Phenomenology and Media: An Anthology of Essays from Glimpse, Publication of the Society for Phenomenology and Media, 1999-2008 9789731997780, 9731997784

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction: Undercurrents
Hermeneutics and Nihilism in a World of Generalized Communication: Gianni Vattimo on a Late Legacy of Nietzsche - Marc Van den Bossche
Enter the World of Your Heroes: Enhanced-TV, Fans and a New Way of Participation - Mélanie Bourdaa
Dissembling Images: Electronic Media and Writing - Alison Leigh Brown
The Experiential Dimension in Online Learning: Phenomenology, Technology and Breakdowns -
Darryl Cressman an d Edward Hamilton
Depth of Field and the Phenomenology of Global Events - Stephen Crocker
Dancing the Dance: Authentic Engagement in a Created Self or Execution of Practiced Skill - Tracy P. Dalke
The Soul Factor: Deception in Intimations of Life in Computer-Generated Characters - Kathryn S. Egan
Dasein and the Existential Structure of Cinematic Spectatorship: A Heideggerian Analysis -
Kevin Fisher
Roman Ingarden’s Theory of Schematized Profiles: A Dynamic Version - Thor Grünbaum
If Journalists Were Vedantins -
Bina Gupta
Epistemology without
a Vicious Circle - Arnór Hannibalsson
Information Warfare and Leadership: The Philosophical Question of Neo-Modern Soldiership -
Aki-Mauri Huhtinen
“We Are All Subhuman”: Responsibility and Media through Sartre’s Nausea - Julia V. Iribarne
Technological Texture: A Phenomenological Look at the Experience of Editing Visual
Media on a Computer - Stacey O’Neal Irwin
The Opacity of the Transparent: A Time-Dweller’s Voyage in the World of the Film Titanic - Matti Itkonen
Cellular Irruptions
- David R. Koukal
The Digital Ethnography : Multimedia Qualitative Analysis -
Kenneth Liberman
Digital Communities of Representation: Wittgenstein to Brazilian Motoboys - Alberto López Cuenca
Husserl on the Artist and the Philosopher: Aesthetical and Phenomenological Attitude - Sebastian Luft
The Web Site: A Social Event
- Lars Lundsten
Empathy’s Impostor: Interactivity and Intersubjectivity - Paul Majkut
Empathy, Mediation. Media - Chris Nagel
On Modes of Consciousness(es)
and Electronic Culture - Melentie Pandilovski
Culture and Identity in Electronic Space - Lea Marie Ruiz
Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of Quicktime -
Vivian Sobchack
Phenomenology of Internet Privacy (Rights) -
Albert D. Spalding, Jr.
Augmented Reality, Augmented Perception: Phenomenological Approach to Interface Culture -
Janez Strehovec
Reality and Its Simile -
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka
Mobile Communication: The Call of Mobility - Randall Dana Ulveland
Scanning Visual Images and Relations - Jarmo Valkola
Aesthetics of New Media - Krystyna Wilkoszewska
The Mobility of Mobile Phones: A Phenomenological Analysis - Zhenming Zhai
INDEX

Citation preview

Society for Phenomenology and Media Board of Directors Melanie Bourdaa, University of Bordeaux, France Gregory Cameron, Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario, Canada Alberto José Luis Carrillo Canán, Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico Kurt Cline, Taipei University of Technology, Republic of China Stephen Crocker, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada Jean-Yves Heurtebise, Aix-Marseille University, Provence, France Aki Huhtinen, National Defence University, Helsinki,m Finland Stacey O’Neal Irwin, Millersville University, Lancaster, Pennsylvania Matti Itkonen, University of Jyväskylä, Finland Lars Lundsten, Arcada University of Applied Sciences, Finland Paul Majkut (chair), National University, San Diego, California Chris Nagel, California State University, Stanislaus, California Melentie Pandilovski, Contemporary Art Center in Skopje, Macedonia Dennis Skocz, independent scholar, Arlington, Virginia Janez Strehovec, University of Ljubljana,University of Primorska, Slovenia Randall Dana Ulveland, Western Oregon University, Oregon Marc Van en Bossche, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium May Zindel, Benemerita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico

phenomenology and media An Anthology of Essays from Glimpse, Publication of the Society for Phenomenology and Media, 1999-2008 Paul Majkut, Editor Alberto J. L. Carrillo Canán, Co-Editor

¤

¤ Zeta Books, Bucharest

www.zetabooks.com

© 2010 Zeta Books for the present edition All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronical or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. ISBN: 978-973-1997-77-3 (paperback) ISBN: 978-973-1997-78-0 (ebook)

Contents

Alberto J. L. Carrillo Canán

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paul Majkut

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

9 15

Marc Van den Bossche

Hermeneutics and Nihilism in a World of Generalized Communication: Gianni Vattimo on a Late Legacy of Nietzsche . . . . . . . . . .

21

Mélanie Bourdaa

Enter the World of Your Heroes: Enhanced-TV, Fans and a New Way of Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alison Leigh Brown

Dissembling Images: Electronic Media and Writing . . . . . . . .

31 42

Darryl Cressman and Edward Hamilton

The Experiential Dimension in Online Learning: Phenomenology, Technology and Breakdowns . . . . . . . . . . . Stephen Crocker

Depth of Field and the Phenomenology of Global Events . . . . .

54 83

Tracy P. Dalke

Dancing the Dance: Authentic Engagement in a Created Self or Execution of Practiced Skill . . . . . . . . . . . .

95

Kathryn S. Egan

The Soul Factor: Deception in Intimations of Life in Computer-Generated Characters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Kevin Fisher Dasein and the Existential Structure of Cinematic Spectatorship: A Heideggerian Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

116

6

Table of contents

Thor Grünbaum

Roman Ingarden’s Theory of Schematized Profiles: A Dynamic Version . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 Bina Gupta

If Journalists Were Vedantins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Arnór Hannibalsson

Epistemology without a Vicious Circle . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

167

Aki-Mauri Huhtinen

Information Warfare and Leadership: The Philosophical Question of Neo-Modern Soldiership . . . . . .

181

Julia V. Iribarne

“We Are All Subhuman”: Responsibility and Media through Sartre’s Nausea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

195

Stacey O’Neal Irwin

Technological Texture: A Phenomenological Look at the Experience of Editing Visual Media on a Computer . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 Matti Itkonen

The Opacity of the Transparent: A Time-Dweller’s Voyage in the World of the Film Titanic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

233

David R. Koukal

Cellular Irruptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 Kenneth Liberman

The Digital Ethnography: Multimedia Qualitative Analysis . . . .

267

Alberto López Cuenca

Digital Communities of Representation: Wittgenstein to Brazilian Motoboys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278 Sebastian Luft

Husserl on the Artist and the Philosopher: Aesthetical and Phenomenological Attitude . . . . . . . . . . . . Lars Lundsten

295

The Web Site: A Social Event . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313

Table of contents Paul Majkut

Empathy’s Impostor: Interactivity and Intersubjectivity . . . . . . Chris Nagel

Empathy, Mediation. Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Melentie Pandilovski

On Modes of Consciousness(es) and Electronic Culture . . . . . . Lea Marie Ruiz

Culture and Identity in Electronic Space . . . . . . . . . . . . .

7 330 346 357 369

Vivian Sobchack

Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of Quicktime . . . . . . . . . . . . .

379

Albert D. Spalding, Jr.

Phenomenology of Internet Privacy (Rights) . . . . . . . . . . . . 404 Janez Strehovec

Augmented Reality, Augmented Perception: Phenomenological Approach to Interface Culture . . . . . . . . . Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka

Reality and Its Simile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Randall Dana Ulveland

Mobile Communication: The Call of Mobility . . . . . . . . . . Jarmo Valkola

Scanning Visual Images and Relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Krystyna Wilkoszewska

Aesthetics of New Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Zhenming Zhai

The Mobility of Mobile Phones: A Phenomenological Analysis . . .

417 430 452 464 479 490

INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 505

Preface

The collection of essays gathered together in this volume represent the best work presented at the Society for Phenomenology and Media (SPM) annual conferences since its founding in 1999 Originally given as presentations or full papers, these essays were discussed at the society’s conferences, amended and corrected by the authors, and first published in Glimpse, the annual publication of SPM. This collection is intended to give the work of SPM a wider circulation. Professor Paul Majkut and I have coordinated our work as co-editors. The Society for Phenomenology and Media was founded by Majkut in 1998. A Professor at National University in San Diego, California, Majkut, active as a discursive philosopher and journalist for many years, held the idea of a philosophical society devoted to media for many years. Under his leadership and that of subsequent Society Presidents, the society grew and thrived through annual conferences and publications. Annual international conferences have been held without interruption since 1999. The first SPM conference took place in San Diego, California, sponsored by National University and Universidad Iberoamericana of Tijuana, Mexico. From that initial meeting until the present, SPM conferences have increasingly become international. The society today is proportionately represented by Europeans, Latin Americans, and North Americans, and Asian participation is increasing. After three consecutive conferences in San Diego, SPM became truly international beginning with its fourth and fifth conferences, held in Puebla, Mexico, and Helsinki, Finland. During

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Preface

these years, SPM directors made the decision to broaden the direction of the Society by recognizing that phenomenology could no longer adequately serve as its sole philosophical impulse. As a consequence, the society opened its conferences to other schools of thought in the hope that contending views would encourage greater philosophical depth. Philosophy unchallenged is philosophy asleep. Although a variety of phenomenologies, often contradictory, continued to represent the largest single, general perspective within the membership of the organization, it could no longer serve as a firm ground for the range of views included. The term “phenomenology,” at least, was thought to be inadequate. This decision greatly widened the Society’s spectrum of media approaches. Soon feminist theory, semiotics, Marxism, cultural studies, analytic philosophy and positivism found their places at SPM conferences. If originally our conferences were concerned to a great extent with the application of phenomenological methodology to contemporary questions of media, as years went by the main concern shifted more to media themselves taken from many theoretical approaches. At present, SPM has approximately 150 members if all past conference participants are included. Individual conference participation varies between 20 and 45 depending on the site location, the decision of the host, and other conditions. Of foremost importance to conference participation are economic considerations. The economic imbalance among nations, the amount of available university stipends, grants and travel expenses, and other factors have affected the growth of the society, although it continues to grow. Because of international imbalances, SPM took the decision to rotate conferences in Europe, North America, and Latin America. Further, it decided to waive fees for graduate students and junior faculty as needed.

Preface

11

The first ten SPM conferences were: 1999 First International Conference National University, San Diego, California Universidad Iberoamericana, Tijuana, Mexico Keynote: Anna-Teresa-Tymienieska, The World Phenomenology Institute: “Reality and Its Similie” 2000 S econd International Conference National University, San Diego, California Keynote: Vivian Sobchack, University of California, Los Angeles: “Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of Quicktime” Report by Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University: “The Mother of all Phenomenological Websites: Development of ” 2001 Th  ird International Conference National University, San Diego, California. Keynote: Bina Gupta, University of Missouri-Columbia: “If Journalists were Vedantins” Report on Research by J. N. Mohanty, emeritus, Temple University: “Notes of Husserl” 2002 Fourth International Conference Universdidad Autonoma de Puebla, Puebla, Mexico Keynote: Maricio Beauchot, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico: “Verdad y Otredad en Emmanuel Levinas como Raices de la Communicacion” Report Antonio Zirion, Instituto de El Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico: “The Status of Phenomenology in Contemporary Latin America” 2003 F  ifth International Conference Arcata Polytechnical Institute, Helsinki, Finland Keynote: Barry Smith, University of Buffalo: “Medicine and Phenomenology”

12

Preface

2004 S ixth International Conference Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah Keynote: John Durham Peters, University of Iowa: “The Voice and Modern Media” 2005 S eventh International Conference Oregon Western University, Monmouth, Oregon. Seminar Conference 2006 Eighth International Conference National University, San Diego, California Keynote: Julia Iribarne, National Academy of Sciences, Buenos Aires, Argentina: “‘We are Subhuman’: Responsibility and Media through Sartre’s Nausea” 2007 N  inth International Conference National University, San Diego, California. Seminar Conference 2008 Tenth Iternational Conference Universdidad Autonoma de Puebla, Puebla, Mexico. Seminar Conference The 11th annual conference, 2009, was held in Arlington, Virginia and was the first not sponsored by a university. Essays from this conference are not included in this volume. The 12th annual conference, 2010, was held at the Autonomous University of Puebla. In 2011, the 13th conference will be held at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, and, in 2012, our 14th annual conference will return to National University in San Diego SPM conferences are the heart of the society and the best papers have been chosen by an editorial board for peer-reviewed publication here. Glimpse, the annual publication of SPM, is devoted to theoretical and practical analysis of media. The quality of its contents are widely acknowledged. In 2000, SPM initiated the Outis Project on Deception, an interdisciplinary research effort. The Outis Project met separately and circulated its own publication, Outis. The Outis Project was a

Preface

13

long-term research effort that continued, according to plan, through five conferences (2002-2007) held in Krakow, Buenos Aires, Jyvaskyla, and twice in San Diego. These conferences explored aspects of deception not limited to phenomenology, although the project began with Husserl’s question concerning transcendental deception in Cartesian Meditations. The title of the project was taken from the name that Odysseus, held captive in the cave of Polyphemous, declared as his own to the Cyclops: Outis (Greek = nobody). The purpose of the project was to gather Society members around a common theme and long-term effort. Project papers were published in Outis, the project’s journal, and included essays in architecture, art, anthropology, design, film studies, literature, marine biology, media studies, music, philosophy, political science, popular culture, psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology and other disciplines. Essays reflected the central vision of the project: the discovery, analysis, and understanding of deception in all and any contexts. Four volumes of Outis were published and an anthology of a selection of these has now been published by Zeta Books under the title “Deception.” All papers published were taken from the conferences held at Krakow, Poland: Jagiellonian University (2002); Buenos Aires, Argentina: Salvador University (2003); Helsinki, Finland: Jyvaskyla University and the HaagaHelia University of Applied Sciences (2005); San Diego, California: National University (2007). The last took place in Helsinki, Finland (2007): The National Defence University, University of Jyväskylä and the University of Lapland (2008). Professor Paul Majkut deserves a special recognition in my remarks. As I mentioned, he founded and was the first president of SPM. After his original doctoral work in the literature of the English renaissance, he studied as a post-doc student with V. J. McGill in San Francisco. McGill, the eminent American naturalist, student of Husserl, and former President of the American Philosophical Society, had been persecuted during the McCarthy era. His influence on Majkut was significant, leading him to

14

Preface

research interests in non-dualist philosophy, naturalism, and political thought. It is from this point of departure that Majkut’s interest in transcendental deception began. Today, Majkut focuses his thinking on media transition, Shakespeare in silent Films, and the cognitive limits of the Internet. His philosophical influences are Marx, Althusser, Tran Duc Thao, Wittgenstein, Lukacs, and Husserl. In close coordination with the Society members, he has attracted scholars from different continents with diverse approaches to the media and, by doing so, widened the Society’s scope of interests in the humanities, arts, and sciences. Majkut has  been awarded two Fulbright grants (Argentina, Finland) and two National Endowment for the Humanities grants for research on the seven deadly sins (Darwin College, Cambridge University) and the representation of Jews in the Middle Ages (Oxford University). He is a Reader of Manuscripts and Rare Books at the Bodleian Library, the Huntington Library, and the Cambridge University Library. He has received numerous journalism awards from the San Diego, Los Angeles, and Southern California Press Clubs, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the National Conference of Christians and Jews. The publication of this anthology by Zeta Books was made possible by the generous financial support of the CONACyT (National Council for Science and Technology, Mexico), project #58995 (“Philosophy of Technology: The Case of New Media”). I would like to thank former SPM presidents, Paul Majkut, Chris Nagel, and Dennis Skocz, as well as all the Society members who have participated and whose papers were selected for this publication. Alberto J. L. Carrillo Canán Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla, Mexico President, Society for Phenomenology and Media

Introduction Undercurrents

What began in 1999 as a society intended to encourage Husserlian phenomenological research into media practice and theory transformed itself over the following decade into an intellectually open organization that sought the participation of other approaches as vital and pertinent to the future of philosophical inquiry. Indeed, the transformation of the Society for Phenomenology and Media from transcendental phenonemology to open inquiry in media studies began at the first conference and, after a decade, was so complete that the fundamental phenomenological assumption that consciousness precedes being had itself been called into question. The 33 essays collected here from the first ten years of conferences held by the Society and published in its annual proceedings, Glimpse, reflect the Society’s changing concerns and the intellectual diversity it has achieved. Although they cannot gather in their scope the variety of media issues, theories, and practices that have animated our conferences, these essays do present a panoramic overview of the Society’s evolution and its international character. Changes in SPM came about soon after its founding when it became clear that the term “phenomenology” was, at best, a fuzzy catchall that included a variety of contending positions, at worst, a restricted idealist perspective on the world that could not continent, except in self-aggrandizing piety, rival philosophical traditions of the 19th- and 20th-centuries—Marxist, analytic, lingusitic, and logical approaches, among others. Though contending traditions continued to exert influence that exceeded that of the “phenomenological movement,” their objections

16

introduction

were, for the most part, dismissed or ignored. At one of the earliest conferences, participation already reflecting a wide variety of appraoches to media analysis and theory, an eminent phenomenologist proclaimed Marxism a “dead philosophy” and analytic philosophy an “Anglo-Saxon cultural phenomenon,” concluding by dictum that only phenomenology remained a viable philosophical movement. A few participants suggested that phenomenology had shown an inadequacy in approaching historical, ethical, and political questions, and been accused of being an exercise in German cultural studies. These underlying theoretical tensions, even when not explicit, inform the practical applications of theory to concrete situations included in this volume. They are particularly illuminating for questions of media. While phenomenological terminology and rhetoric remain the lingua franca of the Society, that language has generally morphed into pidgin phenomenologese, its rigid and brittle terms softened to accommodate other discourses. In Society meetings, phenomenology has become a manner of speech, an eloquence or rhetoric, as well as or even more than a method and attitude. In the end, the development of the Society did not abandon the phenomenological tradition, but loosened its suffocating subjectivist stranglehold on thought. Phenomenology remained “the heart” of the Society. The intention in expanding the intellectual scope of the Society, after all, was not to invite other points-of-view to conferences in order to judge, belittle, insult, or condescend to them, but to listen and react. As phenomenological thought has expanded around the world, it has increasingly found difficulty locating itself. In November, 2002, the founding conference of the Organization of Phenomenological Organizations met in Prague with the theme “Issues Confronting the Post-European World.” The Society for Phenomenology and Media was among the founding members of OPO and remains a sponsoring member to this day. As the Society representative in Prague, I was impressed with the speakers,

introduction

17

the international intentions, and the fine organizational effort that went into the event. Nonetheless, I came away with a number of troubling observations that were highlighted by the contrast between SPM and OPO. Allow me to summarize the reactions I had at the time before I return to the all-important media concerns of the Society. These observations speak to the causes for change in SPM and its overall consideration of media. It is difficult to believe that the first theme of the Organization of Phenomenological Organizations—issues confronting the post-European world—had the trivial and vulgar meaning that Europeans were now willing, noblesse oblige, to accept non-Europeans into the ranks of those who study European phenomenology, a notion as condescending as it is demeaning, but it is difficult to avoid this conclusion. Sorrowfully, this seems to have been the case. I prefer to think that the organizers of the event had not carefully thought through the proposed theme, but it appeared that European phenomenologists had self-righteously proclaimed that they were open to admitting non-Europeans into their club. This is not to engage the world, but to conquer it, not to confront the non-European world that is a “residuum” of a post-European world, but to invite non-Europeans into a Euro-centric club—after the jargon and rites of the club has been learned. It is in this sense that phenomenology is in danger of becoming a narrative justification within an intellectually colonialist project. If the OPO theme was merely an invitation given to nonEuropeans to take up European Cultural Studies—and there are notable Asian, African, and other thinkers fully capable of taking up this challenge, though they represent a very small, even insignificant voice within their own intellectual traditions—then the pursuit is no longer a philosophical one, but a purely cultural one. When this condescension, together with contemporary concerns of ideological neo-colonialism and cultural imperialism in the air, pushes itself to center stage, phenomenology must pause

18

introduction

and consider the possibility that its own large discourse is tainted by its own cultural biases. Discussion of post-European world issues, ideological as well as philosophical, is today inextricably bound to discussion of “post-colonial” or, more accurately expressed, “neo-colonial” projects—this in the context of political-economic globalization. Outside of the complex position that lumbers through a swamp of unresolved issues within the Western philosophical tradition under the flag of “phenomenology,” more pressing questions concerning the ability of the colonized subaltern to “speak back” within the European imperial narrative—including the phenomenological narrative—are widely discussed today outside of the phenomenological movement. Conclusions reached in these discussions may serve as a deciding test of European phenomenology’s ability to transcend what are primarily German and French cultural studies and reach an understanding that addresses the unpleasant possibility of an eidetic colonialism that is neither intended nor acceptable. Discussion of post-European world issues leads to a specific challenge to phenomenology at the present historical juncture: the creation and practice of a phenomenology of listening. It is in this phenomenology of listening that media studies are crucial. While reception theory and, in literary studies, reader-response theory, have grown out of fertile phenomenological soil, this focus has centered on how a message is heard, not listening or hearing a message from the inside. Just as we accept the distinction between looking and seeing, so too the distinction between hearing and listening is crucial. Setting aside post-colonial theorist claims that the subaltern has no authentic voice but must speak within the imperial narrative (better thought of today as the discourse of globalization), the other possibility of stillborn dialog is explained by a failure of political and philosophical colonialism to listen. Unheard subaltern “speaking back” may as readily be explained as a failure

introduction

19

of imperial listening as an inherent inability of the subaltern to speak back. Listening and speech form the corrective feedback loop, Husserlian reiteration, that defines a living language and its ability to communicate truthfully. Together, listening and speech form the empathetic bridge that sustains intersubjectivity. The announced purpose of SPM has from its inception in 1999 been international communication. SPM has not been alone in this effort. In the effort to bring international voices together into a coherent whole, the World Phenomenology Institute and AnnaTeresa Tymieniecka deserve praise for setting an exemplary model for decades, as does the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and Lester Embree, and Círculo Latinoamericano de Fenomenología and Rosemary Rizo-Patrón de Lerner and Antonio Zirión Quijano. Two problematic aspects of post-European ideology draw our attention: 1) the role of Husserlian phenomenology within the larger philosophical context of dialogic analysis and dialectical materialism; and, 2) the meaning of “post-European” in the context of neo-liberal globalization. “Post-European” theory understood as “post-colonial” theory faces the danger of becoming the ideology of neo-colonialism—and phenomenology the danger of becoming a form of eidetic colonialism. The OPO conference theme presumed that the world was, in fact, at one time European and now it is no longer European, but “post-European.” In a political-economic sense, the distasteful truth is that the world was, indeed, at one time largely European and, in that same sense, it can now be argued that the world is more European than ever—hardly “post-European,” especially if unbridled capitalism is equated with “European.” But the term “post-European”—like the term “post-modern”—is itself ambiguous, even misleading. The globalization entailed by the economic novus ordo, empowered by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and encouraged by a renewed class-impulse towards economic imperialism, intertwined with

20

introduction

the radical transformation of the digital mode of production of artifacts and knowledge in the economic base and media, means that the world remains European, though the people in this hyper-European world are not all European. What does it mean to be non-European in a European world? Specifically, what does it mean for phenomenology to confront issues in a “post-European”—in fact, “more-European”—world? The question of the assimilated Other comes up, but at the same time this brings up the question of the abstraction “the Other” and its usefulness. My co-editor, Alberto J. L. Carrillo Canán, and I had great difficulty making selections for this anthology of essays from the first ten-years of the publication of the Society for Phenomenology and Media, Glimpse. We were assisted in our task by a number of others who offered occasional advice, solicited and unsolicited. With the knowledge that many fine and insightful essays would be excluded, we came to agree on those here printed. Should readers be interested in essays printed in Glimpse not included here, please check the Society’s website: http://www. sophenomedia.com/ The essays in this volume are printed in alphabetical order by last name of the author. Because international standards vary greatly, original reference formatting has been retained as much as possible. Paul Majkut Oxford, August, 2010

Hermeneutics and Nihilism in a World of Generalized Communication: Gianni Vattimo on a Late Legacy of Nietzsche Marc Van den Bossche

The Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo has tried to accomplish a dialogue between Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Hei­ degger in a very particular way. Vattimo starts from the idea that we have to lend a willing ear to the ‘messages’ which were sent by our philosophical precursors, messages which might be fruitful for a better insight into contemporary society. In the case of Vattimo, this includes a very creative intercourse with texts from that tradition. Nietzsche, for example, becomes an anachronistic reader of Heidegger and conversely, he states that—in order to stay loyal to Heidegger—we have to oppose his interpretation of Nietzsche. With Nietzsche and Heidegger as his starting point, Vattimo outlines a nihilistic ontology. According to him, this is the situation where we find ourselves at the end of modernity. The point here is the coincidence of Nietzsche’s thought of the death of God with Heidegger’s idea that there is no Being anymore in the technological society. Vattimo sometimes describes Nietzsche’s contribution to this dialogue by referring to his ‘thesis’ that man has fallen from the center into the X. Nihilism, then, is the process of the decline of metaphysical foundations and of objective values. As we will see at the end of this paper, this process is accomplished in our society of generalized communication and information. Let us first begin with an analysis of Vattimo’s account of nihilism.

22

Marc Van den Bossche

A first, important remark about Vattimo’s nihilism consists in a warning against the prevailing interpretation of nihilism, stating that all values would have fallen into decay or would have been leveled. In the case of Vattimo, nihilism doesn’t have any immediate ethical or political connotations, but only ontological ones. Vattimo aims at another ontology, which can be seen as an alternative starting point for ethics and political thinking. In my opinion, the best definition of this Nietzscheo-Heideggerian nihilism can be found in Vattimo’s book on the ethics of interpretation. About the link between Nietzsche and Heidegger, Vattimo says that it is nihilism which makes up the continuity between them. He repeats that this nihilism cannot be understood as the dissolution of values nor as the impossibility of truth, but as a real new ontology, a real new thinking of being, which can be situated beyond metaphysics. Here, metaphysics is understood in the Heideggerian sense as a thinking which identifies being with the objectivity of the calculated object of technoscience.1 A quotation from Vattimo’s book on the end of modernity corresponds with what is said in the book on the ethics of interpretation, although Vattimo uses another terminology for Nietzsche’s contribution to the fictitious dialogue: “… the fact that Man falls from the center to the X, has only been made possible because being has been dissolved”.2 Here too, Vattimo’s way of thinking is anachronistic: simply because being has been dissolved in our technological society, man does not have a central foundation anymore to direct his thinking and acting. All this shows that Vattimo does not aim at a negation of values and truth, but at an elimination of the objectivistic interpretation thereof, an interpretation which is proposed in technoscientific Vattimo, Gianni. Ethique de l’interprétation, Paris, Ed. La Découverte, 1991, p. 8. 2 Vattimo, Gianni. La fin de la modernité. Nihilisme et herméneutique dans la culture post-moderne, Paris, Ed. Du Seuil, 1987, p. 14. 1

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thinking. As an alternative, Vattimo wants to bring about an ethics inspired by hermeneutic thinking. Most important here is that we keep in mind that Vattimo’s nihilism only concerns being itself. This means that it is about a lot more and about something totally different than merely Man. In a Heideggerian terminology we could state that it is about the actual Seinsgeschick. In a Nietzschean perspective, this is considered by Vattimo as the accomplished nihilism. His conclusion is that nihilism is our only possibility: we now have the possibility to become active nihilists. Does it need to be said that the assessment of this nihilism is completely different in Nietzsche and Heidegger, notwithstanding the harmonious relationship Vattimo identifies between them? According to Nietzsche, the process of nihilism leads to the dissolution of the highest values, and thus to the death of God. Heidegger, on the contrary, would argue that being annihilates itself by being transformed into something valuable. And, we know that, according to Heidegger, Nietzsche’s nihilism is the culminating point of Western metaphysics. What is more: Heidegger thinks that we can go beyond this nihilism, which is even desirable for him, whereas Nietzsche means that we do not have to, nor can expect something else. In Beyond Interpretation1 Vattimo remarks that a nihilistic reading of Heideggerian hermeneutics is certainly not widespread, but that it is typical for what he calls a left-wing Heideggerianism. What does this mean? Vattimo describes this as follows: “Right, in the case of Heidegger, denotes an interpretation of his overcoming of metaphysics as an effort, in spite of everything, somehow to prepare a ‘return of Being,’ perhaps in the form of an apophasic, negative, mystical ontology; left denotes the reading that I propose of the history of Being as the story of a ‘long goodbye,’ of an interminable weakening of Being” (Beyond 1 Vattimo, Gianni. Beyond Interpretation. The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1997.

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Interpretation, p. 13). In other words: nihilistic ontology and left-wing thinking are synonymous. As I already said, this Nietzschean-Heideggerian nihilistic ontology has to be situated beyond metaphysics. This ontology needs neither stable structures nor eternal foundations. It interprets being as an event, as the way in which reality is configured in respect to its specific link with the present time. The thinking of being, means, according to Vattimo, that we are open for messages which have been sent from former times, but also for what is contemporary, for what is called—with a wink at Michel Foucault—the ontology of actuality. More specifically, this means, for example, that we are open for what other cultures have to say to us, but also for subcultures within Western culture itself. These messages touch being, Vattimo says; they constitute its sense, they determine the meaning of the word ‘being’ and of the word ‘reality’. In others words, they show us in which way being gives itself to us in our concrete, contemporary world of experiences. In the messages we receive from the past, neither essence nor any moral imperative is revealed. What is announced are historical values, configurations of experiences, symbolic forms containing traces of living. Vattimo asks us to listen to them with pietas, with the devoted attention these traces of our equals deserve. This is also the reason why we can speak of an ethics of interpretation, and why this ethics is emancipating. This pietas is not guided by an imperative and has become possible thanks to the dissolving of metaphysics, a metaphysics which, according to Vattimo, often prevented us from loving our fellow-creatures. Herewith, Vattimo wants to draw our attention to the fact that metaphysics is a violent kind of thinking. When he describes his nihilism as a ‘weak thinking,’ this is meant as a criticism of the strong thinking of metaphysics. ‘Strong,’ here, means that one starts from certain, unwavering foundations, foundations which refer to the essence of man and society. This kind of

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thinking can be excluding, can cover up the openness needed for the pietas. This is why hermeneutics cannot be an exclusive theory of the conversation of mankind, but has to be this dialogue. Hermeneutics thus must be consequent with itself. According to Vattimo, hermeneutics nowadays has the same function as Marxism in the fifties and sixties, and structuralism in the sixties and seventies. In his interpretation, hermeneutics, which is a legacy of Nietzsche, is the most appropriate thinking in a period where the ‘fabulation’ of everything has become complete. This fabulation, about which Nietzsche already wrote, only becomes comprehensible in our society of generalized communication. Here, the principle of reality has been undermined completely. We now recognize that the world is to be identified more and more as a proliferation of worldviews or images, leading to conflicting interpretations. This proliferation of worldviews or images puts an end to the former ideal of the transparent society. One of Vattimo’s books deals with this item. In The Transparent Society1 we get a clear image of Vattimo’s view of our contemporary society, which is marked by mass media. Vattimo undoubtedly forces an open door when stating that mass media play a decisive role in our postmodern society, even giving rise to it. This does not mean that our society has become more transparent, or more conscious of itself, or more enlightened. On the contrary, it has become even more complex and chaotic than in the past. This may not seem very evident, certainly not for the cultural pessimists among us, but Vattimo states explicitly that our hope for emancipation has to be founded on this relative chaos. Following the increasing possibilities of information about reality in its most various appearances, the idea of that one and unique reality has become less and less thinkable. Vatimo refers 1

Vattimo, Gianni. La société transparente, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1990.

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to Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols and concludes that a prophecy of Nietzsche has become true: the real world has become a fable. In this society, we need an ideal of emancipation based upon oscillation, plurality and, in the end, upon the erosion of the principle of reality itself. Previous ideals of emancipation were modeled according to the image of a clear self-awareness, the self-awareness of someone knowing how the world really fits together. Vattimo refers to Hegel’s absolute spirit and the image Marx created of the working man, no longer slave of an ideology. I think that Vattimo here pleads for giving up the metaphor of the mirror of nature, as has been described by Richard Rorty. This also means that freedom has nothing to do with the complete fathoming of the structures of reality and in the total conformity of knowledge and reality. Thanks to Nietzsche and Heidegger—at least in the way they are read by Vattimo—we now can see the emancipating significance of the end of modernity and its conception of history as progress. From Nietzsche we learned that the image of reality as a well-founded rational order was only a reassuring myth for a still primitive and barbarian humanity. From his side, Heidegger showed us that the thinking of being as foundation and reality as a rational system of causes and consequences was only meant for an ongoing expansion of the model of scientific objectivity in all domains of human thinking and behavior. From an emancipating point of view, this idea is counterproductive. It is only a mentality of wanting to dominate and organize everything so that it can be measured and manipulated. As was the case for the Enlightenment, this technological world bears a dialectic in itself. Due to a kind of perverted internal logic, this world of measurable and manipulable objects has been turned into a world of commodities, images and phantasmagoria of the media. The question in this is, what do we have to do? We can react against this world with nostalgia for a solid, unitary and stable reality. But Vattimo fears that such a nostalgia

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would result in neurotic behavior, directed by the concern to restore the world of our childhood years, where familial authority was at the same time threatening and reassuring. To avoid this kind of neurotic fuss, Vattimo prefers to look at the possibilities for emancipation which could result from this loss of reality. He suggests a way out in the arts, or better, in aesthetics. Perhaps the main characteristics of our existence are primarily manifested in aesthetic experience. Thus, we have to consult the arts, to enable us to understand being. Here too, technology plays an eminent role. Since Walter Benjamin and his essay on the technical reproducibility of the arts, we can leave behind the traditional metaphysical conception of the arts as a place for reconciliation connecting form and matter, or as catharsis. Nowadays, it is rather the experience of ambiguity which is constitutive for the arts, showing us oscillation and displacement. These are the only means by which the arts can finally establish themselves as creativity and freedom in this world of generalized communication. In The Adventures of Difference1 Vattimo indicates that Nietzsche too states that the arts embody precisely that particular place in the history of Western culture, where a Dionysian element has been continuously active, a place of freedom for the kind of thinking that Nietzsche would later on call ‘the will to power.’ In The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche extends this idea. Because the true world has become a fable, there are no facts anymore, only interpretations and symbolic products. In this game of interpretations, which is an aesthetic game, the will to power is the most adequate instrument. Vattimo describes this as a game wherein interpretations have to impose themselves without any founding facts. He compares it with a work of art that is engendered of itself. This omnipresence of the arts, of aesthetics has been fully carried through in our media-society. The rigid, machine-modeled 1

1985.

Vattimo, Gianni. Les aventures de la différence, Paris, Ed. de Minuit,

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organization of society, has made way for a public space, rather characterized by a trend towards aesthetization. The question is whether this has indeed contributed to more freedom and more Nietzschean Freigeistigkeit. Or, are we here confronted with a new kind of paternalism? I think of a book by the German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch, Ästhetisches Denken,1 where the author shows how an excessive aesthetization may also lead to a new kind of uniformity. Therefore, we have to keep an eye upon anaesthetics, upon these things which are withdrawn from experience. Welsch, also published a book together with Vattimo, titled Medien—Welten—Wirklichkeiten2 (Media—Worlds—Realities). In their foreword, both authors state that, through the collected articles in their book, they want to demonstrate that the process of aesthetization not only has a manipulating effect, but also contains possibilities for a liberating, oscillating and pluralistic experience of reality. Vattimo himself understands the actual media-revolution as a hermeneutic-emancipating tendency towards the dissolution of reality. As I have already made clear, Vattimo wants, with Nietzsche as his guide, to use this new constellation to emphasize the inappropriateness of previous critical thinking. More precisely, it is better to abandon the pessimistic attitude of the Frankfurter Schule towards the mass-media. The apocalyptic theses of Horkheimer and Adorno have lost their credibility for more than one reason. The main reason is to be found in the erosion of humanism, starting with structuralism and corresponding with the collapse of the last colonial states. This humanism defended a conception of Bildung, of humanistic formation, founded on the idea of the self-transparency of consciousness. It entertained the ideal of a subject, whose emancipating power was founded on a complete knowledge of itself and in throwing off of ideological veils. In Welsch, Wolfgang. Ästhetisches Denken, Stuttgart, Reclam, 1990. Vattimo, Gianni and Wolfgang Welsch (eds.), Medien—Welten—Wirklichkeiten, München, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1998. 1 2

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this way, the subject was supposed to be able to obtain an objective understanding of the world and history. Adorno thought that this subject would be threatened by the mass-media. As we, in our society of communication, renounce the idea of a transparent society, we also have to get rid of the individual who should be transparent to herself. In this sense Adorno was right: the subject, as the center of an objective world, disappears in the actual situation. Important here is that Vattimo links this evolution with the vanishing of the mechanistic worldview. The society of communication can no longer be thought of according to the model of an engine, situated in the center, from where it directs the whole peripheral mechanism. Instead, we now have an image of a network, without any center. Think of Nietzsche’s idea that the individual has fallen from the center to the X. When we abandon this ideal of transparency, we have to deal with hermeneutics. There too, one no longer believes in the possibility and the necessity of objective knowledge to reach emancipating ends. Neither Hegel nor Marx are our companions on our road to emancipation, but Nietzsche. With Nietzsche we free the game of interpretations from the dominance of the one real Truth. A critique of relativism seems to be plausible here: each one has his or her own small piece of interpretation, presented as eye-catchingly as possible. And indeed, Vattimo too asks what the difference of this relative chaos is, compared to advertising on television. He compares his proposals with what Richard Rorty says about the devising of new metaphors, new descriptions of the world. Vattimo also reminisces about the difference between real and unreal dialogue in Gadamer’s thinking. In the former, each answer is in fact a new question and the game of question and answer never ends. According to Gadamer this is about a never ending hermeneutic openness, which refuses to think in terms of essentialism. To be consistent with his own premises, Vattimo has to admit that his thesis too is only one interpretation among many, and that his interpretation is

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not true in the strong sense. But he is convinced of the fact that this is the most adequate answer to the Ereignis, to the event of being in the society of global communication. Alas, Vattimo casts a pall over our aesthetic enjoyment: the dissolution of reality finds its limits on the free market. That must be the last resort for realism, Vattimo concludes. This conclusion is made in a seemingly negligent way. But I think that the market here is more than just an annoying fellow-player. The real story might end with the conclusion that the market is what permits us to construct our aesthetic existence. And this also means that it limits this aesthetic construction. Vattimo’ s optimism about the disappearance of the regulating center within the world of information technology might turn out to be out of date. I give three examples. One of the pioneers of the World Wide Web, the American corporation Geocities, has been bought by its age-peer Yahoo! for about five billion dollars. The new owner fixed by contract that he was the owner of all sites hosted by Geocities by a license which is everlasting and irrefutable, and he was free to use, change, publish or reproduce its contents. A second example: Matra Grolier Networks refused a site to a gay bookstore wanting to sell books on the Web—gay literature, not pornography. The comment of the server: we do not like that stuff. My last example is about the man who would probably roar with laughter at the idea that the media-society no longer has a center. Through the company Corbis Bill Gates controls the rights of the electronic reproduction of about twenty million artworks. Does this need any further comment? With this rather pessimistic conclusion I do not want to plead for a limitation of the free market. But I think we have to be convinced of the importance of keeping an eye upon new kinds of anaesthetization.

Enter the World of Your Heroes: Enhanced-TV, Fans and a New Way of Participation

Mélanie Bourdaa

Television has changed and is now becoming an on-demand, participatory, non-linear device. When fully realized on a mass scale, our current experience of television will drastically transform. For the first time, possibly, TV content can become something a viewer can control and use to interact. Television is quite new in our society. But since the 1990’s, television experiences an important phase of transformation with the multiplication of channels, especially global and narrow-cast ones, and with the advent of new technologies such as Tivo and interactivity. These transformations, based on the changes in our post-modern society and its sense of immediacy, have also modified the way TV viewers consume TV broadcasts Guy Lochard (1998) explains that “from a simple spectator, the TV viewer is becoming an active protagonist submerged in the promises of the new convergence of technologies.” In fact, the thesis of a fascinated and alienated audience manipulated by the power of the mass media (the Frankfurt School) was displaced by the theory that the audience has a right of negotiation while dealing with a mass medium. TV viewers could use three different positions in order to decode a message: or they accept it, or they reject it, or they negotiate. Moreover, for the researchers of the Cultural Studies the TV viewer is an ‘actor’ (accentuating this notion of activity and choice) constructed by his social, political, economical and cultural background. Serge Proulx named him an ‘interactor’, someone who thinks, decides and interacts. But this glowing definition was moderated by the power of

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the production, whose aim is to make audiences watch their shows. TV viewers use techniques and technologies, created by the production and often diverted by the TV viewers, to be part of a participatory process. One of them, which contaminates all media right now, is interactivity. Interactivity allows the TV viewers to participate in the evolution of TV broadcasts and this new technology can be seen as the beginning of a dialogue between production and TV viewers. A Definition of Interactivity Society has changed and TV viewers are always asking for immediate information and for participation in cultural and political decisions. They also have the latest technology in their hands. New technologies are part of the culture, and now they are an element of media uses. With interactivity, TV viewers possess a new tool to voice their opinion. Television is now associated with the Internet: TV viewers go online to watch videos, TV shows, broadcasts on Internet platforms such as Youtube, Hulu or download whatever they want via peer-to-peer softwares. The old way of watching television, sitting on a couch with the family at regular hours in front of scheduled programs, is gone. Now, TV viewers watch programs alone most of the time. Because they experience TV in new ways, TV viewers are fully skilled in using new technologies, and develop a kind of TV expertise, and this is particularly true with fans who are totally devoted to their shows. They also have more and more equipments at home: several cell phones with various new options in order to watch TV whenever and wherever they want, desk or laptop computers always connected to a fast Internet connection allowing them to be in touch with their friends, to check the news, to watch videos and to research any subject, DVD players, Tivo to record broadcasts and watch them at a suitable time for them. TV viewers experience new media

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temporalities which are connected to family and work temporalities. A new relationship with media and its content has also emerged. However, interactivity is not really conceptualized by a stable definition. Several theorists give their own approach of what interactivity is or should be. In a research on the evolution of interactivity in American TV programs, John Carey sets up the characteristics of interactivity: “whether each households can interact with the system and receive individual responses or if the system is limited to collective voting by all households watching at any given time, types of input such as multiple choice or alphanumeric entries, types of input devices such as keyboard, remote control unit or touch screen, real time or asynchronous interaction, whether interaction takes place on the TV screen or an a separate display device, and, services offered, e.g. information, games, entertainment programming, and communication.” For Thierry Julia and Emmanuelle Lambert, “interactivity gives the ability to the user to create his own path and his own discourse, but sometimes it goes further than facilitating the integration of contributions e.g. when the users become a co-author of the media text.” Ha and James think that interactivity has five dimensions which will help frame the analysis of a website: “playfulness, choice, connectedness, information collection, and reciprocal communication.” Spiron Kiousis is the one who gives the best explanation to what interactivity is: “Interactivity can be defined as the degree to which a communication technology can create a mediated environment in which participants can communicate (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many), both synchronously or asynchronously, and participate in reciprocal message exchanges. With regard to human users, it additionally refers to their ability to perceive the experience as a simulation of interpersonal communication and increase their awareness of telepresence.” Besides, the definition of interactivity can also underline the opportunities and technical tools the

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TV viewer will use to interact, such as: is he going to participate to the shows via his cell phone (by sending overtaxed text messages), the Internet (by checking the website and sending questions) or his remote control (by clicking on it, a gesture he already uses when he goes through channels)? We can see that interactivity is still a hybrid, changing concept. Interactivity requires the presence of TV viewers, a message sender (producers) and feedbacks via an interactive technology, and it involves technical skills from the TV viewer and the ability to make the message evolve. TV viewers have now new tools in their hands, interactivity being the most important one, and can develop new skills, emphasized by the convergence of new technologies. Now, they have to use this technology well, in order to voice their choice, to participate to debates, to help elaborate new innovative concepts, and to be part of the History of the ‘new’ television. Interactivity has entered a large numbers of media, and now TV broadcasts are more and more designed to suit both an off line and on line environment. In this context, interactivity reaches its peak with what is called enhanced-TV. This new form of television is now possible thanks to the development of the Internet and its appropriation by a lot of TV viewers who use this new technology more and more often in their everyday life. Enhanced-TV and the TV Expert Enhanced TV is closely linked to the Internet and to its use by TV viewers. Dennis Quinn, vice-chairman of TBS, a popular American network that broadcasts talk-shows and series, described enhanced TV as a “way to attract the attention of the TV viewers and to build up a loyal audience.” Enhanced TV has slowly been revolutionizing TV programming and has slowly changed the way viewers consume television. Hurst (2000) lists four main forms of enhanced TV that allow TV viewers to interact with their favourite shows when they log on to the channel websites:

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1. fan-based features where viewers can find information on the show and discuss with other fans in a virtual community of devotees and experts of the show 2. game-based features where they can play on the website of the show; for example, fans can play the interactive game Join the Fight on the Battlestar Galactica official website where they choose a side, Human or Cylon, and accomplish tasks to win together 3. information-based features in which TV viewers find more news on the website. (CNN.com for instance) and programming-based features where TV viewers can record selected broadcasts But most of all, what enhanced-TV gives to the TV viewer is more freedom, a notion they have already experienced with the remote control (channel hopping) and with their TIVO (new TV temporality and choices). With this new function, available on the Internet, the TV experience is not limited to the duration of the show. In fact TV viewers and fans can interact before, during and after the TV show with many fans from all over the world, they can post comments on the episode right after it was broadcasted, allowing channels to improve their concepts. Reception of TV broadcasts can now be seen as an endless circle, since TV viewers can interact with the show, the producers, the cast and other fans at any time. Ha and James remind us that “one function that network executives treasure about the Internet in the large quantity of immediate feedbacks that viewers provide to programmers and its potential to improve ratings for the programs.” On one hand the TV viewers are always aware of what is going on in and around their favorite shows thanks to the websites, discussing issues and elaborating new theories with other fans and experts, feeling they are part of the production process. On the other hand, the producers and the channels owners have understood all too well the importance and the impact of the Internet on fans especially. For them, forums of

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discussions are like an “in real-time” barometer of what fans and TV viewers in general think of the show. Producers know that the fan is demanding, and that they “can fully indulge themselves in the program” they love, as Fiske argues (1998). As experts and heavy viewers of the show, they can express their opinions in an attempt to influence the outcome or content of the shows. A real exchange, a growing communication is developed between fans of a TV show and the producers. It is also necessary that the TV viewer feel pleasure when they visit a website. Jakob Nielsen sums up the nine essential points that make a website attractive: “content, simplicity, accommodate different web browsers of users, provide context, resolution independent so that it can be displayed in all environment, one year behind the latest technology because many users do not possess the state of the art technology, fast and practicable response time, meaningful first screen printable webpage.” All these elements will welcome TV viewers on the website and will favor the interactions between the producers and the fans. Henry Jenkins (2002) defines this new way of interacting with TV broadcasts for fans as the ‘cultural convergence’. For him, “cultural convergence describes new ways audiences are relating to media content, their increased skills at reading across different media, and their desire for a more participatory culture. If technological convergence ever amounts to anything more than a marketing gimmick, then it is going to be because we have become more invested in the transformations media content undergoes as it circulates from on context into another. If we are going to be culturally invested in interactive television, it is because our culture has come to value our interactions with television and to perceive television content as a resource in our social interactions.” Now that we have understood the importance of the convergence between the Internet and television programs for both the TV viewers and the producers of TV series, we can analyze how producers manage to make their shows more attractive to their

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fans thanks to more and more innovative features that make the viewer dive into the secrets of the show. Enter the World of Your Heroes: Analyses of TV-Show Websites Today, American series are more and more creative, original, subversive, and TV viewers are fascinated by the storylines, the characters. The more they watch the show, the more they are addicted to it and they want to enter the world of their heroes. TV series have the same effect as a drug on fans: they cannot stay away from the show for a long time. They crave for it. Producers of famous and successful American shows have decided to take advantage of the opportunities given by the Internet: opportunities to entertain their fans during the season hiatus, to create a dialogue with them, to take into account what they like or dislike about the show and what they would like to change to make it better. Sharon Marie Ross talks about ‘obscure invitations’ to describe the strategies created by producers to attract the TV viewers into the mythology of a show. More often, producers create an original website devoted to the show. I will describe three Internet sites that integrates enhanced-TV in their features: The L word, Heroes and Lost. The L Word: A Shared Creation The L word, which describes the loves and lives of a group of lesbian friends in Los Angeles, premiered in 2004 on the American cable channel, Showtime. Since the beginning, fans are passionate about the stories, trying to figure out what will happen next to their favorite characters. Because Ilene Chaiken, the producer of the show, knows that the Internet is part of the TV viewer’s everyday life and that he asks more and more for participation and novelties, she has created a special website OurChart.com, in which she expects fans to take part in the

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production process. The websites features the classical options that any fans want to find on a website: downloads, recaps, shops, news, behind the scenes, forums and communities where they can meet and discuss any topics related to the show or the characters. In addition to these, Ilene Chaiken has developed an interactive game, entitled ‘YOU write it’, which was launched between season 4 and season 5 of the show. She asked fans to imagine and write a scene of The L word which will be included, after acceptation by the producers of course, in one of the episodes of the new season. Never before has such a partnership been built. For the end of the sixth season, which is the last of the show, they also took into account the desires of the fans and wrote the end following the Internet buzz surrounding one couple of the show, Tina and Bette. Fans are now treated with respect by producers because as divers (into the show) and devotees (of the show, or in this case of characters), they appear to be legitimate. Heroes: Real-Time Interactivity Hurst, co-governor of the ATAS’ Interactive Media Peer Group has declared in an interview for the Emmy award journal: “the Board of Governors of the Television academy, in approving the awarding of the Emmy Statue, has set the bar for excellence in this existing and growing area, ‘Outstanding achievement in Interactive Television Award. As audiences increasingly interact with television programming in new and innovative ways, it is important that the Television Academy foster the advancement of new media by recognizing and rewarding outstanding achievement in this area.” During the 2007 ceremony, the website of the American show Heroes was rewarded. This lively, interactive website was improved by an innovation: realtime interactivity. During the broadcasting of the show, every Monday on NBC, TV viewers can log on to the website, interact

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with Heroes and dive into their favorite show. As the website states, all TV viewers need is a computer with an Internet connection. The producers clearly bet on the convergence between TV and the Internet. While they watch the new episode of the show, the fans with their computers can answer questions about the show, participate to polls or debates, meet other fans, and find out how the scenes are shot. Moreover, another feature was set up after the final episode of the first season creating a buzz among the fans. A simple question was asked: What’s your theory? What do you think will happen in season 2? Fans posted hundreds of videos or messages on the forums, creating stories, new characters, superpowers, and participating in the global interest for the show, intensifying their creativity, which is also a characteristics of the fans. Lost: Finding Clues While fans are waiting for season 5 of cult show Lost on ABC, the producers have decided to launch a new alternate reality game to satisfy the needs of TV viewers. The website opens up with a news report released by Oceanic Airlines, concerning its missing 815 flight that crashed between Sidney and Los Angeles with 334 persons on board. But this report is cracked by Sam Thomas, boyfriend of one of the flight attendant. Fans have to help him find out what happened to the missing plane and the persons who were on board. The fan who log on to play has to resolve series of tests, such as finding clues from past seasons in an unknown room, reading strange e-mails, listening to some recorded voice messages on a cell phone, watching videos where something is clearly wrong. While he tries to figure out a way to help Sam Thomas, and to decipher the enigma, the fan can interact with other people who are also playing the game. Thanks to this interactive game, the fan’s need for the show is fulfilled, he can have his regular ‘shot’ and wait patiently for the next season to come.

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Between season 2 and season 3, the producers already created a number of videos, called webisodes which were added to the websites. These videos were especially created for an on line diffusion and allowed fans to understand better the mythology surrounding the show. Fans discovered each week a new clue on the story helping them understand what happened to the survivors on the lost island. Thanks to this slow and breathtaking process allowing fans to take their weekly drug dose, the producers keep in touch with their fans. This strategy is also used by the producers of Battlestar Galactica, in order to give clues to fans and help them unravel the mysteries of the show. TV has reached a new turning point, opening its content to new forms of media like the Internet, collaborating with its audience, adapting to society and the growing need for participation coming from the viewers. Producers have created new innovative and interactive websites, because they have understood the needs of TV viewers, and the needs of fans, this particular expert, to dive into the show whenever they want. Enhanced interactive TV facilitates this new relationship, allowing fans to access new forms of entertainment, to experience new ways of watching their favorite TV shows, keeping in mind they can intervene in the creation process more easily than before. What is important for the fans is the belonging to a virtual community with its codes and interactivity which widens their television experience. We can suppose that the old form of television will soon be obsolete and TV channels and producers will more and more put available content on the Internet, letting TV viewers intervene more and more. We do not think like Jean-Louis Missika that this is the end of television, but we think we are entering a new age, called “techno-television.” This new television is defined by the relationship between television and the Internet, the growing implications of TV viewers and fans in the broadcasts they like and, their new choices of temporalities (watching

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television when they want), of supports (on television, cell phone, laptops) and of modes of diffusion (streaming, downloads, VOD, Tivo). Works Cited: Carey John. “Winky Dinky to Stargazer: five decades of interactive television.” Proceedings of UnivED conference on interactive television, Edinburgh, Scotland. Fiske, John. “The cultural economy of fandom.” The adoring audience: fan culture and popular media, Ed. Laura Lewis, Londres: Routledge, 1998. Ha, Louisa. “Making viewers happy while making money for the networks: a comparison of the usability, Enhanced TV and TV commerce features between broadcast and cable network web sites.” Proceedings of the Broadcast Education Association Annual Conference, Las Vegas, 2002. Ha, Louisa and, Lincoln E. James. “Interactivity re-examined: a baseline analysis of early business web sites.” Journal of broadcasting and electronic media, 42 (1998). Hurst, Bradley S. “add value, not gimmicks with eTV.” I-marketing news 10 July 2000. Jenkins, Henry. “The textual poacher and the Stormtroopers. Cultural convergence in the digital age.” Les cultes médiatiques. Cultures fans et oeuvres cultes. Ed. Philippe Le Guern, Rennes: PUR, 2002. Julia Thierry and Emmanuelle Lambert. “Interactivité(s) et médiation en étroite relation .” Lerass-équipe Médiapolis. Toulouse, 2004. Kiousis, Spiron. Interactivity: a concept explanation “New Media and Society, 4(3), Londres: Sage Publications, 2002. Lochard Guy, and Jean-Claude Soulages. La communication télévisuelle, Paris: Armand Colin, 1998. Missika, Jean-Louis. La fin de la télévision. Paris: Seuil, 2006. Ross, Sharon M. Beyond the box. Television and the Internet. Oxford: Blackwell publishing, 2008.

Dissembling Images: Electronic Media and Writing Alison Leigh Brown

Images are reproductions. Writing is image-making in that its aim is to reproduce some content from one form to another form. One reproduces an idea into text and the result is, necessarily, dissembling. Say I take a picture of myself and transmit it onto my web page. What the viewer sees is a translation of numbers. Literally. Never mind, even, that the image itself is already frozen in falsity. Writing in the frenzy of electronic media is hyper-dissembling. This paper is electronically written, passing back and forth between my computers, my thoughts, printed drafts, conversations, scrawls in the margins from my hand, another hand. Crowding in are the images auditors project from some assemblage of words that catch the mind’s eye, that call present a snippet of song or body. There is the further complication that the differences in image dissemination from one form to another are not as radical as one sometimes imagines them to be. The crucial area of concern in this paper involves the space between rigid designators or categories and the irrepressibility of bodies. I argue that electronic media are negligible factors in writing (of any text from screenplays to letters); instead, honesty about the necessary dissembling images which make up any communication should be the major factor. It is interesting that the belief persists in those times and places where and when one is not already encased in the language and linguistic practices which at once liberate and confine. Once named, one is little in one’s body, one takes teeny tiny steps; once classified according to group, one is weary of this great world. Flowing through the bodies and breaths of writers

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are portions of this energy, crying to be let out, begging to have a little breath blown their way. Projecting, introjecting, plaguing with fantasies. So here comes this breathing space again, this space where it is possible to forget casting and recasting. Born in and through us all this liveliness. Breathing together, we are beyond universalizing knowledge claims. Hegel is everywhere. The images of the Phenomenology of Spirit are omnipresent, everywhere projected. Someone says if you tell me what to write I can write anything. I write like hell. I’m touched by this earnestness. The wind blows furiously all around remembering a contractual I write like hell. I just need someone to tell me what to write. I love him for this gift but I know that his is a false contract. The intentional component of contractual thinking is present: he believes in it, it is sweet and beautiful, but because of it, he will only write what he knows, from “deep inside.” How we can laugh at “deep inside” whenever we hear from the pop pop radio blaring systems pop pop go all over the place, way down deep inside baby, I love you. As if. As if everything were not air, surface, the exchange of breath. Deleuze says in the Dialogues: “Not every becoming passes through writing, but everything which becomes is an object of writing, painting or music” (Deleuze, “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature,” Dialogues). Electronic media are surface-bearing surface beings. Their force is in their instant accessibility because of their easy, hierarchical categorizations. Their memory, their history, is transparent. This transparency can aid our own self-analyses. Media are vessels for communication and hence for power. Power is desired because communication is the best thing, the meaning-making, image-sorting thing. The desirability of power may be forged through a desire to have a copy that admits of no dissembling. Memory is image-driven, making the desire for power an unattainable one. A model of memory that can admit of being public memory, without being absurd, doesn’t seem to give us very much predictive capacity. The mode of analysis we are being

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pushed toward resists forms of control which stop our flow toward affirmation while at the same time noting the reality of the reactive forces or historical negations. I subscribe to the view, sometimes called dynamism, that force or energy is the basic principle of all phenomena. This view rejects the primacy of matter mostly as a means to having a coherent account of how human experience is possible without calling on some special magic: God or antecedent harmony and so forth. Deleuze captures the requisite connections when he says: “All sensibility is only a becoming of forces (Nietzsche and Philosophy 63). He is explaining Nietzsche’s active and reactive forces, taking special pains to insist that we take seriously the notion that the play of forces exhausts the class of existing things. Nietzsche’s play of forces contains a polemic against Hegel’s warring forces where there can be no prescription toward “affirmation” and where there is no possibility of limiting the force of negation. This seems to be the space where dialectical and nondialectical thinking are most at odds. But looking closely at Hegel shows affinities that might bring us closer to understanding the desire for power. For Hegel, when we are sense certain, there is “this,” “that,” “here,” and “now.” You know this state, it is mental and physical at once, it is unreflective. Imagine being in the state where you know “Here is this pen now” without verbalization. One notices that sense certainty is insufficient to maintain itself. We are the sorts of things who perceive. We possess the capacity of perception; to function we are required to perceive. But with perception comes deception. Hegel asks us to consider the thought experiment of having something present to us now. For instance we sense with certainty that “Here is that pen now.” Once we verbalize this statement, we are necessarily in untruth. For it is never this pen here and now. It is always already out of the world of sense certainty. It is never now again, nor here. A system of laws is necessary in order that anything makes sense; that anything mean something. From a foundation of

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certainty that turned into something that loses truth in articulation, one must either order or accept defeat. Hegel chooses order. Force and understanding unify the ostensible mess. Selfconsciousness emerges in a second level. At root we are there now… floating. But now, at this next level, we understand things from a more or less unified self-consciousness, which we can make sense of because there are laws which accurately describe the force which pulses through all objects, including our bodies. Hear Hegel: This simple infinity, or the absolute Notion, may be called the simple essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal blood, whose omnipresence is neither disturbed nor interrupted by any difference but rather is itself every difference, as also their supersession; it pulsates within itself but does not move, inwardly vibrates, yet is at rest. It is self-identical, for the differences are tautological; they are differences that are none. (Phenomenology of Spirit, para.162).

Differences must be made in order to proceed in the sensuous world. Now must be separated off from not-now. Interestingly, at this early level, some incipient community basis is necessitated. For understanding, this overcoming of deception, everything is first a force. (Notice that force, the scientific kind, the kind that moves bodies, is in the first case. Autonomy is not in the first case: it is earned. As such it can also be refused. It has a necessity which even for Hegel is not empty, is not merely formal.) Force, then, is really just a thought of the sensuous world. This thought, once thought, is the system of laws. A very interesting thing in Hegel, however, is that even though these laws are independent from us, they are not necessary laws. That is, these laws are contingent because they must be doubly thought: they are not apparent. Their necessity, if we can call it that, is empty. Infinity is the life of the relation. Thinking infinity forces thought of consciousness of itself in another; thereby self-consciousness is forced. And in this force, this technology if

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you will, the rudiments of community life are exposed as already always there. Theory is force. Hegel is helpful here because the coming in and out of focus of necessity starts us on a path to understanding desire and power. Writing is a form of the desire for power, a form of love, a form of communication. With the background from Hegel, everyone’s shadow interlocutor, a return to Deleuze on Nietzsche will make more sense than it may have. In a discussion on the importance of Spinoza and Nietzsche on understanding bodies, Deleuze quotes Nietzsche: What is the body? We do not define it by saying that it is a field of forces, a nutrient medium fought over by a plurality of forces. For in fact there is no “medium”, no field of forces or battle. There is no quantity of reality, all reality is already quantity of force. (Nietzsche and Philosophy 39-40.)

Deleuze comments that this plurality of forces (reactive and active) is why “the body is always the fruit of chance, in the Nietzschean sense, and appears as the most ‘astonishing’ thing, much more astonishing, in fact, than consciousness and spirit” (p. 40). Reactive forces are not ones we can avoid—they are necessary in the weirdly contingent way—but they can be visible to the understanding trying to become more fully realized. Active forces, being more difficult to both project and recognize, can be misread as “masterful.” That is, we are overdetermined to make mistakes individually and publically but the redoubling of misleading semiotics can be as empowering as it is difficult. Hegel’s turn toward lord and bondsman “humanizes” the reactive/active duality and makes of a simple distinction something dialectical and necessary in a non-empty sense. What separates Deleuze from Hegel here is the rejection of dialectical thinking, which rejection required seeing difference as beautiful plurality instead of necessary warring. What had to be seen is that force is primal, that the body is something to celebrate and that power is propelled by potentiality, has its desire in it.

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Releasing power from war, however, makes bodies easy prey to manipulation by other forces. Reactive forces are easier to spot than active ones. Deleuze explains: Here we must note the immoderate taste of modern thought for this reactive aspect of forces. We always think that we have done enough when we understand an organism in terms of reactive forces. The nature of reactive forces and their quivering fascinates us. This is why we oppose mechanical means to final ends in the theory of life; but these two interpretations are only valid for reactive forces themselves. (41)

Dialectical thinking forces us to pay more attention to reactive forces; we are thereby flung out of the realm of possibility into that of necessity. In this realm, we are more frightened, more passive, less vital. Where we could be at one, we find difference. This difference gives us the idea that we act on our own and that the meaning we may find for our lives can be self-determined, can be autonomous. We make of our lives, in our minds, much more than they can be. This inflation of value at the same time diminishes us. Falsely seeing ourselves as one life, one body, one thing, we despair at accomplishing what we should. Indeed, we believe that what is expected of us is the sort of lie we are forced to make from sense certainty. It is not a “bad” lie but we usually figure out when we are being lied to and it makes us feel manipulated and betrayed: not a strong position from which to change the decision-making process of those in power nor to be in power oneself. Bodies which are not primal bodies, which are not situated in an interplay of force, bodies which view themselves as alien to their own thought processes, are prime candidates for becoming bodies which can not care for themselves, bodies which must be docile bodies. They are also candidates for producing, for example, diminished movies that diminish in turn the viewers. The chasm between what should be and what is is so great from this position that the only thing imaginable is inferior pastiche from some other, e.g., movie. The proliferation

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of remakes in Hollywood and on Broadway is related to this docile, passive inability to care. Foucault points out that: “In these conditions, the contradictory movements of the soul—much more than the carrying out of the acts themselves—will be the prime material of moral practice.” (The Use of Pleasure 26). That is, we agonize and spend our precious power, analyzing as our own, movements in our psyches which are perhaps not even relevant to our lives. In addition to worry over what is lost, there is a space opened to look at what might be gained. Control may exert its mysterious power, erasing our memories and sapping our energies through the media of television and cinema. Still, attempts to analyze this control open under-explored spaces where creative resistance is facilitated. We can gesture toward a model of dynamic memory that resists such control while acknowledging not just its presence but the draw of such control, its seductive possibilities. In other words, looking for a modified notion of care of the self, in this case a care of the self which outlines strategies to resist becoming ungrateful, the height of docility, can open one up to love and to forceful communication. Acting on the (false) premise that we can be free of dialectical thinking becomes a sort of reactive public memory which can not facilitate the production of chaotic media forms. It should be clear that this is what I think we should be doing. There is no merely financial reason, for example, that our movies should follow so slavishly the dictates of reactive public memory. Any problem that we have in interpreting images comes to us from the portions of psychoanalysis which are transparent to us as dissembling. The desire for power, which is the force to transmit images, is transparent to us. The fear that proliferation of images will be confusing or “dumbing” buys into a false dualism or a false notion that one can bracket a truth. The only truth is that these images are necessarily dissembling. Love of this human all too human frailty becomes its major strength. Communication

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from the complex of files, or from this body, is the production and product of theory. It is what we do. We have a tendency to split ourselves off from this force by retreating “deep inside” ourselves, a second order dissembling. Hegel, who was among the first to notice this split inherent at the moment a political force obtains power, writes between Spinoza and Marx. In the section on capital in Philosophy of Right, Hegel shows how the erotic might spiral in sinistrorse through a system: . . . subjective self-seeking turns into a contribution to the satisfaction of the needs of everyone else. That is to say, by a dialectical advance, subjective self-seeking turns into the me­diation of the particular through the universal, with the result that each man in earning, producing, and enjoying on his own account is eo ipso producing and earning for the enjoyment of everyone else. (129-30)

To develop a body in relation to another is part of the beauty of loving. Those who love us give us our new bodies; to love outside the Faustian bargain, which our heavily Oedipal structures don’t want to allow, is to get your body back. For Spinoza, the body becomes planes of immanence, or a distribution of affects; the mind is none other than the idea of the body, and the body’s attribute is Extension. To tease one’s sense of self away from representational State Philosophy and nearer to extension/ desire is to become skin, to bring the circulating blood up to the surface, to array the modes of potentiality which are available for a body, which constitute its possibility for pleasure. Which is the point and which must not be forgotten in moments of concrete psychic abandon. A body, for Spinoza, is not defined by its forms, a set of functions, a kind of substance, or even a subject. A body is a place of possible affectivity; a body is kinetic modality, the potential for variation in speed and slowness, motion and rest. To allow this definition of the body is to assert into the between, to alight

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among the interstices which the dominant discourse leaves open; to figure one’s body this way is to refuse the names of the father, the law of the father. For Spinoza, the determinant body qua figure can only be considered as a negation by the very nature of its figure; i.e., the totality of bodies is indeterminate, because indefinite and infinite. There is only force and potential force, since there is only one substance realized through infinite attributes and modifications. The body “stands in need for its preservation of a number of other bodies, by which it is, so to speak, continually regenerated” (Ethics 94). The body as force and rhythm (making no distinction between “theoretical” and “actual”) insists on its own preservation, but meaningful preservation is contingent upon its relation to other bodies; this relation is, in turn, contingent upon the planes of potential becoming at its surface. What does the forceful body mean for people writing? People living. Consider the following passages from Will Self ’s Great Apes. Both scenes take place in the same nightclub. Both scenes show a character trying to inhabit her forceful body. But it wasn’t always thus. This brittleness had once been no­ thing but brittle, thin social ice failing to support her flailing sense of herself. Only. . . what? As little as six months ago this early evening in the club, this prelude to her own abandonment of her child’s body, would have been purgatory, a recrudescence of loathing. Now everything about it was redefined by the fact of Simon. More specifically the fact of his body (p. 19. Will Self, Great Apes, 1997, Grove Press). Yes, we, they, us, we are children. Children playing like chim­ panzees in the jungle gym of the night. We have no application, no purchase on this present with its terminal self-referentiality, its ahistorical self-obsession. We are brothers and sisters in a sibling society—fighting over the toy box. We are allowed to come here and behave thus, while elsewhere meaning resides. No wonder we’re reduced to such pathetic expedients, excluding her, including him, in order to establish some platform from which we can

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swing, out, over the abyss. What if we fell? (p. 54-55, Will Self, (Great Apes, 1997, Grove Press).

If we fell, we would be much better off: we would be outside the realm of self-reference, social ice, ahistoricity. Capitalism is about profit and its relation to surplus value. Tender is not always fragile. Tender is not always exchange. From this amorphous set of competing instantiations, one must find the agency to act and to act well. Brittle is not just social ice. The subject position can as easily aid right action as impede the same. To be tender is an act of love. Tenderness is a necessary attitude to embody because it occurs in the amorphous realm of the possible unnamed, in the forbidden place where woman can be the “container for herself ” in Irigaray (Ethics 41). Tenderness is a matter of becoming woman—not all like some “female” stereotype of nurturing—but of a loving of the self through exchange with the other until the self becomes skin. Skin: where touching happens, a billion tiny openings—skin breathes—openings so close that they are spaces made material. In my tenderness, I am exposed, I reveal the wounds of my body, the fragile mappings of my psyche, the brittle leaves of my heart. In your exhaustion, in your trembling, with your tender skin, you ask for my tenderness, for my recognition of your vulnerability, a vulnerability which has arisen through me, for me. Tenderness asks for an exchange of my openness for yours. Loving tenderness cannot be severed into one of its four categories—fragility, kindness, vessel, note of exchange—they all operate irreducibly together. What is common among these terms is a between. Homunculus. Tender is not mean. When she calls him, she is dizzy and drunk; he is abstracted. He pictures her in her darkened rooms, moving ghost-like. She pictures him alternatively as only eyes and fading skin or as sitting quietly, listening to her. Their voices resonate through the telephone, curling up in each other’s ears. Her voice stirs, charmed, sudden, willowy. He listens for clues; he wants to

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know what to say to make it all right for her, to take away her tired. He is listening so hard he exhausts himself in listening. There is a moment of quiet. In the stilly breath of that moment, the oppositions fall away, there is only breath. She is not speaking, he is not listening. They breathe. They want to be together. Even when they are close, they want to be so huge that they break out of their bodies, that they become singular. They want to be so tiny that they could slide into one another unnoticed, to pour god into god. They want their bodies to resound across this distance; they stop talking and listening: they breathe. They love their words; their words are tender. They want the words to sublate beyond articulation, into pure language, pure presence. To be tender is to open a wound, and have it greeted with more open. Two opens, into which space falls apart from meaning. To think tenderness is to allow the flow, the between, to sublate the opposition inherent in thinking presence. Tenderness is necessary for becoming woman. As is a certain violence. Is this violence the force of theory? Why do we find it, then, everywhere? How does this violence erupt, this meanness? Is it from the exchange—tender scurrying to and fro carrying sacks of gold to pirates and vampires? How to amputate, instead of character, the vampire? How to compact with god without erasing presence? Heiner Muller gets tender, gets presence, writes Hamlet Machine. His Hamlet says, “I am the typewriter…. I feed my own data into the computers…. I am the data bank….” He says, “I want to be a machine. Arms for grabbing Legs to go on, no pain no thoughts.” And then there is Ophelia and she is becoming woman: “Down with the happiness of submission. Long live hate and contempt and rebellion and death.” Applying the forceful body to cyberspace is another way of being typewriter, data, feeder of data. N. Katherine Hayles notes in her essay, “The Seduction of Cyberspace,” that “Body cells change and die; it is the flow of energy and information through the organism that maintains continuity” (p. 174). She sees that

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“This is the double edge of virtual reality’s revolutionary potential: to expose the presuppositions underlying the social formations of late capitalism and to open new fields of play where the dynamics have not yet rigidified and new kinds of moves are possible. Understanding these moves and their significances is crucial to realizing the technology’s constructive potential” (p. 175). The forceful body is not deceived about the insignificant difference between technologies: it is grateful for the possibility of intensification. Recognizing the surface being of any structuring projection is the backdrop to a communication that would be capable of producing change, excitement, or interest. That is, of producing a theoretical communication that knows at all times its actuality, an actuality made of an infinite conjunction of dissembling images. Bibliography Deleuze, Giles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia, 1983. Deleuze, Giles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia, 1987. Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality Volume II: The Use of Pleasure. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Columbia, 1985. Hayes, N. Katherine. “The Seduction of Cyberspace,” in Rethinking Technologies. Edited by V. A. Conley, University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Hegel, G.W.F.. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. —. Philosophy of Right. Trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans., Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Muller, Heiner. Hamlet Machine. Ed., Carl Weber. New York: PAJ, 1984. Self, Will. Great Apes. New York: Grove Press, 1997. Spinoza, Benedict. Ethics. Trans., R.H.M. Elwes. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1989.

The Experiential Dimension in Online Learning: Phenomenology, Technology and Breakdowns1 Darryl Cressman and Edward Hamilton In the past 10 years, the ideas and innovations surrounding online learning have mirrored the progress of the technical medium itself. From its beginnings in asynchronous forms of communication and education based around networked access to message boards and lesson plans, to today’s synchronous, real time chat sessions between educators and students, online learning initiatives and programs have become an important sector of educational research and practice. In the process, such initiatives and programs have also attracted government and business interests ready to take economic advantage of technical advances. The utopian vision of a highly educated population and a resultant “virtuous circle” of economic growth has been given substance in the ideal of extending, through networked computers and educational software, a classroom into every home (Canada). This vision has not, however, been without it critics. Underscoring the messianic visions that often accompany press releases and promotional material is a sharp warning from academics and critical social theorists, who see in online learning nothing more than the commodification and corporatization of higher This paper was undertaken as part of a larger SHRCC funded project entitled “Learning Spaces: A Phenomenological Comparison of Simulated and Mediated Computer Worlds.” The Authors thank Dr. Norm Friesen, the members of the Applied Communication and Technology Lab at Simon Fraser University, and all of those who participated in the Society for Phenomenology and Media Conference “Education and Media” for providing forums for discussing the ideas found in this paper. 1

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education. In this view, the “virtual university” will become nothing more than a money making enterprise, a dystopian scenario of the future of higher education that that Noble equates with the early 20th century “diploma mills” that emerged around the correspondence school movement, and that have served as warnings against distance education for countless years (Noble). In their account of online learning, Hamilton and Feenberg provide an alternative to the dichotomous debate between these positions. Instead of supporting either the position that online learning can create a classroom in every home or (at the opposite pole) that online learning is nothing more than the extension of capitalist instrumental logic to the university, they argue that both boosters and critics of online education narrow the scope of debate by adopting the conceptual and philosophical presuppositions of technological determinism: The problem with these accounts is not that their claims, taken individually, are entirely incorrect, nor that they point to insignificant trends in the University. The problem is the general philosophy of technology underlying both versions of the story. On each side, technology emerges as a fait accompli with which the University must comply or which it must reject out of hand in defense of traditional academic values and priorities…Both views, then, are based on essentially deterministic assumptions. (Hamilton and Feenberg 4) The result is that understandings of online education tend both to obscure the historical development of educational technologies, as well as to ignore students’ experience of actually using such technologies. The erasure of the technological and experiential dimensions of online education forecloses the possibility that it could be or do something other than what boosters and critics claim for it. Abstract claims for online education thus supplant nuanced considerations of how educational technologies emerge and how people engage in and experience technology-mediated education.

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Hamilton and Feenberg refer to these mutually reinforcing positions as an ‘evangelical’ discourse: for both critics and proponents, educational technology takes the place of either an autonomous savior or destroyer of higher education (Hamilton and Feenberg 3). While Hamilton and Feenberg’s paper explores the implications of this conundrum for technological design and policy, this paper explores a theoretical position that reflects the actual lived experience of engaging with the technology that supports online learning and the programs that facilitate it. Attempting to understand what actually occurs in the process of online learning from students’ perspectives will be undertaken using the theoretical and methodological insights of phenomenology (Heidegger; Dreyfus; van Manen; Bauman ). By approaching online education from a phenomenological perspective, this paper can be seen as an inverted model of the more conventional or “evangelical” examinations of online education. Instead of examining and seeking to explain the technology or the potential effects of employing computers for educational purposes, we will relegate what is often the central object of study—the technology and educational models­—to the periphery in order to focus on the human experience of interaction and online education. How is the user-experience of online education conventionally understood? Answers to questions concerning the actual experience of using computer-mediated communication for distance education purposes are often implied or pre-answered, as has been noted by some researchers in the field (Blake and Standish; Cornford and Pollock). Usually, an implicit appeal is made to a broadly cybernetic, information-theoretical framework, structured around the roles of sender, receiver and channel, and often appealing to some notion of “feedback.” Understandings of student experience are thus sidelined in favor of considerations that concentrate on the presentation and delivery of content. Instead of assuming that online education

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involves a process whereby a message is sent by one party and received/acted upon by another party, what we want to provide in this paper is an account of the actual student experience that occurs during computer-mediated educational communication. This involves asking questions directly of the student. What is it like to sit at a computer and ‘chat’ with another person? What is the experience of replying via a keyboard to questions as opposed to answering verbally? And more importantly for this paper, do these actions occur seamlessly according to preconceived notions of what should happen? Proceeding from this last question, and in order to focus our discussion, we wish to isolate a common occurrence that has escaped both the evangelical discourses surrounding online learning and the few studies that undertake a user-oriented perspective (Hara and Kling)—what happens when the technology does not work according to expectation, what happens when the technology breaks down? All of us can recall in our dealings with technology instances where the linear process of ‘working’ has broken down and we have had to improvise or rework our dealings with the technology in question. But most studies of online education assume a “working” technology as a basis for generating knowledge of what users should do and how they learn. Attempting to understand both the concept and the user experience of equipmental breakdowns highlights what may be a significant dimension of online learning from the learner’s perspective. The phenomenology of breakdowns offered by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time and interpreted by Hubert Dreyfus in Being in the World, supplies a cogent approach to understanding the significance of breakdowns, and supplies terms for understanding how this phenomenon could be incorporated into understandings of the learner-experience of online education. Before moving on to a discussion of this theoretical background, however, some explication of the phenomenological method employed will be given.

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Researching Lived Experience: Phenomenological Hermeneutics Most of the data for this paper was drawn from a number of ‘phenomenological’ experiments carried out by participants in Learning Spaces, a research project focused on phenomenology and online learning.1 Participants were asked to engage in a number of activities involving computer-mediated communication and told to record their experiences in written, anecdotal reports. Found throughout the phenomenological tradition, anecdotes serve “as a methodological device in human science to make comprehensible some notion that easily eludes us” (van Manen 116). The rationale behind this approach is that in order to better understand lived experience—the direct contact or interaction that we have with our lifeworld—we must first recognize that this experience is often amorphous and elusive in its particular manifestations and contours. On this point, van Manen writes that “The meaning or essence of a phenomenon is never simple or one-dimensional. Meaning is multi-dimensional and multi-layered” (van Manen 78). This observation contradicts conventional quantitative or empirical methodologies, methods which may provide valuable data of other kinds but which bring us no closer to the lifeworld as it is actually experienced. Essential to this method is its potential to achieve direct contact with the world as it is experienced, not as it is conceptualized. The emphasis here is on pre-analytic and pre-interpretative descriptions. Of course, a “pure” understanding of experience is not possible, and only as a matter of degree is abstraction and theorizing avoided (van Manen 79). Experience can be framed, however, with respect to what van Manen describes as four fundamental existentials—dimensions of experience held in common by all, and consisting of “lived space” (spatiality), “lived body” (corporeality), “lived time” (temporality), and “lived relation” (relationality). These existentials can be seen as the grounding in 1

www.learningspaces.org.

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which all human beings experience the lifeworld, and they thus serve as productive categories for the process of phenomenologically reflecting on lived experiences. Although the four existentials can be differentiated for the purposes of recording elements of experience, they cannot be separated in the experience itself. Together, these dimensions form an intricate unity: the lifeworld of experience, our lived world (van Manen 105). The ongoing work of the Learning Spaces project is to apply and adapt phenomenological hermeneutics to the study of the student experience of online education, with specific reference to the four existentials—how does the user-experience of online education filter through their experience of space, body, time, and relation? Participants in the present study were asked to refer to these four existentials, described in more detail in the following section, to frame and guide their reflections. What is Experience—A Brief Outline of the Four Existentials 1. Lived Space—Spatiality

When we think of space, we usually think of distance and geometrical space—measurable, Euclidean space, spaces of known quantity. Here, terms like kilometers, yards and feet are very handy but reaffirm the unquestioned presupposition of a subject-object divide between being and space. The rationalist account conceptualizes space as composed of mute objects external to an active and knowing subject. But this quantification of space does not reflect the lived space that we inhabit and experience. Lived space is ‘felt space’ and thus it is hard to put into words since the experience that is felt is in some ways pre-verbal—we rarely reflect on it, yet we still experience it (van Manen 102). Think of the experience of entering a large building like a cathedral, bank or museum, or conversely the experience of being crammed in a corner of the subway during rush hour or stuck in an elevator full of people. In each of these cases, lived

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space is an integral part of the experience of the situation, but it is also lived differently in each scenario. What we are dealing with then is not a consistent, measurable and self-identical space, but one which is in flux, and the experience of which is subject to significant qualitative differences. The lived spaces of online education can be understood in similar ways. Do users set aside a specific space for interacting with online educational programs? How does the experience differ if one is performing a task on a campus or in the comfort (or discomfort) of one’s home? What are the experiential differences between online and face-to-face education, or between different experiences of both, if the researcher attempts to understand the relation between lived space and use? What is the difference, because surely there must be one, between the physical space of the classroom and the virtual space inhabited by a person in a networked learning situation? How does sitting alone at a computer at home compare to sitting in a seminar room with other students? By attempting to understand how space affects experience, the researcher can potentially highlight many key differences between classroom and virtual learning otherwise neglected by conventional models of understanding online education. 2. Lived Body—Corporeality

The concept of lived space, of course, begs the question of who or what it is that inhabits and experiences that space, which leads us to the second of the four existentials, lived body. This concept answers to the phenomenological fact that we are always already inhabitants of bodies in the world, and that it is only through our embodiment that we experience at all. Whenever we meet or interact with others in the world, we meet that person first, in a sense, through his or her body (van Manen 104). This embodied experience is not restricted to phenomenology. It is also reflected in disciplines as diverse as philosophy of knowledge and film

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studies—disciplines that examine the politically contentious issue of the body as the subject of someone else’s gaze (Foucault; Mulvey). Being subjected to another’s gaze changes the lifeworld experience, often reflected in descriptions of feeling clumsy and awkward, obvious, or on display—primal experiences of the embodied self. Problems of embodiment loom large in online education (Feenberg). The physical classroom provides a range of senses in which the body figures prominently—raising a hand to call attention to oneself, for example, or distinguishing oneself through the tone and timbre of one’s voice. How does this translate in online education? In the virtual classroom the body is, in real sense, absent. How do students experience their own “presence” in online classes? How do they constitute notions of “being there” or “participating” in virtual contexts when these things are so critically defined by the existence of a body in a classroom? Do they experience it in terms of the freedom of anonymity, as has frequently been assumed (Turkle)? Or does it manifest in them as an anxiety to make themselves present? One possible question raised, then, is how we experience our own bodies when they are physically attenuated, abstracted, and/or anonymous? 3. Lived Time—Temporality

Temporality refers to subjective time as opposed to clock time or objective time—our experience not of the ticking clock, but of time slowing down or time flying, of killing time or having the time of one’s life (van Manen 104). Part of the lived experience of time in a physical classroom are the relatively rigid scheduling and standardized time-blocks represented by classes. In online education, as with all online activities, these constraints are no longer pertinent as conventional understandings of time are displaced. The highly regulated class schedule evaporates and is dispersed into individual choices about when and for how long study will take place. Of course, this is not an escape

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from time, but merely a change in the contexts within which time is experienced. Rather than dispensing with considerations of the experience of time, then, we need to account for the altered context of temporality of online learning. Online education can be evaluated by examining the user’s experience of lived time—how fast or slow does time pass when the user is involved with online educational technology? Is this different from the temporal experiences of traditional classroom learning? Can the way that time drags on or flies by during a dull or interesting lecture be perfectly translated to online education? How is time linked to pleasure in the student’s experience? What happens to the illicit pleasure one experiences in skipping class, or the sense of liberation resultant from waking up to a snow storm knowing that classes will be cancelled? What about the dread that comes with facing a time consuming commute from home to campus? Questions of temporality in online education are thus not merely extrapolated from the fact that online education overcomes the constraints of scheduling and time-tables in traditional education. Rather, they are explored with reference to the experience of temporality in situations of online learning. 4. Lived Other—Relationality

So far, the discussion of the existentials appears to posit single bodies in subjectively experienced worlds. Of course, another critical aspect of our basic experience is that we share the world with others, who are also beings in the world. The final existential, then, involves the experience of interrelation, “the lived relation we maintain with others in the interpersonal space we share with them” (van Manen 105). This can refer to others who are physically present and (more importantly for online learning) to those who we encounter indirectly—by way of interaction mediated through online ‘chats’, email or telephone. Online education offers a unique opportunity to examine this aspect of lived experience. In face-to-face classes, relationality is

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mediated through co-presence in a single space with clearly defined, and often clearly arranged roles, as well as certain permissions or inhibitions that might accompany being physically present with others. The challenges of attaining “presence” online in the absence of the body is exacerbated when we think of the challenges of negotiating and maintaining relationships. How do we experience our interpersonal relations with others when there is “no body” present? How does one get a sense of others as “presences” online? How is online interaction experienced? On another level, if someone commends your work might you be inclined to attach specific physical features to that name? What if someone is critical of your work? Is it a natural assumption to project negative physical traits to only a name? The four existentials provide methodological insight into how phenomenological hermeneutics engages with the user’s experience of online education. In isolating these common dimensions of human experience, it becomes possible to ask specific experiential questions of particular contexts in which bodies act and relations play out in space and time. However, space, body, time, and relation converge in experience only in the context of particular engagements. They are revealed to experience only in the flow of our actions in the world. Conventional understandings of online education tend to generalize from educational technologies as if the student’s experience of them—and so their experience of space, body, time, and relation—always replicate some ideal scenario, in which the technology and the learner are fused in harmonious union, and in which action and interaction are always predictable. To provide a different view we will, in what follows, use the foundation provided by phenomenological analysis to the study of a particular phenomenon in computer-mediated communication and education—that is, the experience of technical breakdowns.

