What do we, critical academics, do with the imaginaries of others? (December 2022)

Macon Holt

In this essay, I want to express and explore a concern about what is done to what imaginaries can do when they are discussed in settings such as this. That setting is not only business schools, though they are perhaps where the problematic tendencies that concern me here are most prevalent, but within the discourse of academia in general and particularly when articulated by those who would describe themselves as critical. My concern is, then, not so much with the idea of imaginaries as serving a key social, cultural, political and subjectivising function. The observations of thinkers like Castoriadis (2005) and Andersen (2016), among many others, pertaining to the production and articulation of complexly abstract forms of social organisation through the malleable but powerful imaginative faculties that characterize socialized human consciousness are undeniably useful for understanding the expression of our world and the worlds of others. Similarly, when we add temporality to this and connect these imaginaries to the Utopian tradition of thinkers like Ernst Bloch (1986), which provided an intuitive escape from the activist cul-de-sac of the more pessimistic wings of the Frankfurt school through a notion like “concrete utopia”, the utility of this orientation as a way to think about how to organise one’s material actions would seem self-evident. For people to produce a better life for themselves and others requires them to project forward in such a way as to allow them to organize action towards it. This would seem to be an uncontroversial understanding of the function of the imaginary. 

What’s troubling is the idea that the academic analysis of these imaginaries is an unproblematic good. Such is the unexamined nature of the academic imaginary, which is built on the assumptions that the imaginaries of others can be coherently studied, by the likes of us, in such a way that it produces a scientifically apprehensible account. Further producing such an account would allow certain imaginaries to be optimised and engineered towards greater efficacy, while others would be criticized out of existence. We may also consider the problem of whose imaginaries we attend to. This is a problem for the institutional power of academia as such. But even if we discount those overtly enamoured with the status quo power structure, what imaginaries earn the attention of the critical academic? Serving as the bad conscience of modernity, scholars such as myself document the imaginative resources of those working to actualize what they hope would be a better world. Perhaps it can be suggested that these critical academics do so as a way to underscore the possibility of redeeming the political situation in which they labour.

The sociologist Martin Savransky articulated this very point with reference to the paradoxical position of the tech-solutionist-imaginary that permeants many sites of discourse (political, business, academic) on how to address the ongoing climate crisis. He claimed that

“The always moving horizon in progress’s upward march, the future stood for nothing if not the unassailable possibility of a redemptive appeal, an appeal to another life, to a better world to come.”

Speaking specifically on the feeling of loss many of us experience in the ever-worsening climate crisis, which has made our aspirations for the future – be they individual, collective or even generational – seem less and less concretely tenable, Savransky articulates a disavowed and perhaps pernicious underside to this angst or grief. He argues that;

“What once rendered the present a source of comfort and consolation is inextricable from the very appeal and imperial dynamics of progress and civilisation for whose sake the modern colonial system of extraction, subjugation and appropriation homogenised and devastated the earth.“ (Savransky 2022, 2-3)

In a kind of temporal folding motion, the historic and contemporary practices of extraction and exploitation that have built the world of which we are undeniably a part, currently benefit and may soon be cast into catastrophe, are apologised for in the present by the promise of redemption in the future. Whether it is solving the climate crisis, inequality or other conflicts, an imagined future serves as the ever-receding locus of a utopia that could justify what had come before as necessary for the process of progress towards its actualisation. However, for Savransky, this was only ever a consolation that could never attain the level of justification. What’s more, the logic that allows for this future’s imaginary construction is built out of a particular, colonialist and capitalist notion of progress. And paradoxically, the material actuality of pursuing that idea of progress has made the imaginary, which organised life and labour towards it, impossible. Imperial capitalist modernity gave us an imaginary future to work towards, but the means it provided us with to pursue it has, in the end, taken it away. Put another way, this is an example of what the late Lauren Berlant called “Cruel Optimism”; a set of temporal and social relations that exist “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (2011, 1).

