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Session 1:
Architecture and Space
Abstraction and
Planning: The Visuality of Urban Planning at Mid-Century in the
United States
Andrew M. Shanken
This paper uses a
Louis I. Kahn diagram of ca. 1944 as the point of departure for a
critical study of the visual sources and strategies that architects
and planners used in the 1930’s and 1940’s to communicate the
obscure language of urban planning to the public. Kahn’s diagram
links the Vienna School philosopher Otto Neurath, New Deal
literature, advertising, abstraction in art, and the social mission
of the Modern Movement in architecture. The larger set of issues
concerns the visuality of planning as a field positioned between art
and science, and the ways planners harnessed graphic techniques as a
means of creating authority for themselves. The promotional
materials of urban planning thus help flesh out the shared visual
culture of art and science in the context of bureaucracy, public
relations, and consumer culture.
Kahn’s engagement
with diagrams illuminates a larger international phenomenon in which
an array of graphic techniques drawn from other fields altered the
representational basis of architecture and planning. In the 1930’s,
architects worked extensively with images that one is tempted to
call unarchitectural: graphs, charts, and diagrams, materials
that described neither the architectonic nor the spatial qualities
of buildings. Naturally, charts and diagrams have played a role in
architecture and planning throughout history. But their use
intensified in the 1930’s with the rise of the government as the
largest client, the emergence of the social sciences and a society
of experts, and the increasing complexity of bureaucracy in the
period. Additionally, architects had to contend with the maturation
of corporate culture and the advertising and public relations
campaigns that went with it. In order to assert authority in this
changing milieu, architects reached beyond the prevailing forms of
architectural representation – plan, section, and elevation – for an
abstract, popular, resolutely modern, and purportedly universal
language in which to engage the public in thinking about planning.
The move
towards an abstract, technical language drawn from charts and
diagrams was part of a larger cultural move away from allegory and
mimesis. In painting, Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb, and others
were making their first forays into Abstract Expressionism. In
architecture, the Modern Movement was supplanting the École des
Beaux-Arts; and in planning, then still very much a nascent field,
visual conventions were even more unsettled. Architects and planners
in the 1940’s experimented with visual strategies, from the
biomorphism then current in late Surrealist art to Otto Neurath’s
Isotypes, organization charts, and the diagrams that illustrated New
Deal literature.
A kind of
diagrammatical imagination became a fixture in architecture and
planning, laying the ground for the graphics of systems planners,
and the more recent fascination with networks. All belong to a
continuous, shared visual culture of organization and persuasion.
The episode reflects the absorption into architecture and planning
of what James Burnham called the “managerial revolution” in his 1941
book of the same title. Burnham wrote that society was increasingly
ruled by managers wielding power in large bureaucracies, rather than
by the speculative capitalists of the pre-1929 era. These managers
were the personification of organization charts, their workers the
bald icons plugged in or plucked out as necessary. In other words,
the rise of a service economy brought with it new visual languages
and literacy. And architects, who became increasingly entangled in
corporate and government bureaucracies in the period, learned that
language.
Abstraction bound the
different disciplines together. Through abstraction, Meyer Schapiro
triumphantly claimed in 1937, “The art of the whole world was now
available on a single unhistorical and universal plane as a panorama
of the formalizing energies of man.” Abstraction, as a form of
image-making with the nature of a “practical demonstration,” yet
bubbling over with the “formalizing energies of man,” as Schapiro
put it, offered a parallel to the presumed tabula rasa of
urban planning that lies beneath many of the schemes in this period.
Much like symbolic logic, these abstractions aimed at the
universal at the same time that they reveled in the ahistorical, in
the possibility of liberation from the drag of history – and from
the obstacle of pre-existing buildings. A similar spirit emanates
from Neurath’s Isotype, which creates abstract figures as universal
signs, with the ultimate goal of putting them to practical use.
Armed with the incredibly rich and varied language of abstraction,
architects and planners painted over Le Corbusier’s brazen and far
more literal plans to destroy the heart of Paris in The City of
To-Morrow and Its Planning, which since its publication in 1924
had become one of the leading paradigms of urban planning.
Abstraction was thus
seen as ameliorative, instrumental, and revelatory. Its claim to
universality offered an ideal mode for planning, whose very nature
remained, even at this late date, an abstraction, and which, in its
most radical form, aimed to liberate the masses. Planning, the
social abstraction that would rid the world of slums, create
equality, reconstruct cities into ideal urban fabrics, and, as
Kahn’s diagram shows, extend the city’s organization to region and
nation, called on visual abstraction as its mouthpiece, as its
promoter. Through these associations abstraction drew planning
closer to science and mathematics.
White Cube and Black Box: The return
of the subject in 1960s American art and psychology
Dawna Schuld
This paper addresses
the influence of developments arising in the field of psychology on
American artistic practice in the 1960s and early 1970s, with
important ramifications for how aesthetic experience is represented
and understood. By the period in question, psychological
behaviourism’s emphasis on what can only be externally observed had
relegated subjective experience to an inscrutable (epiphenomenal)
“black box,” but experimental and environmental psychology re-opened
subjectivity to scientific scrutiny.
For a number of
Southern California artists who began to experiment with creating
art that relied heavily upon the methods and principles of
experimental psychology, these developments had important
implications. James Turrell, Robert Irwin, Douglas Wheeler, and
Larry Bell experimented with the nature of perception, creating
situations (rather than objects) that tested the legitimacy of human
observation as reliable “truth.” Often, this work was installed in
enclosed rooms or pods, was disorienting and closely resembled
experiments in sensory deprivation; in a famous case, Robert Irwin
and James Turrell performed a number of sensory experiments in
UCLA’s anechoic chamber, a soundproof chamber that, with the lights
off, almost completely deadened external stimuli, leaving the
participant to perceive nothing more than her own perceptions (and,
at times, hallucinations). It also incorporated simple illusions
commonly used in perception experiments: James Turell’s early
projection works are complex iterations of the famous “Necker Cube,”
a line drawing that demonstrates to subjects the oscillating nature
of perceptual interpretation. Rather than relying upon observed
behaviour as their data, these artists were interested in the nature
of experience and were frequently subjects in their own
experiments. In each of these situations, the viewer was encouraged
(if not physically required) to take on a position of scepticism or,
as Robert Irwin puts it, “rigorous wonder.” The art became a
laboratory of uncertainties.
For these artists,
the development of a “phenomenal art” was an opportunity to explore
the physical properties of aesthetic experience. By so doing, they
were continuing a tradition begun by American pragmatists William
James and John Dewey, who saw artistic meaning as embedded in viewer
experience and who considered viewer experience in physiological
(neurological) terms. Due in large part to the rejection of
behaviourist anti-subjectivism, American pragmatism has in recent
years been given renewed attention, particularly in the field of
cognitive studies. In the 1960s, experimental psychologists such as
Bruce Mangan and J.J. Gibson returned to James’ vision as a means of
incorporating experience into their studies (effectively rejecting
the behaviourist approach), averting both behaviourism and the
idiosyncrasies of psychoanalysis. Today, cognitive scientists who
see consciousness in phenomenological (in contrast to epiphenomenal)
terms include such notables as Bernard Baars (contrastive
phenomenology), Francisco Varela (naturalized phenomenology) or
Thomas Metzinger (self as process). The work of these scientists
contributes to a deeper understanding of what exactly is being
represented in installation art that takes perceptual
experimentation as its medium.
I argue that the
viewer’s involvement in the situation (with or without an object per
se) is the material, contingent core of the work of art,
bringing into question the perceived neutrality of the high modern
“white cube.” At the same time, artists such as Irwin, Turrell,
Wheeler and Bell expanded upon the work of experimental
psychologists by bringing it into the gallery. Phenomenal art
simultaneously challenges the opacity of the black box and
neutrality of the white cube by making consciousness its medium.
Representation and
the aesthetics of architectural plans
Sonit Bafna
I present a case
study to explore how architectural plans function as
representational devices. I start with a seemingly innocuous
question regarding the status of architectural drawings, and end up
identifying a much broader puzzle about the nature of representation
in architecture in general. The outline of argument follows:
Are architectural
plans representations? Nelson Goodman’s answer in Languages of
Art is no, since plans function as scores, i.e. as characters in
a notational system with syntactic and semantic discreteness. In
company with written specifications, plans function as scripts.
However, in neither case do they exhibit the syntactic and semantic
density that are necessary for a visual artifact to be identified as
a representation.
This flies in the face of
conventional usage. Architects routinely talk of plans as
representations. This use of term may simply imply an undiscerning
colloquial use, arising mainly from the fact that plans are
projected entities, much as pictures are. A deeper, more systematic
look at the use of plans would reveal what Goodman says—that plans
are entirely conventional and are interpreted as inscriptions of
discrete characters. This is true in so far as one is discussing the
role of plans that function as working drawings, i.e. as
specifications for executing built works, where it is necessary,
often for legal reasons, to ensure that the construction is an
acceptable instantiation of the drawings. But there are other ways
in which plans are encountered and used in architectural practice,
and there the role of plans often transcends that of scores or
scripts. This particularly the case when the interest in plans is
specifically aesthetic.
I illustrate this issue
through a description of a project by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The
project is a design for a suburban villa—a Landhaus—and given
that its design was developed for brick masonry construction, has
come to be known simply as the Brick House. It is recognized as one
of seminal modernist projects of the early twentieth century,
although its planning was never developed beyond a schematic stage.
In fact, all the critical acclaim given to the project comes from
just two drawings that were presented at a Berlin exhibition in
1924—a plan and a perspectival view (see appendix). The original
drawings themselves were lost after the exhibitions, but two small
photographic prints have survived and these are the sources for a
series of reproductions through which the project entered critical
architectural discourse.
The first thing to
note is that this project has enjoyed a wide critical acclaim
despite never having been actually built or even developed
completely. And this acclaim does not rest on promise, which one may
find, for instance, in a not-yet-played musical score, but rather on
actual aesthetic response evoked by the presentational drawings in
their own right. A reading of the critical response to the drawings
suggests that they function not just as digital diagrams, but as
syntactically and semantically dense, even replete, artifacts.
Conventionally, one assumes that a plan is a proxy for (or denotes)
a definite class of buildings (whether actually built, or
potentially buildable). In the case of the Brick House, this
assumption runs into a number of problems. First, the plan is very
schematic; the walls are shown as thick, shaded lines, with no
indications of their thicknesses, and the edge of floor is not
specified clearly. This in itself is not a serious problem; it only
implies that there is a very wide class of buildings, which are
acceptable denotations of the plan but may differ from each other in
the many substantive details left unspecified. More seriously, the
plan and the perspective do not match—they do not refer, in other
words, to the same class of buildings within the notational system
specified. Again, it is possible to claim this situation only
invalidates the particular reference, not the entire symbolic
system. But it does challenge the assumption that a reference to a
design or project necessarily implies a reference to a specific
building, or class of buildings.
There is a further deep
ambiguity built into the plan. One of the more dramatic, novel, and
critically noted features of the plan is the sense of limitless
extension suggested by three radially oriented walls that begin as
interior walls, continue seamlessly through to the exterior as
garden walls, and are abruptly cut by the edge of the drawing. This
move further challenges the assumption that there exist definite
buildings, whether built or not, denoted by the plan. After all, how
long will the walls continue in any instance of the class of
depicted buildings? Should it be exactly as measured in the plan, or
should it go up to the boundaries of the site, however the site may
be defined. The answer is not simple because the suggestion of
potentially limitless extension of the walls is a critical point of
interest in the plan. If these walls were to end abruptly, or
arbitrarily, in a constructed building, then a significant quality
would be lost. In Goodman’s terms, by extending his walls to the
edges of the drawing, Mies has turned the edge itself into a
character within the overall symbolic scheme, but this character
does not have a corresponding compliance within the realm of the
actual built environment.
These drawings, then, do
not pick-out a particular class of buildings as notational systems
are designed to do, and they seem to exhibit qualities of
representations. But this conclusion brings further complications
regarding how they function aesthetically. Visual representations
that are an object of aesthetic interest—as these drawings are—are
typically so by virtue of their pictorial qualities. The aesthetic
quality of these drawings, in contrast, does not lie in the way in
which they depict their subject matter, as paintings would do, but
rather is supposed to lie in the object depicted. Critical writing
in architecture is seldom about these drawings; their role is
ostensive—to point to the design presented. Thus under an aesthetic
reading, these drawings are interpreted transparently as notations
typically are, but unlike notations, they belong to as a dense,
replete, and richly evocative symbolic scheme.
I suggest that this seeming
paradox is created by the assumption that the physical building is
the exclusive object of aesthetic interest in architecture, and the
plans are merely a proxy for the building. However, drawings are
involved in two different types of symbolic mappings. At a general
level, the relationship between the drawing and building is best
treated as notational, but under aesthetic readings drawings may
also assume a role parallel to buildings as
representational aesthetic objects in their own right.
Session 2:
Representation and Similarity
Models and
make-believe
Adam Toon
Often, in order to
explain or predict the behaviour of a system, scientists must first
model it. Modelling a system usually involves making assumptions
that are false of that system. Planets are not perfect spheres, the
nucleus is not a liquid drop and the molecules in a gas are not
billiard balls. This characteristic feature of scientific modelling
poses a philosophical problem: how are we to understand what
scientists write down when they model a system if what they write is
false and is acknowledged to be so?
According to one
prominent account, what scientists write down when they model a
system are not claims about that system at all. They are
definitions of an ‘abstract’ or ‘imagined’ object. It is this
object that is the model. Perhaps the leading proponent of this
‘abstract object view’ of scientific models is Ronald Giere. But
this conception of models is implicit in much philosophical writing
on modelling and has a number of attractions. It can make sense of
the false assumptions scientists make when they model a system: they
are not claims about the system, but definitions of models. It can
also make sense of subsequent statements scientists make once they
have formulated their model, including those statements that seem to
refer to non-actual entities like point masses or frictionless
planes: these are simply claims about objects in models. However,
the abstract object view of models also presents two significant
problems. The first concerns its ontology: what are abstract
objects and why should we think that they exist? The second is the
problem of understanding how these objects represent the world.
According to Giere, models are similar to the systems they
represent. But similarity accounts of representation face serious
difficulties.
I will propose an
alternative account of what models are and how they represent. To
do so, I shall draw upon Kendall Walton’s ‘make-believe’ theory of
representation. I will argue that models are fictions, in
Walton’s sense: like War of the Worlds or Dracula,
the principal function of scientific models is to prescribe
imaginings. Just as War of the Worlds asks us to imagine
that London is invaded by Martians, so the billiard ball model of a
gas asks us to imagine that the molecules of the gas collide like
billiard balls. On this account, models are not abstract objects
but are whatever is used to prescribe imaginings. This might be a
set of equations, a diagram or even a three-dimensional physical
model.
This account of
models will not require us to grant the existence of ‘abstract’ or
‘imagined’ objects. And as a result, it will not saddle us with the
task of understanding how such objects can represent the world.
What scientists write down when they model a system are
prescriptions to imagine that system in a certain way; there is no
need to postulate any abstract object of which what they write is
true. Moreover, I will show how we may understand scientists’
subsequent talk about models without construing it as talk about
abstract objects. Walton’s analysis allows us to make sense of
statements like ‘Dracula sucks blood’ without granting the existence
of Count Dracula, even ‘as a character’ or ‘in fiction’. Similarly,
I shall argue that we can understand scientists’ talk about models
without granting the existence of point masses or frictionless
planes, even as ‘abstract’ or ‘imaginary’ objects in models.
Canny Resemblance
Catharine Abell
I defend a novel
version of the view that depiction depends on resemblance. Unlike
rival resemblance accounts of depiction, the account I propose
accommodates important features of both artistic and scientific
pictures. Firstly, it explains why both intellectual and motor
skills are required for the production of pictorial art. Secondly,
it explains the important communicative role pictures play in
scientific and other non-aesthetic contexts. While my account draws
an analogy between depiction and language, it denies that depiction
and language are analogous in respect of their conventionality, but
argues instead that they are analogous in their dependence on
non-conventional contextual factors.
