The Problem of Standpoint in Phenomenology

Abstract

The aim of this book is to argue for a standpoint approach to phenomenology grounded in the idea that social oppression and marginalization can, in some cases, result in privileged insight. However, the aim of phenomenology is to uncover what is shared and essential to our being—what conditions support in general and for all human beings the kind of being that we share. The classical phenomenological methodologies reflect this focus on the “universal” by systematically eliminating specificity as a means of identifying what is common to all. In this chapter, I present the methodological “problem” of introducing standpoint to the phenomenological project. I also present an example from the work of the critical phenomenologists, Alia Al-Saji, whose insights are drawn from the specificity of her experience—they occur because of and not in spite of their social specificity. Yet her work also uncovers something that structures experience more generally. I start with this example to show that such an approach must somehow be possible. The rest of the book will be an exploration of how this is possible and why it is a crucial contribution to the phenomenological project.

In 2015, the Iraqi–Canadian philosopher Alia Al-Saji attended an art exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts titled Benjamin-Constant: Marvels and Mirages of Orientalism. As she walked through the exhibit, she began to feel “swallowed-up” by the images she saw. Paintings in vivid detail and color depicted Arab and Muslim women as passive and alluring sexual objects. Arab and Muslim men lurked in the background or served as attendants—asexual yet quietly threatening. These paintings, she writes, are “made visible in colors and on a scale designed to overpower and convince the viewer” (Al-Saji 2019, 481, 479). As she ventures further into the exhibit, her breathing changes; she feels, even in the large gallery, a sense of enclosure. She realizes she is being trapped by the “viscous” and “sticky” colonial images that “linger in the imagination and mediate how we see—how one sees oneself” (Al-Saji 2019, 483). She is glued to these images and the colonial past they depict in a way that overwhelms her ability to take over this past on her own terms.

Although many writers have written about the objectification of racialized bodies in art, Al-Saji is interested in the temporal aspects of these depictions—how art can influence the experience of time and history (Al-Saji 2019, 475). She argues that art involving racialized bodies can “glue” those bodies (whether subject or viewer) to the past, casting them as “coming ‘too late’ to intervene in the meaning of [their] own representation” (Al-Saji 2019, 475). The racialized viewer can feel “fastened” to a leveled down caricature or stereotype (Al-Saji 2019, 478), and racialized subjects in art reinforce and entrench a standing racial imaginary. This is what Al-Saji herself feels when viewing works like Benjamin-Constant’s The Favorite of the Emir—trapped in the Western sensibilities of “an eternal past” (Al-Saji 2019, 479) in which the Muslim and Arab subjects (and by implication the viewers) are nameless and without narrative—subjects who do not and cannot have a say in who they are (Al-Saji 2019, 480) (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

“The Favorite of the Emir” by Jean Joseph Benjamin-Constant, 1879, Courtesy of the United States Naval Academy Museum, PD-US-expired

Not all art depicting the colonial past is “enclosing” in this way. When Al-Saji visits another “orientalist” painting, General Gordon’s Last Stand (depicting the “heroism” of Gordon’s death in Khartoum, Sudan, in 1885), she finds it paired with a response piece titled This Is General Gordon—I Have Forgotten Was There a Past? by Bob and Roberta Smith.¹ The latter piece is a sculpture of milk crates in the rough shape of a human body topped with an upside-down red bucket (mimicking and mocking the red fez depicted on Gordon in the original piece). There is text written on the sculpture that a viewer can only read by walking around it. This text questions the role and purpose of imperial power paintings like General Gordon’s Last Stand and connects English imperialism of the colonial era to recent events in Iraq. By walking around the milk crate “Gordon” to read the text, viewers take up the path and orientation of the Muslim soldiers who surrounded him. “The effect,” writes Al-Saji, “is dizzying, decentering the sensory-motor schema of the viewer and recentering an open-ended question: not history as such but the suffering past–present, the destructuring and aphasic wounds of colonial durations” (Al-Saji 2019, 486). This disorientation is productive—loosening the grip of the “heroic” Gordon and the “violent” Muslim hoard, creating “possibilities for seeing and feeling differently” (Al-Saji 2019, 486). “As I walked around this artwork, the hitherto invisible and sticky past was reconfigured with new temporal links, spacing it out and loosening its hold; hesitation was introduced into the past and its enduring colonial formations. Breathing time was created” (Al-Saji 2019, 486).

