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Return of the First-Person Singular: The Science of Subjectivity and the Sciences

2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jspecphil.26.2.0163

1527-9383

Alphonso Lingis,

Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Edmund Husserl launched phenomenology as a rigorous and positivist science of subjectivity. It was set up to deal with specific problems in other scientific disciplines. The discovery of paradoxes in mathematics had put in question the ultimate rationality of mathematics and of the mathematized empirical sciences. Husserl's phenomenology worked to trace mathematics and logic back to their fundamental units and operations and to exhibit the mental acts in which they are constituted. Subsequently he judged that every scientific discipline was in need of a phenomenological investigation of the subjective acts in which the distinctive objects studied by that discipline are constituted, given to intuition and their meanings ascribed.Empirical and ideal objects—the essences with which objects are identified and classified—are given in intuition; intuition constitutes them as objects. Intuition occurs in acts in the first-person singular—“I see.” These acts can be brought to light by a specific kind of reflection, also an act in the first-person singular. The successive intuitive and meaning-ascribing acts, and the second-order intuition that is reflection, retain and anticipate one another, forming a distinctive and individual stream of consciousness that is the first-person singular. The science of subjectivity is based on the reality of the first-person singular.By midcentury developments in other sciences led to discrediting the phenomenological conception of subjectivity. Structural linguistics had exhibited system in the phonetics and syntaxes of languages and demonstrated that languages change in systematic ways. The meanings of words and expressions form within language and are determined by the existing vocabulary, grammar, and paradigms of a language; they are not the products of individual subjective acts.Anthropology discarded, as post-Enlightenment Western, the concept of individual subjectivity as an abiding identity and source productive of meanings, judgments, decisions, and initiatives.1 It is cultural symbols that, Clifford Geertz affirms, first articulate, generate, and regenerate thought. To think is to identify things and relate them with words and other cultural symbols. Symbols are external to the thinker; they are words and also images, markings, gestures, rituals, graven idols, water holes, and tools.2 Their meanings are in their uses, and the ways they are used are accessible to observation without divining the minds of the users. “The meanings that symbols, the material vehicles of thought, embody are often elusive, vague, fluctuating, and convoluted, but,” Geertz affirms, “they are, in principle, as capable of being discovered through systematic empirical investigation … as the atomic weight of hydrogen or the function of the adrenal glands.”3 Thus anthropology can dispense with the dubious methods to access other minds and become a natural science like any other.4 Claude Lévi-Strauss set out to show the underlying structures, not explicitly conscious, in kinship systems, myths, garb and adornment, and cuisine. He set out to show that fundamental generative structures are universal across cultures.Emotions surge focused by words and symbols. Indignation, a feeling of injustice, of frustration of our expectations and plans, envy, jealousy, triumph—words and cultural symbols, not produced by the individual mind, make them possible. “Not only ideas, but emotions too, are cultural artifacts in man,” Geertz declares.5For the postmodern philosophy of mind meanings are articulated in the taxonomic contrasts, semantic systems, grammatical forms, and rhetorical paradigms of languages, which are social and institutional productions. The meanings of speech acts produced by individuals are determined from the specific tongue, milieu, profession, and social and practical situation in which they are uttered and from the distribution, condensations, and displacements of signifiers in the unconscious. Perceived things and events are not only identified with language; the vocabulary, grammar, and rhetoric of a specific language determine what we perceive and how. Action is ordered by the material imperatives of things and the cues, watchwords, and orders of social institutions.For postmodernism, Ellen Fox Keller explains, “subjects are … constructed by culturally specific discursive regimes (marked by race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on), and subjectivity itself is more properly viewed as the consequence of actions, behavior, or ‘performativity’ than as their source…. Selves are multiple and fractured rather than unitary, mobile rather than stable, porous rather than enclosed, externally constituted rather than internal or ‘inner’ natural essences.”6 The agency in me that says “I” is not a substantive identity; it is intermittent, fragmented, transitory.Art is now no longer seen as a discontinuous succession of individual creations; its themes and styles are engendered by the history of art. Postmodern theorists have abandoned the notion of creative force in the depth of the individual, indeed the notion of creativity: A society produces innumerable materials, mediums, forms, colors, meanings; artists select and combine from this existing fund. Their productions are constituted as art by being accepted into the history of art by the institutions and commerce of the art world.The postmodern philosophy of mind is seen to be realized in the practice and usage of electronic