From: Bernard Roddy (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Jan 09 2004 - 12:25:14 PST
I looked over the Sachs essay, though not very carefully. Sometime ago I was very
interested in consciousness from a philosophers' perspective. Where I left it the debate
was between those who carried on a conviction related to that which would have
subjective experience be outside the purview of scientific, empirical testing and those
who would reject any claim suggesting that the qualia of visual experience, for example,
falls outside the net of empirical research. The tradition of the first view traces back to
faith in an immaterial person or soul, "attached" in some way to a body. The second
tradition may be traced to logical positivism of the early 20th century, an Anglo-American
philosophical phenomenon that rejected any property that could not be verified by
lab-like observations (thus, out with God, moral truth, and aesthetics). Good, hard-core
analytic philosophers tend to take the second position, believing that this is all just
a matter of time and scientific progress. The problem of qualia (or the subjective dimension of perceptual experience), or how to explain it away, becomes the issue of interest. Nowadays Foucault's work on the ways in which the measurement of deviancy
constitute manifestations of control and power have replaced this interest in Arnheim-type psychological studies for me. Thus, the Sachs discussion becomes interesting
not because of the way in which unusual neurological cases shed light on the "normal"
(as Freud's studies of perversion were supposed to reveal the workings of well-adjusted
sexuality), but for the ways in which the bizarre or strange, the deviant, as the focus of
attention, serve to enforce normalcy, directing attention toward what is "right and natural."
The implication for filmmaking may be this: The studies of perceptual phenomena dating
back to "The Flicker" make reference, in a way, to an apparatus (or to the sublime) without acknowledging the various conflicting interests that have investments in there
being a normal or accurate standard and its being identified with certain perceivers rather than others. I like the idea of reconfiguring the norms, particularly when these have taken such a hold over us that abnormality becomes a kind of exotica.
Bernie Roddy
Outdated site: //bfn.org/~weblab/roddy
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