Of Principles and Phenomena II: The Drama of Phenomenology and Violations of the 4th Wall

Art seems generically and ambiguously involved with sacred and profane...it is always inauthentic vis-a -is the purity of the ritual and vis-a-vis a thorough-going realism. This generic impurity is the best clue to its nature.
    A Kafka parable may help us to define more closely art's mixed essence:

Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this occurs repeatedly, again and again: finally it can be reckoned on beforehand and becomes part of the ceremony.

Profanation enters the inner sanctum, and become part of the holy. From a purist or ritual point of view there is contamination. The sense that the holy is contaminated is one of the views that emerges from Kafka's work as a whole. Not the death of God, but his impurity...Does not every system have its necessary and permitted profanations?

Geoffrey Hartman, "Struturalism: The Anglo-American Adventure," in Structuralism, ed. Jacques Ehrmann, (NY: Anchor, 1970), p. 157.



"Does not every system have its necessary and permitted profanations?" Hartman's prescient and startling remarks on the invasion of the profane into the sacred, nearly 50 years old, cut both ways with a decisive double edge in this discussion of the emergence of the new phenomenology. Hartman could hardly have known what was just beyond the horizon of structuralism when his piece first appeared in Yale French Studies in 1966. The Derridean storm, just forming off the coast of the Anatomy of Criticism, had only whispered a breeze in its advent; Being Given slumbered in the deep structure of the first reduction.

As I have suggested in my previous piece, the phenomenological method,  this new phenomenology, plays out on the stage of a consciousness of a self, whose finitude rests in immanence. If I may continue with the metaphor of an enacted drama, I would characterize Janicaud's (and many other's) critique of the new phenomenology as a description of violations of the '4th wall.' The Husserlian phenomenological inner sanctum is a closed space, not without a certain plasticity of course, but closed off in an inviolable integrity so robust that any infraction, any 'profanation,' would constitute an insurmountable transgression that results in not a renewal, but pure novelty.

4th wall violations in modern drama, either on an actual stage or in film, are common techniques and enhance dramatic effect, even when they shock and disorient with their hyperreal or surreal effects on both the drama and the audience. In my sense of them, such violations are not particularly modern, and one might argue that they have their antecedents in the Greek chorus and the soliloquy. Are such violations then always extraneous disruptions, or do they enter the drama and open it up to whatever is beyond the wall? And what of the violations that leap from the stage or screen into another 'real' space, such as "3-D" effects, or a character walking of the stage or screen into a surprised audience, such as Tom Baxter's escape from black-and-white into Cecelia's colorful world in The Purple Rose of Cairo?

The new phenomenology authentically addresses the phenomenality of any and all things that present in and of themselves. The effect of this address authenticates the method's account of such unusual phenomena while leaving the authentication of the thing 'open.' This openness itself addresses all kinds of openings, in the method and in the thing. The possibilities are endless on either side of the phenomenological moment, the given and the recipient.

This very respect for porosity and excess characterizes the deconstructive gesture in general. In-breakings and out-breakings move with Kafka's leopards. The new phenomenology of givenness can formulate a description of such feline motions in a way the offerings in the un-transgressed Husserlian chalice cannot. Classical phenomenology remains reluctant to chase after in-breakings, such as the in-breaking of the divine into history in the Incarnation, or of the in-breaking of the event in Scripture, the release of the event in the Word of God or the name of God. Is the right of such phenomena to appear suppressed, or do such rights not exist at all? What is forbidden?

Whether or not Hartman's observations of art and criticism apply to the phenomenological method in any illuminating way remains an open question, and only time will tell if phenomenology, properly understood, can accommodate Kafka's cats as the deconstructive gesture has accommodated Derrida's cat. Phenomenology's 4th walls of Husserlian givenness and immanence either evolve into the new phenomenology or they do not, but a phenomenology of givenness is not woven de novo from some novel fiber; it traces itself to a method and a principle. And while the phenomenal moment may already prefigure a hermeneutic according to the given, the utility of phenomenology as a critical approach is plastic enough to explore the possibility of the saturated phenomenon through a productive porosity of method and the thing that gives itself.

Method and its object enjoy a perennial and perhaps even an incestuous relationship, criticism and art a reverberating intertextuality where horizons interface in vague chiasmus. I therefore begin and end with Hartman, who has won the last word: "literature and myth are not mere accretions to a central mystery but involved in its very nature. They penetrate and become part of the structure of the sacred event...[a]lways flanked by its dark sisters, blasphemy and pornography" (op. cit., 158).

Of Principles and Phenomena

"...that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily (so to speak, in its "personal" actuality) offered to us in 'intuition' is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there" (E. Husserl,  Ideas I, 44).





Another anthem for phenomenology might be "back to Husserl himself." His 'principle of principles' (as he described above) marks the points of departure for the deployment of the phenomenological method. Anyone wishing to comment coherently on the movements within phenomenology, especially within the 'new' phenomenology, does well to begin in Husserl's governing principle as it opens upon putting experience at hand. One does even better if one states one's own understanding of the principle, and restates it as an interpretation of it.

If I may restate and interpret, the 'principle' admonishes the excursions of method to have faith in the knowledge that what presents itself within the intuition 'writes' itself into consciousness with its 'own hand,' as it were, without or at least prior to any conceptual framework: nothing intercedes for phenomena as they enter consciousness. What is there is the thing itself, unencumbered by a traversal through an extraneous conceptual space that imprints a signature of its having been there before its arrival in the consciousness. Consciousness therefore only needs to traverse itself to lead itself back to the thing itself.

