Is post-phenomenology a critical geography? Subjectivity and difference in post-phenomenological geographies

I Introduction

Phenomenology is back! Well…sort of.

In a series of recent articles, post-phenomenology – a reworking of phenomenological thought – has been asserted as a new geographic approach (Ash and Simpson, 2016, 2018; Lea, 2009; McCormack; 2017; Roberts, 2019, and others). While the term ‘post-phenomenology’ is rather new within geography, engagements with phenomenology within the discipline have been going on for some time. Phenomenology was a major intellectual current in 1970s and 80s Anglophone geography before being largely dismissed within the discipline (Backhaus, 2009; Pickles, 1985). Yet engagements with phenomenology have persisted, most notably through the development of non-representational theories (Thrift, 2008). The more recent call for post-phenomenology builds on these reworkings of phenomenology, reconceptualizing it through a poststructuralist lens (Gibas, 2019: 604). Post-phenomenology, then, is the most recent outgrowth of a maturing poststructuralist moment in geography that has turned away from earlier concerns with text and discourse toward theories of practice and embodiment. It shares genealogies with other contemporary geographic approaches, including non-representational theories, affect theory, assemblage thinking, and posthuman geographies, drawing eclectically from poststructuralist, phenomenological, and new materialist perspectives.

Post-phenomenology offers various opportunities to revisit and revise the geographic lexicon and introduce new concerns and points of emphasis into geographic scholarship. Yet, as a relatively new paradigm, it also has areas in need of further development. In this article, I consider two such problems in the formulation of post-phenomenology with the aim of rendering post-phenomenology into a more robust and critical geographic approach. The first concern I describe is the ‘problem of the subject’ in post-phenomenology and the manner in which post-phenomenologists have reformulated the subject of classical phenomenology. My second area of concern is the erasure of issues of social difference in post-phenomenological scholarship. I approach both of these foci by presenting post-phenomenological critiques and viewpoints alongside those of critical phenomenology, another strand of contemporary phenomenological thought, to demonstrate how critical phenomenology has developed more nuanced and critical responses to the same problems that post-phenomenologists have identified in classical phenomenology. In doing so, I point to resources both within and outside of the discipline that can aid in making post-phenomenology a more critical and politically self-aware geographic paradigm.

II What is post-phenomenology?

Post-phenomenology has recently been articulated and engaged within the discipline by a handful of scholars (Ash and Simpson, 2016; Gibas, 2019; Lea, 2009; Rossetto, 2018, and others) who situate it as a re-evaluation of classical phenomenology through the lenses of science and technology studies (see Ash, 2019) and post-structuralism (Ash and Simpson, 2016: 49; Gibas, 2019: 604; Lea, 2009: 373). Commentators have positioned post-phenomenology as an emerging paradigm that, as of yet, admittedly lacks coherence and a stable reference point (Lea, 2009; Roberts, 2019: 545). Indeed, post-phenomenology, like any sub-field, is internally diverse, draws on numerous reference points and traditions, and emphasizes various theoretical and methodological aims. Scholars in this field have developed theoretical foundations for this paradigm (Ash, 2019; Ash and Simpson, 2016; Lea, 2009), operationalized post-phenomenology as a methodology (Ash and Simpson, 2018; Rossetto, 2018; Spinney, 2015), or otherwise used post-phenomenology to rethink geographic problems and concepts (McCormack, 2017; Revill, 2014; Simpson, 2009). While the ‘post-phenomenology’ that emerges from these accounts is not monolithic or singular, I will attempt in this article to identify some shared characteristics of these applications, particularly in the way that post-phenomenologists situate themselves in reference to classical phenomenology (and its subject) and issues of social difference.

Before presenting the post-phenomenological critique of classical phenomenology, it is worth sketching the major premises of classical phenomenology. Classical phenomenology refers to a lineage of German and French philosophy, most notably associated with Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In 1900, Husserl introduced the phenomenological method as a return to the ‘things themselves’, and a rejection of symbolic understandings of worldly phenomena (Husserl, 2001 [1900]: 168). In doing so, he advocated for a method premised on the systematic investigation of intuitive cognitions of the world. Heidegger built upon these foundations, developing a conception of being (Dasein) founded on the intertwinement of subject and world (Heidegger, 1996 [1927]). Merleau-Ponty’s work – the most salient reference point for both post-phenomenology and critical phenomenology – is similarly concerned with articulating a lived account of perception and embodiment more generally. In his major work, Phenomenology of Perception (2012 [1945]), Merleau-Ponty builds an account of the embodied subject and its engagements with objects and others, demonstrating how acts of perception link the material, symbolic, and embodied into a relational whole (see Kinkaid, 2019c, for a detailed treatment of his relational ontology). In doing so, he rejects empiricist and idealist accounts of the subject and space, looking to embodied experience for a new philosophical ground. These various articulations of phenomenology are all concerned with developing a new foundation for philosophical and scientific thought, one founded in consciousness and perception: in our embodied experience of the world and its meanings.

Post-phenomenology is situated as a response to this lineage of phenomenological thought. This response or re-evaluation hinges predominantly on the subject of classical phenomenology. Post-phenomenologists identify two major problems with this subject: first, they argue that phenomenology ascribes a transcendental agency to human subjects through the term ‘intentionality’ (a concern I will detail later) (Ash and Simpson, 2016: 53; Roberts, 2019: 545; Rossetto, 2018: 132; Wylie, 2006), and second, it emphasizes human consciousness above other forms of being and is thus seen as centered upon human experience (McCormack, 2017: 3). Further, some post-phenomenologists argue that phenomenological concepts of embodiment are insufficiently intersubjective and present ‘undifferentiated’ subjects (Ash and Simpson, 2016: 60). In response to these problems, post-phenomenologists generally seek to de-emphasize the subject and ‘escape the subject-centered nature of classical phenomenological thought’ (Ash and Simpson, 2016: 49). Rather than locating phenomenology in the embodied, conscious subject, ‘post-phenomenological geographies extend experience trans-humanly’ (Lea, 2009: 373–4) and posit an ‘interrelational body-subject’ that is co-present with others (Rossetto, 2018: 132). This shift generally tracks the proscriptions of an ‘ontological turn’ and ‘posthuman turn’ in the discipline by renewing attention to objects and non-humans, as well as trans-personal forces like affect.

