Phenomenology and post-phenomenology

My attempt in this paper is to illustrate some of the major developments in current phenomenological aesthetic research in the field of Atmospheres, showing how this concept has first consolidated through phenomenological approaches and has then concretized in the context of contemporary architecture. A main issue in this regard is the theoretical-philosophical basis on which the new contexts of this project are based and are therefore marked by a sensitive and perceptive approach toward the inhabited space. Through the concepts of experience, sensitive perception , and predisposition to places I will investigate how Atmospheres today represent an aesthetic way to interpret not only the inhabited space, but also the architectural project in modern and contemporary architecture.

This paper draws on post-phenomenological philosophy of technology and contemporary discourse on interactive art in order to shed light on the role of technological mediation in electronic art, i.e., the flows of audience’s experiences into and through the artworks, and, the role of technology in facilitating these flows. The analysis results in a distinction between “interactive” and “mediating” art on the one hand, and “mediation as a tool” and “mediation as an end itself” on the other.

I explore links between the phenomenology-inspired philosophy of emotion, especially discussions of affective intentionality and situated affectivity, and those strands of work in the field cultural affect studies that take their inspiration from Spinoza and Deleuze. As bridges between these fields I propose the concepts 'disclosive posture' and 'affective arrangement'. 'Disclosive posture' condenses insights from phenomenological work on affectivity, especially those pertaining to what Heidegger calls Befindlichkeit. 'Affective arrangement' is a descendant of Deleuze and Guattari's term agencement. It refers to heterogeneous ensembles of elements coalescing into a sphere of heightened affective intensity in a local setting. I develop this notion into a tool for analyzing situated affectivity. As it does not yet figure within debates in the philosophy of emotion, I will outline what is meant by 'affective arrangement' in some detail. Throughout, I discuss a productive tension between these two conceptual strands.

In this paper I will critically examine the phenomenological underpinnings of what we
might call the ‘spatiality paradigm’ in computer game studies – the project of using
spatial metaphors and terminology to understand computer game play. Drawing on the
(post-)phenomenological tradition, I argue that while this terminology is useful for
analytic projects seeking to shed light on the structure and form of the game artifact and
the processes it facilitates, spatial notions do not necessarily resonate with the first-person
experience of computer game play, especially in cases of playing games of genres which
do not rely on simulated locomotion and proprioception in three-dimensionally modeled
space. Furthermore, I argue that the differences between single-player and multi-player
games – namely that single-player games can be described, using Ihde’s framework of
intentionality relations, as situating in ‘alterity relations’ and multi-player games in
‘relations of mediation’ – further complicate the issue of spatiality in computer games.
Given these observations, I suggest that whereas the spatial notions appear problematic
for the purpose of first-person description of the experience of playing single-player
computer games, the notion of ‘game world’ seems more accurate a description of that
with which the players are engaged with.

Refugee camps are frequently conceived as spaces in which social and political life is reduced to biological concerns of survival or 'bare' life. Yet, for researchers who focus on life in the camp as it is lived, through material adaption, social negotiation and resistance, this Agambenian perspective is unsatisfactory. Instead, a relation is made apparent between practises of everyday life and the manifestation of a politics. This paper argues for the importance of Hannah Arendt's writings for a new understanding of how refugee camp inhabitants can develop and sustain political agency. First, it will highlight the relation by observations and analysis of 'the jungle' in Calais, France. This unofficial camp, although short-lived, has influenced a broad spectrum of research including examination of spatial political practice. Second, applying a phenomenological reading of Arendt's work, I argue that political agency emerges through the concept of world-building. World-building results from the conjunction of human activitiesfrom the quotidian, like labour and work, to the exceptional cases of actionand their orientation towards a specific type of visibility. World-building manifests as camp inhabitants erect spaces of meaning that engage a plurality of persons, transforming them into political agents.

Three-dimensional (3D) laser scanning is a geovisual technology used for precision scientific measurements 3D representations of reality. Laser scanning technology produces point clouds, which are extraordinary kinds of images: commonly a combination of the laser beams’ journey between the scanner and the materialities of a site, and the photographs. In this article, I examine the confused surfaces of point clouds by focusing on the encounter between the laser scanner and moving objects. This encounter is registered as a figure without resemblance, which I call the chimeric point cloud. The chimeric point cloud is oriented toward the past and the future. Using this example, and drawing on Deleuze’s surface event, I broaden the notion of nonrepresentational landscape theory to a consideration of an absence of both the past and future. I show how digital images and technology affect the landscape sight at future sites of encounter through generating sensations.
Key Words: nonrepresentational landscape theory, point cloud, sensation, surface event, 3D laser scanning.

