https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelius_Castoriadis
In an interview in 1991, Castoriadis reflected on the “incessant flux” of the imagination thus:
I am not fixated on the “scopic”; one of the gross inadequacies of Lacan’s conception of the imagination is his fixation of the scopic. For me, if one is speaking of stages that are worked out, the imagination par excellence is the imagination of the musical composer (which is what I wanted to be). Suddenly, figures surge forth which are not in the least visual. They are essentially auditory and kinetic – for there is also rhythm. There is a marvellous excerpt from a letter of Mozart cited by Brigitte Massin, in which Mozart describes how he composes.
Like every self-respecting composer, he composes, obviously, in his head. When deaf, Beethoven heard – imagined – in his head. A true composer writes and hears chords, chordal progressions, as I, in closing my eyes, can review some scene or imagine some scene, bringing into mutual presence characters who have never really been present to each other.
Mozart explains that the piece composes itself in his head, and he says the following hallucinatory thing: when the piece is finished, it is all laid out simultaneously before him in its progression.
He hears in one moment the beginning, the middle, the end of the first movement of the sonata. As Galileo says of God, the proofs we arduously traverse step by step are laid out before Him instantaneously. That is an imagination. When Mozart says, I have the entire piece laid out in my head, it is not that he sees the score, it is that he hears the totality of the piece. That appears incomprehensible to us because our musical imagination is rather poor: to be able to hear simultaneously the beginning of the symphony in G minor and the minuet.
Nor is there anything “visual” in the social imaginary. The social imaginary is not the creation of images in society; it is not the fact that one paints the walls of towns. A fundamental creation of the social imaginary, the gods or rules of behaviour are neither visible nor even audible but signifiable. (Castoriadis, 1997b, pp. 182–183)
The Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalysis in the Social Sciences and Humanities, ed by Anthony Elliott and Jeffrey Prager, Routledge, 2016, p. 172
