Hilarie's van Manen Thoughts

[Website Services Admin]

#745

Van Manen writes, “Thereby, even the word becomes a thing. More precisely, the word makes present the absence that it names, and thus it denies the concreteness and singularity of existence. But at the same time the word restores this absence through the constitution of meaning. Thus the immediacy of lived experience is first lost but then fleetingly restored by the indirectness of meaning that is made possible by language.” The play of opposites here is very easily to tangle one’s thoughts within, and it evokes both the uncertainty and the excitement I felt when I first started reading phenomenological and metaphysical texts as an undergraduate philosophy major. Now, I find myself drawn most strongly to van Manen’s placement of the word within the dialectic of absence and presence. The fleetingness with which he says experience can be articulated feels like the moment of teetering on the edge of thinking, in Gendlin’s terms. Van Manen doesn’t say this, but that fleetingness can be rearticulated as language and writing continue. Even though the moment of certainty is brief, it will come again.

He goes on to talk about “the temporary dwelling space [… that is] the world of the text.” I find myself almost stopped in my tracks by these phrases. The idea of text as a place in which to dwell is so comforting even in its intimidating vastness. There’s a way in which writing is finding a mediating force between life and words – it’s almost like translation, in the way we were discussing in class next week. We have thoughts like, what’s the best word I can find to describe this feeling, or (along Gendlin’s lines) how can I shape the meaning of a word to express what I want it to say, and then how can I communicate that shaping to other people? The “world of the text” pushes aside a Derridean idea of text as world (il n y a pas de hors-texte) and refines it – the text exists in the world in which we exists, as a physical object, but its truest world, in which it takes up phenomenological space, is separable from regular life. It’s a dreamworld, in a sense, into which writers can enter, and which feels markedly different from the quotidian world we all inhabit.

[Sondra Perl]

#765

Lovely restatement of ‘dwelling in the space of a text” and the fleetingness of expression, absence and presence.

[Author]

Posts