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Who says that eyes can only see?
Who says seeing only happens with the eyes? was the rhetorical
question I asked when I described an effect of a canvas by Wapke Feenstra
that, when I saw it, presented itself more physically than visually
to me(1).
Seeing, the question implicated, is a multi-levelled activity. One
senses visual presence as much as one optically perceives it, and
one has to move around some visible thing, turn ones back to
it, feel the space around it, to be able to SEE it properly. Tactility
and kinaesthetics, and even hearing or smelling may be required for
an apt vision. There is another side to this question, however, that
I would like to develop here. Just as sight involves more senses than
the optical alone, likewise the eyes have more sensorial capacities
than vision in the narrow sense of the word. But first I would like
to do something that might appear illogical, and defend pure visuality
not for its own sake, but in order to argue for artificial
environments and protective settings.
In her article What did you see? Experimental psychologys
rich reduction of visual perception, Ruth Benschop describes
a form of seeing that indeed only happens with the eyes(2).
In the 1960s, cognitive psychology struggled with the problem that
experimental subjects more easily recognised the visual forms of letters
when they had encountered those letters in the context of a word they
knew, rather than in the context of a nonsensical sequence of letters
or without any context at all. In other words: before the subjects
had SEEN the letters, they had already interpreted them. This was
a problem for those psychologists who maintained that one first sees
and only then understands forms. So they devised an ingenious experiment
that would allow them to catch visual perception in its pure form,
uncontaminated with other, higher cognitive processes.
With the help of a tachistoscope, a box-like instrument that presents
visual stimuli very briefly and exactly at the same point each time,
they tried to sever the visual from other forms of perception and
recognition.
Benschop describes the instrument almost as a prison for the subjects
gaze. The subject has to put his face against a face-piece against
one side of the box with openings to look inside. The only things
that count are his eyes on the one side and the stimuli on the other
side. The subject should not use his hands, or think, or remember,
he should not move and even his eyes are immobilised. He has to get
familiar with the procedure, in order to get used to the repetitiveness
of the experiment, as he may not be distracted or fall asleep. So
before the real experiments are conducted, subjects are trained to
behave in the appropriate way. Pure visual perception, therefore,
is only to be got at in a very sophisticated experimental
endeavour in which experimenter, apparatus and subject are closely
attuned to each others performance.
One would expect that Benschop would harshly criticise this perception
in the lab that so little resembles perception in the
wild. Interestingly enough, she describes the pure visuality
that is so obtained as a fragile and exotic creature, unable to survive
outside the boundaries of the laboratory experiment, yet worthwhile
nonetheless. A usual criticism of cognitive psychology is that its
experiments produce artificial and static data on cognition and perception
that reduce the rich and always developing nature of cognitive processes
in real life. Benschop however tries to show that perception in the
lab is also rich and in the making, as it involves a long
trajectory of training, adjustment and orchestration. Her description
of the experimental setting and procedure almost reads as if it were
a form of installation art: the creation of a spatial and temporal
setting aiming at soliciting a special form of spectatorial behaviour
and experience.
We might be tempted to transfer Benschops fascination for this
artificial biotope creating such exotic perceptual processes to that
other artificial environment: the white cube. Because what form of
perception is natural? What kind of vision is not cultivated? Even
if seeing most of the time does not happen with the eyes alone, a
seeing that does is not necessarily to be discounted on the ground
of its being technologically, or socially, or culturally induced.
And what from one point of view might be criticised as a constraining
and manipulative visual environment, might be considered as a protective
setting from another perspective. Protective of what? Of ephemeral
or fragile perceptual varieties for instance. Or of unexpected insights
in what vision may consist of, much needed in a time in which the
cultural hegemony of vision is often attacked for inducing reductive
and instrumental forms of thought. Vision, however, can be richer
and emotionally and ethically more involved than is usually supposed.
Just as a protective setting might be required to catch
pure visuality uncontaminated with other cognitive processes, it might
be necessary to build some fences around a space in which the other-than-visual
components of visuality will be able to flourish. Vivian Sobchack
has beautifully described how, before she consciously understood the
opening shots of the movie The Piano, her fingers knew
that she was looking at a images of a human hand(3).
Sobchack argues that seeing is synaesthetical and coenaesthical: even
as we only use our eyes, when we look at a film, in some way all our
other senses are invoked as well (synaesthetics) and the totality
of our bodily condition is involved (coenaesthetics). In a more than
figurative way we can taste the pork noodles in Tampopo,
or smell garlic when we see it sliced in GoodFellas, or
feel the heaviness of the piano dragged along the shore in The
Piano. We are hardly aware of this embodied and multi-sensorial
nature of seeing, except when it is emphatically brought home to us
mainly because we often ascribe it to a process of mental association
based on the conscious recognition of the images we see. But what
Sobchack describes is a pre-reflective, although reflexive, bodily
intelligence, that just like pure perception might be got at
only in specific, highly unnatural circumstances - like
an art exhibition. In daily life we do not take the time to interrogate
our responses to what we see or to question the nature of our perceptions
for instance because we usually know what we are seeing. Moving
around in an installation or exhibition space, we know that something
more is asked: to respond to the perceptual or textual or spatial
clues that are offered and to feel the nature of our responses. The
insights that such an endeavour may produce, could be very helpful
when it comes to understanding our complicated relations to the new
screen based images of cyberspace.
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