occurred to Husserl, or anyone else, even to investigate consciousness in relation to lived Body?

There are experiences in everyday life that do suggest separability of consciousness and lived Body, from as mundane an example as daydreaming while walking down the street, to highfalutin things like meditative “out-of-body” experiences. (That might be something to consider!) We also have experiences of making incorrect judgments on the basis of perception, of pain that we can’t completely localize, of pleasure that overtakes us, of altered states of consciousness, etc., etc. There’s a tremendous range of experiences that offer themselves to potentially very rich investigations. But is it a trick of philosophical tradition, or even a trick of language, that leads us to talk about bodies and minds, and even to regard bodies as possessions or objects? What is it in these experiences themselves, apart from our ordinary attitude (objectivating, etc.), that leads to any questioning of the way consciousness is embodied?

In short, I feel as if Husserl was distracted from this potential investigation by the Cartesian “mind-body problem.” (In addition, he was clearly aiming for a clarification of the distinction between natural and human sciences, and arguing for the primacy of the human to the natural, as well as for the primacy of phenomenology as a science of consciousness – which I suppose is a version of the claim philosophy finally gave up some time ago to being the queen of sciences).

One particular way this disappoints me is that whenever Husserl gets to a point where there’s something obscure in the way we encounter the lived Body, he doesn’t spend a lot of time on it. I don’t know how much further we can investigate certain of these obscurities, but I think it has to be further than he has in Ideas II. My friend Randy tipped me on to one of them: the “aesthesiological” body, appresented as a unity in conscious acts of perception, but not intended as an object of consciousness. We “have” a lived Body in every act of sense perception (say), but not only do we not consciously constitute the unity of this Body (that is, it is “passively” “pregiven”), but we find, if we attempt to enact the conscious constitution of the aesthesiological unity of the lived Body, that we can’t do it ourselves. This is just nuts!

And terribly exciting to me. And the source of great inspiration. In Husserl’s terms, the things I’ve been obsessing over for years now are all of these obscure matters of the pregiven, passive unity of the lived Body.

album of the day: Backatown

We heard Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews on some late-night program, and the performance was just terrific. So we bought the disc.

I ain't got much to say about it. It's terrific. My only criticism is that I wish at least a few of the numbers were extended jams instead of the tight 3-minute jobs they are. I'm not sure if that would defeat Trombone Shorty's purpose here: he might well have a sort of point to make about musical economy, or jabs, or the state of recorded pop music in the fatal stages of capitalism. I don't know.

If you're into that kind of thing, you might enjoy playing "what genre is this" with the album. I had initially stuck him in jazz, before we played the CD, because of the TV performance we'd seen. He was dressed kind of jazz then, too. He looks sorta jazz on the cover. But I moved him to the general mishmash section of our CD collection, because I've decided that the more central vibe here is funk.

But really, what this is, is music. That whole genre-definition game is overdetermined by capitalism, class, and culturally snobbery. At bottom, the only thing that holds a genre together is usage. Certain traits of musical performance and composition keep getting called "jazz" until the family resemblance fools us into imagining it has an essence. By then, it has a cultural cachet, the main significance of which, especially these days, is its brand-identity.

Anyway, you should listen to Trombone Shorty and have a good time.

phenomenological ethics

Today I've been reading Ideas II, on the constitution of the world of nature and of the human world. It led to some probably not terribly novel thoughts about ethics, of all things, in relation to what Husserl was doing on the general question of world-constitution.

So, three quotations from Husserl that frame my thoughts.

What is educational in the phenomenological reduction… is also this: it henceforth makes us in general sensitive toward grasping other attitudes, whose rank is equal to that of the natural attitude … and which, therefore, just like that latter, constitute only relative and restricted correlates of being and sense. (§ 49 (d), p. 189)

[For a person who knows nothing of physics, the] sense-content of physics does not belong to his actual surrounding world (p. 195f).

Speaking quite universally, the surrounding world is not a world “in itself” but is rather a world “for me,” precisely the surrounding world of its Ego-subject, a world experienced by the subject in his intentional lived experiences with the sense-content of the moment. (§50, p. 196)

Posit: A fundamental problem in ethics is the incompleteness of our ethical regard and acknowledgment. That is, a basic motivation for acting unethically is our failure to acknowledge someone or something’s ethical claim on us.

