Chris wrote:
> In this way I think our sense of heralding presence is primarily
>visual and language apes the processions of these images, limits it in some
>sense, in order perhaps to enable decisions, and in some cases in order to
>establish control. I feel language catches up with these atavistic
>apprehensions of engagement. Reading meaning into our filmic sense of life
>is a socialising ceremony. So I'd say language is ceremony I guess. The tiny
>destinies inherent in all this seem more and more to be genetic and
>distanced from moral certainty. We are conditionally abstracted from things.
A few fragmentary responses - I have a kind of visceral and immediate
reaction to that, which is about the potential fascism of the Image (how
much corporate advertising depends on Image).
But this idea goes back a long way. Simonides is credited with
"discovering" the superiority of vision over other senses, and also with
forming the system of visual memory aids which were used in rhetoric. I
think it was Aristotle who said that thinking was impossible without
visual imaging and Aquinas followed him, although he noted that all
senses stem from the sense of touch. That idea that a picture was a
visual poem and a poem was an audible picture. And so it goes, with the
notions of "the mirror of nature" and the dominating eye being formative
of so many ideas about representation...
Surely Proust called this idea of memory/consciousness (no, they're not
the same, but deeply related) into question with his madeleine and his
cuppa tea??? And there's the notion of Homeric blindness to suggest
other possibilities... It has occured to me that the totalising illusion
of sight, figured at the expense of other senses, might explain a few
things about human hubris. Seeing and recognising something, or
remembering something, seems to me a lot more complex than the idea of a
film playing through the mind, a lot more intimate, a lot more complex;
and ritual/ceremony for me is so much about the carnate I can't imagine
it as a purely visual experience. Remembering a poem, for me, is much
closer to tactile senses of memory - and then there's Flaubert's saying
that he "heard the footfalls" of words for pages ahead when he was
writing (he didn't "see" them). I'm not saying physical sight or
remembered or imagined image are unimportant, so much as wishing them to
inhabit a less unquestionedly primary place; and I can't but harbour a
suspicion that this abstraction is a desire to be rid of the messy body.
Best
Alison
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