Imagining Itself (Part IX: Representation and Imagination)

For a more coherent and persuasive account of the evolution of human imagination than is provided by either Steven Mithen or Susan Blackmore we might instead look to the work of Australian artist and art theorist Donald Brook. Over the past 50 years Brook has developed a formidable theory of representation that has broad implications for an understanding of both perception and imagination and takes as its foundation the incontrovertible fact that human perception is limited.

Whenever we observe something, no matter however carefully we do so, we are inevitably locked into the specific characteristics of our perceptual makeup. These have evolved to gather sufficient information about our environment for optimal survival at the scales and speeds at which we operate. And, although the quality and quantity of this sensory information generates a richly detailed perception, this is by no means total or unbiased.

The natural world is full of creatures with very highly developed senses that also provide a rich awareness of the environments in which they live. Some are especially sensitive to vibration, others to smell, some to heat and yet others to taste etc. Each tends to specialize and to prioritise the information gathered through a single sense. We humans are adapted to prioritise sight above all other senses and it is not surprising therefore that we tend to consider this sense to be relatively infallible. Brook’s premise is that human beings are subject to systematic perceptual failures that make it very difficult, often impossible under certain circumstances, to discriminate between thing A and thing B in certain respects. It may be difficult to discriminate between two closely coloured things, a coloured swatch of paper and a painted wall, for example. We might even use the paper as a reference in order to buy a matching pot of paint and in this way to substitute thing A for thing B in respect of colour.

Substitution, Brook believes, is the foundation upon which all representations and representational practices rest and he describes three fundamental forms of substitution: Matching, Simulation & Symbolising.

Matching is the form of substitution which exploits the fact that two things are truly alike. The game of “Snap” where two cards are sensorily indistinguishable in a variety of ways: weight, size, shape, thickness, colour, pattern, etc. could be thought a paradigm of matching.

Matching also occurs in cases where one or more attributes are shared by two different objects. For example, the way a pencil matches the length of a finger or the colour of the pencil matches an orange or the spherical shape of an orange matches the spherical shape of the moon. In each of these cases we speak of the representation and its subject as ‘matching’ because we judge that they are alike in the criteria by which we are matching them. Perhaps a more accurate sensing device might detect some significant discrepancies, but though approximate, the fundamental equivalence between the two matched objects, clearly exists (at least at the perceptual level at which our species has evolved to function).

Unlike matches, Simulations are often radically different from the things they simulate. When holding a pencil at arm’s length it may seem to duplicate the height of a more distant object – a telegraph pole for example, yet we know that it does not actually match the height of the telegraph pole. The reason this strategy works is due to a regular (and exploitable) characteristic of optics in which distant objects are presented to the mechanisms of the eye as disproportionately small, relative to closer objects. Cameras exploit precisely the same characteristics in order to produce the images that we recognize as photographs. Brook describes this simulation process as:

“…a systematically regular discrimination failure, attributable to, and fully explicable by, the circumstances under which we are attempting to perform the sensory discrimination.” [Brook: in private correspondence]

In other words, in some situations it is difficult to discriminate (visually) between a simulation and the thing simulated, even though we are fully aware that the simulation and the thing simulated are not, as a matter fact, actually alike in the simulating respect.

Brook contends that this inability to discriminate between two objectively different things is due to systematic perceptual failures that are common to our species (and have also been observed in a number of other species, most notably our primate cousins).

By establishing this clear distinction between Matching and Simulation Brook provides a vital means to understand how representations function which cuts through decades of muddled thinking about perception and pictorial representation. No longer do we have to choose between what Nelson Goodman called “naïve resemblance theories” or theories that conjure up insubstantial so-called “mental images”.  Instead we have a solid basis upon which to examine representations as forms of substitution that employ varying degrees and kinds of both matching and simulation. However, before we turn to the evolutionary implications of all this theorisation there is one further component that we need borrow from Brook’s representational toolbox: Symbolising.

Symbolising is the means by which we represent things without recourse to either matching or simulation. For example I could use the same orange coloured pencil to represent a tree, a bowl of blancmange or even the moon for that matter and I wouldn’t even need a piece of paper to draw upon - simply designating the pencil as a representation of the moon would be sufficient. And, so long as we were willing (and this mutual consent is crucial to symbolic representation) to accept the pencil as a code for the moon I could use it at any future time – so long as we remember!

Brook speculates that the development of communication, imagination and even human consciousness must be the result of a progressive evolution of representing practices from rudimentary matching, through simulation and eventually to that most sophisticated form of symbolic representation known as language. He distinguishes between symbolic non-verbal representation and language by pointing out that the former still relies (as do matching and simulating) on sensory perception, whereas fully linguistic functions such as naming and describing and referring do not.

In Brook’s view, to utilize one’s imagination is to summon dispositions to represent, whether or not we actually enact these dispositions. It is the process by which we muster the impulses and responses we would have if we were to actually experience the thing or event imagined and, since we are inordinate users of perceptible representations, these impulses and responses are invariably directed towards the formation of representations to both register the situation in which we find ourselves, and more broadly to communicate with those around us; to guide the thoughts of others towards the same objects and possibilities as we ourselves are contemplating. It is an extraordinary feat that, as a species, we are able to do this; to use representations (no matter how unlike the things represented) to prompt other members of our species to respond comparably as they would to an actual experience.

This ability to detach the cognitive response from the perceptual encounter – the feeling from the seeing – must be at the very evolutionary core of human imagination, since, without the ability to entertain thoughts of something in its absence, imagination would be literally unthinkable.

To imagine, it might be said, is to turn our thoughts to experiences that are beyond the current focus of our senses. And how otherwise could our ancestors have learned to do so without the emergent use of perceptible representations to mediate their thoughts and intentions?