This article offers a critique of neuroaesthetics and neurocinematics. Neuroscientific research aims at a quantitative assessment of the impact of different art and film styles on viewers’ brains through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and inter-subject correlation (ISC) analysis. Advocates of neurocinematics, in particular, believe the turn to neuroscience will help film theory go beyond ideological, linguistic and psychoanalytic models, i.e. subject-positioning theories (SLAB theory: Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, Barthes), which draw a pessimistic picture of the subject as “split” and “positioned,” “trapped” both internally (by unconscious forces) and externally (by various ideological discourses, including the film apparatus itself). I argue that by positing a looping effect between the brain and the screen, neurocinematics shows itself to be an extension of apparatus theory, although one rooted in neuroscience rather than in SLAB theory. Furthermore, although “the New Materialism” – of which neuroaesthetics and neurocinematics are two representative instances – positions itself as “post-human” in its commitment to granting the non-human agency and vitality and to acknowledging its affective, ethical and political potential, it covertly carries on some of the assumptions and beliefs fundamental to post-structuralism even as it claims to “de-anthropomorphize” philosophy, aesthetics, and film theory.
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Neuroaesthetics and Neurocinematics: Reading the Brain/Film through the Film/Brain
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2014-10-01
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Cinéma & Cie
Temenuga Trifonova
2014/10/01
York University
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Neuroaesthetics and Neurocinematics: Reading the Brain/Film through the Film/Brain
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16336/17017
14
Neuroaesthetics and Neurocinematics:
Reading the Brain/Film through the Film/Brain
Temenuga Trifonova, York University




Abstract

    This article offers a critique of neuroaesthetics and neurocinematics. Neuro-
    scientific research aims at a quantitative assessment of the impact of different
    art and film styles on viewers’ brains through functional magnetic resonance
    imaging (fMRI) and inter-subject correlation (ISC) analysis. Advocates of
    neurocinematics, in particular, believe the turn to neuroscience will help film
    theory go beyond ideological, linguistic and psychoanalytic models, i.e. sub-
    ject-positioning theories (SLAB theory: Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, Barthes),
    which draw a pessimistic picture of the subject as “split” and “positioned,”
    “trapped” both internally (by unconscious forces) and externally (by various
    ideological discourses, including the film apparatus itself). I argue that by pos-
    iting a looping effect between the brain and the screen, neurocinematics shows
    itself to be an extension of apparatus theory, although one rooted in neurosci-
    ence rather than in SLAB theory. Furthermore, although “the New Material-
    ism” – of which neuroaesthetics and neurocinematics are two representative
    instances – positions itself as “post-human” in its commitment to granting the
    non-human agency and vitality and to acknowledging its affective, ethical and
    political potential, it covertly carries on some of the assumptions and beliefs
    fundamental to post-structuralism even as it claims to “de-anthropomorphize”
    philosophy, aesthetics, and film theory.


   The history of empirical aesthetics is usually said to begin with Fechner’s Prim-
er of Aesthetics (1876), in which he called for a “bottom up” approach to aesthet-
ics – in opposition to the idealistic, metaphysical concept of aesthetic judgement
prevalent at his time – that would be grounded in the scientific study of elemen-
tal perceptual features.1 Despite some positive developments – e.g., a shift from
an original preoccupation with the visual properties of artworks (object recogni-


1
 Arthur P. Shimamura, Toward a Science of Aesthetics, in Arthur P. Shimamura, Stephen E. Palmer
(eds.), Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience, Oxford University Press, Ox-
ford 2012, p. 15.

                                             Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIV, no. 22/23, Spring/Fall 2014
                                      Temenuga Trifonova