So, why are we, and by we, I mean to claim critical academics, attached to this redemptive imaginary of progress and what are we mourning with its loss? We might think with a heretical reading of Foucault, in his lectures on sovereignty in Society Must Defended that sees the subject of power committed to maintaining its protection (Foucault 2003, 241), combined with the anti-humanist psychoanalysis of Lyotard in Libidinal Economy, which understands the working class as enjoying their destruction by capital (Lyotard 2015, 124), that perhaps we are mourning our arrangement of “protection from the violence that would seek to disrupt [the arrangement neoliberal, racial capitalism] [by tacitly affirming] the violence which produces and reproduces it” (Holt 2022, 65). However, the climate crisis has turned this violence against the denizens of industrial extractive modernity to such an extent that even billionaires worry for their future safety once civilisational collapse renders their money capital worthless.

My point of concern, then, is what are we, critical academics, looking for when we study the imaginaries of those labouring towards what they believe would be a better future. Particularly when these better futures preclude those implied by the career tracks we are on. The activists I have talked to often have radical end goals that see the complete decentering of both the human and the individual as paramount to building a more livable relationship with our environment. Such a decentering would make the calculation of one’s impact factor incredibly difficult if not meaningless. Thus, when engaging with such ideas, are we looking in the always deferred imaginary of the other for redemption for our complicity in the destruction that characterises the present? Or are we even looking for ways in which we can tame these unruly imaginations of other futures, so as to allow for the seeming plausibility of our own position within the crisis as being one that is necessary for a shallowly articulated idea of progress? Is it, then, even possible that we attend, in a meaningful way, to an imaginary that doesn’t in some sense serve the purposes of those systems, processes and individuals that abusively protect us as their critical research wing?

As the management theorist Stefano Harney and the poet and theorist Fred Moten claim, the critical academic’s role is less to challenge the systems of destruction of which they are a part than it is to provide a kind of useful sparing partner to such systems and to designate the limit of the politically permissible. They write:

“It is rather that to be a critical academic in the university is to be against the university, and to be against the university is always to recognize it and be recognized by it, and to institute the negligence of that internal outside, that unassimilated underground, a negligence of it that is precisely, we must insist, the basis of the professions. And this act of being against always already excludes the unrecognized modes of politics, the beyond of politics already in motion…” (Harney & Moten 2013, 31)

Drawing on Moten’s work in articulating the aesthetics of the radical black tradition, Harney and Moten mobilise the concept of blackness as a historically contingent function of power that cast those it abuses as some kind of chaotic outside, which we, the critical academics and our ilk, must be protected against. In illustrating the process of this function, they provide this analysis of the NGO – often the subject of academic critique and, equally, support.

“NGOs are the laboratories of governance. The premise of the NGO is that all populations must become gregarious. And the ethics of the NGOs, the dream of governance in general, is to go beyond representation as a form of sovereignty, to auto-generating representation, in the double sense. Those who can represent themselves will also be those who re-present themselves as interests in one and the same move, collapsing the distinction. The NGO is the research and development arm of governance finding new ways to bring to blackness what it is said to lack, the thing that cannot be brought, interests.” (Harney & Moten 2013, 56)

With this kind of framing in mind, I am left to wonder, what is it we are looking for when we reach out into the metastable magma that Castoriadis casts as the imaginary from which the social is produced? What happens when we organise seminars on organisation along the themes of hope, solidarity and utopia and draw data from the imaginaries of those committed to the world being other than it is, not at the safe distance of some far-flung future but now? And in attempting to produce answers to these questions, I am concerned less about the banal fact of my complicity and the complicity of many of us here, than I am about the lack of space in which to address this complicity. Even writing this, I have to stop myself from articulating the idea as a space in which this concern could be “productively addressed”. This impulse toward productivity that I feel would seem to be evidence of how ingrained the notion that progress and redemption that lies just beyond the horizon has become. Harney and Moten, of course, look outside the academy for this non-productive intellectual space, to what they called the “undercommons”. And that is certainly an idea I draw on to function in this predicament. But here, I want to test the tolerance for this necessarily difficult-to-articulate anxiety within the territory of the critical academic.

