Seeing Narrative

The post entitled “Strategies of Sight” describes my first encounters with the concepts of binocular rivalry and amblyopia. Especially catching my attention were the physiological striving for vergence that characterizes human sight and the study of what happens when rivaling images disrupt the brain’s ability to find an appropriate angle for vergence, thereby hindering the creation of a stable visual scene. Thoughts on this led reflection on the way that individuals or entire cultures manage to suppress sightings, i.e., ideas or events “in view" that don’t satisfactorily verge with other abstract visualizations, where so-called factual images compete. Of course, the physiology of seeing can’t simply be used to explain the psychology of thinking. However, this is what we do all the time. We overlay others and ourselves with some pattern or idea or explanatory paradigm, thereby shaping an image of ourselves or others that then limits perception and experience.

In the case of rivaling binocular images, for example, the simplest view might be to look at the “seeing and not-seeing” as a simple on-off switch. The brain fixing the lack of vergence by cleverly presenting each image alternately. However, this is not the case in several aspects.

For example, in some cases, the rivalry can be piecemeal: Image A can dominate certain areas of the field while Image B dominates other. Or one image can appear in lower contrast, that is, appear weaker. Or as in many of the simple explanations, the images are alternately suppressed.


A further investigation into the neurological processes, however, reveals not only that the brain may use different strategies for accomplishing vergence, as above, but also that rather than an on/off shift, perception results from a synchronization of various waves that are constantly in play, the stimuli continuously persisting, but the brain waves responding to the stimulus going in and out of synchronized rhythms.

So, now…what does this have to do with narrative and the way we traditionally view it?

When narratologists have thoughts about narrative point of view, narrative voice, plot sequence, there has always been an abstract paradigm of seeing laid over the narrative object that “explains” its purpose or structure. Critical approaches have been Marxist or feminist, structuralist or post-structuralist, cultural or post-colonial. Focus has most often been on form and meaning. Is plot sequence chronological or logical? How may we “prove” character motivation? What themes are present? What is the nature of the hero? The anti-hero? Who is the protagonist? What does diction say? All of the questions thrown out by theory is valid. Theories express our interests as readers or cultural institutions.

Rarely, however, within the general public, are questions of narrative and perception brought into the understanding of a narrative.

How do narration and narrative mirror “seeing” or “sensing” or the “touch” of reality on our consciousness? How do we “see” this world and this story as we read or watch?

Again, our thinking processes may not be construed by means of studies on how the eyes see. However, when I narrate, when I write a poem, everything I envision is based on the experience of my consciousness in the world and affected by the processes I use to see it. I am affected by my eyes’ attempt to create vergence, to make sense of my field of vision in a physical sense and my world in an abstract sense. I am affected by the experience of a full range of hearing, my my ears rigid, but my mind turning their attention like a cat’s ears when it hears a distant rustling in the brush. When I write and when I read, I don’t merely follow a plot line or recognize mimetic representations of that which lies within my experience, thus being pleased at recognition. I attend to rivaling images. My mind searches for moments of synchronization. I light upon an image and then it is gone. And then I try to make sense. Within scientific experiment on subjective perception, scientist's rely on narrative as evidence of awareness.

As I stare at the screen, the checkerboard ring starts to give way and change into the woman’s face. The face breaks through in disconnected patches, which merge and take over the whole screen. A few seconds later, the face falls apart and the expanding checkerboard rings return, removing the face completely. But this too lasts only several seconds, as the face eventually reasserts its presence. Watching these two images vie with each other, I can sense how their alternation somehow takes place within me. After a while, I begin to feel I can intentionally affect how these images behave. By paying careful attention to a fixed spot at the center of the screen, I can keep one image there a little longer. I can mentally hold onto the image as it starts to fade and sometimes even bring it back. But it’s hard to be sure, because there seems to be no regular pattern to the changing images, just a spontaneous and unpredictable alternation (Thompson 21).