Post-phenomenologists have articulated various directions in which to develop these general theoretical orientations. Ash and Simpson (2016) identify four major themes for elaboration: the body, (inter)subjectivity, objects, and the social. Lea (2009) identifies another set of engagements for post-phenomenology, including: experience, corporeality, affect, dwelling, and landscape. Others have reworked phenomenological concepts, including ‘home’ (Gibas, 2019) and ‘world’ (McCormack, 2017), to speak to post-phenomenological concerns. There are also some experiments with ‘post-phenomenological methods’ including repeat photography (Rossetto, 2018), mobile methods (Spinney, 2015), and object-oriented and sensory methodologies (e.g. Ash and Simpson, 2018; Ash et al., 2018; Simpson, 2009). Rather than reviewing these engagements, I will focus on the more fundamental concerns of post-phenomenology – the revisions of the phenomenological subject and issues arising from this deconstruction – insofar as these philosophical foundations motivate the various conceptual and methodological revisions of post-phenomenologists. However, I first briefly introduce critical phenomenology, another revision of phenomenological thought, which will serve as a foil to post-phenomenology throughout this article.

III What is critical phenomenology?

Critical phenomenology, like post-phenomenology, has emerged from a critique and revision of classical phenomenology. While the term ‘critical phenomenology’ was coined only recently (Guenther, 2013), a critical tradition of phenomenology can be traced back much further. In particular, feminist, anti-racist, and postcolonial scholars have employed a phenomenological lens to address themes of embodiment, space, and difference for decades (Ahmed, 2006, 2007; Bartky, 1990; Beauvoir, 1971 [1949]; Diedrich, 2001; Fanon, 1970; Lee, 2014; Norwood, 2018; Salamon, 2018; Young, 1990). These accounts have described how worlds are experienced and embodied differently by subjects inhabiting forms of embodied difference, including gender, race, sexuality, and disability. By attending to how such subjects encounter worlds, these critical phenomenologies are not merely concerned with these subjects and their experience; rather, critical phenomenologies seek to illuminate how bodies, objects, spaces, and intersubjective worlds are (unevenly and differentially) composed. For the sake of this argument, I refer to any phenomenological account centrally concerned with the differential production of subjectivity and minority embodiment as a ‘critical phenomenology’, rather than limiting myself to the more recent work that explicitly takes this label.

Beyond these concerns with social difference and minority embodiment, critical phenomenology is focused on intersubjectivity as a field of power and a realm inflected with symbolic and social difference and inequality. Here, individual subjectivities are situated in trans-personal relations of power and historically-specific social relations. As phenomenological descriptions, these accounts ‘become critical by engaging with social and political analyses of particular, historically situated social relations’ (Guenther, 2013: xxviii).

In addition to their attention to embodied difference, many critical phenomenologies foreground concerns with ethics and social justice. Critical phenomenological accounts are often motivated by concerns with racism (Ahmed, 2007; Clare, 2013; Lee, 2014), the oppression of women (Bartky, 1990; Young, 1990), violence against and marginalization of queer people (Ahmed, 2006; Halberstam, 2005; Muñoz, 2009; Salamon, 2018), and the experience of disability (Diedrich, 2001; Weiss, 2017). Critical phenomenology, then, necessarily engages with political and ethical questions, ones revolving around marginalized forms of embodiment and how these forms of embodiment shape one’s experiences of space, objects, and social relations. In doing so, it retools classical phenomenology to address perceived shortcomings of the phenomenological subject, namely its lack of specificity and its situatedness in intersubjective fields of power.

As these brief overviews suggest, post-phenomenology and critical phenomenology do have shared concerns. Both identify issues in the formulation of classical phenomenology, including a lack of attention to the body and intersubjectivity (particularly in Heidegger and Husserl; less so in Merleau-Ponty), as well as an omission of issues of power and the socio-political milieu in which bodies act. Responding to these silences, both critiques of classical phenomenology center issues of the body, intersubjectivity, and the larger social milieu. Despite these commonalities, however, there are certainly divergences in how each body of thought responds to these issues. With these general introductions to post-phenomenology and critical phenomenology out of the way, I will now turn to these divergences in greater detail.

IV The (post)phenomenological subject

Issues surrounding the subject of classical phenomenology appear as the strongest motivation for articulating a post-phenomenological perspective. For Ash and Simpson, the variety of approaches operating under the banner of post-phenomenology are united in their aim to reconsider this subject: ‘The main commonality is a move away from a subject-centered approach to experience’ (2016: 53). Post-phenomenologists take a number of issues with the subject of classical phenomenology. The first is a concern that phenomenologists center the human subject at the expense of all other aspects of the world, installing the human subject as a special or transcendental form of being (Roberts, 2019; Rossetto, 2018; see also Ash and Simpson’s [2016: 55] critique of Simonsen 2013) and thus reinforcing a value-laden subject-object binary. Second, a number of post-phenomenologists have focused in on the phenomenological term ‘intentionality’, which they interpret as a reinstatement of a sovereign human agent (Ash and Simpson, 2016: 53; Roberts 2019: 545; Rossetto, 2018: 132; Wylie, 2006), one at odds with contemporary understandings of subjectivity in geography (see Simpson, 2017). These concerns lead post-phenomenologists to decenter the embodied human subject, preferring to focus on objects, affect and the trans- and non-human.

