Chapter 9: The Reversibility of Expression and Perception
Thesis: Expression is being placed in reversal of perception in a way that explains what is being expressed without fading from the original perspective view.
Merleau-Ponty invokes a myth of the original song of language in which nothing is conventional because its history from the first to the last is unthinkable according to any algorithm. (O'Neil, 1989, p. 9)
The relationship between the culture you're in and the parameters that allow you expression are fed back through a technology. It is the state of the art technology within a particular culture that gives shape to ideas. (video artist Frank Gillette, cited in Antin, 1986, p. 148)
Perception is never finished. It gives us a world to express and to think only through partial perspectives. This permission to not "finish" is not necessarily a preference accorded the individual over the world. We may also recognize a mode of communication which does not pass through objective evidence; a signification that does not refer to an already given object, but which constitutes and inaugurates its object. (Merleau-Ponty, 1973, p. 56; paraphrase added)
The exchange and reversibility of expression and perception was a central concern. This level of communication , one that could be called ecological because it deals with the interrelationship among body(an organism), culture (the organism's lifeworld or environment) and world or surrounding physical environment, was studied by Merleau-Ponty and Gebser via the conventions of classic perspective. First manifest in the painting of Giotto (1266-1337)
Perspectival paintings express a style of awareness. The word perspective, deriving from the laten term persepecutiva, meaning "seeing through" (Durer, cited in Panofski, 1955)
By expressing space in a way that locates subject object and distance across two-dimensional plane, perspectival painting illuminates a perception of space in a way of making sense sensible and not a copy or representation of the world (Berger, 1972; Merleau-Ponty, 1964).
This chapter is a mediation of how this reversibility of of expression and perception is manifest in music video. It becomes important to deal with other modes of expression and perception besides perspective (Williams, 1995). As music video composes luminescence into musical patterns, it concerns synthetic perception and the ability for one sense modality to be expressed through another (Godwin, 1992; Williams, 1995).
in 1949, Heidegger delivered several lectures that became the essay "The Question Concerning Technology" (Krell, 1993). Technology is not simply a tool, a means to an end or instrumentally and that "modern technology" is not simply the application of power machinery to production. The essence of technology is a way of bringing forth from concealment into unconcealment, from non-presence to presence.
For example, Muybridge's photographic studies of horses in motion (Solomon, 1972). The purpose of these studies was to resolve a bet over the question of whether or not all four hooves of a galloping horse leave the ground. To resolve the bet, Muybridge placed a series of cameras along the racetrack and photographed the a horse as it passed the cameras. By using a series of cameras to capture the pictures of a horse's moving body, and to express those pictures as moments abstracted from this motion, Muybridge's photos reveals in a new way the workings of the horses's body. The picture unconcealed the concealed, that all four hooves of a horse leaves the ground when it gallops. Photographic technology makes present that which was always there.
Motion picture cameras opened more perceptual and expressive possibilities. In 1923, Russian film director Dziga Vertov describe the movie camera as a perceiving machine.
" i am an eye, a mechanical eye.
i, a machine, am showing you the world, the likes of which only i can see. i free myself today and forever from my human immobilities, i am constant movement......i cut into a crows at full speed, I run in front of running soldiers, i turn on my back, i rise with an airplane, i fall and soar together with falling and rising bodies..... "
My road is towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus, i decipher in a new way the world unknown to you. (Berger, 1972, p. 17; cited in Sobchack, 1992, p. 184; emphasis)
Film even in its instrumentality and mediation, film is an enabling body that works in concert with human activity and consciousness. the intentionality expressed by film is for the a series of embodiment relations between human embodiment and "film's body" (Sobchack, 1992)
Videos bring expression possible ways of perceiving the world. These possibilities are different from film are related to, but are not limited to or determined by the institutional practices of video and television production. (Zettl, 1999)
According to Heidegger, technology is to reiterate a way of revealing, bring the unconcealed to the concealed. Technology is a component of the constructing of our lives and our communicatives awareness of the world. Technology is a act of poeisis more than it is a tool. (Heidegger, in Krell, 1993)
Understanding the logic of video is largely a matter of understanding aural and visual arrangements and interconnections. I have called the aural-visual interconnections specific to music video musical visuality (Grossberg, 1989).
