B.4 Exploring Radical Imagination

Radical Imagination & pragmatism through thoughtful organisation

We are convinced that the complex challenge of Arts Collaboratory is the process of unlearning that allows us to be aware that we are our own obstacles.

The deep problems we face are not only outside of us, but within our own mental structures, social relations, and historical and cultural contexts. Active exploration through radical imagination is absolutely necessary to build this ecosystem based on our ethics.

What is Radical Imagination?

On the surface level, radical imagination is the ability to imagine the world, life and social institutions not as they are but as they might otherwise be or become.

It is the courage and the intelligence to recognize that the world can and should be changed. But radical imagination is not just about dreaming of different futures. It's about bringing those possible futures ’back’ to work in the present, to inspire action and new forms of solidarity across boundaries and borders, real or imagined.

Without a radical imagination, we are left only with the residual dreams of the powerful, and for the vast majority they are not experienced as dreams but as nightmares of insecurity, precariousness, violence, and hopelessness. Without a radical imagination, we are lost.

Radical imagination remains a driving force in the dynamics of our political moment. It is not a thing that individuals possess, but something that groups activate and do together. The imagination is our capacity to think about those things we do not or cannot directly experience, but it is also the filter or the frame through which we interpret our own experiences. For this reason, the imagination is an intimate part of how we empathize with others, the way we project ourselves into the future, and gain inspiration and direction from the past.

Radical imagination is a deep force at the very basis of the human subject, the realm of ‘the imaginary’ where ideas, meanings, associations, fixations, drives and affects circulate beneath the threshold of conscious thought. The notion of the ’radical’ inherits its most powerful meaning from the Latin ‘radix’ or ’root’, in the sense that radical ideas, ideologies or perspectives are informed by the understanding that social, political, economic and cultural problems are outcomes of deeply rooted tensions, contradictions, power imbalances, and forms of oppression and exploitation.

The radical imagination is that tectonic, protean substance out of which all social institutions and identities are made, and which, likewise, is constantly in motion under the surface of society, undermining and challenging all that we take to be real, hard, fast and eternal. Likening the radical imagination to magma, that volcanic substance between liquid and solid. Seemingly permanent social forms (from the ideal of marriage to the form of the state, from the value of money to the concept of nation) are the temporary solidifications of the (shared) radical imagination.

Radical imagination is also that force within individuals and collectives that resists the present order, that screams ’no!’ and refuses to be conscripted. Art is the very concrete means for exercising this radical imaginative power: hence is ’Art’ + ’Collaboratory.’