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114 CHAPTER SEVEN Imaginary Pragmatics and the Enigma of Revolt Nowhere had he seen officialdom and life as interwoven as they were here, so interwoven that it sometimes even looked as if officialdom and life had changed places. Franz Kafka To celebrate our becoming a minority, and to posit an almost-unimaginable parallel urban realm, only opens the door, likely a backdoor, to the faint possibility that there is an imaginary parallel urban realm out there, one yearning to be invented.1 In any flight through the wormhole to another political space-time dimension, into a minor space, physicists will tell you that enormous amounts of negative energy are required to force that hole open, to keep it open, and to permit a time-space crossover to take place. Negative social energy, of course, is a lot of disgruntled and discontented people, fusing themselves together, sometimes fighting one another, oftentimes knowing better what they don’t want than what they do. Negative energy is repulsive in the sense that it’s necessary to keep the wormhole from collapsing, from caving in under gravity, under the oppositional energy of an enemy intent on closing things down. But it’s equally clear that for blazing another cosmic future, a new terrestrial one here on earth, a good deal of positive energy is required, too, energy that’s not only destructive but creative, an affirming power rather than that which simply denounces. To create the almost-unimaginable, imagination is pretty crucial. One needs an active sense of experimentation, of experiments with society as well as with concepts, of moving beyond simple or even complicated “critiques of capitalist political-economy” and something that expresses only critical negativity. Experimentation gives a deeper sense to Marx’s eleventh thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach about changing the world. The point, rather, should be to experiment with the world, people experimenting with how they live in the world, experimenting with what that world might be, experimenting with how they might construct an alternative urban life and how they might make that realm Imaginary Pragmatics and the Enigma of Revolt • 115 for themselves. To say all this isn’t to voice a utopian yearning: experimentation isn’t to rally around utopianism, not that that is necessarily bad. It’s more that what needs developing is, for want of a better label, an imaginary pragmatics, something neither utopian nor pragmatic as such. Imagination is vital stuff here. But it’s been serially lacking in the Left’s militancy , in what it wants and how it might get it. It’s hard to know whether the Left’s past inefficacy is because it lacked imagination or whether its inefficacy has throttled its imagination, doused the flames of the Left’s imaginative drive. Some combination of both is probably the case. By imagination, I love Sartre’s citation from The Imaginary (1940), which I mobilized as an epigraph to Magical Marxism: “the act of the imagination is an act of magic.” “It is an incantation,” says Sartre, “destined to make the object of one’s thoughts, the thing one desires, appear in such a way that one can take possession of it.” Needless to say, “there’s always,” Sartre qualifies, “in that act something of the imperious and infantile, a refusal to take account of distance and difficulties.”2 Perhaps it’s just as well: otherwise nothing would happen, nothing would get done, nothing would even be ventured. Thus the word “magic” in Magical Marxism is closely linked with imagination, with imperious desire, with “infantile” yearning to do something else, to invent something else, to do it now, not when the time is right (and ripe), or not when analysis says the moment is pregnant and that the productive forces have reached such and such a level of maturity. There’s another quote I like relating to the imagination. It’s by Spinoza, from Ethics: “Humans strive to imagine only those things which increase their power of acting.”3 So imagination means setting in motion something pragmatic, something around which one can act, a concrete praxis, a magical act, like an occupation becoming viral, using imagination to spark people’s imagination. But let’s be clear about what “imaginary pragmatics” is and isn’t. It’s not, for instance, a pragmatism of compromise, which is what most pragmatics is; it’s not a pragmatics of the moment, a status quo pragmatism. Instead, it’s an imaginative form of action and activism that constantly...

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