In this section, I work through the post-phenomenological critique of the phenomenological subject and argue that the wholesale rejection of this subject is unnecessary and not entirely philosophically justified. In an effort to encourage a more generative discussion between classical phenomenology and post-phenomenology, I highlight moments of the post-phenomenological critique that, in my reading, lead to more productive engagements with post-phenomenology’s philosophical heritage. Here, I refocus the ‘problem of the subject’ to concerns shared by both post-phenomenologists and critical phenomenologists, namely the need to infuse phenomenological accounts with critical conceptions of intersubjectivity and social difference. I consider this critique as a more precise and adequate starting point to revise classical phenomenological perspectives to be more aligned with contemporary concerns in human geography.

Post-phenomenological critiques of classical phenomenology begin from the premise that phenomenology is ‘subject-centered’ and reinforces a boundary between subjects and objects (Roberts, 2019). Ash and Simpson, drawing on Hinchliffe (2003), argue that ‘Merleau-Ponty re-installs a human transcendence in his discussion of embodied subjectivity because his work starts from the subject-object distinction’ (Ash and Simpson, 2016: 56), though they also claim that Merleau-Ponty’s work is useful because it is non-dualistic (2016: 54). This first major critique is worth unpacking at some length, as it feeds into subsequent critiques of, and the ultimate rejection of, the phenomenological subject.

It is undeniable that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is based in the experience of consciousness, and thus with subjects (of perception); this is the foundation of phenomenology as a philosophy. Given that his work is concerned with understanding the world as given to us in perceptual experience, one could say his is a subject-centered approach (though it need not necessarily be entirely human-centered). However, Merleau-Ponty does not argue that human meaning and knowledge are produced in some manner transcendental to or independent from material conditions. Rather, the subject is deeply intertwined with the world and objects, so much so that they cannot be disentangled in theory or in practice. Merleau-Ponty repeatedly rejects a separation between subject and object as the explicit starting point for his work. For instance, he argues: ‘We have to reject the age old assumption that put the body in the world and the seer in the body, or conversely, the world and the body in the seer as in a box’ (1968: 138). We cannot approach the body as the ‘bearer of a knowing subject’ (1968: 136) but must see it as having a ‘pact’ with the material world that is fundamental and irreducible (1968: 133). This material world is full of meanings that, in fact, cannot be exhausted by perception. Thus, in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, we can retain the subject as an epistemological starting point without dispensing with post-phenomenological concerns about the ‘excessiveness’ of materiality and its ‘agency’ in producing worlds (Ash and Simpson, 2018; McCormack, 2017: 5; Rossetto, 2018). While there is much more to be said on this issue, accusations that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology reduces the world to the experiences and representations of the subject will need to be revisited, textually supported, and carefully argued if this philosophical claim is to continue to serve as a major reference point for post-phenomenology.

Another major, and related, critique of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is that, by focusing on the conscious subject, Merleau-Ponty reduces objects and materiality to the mental activity of that subject, denying objects autonomous existence and agency (Roberts, 2019). For example, Ash and Simpson make the claim that Merleau-Ponty argues that objects only exist because we perceive them (2016: 56; also echoed by Roberts, 2019: 546) and that he is thus a ‘transcendental idealist’. The authors are right to identify this (hypothetical) stance as idealism, but are misguided in reducing Merleau-Ponty’s complex account of how objects are given to consciousness to the idea that objects do not exist without us, especially when he explicitly states that the being of objects is ‘indeed more than their being-perceived’ (1968: 135). Again, Merleau-Ponty’s argument is posed explicitly against this kind of idealism. The discussion these authors are likely referring to in Phenomenology of Perception (though without concrete textual evidence it is difficult to say) is not about the existence of objects per se, but concerns how objects are presented to our consciousness.

This discussion appears most memorably in Phenomenology through a consideration of the ‘backside’ of objects that exceed any act of perception. Here, Merleau-Ponty describes how we cannot grasp all sides of an object simultaneously, leaving ‘blindspots’ in our perception. While we can produce a geometric rendering of a cube as a sketch with lines of height, length, and depth to produce the illusion of a full perspective, this rendering remains an abstraction; it does not capture the object, nor the dimension of depth, as it is actually perceived and lived (Merleau-Ponty, 2012: 273–9). It is in this sense that Merleau-Ponty limits us to a ‘subject-centered’ world: he rejects ‘objective’ (i.e. abstract) accounts of objects in favor of how we actually encounter them. This is certainly not to say that objects do not exist mind-independently; it is merely to describe how they are ‘given’ to us in perception. The implications of Merleau-Ponty’s stance here is that the objective world radically exceeds our ability to access it through our perception and that objects cannot be reduced to their being perceived, a claim post-phenomenologists would eagerly support (see Ash et al., 2018: 169).

One can also turn to Merleau-Ponty’s other works to understand the role objects play in his relational ontology. In The Visible and the Invisible, he stresses how sensing bodies (subjects) and the sensed (objects) are caught in a co-constitutive relationship to the point where ‘finally one cannot say if it is the look [the sensing subject] or if it is the things that command’ (1968: 133). Subjects and objects encounter each other in a mutually constitutive moment of interaction: ‘what there is then are not things first identical with themselves, which would then offer themselves to the seer, nor is there a seer who is first empty and who afterward, would open himself to them’ (1968: 131). Indeed, objects command action in order to be perceived and subjects respond with a mode of sensing that would illuminate the object: an object calls forth a sensing

which makes a vibration of my skin become the sleek and the rough, which makes me follow with my eyes the movements and the contours of the things themselves, this magical relation, this pact between them and me according to which I lend them my body in order that they inscribe upon it and give me their resemblance. (1968: 146)

While it is out of the scope of this article to analyze issues of ‘objects’ in phenomenology and post-phenomenology in any more detail, this brief overview demonstrates that post-phenomenologists overlook discussions in Merleau-Ponty’s work that could serve as resources in articulating a post-phenomenological approach to the material world. Indeed, as I have explained, this attention to objects, their agency in shaping worlds, and their existence beyond human perception is not really at odds with classical phenomenology’s aims. However, phenomenologists accept that we can only access these objects through the perceiving acts of a subject, a point that has been recently been noted by Ash (2019: 1).

