Every one of my department cohort teaches a foundations level class, and my recurring course load includes a 2D visual fundamentals section each semester. I teach about design elements such as point, line and plane, and I go deep into design concepts such as color and gestalt/perceptual theory. Elements are embedded into the concepts. For example, figure-ground is a design element embedded within the design concept of perceptual theory.
Figure-ground relationships are among my favorite to teach because there’s such a visual delight in “See this?” and “Now, see THIS,” without changing anything in what is being looked at. My GenX adolescent self is probably most familiar with the concept through the ubiquitous posters of M.C. Escher drawings sold in malls to teenagers looking to declare some artsy identity on their bedroom walls,
but figure-ground weaves its way through the direct and stark work of Kara Walker, through projected images of Breonna Taylor or Malcom X giving a speech that can be glimpsed online wrapped around confederate monuments.
With Walker’s cut out silhouettes, there’s an element of “should I be seeing this?” or “am I seeing what I think I’m seeing and what does it mean that I know what that’s referring to?” in what we see, which includes Civil-war period minstrel-y figures acting out slaveholder’s negative fantasies of slave rebellions.
With the projections, we are balancing in our mind’s eye the meaning of witnessing a light image of an assassinated liberatory Black activist advocating that young people create new solutions to old problems wrapping around the bronzed monument of a visage that preached state’s rights and the values of maintaining the economies of the slave states by continuing the practice of enslaving people.
It’s an If-Then as well as a But-and-Also.
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s use of the duck-rabbit illusion was to illustrate the differences between the what the physical eye sees versus the capacity of the mind’s eye to see something else entirely, or more precisely, he used the duck-rabbit illusion to distinguish the perceptual difference between “seeing that” and “seeing as.”
The figure is ambiguous.
Our perception is ambiguous.
Our ability to perceptually move between one visual understanding to another is an example of transitive ambiguity, or, more playfully, visual infidelity between forms.
Psychologist Joseph Jastrow wrote of the illusion:
It is a commonplace taught from nursery to university that we see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and feel with the fingers. This is the truth, but not the whole truth. Indispensable as are the sense organs in gaining an acquaintance with the world in which we live, yet they alone do not determine how extensive or how accurate that acquaintance shall be. There is a mind behind the eye and the ear and the fingertips which guides them in gathering information and gives value and order to the exercise of the senses. This is particularly true of vision, the most intellectual of all of the senses, the one in which mere acuteness of the sense organ counts least and the training in observation counts most.
I chose the duck-rabbit as a kind of mascot for this site way back in the early aughts. On the surface, I liked the notion of being able to see two different things in the same thing at once and believed it to be an apt metaphor for how I preferred to engage with art generally. But I see it as an even larger metaphor now, one that speaks to the uncertainty and disorientation of our times, and the importance of being able to discern between what one thinks one sees and what else there might be to see.
Writer Jessica Dore is a favorite contemporary mind that I turn to often, and she has been exploring the imaginative and philosophical terrains of grief and disorientation these past couple of years. I have had cause to experience various kinds of grief in the near-past, and I am grateful to Dore for her deep dive into what it means to be in states of disorientation, how else we can think about ourselves and that state when we are in it, and the kinds of intelligence that resides in not having answers, not knowing a way forward, and not privileging such as the rightful goal.
I have not worked it all out yet, but there are connective routes between the idea of the duck-rabbit, perceptual ambiguity and its transitive qualities and the ideas that Dore is investigating and unpacking when thinking about what and where we are when we are mourning something. And mourning can be more than literal death (although yes to that too): it can be the death of an aspect of oneself, it can be the death of a dream or outcome you expected, it can be the absence of a relationship that one had to someone or something. When you experience a loss that constitutes some manner of mourning, then the illusion of what you thought to be true falls away, much like the mind moving between a duck to a rabbit, or an young woman to an old. The process of psychically jumping from one space to another creates a vertiginous void.
