English at Cornell
December 2005
Copyright © 2005 Stuart Davis.


The Public Imaginary:
A Report on Teaching


Stuart Davis

Online version at http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/~sad4/imag/

We practice and profess the arts of imagination with some confidence, but with "the imaginary" -- understood as the site where collective representations are shared and contested -- we are less comfortable, for some of the same reasons that I am uncomfortable with the "we" I am using in this essay. "We" means humanities teachers, those of the twenty-first century, and I feel strange speaking for or about them in this way. "The imaginary" seems to intend a larger "we," perhaps many, but also an "it" of which I am not really happy to know that I am a part, unless of course I am teaching and want to sound smart about it. "The imaginary" sounds unreal, social, specular, spectacular, French, somehow visual and filmic, and entangled in debates over subjecthood and society that play across the boundaries of English studies. It is a little alien, for it is known as the place where alienation and images of otherness live. It sounds like trouble; it sounds like something technology has organized.1

With a few examples drawn from my and others' teaching (and some texts that cluster around the millennium), I want to suggest that the trouble and strangeness we incur in teaching the imaginary with technology is, well, worth the trouble; that imagining a public or publics for imagination (and thus a "public imaginary") is among the more exigent of reading practices; and that pursuing it leads us to read critically some powerful narratives, including the one that says that there are no more grand narratives.

What happened on the way from the Romantic imagination to the imaginary of the twenty-first century? Of course there is a narrative here. It is, to a point, the story of modernity, of the disenchantment of the world and the growth of instrumental reason, of knowledge purchased with the loss of power. Thus far Shelley had come when he wrote, with the confidence of that heroic individualism which spoke easily for all,
We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; . . . . The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.
"To be greatly good," he opined, one "must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own."2 These days, that "want" seems more urgent, the knowledge to be imagined greater, and the hugely enlarged sciences of empire more paradoxically restrictive, multiplying the "others" and shrinking the "place" for imagining sympathetically. Visibility does not seem to help. "Photographs of the dying, the mutilated, the mute, the devastated are harder to modify than verbally mediated pictures," Geoffrey Hartman remarks.
Utopian visions dim. Snapshots of ordinary or happy life are increasingly like promotional inserts, ads that persuade us to buy life, to go on living. The reign of images, its stark realism, imposes a responsibility that cannot be met, feelings that cannot be acted on, and a resentment that may actually shut those "doors of perception" that the romantic revolution in sensibility wished to open wide . . .3
Meanwhile, driven by global capital, those powerful machines that do our imagining for us seem to shrink distances and flatten out historical depth, while the copies they make eclipse the auratic originals of nature and art and yield in their turn to the culture of the simulacrum, the map that has devoured the territory -- or so the story goes.4 It is thus that a collective imaginary or imaginaries, social and global, become troubled, and the task of imagining what we know, Shelley's project, is compounded by that of knowing what we and others imagine in a way both critical and comprehensive.

Beyond a certain point, you will have noticed, the story becomes one of postmodernism, which is among the grander of narratives and, if misread, among the more paralyzing. At the extreme, it is figured in that mode of popular literature and film that Fredric Jameson calls "high-tech paranoia," where computer circuits and their global hook-ups portray conspiracies complex "beyond the capacity of the normal reading mind."5 This is the vision foretold in Terry Gilliam's film Brazil (1985) and Phillip K. Dick's science fiction, realized in the cyberspace of William Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy (1984-88), and brought to vivid and immensely profitable currency in the Wachowski brothers' The Matrix. That dystopian relic of the last century (1999) and harbinger of this one (two sequels in 2003) perfects the worst imaginings of the postmodern world. Machine intelligence has triumphed, reducing humans to biotic "energy sources" in life-support pods while piping into their minds the collective hallucination of a shared social life. Replicant "agents" scour the world to crush the tiny remnant of humanity that has liberated itself from simulated life, built a "human city, Zion" deep in the magmatic bowels of the earth, and sent out ships in search of a messiah. One of these missions -- led by Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus -- awakens a cybergeek named Neo (Keanu Reeve) from his dream of a life to the tyranny under which he lives. Now Neo is not only a geek and a potential terrorist; he is also a theorist who keeps his illicit software in a hollowed-out copy of Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, so the news that hyperreality has taken over cannot be too much of a surprise. The surprise is the news that he is "the one," the messiah who will free humanity from the Matrix. The ensuing high-tech adventure -- in which he proves himself by the quickness of his wits and the strength of his belief in himself, triumphing in brilliantly balletic kung-fu sequences over hordes of Agent Smiths and the algorithms that breed them -- proves the prophecy right, even while the struggle between the Matrix and Zion goes on without resolution through the whole Matrix trilogy (oddly reminiscent in its pathos of Shelley's Revolt of Islam). The saga at length sends Neo off alone in quest of the machines' home city -- seeking a place, after all, for the source of placelessness in the ecologically ruined world of a global empire.

