Seeing 1: An erotic philosophy of visual perception: outline and notes
- Introduction: embodied seeing
- 1.what the project is for
- 2.spanning the range between neuroscience and mysticism
- 3.what seeing is like
- I. Theory of seeing
- 1.what I can mean by seeing
- 2.how seeing is done: old-style mechanistic acccount
- 3.how seeing is done: new-style organismic account:
embodied, evolved, embedded, erotic
- a.by means of the world
- i.fields of light
- ii.built in evolution
- iii.embedded development
- b.by means of the whole body
- i.visual search and orientation
- ii.wide nets
- II. Practice of seeing
- 1. plasticity, specialization, reallocation
- 2. suppression and loss of seeing, failures of seeing
- 3. liberation and expansion of seeing
- III. 'Seeing': seeming to see, visual simulation
- IV. Mysticism, clairvoyance and scientific visualization:
seeing used as think and know nonvisible things
- 1. Seeing extended by seeming to see
- 2. seeing and causal understanding
- 3. seeing as reaching and touching
- 4. mythic vision
- 5. clairvoyance
- 6. representational uses of seeing
- 7. scientific visualization
- V. The ethics and politics of seeing
- 1.politics of seeing: seeing for whose benefit
- a.ecological crisis
- b.humanistic crisis
- 2.ethics of seeing: making a loved world
- a.objectivity
- b.bravery
- 3.sensory teachers and activists
- VI. Love eyes: some meanings of visual pleasure and
pain
- 1.pleasure and seeing, love eyes
- 2.liking to see natural form and motion
- 3.structural self-intuition: liking to see what is
seeing.
- 4.self-interactive seeing, creative seeing
- 5.being visible
Seeing 2: Love eyes and landscape photography
- (There weren't notes for this session - we looked at
landscape slides and passed around two photography books, Roni Horn's Another
water and Robert Bergman's A kind of rapture.)
-
Seeing 1. An erotic philosophy of visual perception
philosophy: (Gk. philo+sophos, wisdom-love)
- 'natural philosophy' used to be effort to understand what something
is - now physics, biology, neurobiology, psychology
- ontology: (Gk. ontos+logos, thing-talk) - talks about
what there really is
- epistemology: (Gk. episteme+logos, knowledge-talk) -
talks about what we can know and how we know
- language philosophy: talks about how to talk about something
some derivations:
- optic (Gk. optos, seen)
- erotic (Gk. eros, love)
- seeing (O.E. seon, to see)
- vision (L. videre, to see)
- perceive (L. per+capere, thoroughly to take/seize/grasp)
Introduction: embodied seeing
Huge work to be done: personal, theoretical, political
Compare seeing with hearing:
he speaks of how the sound of the rain, never before accorded much
attention, can now delineate a whole landscape for him, for its sound on
the garden path is different from its sound as it drums on the lawn, or
on the bushes in his garden, or on the fence dividing it from the rain.
'Rain,' he writes, 'has a way of bring out the contours of everything;
instead of an intermittent and thus fragmented world, the steadily falling
rain creates continuity of acoustic experience presents the fullness of
an entire situation all at once gives a sense of perspective and of the
actual relationships of one part of the world to another.' Oliver Sacks
on John Hull's Touching the rock: an experience of blindness, 50
I. Theory of seeing
1. what I mean by seeing
literal not metaphorical - a verb of accomplishment (not seeing you
in my dreams) compare 'visuality'
2. how seeing is done: mechanistic description
- erotic as opposed to mechanistic (c/f materialist)
- erotic as opposed to dualist, rationalist, representional
-
- mistakes in how seeing is spoken of:
- dualistic explanations of seeing, mechanically rather than organically
- eyesight vs vision, sensation and understanding dichotomies
- representationally: in terms of images, 'information transfer,' data
- running together real contact and fantasy
3. how seeing is done: alternative organismic/erotic/embodied description:
embodied a body does it, and only a body originally
for body's purposes of action depends on what kind of a body it is
drugs, color cones - body structure, whole body orientation,
attention - integrated: it's wholistic and yet specific
embedded contact, responsive reorganization, responsive
and conditional evolution, responsive development, responsive and interactive
moment, basic relation of creature and world -embedded in fields of light,
fields of conditions and structures of light in a medium or vacuum
evolved requires world, mutually, formed in response to
to world and vv eyes because light colored plants because eyes,
evolution of plants and animals conjoined
erotic the way perception is erotic:
- penetrative - the world comes into us and its structure changes our
structure - that change is, and gives us, pleasure, pain
- creative for instance color, detail - the beauty created
not of a picture, but literally of a world for oneself, for action -
4. slow fine seeing - the new visual system
simultaneous structures seeing at many scales and for many purposes
at the same time, relatively con and
seeing for purposes of motion, action time, place killing,
mating two branches, seeing motion, and seeing for purposes of moving
old system made for interception of animal and object in terrain
mainly for movement of whole bodies
seeing for purposes of care - objects as such two branches
form and color memory, naming a denser more fine-grained
central version of the other - like finer-scale touch for hand and mouth
they are intensively interconnected
hormones: estrogen, oxytocin the bonding chemical, childbirth
the day after sex adolescence and vision
enhancement of color vision, and of eidetic visual perception and memory
with "sensory-limbic hyperconnection"
"I saw everything, as if projected on the paper, and just drew
the outlines I saw." "with all this there went a sort of trembling,
eager emotion, and a strange nostalgia."
He could smell their emotions. "I went into the clinic, I sniffed
like a dog, and in that sniff recognized, before seeing them, the twenty
patients who were there. Each had a smell-face."
"A world overwhelming in immediate significance." D Bear,
1979, Cortex 15:357-84.
