Abstract
This paper explores the relationship between crisis and experience, concentrating on ‘excentric positionality’ in relation to the shared world, as presented in the work of Helmuth Plessner. A by-product of the 1920s Weimar Germany, Plessner’s philosophical anthropology, it is argued, presents us with a forgotten blueprint for transitive and compositional approaches to the social world. Instead of the familiar ‘crisis of experience’ used to diagnose ‘what has gone wrong’, it allows us to re-learn how to work with ‘the experience of crisis’ itself. The latter holds the key to a different type of approach based on ‘xeno-communication’. This type of communication utilizes the productive potential of crisis in its uncertainty and hesitation before a decision, showing a way to extend and enlarge experience itself. Cultivation of these ‘excentric’ dynamics in turn suggests new ‘excentric methodologies’ based on a more flexible fit between concepts and the worlds they are meant to describe. ‘Excentric methodologies’ constitute a type of experience-based, analytical response to the shared world. They work with phenomena across spaces and problems, analytically utilizing their joint emergence from the fundamental imbalance and discontinuity characteristic of the human environment.
One may almost always read off what is central from the eccentricities of thought. (Theodor Adorno, 2020: 118)
The sense of overwhelming crisis has become something like a collective, generalized anxiety disorder. From climate change, the swelling numbers of refugees and displaced persons, and the threat of another global pandemic, to the more abstract but no less worrying concerns about the erosion of democracy and the ‘deficit of empathy’, the latter acute enough to make the list of pressing ‘global risks’ as assessed by the World Economic Forum (2019) (see the Global Risks Report, 2019), something close to a permanent ‘state of emergency’ seems to have taken hold. This general feeling of a ‘life in crisis’, already diagnosed by Marx in the 19th century in relation to capitalism, has now reached even deeper than the sense of ‘false consciousness’ that could still be corrected by cultivating a new type of revolutionary awareness. It is felt through the diminished capacity to cope emotionally and intellectually with the many chronic impasses, realities in limbo, ‘fraying fantasies’, ‘dissolving assurances’ and ‘cruel optimisms’ for a fair resolution of the growing list of grievances (see Berlant, 2011).
This deluge of emergencies sits uncomfortably alongside the disconcerting realization that the historically tried and tested methods of resistance or mitigation, deposited into the reassuring confines of ‘civil society’ (broadly speaking) buttressed by the feelings of solidarity and common plight associated with it, have also been thrown into disarray. In fact, it seems that instead of a multitude of crises we might actually be in the midst of a larger and more fundamental one that speaks to ‘the absence of a common world’ (Latour, 2018: 2, original emphasis) – a world lacerated by the intractability of problems of its own making that can only be addressed by a sharp turn of perspective.
In its epistemic inflection, the universality of this crisis shows itself through the perennially precarious fit between concepts and the social relations they are meant to encompass (Descombes, 2000). The emergence of sociology is directly related to this misalignment and the subsequent gap in ‘meaning’ opened up by it. Hence, the promise for a closure of this gap through the ‘science of crisis’ itself, as Comte, who coined the term, originally understood sociology. Since then, sociology has been either in a perpetual state of crisis ‘concerning its basis’ (Plessner 2018 [1931]: 13), or in anticipation of one, where the crisis is still to come (see Gouldner, 1970). This strained relationship between concepts and social relations is more fundamental than any simple readjustment of method or paradigm could compensate for. An adequate response to this crisis, which reopens the question of positioning of human social reality within the sphere of universal relations, requires a thorough reassessment of the workings of experience itself as a creative, structuring force that makes spaces, and not merely inhabits or ‘fills them up’ with social, cultural, political, etc., content.
What is at stake then, as was already evident to the German philosopher and sociologist Helmuth Plessner (1892–1985) at the beginning of the 20th century, is a space in which one no longer may ‘hope to gain anything from a “critical” search for the interweaving of categories in the experiential unity called “the human”’, even though still ‘guided by [it]’ (Plessner, 2018 [1931]: 13). It is this partial disinvestment from the standard categories used to classify human experiences that brings about new spatial awareness through the experience of crisis – a space of emergence for new configurations of life. ‘Crisis’ and ‘experience’, notwithstanding their juxtaposition when we speak of something already in crisis, are otherwise conceptually detached, with little awareness of their overlapping history and identity. Exposing and describing this shared identity, albeit in its preliminary form, is the main concern of my discussion as it unfolds below. To this end, I engage with the classical, foundational moment (at least as far as the human sciences, broadly speaking, are concerned), where such a link was already worked out, although still sublimated and not fully recognized in its consequences. I am speaking here of philosophical anthropology, or more specifically its specific formulation in Plessner’s hands.