When I see the words on the page, my mind is drawing upon an incredibly complex system of sensing, perceiving, remembering, and ordering. It is not merely following a plot line, recognizing a moment of crisis or registering a logical sequence of events. It is experiencing on the level of perception. In looking at the narrative from this view, I ask other questions. What is in view? What elements are disrupting vergence? What is synchronizing in this moment of sight? What has disappeared? What is overlaid? Employing aspects of the physiological processes of seeing and sensing in the inspection of narratives, we could shift focus from the problems of form or meaning in the usual sense and discover a very different analytical methodology.

It is with these thoughts in mind that I must constantly reflect on the richness of experience and creative, mimetic configuration that is lost in the dissection of narrative and its practical application for the purpose of everything from political power to corporate identity to marketing. In our view of narrative, we flatten it into a plastic bag into which we put the things we sell, thus flattening our own powers of observation and imagination.

The next posts will be attempts to apply various means of approaching the narrative aimed not at understanding the content or structure, but more the rhythms or dynamics of narrative from the angle perception.


Thompson, Evan (2014-11-11). Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition.

Strategies of Sight

In chapter 2 of Waking Dreaming Being, Evan Thompson introduces the concept of binocular rivalry, the situation that occurs when what one eye sees competes with what the other eye sees. While in normal vision the two slightly different points of view presented by each eye converge, creating the impression of a single, 3D field of vision, in the situation of binocular rivalry, the images are different enough that rather than blending, the two views fluctuate, one disappearing, one prevailing by turn.

Unlike the duck-rabbit image in which our mind fluctuates between one interpretation of the image (duck) and another (rabbit) based on a changing perception of the image’s 360-degree orientation, in the case of binocular rivalry, each eye is presented with a completely different image. This can be achieved by means of binocular apparatuses equipped with different images; however, it can also be experienced, as Thompson explains, by simply placing an empty paper towel roll to one eye and looking through that while leaving the other eye open. Because the two views cannot easily converge, the focus of the mind will tend to respond by fluctuating between them.

Also occurring to me at this point is the condition of amblyopia, a condition occurring in young children, in which one eye becomes so dominant that the other eye is suppressed and, if not treated, can fall into disuse and deteriorate completely. If the condition is treated in time, however, the eye can regain its strength.

These aspects of seeing and not seeing lead me to wonder whether in illuminating objects, our mind uses the same strategies it imposes upon vision.

In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger wrote of the "clearing" in which an object appears upon being apprehended. Harmonizing with the idea of the luminous consciousness, Heidegger said that while we see the object (in the light or space of the clearing created by our attention) we do not see in the shadows, all upon which the object depends. Our minds reveal the object and conceal its interdependencies of being. Heidegger also says that in becoming a painting, the “earth” from which the work is created ( i.e., the material used to create it) “disappears” into the world the work creates. Paint, for example, "disappears" into its luminous qualities and the world that it helps "set up". Simplified, one might say we see the radiance of the color and the world portrayed in the work and no longer see the paint. Unless we are trained to look, of course.

Combining these various perspectives on seeing, I can see in our tentative or unknowing or narrowed perception, an ability to overlook or actively suppress aspects of presence or for attention to “flicker” in the perception of disparate views in a perceptual field. Although the “flicker effect” would seem to point to a potential for perceiving objects in their multiple available aspects, I worry that we are trained toward suppression instead. We suppress some qualities at the expense of others in order to see what we have been trained to see, and when we have conceptualized it, to fix it. The significant question here is the extent to which we then stop looking.

And what happens, when as in the case of binocular rivalry, we cannot converge oppositional or significantly divergent perceptions gracefully into an artifice of visual or conceptual stability?

There is a clear potential in this view to explain the inability of many to perceive multiple views as they suppress a disparate sighting, narrowing. as we say, their minds.

In thinking of this narrowing of mind, I wonder whether as in the case of the “weak eye”, the mind permanently loses territory of seeing or illumination or whether as in the case of those wearing a single contact lens or two different contact lenses, their minds are merely “waiting to see” and attempting, in the meanwhile, to create a coherent picture from a visually disrupted field — thereby creating an artificially derived “perfect view” from a severely curtailed set of data.

