TBT #2, how about instead of eye-candy I hit you with an article I once wrote, back when I was smart and stuff: X-ra(y)ted Well! Ive often seen a cat without a grin, thought Alice; but a grin without a cat! Its the most curious thing Ive ever saw in my life! Lewis Carrol, from Alices Adventures in Wonderland, 1865 It is possible to consider the success of our species survival as being instigated and sustained by a series of biological mechanisms that order non-evidential information into a pseudo-but-functioning reality. We are alive and evolutionarily sound because we are preprogrammed to manipulate and exploit delusions to our advantage - in the sense that delusions can be called accidents of the senses (Herbert, 236). This theory, however, is in direct conflict with the premise of the photographic truth, which operates on the implication that an objectively derived visual presence implies the actual existence and truth of a depicted phenomenon. However, this mechanical objectivity that the photographic truth functions by is not a singularly identified notion specific to one time period and one time periods technological achievements. It evolved progressively in distinct phases and eventually behaved more along the lines of our abstract perceptive mechanisms than the hard-lined reasoning we commonly associate with the photographic truth. In essence, there has been a point of symbiotic interface between human consciousness and the photographic truth that has mutually altered each others relative modes of procedure to affect one another more profoundly. With the invention of photography in 1839 came the original notion of the photographic truth: the idea that these mechanically conceived images depicted an irrefutable, legitimate reality. Never before had the image been endowed with such a sense of modern and scientific legitimacy. This unmediated legitimacy was perfectly in tune with the entirety of the Western intellectual climate of the period. Everything was imbued with the potential power of what man could build and how he could change his world around him to satisfy his every need. This was, after all, the Industrial Revolution when technological and economic progress swelled beyond points previously ever seen anywhere or anytime in the history of the world. This was also the year Cezanne was born, and like him the photographic processes would evolve to bridge a gap in how the culture of man perceived what it experienced as reality. A new age of manipulating the External was set in motion and with it came a need to re-envision the Internal. The popular reaction to photography was overwhelming. Photography did to the portrait what the printing press did to the written word. The entire culture simultaneously experienced a version of Lacans alienating mirror phase. The long exposures of the early cameras generated stiff, corpse-like images that obviously betrayed the sitters usual pretense, but the accelerated shutter speeds of the late 1850s allowed people to voyeuristically see themselves as they actually lived for the first time. The literal image of our moving bodies as seen by others replaced any previous internalized impression of how we appeared publicly. The re-envisioning of our internal conceptions of ourselves was indeed in full effect as we realized the exact extent of the separateness between our supposed body images and the indexical signs before us. The individual consciousness of human beings had probably not been altered so dramatically since we lost our original sense of unity after disbanding from our original tribal society structure. In 1895 Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen stumbled upon a process of using radiation to penetrate and record his wifes hand on a photographic plate depicting the entire internal bone structure (posted below in the comments). It is the first ever photograph of a living body part that was made with x-rays. This even more scientific use of the photographic process won him the first Nobel Prize in Physics and once again photography challenged the general publics threshold for reconciling exactly how much of a spectator we can become to our own bodies. The heightened basis of the founding photographic truth found in this new form of photography is discussed in Bernike Pasveers Essay Representing or Mediating: A History of X-ray Images and Medicine. Pasveer cites L. Daston and P. Galisons claim that the invention of the camera beckoned a new mechanical objectivity (Pasveer, 42). He explains that this concept of mechanical objectivity came in stages: The first was the invention of technologies that substituted a machine for the human sensory apparatus: [machines] produced not only more observations, but better observations (Daston and Gailson, 84). The second movement consisted of the invention of technologies that would render visible things that the human eye could not see; technologies, that is, that did not substitute but rather were a new sensory apparatus themselves and that so produced new objects of inquiry (Pasveer, 42). The x-ray was not only a new form of technology, but also a different kind of technology than what we had previously experienced in the realm of photography. Artists and Scientists alike were previously altering camera and film images in time-based ways that allowed for new inquiries to be made and settled. All manner of human, animal and natural movement was examined. Muybridge even reached a conclusion to the age-old debate of whether all four of a