Limits to imagination

There is a strong relation between imagination and association. Imagination is not reducible to society - it is most apparent in particular individuals who are often at some distance from social norms; nonetheless it is a social phenomenon. Moreover, the way in which we are associated, impinges on the available range of our imagination. My observation is that the form of association pertaining in the UK has changed, recently and significantly, and that this, in turn, is tending to narrow the imaginative scope that is typically available - locally, and regionally.

The first thing to say about the form of association known as capitalist production is that it is universal: everybody is related to everybody else involved in the transformative process of production; and this in turn makes for innovation. But here the association of human beings in the production of things is alo their collective subordination to the production of capital: things, and this thing in particular, get to dominate people. And this is where imagination comes in: imagination, and the artistic imagination, in particular, is the term we have used to describe that special activity which both refers to the transformative production of things and also - against the grain of the capitalist form of production - puts human beings at the centre of it. In the artistic imagination, instead of the upside down world of associated objects and their human appendages - the position that capitalist production puts us in, our world is the right way up. It is ours; the outcome of human association and a platform for our further development.

The most obvious illustration of the artistic imagination having this effect is the still life painting, in which everyday objects are humanised by successive levels of association introduced into them. The objects are not just as they are, they are also as the artist sees them, and as the artist sees other people seeing them, and as he has further represented previous artistic representations of them. In other words, they are now tending towards the frame of universal human association which was brought into existence by capitalist production but is also negated by it.

But what now? My observation is that we in the UK are increasingly removed from the universal association entailed in capitalist production; instead we are increasingly associated with serial networks; indeed this is now the primary form of association pertaining locally. As before, we are a trading nation; but trading now on products made elsewhere, and on secondary "products" derived from these and devised locally.

As before, most people have nothing to trade but themselves. But there is less pressure to contract in to the dehumanized, impersonal world of production. Instead we are more often called upon to trade in personality. Now this might make for everyday life which is less of a routine. Perhaps life itself can be more imaginative, as only art was previously required to be. But the problem of being so far removed from production, is that we are equally far away from the transformation and origination inherent in it. Locally, even imagination tends to be as derivative, and lack in origination, as financial "products".

What we get is social media: people presenting derivatives of themselves. Imagination and its paucity having been derived first from the opening up of human association and now, locally, its newly truncated form.

Catch in the Bonfire

A bonfire of all the quangos (some, anyway) seems like a sensible response to their proliferation. It also seems like laudable recognition of their essentially fictitious character: like financial 'products', quangos from the New Labour generation are really self-serving, networking opportunities with remuneration attached (to the right people).

But the Coalition cabinet is sadly mistaken in thinking that this will allow Britain to check back into reality. Sadly, the UK has been sleepwalking for longer and further than they realize. Slashing into the previous generation of networks in the interests of 'de-centralisation', will only lead to the creation of new lines of 'local' networking, similarly self-serving and equally peripheral to the social relations of production.

As the lumpen proletariat is to work, so Britain's capitalists are to productive capital. There is no obvious solution to their lumpen character; and it certainly won't be consumed in a bonfire of Blairite quangos.

The End of Imagination?

Bourgeois imagination having been the means to re-humanize. Thus:

In conditions where the object takes precedence over human subjects, the imagined object - the art object - has been the particular instrument for retrieving the supremacy of the human over objects in general. Although its overall role has been to mediate between contradictory aspects of social reality, and thus it has served to reproduce 'active' objects and the de-activated people who actively made them, for as long as we are appreciating it, the art object reverses the subordination of people to things. But we only continue to appreciate it for as long as it shows us something new. And 'imagination' is what we call the artist's capacity to come up with a new object that can retain our interest. Thus the artistic imagination has been called upon to both reproduce the dynamic character of capitalist innovation, but also to reverse its dehumanising impact. Imagination brings the human back in; and its humanising effect is not confined to scenarios with active human beings featured in them. Humanization occurs even in the process of artistic, imaginative objectification.

But what of the imagination in a context where alienated subjectivity is the norm, rather than alienated objectification? If it is subjectively harder to be imaginative in these conditions, perhaps it is objectively so, also.

The Absence of Style in Politics

Stylization, 'aestheticisation',Tony Blair as an extension of Britain's pop culture - these were new trends in politics a decade ago, and the cause of considerable commentary.

