What Drawing and Painting Really Mean

The Phenomenology of Image and Gesture

Paul Crowther

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315311838
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

There are as many meanings to drawing and painting as there are cultural contexts for them to exist in. But this is not the end of the story. Drawings and paintings are made, and in their making embody unique meanings that transform our perception of space-time and sense of finitude. These meanings have not been addressed by art history or visual studies hitherto, and have only been considered indirectly by philosophers (mainly in the phenomenological tradition). If these intrinsic meanings are explained and further developed, then the philosophy of art practice is significantly enhanced. The present work, accordingly, is a phenomenology of how the gestural and digital creation of visual imagery generates self-transformation through aesthetic space.

1
The Cognitive Function of the Image

Far away is close at hand, in images of elsewhere.

(A piece of graffiti formerly on a wall outside Paddington Station, London, UK)

In order to make sense of the deep significance of pictorial drawing and painting, we have to start with a fundamental. Pictures are images made by gesture from physical materials and are thence autographic expressions of the imagination. However, the imagination is a cognitive capacity that has been much misunderstood. Few would hold, for example, that it has any great significance for the most central philosophical questions.

But this would be a mistake. Kant (as I have shown in detail elsewhere) rightly saw it as playing a necessary role in facilitating the correlation between knowledge of objects and self-consciousness.¹ However, not even Kant understood the pervasiveness of the imagination in the unity of self-consciousness. It is only by understanding this and its relation to the making of pictures that we will be able to understand the full philosophical meaning of drawing and painting.

As a mental activity, imagination is widely regarded as the capacity to represent what is not immediately present to perception. This can be analyzed in terms of four closely related aspects: spontaneity, indeterminacy, intentional repleteness (as I shall call it), and the quasi-sensory.² “Spontaneity” in this context means imagination’s generative aspect. To perceive an object, the object must be physically available to perception. We can choose how to position ourselves in relation to it, but in order for this to take place, the object must be there. To imagine an object, in contrast, is not at all dependent on the object’s presence. It is generated, rather, through a spontaneous act of mind and is thence subject to the will in terms that perception is not.

This factor is also implicated in imagination’s “indeterminacy.” Colin McGinn suggests that “The percept represents the world as dense, filled, continuous; but the image is gappy, coarse, discrete.”³ One explanation of this is that the image is psychologically generated rather than perceptually encountered. Even perception involves a selective orientation towards what is given, but how we interpret the given is constrained and stabilized by factors independent of the will—by the nature of what is present. Imagination is not so constrained or stabilized. The image is projected selectively on the basis of the imaginer’s own experience. This means that what is imagined is subject to emphases, de-emphases, discontinuities, and omissions based on its significance for the imaginer.

The “intentional repleteness” of imagining is another aspect of all this. What is “in” the image—in the sense of what it means—consists only of what we ourselves intend through the act of imagining. We create the image’s meaning through generating it, rather than discovering it through investigation.

The features just described apply to some kinds of thinking, too. This might suggest that imagination can be analyzed, ultimately, as a more complex mode of thought based on propositions or concepts. Again, McGinn is instructive. He suggests that:

the concept theory cannot do justice to the sensory character of the image … The mental state I am in when I form a visual image of my mother is very different from the state I would be in if I simply entertained a number of descriptive thoughts about her; indeed, I could do the latter without being able to imaginatively represent her at all. An image is no more reducible to acts of thinking than a percept is.⁴

On these terms, in other words, imagination has a quasi-sensory aspect that cannot be reduced to processes of thought in some abstract or discursive sense.

Now, understood in terms of these four characteristics, imagination can be given a fuller characterization. It is the mental capacity to represent—in quasi-sensory terms—what items and states of affairs might be like. Of course, there are some approaches to imagination which prefer to treat it as a broad family of competences.⁵ These certainly have value in exhibiting, as it were, the scope of mind. However, the sense of imagination that I have just outlined has more focussed explanatory potential for issues in both philosophy and cognitive psychology. Nigel J.T. Thomas brilliantly summarizes why:

Imagination … makes perception more than the mere physical stimulation of sense organs. It … produces mental imagery, visual and otherwise, which is what makes it possible for us to think outside the confines of our present perceptual reality, to consider memories of the past and possibilities for the future, and to weigh alternatives against one another. Thus, imagination makes possible all our thinking about what is, what has been, and, perhaps most important, what might be.⁶

