Operationalizing Perceptual Phantasy

Abstract In several notes from his Ideas ii , Husserl suggests we should see imagination not only as a doxic counterpart to perception, but also as an act capable of reduplicating emotional and practical content. Consequently, we should also conceive of an emotional and practical imagination, which he designates as Quasi-Fühlen and Quasi-Tun (Hua iv : 275). Moreover, in his notes on image consciousness, he introduces the concept of “perceptual phantasy” to designate a hybrid mode of phantasy, which comes to bear in various ways within the realm of perception itself, for instance when attending a theatre play or contemplating physical images. When considering this expanded view of imagination, it might first appear rather hard to convert into a methodological procedure proper. How can one, for instance, methodologically operationalize something like emotional phantasy and is such an operationalization indeed needed for a rigorous phenomenological analysis of emotions in general and fictional emotions in particular? What are the implications of such a move for phenomenology? In light of these questions, this paper focuses on the possible methodological uses of perceptual phantasy. In contrast to plain mental phantasy proper, perceptual phantasy of course has the benefit of offering a far more explicit and stable intuition of its materials. At the same time, however, it seems to be far less flexible and manipulable in the perspective of eidetic variation. This presentation focuses on some of the ways in which perceptual phantasy could be operationalized by referring, on the one hand, to the practice of imaginative interpolation described by Husserl with the term Hineinphantasieren and, on the other hand, to the technical possibilities we now have to freely manipulate our perceived environment via images; for instance, by ways of “augmented reality”. Such a use of media is, I argue, not only an abstract, harmless and neutral possibility, but a potential tool for phenomenological critique as will be illustrated with regard to the practice of counter-investigative “situated testimonies” employed by Forensic Architecture .