Notes on making value judgements and empiricism vs universality...
I'm reading neuroscientist Semir Zeki's new book, Splendours and Miseries of the Brain (2009). Zeki is the guy who basically founded neuroaesthetics with his influential 1999 book, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain. I'm digging the new one more. He's been engaging seriously with artists and art historians over the past ten yeras and he's refined his theory in a good direction.
As I mentioned in a recent post, one of the problems with neuroaesthetics is the tendency for people to focus too much on the autonomic systems. It makes sense, because the unconscious processes are the ones that can be isolated and studied with the technologies (fMRI and monkey experiments) available to neuroscience. Most neuroscientists make it very clear that their experimental findings do not address the whole picture of human consciousness. But some art folk, like historian John Onians, have been taking up this focus on unconscious brain activity with unbridled enthusiasm and layering it with dubious meanings.
read more...
Onians, heavily inspired by Zeki, published a truly awful book last year called Neuroarthistory. In his introduction, Onians sets up his project as a way to address the problematic positioning of Western Art History in a pluralist, global society. Yet he simply trades in one outdated universalising teleology for another, substituting the supposed linearity of art history with the supposed authority of contemporary neuroscience.
In each chapter Onians chooses an art historical figure (Artistotle, Kant, Winckelman, Gombrich, etc) and highlights various aspects of his subject's theories that address biologically determined factors in percpetion. Then he attempts to show how these theories have or have not been proven correct by contemporary neuroscience. It's a simplistic, sycophantic formula that valorises contemporary science, imbuing it with the authority to validate or invalidate art historical investigations.
Onians' final chapter is on Zeki, whom he clearly admires. Zeki is an expert on the visual cortex, and in his first book he applied his findings about the fundamental mechanics of colour and form perception to the art experience. Onians bemoans the fact that Zeki felt the need to apologize for concentrating on the unconscious processes in the brain. In fact, Onians is generally dismissive of anyone's cautious approach to biological determinism. In his chapter on Gombrich he explains that Gombrich was reluctant to invoke biology because of his experiences as an Austrian Jew in WWWII. Luckily, says Onians, we no longer need to be concerned about such things. Never does he explain why he thinks that biological determinism is a-okay in contemporary culture, relying as usual, on the practice of science as justification in itself. In this respect, Zeki, the neuroscientist, demonstrates much more philosophical depth and subtlety than Onians, the art historian. A responsible scientist, Zeki understands context, and made it clear in Inner Vision that while he could only offer hard data on the autonomic systems, the rest of conscious thought is integral to the experience of art.
I have the feeling that Splendours and Miseries was written in part to correct some of the misapplications of neuroscience that writers like Onians have taken up. In this book, Zeki takes on higher order processing. Again, he is careful to distinguish between speculative theory and evidence, acknowledging that complex conscious processes are simply not discoverable with the technologies available today. But that does not mean they can't be discussed.
Zeki distinguishes between two kinds of concept, inherited concepts and acquired concepts. An inherited concept is a faculty we are born with.* Specific cells are assigned specific perceptual tasks. There are some that register colour, others that register orientation, others that register motion, just to name a few. They are unconcerned with the specificities of the objects that are coloured, angled or zipping by. If the eyes are looking at a red car, these colour cells don't perceive car, they only perceive red. The inherited concepts don't change over time, but they form a system that allows for building knowledge based on experience.
The acquired concepts, such as 'car,' develop and change over a lifetime. These are synthetic concepts, in that they are a categorical synthesis of particular experiences. We develop an idea of 'car' that is then applied to each and every car we see. The relationship between the concept and experience is reciprocal, and our idea of car changes based on the actual cars that we encounter. The acquired concepts are, obviously, culturally conditional (people who never see cars don't develop a concept for them) as well as specific and unique to each and every individual.
The exciting part of this, for me, is that Zeki's analysis raises an important distinction between empiricism and universality. This is critical for discussions of aesthetic judgement. Just because a given judgement is not universally applicable, that does not mean that it is devoid of material validity. For far too long the distinction between empirical reality and universal applicability has been elided, leading to a fundamental misunderstanding of postmodern theory. When we say that a point of view is culturally constructed, it does not follow that the point of view is not real. (A little while back I posted a quote from Bruno Latour on this very subject.) Zeki makes it clear that just because synthetic concepts don't show up as isolated blips of light under fMRI scans, and just because they are different for every individual, that doesn't mean they don't exist, nor does it mean that we as a species could get by without them.
Furthermore, the brain is perfectly capable of holding several different and contradictory concepts, and this can even happen at the unconscious autonomic level, as optical illusions demonstrate. Zeki develops the apparent amiguity of illusions into a theory of art.
