of community. Its ludic character creates connections between images and new images can emerge.
MIMESIS AND IMAGINARY
With help of mimetic processes individuals, communities and cultures create the imaginary. This can be understood as a materialised world of images, sounds, touch, smell and taste. It is the precondition that people perceive the world in a historically and culturally influenced manner. The imagination remembers and creates, combines and projects images. It creates reality. At the same time, the reality helps the imagination to create images. The images of the imagination have a dynamic character structuring the perception, memory and future. The networking of the images follows the dialectic and rhythmical movements of the imagination. Not only everyday life, but also literature, art and performing arts, obtain an inexhaustible memory of images. Some appear to be stable and hardly changeable. In contrast, others are subject to the historic and cultural change. The imagination has a symbolising dynamic, which continuously creates new meanings and uses images for this purpose. Interpretations of the world are developed using these images created by the imagination (Hüppauf, and Wulf 2009; Wulf 2018).
In contrast to the general use of the concept of the imaginary, Jacques Lacan primarily emphasises the delusional character of the imaginary. Desires, wishes and passion play a central role here in that people cannot escape from the imaginary. For them there is no direct relationship to the real world. As a speaking entity, people can only develop a fractured relationship with the real world via the symbolic order and the imagination. With its help they can try to hold their own ground against the forces of the imaginary. «The socially effective imaginary is an internal world which has a strong tendency to shut itself off and develop to some extent an infinite immanence; in contrast, the human fantasy, imagination, is the only power capable of forcing open the enclosed spaces and can temporarily exceed it, because it is identical to the discontinuous phenomenon of time» (Kamper 1986, p. 32f.). This compulsive character of the imaginary creates the limits of human life and development opportunities. This clarification of the compulsive character of the imaginary is so important, it only makes up one part of the range of meanings, which describes the diversity and ambivalence of cultural visual knowledge according to the opinion expressed here.
The imagination has a strong performative power, which produces and performs social and cultural actions. The imagination helps create the imaginary world, which includes images stored in memory, images of the past and the future. Using mimetic movements the iconic character of the images can be captured. In the reproduction of its image character the images are incorporated in the imaginary. As part of the mental world they are references of the outer world. Which images, structures and models become part of the imaginary depends on many factors. In these images the presence and absence of the outer world is inextricably interwoven. Images emerging from the imaginary are transferred from the imagination to new contexts. Image networks develop, with which we transform the world and which determine our view of the world.
The performative character of the imagination ensures the images of the social field make up a central part of the imaginary (Wulf and Zirfas 2007). The power structures of the social relationships and social structures are represented therein. Many of these processes have their roots in people’s childhoods and take place to a large extent unconsciously. The perception of social constellations and arrangements is already learned during this time. These earlier visual experiences and the resulting images play an important, irreplaceable role in the visual understanding of the world. A comprehending viewing of social actions arises through the fact that biographically influenced historical and cultural diagrams and mental images play a part in every perception. We see social actions and relate to them in their perception. As a result, these actions become more important for us. If the actions of other people are directed at us, the impulse to link a relationship originates from these; a response on our part is expected. In each case a relationship is formed, for whose inception the images of our imagination form an important precondition. We enter an action and do not act according to the expectations in this social arrangement, be it that we respond to them, modify them or act contrary to them. Our action is mimetic to a lesser extent because of similarity, but more because of the generated correspondences. Embedded in an action, we perceive the actions of the other and act mimetically.
OUTLOOK
Our imaginary is created essentially through mimetic processes which also use the images of the imaginary to shape the outside world. Images of the human being are key to our understanding of ourselves. They are irreducible. They arise because we communicate about ourselves and must develop similarities and feelings of belonging with other people. They are the result of complex anthropological processes, in which social and cultural power structures play an important role. Owing to their iconic character, they reduce the complexity of the person and his being-in-the-world to select features and do not create a complete view of the person. There are approximations to the homo absconditus, the human being who cannot fully understand himself (Wulf 2013b). In the Ten Commandments there is therefore talk that the human should not create an image of God and by analogy – today we would say – no image should be made from another human being. Images and mimetic processes are important for our relationship with the world, with other people and with ourselves, Image critic is required in order to escape the power of interpretation of images and in particular images of the human being. The same applies to a critical view of the ideas and images created in the discourses on the human being. We must recognise the importance of images, mimesis and imagination for the development of the imaginary and for the understanding of the human being.
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