Why Plessner? Apart from his rich and ground-breaking philosophy that is still largely confined to the ‘hidden gems’ of social thought, or the fact of the recent and long overdue translation of Plessner’s major works into English, there are more important historical and socio-cultural reasons. Plessner comes from the same cultural lineage of embattled intellects as Heidegger (whose Being and Time was published only a year before Plessner’s Levels of Organic Life), Adorno (for whom Plessner filled in as lecturer at the reconstituted Frankfurt Institute after the war), or Husserl (with whom he studied). But even more important is the fact that Plessner is the product of failure. He is the intellectual child of the 1920s and the crisis-ridden Weimar Republic. His philosophical anthropology is a response to that crisis – a creative answer to its felt but at the time still unclear consequences.
The discussion below makes progressively more incisive analytical forays into some of these consequences, first by briefly considering the history of the concept of crisis, and then linking its etymology to a specific perception of qualitative time based on the notion of ‘kairos’ – the temporality of emergence used by the Greeks to indicate the right time for something to occur. From there, the discussion hits a crucial moment in our exposition of crisis by linking it to the decision-making process, or more accurately a space of hesitation before a decision is taken as such. This is how crisis will show itself in its full extent as a space of untapped potentiality, not merely a state of emergency. Excentric positionality (direct translation of ‘exzentrisch Positionalität’), as Plessner understands it, is where all these moments are fused together into the process that drives the continuous ‘making’ and ‘unmaking’ of specifically human realities. It shows itself as ‘this oblique position [Querlage]’ (Plessner, 2019 [1928]: 288) characteristic of human environments – a fundamental imbalance ‘that generates the shared world and guarantees its reality’ (p. 280). My aim is to take a closer look at this imbalance, situating it within the space of crisis that sustains ‘excentric experiences’ at the same time as it generates ‘excentric methodologies’ as points of access to their presence. By engaging Plessner’s thought, I explore how we can work with the experience of crisis itself as this ubiquitous, modern condition through which any sense of a shared reality is generated. This is very much at odds with the more traditional assessment of modernity as ‘degraded actuality’ populated by the interminable crisis of experience, or the life in crisis, in all its myriad inflections. Said differently, ‘excentric positionality’ works with the generative potential of the primary misalignment between concepts and facts – the same one that Plessner experienced during the times of the Weimar Republic. As such, it enables the active shaping of experience itself, not in its content but its structure. In this form, as a type of oblique view or perception, excentricity launches the possibility of an altogether different register of communication; one that operates on the basis of connectivity with the strange, alien phenomena perched on top of various boundary formations – what Wark (2014) evocatively, even though only in passing and in another context, refers to as xeno-communication.
Crisis: A Relief Profile
Philosophical anthropology, as Honneth and Joas (1988: 41) observe, ‘met with great public interest and assumed an almost fashionable character, which was to be surpassed only by existential philosophy’. Through this type of heritage, philosophical anthropology acquires the status of an overlooked precursor to what Lury (2021: 5) recently described as ‘compositional methodologies’ that emerge together with ‘problem spaces’ – vibrant localities that ‘compose the problem again and again’ as it moves along the axis of existence, taking its place among the myriad of new experiences.
The Weimar Republic, politically and culturally, was the epitome of such a ‘problem space’. It was chaotic, creative, and full of artifice; it was unbalanced and decentered, immersed in the ‘haze of worldviews that overshadowed the political-metaphysical superstructure’ (Sloterdijk, 1981: 500). In other words, it was the type of constantly unsettled space that Plessner later remade into the universal component of the human cultural sphere as expressed in ‘excentric positionality’. But it was never a fully degenerate or degraded reality. This, of course changes by the mid-1930s, when the die betting on the catastrophe has been cast, thus technically speaking ending the time of crisis as the moment that always stands before a decision. One then speaks of crisis in name only, as a label applied to a fully debased reality, but not a process of judgment that can still produce a different outcome.