Seventeen magazine (thank you Rhonda)
Self-imaging is not just buying into male images. It's not just worrying
about whether someone will love us, although that's there. It's not just
about being seen, it is also about seeing. Often there is a very strong
pure visuality in it.
In adolescence we suddenly see much more than we did we see
ourselves and we see other people. Women particularly are wired to see
people in extraordinary detail. There is an aspect of girls' preoccupation
with appearance that is highly aesthetic it's practice in the experience
of seeing. When there isn't a better visual culture they can use to develop
that great female power, girls exercise fashion/image study on themselves
and their friends. One of the things we were studying in Seventeen
was visuality itself. If we understand it this way, we are in a better
position to respect and foster the adolescent girl's interest in seeing,
and to understand its thwarted progress in ourselves.
5. fast blind seeing and logical intelligence
Tara Sullivan on Alexander method and Bates method:
"I can experience an openness now that I didn't know how to access
before."
"I've now got a grasp of many things for the first time in my life:
left and right, spatial relations, patterns and designs, and a perception
of three-dimensionality that has always eluded me. I'm learning to understand
how things are put together, and to see depth in things that previously
I could only understand as flat."
"The experience of seeing in depth transcends the purely visual
it organizes the system in a way that creates an enormous sense of
understanding, well-being and compassion. I find that communicating in
depth adds a layer of comprehension which far exceeds anything I've experienced
in terms of sheer presence mine and that of others. The meaning leads
and the words just follow, effortlessly."
VI. Love eyes
1.Pleasure and seeing, love eyes
Liking to see natural form and motion - grass, clouds, northern
light, snow on road, water motion sand, Josie's story
2.Love eyes and trance - adoration puts a chemical aerial into
the brain - like a full tree rather than a skimpy tree a wide intelligence
hidden in branchy places -
3.A gaze that touches well
Do the eyes touch? how do we feel eyes on the back of our head? Some
people do, some don't. More likely with emotion. Is it like radar? A sense
separate from vision.
Don and Jane
He said about Jane, that she was one of two women in his life who
had looked at him. He remembered a moment when he'd come on her holding
Richard in the air looking into his face. Her breasts were pulled up because
her arms were raised. She was looking at her little boy as if he was .
'Delicious,' I suggest. 'Yes, delicious,' he says. He saw it and felt,
Oh I could do with some of that.
Spiritual midwifery the pink baby
4.Being visible what it means to be beautiful, to worry
about being beautiful or ugly
Visuality and a crucifixion between adoration and distain.
What makes beauty - some guesses more coherent feeling
something about consciousness conscious proprioception transformation
to love woman's hormones being willing to be beautiful, to give it
being in conflict about having to deal with the effects "let
longing stretch you"
seeing ugliness or insufficiency in other people you have to be
willing but it's difficult - there's a way it's projective, there's a way
it's diagnostic
V. The ethics and politics of seeing
Ethics - seeing truthfully, increasing the scope of the real.
Co-creation of beauty, human creation. It is not an image, it is a vision.
It is private but has consequences in action.
Politics seeing for whose benefit, the enemies of seeing
"The ecological crisis ... a crisis in perception; we are
not truly seeing, hearing, tasting, or consequently feeling where we are...
In fundamental terms, our evolutionary challenge is a matter of perceptual
development" Laura Sewall 246-7
ecological degradation and degradation of perception,
industrialized surroundings will form vision - being perceptually formed
by nothing but structures "determined and blindly delivered by the
controlling interests of commerce" Sewall 68 - depthless artifacts
Seeing bibliography
Cognitive science of visual perception
Gibson J 1979 The ecological approach to visual perception
Houghton Mifflin
Livingstone Margaret 2002 Vision and art: the biology
of seeing Harry Abrams
Rizzolatti G et al 1997 The space around us, Science
277:190-191
Sacks Oliver 2003 The mind's eye: what the blind see New
Yorker July 28, 48-59
Visual imagining
Epp E Brain and imagining, www.sfu.ca/~elfreda/theory/
Le Guin Ursula 1982 The diary of the rose, in The compass
rose: short stories Harper and Row
Smalley D 1992 The listening imagination, in The companion
to contemporary musical thought, vol 1, J Paynter et al ed, 514-554
Routledge
Seeing and pictures, pictorial knowing
Gibson J 1954/1982 A theory of pictorial perception, republished
in Reasons for realism: selected essays of James J Gibson, ed E
Reed and R Jones Lawrence Erlbaum
Gibson J 1970 The information available in pictures, Leonardo
4:27
Kracauer S 1960 Theory of film Oxford
Edgerton S 1991 The heritage of Giotto's geometry:
art and science on the eve of the scientific revolution Cornell University
Ferguson E 1977 The mind's eye: non-verbal thought
in technology, Science 197:827-836
Stafford Barbara 1991 Body criticism: imaging the unseen
in Enlightenment art and medicine MIT
Stafford Barbara 1996 Good looking: essays on the virtue
of images MIT
Summers D 1990 The judgment of sense: Renaissance naturalism
and the rise of aesthetics Cambridge
Wright R 1990 Computer graphics as allegorical knowledge:
electronic imagery in the sciences, Digital image, digital cinema, Leonardo
supplement Pergamon
Zeki S 1999 Inner vision: an exploration of art and
the brain Oxford
Knowing by seeing, vision as connection
Berger John 2002 Steps towards a small theory of the visible,
in The shape of a pocket Pantheon
Dijkstra Bram 1998 Georgia O'Keefe and the eros of
place Princeton
Keller Evelyn 1983 A feeling for the organism Yale
Milner Marion / Joanna Field 1986 A life of one's own Virago Press
Milner Marion / Joanna Field 1990 On
not being able to paint International Universities Press
Sewall Laura 1999 Sight and sensibility: the ecopsychology
of perception Jeremy P.Tarcher/Putnam
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