Framing Consciousness in Art: Transcultural Perspectives. (Consciousness, Literature & the Arts) 9042025816, 9789042025813, 9781441613424

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Framing Consciousness in Art

Consciousness Liter฀ture฀ ฀the฀฀Arts฀ ฀

&

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General Editor:

Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe Editorial Board:

Anna Bonshek, Per Brask, John Danvers, William S. Haney II, Amy Ione, Michael Mangan, Arthur Versluis, Christopher Webster, Ralph Yarrow

Framing Consciousness in Art Transcultural Perspectives

GREGORY MINISSALE

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

Cover illustration: Untitled, collage by the author, 2009 Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoef he paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2581-3 ISSN: 1573-2193 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Printed in the Netherlands

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments …………….……….…………………….…………………..7 Introduction ……………..…………….…………………..………………………9 Part 1. Framing Art History ……...…………….…………………………….17 Part 2. Framing Philosophy …..……………………..……………………….65 Part 3. Framing Consciousness Studies .………….……...……………...103 Part 4. Framing Consciousness in Art ……………..…...……...…………193 Bibliography …………..………….………………………………………….…379 Index ……………..……………………..……………………………….……….387

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the help and encouragement of David Rosenthal, Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, particularly for useful comments on my adaptation of his higher-order thought hypothesis as an art historical critical tool. In addition, many thanks to the following scholars for clarifications of image consciousness in Husserlian phenomenology: Professor Eduard Marbach, Institute of Philosophy, University of Bern and Christian Lotz, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Michigan. Many thanks to Dan Zahavi, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen who has been exceptionally patient with my questions about his work. I would also like to thank Gary Shapiro, Professor of Philosophy, University of Richmond for useful discussions on the philosophy of art. For insightful comments and skilful editing, many thanks to Firuza Pastakia, Malcolm Sired and Christa Stevens of Rodopi Press. Last but not least, many thanks to Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe, Professor of Drama at the Lincoln School of Performing Arts, University of Lincoln for his encouragement, editing expertise and patience in the preparation of this book.

Introduction The road that leads from painting pictures to thinking philosophy is not as long or circuitous as one might imagine. Some artists, art historians and philosophers, many of whose ideas are examined in this book, have shown that there may in fact be no distance at all between the two activities. Painting and thinking philosophy can be experienced at the same time. Just as with writing, art presents not only the external marks of philosophy but in the doing of the art, in its execution, artists are often engaged in philosophical reflection. In such moments, thinking and doing become one. This has encouraged some to claim that art is a visual kind of philosophy. There are, however, problems with this assertion, not least because it seems too lofty and ambitious, considering that philosophy with its many concepts and schools of thought presents a myriad of possibilities. How do we match this largesse to that of art, which presents an infinitude of shapes and forms rising up before us and in the imagination? How exactly can philosophical concepts be painted, and what kind of philosophy are we talking about: Stoicism, positivism, phenomenology? And perhaps more importantly, how is philosophical method made visible? Numerous volumes by Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and others have dealt with these issues directly or indirectly. It is not the aim of this book to follow these examples by aiming to provide answers to the fundamental questions that philosophy poses about the mind, the self, reality, ethics, life, beauty and idealism. Nor indeed does this book try to find the visual equivalents of these themes in the long and densely patterned history of art. Instead, Framing Consciousness in Art attempts a smaller scale study, isolating one kind of art and a sample of philosophy to examine under a microscope, so to speak, how the two might be mutually illuminating. The research that I have undertaken in this book builds on a longstanding interest in a relatively specialised area of art which has

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allowed naïve questions about art and reality to mature into the kind asked above in the first paragraph. This fascination has centred on the not uncommon but richly evocative ‘pictures-in-pictures’ found in painting, photography and film. These are images which represent artists painting a picture or viewers inspecting paintings in a gallery. The device is also used in film, showing an audience watching a film in a cinema or even in their living rooms, a common enough transposition. In these situations we see a picture ‘inside’ a picture and it is sometimes possible to see yet another picture placed inside the second, and so on. Such a configuration of the visual field is attractive to inquisitive minds, promising alternative dimensions and generating visions of halls of mirrors, science fiction fantasy and infinite regress. In this book, my interest in this particular type of compositional organisation brings together a variety of works of art that share this visual exposition. This leads me to the other part of the equation: the precise area of philosophy which I hope to show is engaged with this kind of art, the aspect of the philosophy of mind we call consciousness. Crucial to this delimiting exercise has been Edmund Husserl’s description in Ideas of a painting in the Dresden Gallery by David Teniers which depicts a gallery with many pictures in it. Husserl used the painting as a way of expressing his ideas about how consciousness directed at the world of objects is organised as a series of different kinds of thoughts: visual memory, abstract and rational visualisations, and even thoughts about thoughts (what we now call ‘higher-order thoughts’). Focusing on the Teniers painting in its original setting can make viewers conscious of what they are doing: standing in a gallery looking at a painting that depicts many pictures in a gallery. This is similar to the phenomenological process that Husserl described as looking ‘straightforward and reflectively’ at the same time. It seems to me the kind of consciousness that this inspection of pictures-in-pictures activates is self-analytical. It takes the picture and its complex use of ‘folded’ space as a mirror to reflect back or characterise conscious experience as a series of framed thoughts. But art is no mere reflection of consciousness. Consciousness is enactive, it constructs the world, the visual field in which it is actively involved yet both the production and reception of art have powerful roles to play in many conscious processes. Much of this book extends and develops a fine grained analysis of the structure of consciousness, how it comes about in many other

Introduction

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comparable situations in art where one appears to look at oneself looking while inspecting a picture of others depicted doing the same. We often organise our thought visually, sometimes even diagrammatically. This visible organisation interacts with both the contents of our thoughts and their relations to each other—how one thought connects to another or generates another ‘inside’ it—to build up a conscious experience as patterns of exposition, as different principles of seriality. Although not immediately apparent, I believe that embedded in art’s organisation of a scene, these patterns emerge as the diagrammatic equivalent of structures of thought but which also instantiate that thought. These patterns are intelligible, especially when they engage with pictorial narratives to produce a complex web of higherorder thoughts which structure philosophical thought and conscious experience. Art is very rarely just about telling stories or recording important events; the visual method of exposition, the unfolding before the eyes, presents to us a visual map of the artist’s consciousness and its organisation of framed thoughts and their relations. In so doing, art provides a visual and mental topography of our own conscious involvement, a process of intersubjective negotiation by visual means. The viewed object in such cases can be said to structure or guide the viewer’s response. Before it is possible to link consciousness to art in this way, it is important to address art history, philosophy and consciousness studies which give us the analytical and conceptual tools to guide us in our understanding of this complex relationship, particularly because the most important epistemological structure shared by these disciplines is the logic of framing. The implicit, yet persistent, language of framing and reframing organises aspects of these different traditions of knowledge, and often guides theit underlying discursive practices. The metaphors of theoretical or scientific language are spatial and serial, and often employ space-within-space mental images which obviously bear a strong relationship to visual traditions of organising space in art. It is my argument that these framing metaphors are not only a means to understand consciousness verbally and textually, but are also seen in art as the picture-in-the-picture and as various other framing devices. In order to enable the kind of comparisons between the different arts and literature I will use a more general term to describe the

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picture-in-the-picture, and that is: the-frame-in-the-frame. One of the advantages of using the term, the frame-in-the-frame, as opposed to the picture-in-the-picture, is that, although they suggest each other and are often found together, the latter is more specific to paintings and the former is more widely seen, for example, as the framing of a view by a window, or a reflection in a mirror, or even as picture seen inside a doorway. Many of these framing devices are used in film and photography, and described in texts. These frames-in-frames are props to delimit scenes and focal points within wider contexts in order to suggest specific thoughts within more general ones. Both the general and the particular are prolonged and balanced in the represented consciousness of the characters, protagonists or viewers depicted. And the viewers watching these depictions become involved in the characters’ balancing act of these thoughts in frames. In some texts, it is common to read about images such as pictures in rooms or characters’ pictorial imaginings. But texts also adopt lexical sets which suggest binaries such as centre/periphery, inside/outside and surface/depth metaphors, binaries which Derrida has successfully questioned by exploring notions of the co-presence of the margin and the text and the tradition of the parergon. Here, a third level of structural organisation that coincides with the visual organisation of the frame-in-the-frame is the relationship of footnotes to the main text, quotes and references which may be seen to embed meanings found in the main text, as the main text embeds quotes within it. Take, for example, the following quote referring to syntax: […] it makes it possible for us to segment our speech, and also to segment our displays, into parts that are not just concatenated sequentially one after the other, but parts that are stacked within one another, in the fashion of Chinese boxes or Russian dolls […] Syntax works not only with individual statements but also in long arguments, not only in particular judgements but also in extended reasoning […] We should not focus so much on the simple judgement that we forget the larger conversation in which each judgment is embedded (Sokowloski 2005: 335).

This paragraph explains, as well as exemplifies, a structure of exposition as a series of frames-in-frames. The reader reads about a thought sequence arranged as a nested series which also co-opts or reflects, to some extent, the pattern of the reader’s own dynamic structure of thought involved in the reading of this passage. It also exemplifies the textual framing of meaning ‘inside’ meaning, literally as well as figu-

Introduction

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ratively. This frame-in-the-frame structure, which the writer also suggests is deeply linguistically embedded as a logical structure, is not only conveyed by an example of syntax describing syntax. The writer demonstrates the structure of the frame-in-the-frame as a pattern of thought by organising the text accordingly and he conveys the pattern by suggesting images of this organisation: “Chinese boxes” and “Russian dolls”, mental images ‘embedded’ in the text that strengthen the explanation while making us aware of its structural organisation. By extension, this book provides examples of how it is possible to see thought similarly organised, not only with the mental images texts suggest but actually, in art. In such situations, the viewer is ‘watching thought’ and its unfolding or intensifying. Although not necessarily, this experience is often self-reflexive. In other words, in addition to viewing the visual organisation of the artist’s thought, watching thought entails watching one’s own thought, exemplified by the visual pattern found in the work of art. Thus, the visual frame-in-the-frame provides viewers with an opportunity to schematise their own thought patterns and their own methods of visual inspection. The frame-in-theframe in the form of points and lines in the visual field allows us to focus on and begin to define consciousness in its details. The underlying logical structure of thinking that I characterise as the frame-in-the-frame is common to both textual and visual examples, reflecting both our syntax and our art. These deeply embedded and embedding structures link examples of art to aspects of philosophy via consciousness, which is itself structured along these lines. All the examples I provide share a pattern of exposition, a method. This inevitably involves finding in philosophical and scientific works the mental imagery of liminal areas, demarcations, or rooms within which there are pictures, reflections or examples of the mise en abyme in order to see how they relate to visualisations of similar framing devices in art. As I show in later chapters, such an endeavour reveals some important parallels between art history, philosophy of mind and consciousness. One of the most important of these is the frame-in-theframe structure evident in both mental envisioning and optical processing. It is important to note that it is possible to have both a mental visual and optical experience more or less simultaneously while inspecting a painting or an illustration in a text, or indeed, during the process of painting itself, when mental image formation rises up from the visual evidence and where the visually apparent is, in turn, shaped

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or colored by this mental envisioning. For example, I may be looking at a painting of a Chinese ceramic flask with a pattern, perhaps a twisted dragon incised on it painted in particular shade of turquoise that reminds me of a lake I once saw, an image of which rises up in my memory, and I which I fancy becomes intricately involved with the brushstrokes and marks in the turquoise pigment on the surface of the canvas, fleshing out the memory, giving it substance and detail while I am also deciphering the flask’s patterns. A common misconception is that it is the eye that sees. Rather, it is the basic apparatus of the eye along with specialised areas of the visual cortex which process stimuli in the visual field, but seeing also involves the cooperation of other brain areas on both the left and right side of the brain. The movements of the eye (‘saccades’) scanning the details of a film screen from one point to another form the preliminary information reconnaissance for other processes of thought to do with memory and the imagination, logical reasoning, interpretation, selfmonitoring and also, emotions.1 These processes are ways of ‘seeing’, or rather constructing what is seen, which may work in cooperation with optical information gathering. Mental image formation occurs while remembering or daydreaming and even while scanning the visual field, and is often triggered during reading. Another example could be when I am reading words on a page that describe an oil painting in a frame of faded gold. In this dark and glossy picture of shimmering beauty, there is a room with a painting in it hung in a bright and ageless gilded frame. This image of a picture-in-a-picture or a frame-in-a-frame is a mental image: it has no existence in material form, and however accurately I describe it, it will not be the same in my mind as it is in the mind of the reader and yet it can be intersubjectively mediated by art. It is important to note that mental images are not stored as picture-like images that can be hung on a wall and we do not need actual eyes inside the head to see them. There are different types of mental images which are stored or made accessible in different ways, from the topographic and schematic to the symbolic (Pinker 1997, 284) or they are predispositions 1

Although there is evidence that such saccades are also searching for patterns in the visual field which are relevant to image schemas pre-formed in the mind: “[…] our emotions gear us up for action and then we search and scan the environment for relevant perceptual cues which become conscious to the extent that they resonate with image schemas” (Ellis 1999, 163).

Introduction

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for distinct neural firings, relationships and routines.2 Mental images do not need external stimuli in order to arise. In the process of scanning the world, however, which is also a way of constructing it, we find the raw material for our library of mental images, but the world may have these images or features of them already there for us to find, where what we discover is, in a sense, what we recognise and what we were looking for.3 In this book, I shall examine many images of this kind and their relation to art, as this is an important way to examine the relationship between art and consciousness. In ‘Part I: Framing Art History’, I examine a number of key texts on framing and the picture-in-the-picture in order to show a consistent bracketing out of consciousness as a factor in the production, reception and critical theory of framing devices. I take art historical analyses such as these further by considering the role higher-order thought plays in the art experience. There is also a critique here of art history’s continual characterisation of the painting-in-the-painting as a token of Euro-American modernist self-reflexivity which marginalises or otherwise fails to recognise its occurrence outside of this framing of cultural and intellectual superiority. Higher-order thought evident is art is not the sole preserve of European and American minds. In ‘Part 2: Framing Philosophy’, I deal with framing and the framein-the-frame as a recurrent metaphor and as a principle of organising thought in Husserl, Sartre, Derrida and others. I also show how consciousness as a factor in the thinking and use of the frame-in-theframe remains implicit in this tradition of thinking. I try to allow this to emerge from within my reading of these traditions of thought, in order to show the usefulness of these philosophers’ concepts in analysing art. ‘Part 3: Framing Consciousness Studies’ deals with various models of consciousness, notions of symmetry and parallel processes, the 2

There is no singular mental faculty responsible for their activation or storage. It is likely that there are various ways in which different kinds of mental images are stored and retrieved in different places and as relations between these areas. I do not think it necessary to decide here on whether mental images are analogue or propositional in nature, it is more than likely that combined aspects of each theory and enactive concepts get closer to defining what mental images are and how they arise, more accurately. For an overview of mental imagery, see Thomas, 2008. 3 “This ‘looking for’ activity has already begun the forming of visual or conceptual imagery prior to any occipital activity [visual processing of objects]” (Ellis 1999, 166).

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structure of higher-order thoughts, the stream, and self-consciousness. Here I show that, implicitly, these models in one way or another all use the underlying logic of framing and the frame-in-the-frame. ‘Part 4: Framing Consciousness in Art’ uses the arguments developed in Parts 1-3 to attempt a new way of analysing a diversity of artworks. I analyse a number of examples from Velázquez, Vermeer, Degas and Magritte to Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Rear Window, as well as experimental video, installation art and a host of other, non-EuroAmerican art forms from around the world. All of these examples use the picture-in-a-picture to construct messages engaging with image consciousness is complex ways. The frame-in-the-frame is the object of study in all sections, yet it also dictates the structure of the exposition of this study which may be visually imagined as a series of Chinese boxes or Russian dolls. This allows us to see art history in philosophy in studies of consciousness, and all three in art.

1. Framing Art History There is immediately an apparent absence, the absence of consciousness as a factor in understanding the psychology and critical appraisal of framing in art. This is evident in a number of art historical texts, and some important philosophical ones, too.1 These texts deal with aspects of framing but are all united in their framing out of consciousness as the cause or effect of framing devices in art. This chapter attempts a more explicit acknowledgement and analysis of consciousness in the production and reception of frames in art and seeks to analyse critically the language used to describe framing in art history, which only implicitly suggests assumptions about consciousness and its operations. I begin with the thought-provoking essay by Ortega y Gasset entitled, Mediations on the Frame, written in 1943. The author cleverly opened his account with a framing device, suggesting that the subject of his essay came about almost incidentally as the result of a kind of ennui produced by his over-familiarity with certain pictures hung on his wall. After an attempt to analyse them as archetypes of masculinity and femininity, he transformed his analysis into something else that has entered his consciousness, the frames by which these archetypal images are presented. This suggests that the essay is an encounter of consciousness and nonconsciousness, and in this, the prose itself sufficiently imitates the visual function of the frame. Gasset is framing his essay on framing; by showing how one might come to contemplate the frame. More than this, he is framing something that usually remains unnoticed or ignored. The essay seeks to illuminate the principle of framing by demonstrating it in writing about it. The subject 1

These concerns, largely focussed on painting are exemplified by studies such as Brettell and Steven Starling 1986; Newbery, Bisacca and Kanter 1990; Heydenryk 1993; Van Thiel and Kops 1995; Simon 1996; Mitchell and Roberts 1996; Duro 1996 and Wilner 2000.

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arises, as he would have us believe, from outside of the frame of what he was intending to write about, the margins of his intentionality, much like consciousness of the frame of art can arise on the periphery of the field of vision: Similarly, the frame does not call attention to itself. Proof of that is simple. If each of you were to reflect upon the paintings you know best, you would find that you cannot recall the frames in which they are set. We are not used to seeing a frame (Gasset 1990: 188).

This suggests that the function of the frame is to remain invisible to consciousness yet, in an apparent contradiction, his writing testifies to his consciousness of it. So we read a text that is about making something implicit, explicit. He psychologises the frame as an indeterminate area, and although he does not state it explicitly, he posits the frame as a nonconscious thing that is inserted between two conscious things: In order to isolate one thing from another, a third thing is needed which must be neither like first nor the second—a neutral object. Now the frame is not the wall, a merely utilitarian fragment of the real world; but neither is it quite the enchanted surface of the painting. As the frontier for both regions, the frame serves to neutralise a brief strip of wall. And acting as a trampoline, it sends our attention hurtling off to the legendary dimension of the aesthetic island (Gasset 1990: 189).

Gasset uses these images: a neutral object (between two warring factions?) a trampoline (on which attention, or consciousness does not settle) and an island, around which there is nothing but the depths of the sea. Much is made of the frame as an intermediary that functions by not calling attention to itself. Interestingly, Gasset writes of how the ubiquitous gilded frame […] is a pure, shapeless color. We do not attribute the reflections of a metallic or glazed object to the object itself […] we are unable to arrange our perception of it” (Gasset 1990: 190).

We are relatively conscious of the wall and the painting on the wall but the frame and perhaps our nonconscious recognition of it cuts off consciousness of the reality signified by the wall and trampolines us, with consciousness hardly able to settle on it, to the island of unreal-

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ity, which is the painting—and all this in an instant.2 The frame’s function is to elide consciousness of reality by creating a nonconscious scission cutting off consciousness from itself, from the wall that remains out of the picture while we look at the painting. The gilded frame’s reflections: [l]ike little daggers, incessantly cut the lines that we unwittingly string up between the unreal painting and the surrounding reality. For that same reason, at the entrance to Paradise one finds an angel brandishing a flaming sword— that is, with a reflection in its fist (Gasset 1990: 189).

The reflection turns off self-reflection, the sword cuts reality from unreality. Gasset’s final paragraph suggests defeat in dealing with the subject of framing adequately and he drifts on to other subjects but not without leaving the impression that his brief foray into the critical theory of how the frame works in art is a kind of circular journey or reflexive loop, his consciousness examining his nonconscious understanding and perceptions of what happens in front of the frame. He exits this hermeneutic circle; he exits the frame, restoring consciousness, moving on to other musings that take him demonstrably far, even into China and Japan: “it would have been worthwhile to pose the suggestive question of why paintings in China and Japan are usually unframed”(Gasset 1990: 189). One might also add that this ingenious essay begs one more question: if the frame switches off consciousness of the wall, which may remained switched off while we travel through the depicted spaces of the painting, does it get switched on again when we encounter inside 2

Interestingly, an installation by Jorge Macchi in collaboration with Edgardo Rudnitzky, created for the Istanbul Biennale, entitled La Ascensión, 2005, consisted of a mural on the ceiling after Maria's Ascension, by Italian eighteenth century artist Tommaso Cassani Bugoni under which was placed a trampoline, the shape and measurements of which correspond to those of the fresco on the ceiling. At regular intervals, the visitor could hear a musical composition featuring the sound made by a leaping acrobat using a trampoline. The play here is not only on the absence and presence of consciousness which weaves in and out of the art experience but this is signified by the rhythms of the trampoline. The image of the ascension (on earth as in heaven) also deals with the embodiment of consciousness and the attempt to enter the frame of the mural. Here, and in Gasset’s essay, the trampoline imagery is used as token of consciousness as an instant, as an ascension ‘into’ the art experience, a stepping stone of consciousness (a ‘coming down to earth’) between two nonconscious states of artistic rapture: ascending and descending.

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that imaginary space, the depiction of a painting on a wall, replete with shining frame, the frame-in-the-frame? Gasset’s trampoline suggests that consciousness is perforated by nonconscious moments. The reverse must also be true: that nonconsciousness bears within its continuum islands of consciousness. This interpenetration is a kind of framing of the one by the other, a process activated by the visual experience of framing in art. The frame-in-the-frame activates this interpenetrative flux by visually exemplifying it. In a more recent article on framing by Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, which attempts critically to deal with the frame in classical art, we begin with a quote from Poussin who recommends that one of his paintings should have a frame “so that when gazing at it in all its parts, the rays of the eye are retained and not scattered outside” (Lebensztejn 1988: 37). Rather than comment on the interesting assumptions underlying this statement Lebensztejn chose to focus on the latter part of the quote which emphasises that the frame should not draw attention to itself, that it should “unite very sweetly with the colours without clashing with them.” His interpretation is that Poussin intended that “the frame should disappear as much as possible, so that the depicted space appears naturally self-contained” (Lebensztejn 1988: 37, my italics). It is clear that the word “naturally” is, of course, quite subjective, and what Lebensztejn is really thinking about here is that the frame should be naturally overlooked, or given, as if by some universal standards of appearance a consensus would prevail to direct the eye to pay no conscious attention to the frame as an object that exists in its own right. He also lists some discordant views about how the frame can interfere with the suspension of disbelief. Yet there is some recognition that the frame is a mechanism to turn off conscious inspection, and some indication of how this might work. Thus, the suppression of the frame, letting it slip by unnoticed in history, is cooperative with the suppression of consciousness that must take place in order for the frame to remain invisible. It is as if the repression of the frame hides another, different discussion of the mechanisms of conscious control which must be achieved in order for this first kind of repression to take place. The frame becomes a symbol of a consciousness that must be suppressed in order for another to emerge, a consciousness of the second, fictive frame inside the painting. This is so even in Lebensztejn’s discussion of Romanticist works that try to fuse art and life so that the frame does not register in conscious

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thought. The study then goes on to modern works by Schwitters, Mondrian, Ad Reinhardt and Brice Marden where the frame is either absorbed into the representation or made invisible in other ways. Ad Reinhardt retains the black frame around his work as an invisible presence. And this Lebensztejn sees as a continuation of the framing of classical space. “The frame here becomes the shame of art” and like all acts of shame are swept under the watchful eye of consciousness. One could argue that Mondrian brings the frame into his work as part of the very structure of his painted world. This certainly allows for a rather complex consciousness of what is going on. His paintings are equivocal because they suggest both space and concrete matter, both the bounded and unbounded. But there are also anticlassical elements here. One might also have picked up on how Reinhardt’s work plays with the conscious attention of the viewer, turning it off and on with his vast blackness that invites notions of visibility and invisibility. The black frame around Reinhardt’s work is a parody of the frame framing nothingness through its own invisibility. And we return again to something else Lebensztejn has overlooked, Poussin’s more interesting remarks that the framed painting functions so that “the rays of the eye are retained and not scattered outside”. In Reinhardt’s black paintings framed by black frames, the “eyes rays” which I would like to understand as metaphors for consciousness, or at least conscious vision, are scattered inside the pictorial space, yet there is no obvious frame to contain them, it is a different dynamic. Here, consciousness may alight at any point and know that this one point is the same as any other. Consciousness can be everywhere at the same time as directed at one focal point. Peripheral and central vision mean nothing here. Here, the frame/painting relationship is reversed because the painting is ‘empty’: visibility is excluded from its domain; consciousness is directed to the painting’s symbolism of invisibility, secured by its edges, now made vitally important and functional, for they send consciousness back into the void, which is the world. The centre disperses consciousness outwards to an ideal point from where it must return; the frame or edge are continually signalled by this rebounded consciousness. In classical framing, the frame acts as a switch to turn off consciousness, here the drift of consciousness, its dispersal, its being ‘switched off’ and overlooked, is managed by the centre, and it is the frame or edge that appoints consciousness and redirects its intensity

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inwards. It is only by meeting consciousness head on, can we find the key to understanding the function of framing in art; but by the same token, this acknowledgment tells us consciousness is the object of art, its unsaid aim and target. It is interesting that the absence of the frame can allow us to see the power of the frame in bestowing familiarity, order and security on the viewer, yet when this is taken away, this subtly undercuts these supports. But this mechanism is not the sole province of modernism. In Mannerist Mantua in the Palazzo de Te, Sala dei Giganti, Giulio Romano painted a fresco of giants pulling down buildings and structures in a scene of havoc and destruction. According to historical records the whole scene was disconcerting to viewers, mainly because its illusionist space is not clearly marked off from the viewer’s as it was normally with the convention of the frame. By all accounts, this absence disempowered the viewer’s rational distinctions between fiction and reality.3 Ultimately, such a lack of clear understanding can undermine existential sureties, as well. This must have been felt more acutely in a claustrophobic room, the walls of which are covered with illusions of falling masonry, broken pillars and crumbling walls. If the removal of the frame can have subtle disorienting effects, then what effect does the addition of an extra frame have? This is a question that I will endeavour to answer in detail in Part 4. Suffice it to say here, consciousness cannot prevent itself from ‘seeing in’ the frame-in-the-frame and residing in that space, and in so doing, it splits itself into scepticism and make-believe, and at times it becomes conscious of its own dithering.4 It is an interesting ambiguity that consciousness negotiates; it struggles to become more conscious of the subtleties of the problem and its own powers of dealing with it. It is not only a conundrum ‘out there’ but one intimately connected to its relationship to itself. The Sala dei Giganti transgresses the uncluttered and genteel viewing habits of sixteenth century viewers fostered 3

This point is made in detail by Carabel 1997: 87-100. Although the author claims that there is an absence of the frame, this is not entirely true, as the fresco has a number of surreptitious framing devices, rings of cloud, and mouths of caves, rock formations which allow for scenes and scene-in-scenes to emerge. 4 For Richard Wollheim (1978: 205-226) ‘seeing-in’ cooperates with ‘seeing-as’, the former is the projection of space and volume in the flat form of the painting's material substrate, the flatness of the surface is the ‘seeing-as’ element. I would suggest that there is a feeling of simultaneiety experiencing both kinds of seeing during the art experience, this has also been called convergence (Church 2000: 99).

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by Albertian framing and perspective by representing the destruction of the frame, an artistic effect that agitates consciousness and brings its desire for order into focus. Michael Camille and the Image on the Edge This important study (Camille 1992), takes as its subject the margins of art in medieval manuscripts and through its decoding of images “on the edge” introduces us to a diversity of medieval ways of organising thought visually. While it continuously excludes how conscious processes cooperate with the reading and viewing of medieval books and their margin designs, it does help to lay the foundation for this kind of study. In focusing on aspects that are historically and visually marginalised, Camille self-consciously reverses the traditional relationship of the margin image to text.5 Here, the text is peripheral to the marginal images which take centre stage. Camille is sensitive to the dynamics involved in the production and reception of images in the margin and avoids interpreting the centre and margins as representations of simple binaries such as spiritual/secular; high culture/low culture; official/unofficial. Rather than seeing the images in the margin simply as an unimportant detail, an attitude which springs from the misguided belief that these diagrams are doodles, or are simply the products of the unconscious or irrational mind, Camille weaves them into an ontological relationship with the centre and with their apparent opposite, so that the binaries just mentioned are undermined. This necessarily puts conscious and nonconscious processes into an equivocal relationship. Indeed, it might be argued that a special kind of configuration of consciousness is necessary for the relationship of margin and centre to co-exist and for them to be painted and viewed as co-present. Camille convincingly shows that these margin illustrations may be seen less as products of unconscious desires and more as deliberate insertions, where there is a conscious, intertertextual play and a comprehensive historical grotesque symbolism also at work, as well as direct references to the text with the use of visual puns. It is to Camille’s credit that he refuses to see marginal images as having a simplistic iconographic stability, and instead, he 5

In the introduction Camille playfully suggests that his method of studying marginal art which is transdisciplinary is as “monstrous […] as its subject” (Camille 1992: 9).

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regards them as sustaining a visual play, which I see as cooperative and co-emergent with particular patterns of consciousness in flux in the viewing and reading of such images, and relation to the centre. These images on the edge may function as repressive mechanism at all. The conventional notion that the often sexual imagery of the margin exorcises baser human instincts that are simply to be ‘left outside’ in the margin, to test concentration on the text may be a little too pat. This would assume that the mechanism is one of repression of the ‘bad thought’ in favour of the sacred text, attention to which triumphs over the periphery. This has often been put forward as interpretations of these works of art in the nineteenth century, which go hand-in-hand with the demotion of the status of these images to mere ornamental embellishment or irrational irrelevance. The structured, conscious and self-conscious ways in which these images are employed, however, show that rather than maintaining the repressed nonconscious and conscious binary in relation to the marginal image and the text in the centre, respectively, we are dealing rather with a consciousness of a co-presence which produces a critical distance, not merely from the sensations depicted in the margin diagrams but also from any special conscious effort it would require to repress them. Long before the binaries of Puritanism, Medieval structures of thought allowed for the presence of the undesirable in the midst of the desirable and on the same page as sacred texts, not as a test of moral fibre but as an exercise in indifference not to the sins of the flesh themselves, which were in reality spectacularly and cruelly punished but to the signs that alluded to them. Lewd thought was not mentally excluded by repression but by transfiguration into an emasculated commonplace. The margin contains the diagrams of sin, madness, desire it does not lead to them. The self-degradation of the sign meant that sin stopped there, degraded with the sign. Rather than focus on the simple signified of the lewd diagram, its function was transposed into the service of the centre. The image on the edge is reverse psychology. One did not pretend to be blind to these images but trained oneself to study them with equanimity and to understand that they effectively lampooned themselves. One of the most consistent principles behind grotesque animals found in medieval manuscript painting is their composite nature, identifiable parts stuck together incongruously, they promise both sense and nonsense, consciousness and nonconsciousness, animal and

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man, buffoonery and the intellect, base instincts and refined symbolism, and more than this, they represent the overcoming of these binaries. The visual play relies on the generation of co-emergent conscious processes. We are not simply dealing with the interpretation of meaning by way of comparing text to visual symbols, margin to centre, but with the structure of this interpretation which brings both into co-presence as a relation. The the centre and the margin and do not signify consciousness and the unconscious respectively, so much as consciousness of other conscious mental states. The former becomes the margin for the latter. We are conscious of our conscious desires, we frame them, and we do not repress them so that they may gather strength in the darkness. Similar to the workings of the riddle, which makes sense yet is also nonsensical in nature, the margin and what it is enclosed in: the book, formed a paradox that depended on an interplay of elements, opposite, tautologous or complementary semantic structures producing both meaning and nonsense-becomingmeaning. The riddle, much like the medieval manuscript page, is composite. The consciousness that attends to it must also be composite: in two places at the same time, conscious of one meaning while striving to move outside it to another. The original experience of consciousness is held, or framed by the subsequent, and one is brought into the semantic matrix of the other, the text’s meaning is brought out into the visual inspection of the diagrams in the margin, which are brought into the meaning of the text. This creates a third entity. And consciousness both unites and subdivides the experience of the textmargin. In order for the equivocation of the text and the margin to be sustained, consciousness must also equivocate between a consciousness of their discrete natures and their merging into coherent meaning in the mind of the viewer/reader. Co-emergence occurs both as a mentalistic internal reality in the mind, as well as in the work of art whose rules and lines, margins and texts form the material substrate upon which this consciousness, as a series of framings, is premised. The ubiquitous figure found in the margin, which is an emblem of this conscious process is the equivocal figure of the jongleur, the medieval juggler, troubadour and jack-of-all trades, who manages to alternate several different tasks as one fluent task. Juggling appears to consciousness as a continuous stream yet is also a number of single, discrete acts of focus. The jongleur embodies the margin’s relationship with the text, an equivocation of inside and outside, where both

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interpenetrate each other in terms of meaning. The text and margin become the jongleur, paradoxically he is external to the text, yet the text is external to him. The fusion of text and margin within a coherent meaning or interpretation of the work of art is unstable and likely to disintegrate but that is the nature of motion, the jongleur is the personification of motion and this motion appears magically to unite contradistinctive realities. He may drop his skittles and the motion will end in disarray but for the time being, there is the coherence, balance, interaction and harmony of binary opposites such as inside and outside the text, inside and outside consciousness. It is from the point of view of these processes of consciousness that we can understand the relationship of the frame and the centre in Medieval art. There are other discursive figures recurrent in margin illustration that function as visual notations of the kind of consciousness involved in processing the margin/text relationship. This is the snail (and the knight who flees it). The snail is embedded in the margin which embeds the text, and is thus also cooperative with the psychology of the margin and its relationship to the centre, for what becomes the centre of meaning is what is brought into it by consciousness from the margin outside. There have been many interpretations of what the motif of the snail means. It has been seens as a symbol of Lazarus (who lives inside his ‘shell’ the tomb), a symbol of agricultural reality—the lowly but formidable snail who eats up a farmer’s crop and is pivotal in his success or failure. Camille mentions these interpretations and a history of others (Camille 1992: 32-36). Whichever interpretation seems most convincing, they all consider the snail as a symbol of some sort. What these interpretations also have in common is that they fail to see that the snail parodies the nature of the sign. The word and the sign in medieval consciousness have a composite character, a material substrate (ink, paint, and paper) and the meaning it evokes, these are the inherent qualities of the sign. Focusing on the external appearance, the material substrate of the sign will reveal its meaning. And so the snail has an external appearance inside which an inner meaning will emerge. The snail is a framing device, a bridge joining outer appearance to hidden meaning, yet is spiralling form is also self-reflexive. Interpretations of the snail as a symbol of the harvest wrecker or Lazarus are simplistic, yet help to create a composite of meanings, one of which is the parody of the sign and the framing of outer appearances which must be accepted for what they

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are and for what they signify. Like the balancing act of reading the medieval margin image in conjunction with the text, consciousness maintains both outer form and content in order to grasp that they are in this instant the same thing, the snail, its spiralling self-referential form, en abyme, references itself, is a symbol of itself as a sign. Consciousness of the material substrate (the page, ink, the book, the pen mark) is subsumed into consciousness of the image (the snail), taken up further by a consciousness of the symbolism of the image—that the snail stands for a material substrate that carries with it an inner meaning. This is a circularity, we are back to our first conscious mental state of the material substrate, which is enclosed within (or is an object of) our present conscious mental state. This is a looking within looking, or a looking over the shoulder of one’s own looking. The snail is capable of activating a consciousness of conscious processes of perception and sign reading, it causes self-reflexivity, and hence the knight flees from the sight of it, for he can fight anything except himself. He too, has an outer shell, his of armour, and there is a doubling here, which reminds us of the doubling of the sign, signified relation. The margin supplements and lays a foundation for the centre in Derrida’s conception of the parergon, which I will deal with at length in Part Two. In this sense, Derrida’s method of deconstruction may be seen as an ‘inner’ meaning in the text, which appears to point to an extra-textual or hidden reality outside of the text, like a margin, present yet absent, indeed providing a critique of our blithe confidence in the ontological category of presence—especially ambiguous with the sign of the sign and the lacunae of meanings in the text, present but not quite present. There are images in the margins where people are seen reading books or writing in them. Camille gives one example of Marguerite’s monkey-business in a Book of Hours in the British Library (like the monkeys around her, she appears in the act of simultudo, from which the word simius or ape, derives). In this way, the margin image points to the book in which it is sited. It is a self-reflexive consciousness which activates the mechanism of this referral of the book to itself and supplies the occasion for the reflexivity generated within consciousness. Not only does the book pictured in the book refer to the physical object the reader has in his or her hands, which is itself an self-perceiving act for which the image is catalyst and mirror, but also the

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depicted reader appears appropriately to read to herself, as we all do in reading, so this diagram refers to mental act of self-reference (and her envisaging), as well as the physical substrate of the book. The image seems to broach the subject of the phenomenology of reading. Creating a diagram of the act of reading in a book is inherently self-reflexive in at least four ways. It shows us what we are doing while we are doing it (looking at a diagram in a book); it alludes to figurative meaning lying side-by-side with the literal, a kind of reading within reading, as we might read between the lines or in the process of deconstruction. Finally, the diagram is made more complex by Camille’s reproduction of the image: a book published by Reaktion, showing the pages of a book in which there is a woman holding a book. This is a visual mise en abyme, a literary device made visual. The concept of visualising when reading, made visible as a diagram here, requires a number of conscious subroutines that underpin such a reflexive act. The process supervenient on being conscious of a mental state of affairs represented by the literal imagery or phrasing, experiencing it, yet all the while aware of the reflexive transpositions which emerges from within this experience. This embedding of meaning within meaning so typical of allegory, and mythological thiking, externalised by the visual embedding of the diagram allow logocentric with occularcentric experiences to converge, and this convergence is structured by a cascade of self-conscious mental states. The experience of reading the literal meaning of a medieval text is copresent with an emerging consciousness of its interpretation, lying cheek-by-jowl with the raucous or contemplative images around the text, a context that ‘contains’ or supports the series of experiences as a series of openings, or frames. By the same token, the opening of a twentieth century book ‘into’ the medieval world works also in the other direction by ‘stepping back’ and out of the implicit internalisations suggested by the text and its margin. In reading the Latin text surrounded by images of reading figures one might be forgiven for the distinct feeling that one is stepping back from the very consciousness one is experiencing as one experiences it. This distancing or stepping back, championed so vociferously by Bertoldt Brecht and his Enfremdungeffekt is not a modernist invention; in fact, it seems to stream quite automatically from consciousness of oneself having a conscious experience, and it is here where one’s composure in the face of temptation of sensuous experi-

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ence is maintained. The margin, which is a frame, is not just an appropriate visualisation for the co-presence of one mental state with another it is a product of and catalyst for such a process of consciousness. Reading through Marguerite’s eyes, as well as our own, presents a juggling of vantage points which appears to create a kind of ecstasis of consciousness. Self-conscious looking at images seems to provide a mirror image of self-conscious reading from which other mental images emerge. The margin is thus not a place for simply lodging unconscious desires but a mechanism to frame mental states we normally have while attending to the reading and viewing of images. The margin frames what we are doing with consciousness and self-consciousness. But the structure of framing and its attendant, fluctuating conscious mental states which appear to apprehend each other, can be loaded with detailed ideological contents, as Camille has showed us with sex, desire, magic and superstition, ribaldry and humour which constitute the specificities of visual play of the medieval image on the edge. The point, however, is not to lose sight in the weft and warp of these messages of the operations of consciousness involved in their production and reception. Non-European Images on the Edge Medieval margin painting is not the only tradition of margin painting that activates a complex simultaneity of conscious processes in the viewer and reader. It would be ethnocentric not to mention examples of images in the margins as far away as the medieval manuscript tradition in Iran, for example, and much later in sixteenth century India, where margin images play a subtle game with the reader and where text and image cooperate with a complex production of conscious states and relations. There are cases which support the view that patterns of consciousness arise from the phenomenology of reading and viewing pictures in the illustrated manuscript tradition based on the properties of the medium itself: its most common effect is to set text alongside image as a questioning of each other’s ontological independence, a questioning which invariably involves thematizing the reader’s own conscious activity of engaging with the text and margin. Acknowledgements are made, and the contents page, bibliography and the index, and of course, the footnotes attached to a

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text all form the margin of a text. These form, for want of a better phrase, the mutual intentionality of text and non-text, in the sense that they are both keys to understanding each other, a mutual dependability that is echoed by conscious mental states of other conscious mental states. An interesting addition to the footnote in early modern cultures is the colophon. The colophon frames the main text that precedes it, gives authorial information or a portrait of the author.Yet rather than give numerous examples of margin images in non-western art which seem to ape Camille’s models of interaction, which are plentiful, it is possible to do a brief analysis of an Indian work of art that adds to the body of research, but redefines some of the parameters. Margins also function as a place where an intriguing colophon was added to an illustrated book of poetry painted in India for the Emperor Akbar (regnal dates 1556-1605) by his son Jahangir (regnal dates 1605-26) in 1610. This painting (reproduced overleaf) bears an interpictorial relation to the tradition of author portraits found in the frontispieces or colophons of manuscripts as far back as the thirteenth century and indebted to antiquity.6 The artist Dawlat shows himself on the left side of the image, in the process of painting ‘Abd al-Rahim, the calligrapher shown writing on a piece of paper on the right hand side. ‘Abd al-Rahim’s calligraphy may be seen on every page of this book, and this painting forms a margin around a sample of his writing, although the writing also appears peripheral. He copied some of the world’s finest poetry for the emperor in swift, measured and elegant script. The calligrapher was known for his rhythmically proportioned and precise nastaliq, a highly attractive cursive script descended from Persian traditions of calligraphy. ‘Abd al-Rahim was named Anbarin Qalam (Pen of Ambergris). This poetic description is complex and relies on a synaesthetic evocation of rare, elusive, seductive incense.7 6

Authors and scribes are portrayed in a frontispiece to the Rasa’il Ikwan al-Safa, Baghdad, 1287, Istanbul, Sulemaniye Library, Esad Efendi 3638, f. 3v (Sims 2002: 42, fig. 56). The tradition probably originates in antiquity in illustrations in copies of texts by Dioscorides. 7 Ambergris has been greatly valued from the earliest times. It is a wax like substance originating as a concretion in the intestine of the sperm whale and used to attract the female of the species (it has a concentration of pheromones). Lighter than water, it is found floating on tropical seas or cast up on the shores of Mauritania, Somalia and India in yellow, grey, black, or variegated masses, usually a few ounces in weight, though pieces weighing several hundred pounds have been found. The poetic idea was that the calligrapher wrote with black ambergris, burnt as incense, which further

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The painting is a remarkable integration of the arts of painting and calligraphy, not only with its main subject (an artist painting a calligrapher) but also in the integration of text block measurements and the measurements of pictorial areas, and even proportions of the body. Both figures are measured and proportioned in relationship to each other, for example, the margin rules of the text and the spacing of the words in the text determine the measurements of objects and between objects in the painting. It is a remarkable image, for it is a self-portrait of an artist painting the calligrapher who is writing the book in which the artist’s image is destined to be placed. The image is not only one of visual art in the making but in writing of it and this suggests the interplay of mental images arising from the writing so often lauded by Mughal poetry, and the images of art. There are sets of double images: we see the image of the calligrapher, doubled by the image of the calligrapher who the artist paints, this is a painting-in-painting. The book pictured on the floor alludes to the book in which the painting is placed; there is also a page within a page, a margin within a margin, poetry within poetry. As with European art, in Mughal painting the image on the edge is not a grotesquery but an intellectual conundrum that invites consciousness to do a number of twists and turns, perhaps the most dizzying of which is the fact that the margin of the book, the colophon, is not only the end of the book but alludes to its genesis, and in such a way that we both see it and read about it as the painted figures are described in the writing which accompany the images. The margin provides the paradox for thoughts about creation, which lies outside of the book, and its image inside it. Bear in mind also that the word, and the image of it refer to the original Word, which sets creation in motion as a series of cascading creations of which imagemaking is the basest copy. Together with this, the image provokes a precise consciousness of the image’s making; the book’s making in the book, but referring to the original act(s) outside of the book. But there is also something challenging about an image that sets into place a series of strongly demarcated spaces, frames-in-frames. The margin signifies the physical end, the outside of the work (parergon) and the outside of the world surrounding the book. In reverse order, it encloses images of evokes the image of plumes of smoke and perfume, used to describe the fluidity and “sweetness” of Abd al-Rahim’s calligraphy that carries with it the beauty and imagery of poetry and the redolence of olfactory pleasures.

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itself and images of images. It is a margin image which brings its own existence into question.

Colophon painting. Illustrated book, India, 1610. Public Domain-Old-100.

There is a definite consciousness of questions of ontology here that are ultimately reflexive. We watch the painter painting the writer, whose gaze is set in the process of writing and reading. The writing (and the painting of the writing) and the image evoke the presence of the calligrapher, who is no more, yet also in an indirect way they invoke the presence of the viewer and reader. There is not merely a con-

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sciousness of the transformations of the image, and transformations of writing and creation, but a consciousness of the transformations of consciousness that track them. In a sense, self-consciousness emerges while becoming aware of the depiction of the painting’s auto-genesis. Stoichita and The Self-Aware Image A serious and comprehensive attempt to study the picture-in-the-picture phenomenon in art is Victor Stoichita’s The Self-Aware Image (1997). I will have occasion to return to some of the examples he cites. While his analysis is admirable in many ways, the author is not particularly concerned with the kind of consciousness that underpins the production and reception of the picture-in-the-picture. Why should he be? Traditionally, art history is concerned with the material specificity of the work of art with the aim of placing this in its cultural, often religious context where textual evidence in literature or scholarly writings are used inferentially to build up a basis for interpretation. Stoichita begins his study of framing devices in art with a look at the development of still life from the periphery of art, literally as an art found in the margin. He is right to have drawn our attention to a tradition of painting mundane objects, pots, pans, dishes which incongruously seem to nestle in the marginalia of fifteenth century book illustrations. This may be seen particularly in works of art that use the frame or illustrated margin to create a centre/periphery contrast, a complex balancing act, where consciousness is engaged with the centre, while at the same time drawn to the periphery. The tension between the central focus and peripheral vision controls saccadic rhythms, the darting movements of the eyes and the contrast becomes a message of binary opposites where the artist usually hopes to obtain some resolution, and where the viewer can synthesise subtle meaning through self-evident appearance, realising the reciprocity of each of these, displayed on the inside and outside of the frame, respectively. This schema is followed in The Adoration of the Magi ca, 1475-80, Master of Mary of Burgundy in a Book of Hours, where objects in cases frame costly and rare vases, jugs and bowls that surround the main painting of The Adoration of the Magi. Stoichita implies that this is an example of some of the earliest stirrings of the impulse to paint still-lifes. Such split images have been traditionally interpreted as thematisations of the frame as a coupure or cut which divides the

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sacred from the profane, the world opening like a window onto another reality and our quotidian world. This, in effect, places the painting squarely in the domain of ethics: it is an illustration of truth and deception, and by extension, we have a visualisation of the contrast between the innocent love of a mother for her child and the sensuous allure of the depicted luxury ceramics and other objects, signs of wealth and sensuous pleasure. There is nothing wrong with this kind of interpretation but because it is concerned with the image as a communicative device it is not interested in turning its focus on how this message needs to be processed in order for it to be a message at all. How can the division of the picture plane into outer and inner, centre and periphery, frame within frame cooperate with the organisation of any thought process? The painting’s effectiveness as an object of interest (to anyone who is interested) is ensured by tacitly contrasting two naturally different conscious experiences, the prereflexive and reflexive modes. In the former case, the framed painted objects are what they are: imitations of objects that are more or less skilfully depicted, and the painting of The Adoration of the Magi they surround is a sacred narrative in contrast to the profane objects scattered around the centre, the conscious involvement here is with the sensus litteralis and much less to do with how the painting works. For this, we need a different kind of consciousness which must be brought into the frame. With a more critical gaze, which leads on to a more reflexive consciousness, these painted objects are transformed from easily identified luxury items so easily confused with the real objects referred to, to parodies of ephemera, they rise up as images not of objects but as tokens of the sensory experiences that are aroused by them. The objects are no longer given as objects; their dumb insignificance of objects is bracketed out, for they become signs. Also, the target of this remarkable process of the bracketing out of the naturalist standpoint towards objects is the painting itself, The Adoration of the Magi and ultimately, the whole painting in which it is embedded. The split is not merely between inner picture and outer pictures, the split is also manifest in the sign itself which points to two signifieds: the real, particular, identifiable objects referred to, ceramic objects, a religious painting, and their general ontology as sense objects. If sensory experience is taken to be a delusion in Neo-Platonist or theological terms, these images of jugs and vases, and dishes of soup and religious paintings are illusions of

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illusions, signs of signs. And in the top corner there a vase that appears to contain a peacock’s plume, which symbolises vanity yet it is also an eye (related to Juno Optica, goddess of sight and indexing the viewer’s sight) that alerts us to a different way of looking, expanding consciousness to reflect on the limitations of a simpler and less demanding consciousness, which takes things for what they are, and enjoys tarrying with beautiful objects and simple pleasures. Ultimately, we come aware of our own looking, for we see The Adoration of the Magi not only as a window onto a heavenly vision but as a painting of vision, so we are able to see the painting as an object like all the others, and yet view it also as a mental visual projection beyond material embodiment. We are looking into the image of Love itself. There are the many splits that appear in the theme of ‘adoration’. We have the possible adoration people might have for the sensuous and tactile quality of luxury goods and their ‘outer’ sensuous beauty. Then there is the possible adoration of a painting or image of the Virgin and Child (an important flashpoint for the Catholic/Protestant divide); this could be confounded with adoration for the signified, the tiny Christ child at the centre of the composition (standing for ‘inner’ beauty), and lastly, there is the adoration due to the visible skill and dexterity of the artist in rendering so many layers of representation. The last kind of adoration refers to the material substrate of the painting itself, which to a period eye (read consciousness) would appear as another luxury item of outer beauty. By logical extension, the painter’s decision to show the adoration as a centre piece surrounded by luxury objects, which allows for so many perceptible possibilities and betrays a taste for metaphysical speculation, shows us that his skill also lies beyond mere technical expertise in reproducing the ‘appearance’ of things. There are other missed opportunities in Stoichita’s work to investigate the fascinating relationship between the processes of framing and structuring consciousness. One of these is a deceptively simple letter, dated 1544, by the writer Pietro Aretino to the celebrated master artist, Titian about a spectacular window view of Venice he had witnessed. The window view is a well-known rhetorical device. Yet Stoichita quotes this letter as an example of how nature becomes painting with the aid of the window frame. The window frames a view which becomes the subject of a letter. And because it is a framed view, it is not

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surprising that some artist should come along and literally paint a view which has been, to all extents and purposes already framed. The window frame makes landscape an identifiable object, an object of intention that is circumscribed by consciousness, and this object is transferable to different contexts (writing, painting, contemplation, discussion). The birth of landscape painting is ushered in through the window, literally, in the sense that pictures in this period painted a landscape as a window view. Yet, the window frame resembles a painting and is therefore its double, a kind of visual metonym, and so, by extension, the painting of a window and its view is a frame inside a frame. It is one small step from here to the reflexivity of painting-inthe-painting. Aretino’s writing uses a remarkable series of mental images to demonstrate different levels of a heightened awareness of what he is seeing and writing, conflating his experience of the window view with the language related to painting, and he conjures these images in order to explore an advanced self-awareness of the relationship between the mental images that arise from a reading of his text and his optical experience of the view of Venice. The letter is worth reproducing in full and I have italicised key references to his visual field, to mental images and to painting which trace the contours of image consciousness: Master Titian, My friend, having broken with custom and dined alone, or rather in the irritating company of the terrors which prevent me from quietly enjoying my food, I left the table filled with the distress I was already experiencing when I sat down to eat. Then, placing my arms on the window frame I rested my chest and virtually the whole of my body against it, and gazed out at the magnificent sight of many gondolas filled with foreigners and local people which captivated not only my gaze but also that of the Grand Canal, itself so seductive to anyone crossing it. Finding myself bored from being alone and not knowing what to focus my thoughts on I raised my eyes to the sky which, since god had created it had never been so marvellously painted with so many shadows and lights. The air was exactly as those who are jealous that they are not in your place, would imagine it to be like. As I describe it, you will see, first of all the houses which, although built of stone, appear to be made of an unreal substance. Then you will see the air which felt alive and pure in places and, the opposite, heavy and contaminated in others. And now, just look at the magnificent clouds made of layers of humidity! Half of them had gathered in the foreground above the rooftops while the rest were moving away into the background. I was quite

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dazzled by the diversity of their colours. The nearest were burnished by the flaming rays of the sun while those in the distance were of a somewhat dull red lead paint. How perfect were the features by which nature’s brushes composed the sky, distancing it gradually from the houses the way Vecellio does in his landscapes! And here a touch of bluey-green, there a touch of greeny-blue, created on the impulse of that master of masters, nature. And with the help of light and shade, it dissolved or accentuated all that should be dissolved or accentuated, in such as way that I, who knows that your brush is a gift of its gifts, sighed three or four times: ah, Titian, where are you? Believe me, if you had painted what I have just described to you, you would have aroused in all hearts the wonderment with which I myself had been infected. As I looked at what I had just described to you, my soul was gratified but the miracle did not last any longer than the colours of this unimaginable painting. May, from Venice, 1544 (Stoichita 1997:35-36, my italics).

A train of events seems to be set into place: the body is first made problematic, hungry, sick, irritated and must be physically restrained and bent to the will of the window frame, which is its double, in order to launch the gaze through it, to settle momentarily on a view of gondolas and people. Even from this captivating sight, he flees, raising up his eyes to the marvellous sky painted by god himself. This deliberately anagogic description of a line of flight allows him to leave the heavy ennui of his prison and room and the anxiety of his physical frailty and mortality behind. Arentino’s consciousness flies to where his eyes can take him. The metaphor of flight from low to high, dark shade to brightness, and heaviness to lightness continues with his descriptions of the air, where he adds another flight from contamination to purity. From the peak of these scales, which work upon each other analogically, we begin a downward turn: from the clouds we descend to a dance of colours on the rooftops, the nearest brilliant flamelike hues (of copper and gold the finer metals) thence further away, to heavy, earthy, dull lead bringing to mind the notion of the four elements. The scales from heavy to light are cosmological, based on classical ideas and of the lowest, sublunary matter, coinciding with the colour black and lead, which contaminate the soul with materiality and which struggles to be free, stretching, through the humidity of the clouds, and flamelike colours towards the transparency and purity of light. These intertwined scales from low to high, from dark to light, from heaviness to lightness, from matter to spirit, and in reverse, are reminiscent of emanation cosmologies, known to Renaissance thinkers

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through Plotinus, where the sun is situated at the top, through to the heavenly celestial bodies beneath it and then on to lesser sublunary entities.8 These ideas were circulated in the Renaissance through the Latin translation of Plotinus by Marsilio Ficino, published in 1492, and the work of Pico della Mirandola and others, long enough to have percolated into the second nature of writers like Aretino. Where classical references abound, it is clear Aretino’s letter is less concerned to record his actual observations and more inclined to recreate an elaborate mental envisioning displaying his literary talents in doing so. How appropriate, though, to switch from the description of high to low and the scale of colours from light to dark and thence to the substances that carry them (lead, for example) to the subject of painting, which relies so heavily on base metals for its pigments (lead for white for example) and yet the artist is able with these materials to duplicate a vision of the clouds. And it is here, at this point, Aretino introduces us to the painter Cesare Vecellio 1521-1601 a lesser known artist, a pale reflection of Titian (whose name was also Vecellio). We begin to see that, along with his system of analogies, Aretino is playing with a complex ontology of the image which involves painting, painting-in-a-painting (Vecellio’s landscape), window view, landscape, and visionary experience, an ontology that is encrusted with cosmological references. Thus, it is not just a matter of thematizing the window onto reality or onto landscape that is at stake here, this densely structured letter speaks volumes of the historical and intellectual horizon with which it forms a continuum. This horizon is peopled with classical references and thoughts about the nature of images and the hidden identities of those created them. The whole letter may be seen as a veiling of the original act of creation from 8

The first emanation is nous (thought), and then the world soul, which Plotinus subdivides into an upper and lower part, the latter identified with nature. From the world soul emanates individual human souls, and finally, matter at the lowest and most imperfect level of being. There are many ways to represent these cosmologies; the most frequent is a vertical line with points or hypostases from high to low marking it, and with bewildering variations of the systems of names for each point (angels, angels of the first intelligence, to lower intelligences, or active intellect down to lesser intellects). The Islamic cosmologists with their common roots in translations of Plotinus elaborated this greatly. Plotinus posited the divine nature of material creation deriving from the One, through the mediums of nous and the world soul. It is through beauty that we recognise the divinity in material things; these ideas are easy to trace as mental images in Aretino’s text.

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which all image making and viewing cascade. The writing continually defers yet alludes to this original act with its own visual fabrications that cross reference and mirror each other. Aretino suggests that the original source of these images is cosmic and divine yet also there is an analogous level of reality, the original window view that was supposed to have triggered the letter and all the other subsequent images. Is it the primacy of writing littered with literary ‘images’ which point to Aretino as the creator, or do these images, in fact, arise from thinking itself, which is ultimately linked to a higher consciousness in communion with the divine as the letter suggests? Are we to believe that this was a visionary experience and the prime mover, god, is sending a cascade of creative acts through Arentino’s mind eventually to all readers of the letter, the Word? In this kind of competition between the Word and the painting, which takes on the colour of the debates on iconoclasm and iconophilia, the author may be seen to foreshadow some of the great philosophical debates about whether the prime vehicle of thought is in the form of the image or words. Like those philosophical debates (with their modern equivalents in semiotic theory), Aretino’s equivocation, underlined by the double entendre of Vecellio who doubles as the figure of the artist, seems to suggest that he was undecided. What we are dealing with here is not only the hidden meaning ‘inside’ the text that clothes it but also with the mental image, which Aretino tries to paint with his words and which is alluded to with the reference to Vecellio, the artist, as a symbol of an artist. Even more subtle questions arise concerning the imagery described in language behind which other images are alluded to (the cosmology, for example). The emanation cosmology, amongst other things, was used to signify a chain of being, a hierarchy that takes as its hypostases both states of mind (different levels of consciousness from bodily awareness, to higher-order thoughts, up to self-consciousness), which interlink with stages of pictorial (and mental visual) creation (the window, the view of Venice, the painting by god, a landscape by Vecellio and by Titian). These are all presentations or frames, which seem to be embedded in each other, and the transformation of their ‘throughness’ is tracked by similar transformations in consciousness. The writing presents the external marks of the structure of consciousness, which is, in a sense, the real originator and author of this exquisite piece. In being able to recognise different levels of

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presentation and the different stages of the image, consciousness must also change from a lower perceptual level of recognition of the subject matter to a heightened level of consciousness. And ultimately, this is what is revealed in the writing, this structuring of consciousness that is experienced as self-consciousness and expressed as a series of levels and pictorial transformations or frames through which this consciousness can intensify. The hierarchy of visual transformations expresses and activates a seriality of conscious mental states sustained by the rapid turnover of descriptions of images. One steps back from this visualising to see the ebb and flow of the whole structure, and one can objectify the structure of consciousness which produced it and which, ultimately must retrieve it. Stoichita was right to bring our attention to the psychological effect of the painted window. It is also noteworthy that in the early Renaissance, Albertian consciousness of the picture as a kind of window on to reality is ‘doubled’ by certain paintings that depict windows with views. Indeed, certain pictures show windows onto a landscape and then, in that landscape, have a depiction of people looking at the landscape. As Stoichita reminds us, the spectator’s gaze is imitated in this manner and points to a mise en abyme effect; presumably, he means the situation where viewers are looking at people looking (Stoichita 1997: 38). Again, I would insist that we are not so much looking at people looking as thinking about what people might be thinking about while looking. It is as if the represented perceptual activity at work in showing people looking at something in the picture, especially inside a window frame which doubles as a pictorial frame, reflects back, or otherwise objectifies, the perceptual activity that occurs in front of the actual physical picture in the viewer’s mind. We are conscious of the frame of the window as we are conscious of the frame of the picture; they imitate each other to provide consciousness of the tension of make-believe, the reading of depth and a counter-tension: our fascination with the surface of the paint on which this depth is premised, the process of “seeing as”. A totally convincing illusion would be less interesting than a revealed one which preserves the tension between these contrary directions. The throughness of the viewer’s consciousness carried into the pictorial space by the gaze is measured by both the picture and window frames, the sense of penetration sends consciousness further to the point of an imaginary horizon. Here, as with the tension of depth and surface, we feel momentarily alone, and yet

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we can take a step back to view the painted figures with their backs to us, who also appear to be transfixed by the horizon—we view it again through their eyes—and we are no longer isolated on that horizon. The picture is less a mise-en-scène for some obvious narrative but a mental image (an image inside or beyond an image) that deploys the metaphor of throughness as a way to point to an emerging consciousness in the viewer that appears to be in the world yet is, nevertheless, ready to settle down to the flat, resistant surface of reality at any moment. Stoichita reminds us of the rigid laws governing pictorial representation which push landscape into the background of a painting but landscape is still a background hum and continues to engage with consciousness. Stoichita’s perception that the still life and landscape in the fifteenth century are parerga (para=against; ergon=the work, singular), that they are out of the main area of ‘art’ and thought, yet oddly co-operative and ambiguous alongside it, is a comment which implicitly draws on a model of conscious reception structured by levels of awareness, theorised as split auditory reception, when one is not entirely conscious of overhearing a snatched phrase in a busy social gathering but rather than view this as a binary which split consciousness is perhaps more accurate to characterise the experience as a series of conscious intensites of different strengths depending on which frame or object in pictorial space is focused on. Stoichita betrays only a naïve understanding of this important perceptual activity in art. Is it landscape and still life that are parerga here, or the unacknowledged principles of consciousness that construct and cooperate with visuality? How does consciousness accommodate, process and construct such a slippery object, this parergon? Stoichita writes: Peter Aertsen’s work and, later, Velázquez’s work represent a critical stage in the metapictorial tension […] It is in the fact the unusual nature of the relationship between the painting’s two levels that makes his [Aertsen’s] paintings so interesting (Stoichita 1997: 28).

But it is particularly this tension that is interesting not in isolation of the image’s properties but because of its cooperation with another tension: between a simple consciousness of the picture and consciousness of the subject looking at the picture. The focus does not have to be devoted solely to the picture’s reference to itself and its properties. Stoichita’s self-aware art should not be a self-enclosed, affective intensity that actively impacts on the viewer, but like all artistic images,

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especially those which utilise the frame-in-the-frame, is cooperative and co-emergent with the act of consciousness that encounters it, discloses and indeed structures it, much like the function of the parergon structures the ergon. This is precisely an interaction because the organisation of pictorial space into a picture-in-a-picture alerts reflexive self-consciousness, and this is no mere reading of the story of the painting but a reading of the story of how we become selfaware of our viewing as part of the art experience. The notion of a painting fictitiously “producing itself” (Stoichita 1997: 220) from within its matrix acts merely as screen, cutting off the image from the viewer’s mental processes involved in inspecting it. By investing the image with the responsibility of engendering another inside it (as if it were doing its own thing), the screen is also drawn across our understanding of how consciousness sustains and actively structures such images which are, in fact, tokens of these very mental processes. If the use of the frame-in-the-frame makes a subject or a theme out of the nature of painting and the viewing of it, it is also because it makes us unusually aware of what the painting’s frame includes and excludes as a direct result of creating a periphery and centre of vision. This pictorial ordering which affects the movement of the eye also orders a series of mental states in consciousness, one of them aware of the centre of the painting-in-the-painting, the other aware of the fictitious environment in which it is framed, and there are other, concurrent mental states processing the relationship between the fictional frame and the real frame at the outermost limit. It is this chiasmic reciprocity of mental states and the reciprocity of mental states represented in pictorial space which bear a relationship worth writing about and which has been scarcely acknowledged by art historians in their attempts to elucidate the relationship between objects and those perceiving them, and how this perception is structured. The art object is structured in consciousness as a way of moving beyond the dualism of the art object sealed off in the world and from its appearance in the mind of its viewer. Instead, we can use reason to bridge this binary a kind of viewing which, to use Husserlain terminology, is both straightforward and at the same time reflexive. It is the task of art historians to mediate this phenomenology with transcultural and material specificities for more nuanced readings of what happens in the art experience, not merely what happens ‘in’ the painting as

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given naïvely. Conversely, phenomenologists must recognise that what happens in the world of the painting is no mere mentalistic construction of the viewer but a co-presence that is mutually creative. This is the conscious art experience. Another necessary clarification relates to what artists and art historians mean when they speak of ‘the gaze’. It is consciousness that is largely responsible for directing the gaze and, to a large extent, for structuring the image on which the gaze is focused in the first place.9 It seems that the term, ‘the gaze’ reduces consciousness and its involvement with images to a specular dogma: the eye and the material object are locked into a mutual reciprocity in order to structure a reality ‘out there’ external to the mind. In fact, when the eye is reduced to a mere instrument of information gathering (rather than shown to be a lens focused and directed by a complex consciousness), it creates a blind spot: we are not able to see that consciousness sees. It is the cooperation of processes in the cerebral cortex and higher thought processes which ‘see’, not the eye, a common misconception in art history. But consciousness is also framed out of this ocularcentrism deferred as an agent in the processes of looking and suppressed by the ‘metaphors’ of “mind” and “idea”.10 There is no consciousness in the eye. It is not possible for the eye to turn its inspection upon itself with a mirror image, which is not the eye but a reflection of it. Similarly, we can more easily understand that consciousness can selfreflect with the aid of art and writing in its many forms, particularly because art thematises art, and pictures thematise the processes of looking at and by extension thinking about pictures. This represented ‘looking at’ should not be taken literally, we are not looking at people looking, that would keep us entrapped in the ocular-centrism of visibilia (where the dumbed-down eye watches dumbed-down objects). In such circumstances, we really hope to be thinking about people thinking, structuring our consciousness in the 9

This idea changes the direction taken by Jay 1993, a history of how vision was regarded with suspicion from a variety of perspectives in modernist critical theory and philosophy. I would say that it is not a question of denigrated vision so much as denigrated consciousness of which vision is an expression. 10 For example, faces in painting can “represent the idea of the mind” (Elkins 1996; 10), here, presumably ‘idea’” is used as a vague token of “being conscious”, and the “mind” as consciousness itself. This is, in fact, a reflexive construct: being conscious of consciousness through the medium of the depicted face, the archetypal trope of human recognition.

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way we imagine them to be structuring theirs, as well as being conscious of our own phenomenological experience. The eye, the gaze, the mind can and must be lifted to the level of consciousness.11 More, the painting is not just an object of the visual field but a field structured by consciousness and by which consciousness is structured. It is not just a simple matter that the complex framing devices adopted by seventeenth-century artists that included door frames, window frames and paintings-in-paintings were merely “explorations of the image’s boundary and the relationship this boundary had with the real world [or] meditation on the structural co-substantiality between the picture frame and all other types of enframement” (Stoichita 1997: 53). Again, these observations merely push meaning out into the world, they set up an overly determined binary of reality and the boundary of illusion as the meaning-horizon, when in fact, the latter joins the mental life of the individual experiencing art to the painting, and to the painting’s referent (in the mind of the viewer). The mediation of reality and fiction is not only to be fought out there in the comparison between model and painting, original and counterfeit, but ‘in here’, with the meditation on the reality of the mind and its grasp of the world. These pictures are not simply allegories of sight or ways to conceptualise sight but they are more accurately, explorations of the cogito. This art Stoichita rightly points out is contemporary with Cartesian introspection and its relationship with outer reality, one of the most dominant discursive practices of the period. These paintings are meditations on the location of reality, and these pictures were and are fascinating to artists and viewers because the boundaries being explored in the painting and viewing of them are those of the ecstasis of the viewer, whose cogito finds itself in the world and in the painting. It is the nature of the cogito to be continually contested, formulated by the cogitatio—thinking, or consciousness—more generally.12 Consciousness of this process encapsulates the visual 11

This is at least what Lacan does in another direction: “In The Four Fundamental Concepts Lacan carries out a critique of classical optics and perspective construction, which he understands to be the optical equivalent of the illusion of self-reflective consciousness.” (Iversen 1994: 732). 12 “I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it now follow that I too do not exist? No: if I convinced myself of something then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as

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perceptions needed in the process of understanding a painting, and especially the painting-in-a-painting, which presents the theme of the ontological status of the painting itself as an object. The painting-in-apainting questions the status of reality, as it does the self in relationship to that reality.13 If the painting through its play on reality and fiction raises doubts it also raises self-doubt. The assertion of the self over self-doubt allows the cogito as a moment of consciousness, or consciousness of the thinking aspect of consciousness, to emerge. Thus, these paintings are instrumental in allowing these assertions to take place, with the help of the depiction of the gaze in the pictorial space the depicted gaze acts as a distancing medium from one’s own, and yet paradoxically, it reveals how the gaze joins the object of vision with the launching of it. It is through painting that the world of consciousness comes into existence and through consciousness that painting becomes more than a configuration of base materials. There are many paintings of artists painting a picture, a common enough occurrence in many cultural traditions. When we appear to launch our gaze into the heart of such a painting we are fixing our consciousness on a point, but what if that depicted point is an eye, as in the eye of Velásquez in Las Meninas? Do we merely continue with a series of prosaic identifications: it is merely made of paint, it represents flesh and blood; it is supposed to be the artist’s eye? All that is achieved by this would be the circularity of outward appearances, the gaze returning the gaze, vision reflected back, without a trace of the process of consciousness that such an exchange demands. The fascination with such a detail is not with the eye, it has never been the eye, not even its intellectual avatar, the gaze but with the unshakeable suspicion of one’s consciousness meeting another’s, meeting itself, best achieved by the image of the eye as a token for such an intersection. Velásquez is looking at the viewer eye-to-eye, but he is experiencing picture consciousness, we see his eye but we are not looking at his eye, we too, are experiencing picture consciousness, it is he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind” (Adam and Tannery: 1904: 25). The painting that questions reality also questions this proposition and allows it to be “put forward” in the mind. 13 For a discussion of the interchangeability in certain kinds of consciousness between “I think” “I see” “I am”, see Shapiro 2003: 50-51.

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a kind of mirror interrogation of picture consciousness. The eye and its surface disappear. In much the same way, the artist forgets the sensation of holding a brush while painting, even the eye which frames the gaze, which frames consciousness, is forgotten in favour of the phenomenology of experience. The structure and processes of consciousness, the conceptual and cultural figures it manipulates and the point at which this is all suspended in the doing of the art (its production and reception) should always be of paramount importance in any account that seeks to provide a history of how art is experienced. In Part 4, I will have occasion to return to the complex consciousness involved in the production and reception of the picture-in-the-picture in Baroque art, in particular, the work of Velásquez and Vermeer. Frames-in-Frames and the Mise en Abyme In a recent attempt to define the picture-in-a-picture one writer on aesthetics reels off a number of interesting phrases taken from various academic fields: […] “La mise en abyme,” “ekphrasis”, “metalepsis,” “metafiction,” “artistic self-reflexivity,” “intersemiotic correspondence,” “self-engulfment,” hypernarrative” and so on (Livingston 2003: 243).

He also adds “nested art” to this list. One might also add metafiction, metapainting, autopoeisis and autonymy.14 All of these terms seem to point to a reflexive movement,15 and they may all use the visual (and 14

“[A]…Barber getting a haircut, shoeshine boy…having his shoes shined, a cook making herself dinner…an elderly secretary cannot write the word “erasure” without having to erase…All of which is autonymy, that disturbing (comical and banal) strabismus of an operation that comes full circle” (Barthes 1987: 49). Implicit in Barthes’ description here is a reflexive consciousness whose avatars are images of autonymy. 15 This term reflexivity has both general and particular applications. Generally speaking, reflexivity has been seen from the psychological point of view as selfreference and in the humanities and arts as a work which references itself in order to demystify its methods of production or artifice. There are many particular devices used in order to pursue these general aims and many of them have been studied by Stam 1992 and Dällenbach 1989. I will use this term only generally from the psychological point of view and in relation to self-consciousness. I consider framesin-frames to be devices used to achieve reflexivity, whether as a ‘modernist’ strategy, as it has often been claimed, or as a psychological reflex. In this I differ little from Christian Metz, who considered that reflexivity used a diversity of devices in film for

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verbal) device of a frame-in-a-frame as a symbolic and compositional construct, and as an image of thought. The frame-in-the-frame is a visual sign that may be described by any number of these technical terms. “Embedding” is another term which is often confused with some of the others in this list; and can be used to mean novels-innovels and paintings-in-paintings (Bal and Tavor 1981).16 I will use it in conjunction with frames-in-frames in art. I will not try to discuss all of these different terms or reduce all their differences here, but focus on various examples of frames-in-frames that assume a number of appearances. I aim merely to highlight how frames-in-frames is a visual device connected directly to the role of consciousness as both a site of origin from where the representation of frames-in-frames is produced, and also as a place of destination where this representation is received in the consciousness of the viewer. The distance between these two points is mediated and negotiation in the ongoing art experience. It is important to note how many of these terms leave out consciousness (or a consciousness of conscious states) from their concerns. Most studies on the mise en abyme and the other forms of mentioned above, focus on the structure of the text or other art form as an aesthetic pattern, or functional and communicative device; there is little or no discussion of their psychological impact or their cooperation with selfconsciousness which often accompany thought about these forms and how they work in the larger totality of the art experience.17 different ends (direct visual address to the camera, frame-within-the-frame, display of apparatus, textual and visual referencing of each other). (Metz 1992). 16 The essay is typical of literary theory which attempts a precise taxonomy, linguistically reducible, of what it sees as a structural convention (embedding or the mise en abyme), and like so many other works, takes little interest in the effects of these conventions on consciousness, or indeed, how they are processed by it. 17 See Livingston 2003 who treats nested art and the mise en abyme as if they were merely words that needed to be made clearer by the insistence of a simple reduction to the following definition: nested art “nests another, real or imaginary, work of art just in case at least part of the latter work’s structure is displayed in the former ‘matrix’ work” (233). But Livingston insists that this nested work has not to be a vague gesture (the implication is that is must past through consciousness, although he does not say this), and must have some (aesthetic) function (238). But on this view easy identification and aesthetic function are mere tools of nested art, which, like the mise en abyme, represent, articulate and reflect consciousness (the artist’s, the viewer’s) striving to understand its own functioning through engagement with the artwork and its nesting. An unintentional picture-in-a-picture may not be nested art in Livingston’s scheme but it is still a result of an act of thinking that may or may not have revised an original impulse to signal self-consciousness. The pattern of consciousness which

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The mise en abyme which literally means to put into the abyss was taken by André Gide from a device in heraldry that involves “putting a second representation of the original shield ‘en abyme’ within it” (Dällenbach 1989:7). Implicit in this kind of miniaturisation of a picture-in-a-picture is the possibility of the abyss of infinite recurrence: On packets of Quaker Oats, there is a Quaker holding in his hand a packet of oats, on which there is another Quaker holding another packet, on which there is a further Quaker etc. (Magny in Dällenbach 1989: 22).

Füredy discusses some of the logical deductions involved in this kind of embedding, and what we need to do to make it work. She reminds us of the process of the suspension of disbelief (Einstellung) set in motion by the viewer in his or her perception of mise en abyme: […] such as the famous cocoa tin on which is painted girl holding another such cocoa tin, on which is painted a girl and so on. Not even a row of such tins coming off the production line would be “the same,” except being tokens of the same type, but the tins painted on the real tin are even more clearly different from it. The real tin is three-dimensional, made of metal, made of specks of paint, and different from the real tin and from each other in size. To be able to regard the cocoa tins as “the same tin” even in the sense of being analogous to one another, we select certain features as more significant than others, foreground them, and interpret them. In this case, this involves translating spatial clues given in the flat, painted tins into three-dimensionality and ignoring the differences in size, material, and the like mentioned before. That is, we focus on the similarities and gloss over the differences (Füredy 1989: 751-752).

Some of us, probably automatically, “focus on the similarities and gloss over the differences” because we have seen many other previous examples of this visual device in the arts and advertising, others might pay more careful conscious attention to it and invest the image-in-theimage with the creator’s intention of communicating the effect of infinite recursion. Füredy continues to examine logical possibilities in perceiving images of this kind. These logical inferences are sometimes useful for indicating the relation that exists between visual embedding and patterns of self-consciousness: produces nested art and the mise en abyme is still reflected and activated by the image. Another author has sought to illustrate the obsessive linguistic self-reflexivity of literary studies when trying to define the mise en abyme, even while trying to break out of it. See Ron 1987: 417-438.

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[…] in order to perceive not only repetition but recursion, what is required is both an abstraction of similarity and punctuation of the continuum in such a manner as to emphasise the difference between the logical levels (the “willing suspension of disbelief” mentioned above); we need a combination of distinct logical levels (difference) separated by a potentially infinite series of boundaries (sameness) and some analogy between the levels (sameness in difference) (Füredy 1989: 752).

At the risk of some simplification, I understand the mise en abyme to mean a process of representation within representation which points to the mise en abyme of consciousness that produces it, and is engaged with it in the art experience. This image-within-an-image can continue several times to suggest aporia; with the mise en abyme the internal representation is often a duplication of the external representation in which it is contained. If there is no internal duplication of this kind, some critical theorists would refrain from calling this an example of the mise en abyme. This inflexibility is acknowledged by writers such as Moshe Ron when he asks, “What might be considered an adequately replete duplication of the narration?”(in order to call it a mise en abyme?) (Ron 1989: 423). To which I reply: adequate when consciousness arises of the presence of mise en abyme, or even the possibility of a mise en abyme. The answer to Ron's question is not to be found in the text but in the consciousness triggered by the text and which, in fact, may introduce (or reintroduce) the figure of the mise en abyme back into the text. The mise en abyme is not simply to be found in the text, author or reader, but in the cooperation of all of these in the field of consciousness. Needless to say, despite its key role as creator reflected in the work en abyme consciousness is continually framed out of critical theory. It is a form of self-consciousness (or reflexive consciousness) which I maintain is rooted in the fundamental self-reproduction of the mise en abyme and is indeed not only the machinery that makes it work in terms of reading the work of art but is part of the mise en abyme’s genesis. Thus, the mise en abyme is less a device and more a process of thought (which may be transposed into any medium) and this process originates in, while exercising the intensities of selfconsciousness. This is so because whatever thing, figure, or sign is placed into the abyss of replication within replication most often produces a consciousness of the ‘placing’ from the point of view of

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artist or viewer. In short, there has always been a need to stress the mise as the progenitor, the original act of the abyme, elided by countless examinations of how it has been effected. Despite the confusion of levels of transposition that are possible and some theorists find unacceptable (Livingston 2003: 240), and despite the inconsistencies and imperfections of defining some examples of mises en abyme and/or failed mises en abyme, they still refer to a point of origin in a special kind of consciousness that is discoverable as the cause and effect of the mise en abyme. How dull and pointless a work of art must be that has a mise en abyme that is clearly recognisable and defined by the exact measurements of theorists who insist on compliance and quality control for the use of such a device. Yet it is not a device, but rather, a process of discovery. The mise en abyme is the image of the mise en abyme of consciousness and can take many forms as a process of emerging consciousness and artistic communication. Despite often unpredictable routes of thought and obstacles, the mise en abyme should be defined by its psychological effects: visual fascination of internal replications, introspective consciousness, regress, vertigo, alienation, yet these effects are also the cause of the image of the mise en abyme and it is perhaps this circularity, not immediately apparent or standardised, that makes the mise an abyme so fascinating. It is enough for the mise en abyme to suggest infinite regression by visual repetition or suggestions of repetitions internally within the matrix of the work of art and this is a visual manifestation of consciousness of consciousness (or self-consciousness). Indeed, the mise en abyme may be seen primarily as the replication or re-presentation several times (it matters little how many), of a configuration of consciousness. There is a rare intimation of this in some critical theory: The modernist writer is at every stage conscious of himself, conscious of his activity as a writer as well as reader and critic of his own work. Self-reflexivity or technical introversion is one of the primary characteristics of modernism […] Some of the more interesting manifestations of the writer’s (and the work’s) self-reflexivity draw attention not only to the text but into it, as Derrida would say, and precipitate a kind of psychological mise en abyme, the writer not only being aware of himself as reader/writer/critic but aware that he is aware, aware that he is aware that he is aware and so on (Lawlor 1985: 829).

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Although some critics might say that this is a very loose usage of the term mise en abyme and insist on keeping it entirely distinct from selfreflexivity, it is clear that when self-reflection becomes repetitive, suggesting aporias through various kinds of resemblances or duplications within a prior or original representation, which somehow ‘contains’ this duplication, we are coming close to what most people would recognise as the mise en abyme. Part of this recognition is the activation of a process of conscious thought about the mise en abyme’s self-division. And again, we come back to containment suggesting the inside and outside of framing and frames within frames, yet at least the link with consciousness has been made clear. With repetitive acts of self-reflexivity an original representation, a point in the history of consciousness is brought to mind again and again by the mise en abyme. If we take the self as a point of origin which is referenced by subsequent reflections of the self we can see where the problem lies with so many literary critics of the mise en abyme: the self is inherently unstable, looking back at previous stages of consciousness may be less reflexive than fictional. It is interesting, however, that the mise en abyme thematises not only an internalising duplication, but also, paradoxically, an externalising one, and this may be transposed phenomenologically as consciousness co-emerging in the self and in the world. No doubt, much of this will have gone beyond Gide’s original intentions in using the term mise en abyme, and even further beyond the precise meanings attached to the term when describing the device used in heraldry: en abyme. These so-called origins of the mise en abyme will always remain open to speculation as to their precise usage in their respective contexts. The language of origins is inherently revisionist, like a palimpsest, continually written upon with fresher theories (and examples of consciousness), which in turn become the latest origins. And to this I could add my own: we cannot be too far wrong if we demonstrate, in an analysis of the framing in framing of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, or in seventeenth century Mughal painting for example (which is what I attempt in Part 4) that the mise en abyme refers to consciousness of many anterior instances of consciousness, a proliferation of origins, one superimposed over the other, each pointing to a seemingly inescapable self-consciousness. The point, however, may be to ask the purpose of this continually referenced consciousness. The answer may lie somewhere in the rela-

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tionship between the artist and the viewer. The artist’s consciousness presents a puzzle to the viewer’s consciousness. Solving the puzzle or at least trying to, empowers (and humbles) consciousness by allowing the viewer to know that the psychic space of the work of art is more than her own. The viewer’s consciousness may be the target of the artist’s, but the art experience is the site of the intersection where one consciousness projects the boundaries of the other inside the frame of the work of art. Although it is not my purpose to deal with the mise en abyme in literature, there are some remarkable texts that describe the details of paintings in order to empower the text and encourage the reader to visualise, we have seen something of this in Aretino’s letter. These texts are interesting because they support my view that the mise en abyme is an image of thought (and not a frozen one), and specifically, a mental envisioning of consciousness which is also visible to sight. Part of Ernesto Sabato’s writing may be described as a visualisation of thought, or a thought of visualisation, using the process of the mise en abyme. Norman Cheadle describes how Sabato’s description of The Burial of Count Orgasz, 1586 by El Greco reflects on the story in which this image is embedded (Cheadle 1995: 543-554). Importantly, this painting also has an image within an image: there is an inset depicting the stoning of St. Stephen in the foreground, and a reflection on the armour of the dead count. This scenario presents the pictorial mise en abyme of the picture-within-a-picture as emblematic of Sabato’s act of placing the painting within his book; the literary en abyme is reflected by the mental image of the mise en abyme, which also bears a relation to the picture-in-a-picture in the original painting. Consciousness is locked into dealing with this mental image while trying to juggle with the totality that contains it, and is indeed referenced by it. The mise en abyme thus causes consciousness to hold on to itself while seeking transformation or resolution within a wider field of consciousness. Something of this is intimated by Cheadle when he observes: [For Sabato] the abyss signifies a very real, non-verbal referent; he insists on the ontological reality of the abyss. Thus when Castel [a character in the novel] composes a painting within a painting, and creates a structure “en abyme”, he is not engaging in a gratuitous aesthetic game. Instead, he is replicating an ontological structure, the stratified layers of psychic reality, which in turn reflect the narrative strata of Sabato's fiction. (Cheadle 1995: 553)

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And the narrative strata of Sabato’s fiction, which presumably reflect the author’s psychic reality, is a form of consciousness that readers find themselves travelling in, nested in and co-existent with, the totality of the narrative consciousness within which little consciousnesses flourish as signposts. Reading with, through the medium of the mise en abyme becomes not only a way of exploring the author’s consciousness but a way of understanding the reader’s thought about his or her own mental states engaged with this consciousness. Similarly, the cinematography of a recent film, The Number 23 (2007) directed by Joel Schumacher, wants us to believe that we are inside someone’s head as they read a book, and we travel with the reader, who is visualising the author’s memories (appropriately shown through a number of windows) that mimic the ‘window’ of the camera lens and the cinema screen. The writer’s mental images are visualised by the depicted reader, and represented by a series of cinematic images or flashbacks, these imitation ‘mental’ images which we ‘share’, are shown through a number of frames-in-frames and windows in windows, in order to enhance the feeling of travel through different thoughts. The mise en abyme is used as a way to show the seriality of mental states that structure an ongoing consciousenss. The effect is to maintain a consciousness of clear visual demarcations, the frames of the book margin, which are representations of the protagonist’s mental windows, and the reader’s consciousness is led by these, while at the same time, we are consciousness of the camera’s movement (itself a frame or lens) within these demarcations. Consciousness of the camera’s movement is a rapidly processing consciousness, which is prereflexive and appears to travel through the more reflexive consciousness of relatively inertial frames. The mise en abyme, then, may repeat resemblances to suggest regress, yet each instance of the frame which continues the series that forms the mise en abyme as a series can be a distinct mental state with its own qualitive feel that can be sustained while entering newer mental states. The mise en abyme presents the opportunity to visualise thoughts as rising up inside themselves to produce composite intensities which retain identity while negotiating self-division. The mise en abyme negotiates identity or sameness in difference as a series, and as such, appears as a visual experience of the serial form of consciousness.

