RELATED TERMS: Design of Narrative Environments; Narrative Environments; Narrative Environments – Environmental Psychology in Architecture
1 Arendt’s phenomenological method
Hannah Arendt seldom referred to herself as a phenomenologist and she is not usually included in textbook treatments of the subject (Moran, 2000: 287). She had no particular interest in the phenomenological method and did not explicitly contribute to the theory of phenomenology, being suspicious of all methods and systems. Nevertheless, her work exhibits a certain practice of phenomenological seeing, in the form of a careful attention to phenomena and avoidance of conventional characteristics. Her work, therefore, can be treated as a kind of phenomenology, one whose topic is ‘publicness’ in all of its guises, for example, public space, the public realm, res publica. Her conception of the public, as political and as a ‘space of appearance’, is in most respects phenomenological: everything that is manifest to humans belongs to the space of appearance, to phenomenality (Moran, 2000: 287-288).
In a more positive assessment of Arendt’s relationship to phenomenology, Moran contends that it is difficult to understand her work unless one appreciates its phenomenological character as a genuine attempt to return to the things themselves which, for Arendt, means a return to the nature of our belonging as humans to a human world. Margaret Canovan (1994: 3) concurs, arguing that, as far as explicit commitments go, her intention was often the phenomenological one of trying to be true to experience.
More positively still, Marieke Borren (2013: 227) argues that Arendt’s philosophical method or approach, hermeneutic phenomenology, is a neglected aspect of her thought. It is a hermeneutic phenomenology, Borren (2010: 9-10) argues, because of her orientation to understanding and disclosing the meaning of phenomena and events in their uniqueness and contingency. Furthermore, Borren contends, Arendt’s hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to the structures of understanding, judging and common sense is implicit throughout her entire work. Analogous to the theological method of a via negativa, Arendt’s analyses of phenomena often begins from an investigation of what this phenomenon is not, or of what its absence or lack amounts to, and only then proceeds to descriptions of what that phenomenon is or means in positive terms (Borren, 2013: 229).
For Borren (2010: 8-9), Arendt’s work is most fruitfully seen as containing phenomenologically informed reflections on the political as well as phenomenological exercises that are politically informed. Hers is a hermeneutic phenomenology of the political, since she is mainly interested in understanding political phenomena, events and experiences (Borren, 2020: 10), one which is directed at understanding the worldliness of human existence. For that reason, Borren (2010: 10) treats it as a phenomenological anthropology of the political which, through its engagement with the totalitarian experience, provides an excellent example of situated, contextual and experience-based political research.
Evidence that her phenomenological approach has been discounted or neglected can be found among her critics. For example, Moran (2000: 318) points out that Isaiah Berlin criticised her for scarcely ever formulating an argument. This kind of criticism may be misplaced, Moran responds, because, while it may the case that Arendt seldom argues, she is instead involved in phenomenological intuiting. For her critics such phenomenological intuition is taken as merely asserting a subjective, impressionistic view of the world.
Moran suggests that a defence for Arendt against accusations of lack of scholarly rigour can be made. As a phenomenologist she was more interested in the things themselves which the words that she uses disclose, rather than being interested in pursuing a genealogical-etymological investigation of those words. While heavily reliant on the philosophies of Heidegger and Jaspers, with their distinct concerns for being-in-the-world, Arendt nevertheless makes a distinctive contribution to the overall framework that she constructs from their work. This contribution, Moran contends, is threefold. It takes the form of, first, her account of action as an individual achievement. Second, she has a unique moral voice among those in the phenomenological tradition. Third, she provides a phenomenological account of the conditions necessary for the creation and maintenance of the public space which makes possible the performance of action.
2 Public space
For Arendt, philosophy emerges from the discrepancy experienced between the space of appearance, as the world in which we live, and the medium of words, through which thinking is substantiated. Understanding the space of appearance for Arendt means seeking to grasp the character of human living (the active life) in the midst of the world constituted through that space of appearance. Her phenomenology concerns a number of themes, bearing upon the realm of public affairs: capturing the intrinsic meaning of public events; being caught up in a plurality; and being caught up in the ongoing constitution and re-constitution of the world and the experience of the in-between. The Arendtian in-between can be understood as commonality and community, on the one hand, and as medium and environment, on the other hand, that which is neither you nor I but is something to which we both belong, the ‘we’ and that which is ours and of us.
