Conceptual blending, imagination, and other people

This nice, short talk about the power of imagination includes a number of concrete examples for what I have termed sedimentation of unreality into reality. Conceptual blending is the operative term; this means that some perception of physical reality blends with an abstract idea to generate something imaginary, which is then treated as real. (In addition to what I have called sedimentation, this notion is also related to Colin McGinn's discussion of imaginative seeing in the third chapter of Mindsight.[1])

In the second part of the talk, he gives a number of examples for how our imagination shapes (and often generates) our idea of other people. (This is what I have also identified in my book as one of he main functions of imagination.) Again, some good illustrations of how such ideas sediment into reality subsequently.

[1] Colin McGinn, Mindsight. Image, Dream, Meaning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2004, 48–55.

Introductory book about the ideas behind this blog

During the fall months of the past year, it's been a little quieter than usual on this blog. The reason was that last summer I found that I needed something more of a coherent presentation of the ideas behind it — a kind of backgrounder and introductory text. So I sat down to write that. The result has taken the shape of a small book, which is now available in a draft version. (There is still some formatting work I want to do to optimize readability, and possibly smallish corrections in wording and grammar.)

You can download the pdf version here.

The table of contents looks like this:

Preface

Activities

  Living your life · Reflection · Imagination · Philosophy

Goals

  Beauty · Excellence of character · Eudaimonia

Theory

  Unreality · Interplay · Apartness · Present

References

History, time travel, and informedness of unreality

'Join us for an amazing journey through time!' — Exhibitions at history museums sometimes advertise that they will 'take you back in time', typically to some earlier period the exhibition is about. And in fact, if the period in question is interesting and colorful enough in itself, and the exhibition supports it by a suitable manner of presentation, focusing not so much on written descriptions and explanations, but rather on rich tableaux, original costumes and items from the time, and appropriate lighting and background sound, you may easily find yourself suddenly 'in' that past world, looking at a lavish banquet, say, feeling almost as if in fact you were there.

Now this is 'time travel' only in a metaphorical sense: you're not actually going back in time — you're just imagining yourself at another time. Or perhaps you don't even imagine yourself as being there, you simply imagine what it must have been like, how it must have looked (and sounded, and smelled) at that time. This is different from time travel as it is presented in novels and films: there, a character is transferred from his own time into a different time and then is actually there. Put differently, a time traveler in a movie would perceive a different world, the world of the past, while a museum visitor imagines it. Both may have some visual impression (and again, also impressions on the other senses, too) of that world. But where the time traveler perceives an independent reality, not subject to his will, the museum visitor shapes such a world in his imagination, and is therefore free to include whatever he fancies (he might for instance imagine his romantic partner sitting at that banquet table in an exquisite old-fashioned dress). By virtue of this difference, the museum visit isn't time travel in a proper sense, only in a metaphorical sense, based on some similarities in the experiences one would have.

In order to make this distinction as clear as possible, I have so far not mentioned a complication, which we now have to look at. The complication is this: even though we imagine (not perceive) the world of the past into which the museum invites us, we couldn't just dream it up ourselves. After all, the very purpose of the exhibition is to make us familiar with details about the past which we didn't know about so far. We learn something from it, something we didn't know before, and what we learn is obviously not coming from our imagination, but comes from the outside, channeled through its presentation at the exhibition. Where does it come from?

The exhibition will be informed, often by historical or scientific fact which we know about. Thus, if the exhibition is about dinosaurs, much of the information will come from science (what did a dinosaur look like, what were its dimensions, its color and shape, its typical movements, how would a typical environment have looked, which plants were there, and so on). It's science which reconstructs these things and can tell us how we would have to imagine them in order to keep within established facts. If the exhibition is rather about historical or cultural matters (such as the history of an island or the life and work of a composer, say), then that information comes from history. (History has methods that are somewhat different from those of science.)

So, from a historical exhibition, we can learn something about the real world, even though we look at the world of an instance of unreality. I call this the informedness[1] of unreality by bits and pieces from the real world. This does not run counter to the general character of the unreal as imagined, as being a product of the imagination; it just shows that the workings of the imagination always take up some materials from reality and include, shape and develop them in the process of generating an instance of unreality. You can learn from an exhibition about the past just as you can learn from a movie or a novel, or a dream: for instance, if you are a reader of crime fiction, you might learn a bit from it about police procedure, or forensic science. Of course, it's only in there because the author has researched it and built it into the world of her story, and it goes without saying that there is no guarantee that it's not fictional — the author might just have invented some bit of science which was necessary for the narrative, but which isn't actual science. Even dreams include memories, thoughts and emotions from waking life as building blocks, however much they may rearrange and distort them; from these you may pick up things about yourself and your recent experience you haven't noticed (yet) while awake.