Is The Matrix readable? Teachable? Abundantly, and not just because it stages the postmodernist narrative with such violent brilliance. It has been read as an allegory of absolutely everything: Christian gnosis, Buddhist enlightenment, the age of the world picture and the death of global space, the Frankfurt school's analysis of the culture industry and the Lacanian drama of confrontation with the big Other, matrix of symbolization.6 Its public includes a willing coalition of the half- and the over-educated. It speaks to the selfhood fantasies of adolescent and post-adolescent hackers, male and female, and it teases college teachers with puzzles of agency and epistemology that belong in Philosophy 101, which is where they tend to put it. I have been guilty of a like indulgence, bundling The Matrix with Plato and Richard Rorty and a string of dystopias (by Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Caryl Churchill, and Jorge Luis Borges) in a course called "Philosophic Fictions," in which students write about, and in, the forms of literature they read. One assignment here: write your own paranoid dystopia, keyed to Morpheus' revelation to Neo: "It's that feeling you have had all your life . . . that something was wrong with the world; you don't know what it is but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad." Or to Borges' prescription for his own literature of the irreal: "Let us admit what all idealists admit: the hallucinatory nature of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: seek unrealities that confirm that nature."7

That assignment produced some brilliant fictions, but also much student resistance to The Matrix's story about itself, so to speak, and this was good news. It's hard to miss the fact that in this picture the culture industry gazes into a terribly hyperbolic mirror and falls in love with what it sees: the twin fantasies of total techno-determinism (we made the Matrix but it mastered us), and of apocalyptic techno-heroism (Neo and his cohort triumph within the Matrix and in the real, only love and suffer). So the omnipotence of technology and the omnipotence of thought fight each other to a draw, and human agency is mystified. The Matrix works like the knottiest of Kafka's paradoxes: if you bet that the truth told by parables is also a parable, you have won -- but then, have you won in parable or in reality? (Not both.) For its audience, The Matrix works as one of those "test objects" the psychoanalyst Sherry Turkle speaks of in Life on the Screen, enabling us to contemplate "mental life that exists apart from bodies" and "dreams that do not need beasts," renegotiating old boundaries between body and mind.8 But these negotiations take place outside the movie, in the public space of the critical or creative essay, the classroom, the world -- all of them more or less embodied places.

But are these places real? Is publicness a place or sphere, or just a stance from which we deplore the loss of such things? And are selves and bodies in play? I have in mind questions raised by the last decade's renaissance in thinking about the public sphere; I am also thinking of a spread of writing courses originated and taught in our department by faculty and graduate student instructors, courses with titles like "Making the News," "Media Worlds," "International Cinema and Global Politics," "Reality TV," "The Culture of Television," and "Writing in the Electronic Age"9 -- courses that go far to give fresh dimensions to publicness in discourse and representation and call into play a practice of reading native and proper, I think, to English departments.

