The Imaginary

About: The Imaginary is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4807 publications have been published within this topic receiving 87663 citations.

Geometry of imaginary spaces.

Abstract: "Imaginary space" is a three-dimensional visual awareness that feels different from what you experience when you open your eyes in broad daylight. Imaginary spaces are experienced when you look "into" (as distinct from "at") a picture for instance. Empirical research suggests that imaginary spaces have a tight, coherent structure, that is very different from that of three-dimensional Euclidean space. This has to be due to some constraints on psychogenesis, that is the development of awareness. I focus on the topic of how, and where, the construction of such geometrical structures, that figure prominently in one's awareness, is implemented in the brain. My overall conclusion-with notable exceptions-is that present day science has no clue. I indicate some possibly rewarding directions of research.

Affect and Society in Precolonial Africa

Abstract: "If the study of political and religious institutions, economic and social patterns , philosophical and scientific ideas is indispensable for an understanding of what our civilization has been and is, why shouldn't the same be true of the study of our feelings, among them both imaginary and real, for a thousand years? "- Octavio Paz, Nobel-prize winning Mexican poet1In their 1920 ethnography of the Ila, Reverend Edwin Smith and District Commissioner Andrew Dale described as "prostitution" the Ila institution of kuweza lubono mung'anda (lit. "to hunt for wealth at home," also called "hunting cattle"), in which a wife and husband agree that she take lovers to attract gifts shared between them. Smith and Dale categorized kuweza lubono as prostitution because they associated the sensuous experience of sex with material exchange or the sincerity of affection, but could not imagine a link between all three without negating the sincerity of lovers' affection.2 Kuweza lubono was all the more complicated because the instigator might be the wife or the husband, confounding categories, such as female "victim" or male "cuckold." The practice of kuweza lubono inspired in Ila husbands and wives jealousy over both personal relationships and the material gains.3 Yet, kuweza lubono was also a source of husbands' pride in industrious wives who accumulated great stores of wealth and wives' satisfaction in both the material and social success facilitated by kuweza lubono. ,4 Indeed, for Ila speakers, the verb kuweza also described the "seeking for wealth and power" in the quest to establish one's social position and the ever-present possibility of failure, conjuring up the uncertainties of striving for social mobility.5 Women often developed deep attachment to their kuweza lubono partners, cultivating such relationships over long periods of time, and even shifting into lubambo relationships (publicly acknowledged lovers) with them.Ila men and women instructed Smith and Dale on meeting economic and social aspirations through kuweza lubono and teach us about entanglements between the sensuous, the affective, and the material in human relationships in Bwila during the first years of the twentieth century. Their descriptions capture instances of affectivity with roots in precolonial life, however recent. The feelings, gifts, and sensory experiences shared or exchanged through kuweza lubono reveal new categories of historical actors, such as lovers, with the potential to bring a subjectivity rich in sensory experience and emotional depth to histories of the precolonial past. They dramatically recast what was at stake in processes common in histories of precolonial Africa, such as the circulation of wealth in the pursuit of social ties.Oral traditions, recovered burial sites, words' shifting meanings, and other residue of early African life also resonate with affectivity, but all too often our narratives of the deep African past do not capture the emotional experiences of the subjects who shared stories of estranged families and jealous husbands,6 who visited gravesites carrying worn pebbles to purposefully deposit on the newly mounded earth of fresh graves,7 and who drew on familiar concepts and words to name new sources of both terror and honor.8 Our precolonial histories, which illuminate the causal power of, for example, novel technologies and political institutions in explaining historical change, might seem dry and overly instrumental to colleagues (and students) studying more recent periods or other world regions because they lack the narrative depth of human emotion. Incorporating the affective dimensions of life into histories of early African societies holds great promise for bringing much needed subjectivity to central themes of early African history, making it "legible" to a broader audience,9 and for transforming how we understand the developments to which we already assign great explanatory power. Indeed, narratives about the development of political institutions, the spread of technologies like metallurgy, cattle keeping, and cereal cropping and even the familiar problem of the Bantu Expansions may well be comprehensible only when we know more about the subjective emotional stakes for the agents of these transformations. …

Ghosts in the Mirror: Colonialism and Creole Indeterminacy in Bronte and Sand

Abstract: | The colonial encounter raises myriad possibilities for reinscribing the terms of subjectivity in the post-colonial condition. Issues of alienation, difference and desire framed the imperial will to conquest, at the pinnacle of the colonial project in the midnineteenth century. Despite their differences, both France and Britain as European colonial powers came to represent the Creole as the unnamable third term, the impossible indeterminacy excluded by the colonial binary's neither/nor dyad. Because discursive form provided the key to authority and control over a myriad of people and places, literary tropes helped construct, elaborate, and reinforce a hierarchical, race-based discourse of inequality.This essay, then, compares the tropological subversion in unwonted reflections of the Creole in two nineteenth-century texts: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and George Sand's Indiana. Both texts seek to contain the complexities of the Creole by negating these disturbing, dangerously indeterminate figures whose subjectivity is paradoxically both unacknowledged and restrained, reflecting a colonial dyad that signifies metropolitan notions of lack and excess. For both Jane Eyre and Indiana-despite their disparate political and sociocultural contexts--are defined by a climactic subjective moment in which their female metropolitan protagonists are forced to give way to an instability signified by a Creole counterpart reflected in the mirror. When this Creole figure confronts the gendered metropolitan subject in the mirror of the colonial imagination, the resultant reversal and discursives undermine those presumptions of subjectivity and knowability that undergird the colonial site. Both scenes, then, inscribe critical contexts that allow us to question colonial binaries through their links to identity, alterity, and knowledge. Held in thrall to the comprehensive discourse of domination and desire in the colonial text, contemporary figures of racial division tended to subsume the "exotic" differences produced by the encounter with the Other, allowing metropolitan authors to ignore colonialism's nascent ambiguities and to appropriate a variety of figures of blackness as repressed elements of the social whole, constructing simulacra of identity that reveal to the reader the dependent framework of metropolitan subjectivity, and provoking the interwoven Creole complexities to increasingly critical strategies of substitution. Principles and patterns of literary re-presentation, then, help shape the imaginary alienation that marks colonial identity, as Homi Bhabha remarks, "The visibility of the racial/colonial Other is at once a point of identity ... and at the same time a problem.... [T]he recognition and disavowal of`difference' is always disturbed by the question of its re-presentation or construction" (1994, 81; emphasis in the original). As literary discourse re-presented the authoritarian violence of the colonial encounter through figures of cultural subjection and exclusion, transposing its hierarchies of self and Other into conventions of class and gender, metropolitan subjectivity was forced to confront the binary relation between metropolitan lack and Creole excess in the alterities of the Creole's erupting, unavowed, supplementary pluralities. The psychological interaction between the subject and its mirror reflection also informs the principles underlying this reading. To sum up, in Lacanian terms, the mirror stage acts as a site of misrecognition and alienation, a moment of crisis that also doubles as the source of secondary identifications. But while these Creole figures do not necessarily act as the metropolitan subject's ideal reflection, they do allow her to be defined through an external image, in a process which, as Kaja Silverman points out, "is to be defined through self-alienation." More important for this subject and her colonial context, perhaps, are the binary patterns of ambivalence that emerge from such structures; as Silverman continues, "it entertains a profoundly ambivalent relationship to that reflection . …