(Such informedness is in some respects a counterpart to sedimentation; just like the latter, the former results from the interplay of reality and unreality, resulting in a mix of both along the path. Instances of the unreal sediment into reality when they influence our views and actions; bits and pieces of the real make up the materials from which the worlds of unreality are created.)

[1] It's also sometimes called fictional export. See for instance Christy Mag Uidhir and Allen Hazlett, "Unrealistic Fictions", in: American Philosophical Quarterly 48 (2011), 33–46. This seems to be a very helpful notion, but I have to read up more about it.

Unreality, sedimentation, and comedy titles

Those who study the forms of unreality closely develop a keen sense of reality (as I have written in an earlier posting here).

There's probably no better example for this than Shakespeare. He put deceptions, illusions, confusions and the like at the center of many of his plays, and then explored how things would develop. (He once alludes to this technique by inserting a play-within-a-play into Hamlet, where his protagonist has much the same intention with it as his author.) And he was bold enough to openly declare this even in his titles from time to time. There's an entire vacation company having some good parties, making a few practical jokes, getting into a quarrel after a devious mind does some real mischief by creating a deceptive instance of unreality — and it's all Much ado about nothing.

Sedimentation of unreality

Dreams sometimes come true. So do prophecies (sometimes). Jealous fantasies can become so destructive that they actually create what they were about (albeit wrongly) in the first place. Visionary leaders know that they first have to draw a picture before people can start acting towards making it a reality.

A while ago I wrote about some even more complex examples in Hitchcock's movies (Vertigo and North by Northwest), where an elaborate deception creates a dynamic in the world (the world of the movie, that is) which in effect makes it seem as if the deception has become reality.

Even in the real world there are some rare cases of an instance of unreality causing far-reaching developments. The first airing of Orson Welles' radio show War of the worlds (based on H.G. Wells' novel) was so convincing that it caused confusion and panic with some in the show's audience who mistook it for a real report.

Such effects are normally short-lived in the real world — reflection kicks in, people communicate and cross-check, and closeness to reality is restored all the faster the higher the number of people who are affected directly. On the other hand, as long as the feasibility of reality checks is kept low and the subject remains fascinating enough to hold a grip on the imagination, even foggy rumors can be sustained for quite some time. In his 1993 Norton Lectures, Umberto Eco cites the case of the Superb, a British submarine which was rumored to be deployed during the build-up of the Falklands crisis. It wasn't, but a combination of public imagination, media speculation and official secrecy quickly made it into a quasi-fact. "[T]he whole story grew out of vague gossip, through the collaboration of all parties. Everybody cooperated in the creation of the Yellow Submarine because it was a fascinating fictional character and its story was narratively exciting."[1]

What all these examples have in common is that some instance of unreality brings about changes in the real world, gets people to act in a different way than they'd have acted without that instance of unreality. Unreality (sometimes) settles into reality: though unreality is unreality, and reality is reality, part of reality consists of sedimented unreality.

Let's look closer at this. When we say that a dream comes true, it's not that literally the dream events come to have happened. It's still only a dream. What does happen is that I start acting in a way that makes some future situation resemble the situation from the dream. (This future situation can be a desirable state, if the dream expresses some wishes or goals I have; it could be an undesirable state, if it is a nightmare and expresses some of my fears. In either case, the way I act towards the situation I experienced in the dream can be conscious, or unconscious, or both.) If that happens and my actions are successful in bringing that situation about, we have now two different situations: an unreal dream situation and a real situation, which I made happen partly because of my dream experience.

When unreality sediments into reality, that instance of unreality remains what it is (it's not, so to speak, transformed into something real). In the example, there's still that dream, and that is an instance of unreality. It becomes, however, the cause (at least, a partial cause) and reason (possibly one reason among others) why some further, real situation, happens the way it does.

