The Matter of Vision. Peter Wyeth
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to me was far from the arts and humanities, in Biology and Neuroscience. That was both unexpected and a major challenge, not least as the matter of the interpretation of experimental results immediately crosses over into the territory of philosophy. I am neither a scientist nor a philosopher and therefore the only sensible approach to the ideas put forward below was to try to keep close to my background in film-making. My limited knowledge of both science and philosophy makes the propositions in this book necessarily tentative, although they have crossed over deep into those territories. My reading of the literature in those sallies forth suggested a range of connections between contemporary neurobiology and Cinema, and it is a sense of the significance of those connections that prompted a Theory of Film based upon them. The ambition of previous generations has often been to bring the discipline of science to bear upon Cinema, but it can be argued that it is perhaps only at this point in the development of neuroscience that one may arguably see beyond generalities to sense a number of profound connections between the way the brain works and the way we respond to Cinema. Those connections potentially form a foundation so much deeper than Language as to reduce any of the traditional parallels between that relatively recent evolutionary arrival and Cinema largely redundant.
This project proposes the notion of using Language to serve Vision rather than its current approach of disregarding and relegating it to a minor role. That would be a new role for Language, but both an eminently possible and valuable one. Language derives many words from Vision and, as with my students learning to think visually, it is as simple a shift as the use of words to attempt to adequately describe the multiple dimensions and richness of a visual scene instead of using words as a shorthand symbol – the comparison between a carefully-drawn portrait and a stick-man.
The antique nomenclature of the ‘Major’ and ‘Minor’ hemispheres of the brain, the first broadly associated with Language skills, the second with Visual skills, is an example of how Language has been used to relegate Vision to a position of inferiority. Neuroscience has almost dispensed with those terms as research has revealed the truth to be rather different, but the prejudice lingers. ‘Verbal’ and ‘Non-verbal’ skills in IQ tests is another example, as though Visual skills have no autonomy.
In one sense the real challenge of this project is to begin to uproot the very deeply-held feeling that Language is superior. I suggest that is a myth and on the contrary that it is Vision that is almost infinitely superior both quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitively in that it processes much more information, and qualitatively in that not just the depth and breadth of information it handles, but the wisdom that information contains, is vastly in excess of anything of which the Word is even capable. It is perhaps above all the wisdom of Vision that is extraordinary. We see so much more than we are aware of and so much more than finds its way into Language. I see therefore I am.
The Matter of Vision
The Matter of Vision has three meanings for both terms – Matter in the scientific sense, as in the world is made of matter, Matter meaning Issue, and Matter indicating a Materialist explanation for phenomena – that is the belief that everything is capable of explanation in time through Science. Likewise, Vision has an adjectival connotation, as in a man of Vision, it also is technical, the capacity of the eye for Vision, and a reference to Cinema as a Visual art.
1An idea from the Danish science-writer Tor Norretranders in his User Illusion, Penguin, New York, 1998.
2By Film Theory I mean to suggest the ideas, mainly from France, that hit England in the early 70s in the film journal Screen (in which I was peripherally involved as an enthusiast), via Cahiers du Cinema, in turn taken from a whole generation of mainly French thinkers broadly in the tradition of ‘Continental Philosophy’, involving semiotics, psycho-analysis and theories of ideology.
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The Matter of Vision
Modern society3 has been the prisoner of three stern gaolers, Language, Consciousness and Reason. Each member of the troika has succeeded in imposing an image of its hegemony upon the mind of modern culture. The result has been the incarceration and repression of their opposite number, the target of this relentless campaign; Vision, the Automatic4 and Emotion.
The task of those images is to boost the prestige of their masters at the expense of their opposite numbers, and in that they have been remarkably successful. Jealously painting-out the real role of their opponents, they have consistently sought to reduce their status.
Language, Consciousness and Reason (LCR) are seen here in terms of their status as cultural5 artefacts, that is not things themselves, but the ‘ideology’ attached to each of them that reifies them above their real status. The question is not of their real relationship to their opposite numbers but the ideological ones that have developed around them.
This project suggests that Language, Consciousness and Reason, in contrast to their image in the public mind, are not quite the peaks of being human that have been promulgated, but more limited in their achievements and reach than their ‘ideologies’ would claim. Those ideologies also have an aggressive attitude towards their opposite numbers and have set out to demote and ‘denigrate’6 Vision, the Automatic, and Emotion (VAE).
The aim of this project is to restore Vision to its real status as the noblest and wisest facility of man, and to turn the tables on the vulgar upstart Language. Likewise, to promote the massive role of the Automatic compared to that of Consciousness, and to aid the return of Emotion to the prestige and position proposed for it as early as 1739 by David Hume in the face of the inflations of Reason.
In the late 1950s it was calculated that the eyes absorb a million times the information of which consciousness is aware.7 In 1965 a physiologist put it that “only one millionth of what our eyes see, our ears hear, and our other senses inform us about appears in our consciousness”.8 Of the range of external stimuli Consciousness handles a millionth, but for internal activity the figures for the brain as a whole suggests it handles between ten and thirty billion times the information of Consciousness.9 That would suggest the possibility that the rest of the information is handled outside Consciousness, yet Language provides us with only a negative term for that activity – the ‘unconscious’. The proposal here is to dedicate an independent term to that area – the Automatic.
Although Consciousness has a limited capacity for information-processing, as in the fabled seven objects that can be held in Consciousness at any one time, it has evolved for the tasks it carries out, and information-processing capacity is not coterminous with value. In other words, Consciousness is more than Information. The brain works to reduce information that is not necessary, a reducing valve,10 and Consciousness in particular does not necessarily require large numbers of neurons to carry out it important functions. However, given that caveat, the issue remains that both the very substantial work of the Automatic and its significance is arguably consistently undervalued, even by neuroscientists.11 It is not that Consciousness is not valuable but that arguably in relation to the Automatic it is an epiphenomenon, an effect rather than a cause, a by-product of brain-function, whereas the image often proposed is of an all-powerful phenomenon, and that of the Automatic a shadowy and uncertain one.
It is suggested here that the Automatic does nearly all the work and directs the limited capacities of Consciousness to attend to the few stimuli it is capable of handling at any one time, effectively tasking it with reporting back on the significance of, and any changes to, those stimuli as part of a feedback loop energised by the Automatic.
The image this project disputes is that LCR are the Major partners and VAE are the Minor partners.