mjz
September 3, 2006, 08:16 AM
For I would indeed be simulating were I to 'imagine' that I was something, because imagining is merely the contemplating of the shape or image of a corporeal thing. But I now know with certainty that I am and also that all these images -- and, generally, everything. belonging to the nature of the body -- could turn out to be nothing but dreams. Once I have realized this, I would seem to be speaking no less foolishly were I to say: 'I will use my imagination in order to recognize more distinctly who I am,' than were I to say: 'Now I surely am awake, and I see something true; but since I do not yet see it clearly enough, I will deliberately fall asleep so that my dreams might represent it to me more truly and more clearly.' Thus I realize that none of what I can grasp by means of the imagination pertains to this knowledge that I have of myself. Moreover, I realize that I must be most diligent about withdrawing my mind from these things so that it can perceive its nature as distinctly as possible.
http://www.american-buddha.com/meditation.two.htm
I think that it is important to note that when imagination posits itself to be a virtue of ontology within non-subversive forms (i.e. as expressed under commodity rule as complacent and with no conscious intent or desire to attempt flourishing outside of said rule), it begins to deteriorate into little beyond a piece of capital; little beyond imagination in the name of augmenting capital and feeding back into it. Obviously, in general, imagination is considered to be a virtue. Who wouldn't pride themselves on a supposedly profound imagination? The problem is, that when it remains locked in commodity pathways with no intent of ever escaping them, it loses its purpose as a human quality which in theory supposedly has the amnesty available to define its own movement patterns (Outside of nightmares, who ever dreams of capitalist domestication? In fragmented dream images, our physical movement is almost always extremely free and we are able to travel, even fly of course, around nomadically outside of any grid and throughout whichever dazzling backdrops suit the fancy of our unconscious psyche; we are not trapped within routine movement patterns, but instead, our bodies drift aimlessly into different scenes and settings as we adventure about, taking in the new experiences as we achieve the physical sensation of literally moving throughout them) -- its movement becomes literally enslaved to the continuous functions involved in the organization and accumulation of commodities (and the indisputable use of daily space-time they evoke), as if hopelessly addicted. The commodity becomes the only traffic light as we march in step with its already-decided production signals.
The student's old-fashioned poverty, however, does put him at a potential advantage -- if only he could see it. He does have marginal freedoms, a small area of liberty which as yet escapes the totalitarian control of the spectacle. His flexible working-hours permit him adventure and experiment. But he is a sucker for punishment and freedom scares him to death: he feels safer in the straight-jacketed space-time of lecture hall and weekly "essay . He is quite happy with this open prison organized for his "benefit", and, though not constrained, as are most people, to separate work and leisure, he does so of his own accord--hypocritically proclaiming all the while his contempt for assiduity and grey men. He embraces every available contradiction and then mutters darkly about the "difficulties of communication" from the uterine warmth of his religious, artistic or political clique.
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/4
It seems quite plausible to mention that along with the human body, the imagination is limited to, and often preferring of, the security of the "strait-jacketed" daily space-time organized for its "benefit" by the movement patterns of commodity production. This seems to generally happen especially so when one becomes, to a certain subjective extent, self aware that merely representing and reshuffling the mere content of ones imagination, a priori (doing so without having to live through or experience, on a direct / first-hand basis, any genuinely new experiences in autonomous space-time outside of the banal purchase / consume process), will help to augment its power and as such, supposedly increase its value. In an imagination which has no genuine intent (dissimulated dissent is of course quite abundant and fashionable in our current culture which takes a repugnant and profitable sort of pride in co-opting and nullifying any sort of veritable revolutionary presence or expression it can get its hands on, or as Debord mentions in thesis 162 of SOS, "Behind the fashions that come and go on the frivolous surface of the spectacle of pseudocyclical time, the grand style of an era can always be found in what is governed by the secret yet obvious necessity for revolution.") of moving beyond the tired old and limited experience-pathways of the consumer-function, no intent of moving beyond the same old banal formalisms of the capitalist market-process, we can easily see how its only purpose as such remains to be little beyond that of a tolerant commodity functionary. In order to improve upon itself, its sole function of physical movement is that of continual commodity affirmation. As such, its purpose as imagination itself becomes grotesquely stunted and the flow of its imagination, trite and controlled. Without a subversive presence, the imagination is left to the fact that it must constantly buy into things and purchase ideas in order to exist at all. It cannot even imagine itself as existing as a concept of "imagination" without or beyond commodity assistance. Oh, what vision! The commodity is the crutch to its crippled thought, its benefactor and symbiotic necessity. Who exactly would want to own an imagination that has no concept of an ontological presence of itself outside of its total reliance on market processing? It's sort of epistemology as such is ancient and extraordinarily reactionary as one that is always caught within age-old forms of human movement as pulled around by economic mechanisms ("Silly marionette! Don't you dare attempt to imagine any sort of new dance routines which dare to realize themselves outside of the space-time methodologies we have provided for you!").
