The Late Modern Reimagining of Imagination

Kallenbach, Ulla

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-76303-3_8

The Late Modern Reimagining of Imagination

Ulla Kallenbach²

Chapter
First Online: 14 July 2018

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Abstract

This chapter offers an analysis of the radical reconceptualization of imagination in the early to mid-twentieth century, chiefly as interpreted by French philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Central interests in this period are the notions of absence and nothingness, which are also evident in the theatre, not only as themes but also as form. Accordingly, the reconceptualization of imagination was concerned both with the notion of imagination as nothingness and with finding new ways of describing potentials of imagination in this nothingness—as an intentional mode of consciousness. Kallenbach analyzes how this reconceptualization of imagination puts into question the relation of the present to the absent; a complex relation that exposes both the power and poverty of the imagination.

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Notes

1.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space [La poétique de l’espace] (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), xxxiv.
2.
See p. 127f.
3.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense,” in The Continental Aesthetics Reader, ed. Clive Cazeaux (London, New York: Routledge, 2011), 66.
4.
This absurdity of the world, the impossibility of finding truth and meaningfulness, and the feelings of alienation that it entailed were, for example, set forth in 1942 by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.
5.
Eugène Ionesco and Leonard C. Pronko, “Notes on My Theatre,” The Tulane Drama Review 7, no. 3 (1963): 127, written 1953.
6.
Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-Modern, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998).
7.
Ionesco, cited in Christopher Innes, Holy Theatre Ritual and the Avant Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 205.
8.
Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 2009), 186; Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Victor Corti, 2nd ed., Oneworld Classics (Richmond: Oneworld Classics, 2010).
9.
Eugène Ionesco, Notes and Counter-Notes [Notes et contre-notes], trans. Donald Watson (London: John Calder, 1964), 190, 191.
10.
Cited in Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 3rd ed. (London: Methuen, 2001), 152.
11.
Eugène Ionesco, Notes and Counter-Notes [Notes et contre-notes], trans. Donald Watson (London: John Calder, 1964), 192.
12.
Albeit imagination had lost its divine powers, we may still conceive it under the paradigm of the lamp, the “light” now signifying the human mode of consciousness.
13.
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination [L’imaginaire: psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination], trans. Jonathan Webber (London: Routledge, 2004), 11.
14.
Thus, Sartre and Bachelard respectively set out with the objective to “attempt a ‘phenomenology’ of the image” (ibid., 5) and to study the “phenomenology of the image.” Bachelard, xx.
15.
Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, 15.
16.
Husserl, cited in Jean-Paul Sartre, Imagination: A Psychological Critique [L’imagination], trans. Forrest Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), 134.
17.
Ibid.
18.
Brann, 121.
19.
Jean-François Lyotard, Phenomenology [La Phénoménologie], trans. Brian Beakley, Suny Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy (New York: State University New York Press, 1991), 55.
20.
Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, 56.
21.
This idea is also seen, e.g., in the theories of Freud; see p. 232f.
22.
Sartre, The Imaginary, 5.
23.
Hume, 13. Also the analytical philosophy of Wittgenstein and Ryle would critique Hume’s notion of the imagined as mental images contained as weak echoes of sensation; see Brann, 168.
24.
Sartre, The Imaginary, 6f.
25.
Ibid., 7.
26.
Ibid.
27.
Ibid., 14.
28.
See ibid., 15.
29.
Ibid., 88.
30.
Thus, Sartre claims, “one can never learn from an image what one does not know already.” Ibid., 10.
31.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception [Phénoménologie de la perception], trans. Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012), 338.
32.
Sartre, The Imaginary, 9.
33.
Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 60th anniversary ed. (London: Routledge, 2009), 227.
34.
Ibid., 228.
35.
Ibid., 231.
36.
Ibid., 234.
37.
Warnock, 154.
38.
Brann, 172, with reference to J. M. Shorter’s reply to Ryle (“Imagination,” Mind 61, no. 244 (1952), my emphasis.
39.
Richard Courtney, “Imagination and the Dramatic Act: Comments on Sartre, Ryle, and Furlong,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 30, no. 2 (1971): 163.
