Allie Fenlon #2

The idea of perception piques my curiosity. As we were discussing All Writing is Autobiography, by Donald M. Murray, I began to think of this subject. I also thought about this during the discussion about Richard Prince and all of the other interesting and unusual topics involved with the art world. But the reason this discussion was so entertaining was because of different people’s perceptions of the subject, and the fact that people in the art world perceive a banana on the wall to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but that’s a whole other topic. Different people’s perceptions give rise to opinions and therefore writing or the sharing of ideas on the topic that creates a discussion or argument. Some people feel extremely passionate about some topics that others do not even know about or do not care enough to be engaged and have a stance. Examples of this may be anything from personal preference on music to their political stance. What I mean to be focusing on, though, is different people’s perceptions in general. By this, I mean how people perceive different instances uniquely. Have you ever thought about if the person sitting next to you you sees the same colors that you do? Or if everyone has a favorite color, are the variations just how their brains perceive them differently? Why is it that I like certain color combinations and others do not? Some may argue that this is simply a personal preference, but the reality is that I will never see exactly what you see and you will never see exactly what I see. 

In a less broad sense, this leads to a discussion on whether perception effects out tastes. Everyone has a different life than another, whether they live on the other side of the world or they are identical twins. Everyone has their own opinions. This leads to the ideas from All Writing is Autobiography. Murray, in his work, provided the idea that all work is autobiography simply because no one would write the exact same thing as another, and people usually write based on their interests, their ideas, and/or their experiences. In class, we discussed whether different assignments or manuals can be considered autobiographies. There are two arguments to this based on different knowledge levels or just different ideas. One side could be those car manuals, for example, are especially impersonal and nonautobiographical because they are found in every car, and they are written in extremely formal writing. Another point of view is that the person or people writing the manuals are the people manufacturing the car and they want their consumers to have a manual to look onto when they have questions. Most people do not sit down and read car manuals, I hope, but the people writing it chose those words and were assigned to inform people who own the car.  In this sense, the manual is autobiographical, but that is based on how an individual perceives the word, autobiography.