One of the most desperate instances of grappling with this ‘degraded reality’ is found in Husserl’s last, unfinished and urgently frantic project on the Crisis of European Sciences – a response that emerged ‘out of the breakdown situation of our time’ (Husserl, 1970 [1936]: 58) and a sense of urgency that, if not already felt, would have been intellectually triggered in the 22-year-old Plessner during his time under Husserl in Göttingen between 1914 and 1916. More than a treatise, Husserl’s text is an intervention carried forward by the urgency of the now; a method that searches for a point of access to a different dimension of life. Phenomenology works on the basis of an incisive and decidedly uncompromising act of opting out of the mundane flow of life; a type of ‘self-reflection’ that arrives at a decision (Husserl, 1970 [1936]: 72) to abstain from the already demarcated reality. The aim is ‘to achieve a breakthrough of insight’ (Husserl, 1970 [1936]: 113) by throwing the world that is already in turmoil, due to the commonly accepted but misleading assuredness about itself, into even a deeper crisis that questions the very shape and constitution of things. This second notion of crisis, even though only implicit in Husserl, is worked into the transcendental method itself. Its impact is felt through the operation of epoché in its various renditions. The latter is a method that works by separating various moments from their achieved status of the presently experienced reality, or more accurately the decision ‘Entscheidung’ 1 (Bello, 2015: 4) to do so. To decide in this fashion is literally ‘to cut off’ (from Latin decidere, which the German ‘Entscheidung’ replicates), and hence to suspend, interrupt, bracket, or abstain from the known world, its pre-judgments and naturalized validities. Suspension of all current judgments aims to arrive at a position that, through critical and historical reflection, throws experience out of the present and into a consciousness ‘before all decisions’ (Husserl, 1970 [1936]: 17) were taken to constitute the world as it currently is.
This is not the place to get embroiled in Husserl’s phenomenology and its method any further. The principal point to keep in mind is that the kind of critical reflection that aims to ‘surpass the world understood as the universe of mere facts’ (Husserl, 1970 [1936]: 9) aligns with Plessner’s philosophical anthropology and the deeper notion of crisis (krisis), as the moment of hesitation before a decision. The crucial difference between Husserl’s phenomenology and Plessner’s anthropology is the positioning of the ground on which those dynamics of decision-making play themselves out. Transcendental reduction looks for something like the ‘ur-ground’ that lies beyond the current reality; Plessner’s ‘excentric positionality creates its own ground’ (Plessner, 2019 [1928]: 294) through which varieties of shared experience take form. Phenomenology elevates method above life, something Plessner also accuses Heidegger of doing through the notion of ‘being’, whereas the philosophy of the human (hence philosophical and later, in its final form, political anthropology) brings the methodology of ‘knowing’ and the modality of life, expressed first through the physical body and only then as a symbolic being, into one shared medium of communication. In other words, philosophical anthropology accepts the constitutive estrangement and deception at the base of human social reality that to others appears only as a dangerous distortion. This is also why it has more to say about it through a uniquely positioned, excentric experience generated by the ceaselessly renewed attempt to respond to the external environment, as opposed to filtering it through the diagnostic reassurance about its stability. It is precisely through such an act of responsiveness that Plessner ‘frees phenomenology from all ontological presuppositions’ (Honneth and Joas, 1988: 73).
Thus, the first element in the redrawn ‘character profile’ of crisis is the realization that its constructive and analytical power goes beyond the surface effect of a mere ‘metaphor we live by’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980); that it is lodged in the identity of modern life itself, in its ‘perspectivism, [and] the uncertainty of experience [that is] not a downfall of reality, but rather the beginning of a wealth, even a surplus of realities’ (Beck, 1997: 167) – their multiplication. This is the same perspectivism and multiplication of reality that guided the brief decade of Weimar culture that produced philosophical anthropology in the first place and which ‘in spite of many counterexamples, stands before us as the most self-aware epoch . . . highly reflective, thoughtful, imaginative . . . thoroughly plowed up by the most manifold self-observations and self-analysis’ (Sloterdijk, 1981: 389).
Here are revealed the foundational elements of crisis that touch the structure of perception itself, before the ‘what went wrong?’ question can even be asked. Taken down to its decision-making moment, crisis becomes the most direct and fragile point of contact with various phenomena. This is why historically speaking and ‘at all times the concept is applied to life-deciding alternatives meant to answer questions about what is just and unjust, what contributes to salvation or damnation, what furthers health and brings death’ (Koselleck, 2006: 361). Said differently, the experience of crisis demands a ‘decision for an actuality’ (Whitehead, 1978 [1929]: 43, my emphasis), in the process generating ‘a reflexivity of the type where in place of disciplinary objects we have constitutive questions’ (Roitman, 2014: 91). It is in this form that crisis becomes not only ‘essentially a theory-shaping force’ (Gouldner,1970: 488) but also and especially a process of shaping experience itself.
