imagination as shadow theatre

IMAGINATION AS SHADOW THEATRE:

HERMENEUTICS OF THE BODY AND THE REPRODUCTIVE IMAGINARY

L. Callid Keefe-Perry

1-27-2013

Carnal Hermeneutics

Prof. Richard Kearney

Keefe-Perry 1

“Tell me: do you think that these men would have seen

anything of themselves or of one another except the shadows

cast from the fire on the wall of the cave that fronted them?”

“How could they,” he said, “if they were compelled to hold

their heads unmoved through life?”

– Plato1

Things present themselves not by their roots, but by some

point or other situated toward the middle.

– Kafka2

While much of the Western philosophical canon considers the topic of the imagination as

equated with mimicry, duplication, and the reproduction of an original, Paul Ricoeur

asserted that beyond these types of “reproductive” categorizations there at least four

domains of what he called “productive imagination.” Drawing on the work of Ricoeur and

Merleau-Ponty, this paper argues that the capacity for this type of productive imagination

can be understood as the result of framing the body as medium, or metaxu, to all perception

and communication. That is, though the productive imagination is capable of novelty and

not merely mimesis, it is nevertheless affixed to embodiment: it is not groundless. Indeed, it

is precisely this grounded embodiment which allows for the possibility of the generative

imaginary.

By emphasizing how it is that our bodies themselves serve as an intermediary of

meaning, a case can be made for the necessity of bodies for productive imagination. Put

another way, a neglect of an understanding of the body as medium of meaning is likely to

yield an understanding of imagination that is merely productive. It is in this context that

1 Plato, Republic, 7.515b

2 As cited in Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible, xxvi.

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Plato's allegory of the cave is reconsidered and an alternative interpretation is attempted.

Ricoeur's Productive Imaginary

George Taylor's 2006 essay, “Ricoeur's Philosophy of Imagination,” provides a concise

comparison between Ricoeur's conceptions of imagination and what came before. He notes

that beginning with Plato, the notion of the imagination has been tied clearly with the

production of images. Hume, Spinoza, and Pascal each also equate the imagination with the

production of images, and the later two are clear that the imagination is a type of forgery of

reality, an “illusion, prejudice... sophistry, deception.”3 Even into the early 20th century, the

dominant trend of philosophical work – with the notable exceptions of Aristotle and Kant –

was such that, “in each case where the image was discussed, there was a distinction

between an original – reality – and a copy – the image or the imagination, and in each case,

the copy was always less than the original.”4

As Ricoeur began to work he noted that this model is merely one type of

imagination: a “reproductive” one. There is another, categorically different, type of

imagination that does not function via attempts to merely alter or reproduce reality with

the mind. Productive imagination is truly generative: when Tolkien crafted Middle Earth he

was decidedly not referring to a historical situation and simply reimagining it. That is,

though there are certainly grounds for considering that the context of writing the text was

influenced by the social upheaval of World World II, the world described within that text is

not a mere distorted reflection of the “real world,” but a new world that did not exist prior

3 Taylor, “Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Imagination,” 95.

4 Ibid.

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to Tolkien's efforts.

Of this type of productive imaginary, Ricoeur argues that there are four types: the

social and cultural, the epistemological, the poetic, and the religious.5 For example, the

productive imaginary of the social and cultural imagination is perhaps best exemplified by

Ricoeur in his understanding of the utopia, a fictive envisioning of an imagined society

which is to be marked as distinct from an ideology, which is merely a reproductive type of

social imagination.6 Ricoeur also suggests that Aristotle similarly understood that

imagination could be productive, citing his argument that the Greek tragedy “is not a copy

or reduplication of human life but on the contrary has a 'power of disclosure concerning

reality.'”7 Rather than conceiving of the imagination as an attempt to counterfeit reality,

Ricoeur argues that imagination allows for a view into another reality, or the opening into

another type of reality. In his perspective, this shift in “types” is connected to the ontological

character of the imagination.8 That is, because the world within the fiction of a novel is not

merely reproductive, but productive, that means the ontology displayed within the

imaginative piece may be separate from that present outside of the fictive world. Ricoeur's

conception of the imaginary has profound implications not only on ontology, but upon

epistemology as well. Indeed, his theory of productive imagination...

