Rhythm and reverie: on the temporality of imagination in Bachelard
ENOur conventional understanding of imagination tends to be governed by the supremacy of the formal over the material. This supremacy conceals the fundamental role of reverie, which needs to be rediscovered and would redeem it from its systematic dependency on realism by exploding its objectlike appearance. Bachelard offers two concepts that bring about an altered temporality of material imagination: resonance and reverberation. If the world is an orchestra, none of its instruments could be heard without the impact of a driving imaginaire. Bachelard contributes a lot to elucidating the paradox of this dynamic process, which accumulates contradictions and operates through the close proximity of imagination and will. Material reveries reach their resonating accomplishment through rhythmical motions, which, deeply rooted in primordial temporality, simultaneously awaken actual corporeal experience or, to put it in Deleuze’s terms, the experience of living sensations.