In addition to these critiques, post-phenomenologists articulate one more major premise for rejecting the phenomenological subject: it is an ‘intentional’ subject (Ash and Simpson, 2016; Roberts, 2019: 545; Rossetto, 2018: 132). The starting point for this critique is the idea of ‘intentionality’, a central conception of phenomenology. I quote this objection at length in order to maintain the logical steps that lead to the dismissal of the phenomenological subject. On this point, Ash and Simpson describe:

In this engagement with post-structuralism, a key target of the post-phenomenology being developed in geography has been ‘intentionality’ (Wylie, 2006). Intentionality relates to the proposition that an experience is an experience of something – we are always looking at something, listening to something, thinking about something, and so on. This ‘aboutness’ implicates the presence of an intentional subject in advance of experience. For experience to be ‘about’ something, there has to be an author of this aboutness and a point from which the directedness of the experience comes. This notion of intentionality is then closely tied to a particular conception of subjectivity whereby the subject governs through ‘internal representational thought’ (Rose, 2006: 546). Therefore, the post-phenomenology emerging thus far in geography can be taken most simply to be the development of a phenomenology beyond intentionality. (2016: 53–4)

Throughout this passage, we see several post-structuralist interpretive moves that attempt to deconstruct the subject. First, the authors deploy a ‘critique of the author’: a decentering of the subject as a conscious, sovereign producer of meaning (see Barthes, 2001; Foucault, 2010). Within the same sentence, this critique of the author blends into a critique of a singular, unified subject, ‘a point from which the directedness of experience comes’ (Ash and Simpson, 2016: 53). Here, the authors are calling into question the possibility of a unified subject and advocate for a conception of the subject characterized by multiplicity, contingency, disunity, and being-in-formation (see Simpson, 2009, 2017).

This second move, toward decentered plural subjects, is common in poststructuralist thinking, particularly in non-representational theory. These stances claim that experience is not located anywhere, is not the property of an individual (Simpson, 2017: 4) and instead that multiplicity, fragmentation, and emergence characterize the nature of subjectivity. The authors here seem to be pushing beyond the claim that our experience is coproduced with others (e.g. subjects, objects, worlds) and not totally transparent to ourselves to argue that there is no source of experiential or existential continuity to our existence as (perceptual) subjects. If this concept of subjectivity were the case, it would mean that we exist only as a suite of emergent effects of ‘events’ and ‘encounters’, incapable of having a sense of identity, speaking as an ‘I’, exercising self-awareness, having memories or a history, undertaking existential projects, etc. More basically, it would also imply that there is no unifying perceptual or physiological point from which our sensory perceptions of the world are processed and synthesized, which would, as Merleau-Ponty describes in fascinating detail in Phenomenology of Perception, make tasks like walking, orienting ourselves in space, responding to stimuli, and exercising muscle memory difficult to understand. It would be difficult to make sense of human experience, or even the formation of a non-human, material world, with this conception of subjectivity which bears little resemblance to our everyday experiences of self (or at least those of the author).

In contrast to this unworkable concept of subjectivity, classical phenomenology provides a concept of subjectivity that acknowledges emergence and multiplicity without denying the existence of subjects as both perceptual and existential entities. In the most basic sense, subjects exist for Merleau-Ponty as perceiving bodies, which are composed by internal and external horizons (1968: 132) and are necessarily embodied. These boundaries are not total, nor is the ‘interiority’ of the subject fully integrated; rather, perception gives rise to a multiplicity that has an imperfect correspondence with both the world and our ‘self’. For Merleau-Ponty, our various sensory systems are ‘little subjectivities’, ‘little consciousnesses of…’ that are assembled ‘like flowers into a bouquet’, such that they give rise to the ‘experience of one sole body before one sole world’ (1968: 141–2). There is certainly room for anonymity, multiplicity, and non-conscious activity in this conception of subjectivity. Ortega takes another approach to this problem, arguing that we may very well transform through time, experience ourselves as ‘different selves’ and not be existentially integrated or self-aware in a totalizing way. Yet we nonetheless remain singular in that we inhabit a stable reference point (i.e. we are still the same body and individual as we were; we have memories, we have existential continuity, etc.) (2016: 78–80).

The post-phenomenological critique seeks to do away with the continuity of the subject in order to substantiate its focus on subjectivity as emergent, based on ‘encounters’ and the ‘event’ (see Dewsbury, 2000; Shaw, 2012). For post-phenomenologists, the problem is this: if we hold that subjectivity emerges relationally, in events and phenomena, we cannot claim that a subject exists before this ‘event’. Merleau-Ponty has a simple answer for this problem, one that does not require that we dispense with subjects altogether. According to Merleau-Ponty, we do exist as subjects before and after any given perceptual experience; ² the life of our consciousness is sedimented and reinvented with every perception, but it continues to issue from one existential vantage point. Our subjectivity does emerge from ‘the event’, but it does so with a history sedimented in our bodies and sense of self. These performative, non-foundationalist, and iterative notions of subjectivity would serve the cause of post-phenomenology well enough. Accordingly, there is no need to ‘radically’ deconstruct subjectivity into an abstraction that makes our everyday experiences of self theoretically impossible.

