⊕︎The "Region of Images"
Bergson describes it as a keyboard which enables thousands of strings to be struck and set vibrating in a single harmony. And this is where the contradiction disappears. (③) The contradiction had been between the location of the injury in the brain which caused aphasia and the various locations, which over the last hundred years have multiplied, involved in speech recognition. That is involved in how we move from the perceived auditory image to the image stored in memory by which we recognise it and parse its meaning. Bergson uses audition to illustrate the problem of images stored in the brain.
If we go from the example of 'forgetting what words mean,' psychology has one explanation, although ever more complicated, and physiology another. They are in contradiction because, at the most basic level, psychic deafness has nothing to do with actual deafness. The image as a unit of intelligibility, and the ability to parse from it a meaning, still exists, and so does the fact that it is heard. The only missing connection is that between auditory image and motor-diagramme: the diagramme has lost its motor.
Both diagramme and motor are physical so Bergson gives them a physical metaphor, that of a thousand strings. The object perceived executes at once its harmony of a thousand notes, so calling forth a "great multitude of elementary sensations corresponding to all the points of the sensory centre that are concerned." (52) Such centres had already been well established by the time Bergson was writing. Now, he says,
... suppress the external object or the organ of sense, or both: the same elementary sensations may be excited, for the same strings are there, ready to vibrate in the same way; but where is the keyboard which permits thousands of them to be struck at once, and so many single notes to unite in one accord? In our opinion the ‘region of images,' if it exists, can only be a keyboard of this nature. (Ibid.)
The lesion causing aphasia or psychic deafness is between two motor elements. They are not those of hearing and memory, or hearing and any other mechanism of recognition. The stimulus from the auditory image cannot reach the keyboard because the keyboard, that stands for the particular region of images posited psychologically to exist, is absent. However this does not mean it cannot play on its own.
This is the somewhat muddled proof offered in ③. An image can occur to you, can be brought to mind by memory, or in a dream, so real that it is real enough to be taken for reality. In this case, which might be said to account for all of Idealism, whether or not you can actually hear the strings doesn't matter. The image is the same. Or the perception is the same.
The keyboard metaphor is as far Bergson will go in admitting a location in the brain, whether the ones presumed stored of memory or the ones produced by imagination, for images. The metaphor is striking for contracting into a harmony, permitting thousands of strings to be struck at once, that metaphor invoked for duration, in which the point of view came at once for a series of notes struck consecutively, to give them a subjective unity, one of inner time. (Bergson has been accused for his thesis of duration being limited to subjective human experience but if we grant that the melody has a point of view which it retains over its duration, any alteration in the intervals between the notes changing that point of view, we might appreciate duration, as he considered it, his fundamental insight.) In both 'images,' the metaphor of a chord struck on a keyboard and that of a bell tolling the time, he talks about coexistence.
To talk about a region of images in this way might lead to the impression they are only psychological. The impression is false. It is only in the context of what Bergson finds wrong with psychology's—and neuroscience's—assumption they do that he says, if they were to, it would be here. It would be the keyboard.
The photo above is of a sophisticated player-piano. It is in a dark room, the keys glow, and its wheels rest on the surface of a sharply delineated square pool of water. In one of the earlier exhibits, most of them featuring water in some form or another, soundwaves, their source invisible, materialised on the surface of a similar square pool.
The piano plays music by Ryuichi Sakamoto. Its keys move as it does, the mechanism is so refined as to preserve, in amplitude and the duration of the notes, the nuances of a performance, of Sakamoto himself playing. The effect is both spooky and moving. We see the keys pressed, held or released, and the pedals, and we hear the sound of the strings being struck by the felt mallets in the body of piano. It is spooky not because there is noone there present but because there is; and, that we know, from the style both of the music and the playing, who it is moves us.
The point is the composer, Sakamoto, is playing to us, yet there is no image attached to him. The region of images, the keyboard, shows his presence. The acoustic image becomes the memory of the visual image. Yet it too is accompanied by or coexists with a visual image, however, can we say that all this gives is a location?
Marina Abramović said in an interview that ideas can come to her anywhere. She was talking about how she hates the studio. They can come to her on the street, when she's walking, when she's eating at a restaurant, or in the bathroom. And from them she always chooses the idea that does not make sense to her and does that.
A whole critique of accepted practice and how she breaks with it is invoked here, not least the idea that a successful artist requires a body of work. The studio contains in some sense the memory of prior pieces that the artist, with each new work, adds to. What Abramović is objecting to here is the artist being trapped by others into a style and, by themselves, by what they already know, by what makes sense to them.
If they only do what makes sense to them they won't grow. In light of discontinuous and disconnected motor-diagrammes, of a diagramme disconnected from its motor, strings from keyboard, keyboard from the motor action of fingers, how can an idea not make sense to the person who conceives it? who is an artist and whose idea is in this case an artistic one? How can an idea not make sense?
(An image without a concept; a concept without an image; a word without a referent (or Logos itself): these belong to the same species as an idea that does not make sense.) Abramović recalls David Lynch talking about where ideas come from (here). And Lynch might have said a similar thing: I choose the idea that doesn't make sense to me.
As part of a kind of movement, an idea can only occur to us, such that we can say it does not make sense to me, by specifying the kind. Abramović explicitly breaks with the kind which comes from memory. The kind that does not make sense comes from the kind that does, and it does as a movement, which Bergson calls motor-diagramme.
Now we can imagine all the points on this diagramme to be schematic links to ideas where the movement between them is important, makes sense, literally constructing it, and not the senses made. The senses made belong to Bergson's 'region of images.' How do we know it's important? because we only go there to embody the links in a kind of movement. For Lynch this is fishing.
The unspoken nature of this movement which can embody ideas that don't make sense is that it belongs to a motor or muscle of which we can feel the movement. Where do we? in the muscle itself—in its exercise, which, since it is an artistic muscle is an artistic exercise—unspoken being that it is a perception.
To use the word perception distinguishes it from a preexisting synthesis of association, such as we might find in our emotional states or their emotive sources: the idea does not make emotional sense if it did we wouldn't choose it. We perceive the idea in so far as it is embodied in the motor-diagramme. There it takes the place of an empty form, like that of the motor-diagramme of an interlocutor's speech, which is a vessel determining, by its form, the form the fluid mass rushing into already tends to take. (cf. 49) For the empty form we can substitute the idea without sense. Conception then is here all perception, qualified as artistic perception—and even further qualified as this or that artist's perception, with all of the nuances present in its exercise as in the perceptive playing of a musical composition.
We might note finally how little Bergson's region of images resembles that familiarity we have with the region of moving images which always seem to accompany us. Not our memories, others'. Not our movements, but those which already tend to have been made, and which by the sense that they have obstruct and limit our own.
