Cultivating Perception Through Artworks

Reviewed by: Cultivating Perception Through Artworks: Phenomenological Enactments of Ethics, Politics, and Culture by Helen Fielding April Flakne (bio) Helen Fielding, Cultivating Perception Through Artworks: Phenomenological Enactments of Ethics, Politics, and Culture Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021, 235 pp., ISBN 978-0-2530-5934-5 "What does it mean," asks Helen Fielding in her rich and subtle Cultivating Perception through Artworks "to move phenomenal perception to the foreground ... to be guided by the pulsating movement of life"? (170). The very question seduces, promising a way, forward or back, to another perceiving, one that could vivify contact to "what is actually there" buried beneath our habits of perceiving "according to the forms of my interests and the plans I impose from outside" (170). Since such entrenched habits of perceiving are diversely invested in calcified values of utility and objectivity, unleashing this "phenomenal perception" will require a self-project—a cultivation—that involves an effort, both rigorous and pleasurable, of reflection and critique. Artworks, Fielding assures us, can be our guides, but also our allies, in a critical phenomenology that aims to awaken perception to its own power and possibilities. Fielding's book elegantly models a practice of critical-phenomenological aesthetics in the vivacious company of select philosophers and works of art. Yet beneath what might seem like a trim focus on aesthetic experience, Fielding offers bold, capacious, and generalizable answers to questions that plague the emerging field of critical phenomenology. With her genteel invitation to "cultivate perception," Fielding nudges us to enliven the body and its creative sense-making capacities (perception) by freeing it from the habits and structures that [End Page 132] pattern it. To escape these tendencies will require rethinking acts of perception and reflection, as well as the "subject" of these acts and their milieu. Through a series of conscientious descriptions of encounters with artworks, Fielding convincingly demonstrates how these can prompt a nested series of bracketing (epoché) that severs perception's quotidian ties to objects, creating a space for reflection, even reflection upon reflection. "Encounters with artworks," Fielding explains, "can cultivate perception by simply conditioning the ways we perceive; encounters can also motivate reflection on how we perceive what we perceive, revealing the possibilities of a more deeply relational world" (15). The critical project thus moves from the ordinary ways artworks disrupt and reorient perceptual patterns to revealing "the primordial openness that is embodied perception" that "remains largely in the background unless it is brought to the fore to be reflected upon" (7). In this way, Cultivating Perception revisits a Heideggerian frame story to argue that embodied perception, understood with Merleau-Ponty as whole body egress unto the world, must be retrieved from beneath "closed frameworks" characterized by "a reckoning with what is there through planning, calculation, switching about, and efficiency" (11). At the same time, Fielding resists "postmodern relativism" (11) in favor of a simultaneity capable of supporting an Arendtian shared public space and a contemporaneity that opens intervals of difference. She also seeks to rehabilitate the maligned subject, albeit in an embodied and relational form inspired by Irigaray. Such subject would not be the subject of knowledge nor the object of its own technological domination but rather a site of alteration in the face of otherness (whether this be of other subjects or of the material world). Defending an intact and robust subjectivity is necessary, Fielding maintains, to understand the gap "between a sensible world and the one who senses" (10) and to allow for an openness to "what is there." Of course, "what is there" should not be understood in a naively realist way. The "'real'," for Fielding, is "the insurmountable plentitude of the world" (98), and for sensemaking to happen, there must be "someone there, a point of view who feels, senses, perceives, and is responsible for how they perceive as well as what they do" (13). Only then can we awaken to "embodied perceptual cognition" as a critical "thinking that is reflexively in touch with the sensible, motile affective world that makes it possible" (7) and so catch sensemaking in the act of transpiring. The book develops over three sections, each consisting of two chapters. "Enacting Ethics" explores the roots

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Metaphysics · Perception · Philosophy of language · Philosophy of mind · Philosophy of science · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Art Education and Development · Law · Philosophy