POSTMODERN CULTURE: THE DEATH OF THE HUMANIST

IMAGINATION
Dr. Stanley Sfekas
Professor of Philosophy
University of Indianapolis/
Athens Campus

Are we witnessing the demise of the concept of the creative human imagination
in the postmodern era? In our Civilization of the Image, as Marshall Mc Luhan has
characterized it, might we not expect imagination to be accorded a privileged place by
contemporary philosophers? The very opposite is the case. Right across the spectrum
of structuralist, post-structuralist and deconstructionist thinking, one observes a
common concern to dismantle the very notion of imagination. When it is spoken of, it
is subjected to suspicion or denigrated as an outdated humanist illusion spawned by
the modern movements of romantic idealism and existentialism. The philosophical
category of imagination, like that of man himself, appears to be dissolving into an
anonymous play of language. For many postmodern thinkers it has become little more
than the surface signifier of a linguistic system.
Postmodern philosophies reflect this crisis of imagination in a variety of ways.
But a central feature of such philosophies is the undermining of the humanist
imagination understood as an original creation of meaning. The postmodern
philosophers deny the very idea of origin. Meaning is deconstructed into an endless
play of linguistic signs, each one of which relates to the other in a parodic circle.
There is no possibility of a single founding reference. Language, as an open-ended
play of signifiers, is no longer thought to refer to some real meaning external to
language ( i.e., some transcendental signified called truth or human subjectivity).
Deprived of the concept of origin, the concept of imagination itself collapses. For
imagination always presupposed the idea of origination: the derivation of our images
from some original presence. And this position obtained regardless of whether the
model of origination was situated outside of man (as in the biblical God of creation or
the Platonic Ideas) or inside of man (as in the model of a productive consciousness
promoted by modern idealism and existentialism).
The deconstruction of the category of origin is heralded by the famous textual
revolution. The humanist concept of man gives way to the anti-humanist concept of
intertextual play. The autonomous subject disappears into the anonymous operations
of language. Truth is replaced by parody, and the diachronic pattern of narrative
history (with a beginning, middle and end) by achronic patterns of repetition and
recurrence. The modern philosophy of the creative imaginationwhether it be in the
form of Kants transcendental imagination or Sartres absurd passioncannot, it
would seem, survive this deconstructive turn.
At the level of dominant metaphors a paradigm shift has taken place in which the
parodic paradigm, replacing the modern productive paradigm, recurs time and again
in postmodern works of art and literature. The phenomenon of a unique human
imagination producing a unique aesthetic object in a unique time and space collapses
into a play of infinite repetition. The work becomes absolutely transparent, a
mechanically reproducible surface without depth or interiority, a copy with no
reference to anything other than a pseudo-world of copies. Thus Foucault speaks of
the death of man, Barthes of the death of the author, and Derrida of endless mimesis
and apocalypse without end.

The human ability to image or imagine something has been understood in two
main ways throughout the history of Western thought: 1) as a representational faculty
which reproduces images of some pre-existing reality, or 2) as a creative faculty
which produces images which often lay claim to an original status in their own right.
These basic notions have been used-- from the ancient Greeks to the modern
existentialiststo refer to acts of everyday experience as well as to artistic practice.
The development of imagination has been paradigmatic and is characterized by a
number of paradigm shifts which signal decisive mutations in the human
understanding of imagination during different epochs of Western history. Thus we
speak of the mimetic paradigm of the premodern imagination, the productive
paradigm of the modern imagination, and the parodic paradigm of the postmodern
imagination. Each historical period privileges some metaphor characterizing the
dominant function of imagination at a given time. Thus the mimetic paradigm
privileges the referential figure of the mirror, the productive the expressive figure of
the lamp, and the parodic the reflexive figure of a labyrinth of looking-glasses.
For Plato, the artist imitates the activity of the divine demiurge by holding a mirror
up to the surrounding world. The artist, in Platos words, Takes a mirror and turns it
around in every direction thus rapidly making the sun and the heavenly bodies, the
earth and even himself.(596d). The use of the mirror motif to characterize the
mimetic activity of imagination was to become a stock motif of classical theories of
aesthetics. What underlies Platos invocation of this motif is a metaphysical scruple
about the blasphemous tendency of images to replace the original order of divine
being, (to theion), with a man-made order of non-being, (to me on). Imagination is
idolatrous for Plato to the extent that it worships its own imitations instead of the
divine original.
Platos famous image of the imagination as a poor child of foster parents points in
the same direction. The connotation here is one of illegitimacy: images are the bastard
progeny of surrogate parents, i.e. the things of nature which are themselves no more
than copies of the Ideas. Images are imitations of imitations which seek to usurp the
legitimate father of all beingthe divine form of the Good. The imaginative activity
of imagination is consequently a form of parricide and, by implication, deicide. For
the original Father, the transcendental source of all light as represented in the
Allegory of the Cave is of course divine being itself. The crime of the artist is to dare
to make the invisible source of truth visible in the form of representational images.
Such a feat transgresses the Platonic oppositions between being and non-being, spirit
and matter, soul and body, good and evil, truth and falsitydualisms upon which the
whole edifice of Western metaphysics rests. As Derrida observes in Dissemination,
the the absolute invisibility of the origin of the visible, of the Good-Sun-Father is the
general rehearsal of this family scene and the most powerful effort to conceal it by
drawing curtains over the dawning of the West. The mimetic image is an illegitimate
son who, like the Stranger in Platos Theaetetus, dares to lay unfilial hands on the
paternal pronouncement (patrikoi logoi) (241-2). And like the Stranger, the
imagination is accused of parricideof displacing the rightful Father, the true origin,
the paternal logos upon which Western metaphysics is founded. The imagination is
thus seen by Plato as a disobedient son who threatens to subvert the patriarchal law of
the metaphysical systema law which safeguards the rights of inheritance by