Here the narrative goes back to Jürgen Habermas' enormously influential Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), which presents that domain as something that fell or withered under pressure of consumer society and the media. "The world fashioned by the mass media is a public sphere in appearance only," wrote Habermas. "Radio, film and television by degrees reduce to a minimum the distance that a reader is forced to maintain toward the printed letter . . . . They draw the eyes and ears of the public under their spell but at the same time, by taking away its distance, place it under 'tutelage,' which is to say they deprive it of the opportunity to say something and to disagree."10 Public sphere theorists such as those writing in the Social Text Collective's volume The Phantom Public Sphere of 1994 inflect and challenge these judgments, redeeming the media from such opprobrium -- "tutelage" being a particularly nasty word in the German of the Enlightenment -- and multiplying imaginable publics and counterpublics in order to "re-invent the [public sphere] notion . . . as an urban space of aesthetic self-presentation, sociability, theatricality, and pleasure," in Bruce Robbins' words11 -- and of discourse.

Students and teachers in a typical "Making the News" course of the 2000s study public events and their reportage through powerful resources for research and critique: print and broadcast media; websites of the major news organizations and a vigorous alternative press; the archives of the online Lexis-Nexis and Dow Jones International services and those of the Durland Alternatives Library; public and Pacifica radio and TV stations; the ever-swelling Blogosphere and the watchdog organizations FAIR and AIM; Project Censored's annual compilation of spiked stories; and a powerful literature of media-critique from Noam Chomsky to Robert McChesney. They ask: what is the role of news organizations in a democracy? How has the growing concentration of US media affected news content and form? What are the poetics of newswriting and newscasting, and how do they account for sameness and discontinuity of coverage? What is an event, and what is a celebrity in the society of the spectacle? How do TV news programs shape and stage raced, gendered, and class-marked bodies? They may ask: what kind of forum has the Internet become in its short evolution from a "virtual community" and a "Cyberkeley" to a half-corporate "Cyberia" that gazettes its citizens with a "Daily We"?12 And they ask: if the public sphere is a phantom agora or a marketplace of phantasms, where does the news take place?

Did the First Gulf War, for example, "take place"? (Baudrillard says it didn't, perhaps without having consulted the Kuwaitis.13) And what about the War on Terror, and the War in Iraq? In a "Making the News" section I taught in the fall of 2002, the "place" of these events was on, and in, our minds while the war in Afghanistan was proceeding and drumbeat for regime change in Iraq rising. Class members tracked many events through many media, writing copiously on a host of subjects: the ability of Chomsky's "propaganda model" to explain coverage of airlifts to Afghans or of the Rwanda genocide; the role of the press in the drive for graduate student unionization at Cornell; stories of Watergate in the press and the film All the President's Men; the reporting of economics in the Clintonocracy and the history of Missile Defense under Bush II. What stands out in my memory is, well, the experience of reading -- reading hard, in good company and in a patchwork of local and global spaces and a richly layered mediascape. The tone was set by a first assignment, Elaine Scarry's "Watching and Authorizing the Gulf War." In that 1993 article, she traces the waning of public debate over recent wars in government and the media and the dominance of spectacle in the 1990-91 war. Her centerpiece is a reading of a McDonnell Douglas ad in The Economist right afterwards. A lean and phallic F/A-18 Hornet, made by the advertiser and laden with microcephalic missiles, spans the page and cleaves a text that celebrates the product and its record in Operation Desert Storm: "You're Carrying 4 Tons Of Explosives And People Are Shooting At You. No problem . . . , " says the text. Says Scarry, "the advertisement enlists the reader into an act of self-recognition," for both the plane and the Economist readership are "proven performers," "dependable" and "fearsome"; and a virtual public is invited on triumphal procession to and from the Gulf.14

Invited, but not compelled -- for of course the reader of the reader here, Scarry, performs another act of self-recognition, making her able (in Habermas' terms) to "say something and disagree." So does the reader of Kevin Carter's Pulitzer-winning photo of a vulture and a dying African child in The Times of 1993, read in connection with Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others.15 So too the reader of the Confederate flag in American politics of the last half century, who in this case happens to be Adam Sasiadek (ILR '06), student in "Media Words" with Angela Naimou and author of the essay that won the Knight Institute's Expository Writing Prize last spring.16 About such acts of reading Michael Warner has something to say in his Publics and Counterpublics (2002): "When we understand images and texts as public, we make a necessary imaginary reference to the public as opposed to other individuals. . . . To ask about the relation between democracy and the rhetorical forms of publicity, we would have to consider how the public dimension of discourse can come about differently in different contexts of mediation, from official to mass cultural or subcultural. There is not simply 'a' public discourse and a 'we' who apprehend it . . . ." 17 To me and I think to Warner, this means that the publicness of imagery and discourse is instinct with a kernel of imaginative force -- is plural, mutable, negotiable, and performable, subject to the aesthetic and ethical intervention an active audience. That is the audience we are when we teach and read and view and the audience student writers need in order to experience their own work as real. What it also means is that distance is restored to the experience of public mediation, the distance lost in Habermas' narrative of transformation as well as Baudrillard's story of the simulacrum. The resulting public imaginary is nuanced, contestatory and fragmented, open to investigation -- and far-flung.