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Phenomenology, Technology and Breakdowns The concept of breakdowns plays a significant role in the phenomenology of Dasein elucidated by Heidegger in Being and Time and Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Hubert Dreyfus, in Chapter 4 of Being in the World, draws on both these sources to provide an extensive exegetical reading of breakdowns. In the remainder of this paper, we will turn to “breakdown” as a phenomenological concept, trace its relation to modes of being and experience, and analyze dimensions of it with reference to the anecdotal reports provided by participants in the Learning Spaces project. We will, throughout, tie these considerations back into an analysis of student experience as filtered through the four existentials in order to tease out the analytical potentials of the phenomenological approach to the study of online education. The concept of breakdowns takes on significance in the context of Heidegger’s larger understanding of Dasein, or being-inthe-world. Dreyfus presents Heidegger as rejecting the traditional rationalist understanding of being as composed of essentially independent, isolated subjects and objects—particularly the view that objects are already fully constituted things, external to a subject who “knows” and “experiences” them as mental content, and who is also independent, endogenously existent. Heidegger does not want to deny that subjecthood and objecthood exist as in the rationalist account, but he says that these must emerge out of some more “primordial” mode of being (Dasein), which is, perhaps first and foremost, encountered as a flow of activity in which subjects and objects form a coherent whole, and in which there is no direct experience of objects apart from concernful (involved) action. In Dasein, subject and object take on the mode of being of “availableness”, which constantly refers them back to the practical activity through which we experience and hence know our world. In this account, Heidegger reverses the terms of the rationalist discourse, and makes subject-object intentionality an exceptional instance in the wider world of

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Dasein. It is out of interruptions in the flow of experience—that is, out of breakdowns—that the mode of being of independent subjects and objects emerges.  quipment and Being: Availableness, Manipulation, E and Transparency In Dreyfus’s reading of Heidegger, there are distinct philosophical steps taken to overcome the subject/object divide between humans and technology. Heidegger begins his interpretation of being and objects by contrasting the rationalist account of detached observation and thought with a phenomenological view of how objects and subjects are in the flow of activity. Zygmunt Bauman clarifies this in his analysis of Heidegger’s position, “I do not start from looking at my world, contemplating it, analyzing: I start from living it” (Bauman 156). It is our actual involvement in, not detachment from, the world of objects and people that provides us with the most logical account of our existence—an account that defines existence as ‘being in the world’. Following this, and applied to the objects that we interact with daily, Dreyfus writes that Heidegger envisions objects through the perspective of action, not contemplation: “we do not usually encounter (use, talk about, deal with) mere things, but rather we use the things at hand to get something done” (Dreyfus 62). Those things that are useful, Heidegger calls equipment. Because equipment is inherently always used for something, we must recognize that it does not exist in isolation. It always, by virtue of its usability, refers to other equipment mobilized in a process of action towards an end. As such, it “fits in a certain way into a equipment whole” (Dreyfus 62). The way of being of these entities is defined by Heidegger as “availableness” or “readiness-to-hand”. The most basic way of understanding equipment, then, is not through conceptualization, but through use. When we interact with objects in the world, our concern subordinates itself

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to the “in-order-to” that is implied in what Dreyfus calls the equipment nexus1 in which we become embedded through use. Objects are “available” inasmuch as they can be integrated into the purposive, committed action in the context of which we use them. We are, in Heidegger’s terms, “manipulating” the equipment (Dreyfus 1991, p.64). Manipulation rests upon a particular kind of being between Dasein and the equipmental nexus—a mode of being in which both disappear in the flow of action towards an end. Equipment, the equipmental whole, and Dasein become “transparent” to the actions in which we are engaged. This becomes clearer when we examine the report given by a research participant’s phenomenological account of an online ‘chat’ exercise. In this case, the participant was asked to undertake a conversation with a ‘chatbot’ named “Ella.”2 Chatbots are automated systems which simulate conversation by associating natural language inputs with an array of potential responses stored in a database. In engaging Ella in conversation, the user inputs questions or comments to which Ella automatically responds. The system displays the conversation in text. “Ella” herself is also represented visually in a series of photos which change whenever the user types a question or comment. Sometimes these photos are of Ella in posed situations, or in candid situations, while at other times the photos appear completely random, not depicting Ella at all. In engaging Ella in conversation, the participant was asked to provide an anecdotal description of the experience, paying particular attention to the four existentials outlined above. In his introductory paragraph, the participant explains his general attitude towards programs like these, For the most part, I am usually offended by the idea that a computer database with generic and predictable answers and According to Heidegger, things and objects do not exist as single entities, rather “To the being of any equipment there always belongs a totality of equipment, in which it can be this equipment that is” (Heidegger 97). 2 Ella is available at http://www.ellaz.com/AI/ 1

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questions fed through a pleasant interface can be referred to as communication…In all previous chat experiments I attempt to confuse the database by talking about sports with the intention that the designers of these programs know little about sports. Despite these initial misgivings, the participant soon becomes engaged with Ella. The initial point of engagement is the changing photo that accompanies each submission and response. The participant notes that, “I am quite intrigued with the facial expressions of Ella—why does she look smug in response to my question?” As well, the participant realizes that he is actively engaged with the conversation that is occurring: “I realize that I have conversed with this thing for a minute and I don’t feel the desire to confuse it with sports jargon.” An expectation of lived relation through which the participant seems to understand “typical” engagement with automated systems is here transformed as the equipment becomes transparent and available to the concernful action of conversation. As the conversation continues, the program begins to pose contentious questions, deepening the involvement of the participant and extending the relationality through which concernful action proceeds. For example, Ella states that, “Imagine that in 30 years computers are more intelligent than us, they look at us the way we look at puppies: adorable, but not so bright.” In reflecting on this point of the conversation, the participant notes again that he is becoming more and more drawn into the conversation, forgetting his original distrust and avoidance of these types of programs. After Ella compares humans to puppies, the participant attempts to counter this point with numerous examples. However, Ella quickly changes the subject, leading the participant to note, “What’s going on here? How can it raise a controversial point and then back down just as I was ready to spell out what I have learned in the last three years of studying technology. Why am I so frustrated? It’s only a database I tell myself.” The disappearance of the equipment as a specific object

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is underscored here by the participant’s evaluation of the experience not in terms of what Ella is as a piece of equipment, but in terms of the ends towards which he is engaged with the system— that is, the sustaining of interaction and communication. We can see from this account that the participant is manipulating the equipment according to Heidegger’s definition—the equipment itself has vanished and the participant is in the flow of engaged activity, which comes to define the experience quite apart from the conscious “use” of a particular technical system. This brings us to another fundamental dimension of manipulating equipment detailed by Heidegger. Quoting from Being and Time, Dreyfus notes Heidegger’s conception of the mode of being that is revealed through the ‘availableness’ of equipment and the equipmental nexus: “That with which our everyday dealings primarily dwell on is not the tools themselves. On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves is primarily the task—that which is to be done at the time” (qtd. in Dreyfus 64). Dasein (being-in-the-world), the equipment, and the equipmental whole become transparent to experience, subsumed in the concernful action in which the participant is engaged. This experiential dimension of everyday concerned absorption in the world is the predominant state in which we spend most of our lives. Activities such as eating, dressing and driving attain this distinction, a type of activity that Heidegger calls ‘circumspection’ (Dreyfus 66). Such a moment of experience is reflected in the participant’s reflections. In engaging with Ella, the participant has shifted his attention from concerning himself with conceptualizations of the task—with a rationalist division of himself as subject and the system/computer as objects—to the task itself. By doing so, he has placed himself in contact not with the equipment as an independent object, but rather with a sense of what has to be done in the flow of practical activity— that is, with circumspective action. The experience of online chatting can thus be said to exclude explicit awareness of

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technology1. Rather, the system being used disappears inasmuch as it can be integrated into a regular flow of action, the primary context of experience. Heidegger designates this type of use as “coping”. However, the absorbed coping with transparent objects that Heidegger describes does not account for every aspect of our shared existence and interactions with technology. Zygmunt Bauman draws attention to what, for Heidegger, is both a significant aspect of experience, and also the foundation of a world understood as composed of subjects and objects: Whatever my world may consist of, it is all there ‘naturally’, as unnoticeable parts of the totality of my existence. It becomes an object of my contemplation only when it is brought into salience because it is missing, or when it strikes me because of its unsuitability. Or, alternatively, when it resists its assimilation into my world because its unreadiness, its obstinate resistance to usability (Bauman 156). Phenomenology must account, then, not only for the regular flow of circumspective activity, but also for those occurrences of interruption in flow—occurrences of breakdown which occasion a shift in the modes of both action and being-in-the-world. It is to Heidegger and Dreyfus’ phenomenological account of breakdowns that we now turn.

1 Although we are working on the premise that all tools and their use fall into Heidegger’s conceptualizations, the idea that computers can easily become circumspective, or ready-to-hand, is contrasted by D. R. Koukal. Koukal takes account of the equipmental complexity of computers (processors, memory, wires, software and networks) and the conspicuous interruptions that occur when using computers (crashes, power failures, slow connections) to conclude that any attempt to become fully circumspect with computer technology is elusive, “Despite the nearness of the PC that appears ready-to-hand before us in a familiar environment, there is also a distance to it, because of the PC and the Internet’s equipmental complexity.” (Koukal 5).

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Breakdowns, Deliberate Action and the Unavailable At times, as we can all attest, we need to take deliberate action in order to overcome the technical glitches that often occur at inopportune times. For Heidegger, such glitches bring the objects with which we are involved in our concernful activity into view for us as objects. When we attend to objects like technologies in a deliberate and effortful way, the tendency is to revert back to a dichotomous subject/object interpretation. The technical object itself thus emerges out of the flow of experience as something distinct and separate from us, and becomes a direct object of our conscious deliberation. We gaze at the object contemplatively, wondering: what went wrong? Heidegger understands breakdowns, then, not as negative to experience, but as opening onto a distinct mode of revealing, and hence of being— that mode which the rationalist mode sees as the only account. Breakdowns can be understood as windows onto the mode of being that is particular to subjects and objects as apparently isolated, independent entities, rather than as a whole captured in the flow of concernful action—that is, in committed practices. Heidegger thus accounts for the traditional rationalist conception of being, while also delimiting its sphere of legitimacy (Dreyfus 69). By looking at Heidegger’s conception of the occurrence of breakdown, we can attempt to better conceptualize the range of experiences that might attend engagement with educational technologies, and through which an awareness of the circumspective participation in online education emerges. When there is disturbance, or breakdown, a new way of “Daseining”, or being-in-the-world, is revealed. There follows a shift from circumspection to deliberation, which reflects the experiential transition that occurs when ongoing coping runs into trouble. Heidegger himself distinguishes between three modes of disturbance: “The modes of conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy all have the function of bringing to the fore the characteristic of presence-at-hand [i.e., the independence of the

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object] in what is ready-to-hand [i.e., available in circumspection]” (Heidegger 104). Heidegger makes some effort to distinguish these modes of disturbance in terms of their particular functional role in a transition between modes of being—circumspective Dasein on the one hand, and rationalist subjectobject intentionality on the other. But while he is able to explain their relation to modes of being in the world, he stops short of offering a clear statement of their function with regard to the being of entities. To compensate for this, Dreyfus reorders and selectively interprets Heidegger’s original distinctions in his reading of breakdowns. In Dreyfus’s conception, the three modes of breakdown are malfunction (conspicuousness), temporary breakdown (obstinacy), and total breakdown (obtrusiveness), each of which corresponds to a new way of understanding not just being in the world, but also the being of entities: […] it is clear that two of Heidegger’s three modes, which I shall call temporary breakdown and total breakdown, reveal two new modes of encountering entities and two new ways of being of entities—unavailableness and occurrentness […] The other kind of breakdown, malfunction, provides a preview of these two. (Dreyfus 71).

In contrast to the availableness of objects, which invests them in the flow of concernful action, breakdowns thus introduce two new moments of being-in-the-world and the being of objects: “unavailableness” and “occurrentness”. Unavailableness is a mode of being in which the object itself cannot be integrated into circumspective action. Occurrentness is a mode of being in which equipment emerges distinctly, in the rationalist sense, as independent objects of contemplation. The three modes of breakdown therefore correspond to an increasingly complete transition from circumspection—the experience of the flow of concernful activity—to subject-object intentionality. How does this contribute to experiential understandings of

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online education? For the purposes of this paper, we will explore in-depth only the first two types of disturbance. The reason for this is that we have yet to come across an instance of “total breakdown” in the context of our study of online education. Malfunction/Conspicuousness The first type of breakdown that Dreyfus details is malfunction. When equipment malfunctions we discover its unusability and it therefore becomes conspicuous. It does not, thereby, emerge into consciousness as a distinct object. Rather, the interruption imposed by the malfunctioning equipment sets in motion a range of coping mechanisms through which circumspection can be maintained. Since we already embody, in our experiential background knowledge, the coping mechanisms to continue on after being briefly startled, this kind of breakdown does not impede the flow of circumspective action generally, but initiates other concernful activities upon which we can draw in the continuation of the task at hand. In this way, conspicuousness is easily overcome and transparent circumspective behavior can be quickly restored (Dreyfus 71-2). In the following example we can see how this type of experience is played out in the case of an online distance education course. Friesen describes a particular experience of malfunction in the context of an online course. The instructor of the class, Dr. Smith, had posted a question for general discussion. A few days later, students received what appeared to be a reply to this question, also from Dr. Smith: “In response to Dr. Smith’s question…” (Friesen 223). It is, of course, not unexpected that an instructor might, for whatever reason, provide an answer to their own question. But the problem in this case was that the answer provided by Dr. Smith appeared to contradict something he had said earlier. The result was generalized confusion amongst students as to what Dr. Smith’s position actually was, exacerbated by the fact that both communication and, importantly, identification and presence, were

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limited to textual representations in an online discussion forum. The structure of relationality meant that the students only perceived one another as names attributed to messages, with the result that in short succession, and with no apparent explanation, the instructor appeared to be representing two opposed viewpoints. The source of the confusion was a configuration of the messaging system which allowed the course TA to post messages from the instructor’s account, meaning that both instructor and TA would have been experienced by students as the same person, in spite of their differing opinions. The situation was resolved by changing this configuration to separate the instructor and TA accounts, thus reproducing the consistency of sources and messages distributed through the system. This is a breakdown specific to online education—it is doubtful, after all, that a similar situation would arise in a face-to-face class. It is one which draws in considerations of the specific kind of relationality and corporeality experienced through technological mediation of human communication. The malfunction touched upon an experience of body (the body of the instructor as a virtual presence) and of others (the perception of the instructor on the part of the students) which initiated coping strategies on the part of both instructor and students that continued to involve them in circumspective action of other kinds in order to mitigate and resolve the problem. Significantly, only a portion of the system was apparently malfunctioning, and it was through continued concernful action using the tools at hand that the situation was resolved. In this case we can see how malfunction occurs and the ease in which we can shift to a new way of coping and go on without radically distancing ourselves from the ongoing flow of activity. After initial deliberation, in which the technology and the communication becomes conspicuous, the problem is overcome and the experience once again returns to a state of absorbed, transparent coping.

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Temporary Breakdown—Obstinacy Temporary breakdown, where something blocks ongoing acti­ vity, necessitates a shift into a mode in which what was pre­ viously transparent becomes explicitly manifest. Deprived of access to what we normally count on, we act deliberately, paying attention to what we are doing (Dreyfus 72).

Whereas malfunction is a type of breakdown that merely initiates other forms of circumspection, temporary breakdown (what Heidegger calls “obstinacy”) transforms the mode of being of what is available to our concernful action. Just as both users and entities become transparent when equipment is available, so entities lose their transparency during breakdown. When equipment breaks down and action becomes deliberate, users encounter objects as having specific characteristics different from those they had previously counted on. In this way, equipment becomes occurent. However, the equipment in question does not become an isolated object that is to be observed; rather the occurentness of the equipment must be understood as bound up in its availableness to the normal flow of concernful action—the unavailable necessarily shows up in a practical context (Dreyfus 77)1. This is the mode of being of objects within temporary breakdowns. In such situations, what was previously available to our activities becomes unavailable and stands apart from such activity as something distinct. In such situations, our own mode of being in the world is forced into another state as well: that of deliberation. It is in this state that one stops and considers what is going on and what to do next. This stance, deliberation, can be focused on the local situation—on the object that is present but unavailable—or it can be directed towards what it not present, a type of long range planning that Heidegger calls “envisaging” (Dreyfus 73). 1 Heidegger writes, “But when an assignment has been disturbed—when something is unusable for some purpose—then the assignment becomes explicit” (Heidegger 1927, p.105).

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Heidegger’s classic example of the former is when a hammer, which was previously transparent to us in the act of hammering, breaks, becoming unavailable and so obvious to us. In the case of the absence of a needed piece of equipment, something similar occurs in the sense that the fact of its absence makes it present to us as something required for continued circumspection. It might be concluded that in the process of envisaging we are returning to the traditional perspective of autonomous subjects and objects. Conventional understanding would say that mental representations that arise during envisaging can be described independently of the world, and that the objects of such representations are also autonomous. But for Heidegger, the matter is trickier than that. Dreyfus interprets Heidegger to say that envisaging finds itself confronted by the problem of “how a mental state can be directed towards an object that is not even present?” (Dreyfus 73). Heidegger resolves this question by grounding envisaging activity in circumspective action itself. In the case of both the present broken item and the absent one, our deliberation is still circumscribed within the context of the absorbed action we wish to perform. Objects do not emerge clearly, purified from the concernful action in which they normally figure in our experience. Indeed, it is only with respect to these contexts that the being of the objects presents itself to us: “[…] the kind of circumspection which tarries and ‘considers’ remains wholly in the grip of the available equipment with which one is concerned” (qtd. in Dreyfus 74). Understanding and envisaging are thus not in our minds exclusively. They are retained in the skilful ways we are accustomed to comporting ourselves. Deliberate activity remains dependent upon our state of being in the world and the background of coping skills that are synonymous with this mode of existence and experience (Dreyfus 75). Looking again at an anecdotal account of interacting with chat services, we can better understand what Dreyfus is attempting to draw from Heidegger’s work and its significance to understandings

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of the student experience of online education. As part of the ongoing research project noted above, a student was asked to participate in a ‘virtual chat’ with a librarian at the university library. This particular chat technology allows the participant to connect with a university librarian by clicking on the ‘ask us live’ link on the library’s homepage. The system provides a window which records the conversation, and allows librarians to “push” content relevant to the inquiry to the student’s main browser window. As part of the service, a transcript of the session, including links to pages visited, is sent to the student’s email account. As becomes clear from this particular participant’s written synopsis of the experience, conducting a session on this service was not as easy as might be expected. Before even entering the system, he realizes that his web browser will not allow him to access the program, forcing him to adopt another coping strategy, but not without some highlighting of the array of equipment involved in the process. He says: That’s odd. I don’t remember seeing anything on the sign-in page about browser compatibility…is something wrong with my connection? Or maybe it’s the service itself—is it down? Or maybe it is just the browser…let me try something else.

We can see here that the participant is initially faced with a disturbance in the expected flow of action. This disturbance brings into view for him a number of potential problems within the circumspective context. However, he is able to temporarily overcome this disturbance by switching to another browser. This particular experience, while exposing some dimensions of the relationship between equipment and practice, does not completely transcend the practical contexts in which such equipment appears as obvious to him. As such, the participant understands the disturbance only with respect to the specific context of use. Breakdown in this instance is not isolated and autonomous from the normal condition of being-in-the-world.

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It is revealed only through a practical context within which the breakdown itself occurs. Finally able to access the program, the participant types his name and a question concerning citation formats, and then waits for a reply. Nothing. He types in his question again, thinking perhaps that the system failed to register it. Still nothing. He grows frustrated waiting for a response, so he begins engaging with other tasks he had to complete that day. From time to time, he returns to the library site to check the progress of his session, but is consistently met with no response from the librarian. He repeats his question a third time, and then goes back to his other work. In a moment of reflection that draws upon his history with this library, he wonders: “Am I destined never to engage in meaningful virtual conversations with librarians? Do they know immediately how huge my library fine is and decide not to talk to me—disdaining my delinquency? I’m worried that perhaps my truancy with the physical resources may be affecting my ease of virtual interaction with the library.” After these reflections he returns to the library’s webpage only to be greeted again by the same unanswered message that he had submitted previously, “is anyone there?” He goes back to other tasks for awhile before returning to the library and once again typing the same message, “is anyone there?” Again, no librarian replies. Frustrated and exasperated with the experience, and aware of the need to turn to other work, the participant returns to the program to find that there still has been no response to his query. Defeated, he types “when does the live part begin anyway?” This description reflects Heidegger’s explanation of how mental representations are not purely detached from being in the world. The student is faced with an activity that is not working, so he must take deliberative action. In doing so, he envisages, in the sense that he draws upon what is not present: the reason for the breakdown is his library fines. This mental

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representation, as we can see from the description above, is not an independent representation, but relates to his being, his past actions and his inability to perform the task at hand. It takes place on the background of absorption and involved activity in the world (Dreyfus 74). This account also exposes links between this experience of breakdown and a virtual experience of lived relation, lived body, and lived time. In a sense, the participant’s experience of the breakdown was both manifested as and tied up with the challenges of establishing a bodily presence online as a basis for engaging in relations with others. The student experiences this in terms of a equivocation over how to present himself: “Should I be informal and just type ‘X’? Or should I give my full name, just in case. I opt for the latter, in spite of the fact that it seems ridiculously formal.” The attenuated experience of lived body in online interaction is given more weight in his description when he begins to contrast his experience on the system with what would be considered proper when visiting the reference desk at the library itself. Would he experience the same lack of communication if he were standing in front of a real person? Tensions in the experience of lived body and the establishment of lived relation are exacerbated and highlighted in the context of this particular breakdown. Shifts in the experience of lived time are also recognizable in the description—the growing impatience the student feels, combined with the feeling that nothing is happening with the query he has made. Seemingly endless waiting, a temporal product of the breakdown itself, shifts into an experience of the need to turn to other work, until at last the experience of the failed library chat session appears not only as a breakdown in and of itself, but also a barrier to other obligations: Back to the library. Again I type “is anybody there?” And wait…And wait…I start writing this exercise in the anticipation that in the time it takes me to write it some voice will emerge out of the virtual wilderness and rescue me in my time of need.

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The breakdown thus foregrounds a particular experience of temporality in contexts of online communication, one which suggests that time, as it is lived in such situations, is associated with the successful establishment of relationality, just as the latter is associated with the establishment of corporeality or presence. Conclusion—Applying Phenomenology to Online Education Through our presentation of the four existentials, the notion of breakdowns, and the examples of participant engagement in computer-mediated communication, we have tried to show how adopting a phenomenological perspective towards online education can provide a cogent analysis of the actual experience of using technologies of online learning. We have not tried to present a complete account of the potentials of the phenomenological approach. This study is a first iteration of ongoing work being undertaken through the Learning Spaces project to explore phenomenology as a fertile ground for studies of online education. Future studies will be needed in order both to enhance the methodology itself, as well as to explore its fuller implications for understandings of the experiential dimensions of online education. We believe that such studies can fill an existing gap in research in the field. Most accounts of online education that include consideration of the actual use of technology tend to presuppose a particular relationship between the user and the system—one in which questions of experience are subordinated to the deployment of mental models linking the user with the machine, and in which the machine itself appears in an idealized light as always working according to some prescribed plan. However, this is rarely the case in actual technology use, which is typified perhaps more by exceptions to consistent operability. Paying attention to the experience of the user (through the filter of the four existentials) and how that experience is shaped in situations

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where the technology (along with the educational processes it mediates) breaks down provides a useful corrective to other approaches and can help to deepen their insights. Phenomenological analysis supplies a means of bringing the researcher from the abstract and conceptual—how things should work—to the experiential and concrete—how they do (or do not) work. Experiential dimensions of technology use such as breakdowns cannot be examined or understood without looking at the actual activity of engaging in the online educational processes. Thus an approach informed by phenomenological hermeneutics also emphasizes attention to the user’s experience rather than the imposition of abstract models on that experience. Anecdotes, stories of computer use, the user’s descriptions of and reflections on the experience of online education—these sources of phenomenological analysis bring research closer to the often informal, unplanned culture that arises around the everyday use of educational technologies, and thus provides insight into users’ specific engagements and encounters which cannot be captured otherwise. Through the study of such experiential accounts and emphasizing the experience of breakdowns, we can take consideration of the glitches, unplanned problems, and disruptions that frequently accompany the use of technology. We can understand the concept of the breakdown in two ways. First, it can be understood in a simple manner—a technology either works and you interact with it according to the prescriptions of user manuals, or it doesn’t work and thus serves no function. This approach is not very useful for any type of experiential understanding because it presupposes that the technology and the experience of using it are predictable and easy to chart. But, as anyone who has ever interacted with any form of technology can attest, very rarely does the prescribed experience match the actual experience. A second approach to making sense of breakdowns is found in phenomenological hermeneutics. People have to cope with and improvise their use of technology

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and they have to experience breakdowns—not as the literal breaking down of technology and the educational process, but as a change in the experience of both. By examining what happens when a program breaks down, certain embodied, temporal, relational, and spatial characteristics of the experience come to the fore. Breakdowns, of course, are only one of the experiential dimensions of online education that reveal themselves to a phenomenological approach and thus provide one example of the direction in which the Learning Space project is moving—a better understanding of the seemingly primary, yet often neglected, aspects of human experience of online education. References Bauman, Zygmunt. Hermeneutics and Social Science. London: Hutchinson, 1978. Blake, Nigel and Standish, Paul. Inquiries at the Interface: Philosophical Problems of Online Education. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Cornford, James and Pollock, Neil. Putting the University Online: Information Technology and Organisational Change. Philadelphia: Society for Research into Higher Education/Open UP, 2003. Dreyfus, Hubert. Being in the World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being And Time. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. Feenberg, Andrew. “The Written World: On the Theory and Practice of Computer Conferencing. Mindweave: Communication, Computers, and Distance Education. Eds. Robin Mason and Tony Kaye. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977. Friesen, N. “Is There a Body in the Classroom?” Writing in The Dark: Phenomenological Studies in Interpretative Inquiry. Ed. Max van Manen London, ON: Althouse Press, 2002. Government of Canada. The E-Learning Evolution in Colleges and Universities: A Pan-Canadian Challenge. Ottawa: The Advisory Committee on Online Learning, 2001.

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Hamilton, Edward and Feenberg, Andrew. “The Technical Codes of Online Education.” Brave New Classrooms. Eds. Joe Lockard and Mark Pegrum. Peter Lang, forthcoming. Hara, Noriko and Kling, Rob. “Student Distress in a Web-Based Course Distance Education Course.” Information, Communication and Society 3:4 (2000): pp.557-579. Heidegger, Martin. Being And Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper, 1962. Koukal, David R. “Dwelling in the Classroom/ Learning at a Distance.” Paper delivered at the 7th Annual Society for Phenomenology and Media Conference, Canon Beach Oregon, May 2005. Mulvey, Laura. The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality. New York: Routledge, 1992. Noble, David. Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education. Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2002 Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1995. van Manen, Max. Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy. Albany NY: SUNY Press, 1995.

Depth of Field and the Phenomenology of Global Events Stephen Crocker

We often hear it said now that globalization produces a depthless and fragmentary structure of experience. But it was not so long ago that the globalizing effects of electronic media could still conjure up for us images of a coming unity and holism. The ideas of Glenn Gould and Marshall McLuhan are exemplary of that earlier moment. Gould, for example, in the early 1960’s, at the height of his fame as one of the best concert pianists in the world, left what he considered the isolated atmosphere of the concert hall, to explore the aesthetic possibilities of electronic simultaneity and mass communication. A century before him, Wagner had redesigned the theater to perfect a higher, concentrated attention of the audience, who could leave the distraction of the everyday life to focus on the single spectacle of a total work of art.1 How far Gould had traveled from that ideal is clear in an interview he conducted with Marshall McLuhan in 1964 when he confided that what he now finds conducive to practice is not a silent, passive audience but the noise of a television set or two radios playing at once.2 Like Wagner, Gould saw himself as a visionary, creating music for a generation yet to come. But where Wagner’s future 1 On Wagner and attention see Jonathon Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 249-255. 2 Glenn Gould, “The Medium and the Message: An Encounter with Marshall McLuhan,” in John P.L. Roberts (ed.) Reflections of a Musical Genius: The Art of Glenn Gould (Toronto: Malcolm Lester Books, 1999), p. 245-6.

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audience was capable of experiencing the stage at the expense of all other dimensions of life, Gould’s audience is composed of fully global citizens, plugged into an electronic circuit that allows them to experience their own present simultaneously with all other cultures and times. The Goldberg Variations played along with the white noise of the television was a sign of an emerging phenomenology of globalization that Gould called “three-dimensional experience.”1 Gould’s idea of three-dimensionality was no doubt influenced by McLuhan who also often used the image of depth and the third dimension to describe the so-called total field awareness characteristic of the electric age. McLuhan’s thesis was that we were living through a transitional phase. Through our media we live electronically—and thus three dimensionally—but we continue to think fragmentarily on what he called single planes. Globalization, for McLuhan, would be a progressive ability to conceptually synthesize a number of planes of experience.2 Today, this notion of a coming unification of the different planes of experience seems much less credible. Partly, perhaps, because we live in the wake of the horrors of neo tribalism, but also because our intellectual categories have privileged the fragment and the petit-narrative over the whole. Ours is not the three-dimensional world envisioned by Gould, but the depthless world of schizophrenic temporality descried by Fredric Jameson, where the speed and quantity of information make it difficult to synthesize experience into any sort of whole.3 By all accounts, the whole is in crisis. But before we conclude there is no whole, perhaps we should ask if there are different ways of conceptualizing it. Our notions of globalism have been restricted by two limited images of ‘the whole.’ When we talk of Gould, “The Medium and the Message”, p. 246. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet Books, 1964), p.25. 3 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). 1 2

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a whole of experience, it usually refers either to an a priori ideal form that precedes the elements it unties (as in transcendental or ‘gestalt’ analyses), or a sum total that may be inferred after the presentation of a series of events (as in empiricism or constructivism). In either case, whole means a finality that is either given or givable. As a result, time and synthesis, if they figure into our image of the whole at all, do so only in order to help realize what has already been (conceptually, at least) determined. In this light, Gould’s and McLuhan’s notion of the three-dimensional nature of globalizing experience may prove far more interesting than we might have initially suspected. Images composed in depth, in painting and the cinema for example, require the viewer to regard a number of distinct compositional planes as elements of a single work. When we view these works, our attention fluctuates between the perception of a multiplicity of planes and a consciousness of a whole which, however imperfectly, seems to unite them. There is an important formal relation between global events and depth of field. But they also share a historical connection. For it is at approximately the same time—the fifteenth century—when the newly discovered technique of perspective makes it possible to multiply the number of aesthetic planes in a work, that the social world is transformed by an interpenetration of different locations of experience in the emerging world system. In aesthetics and social life, experience is redefined as a globalizing synthesis of a multiplicity of events. The phenomenology of depth perception allows us to describe an open and temporal whole in which a multiplicity of elements can participate. For this reason, a comparison of the phenomenology of global events and depth of field may prove compelling and instructive. To examine this relation more closely, I turn to the analysis of depth in Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, who in very different philosophical projects each develop a theory of depth precisely in order to get around the false opposition of the whole

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seen as either an ideality given in advance, or a sum total that follows the experience of a set of parts. The theory of depth that we find there allows us to describe experience—be it aesthetic, philosophic, or scientific—as a synthesis of planes and relations of recession which bind them into a unity. The value of this approach is that it allows us to distinguish different economies of plane and recession and different senses of globalism and synthesis which result from these. This distinction may help us bring questions of wholeness and totality back into the human sciences at a time when concerns about globalization (the becoming whole of experience) provide the motive cause for many of our most important anxieties and hopes. Merleau-Ponty famously described depth as “the most existential of all the dimensions.” It is not a property of space, but a condition of perception that allows one element to be seen in the context of another. It allows things to interpenetrate, to slip into one another, to be together. The whole that depth brings to experience is not a fixed and rigid totality. It is an open and temporal synthesis which, following Husserl, he calls a “transition synthesis.”1 Gilles Deleuze refers to these passages in his cinema books, when he explains how the time-image, which emerges in the postwar years, is first achieved through the device of depth of field in the shot.2 The history of film is a series of ways of organizing compositional planes or shots. The deep focus shot developed by Orson Welles presents the viewer with “an invitation to synthesize” a multiplicity of planes at the same time that they appear on screen. More importantly, it synthesizes and overcomes what had been the two main structures of early film: to record an undifferentiated continuum of Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 265. Deleuze refers to Merleau-Ponty’s theory of depth in Cinema II: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 298, note14. 1 2

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space, characteristic of the early so-called actualities, or to decompose an event into series of shots which could be selected and rearranged in the form of a montage. Film oscillated from synthesis to analysis, from whole to part, and one to many. What was revolutionary in Orson Welles’ use of deep focus was that he combined both of these possibilities. He presented a single continuum that was internally differentiated into separate planes of activity. The interaction of a number of simultaneous, interacting planes produces an invitation to synthesize, a region of time. In addition to its obvious uses for cinema theory, Deleuze’s film books develop what we might call a planar theory of sense. It is this element of the work that I will now concentrate on by following a thesis which Deleuze suggests without fully developing in any systematic way. Deleuze suggests that the history of planar relations in the cinema is part of a much longer evolution in the way we differentiate and synthesize planes of experiencein aesthetics, but also in philosophy and science. According to Deleuze, Orson Welles’ cinema “recreates for the use of our modern world” a transformation of thought that originally took place in the seventeenth century.1 Deleuze follows Heinrich Wolflinn’s thesis that the history of modern art is defined by a change from an initial emphasis on the plane, in Renaissance perspective, to an increasing emphasis on the relation between planes, characteristic of the Baroque, but also the basis for all subsequent abstraction in art. I want to briefly recall that distinction and to comment on the image of syntheses and whole which it produces. In a following section I will try to compare this distinction with a very similar one we find in Merleau-Ponty. As is well known, the development of perspective in the 15th century allowed the artist to multiply the number of compositional planes in a work. By using multiple planes composed according to mathematical rules of recession, it was now possible 1

Deleuze, Cinema II: TheTime-Image, p. 143.

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to unite different tableaux of action as parts of a whole. This created a radically different kind of image than the medieval type which was focused on a central, foreground compositional plane, and was restricted to what Erwin Panofsky called “an unconditionally two-dimensional surface.”1 Wolflinn distinguished between two basic elements of perspective: plane and recession.2 He showed that one could produce very different kinds of images depending on whether the accent was placed on the plane or the recession. Initially, perspective is used to create compositional planes which appear distinct and autonomous. The painting is arranged into strata and sequences of discrete events. Each space of action exists first on its own, and only subsequently in relation to the others. We can take as exemplary of an initial ‘planimetric’ use of perspective a well-known work—Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Here, the landscape consists of a series of episodes of carnal transgression. Each of these planes is a separate present moment which can stand on its own and in fact does when, as commonly happens now, the painting is reproduced in detail. These tableaux are nevertheless distinct events, and the overall unity of the work is cumulative—a Renaissance equivalent of analytic montage, if you like. The same planimetric structure, as it may be called, can be seen in the early Italian Renaissance style of Uccello or Grivelli. In Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano it is still possible to determine a foreground plane in which the action is centered, while the background recedes away in depth. The painting is divided into strips or bands of light, with intervals of land, for example, separating them, so that depth and recession work to maintain a division between them. In Grivelli’s The Annunciation, the distinct 1 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, (New York: Zone books, 1991), p.51. 2 Wolflinn discusses plane and recession in Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (New York: Dover Publications, 1950) chp.II.

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planes are separated by columns, walls, windows and doors. Depth and recession are not used to challenge the planimetric form of composition characteristic of the medieval work. In the evolution from Renaissance to Baroque style, the value of plane and recession changes. Wolflinn says that “[t]he beauty of the plane has yielded to the beauty of recession.”1 Recession relation begins to play a positive role in composition. The ‘nerve’ of the painting now lies in the relation of foreground and background parts. The plane as central focus of the painting is ‘depreciated,’ which is to say that the painting is no longer able to unite in the plane. With Rubens, for example, the interest is less in the compositional planes, and more in the movement of light across them which he uses to bring the viewer into the work. This into-thepicture movement can be achieved in various ways. In the Elevation of the Cross, for example, Rubens uses the properties of color to lead the eye across the planes and to avoid presenting any of them in isolation. Rembrandt, on the other hand, uses light to achieve a similar into-the-picture movement, for example in The Blinding of Sampson. The plane is reduced to a secondary status and light which unites planes is the principal subject. Much the same can be said for Carravagio in, for instance in The Calling of St. Matthew. In each case, the Renaissance interest in the multiplication of planes is replaced by an interest in the coexistence and relation among the planes. Or to be more precise, the relation takes precedence over the relata. Like the deep focus image at the center of Deleuze’s Cinema books, the Baroque image directs the eye not to separate foreground and background planes, but to the recession that unites them. The eye is not allowed to form either a sequence of distinct planes, or a unity of a single plane. The receding depth opens a vista; a space between the main figures in the picture and the viewer is now compelled to move between the planes, to link up foreground and background and to grasp the meaning of the Principles of Art History, p. 76.

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work in the movement between the planes. And, like the deep focus time- image, it is neither a logic of the one nor the many, neither a whole that comes before, nor that follows after. Wolflinn explains that in the Baroque use of perspective, [t]he recessional movement dominates and nothing settles into strips. Roads leading inward, foreshortened avenues happened earlier, but they never dominated the picture. Now it is on just such motives that accent lies. The recession of forms is the chief thing, not their co-relation from left to right. Concrete objects can even be totally absent, and then the new art really comes into its own, then it is the general depth of the space that the spectator is called upon to apprehend in one breadth as unified whole. All pictures have recession, but the recession has a different effect, depending on whether we are compelled to organize the space into different planes, which we subsequently synthesize, or to experience is as a recessional movement. As recession becomes the central motive, the function of depth is to compel the spectator to think two sizes together in the same spatial sense. The principle of synthesis changes and the Baroque realizes what was already the latent possibility of perspectivethat the multiplication of compositional planes already supposes a whole that is neither given in advance, nor simply a sum that follows after experience, but is contemporary with what it unites. We can carry this analysis a further step forward by comparing it with a phenomenological opposition Merleau-Ponty develops between “primordial” and “objectified” depth. Merleau-Ponty opposed a phenomenological theory of depth to the common image of perception as a “mobile zone of distinctness,” which in many ways resembles the structure of Renaissance planimetric composition, or analytical decoupage. We commonly imagine perception to consist of a zone of distinction which we focus on one plane of perception, at the expense of others. After having taken in a number of such views of the exterior world, we synthesize them and make inferences based on

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them, as in empiricism (which I will treat in more detail in a moment). Depth, in the sense that Merleau-Ponty gives to the term, stands opposed to this image of perception, for it refers to a phenomenological condition that enables us to experience separate events, or separate planes of experience at the same time. It is depth in this sense that, for example, allows Glenn Gould to experience the sound of his own playing of Bach and the noise of two radios as elements of a common experience. Berkeley and Descartes formalize what might be called the vulgar theory of depth. In the Dioptrics, Descartes derives the properties of depth from those of breadth and height. The greater the breadth of the distance between two things, the greater will be the difference in the height of the objects. A greater difference in the height indicates a greater distance. Depth is therefore a consequence of the relation of our initial evaluation of breadth and height. Descartes derives the properties of depth from the things it makes possible. In other words, he derives the relation from the relata. He thereby misses the phenomenological problem that Merleau-Ponty identifies: how are we able to project a whole in which the parts can participate? For figures seen in relative size in the foreground and background of a work can only be judged and compared because I have already regarded them as elements of a totality. In other words, I can only isolate a foreground figure because another background one has already provided a context that allows me to consider the two as participating in a whole in which relations can be formed. Merleau-Ponty’s position is that the projection of this wholeof this worldis the condition of any empirical relations we might construct among the parts. There is not first a given difference in size and then a recognition of depth. We do not perceive planes with given sets of properties that we then relate. It is only because they have first been synthesized in this way that the elements can be distinguished and empirical and quantitative relations constructed among them.

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Depth, instead of being a third dimension derived from breadth and height, is “the most existential of the dimensions” because it is what allows elements which are mutually exclusive and belong to different planes to nevertheless be simultaneously present in experience. Different objects can be taken as ‘profiles’ of one and the same world seen in depth. Depth is the dimension in which “things or elements envelop each other.”15 Breath and height are alternately the dimensions in which they remain distinct. Depth is “the contraction into one perceptual act of a whole possible process.”6 Merleau-Ponty writes: We cannot, therefore, speak of a synthesis of depth, since a syn­ thesis presupposes, or at least, like the Kantian synthesis, posits discreet terms, and since depth does not posit the multiplicity of perspective appearances to be made explicit by analysis, but sees that multiplicity only against the background of the stable thing.

For Merleau-Ponty, depth describes the envelopment, coimplication and contraction that allow there to be a multiplicity of signs and sensations. Depth is a globalizing synthesis that exists only in the act of simultaneously unifying and differentiating its moments. Even though Merleau-Ponty explicitly opposes a Kantian notion of synthesis, I will nevertheless suggest now that the metaphysical structure of this kind of whole that is dependent on its parts is best developed in Kantian metaphysics. In fact, the analyses of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, as different as they may be, are both genealogical descendants of a much older debate on the fragment, whole and synthesis that goes back to the development of modern metaphysics, specifically in Kant’s reaction to Hume. Let me say a few final words now about the relation, before bringing the discussion back to the problem of globalization with which I started. Deleuze describes empiricism as a creative movement in which the association of an A and a B produces somethinga resemblance, a causality that did not exist before. Deleuze calls

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Hume’s subject a ‘contractile power’ because it contracts a set of discrete events into a series. Empiricism describes the mind’s movement through a sequence of impressions. In light of what was said above about the multiplicity in film and painting we might say that empiricism resembles a kind of analytical editing of experience, a planimetric composition, if you like. The empiricist mind roves over strips, bands, lines of impressions, and holds them together in a unity. When Kant asks about the conditions under which Humean empiricism is possible, he focuses our attention on the relation between the impressions. Wolflinn says of the Baroque that the beauty of the plane is replaced by the beauty of recession. Can we say that Kant introduces recession in philosophy, since he directs our attention to what unites the multiplicity of empiricist sensations? The idea in the Kantian system is a name for the whole that is implicit in each of our conceptual judgments. It is by virtue of the presence of the whole that we can regard any given phenomenon as part of a system that insures its truth value. In fact, in a striking passage of the first critique Kant himself describes the ideathe whole of reasonin a way that reminds us of the peculiar physics of the perspectival vanishing point. He calls the idea a focus imaginarius, and he likens it to the imaginary space which we must imagine to lie behind a mirror in order that, upon looking into it, we are able to see not only the objects which lie before us ( the sink, our hands washing themselves), but those at a distance behind our backs.18 The mirror illusion allows us to synthesize different elements and planes of experience into a whole, as though to transform the flat two-dimensional relation of concept and object into a three-dimensional plane with depthsomewhat like the device of depth of field in painting and photography. The Kantian idea functions in relation to the concepts in the same way that a vanishing point does with respect to the different planes of a work of art. That is to say, it allows us to transform a flat, two-dimensional surface where elements are simply

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juxtaposed into a three-dimensional plane with depth. Kant is the Carravagio, the Orson Welles of philosophy. This same dialectic between the planimetric and recessional relations can now be seen in our reflections on globalizationfor what is that but a reflection on the kind of whole in which we participate. Apart from social and technical infrastructure, globalization refers to the phenomenal experience in which each of our local actions participates in a (global) whole that is in the midst of becoming. What we are experiencing at present is a globalizing, literally a becoming-whole of different spheres of experience. Areas of life that formerly were left to chance, fate, and destiny are now subject to social and technical intervention. Gender relations, organic life and economic planning, for example, are taken out of the realm of tradition. Or, in Gould’s and McLuhan’s terms, they no longer exist on a single plane. The sequence of which they form a part is no longer given, and so each of these objects demands from us a new kind of anticipatory behavior which relates the object to a whole that is in the process of change. We have tended either to dismiss any notion of the whole, or to characterize it as static, fixed and fundamentally spatial. But the theory of depth and planimetric relations I have been tracing here gives us an image of the whole as open and contemporary with its elements, and challenges us to find in the history of modernity signs of the indeterminacy and openness of experience.

Dancing the Dance: Authentic Engagement in a Created Self or Execution of Practiced Skill Tracy P. Dalke Media can inspire us to experience new realities—indeed freeing us from the constraints of our immediate conscious experience. We can enter new realms, experience strong emotions, all through allowing ourselves to embody the consciousness of a created fantasy presented to us through a medium. This transformation occurs not only for the audience but for the creator of the fantasy as well. We see this in dance, an art form that utilizes the body to arouse empathy, ignite imagination, and inspire possibility. For the dancer, an abandonment of self in order to become something other, allows for the transcendence of dancer to that ineffable something, the essence of the dance itself. If, however, one focuses conscious attention on the technical skill of the dance, then reality becomes the precision of the body. Like an actor playing a part, a musician striking a chord, the poet reading his prose, there is something elemental in each activity that becomes significantly altered if the transmission does not encompass an abandoned self for the purpose of the medium. In each case, a new reality is created that exists beyond, or outside of, its creator. This paper seeks to explore the interdependent relationship between medium (dancer/dance) and the message conveyed to an audience. Depending on the dancer’s intention and audience characteristics such as perspective (critical viewer or passive observer), background experience, and mood at the time of the performance, different messages will be conveyed and received.

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What is the Self? What does one mean when speaking of the self? Is it a static entity that is known intimately by its creator, or is it a state of being that is constantly in flux, changing with circumstances and contextual demands? Consciousness is defined by functionalists in traditional psychological theory as whatever is on your mind at any particular time or moment (James). Indeed, what one is hearing, touching, tasting, or thinking about. It is an altered state of consciousness then that is reflected in daydreaming, sleeping, meditating, and imagining, and this implies attending to something other than present sensory stimuli. William James tells us that the mind is characterized by a “stream of consciousness,” an ever-flowing onslaught of thoughts that we are hard pressed to still. It is only through practiced meditation that one becomes capable of stilling the waters of the mind by narrowing one’s attention to the breath as it moves in and out of the body, or focusing on a single mantra (Titmuss). Thus, consciousness is to know thy conscious self, to borrow from Descartes, and to be aware of ourselves in that moment. We speak of the personality as being comprised of relatively enduring traits that define who we are both to ourselves and to others, and indeed derive much comfort from having this well-defined notion. Yet, we witness a change in our behavior, our degree of talkativeness for example, our comfort level within a particular crowd of people, that seems to reflect a more situation-dependent self (Mischel). Perhaps it is this flexibility of self within particular situations that allows us to shed our belief in the real or actual self as proposed in Hazel Markus’s theory of possible selves (Markus and Ruvolo), in order to take on the self of another … a created or fantastical self. It is through this flexibility in thought, this creative avenue to the personality and cognitive structure that we can imagine and become something other than our current reality. If we follow this reasoning as it applies to our perception of the dance we encounter this challenge in both adhering to and

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yet abandoning our self in the performance (the created experience). Applying the critical, analytical framework of the intellect we see the dancer’s beautiful arabesque position, its alignment perfectly executed. Applying the creative, imaginative aspect of the intellect we see beyond the body to the character reaching out to her partner, longing for his embrace. How does one transcend the boundaries of the analytical to embrace the creative? How does one loosen the reins to allow a freedom of thought and expression to enter one’s consciousness that entertains a reality different from one’s own? The answer is in part, through the effectiveness of the medium in portraying his/her message. Dancer as the Vehicle Dance, in the dictionary, has two primary definitions—taking a series of rhythmical steps (and movements) in time to music; and, an artistic form of nonverbal communication.1 Assuming the dancer intends to communicate a message beyond demonstration of bodily postures she needs to exist within the created world of her character. One cannot hope to inspire and create empathy in others if the performer herself does not also experience the passion and vitality embodied within her created character. As the dancer becomes swept up in her own feelings an emotional contagion effect occurs wherein others become similarly ensnared (Colman, 686).2 We see this same phenomenon in other artistic pursuit: for example, as the actor engages us in his character’s authenticity and we find ourselves crying in sympathetic collusion; or the pianist draws us into in his allegro taking us beyond individual chords of sound to experiencing states of bodily arousal; or the poet captures us with vocal intonation literally bringing his words to life as www.hyperdictionary.com “Emotional contagion” is a facet of “social” or “behavioral contagion,” a psychological term referring to the spread of ideas, attitudes, or behavior patterns in a group through imitation and conformity. 1 2

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they become our own. In each instance the medium must be stirred emotionally or psychologically in order for the emotion (and its message) to reach the audience. Let us consider an example. Years ago I performed a lyrical jazz dance to the theme music from the Academy Award winning film, “Terms of Endearment.” I danced as Emma, my interpretation of the film’s protagonist. As I perfected the dance and became more proficient, acquiring more expertise, I was able to shift my conscious focus away from the execution of the dance steps in order to become Emma herself. As I danced I allowed myself to experience my interpretation of the many conflicting emotions that Emma experienced: loss, from her husband’s infidelity; despair, following her diagnosis of terminal cancer; devastation, at the realization that she would not live to see her children mature; and, torment, from her mother’s conditional love. As I performed the choreography of the dance I attempted to experience all of these emotions and communicate them to the audience using my body. Depending on how I experienced this dance as I was performing it, whether I was conscious of Emma or conscious of my dance technique, a different message was conveyed. With arms outstretched towards infinite space, the audience either felt my desperate attempt to reach out to my loved ones or saw my outstretched arm with tense fingers. Sometimes a dancer will slip in and out of a focused engagement with a created self when choreography becomes difficult or concentration becomes distracted. As the ballerina floats across the stage we become caught up in her beauty and grace. Her face holds a pleasant gaze as she becomes the graceful swan or soaring bird. Then, we witness a definitive change in the dancer as she approaches her pirouette sequence. Her facial expression becomes serious and her body tense, as she prepares for the complicated turns that require precision and balance. We lose the swan or the bird, and instead see the dancer, the person, and her body. The illusion, the fantasy, is lost.

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Another form of entertainment where this can clearly be seen is in the sport of figure skating. The skater skips along to a quick samba, demonstrating intricate footwork, cute stylistic moves with the arms, and cheeky facial expressions taking the audience along with him in the routine. We, as the audience, enjoy the dance and become caught up in the emotional contagion of the music and the atmosphere within the arena. But then, all of a sudden, the performance figuratively stops and takes on a new meaning as the skater ceases all stylistic posturing and gestures and prepares for the complicated jump, the “triple axle.” We see the concerned expression wash over the skater’s face and experience a bodily and psychological discomfort as we watch the skater telegraph his jump.1 We hold our breath in anticipation, literally frozen in the moment. The spell of the performance is broken. The dance is literally over and the message has changed. We are all riveted to the skater’s next move. Will he or won’t he fall? The tension and discomfort is almost unbearable. Then, the skater lands the jump and we feel a sense of relief as we exhale our breath and release our shoulders. The skater resumes his former cheeky grin and reverts back to his samba routine. Entertainment resumes. We witness the shift in consciousness for the skater and experience a shift in consciousness for ourselves. As evidenced in the aforementioned scenario of the dancer and the skater, increased technical precision can cause a shift in focus for the performer. A similar phenomenon occurs when comparing the performance of the novice with the expert. Be it dancing, skating, acting, even teaching, a shift from technique to style, authenticity, and appeal becomes evident in the performance of the experienced professional versus the novice. Recently, I taught a dance class in which the students were technically proficient yet there was no element of dance to their performance. 1 “Telegraphing” is the term used to describe the hesitation and focused concentration that precedes a jump sequence in figure skating.

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They were executing their steps in time to the music but there was no emotional experience or expressive communication other than their visible concern with the accuracy of their movements. Another definition for dance is “to be stirred into rapid movement, as leaves in the wind” (Guralnik, 357). Just as the leaves become caught up in the force of the wind, the dancer becomes swept away in the emotion of the music, the indefinable essence of one’s soul and body succumbing to a calling.1 This was certainly not occurring with my novice dancers who were instead fixated on their bodies. They were unable to move beyond their own self-consciousness in order to experience or become something other than themselves. In trying to formulate an understanding of the self and the messages portrayed using the body we can question whether the body is simply an extension of the self or a separate entity that we use as a tool to express our self. When the dancer performs her routine is she an integral part of the other she creates, or does she use her body to create something other than her self? Can we leave the self behind to become something other, as Buddhist philosophy would suggest, or is our self an integral part of everything we create (Cooper)? Let us explore this paradox from the perspective of sport psychology and the phenomenological experience of being in the zone. Researchers tell us that when an athlete (i.e., performer) doubts her ability to execute a particular skill her faulty cognition can negatively impact her level of performance and limit what she is capable of achieving (Kolezynski). Thus, the belief system held by the athlete determines performance outcome. This was clearly demonstrated with the novice tap dancers who were so consumed with making mistakes that their quality of dance was visibly negligible. With cognitive interpretations of 1 In classical music the term “edification” is used to describe this phenomenon of moving beyond the self in order to create something that defies description, that ineffable something.

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doubt and apprehension come the potentially debilitating mental states of stress and anxiety. If the athlete (dancer, skater, performer) becomes consumed with anxiety and self-doubt the resulting performance will be significantly limited. Social-cognitivist, Albert Bandura, devised a theory of selfefficacy to explain how feelings of confidence (or efficacy) in a particular domain can affect ability levels and motivation (Bandura). For example, those individuals who feel efficacious in their ability to dance will foster a self-confidence that helps them achieve their peak performance. Conversely, those individuals who perceive themselves to be less able (i.e., less efficacious) in their dance ability will potentially be held back by their limiting beliefs and thus be unable to progress beyond the execution of practiced skill. Those who feel more efficacious will theoretically be able to trust in their physical abilities thus freeing up their consciousness. It is when one becomes self-conscious and indeed loses “that edge, that intensity of concentration in which limitations are forgotten and the spirit is set free to soar”1 that one’s ability to transcend one’s self is unattainable (Cooper). So what is meant by being in the zone? In sports psychology we learn that “[t]he zone is the essence of the athletic experience,…and those moments of going beyond yourself are the underlying allure of sport” (Cooper).2 Also known as experiencing the flow, Csikszentmihalyi tells us that optimal experience is a selfsurpassing dimension of human experience that is recognized by people the world over, regardless of culture, gender, race, or nationality. Its characteristics include deep concentration, highly efficient performance, emotional buoyancy, a heigh­tened sense of mastery, a lack of self-consciousness, and self-transcendence. (Cooper) It is this pinnacle of personal performance that is the treasured goal for the expert athlete (or performer). 1 2

Quote from former NFL player, Dave Meggyesy. Quote from former NFL player, Dave Meggyesy.

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Description of the zone implies an almost spiritual altered state of consciousness or being. A place, according to Cooper, that exists yet is without a map. This ability to move beyond one’s self, to achieve self-transcendence, is not a state that can be achieved by will. Rather, it is an effortless and unpredictable enlightenment that one must be prepared to enter. Conditions for entering the “zone” include skill, devotion, and immersion. The dancer must satisfy these conditions before she can achieve something beyond technique. One must set the conscious mind aside. “This is the concentration athletes all seek: anchored in technique, rooted in the body, focused on the task at hand, the conscious mind shuts off, deliberate intent is transcended, and the self seems to fall away” (Cooper). Expressed another way, philosopher Michael Novak writes “[t]his is one of the great secrets of sport. There is a certain point of unity within the self, and between the self and its world, a certain complicity and magnetic mating, a certain harmony, that conscious mind and will cannot direct […]. The discovery takes one’s breath away” (Cooper) Does this shift in consciousness for the dancer (actor, skater, poet, musician) and the audience make a difference to the media itself? I suggest it does. One becomes part of the dance, the performance, when one is able to transcend one’s own being to enter into the reality of something other. Similarly, the audience becomes Emma when being moved by in a performance and their experience becomes richer. As the audience listens to the poet, they experience the emotion garnered through the prose by living the experience, through empathizing with the character that can only happen if they can embody the experience themselves. It is through this ability to transcend their own egocentrism and take on the perspective of another, that they are able to escape the boundaries of the conscious self and open up the realm of possibilities.

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Who is the Audience? Let us turn our attention then to this other very important aspect of the communication relationship, the audience. To whom is the message being sent and for what purpose? Entertainment? Instruction? As a dancer myself, I enter into the dance experience with different expectations from those who do not share my background. While I want to be swept up in the emotion of the performance and journey with the dancer, I am also deeply affected by the ability of the dancers and the flow of the choreography. I see mistakes in footwork and overbalancing errors that would go unnoticed to the untrained eye. This knowledge is almost imprisoning to me in that it holds me back from enjoying the performance if it is not executed to perfection. However, when I encounter a performance that is characterized by remarkable skill and beauty I am deeply moved because of my appreciation for the difficulty of the performance and the mastery of its execution. Other audience members may remark on the costumes and the lighting, not seeing beyond the superficial elements of the dance. Then, there are those who become the dancer, who journey with the performer and abandon their own conscious reality. These audience members are able to imagine beyond their selves. They become “drawn irresistibly by the thrill of witnessing the drama of self-surpassing play. [Dance] awakens and invites us to our own exceptional possibilities. We recognize our own surpassing self in the actions of another” (Cooper). Thus, for some, watching the dancer enables them to imagine themselves capable of performing similar skills. Mood is another factor that impacts the message. For example, in the case of music, we often experience strong bodily sensations (e.g., “knot in the stomach, chocking feelings in the throat) and emotional reactions (e.g., happiness or sadness) as we recall memories or thoughts aroused by the music. Indeed, it is the desire to experience these bodily sensations that often

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determines what music we listen to at any one particular time. Similarly, when watching a performance, our mood can impact what emotions are aroused within us before, during, and following a performance. Moreover, our desire to experience a particular emotion may influence how we receive the message of the dance. If we feel sadness at the recent death of a loved one then our desire to emote with the dancer’s despair and longing may be intensified. Reality then is subjective, driven by one’s past experiences, expectations, and mood at the time of the performance. Varying objectives and individual differences impact the message received from the medium thus enabling it to become something unique for each individual. Dance, as a form of art, allows for this subjectivity of experience and interpretation. Message and Meaning Given all that has been said, is there a core truth to a performance, to a message? Does there need to be a shared meaning for the audience or can the message (in this case entertainment) be all things to all people? We, as a society, endorse the belief that “art” can be interpreted on multiple levels from varying perspectives and we encourage that creative element through the artist. So long as we have moved the audience member, inspired him or her on some emotional level, we have achieved our goal of communicating a message, even if it was not our intended message. Thus, whether dance involves immersion in a created self or the execution of practiced skill a message is conveyed that will be deeply personal for both dancer and audience. Works Cited Bandura, Albert (1990) “Perceived self-efficacy in the exercise of personal agency.” Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, vol. 2(2), pp. 128-163.

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Colman, Andrew M. A Dictionary Of Psychology. Oxford: University Press, 2001, pp.686. Cooper, Andrew. In the zone: the zen of sports. Shambhala Sun Online: Buddhism Culture Meditation Life. http://www.shambhalasun. com/Archives/Features/1995/Mar95/TheZone.htm Guralnik, David B. Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language (2nd Ed). Ohio: Prentice Hall Press, pp. 357, 1984. James, William. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Holt, 1890. Kolezynski, Joe. Belief, Self talk and Performance Enhancement. http:// www.selfhelpmagazine. com/articles/sports/selftalk.html Markus, Hazel and Ruvolo, A (1989) Possible selves: personalized representations of goals. In L.A. Pervin’s (Ed.), Goal Concepts in Personality and Social Psychology, pp. 211-241. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Mischel, Walter (1973) “Toward a cognitive social learning conceptualization of personality.” Psychological Review, vol. 80, pp. 252-283. Titmuss, C. Mindfulness for Everyday Living. Hauppauge, New York: Barron’s Educational Services, Inc., 2003.

The Soul Factor: Deception in Intimations of Life in Computer-Generated Characters Kathryn S. Egan Computer-generated imagery (CGI) makes possible the creation of animated characters that can seem “real,” or life-like, in film. DreamWorks’ Shrek, one such character, is computer-rendered with such richness, luminosity and texture that we might be almost certain of him as a transcendent subject-as-other. Similarly “Woody” in Disney-Pixar’s Toy Story 2 seems to allow for intersubjectivity: when his arm is partially torn off in play and we see him slouch languidly on a shelf, his animated eyes (windows to his brain) convey disappointment, and he is no object but surely a subject, another I. Imitations of life that they are, these creatures still challenge the notion that cyberspace is solely a place of isolation and loneliness (Majkut). Gollum in New Line’s The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers is a rendering based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary character, a composite of illustrations, and computer-generated models from a performance by a live actor. The resulting computer-made character, superimposed into live action scenes, is claimed by its makers to have heart and soul, which makes him so real that he is accepted as just another member of the cast. Heart, soul, mind, and brain are all mentioned as evidence of “realness” in computer generated animated film characters. And yet they seem uncanny. I argue that the claim for “soul” in these characters is ironic: soul is what they lack, and therefore there is no hope to be found in them.

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Soul and Empathy and Hope The soul is the principle of animal life (Aristotle). The essence of soul is movement and sensation; that which cannot move on its own has no soul. In no case can the soul act or be acted upon without involving the body. Even thinking (because it is a form of imagination) requires both body and soul. Religious doctrine adds to Aristotle’s definition that the Gods formed man from the dust of the ground and “put his spirit into him; and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (McConkie), and that the soul is immortal. Goethe, an atheist, depicts in Faust man’s struggle to know himself and to understand the world as a battle for his soul between the forces of light and darkness. In the end Faust’s greatest achievement is reclamation of a piece of land from the sea, a metaphor Freud uses also to convey the saving of one’s soul. In arguing against the “scientific” translation of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Bettelheim claims Freud “showed us how the soul could become aware of itself ” (Bettelheim) by exploring its depths—the hell we may be suffering from. A theoretical understanding of unconscious processes is an emotionally distant understanding, and Bettelheim realized it was of little use in helping children with severe psychiatric disorders. What was needed was a “spontaneous sympathy of our unconscious with that of others, a feeling response of our soul to theirs” (5). This empathy is not about abstract concepts, not necessarily “therapy,” but is valuable “rather because of what it reveals to us about what concerns man most closely: his own essence” (Bettelheim). Empathy, wrote Edith Stein, is the givenness of foreign objects [Husserl’s transcendent others] and their experiences to a psycho-physical “I” that is body and soul together. The soul, the basic bearer of all experiences, is founded on the body (Stein). This psycho-physical “I” experiences subjects external to it in acts of empathy. That is, other psycho-physical individuals appear to me as sensitive, living bodies belonging to other “I’s” that

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sense, think, feel and will, who are centers of phenomenal worlds, and who face and communicate with me. I am aware of not just the concrete bodies and features of these others, but also what is expressed in their faces and their gestures. Empathy tells me also what is behind them. Empathy is the basic nature of acts of pure consciousness that give me, all at once, awareness of feelings, and also the averted sides of what is primordially given. When it arises before me, all of this is given to me whole in consciousness. Although it is possible for me to be deceived by these foreign objects, these Others, it is through this empathy that I become aware of levels of value in myself and discover there are persons of different types from my own—and I see there are ranges of values closed to me. Feelings like everything psychic are part of the body-bound consciousness. Feelings are loaded with an energy that must be released in the form of volitions and actions. The same feeling can motivate an appearance of expression, which I feel, such as a smile, which is pleasure externalized in the stretching of my lips. But the expression is a relatively independent phenomenon. It is possible to stretch my mouth so that it might be taken for a smile when I am not feeling like smiling, when I feel annoyance or fear rather than pleasure. A blush, which is an expression independent of will, can come from anger, shame or emotion, but in any case I experience a feeling of blood rushing to my face. Someone observing this will need an “observant glance” (Stein) to detect its motivation and thus make it an intentional object. This same glance enables me to know the difference between an expression that is related to feelings and one that is meant to simulate feelings—a deception in other words. Edith Stein’s exploration of empathy tells us soul is different from spirit. Soul is a part of nature; spirit is subject to a meaning context based on motivations and feelings, which are necessary for volition and to ground valuing. It is spirit that allows empathy and volition hope. The will (spirit) is the master of the soul,

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as well as the living body, The willing I, as the master of the living body, employs a psycho-physical mechanism to fulfill itself, to realize what is willed through action (55). Every creative act is volitional. To hope is a volitional, creative act. Its fulfillment is the creation of what is not. It is a state of being characterized by an anticipation of a continued good state, an improved state, or a release from a perceived entrapment. It is an anticipation of a bright future based upon relationships with others, a sense of personal competence and the ability to cope with life—a sense of the possible (Miller and Powers). As ethicist Louis Pojman reminded us after the events of September 11, 2001. I may not be able to force myself to believe in my ability to cope with the future, but I can will a hope for the possibility of doing so. Artificial Intelligence and the Computer-Generated Image (CGI) Every character produced as an animated CGI begins in noesis, usually in a role within fictional narrative. Drawings, puppets, clay models, wire frames and live actors—lately a person in a tight Lycra suit—have objectified the noetic imagery to serve as characters that are animated through artistry. The animator engenders life into the character, hand-drawn or computer-generated, by making it seem to move on its own—evidence of soul. The single image is portrayed in sequences of still frames, each frame slightly different, to represent the course of a movement. Projected 24 frames per second, the image is flashed on the eye, and the brain retains that image longer than it is actually registered on the retina, so that I see continuous motion. The computer facilitates animation production. Three-dimensional scenes may be computer-rendered, processing all the elements— models, texture, lights and camera—to create a two-or threedimensional image of that scene. Future software programming is predicted to allow for computation of action by taking into account physical laws such as gravity and velocity, so that when,

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say, a Monster, presumed to be very heavy according to the animators of Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. (Lasseter and Doctor) hits a brick wall, the computer will calculate the Monster’s reverberation by taking into account whether it is a large fury creature, a single eyeball on skinny legs, or a squat one with eight arms. The computation will also include how fast the creature was going when it hit the wall, and the material with which the wall is constructed. The goal is a perfect reproduction of reality. But the computer is limited because it processes information in bits of atomistic information that cannot arrive at anything that approximates our understanding of the world (Wrathall). What the computer cannot calculate is soul. Soul-based artistry is needed to create the aesthetics of animation, such as the “stretch and squish” of anticipation and exaggeration (Laybourne). “Stretch” is the extension of the character in anticipation just before a major movement, and “squish,” is the exaggerated effect of the movement accomplished. The computer cannot calculate these elements, because they are not based on physical laws. Nor can the computer calculate how much change should take place from frame to frame to create the illusion of continuous motion. Change, stretch and squish are elements of the background in the Heideggarian sense in that they become coping practices that allow us to process the two-dimensional film images in terms of our own world, that is they “provide the conditions necessary for people to pick out objects [in this case the animated character] and to allow them to show up as meaningful” (Wrathall). Animated characters are first noetic beings that “stream in” to consciousness (the clearing) in the mind of the animator, whose vision and grasp of circumstances guides his/her bringing the character to simulated life by selecting elements necessary for the character’s coping and by de-selecting the unnecessary ones. The noetically successful animated characters—in that they are taken to engender empathy—are meant to convey that the brain

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is driving the action. “Aliveness” is embodied in detail. Silver in Disney’s Treasure Planet is a combination of computer-generated mechanical arm, leg and eye to simulate his cyborg qualities, while his human parts are hand-drawn. His animator empathized with both his “possessed, greedy mechanical side,” and his “softer hand-drawn human side” to portray the character’s struggle for soul in the pursuit of the treasure. The actor’s voice enacting the character suggested to the animator that Silver’s words come from the side of his mouth. “When people talk like that it means they’re putting up a front. Silver talks that way a lot because he is duplicitous”(Kurtii and Revenson). Animating anomaly invests character and scene with a feeling of authenticity. The animator of teen-aged Jim in the film claims that “how the character feels” is captured in the eyes, and so he closely studied live actors’ eyes for details of movement attached to specific feelings—the downward and sideways glance of adolescent uncertainty for example. Such details are missing in some CGI characters that are brought to light mainly to demonstrate technological ability to create them and place them digitally into the film with live actors. Lucasfilms’ Jar-Jar Binks is one such character, an amalgam so contrary to me as a “live” subject that I cannot process its “bits” of information as a unified whole. Its consciousness is unavailable to me and so I cannot experience it as another subject with sensibilities. It manages to “facilitate boredom with dazzling speed” (Majkut) because it lacks soul. Tolkien’s literary Gollum is all about conflicted soul, a creature driven mad over his possession of the One Ring. In the film the actor for Gollum plays him as a drug addict in withdrawal. He provides the motion model for the computer generated Gollum, the frame for the overlaid pixilated skin. Although based on the movements of a live actor, the film Gollum is a technological composite of “eye-flicks, brow-furrows and fish-devourings” (Cowan) created on computers, which begs the question:

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is Gollum a human performance or just a pattern of pixels? The computer-generated Gollum is inserted into the same contextual plane of the film as the live figures, so that pixels and actors are all taken as parts of the same stable background by the spectator who views them as coexisting (Crocker). Existentially, as spectator I am embodied within the Tolkien world opened to me by the film, just as the filmed world is present within the theater (Fisher). In viewing the film I wish for total transparency of the medium (Ihde), so that I might experience the animated Gollum face-to-face in order to comprehend his feelings and to grasp his habitual attitudes as a unity and therefore as motivation for more experiences with him(Stein). Following Sobchack’s theory of spectatorship, I seek the correlation between the viewing view—mine and the camera’s—and the viewed-view on film (Fisher). I want to be the clearing for the character’s disclosure (its Heideggerian shining forth”) in my consciousness for reflection. The Deception The exploration of the unconscious—and attendant suffering—are portrayed in the CGI Gollum, inviting empathy for his Faust-like struggle for his soul. I am expected to perceive this action as a reproduction of the way in which the soul originates movement in animals, through intention. At first impression, Gollum seems to invite that feeling response as he thrashes between two selves—the Gollum he has become and the tortured Smeagol obsessed by his precious Ring. When concern for a computer-generated “soul” arises before me—in memory, expectation or fantasy—I “read in its face” (Stein) the character’s mood, and I become the subject of the mood in the character’s place. Once I have clarified the mood, it can again stare me in the face as an object. In the case of Gollum, I surround myself with his situation in the context of the film. I see him hissing and moving erratically—the mood emerges and I experience

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perceiving Gollum in anguish. His anguish is not my own, but I am pulled into it and experience it in Gollum’s place, and then I am to feel this anguish though it is separate from me. Gollum is represented to feel that anguish primordially and I am led by it to experience it non-primordially. Nevertheless, ideally the anguish is empathetically the same for me, the viewer, as it is for Gollum, the comprehender (15). I know what it is to plumb the lowest depths of one’s soul, to explore that personal hell, in order to become more fully human, no longer enslaved by lurking, unidentified spiritual demons. I look on Gollum’s struggle with compassion. But empathy eludes me. As in all intersubjective experience through media, mine with Gollum is inauthentic, because no matter how like a living person the computer-generated image may be, he is not really a “person” but rather a composite of idealizations and typifications of Others (Nagel). Gollum is inauthentic in the Husserlian sense. He fails to appear as a phenomenal being constantly in flux, graspable only in an essential intuition. Gollum, like email, is a sign of Being. The grammar of emotions in the case of the CGI is what the animator has made of imagined facial expressions of an idealized literary character. Therefore, the Gollum is a deceitful sign, a fiction constructed by the animator. I know that a human being (more than one if the live actor model is counted) is behind the Gollum sign, but there is no Husserlian fulfilled conscious act of an other, no appresentation—or synthesized unity of movement—of an Other’s Leib. Stein’s empathy requires a psycho-physical individual distinguished from a physical thing (5). This phenomenon of foreign psychic life (the Other) is given to me as a center of orientation of a phenomenal world in which it senses, thinks, feels, and wills. The CGI character simulates such a center of sensitive orientation and therefore deceives me. My presencing in the film causes me to take for granted his movement as coming from his soul, and willed by his spirit. My self-deception lies in assigning

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my own individual characteristic of exploring the depths of my soul to this computer-generated imposter. I come to my conclusion that this Gollum will lay claim to his piece of land, his soul, because I have falsely inferred, on the basis of my own orientation, that he has a soul. I follow Stein’s admonition to reiterate the act of empathy to discover and remove deceit. I look at Gollum’s face looking out from his world seemingly into mine (but never right at me), and know that, having no body of his own, and, therefore, no possible psycho-physical relationship with me, there can be no empathy. If “Hope is a thing with feathers—That perches on the soul,” (Dickinson) then soulless Gollum also has no hope. Like Odysseus he is a trickster with two identities that are mediated perception but not appresented in nuance. The deception is in the eyes. They are not windows to the soul—or mind or brain— after all. There is nothing on the other side of them, no volition, no hope, indeed, No-man. Works Cited Aristotle. On the Soul. The Internet Classics Archive: On the Soul by Aristotle. 350 B.C.E. www. J.A. Smith. Available: classics.mit.edu/ Aristotle/soul.html. February 18 2003. Bettelheim, Bruno. Freud and Man’s Soul. New York: Vintage Books, 1982. Cowan, James. Is the Gollum Worthy? Yes and No. 2003. National Post. January 09 2003. Crocker, Stephen. “Depth of Field and the Phenomenology of Global Events.” Glimpse Publication of the Society for Phenomenology and Media Studies 3.1 (2001): 38-43. Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas S Johnson. Boston, New York, London: Little Brown and Company, 1961. Fisher, Kevin. “Dasein and the Existential Structure of Cinematic Spectatorship: A Heideggerian Analysis.” Glimpse 1.1 (1999): 37-45.

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Ihde, Don. Technology and the Lifeworld. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. Kurtii, Jeff, and Jody Revenson. Treasure Planet: A Voyage of Discovery. New York: Disney Editions, 2002. Lasseter, John, and Peter Doctor. The Art of Monsters, Inc. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2001. Laybourne, Kit. The Animation Book: The New Digital Edition. New York: Three Rivers Press, Crown Publishing Group, 1998. Majkut, Paul. “Empathy’s Imposter: Interactivity Versus Intersubjectivity.” Glimpse Publication of the Society for Phenomenology and Media Studies 1.1 (2000): 59-65. McConkie, Bruce R. “ Soul.” Mormon Doctrine. Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1966. 748-49. Miller, J.F., and J.J. Powers. “Development of an Instrument to Measure Hope.” Nursing Research 37 (1988): 6-10. Nagel, Chris. “Empathy, Mediation, Media.” Glimpse: Publication of the Society for Phenomenology and Media Studies 3.2 (2002): 37-41. Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Trans. Ph.D. Waltraut Stein. The Collected Works of Edith Stein Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross Discalced Carmelite. Vol. three. Washington, D.C.: ICS, 1989. Wrathall, Mark. “Background Practices, Capacities, and Heideggerian Disclosure: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus.” Heidegger, Coping and Cognitive Science. Eds. Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas. Vol. 2. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press, 2000. 93-114.

Dasein and the Existential Structure of Cinematic Spectatorship: A Heideggerian Analysis Kevin Fisher My objective here is to put Martin Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, as the uniquely reflective possibility of human consciousness, into contact with Vivian Sobchack’s argument that what cinema presents to its spectator is essentially a situation of lived-embodiment. In this way I hope to argue that film is a privileged medium not only in which to ask philosophical questions, but in its ability to embody the modes of experience which lead to philosophical reflection. This paper began with what seemed an intriguing point of comparison. In The Address of The Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, Vivian Sobchack provides a general critique of the history of attempts within film theory to define the essence, or ontology of cinema.1 This analysis seemed to corroborate, in the microcosmic history of a 20th Century technological art-form, Heidegger’s overarching critique of the history of Western metaphysics since Plato.2 The important point of comparison is what Heidegger regards as an historical conflation between ontic and ontological questions, or, put differently, questions about the existence of objective beings versus questions about Being: as the conditions under which anything may be found to exist at all. Vivian Sobchack, The Address of The Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press). 2 See especially Martin Heidegger, “The Necessity, Structure, and Priority of the Question of Being,” Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 1-12. 1

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Heidegger charges metaphysics with the perennial error of seeking the “meaning of Being” through causal explanations for the existence of objects. The world is then either explained idealistically, as projections of mind, empirically, as outgrowths of a material substratum, or positivistically, as the demonstrables of science. Correspondingly, mind either retracts into solipsism or is objectified as a subtle substance. In any case, the mistake is the same. The question of the meaning of Being is lost among the objective world of beings. Compare this to Sobchack’s critique of the history of film’s ontology. Heidegger’s ontological/ontic distinction resonates in Sobchack’s complaint that the essence of cinema has been obscured by the metaphors used to theorize the medium. Three metaphors have dominated film theory: the picture frame, the window, and the mirror. The first two… represent the opposing poles of classical film theory (formalism and realism), while the third, the mirror, represents the synthetic conflation of perception and expression that characterizes most contemporary (psychoanalytic) film theory. What is interesting to note is that all three metaphors relate directly to the screen rectangle and to the film as a static viewed object, and only indirectly to the dynamic activity of viewing that is engaged by both the film and the spectator, each as viewing subjects.1 Through the history of film theory Sobchack identifies a common oversight: “that film, as it is experienced, might be engaged as something more than just an object of vision is a possibility that has not been entertained.”2 This historical objectification of cinematic vision has tended to bifurcate the entire lived-correlation that cinema, as it is experienced, involves. Sob­chack’s insistence that the ontology of cinema can only be gleaned from a perspective which engages the subject and object of its vision echoes Heidegger’s condition that “every metaphysical question can be 1 2

Sobchack, 14-15. Sobchack, 20.

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asked in only such a way that the questioner as such is present together with the question, that is, is placed in the question.”1 Although we may, as Heidegger claims, “stand in a vague understanding of the meaning of Being,” it is this very reflective possibility of asking the question that distinguishes human consciousness as the privileged site from which to address the question of the meaning of Being. He writes: [B]ut already when we ask, “What is Being?” we stand in an understanding of the “is” without being able to determine conceptually what the “is” means. We do not even know the horizon upon which we are supposed to grasp and pin down the meaning. This average and vague understanding of being is a fact.2

Thus, for Heidegger, this ontic fact was not merely an unanswerable noetic conundrum, but the passageway to a reframing of the question of ontology: “… this indefiniteness of the understanding of being that is always already available is itself a positive phenomenon which needs elucidation.”3 Heidegger refers to the uniquely reflective character of human consciousness as Dasein, as that being which both has being and can ask the question of the meaning of Being. Heidegger understood a hermeneutic rather than vicious circle in which the question of the meaning of Being may be engaged through an analysis of the existential conditions for the experience of Dasein.4 Although the existential analysis of Dasein is a task which dwarfs the entirety of this paper, consuming the whole of Heidegger’s Being and Time, I want to gloss some of Heidegger’s Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” in Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993). 2 Heidegger, Being and Time, 4. 3 Heidegger, Being and Time, 4. 4 Heidegger understands the circularity between the experience of Being and the average, everyday understanding of Being, as a dialectic through which the phenomenological analysis of Dasein’s being in the world leads to a reframing of the conditions under which there exists a being who can also ask the question of what is Being? 1

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central ideas which ground the lived-experience of Dasein as always-already embodied and enworlded. Heidegger observes that Dasein always comes to reflective awareness of itself as spatio-temporally finite, in a concrete sense of embodiment within a world. Although the essence of Dasein is reflective, Dasein always reveals itself as already involved pre-reflectively in the world. Although the reflective mode of Dasein produces an “ego,” the primordial ground of Dasein is essentially impersonal. The movement of reflection which brings the pre-reflective situation of Dasein before itself in its subjective and objective modalities is itself enabled through and generative of “temporality.” The irreducibly temporalizing movement of Dasein reveals the origins of history, and reveals its own essence as essentially historical. In this way the ontological re-framing of the question of the meaning of Being must proceed phenomenologically through an existential analysis of Dasein as it is embodied within the world and within history. Heidegger’s privileging of Dasein as the ontic starting-point for ontological inquiry corresponds to Sobchack’s privileging of cinema as the only art form which embodies the activity of pre-reflective and reflective consciousness in duration. What Heidegger explains as Dasein is, at first glance, similar to what Sobchack identifies as “film’s body,” an active and embodied opening upon the world through vision. However, it is important to clarify what is meant phenomenologically by “having a body.” Sobchack is speaking of the “lived body,” drawn from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, rather than merely of the body as physiology, or, in the case of cinema, as mechanism. Cinematic technology transcends its mechanisms as the human lived-body transcends its physiology […]. What our bodies instrumentally are for us, the mechanisms of the cinema are for the film—the camera and projector always (and usually effortlessly) engaging the world visually in the compass of a bodily and perceptive style of being.1 1

Sobchack, 213.

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Although embodiment is not reducible to the objective presence or material description of the body, objective-material presence is the necessary corollary of any and all experience, since experience of a world always takes place from some location within that world. Through its irreducibly correlated subjective and objective modalities, embodiment also correlates invisibility and visibility, immateriality and materiality. For instance, although one’s perception—one’s intra subjective, introceptive image of the world—is the place where the world is made present through the unique spatio-temporal situation of one’s objective, visible body, this vision is not itself visible, this perception is not itself a perceptible object within the world for others. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of vision as expressive of the pre-reflective and reflective modes of embodied consciousness builds upon Heidegger’s notion of vision as an irreducible correlation of objective presence and non-objective perception. In his understanding of vision, Heidegger employs a doubled metaphor of “light” that correlates the appearance of things as a “streaming in” and Dasein as a “Lichtung” or forest clearing, which creates the opening for this appearance to be disclosed as such.1 Writing against the ontic-empiricist tendency to understand appearance qua “representation” without regard for the non-objective opening in which vision takes place, Heidegger comments: Light can stream into the clearing, into its openness, and let brightness play with darkness in it. But light never first creates openness. Rather, light presupposes openness […].2

Again, it is the unique ability of Dasein to bring this entire correlation into reflection. I borrow this comparison from Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 273. 2 Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” Basic Writings, 384. 1

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Besides always being pre-reflectively conscious of the world as it comes to one through perception, one can also reflect on the character or “intentional shape” of one’s own perceptual activity and the embodied opening one lives, or reflexively reflect on “one’s self ” or ego as the enduring source or author of experience.1 The following statement by Merleau-Ponty regarding the reflective and pre-reflective modalities of vision is particularly apropos of cinema. Thus vision divides itself. There is the vision upon which I reflect; I cannot think it except as thought, the mind’s inspection, judgment, a reading of signs. And then there is the vision that really takes place, an honorary or instituted thought, squeezed into a body—its own body, of which we can have no idea except in the exercise of it […].2

Sobchack’s theory of spectatorship begins with this homologous relationship that exists between the irreducible structure of consciousness or “thought” as the correlation between intentional act and intentional object, and the similarly irreducible structure of vision as the correlation of what she terms a “viewing view” (the enactment of vision, or what Heidegger refers to more passively as “the clearing”) and a “viewed view” (the visual field and the objects within it, or what Heidegger calls the “shining forth” of objects).3 Sobchack’s theory of cinematic spectatorship is grounded in the assertion that the intentional correlation of vision as “viewing view” and “viewed view” “corresponds not only to the spectator of film but also to the film as spectator.”4 1 It is significant that from the perspective of existential phenomenology, a view held in common by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the ego is not the ground of consciousness, but rather an epiphenomenon—a merely transcendent rather than transcendental entity—produced through the activity of reflective consciousness but not primordially present in pre-reflective experience. 2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception, edited by James M. Edie (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 176. 3 Sobchack, 55. 4 Sobchack, 49.

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Sobchack argues that it is precisely cinema’s embodiment of both sides of the correlation, of situated and active vision (viewing view) revealing a visible field (viewed view), which provides the grounds for the unique mode of intersubjective communication which occurs between film and spectator. Through the reversibility of camera and projector, cinema makes the intrasubjective experience of another (through the camera as perception) directly perceptible as intersubjective experience for the spectator (through the projector as expression). In this sense, the basic correlation between film and spectator transcends a central and invariant impossibility of non-cinematically mediated experience: that one subject can never directly experience the introceptive vision of another. Sobchack articulates this point as follows: My encounter with the film, however, does not present me with the other’s activity of seeing as it is inscribed through and translated into the activity of a visible “visual body.” Rather the film’s activity of seeing is imminent and visible—given to my own vision as my own vision is given to me […]. [U]nlike other seeing persons, the film’s interpersonal and intersubjective visibility is given to me uniquely from the ‘inside out,’ inscribed and made visible as the intrapersonal and subjective modality of vision.1

The embodiment relation of filmmaker and camera records the “viewed view” of the filmmaker as the prereflectively constituted visual and aural field, and the “viewing view” of the filmmaker as the reflectively recognized enacting of vision through the intentionally directed activity of the camera.2 The embodiment relation of spectator and projector produces the correlated “viewing view” and “viewed view” of the film as visibly, audibly, and haptically perceptible on the screen. Sobchack, 138. This includes, but is not limited to, the framing of the shot, the movement of the camera, changes in focus (delineating figure from ground) and the other expressive techniques within the cinematic repertoire (including postproduction) which precede the film’s projection. 1 2

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This model does not, however, negate the embodiment of the spectator, who still perceives the intrasubjective vision on the screen from the standpoint of his/her own situated and embodied vision. The cinema thus creates a unique situation of “double occupancy” for the film’s and spectator’s perception. Sobchack writes: […] the mutual possession of this experience of perception and expression by filmmaker, film, and spectator—all viewers viewing, engaged as participants in dynamically and directionally reversible acts that reflexively and reflectively constitute the perception of expression and the expression of perception. Indeed, it is this mutual capacity for and possession of experience through common structures of embodied existence, through similar modes of being in the world, that provide the intersubjective basis of objective cinematic communication.1

It is this doubled situation of embodiment which provides the hermeneutic possibilities whereby the world presented by the film (viewed view) and the mode of that presentation (viewing view) becomes object and subject to all levels of hermeneutic activity.2 The spectator engages in interpretive activities regarding the objectively visible world presented by the film (viewed view), the film’s manner and style of movement within that world (the film’s viewing view), and the spectator’s own manner and style of watching the film (the spectator’s viewing view) which includes his/her convergence and divergence with the film’s own modulation of intentional address. Sobchack articulates film’s “intentional body” in terms of the dynamic possibilities for intentional agreement and disagreement Sobchack, 5. Sobchack provides a comprehensive account and diagramming of the combinations of intentional correlation within and between the viewing view/ viewed view of the spectator and film. Although too lengthy to recount here, it is important to note that every combination of intentional address between film and spectator permits dialogical convergence or dialectical divergence of attention. See Sobchack, 279. 1 2

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which exist between its embodied vision and that of the spectator. Her emphasis on the dialogical and dialectical possibilities of spectatorship, as a function of the double-structure of visual consciousness in its irreducibly correlated visible and invisible modalities, arises as a critique of “apparatus theory” which, as an integration of the Lacanian “mirror stage” with Louis Althusser’s theory of “ideological state apparatuses,” reduces cinematic vision to its merely objective modalities through the psychoanalytic, binary opposition of presence versus absence. In an extension of the Lacanian metaphor of the “mirror,” theorists such as Jean Louis Baudry and Christian Metz have argued that cinema replaces the invisible introception of the spectator with the visible vision on the screen, returning the spectator to an infantile state whereby psychic integration is misrecognized in the reflected objectification of the subject’s vision. Because the spectator’s vision is not visible, his/her own introceptive vision is assumed to have been usurped by the visible vision on the screen. Because the cinematic apparatus (film’s body-object) is visibly absent—yet actively present—while the spectator’s body is visibly inert, it is assumed that the spectator’s body has been emptied of its own intentional agency and implanted with the mechanized vision of the apparatus. From the perspective of apparatus theory, cinema functions as a sort of mind-control machine.1 However, this theoretical orientation can provide no insight into the multiple ways in which the lived experience of film involves divergences between the spectator’s and the film’s intentional address, whether it be the simple act of staring off into the corner of the screen while the film’s attention is invested in the center, or getting up and (bodily) walking out of the theater in disgust. Sobchack points out that when the non-visible, non-objective modalities of vision are treated as merely absent, theory 1 The seminal articulation of this view may be found in Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” trans. Alan Williams, in Film Quarterly 28 (Winter 1974-75), 39-47.

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forfeits its ability to systematically address the dialectical possibilities of the spectator-film relationship and, furthermore, obviates the need for content analysis since the ideological effect of meconnaisance, the misrecognition of the vision on the screen for the spectator’s own, overcomes and renders secondary all other hermeneutic concerns. Apparatus theory bears mention here because it demonstrates the sort of deterministic thinking which ensues when human and technological perception are comprehended only in terms of their objectively visible characteristics. This returns my analysis to the lived-consequences of what Heidegger understood as the conflation between the ontic and the ontological. Yet, although Hei­degger carefully observed the above distinction in relation to simple human projects, he tends to conflate his own categories in his less sanguine views on the meaning of more complex, modern technologies. I will now turn my attention to how Heidegger’s un­der­standing of technology problematizes the understanding of cinema as an embodiment of the activity of Dasein. As Sobchack argues that the understanding of cinema has been limited by the metaphors (frame, window, mirror) historically employed for its theorization, Heidegger remarks in parallel fashion that Western metaphysics can be characterized as “productionist,” determined by the metaphor of the “workshop” and the production of objects. In an earthbound manifestation of Plato’s realm of the forms, which give essence to dumb and degraded matter and logic to the world through the instantiation of abstract form, modern technology, in its treatment of nature as merely objective, strips things of their singularity and situatedness in order to deploy them as “standing reserve” for its own instrumental projects. For Heidegger, the history of the West is essentially the story of how the “productionist metaphysics” of the ancient Greeks gradually degenerated into modern technology. Heidegger refers to this consequent re-incarnation of the world through technology as gestellen, or “enframing.”

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The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of a setting-upon [Stellens], in the sense of a challenging forth [Herausforderung]. That challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored-up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are ways of revealing. But this revealing never simply comes to an end.1 Gestellen also involves a litany of other activities such as counting, categorizing and other calculations which enhance the interchangeability of things and the mechanization of human labor. Through gestellen things are alienated from their essences and Dasein is alienated from authentic production. For Heidegger, the world characterized by gestellen is the objective fulfillment of the character of Being described through productionist metaphysics. Like the natural world which develops without telos, “worlds world, […] entities appear, […], the rose blooms without why […],”2 technology, despite its instrumental rationality, pursues progress for the sake of progress, a perversion of the Nietzschean “will to power” into the mere “will to will.” It is in this sense that the revealing of gestellen “never ends” because, like a force of nature, it has no final objective beyond its own proliferation. In the world produced through technology and in accordance with productionist metaphysics, space and time become a system of mathematical coordinates, the (en) framing structure which organizes the industrial functions necessary to deploy everything as standing reserve.3 Heidegger understood the world inaugurated through art as the antidote to the world revealed as mere “standing reserve” Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, edited by Davide Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 216. 2 Zimmerman, 234-35. 3 Zimmerman, 212. 1

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through gestellen. Although Heidegger regarded modern technologies as similar to art and “handiwork” in their power to reveal a world, he understood the revelatory power of technology as essentially involved in the concealment of the essence of things which art and the traditional crafts disclosed. There was a time when it was not technology alone that bore the name techne. Once that revealing which brings forth truth and splendor of radiant appearance was also called techne. Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was called techne. The poiesis of the fine arts was also called techne.1 Heidegger compared this authentically productive act of the pre-technological artist and artisan to the Greek concept of physis, which describes an entity’s self-emerging as when the bud breaks forth in blossom.2 In his utopian view of authentic production the individual essences of objects are preserved even though the object itself might be altered. The authentic production of an object out of wood, metal, or stone involved an intimate human connection at every stage of the process. Even in its crafting for use, the material of pre-technological ages was still wood from the forest across the river worked by the local carpenter, rather than particle-board made anonymously from industrial bi-products. According to Heidegger, the form of all authentic production resonates with the artwork of the culture in which it takes shape, and with the autopoetic work of art which the culture itself represents. For Heidegger, art is an originary act which brings a world into being, conjures a framework of relevance in which individual “things” and subjects assume their significance. It is only within the world inaugurated by the culture as masterwork that the work of individual craftsman—tool users and tool makers—gain their relevance. It is in this way that art represented the highest expression of Dasein’s relation to things as one of Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 315. Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 1 2

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“care,” an active recognition and respect for things in their essence.1 In our age, characterized by the transformation of the tool into the mechanism, the craftsman into technician, and nature into “standing reserve,” we have tragically reversed the hierarchy between the work of art, the tool, and its context. Rather than providing a framework in which the tool reveals the things around it while at the same time “letting them be” in their essence, modern technology stores everything as “standing reserve” to be “stamped” with the imprint of its one-dimensional deployment. The difficulty is in telling where authentic production stops and gestellen begins. In his essay “Deromanticizing Heidegger,” Don Ihde argues that Heidegger’s celebration of certain antique technologies, such as the watermill, as opposed to modern industrial manifestations such as the hydroelectric dam, conceals a nostalgic aesthetic judgment behind a metaphysical objection.2 By condemning the latter as an expression of “productionist metaphysics,” Heidegger loses touch with “the politics of the artifact” as it is instantiated in its lived relation to a community. This leads Heidegger into a binary opposition which undermines his theoretical ability to both discern the possible negative effects of premodern technologies, and the possible positive effects of modern technologies.3 Many theorists, including Sobchack, understand Heidegger’s comment that “the essence of technology is by no means technological” to indicate that Heide­gger saw technology 1 Heidegger argues that to use something authentically is simultaneously to “take care of it.” He remarks: “The peculiar and self-evident ‘in itself’ of the nearest ‘things’ is encountered when we take care of things. . . .” See Being and Time, 70. 2 Don Ihde, “Deromanticizing Heidegger,” Postphenomenology: Essays in the Postmodern Context, (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 103-115. 3 Ihde points out how Heidegger’s romantic description of Greek architecture and infrastructure encourages neglect of the fact that Greek civilization ravaged the surrounding environment to such a degree that it threatened the very way mode of being towards the world which Heidegger champions in a structure such as the Parthenon. See Ihde, 104.