To conclude, here are some random reflections about sedimentation. First, in the case of dreams or visions what the unreal situation (the one that's dreamt or envisioned) and the real situation have in common is some experience you have in it, or a description that applies to it. It's an experience or description that was originally a 'what-if' experience or description. In other cases, such as the panic following a fictional invasion from Mars, there's no experience in common, but rather the real situation contains an 'as-if' perception or even action. (People start evacuating as if there really was an invasion.) In the most intricate cases, a constellation might involve both a 'what-if' experience and an 'as-if' action, leading to a very potent confusion of reality and unreality: this is what Vertigo uses to great and disturbing effect.(Again: read more about it in my previous post about sedimentation of unreality in those Hitchcock movies.)

Second, people who act on the basis of some instance of unreality are sometimes aware of this (when they try to fulfill a dream or achieve a vision, or when they have deliberately assumed a scenario, e.g. as a working hypothesis); sometimes they're not (when they act under a deception or illusion). But since people invest by acting and forming views about the world that contains this sedimented unreality, it's unlikely to be reversed once it's found unreal. (There's only a limited possibility to revert your actions in the world anyway, in particular if they have caused more development already.) I've called this the irreversibility of sedimentation in the previous posts I've already linked.

And finally, not everything in reality is sedimented unreality. (Although many facts about the real world have some sedimented unreality somewhere in the chain of causes that lead up to them.) Neither does all unreality sediment into reality of some form. (Some instances of unreality will remain largely without effect in the real world.)[2]

[1] Umberto Eco, Six walks in the fictional woods. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1993, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1994, 97–99, the quote is from 99.

[2] Technical side note: I'm using a sketchy notion of cause and effect here that leaves many unclarities and is not (yet) connected to the contemporary philosophical discussion of causation. But note that the idea of sedimented unreality as a cause is no more problematic than any notion of mental causation of events in the world. Sedimentation can unproblematically be analyzed in terms of people's views and actions. It singles out views and actions that are based on an exercise of the imagination, but that's a phenomenon that every account of human action has to deal with anyway.

Kierkegaard's despairable self

"Man is Spirit. But what is Spirit? Spirit is the Self. But what is the Self? The Self is a relation that relates itself to itself; or it is, in this relation, that which relates it to itself (the Self is not the relation, but that the relation relates itself to itself)."
Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

First we might want to cut through the jargon of the first few sentences: what Kierkegaard wants to say is that the interesting or important thing about human beings is that they have a self. To have a self is to be a special sort of thing. Stones don't have a self. Artifacts, such as chairs and tables don't have a self.[1] Plants don't have a self, and most animals don't either.[2] But human beings have a self, and that is so essential to them that Kierkegaard straightforwardly identifies being human with having a self. It's what Man is — having a self.

The thesis of The Sickness Unto Death is that almost every self that is in fact out there, that is, almost every human being's self in the world, past and present, is defective. A self that is fully in order is very rare; the typical condition of selves is to be defective. The defect takes various forms, but there is a collective term that is used throughout the book for them: Despair. Despair is a condition we're all in (or, at any rate, most of us are in); it's the name for that pervasive defectiveness of selves. Thus, in order to explain what Despair is, it's necessary for Kierkegaard to first state what a self is, for only then we can understand in what sense and in which ways such a self may be defective. That's the point of giving a definition of a self.[3]

So now we have seen what the definition is for and what (intuitively) it is targeted at. We have some idea, that is, what we're talking about, what will be defined for us now. (It's only to be expected, of course, that our idea of a self will be changed in the process of understanding the definition. Part of the point of giving a definition is to clarify and sharpen our understanding of what's defined, and another part is to connect the idea of what is defined in the definition to other ideas. So we learn about distinctions and about connections to other concepts, and that will transform our overall view of things, including the thing that's talked about in the definition.)

Mariana Varela, Inextricable

Now let's sort this out carefully. I can have an attitude towards something. For instance, I can have an attitude to this armchair: that I find it inviting. I feel somewhat lazily drawn towards it, I imagine that it would be pleasant to be seated in it right now, and so on. I have an attitude of finding the armchair inviting.

Attitudes can be to objects like an armchair, or to other people, but I can also have an attitude towards myself. I might reflect, right now, and find that my attitude towards the armchair (my finding it inviting) reveals something about me, at least about what I am right in this moment, right in taking this attitude (of finding the armchair inviting). I take myself to be lazy, let's say. Now I'm taking an attitude towards myself, the attitude of taking myself to be lazy (in finding the armchair inviting).

