Two Fragments and an Imaginal Journey

‘I don’t know how time slips by;
everything vanishes
and the next moment
I’m wandering on the distant horizons of my dream world …’
                   M. K. Čiurlionis

M. K. Čiurlionis, Thor , 1909. Tempera on cardboard

Lightning (1909): It is what it is – the straight lines; immobile, the green, the blue, the sky, the field – nothing but a sea sub specie aeternitatis. And then the break, the wound, an opening, and the seven scars that hold the world together, the material becomes immaterial, and the light becomes a body.

The imaginal is the key to a different way of perceiving the world. Not just a symbol, putting together two things that have been separated, but a reality in itself, colours, notes, waves, a dance that is there in its own immanence, and that is not just the result of the eccentricity of an individual mind, but the door to an imaginal world that potentially belongs to all of us. Besides disclosing ways of understanding reality that have been foreclosed, developing the concept of imaginal has a further advantage in this context. We can best describe it if we briefly look the genealogy of the words ‘phantasy’ and ‘imagination’. A crucial break in the genealogy of the concept is the passage from ‘imagination’ to the relatively new concept of ‘the imaginary’. Critics of theories of imagination understood as an individual faculty have underlined that such theories fail to capture the intrinsically social nature of our capacity to imagine. The concept of imagination as an individual faculty seemed to be too much ensnared within the presuppositions of a problematic philosophy of the subject, which misleadingly suggests that we are individuals, atoms separated from one another. As a remedy, different authors have proposed moving from the concept of ‘imagination’ as a faculty to that of the ‘imaginary’, understood as a context. As a relatively new term, derived from the substantivised adjective, the concept of ‘the imaginary’ had the function of underlining that humans are always born within specific imaginary significations and that, as psychoanalysis, among other disciplines, has persuasively shown, our socialisation as human beings depends on our capacity to absorb socially recognised imaginary significations and make them our own. In short, if imagination is an individual faculty that we possess, the social imaginary is, on the contrary, what possesses us. This claim unifies theories as different as those inspired by psychoanalysis as well as those inspired by different forms of social organicism.

However, the emerging problem is how to account for the free imagination. History has shown that, even within very oppressive social imaginaries, the free individual imagination can always develop. In other words, while the concept of the imaginary helps overcome the shortcomings of a philosophy of the subject, it risks being exchanged for an equally problematic metaphysics of the social context. The very fact that the concept of social imaginary can be declined in the plural, as if ‘imaginaries’ were social wholes that could be juxtaposed one next to the other (i.e., the ‘Lithuanian imaginary’ next to the ‘Italian imaginary’) suggests that such forms of social organicism could be a reproduction of the very same methodological individualism on a larger scale, one where, moreover, methodological individualism can easily turn into dangerous forms of methodological nationalism. In sum, remaining within the alternative between imagination, as an individual faculty, and the imaginaries as social or psychological contexts means taking ‘individuated being’ as the starting point for theorising, and thus implicitly assuming that the only possible alternative is that between micro-individuals (individual subjects) and macro-individuals (societies, nations or even civilisations). The fact that most contemporary theorists of imagination/imaginary kept reproducing the same individual versus social dichotomy is already a sign that they are caught within a false alternative. In both cases, we assume that imagining happens in the here and now and that the only possible alternative is between the micro- or the macro-individuals that produce it.

However, following the insights of philosopher Cynthia Fleury¹ and her re-appropriation of the tradition charted by Henry Corbin², we argue that the concept of ‘imaginal’ can lead us out of the social versus individual dichotomy as well as outside of the methodological individualism and metaphysical impasse it presupposes. In contrast to imagination and imaginary, the term ‘imaginal’ emphasises the centrality of the production of images rather than the faculty or the context that produces them; therefore, it does not make any assumptions about the individual or social character of our capacity to imagine, nor – and this is another crucial advantage – about the absence/presence and reality/ unreality of its content.

While looking at a painting such as Lightning, invoking the concept of imaginal means accepting a double Copernican revolution in the gaze we adopt: beyond the philosophy of the subject (imagination as an individual faculty), but also beyond an equally problematic metaphysics of the context (the imaginary as a given social context). The starting point is neither a subject separated from the world nor a world independent from the subject, but simply images – visual images, tactile images, acoustic images, conscious and unconscious images. The reason why this is a better starting point is easy to understand: without images, there cannot be a world for us, but this does not mean that we have to decide a priori what the source of such a process of imagining, and thus think of being as an already individuated being. This is particularly crucial if we consider that the proper space for unconscious images is beyond the very alternative between the social and the individual and should, therefore, be placed in what we can call the ‘transindividual’: the images that populate the mundus imaginalis are never purely individual nor entirely social, but rather ‘transindividual’ in nature because situated in an intermediary world between that of the (personal) sensations and the (general) intellect.

Notice that images are here understood as (re-)presentations that are presences in themselves, meaning that images are not simply the re-presentation of something else that is missing in the images themselves, but that they can also be fully present to themselves, in their sheer being. Images thus understood enjoy a primacy vis-a-vis language and argumentative thinking. They emerge before language and contain a surplus of meaning that cannot often be fully rendered through linguistic descriptions – this being particularly clear if one considers that the notion of imaginal also includes unconscious, prophetic images. Indeed, it is a common experience that there are images that cannot be fully put into linguistic descriptions, either because descriptions risk being incomplete or because they may turn into a betrayal of the images. This is, we believe, the specific force of the imaginal: it is primordial because it is given with the psyche itself, and thus well before the mind and conscious propositional thinking appears. What is the psyche, if not, and foremost, a stream of images understood as (re)presentations that are also presences in themselves?

To sum up, the imaginal helps overcome the tension between the social and the individual, as well as those between the real and unreal. Besides the Latin expression mundus imaginalis, this is clear even in the English language, where ‘imaginal’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, denotes what pertains to images, whereas ‘imaginary’ primarily means what exists only in fancy and has no real existence and is opposed to ‘real’ or ‘actual’. To put it bluntly, whereas both imagination and the imaginary are associated with a lack, the imaginal is always the sign of an abundance – the abundance of a capacity to produce images that is primordial because it is given with being itself and because it can lead us beyond the immediate data of sensory experience. It is here that lightning in the sky becomes the scars that reveal and hold the world together.

The philosophical passage from theories of imagination/social imaginary to theories of the imaginal signals thus a move beyond the typically modern philosophy of the subject, with its boundary thinking, separating inside from the outside, one individual from another, and thus opposing a single field to a single sky, a passage that, among other things, also enables us to unlock the doors that have been shut down by a few centuries of methodological individualism. Without an engagement with both of them, the imaginal and the transindividual, the doors of the mundus imaginalis and the metaphysical transhumanism that they open, are destined to remain shut, or else only open for a few adepts.

M. K. Čiurlionis, Sonata No. 5 (Sonata of the Sea , 1908). Finale, tempera on paper

Sonata of the Sea (1908): The waves, the notes, the boats, flies in the bottle of what is, a mountain, against the sea, next to the sea, and made by the sea, we perceive the waves, we perceive the single floating devices, and we attach ourselves to them, as if they were the only means to save us, to scare us, to support us, and yet the waves constantly come and go, because only the water is real. Sub species aeternitatis.

Endnotes