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as fundamentally the extension of human projects. I would argue that this interpretation of Heidegger is too generous, although it does offer a corrective to his view that the essence of technology was merely the working out of a productionist imperative born from Platonic metaphysics. Indeed, Heidegger himself was unconcerned with the specific question of “standing reserve for what?” except in terms of the technological unfolding of a metaphysical imperative. In this view the politics of individual types of technological applications recede behind the significance of technology per se as a metaphysically inauthentic form of disclosure. In his book, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, Michael Zimmerman offers an historical explanation. He argues that Heidegger himself had become “imprinted” with the “reactionary modernism” of Ernst Jünger. As opposed to a world of entities revealing themselves to Dasein as a call to care which lets them become what they are, Jünger spoke of technology as a replication and amplification of the natural order which must be embraced in its transformative power over nature and human consciousness. For Jünger this attitude was embodied by the soldier and the worker who, as personifications of a technological imperative, came to replace the craftsman as ushers of a new age. Jünger and Heidegger shared the opinion that technology, as the manifestation of a degraded model of nature (“productionistic metaphysics”), was destined to devour the natural world and human nature like a cancer. Jünger’s aestheticization of his experiences in the trenches of WW I led to his views of technology as a wonderful, terrible force whose apparently pointless acceleration of all life-functions could only be reconciled through an aesthetic stance which submitted humanity to its regimen as part of a cosmic drama; a total art form in the Wagnerian sense.1 In a 1 Junger’s naturalization of industrialized war as the initiating activity of the new order is evident in the titles of some of his writings such as, The Storm of Steel (1918), and War as Inner Experience (1922). See Zimmerman, 50.

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manner comparable to apparatus theory, Jünger viewed cinema as a technological conditioning machine to transform humanity into “standing reserve,” raw material for the fascist cultural productions of the technological age. Although Heidegger agreed with Jünger’s description of the situation, he was repulsed rather than enthralled. Zimmerman argues that it was Heidegger’s shared belief in the inevitability of Jünger’s scenario which compelled him to support the National Socialist movement as a “worker’s revolution,” which would restore Germany to its authentic “volkish” origins, turning away from the forces of technology which he associated with the capitalist West and Russian bolshevism. Zimmerman argues that Heidegger ultimately blamed the inevitability of Jünger’s scenario for the degradation of National Socialism into a merely fascist movement. Perhaps, in this way, Heidegger’s insistence on an overriding metaphysical interpretation of technology is connected to a more grave error of judgment which saw National Socialism as the unfolding of a hidden imperative in technology rather than a product of a concrete socio-cultural and ideological situation within history. Heidegger’s romanticist views themselves end up concealing significant discontinuities and heterogeneities in the development of technologies. This is in like manner to the attempt of apparatus theory to describe cinema as the fulfillment of the historical telos of a “scopic regime” of disembodied, monocular vision and transcendental authority. A generalization which fails to take account for divergent strains in the historical development of visualization technologies.1 Although Heidegger makes only scant remarks about cinema, in the following statement can be located a distrust similar to apparatus theory concerning the tyranny of cinema’s influence, a distrust tied to film’s ability to intervene in the hermeneutic circle or feedback loop through 1 See Jonathan Crary’s “Modernizing Vision,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994).

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which Dasein experiences itself in correlation with the world. In his essay “The Thing,” Heidegger places film on the same continuum of complaint with a number of other modern technologies that together characterize gestellen: All distances in space and time are shrinking. Man now reaches overnight, by plane, places which formerly took weeks and months of travel. He now receives instant information, by radio, of events which he formerly learned about only years later, if at all. The germination and growth of plants, which remained hidden throughout the seasons, is now exhibited publicly in a minute, on film. Distant sites of the most ancient cultures are shown on film as if they stood this very moment amidst today’s street traffic.1 Heidegger seems to object to the plastic possibilities which film exercises over space and time, specifically its ability to “undistance” things. However, here as elsewhere, it is not the metaphor of vision, an essentially distance sense, which guides his overall judgment of technology, but rather the metaphor of the hand and its specific proximity. To hold something in sight is a different matter and this creates problems for a Heideggerian understanding of cinema.2 Film does not merely bring us a visible thing, like the hand grabs an object. Film creates an opening (viewing view, lichtung) in which objects pronounce themselves, but this pronouncement has a double-destination: within the filmed world, and within the world in which the film is projected. Both worlds are inhabited by viewing views which share an intentional convergence in the same viewed view, or visible world of the film. It is only because of the actual spatio-temporal distance which the spectator knows exists between ancient worlds and distant cultures that this presencing seems remarkable. Neither does the spectator assume that film makes an artifact from Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Alfred Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 37. 2 For a discussion of vision as a “distance sense” in terms of Merleau-Ponty, see Sobchack, The Address of The Eye, 86-94. 1

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a distant time and place present as if it were placed in a museum. Because film embodies the movement of Dasein and creates an opening into and within the world it reveals, it presences the spectator within the world of the film as much as it makes the filmed world present within the theater. In Heidegger’s overconcern about how film de-distances objective space and time, he fails to recognize that what film bridges in a more fundamental and essential way is an existential distance between the spectator’s and the film’s respective situations of embodiment. This is the central phenomenological insight of Sobchack’s analysis. Heidegger’s treatment of all technologies as “productionist” but at the same time ultimately pointless (without telos) ends up, on the one hand, revoking the significance of the diverse human projects which they do extend, and, on the other, neglecting the fact that technologies are not always “productive.” This point can be applied to the example of the “time-lapse” film which Heidegger accuses of needlessly “hastening” the growth of plants. But couldn’t it also be argued that this use of technology is redemptive insofar as it returns attention to the wonders of nature, not from a position of sadistic mastery, but as a celebration—albeit hyperbolic—of the type of revealing which Heidegger celebrates as physis? Unlike the activity of gestellen, the film has “let the blossom be”—hasn’t harmed one petal. What has this film imprinted as “raw material,” and for what end? At worst, such a film could be indicted as a metaphor or allegory of technology. But this is just the point, what is important to us is the authenticity or inauthenticity of the metaphor, not of the enabling mechanism. Heidegger himself makes this point in relationship to the work of art. In “The Origin of the Work of Art” he remarks: The artwork is, to be sure, a thing that is made, but it says something other than what the mere thing itself is […]. The work makes public something other than itself; it manifests something other; it is an allegory.1 1

Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 145.

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Although always enabled by an objective body, technologically enabled “art,” like Being itself, must be evaluated through the specific contexts in which it makes meaning. Heidegger provides scant tools for the latter. In fact his monolythic views of technology conflate and conceal this mode of inquiry. The time-lapse film belongs to the history of what has been called “the cinema of attractions,” and, in this sense, points backwards to cinema’s origins in pre-cinematic devices which— purposeless in themselves—functioned as philosophical toys.1 Heidegger never considered this possibility for technology, let alone the subversive and critical function that it might play in relationship to the development of gestellen. Ihde refers to the above function of technology as an “alterity relation,” and illustrates the concept through the example of a child’s top: Set in motion, the technology itself becomes an object of fascination. It has a quasi-life of its own, even apparent self-movement which is unpredictable. It becomes a quasi-other to which the child can happily relate. Such playful technological moments do not seem to belong to the heavy romanticism of the Heideggerian context. But just for that reason one could also miss the kind of appreciation and fascination which characterizes much of the experience of modern technologies.2

For Sobchack film presents a similar but more complex “quasiother,” exhibiting characteristics both like and unlike our intersubjective relations with other humans. To understand the meaning of cinema, as a technology and as an embodied experience, it is crucial to address the manner in which it engages Dasein beyond the merely productionist imperative which Heidegger ascribes to modern technology. However, we need not totally reject Heidegger’s notion of gestellen in order to accomplish this. Rather, if we are going to take seriously Heidegger’s comparison 1 See Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle, vol. 8 nos. 3/4, Fall 1986, 63-70. 2 Ihde, 109.

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of technology as a cannibalizing replication of the natural order, let us extend the analogy to its (un)natural limits. For if the very emergence of Dasein within the natural order is Janus-faced, providing—like free will—the possibility of an authentic revelation of the essence of Being in the world as well as the inauthentic undermining and concealment of the natural order through productionist metaphysics and its manifestation as gestellen, then why should not gestellen, as a reproduction of the natural order, also reproduce something like Dasein which similarly makes possible the unconscious fulfillment of gestellen or its self-conscious subversion? I would argue that cinema is precisely that technology which wields the subversive power to bring the experience of technology and the modern world before consciousness not merely as an object, but as a lived-correlation which embodies the activity of Dasein. To provoke consideration of this matter, I will close my discussion with one cinematic example. While pondering Ihde’s top, I recalled the following film segment from Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964). In this film, distinguished by its enigmatic figuration of large industrial structures, the following scene opens a precipice between the world ordered through technology and that which emerges through Dasein’s direct observation of phenomenon. Monica Vitti’s character walks into a room where her son and husband play with a science set beneath a hearth which holds an array of kinetic, technological toys. The child asks his mother the seemingly innocent question: “Mommy, what does one plus one equal?” and then proceeds to shatter her commonsense mathematical certainty through a parody of scientific demonstration. As we watch from the mother’s point-of-view, the child drips two consecutive drops of blue liquid onto a clear glass slide. He counts: “one . . .plus . . .one . . . equals . . . . See, you’re wrong.” He shows the slide holding one large drop. In the following scene the child plays with a spinning saucer-like top on the hardwood floor. His father picks-up the spinning toy and sets it on its edge. The object wobbles slowly but

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maintains its upright balance as the son watches, fascinated. The father tells his son that the gyroscope which stabilizes the toy is the same as those which keep ships from capsizing in the ocean. Although the technologies are objectively identical, the meaning of the gyroscope as implemented in the context of the child’s toy and the ship at sea vary with context. In both of the above scenes the apparatus of science is brought into an alterity relation, highlighting the manner in which the film itself, as technologically enabled and embodied vision, stands—as a quasi-other—in an alterity relationship to its spectator. Such alterity enables the audience to embody an experience which provokes an essentially phenomenological set of questions, questions that strike the roots of blind-faith in a technologically ordered world and use technology to provoke critical reflection on the meaning of its mediation of experience and sedimentation within our naturalized attitude of being within the world.

Roman Ingarden’s Theory of Schematized Profiles: A Dynamic Version Thor Grünbaum

Introduction In his important work, The Literary Work of Art, Roman Ingarden investigates the borderlines between ontology, logic, philosophy of language, linguistics, and aesthetics. Among other things Ingarden presents a theory about how language provides a schematization of the perceptual experience. He tries to demonstrate how the structures of our perceptual experience are mapped onto language. This does not mean that certain linguistic structures correspond to structures of things in the world, but rather that they correspond to the experiential structures of perception of things in the world. The meaning of a sentence can somehow present a schematization of the profiles through which we perceive a thing or situation. In this short article I will focus on these schematized profiles. As it is well known, Ingarden operates with a theory of language that involves not only the traditional ideas of sound, meaning, and referent. He has a richer and more stratified conception. According to Ingarden, any meaningful linguistic expression contains not only an expression-form and a semantic content, but through the derived intentionality of this content also a corresponding purely intentional referent, and depending on the type of purely intentional referent, a connected set of schematized profiles of the referent in question. Now, the conception that language itself constitutes a triad of sound, meaning, and some kind of “immediate” object, independent of the linguistic meaning, is

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familiar to some semiotic theories of language (even though Ingarden’s intentional way of describing this triad may not be), but Ingarden’s theory about the schematized profiles seems to me to be a genuine phenomenological innovation. For reasons I will return to, it is extremely difficult to describe this fourth component in the semiotics of language and consequently to explain Ingarden’s theory. Ingarden´s conception of the linguistic expression as containing a fourth stratum of schematized profiles has consequently been considered very controversial in theories of literature dealing explicitly with Ingarden. On the one hand we can think of Wellek’s straight forward denial of any such fourth stratum and on the other hand of Iser’s critical embrace of the idea of schematized profiles as a bridge between the text and the reader experience. In the philosophy of language, the semiotics of language, as well as in linguistics there seem to have been an almost absolute ignorance of Ingarden’s theory of language, and especially of the schematized profiles. But something is happening now. Recent developments in cognitive linguistics and semiotics are pointing in the same direction as Ingarden did, and with these new results it will probably become easier to understand what Ingarden meant and to explain his theory. Profiles and the Appearance of an Object Like many other phenomenologists, Ingarden considers it very important to account for the manifesting or presenting qualities of language, by which I mean the fact that we experience language as being able to show or present what is actually absent. Ingarden wants to account for the fact that specific types of propositions are able to make a display of the purely intentional things or situations, to which the propositions refer. His way into this problem is the insight that to be perceptually present is to be present from a certain perspective and, correlatively, to be present

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through a certain profile (Ansicht). Consequently, his main thesis is that if the propositions are to make a display of their purely intentional referents, then the propositions must contain a means to specify the sets of profiles necessary for perceptual presentation of the referents in question. Ingarden explicitly puts aside the general question of which types of objects it is possible through linguistic means to display and thus to make ready for a perceptual apprehension by the interlocutor (Ingarden, 1931, 271). He considers it a historical fact that we frequently experience this type of perceptual apprehension when reading or hearing about real things and situations. Therefore he focuses his discussion on propositions that have referents of the typus real. Thus, his premise is that if such a purely intentional referent should be prepared for a perceptual apprehension, then it has to conform to the structures of sensory perception and the structures of the perceptual appearance of a real thing. Let me therefore sketch what Ingarden describes as the main features of this perceptual appearance of the real thing. I will use a favorite example of Husserl and Ingarden: A red ball. Looking at a red ball in a static position, I can change my attentional focus from the ball to the perceptual experience of the ball. Moving my head slightly from side to side, I can become aware of the fact that my perceptual experience of the red ball is constituted by a series of “red ball-profiles.” Strictly speaking, at a given time and from a given visual perspective, I have only a sensory experience of a given profile of the ball. But nevertheless, normally I do experience the thing I see as a red ball and not as a profile. This leads to some of the conceptual problems involved in describing the perceptual experience. The main difficulty is the status of these profiles. Normally I do not pay any attention to the profiles, regardless of their constitutive importance for the appearance of the thing in question. They do not form the thematic focus of my perception but constitute that

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through which a thing appears to me. I see immediately—if not focused otherwise—a red ball, and although this ball can only appear to me as a red ball through its profiles, the strange thing is that if I focus my attention directly on the profiles themselves, then the object—the red ball—seems somehow to disappear. So, the profiles have a peculiar experiential status. The red ball can only appear through a profile, most likely as a red disk. But this red disk-profile is not the ball itself. A ball is round and the profile is rather a flat, red disk. The ball has the same red color all over and the disk-profile is rather a continuous overlapping of nuances of red. A ball can roll in all directions, a red disk cannot. Further, I experience the profiles as depending on me. I can at will change the flow of profiles, but not the ball itself—it continues to appear as itself through these willed variations. Still, this does not mean that I experience the profiles as a sole function of my will and as absolutely dependent on me. The profiles occur always as embedded in a stream of profiles and are dependent on this stream. This means that if in a stream of red disk-profiles I suddenly experience a blue disk-profile or even a red square-profile, then these two occurrences would not have the same experiential meaning, as if they had occurred respectively in a stream of blue disk-profiles and in a stream of red square-profiles. This indicates that I can only control the profiles within certain limits, in the sense that I can e.g. never make a ball appear in a rectangular profile. So, on the one hand the profiles are not objectified, they are not experienced as things, and on the other hand they are not subjective, being experienced as I-external, as not entirely depending on me. Although there is a clear difference between an object and its profiles there seems to be certain regular or even law governed relations between them. Take for instance the continuous flow of profiles through which I perceive a red ball. Here it counts as

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a law of experience that, as long as I perceive a ball there will be no angle from which the ball will be appearing in a rectangular profile, and consequently appear as say a book. This goes for any objective space-forms. They are all in a law governed way bound to specific sets of profiles through which they can appear. This means that an invariant structure of profiles manifests itself by the flow of ever changing profiles. Two profiles, occurring in the same flow, are never identical with respect to their qualitative content, but they do nevertheless manifest the same inherent structure, which can make the same object appear through both of them. Thus, the appearance of the object concerned is not altered by every difference in the qualitative content of the profiles or in the way they are experienced. This makes it clear that there exists no law governed relation between a given perceptual appearance of an object or its properties and a specific, concrete experienced profile. Rather the law governed relation is between a given perceptual appearance of an object or its properties and a specific plurality of profiles, all manifesting the same invariant structure through which the object or property in question can appear. Or articulated the other way around: If we experience a specific plurality of profiles, then a certain object will appear. In other words, every perceptually appearing object or objective property is a priori correlated with a general schema of profiles (or sets of schemes). In this way, every object or objective property determines a plurality of schematized profiles. So, Ingarden understands the following by the concept of the schematized profiles: The totality of the moments of a concrete profile’s content, the presence of which constitutes the sufficient and necessary condition for the appearance of the objective property in question (ibid. 279). Schematized profiles described in this way are not experienced concretely, because if that were the case we would not be dealing with a schema for profiles, but with a concrete profile itself.

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Linguistic Schematization of Objective Appearance Ingarden applies this concept of schematized profiles in his description of the manifesting or presenting qualities of language. If a linguistic expression refers to an object of the typus real, that is, to an object that can be perceived, then the object must be correlated with a plurality of schematized profiles. These sets of schematized profiles are not to be regarded as a part of the reader’s background knowledge and as something the reader makes use of in case he is to fantasize what he reads. Rather, they are part of the semantic content, that is to say a part of the inferential web, which the text spins. Take as an example this small text: “The red ball was lying on the table. From where Husserl stood he could see something rectangular on the table.” It is clearly the case that the two objects on the table, referred to in the two sentences could not be the same, and that is exactly because they have incommensurable schematized profiles. In a case like this, it has nothing to do with whether the reader imagines the objects or not. The schematized profiles are not associated with the referred-to objects because of the reader, but are present in the text depending on the types of objects referred to. But often the imagination does play a big role in the reader’s or hearer’s experience of a text. The linguistic expression can have such a strong manifesting quality that we almost “see” what we read. It seems that a proper understanding of a sentence in some cases not only forces us to think in a certain way, but sometimes also to imagine in a certain way. In this respect it seems necessary to differentiate between two types of imaginative involvement with the purely intentional objects referred to by the text. By help of the text sequence we can reconstruct the appearance of the described thing or situation, and step by step form an imagination of it. In reading the text sequence we are prompted to form what seems to be a spontaneous perceptual imagination of the linguistically presented thing or situation.

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This goes to indicate that a text in varied degrees can specify the schematized profiles involved. Ingarden’s idea seems to be that in the simple mentioning of an object the correlated schematized profiles will have only a pure potential status. In a further step the potential profiles can be linguistically specified so as to prepare for a specific type of appearance, and in a final step they can be specified so as to function as a “displaymaking.” If this is the case we tend to form a vivid perceptual imagination of what the text presents. So, according to Ingarden, for the linguistically referred-to objects to achieve a perceptual manifestation and for the subject to have a concrete experience of perceiving (in the imagination) the objects in question, there must on the one hand be certain specifying linguistic factors in the text and on the other hand certain actualizing and concretizing operations performed by the subject. The correlated schematized profiles thus may be specified in such a way that they are present not as purely potential but rather as “prepared-for-appearing” or “made ready for display.” But granted this, it implies that it will never be possible solely by linguistic means to specify the profiles to such an extent that the object will appear as real and physically present. It is only possible within certain limits to control linguistically this final specification performed by the reader. This linguistic “control” can be performed in two different ways: 1) By phonemic and prosodic factors of the text or 2) by semantic factors of the text. I will focus on the semantic factors. Ingarden claims that the propositional content can and often will specify the schematized profiles through which the referent appears. There is no easy way to describe exactly how this specification is being performed. According to my earlier statement the profiles are neither objective nor subjective. They are not the object of our perception, but that through which we perceive the objects, that through which they appear. This ambiguous, in-between status of the profiles must be considered and accounted for

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in the understanding of how language specifies the schematized profiles. If the specifications are to succeed, the profiles cannot be the theme of the sentences. This would transform the profile from being the medium by which an object appears to becoming itself an object, often with the consequence that nothing seems to appear. This means that if the schematized profiles are meant to function as “display-makers,’ then the specification of the profiles cannot be achieved by an explicit mentioning or description of a specific type of profile. So the specification of profiles has in a certain sense to be implicit. The schematized profiles cannot be the intentional referent of the expression, but must be the result of the way this intentionality functions. Let us now take a closer look at how this propositional intentionality can function. Ingarden’s Static Framework Ingarden’s answer to how this intentionality can function in a specifying way seems to follow directly from his theoretical framework, i.e. the phenomenological description of the perceptual experience or correlatively of the perceptual appearance of objects. He therefore suggests that the primary way to specify the schematized profiles is by a specification of how the intended object looks. This happens, according to Ingarden, by the type of sentence which unfolds the looks of an object. “Soaussehensverhalte,” Ingarden calls the referents of such sentences. The more the text specifies the important structures of the perceptual situation, the more it is supposed to prepare the described situation for a perceptual appearance. So in addition to describing visual qualities of the intended objects, it also has to indicate the perspective from which the objects are supposed to be perceived and further, the spatial relations between the objects themselves and between the objects and the point of view. As a good example of such a specification, consider this text sequence from Portrait of the Artist:

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The director stood in the embrasure of the window, his back to the light, leaning an elbow on the brown crossblind, and, as he spoke and smiled, slowly dangling and looping the cord of the other blind. Stephen stood before him, followed for a moment with his eyes the waning of the long summer daylight above the roofs or the slow deft movements of the priestly fingers. The priest’s face was in total shadow, but the waning daylight from behind him touched the deeply grooved temples and the curves of the skull (Joyce, 1992, p. 154).

This example from James Joyce clearly demonstrates that indications of all the relevant features of the perceptual situation prepare the described scene for a visualization of it. On the basis of such a description the reader can reconstruct a perceptual experience of the scene in the imagination. But the example also demonstrates that such a reconstruction takes some labor, and it can at times be a tedious undertaking (readers of Robbe-Grillet will grant me that). It seems to have little in common with the experience Ingarden refers to, when he says that the text forces one to imagine what one reads—the almost spontaneous experience of being witness to the scene as it evolves in actu. An experience he describes as being one of presence and not one of distance (Ingarden 1968, pp. 130ff.). But an experience that involves a great deal of imaginative activity and concentration is not likely to be experienced with the kind of effortlessness that characterizes our perceptions. This kind of description does of course specify the relevant features of the perceptual situation and therewith prepares it for perceptual apprehension, for a “visualizing reading,’ but it does not function so as to make a display of the referent-situation. What is missing? The Dynamic Version Ingarden seems to focus on the linguistic description of the perceptual characteristics of the referent-situation as a consequence of his primary interest in the static perceptual experience,

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the scrutinizing vision. For several reasons this choice may be an unhappy one. First of all, as many other phenomenologists have pointed out, this picture of the perception as a scrutinizing attentive perception might only be a limit situation and have only little in common with the normal pragmatic function of perception, which does not focus on the perceptual qualities of the object, but rather on its practical aspects. Accordingly, we do not primarily see a chair as a brown and blue thing, but as something to be sat on. Second, as the example shows, the linguistic description of perceptual qualities may give instructions as to how the referent-situation should be visualized, but does not prompt the reader to visualize the scene without making a willed effort to do so. But there are other ways of specifying the schematized profiles of the referent-situation. Ways that Ingarden seems to have overlooked and that appear to be true to the experience he describes. Let me try to show this by way of a textual example: When Camilla had entered her room, she pulled up the blind, leaned her brow against the cool pane, and hummed Elisabeth’s song from “The Fairy-hill.” At sunset a light breeze had begun to blow and a few tiny, white clouds, illuminated by the moon, were driven towards Camilla. For a long while she stood regarding them; she followed them from a far distance, and she sang louder and louder as they drew nearer, kept silent a few seconds while they disappeared above her, then sought others, and followed them too. With a little sigh she pulled down the blind. She walked to the dressing table, leaned her elbows against it, rested her head in her clasped hands and regarded her own picture in the mirror without really seeing it. (p. 29-30). This sequence taken from J.P. Jacobsen’s short story Mogens presents us with a different type of situation; one that more easily makes us visualize what is going on. Comparing the two different text sequences one immediately senses the dynamic nature of the latter contrasted with the static character of the former. This seems

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to indicate that the more immediate perceptual apprehension of the latter text sequence has something to do with the dynamic way in which it specifies the schematized profiles. Ingarden himself gives some indications of how to describe the way these more dynamic action sentences succeed in specifying the schematized profiles, so as to prompt the reader to visualize the referent-situation. He differentiates between four types of sentences on the basis of what types of referent-situations they project. For example, he contrasts sentences with referent-situations that involve a dynamic doing or happening with those that involve static relations (e.g. between an object and a property). The first type is described as unfolding a dynamic activity in actu; the second as relating one object to another in a static and distanced way. But he seems to leave it at that and does not take it further in the chapters on schematized profiles. Let me try to describe how I understand the action sentences in the last text sequence as being capable of specifying the schematized profiles in a manner that is true to life, that is, analogous to the way the perception functions in our pragmatic real life experiences. Take the sentence “With a little sigh she pulled down the blind.” This action sentence presents us with an active body, with the unfolding of a bodily action. So, by the use of the so-called basic action verbs, such as running, lifting, jumping, crawling, climbing, we are presented with a specific bodily function and experience that is not thematic and not the semantic focus of the sentence. The semantic focus of the sentence is rather the agent and her goal, e.g. in the sentence “She walked to her dressing-table.” A basic action—sentence like this explicitly mentions a specific bodily function, but focuses on the agent’s goal, on her getting to the dressing-table. This sentence in a single and unified manner expresses the agent’s intention (her wanting or intending to get to the dressing-table), her bodily motion (walking), and her perceptual focus (most likely directed toward the dressing-table). The sentence expresses the experience of a

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non-objectified body in action; a unified experience of the moving body and its immediate surroundings as a whole. Our direct and unmediated intimate “knowledge” with this type of basic bodily motion, as well as our knowledge of where the agent directs her attention gives us an awareness of the situation as a whole. So, we have here a direct but non-thematic acquaintance with the structures of the situation, and these structures are of an experiential embodied type. We immediately sense what it would be like to be in the same situation. If we compare these considerations with cognitive linguistic insights of e.g. Leonard Talmy about the attentional structures in language we obtain a way of understanding how action sentences can dynamically specify schematized profiles of the referent-situation. The action sentences involve the lived bodily experiences of the agent. This gives us an immediate understanding of the situation as a whole. We know the fundamental structures of the situation and we experience it as a whole in time and space. This makes it possible for us to focus our attention on specific parts, while letting other parts slide into the background. Linguistically speaking, this means that sentences that mention only some parts of the referent-situation, while leaving other parts out, for a full comprehension still demands that we are aware of the situation as a whole. The explicit mentioning of specific parts of the referent-situation implies or entails the structure of the situation as a whole. But at the same time, the explicit mentioning of specific parts gives a perspective on the situation in which only the mentioned parts are put in the foreground (“windowed”). So, in the action sentences we do not need to mention more than a few aspects of the situation in order to bring the situation as a whole into play. Through these action sentences we are presented with a dynamic situation as a whole and with the attentional focus directed at specific aspects (most often the goal or result of the action). One could work a lot more on this way of describing the manifesting or presenting qualities of the action sentences, so as to

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account in more detail for how the perspective is placed within the situation. But that is beyond the scope of this paper. So, to conclude: Ingarden gives a very interesting phenomenological description of how language can manifest the actually absent. To do this the language must somehow be able to specify from what perspective the referent appears. That is, it must somehow be able to specify the schematized profiles of the referent. This specification cannot be performed by an explicit reference to a schematized profile, because this would seriously distort the function of the profiles as that, which we non-the­ matically “live through” and through which the objects are appearing. Instead, this specification must some how take place implicitly. I have tried to point out that this specification most fully take place by the dynamic structures of the action sentences. I think these are insights that should be more fully appreciated in the semiotics and aesthetics of language. References Ingarden, R.. Das literarische Kunstwerk. Niemeyer: Tübingen, 1931/ 1972. Ingarden, R.. Vom Erkennen des ltterarische Kunstwerk. Niemeyer: Tübingen,1968. Joyce, J., Portrait of the Artist. Hertfordshire: Wordworth,1916/1992. Jacobsen, J.P. Mogens and Other Stories. New York: Arno Press, 1882/ 1979. Talmy, L.. ”The Windowing of Attention in Language,’ in Toward a Cognitive Semantics, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000.

If Journalists Were Vedantins Bina Gupta Some time ago there was a seminar at the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Pennsylvania on the topic “Death of facts?” The discussions revolved around the question: Are facts still alive? The existence of facts presupposes a kind of realistic ontology, which many philosophers are inclined to reject today. The rejection is based on the belief that facts are nothing but interpretations, and the demise of facts makes it incumbent on a journalist to ascertain what he or she would be reporting in the absence of facts. If there are no facts to report, a journalist will simply be reporting the available interpretations. However, if only interpretations are available to a journalist, then he or she will not simply be reporting available interpretations, but rather his or her interpretations of the available interpretations. In short, all reporting will be reduced to mere interpretations. This is consistent with the view that we live in an age of hermeneutics. Let us briefly examine if phenomenology suggests a way out of the predicament in which a journalist finds himself. I I will begin with Western phenomenology. Phenomenology, as it emerged on the Western philosophical scene almost a century ago, assured us that it would be able to restore the world to its original mode of givenness. Prior to the emergence of phenomenology, such well-known philosophers as the Kantians and the positivists had reduced the world to sensory data out of which the world had to be constructed. Phenomenology claimed to bypass this intellectual game by focusing on the notion of

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intentionality. Intentionality, it seemed, performed magic by avoiding all intellectual constructions and recovering the innocence with which consciousness finds the world around it. Phenomenology brought to the forefront that consciousness is not simply thought or an intellectual activity of conceptualization, but rather the manifestation of things in the world to a subject. It may be described from two complementary directions. We may say that consciousness is directed towards the world and to the things in the world; or, we may say, that the world presents itself or manifests itself to a consciousness. Combining these two descriptions, I would like to say that intentionality is consciousness-of-the-world as one unitary phenomenon. When phenomenology drew our attention to this phenomenon, philosophers welcomed the idea with open arms because it helped them bypass many unnecessary intellectual constructions and placed the knowing subject in an inalienable contact with the world. At the same time, however, they could not help but wonder: how, after all, could they miss such an obvious fact? How could such an obvious unity of consciousness and the world have been overlooked to begin with, thereby necessitating that it be brought to light? In response, we were told that our intellectual prejudices, drawing from the natural sciences and philosophical theories, so effectively covered up this phenomenon that a method was needed to set aside these prejudices so that this phenomenon could be made known. Phenomenologists termed this method “phenomenological reduction” or “bracketing.” We were called upon to put aside our intellectual prejudices and presuppositions, to put them under brackets, to subject them to epoché, in the language of phenomenology, so that the most originary way in which our consciousness and the world are together could be shown. Intentionality, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, is this “original complicity” between consciousness and the world. Journalists certainly celebrated this discovery. When a journalist is out in the world to report, he or she must set aside, put

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under brackets his or her prejudices, presuppositions, and prejudgments so that he or she is able to look at the world with an unprejudiced innocence thereby enabling him to report facts, and nothing else but the facts. But like most philosophical discoveries, this discovery led to its antithesis. Intentionality not only presents the world to consciousness, but also presents it as having a certain meaning. In the famous case of a duck-rabbit, a figure sometimes appears as a duck and at other times as a rabbit. A thing is perceived in one context having such and such meaning or significance, while in another it is presented with a different meaning. What to the members of a community is a sacred object arousing devotion and piety, is perceived by the members of another community as being nothing but a piece of cold stone. Intentionality then came to be construed not as presenting the world to consciousness, but as conferring meaning on the world. But what is “conferring meaning”? Nothing but the act of interpreting. As a result, we are back to the point with which we began initially. If all intentionality interprets, then, once again, we would have no access to the fact of the matter, consciousness would continuously be engaged in interpreting and reinterpreting this world, and there would be no reporting of what one encounters. II It is at this point that the Vedantic idea of the witness-consciousness1 seems instructive and helpful. However, before undertaking an analysis of this important Vedanta notion, I will, at the risk of what might appear to be a digression, present before you my thoughts on the Vedantic metaphysics, which is basically a theory of consciousness. 1 For a detailed analysis of this concept, see this author’s Disinterested Witness: A Fragment of Advaita Vedanta Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998).

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I will begin by pointing out, as many of you are certainly aware, that the Vedanta is a very old system of Indian philosophy, whose origins go back to the Upanishads, the texts that were composed approximately three thousand years before the Common Era. The ideas found in the Upanishads in relatively more intuitive forms were given conceptual exposition and rational defense by many great Masters, of whom the most famous and influential is Samkara, who lived in 788-812 CE. This system in its various forms and sub-schools has dominated Indian thought ever since. There have been several contemporary reconstructions of this school, of which two deserve mention. The first was by Swami Vivekananda who, in his most influential work Practical Vedanta, demonstrates very forcefully the ethical relevance of Vedanta. Many well-known figures were influenced by Vivekananda’s powerful presentation of Vedanta, including Mahatma Gandhi. In our times, Sri Aurobindo, in his system “Integral Vedanta,” incorporated ideas from the classical Vedanta as well as modern science, and attempted another reconstruction of Vedanta. In Vedanta metaphysics, consciousness is the fundamental category. Reality, which, in Vedanta is called the brahman, is nothing but pure consciousness, which is one, self-shining, allpervasive, because of which everything else is manifested or known, of which all else is an appearance. For my present purposes, it is not necessary to present the intricate Vedantic metaphysical system and the arguments on which it is based. Suffice it to note that its most profound thesis is as follows: although we all seem to be separate self-contained egos, limited by psychophysical organisms, leading our lives, pursuing our respective self-interests—underlying all this, there is indeed in the deepest layers of our existence and nature, a vast, illimitable unity, of which our differences are only appearances. Consciousness therefore is one universal being at its deepest level, although at a superficial level, it might seem as though each one’s consciousness inhabits his or her bodily organism. The Vedanta as a practical

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discipline shows the path which is to be followed in order to be able to overcome those empirical limitations and to enter into the vast underlying unity of consciousness. Vedanta is not merely a metaphysics of consciousness, but also an epistemology. An important part of its epistemology is the theory of witness-consciousness, which I believe is important for any phenomenological inquiry, or any epistemological theory, and for the self-understanding of journalists whose vocation is to report facts. What or Who is Saksin? Sanskrit commentaries variously describe this important notion. For example, 1. Being the witness of all cognitions, it is changeless and all pervading. If it were to change [i.e. an object], it would have become of limited knowledge like the intellect etc.1 2. [Self ] is consciousness, self-shining, the seeing, immediate awareness, and inactive. [It] is the witness-consciousness directly cognized inside everybody, constant, qualityless, and non-dual.2 3. One who, again, pervades over, regulates both knowledge and ignorance, is different from these two, due to being the witness.3 4. It is the witness-consciousness of all beings, seer of all— owing to the definition “one who directly sees.”4 5. The witness of the seer, the seeing and the seen is the selfshining self, which cannot be known by any pramana. This is the true nature of the witness.5 Upadesasahasri of Sankara, II.15.17. Ibid, II.18.26. 3 Sveta. UBh, 5.1. 4 Sveta U, 6.11. 5 Vidyaranyasvam, Brhadaranyakopanisadbhasya-vartikasara (Kasi: Acyuta Grantha Mala, 1942), 22, p. 1705. 1 2

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6. There are two (kinds of ) seeing: one is eternal, the other non-eternal. Mental modification is non-eternal; the other is witness-consciousness and is eternal.1 A witness or saksin, as its role in the law-courts suggests, is not biased towards or prejudiced in favor of a particular position. A witness is, as characterized in the Samkhya school of Indian philosophy, a madhyastha, and a neutral mediator among disputants. He or she bears testimony to the facts as they are, without distorting them by his or her own preconceived opinions. The witness-consciousness, on the Vedantic account, plays this role. Irrespective of whether I know the truth or commit an error, whether I arrive at certainty or am haunted by doubts, I am also aware of my own cognitive state. I am aware that I know, that I do not know, that I am in a state of doubt, that I had an illusion, and I am also aware that I am ignorant of such and such matter, whatever that matter may be. If I am happy I am aware that I am so, if I am in pain I am aware that I am in pain. What in effect the Vedantin points out, rather insists, is that irrespective of my cognitive state in which I might find myself, I have an awareness that I am in that cognitive state. Without such an accompanying witness-consciousness, the Vedantins point out, no knowledge would be possible. The Vedantins here draw a distinction between two levels of conscious life. At the first level, consciousness reaches out to whatever happens to be its object; this is the level of intentionality. It may assume various forms, intellectual, affective, or volitional. It may succeed in its striving or it may fail in reaching its goal. In other words, it may reach the truth, or it may be erroneous. It may also recognize its own ignorance as in the expression “I do not know such and such.” All these are various forms of the level of consciousness intentionally Ibid, 60, p. 1724. [It seems important to note that “Sachen selbst” is not entirely correctly translated as “things themselves,” nor by “facts themselves.” The present essay does involve a certain reference to this equivocal translation.—Editor.] 1

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directed toward objects. The Vedantin brings all of them together under the category of vrtti. But she distinguishes from all these another level of consciousness, which I would call “awareness,” which accompanies all primary object-directed intentionality without taking sides, impartially, without judging them. Its sole function is to be aware of what I know, as I know it, as well as what I do not know precisely as I do not know it. Thus one can say that at one level each one of us is engaged in our cognitive projects, arriving at our beliefs, testing them, keeping some while rejecting others, recognizing the limits of our knowledge and trying to go beyond these limits, that is to say, to know what we do not know at present. While we are involved in this project to come to terms with the world around us, there is a level of consciousness within us where we play the role of passive on-lookers, disinterested spectators of our own experiences. We have the ability to stand apart and observe what is going on. My contention is that without such a dimension of consciousness, our inner life would be entirely dissipated in endless projects and frustrations. As a matter of fact, without recognizing it philosophically, we are always playing this double role of an involved, interested participant and an uninvolved disinterested witness. III The idea of witness-consciousness is not simply Vedantic; it is to be found in mainstream Western philosophy. One can find trace of it in Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and Sartre. In Kant, it appears as the ultimate principle of “I think” or self-consciousness without which any knowledge would be possible. Of course we know that according to Kant, the object of knowledge is constructed by human understanding with its categories. Nevertheless, that I know something, even if that object is phenomenal, is immediately presented to self-consciousness. The unity of selfconsciousness, as Kant puts it, accompanies all our knowledge.

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This implies that there is this self to which all of my knowledge is eventually presented. Even a philosopher like Hegel considered his phenomenology to be a descriptive account of how consciousness had developed in history. I give the examples of Kant and Hegel, though the primary focus of my paper will be Husserlian phenomenology, to emphasize that although these two philosophers believed that the world at a certain level is constructed by consciousness, they were forced to recognize that their story must be witnessed by the witness-consciousness. The lesson is that without recognizing such a level of consciousness, philosophy would end in complete skepticism. It is my contention that this notion of the witness-consciousness is perfectly compatible with the original spirit of modern phenomenology. In this paper, I am going to attempt to demonstrate that the Vedantic account could not only provide a way to interpret Husserlian transcendental phenomenology, but might also suggest a way of reformulating intersubjectivity different from the conventional Western way. According to its original program, as stated earlier, phenomenology claimed to provide access to the “things themselves” (Sachen selbst).1 The things themselves were accomplished by the method of reduction or bracketing. One puts under brackets the received interpretations and theories so that the things show themselves. The development of the phenomenological movement, especially Heidegger’s existential and hermeneutic thinking, displaced Husserl’s descriptive phenomenology by shattering its confidence that we can reach the things themselves. Hermeneutic phenomenology led to the suspicion of facts or things and exaggerated the emphasis on interpretation. Today, we are at the end of this trend. If now we return to the Husserlian program, we will realize that for this program, the Vedantic idea of 1 Eugen Fink, “Husserl’s Philosophy and Contemporary Criticism,” in The Phenomenology of Husserl, edited by R. O. Elveton (Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1970), p. 115.

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the witness-consciousness is indispensable. By phenomenological reduction, I not only remove from my view all received interpretations and learn to describe what is presented in experience exactly as it is presented, I also reduce myself to the status of a neutral observer, a disinterested spectator, or what Husserl often called the “transcendental ego.” While as an empirical person I am involved and interested in interpreting experience and myself, I can through phenomenological reduction cultivate a stance of uninvolved observer. This is the condition for the possibility of descriptive philosophy. There is no doubt that I will have my own prejudices through which I will see the world, but as a transcendental phenomenologist, I must be able to step outside my prejudices, notice whether they are distorted, and be able to describe how things are in themselves. I must, however, concede that in today’s intellectual world, especially in the intellectual climate of post-modernism, it is indeed difficult to accept such a possibility. However, without accepting such a possibility of disinterested view of things, no theory can substantiate its own position, thereby leading to self-contradiction. So I am suggesting that phenomenology as a descriptive philosophy must find a place for the Vedantic idea of the witness-consciousness. Husserl distinguished between empirical consciousness and transcendental consciousness. Empirical consciousness is consciousness as interpreted within a naturalistic framework. In this framework, consciousness is regarded as a property that belongs to a bodily and biological system. Or, alternately, it may be regarded as belonging to the privately owned mental life of each human individual and possibly even by some other higher animals. This understanding of consciousness characterizes the way we all interpret consciousness, not only in our every day life, but also within various natural sciences such as biology, neuro-physiology, and psychology. It was one of Husserl’s great contributions to have shown that there is a path by which we can move from this empirical perspective on consciousness to

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the transcendental consciousness. The path by now is familiar to us as phenomenological reduction or epoché. Husserl showed that we can put within brackets the naturalistic framework, we can put aside all that we learn from different sciences and look at consciousness simply as it presents itself to us. Once we do this, we begin to see that all these interpretations which the various sciences generate are themselves constituted within consciousness. In other words, transcendental consciousness is the source of the constitution of all meanings. Empirical consciousness thus has its origin in transcendental consciousness. If I use the language of Vedanta, I would say that pure consciousness, which underlies all beings, appears to us as individual, bodily, mental, and egoistic consciousness. The one appears as the many. Vedantic philosophers used simple metaphors—possibly too simple— to describe the situation. Just as space, although one, appears to be many, due to the limitations which seem to partition it, such as the wall, etc., or just as the one moon appears to be many when reflected in different waters, so does one universal consciousness appear to be mine, yours, his, hers, owing to the differing limiting conditions such as the body, the mind, and the ego. In order to find in Husserl’s thinking an access to something like a witness-consciousness, I would like to introduce what Fink calls the paradox of the three egos. The main thrust of Fink’s point is as follows: there is a fundamental difference between the transcendental reflection and the natural reflective attitude. Prior to the occurrence of transcendental reflection, a human ego’s reflection upon himself moves within the parameters of the natural attitude. Accordingly, it is confined to human self-apperception. Bracketing of the world, for the first time, implies that an attempt is being made to establish a reflective ego, which was outside the human context from the very beginning. This ego knowingly directs itself toward the universal world apperception as its theme. The disconnection of

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the world, however, not only makes possible the formation of a non-worldly reflecting-self, but...also makes possible the discovery of the true subject of the belief in the world: the transcendental subjectivity which accepts the world.1 Accordingly, Fink argues that there are three egos in Husserl’s thinking: 1. the ego which is preoccupied with the world (I, the human being together with my intramundane life of experience); 2. the transcendental ego for whom the world is presented in the flow of its universal constituting activity; and 3. the “onlooker” who performs the epoché. In other words, when the method of reduction is applied to the empirical ego, that is, to an empirical consciousness, which is directed toward the empirical world, there arises a transcendental ego with its noetic act and noematic correlate, thereby giving rise to the question: who or what is it that makes the distinction between the empirical ego and the transcendental ego? Is a third ego needed to make this distinction? The answer to these questions reveals something like the notion of the witness-consciousness. As a reflecting philosopher, it is possible for me to make a distinction within me between the empirical I and the transcendental I. The empirical I is a part of the world; it is subject to natural principles of causality and belongs to an empirical psychophysical organism. The transcendental ego, on the other hand, is the same I but purified of all natural presuppositions. It must be possible for me, however, to observe the distinction between the empirical I and the transcendental I, and this observer who apprehends the distinction must be a pure disinterested spectator or observer or what the Advaitins call the witness-consciousness. I am not trying to claim that there is one to one correspondence between the Vedantic and Husserlian phenomenology. I know that there are considerable differences between Husserlian transcendental phenomenology and Vedantic metaphysics. Many of these 1

Ibid., pp. 115-16.

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differences, I am sure, are quite obvious to phenomenologists. In transcendental phenomenology, the transcendental constitutes the empirical. In Vedanta, the transcendental appears as the empirical. The difference rests upon the difference between the ideas of “constitution” and “appearance.” In transcendental phenomenology, the transcendental is also temporal, or rather temporality itself. In Vedanta, the transcendental is beyond time; it is timeless presence. These differences notwithstanding, in both systems the empirical is not self-explanatory and autonomous. It always rests upon and presupposes something that is not empirical. From both the Vedantic and the transcendental phenomenological points of view, I, Bina Gupta, am not merely an empirical individual whose mental life, that is to say consciousness, is strictly bounded by my body, my solipsistic ego. We are not such windowless monads, each inhabiting our respective worlds. We rather open out to each other; our consciousnesses, in spite of their seeming attachment to our respective egos, nevertheless mingle with each other, into a larger river. When we communicate with each other, and share in each other’s experiences and thoughts, and live together in a common world, or as Alfred Schutz has said, when “we make music together,” we transcend our limited egos. We not only constitute a society or a community, but also the whole of humanity. In the same way, deep within each of our egos, we may find layers of universal structures (such as common cultures, languages, beliefs, modes of thinking, or what philosophers call “conceptual frameworks”). These again point to more general, universal structures. In this way, one can make a very plausible case for the Vedantic thesis that underlying our finite egos there are more and more general structures and eventually the most universal, namely, the vast illimitable ocean of consciousness, the brahman-atman. To use other illustrative metaphors, if electricity lights a light bulb and produces light, or if the oil and wick and the match stick light a

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lamp and produce light, they do not produce light as such, but only help to manifest it under certain limited conditions. Light as such, deriving from the sun, is the condition of the possibility of there being these limited fireworks. The bodily condition, the neural and the chemical processes in the same way do not produce consciousness as such but only a limited manifestation of it with the limiting ascription to an ego, that is to say, an I-consciousness. This Vedantic thesis, I think, can have momentous consequences for reinterpreting our personal lives. Husserlian phenomenology, in trying to understand how the transcendental ego constitutes the world, stopped at the level of intersubjectivity. In the fifth Cartesian Meditation, Husserl struggled hard to make clear how one transcendental ego opens out to and recognizes another transcendental ego. But we are still left with a community of transcendental egos as the last constituting source. This shows that despite his attempts to overcome the constraints of the egological point of view, Husserl remained within its clutches. Other phenomenologists, for example Sartre and Gurwitsch, from the very beginning rejected the egological point of view, and insisted that prior to reflection which generates the sense of “I” or the ego, consciousness is presented not as mine, but rather as a field. This notion of consciousness as an impersonal, non-egological field, in which persons participate prior to setting up barriers between their egos, is closer to the Vedantic point of view. If we could transcend the limited egological point of view, the feeling of I and the mine (aham and mamam), we would discover that even within the limits of our ordinary experience, we participate in a field of consciousness. Just as underlying the plurality of nicely demarcated material objects (this table, that chair, that tree over there, that mountain), physics discovered a vast illimitable interplay of energy, similarly underlying the plurality of private egos, the Vedanta discovered the sea of consciousness. The thesis of the Upanisads that the brahman and the atman are identical may then be

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constructed as the thesis that that sea of energy and this ocean of consciousness—discovered in two different directions of inquiry, the outer and the inner—are really the same. It is not so implausible as might have appeared at the beginning. Instead of the idea of an intersubjectively unified community of egos, the Vedanta offers us the picture of a vast underlying unity of which our private egos are only appearances. Such a metaphysical point of view has immense ethical consequences. If unity is fundamental and differences are superficial, then only those inter-personal relations which are compatible with that underlying unity would be ethical. As the Bhagavad Gita puts it: “the wise man sees himself in all beings and all beings in himself.” From this principle we can derive—as Swami Vivekananda forcefully argued in his work Practical Vedanta—that all narrow selfishness, national hegemony, selfish self-seeking, is incompatible with the nature of things. IV In this paper I have placed before you two contrasting, but allied transcendental philosophies: the Vedantic and the Husserlian. The Vedanta teaches that because in my innermost being I am that universal consciousness, and just because all egoistic self-understandings are mere appearances of that unity, it is possible for everyone to function at some level of our being as a witness-consciousness. If my nature as an ego were the final truth about me, then I would never transcend my self-interests and become a disinterested witness. However, my experience, and I am sure you will concur, shows that it is possible for me to step outside of my life as a selfish ego and look at things from a larger perspective, or even from no perspective at all. Let us see how this takes place. Consider a situation in which I am so enraged and agitated that my anger totally takes over my perception of myself and the world around me. Here, it is possible for

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me to adopt two stances: though I am mad, angry, enraged at the world, I am also aware that I am going through these emotions. In other words, my consciousness is split in two: while at one level I am living through a most disturbing emotion, at the same time I have the awareness that I, Bina Gupta, am undergoing this experience. The splitting of my consciousness provides, as it were, the first beginning of my detachment from the ego. It is the first crack that shows that I am not identical with the experiences—thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and desires—that I might be going through. I am also aware of them, and through this awareness I transcend them in my inner life. This is the beginning of my role as a witness-consciousness. I bear witness to my own experiences, and by being witness to them, I transcend them and refuse to identify myself with them. I am not denying that one can be so blind with rage that one is totally forgetful of oneself, but very soon one may be able to distance oneself from one’s own continuing rage and look at it as one is looking at something outside of oneself. In other words, one may objectify oneself as a person who is in rage not unlike the way one can objectify another person in the same situation. In that moment of distancing myself from myself, I may tell myself, “look at your own feelings. Is that what you wish to be like?” Notice that in so asking, I am not only seeing myself as though in a mirror as someone “out there,” but I have also begun to be a critic of myself. In this role of a critic of my ego, its experiences, and myself, I refuse to identify myself with these experiences, thereby distinguishing myself from myself. What I am trying to show is that in my everyday life, I am both an ego with my interests, desires, responses to situations, decisions, love, hatred, and in addition a witness to my experiences - first, as a disinterested spectator of my relation to the world, and then as a critic of it. This shows that my consciousness is never totally exhausted in the experiences it goes through, and that there is always transcendence beyond it. Philosophers

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such as Heidegger, to my mind, over-emphasized the way I am in my world as an interested, concerned, and caring individual being. While all that is true at one level, the Vedanta points out that running parallel to it there is also a disinterested, self-objectifying, neutral consciousness. While this distinction pervades everyday life, it is up to us to decide to what extent we can deepen and extend its scope. If the Vedanta thesis is correct, then it is possible for me to cultivate this detachment indefinitely so that my own ego becomes for my consciousness another object in this world. I recognize that this is a far-off ideal, but without this ideal I would incurably be a part of the world, one entity among many others, with no transcendence. In the Hindu tradition, the liberated souls do not refer to themselves by the first person pronoun “I,” but by their own proper names, as if they are talking about another person in the world. Sri Ramakrishna, for example, would say that Ramakrishna met so and so and said such and such things. Ramana Maharshi in the same way used to talk about Ramana as if he was talking about someone else. Such a complete dissolution of the sense of I, and the consequent objectification of the empirical ego, would make the liberated soul’s consciousness so totally expansive, so disinterested that it may very well be far removed from what we with our normal limitations can imagine. The Vedanta metaphysics provides the theoretical foundation for this possibility. We cannot all become completely disinterested, I concede. We have to get involved both in personal relations as well as in relation to things of the world. We have to be loyal to our friends and family and in doing so we refuse complete universalization. But to the extent we can also be witness to the roles we play, the choices and the decisions that we make, to that extent we are able to stand apart, to that extent we may free ourselves from our limited point of view, from our prejudices and preconceived opinions, and be on our way to truth and objectivity. Vedanta thus places before us an infinite task. Assuming

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that we accept Vedanta metaphysics that there is one universal consciousness of which we all are limited appearances, the spiritual task of experiencing and realizing this oneness is not easy. The persons who experience this oneness are called in the Vedantic tradition “realized souls” or “free souls.” If one believes in the Hindu doctrine of karma and rebirth, then in some exceptional cases the accomplishments of earlier lives may leave one in a position from where it would be but a short step to achieve this experience, even as a teenager. However, for most of us the journey would be long and arduous. The paths are many and varied. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krisna laid down three such paths: knowledge, action, and loving devotion to the supreme self. Western phenomenology provides some instructive contrasts on this point. The transition from the empirical to the transcendental point of view, according to Husserl, is made possible by three reductions: eidetic, phenomenological, and transcendental. In the eidetic reduction, one brackets contingent existences in order to be able to isolate essences and essential structures. In phenomenological reduction, one puts under brackets all transcendent objects until one is left with the pure immanence of consciousness with its noetic-noematic structures. In transcendental reduction or epoché one puts under brackets the belief in the world and is led to discover that the world is constituted by the complicated meaning structures that have their origin in transcendental consciousness. In this last reduction, I cease for myself to be a mundane ego having a place in the world, and I experience myself as transcendental ego who, in community with other transcendental egos, is engaged in the activity of world constitution. If Vedanta sets before us an infinite task, Western phenomenology seems to promise that the transition from the empirical to the transcendental is achieved by a few intellectual, rather philosophical, transformations of our way of looking at things. It is still a task that can be accomplished by a philosopher bent upon

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transforming his or her way of looking at things. A reduction seems to be an instantaneous result of a decision by a philosopher, in this case Husserl (but it may be any one of us), not to let his or her prejudices and preconceptions blur his or her vision. But one can nevertheless ask whether it is really an instantaneous accomplishment. We find in Husserl’s life and writings the tragic but inspiring spectacle of a person engaged continuously in clarifying his vision of transcendental pheno­menology, almost endlessly. Even this seems to be an endless task. One commentator on Husserl, Maurice Natanson, recognized this and labeled Husserl “a philosopher of infinite tasks.” Nevertheless there remain fundamental differences between the infinity that a Vedantin pursues and the infinity that Husserl pursued. The infinity which Husserl pursued is still taken to be achievable within the finite time at our disposal; not so the Vedantic infinity, unless one’s veil of ignorance has already been thinned by past karmic achievements. Having an infinite task before us need not be frustrating. It can be turned into an inspiring prospect. We all pursue limited goals in our lives, goals to be achieved within days, weeks, or months. That is fine. But it is only an infinite task that can give ultimate and lasting significance to one’s existence. Both Vedanta and transcendental phenomenology offer such goals, even if we cannot actualize them in our lives here and now. Once one chooses such a goal as one’s own, then one’s attitude to life, towards others and to the world is bound to change radically. Even without realizing that metaphysical wisdom, one’s life can change ethically, and that is not a small achievement.

Epistemology without a Vicious Circle Arnór Hannibalsson

1. Epistemology has for centuries been considered to be the fundamental theoretical discipline of philosophy. This is the branch of philosophy that has been cultivated more than any other. For a long period of time the other main branches of philosophy, such as philosophy of value (aesthetics, ethics) were, so to speak, put aside as they were based on the unstable foundation of the emotions and therefore unable to deliver any reliable theoretical results. This was the situation during the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, at least among philosophers in the English speaking countries, adhering to the empirical-analytical school. Epistemology and logic (and, based on it, philosophy of science) was considered to be worthier of attention because it was based on a more solid foundation of observation and strict theoretical (logical) thinking. But, nevertheless, it had to be admitted that an unshakeable basis for epistemology had not been found. John Stuart Mill sought this foundation in psychology. Kant looked for it in the interplay between perception and conceptual thinking. In 1911 Husserl launched the slogan of philosophy as a rigorous science. He tried to find the final, firm, solid bedrock of epistemology, on which a theoretical discipline—the science of philosophy—could be based. The first task was to find the ultimate source of all knowledge. The next task was to formulate the correct method by which the `high-rise building’ of philosophy could be constructed. The method could be none other than the descriptive method,

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founded by Franz Brentano. The ultimate source could be none other than the sensation or impressions or sense-data. And, in order to avoid the danger of petitio principii, the investigation was to be carried out without any presuppositions at all, without anything pregiven or any a priori postulates. Why is there a danger of a petitio principii in the very foundation of epistemology? When we ask: What is knowledge? we do so from the standpoint of somebody who does not know but seeks the answer. If he presupposes some knowledge then the investigation will be biased and the outcome depends upon what presuppositions you departed from in the beginning. In its most simple form the paradox of knowledge can be phrased like this: How do I know that I know what I know? The only possible reply is: Because I know it. This paradox calls for a solution. But in order to find such a solution it is necessary to find the ultimate source of knowledge, independent of the knower but describable by him. Carrying out this task has, however, proved to be much more difficult than it may at first seem. If we accept Hume’s premises and consider impressions to be psychological phenomena, dependent on the knower, then the road is paved towards solipsism and skepticism, which is unacceptable, if we are to build up a general discipline worthy of the name of scientific epistemology. This is the crucial question for any viable theory of epistemology. The whole construction of such a theory depends upon the choice of premises and on the nature of the phenomena upon which the whole construction stands. Hume assumed that his impressions were component parts of the human psyche and that a theory of knowledge could be deduced from an investigation into their nature. The task was to find out the natural laws that govern them. Epistemology would then be the fundamental discipline of psychology—the science of the human mind. But if impressions and ideas were a part of human experience then they would be both personal and relative to each and any person.

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Even if the natural laws of association could be discovered and formulated they would be relative to the experience of persons and from there solipsism could only be the final station. If this is so, then the laws of logic would are causal natural laws arrived at by observation and induction. The road to formulating an adequate theory of truth would thereby be closed. There is no way to warrant the truth-value of sentences that are solely based on inductive evidence. But truth, which is doomed to be relative, is no truth. As Husserl stresses in his Logical Investigations, either a sentence is true or it is not. One cannot accept the concept of relative truth as the foundation of epistemology and logic and thereby of all the sciences. It is therefore of utmost importance to find out whether this determination of the most primitive phenomena of experience, of impressions, sensations or sense-data (whatever name we choose to call them (Empfindungen, Anschauungen, etc) are described with the utmost care and according to their true nature, which includes both their mode of existence and true content. It is implicit in Hume’s subjectivism that by describing impressions and ideas we are describing the world. But Brentano always stressed that we must distinguish between phenomena of nature as investigated by natural science and the phenomena of perception. By describing the contents of the sense of vision we are describing phenomena that are different from the phenomena investigated by physics. Husserl and Ingarden agree that the primary source of all experience and knowledge is the most primitive sensation (“Jede originär gebende Anschauung eine Rechtsquelle der Erkenntnis sei,” Husserl, 1950, §24, cf. §19). In order to be able to describe the phenomena of the primary source one must approach them without any presuppositions, pre-judgments, whatsoever. Most importantly, we cannot presuppose any knowledge about them because if we do then we are seeking for what we already know and thus we fall into the trap of petitio principii. The most

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primitive, original impressions must therefore be of the nature of arriving into consciousness and presenting themselves as phenomena about which we know nothing beforehand but which are, nevertheless, of such a nature that they are imbued with describable properties. But are these impressions of such a nature that they come to us originally without name and without us having any previous knowledge about them (e.g. color)? Do we just see and then, by comparing with other phenomena find likenesses and differences with which we can determine the concept under which an impression falls and which allows us to give it a name (e.g. white color)? Or are they such that they carry with them a content that calls on the experiencing person to interpret in meaningful words and sentences? Ingarden adhered to the view that sense-data do, certainly, exist, (“die ursprünglichen fließenden Empfindungsdaten sicher gibt,” (see Husserl, 1968, §. 125). These sense-data are experienced (“erlebt”) but they do not belong to consciousness, sensu stricto, until they become a component part of the intentional act (noesis) (Ingarden, 1961, §125). This very important point should, of course, be self-evident and generally accepted. But it cannot avoid being controversial, even among phenomenologists themselves. Ingarden quotes his colleague Wilhelm Schapp: “You believe in sense-data (Empfindungsdaten). They are a pure construction.” (Husserl, 1968, §. 125). This starting point must be “absolutely undoubted and adequate, that is immanent and a priori” ( Ingarden, 1971, str.383). That is because the aim is to obtain “a system of fundamental principles which allow us to construct a complex of criteria for judging about cognitive value, i.e. the truth value of all the other branches of knowledge, both philosophical and positive knowledge.” ( Ingarden, 1971, str.383). No dogmatically accepted theory may be included in this starting point. It must be completely independent of all theories whatsoever, because it is the forerunner of any theory which is supported by knowledge and which

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can be questioned (See Ingarden, 1963, str 153-154). This is necessarily so if the error of petitio principii is to be avoided. Any knowledge that is to be absolutely valid is so only to the extent that any doubt about it would be absurd and preposterous. Its object must be known and all its components immediately given. Such a cognition is immanent and adequate. These fundamental assumptions are elaborated by Ingarden in several places (i.e. Ingarden, 1963). Ingarden stresses that it is vital to show that there is such a cognition whose cognitive value can be established without resorting to new cognitive acts. If this is not possible and if, at the foundation of epistemology there are cognitive acts that have to be justified by new cognitive acts then we are entrapped in a regressus ad infinitum, which is not acceptable. How is this peculiar and special cognitive act to be characterized and described? Is there anything special about it? Some philosophers reason like this: A cognitive act along with its content is an act of consciousness. It is the object of investigation by the theory of consciousness, and thereby it is a subject-matter to be investigated by psychology. If this is so, then the theory of knowledge would have to borrow from psychology on the one side and from a general theory of objects (metaphysics) on the other a whole group of assumptions which it makes use of when investigating the relations between the cognitive act and the object of knowledge. Epistemology would, then, be dependent on other branches of philosophy, and, in addition, on psychology and physics even. Epistemology would not be engaged in a critical investigation into its own premises, since its foundations would be found in other disciplines. Ingarden replies to this that such a theory of knowledge would be fully absurd. It would be quite impossible if it were to take its own fundamental premises from other branches of knowledge. It is the task of epistemology to do research into the idea of knowledge and the aim of this research is to establish the

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principles of knowledge. Epistemology must be capable of critically investigating the cognitive value of the theses and methods of any other branch of knowledge. This is a condition for judging whether the theories of these sciences are true. It is, therefore, evident that if epistemology were to borrow theses from other branches of knowledge then that would be a clear petitio principii. And, it can be added, that in this case the fundamental principles of knowledge would be based on theses which are not yet investigated as to their reliability and which might be quite absent. From this, it must be concluded that a pure theory of knowledge cannot in any case take over from other branches of knowledge the premises of its research, i.e. it must be independent of all other disciplines (Ingarden, 1971, str.390-391). Ingarden further states that it is not enough to assert that epistemology must be independent of other branches of learning. It must be shown how it can be independent of them. First of all, it must be taken into account that the subject matter of the phenomenology of consciousness and the subject matter of psychology are quite different. Psychology is an empirical science that investigates psychic states and the structure of the psyche. Phenomenology investigates the essence of conscious experience. Even where the fields of research overlap each discipline approaches their object very differently. Psychology investigates conscious experience as a real process, as part of the life of real psychophysical individuals. This process is conditioned by real causal chains (physical and physiological). Because of this, psychology must be considered to be one of the branches of natural science. This cannot possibly be said about the phenomenology of consciousness. It does not view consciousness as being an element of the causal chain of the natural world but sees it as its primary field and the real world as the counterpart of certain acts of consciousness. Psychology is an empirical science that uses the method of internal perception. Phenomenology is far from being an empirical science. It investigates the

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content of the general idea of an act of consciousness, or cognitive acts. This content is revealed by way of experiential intuition. This is eidetic cognition aiming at revealing the essence of the ideas mentioned here. As the field of research of psychology and phenomenology is different there is no need for the latter to declare dependence upon the former. Phenomenology pursues its course without ever crossing the path of psychology. Even though there exists a clear idea of conscious acts it does not follow from this that there are individuals who perform these acts, nor that the study of them must be confined to the observation of individuals. The existence of an idea does not imply that there are individuals falling under it. There is a clear difference between the question of how to investigate the psychic states of real people and the question of what is the nature (essence) of acts of consciousness. Thus, pure epistemology comes close to the field of phenomenology of conscious acts, but it is far from being identical with it. Epistemology is able to acquire knowledge by its own means of the essence of the idea of knowledge and the elements, which are necessary for solving its main task, and it does not need to seek help from other disciplines such as the phenomenology of consciousness. Furthermore, epistemology not only must, but also can be quite independent of natural science. A pure theory of knowledge is concerned with ideas and relations between them (states of affairs), and the existence of an idea is in no way conditioned by the existence of objects that fall under it. Therefore, the existence of the objects of the real world that fall under some elements of the contents of the general idea of cognition cannot be conditions for the states of affairs which are the objects of specific epistemological judgments. A pure theory of knowledge is in no way dependent on natural science. Similarly, one can say that epistemology is independent of metaphysics. It is the task of metaphysics to investigate its objects

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in view of their existence and essence. Metaphysical judgments are either existential or categorical asserting their existence in view of their properties. Metaphysics, like the various branches of natural science, aims at reaching knowledge about the existence of objects and their attributes. But the theory of knowledge does not investigate objects, their mode of existence and actual properties. The theory of knowledge does not assert that there are such and such objects, existing ideally or really objects. The theory of knowledge needs to know the contents of ideas of specially structured objects and their possible mode of existence. It can easily do without any premises borrowed from metaphysics. The same applies to ontology. Ontologies investigate the ideas of objects of certain domains, and the relations among the contents of these ideas. Or, it investigates relations among the elements of the content of one and the same idea. The theory of knowledge asks: What conditions must the cognitive act fulfill if it concerns an object that falls under an idea of such and such a structure? Does it, then, borrow from the ontologist? No. If the theory of knowledge would depend upon some ontology or other, then it would lose its character as being free of all dogmatism. The nature of the theory of knowledge is such that it does not need to overtake any ontological premises. Ontology puts forward existential claims. It makes categorical assertions about the mode of existence of the idea of a certain domain. There is, however, no need for the theorist of knowledge to incorporate these propositions into his theory. The epistemologist is ontologically neutral. He contemplates certain ideas of an object from the point of view of realizing what properties of this type of object can become the object of knowledge. The pure theory of knowledge can be quite independent of any ontology. The same applies mutatis mutandis to the question of whether metaphysics and ontology need to be dependent upon epistemology. The truth of that matter is that the two do not in any way depend upon epistemology.

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2. What has been said up to now cannot be viewed as specifically original Ingardenian thought. It is mostly an elaboration of Husserl’s epistemological theories as set forth in his Logical Investigations. During the XIX century psychologism was widespread among philosophers and logicians, even in Germany. The theoretical impact of Husserl and Frege put an end to this trend. The views proposed by Husserl in the work mentioned above are now generally accepted. Logical rules are not natural, causal, psychological laws. They are based on a priori premises, they are about pure concepts and they are not arrived at by induction. Nevertheless, Husserl always maintained that the prime and original source of all knowledge is sense perception (Husserl, 1968, §24). But this is the thesis of classical empiricism. And if Husserl agrees with Hume about this fundamental principle— how is he, then, going to avoid the very same error that he so vehemently campaigned against in the Logical Investigations? Isn’t he doomed to fall into the trap of psychologism, relativism and, ultimately, solipsism? Husserl says of Hume in his famous essay from 1911 “Philosophy as Rigorous Science”: “Had his sensualism not blinded him to the whole sphere of intentionality, of “consciousness-of,” had he grasped it in an investigation of essence, he would not have become the great skeptic, but instead the founder of a truly “positive” theory of reason” (Husserl, 1950, p. 113). And the method by which this sphere is delineated is the method of epoché, of putting the so-called natural attitude out of action, in parentheses. The meaning of this is simple and clear. It follows from the rejection of psychologism. The science of intentionality is limited to “pure consciousness,” and in this research no use is made of the sciences that investigate the natural world (Husserl, 1968, §§31 and 32). By means of this method the difference between immanent and transcendent perception is discovered

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and an access to an indubitable sphere of being is opened: to the sphere of pure transcendental consciousness (Ingarden, 1963, p.412). Ingarden says in one of his works on Husserl: “The important matter is the method of uncovering a separate region of individual being which is, according to Husserl, pure consciousness. This is the very region in whose framework the achievement of absolute knowledge is to be possible, an indubitable knowledge obtained in immanent perception or in the “eidetic” attitude to the essence of the acts of this consciousness. Here there is to take place the realization of philosophy as “rigorous” science.”(Ingarden, 1975, p.38). Ingarden says elsewhere in the same work: “It is also a fact that the application of the phenomenological reduction, which Husserl introduced with another aim in mind in Ideas I, eo ipso removes the danger of petitio principii in the investigations into the experiential mode of cognition of the objects of the real world” (Ingarden, 1975, p. 12). Ingarden then goes on to throw more light on how it is possible to cultivate this field of philosophical learning without falling into the trap of a vicious circle. The main thing is that the validity (prawomocnosc) of the knowledge needed to grasp the idea of knowledge in general must not be granted beforehand. We must not proceed from a knowledge of the contents of the idea of knowledge in general. But how is this possible? How can one reach an understanding of what knowledge is without presupposing some knowledge or another? The reply is: We can use the general concept of knowledge—after neutralizing our attitude to its truth-value—as a leading idea in our research, although we are not allowed to use it as a categorically decisive criterion. But we can use it to map out the road, and as a road sign on our way to the fulcrum we are seeking. The chain of reasoning which we want somehow to break up looks like this: We get to know what knowledge is by grasping the idea of cognition in general. This can be done only by a new

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cognitive act directed onto the relevant cognition. To get to know a certain cognition there is always needed a new cognitive act. We are in the trap of getting to know what it is to get to know what knowledge is. How are we to break up this regressus? The only possible way out is to look at the relations between the cognitive act and the object of that act (what is known) as one organic unity. Knowing and the known would then be identical and form a homogenous whole in which the elements are to be distinguished only by abstraction as dependent (niesamodzielne) moments. This is the only correct way out (See Ingarden, 1971, s. 365). Ingarden distinguishes quite definitely between outer and inner perception. The former is the grasp which we have of external objects through the senses. And Ingarden is of the opinion, against the English empiricists, that “in outer perception (we see) not only how the thing we perceive is given, but also what the thing is. We see not only “something” brown and bulky etc. but we see a brown wardrobe, a wooden table, a rocky mountain etc.” (Ingarden, 1975, p.17). That means that in this type of perception not only its mode is given, but also the contents of each specific perception. Such sense data (daty wrazeniowe) are contents which in a way stand against conscious acts and do not themselves belong to the domain of consciousness. But the act of outer perception is to be conscious of the contents and these contents are alien to the subject (ichfremd). (Ingarden, 1961, §44, s. 11). In German the term to signify this is Erleben. The act of perceiving this perception is of a different nature. They are both acts of consciousness but each of them constitutes a closed whole, and these wholes are independent of each other (Ingarden, 1971, p. 367). This type of perception is called by Ingarden immanent perception, i. e. immediate cognition of conscious experience. If it can be shown that the cognitive value of such self-cognition can be established without resorting to cognitive acts then we would have an absolutely indubitable and adequate cognitive result which enable us to avoid the danger of

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petitio principii in epistemology (Ingarden, 1971, p. 385). Without going into his detailed descriptions of these phenomena of consciousness it suffices to say that if by these means it is possible to establish the absolute certainty or unshakeable evidence of this type of perception, then Ingarden has won his case. What is experienced and experience itself form a simple and identical act. The experience and its object cannot be distinguished as independent individuals. Instead, the intuitive experience of acts is the cognition of these acts. From the essence of intuitive experience of acts we obtain the evidence for the fundamental idea of knowledge in general (Ingarden, 1971, p. 376). When the subject sees something as it is in itself then we call that knowledge (cognition) in the widest meaning of that word. In the intuitive experience of an act what is known is identical with the knowledge of it. In view of this identity the possibility of an error or illusion is in principle excluded. “Intuitive experience is absolutely indubitable experience (przezywanie). It is absolutely impossible, that whatever is intuitively experienced, could be otherwise as it is experienced. It is a totally adequate and complete knowledge. It is knowledge which absolutely warrants the existence of what is experienced.” (Ingarden, 1971, p. 376). And it cannot be known in any other way. From this it follows that no new act of cognition is necessary to make intuitive experience known. This is the climax of the whole symphony and the most important conclusion. “In this manner—I believe—have we removed the last obstacle on the way to the solution of our main problem,”—says Ingarden in conclusion of his essay (Ingarden, 1971, p. 376). If this were so then this conclusion would be an important landmark in the whole history of philosophy. But if we are to agree to this conclusion it must be self-evident and constitute an uncontested truth in the eyes of anyone who just looks inside himself and lives through the acts of inner and outer perception, and of intuitive perception in particular.

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The belief in this conclusion is of a crucial importance for the whole idea of philosophy as rigorous science, an idea which Husserl was very reluctant to abandon. He tried his utmost to produce the necessary evidence for the premises of this final station of philosophy as science, and more than once began over again from the very beginning but the final outcome was always the same. The crux of the problem lies in the relations between the experiences of pure consciousness and the communication of them. The experiences of inner and outer experience are processes that take place in the consciousness of real, living persons. We have names for various elements of these experiences, such as colors and shapes, but there is no way of communicating them directly, immediately. All experiences must be seen through the prism of somebody’s experience, from somebody’s point of view. We have not yet found the absolute viewpoint that reproduces experiences in its living reality, as they are in their original essence. The lived perception and the description of it must be distinguished. The question of the origin of meaning is also difficult to solve. Do we discover meaning, do we just read it off the lived perceptions, or do we give the phenomena of perception our meaning? The recommendation to look at our lived sensedata either from the point of view of direct immediate experience or also from the point of view of viewing these data as acts of pure consciousness does not do the trick of showing that there are indubitable facts of consciousness. And as for the activity of intuition (insight): is it an activity of pure consciousness, or is it an activity of our pre-reductive psyche? It can be doubted whether Ingarden’s firm belief in his solution to the problem of the vicious circle is solved by the means that he indicates. He “asserts that all knowledge is absolutely true if it is based on eidetic, i. e. immediate intuitive-intellectual cognition. But the knowledge that such is the knowledge based on eidetic, intellectual intuition must itself follow from eidetic, intellectual intuition; thus a certain vicious circle is retained in

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spite of the thesis of the self-sufficiency of eidetic cognition.” (Lubnicki, 1972). The road to absolute certainty is much more thorny than even Husserl and Ingarden could perceive. The belief in the absolute indubitability of immanent perception may turn out to be a dogmatic assumption. The dream of founding philosophy on a firm bedrock of apodictically evident truths and objective certitude may have been an excessive optimism. Humankind and the world that we live in are of such a nature that everything can change and nothing can be forever certain. Work Cited Husserl, Edmund. Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft. Frankfurt am Main 1971, 1965 Husserl, Edmund. Ideen I: Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch. Haag, 1950 (1913). Husserl, Edmund. Briefe an Roman Ingarden. Herausgegeben von Roman Ingarden, Haag, 1968. Ingarden, Roman. “O niebezpieczenstwie “petitionis principii” w teorii poznania” and “Stanowisko teorii poznania w systemie nauk filozoficznych” in the book: U podstaw teorii poznania, Czesc pierwsza, Warszawa 1971. Ingarden, Roman: Spór o istnienie swiata, tom II, wydanie drugie, Warszawa 1961. Ingarden, Roman: On the Motives which led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism. Translated from the Polish by Arnór Hannibalsson. Haag, 1975. Kolakowski, Leszek: Husserl and the Search for Certitude. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1975. Lubnicki, Narcyz: “Sylwetka filozoficzna Romana Ingardena” in the book: Fenomenologia Romana Ingardena, Warszawa, 1972. Póltawski, Andrzej: “Teoria poznania,” in the book: Slownik pojec filozoficznych Romana Ingardena, Redakcja naukowa Andrzej J. Nowak i Leszek Sosnowski. Kraków, 2001.

Information Warfare and Leadership: The Philosophical Question of Neo-Modern Soldiership Aki-Mauri Huhtinen

Introduction In this study, I argue that in addition to human and material power there is information power as well. I argue also that not of wood, stone, or metal but of light, waves, and invisible vibrations are the new instruments of controlling or dominating both an individual and a mass of people. The new technological revolution plays an important part in using power and also creating information. To use the different kind of information techniques we create new kind of invisible control and power. To create information means also the new trend of violence. The whole idea is “the pre-emptive” (PRE) method: “Hit first, ask later”. That is why the United States speaks about “military operations other than war” (MOOTW). Because traditional war needs a declaration of war first, there has to be a threat or hit of military power to the enemy. After the 9/11 there is no more time to wait for that threat or hit. There are no more enemies. We have become back to the Dark Ages when knights fought together in empty combat space. Now, a lot of high technological weapon systems are in the combat space only criminals or terrorists. So, we need a new concept like MOOTW. One of the important parts of MOOTW is Information Warfare (IW).

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The Background Idea of the “Pre-emptive Strike” According to James Der Derian, IW has become the umbrella concept for understanding cyberwar, hackerwar, netwar, virtual war, and other network-centric conflicts. The question of conflict is not only physical, but also a psychological issue. For example, the terrorist group would hit the automated teller machine systems (AMT) and steal the money of private people. The damage would be very small technically but the influence of psychological behavior could have a long effect. The AMT systems work perfectly and safely after the damage has been done but people no longer want use it because of bad rumors. MOOTW has a history that goes back at least as far as Sun Tzu, who considered defeating an enemy without violence to be the “acme of skill” in warfare. (Der Derian 2003, 453) The Chance to Perceive Otherwise In his book, Politique du rebelled. Traité de résistance d’insou­ mission (Grasset & Fasquelle, 1997)1 Michel Onfray describes the paradox of how power is manifested only with the permission of those who are subjects to it. A person has to approve the use of power on him. According to Onfray, power is accepted because of the fear of absolute freedom; the freedoms of having to choose, invent, and want. It is also about intellectual laziness or infantilism, something towards which the machinery of the welfare state has also encouraged people to move. Onfray argues that when disciplinary societies reserved punishment (torture, prison, hospitalization, etc) for rebels, the control society combines freedom with that which you are not supposed to want. The forbidden freedom or invisible discipline is linked to something that is useful to society; the freedom to consume, own, 1 Ms Laura Loikkanen has translated this text from the Finnish translation of Michel Onfray’s original book.

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utilize material goods, behavior, values, and customs. (Onfray 2004, 167-168) According to Artz, for example with video games, consumer and marketing technology appear as a source of corporate profit based on individual consumption. Of course, media or video games do not cause violence or war. Rather, argues Artz, video games and their ubiquitous popularity indicate the centrality of media entertainment to contemporary popular culture; a culture primarily of reception, not production; a culture of corporate-guided participation; a culture of active spectators prepared and equipped for decision making in the same way that video games are prepared and equipped for geopolitical discourse on war and revolution. (Artz 2005, 7) The video games are so appealing because we see the machine and computer as a promise of increasing the capacity of our experience. We have a dream to find more both impressive and active experience. War has been the key area of technological product development but today military companies and industries offer more and more products for peaceful use, as well. The fact that war has become computerized has fundamentally changed the physical relationship of soldiers with their work. To an increasing extent soldiers no longer “physically” work, but sit in front of computers and keep an eye on the battle with different icons. The enemy is an icon on the screen. When a computerized operating system breaks down, it can be repaired only by a professional. When one’s job is reduced to sitting in front of a computer and clicking the mouse, it becomes physically easy. People become weak and commitment to the different phases of work becomes superficial because people no longer understand what they are doing. (Sennett 2002, 77) Panopticon: the Modern Technological Lifestyle The idea of “Panoptisicsm” is one of the most important phi­ lo­sophical issues of power in the 20th century. Because of new

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science, statistic models and economical standards, there is the question of connectivity of power and knowledge. Since the 18th century there has been a waste of human bodies and power, for example in war, until the modern world demanded the moral change of human life. According to Foucault, the new disciplinary project offers the authorities to exercising individual control function according to a double mode: that of binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that of coercive assignment, of differential distribution (who he is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized; how he is to be recognized; how a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him in an individual way, etc.). (Foucault 1977, 199) According to Foucault, Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (Pan) is the architectural figure of scientific power composition. The principle and metaphor were based on the periphery, the centre and the tower. The tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the rings. The peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building. They have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower. The other, on the outside, allows light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker, a soldier or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. (Foucault 1977, 200) The metaphor of Pan has been used in the structure of the global networks so that the processes and innovations of globalization constitute a system of surveillance and control in the everyday workplace and economy, supporting a global system of capital and labor. Through surveillance, data is collected, economic activities are monitored and behavior is reinforced and normalized. The new production of social order is realized in the form of media.

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One of the interesting applications of Pan is new virtual technology. People can move from place to place faster than ever before without actually moving their bodies. Activities of people can be controlled by email addresses, mobile phone numbers, and spending time in the Internet. For example, far away from the scene of an accident the emergency operators can guide and lead relief workers without being there. The so called “virtual connectivity” was created by military action needs and robot wars but the idea of global connectivity has become real life in peace, too. In principle, everyone can be reached anywhere and anytime. There is no privacy anymore. The difference between work and free time, peace and war, day and night, life and death disappears. Panopticon and Iraq War II The Iraq War and its consequences have received world wide media attention. They have also shaped the way we talk about the economic cost of this war and the profit the politically. When the United States made the decision to attack Iraq, the planners of the military operation faced the fact that the way they waged war was hopelessly outdated. They had to create a new war machine that could be mobilized in secret, without the knowledge of the CNN, and that could become effective according to a desired schedule. This nearly impossible task both militarily and economically was given to the commander of the US CENTCOM in Tampa, Florida, General Tommy Franks. When the creation of the new machine began, the eyes of the key politicians were riveted too closely to what it would be like instead of focusing on diplomacy or the economic cost of the war. The body of experts put together by President Bush concentrated on the possibilities of the war machine instead of politics. (e.g. Franks 2004) Enjoying full political and economic trust General Franks managed to create a machine that could make the Iraqis

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desperately want to change the political leadership by striking quickly and effectively with light entities of troops. This theory was based on the Shock and Awe -model planned during the administrations of previous Presidents. According to the model, the physical and psychological reality of the people being targeted would be filled with the independent but simultaneous spikes of the information age and traditional force, in which case the Iraqis would desperately want to get rid of Saddam Hussein. To avoid traditional warfare and destruction, the war machine concentrated on special operations, unusual warfare, information operations and civilian crisis management. In March 2003 we had the opportunity to follow the US attack on Iraq in real time online and on television. The Shock and Awe strategy had been taken into use. According to its creator Harlan Ullman, it was important that the United States take control of the observations made by the states belonging to the Axis of Evil (Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea), create a fear of these states’ vulnerability, and emphasize the superiority and invulnerability of the United States. A good metaphor is a room into which the Iraqis have been locked while the United States turns the lights on and off according to its desires. Scaring someone to death is based on the thought that the use of physical force is subject to psychological fear. An atmosphere of fear is used to achieve psychological, physical and emotional turmoil that leads to social helplessness and surrender or to risking complete destruction if resistance is continued. The new war machine became so efficient that once again its efficacy blinded its users, the experts who supported it, political decision-makers, economical experts as well as the audience following the progress of the war. Military surgical procedures cleanly removed the cancer tumor, but left the structures, development history and culture it had created. Since the Vietnam War the United States has repeated the formula in which the winning of battles has not led to winning the war with the goal

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of peace and a new order. Even though the military machine has been renewed, political thinking and machinery as the context of warfare have not changed. On the contrary, the conservative way of viewing the world is spreading and gaining support in Europe. There is certain charm in Shock and Awe warfare and it penetrates the news, popular culture, entertainment and advertising increasingly better. War still has an effect on the Western individual’s need for information and imagination. It is difficult to understand the allure of war among people if it were only mechanical subjugation and surrender. In the end war is about social meaningfulness and the value of different ways of life. The ideals of war create an appreciable image of a way to live one’s life. War is also present in language and war is created by texts and pictures in media. Especially the metaphors of the language of scientific and economic experts are old concepts of military strategy. People have adjusted to the war against terrorism and its phenomena just as the people of earlier generations adjusted to the forms of warfare in their era. War also presents clear solutions to the social challenges of the culture of each era. The difficulties of diplomatic activity and the aimless problem solving of democracy are increasingly challenged by clear “Win or lose” thinking. The alternative to peace is a viscous, endless process in which the quick model to quick thoughts offered by war receives more and more attention in western thinking. Its speed is supported by the information technological infrastructure. The consumers of war, i.e. the users of various communication equipment, make their choices based on their feelings: rational reasoning takes a back seat. As we receive messages related to war, we accept peace of mind, attitudes, and feelings. They are stories in accordance with our way of life, our values and our basic beliefs. We want to live with these stories. The winners of modern war are those who are capable of creating the best stories. People identify with heroes and winners.

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Barbed Wire: Minimize Energy to Produce the Effects of Control According to Christopher Capozzola, when barbed wire was first introduced in 1876, no one believed that it would work so a young promoter named John Gates organized demonstration at the Military Plaza in San Antonio. Gates invited local cattlemen to test their wildest longhorns against his new fencing material, crafted of nothing more than thin wire and metal barbs. The dubious ranchers released their steers, who stumbled backward in confusion after they ran head first into the fences. When they did so, philosopher Olivier Razac would suggest, they ran up against the dawn of the 20th century. (Capozzola 2005)2 According to Razac, because of barbed wire is everywhere its history and meaning seems too chaotic to chart. At its best power is when it will be created by imperceptible instruments and processes. Like Razac said, the communications could not solve all the problems of supplying the new crow in the prairie. In the 18th century the railroad could not transport the materials so close to fields that the farmers could protect herds from wild animals and Indians. The same logic continued in the First World War and the Second World War: the faster the military troops moved, the bigger problem was the protection of those troops. Like barbed wire in the first modern example, we always need a new tool of process to control our move and increasing speed of communication. (Razac 2002, 11) Barbed wire also opened a new way of seeing how to use power economically. In the extreme climatic conditions of the West, i.e. the absence of wood, water, and stone demanded to the creation of new way of using power. The light weight of barbed wire, its elementary make it easy to transported and build. And it was easy to a mass production. Yet this object, devised at the lowest level of technology, is not especially sophisticated. In a century of stunning technological advancements, when a computer’s power becomes laughable in

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ten year’s time, when obsolete pile up in the junkyards of modernity, barbed wire has remained almost unchanged since its inception. It has always been efficient enough to perform its designated task: to define space and to establish territorial boundaries. The perfection of a tool of power is not measured so much by its technical refinement as by its economic adaptation. The instruments which serve authority best are those which expend the smallest amount of energy possible to produce the effects of control or domination. Barbed wire is such an instrument, because its simplicity makes it a cheap and supple tool, adaptable to all kinds of uses (Razac 2002, x). Razac describes in detail how the lightness of barbed wire gave it its tactical importance. It was also hard to see. By day, it made reconnaissance by airplane and balloons difficult. In addition, it caused infantrymen to make fatal mistakes. Barbed wire’s lightness made it immune to enemy artillery fire and it was easily repaired or replaced. The networks could be worked on at night or in the fog. The networks were camouflaged with vegetation and it was impossible to see where the bullets coming from. Many men killed never saw the enemy. (Razac 2002, 42) This idea of invisible battle is still alive. In Iraq the so called asymmetric warfare is everyday life. One of the biggest problems for U.S. soldiers is finding the enemy. Terrorists don’t use traditional or official military clothes, they don’t use traditional weapons, and they move with civilian trucks and pick-ups. In the battle space, there are also many other agents, like non governmental personnel and volunteers. This makes it difficult to find the enemies within the other agents. Razac said that barbed wire also became a topic in literally works about war and made the battlefield “aesthetic”. The so called “no-man’s-land” becomes a “work of art” and barbed wire is an essential element in this nightmare picture. No-man’s-land was peopled by the dying, the dead, and pieces of corpses. Barbed wire was one part of the demoralizing and dehumanization of

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the soldiers who risked their lives. Barbed wire never became a metaphor for the war but a salient attribute of the memory of the Great War. After the Second World War the Nazi concentration camps made barbed wire the symbol of the worst catastrophe of the 20th century. (Razac 2002, 49-52) This process of dehumanization through boundary-marking reached what Razac considers its logical conclusion in the Nazi concentration camps of World War II. The central element of the concentration camp’s architecture was the barbed wire. The principle of construction of the camps was relatively like Pan. What is most important concerning the future is that in barber wire we can use electric power better than wood or stone. Because perception is so important to the Western people, it has become the principle our experience and knowledge. To draw a parallel between human body and economical circulation arise a terribly in Marquis De Sade’s literature. Human body seems to be only a different kind of functioning mechanism without a soul. This “motor body” has an identity only aid of external discipline and power. Human body are transformed working instrument by scientific machine or experiment. The crucial point is the size of organs, the number of the bodies and the calculation of the human bodies. Like Capozzala said, the barbed wire surrounding the camps demarcated human and inhuman, an important step in making genocide not only practically possible but intellectually imaginable. The theoretical implications of barbed wire are not insignificant. Razac shows that barbed wire is not merely an object, but a whole way of seeing the world, “a sublime, even monstrous modern technology run amok.” (Capozzala 2005) According to Razac, barbed wire has a different order than Bentham’s Panopticon. Barbed wire is not concerned with the general behavior of those being observed, but simply their position with respect to the boundary which contains them. The combination’s sole purpose is preventing people from leaving an

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authorized area and entering a forbidden one. (Razac 2002, 97) Today, according to Razac, social control no longer relies on heavy separations such as fences; they are too visible, and they offer too many vulnerable points of attack. The control of space has become discreet and interactive. Of course, there is still a lot of use for barbed wire, for example at the border between countries, like between the United States and Mexico, between Chechnya and Russia and the Palestinian territories and Israel. (Razac 2002, 99, 107) Razac emphasizes that the idea of barbed wire continues in the electronic gate which detects the invisible: metal, magnetized objects, and, with X rays, the outlines of concealed and suspect objects. Electronic exits are used to spot stolen articles. All the customers undergo a thorough but invisible body search which does not disturb them. Only someone hiding a stolen article triggers both an alarm and the arrival on the scene of the security guards. In real time, these systems can warn security guards when “at-risk” people enter, who may then be expelled or watched more closely. Working together, cameras and computers can choose whom to admit and whom to refuse. One might possibly argue with a guard, but one cannot argue with a computer. Urban spaces are more and more divided into zones with their own access requirements and behavioral criteria. (Razac 2002, 114-117) Conclusion I have argued that power should be understood as an invisible technique. As I have shown in this article, invisibility and frustration to effect common things present a big challenge to leaders and decision makers. Asymmetric, non-linear thinking and common chaos underline the capability of perception and right fast influence. Therefore technology is more important to leadership and management because of the lack of human perception capability. Because there is no longer a distinction between war and

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peace, we need a new enemy: criminals. Political and cultural leadership act neither with unlimited power nor simply through manipulation, but rather with widespread consent arising from the “common sense” of everyday life that has been institutionally organized. I try to emphasize that the metaphor of panopticon has changed the metaphor of barbed wire. In our we –central world we are no longer interested in our controlled audience than the new tools of communication and control. We do no longer try to change the mass of people than try to get some media time. Audience is relative, we –world needs media. Digitalization is the common language and its ease of multiplying, copying, and imitating. The metaphor of barbed wire show us who we try to pre-emptive our life in microcosms like in macrocosms. Because we are interactive and mobile, like our digitalized world, there has to be a light, and imperceptible barbed wire to control us. The change of violence is not a line or evolution. It is a curve. After the contemplation of the post-modern world and self-technique, the neo-modern people start to move and be interactive. That is why we need new tools and techniques for hegemony. References Artz, Lee; Kamalipour, Yahya R. (ed. 2005) Bring ’Em On. Media and Politics in the Iraq War. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Capozzola, Christopher (2005) [http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Mar2003/ booktwo0303.html] (9.3.2005). Coker, Cristopher (2002) Waging War Without Warriors? The Changing Culture of Military Conflict. London: IISS Studies in International Security. Rienner Publishers. Der Derian, James (2005) ”Global Agenda” [http://www.watsoninstitute.org/ news_detail.cfm?id=277], (9.3.2005) Der Derian, James (2003) “The Question of Information Technology in International Relations”. Millenium. Journal of International Studies, vol. 32 No. 3, pp. 441-456.

