Aniela Helfrich

This article enacts a critical phenomenological approach to show how ideal-typical reasoning within the social sciences has contributed to forms of pseudo-objectivity that extend far beyond their disciplinary domain. Reflecting on Weber’s conception of the ideal type, the article demonstrates how its conceptual demarcation, its conceptual purity and thus its abstraction have contributed to the constitution of dichotomizing narratives. In this context, the term “migrant” proves well-suited: rooted in the Latin migrare, it already implies binary distinctions – “in” and “out,” “we” and “they,” “here” and “there.” From here, the non-migrant not only excludes the migrant; this logically contradictory relation also reveals that the migrant and non-migrant do not share a common ground. As a result, the migrant – through its seemingly well-defined and thus “isolated” nature – becomes a pseudo-ideal typical concept that gains epistemic authority and functions as a “technology of migranticization”. To challenge this epistemic power, the article turns to speechlessness as an experience that is inherently non-conceptual – indeed a non-binary, intelligible experience – as a phenomenon that exceeds conceptual articulation. Yet the article concludes that it is through the arts’ realization in materiality that speechlessness can become expressible and reveal what (pseudo-)ideal types and ideal-typical reasoning necessarily conceal: “real-reality”.