Stop Calling It Reimagining: Beyond Rearranging the Given

A couple of weeks ago a friend and scholar-colleague sarcastically posted on his social media, “There is sure is alot of reimagining going on.”

He was right and so was his thinly veiled critique.

It seemed that every social media post, program, podcast, and even recent scholarly articles had ‘reimagining’ in the title or claimed to reimagine a system, the way we do something, or how we be together. The sad fact is that few of them were actually focused on reimagining anything. And it was clear there was a lack of understanding about what it means to actually reimagine. Of course, I have centered my work in reimagination and think it extremely important to offer a bit of context, based on my understanding, of what it means to reimagine in the philosophical and practical senses rather than our far weaker contemporary practice and use of the word.

If you know me, then you know that I always begin with definitions. As bell hooks reminded us, definitions are vital starting points from which we build common language and a springboard from which we can exercise our imaginative capacity.

Imagination Defined
I define the imagination as the human capacity to unpry the gripping authority of the present to make thinkable, intelligible, and potentially kinetic something not-yet-real.

To say it another way, the imagination is the capacity to make the absent present and to suspend the apparent or taken-for-granted inevitability of the given, recombine the materials of experience, and generate alternative identities, meanings, relationships, worlds or futures that are not presently actual but could become possible.

Imagination allows us to understand that what Is need not exhaust the possibilities of what could be. The imagination has profound ethical, political, theological, and sociological consequences because the person, organization, or society that cannot generatively imagine reality otherwise is made prisoner to the present (see Plato’s Allegory of the Cave).

What Imagination is Not
Imagination is not fantasy. It is not an escape from reality; however, in Paul Ricoeur’s words, productive imagination—or what I call the generative imagination—returns us more deeply into reality because it allows us to uncover possibilities concealed by the present arrangement of things. It allows us to not mistake present form or situation for the final form or situation. Fantasy, on the other hand, asks us to leave the world.

Imagination is not creativity. I gave a talk over the summer to a visiting group on the power of imagination as sacred technology. A middle aged man who was a theologian at a major American university raised his hand to let me and the room know that he was not imaginative. I probed further and he replied, “Well, I am not creative.”

I reminded him that of course he was imaginative—he writes, he cooks dinner, he plans his days, he worries (a form of retrogressive imagination), and he prays (a form of generative imagination). He is indeed imaginative. I was apt to remind him and the room that imagination is not creativity. Here is the distinction: imagination creates and projects the possible; creativity gives the possible form.

Imagination is not improvement or innovation. Improvement asks how we can do a thing better; innovation asks what new methods should be introduced to the thing we are currently doing.

Imagination is not reform. Most often reform asks how or what we might change within a system. I am noticing that when I speak of imagination or reimagination without the proper definitional foundation my conversations devolve into how we reorder the parts of those systems or organizations that already exist to achieve our desired collective outcome. This usually leads to a dialogue about whether the group or organization is seeking change or transformation. Change addresses issues by reordering, shuffling, relocating, or eliminating. Transformation alters the very DNA of a thing, makes it brand new and forces us to imagine: to call forth what else could be possible and move toward its making.

While these practices (improvement, innovation, creativity, and reform) require imaginative elements, the imagination, and ultimately, reimagination asks radically different questions.

Finally, I believe, imagination is not a thinking practice. Rather, it is our human ability to project new possibilities into being through an attunement with self, others, the world, our ecological kin, and the unseen. The imagination, Amiri Baraka wrote in 1965, “is a practical vector from the soul…that is all possibility.” Baraka reminds us that “possibility is what moves us”—moves us to act, to be differently, to transform, to educate, and create a new world: to imagine and reimagine.

Reimagining Defined
So, what does it actually mean to reimagine?

Reimagination is a second-order imaginative practice; it goes beyond simply imagining and asks us to consider:

What becomes possible, intelligible, actionable if the assumptions producing the present reality were no longer taken-for-granted or treated as inevitable?

To reimagine is to engage in the critical and generative practice of returning to and dwelling in an inherited reality to expose the assumptions, mental models, states of being, and imaginaries that make reality appear inevitable, and then working to configure it otherwise toward a different horizon of possibility.

While imagination asks:

What could be?

Reimagination asks the deeper, what we would consider the more philosophical, question:

Why have we imagined the world this way in the first place, and what becomes possible when we dare to imagine it otherwise?

