While advertising has long been central to critical discourses on commodification, phenomenology has, despite its “critical turn,” largely been absent from these debates. This paper suggests a way of addressing that gap by applying a phenomenologically informed reading to post-socialist advertising in Romania. Drawing on an interdisciplinary project combining critical theory, phenomenology, film studies, and social history, it explores how advertising and commodity culture left their mark on a country transitioning from a planned to a market economy. Focusing on the structural insights of a phenomenology of gesture, the study interprets how gestures function within post-socialist advertisements. Five analytical dimensions guide this study: (1) the relationship between gestures and non-gestural behaviors; (2) gesture orientation, balancing character interaction, viewer address, and product reference; (3) normativity, promoting standardized behaviors and ideals; (4) mediality, as gestures are shaped by their mediated rendering; and (5) affectivity, revealing emotional layers such as desire, fear, or pleasure beyond what is said in the ads’ verbal slogans. By examining the often exaggerated and awkward gestures in Romanian post-socialist ads, this study demonstrates the value of phenomenology for understanding commodification and its mediated forms.
This paper addresses technological exhaustion as a defining feature of contemporary digital and networked life. Rather than simply attributing exhaustion to the multiplication of relations or to the acceleration of social life through digital technologies, we interpret this condition as the outcome of an eclipse of alterity and of the exponential proliferation of difference within self-referential systems. We argue that the contemporary expansion of interactive, real-time systems generates a regime of hyperconnectivity whose apparent openness and positivity conceals an increasingly enclosed order. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of objects, simulacra and simulation, as well as his theoretical stance centered on the concepts of fatality and reversibility, we reconstruct technological exhaustion as an ontological and existential result of saturation. According to Baudrillard, the excess of communication, information, and operational transparency does not deepen our relation to the world or to others; rather, it produces an implosion of meaning, subjectivity, and alterity, enclosing experience within a hall of digital mirrors. Against critical approaches that seek opposition or negation, we turn to Baudrillard’s concepts of fatality and reversibility to identify possible routes beyond this condition. We contend that exhaustion-through-saturation is radically ambivalent: the very excess that neutralizes alterity may also contain the conditions for its reemergence, as highlighted in the case of contemporary sociotechnical systems. A fatal strategy, by intensifying the internal logic of contemporary systems to the point of reversal, offers a speculative framework for thinking technological exhaustion not only as closure but also as a paradoxical site of transformation, where alterity can be thought anew.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology has, from very early on, been labelled a "philosophy of ambiguity" (Ferdinand Alqui & eacute;, Alphonse de Waelhens). In the early 1950s he encountered different psychoanalytical and psychological concepts of ambiguity and ambivalence (particularly in the work of Melanie Klein and Else Frenkel-Brunswik) that he integrated into his philosophy of ambiguity. This incorporation, and particularly the reception of Frenkel-Brunswik's concepts has so far not been studied in detail. However, this reception is important because it enabled Merleau-Ponty to articulate more clearly the relation between emotional and cognitive aspects and to move from ambiguity of perception to ambiguity in expression, from being confronted with ambiguity to dealing with ambiguity, which is central to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy in the 1950s. This article traces the reception of Frenkel-Brunswik's work by Merleau-Ponty and its further impact on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy in the intermediary phase in the first half of the 1950s.
Tuning-in processes hold a central role in Alfred Schutz’s theory on social reality. Actors mirroring each other’s non-verbal cues and forming shared realities constitute the essence of the communicative interplay between humans. In this article, we will explore the pedagogical facets of tuning-in and focus on the interplay between teacher and students within the context of online teaching. Interview surveys with teachers have indicated that they experience major communicative problems when teaching online. When moving from the real classroom to Zoom or Teams, they find it difficult “to reach” their students and struggle to make themselves understood. However, very little research based on observational studies of online teaching has focussed on how these difficulties unfold temporally. This is the aim of this study. By using a social phenomenological approach, our analysis revolves around two video sequences of online interaction taken from a field study in a Danish seventh-grade class, conducted during the COVID-19 lockdown. Our study highlights tuning-in among teacher and students as the key challenge of online teaching. The processes of bodily exchange that should lead to synchronization of thought is truncated and the actors tend to stay in each their reality. Yet, teachers, who turn to activities characterized by a predefined interactional course can succeed in creating rhythmic processes of appeals and responses between themselves and their students.
In my first reply to Lynch’s “Promise and Silence,” I stressed the major themes of my earlier paper “Ethnomethodology’s Broken Promise”—the failings of ethnomethodological field studies and ways that such shortcomings are ignored, glossed over, or hidden. I considered clarifying this material as being of first importance. On the other hand, Lynch’s paper is written from within a disciplinary approach to the ethnomethodological project. The present comment presents 1970s UCLA ethnomethodology as a foil to understand better the background and misleading character of Lynch’s critique.
