Phenomenology Fundamentals

After reading David Cerbone's chapter on Merleau-Ponty and his rather interesting introduction to the study of Phenomenology, I thought it would make sense to jot down a few fundamentals that will be helpful for me to keep in mind.  Also, while reading the introduction I noticed some interesting intersections with McLuhan's little publication, "The Medium is the Massage."

A Few Important Phenomenological Points (as I understand it):

1) Holistic structure of experience: Also a tenet of Gestalt Psychology which Merleau-Ponty admired.  As Cerbone suggests, "In experience, the whole is prior to the parts and so is more than their sum," and "bodily self-experience is a dimension of my "being-in-the-world", which resists decomposition into physiological and psychological components." Merleau-Ponty calls this unity of consciousness the Intentional Arc.  He says it is a "...unity of the senses, of intelligence, of sensibility and motility."

2) Return to the Phenomena: As the quote in the last point suggests, we need to get back to something that is prior to objective (and scientific) understandings of experience. Phenomenology is highly descriptive, and that has to do with understanding pre-objective experience. As Merleau-Ponty says, we need to "reveal a 'primary layer' of sense experience." 

3) Embodiment: Borrowing from Husserl, Merleau-Ponty championed the idea that the body is central to all experience. Husserl said in Ideas II that "the Body is, in the first place, the medium of all perception; it is the organ of perception and is necessarily involved in all perception." The body is also not just an object in the world, it is "categorically distinct" and one way of describing this is with the phenomenon of "double-touch" (where a hand can both touch and be touched).  The lived body has both of these aspects. 

4) Seeing as Prejudicitave: We see and then we judge.  Merleau-Ponty suggests that "nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see." This concept is very new to me, but as I understand it, there is a passive reception of objects through the senses, and this reception can be fooled, such as with an illusion, but we still have a sense of judgement that understands the greater meaning (an objective sense of truth?). What I have to be careful not to do here, is to turn the senses in to mere channels of perception (b/c that's what the empiricist does), and not to suggest that judgement comes before sense perception (as an intellectualist would). 

Intersections with McLuhan:

After looking at Walter Ong a little bit and thinking about the switch to literacy and the effect this had on sight gaining primacy over the other senses, I began wondering what this would mean for the unity of consciousness that is a part of phenomenology.  In what I have been reading, discussions of ranking the senses have mostly been left out.  Phenomenologists sort of combine sense perception, and talk about them as equal. To zero in on sight seems against the project of phenomenology, and looking at it as a causal result is pretty well out of the question. Husserl says that a "subject whose only sense was the sense of vision could not at all have an appearing Body" (a body that is not just a corporeal thing, but involved in the experience).  I don't think Ong is suggesting that with literacy, society became uni-sensual with nothing but a sense of sight, but I am curious about what this switch in the hierarchy means for Phenomologists.  Does anything really change if some senses are more important than others, or would the phenomologist feel that the balance was disrupted?

What I found really interesting about Cerbone's introduction to Phenomenology is that it felt a lot like what McLuhan was trying to do in his 1967 publication "The Medium is the Message." This little book is filled with pictures that draw attention to the process of reading and how we take part in literate activities without realizing the perceptual faculties involved.  When Cerbone was describing the visual sensations of the words and the tactile experience of the book, it brought me right back to a section in The Medium is the Message that is simply an image with two thumbs holding the pages of the book open.  There seem to be some fundamental differences between the aims of these two works, but I'm noticing some overlap too.  I'm going to keep the aims of these two camps in mind, and hopefully either reconcile them or identify their major differences.  

*And lets not forget multi-media art works... I'm still looking for some perfect examples that fit into what I'm thinking about, but like a phenomenologist, I'd like to look at the experience of these works of art, rather than at their particular content or message. 

A Wordy Rendition of My Three Part Focus

1) The qualitys of sense perception: understanding various ways of thinking about aesthetic experience and our connection to the physical world.

-Kant's theory of aesthetic disintrestedness: "0ur pleasure in beauty, in short, is disinterested because we are indifferent to the actual object, which is not itself an object of direct sensual desire. Our pleasure comes from enjoying the free play of our faculties." -Martin Jay's description in "Songs of Experience." I like this idea that the object doesn't have inherent qualities, and that the senses are directly related to the pleasurable experience of art.

-Martin Jay also mentions another idea I liked. Angelika Rauch's psychoanalytical explanation of Kant's "disinterest," that  "...the ultimate desire for the body of the mother to overcome the loss of an original unity, which may be one way to understand the yearning for aesthetic pleasure, is repressed because it is impossible to attain, leading to the displacement of it onto the subject's own senses." To me this has to do with why we enjoy the senses so much in the first place; I think what she's saying is that we use the senses as a way of making up for the lack of unity with the mother... we have this constant desire that can never be fulfilled, and the senses reflect this yearning.