A familiar problem with the
most basic statement of the view that depiction is
resemblance-governed is that every picture resembles a wide variety
of things, most of which it does not depict. Resemblance therefore
does not suffice for depiction. Plausible existent resemblance
accounts hold that depiction depends on resemblance in a particular
respect. Let us call this view the Canonical Conception of
depiction as resemblance-governed (henceforth CC). Advocates
of CC agree that the relevant resemblance is resemblance in respect
of some shape property shared by a picture and its object:
Christopher Peacocke terms the relevant shape property “visual field
shape”; Robert Hopkins terms it “outline shape”; and John Hyman
calls it “occlusion shape”. Although CC rules out many of the
representationally irrelevant resemblances pictures bear to other
objects, there are two reasons for which resemblance in this respect
cannot suffice for depiction. Firstly, a picture may resemble a
variety of different objects in this respect, although it depicts
but one of them. Secondly, many pictures do not depict the object
they most resemble in the relevant respect. For example, stick
figure drawings depict ordinarily-shaped people, despite bearing a
greater resemblance in outline shape to emaciated people with
enormous heads.
To overcome this problem,
advocates of CC generally appeal to intention. They argue that,
although resemblance in the relevant respect, when taken alone, may
provide an ambiguous or inaccurate specification of a picture’s
object, the intentions of the picture’s maker determine exactly
which object is depicted. A stick figure drawing depicts an
ordinarily-shaped person rather than an emaciated person because
that is what its maker intended it to represent. To ensure both that
resemblance plays a significant role in such an account and that
makers’ intentions determine a picture’s object only if those
intentions are successfully realised in the picture, Hopkins holds
that resemblance in respect of shape determines a picture’s possible
objects, while intention serves merely to select which of those
objects is in fact depicted. Thus elaborated, CC thus yields a
two-level account of pictorial content, according to which shape
resemblance determines first-level content, while first-level
content and makers’ intentions together determine depictive content.
I propose a number of
objections to this version of CC. Firstly, its emphasis on
resemblance in respect of outline shape precludes it from
accommodating the diversity of depictive styles. Secondly, by
construing resemblance in outline shape and intention as the sole
necessary conditions for depiction, CC provides an inaccurate view
of the skills required for picture making. In particular, it
emphasises artists’ motor skills at the expense of the intellectual
skills necessary for picture making.
The alternative resemblance
account of depiction that I develop avoids both these problems. I
argue that depiction is a matter of intended resemblance:
while no single respect of resemblance is necessary for depiction,
the diverse resemblances that govern different instances of
depiction are united by the fact that the pictures’ makers intended
them to hold between the relevant pictures and their objects. Unlike
CC, the account I propose is a single-level account of depictive
content, according to which picture maker’s intentions directly
determine which respects of resemblance are representationally
relevant. This account accommodates the diversity of depictive
styles by enabling different pictures to exhibit different respects
of resemblance to their objects. It explains why successful
picturing requires both intellectual and motor skills because it
requires artists to engage in successful communication with those
who view their pictures. To do this, they must selectively exploit
potential respects of resemblance between picture and object so as
to produce a marked surface from which viewers are able to identify
the relevant respects of resemblance and thus work out what the
picture depicts.
The plausibility of this
account depends on my capacity to explain our ability to identify
picture makers’ intentions from the marked surfaces they produce and
thus to work out what their pictures depict. I argue that this
ability is analogous to our ability to interpret sentences by appeal
to contextual factors, without which those sentences would be left
ambiguous. I develop an explanation of the former ability by drawing
on explanations of the latter in the philosophy of language. The
resultant account of depiction as essentially communicative helps to
explain the wide variety of communicative purposes that pictures can
serve.
I conclude by discussing a
number of objections to my account. Firstly, one might object that,
although picture makers sometimes intend to communicate with
viewers, some pictures are not the product of communicative
intentions. In particular, many artistic pictures seem to be made
with non-communicative intentions. I argue that my view can explain
this by distinguishing between those pictures that are the direct
product of picture makers’ communicative intentions and those that
employ conventionalised depictive styles. While depictive styles
fossilise or conventionalise the respects of resemblance that have
been exploited in past pictorial communication, they need not
fossilise the communicative intentions with which past pictures were
made. It is thus possible for picture makers and viewers alike to
exploit stylistic conventions in picture production and
interpretation, obviating the need for communicative intentions.
Finally, I consider further objections to my account posed by
photography and by the cross-cultural interpretability of pictures
and argue that my account is able to overcome such objections.
Representation,
Perception and Imagination
Edward Winters
A good deal of recent work in the philosophy of science
has concerned itself with the status of scientific pictures. Some of
this work has addressed the literature on depiction recently pursued
in aesthetics. Since the nature of depiction, whilst informing and
informed by representational art, lies outwith aesthetics, it is
reasonable to trace the congruencies and discords that are brought
into focus when considering scientific pictures alongside artistic
pictures.
I shall simply state a view of depiction, neutral
between scientific pictures and artistic pictures, and then go on to
investigate the merits and problems that my view of depiction
celebrates and suffers, respectively.
The paper will look at images and pictures that have
been deemed to be engaged epistemologically; and at pictures that
play an explanatory role in our understanding of various phenomena.
We look at various kinds of picture and assess their logical status.
We then turn to fine art pictures to see in what way, if any, there
are continuities with the epistemic character of science pictures.
Session 3: Uses
and Appropriations of Photography
Deception by
Touch: The Nature Print and Photography in the Mid-Nineteenth
Century
Naomi Hume
In 1853, when the
Imperial printing office in Vienna published a guide to their
“polygraphic apparatus,” or the different printing methods they used
to reproduce both images and texts, they opened the guide with a
frontispiece that makes explicit this comparison between
Naturselbstdruck and photography. The frontispiece presents a
graphic schema of all the branches of the art of printing. At the
top and center of this image, two muses float horizontally, facing
each other, and shaking hands. They are labeled Photographie
and Naturselbstdruck, respectively. Below photography are
ranged the printing methods associated with art and industry. On
the side below Naturselbstdruck, are those methods associated
with languages and science. This small book presents a series of
descriptions of various printing processes, but it is clear that the
main aim of the book is to promote the Imperial printing office’s
own new invention, what the author, Alois Auer, calls the “youngest
daughter of the art of printing,” that is, Naturselbstdruck.
What did
the Imperial printing office believe to be the relationship between
photography and the Naturselbstdruck process, and of each to
the arts and sciences? This paper investigates what these claims
might mean for how representation was understood in the 1850s. By
contrast to the claims made for the nature print, can we deduce what
mid-century viewers understood photography to be? What do the
projected applications for nature’s ‘self-printing’ process tell us
about mid-nineteenth-century understandings of representation,
truth, and the relationship between a depiction and an original
object?
I will address the
discourse of authenticity and representation through a close
examination of the patent dispute that arose after the Austrians
exhibited their new process at the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition in
London. The claims and counter-claims on both sides of the dispute
provide a window onto this moment of projections and expectations
about new and undefined inventions that offers the possibility to
see what mid-century viewers hoped the nature print and photography
would be and do.
When Auer showed off
the results of his Naturselbstdruck process, he reported that
[t]hey found the
resemblance so deceptive that they took them to be real lace, until,
by touching and closely examining them, they convinced themselves
that they were productions of the printing press.
The comparison of
sight and touch in this case confirms the nature-print as a copy.
At other times, however, Auer uses the tactility of the print to
show how it can deceive viewers into believing it to be the
original.
According
to Auer, the Nature-print process involved placing a specimen
between a sheet of lead and a sheet of steel and running them
through a press at high enough pressure that the specimen would
embed itself in the softer lead plate. Once the specimen was
removed from the lead, the plate could be used for limited printing,
or electrotyped to expand the print-run. The tactility of these
images was achieved with the use of special inks that would
reproduce the texture of the specimen’s imprint.
Despite what seems,
to the 21st-century mind, to be a complex, destructive,
and messy process, Auer predicted a far greater application for his
new process than he did for the photographic processes of Daguerre
and Talbot. Part of his reasoning for this was that his process was
compatible with contemporary text-printing processes, whereas the
daguerreotype was a singular image on a metal plate, and talbottypes
had to be printed individually on special papers.
Auer
later printed plant-specimens with the process and their
impressions, “like the lace,” he claimed, “rivaled the original with
regard to resemblance.” Auer took this further, deliberately
attempting to deceive his test audience, by printing impressions of
both sides of an oak leaf on either side of a piece of paper:
Several such leaves
were printed on both sides, and what with the colour varying in
front and back, the skeleton closely fitting in, and such was the
effect that connoisseurs, when holding them in their hands, and then
looking at them through the glass, did not take them to be printed
leaves, but natural ones, and they truly were surprised when I
remarked to them smilingly, -- “Truly these are the impressions
produced in an artificial manner.”
Auer was very proud
of the extent to which his printed specimens could deceive
intelligent audiences. As much as these descriptions sound like
nineteenth-century parlor games, however, Auer was quite serious
when he pointed to the tactile qualities of his invention to claim
that his nature print was more suitable for scientific
representation than the photograph.
Interoperability
and the photograph
Catherine De Lorenzo
and Deborah van der Plaat
Web designers strive
for systems that manifest 'interoperability', that is, an ability of
two or more systems (or disciplines) to exchange information, and to
use the information that has been exchanged. In this paper we want
to employ this concept as a way of examining some nineteenth century
photographic images and their multiple uses then and now.
In the geographic and
ethnographic photo archives in Paris are images taken by commercial
and 'artist' photographers working in Melbourne in the last quarter
of the nineteenth century. One of the photographers is
German-Australian J.W. Lindt (1845-1926), internationally known for
his ethnographic images of Australian Indigenous peoples—especially
Gumbayngirr, Bundjalung and Thungutti peoples of the Clarence River,
Grafton — but in Australia also admired for his landscapes, often
described by him as 'views' or 'scenery'. For the last thirty years
of his life he had devoted himself to taking very specific images of
the land: the cultivated landscape surrounding his home and business
in the Yarra Ranges near Melbourne, and the subtropical wilderness
of the larger setting. Lindt's images, and those of fellow
photographers Caire and McDonald, could be admired for their
descriptive records of the terrain; for the photographer's ability
to convey a sense of being in the rainforest with its very
distinctive terroir; or, upon occasion, for challenging
prevailing notions of terror at the very thought of being lost in
impenetrable bush. Through selected framing and choice of subject
matter (e.g. graceful tree ferns) the images leant themselves to an
aesthetic reading, and so fit happily above a title with the word
'scenery'. Yet, because of the excellent optics enabling detail to
be recognised and examined within a larger whole— (a shrub could be
botanically examined in a garden view) — and because their images
appeared to so accurately replicate nature, these same images were
sought after and mined by natural scientists and geographers. Not
that the nineteenth century geographer was embarrassed by
aesthetics—Humboldt's belief that careful observation could only be
enhanced by aesthetics appears to have been widely understood and
accepted—but nonetheless it was possible to strip the image of the
sometimes sentimental title and to read it against current theories
concerning botanical geography, place or origins. The assumed
mimetic dependability of the photograph was obviously two edged: the
images may have replicated nature but they were also 'seen' to
exemplify or denote concepts valued by the viewer.
We will argue that
'interoperability' in the nineteenth century stemmed in part from
the inherent multiplicity and affordability of the albumen print,
and in part from its beguiling replicability of nature. We will
demonstrate how artists, scientists and travellers alike valued one
and the same image for largely different purposes. Today, however,
with the exception of photo historians, use of the original images
has declined. In place of a broad (multi-disciplinary) scientific
interest in the nineteenth century images is a new set of
contemporary ones focussed on reworking the subject matter (sub
tropical sites in south east Australia): through diverse media the
same sites have been used to address Indigenous dispossession and
land rights, environmentalism, and spectacular tourism.
Unintentionally, but consistent with the idea of interoperability,
current cultural uses of the subject matter provoke new readings of
the old photographs—what was missing from the old? What, despite
initial appearances, had been inserted?
An ever-increasing number
of disciplines in the sciences and social sciences are paying close
attention to their own distinctive uses of the image, often praising
the ways in which they rigorously examine the image for hard
evidence of physical and social qualities in contradistinction to
the additional historical, contextual and aesthetic readings
supplied by art historians. By examining uses of a coherent
repertoire of images over time and across disciplines, the authors
will show that scientists have no exclusive claim to a forensic
reading, just as art historians have no exclusive claim to aesthetic
value.
Scientific
Aesthetics: The Methods and Photography of Eadweard Muybridge & Sol
Lewitt
Jeannine Tang
The image, according
to Nelson Goodman, is denotative, its meaning located within a
semantic field of reference. Such denotation acknowledges the field
that codes the possibility of such representation, vis a vis
classification. The popularization of such thought arguably began in
the nineteenth century with the institutionalized taxonomies of
bodies and objects in medical and biological sciences, where the
logic of deductive systematization was consecrated as methodology. A
significant instance of this lies in the photographic documentation
that functioned as empirical proof, as the medium’s assumed
verisimilitude and mechanical capacity for systematization
legitimized such taxonomical claims, most famously in the motion
studies of Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge’s work witnessed a revival
in the 1960s-80s, where his body of scientific documentation took on
greater aesthetic considerations, particularly in conceptual artist
Sol Lewitt’s visual quotation of Muybridge imagery. The significance
of both these practices, within their respective contexts of
nineteenth-century scientific method and twentieth-century
conceptual art practice, holds manifold possibilities for the
intersection of art and science at the threshold of representation
and practice.
Muybridge’s serial study of
motion sequences in animals, humans and weather conditions were
appropriated by Lewitt in his Muybridge works, where Lewitt
created zoomed versions of Muybridge’s images in peep-hole boxes,
for viewers to experience the process of motion and perception as
they traversed both art object and gallery space. Such systems of
orchestrated viewer-perception raise issues of copies and reception,
seriality and composition in artistic and scientific production, the
corporeality of the body in scientific experiment and artistic
orchestration, as well as the systematization and indexing of
method, imagery and result through the allographic. These issues
hinge on the necessity of a denotative field of reference Goodman
establishes as the semantic key to interpreting the pictorial, which
this paper elaborates upon within the terrain of the serial
photographic tableau. This is particularly significant to both
nineteenth-century scientific practice, as well as the discourses of
conceptual art, which was heavily influenced by the writings of
Thomas Kuhn, where meaning was established through the ratifying
validation of scientific communities. Goodman’s concepts will also
be extended into, and re-evaluated through Pierre Bourdieu’s
symbolic fields of production, with an examination of the economic
imperatives that underwrite such artistic and scientific taxonomies.
The implications of
representational intricacies will thus be extended into
conceptualism’s quasi-scientific adoption of the previous century’s
scientific practice via a photographic impulse. Through a
theoretical and specific study of both Muybridge’s constructions of
the motion studies, and Lewitt’s conceptual art theories channeled
through his reworking of Muybridge’s photographs, I will demonstrate
that the conflation of artistic and scientific practice changed the
field of art production, through deliberate revisions of systems and
methods.
Session 4:
Truth and Objectivity
Anti-realism and Aesthetic Cognition
Ruben Berrios
At the core of the debate between
scientific realism and anti-realism is the question of the relation
between scientific theory and the world. The realist possesses a
mimetic conception of the relation between theory and reality. For
the realist, scientific theories represent reality. The
anti-realist, in contrast, seeks to understand the relations between
theory and world in non-mimetic terms. We will examine Cartwright’s
simulacrum account of explanation in order to illuminate the
anti-realist position.
Science consists of phenomenological and
theoretical laws. The former are concerned with appearances, or
those phenomena that can be directly observed; the latter involve
the unobservable reality that is alleged to underlie appearances,
and are capable only of indirect confirmation. Phenomenological laws
are said to be descriptive, whilst theoretical laws are understood
as explanatory. Cartwright is concerned with the theoretical. She
claims that the standard realist account of the explanatory efficacy
of theoretical laws is faulty.