The landscape left in the wake of this force can be quickly gauged by considering the many attempts to shift perspectives on the world we co-habit, searching for a ‘sociology beyond societies’, to use Urry’s (2000) still resonant phrase. These decentered and rescaled ‘analytical attitudes’ (of which only a few can be mentioned here) have released various objects, creatures, and other material and symbolic, organic and inorganic, human and non-human elements (Appadurai, 1986; Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Coole and Frost, 2010; Haraway, 1985, 2016; Ingold, 2013; Latour, 1993, 2003) into the fray of the shared world. The net effect of this re-scaled vision is not simply a heightened awareness of crisis of various sizes and proportions – the crisis of empirical sociology (Savage and Burrows, 2007), the crisis of the empirical dimension itself (Adkins and Lury, 2009), the crisis of experience and commonality where ‘all find themselves facing a universal lack of shareable space and inhabitable land’ (Latour, 2018: 9) – but the demand for ‘real answers’ that come in the guise of various non-representational theories (Thrift, 2008) that must ‘re-assemble the social’ (Latour, 2003) and liberate its cyclical re-enactments (Law and Urry, 2004), repopulating the world along the way with various ‘new assemblages’ that emerge from new materialisms (Coole and Frost, 2010), vitalisms (Bennett, 2010) and bio-political realities (Rose, 2007), to mention but a few. It seems we have reinvested in crisis as an experimental and experiential 2 dimension. All this constitutes a clear departure from the traditional critical theory based on the diagnosis of various forms of alienation and false consciousness underpinned by the crisis of experience; a perspective captivated and ultimately captured by the ‘what went wrong’ narrative that in the end concludes with a sense of hopelessness because ‘the marrow of experience has been sucked out’ (Adorno, 1997: 31) of existence.
Hence, the subsequent move in the re-drawn profile of crisis is to decouple it from the sense of emergency – a late addition (Koselleck, 2006) to its range of significations that, nonetheless, quickly came to dominate its complex and nuanced history. A more accurate take is to think of crisis as an emergence, even if an alarming one, of difference either expected (as a climax of a process) or unexpected although potentially awaited (like the anticipation of an epochal event) – a marker of circumstances requiring a decision that, at its most intense, could mean choosing between stark, life altering alternatives (hence the original medical meaning of crisis as the critical moment of decision affecting the course of a illness). What is crucial here is the plasticity, or the morphological effect of crisis as something that ‘takes hold of old experiences and transforms them metaphorically in ways that create altogether new expectations’ (Koselleck, 2006: 374). In this form, crisis becomes the nexus of excentric communication where the message and the medium collapse into a singular point of mediation between something that is about to expire and another thing to come. Or, even more precisely, crisis triggers a communicative event that ‘forces a situation of decision that would not exist at all’ (Luhmann, 2002: 162) without it.
Derived from the Greek root krino – to ‘separate’, ‘judge’, ‘divorce’, but also to ‘quarrel’ or ‘argue’ (hence the cognates of critique/criticism, among others) (Koselleck, 2006: 358) – and the older, Indo-European krei – to ‘sieve’, to ‘distinguish’ and ‘discriminate’ – crisis works through discontinuity by throwing duration ‘off-track’ and reconfiguring space and time by enlarging the sense of the present, imparting to it more gravity and momentous energy, lacing it with anxiety, but just as crucially, possibility. The ‘mechanics’ of krisis (crisis) is thus most directly responsible for the presence of what we have come to know as experience that absolutely depends on such exaggerated contrasts and disrupted commonalities. For Plessner, this notion of disruption is much more than a rhetorical trope. Apart from experiencing it in the most immediate way through the cultural and political turmoil of the Weimar years, from the evolutionary perspective, disruption or interruption also constitutes the basic building-block of all life, because ‘everything that is alive exhibits discontinuity in its continuity’ (Plessner, 2019 [1928]: 116). And it is in this form that crisis was present from the beginning, already central to the life of the Greek polis that relied on the immediacy of critical judgment by its citizens as the expression of a functioning community (Koselleck, 2006: 359).
