The first and most basic rule is to consider social facts as things.
—Emile Durkheim
. . . to judge rationally or scientifically about things signifies to conform to the things themselves or to go from words and opinions back to the things themselves, to consult them in their self-givenness and to set aside all prejudices alien to them.
—Edmund Husserl
. . . the old High German word thing means a gathering, and specifically a gathering to deliberate on a matter under
discussion . . . that in any way bears upon men, concerns them, and that accordingly is a matter for discourse.
—Martin Heidegger
Emile Durkheim urged us to “consider social facts as things”1 and Edmund Husserl urged us to attend “to the things themselves.”2 In contrast to this ontological focus, the social sciences are marked by a focus on competing methodologies that (their advocates claim) enable us to gain knowledge of social things—a focus that’s encouraged by traditions in Euro-American schol-arship as well as institutional exigencies. The result is an emphasis on epis-temology and methodology at the expense of ontological inquiry. The meliorative efforts of much social scientific research are hampered, I suspect, by investigation of the phenomena of the social world that begins with
unexamined conceptions of the nature of social things and incorporates (rather than investigating the validity of) commonsensical as well as traditional metaphysical conceptions of “things.” These preconceptions obscure the po-tential value of Durkheim’s and Husserl’s injunctions for social scientific research, and especially for research seeking “practical” knowledge that serves meliorative goals.
Don Ihde’s use of “second phenomenology” in analyzing auditory and
“multistable” visual phenomena enables ontological investigation of social things that challenges those preconceptions, suggests an alternative ontology, and enables us to interpret Durkheim’s and Husserl’s injunctions as supporting interpretive modes of inquiry, rather than (as critics have done) as requiring empiricistic and even positivistic methodologies. In the early work that informs this chapter, Ihde explicates phenomenology as a two-stage mode of analysis.
He uses that explication, grounded in the work of Husserl and Martin Heidegger, for an analysis that’s “intended as a prolegomena to an ontology of listening”
(LV ix). Throughout his teaching and writing career, Ihde has emphasized the primacy of doing phenomenology, in contrast to and conjunction with tenden-cies to dwell in textual exegesis or in talk about phenomenology as an episte-mological method. In other words, he follows phenomenological tradition in holding text and talk as secondary to investigating “the things themselves.” In what follows I sketch Ihde’s phenomenological ontology and suggest its value for investigating the nature of social things.
Toward a Phenomenological Ontology . . . as a radical philosophy, phenomenology necessarily departs from familiar ways of doing things and accepted ways of thinking.
It overturns many presuppositions ordinarily taken for granted and seeks to establish a new perspective from which to view things.
—Don Ihde (EP 17)
Only as phenomenology is ontology possible.
—Martin Heidegger
Ihde distinguishes a “first phenomenology”—a “method and field of study” for which Husserl is the guide—from a “second phenomenology,”
which, with Heidegger as the guide, builds from the first “toward a funda-mental ontology of Being,” and so evolves into “a hermeneutic and existential philosophy” (LV 17–18). “The things which are intended and the acts by which their meanings are constituted occupy first phenomenology centrally,”
Ihde tells us; thus, first phenomenology “operated like a science and is . . . a
The Primacy of Listening 39
statics of experience” (LV 18–19). Husserl’s early attunement toward stasis was even more thoroughgoing than Durkheim’s, perhaps because his initial subject matter was the formal objects of arithmetic and logic. Durkheim took the
“natural” or physical sciences of his day—physics and chemistry, focused on the stable structures of diverse particulars—as the appropriate models for so-ciology. Thus both were concerned with developing a methodology for identi-fying and describing, in isolation from the particularities of their contexts, stable elements that justify descriptions (Husserl) or explanations (Durkheim) of “the same phenomenon” despite the observed diversity of multiple instances.
Durkheim’s third rule for sociological method, “investigate . . . social facts . . . in isolation from their individual manifestations” was joined to his advocacy of statistical analysis as the means for “isolating” “beliefs, tenden-cies, and practices of the group taken collectively” from “individual circum-stances which may have played some part in producing” particular manifestations of those forms.5 Husserl’s method—the much-misunderstood eidetic intuition—was radically different, but also sought a stable subject matter within the flux of experience. Thus despite Husserl’s insistence that phenomenologists must identify and justify presumptions—reminiscent of Durkheim’s second rule, “One must systematically discard all preconcep-tions”—they both assumed that investigation of a stable subject matter is required for (respectively) a phenomenology that would be “a rigorous sci-ence,” or a sociology that would “pass from the subjective stage . . . to the objective stage.” In other words, Husserl, in his radical turn from the “natu-ral” to the “phenomenological” attitude in order to achieve a scientific phe-nomenology, as well as Durkheim, in his radical turn from individual to social explanation in order to achieve a scientific sociology, neglected onto-logical inquiry that would challenge the extent to which their subject matter could be stable and isolable from its context.