Al-Saji’s insight about the ability of art to “glue” one to an enclosing understanding of the past or open one up to an authentic rethinking of it resonates with Heidegger’s view of art. Heidegger argues that a work of art can make explicit the values, interpretations, and everyday practices that provide a shared world and give meaning to the lives of a people. It has the power to shape how we understand ourselves and the world we live in, and thus “gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves” (Heidegger 1977, 168).² Al-Saji’s insight, though related, is distinct. Whereas Heidegger emphasizes the generation of shared culture, Al-Saji starts from a feeling of being trapped—of recognizing and trying to resist the inheritance of such a social world. Because of this starting point, the past, especially, becomes focal in her analysis, and she is able to explore art’s power to “mediate our relation” to the past—either reproducing and amplifying it (“pushing us under”) or complicating and challenging this past, “offering leeway and air” (Al-Saji 2019, 486).

Al-Saji draws on her own experience of colonial art to uncover something about the way “image and sculpture can operate as intervals—corporeal and imaginary prosthetics” guiding our navigation of the past (Al-Saji 2019). I read her as providing insight into a shared condition of experience—that art has the power to mediate our understanding of the past is true for everyone. However, it would distort her view to overlook the “differential” nature of the experiences she draws on: “racialized subjects are stuck and positioned differentially within that imaginary: while white subjects can appropriate that expanse of ‘civilizational’ history, racialized subjects are limited to those historical or fictional elements that make up a stereotyped past” (Al-Saji 2019, 478). As a white American of European ancestry, I might understand there are racist and sexist tropes in these imperial power artworks, but I would not and could not experience the kind of confinement Al-Saji describes. I would not have the same phenomenological insight that she has in that context, because I do not share the same experience of the work. She draws on experiences that are rooted in her social identity. “My phenomenological analysis is informed by my experience of and work on the racialization of Muslims and Arabs in contemporary Western contexts and by my responses in navigating the lived spaces of affect and sensation generated by these installations” (Al-Saji 2019, 476). Her way of understanding and approaching the phenomena is shaped by her socially located experiences in a way that is revelatory, and the origin of her insight is unique to her social identity.

The Aims and Means of Classical Phenomenology

Consider, for a moment, how remarkable Al-Saji’s insight is in the context of classical phenomenology.³ The aim of phenomenology is to uncover shared conditions shaping the phenomena that show up in human experience. Although the project of phenomenology starts from experience, as Steven Crowell writes, “the phenomenologist does not reflect on experience in order to describe it in its particularity but to uncover the ‘essential’ or a priori structures that inform it” (Crowell 2011, 35). This aim is articulated in slightly different ways by different classical phenomenologists; however, all classical phenomenology has a “transcendental” aim.

Husserl captures this aim as an inquiry into transcendental consciousness—not an accounting of “psychological self-experience” (Husserl 1960, 26) but an inquiry into a priori conditions of consciousness that make our experience itself possible (Husserl 1960, 19, 1999, 39, 2017, 112–116). We work back from our actual experience of the world to, as Husserl’s student Heidegger describes it, the “transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences, in which objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness” (Heidegger 1982, 21). Although Heidegger is quick to distinguish his own phenomenological aim from that of his predecessor, he nonetheless shares the goal of uncovering something essential and shared in being: “leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being, whatever may be the character of that apprehension, to the understanding of the being of this being (projecting upon the way it is unconcealed)” (Heidegger 1982, 21, emphasis mine). Heidegger characterizes phenomenology as an interrogation of Dasein—that being for whom its being is an issue. Instead of focusing on consciousness, Heidegger is interested in uncovering the conditions that are necessary to support a being concerned with who they are—a being that experiences a specific kind of articulation of the world as a result of this caring. Merleau-Ponty’s formulation of the phenomenological project incorporates insights from both Husserl and Heidegger (Carman 2013, 2008, 30ff.). In Phenomenology of Perception, he takes up Husserlian talk of “essences,” writing that phenomenology is the study of essences and that its problems “amount to defining essences, such as the essence of perception or the essence of consciousness” (Merleau-Ponty 2013, 7). Yet Merleau-Ponty also acknowledges the importance of our “everyday” comportment in the world—a central component of Heideggerian phenomenology. He writes: “And yet phenomenology is also a philosophy that places essences back within existence and thinks that the only way to understand man and the world is by beginning from their ‘facticity,’” adding that the project must always attempt to understand “this naïve contact with the world in order to finally raise it to a philosophical status” (Merleau-Ponty 2013, 7).

