Abstract
Grennan provides a new explanation of the experience of drawing, visual depiction and imagination, creating a systematic theoretical framework describing the relationship between causes and consequences, the general potential resources of the body, institutions and ideas. He provides a needed explanation of the key distinction between correspondence relationships that structure language and the function of imagination in visual depictions, whilst maintaining a clear focus on the ways in which his explanation of depictive drawings, in particular, require an explanation of narrative, forthcoming in subsequent chapters.
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- 1.
In homage, I modify ‘Drawings Own Devices’, the title of Chapter 12 of Patrick Maynard’s general overview of theorisations of drawing: ‘Drawing Distinctions:The Varieties of Graphic Expression.’ Maynard’s Chapter 12 seeks to describe a number of theorist’s medium-specific descriptions of drawing, in order to tease out ‘…a conception of drawing that separates it from other media, and a theory of drawing’s deepest sources of (…) meaning.’ As such, the Chapter enlarges and to some extent departs from what I here call a technical-activity foundation, established in most of his book, although without reviewing or adopting approaches grounded in other theorizations of systems of signification. Maynard, Drawing Distinctions, 184.
- 2.
Ibid. 3. See Baetens’ and Frey’s discussion of grammatext, in which the locations and forms of marks and groups of marks constituting written text (also known as graphemes and syntagms), have semiotic salience independent of both phonetic and lexical uses. The term grammatext, although used precisely to indicate the semiotic significance of the forms of written letters and numbers, words and groups of words, here parallels my ‘array’ of marks and groups of marks in drawings. Beatens and Frey, The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. 152–53.
- 3.
de Renya, How to Draw What You See, 27.
- 4.
Watson Garcia, Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner, 24.
- 5.
Maynard, Drawing Distinctions, 96.
- 6.
A large and detailed list of topological distinctions can be found in Rawson, Seeing Through Drawing. The names of these topological categories of mark are for the shape of a drawn mark (84, 92), direction (84), relationships between lines (92), contour, visible evidence of production (81–83), dimension, enclosure, temporal index (15), depth-slices (105), bracelet shading (107, 109–110), facelets (160–161), ovoids (160), shading and modeling tone (109–110), plan-sections (37) and shading (39–40). Also see Maynard, Drawing Distinctions: The Varieties of Graphic Expression for untouched surface areas (165) and the ‘oval’ (39). For a detailed summary of John Willats’ descriptions of regions, enclosures, axis, extendedness, connectedness and continuity, symmetry, contour qualities, occlusion and superimposition and rhythm, see Maynard, op cit, 73–82.
- 7.
Ibid. See also Rawson, Seeing Through Drawing and Willats, Art and Representation: New Principles in the Analysis of Pictures.
- 8.
Wright, ‘The Case Against Teleological Reductionism’ 211–23.
- 9.
For this general approach applied to teleological characterisation, see Braithwaite, Scientific Explanation: A Study of the Function of Theory, Probability and Law in Science.
- 10.
Houkes and Vermass, Technical Functions: On the Uses and Designs of Artefacts, 93.
- 11.
British Museum Registration Number 1926,1009.1.
- 12.
This very general summary is derived in part from Charles Taylor’s The Explanation of Behaviour and in part from Wright, op cit.
- 13.
Pisanello, Four Unrelated Figures (British Museum Reference Number pp.1.10) and Two Men Standing (British Museum Registration Number 1895,0915.793).
- 14.
Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 21, 46 and Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 11–14, 205–226 and Thomas, ‘Are Theories of Imagery Theories of Imagination?’ 227.
- 15.
British Museum Reference Number 1860,0616.128.
- 16.
Rawson, Drawing, 95, 97, 15.
- 17.
Rawson, Drawing, 91–2.
- 18.
Rawson, Drawing, 105. He writes: ‘(…) those styles of drawing which are interested in an independent three-dimensional plastic presence have tended to play down both the immediately expressive and the decorative quality of their lines (…).’
- 19.
