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06/06/2005 Archived Entry: "Imagination"

Imagination
A draft of an entry for this project, The Digital Dictionary of Pivotal Terms.

Imagination
The imaginative drives the Web. Conjecture is at the heart of its early incarnations as well as its later ones. Vannevar Bush imagined an office desk where everything interlinked; Ted Nelson imagined Xanadu (itself an early fantasy of virtuality). And Tim-Berners Lee imagined a space where a scientific community could work together in ways not yet conceived. To make the Web happen, its inventors had to conjecture the possibility of an information society where that society did not yet exist.
But writing’s foundations are in referentiality, not imagination. As Jack Goody notes, the earliest moments in writing, the list or the table, were based on referentiality. Figures were meant to represent actualities. With the rise of print culture, referentiality became embedded ideologically and practically. In pedagogy, it emerged as disciplinary study (this study is theology/this study is law) and, more fundamentally, as the topic sentence. The topic sentence has done everything it can to reduce writing to the non-imaginative: it is a declaration intended to stand for all that will follow. It is rigid. It is fixed.
“‘Imaginative’ suggests pliancy, liquidity, the vernal” Burke states (225). Liquid for how it resists the rigidity of referentiality. Without reference, meaning evokes possibilities rather than situates one possibility. Baudrillard called this process commutation. But Baudrillard seems to leave out the imaginative as also a commutative process, focusing instead on the mere exchange of signifiers without reference. That exchange is vital for evoking the imaginative, for without it, we achieve merely bureaucracy of thought. “Call the possibilities ‘imaginative,’” Burke writes. “And call the carrying-out of one possibility the bureaucratization of the imaginative” (225). This bureaucratization Burke connects to ritual. Writing as ritual resists the imagination in terms of the digital. “First have purpose,” is one such ritual. “First have an audience” is another. “Where’s your topic sentence,” yet another. Our writing rituals force digital culture into these already accepted structures and systems we have bureaucratized. Why can’t we imagine other kinds of spaces than those already ritualized in the university or our daily habits?
The Web space does not have to be bureaucratic. It can be liquid. Already, we find imaginative places of writing emerging: memory maps created on the photo sharing site Flickr, weblogs which go beyond personal writing and explore cities or desires, portals where users congregate and swap ideas, files, links. To encounter or engage these spaces is not the same as encountering print. Their very logics often encourage speculation over referentiality (a memory map imagining place rather than representing it). That pedagogy is slow (or resistant) to be as imaginative, or to work with the imaginative (i.e. “what if” as opposed to “it is”) is telling. It forces us to consider whether there is room for pedagogy and web writing, or if there is only room for the bureaucratization of web writing.