Smaranda Aldea is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Kent State University. Her research in phenomenology focuses on the imagination, memory, embodiment, and modalities (especially possibility constitution). She draws on these analyses in her work on the phenomenological method. She is currently completing two book projects: a book on phenomenology as radical critique and a book exploring the critical dimension of the imagination.
A post by Smaranda Aldea
To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world (Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life).
Street walking – free wandering, without aim or worry. Flâneur extraordinaire, Baudelaire brings into relief the embodied freedom such street walking – flânerie – entails. The flâneur is at home in the urban world: he is there to saunter and observe, trusting in his own invisibility – a liberating kind of invisibility. Lauren Elkin writes, ‘Flâneuse [flanne-euhze], noun, from the French. Feminine form of flâneur [flanne-euhr], an idler, a dawdling observer, usually found in cities. That is an imaginary definition. Most French dictionaries don’t even include the word’ (Elkin 2016, 7). There is a culturally coded, gendered dimension to flânerie: its radical embodied freedom is something most women can only imagine. What happens when those of us who, due to deeply sedimented, embodied fears that unavoidably condition our urban walking experiences, imagine Baudelaire’s empowered yet relaxed invisible freedom?
Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of the imagination, across numerous lecture courses and research manuscripts (Husserl 1980, 2012, 2019), provide resources for working toward explicating the distinctive structures pertaining to this kind of imagining. Let us proceed with an everyday example: motivated by Baudelaire’s account of his own flânerie, I imagine myself a completely unfettered flâneuse, heedless to anything other than the streets of the city I walk, aimlessly so. No sense of danger shadows me. Absorbed, I revel in the sheer joy of my observant invisibility.
According to Husserl, as presentification (Vergegenwärtigung), namely, as the kind of experience that makes present that which is absent, imagining implies, along with the givenness of a correlate imagined object (say, the Eiffel Tower, at dusk, on a sunny spring day), an imagined self whose quasi-perceptual correlate is the imagined object. When I imagine an aimless evening stroll in the streets of Paris, I imagine myself ‘as if’ I were there (Husserl 1980, 235ff.), free and fully at home in the world. The largely latent (unaware, non-thematic) imagined self is implied in the experience of this, here, now imagining self. Husserl refers to this doubling of the self as Ichspaltung – the ‘splitting’ of the ‘I’ (see Cavallaro 2017, Altobrando et al. 2018, De Santis 2020, Aldea 2022a). And while memorial and expectational experiences, for example, likewise entail this splitting or doubling of the I, there is something qualitatively distinctive about the Ichspaltung at work in imagining experiences. The latter, according to Husserl, are ‘free,’ doxically neutral experiences, not bound by any of the ontic commitments that memory and expectation, which posit their objects as real, entail. The imagination, according to Husserl, engages its objects ‘as if’ they were real; in short, as irreal (see also Sartre 2004). However, upon closer look, beyond this minimal doxic neutrality, there are sedimented layers of epistemic, normative, axiological, and praxiological commitments that are not necessarily ‘out of the picture’ in imagining experiences (see also Jansen 2020, Aldea 2020, 2022a, 2022b). The imagined self, whose correlates are the imagined streets of Paris, though neutral at the basic doxic level Husserl describes, is nevertheless anchored in the normalized, communalized, and sedimented commitments of my concrete imagining self, whose correlate is the lifeworld in all of its historical thickness (see Husserl 1970; also Carr 1974, Dodd 2016).
Past experiences, according to Husserl, leave traces in the concrete. In recollecting a lovely dinner party I attended a couple of weeks ago, my experience ‘once more’ and ‘again’ (Husserl 1980, 315-316) recovers (Husserl 1980, 255), in the ‘total consciousness’ of the now (Husserl 1980, 282), a whole (former) self: “This form of ‘experiencing again’ is a ‘putting ourselves in the past via leap’ – retracing ourselves back up till now” (Husserl 1980, 313). Imagining experiences, including self-imagining, likewise leave traces in the concrete. These experiences are not ‘aloof’ nor are they ‘detached’ from our everyday senses of self and world (Husserl 1980, 535ff., 606). Not only that. Imagining experiences are self-referential in a qualitatively distinctive way, which, in turn, makes possible a critical reflection capable of self- and world-transformation. In self-imagining experiences, the self being ‘traced’ back to itself is the imagined self, whose correlate is a coherent system of possibilities of being, doing, and knowing. As the imagining self traces the imagined self back to itself, a latent tension can emerge – a tension ‘just beneath the surface’ of awareness or thematization. This tension marks the discrepancy between two systems of lived possibilities: one pertaining to my gendered, everyday sense of self and one pertaining to the imagined flâneuse (my imagined self) absorbed in her unfettered invisibility.
