Elsewhere I wrote that “one of the greatest oxymorons is the idea of a lived body. The body is never given to consciousness or lived experience”. Some people have had trouble understanding this. All I mean when I say this is that we never have direct experience of our bodies and the causes of our affective states. In an earlier post on the opacity of affect, I articulated this in terms of nicotine fits. In the midst of a nicotine fit I believe that my friend is the cause of my irritation, when, in fact, it is a mess going on with my neurotransmitters that is the cause of my nicotine fits. My conscious mind casts about for an explanation of the displeasure of this situation and alights on my friend, when the cause has nothing to do with my friend and everything to do with bio-chemical processes. If you think you’ve ever experienced a nicotine fit you’ve never understood phenomenology or its methodological requirements. You experience the effects of nicotine fits, not the organic causes. You can’t experience the organic causes of anything taking place in your body and never have. Organic causes can only be understood in the natural attitude and from a third person perspective that correlates the descriptions of people with what’s chemically, and through the use of brain scans being detected in bodies. No one has ever experienced their brain.
This is what Spinoza is getting at in 2p27 when he says that the body is affected in many ways of which we’re unaware. We think that x, y, and z is the cause of why we’re feeling as we are, when it’s really p, q, and r. This is where semiotic (symbolic) and (imaginary) discussions of the body will always fail to reach the real body. The paradox is that I both am my body and have no privileged insight into the causes that animate the affective life of my experience. They could be of the imaginary order (phenomenology) or they could be of the semiotic order (culture, the signifier) or they could be of the real order (organic, chemical, material). First person experience can never decide these issues. At best, it can give us a “pataphysics” of our bodies, never an ontological ground of embodied experience. Descriptive analysis can only take us so far and certainly not give us reliable knowledge of causes where our bodies are concerned because our real bodies are withdrawn from us. If we uncritically accept the descriptions of phenomenological approaches and semiological approaches, we risk misconstruing all sorts of issues. Oddly only a third person approach coupled with first person descriptions can give us any insight into the real body (consider the distorted image of the body experienced by an anorexic or the more familiar experience of phantom limbs).
Catherine Malabou has done a wonderful job underlining these issues in works like The New Wounded, when discussing phenomena like strokes and Alzheimer’s. These are phenomena that don’t fit with the semiological fetish of the Lacanians, nor the phenomenological prejudice of first-person experience. They require a different analytic framework. Jane Bennett made similar points about the impact of omega-3 fatty acids on cognition and lived experience in Vibrant Matter. Were we to adopt, for example, a phenomenological mode of analysis for the impact of omega-3 fatty acids we would get things entirely wrong. We’d be talking about the lived experience of students and prison inmates, their “horizon of meaning”, and so on, missing entirely what the causes of these changes are and how they had nothing to do with meanings, signifiers, lived experiences, horizons of significance, and the rest.
People get nervous when these things are mentioned. Usually the first words that come out of the mouth of those of us in the humanities are “reductionism” and “scientism”. Lord knows that Bennett got plenty of grief for what she wrote about omega-3 fatty acids. There were calls to “burn the witch” or the polite academic equivalent. In response, people should remember that the claim is not that these are the only causes, but that these types of material causes are excluded from the sorts of analysis we in the humanities and social sciences generally engage in. The point is not to exclude all we’ve gained from phenomenology and semiotics, but to recognize that they’re limited and that there are other fields of causation that we don’t even begin to entertain or explore. Us humanists really have nothing to say about strokes, Alzheimer’s, nicotine fits, and partial lobotomies. It’s text, text, text and lived experience all the time.
We call ourselves materialists, yet exclude any materialist form of anlaysis a priori; so effectively that we don’t even recognize we’re doing so. I suspect that part of the reason for this is that academics do not work with people who suffer from these things, and have generally led fairly privileged lives where material reality works (exactly what Heidegger described when discussing the withdrawal of tools when they’re working) and have seldom experienced poverty or homelessness as a result of coming from privileged backgrounds. We just don’t see because we’ve never experienced broken material worlds and therefore reduce everything to first-person descriptive experience and texts to be interpreted (the things available in our offices when pondering issues about mind, culture, human behavior, meaning, etc). The issue is one of recognizing our blind spots and making room for these other causal factors. It’s a logic of both/and, not either/or. It’s a question of multiplying sites of intervention, not abandoning sites of intervention. I think that’s a good thing. At any rate, our experience of our bodies is not identical to our bodies and how we narrate or experience our bodies is no reliable guide to what’s going on inside us.
Larval Subjects . 
May 13, 2013 at 11:18 pm
Yet, what matters is not the sublation of reality into actuality but the narrative embodiment of affective investitures as they determine the aetiological gestalt of the present. Thought is embodied in action, but action is an analogue of thought only retroactively made responsible to tokens of actuality, as it chafes against the fabric of time and space”.