outlawing the counterfeit claims of imitators, imposters and pretenders. The

imagination is the alien body in the system, the Trojan horse in the City of Logos.
But what exactly is the Logos? And how did it come to be associated with the
image of divine paternity? Derrida characterizes the Platonic model of the Logos as a
silent dialogue of the soul with itself and argues that it logically entails the
correlative model of the Father as absolute origin, as self-sufficient identity and
unityin short the model of divine being as an original presence to itself. The
mimetic image is a threat to this original presence, this dialogue of Being with itself,
for it constitutes a detour of representation, or ecriture as Derrida calls it, which
claims to do without the Father of Logos. Insofar as it claims a world of imitative
artifice, imagination challenges the copyright of the paternal Logos. It breaks from the
original self-identity of the Father and assumes a life of its own, an existence other
than and independent of the father.
Only the divine demiurge, according to Plato, possessed the original right to form
or shape a world. The artist, who styles himself as a human demiurge by contrast
becomes the Fathers other. The distinguishing mark of all artistic or imaginative
discourse, according to Derrida, is that it can be assigned to a fixed spotsly,
slippery and maskeda joker, a floating signifier, a wild card which puts play into
play. It is precisely because the imagination introduces indeterminacy and
ambivalence into discourse that it serves to deconstruct the paternal logos of selfidentity. The mimetic activity of imagination unleashes an endless play of
substitutionone where artificial representations imitate and eventually seek to
replace the original presence of divine being to itself. In the pseudo-world of
imagination opposites are no longer dualistically opposed as dictated by the paternal
logos of metaphysics. They are subversively conjoined. This entails a flouting of the
founding laws of philosophical logicthe Law of Identity and the law of Noncontradiction.
In the Phaedrus, Plato likens the act of writing to the mimetic activity of painting,
and describes writing as a drug, pharmakon. He uses the word pharmakon in an
ambiguous way, both as remedy and poison. The remedy is that a record of human
experience is kept for posterity, but the poison consists in that it deceives us into
mistaking its image for the original. In a study called Platos Pharmacy, Derrida
outlines the deconstructive paradox which lies at the very heart of Western
metaphysics. Platonic metaphysics insists on the priority of the origin (Sun-FatherIdea) over its supplement, the mimetic play of writing which repeats this origin. Yet
the paradox is that the origin of truth cannot be adequately understood without the
mimetic activity of repetition. The very truth of origin requires the non-truth of
repetitionunderstood as a generalized mimesis of writing. In Derridas words:
Truth appears in its essence as the possibility of its own most proper non-truth, of its
pseudo-truth reflected in the icon, the phantasm, or the simulacrum. What is is not
what it is, identical and identical to itself, unique, unless it adds to itself the possibility
the possibility of being repeated as such. And its identity is hallowed out by that
addition, withdraws itself in the supplement that presents it.
This account of writing as a mimesis-without-origin has decisive implications for
the concept of imitation. Derrida deduces some of these implications in his essay The
Double Session where he contrasts Platos definition of mimesis with Mallarmes in
Mimique, in which the mime imitates nothing. The mime is seen as engaged in
corporeal writing that is not based on any original. This leads Derrida to inform the
reader that the guiding question of his analysis is what is Literature? As treated here
the question becomes eminently self-deconstructive. For Derrida has no intention of

trying to relate literature to truth in the manner of previous philosophical reflections

