The Matter of Vision. Peter Wyeth
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posh/flashy for me? Can I afford it? Will it go with other things? “The only thing that separates us from the Animals is the ability to accessorize” as Dolly Parton put it.28 The Emotions that are part of the process of taking a decision will be partly conscious, but also unconscious. It can be argued that no one ever took a decision rationally – even with an exhaustive list of pros and cons – as in the famous example of Darwin trying to decide about marriage (and concluding it was better than a dog). Emotion makes the decision for us as Reason has its limits.
That point is also related to Damasio’s crucial conclusion noted earlier – that Reason is contingent upon Emotion. Emotion without Reason is possible, but not Reason without Emotion.29 That view overturns centuries of philosophy but also suggests the power of Emotion. Kant reacted against Hume on the epistemology of induction, but it was Hume who declared that ‘Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’. Hume’s wisdom on emotion appears prescient both for his time and in opposition, as it were, to the view Kant would later take.
What might be called The Logic of Nature is seen in Emotion, as Emotion is survival. That is to say that Emotion arises as a survival response, and survival is basic to evolution alongside reproduction. We survive in order to reproduce, that is the logic of evolution and therefore the Logic of Nature.
Cinema is Emotion, according to Sam Fuller in Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou, where he was asked to define exactly what is Cinema: “Film is like a battleground. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word . . . Emotion”. Cinema is drama, and dramatising uses the strongest emotional situations.
There are two immediate connections between science and Cinema in regards to Emotion. The first is that the eye responds to movement. It is natural for our eyes to follow movement. It is built-in as a biological response. Movement may equal danger so we are particularly alert to it. The second connection is Emotional movement. A film is an arc of the hero/ine’s emotional status. Each scene is centred on a change in that status, for example success or happiness. The arc of the hero/ine’s emotional status is the string the audience follows. A film is, in ideal formal terms, all emotional movement. It is not ‘about’ emotional movement, but is emotional movement. Cinema is Emotion.
Life is change. Without change, without movement, there is no life. Life, in the biological sense, is a process of change. The Logic of Nature is change, in the large; evolution. Emotion is a process, a process of change. Movement is central to Life. Cinema brings photography to life. Cinema moves and Cinema moves us. Cinema is Emotion.
Emotion has had a bad name with scientists. After all, it is the opposite of Reason, the foundation of science. The growth in interest in Emotion in neuroscience has met with far from unanimous approval, but I would argue that it as an invaluable advance because it brings the ‘subjective’ within the orbit of scientific method – of experiment and testing, as Dehaene has done in relation to Consciousness. A similar thing could be said of Dream Science, which has taken what were considered to be irredeemably personal experiences, dreams, and subjected them to scientific methods and procedures with striking outcomes – not the least the notion of overturning Freud’s speculative claim that the unconscious hides guilty secrets. Dream Science has suggested the truth to be the direct opposite – the unconscious reveals rather than conceals – it is all about revealing and has nothing to do with concealment.
With the study of Emotion in neuroscience, subjectivity is within the gates of scientific method. I argue that is something of a revolution, extending the reach of science into areas previously excluded. If we accept Damasio’s argument that Reason is contingent upon Emotion the autonomy of Reason falls. However, Emotion complementing Reason is a more balanced picture, an expanded view of Reason encompassing subjectivity in a scientifically-disciplined manner. The task remains to chart the dimensions of unconscious Emotion in order to understand more about that complementarity.
Affective Neurobiology (ANB)
This term is not strictly speaking an existing discipline, nor is it a proposal for one. It denotes an approach to the various Matters of Vision, particularly Cinema, that brings together neuroscience and evolutionary biology but with an emphasis upon Emotion, or Affect. The distinction between affective and cognitive is said to originate with Aquinas in the 13th Century. While the affective is concerned with Emotion, the cognitive is often seen as being concerned with thought, and implicitly with the notion that thought occurs in language. The proposition here, as indicated above, is that thought occurs in Vision. Further than that, thought is not seen as occurring in Language at all, but only in Vision. What we think is a process of thought occurring through Language is our second-hand experience of Vision that has been translated into Language. I have made the argument above how much older Vision is than Language, and therefore the notion that Cinema is structured like a Language seems unlikely in evolutionary terms. In fact, the different approaches to tasks shown by the two sides of the brain overlap to a degree with the opposition here between Language and Vision. Language is a tool that tries to focus in, on the right word for example. Vision tends to be a sweep across a visual scene, stopping along the way, but making sense of the scene as a whole. That ‘holistic‘ quality is identified with the approach of the other, right hemisphere.
Neurobiology is established as a discipline, or rather the yoking together of two complementary disciplines. The biology part is strictly evolutionary biology, and most neuroscience takes evolution as the background against which brain functions are assessed. For example in the left-brain/right-brain debate it is striking how most experiments share the epistemological framework of evolution, often with an emphasis on survival as the driver. There is a saying that nothing in biology makes sense outside evolution, and I would extend that to suggest that nothing in neuroscience makes sense outside evolution.
ANB as an approach to Cinema marks a break with traditions based in Language and a move to a proper science-based analysis. Christian Metz posed the question, how scientific can the study of Cinema be?30 He asked that question 50 years ago, and as though neurobiology did not exist. That generation failed to answer the question directly by looking to science, instead turning in effect to Language (Semiotics is seen here as a subset of Linguistics). With the state of neuroscience today I would argue that the study of Cinema can be properly scientific. Neuroscience is perhaps only on the foothills of knowledge about the brain, but the potential can be glimpsed for a substantially better understanding of Vision and Cinema than would ever be even theoretically possible with analysis based in Language. The varieties of ‘Theory‘ that have held the stage since Metz’s question are not theories science would recognise, and have none of the predictive power required of a theory in science. Science would not regard such claims to the status of theory as legitimate.
The key to theories in science is their ability to be tested. Testing consists, in the classic method, of formulating ideas in such a way that experiments can be designed to assess the viability of the theory under laboratory conditions, a notion quite foreign to Continental Philosophy in all its guises. Theories have to be capable of being disproved. This is hardly news in science since Newton, but does not currently apply to any brand of ‘Theory’ in the Arts and Humanities, which all share Kant’s claim for the autonomy of Reason. The aim of this project is to propose the formulation of ideas in just that way – so they can be tested and are capable of support or disproof. The study of Emotion, Consciousness and Dream Science have shown that what was formerly thought to be subjective and not amenable to objective analysis can be approached scientifically. For example, there appear to be some parallels between the way the brain works in REM dreaming and while watching a film. The external referent part of the brain shuts down in both cases. Dream diaries have been used successfully to chart the forms that dreams take and to begin to challenge some of the myths around dreaming. Researchers have found, for example, that the bizarreness of dreams tends to be greatly exaggerated and that the great majority of dreams have a functional structure that is rather more coherent and rational than previously claimed.31 Dreams are seen as having a biological function like everything else, and as a result are brought down to earth, which is one of the great achievements of science – the ongoing