How far-flung? I want to look at a text taught in "Media Worlds" and "Global Cinema" by colleagues who know more about the world than I, Naimou and Nick Davis. It is Alain Brigand's film 11'09"01, an anthology of cinematic responses to the WTC attacks of September 11 by directors from eleven countries, each segment eleven minutes, nine seconds and one frame long.18 Made in 2002, it contests mass-produced public commemorations of the attacks. It doesn't just imagine publics; it shows multiple publics across the world trying to imagine that catastrophe -- or imagining other catastrophes that rival or recall it. A teacher of Afghan children in Iran seeks to explain the attacks to them and helps them understand it only by pointing to a high chimney that may (for us) recall Auschwitz; she has summoned them to school from brick-making with an omen of future retaliation ("You can't stop bombs with bricks; come to class"). A refugee Bosnian woman defers, then persists in her group's public commemoration of the murder of Muslim men in Srebrenica on July 11, 1995; "after this," she muses (perhaps about 9-11, perhaps about 7-11), "we can expect anything." A Chilean exile in London writes a letter to Americans recalling yet another 11th, date of the U.S.-sponsored coup against the Allende government on September 11, 1973, with copious news footage of the earlier event; he is not evening scores but measuring the later tragedy against the prior. In New York, a Muslim disappears, and his family are hounded by police and reporters who suspect him of complicity -- to learn at length that he has died as an emergency medical technician in the attacks. In Burkina Faso, poor children glimpse and stalk a man they think is Osama bin Laden, expecting to win the large price on his head; they are unconsolable when he slips away on a plane. In New York once more, a French tour guide leaves his deaf-mute girlfriend to go to work, and she writes him a dear-John on the computer while the unobserved TV screen repeats and repeats the attacks; he may be dead, and his return in ashen form does not settle the question. In a nowhere of horror, the Mexican director blacks out all but the jumping civilians, running his film for long minutes against a sound-track of muttered prayers and cell-phone calls from another of the doomed jets and asking "Does God's light guide us or blind us?"

Where does all this take place, and for whom? Not in utopia, but not in The Matrix either. Perhaps in the flows of "ethnoscapes," "mediascapes," and "ideoscapes" mapped in Arjun Appadurai's Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), an indispensable handbook for imagining in the twenty-first century. Almost everyone in 11'09"01 is a migrant or a nomad or someone who harbors them, a citizen of the "diasporic public spheres" of the world Appadurai charts in his study of "the imagination as a social practice." Their extremely varied reactions to the WTC attacks speak volumes about the way they imagine the world and themselves in it. In just such a mixed, fragmented, and electronically mediated world, writes Appardurai, the imagination is a more and not less singular agency -- the medium of terror and pastiche, coercion and community, "the key component of the new global order."19 This is as if Salman Rushdie, who knows something about diasporas and terror, were to write political geography. Wrote Rushdie in his Imaginary Homelands (1981), "[t]he broken mirror may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed."20 Today, thanks to Appardurai, the mirror's brokenness -- refractive, sharp-edged, kaleidoscopic, instinct with depth -- looks like a source of the light it can shed on the new century.


For help with and advice on this essay I thank Angela Naimou, Jami Carlacio, Paul Sawyer, and Judy Pierpont.