tion) to an increasing emphasis on the emotions triggered by artworks (with a
special focus on empathy and mirror neurons) – neuroaesthetics continues to
suffer from serious methodological problems. In one representative fMRI study
of brain responses to artworks, participants were presented with realistic and
abstract paintings they had previously rated as ugly, neutral or beautiful. The
experiment showed that the orbitofrontal cortex was more active when subjects
were presented with paintings they had rated as beautiful compared to those
they had rated as neutral. The scientists concluded that the orbitofrontal cortex
is involved in the evaluation of beautiful works of art.2 The researchers involved
in this study sought to understand what part of the brain responds to the work
and “discovered” that beautiful works of art stimulate the orbitofrontal cortex.
They then went on to argue that the particular part of the brain isolated in step
1 is responsible for attributing the quality of “beauty” to the artwork, i.e. they
“pretended” at the preliminary step – the participants rating, before the fMRI,
the paintings as beautiful, neutral or ugly – never took place. In the first step, the
point of reference was the work of art: a particular aesthetic quality (beauty) was
found to elicit a response from a particular part of the brain, i.e. the artwork (the
known part of the equation) was used to reveal something about the brain (the
unknown part of the equation). In the second step, however, the point of refer-
ence was the brain, not the work of art: a particular part of the brain was said to
be responsible for registering a particular quality of the artwork (its beauty), i.e.
the brain was used to reveal something about the work of art.
    Neuroscientists propose mapping hedonic responses to art and non-art onto
psychological processes such as motivation, arousal, and pleasure. They treat all
objects that provoke hedonic responses as objects of aesthetic experience, and
they conceive of hedonic responses (linked to evolutionary factors) simplistically
in terms of emotional and/or conceptual preferences:

     We will err on the side of inclusion rather than exclusion and consider aesthetics as
     any “hedonic” response to a sensory experience. A hedonic response refers to a prefer-
     ence judgement: an object may be preferred or not, liked or not, interesting or not,
     approached or avoided.3

  However, as George Dickie reminds us, aesthetic properties and aesthetic
judgement are a matter of convention rather than psychological causation.4 Pref-
erence-ordering studies tell us nothing about aesthetic experience: what matters
are the criteria for aesthetic judgement, not the agreement of a random group of
novices. Neuroaesthetics does not take into account the fundamental distinction


2
  Ivi, p. 22.
3
  Ivi, p. 4.
4
  Quoted in Noël Carroll, Margaret Moore, William Seeley, The Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics,
Psychology, and Neuroscience, in Arthur P. Shimamura, Stephen E. Palmer (eds.), Aesthetic Science:
Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience, cit., p. 33.

28
                             Neuroaesthetics and Neurocinematics


between humanistic and scientific kinds of thinking and approaches to the arts.
As Irving Massey puts it,

    subjective reports about attributes of one’s own consciousness…are indeed data for the
    scientist, but the contents of those reports are not. […] Only events that can be verified
    from a third-person perspective can have the status of scientific data.5

   Neuroaesthetics approaches the brain the way medium specificity theories ap-
proach the concept of medium: through the notions of “constraints” and “pos-
sibilities.” Medium specificity theories posit that each medium is defined by cer-
tain inherent properties that constrain, and at the same time determine, the range
of potential aesthetic effects produced by works within that medium. Similarly,
neuroaesthetics assumes that the architecture of the human brain constrains our
perception and cognition in specific ways, either forbidding or obliging us to
respond to artworks in (equally specific) ways. The problem with both medium
specificity theories and neuroaesthetics – a sort of “brain-specificity theory” – is
that they have no way of closing the gap between theories of explanation (state-
ments about the ontology of a medium or the physical make up of the brain) and
theories of interpretation (aesthetic judgements). The question of value – both
aesthetic and moral – falls outside the scope of neuroscience.
   These methodological problems account for the flagrantly tautological nature
of neuroaesthetic studies: all they seek to demonstrate is that the data collected
about our response to artworks – construed as stimuli intentionally designed to
trigger ordinary perceptual, affective, and cognitive responses – confirm our aes-
thetic judgements about the artworks in question. Neuroaesthetics cannot tell us
anything about what makes art “art.” Advocates of neuroaesthetics assume that

    since artworks are intentionally designed to direct attention to their artistically salient
    features, studies of how visual artworks work as perceptual stimuli can contribute to our
    understanding of how they work as artistic stimuli.6

   This attributes a mysterious “meta-function” – the ability to direct attention to
what makes them artworks – to all artworks. It’s one thing to ask how an artwork di-
rects attention to what makes it an artwork but it’s another thing to ask what makes
an artwork an artwork in the first place. From a neuroaesthetic point of view, every
artwork foregrounds the perceptual and cognitive skills necessary for its designa-
tion as an artwork: the artwork is just the means through which the brain represents
itself to itself. However, as Gopnik argues, “the central function of the brain […] is
not to contemplate or analyze its own inputs, precepts, affects and states.”7

5
  Irving Massey, The Neural Imagination: Aesthetic and Neuroscientific Approaches to the Arts, Uni-
versity of Texas Press, Austin 2009, p. 23.
6
  Noël Carroll, Margaret Moore, William Seeley, The Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics, Psychology,
and Neuroscience, cit. p. 49.
7
  Blake Gopnik, Aesthetic Science and Artistic Knowledge, in Arthur P. Shimamura, Stephen E.