When we say that a painting or situation is ambiguous, we invest the painting or the situation with that characteristic. In fact, there is no ambiguity there but the possibility of multiple interpretations projected by the brain onto the painting. Each of these projections is a brain reality and each has a validity and a certainty for a limited time. (p.89)
Neuroaesthetics redraws the binary relationship between constructivism and materialism, putting them in direct, empirical relationship to one another. Without constructed percepts we would fail to communicate, in fact we would even fail to navigate through our environment. Social construction is fundamental to the formation of material processes in the brain. It's hightime, therefore, that theorists who insist on the importance of social construction in the formation of value judgements are no longer castigated for advocating an "anything goes" approach. Judgements are individual and mutable and subject to change (contingent), but in their specificity they are fundamental and necessary to any act of communication, and obviously to art critique.
I do have some quibbles with Zeki. His theory is explicitly Kantian, and I think he goes too far in locating reality in the brain, specifically in his discussion of colour constancy. I'll address this in a future post.
*note: Zeki says that the inherited faculties are not subject to change, but he is talking about the lifespan of an individual. Inherited concepts are subject to evolutionary change, and are therefore, in their own way, culturally contingent. Gerald Edelman has done interesting work on neural evolution — podcast interview here.
In a recent (very interesting) film review tedg tosses out this intriguing quote: "We have good science that indicates mirror neurons work intensely with porn and food movies." I've been reading about these mirror neuron thingies. Does Zeki get into this at all? Is it relevant to "still" art or only movies?
OMG don't get me started. Mirror neurons are huge. I have to dash out out the door right now, but I'll post on this topic soon. In the meantime, Motion, emotion and empathy in esthetic experience by David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese is the most concerted effort I know of to apply mirror neurons to art experience. There are a lot of big claims being made for mirror neurons (umediated communication) here and elsewhere, and it's good to keep up a bit of skepticism. They're just brain cells, like the others, and while they are studied in isolation they don't work in isolation. But still, it's pretty amazing stuff.
This podcast interview with Michael Arbib presents a bit of a balanced point of view on the effects of mirror neurons, without diminishing their coolness.
earlier posts about mirror neurons on this blog here and here.
short answer - yes its relevant to "still" art - Mirror neuron experiments work with static images.
Thanks for the links (the Freedberg/Gallese may be busted). I would also be skeptical about the influence of these primitive cells (whether the "kitties seeing diagonals" ones or monkey see monkey do porn receptors) on higher thoughts like irony and/or Oscar Wilde and/or Nasty Nets internet surf club art. Gombrich was careful to talk about the limits of science insights--not just because of the Holocaust's impact on him as an Austrian Jew (man, that sounds simplistic) but because he knew the intricacies of his field well enough to separate the cultural from the scientific problems. The presumption of some scientists to judge the "mere humanities" amazes sometimes. Over on Paddy's blog a commenter was shocked that art historians "used their guts" to do attribution as opposed to carbon dating everything.
I guess I'd say to Gombrich that cultural problems are scientific problems. And vice versa. The split between them is false. It's hard for anyone to accept the validity of paradigms and methodologies other than the ones we've trained in, but its pretty rewarding to try. The trick, as always, is not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. It really bugs me when people in the humanities, like Onians, get sycophantic about science, mostly because an attitude like that blinds us to the deep philosophical questioning that is coming from science. Most of the scientists that I encounter are really curious and enthusiastic about art, which is great. And the great thing about neuroaesthetics is that it is truly interdisciplinary and there's lots of mutual respect.
That's only my reading on Gombrich. We definitely disagree about a false split. A scientist who carbon dates a sculpture adds some data to what we know about the sculpture but doesn't in the process become an art historian--there's too much intuitive hunchwork involved (based on years of studying history and other art). I get what Arbib is saying in that mp3 about the value of an interdisciplinary approach in the sciences and I encourage engineers to learn more about art than what they got in their one-semester humanities course. Some polymaths are going to master more than one field but most scientists' opinions about art will just be irritating dabbling (like the scientist who thinks he's a Pollock expert after measuring paint fling rates). By the same token if a film critic applies mirror neurons to the study of art porn it will add some poetic heft to the argument but I'm not necessarily going to trust the science. The main reason for a "split" is not because we're blind to it but because in our complexified world blah blah it takes years of study and practice to get up on various fields. I realize this goes to the heart of your current study and I'm not opposed at all to thinking across the gap. I'm just not ready to say there is no gap, like the spoon in the Matrix.
