No [imaginary] exits: sewing up the edges of the imaginal sphere

One should write something everyday, so here’s today’s contribution

The very concept of imagination is overly fuzzy. It must alwas be defined operationally in reference to one’s application of it. This situation is the result of over 2500 years of rather continuous engagement with the concept. The imagination has been vilified as an enemy of Reason and of God (Plato, Aquinas) which are often assimilated to each other in a more or less pantheistic view of the world, as with Spinoza. One of Spinoza’s most important moves was to identify God with the very process and ongoing construction of nature. We find ourselves, in Spinoza’s world, not ‘at one’ with God, but as objects and creations ‘of God.’ Metaconsciousness is produced in the very act of considering this possibility: if we are the products of God’s ongoing production, then we are, to a certain extent, imaginations in the mind or body of God. Reality as we know it begins to collapse into a sort of immanence which renders mediation of all sorts, including the imagination, impossible and unncessary.

Spinoza’s theory of immanent reality has been profoundly influential on modern European thinkers, especially Gilles Deleuze and those who have followed him in an increasingly political vein, such as Toni Negri. While neither of the latter tend to be as vociferous about the imagination, it is important to note that Spinoza shared the same opinion of it that Plato did: the imagination is a purely deformative, mimetic, and distortion function. It should be revolted against by the person attempting to develop the faculty of reason.

This isn’t the place to go into it, but it is worthwhile noting that there appears to be a basic contradiction in the positions held above: Spinoza’s view of the world requires an imaginative approach to the world. Spinoza asks his readers to re-imagine the world as if it were the immanent divine itself, which is an act of imagination. Even in the discursive fields in which imagination is denied even the possibility of possibility (for instance, in Phenomenological descriptions of imagination as an autonomous realm of ‘pure possibility,’ allowing for a reality predicated on its constant difference to actuality), this would qualify as an act of imagination, since it requires the de-realization of common-sense perception and the application of a new schema (we are composed of and immanent to the divine) to our rationality about reality.

It is important for both Spinoza and Deleuze, at least, to emphasize that what is happening is not that the divine is immanent to us, but that we are immanent to the divine. This is another aspect in which Spinoza’s move de-realizes the individual by characterizing the individual as something other than how the individual is represented in common-sense practice (how that, in turn, is imagined).

And yet, Spinoza, Plato, and many many others, continue to differentiate between Reason and Imagination. Reason has privileged access to the Forms in Plato, to accurate realization in Spinoza, and is generally valued over Imagination, which has the capacity to reproduce perceptions mentally but immediately begin the process of deforming those perceptions. It’s a very Zen formulation of the individual’s relationship to reality – reality is best perceived without the map which underlies one’s perception – pure consciousness, undisturbed by imagination.

• Whether we want to agree with Plato and Spinoza or not (I don’t), we can agree that
• ‘imaginary maps’ underlie everyday perceptions, classifications, expectations, and practices
• they do this not so much by enumerating a symbolic system (this is properly the domain of reason), but by creating the imaginary topography in which imaginary objects (imaginata) interact,
• these imaginata do relate to symbolic systems, enabling any number of possible combinations, but definitively preventing many others
• These imaginata are given credence and stability only in relation to the imaginary topography or map which grounds it and allows for the interaction of imaginata

It is the imaginary maps, or imaginary topography which concerns me at the moment of this writing. Spinoza’s imagining of the immanent universe requires that the universe be closed and unitary to itself, no matter how diverse it appears. That is, Spinoza cannot claim that all is divine without making simultaneously the claim that there is nothing that is not divine. This closes the system: nothing is allowed to be without the immanent system Spinoza posits; all imaginata which are discussed after the closing of the immanent universe is accomplished must be accomodated to the vision of the immanent world. This leads to some pretty strange and even horrenduous conclusions: if the universe is God, and the universe is full of horrors, there must be something about the horrors which are necessary to God, and we should therefore not question them.In general, it is the closing of the imaginary world (what Corbin would have called the ‘mundus imaginalis,’ though he attributed a very real degree of reality to it) as a world which allows for that world to become operational: to develop patterns, entities, and relationships within it. The way to close a world is typically through a double negation, the sort of which often defines the act of mystical creation, whether it is the murder of a cosmic man and the decomposition of his various components into the diverse world of perceptible reality (the Indian Vedas), the creation of the world by the word of a god speaking to himself in the plural, or the assertion of Nibbana as the final goal of Buddhism.

Nibbana is the soteriological goal of Buddhism. But while Buddhism asserts the existence of many different worlds, heavens, hells, and imperceptible (to normal human beings) spirits, nibbana is explicitly none of these. It is the end of the line, at which point one no longer experiences rebirth. There is, Buddhism asserts, an ‘outside’ to the world of conditioned dhammas. The philosophy of Abhidhamma breaks down all existence into a numbered and memorized list of elements (dhammas), which then compound in different ways to create ‘reality.’ Everything in the world is composed of dhammas. Except for Nibbana. Nibbana is unconditioned, and therefore eternal.

Note that by equating the outside of the soteriology with its goal, Buddhism renders all perceptible experience less ontologically real. This is not a completely unusual twist: all transcendent religions have it in some manner: the hypostatic union of Christ is an official mystery: “We don’t know exactly how he combines the human and the divine, ladies and gentlemen, we just know that the Son of God does it!”, and although Allah has 99 wonderful names, none of them is sufficient to him.

Placing a negation at the site of the goal of the institution’s own imagined world is a key way of closing the imaginal sphere. Even though the world is denied its reality (the outside becomes the archimedean point to stick your lever), it could not be effectively classified without first performing this operation. Formulating a soteriological goal in terms of a seemingly or truly logical impossibility has, it appears to me, at least the following effects:
It closes the imaginary map by placing a logical contradiction in the place where the religion claims special authority

It induces anxiety about the correspondence between reality as imagined by the institution and reality as the place of true certainty

The logical contradiction relies on the reflection onto reality of the non-reality of the object of soteriology. This last point, although a bit difficult to grasp at first, it the key one, for it is usually the site where religious systems place the process of getting from a place of anxiety about real and imagined correspondence. In Christianity, one must imagine and then dutifully cleanse oneself of activities, thoughts, and habits classified as sinful, while accepting a dead man (who is a living god) as a savior. Buddhism also entails the imagining of the self in relationship to its soteriological goal.

Or rather, Buddhism requires the imagining of oneself as not a self in order to achieve nibbana. The doctrine of non-self, anatta, in Buddhism, fundamentally expresses that there is no perduring self or soul: not from life to life, nor from moment to moment, nor within a single moment. The self is an illusion. It is a compounded thing, made up of things, and will decompose again into things. Nibanna, which is not a compounded element, can never break down. It is atomic, in the understanding of atoms before we realized that the atom could be split. To the eternality and autonomy of nibbana, then, is confronted the impermanence and heteronomy of the imagined self. One can only go so far away from oneself before the doctrine of nibbana denies that you exist, and you can only investigate yourself as a phenomenon (a dhamma) so long without realizing that it’s pretty damn difficult to find a solid core of the self.

It is not at all coincidental therefore, that nibanna is equivalent to death, or rather to one extremely rare and highly valorized type of death: the death from which nothing returns, which leaves all physical matter, all ‘dhammas’, behind.

(the hypostatic union, or the possibility of a dead man being a living god, the many insufficient but wonderful names of god, the non-existence of an unconditioned thing (dhamma) which is not a dhamma (thing), but which is taught about through the major classification of scriptures known as “Dharma”