The current discussion topic on this forum centres on the capacity of neurological models to deal with artistic problems and potentials. Contributors include Dr. Ed Krčma (History of Art, University College Cork), Prof. James Elkins (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Mr. John Paul McMahon (PhD candidate, History of Art, University College Cork) and Dr. Joel Walmsley (Department of Philosophy, University College Cork).
You can post a comment by clicking on 'links to this post' below, this will open up to a link inviting you to 'post a comment', click on this link to add your comment in the dialogue box, click the 'publish your comment' tab to add your comment to this thread.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
11 comments:
Hi,
Just to let everyone know I'd be happy to chat about the "visual practices across the university" project or book or exhibition, and also the UW class... those are all open questions, everywhere in the world.
Cheers,
Jim Elkins
Unfortunately, the existence of different concepts of the visual, or the words we use for them, and there being made public (whatever that would be) does not seem to be of primary motivation when one reduces difference to an act of constant sameness. Diversity, in an absolute way far from richness, is being reduced by most disciplines to a fetish for the pursuit of difference per se, which to my mind, is not difference at all, but the university pretending to be cosmopolitan, which it is not.
JP,
Hi, nice to hear from you. Is that two different things? In the first sentence, are you talking about the unhelpful uniformity of "visuality" as in "visual practices across the university," or in "visual studies"? And in the second sentence, are you talking about the way that the idea of difference is often unproductive (fetishized, ineffective)? Sorry, James invited me to post something, and I'm out of the loop of this conversation.
Thanks Jim and Jp for your posts,
I am posting a link to Jim's 'visual practices across the university' as background information visit http://www.jameselkins.com/Texts/visual-literacy-schedule.pdf. Eye and Mind has had two sessions so far. The forum is drawn from colleagues across the disciplines and outside the educational institution including members who contributed to Cork Caucus in 2005. We are hoping that this blog might generate discussion around the sessions. My initial questions are invitations to think about visuality in a broad context: each field of activity has a different understanding of visuality, how can we collectively benefit from making public our diverse disciplinary understandings of the visual? Can this ever lead to shared understandings? Focusing on Liam's comment: how true is it to say if we control representation we control people?
Many thanks,
James
Are problems associated with different forms of representation (textual and visual) through different structural means (for example, narration) emerging as possible themes? I have posted a link to an essay by James Elkins on the subject of time and narrative under ‘Links’ on the side bar.
Hi all,
Hello from Cork Jim, and many thanks for getting involved with Eye and Mind.
I'd like to introduce one issue regarding visuality that I feel has important stakes here. This has to do with the emerging field of 'Neuro-aesthetics.' I'd be interested to discuss the capacity of neurological models to deal with artistic problems and potentials, and the kinds of productive contact and/or disconnection that occur when the artist is proposed as a kind of neuroscientist - an experimenter seeking to explore the capacities of the brain with regards visual perception.
There seems to me to be a desire here to 'ground' the artist's work in a measurable place – observations of the patterns of neuronal 'firings’ apparently enabling us to directly 'see what art does' as it is received by the brain. This has the advantage of engaging with the aesthetic effects of paintings, for example - how different parts of the brain respond to different formal properties (lines, colours, proportions, etc). This might be a useful counter to the dominance of what has been described as the ‘semiotic turn’ taken by the humanities over the last few decades, where problems of aesthetics have been relegated in discussions of art, and theorists have been more interested in discussing art’s interventions within a ‘discursive’ field. But what is the status of this ‘rediscovery’ of aesthetics by neuroscience? And, more to the point with regards this current discussion, what model of ‘visuality’ is being proposed by this model?
Slovoj Žižek has argued that there is a ‘parallax gap’ here – an unbridgeable divide in that we cannot really accept that what thought and perception IS is reducible to this ‘stupid’ grey lump of matter (his word!). And indeed, how might a neuro-aesthetic model of vision deal with questions of desire in vision (psychoanalysis), or indeed the ‘global sense’ that, according to Merleau-Ponty, was fundamental to embodied perceptual experience - that visual perception cannot be divorced from the body as it moves, feels and ‘prospects’ in the world (phenomenology). Perhaps an even bigger question would be to address the danger of trivializing artistic endeavour as exploring a particular physiological mechanism, just as a scientist might but with less verifiable means (is this a kind of colonization of art's potential by science, an admittance of art's relevance only on science's terms?). In the case of Mondrian, for example, whose extraordinarily sustained engagement with a massively reduced formal means (horizontal and vertical lines, black, white and the primary colours) might seem to lend itself to the analysis of discrete brain functions, it would surely be a debilitating reduction to divorce that from his wider social, political and philosophical project. That said, we clearly do need to attend to the aesthetic effects that the encounter with the paintings themselves, but how far are those effects containable within a system of neurological firings, and are those effects really punctual?
I’ll stop now – where’s a cognitive scientist when you need one!?
