Introduction:
This afternoon, my talk grows from questions I’d like to raise for our neuroscientists, and other discussants, namely: Does the brain know the difference between an imagined and actual reality? And if so, how? Or to put it another way, given the aging brain in terms of human life cycles, how does the brain select for valuing the imagined, yet performed there and then, as as distinct from the performed here and now?
As I mentioned when I got up, I really will almost be speaking in aphorisms, quite mathematically. Let me first say that this is part of a larger project; which will be coming out in Configurations called “Towards a Culminative Image History.” I’ve been working on this for quite a while. The subtitle is “ Romanticism and the Genealogy of Thought,” and that is exactly my problem. How can we get –it seems to me it’s a very old problem and, as we’ve heard in the past two days, it’s also a very new problem.