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SIMULACRA

Funk and Wagnell, ""VISUALIZE To form a mental image of... picture in the mind" "VISUALISER " 1. One who visualises. 2 One whose mental images are formed chiefly by images."

Oxford English Dictionary. " VISUALIZE 1817 1. To form a mental vision, image, or picture of. 2.To construct a visual image in the mind." "VISUALISATION. the act, fact or power of visualizing."

INDEX to Creative Cognition (beneath) for "Visualization see Mental Imagery; Mental Synthesis; Mental Transformation; Pre-inventive forms; Structures Imagination."

 

 

Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself Penguin 1988 (first published 1936) "My office work had taught me to think out a notion in detail, pack it away in my head, and work on it by snatches in any surroundings. The lurch and surge of the old horse-drawn buses made a luxurious cradle for such ruminations. Bit by bit, my original notion grew into a vast, vague conspectus - Army and Navy Stores list if you like - of the whole sweep and meaning of things and effort and origins throughout the Empire. I visualised it as I do most ideas, in the shape of a semi-circle of buildings and temples projecting out into a sea - of dreams ." 

Jerome Singer on Daydreaming - 1981 "As schoolwork, sports and organised games took more of my time, ands as I naturally became embarassed by continued overt make-believe, I indulged in these fantasy characters more and more by drawing pictures of them in notebooks. Eventually the sequences were almost totally internalised in private visual imagery. My drawings were much like comic strips elaborating particular sequences of adventures, except that no captions were necessary because the fantasy was played out internally...."
SEEING WITH EYES SHUT " I have only to shut my eyes to feel how ignorant I am whence these forms and coloured forms, and colours distinguishable beyond what I can distinguish, derive their birth. These varying and infinite co-present colours, what are they ? I ask to what do they belong in my waking remembrance ? and almost always never receive an answer. Only I perceive and know thatwhatever I change, in any part of me, produces some change in these eye-spectra; as, for,instance, if I press my legs or change sides." Samuel Taylor Coleridge from Anime PoetaDecember 19th, 1803.
MEMORY AND INVENTION 01 Bishop George Berkeley, 1710 "28. I find I can excite ideas in my mind at pleasure , and vary and shift the scene as oft as I think fit. It is no more than willing, and straightway this or that idea arises in my fancy; and by the same power it is obliterated and makes way for another. This making and unmaking of ideas doth very properly denominate the mind active. This much is certain and grounded on experience : but when we talk of unthinking agents, or exciting ideas exclusive of Volition, we only amuse ourselves with words.
IMAGES AS FUNDAMENTAL TO UNDERSTANDING PROPOSITIONS Of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus,published in Austria in 1921 and the UK in 1922. Anthony Quinton, in Brian Magee's Men of Ideas OUP Oxford 1978 speaks of LW "The first thing he said the most fundamental doctrine propounded in the Tractatus, is that propositions are pictures. That is not put forward as a metaphorical description, a way of saying somewhat more graphically that propositions represent the world. He took the claim that propositions were pictures very, very seriously. He kept insisting that they were literally pictures. And this leads to a second doctrine that pictures have elements that correspond to the scene they picture. Propositions are essentially composite things, as is shown in sentences which are made of different words : the proposition is made of words functioning as names, and the names correspond directly to the objects which enter into the fact - the names are arranged in the sentence as the objects are arranged in the fact. Attached to this is the view that the world, if it is to be capable of being represented in language must be an arrangement or an array of objects which have various possibilities of being combined with one another. What actually is the case is the way those objects are arranged. That has the consequence that the essential meaningful content of discourse - of language that is put to the really crucial use of which language can be put - is its picturing the facts that constitute the world.... Wittgenstein never gives any examples of these fundamental pictorial propositions - perhaps none of the propositions we utter in everyday life would be examples. But his requirement that if language is to be meaningful it must have a definite sense , and that this definite sense consists in its performing an essentially pictorial task, this for him necessitates that every genuine proposition , even if it is not a single picture, must, if it is to be meaningful, be a vast complex, a conjunction, of pictures."
F.Yates The Art of Memory 1966 quotes "To think is to speculate with images..." Giordano Bruno in Shadows 1582. Yates traces the rivalry of two diametrically opposed methods of remembering - the Ramist approach of hierarchies with no images, and the Renaissance occult method (Bruno) of generating images and learning to intensifying them, pp270 -

"The psychological study of imaging has had a curious history over the past half century. Following the pioneer work of Sir Francis Galton, there was lively interest in the topic. Then starting in about the twenties, progressively less attention was paid to imaging, until today [1957] it is a process more discussed by novelists and literary men than by psychologists... Psychologists have stoopped making substantial contributions to the study of imaging for the simple reason that, in the absence of objective methods for its observation, there are few if any new contributions to be made."

Ian M.L.Hunter, MEMORY Facts and Fallacies, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1961 [1957]
Alfred Hitchcock, film director, article in Stage, July 1936 "There is not enough visualizing done in [film] studios, and instead far too much writing. People take a sheet of paper and scrawl down a load of dialogue and instructions, and call that a day's work. It leads them nowhere. There is also a growing habit of reading a film script by the dialogue alone. I deplore this method, this lazy neglect of the action, this lack of reading action in a film story or, if you like it, this ability to visualize." quoted in Sidney Gottlieb, Hitchcock on Hitchcock, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995, the original title of Hitchcock's article was "Close Your Eyes and Visualize !"

