Idea Of Presence Research Articles

МІЖДИСЦИПЛІНАРНА СИНТЕЗІЯ КОНВЕНЦІЙ ТА ПАТЕРНІВ СУЧАСНОЇ ПОПУЛЯРНОЇ КУЛЬТУРИ США

This article offers a comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis of contemporary popular culture in the United States, with a focus on its development over the past two decades. The research encompasses various theoretical approaches, including philosophical, economic, sociological, psychological, historical, and anthropological perspectives, aiming to provide a nuanced understanding of the complex and multifaceted phenomenon of popular culture within the context of globalization and digital transformation. Attention is given to the impact of recommendation algorithms on popular culture, particularly their role in fostering cultural homogenization, personalizing cultural experiences, and shaping new cultural trends. The issues of cultural hybridization, the ritualization of social practices, and the significance of collective memory in the context of popular culture are also explored. Historical analysis reveals the periodization and evolution of cultural institutions, while the socio-anthropological approach highlights the importance of symbolic structures in the formation of cultural narratives. The philosophical lens emphasizes the postmodern characteristics of contemporary popular culture, including the deconstruction of traditional cultural patterns, and analyzes the dynamics of metaphysical concepts, particularly the idea of presence within the conditions of hyperreality. Sociological methodologies assist in addressing the structuration of cultural practices and adaptive processes of socialization through social networks and other digital platforms, which are emerging as new spaces for the construction of social identities. The psychological analysis focuses on the cognitive and emotional effects induced by popular culture, including cognitive disintegration caused by excessive media consumption, and the impact of social comparison on self-esteem and the psychological well-being of individuals. It is emphasized that popular culture products can be designed to appeal to unconscious desires and internalized norms, shaping motivational structures and social behavior patterns. The economic perspective highlights the processes of commodification of cultural products and the monetization of cultural industries. The article underscores the necessity of integrating these approaches to gain a deeper understanding of how contemporary popular culture in the United States influences global cultural processes and shapes the future directions of cultural practices and social structures. The conclusions emphasize the importance of an interdisciplinary approach that allows for a comprehensive consideration of the impact of popular culture on society, its cultural norms, identities, and social dynamics.

Whose Presence, Whose Absences? Decolonising Russian National Culture and History: Observations Through the Prism of Religious Contact

In the introduction to this special issue, the editors are concerned with how the Russian state defines its national culture and history mainly with reference to Slavic civilisation, Orthodox Christianity and imperial glory. This post-Soviet discourse of nation-building may be understood as an attempt to cope with a sense of loss in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. That discourse also affects how nationalist-minded observers interpret space as naturally Russian and as part of the empire of the past (or the present). Regrettably, little consideration is being paid to Russia’s ethnic and religious minority cultures, which hardly seem to contribute to Russian history and culture and sometimes do not even feature in representations thereof. Critically engaging with the ideas of presence and absence—the presence of one culture or tradition to the detriment of others—, the editors suggest, can potentially help to decolonise accounts and illustrations of Russian culture and heritage. In the best case, the outcome of such an exercise would be a more adequate involvement of minority representatives in the process of negotiating Russian national culture.

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“A Mouthful of Air”: Modern Poetry and the Idea of Presence

Abstract This article reads in tandem works by three poets, George Oppen, Paul Celan, and Yves Bonnefoy, arguing that each in different ways seems to commit poetry to a pursuit of “presence.” The idea of lyric poetry as a privileged expression of the “here-and-now” continues to be prominent in what is known as the “New Lyric Theory” (I examine the work of Jonathan Culler as one example), though this can seem awkwardly at odds with the widely accepted critique by Jacques Derrida of what he called “the metaphysics of presence.” I propose that although my three poets variously celebrate the “presencing” powers of poetry they do so as a means of showing how the actual impossibility of grasping Being in language becomes the necessary condition of the poem's emergence as a form of skeptical self-reflection. “Presence,” however emphatically proposed and desired by these poets, is in fact always compromised by something other to it that sets limits to the very project of poetry. In recognizing those limits, and in negotiating them through figures such as the Heideggerian “rift” (Oppen), the Celanian “breathturn” and Bonnefoy's “opacity,” modern poetry may, paradoxically, present itself as something “otherwise than being” (Levinas).

