From the creativity of collective imagination to the crisis of postmodern fantasy

The Collective Imagination is a fascinating and kaleidoscopic work. It constitutes one of the most illuminating and comprehensive explorations of that mysterious and elusive dimension of human experience: acts of creation. Peter Murphy discloses the enormous degree to which human experience is bound to the collective imagination and explicates significant vicissitudes in the social-historical realization of creativity. The contemporary moment represents a peculiar instance of the latter. Murphy persuasively argues that there is a considerable disjuncture between the interpretations of contemporary institutions and social structures as distinguished by their high levels of creativity and the evidence of a waning in creative achievements during recent decades. In Murphy’s opinion, the enquiry into the collective imagination shows that history is ironic, but this current disjuncture partly derives from a confusing of imagination with the more infantile features of fantasy. In somewhat brutal terms, Murphy associates current fantasies with the prevalence of kitsch. The immediately accessible and singular meaning of kitsch is precisely contrary to the imagination’s genesis of double meanings and its expression in forms that have the power to gradually reveal layers of significance.

Societies and not just individuals, Murphy contends, have imagination. Murphy’s explication of the imagination’s media provides an intricate interpretation of why certain societies and historical periods are more creative than others. The Collective Imagination is a tour-de-force. It is replete with unexpected insights and arguments that dismantle the prevailing dissembling. Its more contentious features can be traced to its qualifying some common assumptions about social progress. Those identifying with current progressive opinion will no doubt find Murphy’s confidence in the values of civilization, as well as his assessment of the abnegation of these values, quite provocative. The Collective Imagination’s reassessment of social progress ensues not only from Murphy’s delineation of the limits of reason, but also from how his conception of the imagination diverges from other interpretations. Murphy does not foreground some of the social agencies that have typically been presented as either creative or committed to the value of creativity, like new social movements and the late-modern culture of self-actualization. At the same time, The Collective Imagination converges in several important respects with other interpretations of the relationship between imagination and creativity. Indeed, Murphy’s explication of these aspects of the imagination is probably unequalled in its clarity and conviction. There is something like a more vivid and intense experience of the world that radiates from this text. It has affinities with the aesthetic that, according to Murphy, Winston Churchill communicated to the British people during the darkness of the Second World War.

What he evoked instead was the joyous serenity of a benignant world framed by broad horizons dotted with uplands and highroads, and bathed in sunlight. This is a world where the land is bright and a steady light glows. (Murphy 2012: 30)

Murphy argues that Churchill made many promises to the British people during this period but that none of them were ideological. What Churchill ‘knew instinctively’ was ‘that human beings reconcile the irreconcilable aesthetically’ (Murphy 2012: 30). Social creation may give rise to innovation and transformation but, in Murphy’s opinion, it is misleading to consider that imaginative creations are inevitably a radical rupture and ahead of time. Murphy believes that it is important to comprehend the temporal dimension of creation and he shows how it is a significant element of the imagination’s various media, specifically those of wit, metaphor and paradox. However, he argues that diverse conceptions of creativity have emphasized the temporality of creation in ways that have obscured the imagination’s major and distinguishing properties. In Murphy’s opinion, the imagination is creative because it is synthetic. The imagination has the capacity to find similarities in things that are taken to be different. It is the imagination that enables associations between things to be created and for things and experience to be invested with additional meanings. According to Murphy (2012: 8): ‘To take one thing for another is the major part of creation. It is what happens in all acts of creation.’ The symbolic construction of meaning has its root in this capacity of the imagination, although social communication also requires distinct and definite signs and referents. Murphy follows Cornelius Castoriadis (1997) in proposing that the connection that is established between sign and referent is the work of the imagination or the social imaginary.

The Collective Imagination extensively explores the implications that the imagination’s power of synthesis holds for reason. Reason and imagination are different, although they are not always in competition. Murphy traces how imagination and reason can complement one another and constructively reinforce each other, such as through reason elaborating the implications of an original intuition. Nevertheless, Murphy considers that imaginative ‘thinking is appositional. It unites opposing qualities into distinctive, socially-powerful and coherent patterns, shapes and forms’ (Murphy 2012: 1–2). Reason, by contrast, is analytical. Reason tends to work by separating and dividing. It assesses and measures, but it does not hold things together in the manner of the imagination. ‘The pathos of reason is that it cannot move in interesting ways without being set in motion by acts of imagination’ (Murphy 2012: 17). Murphy considers that creative societies are ‘good at stimulating appositional thinking’. It is one of the reasons why they are rare and why creative periods tend not to endure, because these societies’ collective imagination is open to contradictions and oppositions – they transform antonyms into appositions. At the level of cognition, the imagination’s appositional thinking works in quite different ways to those of the reasoning involved in the analytical processing of information and the discursive elaboration of explanation. The imagination that shapes intellectual discovery is based ‘neither in analytic distinction nor systematic elaboration. Rather it relies on intuition and analogy’ (Murphy 2012: 2).

What the imagination does is anything but straightforward. This is one of the reasons why Murphy has to sometimes strain language in order to elucidate the imagination’s characteristics, but his evident joy of word-play serves him well in this regard. Murphy converges with Castoriadis (1997) in proposing that the imagination is able to see in something that which it is not. It does something that the basic logic of identity and contradiction deny is possible. That is, the imagination is able to perceive in ‘A’ that which is ‘not-A’, but also to see ‘A’ in terms of that which is ‘not-A’. The metaphor of perception stands in here for different modes of imaginatively dealing with things, so that it is the imagination that enables us to present something and to ‘re-present’ it in another way.

