Shen-yi Liao is Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of Puget Sound. He is interested in the imagination but also in too many other things.
This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Michele Moody-Adams’ recent book: Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope. See here for an introduction from Michele. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.
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Remaking Space for Justice, Literally
If imagination is the junkyard of the mind, then political imagination constitutes an especially messy area within it. Although the concept is often invoked, it is also often invoked in highly heterogeneous ways. What are philosophers of imagination to do with such a confusing concept?
In carving out a role for imagination in social movements, an innovation of Michele Moody-Adams’s Making Space for Justice is to turn what looks like a bug—the heterogeneity of imagination—into a feature. As she puts it, “the heterogeneity of imaginative activities and processes cannot undermine the projects of social movements because those projects actually presuppose that heterogeneity” (2022: 130). She accepts that there is a heterogenous set of activities and processes—which draw on different combinations of cognitive, affective, and volitional capacities, and often from different people—that generate the ideas, images, stories, and experiences that together constitute products of imagination. And it is these imaginative products, not their antecedent activities or processes, that play an important role in social change.
We will get to these imaginative products. But to start, I want to situate Moody-Adams’s account within the broader philosophy of imagination literature. Philosophers who think of imagination as a mental entity of its own kind—one that is comparable to more well-understood mental entities from folk and scientific psychology, such as belief, desire, perception, and memory—are troubled by the heterogeneity of imagination. As Amy Kind (2013) has influentially argued, however, it is doubtful that any single mental entity can play all the roles that imagination has been assigned.
In response, recent cognitive approaches to imagination have resisted positing a single imaginative entity of its own kind. These recent cognitive approaches and Moody-Adams’s account should find reciprocal affinities in each other. For example, Peter Langland-Hassan’s (2020) reductivist account analyzes imagination in terms of more basic mental entities such as belief, emotion, and intention. Or, as Moody-Adams might say, in terms of “a complex array of cognitive, affective, and even volitional capacities that can be quite heterogeneous” (2022: 130). For another example, Nick Wiltsher’s (2019, in press) process account metaphorically compares imagination to a lens: imagination magnifies, focuses, clarifies, attenuates, distorts—and, as such, enables norm-governed transitions from one state to another. Or, as Moody-Adams might say, “through the exercise of imagination, human beings can generate ideas, images, stories, and experiences that present constructively unfamiliar possibilities and perspectives and stimulate novel reflection on what is actual and familiar” (2022: 127–128).
Turn now to the products of the heterogeneous imaginative activities and processes. Moody-Adams posits four types of imaginative products, each corresponding to a form of activism in social movements (2022: 131). Aesthetic imagination (ch. 4) refers to artistic and architectural products that alter a society’s political aesthetics. Epistemic imagination (ch. 5) refers to conceptual products that capture facts of injustice. Narrative imagination (ch. 6) refers to narrative products that either offer utopian visions or dystopian cautions. Sympathetic imagination refers to human insight into the suffering and pain of others.
All three chapters on imaginative products, and their roles in shaping social change, start from the same idea: “Contemporary global challenges to the symbolic celebration of colonialism and racism are thus a powerful restatement of a familiar idea: the notion that we cannot remake the world in the pursuit of human freedom and human dignity unless we can first reimagine it.” (2022: 118–119). I am in complete agreement with Moody-Adams on the importance of these imaginative products for social change. But I also want to advocate for a slightly more materialist implementation of the same idea, for two reasons.
First, I worry that the specific phrasing of this idea suggests that it is a one-way street from reimagining to remaking. Instead, I believe that reimagining and remaking exists in a complex system that involves dynamic backs-and-forths. This view can be motivated by a growing recognition in contemporary cognitive science that thinking doesn’t only happen in the brain. We use parts of the world in our thinking: we use cameras to see, we use devices to diagnose, and we use memorials to remember. However, given that that the world we inhabit has been made by racism and other oppressive systems, there are parts of it that taint aspects of our cognition (Liao & Huebner 2021; Liao & Carbonell in press). Imagination is no exception. For example, as Teresa Blankmeyer Burke says, “The experience of hearing people in Hearing worlds thwarts the imagination; one cannot know what it is to experience the world of hearing privation unless one has never heard” (2014: 9). A world structured by ableism constrains what people who are not targets of that ableism are capable of imagining.
