The thing about fancy, son, is that it is a necessary and important part of our makeup. And as coincidence would have it, I’m reading Zizek’s Plague of Fantasies which (once again: coincidentally (in the first few pages I have read has pointed out that fantasy is not so much a compensation for something we desire and cannot get as a mechanism for figuring out what it is we desire. In fact, no one who has achieved anything has done so without fancy. I mean its kind hard imagine how anything could start anywhere else but a daydream.
But I should first explain to you what I mean by fancy in relationship to imagination. I’m mainly working from the distinction between fancy and imagination made by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in an essay brought to my attention in a creative writing class –one that is increasingly showing significance in my philosophical process. Fancy is more primal and base of the brain, which why it gives so much pleasure. It’s what the mind does when we let it do what it naturally does. Therefore, it would naturally follow that what lies behind it are our natural drives and desires. Imagination is a little more cognitive (and therefore a little more uncomfortable (in that it is a matter of playing our fancies against the reality of things and including our findings. Unlike fancy, imagination takes a little work. We can see a correlation here with something else Coleridge said:
“It’s alright to build castles in the sky. The idea is to build foundations under them.”
However, too often, fancy that fails to make the leap to imagination can all too often end up being dangerous and destructive. To give you a personal example: I am what I am because of a lot of daydreaming (fancy. And I have spent a large part of my life building foundations under those castles in the sky. The thing is that that propensity for fancy is always there and tends to get accelerated when I’m drinking. This combination of fancy and alcohol has been the source of every embarrassing moment I have had on these boards. I, of course, always start out with imagination which results in the daily rhizome. But once I get to certain point, fancy (my primal impulses and desires (seems to take over. And that is a big part of the pleasure we get from alcohol.
And as I go into Zizek’s Plague of Fantasies for the 100th time (excuse the hyperbole: the fancy (I realize that this week will give me an opportunity to further explore the social, political, and philosophical implications of failing to make that leap from fancy to imagination. If you really look at it, son, it is fancy that our system, via media, tends to exploit to keep us passively accepting our exploitation through producer/consumer Capitalism: American Idol, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, name your poison. If there is anything that Capitalism sells best, it is possibility: fancy. Those hipsters and geeks quoting Nietzsche are not Nietzsche’s fault –anymore than NAZI Germany was. They’re the result of a one-sided embrace of the fanciful aspect of Nietzsche much as NAZI Germany was.