We see this profound lack of vision and complete susceptibility to bureaucratic processing or programming of imagination in cultural centers like "Graffiti Art Programming Inc." -- http://www.graffitigallery.ca/ -- which is an organization whose name should indeed be taken in a completely literal fashion as in its commissioned business practice, stupidly champions the role -- and champions it explicitly, while of course feigning only an implicit awareness of the connotations behind its name in order to achieve anti-graffiti grants -- in its title through suggesting that that the individual and inherently / always subversive act of graffiti could ever be programmed. I chose the blatant lack of imagination going into this example specifically because the concept of bureaucratized graffiti is a fucking joke. Obviously, this organization is the result of an imbecilic collective of circumscribed imagination which attempts to bastardize the fundamental notion of what graffiti really is -- the result of an attempt to manipulate the word's veritable connotation through pacifying its praxis by removing those hints of exciting radical posturing from its application -- as existing under capitalism in order to neutralize any striking presence or value that a true form of graffiti, one which inexorably refuses market co-option of any sort in its always-clandestine behavior, may possess. As the act of true graffiti presents a radical gesture which opposes the dominant rule-sets comprising the almost-complete repression of spontaneous individual expression (as kept in order by the various unimaginative informants who don't create, but merely manage modern architectural manifestations which includes the highly restrictive enforcement of how an individual may move and create around and within the vicinity of said manifestations), the way to suppress it as an effective agitational technique is of course to claim it as a virtue by changing its connotation (and nullifying its ad hominem spark in the process by removing all human content from it through mechanized marketing campaigns) and eventually reselling it to the populous (both literally through monetary exchange, as graffiti art galleries sadly do exist, and figuratively through pushing it as an admirable epistemological concept) as a harmless, passive, shared process which no longer requires any passion in order to create -- transmogrified into pure information caught within an old form or vessel of physical movement (the commodity) as accepted a priori by bourgeois-epistemology and as opposed to a lived individual gesture which, as an expression of the desire for freedom-of-movement (i.e. the arcane movement of ones arms when spraying the bricks as opposed to the boring, everyday gesture of putting ones hands in their pockets, etc.), necessarily breaks out of the banal commodity form and suggests new ones by manifesting hints which in turn point towards more liberated modes of physical human movement / creation / expression (I dare you to attempt imagining said potentially ambiguous “modes”), pseudo-graffiti becomes the new Paint by Numbers in the name of promoting philistinism (by attempting to associate the idea of “graffiti” as one that is indifferent to individual values / intellectual pursuits / aesthetic refinement, etc. -- one that is contentedly commonplace in ideas, tastes and imagination [or lack thereof]) everywhere.
Perhaps the most unimaginative quality of bureaucratized graffiti can be witnessed when it insists on hiding, in a cheap attempt to mask its bourgeois roots, under the guise of faux-subversive "non profit" labels, while simultaneously (and sycophantically) applying for government grants in order to tolerantly paint over top of the walls of profit (as such revealing the true artless intent / form / nature of its act in verifying itself as a as blatant janitorial mechanism of the economy) -- http://www.muralfest.com --, only to further camouflage them under spectacles which help to divert the general attention of passerbys into thoughts of something other than the exploitive workings within the chosen opulent skyscrapers / office buildings. This co-option of graffiti as such is clearly a stratagem: capitalism is taking cover and attempting to blend in with the very aesthetic scenery which represents the bombardment of its values and structures. This type of camouflage is similar to that of an individual sitting in church in his finest formal attire while simultaneously, despite his obedient appearance, plotting in contemplative secretly -- based in the fear of openly opposing his dogmatic surroundings -- of his impending conversion to agnosticism. If this analogy seems completely inaccurate, it is only because the type of dissimulation is reversed: while the burgeoning agnostic is explicitly coerced into silent camouflage, the camouflage which capitalism undergoes when it attempts to assimilate its subversive surroundings is an implicit expression of silent coercion. "Look kids! The business man works in a magical building that expresses the same sentiments as you (i.e. we create your imagination within and sell you those sentiments)." This is one of the worst examples of co-opted art serving to dissimulate capitalism in that it is quite stealthy in its actions and manages to capture a lot of would-be radical volunteers to help it along in producing its ambiences of -- ultimately in a subliminal manner at the very least -- for-work / pro-wage-slavery celebration and propaganda. The wall under the brush represents the external membrane of the nerve center of the commodification which stunts the movement of the definition of our imagination which in turn remains tolerant to its coercive movement conditions.