Although phenomenologists differ on the details of the phenomenological goal, they are all ultimately committed to uncovering something “universal” to human being, Dasein, or transcendental consciousness. Al-Saji’s insight, so far, seems to fit within this project. Although part of her work involves lifting out and making explicit the reach of colonial harms and their persistence—something that is a contingent feature of our social and historical world—she also manages to unearth something that is more general about the possibilities of art itself and the way it can mediate our interpretation of the past. Art makes explicit those normally backgrounded values, practices, experiences that shape our understanding of ourselves and others. This is a shared feature of the human experience of art—something essential to how art works. Al-Saji used her own socially situated experience—her Iraqi heritage—to uncover this. However, situating Al-Saji within the classical project becomes complicated methodologically. Although there is nothing about the classical phenomenological project itself that bars the utilization of unique perspectives and standpoints, the methods by which classical thinkers achieve access to shared structures do not provide any means for making sense of socially situated experiences as privileged or especially phenomenologically revelatory.

In contrast to Al-Saji’s work, the methods used to achieve the transcendental aims of classical phenomenology downplay or eliminate significant differences in experience; they either do not credit social location with any special phenomenological value or actively attempt to strip away this specificity to reveal shared, general conditions underlying the experience.

Husserl’s method, for example, proceeds through a series of “reductions” to arrive at the transcendental structures of consciousness. He begins by “bracketing” the natural attitude—our theoretical commitments about the nature of experience (e.g. their scientific underpinnings) and our everyday assumptions about them (Husserl 2017, 105ff.). He then deploys eidetic variation—using his imagination to systematically vary different aspects of the experience to determine the limits of what counts as that kind of experience. When one happens upon a variation that alters the very nature of the experience (e.g. it stops counting as an experience of perception, or would cease to be an experience of something understood to be real rather than hallucinated or imagined), one discovers something essential to the experience itself. By systematically altering the initial experience, Husserl attempts to move past specificity of the source experience to determine which elements of an experience are truly “essential” to it (Husserl 1977, 54, 2017, 198–201). As Duane Davis characterizes this method: “By implementing the skeptical attitude of the epochē and at once engaging in the phenomenological and eidetic reductions, a field of transcendental subjectivity is revealed as the condition of the possibility of the appearance of phenomena within intentional relations” (Davis 2020, 5). This phenomenological methodology starts from a specific lived experience, but does not aim at a detailed description of the experience in its particularity. Rather, the method proceeds through a series of reductions that systematically strip it down to its most essential structural features.

Heidegger does not deploy the method of free variation, but his method also treats specificity and variation as noise to be avoided in the very selection of experiences that ought to be drawn on in phenomenological interrogation. He emphasizes experiences of “average everydayness” (Heidegger 2008, 67ff.), because, he writes: “In this everydayness there are certain structures which we shall exhibit—not just any accidental structures, but essential ones which, in every kind of Being that factical Dasein may possess, persist as determinative for the character of its Being” (Heidegger 2008, 38).

