Liminal Thresholds: Perception and Imagination under the Reign of Virtuality: A Phenomenological Approach

Abstract

The inquiry that drives this article addresses the human need to understand how perceptual experience and interaction with images change with the transition from an analog mediation of reality to types of digitally mediated experiences. The purpose of this proposal is to investigate how human understanding of one's own corporality (cerebral/neurochemical, psycho-somatic) expands at both endosomatic and exosomatic levels, as well as the exteriority in general (surrounding environment, other human or non-human individuals, objects, processes) with the emergence of liminal experiences of reality. In this context, liminal refers to boundary spaces between a world offered to be perceived and the consciousness of the one perceiving it, experiences that blur a clear delimitation threshold between what lies outside the perceiver and what is within their own neurochemical, biological, psycho-somatic constitution. The methodology employed in this endeavour will be that provided by applied phenomenology, analysing those permutations in the realm of perception and imagination that arise with the new experiences offered to humans by virtual technologies. A critical revisit of the phenomenological pioneers (Husserl, Fink, Merleau-Ponty) will be conducted, observing how they anticipate the process of blurring the sharp distinctions between reality thresholds, so that the binaries delimiting between real-virtual/fictional or actual-passive hybridize through various technologies that no longer allow us to defend the assumption that human experience of reality is either unmediated or solely mediated by the epistemological instruments of the brain. The concept around which this research is built is that of virtuality, starting from analyzing how Husserlian phenomenology, alongside post-Husserlian phenomenology, describes perception, imagination, presentation and presentification, and image-consciousness. Then, we will question the ontological state of virtuality, drawing on Bergson's and Deleuze's perspectives on the reality of the virtual. We will observe how the understanding that traditional phenomenology provides of virtuality changes with the emergence of the possibility to live experiences with an advanced degree of technological mediation, using social media networks, gaming, and immersive technologies (AR, VR, MR) as applied case studies.

Keywords: perception, Husserl, virtual reality, phenomenology, Deleuze