“The imaginative realm is not limited to representation as images, text, dreams, or memory that confines its interpretation to object or subject. But when approached as a process or practice, as something relational and productive, imagination leads to new spaces of inquiry…with the potential to open up and to make visible the unknown.” (Culhane 2017, 15)
In a time of deep social trauma and disruption of so many rhythms and routines, many familiar ways of being in the world are simply not available to us. Being unable to safely meet in person tries our capacity to tolerate frustration; it also presents the possibility to explore new ways of being, and to cultivate a practice more deeply grounded both in reality and in imagination.
Pandemic life reminds us that any experience can be engaged as a medium for creative reflection, and disruption may open up generative encounters with the unknown. In these encounters we may reimagine analytic topologies, since meeting online reconfigures which elements of experience are shared—such as the social trauma that affects us all—and which are no longer shared—such as physical co-presence. The inversion of familiar experience teaches us something new about it. The screen may be understood as an invertible surface that collects the residue of both internal and external affective intensities. Meeting through the screen is not disembodied, but differently embodied, and invites a playful refraction of scenes and senses.
The screen as invertible surface is a transitional space that makes visible unknown aspects of both individual and shared reality through contact between them. Winnicott (2005) observes that a child at play (and perhaps also an adult engaged in creative work) “manipulates external phenomena in the service of the dream and invests chosen external phenomena with dream meaning and feeling” (69). The alteration of familiar routines is a chance to turn simultaneously outward and inward in order to engage more deeply with reality. When approached as a dream-canvas to create something from the material of real experience, the screen potentiates an imaginative practice in being-alone and being-together at the same time. A poignant challenge is how to make use of the full potential of objects and phenomena that are available, rather than longing for a fantasy of what is missing. Bollas (2009) suggests that “meandering in the real—moving from thing to thing—can in itself be a form of reverie that constitutes thinking in the real” (53). In this way, we may engage with events in the world as living material for personal and collective dream-work in action.
A practice of “thinking in the real” offers a way to dwell with all that is uncertain about life in this time. Following Stewart (2018), “the expressivity of a vivid, actively mattering world…both underscores certain kinds of thought and makes thought dense and oblique with labors, the constant scanning of possibilities, and an attunement to the amassed detritus of cruel or surprisingly gentle events” (23). This process of mattering may open up new forms of relationality and new ways of thinking/feeling. In this practice, reality and imagination are not opposed, but animate each other.
My first analysis ended before it really began, in part because the screen never materialized as a surface for imaginative contact with the real. One day, gazing out my window, I shared a dream-image of my garden as a couch. Perhaps I dreamed of the real garden as an imaginary couch, and the real couch—in an office I had never physically visited—as an imaginary garden. The analyst found it troubling that I would use the garden in this way, because it did not belong in the customary office frame. The screen between us was flat, and left no space to meander into the unknown or reanimate a sense of what matters in this disrupted time.
I recognize this trouble in my work as an educator, too. Embodied reality is fractured, and it is elusive to sense the contours of the matter we are learning and thinking together. A principle that grounds my practice is to consider living material as its own guide to engagement. Instead of comparing our current experience with a fantasied version of what could have been, together we explore how to use the objects that are available, including communicative technologies for multimodal engagement with texts, images, concepts. In this way we cultivate a practice of imagination in order to become more deeply present with reality, and cultivate a practice of engagement with reality in order to become more deeply imaginative.
References:
Bollas, Christopher. 2009. The Evocative Object World. New York: Routledge.
Culhane, Dara. 2017. “Imagining: An Introduction.” In A Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies, edited by Denielle Elliott and Dara Culhane, 1–21. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Stewart, Kathleen. 2018. “Mattering Compositions.” In Between Matter and Method: Encounters in Anthropology and Art, edited by Gretchen Bakke and Marina Peterson, 21–33. London: Bloomsbury.
Winnicott, Donald Woods. 2005. Playing and Reality. New York: Routledge. First published 1971.
