Notes on Phenomenology

Seeds of phenomenology were laid in the 18^th century

Typically knowledge production is based on a Cartesian model, i.e. understanding world is made up of signs and symbols – the world in a semiological space – that which constructs meaning. (that the world is only constructed through the meanings we associate along with any definite order it might have/not have)

However, our understanding of the world is much more nuanced in the way we make associations even before the semiological apparatus comes into play. These associations are rendered through a very innate sense, through our cultural fragments.

The true meaning of the outside world (whole) are only descriptions by our emotional senses. This would be suggested by the Cartesian construct/apparatus. It assumes that the world outside our mind as a definite meaning, which we interpret imperfectly!

Phenomenology on the other hand says that meaning comes only with existence when the mind encounters the world. Thus, there is no meaning out there – it gets produced only through the intersection and interaction between the mind and the world.

Immanuel Kant made a distinction between the noumenal world of things in themselves and the phenomenal world of reality as experienced through our senses. (in philosophy, noumenon is a posited object or event that exists independently of human sense and/or perception.)

This was picked up by Hegel

Then developed by German philosopher Edmund Husserl – he was trying to develop an objective study of the subjective study and use systematic reflection to determine the essence of consciousness.

Understood as the careful description of experiences in which they are experienced by the subject to study, in Husserl’s words the whole of our ‘life of consciousness;

Although, Phenomenology was really shaped by Martin Heidegger in his Being and Time

And eventually that became the foundation of Sartre’s existential philosophy and that of Merleau Ponty

 

School of Phenomenology is dedicated to understanding consciousness in its raw form. It is an experientialist philosophy rather than a rationalist philosophy (rationalist meaning related to scientific  understanding of things).

Analysis of structure of self-experience

Husserl talks about ‘natural attitude’ – that the word is out there, relative to our experience, that it is just a belief

 

He asks what is the structure of consciousness? Proposes a theory called INTENTIONALITY – ‘aboutness’

Articulates that consciousness cannot be an isolated thing. It is always ‘about’ something. Intentionality is the interaction between the CONTENT of consciousness and the STRUCTURES of consciousness. (Structures of consciousness include perception, memory, protention, retention, signification, amongst many others.)

 

How is phenomenology mobilized> What is the methodology?

·        Bracketing: Remove all judgements, reduce all phenomena to its rawest experience

·        Eidetic reduction: Goal being to find the essence of the phenomenon. Separation of the necessary part of the phenomenon from its contingent part in order to truly understand the essence. For Husserl, the essence is the universal scientific truth.
This is what shaped the idea of Transcendental Phenomenology.

 

Heidegger was more interested in ontology, rather than universal essential structure.

He talks about Dassein – or the Being – a situated consciousness. This affects our absorption or interpretation of the world around us.

He believed that experiences cannot be separated from the context in which they arise. He proposed that phenomenology is not a science, but it is about understanding the being itself.

This is what is the foundation of Existential Phenomenology.

Orijit Sen: Mapping Mapusa

Jitish Kallat: Circadian Studies

published in Art India Jan. 2021

Cast in Shadows
see works here


Jitish Kallat’s new show maps the transformation of bodies in relation to cosmic elements and cosmological rhythms as opposed to the industrial clock-time, reveals Anuj Daga.

 

In his most recent works exhibited at Nature Morte’s virtual viewing room from the 11th of August to the 31st of December 2020, Jitish Kallat continues his long-standing artistic preoccupation of exploring the meaning of time and its effect on the transformation of bodies. Kallat’s attention was held by the shadow constellations of twigs that had fallen in his studio, the changing outlines of which are woven into the rhythms of a new biological universe. Circadian Studies draws several associations together making us dwell upon the cycles of experience and existence and rethink the modes of corporeal and cosmological inhabitation.

The close observation of shifting shadows has been a civilization preoccupation. In the 16th century Europe, Galileo made accurate renderings of shadows he observed on the surface of the moon through his telescope to postulate the centrality of the sun within the solar system. Around the same time in the middle east, sundials were embedded within the architectures of several mosques so that the prayers for the divinity could be attuned to the cosmic alignments. Such obsessions (for finding higher meaning in aligning to the cosmic order) have only left us with fantastic instruments like the astrolabes that inscribe us in the geometry of a proximate galaxy, and at the same time monumental observatories that reflect astronomical cartographies of the visible sky on earth. In India, the time-devices of Jantar Mantar fantastically designed to counter the delineation of shadows bring to us the most subtle yet phenomenal sensation – those that confirm the sublime duality of the fact that the planet that holds us all still, is indeed moving.

Yet, what could be the value of mapping shadows today? At the foremost, Kallat’s invocation of the “circadian” inverts the uninterrogated reliance of the present-day body on the 24-hour time format that was imposed firmly upon humanity historically merely about two centuries ago. It is well understood that the strict scale of 24 hours was invented to manage efficiently the shifts of the working class in the industrial age, a social phenomenon that eventually articulated the notion of the ‘productive’ body and further situated life within the division of labour and leisure. The smudging of day and night, or shall we say the sun and its shadow within the emerging industrial society produced the phenomenon of the modern city and urban life. The biological reclamation of the industrial time in Kallat’s experiment provokes rethinking of the universalising hegemonies of capitalistic society that removed time from the body altogether. Through this realization, the body is liberated to find its own rhythm of being. The anthropocentric gaze is at once redirected to the natural clocks of numerous other life forms that allow us a revised appreciation of our routinized everyday.