media. Media broadcasts diffuse representations of events and products; information about everything is instantly available on the Internet. Knowledge is stored as neutral units of information, detached, as in Wikipedia, from the experience and perspective of a thinker. Cyberspace engineers and theorists see themselves producing a global brain in which potentially all things and events are represented, all data stored in memory, and linked in all possible ways, connected, combined, synthesized. Individuals connected on the Internet constitute the noosphere, the collective consciousness that emerges from all the users of the Internet and that is greater than any one of them and greater than all of them. It would be analogous to the hive mind of ant, termite, or bee colonies studied by biologists. Its axioms, paradigms, technologies of image and message production, and distribution technologies are studied by cyberspace theorists and culture studies.Surveying the field of scientific research today, I will here turn attention to three sectors of research that break with the postmodern conception of subjectivity.Classical ethnographers observed the habitats, implements, economic activity, institutions, and beliefs of a community in view of producing an account of a particular “culture,” conceived as a functionally interrelated structure of economic, political, and ideological systems. Their work was scientific not only in the rigor of its observations but also in that the representation of a culture is translated into the vocabulary, paradigms, and explanations of scientific economics, sociology, political theory, psychology, biology, and physics.How are these productions of an anthropology that aims to be scientific verified? In most cases, another ethnographer does not go back to that community to verify what the first has written. In most cases the members of that community cannot or do not read the account of them the ethnographer has published. In practice a monograph is accepted by the anthropological community for internal characteristics—the appearance of detailed and exhaustive data and the apparent rigor of the reasoning and conclusions drawn from them.Agricultural practices, housing construction, tools and equipment, economic exchanges, and kinship systems are recorded and translated into the objective terminology of modern sciences. But all these are found to be determined by the natives' understanding of causality and the symbolic meanings ascribed to them. In practice the ethnographer sets out to learn the language, the categories, and the imagery of the users of symbols and in fact learns them by speaking to the natives and being understood by them. The anthropologist conceives the “culture” as an overarching and integrated system of symbols and representations, distinctive to a society, that provides individuals with a meaningful framework for orienting themselves in the world around them and to one another.But field researchers have come to recognize that the ideology or mythical or religious elaborations of a community are very unevenly present in the understanding of any informant. Pieces of the ideology and myth combine but also conflict with the practical knowledge each individual acquires of his or her particular natural environment and workplace. The discourse of the informant is also shaped by the sensibility, energies, and skills of his or her body. Consciousness waxes and wanes as sensory thresholds, states of wakefulness, fatigue, and also instincts, cravings, appetite, agitations, and drives surge and recede. Two women working alongside of one another planting and harvesting crops, the one with superabundant energy, the other with slow metabolism, the one young, the other aged after multiple childbearings, do not experience the same articulation of that field, and though they use the common words to describe it, the words do not have identical force and meaning for each of them. The singularity of a person's body also figures as a force of resistance to the identities attributed to him or her from others and from the ideology. Individuals with somewhat different pieces of ideology and myth and practical knowledge interact and engender changes in practical enterprises and social institutions and also in ideology and myth.The entry of the field researcher into a community alters the network of social relations in that community. The researcher is not a fly on the wall, unnoticed, going into every room and field. What an informant tells the ethnographer is selected and oriented by the political and psychological relations the informant has with other members of the community and with the researcher. The informant, commonly paid by the ethnographer, has a political and psychological relationship with that researcher. The informant is motivated by ambition, pride, cupidity, suspicion, affection, a longing to be recognized and admired.There may be much dishonesty in the relationship the researcher has with her informants; the researcher often conceals what she knows in order to increase the likelihood of acceptance and does not reveal her research goals. Her relationship with her informant is shaped by her curiosity, fascination, protectiveness, lust, frustration, anger, vindictiveness, disdain, craving for privacy, homesickness. The publication, twenty-five years after his death, of Bronislaw Malinowski's diaries—where he writes often of how he was just sick of all these truculent and fickle savages—has made ethnographers aware that they are not simply recording what an informant says but are in an obscure agon with an individual.Anthropologists write for readers in their own culture, primarily the academic community, but have to first understand and represent the