Alighting: A Phenomenology and Ethics of Sight and Touch in the Videocall
Abstract
This thesis investigates from a phenomenological perspective how it is that I am able to share a space with my brother, Kyle, by way of the videocalling application FaceTime. While the thesis uses the personal as a starting point, it then draws on Merleau-Ponty, the tradition of critical phenomenology, and Media Studies to argue that the one and the other can share a ‘space’ through the screen, despite that they ostensibly only have mutual access to their auditory and visual environments. Drawing heavily on Merleau-Ponty and other contemporary phenomenologists, the thesis takes space and communication to be two different sides of the same phenomenon of intercorporeality, of being in a world with others, and proposes that communication and space are not superpositional (subsequent and/or antecedent to one another; causally related), but coeval and coterminous. I argue that contrary to some recent and canonical media studies paradigms, the screen is phenomenologically neither a flattening of presence or being through the institution of a transcendental ocularcentirsm, nor the portal to another (virtual) world, and thus not emblematic of an exposure to or display of pure presence. Rather, I suggest that the screen of the videocall is the ongoing surfacing of what Lisa Guenther calls intercorporeal depth, the manifest “vision of another vision, complimentary to mine and yet irreducibly different”; indeed, I see myself as “one among other” seers, and “not as a solitary subject of experience,” even if the videocall nonetheless heightens one’s experience of geographical distance (Guenther: 2013). Ultimately, the thesis regards the computer screen as a surface that might provoke us to hesitate in the reenactment of sedimented (ocularcentric and egocentric) ways of seeing and proposes instead that a sense of sharing space can be thought through in terms of the pre-thetic, operative intentionality of Merleau-Ponty's "sensory life”. Drawing on the media theory of Laura Marks and the critical phenomenology of Alia Al-Saji, I conclude that the videocall is an instance of haptic visuality and, as such, represents an ‘affective’ or ‘rhythmic’ instance of lived ontological non-coincidence that is nonetheless a communion.