[lit-ideas] Why do I have this file on my computer

From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2005 21:16:53 -0600
Listers,

 I've spent an inordinate amount of time re-organizing my computer files 
following a crash more devastating than Katrina.  I came across this one file 
that I can't remember copying or why or under what circumstances I might have 
come across it.  I suspect it may have been referenced on either this list or 
Theoria, though I can't quite imagine it being referenced there.  Does it ring 
a bell with anyone here?  -- I'm asking the same of Theoria so forgive if 
you've already seen this -- I googled the author and title and found it was 
from a sermon by a Unitarian minister, but that's all I know.  I like it.  Is 
it familiar to anyone here?   Was it referenced on this list by anyone?  Why do 
I have it?

2. Lynne M. Constantine: How Do We Know What We Know?

I teach a class called "Visual Perception and the Arts" at George Mason 
University. The first time I taught it, I was startled at how much my students 
resisted what I thought of as a self-evident proposition: that we "see" with 
our brains, not with our eyes. Our eyes are just the means by which light is 
transmitted for interpretation to the brain; and so the apparently solid world 
we see is, in fact, a complex construction, not a direct representation. 

"No," my students say. "That cannot be. Things are things. They are outside us."

Last week, through one of those lovely byways that happen when you spend time 
really talking with children, my four grandchildren and I found ourselves 
discussing eyes and brains. The three boys took the idea that we see with our 
brains in stride, and soon moved on to speculating about whether, if they could 
hook their eyes up to special computers, they might be able to see like dogs 
and alligators. 

But 11-year-old Jennifer Lynne worried about the implications of human sight. 

"I hate to think that we're trapped like that in our heads," she said. "I love 
the world."

"But we aren't trapped at all," I said. "Think of it instead as an amazing 
power. You're always creating the world fresh-and you become part of the world 
by giving a new look to everything you see."

She was quiet for a while. Then she smiled. "Yes," she said. "I can see that."  

But I admit I was putting a rosy face on it for her. Because my Mason students 
are right. It's extremely disconcerting and dangerous to accept the idea that 
perception is co-creation. In a wonderful book called The Object Stares Back: 
On the Nature of Seeing, art theorist James Elkins describes visual perception 
as sharp, invasive, acidic. "Light is a corrosive," he says, "something that 
has the potential to tunnel into me, to melt part of what I am and re-form it 
in another shape. Some things in me are different because of what I see, and 
that means-if I am willing to let down my guard and be honest about how this 
works-that I am not the same person as I was before."

And that is the scariest thought of all. When it comes to perception, the world 
is not "out there," and the "I" who perceives the things of the world is not a 
fixed and stable self. Instead of a strict separation of the knower and the 
known, there is a between-ness, a mutual vulnerability that is essential to 
knowledge. Perception is, ultimately, relationship-not distant and emotionless 
as the old scientific paradigms would have us think, but moral, ethical and 
emotional to its core. 

I'm spending a lot of my time these days trying to understand the implications 
of that statement. I hope some day to have a long conversations about it with 
Jennifer Lynne.

********

Mike Geary
Memphis
[lit-ideas] Why do I have this file on my computer

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