"Seeing as Verb"

10.3.2010 Re: Goldsmiths College Lecture 4.pm Bob Rafel "Seeing as a Verb"


I went to this lecture, part of the Whitehead Open Lectures series, organized by Mark Bishop in the Neurology-Psychology-Computing Cross over.

Bob Rafel showed short films of patients who had right or left Cerebral lesions due to strokes. When two objects were held in front of them in the left and right field of their eye range simultaneously they could see each object if the command was to distinguish them specifically by color or shape which in each was different. However if the shape or color was the same in both and if the command was to name each item even whilst they were the same in form or color, the patients only saw the one object. The patients looked really unhappy, confused by the process. That in itself got me thinking not only ethically but on the practical efficacy of such an experiment in terms of relevant therapeutic approaches to dealing with this limitation that exposed itself under the conditions of this experiment. My feeling is that the experiment in itself is not right or wrong but must lead to some kind of further interaction that creates other routes of navigation in which different outcomes are possible as alternative experiences. Bob Rafel talks about Object Blindness or Task Extinction. What he is arguing is that we only see what is seized through a relevant task either carried out or intended to be carried out. The patients looked unhappy because seated as they were with objects appearing and disappearing infront of their eyes like puppets operated by the therapist, their ability to act on a task and so bring into grasp the objects was at best limited and at worst strongly inhibited by the conditions set out.

My take on this:

I would rather use the word Coalescence or Deleting Repeat Versions rather than the negative and implied failure of Object Blindness or Task Extinction. This is not just a matter of politically correct window dressing, it is about creating the circumstances where the motivation for perception can be addressed and the circumstances for extending and deepening attention in practical adaptive two-way therapeutic interactions endorsed.

My question to Bob after the talk was: What would happen if the patients were moving with their whole bodies? Would these bodily adjustments help to create for them the circumstances in which they could "see" even similarly shaped or colored objects? Do they use such bodily adjustments in their every day life? Is there in other words a way that we can perform seeing as a muscular realignment- to really make seeing into a verb? I gave the example of autistic children I have worked with who spin their bodies and objects in order to displace or perturb a line between too similar sets and so to bring up the contrast through small enacted displacements. This related to a point that Bob made in the talk that when a patient looked through a prism that distorted the placement and so the regular fixture of an object, it was brought back into consciousness from out of the haze of its coalescence and non-differentiation with other objects.

Could it be that autistic people enact certain movements and repetitions in order to jolt things back into contrast after they fade into insignificance as repeat statements of what can only be grasped in one graspable inter-relationship at a time?



Following on from this intro. here then are my rougher and more spontaneous hand-written notes below. This is work in progress:

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If the "Blindness" is about deleting copies it is actually an efficient way in angling attention to what matters. When this over-plays because the body is still- perhaps through neurological damage or trauma, fear- it leads to partial blindness.

Therefore re-angling the body as its alignment with a sense of grasping- with making things happen- reinvigorates a relatedness with persons and objects into affective contingent assemblages in which a person is actively engaged.

A therapy would rely on attention to not what is “out there" in a social, cognitive emotional landscape but in re-angling relationships through increasing a body's capacity to move, to respond, to set up a working device of which it is a part.

As the body rocks, turns, moves off, shaking the place at which objects "land", the scope widens for seeing an object- person not as a single instant but as a slowly emerging and deepening presence. The body perturbing works like the many lines of a sketch that gradually hold together the sense and shape of something that is always falling off from where it was a moment before and always re-building in order to span and join distances as a growth pattern. That is something that occurs with its own concrete and mutable existence.

Through such movements small levels of contrast are put into affect. Differentials that are worked up not in the categorization of set differences in the objects but in how the body puts itself into a specific local arrangement with objects to bring out further differences.

That working sculptural responsiveness is what creates the contrast in which mutable relationships develop and different facets of human-object assembly are emphasized, exchanged and contrasted at any one moment.

This works on Rafels's prism experiment where he found that if an object was broken up and displaced perceptually by a prism, it could be brought back into grasp by a stroke patient. The displacement offered the incentive to fill a gap, to move energetically, bodily, emotionally in order to re-align or re-configure.

Therefore it is the gap- what is missing which creates a turning point or the mark of an attention and can therefore not fade out as replication and be deleted as a useless copy but instead becomes an intentional primer in a context of excitability and relevance.

