Imagination
by Matt Stoltz, 2005
Stitching together a theme for CHID 390 was hardly a difficult task granted the breadth of the material. Yet, at the same time, it was difficult to choose one theme with which to begin. Nevertheless, I decided to focus on one of the class's more obtrusive themes, at least as I saw it, namely the imagination. It has been present in much, and to some extent all, of the material we have read, and it is certainly at work in the process of interpreting texts. Specifically, I am concerned with how the imagination comes to bear on intellectual discourse. The question spurring my essay is what function does the imagination serve? From there, the aim of this paper will be to map the ways in which the imagination allows intellectual discourse to achieve its ends while focusing on the implications and assumptions found within such texts.
Before rushing into the material covered in our class, it seems appropriate to locate some of the theories about imagination so that we can get a sense of its development. Beginning with the term itself, imagination's etymology reaches back to ancient Greece where figures like Aristotle treat the term as an illusory appearance, calling it "phantasia." In Book III Chapter III of his discourse On the Soul, Aristotle writes "perceptions are always true, while imaginings are for the most part false...imagination [will not] be any of those things which are always correct, e.g. knowledge or intellect." In this passage a reader can notice that Aristotle's assumption is not very clandestine; as a matter of fact, it is pretty obvious Aristotle is assuming that "perception," "knowledge," and "intellect" are consistently correct whereas the imagination is not.
This line of reasoning would crumble as soon as a reader picks up a copy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. In this discourse, Coleridge responds to Kant's Critique of Judgment, in which he finds Kant's critique to deny, or not to account for, the possibility of formulating new ideas. Ultimately, his response to Kant puts forward one of the first exclusive theories on the imagination saying,
"The imagination I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception.... The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will... It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify."
Notice how this passage stands Aristotle's assumption on its head. Granted, "perception," "knowledge," and the "intellect" might still be consistently correct as Aristotle claims...but ask yourself, what is at stake in this definition? and it becomes clear how Aristotle's claim crumbles. If, according to Coleridge, the imagination is the prime Agent of all human perception, then in order to arrive at what Aristotle's calls "perception," "knowledge," and "intellect" requires the imagination. This is exactly what devastates Aristotle's assumption. Coleridge gets under "perception," "knowledge," and "intellect" by taking the imagination to be at the root of each. The implication in Coleridge's definition is that it provides the imagination a power that it has scarcely been given before in discourse, by essentially giving the imagination authority over all human perception. Furthermore, the rest of the passage describes the coexistence of the imagination with the conscious will, and the general process of the imagination. Coleridge's conception of the conscious will is that it utilizes the imagination, treats it as a tool that breaks apart and prepares the soil for possibility of something new to come forth. To use another simile, the imagination and the conscious will are like two lions hunting new prey. Remember, Coleridge's biggest problem with Kant's Critique of Judgment was that it did not permit the possibility for new ideas, and ironically Coleridge treats Kant's work as an example of the imaginative process because the critique itself was something completely new. As far as Coleridge is concerned, Kant consciously and willfully set out to diffuse the fundamental conflict between empiricists and rationalists in order to re-create an ideal philosophical system that could unify both disciplines. In the end, the idea of the imagination has evolved since Aristotle's conception of it; it is no longer simply an illusory appearance; rather it is, according to Coleridge, guiding all human perception as it struggles to re-create and unify.
Loosely associated with Colridge's theory of the imagination is Nietzsche. I'm not sure if the man actually read Coleridge, but he avidly read Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was profoundly influenced by Coleridge. In any event, Nietzsche was concerned with, among many other things, epistemology, and he is the next theorist at whom I aim to direct some attention. Nietzsche's work Beyond Good and Evil identifies what is in between the lines of Coleridge's definition of the imagination. Namely, if the imagination is the living power and acting force behind all human perception, joined with the conscious will, then this would seem to suggest a rather concerning epistemological dilemma. By that I mean, are all the accumulated "knowledge" and "facts", which must have passed through human perceptions and individual wills, to be considered imaginative artifacts? Does history simply become layers of interpretations over interpretations? It is precisely in such a way that Nietzsche's discourse calls into question the very foundation of knowledge.