Murphy beautifully illustrates this distinctive capacity of the imagination in discussing the famous verse: ‘The hills are alive with the sound of music.’ It is not just the fact that the imagination combines things that makes it creative, but that what it creates works, so to speak, at another level of reality. This is what has typically been described as emergence, that is, the imagination generates something that goes beyond the given by working with the given. Murphy argues that the imagination’s media of wit, metaphor and paradox display this power of generating a new unity between things that are otherwise taken to be different and disconnected. It is worth reiterating that: ‘What makes this possible is the fact that whenever we look at something, whether it is an event, a deed, or an object, we see it and “we see it other than it is”’ (Murphy 2012: 13).

In Murphy’s opinion, this feature of the imagination has profound implications. It means that everything is always double coded, because everything is as it appears and is also something other than what it appears. The same thing or experience, such as a shoe or a walk on the beach, has another layer of symbolic significance and it always refers to it. Double coding enables more complex social forms and institutions, like friendship, music, religion and philosophy. Yet it is difficult to adequately capture the unity of things that are different. The imagination unites what reason analytically separates, such as near and far, beginning and end. The imagination does not juxtapose these things as opposites, rather it brings these things together without making them the same – such imaginative creations are those of Aristotle’s idea of the ‘unmoved mover’ or Einstein’s compound: ‘space-time’. Castoriadis had likewise drawn attention to this separation and union, but, to fully appreciate the peculiar ‘super-positioning or consubstantiation’ of creation, Murphy coins the word ‘sepion’. Sepion ‘is a compound of separation and union. All systems, all arrangements, are set in motion by a sepion’ (Murphy 2012: 16). Indeed, Murphy goes so far as to describe sepion as ‘creation itself’ (Murphy 2012: 16).

The nucleus of civilized ways of living resides in the imagination’s double coding. Murphy attributes the creation of distinctive forms, whether they are aesthetic, spatial or technological, to the imagination’s ability to perceive something in terms of something else. It should be clear that Murphy’s explication of the imagination intersects in many respects with that of Castoriadis. However, there are several explicit disagreements over the nature of creation and the implications of the collective imagination or social imaginary. Murphy considers that the origination of new forms, perspectives, social arrangements and technologies is an important feature of the imagination. According to him, the imagination can see around temporal and spatial ‘corners’ and he suggests that while anticipation and memory are not imagination, they are complicit with it (Murphy 2012). Despite this overlap, Murphy argues strongly against Castoriadis’s conception of the social imaginary’s ex nihilo creation and Castoriadis’s later claim that creation out of nothing leans on pre-existing being (Murphy 2012: 16, 77). Murphy advances several objections, and he seems to imply that Castoriadis’s conception derives from a somewhat misplaced radicalism. Murphy suggests that modern physics’ vision of the universe exhibits the doubling that is typical of the imagination, such as in claiming that every beginning is an end and every end is a beginning. The implication of modern physics’ vision is that it shows that every ‘nothing is something’ in ‘the same sense that “I am a question” for myself’ (Murphy 2012: 77). In other words, nothingness is not void, or empty space is still space. Similarly, Murphy contends that it is wrong to draw a rigid and absolute contrast between creation and preceding forms. In his opinion, in ‘every act of creation is an imitation, and in every imitation is an act of creation’ (Murphy 2012: 76).

Even though Castoriadis believed that the creative power of the imagination is involved in all acts of social reproduction, he would have been reluctant to depict the relationship of creation and imitation in quite this way. On my reading, Castoriadis considered that creation was limited by the dominance of instituted society over instituting society and that imitation either consolidated the former or was an artefact of heteronomy. In any event, Castoriadis’s notion of creation retained an emphasis on the unprecedented and original character of forms; he emphasized the unconditioned and spontaneous quality of creation in order to avoid the assimilation of the imaginary to the categories of inherited logic and ontology. The latter, Castoriadis argued, misconstrues the imaginary, because its principle of determination denies the novelty or ‘radical alterity’ of creation. It does this by treating creation as derived from, or caused by, what already exists, and, as we have seen, the idea of a ‘multiplicity in unity’, to use Murphy’s phrase, runs counter to logical determination and classification. Social-historical creation, Castoriadis claimed, presupposes itself. I suspect that Murphy’s real disagreement with Castoriadis concerns their respective visions of history. Although it is never explicitly stated, it is possible to surmise from much of The Collective Imagination that Murphy is opposed to the radical modernist idea that originality and autonomy require a complete break with the past. This may not have been Castoriadis’s view but there are nonetheless traces of it in his elucidation of the imaginary. It is also relevant to the contrast Murphy draws between his position and that of Castoriadis on the destructive, as well as creative, power of the imagination:

Castoriadis suggested that the imagination is equally capable of the creation of immense horrors as it is of good and great works. That is a plausible idea. Yet, in the end, I think I disagree with it. (Murphy 2012: 23).

Murphy is undoubtedly right to suggest that tyranny typically displays an incredible lack of imagination and his claim that the qualities of the imagination are drawn on in opposing evil is equally compelling. The imagination’s double coding of meaning, as noted already, enables civilization, and creative societies are distinguished by their transforming antagonisms into appositions. In fact, Murphy suggests that what ‘makes the imagination imaginative is not the capacity to make the absent present, but rather the “syn-antonymic” act of taking one thing for its opposite’ (Murphy 2012: 28). It is this ability that makes the imagination more reasonable than reason. The imagination is able to see the other side and is even able to incorporate the contrary in itself. Murphy tends to suppose that the imagination’s distinctive civilizing and ironic standpoint prevents its complicity with evil. Evil requires that the imagination work against itself, although imagination shares with evil the quality of defying expectations. When the imagination shocks, Murphy argues, ‘it does so without violating the basic norms of human intercourse. The imagination is not irrational’ (Murphy 2012: 24).

