[These are some notes adapted from something larger I’d written years ago. They’re more a sketch, or a series of “beaded” quotations, than a realized argument. Its connections are tentative and in fact tenuous; its conclusions speculative and diffuse if they exist at all. But it’s an excuse to point to a succession of interesting books and essays.]
Chromatic color is said to have come to the cinema, and with its coming, raised Arnheim’s hackles. Much as we now understand the world of ancient Mediterranean antiquity to have been full of color—garishly so, even—which was betrayed by the forms of white marble statues (think of ‘Renaissance’ not only as a rebirth but as a zombie unearthing), we can understand that the history of moving images was not a monochromatic, nor silent, affair that was only subsequently filled in by color and sound. So color’s “arrival” is a useful fiction, a way of framing that serves a purpose. This mythmaking allows for standards that reinforce copies of the model: the story of innovation, of goods delivered to meet demand. Under capitalism the marketplace is part of what structures community, and community is a point to which I’ll return.
The philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, in his essay “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” suggests that what he terms classical sense-datum philosophy does not countenance “a process of concept formation” that is antecedent to, or develops necessarily along with, the sensing of sense data. In other words, when we see red or feel a pinch, say the classical sense-datum philosophers, such sensations themselves form the building blocks for reasoning or reflection. We don’t need reasoning to see red or feel pain. Consider a general proposition from Hume, “That all our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv’d from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent.” Sellars is unconvinced by this idea that our sensory experiences themselves constitute reliable building blocks for our knowledge.
Hume and Sellars both occasionally use the edifying figure of the infant to illustrate some point in a model of an original theater of perception (either a model the philosopher explores and promotes, or perhaps sketches out to critique). Sellars talks about red triangles a lot in his paper, including what an infant could be said to perceive when confronted with one. Because the infant is, rhetorically, not yet attached to nor corrupted by language, its fantasies and fears remain rooted in an order that is pre-symbolic, or at least not so far lost into a symbolic realm as to be mired in words. With age people then lose their access to those fundamentally pre-verbal states of being. Especially intense sensory experiences may provide a return, but this is just where language itself breaks down.
(Re: breaking down: Elaine Scarry, discussing the descriptive brilliance of Clausewitz in The Body in Pain, writes that “The written and spoken record of war over many centuries certifies the ease with which human powers of description break down in the presence of battle, the speed with which they back away from injuring and begin to take as their subject the most incidental or remote activities occurring there, rather than holding onto what is everywhere occurring at its center and periphery.” In other words, a powerful enough phenomenon can prioritize itself for a person that the experiential coincides with the ineffable. The pre-verbal or pre-symbolic emerges as a structuring absence in text or speech.)
Suppose that the infant of Hume, Sellars, etc., leaves its crib and the dangling mobile of red triangles to shuffle outside, in the meadow, to act out Stan Brakhage’s famous line: “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perception, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’?”
Such a world entreats the philosophical narrator via infant-as-proxy to appreciate its sensuous plenitude and its fullness beyond category. This is not Green but greens; perhaps not even greens, but an array of not-yet-greens. Brakhage himself is not so naive about these things; he is explicit in his piece that this is a fantasy from which he moves on. He warns that “one can never go back, not even in imagination.” (In Saving the Appearances, Owen Barfield writes about “original participation” with the world (participation being the “extra-sensory relation between man and the phenomena”) which has been subsequently lost or buried in some sense. Barfield too had to clarify: “It may remove the risk of misunderstanding if I mention at this early stage that it is in no part of the object of this book to advocate a return to original participation.”) Nevertheless, to bring perception “back” to an state is a powerful idea, almost like an Edenic phenomenological journey. Existing outside—outside?—the frame of language are these qualia and sense data. I want to suggest, with only a moderate degree of confidence, that Sellars’ concept of “the myth of the given” can be translated to what we might also call a myth of content: the assumption that there is something there, which our blunt li’l tools (like language or technologies) may deliver but don’t fundamentally shape or alter. Now, indeed, perhaps there is something there, but maybe its primal existence does not come from our senses, or from them alone.
