The Collective Imagination

The Creative Spirit of Free Societies

Peter Murphy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317037835
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Collective Imagination explores the social foundations of the human imagination. In a lucid and wide-ranging discussion, Peter Murphy looks at the collective expression of the imagination in our economies, universities, cities, and political systems, providing a tour-de-force account of the power of the imagination to unite opposites and find similarities among things that we ordinarily think of as different. It is not only individuals who possess the power to imagine; societies do as well. A compelling journey through various peak moments of creation, this book examines the cities and nations, institutions and individuals who ply the paraphernalia of paradoxes and dialogues, wry dramaturgy and witty expression that set the act of creation in motion. Whilst exploring the manner in which, through the media of pattern, figure, and shape, and the miracles of metaphor, things come into being, Murphy recognises that creative periods never last: creative forms invariably tire; inventive centres inevitably fade. The Collective Imagination explores the contemporary dilemmas and historic pathos caused by this-as cities and societies, periods and generations slip behind in the race for economic and social discovery. Left bewildered and bothered, and struggling to catch up, they substitute empty bombast, faded glory, chronic dullness or stolid glumness for initiative, irony, and inventiveness. A comprehensive audit of the creativity claims of the post-modern age - that finds them badly wanting and looks to the future - The Collective Imagination will appeal to sociologists and philosophers concerned with cultural theory, cultural and media studies and aesthetics.

PART I
The Media of Creation

Chapter 1
Imagination

To Take One Thing for Another

The idea of wit is an old one, though not so old. It precedes the age of the Romantics, but post-dates the Greeks, the Romans, and the rise of Christianity. It is neo-classical in spirit, an artefact of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The idea of creativity, as we understand it now, owes something tacitly to all of these – the ancient, the Christian, the neo-classical, and the Romantic. It is its own archaeological dig. For the Greeks and Romans, to create was to make. Creation proper, creatio, was a Christian coinage. God was the creator. Humankind made things rather than created them. It was not until the Romantic age that the artist was thought to create ‘as if’ God. Yet even then the production of an object (be it an artwork, a book, or a building) was still the end-point of creation. From nothing came something. Creation was an act of objectivation. The creator was a maker. In this way, all creation was a function of wit.

The New Critics, William Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, summarized the history of the word ‘wit’ neatly (1957: 229–3). Etymologically the term meant the faculty of knowing in general. About the time of Shakespeare it came to mean smart knowing, joking, repartee, invention or ingenuity. Especially in the guise of the idea of ingenuity – the metaphysical discordia concors – wit was practically equivalent to poetry and synonymous with imagination and fancy. As it was defined in the seventeenth century, wit was the faculty of seeing resemblances between unlike objects. It was a faculty of synthesis rather than one of analysis. Correspondingly, and in contrast to wit, the faculty of analysis was called ‘judgement’. Thus conceived in this manner, imagination is the seeing of resemblances whilst judgement is the seeing of differences. Francis Bacon stated the essence of this intellectual division in his Novum Organum of 1620. Bacon does not use the terms ‘wit’ or ‘judgement’. Nonetheless he does describe the two powers – one of perceiving resemblances and one of perceiving differences.

The same distinction is artfully depicted in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan in 1651 and in John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690. For Hobbes, wit consists principally of two things. First, the ‘celerity of imagining (that is, swift succession of one thought to another)’; second, the ‘steady direction to some approved end’. The second of these is more properly a definition of reason rather than wit. That said, though, Hobbes neatly captures the essential difference between wit and judgement. He does so in these terms:

… those that observe their similitudes, in case they be such as are but rarely observed by others, are said to have a good wit; by which, in this occasion, is meant a good fancy. But they that observe their differences, and dissimilitudes, which is called distinguishing, and discerning, and judging between thing and thing, in case such discerning be not easy, are said to have a good judgment.1

Forty years later Locke drew essentially the same picture:

For wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy; judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully, one from another, ideas wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude, and by affinity to take one thing for another.2

To take one thing for another is the major part of creation. It is what happens in all acts of creation. Wit, it might be supposed, is the swiftest or quickest form of creation. It is very likely that all creation happens in an ineffable instant. Working through the implications of an act of creation, however, is laboured. Such labour is the mark of reason. What is captured in a snap in the imagination is patiently and steadily, and sometimes tiresomely, unfolded by the faculty of reason, ordinarily understood. Reason in this prosaic sense is what steadily leads us in the direction of some approved end. It is what the sociologist Max Weber called means-ends rationality. In everyday settings, we call this problem solving. Analytic capacity and good judgement is very important in such reasoning. Yet it has its limits. For it assumes that both the means and the ends of our actions already exist. When we reason, we fit the two together. But if our means or our ends are inadequate, and necessity calls upon us to invent new means or new ends, then for that we need more than good judgement. We need wit.