40.
Ryle, 224.
41.
Ibid., 225.
42.
Ibid., 229.
43.
The notion of absence is also apparent in semiotics: “Peirce insists, much as does Saussure, that a sign stands for something which is not present (the photograph is not the person; the actor is not the character), thus reinforcing the absence and metaphysical hollowness that haunt all signification.” Mark Fortier, Theory/Theatre: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (London, New York: Routledge, 2002), 22.
44.
Ryle, 225.
45.
Brann, 169.
46.
Sartre, The Imaginary, 3.
47.
Ibid., 120. Sartre continues: “As long as I look at this table, I cannot form an image of Pierre; but if all at once the irreal Pierre surges up before me, the table that is under my eyes vanishes, leaves the scene.”
48.
Ibid., 188.
49.
Ibid., 167.
50.
Ibid., 13f.
51.
Ibid., 180. In the third characteristic of imagination, Sartre asserts that consciousness “posits” its objects in various distinct manners. Thus, the imaginative consciousness posits the object in one of four modes: non-existent, absent, existing elsewhere, neutralized; see ibid., 12.
52.
Merleau-Ponty, 186.
53.
Later on, Paul Ricoeur would also turn to the example of Pierre, here to examine the relation of fiction to imagination and reality, concluding that the unreality of fiction “is not opposed to the absence of Peter, […] but to Peter’s reality.” Ricoeur continues: “The phenomenology of fiction has its starting point in this lack of symmetry between the nothingness of unreality and the nothingness of absence. The nothingness of absence concerns the mode of givenness of a real thing in absentia, the nothingness of unreality characterizes the referent itself of the fiction,” 126).
54.
“In sum, one might say that Sartre takes over from Husserl the notion of the imagination as a mode of consciousness and that his own contribution is the development of the image as a materialization of non-being,” Brann, 132, my emphasis.
55.
Sartre, The Imaginary, 126.
56.
Ibid., 120.
57.
Ibid., 12f., my underlining.
58.
See, e.g., Ibid., 120.
59.
Ibid., 181.
60.
Ibid., 191.
61.
Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, 66f.
62.
Sartre, The Imaginary, 136. Merleau-Ponty later criticized and refuted Sartre’s solipsistic imagination in his essay Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), see Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, 127ff.
63.
E.g., Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature [L’Espace litteraire], trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
64.
“Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Work of Fire [La Part du feu], trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 322.
65.
“Two versions of the imaginary,” in The Space of Literature, 260.
66.
Ullrich Haase and William Large, Maurice Blanchot, Routledge Critical Thinkers (London: Routledge, 2001), 31.
67.
Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, trans. Colette Gaudin, Revised ed. (Putnam, Connecticut: Spring Publications, 2005), 15.
68.
Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, 101.
69.
Brann, 121.
70.
“I can identify the hand touched in the same one which will in a moment be touching […] In this bundle of bones and muscles which my right hand presents to my left, I can anticipate for an instant the incarnation of that other right hand, alive and mobile, which I thrust towards things in order to explore them. The body tries […] to touch itself while being touched and initiates a kind of reversible reflection.” Merleau-Ponty, 93.
71.
See, e.g., The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes [Le Visible et l’invisible], trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 123.
72.
Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, 121. Kearney further explicates: “In other words, the imagination addresses an invisible meaning in the visible world and the world responds only because both participate in a common core of Being.” Ibid., 123.
73.
Ibid., 121, 26.
74.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 138.
75.
While he started out as a philosopher of science, the core of Bachelard’s work comprises extensive studies of the creative, poetic imagination, notably his works on imagination and the four elements, beginning with The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938), and in his influential The Poetics of Space (1958) and The Poetics of Reverie (1960. In these works, Bachelard investigates the poetic image and its relation to matter, and the formation and origin of these images, first taking his point of departure in Romanticism (especially Novalis) and psychoanalysis (especially Jung), later in phenomenology.
76.