                                                                                                29
                                      Temenuga Trifonova


    Since neuroaesthetics cannot explain how the mere processing of visual stim-
uli gives rise to aesthetic judgement, I find that it treats an artwork’s “artistically
salient effects” and its “semantically salient features” as equivalent: to register
the work’s visual properties is already to interpret the work. The conflation of the
work’s visual and semantic features is made possible by the mobilization of a 19th
century concept that has recently resurfaced both in aesthetics and film studies:
attention. The concept of “attention” was central to the re-conceptualization
of sanity and insanity at the fin de siècle. In Degeneration (1892) Max Nordau
located insanity in the realm of ideation, specifically in the separation of the realm
of ideation from the realm of action.8 Degeneracy is a form of inattentiveness, a
break in the psychic-motor apparatus of stimulation and response. The “degen-
erate” brain works inefficiently: it stops acting as a screen for external stimuli, i.e.
it fails the test of attention.9 However, by the time Nordau’s book was published
the established hierarchy of attention and inattention, consciousness and un-
consciousness, was already beginning to be reversed, as evidenced by Theodore
Ribot’s influential study The Psychology of Attention (1890).10 Attention (and
consciousness), Ribot argued, is an inhibitory mechanism: “The normal state of
consciousness supposes diffusion, with the work of the brain diffused. Attention
supposes concentration, with the work of the brain localized.”11 Following Ribot,
Hugo Münsterberg – hailed as a predecessor of neurocinematics – also aligned
attention with conscious perception, positing it as an inhibitory mechanism.
    How does neuroaesthetics engage with the fin de siècle idea of attention as
an inhibitory mechanism? As we saw, neuroaesthetics defines artworks as “at-
tentional strategies that carry information sufficient to enable viewers to recover
their content from their perceptible surfaces.”12 Here “attention” fulfills a me-
diating function: it mediates between bottom up and top-down processing, and
between unconscious and conscious processes. Indeed, neurocinematics has
gone as far as to relocate attention to the unconscious, thus no longer consider-
ing it “an inhibitory mechanism.” One instance of the relocation of attention to
the unconscious is Murray Smith’s discussion of Flanagan’s study of “auditory
splitting,” a phenomenon demonstrating that subjects register and process infor-
mation even though they don’t have a conscious memory of doing so.13 Thus, it
is possible to be attentive to something without being conscious of it. Similarly,
Patricia Pisters distinguishes between “feedforward sweep” (bottom-up cogni-


Palmer (eds.), Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience, cit., p. 136.
8
  Max Nordau, Degeneration, Heinemann, London 1920 [1892], p. 183.
9
  Ivi, pp. 52, 56.
10
   Theodore Ribot, The Psychology of Attention, The Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago
1890.
11
   Ivi, p. 119.
12
   Noël Carroll, Margaret Moore, William Seeley, The Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics, Psychology,
and Neuroscience, cit. p. 57.
13
   Murray Smith, Triangulating Aesthetic Experience, in Arthur P. Shimamura, Stephen E. Palmer
(eds.), Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience, cit., p. 85.

