Simon Lafontaine
Post research fellow, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Postdoc research fellow, Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC).
I graduated with a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the University of Brussels on everyday mobility and migration in urban space. My dissertation advances an approach to mobility as part of a theory of creative action through data collection, description and interpretation of different kinds of oriented movements in space and time, and revisits Alfred Schutz's social phenomenology to analyze the living processes involved in our choices of action and our gearing into the world, sometime moving beyond familiar boundaries to cope with the unexpected challenges that confront us in everyday situations.
During my graduate studies at UQAM, I conducted research on art intervention in the urban landscape in the perspective of the sociology of everyday life and the philosophy of the ordinary. My MA thesis attempted to uncover the experience of the new and unexpected in urban space by focusing on the site-specific performative installations Hypothèses d’amarrages from SYN collective, and by examining their traces in the urban landscape of Montreal and the urbanistic discourse.
My interests also cover Georg Simmel's relational approach to the social and his later writings on life’s self-transcendence and authentic individuality.
Supervisors: Louis Jacob, Nathalie Zaccaï-Reyners, Antonino Mazzù, Thomas Kemple, Hubert Knoblauch, and Jochen Dreher
Postdoc research fellow, Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC).
I graduated with a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the University of Brussels on everyday mobility and migration in urban space. My dissertation advances an approach to mobility as part of a theory of creative action through data collection, description and interpretation of different kinds of oriented movements in space and time, and revisits Alfred Schutz's social phenomenology to analyze the living processes involved in our choices of action and our gearing into the world, sometime moving beyond familiar boundaries to cope with the unexpected challenges that confront us in everyday situations.
During my graduate studies at UQAM, I conducted research on art intervention in the urban landscape in the perspective of the sociology of everyday life and the philosophy of the ordinary. My MA thesis attempted to uncover the experience of the new and unexpected in urban space by focusing on the site-specific performative installations Hypothèses d’amarrages from SYN collective, and by examining their traces in the urban landscape of Montreal and the urbanistic discourse.
My interests also cover Georg Simmel's relational approach to the social and his later writings on life’s self-transcendence and authentic individuality.
Supervisors: Louis Jacob, Nathalie Zaccaï-Reyners, Antonino Mazzù, Thomas Kemple, Hubert Knoblauch, and Jochen Dreher
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Papers and Book Chapters by Simon Lafontaine
the other with love for the other in the intersubjective dialectics of reality.
Weber’s later elaboration of the category of subjective meaning and Simmel’s attention to the intricacies of individualization are shown to articulate solitude both as a counterpoint to loneliness and as a kind of social action that reveals the possibility of restoring communication between discordant perspectives on social reality.
Conference Papers by Simon Lafontaine
Following Husserl’s ontology of the life-world and Schutz’s constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude, I investigate the phenomena of typification and idealization underlying everyday knowledge by which locomotion is constructed and change over time. The subjective-constitutive perspective of phenomenology on the social life-world brings locomotion back to the intentional experiences by which they are formed in human consciousness and objectivated in materialities and cultural artefacts.
I further develop a phenomenological sociology of mobility grounded on the distinction between the “act of locomotion” and the “mobility” of the subject. Whereas locomotion is the objective correlate of an action that sedimented in the past and is anticipated to be reproduced in the future, mobility itself bears a tension between anticipated reproduction and supervening actual experience. As the subjective a priori of locomotion, mobility refers to the virtual presence of emerging possibilities in the field of consciousness and to their concretization through the constructive powers of ongoing action. My social phenomenological perspective traces back locomotion to the experiential mobility toward novel experiences and differences in meaning to account for deviations and changes in anticipated courses of action.
Bearing that in mind, the present communication revisits the social type of the adventurer as depicted by Simmel. The adventurer epitomizes a form of experience in which the experiencing subject is directed toward the unexpectedness of events. This implies a restless impulse that counteracts the course of everyday activities and reaches out by intimate necessity a “transcendent” meaning in the shifts, accidental episodes, encounters that shape one’s life.
Life transcends itself and through this movement of incessant formation it creates “something more”, “extra- social imponderables”, that “fragment” the continuity of social and individual forms. The experience of transcendence is indeed a fragmentary one. And yet, being fragmented is no mere state of incompleteness but has a more fundamental significance: being only fragments of the social world and of our own unique possibilities.
In this respect, the adventurer is intimately acquainted with individuality and difference in meaning by embracing the usually unnoticed and incidental rush of life against historical patterns, cultural and personal forms. Since the adventurer qua social type remains a part of the world and of the self, the form of experience assumed here does not lead to an openness to the absolute indeterminacy of life. As a projection and expectation of upcoming experiences, it continuously shapes the future and therefore paves the way for an active readiness and flexibility that both generate differences in everyday journeys and enable the coordination of action through a hold of their potentially surprising character.