These various interpretive steps lead to the largest problem in the post-phenomenological critique of the subject. This is the moment in which ‘intentionality’ morphs, without explanation, into ‘intentional subject’, a move made explicit in the passage by Ash and Simpson (2016), but repeated elsewhere (e.g. Roberts, 2019: 543; Rossetto, 2018: 132). Intentionality, as noted, describes the ‘aboutness’ of experience. It does not bear any necessary implications for the nature of the ‘subject’, save for the premise that the subject is inextricably intertwined with a world through consciousness. In fact, the concept of intentionality forecloses our ability to think of the subject in internalist terms as sovereign. Backhaus usefully clarifies that Merleau-Ponty’s lived-body intentionality ‘is the precognitive relational field of meanings autochthonously arising from the experiential body in its situation/milieu, manifesting as gestural/postural enactments of meaning’ (Backhaus, 2009: 137, emphasis added). Here, the terms ‘precognitive’ and ‘autochthonously arising’ should dispel the idea that ‘intentionality’ refers to some kind of cognitive, representational, preconceived human will or aim. ‘Intentional subject’, on the other hand, has become a watchword for poststructuralists eager to deconstruct a ‘humanist subject’ who is stable and self-transparent, whose will and agency are transcendental to its circumstances. This concept of the subject has arguably already been killed by decades of post-structuralist critique (Simpson, 2017; Pile and Thrift, 1995). Yet it remains unclear what this subject has to do with phenomenology and the concept of intentionality.

V Revising the subject of phenomenology

As is clear from the previous discussion, there are many reasons why we should question the move in post-phenomenology to go ‘beyond’ the subject. Various post-phenomenological critiques of the phenomenological subject display a partial understanding about the nature of that subject, and base their rejection of it on interpretive moves that are not entirely justified. However, there are some elements in these post-phenomenological critiques that are more productive starting points for revising the phenomenological subject. For example, some post-phenomenological critiques of the subject extend into concerns about intersubjectivity and power relations, concerns they argue are absent in classical phenomenology. For example, Ash and Simpson argue that Merleau-Ponty’s approach to embodiment does not pay enough attention to broader social framings and contexts (2016: 60) and, drawing on Colls (2012), argue that phenomenology ‘is often guilty of presenting an undifferentiated body subject’ (Ash and Simpson, 2016: 60).

This unmarked subject is indeed problematic. In recognition of this, much critical phenomenological work has started from the interpretive space opened up by inserting minority bodies into Merleau-Ponty’s framework (see Ahmed, 2006; Kinkaid, 2018, 2019c; Lee, 2014; Norwood, 2018; Young, 1990). This move within critical phenomenology has thus been a generative starting point for revising the classical phenomenological subject. Post-phenomenology, however, does not follow this move, but uses these critiques merely to justify the dismissal of the phenomenological subject altogether, rather than responding to them by further specifying this subject. In order to recover and advance this more fruitful line of critique in post-phenomenological geographies, and to demonstrate potential overlaps between critical and post-phenomenology, I will present some ways in which critical phenomenology has taken up these concerns in a critical reformulation of classical phenomenology while maintaining a critical focus on subjectivity and difference.

Critical phenomenologists have been vocal about the need to rethink the subject of phenomenology in order to account for intersubjectivity as a field of power relations in the formation of selves and worlds. While Merleau-Ponty is centrally concerned with intersubjectivity, his discussions do not take on a political tone, nor do they explain how some subjects’ worlds exist as the expense of others or come to dominate others. To integrate these political concerns into the phenomenological repertoire, critical phenomenologists have considered how the production of phenomenological worlds as intersubjective is uneven and power-laden.

The first move critical phenomenologists make to correct the oversights of the classical phenomenological subject is to undertake phenomenological description from the perspective of concrete, historically situated subjects, particularly ‘minority subjects’ (Kinkaid, 2019c). The experiences of these subjects, by virtue of their non-normative embodied identities, gestures, and spatial practices, illuminate how spaces and worlds are formed around the bodies of normative subjects and how space becomes organized around logics of identity and difference. Not fitting into these norms produces contradiction and alienation for the non-normative subject, limiting their potentials in various ways. For example, Ahmed (2006) considers how non-white and queer bodies disrupt space and are constantly called into question, while Puwar (2004) describes the experiences of women and non-white members of parliament and their sense of bodily alienation. Salamon (2018) phenomenologically analyzes how trans bodies become targets of violence, while numerous scholars take a phenomenological lens to race and racism (see Lee, 2014). By employing phenomenological methods and theory from the perspective of non-normative subjects encountering objects and spaces, these accounts both work to expand and add nuance to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology while adding insights that could not be accessed without a shift toward the perception of minority subjects. These accounts thus serve as a rich starting point for thinking about intersubjectivity, difference, and power in phenomenology.

Second, critical phenomenologists argue that, as this first point suggests, subjectivity and intersubjectivity are necessarily sites of politics, formed as they are within dominant social meanings, cultural schema, and power relations. Critical phenomenologists are thus eager to demonstrate how the horizons available to subjects are necessarily shaped and constrained by dominant social practices and cultural codes. For example, the sense of existential alienation that Fanon (1970) describes as a black man is necessarily intertwined with the existence of something called ‘racism’ in his society, and hinges on negative perceptions and symbolic associations of blackness that have become entrenched in various ways. The subjectivity available to him is thus limited by historical circumstances that exceed him. In a similar vein, Simonsen remarks:

The additional ‘task’ faced by men and women of colour is one of reconciling their own ‘tactile, vestibular, kinaesthetic, and visual’ experiences with the operation of a ‘historical-racial schema’ producing ‘racial parameters’ within which their corporeal schema is supposed to fit. (2010: 231)

While this kind of intersubjectivity is a crucial concern of critical phenomenologists, they still rely on the phenomenological method – a description of the world issuing from a first-person viewpoint – as a way of knowing that social world. Guenther clarifies: ‘The sense of the world is co-constituted with others, even if its ultimate condition of possibility is first-person consciousness’ (Guenther, 2013: xxviii). While a reliance on first-person perspectives may sound overly limited or even risking solipsism, these accounts are substantiated by other critical knowledges, including history, sociology, anthropology, and critical race theory, that situate individual experience within trans-personal social and cultural structures in which subjectivities take form (Guenther, 2013: xiii).