The problem of dealing with mutually exclusive viewpoints is related to central questions of worldview. In extreme versions of anthropocentric, subjectivist worldview, it is thought that the world does not exist until we create it, leading to a kind of relativist mise en abyme in which no fact can exist.

In any public sphere, the territories of “fact” and “truth” are perpetually contested spaces. The manipulation and reinterpretation of fact and the use of “fact” to arrive at a “truth” comprise central, grinding mechanisms of culture.

An extreme and significant example lies in acts of genocide. Most will recognize that these events have occurred though they may have different points of view on the causes or the chain of individual events, while some will merely deny the evidence, ascribing to the right to a completely subjectivist interpretation of the world, to the suppression of sightings. In an individualist “democratic” society these discrete and sometimes diametrically opposed sets of facts and arguments of truth will bubble up to form a continually disrupted surface, while in a dictatorship or a collectivist society, the surface may be smooth, the interpretations and oppositional viewpoints hidden. Did the holocaust happen? Some people find it possible to permanently disrupt the “view” of the evidence, claiming that it really didn’t happen. In other cases of genocide, whole nations turn a “blind eye.” In everyday life, we find the struggle to focus on one “sighting” or another. We see conversations, people, or situations fluctuate from multiple points of viewing, in this case, often attempting to resolve these fluctuations by arriving at a unified field of vision, a coherent picture or a truth

We cannot depend on the “nature” of our sight. When the eye cannot converge disparate images, it may suppress one. Our mind, as our eyes, plays with the information that it picks up. While we may narrow our field of vision for a task, the infinitely expansive capacity of the mind to navigate disparate and complex viewings can flourish. If we train ourselves to look.

Perceiving, Observing, Experiencing Plot

The camera captures an image, we say.

Our culture trains us to try and capture objects in a similar fashion, stopped or suspended in their motion. We traditionally study moving images as a series of frames, in part because the media of photography and then celluloid film influenced our understanding of objects. However, before photography came painting or drawing; before microscopes came butterflies on pins, dissected cadavers, and stamps in collections. The western fondness for capturing objects, pinning and dissecting them is deep. Even with new seamless digital imagery aspect of motion analysis often isolate poses within a physical process, for example, in the act of running.

Artists often provide other perspectives on such processes, for example, by tracing the overhead view of a dancer's path and revealing the shape or stroke of the dance or filming it, thereby creating an animation which may reveal flow without "steps."

In their native state, our minds can perceive in the observation of the runner, rhythm, sway, or threads of posturing that are not frames. We can also touch the stillness at the center of the act with our awareness, our senses and our minds tuned to connect center to enter.

So we can enter the waving pattern of leaves flashing where the breeze, the leaf and the sunlight meet.

In terms of narrative, the so-called line of the plot might be seen as the reductionist urge to negate the complexity of engaging the object “story” with all of our potential means of perceiving, observing and experiencing, the frame, the flow, and the simultaneously still and moving center.

thoughts about art

Artists are constantly in the process of turning the inside, out. There are others doing this, those philosophers or house-builders or teachers whose every work emanates from a wholeness of being, the reasoning mind, the feeling heart, the perceiving senses.

A story written to be a bestseller may or may not be art under this definition; a piece of architecture may be a functional, lifeless, structure or an object that radiates a design that has arisen from this mysterious place. A teacher may teach according to the lifeless goals and the data to be transferred or may illuminate in place, lighting up a space to be shared with a momentarily connected body of minds.

One of my first university instructors in literature wrote on one of my papers the following: “In your writing, I am struck by the connection between your head and your heart.” In these years, I was caught between music and poetry, but in the moment I read that, I knew that the place where I was most myself and most alive and in love with the world was in my writing. This is my art.

What do we usually teach each other about art? About beauty? Certainly, the history of aesthetics in any of the arts - architecture, literature, painting, poetry, theater, sculpture, etc. - is fascinating, and it tells us of the bodies and minds and hearts of whole cultures. It tells us the collective perceptions and experiences of beauty. Histories of art tell us a story of creative making and our interaction with the materials that we use to construct a human world within the larger world whose wholeness is beyond us.

