María Jimena Clavel Vázquez is a PhD candidate at the St Andrews/Stirling Philosophy Graduate Programme. She works on Philosophy of Mind, Phenomenology, and Philosophy of Cognitive Science. She is particularly interested in embodied, extended and enactive approaches to cognition.
A post by María Jimena Clavel Vázquez
Imagination has been a common topic in coronavirus-related reads, both in the form of invitations to mobilize our imaginative powers and complaints about our lack thereof. This shouldn’t be surprising. Imagination is often summoned when confronted with social and political challenges. We are invited to join efforts to envision possible solutions to the problems faced by society, in general, or by a specific group of citizens. These exercises are considered an important aspect of political projects and one first step towards political change. For instance, in his 2009 Inaugural Address, former US president Barack Obama reminded his adversaries of: “what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose” (Phillips 2009).
There are two ways to make sense of this call. We might think that we are summoned as individuals to put our imaginative capacity to good use and to think about our future. Although what is at stake here is collective, the exercise is, ultimately, individual. Or, we might think that we are invited, instead, to participate in a collective exercise of imagination. We are asked to put our heads together to come up with a solution or build a project. It’s not only relevant that we think about our future but that we do so together. Collective imagination is a good candidate to make sense of at least some cases of political imagination.
Collective imagination is a specific kind of constructive imaginative project (Van Leeuwen 2013) performed by more than one individual, coordinated to jointly build a representation of a possible state of affairs. As other cases of constructive imagination, it’s a process that is extended over time and that involves all kinds of mental states. The individuals involved in the exercise might summon beliefs, sensory imaginings, affective states, etc.
Collective exercises of imagination might be spontaneous (see Michaelian & Sutton 2019). For instance, a group of friends chatting about the measures to ease the lockdown in their city might, spontaneously, start planning their future outings. This is compatible with the exercise being coordinated, as patterns of coordinated behavior often arise spontaneously.
Importantly, although often involved in collective planning and decision making processes, these exercises might arise just as a consideration of possible states of affairs. For instance, this same group of friends might be imagining an outing together just for fun.
A collective exercise of imagination might not be concerned with a collective aim at all. For instance, think of a father and a teenager who engage in an exercise of this kind with the aim of contemplating different career paths for her.
Furthermore, these exercises typically involve external elements that mediate the imaginative exercise, such as texts, pictures, objects, etc. (see Szpunar & Szpunar 2016), which often serve as anchors for the representations created (see Huebner 2018, p. 312). For instance, in thinking about possible career paths, the father and daughter might create a board with pictures of professional settings and brochures of different universities.
Finally, collective exercises of imagination might result in attitudes and beliefs that are taken up by all or only some members of the group. For instance, both father and daughter might, as a result of their imaginative process, conclude that college is the best future scenario for her. Or, she might come to believe that college is not for her, after all.
Political exercises of imagination might be thought of as cases of collective future thought (see Michaelian & Sutton 2019, Szpunar & Szpunar 2016), which is the process by which a group of people comes up with representations about their future. Collective future thought, then, would be a specific kind of collective imagination, since it is concerned specifically with possible future states of affairs related to a group. These cases of collective imagination seem to involve imagining a constrained set of possible states of affairs, namely, those that relate to possible worlds that are close, in a relevant political sense, to the actual world. In other words, scenarios that are a somewhat feasible political future for the group.
So, political exercises of collective imagination have the group in mind, so to speak; and they relate to specific interests and values. We engage in these exercises to imagine possibilities that are of concern to the group as such. For instance, we jointly imagine what the future holds if we were to support one candidate over another; or we jointly imagine what will happen if we don’t commit to lowering our carbon emissions. More often than not, political exercises of collective imagination are involved in decision making processes. Importantly, the external elements that serve as anchors for these exercises will often involve norms, laws, institutions, and regulations (see Huebner 2018).
Now, we might think that there isn’t much difference between engaging in collective exercises of imagination and individually imagining the future of our society. One could think that these consist in a bunch of us coming together to individually engage in a process of constructive imagination. By means of our individual imaginative capacities, we contribute to coming up with a representation, in which case we needn’t postulate the existence of collective imagination.