Comprehensive interviews conducted in Brussels with car drivers about their everyday journeys are mobilized to emphasize the “intermediate” time-space of the road. In fact, the system of automobility impacts travellers’ more or less explicit itineraries, motives, projects, and plans for life in such a way that it may prompt differences in meaning and flexible coordination of action and interpretation in occasions, accidental episodes and encounters on the road. Remoteness and relatively vacant landscapes combined with the incessant flow of diversified social biographies constitute an exemplary case to explore a specific orientation toward the upcoming experience, namely the unexpectedness of events.
In order to flesh out this orientation, literary realities drawn from contemporary American road novels are brought into discussion. Fiction acts here as an analyzer of implicit strata of meaning which are more or less unnoticed and taken for granted in everyday life. Wandering is a form of experience of space freed from the temporality of the project, with its typified goals and expectations. It is often depicted as a restless impulse to move forward, an openness to the future and its possibilities. Proposing the hypothesis of a continuity between the quotidian and the exceptional, the present communication works to understand how the structures of the motorized time-space, embodied through taken for granted typifications and routines, continuously shape the upcoming experience and pave the way to an active readiness to cope with the surprising features of events.
the other with love for the other in the intersubjective dialectics of reality.
Weber’s later elaboration of the category of subjective meaning and Simmel’s attention to the intricacies of individualization are shown to articulate solitude both as a counterpoint to loneliness and as a kind of social action that reveals the possibility of restoring communication between discordant perspectives on social reality.
Following Husserl’s ontology of the life-world and Schutz’s constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude, I investigate the phenomena of typification and idealization underlying everyday knowledge by which locomotion is constructed and change over time. The subjective-constitutive perspective of phenomenology on the social life-world brings locomotion back to the intentional experiences by which they are formed in human consciousness and objectivated in materialities and cultural artefacts.
I further develop a phenomenological sociology of mobility grounded on the distinction between the “act of locomotion” and the “mobility” of the subject. Whereas locomotion is the objective correlate of an action that sedimented in the past and is anticipated to be reproduced in the future, mobility itself bears a tension between anticipated reproduction and supervening actual experience. As the subjective a priori of locomotion, mobility refers to the virtual presence of emerging possibilities in the field of consciousness and to their concretization through the constructive powers of ongoing action. My social phenomenological perspective traces back locomotion to the experiential mobility toward novel experiences and differences in meaning to account for deviations and changes in anticipated courses of action.
Bearing that in mind, the present communication revisits the social type of the adventurer as depicted by Simmel. The adventurer epitomizes a form of experience in which the experiencing subject is directed toward the unexpectedness of events. This implies a restless impulse that counteracts the course of everyday activities and reaches out by intimate necessity a “transcendent” meaning in the shifts, accidental episodes, encounters that shape one’s life.
Life transcends itself and through this movement of incessant formation it creates “something more”, “extra- social imponderables”, that “fragment” the continuity of social and individual forms. The experience of transcendence is indeed a fragmentary one. And yet, being fragmented is no mere state of incompleteness but has a more fundamental significance: being only fragments of the social world and of our own unique possibilities.
In this respect, the adventurer is intimately acquainted with individuality and difference in meaning by embracing the usually unnoticed and incidental rush of life against historical patterns, cultural and personal forms. Since the adventurer qua social type remains a part of the world and of the self, the form of experience assumed here does not lead to an openness to the absolute indeterminacy of life. As a projection and expectation of upcoming experiences, it continuously shapes the future and therefore paves the way for an active readiness and flexibility that both generate differences in everyday journeys and enable the coordination of action through a hold of their potentially surprising character.
Comprehensive interviews conducted in Brussels with car drivers about their everyday journeys are mobilized to emphasize the “intermediate” time-space of the road. In fact, the system of automobility impacts travellers’ more or less explicit itineraries, motives, projects, and plans for life in such a way that it may prompt differences in meaning and flexible coordination of action and interpretation in occasions, accidental episodes and encounters on the road. Remoteness and relatively vacant landscapes combined with the incessant flow of diversified social biographies constitute an exemplary case to explore a specific orientation toward the upcoming experience, namely the unexpectedness of events.
In order to flesh out this orientation, literary realities drawn from contemporary American road novels are brought into discussion. Fiction acts here as an analyzer of implicit strata of meaning which are more or less unnoticed and taken for granted in everyday life. Wandering is a form of experience of space freed from the temporality of the project, with its typified goals and expectations. It is often depicted as a restless impulse to move forward, an openness to the future and its possibilities. Proposing the hypothesis of a continuity between the quotidian and the exceptional, the present communication works to understand how the structures of the motorized time-space, embodied through taken for granted typifications and routines, continuously shape the upcoming experience and pave the way to an active readiness to cope with the surprising features of events.