Bachelard, L’Air et les songes, quoted in Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, 100.
77.
Ibid., 97, my emphasis.
78.
Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, xxiv.
79.
Ibid., xxxvi.
80.
Brann, 183. As Bachelard explains it: “At the level of the poetic image, the duality of subject and object is iridescent, shimmering, unceasingly active in its inversions.” The Poetics of Space, xix.
81.
See James S. Hans, “Gaston Bachelard and the Phenomenology of the Reading Consciousness,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35, no. 3 (1977).
82.
Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, xlvii.
83.
From Air and Dreams, quoted in ibid., 37.
84.
Brann, 183.
85.
Sartre, The Imaginary, 18.
86.
Sartre illustrates this with the example of the female comedian Franconay impersonating Maurice Chevalier, ibid., 25ff.
87.
Ibid., 11.
88.
Ibid., 28.
89.
Riccardo Steiner, Unconscious Phantasy, Psychoanalytic Ideas Series (London: Karnac, 2003), 108. Similarly, Jacques Lacan’s “imaginary order” does not concern imagination as a mental capacity, but rather signifies a “narcissistic illusion: the self’s project of an imago of self-sufficiency or self-completion.” Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, 181.
90.
Braga, 63.
91.
Beverley Clack, “After Freud: Phantasy and Imagination in the Philosophy of Religion,” Philosophy Compass 3, no. 1 (2008): 213.
92.
“In spite of all the emotion with which he cathects his world of play, the child distinguishes it quite well from reality; and he likes to link his imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world. This linking is all that differentiates the child’s ‘play’ from ‘phantasying.’” Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1964).
93.
Clack, 204.
94.
Ibid.
95.
Steen Halling, “The Imaginative Constituent in Interpersonal Living: Empathy, Illusion, and Will,” in Imagination and Phenomenological Psychology, ed. Edward L. Murray (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 164.
96.
Ibid. See also Edward S. Casey, Imagining: A Phenomenological Study, Studies in Phenomenological and Existential Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press., 1976), 12.
97.
Freud, “Creative Writers,” 146.
98.
Ibid., 144. Freud’s idea of creativity also somewhat resembles that which we encountered in the medieval and Renaissance conception in his description of how the child “creates a world of his own, or, rather, re-arranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him.” Ibid., 143f.
99.
Anthony Elliott, Social Theory since Freud Traversing Social Imaginaries (London, New York: Routledge, 2004), 79.
100.
Freud, “Creative Writers,” 147.
101.
Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, 6.
102.
Ibid., 16.
103.
The as if was significantly also central to Constantin Stanislavski’s acting method: “If is the starting point, the given circumstances, the development. The one cannot exist without the other, if it is to possess a necessary stimulating quality. However, their functions differ somewhat: if gives the push to dormant imagination, whereas the given circumstances build the basis for the if itself. And they both, together and separately, help to create an inner stimulus.” An Actor Prepares, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (London, New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 44. First published 1936.
104.
Poetics of Imagining, 83.
105.
Ronald Grimsley, “Two Philosophical Views of the Literary Imagination: Sartre and Bachelard,” Comparative Literature Studies 8, no. 1 (1971): 49.
106.
Sartre, The Imaginary, 127.
107.
Ibid., 128.
108.
Ibid.
109.
Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 3.
110.
Freud, “Creative Writers,” 47f.
111.
Sartre, The Imaginary, 131.
112.
Ibid., 132.
113.
Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, xxxiv.
114.
Iser, The Implied Reader, 283.
115.
Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, 134.
116.
“Cezanne’s Doubt,” in Sens et non-sens (1948), cited in ibid.
117.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Continental Aesthetics Reader, ed. Clive Cazeaux (London, New York: Routledge, 2011), 457.
118.
Sartre, The Imaginary, 64.
119.
Ibid., 188.
120.
Ibid., 191.
121.
Ibid. See further ibid., 189; and Sartre on Theater (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 158–171.
122.
The Imaginary, 125.
123.
Grimsley, 49.
124.
Ionesco and Pronko, 149.

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Ulla Kallenbach

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Kallenbach, U. (2018). The Late Modern Reimagining of Imagination. In: The Theatre of Imagining. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76303-3_8

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76303-3_8
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