[...]![--> world
world multi species contingency assemblage human animal dog space society place
[source: Peter Westenberg / constantvzw.org] world multi species contingency assemblage human animal dog space society place [source: Peter Westenberg / constantvzw.org]](images/ajayeb/0090.jpg)
l area of retina: sensitive to movement
•subjective visual field <== complex aggregate processes of the eye movement (“short fast jumps” =/= instantaneous intake of an image) --> a new psychological model of the human subject
acuity did not correspond strictly to localized anatomy but rather was the product of a dynamic relation of fovea and periphery as well as external luminous factors
hearing: aggregate perpetual process
Wundt's optical model (polarity between:)
•Blickfeld: field of consciousness
•Blickpunkt: focus of consciousness (where apperception occur) ~= attention
=/=
Locke, Descartes, Leibniz
consciousness = camera obscura
apperception: focalization of some content in consciousness ==> structure experience
--Crary--> what is at stake (with Wundt) is a cognitive modality part of a larger ***modern process of decentering***
(+ James -->) a question of the primacy of ‘transitive’ states in which the shifting fringes of perception were constitutive features of psychic “reality”
modernization of perception
center =/= periphery
dispersed functioning of sensory response
(how in 19th century capacities of human eye was made into:)
1. architectural model of *panorama* = permanent activation of optical periphery + no stable center of focused attentiveness
2. *stereoscope* = decisive exclusion of the periphery + 3D image hypertangiblity (<-- our model of visual consumption)
}==> loss of *consistent and coherent relations of distance between image and observer* [<-- this lost consistency is now in 2020 what everyone in art is busy with or to reactivate]
...having the fixed eye many disconnected areas of the visual field at once = continual beginning at a new center = Cezanne ~= *radical rethinking the nature of [*]synthesis: rhythmic coexistence of radically heterogenous and temporally dispersed elements*
...a subjective immobilization
seeking to enter into the world's ceaseless movement of destabilization (=/= holding together the content) ==> a more intensive recreation of a subjective interface with the world (=/= reverie, disassociation)
}-->
•every object's identity is swallowed up in difference
•*vision: veritable theater of metamorphosis and permutations*
(Cezanne reexamining the composition of the visual world ==>)
fanatical attentiveness to the data of sense ==> dissolution of unity, destabilization of objects onto flux, dispersion, displaced the body to the world, into a stream of change, of time, *undoing the immediacy of the world* [<-- my reexamination of the composition of the epistemological world of fables in West Asia, my work's relationship with knowledge is like that. to gain control of myself in the midst of moving concepts, the circulation of concerns, jumble of paths and knots, whirlpool of velocities, and recourse to my capacity for forgetting...]
perceptual consistency is a phantom
(Lucretius:) [*]world: infinite Cascades of self-differentiation
-the question is: how to make aesthetic constructions [the task of the artist] (if the world is so fragile)?
-how to go back and forth between attention and reverie?
perplexity of the eye (related to a deeper and metaphysical perplexity)
an imageless vision
...a mind for which no visible form is visible enough
the fixed and monocular eye has been posed (in recent theatrical writing) as the formative element of classical system of representation **functioning to arrest duration and change in order to achieve a conceptual matey mastery of phenomena** {==> zoocentric animal anatomy =/= ajayeb}
--✕--> (Crary's suggestion that) ***the fixed immobile eye is what annihilates the “naturalness” of the world*** (disclosing the provisional and fluid nature of visual experience) =/= mobile glancing eye is what preserves the preconstructed character of the world
•moving eye --> habitually familiarly caresses objects (extracting previously established relations among them)
•fixed eye --> (immobile eye triggers a ferment of activity ==>) trance and perceptual disintegration --> dissolving the physiognomy of the everyday world [~=>? bestiary's perceptual uncanniness]
fixed truth-taking stare ==> perceptual uncanniness
the idea of un undistorted original perception ==> objects in some accessable state available for objective comparison and evaluation
fixation sets the world in motion
visual field begin vibration and oscillating
chromatic instability
the physiological apparatus (our bodies) incapable of stability =/= the aim of stabilizing the world to look at it analytically
perceptualism: the idea that (artists, cultures, etc.) expressions in varying degrees involves the transcription of the world “as it appears” to them
Cezanne ==> understanding of the world (as processes of becoming) that doesn't possess a *premade integrity* (--> world of ajayeb is full of premade integrities)
reckon & calculate
--✕--> (Nietzsche's) formless unformulable world of the chaos of sensation
--✕--> (Cezanne's) continual emergence and disintegration of constellations (of relationships + self)
production (of other kinds) of fixed vision (amid the increasing awareness of the transitive and unstable nature of perception):
•modern psychology (late 19th century): how to incorporate the vagaries and unpredictability of subjectivity into a set of constants --> quantify subjective perceptual experience [<-- question of artistic feedback: how to perceptually isolate stimuli? how to temporally control one's exposure?]
•tachistoscope (mid 1880s--search for elemental unit of attentive behavior): the idea of instantaneous perception, mechanically producted “presence” --Crary--> fantasy of a descrete quantifiable perception detached from the lives dynamics of the body + the idea that pure nonsense reveals specific aspects of attention that hermeneutics could not conceive {based on naive realism (ignoring the existence of transient iconic memory) presupposing:
1- the subject's visual experience directly mirrors the stimulus pattern
2- the subject's visual experience begins when the pattern is first exposed and terminates when it is turned off
•Muybridge's machine ==> reconstruct appearances through the production of consecutive images
•
tachistoscope (nonconsecutive visual stimuli) --> how within the context of technological modernization, faster mechanical speeds are reciprocally related to new bodily forms of stasis (---> go to Virilio)
•chronometric device: measurement of relation time
}--> the break or interrupting of vision becomes the primary element within perceptual experience, rather than a visual continuum that maintains the cohesiveness of the world
}==> *possibility of pure sensation without perception*
“mental test”
detailed psychometrics of individual performance and behavior --preoccupied--> features of a generalized consciousness
20th century behaviorism --> abandonment of interest in any internal or introspective experience (in favor of data resulted from objective external controlled observation)
==Cattel==> application of systematized knowledge to the control of human nature
--Crary--> **accommodation of subjective life to machine operations** (+ speeds, temporalities)
new objective world: decomposed into autonomous and abstract stimuli (+ machine rythmes that differed dramatically from those of the body) ==> repositioning of the perceiver (+ motor readiness) }-->
•new patterns of production
•spectacular consumption
*machinic interface is the body* ==> related temporal shaping of everyday life
computer ==> psychic field of expectant attentiveness <--within-- one inevitably trains one self to maximize the speed of response to specific commands and functions (and derive at least one satisfaction from these habitual operations of mechanical facility)
}<--Crary-- epistemic shift in 20th century to theorise of subjective vision
instantaneity: unproblematic presentness of vision
Helmholtz (discovery of slow speed of nerve transmission) ==> “present state” of perception is deployed within a temporally extended physiological set of events
[...]