Imaginary Consciousness

The imagination remains perhaps the most mystical part of mankind’s experience of itself. How often, when we were children, did we hear of injunctions to “use our imaginations” and to “let our imaginations run wild”? How strange it is that as we age our injunctions to imagine diminish and that we are, instead, drowned in endless demands for toilsome, useless labor!

Letting the collapse of imagination in mature life aside, we must ask: what is the imagination apart from a fanciful, childish faculty? What does it do, and how does it work?

First, let us suggest that all human activities were once mere fancies. There is nothing around us that was not once merely the imagined hobby horse of an ide thinker. If we wished to valorize the capitalist entrepreneur, we might say that it was his visionary capability to imagine a future for his income and for services he might render to the consumer. Indeed, as Napoleon Hill has said, “whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” If we instead wished to valorize the revolutionary, we might say with Murray Bookchin that “the assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.”

Second, let us suggest that all acts of the imagination are first and foremost images of the environment impressed upon the imaginer. The idea is intuitive—wherever we have acted in the world, there the world has left our mark on us. These marks, with Maturana and Varela but against Lamarck, could have evolutionary consequences if the gonads were implicated. With Niklas Luhmann and Henri Bergson, are points of bodily contact between us and our environment. When we imagine, we are call these images to mind and combine them. The etymology of the term aside, imagination has always consisted in images impressed from without. A historical consciousness of the imagination could roughly suggest the following periodization or morphology, following Vico:

Or, in summary following the historical analysis offered in our introduction to media consciousness, oral societies roughly understood the poetic imagination to be a voice of a god speaking through the poet. In the transition from oral to literate societies, the function of the poet is displaced onto the warrior-prophet, as in the Greek Achilles, the Jewish Samson, the Chinese Guan Yu, or the Indian Arjuna: heroic figures who stand at the threshold between divine inspiration and individual agency. By the time of Plato and Aristotle, the warrior-prophet has been inspired by a kind of “divine madness” whereby impressions of the outer environment are reactivated according to memory. By the Romantic period, imagination is considered as a productive faculty of recombination. Finally, for the last 100 years, imagination has been considered as a distinctively worldhood-disclosing faculty that mediates, to speak with Heidegger, between the fourfold distinction between earth, sky, mortals, and divinities. Imagination, the early Heidegger would say, was a faculty that allowed any object of consciousness to appear as thrown into a series of temporal protentions, or expectancies and projects. The imagination was therefore a futural disclosure of things to come. For the late Heidegger, the imagination is condensed into the thing whose existence, a function of all known and unknown forces, reminds us of our already-being-thrown into a world full of such expectancies:

Thinging is the nearing of world. Nearing is the nature of nearness. As we preserve the thing qua thing we inhabit nearness. The nearing of nearness is the true and sole dimension of the mirror-play of the world. (Source)

Indeed, as the middle Heidegger would say in Being and Time the disclosure of the world and its being gathered around an object is a work of mitsein, a work of being-together-in-the-world. This being-together implies certain total ways of going about living and relating to objects, what Heidegger calls “average, everydayness” in general and “readiness-to-hand” of things in particular (our ability to use them without thinking about how to use them). Already Destutt de Tracy and Marx had described the “ruling ideas” of an age as “ideology” and that, indeed, there was a system of ideas governing society. This conception achieved its apogee in Saussure’s linguistics and was eventually diffused through the social sciences by Claude Levi Strauss and Pierre Bourdieu until the famed “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” essay of Louis Althusser. For such thinkers, ideology was not worldhood-disclosing; to the contrary, as was shown in media consciousness, it was worldhood-inverting.

Parallel to structuralist developments, phenomenology before Heidegger had developed a series of ideas surrounding the transcendental possibilities for social cohesion. Before Heidegger’s worldhood his teacher Edmund Husserl had already conceived of the pre-given “lifeworld” as the “original ground of all theoretical and practical life.” The pragmatist C.S. Peirce had similarly conceived of a “commens” as the “common mind” consisting in the totality of sign-relations between men, and Henri Bergson had conceived of a field of images, or environmental impressions, that, like John Dewey’s conception of sensori-motor unity in his paper on the reflex-arc, structure intention. Psychoanalysis had similarly conceived of “fantasy” as a set of embodied propensities and relationships toward objects. Lacan, of course, conceived of his own “imaginary” register. In all such cases, a common world was constituted for men as something like a field of signs and images given in advance of action. Deleuze would later dramatize this as a “virtual” and a “plane of immanence” following Spinoza. In no case, moreover, would the personal-psychoanalytic conceptions of fantasy and the imaginary connect up with the pre-given fore-structures of Heidegger, Peirce, Dewey, Bersgson, and Deleuze. Nor, moreover, did any of such concepts connect to the classical view of the imagination as phantasia and as environmental impression.

