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'Material Imagination and Non-Material Imagination: What is the relationship between Material Imagination and Non Material Imagination and what are the implications in today’s existence for human beings and society?
by Yvonne Jones
Tessa Atton I Jane Bennett I Belinda Mitchell I Yonat Nitzan-Green I Noriko Suzuki-Bosco
***
This session is something of a patchwork quilt. Which I hope will do two things one be of interest to the group and two unpick some of the ideas weaved in my ‘Mind Walk’.
Bachelard says ‘in addition to the images of form… there are… images of matter, direct images, of matter’ (Bachelard quoted in Yonat Nitzan-Green PIRG session April 2016).
Images of form resonate with me across wider fields of texts. I want to open a conversation on these other-than-material images and draw them into a focus for non-material imagination (my term), that is to say, imagination using, or processing images that have been collected in a non-directly experiential way. I am drawing a line, a difference between images received through materiality, and those received without the materiality of the content that gives rise to poetic imagination spoken of by Bachelard; the non direct , non material images offered from within photographs, cinema, video, any images reaching the brain where the body of the person has not experienced the images in the material world. I want to explore how these images could affect the human unit.
I have constructed a ‘Mind Walk’ map with numbers and supporting list. I am looking for commonalities with regard a consensus across thinkers over time and much to my surprise, recalling my scepticism of earlier days, a possible scientific relationship that reinforces Bachelard’s material imagination and the poetic image.
On mind map: Where to start???
1) Looking at my mind walk, Bachalard (1) is associated with the word direct (material experience) leading to material imagination, he brings in a binary possibility, forcing a dualism into the discourse, when speaking of images of form - ‘images of form, ‘perishable form, and vain images, and the becoming of surfaces.’ (Bachelard, YNG paper 2016). As Yonat tells us Bachalards ‘images of form are referred to as ‘perishable form, and vain images, and the becoming of surfaces.’ (Bachelard, YNG paper 2016)
2) Barad unpicks 3 points raised by her interviewer, that new materialism shows how the mind is always already material (the mind is an idea of the body), how matter is necessarily something of the mind (the mind has the body as its object), and how nature and culture are always already “naturecultures” (Donna Haraway’s term). New materialism opposes the transcendental and humanist (dualist) traditions.
3)Descartes, mind walk (3), gives us a position of binary, a dualistic approach of a separating existence of mind from body. He states ‘in infancy our mind was so tightly bound to the body as not to be open to any experience (cogitationbus) except mere feelings of what affected the body’ (Anscombe and Geach 1954 Descartes Philosophical writings, extracts from Principles of Philosophy part 1 First Philosophy.R. LXXl p 196). He goes on to say “In adult life the mind is no longer wholly slave to the body and does not relate everything to that’
4) Lacan, mind walk (4), speaks of the Real as one of his three parts of our psyche structures. The other two being The Imaginary order and the Symbolic Order. It is the Real that interests me and I forward to
5) John Cussans, mind walk (5), spoke of the Lacanian Real in his lecture at WSA 2003 Symbolic Wounds and the Impossible Real – The Paradox of Traumatic Realism in Televisual Representations of Terror. (I have a personal copy of this text should you wish to read it). He claims here that ‘cinema was the beginning of the end of Real’ He says Real is increasingly difficult to experience, he suggests it is only ‘approached by means of trauma using images of violence'.
6) Steve Dixon, mind walk (6), speaking from a perspective of contemporary cultural and cybercultural theories states ‘The bifurcatory division between body and mind has lead to an objectified redefinition of the human subject - the 'person' - into an abstracted, depersonalised and increasingly dehumanised physical object.’
7) Roboticists, mind walk (7) These notions fit with the idea of machine posthumans spoken of by roboticists including Hand Moravec, where there are very few original experiences, they are mostly held as data in a huge computer ‘out there somewhere’, offering us the raw cold data of “experiences” had over the generations.
Taking the notion that there is a ‘freeing’ of mind from body, suggested by Descartes, as the human develops from infancy, is it possible that this freeing trend of the mind that is spoken of, has by means of the advances in technology continued to move away from the body, to a position very different from that of infancy, to where the mind becomes so (Lingis, 1999) bound to the body as to say it can position the body more like 'the slave' of the mind; a position whereby the mind has so 'freed' itself of the body as to create for itself a distance from the body?