Ernst Lubitsch, German director, "In my silent period in Germany as well as in America I tried to use less and less subtitles. It was my aim to tell the story through pictorial nuances and the facial expressions on my actors. There were often very long scenes in which people were talking without being interrupted by subtitles. The lip movement was used as a kind of pantomime. Not that I wanted the audience to become lip readers, but I tried to time the speech in such a way that the audience could listen to their eyes. " That Lubitsch Touch [1968] quoted in Leyda, Film Makers Speak.

The sudden attacks of melancholia. "My best defence, my only defence was to cover my head with a pillow and and summon up those images that represented for me the excellence and beauty I had lost. The first of these was a mountain - it was obviously Killimanjaro. The summit was a perfect snow-covered cone, lighted by a passing glow. I saw the mountain a thousand times - I begged to see it - and as I grew more familiar with it I saw the fire of a primitive village at its base. The vision dated, I guess, from the bronze of the iron age. Next in frequency I saw a fortified medieval town. It could have been Mt Saint-Michel or Orvieto or the grand lamasery in Tibet, but the image of the walled town, like the snow-covered mountain, seemed to represent beauty, enthusiasm, and love. I also saw less frequently and less successfully, a river with grassy banks. I guessed these were the Elysian Fields although I found them difficult to arrive at and at one point it seemed to me that a railroad track or a thruway had destroyed the beauty of the place."

John Cheever Bullet Park Vintage London 1992 (first written 1969) 
Otto Neurath, "Long before I started to read I started to look at books that contained pictures and maps in my father's library. I looked especially at the atlas intended to accompany Alexander von Humboldt's famous Cosmos. Here were deserts, mountains, clouds, seas, strange plants and unfamiliar animals, marvels of many sorts. This world, presented in delightful drawing and colouring, satisfied my longing for a cosmic view. The arrangement of our library helped my liking for books with pictures. As often happens, the large books, many of which contained pictures and maps, were kept in the tall bottom shelves. I would take them out and lie down on the floor to look at them. I liked that position. Most children do. I soon realised the difference between pictures `made for children', and pictures with a more general appeal. I found that books describing inventions and crafts for children did so by using large pictures and `big' figures, but pictures intended for adults were smaller and not so colourful. The colourful pictures when the colours were clear attracted me much more than when they were vague and indeterminate. I have always remembered this." quoted from the Neurath manuscript, in Future Books, Vol III (undated) c 1949

Kekule made his fundamental discovery in organic chemistry having had a dream image in which a snake was coiled in such a way as to represent the molecular structure of benzine. Faraday claimed to have visualised lines of force that emanated from electric and magnetic sources, resulting in the modern conception of electromagnetic fields. Tesla reported that he could determine how well a machine would work by mentally 'running' it in his mind. Feynman claimed to have used visual images in thinking about interactions among elementary particles, which led to the development of Feynman Diagrams..."

from Finke Ward Smith Creative Cognition MIT 1992 p.45
"Not seldom I please myself with trying to realise the face of medieval England: the many chases and great woods, the stretches of common tillage and common pasture quite unenclosed; the rough husbandry of the tilled parts, the unimproved breeds of cattle, sheep and swine, especially the latter, so lank and long and lathy, looking so strange to us; the strings of packhorses along the bridle-roads, the scantiness of the wheel-roads, scarce any of those except those left by the Romans, and those made from monastery to monastery; the scarcity of bridges, and people using ferries instead, or fords where they could; the little towns wellbechurched, often walled ; the villages just where they are now (except for those that have nothing but the church left to tell of them), but better and more populous; their churches, some big and handsome, some small and curious, but all crowded with altars and furniture, and gay with pictures and ornament; the many religious houses, with their glorious architecture; the beautiful manor-houses, some of them castles once, or survivals from an earlier period; some new and elegant; some out of all proportion small for the importance of their lords.." from Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris, Faber and Faber, 1994, p.40 quoting from Mackail's biography of WM, and as fine a sustained piece of ecstatic description as you could find.
Casey, 1976 "Preoccupied by logocentric concerns, philosophers have been consistently sceptical of imagining and its products. Their skepticism stems largely from a conception of philosophical thinking as image free. "

"There are two sorts of talkative fellows whom it would be injurious to confound,, and I, S/.T.Coleridge, am the latter. The first sort is of those who use five hundred words, more than needs to express an idea - that is not my case. Few men, I will be bold to say, put more meaning into their words than I or chose them more deliberately and discriminately. The second sort is those who use five hundred more ideas, images, resons, etc , than there is any need of to arrive at their object, till the only object arrived at is that the mind's eye of the bystander is dazzled with colours succeeding so rapidly as to leave one vague impression that there has been a greta blaze of colours all about something. Now this is my case, and a grievous fault it is. My illustrations swallow up my thesis. I feel too intensely the omnipresence of each in all, platonically speaking..."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from Anima Poetae.