Śmierć zwierząt w narracjach autobiograficznych osadników na Ziemiach Odzyskanych. Uwagi o obecności

Śmierć zwierząt w narracjach autobiograficznych osadników na Ziemiach Odzyskanych. Uwagi o obecności

Voice and Presence in L’Ève future and Le Surmâle

ABSTRACTWithin the western philosophical tradition, the human voice has long been intimately connected with the idea of presence. By dissociating the voice from its speaker’s body, Thomas Edison’s phonograph posed a philosophical challenge to this view at a time of rising secularism in France. This essay argues that in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Ève future and Alfred Jarry’s Le Surmâle, phonographs allow the authors to examine the relationship between voice and presence in ways that operate within a historical context and speak to contemporary debates. Where Villiers sets subjectivism against a lingering faith in presence, Jarry dissolves traditional notions of the human subject. This essay suggests that the questions of consciousness, technology, religion, the body, and love which coalesce around the phonograph and mechanical ‘love machines’ in these two novels continue to resonate today: in debates surrounding the ethics of artificial intelligence, critical discussions within the humanities, and in mainstream media.

Performance Degree Zero: Roland Barthes and the Theatre by Timothy Scheie

Reviewed by: Performance Degree Zero: Roland Barthes and the Theatre by Timothy Scheie Thomas J. Armbrecht (bio) Scheie, Timothy. Performance Degree Zero: Roland Barthes and the Theatre. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Pp. 225. Timothy Scheie’s book on the importance of the theatre in Roland Barthes’ oeuvre begins with what Scheie poses as an enigma: Barthes wrote frequently of the theatre at the beginning of his career and then ceased to do so, without comment, after 1960. Scheie argues that Barthes’ abandonment of the theatre reveals something important about the development of his thoughts and even about his life. Scheie also considers Barthes’ early theatrical criticism and later use of theatrical metaphors to be an under-considered aspect of the critic’s work. Performance Degree Zero is an ambitious work not so much because of what it argues, but because of its attempt to trace the theatre’s presence (or absence) during Barthes’ entire career as a writer, from roughly 1947 to 1980, through close readings of sections of most of his major works. The book also reviews the history of theatrical criticism in a more general way during a similar time period. Unfortunately, these goals are somewhat at odds with each other; Scheie’s subject is perhaps too narrow to merit a book-length study, while the amount of Barthes’ criticism and theatrical history he attempts to analyze is too broad. As a result, the book is uneven; Scheie makes some very cogent observations about the presence of the human body both in Barthes’ criticism and in performance theory, but he makes the same points over and over again in each of the four chapters as he progresses through Barthes’ work in an occasionally confusing, chronologically oriented reading. Scheie breaks Barthes’ career down into several distinct periods around which he organizes the four chapters of the book: Barthes’ early career in the 1950s as a journalist and critic who frequently reviewed theatrical performances; his articulation of structuralism and emergence as an important and famous theorist in the 1960s; and his post-structuralist writings of the 1970s, during which time Barthes turned to more personal subjects and less academic forms of writing. Scheie shows an impressive familiarity with the majority of Barthes’ work, as well as with much of the criticism surrounding it. Even if his overview of the development of Barthes’ thought has been largely accomplished by other writers (cf. works by Louis-Jean Calvet, Jonathan Culler, and D. A. Miller, for example), Scheie forefronts notions of presence and performance that previously have been explored mostly in articles about specific texts. His efforts to proceed biographically, thematically, and chronologically result in a frustrating amount of repetition, however, both within and between chapters. It is possible that Scheie is paying homage to Barthes’ style, which is reminiscent of the iterative, cyclical aspects of Vico’s Spiral, a figure [End Page 207] Barthes himself used to describe his writing (cf. Le Grain de la voix, 282, for example). Dispersed references to the same aspects of the same texts and even the occasional reuse of quotes give Scheie’s book both a repetitious yet fragmented feel that does not successfully imitate similar qualities in Barthes’ writing. This problem extends to Scheie’s syntax and diction, as well: he uses Descartes’s motto, “larvatus prodeo” and the Latinism “hic and nunc” so many times that the concepts cloy and lose their meaning. Scheie’s writing also contains many laudatory adjectives that make his reading of Barthes seem at times more like a hagiography than criticism. The start of the book is a succinct introduction to performance theory that focuses on the idea of presence. Scheie traces the implications of the performing body, which, in its variability and imperfection, can be considered at odds with the idealized mimesis of theatre. Paraphrasing Derrida’s reading of Artaud, Scheie notes that in the twentieth century, “Presence is decried as the mechanism by which an oppressive epistemology of the subject becomes naturalized and perpetuates its authority as the arbiter of identity” (7). In theatrical performance, the body brings the real into mimetic representation, thereby overwhelming the interpretation with all the culture and history of the...

