Art, Politics, and the Imagination

Date Written:  1996-07-01
Publisher:  Resist, USA
Year Published:  1996
Resource Type:  Pamphlet
Cx Number:  CX14070

The work of our best artists throws into sharp relief what is painfully missing from most activists' work: a fusion of living experience with political insight.

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We hear despair in the loss of vitality in our spoken language: "No problem" we say, "that was a healing experience," we say, "thank you for sharing that," we say. We see despair in the political activist who doggedly goes on and on, turning in the ashes of the same burnt out rhetoric, the same gestures, all imagination spent. Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and mortal defeat, is, like war, the failure of the imagination.
----Adrienne Rich, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics,1993.

Scientific, analytical thinking presides as the dominating force for most organizing, adopted by progressives and conservatives alike. Most of us have grown up believing that reading novels, watching films, attending plays and dance performances, looking at photographs and reading poetry are nothing more than forms of entertainment. Instead, they can be a search for truth, for a deeper understanding of people and the world. We're misled in thinking art is optional: great, valuable, entertaining, excellent, but off to one side of political, economic and legal thought.

"The narrative has never been merely entertainment for me. It is, I believe, one of the principal ways in which we absorb knowledge."
In Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Martha Nussbaum discusses Rousseau's awareness of the importance of the imagination in making us human. The imagination is essential to enliven our capacity for finding connections, drawing inferences and solving problems. Only direct, immediate experience aided by careful imagination allows us to interpret, thereby bringing about the clear contrast and comparison without which no real choice can follow.

How often after reading a novel, a poem, a short story, have you asked yourself, how alike I am to everyone else, instead of how different I am from everybody else?.
In contrast to stories told in a living language filled with images taken from the human world, facts, statistics, data and bits of information, valuable as they are, slide in and out of memory without fully engaging sustained, powerful connections to the whole being. Data are important, are necessary, but not all by themselves, not alone. Analysis and facts are not able to give a face, eyes, a body to the suffering, joy, love, anguish of the people (however near or far away).

Vignettes, stories of fantasy, from Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano's book, The Book of Embraces.
Courage is born of fear, certainty of doubt.

What it all comes down to is that we are the sum of our efforts to change who we are. Identity is no museum piece sitting stock-still in a display case, but rather the endlessly astonishing synthesis of the contradictions of everyday life.

Fantasy as understood by the most memorable artists is not escapist, drawing the reader away from reality, but rather pulling her or him deeper into it. All good art is disturbing in ways that history, social science and government accounting office writing is not. It inspires distrust of conventional pieties and exacts a frequently painful confrontation with one's own thoughts and intentions.

Subject Headings

• Art