For ontological descriptions, see Houkes and Meijers, ‘The Ontology of Artefacts: The Hard Problem.’ For epistemological descriptions, see Houkes, ‘Knowledge of artefact functions.’ For descriptions on the basis of technical functions, see Vermaas, ‘The Physical Connection: Engineering Function Ascriptions to Technical Artefacts and Their Components.’
- 20.
I am here following and adapting van Eck and Webber’s ‘Function Ascription and Explanation: Elaborating an Explanatory Utility Desideratum for Ascriptions of Technical Functions.’ 1371. They provide a comprehensive teleological discussion of the explanatory role of function ascription in design.
- 21.
Carroll and Seeley. ‘Cognitivism, Psychology and Neuroscience: Movies as Attentional Engines.’
- 22.
Newman. ‘The Marks, Traces and Gestures of Drawing,’ 105.
- 23.
Maynard frequently uses the term to describe bundles of topological marks associated with types of perceptual effects in a range of studies of drawing, without considering the theoretical basis on which the term is apt. See Maynard. Drawing Distinctions: The Varieties of Graphic Expression, 41, 49, 78, 81, 84, 95, 101, 103, 120, 138–39, 170, 174, 183, 186–88, 209, 227, 230, 243n.
- 24.
This conflation has caused a number of problems, not least in ‘post hoc’ comprehension of Philippe Marion’s germinal neologism ‘graphiation,’ a remediation of the linguistic concept of enunciation (Baetens, ‘Revealing Traces: A New Theory of Graphic Enunciation’). For example, Gardner states that ‘with the line, we come face to face with the graphiateur,’ The ‘narrative meaning’ of the mark then derives from a direct relationship between mark and indexed activity, allowing for the theorization of the function of unique visual enunciation in a narrative structure. An objection to this particular conception of ‘graphiation’ can be made on the grounds that some drawing technologies index activities of the body without tracing them, in which cases, trace and index do not have mutually substantive roles in the production of enunciative style or, more comprehensibly, ‘voice.’ Gardner, ‘Storylines.’ 64.
- 25.
See Allen. ‘Compelled by the Diagram: Thinking Through C. H. Waddington’s Epigenetic Landscape,’ and Mayer. ‘Gut Feelings: The Emerging Biology of Gut-Brain Communication.’
- 26.
Hague. Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics, 35.
- 27.
Maynard. Drawing Distinctions. 187.
- 28.
Arnheim. The Power of the Centre: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts.
- 29.
Rawson. Drawing. 161.
- 30.
Ibid. 105.
- 31.
Ibid. 107.
- 32.
Antliffe and Leighten. Cubism and Culture.
- 33.
See Rawson. Drawing. 94 and Willats. Art and Representation. 316.
- 34.
Rawson. Drawing. 204.
- 35.
Ibid. 210.
- 36.
Krčma. Trace, Materiality and the Body in Drawing After 1940. 92.
- 37.
Rawson. Drawing. 84, 92.
- 38.
Chalmers. ‘Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.’
- 39.
Willats ‘Ambiguity in Drawing.’
- 40.
Jarombek. ‘The Structural Problematic of Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura.’
- 41.
See Booker. A History of Engineering Drawing, and Dubery and Willats. Perspective and Other Drawing Systems.
- 42.
Necker. ‘Observations on Some Remarkable Optical Phenomena Seen in Switzerland; and on an Optical Phenomenon Which Occurs on Viewing a Figure of a Crystal or Geometrical Solid.’
- 43.
Willats. ‘Ambiguity in Drawing.’ 2.
- 44.
Rawson notes that ‘many art styles (…) make their units of enclosure correspond exactly with those units of the notional world for which there are spoken names (…)’Drawing. 151.
- 45.
van Eck and Webber ‘Function Ascription and Explanation: Elaborating an Explanatory Utility Desideratum fro Ascriptions of Technical Functions.’ 1371.
- 46.