On the contrary, a summative account of collective imagination seems plausible when we consider that the resulting representations might not have occurred to each imaginer individually (see, e.g., Huebner 2018, p. 17). Michaelian & Sutton (2016) propose to think of collective future thought as a process in which cognitive labor is distributed across members, in such a way that each individual member wouldn’t be able to come up, by themselves, with the same resulting representation (Michaelian & Sutton 2019, p. 4951). In collective imagination, then, we ‘collaborate’ by distributing the cognitive load of the imaginative exercise across the individuals involved.
Moreover, this sheds some light on the advantages of engaging in collective exercises of imagination. By collaborating in jointly imagining our future we might be able to contemplate scenarios that we wouldn’t imagine by ourselves. Furthermore, when collaborating with those that are differently situated, we contemplate possibilities that don’t appear in our horizons, given our specific social, historical, political and economic background (Huebner 2018, p. 320).
Nonetheless, if we look at how imagination has been discussed in connection to the current pandemic, the picture is rather gloomy. We’ve heard repeatedly, not about the virtues of imagination, but about the way imagination has failed. Stephen Kinzer, for instance, argues that our “inability to conceive planetary threats” has led us to the current crisis (Kinzer 2020, March). And David Quammen made a similar point in The New Yorker (Quammen 2020, May).
The warning isn’t new and it has arisen mostly in connection to risk assessment. Think, for instance, of the warning advanced by Günther Anders in connection to nuclear weapons and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For him, while we are capable of great technological advancements, e.g. nuclear energy, we seem incapable to imagine the consequences of our own technological products (see Anders 1961).
For Anders, one important limitation for collective imagination stems from the way we conceive our agency, i.e. when actions appear to be beyond our individual reach. This might be due to multiple factors. He refers specifically to the alienation of workers from their labor. But there are other ways in which we might be politically alienated from exercises of collective imagination. We might not be invited to join collective imaginative exercises that concern our community. Or it might be that due to past injustices, objects that serve as cues to remember our history in the group, are not part of the external elements that anchor, and that should continue to inform, the imaginative exercise (see Tanesini 2018).
On the other hand, it might also be that we are alienated in that we are unable to conceive our agency as effective in the face of the magnitude of certain events. In that sense, Anders’ worry is magnified in the face of events such as the climate emergency and the coronavirus pandemic. In these cases, the advantages of engaging in collective exercises of imagination stand way beyond our reach because we cannot conceive of our agency in the face of the magnitude of the challenge.
Moreover, all of these limitations might come together in particularly pernicious ways. For instance, in the face of an unimaginable phenomenon such as the current pandemic, the communities that have been greatly affected have been those that are historically marginalized, e.g. in the UK, BAME communities and the elderly. We might venture to say that, due to their marginalized position, these communities were not invited to participate in the exercises of collective imagination that were involved in tackling the crisis.
More work needs to be done to understand the phenomenon of collective imagination, and its relevance in tackling serious global challenges. But we also need to think hard about how to overcome the limitations of collective imagination that stem from the political alienation of some groups.
References
Anders, G. (1961). Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. München: Beck.
Huebner, B. (2018). Planning and Prefigurative Politics. The Nature of Freedom and the Possibility of Control. In B. Huebner (Ed.), The Philosophy of Daniel Dennett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 296–329.
Kinzer, S. (2020, March). The coronavirus pandemic is a failure of imagination. The Boston Globe. Retrieved from https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/03/18/opinion/coronavirus-pandemic-is-failure-imagination/.
Michaelian, K. & Sutton, J. (2019). Collective mental time travel: remembering the past and imagining the future together. Synthese 196, pp. 4933–4960
Phillips, M. (2009). President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address. Retrieved from https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2009/01/21/president-barack-obamas-inaugural-address
Quammen, D. (2020, May). Why weren’t we ready for the coronavirus? The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/11/why-werent-we-ready-for-the-coronavirus.
Szpunar, P. & Szpunar, K. (2016). Collective future thought: Concept, function, and implications for collective memory studies. Memory Studies 9(4), pp. 376–389.
Tanesini, A. (2018). Collective Amnesia and Epistemic Injustice. In J.A. Carter, A. Clark, J. Kallestrup, S. O. Palermos & D. Pritchard (Ed.). Socially Extended Epistemology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 196–219.
Van Leeuwen, N. (2013). The Meanings of “Imagine” Part I: Constructive Imagination. Philosophy Compass 8(3), pp. 220–230.