Principle of quasi-observation

The Principle of quasi-observation explains why an imagined object can seem present without becoming something that perception inspects and discovers. An image may have direction, duration, or a surrounding atmosphere, but these qualities do not supply the open-ended detail of a perceived thing: they are constituted in the act of imagining. The principle therefore distinguishes an image’s apparent presence from perceptual observation and helps account for the characteristic limits of imagined objects.

Perception and the imagined figure

The contrast begins with eye movements. In perception, movements may be organized by a figure’s structure or by habits associated with it. In the Müller-Lyer illusion, for example, the closed angles impede the eyes while the open angles allow them to continue; these opposed movements are projected onto the lines as a power of extension. The resulting segments appear to possess a potential movement, but this remains a perceptual quality. The lines have been reorganized as perceived objects, not thereby made into images.

A schematic drawing works differently. Three strokes, a point, and a sinuous line can first be taken simply as marks on a white sheet. Under a changed intention, they can be read as a face: the strokes take on the roles of forehead, eyebrow, and nose; the point becomes an eye; the curved line suggests mouth and chin. This reading depends not only on assigning familiar meanings to lines but on a bodily and visual activity that supplies their organization. The eyes follow the nose from top to bottom and enact a connection between separate marks, effectively supplying a line that is absent from the drawing.

The shift also changes how the surrounding sheet is apprehended. Space beside the face can function as its filled volume, while space on the other side recedes as ground. The marks thus acquire an orientation within an imagined figure, but their directions are not simply properties found in the ink. The movements that organize them are experienced as spontaneous and projected onto the lines as imaged qualities. If the figure crystallizes into a recognizable image, the observer still knows that those movements have been freely projected. The schematic figure illustrates the principle’s central distinction: an image can take shape through quasi-observation without turning into an independently inspected perceptual object.

The limits of imagined duration

The principle applies to time as well as to visual form. An imagined scene may be represented over a duration that matches the time taken to imagine it, but that correspondence does not make the scene more detailed. What matters is the duration attributed to the imagined object, not the clock-time spent reconstructing it. The imagined action has a temporal quality, but its moments are not laid out for inspection and counting as perceptual parts would be.

Imagined duration is described instead as a flow projected onto the object as an undivided quality. Its structure is also unlike the unfolding of an event that can surprise its observer: in imagining, the intended outcome guides the preceding moments, which serve as means of producing the moments considered as ends. This holds whether the scene is fictitious or recalled. An imagined action can therefore seem to unfold, yet its development remains governed by the consciousness that constitutes it.

The separation between real and irreal time is especially clear when an imagined action is made to coincide with an event happening now. If someone represents Pierre pouring himself a drink at the very moment Pierre is doing so, the two presents do not become simultaneous. The real action belongs to the actual movement and consciousness; the represented action belongs to an irreal present. Attending to one coincides with the annihilation of the other. Likewise, a represented centaur’s course or naval battle can have an internal before-and-after sequence without being located in the past, present, or future of real events.

Dreams and the atmosphere of a world

Dreams extend quasi-observation beyond an isolated image. A face appearing in a hypnagogic vision may be recognized as an image without bringing a surrounding world with it. In a dream, by contrast, consciousness is persuaded that the image belongs to a story unfolding in a world. That world is not presented as a fully detailed setting available for inspection; it is sustained by belief and by empty intentions directed from the central image toward what supposedly surrounds it.

This apparent world does not overturn the principle that there is no imaginary world in the same sense as a real, connected world. Dream images remain separated by their essential poverty, and the dreamer does not scrutinize them to fill in their details. Instead, each imagined object carries a worldly atmosphere: the dreamer may pass from image to image and believe that the same world persists, although the worldliness is described as a quality accompanying each image rather than an independently observed network of relations. The dream thus feels expansive while its imagined objects remain limited in what they disclose.

The change from a pre-dream image to a dream is consequently a change in the scope of belief. A sudden image can persuade consciousness that a mark is a fish; a dream can elaborate that persuasion into a story involving the fish, a river, and an archbishop. These elements are equally imaginary, but consciousness now experiences them as belonging to a world and projects knowledge, preoccupations, and memories into that mode. Quasi-observation helps explain how this enlargement can be experienced without making the dream’s world a perceptually examined place.

Art and the irreal object

The distinction also clarifies aesthetic experience. A painted Charles VIII is not identical to the canvas, frame, or layers of paint. Those are real things that can be perceived; the depicted king, as the object of aesthetic appreciation, appears when consciousness adopts an imaging attitude. The painting is a material analogon through which an irreal object is apprehended, not a real object produced by transferring a mental image onto canvas.

The physical painting can be illuminated, but the aesthetic object is not thereby revealed as a real thing hidden within it. Nor does the material presence of paint make the depicted object perceptually inspectable. Each brushstroke contributes to a real arrangement of tones that allows an irreal whole to appear when a spectator takes the imaging attitude. The canvas remains a material thing; the aesthetic object is constituted through it, rather than discovered behind its surface.

The same account applies to performance. An actor uses the body, feelings, strength, and gestures as analogons for Hamlet’s conduct without positing that the actor is literally Hamlet. Even real tears can be apprehended by the actor and audience as Hamlet’s irreal tears. The actor is not simply observing a character already present in the body; the performance serves the constitution of that character as an imaginary object. In painting and drama alike, quasi-observation names an experience of presence that depends on an analogon and an imaging attitude, not on the perceptual discovery of the aesthetic object as a real thing.