On Knowing Where You Are

How do you answer the question, Where am I?  This post concerns this question in a broad sense, yet in a sense grounded in the concrete perceptual encounter with the world.  Our sense of where we are in space is a primary form of how our world is disclosed to us.  As Thomas Mann writes (and as I have cited him previously): 

Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached, state. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabound of the pedant and Philistine. Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.

Mann is admirable on this front in that he maintains important distinctions between space and time while showing their ultimate connection in a more general form, which we can call space-time for lack of a better term; lifeworld would probably do as well, but that term is typically invoked with historical and cultural meanings in mind.

Not surprisingly, my musings on this topic were set off by recent travels.  While visiting New York city, I found myself wondering where I was on several occasions.  And I don't mean I was pondering my place in the universe or some existential inquiry; no, I literally needed to know where I was, specifically whenever I got off the subway and emerged back on the surface streets.

One can figure out where he is in a few different ways.  Some of these ways are more "direct" in that one can instantly grasp his spatial orientation by perceiving landmarks, or, say, the position of the sun in the sky.  Simply by regarding one's visual horizon, one can immediately know which way is North, and thus which way all of the other cardinal directions point, and thus, most importantly, which way one must walk if the bar one his headed to is uptown. This was my consistent mode of spatial orientation while living in New Mexico.  When living in a town with uniformly low buildings and distinct mountain ranges in all directions, figuring out where you are and which direction to go is as easy as looking up.

Alternatively, one can figure out where he is in a more "indirect" fashion.  This requires reading signs and making inferences.  If I come out of the subway and need to walk East two avenues and then south for three blocks, then my typical strategy (amateur city-dweller that I am) is to read off the coordinates from the nearest corner, then pick a direction and walk until I see the next set of street signs, thus enabling me to infer what direction I just walked in, and determine how to further determine my course.  I felt alienated doing this.  I quickly learned that I could orient myself in the "direct" manner by identifying specific buildings on the horizon (e.g., the Freedom tower is downtown, so if I can see it, I know which way downtown is, and thus I know where I am).  But this doesn't always work in NYC, where you often can't see further than whatever random set of unremarkable buildings swallow up your horizon.

So, I like to know where I am by being able to simply look around.  But perhaps New Yorkers don't need my crude guess-and-check system to orient themselves when they emerge from the subway.  Perhaps after years of practice they have a little internalized map, like the GPS on your phone, with a red dot indicating where they are and the map adjusting accordingly.  I wouldn't be surprised if this ability were innate in all humans, and just a matter of whether it is cultivated by specific cultures.  It is now well known that Australian aboriginal speakers of Guugu Yimithirr do not rely on "ego centric" direction words at all (left, right, forward, backward, etc.), but rather always refer to the cardinal directions.  To quote a recent NYTimes article:  

Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was “coming northward.” 

The article proceeds to explain how the tribe's linguistic practices ingrain a sense of direction, to the point where speakers of this language simply "feel" directions, in the way someone with perfect pitch senses each note without having to calculate intervals.  This goes beyond the "direct" mode of spatial orientation I described above, however I would argue that it begins in the manner I describe above and becomes habituated to the point where the process is unconscious.

And this brings me back to Thomas Mann.  A change of setting is indeed one of the fastest ways to forget.  A new setting challenges you to orient yourself, to figure out where you are; whereas our home-spaces "feel like home" precisely because one knows where he is at all times.  In a new place we are set back to our "primitive, unattached state," which can be exhilarating, yet equally alienating. 

What Pauses my Gaze? (part 2)

Part 1 of my reply to the question “What pauses my gaze?” arrived at the general conclusion that tension leading to discomfort is one way in which a work of art can grip the viewer. The work of Francis Bacon reaches out and grasps me, which is not always a pleasant experience. Here, in part 2, I will move in the opposite direction, considering how a work of art grips the viewer calmly. Whereas Bacon’s work stops me in my tracks and takes hold of me, other works extend an inviting hand, appealing to the viewer precisely because of the comfort they invite. Thus, perhaps it is better to say “caress” than “grip” or “grasp.”

The work of the gaze is bound up with what Merleau-Ponty calls the “motility” of the body—i.e., the “motor significance” that the movements of our bodies hold for us. We have a non-conceptual, pre-reflective awareness of possibilities entailed by the various ways we can move our bodies. If we approach something, its details come into view more sharply. If we move away from it, we gain a broader view of the thing and the background which makes it stand out. We walk around things with the tacit anticipation of learning more about them. Our understanding of the world is pre-figured by the motility of the body.

The various ways the movements of my body condition what shows up for my gaze, revealing the importance of depth. Merleau-Ponty calls depth “the most existential of all dimensions,” in that it “announces a certain indissoluble link between things and myself” (Phenomenology of Perception, 298). The ever-increasing “screened” existence of contemporary life sacrifices the depth of experience for the sake of presenting information or content in an efficient, uniform manner. Representing something on a two-dimensional surface—“screening”—is without a doubt a great step forward for humanity. Screening arranges content in terms of breadth, and not depth. Breadth perceived as a relation belong solely to objects, thus removing, to a high degree, the perspectival involvement of the subject. In this limited space, I will not bother fleshing out all of the pros and cons of this sort of flat representation. I will just assume it.

