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John T. Waisanen, edited by Jennifer Daryl Slack. Thinking Geometrically: Re-Visioning Space for a Multimodal World. New York: Peter Lang, 2002.
DOI: 10.1177/1086026604270647
If you have watched Jason Bourne in action-portrayed by Matt Damon in the film The Bourne Identity (Liman, 2002) and the sequel, The Bourne Supremacy (Greengrass, 2004)-you have glimpsed what "thinking geometrically" can look like. Always one step ahead of his pursuers, Bourne possesses an uncanny ability to manoeuvre out of the most spatially and temporally tight situations where it appears there is literally no way out. While a team of CIA agents may be galvanizing a strategy to find Bourne, he is one building away, watching them through binoculars. How does he do it? What is the difference between Bourne and the others?
The clue to Bourne's capabilities lies in John T. Waisanen's book, Thinking Geometrically: Re-Visioning Space for a Multimodal World. This link is not coincidental: Waisanen found inspiration-and the term thinking geometrically-from Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Supremacy (1986), the second novel in the Bourne trilogy, which was to become a blockbuster Hollywood movie. As an archetypal modern character, Bourne may reflect Western technological man's ontological (in)security. Forced to navigate multiple identities and intelligences, Bourne reflects a mastery of inner and outer resources that appears magical. If we want to become more like Jason Bourne, one place to start, suggests Waisanen, is in the simple act of drawing.
The simplicity is deceptive. Waisanen's book is a very complicated matter addressing the conceptual and theoretical mechanisms that inform and shape our ability to perceive, respond, and adapt to environments. Waisanen describes thinking geometrically as "the ability to deal imaginatively with the multiple, that is, numerous and simultaneous, dimensions of complex and variable objects and relations in a structured, yet dynamic and interactive fashion" (pp. 8-9). Thinking geometrically is therefore established at the onset as a faculty of the imagination-a capacity to both apprehend and act (or respond) through seeing relationships or, as he would suggest, "projections." He continues,
In a sense, this means being able to construct mental models, to compare these models to real events, and to modify both the models and one's own behavior to arrive at a better fit between imaginative constructions and events in real space. People...