Forms only become substance in the process which transforms them into other forms. In reality, the substance of a form is another form, which, in its very character, is located outside the process, and is different from that which in its turn it serves as a substance. The concept of substance thus points to nothing but a process, or the passage between forms. Substance is the process. Substance is the material reality of the transformation, of change.
http://www.infopool.org.uk/6005.html
Concerning forms of human movement, I emphasize "mere content" above because the continual re-shuffling of content within these same old forms -- these same old human movement patterns / these same old domesticated means to knowledge -- implies that little to zero new experiences are had outside of those experiences which are permissible to achieve within the physical movement patterns of the market (heightened social-experience mobility, that sort of worldly means to expressing as an exemplar an epistemology based in ever changing travel-experiences, necessarily requires affluence as a precondition). While those with enough money manage to adventure around the world, actually living though their ever-changing experiences and constructing their views from the directly felt sense-data of said experiences, the remainder of us are permitted only to sit in idle contemplation, witnessing the results of those with the luxury of freer movement and witnessing those results vicariously / a priori as distributed through the commodity. "Once our adventuring is complete, let’s finance a movie or two depicting similar freedom of movement, whether via fiction, fantasy or fact (the genre doesn't even matter, as long as we sell to the desire to move freely -- throughout life / the planet / space in general, both inner and outer -- while simultaneously limiting it so it can continually be purchased, furthering our own profits and in turn augmenting our own freedom of movement), so you too can consume the desire to move freely, yet never actually experience it!" Personal adventure has nothing to do with this physical confinement of space, this non-nomadic conception of space-time. Within the commodity market, domesticated within our homes and culture-centers (movie theater, dance club, hip college kid bar, etc.), we become utter habitués to an extremely reified extent. Imagination becomes trapped within these similar movement patterns and its only claim to fame within said patterns, its only way to promote itself as the virtue it so perceives itself to be within said patterns, is to acknowledge the fact that it was and is a bought chunk of capital to an abundantly -- it of course requires a vast amount of syncretistic products to culminate into something "great" within its established market form -- affluent extent. In order to continue being a virtue then, it must buy / consume more and more commodities and soon, the only reason it exists at all is to consume yet another one. The commodity is its only means to achieve a "greater" form of imagination-epistemology. Its boring and deterministic telos is one-dimensional and always in step with the market. It soon begins to become more so the imagination of the market itself as opposed to something of its own creation in the sense that it is complacent acting as a market functionary without ever intending any form of literal supersession. The virtue of this old sort of imagination itself then, in this sort of behavior, is implicitly expressing the virtue of the commodity and of the market, as it is happily owned by it; an admiring spectator of the mass produced means to imagination without any clue of what an imagination might ever be like outside of said -- "mass produced" -- sardonic replication of sensibility. How could it ever, as imagination, sense a new form for itself beyond capitalist reproduction if it is otherwise too busy working for said forces of reproduction or disinterestedly tolerating them?
Finally, to those who object that a people cannot live by drifting, it is useful to recall that in every group certain characters (priests or heroes) are charged with representing various tendencies as specialists, in accordance with the dual mechanism of projection and identification. Experience demonstrates that a dérive is a good replacement for a Mass: it is more effective in making people enter into communication with the ensemble of energies, seducing them for the benefit of the collectivity.