In this paper I will discuss, by building on post-phenomenological philosophy of technology, existential ludology, and game studies, the conditions of possibility for discovery in computer games and present a sketch for a model of three 'levels of discovery' in computer games: discovery of that which we can do, of that which we need to do, and, of what we want to do.

Die Lebenssoziologie hat sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten ohne Zweifel zu einer veritablen Wissenschaft des Sozialen formiert. Dabei handelt es sich jedoch nicht um eine Wissenschaft im klassischen Sinn, nicht um eine ›Königswissenschaft‹, die mit etablierten Theore-men, kanonisiertem Lektüren und festen Wissensbeständen operieren würde. Vielmehr hat sich die lebenssoziologische Wissenschaft nicht nur als exzentrische, sondern auch als intensive Wissenschaft erwiesen. Um deren Darstellung soll es in diesem Kapitel gehen. Im Anschluss an die im Band bis hier dargestellten theoriehistorischen Arbeiten, theoretischen Konzepte, empirischen Einzelfallstudien und kritischen Auseinandersetzungen soll in diesem abschließenden Kapitel die Lebenssoziologie als eigenständige Wissenschaft vorgestellt werden. Das umfasst die Diskussion eines Theorieprogramms, einer Methode und die Durchführung einer exemplarischen Fallstudie. Die Theorie setzt sich aus zentralen Schlüsselbegriffen zusammen. Diese beziehen sich auf Begriffe, die in diesem Band bereits Erwähnung gefunden haben: auf die Begriffe des Werdens, der Intensität und des Mehr-als-Lebens, darüber hinaus aber auch auf eine spezifische Differenztheorie – die nicht von einem konstitutiven Außen, sondern von einem konstitutiven Zwischen ausgeht –; und auf die Konzepte der Affektivität, Suspension und Interpassivität. Am Anschluss daran entwickelt der Aufsatz auch eine spezifisch lebenssoziologische Methode, die Intensitätsanalyse, die illustrativ an einer empirischen Fallstudie zu algorithmischen Praktiken im ›automati-schen‹ Börsenhandel durchgeführt wird.

The recent ‘materialist turn’ stresses the fundamental role of nonhumans in the constitution of our social and political life, and argues that our inability to grasp their importance dooms our normative prognoses for ordering society to ethical, political, and practical failure. Our paper combines insights from recent affect theory and indigenous and non-North Atlantic societies in response to this epistemological and theoretical critique. (1.) We argue that affect analyses can give a fuller account of the ways in which nonhuman others participate in the creation and maintenance of human sociability. (2.) We argue that societies such as those organized along totemistic or animist lines have a different ‘affective attunement’ toward nonhuman others, whom they admit as social members (we call these heterological societies). However, our own anthropocentrism renders us insensible to the logic of their modes of social organization. Referring to ethnographic examples, we show how affect analysis can help us translate the insights of heterological societies, so as to eventually dismantle the current anthropocentrism.

Keywords: affect, new materialism, affective attunement, indigenous practice, heterological, becoming-human, becoming-animal

L’épithète « post-phénoménologique » semble aujourd’hui être l’objet d’une dispute au sein de la phénoménologie contemporaine d’expression francophone. D’un côté, on avance que la post-phénoménologie serait caractérisée par la non-radicalité de la méthode et par la reconnaissance de l’impossibilité de « fonder » la phénoménologie ; de l’autre, on affirme inversement que le trait essentiel d’une post-phénoménologie est son souci de radicalité et de nouveauté, car elle s’emparerait de la tradition phénoménologique tout en essayant de la refonder et de l’étendre à d’autres champs d’investigation. À mon avis, ce critère fondé sur le degré de radicalité, plus ou moins « fort » d’une attitude phénoménologique à l’autre, ne permet pas de déterminer en quoi une pensée post-phénoménologique se distingue d’autres mouvances se réclamant de la phénoménologie. C’est en analysant l’histoire de la phénoménologie qu’il est possible de faire la distinction entre les attitudes, ou mieux, entre les différents moments de l’histoire la science des phénomènes. Pour ce faire, il faut non pas chercher à caractériser un type d’attitude particulier, mais une idée générale de la phénoménalité à l’arrière-fonds des diverses moments phénoménologiques et de ses différents gestes. Cette présentation a pour but de suivre la piste de l’idée husserlienne d’ego transcendantal et de voir quelle place elle occupe dans deux pensées explicitement héritières du legs husserlien, à savoir celles de Heidegger et de Jan Patočka. Appartenant à des moments différents de l’histoire de la phénoménologie, ces deux phénoménologues ont toutefois en commun le fait d’avoir décentré, voire détrôné l’ego de son statut d’instance constituante, et aussi d’avoir cherché les conditions non-subjectives de la phénoménalisation et de l’expérience que nous en avons. Analyser ces pensées venues après Husserl permet de comprendre l’émergence de la mouvance post-phénoménologique, caractérisée par une rupture irréconciliable entre phénoménologie et égologie et par un retour à l’expérience phénoménale concrète.