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Franks, Tommy (2004) American Soldier. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc. Foucault, Michel (1977) Discipline and punish. The birth of the prison. Translated from the French by Alan Shedian. London: Penguin Books. Fuchs, Christian (2005) “The Mass Media, Politics, and Warfare“. Artz, Lee; Kamalipour, Yahya R. (ed. 2005) Bring ’Em On. Media and Politics in the Iraq War. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., pp. 189-208. Gasher, Mike (2005) “Might Makes Right: News Reportage as Discursive Weapon in the War in Iraq“. Artz, Lee; Kamalipour, Yahya R. (ed. 2005) Bring ’Em On. Media and Politics in the Iraq War. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., pp. 209-224. Grossman, Dave (1996) On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Little, Brown and Company, Boston. Herrera, Geoffrey L. (2005) “Technology and International Systems”. Bring ’Em On. Media and Politics in the Iraq War. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., pp. 559-593. Huhtinen, Aki; Rantapelkonen, Jari (2002) Imagewars: Beyond the Mask of Information Warfare. The second edition. Helsinki: Published by Marshal of Finland Mannerheim’s War Studies Fund. Jansen, Sue Curry (2005) “Foreign Policy, Public Diplomacy, and Public Relations: Selling America to the World”. Artz, Lee; Kamalipour, Yahya R. (ed. 2005) Bring ’Em On. Media and Politics in the Iraq War. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., pp. 51-66. Kaldor, Mary (2001) New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Onfray, Michel (2004) Kapinallisen politiikka. Tutkielma vastarinnasta ja taipumattomuudesta. Suomentanut Tapani Kilpeläinen. Tampere: Eurooppalaisen filosofian seura. Razac, Oliver (2002) Barber wire: a political history. Translated by Jonathan Kneight. London: Profile Books. Sennett, Richard (2003) Respect: the formation of character in a world of inequality. London: Allen Lane, Penguin Books. Shay, Jonathan (2002) Odysseus in America. Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. New York: Scribner. Soros, George (2004). The Bubble of American Supremacy. Correcting the Misuse of American Power. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

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The Yes Men (2004). Director: Chris Smith, Dan Ollman, Sarah Price. Cast: Andy Bichlbaum, Mike Bonanno (United Artists, 2004) [http://www.popmatters.com/film/reviews/y/yes-men.shtml (quote, 3.5.2005)] Tulak, Broome, Bennett (2005) “The Evolution of Information Operations at brigade and Below”. Military Review, March-April 2005, pp. 18-23.

“We Are All Subhuman”: Responsibility and Media through Sartre’s Nausea Julia V. Iribarne Ce que j’aime en ma folie, c’est qu’elle m’a protegé du premier jour, contre les séductions de «l’élite»: jamais je ne me suis cru l’heureux propietaire d’un «talent»: ma seule affaire était de me sauver— rien dans les mains, rien dans les poches—par le travail et la foi. Du coup ma pure option ne m’élevait au-dessus de personne: sans équipement, sans outillage je me suis mis tout entier à l’œuvre pour me sauver tout entier. Si je range l’imposible Salut au magasin des accesoires, que reste-t:-il ? Tout un homme, fait de tous les hommes et qui les vaut tous et que vaut n’importe qui.»1 J.-P. Sartre, Les Mots

I. Introduction I begin by clarifying that the title of this exposition, “We are subhuman,”2 recalls words from Sartre, quoted by Benny-Levy, who is one of the few persons that accompanied Sartre during the last years of his life. This sentence is, in my view, the extreme 1 “What I love in my madness, is that it protected me from the very beginning against the seductions of ‘the elite’: I never thought I was the happy owner of a “talent”: my only concern was my own salvation—nothing in my hands, nothing in my pockets—by means of work and faith. My own option did not put me above any other person: without equipment, without instruments I totally devoted myself to the mission of totally saving me. If I keep the impossible Salvation in the closet of accessories, what remains? A real human being, made of all other human beings, whose value is equal to theirs and is that of anyone”. This is the last paragraph of Sartre’s Les Mots, Paris, Gallimard, 1964. The translation is mine. 2 This quotation is taken from un interview Sartre-Benny-Levy au mois de mars 1980. Benny-Levy. “Nous sommes des sous-hommes,” in Le Journal, Édition spéciale Sartre—Supplément au numéro 1932.

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synthesis of Sartre’s inexhaustible effort to clarify his ideas and to open up the authentic way towards a higher human form. There are some points of the background of the issue I intend to deal with that I want to point out from the very beginning: First, I assert my belief in the story of David and Goliath, and this belief impregnates all my exposition. Second, I also believe that the long way humanity has been going leads (or can lead, or should lead) toward a higher degree of humanization, i.e., I believe in the possibility of becoming more and more human. Third, I believe that along the process, human beings, having always suffered new necessities and difficulties, have been led by ideals, i.e., conceiving forms that were better and higher than the circumstantial present forms. In other words, ideals amount to the best meaning of the world “utopia.” Fourth, I believe in the importance of models for the process of becoming a person as well as for improving more mature communities. And last, maybe in the boundary of wishful-thinking, I take for granted that nowadays the mass media are powerful means to help human spiritual growth. I would also like to call your attention the importance of an inevitable first step when one envisages a production essentially addressed to the community; I think that there are two different, prior to any other, position-takings. Explicitly or implicitly we accept that: a) The human being as such is a complete being as soon as he/she is born and, therefore, one can create products that he/she can accept or not and include or not in her/his experience without further consequences. Or that, b) The human being is incomplete, in terms of J.-P. Sartre “we are sub-humans,” so that she/he has a certain way to go in order to complete the being that she/he should be. From this point of view, there is for each one, somehow, a

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superior form, a better form to be pointed to, and it would be the best chance for each one to be able to tend toward such form and strive to accomplish it. For this view, temporality, history, is one of the main traits of human beings. Before Sartre, Husserl held a similar view as well as Hei­ degger, Jaspers, Merleau Ponty, to name but a few phenomenologists or philosophers of existence of the first generation. Also vitalists as Bergson, Dilthey and Ortega and Gasset partook of this conviction. From the starting point, one considers the recipient of the product as being from the very beginning what he/she definitely is; from the second, the recipient is thought of as a being that has its being beyond itself and who does or could do its best to advance in the direction of his definite being. In the first case, the mass media creator is satisfied if in the present moment the product calls her/his attention and promotes her/his acceptance of the message; in the second, one hopes that the product can help widening her/his awareness regarding the value and the meaning of her/his life and that of the community. I choose J.-P. Sartre (without necessarily agreeing with all his singular position-takings) as a good example of a writer that got involved with what he considered the true sense of human life, its traits and its best possibilities. According to this view, he used all the means of communicating with his contemporary and future fellow men to send them his message, to awake them to what, from his point of view, would be the implementation of their best resources to broaden their consciousness and become responsible toward themselves and the community. For our purpose, it really does not matter whether we coincide or not with Sartre’s philosophical, political or anthropological views. It is important to recognize in his work a paradigm of a life devoted to act as conscience awakener. He made use of all the mass media he was able to attain or he regarded as fruitful:

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books (novels, theater), interviews, journals, weekly magazines, such as Les Temps Modernes and Liberation, also TV, film documentary presentations, and so forth. In this opportunity, I restrict myself to Sartre’s novel Nausea1 and to his philosophical work Being and Nothingness,2 i.e., I exclude his phenomenological psychology, his ethical and political issues, his all-embracing criticism and consequent position-takings, his political commitment, as well the work that overflows all categories, his Flaubert. The texts I choose are good example of Sartre’s persistent goal, i.e., to help his fellowmen assume their true condition and to generate responsibility toward one’s own life and that of the community. The plan of this exposition is the following: first, it refers to the most significant moments of Nausea; second, it reconsiders them through the light of Sartre’s phenomenological ontology in Being and Nothingness; third, it reconsiders the responsibility of media on the basis, not of Sartre’s doctrine but of the intention of his work. Still a word concerning the fact that in this exposition we neither take into account nor judge mass media products in the realms of publicity, entertainment, violence, mere information, and so forth. It focuses on products of the realm of values of culture, which can include education as well as information, politics, arts, literature, films; nevertheless, we acknowledge that in some cases it is rather difficult to draw a definite line between those two realms. Nor do we ignore the importance of economic factors and different sorts of pressure emerging from power centers and similar participating factors in the production of mass media, but the discussion of these factors falls out of our present goal. 1 J.P. Sartre, Nausea, translated by Lloyd Alexander, New York, A New Directions Paperbook, 1964. 2 J.P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel E. Barnes, New York/London/ Toronto/Sydney, Washington Square Press, 1984, renewed copyright.

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II. Nausea After this introductory considerations, we begin with Sartre’s first novel, Nausea, (1937) followed by his philosophical work, Being and Nothingness (1943). Six years time separates both publications; certain early intuitions of Nausea are an important part of the stuff of Sartre’s ontological phenomenology. In Nausea, the “story of John and Mary,” as Ortega y Gasset would have put it, is minimal. Antoine Roquentin, a writer, still young, lives in Bouville. He intends to write a book on the Marquis de Rollebon, a politician of the XVIII century. The library of the city has the necessary documentation. We are not told that Roquentin has friends or family. He has been in love with a woman, Anny; they have been separated for five years. He lives in a hotel, the Printania and spends his days in the library, or walking the streets or visiting the café of the railway station, the “Railwaymen’s Rendezvous.” Now and then he has sexual intercourse with Mme. Jeanne, the patrone of the café; there is no emotional involvement from both parts. Occasionally, insignificant characters interact with Roquentin: Madeleine, the waitress, the librarian whom they call the Corsican, the customers of the cafés. A person, named by Roquentin the “Self-Taught Man”1 (“Autodidact”) enjoys talking to him from time to time. The most important incidents are the expulsion of the Self Taught Man from the library and the ephemeral visit to Anny in Paris. The story ends up with Roquentin’s abandoning the reconstruction of the life of Rollebon and his departing to Paris. A minimal plot. The main drama takes place in Roquentin’s consciousness through a certain unavoidable awareness regarding the human condition. 1 The translator of Nausea, Lloyd Alexander, prefers the expression “selftaught man” instead of the word “autodidact” used in the French version.

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One cannot say that Roquentin is a good or a bad person; he is a man under the pressure of a personal crisis. He writes down his bizarre experiences. From the first paragraph we are told that his relation towards things is changing. He forces himself to tell how he sees tables, streets, people, his tobacco package; he realizes that these things have lost their usual meaning. Herewith we reach the core matter of the novel. The good sense of the editors of Gallimard is worth mentioning: they preferred the title Nausea instead of the original one: Melancholy. Nausea points out in advance to the main experience of Roquentin. He tries to recall the alterations in detail and writes down what he experiences. It concerns, for instance, his feeling toward the pebble which he intended to throw it into the water: “the pebble was flat, dry on one side and muddy on the other”; he could not throw it. In an earlier experience he was afraid but he did not know of what he was afraid. He does not believe that he is going mad, although he accepts that maybe he had been enduring a light madness crisis: he is sure that all these changes affect things, i.e. things change; now and then he sees settling himself in the world in the way any “bourgeois” would do; he dares ask himself what can one be afraid of in such a regular world. But in the meantime the reader is concerned by the names of the streets: the Rue des Mutilés (mutilated), the boulevard Victor-Noire, destination of tramway Number 7: Abbatoirs—Grands Bassins (Slaughterhouse-Great Dikes). On Monday 29 Roquentin writes down something that happened to him and that keeps him from continued doubting. This is a step foreword in his awareness process: objects are changing: the Self Taught Man came to greet him, in Roquentin’s hand the hand of the Self Taught Man turned to “a big white worm”. He says: “A crowd of small metamorphoses accumulates in me without my noticing it […].”1 1

Op. cit., p. 5.

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When he was in Indochina he had a first indication concerning these odd changes. While Mercier asked him to accept a labor destination that he had always longed for, he could not say a word, he had the feeling—and this is the third step toward the acquaintance of his full experience—of being “full of lymph or warm milk.”1 Thus, he woke up from a dream that had lasted six years. He says: “What was I doing there? Why was I talking to these people-? Why was I dressed so oddly? My passion was dead”2. Two days later he took a boat for Marseille. There is another step toward weirdness: he is in Bouville and he is afraid, “I’m afraid of what will be born and take possession of me—and drag me—where? […] I would like to see the truth clearly before it is too late.”3 The confirmation of different ways of being arises. He observes the manager of the Café Mably who strolls among the tables and speaks confidently to the customers. He is sure that when that man is lonely he sleeps. There are about twenty customers; they make an inconsistent noise that does not bother Roquentin. He thinks that those persons, in order to exist must consort with others. He says: “I live alone, entirely alone. I never speak to anyone, never; I receive nothing, I give nothing”4. Once, he used to think of Anny, but in the days of Bouville he recalls nobody. “I don’t believe you can ‘take sides’ with solitude,” says Roquentin, and this is an interesting assertion relating to the positive side of intersubjectivity. As a sort of counterbalance of that feeling that creates the prevalent atmosphere of the novel, “normal people” are the back­ground of Roquentin’s odd feelings. He says: “I’m alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree Ibid. Ibid. 3 Op. cit., p. 6. 4 Ibid. 1 2

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with each other. In Heaven’s name, why is it so important to think the same things all together?”1 We can grasp now, through Roquentin’s viewpoint, that there is a gap between two worlds: on the one side, there are those persons that accept the usual state of affairs and live in peace and quiet; on the other, dwells Roquentin. Sartre enjoys describing the promenade of well-known people in Bouville on a Sunday morning: “You must not be in a hurry in the rue Tournebride; the families walk slowly” […] I go forward slowly. I stand a whole head above both columns and I see hats, a sea of hats. Most of them are black and hard. From time to time you see one fly off at the end of an arm and you catch the soft glint of a skull; then, after a few instants of heavy flight, it returns”2. “[…] we are walking in front of six people who hold hand.” He recalls their sayings: ‘Bonjour, Monsieur. Bonjour cher Monsieur, comment allez vous? Do put your hat on again, you’ll catch cold; Thank you, Madame, it isn’t very warm out, is it? My dear, let me present Doctor Lefrançois; Doctor, I’m very glad to make your acquaintance, my husband always speaks of Doctor Lefrançois”; then Roquentin notes: […] The little old man close to me is surely Coffier; one of the women of the group […] is devouring him with her eyes, all the while smiling at the Doctor, she seems to be thinking, ‘There’s Monsieur Coffier, President of the Chambre of Commerce,’ […] But Monsieur Coffier deigns to see nothing: the people are from the Boulevard Maritime, they do not belong to his world.”3 Roquentin says: “Since I have been coming to this street to see the Sunday hat-raising I have learned to distinguish people from the Boulevard and people from the Coteau.” This satire continues through many pages. As we will see, it does not concern a mere satire. Let us go back to Roquentin’s experiences. The usual meaning of objects continues vanishing. The happy moments of his Op. cit., p. 8. Op. cit., p. 43. 3 Op. cit., p. 44. 1 2

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life had sunk in the past. He recalls: “How I loved M. de Rollebon that year!1 […] Was I happy!”2. The recognition of the importance of the project is another important clue. We realize that in those days Roquentin’s interest in his project gave meaning to his life. That is the reverse side of his present situation. He says: “I’m sure that fifteen minutes would be enough to reach extreme self-contempt.”3 And now we reach Roquentin’s extreme experience; it takes place while he is looking at his face in the mirror which is for him “a white hole in the wall”4: “[…] what I see is well below the monkey, on the fringe of the vegetable world, at the level of jellyfish. […] I see a slight tremor, I see the insipid flesh blossoming and palpitating with abandon”5 […] Then the nausea seized me […]6. Suddenly there is a hope; there seems to be a possible way out when Roquentin says: “People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have not friends”7. This text encloses an element that has a preeminent place in human interrelation: the sight; in this case it concerns the sight of the friend. The reader thinks: If Roquentin solves somehow his solitude he will be saved. But the extreme crisis advances: “Things are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea. And this time it is new: it caught me in the café […]. And since that time, the Nausea has not left me, it holds me”. “[…] The bottom of my seat is broken and in order not to slide, I am compelled to press my heels firmly against the ground; it is cold”8. “[…] I have a broken spring: I can move my Op. cit., p. 12. Op. cit., p. 13. 3 Op. cit., p. 14. 4 Op. cit., p. 16. 5 Op. cit., p. 17.. 6 Op. cit., p. 18. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 1 2

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eyes but not my head. The head is all pliable and elastic, as though it has been simply set on my neck. If I turn it, it will fall off,” […] I see a reddish flash covered with hair. It is a hand”1. There is still another astonishing text in which the horror of the lack of usual meaning emerges while seeing the roots of a chestnut. We must skip this astonishing as well as impressive description. Later on, we will try to seize which is the broken spring of the system of self-comprehension that leads to such extreme mode of perception. Time is an important issue. In Being and Nothingness Sartre exhibits time from the point of view of his phenomenology. In the novel time appears in its primal form. It concerns a peculiar relation to time: “to pass the time.” Roquentin tells about a group of customers of the café who are chatting and laughing while they play cards; he says: “I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can’t be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates”2. While he is thinking of time he asks the waitress to let him enjoy his favorite record, Some of These Days. Now we face a second conception of time: Roquentin’s experience brings about a positive element within the series of difficulties. Opposite to “our times,” i.e., the time of human beings, the one of the calendar, there is the time of the duration of the music; nothing can disturb it: “A few seconds more and the Negress will sing. It seems inevitable, so strong is the necessity of this music: nothing can interrupt it, nothing which comes from this time in which the world has fallen; it will stop of itself, as if by order. If I love this beautiful voice it is especially because of that: it is neither for its fullness nor its sadness, rather because it is the event for which so many notes have been preparing, from so far away, dying that it might be born”3. Ibid. Op. cit., p. 20/21. 3 Op. cit., p. 22. 1 2

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Music as accomplished event is the cipher of Roquentin’s hope. In his best moments he used to attend the realization of “adventures”; adventures do not necessarily concern important events, they relate to events that, so as his favorite music, can be foreseen if one takes into account the precedent moments, it happens as a meaningful period of time developed toward a target and ending up in due time. In that case, instants would have “stopped piling themselves in a lighthearted way, one on top of the other.”1 But this is useless fantasy; daily life does not occur in this way, everything happens without reason, without any logic or direction; it does not begin in a visible way, and instead of ending up acts disappear. On Roquentin’s view this unveils the lack of the usual meaning of life. Thus, together with the oppression of the inevitable death seen through our organic, things like being, and through the true character of time, the true character of life appears in all its weight. Just as Roquentin, Anny intended to control time, to control its fugacity. She neither accepted to cut her hair nor to change anything in her countenance; in this way she tried to control the inexorable flowing. Her interest for “perfect moments” was the counterpart of her intention of defeating time. Roquentin says: Anny made the most of time. When she was in Djibouti and I was in Aden, and I used to go and see her for twenty-four hours, she managed to multiply the misunderstandings between us until there were only exactly sixty minutes before I had to leave, sixty minutes, just long enough to make you feel the seconds passing one by one. I remember one of those terrible evenings. I was supposed to leave at midnight. We went to an open-air movie; we were desperate, she as much as I. Only she led the game. At eleven o’clock, at the beginning of the main picture, she took my hand and held it in hers without a word. I was flooded with a bitter joy and I understood, without having to look at my watch, that it was eleven o’clock. From 1

Op. cit., p. 40.

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that time on we began to feel the minutes passing. That time we were leaving each other for three month. At one moment they threw a completely blanc image on the screen, the darkness lifted, and I saw Anny was crying. Then, at midnight, she let go off my hand, after pressing it violently; I got up and left without saying a word to her. That was a good job.1

When after a five-year separation he receives a letter from Anny, he thinks of her with the hope that at least she had overcome time: “Anny hasn’t changed her letter paper, I wonder if she still buys it at the little stationer’s in Piccadilly. I think that she has also kept her coiffure, her heavy blond locks she didn’t want to cut. She must struggle patiently in front of mirrors to save her face: it isn’t vanity or fear of growing old; she wants to stay as she is, just as she is. Perhaps this is what I liked best in her, this austere loyalty to her most insignificant features.”2 Roquentin’s stance concerning the past is clear: “The past is a landlord luxus. Where shall I keep mine? You don’t put your past in your pocket; you have to have a house. I have only my body: a man entirely alone, with his lonely body, cannot indulge in memories; they pass through him. I shouldn’t complain: all I wanted was to be free.”3 Thus, we are lead to freedom that is another core issue in Sartre’s ontology. There is a bond between the lack of past, or rather the lack of a relation of identification with the past, and the possibility of being free. The identification with one’s own past is an attitude similar to the identification with the role: these attitudes ban freedom. Doctor Rogé is an example of a certain attachment to the past. He mistreats Achilles, he despises him. On Roquentin’s opinion the relation of Doctor Rogé to his past is the prototype of those who do not want to assume risks: “There’s a lucky man; […] He Op. cit., p. 57. Op. cit., p. 60. 3 Op. cit., p. 65. 1 2

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deserves his face for he has never, for an instant, lost an occasion of utilizing his past to the best of his ability: he has stuffed it full, used his experience on women and children, exploited them.” But Roquentin has his own convictions regarding those who act this way, and he says: “And then, around forty, they christen their small obstinacies and a few proverbs with the name of experience, they begin to simulate slot machines: put a coin in the left hand slot and you get tales wrapped in silver paper, put a coin in the slot on the right and you get precious bits of advice that stick to your teeth like caramels”1. “[…] They would like to make us believe that their past is not lost, that their memories are condensed, gently transformed into Wisdom”.2 Roquentin likes Achilles, who, in turn, admires Doctor Rogé who “has experience.” Roquentin likes Achilles because he is as alone as he himself is. Every body thinks that he is “a crazy old loon,” “[…] he is afraid. What is he afraid of? […] Perhaps M. Achilles conscience is not easy.”3 M. Achilles is afraid because he somehow knows that “when you want to understand something you stand in front of it, alone, without help: all the past in the world is of no use.”4 Doctor Rogé has finished his calvados, his eyelids droop heavily. Without eyes, the face looks like a cardboard mask. All of a sudden Roquentin grasps the truth: “[…] this man is going to die soon. He surely knows he needs only look in the glass; each day he looks a little more like the corpse he will become. That’s what their experience leads to, that’s why I tell myself so often that they smell of death”5. The doctor would like to hide out the stark reality. On the contrary, Roquentin would like to tell everybody the truth that the doctor would like to ignore. Awareness concerning what one tries not to know means for Sartre assuming the very being of man. Op. cit., p. 68. Ibid. 3 Op. cit., p. 69 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 1 2

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As we have seen through several instances of the novel, for Roquentin things are losing their meaning and their order. Thick fog had been for him a similar experience. Once he was caught therein and real panic took hold of him. He felt that anything could happen,1 order disappears and chaos takes its place. We go back to the question of the meaning of life and that of existence. Roquentin does not like any more the traits of character of Rollebon. He recalls: “The great Rollebon’s affair was over, like a great passion. I must find something else. […] M. de Rollebon was my partner; he needed me in order to exist and I needed him so as not to feel my existence. I furnished the raw material, the material I had to re-sell, which I didn’t know what to do with: existence, my existence”2. Farther on he intends to clarify his idea of “existence”: “It (the thing) is nothing: I am the Thing. Existence, liberated, detached floods over me. I exist,”3 “[…] existence is an imperfection”4. In Nausea, Sartre calls existence what in Being and Nothingness he calls “being.” There is a long (and almost unbearable) text in Nausea that helps us understanding the assertion “The thing is me.” This sentence is the synthesis of Roquentin’s odd experiences and refers to the traits of one’s own body when the veil of rationality disappears. He says: “My body of living flesh which murmurs and turns gently, liquors that turn to cream, the flesh which turns, turns, turns, the sweet sugary water of my flesh, the blood on my hand […],”5 and so forth. In a dialogue with Roquentin, the Self Taught Man manifests himself as a person full of convictions that he considers definite and undisputable. Of course, Roquentin does not like such an attitude. In an interview, Sartre said that the hate he felt for humanism was related to a certain form of humanism through Op. cit., p. 75. Op. cit., p. 98. 3 Ibid. 4 Op. cit., p. 101. 5 Op. cit., p. 101/102. 1 2

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which the person tends to admire him/herself, and that it was precisely that attitude that he had pointed to when he invented the character of the Self Taught Man. Roquentin says—and I think that in these words it is possible to unveil Sartre’s intention of being a conscience-awakener—: “They are comfortable, they look with assurance at the yellow walls, the people, and they find the world pleasant as it is, just as it is, and each one of them, temporarily, draws life from the life of the other.”1 This attitude illustrates an aspect of Sartre’s assertion that “We are sub-human”. Roquentin hates such an attitude; he says: “And if I knew how to convince people I’d go and sit down next to that handsome white-haired gentleman and explain to him just what existence means. I burst out laughing at the thought of the face he would make. […] I’d like to stop but I can’t; I laugh until I cry.2 Later on he says: “[…] my place is nowhere; I am unwanted”3; and in the context of the description of the chestnut roots he clarifies even more his partial conclusion by saying: “And without formulating anything clearly, I understood that I had found the key to Existence, the key to my Nausea, to my own life. In fact, all that I could grasp beyond that returns to this fundamental absurdity.”4 After having been separated for five years, the rendezvous with Anny takes place: “[…] she has the morose face which made her look like an awkward adolescent girl. But she doesn’t look like a little girl anymore. She is fat; her breasts are heavy.”5 Anny has been defeated, she does not try to detain time anymore; she admits: “Well, you can believe: there are no more [perfect moments],”6 she is pleased because she believes that Roquentin continues being the same, “I need you to exist and Op. cit., p. 107. Ibid. 3 Op. cit., p. 122. 4 Op. cit., p. 129. 5 Op. cit., p. 135. 6 Op. cit., p. 143. 1 2

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not to change.”1 She used to love him passionately, but in her new life there is no room for him. They both know: there are no “adventures,” there are no “perfect moments.” Roquentin does not hide his astonishment at the life he had received, a life without aims. They recall their past; they know they loved each other. He would like to stay, to spend the night with her, but she asks him to leave. From that moment on, not having any project that requires his presence in Bouville, Roquentin decides to go back to Paris and thereby one of the poles of his view become clear. He feels as though he were empty, there is no justification for his life: “I’m alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death.”2 And, at the end, he recalls: “And I, too, wanted to be. That is all I wanted; this is the last word”3. While he waits for the train that will take him to Paris, Madeleine, the waitress, asks him whether he wanted to hear his favorite record; out of politeness, Roquentin accepts. Then, the music, once more, frees the way towards hope and the second pole of his view appears. While hearing the music he realizes: “[…] so two of them are saved: the Jew and the Negress”. He asks (and this is the main question): “[…] Can you justify your existence then?”. “[…] I feel something brush against me lightly and I dare not move. I’m afraid it will go away. Something I didn’t know: a sort of joy.”4 Couldn’t he, Roquentin, try to achieve something different? His mistake had been his purpose to revive M. de Rollebon. It should be something different, in another medium. “Another type of book, […] you should have to guess, behind the printed words, behind the pages, at something that would not exist, which would be above existence. A story, for example, something that could never happen; Op. cit., p. 137. Op. cit., p. 157. 3 Op. cit., p. 175. 4 Op. cit., p. 177. 1 2

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an adventure. It would have to be beautiful and hard as steel, and make people ashamed of their existence.”1 Having found his way out, he might accomplish what he has been longing for throughout the story: he wants people to know they “exist,” so that they can reach their own salvation. III. The Ontological View of Being and Nothingness The main points of Nausea can be clarified by means of Sartre’s ontology. In turn, Sartre’s ontology can be read as a philosophical anthropology. In my view, a philosophical anthropology always implies an ethics. This position is strengthened by Francis Jeanson2, who concluded that ethics was the last meaning of Being and Nothingness. In the Preface to Jeanson’s work Sartre says: “In as much as, in fact, the existing-being (l’existant) is in my view a being “that must exist his being,” it is obvious that ontology cannot be separated from ethics, […].”3 In Sartre’s ontological analysis the conscience assumption of its lack of a definite being leads to the best possibilities of an authentic human life. In order to clarify this position, we take into account, in the first place, the differentiation between being and not being as modes of being, i.e. the differentiation between the “in-itself ” and the “for-itself ”. The “for-itself,” which is another name for consciousness, relates also to other concepts that allude to conscience traits: “transcendence,” “existence,” “freedom,” “nothingness”. Second, but inseparable from the first issue, the description of the peculiar temporality of the “for-itself ” must be taken into account. The third topic deals with the “bad faith” related to the facticity of being “nothingness.” Op. cit., p. 178. Jeanson, Francis, Le problème moral et la pensée de Sartre, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1965. 3 Op.cit., p. 12. 1 2

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First, we begin by recalling Sartre’s differentiation of two modes of being: he calls “for-itself” the mode of being of conscience; he calls “in-itself” the mode of being of things. The “in-itself-for-itself” that designates a useless aspiration of the “for-itself” is also worth mentioning. The “for-itself ” alludes to a certain relationship to the world: it denies being the world, it goes beyond the world, it transcends the world: the “for-itself ” is transcendence. It transcends the world toward its own possibilities. Things, i.e. the “in-itself,” appear more or less distant from me, oriented toward me, to my place. The “for-itself ” is an embodied being that centers the world in itself. Sartre highlights: it is necessary that the “for-itself ” be “there,” but it is contingent that it be. The contingency of the “for-itself ” relates to its facticity. It shows the fundamental layer of the body-for-itself, the body such as it is concretely experienced. I cannot be an object because I exist as “transcendence”; in other words, we can assert that the intentionality proper to consciousness cannot be an object. In this same sense, it is also impossible to relate to one’s own lived body as an object, the body belongs to the structures of non-thetic self-consciousness. What is broken in Roquentin’s experience of things loosing their identity is the primarily lived structure. Nevertheless, I am a part of the world by means of my body and the world appears to me like an organization referred to my location, referred to my being embodied “here.” The “for-itself ” is an embodied conscience that is the unavoidable center of the relationship I-world; I am with “my” body in the midst of the world: “the table is in front of me”. A certain order is necessary, but it is contingent that the order be this. Precisely this order is the “for-itself ” as embodied; it is the body in its being for-itself. Sartre enjoys exposing his thought by means of paradoxical assertions; he says, for instance, that the body can be defined as the contingent form that embraces the necessity of my contingency.

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The body-for-itself cannot be an object of knowledge inasmuch as it is disregarded. The body is the exteriority of the “foritself,” it allows its individualization. I do not know a function by seeing it; its efficiency is manifest while being at work, it is disregarded and not apprehended. The first announcement of Roquentin having lost his capacity of disregarding his body while grasping it as organic matter takes place, for instance, when he felt himself full of “lymph or warm milk.” Roquentin’s intention of being aware and of understanding the unexpected nausea that is altering his life, is conceived by Sartre as the attitude proper to the human being; it concerns the acceptance of the risk of understanding the sense of existence. He says “before it is too late”: On the one side, the meaning of this expression can be “before I die”; on the other, it concerns the alternative whether understanding or losing one’s own life; in the second case one lives immersed in “bad faith.” We said that the core of Sartre’s ontology was the contrast between being, i.e. things, and nothingness, i.e. consciousness. The “in-itself” alludes to raw being, the thing, all that do not change, what is full, solid, what coincides with itself. It is precisely the meaning of the “in-itself ” that Roquentin misses when things lose their consistency. The “in-itself ” appears superfluous, neither has a reason to be nor relation with any other being. It merely is. Inasmuch as the “in-itself ” is solid it does not change by its own means; thus, it is clear that in opposition to the “for-itself,” it is the “in-itself ” what has a definite sense, a sense that is given by the “for-itself ”. On the contrary, conscience is nothingness: it flows, it varies, it is fragile; it differs from morning to evening, it changes and is the source of its changes. The “for-itself ” is capricious, it does not coincide with itself and precisely, inasmuch as it has not a being it is nothingness. Sartre names conscience “foritself ” because while it exists it is aware of its existence. The whole Being and Nothingness is based on the differentiation between the “for-itself ” and the “in-itself ”; between free

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consciousness, on the one side, and not-free-things, on the other. Usually, the ambiguity of language leads to the use of a single designation to refer to different modes of being; I say “I exist” and I also say “the mountain exists.” The proper to the human mode of existence is what Sartre names “nothingness” and it is precisely this mode of being what founds our being humans. In my awareness of the world this nothingness is always at work: it constitutes the meaning of the world. While the “for-itself ” is alive it produces “nothingness” in the form of a distance from things, in the form of denying being the thing. Its self-awareness prevents it from being consistent with itself; conscience is aware of its own inner emptiness; its nothingness disappears together with life. The dead human has carried out all his/her possibilities, it turns into an “in-itself ” that is definite and irreversible. The fragments of Nausea that we quoted, the multiplicity of impressions, feelings, observations, manifests the phenomenon of a living conscience that testifies for itself and for the world, it flows, it changes; nothing but the testimonial flow persists. The being aware of not having a definite being is hard to bear. The paramount hope of the “for-itself ” is to achieve “being in-itself-for-itself,” to have full meaning, to have an essence, to be something, and at the same time to know about it and to be free. But the phrase “being-in-itself-for-itself ” that fits the definition of God, does not fit consciousness; thus, the paramount hope of the “for-itself ” is doomed to failure. This is why Sartre says: “We are a useless passion”. The only possible way out has been discovered by Hegel, i.e., the relation between Master and Slave, which is, according to Being and Nothingness, the definite meaning of human relations. The other conscience is solely capable of seeing me as an “in-itself ” (my countenance, my body) as well of acknowledging my freedom, i.e., as a “for-itself ”: I need his/her testimony. But such as it is described in Being and Nothingness, and as is shown in Nausea, love, which should entail the

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best possibility and that most probably during a certain period, succeeds in its purpose, inevitably, later on, vanishes or becomes a fight between transcendences in which each one tries to overcome the other in order to secure recognition. However, in this point, the novel includes a way out, a hope. Roquentin says: “People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends.” This assertion concerns the creative sight, the one that helps us carrying out the best of ourselves. Although the successful relationship among consciences is not the thesis of Being and Nothingness, the concern and the responsibility for others is a possibility pointed out in Nausea that has been carried out by Sartre all along his public life. The negative side of the relation is synthesized by Sartre’s famous assertion: “The others are hell.” The constitutive capacity of consciousness is the instrument that each one uses in order to address the other person, to control him/her, to possess him/her not recognizing his/her being free and reflecting nothing but the other’s facticity, identifying him/her with his past and/or with his body. In Being and Nothingness, the type of sight that Sartre describes is alien to any nuance of love or compassion; this is why he says “Thus being-seen constitutes me as a defenseless being for a freedom which is not my freedom. It is in this sense that we can consider ourselves as ‘slaves’ in so far as we appear to the Other.”1 The other is the Gorgon: he/she looks at me and I turn to stone. In relation with this point of view, it is interesting to recall that in Nausea Sartre has taken into account the importance of the sight of the friend. Actually, Sartre’s life is much more in accordance with this second view than with that of Being and Nothingness. The word “transcendence” alludes to the temporal being of conscience which lacks consistency with itself inasmuch as it permanently exceeds its flowing present to hold its past and, simultaneously, it aims at the future in which it tries to accomplish his 1

J.P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p.358.

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project. The past of the conscience (the “for-itself ”) is one of the modes of its facticity, the past is; the “for-itself ” holds its past from its present as having been that past. Sartre says: “I radically transcend my past toward the future to the same extent that I ‘was it’.”1 “I am not my past because I was it. The malice of others always surprises me and makes me indignant. How can they hate in the person who I am now the person who I was?”2. The true interest, the solidarity of the “for-itself,” concerns its future which is not yet. The conscience denies being what it was in the past, and its interest is focused on the future. This is why Sartre says that the “for-itself ” is not what is, (i.e. the past) and it is what is not (i.e. the future). “The ‘for-itself ’ is a being that has to be its own nothingness”3. Temporalizing is the conscience’s mode of being, it alludes to its being a present that immediately turns into past while another present flows from what up to that “instant” was a presentto-come. It is the mode of a flowing being. This lack of being is hard to bear and nothingness permanently intends to fulfill itself. The discomfort, the uneasiness emerging from the flowing character of existence, from the experience of being a stream that only stops in the moment of death, all this is what Roquentin intends to evade through expectations of “adventures.” “Adventures” would be events that could be foreseen before their beginning, because they would be preceded by an unmistakable announcement, and they would continue until reaching an end that completes them. Roquentin intends to control time; but his expectations of adventures are as vain as Anny’s concern for perfect moments, and as vain as her decision of preventing her physical changes. Up to certain moment, Roquentin affirms the absurdity of life on the basis of those inevitable failures. Projects become Op. cit., p. 208. Op. cit., p. 170. 3 Op.cit., p. 215. 1 2

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worthless as soon as they are accomplished; we are contingent; nothing has sense. Only an embodied conscience that accepts tearing the veil of rationalization can experience the nausea that Roquentin suffered. According to Sartre, if one tears that veil one inevitably faces the primal matter of the body (the same body that is usually transcended), the primal power of life that manifests itself in a way comparable to those temples in India that lose their meaning under an ungovernable and ungoverned vegetal proliferation. Nausea is the expression of such unveiling. In the novel there is an overwhelming example in the description of the chestnut root, of its magnificence, and its growth that is as absurd as absurd can be, as well as that of Roquentin’s face in the mirror grasped as organic matter. IV. “Bad faith” versus Responsibility Summarizing: The difficulty of accepting the lack of being, the lack of a complete being that one searches by means of acting, manifests the useless hope of reaching one’s own essence, the hope of being something instead of accepting that throughout life such fulfillment is impossible, that it will be reached only in the moment of death when all possibilities are over. While eluding the acceptance of such lack, the “for-itself” acts in a way called by Sartre “bad faith,” which is worst than mere lies; because while lying we are aware that we are not telling the truth; acting with “bad faith” we lie to ourselves, and that is serious. “Bad faith” takes different forms. In Nausea it is shown in the behavior of the people on Sundays in Bouville. The description runs through many pages from which we could quote only some expressions that show the assumption of social roles as though they were the definite essence of the person: “I am the doctor,” “I am the major,” “I am the chief manager.” The rest of the people also prefers not to see their nothingness, accepts self-deception and acts according to the corresponding rules.

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We have already stressed that when in Nausea Sartre says “The thing is nothing: I am the thing” it concerns an obscure expression clarified in Being and Nothingness where it reads: “the thing is, I am not” (which means “I have no being”). However the first expression can be accepted if we take it in a strict sense: actually, the thing cannot be nothingness because it has a definite being, a being that does not change. The second assertion: “I am the thing” manifests a bad faith that denies my being nothingness and the consequent responsibility for the way I continually construct my being. Instead of assuming such responsibility I blame fate, I delay projects, I identify myself with my past. When Roquentin says “I know, I do not show it but I know that I exist and that they exist,” “existing” alludes to not having a being, to continually look for it while persistently transcending the present toward future projects with the vain hope of being able to fulfill one’s being. On the one hand, this incompleteness of the “for-itself ” does not mean that it would actually prefer the consistency of the “initself ” (the thing); conscience does not want to have the solidity and the opacity of things; its being vulnerable is another name for its freedom and freedom is the source of its responsibility for the being one gradually achieves through permanent choices. On the other hand, such vulnerable “for-itself ” is nothing but the source of meaning. Somewhere in Being and Nothingness says Sartre: “It is by means of the “for-itself ” that meaning comes to the world”. Without the order produced by meaning the world would turn to a chaos, such as it has been alluded to through the nausea as well as through the disappearing of the world in the thick fog where Roquentin loses his way. Thus, we have reached the core of the awareness that Sartre claims for all human beings: it is necessary to assume the astonishing capacity of the human being to produce sense. It is this revelation that leads in Nausea to an, although provisional, “happy end.” Roquentin knows that he was happy while he

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pointed passionately to the project of discovering the true personality of the Marquis de Rollebon. The theme of a meaningful life relates to passionately hold a meaningful project. He realizes that the author of his favorite song and the Negress that sings it have been saved. Therein he sees his own chance of salvation. In that moment, he is able to think of writing “another type of book.” He should write about “[…] something that would not exist, which would be above existence. A story, for example, something that could never happen, an adventure. It would have to be beautiful and hard as steel […]“.1 In the place of provisional conclusion, we think that it is up to each one of us to decide, inasmuch as our product addresses the public, whether we will be satisfied with goals such as entertainment, mere information, and so forth, or if we will hold a more complex, engaged with higher aspirations project. In my view, the person who is aware of the meaning of our being “sub-humans” should consequently assume the risk of working on higher targets. One should intend to produce a message that would work as a conscience awakener, in order to elude new forms of “opium of the people.” I mean, it is not necessary to write the Critic of Pure Reason. It might be enough if, within the realm of one’s own possibilities, one would work in favor of a plus of humanization The end of this exposition opens up a manifold realm. For the present time we would be satisfied if through what has been said the assertions mentioned at the beginning appear to be possible: 1. David will once more kill Goliath if the tread to evasion, to triviality and to public manipulation would diminish. 2. So, as once slavery was banned from human relations, and little by little the indisputability of human rights became a fact, a new conception of duties towards the “less favored” (in a broad sense) will transform mass media products. 1

J.P. Sartre, Nausea, p. 178.

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3. The passage from slavery to the banning of slavery has been guided by the idea of freedom; the development of human rights has been always directed by the idea of universal human dignity. I am aware that our times do not offer the best background to think about utopia. Now and then one has the feeling of living in the verge of a immense disaster. Once Borges said: “His fate, as that of all human beings, obliged him to endure bad times.” Nevertheless, I insist: utopia has always inspired and promoted the best practical means to change bad state of affaires. 4. A life like that of Sartre, dedicated to awaken consciousness in relation to our sub-human condition as well as to the responsibility for one’s own being and for the being of the community, is a successful model insofar as he continues to be recognized as an excellent partner for different areas of reflection, stance-taking and critical efforts. 5. The last point I mentioned, the fact that I take for granted that nowadays the mass media are powerful means to help human spiritual growth, although it is not a universally accepted assertion and although not having been mainly used with such purpose, leads me to the hope that an experience performed in this sense will expand little by little. Hereby we go back to the story of David and Goliath; the first step to help David is to evaluate Sartre’s denunciation: “we are sub-humans” in all its weight and to take charge of our personal responsibility as regards a more human future.

Technological Texture: A Phenomenological Look at the Experience of Editing Visual Media on a Computer Stacey O’Neal Irwin Editing gave me a sanctuary where I could look, think, and make decisions based on my love of music, story, narrative, literature, all culminated in the cutting room. Carol Littleton, Film Editor of E.T., The Accidental Tourist, Body Heat . . . those of us who live in the industrially developed parts of the Northern Hemisphere live and move and have our beings in the midst of our technologies. We might even say that our existence is technologically textured. Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld

Technological Texturing How do we relate with and to technology and do we feel safe in the knowledge that we are “dependent” on technology? What does it mean to have our “beings in the midst of our technologies (Ihde1990, 2)?” What does it mean to be technologically textured through the use of digital technology? How does the technology help a film or video editor look, think and make decisions in the cutting room, the place where they edit the raw material into a visual media program? This essay is written from the perspective of the technology user who has turned to philosophy as a way to heighten understanding and inform experience. As a teacher of technology and a student of phenomenology, I create media and have turned to phenomenology to reveal my understanding of the technology my Being is in the midst of. The noun texture comes from the Latin root word textura or texera, meaning weave. A texture is something comprised of

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interwoven or intertwined threads or strands which make up fabric but it can also mean the surface structure of the work of art itself. The participle textured means to be woven. How is it for a video editor to pull the strands of the moving visual image together and weave it texturally through the use of the computer editing technology called the “nonlinear editing computer?” What is it like to view through a window called the monitor, to create in an environment mediated by a computer? Threading the Texture What can be said about the juncture of relatedness between the person and the computer as the person edits visual media images on the nonlinear editing computer? The word juncture can be described as a joint between two things. The word joint, however, could mean a joining or dividing at the joint. What is both joining and dividing in the relationship between the editor and the computer editing machine, artist and tool, human and technology, user and instrument? How are we users of the technology? What exactly is the technology being used for? Does “use” imply exploitation or the utilization of the thing itself to keep it in its essential nature and safe in its present-ness (Levin 1985)? Are we “in” the computer, “on” the computer or are we altogether separate from this tool? Can we be both? The tension in this relationship to technology and to the world arises when the technological tool becomes an “ex-tension” of the body. To be extended means to stretch forth or lengthen the body. How do we feel tension differently when we are extended beyond the comfort of our natural selves? How we handle the keyboard and how we interface with the software is based on the essential nature of the nonlinear editing computer as a technology. What is the essential nature of this computer technology and what is unnatural about relating to, through, and with it? My time with the nonlinear editing

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computer is sheer joy one moment as I move from bin to time line, gathering in transitions and beats that mesh with audio nuances and rhythms, and other times, sheer hell, when the computer crashes, I can’t find my media, and I don’t understand how to fix it. The technology in our lives provides a texture, a context for understanding, and a way of relating. Looking under the covers of this technologically textured world provides focus on the threads of the texture to further examine the relationship between the creator of the media and his or her tool, the nonlinear editing computer. A Heideggerian Hold Philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote much about technology, both early on in Being and Time (1927) and later in The Question Concerning Technology (1977). In these works, Heidegger questions technology in a way that reveals problems of relating to technology. Heidegger says that the best way to reveal the essence of technology is through questioning concerning technology (Heidegger 3). What then, can we question, about the nonlinear editing computer? His viewpoint takes its departure from the artisan idea of instrumentality, which comes from anthropological perspective (Borgmann 1984, 10). Heidegger’s notion is that this sort of relatedness, very simply as a toolmaker and a tool user, thwarts humanity’s ability to live life to its full potentiality. He seems to think that by merely approaching technology instrumentally, we are hiding an opening which is required for us to be present in Dasein, “that entity or aspect of our humanness which is capable of wondering about its own existence and inquiring into its own Being” (Heidegger in van Manen 1990, 176). The instrumental relationship to technology would affect the realization of Dasein and threaten our potentiality-forBeing because we are no longer wondering about our own being, because we are seeing the world based solely on the basis of

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technology’s abilities to produce something for us. How should we change the way we edit based on this notion of the nonlinear editor’s technological capabilities? How have the new “bells and whistles” of digital editing technologies changed the way we think about editing and how we can create the material object called the edited video program? How do we approach the editing computer, if not instrumentally? For Heidegger, technology is ontologically prior to science. This is an important point because it is contrary to the standard view of technology as it is situated historically. This ontological priority lends itself to the idea that we first and foremost, as humans, always see the technological output as standing-reserve and the technology itself as a resource, ready to create, ready always to be a tool or instrument for our use (Ihde 1984). What happens to my ability to fully Be when my literal body and the technology disappear and I enter into the (technologically mediated) creative process? I am editing in a specific context that involves the material creation of some thing in a bodily way. But, my body seems to be transparent because I don’t attend to my handling of the computer itself but focus on the visual field that seems to lie beyond the monitor that is before me. This disappearance or absorption also occurs when I am writing a paper on my PC. It seems as if the more a technology is “transparent” to me, as a barely noticed background effect, the more this perceptual “withdrawal” of the technology occurs, so that the results of human action that is embodied in it stand out (51). When technology like the nonlinear editing computer is humming along working well and functioning the way it should, it is barely there. It seems odd that I could feel that the technology is barely there even though I am staring through a monitor and using a mouse and keyboard to do my work. What does the transparency of the technology mean ontologically for my inter-relatedness to it?

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A Joining and Dividing Experience I admit that I crave perfectly transparent editing equipment that works fast, never breaks down and always does my bidding quicker than I can be ready to do the next thing. It takes about three minutes to boot up the Media 100 nonlinear editing software from the operating system of my Macintosh computer and even this takes too long for me at times. This temptation to wish for transparency and immediacy can lead me to forget certain essential features of the technological process (51) as I focus on the creation of a material object, the video program. What would technological invisibility mean? What does it mean to wish for the technological to exhibit untechnological characteristics so I do not notice it at all? How might my creativity be different as I relate to a technology that moves in and out of transparency as I use it? At once, the technology is taken for granted and becomes functionally invisible (Ihde,1993) as I delve into my work at hand. By wishing it invisible, I crave technology that I can forget about and that changes the essential nature of who I am in my humanity. Heidegger might suggest that the human/technology exchange, the communication between the self and the technology, also becomes invisible when the technology becomes transparent. In what fundamental ways have we, as humans, changed because technology is invisible to us? Is there a uniqueness in this exchange that is covered over? Why is this cause for reflection? Heidegger thinks that we are closing a relational space that cuts us off from important aspects of our human-ness. According to Heidegger, “We shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technology, put up with it, or evade it” or “regard technology as neutral because then we are given over to it in the worst possible way which makes us unable to see the essence of technology.” (Heidegger 1977, 4) The definition of technology can be separated out into two distinctions according

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to Heidegger; the instrumentality of the technology, as “a means to an end” (5) and as a “human activity to posit ends and procure and utilize means” (4). And it seems important to wonder, “if humans always interpret the world and themselves in some dominant way, how do they do this in the midst of technology”(Ihde 1984,11)? Along with Heidegger, Don Ihde, in his text, Technology and the Lifeworld, adds to the conversation about our relatedness to technology and the tension of transparency of technology in society. Does my yearning for transparency as I create videos on the nonlinear editing computer mean that I wish to become the technology like the Borg from Star Trek? Am I on my way to becoming part of a collective self entwined in a transparent way with the technology? How far will the wish for transparency take us as a world society? I think this is the concern for Heidegger. Don Ihde views this concern a bit differently, in an attempt to reframe Heidegger’s deep seated concerns. He rejects some of Heidegger’s fatalistic notions about technology, in favor of a heightened awareness of technology and concern that we care “for our technologically textured world (1993, 163).” My care for the world of editing takes place in my thinking about technology and how I experience it existentially. My relating to technology begins to be revealed as I trace and interpret the process of creating through using the nonlinear editing computer called the Media 100. Both Heidegger and Ihde bring in to focus the complexities of technology and our relatedness to it as I explore this process further. Heidegger is helpful in interpreting philosophic ideas about technology because he peels back the layers of two distinctions to reveal the true and correct definition about what technology instrumentally and fundamentally is at its core. This is, however, not the same thing as the essence of technology, which is the true meaning of technology and our relatedness to it. For this we need to understand more than the mastery of a specific technology or

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how it can act as a means to an end for us. Heidegger suggests that we begin to think about technology in a way that is not based on what technology can do for us. The exclusively instrumental view of technology operates on the basis of our manipulative need to “make” some material “thing” using technology and this focus hides other ways of “being with” technology. Heidegger calls this “the will to master”(1977, 5). For example; when I am editing a video together, I use the editing computer to attain some material goal or product like a commercial or a television show or a public service announcement. Heidegger seems to think that our single minded pursuit of the technology “in order to make something,” cuts off any relatedness we have with the technology as the “other” within our lifeworld. This cuts off our ability to understand the true essence of technology. Our relatedness is lost because we are intent on mastering the technology in a way that is not relating, but dominating. As the editor creates the visual program, he or she sometimes finds the nonlinear editing computer faulty in some way. The hardware settings might not be set right or the media might not have been digitized at the appropriate compression rate. The editor’s need to “control” or “master” the technology in order to create the material object and this “mind set” or “way of being” threatens the editor’s ability to fully Be in the lifeworld. This way of being cancels out any ability to relate to this Other. This relationship based on commerce and consumability with an end result always to create an object stems from the idea of “causality,” which means that wherever ends are pursued and means are employed, wherever instrumentality reigns, there will be problems of relatedness between the technology and the user of that technology (6). And for the video editor there are always problems to solve when using the nonlinear editing computer just like with any other computer technology. Sometimes error menus occur and the software needs to be rebooted. Sometimes the screen freezes and all of the work completed after the last

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“save” has been lost. Other times the video footage is missing because the computer stored it in a different place. The high learning curve to use the technology also reveals that human error interrupts the computer’s ability to work properly. When there is a breakdown the technology leaves the place of transparency to become the Other, objectified. Ihde suggests that this breakdown is a disruption of flow (1993, 40) that changes our relatedness with the technology in a negative way. Altering Perceptions Through Technology When I look at a theatrical scene occurring before me, the perception is from my eyes to the objects in front of me playing out the scene. I am seeing as a direct perceptual activity. When I shoot video footage I am seeing through the camera to the action. When I edit I am viewing the raw footage that I have digitized into the computer through the monitor screen. There is a change of time and space, a change of intentionality to my viewing (Ihde, 1990). I see through and beyond the video camera and its lens and through and beyond the glass of the computer monitor to see the visual work before me. I can change this world by manipulating the visual image in many ways. I can cut out parts, make the color turn to black and white, make the colors more saturated or reverse the colors or make the video grainy. Now, I am seeing from a different vantage point and perceptual awareness than I was seeing before. Every mediated seeing of an event or object through the technology first, whether it is seeing through a camera or a computer screen or a window, becomes a changed view because the technology has mediated the seeing. This perceptual and embodied transformation through the technological instrumentation creates an altered relationship of embodied vision (56). “And for every revealing transformation there is a simultaneous concealing transformation of the world, which is given through

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a technological mediation which is no longer non-neutral because technology transforms experience and we embody the technology into our own environments” (49). Ihde might suggest that we are interpreting our world in a technologically cultured way and that the human cannot be separated from the technological. The culture then, can determine meaning for the technologically mediated video program. “Technology cannot be understood as an independent power that holds culture in its grip [...] it becomes what it is only in the context of culture (Achterhuis, 2001, 135) What is Lost in the Digital Translation? The artifact called the raw video footage, now inside the nonlinear editing computer, is far from its natural state. Raw materials made the plastic which was coated with electromagnetic emulsion that can capture the analog pulses from recording on the video camera as an image. This has then been digitized into the computer. The digital image shows up as a clip in a bin on the desktop. The use context has undergone so many transformations from its natural state that it can be considered, in Ihde’s term, a technofact (70). Another way of explaining this translation process is through the label double translation, which is a hermeneutic process, a perceptual process or translation of the visual images (92-93). The technofact now shifts to the background and technology moves to the foreground and enters a second spatial, perceptual, and temporal mediation through still more technological instrumentation within the digital realm. Two relationships are revealed when we uncover the technology of the nonlinear editor occurs. Sometimes this tool/user relationship can come into being when an editor sees the nonlinear editing computer in an embodied sense as an extension of the body’s eyes, ears, hands, brain and heart. This would be considered an (I computer)-world of embodiment. This

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embodied experience is one where the editor is involved in an existential relation to the world, or the way I, as a body, interact with my environment by using technology (72). Other times the focus can shift and the editor feels separate from the computer in its world. This is an I-(computer-world) relationship in the hermeneutic sense. The hermeneutic relationship, a textual interpretation within the technological context, is a way to make the technological world present (80). This quasi-otherness of her­ mene­utics versus the quasi-autonomy of embodiment, creates a tension for the editor and the nonlinear editing computer in the same joining and dividing way that the word processor creates tension for its user. This human-technology competition or tension is neither an embodied nor a hermeneutic relationship. Ihde names this tension an alterity relation, a quasi-otherness within the limits of linguistics and logical behavior, which can be explained as an I-computer-(-world) relationship (107). Technology as Other As has been stated, there are many tensions when the film or video editor enters into a relationship with the nonlinear editing computer. Whatever is in the foreground is that with which I momentarily engage. Sometimes I am engaged with the technofact and sometimes I am engaged with the technology. In this place, perception and interpretation are intertwined in a way that the video editor can experience editing through the nonlinear editing computer but also relate to the nonlinear editing computer and at the same time still be aware of the keyboard and the software desktop and symbols in a hermeneutic way. This is where the quasi other reveals itself in the notion of alterity relations, or relations where, since it can never truly be other because it is not human, the technology can act like the Other (Achterhuis, 131). This alterity relationship is an Othering one between the editor and the nonlinear editing computer that occurs in a face

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to face (or a face to monitor) relation. When the properties of the technology, the Heideggarian tool metaphor for example, break down, the otherness remaining is only a negative relation in this example. When, however, we undergo a conceptual shift in relation to technology, understanding it as the quasi other of technology that Ihde explores, that human-technology juncture or joining occurs and the relationship is revealed as othering in the sense of technology-as-other (98). This is an important conceptual move in the understanding of the human-technology relationship because it is where we enter the realm of the technology “having a life of its own.” This does not mean that the computer is a robot or has artificial intelligence, but that the relatedness and tension between embodiment and hermeneutics allow for the possibility that the technology is so embedded in the foreground that it becomes transparent as technology. Within this continuum between quasi-otherness and quasi-autonomy, a dialog or relationship begins. (100) The tension between quasi-otherness and quasi-autonomy shows up often in the workings of the editor and the nonlinear editing computer. Autonomy is revealed when the editing computer has withdrawn and otherness is revealed when the technology moves forward again because of a technological breakdown. What is the essence of this technology called the nonlinear editing computer? I think about how this tension plays out in this technologically mediated way, when we learn to create using computers. How do students enter into a new dialogue or relationship with today’s digital technology culture as they begin to learn how to edit for the material production of the media for television and video? Further phenomenological digging will uncover more distinctions that may help define new pedagogical practices and ways of thinking about this technology that surrounds us.

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Works Cited Achterhuis, H. American Philosophy of Technology. Trans. Robert P. Crease. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999. Borgmann, A. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Heidegger, M. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977. Ihde, D. Existential Technics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984. Ihde, D. Technology and the Lifeworld. Bloomington; Indiana University Press, 1990. Levin, D.M. The Body’s Recollection of Being. Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. Moran, D. Introduction to Phenomenology. New York: Routledge, 2000. Van Manen, M. Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990.

The Opacity of the Transparent: A Time-Dweller’s Voyage in the World of the Film Titanic Matti Itkonen In a film the imagined reality is free to move forward or back, because it in fact constitutes a timeless, ubiquitous artifact present. While in drama the action forges relentlessly on, creating a future, a fate, the fantasy mode is an infinite now. —Susan Langer

This journey of the mind may commence with a clearance procedure providing the traveler with a set of introspectional precepts by way of a prior censorship. For the moment at least, then, the truth may dwell in words. Aamulehti: “Ironic in itself how dependent is even James Cameron on the computer and technology. Without them the Film Titanic would never have been made.” (Selkokari, 24.) Helsingin Sanomat: “I would say without further ado that one can go to see ‘The Titanic’ even if one knows the outcome. I am moreover of the opinion that if the film does not answer the viewer when he asks why those people die or why they must die, then it was made in vain.” (Oksanen, 5). Keskisuomalainen: “The film opens in documentary fashion with Rose as an old woman recalling those bygone days for the people investigating the hulk. Cameron thus combines a number of time levels and accomplishes the shifts between them with effortless elegance.” (Valkola, 13). Me Naiset: “[Rose’s] confession carries the viewer with it and detaches him from time. After the film one actually had to check the clock to see that three hours had indeed passed by so quickly.” (Eronen, 112).

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 yt: “Real persons and events are skillfully woven into the N fictive narrative. The self-confessed Titanic freak Cameron has seen to it that historical details tally down to the very manufacturers of the original objects.” (Sinisalo, 32). Syke: “The Film Titanic is fully deserving of the éclat. It is a masterpiece technically, but it is also a fine film. Nor need we fear a sequel—unless Cameron gets to hear about the Estonia.” (Ahonen, 16). In order now to proceed on our journey I must first delve into the origins of experience—without a life lived there would after all be nothing but a ready-chewed media reality. My World There is often a great deal of talk—without anything substantial being said—as if the whole content were no more than a sign we all share. From the standpoint of philosophy and the lived world what is essential is to study the traces, the furrow left as we pass on our way—an empty place engraved by absence. (Itkonen, 53-4). The term ‘experience’ is open to two meanings—explicit in the pair of German terms ‘Erlebnis’ and ‘Erfahrung’. The former refers to what is being gone through now in its immediate completeness, for example when two people are face to face; the latter is something which may constitute an object of reflection. ‘Erlebnis’ is always immediate; ‘Erfahrung’—in the terms of phenomenology—may for its part be divided into predicative, conceptualized experience and pre-predicative, not yet conceptualized experience. For the purpose of this journey of ours the difference is extremely important and meaningful. (Grathoff, 126). How is experience possible? And its verbalization—the appraisal “from without” of some bygone self? The situation must be considered with the eye of the philosopher within us. According to Alfred Schutz, my direct experience of the world belongs to the sphere of the immediate and pre-reflective

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consciousness. I live in an unstructured present ever in flux, ever renewed as it recedes and vanishes. In the terminology of Edmund Husserl this primitive and pre-phenomenal stream may be described as immediate ‘Erlebnis’ and as ‘Erfahrung’ as we live through it. I would characterize this ceaseless flow with Henri Bergson’s concept of the inward stream of duration (durée), an unremitting approaching and departing of myriad qualities. In this flux there are no objects of consciousness; it contains no discrete phenomena which I could comprehend as clearly distinct from each other and imbued with meaning. (Thomason, 64). To be able to interpret an experience as something meaningful I must distance myself from that flux of time. Standing aside and apart from the stream of experience I can recognize individual components in it, I can separate them from it and consciously reflect upon them. The key here is the concept of reflection or observation. Bergson speaks of ‘attention à la vie’, a fluctuating reflective attitude or disposition which I may adopt—which I do adopt in my ordinary awareness of immediate experience. Precisely this reflection upon existence, and this alone, transforms pure pre-phenomenal experience into consciously apprehended content. The moment I reflect upon life it may be conceived in its myriad aspects. In the absence of this reflective process, according to Husserl and Schutz there can be nothing but pre-predicative experience, a kind of fons et origo, a substrate awaiting my essential constitutive attention. (Op. cit., 64). I cannot however in principle reflect upon my own present. Awareness of experience in the stream of time becomes instantly a remembered ‘having-just-been-thus’. Recollection alone raises experience out of the irreversible flux and thus makes a memory of consciousness (Op. cit., 64 - 5). I must still elucidate the intertwining of experiencing subject and world, the philosophical notion of point of view. The existence of the world is to me obvious, since it constitutes an axiom in my own experience and consciousness. This

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consciousness is the source of meaning of the world and of every fact which is objective in the worldly sense. By means of the transcendental epoché, however, I perceive that everything which belongs to the world—even my own existence as a human being—obtains for me only as a content of experiential understanding or apperception in the modality of assurance of existence. As a transcendental ego I comprise a self who understands or apperceives actively and passively. This apperception takes place in me even though its operation lies concealed in pre-reflection. In the act of realization, world and human being are for the first time constituted as existing. Every sign or proof of worldly beings, every mode of demonstration of their existence—pre-scientific or scientific—lies from the outset in me as a transcendental ego. (Husserl, 320). It may be that I owe a great deal, perhaps almost everything, to others; yet even they are to me first and foremost ‘others’. These ‘my others’ receive from me all the meaning and validity which they may possess for me. As a transcendental ego I thus comprise a subject entirely responsible for everything which has existential meaning for me. Aware of myself as such a subject I stand by merit of transcendental reduction above other worldly existence, above my own human life and mode of being. This position of absolute ‘superiority’, which is or which could be valid for me in any of its given contents, is of necessity the position of the philosopher. (op. 320). This absolute superiority is a position which phenomenological reduction bestows upon me. I do not thereby lose anything of what existed for me in my state of naivete; least of all do I forfeit anything whose actual existence has been demonstrated. In this position I know the world as it is and know it now, for the first time, as it has been and must always be in its true nature: I know it as a transcendental phenomenon. Thus I have brought out a new dimension to the questions I raised, a dimension which has never before been posed with regard to reality

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existing in precisely this mode. Only the answers to these new questions will reveal the concrete and complete existence of the world and its entire and ultimate truth. (op. 320). The foregoing “magnification” of ego-bound existence was indeed necessary, but from the standpoint of reality also extremely limited—“one-eyed”. In order to proceed to an analysis of the notion of the oneness of space (and time) I need another ego—his positional opposition. In constructing the notion of intersubjectivity in the world of ordinary common sense I avail myself (with the help of Alfred Schutz) of the phenomenological account of space and time. I find inadequate here Husserl’s elucidation of the problem of phenomenological constitution of the other. The problem of intersubjectivity lies not between transcendental egos, as Husserl would have it; it subsists solely as a matter of the everyday in the mundane world. In that world, intersubjectivity is taken as a complete, indisputable proposition. Philosophers describe in phenomenological terms this perfectly natural attitude in order to understand how and why the ‘other’ exists. If they demonstrate the existence of the alter ego in this mundane world, this cannot be refuted by any metaphysical or ontological suppositions or presumptions. But now it is time I resorted to my philosopher’s eyepiece. (Gorman, 44 - 5). I set out by focusing on the subject’s spatial perspectives or prospects. The location of my own body constitutes the ‘here’ element, the body of my fellow-man the ‘there’. Even if I were to transpose myself into my companion’s “thereness”, his body would still form a “there” to me, even while this—my thereness—would be for him “here”. I can thus never take my place in my fellow-being’s “here”; this notwithstanding, I can nevertheless join him in an essential sense in a mutuality of perspective in that I perceive the objects of the world in the same way from his “there” and my own “here”. Such reciprocity of viewpoints is taken for granted in the realm of common sense; this

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means that objects and events in experience are “available” intersubjectively and appear in more or less the same guise to all normal people. (Op. cit., 45). This argument of community draws upon Husserl’s stratified concept of appresentation, which, briefly, envisages a pairing or coupling between one existing object of perception and another of like kind. The appresented, simultaneously appearing object, which is as it were contained in the original, can never itself actually present itself. In the case imagined above the body of ‘my other’ appresents my conscious ego as I perceive or understand my own body and my self as inseparable. When we describe the non-interchangeability of the ‘hereness’ and ‘thereness’ of discrete selves, the reciprocity of viewpoints is seen to be a sine qua non for the divided, intersubjective world. (Op. cit., 45). Now my philosophical search directs its focus on the depths of the ocean, or rather, on the point where my consciousness as a by-stander meets the lived drama of the Titanic. The Opacity of the Transparent The situation may be outlined in terms of the difference in nature between experienced reality and imagined, theorized reality. This entails a particularly thorough inquiry into the qualities of the actual and fantasy worlds. One crucial element in the analysis is the concept of biographical situation. The difference between the biographical situation of an ordinary individual—myself included—and that of a theoretician, for example a film critic, is not confined to an ordering of models. My body has meaning as my consciousness of it dictates in the course of normal experience. It is the center, the zero-point, in the set of coordinates by which I order the objects about me. Seen from the position of my body—at any given moment— those objects, also the bodies of others, are ‘there’ from the standpoint of my ‘here’. This topological ordering, moreover,

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embraces the whole of the world that is within my reach, which in turn entails my possibilities, my capacities to move and hence the validity of any outlines I may draw up for future action. In the last analysis the wanderer of the world is after all subject to the severity of time—bound to the clock within him, the process of aging and death. The recognition of death as a token of our innermost temporality, an omen, is the form in which the ontological structure of all beings subsists. These observations prompt me to draw a number of conclusions. As an agent I possess the ‘here’ position of my body, I have a world within my reach and the possibilities for future action. At the same time I live under the temporal reality in which aging and death are inherent. My aging and my death I define in my capacity as an agent-ego who is a concrete human being and who possesses his own world. The theoretician, as theoretician, lacks all the above-adduced characteristics; as a theoretician he has no zero-point, no ‘here’, no temporal reality. In a word, when I as an agent say that I am speaking as a man of sound mind, and when the theoretician says he is speaking purely as a theoretician of whatever may emerge, no uniform or parallel mode of formulation will be attained. (Itkonen, 121-9; Natanson, 34-5). The opacity of the transparent appears in fact on two levels: a) Experienced, lived reality never fully opens up to the theoretician who has not himself passed along some given way. The world as something set before us, something presented, is inaccessible to the fantasist, the theorizer. The reason for this lies in the absence of experiential content, the element of an unlived body. Imagination and depiction—representation—are detached from the world of living, they constitute mere as-it-were dimensions. b) The lived component in any two individuals is never uniform; even a shared reality is appraised with one’s own eyes, not another’s. Something, it is true, may be understood of

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the life-situation of one’s fellow-being, but always there remains the perpetual mystery of otherness, the veiled dimension of ‘thereness’. Let us turn now to a closer scrutiny of this last-mentioned pseudo-transparent modality. My fellow-being’s lived experience is never open to me in its entirety. To tell the truth, my companion’s stream of experience is—like my own—an unbroken continuum of which I may observe only isolated sections. If I were capable of apprehending my ‘other’s’ experience to the full, we would be the same person. We do not, however, differ only in the extent to which we are capable of discerning each other’s lived lives; we also diverge in that when I become aware of some particular sequence or aspect in that other’s experience, I arrange what I see in my own meaning context. In the meantime, however, the other will face the same limitations in his own world of meaning. Thus I will invariably interpret my companion’s experience from my own point of view. (esp. Schutz, 106). Even if I possessed the fullest possible knowledge of my ‘other’s’ entire range of meaning contexts at any given moment and could thus set his whole experiential “repertoire” in order, I still could not answer the following question: “Would the meaning context in which I arrange my fellow-being’s lived experiences correspond completely to the meaning context he operates with?” I presume that the answer must invariably be negative, because the stance each of my ‘others’ takes with respect to his experiences will be different from my manner of appraising them. (esp. op. 106). If I nevertheless review the whole of my store of knowledge regarding the lived experiences of my fellow-beings, and then subject this structure to close scrutiny, at least one thing will be borne upon me: everything I know of that other’s conscious life is in fact based on my knowledge of my own lived experiences. My lived experience of that other is constituted simultaneously or quasi-simultaneously with his. My direct experiences of others are

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thus always associated, conjoined ‘intentionally’ with the simultaneity or apparent simultaneity of that community of being. In other words, my lived experiences of my fellow-beings can come into play in an intentional sense only in simultaneity or as-itwere simultaneity (via e-mail or the like—I shall return to this theme in forthcoming researches). Only thus—looking back at what has already slipped away—can I synchronize my own meaningful experiences with the past experiences of any of my fellow-beings. (esp. Op. cit., 106). How is it then possible to overcome this barrier, to pierce that apparent opacity of perspectives? Or is it necessary to do so? I now approach closer to the reality of the Titanic. 1. Adjusting the Focus

My analysis sets out from the nature of the viewer’s experience as consciousness: from a philosophical outline clarifying the nature of being of the film. My experience of this film—when I watch it and pay no heed to theories of perception—is quite specifically an experience of just this, and just this kind of ‘Titanic’ film, which appears to me in a certain fashion and which possesses its own unique defining characteristics. Its properties are manifested accordingly as I see my object from an angle, from a distance or close up. At the same time a clear or a vague memory means a memory of an object clearly or vaguely perceived. Even my most erroneous judgment constitutes a judgment of some real content. The nature of consciousness in which I live as my own self entails intentionality; consciousness is always consciousness of something. Consciousness by its very nature contains—as modalities of being—presentations (manifestations), probabilities and non-being as well as modes of appearance, goodness, values etc. Phenomenological experience must—as reflection—avoid all manner of explicatory interpretation and prior construals. Its account must accurately reflect the concrete contents of experience; it must be

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possible to draw an appropriate picture of the way any given lived content has actually been experienced. (e.g. Husserl, 52). 2. The Spectator’s View

As I sit in the local cinema my external reality is a Saturday afternoon in January 1998. This is a fact I cannot override; and again, I cannot focus my analysis without defining my concrete perceptions. The role of the spectator in the ontology of a film (at this stage I no more than inch the door open; later we shall make our way into the “film-room” itself ) might be illustrated by adapting the above-mentioned difference between the theoretician and the experiencing subject. As a mode of presentation a kind of dialogue might be envisaged between possible worlds. Proposition a: Only moments or periods in the agent-subject’s life project constitute his acts proper. Here the notion of a project also embraces the horizon of the subject’s protracted plans insofar as the verifiable concrete circumstances attending his outlined activity possess at least in some measure a clear-cut position in his plans. Response a: The only element of action attributable to me in my capacity as a film-viewer is the viewing of the film. My time dimension is pure present; even though the film ranges over the time span from 1912 to 1997, both of these points are for me part of my ‘now’. Any future temporality I may envisage extends at furthest to the closing scenes of the film. I am not, it is true, conscious of these aspects as the story unfolds; I am as it were within the events, constantly present in them. The only obviously reasonable project I can conceive in this context is (at least partial) relinquishment of my existence as a conscious being; this is the only means of “letting the film be”—to step into the stream of its narration and leave the imagined world to its own devices. Proposition b: The entire structure of life plans—even though at any given moment fixed and consistent—is inevitably altered

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as the agent-subject himself passes from one moment of internality to another. Precisely such a structure of life projects has a decisive influence on the full meaning of any of his acts. Hence that meaning itself must change with the constant modification of the overall structure. Response b: In this context it might be as well to speak of two levels of life project: real and apparent. I shall return to the project of the film character at a later point; for the moment I confine my attention to my own part, and specifically as a viewing—experiencing—subject. A more appropriate designation would in fact be ‘quasi-project’; my own moments of internality are entirely bound up in the events and the fates depicted in the film (that is, unless someone sitting near me starts talking!). My task is to implement the act of viewing. I may live a moment of Rose’s fate, but I am nevertheless present in that reality only in some vicarious capacity. Though the action of the film presses on, I remain ever in my position as a spectator; I behold sorrow, I hear laughter—yet I am fettered (at least physically) to my own present. The matter might be crystallized by saying that my life project consists simply in being and letting the aesthetic truth unfold. Then I would be living the film (and not vice versa). Proposition c: The agent-subject can know the scheme of life projects in its explicit form only partially; the structure can be “captured,” comprehended, only approximately in the focused beam of real attention. The composition of a life structure can thus likewise be laid bare only in part. In every given moment there is a brightly illuminated core which is surrounded by the ever-expanding horizon of darkness. Core and horizon together constitute the explicable and yet inexplicable background against which a planned concrete act is clearly discerned. Precisely thus a moment or a period in the scheme for its own part brings about a unity. Response c: As a viewer I can grasp of Rose’s life what the film director chooses to reveal (either directly or by implication) together with what I myself create in my own mind. It may indeed be

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difficult to distinguish the viewer’s own life perspective (as I have done in the foregoing) from the vicissitudes the film’s characters are seen to pass through. The above-adduced problem inherent in the incomplete nature of any account of a life project now appears thus: as I view the screen and the experiences of one now familiar human being (Rose), I can no longer be sure what I am being told and what I am telling myself. The illuminated core consists in my transposing myself into the events of the film, my perpetual present moment, in which Rose passes through a sequence of events spanning eighty-five years. That expanding and darkening horizon I referred to contains the consciousness of other viewers and the veiled past and future of many other figures in the film. Yet in spite of all that to me inaccessible background, the act of experiencing, seeing, participating, brings about a unity in which Rose becomes me and I become Rose. Proposition d: Everything described in the foregoing, however, is open only to the consciousness of the agent-subject himself and remains inaccessible to the “control” and the approach of the observer; his access to the actions of the subject is confined to realized acts—he can note only parts of the subject’s undertakings. If such a witness were to set about truly and ingenuously describing what passes in the mind of the subject as he goes about some act, no matter how trifling and insignificant, he would be obliged to step into the whole process of the agent’s time-stream; thus he would need to be able to go into the entire history of his personality, the originating phases of his subjective life projects, every skill and experience, and his every expectation of future states of affairs. To do all this the observer would need to have gone through every scene and setting in the agent’s inner life—experienced the shared succession, tempo and fullness of every station on that journey; he would have to become the object of his own witnessing, as Bergson has stressed. (Schutz, 1978, 39-40). Response d: Perhaps my awareness as a spectator might be called cosmic time—the sky above the landscape—which pervades a

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fragment of (the film’s) biological time. The ultimate result is a kind of one-way spatial impression: I (at least as I write this) am also completely consciously living cosmic time. Though I do not know everything about Rose’s life, I can nevertheless in my “protracted present” see the course of her life; Rose fulfills the promise she made to Jack in the icy sea. She flies, she rides in a man’s saddle, has children, and dies in her warm bed at the ripe old age of 102. I observe everything which to Rose is either memory or anticipation at any given point in her life. I thus live in the dimension of immediacy, of presentation, detached from the temporality of the film. This situation is imbued with an interesting stratification of awareness—to this I shall return as the analysis proceeds. Jack knows only that the sea divides him from Rose (one present moment in the film). Rose knows that Jack does not know she has kept her promise (from the angle of the scene just alluded to a future ‘now’ in the film). I am aware of both of these levels of knowledge; my own present moment is at once the reality of the film’s past, present and as yet unrealized ‘now’. Here I am thus at one and the same time an observer and the object of my observation. Rose, for her part, can be only the “object” of my perception. True, the boundary fades: I am both Rose and myself, then vice versa. When the film closes, I do not for the moment know myself; something is gone—one life, one experience, one fate—and I am alone in my role as a mere spectator. (Viljanen, 339-340). Reflections from the Past Franz Brentano’s analysis of primal sensation—proto-aesthesis—includes the notion of seeing the past; all seeing, including the reviewing of the days that have slipped away, appears as present. When Rose looks at a painting of herself, her mind is

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filled with all the lived meanings that were once present. I too as spectator learn of her backward-looking perceptions, where the past exists concomitant with the present moment. The whole is as it were a space of inwardness, an interiorization of the mind. Brentano also distinguishes an infinite continuum in the process of beholding things in the past; what is seen, what that object has seen and so on. Rose in her own awareness does not experience her milieu in such stratified form; in terms of general time she is either in her actual present moment (1997), or in the heyday of the Titanic (1912). Rose’s attention—and that of the characters to whom she recounts her story—passes back and forth between those poles. At the end of her tale the camera— taking the spectator with it—assumes the omniscient role of cosmic time; one might here construct a kind of stairway of memory, in which the first step—remembering as such—could set out from the present moment. As a spectator I can take a peep backwards from my seat in the cinema in 1998, either to Rose’s old age or to the moments she spent with Jack. This step might be called ‘from presence to all points of absence’. The second step represents the point at which my omniscience takes its origin; I can for example jump to the scene in which Rose arrives in New York harbor immediately after her rescue. She changes her surname and takes a new course in life. Perhaps this phase is a kind of halfway house in that here other characters are still part of the narrative reality. Nonetheless we have already shifted from present to past; the moment of remembering from which we behold more remote absence is also beyond the bounds of presence. This step might be conceived as ‘the incipient rememberedness of memory’. At the third step the film characters—or their “conscious lives”—are no longer involved in the course of events. I can shift from the present—in Brentano’s terms—for example to past time 3, where Rose has herself flown in a plane; from that point I can behold earlier events, for example her arrival in New York.

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Thereafter I can return to the actual present. Or again I may choose to focus my attention on, let us say, the span of past time 2; there, through the eyes of Rose, now a mother, Jack drowning, the launching of her career, Rose straddling a horse manfashion. The sky above the landscape seems to free me at least in part from the fetters of time; consciousness may pass between present and remembered now-moments and choose for itself a suitable vantage-point from which to survey events and persons long lost to sight. Thereafter comes the return to the present of my own reality. This stage of remembrance I might call ‘the step of omnipotence’. (Brentano, 37; Itkonen, 193-223; 5-9). Rose’s Journey of the Mind My passage from 1912 to 1997 (Has it really contained in itself those 85 steps in time?) has demanded a great deal. Under that same clock I have dwelt in three different dimensions; at the outset it kept the hours of my ardent love, the glow of youth; just now on the research vessel it showed me the past, my memories and soon I shall be there again where Jack awaits me all dressed up in a fine suit. Clock, I love you, pointer to new presence, community. Now I stand at the foot of the stairs; in a moment Jack will turn his face and smile. Dear God, how much lies buried in those years of absence. Can you help me, scholar? What is it I see? How can I see? I shall do my best. I hope you will not be disappointed. Let me begin from the claim that you can see nothing without also looking at something which has already been. Memory links your past to the present, enticing countless fragments from the stream of time to conjoin in that single perception of yours. In this way your experience, which has slid past in the moving stream, is captured and ordered—it exists in your awareness for just this brief span. Things recollected in actual memory—the items within that “picture”—are located in the past and hence are neutral and possibly unapprehended. An approach to

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those pictures, to their immediacy, you may accomplish yourself in your capacity as a self who may find herself confronted by— may sometimes succeed in encountering—the inevitable; this constraint means that you must reconcile yourself in any given case to whatever particular present circumstances may emerge. Memories return because they are useful for the purposes of some task to be undertaken in the presence of this. To be honest I should mention that these buried memories of yours do not remain constant; they alter in accordance with the immediate context. Let me try to be still more precise. Prompted by what I have just said I would claim that no two experiences of yours—inevitably linked to different moments in the stream of time—could ever be uniform. For the contexts of your experience to be perceived it is necessary that they no longer exist; what you perceive is ever and always already the past. What appears in the light of consciousness, again, is perpetually connected to an actual situation; and here the more immediate elements in your past are directed toward the future and impose upon it in order to fulfill it. Something of the “light” of consciousness falls upon that position of yours which lies in the more remote past, and the lighted fragment of it proves useful for your present situation—that is, your immediate past. The end remains in the dark. In thus discharging these two tasks your memory assumes two forms in keeping with them: Being in the true sense spontaneous, self-prompting, your memory, your picture of the past, carries with it in consciousness experiences already put behind you and enables you to envision them. Let Jack turn, then, you will once more see him smile. The clock is now measuring the moments of love. Being bound to the memory of a living organism, your recollections enable you to react to a separate present situation, this faculty in you selecting by association and eliciting appropriate elements from your past. Look at Jack’s smile; it is once more full of you. Go up to him, feel his warmth. What once was is with you again. The rest is illusion.

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The second modality of memory is the lived picture of your corporeal being; it contains pragmatic associations with your one-time prevailing situation. The warmth of lips, the vigor of hands, the glow of other flesh - reach out and claim them. Thus I died to be born again and begin a life! (On the entire foregoing section see esp. Srubar, 1984, pp. 18 - 19.) A Philosophical Expedition Contrariwise In analyzing styles of appraisal the point of departure must be taken in elements peculiar to everyday life. Thus the characteristic features of that province of meaning provide likewise the opening to this story. Philosopher: One must consider that characteristic extension of awareness which is known as expansive attention, full observation of life! Critic: That is precisely what I have done. The mechanical element plays the chief role; the observation of artificial reality is man’s present and future—a futuristic protraction of an otherwise so inadequate consciousness. Philosopher: One must aspire to the epoché of natural attitude, abstinence from doubt. Critic: Rubbish! It is my business to know what goes on in people’s minds and what is good for them. My objective is enlightenment—to tell people what the film director himself has not understood. When I set the spectator on the right track he may learn something essential. Refinement of the connoisseurship of the cinema-goer is after all a privilege of the leading paper in the land. Philosopher: One should appreciate work as a special mode of manifestation of man’s spontaneity, his autonomy. Critic: Quite so. I have revealed something that is essential to the “worker” in the field of film aesthetics; I have depicted in words the expressive potential of the camera. The living and lived picture should

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indeed exist solely as a specific form of its own; and as such it should be evaluated: as nothing else! Me Naiset Philosopher: What must be seen as most essential is experience of self, some kind of overall selfhood. Critic: I moved into the film, detached myself from time and place. For a while I was Rose, not myself, and I was whole, filled with the progression of the narrative. I severed my ties to the everyday until the dial of the clock restored the mundane world and my ordinary vulgar self. Nyt Philosopher: It is impossible to find anything else if one belittles our shared intersubjective world and our social activities. Critic: Eureka! There lies the very core of film reality. Cameron has not forgotten the truth; he has included what is absolutely the most essential—fidelity to his model. The people in the film, the Titanic itself, the crockery, the lifeboats and all manner of other trivial elements tell of the director’s respect for the viewer. Together, in a process of social intercourse, truly great films are born. Syke Philosopher: It is of great meaningfulness to analyze the standard time by which we regulate our lives as the intersection of inward duration (durée) and cosmic time in the context of intersubjectivity in ordering and composing the time structure of the social world. (On the words of the philosopher see also esp. Cox, 1978, pp. 25-26.) Critic: Standard time was now ripe for the making of this film; adequate technology, a past sufficiently distanced (1912) and an intersubjective, universal theme. Sitting there in the audience I experienced a time prior to my own, my own bodily temporality and beside this something yet to come. I was an intersecting point between what has been, what is and what is not, a crossing-point with

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the capacity (and the obligation) to make predictions. The Researcher’s Complacent Sanctimony Life’s grinder seems to make mincemeat of all. The man on the crank often defends himself by saying: “The difference between the slaughterer and the benefactor is a small one.” Translated by Robert MacGilleon Works Cited Ahonen, M. “Se kelluu sittenkin.” Syke. Keskisuomalaisen liite Jan. 17, 1998: 16. Brentano, F. Sensory and Noetic Consciousness. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint III. Trans. Margarete Schättle and Linda L. McAlister. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Cox, R. R. Schutz’s Theory of Relevance: A Phenomenological Critique. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978. Eronen, P. “Valtameren rakastavaiset.” Me Naiset Jan. 30, 1998: 112. Gorman, R. A. The Dual Vision. Alfred Schutz and the Myth of Phenomenological Social Science. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977. Grathoff, R. “How Long a Schutz-Parsons Divide.” The Theory of Social Action. The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons. Ed. Richard Grathoff. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. 125-130. Husserl, E. “The Paris Lectures.” Trans. Peter Koestenbaum. Phenomenology and Existentialism. Ed. Robert S. Solomon. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1980. 43 - 57. Husserl, E. “Phenomenology and Anthropology.” Shorter Works. Ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston. Trans. Richard C. Schmitt. In . Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981: 315-323. Itkonen, M. Zenit - ulkoisesta sisäiseen. Askeleet fenomenologiseen aikaan ja sen tajunnallistumismoduksiin Eeva-Liisa Mannerin lyriikassa. SUFI, Vol. 11. Tampere: Cityoffset ky, 1994. Itkonen, M. “Dialogic or Dialogistic? Dialogicity or Dialogism? A Word of Warning against Rigor Metodologiae.” Trans. Robert MacGilleon. Human Studies 20.1 (1997): 47-58.

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Itkonen, M. Voinko minutella? Filosofisia puheita itsekasvatuksesta. Tampere: TAJU, 1998. Itkonen, M. “Alter et Alter. The Two Faces of the Mirror.” Trans. Robert MacGilleon. Phenomenological Inquiry 23 October, 1999: 107-132. Langer, S. K. Feeling and Form. A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953. Oksanen, K. “Miksi me kuolemme?” Helsingin Sanomat, C-osa Feb. 16, 1998: p. 5. Natanson, M. Anonymity. A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Schutz, A. “Parsons’ Theory of Social Action: A Critical Review.” The Theory of Social Action. The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons. Ed. Richard Grathoff. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. 8-124. Schutz, Alfred. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Trans. Richard M. Zaner and Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1984. Selkokari, A. “Titanic tuo katastrofin lähelle.” Aamulehti Jan. 16, 1998: 24. Sinisalo, K. “Uppoamaton Titanic. James Cameronin suuruudenhullu unelma muuttui matkalla intiimiksi rakkaustarinaksi.” Nyt. Helsingin Sanomien viikkoliite Jan. 16, 1998: 31-32. Srubar, I. “Bergson’s Contribution to Schutz’s Project.” A Bergsonian Bridge to Phenomenological Psychology. Ed. Helmut R. Wagner . Current Continental Research 204. Lanham: University Press of America, Inc., 1984. 17-20. Thomason, B. C. Making Sense of Reification. Alfred Schutz and Constructionist Theory. Hong Kong: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1982. Valkola, J. “Myyttisellä matkalla valtameren sydämeen.” Keskisuomalainen 1.16. (1998): 13 Viljanen, L. “Sillanpään ajanelämyksestä.” Parnasso 5.8 (1954): 338-342.

Cellular Irruptions David R. Koukal

Introduction: the Fundamental Elements of Embodied Signals Communication starts with the lived body. As we know from Merleau-Ponty, the body itself in its very existence is a “power of natural expression,” our “opening onto the world.” (MerleauPonty, 1962, p. 181). As our body moves through the world it generates meaning. The manner in which we leave our homes, the way we cross the street, the way we orient ourselves in relationship to the buildings we pass—all of this testifies to a silent dialogue between ourselves and the perceptual horizons of our lived world. As we proceed down the street we orient ourselves in relation to different bodies in different ways: e.g., waving to a neighbor in the distance, nodding to the mail carrier, both of which respond in kind, silently, but no less meaningfully. We move through space toward beckoning horizons, gesturing toward and orienting our bodies in relation to things and other embodied subjects. At the same time, we find ourselves immersed in the medium of language, which constitutes both a limit and a possibility for each speaking subject. On the one hand, our communicative possibilities are necessarily limited by different vocabularies, vernaculars and audiences, as well as the particular and general expressive conventions at play in any given speech situation. On the other hand, we enjoy a much more organic relationship to language than what typically obtains between a medium and that which exists within it—we are all a part of the living organism of language. This allows each speaker the possibility of instigating new meaning by exploring the silent parts of language. In

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instances when “spoken speech” cries out to be spoken anew, we grope around a signifying intention within the space between words. This initiates what Merleau-Ponty refers to as “speaking speech,” which re-vitalizes a part of language in the face of a lived—and living—world. In this lived and speaking world, an aliveness to bodily gesture is essential for communication. For example, if our neighbor communicates to us through her bodily gestures that she is in a hurry on her way to work, we will keep our greeting brief; if our lecture audience appears restless, we will either curtail our remarks or shift to another rhetorical strategy; if our student’s face communicates confusion, we will try another example to illustrate our pedagogical point. These elements constitute different kinds of embodied signals that come together in the perceiving body-subject to form the fundamental communicative nexus with a lived world made expressive and meaningful through our various spatial, perceptual, gestural and verbal orientations toward it. But we do not communicate just within an intimate world of lived bodies that move and speak and gesture. The world through which our bodies move is also permeated with disembodied signals. In this paper I will attempt to phenomenologically evoke the experience of one of these—the cellular signal. I will do this by first sketching in outline the chief dimensions of the context within which the cellular signal is experienced—what I refer to as the mass-mediated Umwelt. This will set the stage for an investigation of the telephonic signal in general, and then the cellular signal in particular. These investigations will show how the cellular signal is a disembodied signal that is experienced as a unique “irruption” within the impersonal and mass-mediated Umwelt on the one hand, and the more intimate speech situation on the other. My claim is that these irruptions alter our everyday being-with-others and renders more disjunctive our attempts to co-constitute meaning.