30
                             Neuroaesthetics and Neurocinematics


tion), largely unconscious, and “feedback processing” (top-down cognition), in
which recurrent interactions and resonances with past memories and percep-
tions are initiated. Like Smith, Pisters argues that it is possible for something
not to catch our attention – in the sense that we cannot report on it – either be-
cause feedforward processing gets stuck or because recurrent processing is not
sophisticated enough.14 Relocating attention to the unconscious, neuroaesthetics
attempts to bridge the “hermeneutic gap” between the perception and inter-
pretation of visual stimuli by suggesting that in perceiving visual stimuli we are
actually “processing” a lot more than we think we are, that we are always already
interpreting stimuli, including those we are not attentive to (cannot report on).
Pisters’s reading of the significance of the locket in The Illusionist (to which I
shall return later) illustrates my point.
    Neurocinematics inherits some of the problems I identified with neuroscien-
tific approaches to art. In one representative study Uri Hasson’s team measured
the similarity in brain responses of a group of viewers to different types of films.
When they watched an excerpt from Hitchcock’s Bang! You’re Dead, 65% of
the frontal cortex, the part of the brain involved in attention and perception,
responded in the same way across all viewers, whereas only 18% of the cor-
tex showed a similar response when viewers watched a more free-form footage
from the sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm. Another study measured fMRI response
times across different subjects (inter-subject correlation, inter-SC) and compared
response times within the same subject by repeated presentations of the same
stimulus (intra-subject correlation, intra-SC). Advocates of such methods believe
inter-SC and intra-SC methods can be used as a “social-neuroscience” tool to
distinguish neuronal processes shared by all people from those unique to a given
sub-group or an individual.15
    A more recent study promises to make literal Münsterberg’s notion of cin-
ema as the externalization of our mental functions. In The Photoplay: A Psycho-
logical Study16 Münsterberg argued that technological apparatuses, such as the
film camera, are capable of reproducing our mental functions in the absence
of the essential material conditions for perception: e.g., the close up objectifies
the mental act of attention while the flashback objectifies the mental act of re-
membering. Film simply takes advantage of one of the constitutive aspects of
our normal psychic function – its reproducibility. Münsterberg saw the psychic
mechanism utilized by film as lying dormant in the normal structure of our psy-
chic apparatus: it is because the normal mind obeys its own laws, rather than the
laws of the outside world, that film is possible in the first place. Our psychic ap-

14
   Patricia Pisters, Illusionary Perception and Cinema: Experimental Thoughts on Film Theory and
Neuroscience, in Mark Poster, David Savat (eds.), Deleuze and the New Technology, Edinburgh
University Press, Edinburgh 2009, p. 233.
15
   See Uri Hasson, Rafael Malach, David J. Heeger, “Reliability of Cortical Activity during Natural
Stimulation,” in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, no. 1, 2010, p. 46.
16
   Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, D. Appleton & Co., New York-Lon-
don 1916.

                                                                                                31
                                     Temenuga Trifonova


paratus (which includes our mental functions of attention, memory, and causal
thinking) is naturally “set up” to interface with technological apparata, such as
film, i.e. the film apparatus can reproduce our mental functions and project them
back to us as if they existed “outside” us, disembodied. UC Berkeley researchers
seem to have provided visual evidence in support of Münsterberg’s argument.
Combining fMRI and computational models, researchers at Jack Gallant’s lab
have succeeded in reconstructing movie clips – of Hollywood movie trailers –
people have already viewed.17 Gallant and his team hope to use the new method
to reconstruct internal imagery such as dreams and memories.
   What studies like these demonstrate is that neurocinematics is more interested
in the brain than in cinema: cinema is just a means of studying the brain. However,
explaining how the brain works is not the same as explaining what the mind thinks
or why it thinks that way. It is here that we see neurocinematics falling short of
its grand ambition to supplant older theories of film. Studies of inter-subjective
correlation in brain responses are said to have two important implications: 1)
some films have the power to “control” viewers’ responses – a mere mechanical
reproduction of reality of a random, unstructured real life event, fails to produce
a shared brain response – where by “control” scientists mean simply that “the
sequence of neural states evoked by the film is reliable and predictable, without
passing any ethical or aesthetic judgement as to the desirability of the means to
such control”; 2) “assuming that mental states are tightly related to brain states…
controlling viewers’ brains is the same as controlling their mental states, including
percepts, emotions, thoughts, and attitudes.”18 Ironically, neurocinematics con-
strues the spectator as “positioned” on a much more fundamental level than it
is in SLAB theory (Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, Barthes). Instead of being “posi-
tioned” by an ideologically suspect apparatus, or by various ISA (ideological state
apparata), spectators are “positioned” by the architecture of their own brains.
Linear narratives and canonical stories are, thus, no longer “ideological Western
inventions;” instead, they are said to “reflect” basic features in the brain’s ar-
chitecture. Neurocinematics simply replicates, in a different form, the denial of
agency for which it criticizes subject-positioning theories. For instance, writing
from a neurocinematic perspective, Murray Smith insists that our

     traditional conception of selfhood is misleading in two ways: it is neither as internally
     unified [as evidenced by neuroscientific experiments demonstrating that one’s bodily
     self-image can be extended to, even relocated in, another subject] nor as spatially con-
     tained as we are inclined to think.19



17
   Yasmir Anwar, “Scientists Use Brain Imaging to Reveal the Movies in Our Minds,” in UC Berke-
ley News Center, September 22, 2011.
18
   Uri Hasson, Ohad Landesman, Barbara Knappmeyer, Ignacio Vallines, Nava Rubin, David J.
Heeger, “Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film,” in Projections. The Journal for the Movies
and Mind, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1-26.
19
   Murray Smith, Triangulating Aesthetic Experience, cit., p. 101.

