I Believe in the Imagination!

Kearney provokes me, but ultimately I find we are on the same side.

Kearney, Richard
The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture
London: Routledge, 1994.

Perhaps it is because I am able to make my living as an artist, creating dances and teaching for an organization that holds imagination as paramount, but prior to reading Richard Kearney’s The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture I wasn’t at all worried about imagination’s place in our society. And this deep personal belief in the relevance and necessity of imagination in our everyday lives made me wary of a metaphysical philosopher who believes that our culture cannot support this critical function of human thought. I felt myself immediately bristle at his central thesis that postmodernism may be the end of imagination. However, once I put aside these gut reactions, I found that thoughtfulness and pro-imagination arguments are ultimately what Kearney offers.

Kearney is a college lecturer in the Department of Metaphysics and University College in Dublin, and he is a serious philosopher. His book is a comprehensive philosophic argument, and it reads like one. In addressing concerns about the possible waning importance and irrelevance of imagination in post-modern culture, the book attempts a thorough genealogy of the imagination. Kearney analyzes Western thought and perceptions about imagination from the pre-modern (Hebraic, Hellenic, and Medieval imagination) to the modern (transcendental and existentialist imagination) through the postmodern and beyond. He seeks to show historical paradigm shits between each time period, and to demonstrate the changing perception of imagination throughout time, leading up to the current day and ultimately presenting suggestions for the future. He uses philosophic, psychiatric, artistic, and literary ideas of each time to support his cultural arguments.

Kearney’s primary concern, though, is with the imagination’s presence and importance in the postmodern culture of the 1980s and early 1990s. These thoughts are mostly laid out in the 50-page “Conclusion: After Imagination,” the section of the book I found most personally relevant. Much of his discussion centers on our obsession with images (in TV new media and advertisements, mostly) and his concern that globalization and the propagation of electronic media are killing our imaginative abilities. He gets very theoretical about why this is and what this says about us, and while his point of view is interesting, I found myself continually wondering what Kearney would have to say now, in this era of the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle, 17 years after his book was last published.

As I read Kearney’s book, I compiled rebuttals to his arguments, composed of those many instances in which I see the imagination at work. As a choreographer, I use my own imagination daily! As a teaching artist for LCI, I draw on the imaginative choices within a work of art and plan relevant and innovative lessons based on these! In the classroom I observe students of all ages engaging in countless imaginative acts, including discovering new ways to move and devising sequences for these motions. I witness these students engaging in deep noticing with fellow students and making strong and unpredictable connections between often disparate ideas—a skill that I believe demands imaginative thinking! As a citizen of the United States I have experienced the imagination for social change that energized our country in our recent election.

Phew, that was a whole lot of passionate feeling about the postmodern imagination. Which told me this book must be worth some further thought and reading. And if you have the persistence to muddle through what can be an esoteric, difficult text, you can find a deep well of pertinent information and well-constructed philosophical arguments. Kearney does believe in imagination. He ultimately argues for the cultivation of an ethical and poetic imagination, in which I found substantial parallels to my work with LCI. His final suggestions, which advocate for this kind of imagination, were inspiring, and left me thinking that Kearney would find much to admire in what we do at LCI. And, though I may not always agree with Kearney’s arguments, I’ve come around to admiring much of his work, as well.

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