Yes of course there are methodological differences (that's what I said above). What's false is assuming that science operates in isolation from culture and that culture operates in isolation from science; they're co-evolutionary. But I am by no means under the illusion that thinking across the gap is easy.
The problems you are having with the so called science of verifying art authenticity seem to be specifically about the mis-application of technology. There is a very tautological connection between scientific fact and the apparatus that is designed to determine that fact. The popular press loves to invoke scientific experiment as proof, rather than process, and there are certainly scientists who exploit the public thirst for empiricism. The role of technology in determining (and limiting) what kinds of information can be discovered is an explicit issue in both physics and neuroscience, and the scientists who are doing interesting philosophical work are aware of the self-reflexive rules that apply in their labs. It's common for artists to think that scientists are unable to critique science, but in fact the most insightful challenges to science are coming from the field of science. CBC Ideas' podcast series How To Think About Science is an excellent introduction to this kind of thinker.
Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Spoon boy: Then you'll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.
I'm not down with this either. I happen to believe in objects.
This is where my quibble with Zeki comes in. For a scientist he's really Kantian, going for the whole "reality is all in your head" thing. Of course Zeki's starting point is that mind is material — he's not Cartesian (as far as I can tell, nobody in neuroscience believes in the mind/body split). But he is quite extreme in his position that the brain creates reality. I accept this to a certain point. Perceptions are not just external stimulus, they are conceptually based on a fundamental level. Zeki's main proof that the brain creates reality (as in our experience of reality, which is all we are capable of knowing) is colour constancy. If we are looking at green leaves on a bush we will perceive them as green under every light condition, even when there are more red photons hitting our eyes than green ones. The way this works is that we perceive the colour as a ratio, so we are comparing the leaves to the other things surrounding them, and even if there's more red than green in the leaf-reflected light, it's still less red than, for example the light coming off the brick wall behind the bush. Zeki takes this to mean that the brain, with it's concept of relative colour, is 100% responsible for our perception. But what about the material of the objects? Aren't they structured in such a way as to reflect certain ratios of the light spectrum under changing conditions relative to one another? I might be missing something in his argument, but as it is, I'm not 100% convinced.
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Notes on making value judgements and empiricism vs universality...
I'm reading neuroscientist Semir Zeki's new book, Splendours and Miseries of the Brain (2009). Zeki is the guy who basically founded neuroaesthetics with his influential 1999 book, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain. I'm digging the new one more. He's been engaging seriously with artists and art historians over the past ten yeras and he's refined his theory in a good direction.
As I mentioned in a recent post, one of the problems with neuroaesthetics is the tendency for people to focus too much on the autonomic systems. It makes sense, because the unconscious processes are the ones that can be isolated and studied with the technologies (fMRI and monkey experiments) available to neuroscience. Most neuroscientists make it very clear that their experimental findings do not address the whole picture of human consciousness. But some art folk, like historian John Onians, have been taking up this focus on unconscious brain activity with unbridled enthusiasm and layering it with dubious meanings.
read more...
- sally mckay 9-09-2009 2:46 pm
Onians, heavily inspired by Zeki, published a truly awful book last year called Neuroarthistory. In his introduction, Onians sets up his project as a way to address the problematic positioning of Western Art History in a pluralist, global society. Yet he simply trades in one outdated universalising teleology for another, substituting the supposed linearity of art history with the supposed authority of contemporary neuroscience.
Neuroaesthetics redraws the binary relationship between constructivism and materialism, putting them in direct, empirical relationship to one another. Without constructed percepts we would fail to communicate, in fact we would even fail to navigate through our environment. Social construction is fundamental to the formation of material processes in the brain. It's hightime, therefore, that theorists who insist on the importance of social construction in the formation of value judgements are no longer castigated for advocating an "anything goes" approach. Judgements are individual and mutable and subject to change (contingent), but in their specificity they are fundamental and necessary to any act of communication, and obviously to art critique.In each chapter Onians chooses an art historical figure (Artistotle, Kant, Winckelman, Gombrich, etc) and highlights various aspects of his subject's theories that address biologically determined factors in percpetion. Then he attempts to show how these theories have or have not been proven correct by contemporary neuroscience. It's a simplistic, sycophantic formula that valorises contemporary science, imbuing it with the authority to validate or invalidate art historical investigations.