While we can see how post-phenomenology and critical phenomenology begin from a shared critique – that the classical phenomenological subject sits aloof from intersubjective relations and relations of power – it is clear that each paradigm has found its own way of correcting or avoiding these issues. Critical phenomenologists further specify the subject in relation to others and in the context of unequal relations of power. Post-phenomenologists introduce these critiques as part of their deconstruction of the phenomenological subject, but they have yet to explore and develop the full implications of these stances for their own paradigm. These decisions have major effects on the direction of either philosophy, ones I will explore in the next section.

VI Phenomenology and social difference

While the manner in which different strands of phenomenological thinking deal with the ‘question of the subject’ may seem rather esoteric, these decisions have major consequences for our intellectual and political work. The decision to dispense with the subject makes certain lines of thinking more or less possible or necessary. Here, my major concern is that a dismissal of the subject also means a dismissal of social difference, which, as I see it, is a concept needed to think critically about the operations of power and the organization of socio-spatial orders more generally.

This erasure of social difference is not entirely surprising, as classical phenomenologists have been rather silent on this issue. However, it is a bit ironic that advocates of post-phenomenology are quick to critique a ‘transcendental’ subject of classical phenomenology and in its place do not advocate for an attention to historically concrete individuals. Instead, they forgo the question of the subject altogether, even though concepts of race, gender, and sexuality have been theorized in ways consonant with their ontological stances (in the work of Colls, 2012; Kinkaid, 2019b; Saldanha, 2006; and others). However, given post-phenomenology’s stated concern with intersubjectivity and power relations, and its more general geographical concern with socio-spatial formations and processes, a consideration of social difference is certainly not out of scope (and I argue is politically and analytically necessary). I will present the limited statements post-phenomenologists have made about these issues and point to resources in critical phenomenology and in paradigms adjacent to post-phenomenology that can help us consider the meaning and mattering of social difference and understand why social difference is a crucial phenomenological and geographical concern. Here I draw on the limited statements that have been made about social difference in post-phenomenology. While these stances cannot be extrapolated to every practitioner of post-phenomenology, I hold that they begin to demonstrate an orientation in this literature.

Ash and Simpson do seem to recognize the urgency of attending to social difference when they ask: ‘[f]rom a post-phenomenological perspective, what remains of “the social” understood through categories such as age, gender and race?’ (2016: 60). The ensuing discussion seems to dismiss these terms as a priori categories and, drawing on Colls’ feminist non-representational approach, considers difference as something ‘that is not pre-given, hierarchical or oppositional’ (Colls, 2012: 441). In other words, we should not approach the world with pre-given assumptions about what sexual or racial difference mean. This approach to difference is replicated in several post-phenomenological accounts which seek to ‘move beyond’ concepts of difference that rely on ‘predetermined categories’, ‘social contexts’ or ‘power discourses’ and instead see difference as emergent and relational (Rossetto, 2018: 135–6). These accounts argue that we should remain open to the ‘creative’ and ‘plural’ nature of difference, an orientation that characterizes the ontological turn more broadly (Kinkaid, 2019a).

This suggestion would not be entirely unreasonable if we actually saw post-phenomenologists doing this in compelling ways. However, this critique of ‘preconceived’ notions of social difference operates more as a dismissal of these concerns than it does an invitation to explore or center them. Often, the idea of difference is relativized into a generic and universal meaning that does not reference concrete forms of social difference. In some cases, post-phenomenologists refer to difference as ‘alterity’, which is not a historically-specific social construction, but a general condition of being in the world (Ash and Simpson, 2016: 62; Wylie, 2009) or a relation between humans and others, including objects and the material world (Rossetto, 2018: 136). Here, because difference and alterity are everywhere, there does not seem to be a need to pick out historically-specific forms of social difference for analysis (see Kinkaid, 2019a, for a discussion of this framing of difference in geography’s ontological turn).

When Ash and Simpson do ask what ‘social categories’ mean in post-phenomenology, they address these categories as contingent products of ‘encounters’, arguing that ‘[c]ulture or race are then what is selectively retained through different encounters between a variety of objects, such as words, images and bodies, that make up the identifiable aspects of that culture’ (2016: 61). While there is certainly something to be gained from these performative and fluid concepts of social difference, we must be very careful to acknowledge and reckon with the forces and meanings that exceed the moment of ‘encounter’. While advocating for the critical potential of ‘encounter’ as a concept, Wilson notes that we also must ‘keep hold of how social attitudes, discourses and categorizations shape and constrain’ encounters. Wilson provides the example of colonial taxonomies of race as a structure that might mediate ‘encounters’ and constrain the shape they take (Wilson, 2017: 455). In other words, there is something that preconditions, shapes, and is retained through encounters. Without situating encounters in the specific geographies, histories, and relations of power in which they take form, we run the risk of denying the existential continuity, structure, and systematicity of categories like race and racism, as well as those of gender, sexuality, etc., as organizing logics of socio-spatial orders that operate beyond individual bodies and identities (see Kinkaid, 2019b, for an extended discussion on this point).

