>Thanks, Kathleen, for the review - I will definitely be looking at
>Elkins book as soon as I can get hold of a copy (whether this
>makes me "effete" or not, I'll leave unanswered). What does
>interest me in your argument is the following central idea:
>
>> I quote John Berger from _Ways of Seeing_: 'Seeing comes
>before
>> words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.' Language of
>> writing, the process of formal naming, is the secondary act to seeing
>> itself.
>evans
>
>I am no neurologist, but this assertion does strike me as being a
>broad opinion rather than the statement of some incontrovertible
>truth. In fact, Derrida (I won't go into the list of other so-called
>"postmodern philosophers" of "shallow and nihilistic bent" - a
>great phrase by the way) specifically argues, I think,
>against the logic of this dichotomy. It is not a case of
>arguing whether images precede words or words images,
>but rather the necessity of a discussion of the very logic
>that insists on the validity of precedence as absolute
>arbiter of some "truth".
>

>David Sorfa (Rev.)

I'm not sure I'm adressing the heart of the matter here, but if the
questions that you ask about film are questions about its effect or even a
human animals interaction with it, you must address issues of precedence in
order to address issues of level. In other words, visual stimuli could be
hypothesized to have a deeper effect than intellectual stimuli, simply
becuase as individuals and as a species, we have reacted to visual stimuli
longer... precedence may not be an arbiter of truth, but it could be an
arbiter of effect. And in the sense of human children with sight, the child
does (in every case I'm aware of, and certainly everywhere in the child
rearing literature) see objects before it gives them names... although the
naming process, especially the proto-linguistic phase of division by
category, is fascinating and could argue the point that as we recognize we
begin to name, if not in the language of adults.

What we would be left at with that argument is that in fact there is a
co-evolution of language and visual acuity by which humans recognize,
categorize, and describe their world. Much of this naming process in young
children is proto-linguistic, which is to say it happens in a purely
internal language, one that is perhaps not strictly verbal... this
language, then, would become analogous to the micro-code that runs the
actual logic gateways of a computer, a sub-language which governs how the
Operating language interfaces with the neural pathways. The naming process
is a process of generalization, these are piles of "good" toys, these are
piles of "bad" toys, this is a pile of things that do not taste good. The
process of learning language is a process of "re-categorization," these are
piles of "books" that is "mom" that is a bell, this is a cheese sandwich.
Whoa... I had a point, at one point.

Which I think is this... if the visuals are not, in and of themselves,
categorizable at the proto-linguistic level as "good" toys, things which
are entertaining and engaging, 98% of the audience will simply fail to
watch the movie. I say this for two reasons... first, the visual cortex is
faster than the language center, and second, we make surface comparisons
before we adress objects on a deeper level.

j. daigle




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