Phenomenological World Research Articles

Silverless Mirrors: Book, Self & Postmodern American Fiction by Charles Caramello (review)

64Rocky Mountain Review CHARLES CARAMELLO. Silverless Mirrors: Book, Self & Postmodern American Fiction. Tallahassee: Florida State University, 1983. 25Op. This is a difficult and trying book about a difficult and troubled subject: structuralist criticism and the contemporary literature it concerns itself with. Borrowing heavily the language as well as the ideas and the names commonly passed around in these circles, Caramello tries to draw a number of related points into a thesis that, because he deals with literature carefully selected and interpreted to support his argument, barely escapes tautology, as he admits. His argument is that contemporary critical theory, particularly from the French, has caused postmodern American fiction to challenge traditional views of the relationship between literature and reality, among book, author, and reader; on the other hand, under the influence of its literary predecessor, modernism, and its peculiarly American heritage, that same fiction, uneasy in its challenge, seeks to reaffirm those same traditions. The result is ambivalence, an intellectual tug-of-war. Encouraged by their reading of contemporary literary theory, some American fiction writers have come to question the reality of reality, to conflate the realities of their fictional worlds with the world they live in, so that book, author, and reader are said to co-exist within a "story" that purports to be the only reality for the occasion, a world of words. The identity of the author, once sought and established through his writing, now disappears into the "Text," to be established anew for each of many readings. Rather than a mirror reflecting human experiences, postmodern fiction becomes an experience in itself, an instrument with "selfreflexivity " instead of reflection. But modern literature and the American tradition simultaneously pressure the writer toward an affirmation of self and a search for values in an external world. The result, for these postmoderns , is paradox. To support his argument, Caramello calls upon representative structuralist critics, mostly Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes; upon Melville, Whitman, and Henry James; upon selected moderns, especially Joyce; and upon four or five contemporaries — John Barth, William Gass, Kenneth Gangemi, Ihab Hassan. It is an unsurprising collection, yet feels artificial, for Caramello takes great liberties to prove little, and in the process manhandles the major writers to tell us about the minor ones, who have already gone to great pains to say it for themselves. One of the sad facts about postmodern American fiction is that its most avid proponents, in spite ofthemselves, are so deeply studied in the intellectual airs of their critics that they tangle themselves in their fiction with their criticism. All the while, however, they call for literature with a body: "the human muse, full up, erect and on the charge, impetuous and hot and lewd and wild like Messalina going to the stews, or those damn rockets streaming headstrong into the stars" (100, quoting Gass). Spare of subject, they make stories out of their act of writing and worry us along with them, pondering the very possibility of what they do. Apparently they would prefer wild Messalina: less self-consciousness, less intrusion from their own awareness of the philosophical questions about their activity that they inherited in this postKantian , positivistic, phenomenological world. It is indeed a world confused about its own ontological, epistemological, and Book Reviews65 ethical foundations. It is a direction of thought taken to such an extreme that one of its main spokesmen can deny the possibility of history, communication, even otherness: "The writerly text is a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which would inevitably make it past) can be superimposed ; the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genius, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of language" (74, quoting Barthes). Ironic, that a view starting from the premises that everything is change and all experience is interpreted and possible through a priori understanding must conclude that nothing is real and knowable but the fleeting instant of interpretation, therefore nothing really: as if Zeno's arrow in flight were only a collection of an infinite number of static, self-contained, self-conscious monads...

The rhetoric of transformation in ritual healing.

The problem of reconciling accounts of religious healing from the points of view of comparative religion and medicine suggests the necessity of an interpretive or hermeneutic approach to the analysis of therapeutic process. This paper, in the context of examining psychotherapeutic ritual among Catholic Pentecostals, formulates an interpretive approach in which healing is conceived as a form of discourse that is both religious and psychiatric. This discourse embodies a cultural rhetoric capable of performing three essential persuasive tasks: to create a predisposition to be healed, to create the experience of spiritual empowerment, and to create the concrete perception of personal transformation. It is shown that this threefold process activates and controls healing processes endogenous to the supplicant in healing, and either redirects the supplicant's attention toward new aspects of his actions and experiences, or alters the manner in which he attends to accustomed aspects of those actions and experiences. The result is the creation of both a new phenomenological world, and new self-meaning for the supplicant as a whole and holy person.

The Poetic Significance of the Thing-in-Itself

This remark by Barthes echoes one of dominant critical commonplaces concerning modern poetry. Sartre had put it following way: in one fell stroke poet has given up view of as tool; he has chosen once and for all poetic attitude that views words as things and not as signs.2 Coming from author of Being and Nothingness, this statement is perhaps not surprising: world of signs for Sartre is of less interest than phenomenological world that reveals being. Yet when we find anti-sign doctrine of thing-in-itself pioneering semiotic study paradox becomes evident. In Mythologies Barthes notes that modern poetry attempts to recapture an infrasignification, state of language and that it tries to reach a sort of transcendent quality of things.3 Now if main message of Mythologies is that every aspect of cultural life (including literature) is organized as signsystem, then it is an obvious contradiction for Barthes to see modern poems operating at presemiological level of the thing itself.4 It would appear that Barthes is momentarily won over by professed aim of such poets as Char and Bonnefoy, which is to reach realm beyond any system of semiotic conventions. He is not alone this respect since we find Jean-Pierre Richard also insisting his study of post-war French poetry that all poets discussed been grasped at level of an original contact with things.5 How can we account for poetry's commitment to concreteness, as Susan Sontag has called it,6 from within semiotic theory? If we were unable to do so, very axiom of semiotics concerning omnipresence of signs culture would have to be revised order to allow for certain exceptions. We would also have to allow validity of paradoxical proposition that objective poetry like Char's presents itself as an anti-language.7 It is, however, clear