The original question in this passage – what becomes of social categories in post-phenomenology? – quickly and rather curiously morphs into other matters. These substitutions are telling. The first is that ‘race’ is rendered analogous to Nigel Thrift’s experience of learning to write in Chinese characters, given that both ‘race’ and learning to write in these characters rely on bodily memory, symbols, and objects (Ash and Simpson, 2016: 61). In a second substitution, the authors shift the terms of the conversation – originally social categories of difference – to thinking about air, light, and sound (2016: 61), ironically using a feminist theorist to pivot away from issues of sexual difference toward these more ‘metaphysical’ concerns. A similar move is observed in Ash’s (2019) theorization of space and power in post-phenomenology. In setting up the argument, Ash cites the work of Ortega (2016) and Ahmed (2006) – critical, feminist phenomenologists of color concerned with issues of space, power, and the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality – to introduce his argument that we need to theorize power in post-phenomenology. Yet his resulting theorizations of both space and power at no point make contact with any of these authors’ general concerns. Instead, Ash’s proposed concept of space and power is based almost entirely on his reflections concerning the spatiality and ‘power relations’ inside and outside of a bag of corn chips. In these accounts, when the problem of social difference is broached, it is often rendered into problematic analogies, highly relativistic terms, or metaphysical conceptions that undermine the critical purchase of thinking about social difference.

This is all to say that extant treatments of race, gender, power, and other critical geographic concerns in post-phenomenology are markedly out of step with decades of scholarship in geography about how space, place, and power are necessarily organized by social logics including social categories of difference. What is frustrating about such discussions is that the philosophical premises of post-phenomenology, non-representational theories, and other such paradigms are not necessarily incapable of thinking about these issues (see for instance Colls, 2012; Kinkaid, 2019b; Nash, 2000; Simsonsen, 2010). If scholars in geography’s ‘ontological turn’ stopped treating race, gender, sexuality and other ‘identities’ as mere representations (a rather naïve view, given their own philosophical stances), they could illuminate how these forms of difference are social and material practices, as Saldanha (2006), Swanton (2010a, 2010b), Lim (2010) and other geographers do. For example, Saldanha and Swanton articulate theorizations of race and racialization that share much vocabulary with Ash and Simpson’s described above: they are concerned with the ‘encounter’, ‘event’, affect, bodies, objects, etc. The crucial difference is that Saldanha and Swanton remain committed to theorizing race and embodied difference in a historically specific way; race does not just become another name for a relativized field of difference and interaction. Further, they provide accounts that show how race may be performative and emergent, but also how it coheres as a resilient logic that structures socio-spatial relations in a way that exceeds individual bodies and subjectivities and operates in a field of power.

Thus my concern with treatments of social difference in post-phenomenology is that when these concerns do emerge, they are often folded back into generic discussions of ‘difference’, ‘alterity’, and metaphysics (rather than being recognized as specific socio-spatial formations rooted in history, embodiment, and institutions) and there is little to no discussion of how these logics cohere or order space beyond a micro-focus on fleeting ‘encounters’. If we claim there is no subject in advance of experience and ‘encounters’, how are we to account for the existence and recalcitrance of things like race and racism which undeniably sort and shape individual and collective bodies and, consequently, inform broader orderings of space and society (Saldanha, 2006)? Here, ‘race’ does not get invented ex nihilo in interactions between different bodies. It is a concept and a social practice that shapes how bodies perceive and value themselves and others (even before they actually ‘encounter’ each other); it is a logic that interacts with other processes and ideologies to order space and material flows at multiple scales; it is flexible and dynamic but it is also entrenched as a relation of power (Stoler, 1995: 72). My point here is that we can recognize that the meanings of race (as well as gender, sexuality, and other social categories) are emergent, contingent, multivocal, etc., without erasing the geographic and historical specificity of race (or any social category) as a social and spatial formation or denying that there is anything recalcitrant or trans-personal about its operation.

In other words, there may be good reason to revise our understandings of race, gender, and sexuality, but that does not mean these terms should disappear entirely from our work. If we deconstruct these categories without retaining them as a ‘problem or question in need of response’ (Colls, 2012: 436), they tend to vanish from view. Ignoring these concerns not only limits the political and ethical potential of such work, but insofar as forms of social difference ‘matter’ in the production and inhabitation of worlds – insofar as they compose material practices and spatial logics – we lose the ability to describe the forces of symbolic and material differentiation structuring our worlds.

Critical phenomenologists have done an excellent job at acknowledging this need for historical contingency while attending to the systemic and systematic ways in which certain bodies experience the constraints of space and social formations. These accounts rely on processual understandings of how bodies become differentiated in their movements, actions, and potentials by foregrounding the sedimentation of intersubjective meanings onto individual bodies (Fox and Alldred, 2013; Kinkaid, 2019b). These social meanings, laden with power and inequality, are incorporated into bodies, predisposing their potentials and capacities. As Simsonen describes:

The notion of incorporation…involves how different cultural schemes and norms dispose for specific bodily practices but also how bodies are marked by the incorporation of assumptions made about their gender, race, ethnicity, class, and ‘natural’ abilities. (2010: 224)

This is all to argue a fairly uncontroversial point: that bodies and subjects have histories, histories formed in a field of power. Both post-phenomenologists and critical phenomenologists have agreed that while Merleau-Ponty’s account demonstrates the historicity of the body, it fails to account for the relations of power shaping this history. While this critique appears in post-phenomenological accounts seemingly only to displace the phenomenological subject, critical phenomenological approaches have challenged ‘the generality of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the social body as a body opening up into the flesh world of other bodies by maintaining that this world is not a general world of humanity, but a differentiated world’ (Simsonsen, 2010: 228). They have sought to trace the experiences of minority subjects toward the forces that exceed and condition the individual subject, demonstrating the co-production of subjects and world.