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 isembodied Signals in the Mass-mediated Umwelt: D the Competition for Attention “The media”—that amorphous but powerful complex of relatively impersonal communicative forces—inundates our lived world every single day with a breathtaking array of signals. There are inert signals that are relatively passive, such as letters, books, newspapers and magazines, which are experienced as signals that are there waiting, to be taken up and given our attention at our discretion. There are interactive signals that invite us to take them up, such as ringing telephones and the Internet. And then there is the vast assortment of assertive signals which, almost from the moment we awaken each morning, assail our consciousness from a wide variety of media, including alarm clocks, radios emitting music, jingles, slogans and sound bites, pop-up ads on computers, television sets in public places, billboards, posters and signs along roadways, and advertisements on the printed page—to name only a very few. All of these impersonal and disembodied signals make up our mass-mediated Umwelt, and each is designed to command our attention. In a mass-mediated world shot through with chaotically competing signals, asking for someone’s “undivided attention” might be considered an unreasonable demand. Yet despite this chaos, we somehow manage not to be driven to distraction. This is because we do not take these sorts of signals personally. These signals are, in fact, literally impersonal—they are not meant for you or me in particular but for all of us, united only by some of the various demographic features we possess. This intense competition for our attention has forced us to learn how to give our attention to some of these disembodied and impersonal signals, and withhold our attention from others. But in attempting to withhold our attention from some signals, we must necessarily engage with them to some degree. This passive “sorting-out” of signals is the way we make meaning in dialogue with the massified media, but it is also the way we are taken up

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into it. In being thus “taken up” into the mass media, our lived world is altered. One of the major ways in which our lived world is altered is that the disembodied signals1 of the more impersonal mass-mediated Umwelt cannot help but compete with the intimate speech situation animated by embodied signals. Both kinds of signals share the same feature of indicating something—a thought, a mood, a message, a voice, a person, a product, etc., but each indicates in a different way. On the one hand, the more disembodied the signal, the more distinct are the realities of the signal itself and what the signal indicates. For example, even though a car commercial (regarded as a signal) creates a kind of unity between this signal, the car itself, and the joyful experience of driving the car, etc., all of these things are distinct realities that can be experienced by themselves. The unity created by the commercial is only a felt or pseudo unity, not an experiential unity. On the other hand, embodied signals—movement, gesture, speaking speech—are experienced as having a kind of expressive unity that is absent in the car commercial. For example, when the student in my office expresses frustration because his fifth re-write has not improved the grade on his paper, everything in his comportment—the agitated shifting in the chair, the poorly disguised grimace, the peevish complaint, “But I don’t understand!”—all actually embody frustration to a degree that the student’s frustration is manifest to me. To the extent that I can experience this frustration, it cannot be so richly experienced apart from the embodied signals of the student. Though I would still insist on the primacy of embodied signals, their experiential unity does not necessarily give them an advantage in their competition with the various disembodied signals of the mass-mediated Umwelt. For example, it is not unusual to see someone shush the person with whom they are 1 Of course, we may see re-presentations of bodies in the mass media, but these are not lived bodies.

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conversing so they can make out a radio or TV signal. Indeed, my wife and I have many times found ourselves facing each other over lunch in American restaurants, eating silently as we each gaze over the other’s shoulder at a TV screen, sometimes talking only during commercials.1  e Fulfillment and Betrayal Th of the Traditional Telephonic Promise Of all the various communication technologies that have come to mediate human relationships, the wired telephone has perhaps become the most intimately imbedded into our lived world. Though a telephone conversation deprives us of the full richness of the gestural body, Alison Leigh Brown has described in a kind of micro-phenomenology of listening how the very absence of this body can possibly result in a different but undeniably intense beingthere-with through an imagination stimulated by auditory clues (Brown, 1999, p. 11).2 However, though I am impressed with Brown’s analysis, I must reiterate that I am at this point interested not in telephone conversations per se, but rather the experience of the telephone as a technology that emits a signal within our lived world. Despite the fact that telephonic technology is extremely complex, it has become so refined as to become largely transparent to 1 It should be obvious at this point that I am not using the term “signal” in the sense used by Shannon and Weaver in their Mathematical Theory of Communication. In their model of communication, the signal is generated by an information source, and then transmitted through a channel to a receiver. In this model, the signal carries and is hence distinct from the content. See John Fiske, Introduction to Communication Studies, pp. 7-8. For the purposes of this essay, I am instead drawing on Husserl’s theory of the sign, and conflating it with this notion of signal, which allows for the possibility of an expressive unity that is closer to how we can experience a signal. See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Humanities Press, 1970, vol. 1, Investigation I, §§ 1-4. 2 Many thanks to Dennis Skocz for bringing this passage to my attention.

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us. Our telephones are our phones, and are found in certain locations within the domain of our concernful activities in the world. That is, to the extent that we often speak of being “near” a telephone, there are familiar places for telephones. Our telephones are there, on our desks and side tables, mounted on our walls, in our phone nooks, ready-to-hand wherever they have been wired into a breathtakingly vast network of cables and telephone exchanges. This familiarity has made us at home with our telephones, so long as they remain near and ready-to-hand (Heidegger, 1993, pp. 54, 57-58). One way in which the telephonic signal can be experienced is as potentially interactive. The telephone calls to us with an implied promise—that someone wants to speak with us, because our number has been dialed. Like all signals, the telephonic signal indicates. The ringing of our telephone can be taken to indicate a desire to communicate with us in particular, unlike other disembodied signals of the assertive kind. Our phone rings with this desire, and we are invited to respond to it. Beyond the ringing is the promise of a human voice, a person, perhaps someone far away who was once close and whose voice will in moments be brought to our ear. To the extent that the telephonic signal brings us only disembodied voices, it lacks the kind of experiential unity of the embodied signal. Nevertheless, as Brown points out, it can also induce a mode of concernful listening in which even silences are laden with meaning (Brown, 1999, p.11). In such instances, the telephonic promise is fulfilled. On one level the telephone is not part of the mass-mediated Umwelt in the sense that it was designed to be a bi-directional form of communication between two people. However, there is another way in which the telephonic signal can be experienced. Though it is a fundamentally interactive signal, it can assert itself in such a way that it intrudes upon other concernful activities. To use Heidegger’s phrase, the telephonic signal can manifest itself as present-at-hand by being obstinate in its presence. These signals regularly interrupt important conversations, meals, television

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shows, other phone calls through call-waiting technology, and countless other tasks. These interruptions are sometimes rendered more assertive by the fact that they are impersonal—they often bring aural datum other than a familiar voice. Mis-dials and hangups take their toll, and merely because of our phone’s area code, computer-aided and automated telemarketing (at least in America) bring us either pre-recorded spiels or scripted and blandly recited sale pitches. In such instances we feel betrayed by the telephonic promise and begin to regard it with suspicion. Even when the promise is kept, if the signals come too frequently we respond to them with outright hostility. “The phone won’t stop ringing!” we complain. “I can’t get anything done!” The obstinateness of the telephone is compounded when we are expecting a call we want to avoid; in such instances we dread the telephonic signal as if it were an explosive charge with a hair trigger, and we shield ourselves through the use of various countersignals: answering machines, voice mail and caller identification technology. However, these countersignals are of no use whatsoever when we are expecting a very important call that does not come—when the telephone is perhaps at its most obstinate. In these various modes of present-at-hand, the nearness of the telephone is experienced as an irritation, if not a source of oppression. It is no longer experienced as an instrument that is taken up by us in our concernful activities. Unlike Heidegger’s unusable hammer, the telephonic signal (or lack of signal) asserts its presence in such a way that it distracts us from a multitude of concernful activities. When the telephone is present-at-hand in these various ways we feel trapped by it, and we want nothing more than to escape its nearness. The Cellular Signal as a Singular Disembodied Signal Most of what has just been said of the wired telephonic signal can also be said of cellular signals, with some obvious and not-soobvious differences. The most apparent difference is that cellular

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signals are not tethered to wires. Instead, cellular phones are tied by radio signals into a honeycombed network of “cell areas” made up of antennas, cable and exchanges that allow users the ability to move over large areas while maintaining a telephonic connection with other people (Microsoft, 1993-1997). In other words, though the cellular signal is just as disembodied as the telephonic signal, the cellular signal is in a sense hosted and extended by mobile human bodies. Among the not-so-obvious differences between telephonic and cellular signals is that cell phone numbers are not typically listed in a directory, and are therefore not as susceptible to telemarketing. Furthermore, hosts “give out” their cell numbers as if dispensing a favor—“Look, if you really want to reach me, here’s my cell.” They are not likely to give this number to people they are trying to avoid. Hence, when a cellular signal sounds, the chances of it being taken up by its host as an interactive rather than an assertive signal is significantly greater. Though this might not be true for hosts who are compelled to use cell phones for business purposes, the point of having a cell phone for those who have embraced the technology as a part of their “lifestyle” is to remain telephonically connected no matter where one is, or at least connectable. In this sense, the cellular signal is more apt to manifest itself as ready-to-hand, insofar as it signifies to the host the realization of her concernful activity of being readily connected to those with whom she desires to communicate. By extension, the host typically welcomes the cellular signal because it tends to indicate a desire to communicate with the host in particular, thereby keeping the telephonic promise. This means that the cellular signal is a singular disembodied signal for the signal’s host. The host moves through the same mass-mediated Umwelt as we all do, and is therefore subject to the same assertive demands for her attention. However, when cellular signals announce themselves to the host, the rest of the world tends to recede toward the horizon to a greater degree. The cellular

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signal jumps to the foreground and makes a special demand on her attention, to the exclusion or at least the diminishment of the other multifarious disembodied signals directed at her consciousness, including the traditional telephonic signal. The cellular signal penetrates the impersonal din of the mass media, and more than most disembodied signals, this signal is for her. Cellular Irruptions among the Cell-less Cellular technology has loosed the telephonic signal from its static and familiar places, and it is spread throughout the world through radio signals and human hosts, like a virus. Not so long ago we could escape the assertiveness of the telephonic signal; no more. We now move through the world knowing that we may experience the trilling and often melodic signal of the cell phone at any time, anywhere at all. Increasingly, we know this is ever a possibility, if not in fact a probability. This is true even if we ourselves are not hosts of a cellular signal. I myself often register surprise when I have spent time outside of my home and not encountered a cellular signal. Thus, it now seems as if we are always “near a phone.” They lurk all around us, unobtrusive until they announce their presence. But our experience of the cellular signal is radically different than that of other disembodied signals in general and the telephonic signal in particular. First, as has already been noted, the various disembodied signals of the mass-mediated Umwelt assail our consciousness in an impersonal way. But the cellular signal is not impersonal in the same way. When we hear this signal, we may experience it as impersonal to the extent that it is not a signal meant for us in particular. Yet at the same time, we know that the cellular signal is meant for a particular other. Unlike other disembodied signals, which may or may not succeed in commanding the attention of an other, we can be much more certain that a cellular signal will succeed in this endeavor; we can almost feel the other’s attention being peeled away from a common and lived situation.

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Secondly, while our telephonic signals tend to be assertive, obstinate and present-at-hand only to us because they are bound to particular places, the cellular signal by its very nature regularly asserts itself into the various domains of the concernful activities of others. When a cellular signal announces itself in a restaurant, store, classroom, cinema, theater or our own home, this is not our signal. It makes us no promises, not even promises in bad faith. Thus the assertiveness of a cellular signal is experienced by the cell-less as far more obstinate than a telephonic signal, because it has no fixed place. Third, though the cellular signal is in this sense the most placeless of disembodied signals, it can still be said to have a body of sorts. From an exclusively technological perspective, the cellular signal is disembodied. But this technology by definition enables human hosts to extend the reach of the signal. For example, if an embodied host had not brought their cell phone into the cinema, we would have never experienced its signal. To this degree, the cellular signal could perhaps be considered “partially bodied.” Finally, just by virtue of using the technology, the embodied hosts of cellular signals manifest certain unique gestures. My neighbor walking down the street with her head lowered and a hand cupped to one ear is only superficially aware of her surroundings; she is more “with” the radio signal hidden in the palm of her hand, and her bodily gesture signals that she would not welcome an interruption. The airport is a place suffused with cellular signals, and the person sitting next to you at the gate muttering to herself is not schizophrenic; rather, she too is “with” her signal, speaking into a small wireless headpiece of a cell phone, which is concealed in her jacket pocket. But like the voices in the schizophrenic’s head, the voice in this person’s ear speaks to her in a singular fashion, to the exclusion of other voices. The cashier at the market has his back turned to the door as you enter, speaking on a cell phone. He turns his back, just as

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you would turn your back to a crowded room to take a telephone call in your home. He is there in the market, yes, but his consciousness of you, his workstation and the rest of the market is more faint and peripheral, just as your consciousness of the crowded room in your home recedes as you “enter” the telephone conversation. The car in front of you on the road meanders erratically from lane to lane as the driver talks on his cell. His consciousness is divided between the complex task of safely operating an automobile and the conversation he is having. The cellular signal is interrupting his being-with the road, just as the road is interrupting his being-with the signal.1 In these instances, cellular signals have irrupted, drawing consciousnesses away from a lived world. Once the signal has them, those with a cell phone are not fully “there” where they are, but rather also with their respective signals. Because they are not fully “there,” they cannot be fully “there-with-others,” thus interfering with the possibility of entering into a speaking and embodied communicative situation. Another dimension of the experience of the cellular signal is an increased consciousness of the possibility that a cellular signal can burst in on us even while engaged in such a situation. Even in the apparent absence of a 1 According to one study, using a cell phone while driving quadruples the chances of having an accident. See Redelmeier and Tibshirani, 1997. These various “cellular irruptions” should not be utterly foreign to anyone who has attempted to undertake various activities while having a conversation on the telephone. Depending on the relative complexity of the task on the one hand, and the relative superficiality of the conversation on the other, it can be difficult to give each sufficient attention. As was remarked before, the phone calls with a promise. If this promise is fulfilled and the conversation requires it, we put the work at hand aside so we may better listen. We press the earpiece more tightly to our ear. We attempt to block out ambient signals by covering our other ear with our free hand. In such conversations we are not fully “there,” where we are; we are more “with” the signal. It is the same with the cellular signal, except that there are typically more ambient signals to filter out, it can announce itself at any time or any place, and its telephonic promise is greater—making it a more compelling signal to which to respond, regardless of the surrounding situation.

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cellular signal, the miniaturization of the technology allows for its concealment. To refer to an earlier example: in an attempt to better explain to my frustrated student how to improve his paper, I employ rhetorical strategies different than those that have apparently failed up to this point. In an attempt to bring this paper, this student, this philosophy into a coherent unity, I close the door of my office and turn off the ringer of my phone so we will not be distracted. I search my mind for different analogies and examples, richer metaphors, better arguments. My voice is animated, I sit on the edge of my chair, leaning toward the student, gesticulating, imploring, coaxing, reasoning, encouraging. I bring every element of my embodied expressiveness to bear on the situation, all the while looking for bodily gestures from my student, which might tell me if I am actually communicating with him. He is silent and fidgets at first, sullen and impatient; then, as I continue on, he sits up in his chair and inches it closer to mine. He leans forward a bit, and as he begins to speak I start to see in his eyes and hear in his words that his mind is becoming genuinely engaged with the paper’s problems, and I think he is beginning to understand . . . And then a thin melodic trilling irrupts from within his book bag, muted. Embarrassed, he excuses himself, unzips the bag and answers the cell phone’s promise. As he speaks into the phone, his eyes drift to the ceiling and he is “with” the signal and barely present to me any more; he slouches back into his chair and I can almost see the intellectual energy being sapped from his body. Silently exasperated, I too lean back in my chair. Even though he ends the call quickly and we return to the problem at hand, the momentum is lost, his cellular signal reverberating in both of our heads . . . .

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Conclusion: the Division of Communicative Consciousness Cellular technology is often presented as a tool that brings people together, and on one level this claim is undeniably true. Cell phones do in fact allow telephonic communication between those who could not have spoken with each other just ten years ago. Further advances in the technology (Internet access, the taking and sending of pictures via email, etc.) have added even more elements to its interactive dimension. My only goal here has been to show how the experience of the cellular signal in a sense haunts our lived world at another level. Even while it enriches the communicative world of some, this signal always threatens to assert its singular claim on our collective attention, which interrupts our intentional attachment to our immediately surrounding experiences, disrupts our sense of being-with-others, and undermines our attempts to co-constitute meaning within the rich and in my view primordial communicative field of the intimate and embodied speech situation. It could well be that over time this signal will lose its singularity and be absorbed into the mass-mediated Umwelt like other disembodied signals. But even in this case, I would suggest, it would at best be relegated to just one more disembodied signal demanding our attention and further dividing our communicative consciousness. References Brown, Alison Leigh. “Dissembling Images: Electronic Media and Writing,” Glimpse: Journal of the Society for Phenomenology and Media, 1/1, 1999. Fiske, John. Introduction to Communication Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Nemeyer Verlag, 1993). Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Humanities Press, 1970.

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1962, [originally published as Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945)]. Microsoft® Encarta® 98 Encyclopedia. © 1993-1997 “Telephone,” Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Redelmeier, Donald A. M.D., and Robert J. Tibshirani, Ph.D., “Association between Cellular-Telephone Calls and Motor Vehicle Collisions” New England Journal of Medicine 336/7, February 13, 1997, pp. 453-458. (Available at http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/336/7/453 on May 5, 2003). Shannon, Claude and Warren Weaver. Mathematical Theory of Communication (Illinois, Illinois University Press, 1949.

The Digital Ethnography: Multimedia Qualitative Analysis Kenneth Liberman

With the increasing sophistication of desktop digital videoediting software and especially with a new generation of Macintosh hardware (the dual processor G-4) approaching supercomputer capabilities, it is now possible to put into the hands of ethnographic researchers professional multimedia editing systems at a low cost. Because of this, sociology, education, journalism, anthropology, folklore, and other social science and humanities departments across the country are experiencing an explosion of visual and media-based ethnographic research, geared to CD ROMs and videotape outputs. There are three aspects to the benefits provided by these digital methods of ethnographic inquiry: enhanced presentation of social events, improved analysis of data, and a new pedagogy for microinteraction studies. Presentation Let me be clear at the outset that what makes the multimedia capture of data desirable for qualitative methodologists is not merely the fact that a vivid presentation of one’s data can be added to one’s study. The bells and whistles with which multimedia and interactivity outfit the presentation of ethnographic materials is the least important aspect of what these digital technologies provide to microinteractionist, ethnomethodological, and other qualitative analyses of naturally occurring social phenomena. Rather, what is most compelling is that this media permits more detailed, fine-grained analysis of face-to-face interactional events and

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permits the presentation of interactionally sensitive arguments regarding the organization of social life by participants. But this said, the bells and whistles do make for a more attractive presentation, and the more compelling one’s presentation of ethnographic data is the more attention one will be able to count upon from one’s readers. The use of audio software (such as Macromedia’s now unsupported SoundEdit 16) and video software (such as Apple’s Final Cut Pro), along with Adobe’s Photoshop and Macromedia’s Director (the latter as the platform for assembling the various media along with textual transcripts, and for adding an interactive component to the final design), permit the social analyst to gain access to and present to the reader/audience a deep level of interactional detail. And more of the raw data is available to the reader, whose curiosity can be satisfied to whatever level of information s/he finds convivial. So, presentation, yes, but analysis is where the news is. Analysis Digital technologies offer a multitude of tools to the microanalyst who works with video or audio recorded data. Most programs include features that permit some note-taking and comment-making right along with the stream of data that the comments are about. What better way to collect notes than to append them beneath the audio record or snapshots of the actual data? Labeling devices permit the rapid retrieval and re-inspection of one’s analyzed data. In this way one returns more frequently to the raw data and not just to the categorized reductions that heretofore have permitted qualitative analysts to organize their data; here one can have both worlds (the emic and etic) together. The speed of access to a collection of interactional events across a number of recorded scenes is a significant boon to social analytic reflection. If you are looking for that lost event

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you now realize is key to your inquiry, you can run a search through a storage bin by comments, or by participants, or by time and place. Especially, analysis of data is aided by the ease of navigation through one’s data that digital technology provides. One can jump right to the section one needs by clicking on labels or writing in time-codes. If one prefers to work more intuitively, one can move forward and backwards in time by designating ‘in-toout’ boundaries for replay, by changing those borders on the fly, or by designating ‘cursor-to-out-point’, and it is possible to move the cursor along with one’s focus of attention. Better still, one can ‘play-around-current,’ which plays before and after the cursor to a preset duration, and this cursor can also be progressively moved forwards (or backwards) in time and on the fly. A shuttle button allows one to fast-forward or fast-rewind in geometrically faster or slower increments. One can set the ‘loop repeat,’ and hear every turn of talk a dozen times (great for foreign language transcribing), and the loop repeats can be set for any length of time, not only the threeor five-second alternatives of the old standard transcribing machines. And best of all, one doesn’t have to set the repeat loops to predetermined lengths - one can mark a waveform graph of the talk and attend to only that portion of the conversation one is interested in. Please note this substantial benefit: one need not distract the intensity of one’s analytic attention with a second or two of extraneous and unrevealing detail preliminary to the portion of the interaction that one’s inquiry is about, one can pounce right on top of the phenomenon. In this way the local interaction can be mastered and analyzed. Needless to say, as a transcribing tool these features are not to be surpassed. In addition, tempo or speed features permit one to catch phrases uttered quickly (again, very useful for second language analyses). If there is too much wind in the recording, one can use the De-esser; if the microphone was too close to a speaker,

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one can use the De-popper; and if the microphone was too far from the speaker, one can mark that speaker’s utterance on the waveform and slide up the volume until it matches that of the other participants. Dog-barks (a common intrusion in my recordings) can be easily removed. These features don’t exhaust the facilities that improve analysis. The principal feature here, however, is the speed of navigation and the ability to carefully compare different events alongside one another while the analyst’s inquiry is still fresh. And in this regard, the “scrubber” bar or “jog control” (in Apple’s Final Cut Pro; other programs have similar features) permit precise and repeated access to the emerging details of interactional events, making additional phenomena available to an analyst. For a social scientist studying face-to-face interaction (ethnomethodologists, conversational analysts, symbolic interactionists, intercultural communication analysts, etc.) the data analyzed in this way - with the opening-up of a video-taped debate, viewed repeatedly on the computer screen with the scrubber bar and with sound tracks appropriately filtered - is to the traditional tape recorder what an electron microscope is to a microscope. Microsociological analysis will be improved by the ways that these digital technologies provide researchers access to the phenomena they are studying. A Pedagogy for Microinteraction Using these multimedia tools has changed the pedagogy of my ethnography. I am able to inspect and discuss a deeper level of interactional detail than I could with just a verbal narrative. I have been undertaking an ethnomethodology of the public philosophical debates of Tibetan Buddhist monks. My study is based upon many hours of videotaped public debates, which I have also transcribed and translated into English. The detail of these debates is preserved in my digitized video, and I can pick it apart

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in order to best communicate the key phenomena I have identified. The enhanced communicability of the interactional phenomena that characterize Tibetan philosophical debate is the outstanding discovery about these digital tools. Every word, every trick, each convention can be witnessed and re-witnessed, by myself and my reader-viewers, just as it is generated and ratified by a cohort of debaters. Their collaboration, their contestations, and every stratagem can be mastered with an ease and with a detail that analogue technology could not provide me. Perhaps one recalls the unease that set in when the era of audio taped analysis-with-transcripts of the ‘60s and ‘70s gave way to the video analyses of the ‘80s and ‘90s. One couldn’t rewind fast enough to keep up with one’s thoughts, and one was always losing track of where one wanted to be on the tape, fast-forwarding and rewinding again and again to the point of vertigo. Final Cut Pro and other programs provide guideposts to this forest of videotaped data, and with the scrubber bar every inch of recorded data is ruled by one’s fingertips. One can locate the interactional events and communicate those structures to one’s audience, using the very filmed events one depended upon for the analysis. Laying out the interactional details of a formal debate is less awkward than it was before, and I can display the actual material details to the viewer-reader. I have one extraordinary interaction in which both debaters are talking at the same time, but upon analysis (by means of the features discussed above, including closing off the left-channel while listening to the right, and vice-versa) I discovered that they were listening to each other perfectly and recycling the other’s philosophical observations in their own utterances, in a sort of verbal dance that had impressive aesthetic properties which I could not describe but am able to show. Of course, a fuller pedagogy for explaining microinteractional phenomena is yet to develop, but we now have better tools for displaying the actual details of a social scene, and just as those

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details are lived. The liveliness of the displays helps to win the attention of our reader-viewers, and their willingness to hear out a lengthy exegesis may be increased. An important feature here is the interactivity that is provided by means of buttons, which I have set up using Macromedia’s Director software. This places control over each turn of speaking in the hands of the viewer. This is especially important when the displays are in a second language, and reliance upon a written translation is needed. The viewer can repeat a Tibetan debater’s argument, consult the translation and any explanatory links I may have added, and move on to the defender’s reply only when s/he has mastered the debater’s argument. By controlling the progression of the exegesis, the temporality of the explanation is in the hands of the viewer. By virtue of having invested his or her temporality into the display, one can count on the viewer’s interest being sustained more than if s/he was just the docile recipient of a presentation whose temporality was controlled by the author. This further affords the ethnographer the opportunity to say more about the interactional details of the social event. It may be that ethnomethodological arguments may be made more compelling, because with the enhanced attention of the reader their details will be heard and considered. The precise events that compose the work particular actors undertake to organize a local interaction, or communicate a meaning, or win an argument - and especially the way participants concert their actions together to produce a seamless flow of interactional events - can be laid out, presented in its actual visual and auditory content, and conveyed to colleagues and readers in evident and compelling ways. Benefits to Phenomenological Studies Edmund Husserl recognized that the coherence of judgments, both the correspondence of one’s ideas with the ideas of others as well as one’s own intendings (in their capacity to refer

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to the same object over time), is a function of certain conditions of intersubjective understanding. A formalization of an intended object is produced and is made valid for everyone. Or, as Merleau-Ponty (1962: xx) explains, “Sense is revealed… where my own and other people’s paths intersect and engage each other like gears.” This is precisely the site where our investigations are directed. Phenomenologists have a traditional interest in this work of objectivating notions - making objects of ideas so that they can be shared in common. For example, the phenomenon of objectivating the philosophical observations of one’s opponent is key to understanding communication in Tibetan public debate. By objectivation I refer to an actual social practice, not to an individual’s theoretical practice. A Tibetan debater is able to sort out the key elements of the respondent’s arguments (even when he disagrees with them) and formulate them publicly in formal analytic terms. This provides the debaters with clear, evident summaries of the matters with which they are dealing; that is to say, it provides them with “objective” accounts of their developing investigation, and these accounts are the material with which their philosophical reflection will proceed. Alfred Schutz (1967: 31-33) has observed that the notion of an objective phenomenon has both a negative and a positive meaning. Its negative meaning, according to which it is frequently understood, is that it is not the subjective meaning in the mind of an actor. But Schutz wishes to emphasize “the positive meaning” that the notion “objective” has, which is the meaning that is given “equally to all,” the object taken up as a tangible event that has some facticity. Among such objects Schutz includes signs and expressions, or as Husserl (1970: 682) suggests, word-sounds whose materiality is available to all. Objectivation refers to the act of making of such materiality an object-in-common with a meaning-in-common; hence it is a social act in that it is a part of the work that actors do to organize

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the orderliness of their activities. These events have been unavailable to social phenomenologists, since their detail is so deeply embedded within the lived flow of an interaction. The best that ethnographers have been able to do is to bowdlerize what actors do by relying upon some pertinent slang to give the reader a feel for the physical activities on the ground. With multimedia tools, the interactional detail in which objectivation work is located can be identified and described. Once a sign or account has been objectivated, i.e. made an object, it becomes available for use as an “intersubjective thought object” (Schutz 1962: 12), that is, as a tool to facilitate communication. Parties may ignore or at least forget the work of this production, since the objective meaning becomes an achievement in hand. According to Schutz (1967:134) objectivation includes an “already constituted meaning-context of the thing produced, whose actual production we meanwhile disregard.” These objects and their meaning-contexts, so produced, are the keys upon which the actors play the concert of their activities. Schutz’s contribution is that he retained in his sight the fact that this objectivity is practical and that it is an achievement of actors. An objective expression comes to have an anonymous character, and its meaning is “intelligibly coordinated” by cooperating parties (Schutz 1967: 37 and 123). Now we have the tools to witness these achievements. Husserl (1973: 57) speaks of objectivation as a process in which objects may be designated as valid within a given community. Although Husserl recognizes that objectivation is a dynamic process (cf. Husserl 1964: 184), Schutz took the concept of objectivation further than Husserl did, and he was more attentive to the social practices that compose it. Especially, Schutz was interested in how actors collaborate among themselves so that the occasioned meanings of the terms they are using can come to have a more anonymous, generally available sense. Ethnomethodologists have developed this notion of objectivation in

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their descriptions of the practical work of actors who concert themselves and produce accounts to provide orderly and reliably reproducible activities, notions and rules, along with their meaning-contexts (Garfinkel and Sacks, 1970). I propose that the digital multimedia tools I have described have a special contribution to make to such phenomenological investigations as these, and not only to the investigations themselves but also to the persuasiveness of our phenomenological descriptions. A New Language A new digital ethnography is learning to speak in a language that few ethnographers have spoken, and it has more in common with the cinematic poetry of Charlie Chaplin than the Master Narrative of 19th and early 20th century ethnography. I would like to argue that these technologies make the world of one’s subjects more available, that there is less disruption and distortion of the temporality of the subjects under investigation. But that is only a potentiality, since every technique, even the ones under examination here, have the ability to distort and reduce. There are hundreds of filters available for communicating with digital film; indeed, there is a cottage industry that invents new tools and filters every month. But the vast majority of these are unsuitable for ethnographic description. One cannot have Tibetan monks, for example, gyrating in cubist spins in the fashion of the latest television commercials. One must be cautious about using cyber-forensic devices that are inappropriate to one’s phenomenon. And in this sense this new discipline is much like that of the traditional ethnographer, or translator. New aesthetic skills for combining photographs with audio data, and blending in video passages in ways that preserve some fidelity to the social phenomena being elucidated will be needed. I have stumbled upon a few such devices; for example, when a Tibetan debater emphasized a brilliant philosophical point by clapping his hands

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in the face of his opponent, I multiplied the clapping hands in the air above the opponent, applied a brief echo filter, and freezeframed the silence of the dumbfounded opponent. When such filters are accepted by the subjects under study as befitting the phenomenon, one can be sure that they are appropriate cyberforensic devices. Any discourse will semiotize itself, by which I mean it is natural that the signs relied upon for successfully communicating something will be routinized, and they will come to relate with other proximate signs until a system of conventions is established. This system of conventions comes to usurp the hour, and the conventions of the social world under study become subservient to the ways that the ethnographic discourse has semiotized itself. But in multimedia recordings there may be more openings for the presence of the ethnographic subjects, and the actual pictures may permit some indigenous temporality to be revealed. Some of the original data can be placed in the hands of the audience, and so it may be less reductionist. At the very least, the great narratives of social anthropologists (such as Raymond Firth, author of We the Tikopia), which were written as if the researcher was nowhere on the island or merely viewing events from an earth-orbiting satellite, will be exposed to more risk. When one of the 360˚ digital video cameras are used, the researcher cannot pretend s/he was never there, for they can always be found in the scene when the viewer chooses to turn the camera around. Handled correctly, it could spell the end of the Master Narrative. But these are only potentialities, yet to be proven by the next generation of ethnographers, who will need to invent a set of practices than can re-enliven the local practices of everyday life. Much of the success we have will rest in how effectively we communicate our discoveries and methods to each other.

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Works Cited Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, (1964). ---. The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, (1970). ---. Experience and Judgment, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, (1973). Garfinkel, Harold, and Harvey Sacks, “On Formal Structures of Practical Actions,” in John McKinney and E. Tiryakian, Theoretical Sociology, NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts, (1970). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, London: Rout­ ledge, (1962). Schutz, Alfred, Phenomenology of the Social World, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, (1967). ---. Collected Papers, Vol. I, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, (1962).

Digital Communities of Representation: Wittgenstein to Brazilian Motoboys Alberto López Cuenca

This paper addresses a concern of a work in progress that deals in a very wide sense with epistemological continuism and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In what follows, I consider the question of epistemological continuism specifically through what happens to representation in what sociologist Scott Lash (2002) calls “information society.” Most of my text is devoted to reconstructing Lash’s position regarding representation in order to frame it within a more general notion of “epistemological continuism” inspired by the work of Wittgenstein. I argue that it is misguided to think—as Lash does—that the modern idea of representation, as an intermediary between subject and object, collapses under the conditions imposed by contemporary technologies of communication due to the untenability of a transcendental subject. I show that from a Wittgensteinian perspective, we can make sense of technological immanentism (i.e. the claim that there is no more subject than a bodily-incarnated and socially-related one) without claiming that representation is untenable. Once I have done so, I briefly present an art project working with a group of motorbike delivery boys (“motoboys”) in the city of São Paulo and employing multimedia cell phone technology. My point here is to stress how digital representation can work as a non-epistemological means of binding together a community. In this sense, a Wittgensteinian “epistemological continuism” can produce a telling account of how representation may work within digital communities. This is possible only to the

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extent that we take representation as mediation among subjects and experience and as a practice which goes beyond a disinterested cognitive attitude towards the world, i.e. to the extent that we consider representation’s non-epistemological bearings. I nformation Society, Technological Culture and the Collapse of Representation That representations may have non-epistemological implications is far from being a commonplace. Since the Modern epistemological turn representations have been widely held as a means to capture, refer and know reality. Martin Heidegger argues convincingly in “The Age of the World Picture” how representation came to be a synonym of modern knowledge.1 It is through representation that the opposed spheres of subject and object paradoxically come to be at the same time separated and connected.2 Although this predominant conception of representation as quantitative abstract knowledge has become almost a common sense idea, it can be argued that many forms of representation—from the drawings at Lascaux to the Sistine Chapel and The Simpsons—have worked not only as means to capture the world but also as a practice that gathers individuals together. In recent academic works the non-epistemological “side effects” of representation show up as a regular topic.3 However, 1 “The fact that whatever is comes into being in and through representedness transforms the age in which this occurs into a new age in contrast to the preceding one. The expressions “world picture” and “modern world picture” both mean the same thing and both assume something that never could have been before, namely, a medieval and an ancient world picture.” (Heidegger 130) 2 “Man becomes the representative of that which is, in the sense of that which has the character of object.” (Heidegger 132). 3 A good overview of the confrontation between “epistemologists” and “ontologists” regarding representation is presented by Clare Hemmings, “Invoking Affect. Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn,” Cultural Studies,

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current reflections reach the point of considering representationas-knowledge as totally untenable. In order to do so these reflections highlight the non-epistemological aspects of the practice of representing—and so claiming the collapse of representation or the advent of “non-representational theories.”1 As a token of this I would like to present the view of the American sociologist Scott Lash regarding the role of representation in what he calls “contemporary information society.” In his Critique of Information, Lash holds that criticism has always needed a detached place from where to develop its reflection. Lash understands that criticism in the modern sense of the word was in need of a privileged “transcendental” space to develop its task—a space that Lash finds unthinkable in our global information age (vii). I will not address here the main topic of Critique of Information—namely, whether or not we can nowadays conceive of a criticism with no transcendentals. However, in order to answer this question about the possibility of a contemporary criticism, Lash puts forward a compelling description of culture, communication and knowledge in our days. In that broad picture of technological society, representation becomes a blue flower. In what follows, I reflect upon the presuppositions on which Lash builds this picture. The cornerstone of Lash´s argument is that information society is characterized by instant communication. By contrast with other means of codifying and delivering data—like writing— Lash argues that “The media society’s paradigmatic unit of culture is ‘communication,’ which in its brevity, speed and ephemerality is taking over from narrative and discourse as the axial principle of culture” (viii). The main characteristics of this “unit of culture” are flow, disembeddedness, spatial and temporal vol. 19, No. 5, September 2005, pp. 548-567. For the specific issue of art, see a quite disputable argument by Simon O’Sullivan, “The Aesthetics of Affect. Thinking Art beyond Representation,” Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, vol. 6, No. 3, December 2001, pp. 125-135. 1 See specially Thrift (2008).

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compression, and real-time relations. According to Lash, these are aspects that make our age differ from any other previous stage in history. Thus, “[t]here is immediacy to information that has little in common with systems of belief like Christianity or the Enlightenment. The very speed and ephemerality of information leaves almost no time for reflection” (1). Lash develops this idea that there is no time for reflection (due to the ‘immediacy’ of information) as follows: Reflexivity in the technological culture is not a separate process of reflection. There is no time, no space for such reflection. There is fusion of words and things, of thought and practice. To think is not just at the same time to do; to think is at the same time to communicate. In the technological culture, reflexivity becomes practice; it becomes communication. (18)

Reflection is then integrated into communication. This is so because for Lash in our current information society we are connected to others and the world in general. In our society, we communicate and we do so because we are interfaced. Lash goes on to write that In technological forms of life we make sense of the world through technological systems. As sense-makers, we operate less like cyborgs than interfaces. These interfaces of human and machines are conjunctions of organic and technological systems. Organic systems work on a physiological model. Technological systems work on a cybernetic model. Cybernetic, self-regulating systems work through functions of intelligence, command, control and communication. We do not merge with these systems but we face our environment in our interface with technological systems. (15)

The speed and ephemerality in which information technology connects us makes it impossible to detach ourselves from experience and so prevents us from opening up a space for reflection. One of the implications of this picture pointed by Lash is

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that we cannot achieve sociality apart from our machine interface. We cannot achieve sociality in the absence of technological systems (Lash 16). Let me summarize very briefly the main ideas presented so far: 1) contemporary information society is characterized by ‘communication’ as the basic unit of culture; 2) communication is distinguished by flow, disembeddedness, spatial and temporal compression, and real-time relations; 3) the speed and brevity of communication leave no time for reflection; 4) we face our environment in our interface with technological systems; 5) we can achieve sociality only through these technological systems. This is the general picture of information society that Lash presents. Let me now call your attention to two basic epistemological assumptions that underlie this portrait. The first one is that “[i]n technological forms of life, the transcendental term is flattened into the empirical. The dualism of epistemology and ontology is flattened into the radical monism of technology” (16). The second assumption is that representation is no longer possible in the way it was experienced in the past due to the immediacy and immanence of the information order. The main epistemological consequence of these two assumptions put together amounts to erasing the distance between subject and object. Indeed, for Lash there is no longer a gap between subject and object that representation has to fill. In this sense, the information age would bring with it a technological transformation of experience, knowledge and subjectivity. The core of this transformation is what Lash calls a “radical empiricism” or “immanentism.”1 As Lash writes 1 It is worth mentioning what Nigel Thrift writes about what knowledge becomes from the perspective of non-representational theory: “I hope I have already hinted, by using the term ‘style’, that in non-representational theory what counts as knowledge must take on a radically different sense. It becomes something tentative, something which no longer exhibits an epistemological bias but is a practice and is a part of practice” (121).

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Thus in forms of life, knowledge takes place in the life-world, through the subject, through the subject understood as life (the body, class interest, the unconscious, the will to power). Through being no longer above things, but in the world with things, we come to grips not with epistemology and appearances, but with deeper ontological structures (15)

It is in this way that Lash brings to an end modern epistemology understood as “representation of the world by a transcendental subject.” Now, epistemology is to be understood as “technological communication in the life world.” … representational culture presumes an effective dualism, a distance between subject and object. In the representational culture the subject is in a different world than things. Previously existing transcendence and dualism is displaced by the immanence, monism. There are two dualisms at stake here. One is between the subject, whether reader, audience or viewer, and the cultural entity s/he encounters. The other is between this cultural entity and the reality it more or less fully represents. Relationships between all three of these elements –subject, cultural object and real object– are distanciated in the repre­sentational culture. In the technological culture, all three are in the same world, in the same immanent world (156)

Lash devotes a full chapter of his book (“Technological Phenomenology”) to argue in favor of the collapse of representation in the information age. He does so relying, on the one hand, in the notion of “play” as was presented by Johan Huizinga in his book Homo Ludens (1938) and, on the other hand, in the “empirical phenomenology” of sociologist Harold Garfinkel. Let me stress the two central ideas presented in that chapter against representation (and so against the distance modern epistemology established between subject and object) and in favor of an immanentist epistemology: 1) The first one is that global information society does not connect to the representational culture but to the technological culture. And the paradigm of play is central to this technological culture (164). According to Lash,

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Representational culture speaks the language of correspondence. Without representation, metaphor has no sense. Play´s magical language is metonymic, not metaphoric. There is no symbolic correspondence between the man and the kangaroo. Instead the man becomes the kangaroo, hence the significance of the metonymic mask in play. Metaphor works through repre­sentation, metonymy through substitution. Play, contends Huizinga, is the first, the original translation of nature into culture. (158)

2) The second idea is that subjects are empirically connected with other subjects and the world. And so, against the visual and individualistic stance of modern epistemology, Lash highlights the crucial role of the community. In the representational culture, social knowledge was the mirror of social nature. Knowledge stood apart from society as culture did from nature. At issue is classical positivism. I draw on phenomenology, and in particular on the work of Harold Garfinkel, to give and account of how knowledge in the technological culture is no longer above or transcendent to but immanent in, so to speak, social nature… (156)

To conclude this summary of the characteristics of information society that leads to the collapse of representation that Lash argues for in Critique of Information let me highlight two points: 1. For Lash the fact that in information society we are connected or interfaced with communication technologies implies that we as subjects are already in the world with objects. For him, this means that there is no disembodied subject, that there is no objective observer as it was presupposed by modern epistemology (164). There is, then, no epistemological distance between subject and object that representation would have to fill in. 2. For Lash information society’s reliance on communication explains the central role that communities play nowadays. Unlike representation, the mark of technological forms of life is “presence.” This is why he writes that

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Here representation involves a representing subjectivity, exter­ nalizing his or her subjectivity as representations. In presentation meaning is not created by a disembedded and individualized subject, but inheres in situated ongoing practices or activities. In presentation aesthetic is not a property of a subject to be externalized in art but instead inseparable from the Sittlichkeit, and the Sitten (or habits) of the community (90)

 ction and Community: Views A from a Wittgensteinian Epistemology In my view, although Lash offers some suggestive insights into contemporary information society, his Critique of Information merely manages to gather some compelling symptoms of contemporary society’s technological practices. From these symptoms Lash tends to make general and bold statements about—among other issues—knowledge and the redefinition of subjectivity that are poorly argued (if argued at all). I think that his rendering of “information society” could be more clearly understood if conceptualized through a more precise framework, one constructed neither out of solely sociological or technological vocabularies but in epistemological terms.1 I think it is worth noting that the current academic tendency that favors non-representational theories has, among others, a crucial background in the work of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.2 In chapter 2 of Critique of Information, entitled “Technological Forms of Life,” Lash seeks to provide the main characteristics of life in information society, and in so doing he almost casually mentions Wittgenstein as follows cf. Lash’s conviction that only social science is ready for the task of understanding the current technological situation: “First it is only critical social science that will even probelmatize the information age. While the philosophers, anthropologists and aestheticians will speak in absolutes, ignoring the centrality of socio-cultural change, and the transition to the global information culture” (10). 2 Thrift (2008, 121) 1

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But the idea of forms of life –the lineage of Wittgenstein’s notion– is intrinsically anti-positivist. Life here is not organicist but vitalist; it is phenomenological. Thus the centrality of life or ‘life-force’ in Lebensphilosophie: of Nietzsche, Bergson, Dilthey and Georg Simmel (and in the novel, Proust and Joyce). There is a shift here from the disembodied Cartesian ego to the ‘life’ of the body, from cognition to perception; from Newtonian time to the time of experience. (14)

By contrast with Lash, I believe that within a Wittgensteinian epistemology we can account for continuism (or immanentism, as Lash writes) at the same time that we can make sense of representation as a distinct practice. We can make sense of these two aspects on the basis of emphasizing the performative character of representation. This stance is clearly stated in a famous section early in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question, and command?—There are countless kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call “symbols,” “words,” “sentences.” And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten. Review the multiplicity of language-game in the following examples, and in others:  Giving orders, and obeying them—  Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements—  Constructing an object from a description (a drawing)—  Reporting an event—  Speculating about an event—  Forming and testing a hypothesis—  Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams—  Making up a story; and reading it—  Play-acting—  Singing catches— 

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Guessing riddles—  Making a joke; telling it—  Solving a problem in practical arithmetic—  Translating from one language into another—  Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying. It is interesting to compare the multiplicity of the tools in language and of the ways they are used, the multiplicity of kinds of word and sentence, with what logicians have said about the structure of language.( Including the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) (PI §23)1 

The basic point made by Wittgenstein here is to stress what we do with language. We do many more things than just “representing” the world. In so doing, he is stressing the performative character of language—and of any sort of representation for that matter.2 The implications that the information age has upon society and the subject that Lash presents from a sociological point of view, Wittgenstein had previously introduced them as an epistemological transformation of the subject. This subject is no longer the logical condition of possibility of experience but is part of experience understood as a network of intersubjective relations where knowledge and consciousness originate. When And it is indeed interesting making the comparison because Wittgenstein held in the Tractatus that the task of language (and actually of any meaningful representation) is basically to represent the world: “What a picture represents is its sense” (TLP 2.221). “The proposition is a picture of reality” (4.01). “A proposition shows its sense. A proposition shows how things stand if it is true. And it says that they do so stand” (4.022). “Propositions represent the existence and non-existence of states of affairs” (4.1). 2 That language is not just representation is also the key concern of the work of John Austin and his “speech act theory.” More to the point, Austin stressed that mere representation of the world made through statements is also performative” and stating is only one among very numerous speech acts of the illocutionary class. Furthermore, in general the locutionary act as much as the illocutionary is an abstraction only: every genuine speech act is both” (147). I thank Dennis Skocz for calling my attention to this point. 1

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Wittgenstein used the notion “form of life” (as when he wrote that “to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life,” PI §19) he did so in order to integrate language into everyday practice. Once Wittgenstein makes speaking a language a form of life, he presents the subject necessarily related to a whole community as producer of meaning and also as producer of life.1 In his writings since the 1930’s, Wittgenstein proposes an “epistemological continuism.” In Philosophical Investigations (1953) and On Certainty (1969) he conspicuously argues that knowledge is a more complex process than a detached representation of the world. However, that the knowing subject is inextricably embedded in experience does not imply that representation loses its function. As Lash correctly argues, there is no need of a transcendental subject anymore in order to account for knowledge and communication. Nonetheless, against Lash, representation can be understood as a distinct practice in a continuist or immanentist world of experience. It may not be the unique source of knowledge but that does not mean that representation is not a distinct practice that plays a substantial affective and community making role. Representation without a transcendental detachment of the world is what Wittgenstein offers.2 That Wittgenstein holds that language requires a community of speakers to develop is a most discussed issue. It is a view presented by Saul Kripke (1982) and refuted by, among others, McGuinn (1984) and Baker and Hacker (1984, 1990). This “community hypothesis” was then taken up and notably defended by Malcolm (1986, 1989). I agree with Malcolm that if we discard the “community hypothesis” then all the new and important in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy would be dismissed (Malcolm, Nothing 171). 2 The role and importance of pictures, images and representation as a whole in the later work of Wittgenstein has not been properly discussed yet. In part this is so because most of the discussion about representation still spins around the “picture theory” of the proposition presented in the Tractatus. See Kristóf Nyíri (2005), where he quotes Jaakko Hintikka in this regard: “discussions of whether Wittgenstein ‘gave up the picture theory’ in his later philosophy offer an instructive example of the confusion one inevitably runs into if 1

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On the basis of the foregoing, I disagree with Lash in two respects. First, he underestimates the notion of “form of life”;1 and second, the context in which Wittgenstein uses the notion “form of life” underlines life not yet as “vitalist” or “phenomenological”—as Lash suggests—but more generally as “action” and “practice.” Basically, insofar as one is part of a form of life as a speaker, one is part of a bigger community of action and knowledge. Language as a mode of representation—and so any sort of representation—is at its root action and interaction with others. I find this to be the cornerstone for the above mentioned epistemological framework that could account consistently for the symptoms of information society. How could human behavior be described? Surely only by sketching the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. What determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions, is not what one man is doing now, an individual action, but the whole hurly-burly of human actions, the background against which we see any action (Wittgenstein, Zettel §567).2

In order to intertwine language, knowledge and action, Wittgenstein coined the now famous term “language-game.” Regarding this notion, he wrote that “… the term ‘language-game’ is one does not distinguish the different components of the syndrome that usually goes by the name ‘Wittgenstein’s picture theory’.” (“An Anatomy of Wittgenstein’s Picture Theory,” Ludwig Wittgenstein: Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half-Truths, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996, p. 21). 1 A bit earlier he writes that “form of life” is just “a way of life, a way of doing things” (13). 2 “The origin and the primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language -I want to sayis a refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed.’” (Wittgenstein, Culture 311) “Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end; -but the end is not certain propositions’ striking us immediately as true, i.e. it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game.” (Wittgenstein, Culture §204).

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meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of a language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (PI 23). These statements show that knowledge is not just representing the world. Knowledge is rather a practice with social, emotional implications. Stanley Cavell poignantly wrote about this condition of language and knowledge: We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts. .. What on the whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of response, senses of humor and of significance and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation –all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls “form of life.” Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this.... (Cavell 52)

In this sense, the later Wittgenstein understands language not as a means to represent and know the world (as he formerly did in his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus) but as diverse communal networks of practices. In brief, I think that this Wittgensteinian approach to language and knowledge sheds light on the role of representation not just as an objective and disinterested way to capture the world but as a mode to produce community due to its non-epistemological grounds. A Digitial Community of Representation: canal*MOTOBOYS1 A clear example of this capacity of “representation as practice” to bind together a community is the work of Catalonian artist Antoni Abad. In his projects, gypsies, prostitutes, migrants, taxi drivers and people with disabilities webcast from cell 1 A detailed presentation of this project can be found in López Cuenca (2007).

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phones to the Internet. canal*MOTOBOY was the latest of his projects and was developed from April 2007 in the city of São Paulo in Brazil. During work day, 12 motoboys (delivery boys) use cellphones to photograph and videotape their environment and send all the information to a web page. At first sight, they are producing their own maps of the city, their cartographies of everyday life. They are, then, making their own representations of the city they inhabit. I don’t mean to deny this. It is clear that canal*MOTOBOY works through images, texts, audio and video. However, its result is not simply “to make visible the reality of motoboys” or “to produce representations that do not fit in traditional commercial media.” Rather than producing a different representation of their everyday life, the actions of the motoboys set in motion strategies of sociability. They produce social relations through the distinct practice of representation. I find that canal*MOTOBOY opens up a space for enunciation and performativity that goes far beyond a mere “representation of the motoboy’s lifestyle.” When they gather together every week to discuss and develop the group strategies; when they organize a panel discussion to consider their project with traffic Town Hall officials and trade union leaders; and, simply, when they choose, tag, and send their video or audio materials to the web page’s project;1 when they do all these, motoboys create and activate a community. It seems clear that taking pictures and uploading them to the web does not explain the strength of this project. The key is not to represent the life of a minority group, but to generate life itself trough the interaction with the social environment, an interaction that is made possible through the practice of representation. And the point here is “practice”–not representation–, because as I have tried to argue in this paper, it is practice that connects us to other subjects and the world. It is practice (also practices made possible by digital technologies) 1 Steels (2007) puts forward a compelling argument in favor of social tagging as the production of social or collective knowledge.

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that fill the gap between subject and object imposed by modern epistemology. Conclusion As a whole, the characteristics of contemporary information society presented by Scott Lash in his Critique of Information seems cogent. That is, contemporary information society is characterized by ‘communication’ as the basic unit of culture and communication is distinguished by flow, disembeddedness, spatial and temporal compression, and real-time relations. However, Lash’s stress on the collapse of representation due to this technological form of life is misguided and, at the end, fruitless. It seems to me that Lash underestimates the role and extent of representation in contemporary society. Representation may not be the basis of any transcendental knowledge but it still has a distinct social function. I have tried to show that we can make sense of the actual performative role of representation through the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In order to do so, I have proposed an expanded epistemology inspired in the later writings of Wittgenstein. By an expanded epistemology I mean the way we produce and relate to knowledge through social relations as opposed to abstract theories of information. In other words, I have suggested that if we ask ourselves about knowledge, we are asking about the way we conceive ourselves as subjects and the way we relate to others and the world. Thus understood, an expanded epistemology must address sociological concerns and problems as well as those of the philosophy of technology. In fact, epistemology needs to work at different fronts such as political science and political economy. And in this process we also have to make sense of representation. For this reason, epistemology has less to do with the modern search for the foundations of knowledge than with the description of what the social function of knowledge—and

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representation—is. In order to illustrate this, I have commented on the community making function that digital representation may held in a project such as canal*MOTOBOY. References Austin, John. (1962) How to make things with words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Baker, Gordon P. y Peter M. S. Hacker. (1984) Scepticism, Rules and Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Baker, Gordon P. y Peter M. S. Hacker. (1990) “Malcolm on Language and Rules” Philosophy, vol.65, pp.167-178. Cavell, Stanley. (1976) “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy” en Must We Mean What We Say. Cambridge, London, New York: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin. (1977). “The age of the world picture,” The question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. London: Harper, 1977. Kripke, Saul. (1982) Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. An Elementary Exposition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Lash, Scott. (2002) Critique of Information. Londres: SAGE. López Cuenca, Alberto. (2007). “A ruta está sendo recalculada. O motoboy e a economia política do afeto,” canal*MOTOBOY. São Paulo: Centro Cultural de España. Malcolm, Norman. (1986) Nothing is Hidden. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Malcolm, Norman. (1989) “Wittgenstein on Language and Rules,” Philosophy, vol.64, No. 247, pp.5-28. McGinn, Colin. (1984) Wittgenstein on Meaning. An Interpretation and Evaluation. Aristotelian Society Series. vol.1. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Nyíri, Kristóf. (2005) “Wittgenstein’s philosophy of pictures”, Wittgenstein: The philosopher and his works, Working Papers from the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen, no. 17, Alois Pichler and Simo Säätelä (eds.), Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen, pp. 281-312. Steels, Luc. (2007) “Community Memories for Sustainable Societys,” http://www.csl.sony.fr/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/annivsteels1.pdf accessed January 14th 2008.

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Thrift, Nigel. (2008) “Life but not as we know it,” Non-Representational Theory. Space, Politics, Affect. Londres y Nueva York: Routledge. Wittgenstein, L. (1980) Culture and Value. Peter Winch (ed.) Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Edición bilingüe. Wittgenstein, L. (1981) Zettel, G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H.V. Wright (Eds.). Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1961) Tractatus logico-philosophicus. London: Routledge & Paul. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1953) Philosophical Investigations. New York: MacMillan. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1969) On Certainty. New York: Harper.

Husserl on the Artist and the Philosopher: Aesthetical and Phenomenological Attitude Sebastian Luft

Introduction In Western Philosophy, there is an old tradition establishing an essential connection between an aesthetic, pleasing contemplation and that of the curiously perceiving theoretical spectator, who is interested in how the “things themselves” really are, both of which points of view are opposed to dealing with things in a pragmatic context (i.e. as artifacts). These two forms of life, that of the artist and the philosopher or scientist, have thus been seen to have something in common, namely their way of viewing and experiencing the world, their “world.” Let me paraphrase this way of experience the common phenomenological term with attitude. These “special” attitudes, long before the disciplines of aesthetics or epistemology came into being, have been referred to as theoria (as e.g. in Aristotle) or, later, as interesseloses Wohlgefallen, disinterested well-pleasing (e.g., in Kant).1 However, whereas the Kantian notion of a disinterested, pleasurable viewing of the world outside of the rigid nexus of causality seems to lead into a purely contemplative aesthetics which can and should be achieved in order to reach a higher realm where we are freed from the “bad” and “mean” world—as Schopenhauer’s aesthetics It is interesting to note that the discipline of aesthetics is actually a very late development within the canonized philosophical systematics of Western philosophy; the first Aesthetics (in the modern sense) comes from Baumgarten in 1750/58: Aesthetica (2 vol.s). Cf. Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. J. Ritter, Darmstadt 1971, Vol. 1, col. 555-64. 1

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would have it1—the Aristotelian notion of theoria still retains a close link between the philosophical and aesthetical attitudes in the following sense. Since the Greek world view (Weltanschauung) conceives of the world as kósmos—which literally means decoration, even jewelry—viewing the world as it really is by philosophical contemplation means perceiving it as a universe of systematic order which is in itself understood as rationally structured and, therefore, beautiful. Philosophical contemplating is thus nothing but viewing the beauty of the world, which is otherwise disclosed to the common, obscured eye. Although the modern view on aesthetic contemplation (I am not talking about the discipline of aesthetics) seems to be rather detached from the sphere of philosophy2—what could be more stern and rigid than philosophy, being thus in strong opposition to the playfulness and beauty of art? This has not always been the case—and needn’t be, either. Furthermore, since, as is wellknown, Husserl conceives of the attitude of the philosopher as a “disinterested onlooker,” it seems that in him we have a modern witness to a position which enables us to reestablish a link between both attitudes which in their own ways open up a universal, totalizing view on the world. It was Husserl himself who drew attention to this more than external parallel. I shall try to show that this position can in fact let us gain a more universal and thus legitimizable view on the role of art in our world. Thus, in my paper I will deal with these issues in four steps: both higher-order attitudes have an underlying stratum from which they emerge. Husserl has called this basic phenomenon of everyday-existence the natural attitude; hence I first want to give 1 Cf. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Part IV. However, although Schopenhauer criticizes Kant’s theory of aesthetic in the Critique of Judgment (essentially for not doing justice to “real” art), his theory could in fact be seen to have the intention to “make” Kant “true.” 2 Although postmodern thought has significantly dealt with art and aesthetics. I believe the philosophico-historical roots for this lie for the most part in Heidegger’s turn to art in the time of his Kehre, cf. “Der Ursprung des Kunsterkes” (1935/36), in: Holzwege, Klostermann 1950, pp. 1-72.

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a short description of this attitude from where it is clear why this attitude has to be overcome (I). Second, I will sketch out Husserl’s theory of the phenomenological reduction, thus inaugurating the philosophical (or in his words: phenomenological) attitude (II). Next, I will elucidate Husserl’s reflections on the aesthetical attitude which can only be understood on the basis of the philosophical attitude. (III). Concluding, I will try to compare both attitudes and give the upshot of this parallel and the way we should account for art in a corresponding aesthetical attitude, thus spelling out Husserl’s intentions (IV). Generally speaking, my interest in this paper lies in the attitude of the one contemplating art, not in its representation or substantiation in concrete art forms, and it is my impression (from my very limited knowledge of this discipline) that contemporary art theory—even that which tries to remain faithful to phenomenological description—has neglected this (correlative) aspect to a certain extent.1 I. The Natural Attitude The objection arising here, naturally, will be: if we intend to talk about the attitude of the artist and the philosopher, why start out the discussion with the “natural” attitude as the basic substratum? Shouldn’t our aim be, precisely, to move away from this basic life form in order to arrive at these “higher-order” phenomena? True, but it is also Husserl’s claim that all human activity rests on this basic phenomenon which he calls the natural attitude. Not only do all actions stem from and come forth from it, but also the philosophical and, respectively, the aesthetical 1 Cf. A. Casebier, Film and Phenomenology (Cambridge 1991), which has the subtitle: “Toward a Realist Theory of Cinematic Representation.” Here we find a fine analysis of cinematographic representation in a Husserlian vein (with, however, mainly taking the Logical Investigations and Ideas I into consideration), however no attention whatsoever is paid to the phenomenon of attitude correlating any kind of cinematographic presentation.

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attitude can only be characterized by that from which both of them radically differ, and that is, again—the natural attitude. Thus, it is indispensable to give a short description of this first attitude to understand the Husserlian conception; however, this first step will also have to show the finitude and limitedness of the natural attitude, for if it were in itself complete and selfsufficient, there would be no necessity to go beyond it. This attitude is determined by the so-called “general thesis of the natural attitude,” meaning that it is our basic belief that the world in which we live, the things and people we have to do with, and ourselves as part of this world, exist.1 In other words, we take this “existing” for granted, as it were, and this implies, to use yet another term, that the being of the world is “objectively” existing (being means being objectively). But a look at this objectivity reveals that it is always objectivity-for an experiencing subjectivity. World is always world-for-us (-for-me, -for-you). This correlation between world and experiencing subjectivity (in the broadest sense) Husserl has called the correlational apriori. Hence, the general thesis implies that the natural attitude knows nothing of this correlation; since we are always intentionally directed towards things “out there” in the world, we neglect that the world is not existing for itself but for an experiencing (“constituting”) subjectivity. The natural attitude is in this sense naive, i.e., oblivious of the true nature of its being. The person in the natural attitude can be seen as (as Husserl sometimes calls it) a “sleeping monad.” The monad has not yet awakened to its actual self-understanding. This naivety can have a positive and a negative connotation. The positive side is that the person living in this natural attitude is not “faulty” of being as he or she is, “always already”; it is not his or her fault to live in this way and therefore not “bad,” but rather the basic mode of life people live in, everybody, no matter who he or she is, when we are in the daily modes of eating breakfast, taking a cab, asking for the time, etc. It is in this sense a 1

Cf. Ideas I, §§ 27-32.

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basic life form we share in the objective world and that even the philosopher has to live in to a certain extent. The negative twist to the natural attitude, however, is that it is nevertheless limited since it is oblivious of the full meaning of this life. Its “straight forward” way of living towards the objective world means it has no notion of the experiencing subjectivity who “has” the world for its experience. It is thus oblivious of its own involvement in the process of having the world. Yet there is still another essential reason why the natural attitude is limited (which is merely an extension of the first notion). Living naturally, we don’t know of this universal horizon called “world,” which is Husserl’s term for the objectivity of being. This normal executing of our life always lives itself out in a certain context or, as Husserl calls it, in a special world (Sonderwelt). Examples of these contextual life forms are the world of the home, of the job, of sports, business, etc. We know of these situational contexts, and we not only always already live in these worlds, but we always and unknowingly live in attitudes corresponding to these special worlds. However, and more significantly, we automatically switch attitudes and usually do so with great virtuosity: the moment we get in a car we switch to the “traffic attitude,” while having immediately phased out the sports attitude we just now occupied while having sat in the baseball stadium, etc. So this switching around between many (maybe innumerable) attitudes corresponding to special worlds goes on within the natural attitude. This behavior is completely normal and thus belongs to the natural attitude itself. But to get at its limitedness, let’s take a look at what is implied in an attitude as such. Within an attitude I have certain experiences, in Husserl’s words: acts, which are directed at something. However, it is the very essence of an act to not have the thing “completely,” I will only see one side or profile of a thing, with the back side unseen. But this back side can be made seen, e.g., by turning the thing around. Hence (to say it in a very condensed

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form) an intentional act has the character of a necessary unfulfilment which points beyond (to a “plus ultra”); it is not isolated but takes place within a referential nexus. However this nexus of pointing beyond is endless, there are always more aspects which are unseen, hence the acts are directed to an endless horizon—and ‘world’ is precisely the name for this horizon. Now adding the phenomenon of attitude to this, it is clear that if all acts stem from an attitude, then this attitude will itself be endless in the sense that there is no limit to the acts to be directed from the horizon of an attitude correlating the horizon of the world these acts are directed to. Considering that we are talking of special worlds and attitudes, we can now clarify what is limited about them. If each attitude is directed towards its endless horizon, it can essentially never transcend this horizon. But we were speaking of special worlds: that of sports, that of business, etc. There is no criteria to privilege one over the other. They are, in other words, relative upon each other. But if being in one attitude means never coming to an end within its confines, then this attitude does not realize its relativity. In other words, it takes itself as absolute. And this is precisely its limitedness: it sets itself as absolute where it is in fact only relative. But have we not said before that our natural life is always already carried out in such a way that we constantly switch between attitudes? Yes, but we are naive about it, we are not aware of doing so. This does not mean to blur the distinction between the relativities, but this in fact proves their “existence,” since it is one part of this natural attitude to not be aware about this what “always already” goes on—and besides, it does happen that one gets, as it were, “stuck” in one attitude, be it that one has a car accident by being attuned to the voice on the radio or that of his boss minutes before, etc., and down to what we call plain “narrow-mindedness,” which means precisely somebody’s inability to see the world differently than from his or her point of view.1 1 However, it does not take a philosopher to detect simple narrow-mindedness! For a more detailed treatment of the theory of the natural attitude, cf.

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II. The Reduction and the Phenomenological Attitude Thus, if the task of philosophy is to overcome any kind of unreflected presuppositions, it is clear from what has been said that the naivety of the natural attitude must be made explicit, and making it explicit means already having gone beyond it. But what exactly is the reason for this leaving behind, if ‘naivety’ is to mean more than a mere polemical term? Simply put: If the one living in the natural attitude does not know of this essential relativity, he or she cannot claim to have full self-transparency about him- or herself. If philosophy in its most original sense is about enlightening humankind and oneself, it makes sense postulating to overcome the natural attitude in order to gain a universal, uninhibited view on life. The method Husserl employs in order to attain this is the phenomenological reduction. Without wanting to delve too deeply into this method of revealing transcendental subjectivity, I want to focus on the “metaphilosophical” intentions Husserl pursues in this method. Very generally speaking, uncovering transcendental subjectivity is nothing but revealing humankind’s most essential possibilities as a rational being. In doing so, it is radical self-introspection and inquiry. If it is about the loss of naivety, then one task in this methodic step is to reveal these relativities we are stuck in the natural attitude. This does not in any way mean annihilating them—so little as the reduction means gaining a view from nowhere or living in an ivory tower—but understanding them in their relativity. Thus, the natural attitude cannot be abandoned or nullified, it can only be understood.1 It is this full understanding that Husserl means by the term absolute, the attaining of which being an endless limit idea. It is only then that each individual can my “Husserl’s Phenomenological Discovery of the Natural Attitude,” in Continental Philosophy Review 31 (1998), pp. 153-170. 1 Cf. Cartesian Meditations, The Hague 1950 (transl. D. Cairns), p. 151: “phenomenological explication does nothing but explicate the sense this world has for us all, prior to any philosophizing, and obviously gets solely from our experience—a sense which philosophy can uncover but never alter ....”

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claim for him- or herself to completely legitimize one’s own actions, if they are understood in the absolute, encompassing consciousness of transcendental life. Thus, the philosopher in Husserl’s view (the one performing the reduction) is not leaving the world, is not detaching him- or herself from action or dispensing oneself from responsibility; rather, he or she is (and is only then) the full person (or monad), fully awakened to the understanding of one’s own ultimate possibilities. It is only then that he or she can claim to take over responsibility for one’s own actions and for those of everybody else—everybody else, in other words, who has not come to the realization of being caught in the confines of the natural attitude. From this perspective we can understand Husserl’s characterization of the philosophers as “functionaries of mankind.”1 In this tour de force in outlining the meaning of the reduction, I have skipped the question of how this reduction is at all motivated. If the natural attitude is so limited and in this limitedness at the same time endless, how can it ever be possible to overcome it? Is this not futile or an undertaking comparable to that of the legendary baron Münchhausen who pulls himself out of the swamp by his own hair? Husserl has had some trouble coming to terms with this problem which he clearly saw, but has tried to give a number of answers. One solution is comparable to the Platonian-Aristotelian thaumázein. It is astonishment that comes over certain individuals which renders them speechless before the beauty of the cosmos and leads them to abandon their old dogmas and beliefs and to gain a new position on the world, that of the pure theoria. Husserl once, in a letter to the poet von Hofmannsthal, frames it in another ancient metaphor: As soon as the sphinx of knowledge has posed its question, as soon as we have gazed into the abysmal problem of the possibility of a knowledge which is carried out only in subjective 1 Cf. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston 1970), p. 17.

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experiences and yet grasps an objectivity existing for itself, then our stance on all pregiven knowledge and on all pregiven being [...] has become radically different. Everything [has become] questionable, everything incomprehensible, enigmatic!1

Thus, the philosopher—or, strictly speaking, he/she who becomes a philosopher by experiencing this being overcome by unanswerable questions, does not become so by his or her own will or initiative, but because enigmatic questions arise and pose themselves. The sphinx of knowledge is a metaphor for genuine curiosity originally inborn in the human race, which is always already covered up by the situational concerns and everyday problems of the natural attitude. In other words, one becomes drawn in into this sphere which detaches us from this original state of affairs, a sphere where everything we once took as known, becomes enigmatic. We have now become “disinterested spectators” “above” the natural attitude. This sphere we are now attuned to in an uninterested way, to Husserl, is nothing but that of radical self-introspection which one has no knowledge of in the natural attitude. It is the sphere of the full and real self which is still a terra incognita2 in the beginning, after having just performed the reduction, but which we can inquire into. And in Husserl’s belief in philosophy as rigorous science, we are called upon to systematically analyze it as “disinterested spectators.” But this “sphere” or “region” as one can metaphorically call it, is of course radically different from any (actual) sphere in the world. This means, concretely speaking, that we cannot have any preconception of the typicality of that which we are about to experience as we have in worldly experience: whatever I will encounter in the world I will know in its typicality (e.g., I might not know this certain thing, 1 From Husserl’s letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Jan. 12, 1907, in: Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, ed. by Karl and Elisabeth Schuhmann, Dordrecht/Boston/London 1993, Husserliana-Dokumente III/7, p. 134 (my translation). Cf. also Hua. XXIV, p. 397 ff. 2 As such, Husserl also calls it “das gelobte Land” (the “promised land”) of philosophy. Cf. Hua. V, p. 161.

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but I will understand it is a thing, etc.). Performing the reduction means giving up on any preconceived typicality without which we could not live naturally. So, we can say, we have reduced ourselves to absolute poverty of knowledge, we know nothing of that which is “to come.” But this “poverty” is not an impoverishment; quite to the contrary: it harbors an absolute potentiality or freedom: since we are not limited in any way by relativities whatsoever, we have the theoretical freedom of thinking through every possibility, of entering any sphere of the mind. Everything is possible and thinkable, we can enjoy the theoretical delight, as it were, to let our thoughts roam freely, to try out new possibilities, to let ourselves be creative, etc. This freedom is thus the mark of creativity which great thought harbors and which is opposed to the relativities and pragmatically oriented ways of thought of everyday existence, where our considerations are always limited by their pragmatic context. Philosophical thought as Husserl understands it, is the absolutely unleashed and instantiated freedom of the rational mind which is open toward every region of the world and every possibility to be thought through by imagination—however not in this “playful” sense alone but in order to fulfill the very essence of humanity in a responsible and legitimized way by systematically working through the now open horizons of problems. If I may say so, phenomenology is emphatically “joyful science.” I realize that I have now characterized Husserl’s view of the philosophical attitude in quite an unorthodox way; however, my aim was to spell out Husserl’s concrete intentions on the one hand (which all too often are covered up by his sometimes cryptic talk of the transcendental life) and on the other to formulate it in a way to be in a position to compare it to the aesthetical attitude, which I shall undertake now.

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III. The Aesthetical Attitude Husserl’s claim is now that the philosophical and aesthetical attitudes have essential features in common, and if this is so, they must share this commonality over against its opposite focal point: the natural attitude. Let’s again see what Husserl has to say about the aesthetical attitude, once more quoting from Husserl’s famous letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Contemplation of a purely aesthetical art-piece is carried out in rigorous inhibition of any existential positing [Stellungnahme] by the intellect or every positing by feeling and will, which presuppose an existential positing. Or more precisely: The artpiece puts us in the position of (as it were, draws us into) a state of purely aesthetical contemplation which excludes every positing. The more the existential world is posited or is called upon in its liveliness, the more existential positing the art-piece asks for .... the less aesthetically pure is it. .... [The “existential attitude” is] the counter-pole to the mental attitude [Geis­teshaltung] of purely aesthetical contemplation and of the state of mood accompanying it.1

Although Husserl is certainly a child of his time, especially in his privileging of the “aesthetically pure” art-piece (which is 1 “Die Anschauung eines rein ästhetischen Kunstwerks vollzieht sich in strenger Ausschaltung jeder existenzialen Stellungnahme des Intellects und jeder Stellungnahme des Gefühls u. Willens, die solche eine existenziale Stellungnahme voraussetzt. Oder besser: Das Kunstwerk versetzt uns (erzwingt es gleichsam) in den Zustand rein ästhetischer, jene Stellungnahme ausschließenden Anschauung. Je mehr von der Existenzialen Welt anklingt oder lebendig herangezogen wird, je mehr an existenzialer Stellungnahme das Kunstwerk von sich aus anfordert [...], um so weniger ist das Werk ästhetisch rein. [...] [Die natürliche Einstellung ist] der Gegenpol zur Geisteshaltung der rein ästhetischen Anschauung und der ihr entsprechenden Gefühlslage.” Op. cit., p. 133 f. (my translation). It should be added that this letter is from 1907, when Husserl had just “discovered” the method of the phenomenological reduction, and hence his terminology is not yet fully developed. However, I think it is clear from the content that this description of the “positing” of the “existential world” is essentially the same phenomenon as that what he, as of 1913 (firstly in the Ideas I), terms “natural attitude.”

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apparently purer the less sensual representation it has1)—and in no way do I want to defend this—let us see, rather, what we can get out of this definition in comparison with what has been said regarding the philosophical attitude in order to gain a more satisfying picture of what Husserl can offer for a theory of the aesthetical attitude. The first feature both the philosophical and aesthetical attitudes have in common is that, according to Husserl, both of them no longer stand on the basis of the natural attitude. Aesthetical contemplation, just as philosophical theorizing, excludes any positing of something as existing. Does that mean what we contemplate in the aesthetical attitude is less real or even nonexisting? Not at all. Rather, what goes on in the “aesthetical reduction,” as we may call it, is a certain neutrality modification, which means that we no longer are in the usual, pragmatic contexts (the special worlds in their relativity) but in a different stance which is completely different from the usual special attitudes. In other words, the world is now not posited as existing— as it is in one way or the other in any natural attitude—but is turned into a phenomenon. In the neutrality modification it has the index of the “as if.” This does not in any way mean it is less real for us contemplators, but we have detached ourselves from the pragmatic context of our everyday existence and view the world in the mode of the “as if.”2 We have become “disinterested spectators” in the sense that we view the totality of what is outside of any pragmatically limited context. So if we see a “normal” scene of such a pragmatic context in, say, a painting or a movie, it is clear that we are not participating in it, on the one hand (we are unparticipating spectators), and on the other, it in no way means that we are not seeing this scene 1 One might note that Schopenhauer was one of the first philosophers Husserl read in his youth. Schopenhauer’s privileging of music over every other art form might play a role in Husserl’s position here. 2 Cf. Husserliana VIII, pp. 112-120 (on positional and quasi-positional acts).

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as what it is—a pragmatic one—or that we cannot partake in the emotions it evokes (sadness or happiness, etc.) but that we do so in the mode of the “as if ”: this scene is as if it were real (and the better the art piece the better its depiction1). However the compassion or sorrow I feel is in fact real; there is no feelingas-if. However, this feeling I have which accompanies my contemplation is detached from myself in the sense that it is in fact my pain, etc., but not pertaining to me, although by the law of motivation this scene might remind me of a similar event I myself might have witnessed earlier. I am detached from it in the sense that I do not merely perceive it as something I myself have to engage in but which reveals to me the “truth” of this context as such. So, one might ask, what is so special about this contemplating if the only difference between witnessing it in my daily existence and that of contemplating it in an art piece is that one is in fact real and the other is experienced as phenomenon? This neutralizing of the existing world can only occur on the basis that every special attitude within the natural attitude is limited to its certain world: the world of sports, of business, etc. But the reason these attitudes are limited is precisely because they are limited to that existing world. The sports attitude cannot transcend the world of sports, etc. However, the aesthetical attitude (alongside the philosophical one) on the other hand has the freedom to view all of these special worlds in the aesthetical attitude, precisely because it neutralizes the existence positing in the same way as in the phenomenological reduction. If the whole world becomes aesthetically reduced, everything in it can be viewed in this modification as aesthetical. The whole world has taken on a new meaning, and once this new attitude has been attained, it is impossible to go back into the old state of affairs. Art can reveal the In this sense, I would object to Husserl’s thesis that the art piece is “purer” the less “existentiality” it has. As it is, one would have to define the sense of “pure” here more in detail. 1

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world to us as it has never been seen before, precisely by showing us the world as it always and usually is, but in an attitude in which it has never been attained before. As such, it can for the first time truly open up the world for us. The Mona Lisa can for the first time reveal to us what it means to look ambiguously. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony can reveal to us what it means to be afraid of death. We are seeing the same world, but with new eyes. Now there seems to be another parallel to the philosophical attitude which is important to Husserl, namely the question of how this attitude can be attained. It is precisely this power the art piece can gain over us which draws us into its realm, and that means, correlatively speaking, to lift us up out of the natural attitude. The encounter with art can stun us, bewilder us, scare us, fascinate us, giving us experiences that radically break open the attitude we live in normally. Being as such, it shows us not only the world, but also ourselves in a different light. This radical change of attitude means nothing else than getting to know ourselves in a way that is impossible in any context within the natural attitude. This break in our normal living can happen by a slow shifting, e.g., in a realist painting where the scene presented seems to be almost like a photo with nothing special about it—but it is this normality in the depiction that we would otherwise never see because we are always already immersed in the context depicted now. Or the break can be drastic, even violent, when our whole style of perception is changed, e.g., in surrealistic paintings where the whole act of seeing is called into question (and the same would go for a 12 tone symphony in the tonal art piece). In short, the art piece has the power to lift us out of the natural attitude. In this sense, what motivates the aesthetical reduction is nothing but art itself, thus changing our whole attitude in a way that it excludes the general positing of the being of the world. If this attitude is attained, it is not the world that has changed, it is rather ourselves who have changed our view on the world and ourselves as a whole, in a way that we see the world as

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we never could before. Whereas everything is called into question, becomes enigmatic, a new meaning, a new sense arises through art which make us understand the world more fully. This understanding is again not radically different from natural “knowledge” but makes this understanding explicit. The aesthetical reduction thus does not alter the sense of the world, but places it into an encompassing, universal understanding which is in this very universality comparable to the phenomenological reduction. It is from here that we can, in conclusion, spell out the philosophical consequences from this analogy. I V. Philosophical and Aesthetical Attitudes as Ways of Understanding the World Now, if the phenomenological and the aesthetical reduction can be compared and in this sense explicated, as Husserl has it, then there must be, in conclusion, one more parallel which can show us the consequence for the role of art in the system of philosophy, as well as give us a clue for a phenomenological theory of art. Probably the most important trait of the phenomenological attitude is the freedom of thought which it can attain due to its detachment from the natural attitude where nothing is principally unknown but pre-known in its typicality. Since it has no typicality in its new sphere, it begins at the point of absolute poverty but from there has the ability to build up sound and philosophically legitimate knowledge in absolute freedom and as such serve humanity’s inborn telos of self-understanding. If the parallel between both attitudes is plausible, this must also hold for the aesthetical attitude. And it is, I believe, in fact so. There is no sphere where there is more freedom than in art. Art has no limits whatsoever, “everything goes” here, we are not bound to space and time and their laws. Likewise, the aesthetical reduction reduces the aesthetical spectator to absolute poverty:

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he or she cannot take over any preconceived notions from the original sphere, but this poverty proves to be the greatest richness for the absolute freedom of human activity, beginning from thought but extending to every form of human behavior. However, it is this far-reaching extending which makes it so powerful. For this “anything goes” is not to be mistaken with arbitrariness. And this is where this freedom is limited and in this it is again conceived in parallel to the role of philosophy. The philosopher as a “functionary of mankind” must not just enjoy his theoretical contemplation and thus remain detached from the world, but he or she must re-inworld him- or herself, make the results of this research known to others and as such take over responsibility for humankind as such, which is nothing else than that which he or she has revealed in regressing back into the depths of one’s transcendental subjectivity, where he or she will find nothing but the essence of subjectivity as such, which reveals itself to be transcendental intersubjectivity. Likewise does the artist have a duty for mankind. Art’s purpose is not mere aesthetical well-pleasing which offers a certain “relaxation” from our everyday life, but the artist must partake in the universal task to understand humanity—not in the scientific sense, i.e., as philosophy as rigorous science (and any other positive science) does, but in its own way and in its own forms of realizing the freedom of humankind as such which is no longer bound to any particular set of values or contexts. What Schiller has once said about theatre thus would in Husserl’s eyes apply to art as such: it must be a “moral institution” (moralische Anstalt), not in the sense of teaching people a certain set of values but of posing existential questions, e.g., what value as such is life, death, being? Delving into the depths of the human soul, it must then likewise “reinworld” itself (in a concrete art form) in order to have the concrete possibility to draw people into it or, meaning the same thing, lift them up out of the natural attitude. In this sense, this position would radically be opposed to that of,

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say, Adorno, according to whom “lyrics after Ausschwitz is impossible.” Quite to the contrary, art is called upon to assume its role in the context of a humane world. It would be absurd, say, to view a movie like Schindler’s List in an aesthetical attitude in the ordinary sense (as a purely disinterested well-pleasing). More than that, it would be irresponsible. This movie can only be understood if viewed in its enlightening function. But whereas philosophy in the Husserlian sense is bound to scientific analysis and systematic knowledge, it seems to me that art is much freer in the possibilities of its stylistic formations, and this is the reason it can have much more impact on people, since it doesn’t have to theorize to make its point. Rather, it has the freedom of a truly playful, joyful wisdom which has by far not been exhausted. Forms of this freedom which are external to philosophy would be satire, where something is grossly exaggerated for the sake of emphasis; irony, where something is said “around the corner” or from its opposite extreme; humor, which makes it possible to attack somebody without hurting his or her feelings; allegory, where constellations or structures become transparent; metaphor, where something is expressed precisely in its special and precious nature which otherwise would have remained hidden—and all other forms and devices we love art for.1 Thus, I want to end these considerations on a more jocular note. At the end of his letter to von Hofmannsthal, Husserl becomes aware of this role as rigorous philosopher and actually transgresses this sphere in a self-ironical, self-referential way: [Here goes] the incorrigible and genuine professor [again]! He cannot open his mouth without giving a lecture.… I shall not even begin saying anything about your works. I think you are indifferent enough towards praise as well as criticism and wise I want to leave open the question what this would mean for an aesthetics where these disciplines are precisely merged, e.g. in Nietzsche’s “philosophy,” in which it is his point that philosophy becomes aestheticized. Certainly, for Husserl it would be unhealthy to merge disciplines. But maybe in this point Husserl is mistaken. 1

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talk of any sort. And certainly and visibly do you know the three golden rules of the artist (in the broadest sense), which are at the same time the open secrets of all true grandeur, namely: 1) that he have genius; this he has in any case, otherwise he is no artist; 2) that he follow purely and only his demon in the way it drives him from inside to spectating-blind effecting; 3) Everybody else knows it better anyway, thus he ought to view them all—either aesthetically or phenomenologically.1

Letter to von Hoffmansthal, Op. cit, p. 135 f. “Der unverbesserliche u. unverfälschte Professor! Er kann nicht den Mund aufthun, ohne ein Colleg zu halten! [...] Über Ihre Werke etwas zu sagen, werde ich mich sehr hüten. Ich denke, Lob wie Tadel und weises Gerede jeder Art sind Ihnen schon hinreichend gleichgiltig. Und die drei goldenen Regeln des Künstlers (im weitesten Sinne), zugleich die offenen Geheimnisse aller wahren Größe, sind Ihnen sicherlich und sichtbarlich bekannt: nämlich 1) Er habe Genie—das hat er ohnehin, sonst ist er kein Künstler. 2) Er folge rein und einzig seinem Daimonion, wie es ihn von innen her zu schauend-blindem Wirken treibt. 3) Alle Anderen wissen es ohnehin besser, also betrachte er sie alle—bloß ästhetisch oder phänomenologisch.” 1

The Web Site: A Social Event Lars Lundsten

Introduction: The Ontology of Cyberspace This is a sincere but probably somewhat anachronistic attempt to elaborate Roman Ingarden’s (1893-1970) ontological views in order to apply them to the world of cyberspace. By no means did Ingarden anticipate the evolution of computer media. There are, however, many features of his general ontology that can be applied to such novelties. My main point is to argue that a web site should be understood as a temporal but not a spatial phenomenon. Hence, commonly accepted conceptual metaphors such as “site,” “browse,” “surfing,” or “address” should be considered as misleading in ontological terms. In order to enable an ontologically more correct description, one should prefer concepts such as “hit,” “contact,” “event,” or “history.” I begin with some remarks concerning the realm of my exercise. It is concerned with phenomena belonging to so-called cyberspace or virtual reality, presented in so-called new media. Generally, all terms containing the word “new” are bound to be outdated not too far in the future. When I refer to “new” media in this text, it should be understood as a general reference to digital, i.e., scripted media. Computer networks are scripted media of this kind. According to the view maintained in this argument, cyberspace or virtual reality is a socially constructed part of our actual world (cf. Searle, 1995). Cyberspace is present to us in cybertexts (cf. Aarseth 1997). However, not every text on a computer screen is a cybertext. There are numerous quite ordinary texts on the

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web, too. A cybertext, typically, contains a certain portion of activity or even interactivity that engages the author as well as his communicative counterpart, formerly known as the reader (cf. Aarseth 1997, 22). Computer games are paradigmatic cybertexts in this sense. They are scripted interactive presentations that essentially involve the actions of a counterpart, a player. My definition of scripted interactive presentation goes as follows: A presentation is an entity that is used by a communicator (author, programmer) in order to enable a counterpart (reader, viewer, listener, player) to have an experience of a certain presented topic. Paintings, letters, novels, films, maps and newscasts on television are presentation according to this account (cf. Lundsten 1999). I call a presentation scripted if it relies on an expression that is encoded by the author in a primary and code that is not confronted directly by the counterpart. Cinema, music, and most notably computer games are scripted in this sense. The viewer, listener or player confronts a physical expression that is essentially different from the code used by the author. The primary code is a screenplay, a musical score or a number of lines in a computer programme. A reader of a novel, however, confronts the code such as it is used by the author, i.e., the text written in a natural language. A presentation is interactive if it is construed in such a way that the counterpart has to act in order for it to unfold. Paintings, maps, music recordings, and movies are non-interactive presentations according to this criterion. A viewer or a listener is not supposed to influence what he sees or hears. Newspapers, books and particularly books with cross-references are interactive presentations. The reader is left with a genuine choice how to make the presentation unfold. Some people just skip the footnotes and index of names. Other readers attend specifically to these. Among scripted presentations, computer games and hypertexts are good examples. A player has to do something in order to experience the thrill of a fight with alien intruders.

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A web site is another good candidate for being a cybertext. You approach a web site with certain powers concerning how things will appear on your screen. You make your choice and you provide some feedback to the computer by picking a certain option. Still, your powers have been scripted to the scene. A player or a visitor cannot make choices that were not anticipated by the person who construed the game or the site. Most evidently, a web site is not a thing. Natural objects such as sticks and stones are things. In a way, even socially-constructed entities such as coins and license plates are things. They have a certain material extension and an individual temporal location. All web sites are man-made, i.e. they all are artefacts. Within social reality, one should distinguish between artefacts and nonartefacts. Natural languages and symphonies are parts of social reality. Both are created in human action, i.e. speaking and composing. The difference is that an artefact, e.g. a symphony, is a product of a certain action while non-artefacts, e.g. natural languages, are results of action (cf. Simons & Dement 1996, 257). A web site clearly belongs to the category of products of action. Web sites are made. They do not evolve. One might consider a web site as a social fact, i.e. just as “the continuous possibility of the activity” (cf. Searle 1995, 36). This might seem plausible, since a computer game or a web site gives the player or the visitor a certain range of opportunities. According to such an approach, web sites would not be objects at all but rather states of affairs involving certain objects, i.e. particulars (cf. Armstrong 1997). Among the particulars involved in cyberspace, there are at least some computer hardware, a web master, and the visitor who approaches the site. I shall argue that a web site is not a state of affairs (cf. Armstrong 1997 or Reinach 1989) nor a fact (cf. Searle 1995). Instead, I propose that a web site should be regarded as a particular. Moreover, I claim that in accordance with Ingarden’s ontology one should regard a web site as a temporal object. A more modern

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terminology suggests that a web site should be understood not as a continuant but rather as an occurrent object (cf. Simons 1987). According to this distinction, continuants are objects that exist in time, e.g. sticks and stones. Occurrents are temporal objects; i.e. they are things that happen. Ingarden (1964) defines temporal objects as belonging to either of two categories: events and processes. An event is a particular indivisible temporal object, e.g. falling asleep. A process is a temporal sequence that can be divided into phases, e.g. reading a book or playing a computer game. 1. Ingarden’s Purely Intentional Objects Unlike cliffs and forests, web sites are not places to be found and explored on any specific geographic location. On the contrary, it is considered essential to the web that you should be able to approach it regardless of your own location. Web sites are utterly detached from geography. Instead, they are heavily dependent on specific social institutions, for instance on the html language. John Searle (1995) distinguishes between brute facts and social facts. The former are given by nature, the latter are directly or indirectly dependent on human consciousness. Searle (1995, 194) stresses that our understanding of social institutions, such as money, “presupposes the existence of representations in a way that normal understanding on mountains does not.” Roman Ingarden makes an ontologically more sophisticated distinction between natural phenomena and phenomena dependent on human consciousness. He states that objects may have various existential moments (Ingarden 1964, 42). The most relevant distinction in this case concerns the difference between existential autonomy and existential heteronomy (cf. Ingarden 1964, 43). Objects are existentially autonomous if they exist in their own virtue, e.g. sticks and stones. Existentially heteronomous objects must have their existential foundation in some autonomously existing object, e.g. in a human being.

