The Visual (Un)Conscious and Its (Dis)Contents
The Visual (Un)Conscious and Its (Dis)Contents

Author: Bruno G. Breitmeyer

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2014-06-12

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 0191020788

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Visual control of our actions can be unconscious as well as conscious. For example, when a pedestrian steps onto a street and then suddenly steps back, to avoid being hit by an oncoming car, the pedestrian's visual system has been able to detect the car very rapidly. Since the registration of the approaching car in conscious vision could take a few hundreds of milliseconds - possibly too long to avoid being struck by it, the rapid injury-avoiding action has relied on the oncoming car being detected at unconscious levels in the visual system. So how, and at what level in the visual system is a stimulus processed unconsciously? This book explores unconscious and conscious vision, investigated using psychophysical and brain-recording methods. These methods allow microtemporal analyses of visual processing during the interval, ranging from a few 10s to a few 100s of milliseconds, between a stimulus's impinging on the retinae and its eliciting a behavioral response or a conscious percept. By tying these findings to well-known neuroanatomical and physiological substrates of vision, the book presents and discusses theoretical and empirical approaches to, and findings on, conscious and unconscious vision. In addition to presenting an in-depth, integrative review of recent and ongoing scientific and scholarly research, the book proposes several avenues for directing future research in these areas. It also provides a well articulated theoretical and a detailed empirical base that points to the special importance of the processing of surface properties of visual objects to their conscious vision. Aimed at scientists and scholars in visual cognition, visual neuroscience and, more broadly, cognitive science - including that part of the philosophical community that is currently occupied with the mind-brain problem, the book sheds new light on and advances experimental, philosophical, and scholarly research on visual consciousness.

Localization and Its Discontents
Localization and Its Discontents

Author: Katja Guenther

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-12-08

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 022628820X

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Both psychoanalysis and neurology have left equally prominent marks on the history of the twentieth century, yet they have been interpreted in vastly different ways. The two fields appear to manifest an insurmountable Cartesian dualism, one representing a psychological, the other a somatic approach to understanding personhood and subjectivity. Given this apparent opposition it is remarkable that both trace intellectual and practical roots back to the same "neuropsychiatry" that was dominant in the German-speaking world of the late nineteenth century. Katja Guenther investigates the significance of this historical connection, and in doing so not only reframes the relationship between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences but also provides resources for thinking about how they developed as independent fields. "Localization and Its Discontents "transforms how we think about their theory and practice. By understanding the historical connections and surprising parallels in their past development, we are newly positioned to reassess the assumptions that seem to determine their future.

The Constitution of Visual Consciousness
The Constitution of Visual Consciousness

Author: Steven M. Miller

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2013-08-28

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 9027271828

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This volume examines the neuroscience of visual consciousness, drawing on the phenomenon of binocular rivalry. It provides overviews of brain structure and function, the visual system, and neuroscientific methodologies, and then focuses on binocular rivalry from multiple perspectives: historical, psychophysical, electrophysiological, brain-imaging, brain stimulation, clinical and computational, with a glimpse also into the future of research in this exciting field. This is the first collected volume on binocular rivalry in nearly a decade and will be of special interest to researchers, scholars and students in the vision sciences, and more broadly in the psychological and clinical sciences. In addition, it lays foundations for a forthcoming interdisciplinary volume in this series on the constitution of phenomenal consciousness, making it essential reading for anyone interested in the science and philosophy of consciousness.

The Optical Unconscious
The Optical Unconscious

Author: Rosalind E. Krauss

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1994-07-25

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 9780262611053

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The Optical Unconscious is a pointed protest against the official story of modernism and against the critical tradition that attempted to define modern art according to certain sacred commandments and self-fulfilling truths. The account of modernism presented here challenges the vaunted principle of "vision itself." And it is a very different story than we have ever read, not only because its insurgent plot and characters rise from below the calm surface of the known and law-like field of modernist painting, but because the voice is unlike anything we have heard before. Just as the artists of the optical unconscious assaulted the idea of autonomy and visual mastery, Rosalind Krauss abandons the historian's voice of objective detachment and forges a new style of writing in this book: art history that insinuates diary and art theory, and that has the gait and tone of fiction. The Optical Unconscious will be deeply vexing to modernism's standard-bearers, and to readers who have accepted the foundational principles on which their aesthetic is based. Krauss also gives us the story that Alfred Barr, Meyer Shapiro, and Clement Greenberg repressed, the story of a small, disparate group of artists who defied modernism's most cherished self-descriptions, giving rise to an unruly, disruptive force that persistently haunted the field of modernism from the 1920s to the 1950s and continues to disrupt it today. In order to understand why modernism had to repress the optical unconscious, Krauss eavesdrops on Roger Fry in the salons of Bloomsbury, and spies on the toddler John Ruskin as he amuses himself with the patterns of a rug; we find her in the living room of Clement Greenberg as he complains about "smart Jewish girls with their typewriters" in the 1960s, and in colloquy with Michael Fried about Frank Stella's love of baseball. Along the way, there are also narrative encounters with Freud, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard. To embody this optical unconscious, Krauss turns to the pages of Max Ernst's collage novels, to Marcel Duchamp's hypnotic Rotoreliefs, to Eva Hesse's luminous sculptures, and to Cy Twombly's, Andy Warhol's, and Robert Morris's scandalous decoding of Jackson Pollock's drip pictures as "Anti-Form." These artists introduced a new set of values into the field of twentieth-century art, offering ready-made images of obsessional fantasy in place of modernism's intentionality and unexamined compulsions.

