On Public Imagination

A Political and Ethical Imperative

Victor Faessel, Richard Falk, Michael Curtin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000747423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Politik

In this wide-ranging and multidisciplinary volume, leading scholars, activists, journalists, and public figures deliberate about the creative and critical potential of public imagination in an era paradoxically marked by intensifying globalization and resurgent nationalism. Divided into five sections, these essays explore the social, political, and cultural role of imagination and civic engagement, offering cogent, ingenious reflections that stand in stark contrast to the often grim rhetoric of our era. Short and succinct, the essays engage with an interconnected ensemble of themes and issues while also providing insights into the specific geographical and social dynamics of each author's national or regional context.

• Part 1 introduces the reader to theoretical reflections on imagination and the public sphere;
• Part 2 illustrates dynamics of public imagination in a diverse set of cultural contexts;
• Part 3 reflects in various ways on the urgent need for a radically transformed public and civic imagination in the face of worldwide ecological crisis;
• Part 4 suggests new societal possibilities that are related to spiritual as well as politically revolutionary sources of inspiration;
• Part 5 explores characteristics of present and potentially emerging global society and the existing transnational framework that could provide resources for a more humane global order.

Erudite and thought-provoking, On Public Imagination makes a vital contribution to political thought, and is accessible to activists, students, and scholars alike.

Chapter 18 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

PART I

Imagination

Theory and Engagement

1

RALLYING

Imagination’s Political Process

Julie A. Carlson

The association of imagination with make-believe and with methodological practices that characterize the humanities and fine arts has often been said to undermine its “street cred” and contributions to public policy. This chapter argues the opposite. It puts into dialogue divergent strands of discourse on imagination to suggest why leaderless social movements such as Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and Dream Defenders are grounded in imaginative practices that are reinventing politics and why this re-orientation toward process over object is vital to the efficacy of political activity. People cannot be rallied to action if their spirits are incapable of rallying. The justice achieved by such rallying depends on the extent to which people are committed to continually reevaluating their identities, platforms, and aims.

Three of the most searching investigations of imagination come from the fields of British Romanticism, the Black radical tradition, and contemporary neuroscience. Despite their very different methods and objectives, writers in each field agree on features of imagination that specify the usefulness of its approach to reality. Imagination is a mode of perception that does not require immediate sensory input. What it perceives stems from its surrounding environment, but it is neither determined by nor invested in maintaining that environment as is. Always constructing what it perceives, imagination is a form of mentation that also blurs distinctions between thinking and doing. Brain scans show that many of the same parts of the brain are activated when one is performing or simply imagining a particular action, which is why visualizing can improve performance since both are products of the same motor program. Its primary activity is connection-making, which involves also unmaking and remaking connections that have become entrained, hegemonic, deadening. Taken together, these features explain why imagination has long been considered a visionary faculty and the prime generator of creativity. Whether writers in these traditions emphasize neuronal or aesthetic mechanisms by which absent things are present in the mind/brain or are made present to consciousness, they contend that imagination broadens sense-based approaches to interpreting reality and works to extend thought and thoughtfulness beyond the empirical and the here and now.

Imagination’s circumvention of the common-sensical and reliance on unconscious processes are central to its creativity and to bringing the unforeseen into existence. This is why imagination has been deemed a revolutionary faculty and the engine of social reform. P. B. Shelley famously defends poetry—which for him encompasses all of the arts and humanities—by asserting that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. They are legislators because imaginative persons reshape public sentiment as a first step to acquiring more egalitarian laws and social policies; they are unacknowledged because policy-making is the putative domain of the social sciences and because imaginative activity is nuanced and indirect.