native's point of view, more exactly, represent the individual informant's point of view. This has led to the search in recent decades for new forms of writing.7 There is need for theory to conceptualize the forces that make the discourse of the informant his or her own voice.The mind of the informant is not simply a locus where the ideological system of his culture is inscribed; it is a force of commitment—commitment to some pieces of this system but also to his own work and his maneuvers in the network of his political and psychological relations with others.Anthropologists have come to see that every community has contact with other communities and imports some of the representations of other communities, modified, renamed, reversed and assimilated, some sections badly integrated, coexisting or overlapping with sections of its own representations. In zones where a people has been invaded or conquered by another and have to contrive their lives between different economic and institutional systems with different cultural and mythical systems of interpretation, there arise cargo cult messiahs, Vodou serviteurs, ialorixás, mediums, and curanderos. They deal with individuals in individual predicaments and work with parts of the Christian and parts of the Aztec or Yoruba mythology to make sense of what is happening in this individual. They have to invent, to fill in the gaps, to work by inspiration. They improvise rituals and sacraments.Today anthropological field researchers first and everywhere encounter such encroachment of an alien system of understanding on communities in the entry of modern scientific medicine. With the intense and highly profitable penetration of pharmaceutical marketing across the planet, many people, especially the very poor, are treated by local health workers and by their families with a mix of modern therapeutic methods and pharmaceuticals, traditional healing resources, and religious and ritual practices. Medical anthropologists set out to assess and understand the impact of healers and rituals. They come to recognize something else: individuals are forced to take responsibility for their illness and healing with whatever resources and understanding they can assemble.8 Medical practitioners have come to recognize the difference between a patient assenting to and obeying the doctor, or the faith healer, and a patient taking responsibility for his disease and its cure on the basis of his own daily sufferings, observations, and judgments. Their practice will be different if the doctor has to take account of the patient herself taking responsibility for her disease and its treatment. We need a theoretical understanding of the first-person singular in this force to take responsibility for one's illness.In our Western societies folk medicine and faith healing are vanishing alternatives to scientific medical research, institutions, and practice. Medical science has constructed a highly technical vocabulary and grammar to formulate the results of its laboratory and clinical research into pathologies and their treatments. When a sufferer goes to the doctor, the doctor translates the patient's account of her ailments into this language, and the patient is induced to learn this language to understand her ailments, communicate them, and assent to treatment. Increasingly patients download explanations and treatments from the Internet before and after their consultations with the doctor. The extraordinary advance in pharmacology and hi-tech surgical interventions has made this language the more necessary and the more difficult for the patient to master.Medical practice finds that it must also deal with economic, political, and juridical institutions. The patient must learn and understand the medical discourse and to some measure also the economic, political, and juridical discourses.But the patient has another problem: he has to endure the suffering and to assess its impact on his family, his work, his sense of the life he henceforth has to lead and the death that he has to face. For all this, the medical discourse is of no avail. Indeed the real and promised advances of medical biotechnology, organ transplants and prostheses, and life-support systems work to defer death, rendering suffering and death intolerable and unintelligible. The sufferer has to elaborate a narrative of her aspirations and her fate, her destiny, her lifetime. The patient's own narrative of that alien event in her life that is her illness will determine what treatments she will accept and may even have an effect on the efficacy of those treatments. This narrative is composed not out of concepts but out of bewilderment, anxieties, fears, attachments, dereliction, and pain. The sufferer gets sight of the indifference of the material world, the impenetrability of brute reality, gets sight of the aleatory, improbable reality of his or her existence. Suffering and anxiety are not simply cultural artifacts; they are not made possible by the words of a culture but seek words for a private language, the narrative the sufferer composes by and for himself or herself.Anthropologists who have studied mentally disturbed very poor people in Java, Brazil, and India find that the family of the psychotic may accept whatever therapy and psychopharmaceuticals are available while also invoking images and conceptions and rituals from the prevailing religion.9 The images and conceptions from the prevailing religion function to fix, to bind, the rampant strangeness of the sufferer's experience and behavior for them. Medical anthropologists have investigated these phenomena in view of explaining the social and cultural context in which modern psychiatric practice in these places must be pursued.The psychotic himself may