Social Imagination in Times of Moral Panic

A woman working at the Railway Planning and Operation Company. Budapest, 1953 | Fortepan / Nagy Gyula | Public domain

We are living in a time of turmoil. A time of a war of narratives that feed our moral panic – we could even call it a battle of the imagination – regarding the future of the climate and the direction humanity is taking with AI, to name but two issues. It is a crusade that is being played out, spread and strengthened through different spaces and dimensions, from traditional to social media. The proliferation of tools for constructing realities and skewing information has led us into a state of perpetual doubt and confusion. There is something not right with the system, because one needs more than just a critical spirit to survive this melee. The ability to question is key, but without alternatives, the result is disaffection and pessimism.

If there is anything that can keep us looking on the bright side, it is precisely our capacity for fiction. Imagination is oxygen in this uncertain and sometimes suffocating context. In essence, the human species is made up of metaphorical beings, and it is our capacity for symbolism that helps keep our optimism alive. Although the seed of imagination is essentially human, imaginative capital is unevenly distributed. The symbolic sphere is particularly challenging, which is why power hierarchies are so insistent on imposing dominant narratives and controlling the collective imagination. As Alice Walker wrote, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any”.

It is not a question of creating fiction to distract ourselves and remain comfortably ensconced inside our cave, but of using it as the first step towards coming out of the cave and shaping reality to build societies where we can live in harmony with other people and species while caring for the planet that sustains us.

Imagination and the imaginary: two different concepts

Let us pause for a moment on the etymology of these words, which reveals radically different origins (in the purest sense of the term, as “roots”). Imagination (imaginatio, in Latin) is the result of picturing or representing something. It occurs in the mind and takes no concrete form beyond our ideas. It is neither tangible nor perceptible to the senses, even though it exists at an intimate level. As bell hooks says in All about Love, “what we can’t imagine, can’t come to be.” Imagining something is therefore the starting point for it to happen. At the same time, it is this inner and personal dimension that makes imagination a personal and non-transferable bastion of freedom, completely detached from the external realities that can be seen, tasted, smelled or touched through the bodily experience of the senses.

If we took a purely individual, imaginative approach, social life would be complex, because we need shared experiences that can bring us together us as a group or community. Around the 1960s, sociology reflected at length on the relationship between the person (individual subject) and society (collective subject). The sum of the parts is more than the aggregate of individual subjectivities, insofar as it rises above what they have in common. C. Wright Mills calls this “sociological imagination,” and it is shaped by the social structure surrounding each individual. This includes the conditions of existence in the geographical and historical spheres and the role or position from which one participates in society. Sociological imagination also incorporates behaviours in accordance with asymmetries, power relations and inequalities.

For Edgar Morin, our communal existence crystallises in the form of the “collective imaginary” – a term he coined in 1960 and which has since become widely used – which shapes itself around myths, symbols and other representations. Morin was not only a sociologist but also a filmmaker, and he looked in depth at the ways in which the collective imaginary feeds representations in mass culture and vice versa. That is why rituals, traditions, legends, novels, sayings and superstitions situate us, reminding us of customs, limits and expectations.

Nowadays, when we talk about power and privilege, it is based on our awareness of inequalities and the significance of being born in one or another particular neighbourhood, with one sex or another, with a certain gender identity and specific class practices. The first voices to appear were those of black feminist activists in the late 1970s, but it was not until 1989 that Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw put forward the idea of intersectionality. She specifically related it to legal cases in which women had to choose between filing a complaint for racism or sexism. The combined effects of race (being of African descent) and sex (being female) made it very difficult for them to choose between the two reasons.

Imagination, we could say, is the capacity and potential to create, to reinvent and to overcome the oppressions of the imaginary. For its part, the imaginary can be recognised as a specific manifestation of the attitudes, norms and practices that are expected in social life, and which vary according to the specific place, time and group. Imagination is inherently dynamic, while imaginaries – especially the dominant one – aspire to become fixed and reproduced ad infinitum.

For the central purpose of this article, we will adopt the perspective of Ruha Benjamin, a transdisciplinary researcher and author of Imagination: A Manifesto. She recovers Mills’ definition of linking individual problems to broader social processes. And she takes a step further by doing away with the distinction between the two concepts, so that the dynamism of the capacity to imagine is the way in which social imaginaries are produced (and not just reproduced). She refers to imagination as the space of dreams, and – with a critical perspective – to imaginaries as the imposition of the dominant imagination, which aspires to a hegemony and universality that it does not have. Imagination is also poetry, and poetry is radically political. When someone asked Amanda Gorman to stop writing poetry about political issues, she replied that poetry is precisely the way to raise the boldest and the most dangerous questions about the world.