Second phenomenology does not share the predominant epistemological and methodological orientations preconceptions of the Euro-American intel-lectual tradition. Ihde explicates second phenomenology as “an extension and a deepening” of first phenomenology by virtue of being “opened ‘outwards’
towards limits and horizons” as it expands analysis from the static to the active (LV 18). That expansion requires a more extensive application of phenomenology’s epoché of the natural attitude; an expansion that suspends acceptance of the Platonic heritage that’s sedimented in both mundane and disciplinary assumptions about the nature of things. Ihde (quoting Heidegger) characterizes this application as responding to a need for “‘destruction of the history of ontology’” if experience is to be “understood ultimately in relation to its historical and cultural imbeddedness” (LV 20).
This shift from Husserlian first phenomenology to Heideggerian second phenomenology complements Husserl’s attention to “essence, structure, and
presence” with Heidegger’s primary interest in “existence, history, and the hermeneutical” (LV 20). In contrast to Durkheim’s third rule, second phenom-enology requires a turn from treating social facts in isolation from their contexts and presented as static, relatively fixed entities to treating social facts as persistently informing and informed by history, and thus, as active pro-cesses (feeling, listening, seeing, thinking, valuing, etc.) relating to objects (emotions, voices, bodies, thoughts, values), and within contexts (abstract/
formal or spatiotemporal fields). The contextual and processual analysis of second phenomenology engages and builds from, rather than dismisses, static analysis; it insists upon inclusive investigation of both essence and existence, structure and history, the horizonal absence (persistent incompleteness) of meaning as well as the complex presence of sensory experience in which and through which things are manifested.
Expanding analysis to description of “the things themselves” within—
rather than in abstraction or isolation from—their experiential context re-quires that we “begin with the ‘objects,’ or things which are ‘out there,” now named as “the noema, or ‘object-correlates’ of the experience process” in order to discern the “eidetic or structural components of the experience in question” (LV 29). This aspect of experience is “not immediately apparent,”
but can be discerned in “patterns” that persist through perceptual and imagi-native variations. By attending to actual or imagined manifestations (varia-tions on the phenomena), then, we go about a “gathering of descriptive characteristics,” the telling of which “functions like an argument” for “locat-ing and determin“locat-ing existential possibilities”—that is, possibilities for how the things of experience might present themselves (LV 32, 34). Claims about which structural components are necessary to a particular phenomenon’s presence as one thing, rather than another, are in Husserl’s terminology
“eidetic” claims. But interest in what is possible for particular social things calls for ontological inquiry that seeks out contingent as well as necessary characteristics. Second phenomenology’s primary interest in contextualized historical processes enables social research that’s attuned to the functioning of change, contingency, and correlation in actualizing possibilities—without neglecting what is necessary for a particular social thing to be that thing.
Ihde demonstrates second phenomenology at work in analyzing auditory phenomena in Listening and Voice and in analyzing visual phenomena in Experimental Phenomenology. His examples are simple—the sounds of things (LV) and line drawings of “multistable objects” (EP). Yet those demonstra-tions display the function of communicative interaction in making both au-ditory and visual things present and in enabling, as well as revealing limits to, their variation. Despite their simplicity, these examples meet Durkheim’s criteria for being social things: they are external to us, constructed (brought into being) and constituted (becoming meaningful) in sounds that are heard
The Primacy of Listening 41
and drawings that are seen; they allow of variation while resisting our will that they exist in particular ways, and they impose themselves upon us by disallowing variations that seem to exceed their limits and by pressing other variations upon us. Although they are rudimentary social things, studying our interaction with them suggests much about the nature and possible variations of more complex social things. Although no summary can do any justice to the richness of Ihde’s comparative analysis of auditory and visual phenom-ena, I need to sketch some descriptive findings from Ihde’s phenomenology of the auditory dimension before turning to consideration of second phenomenology’s usefulness for investigating communicative interaction.
