1.2 PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE GENDER AND ‘RACE’ CRITICS
Returning to Mrs Obama for a moment and taking into account her statement that the cultural debates are about perception of the other, I want to emphasise the crucial importance of perception and turn towards theories that can help me understand the term and thus assess its relevance to the theme of this dissertation. This leads me immediately to phenomenology in the European tradition. Perception is at the core of phenomenological philosophy. Phenomenology takes a first-person’s view to the material world of phenomena and so places personal perception and experience of the world as a focal point through which knowledge is produced. Because of the focus on personal perception, the tradition has been criticised for being ultimately ego-centred (Andermahr, Lovell, Wolkowitz 2000). However further engagement with phenomenological thinking reveals the tradition of theorising about relations between consciousnesses as well. Here I will present developments within the tradition that emphasise differences of experiences. A strand of thinking within this approach thus deals with phenomenological ethics particularly in relation to the other.
1.2.1 Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir and Fanon
Phenomenology is the study of the essences of consciousness grounded in experience.
Because in phenomenology body and mind are implicated with each other, in that the mind is always already embodied and perception is sensory experiences, it is thus a philosophy which presupposes thought in experience and in existence. ‘The world is not what I think, but what I live through’ (Merleau-Ponty 2007: xviii). Perception to
Merleau-Ponty is the presupposition of all acts. Epistemologically, phenomenology does away with scientific objectivity because of the understanding that the self is always subjective and implicated in the world. Objects can only be perceived from an angle. Moreover, the self is always implicated and affected by the world and the other.
The body is always simultaneously an object (to others) and a lived reality (for the subject), but it is never simply one or the other (Grosz 1994). Experience is in-between. It is because of the other that the self discovers the possibility of an ‘outside spectator’ – the self as an object to others – which posits the self’s consciousness as a
‘consciousness among consciousness’ (Merleau-Ponty 2007: xiv). This places the body in a pivotal position because the body is defined by its relations to other objects and defines and gives meaning to objects through these relations (Grosz 1994).
These relationships are moreover influenced by power relations. Scholars of gender and of race remind us that the perception of the body as an object and a corollary by the subject differs according to the gender and race of the object/subject. Thus one is not born a woman; one becomes a woman, as Simone de Beauvoir (1997) made obvious. That is, the position and perception of ‘woman’ is interpellating and constructing female gendered beings into realising and becoming a particular subjectivity according to the prevalent scheme of the world. This specific embodied condition of these beings, namely their being gendered, racialised or in other ways marked by difference, is not irrelevant to the social schemes they end up implementing. They are necessary but not sufficient conditions for their socialisation process. Patriarchy is that particular scheme in the ‘western’ world that brands female as feminine and male as masculine, is the claim of feminists following de Beauvoir.
The gender binaries are oppositional but also complementary. They uphold sets of rights and social entitlements that are neither equitable, nor even-handed, the balance of power being clearly biased in favour of the masculine. Whiteness is another dominant feature of the scheme, Franz Fanon asserts. Just as the gendered power balance favours masculinity, in the racialised power balance, whiteness is favoured over non-whiteness. To Fanon, the fact of blackness constructs the black man in a
‘third person’s consciousness’ (Fanon 1967: 110) in which he is forced to see himself as an object – as if through the eyes of the white man. The power relations that make up a differentiated experience of non-whites and non-males occur in a socially and historically conditioned context (Gibson 2003). To white women and to black people
the perception of the self (as a subject) and the perception by others (as an object) present conflicting sites. Women and black people are walled in by social and historical circumstances, such as patriarchy and colonialism. It is ‘a walling that is multidimensional – political, economic, social, cultural, and spatial’ (Gibson 2003:
135).
Phenomenology opens up the possibility of conceptualising difference in social, economic, political, cultural and religious spaces and is thus exactly about how we perceive each other as others. Phenomenology is not an epistemological claim alone but carries within it ethical and political implications, to which I will return shortly.
1.2.2 Young and Butler
Developing the tension between the self and the other – the self as object and subject – feminism provides an analysis which questions the legitimacy of phenomenological claim of consciousness and perception. Perception, according to Merleau-Ponty, is the background of all acts and the philosopher needs to step outside this perception – misunderstand the common sense interpretations of the social reality – in order to make it apparent. But what if this perception is not common sense to all? According to many feminist philosophers, Merleau-Ponty avoids the question of the sexual(ised) other (Grosz 1994: 103). This poses a problem to feminists and gender scholars because it is exactly the sexual difference and experience of sexed lives which is at the base of feminist thinking on difference. Iris Marion Young (2003) takes her cue from phenomenology and reverses the gendered experience. Having breasts poses a conundrum to the phenomenological conception of experience, Young argues, because the ‘normalized breast hardly describes an “average” around which real women’s breasts cluster’ (Young 2003: 154). This brings about a schism between the experiences of having breasts and the objectification of breasts and the following perception of female bodies. The double vision of the breasted experience ultimately supports a sexist notion of female subjects. Instead Young proposes a women-centred meaning in which breasts are de-objectified and de-sexualised to become a factor in the facticity of some bodies. Young’s proposal assumes somewhat categorical gender identities in which a woman-centred meaning-making necessarily would de-sexualise breasts, i.e., ‘female sexuality’ is far removed and fundamentally different from ‘male sexuality’. In Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, ‘experience’ is not relegated to an
unchangeable and static realm and so it cannot be taken unproblematically as a source for truth (Grosz 1994: 94). Though it is surely not the intention of Young to fix a female identity to the experience of having breasts, her theorisation seems dichotomising for that reason. Much more could be said about this embodied identification; however it is not my task to do so in this chapter.
Taking de Beauvoir’s claim that gender is a historical and social construction, Judith Butler develops her feminist reading of Merleau-Ponty by emphasising the objectification and the subject’s complicity in this construction in ‘the act’.