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Ingarden and Searle make clearly different points, a fact revealed by their choice of terminology. In general, they do address the same topic, i.e. the ontological distinction between man-made and natural reality. Searle thinks that the world consists only of natural particulars. The social dimension is added to the world by ascribing social function to the natural particulars. This means that the social reality is a matter of natural reality being involved in social states of affairs. Ingarden recognises the distinction between particulars and states of affairs. However, he thinks that particulars and not only states of affairs can be social. In Ingarden’s universe there is, so to speak, a larger number of particulars and types of particulars than in Searle’s universe. A very convenient point of departure is provided in Ingarden’s most well known work, The Literary Work of Art (Das literarische Kunstwerk, 1972/1931). In this book and in later writings on the ontology of architecture, music, visual arts and film as well, Ingarden (1989) makes a rigid distinction between a work of art and its material manifestation. Thus, he claims that a symphony exists because of the act of creation. It does not exist because of singular performances by certain orchestras. He also claims that a symphony does not exist in the score while this physical manifestation is merely a transcription of the work. According to more recent terminology, one could rephrase Ingarden’s distinction as the categorial difference between a social object and the physical medium in which this object has its manifestation. In so-called new media, digits serve as medium for almost any conceivable social object. We are all too familiar with digital music recordings, e-texts, e-mail, DVD movies, electronic online currency markets, virtual shopping malls, and electronic greeting cards. In all these cases, evidently, the object itself is clearly distinct from its technical representation in a computer, in a CD player, or in a Game Boy. However, there seems to be a

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certain difference between electronic greeting cards and the web site on which you compose your card. A web site might seem to have its unique location in a certain piece of hardware. It comes into being through an act of creation, and it can be wiped out simply by deleting a number of computer files. In Searle’s terms, a web site is a part of social reality since a certain physical configuration on a hard disk is made to count as a web site (cf. Searle 1995, 80). Ingarden (1964, 4752) goes somewhat further in his argument about purely intentional objects and their ontological status as existentially heteronomous entities as opposed to entities that are capable of existing on their own, which he calls existentially autonomous. In Ingarden’s terms, the computer hardware as well as its magnetic configuration are existentially autonomous entities. Their existence is not a matter of conventions or of conscious recognition. Furthermore, Ingarden would argue that the web site, although founded upon such autonomous entities, still should be regarded as an existentially heteronomous object, i.e. an object that needs to be created and possibly even maintained in human consciousness. Thus, the web site is not identical with the magnetic configuration of the disk. Ingarden’s work on what he called purely intentional objects is one of the most substantial contributions made within so-called realist phenomenology after the First World War. During the last years before the war, Edmund Husserl and his first generation of disciples had drifted apart. Husserl worked his way into what later was to be called his transcendental idealism, while his early collaborators argued in favor of a more earth-bound approach. As far as I am able to judge in this conflict, it seems that the main point of disagreement was only a matter of differences in emphasis. In a nutshell, the original phenomenological method was concerned with three main features of consciousness: • the conscious subject, i.e. human beings • the conscious act, i.e. mental experiences, and

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• the intentional object, i.e. the phenomena that we confront in our experiences In Husserl’s later work, his focus shifts radically from an overall view to an ever-increasing emphasis on the conscious subject. The realist branch of the phenomenological movement headed by figures such as Johannes Daubert, Alexander Pfänder, and most notably, Adolf Reinach chose a radically different emphasis. Roman Ingarden came to belong to this tradition although he had a very close relationship to the old master until the death of Husserl in the year 1938. In the realist camp, there was no particular interest in idealist speculations about things such as the absolute ego or transcendental reductions. On the contrary, there was a flourishing interest in exploring the third main feature of phenomenological problems, i.e. the real world surrounding us. Hence, the realist phenomenologists made their contribution mainly with regard to the objects we encounter in our mental acts, i.e. what was to be called intentional objects. Ingarden was particularly thrilled with the kind of objects we encounter in artistic expressions. He invented the concept of purely intentional objects when he had realized that our world consists of things other than just ideal objects and real objects. According to his original, Husserlian division, objects are either ideal or real. Ideal objects do exist but lack location in space and time. Geometrical shapes, colors and other abstract objects belong to this category. Real objects are different from ideal ones because a real object, if it exists, must have a location in time and space. The category of real objects is constituted by things such as sticks and stones, radiation, electric current, and so forth. The problem faced by Ingarden springs from the insight that works of art appear to belong to a rather large category of objects that do have a temporal location but lack a spatial one. He made his most extensive analysis of such objects in the field of literary fiction (Ingarden 1931/1974). However, one would make a bad

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mistake by claiming that purely intentional objects were always to be regarded as pure fiction as well. Symphonies are purely intentional objects but they are not fiction. Furthermore, we have good reasons for extending the category of purely intentional objects from the realm of artistic creation to everyday social reality. Laws, corporations, currencies and many other things essential to our life as human beings are purely intentional objects. Ingarden’s term ‘purely intentional object’ was invented in order to distinguish between objects that are merely intentional and those that are rigorously purely intentional. The former category is a general one since it contains everything any human being might encounter in an experience of any kind. Mountains, hallucinations, dreams, pains, wishes and all other things we might experience are merely intentional in this respect. They are just things that can be objects of our experiences. The factual existence of a merely intentional object is of less importance. I might compare unicorns with humans and thereby state that individuals of both species normally have two ears. In this case, the unicorns, the humans and all their ears would be intentional objects despite of the fact that only humans exist. All purely intentional objects are included in the category of merely intentional objects. The category of purely intentional objects contains, however, only entities that could not come into being without human consciousness. They are objects that necessarily exist in time but not necessarily in space. My choice of terminology takes less pain with the sophisticated arguments within early phenomenology. There is no need to emphasize the distinction between ‘purely’ and ‘merely’. Instead, it is crucial to distinguish between existing autonomous and existing heteronomous objects. I would rather use the term social object to denote purely intentional, i.e. existentially heteronomous objects. The term ‘social object’ stresses the distinction between natural reality and social reality. Existentially autonomous objects will thus be called natural or material.

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2. Ontological Features of Virtual Reality The following step in my argumentation is perhaps the most crucial one for this to be an ontological undertaking of any importance. The crucial question concerns whether web sites have ontological features that make them essentially different from social objects such as symphonies, novels, or currencies. Among digital enthusiasts there is a popular opinion suggesting that the emergence of the Internet and the creation of electronic hypertexts resulted in the creation of a totally new world, the virtual one. A slightly moderated version of this stance is that this was seen as the creation of a new and ontologically distinct pocket or dimension in our actual world. According to this conception, the term ‘virtual’ denotes an ontological enclave within the real world. In the virtual part of our world, I might be educated in virtual libraries or by attending classes at virtual universities. I might then make a fortune on a virtual stock market and relax by going to a virtual shopping mall to buy a gift to my virtual lover. There is no need to go further into examples such as virtual sex or virtual travelling. As far as I can see, they are covered by the university and shopping mall cases. The virtual world, the cyberworld, seems to cover a more or less complete analogy of the old, non-virtual world. Many digital enthusiasts would probably maintain the view that it is rather a question of when than of if the virtual world becomes a complete counterpart of the non-virtual one. In this discussion, one should be careful with terminology such as ‘virtual world’ and ‘real world.’ Even if we consider the virtual world a genuinely new phenomenon in ontological terms, it still belongs to the one and only real world. Sometimes the word ‘virtual’ is used almost as the opposite to ‘real’. There are, however, certain important leaks in the virtual worlds of the kind we currently know. And there are good reasons to think that the virtual worlds never could become alternatives to the real world. A virtual world is construed by people

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who do not inhabit it. Furthermore, a virtual world is meant to be approached from outside. I myself do not become a virtual human being by going to a virtual shopping mall. My education and my fortune, if they are to be of any significance, cannot be purely virtual ones. And depending on the maturity of my virtual relationship, the gift to my virtual lover might need to be a non-virtual one in order to be taken seriously. A digital skeptic would counter the utopia of a perfect virtual reality by claiming that it is all just a big mistake. According to the digital skeptic, there is nothing ontologically new or distinct in the virtual world compared to other kinds of representational media. The only new feature, according to the skeptic, is the introduction of new and powerful technology, i.e. devices such as microprocessors and computer networks. In many ways, the digital skeptic has a strong case to defend. Nobody would claim that the ontological status of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was changed by the introduction of gramophone recordings and later by digital reproduction. Nobody would claim that the works of Aristotle or Shakespeare underwent some kind of ontological transmutation when they were made available as e-texts on the net. Nobody would claim that the world currency markets became less real by the fact that trading practices were made more efficient through the introduction of digital on-line technology. It should be evident from the examples above that the term ‘virtual’ denotes a number of things that have very little in common. ‘Virtual’ things do not form any unified ontological category. My virtual lover is a person with whom I experience a love affair by means of electronic messages. A virtual stock market is a high-tech communications centre for trading. A virtual museum is a collection of pictures of an existing or non-existing museum. In most cases, the term ‘virtual’ refers only to a certain technology, the digital one. Nevertheless, there is evidence of a truly

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novel ontological category within the collection of virtual phenomena. As far as I can see, the web site is a paradigm case of this new category. 3. Comparison with Other Social Objects I shall now proceed by discussing the identifying criteria of a web site compared to a number of natural and social objects in its vicinity. My claim is that web sites really belong to a peculiar ontological category of their own. However, it remains to be explored what their ontological specifics would be. The very term ‘web site’ suggests that this object of our inquiry should be understood in spatial terms. There seems to be a strong metaphorical coherence (cf. Lakoff & Johnson 1980, 87-96) between the web as a material network of hardware components and its social function. If one accepts the notion of web site at face value, one has to consider it as a material object. This would also mean that web sites are continuant objects that exist in time. It would be a material object with a social function attached to it, like a piece of paper has the social function of being a twenty-dollar bill. In this case, web sites would certainly belong to the same ontological category as do coins, tickets, luggage tags, and receipts. On the other hand, we may consider the term ‘web site’ to be a merely metaphorical expression without ontological commitment. In this case, we may claim that web sites belong to the category of social objects. Then we have to be able to determine whether this is a category of social objects essentially different from previously well known social objects such as works of fiction, currencies, and symphonies. This discussion also includes the question whether a web site is an occurrent or a continuant, i.e. whether it is a temporal or a non-temporal object. Whenever the web or cybertexts are discussed, you encounter the topic of linearity (cf. Aarseth 1997). Or, rather you encounter

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the notion of non-linearity and the notion of multi-linearity. Typically, the web has been seen as an environment in which you always have more than one possible choice of progression, i.e. the text is supposed to unfold equally along a number of lines. When you visit a web site you can choose what buttons to click and in what order. Next time you visit the same site you click different buttons or the same buttons in a different order. In this argument, ‘linearity’ has been seen as a weakness and as a feature belonging to allegedly old-fashioned modes of communication. Linearity is seen as essential to social objects such as films or symphonies. If you play the notes of Beethoven’s Fifth in reverse order you do not perform that very symphony. Or, if you edit the scenes in Orson Welles’ film Citizen Kane in an arbitrary order you get a new film. Compared to ‘linear’ media such as these—and even compared to traditional print media— cybertexts are claimed to be free of rigorously pre-established order. Sometimes cybertexts are claimed to be non-linear, sometimes multi-linear. The fuss about linearity and its alternatives indicates that the web and thereby any web site has a temporal dimension of some kind. It seems to make a difference how rigorously or loosely the temporal order inside a presentation is established. However, if a web site really were a spatial entity, a place, then the issue of linearity, non-linearity and multi-linearity would pose no problem at all. Places as well as all other continuant objects are essentially non-linear since they are non-temporal. When you stand in front of a painting or a map there is no way of saying what part of it you should consider as the first one, as the second one, and so on. The painting or the map is all there at once. Similarly, in a garden or a square, no particular tree or monument comes before or after another one. They are just there. (Of course, it takes a certain portion of time to walk through a park, but this temporality is a feature of the walk but not of the park.)

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Because of the issue of linearity/non-linearity/multi-linearity, one has to be careful whether to assume a web site to be a continuant or an occurrent object. The lack of temporal order seems to indicate that the web site would be a continuant social object. The close relationship between the web site and it physical foundation in the hardware might even support the view that a web site would be a continuant material object. According to Ingarden’s original distinction between real objects and purely intentional objects, a real object has a location in space and time. This would be the hardware. Purely intentional objects differ from the real ones by the fact that they lack spatial location. This would be the web site. His primary example was from literary art: at a certain point in time a certain literary work is created and thereby comes into existence. A literary work of art has no spatial location since you cannot claim that a certain copy of that book exclusively is the book. Similarly, no particular performance of Beethoven’s Fifth is the symphony. However, without the copies or the performances these social objects would not be available to the public. If Ingarden’s concept of purely intentional object is applied to social objects outside the sphere of arts, the condition of no spatial location needs some further specification. A borderline between two countries is a social object. It may have a material manifestation on the spot but it might only have a technical representation on a map enclosed to a border treaty between the countries. Still, we are entitled to claim that the border is somewhere. You cannot see it, you cannot smell it, you cannot sense it in any possible way, but you can make true and false statements about its location. The solution to this problem is simple. Any purely intentional object is either directly or indirectly dependent on one or more material beings. A borderline is uniquely tied to a certain spatial location; a play by Shakespeare is not. But this does not mean that the border would be a material object. Both plays and

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borders are social objects. The difference lies in the ways they are dependent on material reality. A web site is dependent on a certain binary configuration on a certain computer, or a number of computers. Does this entail that a web site is a material object? What happens when you move a web site? And what happens when you put up a mirror site in Australia? These are important questions concerning the identity criteria of a web site. In short: do we identify a certain web site with regard to the spatial location of its physical manifestation, or do we identify a web site with regard to social features? I might, for instance, establish an Ingarden web site on the University of Helsinki server. This web site could be identified and found by its location. I would contain a certain amount of links and e-texts related Roman Ingarden and his work. All this could be presented by means of rolling banners, blinking slogans, and constantly changing semi-animations of Ingarden’s life. You would be happy reading the most recent Ingarden jokes and you would probably click to the e-text version of Ingarden’s Literary Work of Art. Suddenly, I decide to alter the whole thing. I might do either of the following two things: I could move the whole site to another server in Australia. Or, I could wipe out all the fancy things described above and just leave a picture of Ingarden and one line of text, “This is the official Roman Ingarden web site.” You might have anticipated my move by taking a fullscale copy of all of my files. When I make the change, you establish the copied files on the same server in Helsinki. Now, everyone finds the same rolling banners and animations as before, only the ‘owner’ of the site has been altered. My question goes as follows: In what cases do we ascribe identity between the various official Roman Ingarden web sites? Does identity consist in certain digital records on a certain hard disk? Apparently, the answer is ‘no.’ It seems quite counter-intuitive to claim that a web site would disappear whenever the web master decides to update it. And it seems quite strange to say

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that a web site could not be moved from one server to another. Similarly, it would seem strange to claim that your copy of my web site, or of the old version of my site, would be the original thing. Hence, one is inclined to the view that the identity of a web site is not a matter of physical reality. Instead, the identity of a site is dependent on a certain amount of continuity in its social foundation. By this, I claim to have shown that web sites do not belong to the category of natural objects but to the category of social objects. 4. Conclusion: A Social Event My concluding remarks concerns the problem of linearity and temporality. Should a web site be considered as a continuant social object or as an occurrent social object? According to my definition above, cybertexts are scripted, interactive presentations. Being interactive indicates that the web site has a temporal dimension. However, this does not necessarily entail linear temporality. If web sites belong to the category of cybertexts, they cannot be continuants. Still, we can preserve the idea of nonlinearity or multi-linearity as a typical feature of web sites. Ingarden’s (1964) original definition of temporal objects specifies two distinct categories: events and processes. The former are temporal objects that have no temporal parts, the latter are temporal objects that consist of temporal parts, i.e. phases. The question is whether a web site should be labeled as a process or as an event. The performance of Beethoven’s Fifth is a paradigmatic process. There are numerous temporal parts, and there is a strict order in which they should appear. Every process has, according to Ingarden’s view, a beginning and an end with some phases connecting these two. I claim that a web site is a temporal object without a beginning and no end. This amounts to Ingarden’s definition of event. This should be compared to events such as greeting one’s

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neighbor. It takes a certain amount of time to utter the words “good morning, dear neighbor.” Still, it makes no sense to speak of temporal parts of the greeting. You cannot greet your neighbor only 40 percent. The mere uttering of the words is a process with temporal parts; the act of greeting is an event. The conclusion of this argument is that web sites are social and temporal objects of the event type. Web sites are not in time. They are not linear since there is no process going on. The web site is an interactive presentation. Hence, it involves not only the author and the topic but also the visitor. An essential part of the visitor’s experience consists in being involved in the event. Bibliography Aarseth, Espen J. (1997), Cybertext. Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Armstrong, D. M. (1997), A World of States of Affairs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ingarden, Roman (1964), Time and Modes of Being. Helen R. Michejda (transl.), Springfield Ill.: Charles C. Thomas Publisher. Ingarden, Roman (1972/1931), Das literarische Kunstwerk. [The Literary Work of Art]. Fourth edition. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Ingarden, Roman (1989), Ontology of the Work of Art. The Musical Work. The Picture. The Architectural Work. The Film. Translated by Raymond Meyer with John T. Goldthwait. Athens: Ohio University Press. Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark (1980), Metahpors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Lundsten, Lars (1999) “Modal Ontology of Television,” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 58, No.2, pp. 221-240. Poli, Roberto & Simons, Peter, eds. (1996), Formal Ontology. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Reinach, Adolf (1989), Sämtliche Werke. [Collected Works]. Edited by K. Schuhmann & B. Smith. Munich: Philosophia Verlag. Searle, John R. (1995), The Construction of Social Reality. New York: The Free Press.

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Simons, Peter (1987), Parts: A Study in Ontology. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Simons, Peter M. & Dement, Charles W. (1996) “Aspects of the Mereology of Artifacts” in Poli & Simons (eds.) Formal Ontology. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 255-276.

Empathy’s Impostor: Interactivity and Intersubjectivity Paul Majkut Increasingly, studies find cyberspace a place of isolation, loneliness, narcissism, and violence (cf. Bruckman, Gelder, Michals, Trebilock, Turkle). These disorders are perhaps demonstrative of contemporary hi-tech society in general, but another explanation is that the troubling consequences of sophisticated technology are rooted in an epistemological inability inherent in the medium to convey empathy, a medium-structured noetic deficiency that denies the certitude of an intersubjective bridge, suggesting a general inadequacy in Internet communication, one central to each disorder in its own noetically-mediated fashion, whether visual perception, memory, imagination, or other modes of mediated experience. Without argument, each medium shapes its own distinct disorder. Still, descriptions of these disorders do not fully account for the poorly and partially constructed hyper-mediated experience of the Other in cyberspace, even while they accompany or are inherent in it, nor do they allow for the possibility that the digitized Other is the consequence of mediation as well as social malfunction. Such manifestations of alienation appear as the consequence of communicative distance, indicating that distortion of the other is rooted in technological mediation. Within its own physical limitations, each medium places subjects at a distance by objectifying the subjectivity of the Other. Hypermedia, as is to be expected, has its own set of conventional distortions. Mediation is a way of handling the object at a distance. Rendered as information—that is, discrete statements

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about the Other—the objectivity of such statements resides in the realm of analytic reason, where quanta are accepted as endall descriptions of material reality. Digitization is inherently quantified representation. What is lost in the exchange of thing for representational object is not the raw data of the transcendent world, but the empathy that accompanies the knowing of that data. Empathetic certitude is lost in this perception because digital transformation, as Don Ihde points out, “lies embedded in the preferred quantitative praxis of science” (Ihde 91). Because of its quantified structure as numeric representation, it is questionable whether digitally-mediated knowledge that requires mathematical translation of underlying code formulae can inform us intersubjectively about the world. For example, colors contained in a digitized object are numerals, that is, numeric representations of numbers, differing only in form from Arabic “1,” “4,” “10,” etc. or Roman “I,” “IV,” “X,” and so on. Only secondarily is digitized color a sensation. In this sense, digitized knowledge of an object is not perception but decryption of that object, generating endless speculation concerning the translation itself. In no medium is epistemologically distancing as formidable as in cyberspace. The problem of mediated distance is not solely one of epistemology. On the contrary, within the analytic mode of calculative reason that is restricted to probability, mediated distance is not an epistemological problem. In knowledge of the subjectivity of the Other, logical truth tables and statistical probability do not in definition or practice offer certitude, but exclude it. Further, experiencing the subjectivity of the Other as a “probability” having the same subjective reality as the cogito presents frightening ethical consequences. Empathy without certitude is empty. The contrariety of probabilistic unknowability of the subjectivity of the Other would at first appears to be probabilistic unknowability of the subjectivity-of-the-subject. Underlying this discussion, however, is the understanding that the subjectivity-of-the-subject

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and the subjectivity-of-the-Other are not logical contraries at all, but metaphysical contradictories. Within the transcendental tradition, the subjectivity-of-the-Other is at once an ethical and epistemological concern. To place the subject-as-Other within the problematic of a probabilistic epistemology is to detach it from the empathetic ground of intersubjective experience and, as a consequence, make it unknowable with certitude. This unknowability is ripe ground for social disorders. Let us discuss two problems that can be singled out in new media experience. The first is one of interactivity in general, the second one of digitized interactivity. The communicative inadequacies inherent in cyberspace (understood here as a medium, not a “space”—or, a medium that is identical to its own space) that hinder the interpersonal ethico-epistemological certitude of the reality of a transcendent subject-as-other are easily concealed by hyperactivity that replaces the intersubjectivity at the core of empathetic knowledge with a deceptive form of interobjectivity that counterfeits intersubjectivity, namely, digital interactivity. We should no more confuse hyperactive digital interactivity with empathetic intersubjective communication than we would conflate the behavior of a hyperactive child with empathetic communication. On the other hand, a direct parallel can be seen in both forms of interactivity. Cyberspace interactivity is not only delusional; it is deceptive. Edith Stein believes that “[a]s in every experience, deceptions are [in empathetic knowledge of foreign subjects (her term for the transcendent other)] also possible” (Stein 86), but argues that reiterated empathy can overcome deception: Deception is removed by a further act of empathy. If I empathize that the unmusical person has my enjoyment of a Beethoven symphony, this deception will disappear as soon as I look him in the face [italics added] and see his expression of deadly boredom (Stein 87).

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But the corollary of reiterated empathy, that Stein does not recognize, is reiterated deception. What Stein notes is deception about the other, not the deception or false appearance of the other-as-other. Deceptions about the other, she claims, can be remedied: “In order to prevent such errors and deceptions, we need to be constantly guided by empathy through outer perception” (Stein 87). Unfortunately, Internet experience is the perfected medium of reiteration (repetition) and repetition the breeding ground of bored subjectivity. Repetition of representation via digital media, however, is also troublesome to Stein’s belief that deception may be overcome through acts of reiterated empathy. Repetition is the essence of Internet experience, its representational product existing only in repetition. Contrary to Stein’s belief, the reiteration of interactive digital experience does not lead to the removal of deception concerning the other, but simply to habitual behavior. Repetitive hyperactivity is habitual activity that leads to boredom, not certitude. Internet interactive imagery that initially awes the new visitor of a website soon becomes tedious to the viewer. Knowing designers of elaborately interactive websites include skip buttons that allow users to move ahead without reiterating the representation that causes boredom. Of course, the skip button itself soon becomes a tedious, repetitive interactivity. Digital interactivity facilitates boredom at dazzling speed. For those mesmerized by the process, an observation made by Samuel Beckett is pertinent: . . . the laws of memory are subject to the more general laws of habit. Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment. . . the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence. Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Proust (1931)

For Stein, reiteration is an act of empathy seeking certitude that originates in the subject, and it is the empathetic subject

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who is undeceived by repetition. But if perceptual interaction with the digitized Other allows for reiterative empathy, then the same activity also provides ground for reiterated deception because cyberspace interactivity does not clear the intermediate perceptual space for Stein’s epistemological “looking in the face,” the look that grants certitude. Face-to-face communication, a physical impossibility in Internet communication, is fundamentally changed by the addition of superfluous digital information-content that extends the object into the subject by the nature of its visual-representational reconstruction of the object, a reversal of the process provided by analogue technology (e. g., the lenses of eyeglasses, optical telescopes, microscopes, etc.) that transforms the object but does not reconstruct it. Interactive reiteration in cyberspace, devoid of the empathy that is intersubjectivity in action, becomes habitual, leading to boredom. While this state-of-affairs may be true of nondigital media as well, exaggerated and uncritical claims for interactivity made by some “virtual realists” are misleading. Note this onesided comment by Michael Heim: Programming ceases to be unilateral when interactivity arrives. Digital switching is, of course, under the hood of interactivity. The computer establishes a reciprocal relationship between sender, viewer and producer. . . . The digital era splatters atten­ tion spans till the shared sensibility dribbles into frag­mentary, disintegrative de-construction (Heim 74).

Heim’s technophilic enthusiasm overstates the nature of computer interactivity by an uncritical use of terms such as reciprocity and non-unilaterality built on the shaky grounds of notions such as “shared sensibility,” implying that a simultaneous co-lateral relationship, one of intersubjectivity, prevails in computer interactivity. In face-to-face empathetic communication, however, the sender-receiver relationship is mutual and simultaneous. This is not the case in digital interaction, however rapid the

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communication. Digital interaction is always unilateral, though its power to switch the direction of a signal camouflages this unilaterality with an appearance of immediate-collateral intersubjectivity. The very speed of digital transfer deceives the receiver as “simultaneous” intersubjective encounter, a speed that surpasses the perceptual ability to process the communication as unilateral. This, the first and greatest of the digital deceptions, is not the only. At first, the exceptional speed of interactive reciprocity gives off a counterfeit sense of Heim’s “shared” and simultaneous empathetic experience. The user is easily deceived by this speed into an intersubjective sense of primordial immediacy, “at-once-ness,” but, “guided by reiterated empathy through outer perception,” the deception is soon removed. The user of digital technology soon experiences and learns the utter and tyrannical linearity of computer interactivity, taught by the boredom of repetitivity. The initial, deceitful spontaneity of the interactive click is replaced by recognition of the interactive trick, the tedium that characterizes the empty, nonempathetic relationship of man and machine and leaves users in isolation imposed by the very troublesome sophistication of the medium itself. Reiterated empathy reveals interactivity to be one-sided, that is, unilateral, not collateral, because of the tyrannical “switching” linearity of on-line digital communication. Description of the structure of on-line interactivity as the decentered nonlinearity of a matrix misidentifies the appearance of the high-speed sequentiality of hypermediated unilinear communication provided by the digital medium, as simultaneously “shared” experience of intersubjectivity. High-speed interactivity unwraps information sequentially at speeds that mimic the all-at-once and face-to-face perception, which is “blurry,” but “blurriness” may be understood as natural precision once terminological conflation of digital “sharpness” and “precision” is removed. The purpose here, incidentally is not to paint all “virtual realists” with the same skeptical brush. Heim’s well-known positivist

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speculations are balanced by the less extravagant phenomenological descriptions of on-line consciousness made by Jarod Lanier, the scientist-artist who coined the term “virtual reality” and who convincingly argues against naïve realism and advises that “You Can’t Argue with a Zombie.” The empathy of which Stein speaks is eidetic, so we may appropriately apply a term to intersubjective experience that is inaccurately attributed to hypertext interactivity: non-linear. Empathy not only epistemologically establishes the ontological reality of the Other, Stein’s “foreign subject,” as an apodictic pregiven, but also notices the absence of the Other when empathetic communion is not found in on-line communication. Heim’s “virtual realism” is positivism in realistic drag, though not as farfetched as the mechanism of Ray Kurzweil’s claim in The Age of the Spiritual Machine that Over the next several decades, machine competence will rival— and ultimately surpass—any particular skill one cares to cite, including our marvelous ability to place ideas in a broad diversity of contexts (5).

Stein, to the contrary, describes the communion found in the expression of empathy as “the subject entirely absorbed” (Stein 98), not replaced or “surpassed,” and Husserl suggests that [Objectivity] does arise, however—in a preliminary stage—in understandable fashion as soon as we take into consideration the function of empathy and fellow mankind as a community of empathy and of language (Crisis 360).

The rigid linearity of “on-line-ness” inhibits the expressive communion that is the hallmark of face-to-face intersubjectivity, for, according to Husserl “The intersubjective world is the correlate of the intersubjective experience, mediated, that is, through ‘empathy’” (Ideas I 387). Max Scheler takes a further step, claiming that All human knowledge, in so far as man is a ‘member’ of a society in general, is not empirical but ‘a priori’ knowledge . . .

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There is no ‘I’ without a ‘we’. The ‘we’ is filled with contents prior to the ‘I’ (Scheler 67),

and in his phenomenological treatment of the sociology of knowledge discloses that “love and control. . . are the foundation for two attitudes towards cognition. . .” (Scheler 118). Despite the triviality of his truism (“There is no ‘I’ without a ‘we’”), Scheler’s comment is ambiguous. For example, is “we” possible without “I”? What are the contents that fill the “we” except the “I” and “the Other”? Scheler’s explanation posits an a priori “we” but, in that it is “filled,” it comes to us phenomenologically neither as a plurality (“we”) nor a singularity (“I”), but appears grammatically neutral. A safer term is “human,” but what is human is a posteriori. Human knowledge may be rooted in a prepredicative a priori, but this rootedness does not entail either singularity or group identity; nor does it mean that this prepredicative a priori is “human” or “exists.” Scheler uses a priori to mean “to come before” in time, then employs it interchangeably with logical a priori, mixing terms of temporality with those of eternality. Putting these objections aside, Scheler’s description of the parallel, if not antithetical epistemologies of love and control is profoundly useful for our discussion of the process and structure of knowing that takes place in cyberspace though digital technology. It is apparent, for example, that the digitized “knowledge” (that is, “data”) of Internet communication is knowledge controlled rigidly by quantification. The brittle knowledge of the Other is knowledge controlled by the tyranny of on-line digital rigidity. Face-toface empathetic knowledge of the Other is knowledge uncontrolled (knowledge out of control or Scheler’s “love”). Knowledge controlled is, in the instance of digital media, control exerted by the object. It is the subject that is controlled by the form of digitized knowledge (“data”). In love, as Stein says of empathy, the subject is a cogito that loses control and allows itself to be “entirely absorbed” into but not by the object, for, Stein reasons,

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Feeling in its pure essence is not something complete in itself. As it were, it is loaded with an energy which must be unloaded. . . . By nature it must always. . . be ‘expressed’ (Stein 51-52).

It is this uncontrolled knowledge and expression that allows Stein’s subject to be entirely absorbed into the object of its knowledge, but not reconstructed by that object. It is the surrender of the subject rather than conquest by the object; and, it is expressed face-to-face and found in a facial look. Here a digression may prove helpful, although it will not remove existential objections to the problematic of the “transcendental turn” to which this line of thought is leading. Waltraut Stein, great-niece and commentator on her greataunt’s work, points out a crucial aspect of her kin’s notion of subjectivity: In Stein’s understanding “the pure ‘I’ cannot be localized. Nevertheless, my living body surrounds a ‘zero point of orientation’ to which I relate my body and everything outside of it.” (Waltraut Stein 9)

Of the “zero point of orientation,” Edith Stein says, From the viewpoint of the zero point of consciousness gained in empathy, I must no longer consider my own zero point as the zero point, but as a spatial point among many. By this means, I learn to see my living body as a physical body like others. At the same time, only in primordial experience is it given to me as a living body. Moreover, it is given to me as an incomplete physical body in outer experience and as different from others (Stein 63).

In this discussion, Stein’s zero point of orientation can be identified with Husserl’s transcendental ego, though it is clear that Stein did not make the transcendental turn. The objection that Husserl’s reliance on the transcendental ego to explain the secure source of experience and consciousness violates the very nature of phenomenological description by positing a non-phenomenological

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transcendent entity is serious if transcendent existence is claimed for the zero point of orientation. These objections ignore the point that a claim for existence is not made by Husserl’s transcendental turn. For well-argued reasons, existence beyond experience, transcendent existence, is an absurdity within realist, eidetic phenomenological description. A greater phenomenological absurdity than the claim of transcendent existence for something, however, would be the claim of transcendent existence for nothing, that is, the existence of a zero point of orientation that has no location. In fact, Husserl is careful to discuss the transcendental ego as an “irreality,” a descriptive term proposed as a solution to the epistemological riddle of “the knower of all known by none.” Further, by identifying Husserl’s transcendental ego with Stein’s “zero point of consciousness,” his additional claim that “It can therefore very well be said: I am not my Body, but I have my Body; I am not my soul, but I have a soul” (Ideas II 99) becomes sensible, although its expression remains solipsistic: nothing has (having), something is (existence). A perception of “coldness” commonly accompanies the experiencing of digital images and sound. The term is difficult to pin down, but attempts to give “warmth” to digital images and sounds is a constant task of computer graphic artists who attempt to bring to life the “sterility” of computer-manipulated photographic images and CD music. Solutions that give “warmth” to this perceived coldness invariably involve the addition of more data, more digital detail. This solution has been and continues to be temporary. The extensive use, for example, of “Blur” and “Smart Blur” filters in Adobe Photoshop, other filters, and layering in digital alterations of a photograph is a manipulation of “dead” light. In this sense, digitized objects are decomposing, “dead” images; the attempt to infuse inner light by the manipulation of outer light, futile. The problem of visual coldness isn’t that there isn’t enough digital quanta, but precisely

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that there is too much data. Though it takes repeated experience, viewers soon become accustomed to changes in virtually-real images and sound, and an objective coldness once again sets in or, in other words, perceptual coldness sets in as the object dies (the initial deceptiveness of interactivity passed off as intersubjectivity) as reiterated empathy reveals no subjectivity in the object. When Internet interactivity and representation refer back to the human subjectivity of the digital object, the process of becoming cold begins and philosophical zombification sets in and we are in a world of the walking dead; a commonplace among existentialphenomenologists, we again acknowledge that the lived-body (Leib) is not the corporeal body (Körper), and flesh is not meat. It might be argued that the addition of detail and other changes simply add and/or substitute wrong data and that if right digital data were supplied, the problem of “coldness” could be resolved. For example, in the BBC-Discovery Channel production, Walking with Dinosaurs, background images are analogue film footage taken of forests in Chile. Digital dinosaurs created separately were later added by layering them on the analogue background, itself digitalized. What is immediately originally noticeable is the contrast between the analogue background and the digital dinosaurs. Had both been either analogue or digital, the contrast would not have been noticed because it would not have existed. The quality that is noticed when the media are contrasted, however, is one of digital sharpness and analogue blurriness that is the result of analogue technology and not a digital filter. While all media have problems of content distorted in specific ways by the structure of the medium employed, digital media distort because they are inherently abstract. “Source code” underlies all imagery and representation on the web. What you see isn’t what you get (WYSIWYG), and, despite contrary claims of immediacy, the rigid mathesis universalis that underlies all that is perceived in the medium is an unphenomenological source code phenomenologically accessible only after epoche and reductions.

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If we frame our remarks on the structure of the visual experience on the web in terms of intentionality, applying the phenomenological workhorse theory to the cognitive noetic mood found in cyber-active consciousness, that is, , we discover that the noematic content of cyber-experience is identical with its noetic mode of experience. We have entered a monadological world that, despite Bill Gates, has no windows through which to see, perceive, or empathize with a transcendent world. The noemata of this experience do not present themselves as transcendent objects but appear to be one and the same as their digitalization, saturated with the “dirty light” of superfluous information in which they appear as selfcontained objects, immanent objects first and foremost constituted as noematic. The light that illuminates this experience is its own content: the objects are the cyberspace and its contents of that light. The light is cold and dead. In another place, I have called this light “dirty” because the superfluousness of data that characterizes its presence is not only waste data, but waste that becomes a form of information pollution, data that cannot be perceptually or cognitively processed (Majkut, “Monster” 19). Analogue blurriness is precisely truthful because it does not succumb to the uncompromising, razor-edge object-boundaries inherent in digitized objects. Digitized images, unlike those of the messy objects of nature, are repeatable but unchanging and unchangeable, change violating the mathesis universalis that underlies them. Digital biots, biota and other “creatures” within the context of theories and practice of “artificial life” and “digital evolution” appear to contradict the immutability of digital objects, seeming to evolve, but these image-objects, abstract expressions of a source code, are in fact a rapid sequence of discrete images, one rapidly replacing another, not the same image-object itself in continuous change. Once again, we are too easily led astray by faulty metaphor. “Change” within the metaphor of “artificial life” means replacement, not evolutionary growth. Biota no

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more “live” than a monitor-screen “window” allows “seeingthrough” (Majkut, “Concept” 64). Naïve science, reflection within the natural attitude, often grasps for descriptive expression through faulty use of metaphor, suggesting need for training in the practice of rhetoric more than adequate theoretical descriptiveness. Cyberlight extends from object to subject, from known to knower, reversing the direction of the intentional flow, and interactivity is, in practice, interpassivity within the context of interobjectivity. Of interest here are questions of “intercorporeality” within the structure and functions of cyberspace, questions that deal with the problematic of cyber-bodies, specifically avatars and zombies. We will not here treat the fascinating disorders of social and cultural construction of the self that occur in genderbending, ethnic passing, and other deceptions now commonplace on the web, except to note in connection to a remark made above concerning zombification a pertinent comment made by Husserl: “The corpse bears in itself the representation of a human soul but no longer appresents it; and thus we see precisely a corpse, which was a man, but now no longer is” (Ideas II 352). In “A Phenomenology of Technics,” Don Ihde restates the structure of intentionality applied to media consciousness as: , then continues by distinguishing analogue and digital media. He groups the three elements of media consciousness according to the way in which they function in relationship to either “I” or “world.” The structure of analogue consciousness is described as ; the structure of digital consciousness described as . Within the structure of digital consciousness, Ihde discovers a perceptual enigma. While perception mediated by analogue technology, “by extending vision while transforming it, remains visual and transparent to ordinary vision” (90), perception “can be transformed by a yet more radical hermeneutic analogue to the digital transformation which lies embedded in the preferred quantitative praxis of science” (91).

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It is apparent that intersubjective empathy is only at play in analogue consciousness because this technology extends perception from the cogito in the direction of noematic objects of consciousness, Ihde’s paradigm. The direction of analogue media extension is subject-to-object as an empathetic, constituting activity. On the contrary, digital media do not reformulate the cogito’s perception of the world, but reformulate the object and, as a consequence, extend the object towards the subject of consciousness because, as Ihde says, digital transformation is the preferred quantitative praxis of science. This is the enigma found in digital consciousness. Remarks by Stein are here prescient: Consciousness appeared not only as a causally conditioned occurrence, but also as object-constituting at the same time. Thus it stepped out of the order of nature and faced it. Consciousness as a correlate of the object world is not nature, but spirit (Stein 91);

and, The world I glimpse empathetically is an existing world, posited as having being like the world primordially perceived. The perceived world and the world given empathetically are the same world differently seen. (Stein 64)

The mediated experience of seeing images on a monitor screen is a hypermediated experience because of the digitized make-up of those images, “hypermediated” because the amount of information, the discrete data available, can be infinitely increased— even though the container is finite. Digital media is mathematicized quanta, the ideal expression of positive science—and the marketplace. Finally, if analogue media extend the cogito towards the object and the empathetic “seeing” it provides is holistic and continuous, then it becomes evident that while “holistic perception” (empathy,

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love) can reveal the structure of objects disclosed by discrete, digital perception, digitized perception cannot reveal objects of analogue empathy as other than digital objects. Clear direction for further phenomenological research into digital media along lines attempted here was set out a half-century ago by Eugen Fink: The ‘onlooker’ of the Other is only given to me by empathy (communication), i.e., he is given me in a kind of experience whose intentional explication and constitutive analytic precisely belongs to regressive phenomenology as a theme (54).

Bibliography Bojadziev, Damjan. Self-Reference in Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. 16 Nov. 1998. Bruckman, Amy. “Gender Swapping on the Internet.” Technology and Science. Ed. Dianne Fallon. Madison, WI: Coursewise Publishing, 1999. 100-103. Fink, Eugen. Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method. Trans. by Ronald Bruzina. Bloomington, Indiana: University of Indiana Press, 1995. Gelder, Lindsey Van. “The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover.” Ed. Dianne Fallon. Madison, WI: Coursewise Publishing, 1999. 104-112. Gelder, Tim van. Wooden Iron? Husserlian Phenomenology Meets Cognitive Science. Spring 1996. 2 Aug. 1997. Heim, Michael. Virtual Realism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1970. —. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson. London: Collier Books, 1969. —. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. by Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998. Ihde, Don. Technology and the Life World: From Garden to Earth.

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Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990. Kurzweil, Ray. The Age of Spiritual Machines. New York: Viking, 1999. Lanier, Jaron. “You Can’t Argue with a Zombie.” http://iona.ghandchi. com/JaronLanier.htm Majkut, Paul. “The Concept of the Dog Doesn’t Bark: Notes on a Materialist Phenomenology and Film Noir” Glimpse: Proceedings of the Society for Phenomenology and Media, vol I, 1999. 60-73. —. “The Monster in the Maze: A Phenomenological Glimpse at the Aesthetics and Ontology of Cyberspace.” Visual Arts of the 80-90s of the XX Century. Ed. Olga Zhuk. Kiev, Ukraine, 1999. 19-32. Michals, Debra. “Cyber-Rape: How Virtual Is It?” Technology and Science. Ed. Dianne Fallon. Madison, WI: Coursewise Publishing, 1999. 98-99. Scheler, Max. Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge. Trans. by Manfred S. Frings. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. SeaJay. From Rocks to Avatars: The Phenomenology of Virtual Objects. 5 May 1999. Shaffer, C. Allen. Virtual Reality and Husserlian Phenomenology. 18 September 1998 Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Trans. by Waltraut Stein. Washington, D. C.: ICS Publications, 1989. Trebilock, Bob. “Child Molesters on the Internet: Are They in Your Home?” Technology and Science. Ed. Dianne Fallen. Madison, WI: Coursewise Publishing, 1999. 46-50. Turkle, Sherry. “Is the Net Redefining Our Identity?” Technology and Science. Ed. Dianne Fallon. Madison, WI: Coursewise Publishing, 1999. 98-99. —. “Who Am We?” Who Are We? Ed. Rise B. Axelrod and Charles Cooper. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. 51-56.

Empathy, Mediation. Media Chris Nagel

The phenomenological account of intersubjectivity has had two largely independent historical developments. On the one hand is the well-known (largely French) existential phenomenology of intersubjective relations as relations between persons. In the existential tradition, intersubjective relations are often described as “authentic” or “inauthentic,” the meaning of which varies to some degree from theorist to theorist. What is generally meant by “authentic” has to do with an experience of the other subject as a subject—i.e., not “reduced” to the status of a mere object. An authentic intersubjective encounter is one in which we “engage in dialogue” or see one another “as subjects.” An inauthentic intersubjective encounter is the denial of the other’s subjectivity, or the active pursuit of the destruction of the other, along the lines of the so-called master-slave model. The second is the transcendental phenomenology of intersubjectivity as the experience of another I. The transcendental tradition has had little use for this distinction because it is focused on the condition of possibility of intersubjectivity and the condition of possibility of an Objective world. In the Cartesian Meditations, for instance, Husserl simply does not take up the notion of inauthentic intersubjectivity. Instead, the concern is to show how intersubjectivity is possible. (Authenticity and inauthenticity denote, for Husserl, polar modes of the fulfillment of givenness of an experience—which is not to be confused with “pure presence,” since, in perception for instance, authenticity requires mediation rather than “pure presence.” Husserl further criticizes the notion of authentic intersubjective perception in an instant in the Nachlass [Nachlass, 488].)

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If I were to stick to the existential tradition of authenticity and inauthenticity in media relations, I believe I would be stuck with having to make a speculation about how individual persons relate to other individual persons through media. Though this could certainly go some way toward interpreting the more peculiar phenomena of intersubjectivity through media (of which there are numerous very important examples: the flourishing of hate groups, the quick intimacy and quick aggression of online communication, etc.), I don’t believe it would ultimately support a universal claim about the possibility or impossibility of empathy or a We-community through media. Existential phenomenology may provide clues for the direction of a transcendental inquiry into intersubjectivity through media, but the entire analysis must be begun anew on the basis of the pheno­menological epoché— the setting aside of the posit of the natural attitude, the canceling out of the presupposition that what we take for granted about media or other persons is real. My goal here is to develop a transcendental analysis on the basis of an existential insight voiced by many interpreters of electronic media. The existential clue is that all intersubjective experience through media is inauthentic. This is a conclusion I have drawn (I’m not alone in drawing it) and which I can state quickly as follows: Since in all media experiences of other persons, my direct perceptual encounter is with a media form rather than a person, I must constantly fill in the experience on the basis of conventions of media use and with idealizations and typifications derived from prior face-to-face experience. To use terms from Schutz and Luckmann, the indirect, media-experience of other persons reduces their perceptual givenness from expressive marks to more generally indicative signs (63). Nowhere is this more evident than in Internet relations, where not only are “persons” reduced to media presentations (a form of “signs” as Schutz and Luckmann use the term), but the signs are— sometimes notoriously—unreliable as signs of the person.

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In the most common form of Internet relations, these signs are reduced to alphanumeric text, necessitating the development of a grammar of emotions in an (hopeless) effort to present more signs of oneself (or of what one represents oneself to be). I think it’s easy to see the interpretive and critical power in this analysis. Obviously it’s easier to misconstrue words without a tone of voice or a facial expression, so it’s (1) easier to be misled by text on the computer screen concerning with whom or what one is communicating, (2) easier to fill in unpresented details in a pleasing way for oneself and fictively construct the “person” with whom one is communicating, (3) easier to love or hate that fictively constructed “person” to the degree that the signs match or fail to match the construction. It’s also fairly easy to see the limitation of this analysis: I can never know whether that “person” is a real person. In Internet experience, as we are sometimes reminded, that “person” could be a fiction constructed not only by me but also by the person producing the signs—not only might my encounters with the fictional other I have produced be based on deliberately deceitful signs, but there may be no other at all, or there may be more than one. Since, as this existential analysis reveals, I communicate with a fiction through Internet relations (albeit an unusually responsive fiction), it almost makes sense to say that there are no others in Internet relations. It almost makes sense, because at the same time I know there are other people at other computer terminals in other parts of the world engaging in the same basic form of activity I am— typing and reading. I know this in as much as my own experience of the Internet would be difficult to comprehend without making this presupposition. And herein lies my transcendental clue. The Internet experience of others seems to depend absolutely upon a presupposition about the way signs are produced on my computer screen. The existence of others is the presuppositional sine qua non of Internet intersubjectivity; hence there

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is no evidence (in Husserl’s sense—i.e., no fulfilled conscious act) of others in Internet experience. Primordial Intersubjectivity In the Cartesian Meditations and in the Nachlass manuscripts on intersubjectivity, Husserl discusses at some length the experience of other persons as a mediated experience. Since the terms mediated and mediation are often used in describing phenomena associated with electronic communications media, it might appear that Husserl’s descriptions suggest that there is nothing different, nothing that distinguishes intersubjective relations taking place through electronic means from those that don’t. I would like to offer a distinction between the mediation of ordinary intersubjective experience and what I will call media experience of intersubjectivity. (In my term, media is an adjective modifying experience.) First it will help to understand what Husserl means by “Mittelbarkeit.” In Husserl’s account of temporal, perceptual experience, objects are always appresented in their completeness. In short, since all perception is perspectival perception, perception from a standpoint that presents only a particular adumbration of an object, there is no single momentary perceptual act in which the object is given in its entirety. Perceiving an object, rather than perceiving a particular adumbration, thus involves a synthetic unity of multiple perceptual moments. The object (as an ideal and/or real whole) is “appresented” through the multiple perceptual moments, i.e., appresented in the synthetic unity of those moments that takes place (according to Husserl, as opposed to Kant on this point) within perceptual experience. This is all the more characteristic of intersubjective experience, since what is appresented is never immediately or all-atonce present in perception, in Husserl’s view. For, to perceive intersubjectively, to perceive another person as another subject,

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to perceive the other person as a whole person (as what a person is ideally and/or really), involves a perceptual experience of something other than that subjectivity. Husserl here is offering a phenomenological solution to the problem of other minds: Since my experience of myself as an I reveals that I as a constant, an experience degree zero, an experience of another I seems impossible. Indeed it is impossible understood in those terms. On the contrary, my experience of other persons presents to me similarities of activity and form that show that there is an I over there like mine. The other subject is appresented through the perception of the other’s living body (Leib); i.e., the other subject is appresented in the synthetic unity of the movements of that living body. Intersubjective experience is mediated in the sense that there is no single momentary perspectival perception in which the other qua other is present—present as a whole, as a person, as another I. Mediated is in this sense synonymous with appresented or presented through adumbrations. This brings us to Husserl’s account of analogical perception and its distinction from analogical reasoning. It is vital to understand Husserl’s view of intersubjective experience as a form of perception. Husserl does not hold that intersubjectivity is the result of my judging that the body yonder which looks like mine probably therefore houses a soul like mine. Instead, intersubjective experience involves a “pairing” or analogizing perception— seeing, through the other’s body, an appresented (and never present) other I. Elsewhere Husserl describes pairing synthesis as a “passive” synthesis, meaning that it does not involve a willed conscious act or a deliberative judgment. A judgment about another I (a judgment that the other I is or is not “really” another I) could only take place on the basis of the pairing synthesis of a prior perceptual act. To make this plain: analogical reasoning is founded upon passive, analogizing perception, as a further development or modulation of that originary experience. (In the

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case of determining that what had been perceived to be other I-like is not a genuine appresentation of another I, the reasoning process is a canceling of the prior intention. This would take place in the case of anomalous perceptual experiences of what had at first appeared to be the Leib of another I. For such an experience to be anomalous, something about the perception must fail to be assimilable into a continued fulfillment of the appresentation of another I’s Leib.) As Husserl expresses it, in the analogizing apprehension of the other I as animate organism “the primally institutive original is always livingly present” (CM, 112). The central, indeed vital role of the animate organism (Leib) could be investigated further. Husserl’s emphasis in Cartesian Meditations suggests that self-perception of my own animate organism and perception of another animate organism are necessary for experience of another I. This is the pairing synthesis [in which] two data are given intuitionally, and with prominence, in the unity of a consciousness that, on this basis—essentially, already in pure passivity (regardless therefore of whether they are noticed or unnoticed)—, as data appearing with mutual distinctness, they found phenomenologically a unity of similarity and thus are always constituted precisely as a pair (CM, 112). The animate organism shows itself as such (i.e., as not merely a body but as a lived-body) through “its changing but incessantly harmonious ‘behavior’” (CM, 114). The primordial pairing synthesis is foundational for every meaningful experience of other I’s and their significative expressions. Husserl is not making what would be a very strange empirical claim to the effect that we cannot understand anyone’s speech without first having seen that person (nor that the primordiality of the pairing synthesis must take place through vision). His account of the primordiality of the pairing synthesis has to be understood transcendentally—i.e., as a clarification of the condition of possibility of experiences of other I’s as other I’s. Perceptual appresentation of the other I through another animate

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organism is a primordial apprehension of behavior, of the other I as meaning-giving. It is not an event in the life history of some bizarre universalized Ego that Husserl is describing, but the basis of the intelligibility of behavior as such, the foundation of experiencing a meaningful everyday world. Understanding language as having a meaning is founded on this primordial, transcendental apprehension of other I’s. “Authenticity” and “inauthenticity” will have their places in this analysis as polarities or modulations of the meaningfulness of intersubjective experience. “Authenticity” refers to perceptions which more closely match Husserl’s descriptions in Cartesian Meditations, for the reason that these are the perceptions that primordially appresent other I’s. “Inauthenticity” refers to indications that derive their sense from a non-co-present and non-presented primordial perception. Experience of Media, Media Experience I wish to contrast this primordial intersubjective experience with media experience and with experience of media. By media experience I mean to indicate experience that takes its shape and its normativity through (primarily electronic) media. It is a noetic analysis of an act-character that could belong to experiences of non-media objects. Experience of media is the noematic analysis of the phenomena of (primarily electronic) media forms themselves. The two sides of the analysis are independent of one another, so that someone can have an experience of media that is not a media-experience, and someone can have a media-experience that is not an experience of media. Husserl’s term mediation refers to any objective experience involving a synthetic unity (any perceptual experience, for instance, and as I’ve shown above all any intersubjective experience). Media experience is a subset of mediation, in that it describes a particular formation of the synthetic unity of a perceptual experience—including experiences of

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others. That formation of synthetic unity, or as I prefer to think of it, that habit of perceiving, is one that is normative for experiences of media: It is the shape of synthetic unity of experience that is pre-eminently and optimally sense-giving for experiences of media. A media experience of an experience of media could be exemplified as, for example, televisual experience of television, i.e., an optimal, normal experience of television as habituated and prefigured in the structure of television itself as a medium. The argument I wish to make is twofold, then: First (noematically), that experience of media precludes experience of authentic intersubjectivity; and second (noetically), that media experience precludes the constitution of authentic intersubjectivity. Experience of media is most directly an experience of technological equipment. My intentional directedness in an experience of media always involves dealing with this equipment, regardless of what further adversion of attention is taking place. I may be reading email from someone, but adverting my attention to the meaning of the email (and further, adverting my attention to the author of the email) always happens through my operating on my computer, my email software, etc. I am taking part in a technological production, which, in the words of Husserl, “brings with it anonymous social relations,” since “it is an intrinsic requirement of technological production that those who participate in it define each other as anonymous functionaries” (32). If it seems strange to consider reading and writing email a kind of technological production, consider how the technology organizes not only the process of communicating but the social relations themselves. As “[i]ndividuals becomes organized in accordance with the requirements of technological production” (33), in Berger, Berger and Kellner’s phrase, so too interactions become organized according to technological requirements. The temporality, the materiality, the manner of intersubjective relations are determined by technology that anonymizes.

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Style (in Merleau-Ponty’s sense) is reduced from a bodily appropriating of situation and place, to what the technology can do. (Of course email technology does something my own body cannot; but from this it does not follow that I am able to do more or that the extension of my appropriative potentiality has been advanced. The fact that so much effort goes into careful and deliberate signs of affect shows this.) As a result, I am less capable of authentic self-expression (though this does not mean I am unable to make creative use of the equipment). In terms of the experience of others, the same technological equipment produces the same (experienced) gap in presentation. This is different from Husserl’s “mediation” of perception in intersubjective experience, because instead of an ever-fulfilled, perspectival experience, our experiences of others through media provides a set of never-fulfilled “empty intentions.” We do not perceive other persons, we perceive what we can at most judge to be the signs of other persons. Because it is a judgment rather than an originary perceiving, this experience does not result in another I before us “in person” (CM, 109). Berger, Berger and Kellner describe a certain “cognitive style” (33) that pertains to technological production—a style marked by what they call “componentiality.” This characterizes a form of consciousness rather than an object of consciousness, that is, a noetic act-character rather than a noema. “Componentiality” is an abstract consciousness directed toward elements, portions, fragments, rather than wholes or contexts. This echoes a line of criticism developed in communication studies and social psychological studies, especially of the impact of watching television. While it is more detailed than saying “TV rots your brain,” the idea of abstract or componential consciousness does need to be more explicitly developed, and the experience more directly described. What I have in mind is the act-character that is optimally oriented toward media presentations, but this act-character can be applied to other noematic objects. For example, one continuing

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frustration I face teaching introductory philosophy courses is the way some students read philosophy texts—as though they were television news broadcasts. Such students respond to philosophical writing as though there could not possibly be any underlying meaning to it, or connections between statements that articulate arguments. They do not understand how to read a philosophical text otherwise than as a series of immediate, fragmentary sound bites. Couldn’t this be described as a media experience of philosophy? An experience of media through which one communicates with others is an experience of signs which are interpreted on the basis of a presupposition that they are signs produced by another I. It is not another I that is appresented, but a “meaning of the text,” a certain signification through (of?) language. Interpreting this text is a matter of narrative experience, not intersubjective experience—though in order for the text to be meaningful, its sense must derive from primordial intersubjectivity. But this is not the same as accounting for this text through the positing of another I who “must have produced it,” which would be an inauthentic grasping at an “I” that I experience strictly on the basis of my own construction of it. In Schutz’s helpful terms, I am operating with recipes in regard to typifications or idealizations when I make judgments about that “someone” who wrote what I am reading. This experience is somewhat different in the case of persons known otherwise than as experiences of media, but only to the degree that the idealized details I fill in are founded on previous intersubjective experience. Reading my friend’s email, and having at my disposal a representational idealization of his expressive repertoire, I can suppose the tone of the email. But I submit that we all have interpretive difficulty in this experience of media of even our close friends because and to the degree that we are operating through idealizations rather than appresentations of the other I. That, simply, is how it is with communication through media.

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As a normative formation of experiences of others, experience of media habituates us to a media-experience of others. We learn, through experiences of media, the movements and “cognitive style” of media-experience. In media-experience, others are always fictively constructed. The positing of another I (the analogical judgment founded upon the narrative experience of the text which we judge “must have been produced by someone”) is not strictly necessary to this media-experience. Since what is appresented is fictively constructed, media-experience is actually intentionally directed toward this fictive construction. Another I is superfluous, or perhaps even anomalous and unassimilable. This is, for many, a pleasant, engaging, even compelling experience. It provides a great benefit for some people. I do not disparage it. But it is not intersubjective experience; at worst it’s solipsism or narcissism, at best it’s a unique form of experience, an engagement with a fiction. Works Cited Berger, Peter, Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner. The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness. New York: Vintage, 1973. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations. Trans. by Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960. ---. Husserliana XIV. Edited by Iso Kern. The Hague: Martinus Nijohff, 1973. Schutz, Alfred and Thomas Luckman. The Structures of the Life-World, Volume 1. Trans. by Richard M. Zaner and H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. Evanston: Northwestern U. Press, 1973.

On Modes of Consciousness(es) and Electronic Culture Melentie Pandilovski It is quite clear that the possibilities for communication bet­ ween men have been immensely multiplied, thus enabling a complete set of new experiences. The worlds of the virtual and real have already created their own oppositions, i.e., created each other. No matter how paradoxical it seems, a conclusion imposes itself. The necessary simultaneous existence of these two worlds and our already ambiguous (twofold) inclination towards both of them—this synthesis of oppositions, integration of what is being treated as virtual and what is believed to be real—creates a new, expanded world, that is, and the possibility of a new profoundness of our own being. The products of these experiences can be considered as deep mystical experiences or synesthetic experiences, spe­cific autistic-like realities or what is called “virtual reality”. Nevertheless, they have a common code based on a permanent “cultural revolution” of which we become witnesses through the use of simultaneous, double-sided motion promoted in electronic interactivity with its own characteristics. Our personal relation towards whether the virtuality used in the electronic projects in fact represents total opposition of what we call reality or whether it appears more as an inter-phase, prosthetic tool, a complementation of the reality, is perhaps a crucial point in determining whether interactivity is a brand-new category or is it something that has been known for a long time. Is it just a stairway to the notyet-achieved virtuality or does it serve as a reflexive (recurrent) connection between both realities? It is becoming obvious that with the appearance of virtual reality fundamental changes are taking place. We may also view

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them as a change in consciousness. What exactly is this change of consciousness? Is it simply a change in the logical process(es)? One might answer this question at the point where the change in consciousness causes the replacement of one culture with another. In the case of our times, it has become obvious that the “linear-text type culture” is pushed into the background by the “interactive-hybrid culture of the technologically modulated image/sound, telecommunications and hypertext.” This calls for a re-investigation of the phenomenon of consciousness. Husserl and Phenomenology Let us look back to the beginning of the 20th century, when Edmund Husserl declared phenomenology to be the study of the structures of consciousness that enable it to refer to objects outside of itself. In fact, he believed that the subject-matter of phenomenology is consciousness and that only the essences of specific structures of consciousness are the proper object of the phenomenology. The phenomenological reduction was undertaken in order to study of the substance of the mind, which does not assume that something exists, a state that allows pointing the mind en route towards real but also absent or imaginary objects. Phenomenology has strongly influenced 20th-century thought. It has penetrated sociology, psychology, psychiatry and the arts, becoming perhaps the most valid school of contemporary philosophy. This creates a possibility to link the structures of consciousness through our personal experiences in widely different fields of human activities. What Husserl discovered when he contemplated the content of the mind were such acts as remembering, desiring, and perceiving as well as the abstract content of these acts, which Husserl called meanings. These meanings, he claimed, enabled an act to be directed toward an object under a certain aspect. Such directedness, intentionality, he held to be the essence of consciousness.

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Husserl also introduced transcendental phenomenology, the study of the basic components of the meanings that make intentionality possible, and genetic phenomenology, which he defined as the study of how these meanings are built up in the course of experience. Husserl regards phenomenology as the “science of consciousness.” In his inaugural lecture at Freiburg im Breigsau in 1917, Husserl introduced a distinction between phenomena and Objekten. Within the widest concept of the object, and specifically within the concept of individual object, Object and phenomena stand in contrast with each other. Objekte are objects foreign to consciousness. Consciousness does, indeed, objectivate them and posit them as actual, yet the consciousness that experiences them and takes cognizance of them is so singularily astonishing that it bestows upon its own phenomena the sense of being appearances foreign to consciou­ sness and knows these ‘extrinsic’ Objects through processes that take cognizance of their sense. Those objects that are neither conscious processor nor immanent constituents of conscious process we therefore call Objects in the pregnant sense of the word.

However, what Husserl does not tell us is that if we try to observe the process of consciousness we will find that when one expands the consciousness he/she primarily develops knowledge of the phenomenal rather than of his self. How do we deal with the subjective view then? Where can we find the self? Is the self to be found outside of the phenomenal, of the obvious material and conceptual levels? Even though the self in its transcendental condition is amorphous and unstructured, it equates with the phenomenal world of forms which are by definition limited or restricted, especially if we consider that the self is to be found beyond the obvious material and conceptual worlds. Then how is the consciousness connected to the phenomenal? In our understanding of consciousness

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we may start from its links. What is the self to be linked with? Should it be linked to the concept of transcendence or with the material world? One hint that may be of assistance is that as one gradually expands his or her consciousness, she/he becomes aware of the phenomenal world. Does this still confront consciousness with the material world? It would seem so. Undoubtedly, the self acquires consciousness. Could it be that the evolution of consciousness necessarily demands the duality of the subject and the object? In order to understand the driving current between the center of consciousness and the world of forms that represent the human reality, we need to explore the field of identification. For example, we identify ourselves as human with the human form of the body. The identification with the forms is an obstacle to the emancipation of consciousness, for our experience with the phenomenal world is conditioned by our own limitations. Through it we experience the conflict between the need for the emancipation of consciousness and the limitations of consciousness. Technologization Technology may be regarded as a thirst for the overcoming of the limitations mentioned above and a tool which can assist us in achieving a higher form of understanding of the phenomenal world and its transcendence. Martin Heidegger was another phenomenologist who claimed that phenomenology should reveal the hidden in common experience. In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger writes on the essence of technology, suggesting that technology is the supreme danger to man, one that prevents us of achieving a proper understanding of our own being.

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Technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology. When we are seeking the essence of ‘tree,’ we have to become aware that That which pervades every tree, as tree, is not itself a tree that can be encountered among all the other trees.

Likewise, the essence of technology is by no means anything technological. Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology. According to ancient doctrine, the essence of a thing is considered to be what the thing is. We ask the question concerning technology when we ask what it is. Everyone knows the two statements that answer our question. One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is a human activity. The two definitions of technology belong together, for to posit ends and procure and utilize the means to them is a human activity. The manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve, all belong to what technology is. The whole complex of these contrivances is technology. Technology itself is a contrivance, or, in Latin, an instrumentum. The current conception of technology, according to which it is a means and a human activity, can therefore be called the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology. For Heidegger, the essence of technology, in the sense of the understanding of being which makes it possible, is such as to exclude other ways of understanding being. For him it is not just understanding being, but understanding being in multiple ways, which makes us human. For instance, those involved in creating and engaging with works of art. However, Heidegger’s

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Luddite-like statement should not be regarded as an opposition of technology. It is better understood in the sense of a reminder that technology is power. So what is the hidden in the technology that Heidegger is so concerned about? What is the essence? Let us begin to explore the issue by asking ourselves the question of who it is that is making these works of art? Who is it that is creating technology? The inventor Ray Kurzweil, in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, points out rightly that Homo Sapiens represents essentially the only technology-creating being on the planet. Homo Sapiens is also the only being which has reached the highest state of the evolution curve. This fact leads to the assumption that the creation of technology is undoubtedly connected to the evolution of the human kind. Here, under technology, we might include all the important events in the history of mankind: fire, language, spinning wheel, letters, steam engine, electrical power, computer. Technology is the key moment in evolution of the human kind. Deeply rooted in itself, technology contains the code of inevitability. Vilem Flusser: The Technical Image and Memory Technology has fundamentally changed the structure and the core of communication. The letter-type culture that had articulated thought and given it direction, introducing time segments, has found itself on the margins of culture. The “image” is once again placed on the throne, while this time, of course, it is technologically modulated. According to Vilem Flusser’s idea, the logic of the alphabet, which directed thinking, i.e., linear numerical form or the historical consciousness for a long period of time, is already overcome by the mathematical logic of the technical image. As a result, this creates a fundamental change in thinking. Yet, irrespective of all specificities that it possesses, we cannot still treat interactivity as a new discovery—a tool for exploring the

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inner world of the man. In fact, electronic interactivity, through the use of tools, attaches itself indirectly to the processes of expansion and extension of consciousness. As prosthesis and through mediation, it enables an approach to the processes of the “direct abstraction” or, in other words, to the processes that characterize the phenomena of the poly-dimensional experience of the world practiced through different shamanic rituals on all geographic longitudes. This phenomenon rests on the very essence of reasoning of human beings, but through electronic interactivity a new but deep break-through in the human knowledge is enabled. Two elements appear to come out of our understanding of this topic: “The Memory” and “The Mathematical Logic” of the technical image. Vilem Flusser, who has explored these phenomena, describes the concept of memory as one of the fundamentals of civilization, as it implies the specificity of the human being. Unlike other creatures, we do not only pass on inherited but also acquired information, we do not only have a genetic but also a cultural memory. This faculty of storing acquired information and of making it available (retrievable) to others is almost weird, as it is contrary to our natural condition. In accordance with the second law of thermodynamics all information within a closed system (as for instance human society) must decay in time and yet the sum total of all cultural information available to us is continuously increasing. According to the principles of biology, acquired information cannot be passed on, and yet each human generation inherits a sum of cultural information exceeding that of its parents. Putting it differently: thanks to the cultural memory we are anti-natural beings.

Electronic memories actually are simulations of the memory function of the brain. This function is transferred from within the skull to the outside. We thus acquire a critical distance to the memory function: we can observe it from the outside, we can interfere, and we can control it. Owing to this distance we can

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differentiate more clearly between the function of memory as such (between software) and its aid (hardware). Due to our use of the computer, we recognize that the memory function is a mode and not a thing and, in this way, we avoid the former reification of memory function and, thereby, open a critical discourse to the traditional concepts like soul, mind, immortality. We are greatly assisted in this by the motion received by it and the perception of the splitting of particular functions of the memory, such as the gathering of data, accumulation, processing and transmission. In this way, a critical distance is shown from one of the most fundamental concepts of our society. Undoubtedly, there are epistemological implications of the use of electronic memories, of the very possibility for a more disciplined storage, recombination, and easy retrieval of what has been stored. The potential for a greater creativity appears. We are relieved from the need to store information in the human brain. Interestingly enough, Flusser stresses that exactly this capacity for storing information has resulted in “discovery” of concepts such as soul, mind and Self, and, accordingly, the concept of “immortality.” The Arts The inevitable pendulum-like motion from prehistoric thinking, i.e. thinking in images, towards marking the end of it (with the invention of the alphabet), is now set again in opposite direction allowing the technological image to shape the consciousness. Due to this it should be expected that the general value systems would be thoroughly altered (as every previous change of direction did). This implies that anyone (artist or theorist) who tries to reflect on the consequences of this great change cannot neglect the technology–image relation. Interactive art with its characteristic features is paradigmatic of this relation. I mention just a few of

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those features: Interactivity and the negation of a one-way; linearity; the conceptual level; velocity; visualization; communicative features; waiting, expectation; void; expressive powers; virtuality of art practicing; personal searching and receiving of information; codes; technical procedures; technical conditions; mediation features; self-referentiality; possibilities/results; the concept of collective work. Regarding these characteristics, as an aesthetic preconditions of art in the tech-image era one must always bear in mind that technologically-enabled integration of different disciplines into an artistic whole plays an important role in the aesthetics of interactive arts. Further, research finds that: – It is a matter of a “new aesthetic” of layering of different mediums which is always exhibited in a different pattern, i.e., is different to every viewer – Interactive art is close to the technique of assemblage, the ready-made – It is an interactive art – It has a specific aesthetic quality related to time – It contains hyper-textual and conceptual implementations – The aesthetic qualities in the CD-ROM are very loosely connected to traditional concepts of form and content – It has a capacity for innovation and original expression and representation and therefore it is obvious that its aesthetics will gradually develop in the future. – It is a negation of traditional aesthetics that could evolve in its Aufhebung  e Change of Consciousness Th and the Phenomenon of Interactivity Interactivity is organically connected to the work of art itself. This determines the artist’s work and his narrative-vision about the relationship between the artwork and the person who

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experiences it. The discrepancy between artists’ expectations that the recipient can apply to one sequence, one section or an image an infinite number of times, and the practice of the recipient who does the same a great deal less is due to the artists’ attitude towards technology. This point reminds us of Heidegger once again. Interactive Narration In trying to work on interactive narration, artists focus on the directness of expression and a combination of freedom and structure. But artists depend on the need for ever-stronger hardware and software that will create a truer illusion of reality or truer virtual reality. Artists use a number of narrative options. The most frequent is creating a story that offers a variety of choices leading into same general direction. They do this through a controlled system where “navigators” lead us to the desired direction. The second approach is in a sense opposite to the first. Action remains untouched while the user can observe it from different viewpoints. Characteristic of the third approach is the maintenance of the key dramatic moments in the script while the user and the characters improvise with the rest. In addition, these approaches to interactive art contain—as a particular characteristic—the “decoding” of the new media language. This is due to both the modified totality of the subject, art and aesthetics as well as to the extremely rapid development of the technology, which requires the artist to follow up on it. Given the fact that all these technologies have their origin in the technologically-dependent military complex, questions of accessibility and social control will always come up. For many theorists, this is very important. Some even stress the need for studying these techniques at the art schools so that the artist can participate in the process of the humanization of technology. These issues of the relation man-technology-art are actually based on a general connecting of the most heterogeneous areas

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of human activities. The structure of these works is immanently related to science, philosophy and religion, and art being placed as a fluid floating point between them. All these aspects and possibilities for their separate decoding signify the placement and action from a position of an authentic interactive cohabitus. With the development of new communication media, there a global change of cultures and art has occurred. In this somewhat mature phase of global networking even the most distant and exotic cultures affect the change of the character and the contents of our domicile culture. The possibility of exploiting heterogeneous sources becomes more realistic than the exploiting of our own inert culture. Developed systems of virtual reality (presentation of computer generated multi-sensual information in physical time) set up completely new relations between computers and art. The immediate knowledge or what we might call the anti-semiotic principle is the most dynamic form of interaction that is used and will, as many hope, liberate us from the need for constant translation of certain symbols and forms into other ones. Typical of the systems of virtual reality is the inauguration of new, more dynamic interaction that includes the body as well as the mind in credible, simulated milieus with sharp images and prompt rendering. The basic idea of today’s practical VR gives the feeling that one is the spot of the action. In practice, this happens by the guiding of the view. A mathematically-calculated image abundant with data about size, perspective, eye parallax, and angular movement does not need to be contained in the realms of the realistic, but often enters the imaginary. This is mostly developed in VR tools such as the flight simulator, where beginners learn more than they ever would in the real flight. Another strong idea is the overcoming of the senses and the combination between the brain and computers. Receiving images directly on the retina, and registration of sounds directly by the auditory center are almost accomplished, liberating us from

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the need for the medium of the screen. The next awaited step is expected to be the uploading of the human consciousness into a VR system. That is not all. The very loosing of the means through which virtual reality is achieved, i.e., the computer is placed as the final goal of the VR systems. The only thing that will be left in the case of success will be the individual. In conclusion, the concept of Virtual Reality calls for a new phenomenology that may, in the future, prove to be one of the key paradigms that will assist us in the process of the restructuring of our cultural consciousness in the direction of establishing an intersubjective world and a dynamic intersection between the heterogeneous fields of human activities, between art and science, philosophy and religion, where one will be in dialogue with and function with the other instead of standing opposite to it.

Culture and Identity in Electronic Space Lea Marie Ruiz

The sociology of culture has traditionally conceived of a division between nature and culture. Nature is primarily left to the biologists, while anthropologists and sociologists study culture. Although there is a general agreement in academia that culture is a primary focus of anthropology and sociology, there is much disagreement as to what constitutes culture or how it should be studied. These disagreements are dramatically apparent when one attempts to study culture in electronic space from within these disciplines. On the one hand, there are entire new programs, departments, and research centers forming around issues of culture in computer-mediated environments, and on the other, many of the leading departments in the United States in both sociology and anthropology refuse to recognize the possibilities for ethnographic cultural research in on-line environments. It is precisely this refusal which causes the discipline as a whole to be regarded as inadequate in terms of research in cyberspace. While it is true that there are many complex methodological issues which accompany such work, this work is far from impossible or unsound. It is clear that sociology will have to adapt in order to pursue research in this area. This new form of the sociology of culture will remain true to the issue at the heart of the discipline—the quest to identify and understand patterns of meaning and their impact on individual and collective identities. To do so, the discipline will have to expand its theoretical gene pool to include the sociologies of art, knowledge, technology, and literature. Theories and methodologies from other disciplines, such as communication studies and

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phenomenology, should also be considered and utilized. It is only through this broadening of scope that sociologists of culture will be able to fully realize the goals of their field. This paper will begin to articulate this new sociology of culture by addressing one of the central issues in the sociology of culture—the impact of underlying patterns of meaning in society on individual and collective identity—in the context of electronic space. The question must be answered—what is the impact of using information technology in producing culture and creating/presenting identity? Also, if it is true that “our bodies are where we experience the intersection of our individuality and the cultural space”, and if it is true that our environment is a cultural construct, then what happens when the body is part of that constructed space, as is the case with an electronic avatar? What are the consequences for individual and collective identity outside electronic space? Phenomenology presents some useful tools for beginning to answer these questions, and using those tools, the argument will be made that forms of electronic space such as the Internet, personal home pages, and computer games (networked or otherwise) are cultural spaces where identity offline is expressed and influenced. Among the objections to an ethnographic consideration of life and culture in cyberspace which I have read or heard in personal conversations is the idea that interaction in cyberspace is somehow different from social interaction in face-to-face and other mediated contexts in such a way as to invalidate the observations made there as scientifically unsound and unverifiable. This objection actually has several parts, each of which may be dealt with using ideas from phenomenology. First, there is the claim that ethnographic research in cyberspace is theoretically and methodologically unsound because the ‘true’, or as one would say in cyberspace, real-life (RL) identity of the individuals involved cannot be verified. To respond to this properly, the idea must be broken down further into two assumptions: 1) that scientific inquiry can

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be absolutely grounded and describes things which are ‘real’ and 2) that the identity of individuals in RL may be somehow verified in face-to-face contexts, and that this verifiable identity in RL takes precedence over that which is presented in cyberspace. Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations are helpful in understanding both of these assumptions. Husserl explicitly states that scientists intend to reject, and encourage rejection among others, of any knowledge which cannot be “grounded [and] . . . justif[ied] . . . completely.” However, according to Husserl, this grounding can never “go beyond being a mere claim [which] at all events . . . involves an ideal goal.” Indeed, if one follows this through the next several sections, it becomes apparent that “the being of the world, by reason of the evidence of natural experience, must no longer be for us an obvious matter of fact”. The world itself only claims being, and derives its status from the individual, which can be understood in Husserl’s terms as the Ego. “The world is nothing for me absolutely nothing else but the world existing for and accepted by me in such a conscious cogito.” This calls into question the existence of a taken-for-granted objective reality, as conceived from the standpoint of the natural attitude. Which in turn raises the question, who is to determine what is ‘real?’ On what basis is interaction in cyberspace rejected as not ‘real?’ On the contrary, interaction in cyberspace is just as real, if not more so, to many people as is face-to-face interaction. This brings me back to the second assumption made by those who object to ethnography as an investigation of cyberspace. Face-to-face interaction is reified by these objectors. It is assumed that identity off-line is separate from identity on-line and that identity on-line necessarily false. The objection is made that identity on-line is unverifiable as compared to the verifiable identity presented in face-to-face interaction. Husserl’s meditations are useful in discussing this issue. According to Husserl, “[o]ther men than I . . . are data of experience for me only by virtue of

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my sensuous experience of their bodily organisms; and since the validity of this experience too is called in question, I must not use it.” This may be taken to mean that even face-to-face interaction may not be taken as independently, objectively real. This calls into question the taken-for-granted ideas of verifiability and definition of identity off-line which, thus, cannot be reified over on-line identity. This argument becomes clearer when one considers what is perhaps phenomenology’s best contribution to sociology: the life-world. The life world is the basis of meaning, the “world of signification” and “the world of culture” to which belongs “all that constitutes our own social world in its historical actuality, and all other social worlds concerning which history gives us knowledge.” It is through actions in the life-world that intentionality is exercised. Furthermore, it is through actions in the life-world that identity is transformed. However, this is not to say that identity is created independently of other social actors. On the contrary, the life-world is a socially constructed place with meanings which are founded upon the intersubjectivity of the self and other individuals. The existence of cyberspace and the Internet further complicates this by introducing multiple subsets of social space and interaction which were not available previously and which are not available today to all individuals equally. There are still individuals in this world for whom cyberspace is not part of the life-world. For those who participate in this subset of the lifeworld, understanding all of the influences upon identity, be it individual or collective in nature, is extremely convoluted. “Identity is unintelligible unless it is located in a world.” However, determining the extent of that world is sometimes difficult. The work of George Marcus is helpful in this vein as he considers the negotiation of individual and collective identities as critical to understanding culture as lived local experience within the context of global perspective. This is one of the distinctive features of

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modernity—the interconnection between globalizing influences and personal dispositions, in other words, interconnections between the global and the local. Studies of modernity conceive of identity as a set of processes (influenced by global and local experiences) which cannot be resolved as stable or even necessarily coherent. Instead, identity is fluid. Social actors in cyberspace play out roles locally and globally, and indeed may be actively engaged in fulfilling more than one of these roles simultaneously. It is my opinion that these roles/ identities are ontologically linked and form what Sherry Turkle refers to as a “decentered self ”—a distributed identity which is more than the sum of all of its parts. The local roles impact the global ones and vice versa. The global roles may even have their own multiple elements of locality to them—for instance, participating in an on-line international discussion group or playing an on-line game with people in other countries are both activities which have multiple local settings and yet are global in nature. I once played a game of Hearts with people in Sweden and other parts of Europe while sitting in my living room in Southern California. That game was characterized by the global reality of playing with people in foreign lands, the local reality of my living room and my interactions with my fiancé in the other room, and the local reality of being in a game ‘room’ on the Internet with a group of people and playing a ‘virtual’ game of cards. My interactions with them were no less real to me than my interactions with my fiancé. Those on-line interactions were also local in that we were in the same (cyber)space, sharing in the same construction of on-line reality. To fully understand how individuals in cyberspace share the same space and influence each other’s identities, it is important to examine how individuals inhabit cyberspace and how their virtual embodiment, be it through text, graphic avatars, or a combination of the two, changes the way that identity and reality are constructed. One way to do this is through the ideas of Jean Baudrillard.

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According to Baudrillard, “[t]oday abstraction . . . is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” The hyperreal is replacement of the real with signs of the real. This is interesting when applied to cyberspace. Cyberspace may be thought of as a hyperreal where people are replaced with signs in the form of words and electronic avatars. Graphical images and words on the screen are interacted with as if they are the people who created them. Some bots, left behind on the Net to perform tasks for their programmers, are so realistic that it is difficult to tell if there is a person behind them at a keyboard somewhere, and may actually be mistaken for people typing away into the matrix. The “simulation threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’, the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’.” I would like to propose that this blurred line is experienced not only by the person encountering the words or avatars, but also by the person which the words or avatars simulate. At some point the person who is simulated must experience the simulation as reality. While I agree with Baudrillard’s conception of the hyperreal in this instance, I do not agree that the real disappears. Instead, the simulation from the hyperreal is incorporated in some part back into the real. The opinion that I form through interaction with other people’s simulations is integrated into my conception of what is real, both about the world and myself, and is thus integrated into my identity. This is in-line with the idea that processes of continual change in the life-world necessitate continual changes in people’s identities. Identity is traditionally linked primarily to a physical, organic body which bridges the gap between the individual and society. The body “inhabits space and time,” “transforms ideas into things,” and is the “general medium” or “intermediary” through which people have a world. The body is the physical mass/image people associate with us in our day-to-day interactions. Our bodies are often the first source of information people have about us when we enter into an interaction. Although the

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separation between mind and body has been discussed for centuries, few of us can imagine life without our bodies. This, however, is exactly what happens when interaction moves into cyberspace. A person’s identity is decoupled from the physical body, and is instead only associated with whatever information he chooses to share. In IRC, MOOs, MUDs, and some on-line games, identity is relayed through the participant’s words and actions. Physicality only enters the equation if the individual consciously adds it as a variable. The freedom from images allows for great opportunities for anonymity and experimentation with alternative identities. For example, genderswitching, which has attracted lots of media attention over the last several years is one type of such experimentation. In textbased electronic space, identity is displayed and created through the words and actions of the individual. A new dimension is added in graphical or more virtual spaces. Personal web pages have the added ability to represent the individual visually and even audibly. The contents of a web page say a great deal about their authors. However, there is more than mere representation at work here. As discussed previously, meaning and identity are socially constructed. Web pages provide their creators with the opportunity to continuously work on their own identities. This work is public by nature if the creator sets the file permissions to allow world-wide access. However, it is just as easy for the pages to be removed again from the public domain. The degree of interactivity with others is regulated by the page designer. One of my classmates while I was an undergraduate created a rather involved web page designed to highlight his abilities as a photographer. At the time, he had an interactive portfolio running where people were allowed to create captions for the photos or otherwise comment upon them. This provided him with an almost constant stream of feedback from others. He has since decided to remove that feature. Another way to control interactivity is to choose whether or not to

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supply your e-mail address on your web page. Personal home pages also tend have more ties to RL than do other forms of interaction in electronic space. Perhaps the least investigated form of identity presentation and construction in cyberspace is the avatar. Avatars come in both two and three dimensions depending on the virtual world supporting them. In these worlds, the avatar is the individual’s on-line presence much as the physical body is in RL. In most cases, the avatar can respond to commands, perform actions, and explore its virtual world. Some worlds only have a set number of avatars available with limited customizability. Others support fully customizable avatars and the possibilities are endless. In general, the more customizable the avatar, and the more textual information which can go with it, the greater the connection with the on-line user and the stronger the sense of identity in the virtual world becomes. These virtual worlds are extensions of the life-world by virtue of the interactions which occur there and the investment of self on the part of users. The avatars are at once simulations and entities which correspond to elements of identity in the off-line environment. Some users perceive their avatars both as aspects of their own identities and as independent entities with lives of their own. In virtual worlds such as VZconnections and Dreamscape, avatars can have their own apartments and earn tokens with which they may buy possessions. There is also a list of scheduled on-line activities, a newspaper, and a wedding registry connected to these sites. Avatars, particularly three dimensional avatars, present an interesting situation. In a way it may be said that when an individual operates one of these avatars, the individual has, in a way, two separate bodies. One is the physical body which sits at the keyboard and interfaces with the computer. The other is the three dimensional (3D) avatar which embodies the individual in the virtual world. Both may be said to inhabit the life-world. Some 3D avatars may even be programmed to interact with others

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while the user is not logged in. Users admit that they cannot always control what happens to their avatars, so in a sense the avatars live a separate existence. However, the avatars gain their existence from the users and are expressions of parts of the users’ personalities. To conclude, I believe that identity is a set of distributed processes which are always undergoing change through interactions with others in the life-world. Identity influences interactions in the life-world, which in turn influence identity. The processes are ongoing and are facilitated by all forms of interaction off- and on-line, including the use of IRC, MOOs, MUDs, web pages, computer games, and avatars. Furthermore, on-line identity influences off-line identity and vice versa. Works Cited Avaterra.com. VZones, 1999. Baudrillard, J. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Glaser, Sheila Faria,. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1967. Chandler, D. “Personal Home Pages and the Construction of Identities on the Web.” April19, 2000. Danet, B. “Text as Mask: Gender, Play, and Performance on the Internet.” Cybersociety 2.0: Revisiting Computer-mediated Communication and Community. Ed. S. G. Jones (Ed.). Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1998. 129-158. Douglas, M. Cultural Bias. London: Royal Anthropological Institute, 1978. Giddens, A. Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Hillis, K. “Digital Sensations: Space, Identity, and Embodiment in Virtual Reality.” Electronic Mediations, Vol. 1. Ed. K. Hayles, M. Poster, & S. Weber. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 164-199.

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Husserl, E. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960. Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin. Smith. New Jersey: Routledge: Humanities Press, 1994. NONOBADKITTY!. “Avatar Identities: Thoughts on Virtual Identity and Pizza Noses” Schutz, A. “Phenomenology and the Social Sciences.” Phenomenology and Sociology: Selected Readings. Ed. T. Luckmann. New York: Penguin Books, 1978. 119-141. Soussay, A. “Webbed Bodies: Identity and Communication in Shared Virtual Environments.” 1999. Stone, A. R. “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories about Virtual Culture.” Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. M. Benedikt. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991. 81-118. Taylor, T. L. (1999). “Life in Virtual Worlds: Plural Existence, Multimodalities, and Other Online Research Challenges.” American Behavioral Scientist. 43.3 (1999): 436-449. Turkle, S. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of Quicktime1 Vivian Sobchack It as though all this material represented an underground network in which the only visible landmarks were the boxes and collages, and the difficulty of communicating their meaning was a source of both regret and satisfaction. Dawn Ades on Joseph Cornell

Whenever I watch QuickTime “movies” (a nomination I want to interrogate here and thus keep under quotation), I find myself drawn into someone else’s—and my computer’s—memory. Even when the content speaks of the contemporary moment, the form itself seems a remembrance of times–and things–past. Faced with its strange collections, its moving collages and juxtapositions of image-objects whose half-life I can barely re-member, I tend to drift into the space and time of a reverie not quite my own. Indeed, as QuickTime “movies” play out and often repeat their brief, ambiguous animations and elusive, associative narratives in those “little boxes” that I “open” on my computer “desktop” (or web “browser”), the form most frequently evokes from me the kind of temporal nostalgia and spatial mystery I feel not when I go to the movies, but when I try to “inhabit” the worlds of Joseph Cornell’s boxed relics, or wander among the enigmatic exhibits in the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, California, or leaf through pictures of the personalized collection of “curiosities” found in the Wunderkammer of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 1 This essay first appeared in Millennium’s Film Journal 34 (Fall 1999): 4-23, and is reprinted here with permission of the publisher

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Most of all, however, QuickTime “movies” remind me of Cornell boxes. Both preserve “under glass” the selected and static fragments of a “read-only” memory that, paradoxically, evokes memory as “random access”–that is, as dynamic, contingent, and associational. Both QuickTime “movies” and Cornell boxes also do not open out onto worldly horizons of space and time. Unlike big-screen, live-action movies, they draw us down and into their own discrete, enclosed and nested poetic worlds: worlds re-collected and re-membered; worlds more miniature, intensive, layered, and vertically deep than those constructed through the extensive, horizontal scope and horizonal vision of cinema. Both QuickTime “movies” and Cornell boxes also salvage “the flotsam and jetsam” of daily life and redeem it as “used” material whose re-collected and re-membered presence echoes with bits and traces of an individual yet collective past: personal memories, narratives, histories that were, from the first, commodified and mass-mediated. And, through reverential framing, both QuickTime “movies” and Cornell boxes construct what might be called “reliquaries”: they preserve and cherish “the fragment, the souvenir, the talisman, the exotic” as precious matter, and treat “the ephemeral object as if it were the rarest heirloom.” In sum, both QuickTime “movies” and Cornell boxes contain “intense, distilled images that create a remarkable confrontation between past and present.” Indeed, this “remarkable confrontation between past and present” is furthered by QuickTime’s stuttering attempts to achieve “real-time” movement–or to capitulate to and embrace the temporal and spatial lacunae which visibly mark its expressions. While cut-out statues and matted silhouettes may float gracefully like collaged dreams across photorealist backgrounds that effortlessly warp and melt, “live-action” and “real-time” balk and stiffen in contrast. Strangely static and consequently moving, the temporal field of QuickTime “movies” is oneiric and uncanny–and its animations more effluvial than continu-

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ous. Full of gaps, gasps, starts and repetitions, made “precious” by their small size and “scarce” memory, QuickTime “movies” seem to intensify our corporeal sense of the intensive molecular labor and matter of human and worldly “becoming.” Thus, they evoke for me not the seamlessly-lived and wholly present animation of “real-time” and “live-action” movies, but, rather, the “half-life” of certain time-worn and ambiguous kinetic objects: wooden puppets with chipped paint, forsaken dolls with gaping head wounds or missing limbs, Muybridge-like figures in old flip books hovering with bravado and uncertainty between photograph and cinema, images of nineteenth-century strong men or belly dancers hand-cranked into imperfect action through old Kinetoscopes found deep in the dark corners of amusement arcades. What comes to mind as I watch QuickTime “movies” is not “live-action” and “real-time” cinema at all; instead, I associate them with those forms of animated film that foreground the cinema’s usually hidden struggle to achieve the “illusion of life”–with the works of Jan Svankmajer or the Brothers Quay in which kinetic objects inhabit miniaturized worlds and achieve a laboriously animated life that somehow (and at some deep and molecular level) reminds us of the labor of our own. Hence, I take pleasure in the rumor that the thin-faced master puppet who gets caught up in and subjected to the intense, time-encrusted, miniature world of the Quays’ Street of Crocodiles was modeled after Joseph Cornell. At the risk, then, of sounding retrograde and nostalgic, I don’t want QuickTime “movies” to get any quicker. I also don’t want to watch them get any bigger. Furthermore, given the value and pleasure I find in their fragmented temporality and intensely condensed space, I don’t want them to achieve the “streaming” momentum of “real-time” and “live-action”–measured, although it need not be, against the standard and semblance of cinema. Indeed, precisely because QuickTime’s miniature spatial forms and temporal lacunae struggle against (as they struggle to

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become) cinema, they poetically dramatize and philosophically interrogate the nature of memory and temporality, the values of scale, and what we mean by animation. In sum, I don’t want them to become “real movies” at all. Nonetheless, they will. At least that’s what every computer­ phile enthusiastically tells me. It’s just a matter of time–and compression and memory and bandwidth–before the “limita­ tions” of the medium in relation to moving images no longer display themselves in their peculiar specificity as “different” and “other” and (for many) “less” than the space-times of cinema or television. Before that happens, however, before QuickTime “movies” as we see them today disappear (becoming both an extinct aesthetic form and a computergraphic expansion of cinema and television), I want to consider–and celebrate–them for what they presently are. Refusing the “Myth of Total Cinema”

In QuickTime, a set of time-based data is referred to as a movie. —Developer Documentation

All this is to say that it is a shame that QuickTime movies were ever called “movies”: in being so named, their extinction as a specifically discrete and computergraphic form of aesthetic expression was virtually preordained. And this need not have been–yet could it be otherwise? Digital theorist Lev Manovich has made the astute observation that the basic metaphors reified by computer interfaces–metaphors such as the “desktop” with its “files” and “trashcan” or the “cinema” with its practices of “cutting,” “compositing,” and virtual “camera movement”–are also, and more significantly, cultural interfaces: pre-existing and wide-spread cultural forms of conceptually organizing and visualizing data borrowed upon by a new medium that, after all, had other options. Consider, for example, the developers’ documen-

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tation for QuickTime, “a set of functions and data structures” that permits applications to cooperatively “control time-based data.” QuickTime itself, we are told, is not an application, but a “true multimedia architecture”: a specific “enabling technology. . . comprised of pieces of software” that allows an “operating system to handle dynamic media” so as to “integrate text, still graphics, video, animation. . . and sound into a cohesive platform.” However, this rather open initial description turns proscriptive at its end: hence the emphatic epigraph that introduces this present section of my essay and reduces QuickTime to a “movie.” Long ago now, André Bazin wrote “The Myth of Total Cinema,” an essay which argued that the novel technical disco­veries “basic” to cinematic invention were “fortunate accidents but essentially second in importance to the preconceived ideas of the inventors.” That is: In their imaginations they saw the cinema as a total and complete representation of reality; they saw in a trice the recon­ struction of a perfect illusion of the outside world in sound, color, and relief.