Even a “prolegomena to an ontology of listening”—that is, initial steps toward a phenomenological ontology of auditory phenomena—calls our at-tention to the dominant concern with visual phenomena within Euro-American philosophy, science, and theory. We can then recognize, within communica-tive experience, “vast differences between hearing voices and reading words”
(LV x) and, more generally, between auditory in contrast to visual experience.
An early finding is that visual phenomena—especially a written text, and to a somewhat lesser extent, a pictorial display—can be present in abstraction from time and circumstance. A sentence focally presents itself in front of me as a static thing. Typically, I see it without attending to features of the immediate or encompassing contexts (“field” and “horizon”) that must also be present: the page on which it’s written, much less the typography or binding of the book containing it, the personality of its author, or the eco-nomics and politics governing its publication and distribution. Correlatively (noetically) my bodily placement, prior and future activities, or reasons for reading this sentence, now, are tangential to the actual seeing of the page.
In terms of Ihde’s tripartite analysis: my seeing can be relatively limited to the focal thing directly in front of me, without intrusion from the field that is its context (“fringe”) or the world (“horizon”) implicated by both thing and context.
Reflecting on the “shape” of the auditory field reveals those same three structural elements, but all of them offer more resistance to my will. I cannot limit the auditory field to a focus (and minimal periphery) that’s directly in front of me. Rather, the auditory field “surrounds” me: I hear what is behind me and what is within my body, although both are hidden from me visually (LV 75).3 The auditory field “penetrates” me: I hear “from bones [“fringe”]
to ears [“focus”]” while the “deaf person . . . ‘hears’ from only the fringe”
(LV 81, 138). It more successfully resists my will to efface it than the visual field does: “ears have no flaps” (LV 81). Its “temporality is not a matter of
‘subjectivity’ . . . I cannot ‘fix’ the [musical] note . . . there is an objectivelike recalcitrance to its ‘motion’” (LV 94). It refuses to accommodate itself to being a static thing: “Sound embodies the sense of time” by persistently
fading out of temporal immediacy (LV 84). It also refuses to be a uniform absence: By closing my eyes, I can efface the multiplicity given in any visual focus and its horizon by diminishing the visual field to a uniform redness or darkness. But any attempt to cease listening only magnifies the multiplicity of auditory phenomena (both within the body and in the surrounding environment) that remain in the background (field or horizon) of focused listening. Despite this omnipresence, sound resists our epistemic demands and exercises our methodological strategies: science—“an instrumental context in which instru-ments extend and embody experience”—must translate auditory phenomena into visual display in order to study it (LV 97). Little wonder, then, that Euro-American philosophy, science, and theory privileges the visual (including the written word), over the auditory. Furthermore, research implicitly takes visual phenomena in static immediacy, rather than as emergent “multistable objects.”
Ihde prefaces his phenomenological analysis of visual phenomena with the observation that “despite much philosophical and psychological tradition, dealing with vision in isolation is phenomenologically suspect” (EP 55).
Although even initial reflection reveals that any “span of experience is one of vast complexity and multiplicity,” he continues, “I am able to concentrate my attention upon the visual dimension”: “other phenomena do not disappear . . . but recede to the fringe of awareness” while remaining a “recalcitrant pres-ence” (EP 56). Ihde’s use of line drawings mimics the characteristics of words on a page that I mentioned earlier, in that I can focus on them to the exclusion of their “historical and cultural imbeddedness”—although the varia-tions that I’m able to make, thanks to the stories that he tells about them and the stories that gather as I see/read, rely on just that history and culture (LV 20). The invariant figure-and-(back)ground structure of visual experience, then, retains the focus-fringe-field structure of auditory phenomena. Even more insistently than in auditory experience, “what appears most clearly is at the core of the field and is centrally located . . . phenomena located nearer the fringe are barely noticed, vague, or difficult to discriminate” (EP 60). Along with aspects of what I see that I know must be present but are visually absent (such as the reverse of this page, the desk underneath it, and the legs and floor that support it), they are easily ignored or forgotten. There is always “this sense of absence-within-presence,” which supplies a “latent sense along with what is manifest . . . an inner horizon” correlative to the horizon that gives the
“shape of the visual field” and that is a necessary condition for the possibility of the “manifest profile” that I do see (EP 59–60). “Variations can establish this sense,” Ihde notes, and so enable more adequate description—since “I do not see the world without ‘thickness’ nor do I see it as a mere façade. What appears does so as a play of presence and a specific absence-within-presence”
(EP 62–63).