…requires revision not only of our concept of reality but also of our concept of truth.

No longer is truth defined in terms of “adequation,” a conformity between judgment

and existing reality, because the disclosure of new reality has more to do with a

concept of truth as manifestation.9

5 Ricoeur, “Lectures,” 16:18 in Taylor.



8 Ibid., 16:1


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Having entered into the discourse of ontology and epistemology it is worth

addressing – even if only in passing – that while some of Ricoeur's argument seems

isomorphic to claims that Derrida makes to différance and the infinite slippage of

meaning,10 there is a clear disagreement between the two thinkers regarding the ground of

play. While it is the case that Ricoeur's stance on the ontological and epistemological

novelty capable within the productive imaginary does suggest that “truth” occupies a far

more fluid realm that it did for Platonism, it does not imply the same kind of groundless

slippage and deferral that Derrida suggests.

Whereas Derrida writes that the meaning drawn from watching the performance of

a mime is a “mirror of a mirror... a reference without a referent, without any first or last

unit, a ghost that is the phantom of no flesh,”11 Ricoeur claims that the body is “a source of

motives.”12 That being said, Ricoeur also is clear that there is somewhat of a paradox – or at

the very least, a Janus quality – at play regarding the body and meaning. The body, Ricoeur

writes in 1990's Oneself as Another, “is at once a fact belonging to the world and the organ

of a subject that does not belong to the objects of which it speaks.”13 That the body functions

somehow as the – perhaps only partial – grounding of selfhood while also serving as the

medium of that selfhood is not merely a passing thought for Ricoeur. Indeed, forty years

prior to Oneself as Another he noted in Freedom and Nature that the body “is not the object

of action but its organ,” and that it serves a “mediating function.”14 The body is a kind of

10 Derrida, "Différance.”

11 Derrida, “The Double Session,” 206. Emphasis added.

12 Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 16.

13 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 54-5.

14 Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 212.

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cusp: it is the fulcrum of the voluntary and the involuntary and the middle point between

self and Other. If this is the case, then when the productive imaginary of a piece of fiction

yields an opening into a “a kind of second ontology which is not the ontology of the original

but... the ontology displayed by the image itself, because it has no original,”15 then the

experience of otherness of being is also mediated through the body.

In closing this section on Ricoeur's productive imagination it is worth noting that

while the body plays a role in grounding meaning and selfhood and is the medium through

which an imaginative “disclosure concerning reality” can be experienced, this is decisively

not the same thing as “a fascination which stimulates itself,” or the result of human desire

projecting the “affective image of pleasure.”16 The productive imaginary is not an endless

loop of self-originating, anesthetizing visions of desire fulfilled. Though the imagination

can become “the instrument of our bondage and the occasion for corruption,” it is also that

which “seals the compact of our freedom and our body.”17 That is, while imagination itself

can become a vehicle for pathological fascination, imagination does not necessarily entail

endless captivation and idealized deception. It can also be the the mark and means of –

even if not total – freedom. Indeed, for Ricoeur there is the suggestion that it can grant a

vision of a wholly new being, an ontology unseen before the fiction in which it comes to be.

Cave Shadow Theatre as Production

Perhaps one of the strongest visions of imagination as defectively inferior to reason is


16 Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 103-4.

17 Ibid., 102.

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Plato's allegory of the Cave in The Republic. Situated after the The Analogies of The Sun and

the Divided Line, Plato details the scene of prisoners chained from birth and “compelled to

hold their heads unmoved through life,” such that they saw nothing “of themselves or of one

another, and only “the shadows cast from the fire on the wall of the cave.”18 In Plato's

fourfold division of knowledge, he situates imagination as eikasia (εἰκασία), the lowest in

relative reflection of truth, underneath – in ascending order – belief (pistis), thought

(dianoia), and understanding (noesis). In the Analogy of the Divided line he refers to

imagination as “picture-thinking or conjecture,” merely a noticing of the shadows.19

