The Particular and the Provincial: Thinking with Dorothy Smith’s Phenomenology

I focus on Smith’s phenomenological insights related to the concepts of “bifurcation” and “consciousness” to explore the persistent tension in her work between particularity and abstraction. For Smith, because marginalized groups’ experiences are excluded from dominant ways of knowing, we must begin inquiry from the embodied activity of everyday life, never from the abstracted categories of accepted knowledge. Smith’s concept of bifurcation is essential to understanding this. When people experience the world as bifurcated, we should ask how that split illuminates the ongoing production of marginality as constituted by historically specific relations of ruling. “Consciousness” is likewise essential for Smith because it reflects her concern with how forms of domination get incorporated. For Smith, consciousness is not “micro” but reflects the temporal organization of social power. Starting from the particular seems “small” but is actually incredibly ambitious: The most shrouded aspects of social power are visible there.