Monica Carroll
The experience of writer’s block, the experience of being powerless to write, coerces the writer to alter their bonds to the world and her things, including the bond between writer and self. This pursuit can initiate both understanding and frustration. Within each is the power to write.
Before breakthrough there must be blockage.
Below, a quote from Conrad; three sentences in eight hours, all erased.
I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down to eight hours every day—and the sitting down is all. In the course of that working day of eight hours I write three sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair. There’s not a single word to send you. Not one! … sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self-control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I daren’t do it for fear of waking the baby and alarming my wife. … So the days pass and nothing is done. At night I sleep. In the morning I get up with the horror of that powerlessness I must face through a day of vain efforts.
Conrad, J. 1898. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad
Disgust is a fertile state from which we can explore body/knowledge intersections. From Deborah Durham’s 2011 article in Ethos, “…disgust is part of an array of sensations that are seen to be beyond reason and rationality. To ‘feel something in one’s gut’ or ‘know something in one’s gut’ is to know it surely and incontrovertibly: like gut-knowledge, disgust in American is both non-rational, yet also a form of knowledge.”
‘Non-rational knowledge’ seems an overly complicated, and morally-laden, description for an ordinary practice. Is there a way to heal the cleave between ‘feel’ and ‘know’ so that we can discuss a closer-to-whole beast of knowledge? Are there singular words and meanings we can use to replace the go-to divided choices that have become an unproductive formula?
Taking an anthropological turn away from the assumption of the individual sovereign self, can lead us to reach for intersubjective, inclusive paradigms like ‘atmosphere’, ‘quality’, ‘vibration’ and ‘empathy’. Yet these meanings of assembly and inclusive connection have not yet borne the resolution, beyond Cartesianism, that is recognisably possible.
In a phenomenological exploration of pain, Frederik Buytendijk characterises the state of being ‘in’ pain as a severing of the self from the world. Aurel Kolnai, in a phenomenology of disgust, says disgust extends the self into the world. Disgust is a bridge. To experience disgust entails a real or imagined intimacy with the object of disgust.
Kolnai’s use of ‘intimacy’ places us into a more productive register than ‘non-rational knowledge’. Firstly, intimacy itself is a knowledge, an understanding of the strongest kind. And, second, intimacy is an ‘active’ knowledge in contrast to the passivity of non-rational knowledge concepts such as ‘atmosphere’, etc.. Intimacy is a knowledge known in the atmosphere of experience.
Durham asks us to think of disgust as an act of embodied imagination in the company of an intimacy-distancing dynamic (both in and out, both near and far, both push and pull, etc.). Yet, imagination cannot be anything other than embodied. (E.g., what would a dis-embodied imagination entail? Arial maps? House plans? What could an unembodied imagination be? A ghost’s story? A trans-human unseeable vision?)
Imagine eating fresh human faeces. Warm, waxy on your lips. Your teeth slide into the dark, soft cigar. The smell of shit feels like a thick cloud attached to you from within. Are you experiencing ‘non-rational knowledge’? Do you have an array of sensations ‘beyond reason and rationality’?
I didn’t think so.
Doesn’t the power of ‘gut-knowledge’ demand the engagement of an appropriate gut-knowledge language? Would not that simple act alone indicate the deserved respect for the unspoken supremacy of our body, flesh; gut-intimate both delicate and undeniable?
We, people, observe particular knowledges even when our experiences falsify that knowledge. What we say is different to what we do, and different again, to what we believe.
Interesting writing seeks out our sites of epistemological concussion because, therein, is usually something worth saying in words.
Our epistemological concussion at the sites of pain and pleasure are a distinctly deep knowledge/experience trauma. So much of what we claim to know about pain fails to correlate to our first-person experience. For this reason, sadism and masochism are interesting settings of epistemological concussion worthy of words.
The word, ‘masochism’ has been likened to a wound (see, for example, Eugenie Brinkema drawing from Lacan and Nancy (but regrettably not Derrida)). In this metaphor, the wound of/from masochism is a result of a lack of definition. For masochism (pleasure in pain) to be what it is, pain cannot mean what it means and pleasure cannot mean what it means.
While a literary treatment of masochism is blessedly refreshing compared to the usual psychological and medical stodge, such an approach tends towards a performative narcissism at the expense of the topic at hand. The first responder to any knowing/living epistemological concussion is best chosen from ordinary language. That is what it means to write hard and clear.
Masochism as a wound—a gaping split, a leaking suture, a sore slash, a wet gash, a weeping wound—with these words we begin to find our living pain knowledge.
