МАШТА: ЕСТЕТСКА ИЛИ ПОЛИТИЧКА ДИМЕНЗИЈА УМЕТНОСТИ (ОД ВИЛИЈАМА БЛЕЈКА ДО АНРИЈА ЖИРУА И МАКСА ХЕЈВЕНА)
Imagination: the aesthetic or political dimension of art (from William Blake to Henry Giroux and Max Haiven)

Summary/Abstract: The essay traces the use of the term imagination as the guiding power of social change, from the works of William Blake and the Romantics, to the use of the term “radical imagination” in the studies of Henry Giroux and Max Haiven. Imagination, these authors insist, is the innate human power which can “cleanse the doors of perception” from various types of destructive social myths and liberate mankind into true cognition of reality. In that sense imagination can spark social revolutions. As Meyer Howard Abrams emphasized, it was Blake who “rehabilitate[d] the term „Imagination” to signify not a sick fantasy, but the faculty of vision and eternal truth”. According to Blake, imagination is the defining mental power of mankind, which makes it possible for man to transcend imposed social boundaries and see beyond the unjust social order the more equitable and more humane possible world. Such visions are not escapes from the ‘given’ reality, but its challenge, a will to change man’s oppressed state in the world, by liberating his creative potentials, blocked by forced submission to false authority. In the book The Aesthetic Dimension, Herbert Marcuse writes on the various dimensions of art and establishes the connection between its aesthetic and political dimension. In the connection, he claims, lies art’s power to change human consciousness, and consequently the human world as well. Marcuse’s book provides the theoretical frame for this essay. Just as Marcuse “seeks to contribute to Marxist aesthetics through questioning its predominant orthodoxy”, this essay expends Marcuse’s ideas on the role of imagination and art in social revolutions. As a university teacher, Marcuse deals with pedagogy and didacticism in Die Zeitmessungen (the measure of our time), where he explicitly discusses them. However, in The Aesthetic Dimension he does not mention the didactic dimension of imagination and art, which Giroux and Haiven claim is crucial. Giroux and Haiven believe that the most important function of education is the development of radical imagination. In their own pedagogical work they strive to do so, in order to enable the students “to read the world differently” and to “summon up the courage to imagine the different and more just world and to struggle for it”.

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