Imagine a World like That…

A song that has stuck with me in particular lately, not merely due to a catchy hook but for its distinctive pathos, is Imagine, from Ariana Grande’s magnificent new album Thank U, Next. With the song Grande paints an idealised picture of a relationship with the romantic subject undercut constantly with the refrain, a plea to “imagine a world like that”. The lyrics maintain a certain ambiguity, presenting multiple possibilities; That the world she describes is possible yet the subject cannot imagine it, that the world is not possible and the subject cannot imagine it, that this world comes into being through imagining it or that it cannot, but must be imagined regardless. Within these possible readings lies a pathos of unrequited fantasy, a symbolic ideal that remains out of reach.

This might the point where I come out with some pseudo-nihilist statement, coolly staring into the middle distance as I proclaim that love is just a chemical reaction maaan, it doesn’t exist. This, however, is only half the point. To be in love is to imagine, to dream. The mistake is to proceed from this to claim that love doesn’t matter. The fact remains that at some point we experience the strange and discomforting feeling that none of this is real, and in a sense we are correct. Nothing about this is as it seems, something we can ascertain as soon as we move past transcendential explanations for affects; the reality we all experience is founded upon a collectively consensual dream, the raw, unvarnished reality merely revealing itself as a further servant of the symbolic under scrutiny.

So love, in a Spinozist sense, is a series of affects given symbolic form.. this is only a step away from the “love as chemical reaction” statement, indeed shares with it a kind of cold analysis of human emotion, and yet does not in the manner of this former trite framing render it somehow less important as a result. To live is to dream, as it is to love and to feel. As such, Ariana Grande’s call to imagine becomes both a call to imagine something inevitably unfulfilled, and to express love in its true form, for the romantic subject to submit to the fantasy world of the relationship. This element of gossamer thin tension lies between the twin subject of a relationship and its outside, the point at which both enter the immersion tank and a new symbolic reality forms from the affects generated by their interaction.

So romance, love, becomes the formation of a symbolic reality. It is to “imagine a world” in a true sense, as any collaboration with another human being is to generate affects with symbolic resonance, creating each time a new microcosm of further effects. Love is necessarily a kind of imaginary world, the horizon of which defines its possibilities. To love someone or something is to create between two things a desiring multitude of effects, and in this sense one can easily refer to the DeleuzoGuattarian multiplicity, that within such a relationship is not merely two actors but a many more in the branching effects produced.

To imagine a world then, is to love. To engage in a romantic coupling is an unconsciously desiring production of reality, and this in turn maintains itself through the contradictions of the imaginary and the symbolic, the symbolic representations of affects becoming the imaginary worlds of containment. Love is a swarm. It is a re-alignment of perception, a psychedelic invocation. This renders what begins as a realisation that love is predicated on fantasy and catapults it towards a singular power more potent than any transcendental conception of love as a spiritual force. The transcendent is removed, inarticulate; it contradicts its own attempts to lend power to worldly affects through its own rendering of them as ethereal nonentities. In truth, as anyone who has experienced any kind of emotion might have realised, it is in affects we find that which profoundly alters our experience. To imagine is to love, which is to re-align the vectors of perception itself.

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