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    F i l m - P h i l o s o p h y
    ISSN 1466-4615
    http://www.film-philosophy.com
    Volume 3  Number 27
    June 1999

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    Robert Hopkins

    Pictures and Film; Philosophy and the Empirical Disciplines
    A Reply to Dean



Jeffrey T. Dean
'Getting a Good View of Depiction'
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 3 no. 26, June 1999
http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files/dean.html

I am grateful to Jeffrey Dean for his helpful and insightful review. For
the most part, his grasp of my ambitions in _Picture, Image and
Experience_, and of my attempts to achieve them, is perfect. There is one
point at which perhaps I failed to make my position clear to him, and I
will attempt to clarify this in what follows. I will then say a little in
response to one of his more substantive criticisms. I close by asking how
the book's claims might apply to film.

I
Dean notes that I describe (in pages 15-17) four features of our experience
of pictures, seeing-in. However, I am at pains to point out that these
features do not provide an adequate characterization of that experience
(17). Some of these features are too vague to be of much help as they
stand, and as a set they are exhibited by other experiences too. The most
fundamental claim of the book is intended to fill this lacuna. It is a
claim about what constitutes seeing-in, a claim intended to capture its
phenomenology -- that seeing-in is experiencing resemblance in outline
shape.

I am worried that this is not how Dean sees the contours of my account. For
when he introduces the notion of outline shape, it is as an answer to the
following question: 'in virtue of *what* are we said to experience
resemblance between a depiction and its object?' On at least one natural
reading, this is not a question I seek to answer at all. I aim to capture
the phenomenology of seeing-in, by construing it as the experience of
resemblance in outline shape. It is a further question what features an
object must have to sustain the experience so constituted. And it is an
essential part of my treatment of the problem posed by misrepresenting
pictures (chapter five) that, while a decent account of depiction must
answer the constitutive question, it need not be more than consistent with
the answer to the question about how that experience is sustained (112-3).
The task of providing that answer falls instead to the empirical
disciplines of psychology, neuropsychology, and art history.

The substantive criticism I would like to address also introduces the theme
of the boundary between philosophy and other disciplines. Dean says some
complimentary things about my account of visual imagining, but is clearly
disappointed that I do not attempt to integrate my views with results in
cognitive psychology. I find it difficult to get clear about the various
issues here, and the relations between those disciplines which hope to
contribute to them. So what I have to say will be very tentative. But I
hope nonetheless to describe the interrelations in such a way as to take
the edge off Dean's disappointment.

My goal in the last chapter of the book was to get clearer about the
phenomenology of visualizing, and thereby to gain some understanding of
what visualizing is. As regards the first part of this goal, appeal to the
empirical disciplines, in the form in which we now know them, seems to me
to be of necessarily limited use. Not that such disciplines can never
illuminate phenomenology. On the contrary, there are concrete instances of
their having done so. But of any discovery at the level of processing,
there is always a farther question: what, if any, phenomenological
dimension there is to the facts thus uncovered. This farther question needs
answering by attention to the phenomenon -- here visualizing -- *as
experienced*. So, as far as phenomenology goes, the contribution of the
empirical disciplines, at least in their current state of development, is
heuristic. They provide clues as to where to look for interesting aspects
of phenomenology. Given this, while I might indeed have used those
disciplines to spur my investigations, I have not failed in a duty in not
doing so. It is legitimate to ignore one set of clues, provided the set one
is using are proving fruitful. For clues are not data, and a good
investigation is not obliged to consider all of the former, as it is with
respect to the latter.

This defence, such as it is, leaves untouched the other part of my stated
goal, to explore what constitutes visualizing. And here I must concede that
phenomenological approaches are vulnerable. If some mental event lacked
just one aspect of the phenomenology I ascribe to visualizing, would it
necessarily not count as an instance of this last? It is hard to feel
confident that the answers to such questions always go my way. [1] However,
while this raises questions about quite what my project can be, it does not
obviously lead to the triumph of the empirical disciplines. For there is at
least as open a question about the significance of their results for
constitutive inquiries. Perhaps when we visualize we deploy some of the
same cognitive resources as when we see, but is overlap in that respect, or
even just overlap to a similar degree, necessary if any mental state, of
any creature, however structured, is to count as visual imagining?

