The Cultural Imaginary

Within a generation the problem of creating "artificial intelligence" will be substantially solved. ~ Marvin Minsky, 1967 Had Dr. Minsky (I presume) been dropping half as much acid as I was that year, he might be forgiven such a hallucinatory forecast. For my own part, I was less concerned with the future of machine intelligence than with the question of how to disinherit myself from the acquired characteristics so typical of postwar childhood. Orphans against the night, strange voices from the sky, the world unraveling. You never quite get over something like that. Missing in action, miscast, cast adrift. Picture yourself in a boat on a river... Read my lips, HAL: open the pod bay doors, motherfucker. As this Amazon search shows, "cultural imaginary" is a term of art much in vogue at the rarefied heights of contemporary literary criticism. Here's a clip from a review I found at the University of Toronto's EDGE Magazine that explains... ...[the book] also explores pop culture -- comic strips, soap operas, sermons, scientific essays. By casting their net a little wider, researchers hope to form a better understanding of how this wider body of literature is both created and received, and how it has an impact on the cultures in these areas over time and across geographical regions. This eclectic mix of literature reflects what [the author] calls "the cultural imaginary" -- how average people see themselves and make sense of the world around them in a given time and place. Science, technology, politics, the military, religion, culture. Worlds within worlds, dreams within dreams: each seemingly unconscious of the others' existence, yet all interleaving, interweaving, fabricating your so-called reality. Imagine that.

---