The magical act of imagination

The magical act of imagination describes imagining as an incantation: consciousness makes the object of thought or desire appear in order to take possession of it. Its force is not a supernatural power over real things, but a distinctive way of intending an object. The imagined object appears as a whole, while the world that would ordinarily constrain or correct it recedes. The same structure helps explain both the fascination of dreams and the irreality of aesthetic objects.

Incantation and the Whole Object

Imagination begins with a refusal to accommodate distance and difficulty. The act has something imperious and infantile about it: like a very young child issuing orders or prayers from bed, consciousness behaves as though objects might answer by appearing. What appears, however, has a particular mode of existence. The aim is not to encounter a thing from one limited angle, at one time and place, but to summon it in its entirety. The example is Pierre: imagining him is not the same as seeing him in profile at a specified hour or recalling him at a window. The intention reaches for Pierre himself.

This completeness does not mean that the imagined object is exhaustively pictured in sensory detail. Like a child’s profile drawing in which both eyes appear, it can gather incompatible sides into a single presentation. It is present as a whole rather than assembled from successive viewpoints. Its presence is therefore quasi-sensible: it has the character of an object without being given as a perception of a real thing. When the irreal Pierre surges into consciousness, the real table before the imaginer vanishes from the scene. The two cannot combine into one perception; they belong to radically different acts of consciousness.

How a Figure Becomes an Image

The distinction between perception and imagining is visible in the reading of a few black lines. At first, three segments meeting at a point, another isolated point, and a sinuous mark can be organized as a fork and a separate figure on a white sheet. The eye follows their arrangements, but they need not depict anything. When the figure is instead seen as a face, the lines take on new roles: forehead, eyebrow, nose, eye, mouth, and chin. The change requires more than noticing a resemblance. The perceiver adopts an imaging intention and animates the marks through bodily and eye movements. The white space to one side becomes a filled volume, while the space on the other side functions as empty ground; the eye also supplies a connection absent from the drawing by moving between two separated groups of lines.

This example distinguishes schematic imagining from ordinary perceptual organization. In the Müller-Lyer illusion, the angles direct eye movements that are experienced as properties of the perceived segments: one seems to extend, the other to gather in. The segments acquire vector-like qualities, but remain perceived objects. A schematic figure, by contrast, does not impose its own rule of movement. Knowledge directs the eye, and the resulting movements are understood as spontaneous, projected directions. They function as a hypothesis about what may emerge from the marks. If an image crystallizes, a running man appears in the lines, yet the viewer remains aware of having freely projected those directions. The representative elements are not simply the lines themselves, but the movements imagined upon them.

This account also clarifies why imagining does not merely fill gaps in perception. Perception already includes unformulated intentions that enrich the object: an ashtray is apprehended as having an underside resting on a table, even when that underside is not visible. Such implicit knowledge adheres to the perceived thing without becoming a separate image. The imagined object, by contrast, is constituted through a distinct act. An absent Pierre cannot be added to the perception of the table as though the image supplied another sensory quality; when he appears as an image, the real table leaves the scene.

The Spellbinding World of Dreams

Dreams reveal the magical act in a particularly forceful form. A dream may be experienced as a story, much as a reader is fascinated by a detective novel. Such belief does not require treating the story as real. The dream encloses consciousness in an imaginary world from which it cannot simply withdraw; because that world is not real, perception cannot correct it in the ordinary way. The dreamer is conscious of being caught up in the imagining, yet also of being spellbound by it.

That captivity gives dreamed events their fatal quality. They seem unable not to happen, not because the dream has disclosed an actual necessity in the world, but because consciousness cannot step outside its own story and test another course. Possibilities belong to a real world from which events can be considered as alternatives. In a dream, imagining an alternative would itself become another episode; there are no trial runs from a secure position outside the narrative. The dream’s apparent fate is thus linked to the consciousness that continues to produce its images while unable to disengage from them.

The dream can end when reality breaks into this fascination or when the dream’s own story reaches an event for which no continuation can be imagined. A real fear may become strong enough to provoke reflection, or an external stimulus may impose itself during sleep. In another case, a dream of approaching execution stops at the moment the dreamer’s neck is placed on the block: the obstacle is not necessarily fear, but the impossibility of imagining what follows. The resulting hesitation prompts awakening. These endings expose the dream’s distinctive bind: consciousness lives the story as fiction, yet cannot freely leave it.

Art, Analogon, and Irreality

The same account extends from dreams to works of art. In a portrait, the canvas and its real layers of paint are not identical with the depicted person as an aesthetic object. The painted figure appears when consciousness shifts into an imaging attitude; it is not another object concealed behind the canvas, nor is it available to a purely realizing perception. The painting is a material Analogon through which an irreal object can appear. The artist does not first make a private mental image and then convert that image into a real object for public inspection. The real strokes, texture, and varnish provide the medium through which spectators constitute the image.

This distinction changes how colour is experienced. A red pigment can give a merely sensual pleasure when considered on its own. In a painting, however, it may be grasped as the red of a woollen rug beside a table, with its tactile density contributing to the represented whole. A green can matter as the stiff, shiny green of a wall covering. The aesthetic effect belongs not to isolated real colour but to the relations and qualities of the irreal scene that the painted colours make manifest. Even a cubist painting that does not imitate familiar objects can disclose an irreal ensemble of things with depth, density, and relations of perspective. Its canvas remains real; the objects manifested through it do not exist on the canvas or elsewhere in the world.

The argument also accounts for performance. An actor does not realize Hamlet as a real identity, but can be wholly mobilized to produce the character. The actor’s feelings, strength, gestures, and even actual tears serve as analogons of Hamlet’s feelings and conduct. Those tears are apprehended as the character’s irreal tears; the actor is not simply transformed into a real Hamlet, but is irrealized in the role. A musical performance offers a related case: listeners may seek the Seventh Symphony itself across different performances, treating a poor tempo as a betrayal or concealment of the work rather than identifying the symphony with the dated concert event. In each case, a real performance or material support makes an irreal aesthetic object available without turning it into a real thing.

Significance

The magical act is therefore not a mistaken perception in which an image is taken for a real object. A dream is lived as fiction, though it can be spellbinding; a painting is encountered through a real canvas, though its aesthetic object is irreal. The distinction accounts for the peculiar combination of presence and inaccessibility: what imagination presents can feel complete and absorbing while remaining unavailable to ordinary perception and correction.

The argument also makes imagination more than an optional faculty added to an otherwise complete consciousness. The real world can serve as the ground from which consciousness surpasses what is present, while imagining in turn depends on that world as the ground it sets aside. Realizing and imaging are interdependent modes of consciousness. The magical act names the freedom and constraint within this relation: consciousness can make an absent object appear, yet, once fascinated by an imagined world, may find that it cannot escape by an ordinary act of correction or choice.