This system of realisation, in which environmental and social modulations inhibit or facilitate particular goal-directed activities, resulting in the production of particular arrays of marks in the case of both drawing and writing, is derived in part from James Martin’s and Paul Thibault’s functional theorisations of language. See Martin. English Text: System and Structure, and Thibault. Brain, Mind and the Signifying Body: An Ecosocial Semiotic Theory.
- 47.
New Gallery Walsall, Accession Number 1973.123.GR.
- 48.
Jaques Derrida makes a similar etiological characterisation of the relationship between a trace and its origin, writing ‘the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin.’ Derrida. Of Grammatology. 61.
- 49.
For a specific example of this type of realisation of social practices on the activity of reading, see Joe Sutliffe Sanders’ deft analysis of differences between comic strips and children’s picture books. Sanders. ‘Chaperoning Words: Meaning-Making in Comics and Picture Books.’
- 50.
Harris. Rethinking Writing. 85–88.
- 51.
See Halliday. ‘Towards a language-based theory of learning,’ and Martin. English Text: System and Structure.
- 52.
Willats. ‘Representation of Extendedness in Children’s Drawings of Stick and Discs.’ 697.
- 53.
Cohn is explicit in writing that he considers depiction to be a prerequisite for theorising the visual equivalent of a cognitive language structure realised in visual representations other than writing. Discussing what he calls ‘abstract’ images, meaning non-depictive images (those in which Wollheim’s ‘seeing-in’ does not take place), he writes: ‘these images play with modality alone, and have neither grammar nor meaning.’ Unfortunately, he does not make a theorisation of depiction part of his proposal of a system of ‘visual language.’ It is a serious omission, given the unresolved theoretical controversy about the function of depiction and the fact that he places this function, whatever he thinks it might be, at the heart of his theory. Further, Cohn seems unaware that in defining ‘abstraction’ in this way, he runs the risk of stating that language encompasses semiosis, rather than the other way around. Cohn, The Visual Language of Comics: Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of Sequential Images. 6.
- 54.
Harris. Rethinking Writing. 96–97.
- 55.
Part/part relationships describe what are known in linguistics as dependency structures. For discussions of dependency structures, see Melčuk, Dependency Syntax: Theory and Practice, and Ninio, Language and the Learning Curve: A New Theory of Syntactic Development. Part/whole relationships describe what are known in linguistics as constituency structures. For discussions of both constituency and scopal structures, see Matthews, Syntactic Relations: A Critical Survey.
- 56.
Note that Cohn does not define the grapheme as an indivisible item that derives its indivisible status purely from its location in a graphic realisation of cognitive lexicogrammatical structures. Rather (concurring with the theorisations of types of marks undertaken by technical activity theorists of drawing, for example), he confuses the possible forms that a grapheme might employ with its function in realising the system. He describes graphemes as ‘basic graphical shapes like lines, dots, and shapes.’ Cohn. The Visual Language of Comics: Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of Sequential Images. 28. His definition is difficult to understand, because it is fundamentally at odds with the systemic and functional linguistic models he adopts elsewhere, such as those in Jackendoff, Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution.
- 57.
Halliday. Spoken and Written Language. 225–41.
- 58.
Maynard discusses spatial projection systems in detail, although without noticing that temporal organisation systems (whether modality-independent, such as languages, or modality-dependent, such as music) can also produce systematic visual topographic equivalences. He does note, however, the distinction between spatial projection systems as guides to the location of marks as independent from the morphology of marks themselves. Maynard, Drawing Distinctions: The Varieties of Graphic Expression. 19–52.
- 59.
Andersen, The Geometry of an Art: The History of the Mathematical Theory of Perspective from Alberti to Monge.
- 60.
Cohn, The Visual Narrative Reader. 336.
- 61.
Ibid. 316.
- 62.