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Danto It is appropriate to deal with some of Danto’s work here, at the end of this section on art history and at the beginning of our analysis of philosophy of mind, mainly because Danto might be seen to bridge both of these discplines. Like many philosophers, Danto has treated the general problems of art: answering questions on definition, grappling with representation and ontological problems. Only incidentally do we go beyond issues of perception to speak of consciousness proper in his work, and so his philosophy of art has an indirect relevance here, yet is nonetheless useful to many issues of interpretation I wish to pursue in Part 4. Danto is fond of quoting Wittgenstein, and this is perhaps because that philosopher was one of the first to bridge the gap between elite philosophical language and language more popularly used. At the risk of simplifying, this fits in well with Danto’s methodology involving one of his most famous essays on Pop Art, where Warhol is cast as the philosopher/artist who was also able to play his role in the “transfiguration of the commonplace” into philosophy as art. Pop affirmed the reliable symbols of everyday life as against the magical, the shamanistic, and the arcane. The pop artists cherished the things the abstract expressionists found crass beyond endurance (Danto: 1989: 47).

Even more significantly for Danto, Pop’s “exaltation of the ordinary helped raise art to a consciousness of its philosophical nature.” Yet this begs the question—which kind of philosophy, Neoplatonic or Husserlian? How can art become conscious of its philosophical nature without putting the viewer of art and her phenomenological consciousness of the art experience into the equation? Otherwise, despite Danto’s attempt to present Pop art as an art of the immanent, we are left with the more traditional absolute of art as a supra-individual transcendental category, which somehow obtains a consciousness of itself. This brings into view arguably more fundamental influences in Danto’s work, namely Hegelian concepts and approaches, especially those found in Hegel’s Aesthetik, which have been adapted by Danto in at least three obvious ways. In Danto’s analysis of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (1968) he speaks of the almost imperceptible fusion of art and the commonplace (so that the real and what represents it are in total harmony with each other). This may be traced to what Hegel has to say about classical art, the perfect fusion of idea and form, where

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Danto sees the commonplace in art and art in the commonplace.18 The second adaptation is Hegel’s the theory of the end of art, where Spirit reaches a full-realisation without the need of the exteriorisation and self-reflection of images. Danto substitutes art for the Spirit and because art becomes so much about itself, becomes self-reflexive, it develops into philosophy (which is also similarly self-reflexive), and this leaves our old definitions of art behind.19 Thirdly, Hegel’s influence in Danto’s work may be seen in the latter’s disastrous foray into non-Western art, Mysticism and Morality: Oriental Thought and Moral Philosophy, universally criticised, and deservedly so, by numerous academic journals. The book followed the sprit of Hegel’s approach to Indian art which is derogatory and reductionist. Danto’s the end of art thesis may also be seen as a reflection of this ethnocentrism as it appears to stand for the art of the world, as if the end of art (in the west) is somehow the end of art for everyone. Danto writes often of the self-consciousness of philosophy and art, yet little is said about the consciousness of the viewer or reader, a site, after all, which might be considered the ultimate vantage point to witness art’s self-consciousness. If it is the end of art, is it the end of the particular consciousness that is involved with our experience of art? And how, exactly, does Danto’s conception of the self-reflexivity of art (which is supposedly, its death knell as art, its birth as philosophy), square with the processes of self-consciousness which must naturally attend such portentous moments? And if we are to identify such monumental moments in cultural development (however EuroAmerican they are, and however much they flatter its discoverer) should we continue to point to them as constellations written in the sky without tracing the patterns of consciousness responsible for producing them? It might seem that, like Danto, I have been distracted by the ‘big questions’ asked of art, yet I do not wish to assess the hidden telos of Danto’s end of the art thesis. Rather, I want to look at some of the examples he uses to illustrate his theory on the transfiguration of 18

Yet I am not entirely convinced that Danto is without irony in his description of Duchamp’s urinal, Fountain as a confirmation of “Hegel’s stupendous philosophical vision of history […] an astounding confirmation” (Danto 1986:18). 19 A similar critique is levelled by Shapiro who views Danto’s essay on Brillo Boxes as “making the (traditional) Hegelian point that art at its highest is a reading, articulation, and presentation of the collective soul (Spirit or Geist) to itself” (Shapiro 2003: 353).

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commonplace not only because they tell us about the organisation of Danto’s consciousness but what he believes happens to consciousness during the experience of this transfiguration. The following quote exemplifies Danto’s approach to art with questions about its ontology using what he calls philosophical duplication: The method of philosophical duplication is a powerful lever for lifting factors into consciousness, which otherwise might never have been acknowledged— presuppositions upon which our attitude towards the world has always depended [...] these factors will always be logically external to the thing in question. The most striking contribution to have been made to our understanding of art by the artworld itself has been the generation of objects, ones in every manifest regard like perfectly ordinary objects, things like bottle racks, snow shovels and Brillo boxes and beds. We are (1) to regard these “things” as artworks, and not as the mere real objects from which they are indiscernible; and (2) to be able to say what difference it makes that they should be artworks and not mere real things. Indeed, I regard the matter of furnishing answers to these questions the central issue in the philosophy of art (Danto 1989: 213).

Of course, this is a very clever move, because what we have here is not only a philosophical method of duplication (to posit ‘art’ and a duplication of ‘art’ in order to define the differences), but this method also duplicates the content towards which this method is directed, namely Warhol’s Brillo Boxes which are a duplication of reality in such a way as to demonstrate, visually, Danto’s method of philosophical duplication. Danto sets up a particular kind of philosophy or philosophical method that is justified in the art that it addresses. Danto’s fetishisation of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and his method of philosophical duplication is rhetorical (and therefore not simply, about an experience or the boxes themselves) but he uses duplication (visual and theoretical) as a self-reflexive method of analysis in the Cartesian sense, but duplication is also rooted in Freud’s doppelgänger, and the splitting of the self in the Lacanian mirror stage. The feeling of the uncanny accompanying Brillo Boxes is just as much the result of duplication as it is obsessive compulsive behaviour. This is seen with a seriality of duplication: of Brillo Boxes and Brillo boxes, the philosophical method of duplication, Danto’s own consciousness, the spirit and the flesh, the idea and the form, the linguistic repetition (the baby’s “Da da”/and Dada), and a critique of the fundamental catego-

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ries of sameness and difference on which language and consciousness are based. Warhol’s Brillo Boxes demonstrate an important principle of consciousness for Danto (even if he is not entirely conscious of this himself), they are a way of showing one very important emergence: the difference between reality as art (or art as reality) and reality as reality is that consciousness makes that difference, sameness is ignorance, duplication preserves the idea of sameness co-existing with difference. It does this because Warhol’s Brillo Boxes seem to generate themselves, they do not appear to index real Brillo boxes because they are self-contained, they appear to be what they are, only our knowledge of their status as art (and what we know of how they were produced) allows them to appear as signs of themselves rather than boxes indexical to external and commonplace ones elsewhere. In this sense, the boxes which are identical to each other are a duplication that also stands for duplication in the classical sense of mimesis taken ad absurdum, thereby lampooning capitalist economies and their compulsive obsessive overproduction as a form of mindless duplication (which may after all, have been Warhol’s only intention). They also, like the uncanny, repress familiarity while bringing it to mind. This also may have been Warhol’s intention and indicates the importance of psychoanalysis in his work, which is only natural, given the prominence of psychoanalysis in American culture. Throughout all this, the conclusion that art becomes philosophy is only one possibility. By choosing Brillo Boxes as a discursive figure of philosophy, particularly the principle of the sign standing for itself, the sign-assign (the doubling of the sign) does not, however, produce an absolute unique born in the specificity of Pop Art as Danto would have us believe, for the principle of something referring to itself (and doubling itself or its function) may be demonstrated elsewhere in history, and I have shown this with Camille’s medieval margin paintings. I have in mind also something outlandish such as a Persian Safavid or Mughal Indian illustrated book, in which a painting on paper is surrounded by an ample margin on the edge of the page, in which there are other paintings, some depicting papermakers producing paper, the material that their own image is painted upon.20 Yet the same principle is at 20 “The depiction of bookbinding components alludes to binding that contains the book; it makes the book a subject of representation.” This is referred to as a “reflexive movement” (Roxburgh 2001: 128).

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work in Cornelius Norbertus Gijbrechts, Velázquez, and closer to Danto’s heart, Roy Lichtenstein. All three artists produced images of paint, either as splodges and brushstrokes on a wooden palette in the first two cases, or simply as a brushstroke in the last example, but in the medium of paint.21 I will have the opportunity to turn to these works in detail in Part 4, especially as examples of the self-reflexive nature of art and consciousness. In all cases cited, the pigment, the material substrate, represents the material substrate, as Brillo Boxes are supposed to do, but perhaps even more effectively. Are we supposed to assume the end of art in each case? Danto reduces the complex perturbations of consciousness attendant in the art experience produced by Lichtenstein’s painting as a situation where the artist merely “lampooned the veneration of the heavy looped swirl of paint that emblematised abstract expressionism” (Danto 1989: 69). The comment wastes an opportunity to see the painting as a good example of his own thesis of transfiguration of the commonplace, the perfect philosophical fusion of art as art and reality as art, or art as reality. If one can be philosophical about a small portion of Warhol's work, why not as easily with Lichtenstein? The answer perhaps lies in the fact that Brillo Boxes are time-specific whereas brushstrokes are not. Yet the principle behind their genesis is the same. The picture, brushstroke as duplication of a brushstroke, or paint-as-paint are not only a conundrum, which in fact elides Danto’s binary of the opaque and the transparent (the image is both) yet these works also bring into view issues of the phenomenology of ontology (as Sartre would say), a questioning of the modalities of existence and its interplay with consciousness as a relationship of hide and seek, where one tracks the other in the experience of art. In other words, there is an absence of any resolution about whether the painting of the brushstroke is the signified or the sign, and this may be seen as a visual equivalent of consciousness which is similarly in a superposition as both a signified and a sign. Where Danto would like to see in art-as-art the becoming of art as conscious of itself (and therefore like philosophy about itself), substituting art for spirit in Hegel’s schema, I see art-as-art as an opportu-

21

For Gijbrechts see a painting of Vanitas, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich; Velázquez, Las Meninas, Prado, Spain and Lichtenstein, Brushstroke with Spatter, 1966, oil and magna on canvas, Barbara Neff Smith and Solomon Byron Smith Purchase Fund, 1966.3, Contemporary Art Gallery 138.

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nity to consider consciousness-as-consciousness,22 the effect is uncanny; causing reflexivity. 23 There is another important aspect to Brillo Boxes, which Danto did not discuss. We seem to repress discussion of what is inside of them; and this again complements Danto’s reflexive method which he calls the philosophical method of duplication. For they are, presumably, empty, void of discussion, beneath the surface of meaning or the sign, yet one cannot help but think that, as boxes which box in areas and quantities of nothingness, that the duplication of nothingness is also signifiable here, and that this the work, as sculpture, is a new Enigma of Isadora Ducasse24 or a reversal of the emperor’s clothes, where nothingness lies inside a walking suit. The outside/inside binary is important here, especially as it is raised to the power of so many duplications, cooperative with appearance which plays against substance, content with form and the hidden with the revealed in ways which only go to support the neat philosophical interpretation that this is a visual critique of the ontology of presence. But again, this is not the only philosophy available. The philosophy of mind is also engaged here. One could as easily, and in my mind, more profitably use Husserl rather than Hegel to interpret Brillo Boxes. In his schema, the actual boxes are the picture thing Bildding, the picture’s material substratum, the picture object or Bildobjekt, the picture as ‘picture’ or 22 A step supported by the following: “Points of view or ways of seeing the world are usually transparent to us because we inhabit them. By embodying them in artworks, what is transparent and unnoticed becomes opaque and salient. Art then, serves the purpose of making consciousness aware of itself. Thus, in a way that parallels many expression theories, Danto locates the point of art in the externalisation of subjectivity in such a way that the artist and the rest of us are able to examine it” (Carroll 1990: 111-24). 23 I am reminded that for Freud the uncanny effect is often and easily produced when “the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolises” (Freud 2003: 148). 24 A famous work by Man Ray which references the Comte de Lautréamont, a nineteenth century writer adopted by the Surrealists. It features a cloth bound by a rope covering a sculpture so that one cannot see what is underneath it, although this has been identified as a sewing machine. This is a reference to Lautréamont’s famous phrase ‘Beautiful as the chance meeting, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella’. The sculpture thus encapsulates the Surrealist admiration for chance encounters of odd objects which simulated the apparently irrational juxtapositions of dreams. Conscious knowing thus pierces the veil of unknowing (the unconscious) by the reflexive action of art—and with the aid of a sewing machine.

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image as image, and the picture subject—sujet the thing the picture stands for, all wrapped into one in Brillo Boxes, compacted into a selfreflexive relationship. I am not entirely sure that Danto is unaware of this possible interpretation, his theory of the opaque and transparent in art suggests he is. For Danto, the opaque is the signification of the material substratum brought to mind in some way by the art object, although it is also extended to mean seeing an actor instead of the part he plays, Olivier instead of Hamlet, for example. And transparent is the quality which allows us to ‘see in’ or look through this quality. Both qualities are parallel to Husserl’s Bildding and sujet respectively (and there is a hovering third term of Bildobjekt which cuts across the binary). The point is that using Husserl instead of Hegel allows us to throw away the husk of the end of art theory and look at the kernel of consciousness which Brillo Boxes re-presents. Danto is not able or willing to see consciousness objectified in this way in Brillo Boxes—unable to accept that they present consciousness to consciousness for examination in the art experience precisely because of his theory of transparency, which is rooted in the dogma that consciousness is transparent: Modes of awareness are themselves transparent to those who they are. And should they become opaque, then I think, they are no longer ours…in whatever way we are conscious of consciousness is not an object for itself; and when it becomes an object, we are, as is were , already beyond it and relating to the world in modes of consciousness, which are for the moment hopelessly transparent (Danto 1989: 231-232).

This conception of consciousness (and the transparency/opacity binary which is attached to it) is directly related to G. E. Moore’s hypothesis of consciousness: The moment we try to fix our attention upon consciousness and to see what, distinctly, it is, it seems to vanish: it seems as if we had before us a mere emptiness. When we try to introspect the sensation of blue, all we can see is the blue: the other element is as if it were diaphanous (Moore 1960: 25).

This assumption is also taken up by Sartre in Being and Nothingness along the lines that “Consciousness does not seem to be anything substantial, therefore, Sartre concluded it is not anything substantial; it is a Nothingness.”

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The transparency of consciousness eventually leads to an obvious fallacy (to be found in Danto as well): It rules out materialism, but it rules out every other kind of substantive theory of consciousness as well. It leads to the view that consciousness is a Nothingness […] as an ontological theory it is disastrous. It entails directly a very strong, a priori form of mysterianism; that is, it implies that, in principle, no informative identity statement of the form “consciousness = X” could be true (Williford 2004: 150).

The problem is setting up a concept of consciousness that is absolute and all-encompassing against an experience of it which can never hope to live up to such overpowering dimensions. Consciousness appears mysterious and transparent because it is everywhere and nowhere and one does not normally have an everywhere and nowhere experience. An immediate counter to this is that we do not have to be conscious of the whole of consciousness as an absolute in order to make it visible or thinkable or immanent to us. There does not have to be a like for like symmetry for, as Danto is often fond of telling us, a painting depicting motion does not itself have to be in motion and, mutatis mutandis it is enough for a particular conscious experience of a conscious mental state of an intentional object (a Brillo box, for example) to stand for the experience of consciousness of a particular form of consciousness; this is at least, less ambitious. The latter move invokes the logic of the higher-order thought hypothesis so popular in studies of consciousness and which I will discuss in some detail in Part 3 and adapt as an important part of my analysis of art in Part 4. Even if Danto’s transparency is a weak form that does not deny the ontology of consciousness there is still the assumption that consciousness cannot be an object of consciousness because it is eternally transcendent, moving on before we grasp it. Here, one might as well level the same accusation against the philosophy of philosophy, yet Danto is adamant this is one of philosophy’s defining features. The last argument against diaphanous consciousness however is supplied by Danto himself, a phenomenological one, where consciousness does indeed move on but not beyond the self, each move away indexes the self which becomes the constant conduit for these transformations, a process of self-transcendence, moving, as in a stream but not invisible. And this Danto himself appears to admit:

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Framing Consciousness in Art Perhaps films are like consciousness is, as described by Sartre […] with two distinct but inseparable dimensions: consciousness of something as its intentional object, and a kind of non-thetic consciousness of the consciousness itself—and it is with reference to the latter […] that cinematic processes as such are to be appreciated. In that case a film achieves something spectacular for it does not merely show what it shows, but it shows the fact that the thing shown is shown: it gives us not merely an object but a perception of that object; a world and a way of seeing that world at once, the artist’s mode of vision being as importantly in the work as what it is a vision of (Danto 1989: 231)

Here, Danto comes closer to a phenomenological consideration of the modes of consciousness in viewing film, importantly as a process where a dual vision of consciousness (consciousness of the artist’s consciousness, or consciousness of our own viewing of the film) and which seems to unfold as part of an integrative cinematic experience that, at the same time, represents this experience as a visual spectacle. In other words, when we watch Hitchcock’s Rear Window we integrate a consciousness of looking through the window of the character’s eye, through his camera lens and past his window frame across the way to another room with a window frame, but we are also aware that we may be looking through Hitchcock’s focussed consciousness as we do so. Not only do we appear to look at the lookers, through their eyes, we become conscious of their conscious looking (and inevitably our own). The work hinges on using the frame-in-the-frame to create different presentations of consciousness. The frame however, is transformed from screen edge, eye, camera, window frame in order to mark stages of the stream of consciousness. In Brillo Boxes, these markers all look the same. The work may be seen as a consciousness of different representational modes, each of them presenting a particular kind of consciousness of looking (a domestic product, a work of art, a duplication, a piece of philosophy, psychology etc.) all in one work of art. Warhol’s work is remarkable in that it generates these different presentations within one unified structure, whereas it is much more common in art to create presentations of this kind by employing the compositional device of frame-inthe-frame and its transfigurations, so that a painting-in-a-painting or window, or doorway contain a presentation (with a particular consciousness attached to it) within the other. As with the examples of art I will examine below, Warhol’s Brillo Boxes may be seen to illustrate the principle of duplication, the unstable nature of the sign, the enigma

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of presence and issues in the philosophy of mind and image consciousness, the end of art thesis is only one presentation of such a work of art which is able to multiply so many of them and continues to do so.

2. Framing Philosophy The imagery of the frame is both a literary and visual construct, and it can be used by consciousness striving to define or focus on itself. But the frame takes many forms: the frame of a picture, window, doorway, the camera lens and even the head and the eye depicted in art form frames and framesin-frames, dividing the visual field into scenes and their contents. One of the most obvious stagings of the eye as a frame through which we see a perspectivised reality, a reality that appears mediated by the eye yet is signified as Other, may be seen in Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera 1929, structured by repetitive lens/eye and shutter/eyelid images throughout. If the eye, and by extension, the gaze is used as a metaphor for philosophical inquiry, it has also been used as a symbol of reflection and reflection on philosophy’s methods, and of course, those of psychoanalysis. This visual symbolism and its associated lexical set (looking, gazing, focusing, desiring, scopophilia, optics, reflection, reflexivity, selfdefinition etc.) can be extended to the tradition of framing visually, and writing and speaking about framing. Frames-in-frames form a visual discourse and they activate specialised thought in philosophy, art and science about conscious behaviour. Husserl As an important figure in the philosophy of mind and studies of consciousness, Husserl has made relatively little impact on art and art history, despite the literature that has been devoted to Husserl and image consciousness (Marbach 1992 1993; 1997). This situation is changing, however.1 Husserl’s thinking links consciousness and external objects with modes of intentionality, and the imagery that he uses to describe this 1

For pictures, see Di Pinto 1978; Sepp 1988, 1991; Uzelac 1998; Sokolowski 2005 and Lotz 2007, and for film, Casebier 1991.

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linkage is potentially very useful for art historical analysis. The way Husserl often used the examples of paintings as complex objects that illustrate the relationship between consciousness and external physical objects supports the view that art is neither simply externalist or internalist, nor actively given and passively received. Husserl attempted to link consciousness to objects via a hybrid concept-object thing, the noema. I would like to see Husserl’s noema primarily as an empty frame on a bare wall: it links the external world to the internal in ways that question both terms. It is important that we note that it is possible to see inside the frame (of the noema) the external world, and to see part of the external world in the internal area of the frame.

Painting of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm’s painting collection, David Teniers, ca.1650, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, after original.

In Husserl’s phenomenology one of the most important binaries, the external object and internal concept (of it) may be seen through each other (they frame each other) cancelling out their positions and their isolation from each other in order for a fuller picture of reality to emerge. For Dan Zahavi commenting on Husserl:

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[…] reality is not simply a brute fact detached from every context of experience and from every conceptual framework, but is a system of validity and meaning that needs subjectivity, that is, experiential and conceptual perspectives if it is to manifest and articulate itself (Zahavi 2003: 69).

Husserl attempted to provide an account of how consciousness is connected to objects in the world, among them works of art. For Husserl, the pictorial example in the Dresden Gallery that articulates such a relationship is a painting by David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690), a Flemish artist and keeper of the collection of pictures of the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm (1614-1662) in Brussels, who had assumed the government of the Spanish Netherlands. In order to record and catalogue these items in the collection Teniers painted likenesses of them showing them crammed into one room. There are paintings of this kind by him all over Europe, and many other artists (the Frankens, Willem van der Haecht) did similar paintings of other collections—so-called “cabinets of curiosity”—which to the modern eye resemble dense collages of framed pictures of various artists, genres and styles. The one reproduced above, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, allows us to imagine what Husserl was referring to when he wrote: A name on being mentioned reminds us of the Dresden gallery and of our last visit there: we wander through the rooms and stand before a picture of Teniers which represents a picture gallery […] The pictures of the latter would in their turn portray pictures which on their part exhibited readable inscriptions and so forth, we can measure what interweaving of presentations, and what links of connexion between discernible features in the series of pictures can really be set up (Husserl 1982: 270).

The Dresden Gallery description, more of which follows below, illustrates complications in our conscious life which Husserl believes phenomenology can elucidate; yet it also appears to reference the memory of a real experience in the gallery. It would be remiss not to mention its strong relation to a topos. The Dresden Gallery was used as a way to represent traditions of knowledge by many philosophers and writers.2 Instead of casting the gallery as a history of ideas as they do, Husserl suggests that it cooperates with his schematic of different levels of 2

Winckelmann, Schlegel in Die Gemälde, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche used it as a source for ideas about art, images and philosophy. Schlegel’s characters in his fictional work discuss paintings not in the Dresden Gallery, but as memories or mental images of the gallery and its pictures.

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consciousness, a monadic arrangement where, within the matrix of the painting is implied the larger, physical environment of the gallery. The image appears to illustrate Husserl’s characterisation of consciousness as something in the world. Husserl’s attempts to connect consciousness to objects in the world amount to such a “fundamental re-thinking of the very relation between subjectivity and world that it hardly makes sense to designate [it] as being either internalist or externalist” (Zahavi 2004: 42). For Husserl, the painting-in-a-painting shown in the Teniers picture in the Dresden Gallery demonstrates consciousness and its relationship to a complex intentional object, avoiding the reductionism of internalist and externalist arguments. This is entirely in agreement with essential Husserlian principles: Husserl argued that the notions of inner and outer, notions that he claimed expressed a naive commonsensical metaphysics, were inappropriate when it came to understanding the nature of Intentionality. This rejection of a commonsensical split between mind and world is even more pronounced after Husserl’s transcendental turn. […] Husserl writes that it is absurd to conceive of consciousness and true being as if they were merely externally related, when the truth is that they are essentially interdependent and united (Zahavi 2004: 52).

We are dealing here with levels of representation and their relations, and levels of consciousness and their relations. The Teniers picture is not a simple representation of a gallery but an object containing within it many levels of representation co-actual with the series of conscious mental states processing these different levels. And this is one of the ways in which Husserl brings together the internalist-externalist divide: The “Ego’s regard” […] then goes straight through the noemata of the sequence of levels—until it arrives at the object of the ultimate “level” beyond which it cannot go, but upon which, instead, it fixes. The regard can, however, shift from level to level, and instead of going through all of them is rather directed to the data of that level upon which it fixes; it “can do this” either in a “straightforward” or in a reflective direction of regard. In the previous example: the regard can remain at the level of the Dresden Gallery—“rememberingly” we walk through the Gallery in Dresden. Then we can, again within memory, live in the observation of pictures and find ourselves in the world of pictures. After this, adverted to the gallery of paintings in picture consciousness of the second level, we look at the paintings themselves; or we reflect hierarchically upon the noeses etc. This multiplicity of possible directions of the regard essentially belongs to the multiplicity of intentionalities related to and founded in one another; and wherever we find analogous founding relationships […] analogous possibilities of changing reflection are brought out (Husserl 1982: 148).

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The following diagram attempts to explain and supplement these comments by Husserl, elaborating the relation between consciousness and intentional objects in the visual field:

Fig. 1 schematic of picture consciousness extrapolated from Husserlian formulations

A) is a picture-in-a-picture, in principle the same as the Teniers picture in the Dresden Gallery, which Husserl evokes in us; the also suggests physical immersion in a gallery environment by appearing to duplicate what is going on around it, and in front it, with someone looking at it. In Husserlian terms, it is an image of the picture thing as seen by B, it is an image of the Bildding, the picture’s material substratum, paint on canvas for example. The Bildding is only part of a composite structure for there is also present here the picture object, or Bildobjekt, the picture identified as a possibly meaningful object before its meaning is extracted. Then there is also the subject, sujet, the thing the picture represents within its matrix. The sujet is seen through both the Bildobjekt and the Bildding, the latter two become apperceptions, and these three interpenetrating aspects are repeated by D, the whole image reproduced here. Note that these stages of the image are both phases of the artistic object but they also indicate different kinds of seeing the object in terms of seeing in or distancing, it is possible to experience these three stages of seeing looking at D while presuming

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that this is what the viewer in D is also experiencing. These different kinds of seeing are distinct mental states which appear to converge in the visual experience when we try to hold in our minds the picture as a composite whole. Note that the series of frames mark each stage of consciousness of the Bildding, Bildobjekt and Bildding, stages which we experience while watching this experience represented happening before us. B) Husserl does not mention this and going beyond him, B denotes the physical, inverted retinal image, deflected light shining in upon the fovea; it is a reflection of the object, literally internal to the perceiving body. Something of this is happening with our own retinal image when we look at the diagram. C) This is the mental image which has no existence as an image—an image in name only, produced by mechanisms of memory or imagination which we see in our ‘mind’s eye’ without a retinal image, as with imagining how something feels to the touch, but without touching it. It reflects B’s relationship to A, and gives the depicted viewer an image of how he must look standing in front of the painting from a distancing perspective; it also reflects what we are seeing as viewers of D. D) The letter D denotes the material substrate of the picture thing, framed to highlight the picture thing (the material substrate, in this case, a digitally scanned image of a drawing of pen and ink on paper, the Bildding). A distancing effect emphasized by the framing allows the picture thing to be presented to consciousness. This also signifies the physical context in which the picture is found, the room or gallery and makes us aware of the surrounding space of D (the space surrounding Figure 1, the page and the room in which this page is situated). Both spaces index each other, as well as the space inside A to create a serial, recursive effect. The image just inside the frame of D appears to reflect the macro-consciousness of the viewer, cooperative with his or her peripheral vision, representing these external referents pictorially. D should remind us of Husserl’s structures of embedding as they appear in consciousness: “we “feel” ourselves into the picture object when we see it” (Lotz 2007: 177). A, B and C are rotated and cross-referenced by different levels of consciousness and nonconscious perception (in the case of the B). Another process of configuration may occur when the

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viewer looks at the diagram (to visualise C, for example). In the viewing of the diagram here representing C, we are supposed to see a physical and visual representation of our own mental image in mental image consciousness. This purely spatial schema can be said to be a visual analogue of Husserl’s elision of externalism and internalism in the concept of the noema.3 One of the dualisms dominating recent debates in the philosophy of mind and epistemology concerns internalism and externalism. The former posits a subject immersed in an internal mental life that functions as the source of truth about the external world. Externalism suggests that the subject’s knowledge is largely dependent on external environmental and physical factors where the truth about reality is to be found, rather than in the subject’s mind.4 Much of Part Four is concerned to show that our experience of image consciousness bridges this divide. When I look at the Teniers painting I run through a number of interpretations about what it represents, some of them phenomenological and formal, others art historical. Husserl’s interpretation has not only broadened the range of experiences possible in viewing this painting but I am made aware of how a painting’s material configuration demarcating spaces and boundaries are cooperative with a series of demarcations of conscious mental states engaged in the visual experience of this painting. 3

Rather than rehearse the usual arguments related to the noema from West or East coast perspectives, the first emphasising internalist “mentalist” interpretations of the noema, the other the externalist ontology of it as an object in the world, I will only state that there is recent and convincing work that shifts the emphasis towards reconciling and transcending both views (Zahavi 2004). At the risk of crudely reducing the concept, the noema represents neither the object purely as a combination of material characteristics, nor the internal mentalism of this material reality but the intersection of such an encounter in experience. The shape and form of the thing perceived and the shape and form of the perceiving become the noema (plural: noemata). One is tempted to use the phrase, the “site of mutual discovery”, but a material object has no such experience. However, an artist’s intentions to anticipate the discoveries of the viewer may well be encoded in the material substrate of the work of art. As Lotz writes, “pictures establish themselves through our own shaping power and faculty of formation, which we must find in the object” (Lotz 2007: 183). 4 The duality obviously has its roots deep in Western philosophy, its relatively recent emergence comes in the form of works by Armstrong, 1981; Dretske, 1983; Goldman, 1986; Platinga, 1993, Puttnam, 1975 which are identified with the externalist view. There is an interesting theory of cognitive extension in Clark, 2008 (and countered by Bartlett, 2008). For internalism, see Chisholm, 1977; BonJour, 1985; Lehrer, 1990; Pollock, 1986; Conee and Feldman, 2001; and more recently, a defence by Farkas, 2008.

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The visual stimuli provided by the Teniers picture are produced with points, lines and layers of pigment which are understood as a series of demarcated or bounded spaces which mimic the bounded space of the picture frame and the framing space around the picture, which is the gallery containing other, framed pictures and their contents, also showing other bounded spaces. Of particular interest for the analysis of film and art is Husserl’s approach to vision that emphasises the cooperation between physical vision and mental formation, and which further gets us beyond internalist (mental vision) and externalist (physical vision) distinctions. His intention in writing was to evoke a mental vision of a gallery of paintings which is an internalisation of the real picture in the gallery. The Teniers picture frame is both ‘outside’ of its contents (the fictive gallery) while being inside the ‘real’ gallery. Thus in viewing this painting at least three sets of binaries arise: the external and internal aspects of the noema; the optical in cooperation with mental envisioning; and internal and external spatial distinctions. We are able to think beyond these binaries, however, by conceptualising (or visualising) a monadic arrangement, where one part of the binary is seen through the other and with the concept of interpenetration (Durchdringung). The external world of the gallery is internal to the picture but the represented gallery is external to the picture-in-the-picture. Furthermore, the painting’s material properties are the external marks of the artist’s mental imagery, and interiorised by the viewer, but also the viewer’s mental envisioning constructs appearances of the image in the world and the viewer has an enactive relationship with the world. All three levels of interpretation are analogous with each other because they all suggest an interpenetration or monadic arrangement of their binaries. In addition to this, each distinct level of interpretation interpenetrates the other in the art experience, reflected back by the painting. This schema may be visualised in the following manner:

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Fig. 2 The overlap of three interpenetrative binaries in the conscious experience of the Teniers picture

The organisation of conscious mental states involved in the art experience in such circumstances is co-present with the painting’s spatial and conceptual organisation. The art experience is the site where both appear to co-emerge and interact—that is, they form an interconnected series in order to constitute conscious experience. The internal series of states in the viewer seems co-present with the painting’s internal exposition. I could just as easily visualise this relation between consciousness and the Teniers painting as a staircase of images at different levels and on both walls of the staircase. They do not reflect each other but the pattern of their seriality and exposition provides consciousness with the conviction that it is experiencing that seriality as a visual experience connected to the painting’s physical and spatial properties. The mental image of the staircase shares structural affinities with Husserl’s use of the Dresden Gallery image as hierarchically intelligible, reflecting a hierarchical organisation of conscious states with levels and appearances of the object. It is tempting to think that the Dresden Gallery passage is a successful demonstration of how the external world of physical objects is intricately transformed into the internal world of mental thoughts, collapsing crude internalist and externalist considerations. The Dresden Gallery passage

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puts phenomenological consciousness into art history and art into studies of consciousness. The picture presents contents (pictures and their contents) within contexts (frames and galleries) and this series of insideout, outside-in movements represents the mirrored structure of the noema: noetic embedded structures, reflecting embedded noematic structures. Consciousness appears intricately involved in the art object and the art object in consciousness, both (e)merge in the art experience. Bracketing Out Husserl’s bracketing out or epoché presents us again with an important thought experiment which uses the logic of framing. It is a complex manoeuvre, whereby the misperception that inanimate objects materially exist and exhibit properties that we see as emanating from them (the “naturalist standpoint”) is excluded from consideration of these objects. At the same time, bracketing out as a framing out device which excludes also implies a bracketing in of conscious states from the interference of objects (as defined in their crudest sense). The presupposition that objects are real and exist in the naturalist sense is not expelled by phenomenology but bracketed, not eliminated but deferred, made into a presence of an absence, as a way in which we regard objects it is suspended while at the same time extracted as a feature that inheres in an object's essence. In this way, Husserl hoped to eliminate the dichotomy of a crudely posited external material object and a mentalistic interior consciousness. The bracketing out of the naïve natural attitude to the world is not to deny it but claims to allow us a way of stepping outside it in order to examine it. Is the work of art similarly bracketed out—because it is also part of the natural world? When we have a picture that depicts a painter, with palette and brush in hand painting a canvas, these props refer to the picture thing (Bildding) its material substrate. But we “bracket out”, to use Husserlian terminology, the natural standpoint of interpretation, the painting thing’s material existence, and the painting’s subject thus appears to bracket out itself as a self-evident material substrate, and in so doing it brackets out the concurrent form of interpretation focused on the material base; bracketing out releases us to freely consider the Bildobjekt the picture as ‘picture’, and the picture subject—sujet the thing the picture stands for.

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Yet, the bracketing out does not eliminate material form, or consciousness of it but puts it into reserve, whence comes the presence of another subtle framing device, Derrida’s différance, to put out of the frame but not out of sight entirely—in fact, we see the bracket and this reminds us of what lies inside it,5 it is visibly out of the frame but functions from its position from the outside, a remote control, brought to bear on our on interpretation of the subject, the pictorialisation of the art of painting. Thus bracketing out has a paradoxical nature. It puts something outside in a very visible way. The physical world remains an object of concern to consciousness but this concern has changed. Bracketing out is another way of signalling the power of the centre, for from the periphery, that which is bracketed out moves irresistibly towards its pull only to meet the law of the bracket, the frame, territorialisation, the focus of consciousness as an assertion of the centre, the power of the mind over matter. Yet, like all frames, they are meant to be seen through. The expelled subject meets resistance trying to force its way in and only succeeds in a backlash where its materiality is accepted yet reinterpreted and sent back out, its materiality cut off, left out from the frame and only brought back into the frame after it has been filtered and cleansed of its dark material. Bracketing out achieves a difficult balancing act; it allows the natural standpoint to be present only in an impoverished sense, as with the trophy of the decapitated head of the enemy. It would be unwise to banish or eliminate it entirely for that would put into doubt the nature of the victory, that it is a triumph over the meaninglessness of matter on the margin. Moreover, this hollow victory would remove consciousness of our naïve realism (towards objects) which is part of the exercise of the bracketing out. Instead, matter is formed into meaning by being bracketed out, framed and is co-present but at arm’s length. Bracketing out is thus a form of framing which re-inscribes the mystery of form and substance, their uneasy and shifting alliances and presents consciousness as the frame that has authority over them both. The frame between the internal and external moves again not only en abyme, changing what seemed formerly external into an internal reality, but the frame cuts an undifferentiated continuum into external and internal properties and at the same time brings this divide into an 5

“The objects remain for us in our new, philosophical stance, only now we see objects in the correlation with ourselves and our intentionality. We can now analyze objects, but we analyze them noematically, as correlated to noeses. We do not turn away from objects to noemata” (Husserl 1983: 527).

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equivocal double value: it is both a continuum and two divided things by virtue of the presence of the frame. The frame takes on the qualities of Derrida’s différance and the Husserlian bracketing out, it does not destroy the external object simpliciter but brings it into play as a former reflection of itself, and it is still with us, distanced from our full acceptance of its former state, made uncanny by the frame. It is a convert that will always present the possibility of reversion. The repression in academic discourse represented by the bracketing out process raises several questions. One wonders if anything else could be bracketed out on the basis of different justifications. Ultimately, one wonders if bracketing out can be turned upon Husserl’s phenomenology, if this became a new, dogmatic form of selective naturalism. Logically, bracketing out can be used against bracketing out. And there is the irresistible scenario so useful for pictorial analysis, where we consider the bracketing out of the natural standpoint taken towards objects in the world and go further: bracketing out the paintings that depict these objects, and paintings themselves that visually claim to represent the natural world. And of course, if the paintings are pictures-in-pictures bracketing out becomes a rather more complex process, en abyme. Taking aspects of Husserlian picture consciousness allows us to collapse the artificiality of the internal/external divide with the dynamics of a “bracketing out” process, which is ambivalent in that it suspends belief in the natural world as a set of given values and assumptions. But it is itself reducible to characterisation, to the logic of framing. The Dresden Gallery image is an important theoretical nexus, a visually embedded framing device, as well as a causal paradox that Husserl uses as both a demonstration of different kinds of imaging devices in memory and as an exemplar, and we see it as an imaginary object, yet it is also an image of relations of these Abschattungen,6 to each other, shown as mirroring but also, embedding each other. Framing is the underlying mechanism which brings such a complex set of theoretical relations together. I would like to add one more: the frame as a bridge between Husserl’s devices (bracketing out, the Teniers picture, and the noema) to art objects which similarly utilise framing devices which activate self-consciousness. 6

This important Husserlian term, also adopted by Sartre, applies to objects that are given in a series of profiles or Abschattungen. The object is revealed in a series of appearances or set of appearances. The series of profiles in which an object may appear is infinite. The object itself is the ideal unity of this series. According to Sartre appearance and being are synonymous.

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Sartre’s Keyhole As with the other philosophers referred to in this section, I will only deal with Sartre in regard to key passages where framing and consciousness appear to converge in his thought. In Being and Nothingness Sartre wrote about a man who looks through a keyhole (Sartre 1956: 261-2). This is a mental image easy to conjure up in the reader. The reader not only reads the text, but also uses it as a keyhole for the mental image. Looking through the keyhole, he is at that moment taken up by the scene on the other side of the door and immersed in it at the expense of all else, his consciousness is almost ‘through there’ in the world, his prereflexive consciousness a faint background hum. He exists not as a duality, a self who perceives a spectacle, but as a losing of himself in the world. But this is interrupted, the peeping Tom suddenly hears footsteps, and this causes a major transformation of consciousness which appears to escape from the scene in the keyhole towards the unknown figure in the other direction. The self is split between what the peeping Tom sees with his eyes and the mental image of the other person approaching. For a moment, he imagines himself seen from behind as a shameful voyeur and he becomes aware of himself as an object of the Other’s gaze (who he presumes to be looking over his shoulder). He is conscious of himself through the consciousness of the Other and is looking at himself through the Other’s eyes and is shameful, all the while remaining to look through the keyhole. While his physical eye looks through the keyhole, he is looking at himself looking. The moment when the peeping Tom thought he was alone, engrossed in the scene through the keyhole, he became his look, and there was no strong separation between him as viewing subject and what he was watching (object). But when he heard the Other’s footsteps and began to think about what he was looking at, which remains tantalisingly beyond our grasp, the peeping Tom becomes a viewer of himself through the ‘keyhole’ of the Other’s eye. More than this, the Other’s consciousness is internalised in his, which is a frame-in-a-frame situation7 Like the Other, he becomes a watcher of a watcher, and something of this may be seen in Magritte’s Not to Be Reproduced (La Reproduction Interdit), 1937, of a 7

As Zahavi writes, interpreting Sartre’s view of intersubjectivity: “It is when I experience my own objectivity (for and before a foreign subject) that I have experiential evidence for the presence of an other-as-subject” (Zahavi 200:158).

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man looking in a mirror at his own reflection but seen from behind, looking in a mirror. Consciousness of the Other’s gaze reveals the peeping Tom to himself as an alienation of himself, for he is also conscious of being more than the Other’s image of him. This alienation is not the only split that occurs. The peeping Tom is aware of the Other as a subject looking at him, this shrinks the distance between the two in the sense that the peeping Tom feels as if the Other is “’in his head’ (another framing device) or that he is in the head of the Other looking at him, another play on interpenetration. But this split also happens with the scene through the keyhole. The peeping Tom is now painfully aware of his looking, possibly even the shape of the keyhole and the scene, objects that were until recently invisible to him in his prereflexive state. As the peeping Tom is split off from his scene of desire, he is also split off from himself while looking at himself (being conscious of himself). He is both subject and object which reside in him in a double sense, whether he pays attention to the scene ahead of him (visually) or to what the Other is seeing behind him (a mental projection). The footsteps alienate him from the scene and from his being in the world, through shame they create a consciousness in him of the image of the voyeur which alienates him for his voyeurism. The shame is a form of self-consciousness through the projection of an alien eye looking at one’s inner thoughts; the keyhole is turned back towards the peeping Tom. As with Husserl’s Dresden Gallery, this detailed and unfolding mental image—all this seeing, looking and peeping through keyholes—are props for the staging of operations of consciousness laid out in their complexity for the reader. It is through the keyhole of the Other’s consciousness that the peeping Tom is conscious of his own consciousness.8 The gaze, imagined or real, of the Other distances the peeping Tom from himself and this is another way of saying that the gaze distances consciousness from conscious mental states in order that they come into view, and so that Sartre can write about them. Sartre’s thoughts about the transpositions of consciousness are organised by a series of frames-in-frames. The keyhole scene is a system of frames: the eye of the Other, the peeping Tom’s eye, the keyhole, the scene through the door where presumably the couple are involved in a reciprocal gaze. Each frame is linked to the other spatially in terms of 8

“In the cogito, consciousness is aware that its consciousness appears as an object for another to examine” (Zahavi 2001: 164).

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embedding; the peeping Tom internalises what is externally behind him (a mental image of the Other’s eye) to ‘look’ at (be conscious of) himself looking at (or being conscious of) what he sees with his eyes through the keyhole: 1. Consciousness is to eye, as eye is to keyhole. A conscious mental state becomes a framing device to look through from the vantage point of another conscious mental state 2. The Other’s eye is to peeping Tom, as peeping Tom is to keyhole scene 3. The Other’s gaze at the peeping Tom, is to peeping Tom’s gaze at himself 4. Peeping Tom is a keyhole for the Other to look through 5. The peeping Tom looks through the Other’s gaze as a keyhole to see himself as a voyeur, through which he can see himself caught in the act 6. The peeping Tom’s looking at himself looking is another way of saying he is conscious of his consciousness; his consciousness looks through the keyhole to his consciousness as a voyeur9 7. Consciousness of his facticity as voyeur is the constriction of freedom caused by the Other’s gaze, the constriction of the gaze is like the constriction of the keyhole The mental image is of a gaze that is launched from one static point, the person standing behind, through to the peeping Tom to cause a reflexive consciousness of the peeping Tom’s prior (prereflexive) consciousness as a framed target state, which he can see through, penetrating the keyhole to the scene “inside”. One can imagine what is was like to have experienced a particular kind of consciousness by putting oneself in those shoes again, and this may be expressed as framing a prior conscious state by another in the present. The image of this framing or frame-in-aframe allows both conscious states to co-exist. It is as if consciousness travels sheathed in several gazes, and these gazes are embedded one in the other, the gaze of the Other is carried inside the gaze of the peeping Tom gazing at himself, gazing at the scene. Another way of expressing 9

“Consciousness is aware of objects and of its own activity by power of its detachment” (Howells 1992: 15). Thus, consciousness detaches itself from its present activity in order to become aware of that activity of consciousness as an object: “It enfolds its objects in a shell of nothingness, thus making itself a reflecting of them” (15).

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this is to imagine a series of arrows shot in the same trajectory at intervals, the arrow behind pierces the one ahead of it, turning it into a receptacle, a threshold or a frame through which it passes. The consciousness of the Other includes a mental image of what the Other sees (the peeping Tom, which is himself) and so the peeping Tom’s mental gaze penetrates the gaze of the Other so that the peeping Tom gazes at himself. He is both viewer and viewed, framed and framing. But Sartre is not just writing about looking. The gaze of the Other over the shoulder is transmuted to the peeping Tom’s consciousness of his own consciousness. This reflexive loop of gazing at one’s own consciousness through the consciousness of the Other is doubled by the physical look through the keyhole, which is a confirmation of the peeping Tom’s mental image of himself. Not only does he look into the room, he looks into himself and the jealousy and shame that it confirms through the keyhole of himself. The switch from jealousy to shame is also a dramatic change of consciousness from the exterospective viewing of the world outside to a withdrawal into mental self-visualisation. The footsteps herald a change in the direction of consciousness but again the keyhole is the threshold, the frame which provides the distinction between exterospective viewing and mental imagery. But it is not simple mental imagery, for the viewing of it is framed by the gaze of the Other. In other words, a mental image is framed by a mental image of the Other viewing that mental image. The mental image inside another is thus also structured by an interpenetrative series of conscious states. And importantly, the reader is implicated in the concatenation of mental images, for he or she is responsible for their emergence in the reading experience and in the retelling of the story. The reflexivity of image formation is not only personal but appears intersubjective. We look at our own mental image formation and imagine it to be somebody else’s or we borrow somebody else’s and call it our own, either way, we are looking through somebody else’s ‘eyes’ and therefore states of mind. A similar heightened form of consciousness is achieved while looking at Velásquez’s Las Meninas where we see what is going on through many different points of view. In Sartre’s terms, we switch from the en-soi—the being-in-itself (prereflexive consciousness) to the pour-soi—being-for-itself (self-consciousness). With each frame-in-the-frame, nothingness turns being into nothingness as jealousy turns into shame looking at jealousy. The peeping Tom is alienated from the en-soi by the gaze of the Other which makes

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him look longingly at his en-soi split off from himself, now at a distance, and what he sees through the keyhole is an activity of people being-inthemselves, which brings back the peeping Tom’s feeling of nothingness, a feeling of the lack of being-in-itself, seeing it only in a frame and from a distance. The being-for-itself frames the remnant of the being-in-itself, and therefore underlines the detachment of the being-in-itself further emphasised by the framing of the keyhole. The keyhole acts as a physical reminder of the detachment of the en-soi by the being-for-itself. The frame in Derrida’s terms is a parergon; that which lies outside in peripheral vision can interpenetrate and eventually displace that which appears most central. The eye of the Other, the eye of the peeping Tom, the eye of the keyhole, the eyes of people on the other side of the door are signals that mark which direction of consciousness is happening. Each gaze, and the framing device of the keyhole/iris/edge are distinctions between mental states but these states can collapse into the purview of any one of these framing devices. Needless to say, this further elaborates Husserlian formulations of picture consciousness, strengthening the hypothesis that internal and external states interpenetrate and that consciousness may be visualised as a series of interpenetrating frames. The implicit sexual nature of Sartre’s construct functions as a key which opens the door of the text. The gaze goes through the keyhole and cooperates with the phallus. The keyhole is an outward visible expression of the peeping Tom’s anticipation of coitus through the keyhole. Kneeling down before the keyhole to launch the gaze is a form of outward ritual which instantiates desire. One is reminded here of Michael Camille’s comment that a monstrous figure of the gryllus (an animal that has a head instead of genitalia) in the margin of a medieval manuscript is nothing more than an animal face lodged in the crotch of two legs, with no torso. He writes of the gryllus as “having a head between his legs instead of a prick. His look is an ejaculation” (Camille 1992: 41). Thus the gaze through the keyhole mimics penetrative sex (which is what Sartre’s fascination and feelings of jealousy and shame imply may be happening on the other side of the door). The footsteps allude to rhythms approaching climax, yet also to the beating of the heart, the passing of time, and the element of things in flux. The footsteps are not only the approach of the unknown lodged in the consciousness of the moment, the approach of consciousness of the series of conscious mental states that Sartre begins to describe, but they also take him away from his keyhole

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scene. The footsteps mark the distance of alienation, they take him away from his engagement while he is being approached by them, as he withdraws from the keyhole. But there is also a fear of a series of penetrations from behind. Again, this is similar to the example of arrows piercing arrows, mentioned earlier. At the base of it, however, is the logic of the frame-in-the-frame, the logic of the interpenetration of the series or levels of consciousness of conscious states. Clearly here in Sartre’s mental envisioning and structural logic emerges a consciousness that penetrates and is penetrated, views and is viewed. Interpenetration is the unsaid in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and lends itself to spatial and visual expression most readily. Significant for our purposes is how this interpenetration of series of conscious states is approximated by physical images. Apart from several examples that may be taken from Magritte’s paintings, more recent work springs to mind: Gillian Wearing’s photograph Masturbation. Its many internalisations of the gaze in cooperation with penetration seem to act as visualisations of the Sartrean conceptual apparatus. The series of photographs, the edges of the photographs internalised, remind us of the many frames implied by Sartre centred on the iris/inner eye/keyhole/psyche. These edges are merely there to mark the trajectory of self-viewing (where the elusive self is always a step ahead), of a consciousness of conscious mental states is shown as the gaze, turned inward, repeated en abyme. As in the gaze of the Other in Sartre’s keyhole sequence, in Wearing’s photograph the gaze appears to pierce the gaze and again, another gaze. Wearing links the reproductive capacities of photography, its seriality, to the repeated images embedded in the body which allude to pregnancy or self-reproduction.10 But this fecundity or new life conflicts with the repetitiveness of the image of masturbation. Penetration, as in Sartre’s keyhole, is signified in several ways here: finger; gaze; frame-in-frame; photograph-in-photograph and gaze-in-gaze. The photograph suggests a fusion of seeing and doing, and doing and seeing, the subject is also split between seeing and doing. The woman does and sees what she does; the body is both viewing subject and object. This is nothing less than the continuing alternation of the en-soi with the pour-soi, the switch from

10

The image appears also to refer to a St.Veronica (the image of Christ which the saint has emblazoned on her handkerchief which she looks down into, placed over her torso as the photograph is here). This is obviously a play on the alternation of original and counterfeit.

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Gillian Wearing, Masturbation (left) type print on mdf, 183 x 126 cm 1991 - 2 (MP-WEARG-00192). Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

prereflexive to reflexive consciousness and back again.11The seriality of these changes of consciousness finds its visual equivalent in the frames11 I am using these terms in a deliberately reduced sense. For Sartre the en-soi can be a whole host of objects in the external world which the subject may find itself joined to in moments of prereflexive immersion in the world.

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in-frames in Wearing’s Masturbation and in the seriality of the mental imagery of Sartre’s keyhole sequence. As with Sartre’s mental imagery and Husserl’s Teniers picture, this seriality is expressed spatially as embedding and as introspection of the self. The first is achieved with physical sight the second with mental imagery to achieve a co-emergence beyond the external and internal boundary. Sartre’s keyhole is an illustration of the seriality of the appearances of the object and the seriality which tracks it in consciousness.12 Consciousness, like these visual transformations or profiles (Abschattungen) of the object, is also serial, as each Abschattung is a relation to a subject’s conscious state, and there are many profiles organised into a series with an intelligible order. The structuring of the visual field by screens and frames creates a patchwork of eyes, a collage of mental states that structure photography in motion: the language of cinema. Film strives intersubjectively to connect with the consciousness of the cinemagoer by structuring the screen with a vast array of framing devices. Thus, it not only reflects the viewing processes of the filmgoer, but also, it self-reflects its own viewpoint, the director or photographer’s. It shows us a series of screens or frames often in linear order but sometimes displayed also as a series of simultaneous occurrences, background apertures and windows or pictures, and these frames-in-frames are contrasted and compared in order to create narratives of self-awareness. Sometimes, these narratives are about vision itself. The disembodied gaze penetrates various framesin-frames: keyholes or binoculars or now, increasingly, with science fiction movies the human iris is shown as a frame to travel through and into the universe of thought. These apertures in the cinematic mise-enscène allow moments of self-reflection, where others look back at us from the depicted space, or look at others through windows and doors reminding us of our own looking. In such circumstances, the film aims to enjoin the gaze of film viewer with that of the depicted viewer and in order to achieve a sense of immediacy, of sharing the same mental state. Yet a scene of an audience watching a film (in a film), a favourite cinematic device, creates a critical distance. Thus, types of depicted gazes 12

“The momentary consciousnesses of which I am aware in reflection are given as profiles of various psychological states which in turn are given as belonging to a self from which they spring. The ego is not merely an abstract entity to which states adhere as predicates to a subject, but rather the infinite totality of states which it supports, the “principle of the series” of possible states. The ego always accompanies our acts of reflection, as that to which our reflected states belong and from which they emerge” (Vaughan 1993: 16).

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in film can mediate the spectator’s levels of consciousness and self-consciousness, involvement and alienation in order to progress aspects of the plot. Consciousness appears to fly away from the body into the eyes of cinema until it returns with interest; this is the elasticity of the cinematic experience, its to-ing and fro-ing from self to Other. Marking the lines of flight between them are the frames-in-frames of the cinematography. I will have cause to return to these ideas in the analysis of images of frames-in-frames and their relationship to consciousness in Part 4, where I discuss Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and a still from Psycho where the serial killer Norman Bates looks through a hole in the wall to see a woman undressing. Merleau-Ponty and the Body What is noticeably absent in Sartre’s keyhole is any direct reference to corporeality (which appears framed out by his imagery). It is the logical next step after the transformative power of the keyhole turning itself into the frame, eye, sexual metaphor and consciousness, to see the keyhole, the door itself as unsaid approximations of the physical frame of the body. Yet it is also necessary to see representations of the body in art as frames through which to see our own bodies and concept of “the body”. Of course, Merleau-Ponty is important in any discussion of embodied consciousness and corporeality. According to Husserl and MerleauPonty, the perception of space and spatial objects presupposes a body, and this space may be experienced in a work of art as in any architectural space full of objects, windows, doors, furniture. In a wide variety of such cases, the body is a reference point for orientation in many complex ways. Yet, the body is only ever partially known to the self, one can not see it from all sides at the same time, or think of all its different processes and aspects at once, and so there is always a mental image or dominant set of images of one’s body at work, even through which one views one’s own body in the mirror. In addition, my consciousness of other human beings and their traces in art and writing and communication present a vast repository of images and attitudes that mediate any pure vision of my body which I might have, and many examples of these can co-constitute my consciousness of my body. Thus my body is, in a sense, intersubjectively constituted, it has a material substrate and finality but this materiality is always presented to me through a seriality of Abschattungen and many of these are thematised

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in art, literature, and dance. I can see my body as a cooperation of muscles, or nerve endings, as a layer of skin with pores and hairs, as series of movements and symmetries, pains or sensations, places of symbolic significance and memory, and (in art particularly) as postures, shades, colours or lines, textures and attitudes, intensities and absences; but it is also an index of the shared vocabulary of my species; in fact, the visual, verbal, multisensory vocabulary that I use to understand my body is endless and socially communicable as it is learnt. But it is also constituted from the co-present and relational configuration of other objects in space. Part of the process of intersubjectively constituting the body is the process whereby the body is represented in the materiality of art, as a sculpture. A Rodin is probably the most obvious example. Not only does the sculpture demand that my own three dimensionality is addressed (and is addressing) this Other (with varying pre-reflexive and object oriented self-reflexive levels of consciousness) but its very materiality addresses my own. And in the case of Rodin, the process of materiality coming into form or idea appears often unfinished, which reflects the formative process of my own self-imaging of the body and intersubjective syntheses. My consciousness of my material substance and the profiles and textures that present possible viewpoints through which to see it seems to co-emerge with consciousness of the sculpture’s materiality. The form of the sculpture, especially a Rodin is designed as a series of Abschattungen through which I see the material substrate of the sculpture, its solidity and its textured levels of resistance to the marks of the hand. The sculpture not only has its qualities but it shows us something of what it is like to have them appear in consciousness and before our eyes as a process of appearing, as a way of looking. The work of Rodin and Cézanne show us something of how we see and how we constitute our self image and the myriad, overlapping and co-existent images we negotiate to constitute our consciousness of objects in the world. In Rodin, his sculptures allow us to look straightforward and reflectively at the same time. The flickering Abschattungen suggested in his work are like spectacles through which I can see my own body. The image of my body takes shape in the consciousness I have of the sculpture but most of all, this image is always in a process of formation as my image of the sculpture, which I move around. The sculpture’s material base is presented to me by a series of different profiles but the

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actual material base can be seen as a representation of my own material substrate, which I also view through a series of profiles. The body represented in art emerges, yet it co-emerges with our own body and mind in a series of mutually re-affirming moments and processes. Self-consciousness of my body creates a frame through which the form of the sculpture emerges, yet it is through this form which I see an image of my own body. In the frame of art is embodied the frame of the body, in the frame of the body emerges the frame of art. There is then, something profoundly intersubjective about the clues that the Abschattungen of objects and the Abschattungen of represented objects communicate. And Rodin’s ‘unfinished’ sculptures form a semiotic field of truncated limbs and materiality torn apart that seem to cry out for completion, and we respond to fill those spaces to heal those wounds with our own materiality. In a sense, the sculptures move in contrary directions, they suggest our desire for completion yet all the while showing us that we are not whole, that it is our desire that divides us from each other and from ourselves. It is not simply that Rodin’s sculptures seem to move before our eyes, they visualise our embodied consciousness intensifying, which strives for identity, resolution, rest—things that are continually thrown into disarray by the metamorphoses of his figures. Our consciousness seems in the world beyond our bodies and yet the sculpture returns us to ourselves. These ideas develop the concept of the frame-in-the-frame into an encounter between the frame of art and the frame of the body, where the Abschattungen of each appear to reflect each other and interpenetrate. Derrida Derrida deals briefly with Husserl’s Teniers picture in the Dresden Gallery. Derrida’s treatment of the picture further extends the Teniers painting’s possible Abschattungen and the web of vision, the intersubjective consciousness involved with it. It also provides a link in my exposition here which doubly underlines the seriality of the Abschattungen and the seriality of consciousness with which we are engaged. More than this, the structure of the Teniers picture, so open to the seriality of Abschattungen just discussed, is also a token, a visual illustration of the seriality that it engenders. The structure of the image with its frames-inframes demonstrates the principle of different profiles, while at the same time showing the relationship of these profiles to the structure of

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subjective consciousness responsible for cooperating with the facts of the external world, in order to make these Abschattungen possible. Phenomenological consciousness emerges in the world as the world emerges in consciousness. This is a formulation similar to the mirroring structures of the noema; both strategies attempt to do away with the duality of consciousness and the external world of objects by mapping the intricacies of phenomenological consciousness. Much of this is evident in Derrida’s judgement on Husserl’s use of the Teniers picture: Certainly nothing has preceded this situation. Assuredly nothing will suspend it. It is not comprehended, as Husserl would want it, by intuitions or presentations. Of the broad daylight of presence, outside the gallery, no perception is given us or assuredly promised us. The gallery is the labyrinth which includes in itself its own exits: we have never come upon it as upon a particular case of experience that which Husserl believes he is describing. (Derrida 1973: 101).

In the first two sentences, we have an indication of the notion of infinity, and in the third, the impossibility of containing it (comprehending it) with intuitions or presentations. The fourth shows us Derrida believes Husserl ignored the actually external gallery in which the picture is situated as a frame of reference. And so the fifth line in this quote, which refers to the gallery as a “labyrinth which includes in itself its own exits” refers to the Husserl’s writing by using and extending the metaphor of pictorial gallery but even this excludes consciousness as a figure behind or outside the writing. Like the labyrinth (gallery/picture, writing and consciousness) consciousness has within it absences, lacunae and exits and subsequent, already immanent future formations. The end of Derrida’s paragraph quoted here intimates that the gallery demonstrates a concept beyond a particular experience (which Husserl may or may not believe he is describing) and is rather, a demonstration of consciousness consonant with his description of retrieving a mental image as a memory. Clearly, Derrida questions the naturalness of the experience as described simply as a memory, and is inclined to see it as a demonstration of the principle of intertextuality, of the elusive content of the text and its lack, signalled by the parergon, and more importantly, the dismantling of the dualities interior/exterior, ergon/parergon, for Husserl’s description turns one into the other continuously. But it is also possible with Derrida’s text on the Teniers picture to see a parergon that adds to the visual phenomenology, and the phenomenology of reading. To the seriality of appearances is

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added the reinterpretations of subsequent readers and writers; for both image and text, the labyrinth, is a series of bridges between the external world and consciousness—but with one important difference—the Teniers picture is primarily visual and not textual yet there is a phenomenology at work which takes both in its stride. For Derrida, these intricacies are not reserved for phenomenological consciousness but become for him a seriality found in all aspects of human endeavour, philosophy and the nature of all texts. In Husserl’s use of the Teniers picture Derrida sees a glimpse of the trajectory of phenomenology: the phenomenology of phenomenological studies, a kind of the transphenomenology. The reflexivity that the Teniers picture exercises cannot be dismissed as regress when we consider the different possible phenomenologies which have unfolded because of it in studies of consciousness and philosophy of mind, and now, art history, into a seriality spanning generations. In Derrida, the frame-in-the-frame is not discussed as a visual but conceptual premise; what is outside of the frame shows the lack of what is in it, as a parergon supplementing and founding it shows the lacunae in the text and vice versa. This is yet another way to conceptualise the relationship of consciousness to the objects of the world ‘outside’. For Derrida, the Dresden gallery picture is a visual motif illustrating, in his use of it, the deconstruction of phenomenology (his use of it lying outside of Husserl’s text but supplementing and founding it) but also, importantly, the implication of (1) the phenomenology of deconstruction, and even (2) deconstructed phenomenology of deconstruction and (3) the phenomenology of deconstructed phenomenology. These are not absurdities but real possibilities extending from Husserl’s Abschattungen and Sartre’s “serialisation” of it, to Derrida’s possession of it in order to articulate processes of dissemination and deconstruction.13 Those, like myself, who deconstruct Derrida on phenomenology on image consciousness are, in a sense, engaging in (1) to (3), which a number of inside-out, outside-in conceptual movements, whose visual token in the Teniers picture. 13

By adapting the term Abschattungen, Sartre does a doubling act of extending the meaning of Abschattungen as a series while adding to a series of profiles. In the same way, it is the nature of myth to gather together former appearances of a mythical structure in its matrix both as content and form. Hence the myth of the flying Dutchman is about the cyclical return of the Dutchman, which reflects and instantiates the cyclical return of the myth, and is, in effect a myth about mythical thinking, which instantiates it while at the same time illustrating its principle of recurrence.

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Whereas Husserl uses the visuality of the Teniers picture to illustrate aspects of the structure of the noema, Sartre adopts the keyhole to illustrate the complexities of consciousness and being, and Derrida the figure of parergon and the text, in the text, or texts coming out of texts (and philosophical intertextuality) as ways to show the world-as-text (yet never closed or finished). All these approaches use the structure of the frame-in-the-frame as a way to overcome the duality of the internal and external by positing an infinite seriality that makes nonsense out of the ontological permanence or presence of both terms, for one is constantly becoming the other in history and consciousness. For Derrida, Husserl’s Dresden Gallery passage allows him to deconstruct presence as a fixed knowable site, place, point or being. Instead, the picture denies the specificity of each of these traditional sureties (its exits are the lacunae of presence) and instead, courts the dynamic process of the passing of the presence into the exits that are already contained within it, and those exits are the presence of absences, as the presence of footnotes of a text, as something outside but also alongside the frame, as parerga. This is precisely the continual différance of presence, because presence is never really still, beyond dispute, known, and importantly, neither is it framed by a finite boundary but denotes a process of consciousness where presence (and presence of itself) is continually refreshed. The frame-inthe-frame questions the concept of presence in relation to absence by revealing not merely their dependency on each other but also their ongoing tendency to become each other in consciousness. Dissemination brings into view a series of emergences or re-readings of texts in lieu of an authoritative interpretation, it also reveals the continual stream of multiple drafts of consciousness, a text that has always, by all extents and purposes, already emerged from a previous and continually changing process of becoming. The dissemination of a text cooperates with the superposition of consciousness. Neither can be pinned down with authority. The play of meanings that dissemination describes works against the concept of “a text closed upon itself, complete with its inside and outside” (Derrida 1983: 130) and therefore works against the “presence” of the text as a fixed entity for its contexts, the things that lie outside of it are also inside of it in terms of reference and because of the interpenetration of meanings inherent in language. If for one moment we consider that consciousness is a text, dissemination describes such a text as consciousness engaging with the wider external world. Other consciousnesses and various levels of mongrel conscious-

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ness are co-present. Here we have an intersubjectivity working against the concept of the pure, authoritative centre of consciousness, its absolute borders, towards ideas of distributed systems, and their relational flux. The critique of the fixed presence of the text can be used also as a critique for the fixed presence of consciousness inscribed into neurophysical substrates. There emerges a view of intertextuality as synonymous with the exercise of the intersubjectivity of consciousness and its processes and subroutines. In The Truth in Painting, Derrida uses the discursive figure of the frame as a way to extend the intertextuality of discourses on art led by Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, thus demonstrating dissemination in practice and opening his own text further to that very process. I write four times here around the painting. The first time I am occupied with folding the great philosophical question on the tradition (“What is art” “the beautiful?” ”representation”, “the origin of the work of art” etc.) onto the insistent atopics of the parergon: neither work (ergon) nor outside of the work hors d’oeuve), neither inside nor outside, neither above nor below, it disconcerts any opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work. It is no longer merely around the work. That which it puts in place—the instances of the frame, the title, the signature, the legend, etc.—does not stop disturbing the internal order of discourse on painting, its works, its commerce, its evaluations, its surplus values, its speculation, its law, and its hierarchies. On what conditions, if it’s even possible, can one exceed, dismantle, or displace the heritage of the great philosophies of art which still dominate this whole problematic, above all those of Kant, Hegel, and in another respect, that of Heidegger? These prolegomena of The Truth in Painting, themselves the parergon of this book, are ringed together by a circle (Derrida 1987: 9).

The use of the frame and framing devices by Derrida in this way is not incidental or merely playful but signifies an approach that is both grounded in philosophy’s “framing” of art, in philosophy’s characteristic history of framing, in the framing of art history and even in the latter’s framing of the visual, the painting. This allows him to deconstruct these various frames and in so doing, Derrida claims to be co-opting these frames, writing “around the painting” and that his work is “neither inside nor outside” either traditional philosophy or art history or “around the work” hoping not only to disturb the internal order of the discourse on painting but to attempt to dislodge the domination of Kant, Hegel and Heidegger’s frames of reference in relation to art. In so doing, Derrida works as a parergon, alongside texts and traditions in order to create a view of their lacunae.

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Derrida shows philosophy’s framing out of what it believes is essential and inessential for aesthetic judgement, and so for example, Rousseau’s leaves out colour (which is subordinate to line), and Kant, the frames of paintings and drapery on statues and colonnades—he used the word parergon to describe such ornament and Kant also presented these important ideas in a footnote. Thus, what is framed out of art and philosophy is anything that appeals to the senses; framed in that which engages with the rational intellect. The parergon makes the split, and irrationally, because what lies outside the parergon is a supplement, shows the lack of what lies inside. Derrida also finds a similar exercise of the parergon in Heidegger (form is rational, matter irrational). Thus it is not a far cry from all of this to show a continuing duality of intellect/senses bifurcated by the parergon to create also, an opposition between the semiotic view of art (as a system of signs with various contexts); and the aesthetic view, respectively. In Kant, these binaries are united in the communication of beauty. What all these approaches to art have in common, according to Derrida is to reduce art to the function of universal human communication (an analogy with speech); art becomes the mouthpiece for rational communication, embedded in matter, the figure of signifying structure common to both semiotics and aesthetics. It is important that Derrida shows the parerga of art. More importantly for my purpose here, is the way in which Derrida in The Truth in Painting delicately skirts around the space of consciousness and its involvement with art, and the way that consciousness is involved in the production and reception of the parergon. There is no explanation as to why knowledge should be organised in such a way as to have a repressed other in its footnotes, except as some by-product of the exercise of power which ultimately undermines it. The myth of a perfectible rationality has inbuilt faults, lacunae and traces of expulsion in an attempt to build a foundation of knowledge; and there might also be something in Derrida’s implication of the autopoeisis of these parerga, but nowhere is the phenomenology of individual or intersubjective consciousness invoked as a possible player in the mechanistic dialectics of this ergon/parergon. It is difficult and perhaps impossible to escape Derrida’s accusation that we continually and unwittingly reproduce the same characterisation of art as a kind of visual language, a medium of communication somehow secondary to being rather than constitutive of it. The only way to avoid this stalemate is to try to show how art is not speech but a form of consciousness which can escape logocentrism. And between aesthetics

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and semiotics the phenomenology of consciousness-as-art intervenes. If visual art is a form of consciousness becoming aware of itself, speech may be dispensed with. It also sustains a free play between internal mentalism and the external world and shows these constructs to be artificial. It is the gaze that joins the world and the viewer. There is something extremely personal about what I see and how I am seen from another’s point of view. And in the intersubjective art experience, consciousness can and often does emerge beyond the duality of mind and world. It emerges not as a form of communication but as a form of instant identification, when art and consciousness are one. This is when communication seems not only cumbersome but superfluous, and the best it can hope for is to frame silence and space for this event to occur. Psychoanalytical Models With Lacan, philosophy and psychoanalysis overlap. Much of his imagery and approach to images are useful for understanding the experience of the frame-in-the-frame in art. Inherent in Lacan’s mirror stage is the spatial structure of space enclosing space. The mirror stage is not only applicable to the experience of the infant at an early age when viewing its own specular image for the first time and where the split in the self occurs to create self and Other or self and world but also, because consciousness is continually reliving that stage with the enactments of art, this process is not only phenomenological as the moment of reflection but has a duration over many years. On this view, art may be seen to serve as a mirror re-enacting the ‘original’ stage, a mirror of a mirror. The moment the infant identifies with the external image is constitutive not only of an archetypal subjectivity but marks the moment of consciousness of one’s own consciousness. The specular image is enframed like a selfportrait, and the frame cuts into the previous, anterior continuum of consciousness which the subject leaves behind, to some extent, on ‘entering’ that frame. But this leaving behind is never very convincing: it is revisited all the while exploring the internal space of the mirror. This is an archetypal visual description of the frame-in-the-frame experience as an emerging consciousness cooperative with looking. Consciousness appears split between the frame’s contents and what lies outside of it, and in the mirror is a reflection of the outside (of the mirror) which is supposed to be forgotten while ‘entering’ the mirror image (or endowing it with reality). Yet, we focus on the reality surrounding the mirror by

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inspecting its reflection ‘in’ the mirror. We feel we are looking directly at the reality in which the mirror is ensconced which is, in fact, framed and internalised by the mirror. Focusing on the surrounding location of the mirror will momentarily make the mirror vanish from consciousness, unless one is watching a mirror from the vantage point of another mirror, when one experiences consciousness of the reflection within a reflection. And this is the point where Lacan’s mirror phase begins to unravel. In subsequent developments after the mirror stage, the subject is supposed to use social relationships as her mirror but there is still the image of reflection at work here. How does this second or subsequent mirror stage compare with the supposedly fundamental first? Does it allow the first mirror stage to be recognised as such by the second? On the surface of it such a situation appears to suggest regress, as one is forced to examine one’s own looking (and by looking one often means one’s own thinking) in order to get some perspective on the mirroring of the mirror stage. Can Gillian Wearing’s Masturbation, 1991-2 (pictured here) be seen as an infinite regress of the mirror stage, picturing different levels of deeper and more enigmatic consciousness and selfconsciousness, alternating between capture and release? If it is a looking back at a looking back, it is also a stepping back from a stepping back, as well as a stepping into another stepping in: opposing directions, both staggered with frames or the edge of a photograph. These are reversible because they show us our reversible consciousness; they are serial and self-generating and so are certain processes of consciousness. Wearing’s Masturbation provides a visual opportunity to see a particular process of consciousness at work—conscious thought about the mental states the self is ‘in’ even as they rise up and pass through us. Self-consciousness is captured like a frame by each successive conscious mental state which forms a series of frames, each situated inside the other through which we see the duration of the self, in Wearing’s work signified by the repeated identity through the differentiated frames. The specular image is a construct, a representation for this mental act of self-knowing vis-à-vis the Other as person or thing, yet it also symbolises reflection—the reflection of the self in the Other and the Other in the self. Much like the higher-order thought’s relationship to its target mental state, the mirror splits the self into both object and subject and thereby unleashes the lifelong objective in art, nature or human relationships of their rejoining. The picture-in-the-picture may be reduced

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to its raw and literal state: it is, after all, only one picture which pretends to be two, but this reduction obstructs any meaningful interpretation of the image, which is the whole point of having a picture in the first place (one might even say that the interpretation is the picture). One enters into interpreting as a moving forward into something which is not the original gaze and yet, one ultimately moves to confront this first impression in the most circuitous manner. If it is possible to split the self between subject and object, viewing the self by the self, it is also possible to split consciousness attending the split. The image-in-the-image seems merely to engender and reflect this viewing of the self by the self because it asks us to look again at what we have looked at, think again at what we have thought, turning our previous actions and thoughts into objects of thought forming a seriality of conscious states. In Lacan’s mirror stage, the relationship between the subject and its image cannot simply be described by positing inward-outward relationships. In the viewing of the image something external has been absorbed which becomes internal and vice versa. This is often expressed as having a substrate in physical terms of the mother’s milk turned into the child’s excreta, although it must be said the child will have no consciousness of the external or internal in retrospect unless something marks this distinction to be retrieved at later stages. But the basic pattern of the absorption of something external into something internal and vice versa, which psychoanalytically is a way of countenancing an apparent contradiction, is paralleled by the operation of the mirror image-in-theimage or the picture-in-the-picture. The latter similarly problematises the absolutes of the external and internal and the presence of the space they occupy. Indeed, not questioning this binary may be seen as a regression. Such absolutes are merely the building blocks used by a basic consciousness in order to elevate itself into a vantage point from where it is possible to look back or at itself. The picture-in-the-picture may thus be a form of regression on many levels. The photograph of oneself, the selfportrait and the mirror reflection are objects of observation but are not easily bracketed out by the observer. Such visual forms of identity can pass into casual indifference with repeated experience, and that this need not be experienced as anxiety (the splitting of the self, or the projected self as castration or projection of loss). This is also true for the picture-in-the-picture in contemporary film, where one’s viewing is seamlessly stitched up by the director’s view of things, and so the film is, among other things, a pictorialisation of rela-

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tionships between these points of view. Many scenes from Hitchcock’s Rear Window, for example, engage with the projections of the self through the window, cinema screen and camera lens. In such cases, frames-in-frames are not always the object of thought and intellectual analysis as they might be but merely the way to conclude thought altogether in the pleasure of the expendable moment, instantly, visually and without verbal explanation. This is not a judgement between permanence and impermanence but merely an observation. The object of my observation may seem external to me, and equally in psychoanalysis never really external to me but part of the process of my observation. It is a conundrum which I find succinctly exemplified spatially and visually in the frame-in-the-frame. This only goes to show us that a rigorous analysis which allows various mobile perspectives on a particular problem (what is consciousness? for example) allows us to see that psychoanalytical analyses of art, like any body of knowledge which seeks to describe the world, has a series of images, forms and projections that can be used to analyse psychoanalysis itself and its image projections. Again, one might go back to the visual organisation of the picture-in-the-picture as an emblem of psychoanalysis analysing itself both from within and from the outside, looking “straightforward and reflectively” (Husserl 1982:148). The psychological effect of the frame-in-a-frame is comparable to what Freud called the uncanny (Unheimlich), that strangely familiar, ungraspable consciousness of something that one cannot quite become fully conscious of. For Freud, this is a particularly interesting psychological state, not least because it calls its opposite, Heimlich (homely, friendly, and familiar to the point of contempt) into presence as part of its own being, albeit in a distorted way. In other words, consciousness of the uncanny occurs within the space of the known and familiar within which another space opens up to reveal an unknown and unfamiliar reality that threatens to spill over the frame of what is known. The internal space (which echoes the internal space of the mind, the dream, the body) threatens to erupt through the boundary. Feelings of queasiness and anxiety (or terror in extreme cases) occur with this encounter or admixture of the familiar framing the unfamiliar (and by logical extension, the unfamiliar framing the familiar) and this is an unresolved tension, a coming together of opposites in one conscious experience, as in a sentence perforated by brackets and asides. The frame-in-the-frame and the picture-in-the-picture are visual notations of the structure of consciousness encountering art, which also happens to have this principle

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of organisation visually depicted. It is in this sense that the frame-in-theframe appearing in the visual field is a notation of the more intense feelings of the uncanny aroused by real-life experiences and situations, for the frame-in-the-frame is both familiar and subversive. One may be seen to lie alongside the other, underneath the other, or, as I prefer, through the Other. In Freudian terms, the uncanny arises as a sign of a repressive mechanism, namely, a prior familiarity (which the obviously signalled familiarity may bring to mind) it cannot be easily accepted because of various infantile or primeval fears and it lies suspended, not entirely outside the frame. Some of this survives in the experience of the framein-the-frame in art; imagine various evocative depictions of this in Magritte’s frames-in-frames. Here, as elsewhere, there is a tension between what might be described as an intellectual or an emotional ecstasis. Consciousness must repress part of itself in order to proceed into the space of the inner frame, this it will not do completely; the outer frame will remain part of peripheral vision and consciousness. This might produce a queasiness of sorts, the feeling of being into two places, inside and outside the frame. The lack of resolution creates the uncanny experience of a split consciousness, a doubling of which the double articulation of the frame is a token. What makes the frame-in-the-frame seem even more representative of the mechanisms of the uncanny is that, like the twisting of reality into a familiar-non-familiar movement, one questioning the other, the frame-inthe-frame is a questioning of reality as given and depiction as given. It is this visual structure, strangely objective in its bare geometrical essentials that can generate various conscious states, each of which questions the other’s verity or duration. It is interesting that Freud himself implies as much for the uncanny, for example, when one unexpectedly sees a reflection of oneself turning a corner in an unfamiliar place or context. The reflection arrests current thought—there is a hiatus—where, for a split second one appears to oneself as a stranger. After this ‘nonmoment’, this glimpse or copula, one studies this reflection and sees oneself rising up out of anonymity. In that moment, one might appear to oneself as another person; that split second, poised between familiarity and unfamiliarity is “purely an affair of ‘reality-testing’ ” (Freud 2003: 152). But it is not “purely” at all, for one also tests one’s consciousness in such a moment, one sees it arise in the external marks of the eyes and face and in their changing. One’s external appearance, perhaps quizzical,

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or in the process of changing from one recognisable conscious state to another, is reflected back to a mind that is equally in motion. In art, these moments of the success and failure of self-recognition are painted, sculpted and photographed for posterity in whom such dilemmas are relived. It is important to remember such phenomenological experience never seems to be completely resolved or concluded, it may pass over into other forms of ‘reality testing’. The familiar form of a lower-order consciousness which we use most commonly for object perception confronts a higher-order state that occurs when we become conscious of that first state or when we begin to question it, we then appear to step outside of this simple appreciation of a rose or a rubber ball or gestalt diagrams. We may also have the distinct impression that we are seeing ourselves seeing and this is a higher level reality testing. Because art has an ambiguous relationship to reality, it always co-opts such a questioning as part of its purpose. For while we are seeing our lower-order consciousness intimately wrapped up in the imagery of a simple scene that does not tax the mind, there will always be the temptation to explore the mind beyond these simple pleasures by questioning the given, or parodying it out of over-familiarity, and we do this by having a higherorder thought of our first-order sensations, or those that belong to others. But these states need not be depicted as happening in consecutive moments but simultaneously, hence the Unheimlich. And thus, in a sense, we see two objects in one premised on two ways of seeing, as in the parallax view, in Cubism and in the picture-in-the-picture which seem to multiply these possibilities. In Vermeer’s The Art of Painting and even in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, we have the exposition of the frame-in-theframe, the intimacy of our own viewing projected forth into an object in the external world which is not us, and yet reflects us, to create a feeling of prescience, that what we see before us is our own unfolding. The frame-in-the-frame is a device used in these different visual media to have a certain impact on viewers; those that deploy it understand the cooperation between seeing and being seen and the reflexive operation in consciousness that it engenders. For Freud the uncanny is an intermediate zone in an undetermined situation. The frame-in-the-frame bridges the binary of art and consciousness by recreating that intermediate zone in a visual, as well as mental sense. The frame does its framing and frames another of its species, its frames another of itself. Our viewing of such a presentation

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seems also to be a viewing of our viewing. It is important to note that this poise between subject and object, between seeing and being seen is itself an intentional object of consciousness and an ‘object’ which is a process. This is what happens when our consciousness is fixed on the projected space and meaning of a painting only to have it subverted by another painting within this space: think, for example, of the famous picture by René Magritte, Not to Be Reproduced (La Reproduction Interdit), 1937. The painting appears as two men, both of them with their backs turned to the viewer, one placed before the other appearing to look at the second man further in the pictorial space. On closer inspection this second man is a mirror reflection of the first, in other words, rather than seeing his face in the mirror, the man sees his reverse side, his back. The painting repeats the conscious point of access experienced by the viewer, the first point of entering the room where the picture is placed and ‘entering’ the frame of the picture to see the first man, past the real frame of the painting, the second frame (that of the mirror) is inside the first, and makes us experience that point of access again, but from an unfamiliar perspective. This is expressed clearly in Freud’s description of his dream sequence where he keeps returning to the same place wherever he goes. This return is also a repeat, a doubling, a self-doubt. We enter the pictorial space which is poised between something possible and impossible, which threatens our suspension of disbelief with a repeat or double, it questions our belief in the ontology of both the subject and object. And this is further strengthened because we become conscious of the seriality of conscious states that is enacted by standing before a picture of a man standing before a mirror, and man in the reflection doubling this stance, which is a doubling of the viewer’s stance and intentionality. The frame-in-the-frame confronts us with the splitting of the self experienced during the double entry. The return into the painting is also a questioning of reality and the reality of consciousness.14 The first entry is effortless, without self-consciousness, the second entry stirs an element of the self-conscious; going forward we are not only entering or passing through a limit but a boundary of our own previous consciousness signified by the first frame which we seem to traverse in slow motion. It is only logical to assume that many of us feel at this stage that we cannot 14

Freud relates the uncanny effect with duplication, an inexplicable repetition or reexperiencing of a memory or place, and this is closely related to the figure of the double or doppelgänger (Freud 2003: 44). .

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shake off the uncanny feeling that we are conscious within our own consciousness, exploring it from within or from outside, while engaged with Magritte’s painting which is able visually to epitomise this mental process. Accompanying feelings may be of an uneasy familiarity, a reality which seems a simulacrum, duplicated, or there might be a milder anxiety that we have seen that face before, been here before, experienced this experience before, and this is a doubling which is thematised by art’s duplication of reality. The frame-in-the-frame here is a re-examination or re-experience of a conscious thought by another, preserving both in the art experience, an art experience which opens up to its own duplication. This is possible because within the space of the outside frame that we are conscious of, and which somehow enframes us, there is another space within which to reside—a space within a space. Our consciousness not only seems to share the space of the painting outside but the internal picture makes us self-conscious of this effect; it makes my previous consciousness strange to me, it seems to double or split my consciousness as my visual field is doubled, to produce the uncanny, a counter tension of the familiar framing the unfamiliar, a superpositionality. It seems that the journey of consciousness past the first boundary of the frame is doubled by the second within it, which becomes our new object or journey, yet this repeat causes an alienation from the first frame pushed outward as a thing foreign to our familiar boundary of consciousness, something passes us by. Of course, this is not one-way, the reverse direction from the inner frame to the outer is also possible, and each journey may happen slowly or very quickly, as when a double-take in photography frames one original act of consciousness with another subsequent one and where one is tempted to re-examine not only the target of one’s original consciousness but also, importantly, to re-examine one’s subsequent state of consciousness and to see one through the other. Yet we also have a state of consciousness that sees such an accident as a process of reality. This is more than apperception, retrospectively one is analytical about one’s perceptions, yet one’s earlier perceptions may also be accompanied by a consciousness of one’s perceptions. This is clearly an approach to viewing art that goes beyond simplistic cause and effect and even beyond viewer oriented reception theory, because it takes the objective structure of the art object as proof of the structure of phenomenological consciousness which both produces and retrieves it in the art experience.

