Theory will fail as it is always incomplete. Even the best theories capture only quantities and facts while subjective qualities are always missed.
Signed, almost everyone
This mea culpa, declared by artists as well as scientists of every stripe, evokes a truism. It is also given such authority and expanded importance in the mind that it often serves as an obstacle to thinking how cold, hard stuff becomes the warm, soft immersion of experience. Read too casually, even the observations of our most careful analysts can seem to restate the mea culpa. Consider, for example, this blog’s favorite psychologist James J. Gibson. In 1979, he wrote “the environment does not wholly consist of sharply differentiated geometrical parts or forms. Natural perspective does not apply to shadows with penumbras and patches of light. It does not apply to sunlit surfaces with varying degrees of illumination.” Most seriously, “natural perspective omits motion from consideration.”[i] Gibson argues clearly and forcefully that perspectival theories miss the mark of recording the subtleties of experience. To infer from these statements, however, that he believes perspective to be unimportant or that he thinks moving beyond its limitations impossible is to take two steps too far.
Let’s take two steps back.
Perception, William James argued, is what makes things exist for an individual. While perception and reality are distinct, perception and reality of a given object to a given consciousness are one and the same. Objects, as Gibson and others have noted, have faces or surfaces oriented to a perceiver. The import of that observation is only manifest when combined with the preceding one – objects have faces which are real to the perceiver when perceived – and this becomes the launching point for two forms of exploration: specifically narrative and communicative content more generally. With each, position plays a role – but differently.
The specifically narrative component relies to some extent on the more general notion of communicative or social space. Therefore, it will need to be dealt with later. It is useful, however, to note a feature of successful narrative that differs from communication in general before turning away. A strong object in narrative space must serve as a conceptual or sensory fulcrum for the space in which it is situated. Milan Kundera’s analysis of character in “Getting into the soul of things” hints at the way a written or designed “character” might serve this role without having to convince the reader or perceiver of its ultimate reality: “for a character to be ‘lifelike,’ ‘strong,’ artistically ‘successful,’ a writer [or architect] need not supply all the possible data on him [or it]; there is no need to make us believe he [or it] is as real as you and I; for him [or it] to be strong and unforgettable, it is enough that he [or it] fills the whole space of the situation the novelist [or architect] has created for him [or it].”[ii]
Philosopher Axel Seeman’s work focuses on the more general issue of the role of location in communication and shared perceptual knowledge. This is a body of research that underpins and precedes all that might eventually be said about strong objects in narrative space. A key observation of work in shared perceptual knowledge is that, even if an observer is mistaken about the location of an object, its “experienced location” can be used to point it out to others. Slight divergences in our points of view and our understanding (or misunderstanding) of where an object is do not impede our ability to communicate the location of that object to others. Nor, in general, do discrepancies in our accounts often pose difficulties to our agreeing on what object is under consideration. The looseness of certainty within which we still seem to operate with high efficiency leads Seeman to speculate that a social spatial framework must exist, as “no other frame of reference could explain the possibility of public demonstrative reasoning and the acquisition of common knowledge it facilitates about its objects.”[iii]
One reason we are so effective, of course, is that we are not limited to one point of view.
[i] Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 63.
[ii] Kundera, The Curtain, 66.
[iii] Seeman, The Shared World, 66-67.
Architecture is Fiction 