The Plateau - Zone of Joining


Identity - real or imaginary?

It's one of my chief assumptions that the mind makes little differentiation between the `real' and the `imaginary', that the two things interact which each other in a way that is inclusive and active, not rational.

To read a novel is to have an experience just as surely as walking to the milk bar; conversely walking to the milkbar can strike you as an imaginary event, just as easily as you can imagine having a conversation with someone and then believe `really' that you've already had it when you meet that person next.

I'm as real as you want to make me...
This is not an original thought, of course, and it's history can be traced back for as long as the production of imaginary events have taken place, for which we can include religious ritual, theatre or magic. More recently w can look to the work work of French Philosopher, Henri Bergson.  One of his basic idea was that of `duree, or duration. He asserts that time is experienced differently in the subject that it is in the objective world of scientific materialism.

In 19th C science, time was structured through the use of space and was absolute and precisely measurable. However it was Bergson's contention that the subject experienced time as duration, as a spread of events which could be constituted from many sources, the real, the imaginary, the emotional, and which had it's own temporal feel.

Henri Bergson: (1859-1941) French Philosopher and Evolutionist. Hugely influential at the beginning of the 1900's, Bergsons was a positive philosophy, based on the idea of the elan vital. In Bergson the scientific urge is seen as a reduction of the nature of life.
From Duration to Becoming

`Becoming' is Bergson's notion of the subjects sense of `Duree' combined with the directionality of subjective experience and an `elan vital'. In his world, `becoming' is an evolutionary event; the bland computations of Darwin's evolutionary system are given the fresh spin of purpose. Bergson also believed that this evolutionary purpose could not be predicted in advance and operated in a momentary and inspired way, systems burst onto a new line of development of their own volition. These notions sit very neatly with the `basins of attraction' and `phase shifts' of Chaos theory.
`Becoming' is a very important idea as it suggests both that a subject can experience abstract events as equal to concrete acts in the event-series of the imagination and that `becoming' is an imaginary act, that is, creative... and real. This is the line developed by Deleuze and Guatarri in their influential books `Anti Oedipus' (`70) and `A Thousand Plateaus' (`81)
More about Chaos...
Becoming with technology - my false leg...