Abstract
In this chapter, I layout the methodology of breakdown that Heidegger uses (but doesn’t clearly explain) in Being and Time. When something breaks down (e.g. a piece of equipment, a relationship, a person), you catch a glimpse of the reason for the failure—a condition or the conditions that ought to be met for one to experience something as what it is. A piece of equipment, for example, can fail in many ways—revealing the many conditions that must be met for one to experience equipment as equipment. I then show how Frantz Fanon’s work on the historico-racial schema implicitly deploys this methodology by utilizing his experience of corporeal malediction to revise Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body schema. Corporeal malediction describes experiencing an inhibited body schema due to racist myths and stereotypes. It is a breakdown that is essentially tied to social identity and represents a revision of an already existing phenomenological concept. Fanon’s own status as what Patricia Hill Collins calls an “outsider within” puts him in a position to compare his own insight with those that have issued from the dominant perspective in order to achieve a privileged insight into the phenomenological discipline itself and its flaws and lacunas.
Elements of this essay originally appeared in (Ward 2023).
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Although Fanon writes that he is skeptical of ontology, he objects only to a particular form of ontology. Fanon writes: “L’ontologie, quand on a admis une fois pour toutes qu’elle laisse de côté l’existence, ne nous permet pas de comprendre l’être du Noir” (Fanon 1971, 88). Ontology, when we have admitted once and for all that it leaves existence aside, does not allow us to understand the being of the Black. As Lewis Gordon explains: “The reader will note Fanon’s proviso, ‘when it is admitted once and for all that it leaves existence by the wayside.’ Here, we find the classic critique of system-centric ontology. Ontology is the philosophical study of being or, as W. V. O. Quine puts it, what there is. In opposition, there is existential ontology, which recognizes the being-there of the human being as a question to the questioner. This form of ontology takes seriously the meaning of what there is and what there is not” (Gordon 1999, 49).
- 3.
Alia Al-Saji has written about Fanon’s methodology as well, arguing that “Fanon’s phenomenology should be read as an alternative to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s primacy of perception, and not as an extension or continuation of it” (Al-Saji 2020, 212). Her reason for seeing these as contrasting rather than complementary views is to avoid a temptation to see the phenomenology of racialization as a “phenomenology of (visual) perception or the visible” (Merleau-Ponty), which may threaten “specularization—the tendency to take phenomenology to be equivalent to making experience visible” that can threaten to parse the experiences of racialized subjects “into phenomena available to a racializing and surveilling gaze” (Al-Saji 2020, 207). Rather, she argues that we ought to read Fanon as doing a “phenomenology of affect.” I read Fanon not as providing an extension of Merleau-Ponty’s visual phenomenology, but as offering a revision of his views on embodiment.
- 4.
This view of interpretation will also be important for understanding the methodologies founded on sign and the work of art.
- 5.
When initially learning to use a tool, of course, this isn’t true. Tool use must be learned. However, in these cases, the piece of equipment has not quite entered one’s “vocabulary” of comportment—your task is not an aim beyond the tool, the aim is (at least in part) mastery of the tool. This is a case in which the tool isn’t being experienced as functioning equipment but as un-ready-to-hand.
- 6.
This changes, as we’ll see, if I have trouble finding anything to write with—this counts as a kind of breakdown that Heidegger calls obtrusiveness (Heidegger 2008, 103).
- 7.
When it comes to equipment, Heidegger calls this practical intelligence circumspection [Umsicht]; in the social world, it is considerateness [Rücksicht].
- 8.
The full text here also reiterates why merely “looking” at properties of equipment will never reveal equipmentality:
Our fore-sight is aimed at something present-at-hand in what is ready-to-hand. Both by and for this way of looking at it [Hin-sicht], the ready-to-hand becomes veiled as ready-to-hand. Within this discovering of presence-at-hand, which is at the same time a covering-up of readiness-to-hand, something present-at-hand which we encounter is given a definite character in its Being-present at-hand-in-such-and-such-a-manner. Only now are we given any access to properties or the like. (Heidegger, 2008, 200)
- 9.
See Ward (2021).
- 10.
See Ward (2022) for a full account of this.
- 11.
This, of course, is not true for everyone. People with disabilities, for example, often face obstacles that require they think explicitly about how to move their bodies to navigate around obstacles or through environments that are not designed for them. It is beyond the scope of the paper to argue for this, but I think these experiences should be thought of as breakdown experiences that (like Fanon’s corporeal malediction) that can potentially develop into a privileged phenomenological standpoint on perception and embodiment. I argue for this point in (Ward 2022).
- 12.