GRB–SN Connection in SAO RAS Observations

We present the results of SAO RAS 6-m BTA spectral observations of GRBs and XRFs with the signs of SNe: GRB/XRF 060218 (SN 2006aj) and XRF 080109 (SN 2008D). The properties of these events are similar to those of usual core-collapse SNe without GRBs. Some spectral features in the cases of SN 2006aj and SN 2008D may be interpreted as hydrogen and helium traces. This supports an idea of presence of a relic envelope around the progenitor star and the shock break-out effects observed in X-rays, UV and optics.

Young audiences and live theatre, Part 2: Perceptions of liveness in performance

The concept of ‘liveness’ has become a key theme in performance studies, linking important ideas of presence to contrasting perceptions of audiences as passive consumers or active participants. Forming the second part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded investigation into ‘Young Audiences and Live Theatre’, this paper seeks to contribute to this debate by presenting a detailed picture of what the experience of live performance means for one segment of the live theatre audience—teenage school pupils—in one specific context—a school visit to a production of Othello. The paper follows an interconnected chain of responses to the live experience, directed by the process of self-analysis and reflection begun by the research participants themselves. The result is an experiential understanding of how for these young audience members watching live theatre was about far more than simply sitting down and watching a play.

How Colorful Was Your Day? Why Questionnaires Cannot Assess Presence in Virtual Environments

This paper argues that a scientific basis for “presence” as it's usually understood in virtual environments research, can not be established on the basis of postexperience presence questionnaires alone. To illustrate the point, an arbitrary mental attribute called “colorfulness of the experience” is conjured up, and a set of questions administered to 74 respondents with an online questionnaire. The results suggested that colorfulness of yesterday's experiences was associated with the extent to which a person accomplished their tasks, and also associated with yesterday being a “good”, “pleasant”, but not frustrating day. The meaning lessness of this analysis illustrates that the equivalent methodology used by presence researchers, may, similarly, bring into being the idea of presence in the minds of VE participants. However, it is argued that there can be no evidence on this methodological basis that presence played any role in their actual mental activity or behavior at the time of the experience. It is concluded that presence researchers must move away from heavy reliance on questionnaires in order to make any progress in this area.

MEANING. TRUTH, AND PHENOMENOLOGY

This essay approaches Derrida through a consideration of his writings on Saussure and Husserl. Derrida is right to insist, following Saussure, on a relational theory of meaning: words do not have a one to one correspondence with their referents. But he is wrong to insist on a purely differential theory of meaning: words can refer to reality within the context of a body of knowledge. Similarly, Derrida is right to reject Husserl's idea of presence: no truths are simply given to consciousness. But he is wrong to reject the very idea of objective knowledge: we can defend a notion of objective knowledge couched in terms of a comparison of rival bodies of theories. The essay concludes by considering the implications of the preceding arguments for the enterprise of phenomenology.

Meaning, Truth, and Phenomenology

This essay approaches Derrida through a consideration of his writings on Saussure and Husserl. Derrida is right to insist, following Saussure, on a relational theory of meaning: words do not have a one‐to‐one correspondence with their referents. But he is wrong to insist on a purely differential theory of meaning: words can refer to reality within the context of a body of knowledge. Similarly, Derrida is right to reject Husserl's idea of presence: no truths are simply given to consciousness. But he is wrong to reject the very idea of objective knowledge: we can defend a notion of objective knowledge couched in terms of a comparison of rival bodies of theories. The essay concludes by considering the implications of the preceding arguments for the enterprise of phenomenology.

