Perceptions and appearances

Think of how we experience ourselves, that is, how we think we sound and appear to others, from "within" ourselves, from "inside" our eyes and ears and viscera. We probably have an internal, constructed expectation of how we sound, look, move, etc. But then we see ourselves in recordings and are, perhaps, surprised by our appearance, by the way we look and move and sound. The disparity between what we feel (and thus believe) about ourselves from within as we are talking or moving and how we appear to others (the recording) can be a strong shock. But often the effect is negligible for others, who can never experience the "inside" view we have. All anyone else can know of us is the view from outside, the view on the recording. (Needless to say, I'm speaking about my own experience, but other people have reported similar things, such as how odd or different their voice sounds to them on a recording than what they experience when they speak. It took me a long time to get used to how my voice sounded on tape; as for pictures, I was mostly unhappy with my weight, not so much with general appearance or gestures.)

With the notable exceptions of the sun, moon, and the occasional meteor, I cannot begin to fathom how people can see celestial movements. Yet even the ancients could do that. They looked up at "the dome of the heavens" and saw . . . a dome, the inside of a sphere, in fact, the inside of concentric spheres. They recognized the wandering stars (in Greek, planets), they tracked repeated motions and could infer predictable events like eclipses with surprising accuracy, and they even had the imaginative flexibility to construct elaborate theories, such as Ptolemy's epicycles, to explain the retrograde motions of the outer planets, which they thought orbited the Earth. The analogy that I see in this marvel of perception and interpretation is to how we discuss consciousness and self-awareness (which, btw, are different but closely related notions). 

Consciousness is a creature's functional awareness of its integral body, and self-awareness is the creature's awareness of being aware of itself. As far as we know, only humans have self-awareness—the ability to invent and use the pronoun "I," although perhaps some other species may also be able to form threshold mental constructions of self-awareness. Most animals have the awareness of their own bodies, of their location in space and their sensations of existence—or so we understand (and I think this is a pretty uncontroversial assertion).

Again, this is an analogy, my imaginative projection of a similar attempt to grasp some phenomenon from within its operations. In this analogy, consciousness corresponds to seeing the celestial movements, and self-awareness to recognizing that those motions are a construct that we devise to describe the spatial relationships of celestial bodies.

Making Strange

Garden Fish. © 2000. Oil on panel. 33" x 27" 

The Russian Formalists of the early 20th century proposed a theory of "making strange." By offering the viewer something that does not readily simulate or evoke or call to mind natural images or other referents, poems (and, by extension, other literature and paintings) seem strange and, at first, meaningless. The theorists (among them, Shklovsky, Jakobson, Eichenbaum, and others) developed the concept of otstranenie ("making strange") in literature, and they asserted that poetry pushed forward unusual imagery and such devices as rhythm, meter, and rhyme—which were not commonly evident in ordinary speech—in order to wrench their subjects from their habituated invisibility or routineness in everyday experience and, by "making strange," bring them to the awareness of the listener or reader.

Every mental association can be untied from its original context and connected to another context--that is, given a new "meaning." Empirical science is premised on the notion that natural objects follow regular "laws" or behaviors, which can be reproduced with a specified degree of exactness and certitude. Words, of course, are far more profligate and randy and move around among many "meanings" with almost no qualms or hesitancy. Words and images, principally, and a few facial and bodily gestures, are mapped onto experience in a way that reflects the "meanings" that others agree upon.

The fashion of things, from clothing to cars to colloquialisms, follows a trajectory from the arrival of the noticeably different form, to the widely accepted and admired use, and thence to the noticeably passé state. The actual form did not change, just our awareness of it, first as new, unusual, and sanctioned. Then its formal aspects—what it looked like or sounded like—became ubiquitous and popularly repeated. But in a few short weeks or months, another style for the same situation arose and displaced the current fashion, which soon slipped into the "old" or "out" look, and once again became easily discernible as style. Movies are very good examples of this phenomenon. It is quite easy to look back at an old movie, say, from the 50s or 70s and immediately recognize the cinematic styles and tropes (i.e., not merely the cars and clothing and hair styles), which in their time were adopted (usually) as a means of camouflaging the artifice of the moviemaking in order to enhance a sense of verisimilitude or realism, which prevailed for a while until the techniques themselves became formulaic to the point of rigidity, at which point they were replaced by newer manners of portrayal.

Consider the Preposition

This subject first arose in an on-line email list discussion about art and aesthetics, specifically on the point of how concepts are predicated. Another person argued that the common practice in English of saying "X is Y" ran afoul of many difficulties (instantiation, reification, etc.). 

These conversations led me to ponder how we develop our sense of predicating qualities on some named subject, and that led me further to think of how we use English idiomatically, almost without noticing it, to create shades of distinction in our expressions. Ultimately, I began to think about prepositions and their near relatives, the adverbs that are used with verbs ("run down a fact," "speed up the process," etc.) which has long lost its literal meaning (down, up) and now conveys only a conventionalized meaning.

Language historians tell us that our modern prepositions evolved from these adverbs used in this way. [Paul Roberts, Understanding Grammar, New York: Harper & Row, 1954, pp. 227-228.]

But there is still the matter of how we come to know what "up" and "down," "over" and "under" and the other prepositions (adverbs) signify. As a small child learning the language, our mother or father might have put a toy ___ the table and said, "The toy is on the table." Next, they might have moved it ___ the table and said, "The toy is under the table." And this would have gone on and on until we grasped the relationship they were demonstrating. 

How did we get from "on the table"—a position—to "this goes on and on"?

On this blog, I want to consider the preposition, and to consider how we think about representations, on one hand verbal and internal, and on the other, external and often visual.

I will come back to this specific topic in a separate, longer blog. I will also include here essays and musings about visual art, language, and other matters that arise from culture and society.