Mitchell Atkinson III

The phenomenological discipline must confront phenomena which seem to exist “beyond” consciousness. A variety of disciplines purport to render competing ac-counts of the world which do justice to the pre-philosophical understanding of objects or states of affairs which exist and yet to which no person seems to have experiential access. The discussion of hoping acts can lead to an intuitive understanding of the ways in which consciousness intends what is not given as present. For such an intuitive understanding to have philosophical clarity, a phenomenology of hope is required. The present paper uses Husserl’s later work to help us engage with the problem of hope in a philosophical and sociological sense. It contends that hoping acts are not merely future-directed but may be trans-temporal, that a hoping attitude takes a form of bracketing that puts judgments of probability and possibility out of play, and that hopeful bracketing is socioculturally mediated. It also uses a five-part methodology to bring pure phenomenological and sociological concerns into one overarching investi-gation. The question of hope is bound up with our experience of transcendent entities and states of the world, including especially those associated with religious experience and the capacity to imagine new forms of social life.

This chapter presents data gathered in the field through semi-structured interviews, as well as desk research related to Flint. I use the concepts from part one, in particular recoil, to present detailed sociological analyses of the lived surround of residents of Flint, focusing on the city’s north side (historically where African American residents lived). These maximal interpretations allow the text to explore self-understandings of Flint residents that take the form of a kind of self-recoiling, where the subject of study takes their “people” or their “city” as a typified object that is not expected to figure in certain futural expectations. I also explore various breaches of trust and corporal security experienced by Flint residents as a result of the crisis.In interviews with Flint residents, institutions—local, state, federal, and non-governmental—were generally distrusted. The exception was, broadly speaking, the church. I present a close reading of a Black Church service and discuss it using the phenomenological categories already developed as well as research from the literature associated with the Black religious experience.

At the end of the text, I take the entire discussion “back” into the epoche. I define a chain of power in light of the preceding investigation. I show that forms of alterization are constitutive of chains of power, and that the form of alterization characteristic of a chain partially determines the essence of the chain. Here, I also make contributions to a theorization of authorship recognition in our time as a form of visibility, and offer a preliminary discussion of implications.I begin to discuss ways forward, offering two problematic ways and one underdeveloped way. We can seek to enact new forms of alterity that emphasize hybridity and reject universalizing forms of domination and exclusion. We can radically disrupt social relations by “transcending” our humanity. We can also seek to understand and develop a phenomenology of resilience with its social implications, and see where that leads. This last is work that remains to be done.

In the Prolegomena, I present the major social-theoretic reference motivating the text, Isaac Ariail Reed’s rector-actor-other triad and how rector-actor dyads in complex series form what he calls chains of power. I discuss Reed's reliance on a discourse theory approach, and I suggest that his indebtedness to Foucault leaves him without a habitual, phenomenological grounding for the subject positions he uses in his work. Reed’s theoretical insights are far too useful to found on “thin” discursive methodology. There is also the much-discussed problem of accounting for the possibility of change in social life. Foucauldian episteme, in their “dispersion” seem not to be amenable to social developments, positive or negative.For Reed, the “others” in his social theory can come in three forms: enemies, scapegoats, and slaves. I posit a fourth type of other, the invisible. I also put forward a methodological approach for understanding others through habituation and typicality. I also introduce the concept recoil, developed for this text, which is a block on protention (“expectation” in the living present) related to typification. Perhaps the key social-phenomenological contribution of the text is that alterity as invisibility is founded on what I call recoil, which acts to inhibit expectations related to the types associated with marginalized populations.

In the chapter on intuition, I work with the Logical Investigations, Dieter Lohmar, Rudolph Bernet, Jakko Hintikka, and others. The investigation goes through the ways in which many different percepts contribute to the intuition of a present object. I observe the perhaps disquieting similarities between the intuition of real and imagined objects. I work through categorial intuition, and provide a schematic account. I do the same for universal objects and for ontological categories, or “orders.” Here, it is of the utmost importance that the reader observe that the entire section is placed under a heading indicating the limits of static methods. That is to say, the static approach here should clearly not be enough to animate the kind of social theory we’re trying to do.

Here, I present my method for doing phenomenological sociology. We begin with novel phenomenological investigations and develop our concepts. We move on to minimal interpretations that allow us to apply our concepts to empirical investigations. We leave the epoche and investigate an empirical case (we actually talk to people and interpret texts). We present the kind of maximal interpretations associated with strong social-theoretic knowledge production. Finally, we return to the epoche and do phenomenological work on the entire foregoing structure.In this chapter I also discuss the distinction between the lebenswelt and the lebensumwelt and its importance for sociological work, and I emphasize the importance of temporalization for working with the lebensumwelt in sociology. I introduce the term “lifecone” to mark the explicit temporalization of the lebensumwelt in social-theoretic work.

Here, I discuss in broader detail what I think phenomenologists do. I try to defend a relatively “classical” phenomenology that attempts to contemporize much of what Husserl wrote. I hold that transcendental methods, including the epoche, are key to phenomenological thinking, and that this approach has much to say for social thinkers today. I discuss the reductions, and I discuss eidetic variation as a method.In this chapter, I also discuss noesis, noema, and the hyle. This leads into a fuller discussion of ontology than in Chap. 2, and I discuss regional ontologies, referencing Ideas I. I take the concept of a region somewhat more broadly than many phenomenologists; the discussion here argues that games like chess are associated with forms of materiality that allow us to see them as regions from within the epoche. I think it’s worth thinking of regions and regional ontologies in this broad way because it helps us to shake off naturalistic assumptions when trying to understand forms of social life culturally distinct from ours. I also think it conforms more closely with the intent of the discussion in Ideas I.