Merleau-Ponty’s method is distinct from both Husserl and Heidegger. As Taylor Carman points out in his foreword to Phenomenology of Perception, “whereas they proceeded at a very general level of description and argument, Merleau-Ponty regularly drew from the empirical findings and theoretical innovations of the behavioral, biological, and social sciences” (Carman 2013). Yet (with some notable exceptions I’ll discuss in the chapter, “The Methodology of Breakdown as a Standpoint Approach”), like Heidegger, he generally relies on highly generalized experiences: walking around an apartment (Merleau-Ponty 2013, 209), perceiving a lamp within arm’s reach or a house in the distance (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 14), talking with a friend (Merleau-Ponty 2013, 131, 428), and looking at a newspaper (Merleau-Ponty 2013, 20). We start from these general experiences and then “step back” from them to see them anew and with “wonder.” We do this “in order to see transcendences spring forth and it loosens the intentional threads that connect us to the world in order to make them appear; it alone is conscious of the world because it reveals the world as strange and paradoxical” (Merleau-Ponty 2013, lxxvii).

The goal of phenomenology, as articulated by its classical authors (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty), was, broadly speaking, to uncover the essential conditions of human experience through the examination of experience itself, and the methodologies used operate primarily by stripping away or simply avoiding what is specific or idiosyncratic in a given experience to reveal the shared, general conditions underlying that experience. Al-Saji’s work, on the other hand, is about her own experience of art as an Iraqi-Canadian. Her social identity is not accidental or a peripheral element of experience that might be “stripped away” to better reveal the phenomenon. Still—her work about the experience of temporality, culture, and art reveals shared conditions—they structure phenomena for all of us. How is it that Al-Saji can do this methodologically? The project of this book will be to draw out the implicit and sometimes underdeveloped methodologies already at work in the classical thinkers to make sense of how socially situated experiences provide distinct and (often) privileged insights into the “transcendental” goal of classical phenomenology. I’ve called the set of methodologies that can and do draw on socially specific experiences to uncover shared conditions of experience standpoint phenomenology.⁴

Distinguishing the Problem

I want to distinguish the apparent methodological problem of a standpoint approach to phenomenology from a related problem involving the use of classical phenomenology to uncover the socially and historically contingent forces shaping experience. As Lisa Guenther points out, “patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormativity permeate [and] organize” our experience even if they “are not a priori in the sense of being absolutely prior to experience and operating the same way regardless of context” (Guenther 2020, 12). Given the “transcendental” aim of classical phenomenology, it is not at all obvious what role it plays in unearthing these organizing but contingent structures or ameliorating their harms. In the introduction to a recent volume, Phenomenology as Critique: Why Method Matters, the editors capture the worry this way:

It is often assumed and also argued that these methods and analyses unavoidably lead to ahistorical theorization, divorced from all facticity and situatedness. Phenomenology is taken to be, especially in its classical Husserlian guise, exclusively after a priori structures of experience and, as a result, uninterested in or perhaps unable or unwilling to do justice to the concrete. Its preoccupation with uncovering the necessary purportedly blinds it to the contingent and renders it a toothless affair, without any situated traction, diagnostic or normative. (Aldea et al. 2022, 5)

There are a variety of thoughtful responses to this problem. Lisa Guenther argues that the classical articulations of phenomenology are simply “insufficiently critical” of the contingent historical and social structures that shape our experience and would have to be revised, perhaps radically, to focus instead on the “quasi-transcendental” and historically contingent structures that nonetheless deeply shape our experience (Guenther 2020, 12). Johanna Oksala also argues that the classical methodologies might require revision to address these social and historically contingent forces (Oksala 2016), but the tools for this are already largely embedded in the classical methodologies.⁵ While still others, like Andreea Smaranda Aldea, Sara Heinämaa, and Lanei M. Rodemeyer, draw out detailed accounts of how classical phenomenology is uniquely well positioned to accomplish this task (Rodemeyer 2022; Aldea 2019, 2022; Heinämaa 2022).