Onians' final chapter is on Zeki, whom he clearly admires. Zeki is an expert on the visual cortex, and in his first book he applied his findings about the fundamental mechanics of colour and form perception to the art experience. Onians bemoans the fact that Zeki felt the need to apologize for concentrating on the unconscious processes in the brain. In fact, Onians is generally dismissive of anyone's cautious approach to biological determinism. In his chapter on Gombrich he explains that Gombrich was reluctant to invoke biology because of his experiences as an Austrian Jew in WWWII. Luckily, says Onians, we no longer need to be concerned about such things. Never does he explain why he thinks that biological determinism is a-okay in contemporary culture, relying as usual, on the practice of science as justification in itself. In this respect, Zeki, the neuroscientist, demonstrates much more philosophical depth and subtlety than Onians, the art historian. A responsible scientist, Zeki understands context, and made it clear in Inner Vision that while he could only offer hard data on the autonomic systems, the rest of conscious thought is integral to the experience of art.
I have the feeling that Splendours and Miseries was written in part to correct some of the misapplications of neuroscience that writers like Onians have taken up. In this book, Zeki takes on higher order processing. Again, he is careful to distinguish between speculative theory and evidence, acknowledging that complex conscious processes are simply not discoverable with the technologies available today. But that does not mean they can't be discussed.
Zeki distinguishes between two kinds of concept, inherited concepts and acquired concepts. An inherited concept is a faculty we are born with.* Specific cells are assigned specific perceptual tasks. There are some that register colour, others that register orientation, others that register motion, just to name a few. They are unconcerned with the specificities of the objects that are coloured, angled or zipping by. If the eyes are looking at a red car, these colour cells don't perceive car, they only perceive red. The inherited concepts don't change over time, but they form a system that allows for building knowledge based on experience.
The acquired concepts, such as 'car,' develop and change over a lifetime. These are synthetic concepts, in that they are a categorical synthesis of particular experiences. We develop an idea of 'car' that is then applied to each and every car we see. The relationship between the concept and experience is reciprocal, and our idea of car changes based on the actual cars that we encounter. The acquired concepts are, obviously, culturally conditional (people who never see cars don't develop a concept for them) as well as specific and unique to each and every individual.
The exciting part of this, for me, is that Zeki's analysis raises an important distinction between empiricism and universality. This is critical for discussions of aesthetic judgement. Just because a given judgement is not universally applicable, that does not mean that it is devoid of material validity. For far too long the distinction between empirical reality and universal applicability has been elided, leading to a fundamental misunderstanding of postmodern theory. When we say that a point of view is culturally constructed, it does not follow that the point of view is not real. (A little while back I posted a quote from Bruno Latour on this very subject.) Zeki makes it clear that just because synthetic concepts don't show up as isolated blips of light under fMRI scans, and just because they are different for every individual, that doesn't mean they don't exist, nor does it mean that we as a species could get by without them.
Furthermore, the brain is perfectly capable of holding several different and contradictory concepts, and this can even happen at the unconscious autonomic level, as optical illusions demonstrate. Zeki develops the apparent amiguity of illusions into a theory of art.
I do have some quibbles with Zeki. His theory is explicitly Kantian, and I think he goes too far in locating reality in the brain, specifically in his discussion of colour constancy. I'll address this in a future post.
*note: Zeki says that the inherited faculties are not subject to change, but he is talking about the lifespan of an individual. Inherited concepts are subject to evolutionary change, and are therefore, in their own way, culturally contingent. Gerald Edelman has done interesting work on neural evolution — podcast interview here.
- sally mckay 9-09-2009 2:47 pm
In a recent (very interesting) film review tedg tosses out this intriguing quote: "We have good science that indicates mirror neurons work intensely with porn and food movies." I've been reading about these mirror neuron thingies. Does Zeki get into this at all? Is it relevant to "still" art or only movies?
- tom moody 9-09-2009 4:43 pm
OMG don't get me started. Mirror neurons are huge. I have to dash out out the door right now, but I'll post on this topic soon. In the meantime, Motion, emotion and empathy in esthetic experience by David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese is the most concerted effort I know of to apply mirror neurons to art experience. There are a lot of big claims being made for mirror neurons (umediated communication) here and elsewhere, and it's good to keep up a bit of skepticism. They're just brain cells, like the others, and while they are studied in isolation they don't work in isolation. But still, it's pretty amazing stuff.
This podcast interview with Michael Arbib presents a bit of a balanced point of view on the effects of mirror neurons, without diminishing their coolness.
earlier posts about mirror neurons on this blog here and here.
- sally mckay 9-09-2009 5:25 pm
short answer - yes its relevant to "still" art - Mirror neuron experiments work with static images.