Most people, even those who claim to be learned, parrot predictable narratives about the function and meaning of a thing called ‘sadism.’ Sadism lurks in the realm of the sexual, the perverted, the immoral and the violent. Sadism is, a typical parroted narrative claims, a disorder in which sexual gratification is achieved through the infliction of pain.
Most texts on sadism will trudge through the accepted historical emergence from the chronicles of Sade to the delousing of Deleuze. As this has all been done to the point of boredom and it will not be repeated here. The accepted history of sadism is a cliché, i.e. a concept drained of any genuine meaning. Moreover, it is a lazy history. Does anyone truly believe that up until the novel Justine no one explored the dimensions of being alive?
Turning anything into an ‘–ism’ is a way of killing our ability to see the thing itself. Once an ‘-ism’ is consigned to a thing it becomes forced to bear the burden of moral consensus and is, therefore, subject to policing. A person who participates in an ‘-ism’ is usually labelled and ‘-ist’.
Imagine something that is not an ‘-ism’, e.g. a deep love and commitment to dogs. Of all the mammals, four-footed things and living creatures, our Dogist practices Dogism in her choices because it gives her pleasure. (This notion, of desiring a thing because it has a consequence, a result, or an end goal, of personal pleasure, is another unfounded and oft repeated fiction in the realm of sadism.)
She is naturally wired (another parroted narrative) to prefer the experience of dogs. Dogs are part of her cognitive pleasure structure. She prefers to pat dogs, to walk them, to groom them, to throw a stick and see the dog leap with joy and energy. She once patted a budgie but it did nothing for her.
Some texts speculate that when she was a young girl she had a negative experience that shaped her towards being a dogist. Some significant adult figure was either overbearing or absent, cruel or neglectful, and in those early experiences her dogism seed was planted.
We study her and try to ‘explain’ why she is different. We begin to call her difference a perversion, and she, therefore, a pervert. She has a condition, a disorder.
We need to medicalise her condition. Psychoanalysis, hypnosis, behaviour therapy, cognitive therapy, drug therapy, exorcism, and a transition to synthetic dogs. Dogism, however, presents treatment challenges, because it is often concealed, and is often associated with guilt and shame. (Another cart-before-the-horse parroted narrative; shame is result of dominant cultural values, not individual biological processes.)
The Kennel Club argues that behind closed doors consenting, mature adults should be allowed to keep and care for dogs. We once had a robust licencing system and dog-friendly public spaces but they have fallen away. As the medicalisation of dogism as a disorder grew, we began to forget the art of ourselves as being alive and capable of diverse and beautiful experiences.
We have confused dogism and few of us bother to remember when things were different to today. We have polluted dogism with the crimes of people who are cruel and violent to dogs. Those people are not dogists, that much is obvious. The spaces that accepted dogists have become both shameful in mainstream life and commercialised as a role-driven industry.
Our dogist, our heroine, tries to fight on all these fronts, to remain true to the practice of living as she knows it. She is not a dogist at all; she is a person with a timeless love and infinite care for dogs because they are dogs.
Ever bitten into a tiny raw chilli? Or ordered a twice-hot curry for dinner? What was your experience? And, importantly, how can you bring that experience into the best lights through your personal form of writing?
In A Defence of Masochism, Phillips says ‘…if pain can become pleasure through some strange alchemy, perhaps pleasure itself it not so easily understood” (p35).
Putting the straw-person aside (i.e. who ever said pleasure was easily understood?) there is a glaring deficiency in Phillips’ argument; namely the use of the phrase “through some strange alchemy.” I see this deficiency repeated in many philosophical explorations. Furthermore, rather than pausing to do the hard work to resolve or account for the deficiency, Phillips skips to the next premise, hoping that the wilful act of writing down the words will be sufficient for advancing the argument. But, of course, it is not sufficient.
If you, in your own work, are struggling to express or understand a problem, such as pain, consciousness, symbolism, culture, life, etc., you will reach for grout that permits you to lay the next tile in your thought and development. In Phillips, “through some strange alchemy” is that grout, gap-filler. These pseudo-claims are a useful tool and should be used in early draft work. They keep an argument in motion.
Published texts, however, such as A Defence of Masochism, are devalued as a whole when lazy, magical, hand-wavy putty work is not replaced with a sincere struggle towards candid articulation.
Pain and pleasure are so deeply embedded in our narrative and cultural structures that is it indisputably difficult to experience these phenomena as they appear. The accepted homilies that pass for knowledge, e.g. we are adverse to pain and seek pleasure, dominate pain studies in philosophy. A potentially disruptive text, such as A Defence of Masochism, cannot afford to accept “some strange alchemy” as a satisfactory contribution if it is to challenge orthodoxy with effect.
