Depiction

4. Our experience of pictures

One way to re-establish ties to the visual is to appeal to the idea that depictions are experienced in a special way. Suppose your are confronted by a picture, but do not understand it at all. You can see quite clearly what colour lies where on its surface. Perhaps you can even see that it is a picture of something or other; certainly your experience may give you good grounds to suspect this. But you cannot see what is depicted by the picture. Then, in a moment, you ‘get the point’. You can see that the picture is of a horse, that the strange-shaped lump that had puzzled you depicts its head, those straggly lines of colour depict its legs, and so forth. It does not seem to you that anything in your environment has altered. You still see the same patches of colour in the same locations. And yet in some sense things now look very different. You see the surface organized in a way you could not see before.

There are two experiences of the picture here, one accompanying the successful interpretation, the other preceding it. The second experience has a distinctive phenomenology, or subjective character, for anyone who enjoys it. It is a way of seeing the coloured surface, but a way somehow involving the thought of what is absent - in this case, a horse. And it is, in some sense, an integrated whole; unlike, for instance, the experience of seeing a castle while visualizing something else.

Some, most notably Richard Wollheim (1987), have argued that every picture can in principle be experienced in two ways, parallel to those above. Moreover, they have claimed that experiences like the second hold the key to depiction. The idea is that in those experiences one’s awareness of the picture’s surface involves the thought of something else, and that thing is just what the picture depicts. In the standard terminology, one sees in the picture what is depicted. For such philosophers, the key task is to characterize this experience more fully. After all, what has been said thus far fails to distinguish ‘seeing-in’ from many other experiences, such as some of those commonly discussed under the heading ‘perceiving an aspect’ (see Gestalt psychology §2; Wittgenstein, L.).

Wollheim’s own account of the experience of seeing one thing in another is as follows. It is a visual experience of a differentiated surface, and has two ‘folds’, or aspects. One aspect is in some way analogous to the experience of seeing the surface without seeing anything in it. The other is in some way analogous to the experience of seeing (face-to-face) whatever is seen in the surface. It is not possible to say anything illuminating about the nature of the analogies here involved; indeed to ask for such clarification would be a sign of confusion.

Many, while sympathetic to Wollheim’s thought that seeing-in is the key to depiction, have rejected the idea that nothing more about it can usefully be said. This response is vindicated by the need to offer an account of depiction that accommodates the features mentioned in §3. For unless Wollheim can say more about seeing-in, he cannot hope to offer explanations of those features. Consider, for example, the fact that depiction is always from a point of view. It is natural for the defender of seeing-in to try to account for this by tying what is depicted to what is seen in a surface, and then by establishing that seeing something in a surface itself necessarily involves a point of view on that absent item. What justifies this last claim? The answer must come from the fact that one fold of seeing-in is analogous to an experience, that of seeing the absent item face to face, which itself necessarily involves a point of view. However, this is only the sketch for an explanation until that analogy is clarified. What exactly guarantees the presence of perspective in the fold, given its presence in the analogous experience? If I describe a visual experience in words, my representation is itself of something that is necessarily from a point of view. Does it follow that my description will be perspectival? Hardly: I might simply describe the objects and certain features of the experience of them without implying anything about the point from which they are viewed. So, quite generally, a representation can be linked to something perspectival without being perspectival itself. The question for Wollheim is why the analogy he claims to find between one fold of seeing-in and seeing something in the flesh should evade this general rule. If he is to answer, he must say more about what exactly the analogy is.