Exploring the Social Imagination

Thursday, May 5, 2011

The Latent Hand, What is now?

I am going to present the idea that social imagination is the result of the composition of one's socialization, an ongoing relation among personal ideas as Cooley would have said. It is also dependent upon time and space in that it follows a time space continuum where there exists a past, present and future. Time, past, present and future is also dependent upon our social imagination as the social mind  needs and reacts to such order.When we remind ourselves of Escher's hands drawing hands, we can understand that Now is when we see the active hand and the other is latent. Even though we can change our view, and look at the latent hand it instantly becomes active and the other latent which was active a moment ago. We must also consider the hand that draws the hands drawing the hands in this now. When we do that, now gets mixed into the past and future, in a sense but rather we see how fluid time and space are. Social imagination is also fluid using that same illustration of hands drawing hands. We realize then that the socialization process is a stream of conscious interaction, social imagination thus is not concrete or fixed in time and space. Nonetheless, we still percieve now in relation to the past and future. Why? As it is with viewing atomic structure or particles, they do not appear until we fix our eyes on them, the latent hand becomes active when we look at it. It then becomes now!

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