van Manen (2014)
Chapter 9; The Vocative
EDCP 585
Vocative as Speaking from
Somewhere to Someone
• The experiential writing of the text should aim to create a sense of
resonance in the reader. Resonance means that the reader recognizes
the plausibility of an experience even if he or she has never personally
experienced this particular moment or this kind of event.
• When we speak we tend to stop listening to the object about which
we speak. And now this object has lost its addressive and enigmatic
power. Something can only speak to us if it is listened to, if we can be
addressed by it.
• The vocative aspects of phenomenology involve an aesthetic
imperative a poetizing form of writing.
Factual vs. Fictional: “truth value”
• “The important point for phenomenological inquiry is that it does not
matter whether the story is factual or fictional. Any factual empirical
account of an experience immediately transfigures into the status of a
fictional account when it is examined by phenomenological reflection
of the reduction. Or, better, it does not help to make the distinction
between factual empirical accounts and fictional or imagined empirical
accounts. The only requirement is that the experiential account is
plausible in its truth-value.”
Phenomenology and the Empirical
• …phenomenology … does not make empirical claims. [It] does not generalize from an
empirical sample to a certain population, nor draw factual conclusions about certain
states of affairs, happenings, or factual events.
• …the data for phenomenological reflection are fictionalized or fictitious. Even so-called
empirical data are treated as fiction since they are not used for empirical generalization or
for making factual claims about certain phenomena or events. …phenomenological
research does not aim for and does not permit empirical generalizations.
• …fictionalizing a factual, empirical, or an already fictional account in order to arrive at a
more plausible description of a possible human experience.
Possible Resources for Phenomenology
• “Fictional” examples may be drawn from literature and the arts:
• mythology, poetry, biography, paintings, cinematography, and other arts and
other sources: YouTube, discussion forums, readers’ comments, etc.
• empirical material drawn from life:
• Other’s anecdotes, circulating stories, written fragments, your/others’
memories; aphorisms, common metaphors, riddles, and sayings;
• Empirical material drawn from imagination:
• Sartre’s “The Look” (from Friesen 2014); Merleau Ponty and eye-contact
The Anecdote: is to reflect, to think.
• Anecdotes form part of the grammar of everyday storytelling.
• Anecdotes recreate experiences, but …in a form that is:
• focused,
• condensed,
• intensified,
• oriented, and narrative
• Sharing/writing/revising anecdotes is concrete reflecting prepares the
space for phenomenological reflection.
An anecdote…
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
is a very short and simple story.
usually describes a single incident.
begins close to the central moment of the experience.
includes important concrete details.
often contains several quotes (what was said, done, and so on).
closes quickly after the climax or when the incident has passed.
often has an effective or "punchy" last line: it creates punctum.
[“often tells something noteworthy about life, about the promises and
practices, frustrations and failures, events and accidents, disappointments
and successes of our everyday living.”]
Barthes, Camera Lucida Punctum
• Photographs act on the body as much as on the mind
• punctum …establishes a direct relationship with the object or person
within it;
• is a small, overlooked detail (accident)
• the lacerating emphasis of the 'that-has-been‘
• I could have been in that pose, looked like that, done that; that
reminds me of so-and-so, or of when I....
• An individual response of significant emotion: love, hate, but not “like”
• NOT the obvious symbolic meaning (studium), but takes us beyond the
photo itself
Andre
Kertész
(1894 1985)
Anecdotes and your “Phenomenon”
1. Determine sources for experiential narrative material …that are
"examples" of the meaning …of the phenomenon that you [wish to] study
2. interpret what the significant theme(s) are that seem to emerge from the
narrative as you read it against the backdrop of your research questionthe "lived experience phenomenon“ of your study .
3. Edit (rewrite) a promising narrative into a vivid anecdote by deleting
extraneous or redundant material and retaining theme-relevant material.
(Careful: do not overwrite, change, or distort the text.)
Refining Anecdotes
4. Check or consult with the source (such as interviewee or author) of
the narrative to determine iconic validity (but don't confuse iconic
validity with empirical or factual validity). Ask: Does this anecdote
show what an aspect of your experience is/was like?
5. Next, strengthen and refine (edit) the anecdote further into the
direction of the phenomenon and its theme(s).
6. Ask yourself and other readers: "Does this anecdote show what an
aspect of meaning of this experience is or was like?"
7. Don't forget that good writing is almost always honing the text
through rewriting.
• Remain constantly oriented to the lived experience of the phenomenon.
• Edit the factual content but do not change the phenomenological content.
• Enhance the eidetic or phenomenological theme by strengthening it.
• Aim for the text to acquire strongly embedded meaning.
• When a text is written in the present tense, it can make an anecdote more
vocative.
• Use of personal pronouns tends to pull the reader in.
• Extraneous material should be omitted.
• Search for words that are "just right" in exchange for awkward words.
• Avoid generalizing statements and theoretical terminology.
• Do not rewrite or edit more than absolutely necessary.
“Exemplarity in Singularity”
• They can do this because the exemplary anecdote, like literary fiction,
always orients to the singular.
• Phenomenology reflects on examples in order to discover what is
exemplary and singular about a phenomenon or event. Examples in
phenomenological inquiry serve to examine and express the aspects of
meaning of a phenomenoni examples in phenomenology
• have evidential significance: the example is the example of something
experientially
• knowable or understandable that is not directly sayable-a singularity.
