The Matter of Vision. Peter Wyeth
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of the amount of information that we receive, although that is an indication of how much we are picking up, but of the depth, the intelligence, the sheer wisdom that Vision brings. What I mean to suggest by wisdom is that the nature of the knowledge gained from Vision goes far deeper than common currency would suggest. Wisdom suggests insight, perhaps combined with mature reflection. The wonder of Vision is that it is intelligent in the sense of making discriminations, judgements – just as in the first moments we lay eyes upon a new person – and those judgements would seem to involve millions, perhaps billions of discriminations. That means the brain19 making choices, according to biological criteria, what might be called instinctive, tacit, or natural wisdom – dare I say the best kind – rather than the rational Darwin’s List type,20 the formal kind of the Academy. It is worth stressing that the criteria of this wisdom are biological rather than sociological or philosophical. That means the discriminations are about survival (for reproduction). Evolution makes those choices solely on their being advantageous for survival. For the most part those discriminations are Automatic and do not appear in consciousness. This wisdom, this intelligence is unconscious.
My suggestion would be that many of the qualities we think come from Language in fact come from Vision.
As a prime example, I would contend that Thought takes place in Vision. Not only that but Thought only takes place in Vision.21 Thought does not take place in Language. Language translates what Vision provides into its own medium, but it is not a source of meaning, merely a medium of translation. Language is contingent upon Vision.
My thought is that virtually all the information we gain about other people comes from our Vision, and again mainly unconsciously. When we are told about somebody we compare that information to what we see of them, and it is that latter information that is decisive. The reason is that ‘seeing is believing’, we gain a much richer field of information in Vision, more complex, with more dimensions than anything Language can provide. What wisdom we have comes entirely from Vision. Intelligence is about the application of imagination to making distinctions and judgements. Imag-ination could almost be a synonym for Vision. Christian Keysers22 has shown us that the easy assumption of philosophers over the ages that we cannot know what is in another’s head is not quite true. On the contrary we cannot avoid knowing, not in the literal sense of seeing thoughts but in empathising with what they are going through emotionally and mirroring that unconsciously in our emotions through what he has called Shared Circuits.
Those processes also obtain in Cinema as we watch people on the screen. We gain less intimate information than being in somebody’s company, but what films show us is people in action, with a far broader range of actions than we would normally experience with an individual, the process of drama, the intensified emotions of actors seen on a bright screen in a darkened room.
The articulation of Vision
One problem Vision has is that of articulation. Language could be much more active in articulating Vision, but the ideology of Logocentrism tends to deny and demote Vision, minimising and denigrating it. The result is that, although Language is heavily dependent upon Vision for its references in its own medium, it has not often been used to taking on the positive task of articulating the qualities of Vision. In the letters of Cezanne we see the attempt of an artist to put into words his daily struggle with expressing himself in painting and in Rilke’s letters on Cezanne we see something related, a poet trying to find ways to express the poetry of the Visual in a great painter. It is possible for language to articulate Vision, to serve Vision, and it is suggested here that would bring some balance to the role Language plays, against the tide of Logocentrism. Language serving Vision would be both appropriate and constructive, a role of which it is capable, but in which it is much less experienced than is good for Vision.
I see therefore I am.
The Automatic
I would see it as another instance of Logocentrism that the area beyond Consciousness receives only the negative of the term as its title – unconscious. The terms suggest that Consciousness is the privileged one and its opposite number relatively unimportant and therefore deserves merely the negative term.
The information-processing numbers explored in the 1950s suggested Consciousness has a capacity of only around one-millionth of the area outside it – which we know as the unconscious. In proposing the term The Automatic, I want to draw attention to the notion that this area beyond Consciousness gets on with its many tasks outside our awareness, in silence as it were, and automatically – that is without conscious direction from us.23 The area appears to be substantial and neuroscientists often refer to the relevant processes as automatic, so that the term is already in current if informal use.
The comparison William James is said to have made between the conscious and Automatic as a pin in the Albert Hall gives an image of the difference of scale between the two, in which case Man is arguably an unconscious creature.
One of the main ideas behind this project was that we take in most of what we absorb from a film unconsciously/Automatically. Film-study could make a contribution to the understanding of the brain through helping to devise experiments that use films to assess what information audiences do in fact absorb Automatically. The difficulty is how to untangle information absorbed Consciously and that taken in Automatically.24 While there has been much work over the last twenty years on identifying the threshold between conscious and unconscious absorption, which has tended to suggest the extent of unconscious operations in the brain, there is a difference between crossing the threshold and, as it were, evaluating the building you are entering, between a first step and the universe beyond. Threshold analysis has certainly demonstrated the significance of emotion and the subjective, and that is congruent with the approach taken here towards Cinema. An advantage of working with films is that they can be viewed repeatedly, that is their output is a constant, and their content catalogued exhaustively to compare with audience recall in a variety of ways to find what works most effectively. Experiments with films have demonstrated differential brain activation, with a Hitchcock-directed TV film (Bang! You’re Dead, 1961), for example, scoring around 50% higher than The Good, The Bad & The Ugly. ‘Hitchcock was able to orchestrate the responses of so many different brain regions, turning them on and off at the same time across all viewers’.25 Even that rather basic experiment, using fMRI scanning (2008), provided evidence of the relation between mise-en-scene and attention, and between objective measurement of brain activity and the subjective experience of the audience.26
Emotion
Emotion is central to this project. In terms of the question of what Emotion is, I take the line of LeDoux (The Emotional Brain) that the key thing is what Emotion does rather than being too concerned with definitions of what it is, which tend to end up either diffuse or circular. Emotion is seen here in physical terms as the response of the body/brain system to a perceived survival-threat (or opportunity) in the external environment.27 It functions as an alarm-system that warns of a potential threat, and takes the form of internal activity, blood flow, synapses connecting, galvanic skin response, sweating, etc and only at the extremes does it make an appearance in Consciousness. Most Emotion is unconscious or Automatic (for which there is considerable evidence, see LeDoux). Everything that happens in the brain is seen as prompted by Survival, and Emotion is, as it were, the raw material that the body/brain system produces as a response to potential danger.
The evolutionary sense of a threat may seem too broad and general to apply to everyday life, but if we take the notion first suggested in The Descent of Man that sees human culture as the successor to genetic evolution, in other words cultural evolution as the adaptation of genetic evolution that developed in human society, then the definition of a threat becomes much wider. By a process of adaptation, or ‘exaptation’, what originally served the purpose of an alarm against predators can become a mechanism to help choose a handbag or breakfast cereal. In the choice of a handbag there can be many competing images that battle