Abstract
AbstractThe essay presents an interdisciplinary theory of what it will call “innerscapes”: artefactual representations of the mind as a spatially extended world. By bringing examples of innerscapes from literature (Kafka’s short storyThe Bridge), radio plays (Samuel Beckett’sEmbers), and a creative documentary about auditory-verbal hallucinations (a voice-hearer’s short film,Adam + 1), it suggests that these spatial renditions of the mind are constructed by transforming the quasi-perceptual elements of inner experience into affording ecologies. In so doing, they enable an enactive exploration of inner worlds as navigable environments. The resulting storyworlds display features that resemble the logic and ontology of dreams. Cognitive research on dreams and cartographical studies of the personal geographies of dreamscapes will thus inform the understanding of what innerscapes are, do and can do if used, as the essay argues they should be, as enhancing devices for what Jesse Butler has called ‘extended introspection” (2013: 95).
Highlights
The essay presents an interdisciplinary theory of what it will call “innerscapes”: artefactual representations of the mind as a spatially extended world
Hurlburt et al (2017a), have firmly countered this claim by suggesting that, if we look at the phenomenology of inner experience rather than at the absence or presence of perceptual stimuli, this objection does not stand
As the innerscapes show, what inner experience does possess is the potentiality to be transformed into a storyworld: it has a latent affordance of narratability or, more a latent narrativity
Summary
In his Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Jerome Bruner argues that each story simultaneously constructs what he defines as two parallel topographies. One is what he calls the “landscape of action” where “the constituents are the arguments of action: agent, intention or goal, situation” (1986: 14). Even at the neurological level, data confirm a substantial overlap between brain regions recruited, for example, in visual perception and visual mental imagery (Ganis 2013: 11) If captured in their raw form, as Hurlburt has done for decades with a beeping device that randomly sets off during the day as a prompter for the introspecting subject (Hurlburt & Schwitzgebel 2007), these quasi-perceptual images, thoughts, feelings or sounds in inner experience are usually short-lived, skittish, unstable, with fading degrees of vividness, and confusedly superimposing with each other. As the innerscapes show, what inner experience does possess is the potentiality to be transformed into a storyworld: it has a latent affordance of narratability or, more a latent narrativity This latent narrativity can be activated by the double movement of structuring quasi-perceptual thoughts, images, sounds and emotions into a world-like ecology (worlding) and by threading these inner events into some sort of narrative cohesiveness (storying). We are equipped for a quick comparative journey into different landscapes of consciousness and introspective imageries in action
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