Dore writes so movingly and beautifully:
There is perhaps nowhere that an unseen, assumed future is more evident than when an expectation fails to be met…expectations are often painfully thwarted in grief. I’m curious about how counting on certain outcomes makes the present coherent. And how that coherence is ruptured when a future dissolves…I’m interested in better understanding the degree to which we expect things without noticing…To grieve is in part to grapple with a series of expectations that are revealed again and again over time through encounters with absence that relentlessly thwarts them.
When a counted on future dissolves, something shifts in the present. And while this may seem obvious, it’s really easy to overlook the extent to which learning a future won’t be what we planned can make it hard to make sense of the present. Such times may expose not only things taken for granted, but also what philosopher Ami Harbin describes as the “contingency of norms.” The disorientation we experience when a future’s been thwarted reveals what Lear describes as “the vulnerability of our normal practices.”
How many kinds of imagined futures that you believed to be yours failed to materialize?
What kinds of collective grief are we experiencing because life does not look or feel or act like how we imagined it would, and in turn, us within it? Is now the future you expected to have, even as recently as a year or two ago, or are there elements—people, situations, environments, experiences—that are absent that you were counting on?
With visual illusions we become aware of our mind switching on and off between different visual realities, a movement between what Wittgenstein called “continuous seeing” of an aspect and an aspect’s “lighting up,” with new and different meaning.
Dore speaks of risking what we think we know [of a thing, situation, person], and accepting instead that in our emotional bodies disorientation and confusion are actually the norm, that emotions are way more ambiguous than biologically or evolutionary determined. Line Ryberg Ingerslev is one of the important thinkers that has been guiding Dore’s understanding of grief and disorientation.
“Ingerslev notes that there is a world which becomes available to us in relationships when we share experiences with an other, and that when that person dies or goes away, the world that was open to us through our connection “is closed off or experienced as empty.” Dore goes on to note that once one world goes away there’s a temptation to yield to an instinct to “make another world fast,” and that when we do so, we are robbing ourselves of the benefits of our own disorientation through a will to commit to a new idea(l). Citing philosopher Ami Harbin’s recognition of a “resolvist bias” in moral philosophy (i.e. a combination of knowing what to do, feeling able to do it and successfully executing such), Harbin and Dore both argue that it’s possible to take moral action without knowing if you’re doing the right thing or not, and that one can be confident without having clarity about their own judgements. And that these disorientations can lead to what Harbin describes as “tenderizing effects.”
A tenderizing effect, Dore writes, can be developing a capacity for sensing vulnerability (in yourself and/or others), living unprepared and “living against the grain of norms.” And that if one is going to commit to anything here, it is a commitment to revising and re-editing one’s understanding in a continuous way. “Disorientations can show us what it is to live unprepared, make us aware of the ways norms are contingent, and support us in cultivating humility around both what we know and can know.”
In a paper that I have to read just because the title is so gorgeous, Ingerslev speaks of the grief experience as one that creates a “vocational summoning.”
It is not a matter of witnessing a tragedy and at the same time realizing the tragedy is your own, the tragedy is the one you are suffering. The vocational aspect consists in the way you are being called into question yourself. The struggle is experienced in the way that you are exposed; you are being summoned, questioned and plagued…you are tormented out of passion for what matters to you. (emphasis mine—so beautiful, GAH!)
The specificities of the grief I’ve had recently point to failures of mine to recognize the limits of others and how their own choices and failures would absolutely come to affect me despite a belligerent resolve on my part that they would not. Coming to understand that my own resolve, or my commitment to whatever I’ve committed against feeling what is coming for me whether I want it to or not, does not change the landscape of the present or the future, or me experiencing it, or the disorientations that occur when my own rules and boundaries fail to keep me safe. Safe from what? From what I prepared myself to expect and to feel.
Wittgenstein’s example of the duck-rabbit is an exercise in thwarting expectations of what you think there is to see.
Thinking about disorientation and not-knowing as a condition that one can learn from and even thrive in is another kind of useful about-face.
At the threshold of a new academic year, when everything that will unfold has yet to yield itself to the reveal, I find that living unprepared, but knowingly and with an open curiosity about it, is the right kind of potion for me right now.