Cybernetic Theorists posit 'body has been increasingly conceptualised as an object divorced from the mind, and emerging discourses on the virtual body and 'disembodiment' reinforce and extend the Cartesian split' they further suggest that, 'we could already be posthuman' in such ways as to accept 'that when animated in performative action, the virtual human body (as opposed to a computer simulated body) is perceived by viewers empathetically as always-already embodied material flesh.' (Dixon S 2003 Absent fiend, Internet Theatre, Posthuman Bodies and the Interactive Void Presecesite [online])
There are various degrees of mind/body relationships described, from Barad where New materialism opposes the transcendental and humanist (dualist) traditions, to the Cyberculturalists and Roboticists who dismiss the body as an add on and dispensable.
I suggest the core of these positions is the focus of Bachelard’s work on material Imagination and his form images of imagination.
Two sets of images, material as Bachelard tells of and non-material that I define as sourced from within photographs, cinema, video, any images within the brain where the body of the person has not experienced the images in the material world those sourced.
8) The areas of the brain dealing with both is not sufficiently sophisticated to distinguish between material and non-material images, giving us non-material imagination in opposition to material imagination, removed from the Real of Lacan where Cussans talks of the end of the Real. A lack of distinction that creates a move of divorcing mind from body. With this lack of sophistication, unable to keep abreast of technological developments our brain leaves our mind at the influence of non material images, imagination and no poetic images. A movement away from Phenonemology and mataerial Imagination, where a society shifts to accepting instead the data.
If we accept the characteristics of matter and the power of material imagination as functions of our human material existence, the converse, in accepting the properties of the non-material is in the ascendancy, what is ahead for humanity?
At this time my position is that Phenomenology and Imagination are all that lies between us and de-humanisation.
9) That going forward, the notion of the posthuman subject offers some positive thought and hope for humanity with the erasing of the dualities that have been and still are so destructive.
Click here for list of bibliography
by Yvonne Jones
Tessa Atton I Jane Bennett I Belinda Mitchell I Yonat Nitzan-Green I Noriko Suzuki-Bosco
***
This session is something of a patchwork quilt. Which I hope will do two things one be of interest to the group and two unpick some of the ideas weaved in my ‘Mind Walk’.
Bachelard says ‘in addition to the images of form… there are… images of matter, direct images, of matter’ (Bachelard quoted in Yonat Nitzan-Green PIRG session April 2016).
Images of form resonate with me across wider fields of texts. I want to open a conversation on these other-than-material images and draw them into a focus for non-material imagination (my term), that is to say, imagination using, or processing images that have been collected in a non-directly experiential way. I am drawing a line, a difference between images received through materiality, and those received without the materiality of the content that gives rise to poetic imagination spoken of by Bachelard; the non direct , non material images offered from within photographs, cinema, video, any images reaching the brain where the body of the person has not experienced the images in the material world. I want to explore how these images could affect the human unit.
I have constructed a ‘Mind Walk’ map with numbers and supporting list. I am looking for commonalities with regard a consensus across thinkers over time and much to my surprise, recalling my scepticism of earlier days, a possible scientific relationship that reinforces Bachelard’s material imagination and the poetic image.
On mind map: Where to start???
1) Looking at my mind walk, Bachalard (1) is associated with the word direct (material experience) leading to material imagination, he brings in a binary possibility, forcing a dualism into the discourse, when speaking of images of form - ‘images of form, ‘perishable form, and vain images, and the becoming of surfaces.’ (Bachelard, YNG paper 2016). As Yonat tells us Bachalards ‘images of form are referred to as ‘perishable form, and vain images, and the becoming of surfaces.’ (Bachelard, YNG paper 2016)
2) Barad unpicks 3 points raised by her interviewer, that new materialism shows how the mind is always already material (the mind is an idea of the body), how matter is necessarily something of the mind (the mind has the body as its object), and how nature and culture are always already “naturecultures” (Donna Haraway’s term). New materialism opposes the transcendental and humanist (dualist) traditions.
3)Descartes, mind walk (3), gives us a position of binary, a dualistic approach of a separating existence of mind from body. He states ‘in infancy our mind was so tightly bound to the body as not to be open to any experience (cogitationbus) except mere feelings of what affected the body’ (Anscombe and Geach 1954 Descartes Philosophical writings, extracts from Principles of Philosophy part 1 First Philosophy.R. LXXl p 196). He goes on to say “In adult life the mind is no longer wholly slave to the body and does not relate everything to that’
4) Lacan, mind walk (4), speaks of the Real as one of his three parts of our psyche structures. The other two being The Imaginary order and the Symbolic Order. It is the Real that interests me and I forward to
5) John Cussans, mind walk (5), spoke of the Lacanian Real in his lecture at WSA 2003 Symbolic Wounds and the Impossible Real – The Paradox of Traumatic Realism in Televisual Representations of Terror. (I have a personal copy of this text should you wish to read it). He claims here that ‘cinema was the beginning of the end of Real’ He says Real is increasingly difficult to experience, he suggests it is only ‘approached by means of trauma using images of violence'.
