Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to prepare for a discussion of medial difference by first focusing on what all media share, outlining a series of categories that will be useful in discussing all media. In the following chapters, these categories are represented differentially once we begin comparing kinds of media. The first observation is that, ontologically, medial objects are instances of cultural objects generally. They are all purely intentional objects in Ingarden’s sense. In light of the variety of media – visual, aural, spatial, temporal – it is affirmed that space is ontogenetically prior in media. In an important essay, Arnheim introduced two kinds of images that can be applied to all media – the robin and the saint, the former a “likeness” and the latter a “self-image.” They coexist in any image or medial object and one represents the thing as self-sufficient and the other as referring externally. The way in which a sculpture of a naturalistic robin or an abstracted St. Francis in a garden have these two functions in different measure suggest differences in classes of media.
[Time] is spatial, since its moments co-exist spread out before thought.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologie de la Perception, 1945: “[Temp] C’est de l’espace, puisque ses moments coexistent devant la pensée.”
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Notes
- 1.
Barry Smith, “The Ontogenesis of Mathematical Objects,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 6 (1975): 91–101; Frederik Stjernfelt, Diagrammatology. An Investigation on the Borderline of Phenomenology, Ontology, and Semiotics (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007).
- 2.
J. E. Katz and J. Floyd, eds., Philosophy of Emerging Media: Understanding, Appreciation and Application (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
- 3.
Ingarden, Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt, vol. I, Existenzialontologie, 81–82; c.f. Amie Thomasson, “Ingarden and the Ontology of Cultural Objects,” in Arkadiusz Chrudzimski (ed.), Existence, Culture, and Persons: The Ontology of Roman Ingarden (Frankfurt: ontos, 2005), 115–136.
- 4.
von Wachter, “Roman Ingarden’s Ontology,” 62.
- 5.
Arnheim, “The Reach of Reality in the Arts.”
- 6.
Rudolf Arnheim, “Objective Percepts, Objective Values,” New Essays in the Psychology of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 297–326
- 7.
This is the pithy formulation of Olav Asheim, “Reality, Pretense and the Ludic Parenthesis,” in J. Sageng et al., The Philosophy of Computer Games, vol. 7, Philosophy of Engineering and Technology (Berlin: Springer, 2012), 233–257.
- 8.
Fritz Heider, “Thing and Medium,” in On Perception, Event-Structure and Psychological Environment (special issue Psychological Issues 1 [1959]), 1–34.
- 9.
See the comments in Wolfgang Prinz. “Emerging selves: Representational foundations of subjectivity. Consciousness and Cognition 12 (2003), 515–528.
- 10.
Karl Popper, “Three Worlds,” in S. M. McMurrin (ed.), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 1980, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 141–167.
- 11.
Joseph Margolis, Persons and Minds (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1984). Margolis and Ingarden differ in that “indeterminate” for Margolis means alterable, but full of holes for Ingarden; Margolis, “Reconciling Relativism and Cultural Realism,” 89.
- 12.
Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind. Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
- 13.
Wolfgang Prinz, “Modes of linkage between perception and action,” in W. Prinz & A.-F. Sanders (Eds.), Cognition and motor processes (Berlin: Springer, 1984), 185–193.
- 14.
Max Wertheimer, “Experimentelle Studien über das Sehen von Bewegung,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 1912, 61, 161–265, Eng. trans., “Studies in the seeing of motion,” in Classics in Modern Psychology, (New York: Philosophical Library, 1961), 1032–1089.
- 15.
Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, vol. I, Music and the External World, translated by Willard Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), 136.
- 16.
Giovanni Vicario, “Some Observations in the Auditory Field,” in Jacob Beck (ed.), Organization and Representation in Perception (Hillsdale: L. Erlbaum, 1982), 269–83.
- 17.
Geza Révész, “Gibt es ein Hörraum?” Acta Psychologica 3 (1937): 137–192.
- 18.
