The Matter of Vision. Peter Wyeth

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СКАЧАТЬ tool to unlock the subtleties of art, progress in neurobiology – and in particular the inclusion of Emotion within scientific method – has transformed its potential for a reach far deeper and fundamentally more intelligent⁵⁰ than the word.

      An expansive materialism is in sight that can offer a deeper analysis of a work of art than anything that has gone before. Scientific method, revolutionised by the inclusion of Emotion in neuroscience, twinned with evolutionary biology, forms the basis of a potential Science of Culture. That notion of culture is itself biological, founded on the twin pillars of survival and reproduction, the basis of evolution, the Logic of Nature.

       The Matter of Vision and Philosophy

      The task this project set itself, many years ago, was to try to understand the real basis of the power of Cinema. The reason the task was set that nowhere within the prevailing framework of Film Theory was there anything remotely sufficient to that task, which seemed to me to be among the first questions to be answered about Cinema.

      The two instincts that set me off on this pursuit were that Cinema was much more powerful than it was given credit for, even by its strongest adherents, and that much of that strength could be accounted for by the notion that we take in much more unconsciously from Cinema than consciously, and therein lay its secret power.

      That led me to look at Vision, the unconscious – for which I propose the positive and independent term, the Automatic, and Emotion – which was the one-word definition of Cinema put forward by Sam Fuller in Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou.

      Against that trio I concluded were ranged Language, and its ideology of Logocentrism, Consciousness, with the common view that it was the peak of being human, and Reason, which had the enormous successes of science to its credit, and the gradual encroachment upon superstition and irrationality that Bacon set as its task in the late medieval period, reaching a ferment in the Enlightenment.

      In terms of philosophy, there is a view that nothing of importance has been said since the 18th Century, and with Spinoza and Leibniz, Hume and Kant to contend with, that is not entirely without justification.

      Science has sometimes been accused of a certain naiveté in moving from laboratory experiment and results to the interpretation of those results, which tends to move to the terrain of philosophy, with its porous boundaries between the physical and the metaphysical, between the materialism of science and the terrain vague where the material no longer holds.

      That is why Leibniz and arguably Spinoza are if anything more relevant today than they were in their own time. Physics today is still confirming the insights of Leibniz about some of the most basic questions, whereas Spinoza’s anti-theological propositions hold more appeal for me, as despite Leibniz’s genius he was irrevocably wedded to theological rationalisation at the expense, I would suspect, of a wholehearted rationalism. The meeting of three days when Leibniz went to visit the older Spinoza in Amsterdam, a liberal refuge, in 1679, is a fascinating moment in history of which unfortunately there is no direct record, only imputations of how Leibniz’s views changed after his visit to the Master. There is little sense of a similar change in the views of Spinoza. Leibniz appears to have edged towards the thoroughgoing stern materialism of Spinoza, but could not or would not free himself of his debt to the theology department of his life.

      Kant, regarded as the greatest modern philosopher by many, reacted against both Leibniz and Hume, and yet in so doing, and despite his enormous achievements in philosophy, it could be argued that seen from today’s perspective, Kant in fact moved away from science and his Critique of Pure Reason ended ironically as a dangerous endorsement of it, claiming a certain autonomy for Reason that laid the fateful trail of German Idealism away from science and scientific materialism, betraying Bacon despite his dedication to him in the first Critique.

       The Matter of Vision: Summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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