In my opinion, this differentiation of the imagination from the human propensity for evil is more a normative position concerning what the imagination should be than a statement of fact. It is certainly one that I agree with and it is analytically important to avoid any simple elision of the imagination and evil, because the equating of them is generally used by oppressive social and political orders as a justification. At the same time, I would argue that Murphy’s claim depends on a certain selectivity regarding the properties of the imagination and their implications. It seems more probable that the imagination has been implicated in major instances of horrific violent destruction and that phenomena like genocide and dehumanization equally involve seeing something other than it actually is, such as in the use of metaphors of insects and vermin in the Rwandan genocide (Savage 2007), the ‘narcissism of minor differences’, to use Freud’s term, that manifested itself in the conflicts of the former Yugoslavia (Ignatieff 1999: 34–71; Freud 1991), and the influence on the Cambodian genocide of an alleged cultural norm of disproportionate retribution: ‘a head for an eye’ (Linton 2002).

The fact that these instances of mass destruction are certainly partial forms of the imagination compared to those Murphy elaborates does not mean that the imagination is incapable of mobilizing and legitimizing instances of evil and enduring forms of social oppression. In fact, the modern social-political utopias of fascism and Stalinism should be considered major instantiations of the collective imagination. The imagination was critical to their capacity to mobilize creativity for destructive, even self-destructive, ends. Murphy’s explication of the imagination could provide genuine new insights into the consolidation of these regimes and the means by which they enacted and justified evil, including those based in rational calculation. Indeed, the imagination would seem to be a prerequisite for pathological forms of attachment that are not only destructive of others but also of oneself. It may no doubt take the imagination to recognize these attachments and the possibility at the same time of their transformation, as Castoriadis would claim just as much as Murphy. Significantly, this ability to imagine a version of the self other than it is may provide additional support for the distinction that Murphy draws between imagination and fantasy, with the possibility that evil pertains more to the latter and fantasy’s ideological consolidation under certain circumstances. Even so, Murphy (2012: 21–5) explicitly considers that attributing imagination to Stalinism and fascism is a confusion that is typical of intellectuals. This confusion is due, in his opinion, to how the idea of transgression appeals to intellectuals and the lack of the wit on their part to draw the relevant distinctions.

Murphy’s disagreement with Castoriadis over the imagination’s capacity for both good and evil is related to a major debate that informs The Collective Imagination. In Murphy’s opinion, Thomas Hobbes certainly appreciated the significance of the media of the imagination, yet Hobbes’s political theory was shaped by a distrust of metaphor, wit, and paradox. According to Murphy, Hobbes depicted wit and paradox as ‘villains’ and he wanted reason to limit the imagination. In this regard, Hobbes is typical of the dominant strand of Western thought. Murphy considers that Hegel is something of an exception, insofar as Hegel attempted to provide a dialectical logic that could account for double meaning, the combination in a single entity of A and ‘not-A’, and he developed a notion that simultaneously encompassed historical preservation and cancellation: aufheben, or sublation. On Murphy’s analysis, if Hegel had truly appreciated the imagination then he might have written The Phenomenology of Comedy. Of course, this would have entailed qualifying the teleological vision of the history of reason and adopting an ironic stance in relation to the very enterprise of philosophy. Murphy considers that wit is one of the major media of the imagination and that wit makes fun of the excesses of reason and the obsessions of philosophy. Wit is typically sharp and deflating. It exhibits the synthetic and emergent character of imaginative creation:

Acts of creativity should not exist and yet they do exist. They are in principle impossible but wit overcomes this impossibility by the calculated and rational deployment of absurdities that are tacitly sensible. (Murphy 2012: 40)

Murphy’s discussion of comedy pays homage to one of his major sources of inspiration: Agnes Heller. Murphy endorses and expands on several of Heller’s claims about comedy (Heller 2005). First, Heller claims that comedy is born with reason and Murphy sketches how comedy is a kind of philosophical discourse continued by other means. Comedy is a commentary on reason and it ‘plays with logic’. Comedy, Murphy (2012: 37, 39) contends, ‘segues from one kind of rationality to another. It is a highly intellectual process that shifts a thought from one kind of logic to another in a snap’. Second, Heller argues that comedy flourishes when ‘the times are out of joint’ and Murphy develops the implications of this thesis in an analysis of the ‘great’ British radio and television comedy from the early 1950s to the late 1980s. A plethora of programmes addressed the changing values in society and alterations in the social order. Under these conditions, former certainties were being questioned and new norms were crystallizing. Murphy notes that the persistence of values and roles from the past was a topic of this comedy but it would be a mistake, in his opinion, to confuse this part of the humour with the whole. He argues that comedy really works with a sense of balance and proportion. Comedy ‘responds to change, yet it is a conservative response to change’ (Murphy 2012: 42). It is not reactionary or nostalgic; ‘comedy is a defender of society’s nature’ (Murphy 2012: 43). It parodies distortions, excesses and exaggerations with its own exaggerations, excesses and distortions.

British comedy in the decades after the Second World War responded to imbalances due to the preservation of norms that were no longer relevant and the temptation to excess ensuing from changes, often playing these off against one another. Murphy’s emphasis on proportion fits with Heller’s view that comedy is ‘played out in the world of finitude, the world of limits’ (Murphy 2012: 44). It is certainly true that pomposity and pretension are typical subjects of comedy. Murphy is undoubtedly right to reinforce Heller’s claim that comedy is an enemy of tyranny, fanaticism and cruelty. Still, a skeptic could ask whether comedy has the capacity for self-limitation and at what point does comedy’s upholding of limits and a society’s sense of balance shade into the type of humour that is based on stereotypes and prejudice. I think that Murphy would be right to claim in response that humour that is based on prejudice and stereotypes is without imagination and that it draws on other sources. In fact, Murphy considers that comedy ‘dislikes one sidedness’ and that it deploys the creative doubling that typifies the imagination, such as in comic pairs like Laurel and Hardy, and in the combining of antonymic elements in a single character, like the ‘Singing Detective’. This ‘marrying logic’ is how comedy can, as Heller claims, make sense out of nonsense (Murphy 2012: 48). Murphy’s thesis is that everything can be funny because everything is meaningful and double coded. It is humour that distinguishes humans from animals.