Arendt envisages the active life, with labour, work and action as features of the common human experience, in largely spatial terms: human beings find themselves in an experienced landscape that Arendt divides into different areas, such as the Heidegger-inspired distinction between Earth and World [1]; and Public, Private and Social realms.
Arendt was well aware of how public space is manipulated by governments, commercial advertising and by speech in the form of empty talking or entertainment. She was also well aware of the curious things that can happen to events and experience once they enter the domain of thought.
Crucial for Arendt’s view of public space as a space of appearance are Heidegger’s conceptions of worldhood and being-in-the-world. However, unlike Heidegger’s seemingly rather solitary view of relating to the world, the world for Arendt lies between people. Rather than a Heideggerian Mitsein or being-with, Arendt proposes a moment of being-together, a moment of concerted action that forms a pervasive, enveloping medium or environment, as space of appearance for mutual disclosure and interaction. In addition to Heidegger’s categories of human relating to the world, Dasein, as the kind of being for whom the meaning of their existence is in question, the encountering and manipulating of things (Zuhandensein, ready-to-hand-ness, work), and Vorhandensein (present-at-hand-ness), the theoretical contemplation of things, Arendt proposes the existential category of ‘action’ (praxis). Arendt emphasises being of the world as well as being in the world.
Methodological-Theoretical aside 1. The Active Life, Dasein, Zuhandensein and Vorhandensein
It could be argued that the frame of reference for both Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein and, following Heidegger, Arendt’s phenomenology of human action is Aristotle’s categorisation of activities under the headings of poiesis, praxis and theoria. Both Heidegger and Arendt seek to avert the capture of Dasein, as a practical being-of-the-world, not a purely rational-instrumental being-in-the-world, by particular understandings of poiesis and theoria, such as are characterised by Heidegger as Zuhandensein (ready-to-hand) and Vorhandensein (present-at-hand) and by Arendt as labour and work.
For example, Heidegger, as explained by Derrida (1996: 63) seeks to demonstrate that,
“Dasein is not an entity that is here in front of me or that I can put my hands on, like a substantial object, als Vorhandenes. Instead, the essence of Dasein as entity is precisely the possibility, the being-possible (das Moglichsein).”
Heidegger also seeks to make explicit all of the “problematic closures [that] lock Dasein into an ontological determination that is not its own, [but instead is] that of the Vorhandensein.” (Derrida, 1996: 63)
Both Heidegger and Arendt seek to characterise the human both as a determinate field of possibility (realisability, what is possible now or within some determinate future) and as the possibility of possibility (potentiality, what is possible given an infinity of time), such that the human can be recognised as the being that has its own mode of being as a question rather than a given. Heidegger does so through the notion of Dasein contrasted to Zuhandensein and Vorhandensein and Arendt does so through the notion of action contrasted to work and labour. The confusion between death, as the death of possibility (finality), and death as an ending in a mundane, everyday sense (finitude), Derrida (1996: 63) argues,
“… leads to speaking nonsense; it leads all these bio- or thanato-anthropo-theological problematics toward arbitrariness. In order to avoid this arbitrariness, one must come back to an ontological determination of the kind of being that Dasein is and to an ontological determination of the limit that separates Dasein from Vorhandensein and from Zuhandensein.”
While, Arendt seeks to establish action as a field of possibility and as the possibility of possibility, she also seeks to draw out the opportunities and risks of the possible, its truly political character, politics as a specific, worldly materialisation of praxis, in contrast to the danger of treating action within an absolute or universal frame, or worse, treating a nationalist frame, a spirit of a people, as if it were a universal or absolute and as the basis for a right, the right to determine what exists and who exists within that space of appearance constituted by a nation as an ethnographic-national ’spirit’ as Geist, ghost or theoretical ideal.