This is a distinct debate from the problem I tackle here. My question is not about whether classical phenomenology can be used to understand and study the way contingent cultural forces shape our experience. Rather, I am interested in how diversity of experiences (especially experiences shaped by oppression) offer unique and important contributions to the “transcendental” aim of the classical project. As I show throughout this book, there are many examples of novel and important phenomenological insights that are generated through and because of the specificity of their starting point. I want to know exactly how these insights are possible methodologically. My question is not whether phenomenology can be made attentive to social difference, but how social difference might be harnessed to tell us something new about human being as it is shared.

Standpoint Phenomenology and Critical Phenomenology

Partly in response to questions like those raised by Guenther and Oksala (and many more), a version of phenomenology called “critical phenomenology” has emerged. Although there is wide variation in its methods and content, its “critical” aim unites all practitioners. This aim is two-fold: (1) to uncover the way power structures experience and (2) to draw attention to the way power structures our ability to analyze that experience (Weiss et al. 2020, xiv).⁶ Key examples of this new approach include Sara Ahmed (Ahmed 2006, 2007), Alia Al-Saji (Al-Saji 2018, 2013, 2014), and Lisa Guenther (Guenther 2013). Although our guiding questions differ, there are some deep allegiances.

Standpoint phenomenology illustrates how social position can shape one’s phenomenological insights. This seems closely related to aim (1) of critical phenomenology: uncovering the way power structures experience. One of the most important contributions of standpoint phenomenology is its exploration of how social marginalization can develop into a privileged insight into the shortcomings of past phenomenological conclusions, which is aim (2) of critical phenomenology—drawing attention to the way power structures our ability to analyze experience. Insofar as standpoint phenomenology is a methodology that enables these critical phenomenological aims, it should find a home in critical phenomenology. Because it is a methodology that has not yet been explicitly articulated, it should be considered a novel contribution.⁷ I should also be clear that I do not argue that the methods I articulate here have never been used before. On the contrary, I will show that these methods have been used fruitfully—often by critical phenomenologists—they have just not been made explicit.

While my project is distinct from critical phenomenology, it is not oppositional. This work may provide a way of understanding how many critical phenomenological projects can, in fact, also further the aims of classical phenomenology.

A (Mainly) Heideggerian Approach

At 7 years old, I got into this brutal fistfight with a neighborhood boy. I was scared. I was bloodied. And he kept hitting me. And so I got up and I ran away. Later that afternoon, I do go home through the back door. And I hear my oldest brother yelling and screaming: “He’s such a black sheep. He’s such an embarrassment. He’s a coward.” And he’s talking about me, of course. That really kind of began a smear campaign in terms of shaming me. And so, for years, I just tried to fight my way, I realized, out of my shame. (Goldbloom 2021)

Now an author and teacher, Andrew Reiner thinks, writes, and talks a lot about growing up under the “old” views of masculinity. In his recent book, Better Boys, Better Men, Reiner writes about how formative this early experience was: “The rage my brother inspired in me stayed with me for a long time. Consciously and unconsciously I carried it for years” (Reiner 2020, 5). He feared and disliked his brother. But even at seven, he understood that he should want to be a “man,” and his brother’s taunts reverberated with some already forming and internalized ideas about what it meant to fulfill that role. “I wanted to show my brother that I was as tough as he was. To my consternation and shame, I recognized that I was trying to show my older brother that I was just as much of a ‘man’ as he was” (Reiner 2020, 5). The 7-year-old Reiner cared about being (and being seen as) a man. As he got older, he began to seriously question what it meant to be a man. And when his son was born, the question took on a new immediacy: “if I had a reckoning when I was young, this was really kind of the second big reckoning, because it was no longer just my crusade. It really forced me to face a lot of questions in terms of how I was going to raise a boy” (Goldbloom 2021). As the mother of a little boy and a little girl, I worry about this too; it’s part of a more general worry about who these young people will be and how I can prepare them to flourish in the world in which they will find themselves. My concern about who they are is intimately tied to and shapes the concern I have about who I am as a parent.

