Genealogy: Imagination. 0. Principles

I’m beginning a series of postings involved with my dissertation, specifically the literature review sections on Imagination, Memory, and Desire. This is the first one, on the concept of the imagination. I don’t expect anything as astonishing as Foucault’s genealogies of Mental Illness or Prisons, and indeed in this section will not be historicizing at all. Rather, I’m here concerned with the philosophical genealogy of the concept. The practical genealogy is undoubtedly much more interesting, and much more important, but for talking about such concepts in the university, the philosophical must also be addressed, and often first. So here is the first post, in which I set myself three guiding principles:

Principles for a genealogy

1. Start from the present

1. These concepts are being used nowadays; not just by academics, but also by radicals, politicians, and even guerillas! Their concerns should take center stage and guide our attention. I am not writing a definitive genealogy, if such a thing is even possible., but a clarifying genealogy. I hope to clarify what we mean when we discuss these terms, by offering up a history of how others have used these in the past, and the debates which are necessarily connected to these terms through their histories. This will help me, but it may also be helpful to others, both within and without the academy.

Start from the past

• Once we accept that our study is to be motivated by present concerns, we must nevertheless proceed genealogically, by principles of

• Inheritance

• Reception

• Association

• For must of us, it is easier to understand a story when it goes ‘forward’ in time, from the past to the present (i.e., Mother to daughter). This is, however, precisely the reverse of the practice of genealogy, which proceeds (as I indicate above) from the present to the past (i.e., Daughter to mother).

• But, without attempting to seal and perfect my genealogy, I will go from the past to the present, the more easily to communicate the ideas, while continuing to remind myself that not every path need be followed, not all surfaces need to be planed. As Castoriadis wrote of his wonderful essay “Marxism and Revolutionary theory” (which could be retitled “Marxism or Revolutionary Theory”),

Unlike the work of art, there is no finished edifice here, nor an edifice to be finished; just as much as, and evn more than the results, what is important is the work of reflection and it is perhaps mostly this that an author can make us see, if he can make us see anything at all. Presenting the result as a systematic and polished totality, which is truth it never is; or even presenting the construction process – as s often the case, pedagogically but erroneously, in so many philosophical works – in the form of a well-ordered and wholly mastered logical process, can only serve to reinforce in the reader the disastrous illusion towards which he, like all of us, is already naturally inclined, that the edifice was constructed for him and that he has only, if he so desires, to move in and live there. Thinking is not building cathedrals or composing symphonies. If the symphony exists, it is the reader who must create it in his own ears. (Castoriadis 1998, 1-2)

1. Acknowledge the importance of the irrelevant
• That is to say, that for our present concerns, we may be much more involved with the primacy of practice over knowledge. Indeed, I sense that I’m prefiguring my final position here: that although we may spend most of our time detailing and cataloguing the contents of the imagination, our goals should be to liberate the imagination, to render it autonomous for each and all, individual and separate. Therefore, the study of the imagination must always be contingent and historical.
• This, in turn, almost paradoxically, requires that we pay attention not only to how the imagination is thought to function (some of the earliest concerns of Plato and Aristotle, as well, arguably [though we will squabble over vocabulary, undoubtedly] Buddhists as well), but also to the contents of its functioning. We will detail ghosts, spectres, etc., but what is important is not to preserve any particular imagination, but to enable them to act autonomously.
• If this last seems not to make sense, it’s undoubtedly because I already largely know where I stand, and am performing this genealogy in order to clarify my own thoughts in relation to other thinkers on the same topic. But i hereby ritually humble myself: I promise to learn, and change opinions, as often as is necessary to come to a position that is coherent and engaged.