Ed.
Ed,
There has indeed been a lot of talk recently about neuroaesthetics, especially now that some very productive people--John Onians, David Freedberg, Ladislav Kesner, Barbara Stafford--are engaged with it. Because there are so many questions here, let me reply by recounting something I experienced a couple of years ago. I sat in on one of John Onians's seminars in East Anglia. The subject was an essay on Mondrian by a scientist (I forget his name, but you could get it from John). The essay described how Mondrian's development mirrored the processing of images in the visual cortex. At the end of the seminar, I said something like, "This is interesting, but it does not make contact with the reasons Mondrian has been valued in art history." (That is what you call the "parallax" problem, but I would prefer to associate it with Douglas Hofstadter and others, who believe a more precise explanation simply is better no matter where it comes from. Zizek is unhelpful on this, I think, and his idea of parallax has been criticized by Fred Jameson.) Anyway, John said something very striking in reply: "That may be true now, but wait twenty-five years, and they--the sciences--will own explanation."
Ed wrote:
"Where’s a cognitive scientist when you need one!?"
Well here's one (sort of) -- Joel here, in Philosophy at UCC.
It seems to me that the possibility of a neurology of aesthetics is interesting, but perhaps not terribly surprising.
I mean this in the sense that of course there must *be* a neurology of aesthetics, in just the same way as there must be a neurology of mathematics, or of ethics or or mysticism or whatever. Human beings are creatures that "do" art, methematics, ethics and mysticism, and insofar as these are cognitive (and bodily) activities, they must be mediated by some kind of neural function. But this is perhaps much less interesting that the epistemology or semantics of aesthetics (or of mathematics or ethics or mysticism).
I think Ed's concern is dead right -- exclusive focus on the neurology of aesthetics runs the risk of being overly reductionistic. There's a danger of taking a conceptual step too far and ending with a kind of "neural phrenology" as if these domains of interest are nothing over and above the bumps in the brain that happen to process them.
Note: here I'm not advocating a dualistic account of mentality (that's why I said that it's not at all surprising that there is a neurology of aesthetic experience). Rather, my concern would be that a reductionistic neurology of aesthetics runs the risk of ignoring the dimension of significance that seems to be important for domains such as aesthetics.
I guess this is paradigmatic of the much more general "explanatory gap." Insofar as neurology concerns itself with objective, third-personal, public data, and aesthetic experience involves (at least in part) subjective, first-personal and private phenomena, reconciling these diametrically opposed (yet fundamentally intertwined) aspects is notoriously difficult.
In response to Jim, yes, that's two different things: the first is the uniformity of the visual in the university (we teach students to be the same, not different), and the second, yes, difference is a fetish (such as the discussion on neuro-science) - are we looking for the truth or merely ways to conceptualize art practice? The neuro-science model is useful as long as it acknowledges itself as a 'model' and not a way to truth in aesthetics. Neurological models, as ed calls them, can only incapacitate if taken to far. How far? Well that depends on the application and the desired result.
I agree with Joel and JP that an assessment of the usefulness of neuroaesthetics (as with all theoretical models) would depend upon the nature of the problems it claims to be able to address adequately. I don’t mean to homogenize the field here, as if all involved were that discipline are making the same claims (which they are not), but John Onians’s closing comment to Jim does sound a little ominous from my point of view. If science were able to succeed in an attempt to fully ‘own explanation’ it would surely not demonstrate an absolute conceptual omnipotence, but rather an efficient policing of what counts as a proper object of enquiry and what counts as an explanation. The distinction that Joel makes between third-personal and first-personal methodologies seems crucial here – how could an adequate and objective conceptual framework be provided to capture the body in the process of sensing itself sensing, for example? (Would that require an explanation, a description, or both?)
In raising this issue I don’t mean to fetishize difference for its own sake (could you say a bit more about this JP as I’m not sure I understand you correctly – do you mean that you feel something is being disavowed in this discussion?) I feel that the issue would be to try to establish (as precisely as possible, as Jim says) the nature of both the questions being asked in different fields and the conceptual apparatuses that have been developed to enable those enquiries (or vice versa – how the development of the apparatus might determine which questions it is possible to ask). It seems to me that interdisciplinary activity can only really be productive when those differences are properly registered and acknowledged, and, more, when one field is not made over into an illustration of the findings of another, as sometimes happens when art and science are presented together. This would be as relevant to the way in which ideas from literary theory or psychoanalysis, for example, have been imported into art history: clearly those cross-fertilizations have been hugely generative, but not without major problems (there is no equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary for images, for example, and a reduction of images to text can have debilitating effects, as those familiar with Jim’s work will be aware).
I found this site using [url=http://google.com]google.com[/url] And i want to thank you for your work. You have done really very good site. Great work, great site! Thank you!
Sorry for offtopic
Post a Comment