We discuss habitual perception and art as a possible antidote.

1. MODULE 2.2
Paying Attention
to Experience

2. agenda 1.28.16
• what is perception?
• neuroscientific answer in last class
• in this class, more of a psychological answer
• particular focus on what happens when perception becomes
too routine/habitualized/patterned
• art as the antidote to habitualized perception
• Paul Valery
• Viktor Shlovsky
• John Dewey

6. “To see is to
forget the name
of the thing one
sees.”
—Paul Valery

7. Viktor Shklovsky
born 1893 in St.
Petersburg, Russia
died 1984 in Moscow,
USSR
literary critic and novelist

8. If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that
as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for
example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously
automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of
speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that
with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time,
he will agree with us.
Such habituation explains the principles by which, in ordinary
speech, we leave phrases unfinished and words half expressed. In
this process, ideally realized in algebra, things are replaced by
symbols. Complete words are not expressed in rapid speech; their
initial sounds are barely perceived. Alexander Pogodin offers the
example of a boy considering the sentence "The Swiss mountains
are beautiful" in the form of a series of letters: T, S, m, a, b.
This characteristic of thought not only suggests the method of
algebra, but even prompts the choice of symbols (letters, especially
initial letters). By this "algebraic" method of thought we apprehend
objects only as shapes with imprecise extensions; we do not see
them in their entirety but rather recognize them by their main
characteristics. We see the object as though it were enveloped in a
sack. We know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its
silhouette.

9. If we start to examine the general laws of perception,
we see that as perception becomes habitual, it
becomes automatic.
Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area
of the unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the
sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a foreign
language for the first time and compares that with his
feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth
time, he will agree with us.

10. Such habituation explains the principles by which, in ordinary
speech, we leave phrases unfinished and words half expressed. In
this process, ideally realized in algebra, things are replaced by
symbols.

11. things are replaced by symbols...
Alexander Pogodin offers the
example of a boy considering the
sentence "The Swiss mountains
are beautiful" in the form of a
series of letters: T, S, m, a, b.

12. This characteristic of thought not
only suggests the method of
algebra, but even prompts the
choice of symbols (letters,
especially initial letters).

13. "the object as though
enveloped in a sack..."
By this "algebraic" method
of thought we apprehend
objects only as shapes with
imprecise extensions; we
do not see them in their
entirety but rather
recognize them by their
main characteristics. We
see the object as though it
were enveloped in a sack.
We know what it is by its
configuration, but we see
only its silhouette.

14. quote from Tolstoy
“I was cleaning and, meandering about, approached the
divan and couldn't remember whether or not I had dusted it.
Since these movements are habitual and unconscious I
could not remember and felt that it was impossible to
remember - so that if I had dusted it and forgot - that is, had
acted unconsciously, then it was the same as if I had not. If
some conscious person had been watching, then the fact
could be established. If, however, no one was looking, or
looking on unconsciously, if the whole complex lives of many
people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they
had never been.”

15. “Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife,
and the fear of war... ...art exists that one may recover the
sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make
the stone stony.
The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as
they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique
of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult,
to increase the difficulty and length of perception because
the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and
must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the
artfulness of an object: the object is not important...”

16. After we see an object several times, we begin to
recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know
about it, but we do not see it—hence we cannot say
anything, significant about it. Art removes objects from the
automatism of perception in several ways.
defamiliarization

17. John Dewey (1859-1952)
well-known American
philosopher, educator, and
public figure
resided in China for almost
2 years from 1919-1921
lived to be 92 and
influenced many spheres
of American life (and is still
doing so!)
significant contributions to
philosophy, logic,
psychology, education, and
aesthetics

18. Dewey’s formed a
friendship with Dr. Albert
C. Barnes and was
granted access to his
collection of modern art
Barnes Foundation
formed in 1922 as an art
school, rather than a
museum
Dewey wrote Art As
Experience (1934) in
close connection with
his opportunities to look
at Barnes’s art
Dr. Albert C Barnes, art collector
and friend of Dewey

19. The Barnes Collection is now
located in downtown
Philadelphia in a new building.
The exterior is modern, but
interior is a fairly precise
replica of the previous
building in Upper Merion, PA.
The story of the collection, the
trust that Barnes created to
protect it, and the eventual
breaking of that trust is told in
The Art of the Steal (2009),
dir. Don Argott. Highly
recommended!