By working into a partial absence this bodily reflex of falling away and regrouping between what is lost and found is excited and the body in affect has something to do and so motivates into an alignment that posits the objects-person in view i.e. relevance for touching, doing, facing.

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Maybe face is only this- an excitation between what is lost and found at any one point as we scan relevance through contrast, an on-off pulsation of what is there and what alludes us and the changeability of this brought about through our movements. Those movements are happening both in terms of a scanning of the eye and of our bodily movements generated by the flickering absences it elicits.

I think this is what autistic kids are doing when they rock, turn things, swivel and bounce off surfaces. They are eliciting the viscous and tangible essential concurrences of how they arrange themselves in relation to extended assemblages in order to see and feel and dwell.

This is about moving off-centre, exciting the falling reflex and then catching into this as a still point or pause where the jolt of these different and counter-point speeds elicit information, a sense of the tangibility of things and presence.

I have noticed how these kids power into presence- emotional, social, cognitive, imaginative when engaging in these off-centered cyclical motions of slippage and then a sudden stoppage. It is as if it is a technique for orientation- for tuning too high and too low as a way of positioning through repetitions that vary slightly and so never become redundant. It is an operation for activating grasp by sensitizing to ever more subtle levels of contrast.

This might be one way to work more broadly with object blindness, word blindness, face blindness, social blindness- at the point at which contrast, through self-generated motions can be engined back into a running complex of associations in which that person is "placed". In which they themselves appear. (This is part of an on-going research I am personally engaged with as a Dyslexic person)

In that sense, proprioception is a practice of enacting questions about how to place a body in a space; an environmental complex and multi-facetted space that is generated out of these very movements. How to move and how to configure still points out of those movements where objects and people hang together giving sense and orientation to one another must be the main thrust of working with people with neurological co-ordination, sensory and affective disturbances.

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My sense is that the on: off contrast pump of presence/absence, uprightness/falling can be generated at more and more subtle and complex levels by bringing up differentials in what would otherwise be seen as repeat copies and so, deleted. That deletion is actually only the reverse statement of a state of rigidity or unmoving in the body.

Movement, response, adaptation can be inspired simply by on: off touch as in the modulated contact in Shiatsu and Contact Dance Improvisation where pressure/release inspires sensations and experiences of containment-holding and spaciousness-movement. I am interested in how in Contact Dance small changes at the skin surface and the fascia response elicit this experience of whole-body movement and containment the reality of which is physically and concurrently set into being in the situations between dancers.

There is this continual nudging between freedom and constraint that inspires a multi-facetted vocabulary of possible shapings; pattern assemblages that in turn offer up emotive charges and conditional reflexes that lead to real emotional, physical and energetic states and offer up in the exchange between dancers, shared ideas. It is out of conditional constraints- stoppages, holdings and omissions within a wider flow that sudden speed changes become possible. Ideas and intentions in a sense make themselves out of these physical circumstances offering up mutable and self-forming shapes. A worlding takes place out of this moveability and our concepts of the world and of ourselves and of one another gain flexion out of that movement. All that says is that fixed thoughts come out of mutable origins.

I think Shiatsu, even when practiced on a still body, is capable of eliciting a similar repertoire of movement and experiential cartography- as if a drama and fully embodied actual story is being both told and played out simultaneously.

I think conditions of crisis and healing are a twinned experience that can act as leverage for such experiential involvement because that experience is a greatly intensified sensation of on-off contact and of the conundrum of containment and expansion. This can figure both as a paradox of life and as a physical invigoration towards responsiveness and a new sense of making manifest. In that sense Shiatsu and Contact Dance where there is a utilization of these on-off patternings at the physical level these become positive construction interactions that create a two-way feedback through continual adaptation and subtle realignment.



This needs to be researched in more detail.

How the moveability of the body and its ability to generate conceptual maps of this movement capacity by on: off touch even when the body is still, could help people in vegetative states, coma and restricted movement and awareness conditions.

Rather than tell what is missing in functional and global ability in object blindness in the left/right field how can we use movement, sensation and proprioception responses to falling and uprightness to tweak and readjust the body's capacity to create meaningful gages? To integrate and play off of ever-more refined levels of differentiation in our bearing towards one another and to the objects and surfaces through which we place ourselves. How can we combine left and right in a dynamic whole? A moving through into a mutable cascade of variance. Something more like a flicker than one thing or another thing.