Playtest

I’ve become increasingly aware over the last few months about the differences between the different tendencies in phenomenology thanks to Max van Manen’s Phenomenology Online and Sobchack’s overview as I mentioned in an earlier post. The problem now is more a question of how to draw them together within my thesis, for instance Merleau-Ponty’s embodied body-subject and Heidegger’s accounts of tool use. Though Merleau-Ponty does use the example of the blind man’s walking stick at several points in “The Phenomenology of Perception”, he characterises the example as one of bodily extension, of the body increasing its contact with the world. Conversely, for Heidegger the hammer is something we relate to in our course of action upon the world, though not strictly an ‘object’ (unless broken), it has a meaning for us. Furthermore many artefacts can be used ‘to hammer’, why does the specific tool take our attention first, preceding, say, a flat rock?

Differentiating between microperception and macroperception, Don Ihde provides a possible solution in “Postphenomenology: Essays in the Postmodern Context” (p.74). Simply put, Ihde describes the microperceptual as referring to bodily dimensions of perception (i.e. motility, synaesthesic relationship of sensory modalities), while the macroperceptual relates to hermeneutic and cultural dimensions (i.e. meaning, knowledge, and interpretation). I like the way he characterises this as a kind of gestalt, that is, as a figure-ground relationship:

“there is no bare or isolated microperception except in its field of a hermenuetic or macroperceptual surrounding; nor may macroperception have any focus without its fulfillment in microperceptual (bodily-sensory) experience”(p77)

Just finished teaching my first tutorial class for an introductory media and communications class and they seem like a good group, mostly journalism and professional communication students. Hopefully i haven’t confused them on what they need to do for their tutorial presentations, we’ll see next next week when each group reports on their approach and focus.

I’ve been reading Sobchack’s “The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. The first chapter has a useful discussion of the phenomenological method, particularly Merleau-Ponty’s ‘radical reflection’. Thankfully she sets it out much more clearly than Merleau-Ponty does in the preface to “Phenomenology of Perception”, which lost me at first with its untranslated german philosophy terms such as the “Wortbedeutung of conciousness” (xvii).

Sobchack’s differentiation between the transcendental and the existential and hermeneutic variants of phenomenology are also quite helpful. Though my thesis uses phenomenological concepts somewhat heuristically as part of a wider theoretical framework my research method seems to tend towards its process somewhat, and I feel that i’ll need to include a section on what type of phenomenology is primarily informing the process behind my writing.

Phenomenologyonline.com appears to be a site authored by Max van Manen, which includes a bibliography of recommended readings, glossary, as well as a section of short biographies of a range of selected scholars.

Of particular interest is a section called Inquiry, a conceptual mapping of the various aspects of phenomenological inquiry. As someone getting into the area this is very useful, It seems sometimes that there are as many orientations and understandings of phenomenology as there are phenomenologists!