Aesthetic Imaginary: Rethinking the "Comparative"

My coinage of the term aesthetic imaginary follows the line of a few thinkers in a field that I would like to call "imaginary studies": Cornelius Castoriadis's social imaginary, Michèle Le Dœuff's philosophical imaginary, and Marguerite La Caze's analytical imaginary. The space and the opportunity here do not grant me much room to explain what the different kinds of imaginary mean and potentially imply, and also descant on the points of engagement that aesthetic imaginary might have with them; this is something that I shall undertake to accomplish elsewhere.¹ However, within the spatial restrictions of this paper, I will try to bring out the nature and philosophy of my proposition and expand on the intricacies that aesthetic imaginary produces in our understanding of the notion of the "comparative."

I

The aesthetic imaginary begins in negativity, which is why there is no avoiding the recurrent problematic of the "opposite." Opposites exist as invisibles, and indeed, do not stagnate through time. Attraction is natural and inbuilt. Opposites construct a life of their own, inflected and emplotted; there succeeds a latent momentum that overcomes the conditions of resistance towards an imagined correspondence. If what one has coexists with what one does not, it is also about not simply being-with but being-with(out). The aesthetic imaginary flutters entropically on the edges of the being-with(out); having something is having something with a struggle that always prods it to become something else. Mostly undetermined, indeterminate, and capacious, aesthetic imaginaries aggregate around dwellings in culture, social practices, characters of imaginative reconstruction, and affiliations with religious and spiritual denominations and preferences. The aesthetic imaginary is built inside the borders of a nation, a culture, a society, a tradition, or an inheritance; but, it disaggregates and reconstructs itself when exposed to the callings and constraints of cross-border epistemic and cultural circulations. Thus, the "complexity" that develops from the aesthetic imaginary is also a way to rethink our genetic mapping of the cultural politics of learning and reception. Cultural genomization is not all flatulent; however, it is not apodictic either. The aesthetic imaginary can be epigenetic. Recent researches in molecular biology demonstrate the importance of non-DNA (epigenetic) inheritance. Additionally, in "symbol-based inheritance" (Wheeler 14), language is the central element in evolutionary progression. In fact, the aesthetic imaginary draws on biosemiosis, working on "semiotic freedom," often to produce a non-materialist metaphysics of experience. The aesthetic imaginary incorporates the representational and discursive politics, and, significantly, imbibes the non-reductionist energies of a creative evolution of thought. Therefore, aesthetic imaginaries are entangled figurations that bear out the promise of "shared realities" and what Toni Morrison calls "shareable imaginative worlds" (xii).²

The Aristotelian law of non-contradiction tells us that contrariety is not in being simple opposites, that a thing or a context or an idea comes with affirmative negation, the inherent principle of affirmation without denying the possibility of its reaffirmation. Although Socrates is ill and Socrates is well cannot be simultaneous states of existence, the idea of staying healthy encloses the state of illness, keeping the desire to break free from ill health continuously alive; the comparative quotient of illness makes us skeptical about what can be considered as staying healthy. Contradiction built around affirmation and negation will produce two states of being and consequence, but the aesthetic imaginary constructs the contradiction that battles the yes-no state of understanding: "an affirmation is a statement affirming something of something, a negation is a statement denying something of something [. …] It is clear that for every affirmation there is an opposite negation, and for every negation there is an opposite affirmation [. …] Let us call an affirmation and a negation which are opposite a contradiction" (Aristotle, De Interpretatione 17a25-35, qtd. in "Contradiction"). In modal proposition, if something is true, as distinguished from the false, it follows that the converse is not valid. What is disturbing is that although staying "true" is a boundary, inviolably protected against the not-true, the contradictory particles cannot ignore communication beyond their supposed consciousness of separation and being. Cultural and conceptual particles do not...