Zuhandensein ready-to-hand-ness, for Heidegger, is framed by a project or pragmatic activity in which one is currently engaged, one that is perhaps of the order of habit and therefore not an object of conscious attention or of intention. This could be taken as Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle’s poiesis, or making activity, part of pragmatic and utilitarian being-in-the-world, with its attendant form of knowledge, called by Aristotle, techne, a form of knowledge and practice translated into Latin as ars by the Romans. This is the domain of action and knowledge called ‘work’ by Arendt, the domain of activity that results in a persistent, durable, material output, and an environmental, conditional output, i.e. a relatively permanent alteration of the manufactured or artificial human world in which people act and which ‘acts back’ upon (but not re-acts to) people.
Heidegger defines Vorhandensein as theoretical contemplation of that which surrounds, rather than the incorporation of those surroundings into a Zuhandensein ready-to-hand pragmatic or instrumental practice. In defining this category, Heidegger may be said to be relaying Aristotle’s theoria, with its attendant epistemic or systematic knowledge: episteme in Greek language; scientia in Latin. This the dimension which Arendt put to one side in The Human Condition because she wants to concentrate on the active life, which, in Aristotle’s terms, is constituted by poiesis and praxis.
Arendt develops Heidegger’s discussion of modes of relation to the world, taking Heidegger’s tripartite scheme of ways of being in the world and relating to the world, i.e. Dasein, Zuhandensein and Vorhandensein, while translating them into a different and off-set tripartite categorisation: labour, work and action. The reason for this is to highlight the domain of political action. Arendt’s concept of action, as a mode of being-in-the-world and a space of appearance, is heavily influenced by the Greek polis and the dramatisation of action in Greek tragedy (tragic theatre), which, as Francoise Collins (2010: 86) points out, are the two dominant spaces of the logos, a Greek word that can mean reason, account, word or justification (Moran, 2000: 448). That fundamentally Greek conception of action as politics was later modified in Arendt’s thinking about the Roman Forum and its accompanying civitas. These two frames of inscription articulate the political (praxis) and the poetic (plastic), enacting political power, on the one hand, and the power of the symbolic, on the other hand. As the two dominant forms of power, political representation and theatrical representation have historically excluded women both from their centre-stage and from their staging process (Collins, 2010: 86).
The domain of political action, Arendt feels, has been obscured by too great an emphasis on poiesis (work and labour). The polis/civitas, as a space of appearance, is both a pre-defined location where actors can appear on a recognised, framing stage, the agora in Athens, the forum in Rome and the amphitheatre in Greece and Rome, and a spontaneous emergence, because, Arendt contends, such a space of appearance can emerge whenever people come together (being-together-in-the-world) through speech and interaction to generate concerted action. As she writes, describing the phenomenology of the polis,
“The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be. “Wherever you go, you will be a polis”…” (Arendt, 1998: 198)
Like Heidegger, in re-interpreting the Aristotelian schema of poiesis, praxis and theoria, which she calls work, action and thinking, Arendt spends considerable time defining what ‘thinking’ means. Her concept of thinking, like Heidegger’s, is critical of theoretical contemplation of the world (Vorhandensein), arguing instead that thinking arises from and in the midst of the active life, not the contemplative life. In order to address what might be perceived as deficiencies in Heidegger’s schema, Arendt utilises a fourth term, labour, which, in her anti-systematic systemic way of thinking, she develops on the basis of the Lockean distinction between the ‘labour’ of the body and the ‘work’ of the hands. As she states,
“The work of our hands, as distinguished from the labor of our bodies—homo faber who makes and literally “works upon” as distinguished from the animal laborans which labors and “mixes with” —fabricates the sheer unending variety of things whose sum total constitutes the human artifice.” (Arendt, 1998: 136)
Heidegger, as can be seen, emphasises the hands in his categorisation: Zuhandensein and Vorhandensein. Arendt, in contrast, defines labour as ‘animal’ in character, in as far as it has no long-lasting material outputs (artifactual, environmental or conditional). Its only ‘ output’ is the cyclical reproduction of the animal existents.
