[...]f 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
19th century --Foucault--> the essence of human life ceased to be something representable in the tabular space of classical representation =/= human life understood in terms of it's existence in time, of functions and energies that unfolded and developed outside the **immediacy of classical visibility**
*the conditioned reflex*
a chimerical notion of the western imagination in the 20th century
reflex (central cerebral process, onset of stimulus ==> preparation of motor response)
•one of the ways in which attention was positioned within knowledge of human behavior
==producing==> new forms of sensory experience outside of (various myth of) organic wholeness of subjectivity (--> distinction between “natural” & “artificial” sensation [---> go to my work in WIELS bestiary characters: what was individual experience in middle ages?])
•practical reconfiguration of behavior + possibility of external intervention and control
=/= Dewey's (galvanic image of) subject in a perpetual sensory interface with the world = uninterrupted mass motion --> unity of activity -->{*continuity* ==sustain==> an ideal of unity and wholeness =/= disintegration of individual experience, *disconnected nature of reality*}
(domain of experience in urban capitalist lifeworld:)
•industrial production
•spectacular condonation
•technological modernization
•rational, social, managerial control
(apperceptive experience of) anticipation, memory, and preparation for future actions
(halfway modernist Dewey didn't consider) breaks in perception might also have the capacity for *revivifying or expanding the limits of thought or cognitive awareness* [<-- and today 2020 many don't consider our contemporary media culture has this capacity]
--> what if our fragmented nature is one of the forms the discontinuous nature of reality can be apprehended?
celestial camera obscura
Dewey was deeply interested in practical ways of mind-body unity
rhythm, eurhythmy
alexander technique
unwavering model of pure contemplation
“pure knowing subject = forget your own personality, lose oneself in perception" = clear eye of the world (Schopenhauerian model of knowing in Doctor Strange movie, seeing the world directly and leave entirely one's own interests, the premodern idea of *perception = presence*)
Bergson (+ Cezanne) --> deepest forms of perception are mixed and composite
(in Matter and Memory) Bergson: establish a model of perception =/= routinized and reified forms of perceptual experience within western urban and scientific culture of the late 19th century
[*]externality = dream of inhuman immediacy: a vision of matter both immediate and instantaneous
---> go to Lucy movie primordial and fundamental act of perception
Bergson (+ Dewey's ideal of coordination)
(the role of the) *body: reproduce in action the life of the mind*
(the role of the) *mind: hindering the thought from being lost in dream, an organ of ‘attention to life’
--> how memory and perception interpret each other
*memory coincides (diverge, intersect) with the “present” perception*
{ [*]determine: the more habitual and repetitive one's perceptual response to one's environment ==> the less autonomy and freedom characterize that individual experience }--> creativity = (zone of) indetermination
--again--> Bergson (disturbed by new arrangement of spectacular consumption posed as novelty within a mass society ==> redundancy and habit + decay of traditional forms of collective memory) his work is a response to:
•general standardization of experience
•automation of perceptual response
(<--Sina-- typical problem of life-philosophers lebensphilosophie at the turn of the century reaction to the “intrusion of the mechanical”)
*preconditions of a free and autonomous subject* + *endangered (coherent) system of meaning*
(weak evolutionary assumptions of Bergson's elaboration of) human subject (= the most developed organism) = potential (for indetermination) = escape from a relationship of constraint and necessity in one's lived milieu [=/= animal]
Helmholtz (research on physiological optics) ==> غیر واقعی nonveridical status of vision (and perception) ~= there is no direct correspondence between sense experience and objects in the world ==>
•uprooting: rationalization and instrumentalization of senses (--> technical prostheses)
•displacing: reterritorializing of perception
Helmholtz (~/= Bergson) committed to expanding and optimizing the productive functioning of socioeconomic world (of imperial[...]