Jacqueline M. Martinez was recently elected to be the Vice-President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. This means, as of 2024, she will be the President of that organization. The purpose of this portrait in Black Issues in Philosophy is to introduce readers to her thought, although she is already well known in a variety of fields ranging from communicology to phenomenology to Chicana Studies and Queer Theory.
My knowledge of Martinez’s work spans three decades. It began during her years at Purdue University, where she was an assistant professor in Communications and Women’s Studies. Purdue had the distinction of a stellar faculty whose research brought phenomenology and a variety of disciplines—especially Communications and English Literature—together. It was a place in which thinking was always “both-and,” and Martinez was one of its ideal exemplars. Her book Phenomenology of Chicana Experience and Identity: Communication and Transformation in Praxis(2000) was a landmark text whose impact continues to be felt, as references and discussions of it have appeared in journals, anthologies, and conferences across the globe. It brought to the fore discussions that gained much resonance in contemporary discussions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class marked by what is now known as “intersectionality.”
Martinez’s approach to intersectionality studies differs, however, in that she has never treated poststructuralist approaches, which tend to dominate intersectional analysis, as axiomatic. Indeed, although she often refers to her own work as semiological, phenomenological, and decolonial thought, she never took for granted the intrinsic legitimacy of phenomenology or semiotics. Her approach is radical in the sense of being willing to interrogate all impositions on free thought. The effect is a form of metacritique in which even intentionality—the sine qua non of phenomenological approaches—must be brought into question. The brilliance of her insight is that all theory involves a communicative practice. Unlike the German critical theorist Jürgen Habermas, however, who regards consciousness as a form of Cartesian haunting of thought, Martinez understands the underlying structure of any act of thinking. In short, intentionality for her is not psychological but in the very grammar of the act, as, indeed, it is in my view for Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alfred Schutz, and most great phenomenologists. It is, in other words, an emergent structure of thinking, which makes it, albeit not a well-formed formula of closed possibilities but an openness of being in relation both to what is thought and the act of thinking. This is what takes her into the semiological elements of communicology. That “both-and…” to which I referred emerges, and she continues that interrogation well into her recent work.
Like Habermas and Schutz, Martinez’s work addresses what it means to conduct rigorous social science. Two articles that bring to the fore the importance 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), both of which I have taught in my doctoral seminars on phenomenology and philosophy of social sciences. Both articles bring questions of epistemic decolonization to questions of method. In those articles, she joins theorists in the Global South who question the logic of contraries in most colonial epistemes, where a form of Manichaeism dominates thought. The logic there prevails so long as separation could be maintained as self-contained “wholes” in which there is no cultural or, even more radically, any other kind of interaction. The clear collapse of communicability is a consequence.
The always-incomplete element of communication, where interaction requires active participation in what one cannot completely control, leads to complicated questions of mixture, more radicalized, as Martinez points out not only in those but also other articles such as “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 form of mixture adheres to an element of reality in which we are always in contact, but also the completion of which our reach is always wanting. As reality can never be completely “inside” anything, there are always opaque dimensions to which practices of purity in the form of light in and by itself leads to unintelligibility. The paradox—and I would add maturity—of thought is that it is always indebted to what is other than illuminated thought. I can speak from experience of the profound effect these articles had on my doctoral students not only in my phenomenology and philosophy of social science seminars, but also those in philosophy of culture.
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 first foregrounds her work in critical pedagogy, which addresses the ambiguities and untranslatability of certain communicative practices, as well as her phenomenological work on the constitution of experience. A mistake that is orthodox in many theories of communication is what could be called “the translatability thesis.” The presumption of that position is that one cultural and linguistic framework must be isomorphically related to another for the emergence of communication. The result is pairing as a condition of translation. Critics such as Kwasi Wiredu, Michelle Moody-Adams, Richard Lanigan, and Martinez argue for a shift from isomorphism to pedagogical transformation. What this involves is the understanding that natural languages emerge from different situations and are thus holding different sets of reservoirs of meaning at semantic and syntactic levels. When encounters of difference emerge, untranslatable terms and practices follow, and in those cases, what communicating agents do is to learn the different meanings and practices.
