General Imagination
Discussion
Sean Cubitt:
"We experience one another as affect, tidal forces running through us that can be intelligible, hallucinatory or physical, personal, collective and environmental by turns or simultaneously.
These are the raw energies driving imagination – or restoring it – after systems theory. Think of it as projection. Pondering the projective geometry of perspective, Leibniz wrote that God sees the world absolutely, but mortals see only partially. Now that there is no absolute, not Man or Science, not even System, every perspective is relative and relevant, and emanates from non-humans too. Imagination today embraces this multiplication of the scopic field, where every impression matters, from the river’s cognition of its banks to the sun’s view of Venus. Politically it implies a sensory commons, an un-unified general cognition suffusing the general intellect to produce a General Imagination.
The General Imagination embraces the cognitive and sensory capabilities of the entire cosmos. In the same way that imagined communities become historical realities, imagining a common experiential universe may bring it into existence. Dreaming that comes into existence with no idea of its consequences is as risky as liberating locked-in ancestral labour – including code: as great a risk as the currently dominant, shrivelled imaginary which can see no alternative to the economic suicide of the species. Like Pascal’s wager, liberating gods and ancestors is better than taking no risk, because the status quo is committed to terminal planetary collapse."
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