📸AI images prompted with “Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole, photographic”; and “The Social Imaginary, photographic”

🏴In a lecture on the “public sphere”, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor briefly veers off topic to mention the “social imaginary”. It’s a beautiful phrase, one that incorporates & emphasises the ‘image’ within the social imagination.

Taylor is of the mind that something radical in technology needs to take place before the social imaginary can be altered, claiming eighteenth-century printing technology as an example of how knowledge & communication is radically peddled from person to person without need for the ‘in-person’. This reflects Taylor’s compatriot Marshall MacLuhan’s dictum that “the medium is the message”, the medium being fundamental in how we read & experience the message personally or impersonally.

The social imaginary is imagined by Taylor as based on not meeting in person, but somehow creating a commons through images, images that are imagined ‘common’ without face-to face physical interaction. So we end up imagining a commons through an image of the commons, one that is sometimes idealised in the detached personal & idealised “I”, what Jacques Lacan calls the singular & narcissistic “Imaginary”.

But is this a mere advertisement for an event (or reality) that will never come into being in reality? Perhaps reality is surplus to requirements (NFTs). And anyway, are the real & the virtual mutually exclusive anymore? Especially in today’s social imaginary, one that is hypermediated, vigilant, virtual, mobile & common as never before?

Can we imagine, if this has not already indeed occurred, that the images we disseminate throughout the world have not only changed our relationship with the world, but have become the world. And the world is flat but deep with rabbit holes that extrude our heads inwards until we cease to exist as physical bodies above the horizon…