The instance I have in mind is the rejection of the legitimacy of same-sex marriage, in particular on the basis of religious dogma. In my opinion, a person who denies that same-sex couples should have the opportunity to marry on the basis of one’s own religious belief is doing something unethical. It’s difficult to think of it as motivated by anything other than blind hatred or fear, and I suppose, in many cases, that is as far as it goes. But perhaps there are people who believe sincerely that it’s perfectly good of them to do this unethical thing – that they have good reasons for it, that it’s the right thing to do, etc. They have as little doubt about their rectitude as I have in their blameworthiness.

The world of such persons is, as Husserl puts it, simply the world for them, the surrounding world of just those Ego-subjects, and is therefore relative to their position, their constitution of the world, etc. The sincere denial of the right of same-sex couples to marry on the basis of religious dogma makes sense in a world in which a certain sense-content of ethics is missing. Dogmatism rules out the limitation of one’s own perspective, it denies that one’s perspective is a perspective. The dogmatist takes his or her own world, the world for his or her own Ego-subject, to be the world in itself.

Now, there’s at least two ways we could go about ethical discourse. One, the most common, is to engage ethical discourse as a contest of arguments. Understood that way, we could deal with our religious zealot by demonstrating the circularity of the argument based on religious dogma, or by pointing to the obvious question-begging. We could also marshal a better argument in favor of the right of same-sex marriage. (At least, that’s how I see things, because in my opinion, if we held this contest, the pro-same-sex-marriage-right argument would be objectively superior, given that we live in a pluralistic, democratic society under a republican form of government and a system of law that holds, as a fundamental principle, the separation of church and state.)

It seems fairly obvious that the religious zealot, even upon losing the argument, will not concede. Very often, the fallback position taken is that permitting same-sex marriage is somehow violating the rights of religious dogmatists to be religious dogmatists – a position that requires, as part of its defense, that it is somehow inherent to the free practice of religious dogmatism that the dogmatic religious faith of this particular individual person become public policy.

This is a slightly exaggerated example by which I intended to show that ethical beliefs, especially false ethical beliefs, are not strictly rational in the sense we take to be at issue in logical arguments. They are more fundamental than logically fixed beliefs – which makes sense to me, given that for the most part our ethical conduct in the world does not follow from logical processes but is, precisely, ethical conduct, habituated ways of addressing the world and others and acting. Ethical conduct arises in our fundamental attitudes, which means, following Husserl somewhat loosely here, that ethics is constituted within the Ego-subject’s own relative world – as though that world had been built to correspond to the Ego-subject’s own ethical perspective. The problem of dogmatism is that, for the dogmatist, the everyday world constantly addresses that dogma, because that dogma is constitutive of that everyday world. The dogmatist on this issue is like the person who has no knowledge of physics, in Husserl’s example. The sense-content of ethical regard and acknowledgement of the full personhood of same-sex couples is just not part of the world of the dogmatist.

My everyday world is no less relative to my own Ego-subject, of course. At that level, everyone is, if not a dogmatist, at least someone who has faith in one’s own world and the attitudes and sense-contents that have constituted that world. No one’s ethical regard and acknowledgement is perfect.

This leads me to a second way to go about ethical discourse, a phenomenological way. Instead of arguments, we would learn how to bracket the general ethical positings we make that are constitutive of our everyday ethical life-worlds. (I know, I’m mixing my Husserl terminology. I don’t care.) I’m not suggesting this will magically convince anyone of anything. But a genuine insight into the constitution of ethical worlds, and a genuine understanding of the relativity of those worlds to each Ego-subject, should convince someone not only that dogmatism can never be right, and that dogmatic intolerance can never be an ethical orientation to take toward others. It should also show that logical arguments about ethics are not the complete story. Perhaps, as Husserl claims, it will teach us to be sensitive to grasping other attitudes, and therefore to understanding ethical perspectives, including our own, as perspectives.

the empty university

I'm reading a book by a guy named Bill Readings, called The University in Ruins, published in 1996. It's the book I've been waiting for, examining the contemporary situation of universities, basically through a Situationist lens, with a good dose of Lyotard. I’m amazed that this book is 15 years old, and yet none of the current discussion of university crisis in the US refers to it. Perhaps I shouldn’t be amazed, since this book makes almost all of the current debate absolutely pointless.

A key term for discussing universities in the late 1990s was excellence. It is, as Readings explains and illustrates, an entirely empty term. Excellence is not a criterion, has no referent, and is not a unit of measure. It does not define an ambition or an achievement. It is not ideological, because it does not name what sorts of things should be said or done (and what should not be said or done). It is distinctly anti-cultural, because it refutes any reference of the activities of universities to culture or nationality.

