The Tyranny of the
Visual
Many observers have noted that our culture is increasingly dominated by
the image. Indeed, a recent book was entitled, "The Rise of the Image,
the Decline of the Word". There is certainly no doubt that the image
plays a larger role in our culture now than at any time past. And in
many ways this is good. It's much harder to glorify war, for example,
when the news douses us with images of the horrible reality of war.
This even applies in fictional representations. Old war movies showed
victims clutching their chests and sanitarily falling face down, but a
movie like "Saving Private Ryan" shows heads being blown off bodies and
people being ripped apart with such graphic realism that a friend of
mine, after watching the movie, declared that he could not see how
anybody could ever again support a war.
Tremendous effort has gone into improving the quality of the images we
see. Computer graphics has absorbed billions of dollars of
research and development money and consumed the energies of thousands
of our brightest minds. Hundreds of people will labor over the computer
graphics in a major movie, and their efforts are usually rewarded with
bounteous ticket sales. Television is looking forward to the rise
of HDTV and the huge improvement in image quality it will bring. Our
electronic networks are increasing their capacity dramatically,
primarily in order to transmit images. The text we type amounts to a
few kilobytes, while images gobble up megabytes.
I won't condemn the rise of the image in our culture, and I will not
bemoan the decline of the word — at least not in this essay. What I
want to concentrate on here is the way in which visual thinking has
come to dominate our thinking, to the exclusion of everything else.
Here's a simple experiment: close your eyes and walk around your house.
Can you do it? Probably not. You've been walking those halls and
crossing those rooms for years, and yet you don't have any kinesthetic
sense of what your house is like. Moreover, observe the sense of panic
you feel when you're unable to see your surroundings. You feel like a
fish out of water, don't you?
Since my youth, I have enjoyed the occasional mental exercise of
walking in total darkness. I keep my eyes open but don't bother with
visual cues. I try to navigate by anything but vision. I touch walls
and chairs with my hands, feeling the textures, and I pay close
attention to the subtle shifts in the auditory environment as I move
around. Closer to a window, outside sounds like crickets and cars are
louder. As I move closer to the kitchen, the steady hum of the
refrigerator grows stronger. A ticking clock is a navigational beacon,
guiding me steadfastly past the rocks and shoals of a furniture-strewn
room. Above all, I use my imagination, and not just my visual
imagination. Yes, I imagine the layout of the room I'm crossing, but
it's not just a visual map that guides me. It's the sense of proximity
to familiar things, the echoes of my breathing off a close wall, the
overall sense of things that guides me. It's hard to explain to a
purely visual thinker (as most of the readers of this essay will likely
be) — which is why I recommend the experiment to you. If you can't move
through a pitch-black room, then clearly you have not developed some
thinking patterns that could have been developed. You have narrowed
your perception of your universe.
Of course, walking through a pitch-black room is not a particularly
useful skill, especially when you can flip a switch and bathe the room
in dazzling light. I offer this as only an example of how visually
intense our approach to everything has become. Where it hurts is in the
matter of thinking.
I have long noted that I seem to think differently than others. There's
something
about my mentation that's eccentric. And occasionally this gives me
an advantage. I have long pondered this. I reject the whole
notion of intelligence and its suggestion that I can think better than
others because I'm smarter. What's the definition of "smart"? Why, the
ability to think well. So I can think better than others because I'm
smarter, which means that I have the ability to think better. That's
not very illuminating, is it?
And so I have gone into more detail, examining what it is about my
thinking that differs from others, and what advantages and
disadvantages these differences confer. And one factor that has
consistently emerged is my refusal to allow the image to dominate my
thinking.
When you gaze upon a scene, do you imagine that you are perceiving
reality? I certainly don't. I imagine that I am perceiving a tiny
fragment of reality, perceiving reality through the narrow window of
the visual. I look at a tree and perceive so much more than a simple
visual image. I imagine the fluids slowly creeping through its cambium,
the photosynthesis taking place in its leaves, the absorption of
nutrients from the soil — all these invisible processes that are
central to the life of a tree. My eyes don't tell me much about the
tree; there's so much more going on out of my view.
Note that this perception of the tree is informed, indeed driven, by my
education. Because I have read about biology and trees and physics, I
bring to bear an understanding that allows me to see deeper inside the
tree. My perception of the universe is an integration of my knowledge
and my senses.
Thus, I look upon the world with different eyes than you do. My real
eyes exist inside my mind, and bring to bear everything I perceive and
know about reality. Here's an analogy for you. Suppose that you are
watching a black-and-white movie. You see an apple. It's presented in
shades of gray, but you know that the apple must be red. Your real eyes
see a gray apple, but your mind's eye fills in the color. Now extend
that analogy in a hundred different directions. What if you also
perceived the smooth texture of the apple's skin, the slow oxidation of
the apple's flesh as oxygen seeps through the skin, the slow loss of
water moving in the opposite direction, the water gradient inside the
apple — everything going on in that apple. I can "see" those things
when I gaze upon an apple. So I ask you: by living solely in the world
of the visual, are you "seeing" less of the world than you could?