One is not simply a body, but, in some key sense, one does one’s body and, indeed, one does one’s body differently from one’s contemporaries and from one’s embodied predecessors and successors as well. (Butler 1997: 404)
Butler expands on the concept of ‘the act’ stating that: ‘The body is not passively scripted with cultural codes, as if it were lifeless recipient of wholly pregiven relations’ (Butler 1997: 410). Rather, the ‘[a]ctors are always already on the stage, within the terms of the performance’ (Butler 1997: 410). This sense of ‘the act’ makes possible a transformation of the social conditions, Butler argues. It becomes a matter of changing the social conditions rather than changing the individual acts which spring from those conditions (Butler 1997: 409). Butler’s phenomenological understanding of the social is a hegemonic construction of compulsory heterosexuality and the politics of performative gender acts function in order to
‘expose the reifications that tacitly serve as substantial gender cores or identities’
(Butler 1997: 414) and to question the foundations on which these reifications rest.
Butler argues for a politics of difference, which does not reinstate or fortify the binaries of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. To Butler ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are not essential entities but performances re-instating and re-constituting the imaginary of those entities continuously. Butler’s theory of performativity shoots the concept of ‘agency’
in which power is asserted through actions in a discursive manner, into traditional phenomenology. However, performativity leaves internal activities of emotional, intellectual and sensorial experiences undeveloped. Butler’s theory of performativity seem to presuppose that subjects are in total control of their affections and desires and
the theory thus leaves little room for the other to impact and inflict the self’s subjectivity.
1.2.3 Alcoff and Ahmed
Through the experience of having a Latina-white background, the feminist phenomenological philosopher, Linda Martín Alcoff, argues for a ‘double consciousness’ in line with the argument made by W.E.B. DuBois (1903). ‘Double consciousness’ is an ability to see one’s ethnoracial self from the perspective of the other as well as from one’s own experienced perspective. Alcoff follows phenomenological structures of thinking in that she argues that ethnoracial identity is sustained through common-sensical and ‘everyday consciousness discernible in practices’ (Alcoff 2006: 185). Ethnoracial common sense, then, moreover takes its place in the Foucauldian discursive power structures – originating from below as well as top-down. Foucault’s notion of power is related to subjectivity as a continuous process of acting and being acted upon and it splits into a twofold idea of power;
potesta, which is the top-down power of exclusion of the racial other and potentia, which is a ‘technology of the self’ (Foucault 1982, Braidotti 1996) and the process of subjectivity. Potesta is the normalising process which ethnic minority positions assume in order to function in the ‘white’ world, but simultaneously the discursive practices of perceiving and being perceived as other constitutes the potentia of the ethnic ‘double consciousness’. It is the presuppositions of everyday practices as well as institutional exclusions that are the backdrop for the ethnoracial differentiations and which simultaneously constitute and uphold them.
Important to the ambition of upholding this common-sense behaviour of people is the visibility of race, Alcoff argues. Though ‘[t]he criteria thought to determine racial identity have ranged from ancestry, experience, self-understanding, to habits and practices, yet these sources are coded through visible inscriptions on the body’ (Alcoff 2006: 191). Therefore Alcoff understands our task to be to make apparent the racist common-sense and stereotyping practices of visibility in order to alter the connotative meanings attached to visible differences (Alcoff 2006: 194).
Following Alcoff, the Pakistani-British8 professor of cultural studies, Sara Ahmed (2007), nuances the theoretical approach further by introducing the concepts of
‘distance’ and ‘proximity’ in relation to the reach of whiteness and through respectively ‘orientated’ or ‘phenomenal’ approaches to others. Whiteness, Ahmed asserts, operates through an orientation towards the other, which upholds a distance from the other. Phenomenology opens a space for orienting oneself around the world (Ahmed 2007: 112-15) and in this way becoming a part of this world and orientation (Ahmed 2007: 116). As part of the phenomenological relation to the world it is – also in Ahmed’s view – the interaction, the common sense, which upholds the ethnoracial classifications and orientations. The collectiveness – through common reading, learning etc. – of orientation towards an object makes that object what it is, Ahmed argues. Thus ethnoracial identification and classification is about collectiveness and repetition. Additionally, and following Merleau-Ponty, Ahmed asserts that whiteness enables us to encompass that which is within reach into the bodily experience. The other becomes an extension of the white self (Ahmed 2007: 131). In order to overcome such an objectifying embrace, Ahmed suggests an orientation around rather than toward the other and the world in order for a connectivity to arise. An orientation around the world relates to thinking one’s self as a part of the world and this in turn generates proximity. In this vein Ahmed argues that ‘likeness is an effect of proximity rather than its cause’ (Ahmed 2007: 123). Bringing objects into proximity has a queering effect that arranges things out of line and so out of reach – understood as the extension of whiteness. What is needed in Ahmed’s view is a reorientation of whiteness around the world (Ahmed 2007: 155). This reorientation, though, comes with a feeling of discomfort – of being out of line, in the sense of being queered.
Ahmed’s view shares similarities with Paul Gilroy’s (2004) concept of
‘estrangement’, which endows people with the ability to step outside their privileged positions and recall themselves as part of a larger scheme and world.9 Whereas Alcoff focuses on the visibility of the other and the distinction of whiteness to be named, Ahmed focuses on the shareability of the world and the proximity and distance of the other in our perception of the world. Ahmed’s proposition is thus an affirmation of potentiality, whereas the identity politics of Alcoff seem in comparison to leave the world and its power structures reversed but ultimately unaltered.
8 Both Alcoff and Ahmed use their double ethnic experience to understand the relation with the other.
9 I will return to Gilroy’s ideas of estrangement and cosmopolitanism in the following chapter.