Assume, for a moment, that this sort of episode happens frequently: I consider myself lazy quite often; and not only when faced with armchairs I find inviting; let's say I'm also reluctant to get out of bed each morning; I'm constantly drawn to over-extend my lunch break; I'm hesitant to go out in the evenings for my sheer inertness, and so on. Let's assume, for a moment, thus, that I'm a generally lazy person. In the episode described above, when considering myself lazy when finding the armchair inviting, I recognize an instance of my general laziness. In other words, I relate my attitude towards myself (my considering myself lazy) to other, similar attitudes I have registered in the past. In so relating my attitude, I give meaning to the predicate 'lazy' by putting my attitude towards myself in a class of related attitudes (which would fall under the same predicate). Thus what I do isn't just taking an attitude towards myself, it's also an attitude that contains a further reflective self-reference (in putting itself, as it were, in the category of being an attitude of laziness).

Let's now drop the assumption I've made in the previous section: that episodes like the one described (episodes of considering myself lazy) happen frequently. Let's instead assume that such episodes have never happened before at all. The new assumption thus is the first time ever that I consider myself lazy, in finding this armchair inviting; moreover, this is indeed the first time (we now assume) that I consider myself lazy at all.

Note that we have two options here:
i) It's in fact the first time that I could consider myself lazy; it's the actual first time in my life ever that I had occasion for it; never before was I in a situation where some attitude I took towards something (armchair or other) gave me the opportunity to consider myself lazy.

ii) Although in fact I had many episodes of attitudes towards external things already, the thought hasn't so far crossed my mind to consider myself lazy; only now this has occurred to me, for the first time.

In either case I can either become aware that I'm lazy or be aware that I've become lazy. (That is, we have four cases here: first, that I get into such a situation for the first time but take myself to have been in it for longer and assume that I've just become aware of the fact; second, that again I'm in the situation for the first time and also think of myself as having come into it for the first time; third, that I've actually been there before and now correctly but for the first time notice it; and finally fourth, that I've been in that situation before but got aware of it only now and thus take it, incorrectly, to be the first time.)

In any of these cases again I'm not just taking an attitude towards myself, but also an one that includes that additional reflective self-reference (putting the attitude itself in the category of being an attitude of laziness, one that I think of as either just having come about or just having come to my awareness). So it's not just an attitude, but it also brings with it a comparison with attitudes (that were taken or not, in which they at least might have been taken) at earlier times. These additional reflective self-references (that they are self-references of the attitudes themselves) make up what we call the self. Or, to put it differently, you're said to have a self only if your attitudes include some of that rather complicated variety. And that means that in some way or other, your past attitudes are built into your self. This build-up of reality on unreality is again a form of what I've called sedimentation.

[1] Perhaps there will be rather sophisticated artifacts at some future time which will have a self; think of a supercomputer with an 'intelligent persona' here, one which starts developing its own thoughts, goals and so on. Perhaps that sort of being will have a self in the relevant sense then. But as of today, that's still firmly an idea from the realm of science fiction, even though some progress towards it has been made in the branch of science and technology known as Artificial Intelligence. So for the moment, artifacts don't have a self, even if in principle they might, and in the future they possibly will, have one.

[2] Recent research, especially on primates, more and more suggests that we should ascribe a self in the relevant sense to at least some animal species, which again shows that there's no absolute gap between humans and other beings with respect to having a self: it's something that we might in principle share with animals and machines; though (to repeat) it is still not fully settled whether in fact, and at present, we do. And even if so, there are still obvious large differences in degree with respect to how far developed these selves are, and thus we have to be careful not to be carried away with conclusions from such findings. (A caution which, alas, many science journalists and some popularizing scientists have long thrown overboard, which will probably not help improving the image of science in the long run.)

[3] The plan of Kierkegaard's author (the book is written under a pseudonym, and that is always relevant with Kierkegaard; so I'll not assume from the beginning that we're discussing Kierkegaard's text, but one that he puts before us as the work of an author who is himself already a character) is to explore the concept of Despair. I've capitalized the word to indicate that Despair, Kierkegaard's term, is potentially different in meaning from the everyday word. It's a central term, and it takes much of the book to explain what is to be understood by it. (And this being philosophy, of course, it's not simply settled; part of the challenge is always to interpret central concepts such as this one, so in a sense there is no fixed meaning at all for the term. We always have to keep in mind its interdependency and interaction with our interpretation of the book which discusses it.)

