Reimagine

Social Justice Usage

Source: Giroux, Henry A. On Critical Pedagogy. Continuum, 2011, p. 100.

And, of course, none of this will take place unless the institutions, social relations, and values that legitimate and reproduce current levels of inequality, power, and human suffering are dismantled. The widening gap between the rich and the poor has to be addressed if young people are to have a viable future. And that requires pervasive structural reforms that constitute a real shift in both power and politics away from a market-driven system that views too many children as disposable. We need to reimagine what liberty, equality, and freedom might mean as truly democratic values and practices.

New Discourses Commentary

“Reimagine” is a term commonly used in the Theory of Critical Social Justice when it attempts what, other than criticizing everything, disrupting, and dismantling (see also, Critical Theory), it intends to do. For example, activists might say that we need “reimagine policing” or “reimagine prisons” (see also, abolitionism), or that we need to “reimagine education” or “reimagine classrooms” (see also, critical pedagogy). What they mean by this is genuinely unclear operationally—beyond the obvious bid to give the power to those reimagining things—but is readily comprehensible in the abstract. Whether intentional or not in any given context, this immediate comprehensibility and operational vagueness in the term is useful to and characteristic of the Theory and activism of Critical Social Justice and its intellectual precursors (see also, language game).

Obviously, to “reimagine” means to reconsider, imaginatively. This is true in the Critical Social Justice usage just as in everyday language. The Critical Social Justice usage, in that it is fully steeped in and informed by ideas of systemic power, looks for very radical reimagining that would ultimately disrupt, dismantle, subvert, and ultimately change these systems in their peculiar way. In other words, it tries to reconceive the relevant institution as it would exist in a “liberated” world without oppressive power dynamics (see also, communism). The vagueness in this program of “reimagining” arises because the dialectical process of thinking of the entire affair uses only negative thinking, which focuses only on critiquing what is rather than clearly articulating what should replace it (or how that would be implemented or work).

Within the ideology of Critical Social Justice, it is maintained that the manifestation of institutions, norms, and other social phenomena have been created from within extant (and oppressive) systems of power and were thus designed to uphold and maintain those systems (sometimes intentionally, sometimes in the willful ignorance of privilege and internalized dominance), to the benefit those privileged by them. Thus, to “reimagine” systems of any kind, as purveyors of Critical Social Justice ideology or Theories would have it, implies rethinking (or reimagining) the fundamental assumptions that underlie those systems and then fundamentally reorganizing them in line with the relevant critical theories that drive their thinking, as any other vision would merely reproduce the allegedly oppressive status quo and its power dynamics. More plainly, that means reimagining the systems as being made to adhere and promote the critical ideology.

In Theory, the full range of possibilities that one can imagine for an institution or system can be called its “imaginary” (though this term has other, related psychoanalytic uses as well), and the limits of that imaginary are set by the prevailing power dynamics and those said to benefit from them. In other words, perhaps as the postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault might have phrased it, there are “potentialities of being” that exist for institutions and systems outside of the range currently thought possible (see also, liberationism). Reimagining therefore asks people to call fundamentally into question the full range of ways we can possibly conceive of existing institutions and systems for those that fall completely outside of what the current society would believe is possible (see also, episteme). “Liberation” is a term that describes freeing ourselves from the current limited system for something that admits for possibilities beyond what we currently consider possible, and, depending on one’s frame, either reimagining the systems themselves or recollecting them from a time previous to the present systems of power is the task for the would-be liberator. In the context of neo-Marxism, liberation means “liberation from capitalism and all other oppressive systems” and thus means communism.

On a somewhat deeper level, reimagining systems has roots in the neo-Marxist literature (see also, Cultural Marxism, Frankfurt School, and Critical Theory). For example, the neo-Marxist Critical Theorist Herbert Marcuse admonishes in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance” that “it is the task and duty of the intellectual to recall and preserve historical possibilities which seem to have become utopian possibilities—that it is his task to break the concreteness of oppression in order to open the mental space in which this society can be recognized as what it is and does.”

What Marcuse is referring to here as “historical possibilities which seem to have become utopian possibilities” is approximately communism, though taken in a decidedly liberationist slant (which, in turn, he roughly defines elsewhere (in utopian terms) as socialism without the bureaucracy). Though Marcuse does not mention the term “reimagine” in this essay, reimagining society as a whole is clearly what he is describing, as he continually references the idea that a truly free society has never existed and currently exists nowhere on Earth. The mental space has to be opened to think of the existing systems of society in a new way that sees the existing society as oppressive (and even fascistic) so that other possibilities can be imagined in their place. In that regard, to “reimagine systems” implies rethinking of them as communism-based systems (without the bureaucracy, apparently) within Critical Social Justice thought and activism. In more direct and practical terms, one might critique tolerance as perpetrating violence and thus reimagine violence and censorship as necessary components of a “discriminating” or “liberating tolerance,” as did Marcuse.