The Discourse of Computer-Supported Media: Reading and Writing on Usenet

is neutral: all media modify the status of the messages they transmit, and so give birth to new cultural formations.1 Cheap and frequent postal services, from the mid-nineteenth century on, created one kind of social milieu; the telephone, after World War I, created another. Language must play a central role in these changes and, indeed, the study of transcribed phone conversations has shown that a call is quite a different utterance from an exchange of letters that does the 'same' job. We have become different language users now that we are, as Robert Hopper puts it, 'the people of the phone'.2 In recent years another new medium has emerged, the rapidly increasing private and public exchange of texts over computer networks. What are the social and linguistic implications of this exchange? Computer-mediated communications provide increased communicative power at the cost of a more rigorous and impersonal communicative environment. We move further away from the ideal of face to face, transparent communication between integral subjects; instead, personalities become largely notional, since they encounter each other only in the virtual space created by computer networks now generally known by William Gibson's neologism, cyberspace.3 In cyberspace, traditional ideas of presence and the self are both attenuated and made provisional (since the persona presented to

"The eye finds no fixed point on which to rest..."

"The eye finds no fixed point on which to rest ... HI CHANTAL PONTBRIAND Translated by C.R. Parsons At this point I want to make a claim that I cannot hope to prove or substantiate but that I believe nevertheless to be true: viz.• that theatre and theatricality are at war today, not simply with modernist painting (or modernist painting and sculpture), but with art as such - and to the extent that the different arts can be described as modernist, with modernist sensibility as such. This claim can be broken down into three propositions or theses: I) The success, even the survival, ofthe arts has come increasingly /0 depend on their ability to defeat theatre. 2) Art degenerates as it approaches the condition ojtheatre. 3) The concepts ojqualityand value - and/0 the extentthat these arecentralto art, lhe concept ofart itself - are meaningful, or wholly meaningful, only within the individual arts, What lies between the arts is theatre.2 I have quoted at length this statement by the American critic Michael Fried explicitly in order to underline its ambiguity. On the one hand, he states "that theatre and theatricality are at war ... with art as such"; on the other, that "What lies between the arts is theatre."In the first case, he says that theatre as an artform is an impossibility; in the second, he opposes to the unacceptable notion of theatricality that of specificity. Despite what Fried thinks, what has given impetus to - what bas even shaken - the arts scene during the sixties and seventies is indeed a kind oftheatricality, brought about by a re-examination of the codes categorizing the arts; painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, music, dance, etc.; by a shifting of fields between these codes; and also by emphasis given to a device which is akin to the theatre, that of spectator/stage/spectacle, seen as process. This whole phenomenon is called performance. For Fried, the failure of theatre is synonymous with the survival of the arts '''The eye finds no fixed point ... " 155 and even with their success. Quality or value exists only within a discipline, not between disciplines. A work such as an audio-visual set-up, let us say, or a performance which brings together film, text, and sound elements, could not possibly meet the criteria ofquality and value advanced by Greenbergian critics like Fried, who consider that performance, like theatre, is a failure. It should be pointed out first of all that for these critics there is no distinction between theatre and performance. In their eyes, performance corresponds to a regressive manifestation of no interest, since it does not seek exclusively the specificity of form conveyed by modernism. Performance, they say, represents the ultimate decadence of theatre, which modernism, in its discomfort, has tried to conjure away by making it a theatre of absence, emptiness, void. What would draw performance closer to theatre and theatricality is indeed the idea of presence, which modem philosophy, to a degree, aims to criticize. To speak ofpresence again today, in a theoretical framework, can indeed seem retrograde. But exactly what presence is involved? Is it the presence evinced by contemporary art when there is a meeting between the performer and his public, when there is a performance situation (let us leave it at that for now) - is that presence similar to the one which concerns classical philosophy? Is the relationship continuous or discontinuous? If it is continuous (space-time a priori), one must of course concede decadence. But would it not be more interesting and plausible to think that this nco-presence has broken ties with the old one, or that it is simply different, even without having broken its ties? Ifwe seek in performance something to help us understand the meaning of a reactualized presence, what first comes to mind is the here and now of performance already mentioned, its incidental or situational chara:ter. Presence is temporality, and essentially what interests us in contemporary art is this criterion of temporality, this coming into being: the characteristic presence of performance could be called presentness - that is to say, performance unfolds essentially in the present time. But this definition is not enough, since our aim is to draw...