Elisabeth Sacca, “An Interview with Ernst H. Gombrich,” Canadian Journal of Art Education Research 6–7 (1980–1), 15–27.
- 19.
Wolfgang Metzger, “Sehen, Hören und Tasten in der Lehre von der Gestalt,” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Psychologie 13 (1953): 188–98. See further Erich M. von Hornbostel, “Das räumliche Hören,” in A. Bethe, ed., Handbuch der normalen und pathologischen Physiologie (Berlin: Springer, 1926), 602–18; Zuckerkandl, Music and the External World, ch. 15; Paolo Bozzi and Giovanni Vicario, “Due fattori di unificazione fra note musicali: la vicinanza temporale e la vicinanza tonale,” Rivista di Psicologia 54 (1960): 235–58.
- 20.
Rudolf Arnheim, “A Stricture on Space and Time,” in New Essays on the Psychology of Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 78–89? This distinction derives from Immanuel Kant and his discussion of subjective and objective succession in the Critique of Pure Reason, A198–9/B243–4.
- 21.
Arnheim, “Unity and Diversity of the Arts,” 86.
- 22.
Arnheim, “Unity and Diversity of the Arts,” 86. According to Arnheim (1974, p. 481), Merleau-Ponty’s (Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris, 1945, 469ff) discussion of temporal Gestalten was particularly important for his formulations.
- 23.
Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 373.
- 24.
Arnheim, “Unity and Diversity of the Arts,” 71.
- 25.
Paul Fraisse, The Psychology of Time, 1966.
- 26.
Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 274.
- 27.
Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, vol. I, Man the Musician, translated by Norbert Guterman (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), 22.
- 28.
Arnheim, “Space as an Image of Time,” To the Rescue of Art, 36.
- 29.
Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).
- 30.
Arnheim, The Power of the Center, 107.
- 31.
Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1950), 34; quoted in Arnheim, “The Robin and the Saint,” 330.
- 32.
Rudolf Arnheim, “Art among the Objects,” To the Rescue of Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 7–14.
- 33.
Arnheim, Radio: An Art of Sound (New York: Da Capo); originally published in 1936 as Radio, and based on the manuscript Der Rundfunk sucht seine Form, c. 1935, published in the original German in 1979: Rundfunk als Hörkunst, ed. Helmut Diederichs (Carl Hanser Verlag, 1979).
- 34.
Arnheim, “The Robin and the Saint.”
- 35.
Arnheim, “Robin and the Saint,” 330.
- 36.
Wiesing, “Plato’s Concept of Mimesis and its Concealed Canon,” Artificial Presence: Philosophical Studies in Image Theory (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010).
- 37.
Arnheim, “The Robin and the Saint,” 325.
- 38.
Arnheim, “The Robin and the Saint,” 329.
- 39.
Obviously, these issues touch on the notion of interpellation, and Appellstruktur as found in Karl Bühler and Wolfgang Iser, as well as ideas of “diegysis” and “deictics” (David Carrier).
- 40.
E. H. Gombrich, “Meditations on a Hobby Horse,” in L. L. Whyte, ed., Aspects of Form (London: Lund Humphries, 1951), 209–224.
- 41.
On “generic” intention, see Thomasson, “Ingarden and the Ontology of Cultural Objects.”
- 42.
Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception. This idea was derived from the thinking of Gustaf Britsch.
- 43.
Arnheim, Visual Thinking, 105–6; c.f. Maurice Mandelbaum, “In Defense of Abstractions,” in History, Man and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 350–64.
- 44.
Arnheim, Parables of Sunlight, 271.
- 45.
Walter Hopp, Perception and Knowledge: A Phenomenological Account (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 25–26.
- 46.
Achille Varzi, “Events, Truth, and Indeterminacy,” The Dialogue 2 (2002): 241–264. See further Ian Verstegen, A Realist Theory of Art History, on scales and facets.
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Verstegen, I. (2018). What All Media Share. In: Arnheim, Gestalt and Media. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02970-8_3
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