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Myth criticism flourished in the mid-twentieth century under the powerful influence of Canadian thinker Northrop Frye. It asserted the need to identify common, unifying patterns in literature, arts, and religion. Although it was eclipsed by postmodern theories that asserted difference and conflict, those theories proved incapable of inspiring solidarity or guiding social action.
Arguing for the ethical and intellectual necessity of conceiving a unifying pattern that transcends differences, The Productions of Time: A Study of the Human Imagination demonstrates that imagination is part of the human inheritance, common to all, not just to poets and mystics.
In this guest blog Michael Dolzani provides further context to his new book, exploring the meaning behind the title and subtitle of the work, and the philosophical theories therein.
The subtitle of The Productions of Time: A Study of the Human Imagination may seem to be quaintly outdated. In postmodernism and post-structuralism, imagination is either an irrationalism to be “demystified” or a disguised will to power. The word is associated with the Romantic movement, and so skepticism about the imagination as a power to renovate the world has been frequently anti-Romantic.
But the main title of the book comes from William Blake, an unrepentant radical and revolutionary whose poetry was dedicated to the cause of social change and social justice. And Blake’s premise is as timely now as when he wrote. The failure to change the world for the better is a failure of imagination: progressive political and social programs fail because of what Blake, in his poem “London,” calls “mind forg’d manacles.” Blake said that “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” The present book is a survey of those productions, including not only mythology, literature, and the other arts, but all cultural products, including the sciences and certain aspects of popular culture: all of these are imaginative constructs. Yet the book is anything but a formalist description of patterns for their own sake. The forms of the imagination are modes of vision, ways of experiencing and understanding. Eternity is in love with them, not because they are, like Platonic Forms, lifted above “The fury and the mire of human veins,” in Yeats’s phrase: quite the opposite. They are transfiguring powers, and therefore potential agents of change.
The book’s mandala diagram is a convenient way of representing the cosmology in which the imagination has traditionally operated. There is a vertical axis signifying ordinary existence as a “middle earth” with modes of experience above and below it, a horizontal axis of linear time and an inner circle signifying the cyclical time of nature. But all these are comprehended within a larger circle that represents the dynamic aspect of the imagination, with its twin processes that I call decreation and recreation. On the one hand, the imagination is formal because life is formal: life is organization, and the triumph of entropy is what we mean by death. The fashionable iconoclasm that sees form as inevitably coercive, an act of violence, is…misinformed.
Nonetheless, some forms are indeed coercive and violent, and against these the imagination pits its negative power of decreation—of critique, critical thinking, seeing through structures of oppressive power disguised as “normality,” in literature often through satire and irony. The modern imagination has excelled at decreation, helping to raise consciousness through what has been called a “hermeneutics of suspicion” that calls into question all assumptions about the true and the good, asking whether they are not really instruments of social conditioning serving the purpose of systems of power. The imagination is not just fantasy: it includes the power to see, in the words of Wallace Stevens, “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
Yet decreation has failed to produce decisive transformation. Fredric Jameson once said it somehow seems easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. These days it has become all too easy to imagine the end of the world, and yet the sense of being trapped and dehumanized within a vast, labyrinthine system has in fact intensified. The result is paranoid conspiracy thinking, which produces cults of people who feel powerless and afraid, and who are therefore willing to immerse themselves within the power of a charismatic leader who will defeat the system for them. What is missing is the positive, recreative side of the imagination, the power to imagine, commit oneself to, and act to realize a positive model of fulfilled desire.
Such a power would unite the human subject with all that it is alienated from, everything that is objective to it, not only other people but the natural world. But the ordinary ego can unite only with its narcissistic reflection, seeing in the Other only a version of itself. The radical premise of The Productions of Time is that the imagination can be defined as the perception not of mere unity but of an identity-in-difference. It has been fashionable to deny such perception as mere idealism. The result, however, has been disastrous: without such an ideal, solidarity is impossible, and so is love. It is for lack of such an ideal that the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Such an ideal, which is utopian in the best sense, is, given the present crisis, a life-or-death necessity.
Michael Dolzani is professor in the Department of English at Baldwin Wallace University. He is the author of The Productions of Time: A Study of the Human Imagination.
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