The Ghost is the Machine: Media-Philosophy and Materialism

Abstract

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare asks us to think about how the ‘imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown’ (V. i. 14–15). This line, in a play replete with fairies, asks us to consider the work of the imagination. How are we to imagine the imagination itself? Certainly, the way in which Shakespeare imagined his Oberon — King of the fairies, or his Titania — Queen of the fairies, or Puck, Peasebottom, Cobweb, Moth or Mustardseed, first took material shape on a page, on paper, penned, we presume, in ink. As the play says, ‘the poet’s pen / Turns them [the forms of things unknown] to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name’ (V. i. 15–17). With the help of a writing instrument, ‘airy nothing’ is turned into something. What was invisible becomes visible. What was immaterial becomes material. But is the pen just that: an instrument, a tool? Are the instruments we use to make art from the ‘airy nothing’ in our heads just that: tools which serve art?