ABSTRACT

The deconstruction of imagination is by no means an isolated concern of philosophy. As we have had occasion to remark in our preceding review of structuralist and post-structuralist critiques, the tendency to undermine the basic metaphysical relationship between the imaginary and the real is a recurring feature of contemporary Western culture in its broadest aspects. Hitherto we have concentrated on theoretical accounts of this deconstructive tendency. The fact is, however, that many postmodern works of art, literature and cinema themselves manifest a critical preoccupation with the imminent death of imagination and testify to a keen worry about its apocalyptic consequences. Before proceeding to assess some of the social and ethical implications of this theme, it may be useful to examine some recent examples of its aesthetic development at first hand. This should help us to more fully appreciate the extent to which the deconstruction of imagination is a global phenomenon and not merely the rarefied invention of a few Parisian intellectuals. To this end, we select for analysis six representative samples of postmodern culture: two from literature (Pynchon’s V and Beckett’s Imagination Dead Imagine), two from cinema (Fellini’s Ginger and Fred and Wenders’ Paris, Texas), and two from the plastic arts (Le Magasin de Ben at the Beaubourg centre and the Palace of Living Arts in California). These works testify, in their different ways, to the erosion of the modernist conviction that avant-garde art is the expression of unique and innovative

personalities who can somewhow redeem society by an elitist fiat of imagination. They mark the emergence of a postmodernist aesthetic of undecidability wherein it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between art and artificiality, culture and commodity, imagination and reality.