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Thus, against linguistic interpretations of psychoanalysis, the mirror stage, the uncanny and the doppelgänger are images found in art structured on a pattern of the frame-in-the-frame and this is experienced immediately as a visual sensation using the eyes in a physical sense inspecting the visual evidence and in an co-occurent mental picturing. Both mental picturing and optical inspection are projected back by paintings which show us scenarios where figures are looking at paintings, and so the discursive figures of psychoanalysis such as the mirror stage, the uncanny and the doppelgänger, depicted visually in art with the device of the frame-in-the-frame, stimulate the viewer to look forward and reflectively, a kind of visual psychoanalysis of consciousness attending the work of art. Art visually represents the relationship of viewer to herself in selfimage formation. The projection of an internal image (of body) upon the external image (of body) also appears as a reflection, the external image reflect back the image projected upon it. The device of the picture-in-thepicture is able to enact a feedback with the mental structure of this process. This allows us to see Wearing’s Masturbation, the work of Magritte and Hitchcock as structurations of the self using visual experience as channel of enactive engagement. These works shed light on aspects of psychoanalysis which also relies on the description of visual experience to explain the emerging self. Ultimately, then, we do not simply use psychoanalytical approaches to frame art, we can also use our understanding of art, film and visual experience to focus on the underlying explanatory strategies and mental images arising from psychoanalytical texts and to interact with them in the world.

3. Framing Consciousness Studies Not only do art historians and philosophers use vision as metaphors for consciousness, so do those who relate their philosophy of mind more closely with science, cognitive studies and neuropsychology. In a book widely known in for its impeccable logic, there is a passage in The Conscious Mind where David Chalmers uses vision as a rhetorical device for a heightened consciousness. As a child, the author had one eye weaker than the other and it was a miraculous occasion for him to put on new spectacles which corrected his vision, and so the normal viewing of objects in the external world was accompanied by a heightened feeling of awareness of the depth of the visual field, the clarity of edges and textures. The spectacles not only allowed him to see things more clearly but to see things accompanied by the presence of a sharper consciousness of the external world. Years later he used this experience as a mental image in his writing to allow his readers to look through his spectacles to share the feeling of a sharpened consciousness, which, rather than just being the by-product of the new vision, allowed the new vision to have meaning beyond any prosaic explanation. For me, as a reader, it is as if there is a series of objects set up by the author through which we are able to see: eyes, spectacles, the visual field “which suddenly looked more three-dimensional” (Chalmers 1996:7), and importantly, the feel of a heightened consciousness. We see this heightened consciousness as an object of attention in itself, and like the spectacles, see with it and through it to a world that is deeper and more sharply delineated. We love our new vision and we love our new spectacles. Framed out, beyond the rim of the spectacles is the continuum of a prior and inferior prereflexive consciousness, which the author asks us to simulate by covering and uncovering one of our eyes. The depth of vision is accompanied by a reflexive consciousness which is also an object for the retrospective

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looking back through the author by the reader but not only through the author’s ‘present’ state (which is a visual memory) but through the eyes of his former self as a child and through his old spectacles, all in order to frame this special consciousness described as an feeling of known experience. It is not just a question of improved vision but of consciousness accompanying improved vision (a reflexive notion “I” am seeing things better coupled with “I am conscious of seeing things better” and how wonderful to be conscious of seeing things better), mental states through which the reader can also ‘see’ or experience consciousness as a miraculous object, which nevertheless remains unacknowledged. The rim of the spectacles frames consciousness, the lens magnifies it. It seems peculiar to me that the reflexivity of this childhood experience used as a trope for consciousness in the author’s work should remain unrevealed, almost as if we are being asked to believe in the plot, simply as a true story, which it is, but his retelling of it is more than that, more than a lower-order type consciousness that would attend such a report. The imagery of the spectacles has, perhaps, an unexpected effect on the viewer; it alerts one to the finer grained activity of consciousness that accompanies qualia. At the same time, the writing brings the imagery of improved vision to mind and the imagined object of that vision; we see through the boy’s experience, we even cup our hands to do so, to pretend that we are the boy who sees things differently. There is not only an element of ecstasis in this. Conscious experience of a simply posited quale with one eye cupped allows for the feeling of a transparent overlapping of the boy’s experience with mine, a kind of double exposure, yet not only sense objects are captured here but the subject of consciousness itself. Although relegated as a parergon in the text relating the experience in retrospect with Chambers’s personal reminiscence, we see reflexive consciousness—new spectacles—looking through to prereflexive consciousness—vision with one eye. This reflexive consciousness is also able to focus on the experience of consciousness more sharply vis-à-vis a sharper world. As in Husserl’s Dresden Gallery, Sartre’s keyhole or Lacan’s mirror, with Chalmers’s spectacles we are not merely reading a simple account of a particular experience but thinking of a particular experience of seeing that we can use as a way of thinking about consciousness through a number of representations. We ‘see’ conscious-

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ness through the account of the spectacles and with mental vision through the spectacles and all this reflects back on his more knowledgeable vision in the present, the description is a double articulation of reflexive consciousness. Writing that conjures up mental imagery about ‘seeing’ a red ball or a red rose is probably one of the most frequently used methods for describing how lower forms of consciousness works, and in a wide variety of cultures. But it is important to remember that visual art may also express this kind of mental imagery, rather than being simple evidence of an act of observation. Observation itself is a cooperation of mental visual memory, imagination, rational projection, as well as the processing of facts and details from the visual field. The visual field itself is coloured or ordered by this cooperation of mental processes rather than just a given panorama of details passively accepted by the viewer.1 The cooperation of mental processes which produce vision can be expressed by the external marks of art, the viewing of which further refines visual experience and its accompanying mental processes. This view of art cooperates with or overwrites naturalist and realist models of sight and interpretations of objects. The mutually illuminating relationship between these kinds of vision, the visual processing of physical objects and mental envisioning often forms the 1

This also chimes in well with general reception theory that recognises a more active role for the viewer, where “consciousness forms the point at which the author and reader converge” (Iser 1974: 144). All these views effectively cut across externalist and internalist views of the world simply because the truth, meaning, reality are formed by the interaction of these two ‘sides’ and do not reside exclusively in either of them. Yet this view is also supported by general phenomenological conclusions about consciousness and vision: “Whatever becomes thematised (even as a mere noticing) must have been already affecting and stimulating one in an unheeded manner […] object-directed intentional experience arises against the background of a pre-cognitive, operative intentionality, which involves a dynamic interplay of affectivity and receptivity, and constitutes our most fundamental way of being open to the world” (Thompson and Zahavi in Zelazo 2007: 74). And this is consistent with cognitive data suggesting an enactive view of engagement with the world (and film) “rather than a stimulus causing a response, it is the response which must occur first and then act on the incoming afferent signals to produce a stimulus” (Ellis 1999, 267), and “The structures of the world allow the structures of the observer to exist, while the structures of the observer allow the structures of the world to be conceived and perceived” (McGann and Torrance 2005, 184). All these views effectively cut across externalist and internalist views of the world simply because the truth, meaning, reality are formed by the interaction of these two ‘sides’ and do not reside exclusively in either of them.

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very subject matter of art. This kind of cooperation between mental imagery and visual art or literature is commonly used to illustrate lower forms of perception (again, we go back to the example of the red ball). But the conjuring of mental imagery by a text and by visual works of art that inspire visions, often stimulate higher-order processes of consciousness which are self-reflexive. In writing we could have indicate an image which co-opts lower forms of visual inspection with mental image formation: think, for example, of a sentence describing the appearance of the font, Times New Roman written in red. We read this sentence while at the same time, imagining it in red. This is mental image formation in cooperation with optical observation, parallel processes engaging different parts of the brain at the same time to produce a reflexive action. But visual art does this, for example, in Magritte’s famous Ceci n'est pas une pipe, which points up a binocular rivalry between a mental image suggested by the painted text and the painted image. In Velázquez’s Las Meninas we see depicted a reversed canvas which stimulates a number of mental images about what is painted on it, while we are actually engaged with inspecting the image of the reversed canvas. These mental images are medium-reflexive, allowing for a heightened consciousness attending the text or painting, which deliberately suggest mental images that refer to the medium (text or painting) which convey these mental images. This kind of complex manoeuver is also seen in Chalmers writing on spectacles as a mental image we attend to while reading his text. Another excellent example of this is the quote from Sokowloski on syntax quoted in the introduction to this book. This reflexive experience using mental images can also work by pointing to the reader and to his or her embodied experience: Moving ever inward, towards experiences that are not associated with particular objects in the environment or the body but that are in some sense generated internally, we come to mental images (Chalmers 1996: 9).

Again, the sentence is a double articulation. Note the image of an inward journey employed here, away from the outer space of particular objects “in the environment” (another image) and further inward, beyond the body (another image) eventually to “come to mental images” lodged within this series of mental visual presentations. The sentence presents a journey of ‘internalisations’ that illustrate (and instantiate) the image of introspection. The body is used as a frame

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which links direct visual experience of the world of objects (and the body is part of that world) with indirect visual experience located in the mental envisioning. However, it is important to remember the circularity that the former can appear to mirror the latter, and vice versa. We can develop an analysis of this kind of experience using a simple thought experiment. By writing ‘C’ on a piece of paper and drawing a box or frame around it, let that C can stand for consciousness, or more precisely, embodied consciousness, the frame signifying the body. We can then close our eyes and imagine the image that we have drawn. The mental image of the external image is a representation of the external image, but the latter is also, now, a representation of our mental image. The image on the paper is an external image of an internal image in our mind of C standing for consciousness. But C framed is also a representation of an external image (that is, itself) of an internal mental image of consciousness. The thought experiment could be extended by another frame drawn around this diagram so that there appears to be two frames around C, and this second frame could be made to stand for a thought about the original diagram, C framed. The previously external image is now internalised by the outer frame. It is both external and internal, or rather, in a superposition or flux. Such a thought experiment shows us that a diagram of this kind is both physical, having a material substrate, and that this visual stimulus may be translated as a mental image which mirrors and is mirrored by the external image. At the same time, the process leading from the drawing of the external image to the mental image and back again to the viewing of the drawing is a process which is itself a metaphor for conscious mental states ‘framing’ or ‘seeing in’ other conscious mental states. The relationship of mental images with physical ones is analogous with the relationship of higher-order thoughts (thoughts about thought) and lower-order mental states (thoughts about things).2 Consciousness is framed (isolated) in our consciousness as a phenomenal experience of the image of C in a square. Consciousness is 2

It seems logical that a mental image can be likened to a higher-order thought if that image is experienced in conjunction with a lower-order perception of an image, which in some sense is an interpretation of those optical sensations, as for example, when I am looking at somebody’s face and I am reminded of somebody else, my mental visual memory cooperates with what I am optically experiencing. But not all mental images are like this. Some are simple—an image of a tomato—this could be called lower-order mental images, as opposed to higher-order ones.

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represented as both an object in the visual field and as a mental image, and the relationship between the two is represented by the framed C placed inside another frame. Consciousness is represented as a diagram of C in one frame, consciousness of viewing this diagram (a consciousness of consciousness), is represented by the double frame. The doubly bounded image reflects back our consciousness of our mental envisioning to ourselves; it thematises the interpenetration of internal and external worlds and epitomises our facility to think selfconsciousness in cooperation with the optical experience of a visual object. Frames-in-frames presents the concept of the internal and external in relation to each other, and to a certain extent makes nonsense of the neat division of internal and external whose scission is the body, to allow for a sense of consciousness as a continuum that is captured and released by the frame of direct visual experience to become indirect visual experience, and vice versa. Consciousness negotiates both frames as an intensity that remains relatively constant through a series of environmental or contextual changes denoted by these frames, and this is a kind of consciousness-as-oscillation between principles of identity and difference. It is important to note that art in a hugely various cultural and material examples uses the principles revealed in the thought experiment C framed in far more complex and nuanced ways. 3 One can argue about the conceptual relationship between psychology and phenomenological judgements and theorise how cognitive processes and states underpin phenomenological conscious experience in parallel and co-occurring relationships. But there are many kinds of judgements that are not at all like written accounts but rather more like living processes of analysis that involve, indeed consist of, various shades and levels of consciousness that (to use another mental image) overlap. Chalmers claims that judgements are more like psychological entities and belief more phenomenal in character (Chalmers 1996: 203); this may also mean, presumably, that one can be phenomenally 3

Although I am primarily concerned to show how higher-order consciousness processes the framing structures of film and art, there are some cognitive theories which show that the formation of perceptions of the world naturally proceeds by using framing structures used to group, store and represent the information thus obtained (Barsalou, 1999). Consequently, framing imagery in film and art reflect back the organization and exposition of different processes of consciousness: self-consciousness (conveyed by mental images) and the fine-grained organization of object perception.

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aware of a psychological event such as a judgment or perception of optical stimuli, brought to mind by psychology books and diagrams. In the latter case, phenomenal consciousness frames another neuropsychological event, which in turn, sustains phenomenal consciousness of neuropsychological activity. It is possible to translate this self-reflexive relationship into the language of art and film. Chalmers suggests that basic judgements form a bridge between the neuropsychology and phenomenological consciousness; this recognises that there are different levels of judgement. This may be true for certain judgements but it may not always be true of all judgements. Chalmers speaks of third-order phenomenal judgements, judgements about consciousness, qualitatively different from first-order judgements, such as “I see red” (Chalmers 1996: 176). Third-order judgements about conscious experience of consciousness of a red rose, for example, must be a third, or perhaps even fourth order judgement three or four times removed from the reality of neurological relations. I use the term ‘times removed’ deliberately to remind us of Plato’s theory of images to show that the figurative language we use and the images we engage with are part and parcel of this process of abstraction ‘moved further away’ from low level neural activities and first and second-order phenomenological judgements and kinds of awareness (with psychological correlations) about objects in the visual field. But what if that object of the visual field which we are so busy becoming so many times ‘removed from’, somehow reflects these processes of abstraction or times removed from simple optical inspection? Using a more complex object of perception Chalmers writes: My visual experience of red book upon my table is accompanied by a functional perception of the book. Optical stimulation is processed and transformed, and my perceptual systems register that there is an object of suchand-such shape and color on the table, with this information available in the control of behaviour. The same goes for the specific details in what is experienced. Each detail is cognitively represented in awareness. To see that each detail must be so represented, simply observe that I am able to comment on those details and to direct my behaviour in ways that depend on them; for instance, I can point to appropriate parts of the book. Such systematic availability of information implies the existence of an internal state carrying that information. (Chalmers 1996: 220)

The double articulation here is a form of the frame-in-the-frame: we

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are asked to visualise a book within a book, and to read about an image of a book. One is reminded here of a similar higher-order consciousness involved in the book pictured in the hands of Marguerite in the medieval illustrated Book of Hours, as well as in the Mughal painting in an illustrated book, which shows a painting of an artist painting a calligrapher copying a book, a painting which is itself lodged in a book. In both these visual cases and in Chalmers’s example which is an textual equivalent, consideration of the book-in-a-book takes us beyond first-order phenomenal judgement (of the physical book I hold) to more a conceptualised content adding considerably to the functions and complexity of the internal state generated, sustained and represented by external stimuli. The external stimuli appear also as the cause and effect of the internal imagery. The object in the world appears to be abstracted from itself by its own distancing from itself achieved by the device of the frame-in-the-frame. And this works in cooperation with our own levels of abstraction involved in the “visual” inspection of the object. The Imagery of Parallel Processes Some of this thought is reflected in the literature concerning conscious experience. Epitomising a widely held view in consciousness studies, Chalmers writes “whenever a phenomenal property is instantiated, a corresponding psychological property is instantiated” (Chalmers 1989: 22); “The structure of consciousness is mirrored in the structure of awareness”(223) and the “geometry of experience corresponds to the geometry of awareness” (225). Experiencing the visual field, especially when that visual field appears folded in upon itself as in the frames-in-a-frame situation, requires quite complex cognitive operations and this complexity is related to the combinatorial structure of information states. We can describe this as an information flow or the superimposition of one information state over another, as in the information state required in metaphor or a coded story within a story that requires a double reading. It seems likely, however, that the cooperative relationships between the configuration of the visual field, phenomenal experience and the psychological substrate that come together as consciousness are not imitative of each other. Rather than mimic each other, they cooperate in a complex system of contrasts and counter-tensions in ever-changing adjustments and orchestrations,

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some of which appear momentarily to mimic, at other times to add or subtract from the image of the other. Although combinatorial information states processed in the visual cortex may ‘match’ those found in the visual field and have a close relationship to the organisation or feel of the accompanying phenomenal state, there is probably at lot more going on than a simple parity of effects; for that posited simplistic parity will only be part of the concert of effects, some of which lie cooperate with the visual field in non-imitative ways or in ways that provide a relationship that changes the consciousness of the visual field providing more information for the generation of further information states. It is more than likely that the parallel concept of information states inside and outside of the brain only really describes basic elements or moments of consciousness before they are engulfed in a rather more frantic and densely layered series of asymmetries and abstract relations. But even this begs the question about duality, not only that involved in the concept of symmetry, the tracking of phenomenal with psychological processes but also with asymmetry, a creative dissonance (instead of structural coherence) of these processes that are still connected in some relationship that affects the quality of consciousness. While it is easy to imagine as symmetrical parallel relations between geometric forms in the visual field and processes of the mind, it is extremely difficult to map the causal chain and describe the system of relations between mental states engaged in a complex, dynamic and reflexive phenomenological consciousness of watching a film. The viewer of a film will come to the viewing arena with expectations, memories, vaguely intimated presuppositions or a set of idealising tendencies4 with which to visually process the images 4

One is reminded by Zeki (1999:76-96) that we can look at an ordinary object and see it as a Platonic ideal and this can be explained as a form of perceptual constancy: we see the object through a series of idealisations which are stored as memories. Just as digital photography simulates ideal colour constancy through look-up tables, we can order the vast array of chaos in the external world into ideal forms by referring to our mental library of ideal images. Obviously, what is happening here is that the brain processes to do with memory activity and imagination are co-operative with parts of the cerebral cortex to do with visual processing. One seems to monitor or regulate the other in a mutually framing relationship. However, the idea that philosophical and aesthetic concepts have a biological foundation can only be demonstrated if these concepts are excessively simplified. Third-order thoughts and orchestrations of HOTs and their relations are the foundation for these concepts, which are in fact, traditions

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passing before us. These cognitive operations, some of which will be involved in the processing of the visual stimuli when the film begins, others sustaining predispositions shows that both prior and immediate experience cooperate, and this perhaps works against any purely symmetrical model, for it sets up a model of overlapping where one cognitive operation is initiated after another has not yet come to an end and where that end acts as another’s beginning, middle or end, and the visual evidence is always less than the vast stores of prior knowledge that is brought to the site of visual inspection. If these visual stimuli are a series of windows or door frames in a film, as in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, such picturing moves the story along while containing aspects of other, smaller storylines that are concurrent, and at the same time making the viewer aware of how this complex visual juggling is achieved. On one level, the viewer is processing the meaning and story and on another, split level is processing the fact that these window frames resemble the rapid succession of frames which defines the medium of film. Thus, it is possible to see Rear Window’s windows and frames which contain storylines engaging with consciousness and its many processes. Storylines and processes cooperate with the frames of camera apertures and window views to open up to fresh vistas which, in turn, excite patterns, rhythms and representations in our perceptual systems that are then stored and used again or taken up for synthesis in relation to higher-order conscious processes involved in semantic creativity in later contexts or simultaneously while other perceptual activity is maintained. Because this is time based, residual mental framing devices may be used to mark moments of conscious experience through or along side which we process fresher ones. Most models of consciousness represent series of parallels or dualities: shapes and forms of the external world are copied in the cognitive system, the neurological base or substrate of the cognitive system subserves the upper levels of the phenomenological state to which they relate. And at its crudest reduction, the external world and the internal lie parallel with each other. It would be wrong, however, to assume that the world bifurcated in this manner imitate each other as with two sides of an inkblot drawing folded up to reveal a of thought with centuries of complexity attached to them. Most of what Zeki or more especially Ramchandran and Hirstein find in neurology to explain the art experience amount to only tiny aspects of a massive edifice.

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symmetrical pattern. The relationship between the areas of phenomenology and the psychology cannot be reduced to some crude representationalist formula. This misleading image of a mimetic parallel relationship also generates the logic of origin and copy, a real and a represented, and thus also presumes an on/off causality switch with the optical stimuli causing the lower levels of perception to initiate. Worse, such a causal chain posits the mind as a passive sponge mopping up the active signals of the external world. But as I have shown with film, it is sometimes extremely difficult to isolate that initiation or completion sequence, and the failure to isolate a unit of this into a clear action or event means it is often impossible to locate the causal relationship and the relations between these so-called parallel processes. And certainly, in scenarios of creativity and production it is the body and its embodied processes which are the cause and the effect, target and targeting system of consciousness and self-consciousness. Much of visual cognition occurs below consciousness. What a viewer sees in the frame-in-the-frame in the visual field in many experiences of art, for example, is the result of a complex organisation of processes many of which overlap rather than fit neatly into the binary image of parallel processing. As with the concept of the after-image that lingers on, a thought engaged with the world becomes part of the next. Edge detection during the visual processing of the frames-inframes in art has underpinning neurological processes that allow for spatial data, geometric configurations and intuitive measurements of proximity and colour differentiation seen with rods and cones on the edge of, or inside the fovea but this level of perception is keyed into semantic and linguistic structures interpreting the flow of information. While much of this may happen below consciousness, many other conscious processes occur at the same time and at different times, some of which must interlock and form a superposition that cannot easily be classified as either hard psychology or phenomenological consciousness. This is especially so in situations that may involve memory, conscious comparisons with other situations, mental imagery and self-consciousness in such rapid succession that they are experienced as one conscious mental state, something of this happens in a flash of recognition of the self in some else’s gesture. Some research into consciousness has sought to trace neurological processes to higher levels of consciousness by showing colour per-

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ceptions and their links to related concepts, for example, the way the retina processes red as opposed to blue leads through various stages to closeness/distance, hot/cold colour associations and eventually to quite sophisticated semantic chains (Hardin 1988:129). If we accept the neurological basis for distinguishing colour in the visual field (and edges and shapes) and their cooperation with phenomenological consciousness of colour and form, then we have to accept similar neurological processes at work identifying a frame within a frame in the visual field. It would seem that at a neurological level the brain differentiates one frame from another with edge detectors in the eye, along with many other visual processes and neuronal groups responsible for differentiation of colour, texture, distance, light and dark while higher levels of consciousness differentiate the shades of meaning represented by the information inside, around and outside frames-inframes. Thus, there is a cooperation of neurological processes responsible for demarcating and individuating the visual field with perceptual processes of individuation and identification in the field of consciousness, and their uptake on the phenomenological level, which may lead to a feedback loop to the lower levels. This may happen, for example, in the phenomenological experience of viewing conceptual diagrams of neurological processes and relations, which are so common in studies of consciousness. The following is a skilful description of some neurological processes that underpin the image of consciousness as both a series of fragmented and discrete events and as a global defragmenter, assembling discrete occurrences into a continuous narrative or wave form: Neurons continuously jitter in ensembles, in populations organised on portions of horizontal sheets or in vertical threads or columns. We can picture the sheets as stacked in layers […] imagine that each sheet contains numerous abstract designs. Indeed, staining techniques have shown that the cortex consists of six distinct sheets, and the superior colliculus, the cerebellum, the thalamus, the olfactory lobe, and the hippocampus, also have a layered look. To form an abstract picture of the brain, imagine that each sheet contains numerous abstract designs. The recognisable boundaries between the designs on a sheet represent a functional group. There distinct patterns might of course, run through space occupied by other patterns. Imagine further that the sheets are loosely joined by a system of threads (columns). Some threads run all the way from the top to the bottom; others connect only several intermediate layers. Imagine that sometimes air flows under a single sheet or under part of a sheet. The portion of the sheet is very active, the parts far from the lifted portion are hardly active at all. Next imagine that the vertical threads are put into various

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wavelike motions. This will have the effect of activating portions of many sheets. Depending on the number of columnar threads activated and the strength of the waves, the global activation pattern will be massive or relatively localised. A sheet active at the start of some process may become active again and again, since the waves it sends out can resonate back to it numerous times before the process dies down [an] example where both horizontal and vertical projection is involved occurs in setting down long-term visual memories. Perception of a visual scene involves processing its various aspects (object, shape, motion colour) at different locations in the neocortex […] The brain is a network in which functionally segregated neuronal groups respond in parallel to various aspects of some stimulus and pass the information they compute back and forth to each other […] Perception is the result of global coordination among the system of functionally distributed processors […] synchrony among parallel processors, and signals passing between processors yield a unified perception quite possibly without the involvement of any single perception center (Flanagan 1995: 37-38).

This description refers mainly to processes of basic perception, much of which occurs without consciousness, but imagine the neurological complexity and synchrony involved between different groups of neurons in different locations in the brain involved in the experience of consciousness of a work of art which has one or more frames inside frames representing a multiplicity of realities (and indeed including other works of art representing other realities) that contrast with and complement each other. The imagery of parallels to describe the relationship between phenomenology and cognition or neuroscience suddenly appears inadequate. A particular kind of art history springs from the tradition of studying shape recognition and visual conventions such as the work of E. H. Gombrich or R. Arnheim. This work allows us to become aware of these perceptual processes even while we examine the images they have published as examples to illustrate types of perception. There is of course, an interesting reflexivity at work here. This art history consistently uses words and images to transform perceptual processes below the level of consciousness into apperceptions in phenomenological consciousness—but without saying as much. This art history is less about the works illustrated and more about raising consciousness of perceptions below consciousness; they allow us, if you like, a kind of periscope with which to view the murky waters of perception and ingrained perception, which are somehow transformed into a visual spectacle for us to see in combination with the illustrations supplied. We see the illustrations and the perceptual processes involved in

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viewing these illustrations laid out in text book style, a kind of tourist’s guide to the perceptual activity at work in viewing art which Cézanne or Cubism achieved in purely visual terms. Such an operation changes our consciousness of what usually remains nonconscious: processes of visual perception. Consciousness in this sense can be defined as that area in which previously nonconscious processes of perception enter, in order to fill out the reserved area, which may or may not have been reserved in a prior or co-incidental manner. The process of reading Flanagan’s text reproduced above activates parts of our neurological apparatus and creates wave forms perhaps in ways that are actually described in the text. Consciousness of some neurological processes and perceptions arises in the reading about them but we have no direct experience of such processes. This inferential but strangely self-reflexive process becomes more complex when we consider different kinds of abstract art as objects of perception: imagine viewing an Op Art painting of a ball that appears both concave and convex, in different lines and colours. This would involve all the neurological subroutines mentioned above, with edge detectors, depth and colour and motion detectors (especially if it was a kinetic Op Art sculpture) but would engage phenomenological consciousness in the work of objectifying its own basic subroutines of perception. How is one to distinguish between one’s basic visual processing of pure shape and form, which never usually passes into phenomenological consciousness, when this visual processing is the object of phenomenological consciousness? Scientific diagrams of neurological processes also produce this complex form of reflexive phenomenological consciousness, which also arises out of viewing pictures-in-pictures structured by frames-in-frames. While the simple image schema of containment (a small circle in contact with the inside of a larger circle) may reflect basic neurological organisation, satisfying the demands of an embodied philosophy of Lackoff and Johnson (1999) or at another level, a series of boxes in art can demonstrate Kantian a priori categories,5 one of the dangers is to see perceptual models of visual thinking as entirely reducible to neuro5

For example, Donald Kuspit surmises that the viewer of Sol LeWitt’s Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974 completes missing elements of a logical structure and supplies the missing edges, and experiences “the tension between the literally unfinished and the mentally finished cubes—between what Kant would call the phenomenal cube and the idea of the cube” (Kuspit 1975: 48).

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logical or psychological processes and/or the determinism of nonconscious perception which forces us to see things in a particular way. This goes against the considerable abilities we have to override programming and become self-aware of many of our processes of thought. It is not at all clear, for example, how higher-order thought of mental states is related to neurological processes, physiognomy, or the level of perception despite work on certain types of higher-order activity involved in visual interpreting other people’s actions and behaviour (Frith and Frith, 1999). There is an unrecognised, inherently reflexive thought involved in the diagrams that purportedly just ‘show things as they are’ and without any kind of process of Husserlian bracketing that might mitigate against such a naïve conception of the world. To go back to a typical diagram of ‘containment’, a large circle inside which there is a small circle, it is more accurate to say that this is a diagram of the containment of containment (but is not acknowledged as such) and engages with a higher-order thought about the perception of containment that co-occurs. The diagram thus works simultaneously on a number of levels of consciousness, a higher level directed by the diagram to the lower one as its object. Thus, even basic diagrams such as these and cognitive explanations (in art history and science) about what is involved in basic image schemas of this kind ignore the higher conscious levels processing this image. There are problems about the explanatory gap between phenomenological and perceptual consciousness, and problems of overlap, no doubt, and paradoxes in causal relationships, and now also, the problem that we are supposed to inspect these diagrams naively without higher-order processing. We know the diagram is supposed to illustrate a perceptual process which may bring higherorder thought into play, and even thought about this higher-order process. The stimulus of a frame-in-the-frame may fire up complex neurological responses and cause edge and colour detectors to assemble perceptions for use as data by higher-order processing (or for further scanning of the visual field in an enactive view of visuality) but this does not mean that the frame-in-the-frame can be made the exclusive property of lower perceptive levels of vision even if such frames perfectly seem to describing the bundling activity of perceptual formation (Barsalou 1999). Scientific diagrams and frames may indicate or reflect back structures of perception but also, they are

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objects (and reflections) of higher-order consciousness. In art, framesin-frames are open to a multiplicity of meanings and cultural understandings that help structure and sustain a consciousness of the visual experience. The distinct feel that one is examining one’s own perceptions with scientific diagrams is reflexive: it allows us to consider the problem of consciousness, a problem that is the object of our consciousness all the while we are conscious. Phenomenological consciousness does not appear in a vacuum; as in the example of watching a film, it may need a number of cognitive processes to have occurred before arising. A causal flux occurs in the kind of situation whereby a phenomenal property is instantiated from a focused consideration of the definition of a psychological property or cognitive pattern. This type of consciousness emerges from the dual and cooperative economies of phenomenological and psychological operations, but that does not mean that basic formulae such as “having a green sensation, individuated phenomenally, one has a corresponding green perception, individuated psychologically” (Chalmers 1996:172) are relevant in descriptions of higher-order thoughts and their targets. This idealistically posited simple and harmonious relation between physical and mental processes, a binary which is itself highly contentious, needs bear no relation to how we process the labyrinth of the Teniers’s Dresden Gallery picture. Causal flux suggests that phenomenological experience co-occurs with the psychological apparatus which underpins and sustains it; but only through experiencing various art forms or scientific discussion unfolding in time and space do we get the opportunity for reflection on this cognitive scaffolding, which has moved on in some sense to subserve the reflection on the immediately prior cognitive state. Some kind of activity along these lines is happening in the visual processing of the well-known Edelman’s diagram above that shows a system of directions and relations between the brain and the environment, and between processes of perception and processes of higherorder consciousness and all of these with memory. The diagram emphasises a series of interactions between the brain areas shown in boxes and with inwardly and outwardly directed arrows. For Edelman, speech analysis (Broca and Wernicke areas) and semantic categories (the bootstrap) have important mediating roles between sensory perception and memory, yet the latter two and their relationship to each

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other also feed back into speech and semantic formation engaging with the world. It is implied that higher-order consciousness is a result of the interaction of speech analysis, memory and spatial awareness (hippocampus), all of which have either a direct or indirect relation to sensory signals.

Fig. 3 Edelman’s Scheme for Higher-Order Consciousness

In my interpretation, these brain areas affect each other to produce higher-order consciousness which is not in itself directly related to any brain area (it is not shown boxed) and despite recent research that some higher-order thought may be viewed with the help of fMRI technology in the medial frontal cortex (Frith and Frith 1999) this does not mean that higher-order consciousness arises from activity in this area alone. The re-entrant or feedback loop which connects value-

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category memory to current perceptual categorisation (shown as the long arrow bypassing Broca and Wernicke’s areas) is two-way traffic. Not only are the processes of sensory perception and categories of memory co-present but I would understand them as a subject object relation, where each area is at the same time subject and object, seer and seen, so to speak. They act on each other to question and affirm each other’s functions in order to produce perceptions and (possibly with the activation of other brain areas) apperceptions and higherorder thoughts.6 While inspecting Edelman’s diagram, the brain undoubtedly employs a series of relations between the visual cortex, spatial awareness (the hippocampus) language analysis (the diagram is very wordy) and perhaps some use of short and long term memory if mental imaging and referencing is required. Edelman’s diagram may well be an accurate picture of what is happening while this diagram is being processed by higher-order consciousness. Thus, the feedback loop between visual processes and memory, and memory and spatial analysis may be activated by a diagram showing this feedback loop. In other words, there is the possibility that there is a feedback loop between the diagram (showing a feedback loop) and neuropsychological processes (functioning in a feedback loop with each other) a relationship that produces consciousness-in-the world, a phenomenological consciousness of the self and its experience of the diagram. Here, the organisation of thought is visualised but what of the organisation of thought involved in this visualisation? The reentrant loop is a way of going beyond the simplistic claims of parallel movements or symmetries, and goes beyond the mind and matter dualism because the reentrant loop shows the cooperation between brain areas that produce other processes. The point is not to look at the boxes in the diagram but the arrows, for they are responsible for phenomenological consciousness which is more than materialism or mentalism, and certainly more than the crude ways in which we define these categories. The arrows in Edelman’s diagram are the parerga; they lie outside of the frames we choose to create 6

Frith and Frith (1999) suggest activity in the prefrontal cortex and posterior superior temporal sulcus combine to produce “mentalising” the interpretation of others’ mental states based on observation and self-representation but this is only one type of higherorder thought activity and a very simple one at that, compared to the interpretation of a work of art.

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distinct areas of the brain, areas that at the neuronal level are not as precise as the diagram would have us believe, either. The arrows show non-linear, non-spatial counter-directions and testify that there is no strict ‘in here’ or ‘out there’ brain areas, for the latter lose this discreteness in communication with each other in order to produce brain states and eventual phenomenological experiences that are greater than the sum of their parts. Ultimately, this diagram is not radically different from Husserl’s use of the Teniers picture used to show the operations of the noema. Both use visual schema which feature feedback mechanisms: the frame-in-the-frame leads away from and back to consciousness of the frame. Both visual schemas may reflect back to the thought which is attending them. Events occurring at the same time may be interpreted as related or parallel by phenomenological consciousness but the image of relation and parallelism is only a representation. More than this, the image of parallel events or configurations of levels of consciousness is an image and is already coloured by what we think of images: that they represent something; that there is a relation between the image and what it describes. We try to describe a situation of parallels with a parallel situation. It seems perfectly sensible to keep in mind that the parallel relationship may not be one of resemblance or identity as we might expect with the notion of representation, but instead may be explained as an abstract and figurative relation, as in an abstract painting with no reference to any particular object or event and without any visual resemblance to anything else in particular. Abstract art engages conscious activity but this does not mean that there is a parallel mimetic relation shared between mind and the configuration of the visual field. How consciousness processes abstract art is so little understood because abstract art is so little understood, yet it seems that one way of dealing with the explanatory gap that remains between events happening at the same time, as we have with the different levels of neurology, psychology and phenomenology is to think of the relation between abstract art and reality. Our image of parallel processing then needs to be upgraded from an imitative parallel processing to other, abstract relations. Abstract art also reflects itself, engages with thought and may only be imitative incidentally. In the example of a process of retaining visual information in the neural network for future recognition in the form of an activation pattern the neural activation

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pattern tracks and is accustomed to tracking a pattern found in the visual world, yet this patterning maybe codified differently, and most probably is not mimetic. As Flanagan writes, the underpinning neuroscience is not imitative of the external world: “The neuronal network retains representations but not in permanently codified files. It retains representations as dispositions” (Flanagan 1995: 48). Dispositions are not carbon copies, neither are they themselves, it seems, for they are continually becoming something else, as part of their being. Furthermore, Flanagan writes: The neuronal groups are selected to detect certain constellations of features. The groups are extremely sensitive but not overly fussy. This explains why we are so quick to identify degraded stimuli, for example, letters written in new and obscure handwriting […] the stimuli need not be exactly the same as the stimuli the neuronal group was initially trained to detect (Flanagan 1995: 48).

A painting by Rothko consists of relatively even layers of pigment on canvas; one might say “degraded stimuli”, creating modulations of hues and subtle marks suggesting movement, form and mood, among other things. It has no physical connection with the phenomenological consciousness greeting it, and if it seems perfectly to cooperate with the mood, state of mind, perceptual movement of the viewer, it does so only abstractly, analogously even. As between the cooperation between the senses, no imitation, as such, is needed. The canvas is a record of the artist’s synthesis of sensory and higher-order thoughts. It continually plays a game between perceptual constancy (stimulated by colour blocks) and higher-order degradation of the constancy. There can appear to be a parallel movement in art and in the viewer’s consciousness but this parallel movement is also a selfreflexive one. This makes sense if the self is defined as a complex of conscious processes that index each other without having to resemble each other. I can imagine feeling like an image of Rembrandt but I do not look like him. The kind of visual processing of a lower-order consciousness involved in the viewing subject seems to do its job but also is joined by another kind of processing in the viewing subject at higher levels that seems to bear some relation to the lower levels because they happen, or appear to happen, at the same time. And this relation may not be physical but conceptual; indexical yet selfreflective. In short, the image of parallelism between the phenomenological

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and neuropsychological is not abstract enough. It is also important to keep in mind that the so called principle of structural coherence, the parallel relationship between psychology and phenomenology that occurs when the structure of a visual experience co-occurs or appears to co-occur with neuropsychological relations and processes, can be self-constitutive, in other words, it may not only exist as a series of parallel relationships of mysteriously divided worlds but this kind of structural coherence may also occur at the same time as a circular situation where the intentional object of phenomenological consciousness is the psychology which subserves it. This is important because in viewing frames-in-frames in art, where we can read the content of the message and how the message is structured, we are dealing less with the parallel of consciousness and art and more with their synthesis in the experience of art. It is an example of the fact that some kinds of conscious experience straddle the twin categories of the phenomenological and the psychological.7 What has often been read as the confusion of these two categories lies in fact, in the logic of the parergon, the place where the psychological is projected in consciousness studies, lying alongside the ergon, the phenomenological. This dualistic thought prevalent in the parallel images of phenomenology and psychology sets presence over absence and meaning over meaninglessness, respectively. We need to be aware that phenomenology and psychology often overlap and this should indeed affect our methods of analysis. As Flanagan writes: Consciousness is a name for a heterogeneous set of events and processes that share the property of being experienced. It is taken to name a set of processes, not a thing or a mental faculty […] Getting at this complex structure requires a coordination of phenomenological, psychological and neural analyses. The theory is neurophilosopical (Flanagan 1995:220).

This is a welcome cross-disciplinary and coordinated attempt to un7

Pain, for example, is a psychological as well as phenomenal thing and can occur as both. But also, the brain can psychologically produce a phenomenal experience of pain which it perceives. Chalmers is clear about how pain can be a dual concept, or co-occurrence of properties. “Many mental concepts lead this sort of double life. For example, the concept of perception [when] cognitive systems are sensitive to environmental stimulation […] but it can also be taken phenomenally, involving the conscious experience of what is perceived” (Chalmers 1996: 18).

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derstand consciousness. Consciousness has so often been reduced to images of on/off states or parallelisms without paying much attention to the interactivity (or connectivity) that occurs between these patterns of identification. The strategies that question binaries in philosophy are also useful in the study of consciousness, even in its fine-grained neuronal activity. In the use of images used for basic perceptual experiments such as gestalt images that bring into play a ‘binocular rivalry’ (where the visual system struggles to decide on what it sees), we can question that this is necessarily a matter of rivalry.If we look at a diagram of crosses, we can see how complex interpretations are able to conceptualise perceptual levels of visual processing which usually lie under consciousness. Most theories about shape recognition hold that it is only possible to see the white square or the black crosses but not both at the same time. This is untrue. The viewer can see both if she imagines that the white square has crosses fixed to each of its corners. Another way of seeing this is to imagine the diagram to be a ‘not-quite shape’, an incomplete square with areas missing from its perimeter. In such a re-focussing it is quite easy to resolve the either/or parallelism into a simple recognition of what it is, and in art this is the well-known lesson we have learnt from modernist anti-illusionism, that we see the paint on the canvas as paint, material substrate in a shape where no binocular rivalry is necessary. 8 Such a non-dualistic experience of simultaneous polysemy is further strengthened by the scientific concept of the superposition.9 The other, famous gestalt diagram of the face-vase (or rabbit-duck) may be seen as a series of wave forms, fluid lines and contours or rip8

It is, after all, possible to process different visual stimuli at the same time (Kastner et. al. 1998; Blesa et. al. 2006: 506-511) although suppression of one stimulus in favour of another is common, directed attention can unblock the effect. 9 Chalmers uses both Schrödinger’s equation and Everett’s conclusions to argue for superpositionality in consciousness (Chalmers 1996: 345-390).

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ples, which is a far more accurate perception of the diagram that the reduction of two states of representation. Not playing the game of dualities is to distance oneself from the parallels of binocular rivalry, to experience a higher-order thought about the mental states that allow the duality to persist, and for the recognition of the shape as a composite shape or a completely abstract one, beyond representation and beyond appealing to our library of mental images to recognise the object. The micro-saccades from one reference point to the other and back again in the visual field form the preliminary information reconnaissance for this higher-order thought, the secondary level is an interaction with imagery of memory, and so what ones sees is also what one remembers, understands and actively creates.10 The distancing effect occurs when one is attentive to one’s own psychology, one’s perceptions and one’s mental images fixed on the act of seeing the diagram. Our perceptions become our apperceptions and objects for a higher-order consciousness. Elements of one’s perceptions and apperceptions appear to “get inside” higher-order thought, or to constitute an experience which is not either of them.11 Here we arrive at one way of getting over the binary of perception and higher-order consciousness and the switching from one to the other robotically, as such a schema implies. Logically, this process of getting inside must be, as the binary it displaces, an image of consciousness, it does not mean the literal immersion of one quality mental space inside another but it may show a relation of elements that creates a superposition, allowing a number of viewpoints from where we can have these visual experiences in order to report on their paradoxical nature. Another dominant image of parallel processing is evident in split 10

The enactive view. But one is also cognisant of the fact that mental images in conjunction with external ones (“seeing as”) is also a question of different levels of mental imagery stored in different ways the topographic and representational to the symbolic and otherwise codified (Pinker 1997: 284). There is no reason to choose descriptive or non-descriptive schools of thought, maybe aspects of both are present in mental image formation and storage. 11 Chalmers refers to “The direct constitution relation—the way the experience gets inside the concept, so to speak” (Chalmers 1996: 207): “My inverted twin and I might be physically identical, but our corresponding qualitative concepts are distinct not just in reference but in primary intension. Here, even more clearly than in the case of “consciousness” is a case where the content of a phenomenal belief is constituted by phenomenology […] somehow a sort of experience, which one might think of as the referent of a qualitative concept, is getting inside the concept and constituting its sense (where sense is equated with primary intension)” (207 My italics).

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auditory experiences and other thought experiments to do with listening and divided attention. Splitting auditory attention occurs in both attended and unattended channels and is synchronous or dichotic, in other words, it is possible for consciousness to fix on a series of sounds while nonconscious processes pick up another sequence of sounds (Flanagan 1995: 13). The alternative explanation to nonconscious processing is that consciousness is split, a flash of consciousness passes into the cognitive system and is otherwise diverted, and is subsequently forgotten, and so it only appears to be the result of nonconscious processing. These experiments show that we can attend to two different things happening at the same time, becoming aware that we were aware at some level of both things, a ‘slow release’ of awareness reaching its full concretion only in retrospect. There could be a situation where a piece of music is being played while a bird is chirping from some distance outside the house on the periphery of consciousness; immediate retrieval of the situation would claim that the listener only heard a singular event or stream of events in music but much later, the listener might recall a particular phrase of the music and remember thinking about a bird. This retrospective experience seems to do all sorts of strange things with parallels: setting them up only to bring them down in order to set them up again. Flanagan has this to ask about cases of divided consciousness: Are such cases […] two distinct streams running simultaneously in parallel, or is there simply a single complex stream? One possibility is that a single attentional mechanism switches back and forth between two tasks at blazing speed. The mind somehow sequesters each task-solving sequence so that each seems to take place in a stream of its own, running in apparent parallel with the other stream, where in fact there is an objectively choppy serial switchback mechanism at work (Flanagan 1995: 171).

The switchback mechanism implies either an interpenetration of consciousness with nonconsciousness or a series of on/off switches, or positive/negative moments on either side, a rapid series of binary opposites, where one pays a brief amount of attention to one part of reality (positive), while not to the other (negative), and vice versa, and these little moments of attention form a mosaic of memory and present consciousness, ultimately divisible but most often integrated into a retrievable or reportable image of some sort. Retrospective analysis with the requisite triggers picks out the nonconscious thread

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from the cloth of memory, stitching it into a new consciousness. The parallel and anti-parallel distinction is a conundrum because, as in a parallax view, it appears as either one or the other depending on the viewpoint of nonconsciousness or consciousness. This is conceivable on the psychological level as “synchronous oscillatory patterns in the relevant pathways [that] produces perceptual binding without ever joining up, so that ‘timing is binding’ ” (Flanagan 1995: 172). We could use stereoscopic perspective or symphonic harmony, or metaphor as examples of how this occurs on the phenomenological level. But again, rather than settling on the simplistic image of parallels, the image of ‘timing is binding’ questions the illusionism of this image and also the binary which it depicts, the parallel and the anti-parallel. The phenomenological event of a bouncing red ball stimulates edge detectors, motion detectors, colour detectors, and conscious processes measuring time and context. The phenomenological event (one is tempted to use the word orchestration) is not reducible to any one of these neurons, synaptic pathways or perceptions but rather, their timing, thus the event is greater that the sum of its parts, and this is a good argument against simple materialism and the image of structural coherence and parallel processes, for the concept of timing can escape visualisation in space and matter and the relations of resemblance. Another way to deconstruct the binary behind the image of parallel processes beyond its simplistic use in studies of consciousness is to remember what we have learnt from the philosophy of mind: Husserl’s Dresden Gallery Teniers picture, Sartre’s keyhole, and Derrida’s dissemination all have a common thread running through them. This is the concept of a dynamic seriality of appearances visually displayed as depictions of frames-inframes. These are not given as a linear unfolding of different states but superimposed over the same ground without occupying some ‘next’ space. Because it is possible to claim that consciousness does not move because it does not really occupy space, it seems more accurate to describe consciousness as a seriality and a seriality of viewpoints from which to experience this seriality. Both the monadic ‘getting inside’, or nesting and embedding, the seriality of appearances that simultaneously make up our knowledge of the object of intention which co-exists in the world, and the image of self-reflection are different ways to represent consciousness as an superpositional unfold-

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ing, as a seriality, yet avoiding conventional, or literal definitions of spatial extension and location. Consciousness becomes an interactive process with identifiable parts and parts that change and is not reducible to any of those parts, as such. This paradox of seriality is that it may be centred on one image, or an image within the image, which in fact, does not move, and this is something that I will pursue in greater detail in interpretations of artworks in Part 4. As we shall see, there are many ways to conceive of seriality that it is possible to conceptualise a series of serialities which provide important ways to understand processes of consciousness. The way in which I have shown that it is possible to go beyond the binary thinking of binocular rivalry and divided attention models allows us also to dispense with the split experience of involvement ‘in’ the art experience, either as close involvement of the sensus litteralis and with sensations typical of such an experience or the distancing effect of a critical consciousness described as the Emfremdungeffekt. I have argued for a composite aesthetic experience that allows for both involvement in sensations and intellectual detachment, aesthetic response as superpositionality that rejects the Kantian concept of beauty as an experience if disinterest (Minissale 2006, 2007). It is possible to have an ongoing, sustained, and distinct experience of a superposition between these states. With a deep involvement in the depicted space of a painting, we are likely to be less aware of the frame which surrounds our fiction, in the case of the distancing effect, the frame emerges as the object of our intention, but with the superposition we have a conscious experience of switching from one case to the other, fluently, rapidly so that it becomes an ‘experienceable’, intelligible and ever-changing superposition or suspension. In the artwork with frames-in-frames, the superposition is sustained and strengthened. Resembling the dancing qualia argument (Chalmers 1996: 269) this experience of framing, of the frame-in-the-frame would suggest that consciousness arising from the perception of one frame is supervenient on a particular functional organisation that allows for consciousness of the other frame to arise also, or that several kinds of functional organisation are active and cooperative with the two different kinds of consciousness, one considering the contents of one frame, and one the frame of the frame. Attention can be directed at one frame while in the margins of this attention perception is directed at the other. Possibilities that are more

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interesting arise when we consider a unified consciousness of both frames, where two sets of information rich detail are considered separately and together at the same time. It is a moot point whether this consciousness arises as a unified experience or two separate ones that come into the purview of consciousness one at a time, one after the other in rapid succession, switching “back and forth between two tasks at blazing speed” (Flanagan 1995: 172). Is there a parity of one functional organisation with one kind of consciousness, or can the same functional organisation give rise to different intensities of that consciousness? Will a new transition into complex functional organisation be needed for the intensification of consciousness, when it appears to take aspects of itself as intentional objects? The point is that the imagery that we use to describe such a relationship, one of parallel processing, of one ‘amount’ of activity matched by another, is logically insufficient to describe or measure such processes, especially as they are processes and are therefore continually in flux. The question raises the issue of whether consciousness of conscious states may be seen either as a succession of different states (with different functional organisation on the neural level underpinning each), or consciousness as something that is refreshed and intensified using broadly the same functional organisation within which there a different emphases. This also has consequences for how we view the composite of frames-inframes, divisible activations of conscious states (on different levels) or the same consciousness of two differing conscious states, exemplified and sustained by the spatial markers of frames-in-frames. Frames-in-frames may activate a consciousness of how conscious mental states are organised, not as watertight containers, each with their own, mirroring, discrete neuropsychological cause but as a series of interactive relations and intensities,12 governed by processes of reflexive ‘self-generation,’13 and the mutual monitoring of parts. It is a 12

For some neurological support for this view see Harth 1999: 102. Maturana and Varela write of “autopoietic machines” engaging in mechanised auto or self-production. In cybernetics, the term autopoietic refers to machines organised as a network of processes of production, transformation and destruction. In this sense, the term is synonymous with fundamental processes of consciousness, not because of the reference to machines but primarily because of the autogenerative qualities implied by autopoeisis. Like consciousness, the components of autopoietic machines reconstruct themselves recursively and interactively creating the same processes by which they themselves are produced. See Maturana and Varela 1979. 13

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truism that duality is a fundamental category to be found deep in the human mind. The binary psychology/phenomenology reinvests in the fiction of the original and the copy, the active and the passive, and is analogous with other binaries such as the work of art and the viewer. Much of the art experience is about allowing us to think beyond binaries. The active/passive theory of art is flawed; consciousness emerges over the substrate of the binary. The eyes can be said to dance with the object of the gaze in counter movements, as well as in harmony, and also with degrees of distraction—of not looking—and all combine to create the restless feel of consciousness on the fly. And then of course, when this object of the gaze is consciousness itself, the recursive nature of this consciousness collapses the binary into a thing in itself. Consciousness of various conscious mental states is in varying degrees both subject and object. If consciousness is a superordinate category in which psychological states of varying striations of consciousness come together, part of this also is the waxing and waning of conscious states and their qualitative feel in favour of overlapping textures which, like the transition between psychology and phenomenology, have no name. The arbitrariness of defining a state is like freeze-framing something that is naturally a flow or a wave form to be measured only by artificial means, only a state from the point of view of basic a priori categories that we learn to contextualise. The ‘thought experiment’ of frames-in-frames allows us to conceive of a consciousness held in place while other states pass through it. Far from containing and cutting up this changeable property into separate frames, it sustains a view of consciousness as a multiplicity of reference points, none of which in themselves constitute consciousness. One might say that the illusion of the frozen frame or a series of them are necessary in order to achieve this realisation, which in itself carries with it both an ordinariness and the feeling of a great discovery: the conscious mind is always figuring forth moments of statis and moments that transcend them, conscious thought plunges dynamism and stasis into each other in negotiating the experience of the frame-in-the-frame in art, much like the visual processing involved in induced illusory diagrams: there is both a dynamic switching and a seriality of switches that occurs. In physics a ‘frame of reference’ is a standard by which motion and rest may be measured; any set of points or objects that are at rest,

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relative to one another allow us to trace relative motions of bodies. A dynamic measurement of motion is based on an ‘inertial frame’. This is a spatial reference coordinated with time measurement. Any other frame of reference moving uniformly relative to an inertial frame is also an inertial frame. This is stillness or inertia which originates as an action between bodies, which is analogous with William James’s conception of consciousness as pails of water in a stream, yet another way to visualise the cooperation of identity and difference, constancy and change in conscious experience. In a visual sense, many cinematic techniques take advantage of the interplay between two inertial frames of reference or between non-inertial and inertial frames. The underlying logic of framing is paramount here as a fixed reference which keeps consciousness invariable while allowing variable strands to pass by it or through it, or to lie along side it, and in order to provide a constant frame of reference by which to view a set of differences. Of course, there is no such thing as absolute stillness, and even the non-inertial frame of reference changes. But the point is the variable rates of change of co-occurent mental states can be visually represented as the frame-in-the-frame, as this visual representation in turn will cause this co-occurrence. Consciousness may be seen as superpositional in many respects because of the relative frames of reference that it is able to take on board, for example, based on a ternary system, the location of an object is expressed in relation to both the viewpoint of the perceiver and the position of another object. Thus saying ‘The word is to the left of the page’, we refer to three points of reference: the word, page, and the perceiver’s perspective. Obviously, the frame is a way of thinking, as well as an object of thought and has important applications in science in terms of general principles of relativity, and is reflective of the consciousness which is responsible for such deductions; I do not think that the visual frames that we have in art, and the relativity arising from frames-in-frames visualised therein have a merely coincidental resemblance to this scientific thought. Science and art share a common source in the structuration of consciousness, a structure that is both the object and method of investigation.14

14 Similarly, Chalmers writes that “It seems that the concept of consciousness is irreducible, being characterisable only in terms of concepts that themselves involve consciousness” (Chalmers 1996: 106).

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Higher-order Representation There are various theories in the philosophy of mind that try to explain whether having a thought about being in a mental state actually involves having two mental states: being ‘in’ a lower-order thought, and knowing you are ‘in’ a higher-order thought that is ‘about’ the lower order thought. These are intrinsicality/extrinsicality arguments; the former attempt to show that higher-order thought is part of the lowerorder thought it makes conscious (part of a broader mental event), while the latter argue that these are distinct mental states that accompany each other in order to produce consciousness. Generally, higher-order representation (HOR) theories of consciousness maintain that a mental state, M, is conscious by virtue of the fact that it is the target of another mental state, M*. Higher-order thought (HOT) theories represent M* as an actual, occurent thought.15 Different versions of HOR theory arise because there are disagreements not only over the contents of M* but also concerning the relationship between M and M*. Higher-order perception (HOP) theories maintain that M* should be construed as a kind of perception linked to sensations. There are theories that depict M and M* as less distinct, making them intrinsic to larger mental contexts. This may be seen with the wider intrinsicality view (WIV) and in higher-order global states (HOGS).16 Thus, in the literature concerning HOR theory, there 15 “Since a mental state is conscious if it is accompanied by a suitable higher-order thought, we can explain a mental state’s being conscious by hypothesizing that the mental state itself causes that higher-order thought to occur” (Rosenthal 2005: 26-27). 16 The case that a HOT may be part of the lower-order thought that it is about is argued by Brentano but more recently (Loar 1987: 103). Rosenthal argues against this by saying that a HOT will have more contents in it than a lower-order thought. Yet this does not mean that the lower-order thought is not represented within the HOT as part of its matrix. I will not, however, be arguing for intrinsicality, merely showing that the binary of intrinsicality/extrinsicality can be questioned. A HOT is discrete from the original lower-order thought but the HOT continues that thought with the added content of self-consciousness: I still experience red when I know I experience red. Rocco Gennaro and Robert Von Gulick take various positions which make both first- and higher-order thoughts intrinsic to larger mental contexts. With the first author, the ‘wide intrinsicality view’ (WIV) represents consciousness as a wider field within which both first-order and higher-order thoughts may reside. With the second author, the idea of ‘higher-order global thoughts’ posits lower-order thoughts as intrinsic to the higher-order ones within larger, more complex or global categories or brain states. For an introduction to these views and others, see Gennaro, 2004: 2.

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are various metaphors and images referencing spatial categories and structures that are used to clarify the relations and boundaries between mental states. The whole subfield of higher-order representation continually lies open to questions about the nature of the relation between the two mental states. And, as I have been arguing, this relation is nearly always represented by using spatial categories that provide the imagination with mental images by which to understand these HOTs and their properties. I have already shown the inadequacy of the mental image of parallels used to describe this relation and other relations. Are these mental states separate from each other (the extrinsicality thesis) or does the higher-order mental state have the lower-order state embedded in its matrix (the intrinsicality thesis), as a representation mirrored in the HOT, or is do they form a continuum with differing intensities, as we might visualise a pulsating waveform? By way of demonstrating how mental states are structurally related, Rosenthal uses the language of representation: a higher-order thought “represents” us ‘in’ a mental state and bestows consciousness upon it through the co-presence of the two states. The use of the word “represents” indicates thought about a copy or mirror, and possibly something which separates them. He writes: “In representing us to ourselves as being in states of various sorts, HOTs are in effect interpretations of ourselves as being in those states” (Rosenthal 2005: 211). “Ourselves” suggests that in addition to the mental state (the “target”, as Rosenthal so often puts it, which suggests visual focus and capture), a HOT consists of the self being represented ‘in’ that state, whatever state this is. A HOT is also “a kind of self-interpretation; they are an interpretation of one’s current state of mind” (14). On this view, what began as ‘current’ on its own seems to exist alongside the HOT which now also becomes current; in other words, the two are concurrent. Rosenthal states that “HOTs make us conscious not only of our mental states but also of the self that is in those states” (17). But this is not all a HOT is capable of: it may also “describe its target qualitative state in terms of the position that state occupies in the relevant quality space” (202). This suggests that a HOT also functions as an index or bridge, and the “resulting comparative concepts for mental qualities can accordingly provide content to the HOTs in virtue of which we’re conscious of our quality states” (207, my italics). This, presumably, is also how it is possible to be conscious of having a

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sensory experience while we are having it. The often invisible, unquestioned but nevertheless strongly suggestive spatial value in all this envisioning of HOTs is the preposition, ‘in’. Many of the phrases that lead to various visualizations of HOTs are part of a language struggling to give form to the idea that a HOT is not an on/off switch that merely makes a mental state conscious but a composite entity that represents or contains within itself at least three or four main contents—‘self’, ‘in’, ‘conscious’—which are ‘current’ with each other, and some of these terms seem to be shared across the mental states. The third-order thought represents us ‘in’ a higher-order thought which, in turn, represents us in a first-order thought. There appears to be a double ‘in’ here, and this can be characterised in art as the frame-in-the-frame. When we look at a picture with a frame, we experience the contents and the frame. In the painting, the depiction of a fictive frame reminds us of both the real physical frame as well as bringing the painting’s contents to mind. We are aware of the qualities of the painting while also aware of the frame around it and the information it gives us as to what we are doing, and this awareness happens simultaneously.17 This HOT hypothesis becomes more complex when we consider that the HOT can, at times, be conscious (with an even higher-order thought apprehending it, which also may or may not be conscious by virtue of another HOT); and so with this imagery there is a chain of non-conscious and conscious alternating states. Rosenthal introduces HOTs as “theoretical posits” and insists on the idea that HOTs are “distinct from the target states they make us conscious of” (Rosenthal 2005: 209) and that consciousness is separate from the mental states and properties to which it affords access (3). In other words, the mental state, before becoming conscious (M) is independent of the mental state that is conscious of it (M*). When (M*) occurs in a “roughly contemporaneous” manner, what happens to (M)? Does it fade, or does its structure meld with (M*) to form a new entity (MM*), in which the two former states retain their discreteness? And how, exactly do they retain their separateness? It seems there is still a problem with the contents of (M), which must remain unconscious if it is to remain (M). (M) and (M*) could become (MM*) leaving a dying 17

A well-known function of the frame in art is also to circumscribe consciousness. See, for example, Gasset 1990:185-190.

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remnant of the original (M). Again, this might be reducible to Flanagan’s “timing is binding” argument. Or it might be that (M) is merely viewed from a distance by (M*) and so (M*) becomes a frame through which we can “experience” or see (M) as a representation. According to Rosenthal, lower-order states “are doubtless often implicated in causing higher-order states” (8) so that the latter monitor the former, but this is still a form of introspection where the HOT is about how one is conscious of the lower-order mental state, and insomuch as that HOT is about the first-order mental state. If we follow Rosenthal and agree that they are distinct entities, there is still a representation of the first-order state going on, in, or through the HOT. One way around the intrinsic/extrinsic dichotomy is to adopt framing again as a flexible mental image and principle of relations: at some point for (M*) to be conscious, it needs to extricate itself from (M) in order to see it from a distance. The stepping back is at the same time the viewpoint of the HOT being aware of the contents of (M), while further away from (M)’s prereflexive state. While HOTs may be independent of the conscious states they represent, or in some form of transitional timing distancing themselves from their target states (rather than approaching them), they appear in the phenomenological sense to be the same conscious mental state. And this phenomenological feel implies the language of nesting and frames-in-frames, where the HOT’s outer frame of reference, the consciousness it bestows is preserved, and with its representational power, conveys the qualities of the mental state it captures as somehow seen through it, or is duplicated or reframed by it. There seems to be no definitive answer in the literature about the fine-grained relationship here, and there is also a question about how the HOT represents the conscious mental state to the self; is this by transforming that second-order thought into a memory, which is then reframed as a present and continuing consciousness? This becomes more complicated if the first or second order mental state is about consciousness as a concept. These third-order thoughts may be rare. As Rosenthal is fond of saying, “it is hard to hold in mind a thought about a thought that is in turn about the thought” (27) but it is hard not to think this view is merely a repression of this kind of consciousness, in order to explain more ordinary examples, as if ordinariness is more worthy of study. But the special kind of consciousness that emerges with third order thought is an essential part of the experience of art and cinema, especially where there are nested

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scenes displaying frames-in-frames, and this level of HOT is commonplace in all literature about consciousness, even in the passage just quoted by Rosenthal: all the more reason to study it. It is not at all clear that the relationship between the (conscious or nonconscious) HOT and its target mental state occurs less as an on/off switch of states and more as co-presence both of which reference a self, one, a reflexive self which comes into operation with the HOT and a prereflexive self in conjunction with the HOT’s target state. Both realities may be experienced by these different levels of self, either in a fraction of a second, one after the other, or in some syncopated mental experience that the phenomenological feel assures us is unitary and singular. Indeed, this thought alone demonstrates the possibility of a third-order HOT which is about the relationship between a first- and second-order thought. This third-order state is discrete from lower-order states, but the third-order state presumably must roughly overlap, chime in with immediately prior states in order for the whole movement to seem like a chord in music. Alternatively, using vision, the third order state is a parallax viewpoint from which we experience the viewing of the lower states in some vicarious manner, differently from being inside those states but continuing to remember what it is like to be in them. Furthermore, “My HOT determines whether what it’s like for me is, say, having a conscious experience of magenta or a conscious experience of some nondescript red”(193). But what if one is having a HOT about “iridescence”? It would seem that with a HOT of a very large number of qualitative states, possibly multimodal, perhaps in experiencing a work of art (or iridescence), there must actually be a series of many successive HOTs: “HOTs operate in large bunches” (28) with indeterminate beginnings and endings “when we consciously reason, we are often conscious of one intentional state as leading to another” (129); or one HOT with a great many contents, or “perhaps one could be conscious of one’s intentional states as inferentially connected simply by having a single HOT about them all” (129). Whatever one is to decide about the nature of HOTs, it would be a good start to recognize that what seems consistent in the language describing them is the logic of framing. HOTs are conceptualized as frames or boundaries with ‘contents’, and with extrinsic and intrinsic qualities. Such a model allows us to have two (or more) current states, one of which may be seen through the other and frames the other

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while remaining distinct. It also allows for a superpositionality where we are ‘here’ (‘in’ the HOT), looking through to the lower-order thought ‘there’. Both are co-present as ‘(t)here’. This model of framing provides a useful way to go beyond the limitations of HOR theory, its tendency to set presence against absence, centre against periphery and intrinsicality against extrinsicality. Similarly, in the work of Mondrian, Duchamp, Ad Reinhardt, Howard Hodgkin (whose daubs of paint on the frame and inside it are obviously a reference to Seurat who did the same) and others, the distinction between the frame and the painting is shown as interpenetrative: the frame is made integral to the representation, and part of the representation also functions as a frame. This tends to make us conscious of our peripheral field of vision, in the sense that it becomes the target of our conscious focus, and we have a HOT about something that normally lies below the level of consciousness. Used as an analogy for the ‘frame’ of a HOT in which we see a lower-order thought, the notion of a frame that is also part of the image need not suggest intrinsicality but a superposition, a spatial equivocation that is one of the most consistent properties of all representation, higher-order representation included. In describing consciousness, especially fine-grained processes subserving higher-order thoughts engaged with art, it also seems appropriate to adopt some of the language of spatial paradoxes theorized by postmodernism. This approach is suggested by Plotnitsky (2008: 92). The artists I have mentioned above and their complex framing strategies give us the opportunity to elaborate our conceptions of how higher-order thoughts can be organized. In the works of these artists, the frame questions the idea of presence in relation to absence by revealing not only that the two signal each other but also that their ongoing tendency is to become each other by mutual crossreferencing: absence, the invisible, the unthinkable has a kind of presence which subverts a simply posited, prior presence. As such, rather than notions of presence and absence, it would be more instructive to look at the relational dynamic of the two notions as part of larger networks and series. This, incidentally, is also a principle of music, where sound is perforated and defined by silences. In his analysis of the parergon, Derrida questions the assumption that what lies outside the frame or the work of art is marginal, of minor significance. In his view, as I have mentioned in previous pages, what lies outside the frame as a parergon not only supplements the work

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(ergon) but may replace it, or create a new foundation for its meaning. In this sense, what lies inside and outside the frame are co-present and create an equivocation. This is the continual différance of presence, which is never fixed or absolute and, importantly, cannot be framed. Rather, it is a process of consciousness where presence is continually refreshed and reconfigured in relationship to other presences. It is also possible to re-think Rosenthal’s terminology using the frame and Derrida’s parergon. A higher-order thought, while taking a first order thought as its focus, frames it. This, incidentally, is also a principle of music, where sound is perforated and defined by silences. But both are mutually defining. One might argue in response to this that this non-distinctness between a HOT and its target lower-order mental state which we seem to experience in the same moment is only an illusory feeling. But it is difficult to see how to prove the distinction between them beyond theoretical logic supported by a third-order thought. Rosenthal admits that HOTs are theoretical posits (Rosenthal 2005: 9) and insists on them being distinct from their target states for many logical reasons, not least because HOTs can wrongly interpret that we are in a mental state, when we are not. In the reality of experience, beyond theory, a HOT and a lower-order thought know nothing about what divides them from each other, because they are busy doing other things instead of carving up their anatomy vis-à-vis each other. From the point of view of a third-order thought which analyses what is going on, a distinction between a HOT and its target state might need to be maintained, but this distinction is not grounded in experience, one does not feel the distinction, one merely theoretically posits it. If I am ‘in’ a state and I am conscious of being in a state, I am therefore in two places at the same time: ‘in’ the lower order thought and ‘in’ a HOT that allows me to be conscious of being ‘in’ a lowerorder thought. Even though I am not conscious of being in the latter, I am still in it in order to experience that consciousness; otherwise, this would mean that consciousness could occur without a self being in it. It is preferable therefore to think that one is in consciousness of a mental state while being in that mental state or in a consciousness of a representation of a lower-state, whereby one experiences that state (via representation). This means that the HOT that I’m in tells me I am in the lower-order state, although I am not apparently, because it is only the HOT representing that I am in that state. But I am not con-

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scious of being in the HOT, or of its representation, I believe I am in a lower-order thought that I am conscious of, and this can phenomenologically be represented to me as one state. From the HOT’s point of view, the consciousness of being in the lower-order thought feels like one thought. But from a third-order thought (the kind that allows philosophers such as Rosenthal to propose what a HOT does) we make the HOT distinct from the lower-order thought. Thus, the HOT is distinct from the lower-order thought it represents when one is conscious of this distinction from a third-order point of view, but remains indistinct when one is merely in a second-order thought. I do not know I am ‘in’ the HOT, I only believe I am having a lower-order thought accompanied by the feeling I am in it. This must mean that just after the lower-order thought has been initiated it may happen that a HOT comes to accompany it. Rosenthal claims that it is “roughly contemporaneous” (2005: 26). This contemporaneous relationship is theoretically divisible in terms of analysis but it can also be seen as an orchestration of aspects of thought that are multiplying all the time. The thought “I am having a conscious thought” is actually three or four thoughts depending on how you want to carve it up. Because new thoughts are initiated in split seconds sharing the duration of previous ones, at some point in their crossover and from a distance they may all seem like one overlap which may be read as an element integrated from two different brain states or areas of the brain. It seems that the higher up one goes in the hierarchy of HOTs, looking ‘down’ if you like, onto previous HOTs whose status has been changed into lower-order thoughts from the new perspective, they appear distinct (which allows us to claim that they can happen individually, without each other) but viewed from the same level as the present HOT and further down to the lower-order thought ‘beneath’ it, this hierarchy vanishes, we seem to have the lower-order thought and our consciousness of it at the same time, not only as part of the same mental state but we may even represent this relationship as one embedded inside of the other by virtue of the fact that they exist at the same time for a limited duration in order to make a composite: “I am” or “It’s me” seem like one thought. In visual terms we do not need to look at each individual dot in a Seurat painting and analyse the single thought about that dot in order to work up the picture, we create the whole picture by suppressing such individuation and so we might also think of suppressing the individuation of HOTs and their target states

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if that allowed us to construct more complex concepts and experiences. From a phenomenological point of view, the fine-grained absolute in/out and distinct/indistinct dualisms applied to a HOT and its lower order state are actually relative, depending on whether one is in a third-order thought addressed to those dualisms (noting that absolute distinction between a HOT and its target state is rarely if at all experienced) or in the second, addressed to the modalities of the first, where no such distinctions appear. From the point of view of theory, they are distinct, from the point of view of experience they are not. A frame-inthe-frame model is possible which puts this into perspective and works from the point of view of the second-order HOT: when one is conscious of the contents of the lower-order thought, one is looking at a representation framed by the HOT. One is not conscious of the frame, but when one is, this becomes a third-order thought which tells us that there are two distinct states, the lower and higher-order thought, the latter framing the former. But without knowledge of the frame we remain convinced that the two mental states are one. This phenomenological experience which makes the extrinsicality and intrinsicality binary more nuanced is discussed in greater detail in regard to Velázquez’s Las Meninas in Part 4. A framed picture contains within it a framed picture. The internal frame is both internal in relation to the outer frame and external in the sense that it, too, has contents. This more flexible and multivalent concept of space allows us to appreciate that some objects possess properties that appear to contradict each other. The picture-in-a-picture is both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, both nested and nesting. Significantly, this superpositionality born from the knowledge and experience of opposing points of view makes it possible to understand what it is like to be ‘in’ or outside a mental state and to go beyond the strict formulation of intrinsicality and extrinsicality arguments. The frame inside a frame is a common artistic device and may be described or rendered without complexity. But, in doing so, it immediately becomes apparent that the production and reception of such a device creates a series of higher-order thoughts in relation to lowerorder thoughts. A lower or first-order thought is initiated by the physical frame and a higher, second-order thought arises from considering how the mental state directed towards the actual, physical frame differs from the mental state that takes the fictive frame as its object.

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The fictive frame seems to mimic the outer frame: the mental state F* of the depicted frame mimics the mental state F of the physical frame. The co-presence of a HOT with a lower-order thought seems to fuel the debate over whether the HOT of the lower order thought is extrinsic or intrinsic to each other because we do not know if these two mental states are subserved by two separate, neurophysical configurations or whether one brain state might subserve both. Again, an appeal to frame theory might help to see the problem from a different perspective. What has gone unrecognised in theories about the frame in art and philosophy is the fact that the frame is both physical and non-physical. It may appear as a material boundary, a frame of wood surrounding a painting, but it can also be a depiction of a frame, for example, a picture of a room with a picture in it. Yet there is more to this physical/non-physical binary. In the case of the physical frame, a potentially infinite vista is delimited. In a non-physical sense, meanwhile, a view is delimited within an already delimited view. But, most importantly, in both cases the frame’s underlying logic is to show us what to look at, what to delimit. It is a fait accompli: we view somebody else’s delimitation of the visual field. Frames show us the focus of that other viewer: we are looking through somebody else’s eyes, or through ‘the eyes’ of our lowerorder thoughts. Ultimately, the frame, which delimits the visual field, shows us what the viewer/artist was thinking, and within the medium of his or her thought, we find our own. This is why the frame and the frame-in-the-frame are not just about the scene delimited; they also tell us about the focus of thought attending a scene. Frames do not merely delineate a visual scene but presuppose a gaze (and focus of thought) responsible for the delimitation. This line of thought may also be used for understanding how HOTs take lower-order thoughts as their targets. The frame-in-the-frame simply dramatises this process of focussing within another’s focus. Importantly, this focus-in-a-focus is a metaphor for exploring a thought with another thought. In such cases, a first-order thought is objectivised by the second-order thought, and one of the ways in which this objectification occurs is to delimit the boundaries of the first-order thought, not in a way that creates a sharp binary of here and there, and presence and absence but by considering the experience of co-presence, the first-order thought seen alongside, through and with the framing of the second. The frame-in-the-frame is the theoretical posit that allows for the co-emer-

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gence and self-representation of mental states to be experienced as occurent by a third-order thought. Yet the framing of a HOT by another HOT, or a third-order state, allows the HOT to appear as both framing entity and framed, while the lower-order thought is visible from the positions of the third and second-order thought. Thus, the brain state subserving the third-order thought is more than the sum of its parts: it may be constituted of earlier configurations and processes that subserved lower-order and higher-order thoughts and their relations but it is also itself.18 It is still unclear if a HOT can also be a series, a rapid succession of HOTs, or that they can happen at the same time in order to access the large number of conscious qualitative states that may occur when we experience a complex work of art. It seems important that we consider frames within frames as a model of how HOTs can be understood phenomenologically, how we understand them to work in relation to their contents, mental states or to other HOTs, not only as a way to understand these potentially quite bewildering relationships, but also because it is important to make the latter more consistent and explicit so that we can carry with us in art history some of the invaluable theoretical work that the HOT hypothesis brings to bear in studies of consciousness. Much of my analysis of the consciousness attending Velázquez’s Las Meninas based on HOR theories in Part 4. The Image of Regress We can find situations in art and thought that suggest infinity and regress, as with Wearing’s Masturbation, such a picture brings infinite regress to mind and leaves it incomplete, thus it is both present as a concept and absent in its full concretion. We find situations in the real world and in art where there are exits, signs and mises en abyme denoting infinity and regress, and these are immanent exits which we feel are part of lived experience. A black square can contain a white one and this in turn can contain another black square. Each square is different in size and yet identical in shape. And each square regardless of colour is paradoxically enframing and enframed, external and internal. The series is not infinite but presents a seriality of similar and 18

Discussion of the classification of brain states is pursued in relation to Las Meninas in Part 4.

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dissimilar properties. Such images are useful, visual ways of thinking beyond binary opposites because, rather than set one against the other in symmetrical or opposing spaces, regress allows us to see one side of the binary enclosed in the other and a series of reversals that are not binaries any longer but a series. It not a big leap to apply this visual configuration to the seriality of thoughts that subserve conscious experience. Traditional arguments against the notion of regress cite a top-level nonconscious HOT as a way of blocking the previous one, while others view this as an inadequate response, an explanatory gap. Along these lines, Dan Zahavi writes: Even though a second order reflection might be able to capture the first-order reflection, this will not change the fact, since there will still be something that eludes its grasp, namely itself qua subjective pole, and so forth ad infinitum. One implication of this view is that self-awareness in the strict sense (understood as an awareness of oneself as subject) is impossible (Zahavi 2003: 180, footnote 7).

Rosenthal suggests that each HOT, even if it is nonconscious of itself, refers to the same self as the bearer of the HOT, not to a newly made self inside each HOT (Rosenthal 2003: 343-344). A mental state may appear to be part of the HOT that makes it conscious but Rosenthal is quite clear that the HOT accompanies it at the same time, and the phenomenal feel is one of identity consistent with the view that there is the phenomenal feel of identity between subject and object in prereflexive self consciousness. Zahavi rightly states that the act of reflection is not a sui generis but neither is it a simple subject-object relation either, especially in the phenomenology of consciousness which presumes the ongoing, interactive character and co-emergence of the subject-object relation. But here lies the best defence against the accusation of regress: the HOT taking a mental state as its target, even if it were to be taken as a target by another subsequent HOT is not a simple reproduction or reflection of the same HOT, it is a different HOT. Zahavi’s criticism is based on a picture of pure reflection, while the HOT hypothesis is not. Consciousness of conscious mental states is not the same as the pure reflection of consciousness or consciousness. In order to cite regress, a reductive sense of the self is used combined with the notion of pure reflection. But the self changes from second to second. Consciousness of different kinds of conscious states may show us the nature of our consciousness as a superordinate cate-

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gory but this is not pure reflection, only one aspect of consciousness. We are not reproducing the same image again and again but a different perspective is instantiated with each HOT or combination thereof. There is no reason to postulate regress when a stage of consciousness and one may postulate that the self is just that instantiated by a combination of HOTs remains for a while before changing into something else entirely, which is usually the way in which we begin to think of a different subject. The sentence which is possible looking at one’s photograph, “I am the image, the image is me” (one also sees this visualised in Gillian Wearing’s Masturbation) blurs the classificatory boundaries between self and other for the dynamic of an ongoing (yet perhaps very shortlived) experience, but it is no less ‘real’. Is the statement ‘I am an object’ a form of objectification? Is it not possible for processes of objectification to end up with something other than the either/or of objectification or objectifying self-consciousness? Here one is reminded of the famous Lacanian story of an empty sardine can he saw floating in the water: “you see that can, well it doesn’t see you” says the fisherman.19 Implicit in Lacan’s story is that the object and by extension the image is not only instrumental in providing a reflexive engagement but is able to nullify objectifying self-consciousness by making the subject aware of her self as a representational form for somebody else. Lacan writes “in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture” (Lacan 1977:95). In other words, we are pictures for others’ consciousness of us and we can be 19

The story, like most stories, is highly artificial and self-referential. The sardine can flashing light into the eye from the sea, winking at the viewer like a lighthouse does not see Lacan, however much he invests it with meaning. It is a kind of chronological anomaly, they fish for sardines and the sardine can shows a possible end result of their actions, it is a fait accompli but also a mise en abyme, the can of sardines, presumably with a picture of the sea and sardine on it, reproduces the environment it is in—the sea—as an image on the can. It is also, like the boat, floating on the sea. But the can itself, so exquisitely symbolic of these reflexive operations, remains totally oblivious to them. And this isolates the meaning focused on the can, the meaning is completely cut off from its target and the originator of meaning, Lacan, who realises his solipsism. The can is nothing. Lacan is creating meaning out of nothing, confronting an autogenesis of meaning suggested to him by the autogenesis of the sardine can: the end product of an initial act of fishing in the sea; the can is found in the context that presages it existence and function. Something of this sort is thematised in Magritte’s picture entitled, Clairvoyance, 1936, depicting an artist painting a bird while observing an egg on his table.

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aware of that while looking at the other who is looking at us. This story shows us that the self is not simply a constant and stable presence in the background of mental activity in prereflexive self-consciousness, or in object oriented self-consciousness. The object is continually revised in conjunction with multiple drafts of identity, some of these intersubjectively shared; in short, the self is an unsettled process. In the subject can be found the object and the object the subject, in experience this is a continuum of superpositionality that belies the theoretical and mechanistic and linear either/or fixed binaries represented by object and non-object oriented self-consciousness. Lacan’s story also tells us that it is possible for subject and object to exchange positions, at least in the subject’s conscious processes and for prereflexive consciousness to reinstate itself by way of a temporary journey through objectification. If it is possible that “I am a picture”, what if that picture is a picture of a picture? The ‘I’ is an index pointing to the subject of experience in the present but because the ‘I’ is a composite of past ‘I’s, it is “continuously enriched and renewed”; it is an ever-changing framing device, but whose contents constantly change with additions and editions of ‘I’s changing the very composition of the frame. In other words, the self of reflexive self-consciousness points to the bearer as a continuous self through the different moments of its being. In visual terms, the self can be likened to a screen of pixels which, beneath the image, are fixed in their positions as light-emitting diodes but the images are the result of a cooperation with the viewer’s optical mixture and cerebral cortex and is in constant flux. The self is thus continually referred to, each reflexive moment might index it, yet it is in itself changeable and so the relational dynamics and contrasts create the phenomenological experience. The self of prereflexive self-awareness ‘in’ the moment when it exists as one with the object of intention, is only a fragment, a very basic unit of the self for that moment and each moment changes. The unadorned prereflexive self sees only continuity despite the changes in the object of its intention; the reflexive information rich self sees only changes as aspects of the self. From the perspective of the lower-order thought, there is the act of identity: ‘it’s me’ and from the perspective of the higher-order thought (or objectifying self-consciousness) ‘I am looking at an image of myself’—both are true. The former posits a sensus litteralis, the latter a critical distance. As Richard Wollheim would argue in looking at a

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Manet, we can posit an internal spectator within the matrix of the work, to understand she is both the same, yet different from me, the viewer, she is in a sense, an extension of myself, as is the glove I wear when I shake somebody’s hand. Indeed, the process of melding between a first-order sensus litteralis and a higher-order critical distance is an ongoing one; they have a symbiotic relation or are even mutually defining. Art objects are already special cases in the study of intentionality; they are not merely physical objects but have stories to tell or something to communicate and form a category somewhere between persons and things. It is clear that the intersubjective relationship of empathy between individuals which allows us to mentally ‘simulate’ or project another person is to “use the resources of one’s mind to create a model of another person and thereby identify with that person, projecting oneself imaginatively into his or her situation” (Thompson, and Zahavi 2007: 99). This, logically, can be extended into the realms of works of art and the self as a work of art. One could cite a number of self-portraits in art, many of them showing artists painting themselves and where intentionality seems both to point beyond itself and towards itself simultaneously in the act of seeing. It seems unnatural to freeze-frame the process of consciousness in stuttering moments of object-self-object-self, and lower-order thought, higher-order thought. As with the notion of ‘going with the flow’, losing oneself in the moment, defining our self-consciousness is a process that cuts across the map of territories where there are decisive sites of identifiable mental states, to the kind of self-generative becoming that we experience with the best kind of art and film.20 This is the argument I make in detail in Part 4 in an analysis of Velázquez’s Las Meninas where I show that the HOT can both be objectifying and non-objectifying, external to the lower-order thought, yet appear part of it in the phenomenal “feel” of the moment. There appears also to be a passage of thought between each point in these binaries, which is worth recognising, which is all about ‘the doing’. Phenomenology gives us much to ponder with the prereflexive self-consciousness involved in the doing/reading/painting of acts, where the subject and object dichotomy may be resolved as easily as touching one’s own hand. But even in the perception of an object in art, and one may go 20 Zahavi admirably describes Husserl’s examples of the experience of listening to melody, almost as a co-emergence of subject and object that seems more organic and much less diagrammatic and mechanistic (Zahavi 2003: 157-80).

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back to the Dresden Gallery example or Las Meninas here, could it be that both roles of consciousness co-exist, are co-emergent in time (staggered in Zahavi’s analysis)?21 In other words, rather than the characterisation of a reflexive model of consciousness as a series of moments, externalised from each other as an objectifying experience, the prereflexive moment may intervene, yet consciousness appears seamlessly in the ‘doing’, in the structuring of the experience,22 not as a series of discrete moments but as a process. This is dissected in Husserlian terms by Zahavi: The primal impression is imbedded in a twofold temporal horizon. On the one hand, it is accompanied by a retention which provides us with consciousness of the phase of the object which has just been, i.e., which allows us to be aware of the phase as it sinks into the past and, on the other hand, by a protention which in a more or less indeterminate fashion anticipates the phase of the object yet to come (Zahavi 2003: 163).

