Is Seeing Believing?
Perception in its Cultural Context
The Seduction of Sight
The hegemonic eye seeks domination over all fields of cultural production, and it seems to weaken our capacity for empathy, compassion and participation with the world. The narcissistic eye views architecture solely as a means of self-expression, and as an intellectual-artistic game detached from essential mental and societal connections, whereas the nihilistic eye deliberately advances sensory and mental detachment and alienation. Instead of reinforcing one’s body-centered and integrated experience of the world, nihilistic architecture disengages and isolates the body, and instead of attempting to reconstruct cultural order, it makes a reading of collective signification impossible. The world becomes a hedonistic but meaningless visual journey. It is clear that only the distancing and detaching sense of vision is capable of a nihilistic attitude; it is impossible to think of a nihilistic sense of touch, for instance, because of the unavoidable nearness, intimacy, veracity and identification that the sense of touch carries.
Architect Juhani Pallasmaa writes in his book, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and The Senses , about the hierarchy of the five senses, focusing, not on the perceptual experience, but the bodily experience of life.
Three different eyes.
Three ways of seeing, looking, and observing. But to what end?
The hegemonic eye is oriented towards power.
The narcissistic eye is oriented inward to self-expression.
The nihilistic eye empties experience of meaning for a hedonistic pleasure.
Juhani Pallasmaa, a former guest on The Eddy Network Podcast, ranks Sight as the weakest of the five senses. Read the last sentence in the paragraph above again.
It is clear that only the distancing and detaching sense of vision is capable of a nihilistic attitude; it is impossible to think of a nihilistic sense of touch, for instance, because of the unavoidable nearness, intimacy, veracity and identification that the sense of touch carries.
Ironically, it is eyesight, the visual representation of reality, that has most captured the world we live in. The result is that we lose our sense of connectedness to the world.
Image or Experience
Lake Butte Overlook, Yellowstone National Park
This image is of a place in Yellowstone National Park that I would frequently go to when I lived in Jackson Hole. I would leave before dawn and drive almost two hours to this overlook, waiting for the sun to rise on the Grand Tetons, almost a hundred miles south.
The photograph cannot capture all the experiences of this one place.
On one fall morning, as the sky was lightening to the East, I heard two bull elk bugling to the elk herds as rutting season began. One elk was above me on the mountain. The other is down below me near Yellowstone Lake. I knew that I was in potential danger. I was prepared to leave at a moment’s notice.
Pallasmaa describes the effect of computer-generated images. The pictures above were taken with my phone, which is essentially a hand-held computer.
The computer is usually seen as a solely beneficial invention, which liberates human fantasy and facilitates efficient design work. … Computer imaging tends to flatten our magnificent, multi-sensory, simultaneous, and synchronic capacities of imagination, a retinal journey. The computer creates a distance between the maker and the object …
The visual sense is the dominant sense of the culture of simulation.
The story as human experience matters less. The visual representation is the experience.
In opposition to the culture of simulation is the culture of reality.
It is a culture of physical, embodied presence.
The image is not a facsimile of the real thing. It is its own creation. It is a selection from the totality of the experience.
This picture, which I use as the opening slide of my podcast, captures a moment near the other photos where I was sitting on a rock, and this raven landed next to me.
This is not a staged pictorial event. This is a moment of encounter between this beautiful bird, a vista with the Grand Tetons in the background, and me, a lone traveler stopping to experience the magnificence of this place I love.
These images are not hegemonic, narcissistic, or nihilistic. As images, they are only a reference point to an experience of oneness with the beauty and order of nature.
We are seduced to believe the image is real. We can look at a photograph of an incident in town and believe it represents what happened. In my post, The Spectacle of the Real, I write about the Boston Marathon Bombing in 2013.
News reports played over and over again the video of the bombs exploding, and people being wheeled away to hospitals. Images supported experts’ speculation about who did the bombing. In the end, it was two brothers. It was not the conspiracy that the reporters and commentators were certain was the story. The visual nature of the news meant that there is never a retraction, only the next spectacle popping up on our screens.
The culture of simulation is a visual culture designed to capture our attention through a serial representation of images giving reality to the latest “Breaking News.” These reports claim, “This Changes Everything!” when, it changes nothing. In other words, seeing is not believing, but is deceiving. This is where McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message” helps to orient us to the visual character of the digital age.
Context
Where you stand determines what you see.
Standing in a wilderness setting, like above, hearing wild animals within earshot giving out their mating call, is not the same as watching a YouTube video on the mating practice of elk.
We are never given the whole story. We are only given that which serves a purpose. Juhani Pallesmaa is correct. Our image-based culture operates in various stages of hegemony, narcissism, and nihilistic purpose.
The question we never have time to ask is “Why?”
This is how the culture of simulation operates. The old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words has been transformed to mean a picture is worth a million cultural references. In the age of AI-generated images, this is even more true.
As we scroll through images online, we do not fully realize how our perception is affected. It is far easier to believe what you see than to treat every online image with skepticism.
Marshall McLuhan’s perspective, like Pallesmaa’s, shows that images projected through a phone or on a computer screen carry a message separate from the content. The image itself is the cultural context of the message.
What is that message? We owe our attention and allegiance to the image on the screen.
We believe what we see because the image conveys a message that appeals to us. This is why pornography has such a powerful effect on people. It is not just in the explicit images. It is the suggestion that many of these attractive young people that we see on social media, that we and our children find appealling and entertaining, also have OnlyFans porn sites. Did you know that social media is an entry-level porn drug?
This is the nature of the culture of simulation. I go into greater depth here.
But it is important to understand that every one of us is a human being seeking something that makes our lives matter.
This is why whatever you see on the screen is not the whole story. There is a story to why we all do what we do. The culture of simulation does make it easy for us to share those stories. As a result, we accept what we see on the screen as all that we need to know. It is not.
This is why The Eddy Network Podcast should be a regular stop during your week so that you can see real people talking about their lives with me. These are not simulated conversation, but real, unscripted ones. Ones that you can be having in your world today.
The culture of simulation and the seductive power of the image no longer needs to convince us that perception is reality.
Ask this question.
“What is the impact of an image-based culture on our lives?
How can we as fully embodied people embrace the beauty and consequence of a culture of reality?”
The outcomes is we gain Self-Awareness
I am convinced that we are seduced by sexual and political content as a mechanism of social control. It means that this culture affects how we look at everything far more than our rational analysis of ideas does.
We can’t think our way out of a culture of simulation. It will turn us into knots.
We must live our way into a culture of reality, relationship, purpose, and self-awareness
We need to understand what the culture of reality is. In my next post, I will take us through how we can become fully alive, self-aware men and women, whose lives make a difference that matters.
A Starting Point for Self-Awareness:
I am open to working with any person or group to make the transition to a culture of impact.
For Self-Awareness - For an hour session, schedule through this Calendly link.
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The transition from seeing to a fully embodied leadership culture is the hope that can bring your entire team and community together.