32
                             Neuroaesthetics and Neurocinematics


   In neurocinematics, then, the decentering and fragmentation of the SLAB
subject are made “functional,” hard-wired into our brains in the form of “spe-
cialized” processing capacities. Instead of being “positioned” by unconscious
forces or ideological discourses we are “positioned,” in an even more pernicious
way, by our own sub-personal cognitive capacities:

     We do not exist as persons – that is, as more or less coherent, goal-oriented, conscious
     entities – but the capacities we recognize as typical of persons are built up from a host
     of sub-personal processing capacities, capacities whose investigation is the province of
     physiology and psychophysiology, using such techniques as eye-tracking (saccadic eye
     movement), electromyography (muscle movement), GSR, and, not the least, fMRI and
     other kinds of brain imaging.20

   Furthermore, neurocinematics borrows the methodology of the very same
linguistic models it disavows. Torben Grodal opposes linguistic models since
they overemphasize cultural differences and de-emphasize “our shared embod-
ied nonlinguistic experiences [which] provide a background for transcultural
understanding.”21 Many of the mental processes through which we engage with a
film, he argues, bypass language. However, one could argue that linguistically-in-
flected film theories, which seek to identify the smallest possible unit of meaning
in film, find their analogy in neurocinematics’ revival of the 19th century doctrine
of cerebral localization, the idea that higher cortical (mental) processes may be
broken down into distinct functional units and correlated with discrete areas of
the brain, i.e. there is a parallel between the concept of film grammar (breaking
down larger units of meaning into the smallest possible units of meaning) and, on
the other hand, the concept of cerebral localization (breaking down mental pro-
cesses into distinct functional units and “locating” specific affective responses in
different parts of the brain) or the method of cognitive subtraction (subtracting
one brain response from another so as to arrive at (allegedly) more accurate ex-
perimental results, and decomposing the artwork into a collection of individual
visual stimuli). As Irving Massey puts it, however, the meaning of an artwork
does not “trickle down to the level of the neuron.”22
   Neurocinematics fails to offer a dynamic and holistic account of film specta-
torship, a failure that results, at least in part, from its privileging of bottom-up
over top-down cognition, i.e. its reduction of “aesthetic response” to “motor
response.” To explain film viewing Grodal proposes what he calls the PECMA
(perception, emotion, cognition, and motor action) flow, a model heavily biased
toward sensorimotor responses: films are not “signs to be read” but “visual cues
for simulating action” (I see this as neurocinematics’ version of neuroaesthetics’

20
   Ivi, p. 100.
21
   Torben Grodal, Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture and Film, Oxford University
Press, Oxford 2009, p. 11.
22
   Irving Massey, The Neural Imagination: Aesthetic and Neuroscientific Approaches to the Arts, cit.,
p. 179.

