Dalibor Vesely - Situation and Perception

Situation and Perception

Vesely’s argument on the epistemological process of being situated develops in terms of an analogy to the formation of the visual field. And takes the organic ability of sight only as a point of departure to the phenomenon of vision, i.e. what one is able to recognize and know out of visual perception. Accordingly, the natural process of seeing is shown to be a result from learning. Vesely presents the example of inborn conditions of blindness treated through surgery, where sight itself only emerges after a painful stage of learning, and without which, the recently-acquired sense of sight would be unable to detach or recognize individual objects out of a ‘visual field’ (pp. 50-51). Vesely describes how the integration of the newly-acquired sense relies on the fact that the world of the blind is already structured, not only in terms of temporal sequences, but spatially; and that the reconciliation of the new ability of sight takes place on an already structured ground of existing objects and spatiality. Perception such as visual or tactile is reconciled upon an implicitly structured ground.

Vesely shows how the task of bridging different plateaux of representation can only be fulfilled by covering the distance to a common 'ground' (pp. 61-63). 'Ground' is like a point of departure from which it would become possible to uncover the basic structure of spatiality; but it is hardly the case that such an epistemological ground can provide us with an absolute source of spatial reference. The notion of epistemological ground is not established a priori, as a given point of reference. It comes about in the process of searching, taking place as a continuum of references between different levels of spatial understanding. In which case, what constitutes the structural source of situation is this stream of references (p. 60).

Vesely's notion of ground consists of a primary source of reference that in many ways coincides with the traditional Greek understanding of arché. Arché is not an absolute source of reference, but only a primary one that works as a point of departure towards our notion of "earth" and our understanding of "world" (pp. 50-52). This is an insecure ground that in a sense, speaks more of its own topography, than of clearly defined rules and references. Although this is an unfamiliar ground for modern science, Vesely accurately describes how much of the understanding of what it means to be situated derives from the knowledge of daily situations on Earth, where horizon and gravity play a common role. Accordingly, architecture's task of raising and 'building' situations does not address the mere existence of conditions such as floor or gravity, but concerns the fundamental condition of 'ground' allowing the phenomenon of situation to take place.