The analysis of comedy is consistent with Murphy’s repeated claim that the imagination is not without rationality. Indeed, the kind of rationality that is to be found in wit is relevant to scientific invention and the paradoxical unity of comic creations is articulated in other modes of doubling. Murphy highlights the creativity of dramaturgical societies, like the Elizabethan England of Shakespeare and, contrary to the puritanical interpretation, the United States of America, owing especially to its ‘fierce musicality’ and its appreciation of role-playing (Murphy 2012: 58).

These societies have promoted the performance of roles and embraced the paradox of the imaginative doubling of the self: ‘I am not what I am’. Dramaturgy involves indirect communication and the revealing of paradoxical truths, both in the case of theatre and the social performance. The public is part of the collective imagination. It is the ‘special luminous intensity’ of the small number of truly dramaturgical societies that distinguishes them from the generic theatricality that is found in all societies. Murphy points to how they play with paradox by the doubling back on an antonym: ‘What is the truth of a boy playing a girl playing a boy?’ and ‘a great humourist will not only criticize power but will also criticize those who criticize power’ (Murphy 2012: 59).

Murphy explicates the media of the imagination in relation to major historical forms of their instantiations, notably paradox in relation to Christianity and metaphor in relation to the formation of feudal order. Christianity is full of paradoxes, such as that of the virgin birth, the resurrection, and the idea of the holy trinity. These are certainly mysteries, but Murphy (2012: 69) suggests that these paradoxes ‘are contradictions that make sense’. There is a greater truth at stake in them than their actuality or veracity as events. Murphy argues that the appeal of Christianity did not primarily derive from the Golden Rule (of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you) as is often suggested, but rather from the extremely paradoxical demands that Christianity made upon its followers, especially in the context of Ancient Roman civilization and its secular divide between freedom and slavery. It was the paradox conveyed by the form of the Christian message to ‘love thy enemies’ and to ‘pray for those who persecute you’ that was important, rather than its content. It required embracing a paradox that would seem contrary to the normal order of things. Murphy argues that the notion of enslavement was central to the Christian theology and its reception, but that Christianity was not a liberation theology. The latter is, for Murphy, a Judaic vision. The meaning of Christianity was much more paradoxical; it offered a freedom from the law that was contrary to the Roman obsession with the law and Christianity’s own teaching of obedience to the law. The Christian God is indeed one that ‘frees the slaves who are already free’ (Murphy 2012: 72). This is another version of the imagination holding contraries together in another union.

It is the enigma of the Christian paradox that, according to Murphy, gives it its strong pull of attraction and it is one of the major reasons why it cannot be easily displaced. Murphy suggests that those ‘great societies’ that have had enormous impact on the history of civilization were founded on paradox (Murphy 2012: 68). Metaphor may seem the most intangible media of the collective imagination, yet Murphy reveals metaphor’s powerful material consequences in sketching the formation of the feudal order. The origins of feudal bondage lay in legal changes that were enacted in the rural regions of the Roman Empire and that were intended to reduce labour shortages. The end result was the eclipse of the city by the countryside. Murphy captures this shift in mentality in commenting that ‘land acquisition replaced manumission.… The core metaphor of existence changed’ (Murphy 2012: 74). The collective imagination’s peculiar double coding of things played a major part in the constitution of the feudal order and the medieval world. The institutions that developed were adaptations of Roman institutions and yet they were also something radically new. Metaphor’s ‘syn-antonymic structure of the imagination’ is evident in material forms. The medieval town, with its grand cathedral and market-square, represented a kind of double-coded union of this worldliness and other worldly divinity.

The medieval town’s combination of the urban and the rural remains attractive to the modern mind. Murphy, however, does not develop an expansive survey of the Romantic movement’s relating of the creative imagination to nature and community. This may be simply due to Murphy having extensively dealt with Romanticism in other contexts (Murphy and Roberts 2004). Yet the specificity of Murphy’s conception of creativity and its implications can be partly delineated through their contrast with aspects of Romanticism. Murphy’s account of the media of imagination, wit, paradox, and metaphor constitutes an alternative to Romanticism’s expressivist interpretation of creation as the externalization of subjectivity in objective forms (see Taylor 1989). By no means does Murphy deny the significance of objectivation to humanity; rather his explication of the appositional character of the imagination’s media reinterprets this capacity and qualifies subjectivity. Whilst Murphy agrees with Romanticism about the inspirational quality of creation, his interpretation is more complex and critical than those attributing creation to ecstatic visions and possessed subjectivity. Murphy, I suspect, dislikes the potential self-indulgence of these attributions and considers that they are no substitute for creative achievement.

Similarly, The Collective Imagination does not engage with Castoriadis’s (1997) idea of the radical imagination of the unconscious psyche and other interpretations of creativity that have been inspired by psychoanalysis. Murphy is adamant that: ‘Imagination is not desire or fantasy or wish-fulfilment’ (Murphy 2012: 114). The imagination is grounded in reality and there is, in his opinion, a ‘simple’ difference between imagination and fantasy. Unlike fantasy, imagination is ambidextrous and it recognizes the double-sided nature of things, it simultaneously grasps desire and the costs of desire, or it apprehends that with success comes failure. Now, whilst these Romantic and post-Romantic ideas of creativity may not represent a cohesive standpoint (Joas 1996), they did nevertheless have a substantial impact, such as through influencing the social and political movements of the ’60s and their challenging of bureaucratic-capitalist rationality. It is quite common to trace contemporary forms of social creativity to these movements and to consider them to have heralded a significant cultural transformation. In a comment that anticipates his overall assessment of the contemporary period, Murphy counters this perspective with the remark that ‘in retrospect the 1968 revolt flooded the engine of creation rather than re-ignited it’ (Murphy 2012: 104).

