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Here are the notes that I took on the talk, See Me if You Can! Philosophy, Performance and the Aesthetics of Personal Being by Alva Noe. It was, according to the emcee, the culminating event of a series of lectures on visualities beyond ocularcentrism.
Begin by considering a situation. You go to a gallery to see some art. You go with a friend and the art is by someone whose work is unfamiliar. The entire style the entire genre is unfamiliar. It sometimes happens, it almost always happens that you “just don’t get it” the work seems flat and undifferentiated. The pieces all look the same. You have no way of remembering or distinguishing this one from that one. There is a blur of style. There is little meaning. Sometimes you don’t stop there, you don’t give up. Maybe your friend who brought you is a great fan and she calls your attention to the features – maybe she draws your attention to the artwork, aesthetically culturally etc. and all of a sudden, the art was flat or closed, and all of a sudden you can see it. You get it. What was flat now seems to have depth or significance or meaning or power. It stands our recognizably. What was flat now has structure. What I just described was a transformation that occurs. What I think we can agree on is that a subjective transformation has occurred. Where the change is within you. But it’s not merely subjective; you don’t have just different beliefs. You are now able to see the work before you where before it was hidden from plain sight. This transformation enables you to see what was there. What is this transformation? “Understanding.” Through looking, through interrogating, you were able to achieve an understanding that enabled you to bring the work into focus, to perceive it.
This is generally true about perceptual consciousness. It depends on understanding. It is understanding that makes the world available to perceptual consciousness.
Situated against a background of how perceptual consciousness might work. In this other way, consciousness is more passive. Eyes give rise to processes that we experience. The experience happens inside of us. The visual world is the world that projects into the senses. This projective model is wrong for important reasons. Being stimulated by an object in that matter is neither necessary nor sufficient for perceptual consciousness.
Example: red car was blue. You didn’t see it because you were ‘passive’ in relation to it.
ex. The illusion of seeing. The meaning is not something that affects your retina. We see so much more than that which strikes the retina. We experience the occluded, for example. If you think of what is visible is what projects to the eyes then vision is not confined to what is visible.
We need a different model to think about the scope of the visual world. Instead of thinking of what is visual as what projects, think of what is visual as what is available to a person from a place. This shifts the contours of science; we’re interested in what the perceiver does. This is what I want to focus on. As was mentioned, the central idea of this last book is that we’ve been looking for consciousness inside of us. But consciousness is not something that happens inside of us, it’s something we do. And like anything else we do, it depends on our situation.
Perception is given in terms of availability. The modality of the presence is the modality of the accessibility to me. Right now I look out upon you and I have a rich sense of your presence. Of course I don’t fixate on you individually and nevertheless you are present for me, even if you are on the periphery or out of view. You are available as “to be seen” even with regards to the thing that I’m foveating on there is always a shifting of attention.
There is the hidden and the available and there is never anything more than an act of exploration. Now one of the reasons why this is important, is that what are the conditions of access? Alva says for the sake of argument, you can only have access to what there “is” it is a further condition of access that you have the skills/capacities to take hold of what is out there. So if you are a reader of English, the slide presented you with the illusion of seeing the meaning. It shows up because your requisite background knowledge. You take it for granted – because of that knowing, the meaning was there for you.
If we think of perceptual consciousness as an active skill of exploration of the environment, we can revisit the claim at the outset. That it’s understanding that brings the world into focus for perception. It is the perception and development of skills. A concept is a skill too. A technique or a method for taking hold of something.
Now I want to try to sharpen this more. Wittgenstein in Tractatus makes a claim about the general form of the proposition. Wittgenstein said that the general form is “such and such is the case” propositions are possible states of affairs. To use a proposition is to say that things are that way. I mention that to give you background. The general form of the work of art is this: ‘see me if you can’
‘cope with me if you can’ ‘bring me into focus’ ‘come on, you can do it’ ‘you can’t see me but try!’ this is what the work of art does. It confronts you!
Now one of the consequences of this idea is of this. Arts don’t’ really have anything to do with their apparent subject matter. Choreography is not concerned with dancing. Dance has nothing to do with choreography. It’s like saying ‘music is about instruments’ it’s missing the point. e.g. Saturday night fever, tony manerra is not an artist is a great dancer and maybe some day he will be an artist. Dance for him is a practice, a technique for engaging in a certain kind of social dynamic. Dance for him is a form of deeply beautiful sexy wonderful interesting social play, but it isn’t asking the question that I think the art world asks, which is to prevent you from seeing it from getting it, where you have to transform yourself to get it.
An architect shows you a balsa model. You know what he is showing you. As the context or function changes – if he were presenting this to his daughter as a dollhouse - the model changes its significance. As long as you know what the situation is, however, which you usually take for granted, you know what he is showing you.