The movement is triadic and is therefore reminiscent of the Hegelian Aufhebung, but note the use of the term “imbedded” here, it suggests that the primal impression is framed or interpenetrated by a co-emergent retention and protention, but what is probably meant is the seamless movement where one dissection of the act seems to grow out of the other in a moment of dawning, an overlap, where one frame intersects another. Yet they are also “co-actual”.23 This is important because it corrects the misleading impression that the stream of consciousness is like a series of pictures successively appearing one after the other, from one vantage point. These and other implicit misunderstandings about the stream of consciousness are discussed in more detail below. As opposed to metaphors of spatial extension, instead, 21

“[…] reflection can only take place if a temporal horizon has been established” (Zahavi 2003: 163). The temporal horizon is, of course, a logical inference or theoretical case-limit and is virtually impossible to measure, to the extent that, to the thinking subject it may appear as co-emergent and co-incidental or “co-actual” as Zahavi puts it. 22 This apparent flow is what I take Zahavi to mean when he writes: “Through inner time-consciousness one is aware not only of the stream of consciousness (prereflective self-awareness), but also of the acts as demarcated temporal objects in subjective time (reflective self-awareness), and of the transcendent objects in objective time (intentional consciousness)” (Zahavi 2003: 1663). 23 Or, “not a gradual, delayed or mediated process of self-unfolding, but is ‘immediately’ given as an ecstatic unity” (Zahavi 2003:168).

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consciousness has a temporal extension, measurable by categories of difference and identity but even here, lacunae appear: consciousness may be said also to have atemporal qualities allowing for ‘temporal ecstasis’ (Zahavi 2003:168). Its ‘happenings’ occur at the same time, as we have seen with “timing is binding”, and we might also ponder, in this regard, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of vertical time. It is important to note that the Husserlian triadic schema is also an appropriate way to think of some of the differences between reflexive and prereflexive consciousness: When reflection sets in, it initially grasps something that has just elapsed, namely the motivating phase of the act reflected upon. The reason why this phase can still be thematised by the subsequent reflection is that it does not disappear, but is retained in the retention (Zahavi 2003:162). Husserl often speaks of the acts [of perception] themselves as being constituted in the structure: primal impression-retention-protention. They are only given, only self-aware within this framework (Zahavi 2003:163, my italics).

The schema, impression-retention-protention is also a useful way to think about varieties of the self in time. It allows us to see the self as a collective of fragmented units, as in a mosaic, converging in retention and protention. The self of reflexive consciousness is the overall mosaic image, referred to in different moments of reflection, while the self of prereflexive self-awareness is always different (but is never aware of this difference). One agrees with Zahavi that the self is dependent on and cooperative with different modes of self-awareness, although he might not characterise it in the way I have done here. At this point, Derrida might well have observed the continued metaphysics of presence in Zahavi’s descriptions, as there is a presence inside the framing device of “retention” and inside the framework of a “structure”. This suggests also that prereflexive self-awareness gives us the flow of time where three temporal dimensions are manifested in experience (Zahavi 2003:168 footnote 67) and reflexive awareness allows us to dissect time and experience with the triadic rhythm of primal impression, retention and protention. But this is cooperative with the two different approaches to the self, one consistent, the other fragmented. The possible multi-modal, multi-temporal contents of the framework are manifest in both visual and aural experiences, particularly with works of art and even with popular films that deal specifically with temporal anomalies (and their correlative fragmentations of

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the self) such as Vertigo, Jacob’s Ladder, Number 23, 12 Monkeys, The Star Trek series, Inland Empire to mention only a few. These films reflect back some of the interactions of prereflexive and reflexive self-awareness of inner time-consciousness. In film, the contrast of ‘normal’ time often frames the temporal anomalies depicted, and within these temporal anomalies linear time is temporarily restored, these frames-in-frames of time perspectivise and relativise our perceptions of the emergence of self involved with these continuity problems. One might say that such experiments with narrative forms which deal with temporal anomalies are natural outgrowths of fundamental structures of self-consciousness: the unthinking linear flow of one moment into the other with prereflexive consciousness is put into stark contrast with moments of reflective consciousness where fragmentations of time are chronologically reversed or frozen. As with HOTs and lower-order thoughts, if we are not talking about crude materialism it seems unnecessary or impossible to pinpoint the precise location in time of the passing of primal impression into protention via retention, and thereby to define each term with an extrinsic/intrinsic boundary, or as a frozen state. And this seems applicable to notions of the self, as well as the dynamic relationship between different kinds of consciousness (reflexive or prereflexive for example). The HOT, in common with reflexive self-consciousness need not be posited as a reflective sui generis. As with Husserl’s temporal inner-consciousness, object oriented HOTs remain useful places on the map that help us to locate certain dynamic processes of consciousness and the phenomenological feel we have about them; they also help us to understand how self-consciousness co-emerges with a ‘higher-order object’ in the world, a film or book, or a painting such as Las Meninas, for example, or Husserl’s Teniers picture, for although these are not time based works of art our interaction with them is. Both prereflexive and reflexive self-consciousness are involved in the phenomenology of experiencing these kinds of works of art and in the painting of them, and this is also part of the ongoing experience of the work of art as a dynamic co-emergence of different forms or levels of consciousness. Multiple Drafts In Daniel Dennett’s multiple drafts model (Dennet 1991) competing

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mental processes or idea mutations are abandoned or selected and turned into conscious, reportable activity: the final draft. I tend to agree with Dennet that there is no central self or place in the brain or boundary wherein consciousness is switched on. Instead: Contents arise, get revised, contributed to the interpretation of other contents or to the modulation of behavior (verbal or otherwise), and in the process leave their traces in memory, which then eventually decay or get incorporated into or overwritten by later contents, wholly or in part. This skein of contents is only rather like a narrative because of its multiplicity; at any point in time there are multiple drafts of narrative fragments at various stages of editing in various places in the brain. (Dennett, 1991, p135-6)

Multiple drafts share certain common features with frames-in-frames in the latter model; some of the drafts are kept in play in order to maintain a multiplicity of selves. There is also a continuity of consciousness through the focus of the frames. Consciousness does not just occur inside or outside the frame but in the processing of several of them. In this sense, some art may be seen to cooperate visually with the multiple drafts model as a series of frames-in-frames. One could take Gillian Wearing’s Masturbation as visual form of this; each photograph-in-a-photograph may be seen as a fresh draft. Consciousness can flit between that which is framed, to that outside of the frame and even on the framing device itself, and in a process of having a HOT can conceptualise framing as a process used in other comparable circumstances in order to bring together a consciousness of framing as an artistic and mental activity. Consciousness arises as a number of relations between HOTs. When prevalent conscious constructions do not appear to account for the information rich visual field, as they might not with rather complex framing devices in some artworks, then a new conscious state emerges within others, as wth the frame inside the frame. This does not even take into account unconscious processes at work in the processing of an experience of frames-in-frames. Implicit in the way in which Dennett explains his multiple drafts model is consideration of competing or contemporaneous realities and conscious states. The final draft arises over and above many ‘little consciousnesses’ to piece together an overview of what is going on as a series. A visualisation of this is the frames-in-frames of work of art. The prolongation of the unconscious and conscious processing

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which can be said to be the production of multiple drafts, can be experienced more readily as a rapid, ongoing process of flux and change in the viewing of a film, where earlier drafts may remain or are relinquished consciousness is the process of this happening (the film moves on even while one has had little time to examine the dominant draft in any detail). Because previous drafts are present and linked to various Abschattungen in the work of art, the viewer never entirely shakes off a previous consciousness and can go back and view it as a history of her own consciousness. But added to scenario of a series of Abschattungen each of which can be seen as a draft, is the notion of perspection, the series can also be seen from the relativity of different vantage points. Seeing through somebody else’s eyes to different profiles of an object or an event is also an example of multiple drafts. It is possible that framing devices in film engage with a rapid succession of mental processes (some of which are orchestrations of mental processes that overlap). Thus watching films with framing devices engages a complex consciousness that relies on the one hand, on a gross architecture of relations, eye, film, screen, and on the other, engages with anticipates and activates highly multiple frames as multiple drafts with overlapping moments. With film and art, and I would argue, consciousness, we are sometimes presented with different possible series of thoughts, red herrings, dead ends, unfinished business—the polysemism of a film captures multiple viewing perspectives and voices, as well as those present in oneself without a conclusive final draft, in fact, the final draft consists of a review of all the possible drafts and examines the relations between them. The final draft is always being remade. Multiple perspectives in a film (very often shown with frames-inframes) ultimately have to be decided upon as multiple drafts without any clear finality attached to any of them. This is the character of intersubjective phenomenology (heterophenomenonlogy) and the perspectivisms of witness accounts. In watching a film, the viewer is able to maintain a conscious inspection of multiple drafts of different conscious moments represented as number of multiple viewpoints and perspectives or representations of reality. In other words, the inherent exposition of film is to present multiplicity of drafts shown as various characters’ viewpoints and framing shots yet these also represent various multiple drafts of reality available to the viewer; such presentations may even make the viewer aware of perceptions of

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reality that had not previously passed into consciousness. Even after disposal of the previous drafts of perceptual states (and I extend the drafts model to previous drafts of higher level consciousness), retrieval may come with any number of mental images from our mental image library filtering the dominant draft of the moment or providing for a perceptual constancy (Zeki 1999: 76-96). Much more could be said about the multiple drafts model, especially its textuality, as Derrida might have pointed out. Thus, many of the multiple drafts Dennett discusses may be seen as copresent with the final draft, as lacunae in the text of consciousness, as texts within texts. And by extension then, there should be an intertextuality of multiple drafts possible here (with its correspondence in visuality with interpictoriality). Such intertextuality is a critique of the simple legitimation of the presence of the figure of consciousness as a transcendent presence, which is in fact, littered with lacunae and presences of other drafts. Thus, the final draft is always a multi-layered experience; especially so with an artwork which presents a multispatial and polysemic complexity, this is the approach I will take in interpreting the conscious experience attending Las Meninas. In the intertextual experience in art of framing devices, I am alerted to them and cross-reference them in order to gain more complex understandings of how they function. The experience they are able to activate recall other, previous framing experiences and give me dispositions to recognise newer ones. I am able to synthesise into complex trains of conscious thought an intertextual frames-in-frames process. But it is interesting that it is possible to conceive of the cooperation of coarse to fine-grained thought as a kind of intertextual consciousness. The former, less refined global processing consists of perceptual levels lying just under consciousness that divide and categorise the organisation of the visual field, processes of selection and anticipation which we can re-access and use co-operatively with locally focused, self-aware, fine-grained activities to produce semantic chains and reflexive thought. Both processes, along with others are copresent. The frame-in-a-frame visualised in the film’s presentations splits the visual field and creates multiple drafts and, depending on the director’s intentions, this could result in a binocular rivalry, forcing choices upon us, or we merely obtain a unity of the visual field, a stereoscopic focus where, nonetheless, there is trace of a presence in or under the cinematic image, one draft lying under the other as in a

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palimpsest. The patterns of consonance or dissonance of these visual experiences, the continuum of consciousness attending to the frame and the frame depicted inside it is worked up into the film’s signature, its style of communication. Against the on/off switch notion of consciousness Dennet’s multiple drafts model suggests a continuity of conscious processes and co-present levels of consciousness, rather than a theatre upon which consciousness parades itself or is seen.24 The multiplicity of mental events fits well with the frame-in-the-frame model which also emphasises a number of co-present states and relations of HOTs which altogether in their fine-grained interactivities create experiences of consciousness across multiple timelines. The Image of the Stream Consciousness […] does not appear to itself chopped up in bits […] it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life (James 1890: i, 239).

William James’s imagery of the stream of consciousness has become one of the most dominant models of consciousness that has passed over into folk psychology. Not only is it ubiquitous in the literature describing consciousness but the stream has a whole lexical set associated with it that preserves its presence, even while remaining unacknowledged. Yet there are problems with such an image. Husserl and more recently others have pointed out that reflection tends to halt the flow of consciousness and to split it up in discrete parts (Blackmore 2002; Gallagher 2003). The stream is not just an image, it also sets up the binary opposite of stasis versus motion to describe not only the relationship of different conscious states but consciousness of leaving them behind. One quick and easy way to think beyond this binary is to integrate them, so that one appears through the other as in a moment of stillness represented in Warhol’s film, Empire (1962) which shows the Empire State Building from a fixed camera position, over several hours in the day and evening without any changes at all. The film is 24

This chimes in well with the enactive view of visual response where pre-existent conscious processes are already underway while forming newer ones in relation to perceiving the visual field (Ellis 1999, 167) and Libet’s well-known studies of the unconscious neural preparation to voluntary action.

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rolling, frames imperceptibly pass before us to produce the phenomenological feel of pure stillness and yet we know that there is motion, even of a frantic kind, lying underneath all this. The film seems to represent the binary of motion and stasis, and yet is not either of them, the stream is not visible by external reference marks, yet we are conscious that there is a rapid series of changes in the substructure of the image, which depicts stillness. It is this paradox that engages with qualities that seem contradictory to each other yet more accurately describe aspects of consciousness. We do not see the stream with our eyes or with the laws of physics which traces the micro-movements of particles, but by closing our eyes to all those optical effects to experience the stream as an abstraction, as a theoretical posit. The other, important effect of Warhol’s film is to make the observer aware of his or her observing, it is an encounter of two non-inertial frames of reference (one a film with a moving reel of frames, the other a self-producing consciousness), that appears to create an overwhelming inertia. The point is, consciousness overcomes the binary opposite—stasis and motion and other images of thought are necessary to describe this phenomenological experience. If the stream of consciousness is more like a continuum that in fact does not move anywhere yet intensifies, then perhaps the imagery that we appear to need in order to characterise consciousness is more accurately a series of light emitting diodes on a computer monitor, lights that in themselves are static but in their differential relationships to each other, by virtue of their relative light intensities and the optical mixture in the eye, simulate movement and flow, colour and line, edges and depth, space and flesh and all the rest, when in fact, the stream of consciousness moves nowhere. It is a series of differentiations experienced from a vantage point which processes and generalises these gradations of change and yet this viewpoint is also subject to gradations and changes, the vantage point is not fixed. It detects in the world thematic and structural patterns in the field of vision. To reaffirm the often insightful contribution that folk psychology in literature can make to the study of consciousness, there is a telling episode in a recent novel by José Carlos Somoza who writes about an experience of regaining consciousness after a painful blow to the head experienced in a dark cave: The cave, at first, was a gleam of gold hanging somewhere in the darkness. It became pure pain. It turned back into the gleam of gold. It went ceaselessly

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from one to other. Then there were shapes—a brazier of hot coals that was, strangely, as pliable as water and contained irons resembling bodies of frightened snakes. And a yellow patch, a man whose outline was stretched at one end and shortened at the other, as if hanging by invisible ropes. And, yes, there were noises, too: a faint metallic ring and, from time to time, the piercing torment of dog barking. A wide variety of damp smells. And once again everything closed up like a papyrus scroll and the pain returned. End of story. He wasn’t sure how many more similar stories unfolded before his mind began to understand. Just as a hanging object, when struck, swings violently and irregularly at first, then evenly, then terminally slowly, reverting gradually to its former stillness, the furious spinning stopped. His consciousness planed over a point of repose before managing at last to remain linear and motionless, in harmony with the surrounding reality. Now he could distinguish between what was his—the pain, and what was not—the images, noises smells (Somoza 2000: 289).

The first part of the text is a streamlike description of half-perceived objects merging into each other, and sensations, sights, smells, noises that also lose their distinct character, in the sense that the protagonist cannot distinguish any sensation as his, his consciousness is in the world and the world’s qualities are him. Hercules cannot keep anything still; his head is fighting dizziness and the distraction of pain, both of which seem to keep self-consciousness at bay. The image of the papyrus scroll which indicates the book, the author’s writing, even this gets enveloped into the passage of pain, and fire, water, man and animal get wrapped up within in, and lose their distinctness. End of story. But the story is a metaphor for consciousness and Hercules’s consciousness returns at the same time as the story re-emerges. It is obvious also, that this is no ordinary consciousness. In a book which uses eidesis as its central theme, the nesting of images within the text as a sub-plot, the reader’s consciousness is alerted to the hidden images: Hercules regains consciousness (and by extension, the story, the reader’s consciousness) in a cave, while we, as readers, gain consciousness of Plato’s Cave metaphor, the archetypal theatre where the figure of the idea, eidos, is revealed. We have the image of the cave within which is nested the idea of the cave. But we also have here, consciousness within which there is the idea of consciousness. Note also, that a key image is the tranquillity of consciousness; its lucidity is linked to the moment of (re)gaining consciousness as an ideal point of stasis, it is achieved through regaining the repose of self-reflection within a wide variety of semi-differentiated sensations, eventually to find harmony with the surrounding stillness of reality.

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Consciousness arises as stillness within a bewildering and identitymorphing stream of streams, a common image of phenomenological consciousness, an image which also lies like a mental text within the corpus of studies of consciousness. We switch from a higher-order thought of the eidesis from the first-order thought of the literal text. Once we are aware there is more to the sensation of reading or representing than just image making, then our experience of reading becomes more alert to the words and images used, our higher-order thought about what we are reading arises as a secondary reading, but one in which the first is lodged as a reference point, one which uses the same fixed words on the page as the first-order reading, one reading through the other, a split in consciousness, half in near repose aware of itself watching the other half process networks of information with different intensities and patterns. The contrast in these two kinds of processes may give us the illusion of a stream, yet in order to feel that stream we are also conscious of a fixed point by which to experience and measure it. Both the fixed and non-fixed binary is, in fact, the contrast of two conscious processes happening at the same time. This multi-track consciousness negotiates different rates and patterns of change vis-à-vis each other. From the vantage point of phenomenology, this may feel like a stream. Remaining with the image of repose, reflexive consciousness is less a stream leading away from itself, and more within itself as a series of changes. The process of defining the relation between the polar opposites ‘difference’ and ‘sameness’ and the infinite degrees between them remind us of a stream of movement. Consciousness tracks the patterns of continuity and change within and between conscious states, so that the conscious states become indecipherable from the ordering relations between them. This may be visualised as trying to remember a DNA sequence or a molecular structure by characterising larger categories of structure as rhythm or pattern. A generalising or global consciousness puts experience of all of these states lying between sameness and difference, connectivity and discontinuity into a before, during and after, and with the aid of memory, imagination and rational extrapolation uses the imagery of a steam or movement, or spatial or other configuration in order to characterise sequences and structures of change and repetition between conscious states. This clearly emphasises consciousness as a case of special relativity between generalising (and I would say framing) processes which have as

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their targets shorter lived processes that, even in themselves have complex contrasts and repetitions. Similarly with the optical mixture required in viewing a painting by Seurat, colours go nowhere, consciousness need not settle on any one of them but takes a general view which simulates larger blocks of colour, depth and form, it should not focus on any single point of colour if it is to see the overall picture but this refusal is not a stream of consciousness in the sense that consciousness moves, instead, it changes, becomes more or less intense, more or less interconnected. Neuronal interactivity may produce a series of pre-conscious perceptions (in the case of Seurat, colour, edges, depth etc), consciousness binds this overall information to compose elements into a complex pattern but it is debatable whether these transformations or series of abstractions, sequences or patterns premised on the visual stimuli of various physical properties in the world, or the consciousness that is attentive to them, have a streamlike character. There are also anomalies in the theory of stream. Between sessions of consciousness there are the time gaps of nonconsciousness. Consciousness appears to frame a gap or lacuna, as Derrida would have it, yet is not able to grasp its contents. Memory appears to connect different moments of consciousness with each other over the gaps to allow for the image of a stream and as a way of coding differentiated moments into larger, more memorable blocks, as with the painting by Seurat or the pixelated screen of a computer. Yet even when there is a time gap, the consciousness after it “feels as if it belonged together with the consciousness before it, as another part of the same self” (Flanagan 1995: 162). Consciousness is never the same when it returns with different configurations, thoughts, contents, or relations of becoming. In other words, the stream, when viewed from a distance, appears as an entity but like a painting by Seurat, is only a series of discrete moments or states not connected to each other at all, merely lying alongside each other as in Derrida’s parergon/ergon; it is the binding and distancing effect of the viewer who creates the semantics of a stream. Warhol’s Empire represents, activates and reflects back consciousness as repose, yet without compromising seriality, it also allows us think critically of the imagery of the stream and in so doing, allows higher-order thought about consciousness to emerge. Consciousness of an ideal sameness or even stillness may be experienced as mental

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imagery in cooperation with the physical image of Empire giving rise to a sense of identity or the self through time consciousness, in which we seem sheathed. In contrast, what we glimpse in the landscapes of Cézanne is the instability of this unity, the quivering nature of form and matter that unfold as objects in our consciousness, revealing the negotiation of focus and non-focus (and the elision of these) in the conscious optical experience that is made known to itself through the atomisations of pigment on canvas, imitating the micro movements in the landscape, registered by the micro-changes in the artist’s mind, recording these subtle differences with the micro-movements of brush in hand, cooperating with the micro-saccades of the eye. There is continual adjustment. All is still on the surface of a Cézanne landscape painting but this is only a fleeting sensation. Similarly in Seurat’s, Afternoon at La Grande Jatte, the ideal unity of the afternoon, where the unity of a microcosm emerges when particles form into macrocosmic shapes and their relations. The spots of paint appear to be internalised or framed by these shapes, but we also feel their undeniable importance in forming the very substructure of that framing. As with consciousness of conscious mental states, they are formed into larger groupings and frames but these groupings and frames are their contents. The stillness of the overall image of people suspended in their paradisiacal afternoon emulates the stillness of each daub of paint, but without the aid of imitation. The fine-grained activity of the substructure is emulated by the global formation of the image. With Seurat’s painting, the shapes and forms of people are still, rigid even, yet their isolated groupings suggest a large number of copresent series of events. The substructural level of dots frozen in space seems to reference this stillness. The image references its material substrate. Importantly, with this experience of doubled stillness is consciousness of the method of its revelation. The image of the stream is not sufficient to describe this kind of emergence in stillness which is a commonplace conscious experience not only with Seurat but also with the mosaics of Pompey and our postmodern pixelated universe. In all these examples, there are, broadly speaking, two processes of consciousness: one binding, the other disintegrating. This creates a tension which is third process. One could describe this kind of consciousness as an iridescence that hovers between consciousness as unity and consciousness as disintegration, a consciousness of two

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conscious states. As with the daubs of paint that come together as the image, we become aware of our perceptions as building blocks for the architecture of our higher-order thought, but let it not be said that one gives way to the other, for the fine-grained detail, the intimacy with the canvas and the pigment and immediacy is concurrent with the overall image of distance. This is not binocular rivalry but a copresent series of events. As with consciousness and the world, they are both detached and attached to each other at the same time.25 Stitching together a series of Abschattungen of an intentional object is not a matter of attending a stream but of gaining the feeling of threedimensionality through simultaneous emergences of these presentations and profiles and in cooperation with different viewpoints from where to view them. How can we go beyond the idea of competitive binaries of the streamlike and the static, the psychological and the phenomenological in thinking consciousness, towards a theory of consciousness that synthesises these seemingly irreducible differences in order to accurately understand the functioning of consciousness? Flanagan suggests: Viewed subjectively, consciousness is streamlike. Viewed objectively, it is less streamlike. Which is the truth? James thought that both can be true. I think he is right (Flanagan 1995: 171).

And this is why, presumably, James also used the metaphor of pails of water standing in a stream that flows around it. It is clear that James never actually meant his stream metaphor to be the only, exclusive characterisation of conscious experience. James could only have reasoned if we reject the either/or dilemma that consciousness is a stream or that it is not, we need to accept the possibility that both conflicting qualities accurately describe consciousness or neither them in isolation. Such a move actually demonstrates, and is produced by synthesising both contradictory qualities using the image of a pail of water in a stream to convey the framing of stillness and identity in a series of intensifying changes. This image is a higher-order binding (HOB).26 I 25

“The man of vision may teach us […] how to begin to build a philosophy of indwelling. He shows us how in our very distance from things we are near them, he recreates conceptually, as, for him, the painter does iconically, our mediated immediacy, our attachment through detachment, the very core of our being-in-a-world” (Grene in Johnson 1993: 232). 26 A term coined by Thomas Metzinger (1995: 454).

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use this to demonstrate not perceptual binding but the binding between conscious states which allows for seemingly contradictory experiences to be felt at the same time. Another example is seeing Warhol’s Brillo Boxes as art and as commercially manufactured soap boxes; they manifest and unite their opposing tendencies in the objects themselves. Another way of looking at this binding is to see consciousness as a superposition between the opposing pairs of opposites, able to experience their contrariness, not committing to the either/or dualism but experiencing the tension between each of them as a distinct property. Thus, if we use the stream as a model of consciousness, we are justified in seeing this stream not as a flow from A to B in a linear sense but as a stream in the shape of a circle flowing into itself, backwards and forwards, or as an emergence or efflorescence in several directions simultaneously; a multiplicity of qualities that the stream metaphor is unable to convey. A circle is still yet if it were moving in a perfectly circular motion, clockwise or anti-clockwise, it would continue to appear still, though moving. This is a simple matter and yet seems to expose the fictionality of many of the binaries we work with, and points to a number of possible alternatives to these binaries. William James called the sheathing that surrounds and escorts the contents of consciousness a ‘fringe’. In effect, the fringe is an image of consciousness as a series of isolated incidents which may variously be described as static, fragmented into the larger context of consciousness that phenomenologically appears to flow around it; in this case, the flow is associated with ideas of a continuum without breaks. One such continuum might be a distinct feeling of the self as a receptacle, consistent over time cooperating with fragments of consciousness. Importantly for my purposes, the fringe is yet another example of a theoretical construct in consciousness that uses the logic of the frame, for in James, consciousness envelops a singularity as a frame contains its contents. And according to James, the visible object has a fringe differentiating it from non-object, non-meaning. Using the centre/periphery distinction in an optical experience also suggests a dynamic relationship between the two, where the centre is continually being remade by its osmotic fringe of non-attention. In the fringe of consciousness are: relationships that provide a schema which gives the object to which we are attending a meaning [James] conceived of consciousness in terms of a part-

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whole relationship and of attention as accentuating (or bringing into relief) some part of a whole in consciousness (Evans and Fujack 1976: 138).

These comments are appropriate for describing the function of frames inside frames in art. In James, there is a complex exploration of consciousness in terms of framing and framing within framing. In the following passage, James uses the figure of the “gap” as a framing device: Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. The state of our consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap therein; but no mere gap. It is a gap that is intensely active. A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with the sense of our closeness, and then letting us sink back without the longed-for term If wrong names are proposed to us, this singularly definite gap acts immediately so as to negate them. They do not fit into its mould. And the gap of one word does not feel like the gap of another, all empty of content as both might seem necessarily to be when described as gaps. When I vainly try to recall the name of Spalding, my consciousness is far removed from what it is when I vainly try to recall the name of Bowles. There are innumerable consciousnesses of want, no one of which taken in itself has a name, but all are different from each other. Such a feeling of want is toto coelo other than a want of feeling: it is an intense feeling. The rhythm of a lost word may be there without a sound to clothe it; or the evanescent sense of something which is the initial vowel or consonant may mock us fitfully, without growing more distinct. Every one must know the tantalising effect of the blank rhythm of some forgotten verse, restlessly dancing in one's mind, striving to be filled out with words (James 1962: 177). We see, then, that it makes little or no difference in what sort of mind-stuff, in what quality of imagery, our thinking goes on. The only images intrinsically important are the halting-places, the substantive conclusions, provisional or final, of the thought. Throughout all the rest of the stream, the feelings or relation are everything, and the terms related almost naught. These feelings or relation, these psychic overtones, halos, suffusions, or fringes about the terms, may be the same in very different systems of imagery (James 1962: 182).

These passages suggest that James thought the fringe to be composed of a phenomenology of concurrent relations rather than discrete feelings of unrelated objects or a simple on/off switch for consciousness that lights it up on a theatre stage. Instead, an object attended to is surrounded by the complex system of relations which are not the object of attention per se, but we may be aware of them in continually adjusting fringe of consciousness or relatively unaware of them, but they help make up the context for and lend meaning to an object of attention. The fringe may contain other possible viewpoints and con-

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scious process sliding under our present one, moving it to other frames of focus. The fringe is a frame around attention but may change rapidly depending on new objects of attention, and yet these new objects of attention might be focused on because of stimuli from relations outside of the frame. The fringe is a kind of connective tissue between topics: In all our voluntary thinking there is some topic or subject about which all the members of the thought revolve. Relation to this topic or interest is constantly felt to the fringe, and particularly the relation of harmony and discord, of furtherance or hindrance of the topic. Any thought the quality of whose fringe lets us feel ourselves ‘all right’, may be considered a thought that furthers the topic. Provided we only feel its object to have a place in the scheme of relations in which the topic also lies, that is sufficient to make of it a relevant and appropriate portion of our train of idea […] The most important element of these fringes is, I repeat, the mere feeling of harmony or discord, of a right or wrong direction in the thought (James 1962: 181).

It seems important that while we are immersed in a higher-order thought that we are conscious of being “in”, there could be another consciousness, perhaps represented in a book or painting or in one’s own memory that is contained within this framing higher-order thought or is its intentional object. The point is that neither the framing HOT nor its contents remain the same. As with two noninertial frames, both change configurations while maintaining ordering connections. The ability to think of them separately yet in relation to each other, rather than folding up this encounter into a vague stream of indifference, presents special problems for those favouring the physicalist determination of consciousness: What there is disagreement about is whether the qualitative seriality, the streamlike feel of consciousness, is supported by an architectural feature of mind that is in fact really serial or whether the system consists of parallel processors from top to bottom that nonetheless have the capacity to produce the streamlike phenomenology. This is an interesting and complicated empirical question that remains unsolved. (Flanagan: 1995: 173)

If consciousness may feel streamlike phenomenologically even if it is not neurologically, we also have to accept that consciousness can also feel unstreamlike phenomenologically; does this mean that there is a corresponding stillness in the neurology? Warhol’s Empire seems to suggest that we can manufacture a great amount of stillness by ex-

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pending a lot of consciousness and neurological energy. And what of the possible experience of binding this contradiction as a valid conscious state in its own right, would there be a contradiction of the basic principles of physics in the neurophysical processes of the brain? If these questions cannot be answered, it may be because they are absurd in their attempts to create a mirror like relation of effects in phenomenological and neurophysical levels. The feeling of the stream may be attributed to how consciousness avoids registering the detailed changes in or between mental states, it may be the result of experiencing two or more mental states as one extended seriality of changes, rather than distinct entities which come into view only when we direct our attention to the composition of a particular conscious state, which our conscious focus defines, dissects or frames. In such cases, the linkages between mental states are cut and we isolate a mental state, but in normal circumstances, that mental state is continually becoming something else. By using the image of frames-in-frames we can think about consciousness organised as a series of nested acts; a stepping inside itself which is nevertheless a kind of ecstasis, while remaining in the same place, travel without moving, where changes emerge within themselves rather than going ahead in a stream, which suggests spatial extension. Yet we can also imagine the opposite direction, that consciousness steps outside itself, a series of distancing acts which frame the previous conscious state, yet that previous conscious state is happening and is being experienced all the while that stepping outside is taking place. It is another example of a higher-order binding of the apparent conflict between place and non-place, static and yet changing states that make the stream image seem just too pat. Warhol’s Empire is both static and dynamic, and a Seurat painting is fragmented and unified. Higher-order thoughts take an overview of lower-order details; it is possible to have a conscious experience of the binding of these binaries, a resolution. What is the architecture of the mind that supports that mental state? The various models of multiple drafts, HOTs and the stream are images that we use among many others to describe aspects of phenomenological consciousness; they need not be in conflict with each

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other;27 and can be mediated by the image of frames-in-frames. This model is more than a theoretical construct because it is manifested both in phenomenology and art, we see it engaged and represented visually in art and it preserves the aspects of the multiple drafts model: each frame is a draft or different aspect of reality, discarded or preserved but we can still see through them and experience the relativity of our phenomenal consciousness in the past and emerging in the present.28 The model of frames-in-frames also sheds light on higherorder thought that frames within it the phenomenal mental state that it makes conscious; and with the stream it seems to do the impossible: preserves the important quality of stasis; of things not seeming to move, of a quantum singularity within the stream of consciousness, and allows us also to frame or surround the stream by this image of stasis even if we have to appeal to the image of the expanding universe that extends in all directions into the stasis of the vacuum to make it hold. In other words, perhaps the most thoroughly deconstructive way to question the stream is to invite thought about the stillness which seems to frame it as an image. This allows us to think using the logic of the via negativa, that the image of the stream is hopelessly porous and self-contradicting because it frames out properties which it is not, which in fact, define its distinctness, by denying what it is not, it brings these contrary qualities into a more pronounced presence alongside it.In the case where the image of the stream represents consciousness as a linear progression of successive moments, this overly simplistic view may be countered by considering reflexive, cyclical and embedded series shown in art by the example of the Teniers picture, Waring’s Masturbation and other images I will explore in Part 4. 27

Flanagan at least suggests that multiple drafts and steamlike phenomenology do not have to be in conflict with each other as opposing theories of mind, as Dennett suggests (Flanagan 1995: 174). 28 Dennett’s model appears sometimes to be an either/or situation: “The outer contour of a disc rapidly turns into the inner contour of a ring. The brain, initially informed just that something happened […] swiftly receives confirmation that there was indeed a ring with an inner and outer contour. Without further supporting evidence that there was a disc, the brain arrives at the conservative conclusion that there was only a ring” (Dennett 1991:142). In a painting, a ring is both a disc and a ring; and preserving both drafts is an essential aspect of consciousness engaging with the artwork. Note that Dennett’s imagery of the ring is another form of the underlying logic of the frame-theframe.

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The Self These radically different principles of organising a series are also applicable to representations of the self. The concept of the self is intricately bound up with James’s image of the stream. Yet like the self, consciousness cannot be reduced to the exigencies of a straightforward narrative which attempts to explain it while using the stream as its token of progression. It is possible to understand the stream as a rhetorical device which structures the very exposition of an explanation about consciousness and the self. In this sense, a streamlike narrative describes a streamlike narrative in a relation of reciprocity. Logocentrism is evident here, treating self-consciousness as a text. But as Derrida would undoubtedly have claimed with deconstruction, texts in texts become visible and therefore also with the stream there are other streams which run through it within it and engender within this delta entities which appear quite unstreamlike in character. William James provides us with a frame within which to guide our thoughts about the self: The consciousness of Self involves a stream of thought each part of which an “I” can remember those which went before, know the things they knew, and care paramountly for certain ones among them as “Me” and appropriate to these the rest. This Me is an empirical aggregate of things objectively known. The I which knows them […] need [not] […] be an unchanging metaphysical entity like the Soul or a principle like the transcendental Ego, viewed “out of time.” It is a thought, at each moment different from that of the last moment, but appropriative of the latter, together with all that the latter called its own. All the experiential facts find their place in this description unencumbered with any hypothesis save that of the existence of passing thoughts or states of mind (James 1962: 82).

Perhaps the least explained part of this quote is the word “passing”. One is still struck by its inadequacy, by the fact that it assumes that there is a self measuring the passing of these states of mind that are selves. This, some would suggest, is regressive, others might contend that on this view, we have a temporary vantage point from which to see lots of comings and goings, and this vantage point is the place of subjective unity. Yet, after considering the image (and activation) of a subjective unity in consciousness, it is quite natural to consider issues of the self in relation to this binding or unity, either as a retrospective vantage point of a temporary self-con-

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sciousness, or as principle inherent in the things that cooperate in order for such a unification to take place. It is possible to collect not only a series of vantage points together, as in a Cubist painting, but also a series of subjective unities. In order to save ourselves from regress here, we need merely to think of a phrase such as ‘I see myself’ where I am both viewer and viewed at the same time. Thus, we see a series of subjective unities from a vantage point in retrospect and with some distance. And so, not only is there a unity of subject and object in the self but also, there is a process of immersion where I see myself in a picture unified with the process of distancing: I am looking at my ‘self’ in the picture. This could be described as inter-repulsion, a dithering of involvement and distance, which, in retrospect, may be conceptualised as the more refined sensation of superpositionality. In the scenario where ‘I see my selves’ (a photograph catalogue) where previous, different subjective unities come together in one, new subjective unity, this is a moment of multiplicity centred on the one. Certainly in art, the concept of unity has been extremely hegemonic and one has grown to distrust it; it is easy to see evidence of aesthetic traditions which address unity in art and it is easy also to extend this to consciousness as some kind of mirror by which it appears to see its own unity, visualised by the self and reaffirmed by the portrait or some such other symbolic trace of personal unity. In this schema, unity is not dependent on physical connectivity but complementarity, a question of timing is binding. Importantly, consciousness appears to unify in aspects in the visual field, musical moments, the self and different moments of consciousness in order to appear seamless and connected. Here also comes to mind William James’s characterisation of consciousness as a zoetrope: a toy which, when it turns, allows a series of static figures to simulate movement. The figure does not move (it does not, in fact, exist) but the toy does, and in the viewing process these roles seem reversed, the figure moves, the toy stands still. The principle is at work in a sophisticated way in Warhol’s Empire, as we have seen. There are many selves, many conscious mental states of the self and these can be characterised in relation to each other as a series of framed self-portraits. The relevance of art to this discourse is not incidental but central. Flanagan intriguingly states that “we frame our self-comprehension by mustering thoughts that carry rich information about the past

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course of the stream and the direction in which it is headed” (1993: 182); and later he refers to acts of thinking that “frame new experiences” (186). These phrases bring together both the imagery of the frame and the stream, both of which bracket off the self from the non-self; art practically envisages and grounds this imagery in material form. Furthermore, he writes: “thoughts that contain images of an evolving self are enough to explain the sense of self” (186). Here, framing devices are deployed as a way of expressing a fluid sense of self that appears to flow through the framing thoughts, these thoughts are, nevertheless, organised in a stream. All sorts of mixed metaphors of this kind are very telling for the conceptualisations we have of self-consciousness as a flow or as stasis, framed and framing, seen and seeing. In the framing action of consciousness, in framing conscious mental states, it is important to keep in mind that the viewing of a series of frames-in-frames is both a seriality of consecutive little consciousnesses (some of them intersubjective), from which it is possible to step back, and a more distantly experienced simultaneity. The frames may be individuated or appear as resonances of one event horizon “I am this series”; like the self, consciousness is both composite and singular. In such a scenario, the self is a representation framed by consciousness that unifies several different moments, experiencing consciousnesses. To the abstract concept ‘consciousness’ is appended the concept of the self that frames consciousness. And when one is conscious of the concept of the self as a framing device in this manner, consciousness frames the self. As with history and consciousness, phenomenology and periodising, the relationship between the self and consciousness is a series of frames-in-frames which alternate between the frame of the self and the frame of consciousness, as a kind of continuous interpenetration. The self is not, therefore, in one place and may only be a principle of repetition of indexing that personalises consciousness. This personalisation (or, through want of a better word, ‘selfication’ of consciousness) is formed and reformed and becomes apparent where the relative moments or frames of the self come into view, so that there appears at least temporarily to be a self looking at many different aspects of the self. And of course, this is visualised in art and film as a series of watchers, watching watchers, seeing through their eyes and the eyes of others into frames and other captured moments of consciousness.

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A mental image of thought could be invoked to help realise this: the self looking at many different aspects of the self may be seen as the self-reflection in a mosaic made of small square mirrors that are fixed onto the sculptural form of a human figure (so in effect, a three dimensional mirror of a human form which reflects literally and symbolically the viewer). Imagine that the sculpture holds up its hand to its face in the gesture of looking at a mirror, this gesture not only mimics the viewer looking at her self looking at the sculpture but it also brings to mind the idea that some of these tesserae reflect each other and the idea that the sculpture is looking at itself, as the viewer does. The tesserae reflect the viewer and the sculpture appears to look at the reflection of the viewer, and so on. This series of convolutions is none other than the self emerging from consciousness of the self to consciousness reflecting consciousnesses that are ultimately indexed to the self of the moment. The self works in this situation as a unifying factor, which unifies the visual and conceptual occurrence of many selves as discrete ‘me’s, while moving around the reflective form, which also manages to reflect parts of itself. Different viewpoints witness a series of appearances and presentations. The way that the image of the self (the viewer) seems shattered into many different fragments while looking at the many different tesserae reflections on the surface of a sculpture is a reflection of consciousness shattered into many different instances of self-reflection, of consciousness of different mental states, allowing consciousness’s self to appear to itself as many different selves, and selves reflecting selves, and yet from a distance, as one complete form. ‘Selves’ here are merely a proliferation of different vantage points around an illusory concept of the singular, transhistorical self. Yet if the self does not exist, neither do the discrete little selves that go up to make the unified self. The self, then, is a series of relations. The self as viewer moves around the reflective (and self-reflecting figure), the figure is both a unified form and a seriality of forms, it represents a moment of self-consciousness while its numinous internal series of reflections show disintegration, and this is a visual process which the viewer experiences while walking around the sculpture, not only seeing mirror reflections of the physical self but discreet moments integrated into the encircling movement of the art experience of which she is also the centre, she circumnambulates the

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shining form while it encircles her sense of self. The final frame that it is possible to settle on which seems to bring together all the little framings of the self is the frame of ‘me looking’ at the sculpture, my own vaguely perceived eyelids, nose and lashes framing the experience of art. If we consider that the frame in art represents and activates a figure of thought about the self-as-body in the world, focusing on the non-self; or on the self; the frame signifies not only the edge of the focus, it also signifies the focus itself, the frame signifies the selective action of the eye; yet it also reflects the ‘I’ of me, looking, in the act of looking, the being and existence before the non-fiction of the work of art that brings me to a consciousness of my real being before it. When this frame is repeated many times within the pictorial space then we begin to think the complex thought of how the self is a series of relative reflections, discrete moments that only seem to join together when we take a step back for a general view of the self looking at its many selves. From this vantage point of this larger frame we see all the others gathered. This may only be a fleeting feeling of the edge of our eyes as frames. We glimpse all other instances of frames and frames-in-frames and we are also able to see through them. Some of this is prefigured in William James who uses the key figure of the “title” of the self (I take “title” as another framing device), and this title of the self is passed on from one thought to another, one different conscious state to another: Each thought is thus born an owner, and dies owned, transmitting whatever it realises as its Self to its own later proprietor […] who owns the last self owns the self before the last, for what possesses the possessor possesses the possessed (James 1950: 339-340).

It is possible to see through these frames each of which are possessor and possessed, and this allows us to think of the emergence of consciousness through the fictive frames that signify many selves, multiple drafts, eventually allowing us to become conscious of our own self as act of seeing (and sometimes cooperatively with our bodily ‘edges’ of eyes) all of these selves are already conscious cooperating through and alongside our act of framing. The ‘body as me’ is key here, for it is the last image distanced from so many frames within frames considered in the work of art and upon which we pin our sense of self, but it also re-emerges in

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the world. The ‘I’ is an index pointing to the subject of experience for the equally transient present in which this experience is given. Yet because the ‘I’ is a composite of past ‘I’s, it is “continuously enriched and renewed”, an ever-changing index that remains itself as a framing device but whose contents constantly change with additions and editions of ‘I’s. It is important to remember that: […] there is no mind’s ‘I’ that stands behind all experience as the condition of its possibility. This is because there is nothing that stands behind anything without something else standing behind it as the condition of its possibility (Flanagan: 1995: 188).

Reflexive and Pre-Reflexive Consciousness We have seen how in Sartre’s keyhole episode what happens to the self and consciousness while undergoing an important visual experience of looking through the keyhole. This becomes a more pertinent exercise if we substitute for Sartre’s keyhole a picture frame. But let us say that through the frame is a picture-in-a-picture which is being ‘inspected’ by a fictitional viewer viewing this painting. Imagine that we become aware of someone looking over our shoulder while we examine our picture-in-a picture, and that the viewing self is transformed, and so then is the picture and our conscious experience of it. Our prereflexive consciousness has become reflexive, and whereas in the first case, the self in the viewing experience was implicit to the point of obliviousness, which is itself a scale of experience which science and philosophy fail to track satisfactorily, the viewing self imperceptibly mutates into the self viewed and appears to find a doppelgänger in the painting, in the sense that the painting-in-apainting is itself a doppelgänger. The self is put into a superposition, of self viewing which for some, creates distinct feelings of Unheimlich. In this sense, the person behind us is not really needed to alert the sense of self in the first case of the picture-in-a-picture but is needed in the second case if there is to be a heightened sense of self-as-artexperience, being experienced. However, if there were to be a viewer looking over our shoulder while we are viewing a picture of a fictitious person viewing a painting in gallery, then what we are seeing in the picture is not only in principle what the person over our shoulder is seeing, but we are seeing a rough representation of what that person over the shoulder sees including which has been ‘brought

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into the frame’. What lies in the frame is an approximation of what is happening before it in our world and in the world behind us. In this sense, and in a most unconventional manner, the painting may be said to be a portrait of the art experience. Importantly, also it shows us a series of transformations of the self from a pre-reflexive, implicit awareness to an explicit and richly aware sense of the self, to an intersubjective awareness of the self and selves. The transformations may occur with overlaps and concurrent transitions. Implicit in this kind of art experience is a tiered or hierarchical structure of consciousness, from a series of lower-order thoughts where the self is present as a background hum to a series of HOTs which reference the self in ways that are more obvious. Most phenomenologists accept that there is a prereflexive self-consciousness, a basic, non-objectifying self prior to any object or thought which brings the concept of the self to mind.29 On such a view, the hierarchical perspective of the HOT hypothesis is continually flattened by the basic sense of self present in all HOTs which forms a continuum, despite the possibly disorienting higherorder thoughts about the self which we may experience, and which I have sketched with my picture-in-the-picture scenario above. As Dan Zahavi writes: The act of reflection is itself a prereflexively self-given act. The reflected act must already be self-aware, since it is the fact of it being already mine, already being given in the first-personal mode of presentation that allows me to reflect upon it. And the act of reflection must also already be prereflexive self-aware, since it is this that permits it to recognise the reflected act as belonging to the same subjectivity as itself (Zahavi 2003: 175).

The problem lies with the two words “self-aware” first mentioned in this quote. Does Zahavi mean that the self is so completely identified with “awareness” that it is one moment, concept, experience (of nothing else, presumably just ‘I’)? The appearance of the reflexive act appears after this, yet it could occur or seem to occur at the same time. The timing of this is immaterial, given we may be talking about a 29

“To claim that the self-consciousness is prereflexive is to claim that it is intrinsic to the experiential episode in question. Moreover, it is […] thoroughly non-objectifying” (Zahavi 2006:5). It is important to realise that phenomenologists do not deny the possibility of objectifying self-consciousness, and this can be called a richer sense of self, but they maintain that the primary form is prereflexive, non-objectifying consciousness, nevertheless, fundamental for objectifying reflexive consciousness.

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split-second of a perceived moment, itself in the act of falling into yet another different state. This virtually instantaneous movement, as opposed to the ponderous unfolding Zahavi suggests of fixed states, should also be at work in the second part of the paragraph, when attributing recognition of ownership (of subjectivity) by the reflexive act. A simple ‘It’s me!’ suffices to bring these divisible states into one intensity. Re-reading this, one gets the impression of a film critic who analyses each frame of a film, dissecting with logic each moment of reflection but who fails to see it in its entirely, on the fly, in a process of chameleon-like change within and beyond itself. It seems the binary between an objectifying and non-objectifying self consciousness is thus clearly demarcated, with the former characterised as a complex ornament (read parergon). Yet the relationship between pre-reflective non-objectifying selfconsciousness and objectifying self-consciousness is worth exploring, precisely because it may not be as clear cut as we imagine, and that the possibility of composite experiences of each type of self-reference puts into question the simplistic vision of self-reference unfolding into discretely identifiable modes. Both pre-reflexive and reflexive modes are involved in the art experience with the picture-in-the-picture, which demonstrates that the objectification process in objectifying self-consciousness can be more complex than a fixed statement of identification It is possible to have a non-objectifying self-consciousness in cooperation, or indeed in consonance with a self-objectifying object, for example, an actor’s rendition of the actor in Hamlet for example, in the play within the play, or in a film of Hamlet, or indeed in Shakespeare’s text, or in Pirandello’s Sei Personaggi or a painting of the play within the play. And by extension, something similar happens in Husserl’s description of the Teniers picture in the Dresden Gallery, which represents a picture-in-a-picture. These examples help instantiate the play between prereflexive and reflexive consciousness because they figure forth two realities that deal with each form of consciousness, in an alternating emphasis, or conceivably, as a fusion where higher-order binding will emerge. On the level of prereflexive consciousness the experience of the frame-in-the-frame in painting, film or theatre is not, strictly, objectification, yet from the observer’s point of view and from the point of view of self-reflexive or higher-order consciousness it might seem that way. In terms of experience there is an emergence of

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subjective self-giveness in the subject with no overt differentiation from the object it is directed towards, which appears in its configuration to thematise the very subject of self-giveness, either as a result of the artist or author’s personality emerging in the work as an inner frame emerging from the imagery of an outer frame, or as the viewer’s own sense of emergence in the art experience, especially the kind mentioned in viewing a picture-in-a-picture with someone else looking over the shoulder. This is a kind of interpenetration. As Eduard Marbach writes of a painting of an artist painting a picture: [...] the represented perceptual activity at work in pictorially representing our artist interpenetrates (Durchdringt) the perceptual activity that is actually performed with regard to the thinglike picture (Marbach 1992: 140).

The image becomes the effect of the image, which amply describes the reciprocity and co-emergence of meaning in the world and in our subjective self-giveness without any objectification in a singular, simplistic sense taking place. While it is important not to confuse Zahavi’s critique of the crude inner-outer division (externalism and internalism) with the subject-object distinction, any argument that sophisticatedly deconstructs crude binaries of this kind with the concept of co-emergence can expect to be co-opted for other, similar tasks beyond the author’s intention. Thus, interpenetration, Durchdringung in Husserlian terminology, and co-emergence may be used to re-examine the subject object divide and subsequently, the relationship between prereflexive and reflexive self-consciousness and consciousness and the world. Subjective selfgiveness can co-emerge in the art experience of frames-in-frames as a process of the suspension between art and the viewer, witnessed in the common and simple ‘suspension of disbelief’ or in the totally immersed moment of viewing that Sartre’s speaks of before those footsteps trample all over it. There is something of this total immersion of the self in the visual experience involved in film, we can imagine a voice-over (simulating a prereflexive self-consciousness) that seems to become one’s own voice, for example, at least momentarily. This is theorised by Danto who has a complex view of what happens when we take on the character of someone in a film as our own:

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It is interesting how all these examples use the visual as a way of deconstructing the concept of the self, as Zahavi posits, an “invariable dimension of first-person giveness in the multitude of changing experiences” (Zahavi 2005:10).30 Unfortunately, this invariability may be understood as the reappearance of a transcendental subject. The self is indexed continually in spite of this multitude of experiences, many of them intersubjective, but the self that is indexed never remains the same, only the index or its direction of pointing persists, what it points to may not. The other object oriented reflexive consciousness comes about not with immersion (and here one becomes aware of how that word lends itself to feelings of closeness and of approaching intimacy and fusion) into a basic transcendental state of invariable selfness, but it achieves this with a process of distancing. This could be a representation of an artist painting a self-portrait from an image in a mirror for example, or a viewer looking out from the picture space to point to a painting. The suspension of disbelief is suspended. We become aware of the object of our gaze and ourselves looking at it. We become aware of the object within the modalities of experience; indeed, this experience becomes our object of perception. Freud, Lacan and the philosopher Mach and others were also fond of discussing the sense of self by using disassociated mirror images which are momentarily believed to be an Other but are subsequently recognised as the self. It seems that both immersion and distancing focus consciousness on the self during the visual experience or as a mental creation of a visual experience. It is the self, however, in both reflexive and non-reflexive modes of consciousness that is indexed, and it is in the act of indexing where knowledge of this bifurcated self emerges. I am both a non-reflexive self and a reflexive one, the latter allows me to conceptualise the former. And there is an important, added complexity in any consideration of the self, and that is its 30 Which is probably a move against regress, but which fails to account for the fact that the referenced me, however basic, minimal and unconscious that me is, is always changing, not only as s murmur of an experience, but as the experience of a murmur.

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relation to the Other as a way of structuring the self. I may experience the Other as experiencing myself: […] where I take over the other’s objectifying apprehension of myself; that is, where my self-apprehension is mediated by the other, and where I experience myself as other is also construed to be of decisive importance for the constitution of an objective world. When I realise that I can be an alter ego for the other just as he can be it for me, a marked change in my own constitutive significance takes place. The absolute difference between self and other disappears (Zahavi 2001: 160).

We might also attempt a similar move with the absolute difference between the self as reflexive or non-reflexive, can the dualism disappear? Far from providing an invariability and ontological presence to the terms ‘self’ or ‘transcendental knowing subject’, the intersubjectivity described here shows us the dynamic, relational and discursive consciousness which negotiates and mediates such convenient mental-geographical terms. It also shows that the immersion in or distancing from art can be a doubled intersubjectivity, where the Other in the text, painting, film who views herself in the text, painting, and film becomes a murmur of one’s self constitution. In such a situation, as in others, it is entirely valid to question the precise, not to mention, positivist demarcations set down by the terms reflexive and prereflexive self-consciousness. That fleeting impression of being in two places at once; of immersion and distancing in connection with the art experience, characterised by the rather simpler double sensation of one’s hand touching one’s other hand, the basis for intersubjectivity, the so-called chiasm provides a scenario where the demarcations of the two forms of self-consciousness mentioned are similarly interpenetrative or co-present. I also see this happening with the mental state involved in looking at a photograph and the thought (not statement) ‘me’—which can be called both a moment of prereflexive and reflexive self-consciousness, because it is possible that one is experiencing a mental state about how one’s prereflexive thought is so convincing, how, for example, one actually feels that the photograph’s material substrate is actually part of one’s being or how one’s gaze seems to connect different aspects of the self together. And this comes part of the way to demonstrating being-in-the-world. Note that this common description of prereflexive consciousness assumes its presence with higher-order attention or focus, in other words, it

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may form a background or context co-present with the foreground of a focal point which may be an intentional object. But it also may be the case that in launching the gaze into the world and in some sense investing one’s being into the object of inspection, as one would looking at one’s hands, it is object related reflexive consciousness that becomes the background hum. Note also that the schema of the background hum or context invokes visual and spatial categories which are transposable to our conscious experience of a picture that also has a background hum or context outside of its frame. This phenomenological insight of the co-processing of conscious states uses spatial language (centre/periphery) to describe timing and focus, also is used in recent work on schematising attention as a series of relations of three aspects: focus, margin and context, which are continually interacting (and co-processing).31 The seriality of appearances of the photograph can be extended further if we imagine that this photograph is lodged in a glazed frame which reflects my image that I see while looking at my photograph of myself. But what if, in the photograph I look at, I discover that in the far corner of a room there is a reflection of somebody in the room looking at me while my photograph is being taken, and that is the person who took the photograph? In such a scenario is my prereflexive “self” affected by looking at the photograph through the photographer’s eyes, and what is the relation of this altered self to the object viewed? Is the photographer the other subject looking at the object (me)? And if I remember that at the time that photograph was taken, I was thinking about the photographer’s point-of-view of things, then does this photograph show me thinking about the photograph, the photographer, the moment when I will be looking at my photograph, which I am now fulfilling. The photograph as an object of intention goes through a series of transformations and appearances that put the subject object relation into a rapid switch back process that has the phenomenological feel of ecstasis. In fact, the intersubjectivity (or in31

See Sven 2006. I would argue that these spatial categories are levels of perception in relation to higher-order thought and that these things are co-processual. It is interesting to note that the author uses the logic of the frame to describe aspects of attention and this easily could be applied to the study of works of art, although the book does not attempt this, it shares synergies in conceptual organisation with the approach taken in this book, albeit with an entirely different taxonomy and an emphasis on gestalt philosophy, neurological experiments and other scientific data.

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terobjectivity) of the double relation affects the two forms of self-consciousness by showing them in negotiation with each other in the world. This negotiated process, which is part of a larger one involving different forms of intersubjectivity, shows that the on/off switch model of self-consciousness (objectifying or non-objectifying) and the sense of a rich and thin self respectively, is over-simplified. The photograph situation seems to challenge such hard and fast distinctions, as does any rudimentary deconstruction of binaries. Merleau-Ponty applies the reversibility of the chiasm (my left hand touching my right) to vision, arguing that vision is similarly reversible between self and world, objects see us if those objects are people or indirectly when texts address us as readers but most of all because the seer is part of the visible, that in order to see, the seer must include his or her own seeing as an object of the seeing and this is what happens with a Cézanne painting, we see not only the object but the modalities of how the object appears in consciousness. As with the chiasm, I see and see myself seeing and I see myself seeing through the external marks of Cézanne who has configured his canvas to invite us to be self-reflexive through his sight. I seem to objectify my pre-reflexive self as part of my reflexive act. Even though distinctions about prereflexive self-consciousness and object oriented self-consciousness are important theoretical distinctions, it might be more helpful in some cases to think more of co-present and interconnected intensities, rather than strong divisions, distinctions and markers. When I paint a picture, the to-ing and fro-ing of the binary object/non-object self-consciousness becomes imperceptible. The tip of my brush in contact with the the paper is, ostensibly, my eye when I am painting an image of my eye in my self-portrait. This may be a confused perception but my self-consciousness is intimately wound up with the apparatus of my eye and brush and the image which connect me to the external world and flows through them and back again to the processing in the cerebral cortex. I see through the object (and maintain this throughness) but I still see the object. There is something in this with Roland Barthes’s perception of a visual event: [T]he other day, in a café, a young boy came in alone, glanced around the room, and occasionally his eyes rested on me; I then had the certainty that he was looking at me without however being sure that he was seeing me; an inconceivable distortion; how can we look without seeing? (Barthes 1981: 111).

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We can look without seeing when we allow lower forms of perception to register essential outlines or marks when we scan the visual field (when I read for example I can fine tune my skim reading to pick up on particular keywords I am looking for) while at the same time I am conscious of what I am doing, both blocking out recognition of irrelevant words, allowing shape recognition of the right ones all the while conscious of this very process of filtering. The binary of prereflexive and reflexive consciousness is blurred in this process of reading. There are many questions which arise concerning consciousness and seeing/looking and not seeing, which are so relevant to the art experience.32 What does happen to prereflexive self-consciousness when you have no consciousness that the object of sight appears no different from yourself, while looking at a photograph of oneself, for example, where one is looking at the subject of oneself-who-is-not-oneself ‘through’ the ontology of the object? Dan Zahavi sees things differently and insists on the dualism: If I see a photo of myself, or encounter a description of a certain person whom I recognise to be myself, I would consider these to be cases of objectifying self-consciousness, where one is aware of a certain (re-identifiable and intersubjectively accessible) object that happens to be oneself. At the same time and underneath the objectifying self-consciousness there would remain a prereflexive self-consciousness which is what enables me to recognise that object as me.33

The interesting thing about this view is the phrase “At the same time, and underneath” which suggests, as in the HOT/lower-order thought scenario, that one kind of self-consciousness accompanies another and underneath it is a heavier, more fundamental substrate (which has its own boundary). An archaeological hierarchy is also implied here. Something higher lies on the surface of this boundary, concealing it, yet nevertheless we can see through to it (because what lies over it is lighter) to the darker underneath, if we put our minds to it. This is structurally analogous with the concept of seeing through a HOT to the lower-order thought “underneath it”. Perhaps more importantly “at the same time” suggests two mental states that occur at the same time, one over the other and recalls Merleau-Ponty’s concept of vertical time, where different strands of time lie side-by-side or are stacked 32 33

Some of these issues have been dealt with by Elkins 1997. Private correspondence, 23/09/2007. My italics

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over each other and experienced all at the same time. How is this experience of simultaneity configured? A possible characterisation which seems sensible is that one can ‘see through’ to the other as one would see through a frame in order to view its contents, this is appropriate for the photographic example I have been discussing. The ‘seeing through’ metaphor also preserves the simultaneity of experiencing one through the other as an experience of throughness, rather than a hierarchy of mental states. But there is more to this ‘seeing through’: the parallax view allows for a view through the HOT to the lower-order thought from several different angles, each angle being a different moment or perspective of consciousness, seeing through the HOT to the lower-order thought or sensation; a different configuration allows for both continuity and change. Thus, as in Sartre’s schema, prereflexive consciousness becomes the object of reflexive consciousness, and the configuration can appear as one state of seeing through, where one is both out there in the frame while standing before it looking in. Prereflexive self-consciousness is co-present with ordinary object consciousness, the latter framing the former, which in turn, can be framed by a HOT. These frames do not contain their target states in airtight containers but allow them to be seen through these frames and this provides the simultaneity of states. Seeing in from outside (the in/out binary) seems limited compared to seeing through, which is extendable into a series, as a process it both preserves consciousness of the relativity of subject’s vantage point, and the object (or another subject) seen, and seen through to another object or subject. In such a situation, we are seeing-in multiple sense, through various acts of seeing-in demarcated as stages or frames: A major problem for the philosophy of art on the one hand, and the philosophy of perception on the other, concerns the range or scope of seeing-in. How, in perception generally and in the perception of the visual arts in particular, do seeing-as and seeing-in divide the visual field? (Wollheim 1978: 224).

Perhaps one way to overcome the binocular rivalry between seeing-in and seeing as, is to consider “seeing-in seeing-in” which allows us go beyond Wollheim’s conception of the visual field as an either/or situation, or as a wavering between them. Instead, in this phenomenology of viewing we have seeing-in or through someone else’s eyes (or even the eyes of our previous acts of viewing). And, as in the case of surface effects in painting giving way to the illusion of depth, the

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binary in all these cases: seeing-in and seeing-as, seeing-in and seeing in, alternate in a series of appearances, one introducing the other, not necessarily causing there to be a problematic dither effect, one seems continually to transform one into the other in a continuous flow and this is certainly sustained in the medium of film and its framing devices. 34 Seeing-in seeing-in may be seen as a conscious mental state of the frame (seeing-in) and again to what it contains (another frame which is seeing-in). In terms of surface effects, where, for example, the surface of a painted wall in a Vermeer painting reminds us of the surface of the painting, we look at ourselves looking, when we are seeing in we are also able to critically be aware that we are seeing as. There might be a rapid switchback mechanism between each. Alternatively, as with the sensation of pain, we could be phenomenologically, physiologically and linguistically aware of such a sensation. The scenario of the photograph of oneself, or of oneself holding a photograph of oneself, as in Wearing’s Masturbation photograph is of course, a deliberately simple visual one, posited because it betokens the problem of the moment of visual recognition and its relationship to identification. This moment of object/non-object identification isolated in the photographic medium here is sustained for some length of time, a kind of phenomenology of ‘me’ and the ‘me’ of the person through whose eyes I am seeing in the artwork-as-experience, or more accurately, me-as-the-art-work-experience. There is no invariability of this except in the indexing itself, regardless of what it indexes. Indexing, then, is a form of selfhood. Object oriented self-consciousness depends on the object; nonconsciousness of an object (or all its aspects) is co-present by virtue of the fact that the object itself is hybrid, either being a frame-in-a-frame, which sets itself up as an object only for it to be ‘seen through’ and that which is seen through and that which is reflected back. The process of seeing through presumes both the object of the frame and going through it to what it contains and so on.35 If it is important that perceiving the world, concepts of the self as subject are formed and that this process is re34

Jennifer Church (2000: 109-110) has argued that the process of “seeing as”, that is, seeing a painting as a landscape yet seeing it also as a painting, involves both conflict and convergence together. 35 This apparent contradiction of knowing and not knowing, seeing and not seeing, reading and not reading outlined above is entirely analogous with the double-sensation of touching and being touched by oneself.

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versible (that the world perceives me and this is also part of my perception), it is also important that this radically changes our conception of objectification as something that happens towards the object and through it back to me. But there is also the reverse direction to be considered, the object’s “directedness to us” in art, the artist’s message, the essential latent features of the art object: “intentional beings [...] are the centers of disclosure, permitting worldly objects to appear with the meanings that are their own” (Zahavi, 2004: 50). It is most important to maintain the reality of both directions meeting on a horizon of mutual discovery but it is also important to maintain that this mutual discovery can be directed, to paraphrase Husserl, straightforward and in a reflective direction of regard. This co-emergence is not as simple as it seems, for it presupposes an emergence out of something else, it is not just a co-appearance from nothingness, the underlying logic is that something happens inside something else in order for it to come out, and thus emergence is yet another (unacknowledged) euphemism for a framing device or process (or a transcendental ego) and which defines its economy as a seriality of becoming. And as with all framing devices, what is enframed also frames out, a double emergence on either side of the frame. And to take this logically further, this is the co-emergence of two co-emergences. On the one side (A) we have the co-emergence of meaning in the world (meaning framed by the world, the world framed by meaning in an interpenetrating relationship), and on the other side (B) the co-emergence of the self in consciousness, consciousness in self. (A) emerges in (B) which emerges in (A), a causal paradox, which is exactly the ground occupied by the two modes, the chiasm on one side and, interpenetration, on the other. The co-emergence of (A) and (B), produces meaning, the self and the world, and consciousness of these three things.36 This holistic process of producing consciousness is more than the sum of its parts and is a process of sublation which keeps its individual elements preserved while moving together in a dynamic 36

These ideas are an extension of Zahavi’s interpretation of Husserl, especially the reciprocity of external and internal which I characterise as a process of mutual framing “Husserl gave up the idea of a static correlation between the constituting and the constituted. As he points out in some of his later writings, the constitutive performance is characterised by a certain reciprocity insofar as the constituting subject is constituted in the very process of constitution” (Zahavi 2003:74).

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becoming. And this is exactly what happens in the art experience. This becoming presupposes the causal paradox of interpenetrative frames of reference. It is clear that the process of objectification itself should come under radical revision in light of these interpenetrative concepts of co-emergence and framing, at least in the sense that the object of objectification (framing) is also the process of becoming an object, and may also be part of the process of the subject becoming vis-à-vis the object. But it is also clear that while recent challenges to crude reductions of the subject/object are extremely persuasive, not least because they seem to echo the observable processes in the natural and scientific world, the subject object split as a theoretical posit can only temporarily be closed, otherwise we would have no convergence, becoming, interpenetration and intersubjectivity. Studies of consciousness are not unaffected by the new emphasis on integration and co-emergence, the processes of mutual recognition, the reciprocity of becoming as both a fusion of individual elements and a creation of the excess of meaning and consciousness of this divisibility. With objectifying self-consciousness and the higher-order thought attendant with it there are evidently more complex processes of objectification at work making the binary of subject-object less clear cut. This is especially so with the breed of very special objects that are representations of themselves. In a painting that shows another painting inside it, as we have in Husserl’s Teniers Dresden Gallery example, we have the representation of an object (a picture with a frame, a gallery) which both are objects and non-objects. The object is itself and represents itself, for example, an image of the representation of ‘paint’ on an artist’s palette in a painting, which happens often in art. This may give us an alternative way to characterise a HOT and its relationship to a lower-order thought. The object is also the reflection or representation of an object, consciousness can externalise or objectivise itself and still be itself, within itself, because these objects are representations of objects, not objects in Zahavi’s dyadic inside/outside sense. Similarly, the HOT represents the lower-order thought within itself but it is also itself, a “co-emergent” singular object with a monadic internal structure: thought-as-representation. The image of thought, is thought, thought visually, as in the total immersion of a dream sequence, or with a film where seeing is thinking and where one is both projected by and projecting oneself in the art object, as in film.

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This may come close to describing in the art experience prereflexive consciousness but it hardly distinguishes it from simple reflexive consciousness. What is that elusive fragment that distinguishes one from the other, a chimera of the object-not-object? We are constantly reminded that prereflexive consciousness gives us a tacit (I would say very simple, reduced and unadorned) sense of self, and the richer sense of self seems to be in the experience of self-awareness that is object oriented. But what about the sense of self that emerges with an art object that is, ostensibly, the self? A tattooed self, the self projected into, and at one with, film or image? One is reminded here also, that in traditional phenomenology, the body can be both subject and object, and from the tattooed body can emerge the self of both prereflexive and reflexive self-consciousness, and it is decidedly difficult to keep this demarcation in terms of limit, boundary, moment and position as distinct in such an ongoing experience. And thus by extension the HOT may be viewed not in terms of something that has an intrinsic/extrinsic relation to a lower-order thought but that it has a “reversibility that testifies that the interiority and exteriority are different manifestations of the same”(Zahavi 2001: 161).37 Intersubjectivity From intersubjectivity emerges the notion of a composite self or the self as a system of relations, not only in one person but also with the selves of others in a social network and in transcultural networks. Intersubjectivity also challenges traditional ideas about artistic production and reception (the artist’s self lodged in the work of art and extracted by the viewer); instead, a complex intersubjectivity may occur within the artist and between artists, within the viewer and between viewers, and of course, between both groups. As Shapiro writes, it is important to move away from any residual individual isolationism involved in the artistic project towards understanding artistic practice in contexts and discursive practices. He uses Foucault as an exemplar of this position:

37 Zahavi is here describing the intersubjectivity of bodily awareness of one’s own body which I believe is applicable as a structure to the relation of my HOT to my lower-order thought.

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However, against this, one should add that it is entirely probable that the artist’s marks on the canvas are her discursivity, intersubjectivity, community and dialogue with other artists, rather than her actual verbal utterances in relation to others. In other words, hers is not a private, pure vision but one that is constantly in the making, in discursivity with the medium, with other artists’ discursivity with the medium, and with other artists’ voices, images and thoughts. The artist works alone with her canvas but is never really alone, active in an intersubjective discursivity with the medium and with other artists and discursive communities, yet in a visual language of doing and seeing, seeing and doing. One can have an actual face-to-face discursivity that is rehearsed during painting or writing but this does not mean having an anterior vision which is simply transposed into the work. This shows up the logocentric bias of Foucault’s notion of discursivity. The complex process of application in painting includes a discursivity with the self and former selves and with the world. One of the most succinct summaries of Merleau-Ponty’s approach, extended to an overview of phenomenology’s value beyond the reductionism of reinventing the transcendental subject is given by Dan Zahavi: Consciousness is not something exclusively inner, something cut off from the body and the surrounding world, as if the life of the mind could remain precisely the same even if it had not bodily and linguistic expressions […] Phenomenology is interested in consciousness because it is world-disclosing. Phenomenology is not concerned with establishing what a given individual might currently be experiencing. Phenomenology is not interested in qualia in the sense of purely individual data […] In fact, strictly speaking, phenomenology is not even interested in psychological processes […] Rather, phenomenology is interested in the very dimension of giveness or appearance and seeks to explore its essential structures and conditions of possibility. Such an investigation is beyond any divide between psychical interiority and physical exteriority, since it is an investigation of the dimension in which any object—be it

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external or internal— manifests itself […] It is an investigation which aims at disclosing intersubjectively valid structures (Zahavi: 2005:14).38

This appears to be contradicted by Shapiro’s view that “[t]he model for the phenomenologist […] is an idealisation of a painter like Cézanne, conceived as working in splendid isolation” (Shapiro 2003:282). Cézanne re-interpreted Impressionist strokes, images and sensitivities while also in communication with the writers and philosophers he exchanged views with, Merleau-Ponty recognises this when he mentions the effect reading Balzac had on Cézanne and his numerous dealings with Zola and Bernard, not to mention his deep, life long and extremely comprehensive knowledge of art history, a visual library that he referenced and enacted while painting. Who is to say which minute brush stroke hidden in one of his numerous landscapes is evidence of a silent dialogue with Corot or with Watteau? It is a mistake to interpret the non-logocentric nature of painterly discursivity interpreted as isolationism rather than engagement with the world. This is not the reinvention of the individual subjectivity of solitary experience (or the transcendental knowing subject) which Shapiro (or Foucault allegedly) finds in Merleau-Ponty but a reinvention of ‘visual doing’ and ‘doing the visual’ in painting that is a ‘new language’ of intersubjectivity and discursivity, because it appears unfinished, “the continual rebirth of existence” (Merleau-Ponty in Johnson 2003: 68) not closed or finite but in the process of intersubjective dialogue. Isolation is not what Merleau-Ponty had in mind in his study of Cézanne. This is expressed emphatically when he wrote: Becoming pure consciousness is just another way of taking a stand in relation to the world and other people. There can be no consciousness that is not sustained by its primordial involvement in life and in the manner of this involvement (74). It was in the world that he [Cézanne] had to realise his freedom, with colors upon a canvas. It was from the approval of others that he had to await the proof of his worth. That is why he questioned the picture emerging beneath 38 Furthermore, “subjectivity is not hermetically sealed up within itself, remote from the world and inaccessible to the other. Rather it is above all a relation to the world, and Merleau-Ponty accordingly writes that an openness toward others is secured the moment that I define both myself and the other as co-existing relations to the world” (Zahavi 2001: 161).

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The notion of isolation can be more vigorously contested. Heidegger at least, believed that the world we are engaged in is not private but public, the made objects we live with all give rise to a consciousness of others, regardless if they are there before us or not, thus we never really have one isolated individual who encounters another isolated individual, they are already intersubjective before further processes of intersubjectivity occur. Against the idea of pure vision, objects have aspects or views to them that we cannot see from all angles at once, this is further elaborated by Sartre who claims that such objects contain references to a plurality of embodied others and these references form a dynamic seriality. Their multi-dimensional aspects are all intersubjectively ‘accessible’ and underline our intersubjective consciousness. Even the object imbued with the purposes and presence of the Other, chairs, tables, scissors, string, a telescope, a mirror, are intrinsically intersubjective; and so therefore, is painting. It is within the discursive practices of an episteme that phenomenological experiences are exchanged and co-emerge using a wide variety of communicative modes in art, science, and philosophy. It could be argued that in trying to rid philosophy and history of the transcendental knowing subject, Foucault replaces it with a transcendental of his own: discursivity as the telos of all epistemes. Far from reinstating the transcendental knowing subject as the site of revelation, phenomenology shows us its dispersal and negotiation in forms of intersubjectivity: the transcendental subject is, in fact, a series of variable intersubjectivities. Although Foucault stated his position against phenomenology in the Foreword to the English translation of The Order of Things, both he and Merleau-Ponty were located in the same episteme, and so the differences in their positions formed a mutually reinforcing discursive practice, not a simple binary, and I see this in the synergy that exists between phenomenological intersubjectivity (Dennet calls this heterophenomenology) and Foucault’s concept of discursive practices and the cooperation of these approaches overcome the notion of the artistic genius working in isolation. Far from being an isolationist visionary, Cézanne’s doubt is his self-effacing negotiation with the phenomenological experiences of others as seen in their embodied practices with their art, and with the

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materials of his own art and the world. Indeed, he reaches out to the landscape of the world, consciousness of the landscape and the intervening discursive practices of other artists who have attempted similar intersubjective acts. The result is the kind of hybridity of intersubjective experience with Impressionist technique and vision we find in Cézanne’s work and taken further by Cubism. The co-emergence of consciousness in the world, the world in consciousness is both interpersonal and practically involved with the medium and the emerging image of painting. All this is recorded in the mediating language of Cézanne’s painting which speaks of the intersubjectivity of views, his, others, the mountain’s, which can be reinvented by the viewer as part of this intersubjective network. His painting dramatises the chiasm of consciousness modelling the world, as it is modelled. The concept of intersubjectivity focuses not on the isolated individual but on the individual’s connection with others. Intersubjectivity lies at the base of variously formed concepts in art history, sociology and anthropology which may seem to minimise the phenomenology of the individual and art such as Gombrich’s schemata39Alfred Gell’s art nexus,40 and Bourdieu’s habitus.41 The latter two, in particular, were intended in various ways to allow Western theorists to deal with art practices in other cultures that do not fit into Western aesthetic categories, all of them have a common premise, to change simplistic conceptions of individual artistic creativity based on an notion of a clear, 39 A set of inherited practices and reference points modified from existing forms embedded in the planning and execution of picturemaking, for example. In Art and Illusion Gombrich sets up a telos (often associated, unfortunately with perfecting illusionism) achieved through a trial and error process and by examining the historical lineage of the “schemata.” The schemata make up the mindset artists communicate to each other. For Gombrich, however, the schemata do more than aid technique, it is through them and through finding them in images that we construct and interpret the world, which is intimately connected with the culture that is the repository of these framing devices, schemata, or ways of seeing the world. 40 A complex set of coordinates which designate discursive practices of agency including the art object, artist, patron, and recipient, with a sliding index that indicates different possible interpretations of such combinations (Gell 1998: 29). 41 Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus is a “system of acquired dispositions functioning on the practical level as categories of perception and assessment as well as being the organising principles of action”. This includes learned habits, skills, tastes used in image production for example, which may be said to “go without saying” and as such, operate beneath the level of ideology or higher-order consciousness (Bourdieu 1990: 13).

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motivated self, or a pure personal vision worked into the art object into rather more relational, dynamic and intersubjective processes, some of which are inherited over time and in-between a wide array of subjectivities that interact in the social world. The synergy that these approaches share, however, also makes them vulnerable to a particularly powerful criticism: that the characterisation of agency as a nexus of social, historical, symbolic and material forces beyond the individual self is set too low, at the levels of perception, below consciousness. In other words, art is construed as intersubjective (and intersubjective between generations) by virtue of involuntary transmissions and communications, a product of deeper levels of cognition, below individuated, egoistic intentionality.1 But we know, however, that there are many cases in which art functions with other kinds of consciousness. If the production and reception of art can be fruitfully connected to the intersubjective realm beyond isolated individualism, thereby showing us how art involves a richer, more intersocial, pluralistic self, there must be other ways to show that this connection is not solely dependent on nonconscious processes. Other modes of consciousness, higher-order thought, intentionality and self consciousness are also agents of intersubjectivity in art, and can produce equally, if not more radical definitions of the self and art. Not to acknowledge this would leave us with a crude equation: that the assertion of higher levels of consciousness or self consciousness prevents intersubjectivity in order to assert a narrow sense of self. And so the question remains: can the higher levels of consciousness and self-consciousness involved in the reception and production of art produce an intersubjective and multiple sense of self, in addition to the lower levels of nonconscious perception, traditionally credited with producing such outcomes in artistic experiences? My short answer to such a long question is that the relations between these higher and lower levels are cooperative and interactive. Thus, mutatis mutandis, the two kinds of self, egoistic and intersubjective equally must be cooperative and interactive. The longer answer addresses the cooperation of these levels of consciousness with reference to art forms across 1

“The truth speaks in language as it is continuously produced by speech, through its communiqué of facts, in between the lines, and at anchoring points […] The subject produces through his speech, a truth which he does not know about […] Truth resides, as it were, in the spaces between one signifier and another, in the holes in the chain” (Benvenuto and Kennedy 1986: 118).

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cultures in Part 4. Experiencing art with the co-presence of different selves, either with hindsight or through becoming accustomed to other cultures, also involves the co-emergence of different levels of consciousness. By acknowledging this we enhance considerably our conception of the effectiveness of art, and reclaim a holistic sense of objectivity within a nexus of many perspectives some of them personal, some interpersonal. Intersubjectivity makes us aware of social and relational aspects of consciousness, and I would also include in this social network the work of art as another self, negotiating with other selves. The consistency of this negotiation is creates an identity of sorts, much like Bhabha’s concept of culture as the result of iteration and negotiation between perspectives in the social field. Something of this is also evident in classical social anthropology: For if the final aim of anthropology is to contribute to a better knowledge of objectified thought and its mechanisms, it is in the last resort immaterial whether in this book the thought processes of the South American Indians take shape through the medium of my thought, or whether mine take place through the mediums of theirs. What matters is that the human mind, regardless of the identity of those who happen to be giving it expression, should display an increasingly intelligible structure as a result of the doubly reflexive forward movement of two thought processes acting one upon the other, either of which can in turn provide the spark or tinder whose conjunction will shed light on both (Lévi-Strauss 1969: 13).

The structuring principle of frames-in-frames is evident here. Thought processes “take shape” in a medium of different people’s thoughts. The passage expresses Lévi-Strauss’s consciousness of thought in the medium of thought, showing us how his thought can be lodged in our thought via the process of reading. I would stress here the similar role of the artwork. Lévi-Strauss also refers to an individual’s structure of thought and how this may be reproduced or experienced by another. The terminology is replete with internal and external frames of reference: in other words, the internal thought process of person A which is usually external to person B, is made internal to person B, by the medium of thought and by a “reflexive forward movement of two thought processes acting one upon the other” a sentence which could easily have been uttered by Husserl. The subtext here is the framing of person A’s thought processes in the frame of Person B’s and vice versa. This structure of thought is similar to Flanagan’s:

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Framing Consciousness in the Arts I can spend time with you, read anthropological accounts about your kind, and in this way gain imaginative entry into your life form and eventually into what it is like for you to be you […] What we speak of as taking on the point of view of another involves imaginatively taking on what we think things are like for the other, and this typically requires bracketing out to some extent what things are like for ourselves (Flanagan 1995:104-106).

The process of bracketing out, borrowed from Husserl, is comparable to Lévi-Strauss’s usage to “take shape” in the “medium of thought” both kinds of imagery are based on framing, including and excluding, bracketing out our consciousness in favour of taking on the forms of intentional objects of others. But far too general is Lévi-Strauss’s terminology “objectified thought”; “thought processes”; “medium of thought”, and the “human mind”, such phrases may be seen to bracket out (exclude from the frame) the specificities of consciousness. One suspects that what Lévi-Strauss is really getting at is not only the idea of shared thought but a shared consciousness which is structured by that thought but the lexis if which lies beyond his reach. Flanagan suggests the simple idea that thinking is one of the heterogeneous forms of consciousness (125) in which case, as a superordinate category, consciousness frames thinking within itself, and this logic is apparent in Rosenthal’s concept of higher-order thoughts and their relationship to other mental states. In both Lévi-Strauss and Flanagan we have not only implications of the intersubjective possibilities of consciousness, but also what emerges is the possibility of “phenomenology from both the third-person and first-person points of view” (106). A note of caution here is appropriate before we dive headlong into the arms of an intersubjectivity of sameness, which seems redundant. A totally resolved intersubjectivity is, in fact, a singular subjectivity without any “inter” at all. One way of keeping the intersubjectivity of consciousness relevant is to think of it as being constantly negotiated by cooperative subjectivities working at different speeds. William James reminds us that two people who appear to share the same thought, conclusion or judgement may have arrived at that point through very different routes, and are most probably sheathed in the context of a fringe consciousness connected to different trajectories, schemata and nonconscious histories and developments. The stationary and stream binary re-emerges as shared thought between two people, but leading to (and from) different connectivities elsewhere in

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their respective fringe consciousnesses. This inductive reasoning about conscious processes and their relations is all very useful for understanding visual art, which not only provides a context for intersubjectivity to take place but is also a hybrid object that may be seen as a subjective self or selves playing a part in the intersubjectivity that it provides a space for. Thus, we have here not only an intersubjectivity of subjects but an intersubjective object. Phenomenological support for this view may be found in Husserl. Dan Zahavi emphasises some Husserlian approaches to intersubjectivity describing a special kind of experience of the Other: The Other conceives of me as an Other, just as I conceive of him as a self. I realise, that I am only one among many, that my perspective on the world is only one among several, wherefore my privileged status in relation to the objects of experience is suspended to a certain degree. Whether I or an Other is the subject of experience makes no difference for the validity of that experience […] Husserl claims that my experiences are changed when I experience that Others experience the same as I, and when I experience that I myself am experienced by Others. From then on, my object of experience cannot any longer be reduced to its mere being-for-me. Through the Other, it has been constituted with a subject-transcendent validity. No longer do I experience it as being dependent upon me and my factual existence. Quite to the contrary, as an intersubjective object it is endowed with an autonomy of being that transcends my finite existence (Zahavi 1996: 230).

It possible to apply the terms “objective world”, “object of experience”, “intersubjective object” to include a work of art, a painting, sculpture or film, for example. The Abschattungen, the series of representations, aspects or appearances that the subject experiences of one object (or objects inside objects as with the depicted of a painting) may also be intersubjectively experienced where a seriality of Abschattungen is intertwined with another’s seriality to produce a intersubjective seriality of the art object in conscious experience. This painting does not only include a reference to the subject experiencing it, in the sense of Heidegger’s view that manufactured objects form the basis of intersubjective experience between humans. This is entirely in line with Husserl’s conception that the object of perception is a “plurality of simultaneous adumbrations”, which cannot, in fact, be “actualised in a single subject” (Zahavi 1996: 231) but are, nevertheless, thinkable, as Sartre might say, as an infinite series. Even though a single consciousness will never be able intersubjectively to realise all possible appearances of the object, the subject will at least

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in a very immanent sense, admit the fact of his or her own limitations in the face of a possibly illimitable number of appearances in different consciousnesses. At least some of these other adumbrations of others, however, will become part of a subject’s consciousness and so the notion of consciousness as a seriality of presentations and appearances is made more complex by the fact that one can experience these presentations from a number of vantage points. One could argue that a picture such as Velázquez’s Las Meninas is a supreme example of an intersubjective object, not only because of the large number of writers over several generations who have sought to offer their intertextual views on it but also because the representation itself visually communicates processes of negotiating intersubjectivity by depicting several figures who embody a different a point of view as a series of Abschattungen, the viewer may change the order of exposition of that series and this combinatorial character amount to a different unfolding of the series. As a consequence, I come to the realisation that I am only one among many in front of this picture which is in itself a seriality that can, at times, be reconfigured. The seriality of gazes involved in the mise-en-scène interacts with the seriality of appearances or Abschattungen in the world of the viewer: each gaze is a way of seeing, and no singular way of seeing is privileged over the other, it is an intersubjective space. Strengthened structurally by the system of frames-in-frames represented in this space, as the painting itself is framed, we are also encouraged to see different pictures-inpictures as a variety of viewpoints that thematise both viewing and viewed, both the Abschattung as a way of seeing and as a profile of the object. The seriality of appearances of the intersubjective art object engages with the becoming of the intersubjective viewer. This tells us something important about Abschattungen: that they are a seriality of appearances that may be intersubjectively entwined with others and which we may become highly conscious of during our experience of an intersubjective art object, especially one that appears to thematise such processes.

