The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing

Chapter 6. Image, Memory, and Efficacy

6 Image, Memory, and Efficacy Like the relation between imagination and perception with which we were concerned in chapter 4, the relation between imagination and memory is known by scholars to be a close one. Personal memory ofevents and episodes (in contrast to the memory ofschematic autobiographical facts) is known frequently to be experienced in imaginal form (Brewer 1986, Casey 1987), and it is precisely this kind of memory with which Charismatic ritual healing is concerned. So far we have developed a phenomenological argument that imagery in revelation and in imaginal performance is a bodily practice insofar as it engages multiple sensory modalities, and a bodily mode of being in the world insofar as its final interpretants can be identified as habits. The mutual reference to habit was one way in which we reconciled the phenomenological and semiotic accounts ofrevelatory imagery. Yet we might justifiably ask whether, when it comes to the relation between imagery and memory, a cognitive account might not be more productive than a phenomenological one. At least we could ask for an integration of phenomenological and cognitivist perspectives in an analysis similar to that in which we integrated phenomenology and semiotics. We must briefly return to the theoretical pole of our discussion to address this Issue. For an important reason, it is less easy to reconcile a phenomenological account with one based in the cognitive form ofrepresentationalism. As we discussed in chapter 1, there is a methodological difference between phenomenology and semiotics. The cognitive approach differs 141 142 IMAGE, MEMORY, AND EFFICACY not only methodologically, but also in that it tends to share the empiricist epistemology that we identified as incompatible with phenomenology . Stated another way, we would have to reconcile not only the relation between the semiotic image as sign and the phenomenological image in consciousness, but competing cognitive and phenomenological construals ofthe image in consciousness. For example, although he claims to have a phenomenological project, the cognitivist philosopher Mark Johnson defines imagination as our "capacity to organize mental representations" (1987:140), and follows Kant's intellectualist grounding ofimagination in the faculty ofjudgment.1 For him a "rich image" is a mental picture rich in information (ibid.:24), and not an act rich in existential meaning. He asserts but does not demonstrate the lack of a gap between the rational and the bodily, for in the end his project is to place the body "in the mind" rather than "in the world." Like many cognitive theorists he accordingly relies on a notion of"image-schema," which has the curious sense ofsimultaneously seeming to be the somatic ground of imagery and an abstraction from imagery as bodily practice. If Johnson's is a brave but hazardous way to integrate the bodily into the study of imagery from a cognitive perspective, equally brave is the recent effort ofcognitive students ofmemory to include autobiographical memory as a legitimate topic oftheir research. It is instructive that in order to do so, one ofthe leading scholars in this area found it necessary, with admitted chagrin, to introduce the "soft" concept of self as the referent to autobiographical memories. However, as might be expected, lurking behind the self is a "self-schema," and the events and actions that form the substance of autobiographical memory are defmed as "visual-temporal," such that a relevant question becomes whether or not individuals can "form a mental 'video recording''' of their memory (Brewer 1986:27-28). These efforts must be applauded, but for our purposes they still do not promise the experiential specificity we have found with a cultural phenomenology grounded in the body. Whether these positions ultimately can be reconciled, or whether there is a decisive epistemological step away from the representationalist paradigm to the standpoint of being in the world, is unfortunately beyond the scope ofour argument. For the present we must again favor, as the grounding concept for memory, not the cognitive notion of schema, but the phenomenological notion of habit as immediately embodied practice (Merleau-Ponty 1962, Casey 1987, Connerton 1989).2 In place of the two-dimensional understanding of the memory image as visual representation, we must favor notions ofthe world as "an underly- IMAGE, MEMORY, AND EFFICACY 143 ing field of presentation for the specific content remembered," and of self-presence "of the rememberer himself or herself at the scene remembered " (Casey 1987:69). The full extent to which memory can be understood as an embodied process...