I find it difficult to recognise or understand Cohn’s description of unnamed existing theories of drawing as a monolithic, unsystematic ‘Art Frame’ of thinking that he claims constitute ‘cultural’ approaches, as opposed to cognitive/linguistic approaches. He writes ‘cultural notions about the nature of drawing (…) hold that drawings reflect a person’s unique and individualistic creative nature, and each individual draws differently because it (sic) depicts their own perception on (sic) the world,’ and ‘drawing is looked at as a ‘skill.’ Conditioned only by the expressive aims of the artist and their abilities.’ Cohn. The Visual Language of Comics. 145, 197 and 4. He cites the work of Franz Cižek, the founder of the Austrian Child Art Movement, and other art educationalists associated with his ideas, as examples of unsystematic theorists of ‘free expression’ (op cit. 144). Whether an accurate summation of Cižek’s work or not, Cohn utterly ignores both the serious and complex problems facing current theorists of drawing, narrative drawing and depiction as well as the existing range of systematic approaches taken by theorists of drawing (Gombrich, Willats, Rawson, Maynard, de Preester, et al.), of narrative drawing (Peeters, Groensteen, Baetens, Marion, Barker, et al.), of depiction (Podro, Hopkins, Walton, Goodman, Sartre, et al.), and even theorists in fields more closely allied with his own, who undertake some type of ‘cultural’ analysis (Jackendoff, Thibault, Bakhtin, Vološinov, Johnson, Lakoff and Johnson, Kress, Kress and Van Leeuwen, et al.). Cohn’s proposal that the approaches of these theorists, ranging wide in their evaluation and application of ideas to complex problems also faced by Cohn’s own theory (including ‘cultural’ problems), are unsystematic in comparison with cognitive/linguistic approaches is nonsense. I do not understand it.
- 63.
Cohn. ‘Review: Comics and Language by Hannah Moidrag.’ np. Italics in original.
- 64.
See Note 53.
- 65.
Cohn. The Visual Language of Comics. 8 and 11.
- 66.
Ibid. 25
- 67.
Ibid. 17.
- 68.
Ibid. 21.
- 69.
Ibid. 22.
- 70.
Thibault. ‘Writing, Graphology and Visual Semiosis.’ 134.
- 71.
Cohn. The Visual Narrative Reader. 330. See also Talmy. Towards a Cognitive Semantics.
- 72.
Op cit. 330 and Cohn. The Visual Narrative Reader. 58.
- 73.
Ibid. 330.
- 74.
Ibid. 331.
- 75.
Ibid. 2 and 3.
- 76.
This is true in every case. Even in sequences of depictive images that conform to Scott McCloud’s category of ‘non-sequitur,’ in which sequences containing unexpected diegeses constitute the plot, the function of depiction itself structures semiosis. Plot exists because the diegesis in each part of the sequence is ‘seen-in,’ and the relationship between what is ‘seen-in’ in one depictive image and what is ‘seen-in’ in the next itself constitutes plot. Structurally, there is no such thing as an incoherent depictive image sequence, as a result. On the other hand, the temporal/topological correspondence structure of a written lexicogrammar demarcates a strict boundary between coherence and incoherence, on the basis of the systematically correct or incorrect proximity of the items that constitute it, both cognitively and graphiotactically. McCloud. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, 72–3.
- 77.
Jackendoff. Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. 276.
- 78.
He writes ‘many aspects of communicative competence are subsumed under a larger theory of how people manage to carry out any sort of cooperative activity (…) But (…) a theory of communicative competence and/or performance doesn’t eliminate the need for a theory of grammatical structure.’ Op cit. 35. See also 280 and 332.
- 79.
See Note 14.
- 80.
Hopkins. Picture, Image and Experience: A Philosophical Enquiry. 16.
- 81.
Wollheim. Painting as an Art. 47.
- 82.
Hopkins. Picture, Image and Experience: A Philosophical Enquiry. 31.
- 83.