The second half of The Collective Imagination explores the spheres of collective creation: art, economy, society and politics. For reasons that should be apparent from the review of the media of imagination, these spheres are not entirely discrete and developments in each of them are relevant to the others. Collective creation exemplifies the appositional complexion of the imagination and Murphy draws attention to prevailing interpretations that misunderstand creation in these domains. Murphy sets the contemporary context of these practices in a history of modernity. It seems that there is an implicit supposition of the diffusion and appropriation of innovations from the leading societies, but this thesis is balanced by an explicating of the particularities of regional development and by what might be described as a conception of kinds of appositional reversals. For example, social contexts of limited resources can develop in advance of regions that are endowed with greater resources, as in the case of the lesser natural resources of South Korea compared to North Korea, and, as will be discussed later, Texas moving from an agricultural and commodity economy to a leader in post-industrial sectors like information technologies and finance.

Murphy’s general diagnosis is that of a waning of the imagination in the domains of collective creation, although this should be understood as a product of two connected, but also separable and internally defined, temporalities. One is the general overall level of creation in modernity and the other is the more delimited recent wave of innovation which gave rise to a global age through technologies like computers, the internet, jet travel and air conditioning. The last was significant in facilitating the development of cities and industrialization in hot and tropical regions, like the southern states of the USA and East Asian nations. Murphy’s general periodizing of technological innovation and the phases of capitalist modernization are similar to those of established interpretations, but the focus on creativity results in important differences in emphasis and assessment. Murphy’s more contentious claims are those about kitsch’s predominance and the contemporary exhaustion of creativity in those fields of technological innovation that have recently become pervasive – for instance, the significant inventions in computing and air conditioning are now at least several decades old. Murphy uses the proportion of patent registrations as one of the measures of the current decline in creativity. In fact, he argues that there has been an overall downward trend in creativity over the last 140 years.

It is probably widely accepted that the end of the period of high modernism resulted in a diminishing in artistic creation. Yet this may be viewed as countered by developments in reception and appreciation, the democratizing of aesthetic experience, and the valuing of cultural diversity. Murphy rather argues that the development of ‘museum culture’ during the 20th century instances the triumph of postmodern insignificance. Museum culture is contrary to the exceptional character of creativity. In Murphy’s opinion, there are simply not enough great works to fill the expanding museums. He highlights two major problems of postmodern museum culture: the confusion of ‘trivia with significance and trauma with culture’ (Murphy 2012: 104). Museums generally lack the aesthetic dimension that is needed for people to meaningfully connect with the trauma that is being displayed. Instead, the tendency is for museums to fall back on kitsch and sentimentality. Spectacular blockbuster presentations have come to be recognized as empty and the alternative of story-telling is simply not adequate to the task of coming to terms with the traumatic experiences, an assessment that is effectively illustrated through a comparison of museums of atomic technologies in Japan and the USA.

Murphy is undoubtedly right to argue that contemporary museum culture is often narcissistic and that there is a typical recourse to ‘tear jerking’. At the same time, it is possible to agree with this analysis and to still highlight significant contrary cases. It could be argued that a museum like the Slave Lodge museum in Cape Town, South Africa, should be understood as the outcome of a struggle for recognition and that it represents an enlarging of moral horizons. It suggests a history of slavery in South Africa that can only be understood in terms of the capitalist world system and it contributes to historical learning processes. It may not be the most imaginative museum and more tears will probably be shed at the brilliant Barcelona football club museum, but it fills in elements of a trauma that is difficult to imagine. However, Cape Town’s Slave Lodge museum may be an exception that proves Murphy’s thesis, given the atypical experience of the dismantling of apartheid during the ‘postmodern period’ and the distance of the South African context from the predominant discourses of contemporary creative culture.

Murphy’s point is to highlight the contemporary distortion of the collective imagination and the disjuncture between artistic practices and what should be the proper relationship of art to the imagination. Art has potentially important connections to the imagination, because it permits the creative connecting together. Art ‘allows us to meld nature and society, genetics and culture, self and other, I and me, mine and thine into one thing’ (Murphy 2012: 108). It is unrealistic to expect that all art should be great; the contrary is the case. Even so, Murphy believes that the capacity to create classics has ‘gone missing’ and that the ‘kitschification of the world’ is symptomatic of broader tendencies, namely, the avoidance of difficult and uncomfortable realities.

He argues that the expansion of debt and ‘democratic incontinence’ are the corollary of the embracing of fantasy. Rather than fortitude and responsibility, postmodern kitsch supports the fantasy that ‘it is possible for a society to receive more in benefits than it raises in taxes’ and its sentimental point of view makes it susceptible to speculative promises (Murphy 2012: 118). This is one of the disastrous implications of the rhetoric of contemporary creativity having obscured the actual decline in creativity. According to Murphy, it is not just the economic cycle but fantasy that lay behind the increased US public indebtedness that occurred in the wake of the global financial crisis. Of course, this is a claim about US public debt that could be contested. Duménil and Lévy (2011) point to the collapse in private investment in the US economy in the immediate wake of the financial crisis. This makes it difficult to assess what the consequences may have been in the absence of increased state borrowing, although the probability of an even more dire recession would be high.