Thus, we could tabulate the sets of terms in play as follows:
Aristotle | poiesis | praxis | theoria (Nous) (Sophia) | phronesis | |
| Heidegger | Zuhandensein (poiesis) | Dasein | Vorhandensein (theoria) (scientia) | thinking | |
| Arendt | labour | work | action (politics) | science | thinking (judgement) |
In this way, it can be seen that Arendt reworks Heidegger’s prior reworking of the Aristotelian taxonomy of activities. While critiquing Aristotle’s acceptance of political knowledge as a mode of poiesis, Arendt also implicitly critiques Marx’s reduction of politics to work/poiesis. For Arendt, politics is the domain of praxis/action
Arendt situates knowledge and thinking firmly in the domain of the active life, resists reducing the active life to the instrumental life of labour, work and technical knowledge, while also being critical of Heidegger’s proto-fascism and Marx’s proto-communism, as the two dominant political forms of totalitarianism operating during the early part of Arendt’s life.]
3 Plurality
Arendt, however, is not consistently phenomenological in her approach. Particularly when dealing with the past, Arendt seemed to combine two different approaches, only one of which was the phenomenological impulse to get behind abstractions to experience (Canovan, 1994). When following that phenomenological impulse, she set out to recover the political experience of ‘plurality’ which, following Heidegger, she felt had been obscured and distorted by Platonic philosophy. However, she also pursued a non-phenomenological Benjaminian approach to the past through the deliberate arbitrary use of fragments recovered from the past, assembled as a poetic text or as a collage.
This methodological alternation, in and out of a kind of phenomenological seeing, is difficult for the reader to follow. A further source of confusion for the reader of Arendt’s work is the ‘unsystematic system-building’ in which she engaged. She did not want to build a system of political philosophy. This is consistent with her anti-systemic view of thinking as being like Penelope’s weaving, constantly undoing its own construction, a view she inherited from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jaspers and Heidegger.
Her phenomenology therefore arises in a roundabout way. Canovan suggests that more or less the entire agenda of her political thought was set by her reflections on the political catastrophes of the mid-20th century. Pursuing a thread that began with her discussion of The Origins of Totalitarianism, one of the chief objects of The Human Condition was to provide a more satisfactory phenomenology of the human activities relevant to politics. The Human Condition, therefore, is not concerned with politics per se but rather with fundamental human activities that bear upon politics.
Developing this recognition, Canovan argues that Arendt’s account of human action in The Human Condition cannot be seen simply as an attempt to replace misleading theory with authentic phenomenology. Truly phenomenological investigation would leave aside all theoretical presuppositions in order to respond faithfully to experience as it presents itself. However, Arendt’s phenomenology is enclosed within theoretical commitments arising from her reflections on totalitarianism, modernity and the limitations of philosophy.
However, as Derrida has shown in his discussion of Husserl’s endeavour to establish phenomenology as a rigorous, presuppositionless science, such presuppositonlessness is impossible and masks, in the case of Husserl, metaphysical commitments. So it may be, indeed, that Arendt’s theoretical commitments do not prevent her from developing a genuine strand of phenomenological thinking when she defines action and politics as a (public) space of appearance, aspects of which may be pursued through the conception of a narrative environment.
Methodological-Theoretical aside 2: Arendt, Action and Art
Hannah Arendt (1998) discusses the work of art at the end of her chapter on ‘Work’ in The Human Condition. She defines works of art as among those artefacts that provide stability for the human world created through work (making and fabrication), the artificial world which humans create as their worldly home on earth. To attain their proper place in that human world, Arendt thinks, works of art must be removed from the context of ordinary use objects, “the proper intercourse with a work of art is certainly not ‘using’ it”, she states (Arendt, 1998: 167), and also the exigencies and wants of daily life. In other words, in terms of Arendt’s taxonomy, works of art should be removed from the domain of work and labour, Aristotelian poiesis. A question that arises here is whether that removal by itself puts them in them in the domain of action.