20. Barnes Collection, interior view of a gallery with distinctive
arrangement of furniture, paintings and decorative objects

21. The Barnes Collection, interior view, with Seurat’s The Models amd Cézanne’s
Card Players visible on the far wall.

22. “In common conception,
the work of art is often
identified with the building,
book, painting, or statue in
its existence apart from
human experience.’’
“Since the actual work of
art is what the product
does with an in experience,
the result is not favorable
to understanding. In
addition, the very
perfection of some of these
products, the prestige they
possess because of a long
history of unquestioned
admiration, creates
conventions that get in the
way of fresh insight.”

23. Dewey proposes a new definition of art:
art is not the thing itself (a noun) but a process of interaction
between a given viewer and the thing (it is dynamic, more of
a verb)

24. “When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of
origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around
them that renders almost opaque their general
significance, with which esthetic theory deals.”

25. “Art is remitted to a separate realm, where it is cut off from
that association with the materials and aims of every other
form of human effort, undergoing and achievement. A
primary task is thus imposed upon one who undertakes to
write upon the philosophy of the fine arts.”

26. “This task is to restore continuity between the refined and
intensified forms of experience that are works of art and
the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are
universally recognized to constitute experience.”

27. “raw aesthetics”
“In order to understand the esthetic in its ultimate and
approved forms, one must begin with it in the raw; in the
events and scenes that hold the attentive eye and ear of
man, arousing his interest and affording him enjoyment as
he looks and listens: the sights that hold the crowd—

28. http://envisioningtheamericandream.com/2013/06/03/ladies-and-lawns/
“the fire-engine rushing by; the machines excavating enormous
holes in the earth; the human-fly climbing the steeple-side; the
men perched high in air on girders, throwing and catching red-
hot bolts. The sources of art in human experience will be
learned by him who sees how the tense grace of the ball-
player infects the onlooking crowd; who notes the delight of
the housewife in tending her plants, and the intent interest of
her goodman in tending the patch of green in front of the
house; the zest of the spectator in poking the wood burning
on the hearth and in watching the darting flames and
crumbling coals.”

29. “The man who poked the sticks of burning wood would say he did it to make the
fire burn better; but he is none the less fascinated by the colorful drama of
change enacted before his eyes and imaginatively partakes in it. He does not
remain a cold spectator.”

30. What Coleridge said of the reader of poetry is true in its way
of all who are happily absorbed in their activities of mind
and body: “The reader should be carried forward, not
merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity,
not by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution, but
by the pleasurable activity of the journey itself.” (p. 5)

31. “So extensive and subtly pervasive are the ideas that set Art
upon a remote pedestal, that many a person would be
repelled rather than pleased if told that he enjoyed his casual
recreations, in part at least, because of their esthetic quality.
The arts which today have most vitality for the average person
are things he does not take to be arts: for instance, the movie,
jazzed music, the comic strip, and, too frequently, newspaper
accounts of love-nests, murders, and exploits of bandits. For,
when what he knows as art is relegated to the museum and
gallery, the unconquerable impulse towards experiences
enjoyable in themselves finds such outlet as the daily
environment provides. (pp. 5-6)

32. “The times when select and distinguished objects are closely
connected with the products of usual vocations are the
times when appreciation of the former is most rife and
most keen. When, because of their remoteness, the
objects acknowledged by the cultivated to be works of fine
art seem anemic to the mass of people, esthetic hunger is
likely to seek the cheap and the vulgar.” (p. 6)

33. By common consent, the Parthenon is a great work of art. Yet it
has esthetic standing only as the work becomes an experience
for a human being. And, if one is to go beyond personal
enjoyment into the formation of a theory about that large republic
of art of which the building is one member, one has to be willing
at some point in his reflections to turn from it to the bustling,
arguing, acutely sensitive Athenian citizens, with civic sense
identified with a civic religion, of whose experience the temple
was an expression, and who built it not as a work of art but as a
civic commemoration.

