Jacqueline M. Martinez was not too long ago elected to be the Vice-President of the Caribbean Philosophical Affiliation. This implies, as of 2024, she would be the President of that group. The aim of this portrait in Black Issues in Philosophy is to introduce readers to her thought, though she is already well-known in a wide range of fields starting from communicology to phenomenology to Chicana Research and Queer Principle.
My data of Martinez’s work spans three many years. It started throughout her years at Purdue College, the place she was an assistant professor in Communications and Girls’s Research. Purdue had the excellence of a stellar school whose analysis introduced phenomenology and a wide range of disciplines—particularly Communications and English Literature—collectively. It was a spot through which considering was all the time “both-and,” and Martinez was one in every of its preferrred exemplars. Her e-book Phenomenology of Chicana Experience and Identity: Communication and Transformation in Praxis(2000) was a landmark textual content whose affect continues to be felt, as references and discussions of it have appeared in journals, anthologies, and conferences throughout the globe. It dropped at the fore discussions that gained a lot resonance in up to date discussions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and sophistication marked by what’s now generally known as “intersectionality.”
Martinez’s strategy to intersectionality research differs, nevertheless, in that she has by no means handled poststructuralist approaches, which are inclined to dominate intersectional evaluation, as axiomatic. Certainly, though she typically refers to her personal work as semiological, phenomenological, and decolonial thought, she by no means took without any consideration the intrinsic legitimacy of phenomenology or semiotics. Her strategy is radical within the sense of being prepared to interrogate all impositions on free thought. The impact is a type of metacritique through which even intentionality—the sine qua non of phenomenological approaches—have to be introduced into query. The brilliance of her perception is that every one concept entails a communicative follow. Not like the German vital theorist Jürgen Habermas, nevertheless, who regards consciousness as a type of Cartesian haunting of thought, Martinez understands the underlying construction of any act of considering. Briefly, intentionality for her isn’t psychological however within the very grammar of the act, as, certainly, it’s for my part for Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alfred Schutz, and most nice phenomenologists. It’s, in different phrases, an emergent construction of considering, which makes it, albeit not a well-formed formulation of closed prospects however an openness of being in relation each to what’s thought and the act of considering. That is what takes her into the semiological components of communicology. That “both-and…” to which I referred emerges, and he or she continues that interrogation properly into her current work.
Like Habermas and Schutz, Martinez’s work addresses what it means to conduct rigorous social science. Two articles that deliver to the fore the significance of Professor Martinez’s work in philosophy of social science are “Semiotic Phenomenology and Intercultural Communication Scholarship” (2006) and “Semiotic Phenomenology and the ‘Dialectical Approach’ to Intercultural Communication” (2008), each of which I’ve taught in my doctoral seminars on phenomenology and philosophy of social sciences. Each articles deliver questions of epistemic decolonization to questions of technique. In these articles, she joins theorists within the World South who query the logic of contraries in most colonial epistemes, the place a type of Manichaeism dominates thought. The logic there prevails as long as separation may very well be maintained as self-contained “wholes” through which there is no such thing as a cultural or, much more radically, some other form of interplay. The clear collapse of communicability is a consequence.
The always-incomplete factor of communication, the place interplay requires lively participation in what one can not utterly management, results in sophisticated questions of combination, extra radicalized, as Martinez factors out not solely in these but additionally different articles equivalent to “Interdisciplinary Phenomenology and the Study of Gender and Ethnicity” (2011), “Culture, Communication, and Latina Feminist Philosophy” (2014), and “Cassirer’s Violent Inner Tensions of Culture” (2017). This radical type of combination adheres to a component of actuality through which we’re all the time involved, but additionally the completion of which our attain is all the time wanting. As actuality can by no means be utterly “inside” something, there are all the time opaque dimensions to which practices of purity within the type of mild in and by itself results in unintelligibility. The paradox—and I might add maturity—of thought is that it’s all the time indebted to what’s apart from illuminated thought. I can converse from expertise of the profound impact these articles had on my doctoral college students not solely in my phenomenology and philosophy of social science seminars, but additionally these in philosophy of tradition.
Martinez’s monograph Communicative Sexualities: A Communicology of Sexual Experience (2011) and her co-authored New Understandings of Twin Relationships from Harmony to Estrangement and Loneliness (2021) contextualize her communicative phenomenology of social science. The primary foregrounds her work in vital pedagogy, which addresses the ambiguities and untranslatability of sure communicative practices, in addition to her phenomenological work on the structure of expertise. A mistake that’s orthodox in lots of theories of communication is what may very well be referred to as “the translatability thesis.” The presumption of that place is that one cultural and linguistic framework have to be isomorphically associated to a different for the emergence of communication. The result’s pairing as a situation of translation. Critics equivalent to Kwasi Wiredu, Michelle Moody-Adams, Richard Lanigan, and Martinez argue for a shift from isomorphism to pedagogical transformation. What this entails is the understanding that pure languages emerge from totally different conditions and are thus holding totally different units of reservoirs of which means at semantic and syntactic ranges. When encounters of distinction emerge, untranslatable phrases and practices comply with, and in these instances, what speaking brokers do is to be taught the totally different meanings and practices.