It was clear, by the end of Chap. 2, that static methods would not be enough. Here, I introduce genetic phenomenology, and I develop the concept of recoil at greater length. I show that understanding temporalizing consciousness is key to understanding habit as motivated association. I reference Lanei Rodemeyer heavily here. I discuss how recoil works to block the protention of typically mediated aspects of typified objects, so that for an object of the type “woman,” we may not expect to find the aspect “doctor” associated; for an object of the type “Flint resident,” we may not expect to find the aspect “wealthy” associated, and so on. I clarify the relationship between recoil and affectivity, discuss empathy, and emphasize the distinction between recoil, repression and dissociation. Recoil is not a psychoanalytic concept.

Here, I build up a reading of the phenomenological concept of intentionality, using my own examples. The chapter aims to introduce a non-phenomenological reader to the concept of intentionality, while at the same time casting light on the problem of limiting our methodologies to the analysis of linguistic reference. It is shown that reference and intentionality are clearly different functions of consciousness. In the discussion of reference, I discuss Ruth Barcan Marcus’ work on intensional languages, as an example of the limitations of referential approaches.

I introduce the aim and character of the text. The book is focused on the Flint Water Crisis. The reader is given a brief overview of phenomenological method and its application to sociological work and social theory. The introduction to phenomenology here is structured with the completely uninitiated reader in mind. “Intuitive” glosses for the key phenomenological distinctions are set out in nontechnical language. I establish my position as a researcher who was born and spent my early years in Flint, Michigan.

This text develops a novel methodology for social investigation into the Flint (Michigan, USA) water crisis by using classical Husserlian phenomenology as its point of departure. To develop a proper method in a case like this, the author uses as primary data the experiences of the affected community. The text investigates philosophically how a water crisis happens as well as the structures of power responsible. This book grounds contemporary theories of power in a phenomenology of social experience. Key to that grounding is the careful elaboration of subject positions in power structures as partially constitutive of lifeworlds (lebensumwelten) for consciousness. The applied phenomenological tools unravel the central enigma of how a community’s concerns and the dictates of power can become so disastrously estranged. This text appeals to researchers and students working not just in phenomenology and philosophy but also to those working in the field of environmental humanities and on social justice issues.

Summary I outline an approach to the phenomenology of improvised music which takes typification and the development of multi‐ordered phenomenological structures as central. My approach here is firmly in line with classical Husserlian phenomenology, taking the discussion of types in Experience and Judgment (Husserl, 1973) and Brudzińska (2015) as guide. I provide a phenomenological analysis of musical types as they are found in improvisational contexts, focusing on jazz in the 20th century. Styles are higher‐order musical types. Musical types are structures that are temporally “thick,” relying on sedimented typification and knowledge, driving expectations as definitional. In most forms of music (including improvised music), musical styles involve maintaining a balance between confirming expectations and flouting expectations. I show that improvised music has a phenomenal structure which is enriched by the communicative and “ real‐time” nature of improvised music. Improvised music can be seen as an exploration of a possibility space rendered by the juxtaposition of the musical types afforded by a performance environment (instrumentation, harmonic and melodic traditions, etc.). I show that improvisation in music is a multi‐vectoral form of communication. The communication is founded in what Dieter Lohmar calls “non‐linguistic thinking.” The expression is constituted in the results of active and synthesis. The culmination of improvisational exploration of possibility spaces is the precisification and enrichment of styles‐as‐types, while in some cases developing new styles in the process.

In this paper, I argue that philosophers, while developing ontologies, can be classed as misers or profligates. I develop the categories of ontological miserliness and ontological profligacy and supply explanatory examples. I explore the theoretical motivation of both misers and profligates in terms of thought-time and inquiry scope. In brief, misers prioritize thought-time over inquiry scope; vice-versa for profligates. I examine the extent to which conservation of thought-time is an active concern for misers and provide a miserly taxonomy for ontologies; ontologies may be cheap, expensive or impossible. I argue that profligates countenance the generative character of the ontological enterprise at the expense of exclusion and limitation. The works of Willard Van Orman Quine and Ludwig Wittgenstein provide canonic examples of miserly and profligate ontologies. I argue that Quine is an ontological miser par excellence, and that Wittgenstein is profligate in his later period and evinces an intermediate position in his early period. Finally, I discuss the theoretical stakes involved in this entire discussion, provide brief contemporary examples, and explore the extent to which the distinction between miserliness and profligacy is illusory.

The question of the possibility of a phenomenological sociology is of the utmost importance today. In this paper, techniques in transcendental-genetic phenomenology are introduced as applicable to sociological work. I introduce the concept of recoil, a habit of thought which negatively determines protentions and expectations concerning types sedimented in far retention. Recoil is seen to be an important element in the theory of alterity in social life, including the understanding of alters as invisible. Finally, arguments in favor of the use of the epoché in sociological work is given, as the epoché allows us to engage with the experience of the subject of study without a latent invidious comparison to a naturalistic substructure.