The exaggerated sense of immediacy and presence crisis evokes is the result of the intimate, etymological relationship between krisis and kairos – time (Pirovolakis, 2017). Greek thought generally distinguished between chronos, the quantitative, chronological time underpinned by the ‘how long’ question, and kairos as the qualitative, opportunistic time, guided by the question of ‘when is the right time’ for something to transpire (Smith, 1969). It is in this way that, in addition to dealing with immediate concerns, ‘crisis might refer to a vanished or envisaged identity’ (Pirovolakis, 2017: 200) but always through the frame of a ‘critically right time’ for one thing to disappear and another to appear, based on the exercise of judgment that actively implicates the before and the after in the now that demands or imposes a decision. There is then a complex existential, historical and philosophical relationship between crisis as the signature of modernity (Koselleck, 2006) or Neuzeit – literally ‘new, contemporary time’ – and what Benjamin (1968) referred to as the Jetztzeit – the ‘time of the now’. The latter is not the ‘homogenous empty time’ (the time of chronos) but a time filled to the brim with the vibrancy of things that, much like ancient kairos, is a time overripe with opportunity and potential – a temporal dimension ‘shot through with chips of Messianic time’ (Benjamin, 1968: 263). The ‘now-time’ essentially uses duration against itself, extemporizing it so to speak, to unmoor experience by ‘blasting’ new life out of the continuum of history (Benjamin, 1968: 261). This is how the experience of crisis is freed and deployed, through ‘the time of the now’ which is the time of crisis in its full meaning and extent.
Such regenerative temporality is but a surface expression of the deeper logic of ‘excentric positionality’. As a type of duration, it dwells in the pre-decision moment of the ‘not-yet standing in the now’ (Plessner, 2019 [1928]: 161). This is how actuality and potentiality are harmonized into a conditional being that lives its own eccentric paradox of belonging to actual reality but also not belonging, given how it is never completely here, precisely because it is extended towards the horizon of what is still to come; towards the possibility that it itself is (Plessner, 2019 [1928]: 163). Excentric temporality, as we might call it now, is a boundary at which the standard flow of time is re-sequenced; where the ‘after’ and the ‘before’ exchange positions, similar to the hysteron (later) – proteron (earlier) figure ‘that runs counter to the successive direction of what exists in passing time and amounts to connecting the future back to the present’ (Plessner, 2019 [1928]: 164). Now, it is true that ‘this proteron hysteron [sic] is the schema of material, semantic, dependency, or grounding’ (Plessner, 2019 [1928]: 164) of all life. But it is especially significant for the shared world of the human sphere that lives on the conscious apprehension of possibility. This sense of possibility is more than just an expression of a genetically pre-determined or sequenced course of development but is rather full of invention, artifice and thus unpredictability as to its extensions. All this is enclosed in the experience of decision-making, in itself
. . . a constitution that pervades all of the human’s existential circumstances. It is the present that makes these circumstances a situation. Its circumstances demand decisions from the human, no matter whether or not they present themselves as having to be dealt with by choice and resolution, by free act or self-control . . . That is how there can be, for the human, the right moment, the order of the day, the missed opportunity and the opportunity seized . . . There are boundaries and limits to what is possible here and now. This narrowness of the situation makes it possible to see the present or presence of a reality that does not exhaust itself in the perspectives of the situation. (Plessner, 2018 [1931]: 57, second emphasis mine)
Being in the present of decision-making demands a special type of attentiveness to the possibilities enclosed in the moment only the experience of crisis can sustain. Lindemann (2019) understands this as the execution of a ‘reflexive deduction, in which the self-referential structure of the execution of life, the realization of boundaries, is once more reflexively related back to itself’ (p. 103). This sort of self-relationality also triggers a type of overflowing of experience where ‘the living body experiences not just its own states (hunger, pain, emerging impulses) but the extrinsic and foreign entities it encounters’ (Lindemann, 2019: 103) – an encounter that, without pre-judgment and hence before its social, political and cultural reconfiguration, could only be approached through the type of openness that indecision and hesitation provide. Reflexively deduced relationships bypass the individually centred, restrictive intimacy of familiarity, resemblance, and recognition. Instead, they open themselves up to the uncertainty in its full potentiality – or, in fact, they let in experience, which, in its raw form, makes itself known as an encounter with the unknown.
The impact of this is profound because experiences cannot take (their) place without this sort of swelling of potentiality that rips things out of their normal cycle of continuity, what Simmel described as an ‘adventure’ (Abendteuer) (Simmel, 1971 [1911]). Approached in this way, crisis is not simply the ‘neon sign’ for modernity, even though it has become the most vibrant ‘metric’ of its volatility and contingency. It is not enough ‘to observe crisis as a blind spot . . . [that] allows certain questions to be asked while others are foreclosed’ (Roitman, 2014: 94). Rather, given how this deeper sense of crisis underlies various forms of life, past and present, we have no choice but to go a step further and re-learn how to experience it not as spectators or observers but as fully responsive participants who ‘own it’, re-remaking it into our experience.