The term gained its currency because universities, especially in the United States, are now bureaucratic corporations, and are expected to operate entirely as bureaucratic corporations. The best analogy, he says, is to compare contemporary universities to the National Basketball Association. The NBA organizes activities that are entirely self-referential. Although fans of the sport attach themselves to particular teams and players, and provide financial support for the activities the NBA organizes, as he says, the won-loss record of the Philadelphia 76ers has nothing to do with the city of Philadelphia. Universities, like sports teams, are branded enterprises whose sole purpose is to get consumers to give them money because of their brand name and the consumers’ desire to associate with the brand name. There is, otherwise, at present no other purpose of universities.

What the use of excellence to name the activities of universities achieves is provide a bureaucratic rationale for managerial decisions. Since it is precisely not a criterion for judgment, but an empty qualifier, it can be used rhetorically in any situation to provide what looks like a justification for any decision. Since universities have no purpose, every managerial decision is essentially an arbitrary exercise of power – the power of the administrator (as Readings says, in the contemporary university the major figures are the presidents and provosts), or of market capitalism.

We’re hearing less about excellence these days, for which I’m grateful, because it had long ago lost its amusement for me (when Marvalene Hughes was president, she could almost literally not utter a single sentence without saying it. She also never figured out who I was, despite seeing me in Academic Senate meetings for several years). The word that seems to be replacing excellence is the equally empty success, especially in the phrase student success.

All of this is making me want to write something called, approximately, “A Lousy Essay on Student Failure.” It’d be tongue-in-cheek, you see.

my body with your body

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

And it’s not just sex… (I like e.e. cummings. If you think he's immature or a purveyor of cheap poetical tricks, well, screw you, pal. By which I mean, I think that's probably true, but I like him anyway.)

One way the experience of the size of my Body can begin to become strange and therefore to reveal itself, is to consider our Bodies with other people’s Bodies – or, I suppose, we could consider our Bodies with animal Bodies of any sort, or even with inanimate things. Possibly my pure subjectivity, the subject-I as zero-point of orientation, is unavailable to you – possibly we cannot share experience immediately. And possibly, therefore, how my Body feels for me is unavailable to you. It does not follow that my Body remains unchanged in the presence of your Body – and I don’t mean to refer to physiological or biological changes, but changes precisely as a Body, that is, as a lived-Body, as my-Body-for-me. As cummings shows us, our Bodies become new with one another.

Setting aside all the very stimulating possibilities for exploration of this topic that this introduction offers, since I’m inquiring about how big my Body is, I’ll look just at my Body’s size with another’s. You are shorter than me by several inches. That’s just how it is. Being with your Body, my Body is newly tall, stretching and extending, as though you urge me to reach just by being there with me. As I’ve said before, this is a feeling of my Body that I find pleasant and desirable. It is a particular kind of stretching that my Body undergoes – lacking tension, stretching through unraveling or unwinding, "uncoiling," "unfurling."

With you just now, I am just barely lighter, less dense, my mass more diffuse, again pleasantly, and also like being stretched, stretched upward. I want to be able to say what about this experience is affective or emotional and what is physical or relational. I don't feel that my longer, lighter Body-experience is due just to you "sweeping me off my feet." My experience is of a re-orientation to the world through your presence near me, a lightening and lengthening you and I effect in my Body through our close proximity or contact.

Now sitting in another room, that reaching urge is missing, and my Body settles lower into place. Or, walking away following an embrace, I feel my Body shrink to “normal” size.

(I'm going to adopt the usage of Husserl's translators and refer to the animate, living body with the capitalized Body. This is their translation of Husserl's Leib, which distinguishes a quickened body from a merely physical body, or Körper. Too bad we only have one word in English. I hope the capitalization isn't too annoying. Obviously, cummings should have used the capital B as well, but he was a bastard, and also didn't capitalize much. Poets rarely do, if you think about it. Capitalize, that is. You know, on their poems. Cuz, you know.... poems.... uh....)

how big is my body?

I’ve decided to spend some time this summer considering the question, “how big is my body?” I like this question. It strikes me as sounding peculiar, and I think it’s a good thing for philosophers to consider peculiar questions.

One way it seems peculiar is that, from a certain overly literal and physicalist standpoint, there is a very simple series of answers that puts an immediate end to the question. I am just over six feet tall and weigh something in the neighborhood of 160 pounds. That’s how large my body is. (To these I could add various other data like the length of my reach, my inseam, the circumference of my chest or my head, or the size of my hands. My head and my hands are both notably largish.)

