Reply to Taylor's "Modern Social Imaginaries"

The part of Taylor's piece that grabbed MY own imagination was near the end where transforming the social imaginary is disussed. He writes;

"What I'm calling the long march is a process whereby new practices, or modifications
of old ones, either developed through improvisation among certain groups and strata
of the population [ ], or else were launched by elites in such a way as to recruit a larger
and larger base [ ]. Alternatively, in the course of their slow development and
ramification, a set of practices gradually changed their meaning for people, and hence
helped to constitute a new social imaginary ( the "economy" for example). The result in
all these cases was a profound transformation of the social imaginary in Western societies
, and thus of the world in which we live (30)"

This got me thinking of how the mainstream has/is beginning to now think in terms of the globe; now it is not only the upside of the so-called 'global village' that is in public consciousness, but also the oft-disavowed underside. Indeed in my class, "The Optical Unconscious; Aesthetics in the Age of Photography", we are going to be talking about the postmodern critique of landscape photography- the valorization of panoramic nature photographs over those that show 'nature' as both a beautiful, BUT ALSO a industry-abused entity, or more accurately, these critiques want to explore the fact that nature is overwhelmingly thought of/treated in terms of RESOURCES.

Although my teacher did not see her project as a form of anti-civ activism ( I asked), it nonetheless is a potent form of activism. For the project, my professors, Maria Whiteman and Imre Szeman took the Trans-Siberian express (which crosses Siberia, Mongolia and China), "a journey that fits the genre of adventure travel," traversing "spaces of great natural beauty across two continents." It is also a journey through a zone of intense factory production, and it is this human imprint within nature that they are interested in within their photography and analysis. When I spoke informally with Whiteman, she was interested in showing the side of production we don't always see or think about. She wanted to look at the relationship between product and its origin. Where does this enter human thoughts?

This is a connection that people are making more and more these days, and we are currently seeing people begin to think about the origins of their food. We don't just eat eggs anymore (free range? organic? etc) and hardly anyone can honestly tell themselves that their bbg burgers came from a happy, pasture-roving cow. Indeed, one milestone of such thought happened not in food, but in clothing, as Kathy Lee Gifford and her K-mart clothing line made foreign slave labout, and child slave labour common knowledge. Corporate accountability both at home and overseas was made an issue, as we continued to see with outcries with Coke, Nike, McDonalds and their brethren. And we are currently seeing this accountability continue on to food: 'Eat Local!' and 'Buy Organic!' are no longer only the cries of the dreaded, but slogans you can see at Fortinos and on greasy spoon menus. I forecast that the next issue in this ongoing food thought will be GMO's (genetically modified organisms), which are brought to us by Monsanto- who like to do things like put fish genes in our tomatoes.

Anyhow, all this is an example of how questioning where our food and our products come from, AND how they are produced, both of which have been thought of for awhile now, has entered what Taylor would call a 'transformation', where we rarely think of the former without the latter, and have almost even entered the realm of the "taken-for-granted shape of things too obvious to mention" (31).