The implications of this understanding are manifold, because it means individuals can talk even the place they can not translate. That is an ironic second, because it refers back to the trans side of translation, since there’s all the time a which means that transcends preliminary encounter. This is without doubt one of the causes for Martinez’s transition from interdisciplinarity to transdisciplinarity. There may be thus, then, a type of divergence or nonlinear motion on the coronary heart of moments of communication, which Martinez then extends into the philosophical anthropology of relations produced by that distinction. Sexualities, then, will not be closed identities added onto communication however as an alternative already at work within the manufacturing of communicative relations.
In impact, then, Martinez shares with Sara Ahmed, the famed writer of Queer Phenomenology (2006), the perception that intentionality and in reality the existential emergence of any communication and communicative topic are types of getting “out of line.” There may be, in different phrases, a type of queerness within the divergence from being by means of which distinction and communication emerge. This underlying haunting of all efforts of being—in a phrase, to place us again “in line”—locations sexuality in a relentless jeopardy (which Martinez outlines superbly all through Communicative Sexualities). The hassle to shut ambiguity on the topic leads methodologically as properly to fashions of examine that lack nuance, context, and the precise sources of communicative practices at our disposal. Briefly, we want extra mature, delicate methods of finding out and understanding experiences of sexuality and their social follow.
New Understandings of Twin Relationships from Concord to Estrangement and Loneliness is, merely put, poignant and needed. Twins have been a longtime supply of empirical work not solely on human science but additionally these dedicated to vital work on the cosmos (as present in St. Augustine’s reference to twins to dispel arguments supporting astrology). This extraordinary e-book brings to the fore a nuanced understanding, by means of phenomenological evaluation and outline, of the lived actuality of paradoxes of variations in sameness and the latter within the variations. For Martinez, this challenge is each theoretical and lived since she, too, is the same twin. This challenge delves not solely into how twins are studied from the surface but additionally about their relationships from inside. Functioning as an empirical contradiction of overgeneralizations and supernatural reasoning is a double-edged sword as efforts to articulate life initiatives and narratives of successes and loss are all the time confronted by one other who, by advantage of creating totally different selections, challenges naturalistic rationalizations in some cases and reinforces them in one other.
The significance of phenomenology right here is its motion of inserting to the facet naturalistic and ontological investments; in doing so, the phenomena, on this case the complexity of dual relationships, may come to the fore of their which means. For example, the challenges of separation for the sake of creating distinct identities produce further melancholia past these of breaking maternal bonds. Sibling bonds listed below are extra powerfully structured for similar twins, which raises different issues of experiences of bereavement and guilt in mundane life. This e-book additionally brings to the fore the specificity of similar twin id. I can say already that studying this e-book is such a pleasure, and I’ve already positioned it on my required readings listing for my doctoral seminars in philosophy of social science and philosophy of the human sciences.
With all this, I ought to like so as to add that Martinez is a martial arts instructor within the conventional Shotokan karate-do. One may think about what a phenomenological communicologist brings to the paradoxical philosophy of East Asian martial arts. At occasions confused with violence, the purpose of this and associated approaches whose origins level again, spiritually, to Zen Buddhism is—by means of bodily movement, sound, and thought—to speak the futility of violence. The paradox right here is that the dedication in opposition to violence calls for doing one thing about it. The intention is to cease violence, which at occasions entails entanglement with these dedicated to doing in any other case. Past the bodily disciplining of the physique, there’s the fixed studying of what to speak to and with the Different in encounters that aren’t all the time sanguine. A deeply social follow, the aim is, as Keiji Nishitani concludes within the context of addressing the theodicean downside of evil, to understand that “Salvation for oneself consists solely within the salvation of all others.”
The motto of the Caribbean Philosophical Affiliation is “Shifting the Geography of Cause.” Martinez’s work with the group, particularly as its former secretary on LGBTQI+ commitments, meets alongside together with her analysis in that neighborhood’s efforts to understand that aim.
Lewis Gordon
Lewis R. Gordon is Professor and Head of the Division of Philosophy at UCONN-Storrs, Honorary President of the World Middle for Superior Research, Chair of the Committee on Public Philosophy for the American Philosophical Affiliation, and Distinguished Scholar at The Most Honourable PJ Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy, The College of the West Indies, Mona. His books embrace Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (2021) and Fear of Black Consciousness (2022). He’s the 2022 recipient of the Eminent Scholar Award from the World Improvement Research division of the Worldwide Research Affiliation.