Though the methods I develop could be adapted for use in service of any of the “transcendental” aims of phenomenology I’ve presented, the one that animates my own work is Heideggerian, and it’s worth saying a bit about why. In the introduction of Being and Time, Heidegger writes that “Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it” (Heidegger 2008, 32). When I look to my own experience, I notice that everything I do is permeated by a care for who that makes me. It is obvious in the big life choices I make: my profession, whether or not I should have children, etc., but it is also evident in small things, like what clothes to buy or how to spend my day off. I care about who I am, and it shapes all of my projects, choices, and everyday dealings. In his work on the experience of existential absurdity, Thomas Nagel writes:

Think of how an ordinary individual sweats over his appearance, his health, his sex life, his emotional honesty, his social utility, his self-knowledge, the quality of his ties with family, colleagues, and friends, how well he does his job, whether he understands the world and what is going on in it. Leading a human life is a full-time occupation, to which everyone devotes decades of intense concern. (Nagel 1971, 719–720)

What makes Dasein special is that even in our everyday (“ontic”) dealings we care about who we are. This makes Dasein different from other kinds of things—even other animals. We cannot help but care about who we are: “no sooner has Dasein expressed anything about itself to itself, than it has already interpreted itself as care (cura), even though it has done so only pre-ontologically” (Heidegger 2008, 227).

Caring about who we are gets parsed into all sorts of specific ways of caring about our lives and the things in our lives—our caring about who we are animates our projects and we are concerned with the tools we need to use to achieve the projects. We care about others around us—both how they are doing for their own sake and also what their activities mean in terms of how we see ourselves. The expectations required to fulfill a certain role—being a man, being a good parent, etc.—are set and communicated through the actions of others attempting to fulfil those roles. Sometimes we get explicit instruction about this (e.g. the taunts of Reiner’s brother), but more often we just observe and absorb the norms that surround us.⁸ “Care,” writes Heidegger, is not “some special attitude towards the Self” (Heidegger 2008, 237); we are always “ahead of ourselves,” projecting ourselves forward into who we want to be. Heidegger calls this specific way of being that always cares about who it is “existence”: “Dasein is an entity which, in its very Being, comports itself understandingly towards that Being. In saying this, we are calling attention to the formal concept of existence. Dasein exists” (Heidegger 2008, 78).

I take the important “transcendental” aim of phenomenology to be uncovering those structures or conditions that enable “existence”—that allow for a being who cares about who it is. And our caring about who we are (our being) in an everyday way positions us to inquire into these ontological questions about our being. In caring about who we are in our everyday lives, we are already attuned to questions of our being. Heidegger writes that caring about who we are “implies that Dasein, in its Being, has a relationship towards that Being…there is some way in which Dasein understands itself in its Being” (Heidegger 2008, 32). We are already sensitive to everyday questions and concerns about who we are, and if we can just start to look at those everyday concerns about our being in the right way, we can glimpse the general structures and conditions that support the particular way in which we care about ourselves. Dasein is both ontically distinct in that is cares about who it is, and ontologically distinct in that it can peer into that caring about being to understand being at a deep level; as Heidegger puts it: “Dasein is ontically distinctive in that it is ontological” (Heidegger 2008, 32). We simply need a phenomenological method to interrogate that everyday experience to uncover what makes it possible. The classical methodologies I draw out in the service of a standpoint approach to phenomenology are largely those implicitly used in Heidegger’s project.

Conclusion

This book is an attempt to lay out and defend a standpoint approach to phenomenology—the view that experiences of marginalization or oppression can present novel phenomenological insights. In a later chapter (“Art as Standpoint Method”), I’ll examine the standpoint method I think Al-Saji implicitly deploys in the work presented in the opening of this chapter. For now, it is enough to see that Al-Saji’s work (and the work of other contemporary or critical phenomenologists I explore throughout the book) provide a genuine methodological puzzle that is worthy of pursuit. I take the general aim of classical phenomenology to be an attempt to uncover shared conditions shaping human experiences. The methods that have traditionally been deployed (at least explicitly) in the classical texts generally operate by eliminating specificity or particularity from the source experiences. How, then, might the specificity of an experience itself be the origin of phenomenological insight?