-Merleu-Ponty's sense of "being in the world"; that there isn't a separate intellectual aspect to experience, that the body and the mind are one and we have direct raw experiences with the world around us. I like the idea that the senses are not filters that merely give a partial sense of some objective truth out in the world, but that sense experience is more like direct contact.

2) How interactive multi-sensory art reflects these perceptual theories.

-Artworks that incorporate screen interfaces seem to reflect our visual culture that places sight at the top of the sensual hierarchy.  What's going on when art incorporates bodily interaction and the other senses too?  One example is Janet Cardiff's 2004 work, "Night Canoeing" that incorporates a video display of a canoe trip on a dark night with speakers that play out the sound of the paddles against the water.  Does this work replicate a sense of "being in the world"?  Is the video screen in this piece the result of our preoccupation with vision? Are we really as visual as we think we are if the sound elements in this art add so much to it?

Night Canoeing: http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/inst/nightcanoeing.html

-I'm working on coming up with examples that directly relate to the theories of perception I will discuss.  They will be my forms of evidence. eg. can I find a work that represents the sense of loss/lack accredited to our aesthetic/sensual fascinatins as described by Rauch?

3) What occurs when this type of art is housed in a museum context. 

-Is the museum hoping to heighten visitors' sensual awareness of the world as seen through the work of artists? Are the motivations of contemporary art museums today similar to those of the renaissance - to improve society through the aesthetic (and sensual) experience of artworks created by genius artists?

-What is the motivation for taking works of art from other contexts into museum spaces?  What affect does this have on perception?  What about art that is meant to exist in the gallery?

Thesis as of This Moment

Working Title: Awakening Sense Experience: Embodied Art and the Museum Screen 

Abstract: The hierarchy of the senses dictates that vision is a crucial element of our experiences with the world.  According to thinkers such as Marshal McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Harold Innis, this is the result of the onset of a literate society with cognitive abilities based on our adoption of the printed word. The screen interface is an extension of this visually-oriented culture and has developed into a fixture in museums through interactive exhibition interfaces, projections, and virtual displays online. Artworks that incorporate screen interfaces, however, rarely focus on the sense of sight alone and this multi-sensory activity suggests that screens can act as tools for awakening our weakened senses of hearing, touch, taste, and smell.  Theories of perception often champion an engagement with the world through all the senses and as Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests, "Sense experience is that vital communication with the world which makes it present as a familiar setting of our lives." This article addresses the work of Canadian and international artists such as David Rokeby, Daniel Rozin, Nam June Paik and others who have considered the emotive qualities of screen art, and explores the possibilities of heightened multi-sensory experiences through interaction with museum screens. In a quest to understand these relationships, the following questions are posed: Is the screen a limiting factor that hinders our encounters with multi-sensory art, or does it work in tandem with our sensual faculties to positive effect? How do screens affect relationships with art objects and what forms of art are particularly suited to screen representation? And finally, what role does the museum screen play in an embodied experience with art?

Thoughts Today

Today I am very much drawn to considerations of technology as a mediating factor.  As I think about our perception and interaction with the world around us through the senses, the connection, to me, feels very direct and active in the sense that there are aren't any filters standing between me and the raw experience of the world... whether it is the direct access I have to the sounds of construction around me or the smell of garbage outside my apartment.  

Although, I wonder if in a way, there is no real true raw experience, because everything that I see, hear, smell, touch, or taste is delivered to me through waves of light, energy etc. or is obstructed by something else, such as in the way that I receive the sounds of construction only as an effect of the echoing that occurs on the buildings outside of my apartment.  My sense experiences though, do seem to offer something very real and something that feels quite different from my interactions with various forms of media like the computer screen, television, or radio.  Each of these machines sort of constructs an experience that replicates what's going on when I hear something organic in the world... What is organic though? And why do I feel that a sense experience with my computer is so different from what I feel in the real world? 

My inclination at this point is that sense experience is something vital to perception and it is interesting that media emphasize the visual to such a great extent.  I feel that attention to the other senses might help to awaken something in us, and I'd like to consider the possibility of regaining the perceptual faculties that took the sidelines as we formed into a visual culture.  Can't we combine the benefits of an oral and literate worldview?

Hopefully, as I get closer to a strong thesis, I'll have a more thoughtful opionion on this...