ARCH508 Theory of architecture Prof, Doc, Ayse Senturer THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE VISIBLE CHAPTER 1...

ARCH508 Theory of architecture Prof, Doc, Ayse Senturer

THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE VISIBLECHAPTER 1

(VISIONS OF MODERNITY)BY

ARASH VAHEDI

THE

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Chapter 1: Vision of modernity

Varieties of perception.Certainty & doubt.Eye & Mind.Beautiful appearance.Photography & original sin.The conditions of vision.

The aim of this chapter is to provide a context for assessing these accounts by returning to key moments in the formulation of the modern paradigm of vision.

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Varieties of perception.

Certainty & doubt.

Beautiful appearance.

Photography & original sin.

The conditions of vision.

Varieties of perception:.

One of the most effective accounts of contemporary culture is the impact of technology on vision & the visual.

Since 1960s, a range of critics, including most prominently : - Guy Debord - Jean Baudrillard - Paul virilio -Frederic Jameson

Technology not only reinvents visual culture, but that the new predominance of the visual changes the nature of culture itself.

Eye &Mind.

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By focusing o the technological reinvention of the visual, recent approaches ask why vision should have come to provide such a model for modern thought not other sense??

Unlike touch, vision can operate at long range.

Unlike smell, vision allows the complex of sensory data to be distinguished. Differentiated a discrete source or origin.

Unlike hearing, vision is able to adjust and direct its own receptivity.

Unlike taste, vision allows us to put out of our minds-at least for some of the times.

Certainty & doubt.




Eye &Mind.

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Certainty & doubt. Beautiful appearance.


Then what is the model?

Vision offers a model of engagement with the world which Michael Foucault has described as representation.

Certainty & doubt.




Eye &Mind.

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Within modern European culture, vision has been valued in tow distinct senses:

1.In terms of knowledge or epistemology.

2.In terms of the aesthetic, or its role in the experience of beauty.

Certainty & doubt.




Eye &Mind.

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For the philosopher, geometer, and physicist Rene Descartes, vision offered a powerful instrument for mastering the sensible world by extending the reach and scope of knowledge.

The activity of perception doesn’t touch or distort this world, nor add its imprint to the visual data it receives, since it dose not inhabit the world; and because unlocated, vision dose not suffer from the vagaries of vantage point or perspective, nor from limits to its resolution or scope.

Certainty & doubt.




Eye &Mind.

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In term of the aesthetic value of vision, questions were soon raised about the nature of beauty and its harmonizing of the visible world.

Nietzsche questions?- The notion of visual coherence which he sees as underlying both aesthetic and cognitive accounts of vision, and he dose this by introducing music, and artistic medium which depends on a quite different notion of ‘harmony’.

Certainty & doubt.




Eye &Mind.

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According to Nietzsche, European though has since Plato tended to limit the possibilites of visual experience by organizing it according to a restericted conception of coherence, in which ‘all shapes speak to us, and nothing is indifferent and

unnecessary’

Certainty & doubt.




Eye &Mind.

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Certainty & Doubt:.

Certainty & doubt.




Eye &Mind.

In Cartesian thought: on the one hand it ties vision to the services of cognition while, on the other hand, it makes a fundamental distinction between knowledge and visual experience.

Descartes' aim was to escape the world of analogies, equivocations, and assertions that characterized medieval scholasticism, and to discover instead a point that is certain and free from doubt in order to ground knowledge.

His thinking of vision takes place within this projects, and is organized around its

central terms, certainty and doubt.

The fundamental dynamic which drives Descartes' thinking of vision is a refusal to equate vision directly with knowledge.

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Certainty & Doubt:.




Eye &Mind.

Descartes’ awareness of the uncertain nature of visual experience grew out of a sustained interest in vision and the emergent science of optics.

The impact of the telescope and the new sciences of astronomy and optics on existing understanding of vision was further complicated by developments in the representational techniques of visual arts.

The doubts concerning sensory perception raised by representational techniques, optical technologies, and the new science. And they are play a crucial role in Descartes’ theoretical philosophy.

