SEXUATED TOPOLOGY AND THE
SUSPENSION OF MEANING
A NON-HERMENEUTICAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL
APPROACH TO TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
WILLIAM J. URBAN
2.2 The Ontological Phenomenology of Understanding
The two types of phenomenology sketched out in Section 2.1 above from Husserl and Heidegger's first major works are clearly incompatible with respect to the question of meaning.217 Yet given the many works and even entire schools of thought they both later spawned, their respective approaches appear equally persuasive. In this section we follow one of the two trajectories which emanate from these two men, viz., the work of some French thinkers who effectively remain theoretically steadfast to Heideggerian ontological phenomenology as they nevertheless seek new avenues for its application.
As the title suggests, Phenomenology of Perception (1945)218 extends the descriptive approach of phenomenology to perception. But from the preface onward Merleau-Ponty is at pains to stress how the perception he seeks to privilege is of a primal nature. Empirical perception is deemed derivative and relegated to a secondary status. He quite directly demonstrates this throughout the book by presenting the findings of empirical studies conducted by psychology and other natural sciences to show how they either fail as adequate explanations or simply ignore significant phenomena surrounding their objects of inquiry. By doing so he clears the space for an originary perception said to address a pre-objective realm. The analysis of this latter perception is then offered up as a truer and more complete account of the phenomena involved in these studies. For instance, he problematizes the empirical analysis of a simple figure on a background, arguing that its indeterminacies (e.g., those involving its outline, border and contrasting colors) harbor significance overlooked by an empirical perception, which takes the objective world as its object of analysis. The same is true of 'intellectualism,' which busies itself with casting judgments to subsume aspects of, say, an optical illusion under abstract concepts and so likewise overlooks the meaning of the whole. Both empiricism and intellectualism thus ignore how 'perception is just that act which creates at a stroke, along with the cluster of data, the meaning which unites them – indeed which not only discovers meaning which they have, but moreover sees to it that they have a meaning.'219 This statement is easily misconstrued if one takes perception as a conscious attribute so that this process of meaning-creation is read as resulting from a subjective act. In contrast, for Merleau-Ponty, '[i]n trying to describe the phenomenon of... the specific act of meaning, we shall have the opportunity to leave behind us, once and for all, the traditional subject-object dichotomy.'220 One of the ways he tries to do so is through his continual play with the French term sens, which has two distinct sides, translating both as meaning/sense and direction/way/manner. Never due to a conscious positing, it is rather that objects themselves give sens by directing our gaze to them. The mystery surrounding this is cleared up at once if the subject and its object are conceived as always already intimately connected in a world which encompasses both; in a word the world is a priori to the subject-object dichotomy. Such a notion of course bears the clear mark of Heidegger.221 His most original contribution, however, certainly lies with his novel notion of the body through which the more derivative discussion topics he inherits from Heidegger are effectively restated. This body is not the empirical body but one qua field of potentialities said to be in immediate contact with the world and one which must be seen as the a priori backdrop to those determinant objects of science which thus appear within it. Again he utilizes psychologist studies, and he here supplements them with lengthy discussions of pathological cases to demonstrate the intimate link between the constitution of the body as object and the genesis of the objective world. By so withdrawing from the objective world of objective bodies, the body 'will carry with it the intentional threads linking it to its surrounding and finally reveal to us the perceiving subject as the perceived world.'222 These intentional threads allow us, for example, to 'see' behind our heads or into other rooms with which we are familiar but not presently occupying. There is thus a knowledge known to us without consciously taking it up for consideration. His review of studies on motility and on bodily experience in general allows Merleau-Ponty to discover 'a new meaning of the word "meaning"... [and] forces us to acknowledge an imposition of meaning which is not the work of a universal constituting consciousness, a meaning which clings to certain contents. My body is that meaningful core which behaves like a general function.'223 Reflecting Heidegger's later concern with language, not only is one's body a nexus of living or lived-through meanings standing at the heart of the world, secreting and projecting out meaning upon its material surroundings, but it also comes equipped with a linguistic organ which attunes the body to the primordial meaning the world bestows upon us through the word. For Merleau-Ponty meaning is quite simply inseparable from language, and language for him is that which 'presents or rather it is the subject's taking up a position in the world of his meanings.'224
