We are a knot of relations - syllabus

8/11/2019 We are a knot of relations - syllabus

1/3

School #2, Fall 2014Instructor, Niomi Cherney: [email protected]

Course SyllabusWe are a knot of relations: embodiment and ethics.

Hello!

Im so glad youre coming to School! I really look forward to reading some interesting

things with you all, and sharing some great discussions. In what follows, I am going togive a brief introduction to the course, give an overview of how I see the theme of thecourse progressing and say a few things about how I would like our sessions to run. Iwould invite your questions and feedback on anything contained in this syllabus.

Course Description:

The phenomenological world is not pure being, but rather the sense that shines forth atthe intersection of my experiences with those of others through a sort of gearing intoeach other. The phenomenological world is thus inseparable from subjectivity andintersubjectivity, which establish their unity through the taking up [la reprise] of my pastexperiences into my present experiences, or of the other persons experience into myown.

~ Merleau-Ponty, Preface, The Phenomenology of Perception (2012: xxxiv).

i. A cursory introduction to phenomenology

In this course, we will mostly concentrate on philosophical method of inquiry calledphenomenology. There are many different ways of doing phenomenology, and muchdebate within the field about the right way that it should be done. There are also plentyof thinkers (including some well known post-structuralist philosophers such as Deleuzeand Derrida) who developed substantive critiques of phenomenology and of specificphenomenological philosophers. For the purposes of this work together, we will try tosuspend these critiques in an effort to learn about the practice of phenomenology, andthe kind of understanding this way of viewing the world can generate. It is not our effortto defend phenomenology against critique, nor is it the work of this course to necessarilytry to situate its relevance within a canon of thought and history. Phenomenology is thestudy of the structures of human experience. It is a radically unfinished, perpetuallyunresolved way of describing the world. Our goal here is to engage in this perpetuallyunresolved way of describing experience and in so doing, to open up thepossibility of letting experience show itself.

What does it meant to let experience show itself, and why is that important? Until aboutthe time of German Idealism, when philosophers like Fichte, Schelling, Kant and Hegelstarted to write (and arguably right up until Husserl if you ask some people), Westernphilosophy had really been divided into two camps: empiricism and rationalism. Looselydefined, empiricism lays claim to the external world and sense experience as the

genesis of all knowledge, while rationalism posits a consciousness that can possessknowledge prior to or independent of sense experience. Phenomenologys very basicproject is to negotiate a middle ground between these two extremes. One of thephilosophers we will be studying in this course, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, sets up hiscontribution to this project by situating consciousness in the body, and in this wayundoing what he sees as a false divide between inner and outer experience (which isthe crux of the empiricism vs rationalism debate). On Merleau-Pontys account,experience never rests precisely in the hidden interiority of our consciousness. Rather


2/3


because consciousness is found only in and through descriptions of our embodiedexperience, we only find ourselves already immersed in the world. It is therefore onlypossible to develop an understanding of being a person by accounting for the way thatwe are already intertwined with the world, including both objects and people. Merleau-Ponty calls for an account of experience that does justice to the ways that our embodiedlives impossibly toss us forward into the world, while demanding that the world likewise

find its counterpart in us.

ii. Course content

As we move through the material in the course, we will describe in more detail howMerleau-Ponty practices his method of doing phenomenology and how it has been takenup in the work of some contemporary phenomenologists. Our work together will bebroken down into two major chunks. In the first half of the course, we will read two bookchapters from works by contemporary phenomenologists. In sections from Eva SimmsThe Child in the World: Embodiment, Time and Language in Early Childhoodwe willbegin to explore the structure of intersubjectivity as the extension of dissolving the dividebetween empiricist and rationalist perspectives. Building on the themes of lived space

and time as structures that are shared between our own bodies and the bodies of others,we will read a section of Lisa Guenthers book, Solitary Confinement: Social Death andIts Afterlives. Through the case study of solitary confinement, Guenther uses aframework from one of Merleau-Pontys predecessors, Edmund Husserl, to illustrate thenecessity of intersubjective experience for the creative expression of our own possibilityand action. In the final two weeks of the course, we will read selections from bothMerleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perceptionand Simone de Beauvoirs Ethics of

Ambiguity. We will reconstitute a notion of human freedom that is not derived from theforce of free acting, rational and autonomous agents. Instead, our own possibilities areintimately tied up in the worlds of other people, and the resonance of their bodily actionin us.

Structure of the course

i. Readings

Each week there will be approximately 20-30 pages of assigned reading. Some of it isvery dense, some of it is less dense. I will prepare discussion questions in advance ofeach meeting, which will help to guide your reading. It is really nice to come to sessionshaving read the material and already primed with questions. We will be able to havemuch better conversations that way. Though I will give a brief introductory overview (20-30 mins each class), it is not my intention to lecture during School. Instead, Im there tofacilitate discussion and to field questions. This is difficult shit.I dont have anyanswers, Ive just been studying this stuff for a while and I really like thinking about it. I

am excited about the idea of thinking and talking about it with a new group of people. Ihope you will be too.

ii. Glossary of terms

Together, we will co-author a glossary of key terms from each week. It will be an openaccess Google document and we will all contribute. You can post a word and someone


3/3


else can post a definition. Or you could put both. At the end of each class, well check inabout terms that should go in the glossary.

iii. Discussion guidelines/ rules for School

It is very nice to have a discussion with a group of people who are all on the same page.Please do not say anything marginalizing at all. Ever.Be cool.Think about thewords and body language you are using, and how they could be read as either inclusiveor exclusive. Only say things and behave in ways that are inclusive. To that end, we willtry to only refer to things we have read together in this course.If you want to bringin an idea from another thinker, please do so with the explicit purpose of clarifyingsomething you are trying to express about the current reading. Do not assume thatanyone/ everyone has read the thing you are talking about. I have been in school for onehundred million years and there is tons of stuff I havent read, so even if its just for thesake of making sure I understand what youre talking about, dont assume any outsideknowledge.

These things are extremely important, and the only things that are against the rules inthe School classroom. Anything else goes.

Reading Schedule

Week 1: October 5th@ Videofag, 4pmIntroduction to phenomenology via infant developmentSimms, Eva. Milk and Flesh: Infancy and Coexistence in The Child in the World:Embodiment Time and Language in Early Childhood. Detroit: Wayne State UniversityPress (2008): 11-25.Additional optional reading:(ibid) The Worlds Skin Ever Expanding: Spatiality and the Structures of Child

Consciousness: 27-55

Week 2:October 12th@ Videofag, 4pm.Phenomenology continued: lived space and timeGuenther, Lisa. Person, World and Other: A Husserlian Critique of SolitaryConfinement in Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press (2013): 23-38.

Weeks 3 & 4, October 19th& October 26th, both at Double Double Land.** Whole text available in PDF, will send specific sections closer to the dates. If you wantto get started, you could read the preface to the Phenomenology which I wont assign,but is extremely helpful.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Phenomenology of Perception (Don Landes translation)Simone de Beauvoir: Ethics of Ambiguity

Documents

We are a knot of relations - syllabus