MÉMOIRE DE MASTER 2 (philosophie contemporaine) à l'École Normale Supérieure. Juin 2016.
RÉSUMÉ
Ce travail étudie l’œuvre de l’artiste contemporain français Pierre Huyghe à partir de la question du vivant, objet central de sa pratique. Il s’agit d’interroger la priorité entre l’expérience d’une présence vivante et le discours sur cette même expérience, en partant d’une description phénoménologique de la présence propre à des œuvres faisant intervenir des êtres vivants en chair et en os. C’est finalement pour mieux la congédier ou en tout cas mieux la réviser qu’il sera fait appel à la méthode phénoménologique, l’œuvre d’un Pierre Huyghe pouvant être décrite comme une phénoménologie en acte, ou phénoménologie vivante, dont les enjeux sont tout à la fois esthétiques, profondément philosophiques et en dernière instance écologiques (au sens large). Cette œuvre peut selon moi participer à la prise de conscience d’un être-vivant-en-commun.
ABSTRACT
This study investigates the work of French contemporary artist Pierre Huyghe, focusing on the question of the living, which is a core element of his practice. The idea is to determine which comes first between the experience of a living presence and the discourse it fosters, by building on a phenomenological description of the characteristic presence generated by works introducing living beings in the flesh and blood. In the end, convoking the phenomenological method might lead me to dismiss it or at least review it : Pierre Huyghe’s practice might indeed be described as an actual phenomenology, or living phenomenology, with aesthetic, deeply philosophical and even ecological (in the broad sense of the word) issues at stake. According to me, it is a work which might partake in a realization or growing awareness of our being-alive-together.

This article intends to explore how interactivity and new technologies promote new spectatorship performances and subsequently affect the interactor’s subjectivity. Through the analysis of three interactive documentaries, I propose and describe a taxonomy for addressing the felt experience of interacting in digital environments. Each selected documentary corresponds to a different mode of interaction and, therefore, engages the audience in a particular way: Bear 71 (hyperlink mode), Fort McMoney (conversational mode) and A Journal of Insomnia (participative mode). Throughout the analysis, I consider the interactor and the digital object as two interrelated and dependent entities that influence and shape one another. I argue the objects of interaction affect the viewers by inducing bodily felt sensations and shaping their subjectivity. As so, the sensuous encounter between the interactor and the digital documentary provides a virtual gratification for the spectator’s performance.
Delving into a phenomenological and post-phenomenological investigation, I focus my attention in the microperceptions, as structures of sensory perception in the bodily dimensions of experience, translated as senses. As fragmented, multilinear and dynamic forms, interactive documentaries provide the audience with the agency of manipulating and developing the narrative, while conversely engender in the interactors what I address as ways of affection. I propose or adapt eight digitally disrupted and induced sensations, or senses of, for describing how interactive documentary affects users during the interaction performance: sense of control, sense of presence, sense of Self, sense of place, sense of belonging, sense of almightiness, sense of endlessness, sense of incompleteness.

With walking as ontological shifter I pursue an alternative to the dominant modernist episteme that offers either/or onto-epistemologies of opposition and their reifying engagements. I propose this type of walking is an intentional turning towards a set of radical positions that, as integrative aesthetic and therapeutic practice, brings multiplicity and synchronicity to experience and being in an expanded sociality. This practice facilitates the conditions of possibility for recurring points of contact between the interiority perceived as ‘body’ and the exteriority perceived as ‘world.’ While making evident the self’s at once incoherence with it-self, it opens to a space beyond the self, allowing for difference to seep in from a field of alterity. This movement is the radical turn towards an experiential discernment of the subjective as a pulsing, never fully fixed, relational intensity that re-enters the ‘human’ after decentering it.
Immersing the walker in ‘curated’ environments while making explicit a slowing down to a rate of coherence and synchronization allow internalization and integration of the above mentioned shifts. Walking becomes a medium for a new onto-epistemological organization where the non- linearity of space-time and affective forces with ontological capacities for transformation are held together. Because this medium encompasses the complex multiplicities that are time, movement, land and affective and cognitive processes, the results it yields are necessarily open and indeterminate. I look for these new entanglements to guide the materialities and immaterialities involved in this type of walking towards an acceptance of embodiment and temporality as diverse and open.

