Acta Structuralica

international journal for structuralist research

Journal | Volume | Article

174543

The depicted gaze of the other

Alberto Voltolini

pp. 111-126

Abstract

In this paper, I first want to vindicate Wollheim’s idea that seeing-in, taken as the twofold phenomenologically sui generis experience which picture perception consists in, accounts for the phenomenon of perceptual constancy. Following Wollheim’s usage himself, by “perceptual constancy” I will mean a particular phenomenon of perceptual robustness, namely the fact that a picture’s subject is experienced as undistorted from any point of view in which a spectator may regard a picture. Moreover, I will properly take into consideration the specific impression of “being followed” by the gaze of a picture’s subject in portraits (and alike pictures), which in these cases is a consequence of perceptual constancy. For this impression corroborates a particular reading of what the seeing-in experience really consists in. According to such a reading, in the configurational fold of that experience one experiences both the merely visible surface properties and the design properties of the picture’s vehicle, where such design properties also include the so-called grouping properties of the vehicle. On the basis of such a fold, moreover, in the recognitional fold of the seeing-in experience one knowingly illusorily sees the picture as its subject.

Publication details

Published in:

(2014) The other(s). Rivista di estetica 56.

Pages: 111-126

DOI: 10.4000/estetica.864

Full citation:

Voltolini Alberto (2014) „The depicted gaze of the other“. Rivista di estetica 56, 111–126.