Reading hard and looking hard…

This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date.
 
My new term at college begins on Monday (I am studying for an MA) and I start a 10 week block on curatorial theory. As a result I am reading really hard books, mostly written by French people. My strategy, I don’t know if anyone else does it, is to read two books at once. Thus I am reading short bursts of Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘Distinction’ interspersed with more jolly bouts of James Elkins ‘Visual Studies – a sceptical introduction’. I imagine people might grow out of Elkins but I absolutely love him. He writes a little bit like John Berger, sort of a bit patronisingly avuncular but to be honest I don’t mind being patronised when the person knows what they are talking about.
I wanted to blog about a chapter in Elkins entitled ’10 ways to make visual studies more difficult’ and in particular number 5 on the list: ‘The case of the ghost of CP Snow: Taking science seriously’.
Elkin’s kicks off with Peter de Bolla reference:
‘Visuality is as much constructed in and through social, cultural and discursive forms as those things we might loosely and anachronistically take to be self evidently visible’
For many of you busily honing your observational skills the idea that visibility might be anachronistic may seem scary or even daft.
Elkins counters this more common environmental reading of how we process what we see with a sort of sampler of visual science. What jumped out at me from this pick’n’mix was a short section on visualising the unconscious – a key theme in art – where he considers research into the neurology of unconscious vision as it was when the book was published in 2003.
Blindsight is a condition in people who can see but have convinced themselves that they can’t. They claim to be blind but when asked to guess visual details they guess correctly. Anton’s syndrome is the opposite – where patients appear to be unaware they are blind or forget. This reminded me of my own childhood and me laying in front of our black and white television trying to direct family members to ‘look at the lady in the red dress’ or whatever. I must have coloured the images so completely in my mind I forgot it was invention.
All my life I have carried with me the notion that information comes into my eyeballs, is reflected upside down onto the back of my eye where it is translated into signals which pass up my optic nerve to my brain. What I had not considered is what happens at the other end of the optic nerve. At ‘the place where the optic nerves meet and mingle on the midline of the brain (the optic chiasm), some retinal fibres bifurcate and connect to the hypothalamus’. In other words, it looks very much as if some information never makes it to consciousness.
The plot thickens.
After passing through the optic chiasm, some nerve fibres leave the main pathway and go to the mesencephalon; and nerve fibres also come from the mesencephalon and join the optic tract. This apparently allows for involuntary eye movements and the aforementioned blindsight and is another form of unconscious vision.
Finally, another rogue element is introduced in the form of wee bulbs in the optic tract deeper than the optic chiasm (lateral geniculate bodies).
Stunningly, Elkins reports that apparently 80% of the input to these LGBs – information that is then passed on to the visual cortex for processing – does not come from the retina. In other words “ 80% of what eventually comprises our conscious vision does not come from our eyes” and on top of that who knows what got lost or stored secretly in some prehistoric unfathomable pocket of our poor underused brains.
It’s generally thought that the preprocessing done by the LGBs is some kind of screening process and this has made me consider what the screening function might be for. I operate with a sort of half formed theory that creativity is a form of cognitive executive dysfunction; a dodgy filing cabinet that occasionally results in novel associations but mostly in lost keys and children left in trolleys. Now I am wondering whether my head is full of little bulblets desperately trying to keep me sane by screening and ordering while I have spent 20 odd years pushing with all my might in the opposite direction.
I am reminded of one of my favourite George Eliot moments from Middlemarch:
“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”