The explanatory power of theoretical laws
consists in their ability to provide an explanation of physical
phenomena. According to Cartwright, the realist claims that laws
explain phenomena by providing an abstract description of them, in
terms of their micro-structural features, that is alleged to be
true. On this view, explanatory power is entirely dependent on
descriptive adequacy. As phenomenological laws describe appearances,
so theoretical laws describe the fundamental reality that governs
appearances. Cartwright rejects the preceding view and in its place
proposes a simulacrum account of explanation. According to
Cartwright, the explanatory power of theoretical laws is related not
to descriptive adequacy, but rather to the construction of adequate
models. To explain a phenomenon is to construct a model which best
or most adequately accommodates the phenomenon to a theory. The
model will consist of various posited objects that serve to explain
the phenomena in terms that are consistent with a set of theoretical
laws. Cartwright claims that theoretical laws are true of, or
describe, the objects of the model. The objects of the model,
however, are not descriptive of reality. They are simulacra. They
have, that is, the form or appearance of things, without possessing
their substance or proper qualities.
In light of the foregoing account we can
summarise the distinction between scientific realism and
anti-realism as follows. The realist claims that theoretical laws
literally represent real objects. The anti-realist claims that laws
represent objects of a model that are simulacra of reality.
Anti-realism has an aesthetic dimension. The
movement from realism to anti-realism is also the movement from the
mimetic conception of the scientist as holding a mirror to nature
to the constructionist view of the scientist as engaging with
nature through invention. There is a lot of the artist in the
anti-realist’s view of the scientist. This is true for Cartwright as
well as, for example, Van Fraassen in his doctrine of constructive
empiricism.
It would appear, then, that the philosophy of
science has absorbed some concepts that are ordinarily housed in
aesthetics. And it has done so profitably. The aim of this paper is
to reverse the direction of disciplinary influence. Can art, in
relation to its status as a cognitive enterprise, be illuminated by
scientific anti-realism? I will argue that it can.
In an unexpected reference to the
Nicomachean Ethics, Cartwright draws a suggestive parallel
between theoretical laws and general moral principles, on the one
hand, and physical phenomena and everyday moral conduct, on the
other hand. If we add to this the claim that a central component of
art’s value is cognitive, then we have the basic materials with
which to flesh out a broadly anti-realist view of art.
In the production of art, artists can
construct models that mediate between everyday ethical phenomena and
general ethical tendencies. These models reveal the ways in which
there are implicit consistencies or inconsistencies, conflicts or
congruences and so forth, between the phenomena and the tendencies.
On this basis art can contribute to the reflective understanding of
ethical life. This constitutes to a large degree art’s status as a
cognitive enterprise. To apprehend art cognitively as artist or
critic is to engage in aesthetic cognition.
The paper will seek, in conclusion, to
illuminate the role that the notions of representation and
simulacrum might play in the conception of the relation between art
and the ethical life.
Artistic
Objectivity
Christopher Eliot
It is a commonplace
that scientific representations are objective, or aspire to
objectivity, whereas artistic representations are not and do not.
That is, science as much as possible presents nature as we should
come to see it, while art presents individuals’ ways of seeing,
absent any implicit claim that we should share their perspectives.
An opposing current in philosophy of science especially since the
1970s—though of course with significant antecedents—has argued that
scientific and artistic representation are not distinct in this
way—that science can no more achieve objectivity than can art. (An
early version of this idea appears, interestingly, in work by a
philosopher of both art and science, Nelson Goodman, in Ways of
Worldmaking.) The critique of scientific objectivity mounted in
the following two decades by sociologists of science further eroded,
in many quarters, the sense that science could be objective, while
postmodernists’ treatment of all representations as comparable
‘texts’ made it a commonplace around the humanities that both
science and art are each fully subjective accounts of nature.
Philosopher of
science Helen Longino (1990, 2002) has offered a sophisticated
middle way between these alternatives. Taking seriously the
underdetermination of theories, the theory-ladenness of observation,
and sociologists’ analysis of the ways the process of inquiry can
structure its product, Longino has remained committed nonetheless to
the value of objectivity in scientific representation. Accordingly,
she offers an account of scientific objectivity as a function of a
representation’s openness to “transformative criticism,” including
its interrogation by a heterogeneous community with diverse values
and objectives. An intriguing consequence is that a
representation’s degree of objectivity comes to depend on values
normally thought to be part of the context of science, rather than
in any way constitutive of it. Yet, through this incorporation,
Longino defends an analysis of objectivity more robust than those,
say, treating objectivity as a matter of straightforward
correspondence.
However, there have
been in the philosophy of science literature relatively few examples
produced of objectivity arising through the sort of transformative
criticism Longino identifies. This is not to say that they cannot be
produced, only that there have not been. She herself (1990) presents
a case study from endocrinology, and there is one reanalysis of this
case. But it is difficult to trace in scientific literature the role
of the various value assumptions being brought to bear on a
representation (model, theory, etc.), and much of the important
criticism never reaches publication.
Art criticism—and for
my purposes here, specifically criticism about the quality of
representation—offers intriguingly parallel cases meeting Longino’s
criteria for transformative criticism. For many works, a great
variety of critics, wearing their value-assumptions much more on
their sleeves than scientists typically do, brings a wide range of
assumptions to the analysis of a particular artwork. Analyzing the
history of criticism of several artworks (one of which I would
present in a talk), I argue first that some such bodies of criticism
reach Longino’s criteria for objectivity, at least to a degree.
This argument does
not entail that art is science, because art will normally not
achieve the degrees of objectivity reached by some scientific
representations. However, it also does not entail that
representational art merely stands at a waypoint on the path to
becoming science, either. Art, crucially, can represent what science
cannot, what is beyond the domain of science in the human world,
especially in narrative works like fiction, theater, and film. Its
representations may be just as strong, and as important, as those of
science.
But there is another
important difference between art and science, in that as a
consequence of transformative criticism, scientific representations
evolve, while most artworks remain relatively fixed once produced.
(Many kinds of artworks change or develop after being produced, and
for some this is crucial to their meaning, but unlike theories, even
those do so mostly by accident or by design.) A scientific theory
develops over time, while a film is relatively fixed.
This difference
produces my second major point: what an artwork represents can
itself change and develop over the course of criticism. Using a case
study, I describe how even as a physical object (in the case of
works which are physical objects) or set of words, or images, or the
like, an artwork may remain the same over time, criticism can
transform what we understand the work as representing. In this
sense, the representational relationship itself between an artwork
and its subject should not be understood as fixed by intrinsic
properties of the artwork itself, but as plastic. This is so because
the process which supports the degree of objectivity of a
representation can be a process of revision and development without
a stable endpoint. Criticism changes what we understand works as
representing, and in doing so transforms what it is that the works
themselves represent.
We emerge, then, with
an account of how to understand art as representing well and poorly,
making art not fundamentally different from science in that it can
achieve degrees of objectivity, but also with an understanding of
the representational relationship and representations themselves as
consequently dynamic.
Varieties of Truth
in Artistic and Scientific Representation
Anjan Chakravartty
Recent studies have
suggested provocative analogies between practices of representation
in art, and in science. One concept that has remained largely
outside the primary focus of much of this work, however, is that of
truth. This is not surprising, for on the surface, there
seem obvious reasons to think that as a subject, the “truth” of
representations is an unlikely source of fruitful comparison between
artistic and scientific representation. In the context of the
sciences, there is no general consensus regarding the epistemic
status of representations; realists and antirealists about
scientific knowledge have different views concerning the sorts of
information models contain about the world. In the context of art,
to the extent that one may be happy to speak of ‘knowledge’ or
‘information’, the senses of these terms may appear to be rather
different than those commonly associated with the sciences. I
believe the underlying intuition at work here is that, to the extent
that one may predicate it of representations, the aesthetician’s
concept of truth differs from that of the philosopher of science.
In the current paper I challenge this intuitive, but I suggest
ultimately mistaken dichotomy between artistic and scientific
representation. The key to dissolving the dichotomy is to
appreciate the epistemic consequences of what several authors have
recognized as two fundamental techniques of representation in the
sciences: abstraction, and idealization. I argue that the senses
of ‘truth’ properly associated with these techniques in the sciences
are importantly different, and that an understanding of this
difference is facilitated by important lessons learned by
considering analogous techniques in art.
I begin with a
general, realist commitment in the philosophy of science.
Scientific realism is the view that our best scientific theories
(however this is assessed) are approximately true, or at least
closer to the truth than their predecessors. Even realists,
however, must grant two rather puzzling features of scientific
knowledge: many of our best theories and models appear to
incorporate high degrees of abstraction and idealization. These
terms are often used synonymously, but in a seminal paper McMullin
(1985) credits the origin of an important distinction here to
Galileo’s defence of the (then) new science of mechanics. Roughly,
an abstract theory is one that results when only some of the
potentially many relevant factors present in reality are taken into
account. Here we ignore other parameters, either intentionally or
unwittingly, that are potentially relevant to the phenomena at
issue. Consider, for example, the neglect of frictional resistance
due to air in the model of a simple pendulum. An idealized theory
is one that results when one or more factors is simplified, again
either intentionally or unwittingly, in such a way as to represent
its object in a way that it could not possibly be. Here we do not
exclude parameters per se, but rather characterize parameters
that are taken into account in such a way that our
characterizations of them are false descriptions of their
counterparts in the world. In the Principia, Newton assumes
that the sun is at rest in his derivation of Kepler’s laws of
planetary motion. But that would require that the sun be infinitely
massive, and Newton of course did not believe this to be the case.
The sun experiences small amounts of motion due to the attractions
of other bodies; the attribution of infinite mass is an
idealization.
Now, given that
techniques of abstraction and idealization are ubiquitous in the
sciences, and that both constitute a sort of deviation from the
truth, how is the realist to regard them as yielding correct
descriptions of their subject matter? Several authors have
considered this puzzle, but none (to my mind) entirely
successfully. Cartwright (1983), for example, argues that
abstraction is positively correlated with explanatory power, but
negatively with truth; the more abstract a model, the more useful it
is for explanatory purposes, but the less accurately it represents
the phenomena it is intended to model. Conversely (and leaving
aside the issue of explanation here), I argue that abstract theories
and models may be consistently regarded as correctly representing
certain classes of phenomena, even though they are commonly and
effectively applied to other classes which they do not describe
correctly. Abstractions incorporate accurate descriptions of
properties and relations of the systems they do in fact model
correctly; the reality of such properties and relations is not
impugned by the fact that there are others that might also have been
included. In practice, abstractions are often used as
idealizations – that is, used in application to phenomena they do
not properly describe – but this does not compromise their epistemic
status in connection with phenomena they do describe correctly.
The interesting or
more controversial case, I suggest, is idealization. Philosophers
of science are relatively quiet on the precise epistemic status of
idealized theories and models, and it is here I believe that
philosophical accounts of representation in art furnish helpful
analytical tools. Some artistic representation is conceived
“realistically” (e.g. most obviously in the case of, but not
restricted to, Realist art), and this may be understood as analogous
to cases of scientific abstraction. Other forms of artistic
representation, however, are conceived rather differently, and here
I think nominalist approaches such as those inspired by Goodman
(1976) are especially provocative. I argue that one of the
important lessons afforded by these studies for understanding the
connection between idealized representations and truth in the
sciences concerns a shift in emphasis from description to
reference. This shift, which I suggest is natural in various
artistic contexts, has a striking parallel in scientific realist
responses to sceptical challenges such as the pessimistic induction
(a scepticism regarding theories based on the history of science),
and may prove crucial to understanding the nature of realism in
cases of idealization.
Session 5:
“Mental Images”
Reasoned Images
Josh Ellenbogen
“This is
unspeakable rot! A disgrace to an educated man. As if there ever
could be an analogous situation to that of Galileo! Is the camera
going to supply intelligence and genius? Does not this mark the
degeneracy of France? This man is a Membre de l’institute. This is
enough for me. I want to know no more of this charlatan.”
With these words, C.S.
Peirce closed the books on his rather short career as
English-language translator of Etienne-Jules Marey. Yet, what
caused Peirce to become so upset with the famed French physiologist,
a certain suggestion about photography that Peirce discerned within
Marey’s work, demands more sustained attention than the great
philosopher was himself willing to give it. My talk picks up the
strand that Peirce’s angry pronouncement offers, using it as a way
into some of the most theoretically fruitful questions that Marey’s
work poses. In particular, my talk will directly engage with how
Marey’s project of scientific imaging denudes mimesis of analytic
importance, how it thereby problematizes some of the entrenched ways
commentators set art and science off from one another, and how it
makes difficult the traits that photography, when it functions as an
agent of scientific knowledge, is often purported to manifest. In
pursuing these points, my talk will attempt to establish what Peirce
can mean when he suggests the visualization devices Marey builds
have the ambition to stand in, or act as substitutes for, human
“intelligence and genius.” As I shall suggest, owing to how Marey’s
work undercuts the established accounts of what it means to make a
useful or adequate photograph, the medium’s capacity to perform such
a substitution becomes, within Marey’s investigative project, its
primary standard of usefulness and adequacy.
Marey’s photographic
endeavor, which he pursued from approximately 1881 until his death
in 1904, centered on visualizing a whole range of events that had no
existence in the human eye’s experience, from the swiftest motions
of human and animal bodies, to the energy use of living organisms.
As was the case for an array of photographic projects that were
contemporary with that of Marey (the work of Albert Londe, Francis
Galton, Jules Janssen, etc.), the images Marey made had no
antecedent object in perception to which they could attempt to be
faithful or even try to resemble. As discussion of Marey is
increasingly aware, the visualizations he produced, ones that stand
in a conventional relation to their otherwise invisible objects,
cannot be treated as superior or unbiased versions of what we know
by the senses, but as forms of data that have no existence apart
from the registration situations he contrived. It is only as a
result of the specialized measures Marey took, ones he explicitly
refers to as “artifices,” that visualizations such as figure 1 come
to be. Minus the strange clothing in which he clad his models (see
figure 2), the conditions of absolute darkness in which they
performed maneuvers, the specialized system of camera shutters Marey
arranged, and the newest high-speed films, the data Marey produced
are without existence. The artefactuality of these images, and the
conventional code they deliberately insert between observers and
investigated events, represent the only means by which the events in
question can become objects of study. Marey therefore operates
against the general understanding of what it means to make a
scientifically useful photograph, which often insists that the
photograph’s credibility and authority as a means of making images
derives from its ability to produce images that will appear to be
unmediated, “transparent,” or convention-less. In the absence of
mediation and artefactual intervention, Marey would simply have
nothing to examine.
Yet, if we recognize
how de-stabilizing Marey’s project is to certain of the ways in
which we talk about photography and scientific imaging, a set of
daunting questions present themselves. Above all, what does it mean
to make a valid, or useful, or significant photograph of an
invisible event? Entering use without an antecedent to which they
might strive to conform, what are the duties with which such images
might be tasked? While we can say that the relation between a set
of white lines on a black ground and the body’s use of energy is a
conventional one (see figure 3), what makes for a good or
scientifically meaningful convention for depicting the invisible?
