{"id":67419,"date":"2020-02-01T14:03:03","date_gmt":"2020-02-01T19:03:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=67419"},"modified":"2020-02-01T14:03:03","modified_gmt":"2020-02-01T19:03:03","slug":"public-imagination-the-challenge-of-21st-century-populist-and-authoritarian-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=67419","title":{"rendered":"\u201cPublic Imagination: The Challenge of 21st Century Populist and Authoritarian Politics\u201d."},"content":{"rendered":"

By<\/p>\n

Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka<\/strong><\/p>\n

The book is titled \u2018On Public Imagination\u2019 and subtitled \u2018A Political and Ethical Imperative\u2019. It is edited by Victor Faessel, Richard Falk and Michael Curtin. It is a Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group publication out of New York and London. The introductory thematic essay is by Richard Falk and Victor Faessel and its title lets us straight into the problem that is sought to be tackled. \u201cPublic Imagination: The Challenge of 21st Century Populist and Authoritarian Politics\u201d.<\/p>\n

The date of publication of the slim volume is 2020. It is classified as Politics\/Current Affairs, while in the descriptive text on the back cover the publishers place it more specifically in the category \u2018Political Thought\u2019. In the sphere of Politics\/Political Thought, it deals with the most important theme or problem of the current period in world history.<\/p>\n

I was lucky to get the volume in the mail in Moscow and have it collected from Customs the day before I left. I read it all the way through on the flight back to Colombo. It is co-edited by the man I most respect intellectually and am proud to call a friend, who was also the primary author of the volume\u2019s Introduction, namely Prof Richard Falk.<\/p>\n

Richard Falk is Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University. Victor Faessel is managing editor of The Oxford Handbook of Global Studies as well as the four-volume Encyclopedia of Global Studies. Michael Curtin is Distinguished Professor of Film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

On the flyleaf the publishers had identified the book\u2019s emphasis as dealing with problems of public imagination \u201cin an era paradoxically marked by intensifying globalization and resurgent nationalism\u201d.<\/p>\n

Typical of Falk, whose ethics and lucidity are welded together and wielded like a light-saber, the introductory essay gets right to the point. It hopes to \u201cheighten sensitivity to the wider political and historical context of our time\u201d, at \u201cthis critical juncture in human history\u201d. Falk and Faessel sound the alarm that \u201cthis regressive trend visible throughout the world signals what may be an epoch-defining abandonment of post 1945 commitment to democratic forms of governance and advocacy of human rights.\u201d<\/p>\n

Falk and Faessel pull no punches while describing the tectonic shift: \u201c\u2026the election of autocratic and demagogic leaders adhering to ultranationalist agendas\u2026the rising populist backlash against globalization in many societies has been marked by resurgent right-wing nationalism and in many cases, authoritarianism\u2026Rightwing populism and nativism warn us that more primitive, chauvinist forms of collective political imagination are asserting themselves over what now appears to be a vanishing veneer of tolerance and political civility…and [have] engendered toxic forms of polarization\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Catherine Keller, Professor of Constructive Theology at Drew Theological College recapitulates the main point of the Introduction in its identification of the problem: \u201c\u2026what Richard Falk and Victor Faessel call in the introduction to this anthology, the \u2018regressive politics\u2019 of rightwing populism and nativism, \u2018intensified by disinformation, fake news and corporatized media\u2019 \u201d.<\/p>\n

This is by no means a purely Western progressive humanist or left-liberal perspective. Professor Emerita of Political Science at Delhi University, Neera Chandhoke opens her essay on \u2018The making of an Indian Public Space\u2019 endorsing and extending the diagnosis: \u201cThe important introductory chapter by Richard Falk and Victor Faessel in this volume lays out clearly and cogently the dangers that stalk our world today: rabid intolerance, fear of the stranger, and the closing down of minds. Across the world people seem to inhabit frighteningly blinkered worlds\u2026Since the end of the twentieth century religious identities have made more strident demands and engaged in state-breaking and state-making endeavors.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is echoed by Luis Cabrera, Associate Professor at the School of Government and International Relations, Griffith University, who writes of \u201cthis era of populism and nativism, when battles for some of the most basic principles of rights and equality must seemingly be re-fought daily\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

The main thesis of the volume is that neoliberalism, liberal democracy and the left lost– actually forfeited– their appeal to the public imagination, because of the failure, falsity or obsolescence of their \u201cstories\u201d, their narratives, their myths and legends, while the authoritarian rightwing nationalists succeeded in appealing to the public imagination. The challenge for progressives is to come up with the elements of a viable alternative appeal to the public imagination which can rival and displace the hold of authoritarian rightwing nationalism and nativism. <\/p>\n

The intellectual goal the editors set themselves is indeed ambitious. To rectify the present lack of \u201cany sense of a feasible alternative that extends the social democratic ethos\u2026into the future\u201d and \u201c\u2026above all to liberate public imagination from largely nationalist frames of reference that have fueled the surge of ultranationalist populisms\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Does the volume work and how does it work? In the editorial reviews, Craig Calhoun, former Director of the LSE and currently Professor of Sociology at Arizona State University writes that \u201cwithout imagination our public debates are inanimate and our politics mere power struggles. This book brings 30 exciting perspectives on how to renew public imagination\u201d. Saskia Sassen, Professor of Sociology at Columbia and visiting Prof at the LSE says \u201cthis is a much-needed angle into the larger debate about the decay of liberal democracy\u201d. Manfred Steger, Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaii opines that \u201cour 21st century world is in desperate need of collective action based on a pluralistic public imagination. This highly readable anthology presents the concise and innovative views of dozens of influential intellectuals on the critical role of an ethical imagination\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

