The Matter of Vision. Peter Wyeth
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without justification.
Science has sometimes been accused of a certain naiveté in moving from laboratory experiment and results to the interpretation of those results, which tends to move to the terrain of philosophy, with its porous boundaries between the physical and the metaphysical, between the materialism of science and the terrain vague where the material no longer holds.
That is why Leibniz and arguably Spinoza are if anything more relevant today than they were in their own time. Physics today is still confirming the insights of Leibniz about some of the most basic questions, whereas Spinoza’s anti-theological propositions hold more appeal for me, as despite Leibniz’s genius he was irrevocably wedded to theological rationalisation at the expense, I would suspect, of a wholehearted rationalism. The meeting of three days when Leibniz went to visit the older Spinoza in Amsterdam, a liberal refuge, in 1679, is a fascinating moment in history of which unfortunately there is no direct record, only imputations of how Leibniz’s views changed after his visit to the Master. There is little sense of a similar change in the views of Spinoza. Leibniz appears to have edged towards the thoroughgoing stern materialism of Spinoza, but could not or would not free himself of his debt to the theology department of his life.
Kant, regarded as the greatest modern philosopher by many, reacted against both Leibniz and Hume, and yet in so doing, and despite his enormous achievements in philosophy, it could be argued that seen from today’s perspective, Kant in fact moved away from science and his Critique of Pure Reason ended ironically as a dangerous endorsement of it, claiming a certain autonomy for Reason that laid the fateful trail of German Idealism away from science and scientific materialism, betraying Bacon despite his dedication to him in the first Critique.
The Matter of Vision: Summary
• The key to understanding Cinema is through a scientific analysis of Vision, the Automatic and Emotion.
• Vision is the prime sense, but its extraordinary depth, breadth and wisdom has been the subject of a constant campaign of denigration by the ideology of Language: logocentrism.
• The Automatic is the term proposed for the ‘un-conscious’, flagging up how the ideology of Consciousness has used Language to reduce the importance science now shows it has.
• Emotion is seen as the driving force of the brain, the result of the perception, by the body/brain system, of a potential threat to survival.
• Moving pictures engage our emotions as movement is registered by the eye, for example, as a potential survival threat.
• All is movement. Cinema is movement. Photography is stasis. Stasis is death. Movement is life.
• Cinema is Emotion, as Godard had Sam Fuller declare in Pierrot Le Fou.
• Emotion has moved from the irredeemably subjective to the objective realm, as part of a revolution in scientific method that has also been successfully applied to consciousness and dream-science.
• The emphasis upon the affective, that is upon emotion, is the starting-point of this analysis of Cinema, in contrast to the cognitive with its implicit emphasis on Language and Thought.
• This project in one sense looks back to David Hume, who declared in 1739 that Reason is and must always be under the control of Emotion.
• Reason is a noble ambition of man, but inevitably becomes rationalisation rather than pure Reason. Reason is contingent upon Emotion: you can have Emotion without Reason, but not Reason without Emotion.
• Consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the operations of the brain, every subjective experience is produced by those operations and by no other element, and is now accessible through laboratory experiment able to distinguish the conscious from the Automatic in great detail.
• Consciousness is an effect not a cause, an epiphenomenon of brain function, whereas the Automatic (unconscious) processes vastly more information and arguably directs consciousness to where its minute resources may be best used in the cause of survival (and then reproduction).
• Consciousness rationalises the few stimuli it can manage as an aid to survival strategy – hence narrative as the native medium of the brain.
• Narrative is the native medium of Cinema as it is the native medium of the brain: it is a survival strategy to make sense of the handful of stimuli consciousness can manipulate at any one time. A story links diverse stimuli from the environment to make sense of them in the cause of survival.
• Language opposes itself to Vision, and constantly demotes and denigrates it, while in reality Vision is at least a million times more powerful in numbers, and similarly superior in depth, breadth and wisdom – more intelligent as it has far greater resources at its disposal.
• Affective Neurobiology is an approach that starts from the primacy of Emotion rather than the cognitive, and emphasises the fundamental base of neuroscience in the historicity of evolution.
• The combination of contemporary neuroscience and evolutionary biology in the tradition of Darwin now offers material historical examples of how thoroughly science can illuminate the way Cinema works in the brain.
• Science is now capable of an understanding of Cinema qualitatively deeper than any other analytical framework (An Expansive Materialism).
• Science and art can be reunited as neurobiology based in emotion has the capacity for a comprehensive and expansive understanding of art that qualitatively exceeds any other framework, and in particular, that of the dominant status-quo based in Language.
• The passage from science to interpretation necessarily crosses into the realm of theory and philosophy.
• This project proposes a return to Bacon’s aspiration to scientific method for philosophy, tracing a tradition from Bacon via Newton and Hume that develops scientific method, in particular following Hume in subjecting Reason to Emotion and turning the subjective into raw data for objective analysis, as in Dehaene on Consciousness, LeDoux on Emotion and in Dream Science.
• The last fifty years of ‘Film Theory’ has been a dead-end, unscientific and merely rhetorical instead of properly scientific.
• The philosophical elements behind Film Theory are derived from ‘Continental Philosophy’ which itself took a fatal wrong turn with Kant’s aim of a certain autonomy for Reason. As Hume rightly put it before Kant, Reason is and must always be at the service of the passions.
3From the time of the Industrial Revolution.
4The Automatic is the term I suggest as a replacement for the negative term, the unconscious, p. 10. See Commentaries for further discussion.
5‘Cultural’ is used here in a Darwinian sense discussed later.
6See ‘Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Culture’, Martin Jay, University of California Press, 1999.
7By Kupfmuller, an Information Theorist – quoted in Norretranders op. cit., p. 143.
8Dietrich Trinker, also quoted in Norretranders.
9Quoted