From Cultural Skin to Cultural Therapeutics: Body, Alterity and Media Image Experience

Abstract

In this paper, firstly, I would argue that a ”new psychology,” hidden in the technically mediated situatedness evoked by Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of cinema, will be an important clue for a thematic study of the issue of alterity in Merleau-Ponty's ”new ontology.” Secondly, I would argue that Deleuze was wrong when he identified the media image experience for phenomenology merely as a derivative or secondary experience in comparison with natural perceptual visual experience, but he indeed found the notion of ”intentionality” insufficient for declaring a philosophy of film. Thirdly, through the critique of Deleuze, I would argue that if this ”new psychology” of ”second intentionality” implies a techno-psychology in cultural skin, in the sense of McLuhan and Jameson, of contemporary daily media image experience and a possible cultural therapeutics, whose embodiment will have to be based upon a new ontology of alterity. And we will use the phenomenological analyses of media image experience by Don Ihde and Robert Romanyshyn as clues to prove this ontology of alterity as reversibility and ecart via technological embodiment.