‘Capitalism’, Murphy (2012: 126) states, ‘is as much a function of culture as it is of commerce.’ The collective imagination has been the major driver of capitalist growth. It is not surprising then that Murphy considers that the work of Joseph Schumpeter is a significant alternative to the economic philosophies that prevailed in Western democracies during the last decades: Keynesianism and neoliberalism. Schumpeter appreciated the power of imagination and he sought to comprehend the historical sources of the ability to create and innovate. By contrast, Keynesianism and neoliberalism are each ‘indifferent’ to the deeper cultural and historical causes of economic and social prosperity (Murphy 2012: 127). These economic frameworks are ‘enthralled by the temporal horizon of public policy’, whereas Schumpeter took a longer view of economic dynamics and development. He concluded that capitalist growth is primarily neither a product of market competition nor public policy expenditure, rather it is due to the ‘forces of innovation that create new industrial sectors’ (Murphy 2012: 128).

Murphy underlines the distinction Schumpeter drew between invention and innovation, since it is innovation that distinguishes the creative entrepreneur. Invention pertains primarily to knowledge of the arts and sciences. It occupies a distinct place in the division of labour and it aims ‘to find or create new possibilities’ or things. This was not the role of the entrepreneur, in Schumpeter’s view. The role of the entrepreneur was to ‘lead others to accept or adopt’ new things and possibilities (Murphy 2012: 133). Murphy brings out the basis of innovation in appositional thought and explains how this is salient to Schumpeter’s view of himself as a conservative. Schumpeter believed that ‘innovation was more difficult to achieve than invention’, because innovation opposes itself to habit. Habit is a product of previous problem-solving and habit is deeply set, since its demonstrated effectiveness reduces complexity and produces efficiency. The entrepreneur ‘has to wear down habit’:

Ironically it requires a conservative instinct to explain innovation. What matters in acts of creation is not so much what is new, which often is uninteresting, but rather the surprising takes on what is old. That in a nutshell is the problem of creative economies. They exist, but what drives them is difficult to identify, let alone to subject to public policy prescriptions. (Murphy 2012: 137)

The knowledge economy, the information age, the post-industrial society – these are all terms that have been employed to capture the transformation of advanced societies during the last decades of the 20th century. Murphy does not dispute the empirical trends these theoretical categories reference, although he regards them as imperfect conceptions. They misunderstand the nature of creativity and rely on a sense of historical discontinuity and temporal progress. In Murphy’s opinion, creation ‘connects the unconnected. This process is much closer in nature to poetic analogy than it is to social progress’ (Murphy 2012: 138). These sociological conceptions of contemporary modernity owe much to Schumpeter’s students and associates, who contended that information, knowledge and technology are actually metaphors of creation. Murphy, rather, considers that Schumpeter ‘exceeded them’ in understanding creation ‘as an act of metaphor’; he recognized that the ‘application of ideas to production, or perhaps the new ways of conceiving goods, markets and organizations’, was a general historical tendency of capitalism and that there is historical continuity in the changing of the leading industrial sector and its dynamic (Murphy 2012: 138–9). Of particular significance to Murphy’s critique of these theoretical misconceptions of the contemporary creative society, Schumpeter appreciated the implications of the assimilation of what was once novel and innovative. It means that the phase of innovation gives way to marginal modifications of existing products and technologies.

Murphy demonstrates how this perspective illuminates capitalist creation through an analysis of the US economy during the 1980s, and this analysis explains why the present moment is towards the end of that cycle. The ’80s commenced with stagflation and the continuing decline in the US’s former core industrial manufacturing centres. It then saw the rise of the information and communication industries, which would continue to expand over the ’90s. The US economy followed the classic Schumpeterian pattern: recession, the emergence of entrepreneurial pioneers, super-profits, the incorporating of the new innovations into existing industries and the transformation of them, followed then by the decline in creative energy. There are evident parallels in this sequence with those of the preceding phases of capitalist development and Murphy’s analysis of this sequence is convincing and perspicacious. It is nevertheless probably open to the typical objections to Schumpeter’s views from those critics who prioritize the collective over the creative. First, the idea of entrepreneurial innovation may veil the cooperative character of social and economic creativity. Second, it can be argued that the overall economic situation is as much a matter of struggle, distribution and allocation (Castoriadis 2007: 63; Streeck 2011). Accordingly, these conflicts condition innovation and development. Murphy could, to be sure, respond that these criticisms usually reflect the standpoint of static equilibrium rather than Schumpeter’s interest in dynamic equilibrium and internally generated change. Yet the stagnation in the US’s basic wages and the redistribution of wealth to the top during this period are not prominent features of Murphy’s analysis. For similar reasons, not all will agree with Murphy’s claim that creative peaks have coincided with Republican presidencies. Indeed, it might be argued that innovation occurred in spite of the Republican programmes, not because of them. Yet this claim is not necessarily inconsistent with Murphy’s position. He argues that the conservatives enabled creativity by simply not interfering or dampening it down. Republican governance stimulated the appositional character of imagination and Murphy claims that Reagan’s presidency incorporated opposing views. The enemy of creativity is ideological inflexibility, because it blocks the ‘integrative complexity’ that characterizes imaginative thought (Murphy 2012: 144).

Murphy suggests that societies are like inquiries in the discipline of topology: they have to produce invariance and transformation at the same time. Modern societies have drawn their power through harnessing or mastering the media of paradox. Murphy shows how the modern collective imagination was formed through metaphor. The metaphor of self-movement, or automation, that would culminate in the automated society of the machine and industry found parallels and resonances with other notions that captivated the modern mind, like autonomy, self-organization, and self-determination. ‘The modern imagination seeded the aspiration for an autonomous society and the accompanying paradoxical impulse towards ordered liberty’ (Murphy 2012: 151). In fact, Murphy draws attention to how this intermeshing of metaphors exemplifies collective, as distinct from individual, imagining. Industrial modernity has been, he argues, through a number of waves. In light of innovation’s significance, waves are an apposite metaphor, because they follow a cycle of building, advancing, then slowing and retreating.

