The Contraction of the Possible: Algorithmic Infrastructures and the Erosion of Critical Imagination

This article argues that the contemporary crisis of the public sphere cannot be adequately understood as a crisis of communication alone. What is at stake is a contraction of the horizon of the possible: a narrowing of the conditions under which alternatives can be imagined. Drawing on the Frankfurt School tradition, it develops a concept of imagination as a critical faculty grounded in Walter Benjamin’s characterisation of it as the “awareness of the de-formations of the future,” and traces its erosion through Marcuse’s analysis of one-dimensional society. The article proposes the model of Infrastructural Conditioning of Imagination (ICI), identifying three interdependent dynamics (filtering, familiarisation and anticipation) through which algorithmic systems pre-structure the field of the thinkable. Each dynamic bears on a distinct dimension of experience: filtering concerns the structure of access, familiarisation the structure of reception, and anticipation the structure of temporality. The article argues that this conditioning operates as a suppression of non-identity in Adorno’s sense, eroding the conditions of Erfahrung under which the preponderance of the object can function as a critical moment, at the level of the conditions through which subjectivity itself is formed.