Phenomenal Presence Research Articles

Research on factors affecting the purchase intention on TikTok live stream of students in Hanoi: A SOR model approach

Vietnam has recently witnessed a strong development of social commerce. After the COVID-19 pandemic, e-commerce live streaming rose dramatically to become a phenomenal presence in the live streaming industry. More and more consumers, especially young people in the Vietnamese market are participating in e-commerce live streaming platforms for online shopping since purchasing goods via live stream is not only to satisfy personal needs but also to entertain customers. Significantly, live interaction has opened a new era for brands and businesses to reach customers during Industry 4.0. This study aimed to analyze factors affecting purchase intention on the TikTok live stream of students in Hanoi city based on theories and results obtained from previous studies. The primary data from a survey of 186 students was analyzed by using structural equation modeling (SEM). Findings revealed that five factors were identified to have a positive influence on purchase intention, including live streamer’s attractiveness, price perception, scarcity persuasion, flow experience, and perceived value. Thereby, the research team proposed several solutions and recommendations for stakeholders in the investment and development of social commerce to build a system of factors and methods to help convert viewers into buyers on TikTok live stream in particular and on the Internet and other live broadcasting platforms in general.

Au travers de la phénoménologie : l’expression et les traces du sens chez Merleau-Ponty

A weak and equivocal sign, raised to the rank of a central conceptual scheme in the philosophies of Levinas and Derrida, the notion of trace appears in an allusive but insistent way in Merleau-Ponty's writings devoted to speech and writing. Traces challenge the hegemonic omnipotence of the sign; they both conjure up the mundane contextuality of speech and the lacunar dimension of the expression of meaning, beyond any phenomenal presence and any presentive intuition. Through Husserlian phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty examines the essential character of writing in the constitution of corporeality, otherness, intersubjectivity, and historicity: graphic signs, thought of as traces and the “experience of an absent”, acquire a dimension of material ideality of a new kind, at the limits of phenomenology.

Cynematographic Doubling

The present article contends that cinematic canines do not rupture representation even when they seem to slip out of character; rather, they reveal an immanent phenomenological dimension of fiction films. The main premise is that even such a crystallized representational form as classical narrative cinema, which treats the domestic dog as a sentimental icon, offers at least three layers to account for: 1) a visual layer that constructs the dog as a cute image; 2) an epistemological layer that carries the meanings we attach to it; and 3) a phenomenological, or “creaturely” layer that the cinematic medium will never be able to represent but will continue to present as long as it employs real-life dogs. Dogs thus create moments of what I call “cynematographic doubling”, when their phenomenal presence completes the diegesis with a documentary dimension, and moves the audience to emotions which are difficult to define. While focusing on the first two layers alone would reinforce an anthropocentric approach, according to which dogs in the fiction film project human notions, sentiments and intentions, the phenomenological, or “creaturely” layer calls for a relational approach according to which the cinematic portrayal of dogs is co-created by flesh-and-blood canines. Through an interpretations of selected Hollywood films, the article highlights moments that reveal the extent to which the film is indebted to the star dogs’ creaturely agency and affect.

Inner Awareness as a Mark of the Mental

While for Brentano it is a mark of the mental that any mental state is an object of inner awareness, this suggestion is notably rejected by the Higher-Order Thought Theory (HOTT) of consciousness that posits non-conscious inner awareness, which isn’t an object of inner awareness, and yet is mental. I examine an objection against the HOTT, according to which inner awareness is phenomenally present in ordinary consciousness. To assess the objection, I investigate arguments of Chalmers and Montague in favor of this phenomenal presence. I argue that while these arguments may show that experience is not transparent, they crucially fail to demonstrate that ‘inner transparency’ must be false too, i.e. that inner awareness is phenomenally present. I conclude that non-conscious inner awareness is an open possibility and Brentano’s posit of inner awareness as a mark of the mental thus looks unpromising.

A modal analysis of phenomenal intentionality: horizonality and object-directed phenomenal presence

In this article I argue that phenomenal intentionality fundamentally consists in a horizonality structure, rather than in a relation to a representational content or the determination of accuracy conditions. I provide a distinctive modal model of intentionality that conceives of phenomenal intentionality as the enjoyment of a plus ultra that points beyond what is actual. The directedness of intentionality on the world, thus, consists in “pointing ahead” to possibilities. The principal difficulty for the modal model is logical: the most obvious way of implementing such a structure results in an analogue of Russell’s paradox. However, this paradox can be avoided by fine-tuning the modal logic deployed in this setting. This way of fine-tuning the logic ultimately amounts to intuitive benefits. For, it captures the intensional character of intentionality, since the way that our mental states refer to things is conception-dependent. Moreover, the way I interpret the modal model leads to a conception of intentionality as a feature of dynamic, diachronic patterns in the way that mental acts subjectively appear, rather than as a synchronic property. We ought to think of intentionality as fundamentally a temporal, subjective determination. In a generalization on Sellars’ approach to concepts, I hold that phenomenally intentional mental presentations involve modal laws and are inconceivable without them.