Gombrich. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. It is also illuminating here to consider what Hugo Frey calls ‘tactics for illusion,’ an exemplar of the idea that illusions are always rhetorical, in the sense that they constitute the contradiction of perceptual knowledge with other types of knowledge, so that they ‘push for a particular vision of thing, while simultaneously offering knowledge that contradicts it.’ The tactics that Frey discusses are perceptual/cognitive paradoxes that disrupt viewing whilst cuing the viewer to expect, or even scrutinise, perceptual/epistemological contradictions themselves. The handful of tactics that Frey mentions are all interpretative instances of cognition interposing perception whilst perception is maintained: disorienting changes in scale, unexpected shifts in story-time, the retrospective signification of coded images, story paradoxes and radical changes in the style of facture. Frey. ‘The Tactic for Illusion in Simon Grennan’s Dispossession,’ 55–68.
- 84.
Hopkins. Picture, Image and Experience: A Philosophical Enquiry. 13.
- 85.
See Walton. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. 122–23 and Schier. Deeper into Pictures: An Essay on Pictorial Representation. Chapter 1, Section 6 and Peacocke. ‘Depiction.’
- 86.
Walton. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. 299.
- 87.
Goodman. Languages of Art.
- 88.
Hopkins. Picture, Image and Experience: A Philosophical Enquiry. 10.
- 89.
Ibid. 52.
- 90.
Hopkins writes ‘we must not restrict unduly what counts as the outline shape of an object. The notion is not just that of the object’s silhouette (…) Quite generally, the outline shape of an object may include the nested outline shapes of its parts.’ Ibid. 57. Correctly, he also dismisses an objection to a syncretic geometry made on the basis of binocular vision: the visual perceptual system itself generates a single visual experience in which geometry is retained. Ibid. 62.
- 91.
- 92.
Ibid. 89.
- 93.
Hopkins writes ‘There can be little difficulty with the claim that some pictures are seen to resemble their objects in outline shape. The problem is convincing oneself that all pictures do so, given the wide variety of pictorial techniques and traditions.’ Ibid. 147.
- 94.
Ibid. 109.
- 95.
Ibid. 48. Italics in original.
- 96.
Husserl. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology.
- 97.
Hopkins acknowledges the possibility of a modulation of his theory by (a) historic contingency and (b) differences in individual experiences of the world. He writes ‘Nothing precludes different subjects seeing the same marks as different things. All that is needed is some suitable variation in the empirical determinants of the experience of resemblance. Given that, and appropriate differences in histories of production, similar marks can carry different pictorial meanings,’ and ‘Thus, the three-dimensional shapes one sees marks on a surface as resembling will no doubt be determined in key part by the shapes of things in one’s environment, with which one has had perceptual contact in the past.’ Ibid. 151. However, he cannot commit to exploring the impact of these paradigms on his theory, due to his belief in the global significance of a human biology shared in all places and times—a logical and a philosophical nonsense. He writes ‘it is not possible for a difference in belief to constitute a difference in the character of an experience.’ Ibid. 117. Italics in original.
- 98.
Walker. The Lexicon of Comicana. 28.
- 99.
Schotter. The Economic Theory of Social Institutions.
- 100.
Lévi-Strauss. Structural Anthropology. 159.
- 101.
Mooney. The Body, the Index and the Other. 90–105.
- 102.
Damasio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. 201–22.
- 103.
Johnson. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. 22.
- 104.
Ibid.
- 105.
Ibid. 25.
- 106.
Sheets-Johnstone. The Primacy of Movement. 155.
- 107.
Johnson. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. 276.
- 108.
von Uexküll. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with a Theory of Meaning.
- 109.
Ibid. 46 and 48. Italics and German in original.
- 110.
Ibid. 48–51. This structure is not similar to the stimulus /response model of technical activity that I have discussed in relation to the theories of drawing of Maynard, Rawson and Willats. Von Uexküll proposes that actions (‘effect marks’) create properties, relative to perception as a realisation of physiological capacities, not that these properties belong to the object.
- 111.
Ibid. 52.
- 112.
Ibid. 126.
- 113.
Ibid. 94.
- 114.
Ibid. 122
- 115.
Johnson. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason.
- 116.
von Uexküll. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with a Theory of Meaning. 145.
- 117.