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/Chtcheglov.htm
To truly augment imagination and maybe even live out some of its dream-like desires, we must become nomads beyond the endless ingemination of the commodity-form in order to discover a new sort of imagination which doesn't pride itself as a virtue only because it has been bought under affluent conditions. New experiences of both content and form will lead to new forms of imagination. The commodity has a certain universal epistemology all unto itself. A genuinely new experience requires attempting a form of living outside of the mere content it has to offer. To experiment by endlessly manipulating new content alone (writing, painting, speaking, etc. or anything that can be consumed within thought after it is distributed) can only result in a sort of pseudo-experimentation at best which ultimately requires the combination of new physical movement patterns (gestures, stratagems, placements, perceived physical laws, ineffable circumstances behind the formation of groups or ideas, the process of distribution/displacement as opposed to the consumable object of what is distributed), or in other words, new functions of placement within space-time outside of where the old functions would have normally situated ones presence via their enforced routine in order to reach an authentic experimentation which isn't merely a rehash of forms disguised desperately by supposedly "new" content. While capitalist reign is dominant, the only hope for this appears to be in the act of nomadism -- physically living outside of the movement patterns and boring chronological formalisms (i.e. highschool, university, job, etc.) as required by the rule of commodity-domestication. The commodity can only bring mass-produced experiences to us as we sit, privileged and stationary, barely moving at all from our already-determined, local topographical experiences (our epistemology has no where to run). Imagination remains as something that is totally defined by capitalist diction; as something that is allowed expression only within the space-time patterns as permitted by capitalist diction or not permitted to flourish at all (The docile champions of the rulebook, i.e. the publishers of Fifth Estate with their pretend-radical article submission guidelines based in a long-reified intellectual "style" -- "Referencing system: Harvard" --, exemplify this well: imagination only counts for these types of journals if introduced under a systematized method, telling imagination itself how it may and may not act. The counterrevolutionary implications of such pretensions dictating a proper revolutionary / radical "style" are hilariously absurd). As Gilles Dauvé says when speaking of the contribution to "radical" thought / action that grows out of a university campus (petri dish): "Official 'revolutionary' thought is the scouting party of capital. Thousands of appointed functionaries criticize capitalism from every direction." We find the same sort of absurdity in free online journals like http://www.languageandcapitalism.info in that they are run by a collective of university professors who are ultimately complacent functionaries of capital when considering their literal living / movement patterns as human beings. When pretend radical thought becomes stuck within a rulebook, or elucidated as official by, for instance, a group of professors applying professional titles to it such as "critical discourse analysis," it can only create unimaginative functionaries who too become stuck within the true standstill aspirations of such non-subversive rules.
We should not simply refuse modern culture; we must seize it in order to negate it. No one can claim to be a revolutionary intellectual who does not recognize the cultural revolution we are now facing. An intellectual creator cannot be revolutionary by merely supporting some party line, not even if he does so with original methods, but only by working alongside the parties toward the necessary transformation of all the cultural superstructures. What ultimately determines whether or not someone is a bourgeois intellectual is neither his social origin nor his knowledge of a culture (such knowledge may just as well be the basis for a critique of that culture or for some new creative venture), but his role in the production of the historically bourgeois forms of culture. Authors of revolutionary political opinions who find themselves praised by bourgeois literary critics should ask themselves what they’ve done wrong.
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/report.html
Against these notions which desire nothing but their eventual widely propagated alienation to the page within non-subversive intellectual circles in the name of flashing credentials, augmenting prestige or catering to approbation, the act of physically moving about within the world, moving throughout new landscapes and becoming genuinely immersed within new topography will bring us new experiences that the commodity can only represent within itself as a parodic vessel of mechanically produced-experience which callously cares nothing for human movement unless it is paid for. We should now imagine something new beyond our formal and well-priced definitions of imagination. A non-nomadic imagination which inherently comes as easier to achieve -- while at the same time pretending to be of greater validity in its traditional for-sale form -- for those with more material wealth is no definition of imagination for me.