Murphy notes similar concepts for periodizing shorter and longer cyclical changes; he argues that there have been four main ages of modernity: the machine, empire, nation, and global. These ages combine predominant modes of organization and technology. In each age there are distinctive forms of creativity and limitations compared to the capacity of later ages. These limitations are not obvious at the time and it is the power of creativity that reveals preceding limits. Murphy argues that the current global age, which has been oriented to transmission and distribution, through mainly innovations in media and communication, has recently reached the end of its cycle. This decline is signified by events like the collapse of the dot.com boom and the global financial crisis. Like the other ages, it leaves behind a set of habits and an industrial legacy.

Although he acknowledges the limits of futurology and that we only really know an age retrospectively, Murphy surveys several future possibilities and suggests that ‘three-dimensional printing’ may define the next age. It looks like an extension of the media of the current global age, but it is actually an inversion of it. The technologies of the global age basically turned existing materials into digitalized and mediated forms. It served the purpose of distribution, whereas three-dimensional printing would mark a return to an emphasis on objectivation. Indeed, recalling the early Heller (1984), Murphy (2012: 158) remarks that the human species is happiest in objectivating. One central contention of The Collective Imagination is that creativity concentrates. It concentrates both spatially and in historical temporality.

Murphy discusses two significant forms of concentrating collective creation, and they are each relevant to his evaluation of the contemporary age. The first is the concentration of creativity in the city. Over the course of human history, cities have been major centres of creativity and cities are, perhaps, themselves humanity’s greatest creation. Specifically, Murphy explains how cities serve to mediate arts and sciences, enabling them to flourish and to be integrated into the other dimensions of collective creation. The second concentrating overlaps the first and is the clustering of research and technologies, such as in Silicon Valley or Boston, Massachusetts, as well as expanding to interconnected cities and mega-regions, like Chicago–St Paul–Minneapolis. These centres are regularly the sites of major research universities; however, because of the paradoxical character of creativity, it is the fact of concentrating that is most important. Scientific creativity is often counterintuitive; Murphy shows how scientific discoveries are often the outcome of seeking one thing and discovering something else, as was the case with the discovery of penicillin. It takes imagination to move from one thing to the other, but this means that it is also difficult to predict. This assessment of the dynamics of scientific discovery and creation partly informs Murphy’s view that the state can facilitate creation but that it is not itself an agent of creative innovation.

Given the many parallels, it would be almost impossible for Murphy to ignore the work of Richard Florida (2003) on the ‘creative class’ and the creative cities. Florida can be read as attempting to bring the creative class to self-consciousness and Murphy develops a judicious critique that punctures some of the self-serving myths of this group. What irritates Murphy most of all is the sanctimonious liberalism often associated with the creative class and the projections that are made about this alleged group. Murphy is right to criticize Florida’s categorization of creative work as too broad, and he is undoubtedly correct to claim that much of this portion of the division of labour is uncreative. Even in the case of occupations that can make a demonstrable claim to significant creations, like architecture, it is only a very small minority of practitioners that are creative in the proper sense of generating forms. Florida (2003) associates the expansion of the creative class in particular cities with those cities embodying the values of tolerance and openness. These values, Florida claims, tend to correspond with the creative class’s choices based on lifestyle, so that things like bicycle paths, a gay community and ethnic foods influence their locations.

Murphy argues that the equation of creativity with openness is potentially misleading and that Florida misrepresents the dynamics that drive these population movements. There are a variety of traits that are associated with creativity and the more appropriate sexual allusion is not so much that of openness as that of a hermaphrodite quality. ‘Creativity is not the tolerant coexistence of difference. Rather the act of creation is a melding of two unlike things into a single thing’ (Murphy 2012: 181). Murphy likewise pays particular attention to the movement of professionals that Florida recognized from Pittsburgh to Austin, Texas. Murphy concludes that this has less to do with the lifestyle indices Florida describes and more to do with prosaic factors like relative cost of living and the overall success of the Texan economy. Murphy argues that a comparison of California and Texas leads to conclusions that contradict the creative class thesis that ‘if a city attracts a critical mass of such social actors, represented by masses of bicycles, progress will be self-generating’ (Murphy 2012: 186). In Murphy’s opinion, the opposite is the case because the marriage in California of liberalism and the creative economy discourse meant that the tensions that fed the imagination declined and the public debt expanded. Texas is partly distinguished by is its smaller proportion of ‘low-wage high-qualification occupations like teaching, arts and entertainment’ (Murphy 2012: 190). Its fiscal prudence, according to Murphy, shielded it from the worst effects of the global recession and it is exceptional among US states in experiencing employment growth in the immediate aftermath of the crisis, yet it is not immune to the absence of a new wave of creation that could reverse the decline resulting from the end of the global age.

The Collective Imagination tends to focus on the US context, and this means that its narrative of declining creativity does not consider potential alternatives, like the creative democratic practices that José Maurício Domingues (2012) identifies in contemporary Latin America. Murphy poses the question: is Texas the future? It would be interesting to know, then, what implications the argument about the varieties of capitalism may hold for this analysis. In particular, the German economy contrasts in some important respects with that of the USA, and it remains a major exporter of advanced technologies. My intuition is that Murphy may consider that the German model of capitalism exhibits strengths in the areas of the earlier national and imperial ages of modernity, such as in engineering and chemicals. It is at the same time conditioned by the major European institution of the global age: the European Union. In any event, I think that this amounts to a significantly different case to the comparisons that are made with reference to US states. Similarly, the argument of Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) about how the incorporation of the ‘artistic critique’ of capitalism following the struggles of the ’60s and ’70s shaped the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ would appear an even more apposite point of comparison. It suggests that innovation is more closely connected to critique and conflict, but also that the deficiencies that Murphy illuminates in production and innovation still derive from the immanent conflicts of capitalism – specifically, that of the tensions ensuing from capitalism’s reliance on motivations and commitments that it is unable to generate of itself. In this sense, the discourse of creativity is not a distortion of the true character of capitalist innovation but rather a major and necessary source of its current ideological legitimations.