Visual Perspectives in Episodic Memory and the Sense of Self.

The connection between memory and self-consciousness has been a central topic in philosophy of memory. When remembering an event we experienced in the past, not only do we experience being the subject of the conscious episode, but we also experience being the protagonist in the memory scene. This is the “phenomenal presence of self.” To explore this special sense of self in memory, this paper focuses on the issue of how one identifies oneself in episodic simulation at the retrieval of memory and draws attention to the field and observer perspectives in episodic memory. Metzinger (2013a,b, 2017) recently introduced the concept of the phenomenal unit of identification (UI) to characterize the phenomenal property that gives rise to the conscious experience of “I am this.” This paper shows how observer-perspective remembering provides an interesting opportunity for studying the sense of self. It is argued that observer-perspective remembering is a stable state of consciousness that is distinct from autoscopic phenomena with respect to the dimensions of minimal phenomenal self (MPS). Together, the notion of UI and the particular style of remembering offer a way of understanding the phenomenal presence of self, and three possible ways in which phenomenal properties constitute UI in memory are raised. The study of perspectives in episodic simulation may prompt new empirical and conceptual issues concerning both the sense of identity and the relationship between MPS and extended self.

Sensuous Experience, Phenomenal Presence, and Perceptual Availability

I argue that an experience’s sensuous elements play an ineliminable role in our being intentionally directed upon an entity through perception. More specifically, I argue that whenever we appreciate a sensuous element in experience, we appreciate an intrinsic and irreducibly phenomenal aspect of experience that I call phenomenal presence – an aspect of experience that I show is central to its presentational character – and that the appreciation of phenomenal presence is necessary for perceptual intentionality. If an experience is to possess intentionality, the experience itself must make an entity available as an object of perceptually-based singular beliefs and the experiencing subject, by virtue of undergoing the experience, must in some sense be able to appreciate that it has done so. Phenomenal presence is necessary for perceptual intentionality because it plays an ineliminable role in making an entity available to its subject in this way.

Ghosts in the Machine: Do the Dead Live on in Facebook?

Of the many ways in which identity is constructed and performed online, few are as strongly ‘anchored’ to existing offline relationships as in online social networks like Facebook and Myspace. These networks utilise profiles that extend our practical, psychological and even corporeal identity in ways that give them considerable phenomenal presence in the lives of spatially distant people. This raises interesting questions about the persistence of identity when these online profiles survive the deaths of the users behind them, via the practice of ‘memorialising’ social network profile pages. I situate these practices within a phenomenology of grief that accounts for the ways in which the dead can persist as moral patients, and show how online survival in this case illuminates an important difference between persons and selves within contemporary philosophy of personal identity. Ultimately, the online persistence of the dead helps bring into view a deep ontological contradiction implicit in our dealings with death: the dead both live on as objects of duty and yet completely cease to exist.

The Mediumship of Listening: Notes on Sound in the Silent Arts

This article is a series of excerpts from the author’s most recent book Sinister Resonance. It begins with the premise that sound is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location in space is ambiguous and whose existence in time is transitory. The intangibility of sound is uncanny – a phenomenal presence both in the head, at its point of source and all around, and never entirely distinct from auditory hallucinations. The close listener is like a medium who draws out substance from that which is not entirely there. The history of listening must be constructed from narratives of myth and fiction, silent arts such as painting, the resonance of architecture, auditory artefacts and nature. In such contexts, sound often functions as a metaphor for mystical revelation, instability, forbidden desires, disorder, formlessness, the unknown, unconscious and extra-human, a representation of immaterial worlds. Threaded through is Marcel Duchamp’s curious observation – ‘One can look at seeing but one can’t hear hearing’ – and his concept of the infra-thin, those human experiences so fugitive that they exist only in the imaginative absences of perception.

Extracinematic Animation: Gregory Barsamian in Conversation with Suzanne Buchan

Gregory Barsamian's strobe-lit kinetic sculptures create an experience that places observers in a perceptual paradox that oscillates between the illusion of animated cinema and the phenomenal presence of real objects that share the viewer's physical presence in space and time. The conversation reveals Barsamian's working methods, his aesthetic and philosophical influences and intentions and his artistic relationship with animated illusion.