My sketch of Ihde’s analysis of auditory phenomena has taken up far more of the limited space in this chapter than his analysis of visual
phenom-The Primacy of Listening 43
ena, for two reasons. First, the latter have been privileged throughout Euro-American philosophy, science, and theory. Although the everyday world within which we find social things is, arguably, even more dependent upon the auditory than the visual, social research has focused on what has been done by social actors, and thus can be studied as (relatively) stable visible prod-ucts—rather than on their actual doing, and in particular, their oral/aural interaction. Despite recent emphasis within the field of communication stud-ies on communication as a process, research continues to be dominated by epistemologies and methodologies that incorporate this traditional social scientific starting point. Thus, typically, “communication as a process” is conceptualized as beginning with (speaking) subjects and (represented) ob-jects, and research has a meliorative concern that presumes the value of unambiguous and accurate representation as the goal of communication.4Ihde’s experiments in second phenomenology provide an ontology that problematize that conception without dissolving its elements into language or rejecting melioration as a goal of research. We need to look briefly at some contem-porary alternates to traditional social scientific communication research in order to identify the relevance of Ihde’s ontologically oriented experiments to those alternatives.
Toward a Metaphysics of Communicative Interaction . . . the things of the world become material exemplars of the values which the tribal idiom has placed upon them. Thus, in mediating between the social realm and the realm of nonverbal nature, words communicate to things the spirit that the society imposes . . . The things are in effect the visible tangible material embodiments of the spirit that infuses them through the medium of words. And in this sense, things become the signs of the genius that resides in words.
—Kenneth Burke
. . . paradoxically, the linguistic turn, despite the referential twist of philosophical semantics, has often signified a refusal to ‘go outside’ of language and a mistrust equal to that of French structuralism with respect to any extra-linguistic order . . . the implicit axiom that ‘everything is language’ has often led to a closed semanticism, incapable of accounting for human action as actually happening in the world . . . a phenomenology like Husserl’s, according to which the stratum of language is ‘ineffec-tual’ in relation to the life of intentional consciousness, has a corrective value, just because it proposes the opposite extreme.
— Paul Ricoeur
First phenomenology follows Husserl to “the things themselves” and sec-ond phenomenology follows Heidegger in listening to the insistent givenness of those things: “Listening ‘lets be,’ lets come into presence the unbidden giving of sound. In listening humankind belongs within the event” (LV 110). The recalcitrance of sound to our will—its “unbidden giving” of itself—reinforces its claim to be a social thing. Ihde’s experiments also demonstrate the social nature of vision: The amenability of “multistable” visual phenomena to display-ing alternative meandisplay-ings, especially when suggested by a “story device” or through “direct instructions” but without alteration in their physical gestalt (EP 86–88), reinforces the ontological status of vision as a social thing.
We are apt to valorize our own sounding—and especially our speaking and the (visible) record of that speaking on the page—more than our hearing of others’ sounds, and especially, the sounding of nonspeaking bodies. Thus it’s not surprising that much communication research emphasizes verbality and takes much of its vocabulary and theoretical framework from linguistics and (individual, rather than social) psychology. That practice incorporates an insistence upon stable and isolated subject matter, ratified for linguistics-based research by Saussure’s separation of language and speech and for psy-chology-based research by a tradition of separation between mind and body, thought and communication, reason and emotion. Studying language in iso-lation from speech (auditory experience) and bodily communication (visual and visceral experience) that abjures or exceeds verbal formulation, however, is studying language as an abstraction from one component of the event that is listening in the Heideggerian sense of that term.
Along with its focus on verbality, mainstream social scientific commu-nication research has assumed a dualistic ontology of messages and persons quite in keeping with traditional internal/mind and external/body dualism.
Correlatively, the philosophy of language has extended linguistics’ reduction of its subject matter from social to abstract things by privileging propositional language, amenable to rules for determining truth or falsity, in preference to forms of language typically characterized as dramaturgical, metaphorical,
Correlatively, the philosophy of language has extended linguistics’ reduction of its subject matter from social to abstract things by privileging propositional language, amenable to rules for determining truth or falsity, in preference to forms of language typically characterized as dramaturgical, metaphorical,