This paper addresses the question of occasional expressions, as discussed by Husserl in his First and Sixth Logical Investigation in relation to the problem of gestures. It aims to show that gestures ...are intimately related to the use of occasional expressions and have an indispensible contribution to their understanding. In doing so, the paper points out an important lack in Husserl’s early theory of signification, which has to do with its exclusion of all aspects related to intersubjective communication. The paper begins with a short presentation of Husserl’s interpretation of occasional expressions in the Logical Investigations. Further on it identifies the main source of Husserl’s difficulties in coming to terms with this issue in his problematic treatment of communication, and shows how the consideration of gestures can help overcome these difficulties. Finally, the paper considers some consequences which derive from such a treatment of the issue for Husserl’s theory of fulfillment (Bedeutungserfüllung).
Abstract This paper focuses on a lesser-known aspect of Husserl’s theory of action, namely his understanding of “involuntary behavior,” as developed especially in the recently published manuscripts ...gathered in Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. Specifically, I follow the arguments leading Husserl in these manuscripts to make the peculiar claim that all involuntary behaviors can be appropriated and converted into voluntary action. In reflecting upon this argument I point out the merits of Husserl’s engagement with involuntary acts, which considerably reshape his practical philosophy, but I also highlight some of its important limitations, which originate in a structural shortcoming of Husserl’s theory in general, namely his presupposition of a rigorous parallelism between cognition, emotion, and action. By showing how this ultimately leads to a reductive and phenomenologically inaccurate view of practical experience, I conclude by pointing to some possible ways to overcome these limitations.
This paper discusses the phenomenological method’s reliance on imaginative procedures in view of ethnomethodological research. While ethnomethodology has often been seen in continuity with Alfred ...Schütz’ phenomenological sociology, it mainly parts ways with phenomenology by stressing that the decisive details structuring mutual understanding (gestures, bodily expressions, or the myriad trifles that regulate casual conversation) are „not imaginable, but can only be found out”. This paper reflects from a phenomenological perspective on what such a claim entails by first delineating this line of criticism from other objections raised against the use of imaginative procedures in phenomenology and by showing how this line of questioning departs from the core philosophical debates concerning imaginabilitiy and unimaginability in the Kantian tradition. Further on, the paper offers an in-depth interpretation of the aforementioned ethnomethodological claim in order not only to outline its methodological implications for phenomenology, but also to show that it involves possible key insights for understanding interaction, which phenomenology needs to take into account despite its eidetic scope.
A decree passed by the socialist Romanian state at the beginning of the 1970s stipulated the need to defend state secrets as a condition for the country's economic and social progress in the context ...of its growing participation in world commerce. While the law operated with a wide notion of state secrecy, referring to any piece of information which, if disclosed, could jeopardize the Romanian state's interests, it included harsh regulations with regard to personal contacts with foreign citizens and served primarily for establishing a heightened operative control over the local economic life. Following the Romanian State Security Council's encouragement of campaigns for popular education, which should help prevent any trespassing of this decree, the early 1970s saw the commissioning of several instruction films made by the newly founded Film Service of the Ministry of the Interior as a form of 'counterintelligence training of the working class'. The present paper contextualizes and closely analyzes some of these films staging fictional cases of industrial espionage and their subsequent investigation by State Security as a form of useful cinema, arguing that, aside from their main educational mission of raising awareness about the legal responsibilities ensuing from the decrees concerning state secrecy, these films also acted as an instrument of national, geopolitical and institutional self-representation.
Ever since the 1960s, media and communication studies have abounded in heated debates concerning the psychological and social effects of fictional media violence. Massive empirical research has first ...tried to tie film violence to cultivating either fear or aggressive tendencies among its viewership, while later research has focused on other media as well (television, video games). The present paper does not aim to settle the factual question of whether or not medial experiences indeed engender real emotional dispositions. Instead, it brings into play the resources of genetic phenomenology in order to ask how the formation of such dispositions would be generally possible. Thus, it aims to further the discussion by overtly employing the framework of Husserl’s later genetic phenomenology to the field of emotional experience. By posing questions with regard to how fictional emotional experiences contribute to the formation of apperceptions and to the specificities of emotional sedimentation, it also points out some shortcomings in Husserl’s account by drawing from Freud’s dynamic theory of drives and emotions.
This article brings a phenomenological perspective to the question of how bodily and inter-bodily experience is involved in interacting via audio-visual media like videoconferencing platforms. ...Contemporary discussions in interaction studies point to a certain suspension of bodily involvement in these mediated interactions, which leads to a visible loss of function in the case of gestures. Such observations have led phenomenologists to voice concern as to whether phenomenology is indeed still suited to account for the "digital world" in general. The following article addresses these concerns by first making the case for a phenomenological understanding of gestures, which develops Merleau-Ponty's notion of intercorporeality by drawing from an intersubjective reading of Husserl's threefold analysis of the body (aesthesiological, kinaesthetic and orientational). Subsequently, these reflections are used to describe the modifications, which occur when interacting "through" the screen in videoconferences, by showing that they are not just privative in nature.