In this chapter, I shall follow a thread that—in effect—runs through and binds all the factors noted by Thomas. It focusses on how the four aspects of imagination (just described) unify self-consciousness in an existential sense. This unifying function has been little noticed let alone explored in the literature.⁷

To get a preliminary sense of what is at issue here, it is worth considering a contemporary approach in cognitive psychology that tries to explain mental images without any reference to the aforementioned function. The Kosslyn, Thompson, and Ganis research team argue that “image representations are like those that underlie the experience of seeing something, but in the case of mental imagery these representations are based on information retrieved or formed from memory, not immediate sensory stimulation.”⁸

The Kosslyn-type approach holds that mental images understood in these terms have a depictive character with a distinctive informational value. In their words again, “depictive representations make explicit and accessible all aspects of shape and other perceptual qualities (such as colour and texture) as well as … spatial relations.”⁹

On these terms, then, the Kosslyn group’s basic position is as follows. If a stimulus is registered in perception, it can occasion a mental image which reproduces its perceptible character (in terms of shape, color, texture, etc.) without the presence of the stimulus itself. The image has this character because it uses, in large part, the same neural mechanisms and structures as perception. Through depicting the stimulus’s specific perceptible structure it is intrinsically meaningful. This is why it has informational value that is not dependent on propositional representation.

Kosslyn and his fellow researchers defend the informational significance of this against Zenon Pylyshyn and others, who argue that propositional features based on linguistic structure is basic to all mental representation, and that the depictive aspects of mental imagery are merely epiphenomenal upon this.¹⁰ However, whilst the Kosslyn group accept that propositional representation can be involved in some mental imagery, they insist that depictive content cannot be explained away as an epiphenomenon.

Now, Kosslyn et al. put a good case for mental imagery involving a representational mechanism other than the one sustaining language. But the fact that such imagery involves the same neuro-mechanisms as perception, does not warrant the further inference that mental imagery must be intrinsically depictive in character. The Kosslyn group assume that if such imagery is interpreted as depictive, then this is enough to explain its quasi-sensory character.

However, to depict something (in the usual sense of the term) involves making a likeness of that something’s selected aspects on the basis of learned conventions of artifice, and a publically accessible medium. True, the mental image also involves selective interpretation of its object, but it is psychologically generated. There is nothing of the made and enduring nature of the picture.¹¹ Indeed, as I will argue later, it is the felt lack of this, vis-à-vis mental imagery, that is implicated in our making and enjoyment of pictures.

It follows, then, that to explain mental imagery’s distinctive quasi-sensory character adequately, we must focus on the conditions of its psychological generation rather than the strained depictive analogy. This requires discussion of cognitive capacities much broader than those considered by the Kosslyn group. It requires reference to what I earlier called the existential aspect of the unity of self-consciousness.

My argument, accordingly, proceeds as follows. Part I is a phenomenology of the imagination that emphasizes the image’s psychologically generated and selective character. It argues that this enables a kind of blending between the object imagined and the subjective style in which it is imagined. Through imagining, the imaginer comes to inhabit the object.

Parts II and III respectively explore this inhabiting in relation to memory and the projective imagination of possibility per se. Part IV explains how making pictures takes imaginative inhabiting to a level of completion, and gives the visual imagination autonomy. The aesthetic significance of this completion is analyzed in detail. Part IV concludes that picture-making autographically completes a striving to understand and inhabit the world that is implicit in the generation of mental images as such.

Part I

Imagination can evoke sensory modalities of touch, sound, odor, or taste and, even more importantly, enable us to feel what it might be like to experience the world as other people experience it. However, visual imagery has a privileged status. In order for something to exist in physical terms it must occupy space or be an effect of a space-occupying body or bodies. Touch and taste can describe the physical properties of such bodies to us, but only if we are physically contiguous with them. Smell can indicate the presence of individual spatial bodies, their proximity, and (sometimes) their number.

In human beings, however, vision operates much more effectively vis-à-vis spatial information. It comprehends individual spatial characters and interrelations simultaneously and at distances ranging beyond what is possible for touch, hearing, taste, and smell. Through the visual perception of primary qualities, we can recognize space-occupying individuals, their particular spatial features, and their relations with one another as a field of space-occupying phenomena. Vision has cognitive fundamentality. Imagination in its visual mode plays a key role in this. I shall, accordingly, focus on it (though many of the points argued can also fit imaginings based on other sense modalities).