Democratic Hyperbole

Democratic Hyperbole Marc Goldschmit Translated from French by Samir Haddad It is said that in recent years Derrida’s thought had become ethical and political, thereby correcting a serious flaw for any philosophy. The turn would be all the more visible to the extent that, prior to 1990, his thought obviously lacked a political philosophy. However, we should be wary of this apparent absence and not forget that in his thought and writing Derrida did not cease to challenge and contest the characteristics of visible or phenomenal presence. We might thus suspect that ethics and politics are not simply “absent” from the texts before 1990, even if they do not have the same order of visibility as in books such as Rogues and Philosophy in a Time of Terror.1 We can even elliptically point to signs and indications of the political import of the pre-1990 texts, which worked to continually transform and stratify themselves and each other rather than dialectically contradict each other. The most insistent gesture of writing in the early publications consisted of overturning and then displacing, sometimes generalizing, the concept of what had always been repressed and devalued. Before generalizing writing, Derrida effectively overturned the subordination of the letter and the trace to the voice and living speech, thereby showing that the process of writing constantly structures metaphysical texts, albeit in a self-effacing and ruinous manner. This systematic gesture, without system — overturning, displacing, generalizing — is the principle of the deconstruction of power. It signifies the general political import of all of Derrida’s writings, even if this import is not visible according to the schemas and expectations of traditional political philosophy. Allow me to present some visible marks of this general political import. The revolutionary analysis of Plato’s Phaedrus, published in 1972,2 brought to light the manner in which the philosophico-Platonic determination of writing as anti-substance, without a father, irresponsible and incapable of defending itself, is inseparable from the path and democratic stakes of the case against the sophistry which defined philosophy. In Of Grammatology (1967), the chapter devoted to Lévi-Strauss showed how power and violence are implicated in writing, at its origin, thus signifying that Derrida did not think writing without politics. He showed in the same chapter that Lévi-Strauss’ critique of ethnocentrism rests on an underlying ethnocentrism all the more irreducible because it remains invisible. The Derridean deconstruction of democratic good conscience will always be accompanied by the thought of democracy as a hyperbolic demand — this double strategy was pursued and complicated in 1987 when Derrida interrogated the diabolical logic at work in the Heideggerian spiritualization of Nazism.3 Heidegger’s political engagement avoided racism and biologism, in the name of spirit, at the price of an overvaluation of Nazism. Heidegger saved himself from Nazism as biological racism by investing in it and thinking it as a movement of spiritual essence. It is thus there where he would no longer belong to Nazism at all that this engagement would become more Nazi, more-than-Nazi. At the price of uncompromisingly rigorous analyses, Derrida thus showed that discourses in opposition to fascism, to Nazism, and to Heidegger are made in the name of an axiomatic (for example that of humanism, of spirit or of human rights) that shares fatally in the metaphysics (of subjectivity) that structures that which these discourses oppose. Every political position is thus dangerously shaken, contaminated by its other, and democracy is menaced in its possibility by such a logic of diabolical contamination. Derrida can thus find the “place” of his thought only on the outer limits of political philosophy, where his thought signals towards another heading, in truth to the other of the philosophical heading and of philosophy as heading.4 In order to measure the enormous spacing and interval opened up by Derrida within political philosophy, we should perhaps begin with the large question of right, that is to say the question of law, justice and the juridical. In other words, we should begin with the form in which political philosophy has come to think power, the state, society, freedom, and violence on the basis of these concepts. In “Force...

"Incessant Tragedies": A Reading of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

There are studies of Henry Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers which begin to do justice to its structure, style, and import. Even the most astute and sympathetic critics1 have not, however, accounted, I think, for the power, the impression of the book, perhaps because they are generally preoccupied with its merits as a transcendental document. A Week is Thoreau's impressive attempt to confront the incessant tragedies (236)2 which he perceives and in which he participates; through his perceptions and participation, he fulfills his fate. In Walden, Thoreau works his way beyond fate and tragedy, but in his first book he is concerned with working his way into their phenomenal presence in nature, on the road, in history, in art, and in his personal experience. Of course A Week introduces us to the vitality and happiness of nature, to such facts as would lead to the conclusion Thoreau drew in Natural History of Massachusetts: Surely joy is the condition of life.3 Yet this conclusion is not without its ambiguity, if we consider the condition of joy. A rich sentence from the opening chapter of A Week, describing the scene at Bound Rock on the Sudbury River, engages us in such a consideration:

Further evidence for two components in visual persistence.

The phenomenal durations of tachistoscopically presented letter arrays at five levels of redundancy were measured using a subtractive reaction-time technique. Phenomenal duration was inversely related to redundancy only when report of the letters was required. The duration of functional availability of stimulus information for stimuli at the five levels of redundancy was determined in a backward masking paradigm. The measurements of the duration of functional availability and phenomenal presence were convergent, indicating that one process is responsible for both the phenomenal and functional duration of a persisting representation of a visual stimulus. The results are interpreted as providing further evidence for two components in visual persistence: a physical component whose duration is unrelated to stimulus parameters and an informational component whose duration is inversely related to the efficiency of encoding stimulus information.