‘Excentric’ Experience
In an incisive take, Lindemann (2019) describes excentric experience as a moment of ‘social undecidedness relation’. Buoyed by the ‘time of crisis’, the krisis-kairos double bind where the boundary between indecision and decision emerges as something palpable, the social undecidedness relation becomes ‘a reflexive turning upon the factual state of existing in relationships of touch’ (Lindemann, 2019: 102) with various physical and symbolic realms. It is expressive of the fact that in Plessner’s anthropology all spaces are actively made, hence experienced, not simply entered or observed and, by extension, merely occupied or seen.
If a singular organism is circumscribed by its potentiality, of being a conditional entity suspended between actuality and possibility, between the ‘not yet’ and the ‘now’, as we have already discussed, relating to the world through undecidedness is the anthropological version, in the broadest cultural and political sense, of the same as yet indeterminate potentiality through which the world is mediated. This type of mediation does not grant primacy or special privilege to any particular point of view, whether theoretical or cultural. All these come with inadvertent distortions perpetuated by any presumed ‘native’ familiarity with the world. Instead, Plesser calls for an early form of ‘cultural relativism’ that begins with de-centering the European state of mind, for ‘it is not until it renounces the hegemonic position of the European system of values and categories that the European mind completely uncovers the horizon onto the originary multiplicity of historically-become cultures and their worlds aspects’ (Plessner, 2018 [1931]: 28). This historically and culturally relativist positioning through what today we might refer to as a ‘decolonizing’ attitude is one logical consequence of Plessner’s entire system. It is expressive of the unfixed, unsettled and unfathomable nature of the human realm that, according to Plessner, at the best of times finds only a partial resolution in various forms of attachment and value. In this unsettled environment, experience becomes an absolutely indispensable type of awareness that ‘play[s] a role in virtually every systemic body of thought’ (Jay, 2005: 4). Experience (Erlebnis) is thus not so much an object of study, like it is for instance for Adorno in its many forms of degradation in the ‘culture industry’, as it is the primary building block of human consciousness that arises as the consequence of constant distancing from the world (Plessner’s excentric positionality) that then must be filled in, and constantly re-built using regenerated symbolic orders. For Dilthey (1976), this translates into a special type of methodology that is expressive of the reflexivity foundational to the human reality, characterized by the power to re-configure the flow of events. This is why ‘Plessner begins [with the] fractured, discontinuous structure of human life [in the process intending] a naturalistic radicalization of Dilthey’s Lebensphilosophie’ (Joas and Honneth, 1988: 71).
The most fundamental quality of experience is its expansive and creative potential. Experience only makes sense and maintains itself as renewed encounter, as extension, or augmentation of reality. This is why any ‘experience worthy of the name thwarts expectation’ (Gadamer, 2013: 350), either growing and transforming the old and familiar pathways of identity-making, or creating completely new ones, through a process of self-overcoming. Taken thus, experiences do not so much define our sense of reality as they continually push it over the edge into states of disequilibria and, through these, into new horizons of possibility. We should note here the interweaving among crisis, experience and expectations. The singular effect of crisis, as we recall, is its morphological ability to re-cast expectations and, through it, re-shape the way any potential experience is actualized (Koselleck, 2006: 374). It is in this sense that crisis becomes the condensed nucleus of experiential reality.
Crisis breaks up the seeming continuity of space and time, unmooring it from the built-in expectations and frames of reference. It does this by literally redrawing the boundaries between the self and the other, letting the estranged elements touch and become the aspects of the inside (Simmel, 1971 [1908]: 144). Perception is thus freed, if only at that critical and decisive point, from its ‘self-centred’ (individual and collective) anchoring, because it is here and at that moment that ‘the certainty and uncertainty in life’ are brought into contact (Simmel, 1971 [1911]: 193). This is because ‘the human being not only lives (lebt) and experiences (erlebt), but also experiences himself [sic] experiencing (erlebt sein Erleben)’ (Plessner, in de Mul, 2019: 73).
It is here that the significance of crisis comes into a full view. Crisis is the proto-experience of a decision for an actuality. It functions as an instrument of exposure and an organ of hesitation; a circuit-breaker thrown into the continuity of life, that casts things into new formations. Such critical decision-making is interminable, because there are as many forms of experience as there are bodies (material and symbolic) ‘composed of various centers of experience, imposing the expression of themselves on each other’ (Whitehead, 1938: 32). We know all too well that this is far from a benign reality, because such multiple-registry of encountered and potential experiences demands that their meanings also be endured, even suffered. Culturally speaking, we swim in the reservoir of this ‘sufferance of meaning’ (Uexküll, 2010 [1934]) that can be felt through any imposition of value.