Although these questions can be approached in a number of ways, one
capacity of the photographs Marey produced appears especially
noteworthy. When Peirce became so irate with Marey, he did so as he
read one of the many suggestions Marey made regarding the ability of
the photographic apparatus, when used in the proper fashion, to
stand in for a part of the scientist’s own mental activity. That
is, to photograph an event, at least under the specialized
conditions of Marey’s research, was to subject it to treatments that
had previously been the prerogative of human intelligence and human
genius. The registration device, owing to how Marey employed it in
his experimental work, automatically discharged these duties by
itself, and presented the visualized event as though it had already
been the object of human mental work. In particular, Marey believed
that a useful photograph of an event was one in which the highest
form of scientific endeavor, the discovery of the laws and general
propositions that describe the natural world, had implicitly been
enacted on the pictured event. To visualize an occurrence properly,
in Marey’s account, is to perform on it a part of the trajectory
that leads to the discovery of the law at work within it. In the
argument that caused Peirce to become so upset, for example, Marey
noted “Mechanics is founded on the laws of motion, laws of spaces
described, of velocities, and of acceleration.” He then states “The
difficulties Galileo and Atwood surmounted to determine these laws
will for the future be saved in all analogous cases for those who
shall employ chronophotography for the purpose.” In Marey’s
estimate, to make a successful visualization is to visit on the
pictured event certain of the treatments that culminate in the
discovery of law, and that have heretofore required the agency of a
Galileo or an Atwood.
In order to account
for how Marey believes his images can accomplish such feats, I turn
to certain strands of French philosophy of science from the
fin-de-siècle, above all the celebrated work of Pierre Duhem. Aside
from the historicist warrant for discussing Marey via an
intellectual apparatus contemporary with his work, this move
justifies itself by the deep conceptual overlap between Marey and
Duhem. In Duhem’s account, the pre-condition for a sound mode of
proceeding in science is the creation of a special kind of imagery,
one that sheds itself of sensory originals to which it might strive
to be faithful, and that becomes useful and meaningful for this very
reason. Although, for Duhem, such image-making takes place within
the mind of the scientific investigator, I shall show that there are
profound resonances between Duhem’s understanding of mental imagery
and Marey’s understanding of his own photographs. It is the fact of
this overlap that allows Marey to advance the strong claims he does
on behalf of his images.
Composite Images and Pure Dreams: The
Communicative Functions of Iconic Signs
Mats Bergman
The claim that there is a distinct and
significant iconic ground for representation has been the subject of
intense debates in philosophy and related disciplines. In the 1960s
and 1970s, the validity and value of the concept was strongly
challenged by a number of prominent philosophers and semioticians,
and it became increasingly associated with more or less discredited
mimetic accounts of art. Indeed, as a consequence of the efforts of
such ”iconoclasts” as Umberto Eco, Arthur Bierman, and Nelson
Goodman, iconicity appeared to have been all but eliminated
by more robust nominalistic and conventionalistic theories of
representation.
However, recently there has
been a noticeable rekindling of interest in iconicity. In part, this
trend is connected to the growing research into the semiotic
philosophy of Charles S. Peirce, and an improved understanding of
the subtleness and complexity of his original conception of the
iconic as a central mode of representation on par with the indexical
and the symbolic. At least, this return to the original sources has
shown that the seemingly devastating nominalistic and
conventionalistic criticisms of iconicity are not able to invalidate
the Peircean notion of iconic representation. In fact, if Peirce
ever was their target, they seem to have missed their mark by
considering neither the peculiar roles assigned to various modes of
representation in Peirce’s semiotic point of view nor the crucial
role of abstraction in iconisation. At the same time, developments
in linguistics and cognitive science have suggested that iconicity
is a significant factor in language use and human thought, and
consequently new theories of iconic representation have been
developed. Admittedly, these more empirical (and often evolutionary)
approaches differ from Peirce’s resolutely philosophical standpoint
– to the extent that it is not always clear whether the iconicity of
many contemporary debates is directly connected to Peirce’s concept
of icon or not. But be that as it may, these discussions have
certainly put the problems of iconicity, including the Peircean
variant, back in the spotlight.
In this paper, my primary aim is to
discuss a certain overlooked aspects of Peirce’s conception of
iconic representation. Most examinations of iconicity in the
Peircean context tend to focus on the icon as a sign that represents
its object by means of likeness or analogy – or, to be more precise,
on the icon as image, diagram or metaphor. This
is certainly not incorrect, as the well-known triad of
icon-index-symbol constitutes an attempt to capture the principal
representational modes. However, this emphasis on representation may
conceal the fact that the standing-for relation under scrutiny is in
fact abstracted from the broader sign process, which may more
comprehensively be characterised as one of mediation. In
Peircean terms, the question of how the sign represents its object
does not cover the full sign function, because it omits the
interpretant, the interpretive effect that is a constitutive
part of the sign (rather than just an accidental product of the
dyadic representational relation).
This, in turn,
suggests that the iconic function in representation (understood as a
standing-for relation) is actually subordinated to the role of
iconicity in mediation. More concretely, the question that should be
raised is what special role – if any – iconic signs play in
mediating or communicative sign processes. In this paper, I will not
attempt to present a full answer to this intricate problem. Instead,
I shall discuss two purportedly distinctive communicative features
of icons, as they are presented by Peirce. In particular, I will
explicate his notion that the mental icon may be viewed as a
composite photograph of past experiences, and scrutinise his claim
that the principal communicative function of an asserted icon is to
evoke such mental icons that in fact are experiential
generalisations. As such, they can be said to the carriers of
connotative meaning in communication. Furthermore, I will
investigate Peirce’s suggestive contention that iconicity is a
prominent feature of both scientific reasoning and artistic
contemplation. As a painting may appear as the object rather
than as a representation or copy of a presumably real object, if we
temporarily manage to put its indexical and symbolic aspects aside,
so in the midst of the reasoning process a mathematical diagram may
appear to be the very thing rather than an abstraction. According to
Peirce, we are dealing with “pure dreams” in both cases. They are
neither existents nor generals, but such reveries may still prove to
be highly useful and efficient for certain purposes. In fact, it is
possible that this “iconic illusion” is needed for creative
scientific thought and meaningful communication as well as for
aesthetic appreciation.
Learning through
fictional representations in art and science
David Davies
A number of
philosophers have suggested that there are interesting connections
to be drawn between philosophical questions about thought
experiments [TE’s] and issues that arise in the philosophy of
fiction. I examine whether there are indeed such parallels to be
drawn concerning the ways in which we might learn about the actual
world through engagement with representations which, at face value,
make no pretension to accurately represent that world. Can we
perhaps profit by bringing work on the ‘epistemological problem’ of
scientific TE’s to bear upon the epistemological problems that
attend the cognitive pretensions of works of fiction?
I begin by noting two
respects in which TE’s and standard fictional narratives are indeed
comparable. First, TE’s possess those features most plausibly taken
to be the distinguishing features of fictional narratives. Secondly,
considerations most plausibly thought to enter into the
understanding of fictional narratives also enter into the
understanding of scientific TE’s.
The epistemological
problem posed by scientific TE’s consists in the difficulty, at
least on any standard empiricist view of science, of reconciling the
following three claims:
C1/ TE’s do not rely
on or provide any new empirical data concerning the state of the
world. This is taken to be true by definition.
C2/ TE’s provide us
with new information about the physical world.
C3/ TE’s, while they
involve reasoning, cannot be reduced without epistemic loss to
inferences of any standard kind (deductive, inductive, or
abductive).
A deflationary
response denies that there is a genuine problem, because either
C2 or C3 (or both) should be rejected. By contrast, an
inflationary response accepts both C2 and C3, thereby taking
TE’s to have a distinctive epistemic value, and offers an
explanation of how TE’s can possess that value. We can also
distinguish extreme and moderate versions of each kind of response.
An extreme deflationist will simply deny C2. A moderate deflationist
retains C2 but rejects C3, denying that TE’s have any distinctive
kind of epistemic virtue. A moderate inflationist supplements C1 by
arguing that prior empirical knowledge can be mobilised in a new way
by TE’s. Finally, an extreme inflationist argues that TE’s involve
non-empirical modes of acquiring knowledge.
Arguably, at least
some prominent scientific TE’s - for example, Galileo’s ‘tower’
experiment - are best explained on a moderate inflationist approach.
I focus on what I take to be the most promising such approach - a
moderate inflationism that argues that TE’s are epistemically
singular, and cannot be reconstructed as deductive or inductive
arguments without epistemic loss, because of the way in which they
mobilise cognitive resources available prior to the formulation of
the TE. Mach, the progenitor of this approach, argued that we have
‘instinctive knowledge’, derived from experience but never
articulated and perhaps even incapable of being articulated or made
explicit, and that this knowledge is activated when we imagine
ourselves in a hypothetical experimental situation. This explains
how we are able to “immediately” draw the required conclusion on the
basis of the TE narrative.
This kind of moderate
inflationism has been most fully developed by philosophers who draw
on work by cognitive scientists (e.g. Johnson-Laird) on the
construction and manipulation of mental models in narrative
comprehension. TE narratives, it is claimed, are used by the
receiver to construct a quasi-spatial ‘mental model’ of the
hypothetical situation. In running the TE, the receiver then
operates directly upon the model, deriving the experimental
conclusion by manipulating the latter rather that operating upon the
linguistic representations comprised by the narrative used in
constructing the model. In constructing and manipulating this model,
we can mobilise various kinds of cognitive resources in ways not
possible if we were to work directly on a regimented propositional
account of the problem. Because of the role played, here, by tacit,
unarticulated, and perhaps inarticulable, forms of knowledge, we
cannot reconstruct a TE as an argument without epistemic loss.
Such an account of
the epistemic virtues of TE’s in science, if plausible, can be
enlisted in defence of at least some of the cognitive claims of
fictions. The standard objection against the latter is that the most
we can get from reading fictional narratives are hypotheses
about the general ordering of things in the world, or beliefs
about specific aspects of the world, or potentially insightful
ways of categorising things in our experience. Only if those
hypotheses or beliefs pass further tests can they acquire the status
of knowledge, it is claimed. The challenge is to provide some reason
why we should accept the cognitive claims of literary works without
further empirical test, or why our responses to such works are to be
trusted. Standard defences of the cognitive claims of literature
(e.g. Novitz and Young) either explicitly or implicitly decline to
meet this challenge, and for some of these claims (e.g. the
classificatory role played by fictional names as elucidated by
Goodman) this seems to be the right answer.
It can be argued,
however, that, as with some TE’s, our responses to some fictional
narratives mobilise unarticulated cognitive resources grounded in
our experience of the world. The fictional narrative makes manifest
what are presented as patterns underlying the complexity of actual
experience. The rightness or wrongness of what is manifest in the
narrative is ‘tested’ by our feeling that the novel has, or has not,
revealed such patterns to us, and this feeling is to be trusted
because it reflects the operation of such unarticulated cognitive
resources in our reading. This can be cashed out in terms of the use
of mental models in our comprehension of fictional narratives. The
suggestion, then, is that the mental models through which readers
comprehend fictional narratives also provide, through their
mobilisation of tacit or unarticulated knowledge of the world, a
means of testing some of those claims to knowledge of the actual
world that theorists have located in fictional narratives, and
thereby validate the idea that fiction can be a genuine source of
knowledge of the world.
Session 6:
Examples and Exemplification
The Use of
Examples as Symbolic Practice
Elisabeth Birk
One of the most
important problems for a study of visual practices is the choice of
a description language that is general enough to allow for
comparisons between different symbolic practices (such as the use of
verbal and pictorial symbols) and specific enough to allow for
meaningful descriptions of actual practices. I will argue that
Goodman’s theory of symbols provides some of the categories needed
for such an analysis; this can be shown by applying them to a
symbolic practice that is as complex as it is common: the giving of
examples.
Examples have not
been more than a minor object of study in rhetoric and
epistemological traditions. In writings on rhetorical figures the
almost exclusive attention bestowed on metaphor and metonymy has
obscured other phenomena such as examples; very roughly speaking,
the use of examples has been reduced to one apparently simple
function – that of being a ‘witness’ (Aristotle) to what has already
been said and proven independently of these examples. It is only
with Kant and the profound re-conception of epistemology he
operates, that examples are, in a way, rehabilitated: examples are
to empirical statement what schemas are to categories, they furnish
the intuition that is indispensable to any knowledge as such. With
Wittgenstein’s language-games, finally, realistic and fictitious
examples of linguistic habits have become the centre-piece of
philosophical analysis.
These conflicting
views are, in equal measure, present in our everyday conceptions
about examples: it seems obvious that an example is an instance of a
general concept, that we need it for purposes of illustration, that
examples are mere data; it seems equally obvious that examples show
what cannot be said, that there is somehow ‘more’ to them and that
they defy description. In other words, an analysis of examples
should help us to decide whether examples are indispensable or not
and whether examples are innocent or not. Goodman’s theory of
symbols allows us to disentangle the two different strands of
questions that make up these traditional approaches to the analysis
of examples – the question, what distinguishes ‘showing’ from
‘telling’, from the question, what distinguishes an example from an
image and intuition from iconicity.
According to Goodman,
exemplification is a kind of reference: if denotation is the
reference of a label (a picture, a predicate etc.) to its instances,
exemplification is, conversely, “the reference of a sample to a
feature of the sample”, of what is denoted by a certain label to
this label. If exemplification is defined by the direction of
reference, it is obvious that being an example (as opposed to a
denotation) and being an image (as opposed to, say, a verbal
description) involve distinctions in different dimensions of
description: iconicity does not depend on the direction of
reference, but on how this reference operates; iconicity requires
‘density’ and ‘repleteness’ of representation, a wealth of aspects
that “merge into one another”. ‘Showing’ as opposed to ‘telling’
implies both: exemplification and density.
These distinctions
direct a study of exemplificational practices to (at least) the
following lines of inquiry:
- If not all
examples ‘show’ something, some exemplificational systems will be
digital. The conditions for such a use of examples will have to be
described.
-
Exemplification is selective, it involves choosing one of the many
labels that apply to a given sample; this choice is largely
context-dependent, and it is therefore essential to name the cue(s)
that effect that choice.
- Being an
example is, as Goodman points out, not the same thing as being a
good example. A good example requires ‘projectibility’, i.e. it must
be considered to be representative of a certain class of objects.
Which samples are projectible depends largely on their acceptability
in the wider framework of accepted practices; it will therefore be
important to name the criteria of acceptability that make us
perceive an example as a good example.
- ‘Giving an
example’ is a symbolic practice that involves verbal, pictorial or
other symbols or any combination of these. Many of these practices
will therefore involve complex representational chains: If pictures
are not used as examples in a discourse on pictures, but as examples
in a discourse on what they denote, the label that is exemplified
will be several steps further up in the chain.
- By
retracing the steps in this chain, it is possible to locate what
could be dubbed points of entry for ‘mythological’ connotations
(Barthes), in other words, to show how examples can be exploited to
convey more than just the one reference that is dominant in a
certain context. A picture used as an example in a discourse on what
it denotes will not only be subject to certain representational
conventions, it might also contain clues that it should be
understood as representing its object in a certain way – or
conversely contain strategies to avoid such a ‘representation-as’.
By exploring these
aspects we can identify contexts where examples are indispensible
and those where they are not as innocent as they seem. Such an
analysis would involve an understanding of symbolic practices,
visual and otherwise, not in isolation from each other but as
interdependent practices in a cultural framework. Goodman’s
categories enable us to approach these practices without according a
cognitive or ontological privilege to any of them; it takes us
beyond the ‘reading’ of pictures as well as beyond the search for
iconic or mimetic elements in texts. – Nominalism is a promising
option for visual studies.
The role of
illustration in argumentation
Gloria Origgi
Much of the recent debate about the role of representations in
science and argumentation focuses on the role of visual
representations in scientific reasoning. How do scientists use
visual representations and what do these images mean? Can images be
part of a scientific argument? And, if they can, how do they
contribute to the overall meaning of a scientific argument? Visual
representations are thus viewed as non-linguistic objects that can
exploit the fine-grainedness of visual perception as opposed to
verbal description for a variety of purposes such as conveying data,
exemplifying an argument, or acting as cognitive facilitators in
order to visualise information.