Pain and pleasure are refreshingly complex experiences. When we describe them as they appear, we may first notice the many discrepancies. Holes appear, for example, between accepted narratives such as pain being painful, pain being undesirable, when contrasted with the experienced pleasure of burning and sweating from a painfully hot meal. The experience of pain and pleasure do not align with our accepted knowledge.
In The Crisis of the European Sciences Husserl said, “I seek not to instruct but only to lead, to point out and describe what I see. I claim no other right than that of speaking according to my best lights, principally before myself but in the same manner also before others…” If we commit and follow through our right to speak out the experience of the world for our own self, in our best lights, we will find the stamina to write past lame “alchemy” claims into productive description. Pain studies, from the clinical to the erotic, are in need of quality first person experiential description.
Phillips, A. 1998. A Defence of Masochism. London: Faber and Faber
**Hats off to a treasured reader for the Phillips text.
Phenomenology goes against the tide. It embraces the first-person, or subjective experience, as authorised, logical, valid and legitimate. In phenomenology the first-person point of view is generous, trustworthy and valuable. To understand the strength and uniqueness of the first person requires we release particular stories or myths about the world and how we perceive it.
We are given a script for how the world works yet often, if we stop and look beyond the script, we can see the story fails to fit, to varying degrees. The world itself differs to the story. Our experience of the world exceeds the structures we have constructed. And, if we allow the old story to crumble, we may see the world with fresh eyes, as it is, not as we narrate it.
Many elements of the script, or story, can be safely discharged. Below is my first suggestion.
First, we must reject the idea of perception as a script between two parties; the seer or perceiver and the seen or perceived. The accepted story of perception is that you look at, for example, a dog. You then perform a mysterious, cognitive, internal, private magic called cognition, perception, thinking, representing, etc..
Many textbooks contain a version of a familiar diagram that claims to depict ‘the act of perception’. In this, a drawing of your eyeball may project an arrow onto the form of a dog. From the dog, a second arrow draws out and targets your eyeball. Inside your skull, or above your head in a fluffy cloud, sits a smaller version of the dog. This script has two roles: there is you, looking, and there is the dog, being looked at.
Yet, what of the arrows? Looking is not an act of the eye upon an object. Looking contains not two ‘performances’ in the looker and the looked. To see is a three part event. Seer, seen and seeing itself. The experience of looking seeing, perceiving is not one of cognising then representing to oneself.
If we are standing beside each other, both having an experience that includes looking at a dog and I ask you, “Where is the dog?” you do not point at your head. You point to the dog. When we perceive the dog, we are putting ourselves ‘in’ the dog. We are not creating a small dog within us. We are, instead, reaching out, accepting the givenness, opening into the dog.
Phenomenology is built on the idea that when we experience, we are experiencing something. That is, that consciousness is always a consciousness of something. ‘Of’, which seems a small word here, is actually doing an incredible amount of muscle work. The phenomenological idea of intentionality is often defined as “consciousness of something” yet this ‘definition’ tends to produce fog not clarity. The key is the power of ‘of’.
The experience of perceiving a dog is an experience whereby our consciousness is sited within the dog. Our act of intentionality is to find that consciousness there.
Let me know what you think of this idea.
And look out for the next few posts where we will challenge other aspects of ‘the script’ about perception through the clean-cutting power of phenomenology.
Too often, phenomenology is reduced to a simple schema or steps that must be followed. Let’s take Woodruff-Smith as an example of an over-simplified phenomenology,
“By etymology, phenomenology is the study of phenomena, in the root meaning of appearances; or, better, the ways things appear to us in our experience, the ways we experience things in the world around us. We practice phenomenology (with or without the name) whenever we pause in reflection and ask, “What do I see?,” “How do I feel?,” “What am I thinking?,” “What do I intend to do?,” answering in the first person, specifying the way I experience what I see, feel, think and so on. We produce a phenomenological description of an experience as we declare, attending to our own experience, “I see that fishing boat in the fog,” “I feel angry about what was just said,” “I think that Husserl read Hume,” “I intend to sweep the patio tomorrow” (Woodruff-Smith).
So, in Woodruff-Smith’s process we,
It is that simple?
No.
These descriptions follow Woodruff-Smith’s rules but fail as phenomenology.
One of the books closest to the heart of phenomenology is Husserl’s Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution (Ideen II). (Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution.)