On my view, it is unrealistic to think that we cannot remake the world in the pursuit of human freedom and human dignity unless we can first reimagine it. If our imaginings are bounded by a world structured by oppression, then we may not be capable of imagining a world that is so radically different, one that is completely free of oppression. Instead, we might need to reshape our unjust imaginings incrementally by remaking the world piece by piece—remaking space for justice, literally. While “imagine incrementally differently” is a terrible slogan, it may be a more realistic aim for social movements. Changing material reality is not only good in itself, it is also good as a way to change minds, including our individual and collective imaginings. We do have to reimagine differently to remake the world, but we also have to remake the world to reimagine differently.
Second, I worry that the specific phrasing of this idea suggests that the problem with racist memorials is merely symbolic. Instead, I believe that the problem is also material—they create exclusionary spaces. Moody-Adams urges us to take seriously the symbolic representations of racist memorials that have been the target of political protests. Her discussion focuses on the expressive contents of these memorials, and the expressive harms that result from them. As such, she characterizes political protests against these memorials as social movements that challenge “a society’s symbolic commitments to injustice” (2022: 143).
On my view, while racist memorials do have expressive harms that result from their symbolic representation, their primary harms go beyond the merely symbolic. To motivate this view, we can compare memorials to speech: in addition to saying things, they also do things—including non-communicative things, such as enacting permissions (Friedell & Liao in press).
Consider a “whites only” sign at a restaurant during the era of (overt) racial segregation (McGowan 2012: 125–128). True enough, the sign is a symbolic representation of racial segregation, and as such it does expressively harm. Nevertheless, its primary harm is not from the racial segregation it symbolizes, but from the racial segregation it enacts: it excludes non-whites from the restaurant. As such, protests against a “whites only” sign are not only social movements against a symbolic commitments to injustice, but social movements against a material commitments to injustice—in this case, a commitment to an exclusionary space.
Racist memorials also enact permissions, albeit more subtly. In representing a dishonorable person as honorable, a memorial can proscribe disrespectful behaviors, such as vandalism. In fact, Confederate memorials may even enact permissions that go beyond the memorials themselves. For example, they can proscribe—at least in its presence—characterizing the U.S. Civil War as being primarily about slavery, or criticizing the military generals and soldiers who primarily fought for the preservation of slavery. True enough, racist memorials are symbolic representations of racism, and as such they do expressively harm. Nevertheless, their primary harm is not from the racism they symbolize, but the racism they enact. As such, protests against these memorials are not best characterized as social movements against a society’s symbolic commitments to injustice, but social movements against a society’s material commitments to injustice. With its characteristic humanity, Making Space for Justice gives a powerful argument against impulsive vandalism and vigilante removal of some memorials. Still, at their moral best, these impulses can give rise to social movements for remaking the space for justice, literally.
Making Space for Social Justice carves out an important role for imagination in social movements. Despite my minor disagreements, I found its overall vision compelling, and I have learned much from its careful case studies. It is a wonderful bridge for philosophers of imagination, like myself, who want to extend their work into the political realm.
References
Burke, Teresa Blankmeyer (2014). “Armchairs and Stares: On the Privation of Deafness”, in H-Dirksen L. Bauman & Joseph J. Murray (eds.), Deaf Gain: Raising the Stakes for Human Diversity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 3–22.
Friedell, David & Liao, Shen-yi (in press). “How Statues Speak”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
Kind, Amy (2013). “The Heterogeneity of the Imagination”, Erkenntnis 78(1): 141–159.
Langland-Hassan, Peter (2020). Explaining Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.
Liao, Shen-yi & Huebner, Bryce (2021). “Oppressive Things”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103(1): 92–113.
Liao, Shen-yi & Carbonell, Vanessa (in press). “Materialized Oppression in Medical Tools and Technologies”, American Journal of Bioethics.
Moody-Adams, Michele (2022). Making Space for Justice. New York: Columbia University Press.
Wiltsher, Nick (2019). “Imagination: A Lens, Not a Mirror”, Philosophers’ Imprint 19(30): 1–30.
Wiltsher, Nick (in press). “Imagination as a Process”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
Reply to Liao: Aesthetic Activism
The chapters comprising Part II of Making Space for Justice analyze three varieties of social movement activism— aesthetic activism, language activism, and narrative activism—that draw upon the powers of imagination. They target what Charles Taylor calls the “social imaginary”: images, symbols, stories, and legends through which most of a society’s citizens understand the conceptual underpinnings of their way of life, and by reference to which they take that way of life to make legitimate normative demands. These remarks address three concerns about aesthetic activism raised by Professor Shen-yi Liao’s engaging commentary.
