Abstract
Schutz’s references to literature and arts in his theoretical works are manifold. But literature and theory are both a certain kind of a finite province of meaning, that means they are not easily accessible from the paramount reality of everyday life. Now there is another kind of referring to literature: metaphorizing it. Using it, as may be said with Lakoff and Johnson, to understand and to experience one kind of thing in terms of another. Literally metapherein means “to carry over”. Metaphorizing in this view is then a specific kind of border-crossing between different provinces of meaning. That poses two questions: 1. What means finiteness of those provinces of meaning, what kind of border crossings are possible? What is the ground for metaphorizing meaning? 2. Could this concept used for founding a theory of the constitution of the societal and of society, that overcomes the dichotomy of structure/agency? These questions will be answered with one example in view: Schutz’ report to Kaufmann of his first visit of Husserl describing his experience as feeling like Wilhelm Meister at the Society of the Tower. In a first step this metaphor is presented together with some crumbs of metaphor theory. In a second step these crumbs will be connected to Husserl’s concept of experience. After developing a short overview over Schutz’ “finite provinces of meaning,” the relation of experience, metaphors to the intersubjectivity of these provinces in their dependence from writing and printing is discussed.
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Notes
As far as I can see the “Structures of the Life world”, as outlined by Alfred Schutz in his last months, offer no new insights to this strand of his theory, see Alfred Schutz Papers, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, b. 9, f. 175, 5854–5903 (see also Schutz and Luckmann 1973b: 306 ff.). The same holds good for Luckmann’s elaborations of these notebooks in Schutz and Luckmann (1973a: 49 ff.) and Schutz and Luckmann (1973b: 131 ff.).
A processing which involves a lot of failures, of detypifiying etc. as Gadamer (1990: 359) emphasizes.
Lacan has identified metaphor and metonymy as the two modes of the unconscious, see Lacan (1991: 40 ff).
This transfer could be read as a specification of the concept of “objectivation”, which “is meant to characterize, in general, the embodiment of subjective processes in the objects and events of the everyday life-world.” (Schutz and Luckmann 1973b: 264). “Objectivation” then is a complex process with different stages both inside and outside the subjective consciousness and far from being a univocal representation of former experiences.
That doesn’t mean to state an objective reality, but just a kind of shared reference, sufficient enough for the purposes at hand.
Berger and Luckmanns (1966) theory of institutionalization based on routinization is the main column for a social theory of knowledge. Hopefully the ideas presented here are assist in advancing that project.
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The author is grateful for the stimulating criticism and remarks from both the reviewers. He is particularly indebted to Hubert Knoblauch, who helped to avoid structuralistic misunderstandings.
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Sebald, G. Crossing the Finite Provinces of Meaning. Experience and Metaphor. Hum Stud 34, 341–352 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-011-9196-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-011-9196-7