Phenomenologically, answers of this sort miss the point pretty much completely. I may be, in an objective sense, six feet tall, but to leave it at that does not address the experience of my body size. For a start today, I want to name several dimensions of the experience of embodiment that I believe are relevant for fully answering the question of how large my body is.

(1) I experience my body’s size as varying. In different conditions – rest, movement, health or illness, different postures, even different mental moods – my body feels taller, shorter, heavier, lighter, longer, etc.

(2) I experience my body’s size and limit variably. That is to say, my experience of embodiment is sometimes focally about the limit of my extension – when I can’t reach far enough, e.g. – and other times is so diffuse that the limit is indefinite to me. This particular aspect opens a number of phenomenological considerations related to perception and sense experience. In so far as my body is a seeing body, its extension is in fact indefinite, because there’s no definable limit to the distance I can see, just the acuity with which I can see at that distance. The size of my phenomenal body is related to what can affect my senses, and many of them are affected by things far away from the core of my body. I certainly don’t have to be touching the crow squawking outside my window to be bodily aware of it. (Some difficulties here with wording: in a literal physical sense I am contacted by the air which vibrates with the waves produced by the crow’s vocal apparatus…)

(3) Experiences of varying body size have affective dimensions. I prefer almost always to feel tall and very light. I tend to feel heavier when I am physically tired or sick, or under stress. I tend to feel shorter when I’m in poor spirits. When I am at my peak of physical and mental condition, when I look down at the ground it seems further away, my head feels open to the sky, I am nearly unaware of any sense of my body’s weight.

(4) Experiences of varying body size occur relative to others, objects, and the world. I would not have an experience of my body size without these relations – I feel my body’s size always correlatively to something. I take the measure of my body from the street I walk down, even while I take the measure of the street by my stride. As my body moves with yours, both our bodies size one another up.

(5) My experience of my body size can be at odds with another’s experience of my body size. To some people, my body most likely is experienced as tall, even when for me my body may feel short at that moment. This is a fairly common experience, I believe: people comment on how tall or short they feel relative to one another, even people they’re accustomed to being near. Also, depending on what we’re doing together, our experience of relative body size could vary between us. How far I can reach, or how large my hands are, for instance, could not only vary between us but make a significant difference for us. I’m inclined to say, further, that my body’s size has a public dimension, meaning that my body’s size is experienced by whoever happens to be near enough for my body’s presence to matter. My body can also contribute to the mass of a crowd, and in that situation my body and the crowd’s body are intertwined or enjoined such that I take on some of the largeness of the crowd.

(6) My body’s size can also be considered from the standpoint of its impact on others, objects, and the world. I do not carry all of my weight myself. I do not reach only myself. That I take up space in the world and with regard to others means that my body’s size is part of the world itself. I don’t know how far I can phenomenologically clarify this, but part of what this aspect addresses is how my body’s size affects the world. Asking how much of the world I occupy is asking, among other things, how much noise I’m making (and where), how much of the world I’m consuming (and where), etc. So, a phenomenological inquiry into the size of my body has an ethical and political dimension.

when is a sex scandal not a sex scandal?

I turned on my hotel TV this morning, like I always do when I’m alone in a hotel room, and the first thing that confronted me was the Andrew Wiener “sexting” scandal. Not only did he tweet his underpants to a woman somewhere or other, but he also apparently had an ongoing text flirtation with a casino card dealer. On my screen was an outpouring of moral revulsion and condemnation. It was quite festive.

I don’t care about Anthony Wiener. Nonetheless, it’s disturbing that we’ve become so culutrally obsessed with this bizarre romantic/moral expectation that no reasonable person could ever engage in extra-curricular fantasy, flirtation, or even attraction. I heard Wiener’s texting equated to “cheating” on his wife. Really?

To me, this looks more like an attack on imagination than anything, which is no great surprise in a society that demands simplistic black-and-white moral distinctions. A spouse is either faithful or faithless – and to be faithful apparently means having no other attractions or affections of any kind outside of the marital bond. There is no room for ambiguity, and no forgiveness for even the mildest flirtation or shared fantasy.

On one hand, that attitude is frankly and utterly stupid. I can no more refrain from haphazard and random attractions than I can stop seeing. It doesn’t mean I’m faithless. Beyond that, I can’t begin to fathom why it’s become an unimaginable moral monstrosity that anyone could possibly get erotically entangled in fantasy with someone not sanctioned officially for it. Our culture has a driving need to judge, I guess.

Not that I’m sending anyone pictures of my underpants – because I’m not quite that stupid or foolhardy. Besides, sometimes a few words are worth a thousand pictures.