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Friday, August 13, 2004
Dewey and Merleau-Ponty
Posted by Tiger Roholt on August 13, 2004 at 08:03 PM in mind/phenomenology, pragmatism, visual art | Permalink
Of course, Merleau-Ponty is known for emphasizing the role of the body in perception; I've been struck lately by John Dewey's comments on the body's role in aesthetic experience (in his Art as Experience). The broad context of the following quote is Dewey's claim that the lines and shapes of an abstract painting (e.g.) are not separable from those same lines and shapes as encountered in our "doings and undergoings" with our environment. And he believes that these origins give meaning to the lines and shapes, which is expressed in artworks immediately/qualitatively.
While the optical apparatus may be isolated in anatomical dissection, it never functions in isolation. It operates in connection with the hand reaching for things and in exploring their surface, in guiding manipulation of things, in directing locomotion. (Art as Experience, p. 100; Perigee, 1934).
Upshot: My engagement with and perception of objects must be understood as involving my body; these objects are shaped in various ways; my encounters with these objects have something to do with the meanings these shapes come to have in visual art. The meaning that similar shapes have in visual art, then, is partly constituted by my body's engagement with the objects.
Comments? Secondary literature reading suggestions?
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Comments
Posted by: nix_nevermind | Aug 16, 2004 2:20:48 AM :
You, along with everyone else in the world, would do very well to read Lakoff on embodiment; go for Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy In The Flesh for an introduction to the very, very underrated upstart discipline of "second generation cognitive science".
Posted by: Derek Allan | Aug 17, 2004 12:40:27 AM :
The comment after 'upshot' begs two questions:
1) does the 'perception' in question involve 'the body' peripherally or essentially? (Walking 'involves' my arms but they are not essential to it).
2) More importantly: Is 'perception' of art the same as the perception of just any object? The last sentence appears to assume that it is (though the issue is blurred by the word 'partly'); but can we just assume that?
Posted by: Tiger Roholt | Aug 17, 2004 10:23:53 PM :
The interesting question raised in Derek's comment regards the relation between a typical perception and an art perception. Dewey makes some fruitful distinctions here, even if, in the end, his account is still a bit vague.
Very briefly, Dewey takes art to be a phenomenon of experience, and art experiences to have their origin in non-art experiences. Regarding non-art experiences, he distinguishes between run of the mill experiences and real experiences ("an experience"). Real experiences are significant, unified experiences that are not cut-off but go through to a kind of consummation (like a terrific meal or impressive storm).
Dewey believes that art experiences are real experiences. Among real experiences, how does Dewey differentiate the art from the non-art real experiences? As I understand him, Dewey believes that art-experiences are just refined real experiences that accentuate the quality that makes a real experience unified. Whereas all real experiences have this unifying quality, art experiences are centered on this quality, and they present it in such a way that we perceive it directly or immediately.
So, I think Dewey has something like the following in mind: the perceptual qualities that we are given all at once in art perceptions have their origins in non-art perceptions. The perceptual qualities of shapes in visual art (e.g.) grow out of our engagement and experience with everyday objects with those same shapes--these everyday encounters imbue the shapes with meaning (quality). And the Merleau-Ponty view, which Dewey seems to share to some extent, is that our doings and undergoings in the world are necessarily--to address Derek's first question--embodied.
Posted by: Hunt | Aug 17, 2004 11:13:40 PM :
Dewey's view of the perception of art is not unlike Gibson's view of perception in general. I don't recall Gibson discussing affordances and art explicitly, but if he had, it would probably have sounded a lot like that.
Posted by: Derek Allan | Aug 18, 2004 8:45:13 PM :
Dewey's account does sound 'vague in the end'.
Many accounts of art rely on the notion of unity, and it’s not hard to see why, but the important point to my mind is to go the next step. *Why* is unity important/valuable? Too often the suggestion seems to be that its importance is just self-evident, that it just ‘pleases us’ – an idea that seems about on a par with saying that a tidy room might be more pleasing than an untidy one.
