12 March 2020
Remain in Light: Philosophical Naturalism, Aesthetic Value and, Cultural Crosstalk
Daphne Mayo Public Lecture, University of Queensland
Aesthetic experience – the kind of experience afforded paradigmatically by artworks – is central rather than peripheral to human existence. But aesthetic experience and the value it underpins is complex, both in its relations with other kinds of value (epistemic, moral, political, cultural), and in the diverse ways and contexts in which it can be created or apprehended.
20 April 2018
Philosophical Naturalism, Aesthetic Experience, and Aesthetic Value
Monroe Beardsley Lecture at the Barnes Foundation, sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts, Temple University
Naturalism is widely recognized as the dominant stance in contemporary philosophy (at least in the analytic tradition). But the difficulty of accounting for values and normativity within a naturalistic framework is just as widely recognized. So, what kind of account of values, and the activity of valuing, can be given within naturalism? More particularly, can a naturalistic perspective offer any special clues as to the nature of aesthetic value, its relationship with aesthetic experience, and with other types of value? Reciprocally, can the domain of aesthetics illuminate a path to solving the challenges facing naturalistic accounts of value more generally? Is the topic of value the point at which the naturalist fumbles the ball, or throws the game-winning touchdown pass? My aim in this paper will be to tackle and enliven these characteristically abstract philosophical problems with concrete cases drawn from across the arts, with a particular focus on film, photography, and music.
2 November 2018
Perceptual, Imaginative, and other Varieties of Immersion in Moving Image Media
London Aesthetics Forum
Several distinct streams of theory and practice seem to coalesce in contemporary debates about ‘immersive technologies’ and ‘immersion’ as a psychological state. In this paper I’ll discuss these different varieties of immersion, and the origins and use of the term in different domains, in an attempt to disentangle distinct phenomena that are gathered under the umbrella of ‘immersion.’ I propose a tripartite distinction among perceptual, imaginative, and narrative immersion.
The paradigm of perceptual immersion in the contemporary scene is VR, insofar as VR technologies engage participants through an integrated and ‘replete’ audiovisuohaptic perceptual experience, in which those perceptual channels are saturated by input from the VR representation. Behind VR, however, stands a long history of earlier attempts in film (and other media) to achieve such perceptual immersion: widescreen, IMAX, 3D and 4D, and surround sound, for example. Imaginative immersion, by contrast, need involve no direct stimulation of our perceptual faculties: here the paradigm is the representation of imagined scenarios through verbal means, in oral storytelling and the literary arts. In this context the key cognitive processes are (embodied) simulation and transportation – processes which testify to the ability of the mind to represent either fictional, or existent but spatially or temporally remote scenarios, and to concentrate on these scenarios with remarkable intensity and exclusivity. Narrative immersion, meanwhile, picks out the magnetic power of narrative form over the human mind. Fictional or nonfictional, and embodied in whatever media, artefactual narratives act as superstimuli for the human mind, commanding our attention by tapping into our desire to know whodunnit and whatcomesnext.
Arguably these forms of immersion come together in a particular way – and a particularly powerful way – in standard cinematic spectatorship. And here the notion of immersion intersects with longstanding ideas about the ‘transparency’ or ‘illusory’ character of the moving image. According to one orthodox line of argument, we experience film as a transparent medium, in the sense that we see through the moving image to the entities and events it depicts. In this it is held to contrast with the medium of painting in which we see what is depicted in the surface of the painting, thereby generating a twofold perceptual experience characterized by simultaneous awareness of surface and depiction. The idea of immersion in the context of film viewing functions to underline this contrast: if transparency describes a lack of perceptual awareness of the moving image as an image, immersion might imply an even more dramatic loss of awareness. In my view this is all wrongheaded, however: film viewing, like our engagement with artistic representation in general, is twofold through and through. Not even the current wave of ‘immersive technologies’ can overthrow this very basic feature of our relationship with represented worlds.
18 November 2015
Film, Art, and the Third Culture
Beacon Institute Inaugural Lecture, University of Kent, in association with the Being Human Festival
Drawing on his forthcoming book, and with a nod towards the ‘two cultures’ debate triggered by C.P Snow, Professor Smith will discuss the prospects for a ‘third culture’ integrating the knowledge, goals and methods of the arts and sciences. Taking film as his primary example, he will explore the ways in which various aspects of film and film viewing – including suspense, empathy, and the interaction of sight and sound – can be illuminated scientifically. Professor Smith will also discuss the pitfalls of dialogue between researchers in the humanities and the sciences, stressing the necessity of two-way traffic in any such exchange: scientists must be attentive to the unique features of artistic and cultural phenomena, just as art world denizens must be open to the special insights wrought by science.
11 November 2014
From Reflex to Reflection: Experience and Explanation in the Study of Cinema
Kracauer Lecture in Film and Media Theory
What is cinema? Does it afford us distinctive artistic possibilities and a unique type of experience? And if so, what method or methods are appropriate for the study of cinema? These questions thread their way through the history of film and film theory. I advance the case for a naturalized aesthetics of film in investigating the multifaceted nature of film experience. Films engage us, perhaps to a unique extent among the arts, on a multitude of levels, from the most ‘unthinking’ reflexes, through the many layers of everyday perception, problem solving, memory and emotion, to the most abstract forms of metacognition, including the one known as ‘philosophical reflection.’ These various layers of cognition and experience in cinema are best explored, I contend, through a naturalistic approach that seeks to integrate our understanding of human behavior in general – and artistic phenomena in particular – with our larger knowledge of the world as it is revealed by the natural and social sciences.
7 December 2011
Transparency and Reflexivity in Film
The London Aesthetics Forum
According to George Wilson, film as a medium is characterized by a powerful ‘transparency,’ such that we seem to ‘see through’ a cinematographic image to the objects it depicts, in contrast to the impression typically evoked by paintings, whereby we seem to see the objects ‘in’ the marked surface. By implication, while our perception of paintings is characterized by what Richard Wollheim terms ‘twofoldness’ – simultaneous awareness of the representational surface and of what is represented – our perception of films is unidimensional or ‘onefold’: we see through the screen to the objects depicted. Wilson’s account refines, but broadly accords with, the orthodox view in film theory: mainstream narrative films exploit the transparency inherent in the medium in order to maximize the ‘illusion of reality,’ the impression that as we watch a film we actually perceive the events of the narrative unfold before us. Reflexive films are then those works that take the radical steps necessary to shatter the effect of transparency. In this paper I argue that whatever ‘transparency’ is possessed by mainstream fiction films is often oversimplified and mischaracterized, and that the epistemic claims for reflexive works based on this caricature are consequently overstated. Put differently, I argue that a current of reflexive awareness is present in even the most conventional and realist of representations, and that such fictions cannot therefore function as the ‘straight man’ for reflexive representations in the way that the standard theory assumes.