This applies to pictures as well.
Door handles are transparent for us (as American adults.) but if you change the context, if you subvert the taken for granted function, tools lose their meaning.
[[what is the role that play has in this?]]
Without context, background knowledge, etc, pictures lose their intelligibility.
With regards to pictures and other similar technologies, if you deprive them (technologies) of their home you deprive them of their meaning and self-evidence. The picture acts on your nervous system in so far as the similarity is preserved. Pictures should be thought of as ‘producing effects’ in us. They are instruments for achieving access to the world.
Picture making is a technological practice, I think language is too. Technologies only have meaning with respect to background knowledges and practices.
We are designers by nature, insofar as design is a part of culture. We are cultural by nature.
-something is a part of our biological nature.
Design stops and art begins when the object disrupts that which is taken for granted has its normal function.
Art is always the enemy of function. It is the subverter of function. It is the disrupter of function.
Art changes the context, like in the party game, like with this image. Note that there is no context that can be taken for granted you need to take a stand on the situation that you find yourself and it is only through this interrogation that you cultivate the skills to be able to see/perceive what the artist is doing. That is a revelatory, a transformative experience. So a picture, an art picture, is a tool that has been alienated from the background setting against which it alone has significance. An art picture is a strange tool. Art is in the business of making strange tools. It is in the business of exploring context, which allows us to make meaning in the world.
Art is thus a philosophical practice. It is precisely a practice of trying to understand the possibilities of our understanding of our relationship to the world fundamentally. When you go to the gallery and achieve an understanding that is what philosophy strives towards, an achievement of understanding. e.g. the Socratic method.
Philosophy, I think, correctly understood, is an aesthetic practice. I think that the philosopher more than any other, who explored and illustrated and amplified this ideas was Kant.
Kant realized that there are two [things about our experience with art] 1) our response to art is a matter of feeling and 2) that response is that which makes sense to have agreements with others. We must explain our aesthetic responses, not that we can, but we must. The artwork is always irreducibly necessarily in a space of possible critical conversation about the artwork. Criticism is not this extra thing. It is an essential aspect of the encounter with the aesthetic, with the work of art. This is what philosophy is. Somebody says ‘courage is this’ no no ‘courage is that’ everybody knows the basic facts; the question is trying to justify the responses.
Philosophy and art are all method in their method in their result. There is no conclusion, no q.e.d. You don’t read Descartes to know ‘he thinks therefore he is’ you read it to know why he said that. Art similarly is a practice [to gain understanding]
[in conclusion...]
consciousness is not something that happens in us. Now let’s add performance. What makes an action a performance?
We use the term “to perform” very generally, usually as the most general form of an action. And we can speak of performance on the job, or in the classroom. So what is a performance?
Actions done before another not necessarily before an other, but done before a possible other. Done in light of the possible critical reaction response reflection of another. That which we perform is that which can be judged, and that which is judged, all the time.
Performance seems to be a very pervasive feature of our lives. ‘Sit straight’ I say to my son. It is pervasive and it is performed with the anxiety of being evaluated and judged.
What is it to be a person?
The word person comes from persona, which refers to the mask in a drama.
There is a basic sense that which to be a person is to be the player of a role, is to be a performer. And thus is to be always and unavoidably judgable or at least anxious about being judged. And is confronted with the possibility of criticism.
There is the human being. Then there is the overlay of person hood. There are these labels. I don’t know if you can peel back the labels and get to the human being that is beneath the layers. Insofar as we are person we are performers and we are in the space of being evaluated
I think that this means that the performing arts have a very special basic role among the arts. For performing arts if you like go right to the very basic fact of our personal being, of our personal being of our personal existence. The performer doesn’t just ‘do something well’ but says ‘see if you can make sense of this, see if you can make sense of what it means to be a person.
Now whether or not we think that the performing arts are special/specially basic. They do have a sort of primitiveness. There is something unusually compelling about the encounter of the performer. There are interesting aspects – it’s real time, dynamic, fleeting – but what I’ve tried to do is suggest is…
well the question that I was thinking when I started working in this area was: what is art? And why does it matter to us?
Neurobiological, neuroaesthetic and evolutionary approaches to art miss the point. Because art is not a biological trait. Perhaps the technologies are evolved aspects of our phenotype. Maybe it’s productive to think of language and picture making that way. But art is like irony. Irony presupposed the possibility of straight talk but it is not something that all people do. People get irony, but not everyone is ironic. Art is something like this. It happens in different ways/places… it’s a second order phenomenon. Offering a neurobiological theory of art is like offering a neurobiological theory of philosophy.
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