The Aesthetic Dimension of Visual Culture

Referencing
List: Dadejík, O. (2010) The Aesthetic Dimension of Visual Culture. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing.

In-text: (Dadejík, 2010, p.)

Quotation
This magnificent work, a portrait of the decapitated Medusa, was painted by Michelangelo Merisi di
Caravaggio. According to a sixteenth-century understanding of the Greek myth, it illustrates the triumph of
reason over the senses. In the original myth, Medusa was a beautiful woman and the envy she aroused in
Athena (goddess of wisdom) led to the terrible curse that fell on her: whomever Medusa looked at would be
poisoned by physical temptation, by the libido, by the body. Punishment, in this sense, is a reflection of its own
cause: whoever was the object of Medusa's direct gaze would be petrified. No one could escape this curse and
here Caravaggio portrays a specific moment in time: the instant of self-recognition, where the terrible Medusa
fixes her eyes on her image in the mirror and is thus petrified. There is nothing here except a head, removed
but still conscious, portrayed in its last expressive moment: the image of one of the worst nightmares, the one
of a decapitated head, disembodied but still conscious of its condition, the change of flesh into stone. This
moment is devastating. The eyes will be forever fixed in this instant of recognition and the open mouth signals
the absence of voice.
Caravaggio portrays the consciousness imprisoned in the moment that corresponds to its last bodily
expression; he portrays the specific moment of the recognition of the curse that consists in the absence of the
body. He depicts physical, but not mental, death. In this portrait, we find illustrated the imprisonment of a
mind chained inside a devastating moment: the moment of its self-recognition as a disembodied entity.
(Dadejík, 2010, pp. 98-99)

This understanding takes an image as a simple representation that is present in a mind that thinks without a
body. The disembodiment promoted by such a frame of mind implies a prejudice against a sensorial-based
knowledge. To distrust the body is to distrust perception. (Dadejík, 2010, p. 99)

In this respect, Medusa affirms the sense of embodiment as a condition for comprehension and expression and
the impossibility of dismissing the body. (Dadejík, 2010, p. 100a)

This work enters directly into dialogue with Cartesian thinking, where we find established the propitious
conditions for conceiving images through an idea of vision as disembodied, purely abstract, dismissing both the
physical eye and the body. Descartes believed that the image of the retina and the image of the mind do not
necessarily coincide and that mental images and the way we understand them are independent of the res
extensa, that is, of the body and perception.'
This view had a tremendous influence on many practices and theories in the modern period, which, broadly
speaking, questioned whether bodily perception is dismissible in the conceptions and understandings of
images. (Dadejík, 2010, p. 100b)

Alberti's perspective is the first step towards a conception of visual space that is eminently Cartesian, a
conception which argues that geometrical structures are the link between the outside world and the human
mind.
These geometrical structures allow us to overcome the illusions and the errors of perceptual images.'
It has also long been argued that, during modernity, Cartesian thought also opened the doors to the use of the
visual technologies of reproduction, which are scientifically constructed, and are therefore considered reliable.
This use of visual technologies of reproduction culminated in the technological devices of photography and
cinema. So, arriving at the twenty-first century we may continue questioning the extent to which
understanding of contemporary technological images, and the response to them, has inherited the modern
Cartesian tradition and modern ocularcentrism or, on the contrary, requires and affirms the need to
acknowledge the importance of an embodied perception. Are contemporary technological images still a
portrait of Medusa? If not, in what sense? (Dadejík, 2010, p. 101a)

In Prosthetic Head the belief that the images of the mind can exist independently of perception and the
physical senses is brought profoundly into doubt. This Prosthetic Head is a head without a body and organs of
perception. (Dadejík, 2010, p. 101b)

The mirror neurons are the neurons that are activated when we perform an action or a movement. They were
discovered in the 1990s when scientists from UCLA and Parma University were investigating the brains of
primates.
Almost by chance, they discovered that a certain zone in the brain, the frontal lobes, was activated when the
primates were performing an action or a movement and also when they observed the same movement being
performed by others.
This discovery demonstrated that the brain seems to mirror the movements it sees as if it were actually doing
them. The discovery was fundamental to understanding the way we see the world, other people, and images.
We not only have gesture and movement inscribed in our body, but we can also actually feel them when we
observe them in others. The observation of the movement allows us to share the experience and feel it as
ours. In a certain sense, this means that we move with the observation of movement. The discovery of the
mirror neurons demonstrates that images acquire sense first because of the sensory motor gesture and
expression learning. This learning is absolutely embodied. (Dadejík, 2010, p. 102)

It was eventually demonstrated that it is not a disembodied mind that recognizes an abstract representation of
an idea and therefore understands it. What gives sense to images is a bodily, that is, a sensory motor learning
of the world. The incorporating of cultural practices and the understanding of images and other peoples'
expressions and gestures require a sensory motor system. It is only because we have at our bodily level
previous experience of what we see that we can feel and therefore understand it. Although the content of this
process may vary from culture to culture (different cultures have different bodily expressions for the same
feelings, and so forth), the process is universal. Neuroscientists, basing themselves on the discovery of mirror
neurons, say that we human beings have that capacity to embody experiences and therefore to feel them
again when we see them performed in others. And this is part of the very core of what it is to be human. It
defines us as we are, social beings, constantly needing to connect with, understand, and communicate to
others. (Dadejík, 2010, p. 103)