The attempt to trace the twig in its shadow (rather than photograph it) may seem rather futile, for the differential passage of the shadow even while the artist draws its outline on paper inevitably distorts the already flattened body of its counterpart. What then, does the study constitute? Shifting gears from the scientific to the artistic, Kallat’s endeavour doesn’t seem to be about mapping the escape of time, rather the transformation of the body. The red and green lines bleed into each other indicating the phototropic dependence of all forms of terrestrial life on the one hand, and the animal-plant reciprocity on the other. The final result is thus a temporal adventure, a compulsive crafting of time into the shadow cast of the body as seen perhaps in the eyes of nature. In its diagrammatic universe, the grafting of the intersecting circles within the representational outline of the deceased plant indicates its impregnation with the seed on one hand and eventual bearing of the flower/fruit on the other. Not only does this intervention confound the fact that biological clocks are found in every tissue of all living organisms, but in doing so, the artist also collapses several spatio-temporal dualities together – the past and the future, the day and the night, the outside and the inside, the terrestrial and the extra-terrestrial. It further poses simultaneous couplings within which life necessarily unfolds: moving and the static, material and immaterial, visible and invisible.

The notion of leakage of time has been further amplified in his untitled works where an hour glass shears itself within the space of an aging graph paper, seemingly struggling to release itself from the web of order. In disrespecting the pre-existent ruled grid of the paper, the drawn forms announce their desire of release and emancipation. In these drawings, time re-germinates into new amorphous shapes that could be read as the distant geography of the black hole or the close anatomy of a bumblebee. In one of these, the grid sheet suggestively peels itself in the centre to unfurl the viewer into new rainbow shades of time. Here, the motifs of the plant or animal cross sections showing rings and reins of age collide into the unity of an expanding universe. The artist thus suspends us in an overlapping spectrum of temporal scales within which life could possibly unfold.

Kallat’s drawings bring us to consider the five elements of sun, wind, water, earth and sky together. However, engaging with these works virtually under the condition of our pandemic-ridden home-boundedness is a timely interrogation of our naturalised relationship with heliocentricism. If indeed circadian cycles are related to our physical, mental, and behavioural changes with respect to its response to light, how do we make sense of our present selves being suspended in the non-space of internet that simulates us in a fundamentally different photo-reality? In our imposed interiorities (often bereft of sufficient exposure to natural light) then, circadian studies bear critical place, bringing us to the cusp of an urgent existential meditation.



Captions

Jitish Kallat. Circadian Studies. Graphite and aquarelle pencil, stained gesso, organic gum. 49cms x 60cms x 4cms. 2020. Images courtesy the gallery.

Jitish Kallat. Untitled. Find the medium. 76 cms x 97 cms x 6cms. 2020.

Curatorial Actions and Outcomes

 

Sourced from:

Jansson, Johan. “The Online Forum as a Digital Space of Curation.” Geoforum 106 (November 1, 2019): 115–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.08.008.

The Art of Tantra by Philip Rawson

notes

According the the Brahmin systems, when we manage to stay permanently in this state of attention, with our entire mind stilled and absorbed in the Ultimate, we may achieve Release. Our nature may cease to be human, so that we are converted into an all embracing Consciousness which is at once Being and Bliss.

pg 7-8 

51 Personae

On Glamour

a transcribed excerpt of conversation between Gautam Bhan and Paromita Vohra from Urban Lens Film Festival 2016. Access full conversation here.



Gautam Bhan: You know Paro[mita] one thing I wanted to ask you about is that - what, you said earlier in the point was to emphasize also the point about glamour, right, because I think it's really so important…because somewhere what we're also struggling with: see we from feminism we inherit these two traits of women and minority identity communities right which is the caution that shame, honor, tradition are born on the backs of women, right? and you have the narrative of partition and sexual violence and this constant notion that women are made repositories of moral culture, because of the power of patriarchy in our societies. But here is this other, and I think this is so part of your larger presence in the world with ‘agents of ishq’, with the column on love in the newspaper which is to say that you know, here is an identity associated with the community a minority religious community that in many places could have been a cause of anxiety. but it's actually a marker for pleasure, is a marker for desire. And it's not glamour in the way that women are just objects of male gaze but also ones that are self-fashioning their presence in the cities. So can you talk a little bit more about that notion of pleasure, desire, young people and agents of ishq…

Paromita Vohra: So I think glamour is the most… a very political kind of thing because glamour is a way of saying, “I'm here!” Right, it's like [saying], “You can't decide what I am, I'm going to decide what I am!” at some level. So I do think that - like I like certain kinds of people; people who will be playing in my films are always of a certain kind and I use the word “glamorous” at the shorthand, for what they are, because they all have a way of speaking, a turn of phrase, a way of presenting themselves - which I find very attractive, because they just do not fall into any binaries, right, not political binaries not binaries of gender or social identity or whatever; but they fashion that identity themselves. I don't think that those are the people who actually change the world in some way slowly… Because they give us a suggestion of how we can be; as easily as looking at somebody's clothes and saying - ‘hey, I like how she dresses, I am also going to do that.’ That kind of infecting the world through what you're doing, I think that's a very political thing, and that how politics actually seeds the world every day.