These critical phenomenological approaches make clear the connections between the production of subjectivity and trans-individual spatial, symbolic, and material economies. For instance, Guenther’s (2013) work on solitary confinement examines the phenomenological and existential experience of solitary confinement and, through it, endeavors to understand how the enforcement of this state of subjectivity is necessary in the production of the racialized prison economy. Ahmed (2007) examines how sexual orientation and race shape various spaces and produce differentiated opportunities (social and material) for differently situated bodies. Salamon compellingly demonstrates how racialized trans bodies and their objects are read and how these perceptions justify oftentimes fatal forms of violence against them. These accounts can thus give us insight into how normalized structures of power and oppression function, providing an epistemologically privileged point of engagement with what are necessarily racialized, sexualized, and gendered dominant socio-spatial orders.

These accounts suggest that it would be ill-advised to undertake any ‘critical’ assessment of socio-spatial orders without attending to the uneven production of subjectivity, a process codified and reified through appeals to social difference. These categories are not simply the ‘essentialized traits’ of a subject we are no longer interested in knowing, nor are they merely ‘representations’. Rather, they are descriptors of trans-personal social forces that organize socio-spatial orders, forces that become reduced to bodies in an act of power (Kinkaid, 2019b: 4). This is to say that sidestepping subjectivity as an issue or matter of concern does not mean that we can escape the power these processes exert on social and material orders, as objects and social-spatial orders are also gendered, racialized and sexualized (Chen, 2012; Puar, 2018). If post-phenomenology is genuinely concerned with issues of power and (inter)subjectivity, or even if it is solely focused on describing the world of objects, the dynamics of racialization, gendering, and sexualization cannot be avoided; they encode how bodies and things move through space and take form. As I hope to have demonstrated in this brief discussion, our accounts of social worlds are seriously lacking if we fail to account for forms of social difference and how they shape socio-spatial orders.

VII Conclusion

As is clear from this discussion, there remain many questions to be asked of post-phenomenology. This discussion has not exhausted these questions. Yet it has identified two key problems within post-phenomenology – questions of the subject and of social difference – and attempted to demonstrate why these questions matter. In closing, I present three broad recommendations for the further development and refinement of post-phenomenological geographies, particularly as it relates to its own genealogical inheritances and contemporary engagements with geographic thought.

First, there is a need for more careful genealogical work in post-phenomenology, both in terms of locating and specifying its own conceptual origins and its relation to other perspectives in geography and social theory. Post-phenomenologists need to closely read and situate the work of the philosophers to whom post-phenomenology critically responds, including Merleau-Ponty and other phenomenologists. This is not to argue that all commentaries on post-phenomenology have to undertake a detailed exegesis of major works of philosophy; as Seamon points out, there are legitimate arguments to be had about what role, if any, foundational philosophical texts should play in the elaboration of new theoretical and methodological approaches to the phenomenological tradition (2019: 38). Instead, I am simply suggesting that engagements with these thinkers should be based on textual evidence, charitable interpretations, and logical arguments rather than sweeping dismissals of internally-heterogeneous and theoretically complex intellectual traditions as ‘humanist’ or ‘Cartesian’ and thus not worth engaging. Taking a more open and intellectually curious approach to phenomenology, especially to the work of Merleau-Ponty – a figure who has been caricatured at the greatest expense of post-phenomenology – would likely lead in productive directions and contribute various conceptual and analytical resources to the task of reconstructing phenomenology.

As I have argued in this paper, one potentially useful direction for furthering these genealogical considerations would be to reflect on the development of critical phenomenology, a parallel strand of ‘post-phenomenology’, and consider how it has addressed a shared set of critiques of classical phenomenology while not foregoing considerations of subjectivity and difference. Insofar as critical phenomenology has been in sustained conversation with debates and concepts in phenomenology for decades, an engagement with critical phenomenology may aid post-phenomenologists in developing more nuanced critiques of phenomenology and finding ways to expand and revise its central tenets without rendering it unrecognizable. However, it may also be the case that there is too much separating critical phenomenology and post-phenomenology intellectually and politically to make this dialogue work. Yet existing work that straddles these divides and their competing commitments proves encouraging (e.g. Simonsen, 2010), as do new engagements between critical phenomenology and geographic theory (Kinkaid, 2019c).

In the event that a dialogue between post-phenomenology and critical phenomenology is not very productive or generative, there are various other resources within geography that can aid in addressing the problems I have outlined in this paper. There are several paradigms adjacent to post-phenomenology that have taken up issues of social difference and how we might approach it after an ‘ontological turn’. This includes critical work in assemblage thinking (Kinkaid, 2019b; Saldanha, 2006; Swanton, 2010a, 2010b), affect (Lim, 2010; Saldanha, 2010), and non-representational theory (Colls, 2012; Nash, 2000), among others. This work is animated by feminist, queer, and anti-racist commitments that seek to explain how difference matters, socially and materially, within these contemporary paradigms. Insofar as these approaches generally share the ontological stances of post-phenomenology, they can serve as a resource for incorporating concerns with subjectivity and difference into post-phenomenology. Given these extant and well-developed engagements, there is no longer any excuse to ignore, deconstruct, or sidestep the problems posed by social difference in post-phenomenological accounts when these issues have been thoroughly reconceptualized to align with the ontological commitments of post-phenomenology.

Pursuing these lines of development, I think, will aid in the development of a more nuanced and robust reimagining of phenomenology in geography. In seeking out these new directions, post-phenomenologists should not feel shackled to the history of phenomenology in the discipline, which had its own philosophical problems and limitations (see Pickles, 1985; McCormack, 2017: 4). Rather, we should re-approach the rich and ongoing contributions of the phenomenological thought and fashion a post-phenomenological approach that can respond to the contemporary landscape of critical geographical thought and its concerns. Doing so will require careful attention to this tradition, its variegations, its limitations, and its ongoing relevance to the study of geography. It will also demand, like any intellectual project, a reflexive accounting of our own commitments, the limitations of our epistemological vantage points, and an awareness and recognition of the political implications that emerge as we articulate new philosophies of space and the social (Kinkaid, 2019a).