The implications of this understanding are manifold, since it means people can communicate even where they cannot translate. This is an ironic moment, since it refers to the trans aspect of translation, since there is always a meaning that transcends initial encounter. This is one of the reasons for Martinez’s transition from interdisciplinarity to transdisciplinarity. There is thus, then, a form of divergence or nonlinear movement at the heart of moments of communication, which Martinez then extends into the philosophical anthropology of relations produced by that difference. Sexualities, then, are not closed identities added onto communication but instead already at work in the production of communicative relations.
In effect, then, Martinez shares with Sara Ahmed, the famed author of Queer Phenomenology (2006), the insight that intentionality and in fact the existential emergence of any communication and communicative subject are forms of getting “out of line.” There is, in other words, a form of queerness in the divergence from being through which distinction and communication emerge. This underlying haunting of all efforts of being—in a word, to put us back “in line”—places sexuality in a constant jeopardy (which Martinez outlines beautifully throughout Communicative Sexualities). The effort to close ambiguity on the subject leads methodologically as well to models of study that lack nuance, context, and the actual resources of communicative practices at our disposal. In short, we need more mature, subtle ways of studying and understanding experiences of sexuality and their social practice.
New Understandings of Twin Relationships from Harmony to Estrangement and Loneliness is, simply put, poignant and necessary. Twins have been a longtime source of empirical work not only on human science but also those devoted to critical work on the cosmos (as found in St. Augustine’s reference to twins to dispel arguments supporting astrology). This extraordinary book brings to the fore a nuanced understanding, through phenomenological analysis and description, of the lived reality of paradoxes of differences in sameness and the latter in the differences. For Martinez, this project is both theoretical and lived since she, too, is an identical twin. This project delves not only into how twins are studied from the outside but also about their relationships from within. Functioning as an empirical contradiction of overgeneralizations and supernatural reasoning is a double-edged sword as efforts to articulate life projects and narratives of successes and loss are always faced by another who, by virtue of making different decisions, challenges naturalistic rationalizations in some instances and reinforces them in another.
The importance of phenomenology here is its movement of placing to the side naturalistic and ontological investments; in doing so, the phenomena, in this case the complexity of twin relationships, could come to the fore in their meaning. For instance, the challenges of separation for the sake of developing distinct identities produce additional melancholia beyond those of breaking maternal bonds. Sibling bonds here are more powerfully structured for identical twins, which raises other considerations of experiences of bereavement and guilt in mundane life. This book also brings to the fore the specificity of identical twin identity. I can say already that reading this book is such a joy, and I have already placed it on my required readings list for my doctoral seminars in philosophy of social science and philosophy of the human sciences.
With all this, I should like to add that Martinez is a martial arts instructor in the traditional Shotokan karate-do. One could imagine what a phenomenological communicologist brings to the paradoxical philosophy of East Asian martial arts. At times confused with violence, the point of this and related approaches whose origins point back, spiritually, to Zen Buddhism is—through physical motion, sound, and thought—to communicate the futility of violence. The paradox here is that the commitment against violence demands doing something about it. The aim is to stop violence, which at times entails entanglement with those committed to doing otherwise. Beyond the physical disciplining of the body, there is the constant learning of what to communicate to and with the Other in encounters that are not always sanguine. A deeply social practice, the goal is, as Keiji Nishitani concludes in the context of addressing the theodicean problem of evil, to realize that “Salvation for oneself consists only in the salvation of all others.”
The motto of the Caribbean Philosophical Association is “Shifting the Geography of Reason.” Martinez’s work with the organization, especially as its former secretary on LGBTQI+ commitments, meets along with her research in that community’s efforts to realize that goal.
Lewis Gordon
Lewis R. Gordon is Chairperson of the Awards Committee of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is also Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and Distinguished Scholar at The Most Honourable PJ Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at The University of the West Indies, Mona. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021); Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the USA, and Penguin-UK 2022); Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: Writings of Lewis R. Gordon, edited by Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey (Bloomsbury, 2023); and “Not Bad for an N—, No?”/ «Pas mal pour un N—, n'est-ce pas? » (Daraja Press, 2023).