The dictionary defines imagination as "the faculty of imagining, or of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses." If this is true, then imagination is necessarily the refusal of those images within supposedly commensurable or "objective" reality which are present to the senses (an unavoidably radical notion); is the subjective creation of new forms and formalisms; is as such necessarily radical in ephemeral presence or without existence. Anything that is not radical then, explicitly implies the absence of imagination. Let's move in step with imagination and attempt to discover those new forms of which it can do nothing but invoke in order for it to present itself as an ontological concept at all. The commodity, as a totalitarian form of movement which desires to remain old, has a vested interest in keeping ones imagination within them. The commodity requires your old methods of imagination in order to remain alive, but imagination requires no commodity unless it is working for those who are so lacking in it that they cannot envision a life without its presence. The banal repetition of commodity-form can only pretend to fill in the necessary absence of imagination that its trapped movement patterns create.
http://www.american-buddha.com/meditation.two.htm
I think that it is important to note that when imagination posits itself to be a virtue of ontology within non-subversive forms (i.e. as expressed under commodity rule as complacent and with no conscious intent or desire to attempt flourishing outside of said rule), it begins to deteriorate into little beyond a piece of capital; little beyond imagination in the name of augmenting capital and feeding back into it. Obviously, in general, imagination is considered to be a virtue. Who wouldn't pride themselves on a supposedly profound imagination? The problem is, that when it remains locked in commodity pathways with no intent of ever escaping them, it loses its purpose as a human quality which in theory supposedly has the amnesty available to define its own movement patterns (Outside of nightmares, who ever dreams of capitalist domestication? In fragmented dream images, our physical movement is almost always extremely free and we are able to travel, even fly of course, around nomadically outside of any grid and throughout whichever dazzling backdrops suit the fancy of our unconscious psyche; we are not trapped within routine movement patterns, but instead, our bodies drift aimlessly into different scenes and settings as we adventure about, taking in the new experiences as we achieve the physical sensation of literally moving throughout them) -- its movement becomes literally enslaved to the continuous functions involved in the organization and accumulation of commodities (and the indisputable use of daily space-time they evoke), as if hopelessly addicted. The commodity becomes the only traffic light as we march in step with its already-decided production signals.
The student's old-fashioned poverty, however, does put him at a potential advantage -- if only he could see it. He does have marginal freedoms, a small area of liberty which as yet escapes the totalitarian control of the spectacle. His flexible working-hours permit him adventure and experiment. But he is a sucker for punishment and freedom scares him to death: he feels safer in the straight-jacketed space-time of lecture hall and weekly "essay . He is quite happy with this open prison organized for his "benefit", and, though not constrained, as are most people, to separate work and leisure, he does so of his own accord--hypocritically proclaiming all the while his contempt for assiduity and grey men. He embraces every available contradiction and then mutters darkly about the "difficulties of communication" from the uterine warmth of his religious, artistic or political clique.
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/4
It seems quite plausible to mention that along with the human body, the imagination is limited to, and often preferring of, the security of the "strait-jacketed" daily space-time organized for its "benefit" by the movement patterns of commodity production. This seems to generally happen especially so when one becomes, to a certain subjective extent, self aware that merely representing and reshuffling the mere content of ones imagination, a priori (doing so without having to live through or experience, on a direct / first-hand basis, any genuinely new experiences in autonomous space-time outside of the banal purchase / consume process), will help to augment its power and as such, supposedly increase its value. In an imagination which has no genuine intent (dissimulated dissent is of course quite abundant and fashionable in our current culture which takes a repugnant and profitable sort of pride in co-opting and nullifying any sort of veritable revolutionary presence or expression it can get its hands on, or as Debord mentions in thesis 162 of SOS, "Behind the fashions that come and go on the frivolous surface of the spectacle of pseudocyclical time, the grand style of an era can always be found in what is governed by the secret yet obvious necessity for revolution.") of moving beyond the tired old and limited experience-pathways of the consumer-function, no intent of moving beyond the same old banal formalisms of the capitalist market-process, we can easily see how its only purpose as such remains to be little beyond that of a tolerant commodity functionary. In order to improve upon itself, its sole function of physical movement is that of continual commodity affirmation. As such, its purpose as imagination itself becomes grotesquely stunted and the flow of its imagination, trite and controlled. Without a subversive presence, the imagination is left to the fact that it must constantly buy into things and purchase ideas in order to exist at all. It cannot even imagine itself as existing as a concept of "imagination" without or beyond commodity assistance. Oh, what vision! The commodity is the crutch to its crippled thought, its benefactor and symbiotic necessity. Who exactly would want to own an imagination that has no concept of an ontological presence of itself outside of its total reliance on market processing? It's sort of epistemology as such is ancient and extraordinarily reactionary as one that is always caught within age-old forms of human movement as pulled around by economic mechanisms ("Silly marionette! Don't you dare attempt to imagine any sort of new dance routines which dare to realize themselves outside of the space-time methodologies we have provided for you!").