4. Framing Consciousness in Art Part 4 introduces three different approaches to art history and consciousness. It begins in an apparently conventional manner discussing those various ‘canonical’ works of art in European cultural history that deploy the frame-in-the-frame device. Here, we learn of the role these works of art play in producing forms of higher-order consciousness. Secondly, I move on to examples from non-EuroAmerican cultural traditions across the world where similar lessons are to be learnt. These two contexts inform an analysis of contemporary art and popular visual culture which concludes. Higher-Order Painting There are a number of well-known paintings in art history that address self-reflexive consciousness as part of their subject matter. A good example of this is Parmigianino’s well-known self portrait of 1524 in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum. This is a painting which appears exactly like a mirror with the reflection of the artist painting himself, staring into his own eyes. With a lower-order perception we see the image as a mirror, quickly accompanied by a higher-order thought that it is a painting of a reflection in a mirror; an even higherorder thought allows us to see that the painter is remembering or observing the image of himself in a mirror and using his visual processing to reproduce the visual effect with paint. This is a play between visual memory and visual perception typical of the artistic process; yet it is also true to say that the image reproduces the artist’s consciousness of the layers of representation available: mirror reflection, the mirror surface and the surface of the painting all of which are organised in a series of higher-order thoughts of lower-order perceptions. Whereas the exigencies of Lacan’s ‘mirror phase’ emphasise the image as an experience of self, consciousness returns to the visual in-

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spection of the material reality of the mirror in order to grasp that the image is not real, this visual detection of the mirror’s physical properties is a form of Entfremdungeffekt dividing the mirror from its reflection. Yet, consciousness of the frame or edge of the mirror allows for both the reflection and the mirror-object to come into play as aspects of reality, one introspected and abstract, the other focused on the physical world. The frame allows us to see both, to switch from the surface of the mirror (its dust, its smudges, its convex surface) to the reflection and thence to that which it reflects.

Parmigianino, self portrait, 1524 in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum. Public Domain-Old-100.

This process also occurs with painting, a painted surface of hardened ridges of pigment which we fancy becomes transparent when we read the image, but I am focussing here on the experience of the surface and the image at the same time. In this sense, paintings of mirrors and surfaces, walls or paintings-in-paintings doubly signify both the physical surface of which they are made and the physical surface of objects which refer to. It is not difficult to see the makings here of a complex phenomenology of perception. The relations between a series of conscious mental states are one of the sources and effects of the image’s ability to fascinate. There is also a series of higher-order thoughts which organise the complex process of identification in-

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volved here, distinct from the relatively lower-order percepts about the surface of the image just outlined, yet cooperative with them. This is a painting of a mirror image of the artist looking at the mirror image, and so while he appears to be looking directly at us viewers, the gaze is directed to the artist himself and yet we are able to imagine his own looking at himself, through his eyes—and this is similar to Sartre’s keyhole story of feeling the look of the other through oneself, except here, we are the Other. We need a higher-order consciousness of our own looking to stay with this. The painting depicts the moment of self-reflection, but it also presages a parallel operation in the viewer, and this is yet another level of reflection. He is blind to us yet he appears to see us, more than this, he appears to see through the mirror and beyond the surface of the painting to a prescience of the possible higher-order mode of reception this painting induces in someone else. His seems to look straightforward at us and reflexively at the same time. As viewers, we feel as if our consciousness has intervened in his private moment of self-inspection, or that we are on the other side of the mirror. The painting appears as both a painting and a mirror. Our consciousness of the ‘mirror reflection’ attracts the eye because of its lustre, the brilliant glints and glassy whorls of its ‘interior’ gives way to a new consciousness of the painting and its qualities. This inability to grasp a resolution because of the image’s innate possibilities is nothing more than our own consciousness subdividing into those possibilities, favouring one over the other in a constant scrabbling of priorities. It is precisely images of this kind that prompted MerleauPonty to use them as visual examples of his concept of the chiasm of seeing and being seen, the projection of consciousness in the world, and which I would like to show is also an illustration of the seeing and being seen of the conscious higher-order thought. Merleau-Ponty writes that generally in the in mirror in the painting, “my externality becomes complete.” Although he is referring to the famous mirror image in Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, 1434, it is illuminating to consider the rest of what he writes of the mirror: The mirror’s phantom draws my flesh into the outer world, and at the same time, the invisible of my body can invest its psychic energy in the other bodies I see. Hence, my body can include elements drawn from the body of another, just as my substance passes into them. Man is a mirror for man” (MerleauPonty 1993:129-130).

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A lower-order thought can ‘see’ something, Parmigianino’s painting, for example; a higher-order thought is conscious about what it is we are seeing, perhaps more so because it sees the artist looking at him-self painting the scene (the artist’s large distorted hand carries a pen),1 but also because we reference our seeing bodies in front of the paint-ing taking the position of the artist’s seeing body, which the picture references. The third-order thought is about the second-order thought’s “seeing”, and is one step removed from it but is still very much involved with the visuality of the painting, is still projecting and positioning consciousness within its spaces with the cooperation of the gaze, engaging with the higher-order thought (indeed the consciousness) of the painter who we see looking at his own reflection in the direction of the viewer. We are conscious of looking through his gaze, by standing on this side of the mirror and indeed, the canvas we see what he saw, but of course, this both negates the reflectivity of the mirror and affirms the non-reflective surface of the painting. The artist has, in effect, configured his canvas to articulate the Cartesian sight watched and has thus painted a higher-order image of thought that brings both sight and thought into focus. The mirror reflection allows the painting and self-reflection of the eye to become not only part of the subject of the painting, but they also thematise the reflective effect on the viewer’s consciousness. The mirror becomes the eye and the eye the mirror. In Gabriel Metsu’s Young Woman Reading a Letter (ca. 1664) a woman dressed as a maid with her back to us is shown pulling aside a curtain to reveal a picture of a ship caught in a storm; near her, another woman is seated reading a letter. The painting sets up the contrast of reading and looking at actual visual images and suggests a relation, possibly that the letter causes the woman reading it to have mental images which are available also to us via the staged unveiling of the painting of the ship. This means that if the painting inside the painting was meant to refer to the mental imagery of the woman reading (we can easily imagine she is thinking about some lover far away at sea and the letter shown is his) viewers have the opportunity to both optically inspect and also mentally enact each painting. When we realise that the whole thing is an elaborate fiction, there is a residue of 1

Stoichita simplifies this detail as a thematising of the doing in the picture (1997: 219) this should be more accurately described as the interaction of self-consciousness of the doing, with the doing of self-consciousness.

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thought that insists on viewing the nested image as an abstraction within the physical substrate of the image, the mental image within its physical carrier. Yet, when I visualise this painting now from memory, I am aware of the higher-order consciousness that is needed to sustain it as a mental image part of which refers to a mental image (the ship on the stormy sea). The reader and viewer depicted mimic us the viewers and our reading and viewing of the painting. Again, this is literally a transposition of ‘sight watched’, a consciousness of method as a self-reflexive analysis in conjunction with the ‘outside’ world.2 The woman’s unveiling of the painting on the wall is none other than the unveiling of our unconscious or lower-order viewing of the painting to reveal our self-conscious inspection of the mise-en-scène.3 The frame-in-the-frame envisaged here represents and enacts a cooperation with the framing of lower-order thought by the higher-order thought and the framing of this by yet another third-order thought, and this seriality is expressed with economic visual means and by thematising the viewing of viewing, and seeing through eyes of others. A similar effect is achieved in Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, where we watch the artist with his back to us painting his model, we duplicate his looking, and we imagine he duplicates ours. The painting invites this double articulation. But there is an added level of interest: we know that the painting before us is what the artist saw stepping back from it on its completion. When we do this, we are looking ‘through’ his looking, or we at least try to distance ourselves from merely inspecting the painting from the point of view of its basic information yield, although this low level of consciousness is still undoubtedly going on. But The Art of Painting also shows us the artist painting a canvas with a model in front him. At some point, it is reasonable to assume that the artist imagined looking through the eyes of the fictive artist depicted in the painting, through to the model. This sets up the following: we imagine that we are seeing through the artist’s eyes, through the fictive artist’s eyes at the model. Thus we see through the artist’s seeing through the (fictive) artist’s eyes. This is another variation on the mirror image in Parmigianino’s self portrait. The visual construct relies on the organisation of higher-order thought 2

Some of neurological and cognitive events supporting this kind interplay are dealt with in Harth 1999: 100-114. 3 Stoichita puts it this way “the mechanism of embedding entails reflection around [sic] the status of the image, that is to say, entails self-reflection” (1997: 173).

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in its production and reception, we do not just see someone looking at somebody who looks at somebody else, we produce a higher-order thought each time we do this, and we transform the physical image into a mental one of the artist’s seriality of higher-order thoughts organised as frames-in-frames, and there are at least five frame-in-theframe stages depicted in the The Art of Painting which alert us to Vermeer’s consciousness of the various stages of ‘seeing in’ involved ‘in’ the painting and before it. Other paintings in this period specifically utilise higher-order thoughts to transform into consciousness our simple lower-order thoughts and sensations about depicted objects, bowls, eggs, fish, for example, in Velázquez’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (1619-20). Here, we see an interplay of levels of reality signified by three different painting genres: the still life painting in the foreground, the domestic interior (a genre borrowed from Dutch painting) in the mid-ground, and the biblical scene in the background. To use the values specific to the period, this is a sacred narrative nested in the profane, day-to-day life of a Spanish kitchen. The ambiguity is that the scene in the background seems framed but it could as easily depict an inner room. Each spatial distinction brings to mind different painting genres emerging in this historic period at the same time as the different aesthetic sensations linked to each genre. Yet the painting also activates different ways of seeing and different levels of consciousness. If we saw the scene as a kind of realist exercise, an accurate portrayal of a Spanish kitchen in the seventeenth century, this is probably the most basic (albeit problematic) response; viewers might merely enjoy the sensation of following the artist’s trace in the pigment, the pattern and rhythm of the brushstrokes and how they disperse colour and form, and play with light. A rich sense of self-consciousness need not intrude in this; we are intersubjectively enjoying the sensations of the marks on the canvas as an extension of the artist’s hand and body, eye and mind yet we also enjoy sensations to do with the objects depicted, the identification of the kitchen utensils, the lustrous scales of the fishes on the table, the glints of light on the ceramic bowl with eggs in it, the furrowed brow of the kitchen maid staring out at the viewer, or the wrinkles and hollows of the old woman’s face, next to her. But the ‘innermost’ genre or ‘reality’ depicted here, the nested image of the background scene where Christ speaks to Martha urges us to rethink the simplicity of domestic scene

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and the still-life, to retrace our steps through sensation. In the domestic scene, the women prepare food for the body implicating a sensual involvement in the materiality of objects that the artist has lovingly portrayed; this is the world of the body as a site of perception and projection, and this is in direct contrast to the nourishment of the Word being prepared ‘inside’ the scene in the background showing Christ in the inner room, but the picture is painted in such a way as to appear non-corporeal: it suggests that it is a painting, as well as a window or doorway. The painting can also be read as the depiction of the invisible but immanent Word. At its heart is also the contrast between the sacred and the profane, the external reality of everyday objects and the internal transcendence of spiritual reality, with further references to the feeding of the five thousand (the fish and bread) and the procreation symbolised by eggs. These objects have a dual status: they signify both the notion of the arbitrary reality of a kitchen and the symbolism of scripture. But this rather standard art historical interpretation tells us little about the shifts in consciousness attending it. We probably have little or no self-consciousness in the early stages of engaging with this painting during our enjoyment of its sensuous details but the framed area in the background abruptly brings to an end this circuitous pleasure, for we enter an interpretative space where tactile response is no longer needed. In fact, the frame marks the scission between sensuous pleasure (left outside) and critical response, although this strict either/or is blurred by our revisiting and re-experiencing the painting from a subsequent, synthetic viewpoint. With the interpretation of the scene-in-the-scene it is a natural reflex to retrace one’s steps, to come back out and to re-examine all the details in the foreground, but more importantly, to re-examine one’s earlier vision, experience or lack of consciousness: we are having a higher-order thought about our earlier sensations, framing them with a new consciousness which bestows these humble objects with symbolic significance. There is a new distance between our former selves and our present perceptions; more than this, there is both distance and an attachment between the sensuous material of the paint, the sensuous allure of the domestic objects caused by our retraction, and our consciousness which intervenes in the reflex of sensation with sensuous object. This complex interplay which tells us of the artist’s deep and inspired thought about its reception helps to construct messages about

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the painting’s import: the illusoriness, transience, of sensuous objects, their depiction, their transformation into a higher symbolic order, the truth of which is signaled through and beyond the world of sensation, affects and simple pleasures. This does not in any way make us feel that the artist’s work is trickery or moralistic, Velázquez’s art shines through as an encounter between illusionism and a consciousness of it, and this helps us to reinvest the painting with a revelatory quality hinging on the sharp contrast between the sensuous pleasure of the objects and the paint, and critical distance afforded by the frame-in-the frame. Yet, the equivocation of the frame-in-the-frame tells us about the co-emergence of thought and awareness of that thought, the valid and distinct impression that we are in ecstasis, where we feel both sense objects and the intellectual meanings attached to them, contextualising and fine-tuning our responses while having them at the same time. The framed area showing Christ praising those who seek more than the sensuous pleasures and certainties of the world, gives the viewer the option to be reminded of his or her sensuous involvement with the painting. And this is all done with a visual economy of the picture-inthe-picture which activates and sustains a higher-order thought about lower-order sensations attending the painting. By virtue of the framein-the-frame, Velázquez is able to transform exoteric reality (lying ‘outside’ as part of the material world) into the introspection of esoteric revelation and while doing so, he enriches the aesthetic experience by allowing it to expand from the appreciation of the beauty of the painted objects and from the world of sense particulars that beckons within and emanates throughout the painting as a whole. Through the device of the frame-in-the-frame, Velázquez gives us a harmony of pluralistic aesthetic vision, one keyed into an appreciation of the external qualities of the painting and movement from this to another kind of vision which relies on a figurative and abstract faculty, signaled by the withdrawal into the background scene. The traversing of the outer image into the nested image by the disembodied eye is, in fact, nothing other that the self-penetration of the viewing subject into the self-analysis of his or her own visual thinking triggered by the spaces created by the artist. And these spaces and objects which we examine with renewed vigour, allows us to see (and be seen by) the unfolding of consciousness in the different worlds (actual and depicted) of the painting. It is, in a sense, a mirror of our involvement,

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our being-in-the-world. And the fine-grained activity which sustains it may be likened to a switchback mechanism where reality appears to shimmer between ‘what it is’ to ‘what it means’ back again ‘to what it is’—a series of lower-order to higher-order thoughts, eventually to settle on the pleasure of the switchback mechanism itself. Las Meninas Velázquez’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary and Las Hilanderas or The Weavers share important visual principles with the artist’s best known work, Las Meninas, which cooperates with consciousness and self-consciousness in similar ways. They do this by employing complex frames-in-frames, shown as pictures-in-pictures or rooms within rooms or, in the case of Las Meninas, as a framed mirror inside a room with framed pictures on the wall in the background. These framing devices were produced by the artist’s higherorder thoughts, and they have continued to stimulate such thoughts long after the seventeenth century.4 Awret suggests that Las Meninas imitates “a process that engages the observer in a cascade of higher-order representations of the self” (Awret 2008: 15). But how is this cascade structured? In Las Meninas, one of the most important frames depicted in the picture is the edge of the mirror and the black frame around it. Yet the doorway in the background also functions as a frame, and there are paintings shown above this, which are also framed focal points. And although the reversed painting the artist is shown attending to does not have a frame, its edge is lit up to remind us of one. We travel through the delimited spaces portrayed and yet we are also aware of the physical frame surrounding the actual painting of Las Meninas. These framed areas and images inside images are connected to each other by the different gazes of the figures portrayed. Much of the analysis of Las Meninas by writers in the last twenty years or so consists of higher-order thoughts about these framed areas in the painting: they seem to attract and focus higher-order thoughts. These HOTs inevitably become targets for other writers, such as myself, interested in commenting on how others see this painting. In this way, a series of HOTs about other 4

Much of the following section on Las Meninas has been published as a paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2009 Volume 16: 2.

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people’s HOTs is stimulated by the painting’s focal points, and by its system of gazes, the disposition of which appears to reflect back this intersubjectivity of writing about the painting. This is, I believe, a sign of the painting’s success.5 Part of the fascination with these framed areas lies in the spatial anomalies they bring to mind. A framed picture contains within it a framed picture. The internal frame is both internal in relation to the outer frame and external in the sense that it, too, has contents. These frames, in their many guises, seem both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’; they have contents but also appear as contents of other larger contexts. The door, for example, frames a dark figure and is at the same time part of a whole wall of other framed objects. If these elements in Las Meninas bring to mind the capture and release of higher-order thoughts, what do these spatial anomalies allow us to think? Is it possible to use them in order to understand what it is like to be ‘in’ or ‘outside’ a mental state? The frame-in-a-frame in Las Meninas allow us to rethink this fundamental intrinsicality/extrinsicality dualism by appealing to more sophisticated conceptions of space and representation found in art and philosophy. An effective way for art theory, philosophy and science to understand the kind of consciousness involved with Las Meninas is to refer back to the work of art which displays a visual structure depicting a series of relations that is analogous with the relations of mental states attending it. Awret claims that Las Meninas, “the painting itself”, represents a mental state M and that the reversed canvas depicted inside it can designate the state M* (which is “about” M). Rocco Gennaro’s important criticism of Awret points out that this would mean that M* is within M, “and this does not cohere well with standard HOT theory which states that M* has to be a distinct state or representation” (Gennaro 2008: 49). He may be concerned here to retain an element of this distinctness between HOTs within a wider intrinsicality view, but Gennaro’s point also shows Awret assuming intrinsicality. Yet both authors are constricted somewhat by the discursive practice of extrinsicality and intrinsicality. If we go back to the painting, however, 5

Because it is “self-teaching”, a phrase used by Merleau-Ponty referring to Cézanne, where he writes that it is not enough for artists to express an idea: “they must also awaken the experiences which will make their idea take root in the consciousness of others” (Merleau-Ponty in Johnson 1993: 70).

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spatial ambiguities in Las Meninas and the larger picture of the network of relations depicted show us it is possible to question this duality by using the concept of superpositionality. The gazes in the painting link the figures to each other and also invite the viewer to imagine herself playing a part in this network of sightlines. They form a detailed visual system that the artist has devised to integrate different parts of the painting. The depicted gazes mediate the framed areas to create various combinations of meaning and self-consciousness. Similar to the framed areas themselves, these sightlines are also objects of higher-order thought, and serve to create relationships between them. We are looking at the painted figures and what they are looking at and, by extension, with our own higher-order thought we think about what their HOTs might be and analyze them using third-order thoughts. These third-order thoughts may be relatively rare: “[…] it is hard to hold in mind a thought about a thought that is in turn about the thought” (Rosenthal 2005: 27). But it is hard not to think that this view of what is rare and exceptional merely represses this kind of consciousness in order to explain more ordinary examples, as if ordinariness is more worthy of study. In fact, the special kind of consciousness that involves third-order thought is an essential part of the experience of art and cinema, especially where there are nested scenes displaying frames-in-frames that depict characters’ thoughts about what is going on—which also happen to be our thoughts, depicted as theirs. This level of higher-order thought is commonplace in the literature on consciousness, even in the passage just quoted by Rosenthal: all the more reason to study it. In the following pages I will examine the visual network of framed areas in Las Meninas, and the lines of flight between them, as the external marks of Velázquez’s own HOTs about what he is seeing and what others might be able to see, and explore how these HOTs relate to each other in intelligible ways. A depicted frame in the pictorial space—and there are many of them in Las Meninas—captures ‘a view’ which is both caused by a higher-order thought and effects others in the viewer. But we are also able to shift our perspective from where we view these ‘visual HOTs’ to see them from the differing points of view of those who are looking at them: from the perspective of the dark figure in the doorway looking over the artist’s shoulder at the painting we cannot see, for example, or from the king and queen’s

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perspective, as well as the artist’s. The painting gives us a view of how HOTs can be arranged in relation to each other in complex permutations depending on one’s vantage point. This tends to question the absolute fixed location and even the definition of what a HOT is, particularly because, from the viewpoint of a third-order thought, this HOT is also a lower-order thought. The painting shows us a number of focal points in the visual field which change their status as HOTs or lower-order thoughts, depending on which point of view we adopt while experiencing them. The relations that HOTs share with lower-order thoughts can be mapped onto the visual field of Las Meninas and should include the fictive canvas, as Awret does, but also the mirror, the doorway, the paintings on the wall in the background and the gazes which are launched by the figures, which show the relations between these HOTs. These visual elements may be seen as a series of mental states structured vis á vis each other, not just from the point of view of the viewer’s self-representation. The system of relations depicted in Las Meninas creates an intricate network of mental states. The status of each of these, whether lower- or higher-order thought, depends inter alia on their relations to each other: one depicted figure’s lower-order or pre-reflective thought is the target of another figure’s higher-order thought, and another person’s higher-order thought is captured by somebody else’s HOT. The notion of ‘sight watched’ allows us to adopt a theoretical vantage point where it is possible to ‘see’ (or ‘think’) the network of gazes portrayed in its entirety, stepping back and directing our higher-order thought at what everyone else seems to be focused on. This is a moment of both distancing and framing, when one becomes aware that the criss-crossing sightlines of the figures portrayed appear to form a complex geometrical pattern in three-dimensional space. Being able to consider the mise-en-scène from various angles gives us the phenomenological experience of a conceptual three-dimensionality. I will deal with two major ways in which Las Meninas encourages us to think of superpositionality as a way of going beyond the simplistic intrinsicality/extrinsicality binary. In ‘Framing HOTs’ below, I look at discrete areas of the painting divided into framed areas and examine their ‘contents’. But because these areas are part of a larger content (the back wall, for example, which ‘contains’ them), I also relate these framed areas to their contexts. Following this, in ‘Sight

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Watched’, I examine the system of gazes and points of view depicted in the painting which enables us to adopt various perspectives on these framed areas and to relate them to each other in different ways.6 This enhances the superpositionality of the frames-in-frames because we can, in effect, adopt different third-order thoughts (thoughts about HOTs which these framed areas stimulate). Eventually, this process of generating a number of third-order thoughts of various perspectives allows us to construct a complex system of relations between the third-order thoughts themselves. Framing HOTs The viewer can examine the various framed areas in Las Meninas one at a time but the ability to switch from one to the other in a rapid series of saccades, collecting more information inside and outside these frames to form ever more complex HOTs, provides the viewer with the phenomenological feel of superpositionality. When we explore the contents of one particular frame, we take with us the memory of a previous HOT in relation to a framed area we have already viewed. In other words, we experience the frame and its contents through our experience and understanding of a prior frame and its contents, to create richer meaning. For example, we look at the frame of the mirror which might remind us of the physical frame of Las Meninas as a picture (our first access point), and we feel both drawn into the depicted depth and thrown back by our peripheral vision of the physical frame. Reflections in mirrors both attract and repel, are flat and hard, yet convey depth and space, just as the painting does. The mirror is thus a reflection of the painting’s ability to stimulate a kind of binocular rivalry, or “seeing as” (Church 2000: 99100), while at the same time suggesting that it bears the reflection of the reversed canvas which is shown before the artist. The mirror image in Las Meninas (and that shown in Parmigianino’s self portrait) is thus a more complex threefold “seeing as” because we can see it as (1) part of a painting signifying (2) a mirror reflection of (3) another 6

This approach meets the requirements stated by Jennifer Church that “[…] one must be capable of imaginative projections, not merely imaginative associations” (2000: 104), and that: “it is not enough simply to bundle together associated representations to get the experience of an object, the different representations must be actively imagined as varying in response to different points of view” (108).

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painting which we see the reverse of. This superpositional intensity consists of keeping our higher-order thought of one framed area with us in our journey through to other frames in the picture, in order to see one through the other. It is precisely this kind of intensity, where HOTs emerge in the wake of other HOTs and seem to overlap in each other’s duration, that makes conventional inside and outside spatial markers rather blunt tools to carve up this kind of conscious experience. Much has been written about the mirror lodged in the background of Las Meninas which reflects the king and queen of Spain. For argument’s sake, let us say the king and queen are the models for the painting that the artist is shown attending to, that they are standing before Velázquez who is looking at them, and that their position happens to be the same spot we occupy as viewers. The painting of them may be reflected in the mirror in the back of the room, a reflection that they too can possibly see. The following table shows the relationship between various framed areas and the mental states that arise from viewing these various transpositions. (a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Mirror reflection of king and queen

Mirror reflection of painting of king/ queen (mirror framed)

Reversed painting as source of mirror reflection (painting framed)

Exposition ^Lowerof order conscious thought states about identity of reflection

< ^HOT directed at lowerorder thought about reflection

< ^ HOT directed at lowerorder thought of reversed painting

King+queen in viewer’s position as models of reversed painting (painting of painting framed) < ^HOT directed at lower-order thought of painting of reversed painting

Framed Area

Table 1

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In this scenario, I assume that the king and queen are standing before the painting in the viewer’s position, that they see the mirror reflection of the reversed painting, and that they are the subjects of the reversed painting. Thus, they can see a mirror reflection of their own likenesses depicted in the painting. Imagine that we begin from the left column (a) and take a ‘step back’ with each subsequent column from (b) to (d). Each step back frames a wider contextual view. With the first, lower-order thought we identify that the mirror reflection is of the king and queen of Spain. We step back, ‘out of’ the mirror frame, to the reversed canvas which could be the source of the reflection and so become conscious of the ‘frame’ of the reversed canvas, which forces us back a step further until we see the painting in its entirety. We find ourselves standing in the king and queen’s place, on the other side of the actual physical frame of Las Meninas, and the artist’s gaze is directed at them, that is, at our world, the world of the viewer. The last two columns, (c) and (d), show us how a series of higher-order thoughts eventually leads back to the viewer’s perspective and place (the last act of framing, if you like), through which the other HOTs instigated by the objects and views in the picture may be seen. We have ‘views through views’ and these are third-order thoughts of HOTs. Another HOT makes us conscious of the possible point of view of the king and queen which we seem to share; we seem to look through their eyes at the scene, all the while conscious of our own viewing. Self-reflexive, self-aware viewing, that allows us to remember the picture is only an illusion, is co-present with accepting the illusion in order to resolve the identity of the painting by examining its projections. This deferment is a lower-order thought which we must maintain from the vantage point of higher-order thought. The fictive painting’s superpositioning (being both a reversed canvas and also part of the front of the real painting) is also a superposition between lower and higher-order thoughts. In the same way that we adopt the king and queen’s position while holding our own in front of Las Meninas, the HOT adopts the lower-order thought, remaining distinct and experiencing ecstasis but also identity. This is not mere equivocation, for in the experience of viewing Las Meninas this is one of the most commonly recorded responses: the feeling of being inside someone else’s shoes, feeling that we are behind masks that make us appear as the king and queen to those in the picture who address us. It is

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precisely the artist’s carefully considered superpositionality of the king and queen of Spain, who are both present and not present in the scene, and external and internal to the painting, which allows us to theorize a similar superpositionality or dynamic localisation of the HOT in regard to its target state. We can be deeply involved in the painting, suspending disbelief, and we can exercise critical awareness of that involvement. These conflicting perspectives give us a heightened consciousness. Like the king and queen of Spain, we are both ‘here’ and ‘there’, intrinsic and extrinsic to our lower-order involvement of the visual spectacle, examining (framing) our own responses while we are having (the contents of) them. But also, there is another kind of ‘seeing as’: we see the painting as viewers, but when we imagine we see through the eyes of the king and queen, we see through the painting to the scene where the figures appear to occupy space. Thus, ‘seeing as’ cooperates with superpositionality and this experience can be extended across a series of mental states. These different mental states, some apprehending others, may be consecutive in relation to each other but from the vantage point where we make our stand, in front of the painting, our gaze (our thought) seems to pierce the whole series of frames at once. Phenomenologically, we get the impression that it is possible to pierce the series of frames in this way, looking at the painting through the eyes of the king and queen. The reflection of the king and queen in the mirror denies our self-reflexivity, yet sets it off again in motion through the series of frames, because it points to the same point of origin. Words are not the only or the most direct way to describe higherorder consciousness of this kind; in film, visual sequences routinely access it in lightening ways. One only needs to look at the frames-inframes in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, which is a continuous penetration of frames and planes making us conscious of our gaze, or the thinking that underpins it. In Las Meninas, we do not just become conscious of looking at the painting (and the painting of the painting). Table 1 demonstrates that it can also show us how we organize the unfolding of our thought while looking. In this way, Las Meninas is also a portrait of how HOTs are organized in relation to each other as a simultaneous series of frames. Although the table suggests a linear unfolding of backward steps, it is also possible to see through the whole series in reverse, ‘going into’ instead of ‘coming out’ from the

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painting. In a remarkable moment of unity, it is possible to peer through the painting to gaze at the painted reflection of the king and queen through their eyes, back to ourselves where we stand in front of the picture, all in twinkling of an eye (or Augenblick7). All other previous moments of vision are experienced in the last, and this moment appears to extend our consciousness into the world and into the world of the picture. Importantly, the exposition of higher-order thoughts, especially the kind involved in the viewing process of Las Meninas, can be characterized as a series of frames with paradoxical relationships to each other because we can pay attention to their contents and to what lies outside them. That I am ‘in’ a mental state, and conscious of being in that state, suggests I might be in two places at the same time: ‘in’ the lower order thought and ‘in’ a HOT that allows me to be conscious of being in a lower-order thought. Even though I am not conscious of being in the latter, I am still in it so as to be able to experience that consciousness. The HOT I am in tells me I am in the lower-order state, although I may not be apparently, because it is only the HOT ‘representing’ me in that state. I am not conscious of being in the HOT that tells me I am in a lower-order thought until a third-order thought tells me I am in the HOT which was, until then, representing me in a lower-order state. From the second HOT’s point of view, the consciousness of being in the lower-order thought feels like one thought. From the point of view of the third-order thought (the kind that allows philosophers such as Rosenthal to propose the ontology of a HOT), we make the HOT distinct from the lower-order thought. I do not know I am ‘in’ the HOT. I only believe I am having a lower-order thought accompanied by the feeling I am in it. This must mean that just after the lower-order thought has been initiated it may happen that a HOT comes to accompany it. Rosenthal claims that it is ‘roughly contemporaneous’ (2005: 26). Las Meninas, however, shows us that this contemporaneity can be far more of a multiplicity. When we adopt the point of view the king and queen and ‘pierce’ the frames from their viewpoint, we are having an orchestration of HOTs rather than a neat, chronological unfolding of them, one by one.

7 For an extended analysis of Nietzsche’s concept of the Augenblick as vision where previous moments of vision are experienced phenomenologically at the same time, see Shapiro 2003: 157-192.

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The thought, ‘I am having a conscious thought’, is actually three or four thoughts depending on how you want to carve it up. Because new thoughts are initiated in split seconds sharing some of the duration of previous ones and sharing some of the same contents which may be spread over two or more ‘boundaries’ of these HOTs, at some point in their crossover, and from a distance, there may seem to be an overlap. In visual terms, we do not need to look at each individual frame depicted in Las Meninas and analyse the single thought about that frame. Although this is possible, and sometimes desirable, we create the whole picture by suppressing such individuation. In the same way, we might also think of suppressing the individuation of HOTs and their target states if it allows us to construct a more complex and fluent conscious experience of Las Meninas, yet we can also at any time drill down into the detailed focal points of the painting, to experience HOTs about these and their relations in mosaic detail, as opposed to a sweeping general view. Sight Watched ‘Sight watched’ consists of thought about what is being seen by oneself and what is being seen by another person.8 To use a term from Husserl’s Ideas, we seem to look “straightforward and reflectively” at the same time (Kersten 1982: 148). Something of this sort comes into play during the visual inspection of a printed diagram showing the visual apparatus, such as the one published by Descartes in La Dioptrique, 1637 (Fig. 4). The diagram produces a higher-order thought about what we are looking at because it reminds us of our looking, and it is roughly an image of the effect of an image (perhaps even this one) on our optical system. Higher-order thought considering the diagram of vision is especially interesting because, inherently within this action, there is the possibility of using the retinal image and its relationship to the object of sight as an analogy for the relationship between higher- and lower-order thoughts. Can a third-order thought allow the second higher-order thought of Figure 4 to ‘look at itself looking’, forward and reflectively (think about itself thinking), while taking a lower-order state as its target? 8

It is, after all, the mind (apperception and perception, supported by neural firings in the cerebral cortex) that sees, not the eye.

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Fig 4. A diagram from Descartes’ La Dioptrique, 1637. Public Domain-Old-70

One does not literally look at one’s eye in a mirror, however, but at the mirror image of one’s eye. Phenomenologically, the reflexive movement of the eye watching a mirror image of the eye is only deceptively simple, as we tend to view the reflected eye with a firstorder thought due mainly to habit. If we had a HOT attending that viewing, we could imagine what is reflected in the retinal image that receives the image of reflection, and this would be a reflection of a

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reflection (although the retinal image is turned upside down). The higher-order thought attending the mental state of a ‘reflection of a reflection’ is a third higher-order thought. A HOT can be seen as a mirror reflecting the image of the lower-order thought. The advantage of using this physical analogy for a mental process is that it allows us to bypass the intrinsicality or extrinsicality of the HOT and the lowerorder thought by depicting the former as something which bears the image of the latter. In using the mechanics of sight as an extended metaphor for the production and organization of conscious states, I am, in fact, only referencing the philosophy of reflection and its methods.9 It is possible for us to imagine our current retinal image. We can see what we are seeing and this guides us, and we can imagine Figure 4. The diagram appears to reflect our retinal image and our envisioning of it, providing consciousness with a brief yet distinct experience of co-emergence or circularity. Using a system of analogies, we can think of the retinal image as a HOT and the object of sight (which the retinal image is a reflection of) as the lower-order thought. Thus, the lower-order thought is reflected in the HOT while at the same time the possibility of their distinct natures is preserved.10 This analogy, it must be said, is the product of a third-order thought about two lower, occurent mental states. Looking at the figure looking at his optical apparatus makes me conscious of myself looking, and this is also a thirdorder thought. Figure 4 is, in fact, more complex than is immediately apparent because the diagram is also represented as the object of the observer’s gaze, which we logically infer to be reflected on his retina. This makes us aware of what might be reflected on our retina while looking at this image. The added interest is how this organisation of consciousness logically becomes more involved when we consider that the retinal image we have of the retinal image suggested in the diagram serves as both an analogy and an actualisation of a third-order thought about the higher-order thought it takes as its target. What we have in common, in both the organisation of conscious9

“The entire philosophy of noetics, including the Platonic idea, Cartesian clarity and distinctiveness, Lockean sensational noetics, the Kantian phenomenon, Hegelian phenomenology, Sartrean opacity and much else is inextricably involved with thinking in intellection by analogy with vision” (Ong 1982: 135). 10 Similarly, the retina is part of my body but it seems important to maintain the difference between it and the reflection upon it.

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ness attending the visual process of inspecting a diagram of the retinal image and the diagram itself is an encounter where the internal appears externalized. Yet this image, external to our bodies, is reflected into our internal optical apparatus. In Figure 4, an observer in the diagram looks at an image and appears, at least outwardly, to mimic our visual inspection. The depicted observer makes the image appear as his, setting up a picture-in-a-picture that duplicates the internalisation of the reflected image in his eye and mimics our mental image of what is happening when we look at the picture. Mental imagery of our retinal image (and our retinal image) and pictorial inspection using the visual cortex cooperate to create a heightened sense of self-consciousness. In Las Meninas, these various processes involved in sight watched are multiplied many times over. When I look at Las Meninas after all these years I am still struck by its lustrous surface, and I often find it tempting to imagine my retinal reflection of it while I am looking at it. I imagine that inside my retinal reflection a small Velázquez is shown staring back and out again to its source, the Las Meninas in the Prado, Madrid. This glossy painting, in which the artist is shown peering out at us, has so much about it that reminds one of a mirror reflection. And indeed in a sense it was, at least for the artist, who at some stage presumably stepped back from his creation to see an image of himself looking—the ultimate ‘sight watched’. I have shown, in Table 1 and the various transitions from frame to frame which mark the stages of a line of thought, that we can see the framed areas in Las Meninas from the point of view of the king and queen of Spain. Like us, the royal couple seem to have the whole gallery of frames set out before them barring, of course, the reversed canvas, which may nevertheless be accessible to them via the mirror reflection. In this sense alone, whatever commentators say about its unconventional nature, Las Meninas still provides the viewer with the privileged vantage point inherited from Renaissance art. Some of this omniscience is challenged, however, by the point of view of the dark figure in the background. We know he has the power to look over Velázquez’s shoulder to reveal the subject of the canvas (and this increases our curiosity in that direction), but he can also see us, the viewers. Foucault refers to this figure as a ‘pendulum’, perhaps meaning that he introduces with the door the potential rhythm of an on/off switch. In addition to filtering with his body the light from the

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doorway, this figure signifies the concept of distance and a contrast in scale. The frame of the doorway doubles as a picture frame. It not only provides consciousness of another area of perception within a system of perceptions, but also neatly frames the human form, a body which seems ensconced in the thought of the frame. The figure is a gatekeeper marking a threshold from the inner to the outer limit of visibility, where the painting seems to leave its final trace before vanishing completely. He seems to turn to leave the scene of the painting, as we are ultimately destined to do as well. As Victor Stoichita has pointed out, this figure is José Nieto y Velázquez, the queen’s chamberlain, who bore the title of sumiller de cortina (controlling a curtain): “[…] in other words, he controls the representation […] Nieto is an epiphanic sign. He is announcing the arrival of the kings […] an ‘unveiling’ seen from the back” (Stoichita 1997: 254). At the same time, Nieto is also the painter’s alter ego, given that they share the same second family name (254). He shows us that the scene depicted in Las Meninas can be understood from behind, reminding us of the function of the retinal image at the back of the chamber of the eye. He also alerts us to a number of blind spots. Nieto cannot see the mirror, although he can possibly see the source of the reflection it bears, and he is blind to the paintings above the door. His blind spot is duplicated by ours (we only see the reverse of the canvas, not its front). Most of the figures in the painting cannot see Nieto or these things in the background, nor can they see the reverse of the canvas which we see. The viewer (or the king and queen) cannot see the front of the canvas, although they may be able to see its reflection in the mirror. It seems that many of these blind spots are compensated for: if direct vision is not possible, then a view may be gained indirectly, through inferential methods. This system of optics seems to dramatize the interpretative processes that the hidden identity of the fictive painting encourages. Many analyses of Las Meninas omit any treatment of the little girl, Princess Margarita Maria. Literally speaking, it is her portrait. Traditionally, it was thought that she takes central place because it was on the princess that the dynastic hopes of the Spanish Habsburgs rested after the death of her brother, Prince Baltasar Carlos. In addition, it is often said that the little girl is comparing the likeness of the painting to her mother and father, at whom she is looking, mimicking their stiff dignity (which brings old fashioned, simpler portraiture to conscious-

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ness) yet also paying attention to one of her ladies in waiting who addresses her, whispering something in her ear. The princess is both listening and looking. The child’s gaze appears to address us and her parents while she is being addressed; her gaze is another important aspect of sight watched and forms yet another narrative frame through which to understand the painting. As a child, through a child’s eyes, her consciousness is relative and limited. She cannot see the mirror behind her, the artist, or other figures and, as such, she epitomises the partiality of knowing. She is at the centre of the painting with court life around her yet only cognisant of a part of it, just like a child is only partly aware of life around them: we are looking into the eyes of childhood. Do we see in the mirror image behind her what she is seeing directly? And how does this affect our interpretation of her eyes, and what she is thinking? In comparing the image of her parents with her parents standing before her, like Velázquez, her consciousness is split between canvas and models but, in contrast with the artist, from the point of view of the naiveté of a child. Epitomising her child’s eye view is the Pauline verse: When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face-to-face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known (I Corinthians 13: 11).

We owe to Foucault the observation that the child’s eyes are at the very centre of the painting: “A vertical line dividing the canvas into two equal halves would pass between the child’s eyes […] here, beyond all question, resides the principal theme of the composition; this is the very object of the painting” (Foucault 1970: 12). This emphasises the princess’s viewpoint. She may be looking at her parents through a child’s eye view (“through a glass darkly”) while we see, literally, through the glass darkly at the back of the room: both views are imperfect. We are urged “to put away childish things”, the child eye view, and by extension the literal or naïve reading of simple representation and the belief that mimesis is real, in order to move on to the figurative, esoteric and religious interpretation of the imagery, that sense particulars are only pale reflections of immutable ideals or that the world is a complex of imperfect and partial perspectives which, indeed, often

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use the impoverished metaphors of sight and vision to understand epistemology. The painting revels in its own powers of illusionism, a lower-order appreciation of painterly devices that ultimately causes us to distance ourselves from such sensuous involvement, with its invitations to look again through different eyes. We enjoy the sheen of silk cooperating with the glossy pigment, the tender light glancing off the princess’s hair, the texture of velvet and lace, the dog’s fur, all rendered with a generous impasto in which the hairs of the artist’s brush leave the striations of a presence. This is all sensuous surface, the material substrate which we invest with the illusion of life because it bears the external marks of thought, and the realization of this is a kind ‘putting away’ of ‘childish things’. The reflection of the king and queen of Spain (“through a glass, darkly; but then face-to-face”) also suggests that in looking at the royal couple, a gaze that the artist directs at them and possibly also at the viewer, he refers to the part of the verse, “then shall I know even as also I am known”. But this may also signal the future moment when the child will become an adult looking back at history, standing in front of this painting, seeing through an adult’s eyes, ‘through the eyes’11 of her mother and father, her own likeness as a child (“then face-to-face”). We can imagine seeing the picture through the eyes of the grown-up princess, whose gaze we are presently targeting in the painting. In this way, the whole painting of Las Meninas acts as a glass through which we see things darkly, but we begin to see the painting ‘face-to-face’ by looking at it (or thinking about it) straightforward and reflectively, as the artist most probably did also, when viewing his own work. Part of this face-to-face encounter consists of how, when we try to understand Las Meninas, we end up trying to understand ourselves. The mirror in the background and the child whose gaze we may engage cooperate as a statement of a temporary, naïve understanding or partial consciousness of the visible world which we are asked to understand as a series of appearances and points of view. Imagining the scene through the child’s eyes sets up a hierarchy of consciousness, for while she is not completely at its base (the sleeping dog is), 11

The notion of eyes looking through eyes is, of course, cooperative with looking through frames inside frames. Eyes become frames. But both expressions denote a process of thinking about another’s thoughts, where one is thinking or looking straightforward and reflectively.

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she is surrounded by circles of figures that possess ever increasing consciousness compared to her. We, as viewers, might form an outer circle. The mirror at the back of the room is not just a mirror or a frame but the object of a higher-order thought enclosed in the context of an even more complex and sweeping system of HOTs engaged with the painting as a whole.12 Here, the painting’s display of frames activates higher-order thoughts placed in the context of an all-encompassing third-order thought scanning a picture gallery, an iconostasis where monadic views of views from a number of vantage points are captured for posterity. As we can see from an analysis of the processes of organizing the pictorial space into framed areas in Las Meninas, each area stimulates a higher-order thought, mainly because each area can remind us of what we are currently doing: looking ‘through’ the frame of a painting to see other framed areas. And because there are a number of these framed areas, we relate our higher-order thoughts to each other in a system of contrasts and comparisons which builds up a complex of meanings and interpretations. But what makes Las Meninas even more noteworthy is that it encourages us to look at these HOTs not simply from our own vantage point but from the point of view suggested by the depicted figures. We can engage in this process of ‘looking through their eyes’ at the framed areas rapidly and easily, sometimes without thinking about how remarkable this process is, particularly because these are third-order thoughts about how others are conscious of what is happening in the pictorial space. Superpositionality breaks up the static binary of intrinsicality/extrinsicality on several levels. It is implicated as a way to describe the relations between framed areas, none of which we need restrict ourselves with, since hovering between them also seems to be a valid mental state. There is also a superpositionality involved in our entertaining various third-order thoughts as we imagine the thoughts the figures may be having when they reconstruct their visual fields from their points of view. It is the rapid switchback mechanism initiated in our viewing of the different framed areas, in conjunction with seeing these through different points of 12 This is, to some extent in agreement with Rosenthal who states “HOTs operate in large bunches” (2005: 28). He also writes, “[…] when we consciously reason, we are often conscious of one intentional state as leading to another […] perhaps one could be conscious of one’s intentional states as inferentially connected simply by having a single HOT about them all” (129).

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view, that creates the distinct phenomenological feel of a superpositionality which cannot be adequately described if we are forced to decide on either intrinsicality or extrinsicality in order to characterise these HOTs. The dominant binary of intrinsicality/extrinsicality affects how we think about the organization of consciousness. It may also lead to various misunderstandings about HOTs, for example, that they should be seen as internalist (mentalist) entities in relation to lower-order thoughts which are external to them. I have tried to show that art can free us from this simplistic dilemma, allowing us to look differently at the relations of conscious mental states. Using art to enhance what we know of consciousness is certainly not new. Husserl’s analysis in Ideas of a Teniers picture in the Dresden Gallery is evidence that, in the philosophy of mind, complex forms of consciousness have previously been dealt with in regard to works of art. His analysis also shows that the focus on Las Meninas as an object of research for those interested in higher forms of consciousness is part of a tradition. Rather than making mental states ontologically present either by isolating them or nesting them inside others, we see them instead as we might understand two non-inertial frames of reference encountering each other: to some extent contingent upon each other, yet always submerged in a context, in a series of relations and trajections, which in fact defines their presence more accurately. We see the overall ‘picture’, that each mental state can be distinct or non-distinct from another, depending on limitations of perspective or vantage point, and this involves degrees of intersubjectivity and superpositionality which representations like Las Meninas, and more modern pictures of its kind, exemplify and sustain in their intuitive yet sometimes programmatic questioning of the notion of presence. We can take what we know of higher-order thought and apply it to the analysis of many other works of art, and this I have attempted in the following pages. But the theory will only be effective in this context if it develops a critical awareness of its own limitations. The notion of representation used by Rosenthal and others when they describe a higher-order mental state representing one ‘in’ a mental state (acknowledged most obviously by the well-known acronym in consciousness studies: HOR or higher-order representation) cannot be a simple matter, for representation itself is dogged with dispute about how it works, especially in art theory and philosophy. Merleau-

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Ponty’s conclusions about art and phenomenology are clearly meant to address the problem of representation and consciousness. For him, a representation was not something that was meant to refer to the external world of objects and things. By extension, the notion that a HOT represents a lower-order thought ‘out there’, extrinsic to itself, or simply being part of its matrix ‘in here’, must also be questioned. Representation is not simply an expression of the artist’s internal world but an emergence of the internal in the external and the external in the internal. There is something of this kind that occurs in a serial way in third-order thoughts monitoring this co-emergence. Representation is pigment and canvas, bricks and mortar, which emerge in the world amongst other objects and things, as does the painter’s body in the form of gesture. But representation is also inside the painter’s body in the form of thought and vision, which may take as their objects of intention the configuration of objects and things emerging in the world. Velázquez, or Matisse in Merleau-Ponty’s example, paint themselves painting because they were: […] adding to what they could see of themselves at that moment, what things could see of them—as if to attest to there being a total or absolute vision, leaving nothing outside, including themselves […]. Essence and existence, imaginary and real, visible and invisible—painting scrambles all of our categories (Merleau-Ponty in Johnson 1993: 130). [Paintings] are the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside, which the duplicity of feeling [le sentir] makes possible (126).13

As we have seen with Las Meninas, paintings can also question linear time and spatial coordinates, the mutual exclusivity of external and internal properties, and ultimately, the precise anatomy of brain states by which we are meant to carve up the territory of consciousness. The visualizing language of science describing consciousness with binaries such as being inside or outside a mental state, or a mental state being intrinsic or extrinsic to another, is just poor art history. The superposition and reflexivity of the frame-in-the-frame in many kinds of art question this dualistic imagery of consciousness, as it has been questioned in various ways in the past. This is what Merleau-Ponty was working towards with his notions of flesh and reversibility, “meant to 13

A similar spatial paradox is initiated when one holds one’s own hand: one is both touching and being touched, one envelops while being enveloped.

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express both envelopment and distance, the paradox of unity at a distance or sameness with difference, finding a new ontological way between monism and dualism” (Merleau-Ponty in Johnson 1993: 49). I have mentioned that Church (2000: 109-110) has argued that the process of “seeing as”, that is, seeing a painting as a landscape yet seeing it also as a painting, involves both conflict and convergence together. I would add that a third-order thought can go through a process of “seeing as,” able to understand co-present second- and first-order thoughts as both intrinsic and extrinsic to each other. We are watching Velázquez painting the subject of self-reflexive consciousness (his and the viewer’s); this is self-reflexive consciousness as a visual experience, consciousness framed and reflected back.14 The painting is not only about the painting as an object in the world but also about the conscious experience of the painting. Velázquez’s self-portrait visualises the higher-order thought surveying the experience of the painting. The painting is both referential and self-referential, as is our viewing of it. There are also two kinds of interpretation to be found in the literature that addresses this circularity. Less critical and theoretical interpretations of the painting consist of citing it as a reflection of court life, as a speculum principis, the mirror and art as visual tropes of exemplarity,15 or are concerned with the analysis of it as an artist’s self-portrait, with the aim of marking the new status of the artist at

14

This view has received some support in the literature concerning this painting. Leo Steinberg writes: “Las Meninas is in no sense a conventional picture. It undertakes a lot more, being concerned with nothing less than the role vision plays in human selfdefinition. The picture induces a kind of accentuation of consciousness by summoning the observer’s eye to exert itself in responsive action and in intensified multiple acts of perception” (Steinberg 1981: 52). 15 Snyder attempts to narrow down the interpretative range possible in viewing Las Meninas by reducing the image to the ideas of speculation and exemplarity in Baroque Spain but fails to do so, simply because the painting, as Foucault no doubt would have agreed, may be seen as a parody of interpretation itself. Ideality is only one kind of vision that the painting taxonomises, and to opt for any one kind of vision as the true one is against the spirit of the painting. For the development of Snyder’s ingenious, but like all other attempts to decode Las Meninas, highly speculative view of the speculum principis, see Snyder 1995: 557-572. As such, the theory must remain part of the corpus of works that seek to exercise the polysemy of Las Meninas without exhausting it.

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court (Brown 1978: 101).16 The fact that the painting lends itself to these various techniques of looking may, in fact, constitute an important part of its message. These ways of looking at the painting could also be characterised as naïve and critical (Bongiorni 2003: 99).17 If we were to adopt some of the language of studies of consciousness we might say that the naïve content of the painting, which has produced a relatively naïve tradition of criticism, is akin to lower-order thought while the more complex content, which has spawned an equally complex critical and theoretical writing, is more akin to various higher-order thoughts and their relations. Couched in such terms, the painting is not bi-focal but simply, naturally, a whole process of thought from lower- to higher-order thoughts and back again, producing an arc of consciousness that is traced in the matrix of the painting itself. True, Velázquez may be glorifying the power of his art, not necessarily in a simplistic reflex of vanity but in painting an image of thought, a visualisation of complex thought thinking about itself and how it works through visual means.18 Velázquez has suspended his brush mid-air—this is a moment of thought—the painting is ‘unfinished’ (and will forever remain so in a sense), the gazes are unfinished, and consciousness unfinished. The philosopher John R. Searle argued that the general problem of the meaning of Las Meninas is “how the mind imposes intentionality on entities that are not intrinsically intentional” (Searle 1980: 480). Searle himself imposed rather a lot of intentionality on the painting when he stated that what Velázquez is painting in Las Meninas is Las Meninas (485). But he also stated that we cannot think of the artist being in front of this canvas, as we might do in traditional illusionist paintings, because that position is taken up by us, the viewers, and/or 16

Brown admirably attempts to clarify the poses of the figures by explaining that the scene is supposed to illustrate the moment when it dawns on the figures that the king and queen have just arrived. Brown’s suggestion lends sublety to our reading of the physiognomies of those depicted in the painting and to our conviction that the artist was intent on representing perceptions in motion and from differing points of view. 17 Bongiorni uses these terms from Umberto Eco in his attempt to read the painting as a text which builds into it expectations for two kinds of reader, critical and naïve. 18 Similarly, Bongiorni characterises parts of the painting as linguistic signs that need to be thought, beyond their mere appearance (Bongiorni 2003: 97). For him, the theme of invisibility is about unseen thoughts and ideas. But I would add that what remains unseen also is the play of consciousness as a subject sparked by the dynamics of the visible.

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the king and queen of Spain: “The artist has a point of view but it is an impossible one, he is inside the scene looking out at point A and seeing the very same picture we are seeing from point A.” (485). This would make us both the model, viewer and the artist, which in fact typifies the kind of consciousness involved in viewing Las Meninas, that invites one to think about one’s own thought so that one is both the subject and object of consciousness. If the painting is a critique of classical representation, this is because it encourages the viewer to contemplate paradoxes in both representation and consciousness. In another often cited work on Las Meninas, Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen identified the impossibility of the mirror image reflecting the standpoint of the king and queen of Spain for reasons of perspective and geometry but concluded that the viewer is meant to realise his mistake (Snyder and Cohen 1980: 446447).19 This would mean that the illusion is doubly signified to the viewer: not only is the mirror reflection not real but the viewpoint that is suggests is also not real. Again, if one really needs to answer the question about what the painting is about one would have to invoke the complex process of perceptions articulated by so many theories, all of which create a journey of consciousness, and quite a special, interactive consciousness, engaged with all of these theories, perceptions and points of view. In other words, it is not only the elements in the painting that maintain “such a steadfast grip on one’s consciousness” (Steinberg 1981: 48) but the literature about them that feeds back into the phenomenology of viewing it, indeed, into its very appearance. Las Meninas depicts a complex organisation of gazes, spaces and frames, each of which exemplifies a mental state and, importantly, relations between mental states. The literature which seeks to elucidate this state of affairs represents a similarly complex, intersubjective network. On Foucault’s view, and by logical extension, the complexities of Las Meninas should tell us that to make sense out of consciousness 19 The authors misunderstand why the painting is self-reflexive, not because of the correct place of the vanishing point by whose position they hope to show Foucault and others wrong, or because the reversed painting may or may not be Las Meninas, or even that the artist may or may not be in an impossible space but simply because the artist is seen painting and looking out at the viewer, and because we have a painting of the back of a canvas and a painting of “paint” on the artist’s palette. These details alone are enough to support Searle, Alpers and Foucault’s suggestions that the painting is paradoxical, refers to itself as Other and offers itself up as pure reflection.

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and any other observable or rationable phenomenon, the conventional relationship between subject and object, seer and seen may need to be revised. The painter’s gaze reminds us of our own, the painting is, among other things, about the viewer viewing the painting and so it collapses the traditional viewing relationship between viewer and viewed in art history, as Svetlana Alpers suggests (1983: 30-42), but on this view, it also approximates the role of higher-order thought inspecting first order mental states. Implicit in Foucault’s seminal identification of the visible and invisible in Las Meninas is the visible and invisible nature of the viewer’s body. The spectacle of Velázquez’s gaze: our bodies, our faces, our eyes are doubly invisible, not only because they are not represented in the pictorial space but because they are invisible also to us when they disappear “from ourselves at the moment of our actual looking” (Foucault 1970: 4), which I take as a way to understand a HOT’s invisibility to itself. This invisibility of the viewer’s body may even stand for the visible and invisible nature of all physicality, which vanishes before our eyes when we become conscious of names, taxonomies, individuations and similarities which draw across these objects a mental field of vision. By extension, a HOT is invisible to itself while making a first-order thought visible as a first-order thought in the viewing subject. Of course, a third-order thought would make a HOT visible to the subject (while perhaps eliding a great deal of all else). Velázquez’s brush, suspended in the air, paints (and does not paint) the paradox of the visible and invisible. In Las Meninas, we have the presence of an absence, the invisible ‘in’ the visible—the king and queen, the faceless canvas, the target of the artist’s gaze. These are lacunae in the visual field which nevertheless signify, but in a way that tends to deconstruct traditional notions of presence. And in this way, the presence of the painting and its depiction of presences also come into question. Velázquez’s frames-in-frames encourage a seriality of thoughts: it is through the visible (at least through the intricate visibility that the artist has concocted) that the invisible may become an object of consciousness; this is emphatically demonstrated by the reversed canvas. The back of the canvas brings the invisible to the arena of consciousness not only by concealing the image on its fictive front but by making the back of the canvas momentarily disappear into the invisible when we speculate about what is the subject of the painting is. But already there has been an elided invisible moment: when we ask our-

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selves what could be on the front side of this canvas, we are forgetting that it is only a painting of the back side of the canvas, and in fact, ‘the back side of the canvas’ is the front of the painting, which becomes invisible when we speculate about fiction, we suspend disbelief (and accordingly adjust our consciousness) in the moment of speculation. And this speculation may be configured as a mental image of the other side of the canvas. Pure reciprocity is at work here which Foucault was right to analyse in phenomenological terms. As opposed to those who simply see Foucault in conflict with phenomenology, writing about this aspect of the painting he writes: The tall monotonous rectangle occupying the whole left portion of the real picture, and representing the back of the canvas within the picture, reconstitutes in the form of a surface the invisibility in depth of what the artist is observing: the space in which we are, and which we are (Foucault 1970: 4).

The doubling: “we are”/“we are” is a reference to the fact that the reversed canvas, which is an image of what the artist is looking at, and what he seems to be looking at, both remain invisible to us, yet this invisiblity references us twice. Consciousness of pure invisibility can be held, yet its reflex is to reach out immediately for an image of some kind to represent it as a mental image, in the mind’s eye. But this image is continually rejected because it obscures the concept of pure invisibility which we are trying consciously to think. The invisible in Las Meninas is a perception of what is signified by the tools of painting, the canvas, palette, the paint, the brush: the sensuous and visible nature of painting. We try to go behind the depiction, to tear the visual image aside to see its referent, its model, which should re-main invisible to our eyes in normal, classical representation, yet is revealed as the signified: paint, canvas, brush. Perhaps ultimately, then, what remains invisible is the distance between sign and signi-fied, the ‘paint’ of the paint is appearance and fact, consciousness and world. Searle's point about the artist not being able to be in two places at once, and that Velázquez’s hidden canvas may, in fact, be Las Meninas may not hold up in terms of the actual perspective demonstrated by Snyder and Cohen but that still does not stop us from wanting to believe in the possibility of such a mise en abyme, a natural inclination that crosses our mind and comes into play in the viewing of Las Meninas. It may perhaps dissipate somewhat when we get out our rulers, protractors and compasses to measure the painting’s ge-

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ometry, as Snyder and Cohen have done. But even Synder admits that this technical viewing was not available to the viewer, this was also perhaps not even desirable from the artist's point of view in the historical context. If Velázquez wanted a primary narrative to be discoverable in the painting, why did he make it near impossible to discover with the naked eye? The mirror and the hidden canvas yield only questions about perception. Revelation of the correct perspective as the primary truth on which our ‘higher’ understanding should be based does violence to the intention of Las Meninas which is to avoid a single revelatory narrative. The hidden canvas represents the concept of invisibility framed within representation. The artist’s skill is manifest by representing and thereby predicting possible ways of seeing and understanding the scene in and around this invisibility. Las Meninas is thus a circuit of questions and answers without satisfaction, despite Snyder and Cohen's attempts to provide an ideal visibility to the modern viewer. Intrinsicality, Extrinsicality and Brain States One of the least discussed aspects of Las Meninas is the palette the artist holds in his left hand. On the palette are daubs of paint. This image signifies paint, as well as being the haptic materiality of paint; it signifies itself as being in the world and as a fiction, as dumb physicality and a witty, self-reflexive symbol of physicality.20 In Rosenthal’s schema, there is a first-order sensation of paint or colour (the thing as given), homomorphic with our internal, qualitative mental properties, signified with the use of asterisks as *paint or *colour. Importantly, we are also able to experience a HOT of our mental state of *paint as a mental quality while at the same time visually inspecting the materiality of paint as presented by Velázquez. We see the image of paint as constituted of paint and this is congruent with paint and *paint. In other words, it is possible to see Velázquez’s image of paint as a visualisation of the mental quality *paint, as well as an image of the material, physicality of paint. Here, phenome20

Similarly, Galen A. Johnson writes: “Merleau-Ponty’s stress upon Cézanne as a colourist reveals another feature in the topography of a phenomenology of painting. Color became the unique feature of Cézanne’s fusion of self and world, for pigment is both a bit of nature and a visual sensation, therefore the element of construction that could bind object and sensation” (Johnson 1993a: 12).

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nologically speaking, consciousness emerges in the world as the world emerges in consciousness by way of the materiality of the paint, which is made to signify both itself, as well as the mental quality *paint which attends it and has produced it. The mental quality*paint thus seems to be externalised in the image on the canvas and we are also aware of its co-occurrence in our minds as *paint. Thus *paint is made to refer back to itself via the image.

Las Meninas by Velázquez. Detail of left side of canvas. If it were possible to paint a whisper, this is it. The artist has also painted paint. Public Domain-Old-100.

We have several incidences of reflection: paint as paint, *paint as paint and *paint as *paint (as viewed from a third-order thought which references what it is like to have the mental quality *paint). These incidences reference each other. The dual nature of the paint as depicted by Velázquez suggests that we are conscious of both the lower-order thought as itself and the higher-order thought which thinks it at the same time, one through the other, just as we are able to think of the dual nature of the sign as a signifier and as a self-evident signified, which we see in the representation of paint as paint in Las Meninas. The painting is about something external to it, the world outside the canvas, and yet it is also about itself. Whatever the identity of the re-

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versed painting in Las Meninas is revealed to be, it will always signify among other things, the ‘canvasness’ of the canvas, that is, an image of a canvas on canvas, thereby bringing to mind autonymy. It appears at once as both the front and the back of a painting. One needs to sustain both mental states of front and back to be conscious of this.21 The series of mental images that we have while optically inspecting the painting is quite complex and made more so by the mirror image in Las Meninas. A first-order thought might be that this reflects the hidden side of the canvas. We have both a mental image of what could be the subject of the reversed canvas that cooperates with our optical inspection of a mirror, which now seems to reflect back the mental image we have formed. The image of the hidden canvas is lodged in a fictional space, and is itself fictional and this appears to doubly reference fiction, a kind of fiction inside a fiction. Las Meninas has two backs, one real and the other a depiction of a back. We might surmise that the depiction of the back of the canvas is an accurate image of the real back of Las Meninas itself, and this gives us the peculiar notion of ‘seeing through’ the canvas, or revealing an image of its ‘back’ while we are seeing its front.22 There is also the presence of the artist which we feel we experience by way of the minute execution of the illusionist technique, the application of the paint, the brush marks and grooves in the pigment. In a sense, we see the surface texture through his eyes, while seeing through our own. We are also ‘seeing’ (experiencing consciousness of) a lower-order thought (‘this is the reverse side of canvas, it seems real’) through the spectacles of a higher-order thought (‘I am conscious of the material substrate of this illusion, I ponder its meaning but it also seems real’). The frame within a frame here articulates watching the watcher. The frame focuses on what the inner frame is focusing on but we are not only watching the watcher, we are also watching our own watching.23 Our higher-order thought views (is conscious of) the watching of our lower-order thought, which is an ordinary object consciousness. We see the reversed canvas 21

Some of this ability to unblock the suppression of one stimulus in favour of another has support in neurological studies (Kastner et. al. 1998; Blesa et. al. 2006: 506-511). 22 This superpositionality is achieved with extreme economy in Cornelius Norbertus Gijbrechts’s Painting Turned Around (ca. 1670-5), Copenhagen National Museum, which appears simply as the back of a canvas. 23 This is not to suggest an homunculus situation, we are merely self-conscious of our visual perceptions.

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as a clever illusion through which we inspect our first experience of looking at it as a real, reversed canvas. We see the object through the spectacles of illusion and in so doing, we see our lower-order thought through the eyes of our higher-order thought. This ‘seeing through the eyes’ provides the basis for the seriality of conscious states, one apprehending the other, sketched out in Table 1. There are questions about the neurological brain states subserving the mental state of the reversed canvas that is back and front, fiction and reality. Would there be one brain state subserving the two thoughts (back and front) or two brain states supporting the paradox? Switching from one perception to the other might create a third mental state premised on the inherent ambiguity of the image, a brain state which supports a suspension between perceptions.24 But because there is a double articulation here, that the paint is ordinary paint and an image of paint, one perfectly covering the space and identity of the other, perhaps only one brain state with its fine-grained cooperation between different brain areas needs fulfil or sustain the conscious mental state of this ‘double’ articulation. This also depends on the monism we tend to presume when we speak of a brain state, which may in fact be a number of cooperative processes each bearing an influence on each other in a system of relations, with shifting emphases in terms of higher monitoring processes so that there are different, merging, crossing trajectories that lead from the brain processes to the delta of reportable action. Ultimately, Las Meninas is not just about how an intersubjective network creates a reality shown as a series of sightlines which intersect in a moment in time, it also shows us how our own mental states intersect and reformulate using previous mental states while visually inspecting these sightlines in the painting. The network of sightlines can be re-drawn by us, not least because we can involve our own sightlines as part of that network to change the relations of higher- to lower-order thoughts. Along with an enactive theory of consciousness which posits that we formulate mental images and find them in the visual world, this adds considerable nuance to Husserl’s dictum that we can look straightforward and reflexively. In Husserl’s picture consciousness, we see through the picture thing (Bildding) the picture’s material substratum and also the picture 24

See Kastner et. al. 1998

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object (Bildobjekt), the picture as a “picture”, and the picture subject (sujet, the thing the picture takes as its subject matter). The interesting thing in Las Meninas is that the Bildding, the materiality of the painting, is not just self-evident when we look at the texture of the paint, the sheen of the surface, or ponder the appearance of the physical frame, the Bildding is also signified by the sujet. In other words, the painting’s visual details bring to mind the painting’s materiality. This is done in several ways by the artist’s palette with ‘paint’ on it, the back of the canvas, the artist’s brush. The stages of the presentation are all indivisible from each other as part of the painting in which they inhere, and yet they are intelligibly distinct and this considerably extends some of the compacted conclusions about Las Meninas and the painting that we see ‘inside’ it simply as representing the self. The problem is that parts of mental states seem to overlap in the duration of consciousness of paint as paint. Science does not know if a single brain state can support the simultaneity of two different mental states because we cannot agree on what a single brain state is and how it is connected to a mental state, which we also have trouble defining because it may be extrinsic or intrinsic to another mental state. We cannot even agree on what a composite thought might contain, and whether all those composite elements are experienced at exactly the same time. One thing is certain: each mental state cannot be simply traceable to an fMRI snapshot of a brain state25 because a mental state may be the result of the relations between brain states continually in the process of becoming something other than the frame we arbitrarily choose to freeze it with.26 The combined action (or relative dormancy) of different brain areas and oscillations involved in HOT activity may not be parallel or 25

This also shows the over-optimism of recent scientific research that claims to identify mental states involved in the inspection of natural images from data recorded on fMRI scans of brain states in the visual cortex accompanying such activity (Kendrick, Naselaris et. al 2008). The authors claim: “Our results suggest that it may soon be possible to reconstruct a picture of a person’s visual experience from measurements of brain activity alone.” The notion of visual experience here appears to be quite rudimentary. 26 The underlying strategy behind trying to capture the visual aspects of a brain state comes into question when we consider the shortcomings of traditional photography. “The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the ‘metamorphosis’ of time” (Merleau-Ponty in Johnson 1993: 145).

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mimetic to those HOTs in a matching relationship.1 Despite recent research that some higher-order thought may be viewed with the help of fMRI technology in the medial frontal cortex (Frith and Frith 1999) this does not mean that higher-order consciousness arises from activ2 ity in this area alone. It may be that a higher-order thought taking as its target a lowerorder thought produces a third entity—a relation—that is so far beyond our abilities to detect in terms of biological reductionism to distinct neurological firings in brain states. Similarly, with language, meaning is found in the silences and intervals between the words, not in the words themselves.3 The frame-in-the-frame is not a message but the visual intersection where messages have a relation to each other. It may thus be that the relation between a higher-order thought and a lower-order thought which produces consciousness is not the result of their positions in space or time but a product of the contrast they constitute in their encounter. Consciousness appears as a co-presence of mental states, not in the mental states themselves. As Merleau-Ponty has observed, “[j]ust as thought is supposed to transcend the sounds

1

Flanagan accepts the possibility that different thoughts can share the same physical property, “such as having the same oscillatory frequency” (Flanagan 1992: 216). The neural spatial analyzer may be used concurrently to analyze the space of mind apprehending the space of art. The same way that a depicted space inside a space is not really a space ‘inside’, a neural spatial event need not literally open up in order to subserve thought about that fictional space. 2 Frith and Frith (1999) suggest activity in the prefrontal cortex and posterior superior temporal sulcus combine to produce “mentalising” (the interpretation of others’ mental states based on observation and self-representation), this research does not support intrinsicality or extrinsicality arguments, because the combined action of the brain could suggest a melding of different brain states or one brain state premised on an interaction of parts. This kind of HOT activity demonstrated by Frith and Frith is also only one kind of HOT activity, a much more complex version of this is happening with more complex brain activity in the viewing of Las Meninas, where we are ‘mentalising’ others’ mental states represented in the painting and with a background of critical thoughts about the picture. 3 A reference to Merleau-Ponty’s well-known paraphrasing of de Saussure (MerleauPonty in Johnson 1993: 80). He goes on to write that the English phrase, ‘the man I love’, has no relative pronoun but nevertheless passes into consciousness despite this absence. Is it possible that a HOT and a lower-order thought configure an absence between them that forms a qualitive conscious state? If so, how is this traceable to the neurophysical level?

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and sights which indicate it”,30 a third-order mental state can transcend the second-order thought and its target first-order thought. The mental state, ‘paint as paint’, may then be understood not simply as a higherorder thought of the lower-order one but as the relation between them, which is the target of the third-order thought. The quality of the unsettled relation between intrinsicality and extrinsicality, HOT and first-order thought is a third-order thought or series of thoughts. The co-presence, which creates the relation, may be understood using Merleau-Ponty’s concept of vertical time “with layers and depths that remain latently present, as opposed to linear time with its vanishing present and specious notion of progress” (Johnson in Johnson 1993: 42). Higher- and lower-order thoughts happen with varying speeds, the first overlapping the second, and this overlap, which creates the relation between them, is an instance of vertical time, the resonance of retention with protention.31 We do not know if this relation or overlap is reducible to a third brain state, or whether it is subserved by the same two brain states that allow the mental states to have this relation in the first place. The point is that the either/or, intrinsicality/extrinsicality argument does not accurately describe dynamic localisation evident in neurological, cognitive or phenomenological contexts. A conscious mental state of a sensation is both having that sensation and knowing one is having that sensation, but this need not be divisible into two discrete brain states one consecutively following the other. Something of this could also be happening while one re-inspects Figure 4, reproduced above which shows us how the eye works. We become conscious of our gaze as an object of thought while we are looking. And when we see paint represented as paint or when we look at ourselves in the mirror, seeing and being seen, these moments do not necessarily require two different configurations of the brain, but one continuous brain state.32 30

(Merleau-Ponty in Johnson 1993: 79). This also serves as a context for recently made statements about brain activity “The ability to create reality […] requires massive cooperation between the activity of neuronal elements and the silence of many others. Indeed, as in music, in brain function the silences (of neurons) are as important as the activity in defining perception” (Llinás 2008: 71). 31 Also, see Husserl’s analysis of the consciousness of time, which emphasizes an overlapping of retention and protention (Zahavi 2003: 157-80). 32 “[…] one must give up trying to establish the moment where Latin becomes French” (Merleau-Ponty in Johnson 1993: 78). He also writes: “it is the body which

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This is also the case with the intrinsicality and extrinsicality of lower-order thoughts and higher-order thoughts; they form a continuum, oscillating between intensities and modes of selfconsciousness. They are theoretical posits and their distinctness or non-distinctness is also theoretical. It may be important to retain the contrast between HOTs and lower-order thoughts but they do not have membranes around them to make them free standing, isolated units. The frame-in-a-frame engages a complex consciousness that relies on a gross architecture of relations (physical frame, fictional frame, frame of the eye, mental vision) but also engages with, anticipates and activates highly adaptable, novel, and complex neural relationships and connections at the microstructural level. This is not to say that fine-grained mental processes have clear or mimetic correspondences with processes happening at the neural level, a relationship sometimes called identity theory. The relationship may be massively unequal, indirect, and asymmetrical, but studies in neuroscience are still inconclusive about the correspondences between complex thoughts and brain processes, with only relatively coarse correspondences. Advances in nano-wave technology might advance our knowledge of how brain processes and patterns subserve complex conscious thought but there may well be no direct, mimetic relationship between a thirdorder thought and electro-physical substrates, or at least no simple way to represent, measure or locate neurological processes subserving this mental state, especially if that state is a double articulation such as paint-as-paint.33

comes to bestride duration […] when men or horses [referring to Marey’s images of motion] are photographed during their motion they are both: ‘leaving here, going there’ because they have a foot in each instant” (145). There may be some virtue in abandoning a similar project in neuroscience which depends on the notion of distinct, separate states, one extrinsic to the other, succeeding each other in measured units. 33 Experiments to do with percepts involved in facial recognition show that even with this relatively simple brain function, at least compared to those involved in conscious mental states attending Las Meninas, the categories we use to measure brain states and how they subserve higher mental processes are inadequate: “The brain response is a construct in a multi-dimensional state manifested by amplitudes of oscillatory responses, topological coordinates, and changes in the time axis following presentation of the percepts including delays and prolongations, coherence between locations. Only a new metrics embracing all these parameters can be representative for the dynamics of functionality in the brain” (Baúar and Güntekin 2006: 43).

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Vermeer Whereas in Las Meninas the viewer is confronted by a multiplicity of gazes which multiply his or her own ways of seeing the painting, in Vermeer’s great reflexive painting, The Art of Painting it is the multiplicity of types of surfaces and planes which continually force the viewer to re-focus his or her consciousness. Vermeer’s painting seems to peel off layers before us. In the foreground, a pictorial tapestry acts as a curtain that has been held aside to reveal the next layer of pictorial representation: the back of an artist whose identity remains unknown, seated at his easel, he is painting a canvas which mimics the real life canvas. The next layer of representation presented to us, parallel to the picture plane, and further into the picture space next to the window is a model who is dressed as Clio, the Muse of History (her classical costume is another surface of signification). Prominent on the wall behind the artist's model, which represents yet another pictorial surface is a precise and detailed a map of the United Provinces. On the border are views of the principal towns: yet more ways of seeing in and focussing. This is a complex staging from an outside view, to the drama between original and copy, and faceless artist and model, whose face we see but whose identity is subsumed in her role as the muse of History. This is a pun: Vermeer or his substitute, is painting a history-painting of History herself. The ‘original’ of the model is dressed in the counterfeit of history; the artist is a counterfeit Vermeer, as the canvas he paints is a counterfeit of the true canvas before our eyes (although we there is also the dilemma of paint-aspaint and canvas-as-canvas, here too). And as if to parody the complex viewing processes involved here, we have a map which signifies both distance and microscopic detail on the wall at the back of the room. It is, in fact, painstakingly rendered, yet as a map, it also signifies the great outside, the geographical location which is the figurative and actual setting for the mise-en-scène, painting, and the projected painting nested inside (as in the Teniers picture). But also, we have a codified or symbolic way of seeing an image, represented by a map and its topographical conventions in contrast to the codes of vision we use to decipher the illusionism of painting.34 It is implicit 34

As noted by Stoichita 1997:183. In neuroscience, Harth theorised that art is an interplay of these two modes of seeing, mental images and their relation to optical

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that the theme is the genesis of history painting and the painting is about this particular painting, as a slice of life. As with Velázquez, Vermeer is engaging a complex consciousness by staging different ways of seeing, in this case by presenting different layers of the image and contrasting different systems of signs. But there is more than just a kind of proto-semiotics here. As with Las Meninas, art historians have consistently ignored the cooperation of modes of consciousness with these layers of representation. Whereas in Las Meninas the frames-in-frames cooperate with various images of ‘sight watched’ Vermeer’s painting more consciensciously allows us to see various frames-in-frames in cooperation with a succession of immensely detailed surfaces (tapestry, canvas, maps, walls), which also represent different kinds visual systems or conventions. Yet, at the same time, each surface acts as a pictorial plane denoting a new depth, a new focus. Although some of these surfaces are framed, the picture works differently from the system of gazes in Las Meninas. But as with that picture, consciousness adopts various focal points and continues with this process several times until one gets the contradictory impression of two revelatory experiences, consciousness overwritten or stripped bare in cooperation with viewing the surfaces within surfaces of the painting. The tapestry, and even the surface of the canvas is stripped away from our field of vision (and momentarily from our consciousness) and is instead, pasted onto the next field of vision, the artist’s canvas, reintroduced into our consciousness, and we can step backwards or forwards, conceal or reveal. Whereas in the painting these surfaces are staged and laid out in precise areas with little overlapping, the mental image of Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, seen for example when we close our eyes and imagine it (an often underestimated experience of the art experience), the impression of these surfaces is decidedly like a palimpsest, where the details of the tapestry meld with those of the map on the back wall as our memories wax and wane. Centuries later, Matisse would paint these planes as contiguous, lying side-by-side with each other and flat, allowing us to transcend the binocular rivalry with a sense of the overall design and superposition but Vermeer paints these planes and specialisms of sight (tapestries, maps and canvases and allegories of history) as a series of

processing (Harth 1998: 99-99). This painting seems to foreground this creative and dynamic contrast.

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transitions, a telos of discovery linked to the projection of depth and time. These images of layers, which are also surfaces, different media and spatial planes, appear as a room with depth and as a seriality of signs. The distance between each layer is invisible yet our consciousness rushes to clothe the space with a sense of intelligible exposition. The weft and warp of the tapestry in the foreground plane, painted with an uncanny exactitude, and the cracks in the surface of the map in the background seem polarised in space, far away from each other. Yet all the details which go to make up a lucid consciousness of Vermeer’s vision fade into the superordinate consciousness that all is an inanimate, flat illusion. Note that consciousness of the physical surface of the painting must be suspended if that surface is pierced by consciousness of what it represents, and the latter must be suspended when consciousness of the surface again arises, as it inevitably does in consideration of the fictive canvas which doubly articulates the flatness of the actual, physical painting. This is the interplay of reserved conscious points or states that need to be maintained in order for the play between them to continue.35 The question arises, do I have a consciousness of a higher-order thought of the physical surface of the painting while I am looking at what it represents, the image? And do I have a consciousness of its suspension while I am looking at the image? The question can also be asked in reverse order. The question itself is a representation of (and an engagement with) a quality in con35

Again, I go back to Harth 1999 for some neurological and evolutionary arguments to do with the fascination that art is able to stimulate because of the continuing interaction in the mind between symbolic, codified versus topological representational modes of processing the visible world, which goes some way (certainly not all the way) to explaining how compelling this kind of visual experience can be. As a fact in the visual field, the frame-in-the-frame is processed by the visual cortex yet understood with other brain areas to do with memory and perhaps temporal reasoning, and certainly those processes which are involved in self-monitoring. The specific conscious experience of the frame-in-the-frame in a particular painting or other work of art is a dynamic localisation of brain activities which may involve different areas of the brain depending on the artwork and the person processing it. During the processing of a painting, an art historian will probably have different brain areas activated to those in a musician’s mind, or for that matter, a musician who does not share the same cultural conventions and assumptions that the work of art may presuppose and address. But there are general and specific dimensions to this experience and the interplay between these dimensions should form the objectives of research in science and art.