Ideen II begins with frankness. Husserl observes that nature, as the object of natural science, is not ‘natural’; to perceive nature in this way is itself a constructed perception, an attitude. “Das wird sich verstehen,” says Husserl,“wenn wir die Art der Einstellung des naturwissenschaftlich anschauenden und denkenden Subjekts genauer betrachten wir werden durch ihre phänomenologische Beschreibung erkennen, daß, was es Natur nennt, eben das intentionale Korrelat der in dieser Einstellung vollzogenen Erfahrung ist”.
From within an attitude, the act of looking (noesis) creates a perception of what is seen. Perception is itself an object.
“This will be understood,” says Husserl, “if we consider the nature of the setting of scientific intuiting and the thinking subject in more detail, we can recognise through a phenomenological description of it that the object it calls Nature, is precisely the intentional correlate that is accomplished in this setting experience” (emphasis added).
In phenomenology, knowledge is in-from-the writing-reading. Husserl, above, says it is “through” the phenomenological description that we come to understand. He does not say “owing to”, “subsequently from” nor “as a result of”. In passage “through” phenomenological description may we open into knowledge. Knowledge is not a place we arrive at nor a consequence of having consumed. “Through” phenomenological description is the knowledge.
Writing description is not a second turn at living. A statement of experience is not a description. Phenomenology is not a system for producing conclusions. “Through” phenomenological description is the knowledge.
Husserl, E., 1994. Briefwechsel. [Correspondence.]. The Hague: Kluwer Academic.
Woodruff-Smith, D., 2013. Husserl. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
I have an organic machine that gives me quantified readings of the stupidity of things in the world. My machine almost broke beyond repair as I read Christian Tewes ‘The Phenomenology of Habits.’ Below is the last report my machine provided about this article and why it achieved such a high ranking in stupid.
The article claims to be based on “phenomenology in the Husserlian sense.” Instead of doing the hard work of struggling through with Husserl and his words, the article is absent of any of Husserl’s writing. Instead, the article draws from a range of off-topic, online journal articles. Stupid.
This leads to the second stupid. The article has an odd, and rather ‘special’, view as to what “phenomenology in the Husserlian sense” involves. “Phenomenology in the Husserlian sense aims at discovering essential structures of phenomenal experiences. One can differentiate here between the pre-reflexive … everyday experiences and the specification of these experiences from a reflexive stance, the so-called ‘phenomenological reduction’ … . After having suspended the natural attitude toward everyday experiences, the next step in a phenomenological analysis is to find, in a quasi-mathematical spirit, the ideal possibilities or conceptual structures involved in these experiences…”. Stupid.
Let’s recap the generally agreed upon tenets of what can be considered Husserlian phenomenology. It is the study, not the “discovery” of the structures of experience. The study of these structures is partly achieved through writing a particular type of description from the experience, not “about” the experience. This all takes place from the free of charge, egalitarian and non-academic learning centre known as ‘you’; the first-person, the subjective.
This is the salve of phenomenology in our science-greedy, number-crunching, depersonalised era. Phenomenology is a means to rich and meaningful knowledge about ourselves as people. It can help us shape our world to fit us, rather than the reverse which bears out the negative consequences we see around us today. People who feel alienated, ill-suited, failed. Groups of people who experience exclusion or invisibility. The voiceless living—plants, animals, eco-systems—sacrificed for short-thought economies. Phenomenology has the capacity to ‘tell it like it is’ from your experience as binding and authorised.
The word “discovery” makes the structures of experience sound like the dark side of the moon, but they are right there in front of us—we ‘do’ them all the time. We don’t ‘discover’ them, any more than I discover my hand at the end of my arm when I wake up in the morning. And the little word “about” tells us the source of the problem: Tewes thinks of us, in writing, taking up a standpoint outside our experiences; but this is to miss … well, everything—it is to miss phenomenology.
Tewes wants us to know one more piece of stupid; this repeated in various ways throughout the article. “It is important to highlight that the concrete findings of such a procedure are open to falsification.” “The results of such phenomenological-informed neuropsychological research projects would, of course, be open to falsification.”
And this is the heart of stupid. At once using the word ‘phenomenology’ as a handmaiden for a socially destructive agenda while at the very same time not having the courage to trust. Life is open to falsification. Experience is open to falsification. If a loved one tells you about their bad day, do you listen with sympathy knowing that their whole description is, fundamentally, open to falsification?
What is it that makes Tewes so insecure? Why cling to tools that have no place in this domain? Why employ phenomenology with such insincerity? My organic stupid machine cannot answer these questions. I have to figure them out for myself.
Tewes, C. 2018. ‘The Phenomenology of Habits: Integrating First-Person and Neuropsychological Studies of Memory,’ Frontiers in Psychology 9, p1176
Reasons to Keep Writing 