Though in many respects what they are doing amounts to the extension of Blair, the Cameron-Clegg combination does not attract anything like the same attention to the way they are doing it. It is not noticeable; in the precise meaning of the word, it is not aesthetic.

Not that there is any more substance or ideological coherence to what they are doing; rather, the absence of these is longer noticeable.

This suggests that the stylization of politics was a temporary phase; a tacit acknowledgement of the lack of substance, articulated as concern with what is noticeable, i.e. aesthetic. In this way, the emptying out of politics went relatively unnoticed: acknowledged but not as such.

Today, the lack of substance needs no introduction. It is simply what we do, in all manner of fields far beyond the political.

We-Wii

An activity which is not the same as the original activity to which it refers; nor is it so distinct from the original activity, an abstraction designed to describe (stories, and games from chess to Space Invaders) or account for (journalism to social theory). This activity is neither a second order abstraction, nor does it contain the abstraction which spontaneously occurs in the originating process of capitalist production. Instead, it is a close approximation to the original, but without the material or the relations material to the originating process.

This is the Wii.

It also the world of work in much of the West, where people go through the motions of an original/originating process, but instead of creating new value they are moving things around (arms, legs, capital) in a facsimile of the labour process.

It has long been recognized that the games people played during Britain's industrial age, were an extension of the way they worked. The same is true today. We are to production what the Wii is to the games and other activities which it simulates.

Crime and Punishment

The story of Raoul Moat is oddly reassuring.

Though there has been death and injury (tragic for those personally involved), we know where we are with this drama. This is Harry Roberts, John Dillinger, even Jimmy Cagney.

Just as we on the outside can readily read into Raoul Moat, so the elements within his story seem to form a kind of staircase that runs up and down between everyday behaviour and petty frustrations, all the way to grand emotions and singular, all-or-nothing moments. In other words, in the very words of his story, the contrast between these two levels of human experience is formed into a continuum.

Compare this with last month's shooting spree by Derrick Bird. Apart from the horrifically high body count (Bird left 12 dead before he shot himself), the really disturbing thing about Bird's actions was the absence of narrative (various motives suggested, none sufficient). In this scenario, there was a small man and the big landscape that he lived in; and nothing but random killing to make them anywhere near commensurate.

Reading their lives like books, Raoul Moat's violent behaviour seems like the almost understandable continuation of his personality, now extended to a new level; whereas Bird appears to have flipped from one dimension into an entirely different one. Jekyll and Hyde, but without the potion, or any other potent explanation.

The Derrick Bird scenario is the more unsettling because in it we can see a representation of our everyday lives and their (our) estrangement from anything big enough to make them worthwhile on a world scale. But if we have no stairway to heaven, are we already in hell? Or some sort of limbo? Shaking our heads in horrified anticipation, we come away from watching the Bird episode wondering whether we, too, will find ourselves committing an arbitrary atrocity in order to connect our lives to the wider dimension we know they ought to have.

The Point Is To Interpret, Right Now

Comrades,

(I know, but what else shall I call you?)

'The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.'

But what chance of change, when there is no satisfactory interpretation? Hence no sufficient rationale for making change.

Right now, interpretation is required.

And this is my notebook for interpreting what is going on, right now, as it happens; as a philosopher.

So what does this mean: 'as a philosopher'?

The philosopher's interpretation, as I see it, and as I see the need for it, is the logical reconstruction of current events in their relation to underlying social relations; or, and this is the original point, perhaps in their relation to the absence of underlying social relations.

It is my supposition that the Western way of life now has only a vicarious connection to the general relations between producers as expressed in the products of their labour. Until recently, these were the underpinning of our interpersonal relations. Today we continue to associate, but with only an indirect relation to the societal relations of production. The latter also continue to exist, but they are now largely displaced from the West and increasingly centralised in the East.

In the advanced capitalist nations of the first half of the 20th century, ideology was a material force; in the second half, the absence of ideology was also a material force. Now, in the early decades of the 21st century, the absence of material is a force peculiar to the West.

The point of this notebook is to identify the impact of this absence as it makes itself felt in current events; conversely, to interpet events in the light of what isn't there.