Abstract
The roles of imagination have been largely missed in Foucauldian literatures on subjectivity and constitutive practices of care for the self. His late inquiries into the practices by which the ancients pursued subject-formation have been situated, largely, within the ongoing debate over the relativity of his philosophical position on the question of the subject as such. In actuality imagination is crucial, I argue, for a Foucauldian understanding both of the processes of subjection by which western regimes have sought to govern human life as well as the practices by which we can nevertheless constitute ourselves as free subjects. The relationships between these processes of subjection and practices of freeing up the subject are not binary, however, and the different functions of imagination in these practices are complex. Liberating imagination requires, as argued here, hostility to the function of the image in constitution of the regimes that subject it.
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Notes
His interest in the relations between imagination and the image are comparable to but also distinct from his interest in relations between the visible and the articulable, or ‘seeing and saying,’ which have been the focus of other discussions. It is relevant of course, also, that Foucault did write, fairly extensively, on visual art. This essay touches on but does not address directly these other conceptual relations and foci. Doubtless the relations between language and reason in various historical moments, and the differences between the literary, visual, and conscious or unconscious "psychological" image are also relevant, but will not be explored in detail. To an extent the essay assumes the cross-pollinations of literary, visual, and psychological images as such and in practices of care for the self. For a much wider treatment of this problematic and these themes, see Shapiro (2003), and especially a section of the introduction, ‘Hidden Images: Before the Age of Art’ pp. 31–36, as well as the whole of chapter six, ‘Foucault’s Story of the Eye: Madness, Dreams, Literature,’ pp. 193–216.
See for example Major-Poetzl (1983).
One could argue that this understanding of the function of the mask in the development of biopower is foundational to liberalism itself. See, for example, Howard Caygill’s discussion of the function of masks in the political theory of Hobbes and of Leviathan in particular; (Caygill 1989, pp. 21–31).
Though it is outside of the capacities of this short paper, we doubtless require a full and proper genealogy of the liberal imagination and the images and masks it has deployed. Of such images and masks there are, of course, many. One image with which it would not be irrelevant to start with would be that of the idle Native American on which the Lockean image of the masterful liberal subject was based. One would then want to consider how the contestation of that image developed through the deployment of counter-images, including the ‘noble savage’ of Rousseau and the ‘savage noble’ which Michael Clifford treats in his excellent genealogy of the modern political subject (Clifford 2001, pp. 1–3). The contemporary shift in the liberal imaginary from its investment in security to images of the resilient subject are also relevant here, and themselves deeply invested in images of indigeneity. See especially (Chandler and Reid 2018).
Of course Trilling was dealing primarily with literary images and concerned with the effects of liberalism on literary cultures, rather than images indigenous to the imagination as such. However, his analysis of those effects was generative of claims by no means limited to literature or the literary imagination. When he addressed ‘the liberal imagination’ it was clear that he was addressing a much wider and deeper malaise. He identified in liberalism a project that functions as an attack upon the imagination in the most fundamental of senses. His essay on the liberalism of Freud illustrates this well, reading as it does, as a defence of the life of images and the imaginary from the Freudian reality principle. See (Trilling 1950, pp. 34–57).
Doubtless this is a collective project. See (Bottici 2014), and especially chapter 3, “Toward a Theory of the Imaginal,” pp. 54–71. Bottici develops the concept of the ‘imaginal,’ on my reading, precisely as a way of establishing the power of images to make live.
Elements of this critique could also be compared with Bruno Latour’s discussion of the iconoclasm of ‘modern cults’ of science and art, and thought through with and against his concept of ‘iconoclash,’ designed as it is to make us confront the image-dependence of regimes and practices of iconoclasm. See (Latour 2010), and especially chapter 2, ‘What is Iconoclash? Or Is There a World Beyond the Image Wars,’ pp. 67–97.
Here Foucault is very close in argumentation to Bachelard in his analysis of ‘the imaginary fall’ as a ‘truly positive experience of verticality.’ See (Bachelard 1988, p. 92).
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Reid, J. Foucault and the imagination: the roles of images in regimes of power and subjectivity. Subjectivity 11, 183–202 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-018-0052-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-018-0052-3