II
How far do my claims about pictures tell us anything about cinematic
representation, and to what extent can they be extended to illuminate
cinema as an art? In part, these questions reduce to another, viz. how far
is cinema a pictorial art? For, naturally enough, insofar as what we
appreciate in cinema is extra-pictorial, an account of pictures will have
nothing to contribute to our understanding of those elements.

It is obvious that there are important aspects to cinema which are not
pictorial -- literary, musical, and theatrical elements. But it is equally
obvious that cinema is, in at least some sense, fundamentally pictorial.
Standardly, the medium of communication for cinema is either entirely or in
key part pictorial representation. It is so even where the content thus
conveyed is hard to make out (consider the magical aerial sequence of the
great waterfalls in Wong Kar-Wai's _Happy Together_), or where, even though
there is representation, there is no *figurative* representation, as in the
extended psychedelic sequence towards the close of _2001: A Space Odyssey_.
[2] Cases in which pictorial representation plays little or no role at all
are comparatively rare -- the most extreme example is Derek Jarman's
_Blue_. For the rest, although the relative importance of linguistic (the
spoken word) and pictorial content shifts from case to case (and although
there are many different ways in which either of these might be parasitic
upon, or usefully inform, the other), it is the presence of pictorial
content, with an important role in the content of the whole, which makes a
work recognizably cinematic -- as opposed, say, to a piece of radio drama.

This core pictorial element in cinema is something to which my account
applies with relative ease. My account of depiction, as Dean notes, is
roughly that P depicts O iff some part of P is experienced as resembling O
in outline shape, and some standard of correctness applies, be it
intentionally or causally grounded, by which it is appropriate to see P in
that way. If I am to experience cinematic marks as resembling something
else in this way, it is necessary (i) that I see the marks *as marks* -- I
could not experience resemblance if the resembling item did not feature in
my perception of my environment. But it is also necessary (ii) that I see
the marks as organized in a certain way, i.e. as resembling the depicted
item in outline shape. The first condition here is readily met. The marks
on the cinema screen, although changing almost permanently and having fewer
visible properties than the marks on a canvas, are no more transparent to
me than the oil swirls left by the artist's brush. This is the fundamental
reason why cinema is not an illusionistic art. It does not fool us into
taking what it represents to be present because it does not engender
experiences which are the phenomenological twins of those the represented
scenes would support. And it does not engender such twins because when we
see the lights falling on a flat screen, we see them, in part, as just that.

Condition (ii) is no more problematic for cinematic images than for still
photographs, and considerably less problematic than for some sorts of
picture. The cinematic process projects three-dimensional objects onto the
screen in such a way as to preserve outline shape. What preserves outline
shape is at least likely to sustain experience of resemblance in outline
shape (though, as noted above, the question of what does so sustain is an
empirical one, and I very much doubt that actual resemblance is either
necessary or sufficient for the experience of it). Of course, cinematic
images move as other pictures do not. But if it is plausible that we see
outline shapes at all (chapter four), it is plausible that we see changes
in outline shape. If so, we have all the resources we need to experience
the moving images as resembling in outline shape the changing objects they
represent.

This leaves the matter of standards of correctness. Here the case of cinema
is undoubtedly complicated in interesting ways, compared with most still
pictures. In the book I argue that neither the causal nor the intentional
way of grounding a standard of correctness can be reduced to the other
(chapter four, section one). This leaves it open, however, that certain
pictures might draw on both. I suspect this is true of cinematic images.
The situation will be further complicated if some intentional standard of
correctness is established by exploiting some prior causally-grounded
standard. Thus far these sketchy comments are intended to apply to
classical cinema. The theoretical terrain is ruptured further once we turn
our attention to newer cinematic technologies, such as the use of cartoon
or computer-generated imagery as part of the whole image. However, while
the theoretical issues here are intricate, I see no grounds for anxiety
that they might threaten my basic framework. The work which needs doing can
be done within that structure. Futile to throw away the tool because the
material requires its careful use.