From a certain point of view, I have been studying the imaginaries of climate change activists for the last two years. The motivation for doing so, I think, remains sound. How have people constructed their consciousness in their apprehension of the present crisis and the contestability of the world to come that allows them to devote themselves to the struggle of making the world otherwise than what awaits us if we continue to follow the indulgences of capital? This is a fascinating question. But the kind of answers it churns up, I think, reveals certain blind spots in the academic imaginary that attempts to extract publications from it. The imaginations of many of these activists, be they of collapse or more positive outcomes of a reordered society, do foreclose the possibility of an academic career and the attendant bourgeois lifestyle as we currently understand it. The data I have gathered provides me with no deferred redemption and as such causes problems for my own imaginative institution of my social and professional role.

Those who have read Karen Lee Ahscraft’s article “‘Submission’ to the Rule of Excellence’ (2017) know that this disquiet can be contained[1]. Indeed, one may even be invited to view this text as such a containment. Perhaps, we can understand, with Ashcraft, Moten and Harney the role of the critical academic as being containers for the imaginaries of others. It is as if, in our papers, the imaginaries of others are displayed like artefacts in the vitrines of a national museum with corporate sponsors. So, if this has any relation to critical academic practice, what I want to ask is what happens when we attended to our role as the containers, rather than pretending to be harnessers, champions, or leaders of others’ imaginations? Can we engage with the imaginaries that surround us, particularly those that challenge our own often unacknowledged commitments, in such a way that facilitates the politically and environmentally necessary foreclosure of our most problematic desires or cruel optimism? Can the corruption of our position as midwives of modernity, produce containers for the imaginaries that challenge the appeal to redemption and destabilise our own with its disavowed commitment to the irredeemable? This is not about being more critical. We are very critical academics. There is no need to, paraphrase Lyotard, yet again, to rebegin again the critique of political economy (2015). Rather it is to think about how we do this criticality. How do we deploy or actualise the critical academic imaginary?

Of course, answering this question in new ways is delimited by our terms of employment. This includes both the formal requirements to publish and the institution’s commitment to perform the importance of certain outlets in ascertaining whose work is of merit, and whose merit entitles them to a chance at consistent quasi-autonomous wage labour. And employment is not just employment. For many, residency is tied entirely or in part to performing to the standards demanded by the institution, which Ashcraft calls submitting to the rule of excellence. This is why, I claim, our criticality is not enough for us to escape our role of containers of the imaginaries of those we study because our criticality is what placed us in our predicament in the first place. So, how do we commit to being containers that facilitate a challenge from the outside of this form of social organisation that is dragging us towards the unprecedented destruction of life on this planet? 

Last year the debate about activist research instigated by certain corners of the Danish political class sent what should be thought of as a shock wave through humanities and social science academia in Denmark. I say it should be thought of in this way because of the dangers that are apparent from my point of view of brushing off political expedience as if it were something of no consequence. Having lived through Brexit and Trump, the cuts to humanities and social science funding in the UK and the cuts following these discourses that threaten the same disciplines here, we need to recognise how seemingly marginal positions, in a gradual macro sense, shape the political imaginary, which, through various degrees of light-touches, shapes the academic imaginary. This is to say, the academic imaginary I have criticised so far in this essay is not universal but a historical contingency.

In Moten and Harney’s terms, we may even think of its current incarnation as a kind of gatekeeper of whiteness, which is to say a gatekeeper of legibility to and access to the protection of racial capitalism on the condition of acquiescence to participate in forms of violent social reproduction. This is what we do when we teach in the Mærsk auditorium. We perform activist education for a hegemonic understanding of the capitalist utility of education. Even our critical courses are a form of activism that naturalises those political commitments most expedient to capital. To stretch Mashall Mchluhan a little, the medium of business school and increasingly university education is the message. And the message is capitalism is nature. Thus capitalism, it is suggested, will reach some kind of compact with the rest of nature in the end. In last year’s debate, activist research is then cast as anything that queries this demonstrably false premise on any grounds. 