We see this profound lack of vision and complete susceptibility to bureaucratic processing or programming of imagination in cultural centers like "Graffiti Art Programming Inc." -- http://www.graffitigallery.ca/ -- which is an organization whose name should indeed be taken in a completely literal fashion as in its commissioned business practice, stupidly champions the role -- and champions it explicitly, while of course feigning only an implicit awareness of the connotations behind its name in order to achieve anti-graffiti grants -- in its title through suggesting that that the individual and inherently / always subversive act of graffiti could ever be programmed. I chose the blatant lack of imagination going into this example specifically because the concept of bureaucratized graffiti is a fucking joke. Obviously, this organization is the result of an imbecilic collective of circumscribed imagination which attempts to bastardize the fundamental notion of what graffiti really is -- the result of an attempt to manipulate the word's veritable connotation through pacifying its praxis by removing those hints of exciting radical posturing from its application -- as existing under capitalism in order to neutralize any striking presence or value that a true form of graffiti, one which inexorably refuses market co-option of any sort in its always-clandestine behavior, may possess. As the act of true graffiti presents a radical gesture which opposes the dominant rule-sets comprising the almost-complete repression of spontaneous individual expression (as kept in order by the various unimaginative informants who don't create, but merely manage modern architectural manifestations which includes the highly restrictive enforcement of how an individual may move and create around and within the vicinity of said manifestations), the way to suppress it as an effective agitational technique is of course to claim it as a virtue by changing its connotation (and nullifying its ad hominem spark in the process by removing all human content from it through mechanized marketing campaigns) and eventually reselling it to the populous (both literally through monetary exchange, as graffiti art galleries sadly do exist, and figuratively through pushing it as an admirable epistemological concept) as a harmless, passive, shared process which no longer requires any passion in order to create -- transmogrified into pure information caught within an old form or vessel of physical movement (the commodity) as accepted a priori by bourgeois-epistemology and as opposed to a lived individual gesture which, as an expression of the desire for freedom-of-movement (i.e. the arcane movement of ones arms when spraying the bricks as opposed to the boring, everyday gesture of putting ones hands in their pockets, etc.), necessarily breaks out of the banal commodity form and suggests new ones by manifesting hints which in turn point towards more liberated modes of physical human movement / creation / expression (I dare you to attempt imagining said potentially ambiguous “modes”), pseudo-graffiti becomes the new Paint by Numbers in the name of promoting philistinism (by attempting to associate the idea of “graffiti” as one that is indifferent to individual values / intellectual pursuits / aesthetic refinement, etc. -- one that is contentedly commonplace in ideas, tastes and imagination [or lack thereof]) everywhere.
Perhaps the most unimaginative quality of bureaucratized graffiti can be witnessed when it insists on hiding, in a cheap attempt to mask its bourgeois roots, under the guise of faux-subversive "non profit" labels, while simultaneously (and sycophantically) applying for government grants in order to tolerantly paint over top of the walls of profit (as such revealing the true artless intent / form / nature of its act in verifying itself as a as blatant janitorial mechanism of the economy) -- http://www.muralfest.com --, only to further camouflage them under spectacles which help to divert the general attention of passerbys into thoughts of something other than the exploitive workings within the chosen opulent skyscrapers / office buildings. This co-option of graffiti as such is clearly a stratagem: capitalism is taking cover and attempting to blend in with the very aesthetic scenery which represents the bombardment of its values and structures. This type of camouflage is similar to that of an individual sitting in church in his finest formal attire while simultaneously, despite his obedient appearance, plotting in contemplative secretly -- based in the fear of openly opposing his dogmatic surroundings -- of his impending conversion to agnosticism. If this analogy seems completely inaccurate, it is only because the type of dissimulation is reversed: while the burgeoning agnostic is explicitly coerced into silent camouflage, the camouflage which capitalism undergoes when it attempts to assimilate its subversive surroundings is an implicit expression of silent coercion. "Look kids! The business man works in a magical building that expresses the same sentiments as you (i.e. we create your imagination within and sell you those sentiments)." This is one of the worst examples of co-opted art serving to dissimulate capitalism in that it is quite stealthy in its actions and manages to capture a lot of would-be radical volunteers to help it along in producing its ambiences of -- ultimately in a subliminal manner at the very least -- for-work / pro-wage-slavery celebration and propaganda. The wall under the brush represents the external membrane of the nerve center of the commodification which stunts the movement of the definition of our imagination which in turn remains tolerant to its coercive movement conditions.