I hope these comments, sketchy as they are, make it at least somewhat
plausible that my account of depiction fits the cinematic case. Let me
conclude by asking what the consequences of this might be for the
aesthetics of film.

These consequences are limited, but not negligible. I will note two. As
Dean sees clearly, my central goal is to make good sense of the idea that
pictures are *visual* representations. Pictures sustain a special kind of
visual experience, and their most important features, in terms of what they
can and must represent, and what is required to make sense of them, flow
from this fact. That visual experience is not to be understood
illusionistically. Seeing something in a picture is quite different,
phenomenologically, from seeing it in the flesh. But one way of
understanding the drift of my position is to see it as offering a better
account of the experience, which nonetheless earns us the right to many of
the conclusions a thoughtful illusionist might draw. Elsewhere, I have
defended one of these -- the idea that pictures might, inter alia, offer us
the very same visual satisfactions as the scenes they represent. [3] Those
satisfactions might be aesthetic, erotic, or of yet other kinds. The range
will depend in key part on what sort of satisfactions are offered by
looking at things in the flesh. The first consequence of applying my view
to cinema is that it draws attention to the possibility that much of that
range of satisfactions will be on offer in looking at films too. This seems
to me to account for some of the visceral appeal of film (though not, of
course, of film as opposed to other sorts of picturing). It lets our
sensibility engage with the represented scenes in many of the ways we could
were we (visually) to encounter those scenes face-to-face. [4]

The second consequence is more theoretical, and more cautionary. I have
said that cinema is fundamentally pictorial, and that pictures are
fundamentally visual. Both claims to basicness need careful unpacking. But,
however they are unpacked, it seems likely that other phenomena, of
significant aesthetic interest, might ride on the back of the visual core
of cinematic representation. The right way to think about such parasitism
is, in the first instance, to model it on the case of seeing in the flesh.
Just as some item I see on a daily basis might come to embody for me some
aspect of my life or world, so some character or object seen in the course
of a film might, *in a closely analogous way*, come to embody some idea the
piece seeks to explore or deride. And if one approaches matters by this
path, talk of *symbolising* and analogies with linguistic meaning are
likely to be postponed until they become pressing. This may be at odds with
the practice of many of those who write about film, especially those whose
interests are more theoretical.

Of course, the parallel with face-to-face seeing cannot be perfect. In the
cinematic case, issues of intention enter, and do so early. And this might
alone seem to justify talk of symbolising, and to do so at a stage almost
as early as anyone hoped. But is the mere manipulation of one's thoughts,
experiences, and affective responses by another enough to justify the
linguistic analogy? I am not sure. One goal of the book was to explore one
kind of representation to show just how different, in some ways, it is from
language. In the light of the conclusions thus reached, it seems to me that
intention and representation are seen to be features of a genus only one
species of which has been taken by some to be paradigmatic of the whole.
Bearing this possibility in mind may not only help suggest different ways
to conceive of cinema's most important features, but also encourage a
different sense of quite which features are the important ones.

University of Birmingham, England
June 1999


Footnotes

1. I am grateful to David Bell, and other members of the Sheffield visiting
speaker seminar, for bringing this home to me.

2. For the distinction between figurative and non-figurative
representation, and the difference between the latter and true abstraction,
see Richard Wollheim _Painting as an Art_ (Thames and Hudson, 1987),
chapter 2, section B.

3. See my 'Pictures and Beauty', _Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society_,
vol. XCVIII part 2, 1997, pp. 177-94.

4. In 'Pictures and Beauty' I concede that my view of depiction does not
explain how this engagement is possible. For all that, the view at least
renders it comprehensible that such engagement might occur as, say, a
*semantic* conception of picturing, a la Goodman, could not.


Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_ 1999

Robert Hopkins, 'Pictures and Film; Philosophy and the Empirical
Disciplines: A Reply to Dean', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 3 no. 27, June 1999
<http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files/hopkins.html>.

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