However, as Merleau-Ponty’s words indicate, something important is lost amidst this screened existence. The basic motor significance that things hold for us is the result of the inextricable connection between our bodies and the world. Thus, the second part of my reply to the question, “What pauses my gaze?” is this: the promise of depth. Rather than grasping me in a state of tension, as Bacon’s works do, art that reaches out and offers the experience of depth pauses my gaze with a calm caress. How can artists, or designers of artifacts in general, achieve such an effect?

I think that a certain group of artists, designers, and fabricators are taking the phenomenological principles outlined above seriously. This can be found in the work of Simon Penny, namely his Fugitive 2, where the work of art envelops the viewer in an experience imbued with the motor significances prevalent in everyday experience.

The movements of the viewer have direct and immediate consequences for what appears. An essential feature of this sort of work is an emphasis on calmness, insofar as there are little to no instructions required. In other words, the viewer or user is not faced with a daunting learning curve. The learning is intuitive rather than laborious.

A perfect example of this feature I am calling “calmness” (or perhaps simply “intuitiveness”) can be found in the design of systems like the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinnect. Think of how the gaming experience for these systems differs from the experience of a typical video game. Typical video games rely on behaviorally pairing finger movements with images on a screen. It takes a while to master such games, and there is no way to learn them other than to memorize which combination of buttons is appropriate in a given situation. One instructs a novice Kinnect user, on the other hand, on how to play, say, a boxing game, by simply saying: “Act like you are boxing.”

How can this existential mode of interaction be elicited by the work of art? I have already mentioned Penny’s work, but it relies heavily on expensive technology. Sculpture affords walking around to better understand. Certain sculptural forms invite various kinesthetic, sensori-motor based perceptual attuning. Can painting do the same? I have difficulty answering this question. I would love to hear from others on this, especially painters. Can a painting appeal to one’s gaze in the same manner described through Penny’s works and Microsoft Kinnect? Is its flat objectual existence inherently limiting in this regard? Perhaps it could be said that painting grip the viewer in that they are best viewed from a single, stationary perspective; whereas sculpture and video-art installations such as Penny’s pause one’s gaze by calmly caressing the viewer. These works of art work through a certain intuitive appeal, based on the motor significance an object holds for one’s body. These works engage our bodies. We explore and understand them through the motility of the body. Where we were once gripped, we are allowed room to play.

Back to Ze German Authors

If you know me at all, you know that Hermann Hesse is my favorite author. His last and greatest work Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game) [Das Glasperlenspiel] is my favorite book. I like his stories, I identify with his characters, I like his style.
In keeping with my love of Hesse, I have always meant to read Thomas Mann's work since he was a great friend and literary interlocutor to Hesse. In fact, in Magister Ludi Hesse names one of his characters "Thomas van der Trave," which is a veiled allusion to Mann, who grew up in a town on the Trave river in Germany. Van der Trave is one of the most enlightened and noble characters in Hesse's masterpiece.
Finally, I have made time for Thomas Mann. It was almost as if he made time for me, as I saw a wonderful hard back edition of his master work, The Magic Mountain, at a used book sale on campus. I have only read the first few chapters, but already I'm struck by wonderful passages such as this:

Two days travel separated the youth--he was still too young to have thrust his roots down firmly into life--from his own world, from all that he thought of as his own duties, interests, cares and prospects; far more than he had dreamed it would when he sat in the carriage on the way to the station. Space, rolling and revolving between him and his native heath, possessed and wielded powers we generally ascribe to time. From hour to hour it worked changes in him, like to those wrought by time, yet in a way even more striking. Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached, state. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabound of the pedant and Philistine. Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.
-Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter 1939, p. 4.

Contemplating the last few sentences has yielded extreme aesthetic pleasure for me. Mann's prose is enchanting. He evokes the image of the "primitive, unattached state" in order to make palpable the grandiosity of Space and Time. Whatever it is that Hesse and Mann have in common, it is most striking in passages like this one.

Kant's Majesty

Passages like this will always keep me coming back to Kant:

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not need to search for them and merely conjecture them as though they were veiled in obscurity or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence. The first begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense and extends the connection in which I stand into an unbounded magnitude with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into the unbounded times of their periodic motion, their beginning and their duration. The second begins from my invisible self, my personality, and presents me in a world which has true infinity but which can be discovered only by the understanding, and I cognize that my connection with that world (and thereby with all those visible worlds as well) is not merely contingent, as in the first case, but universal and necessary. The first view of a countless magnitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital force (one knows not how) must give back to the planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter from which it came. The second, on the contrary, infinitely raises my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world, at least so far as this may be inferred from the purposive determination of my existence by this law, a determination not restricted to the conditions and boundaries of this life but reaching into the infinite.
-Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge 1996.

One might argue that the whole of philosophy is contained in this passage. Kant touches on contingency, necessity, time, space, and morality with grace and precision. Additionally, he does this with a phenomenological tone: there is something that its like to have this most unique perspective, that of the zoon logon echon (animal having reason)--our being-in-the-world as well as our being-beyond-the-world.