The Matter of Vision. Peter Wyeth
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and that of science are not coterminous, the result in many cases has been that tumbling ground for whimsies William James described, the ‘Fantastical learning’ decried by Bacon. The failure to engage with science would seem to be a significant intellectual failure, virtually a dereliction of duty, and hardly credible seen from the outside. The contrary fact is that most scientists appear to regard ‘post-modern’ varieties of philosophy at best as utterly ineffectual, at worst as a downright fake, as in Richard Dawkins view of Lacan,45 the psycho-analyst.
As one educated in the Humanities and working in the Arts, broadly defined, I shared that guilt. It was only in realising how helpless Film Theory was at providing a fundamental account of Vision that I turned to science. Over the course of this project I have developed enormous respect for the scientists whose patient and rigorous work suggested certain parallels with my own instincts about Cinema, and that amplified my reservations about Film Theory to the point where it appears to me to be essentially idealist rhetoric, serving no purpose external to itself, academic in the worst sense of the term, and quite unwilling and unable to answer questions of any wider relevance than its internal concerns. As I recall Colin McCabe once asked ‘A theory of what, exactly?’.46
Viewed from my perspective on science, it seems a terrible waste of intellectual effort to see so much scholarship spent in the fruitless pursuit of the Castles in the Air that Film Theory has left as its inheritance. If that effort had instead been turned towards the formulation of ideas capable of being tested and with the goal, for example, of contributing to knowledge about how the brain works, using Cinema as a concrete cultural instance, a remarkable archive with which to further our understanding of the relationship between Vision, the brain and Cinema, that would seem to be far more worthwhile, a substantial contrast to the culture and achievements of what has gone before.
The advances in the areas into which I have delved, namely neuroscience and evolutionary biology, seem to hold out not just a real understanding of Vision and with it Cinema, and the potential for making a constructive contribution to greater understanding of how the brain works, but also the possibility of a proper basis for a Science of Culture, that would finally bring back together Art & Science through a depth of analysis quite simply unthinkable with Language-based analysis.
Vision, Emotion, Cinema: Summary
Vision:
Of the trinity of Language, Consciousness and Reason, the most grievous effects can be laid at the door of the Word, and the most deleterious of those is the reduction of Vision.
Vision is King, as everything we really know we see. Up to three-quarters of words describe Vision or sound. The wisdom of Vision is our only wisdom. We see so much more than we are aware of. The Tragedy of Vision is that we do not realise the complexity and intelligence of what it tells us. This project aims to turn the tables upon the Word and to restore Vision to its pre-eminence.
The opposition is also set between Consciousness and Reason on the one hand, and the Automatic and Emotion on the other. Consciousness is normally opposed in Language to the Un-Conscious, implicitly denying the latter its larger role in the workings of the brain. To remedy that sleight of hand, it is proposed to introduce the term The Automatic to denote those areas of operation of the brain that are beyond the resources of Consciousness. Likewise, Man’s noble aspiration to Reason has a tendency to both obscure his subjectivity and deny the importance of Emotion in the workings of the brain. The Matter of Vision is Emotion.
Emotion:
Emotion is the heart of the matter. The importance of Emotion is such that the proposition put forward is that the brain is Emotion. Emotion is created as a response to the body/brain system sensing a threat to Survival (however distant or indirect, it is always linked). Survival is the prime engine of Evolution. Vision evolved as the most efficient medium for the identification of threats to survival. Emotion is a matter of survival.
Emotion has entered the paradigm of scientific method, a change so substantial as to constitute a New Scientific Method with Reason finally holding hands with Emotion. In neuroscience and evolutionary biology, Emotion has come to the fore, and together these three elements constitute the approach outlined here: Affective Neurobiology.
In contrast to the emphasis on the affective, cognitive approaches are in thrall to the word. Cognition is predicated upon thought. Thought is conceived as occurring mainly within Language. The proposition here is that thought does not occur in Language, but in Vision, and indeed only in Vision.47 Apprehension of the Matter of Vision is only possible through Emotion – the affective. Affective Neurobiology starts from the perspective of Emotion and traces its operations through neuroscience and biology, through the operations of the brain and evolution, seen as inextricably linked, working hand-in-hand.48
Cinema:
Cinema is, in a word, Emotion. Since its inception, analysis of Cinema has been reduced to the word. The restoration of Vision is necessary for a proper understanding of Cinema. Cinema is a Matter of Vision.
Vision, the Automatic and Emotion complement our understanding of the world as they enhance our understanding of the brain, and can transcend the limitations that the ideologies of Language, Consciousness and Reason have imposed. The laboratory in which these conceptions can be tested is a complex cultural artefact whose paths to nature can be traced – Cinema.
In bringing science to bear upon art a route may be glimpsed that overcomes the gap between Art and Science. The two cultures become one. Art can only be fully understood through science.
Where the word inevitably reduces art, science has the potential to reveal its real complexity. For example, neuroscientists have found parallels between brain function and expressive techniques like metaphor and narrative.49 Where science was once an unwieldy tool to unlock the subtleties of art, progress in neurobiology – and in particular the inclusion of Emotion within scientific method – has transformed its potential for a reach far deeper and fundamentally more intelligent50 than the word.
An expansive materialism is in sight that can offer a deeper analysis of a work of art than anything that has gone before. Scientific method, revolutionised by the inclusion of Emotion in neuroscience, twinned with evolutionary biology, forms the basis of a potential Science of Culture. That notion of culture is itself biological, founded on the twin pillars of survival and reproduction, the basis of evolution, the Logic of Nature.
The Matter of Vision and Philosophy
The task this project set itself, many years ago, was to try to understand the real basis of the power of Cinema. The reason the task was set that nowhere within the prevailing framework of Film Theory was there anything remotely sufficient to that task, which seemed to me to be among the first questions to be answered about Cinema.
The two instincts that set me off on this pursuit were that Cinema was much more powerful than it was given credit for, even by its strongest adherents, and that much of that strength could be accounted for by the notion that we take in much more unconsciously from Cinema than consciously, and therein lay its secret power.
That led me to look at Vision, the unconscious – for which I propose the positive and independent term, the Automatic, and Emotion – which was the one-word definition of Cinema put forward by Sam Fuller in Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou.
Against that trio I concluded were ranged Language, and its ideology of Logocentrism, Consciousness, with the common view that it was the peak of being human, and Reason, which had the enormous successes of science to its credit, and the gradual encroachment upon superstition and irrationality that Bacon set as its task in the late medieval period, reaching a ferment in the Enlightenment.
In terms of philosophy, there is a view that nothing of importance has been said since the 18th Century,