Search

International audience; More and more marketing academic research is currently mobilizing conceptually innovative theories that rethink the distinctions commonly made between objects and subjects. In this perspective, this article proposes to introduce in marketing the post-phenomenological theory, recently developed in philosophy. It presents its main conceptual frameworks and translates them into an investigation guide. To illustrate the interest and scope of post-phenomenology, an empirical study is carried out on self-tracking technologies. The results allow us to appreciate the contributions of post-phenomenology. It invites to another way of thinking and questioning the consumption of technical objects, recognizing them as carrying an intentionality. It draws an alternative to the current theorizations on the agentivity of objects. It proposes a powerful analytical framework, which structures and systematizes the examination of the ways in which technical objects modulate consumers' relations to the world: not only their experience of the world but also their experience of that experience of the world.

This article calls into question recent attempts to move beyond, to ‘post’ phenomenology by highlighting the continued relevance of key phenomenological concepts (intentionality and correlationism) for human geography. I show how these concepts are pivotal to addressing problems raised by post-phenomenologists themselves concerning affects and objects. Drawing on recent phenomenological theory, I develop a spatial account of how subject and object cohere in experience. I argue that the very relation between/entanglement of the human and more-than-/non-human can best be accounted for phenomenologically. Such a phenomenological approach promises new ways of understanding various phenomena such as landscape, weather or climate.

Digital interfaces, in the form of websites, mobile apps and other platforms, now mediate user experiences with a variety of economic, cultural and political services and products. To study these digital mediations, researchers have to date followed a range of methodological strategies including the modification of pre-existing qualitative research methods, such as content analysis, discourse analysis and semiotics, among many others, and an experimentation with new methods designed to make visible the operation of data aggregation, analytics and algorithms that are hidden from users. Building upon, while distinct from these strategies, the article sets out a post-phenomenological approach to studying interfaces, websites and apps that explicitly interrogates how they appear as objects. In doing so, the article provides a response to a problem that animates contemporary cultural geography: that new cultural objects are emerging which place in question the habits and practices of analysis that composed the ‘new’ cultural geography. To do this, the paper develops the concepts of unit, vibration and tone to unpack interfaces as sets of entities that work together to shape the experiences and responses of users. As such, the article provides a methodological vocabulary for the analysis of how interfaces operate to modulate user response and action on a series of habitual and un-reflected upon levels and thereby to create outcomes that suit their owners and operators.

This thesis investigates an intersection of broadcasting and watching videogame performance (over internet-based platforms, such as Twitch.tv), and the play of videogames. My focus is the broadcast of professional gaming, or electronic sport (e-sport), a now salient aspect of contemporary videogame culture. Through a case study of Valve Corporation’s game Dota 2 (2013) and its e-sports scene (drawing on empirical material from my own viewing and play experience, interviews and player data analytics), I stage an inquiry into the status of ‘everyday’ videogame play with, through and amidst broadcast e-sport. Particularly, I am occupied with examining how spectators of e-sport shape habitual capacities or skills in their own play (by variously engaging with broadcasts of expert performance). I consider these skills and habits in terms of the space and time produced by human bodies using gaming technologies, mobilising the post-phenomenological philosophy of Bernard Stiegler to guide my analyses. Drawing from studies of games, media and technology, this thesis advances the argument that while game experience traverses bodily and material domains (a perspective sustained in studies of games for some time), we also need to take seriously how objects outside the context of a player-software-hardware ‘circuit’ might intervene in play. I contend that broadcast e-sport apprehends the complex processes of virtuosic play, which can then become enfolded into the mundane encounters that ‘everyday’ players have with videogames. Taking seriously the materially specific ways that e-sports frame expertise, and how various ways of doing or being emerge from this framing for those who watch, is something which no research to date has examined, and represents an original contribution to knowledge. This case study has broader value in offering a helpful epistemological model for challenging dominant formulations of how players form habits and accumulate skills in videogames. In the current literature, limited study has been done on the ways that the experience of play is shaped by the ancillary practices and objects outside the material context of the game. By looking at the contemporary site of broadcast e-sport, I am providing a more complete account of the practices and experiences of skill building around extrinsic game material.

In this reply I try to show that, contrary to Milberry’s apparent assertion, the general intellect of the multitude does not have the explanatory robustness she accredits to it (following both Virno and the Hardt and Negri of the Empire trilogy). Digital network technologies are currently overwhelmingly effective in proletarianizing and disempowering the cognitariat and only an active technopolitics of deproletarianization could reverse this hegemonic situation. In my response to Verbeek, I attempt to correct his misinterpretation (shared by Milberry) of the Stieglerian approach as being dialectical in nature and show that, far from reinstating the humanist dichotomy between human beings and technologies, my analysis assumes their original, albeit fundamentally ambiguous and even ‘uncanny’ [unheimlich] interconnection. I conclude with pointing out some implications of this view for a ‘really realistic’ political theory of technology.

This dissertation argues that critical practices in the expanded field of art, technology, and space illustrate the potential of twenty-first century media by materializing depths of our experiential dimensions. Scholarship on digital embodiment and materialism in art, media studies, and aesthetics has paid much attention to the central role played by the human body in contemporary media environments. Grounded in these studies, however, this study moves forward to understand the more fundamental quality that grounds and conditions the experience of the human body—namely depth. Drawing on diverse disciplines, such as art history, visual studies, media studies, critical theory, phenomenology, and aesthetics, this study provides a reconstruction of the notion of depth to unpack the complex dimensionality of human experiences that are solicited by different critical spatial practices. As a spatial medium that produces the body subject and the world through the process of intertwining, depth points to an environmental affordance that prepares or conditions the ways in which the body processes the information in the world. The dimension of depth is not available to natural human perception. However, incorporating twenty-first century media that are seamlessly embedded in physical environments, critical spatial practices sensibly materialize the virtual dimensions of depth by animating space in a way that is different from the past. This dissertation provides comprehensive analyses of these critical spatial practices by artists who create constructed situations that bring the experiential dimensions of depth to the fore. The acknowledgement of depth allows us to understand the spatialities of bodies and their implication in the vaster worldly spatiality. In doing so, this study attends to major contemporary philosophical and aesthetic challenges by reframing the body as the locus of subjectivity that is always interdependent upon broader sociocultural and technological environments.