antinomies /&/ economies

If communities really are imagined, as Anderson imagined them to be, we still have to ask ourselves the questions: how are they imagined differently under different conditions -i.e. synchronically and diachronically; at different ecological scales, organismic and/or societal, and in different epochs- and how do these imaginaries interact with one another?

The question that seems, along these lines of thinking, to assert itself with regard to Kant, for example, is: to what extent did his evocation of the universality of 'public reason' -and of Enlightenment, thereby- depend on a blindness to the limitedness (pointed out by Cochran) of the new print medium to a literate, (and systemically-educated) bourgeoisie?

This seems to me to be an interesting question, given the radical nature of the cultural and sociopolitical changes we've been studying with regard to their historical linkages to technical advances in communications media. How much could Kant really have been aware of the socioeconomic limitations of the new print media? How does this probable oversight (or shall we say more specifically, lack of foresight -I'm recalling the words of Aeschylus' Prometheus here!) come to bear on his notion of a universal rationality; how dependent is his characterization of Enlightenment as maturity (see his late essay What is Enlightenment -and perhaps see also Foucault's late essay of the same title!) on what we can recognize, with the benefit of hindsight, as an error?

We might summarize: in the relatively massive expansions of the economies of communication that seem to accompany the advent and spread of new media (I'm thinking of Plato as Kant's inverted forebear), can we suggest the presence of a systematic tendency to overestimate the absoluteness of the transition? In other words, in the case of each emergence of a new medium, couldn't we demonstrate that while for those involved the transition seemed absolute, and was therefore theorized and described in absolute terms, in retrospect the transition was relative; the new economy never completely replaces its forebear, but rather includes and recontextualizes it. (McLuhan puts this as: "the content of a medium is another medium").

Are we not then tempted to correct Kant by asserting that his new realm of the text is not in fact a 'universal' res publica, as I think he claimed, in which the imagined community of the Enlightenment (and Platonic!) politeia could somehow assert itself directly, but is rather merely a new form of agora, in which the instrumental politics of 'private reason' -and the dynamics of Foucauldian parresia- have shifted the locus of their distributed operations to a new field; no longer performed verbally as in the Greek agora, but now performed textually in the new agora of the res publica?!