Frameworks, artworks, place : the space of perception in the modern world

261 Pages·2008·1.603 MB·English

by  Mehigan, Timothy J

Frameworks,
Artworks,
Place
Consciousness
11
Liter& ture
the Arts
General Editor:
Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe
Editorial Board:
Anna Bonshek, Per Brask, John Danvers,
William S. Haney II, Amy Ione,
Michael Mangan, Arthur Versluis,
Christopher Webster, Ralph Yarrow
Frameworks,
Artworks,
Place
The Space of Perception
in the Modern World
ediTed by
TiM MehigAn
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008
Cover image: James McArdle: Gush (2007). Chromogenic print.
Cover Design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-2362-8
ISSN: 1573-2193
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008
Printed in the Netherlands
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
The Space of Perception
Tim Mehigan (University of Otago)..........................................7
PERCEPTION, PERSPECTIVE, REPRESENTATION
The Painting of Philosophy: Space, Perspectivalism,
Representability and Consciousness
Peter Leech (Otago).................................................................27
The Anomalous Space of Pictures: Toward a Critique of
Stereographic Virtual Reality
Rose Woodcock (Deakin University)......................................43
Shifting Ground in some Australian Photography
James McArdle (La Trobe University)....................................67
Schoenberg’s Hat: Objects in Musical Space
Barry Empson (Otago).............................................................83
Seeing into Space: the Unconscious and Schematisation
Louise Fairfax (University of Melbourne)...............................97
REPRESENTATION, CONSCIOUSNESS, IMAGINATION
Bodies and Stairs: Modernist Theatrical Space and
Consciousness
Paul Monaghan (Melbourne).................................................117
Bridge, Mirror, Labyrinth: Shaping the Intervals of
Calvino’s Invisible Cities
Kim Roberts (Deakin)............................................................137
Cartographers of Consciousness: Imagined Library Spaces
in the Work of Haruki Murakami, Umberto Eco and
Elias Canetti
Ewen Jarvis (Deakin).............................................................159
Experiencing Kiefer’s “Scorched Earth” Landscapes: Acts
of Re-Enactment, Acquaintance or Empathy?
R.A. Goodrich (Deakin).........................................................173
CONSTRUCTIONS OF SELF IN SPACE
Fractured Urban Memories
Dirk de Bruyn (Deakin).........................................................191
Curating Curiosity: Wonder’s Colonial Phenomenology
Khadija Z. Carroll (Harvard University)................................203
A Synthetic Theory of Self, Derived from Migration
Uli Krahn (University of Sydney)..........................................227
Eternal Recurrence: Art, Pain and Consciousness
Ann McCulloch (Deakin)......................................................247
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS....................................................259
The Space of Perception
Tim Mehigan
The question of space has received attention in recent approaches to
consciousness. This has partly arisen as alternatives have been sought
to traditional cognitive science, whose material focus on the mind’s
processes appears to account for only a small part of what we
understand consciousness to be. It is also due to the rise of phen-
omenological and psychological approaches to the mind, which as-
cribe importance to the data flowing from the subjective standpoint
and thus make the way consciousness is shaped by what might be
called the ‘aura’ of perception1 a key moment of investigation. These
approaches have their source in the ‘Copernican turn’ towards the
subject inaugurated by Kant’s philosophy in the late eighteenth
century, although little significance was initially found in this
emerging idealistic focus on the mind beyond certain stirrings in
German art and philosophy, and its potential utility remained largely
unnoticed outside Germany for more than a century. It was not until
the neo-Kantian revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century that the subjective dimension of consciousness commanded
attention once more and to some extent entered the European
mainstream. Edmund Husserl, one of the most prominent thinkers in
this revived tradition, made the link with Kantian notions of the mind
and the break with empirical psychology quite explicit in his new
phenomenology (Husserl I 1913: 214).
The question of space in approaches to consciousness has pro-
gressively moved to the fore since the pronouncements of early phe-
nomenology. Heidegger, a student of Husserl, attached importance to
the perspectivalism of perception, where the world is not just observed
in pictures made by the mind, but the pictures of the mind, from a

