Читать книгу The Matter of Vision - Peter Wyeth - Страница 13

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 process of replacing myth with experimentally-tested fact.

Dream diaries could perhaps form one example of how viewers’ responses to films could provide the material with which to start a scientific approach to Cinema. The close study of individual films, as in my little experiment with The Searchers, begins to yield up their complex content. It would be possible to analyse the development of the script, its range of references, the ‘exformation’ that was discarded in its writing, all as part of a reclamation of the ‘unconscious’ of a film, an archive of the information it contains. The task is then to devise experiments that begin to untangle the conscious from the Automatic. That is no easy task but I have a sense that the way forward is through the same issues of Survival, Evolution and Emotion. I noticed in teaching that we only take in what has emotional significance for us. Without that, information doesn’t stick. In that sense knowledge seems always to be concrete. Abstract ideas tend to float away, but if there is something that attaches us to an idea, an identification of some sort, then we are much more likely to remember it. As with the study of Emotion, the combination of being able to track brain activity through imaging, like fMRI, and the constant relating of issues back to evolution, to Survival, perhaps offers a route to begin to define what information goes in Automatically and what Consciously. Such a process could also increase our understanding of how the brain works, shifting the ground of the study of Cinema to a collaboration with science. From the current introverted nature of academic study such a future seems far away, but it also seems to me to offer far greater rigour and a real contribution to society, with the considerable side-benefit of bridging the gap between the Two Cultures, bringing Art & Science back together, after a separation often seen as going back to the Eighteenth Century.

The approach in this project is a materialist one in which it is argued that everything has a solely physical explanation.³² It is a materialism of a scientific rather than Marxist character. Marxism borrowed materialism from science in a similar sleight of hand to the variants of Theory in the late twentieth-century, but Marx turned Hegel upside down, which is not quite the same as rejecting it completely. The inheritance of German Idealism is an antithetical tradition to the empiricism of Newton, Locke and Hume. I would suggest that the proper inclusion of Hume’s ‘passions’, Emotion, in the paradigm of scientific method, offers a revitalised and extended, a New Empiricism, an Expansive Materialism with explanatory powers exceeding any other framework.

Science is often accused of reductionism. There is an irony in that it is reductionism as a method that has facilitated the achievements of science. Scientific method involves identifying key variables in order to make predictions about cause and effect. The accusation is that in doing a similar thing to analyse art, science applies a coarse mesh that fails to capture the subtleties of artistic expression. My contention here is that neurobiology with an affective emphasis marks an epistemological advance from the limitations of classical scientific method that is so marked that the potential for a science of art, a science of culture (using an evolutionary definition of culture) is transformed.