The New Daydream Imaginary: On the Ethico-Aesthetics of Spontaneous and Non-productive Thought
The Institute for Performance Studies was pleased to be a partner on the conference, “The New Daydream Imaginary: On the Ethico-Aesthetics of Spontaneous and Non-productive Thought,” held June 16-17, 2023 in the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU Woodward’s.
Organized the SCA’s Eldritch Priest, in conjunction with IdleLab, the event considered the recent philosophical and scientific rehabilitation of daydreaming as a healthy and creative activity. 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 modes of thought—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 operations of cognitive capitalism, and what remains of its potential for resistance? How does distracted fantasizing figure in the current marketplace of meaning? Is there any hope left for the safeguarding of unruly and non-commodifiable forms of intelligence? What does daydreaming mean for the neurodivergent? Is daydreaming an art? If so, then what are its aesthetic contours? How is daydreaming conceptualized by different cultures?
Speakers included: Felicity Callard, Kalina Christoff, Zachary C. Irving, Ania Malinowska, Erin Manning, and Sharon Sliwinski.
More details on the conference can be found here.
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