That was, of course, until the pioneering work of Cornelius Castoriadis. Finally, in Castoriadis, all historical conceptions of the imagination were united in a synthetic view, following Freud’s work in Civilization and Its Discontents, of the “imaginary institution of society.” For Castoriadis, as for Freud, the mind and body are structured as a series of indeterminate impulses. As we enter into social life, these impulses become bound up with environmental and socio-cultural habits, or complexes. For the sake of social cohesion, this binding often redirects our less humane impulses toward more humane, cultural ends—a process Freud and Castoriadis both call “sublimation.” For Freud, sublimation is merely redirective—it merely suggests that impulses are redirected without explaining toward what such impulses are directed. To answer this, Castoriadis suggests, as Bookchin later might, that each of us bears a radical, personal imagination (as the Romantics suggest). This imagination, like Hume’s laws of association, does not merely recall images; additionally, it is an “unceasing and essentially undetermined” power to create “figures/forms/images” at all. (Akin to Nietzsche’s will to power and Spinoza’s conatus). Following a rehearsal of the Oedipal drama and collapse of primary narcissism, the pure, unfettered potentiality (as Lacan will also later say, and roughly following Wittgenstein) encounters a field of public meanings in language. Through language and other significant symbols (as G. H. Mead would say), the radical imagination encounters a social-historical world instituted in front of itself. With Husserl and Heidegger, we might say it encounters a pre-given life-world full of circumspect orientations. Stripped of its private meanings and fantasies, the individual’s radical imagination is compressed into some or another social mold as it encounters images of its institutions. Hereby, it learns to use “social imaginary significations” whose public contents replace the radical imaginary insignificances of pure, pre-social fantasy (Cf. here Hobbes’ conception of “insignificant speech” and Kristeva’s “chora”). Hereby, the socialized individual is “fabricated” by society. Such fabrication comprehends both a determinate institutional role (e.g. a CEO), the descriptive expectancies one might associate therewith (e.g. payment), the normative architecture within which the role is enmeshed (e.g. authority, power, status, prestige, etc.), the socio-historical ideology with which the role functions (e.g. better that a CEO lead than a union), and a series of practical, embodied orientations toward objects and subjects when one fulfills the role (e.g. speaking down and speaking up, using spreadsheets, walking with grace, etc). Hereby, the individual becomes a walking, talking embodiment of society’s specific imaginary significations; in other words, the individual is fashioned as a self-consciousness node in the whole of society, maintaining a set of fantasied relationships between description, norm, ideology, and embodied practice all at once. The individual becomes, as so many critical theorists of the suspicious mode suggested, a somnambulistic repeater of social cliches, a “sheep.” (Castoriadis summarizes the whole of this via his distinction between legein and teukhein). Despite this, the untrammeled radical imagination of the individual remains in the unconscious, generating dreams, neuroses, phantasies, and “otherness,” or our unique potentiality as a being that Hannah Arendt roughly calls our “natality” and which Heidegger roughly calls our “ownmost potentiality for being.” Like the Romantics, and especially in Hegel, the resultant situation is heteronomous imposition of law from without, a life of “quiet desperation” as Thoreau put it. In so many words, it is a state of existential alienation within which fabricated individuals blindly obey institutions they believe they cannot change; as Camus put it, they live in a perpetual philosophical suicide (Heidegger would call it a “fallenness” into “the they”—going along with the crowd).

The alternative to contemporary life, itself also a largely Romantic view, is autonomy in the purest social sense—a recognition not that the mass of men are deluded sleepwalking sheep, but that all society is a self-institution requiring simultaneous incentives and expectations, a highly interconnected fantasy that, unlike the ideologiekritik of suspicious hermeneuts, admits that social imagination is wirklich, or actual, and at work. Upon admitting of such an imaginary consciousness, the individual achieves a personal autonomy—”an autonomous subject is one that knows itself to be justified in concluding: this is indeed true, and: this is indeed my desire.” Or, as Heidegger would say, the individual encounters the limits of his finitude and becomes resolute. Or again, as Emerson would say, he practices self-reliance. Or again, as Nietzsche would say, he overcomes eternal recurrence and practices amor fati. Yet again, from a more fatalist register, as Camus would say, “the struggle alone is enough to fill a man’s heart.” Of course, such a discourse does not yet stand as a personal resolution; to exist as such would be to fall into a depressive existentialism that oscillates with a manic fascism: if indeed “‘Hell is other people’” and ‘living with others is like being under an evil spell,’” then autonomy might merely mean domination over them in complete repudiation of the intersubjective, fantasied ground upon which autonomy is realized.

Imaginary consciousness, yet presses beyond such a personal autonomy to an autonomy constituted as a “social problem and as a social relation.” Indeed, imaginary consciousness is hereby sublated, to speak with Hegel, into the recognition that others want just the same as we—a fundamentally Romantic Kingdom of Ends in which pure creation might be law. Or, as Castoriadis writes of such an “autonomous society’:

Thus also [the] supersession [of alienated society] - which we are aiming at because we will it and because we know that others will it as well, not because such are the laws of history, the interests of the proletariat or the destiny of being the bringing about of a history in which society not only knows itself, but makes itself as explicitly self-instituting, implies a radical destruction of the known institution of society, in its most unsuspected nooks and crannies, which can exist only as positing/creating not only new institutions but a new mode of instituting and a new relation of society and of individuals to the institution…The self-transformation of society concerns social doing - and so also politics, in the profound sense of the term - the doing of men and women in society, and nothing else. Of this, thoughtful doing, and political thinking - society’s thinking as making itself - is one essential component.

Imaginary consciousness so defined thus not only suggests an acknowledgement that there are such things as social imaginaries, that they do indeed quash the originary, creative potential of individuals, but that our practical engagements with the environment impress on us images which are, in turn, grist for the mill of social institutions. Imaginary consciousness is both, then, a resolute will to use one’s own imagination, to encounter the world as a series of images, but also to respond to a world in which the capacities of others to do so are endlessly stifled by the “dull compulsion” of capitalist technics. Imaginary consciousness, so understood, is a determinate practical attitude with which we seek a society of free and equal creators, one in which, as Marx so eloquently put it:

…as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.

For this, a more thoroughgoing practical consciousness is required. Before it, though, we must come to a critical consciousness appropriate to this imaginary consciousness.