Another field clearly linked to the construction of imaginaries is science fiction. The resonance of George Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984 has less to do with his capacity for invention and imagination than with his ability to take the elements of the dominant imaginary to the extreme with a layer of technological futurism. In other words, we could ask ourselves whether science fiction is more self-fulfilling prophecy than prediction. These types of stories even feed into the imaginary about current technological potential and become sources of inspiration for today’s technological and digital innovations – for example, the terms “cyberspace” from Neuromancer (William Gibson, 1984) and “metaverse” from Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson, 1992).

Pioneers such as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells laid the foundations for the genre in the 19th century, and much of the dominant narrative has been written by male voices. Over the years, however, women authors and other underrepresented voices have begun to challenge this hegemony. From early publications such as Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666) to contemporary novels, feminist science fiction has opened up spaces for social criticism, for defining identities and envisaging alternative futures without the limitations imposed by current social norms. From Ursula K. Leguin to Tamsyn Muero, by way of Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood. According to Lisa Yaszek, professor of Science Fiction Studies at the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, “Adopting personae ranging from warrior queens and heroic astronauts to unhappy housewives and sensitive aliens, women were pioneers in developing our sense of wonder about the many different futures we might inhabit.”

Another example of radical collective imagination as a tool for social transformation is visionary fiction. This characteristically takes a justice-oriented approach and is often linked to the decolonisation of the imagination. In Octavia’s Brood, a collection of stories from social justice movements edited by Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha, the editors state that “the decolonisation of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive form there is, for it is where all other forms of decolonisation are born. Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless”.

Beyond the narrative: reimagining the social contract

The social contract is one possible answer to the question of how to live together, organise ourselves, generate value, distribute wealth and tell our collective story. In an economy based largely on data, an epistemological injustice is emerging, and a number of different movements are promoting data governance and AI frameworks based on feminist and decolonial perspectives. IT for Change, for example, points out that behind the data value chain lie chains of suffering and precariousness. A+ Alliance is promoting the project Self, to highlight how health applications are generated based on an ableist perspective and assumptions about normative bodies. For anyone who wishes to broaden their perspective to encompass the Global South, it is well worth revisiting the Decidim Fest conference session.

To open the door to the imagination, we can start with two words: “What if…?” Six letters that catapult us into daring and pull us out of inertia. Rob Hopkins launched the Ministry of Imagination on the podcast From What If to What Next – over the course of a hundred episodes, he brought together potential ministers of imagination to reinvent art, culture, democracy and the acceptance of failure, using play as a way of thinking about the body, equity, the media and regulation. The result of honouring and nurturing the imagination through conversation is this delightful manifesto.

Imagination also makes incursions into other areas, such as prefigurative politics, which often plays with the creation of new institutions, structures and practices with the aim of pushing the status quo into obsolescence. As Ruha Benjamin says: “Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.” A good example is the Centre for the Advancement of Infrastructural Imagination (CAII), which evolved from The Syllabus project, dedicated to creating new infrastructures and institutions that offer viable digital alternatives to the narrow vision that predominates in public opinion.

There is even the Science Fiction Economics network, led by Kate Bee. The purpose of this network is to experiment with new economic and organisational paradigms such as Enspiral and Centrifuge (a decentralised, blockchain-based fintech for transparent peer-to-peer lending).

The climate emergency is also encouraging us to imagine and capture the Giant Whispers. These, in the words of Patrick Reinsborough, are an invitation to lay out alternatives through local resistance. A whisper can take the form of a pandemic, a meme, a viral series or a government presidency.

Imagination can also help us generate new reference points where gaps exist: in a polarised world, where geopolitics involve ever fewer actors and we still talk about north and south, building the imaginary of the global majority allows us to draw interdependent relationships between regions that fall outside the small circle of the US, China and Russia. These are just three of the 193 states in the world – there is ample room to form a majority. The same is true of models of masculinity that are neither toxic nor hegemonic – we must be able to offer inspiration and benchmarks from which to learn. In Raising Boys Who Do Better, Uju Asika invites us to rethink what it means to be a boy and a man, but also to dare to imagine a better world around us. Asika asserts that those who inspire the imagination of others can achieve any milestone.

And if they tell you it is impossible, remember the words of Kelly Hayes when she said that “A lot of things people say cannot be done have not been meaningfully attempted in the context of our lifetimes. It’s easy to maintain myths of impossibility when you crush all experiments.”

In short, there is an urgent need to establish imagination as a radical act of possibility distributed equitably. It is the first reminder to respond to the powers that be and challenge them, to democratise imaginative capital and share out the capacity to construct collective imaginaries. Sketching out other worlds allows us to focus our energies on dreaming, creating and nurturing the worlds we do want to inhabit.