1 Following Benjamin, who spoke of the ‘aura’ of the artwork (Benjamin 1983).
8 Tim Mehigan
certain point of view, in fact make up the world. Key statements in
Wittgenstein’s early philosophy affirmed this interest in the pictorial
aspects of perception and the role of mental space in enlivening them.
The interest in perspectivally generated consciousness, which was
obliged to assume a dynamic subject in whom acts of consciousness
issued, was paralleled during the same period by new developments in
science. The insight of experimental science that scientific attention is
by no means neutral in its access to the external world, but delivers
data specific to the type of examination undertaken,2 notably at the
quantum level of atomic physics, has penetrated ever more deeply into
the natural sciences. As the understanding of what constitutes
scientific objectivity was updated in an age of quantum mechanics, so
the question of subjectivity has bulked ever larger for all parts of the
scientific enterprise. The once sharply drawn distinction between the
sciences and the arts has also been open to reassessment. It is now
possible to estimate more clearly the reciprocal exchanges that flow
between the ‘two cultures’ (C.P. Snow), and to see – as the essays in
this volume do – a ‘preobjective’ patterning in the insights delivered
by science. The contributions to this volume, which betray perhaps
familiar connections with the Aby Warburg-Erwin Panofsky tradition
of art history as well as to phenomenology, for this reason also follow
more innovative directions in fields as diverse as cognitive neuro-
biology (Maturana, Ramachandran) and linguistic philosophy (Lakoff
/ Johnson), where the question of situated, embodied consciousness
has been given new importance.
A significant leap forward in our understanding of the nature of
perception occurred somewhere between the sixteenth and the eight-
eenth centuries. A distinction was introduced – let us say it began with
Descartes – between the process of ordering experience through the
activity of the mind, on the one hand, and the existence of one’s
physical body in ‘outside’ space, on the other. The ordering activity of
the mind, where ‘units’ of perception were created from what could be
taken in of the world through consciousness, separated the mind’s
processes from what could be assumed about the make-up of the
world outside the boundaries of the self. That the mind required an
idea of space to enable its processes to function in consciousness, and

2 As noted, for example, by Max Planck in 1933: ‘Every measurement first acquires
its meaning for physical science through the significance which a theory gives it’
(Planck 1933: 92).
The Space of Perception 9
that this idea of space is apparently different from the space of the
world ‘out there’, did not properly emerge until Immanuel Kant
separated ‘transcendental’ awareness from the ‘thing in itself’. Kant
was only in a position to draw this distinction between outside space
and the mental space of consciousness because of Hume’s work on
empirical causality immediately before, which had identified a
discrepancy between the impressions human beings received of the
physical world and the constitution of that world.
This moment of separation of mind from the space of the outside
world was of enormous utility for the emergence of the new sciences.
For the first time, human awareness was able to probe the physical
environment in which human life was cast, at least notionally free
from the encumbrance of superstition and mind-created fancies.
Francis Bacon, writing shortly before Descartes, spoke of the ad-
vantages that would accrue to human beings if they were able to
release themselves from certain ‘idols’ – certain prejudices affecting
understanding – that stood in the way of direct perception of the
physical world. Galileo Galilei, training his telescope on the heavens
in order to test Copernicus’s hypothesis about the heliocentric nature
of the then known universe – Copernicus had reached his conclusions
on the basis of unaided observation and mathematical calculation
alone – offered a vivid example of this new science in action: its
insights, derived from the technical means of human invention,
appeared self-evident to the human eye, its truth therefore irrefutable.
To be sure, the new science had not yet unfolded its methodology in
more than rudimentary ways. Descartes sprang into the breach with
his Discourse on Method of 1637, setting out a series of simple steps
by which scientific truth could assert itself. The method he advanced,
which was closely aligned with Bacon’s treatise on scientific pro-
cedure in the Novum organum (1620), involved a type of eliminative
induction that, as Fred Wilson has shown, confirmed the innate
preferences of the medieval mind, that is, it confirmed the drift
towards Aristotelian logic and the drift away from Platonic models of
understanding, even as it progressed beyond both in a certain sense.
Thus was inaugurated the now familiar feel of modern science: it is
Aristotelian in its outward focus on physical ‘extension’ and in its
incrementally gathered inductive truths, while human awareness still
roams Platonic terrain in its speculations about the spiritual condition
of human beings that appears inseparable from the circumstances of