Introducing the idea of perception doesn’t seem to help. If I had a print of Van Gogh’s 'Chair' on my wall, would it really be reasonable to say that I see that chair more ‘directly or immediately’ than the chair beside me in my room? Only, surely, if I were using the term ‘perceive’ in some unusual, perhaps metaphorical, sense. But what sense exactly?
Posted by: Tony | Aug 19, 2004 1:47:51 PM :
Derek Allan said:
"If I had a print of Van Gogh’s 'Chair' on my wall, would it really be reasonable to say that I see that chair more ‘directly or immediately’ than the chair beside me in my room? Only, surely, if I were using the term ‘perceive’ in some unusual, perhaps metaphorical, sense."
It depends on what exactly is meant by "directly or immediately." However, when I'm watching a good movie, it's reasonable to say that I perceive the actors on the screen more immediately than the person sitting next to me. Likewise, when I go to a museum, often I'm not even consciously aware of the people standing around me; I'm too busy looking at the paintings.
[in a subsequent comment by Tony, copied into this one by the weblog editors, he continues]
Derek Allan said:
"*Why* is unity important/valuable? "
1. *Why*.
2. is.
3. unity.
4. important.
Your question answers itself.
Posted by: Derek Allan | Aug 19, 2004 8:04:07 PM :
Tony writes: " However, when I'm watching a good movie, it's reasonable to say that I perceive the actors on the screen more immediately than the person sitting next to me. Likewise, when I go to a museum, often I'm not even consciously aware of the people standing around me; I'm too busy looking at the paintings."
Yes, but this is simply a question of where one's attention is focused. Dewey's claim, according to Tiger Roholt, seems to be that where art is concerned, perception is of a different kind (more 'unified') than that involved in 'ordinary' perception (the latter being a questionable notion in itself, in my view.)
I'm sorry I don't understand your second comment re unity. (My question on this, by the way, related specifically to art.)
Posted by: (hris | Nov 3, 2004 8:56:12 AM :
Surely the issue here is one concerning the 'authority' of the artistic presentation. When we perceive objects we are constantly (if not explicitly) making predictions as to the other potential experiences and perspectives this particular object might have (i.e. we are working out what the object is like). Surely to understand a particular 'outline shape' (I borrow this terminology from Rob Hopkins, although with slightly different application) is to understand the features of that shape that tell of the object's non apparent (in the visual sense) qualities. For example when an artist uses linear perspective she implements a convention that tells the perceiver that converging lines (depicted) represent actual parallels.
My point is that in ordinary perception we appreciate that there is much work to be done in terms of interpreting the sense data we might receive from a single perspective. In an art work, however I suggest we take for granted that the artist has *selected* the most appropriate/informative/valuable perspective for our appreciation. It is this 'taking for granted' that the representation prescribes how an object should be seen (perhaps we can couple this with the knowledge that we cannot walk around the representation in search of a better view point) that characterises the difference between looking at paintings and looking at the world. So yes, perception is of a different kind for art works because of the authority with which it is prescribed.
Posted by: Derek Allan | Nov 5, 2004 6:09:42 PM :
Chris's comment seems in part to be in response to mine so I will take the liberty of replying even though I am conscious that I am over-represented in the 'recent comments' list. (This situation could be alleviated if there were more comments by others ...)
Chris's claim seems to differ from that originally advanced by Tiger Roholt. But both seem to share the same assumption - that questions of *perception* are central to explaining what art is. I wonder what fuels that view (which seems to be widespread these days)? Is it the further assumption that art is fundamentally a ‘representation of the world’? So that talking about art becomes a matter of comparing how we perceive things in ‘real life’ with how they are perceived when ‘represented’ by the artist?
If this is so (and it is conjecture on my part), we would surely need to be convinced that art really *is* ‘a representation of the world’ – or else all the talk about perception would be somewhat beside the point, would it not?
If I am wrong in my conjecture, I wonder what view of art all the talk about perception *is* based on?
