Do imagined phenomena do anything like reside in anything like a world? Casey introduces the idea of a "world-frame" to describe the situatedness of imagined objects of consciousness. I don't fully believe in the world of perception that Casey portrays in contrast to the world-frame. As ever, it seems, I am uncertain as to what exactly constitutes a world. Consequently I am reticent about adopting his terminology. His description of the situatedness of imagined phenomena, however, deserves our attention. I quote at length.
When we attend to the specific content of acts of imagining, we see it to be describable first of all in terms of the entities, events, and states of affairs with which we are already familiar from preceding consideration of the act phase. Such specifiable factors constitute the core of what we imagine–its "noematic nucleus" in Husserl's term. But a closer scrutiny reveals other components of imagined content as well, components on which the imaginer typically does not focus but which are nonetheless nonthematically present to his imagining consciousness. These non-nuclear components of imagined content constitute what we shall call a "world-frame" for particular imagined entities, events, and states of affairs. For none of these latter appear or occur in an experiential vacuum. They present themselves as positioned, however indeterminately, in an immediately surrounding zone of presentation.
In its severely delimited and delimiting character, the world-frame is unlike the continuously unfolding and ultimately unlimited world of perception. The perceived world is a massive, all-inclusive whole–so encompassing in fact that there is finally only one such world. This world persists throughout our many perceivings of it, and can never be exhausted by any finite series of such perceivings. It is a world to which we return again and again as an abiding fons et origo.
No such originative and stable world underlies the specific content of imagining. No single experiential plenum persists from one imaginative presentation to the next, linking such presentations as presentations of one all-encompassing world. Rather, each presentation carries with it its own special situatedness. Such situatedness is so shifting and unstable that it cannot even be regarded as constituting a field, at least insofar as "field" implies a persisting plane that underlies and extends beyond the particular items that appear in it. Unlike, say, a perceptual field, the world-frame of imagination has no enduring extensiveness: it appears always and only as the proximal locale of imagined content, as its immediate context. Thus the world-frame is sketchy and schematic in character, offering to the imaginer patches of space and stretches of time instead of a single coherent spatio-temporal continuum. Because of its noncontinuous and nonlasting nature, the world-frame cannot be considered as presenting the imaginer with a world in any sense comparable to the perceived world.
(Imagining, pp. 50-51, Casey's emphases)
As indicated, I doubt the stability, plenitude, duration, extent, and inexhaustibility of the world of perception, though by no means would I close the book on on these features. If we attend to our imaginations and let that experience guide our descriptions of the worlds of imagination, such as they are, we may in fact be led to question whether or to what extent our ordinary worlds of perception are at root worlds of the imagination. Might it not be the case that a phenomenon like inexhaustibility originates in the imagination rather than in some form of brute perception? Further, is it warranted to claim that perceptual worlds abide while imaginary worlds evanesce? Can consciousness really be so simple?
Let's imagine Pegasus again and keep that experience in the margins of our awareness as we continue reading.
In view of its discontinuity and fragmentariness, we might be tempted to apply to the world-frame Sartre's graphic term "anti-world." But this is to go too far. Although the world-frames of imaginative presentations lack the depth, breadth, and persistence of the perceived world, they do present themselves as evanescent constellations of specific imagined contents, as momentary mini-worlds of imaginative experience. Thus if world-frames do not count as worlds in any strict sense, they are at least worldlike insofar as they provide suitable and fitting frameworks for what we imagine.
Despite their ephemerality (they perish at the end of each act of imagining), world-frames function in a worldlike way by situating imagined content–giving it, if not a name, at least a local habitation. This situating capacity derives from the spatializing and temporalizing powers of world-frames, that is, their ability to establish a specifically imaginal space and imaginal time. Such space and time lack the universality of the a priori space and time that, as Kant endeavored to show, serve to make the perceptual world intuitively present to the senses yet infinite in extent. But this does not mean that imaginal space and time are merely "quasi" in character, as Husserl claims. They are not posited as if they were the space and time of perception–which is to imply that they are nothing in themselves. Nor do they represent a strictly "unreal" sense of time and space. Rather, each of these dimensions of the imaginative presentation has its own distinctive character and plays a special role in implementing and specifying the world-frame. For it is due to this character and this role that the world-frame becomes a genuinely framing factor withing the imaginative presentation, enabling each specific item of imagined content to occupy a certain position within the presentation.