galloping horses hooves left the ground at the same time (they did), but this time based-experimentation was only able to manipulate what the human eye could already perceive. We had never been granted the visual access to viewing the inside of a living human body before x-rays (i.e. a new object of inquiry), let alone the leisure of carrying out this viewing in a manner that was in accord with accepted social decorum. The thematic concept of X-ray photography functions in practice as a substitute for dissection. Dissection had been employed since the early part of the third century B.C. by the Greek physician Herophilus of Chalcedon and his younger contemporary Erasistratus of Chios but inexplicably disappeared from Greek science after their deaths (Von Staden, 225). The dissections they preformed were by no means a socially accepted mode of acquiring black-boxed knowledge of the functioning mechanisms of the human body. Dissection in general was customarily forbidden throughout history until the United Kingdoms Anatomy Act 1832. Even this Parliamentary decision was only arrived at in reaction to an alarmingly increased number of murders that occurred due to the unprecedented desire for procuring cadavers among the medical and scientific communities. The idea of dissecting a human body has never been looked upon without an element of social reluctance. There is a relatively pervasive code in human society that traditionally prohibits any social tolerance for non-territorial desecration of a human body (whether that territory be one of ethics, morality, principles, resources, religion or actual tangible areas of land). We have a contemptuous aversion to dismantling fellows of our own species and I suspect this has to do with an instinctive repulsion to seeing the inside of our bodies. We may be coded to understand that the visible insides of our human bodies represent death and, ultimately, the end of our opportunity to contribute in the genetic propagation of our species, which may very well be the ultimate instinctual goal of any species. Another theory could indicate that the actual witnessing of our bodys supremely fragile construction divulges an awareness of how close to death we are at any given time. Either way, the viewing of viscera in some way alienates us from a coded implication that we are somehow likely to survive any given day despite the abundance of lethal situations and adversarial circumstances that our environment confronts us with on a daily, if not hourly, basis. It is entirely possible that a civil and urbane cohabitation amongst human beings as individually conscious participants can only occur if we disregard the likelihood of our mortality in order to concentrate on more optimistically ambitious purposes. Both these theories are loaded with the word our and I must confess to believing that each individual empathetically relates to the horrors of bodily damage viewed in another, even if only in a self-centered manner. We understand how a body that looks like ours on the outside must looks like ours on the inside because our brains function to fill-in missing information. In James Elkins The Object Stares Back he proposes that our eyes are built to seek out whole figures (Elkins, 125). He then discusses a psycho-neurological phenomenon called subjective contour completion. Elkins explains this phenomenon: If a building is half hidden by the branches of a tree, we literally see it in fragments: subtract the tree and you have a floating collection of irregular building pieces. But the eye completes the puzzle and sees the building whole . . . it helps explain how we can routinely see a single building instead of disjunct pieces. On a deeper level, subjective contour completion answers to a desire for wholeness over dissection and form over shapelessness (Elkins, 125). This human predisposition for cognitive invention is further proven by the effective stimulation and stimulating effectiveness of optical illusions. The Kanizsa Triangle (posted below in the comments) works much in the same manner as subjective contour completion by using illusory contours and modal completion. A white equilateral triangle is perceived, but in fact none is drawn. We experience a perceptual filling-in of object borders that do not exist - our brains substitute the missing information and we see an invisible triangle. Illusions help to clarify certain latent perceptual functions of the human vision system whose proper mathematical modeling and computational simulation are essential to our sense of vision. Through the devices of modal completion, a modal completion, Illusory contours and subjective contours (and, likely, a countless other yet-to-be-discovered optical/neural utilities) we have come to trust our brains to tell us what we cannot see and I believe we prefer this trusted faith even to literal evidence. In a historic period marked by a decreasingly invested religiosity the inclination to gravitate towards phenomenological explanations of a proven, scientific nature increase exponentially. While I may not believe in god or miracles, magic or witches, I can wrap my head around the fact that mathematical/cognitive modeling arrangements facilitate a working sense of biological vision that permits me to hurtle myself across a concrete conduit while navigating my automobile at a speed of one-hundred-miles-per-hour based on the faith that my brain allows me to see through objects that I know are substantially solid. Our brains render perceptible