Читать книгу Phenomenology of Productive Imagination: Embodiment, Language, Subjectivity - Saulius Geniusas - Страница 12

What is productive phantasy? Since phantasy has been commonly addressed in the history of philosophy as a reproductive mode of consciousness, let us begin by saying that productive phantasy, if there is such a phantasy at all, must be a relative term whose meaning derives from its opposition to reproductive phantasy. But if this is so, then we must first ask: what does it mean to qualify phantasy as a reproductive mode of consciousness?

In the opening paragraphs of Sartre’s The Imaginary (Sartre 2004), which we will return to in later chapters of this study, we come across a good example of one rather natural way to understand the reproductive nature of phantasy. While writing his book on imagination in Paris, Sartre finds himself imagining his friend Peter walking through the streets of Berlin. Of course, when Sartre and Peter were physically present in the same city, Sartre could see Peter directly in the flesh and blood. However, once Peter leaves Paris and Sartre is merely imagining his friend, he can then only “see” Peter, that is, he can only intend his irreal presence. Commenting on Sartre’s analysis, and his choice of this paradigmatic example, Ricœur remarks that when it comes to imagining, I relate to an image that is “more or less a picture of something that already existed” (Ricœur unpublished, 15:1). This suggests that imagination is reproductive in the sense that it, as a form of intentionality, intends copies, or replicas, of objects, which were previously given in actual experience.6 As we will soon see, such a conception of reproductive phantasy, its widespread acceptance notwithstanding, is not only questionable, but also unjustifiable.

Few other philosophers have been as attentive to the reproductive nature of imagination as Husserl has, and few of others have been as sensitive to the equivocations that accompany the concept of reproduction (see, for instance, Husserl 2005, 692).7 The collection of his manuscripts on phantasy, memory and image consciousness housed in Hua XXIII testify to the long path Husserl took to the realization that phantasy is an essentially reproductive mode of consciousness. At the beginning of this path, we come across Husserl’s attempts to demonstrate that the structure of phantasy consciousness is in principle no different from the structure of image consciousness, that is, from the kind of consciousness that intends its object indirectly, as it is represented in pictures or portraits. In his early analysis, Husserl defends the view that just as image consciousness presupposes a split between image object and image subject, so phantasy consciousness, too, presupposes an analogous split: in both cases, we “see” something in something else. Yet, already in the second half of his 1904-1905 lectures on phantasy and image consciousness, Husserl rejects this view as lacking phenomenological justification: phantasy, he argues, is like perception in that it is a mode of consciousness that grasps its object straightforwardly, without the mediation of any kind of picture or image.8 Here, it is not my goal to describe the details of the early Husserl’s “picture theory.” In the present context, I only wish to stress that it is Husserl’s rejection of this theory that led to the realization that phantasy is a reproductive consciousness. With the aim of clarifying the sense in which phantasy could be said to be essentially reproductive, let us turn to a manuscript that Husserl wrote either in 1911 or 1912 and that was published as Text Nr. XIV in Hua XXIII.9 Arguably, no other text from Husserl provides as detailed a study of reproduction as this manuscript, whose central goal is to fix the strict concept of reproduction.

Just as he does in many of his other manuscripts on time and imagination, Husserl begins his analysis at the limits of language—in this case, by focusing on the act for which “we do not have the right word” (Husserl 2005, 363). Husserl qualifies such an act as “the act of mere apparency” (“der bloss apparenziale Akt”) and “the act of appearing” (“der Akt des Erscheinens”). These expressions refer to a merely perceptual act, yet taken in isolation from any positing act of meaning. In other words, they are acts of consciousness conceived in the absence of what Husserl calls the apperceptive layer of sense: they are simple, bare perceptions, which Husserl qualifies as “schlichte Wahrnehmung” and “blosse Perzeption” (see Hua XXIII 301/ Husserl 2005, 363). They refer to mere perceptions, which entail a certain content of experience, although not yet apperceived in any determinate way. Consider what happens when, after a long and sleepless trip to another continent, you wake up in the middle of the night in a pitch-dark hotel room. As your hand is searching for the light switch, it touches various objects on the bedside table. However, under the circumstances, you do not recognize these tactually given objects for what they are. All you have are mere appearances given in what Husserl in this manuscript calls “the act of mere apparency.” These acts, Husserl contends, are more original than the acts of meaning, which Husserl views to be the act of mere apparency insofar as it functions as “the substrate on which the specifically theoretical act, the theoretical act of meaning, is founded” (Husserl 2005, 363). Relying on the “apprehension—content of apprehension” schema, which plays a fundamental role in Husserl’s early account of intentionality and constitution, Text No. 14 presents the view that the constitution of full-fledged objects of experience is made possible by founding the acts of meaning upon the act of mere apparency. In other words, acts of mere apparency are independent and yet also insufficient, while acts of meaning are dependent and yet also indispensable for the constitution of full-fledged objectivities.10