Poetic Intensification (Compression); Mantic
• I may … feel that I have been captured by a certain feeling or emotion
that is somehow evoked, not by the semantic meaning of the words I
am hearing, but by their mantic or expressive effects. This mantic
(“prophetic”) meaning of words may present itself when listening to a
song whose lyrics are heard not for their content but for their mantic
effect. In such case, the words of the singer have become a sound that
fuses with the other instruments of the musical piece.
Heidegger: Dwelling Poetically
• he shows how for Hölderlin, poetry provides us with a measure of
what it means to dwell on the earth. Of course, the term measure for
the poet does not refer to some number or measure in a calculative
sense. In Heidegger's words, "the nature of measure is no more a
quantum than is the nature of number. True we can reckon with
numbers-but not with the nature of number" (Heidegger, 2001, p.
224).
• “The essence of technology is by no means technological”
• “The sciences do not think”
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gK1S8mJ5bM
Pathic Knowledge
• pathic refers to the general mood, sensibility; felt sense of being in the
world
• Heidegger: Befindlichkeit ("the way one finds oneself“) to refer to the
sense that we have of ourselves in situations; the implicit felt
understanding of ourselves in situations
• E. Gendlin: "It is sensed or felt, rather than thought--and it may not
even be sensed or felt directly with attention.”
The limits of positive, explicit knowledge
476. Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs
exist[. T]hey learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs, etc…
478. Does a child believe that milk exists? Or does it know
that milk exists? Does a cat know that a mouse exists?
479. Are we to say that the knowledge that there are physical
objects comes very early or very late?...
480. …Admittedly it’s true that ‘knowing something’ doesn’t
[necessarily] involve thinking about it.” (On Certainty)
Pathic knowledge/understanding
• It is much easier for us to teach concepts and informational knowledge
than …to bring about pathic understandings.
• But phenomenology can be: “sensitive to the thoughtfulness required
in contingent, ethical, and relational situations.”
• But [it] …is through pathic significations and images, accessible
through phenomenological texts that speak to us and make a demand
on us,
• In this way, “the more noncognitive dimensions of our professional
practice may also be communicated, internalized, and reflected upon.
“Even our gestures, the way we smile, the tone of our voice, the tilt of
our head, and the way we look the other in the eye are expressive of the
ways we know our world and comport ourselves in this world. On the
one hand, our actions are sedimented into habituations, routines,
kinesthetic memories. We do things in response to the rituals of the
situation in which we find ourselves. On the other hand, our actions are
sensitive to the contingencies, novelties, and expectancies of our
world.”
“In praise of tiredness”
[It] is the tired person, rather than the person who [is] fresh and wide-awake
who is the most sensitive to flows and atmospheres. Of course, there are
many forms of tiredness, such as tense or nervous exhaustion which can
make one weak, and can prevent sleep. But our concern here is with a more
benevolent form of tiredness, one that slackens the whole body without
leaving any knots or points of tension whatever. In this kind of tiredness, the
body comes to its own, the breath flows steadily and independently. [...] This
kind of tiredness not only increases emotional alertness, it also boosts one’s
capability for empathic embodied communication. (Schmitz, as quoted in:
Soentgen 1998, p. 75)
Kockelmans: Introduction to Linschoten
• Often an appeal to poetry and literature is almost unavoidable in that
poetic language with its use of symbolism is able to refer beyond the
realm of what can be said “clearly and distinctly.” In other words ... in
human reality there are certain phenomena which reach so deeply
into a man's life and the world in which he lives that poetic language is
the only adequate way through which to point to and to make present
a meaning which we are unable to express clearly in any other way. (
1987, p. ix)
Linschoten:
• Falling asleep means that the world falls asleep and wraps itself in
stilling silence;
• Sleep is a meditation of the body that surrenders and relaxes its hold
on the world;
• boredom does not precede sleep but is the inability to sleep;
• insomnia is the sign of an insecurity or uncertainty that makes it
impossible to "leave" the world.
Merleau-Ponty’s preface
• Phenomenology allows itself to be practiced and recognized as a
manner or as a style, or that it exists as a movement, prior to having
reached a full philosophical consciousness.
• Phenomenology involves describing, and not explaining or analyzing.
• To return to the things themselves is to return to this world prior to
knowledge, this world of which knowledge always speaks…
• Perhaps the best formulation of the reduction is the one offered by
Husserl's assistant Eugen Fink when he spoke of a "wonder" before the
world. Reflection does not withdraw from the world toward the unity
of consciousness as the foundation of the world; rather, it steps back
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.
Phenomenology's most important accomplishment is… to have joined
an extreme subjectivism with an extreme objectivism through its
concept of the world or of rationality. Rationality fits precisely to the
experiences in which it is revealed. There is rationality – that is,
perspectives intersect, perceptions confirm each other, and a sense
appears.
But this sense must not be separated, transformed into an absolute
Spirit, or transformed into a world in the realist sense. The
phenomenological world is not pure being, but rather the sense that
shines forth at the intersection of my experiences and at the
intersection of my experiences with those of others through a sort of
gearing into each other.