Forms only become substance in the process which transforms them into other forms. In reality, the substance of a form is another form, which, in its very character, is located outside the process, and is different from that which in its turn it serves as a substance. The concept of substance thus points to nothing but a process, or the passage between forms. Substance is the process. Substance is the material reality of the transformation, of change.
http://www.infopool.org.uk/6005.html
Concerning forms of human movement, I emphasize "mere content" above because the continual re-shuffling of content within these same old forms -- these same old human movement patterns / these same old domesticated means to knowledge -- implies that little to zero new experiences are had outside of those experiences which are permissible to achieve within the physical movement patterns of the market (heightened social-experience mobility, that sort of worldly means to expressing as an exemplar an epistemology based in ever changing travel-experiences, necessarily requires affluence as a precondition). While those with enough money manage to adventure around the world, actually living though their ever-changing experiences and constructing their views from the directly felt sense-data of said experiences, the remainder of us are permitted only to sit in idle contemplation, witnessing the results of those with the luxury of freer movement and witnessing those results vicariously / a priori as distributed through the commodity. "Once our adventuring is complete, let’s finance a movie or two depicting similar freedom of movement, whether via fiction, fantasy or fact (the genre doesn't even matter, as long as we sell to the desire to move freely -- throughout life / the planet / space in general, both inner and outer -- while simultaneously limiting it so it can continually be purchased, furthering our own profits and in turn augmenting our own freedom of movement), so you too can consume the desire to move freely, yet never actually experience it!" Personal adventure has nothing to do with this physical confinement of space, this non-nomadic conception of space-time. Within the commodity market, domesticated within our homes and culture-centers (movie theater, dance club, hip college kid bar, etc.), we become utter habitués to an extremely reified extent. Imagination becomes trapped within these similar movement patterns and its only claim to fame within said patterns, its only way to promote itself as the virtue it so perceives itself to be within said patterns, is to acknowledge the fact that it was and is a bought chunk of capital to an abundantly -- it of course requires a vast amount of syncretistic products to culminate into something "great" within its established market form -- affluent extent. In order to continue being a virtue then, it must buy / consume more and more commodities and soon, the only reason it exists at all is to consume yet another one. The commodity is its only means to achieve a "greater" form of imagination-epistemology. Its boring and deterministic telos is one-dimensional and always in step with the market. It soon begins to become more so the imagination of the market itself as opposed to something of its own creation in the sense that it is complacent acting as a market functionary without ever intending any form of literal supersession. The virtue of this old sort of imagination itself then, in this sort of behavior, is implicitly expressing the virtue of the commodity and of the market, as it is happily owned by it; an admiring spectator of the mass produced means to imagination without any clue of what an imagination might ever be like outside of said -- "mass produced" -- sardonic replication of sensibility. How could it ever, as imagination, sense a new form for itself beyond capitalist reproduction if it is otherwise too busy working for said forces of reproduction or disinterestedly tolerating them?
Finally, to those who object that a people cannot live by drifting, it is useful to recall that in every group certain characters (priests or heroes) are charged with representing various tendencies as specialists, in accordance with the dual mechanism of projection and identification. Experience demonstrates that a dérive is a good replacement for a Mass: it is more effective in making people enter into communication with the ensemble of energies, seducing them for the benefit of the collectivity.