It is their longevity, their outstanding permanence, which makes of works of art, “the most intensely worldly of all tangible things” (Arendt, 1998: 167). According to Arendt (1998: 168), the “immediate source of the art work is the human capacity for thought…” Thus, she claims, “Works of art are thought things” (Arendt, 1998: 168-169). Nevertheless, they remain, at some level, ‘things’, materialising reifications, but a form of reification that is not a mere material transformation, or change of one form of matter to another, but a transfiguration, whereby the course of nature may be reverted or inverted.
What makes the thought a reality and fabricates the things of thought, for Arendt (1998: 169), is “the same workmanship which, through the primordial instrument of human hands, builds the other durable things of the human artifice”. Thought, however, for Arendt (1998: 170) is not cognition:
“Thought, the source of art works, is manifest without transformation or transfiguration in all great philosophy, whereas the chief manifestation of the cognitive processes, by which we acquire and store up knowledge, is the sciences. Cognition always pursues a definite aim, which can be set by practical considerations as well as by “idle curiosity”; but once this aim is reached, the cognitive process has come to an end.”
While cognition always pursues a definite aim, thought, on the contrary,
“has neither an end nor an aim outside itself, and it does not even produce results; not only the utilitarian philosophy of homo faber but also the men of action and the lovers of results in the sciences have never tired of pointing out how entirely “useless” thought is — as useless, indeed, as the works of art it inspires.” (Arendt, 1998: 170)
[Arendt further distinguishes thought and cognition from logical reasoning, manifest as intelligence, examples of which she cites as the operations of deduction, induction, categorisation and concluding. Thus, for Arendt, to think is not to engage in goal-oriented cognition, which she conceives as a form of work, nor rule-bound rationalisation, which she conceives as a form of labour.]
Arendt (1998: 173-174) concludes,
“If the animal laborans needs the help of homo faber to ease his labor and remove his pain, and if mortals need his help to erect a home on earth, acting and speaking men need the help of homo faber in his highest capacity, that is, the help of the artist, of poets and historiographers, of monument-builders or writers, because without them the only product of their activity, the story they enact and tell, would not survive at all. In order to be what the world is always meant to be, a home for men during their life on earth, the human artifice must be a place fit for action and speech, for activities not only entirely useless for the necessities of life but of an entirely different nature from the manifold activities of fabrication by which the world itself and all things in it are produced.”
The artist, in this Arendtian characterisation, assists “acting and speaking men” by rendering “the story they enact and tell” more permanent and more monumental. The human artifice, with its guiding monuments, both mnemonic and pedagogic in ‘function’, although far from ‘functional’ or instrumental artefacts, as propadeutic for acting and speaking, enable those spaces of appearance that constitute a place fit for action and speech.
The work of art is ambiguously placed by Arendt as essential for action but not part of action, the artist is not an acting and speaking ‘man’, but nevertheless is capable not only of thought but of materialising and reifying thinking in the form of a (monumental) work of art.
In the design of narrative environments, the artefact, whether considered a work of art or not, is acknowledged not simply as a preparatory instruction (propadeutic), but as fully acting on the political stage, the theatrical stage and the economic stage (the world of poiesis, work, fabrication) as well as the bio-geo-eco-logical stage (‘earth’ as articulated with ‘world’).
For Arendt, then, whose phenomenology of power concerns both political and theatrical or aesthetic/symbolic power, the work of art is the pinnacle, “the most worldly of all things” (Arendt, 1998: 172), of poiesis or work.
What Arendt’s political phenomenology does not allow her to discuss, it seems, is the exclusivity of the space of appearance constituted by political representation and theatrical (symbolic) representation. She appears to accept, for example, women’s absence from the political stage, the realm where decisions concerning the organisation of the community are taken, and also from the artistic stage, that on which is determined the vitality of the forms by which that community and its representation are shaped.
[Aside: Does the Arendtian ‘world’ have different stages, different mises en scene?].
Such a conception of politics might be characterised as one governed by a policy of exclusion, albeit an implicit one but nonetheless an enforced one. This kind of order is termed ‘the police’ by Jacques Ranciere (2004). He defines this kind of order as an orthodox organisational system of relationality that establishes a distribution of the sensible or a law/policy that divides the community into groups, social positions, and functions.