The Wachowski brothers created a stunning visual analogy to this
process in their Matrix trilogy:
It comes at the climax of the first Matrix film. Neo has returned from
thed dead and can now see the Matrix for what it is. He looks down the
corridor at the three agents and sees not the corridor, but the code
behind it. The image communicates the idea of seeing the processes
behind reality rather
than just the visual skin of reality. Isn't it odd that we need a
visual representation of an idea that attempts to get around visual
thinking?
I was motivated to write this essay by several experiences I have had
over the last few weeks. In each case, I found myself trying to
communicate a simple, obvious idea to somebody who was hopelessly
locked into visual thinking patterns. For example, in one case I was
discussing geosynchronous satellites with a fellow. At one point in the
discussion, I pointed to the southern sky as I explained something. My
interlocutor stared at me in disbelief; what the hell was I pointing
at? Why, the satellite, I explained. He laughed; there was no satellite
up there. It was broad daylight, and besides, you couldn't see these
satellites with your naked eye. I stared back at him in comparable
incomprehension. Of course we can't actually see the satellite, but
it's there, right there at that point in the sky, as certain as the sun
in the sky. We know its altitude and azimuth coordinates and they're
right there in the sky. But my friend was just not willing to think of
a satellite existing somewhere that he couldn't actually see. Seeing is
believing, I suppose. But I didn't need to see it to believe it.
Here's an even more important example: I was explaining the operation
of a new idea for interactive storytelling to a friend, and after much
patient listening, he demanded to know what the player would see on the
screen. I dismissed his question with the brusque observation that we
could use any reasonable presentation scheme; what was important was
the function of the system. But he insisted, so with patent exasperated
patience, I laid out some of the options for the visual appearance that
the system could use. He then started to argue with me about petty
details of the presentation. This arguement persisted for several
moments until I exploded, "I'm talking about an automotive engine that
runs on water and you want to argue about the shape of the tail
lights!" It shut him up, and it hurt his feelings. Why do people have
to be so narrow-minded?
Another issue in which visual thinking seems to blind people is in the
use of stages in drama. In my designs for interactive storytelling, I
have always used a simple arrangement: space is composed of individual
stages with no spatial relationships whatever between stages. Actors
simply disappear from one stage and reappear on another. Inside a
stage, all actors are able to interact with each other without any
spatial considerations. It's a simple, robust model and it closely
approximates the way in which space is used in most stories.
I suppose I have to substantiate my claim that stories don't rely on
spatial considerations; most people react to it with incredulity.
Consider the interactions between actors on a stage; how many times do
the spatial relationships affect those interactions? Don't think in
terms of movies, because the visual element of movies automatically
includes spatial factors, thereby biasing the analysis. Let's consider
a medium in which spatial factors are not automatically included:
literature. How often do spatial considerations actually show up in
that medium?
At first, one is tempted to claim that spatial considerations are
common in stories. For example, the Odyssey is at heart a story of a
journey around the Mediterranean. Isn't that fundamentally spatial?
Indeed, the journey motif shows up repeatedly in literature, from the
Odyssey to Huckleberry Finn to Star Wars. But I ask, are the spatial
motions central to the story? Are they not merely transitions from one
stage to another, without any genuine spatial content? The best
evidence we have for the chimeric nature of spatial factors in story is
the fact that the actual spatial relationships are never specified.
Odysseus travelled for many days and came to the Land of the Lotus
Eaters — where is that? How far away is it from Scylla and Charybdis?
Is it closer to Troy or to Ithaca? We don't know any of these
relationships, because they aren't specified in the Odyssey — because
they're not important.
The same thing goes for the other journey stories. Huckleberry Finn
takes place on a specified river, with specified places that could, I
suppose, be established on a map. Yet, many of the details just aren't
there. Where was it that Huck saw the body of his father? And how far
away was that from the town where they tarred and feathered Huck's
shyster buddies? Or the place where the feud led to the murders of his
hosts? We don't know, because those spatial relationships are
irrelevant to the dramatic matters addressed in the story.
Even within a stage, spatial relationships are unimportant. Some people
have contested this claim, observing that Cary Grant has to get really
close to the actress if he's going to kiss her. But in literature, they
never write,"Overpowered with passion, he walked over to her, seized
her in his arms, and kissed her frantically." No, the sentence is more
like "Overpowered with passion, he seized her in his arms and kissed
her frantically." Look at it from the other extreme: "Overpowered with
passion, he walked over to her, seized her in his arms, moved his head
directly in front of hers, rotated his head slightly to avoid a
collision of noses, then closed the gap between her lips and his and
kissed her frantically." Pretty silly, eh? Spatial factors just aren't
important in drama. If an actor needs to alter a spatial relationship
to get something done, he simply does it, and we don't need to worry
about the mechanical details of how that's carried out. Stories are
about the exercise of emotion, not musculature.
And yet I never seem to get through to people on this simple point.
They are so locked up in their visual representation of the universe
that they simply can't conceive of the universe as anything more than a
set of images. There's no deeper reality to such people; to them,
reality is WYSIWRE: What You See Is What Really Exists.
It's a big world out there, and we humans will never understand it, but
those of us who confine their thinking to the purely visual are
narrowing their vision.