GB: ...and it’s so distinct from glamour as the possession of brand or consumption

PV: Yeah, so the thing is that post Rekha or maybe Madhuri Dixit, glamour has gotten converted into something that is easily consumable. But it actually is not because what glamour means is ‘I know that I am a story, but only I know what that story is. I'm not going to tell you.’ Right? So that control over your own narrative [is different from the one] which people like Rekha and others, who have mystique… Mystique is just really about saying, ‘I'm controlling the narrative.’ Whether you're really controlling it or not is the whole other discussion, but communicating that in all kinds of nonverbal ways is what I think [it’s about] and that's why I think you find it in certain kinds of spaces - like bar dancers, like movie stars of course, and I find it very intriguing how the figure of the Catholic woman actually just by being almost like a lace edging in a film had transmitted all that glamour right? Because all the women the you’re seeing in this film they are just like they are the backup dancers. They are not the people who in the front of the film but they are what actually gave films their glamour in an earlier time. And that glamour has gotten kind of subsumed under a mainstream identity, and we struggle right now to find a new place for that glamour.

On Aesthetics and Criticism

 

Notes from a lecture by Chaitanya Karnik
Academy of Architecture, 2012

On Loneliness, Belonging and Home

a whatsapp conversation

Me: Have your feeling towards India deepened or loosened over the last 15 years? I am generally asking, to myself, why does it happen? This push and pull...is it the question of identity, or identification?

He: I don't know, but I think some of it has loosened and some of it has deepened. I can't put my finger on it. I think I will forever be in this "I don't belong here" mode both in India and the US

Me: Yes, the question of belonging. Or the question of finding home...

He: For an immigrant, it's a different experience

Me: Yes. But I am speaking of home in a more conceptual, philosophical way. Orientations of this question may be from different places

He: Well, home is a fluid concept. Depending on what phase of life you are in.

Me: Elaborate?

He: Right now my home is wherever my wife and kids are, because I am living with them every day and making memories. Once the kids grow up, maybe "home" will be a different feeling. Growing up, home was where my parents/siblings were. I think home depends on the people who you are most closely connected to in a given phase of life.

Me: Is home always in relation to an 'other'?

He: I think so. We are social beings. If there were no people, would you ever feel lonely? Loneliness comes because you feel excluded from "people" around you

Me: Ah I never thought of it that way. Do you think animals feel lonely?

He: Loneliness can never occur without people. I don't think animals are lonely.

Me: You mean the concept of loneliness exist in human species only. It's a human concept?

He: I think so. Words are human concepts. So, if you use a word to describe anything it is a human concept. Maybe animals have a language. And they do also feel lonely. But it may not be similar to human loneliness. We tend to project our concepts/emotions to other beings. Because we are limited in our expression

Me: But words are placeholders for meaning...and meaning exists in all species no?

He: I don't know. If I were bacteria, is my meaning to just multiply? Meaning/purpose are all human concepts.

Me: And why not?

He: Evolution doesn't care about it

Me: True.

He: Evolution only cares about propagating the species

He: The world is only as complicated as we think it is. It's a projection of our mind/brain. We create our own "hallucination" of the world. The way we think it is

Me: True. That's what philosophical inquiry is all about

He: I'm becoming a believer of the thought that it's all about what stories we tell ourselves. Meditation really helps me observe my thoughts. And I am realizing that there is no "meaning/purpose/reason" of life other than to live it :) There is no deep mystery that needs to be solved. There is not much value in over analyzing. But that is me speaking today, ask me in 5 years and may be I'll give you a completely different answer😀

Me: 🙂

He: I haven't changed my behavior, nor have my thoughts changed, but meditation really helps with observing how your mind works :) The concept of "awareness", I feel is quite powerful. There is no mysticism in any of this…Just awareness...And it's very hard to be "aware", being in the moment, because your mind is thinking a billion things. Not that thinking is bad. But you need moments of clear awareness, however brief to cut through all of that thinking

Me: Hmm. It sounds difficult in the way you put it. Also elusive...

He: Hmm...you won't know until you try :)

Me: Hehehe. Yes. I know!

He: An analogy I liked is - imagine you are looking at the water, trying to find something deep within, whereas all you have to do is to change your plane of focus so that you can see your own reflection. Once that shift in perception happens, it seems very obvious. But until then, you will keep looking at the wrong plane of focus. It really is at the surface of your mind, not something deep within

Anyways enough of all this :)

New Year 2021