Abstract
This article proposes an analysis of a ritual glitch and resulting “misfire” from the standpoint of a phenomenologically informed anthropology of human interaction. Through articulating a synthesis of some of Husserl‘s insights on attention and affection with concepts and methods developed by anthropologists and other students of human interaction, a case is made for the importance of understanding the social organization of attention in ritual encounters. An analysis of a failed toast during President Obama’s 2011 State Visit to the United Kingdom is used to illustrate how attention is directed toward certain participants, actions, and objects – as opposed to others. Affect-loaded empathic reactions are explained by the protracted temporal unfolding of an action whose successful conclusion – or “repair” - is ostensively and publicly delayed.
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Notes
For the purposes of this article we will consider the toast as one single speech act, even though when a toast is as elaborate as the one performed by President Obama the verbal and non-verbal sequence of acts could be seen as a combination of a series of different types of speech acts, which are subsumed under the speech act “toast.” For an analysis of toasts in informal settings, see Solomon (1999).
In the rest of the article, following common usage in the popular press and taking advantage of the fact that there is one and only one “queen” that we write about here, we will refer to Queen Elizabeth II as “the Queen.” As for President Obama, we will alternate among a variety of referential expressions, including “The U.S. President,” “President Obama,” and “the President.” The use of the last name was felt appropriate and in some cases necessary given that Queen Elizabeth has interacted in her life with other eleven U.S. Presidents, including George W. Bush, whose toast to the Queen will be briefly discussed in this article.
As readers familiar with Heidegger’s writings will immediately see, we have incorporated several of Heidegger’s insights into the different ways in which human relate to equipment or, in Heidegger’s language, equipment reveals itself to human users, but we have taken the liberty to remix some of the features of his three-way distinction among conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy (Heidegger 1962, §16, and footnote 1 on p. 104) to fit our own goals, which include a concern for the degree of human agency in a world populated by both people and things and not as much interest in the implications of tool-use in the history of western metaphysics.
One of our reviewers insightfully noted that this form of attentional pull may indeed generatively contribute to debates in the literature over how best to conceptualize the role of emotions in the experience of empathy. As she or he noted, while many scholars (see Decety 2011, D’Vignemont and Jacob 2012, Snow 2000) wish to “restrict empathy to cases in which the target experiences some emotion,” many phenomenologists tend “not to restrict empathy in this way” (see Gallagher 2999, Zahavi 2010). Significantly, the perspective advanced in this article holds that the attentional pull of others’ emotions may importantly modulate our empathic engagement with them as differing aspects of their first-person perspective on the world are, in the process, made increasingly salient to us.
From our perspective, empathy must be understood as a process that is temporally arrayed, intersubjectively constituted, and culturally patterned. As a mode of reciprocal attunement, empathy necessarily arises within a fundamental asymmetry of perspectives. The persistence of intersubjective asymmetry is what in fact distinguishes empathic experiences from other forms of co-existence. As emphasized by Husserl (e.g., 1989: 177; see also Stein 1989: 10), for the empathizer, empathy is a primordial disclosing of non-primordial experience, that is, experiences lived through by another. Along these lines, Throop has argued elsewhere that “[i] t is never the first-person experiences as actually lived through by an empathizee that are ‘seen’ by an empathizer in an act of empathy. Nor is it their expressive acts qua acts that are. Instead, it is the disclosed experiences of the other ‘shining through’ (Husserl 2001b) such expressions that constitute an empathic experience of another” (Throop 2012a: 412; see also Zahavi 2010).
The video clip of the toast was shown to colleagues on two occasions, at a workshop at UCLA Center on Language, Interaction and Culture in February 2012 and at the Conference on Empathy organized by Dan Zahavi at the University of Copenhagen in October 2012.
Following common practice in the media, hereafter we will simply write “Camilla” to refer to Camilla Parker Bowles, Duchess of Cornwall.
In focusing on empathic assessments in such media reactions, we do not explicitly address the possible influence of race and racialization in the context of our analysis. For excellent linguistic anthropological discussions of media responses to Obama's Presidency that could help better illuminate the potential impact of racial bias in amplifying, and in part shaping, these characterizations of the mishap in the media (especially in the US), see Alim and Smitherman (2012) and Jackson (In Press).
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Throop, C.J., Duranti, A. Attention, ritual glitches, and attentional pull: the president and the queen. Phenom Cogn Sci 14, 1055–1082 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9397-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9397-4