A conference report by Avshalom Schwartz and Alicia Steinmetz
In recent years, imagination has become a renewed topic of interest for political philosophers. While political and philosophical concern with the imagination has a long history within Western thought, it has tended to be a marginal or ignored topic in contemporary political theory, in part due to the dominance of analytic moral philosophy and Kantian-inspired models of deliberation and public reasoning over the past few decades.
However, various developments in the early twenty-first century – such as the rise of new digital communication technologies, democratic backsliding, and new voices and strategies in political activism – have placed imagination back on the agenda of political philosophers. So far, many of these new explorations of the politics of imagination (and the imagination of politics) have occurred in isolation from each other.
The Stanford Imagination Workshop, organized by Avshalom Schwartz and Alicia Steinmetz with the generous support of the Stanford Humanities Center, The Zephyr Institute, and the Transformation of Democracy Workshop, was envisioned as an attempt to provide scholars a formal and institutional opportunity to converse and exchange ideas. Held from May 19-20, 2023, the Workshop brought together scholars working on the political imagination, social imaginary, the imaginal, and the history of imagination for a weekend-long discussion of the past, present, and future of these concepts. The goal of the workshop was to highlight some of the most innovative work going on in recent political philosophy surrounding the topic of imagination while also getting a sense of what we can learn from past theorization of the imagination and what ways of thinking politically about imagination are called for in the present moment.
The Workshop featured presentations from eleven scholars, including a keynote address by Michael Sonenscher, a Fellow of King’s College and former Director of Studies in History at the University of Cambridge. The various contributions to the Workshop demonstrated the centrality of imagination in science, religion, law, art, emotion, subjectivity, and democracy, ranging from the role of imagination in classical philosophy and the imaginative roots of the very notion of “political theory” in early modern England to contemporary analysis of social imaginaries and the imaginal.
Some participants focused on earlier historical accounts of the imagination and explored their implications for the politics of imagination. Elena Cagnoli Fiecconi discussed ancient accounts of future-directed imagination. While future-directed imagination is often assumed to motivate action, she explored ancient sources, in particular the Stoics and the Cyrenaics, which reveal how this type of imagining might actually quench and limit action and activity, thus carrying important insights for our understanding of central political emotions like anger, fear, and grief. Sophie Smith turned to Thomas Hobbes, showing how a proper understanding of his theory of imagination and, with it, of his account of the productive power of poetry can shed new light on one of the most puzzling aspects of his political thought: his theory of the state (or the lack thereof). And Jason Frank explored the “revolutionary controversy” of the 1790’s and its heated debates over the meaning and scope of modern democracy. Focusing on the aesthetic dimensions of these debates, Frank showed how the overthrow of monarchy was accompanied by an attempt to replace the grandiose and awe-inspiring absolutist imagery with the rational deliberation of an enlightened citizenry. At the same time, the democratic revolution was inseparable from an attempt to utilize the imagination in constructing an image of “the people” as a collective agent capable of action.
Avshalom Schwartz is a Postdoctoral Fellow with Stanford University’s Civics Initiative, working on the role of imagination in politics and in the history of philosophy and political thought. His current book project, Democratic Phantasies: Political Imagination and the Athenian Democracy, offers a new account of the “democratic imagination” by attending to the role played by the imagination in the ancient Athenian democracy and in classical political thought.
Alicia Steinmetz is an Assistant Professor of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University
Other conference participants offered challenges to dominant understandings of past theories of the imagination by putting different thinkers in conversation to reveal unexpected throughlines across different traditions and contexts. John Rundell offered a re-reading of Kant’s account of the “creativity” of the productive imagination in light of Castoriadis’s ontological account of the human being as a “mad animal,” and the non-functionality of the human mind grounded in the creative flux of its imagination. Dennis Sepper developed the notion that reason—which is normally thought of as the primary mental faculty that distinguishes humans from other non-human animals—cannot be independent of the imagination. Moving from Aristotle’s theory of phantasia to Saussure’s theory of the sign, he showed how language is itself a site of imaginative appearances. He argued that the conversation between Aristotle and Saussure opens up a new understanding of the pedagogical potential of the linguistic imaginary in overcoming the impoverishment of our political world.
Michael Sonenscher delivers his keynote talk, "The Age of Melancholy"
Michael Sonenscher’s keynote address presented different strands of thinking about the imagination in conversation and divergence around the notion of the “age of melancholy.” This concept, he argued, was designed to form a bridge between the thought of Etienne Bonnot de Condillac and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and their respective concepts of the imagination. While the former took the imagination to be responsible for “realization,” or making abstract concepts appear like real things, the latter viewed it as responsible for “adunation,” or making many things look like one thing, like a nation or a general will. Sonenscher explored the intellectual legacies left by these two thinkers and their opposing views of the imagination, showing that they gave rise to two different ways of thinking about morality, history, and politics that are still alive today.
The tension between these two competing and conflicting visions of the imagination and its political implications continues to underline contemporary debates about the political imagination and social imaginary. Like Rousseau, later work on the imagination often highlights its capacity to unify and even mask differences by fabricating identity. At the same time, Condillac’s understanding of the “realization” of imagination is still echoed in contemporary work that focuses on the ideological functions of the imagination.
Several of the workshop participants explored these and other tensions and contradictions at the heart of historical and contemporary scholarship on the imagination. Barret Reiter criticized the overly “normative” approach of recent contributions to the study of the political imagination. Instead of trying to “tame” or “redirect” the imagination, he argues, scholars should pay attention to the more “ontological” aspects of the imagination and to the fact that it is an essential part of what it means to be human. Chiara Bottici discussed some of the limits of the concepts of the imagination and the imaginary, proposing instead that political theorists should repurpose the concept of the “imaginal.” While the imagination focuses on the individual’s mental faculty and the imaginary focuses on social contexts and institutions, the ‘imaginal’—which refers to what is made of images—can be the product of both and thus explain the complicated interactions between them. Alicia Steinmetz, on the other hand, made the case for why the “imaginary” needs the imagination. Tracking the historical developments that led to the conceptual split between the two terms, she argued that abandoning the study of the imagination as a faculty limits what theories of the ‘imaginary’ can do and explain, particularly in a world where production is increasingly becoming dominated by images and imagination itself is being commodified.
Finally, several of the Workshop’s papers examined the politics of imagination in the context of contemporary democratic politics. Yves Winter diagnosed an antinomy in our present political moment, where gloomy predictions about a “futureless future” are contrasted with the joyful and celebratory politics of transformation and change of activists and social movements. He showed what the Left has lost as a result of the conceptual shift from ‘utopia’ to the ‘imaginary,’ arguing that it has led to a focus on will formation as the main constraint on collective action and a de-emphasis of the interests and institutions in enabling or limiting emancipatory politics. Avshalom Schwartz, on the other hand, examined the particular manifestation of imagination in democracy. Turning to Aristotle, he offered a new account of a “democratic imagination,” which provides democratic citizens with minimal unity and shared identity and secures their capacity to act together as civic partners who share a commitment to a collective project of self-governance.
* * *
We would like to thank all the workshop participants for their contribution and to the Stanford Humanities Center, The Zephyr Institute, and the Transformation of Democracy Workshop for their support. All workshop papers will be published in a special issue of Polity in 2024, co-edited by Avshalom Schwartz and Alicia Steinmetz.