Imagination: to leave the audience and the artists alone

Some parts: Cvejić, Bojana (2018) ‘Towards a poetics of Imagination’, in e-tcetera

p. 1-2

Αrtists have little time left over to engage in thinking about their art. All time is invested in practice, on the activities that administrate or reproduce a work, present or circulate or maintain it, but not on those that produce it. Poetics as the art of making, forming and composing, is out of purview (=όρια, σκοπός, εκταση). Working on poetics requires time, in the sense of duration and empty time, dead time, boredom, digression, distraction. Poetics entails the ability to imagine a future and to entertain the curious question, “What is the art I would like to see?”.

The problem is temporal: imagination is endowed in future. “No future” is the bitter message of neoliberal reforms, and presentism is its social mood, an experience of time in which only the present is ‘real’.

I would like to unravel elements of performance poetics in which imagination gains ground. This will amount to elaborating a few theses about imagination as it operates in the dramaturgy of performances from creation to reception.

p. 3 – 10

Imagiation: thinking of something that is not what you are seeing

Imagination for the Pre-Moderns retained a confusing intermediate position between sensibility and the understanding.

Kant: empirical or productive imagination. Empirical imagination gives rise to memory and anticipation by which we recollect or predict the presence of things absent. Productive or poetic imagination produces original representations, that is to say, ideas that have no experiential content nor are they derived from experience. Productive or poetic imagination simultaneously invents and applies laws in reflective judgment.

A way to relieve theater from the self-reproach of representation comes as a shift in theater’s quest from the experience of the impossible ‘real’ to the possible ‘imagined,’ independent of presently experienced.

Time stands still. There is no reason for hurry as there is no progression.

p. 11 – 17

Imagination imposes language as a pattern onto the world.

Imagination is like feigning, pretending to know. Feigning takes place in the gap between ignorance and action.

We feign not that which we know to be true or that which we know to be untrue, but that of which we are ignorant. Feigning is inversely proportional to understanding, but as long as we treat it as an aid to, rather than a substitute of, understanding, it is a point of access to truth.

Why do we agree to feign? Because we are ready to imagine things that we know are not the case, not actual, or not in the realm of knowable. In L’eau et les rêves (1942), Gaston Bachelard writes that “imagination is not the faculty of forming images of reality, it is the faculty of forming images which go beyond reality, which turn reality into song. It is a superhuman quality.”⁶

Imagination is environing.

To visualize what remains unseen is to come closer to conception (= συλληψη) and conceivability. In thinking that I am having a sensation of something that I don’t presently perceive, I include my seeing in what I visualize.

The deceitful sense that anything can be imagined after so many variant propositions is the effect of creating a world, a universe of propositions.

Combining speaking, singing and reading yields a contrapuntal finale – a richness that entails the exercise of various modes of reception in parallel. We are reading, listening to a melody, and discerning (=παρατηρώ) the sung and the spoken text. The performance has environed us, enveloped us with its words holding our ears and eyes in abundance.

Imagination begins with listening…

. Listening in its emphatic sense suggests obedience (the one who listens obeys). However, I experience the opposite in the context of these works: freedom from participation, from speaking or doing any other kind of action in order to verify my activity as spectator.

To be able to imagine, one must initially trust the words that draw them into a world, and accept that this world might turn out obscure or mute or colorless, and most of all indifferent to my thoughts about it. The locus of listening is the interspace of the body and text.

Ηow imagination transforms the theatrical apparatus of spectatorship. If a performance refuses to play the game of hide-and-show, of persuasion of presence and the experience of the real, because it prefers to present itself as a poem, then the spectators are no longer called in as witnesses to a stage event. They are there, like the performers, entering a space in which imagination is alone, words and images take flight and are lost.

To leave the audience alone, trusting it is capable of participating in an imaginary

To leave the artists alone, trusting that their art that they are developing, is worthy of our attention, without that it first prove its worth