Thus, “the cinema was born. . . out of a myth, the myth of total cinema.” And the myth of “total cinema” still remains–this despite technical discoveries that have allowed the invention of a “new medium” (one which digitizes, integrates and, in so doing, transforms all others). In this regard, as a primary cultural interface with the computer, the cinema and its mythic teleology have, on the one hand, merely carried on and extended the representational imagination and realization of cinema from sound and color to “relief ” (QuickTime 3 now incorporates 3D graphics and Virtual Reality navigation and interaction) and, on the other hand, blindly or willfully asserted the primacy of cinema in the face of its transformation into “something else” by another medium.

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Again, the developers’ documentation is telling. Its very first sentence introducing the “set of time-based data” upon which QuickTime operates as a “movie,” the documentation nonetheless continues: “A traditional movie, whether stored on film, laser disk, or tape, is a continuous stream of data. A QuickTime movie can be similarly constructed, but it need not be. . . The movie is not the medium; it is the organizing principle.” Here we have the significance of cinema as a primary cultural interface: while its very principles of organization enable a certain comprehensible use of the new medium, they also constrain its capacities and influence the trajectory of its “development” and practice. Thus, for all that the cultural interface of cinema allows, it also causes a certain “blindness” to both the phenomenological and material differences between QuickTime “movies” and cinematic movies. The aesthetic values of the former are measured against those of the latter–and the true computergraphic “novelty” of QuickTime works becomes historically inverted and transformed into a false cinematic “primitivism.” Hence the desire to make QuickTime “movies” quicker and bigger rather than stopping to wonder at and privilege the strangely stalled momentum of their animation and the heightened intensity condensed by their miniaturization and framing. Indeed, I would have much preferred naming QuickTime works “memory boxes” rather than “movies.” Such a nomination not only evokes Joseph Cornell’s work, but also evokes the essential nature of the new medium that is the fundament of QuickTime’s existence: the computer in both its physical form and essential function. Also, insofar as it refers to a range of diverse containers (from reliquaries to children’s “treasure” boxes to shoe boxes filled with photographs or souvenirs), “memory box” is a nomination that—particularly in the present technological moment—insists upon memory’s immaterial and dynamic status as well as the historical transformation of the material conditions of its preservation. The computer (and all its extensions) is nothing else

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but a fathomless “memory box”–one that collects, preserves, and allows for the conscious retrieval and re-membering, the visible re-collection, of selected fragments of all the possible memories “cached” in the “enormous, under­ground network” of past images, sounds, and texts that constitute the utopian totality of a potentially infinite and hyperlinked database. “Memory Boxes” and the Database A well-calculated geometric description is not the only way to write a “box.” —Gaston Bachelard

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes of a character in a novel who basks in the solidity and order of his oak filing cabinet: “Everything had been designed and calculated by a meticulous mind for purposes of utility. And what a marvelous tool! It replaced everything, memory as well as intelligence. In this well-fitted cube there was not an iota of haziness or shiftiness.” Despite its lack of solidity, I get the same feeling from my computer “desktop.” It reassures me with hierarchy, with clarity and order, with principled and logical menus, commands, and systems through which I can access vast amounts of information (if not intelligence). This database of information while unseen, does not seem “hidden” to me; rather, it is “filed” away in “folders” and, more deeply, in “records” and “fields.” It is rationally organized and always hypothetically available for retrieval and display. Indeed, the “well-fitted cube” that is my computer gives me access to what seems an infinite store of information (if not knowledge)–and I take comfort in the hierarchical logic of its “unhazy” and “unshifty” memory (of an order quite different than my own). Here is the logical–and “official”–organization of the “office,” of the catalog, the library, the museum, and the stock room. Here, everything has been “designed and calculated by a meticulous mind for purposes of utility.” Here, I’ve no

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sense of the “secretive” or “unconscious”: at worst, information gets bureaucratically “classified,” misplaced, or erased (not repressed). In sum, the phenomenology of comfort afforded by the “file cabinet” and the “database” refuses ambiguity, ambivalence, poetry. Human memory and its re-collections don’t compute so neatly. The orderly and hierarchical logic of the file cabinet and the database is not that of Kunstkammern or Wunderkammern, of Cornell or QuickTime “memory boxes.” Some other rationale–and phenomeno-logic–operates here: one more associative than hierarchical, more dynamic than static, more contingent than determined (even when “given” to us as spectators or users in “read only” form). Its search engines driven to the past by a present moment of desire (not utility), this is the eccentric, ever-extensible, yet localized logic of the hyperlink. The contingent nature and function of personal desire as well as the nonhierarchical and associative logic of the hyperlink transform the organization–and phenomenology–of the file cabinet and the database into something quite other than it was. The file cabinet becomes charged with experience, temporality, and desire and its hierarchical order becomes jumbled by logically incompatible–if psychologically comprehensible–functions. Following Cornell’s description of just one of the file folders relating to his work, we could say that the entire file cabinet is now transformed into “a diary journal repository, laboratory, picture gallery, museum, sanctuary, observatory, key. . . the core of a labyrinth, a clearing house for dreams and visions.” And the database? No longer hierarchical, its order becomes that of a comprehensive but incomprehensible labyrinth: a vast and boundless maze of images and sounds, dreams, and visions in which one follows, backtracks, veers off, loses oneself in multiple trajectories, all the time weaving tenuous threads of association in the logically endless teleology and texture of desire. Here, the materials of the world are never fixed data or information merely requiring re-collection;

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here, from the first, they are unstable bits of experience and can only be re-membered. The poetic and phenomenological power of both Cornell’s and QuickTime’s “memory boxes” emerge explicitly from their relation to a larger totality of material and memorial possibilities: they and their found objects exist not only as fragments of personal experience, but also as “emblem[s] of a presence too elusive or too vast to be enclosed in a box. These missing presences crowd the imagination.” Thus, in differentiating QuickTime’s “memory boxes” from “movies,” it bears pointing out that watching a film, I usually don’t have a profound sense of all the images that weren’t shot or all the stuff left on the cutting room floor; watching a QuickTime “memory box,” however, I always feel the presence of an “elusive” and “vast” absence, a sea of memories shifting below the surface and in the interstices of what I watch. In other words, I am always aware of an effluvial database. Thus, by virtue of their framing, their miniaturization, their valuation of the fragment, and the slightness and ambiguity of their associational links, both Cornell’s and QuickTime’s “memory boxes” point to their own presence as the poignant and precious “visible landmarks” of an unseen, lost, and incomprehensible field of experience. And what Carter Ratcliff says of Cornell’s “memory boxes” is equally true of QuickTime’s: “Ultimately, the mode is enchanted by fragmentariness itself, which serves as an emblem of a wholeness to be found in other times and places,” and it produces “an aura of loss which is as perfect in its own way as reunion would be.” And thus, as James Fenton notes: “Here was a place for private contemplation of the beautiful and curious. The important thing was to stay alone with these boxes for a while. . . allowing them to exert their slow influence.” And under this slow influence, “the panic of loss gives way to nostalgia.” Frames within Frames

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Yet “a mode enchanted by fragmentariness” which serves as “an emblem of a wholeness to be found in other times and places” cannot stand as a complete description–for we cannot ignore the presence of Cornell and QuickTime’s “memory boxes” and their fragments as themselves containers. Furthermore, their miniature size, their collector’s sensibility, and the discretion of their enclosures gain particular power from and exist always against their own containment by a larger–and marked–visual field. Both externally and internally, Cornell and QuickTime works provoke a structural and poetic tension between two different logics: one represented by the hierarchical and rational organization of the “file cabinet” and computer “desktop” where everything has its place in some comprehensive master plan; the other by the associational organization that is the psycho-logic of the “memory box” and the “hyperlink” in which everything has a relative and mutable order that, as a totality, cannot be mastered. This tension is simultaneously framing and framed. As a framing device, this tension exists in–and as—a space exterior to, and containing and juxtaposing, the associational logic of the Cornell box and the museo-logic of the vitrine in which it sits, or the hyperlink logic of a QuickTime “memory box” and the hierarchical logic of the computer “desktop” upon which it is opened. That is, the larger frame of the museum vitrine or computer desktop allows the smaller frame of the “memory box” an intensified condensation and concentration of its visible contents into an aesthetic totality: a personally meaningful and contained microcosm structurally homologous to–and nested within–all the potential order and meaning (not meaninglessness) of the macrocosm that surrounds them. In this aspect, both Cornell and QuickTime “memory boxes” take on the magnitude and function (if not the geometric size) of the

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Wunderkammer and Kunstkammer, chambers of curiosities and art curated less on logic and rational principle than on the personal sensibility and desire of their wealthy collectors. Writing of these condensed collections, Anthony Grafton wonders what sixteenth and seventeenth century visitors sought in them and concludes it was the experience of totality and plenitude: “They hoped, that is, to encounter the universe in all its richness and variety, artfully compressed into the microscopic form of a single room that showed all the elements, all the humors, all the musical intervals, all the planets, and all the varieties of plant and animal creation.” Neither hierarchically arranged nor meant to serve utilitarian or scholarly purpose, the compressed totality of the Wunderkammer was also not fraught by the implications of its own contingent desire and arrangement nor overwhelmed by its (to our eyes) chaotic clutter. Indeed, historicized, its totalizing impulse can be read as a celebration of mastery, order, harmony, and structural homology: that is, man’s comprehension of the “universe in all its richness and variety” was represented mimetically in a single chamber complacently “nested” within the larger frameworks of both the master’s residence and God’s “master plan.” Certainly, there are similar compressions and homologies articulated in the smaller Wunderkammern of Cornell and QuickTime “boxes” as they emerge structurally and figurally as both “framing” and “framed” within a larger field. But this “compression” of a homologous “universe” is apparent also in the content of these more contemporary “memory boxes.” Their multi-layered and rich imagery is marked repeatedly by the recurrence of maps, planetary and astrological charts; hourglasses and clocks and other measuring devices; diagrams and schematics of optical devices from the microscope to telescope; evolutionary and devolutionary biological images of microbes and spores and skulls and skeletons. In sum, consistently asserting homologies of shape and structure across scale from the microscopic to the macrocosmic, much like the

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Wunderkammer these “memory boxes” position themselves as both framing and framed by larger cosmologies and cosmogonies. Nonetheless, times and cosmologies change. While contem­ porary manifestations of the Wunderkammer may situate themselves in homologous relation to smaller and larger worlds, their relation to “totality” and its “mastery” is historically trans­formed. The assertion of homologies between the micro- and macrocosmic is not emblematic of man’s security and mastery in Cornell’s boxes– and, in QuickTime boxes, this assertion foregrounds a relativism quite other than the comforting and “nested” unity of God’s master plan. Cornell’s references to, as well as containment of, macro- and microcosmic images seem nostalgic—indeed, elegiac—in relation to a totalized harmony and order, homologies between quotidian and cosmic objects thus provoking a sense of the great loss—and mystery—of perfect “comprehension.” (Here we might remember Ratcliff’s description of the boxes as generating “an aura of loss. . .as perfect in its own way as reunion would be”). In QuickTime “memory boxes,” homologies between the micro- and macrocosmic are also not about mastery or a sense of security and “nested-ness”: here the revelation of self-similarity across scale and structure constitutes a disconcerting and chaotic relativism, often evoking the vertiginous and non-hierarchical totality of “infinite regress” and “cosmic zooms”—and thus undoing an entire hierarchical history that positions and privileges the mastery and rationality of both “man” and “God.” Indeed, in QuickTime, it is not God’s rational master plan mimetically framing or framed by the “memory box” opened on my computer desktop or browser: rather, these images of maps, measures, microbes, and constellations mimetically contain and figure and point to the total containment and mastering structure of a more contemporary—and secular—“main” frame: the computer. As indicated earlier, the tension between the two different logics that organize the objects and structure of these contemporary “memory boxes” emerges not only in the juxtaposed relation

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between the interior space of the boxes and the external space that frames them. It also emerges framed within the intimate space of the boxes themselves–revealed in imagery that manifests both an appreciation and fear of the associational contingencies, oneiric secrecy, and mysterious material poesy that pervade lived experience and yet threaten to overwhelm it. Bachelard writes: For many people, the fact that there should exist a homology between the geometry of the small box and the psychology of secrecy does not call for protracted comment.

Nonetheless, it is worth noting that within both Cornell and QuickTime “memory boxes,” we see such a homology literalized again and again: the associational vagaries and “hyperlinked” debris of contingency, dream, and secret desire overlaid and in palimpsestic relation with the hierarchical and “orderly” order of the rational “file cabinet.” Cornell’s work evidences this inter­nal tension even in name: his boxes exist in taxonomic series titled “Jewel Cases,” “Museums,” “Pharmacies,” “Aviaries,” and “Ha­ bitats.” Furthermore, as Ratcliff notes, “When Cornell feels the clutter becoming too oppressive, he sweeps it into those com­ partmented formats which draw on the orderliness of Victorian cabinetry and the museological devices of natural historians.” His “Museums” and “Pharmacies,” in particular, are “works which tuck images into drawers and vials and grids.” Compartments, grids, drawers, slots, and boxes within boxes: these manifestations of hierarchy and order do not only point to potentially larger (and smaller) frameworks of organization so that “scale is more than flexible, it is multiple, in Cornell’s art”; such nesting also frames and contains potentially uncontrollable fragments of temporality and experience that are infinitely extensible in their generation of memory and meaning and secrecy. The same is true of QuickTime “memory boxes.” Fre­quen­tly “overlaying” the image fragments and detritus of their re-membered experience are orderly grids and schematic diagrams, ge-

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ometry in the form of mattes that segment and compart­ mentalize. And more specific to the particular medium, this compartmentalization and grid work point not only to the larger order and framework of the surrounding “desktop,” but also to the smaller geometries and hidden, “secretive,” orders of microchips, bits, and bytes. That is, re-membered experience in QuickTime is often “bit-mapped” and “pixel-ated”: boxed frag­ ments of photorealist images are fragmented and compart­ mentalized further into smaller boxes yet, un-resolving the personal meaning and contours of human memory and re-solving them as the visible and controlled geometry that in-forms the computer’s underlying memory and structuration. There is, then, both without and within QuickTime and Cornell “memory boxes” the tension between two kinds of logic and order and between a desire for re-collection and for re-membering. Memory itself is thus generated and enacted by both “box” and “viewer” as a multi-stable phenomenon–one echoed in a layered and palimpsestic structure and imagery that together provoke a richly poetic ambivalence and ambiguity. On the one hand, the geometry of compartments and mattes and pixels re-collect and contain the amorphous and ever-extensible material of experience; on the other, the composited and collaged accu­mulations and associations of this experiential material always also challenge the neatness of re-collection by re-membering it–and we are reminded there is a radical difference between a “pharmacy” and a “treasure box,” between a computer’s memory and our own. Thus, we could say according to Bachelard, that the “two kinds of space”–”intimate” and “exterior”–that frame and are framed by Cornell and QuickTime “memory boxes” gain poetic power through their juxtaposition and layering: they “keep encouraging each other, as it were, in their growth.” “Little Movies”: Memory, Miniaturization, and Compression.

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Although arguing “cinema” as a primary “cultural interface” in our engagement with the digital, Lev Manovich has used QuickTime to make a series of what he calls “little movies” that use “classic” cinematic imagery as the “raw material” of a digital exploration that interrogates the differences between these media. Furthermore, all six of his “little movies” privilege and foreground the limitations of computer memory and storage space under which they are constructed and by which they are constrained. Appearing in only a small portion of the lower third of a black background (itself framed within the computer screen by the web browser), all six variously explore and emphasize their miniature size and compressed nature. In this regard, one called “A Single Pixel Movie” is particularly striking. To a quite literally “loopy” tune reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy’s theme music, we watch the already small square of a primitive “movie” in which a strong man holding a pole does rote exercises and is intermittently interrupted by the sound of a “blip” and a digitized circle of “light”– both “movie” and “digital blip” becoming smaller and smaller (and less and less audible) at each interruption until both are reduced to a single pixel on the screen. The effect is more compelling and poignant than the mild comedic repetition of mechanical motion and see-sawing music would seem to warrant: that is, we watch more and more intently as the already miniaturized image becomes smaller and smaller and we are aware throughout of the increasing fragility and impending disappearance not only of the oblivious optimism of the strong man and “early” cinema, but also of the QuickTime “movie” presently being extinguished from our human sight. It is no small thing that these “little movies” are “small” both spatially and temporally. As Bachelard tells us in The Poetics of Space: “It must be understood that values become condensed

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and enriched in miniature.” Susan Stewart also notes of the miniature in On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection: “A reduction in dimensions does not produce a corresponding reduction in significance.” Indeed, quite the opposite. Pointing out that “we should lose all sense of real values if we interpreted miniatures from the standpoint of the simple relativism of large and small,” Bachelard writes: “A bit of moss may well be a pine, but a pine will never be a bit of moss. The imagination does not function with the same conviction in both directions.” Thus, QuickTime “movies”—or, as I prefer, “memory boxes”—not only emerge from and allegorize the present objective necessities and constraints of data storage involving digital memory and compression, but they also accrue phenomenological and aesthetic value as an effect of these necessities and constraints. Objectively, the miniature is a compression and condensation of data in space, but phenomenologically and poetically, the compression and condensation of the miniature in space intensifies the experience and value of the “data” and makes of it something “rare” and “precious,” something spatially “condensed” yet temporally “interiorized” and thus “vast in its way.” Furthermore, the miniature exaggerates interiority: in the “little movies” or “memory boxes” of QuickTime, not only the interiority of the individual perceiving subject, but also of the computer. A digital version of The Incredible Shrinking Man, the strong man exercising in Manovich’s “A Single Pixel Movie” is extinguished from human vision but not from the computer’s: while “in the mind of God there is no zero,” in the memory of the computer there is always zero–and always also one. Thus, as Stewart suggests: That the world of things can open itself to reveal a secret life– indeed, to reveal a set of actions and hence a narrativity and history outside the given field of perception–is a constant daydream the miniature presents.

The miniature, then, is always to some degree secretive, point-

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ing to hidden dimensions and unseen narratives. Its “nestedness” within a larger whole draws us not only beyond its frame, but also into and beneath it. In this aspect, the miniature is transcendent, its “metaphoric world” making “everyday life absolutely anterior and exterior to itself.” One gets this sense of “transcendence and the interiority of history and narrative” viewing QuickTime’s “little movies” and Cornell’s small “boxes.” For Stewart, however, these effects are most dominant in our encounter with what she considers “the most consummate of miniatures–the dollhouse.” Nonetheless, her description also speaks to the phenomenology of QuickTime’s and Cornell’s miniaturization: “Occupying a space within an enclosed space, the dollhouse is a materialized secret; what we look for is the dollhouse within the dollhouse and its promise of an infinitely profound interiority.” Thus, Cornell’s miniaturized “memory boxes” (themselves constituted from compartments and spaces “within an enclosed space”) become, as McShine puts it, not only “sanctifications of the small object,” but also constitute “an infinity of atmospheres within a small space.” And it is not merely a fortunate “coincidence” that McShine echoes Stewart when he writes: “Although Cornell’s choice of intimate scale also reflects the world of childhood, of containment, of the architecture of dollhouses, it almost makes reference to Vermeer interiors–with tables, cupboards, maps, globes, light, glass–holding captive a moment in a transient, enclosed world.” In sum, the spatial condensations of Cornell and QuickTime and their framings within the frame constitute an interiority that transcends quotidian spatial and temporal relations–and “as an object consumed,” their miniaturization “finds its ‘use value’ transformed into the infinite time of reverie.” In the doll house spaces and interior chambers of the “memory box,” now excluded by their physical size, both artist and viewer imaginatively prospect and inhabit the empty rooms, filling them with their

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own missing presence in fragments of autobiography, dream, memory, confession. (Speaking both to us and its maker, one QuickTime miniature superimposes over a vague, empty, and receding hallway the following textual reverie: “Here is the solitude from which you are absent.” ) Thus, whether in my sight or not, the strong man of Manovich’s “little movie” will exercise forever in the depths of my–and the computer’s–memory: unlike my engagements with cinema, I never quite have the sense that QuickTime “movies” are ever really “over.” (Indeed, their terminus is ever really “under.”) Thus, Cornell, although he used slots, drawers, and compartments to contain and control the materials of overwhelming experience, he also used them to draw us inward into an ever-extensible reverie: the compartments, according to no “rational or logical sequence,” further housing and condensing “private and nearly unfathomable associations, almost like a metaphor for the cells of the unconscious mind.” Here, in the space-time that is the miniature and the reverie it provokes, it can indeed be said that “the poet inhabits the cellular image.” Mnemonics, Reverie, and Reliquaries The casket contains the things that are unforgettable, unforgettable for us, but also unforgettable for those to whom we are going to give our treasures. Here the past, the present and a future are condensed. —Gaston Bachelard

The miniature “memory boxes” of QuickTime and Cornell memorialize fragments of past experience in all their secretive interiority and mystery. In framing and effect, they act as “reliquaries,” preserving “under glass” remnants and souvenirs that gain power from partiality but also from the precious nature of the boxes’ own small size: as discussed previously, to a great degree the “valorization of the contents” emerges through a “valorization of the container.” Hence the fragment and the

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miniature “encourage” each other, evoking the “singular,” the “rare,” the “fragile,” the “ephemeral,” and the “compressed” as materially and poetically valuable. Manovich makes “little movies” that his text suggests will disappear, “the artifacts of the early days of digital media.” Bachelard privileges treasure chests and caskets. And Cornell creates “jewel cases” and places some of his compositions “under bell jars” as if “holding captive a moment in a transient, enclosed world.” The preciousness articulated here also emerges from the particular kind of contingency that in-forms the artfully arranged but “found” objects of the “memory box.” That is, we encounter these re-membered objects as objective recollections that have been subjectively assembled according to ephemeral associations, the very slightness of the links among them making their present appearance seem singular, fragile, fleeting–and thus precious. Stewart, writing of the material fragments of the past gathered in photograph albums or collections of antiquarian relics or souvenirs, points out: “There is no continuous identity between these objects and their referents. Only the act of memory constitutes their resemblance. And it is in this gap between resemblance and identity that nostalgic desire arises.” This sense of a “gap between resemblance and identity,” of the tenuous and fleeting associations of memory leads not only to nostalgic desire, but also to a desire to preserve the associations, to keep them “in mind.” Thus, these “memory boxes” tend to contain and enact what I would call a “mnemonic aesthetic.” This aesthetic both practices and privileges devices and operations that serve to fix and preserve the fleeting ephemera of memory, to “pin them down” and “put them under glass” as are the gloriously colored butterflies one sees “fixed” in the vitrines of natural history museums. Such mnemonic practices are all based on repetition and rhythm and, in the “memory boxes” of both Cornell and QuickTime, can be seen in a variety of forms and modes such as “rote quotation” and mnemonic clichés; “looping,” duplication,

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and cyclical recurrence or repeated uses of images, objects, and sounds; rhythmic and repetitious patterning of images, objects, sounds and music whose modes can be “ritualistic,” “mantric,” or “mechanical.” All these devices and modes are mobilized in a “concentrated” effort–to keep hold of a memory that keeps threatening to slip away and vanish. We certainly see this mnemonic aesthetic in Cornell and QuickTime “memory boxes.” What Ratcliff observes in Cornell’s work can be also observed in QuickTime. The artist, we are told, is drawn to ‘material facts’—objects and images—whose precio­ usness is ratified by memory and he often calls on popular memory to reinforce his own. His image-chains often run along lines of well-worn cliché–butterfly, swan, ballerina.

His boxes also contain and, through repetition, make mysterious the most common of objects: a row of wine glasses, a field of thimbles, series of cork balls or pharmacy vials. Nonetheless, although the seriality and the idea of repetition is “central to Cornell’s oeuvre,” this is “not the intellectualized notion of serialization, but more like the ritualized repetition of the alchemist.” Indeed, as Ratcliff says: “To duplicate an image endlessly is often to make its spell all the more binding.” The use of the term “binding” here in relation to duplication and repetition is telling for it expresses the desire to preserve what escapes preservation, to tie the ephemeral down without undoing its ephemerality; it expresses the desire to remember. Both QuickTime and Cornell “memory boxes” are thus also highly citational: that is, they don’t only attempt to fix personal memories through repetition, but they also quote and repeat previous artifacts of cultural memory–especially privileging those that speak mnemonically to technologies of reproduction and preservation. Hence, both QuickTime and Cornell “memory boxes” are “deeply involved with the photograph, the postcard, the photocopy, and the

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printed reproduction of works of art.” In addition, the boxes are also marked with great frequency by repeated “art historical” images that reference the past: well-known paintings, old lithographs, classical statuary. In QuickTime, to an extraordinary and remarkable degree, sound is also used mnemonically. That is, it marks time in repetitive patterns and, in musical form, is generally less melodic than it is insistently rhythmic. While often voiced (literally) in fragments, it is often also looped, repeating a partial thought, setting up a percussive rhythm of mechanical repetition, “scratching” or “stuck” in a temporal sonic groove as if in an old phonograph record, creating a mantra. Indeed, middle Eastern and Indian music are used to a striking degree–particularly given the often unrelated cultural imagery being re-membered. The boxes, then, use repetition and rhythm in their attempts to grasp and preserve the ephemeral fragments and fragile relics of memory. They construct mnemonic rituals of re-membering and, as Ratcliff notes, “ritual is mechanical, so any ritualizing aesthetic must have the power to mechanize the artist’s meanings.” This mechanization is particularly compelling in QuickTime “memory boxes”–for, along with the aforementioned “ritualized repetition of the alchemist” that marks Cornell’s work, the QuickTime boxes also convey “the intellectualized notion of serialization.” That is, duplication and repetition as ritualized in QuickTime “memory boxes” often seem much more “mechanical” than “alchemical.” Indeed, duplication and repetition in QuickTime derive much of their poetic power from mimesis: the boxes duplicate and repeat their “memory fragments” as figural repetitions of the functional capacities of the computer itself to “duplicate,” “copy,” and “paste.” Here, the mnemonic aesthetic emerges not only from a desire to preserve scarce and rare memory, but also from the ritualized and routinized (or “mechanical”) capacity of the computer to do the same. In “Two Marks Jump,” for example, serial images are stutteringly animat-

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ed as duplicated and endlessly looped images of two “Marks” leap into and out of a scene accompanied by a similarly looped and endless yell; here the titular description of ”two” Marks is belied by the rote duplication of an infinite series. Another example, “Hommage à Magritte” [sic], may “alchemically” duplicate and transform the artist’s emblematic bowler hats, but also “mechanically” animates his famous painting “Golconde,” in which dozens of indistinguishable little bourgeois men in similar hats rain down upon a sterile townscape. In QuickTime ”memory boxes,” mechanical serialization and mnemonic repetition often combine–each “encouraging” the other to keep in mind–to re-collect and re-present–the ephemera of memory that would otherwise disappear from view.

Time, Movement, and the “Illusion of Life”



Thus we find that the disjunctions of temporality traced here create the space for nostalgia’s eruption. —Susan Stewart

The miniature encourages the phenomenological experience of intensity, interiority, and material preciousness by virtue of its compression and condensation of data in space. But the miniature also effects our sense of time. As Stewart points out, there is “a phenomenological correlation between the experience of scale and the experience of duration.” That is, time also compresses and condenses in the miniature: it “thickens” in significance and implodes. Constrained or “nested” in a small spaces, time is reflexive: it falls back upon itself and “encrusts,” building up into the “weight” of a generalized past, or it collapses under its own weight, diffusing the present into an ahistorical and “infinitely deep” state of reverie. Thus, as Stewart says: “The miniature does not attach itself to lived historical time. Unlike the metonymic world of realism, the metaphoric world of the miniature makes

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everyday life absolute anterior and exterior to itself.” Furthermore, unlike in “real-time” and “live-action” cinema, our sense of temporality as we engage the miniature never “streams” toward the future (and this is so even when movement is involved). Temporal compression and condensation conflict with forward movement and “life-like” animation. As a result, “the miniature always tends toward tableau rather than toward narrative, toward silence and spatial boundaries rather than towards expository closure.” Fragments and bits and traces of past experience exist “now” in our sight and reverie, not only evocative but also emblematic of irrecoverable “originary” moments of wholeness. These broken and poignant units of time are silent (or, put in motion, they stutter), but their static and tableau-like presence points to both the passage of everyday “life” from particularity into allegory and the great temporal mysteries of matter’s slow and inexorable emergence and extinction. (In this regard, we might remember the tendency of the “memory box” to figure and often make thematic cosmological imagery suggesting not human temporality, but the imperceptible dynamics and perspective of “longue durée”: an “almost immobile history” written not in human events, but in the cosmic temporality of geologic or climatic transformation. ) There is, then, an extraordinary obfuscation (and questionable utopianism) in the nomination “QuickTime.” QuickTime is anything but quick: its animations are forestalled, its “illusion of life” incomplete. Compressing and condensing its imagery in a “miniature” number of bits of digital memory and display space, the material conditions that inform QuickTime’s miniature “memory boxes” are literally dramatized in the “half-life” of its objects. Not only are these objects constituted as “fragments” in space, they are also “fragmented” in temporality and motion. Thus, even when they take human form, the animated “subjects” of QuickTime are experienced as partially discontinuous and without agency. Phenomenologically, their movement is seen as imposed from “without” rather than as emerging intentionally

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from “within.” At best, like the puppet Pinocchio, they struggle against their existence as mere “kinetic objects,” in frustrated fits and starts stuttering out the desire to become a “real boy”–that is, fully alive in the temporal continuity and spatial coherence of intentional and realized action. My evocation of Pinocchio here is hardly coincidental to the temporal and spatial qualities of both the miniature and the “memory box.” The way in which both together transform time and space and thus question the nature of human animation and agency seems to call up both puppets and theater, “subjects” whose lives are directed from without and a space which miniaturizes, condenses, and foregrounds the “illusion” of life. Indeed, in both QuickTime and Cornell “memory boxes,” the “theatrical stage is evoked,” particularly “children’s puppet theaters with cutout cardboard scenery.” Central also here is intermittent motion: time and action broken into fragments, foregrounding gaps and the laborious struggle to “become” really human or “real” cinema. In this regard, Pinocchio’s bildungsroman of self-realization is countered with the oxymoronic miniaturization and intermittencies that undo cinema within cinema in the uncanny films of Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay. Indeed, Cornell’s own forays into filmmaking were meant to undo “live-action” and “real-time”: he insisted that his Rose Hobart–shot at sound speed (24 fps) and using fragments of a 1931 sound melodrama (East of Borneo)– be projected at silent speed (16-18fps) to the accompaniment of scratchy phonograph recordings. In Cornell and QuickTime “memory boxes,” intermittent motion is always more than merely mechanical: it also articulates the temporal and existential conundrum of discontinuity. Thus, in Cornell’s kinetic constructions such as his “sand fountains,” Fenton tells us that “the sand was deliberately mixed with some larger impurities, so that the flow was supposed to be somewhat discontinuous rather than like an egg timer.” And a QuickTime work like Victoria Duckett’s “Self Portrait,” which shows a naked little girl running—but not—over

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a background of repetitious forms, merely figures and foregrounds the discontinuity in-forming both QuickTime and the medium where the selected fragment and the digital bit are animated discretely, discontinuously, in “tableau” time. In sum, movement in time in both Cornell and QuickTime “memory boxes” becomes emblematic as it condenses and compresses “momentum” into a series of reified and frozen “moments.” The effortless and continuous animation of “life” becomes temporally solidified in what we might call a kinetic “souvenir”: a memory of motion that is now merely its token. Connecting the souvenir with the disjuncture between the past and present, Stewart tells us that it “speaks to a context of origin through a language of longing” and arises “out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia.” That is, “the souvenir generates a narrative which reaches only ‘behind,’ spiraling in a continually inward movement rather than outward toward the future.” Both QuickTime and Cornell boxes are, in the end, always engaged as souvenirs. It is worth noting—even as we know that Pinocchio became a “real boy” and that QuickTime will eventually and seamlessly “stream” into “live-action”—that, as Stewart suggests, the “point of desire which the nostalgic seeks is in fact the absence that is the very generating mechanism of desire.” Both Cornell and QuickTime boxes mobilize memory and desire through an aesthetics of absence: a privileging of the poetically and philosophically charged gap between a present artifact and the past experience of which it is only a fragment. Call me retrograde: as the “gap” closes and QuickTime enlarges and quickens, I feel nostalgia at the impending loss of a unique historical experience and a rare and miniature digital object.

Phenomenology of Internet Privacy (Rights) Albert D. Spalding, Jr.

The Houston police department recently proposed the installation of surveillance cameras on downtown streets, apartment complexes, shopping malls and, in extreme situations, private homes. Its police chief was questioned by reporters about this initiative. He responded by asking the following question: “If you’re not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?” (Grant). The same question could be asked of every person who sits at home browsing the Internet with their employer-provided laptop computer. It could be asked of every employee who makes use of their employer’s email server to send and receive personal email. And it could be asked of anyone who might be concerned about the extent to which the government (through police search powers), or their employer (by subpoena or otherwise), could obtain a complete record of all computer and Internet activity no matter when or where it took place. If you are not doing anything wrong, why be concerned about whether every keystroke can become part of a private dossier or a government database? Unless you are committing a crime, what’s the harm in the creation and retention of historical files—capturing your every Internet search and instant message—on the hard drives of your Internet service provider (ISP)? And unless you have been doing something for which you would be ashamed, why worry about such silly notions as privacy rights or government intrusion? In fact, people do worry about privacy. And they argue about it. Privacy is one of the most cherished, and most closely guarded,

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notions in the human experience. The idea of privacy informs some of the most hotly debated controversies in western society, from Internet access, to abortion rights, to government surveillance. Privacy rights advocates insist on the idea of privacy— founded upon human rights concepts—and yet privacy is also almost impossible to define. When we insist on asserting or protecting our right to privacy, what exactly are we protecting? In many respects the answer to this question pertains both to the information which we would protect, and to the secrecy or confidentiality (or state of inaccessibility) that we would attempt to protect. When we speak about loss of privacy, we refer both to the information about ourselves, including our thoughts and mental states, and even our emotional states, that has become or may become available to others. But we are also speaking about the experience of having ourselves, and our actions through time, being exposed to the eyes and ears of others. This paper examines the notion of privacy as phenomenon, and compares the idea privacy as phenomenon to the “reasonable expectation of privacy” that forms the basis for privacy rights in North America. This exploration is itself a troubling endeavor, because it reveals the unraveling of the very fiber of the protective cloth of privacy rights that has been placed around individuals in North America, and it leads to the conclusion that the current legal theories about privacy are ineffective and inefficacious. Privacy as Phenomenology For some people, privacy consists in being left alone. Others think of privacy in terms of not being interfered with, or in terms of solitude, secrecy and anonymity. Perhaps the best way to think about privacy is in terms of accessibility to others. In particular, accessibility to be seen or heard by others as we go about doing the normal activities of our lives.

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Moore’s attempt at a definition is typical: he explores various perspectives of privacy, and ultimately associates privacy with a general notion of control over information about the person (699-702). Privacy rights, in turn, are often defined in terms of those rights that protect the exposure, disclosure, or revelation of things held dear by the individual. It is the ability to control information, and to make selective disclosure, that is sought by most privacy advocates. The unintended or uncontrolled disclosure or revelation of information against the wishes and preferences of the individual, thwarts the will and the preferences of those who would wish to avoid such exposure. The reaction to this thwarting, is often intensely emotional. The phenomenology associated with a disruption of one’s sense of privacy is described by Jean-Paul Sartre in his articulation of The Look (le regard). In a famous passage from his 1943 book Being and Nothingness Sartre imagines and describes a scenario wherein he is looking through a keyhole, watching someone inside a room (347). At this stage, he remains completely unreflective and thoroughly engrossed in his activity. He is, in his experience at that time, his active experience. But then he suddenly hears footsteps behind him in the corridor, and he realizes that someone is looking at him. In his experience, he is immediately transformed into an object-for-himself insofar as he comes to perceive himself as he appears to this Other person. As he describes this sensation, Sartre makes the following observation: By the mere appearance of the Other, I am put in the position of passing judgment on myself as on an object, for it is as an object that I appear to the Other (302).

Prior to this sudden awareness of the presence of the Other in the corridor, and watching him, Sartre saw himself as being immersed in his own actions and interests. The rest of the world had, for the moment, fallen away from his conscious awareness. In fact, he was so focused on his spying activity, that he did not

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even recognize his actions as necessarily constituting a “spying” activity. By being seen by an Other, he was immediately brought back to a sense of himself as a self-conscious being-as-object for the onlooker to judge as they would see fit. Sartre explains: The appearance of the Other … causes the appearance in the situation of an aspect which I did not wish, of which I am not master, and which on principle escapes me since it is for the Other (355). This unpleasant experience, triggered by the revelation of his activity to a third party, brought Sartre back to an understanding of himself in shame. He expressed resentment about this shift in perspective, from his objectifying stance toward the world, to his being objectified by the Other. The shift in perspective corresponds to a shift in power: the power to objectify flows from Sartre to the Other. He describes this dynamic as follows: [The Other] is that object in the world which determines an internal flow of the universe, an internal hemorrhage. He is the subject who is revealed to me in that flight of myself toward objectification (345).

This transfer of power, in turn, is tantamount to a loss of freedom. Sartre declares, “I can be ashamed only as my freedom escapes me in order to become a given object (350).” Robert Metcalf calls the denial of this susceptibility (to feeling shame in the presence of others) a “solipsistic pretense,” that is, a delusion regarding my ability to be “self-respecting independent of the respect of others (12).” The objectifying power of the Other does not arise ab initio upon one’s sudden awareness the Other’s presence. The power itself, in fact, is unrelated to whether the Other is real or imagined, actually present or only possibly present. Under Sartre’s regime:

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I do not cease to experience my being-for-others; my possibilities do not cease to “die,” nor do the distances cease to unfold toward me in terms of the stairway where someone “could” be, in terms of this dark corner where a human presence “could” hide. Better yet, if I tremble at the slightest noise, if each creak announces to me a look, this is because I am already in the state of being-looked-at (370).

For Sartre, there always remains a residual presence of the Other. He declares, “the Other is always present to me inasmuch as I am always for-others (374).” That residual presence continues to affect (or master) the subject by stirring up within the subject a readiness to be ashamed. Sartre admits, “I am a slave to the degree that my being is dependent at the center on a freedom which is not mine and which is the very condition of my being (374).” Switzer calls this ever-present threat of capture by the gaze of the Other, an invasion, or an appropriation (43). For Switzer, Sartre’s dread is in the form of a nagging question in the back of the mind: what if I am seen? Reasonable Expectation of Privacy At the core of being, for Sartre, is the question of identity, and that question cannot be answered without some awareness that the Other is somehow involved or engaged in defining me—even when the Other is not actually present. I am never really alone, so long as I can imagine what Others would see when they look at me. It is almost impossible for me to have private thoughts, or engage in private behavior, that would be unaffected if I was being observed by another. This purported lack of true phenomenological aloneness is at odds with legal notions of privacy. In the United States, privacy rights are dependent upon a vague notion of an expectation of privacy. That is, the judicial system’s ascertainment of an

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individual’s personal expectation of privacy forms the basis of privacy rights. With the growth in Internet, email, instant messaging, and similar computer technology, however, the idea of a reasonable expectation of privacy is fading. Along with it, privacy rights—premised upon such expectations—seem to be shrinking as well. The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution provides that the people of the U.S. are to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. This is a right that under the Fourth Amendment is not to be violated. The Fourth Amendment also provides that no warrants are to be issued unless there is probable cause. The protections of the Fourth Amendment are triggered only upon the occurrence of a “search.” A search, in turn, is defined in terms of whether a person has a constitutionally protected “reasonable expectation of privacy.” The currently relevant line of cases articulating and applying this doctrine began with the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in Katz v. United States. There, the Court rejected the requirement of physical intrusion into a constitutionally protected area, recognizing that the Constitutional promise of protection from unreasonable searches could be jeopardized without the physical “penetration” of enclosed spaces. In that case, electronic eavesdropping on a conversation in a telephone booth without physical intrusion was held to have constituted a search because it violated the privacy upon which the defendant in that case had justifiably relied. In his concurrence with the Katz decision, Justice John M. Harlan asserted that the protection of the Fourth Amendment requires that a person have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable. The Supreme Court has subsequently adopted the formulation proposed in Justice Harlan’s Katz concurrence. Today, application of the Fourth

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Amendment depends on whether the person invoking its protection can claim a justifiable, a reasonable, or a legitimate expectation of privacy that has been invaded by government action (Smith v. Maryland). The reasonable expectation standard remains the primary protective doctrine pertaining to surveillance of individuals in the United States. In the 2001 case of Kyllo v. United States, the Supreme Court reaffirmed its commitment to this concept. The Court held in that case that the use of a thermal-imaging device to detect the growth of marijuana in a home constituted an unlawful search. In reaching its decision, Court expressed concern that the device was capable of detecting lawful activity—in that case, intimate details in a home, such as the time of day that residents sleep or bathe (38). Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, reasserted the primacy of this doctrine as follows: While it may be difficult to refine Katz when the search of areas such as telephone booths, automobiles, or even the curtilage and uncovered portions of residences are at issue, in the case of the search of the interior of homes—the prototypical and hence most commonly litigated area of protected privacy—there is a ready criterion, with roots deep in the common law, of the minimal expectation of privacy that exists, and that is acknowledged to be reasonable. To withdraw protection of this minimum expectation would be to permit police technology to erode the privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment (34).

And while the Kyllo opinion reaffirmed this commitment to the notion of an expectation of privacy, it was limited in scope to an expectation that related to a specific constitutionally protected area, that is, a home’s interior (34). The Court in Kyllo acknowledged that the expectation of privacy is also dependent upon technology that is readily available. In that case, the thermal-imaging device—used by the police to discover the indoor marijuana-growing operation—was not (at that time) readily available to the public. The expectation-of-privacy

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standard was upheld in that case “at least where (as here) the technology in question is not in general public use” (34). Technology, of course, is in a constant state of change. As technology advances, the courts have attempted—with mixed results—to ascertain the extent to which the rationale of earlier cases (pertaining to older technology), applies to newer or more advanced technology. For example, to what extent to cases involving the telephone, apply to cases involving computers and the Internet? At least some courts have determined that there exists some differences, for purposes of privacy considerations, between the two. The Second Circuit, for example, has ruled in United States v. Sofsky, that a probationer (who had been convicted of fraud) may be forbidden from using the Internet without prior approval from his or her probation officer, but may not be kept in the same manner from using the telephone (126). To the extent that an employee does have any possible or potential legally enforceable expectation of policy, the employer may eliminate any residual or potential privacy rights by simply publishing a “workplace privacy policy.” In O’Connor v. Ortega, the U.S. Supreme Court considered the extent to which employee has a legitimate expectation of privacy at the workplace. a state hospital commenced an investigation into suspected improprieties by its chief of professional education, Magno J. Ortega. In the course of the investigation, hospital personnel searched Ortega’s office without his knowledge or consent. Following his discharge, Ortega commenced a federal lawsuit, alleging that the search of his office violated the Fourth Amendment. The Supreme Court held that although some hospital personnel may have had a legitimate right of access to his office, Ortega might have had a reasonable expectation of privacy in his desk and file cabinets. The U.S. Supreme Court listed several factors which are relevant in determining whether an employee’s expectation of privacy in the workplace is reasonable. One key factor is the existence of a workplace privacy policy.

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In Biby v. Bd. of Regents, researchers at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln were informed not to expect privacy if the university determined that it a legitimate reason to conduct a search. The users were specifically told that computer files, including e-mail, could be searched whenever the university was responding to a discovery request in the course of litigation. The plaintiff professor in that case—who had been terminated by the university—contended that the university’s true motivation for the search was to find a reason to fire him and to tamper with evidence. The court in that case, however, concluded that the university’s search was connected to an arbitration case, and that the professor was told in advance that a search was necessary to locate documents related to the arbitration. The court in the Biby case ruled against the professor, holding that a search of a government employee’s office is justified under O’Connor whenever there are reasonable grounds for suspecting that it is necessary for a noninvestigatory work-related purpose (726). In short, the court ruled that the professor had no reasonable expectation of privacy in his computer files. Nor do people have an objectively reasonable expectation of privacy in their Internet account information voluntarily turned over to third parties. The court in the recent case of the United States v. Ohnesorge addressed the issue of a search of subscriber information. There, the defendant had downloaded pornography onto a government computer through a subscription to EasyNews.com operated by El Dorado Sales, Inc. The defendant accessed the subscription through his AmericaOnline (AOL) account with the username of “RuhRowRagy.” An agent of U.S. Custom Service went to El Dorado and asked if they had a subscriber with that username, and assured El Dorado that an administrative summons or subpoena would be provided for the information. The customs agent did not have a summons, subpoena or search warrant at the time. El Dorado then searched the subscriber database and found the pertinent account information

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the defendant’s name, service activation, and credit card number used to pay for the subscription was turned over to the agent. Customs served an administrative warrant on El Dorado two weeks later. The defendant in that case asserted that the government’s request for subscriber information constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment, that he had a reasonable expectation of privacy in that subscriber information, and that absent a warrant or similar authority, the obtaining of that information violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The court found there was no reasonable expectation of privacy in the subscriber information, in part because the defendant’s agreement with EasyNews.com put the defendant on noticed that the information could be shared with third parties. Other recent court cases have resulted in rulings that there is no legally cognizable expectation of privacy in regard to text messages (United States v. Jones), emails (United States v. Lifshitz), student use of university-owned computers (United States v. Butler), or personal use of home computers for Internet access and emails (United States v. Yuknavich). A married person’s password-protected home computer files are not protected from being searched if his or her spouse decides to give consent to the search (United States v. Buckner). And if a university professor deletes files (such as pornography) from a university computer, the university’s published workplace privacy policy serves to eliminate any legally cognizable expectation of privacy in regard to deleted, or undeleted, files (United States v. Angevine). Conclusion We harbor expectations in regard to the world around us. Those expectations often take into account our relative solitude or aloneness. If I am driving a automobile faster than the speed limit, for example, I am alert to the possibility that I might receive a speeding ticket if I am seen or clocked by the traffic authorities.

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Or, if I am peering through the keyhole of a door, as Sartre proposed, I am alert to the notion that I might feel shame if seen by another. I anticipate the actions of others, including the whole of society (as expressed through law). I take into account the possibilities (and, sometimes—such as when I choose to drive in excess of the speed limit—the probabilities) of being judged or adjudged. These considerations of my social and legal environment become part of my expectations. In the area of privacy rights, this dynamic is turned upside down or inside out. The law itself is premised upon expectations. The courts in the United States have attempted to construct privacy rights around the somewhat elusive, and often highly subjective, notion of personal expectations. But as technology has advanced, and as courts have discovered or acknowledged new or expanded reasons to disregard or discount personal privacy expectations, the actual protection of privacy has faded correspondingly. Perhaps personal expectations make a poor foundation for legal rights. Especially when, as Sartre suggested, there is always the possibility of being seen, and that very possibility makes true privacy nearly delusional. People of faith in a personal, omniscient God, for example, can never claim to be truly alone. But even atheists like Sartre recognize that our ideas about ourselves are entirely dependent upon our sense of what other think about us (or might think about us). And, as recent court cases have demonstrated, personal expectations of privacy in the face of rapidly changing technology are almost impossible to define, ascertain, measure, justify, or effectively protect. It appears from this analysis that the entire “reasonable expectations” doctrine has failed, and that a new approach to the protection of Internet-related privacy should be developed. One that does not rely upon subjective expectations of computer users. A model that might be consider is the protection of trade secrets: such protections are not dependent upon the actual avoidance of

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information leakage. “Secret recipes” and similar protected information and formulae are not protected because they are actually secret. They are protected because their owners claim such protection under common law jurisprudence. Proposals for a new approach to the protection of Internetrelated privacy rights are beyond the scope of this paper. The concern here is simply that an entire legal doctrine has been developed around this notion of personal expectations. And, in the face of expanding technology which threatens to leave us without any truly reasonable expectation of privacy rights in regard to most aspects of our lives, that doctrine has failed to offer any significant protection. Works Cited Colaizzi, Paul F. “Psychological Research as the Phenomenologist Views It.” In Ronald S. Valle and Mark King, Eds., ExistentialPhenomenological Alternatives for Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and Its Discontents, James Strachey, Trans., New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1961.1977. Grant, Alexis. “HPD May Add Video Cameras to its Ranks.” Houston Chronicle 18 February 2006. 20 February 2006 Heller, Agnes. The Power of Shame: A Rational Perspective. Boston: Routledge and K. Paul, 1985. Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967). Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001). Metcalf, Robert. “The Truth of Shame-Consciousness in Freud and Phenomenology.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 31.1 (2000): 1-18. Moore, Adam D. “Employee Monitoring and Computer Technology: Evaluative Surveillance v. Privacy.” Business Ethics Quarterly 10.3 (2003): 697-709 . Moustakas, Clark. Phenomenological Research Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994.

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O’Connor v. Ortega, 480 U.S. 709 (1987). Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979). Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956. Switzer, Robert. “Metaphysical Shame.” Angelaki 3 (April 1998): 39-48. United States v. Angevine, 281 F.3d 1130 (10th Cir., 2002). United States v. Butler, 151 F. Supp. 2d 82 (D. Me. 2001). United States v. Buckner, 407 F. Supp. 2d 777 (W.D. Va. 2006). United States v. Jones, 149 Fed. Appx. 954 (11th Cir., 2005). United States v. Lifshitz, 369 F.3d 173, 190 (2d Cir., 2004). United States v. Ohnesorge, 60 M.J. 946 (N.M.Ct.Crim.App. 2005). United States v. Plavcak, 411 F.3d 655 (6th Cir., 2005). United States v. Sofsky, 287 F.3d 122 (2d Cir., 2002). United States v. Yuknavich, 419 F.3d 1302 (11th Cir., 2005).

Augmented Reality, Augmented Perception: Phenomenological Approach to Interface Culture Janez Strehovec

Investigations into the ontological status of the work of art brought phenomenological aesthetics to the realization that the nature of its being is heterogeneous; for besides a real foreground the work of art also contains a layer of unreal background. Analyzing the intentional world of artworks, phenomenological aesthetics likewise revealed such special ontological forms as the unreal and the as-if-real. And, last but not least, phenomenological investigations also raised the issue of the ontological status of entities such as the centaur, the round square, wooden iron etc. The being of these entities—as of the so-called impossible objects—is again quite particular in nature; one could say that their ontological status is shifted from being towards nothingness. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, having dedicated his thought precisely to nothingness—which in a way is essential to being—reached farthest into these issues. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre distinguishes intermediate stages between fully positive realities and those whose positive nature is mere appearance, concealing the chasm of nothingness. It is this very notion that first highlighted the existence of reality entailing non-being within it. The phenomenological approach to the plural-modal being structures pertaining to fictional objects (i.e. objects of art and imagination), however, is not typical only of the theoreticians of phenomenological aesthetics, (e.g. Roman Ingarden, Moritz Geiger, Eugen Fink); this field of objects was equally familiar also to Edmund Husserl—as testify the writings from his Nachlass,

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published in the 23rd volume of Husserliana, under the title Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung (1980). His major concern in this book is fictional objects of imagination (Fikta) in the sense of as-if-real objects, and the specificity of unreality. Nowadays ontology can still be written by referring to the tradition extending from Parmenides and Plato through to Husserl and Heidegger. However, this ontological movement can also be enriched with analyses of the ontological modality of new-media entities, such as clones, avatars and virtual agents. To these, one could also add investigations into spaces and times that define on-line communications and new-media activities. As a result, the experience of new media generates what we shall term augmented reality, i.e. reality which encompasses both a given reality plus a vast field of virtual as well as other artificial realities. The components of this reality are objects which in fact are no longer full and evident objects, but rather most fluid and dispersed entities, often only relations, actions and data ‘inscenations’ of quite provisional existence. The key issues here are centered around the entities which exist for an instant and last only as long as certain special conditions continue to be satisfied. The moment this is no longer the case, the entities in question vanish or can be even erased by pressing a key on the computer keyboard. New media, as part of cyberspace, defined both by classical and second-order cybernetics, thus generate relational forms of existence whose being is likely to be something between stable being and pure nothingness. Cyberspace and cybertime encompassed within augmented reality therefore do not overlap with real space and time. In precisely this way these entities call for comprehensive inquiries as well as noetic and noematic descriptions of virtual entities as such, and in this they also raise questions for the phenomenological approach. What proves crucial here is the fact that phenomenology arises from a commitment to ontological pluralism and has no predisposition against entities characterized by fragile and instant nature. This brings us to an observation of Herbert Spiegelberg’s:

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“What is all-important in phenomenology is that we consider all the data, real or unreal or doubtful, as having equal rights, and investigate them without fear or favor.” Facing the specificity of cyberspatial phenomena, we are now able to discern not only the irreal, the as-if real and the unreal, but—metaphorically speaking—also the e-real, the cyber-real, the virtual and the @-real. The present-day mediascape increasingly blurs the boundaries between the real and the fictional; the latter even appears to be the most prominent principle, and art by no means remains exclusively a field of de-realization. Let us therefore mention the far-reaching claim of the philosopher Odo Marquard, maintaining that the relevant and irreplaceable role of art within a reality becoming increasingly fictional lies in the very fact that its productions are no longer defined in relation to the fictional but against it, i.e. art is conceived as counter-fiction. One of the virtues of phenomenology is seen in its ambition to bring description as close as possible to the specificity of the medium in question. On the basis of phenomenological reduction and by considering the plural nature of objects (given as phenomena), it tries to disclose with great accuracy the special nature of the object under analysis, whether real or unreal. Eugen Fink, in his investigations into the visual medium, observes that: “objects of the world of images are not objects in real space, nor do they last in real time; they exist merely in the space of the world of images and in the time of the world of images.” Indeed, this is an instance of taking things for granted, in the sense examined by phenomenology; however, such an approach and orientation remain important even in the case of new-media objects, which fall under the concept of the so-called augmented reality. If we think, for example, of avatars and virtual agents presented in cyberspace, we see that in fact they only exist in cyberspace and cybertime, they have cyberpasts and cyberfutures, and they can only be the objects and subjects of cyberactions, cyberactivities. Let us remind ourselves of the theoretician of telematic society Vilem Flusser, who pioneered the analyses of specificity in

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objects established by new media. In his text Conceiving Technology (Technik Entwerfen), in the section dealing with holograms, he remarks that these “pseudo-objects established by means of technology are no longer objects of the kind that can be negated by the subject, but rather they are projections, conceived from within the framework of a project.” In the case of the hologram cube, he approaches the conclusion that this is no longer an object standing in space, but immaterial, pure appearance, pure ‘would-being’ (Sollen). Another example of the phenomenological orientation in dealing with the specificity of a particular medium is also seen in the theory of the work of art as a stratified formation. This theory was developed by Nicolai Hartmann and Roman Ingarden, while its basic principles are found earlier in Waldemar Conrad’s Aesthetic Object. According to this view, the work of art is not—so to speak—a monotonous formation, but has a polyphonic character, founded on the many-layered nature of its structure. Life in augmented reality fosters the emergence of new forms of perception to suit the interaction with objects in cyberspace. These objects even call for a new sense to be created, namely— metaphorically speaking—the sense of the virtual, much in the vein of Karl Marx’s notion of the mineralogical sense and the sense of beauty. This means that our conscience needs to be cultivated so as to be able to handle the objects which we touch and control in virtual and other realities in a subtle fashion. Augmented reality is, as a rule, accessible via interfaces, and our contemporary culture as a whole is increasingly becoming an interface culture. Interfaces generate special matrices, which in turn enable typical, specific access to reality: one interface will run a distinctly particular movie in front of our eyes, while another will confront us with “another story,” say, in the form of a computer game. Furthermore, the use of a particular interface is crucial for defining the structure and form of an activity; using a wordprocessor, for example, a text is organized in a different way than

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it would be organized if it was written with pencil or typewritten. Interfaces also enable us to apprehend space and time in formerly unknown ways, and direct us towards new forms of representation. Consider, for example, interactive representation (typical of video and computer games) which takes us from the perspective of the perfect tense and places us into the imperfect tense referring to the pure present, and from the standpoint of an observer to the position of the protagonist or actor. The game, unlike the story, integrates us into real-time activities, it demands exercise, skill and experience as well as motor abilities, which means that it employs all the senses most intensively— while creating a new one, namely, the sense of the game. Games give us directions as to how to achieve mastery in a particular game and how to react quickly in risk situations, but, on the other hand, they only offer a limited and—in comparison to the narrative quality within the medium of the story—an impoverished view of the world, for now this view has been reduced to the mere goals of the game. Games are unmistakably centered around goals and motivated by results—all of which has nothing to do with the story and its subtle use of description. Parallel to augmented reality, therefore, emerges also augmented perception. This means that the perception of the present-day individual is “modeled by media”, which is why she looks, listens and touches—metaphorically speaking—in accordance with the principles of film, simulation, clicking and hypertext. Not only film, but also new media, among which the Internet nowadays occupies an important place, significantly influence perception, activities and imagination of the present-day individual, so that she—metaphorically speaking—sees, hears and touches more and in a different fashion than she would if she didn’t live in the world of interface culture. In this paper I will show an example of augmented and therefore highly complex perception, enabled by the combination of three interfaces, namely the bicycle, the computer and the ride simulator such as can be found in theme parks. Thanks to the

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very combination of a ride in real space and a ‘co-imagined’ ride in a simulator on the one hand and an acquired ‘clickual’ sensitivity on the other, I can perceive space in its complex entirety, which means that in the perceived space I can switch smoothly between the spheres of the real and the unreal, and enjoy “the essence of the ride as such.” This kind of ride is founded in the everyday experience of the author of this paper; in other words, I am going to write about how I view the city and what I see in it, now that cycling complements both my everyday professional work in front of the computer screen as well as my excursions into the trendy environments of the present-day entertainment industry (simulator races, SF-movies, VR-based games). I cycle through Ljubljana, the city in which I live, in my own way: in the gear which demands rather heavy pushing on the pedals. The pedals, offering crude resistance, remind me of the feedback of the force. I myself am uncertain why I don’t shift gears so as to make it easier for me, why I torture myself in this kind of way and indeed why I am so ridiculous; for pushing the pedals I keep making unnecessary bows of my head. But that’s how it is: I have simply gotten used to cycling through the city in my own way. Pushing the pedals of my city-bike brings to my mind mouse clicking, say, in front of a screen featuring some slow 3-D computer animation into which I gradually penetrate by means of clicking. I have already pointed out that I push my bicycle slowly, so as to feel the maximum feedback of the force; it is for this reason that what I see in front of me does not open up as a traditional movie based on the sensitive chemistry of the film tape. There’s no speed and no play of city lights involved, instead the scene opens up for me in the sense of a step-by-step, even saw-like penetration within the framework of gradual approaching. What is relevant here is this sequential approaching, progressing to a rhythm beaten by a metronome and/or some other, digital device.

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Riding down Mikloieva Street or Preernova Road I not only cycle on them, but at the same time—metaphorically speaking— I also click on them to the rhythm of buildings approaching and receding. Whenever I cycle I take the road as an imaginary tunnelzone, simulated by my own perception, which ends, say, near the Three Bridges. Thanks to the ‘clickual’ pattern of approaching, structured in levels and steps, such a tunnel is shaped as a telescope tube, offering numerous views across the landscape. Slow cycling also allows looking upwards and sideways, at the facades and pedestrians on the pavements flanking the two rows of buildings, and, of course, above all it allows looking down. The cyclist must look down to the pedals and forward, a little ahead of the handlebars. She must also direct an intense gaze on the surface of the road and on the immediate surrounding terrain, which, however, lies at the same level, i.e., down. In my imagination, I complement the ride down a real street with a ride through an unreal, ‘co-imagined’ tunnel, and in that moment I receive a special stimulus. Viewing the surroundings I notice that acceleration causes the facades to be set in motion as if to create a movie featuring light-dark surfaces with their outlines getting lost. It is in this moment that I switch to the ‘tunnel-mode.’ Suddenly I notice an agreeable change in the environment under my observation; this change, caused by my very motion, in turn gives rise to a desire/interest that this object-process-movie should last a long time, so that I could, in a way, possess it and derive some pleasure from its changing. These changes are primarily associated with accelerating and stopping, and, consequently, the facades alternate between being caught in the flow of a movie and re-entering again into the phase of rigidity, i.e. being re-composed into a stable form. The ‘movie experience’ with the liquid architecture of the street, enabled by the interface of the bicycle, but also indirectly by computer and simulator interfaces—in ‘co-imagined’ analogy, has been provoked by what Roman Ingarden termed “aesthetic genuine emotion (aesthetische Ursprungsemotion).” In referring to Ingarden’s

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term I intend to denote the stimulus which arises from the environment and manifests itself on a real object as its formal modification. This experience does not inspire indifference, but rather an interest in the particular superstructure that adorns the perception of the real ride through the exploration of an unreal tunnel. This impression, brought about by the proximity of attractive qualities which arise from my perception in motion, is in fact only the beginning of the large-scale and complex process of aesthetic experience, which then accompanies my ride. In this experience I combine both modes: a real ride and a ride-process in the world (tunnel) of images. What counts in all this is not only the pleasure derived from the changes which pave the way to an ever more intense tunnel-movie (depending on the acceleration), but also my interest in changes resulting from stopping, which causes opaque facades on both sides of the street to reassemble back into clear architectural outlines. I do not merely cycle through the city, because in fact I cycleclick through it. This means that I do not merely follow an urban street network, but I also draw my own loops between its threads and nodes: across courtyards, along poorly fenced building sites, through narrow passages. I make use of the bicycle to benefit from the quite special experience of the city’s nearness: to encounter its underlying structures and configurations, to look across the river and into the canals. With my bicycle I stick to those parts of the city where, in a certain sense, the bicycle still belongs, i.e. where it is not thoroughly out of place. The bicycle is not like the mini scooter, the skate-board, or the roller-skates on which you can speed across the plazas of huge shopping malls, between skyscrapers and all over wide platforms extending in front of contemporary cinemas which boast 14, 20 or more screens (“kinedomes,” “kinepolis”). To be frank, the bicycle is actually an old device; it does not become any place (say, downtown L. A., especially if conceived as New Jerusalem handy for any sort of catastrophe movie), it does not suit anybody, not a few find the bicycle downright disturbing. However,

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the bicycle can still function as an interface, and sustaining a particular framework (moderate speed, moderate detachment from the ground, pushing the pedals, the pedals offering sufficient resistance, the cyclist bending over the handlebars) it enables a quite particular kind of perception. Simply the posture and motion of the cyclist, associated with the pedal pushingturning intervals, provide for the unique experience of a ‘coimagined’ projection tunnel and the experience of the city’s buildings in it as the scenery of a digital cinema. What kind of buildings are of interest to us, how do they outline the tunnel? At this point I must be more accurate: buildings stand sideways, they delimit the outer border. Buildings stand, buildings are there; as a cyclist I actually view whatever fills the area between the buildings and my eyes, which is shaped as a tunnel network. In fact, the tunnel contains not buildings but images—as if the tunnel was a screen softened by motion, full of light and life, the images pinned onto the nodes of the network. These, however, are not momentary patches of color extended to the degree of formlessness—we are not aboard a high-speed train (like the French TGV); the images in the tunnel therefore preserve the configurations of doors, windows, ornamental pillars and the like, which linger for an interval only to extend again at an accelerated pace. It is thus while cycling on roads and paths and sandy trails that I watch, in motion, the images within the tunnel network. I perceive this network as a particular spatial configuration, generated by my own activity. This is the space-time-action maintained and modified by my own cycling, it is one space-derivative out of an abundant set. Moreover, thanks to its net­work-sequence structure, not only can I see images and motion, i.e., not only do I follow visualized nouns and verbs, but rather my gaze, enabled by the interface of the resisting pedals, also touches—metaphorically speaking—the conjunctions and prepositions between them. As I cross a section of the network, I cycle into and, I watch

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over, towards, in the direction of, from the direction of. Furthermore, I cycle between and into, for, in a sense, I also dive in. Is the virtual space of the tunnel constructed according to the perception of a cyclist the only feasible form by which imagination can enhance cycling through the city? Does the augmented gaze emerge only via the configuration of the tunnel? Can pedaling-as-clicking also be seen from a different perspective? It can be. There are areas where the city exposes its bowels, or at least its wounds, i.e., where it falls apart and where it is being built. Upon such areas I also cast—metaphorically speaking—the blanket of the orbital satellite gaze. What do I mean by that? In this case, the whole thing looks like the following: I cycle and at the same time, by virtue of my perspective modified by the optics of a satellite camera, I am—above. Cycling (say, around building sites, amid ruins, etc.) I look down as if from a spacecraft slowly cruising over an unknown planet, stopping-clicking each time I push on the pedal, to catch a close-up image of some striking configuration on the planet’s surface, say, a crater. My cycling-clicking corresponds to a point-by-point crossing of space. This description is intended as an illustration of how a means of transport as traditional as the bicycle enables a quite particular kind of perception, from the moment we start using it as an interface in order to experience environment in a special way. Also the issue of (new) media in general is the issue of technologically modeled and accelerated perception, i.e. perception which is enabled via a particular matrix, or better, enframing (Heidegger’s term), and which—in the case of the bicycle—is fairly specific. It differs distinctly from perception pertaining to, say, the now fashionable, re-materialized mini-scooter. The defining feature of the scooter—reiterating the mouse metaphor—is clicking by pushing against the ground in a vibrating ride into the image, which makes one the protagonist of very definite pushing, followed by the advantage of a long, economic use of the force in a slowly decelerating ride without major interruptions.

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It is typical of state-of-the-art interfaces that they are increasingly departing from separate, isolated functioning; on the contrary, they are being linked up and enhanced to form systems. Perception enabled by a particular interface, too, is intertwined, linked, combined with perception enabled by another interface. The city as a digital cinema in the cyclists’ experience is cycledthrough and constructed—viewed through both interfaces, namely the bicycle and the screen and/or their units, i.e., the pedals and the mouse. My cycling into the city as a digital cinema is also based on the experience of perception which has been shaped in front of the computer screen. Without the experience of clicking, watching science-fiction movies with special effects or employing IMAX technology, and without racing in simulated races, I would view things differently while I cycle, and I would see—in a certain sense—less; the cityscape would be poorer by that tunnel derived from space which is shaped by my ride and which exists in the time of my ride. The issue which needs to be raised at the close of this essay concerning the description of my cycling through the city is how to place this sort of perception within phenomenological investigations. Could it be that my exploration of the city in the form of cycling-clicking is relevant primarily for the mode of perception of popular interface culture—a mode which is foreign to the perception of the situations which preoccupied Husserl and his successors? Does Husserl at all provide us with a phenomenological approach to issues of this kind? My answer to the latter question is affirmative. Not only the texts gathered in the 23rd volume of Husserliana, but also his analyses of space, time (say, temporal structures of kinaestetic sequences in Ding und Raum ) and perception remain of some value as guidelines for such descriptions. Husserl also described the shift to the as-if mode and the subsequent de-realization of objects and processes; or better, he described these shifts and derealizations in relation to modifications, modifications such as I

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myself proposed describing a ride through an unreal tunnel. Husserl claims: “Reality can be observed as if it were an ‘image’.” And, further: “In a way, anything can be viewed as an ‘image’.” In the context of phenomenology, seeing something as-if it were an image paves the way for the procedure of de-realization, and consequently leads to the as-if mode—which finally means that the given real becomes infected by the ‘as-if mode.’ Husserl’s view is of great importance for my essay also because of his fundamental standpoint, namely that everything (and therefore not only a thing of artistic imagination) can be observed as an image, which means that everything can be included among the objects of de-realization. If I now return to the description of what I perceive cycling through my home city, I can note once again that I perceive the streets within some real attitude, and at the same time I also see them as an image not only as a static image in Husserl’s sense, but also as a moving image, as in film. And, in a certain sense, my experience of cycling appears not only in that way, but also as a theme park simulator. The contemporary individual, confronted with the mediascapes of interface culture, is clearly urged to observe this reality’s components and processes as-if they were images, movies, simulator races or computer games. Perceiving augmented reality, she is urged to switch to the ‘as-if ’ mode.

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References Spiegelberg, H., The Phenomenological Movement - A historical Introduction, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff 1960, p. 692. Cf. Marquard, O., ‘Das Fiktive als Ens Realissimum’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik X - Funktionen des Fiktiven, Munich, Wilhelm Fink Verlag 1983, pp. 489-495. Fink, E., Studien zur Phänomenologie - 1930-1939, The Hague, Martinus Nijhof 1966, pp. 74, 75. Flusser, V., Vom Subjekt zum Projekt - Menschewerdung, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer Taschebuch Verlag 1998, p. 144. Conrad W., Der ästhetische Gegenstand, 1908/1909. Cf. Ingarden, R., ‘Das Aesthetische Erlebnis’, In: Erlebnis, Kunstwerk und Wert - Vortraege zur Aesthetik 1937-1967, Darmstadt, 1969, pp. 3-7. Husserl, E., Ding und Raum - Vorlessungen 1907, Husserliana (Vol. XVI), Den Haag, Martinus Nijhoff 1973. Husserl, E., Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung - Zur Phaenomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwaertigungen - Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898-1925), ed. by Eduard Marbach, The Hague, Martinus Nijhof Publishers 1980, pp. 591, 593.

Reality and Its Simile Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka

Preface Why do we bother with an investigation into the philosophical underpinnings and modalities of the media of communication? After a period of resistance on the part of many individuals, the modern media belong to our life, to our world, and to our experience of reality and illusion. Their assimilation at first menaced several aspects of our traditionally transmitted modalities of life and of the world, and with the progress of their assimilation we become aware that they may be influencing even our basic natural modalities of experiencing reality and life. The media of communication have rapidly invaded the various channels of our relationship with others and the world at large in an almost automatic way. We are left breathlessly following willynilly the latest advances. Hence, a twofold question: first, what does the so rapidly unfolding sphere of artificial intelligence that underpins these media signify with respect to our experience of the world, the other, life? Does it bring about deviations in the natural directions of our experience of life? Does it transpose us into an unreal, artificially-concocted sphere? Does it menace our innermost ties with nature-life? The second set of questions which confront us focuses on the role of technological progress in general and the further development of the media in wondering where we are heading. Is our life to become governed by the “artifax”? Is this the last phase in the evolution of life and, if so, our ultimate degeneration? Will living to an ever-greater extent in an electronic world

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weaken and then loose the knots which maintain us as living beings, and thus lead to one or another form of self-destruction? Does the evolution of the types of life end with the human race as we know it at this period of development? These puzzling and disquieting questions justify our taking a philosophical approach to at least some of them. Our approach will be made within the phenomenological tradition. Even if we cannot fully unfold it, it seems most appropriate to bring phenomenology into a fundamental discussion of the media for an essential reason: the entire Bulwark of artificial intelligence and the media of communication is the implementation of the powers and rules of operation of the human mind, which in coming to grips with reality constitutes the meaningful world of life while it constitutes itself, drawing upon the unfolding of its powers It is then the question of the constitution of the world, of life, of reality, that is the crucial reason for confronting the phenomenology of constitutive consciousness with the reality and the world that we witness in film, television, cyberspace, etc. In fact, the underlying question concerning the real and its representation in the media is just as much a question concerning reality as naturally (not “artificially”) experienced. This is the question of the “true nature” of this world in which we exist, act, perdure; it is about our struggles with deceit, the falsity of appearances, and our ignorance of crucial factors in making our decisions. This question about truth and falsity has been from time immemorial a motor of artistic endeavor. The artist seeks to capture and present the world “as it really is” beyond or beneath its deceitful appearances. Particularly with the theatre, this aim has been a prime motive. The media of film and television continue this tradition of the arts. Therefore, in attempting to approach film and television primarily from the point of view of their rendition of reality, we may begin by investigating their prototypes

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in literature, theatre, and painting. It is essentially this issue of the “reality” or “illusion” of the represented world that is the meeting point of the traditional arts and the media of film, television and the “artificial intelligence” newly deployed in cyberspace. When we speak here of phenomenology we mean the classical Husserlian description of our experience. Therein, we have in the intentional conception of the world of life and of human experience a uniquely germane platform for addressing this crucial vital and artistic issue. By “classical” is to be understood the basic analysis of the transcendental life by means of which the human being constitutes his/her world of life in various circuits of experience. It seems clear; however that what transpires in the media is quite different. It is therefore from a threefold phenomenological perspective that we must treat our issue. First, there is the perspective of the primordial experience of transcendental consciousness, experience that is foundational for the constitution of the human person within its lifeworld. Second, there is the perspective of this constituted lifeworld itself, the world within the context of which the media are introduced and function as mediators of intersubjective communication and the world as well by means of which this communication creatively advances. Thirdly, there is the perspective of my phenomenology of life, the life whose advance in ever new circuits the constructive genius of the various media serve, the life which provokes wonder about the significance of this advance, its prospects, and its role in the progress of evolution itself. In brief, I plan to treat the above-mentioned issue of reality and illusion in the media with reference to three main themes of phenomenology: 1) originally experience, 2) the constitution of the lifeworld with special emphasis upon the “thesis” of the reality of natural experience, and 3) my own phenomenology of life and the human creative condition.

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1. The Illusory Nature of Reality Conveyed by Experience Whether we look at it from the point of view of our individual and social experience or through the eyes of artistic representation, reality—which is the matrix of our existence, the sphere within which that existence emerges, evolves, and which perdures at our death, the reality that we so naturally believe—is by no means reliable and trustworthy, not even in the midst of our experiencing it. As a matter of fact, our very experience of the world is only fragmentary, and without knowing what the missing fragments are, we cannot trust the reliability of our perceptions of that which we may survey. This is even more the case given that we ourselves are in constant progress and the real world about us is changing, advancing beyond its present condition. Finally, Husserl’s description of sensory perception shows— as real thing or being, is to be physical or otherwise—is pluridimensional, so that we cannot grasp its various aspects in one glance but have to turn it around to grasp in turn each or some of its sides. We may never see them all, and all along they are in progress, even in transformation. And a transformation cannot be foreseen with certainty, e.g., a change in the weather, or a change in the climate of one part of the world or another. The physical world is in constant change, and our knowledge never encompasses all of it to give us a trustworthy picture. Our knowledge of it is always provisory, piecemeal, and subject, if not to doubt, at least to fresh verification. What then of our societal world? Our existence and its progress depends on our being able to reply on some stability in our circumstances, to trust in the veracity of people’s information, in the sincerity of their commitments, and, to some degree at least, in the benevolence of their attitudes. Here we are even more at a loss, however, to have any guarantee, assurance, and, to begin with, understanding of the situation in which we are caught with its grounding and its possible innuendo. The societal world, with its uninterrupted play of ambitions, desires,

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egotism, which bring individuals into conflict, engendering animosity, hatred, ruthlessness, is far less reliable in even its most familiar provinces than is physical reality. Hypocrisy, deceit, subterfuge, ruthless ambition drive the game, which lasts until all the forces are dwarfed, spent, or destroyed by larger powers or until the players who give themselves over to the game with such total abandon themselves vanish from the scene. Their struggles are then largely forgotten. Only the “great deeds” of a few of them stand out among the shadows of the past. Humanity must have struggled from its beginning with the questionable reality of the world’s going on. Plato made a radical division between doxa-knowledge of the world subject to doubt, change—and episteme—knowledge of the intrinsic, ideal structures of beings, things, events, that is, of their ontological structure, which remains unchangeable permanent and accounts for their distinctiveness and ordering in the midst of change and turmoil. The phenomenological conception of knowledge draws somewhat from this distinction. Attributing a changeable and pulsating status to the sensory experience of reality, Husserl set the task of distinguishing permanent and cognitively certain intentional structures from the fluctuating components of the world of life. He thus proposed a network of distinctive and stable intentional structures, which, lying between the mind that constitutes the whole of reality and the laws of that constitution, represent the structuring, constitutive powers of the human mind coming to grips with the footholds of existence. Assuming that whatever we may know is to be known along these lines, he proposed an intentional network that all human beings may encounter and respond to. It is along the lines of this exploration of the human mind’s virtualizes in constituting such intentional, mental, sensory in origin, dimensions that artificial intelligence and hence the media emerge and evolve.

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However, there is a crucial point to be brought out here. Having differentiated experience (empirical, sensory, fluctuating and changeable) from intentional cognition (relatively stable and a sort of constant factor in the changeable world of life), and having, as he put it, “suspended” trust in empirical experience for a while, while considering its intentional import, Husserl, nevertheless, insisted in the strongest way on the decisive significance of a factor present within empirical experience: a belief in the real existence, a belief that is the carrier of the validity of the real world for us. This reliance on the really existing world gives the entire commerce of life within the world its purchase. This affirmation in the strongest sense of the crucial role of belief in the real existence of the world (particularly clearly and strongly stressed in Erfahrung und Urteil) Husserl called “the thesis of the real world.” This thesis underpins the entire intentional bulwark of the constitutive work of the mind and is precisely the point over against which we will have to check, to refer to, take into account while sketching the reality of our experience, of the world in life as well as in the arts and the media. This is paradoxical considering that from Plato through Descartes and Husserl experience has been thought of as giving us a distorted, hazy, changeable, illusory view of reality, but, on the rebound, this crucial belief in the existence of the world conveys that we have to judge and learn to recognize what is reality and what is illusion. 2 . Fine Art, Literature, and Theatre Engaged in the Discovery of “True” Reality and Denouncing Its Illusory Character The dialectic between truth and falsity in art’s pursuit of “true” reality pervades its exemplary achievements. We cannot here be encyclopedic and discuss this thesis as exemplified in the cave drawings of animals, ancient monumental depictions of kings, courtiers, etc. In portrait painting and sculpture in particular, the revelation of the inner, true character of the person has been both

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sought and keenly appreciated. But emphatically, the inquisitive and discursive form of the dialectic at work in the attempt to depict and represent the “real” world and life has been strongest in literature and the theatre. There has been a special focus in the theatre on the tricks of individual psychology and societal passion in human perceptions and relations, to say nothing of outright deceitfulness. But we have to note the important role-played by theatrical spectacle as such. Reality is here made spectacle for the audience, and the way in which the protagonists and their settings appear on the stage, the manner of their behavior, the tone of the pathetic choral commentaries (as in the Greek plays) are all geared to the dialectic of the true vs. presumed nature of the reality they depict. Fixation on the illusory in the world reached its culmination with the theatre of the seventeenth century, in the so-called “Teatrum Mundi.”1 Stage dramas and comedies strove then to show the real world’s “true,” that is, illusory and deceitful, nature. Under the device “All the world is a stage” upon which human affairs are being played, the theatre stage brought the then running philosophical controversy over the reality or illusion of the world to its peak. The intricacies of the psychological natures of the protagonists—especially fickleness, hypocrisy, self-centeredness, recklessness, vengeance, etc.—the ins and outs of their societal interrelations, and the simple deceptions of human perception and memory are exposed to show that the affairs of the world are untrustworthy. The emphasis here is on the errors created by our imagination, bents, dreams, hallucinations, and delusions. With our coming and going, building up and destroying, all in time vanishes from the scene like a dream. In this celebrated drama “La Vida es sueno,”2 Calderon de la On the Baroque concepts of the “Teatrum Mundi,” see Esthetic baroque ET imagination creatrice, ed. Marlies Kronegger (Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1998) 2 Pedro Calderon de la Barca, La Vida es sueno (1935). 1

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Barca, one of the foremost dramaturgists the Golden Age of Spanish Literature, if not the greatest of all, most artfully moves between “reality” and the very much “unreal” total seclusion from the world’s affairs in which the hero, Sigismund, is brought up. After his initial condition of confinement, his entering the normal life of the court is (for him) dreamlike. This new life has no reality for him, and consequently he behaves in it with unwarranted violence, in punishment for which he is put to sleep. Upon awakening, he does not know what is real and what was a dream. It is in an encounter with a vitally significant call from the people, who want him to succeed the father responsible for his extended captivity, that he finds a foothold on reality and so can reveal his true, hidden dispositions? This gaining of a foothold in vitally significant facts that dissipate dream life and illusion we see also in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The theatre in uncovering life’s innermost deceitfulness and reminding us of our ultimate vanishing dreamlike from the scene of the world has frequently had recourse to mechanical and technical devices. I have here in mind especially the theatrical device of disclosing “the hidden reality behind the appearances” through the play of mirrors. The play of mirrors had its origin already in the Middle Ages. Mirroring was seen as endowed with the power of “grasping reflections of a hidden, superior reality.” The scrutiny of hidden reality through the play of mirrors appears at its simplest in painting. It is enough to mention the painting of Vermeer in which the artist himself appears at its simplest in painting. It is enough to mention the painting of Vermeer in which the artist himself appears in the background, as if in a window, or Velasquez’s painting “Las Meninas,” in the background of which are incorporated pictures of two models for the painting. And then, strikingly, Herman va Hoogstraten, a student of Rembrandt, in his treatise on painting treats mirroring and spectacle as parallel notions, saying that an artist should never separate himself from

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a mirror, that he “has to be simultaneously an artist and a spectator”1 We also see the use of the play of mirrors in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. As Tadeusz Kowzan points out, the “play within a play” featuring the murder of Gonzalez performed before the King, is a mirror set before him, one in which he should, if he be the real murderer, recognize himself. It is in this way a test of true reality. Despite his dreamy disposition, Hamlet is not certain about the factual truth of the message from the ghost of his father: he needs a proof of the facts.2 A second mirror aiding the revelation of the truth is the spectators in whose presence this recognition of the murder in Claudius takes place. Illusion, delusion will not stand the test of the real facts. Another seventeenth-century play presenting the world and life as illusion, one almost unknown now but very significant and striking, is a play that Brosse presented at the Hotel de Bourgogne in 1645 titled “Les songes des hommes eveilles.” Pierre Pasquier has discussed it in detail and describes it as being a “coherent ensemble of the representation of the world and of existence” of the Baroque period.3 In the play, whose substance consists of the extravagant adventure of the protagonists, the first and foremost point of the 1 Quoted in Tadeusz Kowzan, “Theatre comme jeu de mirroir,” in Kronegger, Op. cit., p.25. 2 Hamlet,” Act II, sc. II: “. . . Hum, I have heard that guilty creatures, sitting at a play, have by the very cunning of the scene been struck so to the soul that presently They have proclaimed their malefactions; For murder, though it has no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ. I will have these players Play something like the murder of my father. Before my uncle. I’ll observe his looks; I will tent him top the quick. . . I know my course. The spirit that I have seen May be a devil; and the devil has power T’assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me. I’ll have grounds More relative than this. The play’s the thing Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” 3 See Pierre Pasquier, “un miroir du savoir baroque: les songes des hommes eveille de brosse (1646)” in Kronegger, op.cit. p.38.

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denunciation of the treachery of reality is the illusory character of the world, or as Pasquier says, “the perception which the human being may obtain of the world, through phenomena.”1 the principal causes of illusion are these sensations, which vary in different circumstances, such as being in love and dreaming (whether the profound dream, or daydreaming, or somnolence). To these one has to add other sources of illusion: enchantment, drunkenness, metamorphoses, folly. Brosse passes from the sources of illusion to an exhaustive repertory of the classic baroque metaphors for illusion, which according Pasquier are charm, dream, mirage, pretense, overcleverness, confusion, trouble, error, the lie, illness, shadow, wind, doubt, vision. . .2 Furthermore, having recourse to theatrical techniques, Brosse represents human existence in scenes—as a spectacle—and there is a distinction between four fragments in the play that are a “play within a play” and those parts framing them, which results in two levels of representation. Through that device, and by the device of transferring the facts which precede the exposition from their usual place at the beginning to the end of the action and from the frame level of the play of its inner fragments (a device hitherto unknown), Brosse obtains an extraordinary effect of illusion when the progress of the play’s development changes direction and when the comedy ends at its beginning and the fragments of the “play within a play” turn out to be the actual frame of all the action. Through these extraordinary mechanisms, human life is revealed as a game. It seems as if the activities of men in reality possess through and through the same nature as that possessed by those presented in the play in such way that the spectator passes without distinction from one level to the other—as if we may pass from real life actions to those presented on the stage without experiencing the slightest difference. 1 2

Ibid. p. 38. Ibid. p. 39.

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Employing another way in which the baroque theatre purses its aim, Brosse presents human existence as a game with an uncertain result. Indeed, paralleling the gnoseological impossibility of ascertaining what is real is an equally perplexing source of error, the deceit to be found in the moral attitudes and the comportment of human being in their interactions. Thus, the illusion in which the human being lives seems total. Though we might be transported by Brosses’s thesis that in consequence of this unreliability in real life we cannot differentiate between reality and fiction on the basis of the consistency of reality over against the disruptive and tipsy-turvy nature of fiction, yet we remain unconvinced that the reactions of the intellect to the work of sensation are illusory. Indeed, in the play we have a protagonist dreaming about the eruption of a fire and on being spontaneously alerted to it, reacting violently “as if ” it were factual, real. Waking up, he discovers it has been a dream. However, had it not been a dream, however vivid and powerful, but the real factual eruption of a fire menacing instantly and progressively the life of the protagonist, he would have certainly woke up from all that is dreamy and illusory. We have here the test of reality found in Husserl’s discussion of the thesis of the real world. But we are also touching the neuralgic point: the relationship between reality and its simile in the performing arts. 3. The Simile of Reality Granted it is reality and the world that theatre performances on the stage, in film, on television, etc. aim to present, yet this is not reality in its factual core, but its simile. On the point of the distinction between simile and reality, the factual reality of the world, we may turn again to phenomenology to guide us. In actual fact, both the presence and the simile of the real world are suspended upon two basic modalities of constitute experience of

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the individual subject: the timing and scanning of events, appearances, occurrences, significant places, entanglement of situations. All these make up the nerve and dynamic skeleton of both reality and the performing arts, including the aforementioned media, all of which are suspended upon the underlying play of these two basic constitutive modalities. Leaving aside discussion of the constitution of the artistic temporal and spatial sequences performed on the stage by live actors with live spectators watching, we will bring out what is the essential difference between the way in which the constitution of spatio-temporal sequences occurs in the artistic work and the way in which our existence in the real world is timed and scanned, namely, art’s disruption of natural experiential continuity. A selection spatio-temporal fragment is made that singles out fragments of the action pursued in a theatre pierce, which are particularly significant. The same holds for film as well as for television drama. Roman Ingarden compared space and time constitution in film with that in stage plays and found there a well of nuance and significant differences, such that the question of reality in both became very ambiguous, at least at first.1 We will not here enter into the basic examination of the structure of the film, which, like the theatre play, lies at a cross section of painting, literature, music, architecture, but it appears essential that we refer to at least some of these borderline arts insofar as film encroaches upon their domains, especially those of music, painting and literature. First of all, we have to distinguish at this point between artistic films and television productions having a strictly aesthetic intent and those genres that serve pragmatic ends, like advertising, educational programs, news reports, weather reports, life enhancing information, consumer advice and warning, disaster alerts, etc. Every genre presents the real world using its own type of simile. In a film this simile consists first of all in pictorial 1 Roman Ingarden, “O sztuce filmowej,” in his Studia z Estetyki, tom drugi (Warsaw: 1958), pp. 299-316.

