The Matter of Vision. Peter Wyeth
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an old distinction that used to be made between left and right hemispheres of the brain, with the Left, language-oriented hemisphere, termed Major, and the Right, vision-oriented hemisphere – termed Minor. That terminology reflected an old prejudice that Language is more important than Vision, a prejudice that is the prime target of this project.
Again in raw numbers, Language processes an average of around ten bits per second of information. Vision processes around ten million bits per second, again a differential of a million times.12 Yet the ideology around Language, here referred to as Logocentrism, unequivocally suggests that Language is superior to Vision – with Vision characterised as superficial and lacking in depth compared to the profundities of which language is capable. The proposition here is that quite the opposite is true, Vision is deeper and broader, more sophisticated and mature than Language could ever hope to be. Wisdom resides in Vision, not in Language, which is a narrow medium of translation. Thought, for example, takes place not in Language but in Vision, and only in Vision. Thought is translated into and manipulated in Language, but only actually takes place in Vision.
Neuroscience has also revolutionised our understanding of the relation between Reason and Emotion. From twenty years’ work with brain-damaged patients, Antonio Damasio13 concluded that Emotion is possible without Reason, but that Reason is only possible with Emotion. In other words, Reason is contingent upon Emotion and it is Emotion that is autonomous. That conception turns upside-down the conventional valorisation of Reason and concomitant pejorative image of Emotion. In relation to Cinema, Hitchcock said that Cinema is stronger than Reason, and Godard went further to declare that Cinema is Emotion. The conception here is that Emotion is the alarm-system that the body/brain uses to alert itself to a threat to survival.
The other side of that pairing is Reason, seen here as more of a noble ambition than a universal truth. Man’s ineluctable subjectivity inevitably condemns him to rationalisation rather than grand Reason. And it in that rationalisation that we witness the operations of the subjective in the body of Reason. Recent neuroscience has turned the negative aspects of subjectivity into strengths. Subjective experience should be seen not as out-of-bounds, but as right at the heart of understanding consciousness, for example, by treating it not as evidence, but as raw data.14 A similar approach has yielded valuable insights both with Dreams and with the study of Emotion, and it is in that last area that I would suggest that by including Emotion within a reformed paradigm of scientific method, a revolution of Newtonian proportions has quietly occurred, reinvigorating empiricism and substantially extending its reach. The proposition here is to view Emotion as the raw-material of the brain, the fuel that drives it, and also gives it ignition in its constant movement. It is a commonplace that to live is to feel, but that has a deeper and profound truth in the very mode of the operations of the brain and the body/brain system as a whole.
This project would restore liberty to Vision, the Automatic and Emotion and in so doing repair a serious imbalance in our culture. Lacking a proper hearing for Vision, the Automatic and Emotion we are not losing one half of the picture but in fact sustaining a greater loss. The Major factors have been painted as Minor and the Minor factors as Major. The aim should not, however, be simply to turn the tables, replacing one structure of dominance with another, but to restore the balance in a context that understands how evolution developed such apparent opposites into an integrated whole where both sides play an invaluable role. The reverberations from properly correcting the imbalance would be a revolution in how man thinks of himself in the world.
LCR v VAE
Vision
The starting-point of this enquiry was a sense that Cinema is more powerful than it is given credit for, and that power comes from its nature as a visual medium. The conception of Vision that accompanies that view sees it as the source of virtually all our knowledge about the World. Unlike Language, we do not in general have to practice Vision.15 With Language there is a search for every word, sometimes conscious, often unconscious or Automatic. With Vision we do it without thinking (even where we get it wrong first time around). There is immediately an irony in that situation in that we tend to take the power of Vision for granted. That might be thought of as the Tragedy of Vision.
Language is said to be around 40,000 years old, with recent estimates putting it as 100,000 years old, and speculation that it might be considerably older, even up to a million years old or more. Man is said to be around 2.4 million years old, depending on how you set the boundary between Man and his predecessors, but the first anatomically modern human fossils date back only 195,000 years, however primates with semantic communication seem possibly to predate ‘man’ which could set the origins of language further back.
Vision is eons older, evolutionarily, than Language. The notion that Cinema, a visual medium, could even be imagined to be ‘structured like a Language’,16 a relatively addition to the evolutionary scene, makes little sense (when added to the disparity in processing capacity). The reduction of Cinema to Language would be ahistorical in the extreme and Idealist in philosophical terms. From the perspective of evolution, Language can be argued on the contrary to be contingent upon Vision. For example, between two-thirds and three-quarters of words are said to represent Vision (or Sound, but with a much lesser number devoted to Sound). Language is a development that is based upon Vision.
One element of my interest in Vision was to look at the development of the eye. What could that tell us about Vision? The evolution of the eye can be traced fairly accurately and linked to certain geological changes on Earth. At the time in question the planet was covered with mist and geological changes raised the ambient temperature a few degrees, sufficient to disperse the mists. Before that, vision was useful but of only local significance. Afterwards, vision was at a premium, as the ability to see a potential predator, or indeed potential prey, obviously possessed biological value. Following these events, the eye accelerated in development over a relatively short period in biological terms, a period known as the ‘Cambrian explosion’, between 542 and 543 million years ago.17 By the end of that million year period, the sophistication of the eye was not much different from ours today.
The eye developed as the most efficient method of alerting creatures to a survival-threat. The reason for its efficiency is its capabilities in registering movement – as in the movement of a predator. Movement is the best sign as an early-warning of the approach of a threat to survival. Our eyes respond with alacrity to movement in peripheral vision, and that is an inheritance of evolution. It is, of course, also significant for Cinema, for moving-pictures.
The Wisdom of Vision
Vision may be vastly older and vastly more powerful than Language, but what I would like to draw attention to here again is the quality of Vision. There is a common view in my culture that it is Language that is the subtle medium, capable of the depths of expression of Shakespeare, while the visual sense, and in particular Cinema, is crude, obvious, and superficial. I would guess that part of that attitude comes from the fact that Language has to be practiced to gain its effects. We are more conscious of making an effort to manipulate it on a daily, hourly, constant basis. With Vision, as I have said, it is automatic, often unconscious and we are much less aware of any effort involved.
This conception has Vision as an intelligent medium. In other words it is not merely a passive vessel through which information passes, but an active mediator that has a role in identifying what is important to be looked at and passes back information it assembles about those things to the body/brain system in a constant feedback loop. Horace Barlow, twenty years after his 1953 experiment in frog vision sensed something similar: “a large part of the sensory machinery involved in a frog’s feeding responses may actually reside in the retina . . . each single neuron can perform a much more complex and subtle task than had previously been thought . . . the activities of neurons, quite simply, are thought processes”.18
The notion I want to develop here is that we do not realise the quality of information we receive from Vision. I suggest that everything we know we learn from