British Romantic-era elevations of imagination as a moral as well as aesthetic faculty have rightly been censured for their possessive investment in whiteness and theoretical undergirding of a liberal subject whose alleged sympathy is tautologically self-involved. Does the fact that this white-privileging has occurred—and continues to occur—invalidate imagination’s visionary potential? And should it discredit hope, as Afro-pessimists, no-future queer theorists, and Americanists averring the cruelty of optimism contend? Probing this question is why I began by outlining convergences among such an unlikely ensemble of theorist-activists. To my mind, perceiving their congruence illustrates not only the function of metaphor in forging what Shelley terms “before unapprehended connections” between things but also the reasons why artists constantly must remake a culture’s figures of speaking so that they at once bespeak and focalize marginalized perspectives. This commitment to re-figuring thought is crucial to destabilizing racial regimes. As Cedric Robinson argues, because racial regimes are forgeries of memory and meaning rather than naturalized entities, the dominating connections that they have forged are vulnerable to protest. The trouble is that perceived vulnerability provokes primitive defenses, especially in those whose power is established and thereby unjustly maintained. Direct attacks on them are risky and thus require training in indirection by those whose repeated experiences of injustice have made them experts in improvisation. And thus who act in accordance with the rhythms of the “inside songs.”

To the hegemonic workings of Romantic-era imaginations, then, the Black radical tradition offers some basic correctives. The subject-object binary that grounds Western conceptions of selfhood and democracy endorses slavery, treats others as things, and profits off of their objectification. To the degree that past or current imaginations strive to isolate self from other, foster zero-sum mentalities, and affirm the sovereignty and immateriality of mind, they are ignorant about the brain and are using old power tools to renovate and secure master’s houses. By contrast, art in the Black radical tradition affirms collective and non-urbane renewals that prioritize process over objects. Black Radical imagination is improvisational, at play in ensembles rather than in separate and individuated individuals. Moreover, the freedom dreams that Black radicals conjure re-evoke massive resistances by no-things whose palpability in the present is the motor of whatever inspiration ensues. To say that histories of Black struggle are inseparable from histories of Black music sounds romanticized only if one hears struggle as dissonant or disconcerting and those qualities as unmusical. Here, the imaging of neuroscience is useful in registering that memory and imagination are part of the same network and that, when confronted with obstacles, neurons are resourceful at discovering new pathways. What “is,” that is, cannot be entirely separated from “was” or “ought,” but this does not make them an identity.

I catch something of this background in the call and responsiveness of Angela Davis’s “Power to the Imagination,” when she both delivered a lecture and took it to the streets as part of Occupy Philly in late October 2011. The transfer from “people” to “imagination,” with its implied shift of power from rights to rites and writing, is in keeping with an aesthetics of fugitivity and conceptualization of freedom as marronage. One can, and should, hear records of defeat in this transposition of rights to rites: minimal discernible shifts of power; palpable shiftiness in the terms of order; dead bodies of color left in the streets that “the 99%” ostensibly occupy; countless projects to wall people in and out. But articulating why this occasions yet should not sanction defeatism marks another convergence among my before-unconnected ensemble.

The conclusion that “despair is criminal,” reached by British Romantic-era radicals Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin in novels that expressly delineate the impossible obstacles that disenfranchised subjects confront in getting their stories heard, is rephrased but echoed in Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s conviction that subjects who are characteristically criminalized know that something more is going on and know just where it is happening and always has been happening—in the wild sociality of the undercommons. In such a space, folks are welcome so long as they reject a politics of recognition and its demanding uplifts. Their type of disengagement does not mean that undercommoners are, or wish to be or remain, invisible. Or that they are not preparing for a fight. They are. And how. It’s that their imaginations are geared toward creativity, not identity and its reflections, and their arts co-implicate struggle and power.

In other words, radical Romantic imaginations contend that despair is “criminal” because it occasions a degree of hardening that forecloses possibility. While hardening is a reasonable response to being on the receiving end of racist projections and fire-power, Black radical improvisation keeps imaginations attuned to the sound of surprise. Staying open to surprise can be a crushing burden for subordinated peoples but it is also their lived reality, a major lesson of their histories, and their most impressive legacy. Acknowledging this skill foregrounds an aesthetic reason why Black lives matter, and why Blackness as radicals construe it remains avant-garde. Moreover, the bi-directionality between ought and is, whereby the “ought” of justice is situated in the “is” of a doubled consciousness and its un-self-conscious forms of sociality, is what new social movements like Occupy Now or Black Lives Matter embody. Their reinvention of political life, as Davis puts it, involves artful practices that stimulate imagination, evoke surprise, and are alive to the intersections among struggles as well as identity categories. Their mode of organization is prophetic by staying cognizant of the benefits of disorganization, a basic lesson of brain-based models of creativity. Relevant too is the narrowing of attention that attentiveness mandates and the habituation that neuronal efficiency dictates unless roadblocks are made or found to forge new connections. The evaluative standard for imaginative activists is whether whatever gets reassembled is then valued because of the exclusions its formation entails or because it provides a platform from which to conjure again the before unapprehended. Cultivating desire for the latter is what the affective power of art strengthens by ensuring that persons do not have to stare into that void alone.