Johnson. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. 2–5.
- 118.
Ibid. 3.
- 119.
Johnson. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. 225 and 228.
- 120.
Johnson. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. xiv.
- 121.
Johnson. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. 19–20.
- 122.
In a personal email from Johnson, received by me on 15 January 2016, he explains the creation of the term: ‘Thirty years ago we were, and still are, very concerned about intellectualist and objectivist views of concepts, meaning and reasoning that leave the body out of the story. (…) Putting ‘image’ before ‘schema’ was our way of trying to say that (image)schemas are embodied and body-based. So the ‘image’ part was supposed to emphasise the imaginative and embodied character of meaning, reasoning and knowing. When ‘image’ is used in this way, it is obviously not just a VISUAL image, but includes patterns of organism-environment interaction (…).’ More accurately, ‘image schemata’ might be considered ‘force schemata,’ describing cross-modal capacity and avoiding possible confusion between non-propositional structures and their propositional realisations, were it not for the fact that the term ‘image schemata’ has now been in general use in the field of cognitive linguistics, and elsewhere, for thirty years.
- 123.
Johnson. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. 5.
- 124.
He also describes an image schema as ‘a recurring dynamic pattern of our perceptual interactions and motor programmes that gives coherence and structure to our experience,’ and as ‘a dynamic pattern that functions somewhat like the abstract structure of an image, and thereby connects up a vast range of different experiences that manifest this same recurring structure.’ Ibid. xiv and 2.
- 125.
Ibid. 15. Of interest here is one of Jackendoff’s various descriptions of ‘spatial structure’ relative to semantic/cognitive structure in lexicogrammar, as ‘the physical (or nonpropositional) structure of the model in which the truth conditions of (…) conceptual structure are applied.’ Jackendoff. Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. 12.
- 126.
Johnson. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. 2 and 99.
- 127.
Ibid. 4 and 28.
- 128.
Ibid. 43 and 34.
- 129.
Ibid. 114.
- 130.
Ibid. 98.
- 131.
Ibid. 36.
- 132.
Ibid. 113.
- 133.
Ibid. 137
- 134.
Ibid. 29.
- 135.
Ibid. 105 and 126.
- 136.
Jackendoff. Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. 21. Italics in original.
- 137.
For example, see Gibbs. Embodiment and Cognitive Science and Gallese, Ferari, and Umilta. ‘The Mirror Matching System: A Shared Manifold for Intersubjectivity.’ and Katz. How Emotions Work and Sheets-Johnstone. The Primacy of Movement and McNeill. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought and Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
- 138.
Massumi. Parables for the Virtual. 30.
- 139.
Massumi. ‘Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements.’
- 140.
Fagin. The Artist’s Complete Guide to Facial Expressions. 126.
- 141.
McNeill. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought. 20.
- 142.
Ibid. 22 and 105.
- 143.
Ibid. 105.
- 144.
Fagin. The Artist’s Complete Guide to Facial Expressions. 14.
- 145.
Katz. How Emotions Work. 178.
- 146.
Abbate. Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century. 27.
- 147.
Katz. How Emotions Work. 116.
- 148.
Gibbs. Embodiment and Cognitive Science. 90.
- 149.
Smyth. Greek Grammar. 677.
- 150.
Luzar. Drawing upon Multiplicity: Mark, Body and Trace of Thought. 21.
- 151.
Beattie. Visible Thought: The New Psychology of Body Language. 117.
- 152.
Katz. How Emotions Work. 69.
- 153.
Ibid. 186 and 190.
- 154.
Fagin. The Artist’s Complete Guide to Facial Expressions. 77.
- 155.
Gibbs. Embodiment and Cognitive Science. 27.
- 156.
Shannon. ‘What Are the Functions of Consciousness?’
- 157.
Beardsworth and Buckner. ‘The Ability to Recognize Oneself from a Video Recording of One’s Own Movement Without Seeing One’s Body.’
- 158.
Gibbs. Embodiment and Cognitive Science. 127.
- 159.