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/Chtcheglov.htm
To truly augment imagination and maybe even live out some of its dream-like desires, we must become nomads beyond the endless ingemination of the commodity-form in order to discover a new sort of imagination which doesn't pride itself as a virtue only because it has been bought under affluent conditions. New experiences of both content and form will lead to new forms of imagination. The commodity has a certain universal epistemology all unto itself. A genuinely new experience requires attempting a form of living outside of the mere content it has to offer. To experiment by endlessly manipulating new content alone (writing, painting, speaking, etc. or anything that can be consumed within thought after it is distributed) can only result in a sort of pseudo-experimentation at best which ultimately requires the combination of new physical movement patterns (gestures, stratagems, placements, perceived physical laws, ineffable circumstances behind the formation of groups or ideas, the process of distribution/displacement as opposed to the consumable object of what is distributed), or in other words, new functions of placement within space-time outside of where the old functions would have normally situated ones presence via their enforced routine in order to reach an authentic experimentation which isn't merely a rehash of forms disguised desperately by supposedly "new" content. While capitalist reign is dominant, the only hope for this appears to be in the act of nomadism -- physically living outside of the movement patterns and boring chronological formalisms (i.e. highschool, university, job, etc.) as required by the rule of commodity-domestication. The commodity can only bring mass-produced experiences to us as we sit, privileged and stationary, barely moving at all from our already-determined, local topographical experiences (our epistemology has no where to run). Imagination remains as something that is totally defined by capitalist diction; as something that is allowed expression only within the space-time patterns as permitted by capitalist diction or not permitted to flourish at all (The docile champions of the rulebook, i.e. the publishers of Fifth Estate with their pretend-radical article submission guidelines based in a long-reified intellectual "style" -- "Referencing system: Harvard" --, exemplify this well: imagination only counts for these types of journals if introduced under a systematized method, telling imagination itself how it may and may not act. The counterrevolutionary implications of such pretensions dictating a proper revolutionary / radical "style" are hilariously absurd). As Gilles Dauvé says when speaking of the contribution to "radical" thought / action that grows out of a university campus (petri dish): "Official 'revolutionary' thought is the scouting party of capital. Thousands of appointed functionaries criticize capitalism from every direction." We find the same sort of absurdity in free online journals like http://www.languageandcapitalism.info in that they are run by a collective of university professors who are ultimately complacent functionaries of capital when considering their literal living / movement patterns as human beings. When pretend radical thought becomes stuck within a rulebook, or elucidated as official by, for instance, a group of professors applying professional titles to it such as "critical discourse analysis," it can only create unimaginative functionaries who too become stuck within the true standstill aspirations of such non-subversive rules.
We should not simply refuse modern culture; we must seize it in order to negate it. No one can claim to be a revolutionary intellectual who does not recognize the cultural revolution we are now facing. An intellectual creator cannot be revolutionary by merely supporting some party line, not even if he does so with original methods, but only by working alongside the parties toward the necessary transformation of all the cultural superstructures. What ultimately determines whether or not someone is a bourgeois intellectual is neither his social origin nor his knowledge of a culture (such knowledge may just as well be the basis for a critique of that culture or for some new creative venture), but his role in the production of the historically bourgeois forms of culture. Authors of revolutionary political opinions who find themselves praised by bourgeois literary critics should ask themselves what they’ve done wrong.
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/report.html
Against these notions which desire nothing but their eventual widely propagated alienation to the page within non-subversive intellectual circles in the name of flashing credentials, augmenting prestige or catering to approbation, the act of physically moving about within the world, moving throughout new landscapes and becoming genuinely immersed within new topography will bring us new experiences that the commodity can only represent within itself as a parodic vessel of mechanically produced-experience which callously cares nothing for human movement unless it is paid for. We should now imagine something new beyond our formal and well-priced definitions of imagination. A non-nomadic imagination which inherently comes as easier to achieve -- while at the same time pretending to be of greater validity in its traditional for-sale form -- for those with more material wealth is no definition of imagination for me.
The dictionary defines imagination as "the faculty of imagining, or of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses." If this is true, then imagination is necessarily the refusal of those images within supposedly commensurable or "objective" reality which are present to the senses (an unavoidably radical notion); is the subjective creation of new forms and formalisms; is as such necessarily radical in ephemeral presence or without existence. Anything that is not radical then, explicitly implies the absence of imagination. Let's move in step with imagination and attempt to discover those new forms of which it can do nothing but invoke in order for it to present itself as an ontological concept at all. The commodity, as a totalitarian form of movement which desires to remain old, has a vested interest in keeping ones imagination within them. The commodity requires your old methods of imagination in order to remain alive, but imagination requires no commodity unless it is working for those who are so lacking in it that they cannot envision a life without its presence. The banal repetition of commodity-form can only pretend to fill in the necessary absence of imagination that its trapped movement patterns create.