Excentric Communication
Excentricity emerges from the Realpolitik of organic life; out of its agonistic, creative self-constitution. It is literally wrested out of the unfathomable continuity of life through the perennially regenerative historical crisis (Plessner, 2018 [1931]: 48); a crisis that is experienced as history, in itself ‘a constantly effected decision, the decision that is to be made for a present’ (Plessner, 2018 [1931]: 48). The issue here is not simply that such decision-making has a past. Rather, such critical decision-making is itself built into the historical architecture of ‘pastness’. And when apprehended against the horizon of universal relations, that past presents itself as the history of ‘having-decided for’ an actuality, or against it. This is how we are from the start immersed in a generalized state of ‘agonistic belonging’ (Gilroy, 2019), as far as anything human-oriented is concerned. Any sense of a common world is a hard-won and an unstable side-effect of constantly communicating with alien things, forces and histories. In this basic configuration, the world is discontinuous, populated by adjacent and parallel but not necessarily intersecting spheres of life.
The distinguishing mark of the human world is precisely this type of consciously directed transitivity, a ‘rooted groundlessness’ 3 (Plessner, 2020 [1941]: 39) that, through multiple technological, imaginative, and abstract modifications, straddles multiple environments, if ever so precariously. This is why our world is always partially decentered. Through multifaceted encounters, objects and spaces are detached from their original placements and re-assigned to new positions – material and symbolic. Thus, ‘to be excentrically positioned means that the living subject has an indirect-direct relationship to everything’ (Plessner, 2019 [1928]: 301). This paradoxical entanglement in ‘mediated immediacy’, as Plessner (2019 [1928]) is careful to emphasize, constitutes one, unified excentric stance, not two conditions between which we oscillate (p. 303). It is only in this way that our actions acquire the degrees of freedom necessary for various forms of collective and individual self-expression. Whereas at other organic levels, organisms are centered and fused with their own environments, humans, even in all their anthropocentric blindness, are fundamentally diffused and excentric, spilling over beyond the strict confines of their surroundings. In short, our centers are mobile and detached. It is this ‘alien givenness’ of the world that turns reality into one that must be mediated to be communicated with, thus opening up a semiotic gap and a constant need for sense-making that can never be completely settled. Whatever the abstract, symbolic and material contents that serve as the fill-in materials for the artificial islands of cultural expression, they cannot escape such xeno-communication, in ‘the double sense of communication with what is strange and also . . . a hospitality towards what is alien’ (Wark in Moreno, 2014: 1). Xeno-communication is the primary positionality of uncertainty and indecision surrounding the still unformed relations. As such, it serves as the condition of possibility for all subsequent, more elaborate systems of information exchange, because xeno-communication is first of all a process of selection and decision making about encounters, not content transmission or management. Crisis plays an imperative role here. It expresses our constitutive estrangement from the world because ‘excentricity [also] means that the human doubts the immediacy of his [sic] knowledge, the directness of his contact with reality’ (Plessner, 2019 [1928]: 305). This is how the experience of crisis moves in step with the critical response that undermines the assurance of a constant world. It is through such excentric orientation that we communicate with unfamiliar experiences and spheres of being. It is not only the fact that humans ‘stand apart’ from themselves (Plessner, 2019 [1928]: 277) and from the world they inhabit but the consequences of this apartness that are crucial, because these lead directly to the need to share this constitutive estrangement amongst ourselves – to parcel it out.
We are thus deep in a constitutive crisis of positionality in relation to our surroundings. The impact of this crisis depends on how the information about the world we produce is experienced. Whatever its shape, such experience always emerges as a detour from the directness of organic life via the ‘natural artificiality’ of all our cultural endeavors in their creative, conceptual design: ‘Artificiality is the detour to a second native country, where the human finds a home and absolute rootedness’ (Plessner, 2019 [1928]: 294). This excentric positionality is not only found in the cumulative effect of historical life but also felt through the limit conditions that constitute the boundary situations of our everyday existence – run of the mill realities like Plessner’s investigation into the acts of laughing and crying (Plessner, 2020 [1941]) as well as more traumatic events like, for instance, chronic or terminal illness. One illuminating recent example of how excentricity works itself out in the course of existential encounters at the limit of their load-bearing capacity comes from Stern (2020). The fittingly entitled Diary of a Detour documents the symbolic and material adjustments demanded along the way of communicating (xenocommunicating, in fact) with the ‘alien presence’ of a terminal illness (chronic lymphocytic leukemia). Written in a series of reflective bursts, the text maps out the many decentering interruptions to the prescribed experience of an illness.