Polanyi. The Tacit Dimension.
- 160.
Botvinik and Cohen. ‘Rubber Hands “feel” Touch That Eyes See.’
- 161.
Hutchinson, Davis, Lozano, Tasker, and Dostrovsky. ‘Pain-Related Neurons in the Human Cingulated Cortex.’
- 162.
Mead. Mind, Self, Society. 46.
- 163.
McNeill. Hand and Mind:What Gestures Reveal About Thought. 92.
- 164.
Ibid. 191.
- 165.
Beattie. Visible Thought: The New Psychology of Body Language. 129.
- 166.
Ibid.
- 167.
Bateson. Steps to an Ecology of Mind.
- 168.
Gallagher. ‘Body Schema and Intentionality.’ 69.
- 169.
See Cole. Pride and the Daily Marathon, and Valentini and Costall. ‘Visual Perception of Lifted Weight from Kinematic and Static (photographic) displays.’ and Babcock and Freyd. ‘Perception of the Dynamic Information in Static Hand-Written Forms.’
- 170.
Sobchack. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. 291.
- 171.
Scherer. On the Nature and Function of Emotion: A Component Process Approach. 296.
- 172.
Sheets-Johnstone. The Primacy of Movement.
- 173.
Lazarus. Emotions and Adaptation. 230.
- 174.
Erikson. ‘Patient Role and Social Uncertainty: Dilemma of the Mentally Ill.’ and Goffman. Stigma. 340.
- 175.
Katz. How Emotions Work. 143.
- 176.
Ibid. 6
- 177.
For example, Gallagher notes the ‘two aspects of gesture, its inter-subjective (communicative) and intra-subjective (cognitive) functions.’ Gallagher. How the Body Shapes the Mind, 117. Italics in original.
- 178.
Katz. How Emotions Work. 299. Italics in original.
- 179.
In particular, the work of Stephen Kosslyn, who develops a ‘pictorial’ theory and Zenon Pylyshyn, who develops a ‘proposition’ theory of visualisation. See Kosslyn. Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate and Pylyshyn. Computation and Cognition.
- 180.
See Slezak. ‘The “Philosophical” Case Against Visual Imagery,’ and Reisberg and Chambers. ‘Neither Pictures nor Propositions: What Can We Learn from a Mental Image?’
- 181.
For a theorisation of the function of attention in perception and visualisation, see Tsal and Kolbert. ‘Disambiguating Ambiguous Figures by Selective Attention.’
- 182.
Both capacities have been demonstrated in Shepard and Cooper. Mental Images and Their Transformations, and Kosslyn.Image and the Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate.
- 183.
These explanations of visualisation also constitute an approach to memory. Although memory is not my focus here, it is important for me to remind myself that a theory of embodied visualisation must also suggest a theory of embodied memory, rather than one based on the realisation of other structures, such as a ‘proposition’ model.
- 184.
Thomas. ‘Mental Imagery.’
- 185.
See Clancy. Situated Cognition: On Human Knowledge and Computer Representations, and Thomas. ‘Are Theories of Imagery Theories of Imagination? An Active Perception Approach to Conscious Mental Content.’ Thomas also notes embodied theorisations of visualisation in Ramachandran and Hirstein. ‘Three Laws of Qualia: What Neurology Tells Us About the Biological Functions of Consciousness.’; Ellis. Questioning Consciousness: The Interplay of Imagery, Consciousness and Emotion in the Human Brain; Neisser. Cognition and Reality and ‘Anticipations, Images and Introspection.’ and Morgan. ‘The Two Spaces.’ and Janssen. On the Nature of Mental Imagery; Sarbin and Juhasz. ‘Towards a Theory of Imagination.’; Hochberg. ‘In the Mind’s Eye.’; and Hebb. ‘Concerning Imagery.’
- 186.
See Note 179.
- 187.
Kosslyn.Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate, and Image and Mind, and ‘Information Representation in Visual Images.’ Kosslyn and Shwartz. ‘A Simulation of Visual Imagery.’ Tye. The Imagery Debate.