One of Nietzsche's entry points is through a notion of the will. If Nietzsche can reduce the work of philosophers, artists, or any creators of knowledge for that matter to being nothing more than a confession of the author's will, then he can call into question the integrity of their work. Nietzsche does this on such a large scale that he successfully disrupts knowledge, calling into question solid epistemological conventions brought forward by figures like Kant, Christ, and Socrates to name a few. Rhetorically, this is not very hard to do; all one needs to know are the assumptions that allow authors of knowledge to bridge their propositions to their conclusions. It is assumptions that disclose the author's will, and Nietzsche goes after these. Logically, it can be more difficult but by no means impossible. Consider the syllogism. The whole logic of the syllogism depends on the middle term, crafted by words, which imposes a particular understanding on the reader. The revealing question becomes what is the effect of this particular understanding? What does the author of this want me to agree with? Here you can locate the syllogist's will. For Nietzsche all this boils down to power. But even more interesting, is that if we consider this notion of the will in a Coleridgean sense, then the connection between imagination and what Nietzsche calls will to power is manifest. For example, in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche vehemently attacks philosophers who conjure up knowledge in order to fulfill their purposes by maintaining that one cannot find truth in these discourses, but rather only a will to truth or a will to power. As far as denying the importance of the will to power or what we might now call the imagination in disguise, Nietzsche is reluctant to say. Yet, he undoubtedly goes after work which doesn't adhere to his politics. As a result, Nietzsche merely identifies an epistemological problem whose shockwaves are still being felt today. Describing the problem, Nietzsche writes that philosophy "always creates the world in its own image, it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to creation of the world." In passages like these one can discover the imagination lurking in the shadows of Nietzsche's polemics; all one must ask is, "what does it take in order to create a world in my own image?" Certainly such an endeavor would require the imagination. In the end, Nietzsche's claims have a tremendous effect on discourse, and especially on Foucault, who, in turn, influenced a lot of the authors and material we covered in CHID 390.
In Foucault's Chapter "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" of his book Truth and Method, we can discover how the imagination has affected historiography. In defining what "effective" history is Foucault claims that,
"Effective history deals with events in terms of their most unique characteristics, their most acute manifestations. An event, consequently, is not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it, a feeble domination that poisons itself as it grows lax, the entry of a masked other" (72).
This passage describes a method of conceptualizing history that narrows its scope, allowing an author of "effective" history to appropriate the language of the past and 'usurp power' from the very people who, once upon a time, used that language. In this case, writing "effective" history becomes a semiotic struggle for power. Yet, what can we assume to be a precursor to the writing of this "effective" history? Well, certainly an author of effective history (or history in general) would be required to interpret the language of the past through textual artifacts, oral traditions, and so forth, which brings forward the question of what is involved in interpreting a text?
Ultimately, to answer this question I think it's necessary to consider what Foucault calls the will to knowledge. For Foucault, the interpretation of a text involves this concept of the will to knowledge, and, essentially, the imagination can be found there (within the concept). In the above passage, the definition of effective history provides an understanding that usurping power and appropriating language is what certain historians do as they interpret texts, and the result of their interpretation becomes a new version of history. This is where the imagination and the interpretation of texts work together. The interpretation of a text is where an author searches archives for particular things that his or her imagination wants to baptize as legitimate knowledge. To further explicate this concept of the will to knowledge, we can compare it with Nietzsche's notion of the will to power. Both seem to have a hand in the same epistemological problems and appear to be constructed around similar claims. For example, consider the following passage from Foucault, "the historical analysis of this rancorous will to knowledge reveals that all knowledge rests upon injustice (that there is no right, not even in the act of knowing, to truth or the foundation for truth) and that the instinct for knowledge is malicious" (95). Here, the same thing is at stake as we saw in Beyond Good and Evil, namely, the foundations of knowledge are called into question, and Foucault describes the concept as if it were an instinctual drive. Yet, in a sense, Foucault takes it a little further than Nietzsche by reducing the entire process of the will to knowledge to malice; so where Nietzsche merely identifies the problem and aims his criticism at particular historical figures that compromise his politics, Foucault makes a sweeping judgment and aims his criticism at historiography in praxis. In effect, the epistemological problem just got bigger.
Let's consider how Foucault's will to knowledge is premised on the assumption that knowledge has become self-conscious and finds itself to be simply "instinct, passion, the inquisitor's devotion, cruel subtlety, and malice" (79). With this intellectual framework an author of "effective" history becomes unhinged from what Foucault calls "traditional" history and is no longer burdened by the continuity of history, and can ultimately start imagining. Now it is crucial to underscore how I have been tracing the imagination along side the will or 'co-existing with the conscious will,' as Coleridge argues. With that in mind, we could treat Foucault's will to knowledge as co-existing with the imagination. And, if this is the case, then it would seem as though the "effective" historian interpreting a text, under the influence of the will to knowledge, is to a certain extent interpreting the language of the past through the faculty of the imagination. Now let's see how Foucault's influence rolls off onto other authors we have considered this quarter.