It is this orthodox order that, for Ranciere, is disrupted by politics. The essence of politics, for Ranciere, consists in interrupting the distribution of the sensible established by policy by supplementing it with those who have no part in the perceptual coordinates of the community, thereby modifying the very aesthetico-political field of possibility, or in Arendt’s terms, altering the space of appearance to permit recognition of those who have no part as having a legitimate right to be appear and be seen, and to interact and be heard. For Rancière, the political is relational in nature, founded on the intervention of politics in the order established by policy (constitutional law), rather than on the establishment of a particular governmental regime.
Ranciere sees this admixture or confusion of politics and aesthetics as modernist in conception, arguing that it is the notion of the avant-garde which defines the type of subject suitable to this modernist vision and appropriate, according to this vision, for connecting the aesthetic to the political. The very idea of a political avant-garde, Ranciere argues, is divided between the strategic conception, the topographical and military notion of the force that marches in the lead, and the aesthetic conception of the avant-garde, that is rooted in the aesthetic anticipation of the future, in accordance with Schiller’s model.
Ranciere frames Arendt’s view of the role of the work of art, as a communitarian, monumentalising, mnemonic moment, in German idealism. He cites the example of the texts of the young Marx which confer upon work the status of the generic essence of mankind. Such texts were only possible, Ranciere suggests, on the basis of German Idealism’s aesthetic programme: art (work) as the transformation of thought into the sensory experience of the community.
Reconfiguring Arendt’s notion of the relation of the work of art to work, Ranciere (2004: 44) argues that “art anticipates work because it carries out its principle: the transformation of sensible matter into the community’s self-presentation.” This initial idealist programme, Ranciere continues, laid the foundation for the thought and practice of the avant-gardes in the 1920s, that is, abolish art as a separate activity, put it back to work, give it back to life and its activity of working out its own proper meaning.
The aesthetic mode of thought, Ranciere points out, is much more than a way of thinking about art. It is an idea of thought linked to an idea of the distribution of the sensible, to a policy regime.
As Francoise Collins (2010: 86-87) notes, the modalities determining the elaboration and identification of an art work have varied over the centuries. In the the 20th century, the name of Duchamp is taken as the reference point for the change identified by Ranciere, the avant-garde putting art back to work. With Duchamp and the introduction of readymades, the art work no longer depends either on its conformity to a model or on a technical skill acquired over a long apprenticeship, the acquisition of a savoir-faire or techne. Rather, it comes to depend more on the production of an effect of estrangement by the displacement and positioning of a random object, the ‘whatever’, which in the case of Duchamp was a urinal. Contra Arendt, for whom the work of art remains ‘work’ (poiesis), only a propadeutic for action (praxis), the work, after Duchamp, thus became a pure praxis, an action which requires little or no fabrication (Collins, 2010: 86-87).
Given this development, in principle, art becomes ostensibly the most democratic act imaginable since any person, including any woman, can take advantage of it. Art no longer arises from the fashioning of an object, requiring skilled expertise acquired over a long apprenticeship, but from dis-placement, or rather a double process of de-contextualisation and re-contextualisation. Detached from fabrication, the art work becomes a pure action (Collins, 2010: 87).
Becoming less dependent upon professional skill, a recognition that conceptual art radically demonstrates, art work has become more dependent than ever, perhaps even dependent above all else, on the authority of its creator (Collins, 2010: 87). Interaction with the art-work formerly required, but less so today today, learning about skill and the recognition (appreciation) of skill. Since the advent of the avant-garde, learning about authority and the recognition of authority, and obedience to authority, a sense of respect, dominates the interaction. In Collins’ (2010: 87) words, “What the art work loses in terms of no longer demanding training – or métier – it regains and requires in terms of authority.”
The ‘random whatever’, for example, the bottle-holder or urinal displayed by Duchamp, does indeed become an art work. However, it is not on the authority of ‘whosoever’ (anyone at all) nor, besides, ‘wherever’ (anywhere at all). The ‘whatever’, Collins (2010: 87) points out, goes accompanied by certain conditions of presentation which are anything but ‘anything goes’ (for any one). What becomes essential to the work of art is the audacity of the act of displacement or intervention.