The same spectre haunts our proofs. We make statements and we propose theses. We mobilize reason in support of them. We reason by marshalling evidence that we patiently connect to principles and axioms. But as the child quite reasonably asks, where do those axioms and first principles come from? Even if we adopt the posture of the radical empiricist, and dismiss principles as puffery, and claim that all we need is the evidence of our eyes, we still cannot avoid invention. Observation is not innocent. The astronomers who looked at photographic plates of distant stars beyond our solar system had first to draw the audacious connection that Doppler effects – those small changes in the colour of light when a star moves toward or away from the earth – might be caused by an orbiting exo-planet.3 Where do such connections come from, pray tell? Wit, again, I’m afraid.

In 1744, Corbyn Morris in the splendidly titled An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Raillery, Satire, and Ridicule observed that wit is ‘the Lustre which results from the quick Elucidation of one Subject, by the just and unexpected Arrangement of it with another Subject’. The unexpected nature of the combination of subjects is certainly a prime characteristic of humour, as it is of literary simile or scientific metaphor, as it is of everything that arises from an act of creation. If we expect something, then it is part of routine life. It is not creative. What happens unexpectedly happens quickly. Wit is distinguished by its swiftness. The witty mind is fast. We observe this in repartee, raillery and ridicule. These depend on a very quick response, in verbal exchange for example. Creative acts or imaginative insights take place in a flash. To take one thing for another, to observe similitude, to see resemblances between unlike objects – all of these things happen very fast.

The critic William Hazlitt probably had the best go at separating the species of wit from the genus of imagination. He suggested (1818/2004: 436) that imagination was:

the finding out something similar in things generally alike, or with like feelings attached to them; while wit principally amounts to a momentary deception where you least expected it, viz. in things totally opposite.

In Hazlitt’s account, wit is the most radical instance of the imagination. It produces what is least expected and stimulates in an audience not only the feeling of what is unexpected but also a feeling of deception in connection with it. We have all experienced that momentary feeling of deception. It is present whenever anyone grasps a joke. But the same feeling is also present in the case of any far-reaching act of imagination. The response to an imaginative act is a feeling however fleeting of being tricked. ‘Is our leg being pulled here?’ is the reaction, even if it amounts to only a flicker of disbelief. This is properly so. Given the proximity of humour to intellect, there is a strain of the circus acrobat in any imaginative leap. The art of the cognitive acrobat is to pass over the yawning gap between distant opposites by negotiating the slender tight-rope that connects them.

Wit, imagination, ingenuity, invention, joking and smart knowing are all related to each other in ways that analytical dissection simply confounds. The very point of wit and imagination is that they are faculties that combine rather than separate. The act of combination ironically subverts their status as faculties. The analytic mind parses. It differentiates and separates out objects. The imagination in contrast synthesizes rather than analyses. That means it finds resemblances between unlike objects. It also does this with astonishing speed. Partly because of its swiftness, and partly because of the unlikely nature of the conjurations it makes, it defies our expectations and produces thereby the unexpected. It forges unusual congruity out of manifest incongruity. It combines opposites such that we do not know, and cannot tell, where one finishes and the other begins. It creates similarities out of differences. All of this is startling work.

The imagination is through and through uncanny. This is reflected in its basic nature. Its agency is both individual and social. It is a psychological and an institutional phenomenon. It is expressed in unique genius and in statistical regularity. It is existential and sociological in the same breath. Consequently, there are imaginative nations, exciting historical periods, and audacious states as well as brilliant artists, inspired statesmen and far-seeing founders. Some individuals are especially adept at the imaginative ability to see something as being what it is and other than what it is. A handful of individuals have a breathtaking ability to do this. Practically every second line in Shakespeare has a simile or metaphor of some kind. Notwithstanding that, all human beings are born with the capacity to understand jokes and metaphors. Imagination – whether it happens to be imagination in reception or imagination in conception – is a very pleasurable act. Much the same is true of societies. Few societies can extinguish invention entirely. The most successful in that are the most tyrannical. It is equally evident though that some societies, in some historical periods, are much more imaginative than others. The varying concentrations of inventiveness in the arts and the sciences across time and space are an unimpeachable indicator of this. But the reason why this is the case is less clear. Just as it is not immediately evident why it is that some people are very witty and others are not, or why some have extremely quick senses of humour and others, alas, do not sparkle.

That the imagination is an incongruous faculty, individual and social at the same time, means also that we do not know, and cannot tell, where the individual imagination finishes and the collective imagination begins. This reminds us that analytic distinctions in general, useful as they are, are always parlous and invariably a little misleading. From the stand-point of our species being, and that is not a stand-point we can easily dispense with, there is not an implacable distinction between the individual and society. Winston Churchill (1909: 79) put this rather neatly when he observed that:

It is not possible to draw a hard-and-fast line between individualism and collectivism … The nature of man is a dual nature. The character of the organization of human society is dual. Man is at once a unique being and a gregarious animal. For some purposes he must be collectivist, for others he is, and he will for all time remain, an individualist.