      1 Cornelius Castoriadis may be the most influential proponent of the "social imaginary" as a term for the source and respository of collective representations, but a look at The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987) reveals fissures between his sense of the word and others'. For Lacanians, for example, the imaginary is the site of a fundamental self-misrecognition through which both identity and alienation are produced. Castoriadis' disavowals say something about this opposing sense of the term.
That which, since 1964, I have termed the social imaginary -- a term which has since been used and misused in a number of different ways -- and more generally that which I call the imaginary has nothing to do with . . . that which is presented as "imaginary" by certain currents in psychoanalysis: namely, the "specular," which is obviously only an image of and a reflected image, in other words a reflection . . . . The imaginary does not come from the image in the mirror or from the gaze of the other. Instead, the "mirror" itself and its possibility, and the other as mirror, are the works of the imaginary, which is creation ex nihilo. Those who speak of "imaginary," understanding by this the "specular," the reflection of the "fictive," do no more than repeat, usually without realizing it, the affirmation which has for all time chained them to the underground of [Plato's] cave; it is necessary that this world be an image of something.
For a version in the Lacanian line, see Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Pr., 1971) 127-186. For a less problematic one, see Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke Univ. Pr., 2003).   up

      2 Percy Bysshe Shelley and Thomas Love Peacock, A Defense of Poetry and The Four Ages of Poetry,  ed. John E Jordan (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 68-9, 40. up

      3 Geoffrey Hartman, The Fateful Question of Culture  (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997) 143-4. up

      4 Much of the story is Jean Baudrillard's, told in "The Precession of Simulacra" and "Simulacra and Science Fiction," Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila F. Glaser   (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1994). up

      5Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism  (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1991) 378. up

      6For a sampler of interpretations, see William Irwin, ed., The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real  (Chicago: Open Court Pr., 2002); Karen Haber, ed., Exploring the Matrix: Visions of the Cyber Present  (New York: St. Martin's Pr., 2003);   Matthew Kapell and William G. Doty, ed. Jacking Into the Matrix Franchise: Cultural Reception and Interpretation  (New York: Continuum, 2004).  and Christopher Grau, ed., Philosophers Explore the Matrix (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).up

      7Jorge Luis Borges, "Avatars of the Tortoise," Labyrinths , ed. Donald Yates and James Irby (New York: New Directions, 1962) 208. up

      8Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1995) 22. up

      9Current listings at http:instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/Courses/engl288-289/; past section descriptions at http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/Courses/engl288-289/samp.html   up

      10Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,  tr. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Pr., 1991) 170-1 up

      11Bruce Robbins, ed. The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: Univ. of Miinnesota Pr., 1993) xix. up

      12 See Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Comunity: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (New York: HarperCollins, 1993); Andrew Shapiro, "Street Corners in Cyberspace," Nation 261:1 (3 July 1995) 10-14; and Cass Sunstein, "The Daily We: Is the Internet Really a Blessing for Democracy?" The Boston Review (Summer 2001) <http://www.bostonreview.net/BR26.3/sunstein.html> up

      13 Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton (Bloomington, IA.: Univ. of Minn. Press, 1995). up

      14 Elaine Scarry, "Watching and Authorizing the Gulf War," Media Spectacles, ed. Marjorie Garber et al. (New York: Routledge, 1993) 65-68. up

      15 Arthur and Joan Kleinman, "The Appeal of Experience; the Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times," Daedalus 125:1 (Winter 1966) 3-8. up

      16Adam Sasiadek, "Cultural Warriors: The Old South, Nostalgia Without Memory, and the Formation of Contemporary Conservatism," Discoveries 6 (Fall 2005), <http://www.arts.cornell.edu/knight_institute/publications/publist.html>. up

      17 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002) 161-2. up

      18 The directors are Samira Makhmalbaf (Iran), Claude LeLouch (France), Youssef Chahine (Egypt), Danis Tanovic (Bosnia-Herzegovina), Idrissa Ouedraogo (Burkina Faso), Ken Loach (United Kingdom), Alejandro González Iñárraitu (Mexico), Amos Gitai (Israel), Sean Penn (U.S.), and Shohei Imamura (Japan). up

      19Argun Appardurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Public Worlds, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minn. Press, 1996). up

      20Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (London: Granta/Viking, 1991) 11. up