상상력의 열림과 닫힘

Abstract

Imagination generates and operates between sign and image, metaphor and metonymy, mimesis and fantasy, ideology and utopia. I examined these binary mental principles and aspects on which our imagination generates and operates. The imagination is opened by our desire and intentionality but oriented concretely and deeply by social-cultural-environmental contexts. That is to say, our imagination spreads on the basis of dream, desire, absence and path of death on the hand, and at the same time it become concrete with reality, pression, presence and path of living life on the other. The imagination is not only our mental floating energy but also our rationality; it is necessary to remove the ambiguities in the concept of imagination which we have discussed, in the large part, on its floating aspect. Firstly, a pair of images and signs. We can reach to our early years' unconscious with the images, mental or not, while, with the signs, we can drag down our imagination into the logic and reason for analysing the objects. Secondly, a pair of metaphor and metonymy. The metaphor is 'a metaphysical. desire for the originality'. As an exchanging activity between two existences, the metaphorical imagination becomes more active between the tenor and the vehicle when their relationship could be less assumed. But the metaphorical imagination comes always back to the originality or the identity of these two existences. The metonymical imagination is contradictory to the metaphor and destroys it in the end because the former moves down to materiality of existence while the latter moves up to the ideality. Hence, when the metaphorical imagination represents the reality in its extreme ideological aspect, the metonymy can destroy all of cultural representations and their social formations. Thirdly, a pair of mimesis and fantasy. The phantasm conducts us to a vacant pleasure without relation of our realities. The mimesis conducts us to a fixed contextual realities. But the phantasm and mimesis operate each other in the perpetual interaction which the realities move down to our contextual conscious and move up to our free imagination. Thus, the textual meaning reveals constantly; the text becomes closed for reading by the mimesis and opened for interpreting by the phantasm. The reality, the politic and the historicity overcome their limits in this interaction. We recognize that the ideology extends our imagination on the time and space and gives us some new perspectives and epistemological mind. But it is also necessary to recognize that it excludes, by repressing our imagination, our stable perspectives on the world and epistemological mind which we have established. The utopia, built by our imagination, penetrate into the ideological formation of dominating power and renewals our mind, especially our ideality on the world. Of course, when the negativity of the utopia is burnt down and becomes an another type of ideology, the utopia repress our imagination again. This is the place where a power struggle for the hegemony is under way between the dominating power and the utopia, their own discourses and interpretations. We knew already that the readers spread their imaginations according to this hegemony but most of all are under the dominating one. Without images and imagination, we cannot reach to the unconscious dimension which leads us to overcome our own rationality and to think about the originality of being while we can neither solve our humane problems, nor criticize these corrupted and degenerated socities without our thought and self-refletion based on the rationality.