hey engage our senses textually at the hermeneutic level of what might be called our macroperception. [4] 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 representations.[5] Nonetheless, "all such contexts find their fulfillment only within the range of microperceptual possibility."[6] We cannot reflect upon and analyze either technologies or texts without having, at some point, engaged them immediately--that is, through our 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 could be "no macroperception without its microperceptual foci."[7] 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. The aim of this essay, then, is to figure certain microperceptual aspects of our engagement with the technologies of cinematic and electronic representation and to suggest some ways in which our microperceptual experience of their respective material conditions informs and transforms our temporal and spatial sense of ourselves and our cultural contexts of meaning. Insofar as both the cinematic and the electronic have each been objectively constituted as a new and discrete techno-logic, each also has been subjectively incorporated, enabling a new perceptual mode of existential and embodied "presence." In sum, as they have mediated our engage...