First, then, in terms of its psychological generation, imagination involves deliberative activity. It is something we can both choose to do and, when appropriate, do thoughtfully, either through visualizing some described state of affairs or through paying close attention to what we are imagining. Imagining can also happen involuntarily. In this case, imagery intrudes upon our consciousness without any obvious explanation as to what occasioned it.

Now, as noted in the Introduction, whether a phenomenon can be perceived or not involves factors beyond our control. To be perceived, the object must be physically available to perception.¹² In this sense, it is independent of the will. In contrast to this, an object can be imagined irrespective of whether or not it is physically available to us. In fact, we can even—and often do—imagine things that do not actually exist. The object’s availability to imagination, in other words, is determined by the will alone.

There is a second contrasting feature. Perception and imagination are necessarily selective. This is because, from our cognitive viewpoint, reality is only experienced under aspects, i.e. features that enable us to identify one kind of object or individual and distinguish it from others. In order to perceive, our attention must focus on aspects of the object which enable this and, where relevant, situate it in respect of our interests and activities. The object’s other aspects go unnoticed but remain, of course, physically available and (thence) independent of the will.

With the imagination, matters are more complex. It too has to be selective through generating quasi-sensory aspects that identify a specific kind of object or individual. However, since it is subject to the will, the image—in contrast to perception—is intentionally replete; there are no unnoticed details available in the image. To imagine is to generate quasi-sensory content, not to discover it.¹³

If, for example, I imagine my friend’s gloved hands, the rest of her is not tucked away in the corner of the image waiting for me to attend to it. It is not there at all, except when before the mind’s eye. Of course, an image may have peripheral details or involve superimposed features, one of which we attend to more than others. But insofar as we are aware of these, it is because we are representing them as peripheral details or as the aspects that are not our main interest. Everything in the image is generated by us as we project it. It is the result of spontaneous activity. This is the case even in the most deliberative imagining. Suppose, for example, that I imagine my friend on the basis of a very detailed description. I stipulate that she has to be wearing the black coat with the mushroom-color edgings. She must be visualized exactly two feet away, motionless, and facing towards me. It must be twilight on a rainy day by the side of the pharmacy adjoining Dunnes’ supermarket in Westside. Despite this detailed specification, the image’s content is still spontaneous. Details such as the black coat and the pharmacy by the side of Dunnes can be imagined in many different ways—how they appear in our imagining of them is something that just happens. And this is true for every detail that one generates an image for.

On these terms, then, the act of imagining can be deliberative, but its content involves features that are not pre-planned and which cannot be sufficiently determined through description. The character of an image is determined spontaneously rather than by taking a means to an end that would allow the image’s detail to be controlled.

The spontaneous character of such imagining has some further correlated features. Most important amongst these is the one that, in my Introduction, was described as “indeterminacy.” This term, whilst frequently used, is not wholly adequate. What is involved can be better described as the image’s schematic and unstable character. Qua selective the image presents only a range of identifying aspects of its object. This means that some features characteristic of the kind or individual in question are omitted, and others are perhaps exaggerated. And the identifying aspects may change even as we hold the image before the mind’s eye. The image is a schematic quasi-visual interpretation and not a reproduction of the object.

Its instability is linked to this. The image is unstable because, as we have already seen, its content is generated in the very act of attending to it. As we focus on one aspect of the imagined object, its other aspects disappear from consciousness— reappearing (and then in a visually changed form) only when we focus on them again. Indeed, even as the image is before the mind, it may be generated in a fragmented or partial way, or involve overlapping features. In all respects, the image is unable to settle in an enduring and stable state that might approximate visual perception’s relation to its object.

The reason why imagination has this character centers on (at least) two important factors. One is that we might confuse what is perceived and what is imagined, and thus loose our sense of reality, if images were not schematic and unstable. Hence if imagination has evolved to be of cognitive utility, it must have a mode of being that allows it to be clearly distinguished from perception. A further reason for imagination’s schematic and unstable character is its relation to the will. As we have seen, imagination is subject to the will insofar as we can choose to, and choose what to, imagine. It can now be added that the image’s spontaneously generated content is determined by its relation to the structure of the will (rather than by the act of willing as such). This is because the will is not a static subs...