Merleau-Ponty purposely uses the phrase “le schéma corporel” (body schema) rather than “l’image du corps” (body image) (Landes 2013, xlix; Merleau-Ponty 1945). Even though these phrases are often elided in the relevant literature (see for example (Fisher 1972; Schilder 1935)), Merleau-Ponty explicitly rejects viewing the body schema as an image or representation (Merleau-Ponty 2013, 82ff., 97ff.). Some philosophers who draw on Merleau-Ponty neglect this important distinction, but as Shaun Gallagher painstakingly points out, to do so distorts the view and covers over some of the most innovative aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s work on embodiment (Gallagher 1986).
- 13.
Fanon does not specifically address the ways in which the white gaze can be invoked to trigger corporeal malediction. However, he is clear that many forms of corporeal malediction simply do not arise for a Martiniquais who never leaves the island, even if they are aware of the stereotypes to which they are subject. It is only when one sets foot in France, for example, that the threat is provoked. “[T]here is a stereotype of him that will fasten on to him at the pier in Le Havre or Marseille” (Fanon 2008, 10).
- 14.
Some read the body schema as a third-person consciousness and argue that racialization turns that third-person consciousness into a consciousness of the body “en triple personne.” I don’t think this is right, but it is a subtle interpretive point. In the chapter, “The Lived Experience of Blackness,” Fanon writes, “Dans le monde blanc, l’homme de couleur rencontre des difficultés dans l’élaboration de son schéma corporel. La connaissance du corps est une activité́ uniquement négatrice; C’est une connaissance en troisième personne” (Fanon 1971, 89). Fanon begins this paragraph by pointing out that “In the white world, the man of color has difficulty elaborating his body schema.” He then shifts to explaining why this is: “Knowledge of the body [here I take him to mean explicit knowledge of the body] is a uniquely negating activity; It’s third-person knowledge.” He continues by contrasting this third-person explicit knowledge with what ought to happen in the construction of a body schema. “Tout autour du corps règne une atmosphère d’incertitude certaine. Je sais que si je veux fumer, il me faudra étendre le bras droit et saisir le paquet de cigarettes qui se trouve à l’autre bout de la table. Les allumettes, elles, sont dans le tiroir de gauche, il faudra que je me recule légèrement. Et tous ces gestes, je les fais non par habitude, mais par une connaissance implicite. Lente construction de mon moi en tant que corps au sein d’un monde spatial et temporel, tel semble être le schéma. Il ne s’impose pas à moi, c’est plutôt une structuration définitive du moi et du monde —définitive, car il s’installe entre mon corps et le monde une dialectique effective” (Fanon 1971, 89). “All around the body reigns an atmosphere of certain uncertainty.” He gives an example: “I know that if I want to smoke, I’ll have to reach out my right arm and grab the pack of cigarettes at the other end of the table. The matches, they are in the left drawer; I’ll have to step back slightly.” Finally he brings these together to explain how the structuring of the body schema comes together not with explicit but implicit knowledge: “And all these gestures, I do them not by habit, but by an implicit knowledge. Slow construction of my self as a body within a spatial and temporal world, such seems to be the pattern. It does not impose itself on me, it is rather a definitive structuring of the self and the world—definitive, because an effective dialectic is established between my body and the world” (Fanon 1971, 89, my translation).
- 15.
In the original French: “Garrrçon! un vè de biè” (Fanon 1971, 16).
- 16.
- 17.
See Weiss (1999, 1ff.) for a clear development of this point.
- 18.
Iris Marion Young’s work on feminine comportment is, like de Beauvoir’s work before her, a project that uses the insights from phenomenology to understand women’s oppression as it relates to embodiment. This revision of the body schema, however, would be the shared condition of experience that explains the phenomena Young discusses (Young 1990).
- 19.
Sara Ahmed provides an anecdote that clearly illustrates this point (Ahmed 2006), and I discuss her work in detail in the next chapter on signs.
- 20.
Linda Alcoff provides the example of Jack Kerouac experiencing corporeal malediction as a result of his white identity (Alcoff 2006, 186).
- 21.
Recall from the chapter, “Standpoint Epistemology/Standpoint Phenomenology,” Ngo’s analysis of the dominant defense of unintended racism (“I didn’t mean to offend”) that emphasizes the inner life of the perpetrator while ignoring the harm done to the recipient of such behavior.
- 22.
An important part of this view is that it isn’t just about the subjective or felt weight of the past, “these are not isolated pasts tracing different lives or cultures in parallel” (Al-Saji 2018, 345).
- 23.
She writes this explicitly in the piece: “My experience of navigating travel as an Iraqi-Canadian gives rise to a critical phenomenological reflection on the affective weight of colonial pasts” (Al-Saji 2018, 331).
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Ward, K. (2024). The Methodology of Breakdown as a Standpoint Approach. In: Standpoint Phenomenology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55456-8_5
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