Having a handle on the principle assists in determining if an application of the method has violated it, as, for example,  Dominique Janicaud charges Jean-Luc Marion and others of doing (see his Phenomenology and the "Theological Turn"). I am uncertain if Janicaud is a maximalist Husserlian, as perhaps Eugen Fink seems to be; but if there is something worth protecting in Husserl's thought, something worth keeping from a contamination, it must be the principle itself. Fink himself protects Husserl's project from misunderstanding and at the same time suggests that what awaits the effective phenomenologist (one who deploys the method successfully) is nothing short of phenomenal (as in, 'he played a phenomenal game,' or 'the performance was phenomenal,' or 'it was a phenomenal film'). Nothing short of conversion or transformation awaits over the Husserlian rainbow (see Ronald Bruzina's Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928-1938, Yale, 2004; and, of course, Eugen Fink's own Sixth Cartesian Meditation: the Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method, trans. R. Bruzina, Indiana, 1995).

How ironic then is Marion's work, work accused of violating the principle of principles and lacking 'rigor', which proves the method (a special case of the exception[al] proving the rule), demonstrates how the method really can get at the very possibility of conversion and transformation. What should trouble us more is the principle's not-so-subtle post-Cartesian appeal to certainty, or at least confidence; Marion has rehabilitated both the principle and Descartes in this regard. In any event, nothing in Marion's work, especially The Erotic Phenomenon and In the Self's Place, eludes 'rigor;' in fact, the former work can be viewed as overwrought, and both viewed certainly as vigorous and exhaustive (if not exhausting).

The principle, nonetheless, provides a basis for moving into this new phenomenology of givenness. I have described the maneuver of this graduated method as the phenomenological moment in part to remind me that the method defies causality---the moment is a moment of simultaneity---and in part to remind me to resist the temptation to think the reduction as the result of a sequential process of 'epoche' followed by the 'reduction proper.' Despite Husserlian 'givenness' rooting itself in the mathematical, in the given of geometrical proof, Marion's givenness leads back to the fecundity of such 'originary' givenness and deconstructs it, leading the way to his third reduction.   

Hence, the phenomenological moment is a busy place, whether sonorous or cacophonous. The horizonal element of the principle which sets the limits at which the thing presents itself also sets the tone (the stage?) for the moment itself, where the thing, consciousness, and the horizon intersect upon the 'ground' of the moment, which is none other than a shape-shifting 'self,' or better, shape-shifting 'selves.' At the risk of participating in the seemingly endless talk sometimes construed as a meta-discourse of 'phenomenology', let me remind myself of why the method tends to work in productive and fascinating ways. While phenomenology 'proves' nothing and only points to possibility, its effects can have profound critical implications, especially for the critical approach generally employed in this blog.

The stakes are high: reality itself. The moment of method recreates the world. So long as we dot our "I's" and cross our "gazes" we should be OK and live to commit phenomenology another day. We should also bear in mind that temporal and spatial markers [I underline some of these below] are merely a convention in phenomenology, much like the trope of its presenting itself in the first person singular---all convention, all Darstellung, all stage-craft. All the world's a stage.

The enactment of the method begins as the thing surprises consciousness into a consciousness of 'something.' That consciousness is a consciousness of a self, and that self is a self in the flesh, and that flesh rests in its finitude and immanence. The very boredom (how's that for an electrified term in this business) of the natural attitude, the attitude that accepts the science of reality as, for example, a clockwork (choose a metaphor for the scientific worldview), an acceptance of the clockwork in all its magnificence and awe, breaks off---boredom experiences a disturbance, even astonishment, at a thing presenting itself, appearing in view, within a gaze. What gaze? When did consciousness get a gaze? The thing awakens the gaze resting dormant---waiting to be born---in consciousness---the intention born of the thing.

What next? What happens next is boredom already collapsed upon consciousness's [t]race leading back through itself to the thing that comes into view. The world of the self has just gotten a bit bigger, stretched out by the space cut by the thing itself; the thing births an enlarged self, a self become through a becoming, a turning toward, a conversion to the thing by the thing. The collapse of the natural attitude, boring as such, comprises the epoche which brings into relief what has just collapsed it: the reduction proper and the thing itself. To separate the two into sequential occurrences would be tantamout to tweezing out rhythm and time from pitch and tonality in music. Let's not do it.

Cacophony or symphony? If experience forms the self, then the epistemological problem presents fully formed. "We are our experiences." "We learn through experience." Certainly these are not difficult notions. Truth is, phenomenology, when its not masquerading as its own meta-discourse, happens every day to everybody. We are 'everyday' phenomenologists, just as we are everyday mystics (as Karl Rahner would have it, referring to Christians who otherwise would be nothing at all), who experience something.

It's a place to start, a place for me to remember that I said this and was going someplace with it. Perhaps it is a place to start again, restart, from where I viewed this through a parallax view, or through the Lacanian registers and the role of 'lack.' In a modified version here, Lack constitutes the self in the flesh and its opening upon the immediacy of the thing fulfilling the intuition. The loss/lack within the self experiencing itself (as itself) and the world through the epoche, points to a fall into the reduction, a 'leading back,' which inheres in the growth of consciousness, and therefore recreates it. In the play of the Real (the condition of the absence of intercession for the thing, its immediacy of presentation), the method enacts, in the Imaginary order, something actually going on in the ineffable Real.  Lack is loss, but loss as a space for something to enter, not merely consciousness, but of becoming.