Yet often shoved off into the corner are the insides of the outsides, the mysterious unities of the works and their artists; and when the insides are studied, it is often with the paradigm and the ruler and the mathematical equation or it is left to those who consider only the heart or the spirit and not its connection to the brain or the world.

The things we do - painting, philosophy, poetry and sometimes teaching or baking or building a chair - have precisely that quality of art when they are whole, and when looking or talking about these pieces of being, analyzing “quality” or attaching status to them, I think there should be respect - not necessarily for the artist as personage but for that being continually driven to turn the inside out.

plot as an ephemeral trajectory

In "What is Critique" Foucault describes dialog and listening as traditional methods of learning and confession as a means of knowing oneself. He also states that critique is reason's expression of a desire to "not [be] governed quite so much."

Ricoeur sees history as a record of the collective struggle between the finite self of the spatiotemporal being (bios) and a consciousness capable of grasping the universal (logos). Within history are witnessing and confessional narratives, the learning and knowing of oneself, and the listening to texts.

Within the framework of these thoughts, I see narrative as a process of tracing possible trajectories of knowing and a means of embodying critique in an expression of potential in possible worlds.

From the same perspective, the historical narrative moment can be seen as a trajectory of collective or cultural freedom in trying on the possible "we" in the possible world.

Whether a cultural tragedy or accomplishment has actually occurred becomes of less importance than its inclusion in our narrative. The cautionary tale, the witnessing or the confession is the significant aspect of the event as it becomes part of our self-knowledge, our learning, and our trajectory of freedom to become something as yet unknown.

How does the narrative event exist in time? Does, as Derrida states in the Specters of Marx, the ghost of Hamlet's father, that is, the past, stepping into the present to draw us into the future? What use is the causal plotting of events in timelines? In constrained plots and subplots?

Isn't it the narrative folds, the associations opened up to defy imagined causality in the story of tragedy or comedy, the temporally and spatially positioned events not in a storyline but of a story-field, that make narrative exceed all critique? From the series of brush strokes we call events, we tend to imagine a line, but wouldn't a more provocative portrait be the view of the continual opening up of the folds, the revelation of opening after opening that forms a future from a field of a possibilities? In a free flow of ephemeral trajectories, we do not limit ourselves to the one momentarily supposed causal chain but rather open ourselves to a field full of potential and creative possibility, an expression of the true vulnerability of our imagined lives.

the responsibility of sentience

Certainly humans are generally considered more intelligent than other living species on earth, that is, when measured by humans on the scale of intelligence that they themselves have developed. Most of the human discussions I’ve seen floating around the world also indicate a belief that humans have a “higher” level of consciousness.

To discuss intelligence invariably leads us to scientific theory and a measuring of abilities to understand or complete tasks that are useful to us humans. To discuss consciousness is equally biased on the basis of that which we can understand with our human consciousness. I have a hard time embracing the quantitative and hierarchical views of these qualities because from my perspective, they deaden the study of the fascinating and complex dynamic of behavior and the multidimensional system that might be called life. Even more significantly, they usually involve a disregard for much of the self-awareness and knowledge that we ourselves experience.

When considering our species-identity, rather than prizing myself because of my superior intelligence or higher consciousness and using this judgment to justify tampering with the fate of “lesser beings”, I would rather consider the sentience that I have in common with living species (and possibly inanimate objects) and the responsibility that might be connected to my capacity to apprehend the world through the senses and feelings that I posit and even assume. If sentience is response to that which we describe as feeling or sensing and if the evidence of the sensing is the perceptible response to it, doesn’t it follow that when a rock warms in the sunlight, it has sensed the sun in the same manner that we flinch when our hands touch something hot or a bird swerves to avoid its fellow fliers in the flock? Who can say at what cellular or molecular or atomic level sentience begins?