Kierkegaard's Despair is a defect in the Self. Before his author starts exploring the nature of this defect, its various forms of appearance, and the meaning of the fact (which he claims is a fact, anyway) that this defect pervades our reality and is a defect to be diagnosed in pretty much everybody's Self — before he starts discussing all this, he tells us what a Self is, so that we can understand the idea of a defective Self. It's a compressed passage and so obscure and complicated that some commentators have thought that it isn't even part of the more serious work but rather a playful, parodistic introduction (satirically imitating the jargon of another philosopher, namely Hegel). I don't think that's likely, though, so I'll just take it seriously, and take it to be doing what it purports to be doing, namely: defining what it means to be a Self (so that we later on can learn what it means to have a defective Self, i.e. what it means to be in Despair). For me, of course, the interest is mereley whether we can learn something interesting about any of the forms of unreality from all this.

Greek names

James Axton is an American who lives in Greece and works as an investigator for an insurance company with interests in Mediterranean and Middle East countries. He doesn't speak Greek well (and tends to avoid the ancient cultural monuments). Often when he talks to Niko, the concierge of his apartment building, he is ashamed of his bad pronunciation; so after a while he answers questions about where he is going not by telling the names of the actual places he goes to, but instead by giving those names he can easily pronounce. He is a little uneasy about doing so, however.

I felt childish, of course. [...] But the lies began to worry me after a while in a way that had nothing to do with childishness. There was something metaphysically disturbing about them. A grave misplacement. They were not simple but complex. What was I tampering with, the human faith in naming, the lifelong system of images in Niko's brain? I was leaving behind in the person of the concierge an enormous discrepancy between my uttered journey and the actual movements I made in the external world, a four-thousand-mile fiction, a deep lie.

The lie was deeper in Greek than it would have been in English. I knew this without knowing why. Could reality be phonetic, a matter of gutturals and dentals? The smoky crowded places where we did business were not always as different to us as the names assigned to them. We needed the names to tell them apart [...]. (Don DeLillo, The Names; p. 103 in my paperback edition, NY: Vintage Books 1989.)

James is a character in Don DeLillo's novel The Names, and his reflections on his own escape technique throw an interesting light on what I've previously called sedimentation of unreality: when unreality in whichever form (fiction, hypotheses, lies — even those harmless ones of the kind James uses) is taken for real and acted upon, when others build their views on them, then it quickly becomes a layer of reality itself, and irreversibly so.

In DeLillo's book, reality and its relationship with signs, language, and texts is hard to get a grip on. The quoted passage somehow fits with the main plot line of a curious sect which seemingly randomly kills people whose names' initials match those of the location of the murder: there is a suspicion that there is nothing meaningful, no structure or direction behind their path, any more than behind the faceless nondistinct business surroundings referred to above in the quotation; only the arbitrary symbolism of the names brings some kind of distinction into it at all, but that hasn't any real meaning to it, either.

The novel presses this motif home when one cult member defects and starts explaining. At first his account seems to provide "an element of motivation, of attitudes and needs", whereas "[t]he cult's power, its psychic grip, was based on an absence of such things. No sense, no content, no historic bond, no ritual significance." (216) But then again, this is quickly revealed as the personal recoil of a dissident; quite opposite from giving an insight into the mindset of the cult, it once more only gives an impression of what is missing. "These meetings were a way of turning himself toward the air of worldly reason, of conventional sense and its manipulations. He was raising a call for pity and forgiveness." (Ibd.)

Things are systematically left obscure; only the constant flow of symbols remains — names —, and there's nothing behind those. The effect is a deep uneasiness in us as readers (a commentator has called the book 'haunting'), not quite unlike the one James Axton professes to feel in the quote above. There is a deep suspicion that drifting away too far from reality (and even being led away from reality systematically and intentionally), isn't good for us.

Lost time, sedimentation, and the future as a form of unreality

A few days ago I had a business appointment at the company headquarters which was scheduled to start at ten in the morning. I planned to be there half an hour early to prepare a few things for the presentation I was to give; since I was going there by public transport which normally takes about 40 minutes, I left home at 8:40 and walked to the tram station.

