Abstract

This chapter begins by first complexifying the psychoanalytic concept of ‘suture’ as a theory of how we aesthetically and affectively interface with images, asking how we police the boundary between actual and virtual in our experience of the world. By working through notions of mirror neurons, the simulation theory of the mind, the metaphoric structure of memory, and mimetic capacity, it establishes that we are influenced and conditioned by the images we consume to inhabit certain fields of immanent possibility intuitively and corporeally. Within digital images, this field of possibility is rendered plastic, subject to reformation, modulation and regeneration and it is argued that this foments a more plastic mind in which actuality and virtuality fuse.

Keywords: Suture, The Mimetic faculty, Metaphor, Embodied Simulation, Kinetic Synaesthesia, Play

A psychologically tested belief of our time is that the central nervous system, which feeds its impulses directly to the brain, the conscious and subconscious, is unable to discern between the real, and the vividly imagined experience – if there is a difference, and most of us believe there is. Am I being clear? For to examine these concepts requires tremendous energy and discipline. To allow the unknown to occur… and to occur… requires clarity [sic]. And where there is clarity there is no choice. And where there is choice, there is misery. (The Swami in The Monkees's 1968 film HEAD, dir. Bob Rafelson)

Everything is backwards now, like out there is the true world, and in here is the dream. (Jake Sully [Sam Worthington], in Avatar, 2009, dir. James Cameron)