Consciousness as we imagine it is not the whole of possible consciousness. It is merely the form we can know at a particular time. How can we extrapolate from this limited view the experience of objects or other beings, much less suspect them as having a lesser spectrum of consciousness or a lower intelligence?

Some branches of science have investigated the consciousness of other beings, in plants, by measuring their cellular or systemic response to being cut. In such tests, however, we can see only that there is response. We can’t see the value of the feeling for the plant. We may posit the awareness of pain as suffering or we may see in the response mere chemical reaction. All of our judgements in that area are mere speculation, however, since no theory can prove the pain of the plant or the screaming animal. It is my contention that our duty to sentience doesn’t lie in these investigations or theories, however interesting they are to qualitative physiological or psychological commonalities between ourselves and other species, but rather in the acknowledgment of our ultimate unknowing, to acknowledge that we can never know other and that all of our measuring and theorizing and believing cannot make us sure of anything outside of ourselves.

This duty to sentience would not preclude the creation of theories or the use of arguments for their intended purpose—whether such arguments relate to our carnivorous “nature” or the use of animals for experiment or to our relationship with the earth or each other— but would require that we always remain mindful of the mysterious lives of others and that while acting on the hypothesis or the need or the drive or imperative of the moment, we do not assume or celebrate an imaginary absolute. This duty of sentience is not based on doubt, that which results from a desire for the absolute, but rather on a tolerance for uncertainty and a willingness to grant sovereignty to otherness that we can never know.

Converse to the acceptance of the ultimate unknowability of other, however, lies a duty to attend to the whole of our awareness and ability to empathically perceive otherness.

When I open the window, I hear the birds. I know from ingrained experience of patterns that their calls are spring calls, that nests are being built. I can visualize the bent strand of leaf or straw in a bird beak, pick images of dipping flights and flashes of color from underwing or throat or belly. I can imagine because we both have throats, the muscle contractions of their warbles, yells, and chirps. I can imagine the myriad of muscles in mouth, cheeks, tongue, and throat that I might have to use to imitate these sounds, the knowledge of the instrument that is my voice. I also hear the starting car, at such an early hour, someone surely starting out for work. I know it’s later than I first thought at waking because of the white noise of traffic and garbage trucks and then some distant hammering. I have all of this sensory experience and capacity to visualize, imagine and feel the movement of the world around me. It is my duty to make use of all I sense in navigating that world.

If this is true, when I see images of war and murder and violence and cruelty, is it not equally my duty to give equal ground to my ability to visualize, the imagine, to feel the moment of the world around those who suffer or feel and use this knowledge to navigate my ideas?

In our anthropocentric view of a cat, we think of it responding to its field of sentience by hearing not birds but “prey”, by using its memory to track and hunt, to escape the immediate and patterned dangers. If we really are as different from this as we imagine, doesn’t our more complex sentience and the depth of imagination and soul that human theory imagines in us make it our responsibility to use these capacities? To avoid reducing ourselves to limited sentience of “fight or flight” to imagine simple schemes of “it’s them or me” or pretending that inconveniences or endangered practices of lifestyle are matters of life and death? Many people might say they already do, but then there are bombings to abortion clinics by people who pretend that what others do is a threat to them and judgments about people who take drugs. There are constantly judgments thrown into the world that cannot have taken the full range of sensory information, memory, intellect or consciousness available into account. We filter information to get tasks done, but we can also filter into the sentient spectrum of the animals we to whom we feel so superior.


If we can know something, we must pay attention to that knowledge.

freud & narrative

Freud: Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex

In "Author's Preface to Third Edition" of his Contributions to the Theory of Sex, Freud emphasizes the empirical foundation of his essays, as well as the focus on considerations of therapeutic practice and purpose:

The dependence of this work on the psychoanalytic experiences which have determined the writing of it, shows itself not only in the selection but also in the arrangement of the material. A certain succession of stages was observed, the occasional factors are rendered prominent, the constitutional ones are left in the background, and the ontogenetic development receives greater consideration than the phylogenetic. For the occasional factors play the principal role in analysis, and are almost completely worked up in it, while the constitutional factors only become evident from behind as elements which have been made functional through experience, and a discussion of these would lead far beyond the working sphere of psychoanalysis.

