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alyaza [they/she] @beehaw.org

Judith Butler: To Imagine a World After This, Democracy Needs the Humanities

Many young people tell me that they fear there is no future. When they ask about the future, they are also asking: what is still imaginable or for what may we still hope? To say there is no future, or that the future moves only in the direction of greater destruction, then we are still imagining something, even if it is a dark picture, one that shows no signs of hope. If we are imagining a fatal conclusion, we are still imagining.

When we say, for instance, that we are imagining the end of the world, or the end of the world as we have known it, we are imagining the end to imagination itself. That is surely something difficult, if not impossible for the imagination to do. For it is one thing to imagine an ongoing destructive process and quite another to feel one’s own power to imagine draw to a halt, potentially destroyed by the destructive processes one is tracking. Tracking fatality is still anticipating, and that assumes a form, whether a picture, a sequence of associations, a cluster of images, a story yet to be narrated about history unfolding, or the new landscapes now lay before us.

If we have an image or story to communicate or we find a form or discover that the image or story is already taking form and that the story took shape in one of the languages we speak. No one is predicting the future at such moments, since it is the unknowable dimension of the future that has us most concerned.

And so, we find that what we imagine is framed and formed in ways that support one kind of interpretation of what will happen over another. The frame and the form are central to an everyday form of conjecturing, one that informs the fear we feel and the imagining we do. All this happens not only inside the mind, but in the modalities and objects through which fearing and imagining take place: specific sensuous modes of presentation, specific media. These are not simply vehicles for preformed thought, but formative powers in themselves.

1 comments

  • This is a great piece, which points in the same kind of direction that I have tried to point in some recent conversations: that obsessive comparisons of our present moment to some prior historical moment (such as 1930s Germany, to take what seems to be the most popular one these days) are not actually helpful. This piece gives me a little more of the vocabulary I need to say why: because they are worse than unimaginative; they are even against imagination. Those kinds of comparisons are the human-participatory equivalent of generative AI: an echo chamber.

    But shouldn’t we seek to learn from the past? Sure, I guess. But that’s not what I see in these comparisons. Instead, I see a kind of nihilistic determinism of if this, then that, from which we have no freedom of escape. This must be coded as the nazification of the United States, and every decision must be fitted to that framework.

    What we need instead is more imagination—more of the “necessary fiction,” as Butler puts it, of what the world transformed ought to look like. Not what the world looked like 90 years ago, or 80 or 70, but what the world ought to look like today. And that imaginative work must be inclusive and it must integrate all of our reality. We cannot just leave out the bad people.

    Anyway, thanks for sharing this.