What is aesthetic activism?
Aesthetic activism challenges art and artifacts that symbolically represent social narratives which objectify, stigmatize, and even dehumanize socially non-dominant groups. The ambiguity of the word “challenges” is important. Aesthetic activism may involve quite varied endeavors, such as serving on a committee deciding which monuments to allow in public spaces; preparing petitions seeking to remove a monument from a public space; protesting a monument in situ; spray-painting or otherwise defacing a monument; actively removing, toppling, or even destroying a monument. Yet aesthetic activism is collectively most rational and morally most defensible when it avoids precipitous actions, and rests on careful consideration of the context in which a challenged monument was produced and the role that contemporary events may play in licensing some interpretations rather than others.
What are the theoretical underpinnings of aesthetic activism?
The underlying theory involves six claims:
1. Monuments and memorials can be symbolic expressions of the intentions and goals of oppressive and discriminatory institutions, practices, and actions.
Making Space for Justice discusses Confederate monuments and memorials as examples.
2. A symbol is an entity or mark that represents or stands for something else.
As Hannah Pitkin held, symbolic representation involves one entity “standing for” something or someone else.
For instance, Confederate Monuments stand for or represent the “Lost Cause” narrative that (among other things) defends the oppressive and violent excesses of white supremacy.
3. When a symbol represents or stands for a narrative meant to justify oppression and unjust discrimination, it can constitute expressive harm.
This claim is implicit in the work of social movements. Chapter 4 defends it with an analogy to J. L. Austin’s notion that we must understand a speech act by reference to the “total speech situation.”
On the analogy, the “total expressive situation” of Confederate monuments includes the Lost Cause narrative plus the practices of contemporary agents who clearly treat the monuments as symbolic expressions of white supremacy.
We don’t need to attribute agency to stone statues and metal signs—as Professor Liao wants to do—to understand how such entities constitute expressive harm.
Social movement activists and movement intellectuals correctly maintain that people who create, display and defend Confederate statutes and Jim Crow signs (and not the statues and signs themselves) “enact” racism and discrimination.
4. Expressive harm is harm to one’s non-material interests, as distinct from the harm that “ordinary” slander and libel may do to one’s material interests (say, in having a good reputation).
As I argue in other writing (drawing on work by Elizabeth Anderson and Richard Pildes), expressive harm is harm to our non-material, psycho-social interests in being recognized as worthy of equal consideration by the communities we inhabit.[i]
5. Some cases of expressive harm also qualify as “citizenship harm”—as when the state treats members of certain racial groups as inferior, or (as in chattel slavery) as nonparticipants in the collective life of the community. (see Ch. 4).
In “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” King describes the humiliation he experienced when confronting “whites only” signs in Birmingham stores. Here, expressive harm was also citizenship harm.
6. Expressive harm is real harm, not “symbolic harm.”
Despite Professor Liao’s assertions to the contrary, nowhere does Making Space for Justice say that expressive harm is not real. Even when expressive harm does not rise to citizenship harm, it is real harm.
How is aesthetic activism possible?
It draws on the capacity to understand that a given social imaginary could have a different content, and on the willingness to challenge its current content. Moreover, as Václav Havel argues in “The Power of the Powerless,” even when we live in totalitarian regimes governed by “totalizing” narratives, we do not lose the capacity to consider the possibility of (i.e., to imagine the possibility of) an alternative way of life. Finally, the word “ imagination” is shorthand for a complex, heterogeneous set of processes and activities, and it is unlikely that all of the capacities through which we might imagine an alternative could ever be entirely destroyed. Remember that many people living with aphantasia (lacking the capacity to “see with the mind’s eye”) —people like Disney animator Glen Keane—can be creative visual artists whose creations enrich the imaginations and lives of millions.[ii] In confirming the resilience of human inventiveness, these achievements help to explain how aesthetic activism is possible.
Notes
[i] Michele Moody-Adams “Is There A ‘Safe Space‘ For Academic Freedom?” in Jennifer Lackey, editor, Academic Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 36-60.
[ii] The Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience at the University of Glasgow offers an online version of an exhibition of visual art and design by people who live with aphantasia. See: https://www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/cspe/engagement/extreme-imagination/Centre