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sciousness that finds the image and its surface so captivating, deferring resolution. The painting reminds us that it is possible to see surfaces within surfaces which cooperate with various ideological stages of interpretation of what the painting is about (the rhetorical intersection of allegory and real life; the political, religious and social state of affairs that the painting seems to thematise). But this series of appearances of the painting, which make us aware of our ways of seeing, is at the same time accompanied by important, ongoing adjustments in consciousness becoming self-consciousness, processes which not only subserve various interpretations of the painting but are revealed in those interpretations. In Jan Vermeer’s Woman with a Balance (1662-63) the frame-inthe-frame, a picture shown on the wall in the background is used in the service of bringing to mind the notion of the physical embodiment of artistic and spiritual principles. We see the profile of a woman who is pregnant, she delicately holds a balance in her hand appearing to weigh up pearls or jewels before the afternoon light filtering through a window in front of her. Behind her is a framed picture of Christ triumphant over death at the Last Judgment. Both this fictional painting and the woman’s body are embodiments of new life. As Christ acts as a fulcrum in the equilibrium between life and death, she holds the balance. The nesting of one picture inside another mimics the woman’s pregnancy and the “nesting” of the Holy Spirit in the body of the woman/painting. The nested painting makes us conscious of an ideal, divine creation or re-creation after the last judgment, contrasted with human procreation. This in turn, inevitably reflects upon that other type of human creation, the imagination responsible for crafting our works of art. Indeed, the Woman with the Balance makes us conscious of three kinds of creativity: art reflecting procreation reflecting divine creativity. This triggers thoughts about materiality and spirituality and the uncertain status of art lodged between them; like man, art has both a material aspect and is a carrier of meaning. The canvas doubles as the physical bearer, the manifestation of metaphysical thought, as Christ is the bearer of the Holy Spirit and as the woman bears her unborn child. The weighing up is an entirely appropriate visual and symbolic process of discerning the interpretations or multiple truths involved in this work, much like the dark figure Nieto in the door way in the background of Velázquez’s Las Meninas who strikes us as someone

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who assesses the visual evidence before him, as we do. In Vermeer’s painting, the woman’s weighing up represents the balance of analogies, an equilibrium of commitments to each of the possible narratives held in check by an expansive consciousness, able to take text and subtext, image and nested image into its domain. The consciousness that holds these higher-order thoughts together adds one more level of creativity to the Woman with the Balance: the viewer’s re-figuration of the work of art, the creative engagement with the work of art that is also co-creative. Thus, the viewer’s creative act is in direct relation to the analogous worlds of creation set in motion by the image and its internal spaces. But this creativity is bound up closely with judgment, the Last Judgment which brings the celestial and sublunary worlds into final balance and is analogous with the judgment implicit in the scales held by the woman. The sets of dualities: Christ and Holy Spirit; Mother and unborn child; painting and inner painting; meaning and inner meaning; higher-order thought and lower-order thought are all are arranged so that through each first term, the second is visible, this forms a seriality of frames-in-frames. The system of analogies is a seriality, a succession of semantic, aesthetic, spatial, visual and mental dimensions that nevertheless escapes a linear extension, for although these analogical relations unfold step by step they are, ultimately, simultaneously immanent in the art experience where it is possible to ‘see through’ the whole series. I have added one more level of interpretation which consists in consciousness of the viewer’s involvement in the art experience. This is achieved by having a painting within a painting which makes the viewer conscious that he or she is looking at a fiction brought to mind by the depiction of a fiction within a fiction. The painting addresses the viewer with the sharp and intense personal sensibility of Baroque art, which aims at involving the viewer in the mise-en-scène as an active participant in its unfolding, a participant who also has a heightened awareness of the devices used to bring about this involvement as psychic equivalents of co-creativity and birth. The viewer is acutely aware of the cascade of analogies concerning creativity, each requiring a different yet composite aesthetic response. This involvement is finely balanced with our reflexivity, we look forward and reflectively. Our consciousness of the less obvious implications of the representation allow us to look at our earlier, more naïve first-order thoughts of what is going on here with irony, and to burst through them with

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higher-order thoughts. The figure of an ironic consciousness arises that allows us to be in two or more places at the same time. We have our enjoyment of the thing in front of us and we parody our enjoyment, in many ways this increases our enjoyment. We can also substitute “consciousness” for enjoyment in that last sentence. Our higher-order thoughts make our lower-order thoughts part of the ongoing art experience; they are elements in our picture making, in our framing of what is going on. The Myth of Arachne: Interpictorial Consciousness Vermeer’s Woman with the Balance stimulates a multiplicity of readings which are somehow synthesised into a unity of experience. This unity is structured into analogical relations that we can understand as an abstract seriality, yet each reading is also a mental state. And each reading or mental state forms an intertextual mass, which, in itself becomes an object of perception. This interweaving of mental states occurs with intertextual interpretations of art, where the critic and artist engage with several stories or myths binding them into one multi-layered exposition. It is important to note, however, that this intertextuality is also visual: the picture-in-a-picture is a way of representing and engaging with the intertexual mental process. I have argued it is more productive to see the painting-in-a-painting as simultaneity of two or more mental states rather than a binocular rivalry, yet it is clear that both divergence and convergence come into play as a tension in the visual experience of intertextuality. But to steer clear of purely textual interpretations of paintings, it is more accurate to speak of the power of images and other images embedded within them as interpictorial. The viewer has the potential to become aware of the depiction that contains other depictions, a visual expression of variable conscious moments enclosed within a master strategy of conscious thought. Consciousness must act in an interpictorial way, which means it must juggle or otherwise sustain and make co-present various mental states attending the multiplicity of images in the visual field. One pictorial consciousness or moment is played off against another, and this introduces the interplay of a first-order thought with a higher-order thought (which may happen for example, when we view an object naively and then see it for what it might a symbol of) and this may also happen when we compare different images to each

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other, or where we see one image as a symbol of another. For example, I can see Warhol’s Brillo Boxes simultaneously as Brillo Boxes and as Pop Art, I do not see why binocular rivalry need occur here, and yet there are at least two distinct mental states involved in this interpictoriality. The picture-in-the-picture is more readily discernible in its separate parts but these separate parts are, in fact, the same painting. In both the example of Brillo Boxes and the picture-inthe-picture, which appear to engage quite different visual processes, the end result is the same: in viewing the work of art we hold dissonance in counter tension to consonance and it is this that forms the logic of interpictoriality and its various forms. Memory and the ability to keep in mind several kinds of conscious mental states are important for interpictoriality to occur. Awret writes that the pictures in the background of Las Meninas are pre-reflective, on the fringe of consciousness (Awret 2008: 15) but both are allegories of artistic creativity in competition with divine creation Athene and Arachne and Apollo and Marsyas (Schneider Adams 1994:185). These paintings, like the figures depicted, add extra ‘eyes’ to Las Meninas; more conscious viewpoints that pass through our own. Stoichita perhaps does not make enough of this and interprets these paintings as references to art and part of a system of framing devices that include the door and mirror. For him, these framing devices merely mimic the art of painting and create a parody of fiction. At no point is the author inclined to examine how these complex framing devices facilitate an affective consciousness of the act of viewing. Consciousness is both an agent that affects the visuality of the art and the art that affects a reflexive consciousness. The mind seeks interpretation of the visual system of signs and finds that it is also at the same time interpreting itself and its own interpretative patterns. It sees a visual network of meanings and becomes aware of itself as a network of conscious moments. The allegories pictured in the background of Las Meninas frame the painting with the parerga of the mythology of the gods and of divine power and creativity, through or in which we should carve our consciousness of Velázquez’s painting, an artifice that challenges even Arachne’s efforts. In the first tale, the satyr Marsyas challenges Apollo to a flute playing competition and loses his life as forfeit, the second is the tale of Arachne which captured Velázquez’s imagination enough that he created a separate work years after Las Meninas, now called Las Hilanderas, or The Weavers

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(1667) in the Museo del Prado, Madrid. In Las Meninas, the picturesin-pictures refer to two types of creativity, earthly and heavenly in competition with each other and are styled on paintings by Rubens. Thus, the artist consciously sets up his own competition with that other great artist and suggests that Las Meninas might also be seen in the light of the Marsyas and Arachne’s challenges to the gods. And so, depending on whose vantage point, these pictures are actually the result of the artist’s HOTs about his painting. Thus, Awret’s observation that these are peripheral elements in the painting is true for some but for others they are evidence of higher-order thoughts about the mise-en-scène of Las Meninas and central to its meaning. Arachne, in Ovid's Metamorphoses was gifted in the art of weaving. Her tapestries were beautiful to look at, but also the way in which she wove was a sight to behold. Observers were wont to attribute her skill to the patron goddess of weaving, Pallas Athena. This made Arachne proud. Athena came to earth disguised as an old woman to test her and lays down a challenge for a weaving competition. This is not only about the skill of weaving but the skill of storytelling and both act as metaphors for each other. Athena began to weave the scene of her contest with Poseidon for the city of Athens, a tale of mortal hubris. Arachne, created a tapestry depicting the follies of Zeus in the form of the story of how he turned himself into a bull in order to rape Europa. These are mental images within the mental framework of the story, and are again, a series of nested images and images behind images, Zeus hides behind or within the appearance of a bull, and Athena is disguised as an old woman. Athena cannot find any fault in Arachne’s sublime work. Thus enraged, the goddess punishes Arachne by touching her forehead to make her feel deep shame. But after committing suicide, it is the goddess Athena who repents and transforms poor Arachne into a spider, Arachne now takes on the outer appearance of the spider as the gods have taken on their various appearances. Arachne’s descendents forever hang from threads and become great weavers. The form of story itself is an intricate weaving, and uses weaving as a metaphor for its own complexity and richness of meaning, and this is further extended by Velázquez, visually. Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas, painted more than a decade after Las Meninas, weaves further intertexual meaning into the tale. We are seduced by the intricacy of the mise-en-scène, weavers in the fore-

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ground are painted with an eye for realism and highly finished; and tapestry in the background is painted with sketchy strokes but with the fantastical bravura of Ovid’s imagery. The framed tapestry draws us into the magic realism but reflects back on the methods of representation; the viewer’s consciousness hovers between a first-order sensation: enjoyment of and involvement in the story and the depicted space, and a higher-order thought about the epistemology of representation within representation. In the Baroque period and especially with Velázquez, as we have seen, the picture-in-the-picture is often concerned with a spiritual or otherworldly narrative contained within an ‘earthly’ or exoteric outer image. But, again, this encourages the viewer to become aware of two kinds of vision, one fixed on the literal depiction of reality, the other on the meaning beyond external appearances. Layers of representation interlock with levels of consciousness in a pattern of nesting that even challenges the aesthetic experience to look at itself aesthetically, for this is a painting about a contest between different aesthetic experiences, one a response to a mortal creation, the other to a divine creation. Velázquez’s painting, which slips in and out of the viewer’s consciousness as a painting, seamlessly appears to stitch the two together. And also, as with Vermeer’s The Woman with the Balance, artistic creation is seen as a cascade of instances from divine creation, to mythological embodiment and finally, to Velázquez’s own painting. Consciousness here needs to be able to work on a number of levels at the same time, in a sense, it needs to be multi-modal and intertextual and interpictorial. For many years the subject of the painting remained obscure and debatable.36 As with Las Meninas, this only reflects Velázquez’s deliberately allusive style and a pictorial consciousness that allowed for others to come into play. He painted Arachne’s miraculous tapestry pictured in the background based on Titian’s depiction of the story of Europa and the Bull. This is the intertextual reference, but as with Vermeer in The Art of Painting, the artist has represented another medium of representation with paint: a tapestry which appears as a tapestry, but is in fact, paint. This is the illusion of transmediation 36 As recently as 1980, some art historians tried to challenge the consensus that the painting portrayed the story of Arachne, instead suggesting that the painting refers to the story of Lucretia (Millner 1980: 376-385). A more thorough and persuasive article with much more visual analysis is provided by Stapleford and Potter 1987: 159-181, which firmly re-establishes the link with Ovid’s story of Arachne.

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where a sculpture, tapestry, architectural details, or map for example appear as different material from which they are actually made. This is a favourite device in late Renaissance and Baroque art, probably stemming from the paragone tradition of competition between the arts of painting and sculpture which often consisted of depicting examples from these different media, side by side, one of the better known examples being Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. This kind of illusion requires that consciousness negotiates the visual contradiction “paint not paint” or “tapestry not tapestry” a contradiction that in some minds is resolvable. Sometimes, requiring even more higherorder thought, this illusion of different media works well in conjunction with intertextuality. Thus for example, the nested image of Europa and the Bull in Las Hilanderas refers to Titian’s work which we are encouraged to compare to Velázquez’s painting but the illusion of transmediation (Titian’s work transformed into a tapestry) allows the work to be polysemic: it also refers to the story of Arachne and also to the myth illustrating divine folly, Zeus in the form of a bull raping Europa. Velázquez here is spinning a tale of his own, elaborating a story which has in itself so many nested images and layers of meaning: Arachne weaves an image of divine folly; Athena weaves a tapestry of mortal hubris. As with the various metamorphoses inherent in the story, we have visualised here, a myth within a myth. I want to make three points here. First, weaving is a transmediation of intertextuality and interpictoriality, that is, both in Velázquez’s terms and in the terms of the story of Arachne and Athena, both examples use intertextual references to other stories and paintings in order to spin their tale. One might say that Velázquez is extending the latent system of intertextuality evident in Ovid’s story to include his own, visually representing and continuing the process of quoting and nesting works of art for comparison with the reference to Titian’s work. He thus represents a competition between artists as the tale of the mythical weaving competition by weaving Titian’s painted tapestry into the story. Second, intertextuality requires a particular kind of consciousness that is involved in its deployment: multimodal, cooccurent and cooperative, where one moment of consciousness needs to be played off against another for a third or fourth to emerge. Ultimately, this system of relative perspectivisms becomes self-reflexive. A third point, consciousness can appear to go in two opposing directions. A perversity of logic also allows for Arachne’s tapestry to be

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understood as a copy of Titian’s work; we are conscious of a number of possibilities, some of them complementary, some in contradiction but it is map of consciousness, its processes; its advances and withdrawals that we are left to ponder as the most tangible experience of the work of art. For this map of our individual consciousness is inscribed upon the imagery of the painting when we view it over and again, it reflects, with its shapes and forms, the unfolding of the organisation of our conscious thoughts involved with that painting.

Pen and ink drawing showing compositional construction of Las Hilanderas, or The Weavers (1667) by Velázquez

Re-viewing is also a re-viewing of one’s prior conscious states and their relations, which may be enhanced by or set against my present consciousness. Consciousness thus appears nested within the world and the world of the painting and as an object of its own gazing. Whenever I revisit paintings after many years, I find in the tiniest details of a painting a consciousness I left behind which springs to life again and is co-present with my current self-consciousness. This is a kind of intertextuality involved with the world that comes full circle. Patterns of composition, motifs, gestures and the poses of figures

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can all act in the same manner and as interpictorial elements referring to other paintings or sculptures; the multiplicity of conscious mutations seem endless. In Las Hilanderas the shape of the circle is used as a compositional device but one with a number of semantic associations and intertextual meanings. The painting is divided into a dark or sublunary foreground chamber and a brightly lit celestial upper chamber in the background framed by an arch. Other striking visual details are the circular spinning wheel lit up in the dark in the foreground and the darkened, mysterious and powerful architectural feature in the background in the upper chamber, the oculus. We are clearly dealing here with a system of opposites: the spinning wheel (likened to the wheel of fortune surrounded by the Fates) which signifies the world of mutability and change (importantly also the recurrence of myth), its spokes vanish into a blur of speed, an echo or pale imitation of the inscrutable, fixed, black circular disk the “eye of god” suspended in the background, like a solar eclipse. The compositional relationships between different circular areas above and below, left and right sides of the painting create regular, symmetrical, saccadic rhythms and relationships suggesting harmony and accord but also tension and counter tension. There is a visual circularity in composition and motifs and a circular logic at work which links the lower world of consciousness and earthly creativity with the higher. There are five figures in the foreground and five in the background. The heads of the women in the foreground are placed in a circular pattern rising up on both sides and this pattern is repeated by the line of heads in the upper chamber, where Pallas Athena, Arachne and the Three Graces or Muses have been convincingly identified (Stapleford and Potter 1987: 172). The Fates in the foreground represent the cycle (circle) of the ages of man, the lunar cycle (change), destruction and mortality with the wheel of fortune moves like the spinning wheel (159-181). The Three Graces in the upper chamber oppose the forces of the Fates representing timeless beauty and art. It would seem also that the disguised nature of these allegorical figures by the artist articulates the manifestation of the celestial in the material of the sublunary (art materialises and represents divine principles) and sets off a contrast between divine creativity and human, divine representation in the earthly world (a theme strengthened by Zeus’ disguise as a bull, Pallas Athena’s as an old woman) and the art of Velázquez who disguises themes of divinity and immutable ideals in the apparent ordi-

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nariness of a scene of spinning and weaving women in recognisable Spanish seventeenth century costumes. Consciousness must juggle lower-order disguised appearances of reality and higher-order thought, each centred on the lower and upper chambers respectively, while dealing with the multilayered aspects of the myth in a myth. The ladder, so prominent in the background on the left reaches from the lower steps of creation (and consciousness) to the higher and is a material linking device leading from lower to higher parts of the picture and mimics another visual device in the upper chamber which connects the lower-orders to the higher, this time the shaft of light streaming in from the left and indicated by the dotted lines, here. It is temping to see both ladder and shaft of light signifying various emanation cosmologies (the chain of being is one of them) whose source at the top is invariably light or god leading down to a series of lesser intelligences (one might say levels of consciousness) or angels, down to man and to base matter via animals and the four elements.37 Some of these emanation schema that denote different stages of enlightenment, or perfection, planes of existence or celestial and sublunary intelligences are also related to Dante’s different spheres which he traverses in his Divine Comedy. Both the circle and the ladder, the shaft of light, the upper and lower chamber are all carefully used by the artist as compositional constructs as well as symbols, co-opting levels of interpretation and visual harmony in Las Hilanderas. It is not without significance that each abstract and allegorical interpretation presages an image of an anagogic movement, and each interpretation that takes us back to the sensus litteralis to the lower chamber and to a form of representation that requires a lowerorder thought about what it is about. This works in conjunction with spatial awareness and saccadic rhythms. Thus, the painting’s complex visual structure of circular movements, frame-in-the-frame devices and vertical uprights and contrast is a seriality of conscious states lying parallel with cosmological and mythological narratives. Through a system of transformations of consciousness which begins by revealing the identities of the figures in the lower chamber, through to the upper chamber, we identify the subject of the tapestry and we 37

Although Stapleford and Potter persuasively argue for the linkage between the ladder and the shaft of light using various references to other pictures, I prefer to see that this motif is more specifically about different steps from higher to lower found in many emanation systems, either as steps or ladders or circles within circles.

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identity the hidden consciousness of the artist as a target state for our own conscious inspection. I have shown how the frame-in-the-frame used here (encapsulating, seeing in, distancing) is one of Velázquez’s favourite compositional and interpretative devices. The celestial image of the tapestry is surrounded by at least four framing devices, each alerting us to a seriality of appearances; they also alert our higher-order thoughts that this is not an ordinary painting of an ordinary story (or an ordinary tapestry), but a representation inside a representation that questions the modalities of representation and what it is able to convey in critical, allegorical and spiritual terms. The ‘tapestry’ is the crowning glory of the ‘lower’ actions of human labour which deal with thread, cotton and cloth. Not incidentally is the canvas which Velázquez has painted on, made also of threads and this reality is alluded to by the theme of cloth and weaving (Stapleford and Potter: 178). The fact that the artist has disguised painting as tapestry is the ultimate artistic transformation from base matter. The painting not only glorifies painting but the heights of human consciousness which goes beyond the meaninglessness of base matter and the sensus litteralis. As in Las Meninas, the painting “brackets out” (to use Husserlian terminology) the natural standpoint of interpretation, the painting’s material substrate, and it thus brackets out itself, and in so doing, displaces the form of interpretation focussed on the way of its making, its stylistic particularity (although I have already mentioned the sketchy and finished styles the artist employs here). The bracketing out does not eliminate material form, or consciousness of it, but puts it into reserve; it is ‘visibly out of the frame’. It functions from its position as outcast brought to mind by the working with the hands, the labour of carding, spooling, weaving; the threads are the origins of the work of art, seen within its pictorial space, yet they are its basest form, bracketed out from consideration so that we may feel free to move in the rarefied air of higher meaning and interpretation. We must also remember that this is a tale about hubris. Thus, ultimately, our consciousness comes full circle because we are presented with a painting whose levels of meaning require that consciousness transform itself from genre to allegorical and theological modes in order to bring us back to ‘painting’ and our ways of looking at painting and the ways in which humans can understand what it is they see. The painting is a circle of consciousness; we are restored to our first-

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order thought that this is a painting through an impressive array of higher-order thoughts about the painting and its contents. And in the reflexive movement of a circle the painting allows consciousness of the viewer’s looking, his or her involvement with the image, it is a visual record of what happens to consciousness during the experience of the work of art and its creation, and when this visual record is reread, we retrace the circle of consciousness as a form of creation to which the painting allegorically alludes. Circularity appears as an image of consciousness projected visually in painting, and with the circularity of the story which returns in Velázquez’s painted version. Just as we see paint as tapestry and paint-as-paint by seeing the image from a lower-order thought through a higher order one, we see Velázquez’s painting both as a slice of Spanish reality, a scene of simple spinners at their work and as the recurrence of the myth of Arachne in whom all spinners have their mythical origin, we see one as the other, as co-emergent. Interpictoriality allows for one vision to be seen through the other and it is based on the peculiar co-presence of higher-order thought and lower-order thought, critical analysis and ‘naïve’ enjoyment, respectively. And it is with the frame-in-the-frame and with circles-in-circles that such a co-presence is made possible visually. Interpictoriality in the Nineteenth Century With many examples of the frame-in-the-frame works of art appear to frame other works art by other artists. This practice continued in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when it became useful to express a new museum consciousness. Degas, Manet, Van Gogh, Gauguin and many others in this period used the picture-in-the-picture to ‘quote’ works of art by other artists, not merely to structure artistic messages but also to acknowledge their consciousness of art history, and as an acknowledgment of their own place in artistic traditions. Thus, the frame-in-the-frame in this period was used to establish a widely shared consciousness amongst the artistic community of the interwoven, indeed, interpictorial quality of art working hand in hand with the intertextuality of interpretations. Part of this kind of structuring of consciousness entailed building the phenomenology of viewing into the conscious experience of art. Although these artists painted the moment, they also painted the moment as an exemplification of a con-

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sciousness of the history of art. Ultimately, through this interpictorial consciousness arose various manipulations of the frame-in-the-frame, not only as references to cultural history but as a way of inviting formal, technical and aesthetic responses to the visual organisation of these references. The frame-in-the-frame was also a useful tool in articulating the new museum and gallery consciousness that lead not only to new ways of looking at pictures and constructing them but to the thematisation of this newness itself, this has been pointed out by art historians and philosophers, Germain Bazin, Andre Malraux, Michel Foucault and Michael Fried. Many of these thinkers chose the example of Manet’s use of other artists’ paintings within his own work as indicative of the rise of the role of the museum as part of artistic experience, although, it must be said, the Teniers picture analysed by Husserl prefigures this mentality. The diversity of paintings available in museum and gallery collections encouraged consciousness of style and art history to become an important theme and method of interpreting painting. Public collections of paintings and artefacts from all over the world not only generated paintings out of paintings but became a new source of exploitation for subject matter: this is the period where we have paintings of viewers of art in museums as a way to pictorialise looking and thinking about art. The tradition of copying masters works as part of the educational tradition of fine art academies also lead to the increased use of the frame-in-the-frame as a way of acknowledging masters’ works. It had always been common for artists to be excellent copyists of classical works, Degas, for example, was one of the finest draughtsmen. The inclusion of other artists’ works in his pictures was a natural outcome of this artistic training. The practice of copying earlier works exercised an intersubjective consciousness both as a physical and intellectual process; it provided the opportunity for familiarity with the extremely subtle and delicate lines and brushstrokes that express the artist’s sensuous and perceptual involvement with materials. Such an intersubjective intimacy gave copyists insights into their predecessors’ fine-grained thought processes involved in producing works of art. Through copying works, artists often feel they are sharing similar sensations associated with closeness to the pictorial surface where the artist has left a series of traces in the way the paint or materials have been treated. Certainly, this is in the phenomenology of making the

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art; and sometimes this impression lingers on well after the art is done, when taken up again in the viewer’s response. In other words, at least for those who have painted with oils or other media, part of the viewing experience is involved with perceiving the haptic qualities of the paint as well as gesture, re-enacting the rhythm of lines (this is as much about sight watched as imitating a kind of dance move). It is through retracing these and the artist’s hand-eye coordination that we feel we are getting closer to the original conscious thinking that was so intimately involved with these manipulations. This involvement has become a cliché in art history often lacking analysis of the precise processes of intersubjective consciousness subserving this kind of sensitivity to painting. This is also the case for the picture-in-the-picture device. Art history of this period focuses on deciphering the contents of picturesin-pictures as clues to the aesthetic and art historical messages and there is only implicit acknowledgement of the mechanisms of consciousness involved with the production and reception of these kinds of works. One of the major works on Degas’s pictures-in-pictures remains Theodore Reff’s engaging and insightful essay (1968: 125166). Reff attributed Degas’s use of this device to a number of motivations, most of them convincing but none of them, it may be said, spring from any consideration of how the use of this device shows us the artist’s and the epoch’s patterns of image consciousness. The frame-in-the-frame may be used for a great number of complex artistic, social and philosophical messages, as I have shown, but its visual organisation is synonymous with the organisation of consciousness in which it has its origins. Not only is the division of the canvas into the frame-in-a-frame a physical compartmentalisation but also a mental one. Using complex framing devices, Degas managed to structure a consciousness of the image with the use of form and the division of space which ignite a consciousness ‘on the fly’ guiding saccadic rhythms and different focal points fixated on minute details played against the general overall composition. Yet also, many of Degas’s portraits of friends and family are composed using the frame-in-the-frame device in order to suggest psychological states, and higher-order thought becomes attuned to recognising various mental states presented as pictures-inpictures in his works. Thus, consciousness sees through the picture-inthe-picture as it experiences those mental states, while conscious all

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the time of compositional formulae and technique it has become accustomed to. This is an art which refuses to appear static because of the interaction of these various levels of consciousness which are engaged with complex spatial, semantic and psychological divisions of the visual field. Integral to this art experience is an art historical awareness of style through comparison of the inner picture with the outer, technical awareness of method through the handling of paint, which is in a sense purely autobiographical, and from there consciousness of the material substrate of the painting, pigment, brush stroke, flat surface, frame and the imitation of another artist’s style, again, pointing to the artist’s choice. The use of the inner picture is not only a key to reading the style of the rest of the painting but allows for a parody of painting or the notion of what lies ‘inside’ it—a parody of a painting’s apparent contents. As with the concept of the parergon, the artist’s work is his, and yet, with reference to the internal imitation, fictionally shown as not his. The picture-in-a-picture is ‘in’ the work yet it is nothing other than the work it appears to be lodged in. The work of the other artist alluded to in the work is a supplementary presence. If Degas includes a picture of Cranach in his work, as he did and executed with utmost faithfulness, this is the double-speak of a ‘Cranach-not-Cranach’. Reff does well to analyse Degas’s use of visual psychology in the form of the picture-in-the-picture. However, the limitations of Reff’s study are emblematic of the limited focus of traditional art history which sees, for example, portraits simply as studies of emotional states and attitudes and thus he tends to reduce the picture-in-thepicture to a device used by Degas in his portraits to convey aspects of the sitter’s or artist’s personality, or the artist’s admiration for artistic styles other than his own. But other interpretations might be supported. Implicit in Reff’s own analysis is the suspicion that there is more to the use of this device. At several points in the text, Reff describes the psychological state of those portrayed by Degas as “withdrawn” “remote” or suffering from some sort of “hermetic effect”—an implicit vocabulary of the introverted. This withdrawn, introspective placidity, the underwhelming meditative state that Degas subtly suggests that is delicate and yet highly strung is articulated structurally by the painting-in-the-painting regardless of its message. For Reff, this introspection of Degas’s subjects never seems to be wholly out of reach, for the embedded image that so often accompa-

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nies these pensive individuals appears to index the mental contents of their introspection. But the paintings-in-paintings do not function merely as the text embedded in a cartouche—the bubble—as it does in cartoon comics and used to show an individual’s thoughts? The embedded painting is a pictorialisation of the effects of selfconsciousness. Just as the painting refers to itself with the device of the picture-in-the-picture, consciousness refers to itself by virtue of a higher-order thought targeting a mental state attending the image. The painting appears to withdraw into itself and this is a demonstration of the mental process involved in painting—withdrawal from gazing at the world into gazing at oneself engaged in the world. For Hegel, painting is in itself an abstract, introspective and therefore selfreflexive art, signified primarily by the fact that it is two-dimensional: The reduction of the three dimensions to a plane surface is implicit in the principle of withdrawing into inwardness, this can be interpreted in a spatial form as inwardness only by virtue of the way it does not allow externality to remain complete but curtails it [...] In painting [...] the content is the spiritual inner life which can be made manifest in the external world only as withdrawal from the external world into itself (Hegel in Podro 1984: 20).

Degas’s work shows us a picture-in-a-picture as a demonstration of the character of the artistic process of painting, the capability of painting to copy itself in miniature, within itself, which cooperates with the withdrawal of painting into inwardness in the viewer, the sitter and the artist’s worlds. Painting is silent in the most obvious sense but this silence is doubled by the imagery of an empty room or a brooding figure. And similarly, frames are a visual doubling of a psychological framing or focus on a mental state. Reff is keen to show us that Degas was quite aware of the appearance of the wooden frames surrounding his paintings and there are many sketches by him of different kinds, and he was known to have chosen them with great care for their different psychological effects. Frames were not only devices used to surround a painting, they were also to be used as subjects of painting, this is already an interesting paradox—where the function of a frame (to capture, focus, separate) is drawn inside the painting itself, so to speak, as evidence of the choice of a particular kind of frame and in relation to the fictive one, a relationship on display which becomes part of the painting’s meaning.

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Degas, Interior at Menil-Hubert, 1892 after original.

The world of the outside is internalised and translated from the physical to the mental. Yet the reverse is also true: while it is difficult to imagine a painting existing outside of the frame, yet this is what Degas and many other artists achieved, in effect, when they painted a picture-in-a-picture which is also a picture outside of a picture (if one were to begin with the innermost painting as a reference point). This puts a different gloss on the Hegelian introspection and withdrawal thesis. Like most binaries, withdrawal from the world and involvement in it are strangely cooperative, both directions are taken in the act of painting and interpreting, and both are mental acts in close relation with or toward external materials. But there is also an argument that consciousness is already in the world when approaching the physicality of paint. On this view, introspection is a myth, because the presence of consciousness is occluded or made absent in introspection but is, in fact, revealed. What seems like introspection in Degas is the exteriorisation of such a process by the expressive power of paint and in engagement with being-in-the-world. As I have mentioned, Reff’s essay on Degas interprets the-picturein-the-picture as a device for communicating a story of some kind or

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mood, or even Degas’s taste in collecting. The problem with these explanations is that it they are one-directional: they posit the viewer as a passive recipient of information lodged by the artist. The different ways of processing that information creates the art experience. When an artist copies a master’s work of art (or a viewer recreates in her mind the rhythm and textures of the brushstrokes), it is possible to feel as if one is experiencing some of the original sensations that were engaged in the production of the image. Similarly, for the viewer, his or her perceptions engage with the external marks or signs of the artist’s perceptions in order for the art experience to take place with the work of art. The picture-in-the picture allows the viewer and artist to become conscious of these sensations; the artist does not dictate the viewer’s consciousness but gives it choices. The artist’s lines and colours form a framework of sensations within and upon which a higher-order consciousness emerges. Yet the self-consciousness arising from contemplation of the picture-in-the-picture is not a simple turning back upon consciousness but an extension into the external world, as surely as Degas’s sitters emerge from their withdrawal with the aid of the picture-in-thepicture. If Degas’s picture-in-the-picture is an emergence it is an emergence of sensation in consciousness which is also a way of recognising the world, it is an emergence out of something and into something. In 1892, Degas painted interior scenes of a mansion he was staying in at Menil-Hubert, the country estate of his childhood friend, Paul Valpinçon. They are both void of figures but crowded with frames and frames-in-frames, one of a billiard room, another of a bedroom. Both are the kind of compositions that Edward Hopper was to paint over and again in the twentieth century, using windows and paintings to capture various mental states of the figures portrayed. Degas managed to intimate various mental states without human figures. In the bedroom scene, there is an open door to the right, which suggests a presence, yet this only serves to emphasise emptiness. And in emptying out the painting of any obvious ideological message and identity, Degas succeeded not only in making the formal composition speak volumes but he invited the viewer’s consciousness to approach his own; both meet on the projected plane of absence here. The viewer searches for clues, for some form of narrative but is not easily rewarded. Consciousness is directed to a consideration of the various

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transformations of the frames; the painting is strongly linear, the artist was perhaps recalling here Ingres’s advice to him many years before, to “draw lines, young man, many lines.” The painting is relentless in its abstraction, worked into measured, symmetrical relationships; and between the two pictures in black frames is a mirror. The pictures serve to present themes of symmetry, duplication, and capture within the rigid intellectual order of the space. There is the duplicative power of the mirror which reproduces the fancy wallpaper on the opposite wall, the same wallpaper design on which the mirror is mounted. This clearly creates a back to front situation where background becomes foreground, and the unseen wall where the viewer is situated is reflected in the mirror, the clash of wallpaper design and its mirror reflection appear contiguous on the same plane, a device that was to become one of Matisse’s favourites; the frame of the mirror is full of information. In this reflection is another picture, and even a view into another room with another painting in it, en abyme. This is the eye, indeed, the ‘retinal image’ of the room and by extension, the painting itself. The painting is ‘in’ the reflection of the mirror, the mirror is ‘in’ the room and ‘in’ the painting. This engages consciousness in a framework of almost mathematical angles and projections, within which it generates continually conscious states engaged with dynamic formal relationships caught within the constant of an overall order. In this painting, Degas demonstrated a catalogue of illusionist windows and frames in order to render different kinds of space, an empty doorway to another room that ushers in a block of light on the floor which, in turn, creates another abstract frame; this square patch of light is matched by the white door; even the heavy black frames on either side of the mirror and the square cupboards of the washstand are all a series of square modules. A carefully measured system of proportions is evident here, as are allusions to the basic elements arranged somewhat along the lines of Velázquez’s Las Meninas, which Degas was known to have studied. These squares are multivalent and present us with properties such as opaque, transparent, reflected, patterned, bright, dark, stretched, and embedded and all are first-order thoughts which form a substructure for an overall awareness of a system of counterbalances. Sharing synergies with the Teniers picture, the painting is a clear demonstration of how frames within frames induce a consciousness that blurs the boundaries of internalist mentalistic attitudes and externalist views of reality, allowing these crude charac-

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terisations to appear lodged one inside the other in art. The framed internal spaces which also double as flat, patterned blocks and surfaces, also have embedded in them other framed spaces and blocks, yet because they have been denuded of precise identities by the impressionist execution, no doubt to keep the general design foremost in mind, only the outlines and frames emerge into a semi-abstract general view. It is through the ‘painterliness’ of the wallpaper composed of quick, regular brushstrokes (and their ‘mirror reflection’), and the unfinished appearance of the painting that Degas allows the substructure of consciousness to emerge as something appearing before the eyes. We ‘see in’ the brushstrokes the material substrate of the work, the paint, the brush, the artist’s gesture, yet we also see in the room and the reflection, almost as a gestalt image, a shimmering effect hovering between two or three perceptions which, judging by how often it was used by Degas (and later by Matisse) was surely intentional. But the frames-in-frames do not only indicate the frame of the painting as it is presented to us but they also mimic the actions of our seeing-in, invited to duplicate itself. There are many kinds of seeing-in here, and Degas’s painting allows consciousness to take them all into its purview. He is not only painting his own visual thought or “state of eyes” as he put it,38 but his consciousness of how these devices provide an interplay of percepts. One of the most fascinating is the play between the seeing in or through the painted surface to the wallpapered surface of the wall, which in turn gives way to a mirror reflection and many other seeing in situations, all achieved by the regress of the frame-in-the-frame. If the mirror and its images ape the reflective capacities of the retinal image, they also figure forth the self-reflection of the inner eye, the mental image of aporias, where one 38

The following letter of a conversation Degas had in 1892 makes it quite clear that the artist was aware that painting was (despite his sarcasm) more than just about copying nature: “The fruits of my travels this summer. I stood at the doors of railway carriages and looked around vaguely. That gave me the idea of doing some landscapes. There are 21 of them,” “What? Very vague things?” “'Perhaps” “States of mind?” said my father. “Amiel has said ‘A landscape is a state of mind.’ Do you like the phrase?” “States of eyes” replied Degas. “We do not use such pretentious language.” Quoted and translated by Kendall 1988: 180.

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inanimate frame appears to acknowledge the other without human agent. Consciousness appears to travel through these enclosed spaces, alighting on these forms and is alternately fixed, then released by them. In this restlessness of grappling with the fragmentation of the image and the elusiveness of place, it does occasionally find repose yet in the loneliness of solipsism, which in turn, vanishes into an inhuman flatness. One of Degas’s best known group portraits is of the Bellelli family. In 1862 Degas painted his aunt, Baroness Laura Bellelli and her two daughters (with his uncle, the Baron, detached and painted with his back to us, far to the right). It is not clear whether this arrangement is meant to show his aunt’s emotional estrangement from her husband or whether this formal arrangement recalls the fact that the family had just recently suffered the loss of the patriarch of the family, the Baroness’s father, and Degas’s great uncle. Degas contrived to paint prominently in the background one of his own paintings, another portrait, this time of his father, Auguste, in an elaborate frame, the kind of frame that appears as if one has been set inside the other as a series of steps, regressing further into space on a perspectival scheme. There is no doubt that the visual effect emphasises gradual diminution, an apposite image of the thought of the nature of thought that accompanies the eye’s withdrawal from the world outside the frame. And so, in the Bellelli family portrait, Degas links the artist (himself), the viewer (himself again) with the family depicted by the device of a portrait of his father which is also one of his paintings. The artist thus embeds his own work. The portrait of the father, the Baroness’s brother is the human link to Degas the nephew but the inner painter also references him as the artist, such an image is perhaps also a very personal momento mori. Degas is not there in body but the paintingin-the-painting nevertheless indexes him twice (it is his father, and his painting of his father) and links brother (painting on the wall) and sister (Baroness Bellelli) together in mourning. These interesting intellectual convolutions presented by the framein-the-frame provide some answer as to why the painting holds such a fascination for the viewer, otherwise, why should a private family affair such as this affect a stranger? What made Degas believe that this portrait had anything to offer as art to the world beyond the immediate circle of his family, his aunt and cousins? It is the phenomenology of perception clearly engaged with the complexities of this work that

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may be seen to constitute the work of art as something more than a family affair, a documentary recording of external facts and features. It is interesting that other commentators on Degas have used the Lacanian psychoanalysis of the mirror phase to interpret some of his paintings (Armstrong 1988: 108-141) especially those which feature mirrors in them, which are great in number. Although somewhat overdetermined in places, such an analysis gains some purchase from the idea of the artist’s psychosexual stress, his physical lack of presence mirroring a symbolic castration both played out in the projection of his painting (signalled by his use of the mirror which doubles the reflective power of the painting), made more urgent in his cropping of the female body which serves to emphasise the viewer/artist’s gaze which cuts up the visual field, and this, in a sense, is also introduced as an element in the work, it is both his signature and his jouissance exercised over the territory of the human body. It seems, however, that his configuration is not peculiar to Degas. One can think of Edward Hopper, Max Beckmann, Giorgio de Chirico, and Japanese panels in Edo period art—the compositions of which were used as models of Degas’s cropping. All of these examples have oblique angles and cropped figures. And this tends to dissipate some of the particular intensity of the psychoanalytical project focused on the perceived peculiarites of Degas’s work. The artist may have been searching aesthetically for a solution beyond the conventional European configuration of the visual field which emphasises symmetry and perspective. Psychoanalysis has the potential to make some contribution to interpreting pictures with a claim to turning outward the artist’s subconscious for everyone to see. Once this kind of psychoanalysis is enunciated it is not surprising how it becomes part of the conscious art experience, how it is, in fact, framed by the viewer. Yet its objectification in this manner risks reducing Degas’s work to the formulas and schemes of psychoanalysis, and can serve the purpose of further disguising the interpreter’s or viewer’s own subconscious involvement with the work, as if discovering Degas’s unconscious drives somehow frees one from the obligation to examine one’s own in the art experience. This is a lack that disguises a lack. And it also sets itself up as a metacommunication pointing away from unconscious elements within it. This is why there is some truth to the argument that, in the viewing process one should try hard to psychoanalyse oneself, to integrate the

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processes of viewing with one’s subconscious life: this may mean returning to painting many times with an eye to revealing its inner, affective structures and paying attention to the twilight areas falling in and out of awareness. The Bellelli Family group portrait seems to possess the qualities of this twilight world. In the cold light of day, it seems to be a powerful study of repressed emotions, estrangement, the presence of death and the absence of the departed, an absence which is duplicated by the artist’s own absence, also intimated here. The artist uses the theme of doubling (the two daughters, the picture-in-thepicture) to create a series of identifications with the viewer and artist. Yet Degas’s compositional structures are also a means to visualise and otherwise work out how mental states are related to each other, his own and others, the painting is thus nothing less than a visual phenomenology. One might think that the Bellelli portrait is an excellent premise for psychoanalysis, except that it is Degas doing the psychoanalysis of the sitters and his own mental states involved in the painting of the portrait. In this sense, it could be argued that Degas’s family group portrait frames hidden emotions using the picture-in-the-picture to make unconscious desires explicit. This is the favoured conventional art historical interpretation of the picture-in-the-picture as a device to thematise the play of fiction and reality, a level of interpretation that is no doubt valid in a large number of cases. The psychoanalytical interpretation that sees the painting as the mirror in a “mirror phase” situation—the child’s crucial moment of identity through the establishment of the Other—and therefore, through this Other creates his or her own subdivision mimicked, perhaps, with the twinning of the two girls. This is only one level of interpretation where, in fact, in all cases of frames-in-frames a process of cooperation with different levels of meaning can be discerned. True, when artists paint portraits they usually paint from a mirror reflection of themselves, which strengthens the parallels between mirrors and paintings and Lacanian analysis, but the painting-in-the-painting also acts as a mirror of the painting outside it, in which it is lodged, even if it does not carry the same subject matter, it still points to its own fiction and to the fiction of being inside of another painting. The Bellelli picture-in-the-picture is a portrait-in-a-portrait. And as a mirror indexing the artist twice, it is a portrait of the artist’s psyche composed of several other psyches nested within each other. The

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Baroness is a daughter, cousin, wife and also a mother (and in the pyramidal composition reminds us of so many Virgin and Child paintings from Leonardo to Raphael). She is just returned from the funeral of the father. Is it rather too pat to see this arrangement as a distorted oedipal one, Degas using his portrait of his father to insinuate his own presence in the scene of mourning the absence of the father/uncle? One thing is for sure, he wanted to clearly signal his own personal connection with this scene using this device, a connection that psychoanalysis might cast as an attempt to deal with (and yet instantiate) the artist’s lack, or the lack of the artist in the scene. The complex frame-in-the-frame breaks into another space of meaning beyond the sensus litteralis of art and its interpretation. It brings together consciousness of viewing pictures as part of the subject of the picture itself. It thematises self-reflection as art and links it to physical space, the gradual diminution of the stepped frame groove by groove marks a double penetration: of space and consciousness of space, yet the frame also flags up the setting for an elaborate illusion which consciousness must seek to harmonise within itself. The Bellelli Family portrait is a deceptively simple ‘portrait’ yet with its lines, forms and colours paints the complex conscious mental states and their relations to each other familiar to us all. It is an example of the artist looking straightforward and reflexively and he was able to invite us to role-play in this mental geography. It is clear that psychoanalysis has a part to play in the processes of the production and reception of the work of art. But this exegesis should remain relational to other forms of interpretation. Within consciousness and selfconsciousness there are roles for nonconscious processes. One might say that this model of embedding is like the parergon in relation to the ergon, one defines the boundaries of the other, and each has the power to use the language of the other within its matrix, as a quote, or as a bracketing out. Unfortunately, this does not make the work of interpreting art any easier, picking out strands of unconscious thought from conscious experience with a visual transactional analysis. They are intertwined, and in the Bellelli portrait the viewer’s fascination lies with this transactional complexity, each figure is not just a brother or sister but they are interconnected by their multiple roles and ego states, and the structure of Degas’s composition articulates this with a visual pattern of shifting intersubjectivities which simultaneously involves transactional flows from higher to lower order thoughts and

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percepts. There is more to Degas than a simple subconscious reflex, Degas consciously identified many of his own subconscious reflexes and desires and turned them into the subject matter of the painting itself. Thus, his transactional painting is itself a form of psychoanalysis—but uniquely, a visual one. Not only does he discover his own unconscious drives through the doing of painting but he also visually translated the pattern and rhythms of this dawning of conscious processes. In so doing, he transformed a painting of a private family moment into something of lasting value for us all. In Degas’s Collector of Prints, 1866, a figure looks out directly at us, whom Reff describes as “an introspective and disenchanted man”. Degas contrasts his impassive expression, his inscrutable interiority with the affectivity of the bulletin board behind him, another picturein-a-picture, this time of patches of colourful Japanese fragments of cottons an silks and some other prints pinned up with the semblance of subconscious randomness, or the commonplace, that: “in their fascinating diversity of styles, seem more expressive of his real interests than he himself” writes Reff. Here, as in the other examples of Degas images insides images, the underlying assumption is that the painted figure, the body, the sitter’s head in particular, is so deliberately and closely aligned to the inner picture that it appears as a frame through which we are to place objects that lie outside of it, that is, the patchwork of coloured materials that are the sitter’s assumed objects of intention. Degas might have us believe that the patchwork of riotous, disorganised colours and patterns is Degas’s “image of thought”, an image of the disorganised rhythms, sensations and abstractions carried along by the sitter’s stream of consciousness, yet this is not a stream. The artist interpolates hand (the sitter chooses, grasps a print of a flower—paused for the moment), his back turned to a desk, the site of work (the presence of methodical thought, ordering), and further behind, there is the bulletin board, on the margins of vision and methodical thought, disorganised in the process of being sorted out, where memory and future recall are in tension. It seems necessary that the artist paint the collector’s expression as deeply thoughtful in order to strengthen the link between the objects around him and their relations with contents of these thoughts, luring the viewer into similar concatenations of mental states. The same visual technique is used in Manet’s famous portrait of Emile Zola, painted roughly a year or two after this. From the apparent innocence

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of inanimate objects and arrangements (and let us not forget the semblance of surfaces, coloured paper on bulletin board on wall—all of which are detectable and distinct objects of thought) we build up a complex image of consciousness as a system of relations of focal points and planes. The visual design of the bulletin board is only a representation of unconscious organisation. We are sometimes struck by other people’s ordering of objects, especially objects in a room where the absent person has tried to achieve the appearance of a casual naturalness which, in fact, always advertises itself as a simulacrum. Even more of a surprise is that we are often willing to play the role of sleuth in reconstructing the conscious or unconscious transactions that the relations of objects may suggest. And this happens all the time, or should happen all the time in the visual inspection of paintings. The process and its deployment with Degas’s portrait of the collector are similar to the mechanism used by Edgar Allen Poe in the Purloined Letter.39 In the story, Minister D intercepts his queen’s letter as way of blackmailing her. The way he conceals the letter from the queen’s detective, Dupin, who is ordered to retrieve it, is by ingeniously creating a screen or appearance of unconscious carelessness: by scuffing and slightly besmirching its appearance giving it the very semblance of ordinariness he then casually ‘misplaces’ or forgets it, by leaving it unattended on the mantelpiece in the very room where he receives his guest, Dupin and in order for it to be overlooked (as the slips of paper and cloth on the collector’s bulletin board in Degas’s portrait). Instead, the queen’s agent and inspector Dupin, sees beyond the appearance of the unconscious, to the elaborate artifice used to make it appear as an insignificant backdrop beyond consciousness, and steals back the letter returning it to the queen. And so in Degas’s picture and in many of his pictures, the clues telling us of unconscious desires and instincts would-be psychoanalysts are so keen to see, are placed there deliberately for us to find. The bulletin board is used ostensibly to remember things, to keep them suspended between judgements of inclusion and exclusion, a visual, mental notebook, a margin between oblivion and conscious focus, it is meant to appear as incidental. The bulletin board is framed as a picture, signalled as an 39

For a study of Derrida and Lacan’s reading of this famous short story, see Muller and Richardson, 1988.

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object of thought inside the painting. At first, it seems does seem to be an ornamental, unconscious element, but is, in fact, an elaborate visual catalogue of the collector’s (and Degas’s) aesthetic and intellectual choices, part of his conscious world, evidence of his network of thoughts and memories. More than this, using Derrida’s definition of the parergon, what seems supplemental or merely additional to the work becomes its foundation and so the bulletin board, rather than being an incidental footnote to the main subject of the collector or painter’s presence, signals part of his mental life and gives us the vital information with which to replenish the double lack, the absence of thought in the collector, and the absence of the body of the painter. The apparent disorganisation of the photographs, envelopes, calling cards, patches of silk is a visualisation of the waxing and waning of the self, its generation and self division of thoughts and their relations. What makes this interpretation convincing in my view are the processes of thought required in painting the bulletin board: moments of isolated concentration, projection and the piecing together of these in a system of relations, indicative of the painting process itself. On this view, the painting of the bulletin board becomes the medium not only through which Degas’s thought is conveyed, and his visual judgements but it is also the site in and around which the viewer’s become located. Degas has used the bulletin (or message) board as a message, telling us of his consciousness of the collector’s unconscious. It tells us of Degas’s processes of consciousness aimed at producing the semblance of arbitrary and unconscious processes. And everywhere in the work of Degas, there is evidence of a series of higher-order thoughts—manipulations of naturalism—controlling the placement of objects and the painting of faces. But these are disguised as products or targets of lower-order thought concerned simply to identify ‘what the painting is about’. The sense of discovery beyond this illusion that the painting is just a simple reproduction of reality, rather than a system of painting directed at the sublety of psychic space one of Degas’s greatest achievements: because intellectual intensity appears as the arbitrary elegance of the material world. Photography Degas’s work, contemporary with the burgeoning art form of photography and cooperating with his interest in mirrors and reflec-

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tions, highlights two differing approaches to the configuring the frame-in-the-frame. With painting, the objective was to make frames seem instantly natural, concealing the time consuming and meticulous deliberations needed for this appearance. With photography, the medium of relatively instant capture, the aim was to create the appearance of a timeless order captured instantly by the framing eye. A particularly thought provoking essay on Brassaï’s photography by Craig Owens dealt with issues of images inside images and some of their psychological repercussions (Owens 1978: 73-88). In particular, Owens drew attention to Brassaï’s doubling devices, where he repeated images, either by showing subjects next to images or mirrors, and he goes on to write about how this doubling acts as a mise en abyme in photography, and is emblematic of the nature of photography’s duplication of reality. By photographing the doubling of photography, it points to its own methods and properties as a medium of representation and points also to the representation of representation. Crucial in this regard is the use of the phrase “the splitting of the self”. For Owens, in photography there is an “implicit analogy between mirror and photograph […] the splitting of the subject by its photographic doubling” (77) so that, I would say, a woman looking in a mirror represents the analogical convergence of various mental states: such an image shows us both the duplicative power of photography and also, the psychological split of identity which occurs when looking at the Other/self in the mirror. As Owens writes, the photograph becomes a portrait of the process of becoming self-reflexive (79). But it is possible to develop this further with an analysis of the effects of the photograph-in-the-photograph. Owen’s insightful analysis cuts out a major player in the reflexive loop of the photograph about ‘photography’ and that is the self-reflexivity of the viewer who is included in this loop. The subject’s splitting is not just ‘out there’ in the fictional space, the photograph is not just ‘about itself’. The splitting is about photography’s use of photography (split off from simply viewing it as a duplicate of reality), and it is also about the photographed subject’s consciousness of herself and the event of the viewer’s consciousness, her own potential doubling or splitting during the viewing of the image as viewer and viewed. Photography’s duplicative power, premised on the frame-in-the-frame, also involves the double take of higher-order thought of another higher-order thought.

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This is especially so in photographs taken of people looking at photographs. The image of the split-image, the doubled face, the subject looking at herself in the image of a mirror or another photograph is also an image of the consciousness splitting into subject and object. The viewer is conscious of the medium of photography as a doubling or duplicative mechanism; the viewer is conscious of herself as a viewing subject, she is also conscious of the photographed subject’s viewing and assessment of her image-in-the-image. Her viewing is duplicated by ours and this is yet another form of duplication. The viewer shares the viewing of the photographed subject’s viewing (of a photograph in the photograph); also duplicated here is an awareness of the fiction of this projection: that it is not a private event that the camera has stumbled on but a staging of a complex image of thought that has been photographed. Self-consciousness arises from an awareness of the medium which carries the image but this self-consciousness can be photographed as someone looking at photograph of herself, as we have seen with Wearing’s Masturbation. So, rather than valuing photography simply as something which ‘catches somebody at it’ in action, photography is also about creating portraits of people thinking about photography. Of course, the photographed subject may be thinking about anything else, but when she is invited to think about the photograph she holds or to look at the image or view presented to her and is photographed doing so, this scenario is not so different from acting in theatre or film, where we see the actor’s projection of a thought. But photography does not speak. Our vision, which connects us to the intricate spaces of the photograph, that makes us feel as if our consciousness wanders through the details of that photographed room, is a process of being-in-the-world. Just as any mirror we care to peer into is a reflection of our space, our psychic energy seems to be directed into that very reflection, that projected space in which we invest ourselves. Similarly, in Brassaï’s photographs of mirrors we are somehow in the space of the photograph and in the space of the mirror shown in that photograph. The process of entering into the work of art twice causes self-reflection. The second entry, which is also a being-in-the-world, is a representation of the first, reflected back to us. But the photograph which is taken of the subject looking at her own image multiplies the higher-

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order thoughts involved with processing such a photograph of a photograph. Owens describes a picture by Lartigue of Renée Perle who is shown looking into a mirror while on her dressing table is a photograph of herself (Owen, 1978: 78). Needless to say, there are innumerable photographers who have used the device of splitting the subject by photographing him or her looking at their own photograph. In a more complex manner, a photograph which depicts a sitter looking at a picture of herself in a mirror or with the aid of photograph she is seen looking at is also a portrait of the sitter’s self-consciousness, in cooperation with, or indeed, effected by her consciousness of the medium of representation and the act of representing; but this also mirrors the viewer’s self-consciousness brought about with the same signs. The portrait is about her self-consciousness but it makes us selfconscious. It is important to note that photographs of this kind engage with the viewer’s consciousness of the medium by showing the photographed subject’s consciousness of the medium. Becoming conscious of the medium is synonymous with the self-consciousness of the viewer; this can be the subject of the photograph and reflect the response of the viewer. The image engages with the effect of the image, or rather, the effect of the image in the viewer appears strangely to be duplicated in what is happening in the image itself. Ordinary considerations of the mimesis of the ‘external’ world and its effects on ‘internal consciousness’ seem not to hold here. Indeed, the representation of an internal/external relation in the depicted space of the photograph seems to track and certainly helps to activate a similar internal/external relation in the viewer. This is a concrete example of how consciousness is depicted in images, almost as a causal paradox: the image engages a special higher-order consciousness in the viewer, which is responsible for recognising this in the internally generated and organised meaning of the image. Here is a mind-to-mind meeting with the image, which is also about the viewer’s mind describing itself in engagement with the work, the work acts as a mirror just as it represents the mirror as part of its representation. It is perhaps not surprising how duplication with the picture-in-thepicture or other kind of frame-in-the-frame device is ubiquitous in photography. One of the most engaging images that deploy this device as visual analysis of the patterns of self-consciousness is CartierBresson’s multiple self-portrait from 1992. In Bresson’s hand, we see

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a pencil drawing and a mirror image, a small area of the photograph where he is seen peering out at the viewer, when, in fact, he is looking at himself. There is also the back of his head, and all of presentations of the body are merely different parts of the same photograph, a photograph of externalised images of self-consciousness. This is a series of visual projections of the self through which the self appears to the self as a series of frames, and frames containing different media: the frame of drawing, the frame of photography, the frame of shadow and light; there is also the transparent frame of the mirror—the mirror reflection also appears as a photograph en abyme. The photograph also raises issues about the mental visualisation of the self as a seriality and its relationship to optical sensations. This is, in part, the past self, the physical self (always viewed through various appearances) with nonphysical characteristics and mental qualities which one identifies with the self and which all appear in the present self as a moment of visual recognition. Bresson the photographer is dealing with the duplication or splitting of himself, while somebody is duplicating him, it is thus a duplication of a duplication. The frame is the crucial, visual construct which presents the subject of duplication as a series of spatial internalisations, and in this, the image is not hugely dissimilar to Gillian Wearing’s Masturbation that also deals with photographic duplication as a visual approximation of the duplication of the self in time and through different self-images. So we have a series of images rather than just one, which succeeds in duplicating the essential property of photography-as-self, and is a portrait of photography using Bresson as the embodiment of that art, with the suggestion that he is turning the camera on himself. But it is also a photograph of the photographer’s self-consciousness seen by his gaze at his own reflection and duplicated by the evidence of the drawing he holds in his hand. Bresson mimics the gaze of the viewer. We see through his eyes and he sees through ours, or so it seems, as in the mirror reflection his eyes, his gaze, meets ours through the mirror reflection. There is a narrative here about the self making itself but it is also made by others in an intersubjective sense; there are many authors of the self, besides the self. The series of modifications of self-conception and self-interpretation are also levels of consciousness. The three heads (mirror, drawing and back of head) form an anagogical movement, a line rising up to create a circle formed by three points, the exact composition uses the placements of the heads to suggest the relation of thoughts

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about moments of self-identification through different media, different physical materials (although they are all in fact, transformed in photography). It must be said that a large part of self-formation goes on nonconsciously and aspects of the self remain unknown to the self seeking reflection, otherwise such a process of ‘doing’ the self-portrait seen here would be superfluous, because there would be nothing to discover, and the theme of this photograph, if it can be reduced to anything, is the visual transformation of thoughts about selfhood. And so the phenomenology of self-apprehension and understanding is visualised here as a process of doing and seeing and in the doing the self is being made. It is with the frame that the doing is signified. Ultimately, this references yet another medium: the photograph’s frames and duplications are a knowing reference to the defining characteristics of film and its ability to stage a process of becoming as a fluent series whose duplication simulates action, and CartierBresson’s photograph of three selves mimics cinema’s unfolding of consciousness from moment to moment. Bresson uses his own face as a way to think about consciousness rising within itself to frame itself within the bounds of the visual, consciousness not only gives itself a picture of itself but it also supplies itself with eyes to look at its image of its own eyes and its looking, and this self-duplication is photographed. The photograph is a complex image of thought: consciousness framed as seer, seen and seeing. Different aspects of the self are drawn together in one image. “The self plays for the self […] I produce in thought and words a narrative self” (Flanagan 1995: 204). The self is a construction and the drawing of the face an image of this construction. This construction of the self is so closely linked to the process of consciousness that one might say that the self is an image or representation of consciousness viewing itself. We have four players, the face, the self, the image, and consciousness. Consciousness uses the first three simultaneously in order to experience the last as itself. There is something in the telling, representing or thinking of the self that is in a sense what the self is—in its process of representing or in the viewing of this representation. In Bresson’s trinity and triptych of the self, this narrative self appears not only to represent itself as cause and effect, but as the viewer of somebody else’s projection of a narrative self or selves. There is also the suspension of self as transmigratory here; the self as reflection, draw-

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ing, photograph or moment of mental image reflection and the mental state of self-consciousness is premised here on the functioning of this series of visualisations and their interactions. Yet it is not just Other: this is Bresson’s moment and we see him in the process of assembling himself with his props, and yet we are capable of putting ourselves through his self-assemblage. We become the self of the viewer through the self of his viewing, we see through the frames of his eyes, and see them looking through to himself. The face in the mirror is a lower-order thought; one obtains distance from it by framing it in the thought of the self which we see in the drawing, with the transposition of the lower-order thought; further distance is achieved regarding the image of Bresson’s body seen from behind, we see it ‘simultaneously’ from both front and back, we can also withdraw from the frame of the photograph entirely and return to ourselves, which seems, oddly, to duplicate Bresson’s distancing. The image works as a double mechanism of involvement—‘seeing in’ and distancing—it is an image of both mental processes, a portrait of the superposition of the self. Ultimately, then, we are able to have higher-order thoughts about looking at the image and what it entails. These particular HOTs are less concerned to establish the identity of the photograph and to inspect the factual details and more concerned to frame these to focus on their relations to each other and their modes of giveness: how they the style of their representation may be processed by the viewer. This is why such a photograph of one of the world’s most fascinating image makers is not just about a moment in time but a visual treatise or visual enactment of the phenomenological unfolding of self-portraiture and simultaneously a portrait of the medium of photography itself, shown in relation to drawing (a slower process than photography) and the self-duplication of a mirror reflection (faster). The photograph could be described as an example of the following mental process: Although self-represented identity is identity from the subjective point of view, it invariably draws on available theoretical models about the nature of the self in framing its reflexive self-portrait. We represent ourselves by way of various publicly available hermeneutic strategies. Psychoanalytically inspired self-description is most familiar in our culture. But genetic and neurobiological models are increasingly visible (Flanagan 1995: 197).

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And this visibility, it must be remembered, is visual and artistic; selfrepresentation can be instantly achievable through photography or in the meticulous execution of painting techniques. Through the various media of the arts and photography, these hermeneutic strategies of self-representation become intersubjective; we see the image of ourselves through the self-imaging of the Other, not only in the contents and details of this image but in the methods and techniques used for its production. Moreover, “theoretical models of the self”, whether reflective, serial, genetic, neurobiological are both cultural and personal, and as seen here, may be instantly enacted and experienced by the signatures of the self made visible in the properties of materials, techniques and processes. Framing Consciousness in the Body of Art I have tried to show that a valid experience of the self may in some sense be vicarious and visual, that it can amount to a viewing of others who may be shown in the process of viewing themselves in some way, an image of this self-viewing arises as a seriality of viewing experiences, each appearing to ‘pierce’ the next in stages of ecstasis and this is often shown as a series of frames. Most importantly, there are three important ways of seeing (and therefore piercing): mental, when one is imagining an image of oneself and this could be something quite abstract, for example, seeing a gesture, an action, or a mental quality of consciousness that may be mentally identified and represented. And there is also an optical (non-mental image) viewing of the body, of the face, and of the eyes. And thirdly, it is possible to see the latter kind of viewing through the ‘eyes’ of the former, where both the visual inspection of a painting is co-occurent with mental images from the memory or the imagination.40 A feeling of the uncanny puts this into relief, when we feel we recognise a face, but it 40

This is what I take Harth to mean when he writes, “Man has become adept at juggling images and symbols between layers of the brain” (Harth 1999: 109). The symbols go some way to explaining the codes needed for the synthesis of mental images that are continually contrasted and compared with optical evidence. In the making of art, visual stimuli are continually being remade and re-presented to the visual cortex, processed and compared to the mental image library or sketchpad and remade again. But in so doing, the work of art also affects the configuration of the mental visual resources. This joint process of visualisation may be discerned in the viewer in finished work of art as well as in the making of it.

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has changed somehow, seen in a different light, the familiar seen in an unfamiliar context. The external marks of mental images allow us to infer that such images are also intersubjective, they are taken up, interpreted compared or contrasted with the viewer’s library of mental images. This viewer may also be an artist who reinterprets these works of art. Interpictorialism and intertextuality arise from these processes. The work of art may be configured by consciousness as a series of appearances or models of the self: sexual, neurobiological, spiritual, social or aesthetic, through which one experiences and visualises one’s own body and its parts. Art and its lasting fascination with representations of the body makes conscious in a visual sense this very relationship between different ways of ‘seeing’. Thus the body in art is not just a simulacrum of the body in reality, but the body framed through the complex intersubjectivity of image consciousness. This is sometimes evidenced in very subtle ways. In a Byzantine icon in the British Museum known as the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” c. 1400, we have a remarkable picture-in-a-picture that seems in its way to articulate the phenomenology of consciousness and body. The icon represents the restoration of images and the end of the iconoclast period in 842 AD. The upper register of the icon shows another icon, the Hodigitria icon (of the Virgin and Child), framed within the pictorial space and is held up by angels; in the lower area, important personages witness the restoration. The Hodigitria icon was thought to be the only real likeness of the Virgin (all others were based on secondary sources). The icon represents an historical event centred on the historical reception and event of receiving and beholding the portrait of the Virgin. This puts the depiction of the historical event in contrast to the icon which we see shown inside this depiction. Therefore, one of the icon’s main themes is about original and copy, authenticity and counterfeit, visual evidence and the truth to which it refers. Viewed against a backdrop where icons were considered to be not merely images but holy images, partaking of the holiness which they represent, the icon within the icon appears to double that power. The gold background of the icon forms a continuous surface on which is painted a red frame (the icon-in-the-icon) and this appears to divide the gold into substance and space, the processes of optical evidence and rational inference needed respectively for each kind of interpretation. But the former is also seen or ordered through the latter. This

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immediately sets up an opposition between real gold and represented gold, and splits and rejoins the image of the substance of gold and its image as a representation. This latter point is important in debates about the nature of transubstantiation. Consciousness thus arises from the conundrum of material body verses image, and becomes centred on the icon within the icon, which seems to articulate the ontology of the image. The icon shown inside the icon articulates the Immaculate Conception, the nesting of the divine within the prima materia, the body of the Virgin, an image of which is the Holy Spirit in the physical body of man and God in Christ, a series of internalisations (or externalisations) suggested by the icon-in-the-icon and seen also in the example of Vermeer’s Woman and the Balance discussed above. Higher-order thought about the nature of matter and representation (and the nature of the representation of matter) arises from a lower, or previous higher-order thought assessing the ontology of internal image in relation to the outer image which contains it. In its consummate poise and transfixed demeanour the image tracks and is tracked by a rapidly adjusting phenomenological consciousness that appears to subdivide itself into finer analyses of itself and its involvement in the work of art. Most importantly, consciousness of how conscious processes are engaged in a work of art of this kind guard interpretation of the artefact or work of art from the sensus litteralis, from the reductionism that it merely has a simple story to tell, or that it merely depicts history. To use Husserl’s terminology, this is close to the naturalist standpoint of observing objects and can be “bracketed out” in order to begin understanding the object as a complex hybrid of intellectual, psychic and physical properties, an entirely apposite exercise given the visual detail of the art object and the doctrinal and perceptual complexity it alludes to. The operations of consciousness activated by the image are part of the image’s subject matter as much as the image’s literal identity. The frame-inthe-frame alerts us to this fact, and to the fact that there is another, more complex story within. The empty red frame appears to contain and be contained by that gold surface. Consciousness, like the red frame, is both embodied yet found in its relationship with the world, forming a continuum of sorts between interiority and exteriority, yet defining them. Consciousness emerging in the viewer’s mind is also emerging in the world, for the viewer’s body is in the world. And this

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nesting relationship seems to be indexed by the icon’s configuration of space, which is also a product of consciousness. Something of this sort in evident in Hindu representations of deities who wear brooches or emblems of other deities on their foreheads in order to signify divine consciousness embedded in another consciousness yet turned out and made visible in the world and in the physical material of the idol. Similarly, in Buddhism it is common to see representations of the Bodhisattva who wears a headdress in which is nested an image of his spiritual leader. This is not only a physical nesting but represents changes within the continuity of consciousness, the consciousness of the Bodhisattva is revealed to us, his head is the framing device for another consciousness in the shape of the figure he wears on his forehead. The forehead is the site and image of thought, a deity’s forehead is an image of a universe of thought and within this image is shown, a deity. The image of a deity resting on the forehead of another deity is an image of mental image of thought of the deity and reflects back to what is going on in our own ‘foreheads’ as viewers. Images of the pupil, eye, brain, head, and body in art act as framing devices for consciousness to circumscribe or record conscious mental states.41 The images become key devices for retrieval and the reconfigurations of the imagination but they can also suggest new modes of self-consciousness. These ideas are explored in regard to more examples given below. The “Triumph of Orthodoxy” represents the apotheosis of the Byzantine tradition because it is produced by a higher-order consciousness and creates the same in the viewer: we are looking not only at an icon but the icon of an icon, and as such, we are to be aware not so much of what the painting represents but of the thematisation of representation as a cultural and intellectual product, and in that sense, it lionises Byzantine painting first and foremost as a critical (and mental envisioning) consciousness of lower-order, embodied consciousness. Cultural and religious traditions of interpreting this process of consciousness might represent it as a message of spirituality and devotion framed within the body of art. Note that this polysemic message made of different, discretely intelligible parts can also be seen as a harmony of parts. Most important, however, is that the icon of ico41 Note the seriality of the anatomical lexis suggests the embedding of the first term in the second and the second in the third and so on, until we are able to ‘look through’, the series at the end, forward and reflectively.

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nicity allows the viewer the distinct consciousness that the organisation of his or her embodied thoughts is co-emergent in the world with the pictorial configuration of space, one consciousness of reality that is allowed to subsist and interact with another. The Byzantine icon is both method and message, it is a powerful index both to the physical materiality of the body and the materiality of art and this double index is not arbitrary or coincidental. In the art experience, a consciousness arises of the indexical link between body and painting in the concept of the ‘body of art’. Art becomes an analogue for the body, consciousness balances and relates each to the other, both as sites of meaning sustaining consciousness as a thing which bestows meaning on the world and yet at the same time, derives a meaningful consciousness from it. In their own ways, both the body and art have a dual nature, they both have a material substrate and bear an image or self-image visibly apparent and mentally envisioned. Sculpture Sculpture represents a long tradition of equivocation: of flesh turned to stone, or stone come alive as flesh. This obviously references mythical and religious traditions of turning to stone but it is also a way of allowing sculpture to comment on itself, on its materials. In other words, sculpture appears as stone, and this stone represents materiality, a materiality that is body-shaped. Both the human body and the sculpted figure are matter and they are made to represent each other in the sculpted human form, in this, they are not much different from the background in “The Triumph of Orthodoxy” which shows gold as a background of the icon and for the icon inside it. In many cultures, the physicality of the body is re-presented to consciousness as an Abschattung of the physical substance of the work of art, materiality-become-image. Art re-presents materiality as a modified material substrate by virtue of intervening Abschattungen processes by the mental image library. Sculptural techniques and styles, the interplay of gesture and surface, shadows and high relief bridge raw materiality with consciousness because the signature of the human body is left as a trace in the material of the art. In this way, the marks of consciousness are found lodged in the external world of the body and the sculpture and it is in the doing of the sculpture that the

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quality of materiality’s resistance is recorded in consciousness; this mutuality can be expressed as Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm. The image of the human body in art becomes the medium or set of external marks recording the interplay of consciousness between mental envisioning and optical processes. This interplay is sustained by the duality of the human body working with inanimate materials, an encounter which reflects the encounter between different brain areas. The sculptural form representing the human body reflects back the body optically to the mind, interpreted by the imagination and the mental image library, which refreshes exteroperceptive analysis in a feedback loop. The creative loop is a powerful argument against the notion that art is simply a dumping place for the images stored in the mental image library or other areas of the brain which support perceptual constancy.42 This is why the sculpture of Rodin seems to have exercised such an influence on phenomenology, for in the traces of finished and unfinished aspects of his figures we glimpse this doing, where the arbitrary face of materiality resists and rises against the finished hand of the sculptor. I am thinking specifically of his sculptures of The Hand of God and the Hand of the Devil, where Rodin sculpted a pair of hands sculpting a figure. This is autonymy, the sculpting of ‘another sculpture’ that seems to emerge from the sculpted hands. The sculptural hand refers to Rodin’s hand as the genesis of the sculpture: he is its maker. The hand produces the hand in which a body emerges. This shifting metamorphosis of autonymy seems continually to be the object of Rodin’s focus, and involves a consciousness affecting and affected by the haptic materiality of the sculpture, it is a chiasm of touching and being touched by the sculptural form. It tells me ‘my consciousness flows through my touch and my being touched.’ Here, the hand of god is seen as a frame through which the body emerges and yet the sculpture is a frame for god’s hand, this anthropomorphism acts a frame through which we may glimpse the divine. But the human body in the hands of god is also a frame for the soul— a reference to Michelangelo who described the body in such terms. The frame-in-the-frame here is presented to us as appearances of the body in which one part seems to emerge from another.

42

A similar point is a made about Cézanne by Lone 2000: 73.

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The Hand of God, 1898. Marble, Rodin Museum, Paris. Public Domain-Old-120.

The recognition of the human form emerging from the frame of the hand is a self-recognition, self-consciousness through identification with the sculptural body. Rodin’s Hand of God does not only reference the mythos of man from clay but the holding of our own bodies with our hands, and the exploration of others’ bodies through the blindness of touch which the sculpture brings to mind. Sculptural consciousness, the ratiocination of form goes hand in hand with sensuous consciousness, the images that arise from our sensations of touch; both are complementary ways of achieving a three-dimensional feel for the body of the Other. A series images piece together three-dimensional form, the sculpture is a series of profiles, but we witness the series and its metamorphoses from a number of viewpoints. The sculpture’s invitation for us to be in so many places at once, while looking at the body emerging through the fingers of the hand, is none other than a reference to the omniscience of god. The hand is blind but it is a seeing hand; the brain processes mental images from touch as

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well as from sight. The sculpture tells us of this cooperation and adds to the topographical dimensions of omniscience. There have been other ways in sculpture to achieve this sense of a many sided, self-generative phenomenology. In the Renaissance period, for example, lodged in a niche in Or San Michele in Florence, Nanni di Banco sculpted his Quattro Coronati (1408-13) four early Christian sculptors who were martyred for refusing to create an idol for the Emperor Diocletian to worship. Under the Quattro Coronati, there are shown two sculptors carving sculptures in the medium of stone and this is shown as a stone relief in the predella. They appear as reliefs that are sculpting themselves, rising up through the anonymity of unsculpted stone to play a part in our fashioning consciousness, yet in a sense, they are ‘about themselves’. As with paint-as-paint, the sculpture refers to the material substrate of which it is made. Other examples are Verrocchio’s Doubting Thomas a bronze sculpture also on the Or San Michele, which thematises touching: a double reference to the nature of sculpture, its evocation of the tactile quality of the medium and the nature of believing through the proof of touch inherent in the story of the doubting Thomas. The sculpture is medium reflexive, a kind of truth to materials. It thematises stone-as-stone and sculpture-as-sculpture and signifies both the message and physical carrier or medium of the message. In both cases, the body appears as a form (or frame) through which the materiality of the sculpture emerges. In 1751, Jean-Auguste Nahl created a dramatic tomb sculpture for the wife of the Pastor of Hindelbank in Switzerland. Frau Langhans died in childbirth at the age of 28. The tomb, with an inner frame which encloses a space appears to be torn open with the mother and her child rising up through the stone torn asunder. This tripartite message of the resurrection, of childbirth and of the touchstone of memory, breaks through into consciousness unceremoniously upturning symbols of death and the blank forgetfulness of stone into living flesh. Yet again in art, the materiality of art is highlighted in order to index our own physical nature manipulated by our consciousness, our thought turned into external marks. Our bodies are shown as tools for our dexterity and coordination in the modelling of the art but the event depicted is not only a simple triumph over death but depicts the emergence of a new revelation, a new way of seeing. As with Rodin, the sculpture invites a number of higher processes of consciousness which

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grapple with the way in which something is being revealed, sculpture as a process, rather than simply as a fixed representation, and as with Cézanne, we see not only the thing portrayed but something of how meaning and self-reflection emerge as a process during the art experience. We are witness to a number of co-present events.

Pen and Ink drawing of Jean-Auguste Nahl’s tomb sculpture for Frau Langhans, 1751, Hindelbank, Switzerland

The sculpture is a reflection of our philosophical thoughts about the nature of materiality and which is part of our own bodies, we look straightforward and reflexively, the emergence of the body from the tomb-cave is also the emergence of our consciousness from a simple reading of the representation. It is also a sculpture-in-a-sculpture, a meaning in a meaning. But there is also, a new born child a sign of emergence within an emergence. In Nahl’s sculpture, the tomb appears as a bed piercing the restfulness of sleep, yet it is also a pictorial framing device encrusted with the scull and bones, a charmed circle broken by the living consciousness appearing through it. The woman is reborn and so is the child through and by way of stone. The sculp-

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ture appears to wreck itself and art but in so doing, allows art to rise above its physical substrate in the sense that it not only represents its own materiality but begins to reveal the consciousness that is struggling to make itself known through the modelling of the stone and seems to represent deeper meanings rising up in us. The crack in the stone traces the form of Christ on the cross but it also references the childbearing body of the mother. It functions as a frame of reference seen through the resurrection of the mother and child through the body of the stone. On the last day of judgement, the woman and child escape death and both are reborn; cast aside is all the morbid art of tomb sculpture for a sculpture of the living, of the moving, it is both stone and denies stone, breaking it apart. And the visual appearance of the sculpture of limits, frames, bounds being broken matches the breaking through of consciousness emerging from the ‘flatness’ and dead stone of materiality, ignorance, anonymity, and nonconsciousness in order to countenance a more fully rounded, embodied consciousness of meaning and form. Consciousness transforms the inanimate sculpture into a living image of thought, the image of an emerging consciousness breaking the sculpture bounded by the body of stone and the fixed frame. There is also another level at work here: the system of the analogies between child birth, resurrection and creative art, which we have seen in Aretino’s letter, Vermeer and Velázquez, all stages in the acts of creativity but stages that the artist is able to illustrate simultaneously as meanings that spring out of meanings in a series. We look at the sculpture and the sculpture that seems to arise out of it and this fashioning of stone is cooperative with notions of the divine in the human and the human in the divine, the child from the womb, art from stone, body from art, art from body, and life shining forth through death. The exposition of these interpretations are a seriality of emergences, one out of the other and all focussed on the configuration of materials and techniques that seem to sustain this train of thought, without speaking, without moving anywhere. Beyond Euro-American Art The examples I have given are well known in Euro-American cultures. Yet to argue that the particular conscious processes I have analysed here are solely or inevitably part of a Christian religious tradition of

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transubstantiation traceable to classical concept of form and hyle would be unnecessarily insular. For example, the Sanskrit Yogavasisthamaharamayana (the Jog Vashisht) is an Indian poetical work that focuses on Vedantic philosophy and the illusoriness of the physical world. In the Jog Vashisht, sculptures, carved reliefs, pictures and reflected images are described as a means to indicate the true nature of reality: all other external appearances are deceptive. Divine knowledge is described as a stone and creation and created forms as pictures carved onto that stone but these are, in essence, made of the same material as that stone. In this tradition of thought, and in the works of sculpture which are carved from it, there is only one true reality and one indivisible unity of consciousness and the world. All its manifestations, including ourselves, form an elaborate system of metaphors or signs leading back or pointing to the origin of creation, the divine artist. Again, divine creativity is signified by the metaphor of artistic creativity, a cascade of creative acts that lead up the original, divine creative act which we reference with our own modelling of matter into form. The Malanggan of Papua New Guinea There are other sculptural forms from cultural traditions outside of Europe and America which articulate the relationship of consciousness to sculpture. As we have seen in many cases, frames-in-frames in art thematise the relationship between consciousness and embodiment and, by extension, physicality or matter. The frame-in-the-frame brings to consciousness the theme of embodiment within which consciousness resides. Yet consciousness is not fixed by this framing; the concept of co-emergence of framed meaning in the painting and the embodied consciousness of the viewer allows for consciousness to appear already in the world as a system of external marks which are placed there by the artist’s conscious processes. Framing as a doubling of embodied consciousness may be seen in Malanggan, sculptures from New Ireland off the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea. I cannot better John Mack’s description of them: Malanggan are intricately constructed in the form of a figure set in within a lattice of carved and incised fretwork. The incisions draw on the motifs from the surrounding environment, deploying birds, pigs, shells, fish and so forth with precision and accuracy and all brightly painted, and all brightly painted.

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Framing Consciousness in Art The nature of the carving creates a spatial complexity of inner and outer areas and interpenetrating forms, such that parts of the form act to constrain others which, in effect, inhabit the inner core (Mack 2003: 104).

Although the writer may not be aware of it, the language he uses of outer and inner forms and interpenetration describes his own consciousness interacting with the intricate, multi-perspectival framing device in which is placed another sculpture. His consciousness is both aware of the space of the “surrounding environment” and the sculpture, its outer appearance, its outer surface (“incised fretwork”); and also that these incisions have a double function, their patterns are symbols but they reinforce the message of the piercing and carving of the latticed frame, the outer hull of the sculpture that contains “a figure” inhabiting “the inner core”. The incisions and marks are gateways “into” the sculpture, the piercing and carving signify deeper gateways and thresholds. The physical processes of incising, piercing and carving are signified in the material reality of the sculpture, the gestures of these actions are left as traces and clues that lead us to different conscious mental states connected to containment and to our imagination of the viewpoint of the thing that lies enclosed in the ‘cage’. We see things from another perspective, we are conscious of both viewpoints from within and from outside. The relationship between outer hull and inner core is analogous to the viewer’s body, the surrounding environment, and the consciousness that creates a bridge between them. These Malanggan suggest the natural forms and relationships of mother and child and the figure of introspection, of consciousness turning in upon itself, to give itself form as an object to be viewed and perceived. According to Mack, the sculpture provides: […] a temporary repository for the life force which might otherwise be dispersed with the death of a person. The sculpted framework is referred to as a body or as a ‘skin’, and the sculpture is conceived as charged with the concentrated energy accumulated by the dead throughout a lifetime. In the creation and death of the sculpture, the vital force is harnessed to be rechanneled to the living in the form of power; not least, power in the form of authority over the production of further Malanggan […] memory of the sculpture takes precedence over the object itself (105).

The sculpture is destroyed in the funeral ceremony but its design may be passed on: “it is in a sense literally a memory: no record of it is

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kept; it exists only briefly in reality and thereafter exists only as a mental image which is owned by specified individuals” (105). Death, in the form of a funeral ritual immerses the sculpture within a sculpture. The outer sculpture symbolises dead matter, within which is placed life, the life force. In this, the spatial logic of the sculpture is not far removed from Nahl’s funerary monument, where the stone body is portrayed ensconced in, yet breaking through the tombstone. With the Malanggan, both inner and outer sculpture are destroyed leaving behind the life force as a mental image of the sculpture, which is enclosed in the body of the viewer. The spirit of the sculpture, its life force, presumably symbolised by the internal figure, is released back to life as a mental image nested in an embodied consciousness. Memory has an important part to play in this, because the mental image of the sculpture that is passed on to different generations is temporarily materialised and is seen as a tradition of visual memories. But this would all fall by the wayside without a complex process of consciousness equating inner sculptural figure with inner mental image but able to maintain the ‘outer’ consciousness involved in the optical viewing of the sculpture located in the world. The sculpture possesses visible properties inviting visual sensations, while those viewing it must have higher-order thoughts about how these sensations are a shared part of the community and its generations of viewers. The dual relationship between the inner and outer sculpture engages with the dual action in the brain of processing optical information cooperating with processing mental images from a mental image library, a resource which also changes over time after visual information processing. Both processes affect each other over time. For example, my own surveys of the visual arts have become attuned to detecting and processing frame-in-the-frame structures, but my memory and imagination have been much enriched by finding these structures, so that quite complex cross-referencing and identification takes place. The terms used by Mack of incising patterns, piercing, carving, containment, framing and emergence are words that can be used to figuratively describe the formal organisation of consciousness and its fixing or etching into the realm of image memory and the ‘bringing down to earth’ of image memory into the material substrate of the work of art. Being aware of an object from a parallax differentiation allows us to see it from several perspectives at the same time, the kind

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of consciousness that a Cubist painting is supposed to support, but this multi-perspectival viewpoint should not be thought purely in terms of optical sensations, for one of the perspectives involved in this multiperspectival experience is the mental envisioning which is concurrent with optical processing. Optical perception can be accompanied by intentional content, as Rosenthal puts it: On the HOT hypothesis, a sensation’s being conscious consists in its being accompanied by a HOT to the effect that one has that sensation. So a sensation’s being conscious involves intentional content in addition to the qualitive character of the sensation (Rosenthal 2005: 215).

Furthermore, Rosenthal’s arguments about this composite mental state can be applied to the experience of the Malanggan: When one shifts from consciously seeing the tomato [or Malanggan] to introspecting that experience, one’s attention shifts from the quality of the tomato to the quality of the state one is in. One doesn’t come thereby to be perceptually conscious of a distinct quality. But, by having a conscious thought about oneself as being in a particular kind of state, one does shift attention to the quality of the conscious experience. And, since having a thought about something as being present also makes one conscious of that thing, having a thought about oneself as being in a state with a red* mental quality makes one conscious of a red* mental quality (215).

Rosenthal uses the asterisk with red* to denote the mental quality rather than the physical perceptible property red as in a red tomato. Being in a state with a Malanggan* mental quality is a far more complex proposition than a tomato, particularly because both the mental state Malanggan* and the Malanggan itself both reference “being in”. The Malanggan* is a quality state premised on a seriality of appearances, some reflective of the mental processes involved in the perception of the object. Consciousness shifts its attention from exterospection, consciously seeing the sculpture (which is a dual seeing of inner and outer sculpture) to “introspecting that experience” which is symbolised, or indeed, activated by the ‘introspection’ of the sculpture in the sculpture. In the case of the Malanggan* introspection can happen in the form of considering the inner figure as a symbol of one’s introspection. And this is what can happen when it is destroyed in the funeral ceremony, when it becomes a mental image; yet this internal mental image is symbolised by both the inside figure and its outer framework.

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Although Rosenthal is clear that having a higher-order thought (HOT) of the mental state one is in is distinct from a mental state or sensation about red*, I have already mentioned that the best way to characterise the relationship between these conceptually different mental states is to use the logic of the frame-in-the-frame which does not demand that we choose to be mentally ‘in’ an either/or situation but instead, possbly both, and importantly, that this mental superposition can be intelligible as a visual art experience. The case of thinking about and viewing the Malanggan in particular, puts this into sharper focus. In regard to the sensation of the sculpture under question, which is after all, multivalent and composite, consciousness would appear to switch from the outer sculpture to the inner one and back again much in the same way that one is inside or outside of a sensation, perception or HOT. But still, one has to consider that it is always possible to see both inner and outer sculptures together as a whole; together the sculpture appears as one, as a dressed figure would. And why not then, also with one kind of first- or second-order consciousness ‘clothed’ by a third? As Rosenthal writes, “It’s in virtue of HOTs that we are conscious of ourselves as being in states with qualitative character”(193), which also suggests consciousness within a qualitative character or characters. The processing by consciousness of the inner and outer forms of the sculpture that appears homomorphic (but not mimetic) with the nature of the sculpture, is similarly divisible and whole at the same time. In a sense, the paradox of consciously being in a qualitative mental state which seems to preserve both quality and consciousness of this quality in one moment is homomorphic with the perceptible properties of the Malanggan which is both at the same time an internalised and externalised sculpture, a qualitative feel that is embodied as the mental quality Malanggan* in cooperation with the material substrate of the Malanggan whose form implies the embodiment of Malanggan* The Mediation of Painting and Architectural Space As a way of further developing the concept of a psychogeographical space formed by frames that link the viewer’s body and consciousness with the body of art, and which I have shown with the example of icon-in-the-icon and sculpturally with the Malanggan, I will deal here briefly with architectonic space comparing a European example with

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examples from Indian, Chinese and Japanese art. While sculpture encourages us to relate to the art object as a body in which consciousness resides, which is a way of looking at art straightforward and reflectively at the same time, a logical extension of this is the three-dimensions of architectural structures where the viewer’s body is not external to the art object, as such, but is placed inside it, and this envelopment is part of the logical structure of architectural space. The sculpture is open-ended in the sense that the viewer may approach it from an infinite number of trajectories and origins, but with enclosed architectural space the relationship of a fixed point to infinity seems reversed, with the human body addressed as a freedom to be found within coordinates, rather than a freedom brought to them and to the site of revelation, as with sculpture. A good way to proceed towards analysis of this different kind of space is to use the example of the traditional iconostasis in Eastern Orthodoxy which mediates painting and architectural space. The iconostasis is a painting, a gallery, a partition and an architectural space with concomitant negotiations of consciousness needed to track and evaluate such a complex management of physical and mental space. Implicit in many of the examples of art I have dealt with here and in Albertian terms, the work of art is a window, doorway or other such transitory non-place which announces its presence only as a way into another differentiated space. Psychological, imaginary, factual or Other, this space is given to a seriality of appearances. The iconostasis draws together various religious, aesthetic, epistemological and selfreflexive strands. The iconostasis must be understood as a partition that not only references architectonic space but the space mediated by the body, a body which itself acts as a partition of architectonic space, dividing it into forward, behind, up and down, left and right and all the cardinal points, its dynamic presence orders anonymous and inanimate space into a seriality. As a great wall of sacred images, the iconostasis can be traversed through a door physically, the Orthodox priest and on occasion, matrimonial couple, walk through the pictures, and mentally, observers pierce the partition with their imaginations and with their gazes. The microcosm of the body-as-structure inserts itself into the temple as structure; the body becomes a mise en abyme. The iconostasis not only represents inner and outer but points to its own materiality as a partition ‘underneath’ the holiness of the images. In many Serbian churches, it is common to see at the centre of the ico-

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nostasis a painting of St. Veronica showing us her square, white cloth on which appears the face of Christ. The tradition of Veronica’s veil tells of a sudarium which became imprinted with Christ’s features when she offered it to him to wipe his face on the way to Golgotha. A special consciousness must arise from the references, meanings and cultural memory which converge on the site where this image is situated at the centre of the iconostasis. There is a rapid flicker of processing where one becomes aware not only of where one is, physically, but how one thinks and sees the spaces portrayed and partitioned by the iconostasis. The seriality brought to mind is complex. Through the body of Christ signified by the image on the cloth, the materiality of art, the painting on the iconostasis, consciousness also arises of the immediate presence of the iconostasis in the architectural and temporal specificity of the church and one’s own body in relation to these coordinates. One traverses a mutually reinforcing series of Abschattungen which involves both real, actual physical and material objects and bodies and immaterial, architectonic space and the powerful series of framed images, Christ’s face, cloth, frame of icon, iconostasis. One confronts a painting of an image imprinted on a handkerchief which looks back at us and seems to pierce us; they are all layers of the image, all acting as a partition between the sacred and the profane, the real and the imaginary. The gaze pierces the series of surfaces in the forward movement, away from one’s own body but reflectively one imagines the church/body/eye/brain/mental image library as a series en abyme which parallels the series en abyme of the image. The iconostasis is the architectural division that mediates between physically visible space and the invisible, and optical inspection and mental envisioning, respectively. But this is also a function of the viewer’s body, which is, by extension, a kind of image bearing iconostasis. I imagine my physical body through series of projected images. I also project my mental images upon the physical images covering the iconostasis. It seems to me that the image of St.Veronica carrying an image of Christ’s face, which she looks at covering her own body, reflects these processes of self-reflection which consists of addressing the material, physical world through a series of remembered or imaginary images, shown as layers or surfaces of the image. We look at our own bodies as objects through Christ’s gaze directed at us. In imitating Christ, whose image we see on the cloth we are enjoined to view our own body as a cloth bearing his image, through which we see ourselves.

