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The Constructions of Imagination

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Seeing as Practice

Part of the book series: Performance Philosophy ((PPH))

Abstract

The power of imagination plays a part in each and every act of perception. Perceptual world disclosure is an interpretive, picture-making process. This applies not only to materially present pictures but also to immaterial images. Pictures that are generated by and at the same time inform perception are perceived and imagined images that contribute to the idea we have of ourselves and the world. This pictoriality in acts of perception is explained with the help of a concepts of images and their genesis, as discussed by Kant and Fichte.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The terms are all polyvalent and their use wanders according to author, language and époch. Coleridge (1817) distinguishes between imagination as a creative faculty and fancy. The German term Einbildungskraft is translated into French as ‘imagination,’ meaning a Vorstellungsvermögen, translatable as faculty of representation. This is an important shift in meaning. The plural Phantasien (fantasies) usually signifies the content of Vorstellung, presentation or representation, while German ‘Phantasie’ in the singular means the faculty or power, Einbildungskraft. As Dieter Kamper (1981, p. 12) has pointed out, the term Phantasie occurs three times in the Occidental tradition: “First, as ‘material’ […] for dreams […] and civilisations; second, as transcendentally efficient order for knowledge; third, as the reviled minor faculty of daydreaming that mainly assumes compensatory functions.” The multiplicity of the term is also manifest in the various disciplines concerned with it: psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, epistemology, aesthetics, mythology and, in the case of Castoriadis, political theory.

  2. 2.

    Talk of sense impressions falls back into the traps of deliverance thinking, which the concept of schematism sets out to avoid, by making sense impressions originally inseparable from schemata.

  3. 3.

    The assumption that sense is something merely determined results from this way of thinking that I have called ‘deliverance thinking.’

  4. 4.

    Dieter Henrich (1955) rejects Heidegger‘s interpretation on philological grounds: Über die Einheit der Subjektivität. A reading based on the shying-theory is developed by Hans-Dieter Gondek (1990, p. 256ff.).

  5. 5.

    Slavoj Žižek (1999, p. 29), for example, argues that Kant is “obsessed” with […] the endeavour to synthesise,” passing over the contrary forces of imagination, imagination as an ‘activity of dissolution,’ as later emphasised by Hegel.

  6. 6.

    More on this can be found in D. Kamper (1998). Further readings in the same spirit are found in the collection by G. Schäfer and Ch. Wulf (1999).

  7. 7.

    See the overview provided by Käte Meyer-Drawe (1999). For a more thoroughgoing account: E. Lichtenstein (1966).

  8. 8.

    For more on this, see W. Janke (1993).

  9. 9.

    With ‘Bildsamkeit,’ Fichte (2000) designates an infinite capacity for further development and mutation that distinguishes humans from animals. What the human is, is not determined “but rather to all conceivable movements ad infinitum. […] It would not be formed in any particular way but would be formable. In short, all animals are complete and finished; the human being is only intimated and projected […] Every animal is what it is: only the human being is originally nothing at all. He must become what he is to be. […] Formability [Bildsamkeit], as such, is the character of humanity.”

  10. 10.

    For further reading on this, see A. Bertinetto (2001).

  11. 11.

    Interesting in this regard is the empirical study by James Elkins (2001).

  12. 12.

    On the psychological and affective aspects of interactive percept, see the collection by Gertrud Koch (1995).

  13. 13.

    See W. Iser (1991, p. 314): “The imaginary perhaps only attains to pure presence on madness.’’

  14. 14.

    W. Iser (1991, p. 312) has described this concisely: “The continuity and identity of the perceived object can only be ensured by imaginary constituents.”

  15. 15.

    See Sect. 2 in Chapter 8. The distinction being the experience of imagining and imaginings themselves merely relocates the problem while leaving unaltered the fact of the effects of images on the body.

  16. 16.

    See Kosslyn (1980). An overview can be found in Gottschling (2003).

  17. 17.

    Andreas Hetzel (2004) has penetratingly described the between: “The performative stands for a ‘between’ that can be reduced neither to objective structures nor to subjective intentions. It consummates itself in our speech and action, thereby transforming or even bringing forth the subject of consummation and its framing institutions.”

  18. 18.

    On the proximity of the two, see K. Jaspers (1977).

  19. 19.

    On the sceptical problem of general uncertainty, see S. Cavell (2003). According to Cavell, the piece works through the question; how can we ever know about the feelings and thoughts of others?

  20. 20.

    See W. Schapp (1976, chapter 4 and passim), who places more emphasise than other narrative theories on the process of self-understanding by means of language as intrication, and construes intrication in turn as practice. However, the author reduces the relation between stories and images basically to one of illustration. On this account, images have the derivative function of making the story easier to understand. They are not recognised as a proper form of story-making.

  21. 21.

    See S. Krämer (2001, p. 259) on Judith Butler‘s conception of performative speech acts: “What constitiutes its performativity is not that it is an individual speech act, but rather that it evokes past speech acts in the manner of citation.”

  22. 22.

    Oswald Schwemmer (2007, p. 113) adopts a similar approach: “We see what we see through the images in our image-world.” Schwemmer elucidates how such patterns of perception and Prägnanzprofile [significant profiles] constitute the characteristic traits of a culture in language and images. According to Schwemmer, the utopian task of art is to break up the dogmatically inclined, ingrained customs of interpretation.

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  1. Otto-von-Guericke University, Magdeburg, Germany

    Eva Schuermann

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Schuermann, E. (2019). The Constructions of Imagination. In: Seeing as Practice. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14507-1_6

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