Dr. Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in Radical Imagination. He’s a co-director of Lakeland University’s ReImagining Value Action Lab. His work is dedicated to helping us recognize that our society is the product of our collective imagination. The radical imagination is that spark of difference, desire and discontent that can be fanned into the flames of social change.
Imagination can be examined through its creative faculty or its psychological notions but its function as a social or sociological force, namely how the imagination shapes society and conversely, how society shapes our imaginations, is a most fascinating approach.
Working quite closely with social movements, specifically ones that were not particularly successful in changing the world, contributed to understanding how people in those movements imagined the world could be different. How they came up with imagined alternative futures that they were striving to move us towards and how they were trying to spread those imaginative capacities to the rest of society.
This research could enrich the understanding of similar processes in different areas. For example, the economic system that we live under shapes our imaginations; it also depends on our imaginations. It is tempting to think that this system mercilessly crushes the imagination but, much more dangerously, the economy we live under actually depends on us reshaping our imaginations, reshaping how we think of ourselves and how we think of our ability to contribute to society. It does so in quite profound ways.
Imagination then, emerges as this kind of social force, something deep at work not only in our own individual beings, but also in the shared territories of meaning-making and sense-making in society at large.
There’s a kind of feedback loop in operation: on the one hand, we have an imagination of the world, an understanding of the sublime complexity that we encounter every day. We, somehow, have to create a mental picture or a series of interlocking mental pictures about what it means to be an agent, what it means to be a subject, what it means to act in a world that’s beyond our comprehension. That imagination of the world leads to various forms of action that we take in everyday life and that action then contributes to the constant reshaping of society. Conversely, society influences and reshapes our imaginations in many ways.
Theories of the radical imagination are particularly interesting. They involve the radical imagination of people who are radicals, who believe that we can and must transform society in a fundamental way. However, the radical imagination has a slightly different valence as well, in the terms provided by another inheritor of the psychoanalytic tradition, the French-Greek theorist Cornelius Castoriadis. Castoriadis draws on the Latin root of the word “radical” – coming from the roots. He views the radical imagination as a tectonic and eternal force at work, brewing not only within every individual subject, but also at the core of society. What is then, the relationship between the imagination of individuals and the imaginary structures that we create to be able to live together, the social imagination or the realm of the social imaginary? For Castoriadis, the radical imagination is a magma-like substance which has the capacity, at certain moments in time, to erupt and sweep away the social institutions which are familiar, like a volcano erupting, and replace them. §
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World Goodwill Newsletter 2022 #3 - In Search of a New Culture