6) Steve Dixon, mind walk (6), speaking from a perspective of contemporary cultural and cybercultural theories states ‘The bifurcatory division between body and mind has lead to an objectified redefinition of the human subject - the 'person' - into an abstracted, depersonalised and increasingly dehumanised physical object.’
7) Roboticists, mind walk (7) These notions fit with the idea of machine posthumans spoken of by roboticists including Hand Moravec, where there are very few original experiences, they are mostly held as data in a huge computer ‘out there somewhere’, offering us the raw cold data of “experiences” had over the generations.
Taking the notion that there is a ‘freeing’ of mind from body, suggested by Descartes, as the human develops from infancy, is it possible that this freeing trend of the mind that is spoken of, has by means of the advances in technology continued to move away from the body, to a position very different from that of infancy, to where the mind becomes so (Lingis, 1999) bound to the body as to say it can position the body more like 'the slave' of the mind; a position whereby the mind has so 'freed' itself of the body as to create for itself a distance from the body?
Cybernetic Theorists posit 'body has been increasingly conceptualised as an object divorced from the mind, and emerging discourses on the virtual body and 'disembodiment' reinforce and extend the Cartesian split' they further suggest that, 'we could already be posthuman' in such ways as to accept 'that when animated in performative action, the virtual human body (as opposed to a computer simulated body) is perceived by viewers empathetically as always-already embodied material flesh.' (Dixon S 2003 Absent fiend, Internet Theatre, Posthuman Bodies and the Interactive Void Presecesite [online])
There are various degrees of mind/body relationships described, from Barad where New materialism opposes the transcendental and humanist (dualist) traditions, to the Cyberculturalists and Roboticists who dismiss the body as an add on and dispensable.
I suggest the core of these positions is the focus of Bachelard’s work on material Imagination and his form images of imagination.
Two sets of images, material as Bachelard tells of and non-material that I define as sourced from within photographs, cinema, video, any images within the brain where the body of the person has not experienced the images in the material world those sourced.
8) The areas of the brain dealing with both is not sufficiently sophisticated to distinguish between material and non-material images, giving us non-material imagination in opposition to material imagination, removed from the Real of Lacan where Cussans talks of the end of the Real. A lack of distinction that creates a move of divorcing mind from body. With this lack of sophistication, unable to keep abreast of technological developments our brain leaves our mind at the influence of non material images, imagination and no poetic images. A movement away from Phenonemology and mataerial Imagination, where a society shifts to accepting instead the data.
If we accept the characteristics of matter and the power of material imagination as functions of our human material existence, the converse, in accepting the properties of the non-material is in the ascendancy, what is ahead for humanity?
At this time my position is that Phenomenology and Imagination are all that lies between us and de-humanisation.
9) That going forward, the notion of the posthuman subject offers some positive thought and hope for humanity with the erasing of the dualities that have been and still are so destructive.
Click here for list of bibliography
Reflections and Feedback
Tessa Atton
Yvonne gave us much food for thought in her “patchwork quilt” (Yvonne’s description) of stimuli for conversation. Positing a future in which the mind experiences only the virtual as technology has swept material experience aside and destroyed imagination, leaving the body and mind totally disintegrated, Yvonne’s aim was to raise awareness of the risks of becoming post-human and to see more clearly what it is to be human.
Yvonne described a path from Descartes’ view that in infancy body and mind are totally integrated but separate with growth, to Bachelard’s further separation in the mind of form and material imagination, to Cussans’ assertion that it is gradually becoming more difficult to experience phenomena as the Lacanian Real becomes less easy to access. This led to Cussans’ view that the Real is dead, replaced by cyberculture and virtual experience (Dixon) and thus to the post-human (Moravec) where the body is simply the container of the mind and has no direct experiences: the non-human.
This led to a lively conversation about memory – real and false, about imagination – material and non-material, and about the potentialities afforded by technology for different uses of the body; Belinda had recently attended a lecture given by Stelarc, who described the contemporary body as a portal into the virtual world. Whilst it is true that twenty-first century technology can facilitate Stelarc’s experiments, it still needed his imagination to create them: perhaps we still have grounds.