As I found out, the workers of all the public transport firms were on strike, and there was no tram arriving for the next half hour; then a defect along the way forced the train to take a detour; in between I had to sprint across the street from one stop which was temporarily out of order to another one. When I arrived at the office, I was half an hour late and the meeting had already started; I was just in time to give my presentation. It went well, and there wasn't really any harm done; still it wasn't exactly my favorite sort of morning: I had lost some time I would have rather spent otherwise than standing around at train stops in the cold or sitting in overcrowded trains among angry commuters, I'd felt some nervousness and anger myself during the journey, and afterwards I looked back at it as somewhat stressful; I had probably caused some (minor) unplanned re-organizing at the office when I called in to give notice I would be late; and I was forced to improvise a little in my presentation which I had to do without the planned preparation.

Things like that happen all the time, and they're a good example of how we have to adjust our plans when events turn out unexpectedly. There is often some discomfort to it when that happens: when reality diverges from what we planned (or hoped), we feel negative about it. (Depending on one's temperament, and the amount of difference between expected and actual course of events, the feeling will be more or less intense, ranging from slight irritation to being outright annoyed or angry.) And although we might take measures in advance to prevent unpleasant surprises, we'd normally do that only in special cases, when the outcome is particularly important to us. It's impossible to do that for every imaginable circumstance, and even where it is possible, the risk, although it is real, is often simply to small to bother.

If it's not avoidable to run into situations like that from time to time, and if it's not a big problem (after all, the resulting problems in my example were all easily handled), then what is the source of the negative feeling?

At the base of it seems to be a comparison: between a more favorable situation (the planned one) and a less favorable one (the one that actually obtained). So there seems to be some judgment in play, a judgment of the relative values of those two versions. Since the actual outcome is seen to have less value for us, the difference is perceived as negative. Thus in my example, the loss was primarily one of time: I spent about an hour in traffic that was planned to be used for business. The planned outcome would have been more valuable compared to the actual outcome, it would have been an hour better spent. So the overall judgment of that course of events is naturally a negative one.

However, that seems to be only part of the story. Compare it with a different example: the weather. Sometimes we expect nice weather and are then surprised by sudden cold or rain. One could make a similar calculation, then, about those two situations (the expected and the actual situation), and again the difference in value would be negative, since the actual bad weather would have a lower value than the expected nice weather. Yet, with respect to the weather, people rarely react annoyed — everyone knows that the weather isn't reliable, after all.

A key difference between the tram example and the weather example is the kind of value we're talking about: our time is generally (and rightfully) seen to be of a higher sort of value than mere physical comfort. Overall, life time spent well adds up to a successful life in a way in which the pleasantness of feeling in nice weather doesn't.

(Our time is also something we're responsible for in a way in which weather conditions aren't. Using it well is up to us to a higher degree than the external conditions around us are. This aspect, however, doesn't account for the difference between the two examples: in the tram example, the external circumstance weren't really something I could influence any more than I could influence the weather. I could have informed myself better about them in advance; but then, one can normally inform oneself about the weather in advance, too.)

Life time is not simply something that passes by; it consists not simply of events that happen. Life time is something that is made up of our own actions and their results as much as of circumstances external to those actions (i.e. things out of our direct control, things that simply happen to us.) In the tram example, the sequence of events that I had planned was not simply different from what actually happened: what I had planned was active and productive use of my time, where one step built onto the other. What happened instead wasn't just something else; it was precisely no longer a sequence of productive, constructive action, but mostly reactive and unproductive. And this is what lies at the root of the uneasiness: when reality runs counter to plans or projections, it runs counter to a form of unreality. More precisely: it runs against what has already partially sedimented from an instance of that form of unreality.

Source: http://www.windows2universe.org

Thinking about the future is a form of unreality. Just like other such forms, future-related unreality is produced when we make up, in our thoughts, a version of reality that differs from it in some respects. When we make plans, we envisage a future state that is different from the present state as we conceive of it. When we begin acting out such plans, this is sedimentation of unreality: if everything goes by plan, the present situation transforms gradually into what we've planned. One action builds on the results of the preceding actions, and the whole course gets its direction by the projected future state we envisaged first (the instance of unreality). We might make some adjustments along the way, but as long as we can keep the original goal it remains that same instance of unreality gradually sedimenting itself into reality.

If, on the other hand, the plan breaks down and it becomes clear that it won't be realized, the original instance of unreality gets abandoned, and as far as the sedimentation has already taken place, it becomes a write-off, a misspent investment. Whatever time and effort has gone into it is recognized as wasted or misdirected in retrospect — and since that is a precious resource for each of us, that hurts.

