The issue of triadic experience deserves a little attention. This takes us back to meditations 11-17 and Charles Peirce’s notion of “thirdness.”[i] There, I discussed thirdness or triadic experience in terms of an object, a subject, and a name/concept – literally, a closed triangle with a perceiver occupying one node. The discussion, in this form, operates only at the level of an individual. An essential question left unanswered is this: How can individuals participate and be joined in this perceptual triangle so that it can be said that we share an environment or that we study the same object?
The short answer established by J.J. Gibson and later elaborated by philosophers like Axel Seeman is centered on the spatial organization of the environment. Longer versions of their answers differ significantly. For the time being, I’ll stick with the short version which relies on the fact that, while fixed observers or studies conducted at an instant render the perceptions of individuals radically distinct if not incommensurable, moving observers or studies conducted across time (which is how animals perceive) render various locations in an environment at least theoretically equal. Differences of perspective are contingent and fleeting and insignificant in view of inhabitation of a place over time – as if there is another way to inhabit.
Gibson sums up the result of our capacity to occupy all places – physically or mentally – over time. “In this sense the environment surrounds all observers in the same way that it surrounds a single observer.”[ii]
This answer is satisfactory for comparing experiences of individuals. It is not clear, however, that it adequately addresses differences between the experience of an individual and experiences of those constituting a group – whether family or tour group or student cohort, what-have-you – sharing a joint perception. The well-known story of the blind men and the elephant could serve as an example of the problem. A series of individuals each slowly circumnavigating an elephant will slowly come to have parallel or commensurable experiences. We gain understanding over time. A group, on the other hand, each confronting a unique anatomical feature simultaneously and reporting their discordant findings to the others faces a different interpretive challenge.
One source of confusion is obvious. The group has not been given the circumnavigation time that the individuals were granted. But this retort diminishes a more fundamental difference: assuming individuals – whether alone or in a group – can only ever experience some portions of a thing, whether elephant or building, and will likely experience those pieces in different sequences, the collective experience of a communicative group is distinct from the lone explorations of an individual. Anyone who has toured a building with a group of students will know that the reported experiences are varied, to say the least.
A second and more subtle source of confusion exists and is more significant. The discussion above values cumulative over momentary experience. This is rooted in our tendency to believe that novel things are meaningless or irrelevant when first encountered and gain meaning as we learn to understand how they fit in the complex of other categorizations. Experiencing the elephant’s trunk or tusk, leg or tail, is, in this view, only valuable when we understand each relative to the other parts. This belief, however, belies individual processing and valuing. Novel or unexpected things and events are meaningful by default, at the instant they are encountered, but “are rendered irrelevant, as a consequence of (successful) exploratory behavior.”[iii] That is, the discovery of a hard, pointy, moving object is immediately interesting and important. When I realize that this novel surface is actually an elephant’s tusk, I might shrug and say oh, of course. I’m walking through a natural history museum blindfolded. On the other hand, if I encounter the same novel surface in a forest on a night with no moon, I am likely to experience the full fledge fear, and attribute even greater meaning than, the object deserves.
The real mystery, on reflection, is not that individuals in a group can share information about their divergent experiences and come to understand or classify them. The real mystery is how those individuals can hold onto the impacts of their independent experiences in the face of group think. Functional Fixedness (the tendency of people to use things only as intended) and the Einstellung Effect (the tendency to hold onto a previously accepted solution even after it has been proven false) are propagated socially and serve to limit our acceptance of novel meaningful experiences. This is the problem. And at present, only a tentative and suggestive solution is possible:
Architecture differs from buildings as magic differs from demonstrations of cause and effect: the former in both cases utilize joint expectations to misdirect observers from classifying or trivializing experiences.[iv]
[i] Walker Percy expands the idea by asking himself: “What is the natural phenomenon signified by the simplest yet most opaque of all symbols, the little copula ‘is’?” His breakthrough, as he called it, was realizing the triangle between object, subject, and word “was absolutely irreducible. Here indeed was nothing less, I suspected, than the ultimate and elemental unit not only of language but of the very condition of the awakening of human intelligence and consciousness.” See Message in the Bottle, 40.
[ii] Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 38.
[iii] Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 55. Italics in the original.
[iv] Kuhn, Experiencing the Impossible, 39.
Architecture is Fiction 