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Tuesday, July 27, 2004
Depiction as seeing-in
Posted by Robert Stecker on July 27, 2004 at 12:18 PM in depiction, representation | Permalink
This paper does two things. It argues for an account of seeing-in that is built on but is different from the late Richard Wollheim’s original account1 and then argues that seeing-in, so understood, is the main constituent in the best analysis of depiction.
Seeing-in
Seeing-in stands in contrast with ordinary seeing. Of course, when I look at a painting I do see it in the ordinary sense. I see a canvas covered by paint that has certain properties: a rectangular shape, a colored surface, and a visible design on that surface. If I truly see all of these things then it follows that there exists a painting that has the various properties mentioned so far, just as if I see a brown cow, there is a brown cow that I see. Call this property of ordinary seeing “existence.” However, if the painting is representational, say, Vermeer’s A Woman Weighing Gold, then in some sense I see more. I see “in” the painting a room containing a woman before a balance underneath a painting of the last judgement with the light entering to cut the space occupied by these objects into two diagonals: one dark, one light. However, in seeing these things in the painting it does not follow that there is a room containing a woman, a balance, and so on. Further, while I am seeing-in the painting these various things, I am typically still aware that I am looking at a painting with certain surface design features.
So two typical features of seeing-in are, first, that one can see something that is F in something else, call it P, without it following that there is something F that I am seeing, and second that I am aware of seeing P and some of its features, while I am seeing-in P something that is F. Call the first feature “nonexistence” and the second “two-foldness”.
In explicating seeing-in in terms of these two features, I am departing from Wollheim’s original account in two ways. First, he explains seeing-in exclusively in terms of two-foldness, whereas I explain in terms of two properties: two-foldness and non-existence. Second, for Wollheim, the former property is the one constant feature of seeing-in, while for me it is at best a typical feature. The constant feature is non-existence.
Nonexistence does not imply that I can only see-in depictions fictional beings. Portraits and some other depictions represent real people. In the case of paintings, even when the painting is a portrait, say of Henry VIII, or represents an actual person, say Socrates most people think I am not actually seeing Henry VIII or Socrates in seeing them in the painting. However, nonexistence does not even imply that I am never really seeing something that is F in seeing it in the picture. It just says that there is no entailment from seeing something that is F in P to actually seeing something that is F. There is also no entailment from seeing something F in P to there existing something that is F.
As Wollheim emphasized, the phenomena of seeing-in is not confined to pictures and it is also not confined to representations. We can look at an old, stained cracked wall and see rivers in it running down through some sort of terrain. The fact that we have similar visual experiences with all kinds of seeing-in, shows that seeing-in might be useful in giving an account of the special kind of representation of interest here: depictions. The fact that we engage in seeing-in when there are no representations shows that “seeing-in” is not equivalent to seeing a representation. That sort of visual experience might be what distinguishes them from other representations. However, seeing-in can’t be the whole story about pictorial representation because it occurs when no depiction is present.
Two people can see different things in the same cloud formation, and there is no room for argument about who is seeing it correctly. In the case of representations, there is room for argument. There can still be diverse seeings-in, but some might be incorrect. For example, one might see-in a painting an angel travelling toward earth, when it is in fact rising toward heaven. So for a work to depict something that is F, it is not enough that someone can see something that is F in the work. Wollheim’s proposal is that a work depicts something that is F just in case a suitably sensitive and informed spectator can see something that is F in the work, and the creator of the work intended something that is F to be seen in it. The second condition that mentions intentions of the creator might be adjusted to take in special circumstances where something else determines what it is correct to see in the work. We can leave that open.
We now have an account of depiction partly in terms of seeing-in. There are people who share the intuition that seeing-in occurs with respect to depictions, but don’t accept the seeing-in account. They think the account is incomplete in one way or another. These people offer proposals that supplement the seeing-in account, or explain the seeing-in phenomenon in other terms.