The present, as symptomal consciousness, is an analogue of the past:
“The cultivated distraction which inhibits the analyst’s bildung is not of the order of mere contingency, it officiates the nomologically anterior engram of the anal-yst who takes heed from the imaginary gestaltism of the big Other a-nalyst. Then, the a-nalyst whose provenance extends across the being of the analyst by penetrating his innermost intentions and subjective relation[s] to jouissance, by the very auspice of the concept of conceptual possibility, and its prodigal objet d’ analysis[19], is only a proposition entailed by the regime of the allmighty semblable of semblation, and its analytic adequacy. This semblable of semblation emerges as the predetermining horizon of the session and an inavouable subject position which the analyst occupies axiomatically”.
May 13, 2013 at 11:24 pm
Drop the lingo and return when you’ re ready to talk to others without technical vocabularies.
May 13, 2013 at 11:28 pm
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to jargonise my position. It is just the circularity of the psycho-analytic commitment to the ineluctability of the real, the fractured nature of the symbolic and the psychotic/neurotic bent of the imaginary relation that I find problematic as far as critique of phenomenological reduction from within the Lacanian position is concerned.
I apologise for any misunderstanding, or seeming snarkiness.
May 14, 2013 at 5:25 am
I guess there wil always be some technical vocab…and of course we can never know/experience that which we have not created – the inner causality of things – we experience their effects/accidents – but I have never found a chain saw to be ‘withdrawn’ or kind of disappearing, when it is working….maybe heidegger never used one?
May 14, 2013 at 7:49 am
I had no idea Bennett got so much heat for writing that. It’s weird that books on nutrition seem to be much more advanced than humanities in that case. They usually don’t have any problem thinking of stress put on the body and mind by lack of nutrition and stress put on by destructive pressures at work or in relations are the exact same stress, without reducing one to the other. If people called her out on reductionism it seems they have a reductive understanding of what the body is and how it reacts to both external and internal factors.
May 14, 2013 at 8:02 pm
Hi, Paul. Heidegger’s point was that what we have in view when we use a chainsaw is the work itself, and not even the present work, but the aims of doing the work, the goal. So, the chainsaw—and I’ve used and likely abused chainsaws too—disappears, or withdraws to the extent that when it’s right for the job and we’re engrossed in the work, we “see” through it to the lumber and to the fire we’re going to build and to the warmth and to the living. But when the chainsaw kicks back unexpectedly or runs out of gas or otherwise breaks, then it’s visible; it obtrudes; it no longer withdraws. Harman does his own thing with this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Harman#Thought Bryant something else.
May 14, 2013 at 9:38 pm
Levi, I think you are not appreciating what phenomenology (in the widest sense possible) can do (deep description) when you asking it to do something it cannot. Phenomenological investigation is descriptive (providing much needed primary perceptual distinctions) not explanatory (assembling secondary associations). Some kind of phenomenology is beginning of naturalism not its endgame.
See here:
“Part of Husserl’s ambition is to provide an adequate phenomenological description of consciousness. He is not concerned with finding room for consciousness within an already well established materialistic or naturalistic framework. In fact, the very attempt to do the latter, thereby assuming that consciousness is merely yet another object in the world, might very well prevent one from disclosing let alone clarifying some of the most interesting aspects of consciousness, including the true epistemic and ontological significance of the first-person perspective. For Husserl, the problem of consciousness should not be addressed on the background of an unquestioned objectivism, but in connection with overarching transcendental considerations. Frequently, the ssumption has been that a better understanding of the physical world will allow us to understand consciousness better and rarely, that a better understanding of consciousness might allow for a better understanding of what it means for something to be real” (Zahavi 2004: 5-6)
From “Phenomenology and the project of naturalization” (2004): http://cspeech.ucd.ie/~fred/cogsci/readings/zahavi.pdf
May 14, 2013 at 9:54 pm
Again, I believe phenomeonology is where philosophical thought begins (the ground zero of experience) not where it ends. Where philosophy or theory goes or ends is to be determined in relation to specific projects and pragmatically-oriented goals.
As Husserl writes in the early lecture course Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie (1906–7):
“If consciousness ceases to be a human or some other empirical consciousness, then the word loses all psychological meaning, and ultimately one is led back to something absolute that is neither physical nor psychical being in a natural scientific sense. However, in the phenomenological perspective this is the case throughout the field of givenness. It is precisely the apparently so obvious thought, that everything given is either physical or psychical that must be abandoned” (Husserl 1984: 242).
May 14, 2013 at 10:12 pm
Michael,
I don’t disagree with anything you say here at all. Phenomenology provides us with an account of what needs to be explained, but is not in and of itself an explanation. Cognitive science, for example, that hasn’t done good phenomenology tends to generate pretty absurd theories of mind because it’s never bothered to look at the nature of lived experience.
May 14, 2013 at 10:33 pm
“Phenomenology provides us with an account of what needs to be explained, but is not in and of itself an explanation.” YES! exactly.
And the body shows up just fine via phenomenological investigation. Does it require further explanation? Sure does. But the lived/felt/experiencing body is given…
May 14, 2013 at 11:32 pm
Michael,
The lived body is not the organic body, though you can’t have the former without the latter.
May 15, 2013 at 10:32 pm
@John
thanks for that. I guess I never really do ‘see through’ the chainsaw to the lumber. I’m v. conscious of the chain-saw…..:)