One of the central issues that Performance Philosophy deals with is the traditionally established and rather artificial gap between theory and practice. To bridge this gap, I propose the so called “ludic theater”, an approach which does not diminish the chasm but plays with it, takes profit from it, and transforms it creatively. Originating in the works of e.g. F. Dürrenmatt, F. Kafka, or B. Brecht, ludic theatre is unique in combining  the necessary distance from the situation (gained through laughter, estrangement effects and critic) with full engagement (established through acceptance of personal interest, narratives and embodiment).
This workshop presents one particular ludic practice called Dialogical acting. Developed by the Czech playwright and philosopher Ivan Vyskočil, this practice consists in a very attentive, embodied, enactive and at the same time critical investigation of the so called “public solitude” (inspired by Stanislavsky and Brecht). Dialogical acting invites the participants to develop ludic capacities (playful in adult sense of the term), generosity, awareness of social conventions in everyday behavior, and possibilities to take a stance towards oneself. As such the workshop intends to contribute to answering the question of  what Performance Philosophy can do in the domain of intertwining of theory and practice and what benefits it can bring into performance, philosophy and, most of all, everyday life.

Post-phenomenology has emerged as a diverse and conceptually challenging movement within human geography, one that is now positioned at the forefront of debates concerning the more-than-human constitution of social and cultural life. In recent years, these conversations have been further energised through the influence of various ‘object-oriented ontologies’ on post-phenomenological thinking. By questioning the ontological primacy of the intentional subject, object-oriented approaches have enabled geographers to problematize the anthropocentricism of phenomenology’s Husserlian tradition. While sympathetic to the overall spirit of these endeavours, this paper takes issue with a significant and often unacknowledged constraint placed upon post-phenomenology by object-oriented approaches: the reduction of reality to a collection of individuated terms. By merely replacing one kind of individual (subject) with another (object), object-oriented ontology inherits an image of thought that remains profoundly phenomenological in its privileging of individuals. Turning to the work of Gilles Deleuze, this paper strives to resituate geography’s post-phenomenological critique upstream of either subject or object, focusing instead upon the distinction between relations and terms. For Deleuze, to think beyond phenomenological coordinates is to affirm the irreducibility of relations to individuated terms, whatever form these terms might take. Returning to his early work on Hume, the paper explores how Deleuze’s invocation to think relations as such raises important questions in terms of how geographers situate the problem of post-phenomenology within contemporary social research. I conclude by reflecting on the practical implications of these questions for the framing of ‘the social’ in excess of its individuated terms, paying particular attention to three key themes within human geography: relationality, materiality and empiricism.

Human sensory orders are recalibrated when faced with the reduced illumination levels of the night; it is harder to judge depth and distance, details are obscured, colours muted, and one is obliged to compensate for this loss of visual acuity by drawing on the other senses. Darkness also forces one to question how one’s body is in relation to that which surrounds, challenging one’s human sense of bodily presence and boundary. Focusing on The Storr: Unfolding Landscape, a temporary night-time installation by the environmental arts charity NVA (Nacionale Vite Activa) on the Isle of Skye in 2005, this paper draws together contemporary art theory on installation art and recent post-phenomenological work in geography to explore the ways in which individuals experience the nocturnal landscape. In so doing, the paper highlights the close connections between these two bodies of work and how they might be usefully employed to advance traditional geographical understandings of landscape in art. At the same time, however, it raises both an empirical concern and a methodological question. First, regarding the uncritical way in which visibility is incorporated into many post-phenomenological accounts of landscape. Second, regarding the validity of focussing on isolated narratives in instances such as this when so much of what the individuals experienced was caused by, or shared with, others.

What follows is a structural reading of two different theory architectures – Merleau-Ponty´s (from now on simply »MP«) and Media Ecology focused on McLuhan – with a view to revealing their convergences and congruencies as macro-descriptions. While a more detailed model of mediality/media in respect to MP is implicitly used, it is not elaborated in an exegetic or meticulous argumentation. Instead, »topographic« similarities between MP an Media Ecology are to be foregrounded in an attempt to reach a deepened as well as specified concept of »ecology« in the context of human actors and their uses of those material phenomena which have to be described as media (as in specific contrast to intentional objects in general or instruments in particular). Thereby both discourses are to be enriched – Media Ecology in terms of its affiliation to »indirect« or »lateral ontology« and Merleau-Ponty in terms of an incorporation with theories of technical media.