The Deep Structure of Imagination.pdf

Are we witnessing the demise of the concept of the creative human imagination in the postmodern era? In our 'Civilization of the Image', as Marshall Mc Luhan has characterized it, might we not expect imagination to be accorded a privileged place by contemporary philosophers? The very opposite is the case. Right across the spectrum of structuralist, post-structuralist and deconstructionist thinking, one observes a common concern to dismantle the very notion of imagination. When it is spoken of, it is subjected to suspicion or denigrated as an outdated humanist illusion spawned by the modern movements of romantic idealism and existentialism. The philosophical category of imagination, like that of 'man' himself, appears to be dissolving into an anonymous play of language. For many postmodern thinkers it has become little more than the surface signifier of a linguistic system. Postmodern philosophies reflect this crisis of imagination in a variety of ways. But a central feature of such philosophies is the undermining of the humanist imagination understood as an 'original' creation of meaning. The postmodern philosophers deny the very idea of 'origin'. Meaning is deconstructed into an endless play of linguistic signs, each one of which relates to the other in a parodic circle. There is no possibility of a single founding reference. Language, as an open-ended play of signifiers, is no longer thought to refer to some 'real' meaning external to language (i.e., some 'transcendental signified' called truth or human subjectivity). Deprived of the concept of origin, the concept of imagination itself collapses. For imagination always presupposed the idea of origination: the derivation of our images from some original presence. And this position obtained regardless of whether the model of origination was situated outside of man (as in the biblical God of creation or the Platonic Ideas) or inside of man (as in the model of a productive consciousness promoted by modern idealism and existentialism). The deconstruction of the category of 'origin' is heralded by the famous textual revolution. The humanist concept of 'man' gives way to the anti-humanist concept of intertextual play. The autonomous subject disappears into the anonymous operations of language. Truth is replaced by parody, and the diachronic pattern of narrative history (with a beginning, middle and end) by achronic patterns of repetition and recurrence. The modern philosophy of the creative imagination-whether it be in the form of Kant's transcendental imagination or Sartre's absurd passion-cannot, it would seem, survive this deconstructive turn. At the level of dominant metaphors a paradigm shift has taken place in which the parodic paradigm, replacing the modern productive paradigm, recurs time and again in postmodern works of art and literature. The phenomenon of a unique human imagination producing a unique aesthetic object in a unique time and space collapses into a play of infinite repetition. The work becomes absolutely transparent, a mechanically reproducible surface without depth or interiority, a copy with no reference to anything other than a pseudo-world of copies. Thus Foucault speaks of the death of man, Barthes of the death of the author, and Derrida of endless mimesis and apocalypse without end.

What's the place of imagination today?

Le Journal des Laboratoires d' Aubervilliers, Paris, 2010

Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. How does one start at the beginning, if things happen before they actually happen? (Clarice Lispector) For some time now we have been considering questions related to the political potential of a work of art, or, put somewhat differently, about freeing the revolutionary potential of art from its social and political forms of representation and from the limitations of its communicative medium. Jacques Ranciere, for one, talks about the emancipation of art from its representative regime. But what does this actually mean? When we consider the political potential of an artwork, we are usually attentive to the possible changes in the social field that this work can stimulate or evoke. We think about the devices in an artwork (such as the motives, the narratives, or "meaningful spectacle" as Ranciere put it) that contribute towards raising political awareness in a social and economic order. We can even say that it is all about certain political pedagogy. But what we are actually talking about are the ways politics conditions art and not about art's emancipation from the representational regime. What we are interested in, then, is something else: the unmediated experiences, acts of creation, operations of desire or even insights, which are not yet formalized knowledge but thoughts in their purest formation, passing the field which has been liberated from the institutionalized rationality. Translations of these operations into the so called representative regime of art are never unproblematic, since they stimulate anxiety, incite new reactions and interruptions of the already-known and if not, they remain hidden until they reach their "extractive conditions". But how does one recognize the moment of moving beyond the subjective territory of the "not yet" into the plane of transversal linkage? How can radical imagination contribute towards crossing that threshold in question, bridging the gap between subjectivity and the representative regime of art? In order to attempt to answer these questions we should not only reconsider the meaning of imagination and creativity but also the long tradition of conformity to forms of expression and content which resulted in representation coming to dominate our way of thinking. It has been suggested (Simon O'Sullivan) that under different circumstances the art history practice as it is known now might disappear; that is, the kind of practice which positions an artwork as a representation, as a hermeneutic activity.

Philologia Hispalensis

In his introduction to the English edition of Deleuze and Guattari 's Anti-Oedipus, Foucault writes that it "is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force ... " (xiii-xiv). We would like to consider the possibility that what Foucault means by this connection is the labor involved in the construction of the world via the imagination. Our argument consists of paradoxical movements. To begin with, we focus on the political aspect of the postmodern by reading a distinctly pre-modern text: Lope de Vega' s Fuente Ovejuna. We argue here that in Lope's play about a collective rebellion of the multitude, one already discerns the con tours of a certain 'postmodern' conception of the subject in terms of a productive and collective praxis. Next, we take up the discussion of the postmodern at the point of crossing of philosophy and poetics, as we examine the role of mimesis in subject formation as a passage from dynamis to energeia (potentia to actuality). Both lines of inquiry-on the concepts of multitudo and mimesis-converge, finally, at the point which marks the political crux of all aesthetics, which is the problem of agencythat is, of the subject. In his book on Spinoza, L 'Anomalía Selvaggia, Antonio Negri writes, Poli tics is the metaphysics of the imagination, the metaphysics of the human constitution of reality, the world. The truth lives in the world of the imagination; it is possible to have adequate ideas that are not exhaustive reality but open to and constitutive of reality, which are intensively true; consciousness is constitutive; being is not only something found (not only a possession) but also activity, power; there is not only Nature, there is also second nature, nature of the proximate cause, constructed being. (97)

