A post by Janine Jones

There seems to be a general consensus that imagining — sometimes thought of as seeing with the mind’s eye — is inherently representational. How could re-presenting to ‘the mind’s eye’ what is not present fail to involve a representation of that which is presently absent. Isn’t such a form of representation at the heart of what it is to imagine?

In this post, I take advantage of the bounteous nature of junkyards. I participate in a form of engagement that both philosophy and junkyards invite:  wondering and wandering. I wonder as I wander through the junkyard trying to imagine how what I am trying to imagine could be in the junkyard. I am trying to discover a type of imagining, in the junkyard, that bears representational constituents (perhaps even necessarily so), but which is, itself, non-representational, at least at the non-sub-personal level.

In this post, I introduce two (epistemically) possible non-representational imaginings. The first presents a possible imagining of a Town Hall. The second pertains to imagining abolition. The first may set us up for understanding the second; the second may allow us to better understand a claim that I make regarding the first.

In the fall of 2016, I conducted focus groups with black girls in an alternative school in Greensboro, North Carolina, in preparation for an upcoming African American Policy Forum Town Hall (AAPF) (Jones, forthcoming). The girls were sent to this school after being expelled from their regular school. On various occasions, I explained to the girls the set-up of an AAPF Town Hall and its purpose. The Town Hall included various types of essential supporting roles. But the basic set-up required (a) testifiers — black girls who provided testimony about systemic/structural problems they faced in their lives (b) a set of commissioners who: (i) listen to the girls; (ii) understand the relevant issues; (iii) are on the side of what the girls are advocating for, e.g., fighting against forms of sex-gender discrimination targeting black girls in schools; (iv) hold positions of power or decision-making clout in the community. Condition (iv) is essential to a Town Hall, because action on behalf of the girls is its ultimate goal. Finally, (v), the presence of community beyond the commissioners and other testifiers, is integral to a Town Hall. I showed the girls a video, Breaking the Silence, which presented an AAPF Town Hall. I thought doing so might be a good way to acquaint them with a Town Hall, short of attending one. Bolstered by my prescriptive description of a Town Hall, the Town Hall in the video could serve as a model.

The girls seemed more or less interested in the video. However, one girl — I’ll call her Dantze —turned her back to the monitor. A white woman — either a teacher or an administrator — entered the room. Indicating Dantze, she asked me (annoyance in her voice) “Is she paying attention?” I responded (annoyance in mine): “She’s fine.” The woman left. Dantze continued with her back to the screen. A few minutes later she turned around to watch. By the end of the video, some of the girls were crying. Others comforted their classmates. One student volunteered to be a testifier. Dantze left the room. I was told later that Dantze had found a counselor and told the counselor about things that had happened to her. Dantze gave a testimony she had never provided before to the authorities in that space. Due to her testimony, the school was able to demand that the state pay for the therapy she so badly needed. Without her testimony (or someone’s testimony) no one at the school had ever been able to make an argument on Dantze’s behalf for state monies. As I wander around the junkyard amongst all kinds of shiny objects, I make out something that is not an object at all. It’s Dantze enactively imagining a Town Hall in her here and now, through a process that enactively engaged her environment. Indeed, she imagined a Town Hall that got the desired result:  an intervention that could help her.

I conjecture that Dantze’s overall imagining was a creative process of worldmaking, and that her overall process — with representational components — was an instance of non-representational imagining, at least at the personal level. Two important components, whose representational status would be, I think, uncontested, had been given by the prescriptive description that I gave of a Town Hall and the video showing an instance of a Town Hall. Singly or taken together, each could be understood as affordances for Dantze; that is, as providing possibilities of action given through an experience of the environment that compels a being “to act in a way that is solicited or afforded by the environment” (Siegel, 53). However, even if these affordances, in concert with idealization/abstraction processes, were constituents of Dantze’s overall enactive imagining, her overall imagining was not reduced to them. What is included as constituting Dantze’s enactive imagining is not only that which was embodied in and enacted by her but also that which was embedded and extended in environmental structures beyond her embodiment and which were put into play with her and each other by her, through the ways in which she engaged the environment. Yet, how those structures engaged with Dantze was not determined by her. She had to go with their flow(s), which she had set into motion, and leverage those flows to guide her course. The overall enactive imagining could not be said to be representational simply because the component affordances of the imagining were representational. Why? Because an essential part of what would have constituted the overall imagining would have been outside of Dantze’s representational purview.

Now I turn briefly to imagining abolition to provide an illustration of an enactive imagining that is embodied, enacted, embedded, and extended in environmental structures, (Gallagher 2017, 26-47), and which possesses representational constituents and yet is not, overall, representational. Imagining abolition proves to be quite an elusive project. (Davis 2003) This may be, in part, because imaginers try to imagine a representation that has correctness conditions (Roelofs 2018, 247), which if not satisfied would mean that the imagining of abolition had failed.

In Tip of the Spear, Orisanmi Burton analyzes what he calls the Long Attica Revolt, a genealogy of Black radical and revolutionary struggle that emerged among New York’s captive population during the early 1970s” (Burton 2023, 3). He “decarcerate[s] our understanding of that rebellion, revealing a Black radical praxis of abolitionist worldmaking (78, emphasis added). Rebels “demarcated new spaces for being in common,” (91) thereby constructing “what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls an ‘abolition geography’” (91). They organized disorder. A state trooper could be heard saying “they seem to be building as much as they are destroying!” (91) The one small point I stress here is that the rebels’ worldmaking was itself an instance of enactively imagining abolition. Doing so included representational components (e.g., “to blow the colonial world to smithereens is henceforth a clear image within the grasp and imagination of every colonized subject” (87)) Yet I propose that their overall imagining abolition was non-representational in essence. A representation of the totality would have been beyond the purview of the collective (or any individual, for that matter). We might understand a way in which a representation of the totality would have been beyond the purview of the collective as follows.

An essential correctness condition for a representation of abolition includes abolishing the prison and reliance on “violence and carceral techniques” (95). However, in enactively imagining abolition, the Attica rebels “erected a prison within…an abolitionist geography, and summarily executed three men for violating an unspoken code of conduct and being difficult to manage…” (95). But the failure to satisfy the correctness condition did not bring it about that the rebels’ collective process failed to constitute enactively imagining abolition. Whereas a contradiction in a representation-object might act as an impediment to imagining abolition by flagging a failure — i.e., the contradiction — this failure within the context of the rebels’ imagining abolition was a condition of possibility for the imagining. (95)

If flouting an essential correctness condition of representation can make worldmaking-imagining possible, then worldmaking-imagining is not essentially representational. At the heart of imagining a Town Hall or imagining abolition is worldmaking. That is, forging a world that is not present rather than seeing, with the mind’s eye, something that is absent in the world.

References

Breaking the Silence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WLbPC9vDrM&t=4s.

Burton, O. (2023). Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt.

Davis, A. (2003). Are Prisons Obsolete. Seven Stories Press.

Gallagher. S.(2017).  Enactivist Interventions:  Rethinking the Mind. Oxford University Press.

Jones, J. (forthcoming). Revelations: What I’ve Learned or Unlearned from Black Girls:  Learning from Scratch. Peter Lang.

Roelofs, L. (2018). Why Imagining Requires Content: A Reply to a Reply to an Objection to Radical. Enactive Cognition.” Thought. 7, 246-254.

Siegel, S. (2014). Affordances and the Contents of Perception. Does Perception Have Content? ed. B. Brogaard. Oxford University Press. 51-57.