(pp.51-52, Casey's emphases)
I'm picking up on a contradiction between the ephemerality of the image and the habitation of the image that I'd like to explore. In my marginal notes I've called attention to repetition, the recurrence of images, world renewals and habits of imagination. When you imagined Pegasus again did you notice any recurring images? Did you have a sense that Pegasus inhabited any re-cognizable world or worlds? Well, here's a question about experiential multiplicities. Can you re-cognize multiple dimensions of imaginative presentation? If you could describe the chronotope corresponding to the complex genre of our imaginations of Pegasus would you be satisfied that you had covered all manner of the extensivity of imagination? What does habitation do to extensivity? (Perhaps it neither breaks it up nor prolongs it, but constitutes it all at once. I don't know.) Think for a moment of intensivity, and think of habitation as an intensification. What does intensity do? What does it do with respect to the constitution of worlds? Are worlds more or less intense, or does intensity simply not pertain to worlds, in which case a question of the habitation of worlds, since we have proposed to define habitation in light of intensification, would be left hanging? Recall Nancy's intensive re- of re-pre-sent-at-ion. Is there such a thing as a presentation that isn't in some sense already inhabited, already constituted in intensity? If something like a pure perception were to exist, in contradistinction to an imagination, it might resemble an uninhabited presentation, a re-presentation, or a kind of meontic representation. It would have to be startling, I think. Extraordinary. This is one reason I suspect that ordinarily we inhabit imaginary worlds, although I reserve doubts about the possibilities of repetition, strictly speaking.
My definition of the occasion of imagination is looser than Casey's, my sense of the act of imagination more amorphous, more ambiguous. Am I projecting ambiguity onto imaginary phenomena or are they intrinsically ambiguous? Does my sense that imagination, memory, habit and cognition operate together blind me to an appreciation of imagination itself? At bottom perhaps is the issue of how to define an act of consciousness–as if that could be accomplished in a single gesture. Casey speaks of the "multiplicity of the mental," which he defines as "the mind's proclivity for expressing itself polymorphically, resisting reduction to monistic schemes and structures" (p. 60). Do worlds have proclivities? Are they constituted by proclivities, or through proclivities, in such a way as to warrant being called polymorphic? How much distance is there finally between the polymorphic and the discontinuous, between metamorphosis and intensification, between habitation as formative and habitation as resistance to form?
Labels: Casey, habitation, imagination, Pegasus, repetition, representation, world
A scene from the film Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle:
Kumar: How were Katie Holmes' tits?
Goldstein: You know the Holocaust?
Kumar: Yeah?
Goldstein: Picture the opposite of that!
Kumar: Nice!
This is, if one turns it around as one must, a voyeuristic image of the camps produced by a voyeuristic culture. It might also fairly be called juvenile. If the opposite of juvenile is mature–words like "experienced" and "wise" also spring to mind, perhaps unfairly–what is the opposite of voyeuristic?
Jean-Luc Nancy, the French philosopher, wants us to think of the Shoah as "an ultimate crisis of representation" ("Forbidden Representation," in The Ground of the Image, p. 34). He presents us with a particular understanding of representation (or rather two entwined ways of understanding representation). He notes that, "The re- of the representation is not repetitive but intensive (to be more precise, the intitially iterative value of the prefix re- in Latinate languages is often transformed into an intensive or, as one says, 'frequentive' value)" (p. 35). I'm sure I'll be returning to this idea at a later time. Here I'll just paraphrase Nancy's argument about what representation is not: it is not the repetition of a thing, or the reintroduction of a thing in a context that differs from its original context; it is not recontextualization. He says that it is essentially the "presentation of an open absence within the given itself" (p. 33). He continues:
Representation is not a simulacrum; it is not the replacement of the original thing–in fact, it has nothing to do with a thing. It is the presentation of what does not amount to a presence, given and completed (or given completed), or it is the bringing to presence of an intelligible reality (or form) by the formal mediation of a sensory reality. The two ways of understanding it do not exactly coincide with each other, neither in the divisions they afford nor in their intimate entanglement. Nonetheless, they must be taken together, and the one taken against the other, in order to think the dispute, or the secret, of "representation."
(ibidem, Nancy's emphasis)
Nancy's description of Nazism utilizes some familiar tropes, including the representation of the Aryan body.
The figure of the "Aryan" is the very principle of this [Nazi] vision; it entails nothing less than the presentation of man regenerated as super-man. I propose that we call this regime "super-representation" to emphasize that it is not simply a matter of representing triumphant humanity as a type (as is also the case, in the same era, with Stalinist art). Rather, what is involved here is the (re)presentation of a type that is itself a (re)presentative, not of a function like the hammer and sickle, but of a nature or an essence (the Aryan body). It is in this body that the presence of a self-creating humanity would truly consist (a humanity that is, in this sense, divine, but with no separation of the divine, that is, with no "sanctity"). The Aryan body is an idea identical to a presence, or it is the presence of an idea without remainder: precisely what the West has, for centuries, thought of as the idol. In the terms employed by Hitler, moreover, it is called "idealism": the idealism of the founder of civilization (Kulturbegründer), whose supreme virtue is that he gives himself over to the service of the community upon which he has bestowed "the civilizing spirit." "The Aryan alone can be considered as the representative [Vertreter] of the race of the founders of civilization." "Civilization," here, has no other meaning than the conformity of a world to its representation. The Aryan is the representative of representation, absolutely, and it is in this precise sense that I propose the term "super-representation."