In this paper I will argue that illustrations, that is, cognitive
facilitators that make things clearer to the mind, play a central
role both in language and in other representational systems. In my
view, illustrations (linguistic and pictorial) are a subset of
exemplifications, and play a distinctive role in argumentation:
Instead of providing evidence for an hypothesis (as exemplifications
do in inductive reasoning) they facilitate the construction of a
visual representation of that hypothesis. Both kinds of
illustrations, linguistic and non-linguistic elicit semantically
dense representations of a property or a concept presented in an
argument. I will take some linguistic examples of illustration
coming from the philosophical literature, in order to show that
their role in the overall meaning of an argument is very similar to
the role of images when used as illustrations.
Take the example of a relatively recent philosophical book, Margaret
Gilbert’s book on Social Facts (Routledge, 1989). She
introduces the technical philosophical notion of “we-intentions” and
the illustrates it with various examples, such as for example the
“restaurant case” (p.175) in which: “A group of people are eating
together, two of them, Tony and Celia, are engaged and the other two
barely know each other. Tony asks Celia: “Shall we share a pastry?”
Celia agrees. The one of the other man, Bernard, turns to Sylvia,
who is sitting on his right and whom she hardly knows and asks
“Shall we share a pastry?”. She finds his use of “we”
inappropriate”. These stories are neither presented as pieces of
evidence that may prove the hypothesis at stake, nor are they
standard exemplifications (as defined in Goodman, 1976) because the
don’t possess the properties they are supposed to exemplify. They
illustrate these properties by eliciting a visual representation.
Or take the more classical case of J.P. Sartre’s famous
illustrations of what “bad faith” means. He introduces the
description of a scene, in which he pictures a girl sitting with a
man who she knows very well would like to seduce her. But when he
takes her hand, she tries to avoid the painful necessity of a
decision to accept or reject him, by pretending not to notice,
leaving her hand in his as if she were not aware of it. The second
illustration of "bad faith" describes a cafe waiter who is doing his
job just a little too keenly; he is obviously 'acting the part'.
These descriptions play an obvious role in his argument by
contributing to making the notion of “bad faith” more vivid.
These descriptive sketches require a narrative ability and may fail
to elicit the appropriate visualisation of the concept because of
lack of some aesthetic properties.
My idea is that illustration as a rhetoric device bears interesting
relations with visual representations both in the case of linguistic
illustrations and graphic illustrations. A better investigation of
the notion of illustration could provide an insight on the role of
visual representations in argumentation.
The facts about pictures: A response
to Perini
Letitia Meynell
In “The Truth in Pictures” (2005), Laura
Perini argues that any theory that can account for the epistemic
efficacy of scientific images must start with a theory explaining
how pictures can be true. She attempts to provide such an account,
using Alfred Tarski’s theory of truth (1958) and Nelson Goodman’s
theory of representation (1968). Three of Perini’s central examples
will be the focus of my critique. A graph and a chemical diagram are
taken as exemplars of the type of Goodmanian symbol system that can
be parsed and assessed. An electron micrograph, in contrast, is
treated as a worrying but marginal case; though it speaks against
her theory it is not taken as sufficiently significant to warrant
its rejection.
I argue that Perini has inverted the
significance of these images. Far from marginal, the electron
micrograph is a type of representation that is paradigmatically
pictorial. It has spatial properties that ‘resemble’ those of the
represented objects—not accidentally, but crucially—and is thus
fundamentally distinct from Perini’s other examples, wherein the
spatial properties of graph/diagram are arbitrary with respect to
the object depicted. Indeed, I will show that Perini’s graph (and
arguably the diagram also) are not pictorial in any interesting
sense. The analytic tools developed by John Willats (1997) and
Kendall Walton (1990) provide both the groundwork for the critique
and offer the promise of a more empirically grounded account of the
function of pictures in science.
Goodman characterizes all
representations, pictorial or otherwise, as symbol systems.
Representation is understood as a subclass of denotation and, as any
thing can be taken to stand for, or denote, any other, resemblance
is taken to be irrelevant. Crucial to understanding the power of
Goodman’s theory is recognizing the motivations for it. Goodman
argues that theories of representation that base representation of
an object on resemblance to the object are hopelessly flawed and
that his conventionalism is the only real alternative (Goodman 1968,
Chapter 1). In short, copying an object “just as it is” (Goodman
1968, 6) is impossible, copying an object as it appears to be is
also impossible (ibid. 11-12), so resemblance must be meaningless.
What Goodman’s remarks in fact justify is the recognition that there
is no one right way to characterize resemblance relations between a
representation and its object or the appearance of its object.
Indeed, Willats’ distinction, drawn from developmental psychology,
between object centered and view centered descriptions highlight the
fact that with the creation of any representation comes a choice as
to whether to represent the scene or our view of the scene. There
is no a priori answer to this question. Indeed, Willats
offers an extraordinarily rich analysis of drawing systems
(including projection systems) and denotation systems (covering
marks on the surface, the shape of these marks—picture
primitives—and the “elementary units of shape information in a
scene” (Willats 1997, 370)—scene primitives). Understanding these
are crucial to properly understanding a picture, which following
Wollheim, Willats conceives as “a two-dimensional representation of
a three dimensional scene” (ibid., 369). At best, then Goodman
shows that resemblance is complex, so a theory of representation
characterized through resemblance is also likely to be complex.
Willats offers some insight into this complexity. Because his
account is focused on transferring a three dimensional scene onto a
two dimensional surface, he is crucially concerned with spatial
relations that constitute resemblance.
Though Perini explicitly adopts
Goodman’s theory, paradoxically, she also allows that resemblance
can play a role in representation. The decision as to which
similarities are used is arbitrary—a mere convention. Thus the shape
or colour of a drawn leaf can represent the shape or colour of the
leaf itself through resemblance (in opposition to Goodman, this is
taken to be meaningful); but acceptance of the resemblances as
representationally relevant is merely convention. Against, this I
follow Walton’s view that there is a special kind of representation,
namely depiction, where, far from accidental, resemblances between
object and picture are crucial. It is the particularly visual
character of a depiction that distinguishes it from other
representations, be they text or some other symbol system. The
perceptual experience of depictions has a kind of dual nature (akin
to Wittgenstein’s ‘seeing as’ and Wollheim’s ‘seeing in’). “It is
this complex experience that is distinctive of and appropriate to
the perception of pictures, the experience sometimes labeled ‘seeing
the picture as [for example] a mill’ or ‘seeing the mill in the
picture’” (Walton 1990, 295). Rather than grounding depiction on
some kind of general appeal to similarity or illusion, Walton’s
account depends on comparisons between the depiction and the object
depicted. The relevant comparisons “hold between the process of
inspecting pictures to ascertain what is [true in the picture] and
the process of inspecting reality to ascertain what is true [in the
world], between visual investigations of picture worlds and visual
investigations of the real world” (ibid.). The processes of
inspecting the object(s) in reality dictate which of the various
modes and methods of depiction (Willats’ drawing systems and
denoting systems) are appropriate.
We can see how Walton’s distinction
between depiction and non-depictive representation nicely clears up
a number of issues. The resemblances that inevitably support
depictions are not cases of naïve copying, attacked by Goodman, but
nor are they arbitrarily chosen as per Perini. Rather they are
constrained choices whereby the crucial features that are of concern
to the drawer and viewer dictate how the drawing is rendered so as
to capture these features. A given representation can be
purely conventional, but for a picture to be peculiarly pictorial
depiction must be involved. Moreover, while Walton’s depictions
will not necessarily be Willats’ pictures, they will tend to be.
Walton recognizes that we can choose to use any thing to
represent anything else (lines to represent housing developments,
salt and pepper shakers to represent bicycle accidents); however,
there are certain representations, depictions wherein there are
crucial analogies between looking at the picture and the object
pictured.
In the last part of the paper I will
show that Perini’s graph is a non-depictive representation, while
the electron micrograph is a depiction. A closer analysis of these
images will also help to decipher whether the chemical diagram is
depictive or not. While space constraints preclude giving an
exhaustive account here, issues concerning the origins of the image,
interchangeability of the content of the image with other content,
and the relation of the image to text all play a part. This analysis
will further explicate the distinction between depictions, which
cannot be reduced to symbol systems because of their analogies with
visual experience, and symbol systems, including graphs, which can
be easily parsed using logical form because of their profoundly
conventional nature. Ultimately, it will be concluded that Perini’s
account, showing how the graph and chemical diagram can be both
parsed and epistemically evaluated is fundamentally uninteresting
because they are fundamentally not pictorial. Thus Perini’s central
examples are irrelevant to the issue of pictorial representation in
the sciences.
Session 7: Can
Pictures Be Scientifically Explained?
Pictorial
Depiction: Letting Neuroscience Say Something to Nelson Goodman
Pradeep Ajit Dhillon
Among other concerns,
Immanuel Kant took aesthetics to be concerned with understanding how
humans translate sensory information into representations thus
blurring the line between different kinds of images. Further
blurring the line between art and science, two neuroscientists, V.R.
Ramachandran and Semir Zeki, have taken the lead in naturalizing
aesthetics. In this paper, I wish to explore the usefulness of
naturalizing aesthetics in helping advance philosophical aesthetics
generally. Specifically, I intend to use neurobiological
explanations of perceptual processing to help adjudicate between
competing claims in the area of pictorial depiction particularly
with regard to reference. In following this line of inquiry I will
navigate between mimetic and symbolic theories of representation.
Gareth Evan’s
conception of reference and its connection to information-based
thought provides a suitable model for Dominick Lopes for a
perceptual account of how pictures refer. To understand pictures, he
argues, viewers must employ a specifically pictorial mode of
identification that singles out, based on their contents, the
pictures’ sources. Thus Lopes hopes to maintain Nelson Goodman’s
insight that pictures can fruitfully be modeled on other kinds of
representation by taking them to be symbols of perceptual accounts
of depiction while refusing to be bound by Goodman’s nominalism. If
pictures are symbols, they may be symbols whose reference depends on
the exercise of perceptual skills.
In opposition
to those who present consciousness as singular, unified and distinct
from the micro-processes of our neural systems, Semir Zeki proposes
a model in which the various, functionally specific, areas of the
brain constitute regions of conscious activity with no higher
interpretive cognitive processes. The impression we have of
holistic experiences, he argues, is illusory. Some of Zeki’s
experiments have shown that we experience a lag between when we see
color and when we perceive motion. Film makers use this phenomenon
to great advantage. Introducing temporality and modular distribution
to our understanding of visual perception, Zeki has added another
dimension to our worries of depiction.
Let us consider
Ramachandran’s claim that artists either consciously or
unconsciously deploy certain rules or principles to titillate the
visual areas of the brain. Lopes would receive support from
Ramachandran for demonstrating how important aspect recognition is
for depiction. It is to uncover these forms that Ramachandran thinks
that neuroscientists should pay attention to art forms across
cultures. While Ramachandran does not draw on the rich
philosophical discussion of depiction, we can see how this might
parallel, if not outright support, Gombrich’s use of the concept of
substitution in depiction. Furthermore, Ramachandran recognizes the
role of autobiographical and cultural memory in aesthetic
perception. Ramachandran suggests that some trends in art history
could be studies under the logic of peak shift such as the reliance
of Picasso on earlier forms of African art. Furthermore, the
principle of perceptually binding and grouping can often be found in
art. Our ability to group and bind refines our thinking about
pictorial depiction in a manner that takes us beyond debates of
whether pictures are symbolic, substitutive, and perceptual
explanations. Ramachandran also provides evidence from psychological
studies and visual neuroscience for recognition and depiction such
as Contrast Extraction, and Symmetry in laying out what he calls the
eight laws of pictorial depiction and experience. Thus Ramachandran
anticipates, and seeks to refute, the objection that originality and
uniqueness are the main characteristics of art. Regardless of where
we stand with regard to Ramachandran’s eight bio-genetically based
aesthetic universal principles, it is hard to disregard them
entirely since they serve to refine philosophical questions.
In reading the
neuro-scientific literature we learn, among other things, that there
are many perceptual processes that result in visual experiences
subject to cognitive contingencies; ambiguous images offer prime
examples. Zeki argues that functionally specialized visual areas
(such as those responsible for recognizing lines and angles, for
example) draw upon other brain processes, such as memory and
experience to produce a cognitive interpretation containing
information that is actually missing, or misrepresented in the
image. Hence, even though a depiction of a plate in two-dimensional
space is given as an oval shape, in our everyday world dinner plates
are usually round and so we experience the elliptical object as
round. Zeki reminds us that our encounter with images does not
merely produce one interpretation but is apt to vacillate between
readings.
The philosopher
Robert Hopkins presents six features of the experienced resemblance
view of depiction. Two of these are especially interesting with
regards Ramachandran’s discussion of point of view in depiction, and
Zeki’s attempt to establish the neurophysiological bases of
ambiguity. The first of these is Hopkins claim that “since
resemblance can only be experienced to something with an outline
shape, and since an outline shape and outline shape is relevant to a
point, resemblance is experienced to something considered from a
certain point of view.” Drawing on experimental studies,
Ramachandran argues that our neural systems strenuously resist
singular points of view. Hopkins’s argument motivated by a desire
for certainty concludes by entirely rejecting Goodman who might have
followed Zeki’s naturalized account of pictorial ambiguity with
considerable interest.
Lopes rightly,
in my view, challenges Hopkins on all the features of his
explanation of depiction in terms of experienced resemblance in
outline shape (which he calls EROS for short). Specific to our
discussion of Hopkins and Zeki in light of ambiguity he is accurate
in pointing out that Hopkins theory relies on a point of view which
should be loosely interpreted “for an object may be recognizable
even when so rendered in two dimensions that the point of view is
indeterminate or multiple, as in East Asian “roving eye” painting or
analytic cubism.”
Favoring
recognition theory over Hopkins’s EROS, Lopes remarks that “On EROS,
central cases of depiction comprise only pictures that are
experienced as matching their depicta in outline shape; all others
are marginal. By contrast, the recognition theory counts among
central cases of depiction many pictures of nonstandard projection
systems, cubist pictures, and otherwise stylized pictures.” Here
Lopes is with Zeki on thinking about the possibilities of our
experiencing plates depicted on as oval on a two-dimensional surface
certainly as plates but also oval or round based on our perceptual
relation to the depiction.
In this paper I
seek to draw on neuroaesthetics to argue for a theory of
representation that moves between mimesis and Goodmanian symbolic
schemas. There might be some profit in looking to neuroscience when
we raise questions regarding pictorial depiction even as
neuroscientists have turned to art to develop their understanding of
visual processing. Such interdisciplinary questioning should deepen
our philosophical understanding of aesthetic representation,
movements in art-history, refine the tools of art criticism, and
perhaps even provide a framework for global aesthetics. Finally,
while productive as this interdisciplinary inquiry might be we would
not wish to reduce the aesthetic and scientific realms to each
other. In the end, each discipline serves itself by crossing
disciplinary boundaries.
Chaos
Damn It.
Fractals and Jackson Pollock.
Francis
Halsall
The all-over abstract
canvases which Jackson Pollock produced between 1943 and 1951 have
proved notoriously difficult for art historians to deal with. This
is undoubtedly a consequence of their abstraction. In the face of an
apparent disintegration of the traditional pictorial distinction
between figure and ground a multiplicity of readings present
themselves. These may be based on either mimetic or nominalist
readings. To many, including the baffled contemporary audience, they
were nothing but an inchoate mess. In 1950, Time magazine referred
to them as ‘Chaos’ prompting Pollock to wire a heated reply, ‘NO
CHAOS DAMN IT.’
Given the suggestive
ambiguity and ‘chaos’ of the images there is little in the work
itself which challenges the numerous, often contradictory, readings
that have been posited. In fact how art-historians approach such
images tells us something about the way art history itself works.
The plurality of questions raised concerning what the paintings
actually represent is itself demonstrative of the wide variety of
techniques which modern art-historians have at their disposal.
Analyses have been based upon observations which are couched in the
vocabularies of: politics (often Marxist); feminism; psychoanalysis,
iconography; formalism and so-forth. At the time even the C.I.A.
were in on the act, apparently realising that the ambiguity of the
work left it open to political manipulation and secretly funding the
promotion of Abstract Expressionism as a weapon of the cold-war. The
distinguished art historian Ernst Gombrich voiced his celebrated
frustration with abstract art in a manner that highlights the
problems traditional art historical methods have with such art.
