Quake3World

This power to alter our perceptions is doubly true of technologies of representation. A technological artifact like the automobile (whose technological function is not representation but transportation) has profouindly changed the temporal and spatial shape and meaining of our life-world and our own bodily and symbolic sense of ourselves.

However, representational technologies of photography, the motion picture, video, and computer inform us twice over: first, like the automobile, through the specific material conditions by which they latently engage our senses at the bodily level of what might be called our microperception, and then again through their explicit representational function by which they engage our senses textually at the hermeneutic level of what might be called our macroperception.

Most theorists and critics of the cinematic and electronic have been drawn to macroperceptual analysis, to descriptions and interpretations of the hermeneutic-cultural contexts that inform and shape both the materiality of the technologies and their textual representation. Nonetheless, “all such contexts find their fulfillment only within the range of microperceptual possibility.” We cannot reflect upon and analyze either technologies or texts without having, at some point, engaged them immediately — that is, through our own perceptive sensorium, through the materiality (or immanent mediation) of our own bodies.

Thus, as philosopher of technology Don Ihde puts it, while “there is no microperception (sensory-bodily) without its location within a field of macroperception,” there can be “no macroperception without its microperceptual foci.” it is important to note, however, that since perception is constituted and organized as a bodily and sensory gestalt that is always already meaningful, a microperceptual focus is not the same as a physiological or anatomical focus. The perceiving and sensing body is always also a lived-body — immersed in and making social meaning as well as physical sense.

“there is no microperception (sensory-bodily) without its location within a field of macroperception,” there can be “no macroperception without its microperceptual foci.”

BlueGene wrote:FFS, it's really not a word.

Dave wrote:I was able to read that.. what's the deal?

sliver wrote:You read it; you didn't understand it.

And must you be a cunt in every thread?

Dave wrote:Well, you didn't provide the entire article for one thing... How was I being a cunt? I read shit like this every day. You get used to it after awhile. Stop complaining and get out the dictionary if the big words intimidate you.

mjrpes wrote:You can figure out what microperception and macroperception mean from the context. Dave is right. Get used to it. You're going to see a lot more of this shit. People have to write this way to fill up articles and books.

After you read enough of this stuff your brain begins to build a bullshit filtering device, which filters out the underlying idea from the poorly worded and often padded crap.

For example, "We cannot reflect upon and analyze either technologies or texts without having, at some point, engaged them immediately — that is, through our own perceptive sensorium, through the materiality (or immanent mediation) of our own bodies. " This is brimming with verbiage. All this sentence seems to be saying is, "we cannot understand technology until we use it".

riddla wrote:most film studies professors need a good Clint Eastwood-style beating anyhow.