Alterity, Invisibility, and Violence: A Public/Phenomenological Turn

• In Event: Theorizing Gun Violence: School Shootings, Politics, and Curriculum

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes

Following Michael Staudigl (2007), I argue that phenomenology has been limited by unclear assumptions regarding its aims and methods, but that a reconstituted phenomenology has the potential to help us better understand the varied and various embodiments of violence, particular in school and school curriculum contexts. This project enlists Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl in highlighting both “sense bestowal” (Sinngebung) and “sense-formation” (Sinnbildung) to reconsider violence in terms of humans’ pre-objective, embodied openness and Alfred Schutz’ pragmatism of the “life-world,” specifically as it relates to how we conceive of particular experiences as violence.

Perspectives/Theoretical Framework

Phenomenology and conceptual analysis constitute the framework for this work.

Mode of Inquiry

The paper proceeds in three parts. Firstly, I describe the various phenomenologies (via Husserl, Schutz, and Merleu-Ponty) and provide links to particular critiques of them in order to establish what I’m calling a “phenomenological turn:” one that contests “bracketing” in favor of transactional embodiment. Secondly, I link the “turn” to the topic of violence and, in the process, highlight alterity and make visible some of the hidden attributes and meanings of violence. Finally, I link the topic to school settings, specifically, to illustrate how embodiment, recontextualized, might be understood by teachers and students in order that their interactions be more meaningful.

Data Sources, etc.

Joshua Freistadt, “Understanding Others’ Experience: Phenomenology and/beyond Violence,” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology 1 (2011): 1-42; Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (Dordrect: Kluwer, 1989); James Richard Mensch, Ethics and Selfhood: Alterity and the Phenomenology of Obligation (Albany, SUNY Press, 2003); Maurice Merleu-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968); Alfred Schutz, On Phenomenology and Social Relations: Selected Writings, ed. H. Wagner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); and Michael Staudigl, “Towards a Phenomenological Theory of Violence: Reflections following Merleau-Ponty and Schutz,” Human Studies 30, no. 3 (September 2007): 233-253.

Results/Conclusions

While bullying, fighting, shootings, and verbal assaults are relatively clear instances of violence in schools, more subtle (if not more insidious) forms of violence are evidenced in other ways in schools—and students may not understand or know when such violence is enacted upon them.

Significance of the Study

This paper provides an argument for using a modified phenomenology to better understand how violence in schools is easily mistaken. That is, a student (viz. vulnerable, embodied subject) can experience violence, but not everything that violates the student’s integrity/being will be understood by the student as violence. This point is significant because it requires students and teachers (and parents, etc.) to be more thoughtful about what constitutes violence and what is perceived by students to be violence. Gun rampages are clear illustrations of violence. This paper problematizes the not-so-obvious school-climate/school-curriculum instances of violence.

Author

• Deron R. Boyles, Georgia State University