Seeing-In in other Terms
One objection to the seeing-in account is that the two-foldness condition does not always hold. Trompe l’oeil is the standard counter-example here, since under the right conditions one cannot see the surface or design properties of such paintings. Cinema is another counter-example. People often don’t notice anything other than pictorial content while caught up in a movie. It should be noted that both these examples are controversial since there are people who deny that they are examples of pictorial representation, or any sort of representation.
I am inclined to allow that the items discussed so far are really counter-examples to the idea that seeing-in requires rather than merely permits and is usually accompanied by two-foldness. They prompt us to realize that even in cases where the two-fold aspect of seeing-in is possible, viewers sometimes focus exclusively on one aspect. This, however, is a clarification rather than a denial of the seeing-in account that is endorsed here.
If this is right, then seeing-in should be reconceived as follows. It is an experience as of seeing an object or state of affairs that is F in something else, that allows for but does not always require being visually aware of the object through which one is having the experience as of seeing something that is F2.
The chief objection to the seeing-in account, echoed by almost everyone who is not satisfied with it, is that it is incomplete or not sufficiently informative. If seeing-in is a perceptual experience, what underlies or explains? If it is in not (wholly) perceptual, what is its exact character?
There are three main proposals to supplement the seeing-in account. One proposal appeals to the familiar idea of resemblance, a second proposal to the idea of a recognitional ability, and a third proposal appeals to the idea of make-believe. Each of these proposals can, and have also been put forward as free standing accounts of depiction. So we should ask two questions about them. Do they complete the seeing-in account by elucidating either the basis for or the nature of seeing-in? Are they superior accounts of depiction in their own right?
Resemblance
The idea that pictures resemble what they represent is perhaps the first to come to mind when one contrasts depiction and description. Many people think that we can define depiction by appealing to resemblance and thereby clarify seeing-in. To pursue this strategy, two things, both well known, have to be realized right at the start. First, resemblance consists in two things sharing some properties, and, since any given thing shares some properties with everything else that exists, everything resembles everything in some way or other. For this reason, any attempt to explain depiction in terms of resemblance has to specify the relevant resemblance in question. Second, resemblance is a symmetrical relation. If a resembles b, b resembles a in the same way. Depiction or representation is non-symmetrical. If a depicts b, b need not and typically does not depict a. This means that if one wishes to define depiction in terms of resemblance, one has to appeal to some one or several additional conditions as well.
The most obvious thought concerning relevant resemblance is that depictions look like what they represent or resemble what they represent in visual appearance. However, this thought is still too undeveloped to be useful, because it is consistent with a number of incompatible accounts. First, there are a number of different aspects to visual appearance – color, shape, relative size, etc. – and one might think that not all of these are equally important. Second, one can develop the basic idea of similarity in visual appearance in two fundamentally different ways. One could claim that there are objective similarities between objects and the figures that depict them. Alternatively, one could claim there are similarities between the visual experience of depictions and the visual experience of the objects or scenes they depict.
One feature, or rather a family of related features, has attracted a number of theorists. These are either certain shape properties of the depictions and their objects or the visual experiences of these shapes. The sort of shape that is often put forward is one that would be identified by tracing the outline of the objects one sees through a window on that glass. This is sometimes called outline shape. Some claim that pictures resemble what they depict by sharing outline shape or something quite like this.3 Others claim that one’s visual experience of a depiction’s outline shape resembles one’s visual experience of the outline shape of objects represented.4 There is no doubt that some depictions bear some such similarity to their subjects. In the case of fictional pictures, we would have to say something a bit more convoluted: that the depictions would bear the similarity if there was a scene it was really depicting. Even if we grant all that, there are many styles of depiction which don’t capture this sort of resemblance. Just think of stick figures, various sorts of stylization, and so on. Second, the reproduction of outline shape from certain viewing position, for example, seeing a knife blade straight on so that one just sees a line of some small thickness, would not produce recognition of a depicted object by itself. Even that most recognizable of objects: the human face, might have an unrecognizable outline shape from some viewing positions. In these cases, it is other features that allow us to recognize a figure as representing a kind of object.