- 188.
Kosslyn. Image and Mind. 6.
- 189.
Slezak. ‘The “Philosophical” Case Against Visual Imagery.’
- 190.
Pylyshyn. ‘The Role of Cognitive Architecture in Theories of Cognition.’ Fodor. The Language of Thought.
- 191.
Thomas. ‘Are Theories of Imagery Theories of Imagination? An Active Perception Approach to Conscious Mental Content.’ 216.
- 192.
Thomas writes ‘We imagine, say, a cat, by going through (some of) the motions of examining something and finding that it is a cat, even though there is no cat (and perhaps nothing relevant at all) there to be examined. Imagining a cat is seeing nothing-in-particular as a cat (…).’Ibid. 218.
- 193.
Ibid. 222.
- 194.
Swain and Stricker. ‘Promising Directions in Active Vision.’
- 195.
Thomas. ‘Are Theories of Imagery Theories of Imagination? An Active Perception Approach to Conscious Mental Content.’ 219.
- 196.
Ibid. 220.
- 197.
Ibid. 230. See Ryle. The Concept of the Mind. 248
- 198.
Walton. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. 21–24.
- 199.
He writes ‘‘imagination,’ in one important sense at least, just is our name for the faculty of seeing as (…).’ Thomas. ‘Are Theories of Imagery Theories of Imagination? An Active Perception Approach to Conscious Mental Content.’ 232.
- 200.
Here, a model of the function of the correlative realisation of schematic structures in the adjudication of percepts, that is, in the production of cognitive self-representation, very broadly follows Johnson’s discussion of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. See Johnson. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. 141, 147–53 and Kant. Critique of Pure Reason.
- 201.
De Preester writes that, in imagining, ‘hypotheses about what there is to see or hear are still being put forward, giving rise to (potentially) conscious experiences, but these hypotheses are not tested against reality.’ De Preester, ‘The sensory component of imagination: The motor theory of imagination a203s a present-day solution to Sartre’s critique.’
- 202.
De Preester’s ‘Motor Theory of Imagination’ extrapolates Thomas’s ‘perceptual activity’ theory by introducing the concept of imagining as the realisation of anticipated, but unfulfilled, motor commands, in which ‘The distinction between anticipation and actual fulmovieent is (…) crucial to be able to distinguish imagination from perception.’ De Preester. ‘The Sensory Component of Imagination: The Motor Theory of Imagination as a Present-Day Solution to Sartre’s Critique.’ 13.
- 203.
Walton. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. 35.
- 204.
Walton writes, ‘I find especially attractive the suggestion (…) that propositional attitudes be understood in terms of the ascription of properties to oneself.’ Ibid. 36.
- 205.
Ibid. 33. Italics in original.
- 206.
For example, see Benveniste. Problems in General Linguistics and Chatman. Story and Discourse and Genette. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method and Genette. Narrative Discourse Revisited.
- 207.
Walton. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. 273.
- 208.
Ibid. 17.
- 209.
Ibid. 69. Italics in original.
- 210.
Ibid. 39. Italics in original.
- 211.
Jackendoff. Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution, 330. Further, he considers that ‘Conceptualisation based on one’s own observations of imagination may conflict with the ‘received’ conceptualisation with which one desires to tune oneself.’ Ibid. 331.
- 212.
Ibid. 323.
- 213.
Broad. Five Types of Ethical Theory.
- 214.
Vološinov. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. 21.
- 215.
He writes ‘Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges.’ Destutt de Tracy. A Treatise on Political Economy. 6.
- 216.
The use of the concept of the resistance to or promotion of types of imagining—of ideas—in explaining how the subject is created and institutions reproduce themselves, is first found in Marx and Engels.The German Ideology, in Mannheim. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge and in Gramsci. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. 12, 259, 260.
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Grennan, S. (2017). Drawing, Depicting and Imagining. In: A Theory of Narrative Drawing. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51844-6_1
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