My late supervisor, Mark Fisher, coined a term from this. He called it “capitalist realism” (2009), which could be thought of as a limit placed on the imaginary by the cultural atmosphere of neoliberal capitalism. Individualising workplace practices, a de-politicised understanding of health, mental and otherwise, and a post-colonial perspective that understands the outside of this system as lacking in every sense, lead many of us, and in particular those on the political left, to the forlorn conclusion that the current arrangement of things is inescapable. His point was that this was only ever an appearance and not an actuality. Towards the end of his life, in the unfinished introduction to the also unfinished monograph, Acid Communism, he turned is attention to how one may begin to imagine differently. In the opening he wrote;

“We on the left have had it wrong for a while: it is not that we are anti-capitalist, it is capitalism, with all its visored cops, its teargas, and all the theological niceties its economics, is set up to block the emergence of Red Plenty. The overcoming of capital has to be fundamentally based on the simple insight that, far from being about wealth creation, capital necessarily and always blocks the production of commonwealth.” (Fisher 2018, 753–754)

This is not a notion of redemption to come or even a notion of a dialectically necessary overthrow of the status quo but a call to reappraise what is already there. Here, we may think again of the role of academics as containers of the imaginary of the other as potentially being that which blocks the production of commonwealth. And then we may think of how can we perhaps contain differently. Returning to Saveransky, his tentative solution is to move our focus from hope to worth.

“[W]hat often sustains [those outside of the protection of racial capitalist power], what keeps them going, is not hope but an immanent sense of worth, the inalienable sense that taking and making the trouble of living on this unstable earth might be worthwhile in spite of all, however short the while, however spiteful the world.” (2022, 6)

Can this provide a hint of how the critical academic imaginary may do more than optimise that reproduction of capitalist realism, and extractive violence and block the emergence of other, already implicit, forms of social organisation? Perhaps, as containers of the imaginaries of others, we have the opportunity to display ideas of worth in the present that will disturb our hopes for the future. Perhaps, it is possible for our work, in both teaching and research, to be about producing leaky containers, the overflowing contents of which will ruin our implicit hopes for redemption. But in so doing, we have to accept the dangers of neglecting the maintenance of a powerful imaginary that mostly belonged to an impersonal political economy, to begin with. This means confronting the question of what can we do without. What successes are worth how much investment from us? And who’s activism should we commit our work to, once we realise abstention was never an option?

  [1] Here it must be noted that the mobilisation of this concept of a container is indebted to the theoretical work of the composer, Marcela Lucatelli.

Works Cited

Anderson Benedict R. O’G. 2016. Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism Revised ed. London: Verso.

Ashcraft, K. L. (2017). ‘Submission’ to the rule of excellence: Ordinary affect and precarious resistance in the labor of organization and management studies. Organization, 24(1), 36–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508416668188

Berlant Lauren G. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.

Bloch Ernst. 1986. The Principle of Hope. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Castoriadis Cornelius. 2005. The Imaginary Institution of Society Paperback ed. 1997 repr ed. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? Hants, UK: Zer0 Books.

Fisher, Mark, Darren Ambrose, and Simon Reynolds. 2018. K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016). London: Repeater.

Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must be Defended. London: Penguin.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons. Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions.

Holt, Macon. 2022. “Approaching the Sonic Shimmer of Popular Music”. Periskop.

Lyotard, Jean-François and Iain Hamilton Grant. 2015. Libidinal Economy. Bloomsbury Academic.

Savransky, Martin. 2022. “A Life Without Appeal? For and Earthly Ensemble of Uncivilized Feelings”. Conference Paper. Earth Sensations: Affects, Sensibilities and Attachments in an Era of Climate Change. AIAS, Aarhus University, October 2022.