The reimagining question requires an exploration of history, memory, power analysis, and moral and ethical judgement. It requires understanding who has benefited and who continues to benefit from the prevailing imaginary and whose possibilities it has foreclosed. Finally, it requires generativity—both deconstruction and construction. Reimagining, like education, requires us to make strange the familiar, then return to it as unfamiliar and in turn make the new (Robinson-Morris, 2019).

Reimagining is not simply “imagining again,” rather it is a reflexive form of imagination that turns imagination back upon an existing imaginary utilizing all available senses and the unseen data available to us in the quantum field to project new possibilities and render new configurations.

With this understanding, our process at the REImaginelution follows this order of four intellectual movements and rests on a foundation of contemplative practice, which I define as coming home to one’s self, because (generative) imagination requires energetic attunement in right relationship.

The Crisis of Our Time: Imaginative Foreclosure
Writers, scientists and social critics like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Amitav Ghosh, and adrienne maree brown have all said better than I—the crisis of our time is imaginative foreclosure.

adrienne marre brown says it this way,

We are in an imagination battle.

…

Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown and Renisha McBride and so many others are dead because, in some white imagination, they were dangerous. And that imagination is so respected that those who kill, based on an imagined, radicalized fear of Black people, are rarely held accountable.

Imagination has people thinking they can go from being poor to a millionaire as part of a shared American dream. Imagination turns Brown bombers into terrorists and white bombers into mentally ill victims. Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of ability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.”

As I often say, we know that the first thing to go in any oppressive system, situation, or relationship is our imaginative capacity. Therefore, it has to be the first thing that we regain if we are to be-do-fight our way out any current mess toward liberation. Otherwise, the focus of our attention and intention becomes survival not thriving and not flourishing beyond the confines of the existing reality. This is what I mean by imaginative foreclosure,

a condition in which the existing order has so thoroughly structured the horizon of possibility—conforming not only our minds, but also conditioning our bodies and caging our spirits—that alternatives to any current reality becomes difficult to conceive, articulate, or make actionable.

The structuring is so powerful that imaginative foreclosure would have us use the language of reimagining when, really, what one is actually doing is creating and innovating inside an inherited horizon. This crisis of imaginative foreclosure has us making the existing arrangements faster, more attractive, more efficient, and technologically sophisticated while never questioning whether the present system should even define projections of what might be possible.

We do this every day. We innovate within inherited bureaucracy and racial hierarchy. We innovate within capitalism and a political system that no longer serves the people. We innovate inside of prevailing educational models and philanthropic structures. And we often call these things reimagining; they are not. Remember: innovation asks how the present system might function differently while reimagination asks whether the present system should define the horizon of possibility in the first place.

This is why a Reimaginelution is so important!

Definitions Revisited
Because writing is thinking made visible, I want to revisit the definitions I offered at the opening of this very brief essay, which by no means moves you through the scholarship and philosophical turns in the works of Paul Ricoeur, Lev Vygotsky, Daniel Schacter et al., Randy Buckner, Cornelius Castoriadis, or Teresa Amabile—which I’ll save for a scholarly article.

Rethinking the definitions of imagination and reimagination, I might expand them in the following ways.

Imagination
Imagination is the human capacity to loosen the grip of the actual and bring into cognitive, narrative, symbolic, physical or social presence possibilities that are absent, unrealized, or not yet to this plane of existence. Operating through retrieval, rememory, recombination, and reconfiguration of materials supplied by memory, experience, culture, symbol, language, history, desire, and the unseen, the imagination does not emerge through creation from nothing. It creates the cognitive, moral, affective, narrative, and social space through and in which another world can be made intelligible.

Reimagination
Reimagination is the imagination turned critically and reflexively upon itself and the inherited world. It is a disciplined practice through which individuals and communities remember the future; excavate and interrogate inherited assumptions, narratives, institutions, and social imaginaries which have made the present configuration appear natural or inevitable; reveal and retrieve possibilities obscured, suppressed, or forgotten; and respond by combining and configuring resources from memory, experience, and inspiration toward the construction of alternative possibilities to a discerned moral horizon.

Even more succinctly, to imagine is to perceive possibility beyond the actual and to reimagine is to refuse the limits of what is possible based on the present arrangement of reality.

So, for those focused on reimagining: are you actually reimagining at all?

May we think deeper.
May we imagine higher.
May we project new, generative possibilities—together.
May the REImaginelution continue!