Quanta and Qualia in the Semiotic Theory of Culture

Much of the contemporary phenomenological reflection on the concept of imaginaire (the imaginary) stems from Sartre’s characterization of it as occasion for transcendence, wherein human beings can elude the yoke of reality and fully express their imaginative freedom. However, semiotics seems to be inspired by an opposite stand: the imaginary is not a place for the free exercise of human imagination, but a semio-linguistic dimension that provides a pre-arranged matrix of imaginative possibilities. As langue cannot be transcended in the constitution of parole (in Saussure’s prototypical envisagement of the dialectic between potentiality and actualization), imagination cannot elude the imaginary as reservoir of imaginative potential. Therefore, according to semiotics, imagination is mostly a combinatorial exercise, in which creation is not to be construed as romantically free, but as an essentially combinatorial practice. Nevertheless, the article contends, such a logo-centric, lego-centric (from the name of the famous brand of toy bricks), and intrinsically quantitative conception of the imaginaire (that is, based on cultural quanta) is not the only possible one; semiotics, too, owes much of its theoretical and epistemological imagination to its socio-historical context, and hence another notion of the imaginaire – icono-centric, uncanny, and qualitative (that is, based on cultural qualia) – is also possible. Such an alternative notion, the article argues, is particularly instrumental in countering the progressive quantification of human culture, as it can be witnessed in numerous present-day phenomena, including the article’s case study: the transformation of the TV imaginary into an aquarium of quanta.