Through this tension, the imagining self experiences the system of possibilities pertaining to the imagined self as something ‘other,’ ‘alien,’ ‘strange’ even. This strangeness can capture the interest of the imagining self precisely in virtue of the thinly veiled tension between these two systems of possibilities. What may have been an initial indifference toward the imagined possibilities of my imagined self can fissure, making room, so to speak, for stirring new interests. The imagining self may reorient itself toward these imagined possibilities, which now present themselves, beyond their ‘alienness,’ as possibilities for me. This attempt, on the part of my imagining self, to align its own possibilities of streetwalking to the modal range pertaining to my imagined flâneuse has the potential to illuminate not only specific possibilities of being and doing (say, a certain rhythmic breathing attuned to my footsteps that relaxes me deeply), but also the very limits and boundaries – my lived impossibilities – I have thus far taken for granted. Through this re-orientation whose interest is the modal tension itself along with the lived impossibilities it reveals (such as lost, foreclosed, forgotten, irrelevant possibilities of streetwalking), the imagining self renders itself strange to itself. Lived impossibilities I have simply assumed lose their patina of finality. Thus, in tracing the imagined self ‘back to itself,’ the imagining self can open new, potentially realizable possibilities. Fissuring the finality of sedimented lived impossibilities holds self-transformative potential.
I noted above that the splitting of the self at work in imagining experiences, especially in self-imagining experiences, is qualitatively distinctive compared to other presentifying experiences. In ‘tracing ourselves back up till now,’ the potential for a critical re-evaluation emerges. The process can render provisional deeply entrenched, stubborn senses of gendered ‘I cannot’ (say, my sense of ‘I cannot’ let myself absorbedly and aimlessly walk the streets of a city I am visiting). In disrupting heretofore assumed lived impossibilities, this imagining self-collecting points toward the otherwise, the strange, the unexpected ‘anew.’ The finality this process interrupts is thus not solely the temporal finality of the expected understood as an ‘already settled affair.’ The finality beyond which the imagining self now points is the sham finality of seemingly necessary modal limits and boundaries I have thus far experienced as ‘given.’ There is a depth element to this endeavor: the interest of the imagining self may very well turn to what conditions these modal ranges themselves – namely, what conditions my sense of ‘I cannot’ as a gendered streetwalker (take, for instance, societal norms and expectations surrounding body image and behavior in public spaces). As such, I am now positioned to evaluate other gendered epistemic, normative, axiological, and praxiological commitments undergirding my senses of self and world. Imagining, especially thematic self-imagining, leaves traces in the concrete.
What I have sought to accomplish here through this example and a Husserlian approach is to shed light on the critical, reflective potential at the core of imagining experiences. The latter are not disinterested, detached, utopian or escapist, not even when they are playful and aimless in their own right. Imagining experiences are not normatively or axiologically neutral. They are the experiences of an imagining self, embedded in systems of power and knowledge messy and complex. Any reverie, daydreaming or reading experience can turn self- and world-critical. My reading of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway could do this. So could everyday encounters and experiences, such as bearing witness to another’s joy, courage or pain. Considering how deeply entrenched our socialized senses of ‘I cannot’ are, the transformative otherwise is surprisingly within our reach. And the imagination is uniquely positioned to bring it into relief.
References
Aldea, A. S. (2020). “Modality matters: Imagination as consciousness of possibilities and Husserl’s transcendental eidetics.” In Special Issue: Imagination in Phenomenology: Variations and Modalities, Husserl Studies 36(3), 303–318.
Aldea, A. S. (2022a). “Husserlian phenomenology as radical immanent critique – Or how phenomenology imagines itself.” In Why Method Matters: Phenomenology as Critique, Aldea, A.S., Carr, D. & Heinämaa, S. (Eds.), Routledge, 56-79.
Aldea, A. S. (2022b) The Normativity of Imagination: Its Critical Import, in Norms, Values, Goals, Heinämaa, S. and Hartimo, M. (Eds.), Routledge, 157-179.
Altobrando, A. et al. (Eds.) (2018): Realizations of the Self. Palgrave Macmillan.
Carr, D. (1974). Phenomenology and the problem of history: A study of husserl's transcendental philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Carr, D. (1986): Time, Narrative, History. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Cavallaro, M. (2017). “The phenomenon of ego-splitting in Husserl’s phenomenology of pure phantasy.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 48(2), 162–177.
De Santis, Daniele (2020): “‘Self-Variation’: A Problem of Method in Husserl’s Phenomenology.” In: Husserl Studies, 36, 255–269.
Dodd, J. 2016. “Deep History: reflections on the archive and the world.” Continental Philosophy Review 49, 29–39.
Elkin, L. (2016). Flâneuse. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Husserl, E. (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. David Carr (Trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Husserl, E. (1980). Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung 1898–1925. Eduard Marbach (ed.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Husserl, E. (2012). Zur Lehre vom Wesen und zur Methode der eidetischen Variation. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1891–1935). Dirk Fonfara (ed.). Dordrecht: Springer.
Husserl, E. (2019). First Philosophy Lectures 1923/24. Sebastian Luft & Thane Naberhaus (Trans.). Dordrecht: Springer.
Jansen, J. (2020). “Imagination in the Midst of Life: Reconsidering the Relation Between Ideal and Real Possibilities.” Husserl Studies, 36, 287-302.
Sartre, J-P. (2004). The Imaginary. New York: Routledge.