Similar analysis could be undertaken within the postmodern vein of Critical Social Justice thought (see also, critical constructivism), though perhaps with less glaring obviousness and not so overtly communistic (as the postmodernists were post-Marxists who were disillusioned with Marxism rather than neo-Marxists who hoped to achieve siimilar ends through cultural means). When the postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault waxes on the idea of “expanding the potentialities of being,” for example, which can be considered fundamental to a significant part of his philosophy (see also, Foucauldian), he is actually hearkening to “reimagining” the norms (and normativities) of society in a way that is less restrictive. For the postmodernists, total nihilistic freedom rather than total “liberation” is the overarching objective, but the underlying conceptual framework is the same: the existing systems are bogus and oppressive and need to be deconstructed to enable new ways of being in life, which will come about through completely “reimagining” that which is and that which has already been done before (again, merely through the negative-thinking process).

Thus, conceptually, the term “reimagine,” when used by the Woke, has a concrete and comprehensible meaning, but this does nothing to change the fact that it is utterly and intractably vague. It is, in a sense, a way to reframe the negative thinking approach (e.g., problematizing) to make it sound like you’re doing something positive (instead of something merely negative). This reframing is accomplished by equating saying that the current system is unacceptable at its very foundations with pointing in a constructive direction that imagines things differently. It must be understood as merely pretending to point in a constructive direction because the activity is wholly abstract and, ultimately, proceeds by imagining a perfected (communistic) system that will just work once sufficient numbers of people believe in the reimagined vision and then applying negative thinking to the existing circumstances. More specifically, nothing in the Woke ideology or its intellectual precursors (neo-Marxism, postmodernism, and Marxism, particularly) have the slightest idea how to bring their “reimagined” vision into reality (for more on this, see here).

This lack of knowledge about how their “historical possibilities” are to be manifested in reality (except through dialectical negative thinking and “ruthless” criticism) does not mean that Woke reimagining doesn’t have an operational program to it. It does, and it proceeds effectively under two components. The first is straightforward: elevate in terms of power, access, representation, or visibility those (Woke) people who believe in the need to reimagine systems (see also, inclusion, belonging, standpoint epistemology, vanguardism, and grifter). The second is meant to operate in parallel and follow from the first: convince as many people as possible to believe in (have faith in) the vision that dictates the correct way to “reimagine” the system at hand, i.e., induce critical consciousness in as many people as possible. That is, the operationalization of “reimagining” is handing over power to people who advocate for the Critical Social Justice ideology while evangelizing to get others to believe in it as well.

As just indicated, then, the “reimagining” process is, in fact, a faith-based project modeled at least loosely off communist beliefs about the role of revolutionary consciousness in remaking society and its institutions at a fundamental level (e.g., class consciousness, critical consciousness, feminist consciousness, etc.). The core article of faith behind this project is that when sufficiently many people believe in the vision at the heart of “reimagining” (some variant of liberationism) and sufficiently many believers in that vision hold the relevant positions of institutional and cultural power, revolutionary change will proceed, taking the relevant systems and institutions away from the assumptions that guided them previously into a new model that doesn’t reproduce their alleged oppressions. In the language of customer service and sales, then, reimgaining means selling the (generally Marxian) dream without worrying about who will ultimately service the nightmare.

Related Terms

Abolitionism; Capitalism; Class consciousness; Communism; Critical; Critical consciousness; Critical constructivism; Critical pedagogy; Critical Theory; Cultural Marxism; Deconstruction; Dialectic; Dismantle; Disrupt; Episteme; Fascism; Feminist consciousness; Foucauldian; Frankfurt School; Grifter; Hegemony; Ideology; Imaginary; Inclusion; Internalized dominance; Language game; Liberationism; Marxian; Marxism; Negative thinking; Neo-Marxism; Norm; Normativity; Oppression; Post-Marxism; Postmodern; Privilege; Problematize; Radical; Reality; Revolutionary; Social Justice; Socialism; Standpoint epistemology; Status quo; Subversion; Theory; Tolerance; Utopia; Vanguardism; Violence; Visibility; Willful ignorance; Woke/Wokeness

Revision date: 6/17/21

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James Lindsay