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.