The New Daydream Imaginary: On the Ethico-Aesthetics of Spontaneous Thought
15-17 June 2023, Vancouver, BC
In his 1972 essay “Passing for Human” (which was read at the second annual Science-Fiction Convention in Vancouver), Philip K Dick observed that The State was unable to tame the erratic behaviours associated with youth culture, and predicted that burnouts, paranoids, and heavy trippers would therefore be the salvation of the future in North America. However, Dick’s prediction has not exactly come to pass, for today we see such modes of thought as co-constitutive of the attention and information economy. Furthermore, daydreaming itself is undergoing rehabilitation. Formerly understood as a waste of time, or an idle indulgence, daydreaming is coming to be treated as an adaptive faculty and health-giving activity. Although the concept of “positive constructive daydreaming” was proposed over fifty years ago by Jerome Singer, only recently, in the wake of neuroscience’s discovery of the “default mode network,” have scientists and philosophers begun to systematically investigate the wandering mind and develop what we might want to call a new daydream imaginary. Largely driven by a rhetoric that takes the figure of the “brain at rest” not only as an evolutionary adaptation but as evidence of our essentially creative nature, this new imaginary comes at a moment in our history when we appear to have less time to indulge its refrains, and strangely, at the same moment that a pathological form of daydreaming is being diagnosed as “maladaptive.” Yet as daydreaming acquires a new imaginary so, too, does reality. This suggests that the study of daydreaming might be usefully conducted in a mode of thought less concerned with the facticity of its expressions than the efficacy of its fabulations. As such, current research into daydreaming might be productively linked to a growing trend in the (post)humanities to explore fiction as a method for conducting scholarly research. A consequence, albeit an oblique one, of daydreaming becoming integral to daily life is that the act of imagining alternative realities is beginning to overlap with contemporary media’s way of playing fast and loose with the categories of reality, truth, and reason. Thus, as we indulge our reveries we also experience an anxiety concerning our ability to distinguish news from fiction, conspiracy from criticism, a joke from an offense. Gathering a variety of non-productive cognitive modes—from doodling to tripping to doom scrolling—within the genus of “daydreaming,” we might then ask: What role does the wandering mind play in the productive operations of cognitive capitalism, and what remains of its potential for resistance? How do cognitive processes such as distracted fantasizing figure in the current marketplace of meaning? Is there any hope left for the safeguarding of unruly and non-commodifiable forms of thought? Is Dick’s vision of individual unpredictability now more urgent than ever before?
Support by:
Vice-President Academic Conference Fund, Simon Fraser University,
Art, Performance and Cinema Studies, School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University