Thus, a heap of ash taken from the street, the context of everyday activity and learning, and re-presented on the wooden floor of a museum or art gallery, different contexts of activity and learning, becomes injected with other meanings, and becomes part of ‘quotation art’ or ‘citational art’, with collage, montage and assemblage as principles of de-contextualisation and re-contextualisation, encouraging a double reading of the elements, once in their initial context and again their new context, creating a (third) space of appearance that had hitherto not existed, the in-between here-and-there. In this context, it can be recognised that Walter Benjamin’s ‘era of technological reproducibility’ is not simply a technical matter. It also crucially involves, through ‘reproducibility’ or citationality, displacement, re-contextualisation and the oscillatory movement betwixt and between.
It is therefore no longer so much the nature of the object itself which is decisive but its situationality, a situationally that cannot be reduced to presence in any form, whether physical or ideal.
[Differential art, perhaps, rather than conceptual art.]
Examples of such displacement, involving situationally and citationality, can be seen in the theatre, dance and the plastic arts of the 1970s, all of whom departed their dedicated, conventionalised spaces, with their particular kinds of interaction and meaning production, to explore completely novel sites for performance, such as in the street, the factory, the private house, reversing the migration of everyday items into the museum and art gallery (Collins, 2010: 88).
One of the principles of the design of narrative environments emerges in this moment, wherein situationality and citationality, as simultaneously location and regime of meaning production, a situated distribution and re-distribution of the sensible, come to the fore, as well as the principles of collage-montage-assemblage-bricolage, in the form of various de-contextualisations, displacements, re-contextualisations and juxtapositions, under the twin discipline of ‘assembling’ (making an assemblage and a convocation) and ‘plotting’, even if plot in recent times is elaborated more often than not through character.
Nevertheless, the problem of authorship and authority remains for the design of narrative environments, especially as the transition from the register of expertise to that of authority in the determination of what constitutes the art work, or indeed the design, has not been necessarily advantageous to women or other excluded groups. While expertise can be acquired, authority, for its part, must be won, and must be granted by those already in authority (Collins, 2010: 88).
Making a claim to authority, or asserting the right to appear in a particular space of appearance, is a venture full of risk because it requires that the claim be acknowledged by others, for example, the public or the art critic. Such a claim solicits the assent of the other for its recognition and even purely and simply for its existence (Collins, 2010: 88).
Thus, a work of art, when it does not result from a commission but rather from ‘free’ initiative or responsiveness, does not become a work of art until recognised as such by those who ‘matter’, who give permissions to appear in a particular space of appearance, those who are already in ‘authority’, those who have the ‘power’ to decide who appears, those who are in power, in authority.
This is where politics emerges, in challenges to those in authority, to those in power, to acknowledge works and persons who are imperceptible and who cannot (inter)act. This is also where disobedience emerges, through the dissensus created by montage/collage/assemblage/bricolage, not only as refusal to follow a norm, a convention, a rule or a law, but also to disobey or refuse authority by making explicit the processes and the grounding whereby it is authorised and authored.
From here, we may move to dissensus…
Addenda
As stated most decisively by Heidegger, in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, there is not one phenomenology. No single, definitive, final answer to the question of ‘what is phenomenology?’ is possible. Nevertheless, despite this recognition, three pre-eminent characteristics of phenomenology can be identified, Rehberg (2011: 1) argues.
First, it is a philosophical method [2] that seeks to provide descriptions of phenomena cleared of extraneous impositions, most notably impositions from modern science, with its proclivity to quantify phenomena and thereby to make them calculable; common sense, which claims to look at phenomena in an unbiased way but is instead the repository of self-naturalising and highly problematic ideologies; and traditional philosophical approaches.
Second, the phenomenological manner of doing philosophy aims to let the phenomena under investigation show themselves as they are given in intuition without first subsuming them under any conceptual schema, model, or theory. The self-understanding of phenomenology is that it investigates the subtle phenomena that escape traditional philosophy.