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presentations of objects, beings, scenes, landscapes, depending upon the theme of a presentation. Thus it spreads out spatially in the form of a spectacle for the spectator to see. Yet in contrast to painting, which is stationary and unchangeable, these real-life similes present the world in a constantly moving series of appearances. In the theatre play performed on a stage the events, people, scenery, etc. also change, but within strictly delimited sequences. Even if the three classical unites are not maintained there, the visual presentation of events is nevertheless restricted to the material means at hand on a stage. Even the Italian theatre of the seventeenth century, in which a variety of mechanical devices allowed for an instantaneous change of props that transported the unfolding story from one place to another, although it may be seen as a prototype of the transformation of scene possible in a film, does not begin to match film’s perpetually changeable settings and unfurling of action. The theatre with its empirical delimitation just cannot compare with film in its ability to move in space and present protagonists in the most varied circumstances like the heat of battle in a Shakespearean drama, or the cataclysmic earthquake in Shogun, or flying in outer space as in Star Trek, etc. A film creates a facsimile intended to present reality but, as just mentioned, one extending into spatial areas that the human being in real life has no access to. And with its manipulation of the timing of events, moving incessantly onward but interrupting the action in order it flash back to past events and even flash forward to future developments, film does not leave much space for mystery and imagination. Here we touch on a crucial point. How does the experience of this simulated reality stand in relation to the vitally real? We live as human being within the unfolding of our own natural flux of life. This flux follows its very own subjective flow, and no matter how it be interrupted by interfering events and factors, it maintains in itself—that is, in our self-adhesion to it, our selfawareness—a continuity, a pattern of natural concerns, plans,

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worries, and joys. When we view a work of art, that very activity—our perceiving it—is an interruption of the natural flux of consciousness, the flow of our natural interests in the natural world of life. Looking at a painting, reading a poem, watching a theatre performance or an artistic movie not only interrupts this natural flow but also lifts our attention, our experience to an aesthetic imaginative level. Indeed, it is this aesthetic “elevation” of consciousness that is the breaking point between reality and simile. No doubt, as said repeatedly above, when watching a film or a theatre play, the spectator is perceiving scenes of life, landscapes as if they were real while, however, keeping it in mind that they are not. In the perception of such a simile, a split occurs in consciousness inasmuch as the spectator identifies it with natural reality and is simultaneously in which that identification is accomplished, that it is a simile. In this split between the experiences of real empiricallygrounded perception and transporting aesthetic perception, there lies a host of issues pertinent to our argument. First of all, the role of imagination is of paramount importance in distinguishing between real and simulated reality and that comes out clearly when we contrast a theatre play performed on stage with the same presented on the screen. Again it is the spatio-temporal modes of expression involved that we refer to. We never know the real world in its complete spatio-temporal extension. Not only, as phenomenology has established, can a real thing not be seen all at once, but it is only from the singular glimpses that we gather as we go around it, investigate it from the top, the bottom, and sides, and in cross section, if possible, that we construct and constitute a real object in the natural world. But on the screen we see objects that are altogether “flat” presented to us in their essential appearance. Then too in watching a film we never simultaneously participate in the events deferent in time and space which form the background or pertain

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to our understanding the reasons for the special development of events and situations. We ponder these things; inquisitively, we attempt to reconstruct them in our mind; we imagine. A similar situation is had with the theatre play. There, a number of episodic events are artfully selected to sustain the action of the play and to give it its specific bent, while their antecedents and events simultaneous to them taking place outside of the presentation are left to our imagination. In fact, there is a lot of coercive work for our imagination to perform while watching a theatre play. The same would be true for dramas seen on the silver screen were it not precisely for the difference in the spacing and scanning of events that the medium allows. Watching a play, we strive to “understand” the action, but this entails that we make efforts to empathize imaginatively with the feelings, attitudes, and intentions of the protagonists. A theatre play gives us clues in these matters through the playacting in which the protagonists present themselves, but we have to follow these clues with our own imagination, bringing to the drama our knowledge of life, of people, of the period of the action with its mores, all this as background feedback. This imaginative concretion with the playwright brings the depicted reality closer to us so that it the more enters our own system of sentiments, feelings, emotions, which makes it all the more real to us. However, with film, the extended spatio-temporal reach the director has in presenting the scenes in which the action occurs is almost without limit, is almost coterminous with the limits of imagination. In effect, the ambition to match the real world here leads to as many spacio-temporal perspectives on the action being presented as possible. The limited numbers of vistas we see in the theatre are copiously supplemented. What formerly could be only intimated or left to the spectators imaginations is now filled in. This enrichment works an aesthetic transformation of the simulacrum of the real. In our natural experience of the world little compares to this. We see

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expand before us a world full of continuous action, unfurling ever-new virtalities, moving forward without tedium. We see battles fought extravagant acts of prowess performed, great of generosity done or criminal acts perpetrated. All is done too ever more adequately simulate the real world. The so vivid colors, the rapidly changing scenes call for our acute attention in viewing them; the musical background accompanying the action in the sound track keys our mood throughout the performance (e.g., the background music in the film presentation of “Anna Karenina” skillfully stirs up in the viewer a foreboding of tragic denouement). With a television the short distance makes presentation we have only changing Images Theater strikingly vivid, but their reception more acute between the screen and the viewer in contrast to the remoteness of a stage scene. The intensity of color, the rhythm in which the scenes appear, and the action coming directly at us from the screen as if for our special benefit certainly impinge on our sensory field. Given all the striking effects directors can now carry off given the means at their disposal, we might presume that film and video draw us nearer to the reality we experience naturally. And yet, this is not exactly so. In this grand attempt to make the simulated world match the real one and to draw the spectator into it as if it were real, the difference between the two worlds is actually the more accentuated. A world that is so “complete” leaves much less places for the play of coercive imagination, for the charm of dreamlike enchantment. This becomes obvious when we see the same drama presented on the stage and then on the screen (e.g., Antony and Cleopatra). We find that the “ remoteness” of the stage and the parsimonious clues offered in the stage production provoke and involve our imagination. The Hollywood production, with spectacular sea battles, the glitter of carefully reproduced Egyptian settings, in short, with its strong emphasis on spectacle, does not bring the simile of the world any closer to reality. On the contrary, there is not much room left for our imagination; the

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entire splendor simply bedazzles, leaving no space for the meditative reflection that the presentation of the play on the Erfurt stage awakens. In point of fact, when we look more closely at a theatre performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and compare it with the vastly acclaimed movie presentation of the same by Branagh, we see that although the latter presentation is richer in color, vivid dialogue and splendid scenery- the views from the castle, the sea scenes, etc.–and although the upbeat personification of Hamlet himself therein makes the play more probable measured against the standard of the natural world than the stylized and mysterious personality of Hamlet on the stage, it is still from this latter that the play draws its aesthetic/existential depth. The poignancy of Hamlet’s dilemma voiced in the famous utterance, “to be or not to be, that is the question,” is not conveyed well in the film production. The words that have so deeply struck the aesthetic/ existential chords of countless spectators remain without an echo in this strikingly vivid and “realistic” movie presentation. It does not rise to its intended level, it falls flat. On the rebound, while this vivacity of movement, of stirring musical accent and rhythms, may not allow film to rise to a high level of aesthetic experience, it might strike some chords of our natural experience of reality and its felt fragments are easily incorporated into our everyday experience. It remains a simile, yet this simile has some impact upon the real, a natural impact, I would say. This impact is not aesthetic and even goes counter the aesthetic elevation of experience. We may, in fact, wonder whether our sensory reception of the simulated world does not dull our aesthetic reception of art, especially the art of the theatre play. We may also worry, what is often voiced, that the vicarious introduction of some of a life simile’s emotional elements into our experience inadvertently influences our experience of the natural world. Finally, we may wonder whether getting used to the clearest possible presentation of events and the most

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striking effects is not dulling our capacity to perceive the beauty in the world, again interfering with our natural experience, changing it. But these are just matters we will raise and not pursue. This vicarious impact of media like artistic film and television upon the natural experience we have of the world and ourselves brings us now to the role, which is played within this natural world by the practical/pragmatic/informative presentations made in the media. Do these not present “real life events” on the screen? Or is a different interpretation of their nature and impact to be made? With the documentary films, news, and information alerts given on television we seem to cross the borderline between the simile and the representational aspect of presentations, which assume television’s specific role as a “mediator” between and among various folk in the real world, hence the name “media.” The mediated messages are meant to connect people by attracting the attention of some of them, perhaps to inform them about what is going on in another part of the world, or in their country, or community. And a human being in order to establish and maintain consciousness of his bearings wants to know what is “happening” in the world that is to say, in the real world. The reality, which is conveyed by these messages, is not supposed to be doubtful; it is not supposed to leave room for imagination to fill in, to supply its links, to understand its knots. The images on the screen, which these depictions or advertisements convey are meant to be exact, pictures of real facts or objects. We would say that there the real world is being extended by the intentional means employed to draw people’s attention to it, with the call for attention coming from the real world and being addressed to the real world through the screen in what I would call an “intentional representation,” one which emerges on the wings of the evolving powers of human invention. The real world that is the fruit of presentational/constitutive consciousness has found with the technical progress that human intentional powers have

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delivered us a mid-air intentional platform on which to carry on its mundane activities and extend the viewer’s notice to otherwise visually unattainable realms. When intentionally gives this role to representation, which is not the usual conscious representation of presenting, memory, etc. or of artistic-creative vision, it abjures giving the pictures through which it operates the character of simile, that for the sake of representing reality. Of course, with commercial messages the informative image presented on the screen is meant to enhance the real aspects of the merchandise advertised. That is the meaning of advertising. But these images, by impressing on our senses certain aspects of the real through the force of strong effects, do not leave any space for creatively imaginative play, for recollected association, for the referential network of remembered links to history, culture, and for our personal experience. In short, these electronic images are by and large not entering into the cultural horizon of human existence1. But they belong to the vital sphere of our existence. Their validity or significance is restricted to the hic et nunc of the present state of civilization in its practical matrix.2 There is still one sphere of imagery that merits our special attention: the cyberspace of the Internet.

See the “death of the image” argued in the recent book by Regis Debray, Vie et mort de l’image (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). 2 However, by the same stroke our sensitivity is dulled upon exposure to the vividness and striking colors of electronic images and loses its ability to appreciate images with finer points, subtle and evocative images. No wonder that there is a strong denunciation of the negative role of motion pictures upon our experience and consequently upon our culture. Introducing phenomenology, that is, intentional experience of the natural world as well as the spatiotemporal axis of this world’s constitution, as our point of reference, we gain an integrating vision of the various intentional spheres-all of them rooted in human consciousness with its world-constitutive laws and structures- that the outburst of the human inventive genius has brought to the fore. 1

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4 . The Stage of the World: Cybernetic Space, the Mid-Air Platform of Representational Intentionality In coming to cybernetic space, the Internet, we have meandered back to where we started: the teatrum mundi of the Spanish seventeenth century and of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre. Is not, in fact, the entire world a stage for our human struggles and actions on which stage we assume that or another role and perform that or another function against the background of nature-life, which is itself at play, undergoing transformations prompted in part by our active involvement with it? Let us recall, however, that beneath this intentional network of manifestation the lifeworld reaches down to the primogenital belief in the existence of this world that permeates all human experiences within it. This decides the issue of reality and illusion. But there are also other, “physical” factors underlying our intentional structuring and which build this belief, namely, the factors of the spatio-temporal situation of the natural world. We all live within a strictly delimited space. The place within the world that we have managed to secure for our vital existence has precise and strict confines. If we transgress them, we encroach upon the place/space of other human beings.1 We are confined to our place/space in the world. An analogous situation governs our time and temporal relations. Even though images of their very essence occupy space, are “spatial” (and are temporal, for they have origins, appear before us for a term, and vanish), it seems that in our modern media images have become somewhat detached from the settings in which they 1 The attribution of land to individuals has been one of the principal acts of a sovereign in every culture and although land is constantly changing hands in human transactions, yet we deal always with the same-although in various different configuration-amount of space. Spatial relations, extension and its delimitation may change in detail and attribution, in ownership, but in themselves they remain unchangeable.

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customarily express or represent beings and things. They may now be intentionally transposed from their distinct natural settings and appear on the neutral stage of the cybernetic screen before one subjective spectator after another. In cyberspace they acquire other peculiar “lives” because this is an open stage available to all, addressed to all possible spectators indifferently, that is, regardless of what their spatial settings might be The liberation of space that seems to lack any grounding in the natural world culminates in the cybernetic space of the Internet. (This time it is purely intentional space.) The cyberspace of the Internet is rightly called “virtual” because it is liberated from all the spatial constraints of the physical space of the natural world. It consists in a virtual power to expand to any desirable length, width, to take any form. It may be the locus of an unlimited number of images of any size. It offers an open field to our human rush to expand. Such expanse is not reality available in the natural world of life. With the opening up of cybernetic space on the Internet, we find an outlet for sharing our interests and even our thoughts, for announcements about goods, about our projects and activities, for presenting ourselves to the world so that it might become acquainted with us, and always we find the space for this. For in this space, which expands to our wishes and which we may trim and shape to our needs and illustrate with image, we have an outlet that we cannot secure in the space of the natural world. It seems as if we are intentionally constructing a second world above the first, natural one. This world is really a stage in the strong sense of the expression, a stage upon which we may inventively put our own play as on a stage, not an artistic play of an aesthetic imaginative nature, but our real life play. A life whose quintessence is ignored by others close by may be displayed before the whole world in flagrant light. And this we may do at our whim, since the temporality of this New World is also not restricted to the regulations of the

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physical time of the real natural world. We can change the events that we announce at our whim we may expand these announcements or erase them altogether. And yet, strange to believe, this invented new world, this mid-air dimension, although it cannot match the reality of nature life, still has its point of reference, its foothold, in the originally lifeworld on whose doings it thrives. We cannot consider it “artificial” since not only is it the fruit of the human intellectual/intentional powers upon which its existence and development remains suspended, but we are extending our real life concerns to this platform as surely as we extend our earthly interests into outer space. Surprised as humanity has been by the invention and subsequent installation of this “new world” of virtual powers, it can only see in it the marvel of human genius responding to the promethean drive toward ever greater accomplishment, toward the limitless extension of our dominion past the frontiers of our orb. To conclude this long study of reality, illusion, and the situation of the media within this controversy, I wish to submit that, far from belonging to the illusory realm of artistic fantasy, the media have a strong foothold in the real “natural world.” This is also true—and true in the first place, we may say—of the cyberspace of the Internet. This new purely intentional world is yet another stage on which humanity may unfold its drama.

Mobile Communication: The Call of Mobility Randall Dana Ulveland

The Cellular Phone Call The phone rings: “Hi,” she says. “It’s me.” “Where are you?” I ask. “I’m at the airport. I guess you made it there alright,” she continues. “We were late,” I say. “Our flight was delayed. Where are you right now?” “We’re at the airport,” she says, referring to herself and our daughter, Emma. “Our flight is delayed, so we have some free time.” My one year old daughter, Abby, is standing beside me in her grandparent’s kitchen. “Abby, do you want to talk to Mommy?” I hold the receiver to my daughter’s ear without waiting for a response. At first, Abby listens. Pausing, seemingly transfixed on the sound. I try to put my ear to the receiver so that I might hear the conversation, but she pulls the receiver from me, pushing it firmly against her ear. I give her a few moments. “Bye, bye,” I say, trying to pull the receiver away. But she holds fast. She wraps her little arms around the ear piece, hugging the receiver, refusing to let it go. She holds fast, as if she were trying to wrap herself in the sound of her mother’s voice, to her, such sweet comforting sounds. Her mother’s words bring a comfort that need not rely on word meanings. I watch the way that Abby stops focusing on the world around her, hugging the sound of her mother’s voice—enveloped by the rhythmic timbres. Distance and

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bodily separation give way to a ‘melding into.’ She falls into the sound—her aural world. Her mother is there, here. She can hear her, feel her—she seems to express a communal urgency that seems meaning-less, sense-less, to me. When I talk on the phone, I live a different experience. “Where are you?” I ask. My perceptible bodily being communicates in a different way. Her mobility lies beyond my initial confined view. She is outside of my spatial horizon. For me there exists a vague haziness, a seemingly impenetrable thickness. I reach out. Location and space prevail. Mobility gives rise to different possible actions. Perhaps by habit, the same habit that would inquire about the weather, I inquire about location, computing distance and spatial placement as I speak. I conjure up that Cartesian metaphysical split. My map, my culturally constructed imaginary Cartesian coordinate grid, is imposed on my surface of the earth. My grid is laid out over miles of terrain. Position is made a function of time. I bring my own orientation, if only briefly, in my need to grasp this spectacle. With, or by, this interruption, I am cognizant of my location. My being, my world, reciprocates and resonates with an imagined local of my interlocutor. I search for that reciprocal corporeal encounter. But the encounter is corporeally diminished. A need to locate brings with it its own significance—a new sens for my gaze. Mobility gives rise to a need to locate. The gaze gives way to the visual—a new manifestation of my desire. My ‘longing for,’ a longing that seems so deeply felt by Abby, seems removed. The awaiting sense of desire1 seems to have been lost, for the visual encourages manipulation and control. When I place the other, I am both here and there at the same time. But the ‘here’ seems to give way to the ‘there.’ My look envelops and obscures the ‘here.’ I know the landscape from here to Minnesota. I have flown the distance and have driven over the terrain. I know the airport—the many pods. I have run from one gate to 1

Etymologically, await what the stars will bring.

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another. In my listening, I call upon the visible. But there is more than the visual. Both Abby and I listen. There is something toward which we are oriented or to which we attend—something we listen or wait for. We each live what is given. Even though our intentions or comportments are different, we listen. Not simply with the ears—we listen or ‘pay attention to’ with the whole body. Our experience is a corporeally significant sense of dwelling, communing, and revealing. But Abby does not respond to language as I do. She is foreign to mobility’s world. (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p.123). She listens to the sound, to its appeal, to the glorious song—that obscure “communication with the world more ancient than thought.” “[A] sort of dehiscence,” Merleau-Ponty says, “opens my body in two, and because between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching, there is overlapping or encroachment, so that we must say that the things pass into us as well as we into the things.” (MerleauPonty, 1968, p. 134).

How closely this seems to represent Abby’s experience. Mine is a technological attendere for, in my waiting and listening I am summoned or called toward mobility’s ground. I am summoned, in that the language that gives meaning to mobility possesses authority, and I am drawn and move into, and find myself within mobility’s field. I, too, experience the overlapping or encroachment, but I am also called to question about location. “Where are you?” “What are your plans?” “What will you be carrying out?” “Where are you going?” Mobility loosens my hold. I grasp at, and try to establish, identifiable points on which to fix my gaze. That sweet sound that captures Abby, the sweet song that transfixed me at one time, has given way to the mundane, the practical, the superficial. “Where are you?” I say, as if that is somehow important. Abby knows better.

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The Undercurrent Does mobility call upon the practical, the mundane? Does mobility’s need to mark the limits, boundaries, or horizon of one’s experience obscure the call of wonder—the wonder that lies just beyond the known, or that which cannot be easily transmitted? Does it objectify? “[Communication is] the transmission of something from one location to another” a dictionary of psychology tells me. Communing as coming together gives way to mobility’s distancing. Location loses stability. I long for stability, in my attempts to communicate. I grasp to find my bearing in this dark thickness that accompanies the other’s voice. “Where are you?” I ask, and with the response I imagine the location. My communal gaze attempts to fasten. I look for cues, something upon which to hold. You are there, the sender, the receiver. I am here, the sender, the receiver. I want to believe that Abby’s mother is the same person, only from a distance. But I don’t feel her the same way. The communicative gaze prevails.1That which comes into being when we are together fades away with mobility’s encounter. I hear the words, but not the way they are shaped by the mouth, the face, the eyes. There is no sun that heats, or breeze that cools. No hands that caress, as when we sit and talk on a bench in a park, distracted by passers-by, or taken by gestures that would move us to laughter or tears. I attempt to feel her body, her location. Is she is standing, maybe sitting, Emma by her side. Yes, Emma, holding her little doll, pulling at her mother’s sleeve, wanting to talk. I imagine the look, the feel, the shared longing. But all of this is only by approximation, something I am reminded of as I fade back to ‘here.’ The communal unity is violated when I isolate Abby’s mother, placing her against objectified space. But, for Abby, mobility I am making a distinction here between the communal and communicative gaze. The former relies less on the visual and more on the corporeal experience. In this description, communal intimacy, or making common, gives way to the sense of transmission. 1

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and ultimately locationality lack significance. For the child, I am you and you are me. A child might lose herself while being rocked in her mother’s arms. My initial or immediate analysis relies on a subject-object / sender-receiver communication model that presupposes both a sphere of consciousness and a sphere of objectivity. Media critic Marshall McLuhan referred to this information processing form of communication as the pipe-line, or conduit, model of media and communication, attributing the form to a mathematical model developed by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver (McLuhan, 1988). One day Abby will hear their contribution, for she will come to live the language that describes it. “The information source selects a desired message out of a set of possible messages . . .” Weaver said. “The selected message may consist of written or spoken words, or of pictures, music, etc. The transmitter changes this message into the signal which is actually sent over the communication channel from the transmitter to the receiver. In the case of telephony, the channel is a wire, the signal a varying electrical current on this wire; the transmitter is the site of devices (telephone transmitter, etc.) which change the sound pressure of the voice into the varying electrical current . . . .” (Shannon and Weaver, 1988, p. 6).

He likens the mathematical model to communicative acts saying: In oral speech, the information source is the brain, the transmitter is the voice mechanism producing the varying sound pressure (the signal) which is transmitted through the air (the channel). . . . The receiver is a sort of inverse transmitter, changing the transmitted signal back into a message, and handing this message on to the destination. . . .” (Shannon and Weaver, 1988, pp. 86-87).

Abby will listen, as did the psychologists, as did I. McLuhan argued that once a model is established, such as the conduit (or sender-receiver) model of communication, then

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a multiplicity of derivative side-effects will naturally fall out of the model forming a kind of subculture or environment of interfacings that accompany our understanding of that which is described by the model (McLuhan, 1988). Prior to mobility’s advance, we were connected via hardware and metaphor. But now permanency of location has given way to movement. With this, our language and understanding of communication undergoes transformation. In this way communication resides in a subculture, in part, by virtue of the machinery used that helps align, in McLuhan’s terms, similar interfacings between the technology and communication. When we speak about mobile communication and technology use, we speak in such a way that what we say makes sense within that subculture. A more extreme way of looking at this would be Heidegger’s sense that “We do not merely speak the language—we speak by way of it.” Language summons from the “regions of presences” calling “whatever is present to appear and to fade.” (Heidegger, 1982, p.124). The language of the subculture, in this way of thinking, largely determines what is presented, and thus in many ways determines the actions and understandings available to us. Mobility gives us ways of acting that can be described by language—pulling from ground ways that make sense of, and give sense to, distance communication. There is little tension, and little need to question mobility’s effect when mobility’s ways are coupled with a sender-receiver model of communication. What moves through the conduit of language takes on the appearance of objectivity. But Abby doesn’t feel it that way. There is little tension as long as the language depicting and revealing mobile communication is thought of as a conduit through which, and by which, ideas and information move from one autonomous individual to another—as long as location reinforces a distinction and separation. But Abby doesn’t feel it that way. There is little tension when earlier notions of communication that emphasized the communal experience

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give way willingly to a means of transmission between objective bodies. But Abby doesn’t feel it that way. When we look at the origin of the word communication, we find that it is derived from the Latin word communicare, meaning to share, commune, and impart. Yet the communal aspect of sharing has, at times, been obscured by the giving sense of imparting. Upon analysis, I may indeed talk as though I was imparting or requesting information. “Where are you?” I ask. But this neglects that one dwells within a way of life that makes experiential situations meaningful; neglected is that one is immersed within (and belongs to) a consensual domain, absorbing and being absorbed by the activities and surroundings in which one is situated—implying that communication can be abstracted from a bodily/corporeal experience, from situation, activity, and way of life. When lived ways, aspects of experience, become occurent properties, lived ways are rationalized and removed from our corporeal understanding. Existence is reduced to a mere pellicle of its corporeal potential, taking the body out of the world and treating things ontically. Asking “Where are you?” does not refer to the other’s center, home, dwelling place, or life, but rather location. Location is once again given significance. In my questioning, I no longer live naively: my listening-being heard relation is violated. An objectified link is formed between me and my listener. Our sole movement is de-centered, slipped out of phase (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p.138). “Hello Mommy,” Abby whispers. She is centered. She dwells. The embodied being is bodied in space, place, world. This capacity for mobility and motion, the ability to move or be moved, brings with it the need to fix in place, or be cognizant of place. There is a desire to come into being with the other. But as mobility prevails, and veils, where is the other? Where am I? When one dwells within a way of life where interactions have been substantiated by the corporeal body coming into being with another in the world, one dwells in such a way that there is

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corporeal embodiment and relationality. But mobility moves us away from the other, peeling away embodiment and relationality. We are given a body in action and in motion away from others. My mobile body opens itself up to the latent possibilities available to it—possibilities that shape my field of presence. As I talk to Abby’s mother, my field of presence extends in two dimensions: the here-there dimension and the past-present-future dimension. But as mobility’s potentialities become paramount, dimensions are skewed. The “here” recedes from the “here-there” dimension; the “past” recedes from the “past-present-future” dimension. I fall into the there, the present, and the future. Abby simply nods, and mumbles something incoherent. The Flesh Merleau-Ponty must have known Abby’s world for he spoke of Abby’s experience. He spoke of the latent possibility—he spoke of ‘flesh’. This is not the “flesh” of the body as we might presume in familiar terms. In Merleau-Ponty’s words, “my body is made of the same flesh as the world . . . and moreover . . . this flesh of my body is shared by the world.” Nor is the flesh “the union or compound of two substances,” but rather an “element of Being” that traverses and forms “other bodies as well as my own.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 140). When we begin to think of the communicative act arising from within a latent possibility of communal, corporeal, depth, the linear communication model that seemed to predominate begins to recede. My communication with another need not be two opposed entities connected via the transmission of information but rather as belonging to a shared space of possibilities that precedes and exceeds our individuality (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 59). We come into being together within a situation. The call—including cell phone, mother, child, distance—belong to an element of Being (the same ‘flesh’) that traverses and forms all involved.

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When we begin to reformulate our communicative understanding to include that element of Being containing those lateral or hidden elements in the corporeal experience, we can begin to bring back the richness and depth of the ‘flesh’ that seems difficult to achieve when communication between people is linearly designated. We are of the world. Even when mobility prevails, we can sense being part of (in) someone or something. Within this intertwining, we re-cognize the visual locating as a place of sharing touch, feeling, background. We inhabit, caught in that chiasmic moment of confrontation. We are sensed, and sentient. And in our sensing and being sensed, we dwell. To dwell with others is to dwell consensually. Consensual dwelling calls for intercorporeity, a relationality, with the world and others. This is a reference to, and consideration for, the lived other, a relationship that not only acknowledges the I-Thou but begins to emphasize the shared reality that brings the I-Thou as one into existence. It is not enough to say that we dwell within our own fields, for as dweller we share latent possibilities. We dwell sensuously with others consensually. We share consensually. Difference While the ‘flesh’ is an element of Being that traverses and forms “other bodies as well as my own,” there exists that which allows recognition of difference. I recognize a distinction, a separation, a subjectivity that defines me from the other. I recognize the other after she “tears herself away from being one of my phenomenon.” We are still ‘of’ the world. I am ‘of ’ the world. Abby is ‘of’ the world. Merleau-Ponty is ‘of ’ the world, speaking to this by saying: That the presence of the world is precisely the presence of its flesh to my flesh, that I ‘am of the world’ and that I am not it, this is no sooner said than forgotten: . . . this thickness [of the flesh] is

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ascribed to me, it is the sheath of non-being that the subjectivity always carries about itself (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 127).

I am ascribed that sheath of non-being, but in ways that Abby is not. There is distance for us both—but for now, I live that distance dimension more fully than Abby. And with that as my focus, the sender-receiver model of communication can easily make its way to the fore. But there is more than what is perceived. Merleau-Ponty says: We understand then why we see the things themselves in their places, where they are, according to their being which is indeed more than their being perceived and why at the same time we are separated from them by all the thickness of the look and of the body: it is that this distance is not the contrary of this proximity, it is deeply consonant with it, it is synonymous with it. It is that the thickness of flesh between the seer and the thing is constitutive for the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his corporeity: it is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 135).

There is a thickness that separates, giving us a sense of difference. But when we allow the ‘here’ to once again re-gain its rightful place, the communicative act is accomplished not by overcoming a particular distance, but rather the intertwining of the ensemble of our bodies’ routes into the world (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, pp. 263 and 247). In the intertwining, Being is shared. Child and parent are formed by the same element of Being, and now dwell together in a communal activity. But herein lies a tension. For in an historically novel way the element of Being now involves a mobility. There is a tension between parent and child in that neither is brought into being by mobility’s possibilities in quite the same way. There is also a tension in that there is both a distancing, and a resolving of the distancing that accompanies each other in the communicative experience. If we listen to Merleau-Ponty, we might move from a subjective/corporeal consciousness to an intersubjective/intercorporeal

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relatedness that is in keeping with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the ‘flesh.’ This communal activity can be nothing less than a relatedness when people live together a stark contrast to a rendition of communication whereby information is imparted between juxtaposed bodies and lifeworlds. Being of the ‘flesh’ is being together for we are formed together. Our ways of life call for communication in living together. Even in mobility’s world we commune. But communing changes once we are no longer foreign to mobility’s ways. My perceptibility, this new density of mobility gives rise to a heightened percipient when I am called to live distance. My percipient bodily flesh includes a locatability as Flesh folds over upon itself, creating an opening for percipience, a dehiscence of locating. Just as my eyes belong to visibility, my locating being belongs to mobility (Cataldi, 1993, 65-66). As percipient perceptible, I belong to this folding Flesh. Only now I am swayed by mobility. Communication is a way to come into being with another. It is in this way that we know that we are being, rather than nonbeing, that we are alive rather than nothing at all. Mobile communication as we know it did not have to arise. Perhaps a forced mobility brings about an angst that we attempt to overcome— an awareness of absence, non-being, even death. I kneel down beside Abby. “Say bye, bye Mommy.” “Bye, bye” Abby says. Then she takes her grandmother’s hand. “Come on Pumma,” Abby says to her grandmother, pulling her into another room to show off her new riding horse, to share or re-live an experience with her. For when together, both grandmother and child are embodied in ‘flesh’ allowing them to sense, show, and share their way of being-in-the-world. Corporeality, relationality, and embodiment are paramount. Mobility is hidden once again.

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References Cataldi, Sue.“Emotion, Depth and Flesh’ in A Study of Sensitive Space: Reflections on Merleau-Pony’s Philosophy of Embodiment, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Heidegger, Martin. On the Way to Language, New York: Harper and Row, 1982. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible, ed. C. Lefort, trans. A. Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Shannon, Claude and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication Urbana: University of Illinois, 1949. Ulveland, R.D. “The Educational Insignificance of Technological Attendere: Listening Toward a New Educational Discourse,” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, Pennsylvania: Sage Publications, Volume 18, Number 1, pp. 7-15, April, 1998.

Scanning Visual Images and Relations Jarmo Valkola “Visual images are the products of intentional human activity.”1 —Noêl Carroll

Images (like all mediation in general) have a tendency to block the path to the objects they mediate2. The application of the photographic process to reality results in an image which is unique in many respects. A photograph testifies the existence of a certain reality, and if realism is a term for a graphic image which precisely simulates some real object, then a photograph must be differentiated from it as a form of reality itself3. Images are not to be thought of as entities like pictures, they are purely relational, a relation between consciousness and the object. An image is nothing else than a relationship (une image n’est rien autre qu’un rapport), an orientation towards the object.4 —Jean-Paul Sartre

We are not conscious of an image of an object, but have an imaginative consciousness of the object. Perception itself is cognitive, to see is to perform operations on visual materials. The cognitive operations called thinking are not the privilege of mental processes above and beyond perception but the essential ingredients of perception itself. It is a question of active exploration, selection, grasping of essentials, simplification, abstraction, analysis 1 Carroll, Noël (2001), Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 347. 2 Flusser (2002), 111. 3 McPherson (2005), 116. 4 Sartre, Jean-Paul (1940), L’Imaginaire. Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 20.

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and synthesis, completion, correction, comparison and problem solving. These are the ways that the mind treats cognitive material at different levels.1 Each of these operations is a component of intelligence and of perception. Take, for example, the fundamental operation of selection. If one is to select some aspect of a visual situation for attention, and for further processing, then one must select a particular shape, color, patch, or line. The same is true of all such operations, which are thereby shown to be indisputably both cognitive and conducted from the very beginning in visual terms. That is why Arnheim called them visual thinking. A difference between passive reception and active perceiving is contained in elementary visual experience. Arnheim insists that although a retinal projection is given, it is not the essence of perception. That given world is only the scene on which most characteristic aspect of perception takes place. The perception takes place through glances, directed by attention, and focusing the narrow range of sharpest vision on different aspects.2 It is an active concern of the mind. Perception also consists in the formation of perceptual concepts. Vision deals with the raw material of experience by creating a corresponding pattern of general forms, which are applicable not only to the individual case at hand but to an indeterminate number of similar cases. Arnheim does not want to point out that perceiving is an intellectual operation. What he wants to say is that there are striking similarities between the elementary activities of the senses and the higher ones of thinking and reasoning. The same mechanisms operate on both the perceptual and the intellectual level so that we need terms like concept, judgment, logic, abstraction, conclusion, computation, to describe the work of the senses.3 Perceiving accomplishes at the sensory level what in the realm of reasoning is known as understanding. Much of human Arnheim, Rudolf (1970), Visual thinking, Berkeley: University of California Press. 2 Ibidem., 14, 37. 3 Arnheim, (1974), 46. 1

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inference depends not on deduction, but on inductive probabilistic reasoning under conditions of uncertainty. Everyday inductive reasoning and decision making is often based on simple judgment heuristics related to ease of memory retrieval and degree of similarity.1 Gregory has the same kind of concept on perception. He thinks that perception can’t be deductive thinking, because perceiving things is not only a human operation. That’s why it is more inductive thinking, and for this reason we can, for example, experience perceptual paradoxes.2 Thinking can be inductive, and it presupposes selection and choosing. The visual concept of the object derived from perceptual experiences has three properties. It conceives in itself the image, where the object can be seen as three-dimensional, of constant shape, and not limited to any particular projective aspect. That is why a person’s visual concept of the object is based on the totality of observations from any number of angles. It is still a visual concept, and not a verbal definition obtained by intellectual abstraction. Sometimes intellectual knowledge helps to form a visual concept. Object’s certain and essential feature will appear best from different angles. Visual concepts must be distinguished from so-called eidetic memory images, which make it possible for some people to project upon an empty surface an exact replica of a scene they have perceived before. We can compare them with afterimages, although they can be scanned by eye movements, and this is not possible with afterimages. According to Arnheim, eidetic images are substitute percepts and as such mere raw material for active vision. For example, the problem of surface perception is difficult because the visual system is confronted with the problem of untangling the different physical causes of the images on our retinas, and filling in 1 See, for example, Kahneman, David & Tversky, Amos (1982), Judgments Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2 Gregory, R.L. (1971), The Intelligent Eye. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 161-162.

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missing information when only portions of a surface are visible. Much progress has been made in understanding how the visual system infers surface structure in some simplified images, but still much remains to be done before we have a full understanding of how our visual system works.1 Visual theory has developed into a point, where it is possible both to assess the conditions requisite to the effect, and to appreciate its theoretical importance. Extensive research has made it obvious that not only is the veridical perception under certain conditions a most feat of the visual system, but also that the manner in which that feat is accomplished represents an outstanding example of the cognitive problem-solving nature of the visual system. To appreciate the difficulty posed for the visual system, it is necessary to reflect upon the precise nature of the input received by the system under certain conditions. The various parts, for example, of a passing figure are received at slightly different times. This is not a major difficulty, since several lines of evidence suggest that our experience of briefly presented stimuli persists beyond the presentation itself in the form of iconic images. It is not surprising that a percept of the stimulus pattern is sometimes not achieved. These kind of failures are instructive both with the respect to the phenomenological nature of success, when it occurs, and with respect to the operations of the visual system which underlie success.

See, for example, Nakayama, K. Z. J.He, and Shimojo, S. (1995), “Visual surface representation: A critical link between lower-level and higher-level vision”, in S. M. Kosslyn and D. N. Osherson, Eds., An Invitation to Cognitive Science: vol. 2, Visual Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1

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Schemes of the Mind “What is often forgotten is the meaning and enigma of visibility itself.”1 —John Berger

Eidetic images are not constructs of the formative mind like visual concepts.2 The visual concept of anything that has volume can be represented only in three-dimensional medium, such as sculpture and architecture. If we want to make pictures on a plane surface, all we can hope to do is to produce a translation, to present some structural essentials of the visual concept by two-dimensional means.3 Also Gombrich point out that an image is translation or transformation but this transformation has to be reversed to obtain the required information.4 In talking about visual concept and perception, it is not only a question of image perception but of perception in general. For example David Marr and Irving Biederman think that representations and descriptions of the mind are object-centered. So, a visual concept is not just a reflection of some aspect. One can call Arnheim’s visual concept a representation or scheme of the mind, which is a three-dimensional model composed through experience, and not a scheme related to the organization of perceptions and of principles concerning with the perception. Arnheim believes that by investigating the drawings of children, we can find out what and how they will perceive things? The early drawings of children show neither the predicted conformity to realistic appearance nor the expected spatial projections.5 So, children actually draw visual concepts. Earlier it was suggested that children are technically unable to reproduce what they perceive. Berger, John (1980), About Looking. New York: Pantheon, 41. Arnheim (1974), 107. 3 Ibidem. 4 Gombrich, E.H. (1982), The Image and the Eye: Further Studies in the psychology of pictorial representation. New York: Phaidon Books, 280-284. 5 Arnheim (1974), 163. 1 2

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The nature of cognition is adaptive, because perception, memory, and reasoning do not operate simply for their own sake. Much of our cognitive apparatus evolved to serve basic functions of life, and human cognition involves intricate systems for motor control, and learning. Arnheim thinks that the drawings of young children show incomplete motor control.1 The lines are yet accurate enough to indicate what the drawing is supposed to be like. Other theorists have maintained that children aim at making straight lines, circles, and ovals because these simple shapes are relatively easy to draw. This might be true but does not indicate what mental process induces children to identify complex objects with geometric patterns. We cannot interpret them as simplified projective images.2 The mental life of children is intimately bound up with their sensory experience, and if the child’s mind contains any non-perceptual concepts of roundness, straightness, or symmetry, how would they be translated into visual shape?3 If they are derived from visual experiences, should we believe that the primarily raw material is processed into non-visual ‘abstraction’, to be translated back into visual shape for the purpose of image making. Because visual perception is based on optical projection, the sense of sight was deemed incapable of conveying a truthful image of what three-dimensional things really look like. Nevertheless if we realize that to apprehend a shape of an object by touch is in no way simpler or more direct than apprehension by vision. For example, to experience space kinesthetically, the brain must create that experience from sensory messages that are not spatial, and kinesthesia involves the same kind of task as vision.4 “As a reality, the photographic image confronts us with the innocent arrogance of an objective fact, one which exists as an independent presence, indifferent to our response.”5 (Maya Deren) Ibidem. Ibidem., 164. 3 Ibidem., 165. 4 Ibidem., 166 5 McPherson (1005), 117. 1 2

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A grown up person selects visual interpretations concerning different objects on the basis of visual information at hand. Other senses, like touch, will affect our perceptions, but they do not determine the perception.1 Perception does not consist of photographically true recording of something, but more like reaching out for the structural features of something. In perceiving an image one perceives actively the structural features of an image. The human mind can be forced to produce replicas of things, but it is not naturally geared to it. Since perception is concerned with the grasping of significant form, the mind finds it hard to produce images devoid of that formal virtue.2 An artist may start his or her work based on an idea, which is then worked out through some vague scheme, and then gradually fixed with new ideas. If an artist tries to reach out something, which corresponds to real perception, then what kind of scheme or mental representation is there to be fixed? One can think that the concept of a scheme might be different when applied to perception of reality than to representation of it. In drawing, the artist uses a reduction to contours similar to that found in vision. A physiological basis of pattern perception in the visual system is the signaling of outlines signifying the contoured forms of the object seen. The draughtsman usually first sketches these linear outlines and later fills them in with hatching or wash to give the illusion of light, shade, and plastic form. In vision the eye receives the projections of bright and dark areas on the retina, and the neuronal systems code them for relative brightness or darkness respectively, and enhance their linear borders. During the transfer of visual information from the eye to the brain, the contoured borders are accentuated progressively in the retina, the lateral geniculate, and the visual cortex. By means of this border contrast enhancement, the neurones of the visual cortex can signal complex patterns with linear contours. The brain generates a vast number of interactions between 1 2

Gregory (1971), 40-42. Arnheim (1970), 140.

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neurons: within this mix of events, memories and connections, thought emerges. In sketching, the artist acts in accordance with the same visual law, but proceeds in a direction opposite to the abstractive process of vision. An artist begins with the linear outlines and ends with a picture showing also the values of light and space.1 The eye is constantly in motion, so we can’t really fix our gaze in any prolonged manner or produce an arrested image, as is possible through technological imaging. Our brain must make up an image out of constantly changing, and often scanty, clues like lines and signs.2 Artists employ a wide range of visual styles in which different subjects are chosen, and in which different visual attributes are emphasized. Artists are like visual neuroscientists, when they try to understand the way in which we know the visual world. Artists have independently discovered the modules of the visual brain. The visual in all of its complexity can be broken down for the purposes of analysis and criticism, but essential components of vision will remain enigmatic.3 Perception depends on active, psychologically based processes. It is accepted that stored knowledge and assumptions actively affect all kind of perception. Perception consists of forming visual concepts, and mental representations, and making an image is like producing representa­tional concepts on the basis of visual concepts. These concepts and representations are structures consisting of essential and special features. This means that although a mental representation of a mind or a visual concept contains more information about an object than what we can perceive from one perspective, it still is a simplification of the object.4 Phenomena of this kind find their exJung, R. (1974). Neuropsychologie und neuropsychologie des Kontur—und Formsehen in Zeichnung, und Malerei in Wieck, H.H. (ed.), Psychopatologie Musischer gestatltungen. Sturttgart und New York: F K Schattauer, 29-88. 2 Schirato, Tony and Webb, Jen (2004), Understanding the Visual. London: Sage, 37. 3 Burnett (2005), 11. 4 Rock, Irving (1984), Perception. New York. Gibson, J.J. (1950), Perception of the Visual World. Boston. 1

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planation in what gestalt psychology describes as the basic law of visual perception: Any stimulus pattern tends to be seen in such a way that the resulting structure is as simple as the given conditions permit.1 Simplicity can be defined by means of information theory: The smaller the amount of information needed to define a given organization as compared to other alternatives, the more likely the figure will be so perceived. Both a psychologist and an artist must come to realize that the perceptual experience of looking at a figure cannot be described as the sum of the perceived components.2 Objective and subjective simplicity do not always run parallel. A perceiver may find a sculpture simple because he or she is unaware of its intricacy, or find it confusingly complex, because he or she has little acquaintance with even moderately elaborate structures.3 It appears that we have a tendency to see things as wholes. What is seen in a particular area of the visual field depends strongly on its place and function in the total context. Of course, the structure of the whole may be modified by local changes. This interplay between whole and part is not automatic and universal. A part may or may not be influenced by a change in the total structure. This illustrates just that any visual field behaves as a gestalt.4 If attention is focused, we can see details, but when attention is split, we perceive more about whole than its parts. So, the quality of attention reflects the nature of perception. Even though well-organized figures cling to their integrity and complete themselves when distorted, we should not assume that such figures are always perceived as undivided, compact masses.5 Shape is not the only factor determining the splitting of visual field. Similarities and differences in brightness and color can be even more decisive. The appearance of any part depends, to a Arnheim (1974), 53. Ibidem., 58. 3 Ibidem., 55. 4 Ibidem., 67. 5 Ibidem., 69-70. 1 2

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greater or lesser extent, on the structure of the whole, and the whole is influenced by the nature of its parts. Arnheim thinks that no portion of a work of art is ever quite self-sufficient.1 Picasso, after experimenting with sketches of rather complex hands and figures for his mural Guernica, made them much simpler in the final work. Every painting, sculpture or film carries meanings. Whether they are representational or abstract, they are about something. An image can present a visual statement, and the simplicity of art objects involves not only their visual appearance in and by itself, but also the relation between the image seen and the statement it is intended to convey. For example, simplicity requires a correspondence in structure between meaning and tangible pattern. Gestalt psychologists call this isomorphism, a requirement for design in the applied arts as well.2 A visual concept is something that comes through visual, and not verbal thinking. Generally, the models, descriptions, and representations stored in memory are usually visual. Rekula and Deren: Aspects of a Dialogue Finnish media-artist Heli Rekula has several times expressed an interest in the work of Maya Deren.3 Deren (1917–1961) Ibidem., 78. Ibidem., 63. 3 Maya Deren was a filmmaker and theorist, an essayist and staunch defender of independent art. She made her own films during Hollywood’s Golden Age, when the studios and the star cult had a huge influence. These phenomena of the time did not find a sympathetic ear in Maya Deren, who was known for her critical attitude towards the prevailing cinematic phenomena and aspirations, both in the case of Hollywood productions and independent films. In Maya Deren’s case we should see that the forms and productions of art can, in a very special way, activate the dimensions of the human mind and allow new views on one’s own as well as more general artistic and cultural development. A key aspect of Deren’s early work is the depiction of different mental levels. Deren visualized her own ideas of the mental plane in a way that resembles the concept of introspection, important in the study of mental 1 2

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saw aesthetics and ethics as interlinked perspectives. Aesthetics for her was not only formal choices, but also a conscious expression of humane values in a material form. A work of art is a kind of fabric linked to an idea, one that also illuminates ethic dimensions. An artist’s style is tantamount to illuminating the human condition, which is motivated from within by inner aims. Form is the main source of moral perspective, emotional effect and cognitive meaning. Form is stronger than any meaning or interpretation. Form is constituted of structures that rely upon the distinctness of the artistic medium in question by modifying reality with artistic methods. Therefore a careful form requires an observant and thinking viewer. Rekula’s compositions are designed images, conceptual visualizations and poetic resonances uncovered through repetition and variability. In her film At Land (1944), Deren showed the narrative structure of a type of searching, abstract climbing, surrealistic chess and the mythical. In the spirit of symbolic poetry, we move towards a minimalistic trance. Visual transformations are ever-present and the female character, played by Deren herself, experiences and sees everything. The story plays with identifications between the various actors (author, main character, viewer) and we are constantly aware of Deren’s bodily movements, choreographies in time and space. In Rekula’s work, similar processes of meaning partly direct the subconscious journey, symbolic rituals in appendices of the sacral. Social rituals (Skein) are seen as formal tools and structures. Deren relied on the vital energy of past ritualistic cultures, and criticized the inability of modern culture to create such levels of meaning. Rekula, too, paints her pictures and scenes with the mysteries of symbolic orders, with looks and figures, which imagery, the active browsing of the images in one’s mind. Regarding this, see: Valkola, Jarmo (2001), ”Maya Deren—Esteettistä etsintää ja heijastuvia kokemuksia”. [M.D.—Aesthetic searching and reflective experiences] Tieteessä tapahtuu no. 2 /2001.

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develop into metaphors for artistic conceptuality. Artistic form is the ordering of visual surfaces. Deren theorized the art of cinema with the instruments offered by editing, the cinematographic image and the relationship between cinema and reality. Editing created a new meaning for the images on film precisely through those functions, because editing enabled the context and form that alter images.1 Thus Deren came close to the ideas of Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov and other Soviet cinema theorists who saw film as a mirror of the new, modern world. However, Deren re-formulated formalist film theory in the sense that she added psychological introspection, and the dimension of observation it engenders. Conceiving of perception as visual thinking implies that observations contain a great deal of information that the viewer does not use.2 The process of watching involves a selection of structural features of the image, whose interpretation is fraught with cultural and individual differences. Yet the perception of an image involves not only recognition, but also a conception of spatial structures and an understanding of the relationships between the elements of visual scenes. In the cognitive reality of an image, even individual features can activate mental representations and thereby lead to object recognition. Thus, a visual experience is a dynamic process based on interaction between various tensions, as shown so intensely by Skein. Observation is not just the recording of perceived information or an activation of representations, it is an experience that is created equally by the information at hand as by the intuitions it gives rise to.3 Deren, Maya (1960) “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality”, Daedalus, Visual Arts Special issue, Winter. 159. 2 Arnheim, Rudolf (1972), Visual Thinking. Berkeley: University of California Press. 3 On the problematics of observation, see e.g. Arnheim, Rudolf (1974), Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (The New Version). Berkeley: University of California Press; Arnheim, Rudolf (1981), The Power of the Center. Berkeley: University of California Press; Bruce, V. & Green, P. 1

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In her work, Rekula investigates the instrumental functions of photography, film and video, their manipulation of time and space and methods of editing, juxtaposing these possibilities with the structural features of other art genres. For her, film, photography and video are all visual instruments that communicate through one another. Consequently, visuality means that one does not necessarily need dramatic or literary dialogue. It is characteristic of Deren and Rekula both that, because theatre and dance utilize a bodily movement through space, the maker of images must create new paths of motion. Deren took the indexical relationship between reality and the photographic image as a given. She saw film as being based on photographic realism, not unlike Siegfried Kracauer before her.1 Deren’s belief that photography stands in a discursive relationship to its referent echoes similar ideas in André Bazin’s thinking. According to this idea, photography settles into the system of cultural signs to reinforce its indexical relationship to reality.2 According to Deren, the obvious value of film stemmed from the camera’s ability to present the reality it observed in its own terms. The status of camera vis-à-vis reality can be a source of strength, especially when the purpose of photographic realism is to create an imaginary reality. Alternatively, it can tempt the (1985), Visual Perception: physiology, psychology, and ecology. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Ltd; Gregory, Richard (1966), ”Visual Illusions”, in B.M. Foss (ed.), New Horizons in Psychology, Harmondsworth Penguin Books; Gregory, Richard L. (1966), Eye and Brain. World University Library, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; Valkola, Jarmo (2004), Cognition & Visuality. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, Faculty of Humanities. 1 See e.g. Kracauer, Siegfried (1960), Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. New York: Oxford University Press, 16-23, 28-29. 2 Deren’s observations are reinforced by Juri Lotman’s idea that the moving image is a natural continuation of such basic material, and thereby the illusions of reality become an essential part of the language of cinema. Lotman, Juri (1981) ”On the Language of Animated Cartoons,” trans. Ruth Sobel, Russian Poetics in Translation 8, 36-37.

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photographer to rely on the mechanism itself to the extent that his conscious manipulations are restricted to a minimum.1 The images of cinema and photography have a correspondence to the images of external reality created by human consciousness, even though on the level of representation they are aesthetic constructions. The boundaries of the image are a kind of storage space for dynamic reality. They also delimit the area of representation on behalf of the viewer, whose observation is directed towards the aesthetic constructions thus revealed. The observation is accompanied by instinctive associations to the content of the views observed. On the cognitive level, pictorial representation carries a certain visually framed understanding, which is nevertheless not limited to it. In pictorial observation conflicts of this type complement each other. They are intrinsically interlinked and it is through such oppositions that pictorial reality emerges. For the viewer, an image is a perceptual concept and also an aesthetic object. An image is tangible, but through its associations it can turn into a sign containing abstract dimensions. The constituent elements of a single work must be seen in the light of the medium in question, regardless of their original content. It is this that allows the use of editing, for example, to create a new, artistic reality. Experiences created by manipulating the time and space of reality become the content of art. However, the form of art is no mere self-expression, the artist is like a member of a primitive community. The forms of his art are ritual forms that are linked to social existence. The links between Rekula’s Skein and Deren’s Ritual in Transfigured Time (1945–46) are obvious. Both works are ritualistic in terms of form as well as content. The works are a combination of ritualistic forms and performance. Skein contains social communication and a very advanced aesthetic control of situations. Rekula expressively utilizes the possibilities created by a divided pictorial space, the dialogic 1 Deren, Maya (1946), An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film. New York: Alicat Bookshop 30.

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narrative between the different panels, and the language of the organized paths of motion imparts the overall impression with some of its own fulfillment. In the case of Maya Deren and Heli Rekula, we can speak of their works as choreographies for the camera, cinematic poems or chamber films, in which temporal manipulation plays a major part. Film and video—just like dance, music and poetry—function rhythmically or in cadence, and the temporality of movement or change is an intrinsic part of this. Therefore we may speak of choreographies made for the camera, dimensions of visual composition, the meanings of which contain a layered spaciousness. They are not only about recording staged, “dancelike” movements, but also about the interaction between the paths of motion created by the performers, the presence of the camera and the editing. Art is present in those moments of visual landscapeness, whose truth can be seen precisely as poetic condensations.

Aesthetics of New Media Krystyna Wilkoszewska

Texts written by theoreticians of new media indicate that this new and dynamically developing domain requires aesthetics. The explicitly expressed need for aesthetic reflection is given various names, depending on the context: communication aesthetics, information aesthetics, new-media aesthetics, electronic aesthetics or digital aesthetics, aesthetics of design or of video image, etc. Although aestheticians, well established in philosophy of art, are unable to keep up with this rashly created terminology, they cannot ignore its message of authentic need for aesthetic reflection in fields hitherto unknown to aesthetics. Entering a new domain of research, an aesthetician faces a difficult task of combining the tradition of his/her own discipline with sensitivity to the more or less radically conceptualized dissimilarity of the electronic media sphere. Benefits coming from a careful aesthetic reflection over the domain of new media should be mutual. Both traditional aesthetics and the theory of new media may enrich their knowledge reconsidering the old traditional ideas like medium and techne, which are now seen in a new perspective. Medial Aesthetics The concept of “mediality” has accompanied art since its very birth. Firstly, art as a whole is treated as a medium or a means for something else: for getting to know the world, improving it, reproducing the world or even expressing it. Sometimes, especially in our time, art resented being treated as a means. It wanted to be the goal in itself and not a medium representing extra-artistic worlds.

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Secondly, art itself—either as an autonomous domain or as a domain subordinated to other spheres—uses “media”, that is, means of artistic expression. Two great aesthetics—mimetic aesthetics and expressive aesthetics—required “media”: sounds, colors, shapes or lines as a specific mediation, a bridge between art and the represented external world or the expressed internal world. At the same time, art history shows in what way the means of expression applied by artists changed—together with general cultural transformations—in every epoch. It also shows how, on the other hand, important changes within the applied “media” like, e.g., the introduction of bronze in sculpture or oil in painting, marked subsequent stages in the history of development of our culture. Thus, medial aesthetics should include all its experience connected with the concept of historically varying media—means of artistic formation. The problems of media have always been present in aesthetics (understood as reflection on art); it is enough to mention the Renaissance debates on the role of drawing and color as well as perspective in painting. However, it was no sooner than the beginning of the 20th century, when art started to fight for its autonomy, that the concept of medium came to the foreground in the reflection on art. It happened so mostly due to avant-garde experiments with form leading to transformations in understanding the means of artistic expression. Achievements of numerous artists from the first half of the 20th century contributed, first of all, to depriving the traditionally applied means of their functions of representing and expressing. This started an emancipation of artistic means, which soon became important in themselves and not in their mediating role. However, since mediating, by definition, belongs to the essence of a medium, depriving artistic means of their external frame of reference causes that emancipation of media in art to lead straight to their annihilation as media.

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As it seems, this 20th century process of metamorphosis of the old concept of a medium was completed in two stages. In abstract art we can trace, first of all, the progressing emancipation of artistic means: colors, lines and shapes lose their mediatory functions, they no longer refer us to something else but—emancipated and autonomous—they focus our attention on themselves. On the other hand, for Malewicz—and here I speak of the second stage—abstract painting is still too “objective”, that is, representing. Although the function of mediation between art and objective reality has been distinctly weakened in an abstract painting, it has not been completely eliminated. Suprematism, pointillism as well as constructivism and other avant-garde trends tend distinctly towards a detailed analysis of the picture, its reduction to basic elements or to spots on a plane, in order to liberate art from objectivity understood as the force of gravity or the concreteness of substance. This direction, opening the space for later images of pixel structure also signifies the advancing process of “de-mediatization” of media. This is why the “pure whiteness” of Malewicz’s square, its brightness free of any references or associations, was described as the “zero-medium” in art. Within the experimental avant-garde, the artistic medium, having attracted all attention to itself, loses its medial functions. At the same time the advancing progress of technology in the 20th century provides us with new kinds of media—the stillphoto camera and the motion-picture camera. Later we get electronic media, which, when developed as art, seem to take over medial functions, that is, they seem to mediate between the picture as a work of art and the objective actual reality. However, though technological and especially electronic media are commonly perceived to function as a recording of reality, experts treat them rather as “producers of images without reference.” It is said, for instance, that transmission of meanings is merely a side-activity for these new media. It is just the light

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flashing that counts for them. In this sense, contact with new media resembles gaping at the starry sky so irresistibly attractive for human beings, or watching sparks or fireworks. This is why an expert on media, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, described TV as a “zero medium.” On the basis of video-clips and MTV programs most characteristic of the essence of the television medium, he pointed out the pure pleasure derived from gazing at the fairy-like sight of light spots flashing on the black background. Lorenz Engell reached similar conclusions, calling television an “amedium,” since, in his opinion, television behaves amedially in the most proper sense of this word. However, it is hard to deprive media completely of their functions of mediating and transmitting. Thus, there appears a certain duality in understanding the essence of media. This duality is well known in medial aesthetics investigating the processes of development of art in the aspect of means of transmission. In art we also emphasize either its “medial” functions of transmitting and representing or its autonomous function of evoking purely aesthetic pleasure. The experience of medial aesthetics studying the history of development of art includes, among others, the following factors: • The conviction that there is historically occurring change of the means of artistic formation; three basic stages of this transformation can be distinguished: means of handicraft formation, technical means of shaping and reproducing, electronic means of generating; • The conviction that the periods of transition occurring between the subsequent stages in the development of artistic means are of evolutionary character; the specific historical wisdom of medial aesthetics consists in the fact that it is open to all future media in art; • The observation that with the subsequent stages of change in artistic media, the very concept of medium is changed as well;

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here we can distinguish the following stages: a) the notion that the medium does not interfere with the transmitted content (e.g., the painted fruit is so “real” that birds come to feed on them); b) a medium unavoidably changes or transforms the message (e.g., the emotion expressed in a poem with words is not the same as the emotion experienced by the author, since the emotion expressed, i.e., objectivized by means of words, colors, sounds or shapes is marked by the medium); c) the medium itself becomes a message; presentation takes the place of representation (e.g., Malewicz’s square). It seems that within new media we can find the whole medial experience that art acquired in the course of its development: from the traditional media playing the role of mediators through emancipation of media to a-mediality, that is, the negation of mediating function. Ambivalence and paradoxes that art encountered on the path of its development towards gradual weakening of the mediating function of artistic media seem today to be present in the very center of the problem of new media. This is why medial aesthetics, covering the knowledge about all media in art, may well contribute to understanding numerous problems that arise within the new electronic media. Techno-aesthetics Just as medial aesthetics is organized around the concept of medium, techno-aesthetics (the part techno- refers both to technique and technology) is focused on the concept of techne, which has accompanied art since antiquity. Both medial aesthetics and techno-aesthetics are embedded in a centuries-long tradition and differ from general aesthetics as well as from each other only in what is emphasized. In this sense medial aesthetics and techno aesthetics are, as it were, two sides of the same coin. However, the differences in emphasis sometimes evoke essential differences in understanding in what appears to be the

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same tradition. While in medial aesthetics the problems initially connected with art direct us towards the general theory of media, techno-aesthetics, based on the ancient concept of techne, the concept that formerly signified both art and technology, focuses it attention fully on the problem of art—both traditional art (conventionally called in this context classical art), and technomedial art. Moreover, in medial aesthetics the stress is put on continuity: transformations of the means of artistic formation are presented against the background of their earlier development and the occurrence of new, technological and electronic media is treated as a continuation of avant-garde experiments with image. On the other hand, in techno-aesthetics it is the radically different character of art produced by technological media of the older type (photography, film) or the newer type (video, computer) that is stressed. At the base of this approach to tradition, demanding a clear-cut distinction between classical (traditional) art and technological art we find the conviction that first the industrial revolution and then the electronic revolution triggered the essential transformation of older art into the medial art of today. This transformation is fundamental because the changes introduced by technology not only regard art but also make us revise our understanding of the mode of existence of objects. We could even say that classical art and technological art are based on two different ontologies. The ontology of classical art is the ontology of thing, object, space, and the static. It corresponds with mimetic aesthetics, the aesthetics of motionless pictures. The ontology of technological media art is the ontology of movement, time and change. It corresponds to the aesthetics of moving pictures of temporal rather than spatial character. As P. Weibel has said, “Considering the influential aesthetics of the last two hundred years we can see that it was built on an ontology of the picture, on the static concept of being that a priori negates or rejects the essence of the art of media, especially of moving pictures, namely their dynamism, immateriality and temporal form.”

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To better explain the difference indicated here, techno-aesthetics refers to its source in the Aristotelian definition of techne. In free translation Aristotle’s definition reads: “In general our techne partly tries to make that which nature itself cannot produce, and partly it imitates nature.” Thus, technology may either imitate nature or complement it; it may reproduce what exists or produce what otherwise would not exist. Classical art would be the art of imitation, techne in the service of mimesis, while the ambition of technological art is to complete nature. In the case of technological art, techne means creation. Both forms of techne, the one that reproduces and the one that produces, seem to be equally creative and dynamic, though in different ways. In other words, technology always possesses the power of creation and includes an element of art; this fact was also known in antiquity. This is why the art of technological media cannot be denied the name of art. If this happens, it is because the aesthetics of classical art (reproducing) is applied to technological art (producing). In this situation, whatever is technical and mechanical appears to be spiritless, inhuman and—in a word—uncreative, as opposed to nature. As long as technology is directed toward the imitation of nature, it seems to be in harmony with it. On the other hand, technology producing something new and thus transcending nature often appears—being different from nature—as something dangerous, threatening nature with destruction. Representatives of techno-aesthetics are convinced that there is a gap between classical art and the art of technological media. Thus, techno-aesthetics gets divided into the aesthetics of classical art on the one hand, with its concepts of the work of art, the author, the recipient, originality, etc., correlated to the traditional techniques of creation (handicraft), and the aesthetics of technological art on the other hand. The foundations of the latter were worked out by the philosophers Benjamin, Malraux, McLuhan, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and the artists Duchamp, Cage, Kosuth and others. As a result we have a body of new concepts like loss

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of aura, the death of the author, the end of originality, reproduction and repetition, museum of imagination, medium as message, simulation, etc. The reflections of techno-aesthetics concern (a) the traditional techniques of handicraft; and (b) ways of creation in art using technical equipment, first mechanical and now electronic. If techno-aesthetics clearly separates the art of technical media (b) from all earlier traditions of art (a), it does not determine a distinct boundary between the art of mechanical media and that of electronic media. Paul Virilio’s aesthetics, which he calls “the aesthetics of disappearance,” is an example of techno-aesthetics joining in its reflection both old technical media (e.g., film) and new media (e.g., video). Obviously, Virilio is aware of the differences that occur between the time of mechanical equipment and electronic machines, but he builds a common base for them on the concept of dromology, the study of velocity. In this approach the difference between the old media and the new is limited to the quantitative aspect and reduced to the difference in acceleration. Some people think that this approach neglects the qualitative shift that occurs with electronic media. They point to the deficiency of techno-aesthetics for studying the problems of new media. Making a strict division between mechanical media and electronic media, they postulate a radically separate model of aesthetics for the latter. The postulating of a radically new aesthetics for electronic media appears, as has already been mentioned, not so much among aestheticians as within the theory of these media. Various aspects of this new aesthetics are indicated: multimediality, immateriality, digitality, etc. For the purposes of this paper, we shall use the arbitrarily chosen name of digital aesthetics to cover the rich and manifold aesthetics of new electronic media. In using this name we mean not only the digital or numerical character itself, but also the “finger-touch” (Latin digitus—finger), that is, the radically new and previously impossible way in which new media artifacts are created by human beings.

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Digital Aesthetics Norbert Bolz, a German expert on contemporary problems including media, gave one of the chapters of his book the title: Digitale Asthetik. In this chapter he writes that the space for digital aesthetics was opened after the Second World War, with the advance of experiments in simulation of aircraft flights. In this way, a person, or precisely a pilot training without risk in a three-dimensional simulated world, entered the picture. In flight simulation, the difference between what is real and what is imaginary becomes obscure. In the first pages of his work, Bolz points out some of the most important concepts of the arising digital aesthetics, like simulation, immateriality, obscure boundary between the real and the imagined, virtuality. However, everything that he works out later hardly deserves the name of aesthetics. This is why, while investigating the development of digital aesthetics, we shall follow another trace. It is not clear whether digital aesthetics is focused exclusively on art—i.e., the art of electronic media - or on these media in general. It is rather a picture, a synthetic image not necessarily aspiring to the name of a work of art, that is its main focus. Nevertheless, this picture is usually treated as “an aesthetic product of a new kind,” and described as the work of media—a medial work. This medial work is often recognized—though without justification—as a work of art, and is treated as such. Supporters of digital aesthetics as aesthetics of electronic media accept the description of a medial work as a work of art if this generalization does not obscure the boundary between the earlier art and the new, radically new art of electronic media. A medial work signifies a break in the tradition of art, since it constitutes the beginning of the new way in which human beings produce artifacts. And so, while techno-aesthetics makes a clear-cut distinction between classical art (handicraft) and technical (mechanical) art, digital aesthetics draws a distinct boundary between traditional

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art including both handicraft art and mechanical media art (photography, film) from medial (i.e., electronic) works that can be defined as art on condition that this radical distinction is visible. For digital aesthetics, the difference in traditional art between hand-made works and the art of mechanical equipment is recognized and defined with Benjamin’s term “mechanical reproduction.” However, this difference is not treated as essential, since the works of all traditional art are “objectively grounded.” The essential difference, that is, the qualitative shift to digital aesthetics occurs with the birth of electronic medial art whose most important mark is not so much “reproduction” as generative character of works leading to transcendence of the material sphere. As P. Zec has said, “Unlike photography or film, whose principle of reproduction is, in fact, merely a technical perfection of perspectivist painting, the new means of creation like computers, holography or telematics have nothing in common with the traditional artistic ways of creation and representation.” This is why the works of electronic media require, according to numerous theoreticians of new media, a radically new aesthetics which I have called here digital aesthetics. This aesthetics would not deal with the digital background of images, but rather with recognizing and emphasizing the essential semantic shift, which occurs with the occurrence of the new, electronic media, in concepts like the work of art, the artist, the recipient, that is, all the concepts forming the so-called aesthetic situation. In other words, the different character of a medial work is connected with its new ways of creation and reception, which, in turn, evoke a change in function of the whole aesthetic situation.

Bibliography N. Bolz, “Mediensaesthetik,” in: Am Ende der Gutenberg-Galaxis: die neuen Kommun-ikationsverhaltnisse, Munchen 1993

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H. Belting, S. Gohr (eds), Die Frage nach dem Kunstwerk unter den heutigen Bildern, Stuttgart 1996 P. Weibel, “Transformationen der Techno-Aesthetik,” in: F. Rotzer (ed), Digitaler Schein. Aesthetik der elektronichen Medien, Frankfurt am Main 1991 P. Virilio, Esthetique de la disparation, Paris 1980 N. Bolz, “Digitale Aesthetik,” in: Eine kurze Geschichte des Scheins, Munchen 1992 V. Flusser, Medienkultur, Frankfurt am Main 1997

The Mobility of Mobile Phones: A Phenomenological Analysis Zhenming Zhai

1. Prelude I just got married a few months ago, and that was about two years after I returned to China from the US and assumed a Chair Professor position in the Philosophy Department of Zhongshan University. Right after the wedding, my wife and I had a few heated arguments about the way I used my mobile phone. Why? Let me explain. In the US, I did not use a mobile phone, and that did not seem to have been a major problem. People did not usually assume that they could reach me via a mobile phone on a regular basis. In US academic circles, it was normal that people did not have a mobile phone. If you did have one, that would be viewed as something extra, and people wouldn’t be surprised if you did not carry it around with you most of the time. Your friends or family wouldn’t seriously complain about the fact that they often failed to reach you by dialing your mobile phone number. But in China, a few years ago, people in the city began to assume that an average bread earner should be reachable by mobile phone almost all the time. I had not got used to such an assumption when I got married, and that was why my wife found me intolerable and ignited a few unhappy non-philosophical arguments. I had yet to learn to view my mobile phone as part of my body and let it function as my wife expected it before I could finally ease the tension between us. Even though I called the arguments “non-philosophical,” I do want to explicate the philosophical significance of the arguments.

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2. The Detachable versus the Attached Before the mobile phone was invented, people had a long history of using devices attached to the human body so as to make up the defect of a certain sense organ. These devices are tools, but unlike regular tools that are usually put away and picked up only when needed, they are rarely separate from the user because they are expected to function as long as the user is active in everyday life. A pair of spectacles used by a near-sighted person, for instance, is very different from a pair of scissors used by a housewife if viewed from the perspective we are taking here. If you are a sloppy person, you have to spend time finding the scissors when you are suddenly urged to use them. But spectacles should be, and mostly are, always with you as long as you are actively awake; normally, you are hardly aware of their existence just as you are hardly of your eyes. Indeed, your spectacles are meant to be practically no less than an extension of your eyes. Taking a look at contact-lenses in place of regular spectacles, we will be more convinced of the point being made here. We don’t want to be superficial in understanding such a contrast. Doubtless, devices such as spectacles and hearing-aids differ from tools such as a screwdriver or knife, in the degree of constancy of their attachment to the human body. But more interesting and phenomenologically more relevant is the fact that their functionality is not a result of an act of deliberate operation, as it would be in the case of the normal use of a tool. It is rather an effect associated with the background of the constitutive subjectivity. Our hands, for example, are certainly parts of our body, but they are like knives or screwdrivers more than they are like eyes or spectacles in this respect, because we objectify our hands a great deal when we use them to grab or push something just like using a man-made tool. On the contrary, we do not objectify our eyes when we look and see something. Therefore, even though physical proximity between the device and the natural body might be a hint of something

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phenomenologically important, it is not itself the central point of interest in our current discussion. What we are concerned with here is where the functionality of the device fits in the intentional structure of the user’s consciousness. Contact-lenses, say, do not appear in the objective world from which we can pick them up and operate them. Rather, they are constitutive for the precondition of the world-perception and make possible the clear appearance of the whole world for the near-sighted user. They are not sensed as something attached to our body, but as an indispensable, though detachable, component of our active body. At this point, I hope we have become pretty clear about the contrast between the detachable and the attached from the reference point of a single individual’s subjectivity. A mobile phone, however, cannot be adequately understood from such a reference point. Instead, it is by its very nature a device of intersubjective sharing because it is designed for the sole purpose of interpersonal communication. My wife viewed a mobile phone, as shown in the above example, as a device detachable from, rather than attached to, her husband’s body. For my wife, my body with the mobile phone was not merely a physical object far away or nearby, but a soul-dwelling locality immediately accessible by pressing a hot key. With a mobile phone accompanying herself as well, she tacitly assumed that she could communicate with her husband anytime she wished, and was ready to engage in a conversation with him whenever prompted to. Of course, that “him” happened to be me. In other words, she assumed no significant difference between us being both at home under the same roof, or miles apart insofar as verbal communication was concerned. Such a mentality must take it for granted that the mobile phone is always working on the other side unless something unexpected or undesirable has happened.

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3. Schutz’s Categories Amended: Comsociates? Alfred Schutz examined the structure of the social world, and in so doing he classified the phenomenological relations among individual persons with new categories. For Schutz, there are Consociates who share the same time and spatial access to each other’s bodies, Contemporaries to which also belong those with whom one shares the same time and whose lived bodies are not immediately accessible, and Predecessors and Successors with whom one does not share the same time and to whose lived bodies one has no access. The distinction between Consociates and Contemporaries is made for the first time by Schutz, and is loaded with rich phenomenological implications. Unlike “Contemporaries” that denotes only an abstract concept with an indefinite number of individuals, one’s Consociates are present to each other physically, and thus one can count them one by one and come up with a definite number. Actions of Consociates can contribute to the formation of one’s intersubjective experiential complex without institutional mediation, and it is from such a perspective that we see the importance of the reciprocal physical presence for the constitution of the pre-social world of intersubjectivity. But the substantiation of intersubjective experience does not always require each party’s physical presence. Those with whom one can communicate without a third person’s mediation are not necessarily one’s Consociates, and the partnership of these partners is no less significant for the formation of one’s life-world experience. Would Schutz mind if we create a new category called “Comsociates”, so as to capture another essential constituent of the intersubjective experience? If so, Comsociates can be understood as those Contemporaries with whom one can communicate real-time in principle by means of any device. The communicational process must be reciprocal, and the contents are carried by linguistic symbolism. If the interaction between two or more parties is partly sensory

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without symbolic mediation, the relationship among Comsociates begins to move toward that among Consociates. People conversing through video tele-conferencing, for example, are more than Comsociates. People interacting in the still more extreme environment of immersive networked virtual reality, that is, in cyberspace in its Gibsonian sense, are Consociates, not Comsociates. Insofar as the communication is carried on with a fully immersive sensory configuration that involves senses of vision, hearing, touch, or more, it is phenomenologically equivalent to that carried on among Consociates. Since we are not concerned with any physical-causational mechanism in our phenomenology here, we are justified in viewing Gibsonisn cyberspace as equivalent to physical space for our purpose. “Comsociates” or not, interpersonal communication among non-Consociates is not in any sense a novelty. It’s reasonable to assume that it is as old as, or even older than, the use of human language. But communication in a traditional manner did not allow us to establish a communicational network by means of which we can immediately engage ourselves in a conversation with anyone of those in the circle anytime. Only mobile phones allow us to do that, and urge us not to fail to do that. In this regard, we can view a mobile phone as a kind of potential “zerodistance” communication device. In such a zero-distance communication setting, some of our “Comsociates” are further condensed into more intimate partners. They are much closer to one another than to those accessible others who do not use a mobile phone or use a mobile phone only on special occasions. Consequently, the ontological structure of the life-world experience has undergone a process of realignment or repositioning. Furthermore, intersubjective components are now much more intimately interwoven with each participant’s intentional horizon. A mobile phone is thus by no means a mere technological innovation. It might be more constitutive for the shaping of our Being-in-the-World than the kind of technology Heidegger

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characterized as “standing-reserve.” Indeed, the “detachable” plug-in gets deeper into one’s lived experience than a power station could have ever attempted. 4. Mobility as Fixation A mobile phone is mobile only because the user is mobile. So it turns out that the mobility of a mobile phone is so designed just to subordinate itself to the kind of mobility essential to the formation of one’s lived experience. That is, the user’s mobility is equivalent to her ability to take an unlimited number of spatial perspectives, and the mobility of a mobile phone originates from this primary mobility. Physically speaking, two instances of mobility now converge into a single instance of fixation between the user and the device. More often than not, the mobile phone user is in motion, with the mobile phone immobilized or fixed on her body. With such a setting of fixation, the causal chain of communication between the two mobile phone users is maintained continuously without a loss of the symbolic meanings being passed over back and forth. In fact, the causal connection that underlies the communicational process must be totally ignored by the two users during their dialogue; if the talker starts to think about the causal connection of the physical process in terms of electromagnetic waves or Boolean algebra, for example, she will miss some contents of the conversation. Therefore, the resultant fixation is not, phenomenologically speaking, a project to be accomplished by the user, but part of the background structure for the zero-distance communication, or a node of the intersubjective complex on which the lived experience of the mobile phone users unfolds and progresses. The idea of round the clock, zero-distance communication sounds frightening to many contemporary Westerners because they think there is, for each person, an absolute inner-self whose integrity should be protected, and such a kind of protection is

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possible only if one can block the access from any counterpartself at least for some period of time. They are not willing to forsake such a privilege and thus just create a subversive sense of intimacy in return. Many people in China, however, do not appear to be aware of the subversive potential of such a sense of intimacy. It is not surprising to hear a mobile phone user in a public place of Beijing City telling his counterpart that he is right now at the airport in Guangzhou, a city thousands of miles away from Beijing. Nobody would feel embarrassed to hear a friend next to him saying to somebody over the mobile phone things like “I am now at my office” while in fact he is on his way to a concert. Communication occurs only among multiple individuals, and what separates each individual from others is exactly an ontological distance. An ontological distance is not equivalent to a distance in physical space, even though the latter may in fact accompany the former. Puzzles that originate from such an ontological distance have bothered philosophers for many years and continue to bother them. The problem of other-mind, for instance, is one of those puzzles, and the Wittgensteinian issue of “private language” is another. We can argue that individuals are constituted by social relations, or that the idea of atomic individual is a chimera, etc., but we cannot deny the prima facie distinction between thought-contents of one person and those of others. If there were no such an unbridgeable gap, there would be no need for communication. That is, intersubjectivity presupposes subjectivity, regardless of their constitutive history. Were the distance to become zero, the multiple would become singular, and the interpersonal would become personal. The ontological distance in the context of communication could be understood at two levels. The core level is rooted in the pure ideatic sphere, and is manifested in the structure of so-called “double contingency:” one party always encounters the other in an unpredictable meaning-formation process. One expects the

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other to continue the process in an intelligible manner, but what will come about to get the communicative process going further is open to unlimited possibilities. At this level, the mobile phone can make no difference. On the other hand, the distance is about the possibility of engaging the other party in a desired real-time interactive communication process, that is, it pertains to the availability of the other. The immediate availability of the other for the purpose of communication creates a sense of gap-filling, and such a sense of gap-filling accompanies the sense of intimacy brought in by the use of a mobile phone, if one uses it as a device for round-clock zero-distance communication. Obviously, the apparent intersubjective intimacy based on the mobile phone capacity has to be countered by some kind of interpersonal manipulation in order to fit into the a priori structure of intentionality. One might or might not honor the notion of individual privacy, but no one can escape the ontological constraint pre-determined by the transcendental condition of life-world experience. The point is that no matter how people think in a particular cultural environment, zero-distance communication seems to be technologically possible but anthropologically impermissible. The notion itself involves an ontological conundrum, that is, how is it possible to reduce intersubjectivity to subjectivity, or vice versa? This is in a way similar to Sartre’s question: How is it possible to become God when you are in principle not God? 5. Inconclusive Remarks We have seen a structural tension between the notion of zero-distance communication and the ontological condition of intersubjectivity. Such a tension can be eased either by refraining from taking the full advantage of the technology or by practicing deliberate miscommunication as a means of distance restoration. One thing is certain: when mobile phones are used to

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reduce the communication gap to the utmost, the horizon of the intersubjective life-world experience will be substantially restructured. If McLuhan’s saying, “the medium is the message,” did make a strong point about things such as television, can we now in a similar fashion make an even stronger similar point about things like the mobile phone? After all, our “Comsociates” might want to explore more possibilities before making a quasiontological commitment to the alluring notion of zero-distance communication.

CONTRIBUTORS

Marc Van den Bossche is currently a professor in philosophy at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He has had a career as a professional journalist and has published books on technology, ecology, intersubjectivity, Richard Rorty, and Hannah Arendt. Mélanie Bourdaa teaches popular media studies at Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux. She is particularly interested in the role of television interactivity and reception theory. Her work has included research into Spanish and French television viewing patterns. Alison Leigh Brown is a Professor of Philosophy in Humanities, Arts and Religion in the College of Arts and Letters at Northern Arizona University. Her research and work on cultural and gender issues have resulted in the publication of a number of widely recognized essays. Darryl Cressman teaches in the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University. His research into the philosophical foundations of social theory has occupied much of his work. Recently, he has focused his studies on education and the Internet. Stephen Crocker Dr. Crocker teaches courses in social theory, media, and globalization in the Department of Sociology at Memorial University. He regularly lectures on culture and social philosophy in the Master of Philosophy in Humanities program. Tracy P. Dalke teaches in the Psychology Division of the Western Oregon University. Her interests in phenomenology center on movement and dance. She has written on various aspects of contemporary therapy theory as well as teaching in that area. Kathryn S. Egan taught in the Department of Communications at Brigham Young University until her retirement. Her career included work in media, most significantly in radio broadcasting. Her work in the establishment of the Society of Phenomenology

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contributors

and Media significantly moved the Society to greater attention to practical applications. Kevin Fisher received his doctorate in Film Studies from UCLA, where he attempted to synthesize the film theories of Vivian Sobchack with traditional phenomenology, specifically applicable ideas from Heidegger. He is concerned with questions of spectatorship and cultural identity. Thor Grünbaum is associated with the Danish National Research Foundation: Center for Subjectivity Research. He has taught Introduction to Cognitive Science, Embodied and Embedded Cognition, and worked in Cambridge/Copenhagen efforts in the philosophy of action and phenomenology. Bina Gupta is the Curators’ Professor at the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Her research areas include Comparative Philosophy, Asian Philosophy, Indian Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy, Advaita Vedanta, and Indian Epistemology. Edward Hamilton teaches in the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University. He has worked extensively in media theory and is particularly interested in questions related to on-line education and emerging technologies as they apply to pedagogy. Arnór Hannibalsson teaches in the Department of Philosophy, University of Iceland. His research and teaching is concentrated mainly in the fields of æsthetics, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of history, and political philosophy. Aki-Mauri Huhtinen teaches in the Department of Management and Leadership Studies at the National Defense College, Helsinki, Finland. He attempts to answer perennial questions about warfare, such as, Are we going in the right direction with the western triumph of technology and media? Julia V. Iribarne is a member of the Academia Nacional de Ciencias, Argentina. She has worked extensively in the areas of ethics and intersubjectivity, specializing in research and application of Husserlian phenomenology. She is also a published novelist. Stacey O’Neal Irwin teaches in the Department of Communication and Theatre as a Professor of New Media at Millersville University. Her research interests include the philosophy of technology, postphenomenology, and hermeneutics.

contributors

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Matti Itkonen teaches philosophy and education at Jyvaskyla University in Finland. His research interests include memory, nostalgia, language, and poetry. Philosophically, he applies notions from Bergson, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Husserl. David R. Koukal teaches in the Philosophy Department at the University of Detroit Mercy and is the Director of the Honors Program. His interests include scholarly work on Husserl and Heidegger, but above all he is interested in the application of phenomenological insights to practical application. Kenneth Liberman teaches sociology at the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, specializing in Tibetan practices of reasoning, intercultural communication, and race and ethnic relations. He is presently working on a translation of an 18th century text by the First Panchen Lama. Alberto López Cuenca teaches at the Univesidad de las Americas Puebla, specializing in creation and culture theories. In his work, he seeks to give researchers, teachers, creators and critics, methodological tools for analyzing in a critical but creative way, contemporary cultural productions. Sebastian Luft is currently located at Marquette University, where he teaches Husserlian phenomenology. Current interests include the origins and consequences of the phenomenological movement with research on movements and philosophers coming out of phenomenology, such as Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Lars Lundsten is the Director of Research and Development at Arcada Polytechic University in Helsinki, Finland. He has worked extensively on media theory with special attention to the work of early phenomenologists, especially Roman Ingarden. Paul Majkut directs the graduate Film Studies program at National University in San Diego, California. He studied Husserl under V. J. McGill. He has been awarded two National Endowment for the Humanities research grants (Cambridge, Oxford) and is currently completing a book on media transitions from medieval to contemporary times. Chris Nagel teaches in the Department of Philosophy, California State University Stanislaus. His research focus is on the experience of media as the key to understanding and criticizing the role granted the media in intersubjective relations, community-formation, gaining access to information, entertainment, and commerce.

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Melentie Pandilovski is the Director the Contemporary Art Center in Skopje, Macedonia. His current investigations focus on bio-art. He has written extensively on the contemporary art movements, aesthetics, and the ontology and epistemology of art. Lea Marie Ruiz, a graduate student in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, works on various questions of new media. She is particularly interested in questions of identity in the digital age, cultural determinations, and the epistemological implications of new media. Vivian Sobchack is a professor in Critical Studies in the University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Film Television, and Digital Media. Before retiring, she was the Associate Dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Currently, she teaches classes in Visual Phenomenology and Contemporary Film Theory. Albert D. Spalding, Jr. is a professor at Wayne State University, School of Business Administration, Department of Accounting, in Detroit, Michigan. He is a practicing attorney as well as a Certified Public Accountant in Michigan. His interests are in questions of Internet security and privacy rights. Janez Strehovec received his Ph.D. from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1988 in Aesthetics. Since 1993, he has been working as principal researcher in two projects supported by the Slovenian Ministry of Science and Technology: Theories of Cyberarts and Theories of Cyberculture. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka is a Polish-born American philosopher, one of the most important and continuously active contemporary phenomenologists. She is founder and president of The World Phenomenology Institute, and editor of the book series Analecta Husserliana, presently published by Springer. Randall Dana Ulveland teaches in the Department of Education at Western Oregon University. He is interested in the immediacy of experience, most often relying on Heideggerian concepts as well as his own direct experience. He has worked on the perception of sound and how that perception is modified by culture. Jarmo Valkola is a Principal Teacher in Communication and Media Culture Studies, School of Culture Studies at the Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences. He has worked and published in the areas of film theory, visuality, and visual cognition.

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Krystyna Wilkoszewska teaches at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. Her work in aesthetics is widely recognized internationally. Her teaching and work is centered on questions of aesthetics and epistemology, which she applies to practical as well as theoretical matters. Zhenming Zhai teaches at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China. His interests in phenomenology are currently centered on questions of mobile communication and cell phones. His work focuses on the application of phenomenological methodology to practical questions of language, communication, and media.

INDEX

aesthetics, 479 Adobe Photoshop, 268, 339 Althusser, Louis, 14, 124 analogue, 271, 343 animated characters, 110-111 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 134 apparatus theory, 125 Arnheim, Rudolf, 466 artificial intelligence, 109, 231, 431 at-once-ness, 335 audience, 31, 83, 95, 104, 135, 186, 192, 250, 253, 268, 276, 436 augmented perception, 418 augmented reality, 418 avatar, 342, 370, 376, 418 bad faith, 217 barbed wire, 188-9 Bachelard, Gaston, 385 Battlestar Galactica, 40 Baudrillard, Jean, 373-4 Baudry, Jean Louis, 124 BBC-Discovery Channel, 340 Beckett, Samuel, 333

Bentham, Jeremy, 184 Bhagavad Gita, 165 blurry, blurriness, 336, 339 Body, am my 339; have, 339 Borges, Jorge Luis, 220 Bush, George W., 185 cell phone, cellular phone, 34, 453 computer-generated imagery (CGI), 104, 111 Cornell, Joseph, 384 corporeality, 60-1 Crocker, Stephen, 112 cultural revolution, 358 cyber-body, 342 cyberlight, 342 cyberspace, 313, 332, 334, 372, 418, 450 cybertext, 313 cybertime, 418 dance, 95 Dasein, 64, 116 deception, 112 deep focus, 90

506 Deleuze, 43-7, 86-7 Deren, Maya, 474-76 dialectical thinking, 47 digital coldness, 339 digital object, 380 digital switching, 336 digital translation, 229 digitized interativity, 332 dirty light, 341 Disney-Pixar, 104 Dreyfus, Hubert, 58, 64 eidetic images, 468 electronic memories, 363 electronic space, 369 Ella, 66-8 embodied signals, 253 embodiment, 122 empathy, 95, 107-8, 331, 346 enhanced TV, 34 epoché, 236, 340 Erfahrung, 234 Erlebnis, 234 face-to-face, 334, 347 Final Cut Pro, 268 Fink, Eugen, 158, 344, 417 flesh, 460 Flusser, Vilem, 362 for-itself, 211 Foucault, Michel, 48, 184 Freud, Sigmund, 107 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 29

index

Gates, Bill, 31, 341 gestellen, 126 gesturing, 99 Glimpse, 10, 16 Gould, Glenn, 83-85 Hegel, 43-7, 49, 156 Heidegger, Martin, 57, 63-72, 110, 116; National Socialist movement, 130; Heideggerian Hold, 223; 279; 360 hermeneutics, 22-29, 58-59, 80, 149, 230 Hume, David, 168, 175 Husserl, Edmund, 156, 158, 162, 166, 169, 175, 235, 238, 273; aesthetics, 295-313; 336, 339, 342, 346, 358, 417, 432 hyperactivity, 332 hypermedia, 330; hypermediated, 343 Ihde, Don, 226, 331, 342 image, 25-30, 41-45, 83-87, 106, 120, 187, 206, 228, 291, 333-355, 362-5, 379 information warfare, 181 Ingarden, Roman, 136, 1717, 316, 417, 441 in-itself, 214 intersubjective, intersubjectivity, 113, 133, 162, 237, 250, 273, 287, 330, 332, 346,

507

index

368, 432, 461, 492 intentionality, 150 interactivity, 31-3, 314, 332, 357 intercorporality, 342 Internet, 32, 34, 185, 255, 291, 321, 330, 348, 370, 450 Internet privacy, 403 interobjectivity, 332, 372 interpassivity, 342 Iraq war, 185 irreality, 339 Irigaray, Luce, 51 Jameson, Fredric, 84 journalists, 150 Joyce, James, 144 Jünger, Ernst, 129 Kant, Immanuel, 155-6, 167 karma, 165 Körper, 340 Kurzweil, Ray, 336, 362 Langer, Susan, 234 Lash, Scott, 278 Leib, 340 lifeworld, 432 linguistic schematization, 141 literature, 435 lived body, 60-1, 340 lived Other, 62-3 lived space, 59-60 lived time, 61-2

Lochard, Guy, 31 looking in the face, 334 Lost, 39 love, 337 Majkut, Paul, 104, 111 Manovich, Lev, 382 Marx, Marxism, Marxists, 10, 14, 25-6, 49, 420 memory boxes, 385 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 8692, 150, 253, 273, 459 Metz, Christian, 124 McLuhan, Marshall, 83-85, 456 mobile phones, 491 MOO, 375 MUD, 375 military operations other than war (MOTW), 182 multi-media, 268 Nagel, Chris, 113 narration, 366 National Socialist, 190 Nausea, 199 new media aesthetics, 479 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 21, 44, 126, 286 nostalgia , 26, 387-90 non-linear, non-linearity, 31, 335 nothingness, 211

508 Odysseus, 114 Onfray, Michael, 182 on-line education, 55-6 Organization of Phenomenological Organizations, 16 Other, the, 230, 331, 406 Outis, 13 out of control, 337-8 othering, 231 Panoptican, the, 184 photograph, 464 posturing, 99 pre-emptive strike, 182 privacy, 406 psychoanalysis, 13, 48 QuickTime, 380-85 Ramakrishna, 164 real-time interactivity, 38 reiterated deception, 332 reiterated empathy, 332 relationality, 62-3 representational object, 33031 rights, 410-415 Rorty, Richard, 29 Sachen selbst, 156 Saksin, 153 Samkara, 152 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 155, 161, 196-222, 406, 463

index

Scheler, Max, 336-7 Schutz, Alfred, 273-5, 347, 273, 355, 493 Searle, John, 316 self, 97 Shakespeare, 445-6 shock and awe, 186 Sobchack, Vivian, 112, 116117 source code, 341 soul-based artistry, 110 spatiality, 59-60 spectacle, spectator, 242, 442 Spinoza, 49-50 Stein, Edith, 107-8, 113-4, 332, 343 Sub-human, 197, 209219 techno-aesthetics, 484 technological texture, 221 temporality, 61-62 threading, 222 3D, 84-85, 109, 363, 376, 383, 422, 466, 468, 487 Tolkien, J. R. R., 104 Tran Duc Thao, 14 transcendental, 157-8 transcendental ego, 339 transcendental epoché, 236 Turkle, Sherry, 61, 330, 373 Umwelt, 256 Upanisads, 161 Vattimo, Gianni, 21

index

Vedanta, 151-8 viewed object, 118 viewing subjects, 118 Virilio, Paul, 486 virtual realists, 334 virtual reality, 313, 357, 368 Vivekananda, 152 Vitti, Monica, 134

509 Web Site, 313 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 278, 285-92 World War II, 190 WYSIWYG, 340 zero point of consciousness, 338 zero point of orientation, 338 zombie, 336, 342

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