Abstracts

Imagination, Film Experience, and Three Meanings of ‛Seeing’

Enrico Terrone Collège d’études mondiales|FMSH Paris

Within the framework of analytic aesthetics, there are two contrasting accounts of the role of imagination in the experience of fiction movies, namely, the Impersonal Imagining Thesis (IIT), defended by Currie, Gaut, Carroll; and the Imagining Seeing Thesis (IST) defended by Walton, Wilson, and Levinson.

According to IST, we imagine that we are seeing the fictional events. According to IIT, we just see depicted scenes, thereby imagining, in an impersonal way, the fictional events. The main problem for IST is that the possibility that the fictional events could be seen from another world is normally ruled out by the narrative itself. The reason is that seeing the fictional world requires a causal connection between the spectator and the fictional world, but narratives normally exclude any spatiotemporal route connecting the fictional world to the actual world. On the other hand, IIT finds it hard to explain the peculiar immediacy of our engagement with films. We have the impression of seeing not just pictures that lead us to imagine the fictional events, but these very events – just as we have the impression of seeing broadcast events while watching live television.

I argue that, in order to overcome the antinomy between IST and IIT, we should distinguish three meanings of ‛seeing’.

First, face-to-face seeing, in which we experience events as taking place in a unitary spatiotemporal system centered in our body, i.e. in our “egocentric” system. This is the case that corresponds to ordinary vision, and which requires a causal link based on a spatiotemporal route that connects what is seen to the act of seeing.

Second, impersonal seeing, which is “detached” from the viewer’s egocentric system, and corresponds to an ideal disembodied vision that occurs from an unoccupied perspective. Impersonal seeing, unlike face-to-face seeing, does not require a spatiotemporal route that connects what is seen to the act of seeing, but only a counterfactual dependency of the latter on the former.

Third, pictorial seeing, which is “twofold” (cf. Wollheim 1980), in the sense that it has a “configurational fold” consisting in the face-to-face seeing of the screen and a “recognitional fold” consisting in the impersonal seeing of the depicted scene.

Our experience of a film actually is pictorial seeing, but, when we wholly enjoy a film, imagination favors the recognitional fold at the expense of the configurational fold, thereby turning actual pictorial seeing into purported impersonal seeing. I call this account Imagining Impersonal Seeing Thesis (IIST). On the one hand, IIST is sympathetic with IST in characterizing the film experience as a sort of imagining seeing, but it does not require a spatiotemporal connection between the fictional world and the actual world. On the other hand, IIST is sympathetic with IIT in pointing out that our experience of the story told is somehow impersonal, but it preserves the perceptual nature of the film experience. In this sense, IIST combines the explanatory power of IST and IIT thereby solving their respective problems.