Phrasing, linking, judging: Communication and critical phenomenology

Abstract

When two people dispute reality claims resulting from different perceptions of the power matrix in their working relationship, and the discourse of one operates according to assumptions that are heterogeneous to that of the other, how might their respective tableaus be evaluated? Whose interests ultimately guide the formal and/or informal adjudication of such disputes when they take place on the grounds of institutional 1 life? These questions have become central to my research on ambiguous cases of harassment in which different senses of reality collide and damages are felt, but no clearcut violations of law can be found. Interviews and conversations with alleged harassers and harassees have broadened my critical concerns to include how agents mandated with resolving harassment complaints are able to do so while keeping the integrity of each disputant and the interests of the institution at heart/in mind. 2 In this paper I discuss how Maurice Merleau-Ponty's seminal work in communication phenomenology and Jean-Francois Lyotard's complementary theory of the differend have influenced my thinking about the social disease known as sexual harassment. To illustrate their contributions to this debate, I present and critically analyze an alleged harasser's narrative taken from my current research with Jacqueline Martinez (1992). Martinez and I are concerned with how power, ambiguity, and desire are constructed or dissimulated communicatively in harassment complaints - both formal and informal - and how an ostensible harassment situation might be resolved without valorizing mechanistic forms of communication among people in institutional environments. I conclude the essay with a plea that supports the idea that abysses between men and women are cultural gaps that should not necessarily be eliminated but cultivated into new idioms of communication amenable to the human and institutional interests of any particular dispute.