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A post exploring seeing as a process rooted in movement

This week’s post is about eyes. It’s about the overwhelming demand that our hyper-visual culture places on these precious organs, and the ways in which such demand shapes our capacity for movement and our experience of self.

In my very first Deep Embodiment post, I noted the complexity of the body’s dialectical status as object and subject. This dialectic is perhaps best illustrated by the eyes. Because eyes seem to be such valuable tools. They are our windows to the outside world. They are the means by which we take in the information that occupies much of our conscious thought. To not have them would be almost unimaginable for many of us.

However, this object driven view of our eyes is partial and, I’ll argue, disembodying. The light of the world doesn’t pour in through our eyes. We go out to meet the world. Our eyes are just one of the ways that we negotiate with it.

The title of this post is taken from the psychologist and pioneer of visual perception, James Gibson - one of the first people (along with his wife Eleanor) to theorise vision and perception as processes that happen in dialogue between brain, body and environment. Gibson’s work sought to explain why vision can’t be understood simply by studying how the eyes register light, or by testing how the light registered in our eyes is encoded into a signal that is later decoded by the brain. Instead, he argued that vision is established in the reflexive relationship between the light entering our eyes, our felt sense of bodily presence in the world, and our lived experience of moving through the world.

To see that the toy cows resting on the table are small while the ones outside in the field are far away depends on us recognising a great many things. Such knowledge depends on our ability to perceive the light that enters our retina, but it also depends on us recognising and believing in the cow’s permanence as we walk across the field to bring it closer to us. It depends on the ability to imagine distance, which in turn depends on our ability to connect the feeling of movement through space with the feeling of movement through time. What we see is fundamentally linked to what we feel and what we know about where we are. (Perhaps Father Ted shouldn’t have been so exasperated with Dougal after all.)

Maybe the best way of explaining Gibson’s way of thinking about vision is to note that when blind people learn to echolocate from childhood, their visual cortex is stimulated by the sounds they hear as they move through the world. You can learn to see with your ears.

So why does all this mean that experiencing the eyes as means to a visual end, rather than integrated parts of our subjectivity, is potentially disembodying?

To think about vision as something that enters into our consciousness, like light pouring through a window, is to treat seeing as a passive activity. And unfortunately, this is increasingly what seeing feels like for most us. The vast majority of the people reading this will spend the majority of their time inside, doing jobs where we look at screens, and engaging in leisure activities where we look at screens. We have a screen in our pocket, one on our desk, maybe another somewhere in our living room.

If you recognise yourself in this description, you might also recognise that the relationship you’ve established between eyes and screen is habituated. There is probably an equivalence between the way you look at your desktop, laptop and phone. The depth of focus you use when looking at these devices may not vary too much. TVs are getting larger and larger, perhaps to make them feel as close to us as the screen we can hold in our hands. We’re turning the very flexible and adaptable lenses we were born with into ones that are narrow and standardised. We are habituating ourselves into myopia.

I worry that this self-inflicted myopia is not just making it difficult to thread needles or read the small-print. I worry that through spending our time looking in similar ways at similar things, we are losing sight of the ways in which seeing is not a process of passive reception, but an agential process of discovery. A lot has been written about the crisis of sedentary living, but our capacity for sitting needs to be considered in direct relation to our growing desire to have a 4K world delivered directly into our eyes - without consideration of how it shapes our breathing or our sense of our spine.

In the last few years, passing reference to James Gibson has become a bit of a movement nerd flex. But there’s a reason why so many muscly movement culture bros on Instagram and Spotify are talking about him. It’s because he puts our eyes in our head in our bodies resting on the ground. And that’s helpful. Because having our eyes in our head in our bodies resting on the ground forces us to recognise that what we can see is also what we can explore, touch and move in relation to. While it’s obvious to say that we can see more than the phone in front of our face, it’s worth noting that the spending so much time on our phones is shaping how and what we see. Have you ever had the urge to use your thumb and forefinger to zoom in on a picture or some fine print only to realise that you aren’t on your phone? (Asking for a friend.)

So this week’s lesson is about feeling your eyes. It’s about feeling how they move. It’s about feeling their shape and materiality. It’s about engaging with the idea that your eyes are you and you are your eyes.

You’ll need somewhere quiet to lie down. If you wear contact lenses, you are advised to remove them to avoid irritating your eyes.

For those of you interested in finding out more about the environmental model of perception, you might enjoy Alva Noe’s Action in Perception (2004) and Out of Our Heads (2009). For a different take, I also recommend Drew Leder’s The Absent Body (1990). These books are fascinating for the way in which they establish consciousness beyond the confines of the brain, paradoxically establishing felt experience as the means by which we can take leave our bodies to inhabit imagined spaces and places.