Imagination, history, and movement

A “visiting scholar” at the University of Macerata

di Madalina Florescu *

There seems to be a subterranean text that is shared by those who sooner or later turn to the problem of the presence of the past. But, as Paul Ricoeur observed, this text is in fact a missing theory of imagination. This theory would account for the semiotic aspects of the image itself as a site of remembrance and as a discursive universe distinct from language. As a path through which the forgotten past returns to consciousness, the “image” requires us to rethink the distinction between literal and figurative meaning and between the individual and society as the two ends of an “opaque” region.

In the language of an earlier technology of photography, “opacity” designated the proportion of light absorbed by the emulsion on a film or plate. A figurative interpretation of this term could be the basis for a theory of imagination as an inner movement of historical consciousness beyond the individual psyche. Forgetting is to imagination what opacity is to the photograph, and remembering is like the “revelation” of the photograph in the camera obscura. “Dialectical mediation, says Adorno, is not the recourse to what is more abstract, but the process of resolution of the concrete in itself”.

The concrete can be an image. In Foucault’s Les Mots et les Choses for instance the grain of time is no longer the “statement” produced by the archive as a system, but the “scene” as an allegory represented under the guise of realism. Thus, Velazquez’ Las Meninas is described as a representation of an instance of concealment.  The painter stands in his atelier before a canvas. But the viewer sees the painter and the back of his canvas. The side directly visible to the painter is only indirectly visible to the viewer as reflection in a mirror at the back of the painter. There, the viewer can glimpse the figures of the Habsburg sovereigns of the Iberian Empire of Spain and Portugal, Philip IV and Mary Ann of Austria. The painting represents the context in which it was made. At the moment the historicity of the image is apprehended, history enters the image. A change in historical consciousness makes the viewer doubt her point of view as mediation between figure and ground, between the context in which the painting was made and the context in which it is looked at.

How would Las Meninas appear from the other’s side of the encounter with Iberian expansion across the Atlantic? Or, what would the genealogy of “Western civilization” be if reconstructed not from within Velazquez’ atelier in 17^th century Madrid, but from within an atelier of translation in 13^th century Toledo? There, the Arab commentators of Aristotle were translated into Latin, and these translations gave birth to imaginatio as a frontier notion between intellect and the senses. Like all frontier notions it was also a site of ambiguity hedged by danger. This, the Western world would learn much later from Captain Cook’s lethal encounter with the Polynesian notion of taboo.  

This incipient elaboration of a theoretical apparatus would not have been possible without the support of the Department of Political Science and Communication of the University of Macerata. In particular, I would like to acknowledge Professor Uoldelul Chelati-Dirar, the students who attended my seminar series “ethnography as more than a ‘method’”, the librarians of the Ateneo, the administrative staff who organised wonderful excursions around the Marche, and, last but not least, all those who have shared with me their time, ideas, sense of humour, food, and friendship. 

* Centro de Estudos Africanos Faculdade de Letras Universidade do Porto / PORTOGALLO
Visiting scholar at University of Macerata / academic year 2014-2015 with the Project VISITING SCHOLAR 2013 “COLLEGIO MATTEO RICCI”