The Ghost is the Machine: Media-Philosophy and Materialism

Abstract

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare asks us to think about how the ‘imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown’ (V. i. 14–15). This line, in a play replete with fairies, asks us to consider the work of the imagination. How are we to imagine the imagination itself? Certainly, the way in which Shakespeare imagined his Oberon — King of the fairies, or his Titania — Queen of the fairies, or Puck, Peasebottom, Cobweb, Moth or Mustardseed, first took material shape on a page, on paper, penned, we presume, in ink. As the play says, ‘the poet’s pen / Turns them [the forms of things unknown] to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name’ (V. i. 15–17). With the help of a writing instrument, ‘airy nothing’ is turned into something. What was invisible becomes visible. What was immaterial becomes material. But is the pen just that: an instrument, a tool? Are the instruments we use to make art from the ‘airy nothing’ in our heads just that: tools which serve art?KeywordsWide AnglePerceptual ManipulatorDiscourse NetworkMaterial ShapeLoeb Classical LibraryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.