ARE VISUAL AND VISUALITY COMPLEMENTARY?
Could visuality exist without the visual? Does visuality help the visual in terms of understanding the world? The relation between those two is very close. It is true that there are many psychological studies that verify that in the act of seeing and understanding there are two steps; differentiating, this way, visual and visuality.
Does our physical and psychological condition influence the way in which we see things? In other words, depending on our both physical and mental condition we will be able to see things differently. In the following example, we can see this difference: in one of his books, Crane explains that due to a dizzy condition of a group of people in a boat, these people were not able to see the horizon properly and, for them, it was transformed into a huge amount of rocks. The vision is what a human eye can see regardless of the things it entails. In comparison, it exists what is called visuality that involves both things: visual and visuality, which is eye and mind. That is to say, visuality could not exist without the vision because when people see something; they do not only see it, but they judge and interpret something. For instance: when someone sees a traffic sign formed by a blue square with a white H stamped in the middle, he or she only sees these described things but, due to his or her cultural literacy, this person knows that there is a hospital nearby. Having said that, it is obvious that visuality includes the habitus, the cultural literacy of each individual and the context of the situation. As has already been mentioned, seeing is taken for granted.
Nevertheless, what you see is not what you get. It is a fact that everyone sees the same things, but not everyone can understand the same thing. There is a psychological act, which is to see what everyone sees, but each one interprets what every single knows. This psychological act is individual for each person depending on his or her cultural literacy and on his or her background. Due to the fact that society shapes the beliefs of its peoples, each in his or her own way sees through the filters of its culture, its society, its personal histories, its own tastes, etcetera. There is not any human being that only sees what his physical conditions allows he or she to see; every single is able to see beyond the physic gaze. Whereas it is true that a person can learn how to see things in different ways and how to surpass this “general” stare. Then again, there is a tendency spread among the population based in believing what one has seen, on this is where the researchers can see the power of the image. Related to that, there is a scopic regime present in people’s everyday life, the Cartesian Perspectivalism. This regime explains that each person has two parts: body – the physic gaze, and mind – the psychic gaze. This regime also states that the subjective part, which is the mind, is the one transcendental; but the objective part, meaning the body, is inert in each person because, willingly or not, a person will see what is in front of his or her eyes. This regime was one of the dominant ones in the modern era It is therefore worth emphasizing that visuality is conceived through the people’s perspectives. Panofsky talks about perspectives in his book Perspective as Symbolic Form. In this text, he determines that the perspective is a frame through where you can see. He says that human being has two types of vision: the psychologically conditioned “visual image” and the mechanically conditioned “retinal image”. He also mentions that perception is conditioned by the epoch and the beliefs of the society. There is a part of the text in which he says that the emergence of this tendency is by nature a two-edged sword. Metaphorically, in this part, it can be understood that the arrival of this tendency can be good in the sense of opening the view, but it can bae harmful because it allows people to see further or in a different way.
What happens when we see something for the first time? When something appears and we are not able to fill it in any known category, we tend to miss it. As stated before, every single sees the world through the frame of its life. Two different set of distinctions allows people to do that, such as the habitus and the cultural literacy. The habitus is normally given by the society but the cultural literacy is what a person has learned by the time. Therefore, as pointed out earlier, without being classified this new thing people start a process of learning. There are so many texts that state that people does not born knowing everything but people is born to know things and to “learn how” to do those things. Visual and visuality can be compared with reading a book. When a person start reading a book the only thing that sees are letters written in a white page, but in his or her mind, there is a beginning of visuality. The act of interpreting the letters written in this page is the visual and the act of picturing what is written in the page is visuality. Ergo, in a book we do not have this visual representation, as a real image; so, we, as readers, have to create a stage and we are the painters and the readers. We are selecting, editing and framing the history influenced by the context in which we are living, our habitus and our cultural literacy. Similarly and taking into account people’s everyday life, we can talk about the “tacit knowing/seeing” made by Michael Polanyi stating that we are constantly being distracted by noise, by sensations, by visual representations, etcetera. It is good to have the desire to know everything that surround us but not in people’s everyday life. It is good to know everything in the work life, but it is impossible to know everything in the personal life. In Brazilian there is a word that describes that people has to be selective with the huge amount of input information, this word is Blasé: meaning that you are jaded. Referring to my previous argument, the main example of what people do when they see something for the first time is the reaction of the people in the room where the “The arrival of the Mail train” was projected for the first time. In the room, everyone went away to the fund of the room thinking that the train would squash them. Having said that, in this example we can see that people not only tend to avoid things when are unknown but they are scared of new things. Related to the visuality, the people in this room were unable to understand that this was a film and it was not real because it was new for them. 475
Considering all this, photography should be mentioned in this essay. The first representation of images was done by Nicéphore Niépce, and was called View from the window at Le Gras in the 1820s. It was done with a camera obscura. This picture was taken with an 8-hour exposition in front of a pewter platin coated with Bitumen of Judea. Grace to this bitumen the light projected in the plate was retained. The camera obscura machine consists in a box completely closed; any light can penetrate into the interior excepting the dim light that allows printing the exterior but upside down. Coupled with that, there is a phenomenon called “the arrested image” in which the realty is not what is printed in the photography. The reality is a simply effect because in a picture not everything happening in that moment is captured but a photographer can capture everything he or she wants.
“Perspective centres everything on the eye of the beholder”
– John Bromhall
Knowing that, what we see is what we get? In this case, the answer is completely clear: no. In a picture, you see what the photographer, in that exact moment, wanted you to see. Thus, perspective should be mentioned as well because not only the will of the photographer is shown but also the perspective of the picture is altering the way in which we see things. There is another theory invented by the Greeks that states that a picture is showing what you would have seen is you would have been there. Given those two arguments, we can see that the second one is not completely true because if a person has been there he or she could have seen more than only which is in front of the camera; here come into play the role of the periphery, human eye has a large field of vision. In the evolution of photography there were a lot of different types of capturing images such as the Daguerrotype in 1839, the Calotype in 1840 or the Collodion Process but the most successful was Le Carte-de-Visite and the Stereoscopy. The first one was a small picture of a person that people gave to their clients; the second one was a type of virtual reality trying to emulate presence for the purpose of entertaining people.
Above all, visuality could not exist without the visual because they are complementary. To have a mental picture of what people see and to go beyond of what is in front of his or her eyes they need to, firstly, have a physical gaze. Ergo, see is similar to read because, first of all you need to understand what is written before picturing it in your mind. Talking about order, we can also see that visuality is not the first psychological act but is the second because people first has to analyse what is in the reality and then, with the help of the three main keys of the visuality – context, habitus and cultural literacy, understand and interpret what hidden meaning could this have. Owing to the “Cartesian Perspectivalism”, we can conclude that the human being is divided in two parts: the physical – mechanical eye, and the mental – transcendental and non-mechanical knowledge. Having the example of the fear that people experienced seeing the first film of the train approaching we see that, when people see something for the first time, they do not entirely avoid it but they are scared. Finally, we have seen that photography is more limited than the human eye because a camera can only capture what is in front but human eye has a wider field of vision. All things considered, I conclude that it can be proved that visual is what the human eye is captable of seeing, while visuality is the way in which the mind is able to build a sense of what is the reality and to transcend in the meaning.
Fleckenstein, K. (2008). A Matter of Perspective: Cartesian Perspectivalism and the Testing of English Studies. JAC, 28(1/2), 85-121. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20866828