Imagination, representation, and the priority of the political

The conventional approach when confronted with a problem in the world is to seek its accurate representation as the first step toward successful remediation. The substantive description, however, elides the political challenge of how a solution can actually be achieved. To foreground the political as the arena of policy formation is to pursue a course that is imaginative rather than representational; anticipatory rather than retrospective; insistently situated rather than universal and abstract; continually unfolding in step with evolving circumstances rather than constrained by determinative laws of capital or markets or human nature; and willing to endure over the long durée required for change to occur rather than succumbing to impatience or fatigue. In place of authoritarian knowledge claims on the part of a technological elite, imaginative politics rests on inclusion of the widest circle of those recognized as “us” rather than “them.”