Jane Bennett
Using a ‘mind walk’ was a very interesting way of introducing and relating the different aspects of your argument. It added a further, visual dimension to the text under discussion and revealed so much more about how you were thinking. It took me a while to realise that you were playing devil’s advocate with some of the texts you introduced and I should have liked to hear more about Katherine Hayles’ ideas as I think these appear more aligned with what you were trying to explain. In an article that reflects on the increasing interest in transhumanism in the twelve years since publication of ‘How We Became Posthuman’, she proposes science fiction as a site of debate about possible futures. ‘Imagining the future is never a politically innocent or ethically neutral act. To arrive at the future we want, we must first be able to imagine it as fully as we can, including all the contexts in which its consequences will play out.’ (‘Wrestling with Transhumanism’, http://www.metanexus.net/essay/h-wrestling-transhumanism, Sept 2011.). For me, you achieved your aim of raising awareness of the threat to humanity of sliding away from the materiality of the body.
Belinda Mitchell
I found it really helpful to hear about the materiality of your work. In particular your description of the dialogue between your two selves, one on video and the real you. Following on from this you began to talk about your subsequent engagement with paint, I wondered what was materialising through the paint and if this more tactile engagement was a metaphor for your material presence. I thought about the emerging of an embodied self after the trauma your body has been through.
It was grounding to understand the discussion in relation to your practice and through different parts of you. For me 3 parts emerged from your work, one on the screen, another through a script and the third a material presence.
I really like the Stellarc comment about bodies being portals to the internet and that we are now moving beyond the boundaries of our bodies, and think that this connects to your work. He was over here at the Bartlett to discuss new architectures relating to the body. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0802/08022003
Yonat Nitzan-Green
While Descartes explains memory as ‘traces of former sensations’ (YJ, 2016, p. 7), thus the path between memory and senses is clear, imagination is described as ‘other bodily conditions that are more active when we sleep or daydream’. Imagination, here and in the following parts of Yvonne’s text, is considered from the mind’s perspective; with the mind’s ‘tools’; excluding a consideration from the soul’s perspective.
Gaston Bachelard shows us the etymological confusion between the word ‘image’ and the word ‘imagination’. He writes: ‘… the word image, in the works of psychologists, is surrounded with confusion: we see images, we reproduce images, we retain images in our memory. The image is everything except a direct product of the imagination.’ (GB, The Poetics of Space, 1994).
The word that is rightly associated with imagination is ‘imaginary’. Bachelrd writes: ‘The fundamental word corresponding to imagination is not image, but imaginary. The value of an image is measured by the extent of its imaginary radiance.’ (GB, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, 2005). This can be contrasted with the mind’s approach to imagination which harnesses the imagination to perception of reality and grants it a value-judgment as ‘reliable’ or ‘unreliable’, ‘false’ or ‘true’.
Noriko Suzuki-Bosco
Yvonne pointed out that what she hoped from her session was for us to think about the consequences of our minds being influenced more and more by ‘non-material’ imagination, which Yvonne defines as sourced from ‘photographs, cinema, video or any images within the brain where the body of the person has not experienced the images in the material world those sourced.’
It is a warning and questioning of the authenticity of de-humanised experience, where physical matter plays no part in the condition for rational and objective knowledge making. What kind of imagination, indeed, what kind of human communicative understanding are being created through ‘non-material’ imagination?
‘New Materialists’ such as Karen Barad have attempted to dissolve the dichotomy of subject and object through ideas such as ‘intra-action’ and ‘agential realism’. These concepts of relational ontology opens up space for possibilities of relationships (or entanglements in Barad’s words) that should, I feel, embrace imagining and reconfiguring of the world through non-material agencies just as much as it is through enactment with material matters. However though, what humans do with imaginations derived either from material or non-material intera-actions lie with human responsibility. Although New Materialists attempts to posit a non-humancentric world by not having agency localized in the human subject, the decision and ethics of how humans should behave, I believe, still very much lies with the human conscience.
Tessa Atton
Yvonne gave us much food for thought in her “patchwork quilt” (Yvonne’s description) of stimuli for conversation. Positing a future in which the mind experiences only the virtual as technology has swept material experience aside and destroyed imagination, leaving the body and mind totally disintegrated, Yvonne’s aim was to raise awareness of the risks of becoming post-human and to see more clearly what it is to be human.
Yvonne described a path from Descartes’ view that in infancy body and mind are totally integrated but separate with growth, to Bachelard’s further separation in the mind of form and material imagination, to Cussans’ assertion that it is gradually becoming more difficult to experience phenomena as the Lacanian Real becomes less easy to access. This led to Cussans’ view that the Real is dead, replaced by cyberculture and virtual experience (Dixon) and thus to the post-human (Moravec) where the body is simply the container of the mind and has no direct experiences: the non-human.