Writing on Pollock’s Number 12 (1952) he too seemed perplexed
in the face of chaos. His response to the lack of explicit
representational content or accountable meaning was to claim:
‘It is quite
consistent that these [action] painters must counteract all
semblance of familiar objects or even of patterns in space. But few
of them appear to realise that they can drive into the desired
identification only those who know how to apply the various
traditional consistency tests and thereby discover the absence of
any meaning except the highly ambiguous meaning of traces.’
Indeed if there is
any consensus about Pollock’s work it is that a single, specific
meaning will always allude us.
All of this makes the
recent claims of three physicists to have found the ‘fundamental
content’ of several of Pollock’s paintings as astonishing as the
images themselves. In two papers which appeared in Physics World
and Nature in 1999 Richard Taylor, Adam Micolich and David
Jonas stated that through the application of ‘scientific
objectivity’ they could determine the specific meaning of the
paintings. In a follow up article which appeared in Leonardo
in 2002 the claim was re-iterated with the bold statement that by
identifying certain fractal patterns in the paintings the authors
were: ‘ending 50 years of debate over the content of his
paintings.’ To determine this ‘fundamental content’ Taylor,
Micolich and Jonas had used methods employed by Chaos Theory and
Complexity Theory and analysed several paintings. They found
mathematical patterns in the apparent chaos of paint.
Their thesis implies
that Pollock’s protestations of ‘NO CHAOS DAMN IT,’ can be verified
by proving that there is an underlying structure to the images after
all.
This paper explores
the implications of such scientific methods of visual analysis.
Relevant questions include (but are not limited to): how fractal
patterns provide evidence of Pollock’s working method; how this may
be used to date the work; how fractal patterns provide evidence of
structure in Pollock’s work that are mimetic of naturally occurring
forms; and that such structure explains the work’s aesthetic appeal.
My conclusion will
present a response to such implications. I am skeptical of the art
historical efficacy of such methods for two main reasons. Firstly
because an effective account of any work of art must extend its
focus beyond the singular work itself to the socio-political
contexts of its production and reception. And secondly because,
arguably, the power of Pollock’s work, and hence his continued
importance in the development of avant-garde art, is a very function
of its abstraction. This means that attempts to find singular
definitions of the representative content of the paintings (either
mimetic or nominalist) will always be confounded by the works’
complexity.
Reconsidering
Visual Experience and Pictorial Representation: An Enactive Approach
Johan Veldeman
I
shall propose to reconsider pictorial representation in the light of
recent advances in our understanding of visual perception. It will
be argued that the available models fail to properly account for
pictorial representation.
An alternative
model of pictorial representation will be proposed, inspired by an
enactive approach to visual experience.
The ‘standard view’
of depiction comprises quite diverging views that share the
conviction that pictures need to be explained by invoking the unique
type of experience they elicit. To sum up the most outstanding ones:
‘resemblance theories’ (Peacocke, Hopkins) hold that pictures
represent because experiences of pictures are similar to experiences
of their represented objects and scenes; on Wollheim’s ‘seeing-in
theory’, depiction is explained in terms of the distinctive
phenomenology of simultaneous seeing the picture’s surface and its
represented objects; the ‘illusion theory’ defended by Gombrich
explains pictorial realism in terms of an exact match between the
content and the phenomenology of pictorial experience and the visual
experience of whatever is depicted.
Although there is
undeniably some truth in each of these theories, the attempt to
explain pictorial representation in terms of pictorial experience is
ill-founded. The common flaw with these proposals is that they are
based on the assumption that one can specify pictorial experience in
a determinate way, independently of what pictures represent. This is
mistaken for several reasons. It overlooks that experience is
‘transparent’, so that its phenomenology cannot simply be captured
by introspectively attending to it. Moreover, these approaches
heavily draw on a conception of visual experience that treats vision
itself as ‘picture-like’. If one conceives perception as a process
of building up a detailed representation of the world on the basis
of the retinal image, as on the standard computational approach,
then it might seem natural to see a picture as designed to produce a
certain kind of sensory experience. Such a ‘picture-like’ conception
of perception is problematic for several reasons, and it is being
increasingly challenged by diverging alternative research programs
that are united by their insistence on the importance of action and
embodiment for the study of perception, and that suggest that seeing
is essentially active and attentional. The implications of this
paradigm shift for theories of art and pictorial representation have
rarely been considered, however. One such implication is that any
attempt to explain depiction in terms of pictorial experience is
highly problematic. If visual experience is not some state that is
produced in the brain at some stage in the visual processing, but if
it rather active and dynamic, then any attempt to explain pictures
by treating them as somehow equivalent to certain experiences is
doomed to failure.
An independent and
equally important reason for rejecting the standard approaches to
depiction is that they are committed to taking some distinctive
experience as a starting point, thereby severely violating the
enormous diversity of pictorial representations. This has been very
well acknowledged by Nelson Goodman. As a radical alternative,
Goodman has developed a symbolic theory of depiction, which holds
that visual art represents by way of a symbol system that has
distinctive syntactic and semantic properties, just as a verbal
language does. Goodman’s groundbreaking theory has delivered some
important insights that any theory of depiction should take into
account. It explains pictorial diversity and it rightly points out
that pictures belong to a system of representation and that
correctly interpreting a picture requires knowledge of that system.
Yet according to the symbolic approach pictorial systems are not
constrained by perceptual mechanisms at all. As a consequence,
Goodman is unable to explain what is distinctive of pictorial
representation with regards to other systems of representation.
Whereas standard theories are implausibly subjectivistic, Goodman’s
account is implausibly objectivistic.
A promising middle
way is provided by so-called ‘recognition theories’, as defended by
Flint Schier and Dominic Lopes. On this model, pictures are symbols
whose reference depends on the exercise of perceptual skills: the
ability to recognize the objects a picture represents is taken to be
a extension of the dynamism of recognition generally. Recognition
theory nicely reconciles symbolism with perceptualism. The principle
virtue of recognition theory is that it rejects the deeply
entrenched but mistaken assumption that pictorial representation is
highly determinate and specific - an assumption shared by
subjectivists and objectivists – and holds instead that it is
essentially selective and aspectually structured. And since
recognition abilities exploited in identifying what a picture
represents are always dynamic relative to kinds of aspects, the
account is able to explain pictorial diversity.
The central problem
with recognition theory is with its appeal to nonconceptual
representation underlying aspect-cognition, or so I shall argue. The
approach draws on a modular view on visual perception, which is
phenomenologically implausible. It will be argued that adapting the
general insights of recognition theory to an ‘enactive’ approach to
visual perception might yield a better explanation of the aspectual
and selective nature of pictorial representation. On the enactive
approach to visual perception, as developed in the ‘Sensorimotor
Contingency Theory’ by O’Regan & Noë and in Alva Noë’s Action in
Perception, seeing is a particular skill-based activity of
environmental exploration that is constituted by a kind of
sensorimotor understanding, that is, the implicit understanding of
the effects of movement on sensory stimulation. The enactive
approach suggests a radically different conception of how pictorial
representation might be grounded on perceptual processes, which does
full justice to the phenomenology of experience and which does not
appeal to representations in the head. It suggests that the
perceptual skills that make it possible for viewers to grasp what
pictures represent should be regarded as a kind of sensorimotor
understanding. By explaining pictorial aspects, and thus the
diversity of pictorial systems, in terms of aspects of the world of
which we have a sensorimotor grasp, the enactive account reconciles
the idea that pictorial representation is perceptually constrained
with Goodman’s central insight that depictions belong to pictorial
systems.
Session 8:
Philosophical Accounts of Representation
The Visual
Character of Pictorial Representation
Katerina Bantinaki
The focus of my paper
is on the claim, popular in pictorial theory, that pictorial
understanding can be attained directly and entirely by means of
one’s visual engagement with a picture. I argue that this claim
(which I call the opticality claim after R.
Wollheim)is unqualifiedly true only in those cases that the viewer
is suitably informed; I explain what the contexts are along which
the viewer ought to be informed in order to understand a picture;
and I point out that the opticality claim, as it ought to be
understood, is not so much a claim about the process of pictorial
understanding (as it is not unqualifiedly true of this process) but
about the character of pictorial understanding: it indicates
the fact that pictorial understanding, regardless of the way that it
has been accomplished, is distinctively visual, to the extent that
the upshot of an interpretation informs, and at the same time is
informed by, what is seen in the picture.
On the interpretation of Guernica:
Why isomorphism won’t do for representation – in art or in science
Mauricio Suárez
In a scientific
representation a model – more generally a representational source
– stands in some putative relation to a system or object – more
generally a target. What kind of relation is this – if it is
indeed a relation? In previous work (Suárez, 1999, 2003) I presented
five arguments against taking the relation to be similarity or
isomorphism: the arguments from variety, logical,
misrepresentation, non-sufficiency and non-necessity.
The argument from variety points to the large number of distinct
means of representation employed by scientists in their
representational practice. The logical argument is inspired by
(Goodman, 1971) and shows that isomorphism and similarity have the
wrong logical properties for representation. The misrepresentation
argument shows that isomorphism and similarity cannot make room for
the ubiquitous phenomena of inaccuracy or mistargetting. The final
two arguments (non-sufficiency and non-necessity) are supported by
an analogy with artistic representation, and painting in particular.
The analogy helps to
bring out the ways in which scientific representations can be said
to be representations in the ordinary sense of the term. The
force of the analogy between scientific models and painting is to a
large extent a consequence of the currently dominating semantic
conception of scientific theories. On this conception scientific
theories are best understood as sets of models; and models in turn
are best construed as mathematical structures. This is why I have
illustrated some of my arguments and theses with analogies with
three paintings: Diego Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X,
Picasso’s Guernica, and one of Mondriaan’s Diagonal
Compositions.
The
non-necessity argument in particular turns on the analogy with
Picasso’s Guernica. I argue that (1) if scientific
representation is to be a form of representation in general, then it
must be in line with artistic representation in the following sense:
if isomorphism is not a necessary condition for artistic
representation then it is neither necessary for scientific
representation. I then defend the claim that (2) representational
paintings are not representational in virtue of any isomorphism with
what they represent, and I employ Guernica as an
illustration. A simple modus ponens then yields the
conclusion that (3) isomorphism is not necessary for scientific
representation.
Steven French has
contested my arguments (French, 2003), and in particular he has
taken issue with the non-necessity argument. French seems to accept
the analogy between scientific and artistic representation while
rejecting that isomorphism is irrelevant in both cases. In other
words French apparently accepts premise (1) in my argument above but
denies premise (2), and hence denies the conclusion. He first aims
to defend, by appeal to Budd’s work on the visual field (Budd,
1993), that artistic representation generally requires
isomorphism. And then he attempts to show – more concretely – that
Guernica is representational precisely in virtue of some kind
of isomorphism – in this regard he appeals to the work of a
distinguished American historian of art (Chipp, 1989).
I value French’s
reply for engaging with my argument in detail, and for taking what
appears to be the hardest route to refute it. French’s clever
strategy is to turn my argument on its head in order to argue from
the artistic case to the scientific case. It is clear that we agree
that what goes in the artistic case goes in the scientific case.
Hence our dispute concerning my non-necessity argument turns
entirely on the thesis about art, and in particular on the
interpretation of Guernica. I believe that French’s argument
is mistaken, and I stand firmly by my original theses. In this talk
I would like to defend them publicly – both the general thesis
regarding painting, and its more concrete application to the case of
Guernica.
I defend the general
thesis (when painting is representational this is not in virtue of
any isomorphism) by criticizing French’s interpretation of Budd’s
theory. First, I contest the theory by showing that arguments by
Goodman (1971), Wollheim (1980, 1987), and Lopes (1996) against
resemblance theories in general apply against it too. I then contest
French’s interpretation of Guernica, by showing that he
glosses over key elements of the representational content of this
famous painting. I review most of the historical scholarship on
Guernica (including Arnheim, 1962; Blunt, 1969; Calvo Serraller,
1999; Cowling, 2002; as well as Chipp, 1989), and find that there is
nothing in this literature to suggest that isomorphism plays a role
in picking out its representational content – either as constituent
of the representational relation, or as a means for drawing correct
inferences from the painting concerning what it in fact represents.
An Argument against the Conflation of
Denotation and Representation
Gabriele Contessa
In Languages of Art, Nelson
Goodman notoriously claimed that ‘denotation is the core of
representation […]’ (Goodman 1976, p.5). Goodman has often been
interpreted as claiming that representation is nothing but
denotation. This interpretation of Goodman’s claim may be
questionable but In this paper, I will not discuss whether this is
the correct interpretation. Rather, I will offer an argument to the
effect that denotation and representation are two distinct
relations. The argument goes as follows.
Suppose that we find an old portrait. If
denotation and representation were identical, then, if we knew who
is represented by the portrait, we would also know whom the portrait
denotes, but this does not seem to be the case. By examining the old
portrait, we can determine that it represents, say, an elegantly
dressed 17th century gentleman, with a black goatee and dark brown
eyes, but we cannot determine whom it denotes, as nothing in the
portrait unmistakably reveals the identity of the sitter.
To this, an advocate of the identification of
denotation and representation might object that it is not true that
we do not know whom the portrait denotes. The portrait denotes whom
it represents—it denotes an elegantly dressed 17th century
gentleman, with a black goatee and dark brown eyes. The portrait
denotes like definite descriptions do and not like names do.
The problem is that the inference from the
fact that the portrait represents an elegantly dressed 17th century
gentleman, with a black goatee and dark brown eyes to the fact that
the portrait denotes an elegantly dressed 17th century gentleman,
with a black goatee and dark brown eyes is unwarranted. For all we
know, the portrait could be a mendacious representation of its
subject (e.g. it could denote someone who actually had blue eyes and
never wore a goatee), it could be an ironic representation of
contemporary man whose manners resemble those of an elegant 17th
century gentleman, or it could fail to denote any real person.
Therefore, even if we know that the portrait represents a man with a
goatee, it does not necessarily denote a man with a goatee.
It is crucial to note that the point of this
argument is not that, unlike a very faithful portrait, a mendacious
portrait denotes one person and represents another; nor does it mean
that every portrait represents one person and denotes another (what
John Hyman calls the external object and the internal object of the
portrait). Rather, any portrait represents whom it denotes, but
denoting them is not sufficient to representing them. The lack of
substitutivity salva veritate between of co-referring
expression ‘the man denoted by the portrait’ and ‘the man
represented by the portrait’ in the above context is only due to the
opacity of the intensional context (we know). The point is that
‘represent’ and ‘denote’ do not have the same meaning and do not
pick out the same relation. Denotation, I conclude, may well be a
necessary condition for representation, but it is not sufficient.
Session 9:
Historical Encounters of Art and Science
Circa
1600: a Scientific Watershed, a Nominalist Philosopher, and a
Not-so-Realist Painter
Itay Sapir
Along the fault line
separating the tectonic plates of the Renaissance and what the
French call l’age classique, several intriguing phenomena are
traditionally pointed out by attentive observers: first, an emerging
“realism” in painting; second, a trend of scepticism in philosophy;
and, last and probably even least, a temporary scientific vacuum,
the unassuming prelude for the dramatic developments – a revolution,
no less – of the years to come.
Today,
the three contemporaneous processes are often described separately,
if only because of disciplinary boundaries still very much alive.
Alternatively, the new painterly taste for depicting reality “as it
is” is annexed to a triumphant story of scientific glory – in spite
of the temporal gap between the emergences of the two – whereas the
philosophical episode is relegated to the status of an untimely
curiosity.