This notion of positioning can also be found in the work of Bachelard, who applies the Heideggerian approach to another realm and thus founds a new phenomenological school. His phenomenology of imagination is amply demonstrated in his The Poetics of Space (1957),225 where he attempts to determine the poetic image in its emergence into consciousness as a product of the being of man. Given that Bachelard was once a philosopher of natural science and its methodology, this representative text of his later work is quite a radical turn from his earlier days. Yet although never rigorously formulated226 there nevertheless is a discernible 'method' to the work, just as was the case with Phenomenology of Perception. While the latter utilizes the texts of empirical studies as vehicles for demonstrating how the ontological dimension stands prior to epistemological concerns, Bachelard mines literary texts for their poetic images to stimulate the imagination. He considers the imagination to be the primary and 'most natural of faculties,' whose actions are 'as real as those of perception.'227 Whether or not Bachelard has in mind Merleau-Ponty's notion of perception or its derivative empirical version is beside the point, for it is clear he privileges the imagination as the only faculty capable of truly grasping the dynamism of the poetic image, that entity 'referable to a direct ontology.'228 But despite their differences, they would both agree with Heidegger that ontology trumps epistemology and thereby relegates to all apophantic interpretive approaches to the being of a text a mere secondary status. In the case of Bachelard, we are specifically advised not to examine poetry as a literary critic who moves from text to reality. Rather, we are to find those select texts which back up reality, just not those that do so in a metaphoric sense for metaphor 'has no phenomenological value.'229 Because he sees the poem as the written evidence of its author's imagination, the images contained therein are simply not subject to verification in reality and to do so would kill them. Verification would squander the opportunities they offer us, the chance to add our own images in a way completely independent of all knowledge of the outside world. Poets are therefore said to set traps in their poems and we are to let ourselves be caught in them, to position and orient ourselves according to their images or else outright seek a dwelling place in the spaces provided by the 'little houses' of their poetic words.230 The phenomenology of the imagination does not reduce the image to a subordinate means of expression but designates it as an excess of the imagination demanding to be lived directly in life. Its microscopic focus on the detached, isolated, single image and not on the structural composition of images in a poem is argued to be its unique strength, giving 'fresh stimulus to the problem of phenomenology. By solving small problems, we teach ourselves to solve large ones. I have limited myself to proposing exercises conceived for an elementary phenomenology. I am moreover convinced that the human psyche contains nothing that is insignificant.'231 Because this entity that is the poetic image is without causality, it escapes the natural science of psychology, and so psychology is accordingly condemned. Non-Jungian psychoanalysis fares no better since it equally seeks causal forces and focuses on the deep nature of the author at the expense of the autonomous image. In the final three chapters Bachelard often alludes to Heidegger's Dasein (in French, être-là) to suggest the close connection between the poetic image, language and being. For instance, he writes that '[w]hen we really live a poetic image, we learn to know, in one of its tiny fibres, a becoming of being that is an awareness of the being's inner disturbance. Here being is so sensitive that it is upset by a word.'232 For Bachelard the expression of the word, however, must always enclose an actuality which issues forth as a poetic image so as to release the major productive power of his imagination. And without the exercise of his imagination, the being of man will remain veiled.