The naturalistic method of educational and social research — A Marxist critique

Viewed from a Marxist scientific perspective, any assessment of the naturalistic perspective associated with the work of CARE and the new sociology of education must be highly critical. In the focus of its work, the naturalistic perspective is concerned mostly with the “micro” world of the school and within-classroom interaction, neglecting to focus on the possible material determination of this phenomenological world. Naturalism accords to the social scientist the role of passive reporter of events and member accounts rather than interpreter of the world that Marxist analysis wishes the intellectual to adopt. Naturalism, as exemplified within the contemporary sociology of education, does not appear to be concerned with the validation and objectification of the knowledge that is produced. Lastly, little concern is shown for the need to use empirical insight to generate adequate theoretical constructs of the inter-relationships between different bodies of knowledge. The naturalistic perspective upon social and educational matters seems to reflect a temporary disillusionment with such conventional modes of scholastic enquiry as positivism. Yet there is no evidence that our understanding of social and educational matters has been dramatically increased by this new, unscientific, idealist, and micro-sociological paradigm. Genuine advances in our understanding of the social world are, I believe, more likely to occur if social research adopts the methodological apparatus of scientific Marxism, an apparatus that has brought considerable increments of understanding to those social science disciplines that have utilised it.

Culture as rhetoric: patterning in the verbal interpretation of interaction between teachers and administrators in an American high school

Six “texts” produced by the staff of an American high school are analyzed and shown to possess a common rhetorical structure that is independently constituted and that may determine what is being said. It is argued that this rhetoric of everyday talk signifies a set of social positions that are projected onto social reality without always representing it. It is suggested that in this rhetoric may lie the concrete impulse in the phenomenological world that has led anthropologists to talk of culture.

Optimal federalism: A model of psychological dependence

Increased size, scope, and visibility of government may strengthen relations of psychological dependence, an unintended aggregate effect of liberal programs. Such an effect depends upon the dominant phenomenological world of the citizenry which intersects objective trends: dependence,eminence grise identification, or enlightened maturity. A model of self-conceptions and emotional syndromes characteristic of the two parties in a dependency relationship predicts there will be objectively inconsistent and unrealistic expectations and demands by both parties, inadequate rationality and program evaluation, and mutual frustration, mistrust, and disillusionment. Trends in American politics suggest the possibility of an increasing dependency substructure. If dependency relations are growing, then the political and administrative problems outlined can be expected to increase.

Existentialism in Counseling: THE RELIGIOUS VIEW

The purpose of this article is to throw some light upon the contribution existential thought has to make to counseling and religious experience. The existential approach aims at grasping the total phenomenological world of the client, including the world of religious experience. Key concepts in the client's religious world are freedom, personal encounter with God, and the discovery of meaning in life. One of the goals of counseling is to promote that freedom which will permit the client on his own to participate in a true encounter with God and his fellow man and discover for himself a meaning of life.

BRIDGING PHYSIOLOGY AND PHENOMENOLOGY IN DYNAMIC PSYCHOLOGY

Rasmussen, E. Tranekjær. Bridging physiology and phenomenology in dynamic psychology. Scand. J. Psychol., 1961, 2, 161–166.—It is important to distinguish between the immediately experienced (the phenomenological) and the physiological‐neurological basis for the phenomenological world, e.g. between beta needs (subjectively experienced states of needing or wanting) and alpha needs (objectively defined, physiological needs). The concept of psychon is introduced and defined as a necessary and sufficient condition in the physiological‐neurological system for the existence of a subjective experience; psychon bridges the gap between the physiological and the phenomenological world.

Coherence in the Physical World

The term coherence is used in many connections. We often speak of coherent reasoning, coherent activities, coherent bodies, and coherent phenomena. In science this term is often used to indicate continuity of a structure in space and time. If many individuals can simultaneously observe similar sets of coherent phenomena, we infer with some justification, first, that the phenomena observed have some kind of correspondence with activities in an external world, that is, a world independent of the existence of the individual observers, and second, that the coherence itself is an attribute of the external world. In a recently published article, to which I shall make several references in this paper, I have called attention to the fact that the science of physics is based on the form and the changes in form of an immediately observed phenomenological world, called the physical world, which can be completely characterized as a structure in space and time. In his analysis of the foundations of the science of physics Eddington has clearly shown that theoretical physics deals exclusively with structures of the type described in the mathematical theory of groups, and that our knowledge of the physical world could have been reached by our sense of vision alone. Coherence in the physical world is that characteristic of the structure which describes the more or less permanent relationship between phenomena in different parts of space at approximately the same time, or a regular sequence in the changing phenomena at approximately the same region of space.