on this subject from Plato to Sartre. On the contrary, he will show that the very
opposition between literature (the imaginary) and truth (the real) is without
foundation. From the first elaboration of the concept of mimesis with Plato to its end
with Mallarme, a whole history has run its course: a history of metaphysical truth
which in turn made possible a history of literature understood as a representation of
truth. The entire development of the interpretation of the arts of letters has, Derrida
claims, moved and been transformed within the diverse logical possibilities opened
up by the concept of mimesis.
Derrida comments on a passage in the Philebus where Plato compares the human
soul to a book (biblos) which copies and illustrates human experience. This activity of
mimetic writing carried out by an internal scribe (grammateus) and painter
(zographos-demiourgos), records passing events and thereby confers a certain
permanence on them: it enables the past to be recalled in the present. Here again
Derrida underscores the metaphysical paradox of mimesis. Without its capacity for
recollection the soul would be unable to intuit meaning as an enduring essence (eidos,
idea). But recollection itself presupposes the mimetic activity of duplication which in
fact replaces the original events which it imitates. Logos or truth needs mimesis if it is
to be preserved in the soul and intuited as an essence. Thus Plato is compelled in the
Philebus to accord a central role to mimetic imagination in our knowledge of truth
even though he had made it clear in the Republic and elsewhere, that mimetic
imaginationbe it that of the painter, scribe or poetis that which removes us from
truth and provides us with mere copies.
Derrida argues accordingly that Platos description of mimesis as both truth and
non-truth points to its own deconstruction and by extension to the deconstruction of
the metaphysical concept of imagination. For what Western metaphysics has always
strived to establish is the primacy of logos over mimesis, of being-present over its
representation, the imitated over the imitation, the real over the imaginary. The whole
order of metaphysical logic has been based on the ability to establish that what is
imitated is more real, more essential, more truethan what imitatesanterior and
superior to it.
Derrida states that although there have been several attempts during the course of
the Western history of aesthetics to contest this logocentric model of mimesis, as he
calls it, he denies that any metaphysical system, whether idealist or existentialist, has
ever succeeded in dispensing with the distinction between the original and its
imitation and with according primacy to the original. It is the case that the romantic
imagination refused to imitate any thing or action, or any reality already given in the
world as existing before and outside its own sphere. But he argues that the model of
the original is simply interiorized. The metaphysical idea of divine origin as the
presence of what is to itself is now converted to the transcendental consciousness of
the creative subject. To declare as the romantic idealists and existentialists did that art
no longer copies nature but productively transforms it, is nonetheless to remain
captive to a metaphysics of presence.
The deconstruction of the metaphysical concept of mimesis is therefore logically
contingent upon that of origin. What then are the main conclusions to be drawn from
Derridas deconstruction of the metaphysical distinction between the imaginary and
the real? Once the notion of an origin of meaning has been done away with, it makes
no sense to speak of a transcendental or existential subject who produces or
reproduces images. There is no author of the text, no human center from which the
imaginary emanates, no father of writing, no one to intend or intuit meaning.

Deconstruction emerges as a symptom of the break-up of Western culture and its

metaphysical foundations. To acknowledge this, as Derrida does in `his lecture, The
Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy, is to present a postmodern vision of apocalypse. The
term apocalypse, Derrida reminds us actually means to uncover. But in unmasking the
logocentric language of power and authority, apocalyptic discourse is paradoxically
often compelled to mask itself to evade official censure. Derrida agrees with Barthe,
Althusser and Foucault that the cult of the creative subject is a symptom of bourgeois
ideology. The cryptic character of much apocalyptic writing is therefore to be
understood as a ruse to defy the authoritarian status quo. Such subversive discourse
whose multiple meanings Derrida compares to an Argus with a thousand looks
resists assimilation to the established order of domination. It hijacks the accredited
system of communication and undermines its legitimized conceptual oppositions. As
such, there is for Derrida nothing less conservative than the apocalyptic genre. By
confusing the codes and confounding conventional expectancies, this genre poses a
radical challenge to the dominant ideological consensus. The apocalyptic strategy is
the final word in the demystification of ideology. But as practiced by Derrida himself,
one suspects that it is also more than thatit is demystification itself brought to the
point of self-deconstruction.
Derrida acknowledges that his writings have at times been charged with having an
apocalyptic tone. This he sees as an inevitable consequence of the fact that to write
about the end of the Western system of understandingthat is, about an apocalypse
of human consciousnessis itself apocalyptic. Derrida grants the existence of an
apocalyptic laughter about apocalypse. Derrida thus concludes his apocalyptic
commentary on his own apocalyptic commentaries by noting that the deconstruction
of the notion of apocalypse ends in an ending without an end. The deconstruction of
the whole order of Western thoughtwhat Derrida calls onto-eschatotheologyhas
concluded with the notion of mime without origin. This in turn leads to apocalypse
without end, or as Derrida puts it, an apocalypse beyond good and evil, the
apocalypse of apocalypseour apocalypse now.
We see, then, that in our postmodern era of apocalypse both the poetry and the
philosophy of the human imagination would seem to have reached their end. What is
to come is, apparently, beyond the powers of imagination to imagine. After the
holocaust of the Second World War, Adorno had asked who can write poetry? After
deconstruction, we may well ask: Who can write philosophy?