The Magic of Images

Lecture by Camille Paglia.Remember her? Pop anti-feminist art historian who once appeared in Vanity Fair? Here she is making a bid for the role of humanist education in helping the soulitarian generation of digital kids make sense of their info-blitz. Her key point is below, which ends with a startling political link-up between science and art:

The visual environment for the young has become confused, fragmented, and unstable. Students now understand moving but not still images...Education must slow the images down, to provide a clear space for the eye.

The relationship of eye movements to cognitive development has been studied since the 1890s, the groundwork for which was laid by investigation into physiological optics by Hermann von Helmholtz and Ernst Mach in the 1860s. Visual tracking and stability of gaze are major milestones in early infancy. The eyes are neurologically tied to the entire vestibular system: the conch-like inner ear facilitates hand-eye coordination and gives us direction and balance in the physical world. By processing depth cues, our eyes orient us in space and create and confirm our sense of individual agency.

Those in whom eye movements and vestibular equilibrium are disrupted, I contend, cannot sense context and thus become passive to the world, which they do not see as an arena for action. Hence this perceptual problem may well have unwelcome political consequences.

I'm interested in questions of how mind science can inform how we deal with the play of images and culture. See this piece (not free, unfortunately), from the great theorist of flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, on tv's neurologicallly addictive properties.