                                                                                                  33
                                   Temenuga Trifonova


conflation of “artistically salient effects” with “semantically salient features”).
Given the privileging of goal-oriented, action based narratives – which reflect
the motor bias of the brain – it is not surprising that Grodal identifies video
games and virtual reality narratives as the ideal media forms inasmuch as they
do not impede the PECMA flow (while art films do). He even suggests that dif-
ferent genres can be “located” in specific parts of the brain or at specific stages
of the PECMA flow: some genres “cue an intense focus on perceptual process-
es” (abstract or experimental films), others “evoke tense, action-oriented and
goal-oriented emotions” (action films), and still others “elicit relaxation through
laughter” (comedies).23 Like Grodal, Gallese and Guerra identify the motor
mechanisms subtending and directing vision – simulated motor behaviour, what
they call Embodied Simulation (ES) – rather than scopophilia, as essential to
cinema. The brain, they argue, serves primarily one purpose – to move us around
– and the basic stories we know best are stories of events in space. The mirror
mechanism functions both in real life and in film viewing: “ES constitutively
shapes the content of perception, characterizing the perceived object in terms
of motor acts it may afford – even in the absence of any effective movement.”24
Murray Smith’s explanation of what he calls “anomalous suspense” (experienc-
ing anxiety and suspense about the outcome of a narrative even though we know
the outcome in advance) provides another example of the subordination of aes-
thetic response to motor response. If we think of suspense only in relation to top-
down cognition anomalous suspense cannot be accounted for; however, if we
think of suspense as largely the product of bottom-up processes, we can account
for it. What actually happens in cases of anomalous suspense, Murray claims, is
that empathy outweighs suspense since the experience of empathy is subtended
by bottom-up processes (the firing of mirror neurons).25 Murray’s explanation
simply assumes what it wants to prove: bodily reactions such as fear, horror or
disgust are subtended by bottom-up cognition and this is why prior beliefs or
knowledge play no role in them.
   One of the interesting aspects of neurocinematics is its appropriation of
Deleuze, whose conflation of the ontology of the film image with historically
specific genres/movements (Italian neorealism and 1960s modernist cinema)
finds its own counterpart within neurocinematics, most prominently in Grodal’s
evolutionary theory and Patricia Pisters’s cinema of the “neuro-image.” The em-
bodied brain is “not only a body driven by excesses and mysterious Freudian
traumas and perversions,”26 Grodal asserts, but also by “the practical problems
that have faced our ancestors” in their struggle to adapt to the environment.
One genre in particular – the action or adventure film – reflects “core elements


23
   Torben Grodal, Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture and Film, cit., p. 151.
24
   ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
   Vittorio Gallese, Michele Guerra, “Embodying Movies: Embodied Simulation and Film Stud-
ies,” in Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, no. 3, 2012, p. 186.
25
   Murray Smith, Triangulating Aesthetic Experience, cit., pp. 80-106.
26
   Torben Grodal, Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture and Film, cit., p. 5.

34
                            Neuroaesthetics and Neurocinematics


in the emotional heritage that enhanced human survival in the past,”27 which
explains its continuing appeal. Reversing Deleuze’s hierarchy, Grodal posits the
cinema of the movement-image – the action film, in particular – which stimulates
sensorimotor processing, as aesthetically superior to (“more pleasurable than”)
the cinema of the time image, whose unpopularity Grodal attributes to its evo-
lutionary irrelevance. Grodal thus proposes to account for the birth of genres
and for their subsequent development and popularity in terms of their appeal
to “innate emotional dispositions,” which automatically privilege certain types
of emotional responses (adaptive i.e. motor-based ones) over others. On this ac-
count it is impossible for genres to fluctuate in their popularity: once the “in-
nate emotional disposition” toward physical action has been posited as primary,
action-oriented genres are automatically “guaranteed” a privileged place, while
“art films,” which violate basic emotional and cognitive schemas, are doomed to
the low ranks of the cinematic pantheon.
   Contrary to Grodal, who identifies the “essence” of cinema with the type of
film that matches most closely the motor bias of our brain, Pisters identifies “the
neuro-image” – the image that inaugurates our entry into “other minds,” thereby
proving their existence – as fulfilling cinema’s potential. Sometimes she discusses
the “neuro-image” as a third type of image, one that follows the movement-
image and the time-image, or as an “intensification” of the time-image. However,
at other times she explicitly calls the cinema of the neuro-image simply another
“genre,” identifies the genre’s most prominent characteristics, and even distin-
guishes a few sub-genres.28 Like Deleuze, who offers a historical explanation
for the emergence of the time-image – the failure to adapt to, and respond in
a meaningful way, to post-World War II reality – Pisters traces the “origins” of
the neuro-image to recent advances in neuroscience. Although Deleuze does not
explicitly refer to neuroscience, Pisters feels that the film-philosophical concepts
he develops “do relate the brain and the screen in an immanent way, mainly due
to the Bergsonian inspiration of Deleuze’s cinema books.”29 Pisters doesn’t ac-
knowledge Bergson’s well-known critique of attempts to ‘map’ mental life onto
the brain. Bergson invokes the photograph to explain the brain-mind relation-
ship, comparing the brain to a frame and the mind to a picture:

     The frame determines something of the picture, by eliminating beforehand all that which
     has not the same shape and size. […] So also with the brain and consciousness. Provided
     the comparatively simple actions – gestures, attitudes, movements – in which a complex
     mental state would be materialized, are such as the brain is ready for, the mental state


27
   Ivi, p. 6.
28
   Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture, Stan-
ford University Press, Stanford 2012, p. 25. Neurothrillers (like Andrea Arnold’s 2006 Red Road)
and delirium cinema (which dramatizes the powers of the false and illusionary perception) “can be
considered a subtype [subgenre] of the neuro-image [genre]” (p. 113).
29
   Patricia Pisters, Illusionary Perception and Cinema: Experimental Thoughts on Film Theory and
Neuroscience, cit., p. 226.