In the manuscripts under consideration, Husserl employs such unusual concepts as “the act of mere apparency” with the aim of analyzing its re-presentational modifications (Vergegenwärtigungsmodifikationen). Moving within the sphere of actuality, Husserl suggests that “memory in the widest sense” is the re-presentational modification of the simple perceptual appearing.11 By extension, once we move from the sphere of actuality to that of inactuality, phantasy can be qualified as the re-presentational modification of such simple perceptual appearing.

“The question to be asked first here is: What does re-presentational modification mean?” (Husserl 2005, 367) We face here an ambiguous concept, first and foremost because the modification can be understood in both a noetic and noematic way. It is by clearing up this ambiguity that Husserl introduces the concept of reproduction. “Normally we say re-presentation with respect to something objective” (Husserl 2005, 367). Let us retain such a noematic conception of representation and let us supplement it with noetically conceived reproduction. Thus, in the case of a recollection of a perception, we should say that we represent what was previously perceived and that we reproduce the act of perceiving. In the case of phantasmatic perception (“seeing as if”), we can further say that we represent the perceptual objects intended phantasmatically while we reproduce the perceptual acts. In short, acts are reproduced while objects intended in these acts are represented. This means that phantasy consciousness is essentially reproductive, not because it reproduces perceptual objects, but because it reproduces perceptual consciousness. It thereby becomes understandable why in the section of the manuscript entitled “Definition of a Strict Concept of Reproduction,” Husserl argues against the view that reproduction is a new production of the same objects that were once already given in experience, yet that now reappear as their pale echoes or afterimages. On the one hand, the representation of objects intended in experience should not be called a reproduction. On the other hand, “we still need a separate term for the separate re-presentation of internal consciousness, and this re-presentation may be called reproduction” (ibid).

Such a sharp distinction between reproduction and representation suggests that we draw a no less, sharp distinction between phantasy modification, on the one hand, and empty presentations, on the other hand.12 We all know that a full-fledged perceptual act is not reducible to the act of mere apparency. When we turn to the front of a perceptual object, a determinate appearance awakens a series of non-given appearances that belong to the object’s unseen sides. The question to be asked is whether or not these unseen sides are given through an act of phantasy. Husserl rejects such a view. Consciousness of the rear aspects belongs to perception, taken in its unity with the act of meaning that is founded upon it. To use Husserl’s own neologisms, when I prehend a profile of the object, it is given to me within the horizon of apprehension: I intend the appearing object through a direct act of apparency and I also emptily co-intend the object’s non-given sides through the acts of “co-meaning.” Such founding of empty intentions upon the intuitive act of apparency is of fundamental importance, since, in its absence, consciousness would not be a consciousness of objects, conceived as noematic correlates of diverse intentional acts. In the present context, it must be stressed that while the consciousness of empty intentions is founded upon the intuitive consciousness of apparency, phantasy consciousness is, for Husserl, a reproductive modification of an original act of mere apparency, a reproduction which is essentially noetic, not noematic. Therefore, while the consciousness of empty intentions exists only as a companion of the “acts of mere apparency,” phantasy consciousness cannot accompany, but can only modify perceptual consciousness, so much so that, as Rudolf Bernet has convincingly argued, perception and phantasy cannot exist contemporaneously: “phantasy ‘represses’ or ‘covers’ (verdeckt) perception, and the perception of the real world reacts allergically to every uncontrolled mixing with phantasy” (Bernet 2003, 213).13