identify himself and his states with concepts and images from the prevailing religion. However, the psychotic works an individual transformation of them, giving them new and distinctive structures and force, often viewed as heterodox and fanatical by the family and by religious leaders. They may often be mixed with practices of black magic and sorcery. Anthropological researchers have come to recognize positive and productive forces in these heterodox beliefs and practices: they function to isolate the sufferer from her family and the community, in a protective withdrawal that enables the psychotic to recognize the distinctiveness of her sufferings and anxieties, establish some kind of distance from them, and produce images and discourse of strong coherence and emotional intensity.In 1922 Doctor Hans Prinzhorn published Bildnerei der Geisteskranken—translated into English as Artistry of the Mentally Ill—in which he reproduced and analyzed 187 from the more than five thousand paintings, drawings, and carvings he had collected from asylums in Heidelberg and farther afield, mostly from patients diagnosed as schizophrenic. Psychiatrist John M. MacGregor observed that “these ‘things’ are the product of an obsessional involvement with images in the service of extremely unusual preoccupations and ideas.” They are cosmological diagrams, maps of planets or worlds, depictions of visions and visitations of the dead, icons of private religions, influencing machines or magical weapons, medical illustrations, excitants for an explosive sexuality: “Commonly, there is no desire to share these things with anyone, and the images are kept secret, or are hidden.”10 They express a drive to create a metaphysical habitat for oneself alone.Prinzhorn found that he could not diagnose the psychiatric traumas and conditions of the patients from the images they made. Although they had no art education, these individuals had through long and obsessive application come upon techniques and styles that gave their works intense coherence, economy, and extraordinary expressiveness. Prinzhorn had obtained a degree in art history before training as a doctor and psychiatrist. He argued that the works of asylum image-makers issue from the same basic drives—an expressive urge, the urge to play, an ornamental urge, an ordering tendency, a tendency to imitate, and the need for symbols—that are at work in professional artists. Prinzhorn identified ten masters of the asylum, whose works exhibit exceptional skill, power, and eloquence.Professional artists such as expressionists Paul Klee and Alfred Kubin and surrealists André Breton and Max Ernst looked upon the works reproduced in Prinzhorn's book with awe and admiration; Paul Éluard called it “the most beautiful book of images there is.”11 Jean Dubuffet collected thousands of works of the insane, prisoners, and also spiritualists, mediums, and children, people ignorant of the canons and taste of the art world, calling them art brut, and eventually housed them in a building in Lausanne, Switzerland, set up as an antimuseum. English writers now call them the works of “outsider artists.”For postmodern aesthetics and culture studies the materials and styles of the artist are culturally produced, and an image or audio composition is constituted as art by the judgment of the art world, recognized because it makes a significant statement at a specific time in the evolution of art history. These works were made by individuals untrained in art and ignorant of the art world. Yet these works that issue out of their exaltations and terrors and made as metaphysical habitats for them were recognized to have in addition extraordinary aesthetic quality—and just because they were isolated from, free from the constraints of, the canons, tradition, taste, and trafficking of the art world. “Madness lightens the man, gives him wings, and promotes clairvoyance,” Dubuffet observed:12 “Insanity is the great art.”13 “We who love them,” Paul Éluard wrote, “understand that the insane refuse to be cured.”14Dubuffet realized that to understand the phenomenon of art brut a new conception of the first-person singular is required. He invoked the unconscious, not, as in Freudianism, constituted by what is foreclosed from and by consciousness but, instead, a wellspring of positive, creative energies, and not as impersonal but as radically individual. The attention to the art of children was motivated by, and confirmed, the conviction that the fundamental urges identified by Prinzhorn were part of human nature. Ananda Coomeraswamy declared, “The artist is not a special kind of man; every man is a special kind of artist.”15 We need theory to understand how the basic drives that produce artworks are seated in and set forth the first-person singular.In my book The Imperative, I argued that darkness and light, the sensuous depths, chromatic hue, sonority, textures, the useful but also the enormity of nonuseful things we perceive, and the other living species are not simply linguistic and social constructs;16 they are as real as we are and order us, order our sensibility and our movements. We need a theory that understands this reality and this ordering force. In The First Person Singular, I located a threefold force in the first-person singular, the force of commitment to one's word, a visionary force, and a force elaborating a narrative of one's own life.17 Here I have directed attention to zones in the broad field of contemporary research where the methods of anthropological, medical, and cultural research run up against the first-person singular and the specific forces of the first-person singular. Attending to these zones will enable us to forge a more incisive and more concrete concept of the first-person singular.