34. The turning to them is as human beings who had needs that
were a demand for the building and that were carried to
fulfillment in it; it is not an examination such as might be carried
on by a sociologist in search for material relevant to his purpose.
The one who sets out to theorize about the esthetic experience
embodied in the Parthenon must realize in thought what the
people into whose lives it entered had in common, as creators
and as those who were satisfied with it, with people in our own
homes and on our own streets. (pp. 2-3)

35. We can know the building
in great detail as an object
without ever understanding
it.
To understand it, we must
imaginatively connect with
the human beings who
made it.

36. As works of art have lost their indigenous status,
they have acquired a new one--that of being
specimens of fine art and nothing else. Moreover,
works of art are now produced, like other articles,
for sale in the market. Economic patronage by
wealthy and powerful individuals has at many
times played a part in the encouragement of
artistic production… Objects that were in the past
valid and significant because of their place in the
life of a community now function in isolation from
the conditions of their origin. By that fact they are
also set apart from common experience, and serve
as insignia of taste and certificates of special
culture. (8)

37. Even a crude experience, if authentically an experience, is more
fit to give a clue to the intrinsic nature of esthetic experience than
is an object already set apart from any other mode of
experience. Following this clue we can discover how the work of
art develops and accentuates what is characteristically valuable
in things of everyday enjoyment. The art product will then be
seen to issue from the latter, when the full meaning of ordinary
experience is expressed, as dyes come out of coal tar products
when they receive special treatment. (9-10)

38. It should be just a commonplace that esthetic understanding--as
distinct from sheer personal enjoyment--must start with the soil,
air, and light out of which things esthetically admirable arise. And
these conditions are the conditions and factors that make an
ordinary experience complete. The more we recognize this fact,
the more we shall find ourselves faced with a problem rather
than with a final solution. If artistic and esthetic quality is implicit
in every normal experience, how shall we explain how and why it
so generally fails to become explicit?

39. Why is it that to multitudes art seems to be an importation into
experience from a foreign country and the esthetic to be a
synonym for something artificial?
We cannot answer these questions any more than we
can trace the development of art out of everyday experience,
unless we have a clear and coherent idea of what is meant when
we say "normal experience." (11-2)

40. Of much of our experience as it is actually lived under present
economic and legal institutional conditions, it is only too true that
these separations hold. Only occasionally in the lives of many
are the senses fraught with the sentiment that comes from deep
realization of intrinsic meanings. We undergo sensations as
mechanical stimuli or as irritated stimulations, without having a
sense of the reality that is in them and behind them: in much of
our experience our different senses do not unite to tell a
common and enlarged story. We see without feeling; we hear,
but only a second-hand report, second hand because not
reenforced by vision. (21)

41. We touch, but the contact remains tangential because it does not
fuse with qualities of senses that go below the surface. We use
the senses to arouse passion but not to fulfill the interest of
insight, not because that interest is not potentially present in the
exercise of sense but because we yield to conditions of living
that force sense to remain an excitation on the surface. Prestige
goes to those who use their minds without participation of the
body and who act vicariously through control of the bodies and
labor of others. (21)

42. Ordinary experience is often infected with apathy, lassitude and
stereotype. We get neither the impact of quality through sense
nor the meaning of things through thought. The "world" is too
much with us as burden or distraction. We are not sufficiently
alive to feel the tang of sense nor yet to be moved by thought.
We are oppressed by our surroundings or are callous to them.
Acceptance of this sort of experience as normal is the chief
cause of acceptance of the idea that art cancels separations that
inhere in the structure of ordinary experience. Were it not for the
oppressions and monotonies of daily experience, the realm of
dream and revery would not be attractive. No complete and
enduring suppression of emotion is possible. Repelled by the
dreariness and indifference of things which a badly adjusted
environment forces upon us, emotion withdraws and feeds upon
things of fantasy. <270-71>

43. For while the roots of every experience are found in the
interaction of a live creature with its environment, that
experience becomes conscious, a matter of perception, only
when meanings enter it that are derived from prior
experiences. Imagination is the only gateway through which
these meanings can find their way into a present interaction;
or rather, as we have just seen, the conscious adjustment of
the new and the old is imagination. (p. 283)