Yet even such a noetic/noematic clarification of the concept of “re-presentational modification” does not clear up all of the ambiguity. In Appendix XXXV, Husserl distinguishes between three different senses of reproduction. By reproduction, one can either mean a reproduction of an object of experience (der intentionale Gegenstand des Erlebnisses), for example, a clearly or vaguely remembered object that had been previously given in original experience; or one can mean a reproduction of experience (das Erlebnis), for instance, a clear or vague memory of an actual experience; or one can mean a reproduction of an act of experiencing (das Erleben), such as a reproduction of an act of seeing, hearing, touching, thinking, loving, hating etc., taken in isolation from the concrete flow of experience and from the object of experience, to which it was previously intentionally related. This threefold distinction allows us to conceptualize the difference between memory and mere phantasy as two different forms of reproductive modification. “Memory is a reproductive modification of perception, but it has the remarkable peculiarity that it is also re-presentation of perception and not simply re-presentation of what was perceived” (Husserl 2005, 367). This means that memory is a reproductive form of consciousness in all three senses here distinguished. By contrast, mere phantasy can be (although, admittedly, it need not be) a reproductive form of consciousness only in the third sense: phantasy, in contrast to memory, can reproduce a certain kind of perceptual act (for example, the act of seeing, or the act of hearing) without simultaneously replicating the former act of experience or intending the object as it was given in past experience. In this regard, one can only concur with Bernet’s observation that “phantasy as intuitive, reproductive presentification is best compared with a neutralized remembering which would not be related to a past perception of an object but to one that is both present and absent” (Bernet 2003, 208). As Bernet further notes, this renders phantasy a productive form of reproduction: phantasy is “a reproductive consciousness of presentation, that is to say, a reproductive modification that produces the modified in such a way that it modifies it” (Bernet 2003, 208).

Thus, if I phantasize that I “see” Pandora opening her box, I thereby reproduce an act of seeing, although without reproducing a former experience or a formerly given object of experience: I see her, yet it is only as if I see her. If I phantasize that I hear the sound of Pandora opening the box and hear the sound of the evils flying out of it, I thereby reproduce the act of hearing, although without reproducing a former experience or a formerly given object of experience: it is only as if I hear it. Despite all its powers, phantasy lacks the capacity to give us the objects of phantasy in flesh and blood. Whenever I phantasize, I can see, hear, touch, think, remember, anticipate, love or hate an object, yet this is always only as if. Precisely because this as if is irreducible, phantasy is a reproductive mode of consciousness.

Husserl is fully justified to characterize phantasy as a reproductive mode of consciousness in the above-mentioned sense. It is hard to see how phantasy could produce an original (that is, unmodified) relation to the world at large in the sense of forming originally intuitive acts, such as seeing or hearing.14 I contend that those critics who accuse Husserl of being blind to the productive powers of imagination (for example, see Castoriadis 1997, Drost 1990, Ricœur 1975, Sallis 1992) misunderstand the precise nature of Husserl’s qualification of phantasy as an essentially reproductive mode of consciousness. Imagination is reproductive not because it can only intend copies, or replicas, of something that already exists, not because, supposedly, “there was always somewhere an original for the picture” (Ricœur unpublished, 15:1). Rather, phantasy is essentially reproductive because the acts of phantasy can only be reproductive acts.

As a response to the skeptic who worries that Husserl’s conception of reproductive phantasy conceals phantasy’s productive characteristics, I would suggest that precisely because phantasy can be said to be reproductive in many ways, Husserlian phenomenology leaves open the possibility for diverse determinations of phantasy’s productive capacities. Phantasy cannot be productive in the sense that it cannot produce an unmodified relation to the world at large: whenever I phantasize, I can see as if, hear as if, or think as if, and this as if is irreducible. The consequence here is that phantasy is essentially reproductive in the noetic sense; however, this noetic sense does not exclude the possibility that phantasy might be productive noematically. Before uncovering in more detail the different noematic senses in which phantasy can be said to be productive, let us now address some of the doubts that arise from what could be viewed as an excessively generous interpretation. The time is ripe to address the question of whether it is really true that the Husserlian phenomenology of phantasy so easily lends itself to be transformed into a phenomenology of productive phantasy?