In stark contrast to this celebration of poetry, Sartre instead argues that when it comes to a question of releasing man, prose is the superior literary form since only it relates writing to the existential concerns of real-world praxis. Indeed the message of his essay "What is Literature?" (1947)233 might be fruitfully paraphrased as 'Poets have only ever interpreted the world; however, the point for the prose writer is to change it.' This thesis is defended in the first section of the essay which asks 'What is Writing?' There the poet is criticized for his treatment of words as objects devoid of meaningful expression of our shared human condition. In the best case scenario, even if the poem represents this meaning, it nevertheless transmits it ambiguously and thus fails to meet the requirements of the type of political program Sartre wants to promote. For Bachelard, poetry's movement away from meaningful expression so as to better isolate the poetic image is its undeniable strength;234 but for Sartre this is its fatal flaw. Poetry cannot provoke indignation or political enthusiasm in the reader like prose, which is direct and instrumental, reflecting its greater respect for language as a moment of action. Because words in prose are used as signs which point to things in the world, Sartre recognizes a great responsibility for the selection of these things. What exactly will one write and read about and who is responsible for these decisions? Sartre asks. The writer and reader, of course. He often reiterates this ethical dimension surrounding prose: 'But from this point on we may conclude that the writer has chosen to reveal the world and particularly to reveal man to other men so that the latter may assume full responsibility before the object which has been thus laid bare.'235 Even more so Sartre emphasizes the responsibility on the part of the writer, who must have a clear commitment to his writing, a writing to be seen as a cause which delivers an expressed message. In the second section of the essay, which asks 'Why Write?,' Sartre effectively provides an existential phenomenology of writing and reading to convey how the participants of these two activities must collaborate to produce the object of the work. He here argues against Kant's belief 'that the work of art first exists as fact and that it is then seen' and critiques Kant through the latter's own categorical imperative.236 For Sartre the implication here is that you are perfectly free to ignore the book lying on the table, but once it is opened, you assume responsibility for it. The author for his part must freely project his writing toward that readership which will complete the concrete object of the work. Sartre thus supplements his emphasis on responsibility with an equal emphasis on freedom:
'For, since the one who writes recognizes, by the very fact that he takes the trouble to write, the freedom of his readers, and since the one who reads, by the mere fact of his opening the book, recognizes the freedom of the writer, the work of art, from whichever side you approach it, is an act of confidence in the freedom of men. And since readers, like the author, recognize this freedom only to demand that it manifest itself, the work can be defined as an imaginary presentation of the world in so far as it demands human freedom.'237
When a writer writes, he both discloses the world and offers it as a task to the generosity of the reader in a selfless appeal that is analogous to Christian passion, which obliges the reader to create what the writer discloses. This is done in mutually acknowledged freedom, free men addressing free men on the subject, ultimately, of freedom. In the third section which asks 'For Whom Does One Write?' the quick answer is that the writer, immersed in his situation, addresses his contemporaries with respect to class and race. This of course is not ideal. He cites 17th century French writers whose public was just slightly broader than the 12th century clerk-writers of the early Roman Church. Both reflected their own conservative ideals of faith and monarchy, which preserved the respective classical society from liberating change, back to a limited readership. However, with the rise of bourgeois freedom in the 18th century, which created an intellectual class of writers untied to classical institutions, while writing did continue to be directed toward the consolidation of class privilege, there were nevertheless those that began directing an abstract freedom against concrete oppression. The problem was and continues to be that this freedom is too abstract. Writing here concerns an abstract man for a timeless reader. So this era also falls short as the previous two did. It overlooks the essence of oppression and so its literature is alienated and fails to arrive at explicit consciousness of its autonomy. It conceives of itself as a means serving temporal or ideological powers and not as an unconditioned end in itself. Sartre thus calls for the writer of today to move away from abstractness to express instead the (Hegelian) 'concrete universality,' what he understands as the actual historical situation of 'the sum total of men living in a given society.'238 Concrete literature could then become conscious of itself, of how 'its end is to appeal to the freedom of men so that they may realize and maintain the reign of human freedom.'239 For Sartre, the writer 'must write to the public which has the freedom of changing everything; which means, besides suppression of classes, abolition of all dictatorship, constant renewal of frameworks, and the continuous overthrowing of order once it tends to congeal. In short, literature is, in essence, the subjectivity of a society in permanent revolution.'240 Concisely said, one writes to the proletariat or at least until that time when society is without classes and the formal freedom of saying at the level of the word is identical to the material freedom of doing found at the level of the act. In this ideal situation one level of freedom could be used to demand the other. And only prose can aim for this ideal, as it treats the word as a moment of action capable of engaging the writer and reader in the meanings it confers upon the objects in the world in mutually acknowledged freedom.
Book based on this dissertation
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