Technology plays an important role in illuminating the nature of visual experience and its relationship to cognition.

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Certainty & Doubt:.




Eye &Mind.

The Cartesian understanding of visual experience as mechanical or ‘technological’ undermines empirical sense certainty, demonstrating that we do not immediately perceive the world as it ‘really is’; therefore we can’t locate sensible perception as a point of certainty, because when taken in isolation it is inherently subject to uncertainty and doubt.

Descartes propose that first he must suppose ‘that everything I see is fake’, that ‘body, shape, extension, movement and place are dreams’, that ‘I have no senses’, and therefore that ‘my memory tells me lies, and that none of the things that it reports have ever happened’.

At a stroke Descartes has lost the sensible world in all its richness and complexity, and must assume ‘that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds and all external things are only the delusions of dreams which he has devised to implicate my judgment’.

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Certainty & Doubt:.




Eye &Mind.

‘’Now if words, which signify something only through human convention, are sufficient to make us think of things to which they bear no resemblance, why could not nature also have established some sign had in it nothing that resemble this sensation? And is it not thus that nature has established laughter and tears, to make us read joy and sorrow in the face of men.’’

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Eye and Mind:.




Eye &Mind.

For Descartes the question of knowledge and the question of vision may be related, but they are not the same; that is; knowledge cannot be directly extrapolated from visual experience.

Visual experience becomes simply a matter of collecting or registering sensory data, whose meaningfulness is to be found elsewhere, in cognition’s activity of inspecting the mental perceptions to which it gives rise, and evaluating their compatibility with its own rational co-ordinate.

Visual experience has no lessons to offer to the eye, since neither the eye nor the visible world are actively involved in perception.

Optical technologies and representational techniques cannot fundamentally change the nature of visual experience because the co-ordinates of visibility are already fixed, in the mathematical time and space of Cartesian rationality.

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Eye and Mind:.




What Merleau Ponty so elegantly articulates here in the contradiction between Descartes’ explicit separation of cognition and vision and their implicit conflation through their a priori formal identity.

Descartes separate vision from rational structure of awakeness, but only in order to organize them in the same terms, so that his model of the visible mirrors his conception of rationality, while his conception of rationality mirrors his model of visible.

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Beautiful appearance:.




Baudelaire's understanding of vision reflects the dissatisfaction felt by many artistic and intellectuals with the nineteenth century’s optimism in scientific and technological progress.

while Descartes sought to generalize the technologically mediated sight of the telescope as the theoretical model for all vision, Baudelaire's had to contend with the technological organization of the appearances in urban modernity.

Baudelaire’s Paris was perhaps the greatest urban center of Europe, and like other urban centers, the city streets of Paris offered a visual scene which constantly reinvented itself, with new shop fronts, apartment buildings, dioramas, arcades, and streets signs appearing and disappearing according to the quickening rhythms of urban life.

Just as for Descartes 200 years earlier, for Baudelaire technology necessitated the rethinking of vision by breaking the immediate link between appearance and the image perceived.

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Vision comes to involve not just questions of certainty and clarity, but also questions of recognition, orientation, and memory.

Baudelaire, the reconstruction of the Paris meant quite literally the disappearance of tradition, in that the technological reorganization of the city obliterated the traditional meaningfulness of its appearance.

Baudelaire’s sensitivity to the distinction between appearance and its subjective framing was sharpened by another important 19th century technological development, photography.

For Baudelaire, the difference between the photographic and the aesthetic image testified to the fact that vision was not a matter of the blank duplication of appearance or the passive recording of the visible world, but involved the active framing or construction of appearance in visual experience.

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Baudelaire wants to assign an agency to perception, but he also wants to limit the contribution made by the visible to visual experience, because he understands it to threaten the coherence and unity of the subject’s perception. Consequently, he limits visual agency to aesthetic perception because he understands beauty to figure a meaningfulness or harmony which is fundamentally artificial or humanly produced, rather than deriving from the appearance of things.