(pp. 38-39, my bold)
Why aren't representation, idolatry, iconograhy or propaganda adequate to describe Nazi imagery? The inadequacy of these terms follows from Nancy's casting of Western civilization. If Western civilization is a representation its excess can only be superrepresentation, and excess is one of the tropes one uses to talk about Nazism, especially if one is a French intellectual writing in the last twenty-five years. (Kristeva showed us an example of this, to give just one name.) But I'm using shorthand, which means I may well end up putting my foot in my mouth. Nancy actually calls the West an event and a configuration. He says it's a "configuration whose history is rushing toward its completion before us, having already undergone the total crisis that beset the order of representation" (p. 35). Is there a question here of a world conforming to its representations? (I'm aware of playing on two senses of "its," and also pointing "its" in different directions, i.e at the West, at its iconography, and at Nancy the iconographer– how many ways are there for a representation to belong to a world?)
Nancy brings a great erudition to the question of how one describes the Nazi camps. I can't match his erudition at this time, nor can I pretend to offer much in the way of a critique. I have qualms, and I will share those with you. I question what erudition accomplishes in this case. I question Nancy's strong stand against allowing for the ineffable (the "idolatorous mysticism of the 'ineffable,'" he says), and I suspect that his writing on the topic has actually scored a point for the other team. Possibly, I wonder, Nancy has misnamed the ineffable as "absence" (or absense). I don't know. There may be something to say here about female nudity in the movies and superrepresentation, but I'm not going to be the one to say it–what I have are qualms, and I'd like to talk about having qualms.
Is the qualm mystical? Is to speak of qualms to reject philosophy? Frequently a person who has qualms will keep her thoughts to herself. My inner voice warns me, Fido, just because you have a qualm doesn't mean you have something to say. Don't upset people for no good reason. Don't upset yourself. I may and probably will upset myself–after all, these are my qualms. Now here I am talking about the qualm itself and my question is, What is the proper attitude to take towards the qualm? Is it good to eliminate qualms? Can they be interrogated without seeking to dispel them, to somehow resolve them as if they were logical contradictions?
There is some uncertainty about the etymology of the word qualm, an ambiguity about the word itself. In one sense, the sense that I initially had in mind, qualm is related to an early modern German word qualm meaning "swoon, faint, half-conscious or unconscious state" (that's according to the OED). The half-conscious intrigues me. My qualms about representions of Nazi Europe's death camps may be only half-conscious, which is not to say that they aren't meaningful or can't be (half-)said. My qualms themselves may be a psychic indication of halving and its remainder. They may themselves be halved. Qualm is probably related to a Danish or Swedish word kvalm meaning "nausea, sickness, or indisposition." Is indisposition like a bad hexis? It's striking that there would be a word that implied feeling intensely an indisposition. The implication is there in a meaning that comes out of the word in later centuries, "pang" or "distress." To be qualmed is to suffer. (Ethically then it would seem that the proper course of action when confronted with a qualm is to do away with it because it causes suffering. More on that in a moment.) There is another, obsolete word qualm that goes back to Old English (and Old High German). The Old English cwealm meant, in part, "torment, pain, injury." The Old Saxon qualm meant death of a violent nature, and the Old High German qualm meant "torment, torture, (rare) downfall, perishing." The obsolete qualm meant violent death or murder. It also meant "general or widespread death or mortality; pestilence, plague," and, in an extended sense "calamity" or "disaster." Qualm appeared in the compounds qualm-stow, a place of execution, and qualm-house, "a house of torture; a prison, esp. one for those condemned to death" (Incidentally, the sequel to Harold and Kumar go to White Castle will be titled Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay).
Sometimes I feel like the world interrogates me. Language interrogates me. How do I feel about the existence of qualm houses? How do I feel about qualms? Blasé? (A word of uncertain etymology, btw.) No, that might imply that at some time in the past I actually found qualms enjoyable. How familiar am I, personally, with qualms? I say I feel them, but my feelings are half-conscious. If you said to me, "Fido, here is your chance to escape your qualms, leave them behind, be free," why on earth wouldn't I follow your lead? I am drawn to my qualms and they to me, half-drawn, half-dead, half-qualms. What is half of a violent death? The other half of a violent death? What is half a binary opposition?
It would be wise to know what saying does. Before even speaking of the ineffable, it would be wise to know what saying is and what it does. I don't even know who is saying this, and surely who is saying must figure into what saying does. I feel there must be something ineffable because I can't say it, whoever I is. Have I said too much to count myself among even the half-wise? Here is the ethical problem: there are worse things than qualms. And philosophy may yet offer worse alternatives to the ineffable.
Labels: death, death camps, excess, ineffable, Nancy, nudity, representation