Following from this, within the Analogy of the Cave, Plato argues that the “prisoners

18 Plato, Republic, 7.515b

19 Ibid., 6.511e

Illustration 1: Representation of the Allegory of the Cave

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would deem reality to be nothing else than the shadows of the artificial objects.”20 They are

categorically wrong to deem reality as the shadows because in truth – understood to be

stable – they are but the result of the true reality of those standing further back in the cave

and casting the shadows. This is Plato's notion of the imagination: eikasia, the lack of a

capacity to distinguish whether or not that which is perceived is an image or reality,

marking those two categories as essentially unable to be experienced simultaneously.

While this allegory is perhaps one of the most famous and well known texts of

Western philosophy, I would like to suggest that perhaps it lacks an understanding that,

when taken account of, suggests a very different reading of the epistemological situation of

those prisoners. The root of the issue is in one question: Why is it that the tactile bodies of

the prisoners are ignored? That is, while Plato is clear to have Socrates explicitly inform

Glaucon that their heads of the prisoners are fettered so that they “compelled to hold their

heads unmoved through life,” and deprived of voluntary sight, what precaution –

discounting the possibility of as-yet-undiscovered Hellenistic prowess with neuroscience

and spinal cord surgery – could have possibly been taken so as to remove their capacity to

touch and sense being touched? To feel the tensing of muscles and the internal motion of

organs? The entirety of the allegory is set up upon the ground of an assumption that the

sense of sight is privileged. In fact, it is given such a vaunted place that no consideration is

made for the flesh of the prisoners.

Consider the illustration provided on the previous page. Now imagine that while

heads are fettered as Socrates notes, there is the capacity to move slightly though not get

20 Ibid., 7.515c

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up. When the prisoners saw that their movements – which they could sense as participating

somehow with their own bodies – caused the shadow of their bodies to move on the cave

floor in front of them, then would there not be some association made between their

embodied experience and the wall shadows? Furthermore, consider if the allegory was

slightly changed and though they could not move from their spot and could only ever look

at the cave wall, they were able to move their bodies to

some small degree in their assigned space. There, might

by chance, some day one of the prisoners realize that a

movement of his hand – struck by the light of the fire he

cannot see – could resemble one of the cave wall forms?

That is, having stumbled upon shadow puppetry, would he

not then explore the world of the shadow? His shadow

puppet, as an avatar of the prisoner himself, might well

try and interact with the shadows on the cave wall, and while they would not likely interact,

it seems reasonable that the shadow puppets of the other prisoners might. Now two

prisoners, unable to move or speak or see anything but shadows can interact by proxy. And

while the communication taking place between fettered prisoners lacking speech by means

of the motion of shadow puppets is not normally what we equate with language, perhaps

the comparison is more readily approachable “if we rid our minds of the idea that our

language is the translation or cipher of an original text,” accepting that “the idea of

complete expression is nonsensical, and that all language is indirect or allusive – that is, if

you wish, silence. The relation of meaning to the spoken word can no longer be a point for

Illustration 2: Rabbit Shadow Puppet

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point correspondence that we always have clearly in mind.”21 The hands which cast the

shadows themselves are not the means of communication: looking at the hands used to cast

the shadow of the rabbit on the previous page, one cannot so clearly see that the shadow

will resemble a rabbit. It is only in the casting of the shadow that representation is enacted,

and yet without the hands – unclear as they may be – there is no connection at all. Things

can be said with the shadow of a prisoner's body that the body alone cannot say: it speaks

exclusively in the register of the indirect, having no other ingress.

The situation is now much the same as Plato had it previously: the prisoners are

separated and chained such that they cannot leave the cave, they are only able to see the

space in front of themselves and the cave wall, and they do not know of the fire and those

casting shadows from behind them. However, they each now are themselves puppeteers,

casting shadows – though still unable to speak or see one another. What is the epistemic

status of this second set of shadows? The prisoners are clear that they are the result of their

bodies, and since they are aware of the existence of their bodies it seems reasonable they

might assume that all the shadows seen are the result of other bodies, or at least other

objects; something Other. Is that not precisely the case? Even if their captivity deprives

them of the breadth of experience that their out-of-cave companions have, are they not

accurate? Merleau-Ponty's commentary on language and speech seems exactly appropriate

here, as in this revised allegory shadows can be seen to serve as speech.

