Читать книгу The Matter of Vision - Peter Wyeth - Страница 25

• The key to understanding Cinema is through a scientific analysis of Vision, the Automatic and Emotion.

• Vision is the prime sense, but its extraordinary depth, breadth and wisdom has been the subject of a constant campaign of denigration by the ideology of Language: logocentrism.

• The Automatic is the term proposed for the ‘un-conscious’, flagging up how the ideology of Consciousness has used Language to reduce the importance science now shows it has.

• Emotion is seen as the driving force of the brain, the result of the perception, by the body/brain system, of a potential threat to survival.

• Moving pictures engage our emotions as movement is registered by the eye, for example, as a potential survival threat.

• All is movement. Cinema is movement. Photography is stasis. Stasis is death. Movement is life.

• Cinema is Emotion, as Godard had Sam Fuller declare in Pierrot Le Fou.

• Emotion has moved from the irredeemably subjective to the objective realm, as part of a revolution in scientific method that has also been successfully applied to consciousness and dream-science.

• The emphasis upon the affective, that is upon emotion, is the starting-point of this analysis of Cinema, in contrast to the cognitive with its implicit emphasis on Language and Thought.

• This project in one sense looks back to David Hume, who declared in 1739 that Reason is and must always be under the control of Emotion.

• Reason is a noble ambition of man, but inevitably becomes rationalisation rather than pure Reason. Reason is contingent upon Emotion: you can have Emotion without Reason, but not Reason without Emotion.

• Consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the operations of the brain, every subjective experience is produced by those operations and by no other element, and is now accessible through laboratory experiment able to distinguish the conscious from the Automatic in great detail.

• Consciousness is an effect not a cause, an epiphenomenon of brain function, whereas the Automatic (unconscious) processes vastly more information and arguably directs consciousness to where its minute resources may be best used in the cause of survival (and then reproduction).

• Consciousness rationalises the few stimuli it can manage as an aid to survival strategy – hence narrative as the native medium of the brain.

• Narrative is the native medium of Cinema as it is the native medium of the brain: it is a survival strategy to make sense of the handful of stimuli consciousness can manipulate at any one time. A story links diverse stimuli from the environment to make sense of them in the cause of survival.

• Language opposes itself to Vision, and constantly demotes and denigrates it, while in reality Vision is at least a million times more powerful in numbers, and similarly superior in depth, breadth and wisdom – more intelligent as it has far greater resources at its disposal.

• Affective Neurobiology is an approach that starts from the primacy of Emotion rather than the cognitive, and emphasises the fundamental base of neuroscience in the historicity of evolution.

• The combination of contemporary neuroscience and evolutionary biology in the tradition of Darwin now offers material historical examples of how thoroughly science can illuminate the way Cinema works in the brain.

• Science is now capable of an understanding of Cinema qualitatively deeper than any other analytical framework (An Expansive Materialism).

• Science and art can be reunited as neurobiology based in emotion has the capacity for a comprehensive and expansive understanding of art that qualitatively exceeds any other framework, and in particular, that of the dominant status-quo based in Language.

• The passage from science to interpretation necessarily crosses into the realm of theory and philosophy.

• This project proposes a return to Bacon’s aspiration to scientific method for philosophy, tracing a tradition from Bacon via Newton and Hume that develops scientific method, in particular following Hume in subjecting Reason to Emotion and turning the subjective into raw data for objective analysis, as in Dehaene on Consciousness, LeDoux on Emotion and in Dream Science.

• The last fifty years of ‘Film Theory’ has been a dead-end, unscientific and merely rhetorical instead of properly scientific.

• The philosophical elements behind Film Theory are derived from ‘Continental Philosophy’ which itself took a fatal wrong turn with Kant’s aim of a certain autonomy for Reason. As Hume rightly put it before Kant, Reason is and must always be at the service of the passions.

3From the time of the Industrial Revolution.

4The Automatic is the term I suggest as a replacement for the negative term, the unconscious, p. 10. See Commentaries for further discussion.

5‘Cultural’ is used here in a Darwinian sense discussed later.

6See ‘Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Culture’, Martin Jay, University of California Press, 1999.

7By Kupfmuller, an Information Theorist – quoted in Norretranders op. cit., p. 143.

8Dietrich Trinker, also quoted in Norretranders.

9Quoted in Norretranders, op. cit., Ch.6 ‘The Bandwith of Consciousness’, p. 124, and Part III ‘Consciousness’, p. 211.

10The term used by Simon Raggett see: www.quantum-mind.co.uk

11Dehaene, 2014, details extensively the work of the unconscious but asserts that Consciousness is like an executive choosing from vast amounts of material prepared for its decision by the unconscious, whereas my sense is that Consciousness is the passive partner, presented with the choices for attention by the Automatic and reporting back on them to the Automatic in a constant feedback loop.

12From Norretranders, op. cit., Ch 6 in general, pp. 143–144 in particular

13Damasio, Descartes’ Error, Quill, New York, 1998.

14A point well-made by Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain, Viking, New York, 2014, pp. 12, 41–43.

