Perceptual Priors and Artistic Conventions

Writing on iPhone as they have shut down the library. Forgive spelling errors, so sorry.

It may be the mood that comes at the end of a lousy valentines day, but I'd like to voice my extreme dislike of Solso''s prose style, and his affinity for goofy acronyms and statements of sweeping gushing generality about how each of us views the world through our own unique etc.

Yes, of course we do. And our perceptions are bound up in culture and in the conventions imposed on us by society. I don't see the same connotations in a square that you see, or that someone in Africa sees. Analysis of those differences in connotation is surely a worthy and fascinating study for those involved. Never mind all of that, however, because there ARE perceptual phenomena that transcend culture and individuality in all but the mentally impaired, and those phenomena deserve our attention. For example you might see a square this way, and I might see a square that way, but neither of us would mistake a square for a circle. In any culture, at any time, by any functioning human being, a square will be perceived as inherently different from a circle. The nature of that difference may be cultural, but the fact of it is not.

Why do certain visual differentiations transcend culture? There are biological reasons, as we have begun to see in Livingstone (at the risk of sounding like a broken record: red may mean love, red may mean hate, red may mean a lot if things, but no matter what it means, red will always be complementary to green.) We have had hints of certain cells which only trigger when stimulated by vertical lines, or horizontal lines, or some special type of line. Here we have biology informing our perception of difference, of certain visual phenomena deriving their meaning not from culture but from an objective relation to other geometrically different stimuli.

Once certain basic terms are in place. we can begin to reincorporate the influence of society, as Winnie is correct: just as it is impossible to make a statement free of inflection, it is impossible to create or interpret anything without the influence of society somehow encroaching upon it. In this regard, Mamassian makes a perfect segue with his discussion of perceptual priors vs sylistic conventions. The former have been experimentally proven to precede or predate the influence of culture, while the latter are inextricably bound up in it. Good good. The distinction becomes even more useful when we note that perceptual priors and stylistic conventions are both there to help us resolve ambiguities in the retinal projection. We can then say that while a perceptual prior would resolve ambiguity for all members of our species, a stylistic convention would not necessarily resolve ambiguity for a viewer unfamiliar with the cultural context in which that convention arose.

I'm not sure how to develop that point, plus I'm typing on a goddamn iPhone so I'll move on to the other thing I wanted to discuss, which is the whole question of archetypes. Whether you think of archetypes as being generated by culture or by some inborn set of human ideals, the concept is interpretable in a gestalt context. A "type" of any kind, archetype, stereotype, personality type, is just a gestalt. A way of organizing information into a simple structure. If we want to talk about Meyerhold and gesture, we could say, just as we did when comparing a circle to a square, that a gesture which is soft and light is fundamentally different from a gesture which is hard and strong. Once we've established that opponance, we can begin to categorize whatever other gestures we see as belonging to one of two "types." Of course, some gestures will not be so straightforward, some might be intricate and complex, but any gesture will land on some portion of this spectrum of opponance, and in our tendency to resolve things into the simplest possible whole, we will end up placing the gesture in the category to which it is closest. The same mechanism operates in the whole notion of character archetypes, or even in such things as astrology or those silly enneagram charts.