The Eidetics of the Unimaginable. What a Phenomenologist can Learn from Ethnomethodology

Following up on these arguments, it would have been interesting to also explore the extent to which imaginative procedures come to be used by authors like Garfinkel or Sacks as well in their own ethnomethodological work in ways akin to phenomenology. But while this would be an interesting addition to my present reflection here, it is a different paper altogether.

See for this also DeSantis, 2011, Ferencz-Flatz, 2011 and Summa, 2022.

For a more extended treatment of this issue, see Ferencz-Flatz, 2018.

The racist undertone of this example, which uses cultural stereotypes to make a point about differences in apperception, is of course difficult to overhear.

This latter illustration might not appear as “overtly fictitious”. It looks like an example that could be real, but might just as well be merely hypothetical, while its use of the present tense suggests the latter – and this is precisely the point at stake here. For in speaking about imaginability, I am not interested primarily in the use of outlandish, impossible, or improbable examples, as they are employed frequently by analytic philosophers and also to some extent in phenomenology, but rather about the possibility of plainly accessing the concrete details of social interactions via mere made up examples. In other words, when speaking about fantasy here, I am specifically using the term in a phenomenological sense, as referring to experiences that are not lived through directly, but reconstructed imaginatively regardless of how prosaic they are. In a phenomenological perspective it is in principle indifferent whether the concrete example under scrutiny is fictional or not, for as long as it can plausibly pass as an account of concrete experience it will not lose anything by being merely fictional. According to Husserl, a phenomenological demonstration does not rest upon the factuality of its starting example. Instead, the main point of my argument here is to show that such an assumption poses some serious difficulties, which should be reflected from a phenomenological perspective.

See for this especially Kramer and Wilcock, 1999, Wolff, 2006 and Tengelyi, 2012.

See for this Psathas, 1999, 2009, and 2012, as well as Hammerslay 2019. In his later work, Garfinkel also showed a strong interest for Husserl, Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty, see for instance Garfinkel, 2021 or Garfinkel, 2022. Tellingly, Garfinkel himself qualifies his reading of these authors as a “mis-reading” directed at “discovering the phenomena of embodied practices that compose as its production and analyzability the miraculous familiarity of the ordinary society” (Garfinkel, 2022: 76).

For a more extended analysis of the following, see especially Meerbote, 1981, Makkreel, 1984, Makkreel, 1990, and Kneller, 2009.

See for this also Ferencz-Flatz, 2018: 190f.

Garfinkel, 2002: 96.

Garfinkel, 2002: 96.

See, for instance, Livingston, 1987: 10f. See also Garfinkel, 2002: 265-282 and Garfinkel and Livingston, 2003.

See for this Garfinkel, 1996: 35f. and Garfinkel, 2002: 169f. See also Bergmann and Meyer, 2021. Nonethelless some allusions to phenomenology can be found in this context as well, see for instance Garfinkel and Livingston, 2003: 27.

Garfinkel, 2002: 96.

Thus, Garfinkel’s account of ethnomethodological descriptors, which are “only available to the search for and recognition of their sense and relevance when they are consulted from within the in-course on-site practices that the analyst is competent with” (Garfinkel, 2022: 73) has overt analogies to Heidegger’s understanding of “formal indication” in phenomenology (see Heidegger 2004: 42 f.).

These limitations of the imaginative procedure come to play symptomatically in Husserl’s account of practical possibilities. In the initial manuscript of his Ideas II, Husserl starts out by claiming that fantasy enactments are sufficient for a subject to assess what they actually can or cannot do, for instance lifting a weight. The fact that such fantasy assessements are so often erroneous, however, forces him to revise this claim. In doing so, he implicitly acknowledges that our actual behaviors in real situations are unimaginable in advance be it only because they presuppose a mode of consciousness that is impossible to intuitively experience in advance in the form of full-active awareness. Insofar as much of what occurs to us, of what we do, perceive and react to in a situation is not consciously at hand and evades the sort of noticeability, which conditions what we can tell of and describe with regard to that situation, it is also not available for voluntary reproduction. As a consequence, situational experience as a whole remains “not imaginable” in the sense of inaccessible to both imaginative foresight and reconstruction. For a more detailed account of this, see Ferencz-Flatz, 2012.

On the other hand, Sacks himself of course also frequently uses hypothetical and typical examples.

For a more extensive discussions of the “naturalization of consciousness,” see, for instance, Zahavi, 2004 and, 2013.

With regard to Husserl’s view concerning “phenomenological experiments,” see Ferencz-Flatz, 2018.

Nonetheless, one may argue that such fertilization still involves a necessary empirical foundation for phenomenological research in the perspective of genetic phenomenology at the very least.