In terms of influence, Joan Scott's Gender and the Politics of History show indications that she was versed in Foucault's arguments about effective history. Foucault actually provided a criterion, or a rule book, for researchers, theorists, historiographers and so on to write these "effective" histories. So from this, a reader, as we will see, can derive another point of contact with the imagination in Scott's work on Gender studies. As I've already mentioned, Scott's epistemological approach to historical writing is consistent with Foucault's notion of "effective" history, and it also appears to be guided by the will to knowledge. Now, this becomes explicit by virtue of the fact that she goes into history with the will a change it, specifically to change the conventional categories that define gender. For example, Scott exclaims "This epistemological perspective permits the kind of critical assessment of their discipline that feminist historians need in order to pursue their goal of making women historical subjects" (84). A reader knows that the epistemological perspective Scott is privileging in this passage corresponds with Foucault's arguments on "effective" history, because she comes right out and says it, "I use knowledge, following Michel Foucault, to mean the understanding produced... (81, italics mine). Scott is not going into her research with the intention of rearticulating some long historical understanding which women already posses; rather Scott is heading into history with the gospel of the will to knowledge foregrounded in her approach, which, as we have seen, usurps power, appropriates language, and ultimately can grant Scott a method to make women historical subjects. Such a task would require an interpretation of the past through historical texts etc., and it would also require an act of the imagination which looks at the present condition with a will to change it.
Furthermore, we can see how the imagination is present in Scott's project by considering how she treats the past. Scott writes, "I assume that history's representations of the past help construct gender for the present. Analyzing how that happens requires attention to the assumptions, practices, and rhetoric of the discipline, to things either so taken for granted or so outside customary practice that they are not usually a focus for historians' attention" (81). Again, she is aiming to construct gender, and she is also after assumptions, practices, and rhetoric that have come to define gender in the past. If Scott can disrupt our conventional knowledge about gender (and she can, granted that she cuts away at the root by exposing the problems behind such assumptions, practice, and rhetoric), then she will be able to redefine gender in a way that fits her agenda. Something interesting in terms of Scott's historical project, especially after reading Foucault, is that a reader can ask, "is this so malicious, as Foucault would have us believe? Don't women deserve to be historical subjects under a less oppressive understanding of what gender is, and how it works?" Scott might say, 'no this is not malicious,' because "it provides a means for understanding and contributing to the process by which gender knowledge is produced" (81). For Scott, it seems almost malicious for theorists not to address the problems of gender.
The last author I want to focus on is Stephen Greenblatt. Essentially, Greenblatt's work articulates many of the things that have been discussed in this essay. In his book Marvelous Possessions we can see how Greenblatt employs the imagination to achieve his ends. Interestingly enough, Greenblatt is so preoccupied with imaginative theory that his own scholarship discloses how profoundly present the imagination actually is in it. Confessing his bias, Greenblatt writes, "I shall try to show [that] the principal faculty involved in generating these representations is not reason but imagination" (14). In other words, when Greenblatt goes into a text by, for example, Columbus he wants to demonstrate that the imagination is that which generates these representations of the New World. Ironically, not only does a reader get a sense of how 16th century explorers used their imaginations to generate representations of the New World, but a reader cannot help but get a sense of how Greenblatt's own imagination is generating representations of the very texts which he is interpreting. In a way, Greenblatt reflects precisely the circumstance he is presenting us with; his scholarly behavior appears to be very much like the early explorers, the difference of course being that he is not dealing with living people, but rather with texts.
In Greenblatt's chapter "Kidnapping the Language," he argues that language barriers spur a sense of wonder which, in turn, causes the interpretation of signs or gestures to lean towards optimistic conclusions. He claims that "[Europeans] do not understand, and when they do not understand, they can only continue to entrap, kidnap and project vain fantasies" (117). The implication here is that whenever there is an absence of understanding with respect to language, signs, gestures etc. it forces the interpreter to construct optimistic conclusions. This strikes a chord in Greenblatt's discourse because he seems to commit the same crime as early explorers in constructing his discourse. Furthermore, Greenblatt characterizes early explorers as making confident assumptions, daring interpretive leaps, and filling in the blanks whenever a sense of wonder is on the horizon. Now, one of the first things that a reader can notice is that Greenblatt can be characterized the same way through his use of the term wonder. Essentially, Greenblatt appropriates the term wonder, constructs his own meaning out of the term, and turns it against the very people who once used that language. In so doing, he too makes daring interpretive leaps and confident assumptions. For Greenblatt, his whole argument depends on the term wonder; he is convinced that wherever the term wonder springs up in these 16th century texts, the imagination is there to forge an understanding. Ultimately, what Greenblatt is assuming here is a consistency in the language in upwards of five hundred years; he does not concede the idea that perhaps language evolves. Wonder may simply be an idiomatic expression. In the end, what I find most striking about Greenblatt's discourse is that it appears to be almost entirely imaginative. By this I mean that Greenblatt deals with old texts but he is imagining something that is entirely new and completely his own. In all honesty, it was Greenblatt's discourse that truly set me in motion on this theme of the imagination.
As you can see, I have tried to argue the imagination into intellectual discourse by exploring how it has functioned in texts, and how it has aided these various authors in achieving their ends. What I find most fascinating is how broad its applications are. Throughout the quarter I saw glimpses of what it can do for vastly different projects coming out of philosophers, historians, feminists, literary critics, and others. Here, I tried to make public my observations, and hopefully I will strive to make more observations.