This led to a lively conversation about memory – real and false, about imagination – material and non-material, and about the potentialities afforded by technology for different uses of the body; Belinda had recently attended a lecture given by Stelarc, who described the contemporary body as a portal into the virtual world. Whilst it is true that twenty-first century technology can facilitate Stelarc’s experiments, it still needed his imagination to create them: perhaps we still have grounds.
Jane Bennett
Using a ‘mind walk’ was a very interesting way of introducing and relating the different aspects of your argument. It added a further, visual dimension to the text under discussion and revealed so much more about how you were thinking. It took me a while to realise that you were playing devil’s advocate with some of the texts you introduced and I should have liked to hear more about Katherine Hayles’ ideas as I think these appear more aligned with what you were trying to explain. In an article that reflects on the increasing interest in transhumanism in the twelve years since publication of ‘How We Became Posthuman’, she proposes science fiction as a site of debate about possible futures. ‘Imagining the future is never a politically innocent or ethically neutral act. To arrive at the future we want, we must first be able to imagine it as fully as we can, including all the contexts in which its consequences will play out.’ (‘Wrestling with Transhumanism’, http://www.metanexus.net/essay/h-wrestling-transhumanism, Sept 2011.). For me, you achieved your aim of raising awareness of the threat to humanity of sliding away from the materiality of the body.
Belinda Mitchell
I found it really helpful to hear about the materiality of your work. In particular your description of the dialogue between your two selves, one on video and the real you. Following on from this you began to talk about your subsequent engagement with paint, I wondered what was materialising through the paint and if this more tactile engagement was a metaphor for your material presence. I thought about the emerging of an embodied self after the trauma your body has been through.
It was grounding to understand the discussion in relation to your practice and through different parts of you. For me 3 parts emerged from your work, one on the screen, another through a script and the third a material presence.
I really like the Stellarc comment about bodies being portals to the internet and that we are now moving beyond the boundaries of our bodies, and think that this connects to your work. He was over here at the Bartlett to discuss new architectures relating to the body. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0802/08022003
Yonat Nitzan-Green
While Descartes explains memory as ‘traces of former sensations’ (YJ, 2016, p. 7), thus the path between memory and senses is clear, imagination is described as ‘other bodily conditions that are more active when we sleep or daydream’. Imagination, here and in the following parts of Yvonne’s text, is considered from the mind’s perspective; with the mind’s ‘tools’; excluding a consideration from the soul’s perspective.
Gaston Bachelard shows us the etymological confusion between the word ‘image’ and the word ‘imagination’. He writes: ‘… the word image, in the works of psychologists, is surrounded with confusion: we see images, we reproduce images, we retain images in our memory. The image is everything except a direct product of the imagination.’ (GB, The Poetics of Space, 1994).
The word that is rightly associated with imagination is ‘imaginary’. Bachelrd writes: ‘The fundamental word corresponding to imagination is not image, but imaginary. The value of an image is measured by the extent of its imaginary radiance.’ (GB, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, 2005). This can be contrasted with the mind’s approach to imagination which harnesses the imagination to perception of reality and grants it a value-judgment as ‘reliable’ or ‘unreliable’, ‘false’ or ‘true’.
Noriko Suzuki-Bosco
Yvonne pointed out that what she hoped from her session was for us to think about the consequences of our minds being influenced more and more by ‘non-material’ imagination, which Yvonne defines as sourced from ‘photographs, cinema, video or any images within the brain where the body of the person has not experienced the images in the material world those sourced.’
It is a warning and questioning of the authenticity of de-humanised experience, where physical matter plays no part in the condition for rational and objective knowledge making. What kind of imagination, indeed, what kind of human communicative understanding are being created through ‘non-material’ imagination?
‘New Materialists’ such as Karen Barad have attempted to dissolve the dichotomy of subject and object through ideas such as ‘intra-action’ and ‘agential realism’. These concepts of relational ontology opens up space for possibilities of relationships (or entanglements in Barad’s words) that should, I feel, embrace imagining and reconfiguring of the world through non-material agencies just as much as it is through enactment with material matters. However though, what humans do with imaginations derived either from material or non-material intera-actions lie with human responsibility. Although New Materialists attempts to posit a non-humancentric world by not having agency localized in the human subject, the decision and ethics of how humans should behave, I believe, still very much lies with the human conscience.