15While we do not perhaps have to practice Vision as we do Language, as a technical facility, that is distinct from whether we learn from Vision – which evolutionary logic suggests is primary – which things are food, which might suggest danger, which are poisonous etc. Its capacities evolved for survival, but exaptation has made that enormous capacity for information available for Cinema, as it were. See Gould, S.J.; Vrba, E.S. (1982). “Exaptation – a missing term in the science of form”, Paleobiology 8 (1): 4–15.

16See ‘Cinema and Language’ below, p. 24.

17Andrew Parker - In the Blink of an Eye, Simon & Schuster, London, (2003).

18Quoted in Norretranders op. cit., p. 193.

19According to Bennett and Hacker’s 480 page survey, The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, Wiley-Blackwell, London, 2003, it is not sensible to talk of the brain separate from man, but their whole comprehensive survey is based on a fragment from Wittgenstein to that effect, which I admire on principle as eccentric, but not in practice as creating more problems than it solves, and to no effect, an echo of a current view of their sponsor.

20See p. 106 for Darwin’s List.

21Those born blind cannot think in Vision, but as it has been suggested that the brain provides optional overlapping systems where sight is not available, it may be possible that for the blind thought occurs through those systems.

22Christian Keysers, The Empathic Brain, Social Brain Press, 2011.

23The area beyond consciousness includes the autonomic, reflex, homeostasis, and their status would need to be clarified as part of a greater understanding of the terrain of the ‘Automatic’.

24See Dehaene op. cit. for an account of such experiments since the 1990s. The ‘threshold’ method his laboratory uses would perhaps require some development to deal with the issues of Cinema discussed in this book.

25Hasson et al., Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film, Projections, Vol 2, Issue 1, Summer 2008, pp. 1–26.

26The issue of developing experimental methods to analyse unconscious activity from films is one to which I hope to return.

27While the primary mention in the book is of Survival, it is implicit that survival for reproduction is the order of play.

28In 9 to 5 (1980), Screenplay: Patricia Resnick & Colin Higgins.

29Damasio, Descartes’ Error, Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, op. cit.

30Metz: ‘Le cinéma: langue ou langage?’, 1964, Volume 4, No 4, pp. 52–90.

31‘dreams are most often reasonable simulations of waking life that contain occasional unusual features in terms of settings, characters, or activities (Dorus et al., 1971; Foulkes, 1985; Hall & Van de Castle, 1966; Snyder, 1970)’ in Domhoff, G. W. (2005). Refocusing the neurocognitive approach to dreams: A critique of the Hobson versus Solms debate. Dreaming, 15, 3–20.

32See the later discussion, in On Method, about the boundaries between the physical and the metaphysical.

33Description taken from Dehaene p. 94 op. cit.

34These experiments have become almost apocryphal in film-study, and represent an early interest in linking science to Cinema in the optimistic period after the Russian Revolution. They are often regarded as establishing editing as a unique element of the new medium, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_Effect

35For the Gazzaniga experiment see p. 281 in Norretranders op cit.

36It is worth distinguishing here between the ‘natural’ skills of Vision technically, as it were, and the ‘cultural’ evolutionary learning involved in their use, such as being able to distinguish between a mushroom that tastes wonderful and one that will kill you.

37Christian Metz, Film Language, University of Chicago press, Chicago, 1990.

38Jacques Lacan, the leading figure in psycho-analysis in France at the rise of Film Theory. The French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene quotes his colleague Lionel Naccache to the effect that “the unconscious is not structured like a language but as a decaying exponential” – indicating the decay of unconscious memory that does not enter consciousness. See p 104 ‘Consciousness and the Brain. S Dehaene, Viking, New York, 2014, also see Commentaries on ‘Consciousness and the Unconscious’.

39See Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, Vintage, New York, 1993, commenting on philosophy.

40see Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error, op. cit.

41Schopenhauer’s view of Hegel’s philosophy.

42See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes – The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought, op. cit.

43See section on Emotion (p. 17) for an operational definition from Joseph LeDoux. Since this section was written I read Stanislas Dehaene on Consciousness, and he applies a similar philosophy to the treatment of subjective reports as raw data which, together with the approach of Dream-Science to dreams creates a triple confirmation of this revolution in scientific method.

44Quoted in Downcast Eyes, Martin Jay. op. cit.

45Richard Dawkins’ comment on Lacan’s discussion of science: ‘the author of this stuff is a fake’, in a review of Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont (1988) Intellectual Impostures, London, Profile Books.

46If that isn’t false-memory syndrome it was a wry comment on a social occasion rather than a public pronouncement.

47For those born blind, again it is suggested that the brain provides alternative circuits for the processing of Vision which the sighted also possess but become relied upon exclusively by those without sight.

48The sense intended here is that evolution has developed the brain’s functions and thus those functions are always the product of evolutionary pressures.

49See Commentaries section on ‘Art & Science’ p. 127 for discussion of these developments that help to suggest the depth of analysis ANB can bring to an understanding of Cinema.

50Intelligent in the sense of providing more and better-quality analytical information.