ment with the world, with others, and with ourselves, cinematic and electronic technologies have transformed us so that we presently see, sense, and make sense of ourselves as quite other than we were before them. It should be evident at this point that the co-constitutive, reversible, and dynamic relations between objective material technologies and embodied human subjects invite a phenomenological investigation. Existential phenomenology, to use Ihde's characterization, is a "philosophical style that emphasizes a certain interpretation of human experience and that, in particular, concerns perception and bodily activity."[8] Often misunderstood as purely "subjective" analysis, existential phenomenology is instead concerned with describing, thematizing, and interpreting the structures of lived spatiality, temporality, and meaning that are co-constituted dynamically as embodied human subjects perceptually engage an objective material world. It is focused, therefore, on the relations between the subjective and objective aspects of material, social, and personal existence and sees these relations as constitutive of the meaning and value of the phenomena under investigation.[9] Existential phenomenology, then, attempts to describe, thematize, and interpret the experiential and perceptual field in which human beings play out a particular and meaningful structure of spatial, temporal, and bodily existence. Unlike the foundational, Husserlian transcendental phenomenology from which it emerged, existential phenomenology rejects the goal of arriving at universal and "essential" description, and "settles" for a historicized and "qualified" description as the only kind of description that is existentially possible or, indeed, desirable. It is precisely because rather than in spite of its qualifications that such a description is existentially meaningful--meaningful, that is, to human beings who are themselves particular, finite, and partial, and t...