Not only this, in terms of focus and causality, Freud looks at "constitution" as the "precipitate of a former experience of the species to which the newer experience of the individual being is added as the sum of the occasional factors." That the essence of group behavior and group consciousness is observable is implicit here; that the nature of the individual consciousness and behavior is additive to or variation of an essential or historical "story" of sexuality is also implicit. From these statements, the reader can expect Freud's essays to focus on the individual as extrapolated from observable group behavior over time and representative of variation with a clearly defined field and/or changes in the observable structure of sexuality over time. The empirical nature of his theory is thus clear; the absolute of the conglomerate whole of observed behavior implicitly so.

In the subsequent introduction to the first essay in the actual text, entitled "The Sexual Aberrations", Freud describes the biological view of "sexual impulse" and then what he attributes to popular beliefs about the same.

The fact of sexual need in man and animal is expressed in biology by the assumption of a "sexual impulse." This impulse is made analogous to the impulse of taking nourishment, and to hunger. The sexual expression corresponding to hunger not being found colloquilly [sic], science uses the expression "libido."

Popular conception makes definite assumptions concerning the nature and qualities of this sexual impulse. It is supposed to be absent during childhood and to commence about the time of and in connection with the maturing process of puberty; it is supposed that it manifests itself in irresistible attractions exerted by one sex upon the other, and that its aim is sexual union or at least such actions as would lead to union. (I:Introduction)

This is implicitly compared to the focus described in the aforementioned preface. Rather than an assumption of a biological impulse as explicitly imperative as the need to eat or the assumption of an idealized impulse that is a part of divine mythical union, Freud finds his explanation of the sexual impulse in the empirically observed behavior of the species over time and in the observed behavior or testimony of the individual.

What has become clear in these passages is not only his focus on empirical date and observed behavior but also the reliance on narrative mode as an indispensable part of the structure of psychotherapy, specifically the means of finding the causal story of the individual psyche and/or the story of subject's behavior (also object of study) in his setting.

Described in terms of narrative function, Freud clearly declares his independence from the "story" of biology or myth and chooses instead the "story" of the patient's behavior or psyche (ontogenetic view) as it relates to the story of the behavior of the group or category (phylogenetic view) as his point of departure:

The characteristics of the inversion in any individual may date back as far as his memory goes, or they may become manifest to him at a definite period before or after puberty.

and:

(a) It must be considered that inversion was a frequent manifestation among the ancient nations at the height of their culture. It was an institution endowed with important functions. (b) It is found to be unusually prevalent among savages and primitive races, whereas the term degeneration is generally limited to higher civilization (I. Bloch). Even among the most civilized nations of Europe, climate and race have a most powerful influence on the distribution of, and attitude toward, inversion. (I:1A. Inversion)

The causal, descriptive narrative of the psychotherapist is a reasoned unity: that the condition of inversion is congenital must be questioned, for example, due to the variety of its forms and the variety of the histories in their particulars of path and manifestation of traits or behavior at certain points of development or in conjunction with certain influences. Thus, congenital influence is taken out of the narrative scope.

The story of inversion, the narrative of the inverted individual is a multiple storyline, a host of variations, that, taken together, reveal an essence of sexuality that is biological, cultural and somehow graspable as an absolute set of variations.

The manifestation of homosexuality is therefore in no way connected to the narrative of sexuality as a free enterprise or to a penchant of consciousness to exist in a narrative mode of possibility, in which the self may be projected into a character, a setting and a storyline, on the basis of the basic functions of consciousness: the perception of self as something that is self-actualized on the basis of freedom that is narrative in structure.

How narrative may be a part of consciousness, how the story of one's sexuality might be one a trajectory of possibility within the individual consciousness, a possibility revealed through the narrative event itself, would never be the focus of a theory arising from the practice of psychotherapy, geared as it is toward an externally observable data.