Individual and society are implicated in the other. Just as one self always interpolates another self, each one of our selves interpolates the thing called society. Thus ‘I am always not me’. This is true in the sense that I carry within myself thoughts, feelings and experiences of my own along with the expectations of particular significant others and also of the generalized other that we call society.4 Each is translatable into the other. I am singular. I am a multitude. My singularity is many. At the same time, I am a super-singularity. My individuality carries within it the collective impress of society, while that collective impress is refined over time by individualities that aspire to generality.

Thus the work of the imagination is not just the work of individuals, though there are many smart, witty, and ingenious individuals. The point is not that there are not clever individuals but that wit and imagination are species-capacities. Human beings, as a species, display a collective capacity for wit and imagination. If anything, it is humour that distinguishes humankind from the animal world. Dogs do not tell jokes. With witty aforethought, we anthropomorphize dogs. But they do not canine us. Animals have one nature. Human beings have two natures. We live both in a first natural nature and a second artificial nature of our own making. We extend membership of that second nature to some of our animal friends. Dogs, all things considered, have a pretty cushy life. Yet that does not mean that dogs have the peculiar capacity of human beings to see resemblances in what is different. Sometimes we find profound resemblances in what is radically different. Thus we domesticate animals. Some of us even find some of our animal friends, cats among them, more companionate than most of our own species. Nevertheless, they do not cheer us up with jokes. That is a species-specific ability. We are the humourous species.

The fact that the imagination is a capacity of the species means that it manifests itself socially as well as individually. In fact, what is social and what is individual, although distinguishable, are difficult to distinguish with any finality. The social ‘me’ and the individual ‘I’ are wound together in uncanny ways. Their relation is eerie. The apprehension of such eerie relations is itself a function of the imagination. The species that imagines readily leaps over any analytic boundaries, whether between ‘I’ and ‘me’, or any other distinction (perceptual or linguistic) that is made. While the making of analytic distinctions is powerful, equally powerful is the imaginative capacity to override them. The larger point is that all oppositions, at a certain turning point, become unions, fusions, blends, and mergers. In acts of imagination, antithetical elements coalesce into one entity and yet continue to exist concurrently.5 This occurs in the course of what Hegel called sublation or aufheben, the simultaneous cancelling and retaining of things.6 Hegel’s term is a potted description of what happens in the act of creation. Things (events, deeds, words) are cancelled and retained at the same time. Differences become similarities or similitudes that are both simultaneously the same and different. Although this is an odd thing, it is not so odd because it is deeply embedded in human cognition. It is how the human species apprehends the world.

The philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis observed (1987: 127–31) that individuals and societies apprehend the world in imaginary and symbolic ways. In the most general terms, the imaginary powers the symbolic. The imaginary is inarticulate, invisible, intuitive and primary. The symbolic is articulate, visible, discursive and secondary. Whilst different, the imaginary and the symbolic share something profound in common. This is the capacity to see in a thing what it is not such that ‘what it is not’ is ‘what it is’. Thus we consider a thing (event, deed, word). We ‘see’ it for what it is. We ‘see’ it for what it is not. We equate the two. The equation is the act of creation. Creation is circular. What A is, is ‘what it is not’ is ‘what it is’. What that describes among other things is the act of metaphor. This is the capacity to say ‘You have seen/Sunshine and rain at once; her smiles and tears’. What the Gentleman does, when he describes Cordelia’s behaviour to Kent (King Lear, IV.3), is a species capacity. And what a remarkable capacity it is. It is the possibility and at the same time the necessity, as Castoriadis (1997a: 242) puts it, of thinking A by means of non-A. This is what gives the human species its ability to invent and adapt and create. It is also what gives human beings the capacity to make meaning. It is what makes the human being the being that imputes significance and insignificance to things. Put simply, creating, valuing and signifying are Janus-like processes. Each involves seeing, saying, attributing, or implying in two directions at once. It is as if two worlds are conceived together. That is the way the critic William Empson (1947: 226) described it. The conception of two-worlds-as-one is at the heart of poetic meaning. It is, as Shakespeare’s Richard II declared, as if language sets ‘the word itself/ Against the word’.7 In a beautiful discussion of four lines from a fragment of Sappho’s poetry, Castoriadis (2007) meditates on the Greek word hōra – with its several senses of season, day, hour, and point in time. In the middle of the night, the poet says that the hōra passes. With this single word, the poet evokes multiple and contrary meanings that are folded beyond easy distinction into each other. Season, hour, and th...