Tiger C. Roholt

Merleau-Ponty on Eye-Reflections

There is an interesting point made here about the trickiness of Photoshopping the reflections of light in eyes. I left a comment on that weblog (Boing Boing) suggesting that the issue might be even more deep and important than Photoshoppers think. I promised to offer something brief here about what Maurice Merleau-Ponty says about the perception of reflections in eyes in his Phenomenology of Perception (1945). 

Just how do we experience a reflection in eyes when we look at someone's face? Merleau-Ponty considers how the reflection in human eyes shows up in experience, and he also describes the impact upon our overall experience of the face. He is ultimately making a point about the perception of actual human eyes, but in the quote I'll give, he makes the point by referring to painting (which is perfect for this Photoshop discussion).

"Only after centuries of painting did artists perceive that reflection on the eye without which the eye remains dull and sightless as in the paintings of the early masters. The reflection is not seen as such, since it was in fact able to remain unnoticed for so long, and yet it has its function in perception, since its mere absence deprives objects and faces of all life and expression."*

Merleau-Ponty's point is that the perceptual effect of the reflection on the eye is to give the face "life and expression." What he says next is based upon idea that there are different ways of perceiving this reflection.

"The reflection is seen only incidentally. It is not presented to our perception as an objective, but as an auxiliary or mediating element. It is not seen itself, but causes us to see the rest."*

The idea is that we can perceive an eye-reflection either as a separable  object of attention (as a Photoshopper might), or "incidentally" (as the typical viewer of a touched-up photograph might). When viewed in the latter way, the reflection makes an important contribution to our perception of "life and expression" in a face; namely, it mediates that perception; again, seeing an eye-reflection "incidentally" fosters our perception of the "life and expression" in a face.

If this is right, then a Photoshopper aims to get the reflection correct so that when a viewer sees the photo, the reflection can do the proper mediating of the facial expression. A mishandled reflection can make the face look dull, or just plain weird. Maybe this next point is surprising: the conscientious Photoshopper is seeing the reflection in one way, while the normal viewer is perceiving it in another; the import of getting the reflection right only becomes clear to the Photoshopper when she stops focusing on the reflection and perceives it incidentally while looking at the face as a whole.

My own work is on music, and I use this observation in examining musical nuances, which are the minute "expressive variations" made by musicians. I claim that in order to correctly hear the slightly late note sung by Wyclef Jean or Frank Sinatra, we should not focus our attention on its lateness but rather perceive it "incidentally" and thereby allow that note (with others) to mediate a groove. The experience of a rhythmic leaning or pulling arises when we hear these slightly late notes in this way (not when we focus our attention on them).

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* Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Routledge, 1996), p.309.

A Symposium on Philosophy of Art

“Genres, Categories, and Concepts in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art,” a workshop-style symposium. (May 16 - 18, 2008. Indiana University, Bloomington.)  I'll be Presenting on Musical Nuances.  The symposium website is here.

(click poster for full size pop-up)

Windows Music

Here is music created entirely with the sounds of Windows XP and 98. (The sounds we hate most made into something interesting.)

Errors in Wikipedia

Here is a link to a portion of an interview with the co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, on the BBC UK program Hardtalk. The discussion centers on errors in Wikipedia. Two interesting points: (1) Wales admits to previously tampering with his own Wikipedia entry in order to remove Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger from the historical account of Wikipedia's origin (but Sanger is not referred to by name in the interview). (2) At another point in the interview, for a moment, it appears that Wales is attempting to downplay the seriousness of the fact that there are errors in Wikipedia by emphasizing that there are errors in newspaper articles too. Comparing reference works to journalism seems odd, to say the least. Wales goes on to claim that the way to make a reference work more dependable than a newspaper is to get "as many people participating as possible." —Doesn't the reasonableness of this claim depend upon how well the participants know the subject that they are writing about? Isn't this the most obvious problem with Wikipedia? And, of course, there is the problem that contributors remain anonymous. (For an example of a case in which the "editors" in charge of a Wikipedia page did not have an acceptable level of expertise, click here.)

a plug for the ASA

This is a plug for the American Society for Aesthetics Eastern Division Meeting (April 4-5, 2008). The Keynote Speaker is Jenefer Robinson; Kwame Anthony Appiah will be delivering the Monroe Beardsley Lecture. Always held in Philly, this is a particularly interesting annual aesthetics conference, with rich Q&A sessions, due in part to the abundance of talented philosophers of art (both faculty and grad students) at Temple. There is also a burgeoning interest in aesthetics at nearby Rowan University. I will be presenting a paper entitled, "A Phenomenological Criticism of D. Raffman's Account of Musical Nuance."

Friedman

In 2005, the New York Times Columnist Thomas Friedman gave a talk at MIT that consisted of an impressive and polished synopsis of his book The World Is Flat. While this book is certainly not new, and he has certainly spoken about it in the media (e.g., on Charlie Rose), this talk is a particularly striking presentation of the thesis.

Here is a characterization of the book from the MIT site:

"In his latest book, The World is Flat, Friedman describes the unplanned cascade of technological and social shifts that effectively leveled the economic world, and 'accidentally made Beijing, Bangalore and Bethesda next-door neighbors.' Today, 'individuals and small groups of every color of the rainbow will be able to plug and play.' Friedman’s list of 'flatteners' includes the fall of the Berlin Wall; the rise of Netscape and the dotcom boom that led to a trillion dollar investment in fiber optic cable..."

This link will automatically open iTunes and take you to a free video podcast of that talk. This is a link to the MIT page. (I discovered this podcast through OpenCulture.)

Note-Taking

Here are two posts of note-taking tips. If you already create indices in the back of books you read, then you will like Tim Ferriss's tips on indexing notebooks of your own writing. Here is a link outlining the Cornell note-taking method for students, at lifehacker.

Harry Frankfurt on Stewart/Colbert

This is a link to Mark Molaro's May 2007 video interview with Harry Frankfurt (Princeton Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, author of On Bullshit and On Truth). At the 6:25 mark, the discussion turns to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's criticisms of politicians and the media, and its impact. Frankfurt raises the example of Jon Stewart's 2004 appearance on CNN's Crossfire, which directly resulted in the cancellation of the program. Here is that Stewart appearance on Crossfire.

Ahmadinejad at Columbia

Here is one of the clever ways Ahmadinejad spins Iranian policies and social injustices. He re-describes an atrocity, lack of rights or lack of freedom in Iran in terms of something we value in the west. And of course, this results in a misdescription. In the following example (which you can watch here),* he re-describes women's lack of freedom in Iran as an exemption from responsibilities—out of respect !

"Women are respected in Iran.... Women are respected more than men are. They are exempt from many responsibilities; many of the legal responsibilities rest on the shoulders of men in our society, because of the respect culturally given to women, to the future mothers."

Watch raw video of the entire 81 minutes here.

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* This clip also includes the hilarious claim that there are no homosexuals in Iran.

Revisiting the Canon Wars

That is the title of an essay in the NY Times Sunday Book Review (9/16/07) reconsidering the impact of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, and the value of the Western canon for American undergraduates.