The objective of the study of aesthetic communication is to explore and describe phenomena such as televisiual sound and vision relationships which have been neglected and too often completely over looked (Williams, 2003)
Chapter 10: From Logos to Echos
Logos is considered as reason or word and it is often used in suffix form to denote reasoned inquiry, the logic, fundation, principle, base, or ground of phenomenon or field of study (Stewart & Mickunas, 1974)
Logos can be defined as the appeal to logic – it is a fact-based argument that very often uses
classically logical approaches such as the syllogism to make a point, or uses reliable sources of
data as the primary “convincers” in an argument.
Ethos can be compared with the concept of “street cred,” the idea that one’s credibility,
trustworthiness, personal experience, position, profession, or other factor automatically lends
the speaker and her argument credence and believability, provided that the speaker is
addressing a topic about which she is reasonably supposed to be knowledgeable.
Logos signifies "word" and "the word"(Ferrara, 1991), it also signifies the logic underlying reason, the expression of reason, the order perceived in things, and their creative source-the world (Heidegger, 1962). Logos is not just a law of being and principle of logic, but alos as a creative source; the shaping word that is both reason and creative act (Fry, 1957).
Logos is an opening onto international structures. It is making manifest of reason, arrangement or order of things understood in the lived world as expressed to and perceived by somebody (Stewart & Mickunas, 1974)
It is important to address the knowledge of television; it is not important to carry oral or literary notions of reason or logic in the realm of video. ("Imagine a world before the beginning was the word'", suggests filmmaker Stan Brakhage, cite in Sobchack, 1992, pp. 90-91). MTV and music videos have been said to break the limits of rational sense.
In the opening of Plato's Phaedrus, the Greeks established a sense of ethos by a family's reputation in the community. Our current culture in many ways denies us the use of family ethos as sons and daughters must move out of the community to find jobs or parents feel they must sell the family home to join a retirement community apart from the community of their lives' works. The appeal from a person's acknowledged life contributions within a community has moved from the stability of the family hearth to the mobility of the shiny car. Without the ethos of the good name and handshake, current forms of cultural ethos often fall to puffed-up resumes and other papers.
Aristotle warns us away from such decoys, telling us that the appeal from ethos comes not from appearances, but from a person's use of language. In a culture where outward appearances have virtually subsumed or taken over the appeal from inner (moral and intellectual) character, the appeal from ethos becomes both problematic and important. Given our culture's privileges/rights of free speech and personal equality, however, we have enormous possibilities for the appeal from ethos any writer well versed in his or her subject and well spoken about it can gain credibility. This kind of persuasion comes from what a person says and how a person says it, not from any prejudice of the author.
Being is inscribed, coded, constituted in discourse and consciousness. Being is, within the liminal space of an investigation, the grounds of possibility and horizon for interpretation (Stewart & Mickunas, 1990).
Echos is a methaphoe and way to understand the mutual interpretation of sights and sounds and of the presence of multiple logics and the mulitple ways in which such a work may be read, interpreted and become meaningful in one's life.
Echos describes this multilayered radical of television presentation in which the singular notion of origin must be rethought as multiple. Echos replaces logos, word and reason are being used for their ability to express what is itself only partly linguistic and rational. Echos becomes the echoe of logos. (Williams, 2003)
Echo means convincing by the character of the author. We tend to believe people whom we respect. One of the central problems of argumentation is to project an impression to the reader that you are someone worth listening to, in other words making yourself as author into an authority on the subject of the paper, as well as someone who is likable and worthy of respect.
In the Gandavyuha, the world is describe as such that everything can be seen through everything eles (Suzuki, 1968).
The positioning of objects makes us go beyond the limits of out actual experience which is brought up against and halted by an alien being, with the result that finally experience believes that it extracts all its own teaching from the object. (pp.70-71)
Aesthetics have been concerned with notions of form, beauty, image and the lines an boundaries that separate categories and give us individuations. (Bukofzer, 1947; Smith, 1967) Although mediation takes place at various levels there are forms of media that stand out as "the richest allegorical and hermeneutic vehicles" for yielding descriptions of cultural logics. (p. 69)
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