Present After Presence: Subtraction, Givenness, and the Structure of Being-There

Abstract

Presence research has often proceeded by addition, treating immersion, embodiment, agency, ownership, co-presence, reciprocity, and temporal simultaneity as conditions that stabilise the sense of being there. Yet immersive video suggests that several of these conditions can be weakened without eliminating Presence. Building on Bodyless Presence and Bodyless Presentness, this paper asks what is disclosed when such conditions are progressively subtracted. I distinguish three levels that should not be conflated: stabilising conditions that strengthen or support Presence; empirically resilient articulation-forms through which Presence is lived as here and now; and a transcendental limit-condition concerning the first-personal givenness of experience. Subtraction provides evidence for the resilience of here and now, but empirical resilience does not by itself establish constitutivity or transcendental necessity. I argue, on phenomenological rather than experimental grounds, that for-me-ness names the limit-condition within which any such spatial or temporal articulation can be experienced at all. The paper bridges operational Presence research with Husserlian givenness, Leibhaftigkeit, and image consciousness; rereads Bodyless Presence as exposing the resilience of here; rereads Bodyless Presentness as exposing the resilience of now; and develops a stratified account of Presence through Zahavi's pre-reflective self-awareness while taking Derrida's critique of self-presence seriously. It concludes by proposing immersive media as dissociation apparatuses for loosening conditions ordinarily coupled within experiential there-ness.