Invisible, but how? The depth of unconscious processing as inferred from different suppression techniques.
Invisible, but how? The depth of unconscious processing as inferred from different suppression techniques.

Author: Julien Dubois

Publisher: Frontiers Media SA

Published: 2015-02-09

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 2889194205

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To what level are invisible stimuli processed by the brain in the absence of conscious awareness? It is widely accepted that simple visual properties of invisible stimuli are processed; however, the existence of higher-level unconscious processing (e.g., involving semantic or executive functions) remains a matter of debate. Several methodological factors may underlie the discrepancies found in the literature, such as different levels of conservativeness in the definition of “unconscious” or different dependent measures of unconscious processing. In this research topic, we are particularly interested in yet another factor: inherent differences in the amount of information let through by different suppression techniques. In the same conditions of well-controlled, conservatively established invisibility, can we show that some of the techniques in the “psychophysical magic” arsenal (e.g., masking, but also visual crowding, attentional blink, etc.) reliably lead to higher-level unconscious processing than others (e.g., interocular suppression)? Some authors have started investigating this question, using multiple techniques in similar settings . We argue that this approach should be extended and refined. Indeed, in order to delineate the frontiers of the unconscious mind using a contrastive method, one has to disentangle the limits attributable to unawareness itself, and those attributable to the technique inducing unawareness. The scope of this research topic is to provide a platform for scientists to contribute insights and further experiments addressing this fundamental question.

The Geographical Unconscious
The Geographical Unconscious

Author: Argyro Loukaki

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-09

Total Pages: 502

ISBN-13: 1317030664

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This ambitious and innovative volume stretches over time and space, over the history of modernity in relation to antiquity, between East and West, to offer insights into what the author terms the 'geographical unconscious.' She argues that, by tapping into this, we can contribute towards the reinstatement of some kind of morality and justice in today's troubled world. Approaching selected moments from ancient times to the present of Greek cultural and aesthetic geographies on the basis of a wide range of sources, the book examines diachronic spatiotemporal flows, some of which are mainly cultural, others urban or landscape-related, in conjunction with parallel currents of change and key issues of our time in the West more generally, but also in the East. In doing so, The Geographical Unconscious reflects on visual and spatial perceptions through the ages; it re-considers selective affinities plus differences and identifies enduring age-old themes, while stressing the deep ancient wisdom, the disregarded relevance of the aesthetic, and the unity between human senses, nature, and space. The analysis provides new insights towards the spatial complexities of the current age, the idea of Europe, of the East, the West, and their interrelations, as well as the notion of modernity.

The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature
The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature

Author: Larson Powell

Publisher: Camden House

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9781571133823

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"Even after the end of modernism and postmodernism, the grandiose fantasies of artifice and self-reference that have informed so much modernist literature still resonate in the "social constructivism" of current literary and cultural theory: in the idea that we can perform or construct "identities" or social roles without external constraint, as if we had consumer choice of self. Larson Powell's book posits nature as a limit to such fantasies, redefining aesthetic modernity's conception of and relation to nature and therefore its relation to reality. He shows how nature, no longer the idealized, maternally coded Utopia of the Romantics, becomes the trace of specific political, sexual, and technological traumas. The book's four chapters center on the representation of nature in German prose and-especially-poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, Gottfried Benn, Bertolt Brecht, and Alfred Doblin from the years 1900 to 1945, while making reference to other literatures as well." "Powell's term "the Technological Unconscious" refers to a point of intersection between psychoanalysis and social and scientific theories of modernism and also to the philosophical mediation between history and nature, a motif important from Kant to Adorno. Powell critiques the tendency toward jargon of an often merely rhetorical "theory," while continuing to develop the philosophical and conceptual inheritance of Continental traditions. He analyzes in connection with the works treated the conceptions of subject and system in the theories of Adorno, Luhmann, and Lacan and their relation to their complement, nature. The Technological Unconscious is thus an important polemical intervention both in the debates over interdisciplinarity and in those between eclectic "culturalist" theories such as New Historicism and postcolonialism on the one hand and systems theory and psychoanalysis on the other." --Book Jacket.

Automotive Prosthetic
Automotive Prosthetic

Author: Charissa N. Terranova

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2014-01-15

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 0292754515

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In the twenty-first century, we are continually confronted with the existential side of technology—the relationships between identity and the mechanizations that have become extensions of the self. Focusing on one of humanity’s most ubiquitous machines, Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art combines critical theory and new media theory to form the first philosophical analysis of the car within works of conceptual art. These works are broadly defined to encompass a wide range of creative expressions, particularly in car-based conceptual art by both older, established artists and younger, emerging artists, including Ed Ruscha, Martha Rosler, Richard Prince, Sylvie Fleury, Yael Bartana, Jeremy Deller, and Jonathan Schipper. At its core, the book offers an alternative formation of conceptual art understood according to technology, the body moving through space, and what art historian, curator, and artist Jack Burnham calls “relations.” This thought-provoking study illuminates the ways in which the automobile becomes a naturalized extension of the human body, incarnating new forms of “car art” and spurring a technological reframing of conceptual art. Steeped in a sophisticated take on the image and semiotics of the car, the chapters probe the politics of materialism as well as high/low debates about taste, culture, and art. The result is a highly innovative approach to contemporary intersections of art and technology.