Mark Tansey's "The Innocent Eye Test" (1981) uses the cow's iconic blank gaze to represent a failure of perception.
If animal scientists have traditionally assessed primate “intelligence” with explicitly anthropocentric criteria — language capacity, for instance — it should also be pointed out that these assessments have been carried out at the neglect of the ways in which animals actually do experience the world. As Kaplan & Rogers (2002: 502) recently observed:
“In the main, studies of communication in orangutans have been focused on vocalizations […] Studies specific to nonvocal communication are less common. There has been limited research on facial expressions and of nonvocal communication […] but no detailed investigation of eyes and eye movement.”
Some of the resistance to locating ‘intelligence’ in animal perception, in general, and vision, in particular, can be attributed to mainstream conceptions of animal gazes –- which, if pop-culture is any guide, are typically represented as forming a vision devoid of thought, a blank stare or empty gaze. To be sure, little in the way of scientific rigor separates the concluding remarks of one study on dolphin vision –- which found that “the most parsimonious and logically defensible position is to assume that cetaceans (like most primates) have clever brains but blank minds (Humphrey, 1982)” (Gallup 1995: 228) –- from, say, Mark Tansey’s celebrated painting “The Innocent Eye Test” (1981), above, which uses a cow staring at a painting of a cow to represent the stupidity or simplicity of certain art critics.
In human video studies, analogous views are just as difficult to find: for instance, the experimental film scholar Catherine Russell has recently described Bill Viola’s I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986) as evidencing the
“failure of the animals to return the gaze. They look without seeing. We cannot know what they are thinking, if they are thinking; the eye becomes a mask. Viola may catch his own reflection in the eye of an owl, but nothing and no one looks back at him with any interest” (Russell 1999: 119-120).
The animal eye, in this view, functions as a mirror for the gaze of the human; it arrests the human’s, admits of nothing, and so fails to engage in the coveted mutual exchange of glances. In a single symbolic move, the eye becomes a mask for the animal and a mirror for the human.
(That is, where (since Plato perhaps*) many have sought to discover in the eye’s disappearance into the gaze a foundation for sociality, love, and truth, in the eye of the animal the reflection of the human obstructs, and so limits, the powers of inspection. Indeed, many of the (anthropocentric) experiments that fail to find satisfactory evidence of animal intelligence betray a curious disappointment, as if they were expecting to find a human behind the mask.)
It is nonetheless otherwise understood that “monkeys and apes are able to follow the gaze of others” (Itakura 2004: 216) and that domestic animals especially are able to interact with humans, follow their gazes, engage, and respond. Which presents a curious, if familiar, paradox: in one discourse, animals are regarded as self-evidently social, intelligent, and ‘conscious’, while in another, the same animals are regarded as unconscious, unaware, and, in an almost literal sense, unperceptive. (Sara Shettleworth’s ridiculous question, “Do animals know that they know?”, from her essay of the same name, seems perfectly symptomatic of this paradox pushed onto the animal.)
The critical task, then, is to see more than ourselves in the gaze of the animal. Which, in terms of experimental design, amounts to discerning and eliminating anthropomorphic bias in the construction of studies and the analysis of results. (The history of animal behavior experiments is thus also, in its way, the history of the human animal’s negotiation of a seemingly unthinkable, inaccessible difference.) In coming posts, I’ll take a look at some of these experiments.
Notes
* “Have you already noticed that the face of one looking in the eye appears there as though in a mirror? Thus we call it our pupil (pupille), that is to say small doll (poupee), because on it there is an image of the one who looks into it. When the eye looks into another eye … it recognizes itself” (Plato, Phedre, 255, and Le Premier Alcibiade, 132d; quoted in [Melchior-Bonnet 1994: 230]).
References
Gallup G (1995). Mirrors, minds, and cetaceans. Consciousness and Cognition, 4, 226-228. [Link]
Humphrey N (1982). Consciousness: A just-so story. New Scientist, 95, 474-478. [Link]
Itakura S (2004). Gaze-following and joint visual attention in nonhuman animals. Japanese Psychological Research, 46 (3), 216-226. [Link]
Kaplan G, & Rogers L (2002). Patterns of gazing in orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus). International Journal of Primatology, 23 (3), 501-526. [Link]
Melchior-Bonnet S (1994). The mirror: A history. KH Jewett (Tr.) New York: Routledge. [Link]
Russell C (1999). Experimental ethnography: The work of film in the age of video. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. [Link]
Shettleworth, Sara J (2001). Do animals know that they know? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5 (9), 404–405. [Link]