At play here is precisely the type of excentric logic that is able to ‘shift the I’ (Stern, 2020: 3) into other material and symbolic registers. Apart from all else, this can be accomplished by encountering other living creatures, such as chickens in this case, or more precisely the strange experience of raising them, as Stern decides to do. Engaging this new and alien medium allows the prescribed, dominant experience of ‘being ill’ to pass through a new space. The old symbolic forms are uprooted and rerouted, forming a new ground underneath one’s feet that literally mediates the illness via something like ‘alien ambulation’ – in this instance, chicken feet strutting around the yard. These, as well as other uncanny sounds and pulses, such as clacking and pecking, throw things out of rhythm and out of sequence. They reinscribe the always self-centered but now deformed by an illness environment into new idiorrhythmic (one’s own idiosyncratic pulse/rhythm) patterns – ‘a kind of dispatching along an eccentric path’ (Barthes, 2013: 4) of life. This is how we are in the midst of sympoiesis – of ‘making-with’ (Haraway, 2016: 58), and co-constituting what for Plessner also became the indexical condition of our shared-world (Mitwelt) – that ‘sphere of absolute disclosure’ (Plessner, 2019 [1928]: 283).
Plessner (2019 [1928]) ultimately concludes that ‘excentricity does not permit an unequivocal fixing of one’s own position’ (p. 317). There is certainly a constant demand for such a fixing that re-appears in various domains of life, but no sooner does it establish itself, no sooner is it rescinded, put in a position of ‘a constant annulment of its own thesis’ (p. 317) – its own rootedness. It is this existential paradox that blocks any permanent claim to a common world, an artificial configuration that is as durable as the imposed and always decaying value-systems on which it depends. The principal take away lesson here is that a common and a shared reality are not the same thing – a distinction any serious analytical encounter with the general structure of the social world cannot ignore.
Conclusion: Towards Excentric Methodologies
Of what use is philosophical anthropology today? If the question is one of relevance of the social sciences in the time of crisis, one that asks ‘in what way are concepts and social relations two sides of the same coin?’ (Descombes, 2000: 41), then Plessner’s philosophical anthropology goes further than other analytical frameworks towards reducing the communicative gap between abstraction and life, precisely because it makes it its main task to inhabit the boundary between the two. If excentricy harnesses the impulse to constantly remake ourselves, then excentric methodologies are forms of analytical perception that try to keep apace with that process, documenting how problems and spaces emerge together. The analytical approach derived from Plessner’s struggle for and with experience under the conditions of crisis in the 1920s Weimar results in a particular and in itself a bespoke way ‘of posing problems [that] must renounce the guarantee of . . . being answered [because] its objects cannot be regarded as . . . variables that are exhausted by determining points in space and time’ (Plessner, 2018 [1931]: 42–3). The human sciences are full of unfathomable, open questions projected onto the horizon of expectations where ‘life-reality . . . one that is always to be seen anew because it permanently renews itself in a different sense’ (Plessner, 2018 [1931]: 43) is located. This way of posing problems fits the contemporary ‘post-truth’ environment better than the old structural divisions between nature and society, politics and culture, and so on. Now problems are not simply puzzles to be situated and solved but points of contact with and information about reality that arise together with the current circumstances. As the new xeno-communicative entities, they rescale our expectations, subjecting things ‘to the needs of answer-ability rather than the demands of know-ability’ (Lury, 2021: 198).
Excentric positionality problematizes relationships in new ways, imbuing them with renewed methodological potential. The net result is the creation of artifacts and interfaces as ‘meeting points’ (Lury, 2021: 37) at the limit of various symbolic and material boundaries. Whereas ‘classical methodologies’ keep things anchored as firmly as they can in the prescribed sense of reality, i.e. the sociological, political, natural, cultural, economic, and so on, excentric methodologies release phenomena from this constraint, letting them drift through and across spaces, where they undergo a metamorphosis acquiring new dimensions that result in the emergence of new forms of experience. This type of emergence works on the basis of communication that answers to the presence of the estranged, foreign, unknown element, without imposing itself symbolically on it, because it speaks from the boundary of decentered positionality and hence a diminished certainty about itself. This is the space of judgment and responsiveness; the space of crisis as experience that makes Plessner call for the ‘science’ of experience as ‘open immanence’ (Plessner, 2018 [1931]: 48), one that pushes the limits of perception that ‘cannot and ought not limit itself to the human as a person . . . mak[ing] the same old mistake of purporting to survey from one experiential position things associated with different experiential positions’ (Plessner, 2019 [1928]: 24). It is a process of moving through and not out of difficult spaces – one that embraces the experience of crisis as interminable reality-testing.
