Excerto para Análise de Texto

“[T]he brain is in effect a shared space with a ‘we’ that is not a crowd of individuals but a collective formation. It is from this formation that individuals emerge, meaning that we move from the social to the individual. By this [I mean] that we don’t generalize what we learn on our own, but apply the general to the specific, because we all form a ‘theory of mind’. Such a theory, well known to philosophers, is vital to human interaction because without it, no one could begin to imagine how others might act. Like all visual culture, this insight is rooted in the everyday. If, in a café, I see a person reach for a coffee cup, I believe she is going to drink because that conforms to my theory. Of course she may throw the coffee over her spouse but that would be an exception to which my theory would then have to adapt. Rather than being a distraction from reality, the imagination is key to our very understanding of how we exist in the world.

(…)

All of the experience we call ‘vision’ is multiply processed, multiply analysed and subject to constant feedback from other areas of the body, rather than being a single, independent ‘sense’. Researchers now want to add many new senses, like the proprioception (…), to the classical five senses. For example, we feel hunger and thirst as strong needs without having to think about them and without external stimulation. But that is not to say, as some sceptical philosophers have done, that we all see differently or that we can make no use of the sensing that we do. Because seeing is a specific instance of our collective theory of mind, vision is a commons, meaning a shared resource that we can nonetheless make use of in ways that also suit our individual needs. And this is what [we are going to debate and explore in North American Art this semester].”

Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to See the World. Penguin, 2015, 95-97.

Comente o excerto apresentado usando como contraponto (pelo menos um dos textos da) bibliografia da cadeira.

Consulte o calendário relativamente às regras formais que deverá seguir.