Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Phenomenology and its problems with serinity and nostalgia - The story of lonely travels and frozen moments

What is special about travelling alone? Well of course, you enjoy freedom of choice, you are with your own pace and peace. It might just be the other name for narcissistic pleasure, just like the selfie mania which affects billions in different ways. I am not interested to explore the late capital pleasure seeking souls or its insatiable needs and requirements, rather I wish to see what happens with lone travels even when we barely move but explore in macros - the moments has gone, the moments yet to come.


The return of the repressed and frozen moments:

How do you find a frozen moment? It is usually there and touches you at the most unpredictable point of your life. Often you encounter something else - bigger and more holistic than the mere material appearance of your being-in-the-moment. It often extends as you keep thinking about the moment that is over - quite like the way you think of a moment of pleasure and pain that comes back just like the repressed returns. The past, and nostalgia haunts you - kills you. Kaleidoscope as an individual often allows such moments to come back and to make him overwhelmed. He discovers newer dimensions in the same old moments as his memories accumulate. The impact of such moments might differ for different persons. People's exposures, their age and location shape them - so do their frozen moments.

There are two kinds of such frozen moments:
1. The repressed or overwhelmed dimensions of moments in the past or an imagined future.  These frozen moments are there inside your brain waiting to overwhelm you.

2.  However, there are other moments that overwhelms you right during the creation of such moments in itself. Those represent precisely the moments when you are inside the fleeting pace of time and space. That moment is simultaneously frozen and moving on. It can haunt you, please you and touch you forever. One thing that will happen for sure is your clinging position between real-surreal boundaries forever.

Setting the clock somewhere in time:

Lets assume two persons who couldn't finally went on spending their life together by sharing the same balcony, having coffee in the same table or reading the same book together, met once again. They know they have two different pathways which can perhaps never meet. May be, they aren't even interested to share the same balcony any more. Lets assume, they met and had some time to spend together. Several possibilities are there, some of them are beautifully worked in movies like Before the Sunset or CafĂ© Society! The one thing that happens for sure is the setting the clock in somewhere back in time and space. Its like doing or reliving the essential dimensions of the relationship. This can happen in nostalgia to a person, to a place, to a moment and in any combination or level between these three. Such clock setting happens every time you tend to think. With frozen moments you can actually rewind and replay as Kaleidoscope does quite often. He goes the point where he dropped her lover, left the river, smelled and made love and listened to the stories of fallen lives of the forest library. Some are captured in the camera as Kaleidoscope roamed around the world alone and explored world more serene, a lot more moments, however, are actually lost in time, or did they? The precise point in the mundane history has not been jotted down, after several years the time would be more holistic and engulfing but those clock setting moments are there forever to relive.

Your everyday phenomenology:


How do frozen moments and their potential relivability become accessible to the mode of observe - construct - contend on which the social scientists have faith for centuries? Understandably, of course, it should be done through a combination of Husserlian being-in-world and being-in-itself/being-for-itself simultaneously with Sartre's being-for-others. The person looking for the frozen moments must travel through these three stages to find out essence of the experience - essence of the phenomena. The first order construct of mundane everydayness in Husserlian natural attitude needs to be accessible to the thinking souls so that these can be questioned, dealt with and brought down to their immediate experiences and exposures. The first order constructs are the moments when you are experiencing it at your immediate being-in-itself. A slight analytical distance would land you to being-for-itself. As you live on like Kaleidoscope, you relive the moment once in a while and you tend to create the second order constructs and like that of a phenomenology inspired researcher you can (if you try) find your being-in-the-world - the subject-object, subject-subject, object-object interplays. Here, lies the typical phenomenological descriptions that supersedes interpretation or explanations to give rise to third or fourth or perhaps 'n' number of dimensions and constructs. One can actually follow a standard qualitative methodology to describe and find out schema of human experience rooted in the phenomena of being-in-the-world.

However, the problem persists as long as one is overwhelmed and engulfed by the moment in itself as he tends to live on - typically the second categories of frozen moments as already discussed. The fleeting pace of time and place, the simultaneous frozening of moments and experiences on the move! The phenomenology takes a break and paradoxically suspends itself from what it wants us to suspend, i.e., the natural attitude, the preconceptions, the constructs. As the phenomena in its origin is overwhelming,  its later phenomenological intervention engulfs the entire experience once and for all. It perhaps calls for a new methodology or otherwise remains to be superficial to limits of the second order constructs. Even when such frozen moments are auto-ethnographic, they could never address the crisis of representations - too much to the writing culture groups - perhaps way to much to the objectivists and even constructivists.

There isn't any solution to this problem as of now than to immerse oneself once again to the circle of reasons, circles of constructs and circles of human cognition.

Meanwhile the interplay of time and space/ past and present, experience and constructs continue, continue to amaze every now and then - making the world a beautiful place with memories.

1 comment:

  1. A completely unconventional way of arriving to phenomenology quite like the inductive method in itself. Saw this in qr group. Will share this with Cathy. You can write a paper on it the problem you focus seems to be a valid one.

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