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Sessions

1. Intentionality and Gestalt

11.02.09 Thursday 6:00-7:30pm

In this session we will explore what is known as 'intentionality' - the way that our perceptions, thoughts and actions are directed towards things, i.e. phenomena.

Our intial examples will come from the philosophical literature. Specifically we will consider what Merleau-Ponty says about how we interpret a simple line drawing as a three-dimensional figure, and we will go on to relate this to Wittgenstein's discussion of 'seeing aspects'. Both examples point to perception as always involving a relation between figure and ground, or object and horizon - in other words a Gestalt.

This means, as Merleau-Ponty emphasises, we don't just 'see' sensations - colours, tones, light - rather we see things as things. When we see a tree, for example, it is not a set of colour sensations we primarily perceive and only interpret afterwards as a 'tree'. Rather seeing is the perception of phenomena themselves: it is the perception of a world with spatial depth, objects we can reach out for and a horizon that we can move towards, but which continuously shifts and is never exhausted. So, we immediately perceive the tree as a tree, because seeing is more than merely registering intensities of light on the retina - that is to say perception is not, according to phenomenological analyses, the same as sensation; it cannot be reduced to sensation, and the reason for this is that what we perceive are relationships and patterns.

In this first session we will also look at some of the images that will detain us in later sessions, specifically the paintings of Paul Cezanne, which Merleau-Ponty wrote of repeatedly, and the photo-collages of John Stezaker.

2. Montage and Gestalt Perception

04.03.09 Thursday 6:00-7:30pm

Reading: Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964), 'Film and the New Psychology', Sense and Non-Sense, Evanston: Northwestern University Press

In this session we will explore further the ideas about intentionality and Gestalt perception developed in our first session, this time in relation to film and the preceptual experience occasioned by the montage sequence. With reference to extracts from a couple of films, including Joris Ivens's short film 'Rain', we will explore the argument of Merleau-Ponty's essay, 'Film and the New Psychology', which conveniently summarises some key ideas from his major work Phenomenology of Perception.

Whilst in the essay Merleau-Ponty looks at how the functioning of montage is grounded in the Gestalt mode of our perception, in the Phenomenology he does also draw a distinction between the film screen and perceptual field we otherwise related to. Whereas our perceptual field is bounded by a horizon, towards which we can turn, whether it be the margins of our vision, things we hear but don't see, or the rear side of objects we do see, etc., the film screen, Merleau-Ponty writes, 'has no horizons':

"When, in a film, the camera is trained on an object and moves nearer to it to give a close-up view, we can remember that we are being shown the ash tray or an actor’s hand, we do not actually identify it. This is because the screen has no horizons. In normal vision, on the other hand, I direct my gaze upon a sector of the landscape, which comes to life and is disclosed, while the other objects recede into the periphery and become dormant, while, however, not ceasing to be there. Now, with them, I have at my disposal their horizons, in which there is implied, as a marginal view, the object on which my eyes at present fall. The horizon, then, is what guarantees the identity of the object throughout the exploration; it is the correlative of the impending power which my gaze retains over the objects which it has just surveyed, and which it already has over the fresh details which it is about to discover." (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962: 68 / 2005 :78)

So, there is a contradiction we need to think through: to a degree, we are told, film lacks the horizon of perception. However, as it relates these horzion-less images themselves to one another, we nonetheless perceive it as a Gestalt, i.e. as having horizons. In particular, we perceive the film image as having a horizon constituted by the out of field (places which the camera would reveal if it were moved) and the sequence (what it will revealed when the next image comes along).

3. Painting, Distance, Horizon

11.03.09 Thursday 6:00-7:30pm

Readings:

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964), ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’, Sense and Non-sense, Evanston: Northwestern University Press

2. Renée van de Vall (2005), ‘Space without hiding places: Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on linear perspective’, in C. van Eck and E. Winters (eds.), Dealing with the Visual: Art, History, Aesthetics and Visual Culture, Aldershot: Ashgate

After having consider the moving image in the last session, in our third session we turn to considering the ‘static’ image: painting, collage etc.. Our key reference will be Merleau-Ponty’s first essay dedicated to painting, ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’, published in the same year as ‘The Film and the New Psychology’. We will draw two central themes from this essay: firstly, we’ll explore what Merleau-Ponty has to say about, on the one hand, Cezanne’s use of colour over drawing (or ‘outline’), and on the other, what this tells us about the relationship between things, perception and representation. Secondly, we’ll look more specifically at what he has to say about perspective. It is implied in this essay that the linear perspective associated with renaissance painting is an abstraction that does not correspond to the ‘lived perspective’ of ‘natural perception’:

‘By remaining faithful to the phenomena in his investigations of perspective, Cézanne discovered what recent psychologists have come to formulate: the lived perspective, that which we actually perceive, is not a geometric or photographic one. The objects we see close at hand appear smaller, those far away seem larger than they do in a photograph. (This can be seen in a movie, where a train approaches and gets bigger much faster than a real train would under the same circumstances.)’

(Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, 1964: 14)

Not surprisingly, as the essay was written in the year that his Phenomenology of Perception was published, the example here is one familiar from the section on depth in that book, which we looked at in our first session. However a number of question arise that Merleau-Ponty does not address explicitly in this essay. Foremost among them is one that has two parts: Firstly, how does a mode—or ‘code’, as it is sometimes referred to—of representation such as linear perspective relate to natural perception, i.e. the unmediated perception we experience in the world? Secondly, in what sense can a mode of perception that is independent of cultural forms be spoken of? His last text on painting, ‘Eye and Mind’—written some 15 years after ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’ and shortly before the writer’s premature death—takes these questions up more explicitly; however, starting with our own reading of the earlier essay, we will use Renée van de Vall’s essay on ‘Eye and Mind’ as our guide to address the debates that surround the issues opened by Merleau-Ponty’s writings on painting as a whole.

I would like us also to revisit in this session some of the ideas around Gestalt perception raised in the first two sessions, and to extend these, along with the concepts raised in ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’, to more contemporary work, in particular the collages of John Stezaker.