The Photographer as Autobiographer by Arnaud Schmitt

Author:Arnaud Schmitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031088551
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The Cognition of Hybridity

The cognition of hybridity can be a complex area since, before even considering how two different media can interact, it logically needs first to take into account how we apprehend words and images separately, a vast and extremely elaborate subject. For instance, “the cognitive psychologist Allan Paivio (1986) suggested that information can be stored in either pictorial or propositional, quasi-verbal form, depending on the mind style of the subject (some people are ‘visualizers’ while others are not) and on the nature of the data” (Ryan 2003: 233; my emphasis). As if this were not complex enough, Ryan adds: “Some types of information—for instance the meaning of a sentence like ‘the cat chased the dog’—can be stored in both forms while other types (‘I think therefore I am’) can only be stored verbally. This is known in cognitive psychology as the ‘dual-coding’ theory (Esrock 1994: 96–104).” Knowing that “an image is more like a complex utterance than it is like a word” (Burgin 1982: 66), what happens then when you encounter “a sentence like ‘the cat chased the dog’” and across the page is an image of a cat chasing the dog? Does the image override the sentence and the latter is automatically subordinated to the former, becoming almost semantically void, just an echo of its visual counterpart? Or does it follow in all cases a different pathway in our brain and thus, even when associated with a matching picture, maintains a form of semantic independence? Answering precisely such sophisticated scientific questions is far beyond the scope of my knowledge but conjuring them up is as far as I am concerned the most honest way of starting to tackle the issue of hybridity, and even if my contribution eventually remains a humble and limited endeavor, it will at least consider the problem in full knowledge of its far-reaching implications. Some of these implications, as complex as they are for a non-scientific author and, probably, readers must remain on our radar. For instance, the fact that “[d]iffering perceptual situations will, however, tend to elicit differing configurations and emphases of response” is seminal. Indeed, Burgin tells us that “just as sculpture will tend to prioritise the enactive and kinaesthetic suffusion of visual imagery, so photographs predominantly tend to prompt a complex of exchanges between the visual and verbal registers” (1982: 198), which implies that, to some extent, a photograph, or rather the way we look at and interpret it is already hybrid in itself. So a hybrid memoir provides a double hybridity: the “verbal register” required to make sense of it and the text it is associated with in the work. Thus, we must be wary when we handle notions, such as visual media, or the ‘purely visual’ elements in a book, since “[r]egardless of how much we may strain to maintain a ‘disinterested’ aesthetic mode of apprehension, an appreciation of the ‘purely visual’, when we look at an image it is instantly and irreversibly integrated and collated with the intricate psychic network of our knowledge” (Burgin 1982: 206).

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