[For Husserl, phenomenology has to do with consciousness and all types of lived experiences, acts and act-correlates. For Nietzsche, when he turns his attention to consciousness, it is to demonstrate its capacity for falsification under the reign of herd values. He views consciousness as the outcome of the struggle between different forces in the unconscious and entirely impersonal realm that he calls the ‘will to power’. ]
Third, the notion of intentionality gives rise to two of the most productive convictions of phenomenology. The first posits the fundamental relationality between “mental acts” and the phenomena they are concerned with, the fact that experience is always the experience of something, whether that something is real or not. The second concerns the “givenness” of phenomena, including the ways in which they present or show themselves to experience.
[For Nietzsche, intentionality enshrines an anthropocentric bias, which can be recognised at the core of Husserlian phenomenology. For Nietzsche this bias presents the greatest obstacle, not only to thought, but to the affirmation of life itself. (Rehberg, 2011: 5) Nietzsche maintains that human being, if not an altogether illusory fixed point, is no more than a node in a perpetual if discontinuous material becoming, the core aspects of which are will to power, eternal recurrence and physiology. To elevate and valorise this nodal point into a privileged, unique perspective represents to Nietzsche’s thinking a type of delusional phantasy.]
In relation to the above points, if Arendt is considered as part of the broad phenomenological tradition, it becomes clear that the goal of phenomenology is not to attain a ‘pure description’ of a phenomenon. Phenomenology is not about reaching an ‘origin’ in consciousness prior to experience, so to speak. Rather, phenomenology is a question of engaging with phenomena as presented to consciousness, through the intentional relation, within the schemas of perception by means of which they become perceptible.
Phenomenology does not seek the pre-categorical but seeks to articulate, on the basis of prior categorisation, a new configuration of categories that allows us to experience differently. Both Arendt and Derrida acknowledge that we can only begin from the traditions, rules, laws, norms, conventions, codes, ways of seeing and so on, into which we are born, which we inherit and which are taken as ‘givens’, that which appears simply to exist, the naturalised order.
There is not, in this perspective, a ground prior to or above this grounding in praxis, for Arendt, or in language, for Derrida. The Arendtian active life, vita activa, is dominated by conventions, codes, laws, rules, norms, ritual, ways of seeing. In short, ‘intuition’ itself is already ‘shaped’. In this context, Arendt’s phenomenological contribution is, as Canovan points out, firstly, to provide articulations of experiences previously un-described; and, secondly, to challenge ways of looking at the world by suggesting alternative ways of seeing.
Her insights are therefore valuable for designing, understanding and participating in narrative environments because these two facilitations, to articulate previously undescribed experiences and to challenge conventional ways of seeing, are also what the design of narrative environments seeks to achieve.
Notes
[1] For Heidegger, as Iain Thomson (2015) explains, the concept of the ‘earth’ is that which both informs and resists conceptualization. The historical unfolding of truth, according to Heidegger, takes place as a struggle to dis-close or un-conceal (a-lêtheia) that which conceals (lêthe) itself. The effort to bring the earth’s inexhaustible abundance of simple modes and shapes completely into the light of our worlds generates what Heidegger calls an essential strife between two interconnected dimensions of intelligibility: revealing and concealing, which Heidegger calls ‘world’ and ‘earth’. ‘Earth’ is an inherently dynamic dimension of intelligibility that simultaneously offers itself to and resists being fully brought into the light of our ‘ orlds’ of meaning and permanently stabilised therein, despite our best efforts.
The world grounds itself on the earth and the earth cuts through into the world. The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to raise the earth completely into the light. As self-opening, the world cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there.
[2] Although, as Moran (2000: xiv) points out, phenomenology cannot be understood simply as a method, a project or a set of tasks. In its historical form, Moran suggests, it is primarily a set of people, beginning with Husserl and his personal assistants, Edith Stein, Martin Heidegger, Eugen Fink and Ludwig Landgrebe, and extending to his students, spreading out more widely from that base.
References
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Canovan, M. (1994). Hannah Arendt: a reinterpretation of her political thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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Rehberg, A. (2011). Introduction. In: Rehberg, A., ed. Nietzsche and phenomenology. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 1–16.
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