things that the human eye cannot see in a manner concordant with the technologies of mechanical objectivitys second phase. Not only do we perceive invisible and non-observable objects, we tend to anthropomorphize the ones we do see. Elkins claim that we seek and desire wholeness is further pushed to include an inherent human need to see whole bodies. He suggests that we need to see figures that are like bodies because we ultimately need bodies themselves as a means of reproductive success. When it comes to acquiring partners for genetic reproductive purposes wholeness is instinctually preferred (Elkins, 129). This applies to all objects, no matter how un-body-like they are. Even Children will draw a smiley face on a tree. Could this human instinct to anthropomorphize non-human objects and animals be an auxiliary function of the same biological mechanisms that allow us to see the unseen? In the article Why Anthropomorphize? Folk Psychology and Other Stories authors Linnda R. Caporael and Cecilia M. Heyes suggest that humans possess a cognitive default for anthropomorphosis that is derived from a social need to coordinate behavior much like the use of pheromones in insects (Carporael and Heyes, 69). This hints at the type of sensory exotica found in the animal kingdom that practically writes the to do list of humanities aspirations for technological advancements. Humankinds best natural defense has always been its ingenuity and this very ingenuity has always been in direct competition with natures non-human elements. We started with inventing spears to rival teeth and claws, cars to rival horsepower, planes to fly like birds and on and on to magnetic and solar biological compasses like birds and insects, and sonar, electroreception and chemical communication-like systems. This defensive, survival-driven ingenuity may well be a direct result of these various methods of visual supplementation and neural metaphorism. This ability to metaphorize neurally and anthropomorphize non-human-looking forms, along with the numerous other forms of subjective cognitive invention, have amalgamated with the second generation technologies of mechanical objectivity to alter the way humans perceive their bodies and their environment, as well as altering the way these mechanical devices portray people in a survival-driven way. The symbiotic relationship between the process of x-ray photography and the human biological methods of perception illustrate this concept. The actual image derived by the x-ray by no means looks like a human interior. A human interior is represented, but not portrayed realistically. It takes the abstract, coded sense of human interpretation to decipher these images in a manner that is advantageous to fully utilizing their medical advantages. It took decades to perfect the art of reading the x-ray in order to understand what knowledge its image held. As Pasveer explains, . . . it is unmistakable, even for historians, that an x-ray image is not a simple, true-to-nature representation of a bodies insides . . . but only a particular perspective on that body (Pasveer, 43). Without the human skills of inventive cognitive perception we would never have been able to sophisticate the reading of these particular perceptive images into a content that was beneficial to our health and survival. Humankind has finally risen above the challenge of only mimicking its peripheral natural elements in its quest for inventing new technologies. We have finally added ourselves to the list of natural objectives that must be out-witted and superseded. At the same time, we have accepted our machines as like-minded comrades in their ability to abstractly portray the world in ways that were formerly only comparable to our own cognitive abilities. But exactly how truthful an image of the human body or the world we could possibly capture and record when the means for describing objectivity is in a constant flux between the literal and the conceptual? Immanuel Kant argued that because the mind begins with perceptions and not with things in themselves, we can never entirely understand either phenomena or the world (Dunning, 157). When the mutual modeling of our things and perceptions progress and evolve we can possibly begin to obligate ourselves for the first time to attempt a new form of faith with an alliance of reason. Works Cited Caporael, Linnda R., and Cecilia M. Heyes. Why Anthropomorphize? Folk Psychology and Other Stories. Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals. Eds. Robert W. Mitchell, Nicholas S. Thompson and H. Lyn Miles. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1977. 59-73. Daston, L. and P. Galison. The Image of Objectivity. Representations 40. 1992; 81-128. Dunning, William V. Advice to Young Artists in a Postmodern Era. Syracuse University Press, 1998. Elkins, James. The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. New York: Harcourt, 1996. Herbert, Frank. God Emporor of Dune. Berkley Publishing Group, 1982 Pasveer, Bernike. Representing or Mediating: A History of X-ray Images and Medicine. Visual Cultures of Science: Rethinking Representational Practices in Knowledge Building and Science Communication. University Press of New England, 2006. Von Staden, Heinrich. The Discovery of the Body: Human Dissection and its Cultural Contexts in Ancient Greece. Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine. 1992 May-Jun; 65(3):223-41.
Posted on: Thu, 15 May 2014 13:16:11 +0000
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