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The body of the church contains my body, the iconostasis also surrounds me, and my body contains me and is me. The various appearances of partition: iconostasis, cloth, painting, image are also a series of containments which we must endeavour to look through straightforward and reflexively. Each appearance of a partition is processed by a higher-order thought, which forms a series that we look though straightforward and reflexively. The Buddhist Cave Shrine As with the non-Euro-American examples of sculpture given above, it would be wrong to assume that the potentially vertiginous experience of architectural space described above, the result of a rapid succession of higher-order thoughts about history, place, time, religious, aesthetic and epistemological perceptions and their representability centred on one object, is attributable only to European traditions of art. In the Buddhist cave shrines at Dunhuang, dating back to the eighth century AD, a model of consciousness forms the basis for an architectural and psychological organisation of the shrine space. In other words, a consciously contrived and understood model of how consciousness may be seen to work is actualised visually and materially in the built environment, design and use of the shrine space. The shrine space has been referred to in recent research as a “mirror hall” a visual and physical expression of a mental image of consciousness called Indra’s net of jewels (Wang 2004: 494–521). The Vedic god Indra’s net veiled his palace on Mount Meru, the centre of gravity of Vedic cosmology and mythology. Indra’s net consists of many jewels, each cut with various aspects, and placed at every vertex of the net’s strands, and each jewel is reflected in all of the other jewels. This model emphasises various serialities of consciousness related to each other in the form of intersubjectivity and interpenetration. Originating in the Mahayana Buddhism of the third century, it was later adopted by Chinese Huayan Buddhism between the 6th and 8th centuries. Buddhist concepts of interpenetration hold that all phenomena (including individual examples of consciousness) are intimately connected and this is visualised as a net, a vast series of mutual relations that connect individuals in the universe and allow different aspects, moments and levels of consciousness to come together in one, crossreferenced experience. This is a trans-individual neural network of

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consciousness that consists of many little, individual neural networks which mirror the overarching structure of consciousness. Evident also in this imagery are various monadic movements: each jewel contains a reflection of the vast network of all the other jewels in the net. This capturing of the vast operations of interconnectedness in the individual is expressed in the architecture of the Dunhuang shrine as a series of internal and external movements. Firstly, the shrine is a cave and is embedded in the earth; the cave’s space is an internal space, the walls of which are covered in murals that allude to Indra’s net, and so the visitor is literally inside a cave, inside an image or a network of images painted onto the walls and inside the net. The next internalisation is formed by the visitor in the cave whose mental images, framed by the body seem mirrored by the outer shell of the murals and the cave, and the earth in which this whole series of frames is ensconced. Consciousness is at liberty inside the cave to imagine a series of introspections or, in the other direction, as a series of externalisations outwards, beyond the layers of murals and cave walls to the earth’s surface and further out towards the earth’s atmosphere and other boundaries. As with the iconostasis, the visitor is at the centre of a multi-directional expansion of consciousness measured by layers or frames of the image and architectural framing, a centre which is continually being stepped out of. Yet, such a cooperation between physical and mental imagery is intimately connected to the physical universe it describes; there is a co-emergence of physical space and the space of the mind and this effectively, goes against the simplistic internal and external binary, for travelling in one direction already presupposes its opposite, at the same time. This interpenetration may be characterised as (but is not reducible to) the mutual series of reflections of Indra’s net, not only referred to visually in the murals but also in the body of the Buddha “a figural analogue and testimony” (518) of the drama of consciousness, time and space enacted by the cave’s cosmology, where one’s personal experience is supposed to be the experience of the many, of the many images and projections of the body and the co-existence of different time frames in which these appearances occur, and which are dramatised and painted in the murals of the cave shrine. Here, visual cosmology tracks and enhances the transformations of consciousness. Wang writes about the cave shrine:

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Framing Consciousness in Art Operating on the principle of a mirror hall of infinite reduplications, the cave shrine is thus an ‘abyss of representation’. The scene of the man meditating in front of a mirror on the east ceiling slope amounts to something of a mise en abyme, a visual artifice that uses an internal mirror within a represented scene to ‘reflect’ and thematise the entire structure of the work that contains it (518).

But what helps to add further depth and interest to this visual analysis is Wang’s use of Husserl’s Dresden Gallery example, the mention of which set up a series of mises en abyme, a kind of Indra’s net formed by the overall context of my analysis in which is reflected Wang’s: When Jacques Derrida gives the notion [the abyss] a poststructuralist spin, the cue comes from Edmund Husserl’s description of the Dresden Gallery which contains a picture depicting a picture gallery. To Derrida, such a gallery space amounts to an ‘abyss of representation’ involving ‘indefinite multiplications’. This Derridean abyss can thus be envisioned just as well as a mirror hall: ‘a space of repetition’ that posits an ‘indefinite process of supplementarity’. Presence stems from the ‘abyss’ of ‘representation of representation’. The self is split into multiple reduplications. The Buddhist cave shrine considered here may be theorised in the same way. The painted scenes of mirror-viewing thematise the perceptual mode attending the wall paintings as a succession of mirrors. In this mirror hall – this abyss of representations – the painted images are analogous to mirror reflections registering the multiplied presences of both Buddhist deities and the split self of the viewing/meditating subject (518).

Wang, too, is drawn towards cross cultural comparisons of models of consciousness, although he does not mention that word and concludes at a juncture when his analysis was becoming more significant. For Wang, the cave shrine questions embodiment with its mimicry of embodiment (ultimately questioning the skin of the self); and I would agree by adding that consciousness is caught up in (and becomes) a seriality of appearances that includes reflections of the self as skin, as body, as image, as cave and earth, each appearance forms an interrelated series or a net of jewels, with each image reflecting the others in their ability to be both nested and nesting. The underlying pattern of this logic is shared by the example of St. Veronica on the iconostasis of a Serbian church, in its own way, a series of images and physical spaces that surround the body of the knowing subject, which are mutually reinforcing as much as they are mutually questioning and undermining. This questioning in both cultural examples consists in the continual undercutting of the certainty of the knowing subject and

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her body, and the larger reality in which these only have relative, interdependent and constantly changing roles to play. What makes the examples of the cave shrine and the painted screen of the iconostasis comparable to each other is the three-dimensional space of framing, an enclosed space (or the space behind and in front of the iconostasis), which is in addition to the two-dimensional framing represented in the pictures or murals painted on top of this architectural three-dimensional structure. This means that the sculptural or architectural object literally contains within it or upon it a flat, two-dimensional image, which, in turn, contains another image ‘inside’ it. Thus, we have a series of frames-in-frames, which not only contain different images but different media (wood, stone, paint and purely abstract painted space—the medium of thought). These examples also address the body differently from the way flat paintings do because they enclose it, encounter it, to make the body feel not exterior to the work of art but interior to it; and so the body/body of art distinction becomes analogous rather than a contrast of a three-dimensional body confronting a two dimensional image. We could add one more dimension to this architectonic frame-in-the-frame: the abyss of representations is premised on the abyss of the site of knowing subject, consciousness appears as a superposition that is reflected in a series of mutually reflecting projections, only one of which is the embodied self. The Chinese Painted Screen As with the examples of the iconostasis and the cave shrine, the Chinese painted screen mediates painting with architectural space. The Chinese screen, a cultural product which divides space in a room, has pictures painted on it, often of scenes of rooms with painted screens placed en abyme upon or within them if they are folded in upon themselves. The screens allow visitors, viewers, occupants of rooms to walk around the screen, have conversations on either side of it (the screen is also like a veil and allows a woman to retain her modesty while meeting strangers in various social settings). Yet it is always understood that the screen is not fixed, it can divide space up differently depending on the social situation, and is itself mobile (often with a central panel with wings, like the European triptych altarpiece but without the Christian iconography). The painted screen

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has paintings on both sides and the way in which the wings may be brought forward of pinned back changes the nature of the space in front and behind the screen and the interrelationships of the paintings on the panels. Already, one can see how such an object engages with a consciousness of many configurations of space and image, place and nonplace. The screen is a parergon of the social event it accompanies. It may indeed, double as a parergon, given the images painted on it that may in some way act as some form of commentary on the social event it is supposed to frame. This becomes more complex when we consider that some of these images depict romantic scenes of women looking into mirrors of dressers in bedrooms or women standing before windows with landscape scenes (with further frames-in-frames with pictorial details on fans and clothes). Wu Hung writes about the function of a Chinese screen in a royal ceremony of the Zhou Zhou (ca. 1030-256 B.C.): […] “The Positions in Bright Hall” (“Mingtang we”), the classical essay that records this ceremony, has provided Chinese rulers with a model for constructing a symbolic space pertaining to the country's political structure. It instructs officials of different ranks to form an inner circle inside the ritual compound during the ceremony and orders the chiefs of the four ‘barbarian tribes’ (in the North, South, East, and West) to constitute an outer circle beyond the compound's four gates. The king, the center of this symbolic universe, gives an audience to his ministers and subjects ‘with his back to a screen decorated with embroidered axe pattern.’ This screen, the only furnishing mentioned in the text, defines the king’s place and enhances his authority over it. This place is both real (the ritual ground in Bright Hall where the ceremony takes place) and symbolic (a miniaturisation of a larger geographic and political sphere known as China). To the king, the screen is both an exterior object and an extension of his body. On the one hand, it encircles; it draws the boundary of the ritual/symbolic place that he claims as his domain. On the other, it seems part of him. Like his own face, the screen is both something that he is not supposed to see during the ceremony and something that must be seen during the ceremony. Facing the other participants, the king and the screen merge and appear in unison to confront and control the other participants. It then becomes clear that the focus of the ritual symbolic place is actually this unity, a unity that can become the focus of the place because it manipulates perception (Wu Hung 1996: 40- 41).

The screen then, not only plays a central role in court ceremony, framing the king but it manipulates consciousness in such a way that paradoxes of reality arise by way of a series of framing devices. The

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screen thus not only shields and divides in an architectural sense but also within its projected spaces and this interplay between two and three dimensions extends to the body of the king, seen within the screen's frame who is conceived as “a timeless visual presentation, a portrait, an icon” (41); he is given a different sort of reality. At the same time, the screen secures a hierarchical relationship between the king within the frame and his subjects outside the frame. He is transposed into a portrait in a double sense when he is depicted in front of the painted screen. In other words, the painting represents a highly visual ceremony which represents the emperor as a painting—this is a painting of a “painting” behind which is a screen painting. The seriality of consciousness goes hand in hand with the series of Abschattungen and their transformations of the image. But this is also the case with the dragon, an imperial symbol seen in the screen painting on the panels in the central area and side wings, but also dragons “adorn its sculptured foot, embellish a golden lacquered chair, and are woven into the colorful carpet under the emperor's feet”(41). They are also woven into the silk robes of the emperor. The dragon’s superposition reflects the emperor’s omniscience, yet like consciousness itself, the picture maintains the constant element of the emperor’s unchangeable self, in opposition to the multi-positional nature of the dragon who is seen transforming itself into silk (the painting itself is on silk), lacquer and paint. And it is this superpositioning of consciousness—able to be fixed on one mesmerising focal point of the emperor, the axis mundi of the image, while remaining entirely cognisant of the myriad transformations of the dragon and other designs that appear to vibrate in the periphery of the visual field. It is this very engagement with consciousness that creates the image’s power, over and above the material substrate of the painting on silk, doubled by silk screen painting behind the emperor. The frame-in-the-frame mechanism is associated with royal authority and helps to articulate it as a form of hyper-consciousness. Besides the encounter of the principles of immanence and transcendence that the dragon represents, there is another paradox, a distancing afforded by this doubling of the screen as a painting-in-apainting, and the small, miniature details which, conversely, draw in the gaze. The viewer’s consciousness is both detached and embodied when conscious of standing before a painting brought to mind by the painting-in-the-painting within it. We lose ourselves in our

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exploration of the rich detail, rhythms, and repeats of the series of signs which altogether makes this painting an exercise in bedazzlement, overloading saccadic rhythms. But note that the consciousness of embodiment, and the embodiment of consciousness so dear to the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty is a phenomenon that not only comes into play in the experience of this painting, but it is also inscribed in its imagery: the emperor is embodied by the painting but he appears disembodied by the detailed programme of symbols and designs that seem to whirl around him, transcending the material substrate of his physicality, making him part of a system of signs. His body, even his eyes become part of the visual display, lost in the rich pattern, and our consciousness of our own bodies, eyes is lost in the labyrinth of patterns displayed before us at the moment of our looking. In this sense, the image represents the effect of the image on the viewer. Wu Hung’s highly original approach to the study of Chinese screens employs contemporary critical theories to a traditional art, and in so doing, often unintentionally gives us insights into patterns of conscious visual interpretation which we can upload into broader conclusions about consciousness and the art experience. This we have seen in the context of royal ceremony outlined above, which bears some resemblance to the other examples of visual art and their relationship to consciousness which I have analysed, but there are some other aspects of the Chinese painted screen and how it unfolds cooperatively with phenomenological consciousness which are also worth considering. Certainly, it is not enough to reduce the picture-in-thepicture of the Chinese screen to a linguistic formula, the placement of a “metaphoric space within a metonymic space” (59). Wu Hung goes into some detail about depictions of the Chinese screen in Chinese prints, painted handscrolls and albums. Such depictions communicate attitudes to the symbolism of spatial organisation and division, the depiction of the Chinese screen in art articulates binaries such as culture versus nature for example, where the outside, beyond the screen is contrasted with the etiquette of a social event on the other side of the screen; it clearly signals masculine and feminine, public and private areas. A late Ming woodblock illustration by Chen Hongshou in 1639 depicts a famous episode in the romantic play The Romance of the West Chamber. It shows Xixiangji, the heroine receiving a letter from her lover. She stands in front of an elaborate

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screen of four panels with flowers and vegetation shown in seasonal sequence, along with a pair of butterflies, the traditional symbol of romantic love. The screen functions as a picture-in-a-picture and serves to give us a sense of romance sustained over the seasons, it also suggests the subject of the letter Xixiangji reads. On the other side of the screen an observer, possibly a maid, looks at the lady reading her letter, duplicating or referencing the visual inspection of the viewer. This also sets up with the device of the painting-in-the-painting a cooperation between logocentric and ocularcentric narrative forms, as it does in Gabriel Metsu’s Young Woman Reading a Letter, which I have analysed in some detail in previous pages. The screen provides a visual clue to the clever co-emergence of narrative forms (visual and textual) and also makes the viewer conscious of his or her own kinds of understanding. The similar exposition in both examples shows that it is possible to identify similar patterns of visual consciousness in widely different cultures. In examples of Chinese hand scrolls the viewer’s body is physically involved with the narrative of the painting he or she unrolls to reveal the next episode or subframe of the visual narrative. Sometimes this visual sequence contains pictures of painted screens (with their own pictorial sequences) and this presents an interesting dual movement: the sequence of images unfolded by the viewer contain another sequence of images—this can only serve to thematise or reflect back the phenomenology of viewing such a handscroll—a central feature of which is the seriality of mental image consciousness, which in a contrasting sense, need not be linear at all. The viewer takes on board the substantive message of the painting but is also made aware of its structuring by her unfolding of the handscroll in a chronological, physical sense, and in the figurative sense of an unfolding consciousness. This structuring makes us aware of our own mental image structures, interplaying with memory of earlier images contained in the handscroll. We thus have a dual unfolding of sorts, conscious points which are revisited (and folded back up again) and pictures which are folded and folded up again. The handscroll is inherently reflexive because it allows consciousness, via memory and imagination, to review itself and its previous viewing behaviours and thus fuses personal, psychological history with the narrative of cultural memory, and the result is an intersubjective experience. Some of this

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phenomenology of viewing is implied by Wu Hung who writes that in viewing the handscroll, the viewer’s: […] motion and vision are periodically stopped by painted screens, which constantly readjust his or her relationship to the picture reasserting distance, preventing excessive proximity, and creating concrete measures for the degree of attachment and detachment between the spectator and the picture (66).

Wu Hung thus recognises how consciousness is sustained in degrees of detachment and attachment in the visual experience of handscroll’s picture-in-the-picture. This is also the case with the interpretation of another famous Chinese handscroll which features a painted screen, en abyme. The Double Screen which was: […] designed as a screen painting (an image-bearing object) that represents a series of painted screens (images of image-bearing objects). Although these nested, concentric spaces seem to regulate first- and second-order representation and to distinguish successive levels of reading, the essence of this work, I would argue, is the tension between image and medium (71).

This so-called tension has its origins in and achieves its ends through the cooperation of higher-order thought (focused on the medium) and lower-order thought (the message) and even further higher-order thoughts about the interaction between these two sets. Japanese emaki Much of the unfolding pattern of phenomenological consciousness involved in the art experience of the Chinese handscroll is evident in the Japanese tradition of compartmentalised picture handscrolls (emaki), where the complex framing device, the fukinuki yatai which removes a roof or wall providing a view through houses into rooms and private chambers, allows the viewer to interact with and amplify processes of consciousness to a point where it seems that the picture addresses the viewer’s phenomenology of viewing. As in the Chinese examples given above, recent Japanese scholarship has become more interested in explaining the phenomenology of viewing and reading, where spatial and visual apertures: windows, screens, doorways and open roofs compartmentalise mental states alluded to in the illustrated text. Indeed, psychological shifts and patterns described in the text which the reader adopts are visually supported by the frames-in-

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frames of the illustrations, so that they co-emerge with mental images aroused by reading. Masako Watanabe in his study of the tales of the Genji scroll tradition writes: These apertures in the picture signify the passage of three parallel movements in the various layers of the narrative [A scene can contain] multiple layers of temporal and spatial allusions. While the viewer’s eyes touch on each pictured object or figure again and again, the viewer actually experiences a drama in all its spatial and temporal dimensions (Watanabe 1998: 135-136).

The fukinuki yatai device, which removes portions of roofs and walls allowing the viewer to see through them, has multiple uses similar to the framing devices in art used in other visual traditions. As in Velázquez’s complex framing devices, the fukinuki yatai compartmentalises thoughts and shows them to be interior and secreted away from many of the figures portrayed, but they are also revealed to the viewer. A vantage point is created for the viewer which is a higherorder thought of all the lower-order thoughts exemplified by the framed scenes and relations to the figures. But it is important to state, as I have elsewhere, that this vantage point is not necessarily cut off from the work it surveys, for the target of observation may index this particular conscious state. Masako Watanabe suggests, as I do with many other examples of framing, that the fukinuki yatai device is: […] a critical instrument to illustrate not only interior activities but also the interior mind of characters in the courtly narrative painting. This compositional scheme is enhanced by the compartmentalised rectangular frame, because the geometric force of the architectural elements, which are severed by frame borders, gives a sense of flatness and abstractness to pictorial space in the compartmentalised emaki. This peculiarity of narrative space serves to suggest the ambiguity of the character's inner mind, which parallels the intricate textual structure (143).

It is not difficult to see where this logic leads, for in compartmentalising characters’ consciousnesses which the fukinuki yatai device reveals, the viewer’s consciousness is also implicated. It steps into the various frames and spaces to occupy the states of mind projected by the artist. The visual organisation of space is thus more than an aesthetic effect; it helps to organise consciousness into a series of attachments and detachments, openings and enclosures, vantage points and points of view. The indexing of the viewer’s consciousness is particularly strong in cases where characters are seen inspecting

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paintings, which we see in an example, entitled, A Painting Competition cited by Watanable, but whose complex visual effects are left unacknowledged. Here, not only do we see through the frame of the absent roof, but through the eyes, pictures-in-pictures and consciousnesses of the characters depicted, a doubling of our own visual inspection occurs. In a sense, what is being painted here is an intersubjective seriality of consciousness that visually compartmentalises and reveals our own viewing consciousness to ourselves. In showing us a series of frames the Japanese handscrolls provides a consciousness of our embodied self-consciousness which we can imagine as a frame. The frame-in-the-frame indexes our physical embodiment and the mental states that pass through it. In this, the emaki are not different from the other examples from different cultural traditions I have dealt with here. Yoruban Heads Many traditions of art visualise the embodiment of consciousness as a frame. And depictions of the head also are used as framing devices for the same purpose. Osi Audu, a Nigerian and British artist uses the traditional Yoruban visualisation of consciousness as a head-in-a-head or ‘inner head’ as an important part of his art. His works are: […] about the human head, and the different kinds of experiences one can feel in the head or mind. I believe that all objects and shapes, because they are man-made or conceived by man, have a direct or indirect reference to the human form […] In response to the form of the human head, I use abstract, geometric and sometimes organic shapes as metaphors for the head, and incorporate a selection of man-made objects i.e. candy, rubber band, plastic bowl including human hair for their expressive as well as sculptural qualities. I use these to reference a range of phenomenal experiences like seeing, dreaming, tasting sweetness, the ability to produce sound as in whistling, the crowning of the baby’s head during birth, and the visual implications of the saying ‘the eyes are the windows of the soul’. I also consider the physiology of the head, and use the imagery of stars to allude to the neural sparks in the brain, which produce awareness. I have always been fascinated by the nature of consciousness, and I am continually interested in scientific, mythological and philosophical concepts about it (Osi Audu, New York, June 2007).43

43

Artist’s statement published accessed 13/09/2007.

at

http://www.artco-art.com/osiaudu/raum1.html

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In a pastel and graphite work on paper entitled, I have a landscape in my head (2001), the artist explores the sensation of flight in dreams. It depicts a dark framing device which develops into an elbow and culminates in a curled hand, this frame also has stylised hands and feet and represents the figure of the dreamer. The dark rectangle of graphite inside this body-frame symbolises embodiment whilst the multicoloured striped area at the centre of the rectangle represents the experience and excitement of flight in the mind or ‘inner head’. The matt surface of the pastel refers to the unconscious which absorbs all dayto-day experiences (as it does light), whilst the shiny graphite refers to the structure of the skull that protects each person’s inner world and reflect images and light. The artist writes: The work is a reference to the Yoruba concept of orí inú (literally ‘inner head’ in Yoruba) where the head is the seat of destiny and location of each person’s private yet potent set of dreams. The life-force àse (pronounced ash-ay), another Yoruba concept, is contained within all things, whether animate or inanimate. In people the head is the container for àse.44

In the picture, the frame of art repeated here is a head and an inner head, the artistic frame references the body and the viewer’s body, her self-examination is visualised by the painting of introspection through these different heads or frames. Orí was originally associated with an early divinity that conquered all with his superior áse and thus the association of the power of the head was: […] extended to political and spiritual heads and leaders. This is also true in the case of the physical human and animal heads because they control the rest of the body, the head of a city or town usually an oba (a divine ruler), a community leader and whoever or whatever controls and leads the way in any situation, are all believed to possess áse similar to that of Orí (Abiodun 1994: 313).

As in the Renaissance system of analogies, with the Byzantine iconin-the-icon discussed earlier, and also with Vermeer’s The Woman with a Balance, art is linked to cosmology and creation myths by the organising principle of embedded/embodied series of containers, which begins with the divinity’s first creation through the frame of prima materia or the ‘hand of god’ which we see with Rodin’s sculpture, and cascades to various other acts of creation. The work of art 44

Website accessed, 10/02/2006. http://www.osiaudu.com/index_works.htm

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instantiates the concept of creation and procreation, and this is so the case in Yoruba cultures, where the concepts of pregnancy and creating a work of art are often described in similar terms (Lawal 2001: 500). Art ‘contains’ the concept of creation and consciousness ‘contains’ creation within itself, and like art, utilises and reveals the principle of creativity. Such examples of art seem naturally to reference the body inside of the body of pregnancy and also consciousness inside the body. It is through the signs of art, the head, and the body containing another body in pregnancy that the principle of creativity is made visible. The principle of organising this system of analogies is, in fact, a principle of consciousness itself, a presentation of a seriality whose visual manifestation is through frames-in-frames. It seems important that orí can mean both head and consciousness and, as such, is a container, and can be a container of life. Orí has both a literal and physical meaning: head and a non-literal meaning: consciousness, but both contain the destiny agreed with the divine before existence and erased from consciousness at birth. Details of this agreement are concealed not only within the head but within the inner head (orí inú). There is therefore, an important element of self-discovery in this schema that works on both psychogeographical and religious levels of interpretation, where the self and destiny are contained within the head and within consciousness, both of them discoverable through self-reflection and analysis. To come to know the orí is, essentially, to come to know oneself, to have a consciousness of one’s conscious behaviour: Likewise, every creature uses its orí (usually the head or some other place where their áse is located) to solve problems and surmount obstacles. In the visual arts, notably in sculpture, orí is made the focus of much ritual, artistic and aesthetic activity. Not infrequently, orí is made more prominent and given a place of visual command by rendering it bigger than normal in size, and proportionally subordinating all other parts of the body to it. Its features receive a detailed artistic treatment while coiffures, headgear and crowns worn on the orí are deliberately emphasised (314).

Thus, the inner head (orí inú) is adorned with the ‘outer head’ and hair, which are adorned with plaits and ornaments, and there is a rich tradition of crowns (ìborì) for heads in Yoruba culture. This beautification is meant to signify the lifting up of, or respect due to the ‘inner head’. Art and representations that place such importance on the head by placing ornaments upon and around it, and the actual adornment of

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the physical head with ìborì, corresponds to and articulates the valorisation of the ‘inner head’ by thematising a visual inner/outer relation. And this is further emphasised by the conical headdress intricately decorated with coloured glass beads on grass cloth which incorporate not only birds often placed on the very tops of the conical structures to emphasise height and flight or áse, but also naturalistic depictions of heads.45 Thus, the crowns placed on the head have heads woven into their designs. This head-in-a-head design corresponds to the frame-in-theframe, where the outer adornment with a head design contains the outer head, the inner head and consciousness. The wearer of this headdress also wears ‘a head’, which further articulates the inner/outer head distinction, en abyme.46 This is also the case with masks that symbolise outer heads which also have heads decorated on them and sculptures, diviners’ bags, textiles, and a whole series of objects that feature heads as designs, or head shaped containers. These designs express the complex relations between consciousness, the inner head, the life force, and the embodiment of these in the outer head and physical substrate of the art work-cum-outer head. Clearly, there is a consciousness of a series of embodiments in religion, biology and art that are organised by the structural and creational principle of headsin-heads premised on the structural organisation of frames-in-frames. This consciousness makes sense out of its own seriality by using this principle of organisation or exposition to mentally visualise itself, while engaging with these works. It does not take a giant leap to see that logically here, and elsewhere, consciousness and creativity are comparable to each other in the method of their productivity, which may be expressed as framing within framing. In another work, in the British Museum: Juju, graphite and mixed media, 1998, Osi Audu represents a rectangular box which is used as a metaphor of the head as a frame or container for consciousness. It is adorned with plaits and safety pins. This is a reference to the Yoruban ìborì richly decorated with cowrie shells which symbolically house 45

Three different modes of representing the head have been identified in Yoruba sculpture as “the naturalistic, which refers to the external or physical head (ori ode); the stylised, which hints at the inner or spiritual head (ori inu); and the abstract, which symbolises the primeval material (oke ipori) of which the inner head was made” (Lawal 1985: 91). 46 See a photograph of such headdress being worn in Lawal 2001: fig. 22.

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the inner head. As with the other examples discussed here, art becomes a physical, material simulacrum of the physical, material head/skull. Consciousness is visualised as something contained and containing, as such, there are also containers of containers. And of course, this series of containers is also to be experienced from the third person point of view, from the outside, but through one’s own containment, social mask, head, inner head, consciousness. Note also that, along with many other cultures, the eye in Yoruba tradition has an outer aspect (associated with the day-to-day, ordinary vision) and an inner aspect responsible for mental visualisation. Art, using the imagery of heads and eyes, is a way of physically representing many of these distinctions and relations between envisioning higher-order thoughts and lower-order optical sensations. Heads and Frames When heads, skulls and eyes are used as framing devices or on the edges of frames in painting, sculpture and architecture across many cultures, at least two functions may be discerned from such a usage. These visual elements serve to emphasise a scission in the visual and conceptual field, usually between different levels of consciousness, variously presented as binary opposites: true versus false, sacred versus profane, higher verses lower, esoteric versus exoteric, intrinsic versus extrinsic. However, the scission brings into play discursive practices that allow these binaries to be negotiated in various ways. The frames of eyes or heads show us (and activate in us) the very switch from one kind of consciousness to another. As with Derrida’s theoretical construct of the parergon, such frames denote a blending into each other of the binaries they also divide. Indeed, the psychological process of transition, of blending, would be more difficult to experience without setting up the binary coordinates which stage such processes of flux so vital to the art experience. The frames of eyes or heads in art are signs in the visual field of various crossings binaries in one of the most important of which is the body/mind distinction. The frame marked with heads and eyes suggests a consciousness inside the frame, creating a continuum with that outside the frame. The frame of heads dramatises consciousness in the world and representations of the world in consciousness. Such frames make us aware of our own embodied sight, and our embodied consciousness, while showing

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tokens of consciousness which are embodied in the world, in art. In Yoruba culture, the power, gaze or consciousness of a deity signified by an effigy or collection of charms is usually “concealed inside a wooden bowl with a face carved on it to provide an ocular outlet for its content” (Lawal 2001:519). Further levels of concealment occur with the covering up with cloth of carved figures to shield their destructive power from the uninitiated. This not only repeats the containment of a specific consciousness inside another containment of consciousness but uses the motif of the head to symbolise and contain that consciousness. Clearly, the head as art functions as a threshold in the transformation of consciousness, as anthropology has taught us. “The body is a complex structure. The functions of its different parts and their relation afford a source of symbols for other complex structures (Douglas 1966: 115). One of the most complex of these structures is consciousness itself. The motifs of the severed head, and more commonly of a row or chain of severed heads surrounding an image or worn as a necklace, are deeply rooted in the visual arts of the Indian subcontinent. Kali, the goddess of change, destruction, and rebirth is perhaps one of the better known deities wearing the necklace of skulls. Kali’s necklace represents her power over human life and is meant to shock and awe. But note that the heads or skulls surround her head and so there is a framing of heads within which there is another head which acts as the frame for an embedded consciousness. Síva as Gangadhara, also known as the destroyer and the third deity of the Hindu triad of great gods, the Trimurti, features the deity wearing a necklace of human heads. The heads serve to make the worshippers or viewers wary of lifting their eyes to the deity’s face without a sense of the uncanny, so integral to worship, and premised on the intersection of familiarity and fear. The frame of heads or eyes demarcates a boundary of familiar consciousness which may be crossed only if fear or the exhaustion of intellectual thought are conquered. The framenecklace is the boundary to another world co-existent with this, en abyme reached by the power of the gaze which carries consciousness through the frame-necklace of heads to what lies inside the head of the deity et cetera. Yet this is also self-reflexive, we are also ‘going deeper into our own heads’. Such a fusion of horizons between art and consciousness is also interpretable as a message from the gods: when we seek to go beyond the frame of heads (and in a sense beyond our own head) we are being invited to do so.

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The framing of heads in various ways features in the myths and stories of many cultures. In Japan, Shodo Shonin, a famous founder and saint of the temple at Nikko, prayed for a bridge to enable him to cross a raging river and a giant gatekeeper appeared wearing a garland of human heads around his neck. The giant threw snakes across the river and the saint crossed over on their backs. The garland of human heads is associated with the gatekeeper who marks the boundary between two worlds: the sacred and the profane, ordinary consciousness and that accompanying the knowledge of the initiated. In several East European myths, a Baba Yaga is a cannibalistic witch who lives in a house surrounded by a fence on which she places the skulls of her victims to demarcate her territory. In ancient Greece, a common talisman was the gorgoneion, a stone head or picture of a Gorgon, which was often placed on temples and graves to avert the evil eye and was also placed on the shields of soldiers to protect them against danger. A corresponding use is found in Indian art in the form of the kirtimukha, the face of glory, which wards off evil from the top of sculptural niches in Medieval Hindu sculpture. In a thirteenth century octagonal cast brass mortar made in Iran, there are heads carved into the sides, and the inscriptions invoke a spirit of protection and immunity from danger for the owner.47 In medieval European manuscripts and maps, it is common to see atlases of the world framed by human heads. In a world map from a psalter now in the British Library,48 heads are painted on the very edges of the ends of the earth, marking the outer limits of the known and signaling the beginning of the fear and danger of the unknown terra incognita surrounding it. In fact, the heads in all examples given both warn viewers of the dangers of crossing a boundary, invoke fear in those who see them as representations in themselves, eye-to-eye, and they are charms to ward off the evil eye. These representations are also: T Thresholds, whether spatial or temporal […] are liminal zones, ‘betwixt and between’, or transitions where danger lies. As people pass from one state (physical, psychological, social) to another, so they encounter danger which must be controlled through rituals that protect against pollution (Pearson Richards 1994: 25). 47

(Melikian-Chirvani 1982: 161-163). The author goes on to note that, “Since mortars were an essential accessory of pharmacy and alchemy, as well as magic, some unorthodox inspiration might, perhaps account for this strange iconography” (162). 48 Ms. 28618 f. 9r. See Camille 1992: fig. 3.

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The row of heads is thus intended primarily to signify a threshold, either to guard secrets and bar the way of the traveler or enquirer or, simply to mark physically and conceptually discrete domains: Primary mythical and religious feelings are linked to the spatial threshold, which finds expression in the sacred control of the moments of ‘entrance’ and ‘exit’ in rites of passage and their corresponding myths (Meletinsky 2000:34).

The row of heads is thus intended to warn of danger and, I would add, different kinds of consciousness. The severed heads emphasise the frame that creates an area which is mental visual and yet made immanent in the visible world by framing: ‘Self-contained’ means isolated from and even protected against two potential intrusions: (1) that of the picture’s own environment, and (2) that of the spectator’s intrusive presence […] frame or boundary are meant to protect that which is ‘within’; the surface or plane that which is ‘behind’. Both are seen as containing what is ‘not of this world’ but of a separate or higher reality (Puttfarken 2000: 7)

The frame “is a threshold, but also of meaning” (Stoichita 1997:159). As a device that alerts us to a self-contained area, the heads are responsible for the signification of different levels of meaning for the initiated, brave enough to venture beyond the threshold of the literal. Against the view that the internal division displays a preference for a mode of presentation, it introduces various modes of presentation, of ways of looking at the world as a set of unresolved discursive practices which keeps the phenomenology of experience sustained while looking at the picture. Heads in Indian Art In a painting from an illustrated book of poetry owned by the Emperor Akbar (regnal dates 1556-1605) the contrast of different kinds of vision (mentally visual, optical) is visually expressed. For convenience, I will call this painting The Disputing Physicians. The painting depicts two opposing physicians from the same school shown engaged in a theological debate. Behind these in the background is a representation of murals taken from European art. One of these depicts St.

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Luke (or St. Matthew) receiving instructions from an angel to record his vision which is a message from god. Such Christian images were brought to India by the Jesuits in the form of prints in their missions to convert the Mughals in the sixteenth century and were used as oddities in the repertoire of several generations of Mughal artists’ works and pasted into Mughal albums. Such images would have had a certain resonance for the Mughals, for according to Islamic traditions, the prophet Muhammad received a series of visions in his lifetime which were later transcribed into the Qur’an. Such a picture is thus an intertextual one which embodies and projects cultural memory for both Christian and Muslim consciousness in one conceptual and physical space. The following is a short description of what is illustrated: Two physicians […] quarrel because each claims superiority. One night they agree to a contest in courage and in skill. The one makes a potion of deadly poison. The other drinks it followed by an antidote. He then picks a rose, and breathing a spell over it, offers it to his opponent. The first overcome by terror of the enchanted flower falls dead (Brend 1995: 11-12).

The first physician’s fear of the poisoned flower (that is in fact a visual deceit, a bluff) causes his downfall. The ‘outer’ painting which surrounds the inner, portrays the moment when the defeated, swooning physician falls to the floor watched by the victor. Their respective followers accompany both of them in two groups, one on the left hand side, the other, on the right, supporting the swooning physician. The author of the original text in the twelfth century, the Iranian poet Nizami, who composed the poetic imagery which the painting is meant to evoke, relies on many ancient traditions and cloaked allusions to different schools of thought in Islamic jurisprudence and theology to enrich the tale. The debate here could symbolise the polarised one between philosophical and theological traditions, both of which had contributed formidable legacies of interpretation of the Qur’an. But it has been transposed here by the Mughal artist who has used a Christian print as his model almost four hundred years later to depict an encounter between Christian religious imagery and the poetic imagery of Iranian culture. As for the disputing physicians, we know that there was much fanfare connected to the many theological debates which were held between the Jesuits and the Mughals described in the Akbar-nama, the chronicle of the Emperor’s reign, as an invitation to scholars and theologians of all religions to debate the truth at the

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The Disputing Physicians, illustration in a book of poetry, India 1593-95 after original.

‘ibadatkhana (or debating chamber), opened at Akbar's splendid palace at Fatehpur Sikri.It is possible that ‘ibadatkhana idea is being referenced in this picture. Not only is there a reference to old debates between faith and knowledge re-enacted in sixteenth century India in a visual way by the Mughal artist, but vision is itself a theme, for the dying physician is visually fooled, while the painted prophet in the background receives the true vision, which is not based on the trickery of worldly appearances. The poison (the poisoned rose) is a false representation, a form of rhetoric through which the truth (the antidote) emerges. The foreground mise-en-scène serves the purpose of providing a contrast to the background scene. Mental vision (processed with higher-order thought) shown as the saint’s vision is shown over mere optical illusion (lower-order thought). Imperfect vision and deceit in the foreground are contrasted with visionary inspiration shown in the picture-in-a-picture, and at the same time, the vision involved in inspecting this painting is brought into focus here,

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as well. Are we viewing the painting as the simple illustration of the story or are we able to ‘see’ its esoteric import? We are looking at a painting, and a painting-in-a-painting, both represent different ways of seeing and different ways of thinking. In this, it differs little from the use of the picture-in-a-picture in Velázquez’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary painted a century later. Not only can we have higher-order thoughts about these different ways of seeing involved in our own experience of art, but the picture-in-the-picture shows us the story of a visionary who writes about his vision in a book, logocentric consciousness is contrasted with the ocularcentric and the latter with mental vision. Intervening in this encounter between logocentrism and ocularcentrism is the visual code of a row of severed heads (repeated on the pillars), which creates a boundary around the ‘foreign’ or otherworldly vision. Thus, we have a ‘supernatural’ vision bounded by a frame of heads. The row of heads is in fact, a consistent framing device found in many Mughal illustrations that contain European or Hindu imagery, and is usually represented as an architectural detail above an entrance. On its own, this detail may have signified little but seen in so many contexts in Mughal art it is evident that such a frame of severed heads was used probably by the Mughal court’s more superstitious artists, as a magic charm or talisman to ward off the power that these foreign images, incorporated into Mughal illustrations might have on the artist or the viewer, or to warn them to be wary of such visions. It is also possible that the heads are a reference to the boundary of the mental visual consciousness (alam-i mithal), which should only be crossed with caution by the initiated. The superstitious attitude is yet another kind of vision. And so, as with Las Meninas, the painting is an index of different ways of seeing, which are also different levels of awareness. As a picture-in-a-picture which presents a multiplicity of ways of seeing and because of its remarkable references to art and to pictures with its large number of framing devices, framing figures, doorways and windows, the image would be at home in a diversity of epistemes.49 As in Las Meninas, there is a multiplicity of interpretational modes which are possible here and the spatial depictions denote dif49 The use of the Focauldian term here is meant as a way of showing how cross cultural connectivities of this kind challenge the philosopher’s framing of a largely Euro-American intellectual history.

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ferent mental compartments and levels and qualitatively different packages of information that balance and counterbalance viewing and self-reflection. Another important way of seeing here is the use of the contrast of embodiment and disembodiment both in literal and conceptual terms. The outer painting embodies the inner image of eidesis and therefore doubles and confronts us with our own embodied mental visual consciousness. The frame of heads visualises my physical head, in the picture I must pass through the embodied world for consciousness to arise and for the world to be in my consciousness as an intentional object. This is dramatised by one picture emerging inside the other. Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of conscious experiences of the body help to provide a useful framework within which to position a phenomenological analysis of images with bounded frames of eyes, bodies and heads, as we see in The Disputing Physicians. My body is given to me as an image of interiority and exteriority, I have a consciousness of its outsidedness as I feel its insidedness. These categories are brought to play in The Disputing Physicians that brings embodied vision, the framing bodies of the two physicians, the frame of heads around the inner picture (which refer to our own bodies as viewers and our own embodied experience) into direct contrast with the image inside which represents a moment of non-corporeal mental vision (the angel is seen by the saint with the mind, not the eye). Our consciousness appears to go through and inside the ‘physical’ frame of heads shown here. The frame of heads is also a head which separates mental images from the external world of objects and things. It is important to remember that the whole picture, not just the picture-in-thepicture, is an image of the artist’s mental visual consciousness arising from an inner vision of the details of the story. But as a material reality, a picture of paint upon a page, it forms the physical image available intersubjectively. The physical image becomes the beholder’s intentional object, becoming part of her own consciousness. Consciousness of sensual, tactile and haptic materiality (which may be prereflexive) may act as a bridge between the external world and the internal. And I have already written about the unsatisfactory and misleading duality of external and internal, where phenomenology prefers to speak of co-emergence. In this sense, the painting engages with that process of co-emergence, thematising and deliberately crossing the binary of the external and

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internal with the embodied and embodying frame of heads. The painting of a mental vision references both external and internal reality. The body’s two-sidedness is explained by Husserl: […] my bodily self-exploration permits me to confront my own exteriority […] It is exactly the unique subject–object status of the body, the remarkable interplay between ipseity and alterity characterising body-awareness that provides me with the means of recognising other embodied subjects (Zahavi 2001: 161).

And it is this very play between ipseity and alterity which is brought into play by the frame of bodies, heads and eyes in art. In the Mughal context, however, interiority in spatial, conceptual, physical senses implies the esoteric and the sacred (batin), that which lies behind, beyond or through the exoteric and mundane (zahir). The frame brings both worlds into view and mimics the frame of art, but it is also the framing body which acts as a conduit for the relations of the external (the revealed) to the internal (the esoteric). The Disputing Physicians thus presents us with a double-sidedness of reality—the exteriority of the physical world and the interiority of the mental—joined by the frame of severed heads which mimics our own ‘headed centredness’. Both realities co-emerge in the experience of the body of the work of art. The conscious experience of the co-emergence of inner and outer picture which hinges on the frame of heads, so commonly seen in Mughal art as a divider between different visual traditions of different religions thus enables a kind of visualised phenomenology. In The Disputing Physicians the frame of heads acts as a frame for the world and consciousness, the frame thus alludes to the doublesideness of the body as interior and exterior, subject and object. The frame of heads signifies the materiality of the world, body, and art through and upon which consciousness emerges. The spatial configuration which features an inner picture and outer picture joined by a frame of heads, implies the spatial schema of consciousness depicted ‘in’ the world (of the picture) and this world in consciousness as an intentional object. Another important thing to become conscious of is that this painting is lodged in the body of a book, and we are reminded of the fact that we are looking at a book (not a painting in an art gallery sense) by the very noticeable outer margin frame of gold inks on parchment which surround this picture and by the depiction of the book and lectern ‘embodied’ in the centre of the painting. This is a reverse em-

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bodiment of image-in-book and book-in-image which further strengthens the play between a double pair: ocularcentrism with logocentrism and disembodiment with embodiment. The two central figures that create a frame with their bodies form an écart, an opening through which we behold the inner frame of bodyless heads framing the picture on the back wall. The frame of heads is both of this world and not of this world, embodied and disembodied, and forms another threshold onto the prophet’s vision; the body of the prophet forms another frame to be surpassed, and the body of the angel is the last frame, and through this frame is the purely mental image of god whose presence in the picture is intimated but not embodied, or embodied only by the word which the prophet is busy writing on some scroll. This brings us back to the words in the margin of the text which, in the original are seen above the painting, and this returns us to our consciousness of the book in which this visual, emanationist cosmology appears. And underneath the picture of the prophet and the angel is a small framed picture of a woman in a bed being shown a scroll, possibly a nativity scene, which further creates the sense of analogical levels of creation. While any sensitive art historical reading of the painting would unearth an underlying structure of opposites, sacred and profane, human and superhuman, physical and spiritual, logocentrism and ocularcentrism, the discursivity between these different elements create in the viewer an unresolved phenomenology of body consciousness, an undiminished flow of image and self-image and of a multiplicity of viewpoints that put the ontology of the body under constant review— as it is always with our bodies—not least by making us aware of our own body movements, of our eyes, our hands on the page, only to erase consciousness of these momentarily with the passage of other Abschattungen and with the launching of the gaze. And so both prereflexive, unthematic awareness of the body cooperates with a thematised consciousness of the body. But the body itself as an object appears as a series of abstractions: margin, word, picture, head, prophet, vision, and angel. The telos in the Mughal context is spiritual transcendence beyond the prison of the body but the route it takes to this ideal is phenomenologically intelligible. Art history might also point out that the proximity of a fainting figure near a painting within a painting resembles many other pictorial traditions of saints having visions (or a crucifixion or deposition

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scene). This would imply that one of the disputing physicians has a vision of the angel in the European painting on the wall (associated with his swooning or the giving up of his consciousness of his surroundings). In parallel with a common compositional scheme in Counter-Reformation Europe, the disputing physicians is a Mughal example of an artistic device that consists of the representation of a visionary experience by placing the visionary in the lower part of the picture with the vision in the upper part (Stoichita 1995: 27). Again, this juxtaposes body and head with external vision and internal vision. The plurality of meanings that can be formed from comparing background image with foreground is undoubtedly a measure of the success of the image as a whole in capturing the viewer’s imagination, the heads alert us to a scission of the literal and the figural but alerts us also to their cooperation. The curtain thrown back as if to reveal a secret adds to the sense of deliberation behind, in and around this enclosed image. Dividing the picture into different sections is the tool the artist uses to present this joint narrative (the story within the story). But also, it may be a solution to the problem of illustrating the author Nizami’s complex poetic imagery. Returning to the text, in the verse in the Khamsa dealing directly with this part of the story of the disputing physicians we read: Know (reader), that the garden of the world, whose spring time you are, to be a place of grief, in which you are a picture. Throw stones at these layers of earth; throw dust at this mirage (Nizami in Darab 1945: 30).

The Mughal artist has chosen to illustrate this verse by showing that the mirage is a painting of someone having a mirage. The verse nests a picture within the garden of the world, a mental image which thematises mental visualising. Nizami characterises the world as a garden, filled with the presence of spring in the form of the reader (or humanity itself). But the garden is a place of grief, perhaps because the spring is so short-lived and therefore only an illusion, like a picture, compared to the eternal life of the soul, at least in theological understanding. Similarly, consciousness is more than (or cannot be explained purely by) its physical substrate and it must not be seen as a

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purely mentalist interiority. He invites the reader to throw stones at “layers of earth”, layers of material incarnation of which the body is one example but which may also refer to the garden, the picture itself, and the self of the reader. The verse has a parallel in the Old Testament Genesis III, 19: “dust thou art and unto dust thou shall return.” These layers of earth hide the true meaning lying underneath. Seen simply as an illustration of Nizami’s poetry, the viewer is prompted to leave behind the mirage or the outer husk of the body, frame, painting, as a series of temporary appearances in order to penetrate the real meaning of the painting, beyond the mirage of its literal, outer, physical appearance. The power of the image here is to constitute consciousness from two opposing angles, namely, the body seen as an image from the outside, and as an image from the inside, both questioning each other, giving rise to an intersubjectivity. The body’s materiality is doubled by the materiality of the art, its power to reference absence outside of the frame and with its references to visionary experience. We are left with a dynamic indeterminacy that creates a superposition of consciousness, bringing the body and images of it into a productive uncertainty. As with Las Meninas, for example, the painting is premised on the open ended processes of consciousness which come into play as a detailed exploration of the structure of the painting, which is also an engagement in the world. What is disclosed by the cogito is consequently not an enclosed immanence, a pure interior self-presence, but an openness toward alterity, a movement of exteriorisation and perpetual self-transcendence. It is by being present to the world that we are present to ourselves, and it is by being given to ourselves that we can be conscious of the world (Zahavi in Toadvine and Embree 2002: 9).

This openness to alterity is encouraged by The Disputing Physicians which is an exteriorisation (an object present in the world) while revealing itself to be a process of interiorisation, which we confront and that allows us to be present to ourselves. It is both Other and self-referential, and it does this by configuring the visual field into internal and external relationships which signify spatial and mental differences which we also experience with our bodies in front of the picture during the art experience. The consciousness which produces and experiences the painting-in-a-painting has a structural organisation that is a mental analogue of that configuration in the visual field, but

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as I have argued, this need not be thought of in crude symmetrical terms and there are also cultural inflections that vary this consciousness which the painting of The Disputing Physicians prompts us to consider. This is also the case with another painting from Mughal India, an album painting now in the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin.50

Detail of Mughal painting in Berlin Album early 1600s. Public Domain-Old-100

The image represents several levels of fiction, one inside the other. The painting in the Berlin Album features a figure dressed in a white robe and turban with red shoes carrying a picture. This picture shows painting of the same man dressed in white and so on, en abyme. The notion that the mise en abyme and its philosophical and psychological underpinning simply demonstrate the concerns of Euro-American modernism is shown here to be untenable. With the aid of a magnifying glass, one can also spot a third, further ‘internal duplication’ of the same picture of the white figure holding a picture. It is a deliberate regress. We get the impression that time is repeating itself and that an illusion is copying or creating itself within itself, using the body of the man in white and the series of frames as a way to mark the internal duplications. 50

It has no official title. MS 117, fol. 21a, 41 x 25.5 cm.

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Parallel mental constructions appear in various Islamic theological texts which show the mise en abyme of the Mughal image to be a structurally cooperative with emanation cosmologies, where there are many references to regress, a series of realities, the most important being the highest reality of the divine archetypes, successively reproduced in a series of emanations of less pure or “less real” versions of reality, the closer one descends towards matter, or sense particulars.51 On this view, there are obvious similarities with my interpretation of the Aretino’s letter to Titian in Part 1 and with Vermeer’s Woman with a Balance, Yoruban heads and the Buddhist cave shrine at Dunhuang. Each level of creation in all these cases is expressed as a picture-in-apicture or a container inside another. It is the principle that these different kinds of hierarchies of emanation have points along a scale, each of which is a mirror image of the one beneath it or within it or otherwise alongside it. In the widely influential thought of Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240) these levels are called hadarat (or hudud in other schema), which are presences, limitations or frames, of which there are five: the highest world of absolute mystery; the lower, angelic world of determinations; then the world of souls; the fourth world is the world of idea-images, the alam al-mithal, a world common to most schemas of this kind. The fifth and lowest of the worlds is the world of sensory data, the world of phenomena of contingent existences. The important principle governing these worlds and their relationships to each other is that each lower presence is the image and correspondence of the one above it, and: […] the reflection and mirror of the next higher. Thus everything that exists in the sensible world is a reflection, a typification (mithal) of what exists in the world of the Spirits and so on, up to the things, which are the first reflections of the Divine Essence itself (Corbin 1981: 225).

This is most efficiently envisioned as series of embedded images each reflecting the other inside itself, as in monadic arrangements.52 Each internal penetration is equal to a new inner vision or esoteric truth, and 51 For a detailed study of the traces of Plotinian emanation systems in Muslim theological traditions see Netton 1994. 52 Each reflection is also, at the same time, an almost imperceptible alteration of that which it purports to reflect; the failure to make this distinction prolongs the illusion of regress.

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so travelling to the center reveals truths (as does adjusting vision to see the embedded image). Travelling to the center is also analogous to travelling higher in the hierarchy of levels in the quest for truth and self-knowledge. The visual organisation of the monad in this painting, as in Husserl’s Dresden Gallery, supplies consciousness with a vocabulary to describe its own processes which organise it, a consciousness of a seriality which makes use of frame-in-frames as a principle of self-organisation. Thus, the picture-in-a-picture device is a seriality centred on one location, as a self-generating intensity. The Berlin Album painting encourages a superposition between perceptions of an embedded painting and a distancing effect, and the monadic pictorial organisation brings this binary of perceptions into a restless relationship, as with the refresh rate of a digital image, consciousness negotiates the conflict with a rapid deployment of higherorder thoughts. The Berlin Album painting is an image of thought as a self-reproducing, self-generative process which goes nowhere. The Disputing Physicians, the Berlin Album painting, as well as Velázquez’s Christ at the House of Mary and Martha set up a contrast between the projected ‘internal’ painting and the ‘external’ painting. But these are not merely spatial categories. The depicted internal space may be read as an esoteric, sacred message situated in the exoteric context of the ‘external’ space, usually depicted as a profane space. Both kinds of projections of space—one inside the other— provide the opportunity for a complex, integrated viewer response where the internal is read ‘through’ the external, while at the same time, the religious is read through the aesthetic. As the soul or the heart lies within the body, so the soul of the work, its esoteric truth, lies within the body of the work. We can shed further light on the phenomenology involved in the experience of the frame-in-the-frame in these paintings by referencing some Mughal philosophical opinions about how vision works. Abu’l Fazl (d. 1604) Mughal vizier, historian and philosopher wrote: What we call form leads us to recognise a body; the body itself leads us to what we call a notion, an idea. Thus, on seeing the form of a letter, we recognise the letter, or a word and this again will lead us to some idea. Similarly in the case of what people call a picture (Abu’l Fazl in Blochmann 1873: 96 97).

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For the Mughals, framing devices added a multiplicity of meaning to paintings and another layer to aesthetic experience. Not only did these frames-in-frames cooperate with the literary concept of ‘meanings within meanings’ characterised as ‘outer meaning’ and ‘inner meaning’ in Islamic thought, commonly called zahir and batin, respectively, they allowed logocentric consciousness to be aligned with an ocularcentric one. This alignment of spatial and semantic levels may be seen in another statement by Abu’l Fazl describing paintings by European artists: Although in general, a picture represents a material form [...] the painters of Europe quite often express, by using rare forms, our mental states53 and (thus) they lead the ones who consider only the outside of things to the place of inner meaning (Blochmann 1873: 96, my italics).

And in comparing a letter or word to painting, Abu’l Fazl implies that painting too, is a kind of language meant to communicate “a notion, an idea.” Elsewhere he writes: A letter [i.e. the visible symbol or form] is the portrait painter of wisdom; a rough sketch from the world of ideas […] speaking, though dumb; stationary, and yet traveling; stretched on the sheet and yet soaring upwards (Blochmann 1873: 103).

“Soaring upwards” indicates the emanation cosmology of repeated stages of creation, but each stage is a mirror of the one above revealed or clothed in material forms for all to see. Ideas are visually represented in matter, they are the inner meaning of that representation, which is to be ‘brought out’ and made known through a process of revealing. The Emperor Akbar was described as “Lord of the World, depicter of the external, revealer of the internal” (Abu’l Fazl in Jarrett 1948: 502, my italics). The implication here is that Akbar was able to reveal and interpret esoteric wisdom from external appearances. This is also the case when Abu’l Fazl described the Emperor as “Perceiver of the links between the Visible and Invisible Worlds” (Jarrett 1948: 53

Khilq, an adjective meaning any disposition in human nature whether intellectual or emotional (‘tolerance’ or ‘anger’, for example), which helps to form different characters. The singular noun, khilq can mean humour, spirit or temper while the plural aklaq, has the more intellectual meaning of morals, ethics or good manners. The word has also been translated as khalq—latent creation or nature.

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451). This process of externalisation is also, however, reversible, where, in a process of internalisation one can see behind or through outer appearances. Akbar is also credited with having a “transmuting glance” (iskri-i binish), which transformed the painting of one of his court painters from outer form to inner meaning (Blochmann 1873: 103) a statement which confirms the Mughal attitude that painting, as well as writing, has a batin as well as a zahir, subtle as well as obvious qualities. This immediately sets up two kinds of vision: optical, details which we process with our visual cortex (zahir) and the processing of mental images (batin) which cooperate to create the effect of the external image reflecting the response to the image, linking the external world to the internal mentalism of consciousness, which however maybe found again or ‘revealed’ in the external world of the image. In both traditional literary and pictorial terms, a recurrent way to represent the qualitative difference between outer form and inner meaning is spatially: outside or inside. To enclose one painting within another allows the nested painting to stand for a meaning ‘inside’ the meaning of the painting in which it appears. In this process of nesting, spatial, aesthetic and epistemological processes are brought together. The nested image allows the disembodied eye to travel deep into imaginary space to find other thresholds or frames that open up to internal spaces, to which are attached the value of esoteric and aesthetic discovery in the illusionary space of the painting. The nested image, which lies ‘inside’ mimics the painting that encloses it, challenges it and transcends it, and in so doing, ‘stereoscopically’ fuses the ‘ethical eye’ with the aesthetic to form the conscious experience of the work of art as a series of conscious states each ‘looked through’ or reflected by the other. If I remember a room, I can also remember objects that are inside it, and things that are inside those objects. It comes to me already as a series of images inside images. This is also a principle of art that always comes to me within something, some material substrate and within various spatial and semantic constructs which I can experience simultaneously, or unpack. Yet art also embodies art, is shown as embodiment and cooperates intellectually with the embodiment of consciousness in the world, body and matter. Consciousness occurs as an embodied experience but the body is itself in the world, and this, in fact, allows the

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structure of the body to emerge as a frame, providing a continuity between consciousness revealed in the external marks in the world. This global and local dual movement reveals consciousness as a superposition. Embodiment is a discourse on the meaningfulness of materiality, that which embodies meaning and makes its latent nature apparent. It may be depicted as the thing that animates stone, or as the principle of regress captured by the image of an image. Even purely mental images, though they do not have a direct material substrate, are still bound by the image of materiality, or potential materiality. Hence, there is never a pure mental image of anything which is not in some sense referential to the material world of colour or sensation. This series of conscious thoughts which have theological implications is set in motion by images such as the Berlin Album painting. It is important to remember that the cooperation between this organisation of the visual field and images of the organisation of consciousness attending it may be seen as a phenomenological process shared by different cultures and time periods. Un Chien Andalou The image from Un Chien Andalou exemplifies the paradox central to cinematic consciousness: stillness in motion. The camera zooms in on a still object, fixed on page and by the camera frame, for one instant we see the frame of the book and the painting’s frame, and then the reader begins to turn the page rapidly to reveal other still pictures. The movement parodies cinematic frames, while causing a rapid turnover of higher-order thoughts in the viewer. The book and its turning pages form a movement which brings to mind the frames-in-frames of the film reel and the frames-in-frames of the image. Motion is figured both straightforward and reflexively, vertically and horizontally, and yet this is a film ‘still’. Roland Barthes’ analysis of Eisenstein’s film stills, as opposed to the motion of film sequences, is at pains to focus on a similar paradox whereby a vertical or paradigmatic reading of correspondences is superimposed upon a horizontal or syntagmatic chain of events (Barthes 1977: 54-57). The film still from Un Chien Andalou with its internal framing devices imitates the action of the film reel; the film reel gives us the momentary illusion of stillness and singularity.

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Digital image of browser window containing a still from Buñuel’s film, Un Chien Andalou (1929). Public Domain-Old-70.

The visual paradox represents and activates our viewing consciousness as repose, yet without compromising seriality, the sense of moving through time. The shot of Vermeer’s Lacemaker in Chien Andalou thus makes difference and seriality available to consciousness without conventional signifiers of motion. As with Husserl’s Dresden Gallery image and my extension of it, what is framed here in an abstract sense is a series of different conscious states which are synonymous with a seriality of appearances of the object-image: Presentations: 1. This is an image printed on the page of a book 2. It is an image of a web browser frame, an image of a digital image on the Internet 3. It is a still from a film, Un Chien Andalou, by Luis Buñuel and is thus part of a reel of celluloid, a frame among many others. 4. It is a photograph in a book: we are back to 1. At this stage consciousness may appear paradoxically to move backwards and

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forwards into the space and back to the flat surface of the printed image (in Wollheim’s terms, a conflict between seeing-in and seeing-as) which is only surpassed by conceptualisation of the seriality of relations between them. 5. It is a photograph of the Vermeer painting, The Lacemaker. 6. A woman sits at a table fashioning lace. Is the painting a pure reflection of what Vermeer witnessed? 7. Is The Lacemaker a subtle reference to Arachne in Ovid’s Metamorphosis and therefore another possible mental screen through which to physically view the image?

These are forms of remediation similar to those which Danto is fond of quoting in order to trace transformations of the ontology of art (Danto 1999: 218). It is also taken up by Baudrillard54 and others. The art historian James Elkins uses a similar seriality: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Original Rembrandt Etching Twentieth-century photo of the etching Photograph used in an (unidentified) book The university’s slide taken from the book My photograph taken in a classroom The scanned file from my photograph

Elkins is content to describe these different presentations of the Rembrandt etching as something that “exposes counterfeiting in addition to a Benjaminian mechanical reproduction” (Elkins 1996: 23). But more can be said of this kind of image and the still from Un Chien Andalou, both of which represent a seriality of meanings through which we see the image. Not only do we see the image as singular but we also see it through the lens of various mental states, conscious of its remediation from ‘original’ work of art into photograph of painting, and so on. One conscious mental state may be seen through the other, through which the idea of the original identity is veiled and continually translated. The series of frames-in-frames are structurally analogous with Husserl’s Dresden Gallery device and Sartre’s keyhole example, which are also a series of conscious mental 54

Baudrillard sees successive phases of the image as: the reflection of a basic reality. it masks and perverts a basic reality. it masks the absence of a basic reality. it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (Baudrillard 1994: 6).

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states centred on the image. But note that the seriality slides between images within images, images next to each other in a line and a singular image and various perspectives on it. All of these different series can be read with or through a series of conscious mental states. In other words, not only is the image transparently serial, structured by various apertures, frames, windows or edges through which we can continually re-inscribe the act of “seeing-in”, but so are the conscious mental states which track these distinct demarcations of the visual field; consciousness ‘sees through’ its own seriality of mental states while engaging with the visual series and its modes of presentation. Vermeer’s The Lacemaker has been given seven different guises; we seem to inhabit a new conscious state every time we see through one of them, but it is also possible to conceptualise them together as a series. Every time we consciously consider the frame, we at once become aware of another level of representation and this awareness is a new conscious moment. But this frame is left behind for a new, ‘penetrated’ space and a new consciousness of the next or last level of representation. Cooperating with the frames-in-frames are re-presentations of the surface. The surface of the printed image on the page appears to dissolve into the surface of celluloid (a moving surface), which transmutes into the surface of the image of the computer screen, the browser window and in a printed book carrying this image. In such a situation, the image of the browser window surrounding the still from Un Chien Andalou cooperates with the surface of the computer screen on which the image (of the computer screen) is displayed. This is also a co-operation between mental and physical vision. One is conscious of seeing through all of these surfaces (as different transformations of materiality) and frames within frames. But this is still consciousness as penetration, which transverberates the series of appearances and views.55 Consciousness of extrication from framing and embodiment is also possible. The mental image here is of a consciousness which withdraws from the frame covering over the image with a new surface with each backward step: the painting, photograph, celluloid, browser, computer monitor, printed image, and this is similar to the effect I have described in connection with Las Meninas. This may restore the 55 Husserl writes, “the glance penetrates through the noemata of the series of levels, reaching the object of the last level, and there holding it steady, whilst no longer penetrating through and beyond it” (Husserl 1982: 271).

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initial conscious mental state of beholding the image before the processing of frames-in-frames has occurred, but this revisited conscious state is enriched with knowledge of the possible series of thoughts accompanying each pictorial transformation. The viewer’s consciousness becomes self-reflexive, but this process does not have to be ordered in this manner, it can be more chaotic with more intricate with unpredictable saccades. Yet conscious editing creates a sequencing of meaning that allows for a series of penetrations and projections. We imagine we can see all projections of the image and their fleeting surfaces as one image, as we would see one image watching a film, a series of frames speeding fast before our eyes. In the latter case, our consciousness of the metamorphosis of the image is one with our consciousness of the moving image of a film. These different presentations of the image through which we see are described as the different levels of the picture in Husserl’s Dresden Gallery description. To summarise again, as I did in connection with Las Meninas, we see through the picture thing (Bildding) the picture’s material substratum, the picture object (Bildobjekt), the picture as “picture” and the picture subject (sujet, the thing the picture stands for). The still from Un Chien Andalou goes further, for it suggests more stages and transformations of the material substrate that not only carry the image but are part of what it ‘means’. The iteration is not only a method of exposition but the carrier of the image’s semantic content: a critique of mimesis, presence and authenticity. The virtue of having a series of frames and surfaces presented in this way, however, is that it suggests both the motion of a stream (going through the frames) and static moments, iterations, “ruptures”56 and particulars of time and materiality that are experienced while passing beyond them. Consciousness constructs the mental image of a series of frames-in-frames folding in or unfolding out of space, engaging in real life with the flat image of the still from Un Chien Andalou, but when one becomes conscious of this mental construct, the principle of seriality occupying the same space, flatness returns. But one cannot shake off the notion of being able to see one through the other, aware 56 Photographic cropping, for example, “is always experienced as a rupture in the continuous fabric of reality […] Surrealist photography [and we may include the still from Chien Andalou in this] puts enormous pressure on that frame to make itself read as a sign—an empty sign it is true, but an integer in the calculus of meaning, a signifier of a signification” (Krauss 1985: 115).

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of both a plurality of distinctions and the single image. difference and identity. The image from Un Chien Andalou and Elkins’s transpositions of the Rembrandt etching manage to incorporate two sets of values: an ontology of states of an original image, which in some sense lies ‘underneath’ its iterations, and secondly, a phenomenology of conscious states that, like the image itself, is both singular and pluralistic, representing one moment in which many other previous ones subsist. The visual and the mental visual co-emerge in the art experience and in so doing, question fundamental distinctions: external and internal: presence and absence: stillness and mobility; sameness and difference; original and translation and immanence and transcendence. Ultimately, what is also questioned is the nature of representation itself. If the processes of phenomenological consciousness can be described metaphorically as a series of frames-in-frames, then the variously embedded iterations of Vermeer’s Lacemaker in Un Chien Andalou may be seen as an image which, at least in principle, can reflect back the structural organisation of consciousness attending it. This interactivity and co-presence suggest ways to understand representation different from traditional notions of the cause and effect of representation. And instead of something that ‘stands for’ consciousness, such an image, in fact, stimulates consciousness to take its object of intention straightforward and reflexively. The image from Un Chien Andalou is not seamless; the clues to the stages of iteration are its various frames and edges. Frames-inframes structure the image and, importantly, the mental imagery of phenomenological consciousness which cooperates with it. Each frame marks a different state (of ontology and phenomenology) and a different vantage point ‘observing’ these states. Every frame signals a different way of looking (a re-take); it is also able to make us conscious of our personalised mental imagery, cooperative with the external marks of the frame-in-the-frame. We journey through our mental envisioning while examining the frames-in-frames in the art object which seem to mark the route of this journey. The mental imagery is yet another presentation, another iteration of the image and yet is also a mode in which these presentations occur. A consciousness of each experience or stage of observation, one might even say each adjustment in focus, can either be divided amongst different observers depicted in the work, outside of the work,

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or united in a single consciousness aware of these relative points. Some of these points-of-view are listed by Elkins, who describes different ways of looking at a figurative painting in a gallery: 1. figures in the painting who look out at you, 2. figures in the painting who look at one another, and 3. figures in the painting that look at objects or stare off into space or have their eyes closed. In addition there is often 4. the museum guard, who may be looking at the back of your head, and 5. the other people in the gallery, who may be looking at you or at the painting. There are imaginary observers, too: 6. the artist, who was once looking at this painting, 7. the models for the figures in the painting, who may once have seen themselves there, and 8. all the other people who have seen the painting–the buyers, the museum officials, and so forth. And finally, there are also 9. people who have never seen the painting: they may know it only from Reproductions [...] or from descriptions (Elkins 1996: 38-39).

Thus, framing and the gaze are connected because looking at somebody looking is similar to a frame-in-a-frame, the frame acts as the focus of the gaze. It tells us of the moment of consciousness captured by that gaze. Yet it also tells us of two things: the vantage point from where the gaze is launched and the object of the gaze, both are linked by the gaze, which is constantly refreshed. In the film still, the seriality of frames is a seriality of conscious mental states represented as a seriality of points of view as well as a palimpsest of surfaces. This becomes more complex when we realise that the still from Un Chien Andalou is part of a vast concatenation of frames which we call film. Thus, the seriality of layers of representation cooperate with a multiplicity of re-adjustments of focus and mental states attending them, but we can see this intertwined seriality from an number of others’ perspectives, as well as our own, as I have shown with Las Meninas. The overview of this seriality of gazes activated so effectively by iteration and re-presentation of the image is often fictionalised as the omniscience of god. In a recent popular novel, the philosopher Leibnitz is depicted as saying: Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, as he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle—all on the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe—for he sees I from every point of view at once. By

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This is, of course, a literary conceit which consists of Stephenson’s seeing through Leibnitz, seeing through the character reporting the story of his encounter with the philosopher, and so on. Indirectly, the author demonstrates a series of points of view available to the reader, thereby apprising him or her of god’s bird’s eye view (of other views). Sartre’s use of the Husserlian Abschattungen refers not only to an existent object as a series of appearances but to the potentially infinite series of subjects which can process these Abschattungen. The phenomenology of ontology is the grasping of the principle of an infinite seriality (a transcendence of the object) shown by the waxing and waning of its momentary and fragmentary concatenation of profiles. As Sartre writes: The appearance does not hide the essence [,] it reveals it. It is it; the essence of an existent is no longer a property sunk in the cavity of this existent; it is the manifest law which presides over the succession of its appearances, it is the principle of the series […] but essence, as the principle of the series, is definitely only the concatenation of appearances (Sartre 1956: 5).

The existent, the real is defined as a series of its appearances, potentially infinite; each manifestation of the series of appearances presupposes a subject who perceives this. Each profile (Abschattung) is a relation to a subject who is constantly changing, thus the existent cannot be reduced to a finite total series of its appearances. In Sartre, there is a parallelism between existence and consciousness. Thus, the existent object, the art object, is a relative-absolute, its relativity refers to its absolute seriality which is unknowable from the point of view of a single subject but whose principle is nevertheless made immanent in the seriality of presentations of the image. The essence of Un Chien Andalou as a film still from the dynamic assemblage of frames in the film reel, is the principle of its infinite seriality structured by various relative instants or frames that can be reproduced in a variety of ways. The still from Un Chien Andalou is an image of thought and this image illustrates the principle of seriality; it is also a relation to the subject’s consciousness which perceives that seriality and which is a seriality itself. The subject cannot experience the object/image’s infinite seriality, as it is not itself an infinite seriality, but the principle is

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recognised; this guards against vicious regress. Sartre writes that the subject “transcend[s] the appearance toward the total series of which it is a member” (6) “Towards” is not the same as arriving at a point where that seriality has been circumscribed. Sartre explains: the subject “must seize Red through his impression of red. By Red is meant the principle of the series” (6). As in so many thought experiments in the philosophy of mind, the subject sees red (a particular shade or texture of it), an Abschattung. The principle of the series “red” as an exposition of connected appearances is there also, the series is annotated by just a few mental images which can continue the series and establish the principle of its (potentially) infinite seriality. The essence and the appearance of the existent are the same: the principle of a series is the ‘appearance of a series’ of appearances. This is grasped by artists and image makers intuitively and in some cases quite selfconsciously in order to the show images and the experience of them as parallel serialities. For Sartre, there are series of appearances that are infinitely extendable, but how are they extendable—in space and time, or conceptually through individual to individual? How is this ‘extendability’ to be thought, as endless variability in a series through time, or through difference within the object being observed or perceived?57 These are important questions, because if appearance is everything, then does each appearance in a series extend itself conceptually through difference without spatial or chronological differences, or are space and time essential to the continuity of the series? In the case of the image in the image, is this an appearance of an appearance or an example of seriality, or both? And does the series fold within itself or upon and through itself (as the still from Un Chien Andalou suggests), or unfold into a series continually outside itself as a series of self-contained units? It is evident that the principle of seriality may be visualised as a 57

Some of these issues have been dealt with by Foucault and Deleuze and are summarised by Shapiro (2003: 328-321). Little is said, however, of how the origins of their thought are to be found in Sartre’s rejection of the duality of being and appearance. Eschewing the duality of mirroring effects of the original and the copy, the idea and its appearance, Deleuze speaks of infinitely multiplying phantasms or simulacra ancontinuously metastasing simulacra which produce a transformation in consciousness, “replacing a representationalist image of thought with a form of thinking that understands difference and repetition as primary features of being that need not be traced back to the concepts of identity and resemblance” (Shapiro 2003: 358).

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multi-directional, multi-dimensional seriality, spreading out in all directions simultaneously rather than consecutively in some sort of easily identified linear order, perhaps like the expanding universe, or Deleuze’s characterisation of thinking as a series of rhizomes, distributed growths constantly expanding in all directions simultaneously and without any real centre. It is all very well to speak of the seriality of appearances, but what about the method or dynamics of its unfolding? If we are also to consider consciousness as an unfolding seriality, the answers to these questions seem important. Un Chien Andalou suggests various principles of seriality not only as an extendable and dynamic unfolding of frames in time and space, but also as a folding back in the reverse direction. Yet there is also a possible radical folding/unfolding of seriality which never moves or diverges from the point of its initiation. The image in the actual running film, Un Chien Andalou, looks still (it looks like a film still and a photograph) but is actually a series of frames rapidly passing before the eye, the verisimilitude of stillness brought to mind also by the pages of the book, nonchalantly turned over to reveal the image of The Lacemaker. Yet the static, fixed photograph reminds us of the running film. The seriality of the image here appears as a series of internalising and externalising images but also as static self-reproduction. The scene encourages us to become aware of the paradox of a still image produced by dynamic seriality of film frames. This paradox has its counterpart in our mental envisioning. We can have mental image of The Lacemaker which we maintain in our minds (the still image) while envisaging its transformations into photograph, film still and digital image, I can visualise the varieties of Bildding (the sheen of oil on canvas; the matt surface of an printed illustration in a book; the pixels of a digitised image) I can also create mental images of the Bildobjekt and sujet. Our mental image of The Lacemaker may appear to be still in the sense that we maintain it as a reference point, an identify through transformations and changes, it is continually refreshed by other mental images which wash over it to change its identity from painting to photograph, and to digital image yet it still shines through these changes. There is a stillness within dynamism and identity through difference a convergence of opposites that William James characterised as pails of water standing in the stream of consciousness. The mechanics of film and mental processes seem to index each other: while the film still appears fixed and our consciousness appears fixed

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upon it, both, in fact, are non-inertial parallel processes that appear to reference each other. This is not surprising given that film sequences are products of conscious processes that we re-enact while watching them. With Husserl’s use of the Dresden Gallery picture presents the frame-in-the-frame as the complex embedding and embedded structure of the noema and Sartre’s mental visual construction of the keyhole sequence, we are presented with monadic and interpenetrative operations. The principle that consciousness is organised as an iterative, transformative and often self-reflexive series of conscious mental states often depicted in film and art as stages of seeing-in, and as pictures-in-pictures, helps us to go beyond the simple binary of internal mental state and external reality, in the experience of film they seem to tag each other, on an abstract level, the level of how one visualises the unfolding of one’s thought. The film seems to be a kind of other person who predicts and engages with the viewer’s self-reflexive visualisation and develops it further. Thus while film appears to represent the external world of objects and things, it also ‘represents’ in a radically new way: it supplies a co-presence with viewer’s thoughts about the exposition of her own conscious experience. And this is what allows the viewer to personalise a film like Rear Window. The actual, visual examples in film and art dealt with here, elucidated by Husserl’s treatment of the Dresden Gallery painting and by Sartre in his account of the keyhole experience, show how physical sight and mental imagery cooperate in conscious experience and, by extension, in the viewing of film. We can have a mental image of consciousness as a series of mental states organised monadically, by a series of frames-in-frames, or in a number of other ways. We can have a conscious mental state that we are having a mental image of this kind, especially when we appear to view a film or image that brings this seriality to mind. In such a case, consciousness becomes aware of its seriality not as a purely mental self-image but in co-operation with the physical sight involved in finding serialities in the world. Conversely, the visual experience of a film’s seriality is seen through a mentally visual lens. We are made aware of this lens by our visual experience, which appears to exemplify and confirm our mental imagery, and this is what allows us phenomenologically to feel that our consciousness is in the world.

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Hitchcock: Psycho Hitchcock’s films represent a reflexive phenomenology of vision. Various stills from the film Psycho (1960) reveal an immediate synergy with Sartre’s keyhole. Both the film and Sartre’s story are complementary, they show us what somebody is seeing and they also show us our own consciousness tracking these very trains of thought. In so doing, they make us aware of our own viewing process (which is also cooperation of visual processing and the mental envisioning). As the cinema audience looks at the character seen here in the dark (as the cinema audience is), we are watching him watch his motel guest undress and we become aware of our own watching through his. It appears as a visualisation of Sartre’s keyhole description but we are split between being the Other, gazing at the target, and the target being gazed at. The glazed frames of pictures displaying birds in the background on the periphery of our vision serve as a subliminal presence, a reminder that the peeping Tom, Norman Bates, is associated with a hunter, a bird of prey, and we have already seen his room, replete with various stuffed birds which signify trophies as well as corpses. The bird’s eye view is re-presented to us as the hole in the wall through which the gaze is launched and, as in the case of Sartre’s keyhole (and Bataille’s Story of the Eye and the gryllus of medieval illuminated manuscripts), this doubles as an aperture for both the eye and coitus. This is made more complex when we realise that Norman Bates has a split-personality disorder and that his mother may be a ‘co-watcher’ during this peeping Tom sequence.

Stills from Hitchcock’s Psycho, 1960

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The viewing audience is implicated in the act of voyeurism, not just by looking but also in thinking. We are thinking about what the characters may be thinking, stepping back into what we consider to be our own thought—although, of course, it is all our own thought, strangely visualised for us by the director’s use of props and editing. The sequence not only imitates the nature of film production (eye, through camera aperture, through to viewed object) but re-enacts the nature of cinema’s reception: we are both viewer and viewer-of-ourown-viewing and this should tell us about our own abilities to shift our consciousness from one site and one vantage point to another, as it does with Sartre’s keyhole imagery. We seem to share the intimacy of the darkness ensconcing Norman Bates which is somehow contiguous with the dim ambience of the cinema hall of which we are marginally aware. He is an image of me watching the film. As in a mirror reflection where we are viewer and viewed, we are in the same position as one who looks at his or her own body. The sequence is thus reflexive of important mechanisms of consciousness of the body both as a viewing subject and viewed object. And this elision serves to create a conflict in the viewer who is reminded of his or her own embodied experience watching the film by the framing devices which trigger levels of self-awareness, further emphasised by the presentation of the body as seen object through the hole. This is suspended by the cut to the voyeur’s eye, which is key, for we are lodged in its trajectory, carried along with it, and to the object of the gaze, the actress’s body. We feel violated, while violating. But it does not end there, because we again become conscious of our viewing body, we are aware of our own bodies through the eye of the voyeur; in a sense, when we look at ourselves looking we are looking through his eyes at ourselves (entirely consistent with Sartre’s perceptions) and by extension, then, we are looking at ourselves through the voyeur’s eyes. This is, of course, not a simple optical experience of looking with the eyes, it is the cerebral cortex and its many cooperations between areas of the brain, both memory and imagination are also stimulated by the visual process. We are aware of our embodied experience as a mental representation of ourselves as a vantage point, as a point from which and inside which perception is sited, but it just so happens that it matches entirely the optical experience we are having. More that this, Hitchcock seems to get into our heads, he seems to turn the camera on our own looking, thereby framing our gaze, but we

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also take up the director’s gaze and see through it. The camera aperture through which the director ‘sees’, which is the edge of the cinema screen, can also be tried on for size by any viewer. The framing devices in the film—peephole, window or picture frame—play with the viewer’s consciousness of viewing. All this may sound ponderous but is in fact subtle and immediate, rapidly effected by a series of saccades back and forth, saccades which are sent into further stimulation by the quick editing of the film, adding other levels of curiosity and concern. The series of unresolved conflicts between capture and flight, self-awareness, awareness of being in someone else’s gaze, Hitchcock’s, Norman Bates, the actress’s gaze at her own body and our ability to step back and escape are used by the director to create an introspective, claustrophobic viewing experience, not of film per se but of the anatomy of consciousness as a visual experience. The film sequence is a diagram of conscious processes and their relations. Rear Window Cinematic framing and frames-in-frames move before the eyes, providing the illusion of the freedom of movement but, in fact, they restrict eye and body movements far more than the viewing of a painting, where the spectator is free to move around and go back and forth to pick up bits of information, revisit parts of the composition, or leave and come back. Of course, with DVD culture rewinds and fastforwards are always possible but such freedom is rarely built into the raison d’être of the film. So there is something that seems, on the surface, liberating, to do with the dynamism of film, and yet in contrast it seems also inherently totalitarian about what it is the viewer can and cannot see. One might say that this conflict is integral to the medium. This very tension was given full expression in Hitchcock’s Rear Window which engages with scopophilia (one might say activates it by representing it), and this is done with the ‘bricks and mortar’ of various framing devices and frames-in-frames that are paraded before us on a catwalk. In Hitchcock’s Rear Window we are the audience looking through a character’s eyes into a window. The frame functions psychologically in many ways. It puts us in the position of voyeurs, and in the position of seeing through the eyes of voyeurs. We seem framed in the bodies of voyeurs. Yet we are also external to

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them, we are voyeurs of voyeurs, there is a switchback effect here of distance and involvement, of continually stepping back from watching people and watching through their eyes. In the same way, the frame of the screen is complemented by the frame of the window; but the frame of the cinema screen is also the frame of the lens, our eyes (the extent of our peripheral vision), the character’s eyes and Hitchcock’s eyes. These are all stages of the frame; their plurality alluded to in the image itself, in the plurality of its frames. Much like the work of Velázquez or Vermeer centuries before, the film director has contrived to multiply seeing-in through seeing-in, cooperative with frames-inframes. These stages of seeing-in occur as conscious mental states of the frame, fringe or threshold of seeing which might even be depicted as somebody’s else’s eyes, spectacles or more commonly, binoculars, a telescope or camera aperture while also being conscious of what that other person is depicted as seeing, the view inside these frames. The view inside these characterisations of the eye focusing might also be a view of another person viewing something through binoculars, a telescope et cetera. It is important to note that this conscious mental state, which is both conscious of the frame (the vantage point from where or from whom the gaze is launched) as well as the object or target of the gaze, is only another example of what we normally do with the gaze which connects us to what we see. By extension, we may be conscious of ourselves seeing through someone else’s eyes in a rich, self-reflexive sense doubling the selfreflexive sense of the person who is seeing herself seeing. It is interesting that this raises questions about the basic sense of self, the prereflexive: is it possible to have a prereflexive sense of self of somebody else’s self, through whose eyes we are looking at a particular scene? This intersubjective sense of prereflexive self, the background hum or the halo of somebody else’s self that we feel while experiencing the world alters our notion of self and world, subject and object in complex ways. Why should these two works of art, Psycho and the Vermeer’s Art of Painting share similar visual devices unless it is the structure of consciousness which produces this visual counterpart of various stages of seeing-in? We apprehend a person watching and a person watching another person watching, and this suggests being conscious of another person’s mental state, which may be about yet another person’s

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mental state as deduced from the visual evidence. Such a chain of relations is visually represented in art and film as a framed picture representing a mental state in which there is another picture depicting another mental state. We go through a series of spaces which are also changes in the vantage points of consciousness. The compulsion and release inherent in film find their vehicle in scopophilia which both constricts and releases frames. These frames move while James Stewart’s character in Rear Window, a photographer immobilised by a broken foot and through whose eyes we are supposed to see through the telescopic lens and window frames, is a reference to film, its freedoms and constrictions and its unflincing focus on the fetish. The photographer’s subtly signalled obsession with the visual in cooperation with his immobility mirrors the audience’s, and so the mise-en-scène is similar to Husserl’s Dresden Gallery image because it is an inner reflection of the world which surrounds and contains it, the cinema. The mise-en-scène ‘is about’ the audience’s viewing or, more correctly, what it means to be an audience who has consented to have its will, its ability to intervene, curtailed and its consciousness directed to look straightforward and reflexively at the same time. But self-consciousness and embodiment is brought into sharp focus when through the telephoto camera (the film-as-aperture/eye) the photographer sees the murderer look back at him from the window across the courtyard. The seeing-in through seeing-in comes to an end when the gaze is confronted by another. Raymond Burr, the actor who plays the murderer, eyes crisply demarcated with round spectacles, is looking directly at Hitchcock’s camera, a gaze which magically reverses the photographer’s and, by proxy, our own. This rare cinematically powerful shot shrinks distances, reverses gazes and brings what previously seemed discrete and mobile moments of consciousness into a compellingly frank and inescapable chill. Consciousness of the film’s address in this way re-embodies consciousness as self-consciousness in the audience, coupled with feelings of vulnerability and exposure to the gaze of the killer. The seriality of the stages of seeingin is reversed. If one were to isolate the still we would have a picture of a man looking at us from the pictorial space, but that gaze is pregnant with many other gazes in the context of the film. The actor, Raymond Burr, is looking into the camera aperture, which is being looked through by Hitchcock or the cameraman, but he is represented as looking at the peeping Tom photographer (James Stewart) through

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whose camera I, the cinemagoer, peer. Hitchcock’s target is the audience; he launches his intentional thought through the imagery of the gaze of his actor looking straight at the camera. The audience cooperates in a glaring self-examination of themselves looking. Never let it be said that Hitchcock took the gaze lightly. Indeed, through it and through its representations in the eyes of his actors, his power over the stream of consciousness seemed total. The only escape from this grip is through critical engagement, when the viewer becomes not only conscious of the devices and techniques used by the director to achieve his ends, techniques that are relatively invisible to the untrained eye, but begins to enjoy their deployment as part of the experience of the film. Vertigo As I will be analysing the interplay of narrative structure, visual language and phenomenology involved in watching Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) a summary of its plot is necessary first: While pursuing a criminal across the rooftops of San Francisco, detective Scottie Ferguson slips and finds himself dangling from the gutter of a tall building. A colleague falls to his death in an attempt to rescue Scottie as he looks on in horror…in light of his newly discovered acrophobia, which has prompted him to quit the police force […] Scottie is contacted by college acquaintance Gavin Estler, who has heard of Scottie’s accident and wishes to hire him to trail his wife Madeleine, who Lester believes is possessed by the spirit of her great-grandmother Carlotta Valdes. Scottie later learns from Lester that Carlotta committed suicide at age twenty-six—Madeleine’s current age—and he fears that Madeleine, too, has suicidal tendencies. Scottie is initially sceptical but begins to follow the beautiful and mysterious Madeleine in her wanderings around San Francisco. [After meeting] They decide to spend the day wandering together, travelling to the giant sequoia forest at Big Basin, where Madeleine makes evasive allusions to her possession and her strange dreams about death. She describes a place in her dreams that looks like Spain, which Scottie later recognises to be the mission at San Juan Bautista. Scottie tells Madeleine that he can explain her strange obsessions as a repressed memory of time she must have spent at the mission. He resolves to take her to the spot to bring to rest the notion that she is possessed. When they arrive, she recognises it all, and after professing her love for Scottie, runs agitatedly toward the bell tower. She heads up the spiral staircase with Scottie in hot pursuit. Near the top of the tower, Scottie’s acrophobia strikes, and he is unable to continue the climb. He looks out the window in time to see Madeleine’s body hurtle down to the rooftop of an adjoining building […] wracked with guilt and grief, Scottie spends the next year catatonic in a sanatorium.