1988

Phainomena, 2022

This collection of nine papers explores the possibilities of a poetics which, after three decades of postmodernist experiments, wishes to refocus on the social and political dimension of the creative enterprise. In the latter years of the twentieth century, poetics has seen a variety of styles and modalities that have both called into question the very nature and need of poetry, and put forth a number of hypotheses. Among these we can list performance art, hybridity with pop and rap music, parody and collage, multilingualism, and an apparently acritical recycling of older or traditional forms. The lyric tradition seems to have continued unperturbed, especially in university settings. What seems to have disappeared from the scene is a poetics of the public sphere, one which is more in tune with broader movements that grew from the smoking debris of the Twin Towers in 2001. In a way, suddenly even postmodernism collapsed. Within a few short years, new poetics emerge (clearly some had been in gestation for decades), such as immigrant poetry, hyphenated poetry, poetry in translation, prose poems, computer-generated textualities, memorialism, technoallegories, and in general political poetry after the void left behind by the Beat generation and European committed writings of the 1970s and the 1980s. The questions the critic and the philosopher ask themselves are: what is the meaning of this transition? What carries over, what is gone for good? And what prospects lie before us? This collection addresses the necessity, in the context of this problematic set of issues, of whether new critical models need to be devised in order to better recognize, describe and relaunch a poetics for the twenty–first century.

Artnodes, 2022

When facts become predictions or even catastrophic prophecies, they can only be complied with or denied. Critical imagination is then locked into a twofold experience of the absence of limits, in other words an absence of limits leading to the Apocalypse or an absence of limits in the production of images in the global factory of innovation and creativity. The critical tradition was, right from the outset, to establish that the condition for true autonomy (of reason, decision, and learning) is being able to participate in setting one's own limits. This article is based on the hypothesis that, today, critical thinking needs to be constructed in alliance with ecology of the imagination. Criticism is the art of limits, of inquiry, and of cautious discernment regarding human productions and their conditions of possibility. Imagination is the living relationship with them, situated in a "between" that links-beyond the principle of non-contradiction-being and not-being in their various forms: what we know and do not know, what we see and do not see, and the different dimensions of time. Accordingly, I shall argue throughout this article that imagination is a power of strangeness that returns to us the possibility of relating with a common, but not unique, world and temporality.

""Perhaps no single entity was more important to Romantic writers than the imagination. Blake wanted “this world of imagination” to be “the world of eternity,” to the God dwelling within every human breast. Percy Shelley wanted the imagination to be “the great instrument of moral good” and it could function as such by operating as an organ of sympathy. In her “Ode to Imagination Under the denomination of Fancy,” Scottish novelist and poet Elizabeth Hamilton addressed the imagination as “Offspring of celestial light, /Spirit of the subtlest kind,/Fancy! Source of genius bright--/Illuminator of the mind!” In one go, she desired the imagination to embody fecundity, Enlightenment, spirit, genius, and mind. That this linkage is accomplished by the figure of apostrophe, the fictive figure of address, perhaps hints at the inability of the imagination to be all these things, even as her insistence on “denomination,” based on the Latin meaning “calling by a name,” generates more naming by adding fancy to imagination. The very powers of naming and addressing are thereby undermined. In her final stanza, Hamilton renders this initially ungendered “offspring” a “daughter,” and femininity enables her to close the gap between “thee,” “thy,” and “thou” (the imagination) —which appear 15 times—and her “my” in the final line (used once). Hamilton thus demands thinking about how the imagination can bridge the gap between wanting and being, and invites us to consider what we are to do with this gap. The gap between wanting and being is well worth thinking about especially with regard to the critical history of the imagination. This essay deliberately begins a few miles above Romantic accounts of the imagination because it charts the competing ways in which Romantic critics have invoked the imagination to perform critical work. Why have critics wanted one version of the imagination over another? The fact that these positions so often mirror and/or reverse previous positions signals that our very definitions and theories of the Romantic imagination have something, perhaps everything, to do with critical desire. Indeed, this history shows that the Romantic imagination oscillates from being pure of ideology to the very embodiment of it, and now to being more wary of ideology than critics of the evasive or ideological imagination have recognized. At bottom, then, I will argue this debate—this need to read ideology where others have read imagination— is conditioned by our increasing skepticism about the role of literature in the world, and the uses or uselessness of literary methods of reading to that world. The symptom of this skepticism is that contemporary critics have renamed the imagination ‘history,’ the ‘social,’ and ‘ideology.’ And yet, as we shall see, what counts as ‘history’ and ‘ideology’ is a particularly literarily-centered history or ideology whose core is figuration or language or reading. The irony here is that Romantic writers had no need to name the imagination as history or ideology because it was for them inextricable from history or ideology. Nor did their histories of the imagination take the forms ours do. The clear cut distinctions between text and context, literature and history, verbal figures and action, are more ours, than theirs, and they are ours because of our faith that making literature historical or ideological is to do meaningful intellectual work. I will then propose some future directions of study that attempt to return to what the Romantics wanted to do with the imagination, what they found wanting in it, and why.""