Speech always comes into play against a background of speech; it is always

only a fold in the immense fabric of language. To understand it, we do not

have to consult some inner lexicon which gives us the pure thoughts

covered by the words or forms we are perceiving; we only have to lend

21 Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language,” 43.

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ourselves to its life, to its movements of differentiation and articulation, and

to its eloquent gestures. There is thus an opaqueness of language.22

The shadow puppeteer prisoners have no need of an “inner lexicon” of puppetry, nor

do they need the direct experience of the world above the cave to enact the movements of

their own bodies and to have those bodies cast shadows. When they “lend themselves” to

the shadows they come to grasp aspects of that which was closed before. Thus, by virtue of

their embodiment and the imaginative creation of shadows which they had not seen before,

the prisoners come to know something which is beyond that which they had known. By

producing a work of novelty, they were able to understand how it was that that which was

beyond that might be seen differently. Or, as Ricoeur notes, “imagination is not at all an

alternative to perception but an ingredient of perception. It’s encapsulated within the

framework of perception.”23 By using their bodies – and the awareness of their bodies – to

explore the possibility of new types of shadow eikasia, they have confirmed that "the body

is essentially an expressive space"24 which can open into new understandings of being.

Indeed, with this revised cave allegory it is perhaps easier to see how a certain kind of

“manifestation of truth,” and a “ disclosure of new reality” might be glimpsed within the

fiction of the cave.

The body, then, is extremely elusive. It acts like an object, affected by the doctor's

chemical remedies and observed by other people. It acts like a subject, observing the

world around it from a particular position. It acts like a magical combination of

objective and subjective elements, an interface of exchange between the experience

of sensing and of being sensed.25

22 Ibid., 42.


24 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 129.

25 Steeves,“Imagining Bodies,” 101.

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Merleau-Ponty's point is now cast with even greater clarity: the bodies of the

prisoners are a mystery to them for they cannot come to know them for their chains and it

is the case that it is only because they have flesh and feeling – and not just sight – that they

are able to understand anything at all with their subjectivity as the agent of action. Prior to

shadow puppetry the prisoners had no experience of active subjectivity beyond their

capacity to flex their muscles while remaining still. Everything seen before the puppetry

was the result of the others in the back of the cave. Having discovered shadow puppetry –

understood as a type of productive imagination – they were then able to act upon their

surroundings in such a way that to engender a “manifestation of truth” within the fiction of

the shadow figures. Indeed, it is particularly interesting that even the notion of

“manifestation” is etymologically tied to the body: the word comes to us in English via Old

French from the Latin manifestus , with a meaning of "proved by direct evidence" coming

from manus "hand" + -festus "struck." The manifestation of the truth that the shadows are a

consequence of bodies and that the cave wall shadows might be the consequence of other

bodies emerges from the “direct evidence” of the feeling of the prisoners' own flesh and

will, of their hands being struck by light and casting shadows that they can voluntarily

manipulate. That being said, it is not as if the prisoners have arrived at some kind of fixed

and essential subjectivity: their sense of self is highly contingent.

The prisoners are able to enact their subjectivity only via silence and shadows,

interacting with each other in the mime of light on hands that have never been seen. And

yet given their sense of the voluntary bodily motion which produces their hands' shadows

and the interaction of the other prisoners' shadows, is it not the case that some meaning is

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being produced and conveyed even if not of the systematic and linguistic sort? Are they not

experiencing something indirectly? That is, the situation seems to exemplify the fact that

“things present themselves not by their roots, but by some point or other situated toward

the middle,”26 an understanding that there is a “middle,” a medium, an in-between-ness

necessary to understanding everything. Merleau-Ponty's commentary on language is again

appropriate here:

One must give up trying to establish the moment at which Latin becomes French.