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[…] After his release from the sanatorium, Scottie again wanders the streets of San Francisco, seeing hints of Madeleine in everyone. He follows one woman, who he believes looks like a brunette Madeleine, back to her apartment and questions her relentlessly about her identity. She says her name is Judy Barton, that she hails from Kansas, and that she works in a department store. Scottie invites her to dinner. As soon as he leaves to allow her to change her clothes, Judy begins to pack a suitcase. Hesitating about what to do, she sits down and composes a letter to Scottie. In it, she divulges that she had been hired by Gavin Estler to play the role of Madeleine in a plot to murder his wife. Judy reveals that when she got to the top of the bell tower, Estler was waiting with the already-dead body of his wife dressed identically to Judy, which he hurled out the window for Scottie to witness. She ends her letter by admitting her love for Scottie. After a brief hesitation, she tears up the letter. Scottie and Judy have dinner and it is apparent that Scottie is interested in Judy only insofar as she resembles the dead Madeleine. His obsession deepens, and he insists that Judy dye her hair blonde and wear clothing identical to that worn by Madeleine. Judy initially resists, but then decides she would rather be loved by Scottie as someone else than lose his love altogether. When she returns from the beauty parlor, her transformation is complete. They kiss passionately. In the next scene, the two are preparing to go to dinner when Scottie notices that the necklace Judy puts on is Carlotta’s necklace, which Madeleine wore the day she died. He realises Judy’s true identity but does not say anything right away. Instead, Scottie tells her he wants to take a drive in the country and begins driving toward San Juan Bautista. Judy becomes increasingly hysterical as she realises that Scottie suspects her secret. In a rage, Scottie drags Judy up the steps of the tower, confronting her with her deception. She admits her guilt but claims to still love Scottie and begs for his forgiveness. They reach the top and embrace, but are interrupted by the shadowy figure of a nun. Judy is so startled by the ghostly figure that she screams and falls from the tower to her death. Scottie is left alone in the tower, cured of his acrophobia but broken in every other respect (Trosman 2000: 159-160).

It is clear from the plot summary that the film has a repetitive, spiralling structure and that this is visually articulated by Hitchcock in many ways. Of course, I like this because it suggests that Hitchcock visualised the structure of texts and exemplified them as visual patterns, using the techniques of his cinematography to service his mental images which arose from the script and his projections of it. What is also fascinating is that the film’s first half is repeated in the second half, and that we are critically watching the repeat from a position of (or indeed through) a higher-order consciousness. This, again, is a play on the doubles and binaries of the film: Carlotta and Madeleine, Madeleine and Judy. The viewer is aware of a previous consciousness which is relived from some distance exemplified by Madeleine’s con-

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sciousness of her former consciousness58 but this also relativises current conscious viewing. The repetitions and doubles articulate obsessive compulsive disorder and paranoia. The motif of transformation of a woman into a deceased double occurs twice. The doppelgänger also articulates a split personality and a conflict of the self. Vertigo uses the motif of vertigo—the fear of heights and the fascinating, mesmeric feeling of dread that accompanies this—to articulate notions of compulsive behaviour (in which the audience is implicated) and in order to organise the visual and structural unfolding of the film. The visualisation of vertigo, the compulsive spiral en abyme which embodies the audience’s nausea of desiring to see and its fear of seeing, and the director’s total control of that sight are all premised on the compulsive repeat. Kim Novak plays the mysterious blonde woman of desire, Madeleine, who appears to commit suicide. The second half of the film is ushered in by her reappearance, but this time as a brunette with heavy make-up. Of course, the audience can recognise her through this mask but this is part of the sense of vertigo: she is Novak as Madeleine-not-Madeleine; our confusion tracks Madeleine’s original confusion over her identity where she believes that she is Carlotta, this is a repeat of Madeleine’s madness, which is doubled by Scottie’s repeat bouts of vertigo. Carlotta, Madeleine and Judy represent a spiralling repeat that interlocks with the vertigo of the viewing subject (Scottie, the audience). She is strangely familiar and yet we saw her die, she is both a different woman who is eerily like the former, yet we see Madeleine as an actress playing Judy, who is asked to put on Madeleine’s identity for Scottie. This mise en abyme is further extended when we realise that Kim Novak the actress must act as a woman concealing the fact that she is not the previous woman she looks like, even though she is. Kim Novak must play the role of Judy, who is playing the role of Madeleine, and Madeleine who is playing the role of Judy pretending to be Madeleine—and this is not to mention that she has already had to do this triple act by playing Madeleine who is supposed to be Gavin Estler’s wife, playing Carlotta. This is a radical critique of presence.

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It is, perhaps, indicative of a mischievous sense of humour, not to mention selfawareness that the name Madeleine recalls the Madeleine cake, the switch that turns on a rush of memories invading the present in Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past. This has been commented upon broadly in works about this film.

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The truth is, we do not ever find out her real name. She is alienated from her identity several times, and in terms of consciousness, she is both subject and object, viewed and viewer, looking at herself several times removed, continually stepping outside of herself in order to play some part distanced from herself. And this process of distancing works hand-in-hand with the viewer’s consciousness which must also distance itself from the series of appearances of reality which it turns into moments of objectified consciousness. And this fascination between original and copy, sign and referent is voiced continuously by the man who is forced to fall in love with her again. Like Kim Novak’s make-up, through the veneer of the second part of the film, we can see the previous personality; the latter is a loosely based repeat of the former (whence we get our sense of déjà vu or dread). Another vertiginous twist and turn is enacted when Judy is forced by Scottie to bleach her hair again to look like Madeleine, even though she is Madeleine (although a woman playing Madeleine) she thus becomes an imitation blonde of an imitation blonde: she is acting as if she is anything but that woman, concealing her original identity as part of an elaborate confidence trick. One untruth is piled upon another in a vertiginous manner. This sets up the strange scenario where Kim Novak, the film, reality are all both before and after, she is and is not the woman of desire. And in all of these frames of reference, consciousness must step outside of itself in order to see what it is looking at from relative vantage points. Hitchcock’s work resonates not only because it follows the contours of our own questioning about ourselves connected to a projection of reality we choose to immerse ourselves in, but also the relations of our own conscious states. Vertigo and Vertigo are not only the simple fear of heights but both are masks for a fear of pre-determination—of history repeating itself without our freedom to avoid it—a fall from which we cannot recover, visualised beautifully in several instances as a spiral staircase, a spiral bouquet of flowers, an elaborate spiral shape wound into Kim Novak’s hairstyle which becomes the focal point of a long shot in the gallery, and the spiral in the tree cross section of circles in circles in the Redwood forest where Madeleine first acts as Carlotta’s ‘re-incarnation’, itself, another spiral construct. But this spiral is also the pattern of consciousness repeating itself, which winds in upon itself with desire to apprehend yet escape from itself. As in the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, Scottie gets a chance to

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bring back his beloved from death, but only if he does not look back, he must love her for who she really is, for the blonde he idealises really never existed, she was playing a role, and role of a role. Eventually, he comes to encounter his own spiralling consciousness withdrawn from the world of appearances. The spiral is also presented as frames within frames: at the Legion of Honor Museum Gallery Madeleine views a portrait of Carlotta the woman who is supposed to be one of her previous incarnations. The invasion of Madeleine’s sanity by Carlotta is also a spiralling into the past. Her destiny, her apparent death wish turns out to be true, and Scottie’s feeling of the anguish of vertigo, about history repeating itself (with the consciousness that accompanies it), also true. Again, the vertigo here is about the inherent compulsions of cinema, the way it overrides autonomy for the unavoidable destiny signalled by the impossibility of not looking (again, the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice come to mind). And of course, the real genius of Vertigo is that when the viewer sees it again she confronts previous forms of consciousness experienced in an earlier sitting, which appear ensnared by Hitchcock’s monadic devices. It is a rare film because, seeing it again only increases the sense of dread that is so integral to the film’s unfolding. The film does not only tell us a story but the story of how the story is told: it captures a fleeting moment of consciousness, the fear of a fall into chaos, then the actual fall into chaos, then the reappearance of consciousness and the fear of the past repeating itself, which casts a shadow over the moment of unfolding consciousness, a moment where past consciousness is immanent in the present as an inescapable prescience. Hitchcock knowingly or unknowingly employs the devices of the doppelgänger (Madeleine-Judy); Freud’s uncanny (the representation of prior, repressed realities); and the mise en abyme, the actress in the actress in the actress, all deployed to mark the style of unfolding the viewer’s consciousness and to give it a sense of looking at itself while it does so. Understanding the film through the frames of these devices projects consciousness into those frames, we experience paranoia, dread and obsession by reading both the message of the film and its exposition which point directly to dread of predestination and regress. Ultimately, some of the structures of understanding consciousness typified by Husserl, Sartre, Lacan, and Merleau-Ponty are evident in the structures of Hitchcock’s filmmaking and in his desire to shape the

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consciousness of his audience. In Vertigo, the gallery scene shares a synergy with the underlying structure of Husserl’s Dresden Gallery device. Hitchcock seats Kim Novak on a bench in the Legion of Honor Museum Gallery with her back to the viewing audience, which references the audience’s viewing consciousness of itself doing something very similar: viewing a fictional character. It is impossible to forget that this deliberate setting up of the process of looking at looking (which is both self-reflexive and other) is further emphasised by Scottie, whom we see is secretly looking at her looking during this moment. Thus, as in the Dresden Gallery the picture-in-the-picture (the portrait in the gallery in the film in the movie theatre) is already a series of embedded states, divided by frames (cinema screen, gallery setting, horizontal bench and the actress’s body at a right angle with this forming another frame). As I have shown earlier, the embedded structure of this series is also implied in various higher-order thought theories of consciousness, which hold that consciousness of one mental state (say, a woman looking at a picture) may also become the object of another consciousness, someone else, or our own in a distancing effect. This structure of seriality built on frames-in-frames and gazes of gazes cooperates with another Abschattung, that which represents the series. Note that I use this term not to refer to a profile or appearance of an object but the appearance or profile of a seriality itself. Thus, we have different ways of presenting the principle of a series, and this is a somewhat of a departure from Husserl and Sartre, which should also help us to understand consciousness not merely as a series of Abschattungen of an object but as a series of Abschattungen of different ways of representing this series. In Hitchcock’s use of Kim Novak the body is a monadic seriality of identities which unravel before the viewer of that body, who is outside of that body and yet we are able to look at the world through her eyes and to step into these identities. Thus, Kim Novak plays Judy, acting as Madeleine, pretending to believe herself to be the avatar or reincarnation of Carlotta. Her body not only acts as a frame for a monadic series of identities but implies a series of views of these identities, each of which she must distance herself from in order to behold that identity, each of which, the audience must exfoliate. We become aware of this dressing and undressing of identity, this awareness in structural terms is the grasping of the multiple Abschattungen

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of identity which Hitchcock has placed over and through the body of his actress, and indeed, through which she may see herself, with us accompanying her self-inspection. As Merleau-Ponty would insist, the body is a site of perception in the world, and I choose here to see it as a frame on the world and part of it, as well as something which frames the self-evident, and through which the world is made present. It is also a series of appearances and self-appearances, but as in the still from Un Chien Andalou, these transformations which suggest a radical dynamism are focused on the one body and this conflict of knowing and seeing makes a nonsense out of the binary of inertial and non-inertial frames of reference. But the series of appearances, of intensities, are not illusions, for their seriality reveals an intersubjectivity of consciousness: mine, the audience’s, Hitchcock, hers (and each to their own). As allegories of spectatorship, Psycho, Vertigo and Rear Window are riddled with intersubjective points of view, each window is a different narrative of consciousness. But these points of view multiply within the singular consciousness engaging with the film. The logic of Sartre’s keyhole, a series of presentations and selfimages from different viewpoints creating a consciousness of a seriality of the object of perception, is evident in the basic premise of Hitchcock’s cinematography. In Rear Window, as if to underline the logic that links Sartre’s keyhole with the camera aperture one of the characters tells Jeff the photographer that his telephoto camera, which he uses to study the lives of others, is “a portable keyhole”. Yet this keyhole logic structures not only the Peeping Tom sequence where Norman Bates peeks through his grubby hole in Psycho but also the reconfigurations of Novak-Carlotta-Madeleine-Judy which present different ‘keyholes’ through which the (mainly male) scopic drive is launched at the woman as object of desire. But also, the gallery scene in Vertigo takes the idea of Lacan’s mirror phase into film, not as one act isolated in childhood but one repeatable in various frames, from different retrospective and perspective views. We are looking at her self-identification, looking at our own self-identification with the image and the image of the image. Much of this structure of consciousness and its various representations are evident in Rear Window as well, for the cinematic viewing experience is repeated several times by the viewing experience of the characters through whose eyes we see, mimicked also by the view of the windows across the courtyard

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seen through the photographer’s phallic telephoto camera and window, obviously a token of the camera, screen and eye. Transformations of consciousness of the body as a site of perception are also evident here; our inability to act is doubled by the photographer’s: he sits in convalescence, with a broken leg viewing the world from his window. The bodies of others become his prosthetic arms and limbs, and ours. The point is there is a series of frames, whether they are eyes, bodies, cameras, screens or windows, but this series is intersubjectively realised. As it is with self-reflection, we look at ourselves through the series, and at others through them, and in a more complex way, through others’ frames to views of ourselves. In other words, consciousness brings intersubjectivity into self-reflection and these films seem to visualise and activate these fundamental processes. The Truman Show Something of the remarkable structure of consciousness which Hitchcock’s movies sustain and appear to reflect may be seen generations later in the contemporary world of surveillance culture and CCTV. Foucault might have said that this is yet another extension of the modern episteme as exemplified by his diagram of the panopticon. One of the best films to epitomise the workings of consciousness involved in a Big Brother world is The Truman Show, (1998), directed by Peter Weir, a film about a reality TV show (but both in front of and behind-the-scenes) spanning the life from cradle to uncertain end of its unsuspecting star, Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey). The film poses as a soap opera which chronicles the life of a man who does not know that his every move since childhood is a constructed reality and broadcast as a soap opera, televised 24 hours a day to billions of viewers. The film’s structure is premised on a whole series of shots enabling the illusion that the viewer is watching viewers watch The Truman Show, in other words, we are watching The Truman Show the film, of The Truman Show the soap opera, of the Truman’s real life and his burgeoning consciousness of the artificiality of his own life premised on CCTV devices, film props and the deceptions of actors who are supposed to be his closest friends. These ‘reality checks’ are no less than conceptual frames-in-frames, a series of views of what is happening from the perspective of a particular consciousness, which in turn, is intensified by another, when we see a new reality behind the

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scenes. The CCTV network is monitored by the programme’s creators who are employed to keep his illusion entertaining for those who watch his existential struggle, and this forms a tripartite universe: Truman’s perspective, the creators’ manipulations and the depicted audiences’ responses, which of course, track and mimic our own. But besides these conceptual frames-in-frames, the film is also heavily dependent visually on shots of frames-in-frames that emphasise relative points of view and articulate Truman’s captivity and his desire to break through the frame; thus, the frame is both a structural device which enables the exposition and style of the film, and a symbolic mechanism. One particular shot is very telling: Truman looks at his reflection in a bathroom mirror which is, in fact, a one way glass with a CCTV behind it connecting his images to billions of people watching him shave (including us, the viewers). It involves a particularly complex series of transformations which shares much with the still from Un Chien Andalou, and with Parmigianino’s mirror self portrait treated earlier, because his personal vision of himself, his reflection, seems directed at us, the mirror surface is also the surface of TV screen, an enormous cinematic screen broadcast to the world, and monitored by the producers. We are looking at Truman looking at himself, pulling funny faces at himself (which indicate his exercising of his mental library of images of characters he is playing with in his mind’s eye) while unknowingly entertaining everyone else; we see shots of TV screens in bars and homes of his face looking at his face and putting on these mentally visual masks. It makes us conscious that every time this reflection is reproduced in a new context (a viewer’s living room, a bar, and the screen which the producers are looking at) carries with it a different perspective of consciousness. The frames-in-frames remain still but consciousness transforms them into a series of different surfaces, media and reality situations and moments, and ultimately, because the image is a self-image which penetrates all of these projections, it reflects the seriality of consciousness which constitutes it. We look through Truman’s looking at himself, and he looks through the image of himself, imagining what a viewer might see as he play acts a smile, and as the actor, Jim Carrey also does—and this multiplication of the self-image through different perspectives, different reflections of self, is the mechanism we have already witnessed in Vertigo, through Kim Novak’s monadic series of actresses playing

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actresses. The mirror becomes the surface of the film, the cinema screen in which is placed the TV screen, it is a reflection of the actor’s private mentally envisioning interplaying with his physical appearance reflected in the mirror, and it is both a personal, intimate and extremely public moment, a microcosm in which millions of people are implicated, as the jewels in Indra’s net. The CCTV frame is key in conveying notions of privacy and public exposure and the capture and loss of political and personal freedom which we, as voyeurs of voyeurs through privileged vantage points are at liberty to ponder. The ethical analysis of our surveillance culture triggered by the film is not a simple illustration of its dangers but it shows us our blind spot: we are not able to see the serious curtailment of our freedoms by CCTV because it purportedly provides security, entertainment, assuages (or increases) voyeurism while delivering up our permission to unaccountable powers to expose ourselves to the gaze of others in any way it is deemed necessary. And this is a special consciousness: for we see that we cannot see, we are conscious of what we are not conscious of: our own acquiescence, which the scopic drive opens up. The frame signals voyeurism, capture and is literally, as well as figuratively, the fixing of eye movement, not only on what is pictured but the fixing of the eye of the picturer, and the blotting out of all else (even ethical considerations). The fixing of the eye by the frame is a metaphor for the fixing of reality by the thought police watching (and by the thought police in us). Through the CCTV we go along with the watcher watching and look through the watcher’s eyes, and we are only released from this point of view in the moment we objectify the frame of our own screen, focus on it as an object in our space, just as Truman begins to look at the constructs of his world as props in his space rather than investing his self in and amongst them. In so doing he/we become partly estranged from the frames of the film and the film itself, we contrast and compare our frame (TV or cinema) to those projected in the film. And yet this revealing still has us hooked, we are hooked by the revealing of the props and illusions. By playing with frames in this way, the Truman Show invites us to evaluate the freedom of our own consciousness in regard to its capture by frames. It also invites us to ponder the central struggle which Truman exemplifies, the need to know if there is a truth behind appearances or whether appearance is in fact, and as Sartre would have us believe, everything there is.

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The Number 23 In The Number 23 (2007) directed by Joel Schumacher, a man (again played by Jim Carrey who seems to be developing into an auteur actor focussing on ontological conundrums) reads a book entitled, Number 23, the same title as the film. It tells of the unfortunate story of his compulsive obsessive disorder which consists in not being able to avoid seeing or thinking about the number 23 and its variables and multiples, which drives him insane and leads him to murder his family. The plot is loosely based on a scenario sketched by Freud in his essay on the uncanny. Freud, however, used the number 62 to describe the syndrome, also a variable of 23 (Freud 2003: 144). The feeling of the uncanny 23 is doubled by the reader’s seeing 23, which is duplicated by the film viewer’s seeing of the number 23. The events described in the book begin to bear an eerie resemblance to the reader’s life. Of course, as viewers, our consciousness is also structured by what the reader sees of the writer’s life. In fact, the visual field of the film is carefully structured to instil the uncanny feeling of the reader in us by way of experiencing the number 23. As viewers, we develop a hyperconsciousness of the apparent randomness of the visual field, our saccades adopting complex and rapid movements to scan background visual information which only serves to create a sense of anxiety that is quite deliberate. Some of Arthur C. Danto’s general remarks about film find a particular resonance here, for Number 23: […] gives us not merely an object but a perception of that object; a world and a way of seeing that world at once, the artist’s mode of vision being as importantly in the work as what it is a vision of (Danto 1989: 231).

The film is structured visually with the repeat of sequences and of the number 23 which follows the syndrome of the obsessive compulsive urge to repeat and which works cooperatively with the figure of double. There is one rather important mise-en-scène in particular, where we hear the author’s lines spoken by the reader who is the main character played by Carrey who sees himself as the author having a flashback, this is visualised as a series of windows-in-windows which reveal moments of the author’s past, the camera seems to travel through the windows; the camera aperture reflects a single conscious-

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ness which travels through different, framed past moments of consciousness. We retain our consciousness of the reader as a self-defined or framed psyche through his journey through the frames of the author’s consciousness presented by mental images. We see the author’s visualising through the eyes of the reader who pictorialises himself, rather than the author, even though he is reading the author’s story, so we see the reader’s visualisations of the author’s flashback. It is important that this process is structured by sustaining one mental state (our consciousness of the present, for example) while entertaining others (the series of other time frames represented by windows). In the end, it turns out that the author and the reader are, actually, the same person, his horrible sense of familiarity arises from the fact that the reader is the author who has repressed through trauma his memory of writing the book in the first place, which is a classic case of the uncanny as a repressed familiarity but also picks up the dizzying theme of predestination we have seen in Vertigo. The sequence of going through several window frames visualises the pattern that unfolds in the character and viewer’s consciousness. The frame (window, mirror, and painting) in any media (including mental images) allows for much more than just a focus. It allows a fixed vantage point through which to view a self or a consciousness, which could also be ours. The frame fixes the self so that consciousness can travel through it, or consciousness is fixed, so the self can travel through it. Whereas in Hitchcock’s Rear Window we watch the watcher and see through the eyes of the watcher, in Number 23 we see the character’s consciousness through his mental images (as he sees the reader’s consciousness with the mental images of the text). This conforms to the pattern of many of the other images and films I have analysed here. The effects of framing devices in film appear in direct contrast with film studies which foreground editing and cutting devices. Gerard Mast has reminded us that there is much in the way a shot is framed in cinema which not only has an effect on the psychology of the viewer in a subtle sense but can in itself organise, convey and direct the meaning of the film (Mast 1984: 82-109). Thus, framing devices in Fred Astaire musicals, for example, visually reinforce and engage with both the symmetry and counterpoint inherent in the dance, and in the expert tracking of the dance, the frame invites the viewer into further involvement. Also, in Howard Hawks’ movies,

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Mast has made us aware of complex compartmentalisations which contain different psychological states signified to the viewer by frames (and I would also add, frame-in-frames, although Mast seems unaware of these possibilities in interpretation). Importantly, he reminds us that the film’s frame has often been represented by the window, telescope, and the sight of a rifle or even the cinema screen and camera lens itself (in Cinema Paradiso, for example in recent times, a borrowing from much older examples in the history of cinema). For Mast and for the present critical approach taken here, the frame is analogous with psychological and visual consciousness as a process, and this is inherent in the medium of film itself because it is a rapidly intensifying medium: […] the film frame is analogous to an operation, a process, almost all of which require a present participle (that is, wandering, roaming, masking, sighting, covering, focusing, shooting) [This] operation is analogous to vision itself in both possible senses of the term (as physical sight and as mental insight) (Mast 1984: 85)

In Number 23 framing devices are used to structure a projected journey or process of self-consciousness, we look through these frames and see what the character sees of himself, all the while conscious of our own viewing. In other words, we look straightforward and reflectively through the character’s looking straightforward and reflectively. Science Fiction In this part, I will use some examples of television productions as a way to step down from the high pedestal of art; and in so doing, I aim to show that the visualisation of higher-order consciousness, often misconstrued as a rare occurrence is, in fact, ubiquitous in popular TV series as part of their logic of its production and addressing expectations of their reception. The frame-in-the-frame is the device, par excellence, in science fiction movies and TV series to depict different mental states, time periods and dimensions in one shot. The frames-in-frames of sci-fi films give rise to ideas of expanding consciousness beyond the simple subject-object, viewer-screen relationship, connecting interiority with exteriority by making the viewer aware of depicted space as a frame for conceptual space. Here, space travel becomes a metaphor for the exploration of consciousness.

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This is done frequently in the popular Star Trek TV series. One constant in Star Trek is the inside/outside visualisation of warp travel. Exteriorisation is shown by an image of a ship vanishing into space, while interiorisation is shot as a frame-in-a-frame: we see a screen on the ship’s bridge which shows us travelling into that space. The space ship is a body, our body; we are both aware of our inner life and our body as an exteriority. The bridge’s screen duplicates the frame of the television, and it is often the case that what we see approaching the ship, planets, star clusters, alien ships are shot in such a way as to appear as if they are approaching us, through our TV screen. Exteriorisation is folded in, and our minds appear to travel out through the screen into another dimension, when in fact, the image is internalised in us, from the TV through the frame of our eyes to our mental processes of image adjustment and monitoring.

Computer generated image of the starship, Voyager caught in a holodeck simulation. Courtesy STVI

On the ship, there is a holodeck, pictured above, whole landscapes, planets, ships and people can be simulated in three-dimensions in this ‘entertainment’ area. Again, this is another example of how the series uses a complex, but habitually signaled and therefore familiar series of

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spaces to suggest monadic arrangements which stimulate a series of mental states and their relations. In this digital picture, we see Enterprise, the star ship, inside a holodeck, yet we know that, in fact, the holodeck is inside Enterprise. The same paradox of space is pointed out by Husserl in his Dresden Gallery image, mainly because of the convolution of consciousness required to understand this spatial anomaly. Such an image also suggests regress (a starship in which there is a holodeck, inside which there is a starship and yet another holodeck, et cetera). Virtual reality is embedded in the ‘real’ space of the ship in the holodeck, pictured here, which is an internal space that allows for the projection and interaction of holographic images. This clearly doubles as a cinematic/television screen which reflects our own viewing. The crew’s relationship to the holodeck images is a dramatisation of our own relationship to Star Trek, and this rapport is managed with a series of framing devices. Holodeck characters periodically also have existential debates about sentience and consciousness and the frame is a key tool used to visualise consciousness of different conscious mental states. In the next picture (see below), there is a computer generated simulation of the captain’s quarters, we see a laptop open to a view of a galaxy, in the window behind we see an image of the space vessel, in space, which tells us where the laptop and captain’s quarters is situated. We have a consciousness of the outside, the spatial context, reaffirmed by the computer screen’s image of the galaxy and the computer screen also mimics our own computer screen which supports this image. Parallels with Husserl’s Dresden Gallery image also spring to mind, again. Consciousness maintains a multiperspectival positioning (a superposition), fixated both by the object of virtual reality and the ‘reality’ of the physical computer screen embedded within it, and, of course, this frame-in-the-frame acts as a double for our own viewing space and our own computers which sustain the illusion, and re-presents the digital image. In fact, it is a digital image of a ‘digital image’. Consciousness is not only contorted into the hyperreal, which is ‘more than’ reality and yet is reality, a kind of heterotopia,59 but also our consciousness reads

59 A heterotopia, according to Foucault, is a place that is both real and unreal at the same time, like the space opened by the mirror (Foucault 1984). These are spaces of Otherness, which are neither here nor there, that are simultaneously physical and

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that we are caught in a series of embedded projections, a series of insides: a laptop view of outer space, a room in a ship, in a galaxy. Yet these are also, at the same time, a series of outsides: my consciousness places me outside the laptop, outside the room, outside the galaxy of virtual space, outside of my real life computer which projects all of these ‘insides’. The picture in the background of the embedded galaxy refers both to the position of the starship in space and the embedded space of the laptop screen, which seems to represent our real life computer screen, when this image is viewed on the Internet. There is space within the representation of the laptop screen, a space around the laptop which is the captain’s quarters, which is contained by the picture/window signifying the space in which the starship is immersed and where this whole scene is supposed to be located.

Computer generated image of the captain’s quarters with Voyager seen in distance. Courtesy STVI

We also become aware of the space which we occupy, the computer which projects this image of an image. At the same time, we are also aware of a chain of metaphors of metaphors based on the image of mental and is a concept that could be used to question the strict intrinsicality and extrinsicality of HOTs and various other spatial binaries.

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space: virtual space reflects the ‘outer space’ of the galaxy reflected on the virtual laptop screen. Ultimately, however, my own real computer screen is embedded in my real space, the space of my room, world, solar system, galaxy, and universe. The embedded spaces of virtual reality imitate the embedded spaces of my own threedimensional reality. What is also reflected back here (and activated) is the power of consciousness to maintain and rationalise a large number of different possible viewpoints and mental states of position and space, each of which represents a different consciousness of space and this consciousness of consciousnesses appears appropriately represented by the image which contains a plethora of images, each exemplifying the quality space of a mental state. The framing devices that present so many different projections of space produce an image of consciousness stretching out from the embedded introspection of our own minds into the universe, the mind travel here reflects the space of consciousness warping into a process which is shown as a journey, and a journey into an image. In a fourth-season episode in Star Trek Enterprise (produced after Star Trek: The Next Generation and Voyager) framing devices are used as visual ways to express the modalities consciousness. Two key members of the starship crew, Commander Tucker and the Enterprise’s translator and communications officer, Hoshi Sato, return from a routine away mission but have contracted an unknown radioactive virus and are immediately quarantined. Meanwhile, the conscious minds of two key officers of the Enterprise have been taken over by two aliens who plan to observe how physical species behave under the threat of disease and unknown circumstances. Their mission is to seek first contact only with creatures of a higher intelligence and this they measure by their reactions, enlightened or otherwise, to the sickness of their kith and kin. Thus, the scenario sets ups several tiers of observation, indeed the episode is, in fact, entitled The Observation Effect and these modes of observation symbolise different conscious perspectives (with the viewer of the episode given the privileged position of an overview all the different kinds of consciousness at play). The virus is monitored by the doctor and made visually available to the viewer through the framing devices of computer monitors and projectors in the medical laboratory. We see not only the crew viewing the virus microscopically (a view that expands our consciousness of the macrocosmic context of

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spaceship in a vast expanse) but views of the body of the diseased crew on screens; doctor and crew also view and interact with Tucker and Hoshi from a behind a glass screen, and from protective space suits (with framed viewpoints), and the sick crew are continually framed by a window onto the air-locked quarantined section, a framed view which emphasises their confinement, while at the same time the power of the gaze is focused on them. This gaze mirrors the viewer’s gaze fixed on the television screen. The transference of gazes which consists of various characters’ viewpoints and the various screens mentioned here is a seriality of conscious states.

Still from, Voyager episode, The Observer Effect. Courtesy STVI and Paramount.

The viewer of the episode is watching the watchers of the sick crew and sees them through their eyes. But to make things more complex, the aliens are watching through the eyes of the crew, whose consciousness they have commandeered. Yet the audience is able to see through the eyes of the aliens, also. One particular, ingenious shot duplicates a series of framing devices at a key moment when both quarantined officers are about to die. We see Sub-Commander T’pol’s head and shoulders, almost full frontal, eyes down, viewing a screen which is simultaneously projected behind her (for the viewer’s benefit), and so we see what she sees and her conscious focus is framed for us to view. She sees a view of the Captain. Cleverly, behind the Captain in the screen is yet another screen, showing us a

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projection of Commander Tucker’s biology, and so we have a neat summary, or consolidation of the storyline in one shot. Here, we have both macrocosmic, external views looking into to internal views of the body. The body becomes the frame for a microcosmic reality, and the shot contains both vantage points. And there is a complex exchange of gazes, T’Pol represents the external eye looking in, the Captain returns the gaze, which we see, and we imagine that he is in fact, looking into her eyes which puts us strangely in her shoes, much like the aliens who invade the hosts’ bodies. This mechanism is used centuries before by Velázquez who with the aid of the mirror reflection of the Spanish king and queen in Las Meninas puts the viewer in their shoes, in their space, to see things from their vantage point. The crucial line here, delivered by the captain framed in the screen, is “I take it you’ve been watching?” which appears to be a formal, conscious recognition of the complex observing that is going on but is, in fact, ironic, for although he is aware that T’Pol is watching him, his awareness of being watched is only partial, he should not be aware of the aliens watching him (the aliens indeed may be watching him through her trusted eyes) but he cannot be aware of the audience watching him, although his question seems awkwardly address to the audience and to the other possible watchers in the chain. The use of the interrogative in this manner and at this stage of the proceedings brings together the disparate observing acts (doctor, aliens, and crew) into a kind of convergence in the viewer’s consciousness of his or her own viewing acts. And so the viewer becomes, in effect, an omniscient being by virtue of his or her consciousness of everyone else’s consciousness, a privileged position where the viewer, as all-seeing panopticon, views the viewing behaviors of all others, much like the aliens are doing. This I take to be the real subject of the episode, The Observer Effect. The aliens’ omniscience has already been identified in the opening sequence where they play chess with each other in their hosts’ bodies, belittling the game as a product of a limited intelligence. The playing of chess has been a cinematic device for the inscrutable omnipotence exercised over the lives of mere mortals or a colonial underclass for decades: in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) and Satyjit Ray’s Chess Players (1977) to name but two. The gods, superhuman higher consciousnesses, the ultimate observers of everything are playing chess with peoples’ lives. The fragmented, limited and circumscribed

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consciousness of mere mortals (symbolised by the square or frame of the chessboard) is one small unit or element in the mosaic of consciousness possessed by the all-seeing observers whose omniscience is shown as ours. Superconsciousness is set up as something that is able to remain outside of any kind of framing device, so that it never becomes the subject of any other superconsciousness. But we, as viewers get the last laugh, because we are able to see the aliens’ haughty viewing behaviour from our own privileged vantage points. Of course, it is never possible to achieve this sense of a unity of consciousness without the frame; every extrication from the limit of the frame becomes a new frame. But the point is that this would all fall by the wayside if these elaborate framing devices were used for comparatively less ambitious ends to forward the plot, but because the episode is called The Observer Effect we are clear from the outset that the episode frames viewing acts as a seriality of monadic devices and kinds of viewing as the subject of the episode, and by extension, frames consciousness, for consciousness and conscious states are always represented in visual language as representations of the eye, the gaze, looking, observing and being observed, and the frame localises, focuses, emphasises and articulates the gaze of consciousness. If The Observer Effect is really about multi-perspectival consciousness as a mosaic of many other forms of consciousness, it must also be about how consciousness seeks escape from the frame (and the body in which conscious viewpoint has its origin) to gain a greater vantage point from less circumscribed or limited vantage point which appears as a target beyond our present predicament. This resembles the schema of Rosenthal’s HOT thesis because it is the thought of what we are experiencing, the thought that we are conscious of being conscious that allows us a similar vantage point. If we were to follow the episode of The Observer Effect at the level of a simple tale of a dramatic day in outer space in the life of Enterprise, we would not be having a HOT about how the episode achieves these ends. In effect, the episode and how it is shot, its form and content are able to sustain a number of sensations and reactions, thoughts and opinions but also, remarkably, through its dense and intricate play on modes of observation, viewing and being viewed, it achieves the effect in the viewer of self-observation. The viewer addresses herself while being addressed as a viewer implicated in the unfolding of The

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Observer Effect. The episode sustains higher-order thoughts about our conscious states of watching and the different characters’ conscious states of watching, and on occasion, HOTs about HOTs about our conscious states of watching by the characters and ourselves. In another scene, the tables are reversed and the aliens experience the sensation of being watched by the doctor, he is portrayed to have, in effect, higher-order thoughts about what they are saying and doing and about their mental states in their hosts’ bodies. This becomes more complex when we consider that we, as viewers, are watching the representation of the process of higher-order thoughts (of the aliens) of mental states (of their hosts), and so we are having a HOT of a representation of a higher-order thought. The visual language of framing represents the chiasmic process of how HOTs ‘frame’ mental states and are, in fact, framed by them. By extension, this chiasmic relationship is evident in the proposition that the mental states that we have about other people’s mental states are, and also are not, our own mental states. And I use the word frame here as an important qualitative point about the relationship of a HOT to a mental state. For, although Rosenthal says that having a HOT often distracts us from the mental state we are having, it is not clear at all that this need be the case. The framing model allows us to see both the frame and its contents and sometimes in harmony as an integrated consciousness of two discrete states in and out, HOT or not. In sum, The Observer Effect uses a sophisticated visual language of framing realities which relies heavily upon our own natural propensities to have HOTs, and each frame signals and activates a new HOT about a mental state. The frame model allows us to see that we are having an experience of the HOT and its contents, the lower order thought, at the same time and intersubjectively. New Media Art Peter Horvath is a contemporary photographer living in Canada; he is a filmmaker and new media artist. Many of his short films show as installations in galleries and they are available online at www.6168.org. Horvath’s artist statement published on this website shows his interest in the subject of consciousness: Through my work I attempt to address the difference between conscious and subconscious identity and drives […] I engage in fragmented narratives and

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Framing Consciousness in Art sub-narratives that form and reform as multiple windows open and close. I orchestrate layers of history, including journal entries, sketches, written records, video, photographs, music, voice and general sound loops, resulting in a atmospheric investigation into states of being.60

Also on this website, a work entitled Album, 2004 is described as a work “Unfolding as consciousness itself.” It opens with a view of several cut-out figures, to halt momentarily at the heart of a young girl which opens up to us in the form of a square screen, in this screen in her chest we see an motion image of a ballerina, and from this point on, pop-up screens multiply at an alarming rate, each with their own moving image. Many of these reflect images that remind us of the operations of consciousness, the eye, the frame of a television, pictures of the brain and a plethora of inside/outside imagery of the body, cells, organs, and the rib cage. The film is reversed at a faster speed at the end of seven minutes.

Still from Intervals, Peter Horvath. Courtesy the artist.

He uses a similar technique in another work, entitled Intervals. The key visual consistency or technique here and in many of Horvath’s works is the use of multiple pop-up windows. One views a film in a framed window, a woman and man kissing for example, and then a pop-up window appears containing another visual sequence. In the 60

See www.6168.org consulted, 21/11/2007

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way that Pop Art used everyday commercial images for its own ends, the artist deliberately inverts the crass commercialism of the pop-up used for advertising purposes. Horvath takes the essentials of web visuality, one might say web literacy, which is the navigation of frames, and turns this every day vocabulary into visual journeys into consciousness, and with irony allows consciousness to live with this and the high art sentiments of art cinema (replete with invariably wistful music, and caustic one liners written across the screens). With black backgrounds, his works conjure up the shared intimacy of the cinema with the poignant, personal interactive world of the computer screen. Sometimes, pop-up images appear each with their own film sequence contained within them, which, in turn, contain TVs or windows with views, and so consciousness is continually travelling from one motion to another, identity to identity in his work. This complex use of frames and the principles of montage articulate a split consciousness, indeed a plurality of conscious states which act as points to piece together a perspectivism of consciousness.61 The subject of consciousness is framed by several pop-up windows and jumps from one to the other and through various pop-up windows, it is through the rhythms of this image switching and juggling that I gain knowledge of my own fleeting and relative consciousness and the fine-grained relativities of its mental states. With varying intensities, these frames orchestrate conflicting sensations, stillness, motion, sharpness and blurred images, and the result is a distancing effect where one becomes conscious of the computer screen at the same time as the projected spaces of the pop-up windows. The perspectivism caused by the series of projected moments and phases of objects and sensations emphasise the relational and intersubjective aspects of consciousness. The image of consciousness framed here is not a centralised, absolute and singular, one based on the model of one-point perspective, but a distributive system of consciousness that is dynamically rhizomic, and which self-reflects nodes from relative positions, as in the diagram of thought represented by Indra’s net. And these nodes are sensations, memories, and levels of consciousness. The sightlines of a system of experiences, the nature of looking and experiencing the multiple intensities of consciousness and 61 This term is used deliberately as a reference to Schacht’s perspectivism where each perspective and its context are subsumed into the measure of the veracity of a proposition under examination.

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their afterimages is what makes this work so engaging as a visual yet also heterogeneous phenomenology, a visual intersection of multiple phenomenologies structured by the overlapping and unfolding of frames-in-frames. Horvath writes: As a medium, the web stimulates the environment of the mind, offering frenetic and multiple displays of stimulus. In my work, windows open and close in the same manner that thoughts enter our minds, play out, and disappear, making room for new thoughts. In this way, my pieces mimic the thought 62 process.

In The Presence of an Absence, 2003, Horvath uses his own image as an ‘interface’, a launch pad used for initiating three films. The user/viewer (this ambiguity is itself worth a separate acknowledgement) points the mouse at the head and through the head, to the brain, where an image appears, and launches a pop-up containing a film sequence. The reference to the body as a frame for mental geography

Interactive website with films, The Presence of an Absence, 2003, Peter Horvath. Courtesy the artist.

and conscious or dream states is obvious. In one film, we see a popup containing the image of a TV screen with an FBI warning against video piracy, this obviously reflects consciousness back to the 62

See www.6168.org accessed, 21/11/2007

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‘video’ sequence we are viewing on our screens, and it points up a new consciousness of illusions of modern image projection. In the same way, the viewing of digital images and ‘travelling’ from one to the other in contemporary visual experience are illusions. Ultimately, they are reducible to their technological reality, as pixels and as light emitting diodes on another level of consciousness. Horvath often shows images that disintegrate into the grainy, subfusc, white noise of a faulty TV screen, or is deliberately blurred in order to alter our consciousness of what it is we are looking at, and to display a number of viewing choices and types, each kind of different viewing experience goes hand in hand with a different kind of accompanying consciousness.

Still from Tenderly Yours 64 Steps Contemporary Art. Peter Horvath. 2005. Courtesy the artist

As images based on this invisible substructure, they conceal with illusions the unfolding within itself of the same material of which they are made, and this appropriately, mirrors the “unfolding of consciousness itself” as the artist puts it. The invisible refresh rate of the screen, the

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hum of the machine are also metaphors for the jerky rapidity of thought, the saccades of the eye that rapidly interpose consciousness with non-consciousness and from where the presence of the self arises. Consciousness engages with series of visual translations, we move inside images within images, self-generating higher-order thoughts ‘within’ the intensities of other higher-order thoughts about how we see, experience and respond, both within the phenomenology of Web visuality and art and film. In Horvath’s work, we glimpse the vast metaphorical power of the medium of the Internet and its many windows, not merely as navigational devices but as a series of visual experiences which regulate the refresh rate of conscious reflections. These processes are explored further in Horvath’s film shorts. In Tenderly Yours 64 Steps Contemporary Art (2005), a film taken with a handheld camera of external views of windows and art galleries and it gives us a sense of being outside, excluded from warmth and the glow of light within, and with this is added a certain melancholy induced by the accompaniment of sparsely composed piano music. The consciousness of being outside the gallery (and outside the work, as we are outside the screens that project the work) is contradicted by the sense of voyeurism, peering in through an eerie empty gallery window. One cannot also escape a feeling of being ensconced in the darkness of the artist’s camera, even inside his eye and toward the end of the film, we are transported into a cinema where we hear the voice of a French actress and feel the seductive flow of sound and music. And Horvath wants us to compact the viewing experience of Internet art with video, installation, photography and cinema with the feeling of walking in the street. But it is the darkness and the flickering screens, the reflections on the glass that confuse boundaries. We are led from this inside-out paradox to gaze into the gallery space where there are moving pictures projected onto the wall which we see through the glass, and curiosity naturally leads us to want to decode them, and in so doing, we appear to move into the gallery space and into another frame of consciousness projected by it. Some of these films displayed on screens in the gallery are Horvath’s other works, videos of men and women kissing, at times the shiny glass of the gallery window reflects other scenes superimposed over the pictures in the gallery. The gallery as an object of the camera’s focus is a double sign: not only does it refer to the artist’s work, the video is a Horvath work about Horvath’s work, and specifically, a film that

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films a film of his work through a gallery window, but Tenderly Yours 64 Steps also cooperates with the process of conscious mental states and their relations to each other which sometimes seem discrete and distinct and yet at other times seem to morph into each other. Most importantly, the imagery of the film suggests that consciousness can preserve its identity while being conscious of another changing one. Visually, not only are we inside the work, we are also looking at it from the outside, and so with consciousness we experience it subjectively from the inside and yet we are able to create what we feel is some distance from the experience, in order to try and analyse it. The film encourages us to have a vision of our own exteriority, looking in.When we view the picture inside the gallery, we are also looking at our consciousness of the inside which is framed by our consciousness of the surrounding space, outside. Our consciousness appears both outside and deeply involved inside the work as being-inthe-world. The film inside focuses on the face of an actress; with her lips and eyes looming over the space of the whole screen, moving slowly and sensuously like the camera which is filming this and the camera which is recording this run filming on a wall, but from outside the gallery, outside the work of art. The result is somewhat fascinating and disconcerting, one motion tracks another, and one kind of conscious process also tracks the two kinds of viewing: the film and the film featured inside the film. We obviously see what the filmmaker is seeing through his camera, and also through the camera that has produced the internal film of the screen on the wall in the gallery, and it is difficult not to see this as a construct for experiencing one consciousness through another, as a kind of unresolved ecstasis, a continuum of two phenomenologies, one seen through the other. The tracking of a non-inertial frames by non-inertial frame in this way creates a visual sequence which reflects back on our own dual track consciousness of seeing and seeing ourselves seeing in the world. A third higher-order thought occurs when the viewer becomes aware of these removes from reality when we examine our own consciousness of the computer screen which displays Tenderly Yours 64 Steps and we become aware of the site of the artwork which frames the art experience, oddly parodied by the projected site of the gallery framed by the free and non-site specific camera which produces the image. This intellectual play: site/non-site, real space, virtual space, cooperates with the nature of consciousness, how it is both situated in

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the brain, in the mind and yet both in the world. This must be so in terms of fine-grained higher level thoughts as it is of basic sensations, that there is a parallelism between non-site specific consciousness in the brain and the non-site specific dimension of the work of art: Sensation, perception, cognition are subserved by neural events taking place in multifarious neural locations. Massive parallelism, massive connectivity, and unimaginably great computational power make clearer how the brain could produce experience without there being any one way in which it does so or any one place in which it does so (Flanagan 1995: 60).

It is tempting to see the superpositional, distributed system of consciousness without a centre as having parallels with the distributed networks of online art and the Internet. Horvath films a video screen on gallery wall, it duplicates our own viewing process, either in a real gallery space, or at home on the Internet, where our screen becomes the gallery, where the gallery window becomes the window of our computer screens, where the work of art in the gallery is the work of art on our computer screens. Each projection of consciousness is a plane of consciousness attached to a particular surface: through viewer’s eye, computer screen, artist’s eye, camera lens, glass window of gallery, glass reflection, screen of work of art, video image, flesh of the actress, eye of the actress, and to the human being behind the mask, and in this, it differs little from the still from Un Chien Andalou. Consciousness not only seems to be able to fuse and individuate the different surfaces of reality recorded on film here, but it also unites and individuates different timeframes (the different films seen in the picture) and exercises this dual effect on spatial differences. It is consciousness that holds in place an apparent contradiction: the fusion and individuation of spatio-temporal flux. It is the series of frames in these visual sequences, so often figured in art, which expresses a multiplicity of spatial and temporal realities unified in a vantage point that is able to see through all of them both individually and collectively, and on the fly. While it is tempting to see this work as a piece of modernist reflexivity, a sleight of hand or an artist’s conceit, these superficial judgements avoid a very important quality which Tenderly Yours 64 Steps effortlessly sustains: motion captured within another, larger context which is also in motion. Through its shifting frames it not only sustains an intensity of consciousness that processes a series of signi-

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fying surfaces but it reflects back on what it is we do when we watch and how watching is a metaphor for the production of consciousness. The viewer is consciously watching and watching consciousness, because through the camera, the artist is watching and the relationship between watching his watching, experiencing his consciousness, mimics the experiencing of our own consciousness oddly detached within our own, and what better way to visualise this process than by the depiction of motion framed within a broader dynamism? Rosenthal might say we are having a higher-order thought about conscious watching which makes the mental state of watching, conscious. But this thought process of framing one mental state with a higher-order thought is visually expressed by the series of moving sequences in sequences in Tenderly Yours 64 Steps. Rather than a series of on-off alternations of conscious and nonconscious states, the film exemplifies and, indeed, acts as a catalyst for the rapid alternation of HOTs and lower-order thoughts with semi-conscious mental states of different qualities and intensities and this is interpreted as a sensation of movement echoed in the rhythmic camerawork and the motion of the objects in its view, and importantly, in the dancelike relationship between these two movements, the encounter of two non-inertial frames. The two flows of movement suspend and sustain consciousness as an image of movement. And this flow is also about how consciousness emerges as a recognisable object or process in the mind, Tenderly Yours 64 Steps activates consciousness in a process of becoming and tracks its trajectory, reflecting it back for further conscious analysis. In Tenderly Yours 64 Steps nothing is ever still, the camera pans over, passes the windows and brings others into its purview and as a trancelike motion, it tracks other forms of motion independent of the hand holding the camera, allowing for a first person perspective through the eyes of the third person tracking a conscious motion tracking another, and this is, perhaps, a profound insight into consciousness: not only is it able to experience, record and recirculate consciousness of this kind of ecstasis in future becomings of consciousness, but it is also able to experience the projected ecstasis of another, entirely discrete consciousness through its own mental envisioning. The artist visits previous forms of his consciousness figured as framed displays of his earlier work and he is both inside and outside this work, for his previous framing (making conscious of),

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filming the subject seen in the gallery, is seen again through his ‘present’ eye that shoots the same film from outside the gallery, and these subsequent framing processes, which frame his earlier framing, creates a tunnel effect for the viewer; an intricate series of conscious moments all seen through the vantage point of one single, conscious moment: a myriad of conscious frames seen through the individual frame of now, looking back at the clones of past consciousness with the added feel for the transitory nature of the present draft of consciousness. The moving hand-held camera, the feeling for the noise and sensations of the street, the voyeurism of looking in at one’s own work, tracks consciousness of a (previous) consciousness, and this reflexivity is visualised by the film of a film, a (glass) computer screen seen through a (glass) lens onto a (glass) window of a (glass) screen on a gallery wall. The substructure again, echoes the principles identified in Husserl’s Dresden Gallery picture, and the shot in The Truman Show where the glass of the mirror becomes the cinema screen and computer screen and where reflections have a dual function: to embody the principle of reflection or duplication while showing us two or three realities in one picture. Again, we look straightforward and reflectively at someone with a camera who is looking straightforward and reflectively. The quality of consciousness is not strained by the mind but articulated by it and spills over into the world straightforward and reflectively. Art provides a visual representation of this consciousness as a superposition by showing it to be both inside and outside of the frame. This may be seen in contemporary Mexican-Canadian interactive installation artist, Lozano-Hemmer’s work. In particular, Body Movies, 2001, Relational Architecture 6, is a series of large projections on buildings set up in various European cities which allowed passers-by not only to see their bodies projected ‘out there’ framed by large urban buildings, they were also able to vary the size of these projections so that their shadows could appear nested inside larger ones, or the shadows cast by other people bodies.This is made more complex, as within these shadows are projected photographs, portraits of people who wander the streets of the cities where the project is exhibited. However, the portraits only appear inside the projected shadows of local passers-by, whose silhouettes measure between 2 to 25 metres high, depending on how far people are from the powerful light sources placed on the floor of the square.

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A custom-made computer vision tracking system triggers new portraits as old ones are revealed. People get the distinct feeling that they are framed by an urban space, yet their own shadows contained in that space appear to contain other people’s identities and these change continually to give the impression of a series of monadic spaces. The body-in-a-body becomes a frame-in-a-frame. The images controlled by walking, dancing, gesturing in front of the screen create an intersubjective consciousness between public and private lives, the latter suggested by their gestures projected into public space. Even micro-movements become gigantic. People in the square expressed their spontaneous and self-reflexive conscious thought through movements alone or shared with others, patterning public space with their private interactions and movements.

Body Movies, Rotterdam, Projection, 2001 Lozano-Hemmer. Courtesy the Artist.

Identification with their own bodies and the mental states epitomised by such movements and gestures through light and shade were projected out onto the city, but the projections also created a new consciousness of space and body as a negotiated series in their relation to other people’s bodies and movements. Thus, the work of art included aspects of cinema, architecture, dance, interactive art and shadow play. The projections toured Rotterdam, Lisbon, Linz, Liverpool and Duisburg. The global and the local, which we are familiar today as

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‘glocalism’ and where ‘there’ and ‘here’ become ‘(t)here’, both elisions express a hyperconsciousness that is engaged with and activated by a very local space but is also wired into a global availability, and this is also a framing of the global in the local and it is where the global, culturally, and on the level of consciousness acts as a framing of projections of the immanence of the self, the act, the moment. The projections of bodies on a large scale acted as personal frames through which other bodies and frames could pass, and public space is impregnated with private narratives that cross and cross out the square and the piazza. Many people interviewed who experienced the massive projection in Rotterdam reported seeing the space/projection as a communion of personal experiences in a globalising range of experiences, personal outlines (the frame of the body) merged with other shadows from different localities and overlapped. Moreover, these shadows appear, fleetingly, to reveal faces and other bodies projected through the shadow, further strengthening a consciousness of overlapping identities. In fact, one had the distinct impression of consciousness seen through the eyes and the body of someone else. In the space of the public square, the whole experience makes intersubjective consciousness visually dynamic and three-dimensional. The projection is all about motion, not only from side-to-side and back and forth, expressions of simple directions that any framing artwork permits but also intriguingly, it articulates a vision of space where, not only the shadow becomes the frame through which consciousness can pass, but the body itself is a frame, a locally situated self, through which other consciousnesses can pass. So, both the intersubjectivity of the phenomenologists and Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that the body is recognised as both the subject and object of consciousness are given a visual dimension here. The deliberate play of scales, the monumental global projection of the body compared to the tiny actual body dwarfed by the great public space of the square is also a series of embedded spaces; whereas Husserl’s Dresden Gallery picture was a token of phenomenological consciousness or frames of the noema, here one’s own body appears as both a framed and framing device, a noema represented as body and shadow. One becomes the artwork; one’s body and image become the visible instantiation of consciousness, while consciousness views this exteriorisation: there is no clear internal/external, or art/viewer binary. Physical space, shadow, and body and projections of these in an

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architectural and urban setting track and frame a powerful psychogeography, the kind the Situationists sought in their radical mental and physical interaction with the city. The physical projection is also about mental projections reflected back, the body becomes a gesture of the mind. The projection engages mime and invites childish pranks premised on the constant play of scales: incredibly shrinking persons acquire a gigantic monumentality simply by stepping back, closer to the projector, and these are the external marks of individuals’ conscious projections. This shadow-play is not only the stuff of the most elementary consciousness of Other and self (with rather neat references to Plato’s Cave that further involve thought about levels of consciousness), but these tricks, which onlookers invariably attempt, are efforts to own or give identity to their shadows, they are also about breathing consciousness into the faceless image of the shadow, giving it a trajectory through the signature of movement and relation to Others. The binary of external and internal is swallowed up by the shadows. Consciousness and its signs, shadow boxing, movements, images and bodies occupy the spaces of the urban landscape, which also appears embedded in the bodies of consciousness. This chiasmic interpenetration is also seen clearly as the rapidly lengthening and expanding shadows of people’s bodes which appear to move forward into the space of the square, blotting out great historical buildings transforming them into backdrops, while at the same time, this looming projection is brought about by stepping back towards the light source. One becomes conscious of one’s body as an image, as a projection which affects the urban environment, which in turn nests the image of the body. The urban setting becomes a body, a frame in which other bodies and frames pass through and overlap. In work by another artist, Pakistan born Rashid Rana, entitled Veil I-III, 2004, bodies are contained within bodies but on a miniaturist scale. At first glance, the image appears as a woman covered by a traditional veil (burqua); we see a close-up of the geometrically patterned lace that covers the eyes. Closer up, the image fragments into a mosaic of digital images taken from the Internet, each of these, in varying degrees, display many wriggling bodies in various pornographic poses. This is a computer programme which manipulates subroutines automatically selecting minute details of images to make up a larger preselected one.

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(Above) Rana Rashid, Veil I 2004, digital print. The image below is a magnified view of the one above, made of pornographic digital images. Courtesy, the artist and Green Cardamom.

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The image is not only a reference to the almost viral and anonymous duplication of visual images found on the Internet but the recursive algorhythms63 used to form the image, mimicking the pixels that lie at the substructural level. The vastness of Rana Rashid’s universe of digital images, which constitute the image of the veiled woman, menaces the frail optimism of individual identity, even the viewer’s, whose gaze is fragmented into the pictures of a thousand lives which reference the substructure of pixels, the stuff of which ‘reality’ is projected. The image of a veil is used as a veil to make invisible the substructure of the image (pixels and porn). Consciousness is engaged by both the image of the veil, which suggests a presence behind the veil, and the substructure from which the folds of veil seem to arise. The paradox is that the veil reveals that there is nothing behind the veil (it is a series of photographs) but when we step back, we read the optical mixture which suggests that there is a presence behind the veil. Like the pixels, the presence behind the veil is also a substructure. The optical mixture is a series of relations of individual conscious moments; consciousness unities them into one image, an image of images, divisible yet integrated. In this sense, the image presents apects of consciousness (fragmentation and unity and the elision of each) and presents them to the consciousness of the viewer. Conscious processes converge and diverge during the optical experience. The image is both one moment and a series of moments, one perspective and many perspectives and consciousness can align itself to either a multiplicity of views or to the illusion of a still and solitary one. So consciousness negotiates the image at the substructural level of the mosaic, the formation of the image into a veiled woman, and then negotiates on the level of a network of gazes, who is looking at whom, and the reversal of the subject/object. Indicative of processes of consciousness activated by such an image is the fact that it is not clear at all that the wearer of the veil is made of these pornographic images because she is experiencing them in the mind’s eye, or whether they are projected on to her by the mind of the viewer. And this adds considerably to the potential for interactive experience with the image and 63

Recursion, in mathematics and computer science, is a method of defining functions in which the function being defined may be used within its own definition. The term is also used more generally to describe a process of repeating objects in a self-similar way.

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the interaction between optical (zahir) and mental vision (batin) consciousness, which morph into each other. In Veil I-III, the veiled body is a universe of frames and frames-in-frames, a tower block of windows, a city of lights, thousands of computer screens through which we see many moments of life. It is a cloak of eyes worn by consciousness and viewed by consciousness. The veil of bodies becomes a framing device, much like the body-in-the-body or the head-in-thehead in the Malanggan and in Yoruba examples of ìborì. Yet also, it shares some affinity with the image of St. Veronica’s cloth, the iconostasis in European art, Vermeer’s The Art of Painting and even the Chinese screen: all feature surfaces in order to show consciousness as a seriality of continuous focal points ‘across’ and ‘through’ the projected space. It is through these frames that the identity of consciousness becomes known or apparent to the self. The screen is also a mirror not only of the physical body but the consciousness that resides within it, and it is by virtue of the image as a screen that this consciousness appears in the world. This is so because the projection of consciousness behind or beyond the screen immediately points to consciousness before it. The framing of the camera, the grille of the veil, the window and the painting, all double as the aperture of the eye, and when the eye meets the eye consciousness of looking becomes apparent; more than this, consciousness of embodied conscious looking becomes self-evident. Veil I-III is a digital print but shows us the historically specific visuality of our times: the Internet as a vast expanse of frames and frames-in-frames, virtual spaces in which consciousness unfolds and finds it own structures, transforming the body into a myriad of appearances by which it is veiled and revealed. Bangladeshi artist Runa Islam makes video installations that explore interactions between different viewpoints, requiring complex interactions between different conscious mental states. She installs her films using two or three screens in architectural settings, and they also project architectural settings. The work is thus a cross between video, installation art and architectural consciousness. A common theme here is the inside-out nature of the art work which contains the architectural setting in which it is placed, much like Husserl’s Dresden Gallery picture, and like that example, reminds the viewer of the inside-out nature of consciousness in the world. In Scale 1/16 inch = 1 foot (2003), the artist re-stages the cult film, Get Carter (1971), where key

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scenes were shot in the Brutalist multi-storey car park in the gritty northeast England town of Gateshead.

Still from the film Scale 1/16 inch = 1 foot (2003) by Runa Islam. Courtesy the artist

The artist’s double projection, which appears to nest one image inside another, shows footage of the car park complex from the restaurant windows, framing devices that were used as metaphors for the cinematic process in Get Carter, especially as the architecture resembles the frames in celluloid. Runa Islam contrasts outside views with inside ones using the double projection, so that there are claustrophobic views from inside looking out from the tenth storey, while in embedded projections we see interiors, or vice versa, embedded views of exterior scenes inside large projections of interior shots. The artist plays with consciousness of the building’s ambiguous iconic status, half a soaring vision of seventies utopia and the other half its subsequent notoriety as a maladjusted architectural dystopia fit only for the scene of a brutal murder. There are two sides of the coin that are continually contrasted with bi-focal frames creating a rhythmic interplay of different drafts of consciousness that overwrite each other. Yet this is also the contrast of two motions: one looking in, the other looking out. The film references the architectural setting, pointing to the viewer’s embodied experience both as a reference point but the inside-out shots also make us aware of our own exteriority as it appears in the world.

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This overlapping of conscious mental states expressed visually occurs in works from other cultural traditions. At the 8th Istanbul Biennale, there was a video installation entitled, Smashing Mirror Limit, 2003 where Chinese conceptual artist, Song Dong, smashed a mirror put up on a river bank in Istanbul. In the installation, he showed the action with a double projection on opposite walls, as well as on a piece of framed glass, standing in between these two projections.

Stills from Smashing Mirror Limit, 2003. Song Dong. Courtesy the artist.

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This is a modern interpretation of an ancient topos. In Iranian and Turkish literatures, Alexander the Great (known as Iskandar) judges a competition between the artists of China and Rum (Byzantium), latter day Turkey. Note the geographical relevance of the locations in this story for Song Dong’s performance on the banks of the Bosphorus, itself the iconic border between east and west. In the story, the artists of Rum paint a life-like picture on one wall, while the Chinese polish the other side of the room wall turning it into a mirror (as Song Dong does), so that it reflects the painting on the opposite wall by the artists of Rum. Iskandar orders the curtain between them to be drawn open and closed and thus discovers the trick the Chinese have employed. This episode was also illustrated by Persian artists in the fourteenth century, showing a double painting inside a painting.64 This picture entails a complex process of abstraction in three stages which is ‘mirrored’ by Song Dong’s video installation. If the world may be considered an illusion in the classical literature of Iran, so is the image of it painted by the artists of Rum, and yet there is another illusion created when the painting reflected on the opposite wall, polished to a high gloss, created by the artists of Chin. The story illustrates different kinds of consciousness, one, a low order sensation (the sensus litteralis), the other, a higher-order thought about the relationship between projected reality (the painting) and sense objects that are copied in it. As in Parmigianino’s mirror portrait, Peter Horvath’s 64 Steps, and the shot of Truman looking at his reflection in the mirror, reflections becomes framing devices where conscious states in the viewer arise, and appear to be reflected back. Song Dong’s work also provides the viewer with a complex phenomenological experience which includes reflection on conscious processes. In fact, Song Dong’s reflective surfaces—screen, projection, mirror, glass and camera, are the surfaces of different moments of conscious reflection. Looking through the glass, one not only sees the projection on one wall but the reflection of the projection on the other. This thematises being in more than one place at the same time, a theme that reflects the property of consciousness as several moments and vantage points, the local and the global are united in the subject’s 64

A painting of this scene from a Timurid Khamsa of Nizami is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 13.228.3, f. 332r (Sims 2002: 316).

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experience.Yet rather than projecting seamless transitions of consciousness from one reality superimposed over another, the artist employs the iconoclastic imagery of the smashed mirror that violently destroys a moment of consciousness in order to reveal another one. The projections show the image of the artist beginning with his back to us in the first still, standing in front of a life-size mirror whose frame is perfectly aligned with the frame of the video shot and projection, so that it appears to the viewer as if the mirror image is a real space before him with a view out to the Bosphorus. In the second still, this false consciousness is shattered by the smashing of the window with a mallet, to reveal another view of the Bosphorus behind it. But Song Dong also shows us the smashing performance from behind the mirror on the other projection. This puts the viewer conceptually in a no-man’s land, like the glass in between the two projections, caught somewhere in between two projected images, one of a mallet smashing into the front of a mirror, the other image of the mirror being shattered from the other side: the mirror is, in fact, a one-way glass! The image of the artist in front of the mirror with his back to us shatters before our eyes to reveal the artist with mallet facing us with mallet but consciousness quickly adjusts and recognises that despite this dramatic denouement which gives us a momentary grasping of a new reality, it is also an illusion, a video projection. One plane of immanence is torn away to reveal another, and another frame is revealed by the jagged, shattered edge of the mirror, left in tact by the impact of the mallet which has smashed the mirror from behind. Yet even consciousness can smooth over (and pass through) violent ruptures and cuts to create continuity, and this fact is figured forth in the projections and crystallised most eloquently by the glass frame in between both projected images which remains standing—the anchor of identity that consciousness provides as an illusory vantage point from where to judge what is real or illusionary, just as Iskandar was meant to do when drawing back the curtain between wall painting and mirror. Coda Rather than attempt a conventional conclusion which summarises the core arguments, I would like to end by analysing the work of an artist who brings together and yet extends some of my main conclu-

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sions about consciousness and the visual. Lee Bontecou (b. 1931) is famous for her sculptural-cum-pictorial installations, many fashioned from flattened metal plates welded together to fit on the wall, some free standing, a large number featuring a mysterious black hole burnt into them. These works are intellectually stimulating and yet they also arouse instinctive anxieties and sensations. In the black hole, we see the blank, dead stare of a lizard or a fish, an inscrutable consciousness which we find alarming because it does not seem to meet us half way or to recognise our consciousness. This inanimate consciousness seems to inspect us from two possible positions: embodied, with a reptile’s body or a body of scales, and from behind this frame of the eye, as a disembodied intellect beyond the body staring at us from the darkness. The viewer’s privileged position in these works is shredded by an anxiety of self-questioning. Much has been said about the cosmic black of this work. But the work is more than a framing of the abyss.

Pen and Ink drawing after Bontecou sculpture, Untitled, 1959 of welded metal places with hole in centre.

Bontecou’s work is about the liminal, about fetishised edges, framing devices that suggest a circular frame or disk, the eye, vagina, mouth, anus. At first, the black hole seems inhospitable and captures a fleeting ommetaphobia. Framing is a major part of this work for it is possible to see whole sculptures as elaborate frames, organic excrescences, as neatly welded together lustrous segments of metal surrounding

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the non-physical—being and nothingness. Here the void is an integral unit in the sculptural whole, and this has prompted some to use the phrase, the “sculptural void” (Applin 2006: 476-502), suggesting that this is the real sculptural element in her work. It is possible to view this focal point through a continually morphing series, as with Bataille’s The Story of the Eye, which transforms the eye by associating it with the sun, egg, and vagina. Bontecou’s sculpture suggests dark matter or an eclipse. The pupil, a frame-in-the-frame, adds to the seriality of Abschattungen, a seriality of holes, eyes and orifices through which, in fact, we can see the seriality self-generate. It becomes a site for the generation of Eliadian mythic associations, where the cave is a dark place of initiation, a threshold onto the preconscious, nocturnal world of the dreamscape. We can view Bontecou’s image of the eye through our mental imagery as an image of our third eye, our mind’s eye. In this way Bontecou’s sculpture can be compared to Magritte’s The False Mirror (1928), a picture of an eye with a large black pupil surrounded by an iris composed of clouds and a blue sky, a visual paradox using focal point and vast expanse to induce both an optical fixation and the illimitable imagination. The image of the eye is also the instrument of self-consciousness, and as with ritual and totemic art, the sculpture becomes the replica of the viewing body in the world, and yet also the focus of our psychic energy, and we are impressed by its ability to cause a conscious mental state in us which is about self-inspection. This is similar to Sartre’s keyhole experience in that we examine our consciousness looking at or through the hole, and the image of the hole/eye becomes a means by which we examine ourselves. The hole is a doubling: the eye of the subject encounters the eye of the object, one looks through the other and at oneself reflectively. This is also a common motif in Islamic Sufism, where one sees oneself in the reflection of the eye of the beloved. Bontecou’s punctum is non-reflective, however, we feel attracted to the darkness which it captures, yet it also pushes us back. Bontecou’s Untitled is composed of lines of perspective traversing spiralling forms, circular enclosures that progressively capture space to create a vertiginous effect, accentuating an apprehension of going further inside. This tunnel vision is subtly achieved and references the

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fear of falling, and there is also the fear of nonconscious helplessness falling into the power and control of the Other’s consciousness. The staring back sensation, where the viewer’s gaze is repelled (and yet attracted also), tells us that our looking is being looked at. These fears are enhanced by the notion of a presence behind the edge of the iris in the heart of the pupil, beyond the embodiment of the sculptural. This, ostensibly, makes the sculpture a mask for the real figure behind it: consciousness, breathing, knowing what we do not. It looks back at us, mimicking our looking in at it. At the same time, it frames our looking in at our own consciousness which is strangely externalised by this work that is in the world, yet part of the intimate resources of our mental imagery. It appears almost too intimate, a sign of our looking forward and reflexively at the same time. The darkness is both self and Other. The penetration of our gaze through the darkness mirrors the depth of our own self-penetration into consciousness. The sculpture frames the penetration of self-reflexivity, its inward directed force, yet as a visual experience. The image may be seen as projecting out into our space, as well as infinitely inwards, and this dual direction is a conscious experience of superpositionality. Bontecou’s image of the eye is also an image of the blind spot, and paradoxically, of the focused eye that does not flinch, that stares us down. This is what happens when consciousness fixates on the notion of infinity, where consciousness itself seems to travel far into the heart of a distant point while travelling nowhere at all. We can wear the mask of the sculpture to see through it, but it wears us, frames us, and holds us in one place. The abyss attracts consciousness into the vertigo of self-inspection, of higher-order thought apprehending abstraction. The work robustly frames mental states and their fixation on the physical, the will of consciousness to form things while forming itself through the imagery and material substrate of the frame, the eye and the body. The seriality of apertures is focused on one spot; similarly, consciousness is a series of mental states that appears fixed on one reference point which is the image, yet it is self-generative, a series of arrows shot through each other at the target of the punctum. Yet this seriality is beyond crude representationalism and co-relation. For although these arrows are shot through each other, we can be conscious of other arrows shot through each other in many different trajectories, as is the case of the figures launching their gazes in Las Meninas, or

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with the dynamic localisation of neural firings in the brain. Consciousness appears as an exploding firework of lines of flight in threedimensions, shot into the dark and refreshed by other fireworks exploding within its momentary extension to form a continuum of energy in all directions. This image of thought, too, can be taken up while looking at Bontecou’s sculptures, where the lines around the dark point suggest an emanation in all directions while centred on the eye and the eye that sees it. It seems important, though, to insist that there is no centre of consciousness as such. Deleuze’s model of thought and creativity, which can be easily applied to our understanding of consciousness, is the rhizome, a series of centres underground that grow in all directions while being interconnected. The rhizome is a synchronous form of generation without a single self or centre of the universe. It suggests various forms of consciousness and intersubjectivity with other selves. As with many of the images addressed in this book, it provides the opportunity to enact consciousness in the world as a series of intensities in all directions and timelines, outward and reflectively. Bontecou spoke of her work as ‘mentalscrapes’ alluding both to the physicality of her work (scraping the surface of the body and the metal sheet) and the mental states that she frames with her work. Scraping the surface of the physical, revealing its layers and leaving the marks of this repeated excavation reveal aspects of conscious mental states. We scrape the layers of ourselves while constructing and excavating the physical universe. It is Bontecou’s uncanny ability to frame both the eye and darkness that brings sight and blindness together so as to explore consciousness as an experience in relation to materials. This is closely aligned to Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the night as an allcompassing abyss that: […] is pure depth without foreground or background, without surfaces and without any distance separating it from me. All space for the reflecting mind is sustained by thinking which relates its parts to each other, but in this case, the thinking starts from nowhere. On the contrary, it is from the heart of the nocturnal space that I become united with it. The distress felt by neuropaths in the night is caused by the fact that it brings home to us our contingency, the uncaused and tireless impulse which drives us to seek and anchorage and to surmount ourselves in things, without any guarantee that we shall always find them (Merleau-Ponty 1958: 330-331).

Bontecou’s abysmal pit conveys some of the fusion of consciousness

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and the world that is being in darkness. Not only do we enter that space, we are entered by it. This is the phenomenology of the chiasm, not only of the body and touch but of consciousness itself with itself. In the encounter with the punctum of consciousness who is framing whom? What is happening here is the superposition of framing and being framed by an unknown consciousness, another’s or my own. This redefining or blurring of the boundary of the self engages with deep, instinctive anxieties about self-preservation: As soon as something gets into the business of self-preservation, boundaries become important, for if you are setting out to preserve yourself, you don’t want to squander effort trying to preserve the whole world: you draw the line (Dennett 1991: 74).

Bontecou’s work invites the eye to look straightforward and reflexively, fixing the eye as it struggles to flee, to go beyond that framing. The balance between self and Other is tipped when finegrained nonconscious calculations based on fight or flight are initiated, this dilemma is sustained when contemplating the frame, which suspends the on/off switch to stay or to run, to look, or to look away. While it may be true that in the battle for survival we have only one simple instinctive urge to answer, in art our instincts are only part of a complex of mental processes which, in fact, uses this instinctive response as a target for address, analysis, discussion or entertainment. What else would one expect in civilisations which valorise the superfluousness of the need to run away because danger has become aesthetic play? Consciousness frames the phenomenology of fiction within the experience of reality: in such a way, we can experience a threat and the artistic interpretation of one at the same time. This is a parallel experience of nonconscious mental states and their fluctuations, alongside a more constant and broader self-consciousness that may be engaged with questioning existence at a more abstract level. Bontecou’s eye-catching black hole frames blindness bringing to mind a limitless and explosive darkness which we associate instinctively with the death and birth of consciousness. It can remind us, if we repress the urge to look away from its depths, that art brings into the frame of the physical universe the darkness where our consciousness resides. It marks the initial point of contact between pen and paper, the opening of the work, yet it is also the full stop, the period that marks its closing.

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Index A Akbar, Mughal Emperor 30, 303, 304, 315, 316 Aretino, Pietro 35, 38, 39 Audu, Osi 296-299 ‘Arabi, Ibn 313 B Barthes, Roland 46, 177, 317 Bhabha, Homi 189 Binocular rivalry 106, 124, 125, 128, 152, 159, 170, 234, 238, 239 Bontecou, Lee 373-377 Brassaï (Gyula Halász) 264-264 Buddhist art 286-288, 313 Buñuel, Luis Un Chien Andalou 317-326 339-341, 360 C Cartier-Bresson, Henri 265-268 Camille, Michael 23-30, 57, 81, 302 Cézanne, Paul 186-187, 202, 225, 274, 277 Chalmers, David 103-110, 118, 123, 124, 125, 128, 131 Consciousness, and Abschattungen 151, 159, 191, 192, 273, 285, 291, 309, 324325, 338, 374; and body 70, 82, 85-87, 96, 101, 106, 107, 108, 113, 164, 169, 183, 184, 195, 196, 198, 199, 214, 219, 223, 231, 236, 256, 257, 260, 262, 266, 269-289, 293, 297-301, 307-314, 329330, 338-339, 346, 350 354, 362-365, 368, 373-377; hands 86, 146, 168, 175, 176, 177, 219, 260, 274-275, 297; and heads 244, 266, 272, 296-310, 313, 329; and brain states 14, 106, 111, 114115, 118-123, 132, 139, 141, 150, 163, 164, 219, 225-232, 235, 260, 269, 272, 274, 275, 281, 285, 296, 354, 356, 360;

and ecstasis 29, 44, 97, 104, 148, 163, 176, 200, 207, 269, 359, 361; as a seriality 40, 53, 56, 73, 82-99, 127-130, 142, 157, 162, 167, 168, 176, 181, 186, 191-192, 197, 198, 223, 228, 235, 237, 245, 266, 267, 272, 278, 282, 284, 285, 288, 293, 296, 298, 299, 314, 318,332, 278, 282, 284, 285, 288, 293, 296, 298, 299, 314, 318, 332, 338, 341, 350, 352, 368, 374; stream of 25, 28, 51, 62, 90, 126, 131, 141, 153-167, 190, 245, 260, 321, 326, 333, 337, 379; superpositionality 58, 90, 100, 107, 113, 124-128, 131, 137, 140, 145, 160, 166, 170, 203-208, 217, 218, 234, 268, 283, 289, 291, 311, 314, 317, 347, 360, 362, 375, 376. See also, Higher-Order Thought (HOTs); Intrinsicality and Extrinsicality; Eyes; Mental Imagery Cubism 98, 116, 187 D Danto, Arthur 54-63, 173, 174, 319, 342 Degas, Edgar 247-262 Dennett, Daniel 149-164 Derrida, Jacques 12, 15, 27, 50, 75, 81, 87-93, 127, 137, 138, 148, 152 157, 164, 261, 262, 288, 300 Descartes, Réne 210 Dong, Song, 370-372 E El Greco, 52 Eyes (and ‘looking through others’eyes’) 29, 33, 41, 64, 77-81, 84, 86, 97, 101, 103, 104, 107, 130,

388 141, 151, 167, 169, 176, 180, 193, 195, 97, 207-209, 215-217, 223-224, 227, 228, 233-234, 239, 255, 266-269, 292, 295, 296, 300-308, 329-332, 338-340, 344, 346, 350-1, 361, 364, 365, 368, 372, 374 F Fazl, Abu’l, 314-315 Foucault, Michel 9, 183-186, 211, 215220, 222-224, 248, 325, 340, 347 Freud, Sigmund 56, 59, 99-99, 174, 337, 343

Index I Islam, Runa 368-369 Intersubjectivity 11, 14, 77, 80, 8493, 145-151, 174-192, 200, 202, 218, 230, 250-251, 261-262, 286, 293, 307, 311, 331, 341, 342, 363, 364 Intrinsicality and extrinsicality 132, 135-136, 143, 154, 171, 183, 204, 212-220, 225 Icons and Iconostasis 217, 270-273, 283-289, 291, 297, 368 J

G Gasset, Ortega y 17-19 H Heidegger, Martin 91-92, 186, 191 Higher-order thoughts 15, 63, 98, 107, 117, 119, 120, 125, 132-143, 146-150, 155-164, 171, 176, 178, 179, 182, 183, 188, 193, 202-212, 217-218, 230-238, 241-244, 247, 249, 263, 271, 283, 286, 294-295, 305-338, 352-353, 359, 361; monadic seriality 72, 127, 182, 217, 287, 312, 314, 327, 337, 341, 347, 352, 363 Hitchcock, Alfred Rear Window 16, 62, 85, 96, 100, 112, 208, 327, 330-333; Psycho 85, 328-330, 331, 339; Vertigo 16, 50, 51, 149, 333, 240 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 9, 54, 59, 60, 91, 251 Horvath, Peter 353-362 Husserl, Edmund 10, 15, 42, 54, 59, 60, 65-76, 80, 81, 84, 85, 87, 88,-96, 104, 117, 121, 127, 146, 147, 148, 149, 153,172, 173, 181, 182, 189, 190, 191, 210, 218, 228, 231, 246, 248, 271, 288, 307, 308, 314, 318-321. 324, 327, 328, 337, 338, 347, 362 364, 368

Japanese art 257, 260, 284, 290-296 Jongleur, juggling 25-26, 29, 112, 269, 355 James, William 131, 153 K Kant, Immanuel 9, 91-92, 116 L Lacan, Jacques 44, 93-95, 144, 174, 193, 337, 339 mirror stage 56, 93-95, 101; sardine can 140 Lebensztejn, Jean-Claude 20-21 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 185-186 Lozano-Hemmer, Rafael 362-365 M Macchi, Jorge, with Edgardo Rudnitzky 19 Magritte, Réne 16, 77, 82, 97, 99, 100, 106, 144, 379 Malanggan, Papua New Guinea 279-283, 368 Manet Édouard 146, 247, 248, 260 Matisse, Henri 219, 234, 254,255 Mental imagery 11-15, 29, 31, 36, 39-41, 52.53, 67, 70-80, 84, 85, 90, 103-108, 113, 125, 133, 135, 152,

Index 168, 196-97, 3213, 224, 227-228, 231, 234, 240, 252, 268, 287, 293, 295, 307, 310, 316, 319, 321-326, 348, 374-375 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 9, 85-87, 148, 177, 178, 185, 186, 195, 102, 219, 220, 225, 230-231, 274, 292, 307, 337, 339, 364, 376 Mise en abyme 13, 28, 40, 46-53, 144, 224, 263, 284, 288, 312, 313, 335, 337 Moore, G. E 60 Mughal art 31, 51, 57, 110, 303-317

389

N

299, 311, 331, 335, 341, 349, 359, 364, 368, 376 Seriality (see Consciousness and) Seurat, Georges-Pierre 137, 139, 157-158, 167 Schumacher, Joel The Number 23 53, 149, 342, 345 Star Trek 149, 346-349 Stoichita, Victor 33-49, 196-197, 214, 233, 239, 303, 310 Superpositionality (see Consciousness and)

Nahl, Jean-Auguste 276-277, 281

T

P

Teniers, David 10, 66-76, 84, 8790, 118, 121, 127, 149, 164, 172, 182, 218, 233, 248, 254

Parmigianino, Girolamo 194, 193-197, 209, 345, 375 Plotinus and cosmology 38, 313 R Rashid, Rana 365-368 Reff, Theodore 249-260 Regress 50, 53, 89, 94-95, 142-144, 165, 166, 174, 256, 310, 313, 317, 325, 337, 347 Reinhardt, Ad 21, 141 Rembrandt, Harmenszoon van Rijn 122, 319, 322 Romano, Giulio 22-23 Rodin, Auguste 86-87, 274-276, 297 Rothko, Mark 122 Rosenthal, David 132-139, 143, 203, 209, 217, 218, 225, 282-283, 252-253 S Sartre, Jean-Paul 15, 59, 60, 62, 76, 7785, 89-90, 104, 127, 170, 173, 179, 186, 191, 195, 212, 319, 324-329, 337, 338, 339, 342, 374 Self, the 45, 53, 56, 77, 84, 93, 113, 120, 122, 133-149, 158, 160, 165-180, 189, 200-201, 229, 253, 254, 263-270, 289,

V Velázquez, Diego 16, 41, 45-46, 80, 106, 140, 142, 146, 192, 198, 200, 201, 241 Las Meninas 45, 54, 80, 106, 140, 142, 147, 149, 152, 192, 201-241, 246, 254, 306, 311, 320, 321, 232, 351, 375; Las Hilanderas 201, 239-245; Christ in the House of Martha and Mary 198-201, 306, 314 Vermeer, Jan, 16, 46, 180, 233-238 The Art of Painting 98, 180, 197198, 233-234, 241, 331, 368; Woman with a Balance 236238, 271,297, 313; Lacemaker 318, 319, 320, 322, 326 Verrocchio, Andrea del 276 W Weir, Peter Truman Show 340-342, 362 Wollheim, Richard 22, 145, 179, 318

390 Wahol, Andy 54-58, 62, 153-154, 157, 160-163 Wearing, Gillian 82-85, 94, 101, 142, 144, 150, 180, 264, 266 Y Yoruban art 296-300, 313 Z Zahavi, Dan 66-68, 71, 72, 77, 78, 105, 143-148, 171-175, 178, 181, 183, 184, 185, 191, 231, 308, 311

Index