Doing Phenomenology. Whose phenomenology?

The trials and tribulations of doing phenomenological analysis

In performance studies

By

Edwin Creely

April, 2009

The struggle to find my way in these territories has concerned finding

How I understand ‘performance’ Of what is ‘performance’ constituted?

What is its ontology? What different phenomenological

positions should I incorporate in my method?

Of what use is phenomenological analysis to performance studies?

I HAVE BEEN ON A JOURNEY THAT IS AS MUCH ABOUT THE HISTORY OF IDEAS AS IT IS ABOUT THE IDEAS THEMSELVES

A great debate in philosophy

Conceptualisations/the mind/ideals/ a priori/deduction/cogito

Vs

Being-in-the-worldBeing-in-the-flesh/experience

The data of the worlda posterioriinduction

What is phenomenology?

Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Philosophers, as things now stand, are all too fond of offering criticism from on high instead of studying and understanding things from within. Edmund Husserl

So, phenomenology is a reaction to a lack of concern with data from the world and experience in philosophy

Are we doing a post-phenomenology?

We cannot separate phenomenology from it history and from the debates of the 20th Century (it has a historicity)

We are now in an era where these debates are past and have been submerged in the plurality of the postmodern

Are we not now revisiting phenomenology in performance studies for its utility value?

A typology of phenomenology

Key PhenomenologistsProto-

phenomenologists

TRANSCENDENTALISTS

EXISTENTIALISTS

REALISTS (or empiricists or materialists)

Hegel(dialectic, such as immanence and transcendence)

Husserl (father of modern

phenomenology)

Heidegger Reinarch

Kierkegaard(subjectivity as

truth)

Stein and Fink Merleau-Ponty Whitehead(process

phenomenology)

Brentano(notion of

intentionality)

Giorgi(phenomenologic

al psychology)

Levinas

Buber (notion of the sacred in the

‘other’)

Sartre

Marcel

My phenomenological approach is derived from or built on Transcendental phenomenology (especially Husserl) notion

of ‘pure seeing’, of apprehending a phenomenon, of intentionality, of reduction to its essence in the structures of consciousness, the Lebenswelt or Lifeworld

Levinas and the notion of the epiphany of being-together, of co-presence (note Buber’s I-Thou)

Merleau-Ponty the idea of the body-in-the-world or embodiment, the primacy of the body and of actual relation to the world

Whitehead (and his process phenomenology) a coming-into-being from the potentiality of being and the coalescence of parts

Reinach (and his realist phenomenology) the materiality of event, of certain a priori universals that exist independently of mind

What CONSTITUTES a performance phenomenon?

Or an ontology of performance

Its materiality in event It’s embodiment in space (both what is

felt and what is seen) It’s transcendence in consciousness Its residual traces in memory It states of co-corporeality and

epiphany It essentialities and contingencies

Applying method to text

Excerpt from an interview with Dominique and Miranda (2008)

DOMINIQUE : There was one point, at Noble Park, and it's the one that everyone loves to talk about, but really was just ridiculous - it was this narrow, not too long room with shinny floor boards, low ceilings, gym equipment like ladders and stuff on the sides, it was about 100 metres from the train station so you get the train past, you had the speaker going off to announce injections so the entire row of people got up and left, and the entire row of people came back and sat down - it was just - the space itself was just mind blowing that this was somewhere where you would put on theatre but for me it was really amazing that performance I think everyone just kind of went "Fuck it we are good" and that was just amazing - Dan climbed the wall Grace was just scary - it was really a sense of - this is tough but we are better than the space we are in.

Analysis of a sample text

In this more potentially chaotic context, one charged with visible emotion, not only was there a synergy with the audience but both actors spoke about being “so comfortable with each other” and developing “trust for each other” that as an acting team they were able to face any “challenge”. The actors, paradoxically, worked with a sense of co-presence without seeming to lose their individual agency, expressed so neatly by Dominique when she said, “Fuck it, we are good and that was just amazing”. The movement into an unfamiliar space, with a reactive audience and a focussed awareness of the possibilities of change created a ‘coming together’, a concrescence, that was unique and intimately felt.

What am I about?

A philosophy of performance and performing

A phenomenological method that is syncretic and is crafted and engineered to suit performance and experiences of performance

An approach to textual analysis built on Husserlian principles (transcendental reduction)

An awareness of the constitutive elements of performance phenomena

A final word on a great debate

"Contrary to what phenomenology- which is always phenomenology of perception- has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes.”

Jacques Derrida

In practice (in our praxis) concept and experience, deduction and induction are constantly in interplay