                                                                                               35
                                        Temenuga Trifonova


     will insert itself exactly into the cerebral state. But there are a multitude of different pic-
     tures, which would fit the frame equally well; consequently the brain does not determine
     thought and, at least to a large extent, thought is independent of the brain.30

   Pisters’s misreading of Bergson initiates an equally problematic reading of
film spectatorship. Referencing Münsterberg’s studies of optical illusions, which
showed perception to be a mental act with only a partial relation to reality, Pis-
ters wants to argue that puzzle films, like The Prestige and The Illusionist, (re)
mobilize Münsterberg’s insight that optical illusions throw perception into ques-
tion, but she erroneously assumes that optical illusions are equivalent to “mind
games.” She provides several examples from the two films above, but none of
them have anything to do with optical illusions; rather, they illustrate the film-
makers’ manipulation of point of view. Optical ambiguity (being unable to de-
termine which properties of an image are “true”) is not the same as hermeneutic
ambiguity (being unable to decide which interpretation of an image – which we
actually see unambiguously from an optical point of view – is true). Her reading
of the significance of the locket in The Illusionist is exemplary of this conflation
of optical tricks with mind-tricks. The locket appears several times throughout
the film, in close up, but it is only later in the film that we understand its real sig-
nificance: from an object of attention it becomes an object of awareness. Rather
than proving that the locket is both an “optical illusion” and the object of a
“mind game,” this reading simply restates the importance Aristotle attributed to
“recognition” (and “reversal of fortune”) in the Poetics.
   Pisters reads the decentering of the (SLAB) spectator at the neural level as lib-
erating: yes, the images of contemporary culture operate directly on our brain (the
screen can no longer “protect” us); however, the “benefit” of mapping the mind
onto the brain, and then dividing the brain into regions, each with its own specific
function, is that the subject thus conceived cannot respond to reality (or cinema)
in a coherent way and thus cannot be “interpellated”/“positioned.” Pisters rein-
terprets the potentially pessimistic idea of the subject as positioned on a neural
level as emancipatory: the autonomy of affects and percepts now comes to signify a
secret “schizoanalytic power,” which lies precisely in the subject’s vulnerability to
the “realities of illusion.” She refers to neurological findings about the nature of
schizophrenia – that schizophrenia is a brain disorder related to abnormal synaptic
connections and plasticity – to redeem the schizophrenic brain as a positive force
of “resistance” precisely because of its plasticity. The schizophrenic brain becomes
a sort of a “poster brain” for the digital age: its failure to operate through “normal”
synaptic connections promises to “liberate” us from the “tyranny” of the left hemi-
sphere and the trap of the psychoanalytic family triangle.31


30
   Henri Bergson, L’énergie spirituelle. Essais et conferences, Les Presses Universitaires de France,
Paris 1919 (Eng. ed. Mind-Energy, Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2007, pp. 42-43).
31
   Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture, cit.,
p. 45.