Visual experience becomes certain for Descartes because of the correspondence between the rational form of mental perception and that of the visible world, a correspondence which precedes visual experience and which is guaranteed by God.

Baudelaire refuse to accept the primacy of verisimilitude, but in doing so he argues we must also replace the providential nature underlying it, complaining that is was ‘the rejection of original sin responsible for the general blindness’ of the enlightenment.

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Baudelaire’s rejection of the providential nature underlying verisimilitude involves a rejection of its temporal structuring of vision as an endless series of discrete and complete moments.

For Baudelaire, visual experience can no longer be imagined as the simple synchronicity of a self-present subject confronting a temporally unified space, but occurs as the coincidence of nonsynchronous moments within which the achievement of unity or meaningfulness becomes a fraught, and even unlikely, prospect.

The beautiful image is therefore not an immediate unity, but ‘a series of superimposed pictures’ with ‘each fresh surface giving reality to the dream, and raising it one degree towards perfection’.

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Baudelaire’s aesthetic theory liberates aesthetic technique from its subservience to nature, whether understood in terms of a neo-classical aesthetic of verisimilitude and, ‘truth to nature’, or in terms of the romantic impulse to discover the unity of awakeness and nature.

For Baudelaire the image is not an immediate unity, but is inhabited by resemblance which allude to other moments of vision and other scenes of appearance.

Baudelaire’s accounts of the technologically mediated image of the photography comes to ascribe as agency to the visible which is unavailable both within the co-ordinates of Cartesiansim , and within his own conception of aesthetic vision.

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Photography & original sin:.



Underlying Baudelaire’s account of photography is a refusal to accept that the photographic image escapes from the direction of aesthetic technique because of its production by a technological apparatus; the central issue for Baudelaire is rather the kind of relationship that is possible in photography between technology and technique.

Baudelaire argues that because of the nature of the technological apparatus, there are always residual elements of contingency within the photographic image which interrupt the patio-temporal unity of beauty. Therefore, he claims that beauty can only be realized by the fine arts.

Baudelaire’s distinction between photography and fine art may at first appear familiar enough, but because of the temporally complex conception of vision underlying its approach, its conception of the photographic image remains suggestive whether or not we accept its evaluations.

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Baudelaire’s hostility to the camera takes us a long way from Descartes' warm embrace of the telescope and its practical potential not only for knowledge, but also for commercial and military adventure.

In Cartesian thought the technological mediation of vision by the telescope is employed to exemplify the fundamental and unbridgeable distinction between cognition and vision, and the inherently illusory nature of visual experience.

The conception of technique and technology developed by Baudelaire’s aesthetic theory emerge out of a fundamentally different understanding of visual experience.

Although Baudelaire can recognize the dynamic and productive nature of visual experience, he insist that the teols which orders the configuration of form must be derived from purely human and invariable imagination, because to recognize the involvement of the visible in producing the terms of vision would be to accept the inherence of contingency , ruin, and decay as the very condition of human meaning.

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Baudelaire aims to demonstrate the inert nature of the photographic image, by breaking the Cartesian identification of technology and technique he grants to technology and agency and effectively which is fundamentally different from the terms of human perception.

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The conditions of vision:.


While Baudelaire’s theology of original sin allows him to develop a more complex understanding of vision, at the same time it leads him to suppress the contribution of the visible to the framework of perception, because he wants to maintain its purity against the fallen state of the world.

Despite Baudelaire’s rejection of providential nature, his dethroning of cognition as the arbiter of visual experience, and his recognition of the production of form within visual experience, his conception of the relationship between the perceiving subject and the visible world still somehow resemble that of Cartesian rationality.

The significance of Kant’s critical philosophy in the present context in twofold. 1-First, Kant insists on a commitment to the human experience of space and time, and so outside of his practical philosophy he refuse any direct access to a ground or principle prior to experience.2-second, if Kant demonstrates a new commitment to experience, he also extends analysis beyond experience to the condition which make it possible.

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The conditions of vision:.

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ARCH508 Theory of architecture Prof, Doc, Ayse Senturer THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE VISIBLE CHAPTER 1...

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