In this
paper, I will propose a revised account of this turn-of-the-century
from a distant past, focusing on a new reading of the period’s
greatest revolutionist in painting – Michelangelo da Caravaggio. I
will ask to what extent Caravaggio should be called a realist;
the question is particularly interesting in view of the link I
suggest between Caravaggio and the philosopher who is convincingly
described, by Antoine Compagnon and others, not only as a sceptic
but also as a nominalist – Michel de Montaigne.
A new
light is shed on the traditional philosophical opposition between
Realism and Nominalism – as well as on the notion of scientific
realism elaborated, among others, by Ian Hacking – when we consider
both Caravaggio and Montaigne as presenting a parallel insight on
the question of knowledge. I will claim that Caravaggio’s Tenebrism
– simply put, his use of the colour black and of darkness to cover
large parts of his paintings’ surfaces – is to be seen as a
challenge to accepted notions of knowledge, visibility and their
availability for the human eye and mind. As such, it is
complementary and similar to Montaigne’s avoidance of systematic
knowledge and even of the judgment about the possibility thereof.
Thus, the philosopher’s nominalism is to be understood as
coextensive with the painter’s subversion of mimesis as the latter
concept had been perceived and thought of for two centuries at
least. After all, the possibility of mimesis is based on a solid
notion of knowledge: the entity to be imitated – or represented, as
both translations have been suggested for “mimesis” – has to be, in
the first place, available for knowledge. At the same time,
Montaigne’s nominalism – i.e. his denial of reality for abstract
entities – can be compared to Caravaggio’s depiction of specific
figures with an often remarked presence effect: it is this “realism”
of particulars that may hint at a nominalist approach to anything
beyond the specific. Moreover, the resistance of Caravaggio’s works
to attempts at deciphering, verbal translation and exhaustive
account – a resistance underwriting Goodman’s distinction between
the discrete units of language and the continuous nature of painting
– echoes Montaigne’s pragmatic belief in the ultimate opacity of the
world.
The
historical position of Caravaggio and Montaigne, at the epilogue to
the long, self-confident story of the Renaissance’s Humanistic
culture, is pivotal in understanding their respective – and similar
– projects. Michel Foucault describes, in The Order of Things
(1966), the demise of the universe of correspondences and infinite
layers that gave way to the emergence of a new episteme.
Indeed, around 1600 the former system for the understanding and
representation of the world was in ruins, whereas the new one was
not yet fully developed. It is this experience of transition – a
void waiting to be filled, and an ethos of a new beginning – that
characterises the pictorial and philosophical innovations of the
day; not surprisingly, this applies just as well to science and to
scientific representation.
The
“Scientific Revolution”, advancing from triumph to triumph all the
way from Galileo to Newton, is not yet there; the mathematical
representation of the universe’s totality has not yet taken the
place once occupied by Humanism’s harmony of the spheres. The
paintings of Caravaggio and the writings of Montaigne do not
represent this state of affaires, however, precisely because the
whole idea of representation – not to speak of a
faithful-to-reality, informed representation – is questioned by
their works.
I
propose, therefore, to tell an alternative story about mimesis in
Western culture, on the basis of the alternative model suggested by
Caravaggio and Montaigne. This is a story parallel to the hypothetic
scenario that Richard Rorty imagined in reaction to Stephen
Toulmin’s Cosmopolis (1990): “showing how different the last
three centuries would have been if Montaigne, rather than Descartes,
had been taken as a starting point”. It also has significant
ramifications concerning present-day epistemology for the humanities
and the latter’s relation to science. One important paradigm to that
effect is to be found in the agenda Rorty himself, in Philosophy
and the Mirror of Nature (1979), attempted to promote. He
distinguishes between epistemology, as a systematic,
deductive rigorous idea of knowledge, and the more conversational
notion of hermeneutics. And where knowledge production and
representation are thus being challenged and revisited in one
extensive field, the more general question of knowledge gains a new
relevance, for the links between art, epistemology and sciences are
complex and profound today just as they were in that distant mirror
of 400 years ago.
Taming the
Two-Eyed Beast: Doubtful Visions of Animals in the
Seventeenth-Century French Academies
Paula Lee
This paper focuses on one aspect of “doubt” as an intellectual
category: the inability to trust what one sees. Historical aspects
of this question have been examined by a number of scholars, most
notably by Martin Kemp and Barbara Stafford, whose studies have
stressed the contributions of visualized forms of representation to
the epistemological foundations of modernity. The argument presented
in this paper is less concerned with the artistic doctrines or
physiological studies used to theorize vision, though both will
inevitably be engaged here. Instead, it is the insistent linking of
sight to reason, which connects a physiological sense to cognitive
capacity, which is questioned for its cultural implications. In
other words, neither that coupling nor its exclusionary conditions
are taken for granted. Instead, it is viewed as a historical
construct directly informed by the emergent codes of the natural
sciences, and examined as a philosophy as well as an aesthetic.
In this regard, the historical conditions inhabited by the
seventeenth-century French courts are particularly illuminating. Not
only did the reign of Louis XIV systematically exploit the authority
of representation, ranging from dance to decoration, but a similar
impulse informed the academic institutions that the Sun King
inaugurated, setting the conventions which would be emulated for
centuries. The academies confirmed the authority of the visual even
in the literary tradition, where one would expect, ut
pictura poesis, that poetry would trump painting. Rather than
simply confirming an entrenched grammar of power, however, the terms
of pictorial representation became the focus of heightened attention
precisely because the eyes were no longer trustworthy sources of
information. With one swipe of the anatomist’s knife, the
Renaissance equivalence between the eye of God and human sight had
been permanently severed, thereby introducing a ‘one eye, two eye’
problem that was not unlike the ‘one sex, two sex problem’
articulated by historian Thomas Laqueur. Insofar as the one-eyed
gaze was imagined as purposeful and penetrating, the analogy is
consistent. In both cases, a body was being observed that was either
female or feminized, whose apparent attributes stubbornly
contradicted an accepted version of the anatomy. And, given the
choice between keeping the theory or dismissing the physical
evidence, the theory prevailed precisely because it was sustained by
a method. On its own, without textual support from the Ancients, the
body was disorganized and deceptive, and not even the eyes of the
interrogator could be trusted because they, too, were susceptible to
corruption.
“God did not give us two eyes for nothing,” wrote engraver and
dessinateur Grégoire Huret in 1670. But he was not stating the
obvious: he had to vigorously defend that claim. It was not the
anatomical reality of two separate eyes that was seriously
questioned, but their role -- or possibly roles -- in the cognitive
process of vision. Many organs in the human body are doubled, such
as kidneys, lungs, breasts, ovaries, testes, and all of the digits
and limbs. From a physiological standpoint, the partner is
redundant. Was the second eye a spare, or did it contribute
something specific? In 1679, architect and anatomist Claude Perrault
presented before the assembled members of the Académie des Sciences
the skull of a one-eyed infant, which had only one occipital orbit,
and one canal for the optic nerve. It was unclear if the newborn was
ever capable of sight, since it had died within minutes following
birth. But the notes registered another detail: specifically, that
what had been presented for the Academy’s inspection was not the
skull, but a drawing. That Perrault’s skillful rendering was based
on direct witnessing of the original was seconded by Duclos, who had
gone with him to view the human “cyclops” and saw it firsthand as
well. Whether the infant’s eye had ever functioned was impossible to
determine, and ultimately beside the point. Instead, what was being
certified by the assembly was the validity of the representation, as
verified by a reputable witness who was also in the presence of the
body and could vouch for its mimetic accuracy.
How reliable was this drawing as a descriptive document? Did
Perrault use one eye or two eyes when he drew this tragic object?
Though the question may seem peculiar, its ramifications were
interrogated at length by Perrault’s frequent collaborator,
Sébastien Le Clerc, who argued that the mechanics of vision
demonstrated that that which was seen clearly was “only seen by one
eye,” i.e. the active eye on the right. This eye corresponded to the
vanishing point as the first element of linear perspective, a
subject on which Le Clerc had written and illustrated several
treatises. Winking off to one side, the left eye only “bothered” the
right eye and offered “confusing” visual information. Thus, he
explained, hunters closed the left eye to draw a bead on their prey,
and painters ignored the information from the left eye, the better
to raise their art to the ranks of a “mathematical science.”
Unsurprisingly, Le Clerc asserted that the phenomenon of separate
axes of sight for each eye was most evident in brutes and especially
in birds. Because the eyes of birds were placed on the extreme sides
of the head, Le Clerc explained, they could never see the same
object with both eyes at the same time, and were obliged to turn
their heads side to side. Because they were so far
apart, neither eye could establish dominance, and the left eye was
constantly offering irrelevant information. As a result, brutes were
constantly confused, for they were literally unable to see reason.
Inside the Cartesian framework, the capacity for informed vision was
only available to humans, as it was held that animals did not have
reasoning souls and were thus unaware of what they were seeing.
Notably, the converse was not true: the reasoning faculty did not
derive from the possession of functioning eyes. Hence the mélange of
creatures that Le Clerc showed in his illustration was crucial, for
the engraving made it clear that the “confused” vision of animals
was shared by some human. To wit, men limited by ignorance
thoughtlessly used both eyes together. But to observe the world with
two eyes simultaneously -- “comme les yeux voyent” – was a simple
physiological phenomenon, no different from any other creature’s
ability to react to motion, produce sounds, and make gestures. Just
as the howls of vivisected dogs and their juddering limbs were
understood to be strictly mechanical actions that were unrelated to
the awareness of pain, the ability to register light, color and
motion did not reflect a reasoning mind in operation. In the 1630s,
Jean François Niceron’s experiments with the camera obscura
(“dark room”) had shown this claim to be true: it was possible to
project an image inside an actual room by puncturing one wall with a
pinhole that would admit a thin ray of light. Per Descartes, the
“painting” produced by natural light passing through the pupil of
the eye, traversing the optical chamber, and hitting the retina
followed exactly the same mechanical principles. Yet a man-made box
had no more intelligence than a plank of wood, and no potential for
sentience. In the same way, the eyes were empty chambers that were
receptacles rather than agents.
“Reason” thus demanded that one eye be extracted from the cognitive
equation, else wallow in brutish ignorance, victim to a diffuse and
passive gaze incapable of intellectual penetration. As this paper
will demonstrate, the resulting “one-eyed” drawings subsequently
reflected the imposition of cultural will, crafting a way of seeing
and a mode of representing that was self-consciously artificial, in
order to distinguish the lineaments of science from the confusions
of ordinary perception.
Between Art &
Science: Representation, Dr. Richard Mead, & the Royal Society in
the Eighteenth Century
Craig A. Hanson
In 1766 Dr. James
Parsons published a notice, complete with an illustration, in the
Philosophical Transactions about the double horns of an African
rhinoceros. The rarity especially intrigued eighteenth-century
virtuosi because it solved a dilemma that had pitted ancient
authority against the discourse of early modern natural history. On
the one hand, Martial made reference to a double-horned rhinoceros
in the first century; and yet, in an age bent on empirical
observation, the absence of double-horned specimens in Europe led
many to question the reference (itself an interesting counterpoint
to many of the unseen creatures that, nonetheless, continued to
carry currency for many scholars). It was framed largely as a
philological problem, and Samuel Bochart had attempted to solve the
conflict by revising the translation. Dr. Richard Mead, physician
to George II and a close acquaintance of Newton, had sided with
Bochart, but as Parsons relates, once Mead saw for himself an
example of the double horns, he invited Parsons over for breakfast
and graciously acknowledged his mistake.
The instance raises a
number of important issues related to the depiction of science
including the role of ancient authority vs. empirical evidence, the
contributions of travelers and traders who trafficked in such
objects (along with more overtly economic goods including, at a
moral nadir, slaves), and the social relations that facilitated
knowledge production.
Mead is an especially
interesting figure because of the way in which he himself bridged
the worlds that we now think of as standing so far removed from each
other, the arts and sciences. Mead largely embraced a classical
conception of representation based on mimesis. He also belonged to
an early modern context that has proven especially rich for
historians of science who have embraced a fully socially constructed
model that would stress the role of the gentleman scholar in the
Royal Society, for instance, as a way to make sense of the content
of scientific knowledge. In the context of the present conference,
I want to use Mead and his contributions to the Royal Society’s
proceedings as a way to think more closely about the function of
representation in the early eighteenth century. I am especially
interested in issues of practice and the status of images during the
period. As it turns out, Mead, himself ended up with just such a
double horn in his own collection along with a painting by Parsons
himself of a rhinoceros. How do we relate pairs of objects like
this? How do we fit this sort of picture in with Mead’s other
paintings, which included works by the likes of Rubens, Van Dyck,
and Watteau? The material is useful for engaging questions of the
history of science, but given the importance of this period, it also
holds the potential to inform larger discussions within the
philosophy of science including suggesting what an art historical
contribution might look like.
Session 10:
Shaping the Mind - Imagining the World: Perception, Cognition and
Representation in the Arts and Sciences
Visual Membranes:
Optical Drawing Devices and the 'Subjective Objectivity' of Vision
and Representation in Early Nineteenth Century
Erna Fiorentini
A 'membrane' is a
thin, typically planar structure or material that separates two
environments. Given that it sits between environments or phases and
has a finite volume, it can be referred to as an interphase rather
than an interface. As an interphase, a membrane selectively controls
mass transport between these phases or environments.
One particular
optical drawing device, the Camera Lucida, which was invented at the
very beginning of the nineteenth century, seem to have been
conceived and used in this sense, as a membrane suited to control
the subjectivity of vision for the sake of objective representation.
Put between the eye
of the observer, the physical world, and the image resulting from
observation and drawing, the 'masses' this device transports are the
visual stimuli from the outside world on the one hand and the
perception data - as well as their subjective processing due to the
physiology, the ratio and the emotional potential of the observer -
on the other. The results find their way onto the drawing paper as
visible, 'objective', recording of this process.
This peculiar
connection of inside and outside, binding the subjectivity of the
observer and the need to objectify it in representation without
suppressing it, regulated the interrelation of vision and
representation at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In fact,
it not only corresponds to major theoretical shifts in the aesthetic
and epistemology of observation and of its visual outcomes, but it
can also be traced as a mass phenomenon, according to the success of
the Camera Lucida in drawing practices with very different tasks in
art and science (landscape sketching, archaeology, travel
illustrations, natural history, and microscopy).
If the idea of
ongoing interchange between claims of subjectivity and objectivity
characterizes the basic principle and the use of optical drawing
devices in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, then a
division of motivations between such practices and concepts of
representation driven by mimetic intentions and such based on
nominalistic construction cannot entirely apply for this time. Nor
does the idea of a sudden break occurring between regimes of vision
and representation exclusively dominated by either 'objectivity' or
'subjectivity': The Camera Lucida as an optical metaphor and as an
actual drawing device indicates - particularly in the comparison
with another important optical drawing device of the time, the
Camera Obscura - the historical prevalence of a mixed model of
'subjective objectivity' which I term Prismatic Vision, informing
the interlacement of vision and representation at the beginning of
the nineteenth century.
Vermeer and the
Problem of Painting Inside a Camera Obscura
Philip Steadman
There is a general - though not universal - consensus among art
historians that the 17th century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer
employed the camera obscura in some way as an aid to painting. In
2001 I published a book Vermeer's Camera in which I presented an
argument, based on a perspective analysis of the rooms appearing in
Vermeer's interiors, suggesting strongly that the artist did indeed
trace from the images projected in a large booth type camera. More
controversially, David Hockney in his Secret Knowledge has proposed
that many other artists from the 15th century onwards used optical
images projected with concave mirrors. Much of the evidence adduced
for these optical aids would seem to indicate however that painters
did not just trace, but actually painted under or over projected
images. How might it be possible to do this, given the relative
darkness required inside a camera obscura? This paper will discuss
the problem and report some experiments.