36
                             Neuroaesthetics and Neurocinematics


   But does the “neuro-image” even exist? Pisters’s primary example of “the
neuro-image” is the opening sequence of Fight Club, which literally features ‘a
ride through the brain’: “We no longer see through characters’ eyes, as in the
movement-image and the time-image; we are most often instead in their mental
worlds.”32 What makes possible this mapping of brain processes onto mental
states? Special effects! Pisters emphasizes the fact that artists of the visual effects
department and the neuroscientists consulted for this sequence discovered they
had very similar digital visualization techniques. For her the mere analogy be-
tween techniques for representing the brain and special effects techniques (“nested
instancing”) is sufficient to equate the brain with the mind. She takes the devel-
opment of film technology (special effects), which allows the visual representa-
tion of the brain, as “evidence” that such images of the brain are, actually, images
of the subject’s mental world.
   Neurocinematics claims the turn to neuroscience will help film theory go be-
yond ideological, linguistic and psychoanalytic models i.e. subject-positioning
theories (SLAB theory), which draw a pessimistic picture of the subject as “split”
and “positioned” (trapped) both internally (by unconscious forces) and exter-
nally (by various ideological discourses, including the film apparatus itself). For
instance, Torben Grodal attacks subject positioning theories for failing to ex-
plain how cultural discourses, which are supposed to “position” the subject, are
psychologically realized in individuals.33 Neurocinematics promises to reinvest
the subject with agency and yet, ironically, what most fMRI studies are known
for is the “material” evidence they claim to provide of a similarity in brain re-
sponse among viewers, especially in the case of Hollywood films, “proving that
our brain-response is not as individual as we might like to think.”34 That neuro-
cinematics fails to return agency to the subject is not that surprising given that it
inherits some of the SLAB assumptions – assumptions about the relationship be-
tween the apparatus and the aesthetic object – it purports to critique: the subject
of neurocinematics is “positioned” by the apparatus of her own brain rather than
by various ideological apparata or by the film apparatus itself. Scholars following
in the steps of Antonio Damasio, a prominent figure in what came to be known
as the “affect revolution,” as well as those promoting a “New Materialism,”35


32
   Ivi, p. 14.
33
   Torben Grodal, Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture and Film, cit., p. 10.
34
   Karin Badt, “Mirror Neurons and Why We Love Cinema: A Conversation with Vittorio Gallese
and Michele Guerra in Parma,” in Huffington Post, online 5 October 2013, http://www.huffing-
tonpost.com/karin-badt/mirror-neurons-and-why-we_b_3239534.html.
35
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   Some of the most prominent works seeking to go beyond post-structuralism by promoting vari-
ous versions of “the New Materialism” that coalesced as a result of the re-discovery of Deleuze and
Spinoza include: Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorry, and the Feeling Brain, Vintage,
New York 2003; Heidi Morrison Ravven, “Spinozistic Approaches to Evolutionary Naturalism:
Spinoza’s Anticipation of Contemporary Affective Neuroscience,” in Politics and the Life Sciences,
no. 1, 2003, pp. 70-74; Diana Coole, Samantha Frost (eds.), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency,
and Politics, Duke University Press, Durham 2010; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecol-
ogy of Things, Duke University Press, Durham 2010; Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What

                                                                                                37
                                      Temenuga Trifonova


claim Deleuze and Spinoza as their predecessors insofar as they anticipated
some of neuroscience’s most important recent discoveries. As I hope to have
shown, however, the “New Materialism” – exemplified here by neuroaesthetics
and neurocinematics – which positions itself as “post-human” in its commitment
to granting the non-human agency and vitality and acknowledging its affective,
ethical and political potential, in fact covertly carries on some of the assumptions
and beliefs fundamental to post-structuralism even as it claims to “de-anthropo-
morphize” philosophy, aesthetics, and film theory.




It’s Like to Be a Thing, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2012; Estelle Barrett, Barbara
Bolt (eds.), Carnal Knowledge: Towards a ‘New Materialism’ through the Arts, I.B.Tauris, New York
2013. The “New Materialism” has been criticized for its reductionist and anti-humanist tenden-
cies. Sarah Ahmed has argued that “the New Materialism” posits matter as an “it-like fetish object”
while also strategically ignoring previous theoretical work on body and matter, e.g., phenomeno-
logical studies and feminist work on embodiment. For a critique of Deleuze’s philosophy, see Vin-
cent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (MA), 1980;
Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1997 and
Alain Badiou, Cinema, Polity, New York 2013; Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, Berg Publishers,
Oxford 2006; Slavoj Zizek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, Routledge, New
York 2004. Among the most important critiques of “the New Materialism” and neuroscience are:
Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity,
Acumen Publishing, Durham 2011; Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-
Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2012;
Sally Satel, Scott O. Lilienfeld, Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience, Basic
Books, New York 2013; Robert Burton, A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can
and Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves, St. Martin’s Press, New York 2013; Nikolas Rose, Joelle M.
Abi-Rached, Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind, Princeton Univer-
sity Press, Princeton 2013. For a more balanced view of neuroscience, see Patricia S. Churchland,
Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain, Norton, New York 2013.

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