some thoughts about the duration of vision and the present moment

I’ve been thinking a bit about the duration of vision (and reading a bit about duration in itself). And I’ve been thinking about this idea (of a duration of vision) in different ways, from the micro to the macro, I suppose.

(the macro) Something I was reading in Oliver Sacks’ book, The Island of the Colour-blind made the connection between the way we see now and the development of sight in a greater sense. Our sight is the culmination of vision shaped by the evolution of millions of generations of our species and before, back to the emergence of the very first eye. What and how we see today is a direct result of how our ancestors reacted and interacted with their environment, with the world that gradually emerged and changed in response to their sense organs.

I wonder how our vision adjusted when we began to walk upright? Our whole relationship to the way we experienced the world would have changed. I guess it must be a two-way effect; the way our vision changed in relation to our environment would in turn have affected the way we perceive it. Looking at different kinds of animals, each has a specific kind of vision specially evolved for the way it needs to perceive and navigate its own fragment of the world.

(the micro) Then on the other hand there is the duration of vision within one person, one body, one blink. When I imagine the process of vision, I think about it as an action occurring in the small aperture of the present, something which continually repeats, a single action proliferating. But of course while the action occurs in a continually renewing present, it is interpreted through the virtuality of the past. It must be through past experience that we actually become conscious of seeing. The action of looking in the present means nothing without the past experience that we bring to what we see, so that we can make sense of it. So there seems to be an interruption, a certain delay between the action and cognition, between the eye and the brain, and between the present moment and the past.

What does this mean for our experience of the present moment? Maybe we can never encounter the present precisely in ‘the present’, because by the time we consciously experience it, it is already past (unless of course, it is the perception of it which defines something in the present, rather than its actual event? Perhaps it isn’t ‘present’ to us until we are conscious of it?) These thoughts imply a duration to the present moment, a duration which takes into account the delay between action and cognition.

While thinking about Elizabeth Grosz’ writing about the sense-bubble of an organism, it occurred to me that maybe we perceive time in a similar way? Is the time experienced by one individual different from that experienced by every other individual? Could we each have our own body or sense specific dimensions of time? Could there be many different durations, or many understandings of the length of the ‘present’? When Grosz writes about Bergson’s conception of the present, in The Nick of Time, she says that its duration is flexible, taking as long as it needs to include a continuous action and understanding, and expanding to absorb the edges of the past and the future. It isn’t a contained ideal moment: “The living present, that which we concretely experience, has its own duration; it has no minimal units, no instants or length, except those imposed retroactively through analysis.” (p. 176)

So maybe these two extremes of the duration of vision could both exist simultaneously. The present in the flickers and saccades of the eye and the response of the mind, as well as a Darwinian reference to all preceding vision(s) of our species, or beyond, from when sight first emerged; all contained within the one observation. And perhaps included within that is the potentiality of future vision.

(refrence: Grosz, Elizabeth, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely, Duke University Press, Durham, 2004, pp.176-179)