If these criticisms are correct, there is not one salient type of resemblance in shape that always is in play when we have a depiction. What is left for the resemblance theorist to do is appeal to overall visual resemblance or to visual experiences of depictions bearing an overall resemblance, or a resemblance in some respect or other, to visual experiences of objects or scenes. However, the explanatory or analytic value of this far more vague appeal to resemblance is suspect. It’s not clear that it is really more informative than the direct appeal to seeing-in.
Recognitional Ability
On a picture by picture basis, it is may often be true that recognition of what is depicted is underwritten by some resemblance or other between depiction and object. Another way to put this point is that seeing an object in a picture is made possible by the resemblance because it is the basis in a given case for our recognitional ability. This leaves open that in other cases the basis of our ability to recognize what a depiction depicts (to see the object in the picture) is something other than a resemblance. This suggests that the best way to account for seeing-in is to give an explanation in terms of recognitional ability rather than resemblance. This is precisely what the second proposal to be considered does.
One version of the proposal suggests that a representation of a given object is pictorial if it triggers the same recognitional abilities as would be triggered by visually perceiving actual objects.5 One problem with this version of the proposal is that we should have equally easy access to all kinds of depictions because they would all trigger the same sort of recognitional abilities – those used in ordinary perception. But this is not so. Some styles of depiction such as the cubist style require a period of familiarization before we see with ease the objects represented in them. A second objection is that pictures are not the only representations that rely on perceptual recognitional abilities. Diagrams, maps, charts and graphs also do. So such reliance is not sufficient to identify depictions.
An improvement over the initial recognitional ability account of depiction appeals to our ability to recognize a variety of aspects of objects. According to this view, different styles of picturing selectively carries information about different aspects of perceptual objects and for that reason calls on somewhat different recognitional abilities. A picture depicts a kind of object F if it embodies aspectual information derived from F’s on the basis of which a suitable spectator can recognize that it is an F.6 This view is equipped to answer the first objection to the first recognitional account. Whether it can answer the second objection mentioned above is less clear.
Because of these doubts, I am inclined to think that the seeing-in account of depiction is still the best basic account. Appeal to recognitional abilities may well be the best explanation of the seeing-in phenomena. It also may provide or suggest ways of accounting for certain features of depiction that the seeing-in account is silent about. For example, the second version of the recognitional ability account seems especially well equipped to identify what is distinctive about different styles of depiction. So it may not only explain the fact that seeing-in occurs but supplements the seeing-in account by providing a more fine grained analysis of its varieties.
Make-Believe
The last proposals is based on the idea of make-believe The make-believe view claims that, like fictional representations, depictions are props in make-believe, but props of a distinctive kind. If one is looking at a picture of a mill, then, on the make-believe view one is imagining seeing a mill. The viewer is imagining her actual visual experience to be of a mill. An experience that is both visual and imaginative is thus claimed to be the constant feature of grasping pictorial content by looking at a picture. That is the make-believe view’s free standing account of depiction. As an elucidation of seeing-in, it adds that this imaginative visual experience is what seeing-in consists in.
