Blindspots

We can’t see everything all the time. When I look at a tomato sitting on the counter, I think that I see all of it. But, really, I don’t see the whole thing—I don’t see, for example, the back of it, nor the bottom. A spider could be crawling up the back and I would have no idea.# Does this make me freak out? Does this mean that, in seeing the tomato my mind engages in suture? The tomato is just a construction of bourgeois ideology! The tomato is daddy-mommy-me!

Really, I know about the backside of the tomato because of my previous lived experience. I have walked around the backside of the tomato, and I know that I can get up and walk behind it even now. My point is that we don’t carry gigantic maps of the world in our heads—in fact, we barely carry any mental images in our heads, maybe a select few momentarily (this view is slowly being realized even by hardline mental imagery folks like Zenon Pylyshyn and Stephen Kosslyn).

The world itself is our map—so why do we need to carry a stitched-up copy in our brains? So, too, with our experience of film. When I watch a movie, my mind is not constantly stitching together frames and shots and narrative sequences. I’m not storing the film in my head so my brain can piece it together for me later. Watching a movie is an active, lived experience! Wow—it’s almost as if these theorists they have become so blinded by tradition (because, yes, to be good critics we have to at least read critical tradition—but we don’t have to blindly swallow it whole!) that they can’t even walk down the street and pick up a tomato. It’s as if they are sitting in the theater thinking, “Wow, this is a good movie—I wonder what my brain will think of it later after it sutures it together.”


#The example is Alva Noe’s.