Session 11:
Images and Knowledge
Alchemy,
Nominalism and the Art-Nature Debate in Medieval Literature
Brendan O'Connell
In the Physics,
Aristotle comments that the arts either, on the basis of Nature,
carry things further than Nature can, or they imitate Nature. In
doing so, he posited a distinction between the perfective and the
mimetic arts that proved extremely durable. However, the
Aristotelian idea of mimesis was not transmitted directly to the
Middle Ages, but rather indirectly, through the popular and
influential commentary on the Poetics by Averroes, which
significantly modified the concept of mimesis to emphasise the moral
function of poetry. JB Allen has noted that a fundamental concern of
Averroes’ assimilatio (the medieval version of mimesis)
is to emphasise the ability of art to presume and generate a
relationship between the particular and the universal. The rise of
nominalism in late middle ages therefore presents a clear challenge
to the nature and function of poetic art.
As William Newman has
noted, the core distinction between the perfective and mimetic arts
led many medieval thinkers and writers to employ analogies between
art and alchemy when theorising about the nature and function of
art. Indeed, Newman notes that alchemical manuscripts, in turn,
frequently rely on analogies with art when defining the parameters
of the alchemical project. The alchemical quest to create gold could
be interpreted as the supreme and perfect achievement of mimetic
representation, but it could equally be viewed as a near-demonic
attempt to usurp the divine office of Creation. The metaphor is used
brilliantly by Jean de Meun, in the Roman de la Rose, to
explore the relationship between Art and Nature. In particular,
Jean de Meun draws parallels between alchemy and the visual arts,
frequently emphasising the absolute inadequacy of the visual arts to
imitate Nature.
This paper, however,
will focus on the brilliant use of alchemy as an analogy for poetic
representation in Dante and Chaucer. Both writers are keenly aware
of the potential of drawing an analogy between alchemy and poetry;
and both make superb use of the ambiguous status of alchemy in the
fourteenth century, when it is by some respected as a true science,
and by others denounced as the worst sort of fraud and trickery.
Dante focuses on alchemical trickery and deceit in order to
articulate a negative vision of poetry, against which he defines his
own. However, it is with Chaucer that the metaphorical – and indeed
philosophical – implications of the alchemical project are most
fully realised. Towards the end of the Canterbury Tales,
Chaucer teases out the philosophical implications of the analogical
world-view that is implicit in the work of alchemy. In the apparent
chaos of the alchemical world of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, he shows
a sharp observation of many of the key scientific and philosophical
assumptions on which the claims of the alchemist are based.
Importantly, he recognises that an insistence on the fundamental
relationship between the universal and the particular, between
species and individual, is key to the alchemist’s hope of success,
and he uses this to highlight (in a subtle but fascinating way) the
challenges presented to analogical thought by nominalist and
conceptualist philosophy. In doing so, he uses the alchemical
analogy to explore and question the basic assumptions of medieval
literary theory, specifically those found in Averroes’ concept of
assimilatio. Specifically, he parallels the alchemist’s hopes
for success with those of the poet, and suggests that the poet’s
attempts to present universal truths may be doomed to failure. Like
Dante, he draws an analogy between alchemical fraud and the “fraud”
of artistic representation; unlike Dante, this leads not to a
celebration of the transcendent power of art, but rather to a
rejection of the literary project itself.
This paper will take
an interdisciplinary approach, and attempt to highlight the
convergence of medieval philosophy, science and artistic theory in
the medieval debate about the nature and function of literary
representation.
Knowing with images: medium and
message
John Kulvicki
There is something special about the way
in which images, graphs, and the like present their contents to us.
It is easy enough to say that in some sense our access to the
information carried by such representations is rather direct or
immediate, but rather difficult to unpack just what this special
kind of directness or immediacy consists in. The fact that images
seem so special is the source of the privileged place they hold as a
means of presenting data as well as of the suspicion with which many
regard them.
What are the epistemic advantages and
disadvantages of using such representations? And along what
dimensions relevant to these issues do different kinds of
representation--images, graphs, descriptions, lists, etc.--relate to
one another?
We claim that what makes images valuable is
not just that they carry many very specific bits of information but
the fact that they facilitate our getting at precisely the abstract
bits of information we want. The way in which images encode such
vast amounts of information allows viewers readily to
abstract a great number of claims from that information. The
information sought when viewing an image is often coarse-grained and
qualitative, which is similar to what is sought when reading
descriptions. The way in which images present fine-grained,
quantitative information, however, makes much coarsegrained,
qualitative info readily available. Such
immediate availability of a great many pieces of abstract
information accounts for some of the epistemological weight given to
images and graphs, not to mention photographs. Descriptions, by
contrast, are very selective in the pieces of abstract information
that they provide. This means that there are limits on what one can
do with descriptions that do not apply to images.
This paper explains what it means for a
representation to make information immediately available, and
then it explains the peculiar sense in which images make many
pieces of information immediately available.
Presenting information immediately amounts to
satisfying three conditions. First, a piece of information is
immediately available in a representation only if it is
extractable from that representation. Extractability just means
just that there is a non-semantic feature of the representation in
virtue of possessing which it carries the piece of information in
question and no other, more specific piece of information.
For example, red regions of the Doppler radar image indicate stormy
weather of a certain intensity, nothing more. Being red says nothing
about the location of such a disturbance: the relative location
of the red region is responsible for that. Extractability
concerns how non-semantic features of representations are
responsible for the information that they carry.
Second, in order to present a piece of
information immediately, the properties in virtue of which a
representation carries that information must be perceptually
salient: they need to stand out. We call this condition syntactic
salience, because it says something about the non-semantic
features of representations, not about their content.
Third, for pieces of information to be readily
available, there must be a plan of correlation between features of
the representation and features of the data that is easy to grasp.
This is semantic salience. Without semantic salience,
interpreting a representation will be difficult, defeating its
purpose.
Almost any representation makes some aspects
of its content immediately available. What distinguishes images and
related representations from descriptions and the like is that the
former make information across many levels of abstraction
immediately available.
Consider a 2D image of the temperature along
that surface. The darker a region of the graph, the colder the
corresponding region of the represented surface is. This image can
carry all of the info that the list carries, and no more
information, but it is much easier to abstract from the image's
detail. With the image, abstractions over the data are extractable
and syntactically salient (not to mention semantically salient). We
show that for the list, these abstractions are not immediately
available. For example, one could scour the list to figure out that
region A is warmer than region B and that the difference between A
and B is greater than the difference between B and C. It's easier to
figure this out using the image because the region of the image
corresponding to A is lighter than the region corresponding to B and
the difference in lightness between A and B is greater than the
difference between B and C. There is no need to decode the image or
a part thereof in all of its specific detail before abstracting to
these more general claims. Abstracting over features of the graph
itself and then decoding it gets you to abstract features of
the data.
It's easy enough to say that this results from
there being an isomorphism between regions of the graph and their
features and regions of the represented surface and their features,
namely temperatures. Many agree that isomorphism, or the more
general notion of homomorphism, marks off graphs and images from
other kinds of representation. Without being inaccurate, this
covering term often used to describe images and graphs misses what
makes this kind of isomorphism so interesting, vis-à-vis the
goals of those who need to use the representation. Isomorphisms are
multifarious and ubiquitous, which means that they are in and of
themselves unhelpful. The graph of temperature exhibits isomorphisms
across many levels of abstraction from the determinate data
points. Moreover, this particular isomorphism is syntactically and
semantically salient. So, regardless of how abstract or specific
one's information needs are, those bits of information are
extractable from the graph of temperature along a surface in a
syntactically and semantically salient manner.
After unpacking what makes images special, we
go on to discuss how images thus described can be exploited for both
elucidating and obscuring data.
Scientific
Imaging: Representation, Mechanization and Interpretation
Otávio Bueno
Contemporary science,
from experimental physics through chemistry to molecular biology,
crucially relies on results obtained from scientific
instrumentation, particularly a plethora of different microscopes
(ranging from optical and electron microscopy to different types of
probe microscopy). The images generated by these instruments shape,
inform, and characterize substantial parts of the scientific
enterprise. But these images can also mislead, be misinterpreted,
and present as genuine certain features of the sample that may turn
out to be just artifacts of the instrumentation. In the end,
scientific images demand careful interpretation
In order to interpret
scientific images, it’s important to determine which kind of objects
they are. In particular, are scientific images representations? It
might be thought that they are. After all, certain features of the
sample are selected for representation (say, in the case of a
scanning tunneling microscope’s image, information regarding the
surface of the sample), whereas other features are left behind (such
as details regarding the inner structure of the sample). However,
there is also reason to think that scientific images are not
representations. After all, such images are supposed to be the
mechanical product of certain interactions between the sample and
the microscope, and the more room that is left for intentional
manipulation of the image, the less reliable the image will
typically be taken to be. Again, in the case of a scanning tunneling
microscope (STM), the image that is produced is the result of a
particular sort of interaction between the STM’s single-atom tip and
the atomic configuration of the sample (see Binnig and Rohrer
[1983], and Chen [1993]). Now, how should we make sense of this
situation? Since we have reason to believe that scientific images
are and are not representations, how should we proceed.
In this paper, I
argue that as long as we distinguish the appropriate contexts in
which scientific images are constructed and obtained, both answers
regarding whether they should be taken as representations or not are
ultimately correct. There are three stages to consider: First, when
an instrument is being constructed and debugged, intentional
elements play a central role, as the instrument is built in order to
be sensitive to selected features of the sample. (I call this the
construction stage.) Second, after the successful construction
and calibration of an instrument, it is meant to provide a
mechanical device of image generation, and at this point, we no
longer have a representation. After all, at this stage, the
intentional elements no longer play a role, and all the instrument
does is to reproduce mechanically and enhance the relevant features
from the sample. (I call this the mechanization stage.)
Finally, after obtaining an image in a suitably calibrated
instrument, it’s still crucial to interpret the result, that is, to
determine what the images means and what it establishes with respect
to the sample. (I call this the interpretation stage.)
After distinguishing
these three stages, it then becomes clear that there are
representational components in scientific imaging in the
construction phase and in the interpretation stage. In the
construction phase, given that certain features of the instrument
are selected, in fact built, in order to capture certain aspects of
the sample, a particular representation has to be in place as part
of the construction of the instrument. In the interpretation stage,
in order to read the result of the instrument, one needs to adopt
suitable coding conventions that specify what colors, texture,
brightness etc. mean in the image that is generated. For example, to
interpret an image from an STM, one needs to take it as an
STM image and identify the relevant information that the image gives
us about the sample. At this point, bringing results from the
history and philosophy of art to bear on the interpretation of
scientific images is both central and insightful, given how much
these disciplines have made us aware of the multiple functions that
coding conventions play in image making and in image interpretation.
In turn, the mechanization stage should not involve any
representational elements, since at that point the instrument should
simply enhance and reproduce the features in the sample that it was
devised to reproduce.
In this way,
scientific imaging incorporates representational and
non-representational components. I’ll illustrate how this
three-stage model of scientific imaging works, examining the case of
scanning tunneling microscopy, from its early days in the 1980s to
the many functions it plays in the current scene. I’ll also explore
the mechanism of representation that underlies STM imaging, and how
suitable partial mappings from the sample to the images are crucial
both in the construction and in the interpretation stages.
Session 12:
'Shaping the Mind - Imagining the World: Perception, Cognition and
Representation in the Arts and Sciences' continued
The Very Visual
Vocabulary of the Mind
Anil Anthony Bharath
In modern science,
engineering and medicine, the still image and sequences of images
play increasingly central roles, both in communicating ideas, and in
the form of tools, almost as ubiquitous as the stethoscope and
oscilloscope were less than a century ago.
Diagrammatic
representations, and not just mathematical equations, have also held
quite central roles in addressing the most fundamental of physical
questions.
I develop a theme of
tracing the links between communicating scientific ideas through
representations, in the visual and mathematical sense. In
particular, I will consider why visual representations continue to
hold so much power and utility for even the driest and most
apparently mathematical of scientific areas, by considering the
biological evidence for the importance of visual information in
cognition.
This biological
perspective on how visual information is represented at early stages
of visual processing in the human brain is, surprisingly, striking
in its easy equivalences with verbal descriptions of visual
structure, elegant in its mathematical detail, and stunning in its
visual interpretation and significance. I will present these aspects
through discussing, though in limited detail, some recent
developments in the rapidly developing scientific field of
"computational neuroscience", and will explore the significance and
meaning of what is emerging as a neural code for visual data,
formulated in terms of vocabularies of visual structure.
As proof of the power
of what might appear to be quite prescriptive representations and
vocabularies of visual structure, I will show how such
representations are finding increasing use in areas of technology
associated with the Internet, modern telecommunications, and of
artificial intelligence, and will generally demonstrate how these
very representations of visual structure are actively being
transferred from linguistic, to mathematical, to visual, and to the
machine domain. With the objective of creating a "seeing machine"
this perspective will be presented as being very different from
ideas on artificial intelligence popular in the 1960's, and will
lend credence and further illumination to the ideas, pursued by van
Fraassen and others, that the scientific discipline, and indeed our
very perception of all things visual, is very much governed by our
beliefs.
Sciences of the
Face: Portraits and the Expression of Emotion, Character and
Physiognomy
Cynthia Freeland
In this paper I
sketch some key stages of development in the history of portraiture
and conceptions of emotional expression. I will show there is a very
complex relationship between artistic ideals in portraiture and
philosophical and scientific theories about the nature and
expression of human emotions. It will become clear that what is
taken to be "truthful" in depictions of human beings and their
fundamental natures has evolved alongside of scientific conceptions
of the very nature of human emotions and the self.
I begin in the early
modern period by discussing the relationship of Descartes'
(1596-1650) treatise on Passions of the Soul (1649) upon the
influential work by Charles le Brun, A Method to Learn to Design the
Passions (1667). Le Brun's text became the guide for an entire
generation of painters and encompassed the depiction of animal as
well as human emotions. But le Brun did not simply adopt Descartes'
views, he made important revisions, indicating that artists
themselves contributed significantly to the conceptualizations of
emerging psychological science.
I turn next to the
enormously influential work on physiognomy by Johann Caspar Lavater
(1741 - 1801). Essays on physiognomy: designed to promote the
knowledge and the love of mankind. This work was known to
philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and clearly influenced his early
essay "On the Beautiful and Sublime." Translated into English in
1789, Lavater's work was made available in inexpensive and richly
illustrated editions. Among others, it influenced portraiture of the
most important painters of the new American statesmen and heroes by
Gilbert Stuart and Rembrandt Peale in the United States.
The next influential
scientist whom I discuss is Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, who
published Mécanismes de la physiognomie humaine in 1862.
Working in the
Salpetriere, the same hospital where the painter Géricault had done
a series of mental patients in 1822-3, Duchenne employed the new
technique of Galvanism (electric shock) in experiments from 1852-6
to stimulate various facial muscles in order to demonstrate
emotional conditions and disorders. Instead of drawings, he employed
Adrien Tournachon, the brother of the eminent early French portrait
photographer known as Nadar, as his photographer. This work was
clearly influential upon Charles Darwin, who also used photographs
to illustrate his important book The Expression of the Emotions in
Man and Animals (1872). Darwin worked, among others, with the
Swedish art photographer Oscar Rejlander, who actually posed for
some of the images in the book.
To bring things up to
the moment, I conclude by describing the work of the leading
contemporary psychologist of the face, Paul Ekman, author of
numerous books including Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and
Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life (2003). Ekman
purports to be able to use his "facial action coding system" to be
able to differentiate "true" from "false" (concealed or faked)
emotions.
Interestingly,
however, Ekman's studies employ video, and he often uses actors who
"display" various emotions (much as Darwin's book did). I will
compare some of Ekman's imagery to the large-scale, slow-motion
imagery the recent major video exhibit The Passions (2003) by
contemporary artist Bill Viola (b. 1951-).
My broadest aim is to
show how art and science have interacted in these benchmark periods
in the development of portraiture. Both art and science contributed
to evolving ideals of the scope and meaning of facial expression in
representational genres (from painting and drawing to photography
and then video). Each stage both reflects and shapes broader
cultural agreements about the very nature of human emotion and, in
turn, what it is to be human.
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