If the make believe-view is going to successfully elucidate seeing-in, it must be successful in its own terms as an account of depiction. As such an account, it has met a lot of resistance. The make-believe view has to insist that we are always imagining something when we are visually grasping depictive content. This strikes many people as counter-intuitive. Much imaginative activity is voluntary and active. That is, we are consciously doing something that we can refrain from doing in much of our imaginative experience. Whereas, if you look at many a pictorial representation, one can’t help seeing a mill, a woman, or some other item in it, and one is quite passive in having this experience beyond the fact that it requires directing your eyes at the picture. Suppose you are looking at a poster illustrating the game fish that inhabit the Great Lakes or an anatomical drawing of the muscles in the human arm. Does one imagine seeing fish or muscles? One need not do so in the active, voluntary way one imagines, while looking at the poster, fishing on a Great Lake for one of the illustrated species. But there are, it could be claimed, passive rather minimal imaginings and that is what is happening in the visual experience of depictions.7 (Walton 2002, 31)
I think that the intuition (not shared by the critics of the make-believe view) that we are always engaged in some sort of imagining with depictions derives from the nonexistence condition on seeing-in. For any picture, even a photograph, there is no entailment from the fact that we see something that is F in it to the conclusion that there is something that is F we are seeing or that the picture refers to. (There may be other properties of photographs the secures such reference.) One way of putting this fact is to say that there is always an imaginative element to seeing a depiction. However, if I am right in pinpointing the source of the intuition that there is this imaginative element, the make-believe view does not elucidate seeing-in but derives whatever plausibility it has from what I have claimed to be a central condition of seeing-in: nonexistence. The conclusion to be drawn is that the seeing-in view is not made more comprehensible by the make-believe view. This does not mean that we have to reject the make-believe view outright. It also may be that there are features of depictive visual experience that are easier to elucidate with the make-believe view.8 The two accounts might be satisfactory parallel explications of important features of depiction. But the main motivation for speaking of imaginative seeing is better explained by the seeing-in account properly understood rather than visa versa.
Notes
1.The seeing-in account was first introduced by Wollheim in Art and its Objects, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1980. It is further discussed in Painting as an Art Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987 and “On Pictorial Representation.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, 1998, 217-26. Wollheim emphasizes two-foldness above everything else in his explication of seeing-in. It is not entirely clear whether he would accept the claim that seeing-in possesses the non-existence property. I believe he would, but this depends how to interpret some of his claims. For a different interpretation, see Kendall Walton, “Depiction, Perception, and Imagination: a Response to Richard Wollheim.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60, 2002, 27-35 (2002). What Wollheim would not do is modify the two-foldness condition in the way proposed below.
2. Jerrold Levinson makes a similar proposal in “Wollheim on Pictorial Representation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, 1998, 227-33.
3. Robert Hopkins. Picture, Image, and Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
4. Christopher Peacocke. “Depiction,” Philosophical Review 96, 1987, 383-410.
5. Flint Schier. Deeper into Pictures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
6. Dominic Lopes. 1996. Understanding Pictures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 152.
7. Kendall Walton (2002) cited in note 1.
8. Walton (2002) suggests that the make-believe view is better placed than the seeing-in view to account for the point of view from which we see pictures. It is the point of view from which we imagine seeing the objects represented in them. It is not clear to me that this explains much. Shouldn’t the explanation of point of view tell us why we imagine seeing those objects from that point of view? Why we see-in the picture objects arrayed in the pictorial space in a certain way? This explanation perhaps comes down to identifying the perspective (e.g., linear, orthogonal, oblique) in which the picture is made and the viewers tacit grasping of this.
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Comments
Posted by: Gary Kemp | Aug 16, 2004 2:00:23 PM :
Robert - Wollheim's original account at least began with Seeing-as, an independently identifiable phenonomenon. The considerations motivating the move to something like seeing-in are genuine, but since it isn't seeing-as, I've never been convinced it isn't a mere phlogiston theory (alternatively, a dormative-virtue theory). What do think about that worry?
Posted by: robertstecker | Aug 27, 2004 4:21:18 PM :
Gary,
I tried to give conditions for seeing-in in the paper. The expressions "seeing-in" and "seeing-as" can be used interchangeably when they describe phenomena that meet those conditions. Sometimes one expression is more idiomatic: 'I see a mill in the picture', sometimes the other is: 'I see the cloud as a fox.' "Seeing-as" can also refer to a different phenomena: seeing according to a concept: seeing that thing as an electron mocroscope (which it is).
Robert