Nothing could be further from the ideas of mental or disembodied representation. In fact, these neuroscience
discoveries reinforce the idea that our relationship with images is precognitive and that this finds its meaning
in gesture, the sense of touch, and physical spatial perceptions-more specifically, in the sensory motor system.
These discoveries confirm the hypothesis that we relate to images from inside, that is, by participating in them,
creating empathy, and melting with them, not by observing at a distance. The discovery of the mirror neurons
repudiates the belief of the European post-Enlightenment that inherited a certain Cartesian trend, that is, the
belief that the images of the mind can exist independently of perception and the sense of physical body, that
there is a kind of mental immateriality disconnected from perception, and that we can relate to images only by
mental processes, totally abstract from the body, only by symbolic thought. It therefore promises to
revolutionise both cognitive and image theories.
Subsequently, the discoveries demand a new concept for the way we relate to images—a concept that is far
from the idea of a disembodied relation to images. In fact, in recent decades, several media theorists and
philosophers have argued for a new understanding of visual technologies as working outside European post-
Enlightenment ocularcentrism with its abstract optical space. Walter Benjamin had already acknowledged this
as early as 1936, when he wrote of the "tactile quality" of cinematic images. (Dadejík, 2010, p. 104)

He spoke of a tactile or haptic vision, where touch is empathized, unlike optic vision where touch is minimized
(Riegl 1985). To Riegl, broadly speaking, haptic visuality is connected with the sense of touch, with proximity.
Later on, Gilles Deleuze proposed that the distinction is between the optical and haptic functioning of
perception, rather than between the different senses. According to Deleuze, the haptic is a means of seeing
with the hand, "a tactile-optical space" without subordinating the hand to the eye (Deleuze 2005, 88).
For the past ten years or so, Laura Marks has been exploring the haptic quality of cinema and video images.
She argues that cinema has the ability to offer haptic images. Rather than pull us into abstracted space, they
"encourage a bodily relation to the screen itself before the point at which the viewer is pulled into the figures
of the image and the exhortation of the narrative" (Marks 2002, 17). Marks further argues that haptic visuality
has a strong sense of the material connection between vision, the viewer's body, and the object.
So, broadly speaking, the adjective "haptic" frequently means the exploration of the sense of touch, doing, and
moving. Associated to touch, that is to say, to the gesture and the skin, the haptic has been considered a sense
of proximity, affection, and empathy with the image. The haptic sense comprises the idea of continuity, direct
contact, and resonance. The best way, I find, to describe it is to say that haptic visuality sees the world by
touching it, that is, from a much closer position, with physical and perceptive involvement; but without a clear
distinction between the subject and the object of perception. Haptic visuality inhabits in a world of
involvement that contrasts with the world of the distance of optical contemplation. In symbolic knowledge,
representation is based on abstraction. Haptic visuality works outside symbolic knowledge.
We may now ask: what is there of haptic in our current relation to images and, specifically, to technological
images? What has that got to do with the mirror neurons? We find the answer to this question if we focus on
the functioning of the image, rather than on its ontology. This includes the way images address us and the way
we respond to them. Note that haptic visuality is a term of reception. (Dadejík, 2010, pp. 105-106a)

My argument here is that new digital media and new media art are abandoning modern ocularcentrism, with
its account of vision as a disembodied process, and are exploring the way we relate to images primarily at a
sensory motor level, as seems to be demonstrated by the discovery of mirror neurons. In recent years several
practices (from cinema, video art, new media) have been exploring the way we create empathy for the images,
demonstrating how this empathy works primarily at a bodily level and not at a cognitive or representative
one.' In fact, new media and technological images have recently been used to explore several distinctive
characteristics that push them away from the optical and symbolic understanding of visuality, and appeal
directly to the viewer's body. These features are proximity, empathy, affection, desire, and adhesion—the core
of the haptic. I believe that they can together be summed up in two words: plasticity and interactivity.
(Dadejík, 2010, p. 106b)

Interactivity has been a catchword in the discussions on the nature of the digital image or of the new media.
Undoubtedly, digital technology increased the capacity for technologies to construct labyrinths of
combinations (rather than objects) in which the image does not appear as a given form but, on the contrary, as
a myriad of hypothetical routes. The digital image is not an image-object but an image that functions as a
possibility of combinations between elements. These possible itineraries tend to be perceived as circuits
constructed by an active user rather than by a distant, rational subject. This process started with cinematic
montage, as described by Benjamin, continued in television images, as described by McLuhan (1964), and is an
obvious feature of computer games and new media devices.' The old idea of the passive spectator has been
replaced by the notion of the user who interacts with the devices and images in a synaesthetic way. (Dadejík,
2010, p. 107)

Haptic visuality tries to define our relationships to the images we see as being a primarily physical relationship,
where our body is the prime attributer of sense, and where images are addressed not as a language, or signs,
but as sensorial inputs that enter into a dialogue with us at a physical level, allowing us to become immersed in
the images we see.
This same idea has been demonstrated by philosophers, neuroscientists, and image producers and consumers.
It is now time to leave behind the abstract and representative understanding of the image which dominated
modern ocularcentrism; it is time for us to stop being like the decapitated Medusa and to try to address the
visual culture in which we all live in terms of embodiment and bodily perception. (Dadejík, 2010, p. 109)