- sally mckay 9-09-2009 5:32 pm
Thanks for the links (the Freedberg/Gallese may be busted). I would also be skeptical about the influence of these primitive cells (whether the "kitties seeing diagonals" ones or monkey see monkey do porn receptors) on higher thoughts like irony and/or Oscar Wilde and/or Nasty Nets internet surf club art. Gombrich was careful to talk about the limits of science insights--not just because of the Holocaust's impact on him as an Austrian Jew (man, that sounds simplistic) but because he knew the intricacies of his field well enough to separate the cultural from the scientific problems. The presumption of some scientists to judge the "mere humanities" amazes sometimes. Over on Paddy's blog a commenter was shocked that art historians "used their guts" to do attribution as opposed to carbon dating everything.
- tom moody 9-09-2009 7:20 pm
I guess I'd say to Gombrich that cultural problems are scientific problems. And vice versa. The split between them is false. It's hard for anyone to accept the validity of paradigms and methodologies other than the ones we've trained in, but its pretty rewarding to try. The trick, as always, is not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. It really bugs me when people in the humanities, like Onians, get sycophantic about science, mostly because an attitude like that blinds us to the deep philosophical questioning that is coming from science. Most of the scientists that I encounter are really curious and enthusiastic about art, which is great. And the great thing about neuroaesthetics is that it is truly interdisciplinary and there's lots of mutual respect.
- sally mckay 9-10-2009 2:33 pm
That's only my reading on Gombrich. We definitely disagree about a false split. A scientist who carbon dates a sculpture adds some data to what we know about the sculpture but doesn't in the process become an art historian--there's too much intuitive hunchwork involved (based on years of studying history and other art). I get what Arbib is saying in that mp3 about the value of an interdisciplinary approach in the sciences and I encourage engineers to learn more about art than what they got in their one-semester humanities course. Some polymaths are going to master more than one field but most scientists' opinions about art will just be irritating dabbling (like the scientist who thinks he's a Pollock expert after measuring paint fling rates). By the same token if a film critic applies mirror neurons to the study of art porn it will add some poetic heft to the argument but I'm not necessarily going to trust the science. The main reason for a "split" is not because we're blind to it but because in our complexified world blah blah it takes years of study and practice to get up on various fields. I realize this goes to the heart of your current study and I'm not opposed at all to thinking across the gap. I'm just not ready to say there is no gap, like the spoon in the Matrix.
- tom moody 9-10-2009 4:29 pm
Yes of course there are methodological differences (that's what I said above). What's false is assuming that science operates in isolation from culture and that culture operates in isolation from science; they're co-evolutionary. But I am by no means under the illusion that thinking across the gap is easy.
The problems you are having with the so called science of verifying art authenticity seem to be specifically about the mis-application of technology. There is a very tautological connection between scientific fact and the apparatus that is designed to determine that fact. The popular press loves to invoke scientific experiment as proof, rather than process, and there are certainly scientists who exploit the public thirst for empiricism. The role of technology in determining (and limiting) what kinds of information can be discovered is an explicit issue in both physics and neuroscience, and the scientists who are doing interesting philosophical work are aware of the self-reflexive rules that apply in their labs. It's common for artists to think that scientists are unable to critique science, but in fact the most insightful challenges to science are coming from the field of science. CBC Ideas' podcast series How To Think About Science is an excellent introduction to this kind of thinker.
- sally mckay 9-10-2009 6:26 pm
Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Spoon boy: Then you'll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.
I'm not down with this either. I happen to believe in objects.
This is where my quibble with Zeki comes in. For a scientist he's really Kantian, going for the whole "reality is all in your head" thing. Of course Zeki's starting point is that mind is material — he's not Cartesian (as far as I can tell, nobody in neuroscience believes in the mind/body split). But he is quite extreme in his position that the brain creates reality. I accept this to a certain point. Perceptions are not just external stimulus, they are conceptually based on a fundamental level. Zeki's main proof that the brain creates reality (as in our experience of reality, which is all we are capable of knowing) is colour constancy. If we are looking at green leaves on a bush we will perceive them as green under every light condition, even when there are more red photons hitting our eyes than green ones. The way this works is that we perceive the colour as a ratio, so we are comparing the leaves to the other things surrounding them, and even if there's more red than green in the leaf-reflected light, it's still less red than, for example the light coming off the brick wall behind the bush. Zeki takes this to mean that the brain, with it's concept of relative colour, is 100% responsible for our perception. But what about the material of the objects? Aren't they structured in such a way as to reflect certain ratios of the light spectrum under changing conditions relative to one another? I might be missing something in his argument, but as it is, I'm not 100% convinced.
- sally mckay 9-10-2009 7:24 pm