A Centre Not Its Centre

In “Line and Surface,” Vilém Flusser draws a strict distinction between “imaginal” and “conceptual” thinking, as they are realized by images and written texts respectively. The two media, he posits, impose a different “structure on thinking:” “we must follow the written text if we want to get at its message, but in pictures we may get the message first, and then try to decompose it” (23). Flusser explains that “when we translate image into concept, we decompose the image—we analyze it.” In doing so, he claims, we “throw…a conceptual point-net over the image, and capture only such meanings as did not escape through the meshes of the net” (28). The inadequacy of written lines, which “relate their symbols to their meanings point by point,” to explaining surfaces, which “relate their symbols to their meanings by two-dimensional contexts” (27-28), represents what Flusser calls “the present crisis.” What Flusser fails to recognize, it seems, is the possibility that written lines can be used in the service of “imaginal” thinking—indeed, that language can ever be used to disrupt the teleological “history” of the sentence and gesture toward new “structures of thinking.”

                Such a project plays out (of course) in Samuel Beckett’s Watt. For the sake of concision, I will focus only on the most obvious example of the intersection of imaginal and conceptual thinking in the novel, which occurs when Watt tries to articulate the strange effect that a painting has on his thought process.  Watt describes the painting, which he finds in the room of his fellow servant, Erskine, as follows:

A circle, obviously described by a compass, and broken at its lowest point, occupied the middle foreground, of this picture…In the eastern background appeared a point, or dot. The circumference was black. The point was blue, but blue! The rest was white. How the effect of perspective was obtained Watt did not know. But it was obtained…Watt wondered how long it would be before the point and the circle entered together upon the same plane. Or had they not done so already, or almost? And was it not rather the circle that was in the background, and the point that was in the foreground? (104)

Here Watt’s struggle to determine the foreground and the background of the painting are clearly presented in “conceptual” (or written) lines. This desire to translate the “conceptual” to the “imaginal” is taken to its logical extreme (as are most things in Beckett), as Watt:

wondered what the artist had intended to represent (Watt knew nothing about painting), a circle and its centre in search of each other, or a circle and its centre in search of a centre and a circle respectively, or a circle and its centre in search of its centre and a circle respectively, or a circle and its centre in search of a centre and its circle respectively, or a circle and its centre not its centre in search of its centre and its circle respectively, or a circle and a centre not its centre in search of a centre and a circle respectively, or a circle and a centre not its centre in search of its centre and a circle respectively, or a circle and a centre not its centre in search of a centre and its circle respectively, in boundless space, in endless time (Watt knew nothing about physics), and at the thought that it was perhaps this, a circle and a centre not its centre in search of a centre and its circle respectively, in boundless space, in endless time, then Watt’s eyes filled with tears that he could not stem, and they flowed down his fluted cheeks unchecked, in a steady flow, refreshing him greatly. (104-05)

Watt’s permutational logic, which is clearly composed of written (conceptual) lines, seems to become a dizzying textual surface that contains a different, “imaginal” thought. When Flusser posits that, in the future, “first there will be an image of something, then there will be an explanation of that image, and then there will be an image of that explanation” (30), I immediately thought of the many long passages in Watt in which the permutational logic is taken to its extreme, as in the passage above. I will spare you more examples (mostly because they are painstaking to transcribe but also because they get progressively longer as the novel goes on), but it seems that Beckett is effectively able to translate conceptual (written) lines, which still retain their individual "histories" in isolation, into a textual space that can best be grasped as an (imaginal) surface—one whose content is grasped more fully at first glance than by painstakingly reading each permutation.

                I wonder if Flusser’s essay (which describes poetry as an “articulation of linear thought” (30)) fails to take into account a wide range of seemingly conceptual content that is actually insisting to be understood with imaginal structures of thought.