origin”so as“to orient, balance, and organize the structure.”^51 Perhaps such
orienting efforts cannot be quite wholly foregone. But they cannot, Derrida
argues, be completed either, and the canny critic can decipher their fractures
and self-contradictions: no text is a completely unified and univocal whole.
Such canny reading might help us to cease to dream quitesoheavy-handedly
and tactlessly“of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and end
of the game”^52 and thus help us at least to be more open-minded. After all, as
Walter Benjamin worried, might not the pursuit of a fully formed, final,
original vision of humanity and social life, involving“genius and creativity,
eternal value and mystery”lead us to“the processing of data in the Fascist
sense”?^53 If one is magically in possession of the correct vision of humanity
and social life, then anyone who disagrees with it must simply be in error and
hence properly subject to some form of discipline, correction, or removal.
Perhaps we would do better to eschew the pursuit of the coherently visionary
and to embrace“works”that are clearly fragmentary, uncontrolled, incom-
plete and open-ended.
Not only, however, has it been argued that the putatively original produc-
tions of artists are both structured by sectarian linguistic and social codes
and interests and less than fully formed and coherent, it has also been argued
that the very idea of a creative artist is a modern invention. Prior to the
Renaissance, it has been claimed, the artist was regarded largely as a crafts-
man, principally serving the interests of the aristocracy or the Church
according to rules. It is only when, first, in the Renaissance, individuality
began to be valued and cultivated, and, second, in the eighteenth century,
painters, writers, and musicians lost court patronage and had to earn livings
through sales, that the modern idea of the creative artist emerged. To suit
this new social situation, the idea arose–urged by writers such as Words-
worth and theorists such as Kant–that artists and authors have been
specially touched by inspiration or genius. This claim served conveniently
(^51) Jacques Derrida,“Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,”in
The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard
Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972),
pp. 247–65 at p. 247.
(^52) Ibid., p. 265.
(^53) Walter Benjamin,“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”in
W. Benjamin,Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, & World, 1968), cited in Gould,“Genius,”p. 291A.
Originality and imagination 129