David Bentley Hart in The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss writes, “To see how the rose in my garden resembles another flower, I must already have not only some notion of flowers in the abstract but also some grasp of the abstract concept of resemblance, as well as some concept of discrete objects as discrete objects of mental focus, and some set of conceptual rules regarding what sorts of similarity or dissimilarity to look for or ignore. … Not even the simplest abstractions, such as the resemblance between different shapes or patterns, can arise from mere physical condensations of experience, spontaneously generating conceptual algorithms of reality, because the synthesizing work of comparison is only possible by way of some prior conceptual grammar, which is not wholly dependent on the senses, and which can direct consciousness toward specific defining features of likeness and unlikeness.”
The limit experience—incredible pain, say, or Brakhage’s catalogue of art’s preoccuptions: “birth, sex, death, and the search for God”—provide these horizons toward which art and aesthetic experience might gesture, or recreate. It approximates, it emulates, it might even take us there, guiding like a psychopomp, without pretending that its concrete particularities are identical to those of either the experience or the concept. There is something asymptotal, then, about “art.” Through its presentation of sense data, formulated in some kind of order, art may continually bring us closer to the ur-thing which it ultimately represents, which is, of course, Unrepresentable.
Dave Hickey, in “Pontormo’s Rainbow” writes, “There are thousands of colors in the world and only a few hundred words to describe them, and these include similitudes like teal and peach and turquoise. So, the names we put on colors are hardly more than proper names, like Smith or Rodriguez, denoting vast, warming, diverse families of living experience. Thus, when color signifies anything, it always signifies, as well, a respite from language and history—a position away from which we may contemplate absence and death in the paradise of the moment—as we kids in Santa Monica contemplated the death of puppies in the embrace of cartoon rainbows.” This strikes me as a useful way of approaching the problem. The aesthetic register brings us close; our access to sense data may very well gesture toward aspects of pre-verbal or pre-conceptual experience, or may not, but either way we will subsequently direct our language to create, dissolve, and reform the communities through which we inevitably understand and experience anything. Meaning inheres through experience but also its sharing and transmission.
Teresa of Avila tells us: “it is clear that anything white looks very much whiter against something black, just as the black looks blacker against the white. … [I]f we turn from self towards God, our understanding and our will become nobler and readier to embrace all that is good: if we never rise above the slough of our own miseries we do ourselves a great disservice.”
Red triangle, green grass—red and green are socially determined colors for Stop and Go, as well as colors associated as a source of confusion in (certain types of) color-blindness. On colorblindness, Wittgenstein writes in Remarks on Colour: “Even if green is not an intermediary colour between yellow and blue, couldn’t there be people for whom there is bluish-yellow, reddish-green? i.e. people whose colour concepts deviate from ours—because, after all, the colour concepts of colour-blind people too deviate from those of normal people, and not every deviation from the norm must be a blindness, a defect.” Indeed, the social function of shared color-concepts—that is, shared appeals to sense data, often presumed to be immediate—becomes a way of naming, distinguishing, and describing the social world. People have speculated over the meaning of Homer’s “wine-dark sea,” and whether by extension it meant that, perhaps, the ancient Greeks did not “see” blue the way we see it. (I’m an uneducated barbarian, and have no idea, but it makes sense to me that the “wine-dark sea” would mean most of all opaque, i.e., the deep ocean one couldn’t walk out and swim in, and look into below to view the sandy bottom or passing fish.)
If something so fundamental to perception as color can, in fact, be shaped by culture or language or other factors, this demonstrates the challenge of constituting a sensus communis on a large and diverse scale. If epistemological certainty can find proof in the perception of an appearance, then how we structure the accommodation of different appearances is a crucial sociopolitical question.
Private convictions gain currency through links with others in community: I can see green, and I see that we all see green. But what about the one who sees something other than green? If what we see had to be identical to what is shown in, for example, a film, then those who see differently (not just enjoy or conclude differently) are wrong, “colorblind,” defective. The latter judgment is neither inevitable nor required by the observations before it.
I think Wittgenstein’s account of perceptual diversity acknowledges pluralism in a wider social sense. We might envision a dialogue in which a person who sees reddish-green rather than brown could point along a spectrum and “differentiate between the colours of two chemical compounds that seem to us to be the same colour and he calls one brown and the other reddish-green.” We could even belong to tribes, or factions, differentiated by our color-sight, who though bonded through common language would mean different things. Here, I believe, is where aesthetics and politics meet most fundamentally; they meet not at taste or consumption so much as at perception. And whether it’s possible to dissolve the antagonisms of the tribes of the sensible into a more harmonious cosmos is beyond my present understanding.