Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde

1. Simple Grounds: At Home in Experience

13 1 Simple Grounds: At Home in Experience Vivian Sobchack Sometimes he envied the boy, who could with equal enthusiasm enjoy the lizards sunning themselves on the rock wall by the house, the loud MTV channel, and his toy computer. —Don Ihde (TL 218) Don Ihde’s work is particularly significant—and unusual—for what might be called its grounding simplicity, its capacity to make his readers comfortable enough to follow him anywhere—outdoors, indoors, home and abroad, and always, or at least, into micro- and macroperceptual adventures that expand both their embodied presence to the world and its “possible reciprocities of experience” (BT 32). His mode—indeed, his style—is to settle us, first, in domestic and felicitous places and experiences, attuning us to our everyday perceptions in and around our homes and offices as we engage what we think of as the “natural” world and as we use and incorporate a common array of low and “high” human artifacts and technologies. That accomplished, he then entices us, ever so casually and always without threat, into the phenomenological complexities and multistabilities of what seems familiar to us and then further—into the less “homey” places and practices of cultures and histories that we do not experience in the “natural attitude” as remotely our own. In a straightforward manner that is less deceptive than seductive in its promise that we can and will understand what follows, his philosophical (and literary) persona is relaxed, steady, and unpedantic. Even as his descriptions accumulate in phenomenological complexity and rigor, his tone, attitude, and autobiographical grounding remain purposefully “unacademic.” Like the boy (his son) in the epigraph above, with “equal enthusiasm,” Ihde fully enjoys himself wherever he goes: listening to himself listen on a dark country road or 14 Vivian Sobchack in a concert hall, exploring variations of ocean navigation, cooking a meal, describing an array of perceptual technologies and “epistemology engines,”1 or thinking about his own embodiment as male in our culture. We get the sense that he has lived not only a full life but also has lived life fully. In sum, throughout his books and essays, Ihde offers us the friendly guidance, companionship , and presence of (dare I use the term with admiration?) an “armchair philosopher.” Indeed as one commentator has put it, “the overall points almost sneak up on you, they are so gently and gradually offered.”2 In this regard, Ihde provides us an extraordinary and exemplary phenomenological pedagogy—a pedagogy that can be “inhabited” and lived as well as abstractly learned and thought. His unadorned prose, his autobiographical vignettes, his use of narrative and thought experiments to open up perceptual possibilities, and his call for readers to test the precision of his descriptions against their own concrete empirical experience, all find expression in, as Ihde describes it, “a nonfoundational and nontranscendental phenomenology which makes variational theory its most important methodological strategy” (PP 7). Indeed, it is this emphasis on variational method that leads his readers to an active appreciation of the open possibilities of embodied perception as it is enabled, shaped, and regulated by human and natural history, cultural traditions, and (as Ihde titles one of his books) “existential technics” (ET). However, while variational method forms the core of his phenomenological investigations, what enlivens it (what makes it seem methodologically achievable to his readers) is an underlying—and rare—sense of existential presence. The autobiographical vignette only the most obvious of its signs, this sense of presence informs and animates Ihde’s work—grounding us in personal (and personally possible) experience but, as well, demonstrating that the “personal” is neither synonymous with nor reducible to the “individual,” and that, instead, it provides the very intersubjective basis for further investigation of more general forms and structural variants of lived experience. In its clear call to an awareness of our lived experience and existential presence, Ihde’s pedagogy seems to me of the utmost importance in the contemporary context of the commonly abstractive practices of the humanities disciplines in today’s research university—the latter now an environment (as Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht eloquently decries it) “filled with the technological and epistemological noise of our general mobilization,” “an environment that will not let us pause for more than moments of presence.”3 Indeed, in today’s university, most graduate students, encouraged by most of their professors , are in such a hurry to “professionalize” and to “understand” that they sometimes forget to attend to their “experience” and to “see...