Grammatical forms begin to be efficacious and outlined in a language before being

systematically employed. A language sometimes remains a long time pregnant with

transformations which are to come...27

A precursor to formal communication resides in the shadow of the prisoner, which is to say

that the precursor to communication is dependent on the body; dependent upon, but not

wholly arising from. That is, the body functions as the means of expression and

interpretation not merely the seat of consciousness in which the Subject comes to

understand the world. Communication and meaning could not come to be only through one

prisoner: it is necessary that a second also come to an awareness of the body and of the

shadows it can cast. It may, in fact, be more accurate to say that it is not just that “a body” is

the medium of meaning, but that embodiment itself is the medium, that the fact of subjects

having bodies is essential to communication.

Is it accurate to refer to shadow puppet meaning-making in the Cave as language or

communication? Perhaps not fully, however it may well be a situation “pregnant” with the

nascent possibility of systematization and linguistic development. A situation grounded in

26 As cited in Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible, xxvi.

27 Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language,” 41.

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the experience of voluntary motion of bodies expressing and image-ing shadows of a world

never seen. In his extensive treatment of Merleau-Ponty and the body, James Steeves

concisely articulates the qualities of the imagination in consideration here.

The imagination expresses and reflects the poetic power of flesh when it is engaged

in aesthetic production, carrying forward a potency and productivity that has

already begun... All other instances of the imagination, be they fanciful thinking or

perception, are modes of this productivity of flesh.28

Without the body understood to be the means of “carrying forward” – and receiving –

expression and aesthetic production, it would indeed appear that any shadows seen would

be deceptions and forgeries; that all imagination is lesser than “true perception.” When we

limit our understanding of interpretation and hermeneutics to be confined to the visual and

mental alone we greatly lessen the capacity to conceive of the productive imaginary.

Conversely, when we understand the body to be a medium, to be the in-between (metaxu) of

self and other, we realize with Ricoeur, that “far from being a mere escape from reality or a

source of illusion and falsehood, the imagination... permeate[s] our existence and [is] an

essential medium for the discovery and expression of meaning.”29

Conclusion

At least two issues are at stake in this exploration. First, that there is a linkage between (a)

understanding the body as an expressive and receptive medium of meaning and (b) the

possibility of conceiving of the imaginary as productive. Second, following from the first,

that if the productive imaginary is capable of a “ disclosure of new reality,” then that

28 Steeves, “Imagining Bodies,” 209.

29 Ibid., 176.

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disclosure too is mediated by the body: how we imagine the possible and as-yet-unknown

future – for better or for worse – is foundationally bound up with the experience of being

bodied and of that body as being in need of interpretation and account.

More broadly, the argument above suggests implications for Ricoeur's concept of

productive imaginary that he does not make explicit. Namely, that even though the

imagination is capable of generating newness of vision and meaning that extends even to

the level of ontology, its novelty extends from – and is possible to be received because of –

the body. Imagination begins with the body and and moves through it, adding possibility to

it. It does not endlessly spin its wheels based on nothing: the body is both the ground of

meaning and the means of carrying it forth and receiving it back.

Keefe-Perry 15

Bibliography

Derrida, Jacques. “The Double Session,” In Dissemination. Barbara Johnson (trans.)

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

_____. “Différance." In Speech and Phenomena and other essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs.

David B. Allison (trans). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

Kearney, Richard. The Wake of Imagination.

New York: Routledge, 1988.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.” In Signs.

Richard McCleary (trans.). Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

_____. Phenomenology of Perception. Colin Smith (trans.).

Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.

_____. The Visible and the Invisible.

Evanston, IL: Northwestern, 1968.

Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes. Paul Shorey (trans.)

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/

Ricoeur, Paul. Freedom and Nature.

Evanston, IL: Northwestern, 1966.

_____. Oneself as Another. Kathleen Blarney (trans).

Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992.

_____. “Lectures on Imagination.”

As transcribed in George H. Taylor's “Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Imagination.”

Steeves, James B., "Imagining bodies with Merleau-Ponty"

Dissertation. McMaster, 2000.

Taylor, George H. “Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Imagination.”

Journal of French Philosophy. 16.1 (2006): 93-104.

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