References

Andreasen, Nancy C. 2006. The Creative Brain: The Science of Genius. New York: Penguin.

Carlson, Julie A. 2012. “Romantic Poet Legislators: An End of Torture.” In Speaking About Torture, edited by Julie A. Carlson and Elisabeth Weber. 221–246. New York: Fordham.

Davis, Angela Y. 2016. Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Doidge, Norman. 2007. The Brain that Changes Itself. New York: Penguin.

Godwin, William. 1794. Things as They Are; Or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. London: Printed for B. Crosby. https://archive.org/details/thingsastheyare00godwgoog/.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions. www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf.

Howard, Charles. 2017. “Angela Davis: Power to the Imagination.” Huffington Post, December 6, 2017. www.huffpost.com/entry/angela-davis-occupy-philly_b_1067740.

Kelley, Robin D. G. 2002. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press.

Modell, Arnold H. 2003. Imagination and the Meaningful Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

———. 2010. “barbara lee.” In B Jenkins, 84–87. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392675.

Roberts, Neil. 2015. Freedom as Marronage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Robinson, Cedric J. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press.

———. 1980. The Terms of Order: Political Leadership and the Myth of Leadership. Albany: State University of New York Press.

———. 2007. Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film Before World War II. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1821. A Defence of Poetry. Poetry Foundation, 2009. www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/essays/detail/69388.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1798. Maria; or The Wrongs of Woman. Project Gutenberg, 2006. www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/134.

Zeki, Semir. 2009. Splendors and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity, and the Quest for Human Happiness. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

2

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE PUBLIC IMAGINATION AND WHY?

Drucilla Cornell and Stephen D. Seely

What do we mean by the “public imagination”? We could look, first, to definitions of the “public.” Jurgen Habermas, for example, has argued that a democratic public sphere first developed in the bourgeois revolutions where people came together in cafés and social clubs to discuss the burning political issues of their time. Crucial to this public, and to the creation of shared meaning, was the printing press, which allowed pamphlets and newspapers to be widely circulated. What is important to Habermas, however, is not the political imagination, but the shared meaning that grew out of these public spaces. Many social theorists have bemoaned the collapse of the public sphere in modern democracies in Europe and especially in the U.S., where only the church (and, perhaps, as queer theorists have argued, bars) seems to provide space for collective political and ethical discussion.

But we approach this question somewhat differently. Of course, we accept the insight that public spaces have diminished, especially with the collapse of the industrial unionist movement, which provided an entire edifice of public spaces, most notably workers meetings and union halls. Our approach to the public imagination, however, begins with Spinoza, the greatest thinker of the imagination in the European canon. As we argued immediately after the 2016 U.S. election, Trump’s movement—as well as similar fascist, xenophobic, nationalist movements arising throughout Europe—is tied to the collapse of any ethical horizon or sense of shared meaning within neoliberal capitalism: its distorted myths of superiority are an attempt to overcome this nihilism and cultivate a sense of collective belonging (Cornell and Seely 2016). We believe that Spinoza’s philosophy can help make further sense of this phenomenon, including how the left might build an effective response to it.

To put it very simply, Spinoza teaches us that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Public Imagination: The Challenge of 21st Century Populist and Authoritarian Politics
• PART I: Imagination: Theory and Engagement
• PART II: Imagining Communities and Rights
• PART III: Ecological Imaginations
• PART IV: Rupture and Revolution
• PART V: Across the Border
• Coda
• Appendix
• Index