Hello, my name's Tom and welcome back to my channel where I talk a little bit about theatre,
a little bit about being a PhD student and a little bit about those things on a collision
course with one another. Today, another episode of What the Theory?,
my little series in which I attempt to provide some quick and simple and, hopefully in some
ways enjoyable, introductions to some key theories within the humanities. If that sounds
interesting to you, if you're a massive nerd like me and that sounds interesting then please
do consider subscribing and, if you have any thoughts or comments along the way then do
drop those down below. Today, however, we are looking at Phenomenology.
So most of my recent What the Theory videos have primarily focussed on understanding the
world through a semiological lens. In this regard what we've done is we've looked at
the world as being made up of signs and symbols, as essentially being a meaningful place which
we as "readers" of this logical world decode in order to understand what the empirical
meaning of the world around us is. Primarily, we've been interested in exploring why a certain
sign or symbol comes to stand in for a certain concept or thing and what the development
of that decision might mean for the underlying power structures that might exist there.
This is broadly known as the Cartesian approach to understanding the world. Named after the
French philosopher René Descartes, essentially what it means is approaching the world as
a logical place. I often like to think of the Cartesian approach to be what people outside
of academia assume is the stereotypical academic approach and that is to be slightly joyless
and slightly emotionless in our understanding and interpretation of the world.
However, our experience of the world is not entirely logical or scientific. At a very
basic level, it's obvious that our senses play a huge role in how we interpret the world
around us before any of that semiotics stuff comes into play. Furthermore, our emotions
have a huge handle on colouring the pieces of cultural fragments that are flowing into
our brains. The Cartesian approach suggests that these
emotions, these imperfections in our senses are distractions from the true meaning of
the outside world. The Cartesian approach assumes that the world outside of our minds
has a definite meaning and that we therefore interpret that meaning imperfectly. Phenomenology,
on the other hand, suggests that meaning only really comes into existence in relationship
with our own senses and our own emotions and our own consciousness.
So, on the one hand, we've got the Cartesian approach which assumes that the world has
a correct meaning which we then process slightly imperfectly whereas the phenomenological approach
suggests that the two are in actual fact combined and that our interpretation of the world around
us is part of what the world around us actually means.
To give an example, although in my own research, I primarily focus on that Cartesian, very
logical, meaningful approach, lots of people who work in the same field as me, theatre,
tend to find phenomenology to be really, really useful. Because, in attending any live event,
whether that's a show or a music gig, our emotions going in to see a live performance
might effect how we decode the meaning of that live performance. The Cartesian approach,
then, would be to suggest that there is a correct meaning to the performance being watched
and that all those other things are distractions from that true meaning, whereas phenomenology
would suggest that those other elements, such as our own emotions going in, are actually
part of the meaning of that performance because the meaning of the performance only comes
to exist as experienced by a human person. And it gets even more complex. So, the idea
of meaning coming into existence through the relationship between the outside world and
our own senses and our own feelings is only a very basic understanding of phenomenology.
As we dig deeper into the academic literature what we find is an exploration into how our
own awareness of our own consciousness actually comes to influence how we understand the world
around us. In a lot of what I'm talking about in today's
video, I've particularly drawn upon some of the scholarship of Heidegger who uses the
word "dasein" which, roughly translated from the German means "being there" or "existence"
and he uses this term to talk about a particular, situated moment of consciousness.
When we talk about phenomenology in these words, however, I think it can sound very
heady and very complicated. How does our consciousness, whatever that might mean, effect our absorption
and interpretation of the world around us? Today, then, I want to mainly use an example
and that is to look at the time element of our consciousness. Because time is clearly
a huge part of how we experience the world. And yet it's not something we can see or hear
or touch or smell and its certainly not something we can feel emotionally. Obviously, we can
measure time using those concepts of hours and seconds and minutes however how we experience
time as a conscious, lived experience doesn't always mao on to those hours and minutes as
we might expect. We talk about time flying when we're having fun and time dragging. And,
when we're talking about time phenomenologically, its not those Cartesian, those logical measurements
of time that we're talking about but that experience of time.
A recent work of culture which I thought explored and engaged with this idea of the phenomenology
of time really well was the Christopher Nolan film Dunkirk. Hopefully, by taking a quick
look at this film, you might begin to understand how we might talk about time phenomenological.
To briefly summarise, Dunkirk is a fictionalisation of the evacuation from the Dunkirk beaches
during the Second World War while the Nazi's has the upper hand. And, throughout the film,
there are three storylines which follow three different sets of characters and also work
around three different conceptions of time. One storyline follows a group of soldiers
as they wait to be evacuated from the beaches. Another follows three civilians as they sail
across the English Channel as they attempt to pick up some soldiers and take them back
to safety.The third storyline follows a pilot as he flies across to beat off some enemy
aircraft to rescue some soldiers in that way. The narrative drive of the film, therefore,
revolves around this tension of us finding out whether the soldiers will manage to be
evacuated before the enemy arrive. However, for these three different groups of people,
what constitutes a long time or a short time varies greatly. For those on the beach, then,
we first meet them with a week to go before the enemy arrive and that may sound like a
long time, however, once we take into account how many soldiers are waiting on that beach
and we take into account the fact that they've got to be picked up by little ships and taken
out to big destroyers and then the fact that the destroyers have got to get back without
being torpedoed, suddenly a week doesn't seem like that long. The civilian boat which sails
across the Channel sets off with a day to go until the enemy arrives. But the fact that
it's only got a tiny little motor means that that day too is, in fact, a short amount of
time for them to get there and get back. Finally, the pilots of the Royal Air Force have only
one hour to get from Britain to across the beaches at Dunkirk to fight off the enemy
aircraft. Where the film really plays with the phenomenology
of time, then, is by stretching, or condescending (depending on how you look at it) each of
these storylines to sit across the same length of time of film. So, in our experience of
watching the film, the week in which the soldiers are waiting on the beaches and the hour in
which the aeroplane is flying across the sea are experienced as the same amount of time.
Because, although these periods of time vary greatly in their quantifiable amount of minutes
or seconds or hours, in fact, when they are experienced in relationship to the time pressure
of the enemy arriving and the speed with which that certain form of transport can travel,
they feel, phenomenologically, like a similar amount of time.
Dunkirk, then, is a really good example of a piece of culture that really plays with
that idea of the phenomenology of time. Because, rather than suggesting that time gains meaning
through us measuring it in hours and minutes and seconds, instead what it does is suggests
that our experience of time only gains meaning only once we know what we're set against.
So, this has been a very brief introduction to phenomenology, particularly focussing on
that idea of time. But I hope that that idea of time can start to give you an example of
how we might understand this concept of consciousness which I think can be quite tricky to get your
head around and I know is something I struggle with massively quite a lot. But it's really
good to have these ways of starting to dig beneath the substrate of phenomenology to
get down into those really nitty gritty, complex debates. If you would like me to go further
into any of the bits of this video or have any questions then please do pop those down
in the comments as well as if you've got any suggestions for potential future videos. And,
if you've enjoyed it, please consider giving it a thumbs up, if you haven't maybe give
it a thumbs down. Thank you very much for watching and have a great week!