The Creative Imagination contains similar observations about the relation of the ‘creative class’ to politics as those that applied to cities. Murphy demonstrates that there is more alternating in the creative class’s political commitments than is sometimes presumed and that this refutes the idea that the new economy inevitably leads to Democrat majorities and Democrat presidencies. The success of the Clinton Democrat presidency, according to Murphy, reflected its appositional character and unifying of oppositions, whereas the relative lack of success of Democrats from the late ’60s until the Obama presidencies was a result of their being simply oppositional and the dissolution of the coalition of groups that previously supported them, especially the loss of conservative Southern Democrats after Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation in the ’60s. The Republican successes were precisely due to their capacity to form coalitions and to blend together traditional conservatives, economic liberals, religious fundamentalists, the military and former ‘Democrats’. According to Murphy, it was not so much that the post-civil rights Democrat coalition was unwieldy as that there were simply insufficient numbers of these people to produce majorities.

The post-modern era assumption that creativity equalled smartness equalled university credentials equalled voting for the political party that identifies itself with graduates was deeply flawed. There are many, too many, steps in this equation, and along the way it loses efficacy. (Murphy 2012: 225).

The second Obama electoral victory has led to arguments that social change has produced a new progressive ascendancy, but Murphy shows that it is a mistake to extrapolate long-term tendencies from single elections and that the creative class is much more equivocal in their value commitments. Murphy rather places Obama’s first presidency in the context of the triumph of kitsch and sentimentality.

This analysis of recent US politics exemplifies the more general concern with elucidating the creativity of political systems, based on the accommodating of appositional thinking. Where others have seen Madison’s idea of a federal republic as producing gridlock and inevitable resistance to substantial social reform, Murphy considers that its brilliance lies precisely in its forcing the forming of coalitions and its opposition to the tyranny of any particular interest. It represents a political structure that sought to turn opposition into apposition and it made a virtue out of incorporating the excluded middle. These require creativity and imagination. Of course, it may not have always succeeded in achieving these objectives, yet it points to how politics can involve enlarging one’s point of view by taking into account the views of others. For Murphy, political theorists, like Kant and Arendt, have misunderstood this ability as a matter of judgement; it is rather an artefact of imagination. This is an important and profound analysis of the US political system, yet it is possible to wonder whether this system is nevertheless substantially undermined by the social structure that is external to it and even by, as Murphy recognizes, the character of the party political divisions. It may be possible to retain this insight into the importance of imagination to the political institution and to nevertheless give greater emphasis to the dynamics of democratic participation. On my reading, this would seem to be the intention of Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner (2005) in developing a theory of synagonism, which could have interesting connections to Murphy’s understanding of creativity. Synagonism may constitute a way of developing Murphy’s insights into creative politics in a manner that is compatible with another kind of imagining of democracy.

In conclusion, The Collective Imagination is a book worthy of the independent and creative thinkers that Murphy admires. It defies neat pigeonholes and sets itself against some widely shared, though weakly grounded, notions about contemporary society. Murphy shows the historical importance of the collective imagination and illuminates the synthetic doubling that is performed by its media of wit, paradox and metaphor. In this regard, reason is limited compared to the imagination, although Murphy claims that the proper antithesis of reason is fantasy, rather than imagination. The Collective Imagination provides a penetrating and revelatory assessment of the triumph of fantasy, kitsch and sentimentality in contemporary post-industrial and postmodern societies. This triumph of fantasy and kitsch has produced a social order that uses the category of creativity to differentiate itself from the preceding social structure and its denial of reality has led to the accumulation of excessive debt. According to Murphy, the overall level of creative achievement has declined and the last wave of innovation, which is associated with information and communication technologies, is at the end of its cycle. The deeper point of this account is that of a loss of that sense of irony that the imagination displays and a loss of the moral compass that derives from it. I have tried to show how it is possible to agree with this diagnosis, whilst suggesting that it could be refined through comparing it with intersecting interpretations of contemporary capitalist societies and their dynamics. Even so, The Collective Imagination provides a substantial and timely refutation of some of the myths of contemporary capitalism, and it discloses the lack of perspective and real assessment that has enabled the fantasies of the postmodern creative society to take hold.

The Collective Imagination details the conservative disposition that connects imagination with reality and that gives imagination social efficacy. Murphy considers that the contemporary equation of creativity with progressive historical change misrepresents the main characteristics of the imagination. The imagination’s real historical significance, from the genesis of religions to scientific discoveries, derives from its poetic qualities. Despite the contentious character of some of Murphy’s historical exemplars and the connection that he draws between creativity and a conservative sensibility, Murphy’s analysis actually has quite radical implications for how we understand social change. The Collective Imagination shows how humanity can slide from one universe of meaning to another almost imperceptibly by having already associated one thing with another. I have argued that it is perhaps surprising that Murphy disputes Castoriadis’s claim that the social imaginary is capable of both creation and destruction, given Murphy’s very profound elucidation of the imagination’s social-historical implications.

However, it may be important to take into account The Collection Imagination’s subtitle of The Creative Spirit of Free Societies. It should be clear that many of Murphy’s arguments are directed against the current confusions over values and the tendencies to evoke the irrational powers of the imagination. These tendencies go back to Romanticism and they were subsequently extended by psychoanalytic conceptions; Murphy’s conception of the imagination opens up another perspective on creativity. I suspect that any future discussion of creativity that did not engage with The Collective Imagination would be deficient.