There is a great variety in thinking about the future, and it still remains to be shown that they all constitute yet another form of unreality. If they do, then the process I've called sedimentation is something very common; whenever it is frustrated, the situation is akin to what I've described in my example. Thus, one thing this account can serve to explain is the negative feeling we might feel in such situations; another one is the hesitation we often experience to engage in what I've called reflection, i.e. cutting down instances of unreality in living our lives. (In reflection, we deliberately act against already partially sedimented unreality, so in a sense we have to bring ourselves into the unpleasant situation described in the tram example.)

The irreversible sedimentation of unreality

In Hitchcock's North by Northwest the main character (played by Cary Grant) is an advertising man who gets thrown out of his dull life by first being kidnapped and almost killed and then wrongly accused of a murder, all this putting him on the run from both his kidnappers and the police. Each of his attempts to bring some light into what's going on only gets him entangled more deeply in the strange affair that he stumbled into by accident.

Well, what is going on is that Grant's character is mistaken for an intelligence agent; an agent, however, who doesn't exist, but whose identity was set up as a decoy to divert the attention of a spy ring from a second agent (this time a real one). We're told exactly that in a scene right after the first act (the first act containing pretty much what I've summarized in the paragraph above). A group of US Intelligence people around their mastermind, the 'Professor', discusses the situation, and we get the feeling that the whole scene's only function is to brief us, the audience, about every single bit of the background (with the exception of the identity of the other agent; to establish that is the main theme of act two).

What is the purpose of this comparatively undramatic revelation? Why tell us these things, instead of keeping them secret for as long as possible? The script could have been silent about them for much longer: they might have been revealed only at the time when the main character learns about them, preserving much more of the mystery.

Yet that's not Hitchcock's strategy. North by Northwest has this in common with Vertigo, another film where the main character gets drawn into an elaborate game of deception. And once more, there is a dedicated scene that simply reveals the plot of the mastermind behind that deception, in detail, and without inner necessity that would enforce the disclosure at the moment at which Hitchcock puts it in the movie. This time, it's the female lead (Kim Novak) who explains the background of what has happened so far by writing a letter to the main character and target of the deception (James Stewart), revealing the motive and method of the crime as well as the manipulative means she and the mastermind have employed. The letter never reaches the intended receiver, of course: it's just a plot device that provides a pretext for explaining something outright to the audience, without using any dramatic or cinematic means.

What this suggests, of course, is that unraveling the elaborate deception is not the main game the director had in mind for us as the audience. These movies are not about gradually getting behind the devious plotting of some mastermind; they're about something else, and therefore the mystery is quickly and thoroughly disposed of before it can get into the way too much. On the other hand, however, there is an elaborate deception going on in these films, so there must be some function to it. Otherwise, Hitchcock could just have left it out. But he does take some care to build it up. We're thus faced with the double question: what, if not the unraveling of the mystery, is the main way in which the director wants to engage us? And what, if it is not the riddle he wants us to solve, is the function of the complicated deception the main character undergoes and gets only gradually behind? (In contrast to the audience, the main character doesn't learn about the background all at once, and early on; the main character has to get behind everything painfully and slowly, and in the case of Vertigo he's in a tragic predicament which doesn't have any possible happy solution, so that he doesn't even get behind it completely.)

One possible interpretation is that Hitchcock's goal is to demonstrate the sort of struggle a character goes through in the face of elaborate unreality. That is what both films roll out before our eyes, in different constellations. Subjected to a complicated deceptive plot, they have to find ways to cope with events that don't fit their world. Getting behind the deception is part of their adventure; but it's not just an uninvolved interest they have: in both cases, their own lives and persons are threatened at a deep level. (And in both cases it's not a choice they've made on their own to embark on the sort of adventure they get in.)

In the process, the unreality (the fake world produced by the deception) gains a certain weight, so the hero's goal is not reversal simple and pure, but something that includes both getting back to reality and keeping something from the unreality. The main character in North by Northwest won't be going back to his "dull life", as he puts it; and above all he has met his future (third) wife in the course of the adventure (Eva Marie Saint). The main character in Vertigo is fully broken by the loss of the fake person he has met and the powerlessness he experienced when he failed to save her (a failure that was of course meticulously arranged for by the deceiving party), and he is unable to get into any meaningful relationship again because he compulsively tries to force the moment of crisis back from the past into the present again. Something has been created that cannot be reversed; even though it was unreality, it has caused real people to take real action, and has produced a new state of affairs (with both good and bad aspects). Unreality, one might, is no less of a 'real' force in the world than reality.