The volume is divided into five parts, covering \u2018Imagination: Theory and Engagement\u2019, \u2018Imagining Communities and Rights\u2019, \u2018Ecological Imaginations\u2019, \u2018Rupture and Revolution\u2019, and \u2018Across the Border\u2019. The contributors include two respected former Foreign Ministers, Celso Amorim (Brazil) Ahmet Davutoglu (Turkey), iconic futurist thinker Johan Galtung, top journalists and writer Victoria Brittain, famous civil society figure Chandra Muzaffer, and respected senior academics Fred Dallmayr, Stephen Gill, Marjorie Cohn, Mary Kaldor and Neera Chandhoke. <\/p>\n

The contributors as listed in alphabetical order in the volume are: Celso Amorim, Akeel Bilgrami, David Bollier, Chiara Bottici, Victoria Brittain, Luis Cabrera, Julie A. Carlson, Neera Chandhoke, Allen Chun, Kevin P. Clements, Marjorie Cohn, Drucilla Cornell, Michael Curtin, Fred Dallmayr, Ahmet Davutoglu, Victor Faessel, Richard Falk, Tom Farer, Johan Galtung, Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Stephen Gill, Anna Grear, Penny Green, Abdellah Hammoudi, Dayan Jayatilleka, Paul W. Khan, Mary Kaldor, Catherine Keller, Sara Lafia, Chandra Muzaffar, Stephen D Seely, Vandana Shiva, Kamal Sinclair and Elizabeth West. I was privileged to be invited to contribute. <\/p>\n

Mary Kaldor, the renowned writer and scholar of global militarization, identifies with enormous lucidity in her chapter, the responsibility of the left for the catastrophe that has befallen humanity with the triumph of the nationalist right. Her analysis is true of all countries, except, I would argue, for those such as Argentina and Mexico in which the left adopted a Left Populist strategy and program. \u201cIt was a failure of the left\u2014the belief by representatives of the left that they needed to compromise with market fundamentalism in order to capture power\u2014that created a gaping hole in the creative imagination. So it was that the new, claiming to be old, scions of the right were able to manipulate nostalgia for a time when our institutions seemed to work and to attribute blame for the breakdown of our institutions on the so-called newcomer, \u2018the other\u2019 who spoiled our golden past. In the 1930s, this kind of thinking led to the rise of fascism and culminated in a war\u2026Currently the dominant narratives are polarized between a rightwing nationalist populism and global neoliberalism. The left is divided between the old nationalist left and those, like Clinton and Blair, who compromised with neoliberalism. What we need is a new global emancipatory narrative that is global, green, socially just, and realistic, another way of seeing the world…\u201d <\/p>\n

Fred Dallmayr, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Notre Dame recalls at the conclusion of his contribution \u2018Public Space: thinking at the Edge of the Cave\u2019, that the antidote to the ultranationalist public imagination of our time has been Richard Falk\u2019s long standing (2002) advocacy of the archetype and mentality of the \u201ccitizen pilgrim\u201d. For his part, Celso Amorim, Brazil\u2019s former Foreign Minister and Defense Minister under President Lula, counterposes the conceptual-cum-value cluster of \u201cnational sovereignty\u201d, \u201chuman rights\u201d, \u201cdemocratic governance\u201d and above all \u201csolidarity\u201d, against the \u201cconservative nationalist ideologies of the kind represented by Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kevin Clements, Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago, NZ, argues for a \u2018Politics of Compassion in an age of ruthless power\u2019, pointing to the familiar reality of \u201ca deliberate cultivation of existential fear and anxiety by opportunistic leaders and their media allies. This has been used to justify the expansion of dominatory and authoritarian politics.\u201d The new category he mints\u2014 \u2018dominatory politics\u2014may be profitably deployed to understand the unilateral redesign of the politico-Constitutional and social (ethnic, religious, linguistic and gender) relations that is being attempted by right-wing nationalist authoritarianism the world over. In his definition \u201cdominatory politics\/processes refer to all those exchanges that result in the intentional or unintentional subordination of others and the development of persistent hierarchies based on age, race, gender or class.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clements posits instead a Politics of Compassion comprising \u201cgenuine paradigm shift\u2026from \u2018power over\u2019 others to \u2018power with\u2019 others\u2026The politics of compassion, therefore, is the opposite of dominatory, fear driven, xenophobic politics based on a monopoly of force and coercion\u2026more attention should be directed to enhancing the power of unifiers in communities and diminishing the power of dividers. The challenge however, is understanding and combatting all the dynamics which threaten to undermine these values\u2014possessive individualism, neoliberalism and elite-driven politics\u2026 For a new, socially driven imaginary to succeed it must first, however, analyze and negate politics and practices of domination everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

My only point of disagreement is with the bottom line of the impassioned essay by Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton in his contribution to Part IV, the section on \u2018Revolution and Rupture\u2019, in which Stephen Gill, Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at York University, and I have had our contributions housed by the Editors. Ghamari-Tabrizi draws a distinction in his essay on \u2018Revolutionary politics and Public Imagination\u2019 between \u201cpossible realities\u201d and \u201creal possibilities\u201d, and counterposes them, arguing for fidelity to the former and lamenting the latter. Prof Gill and I, writing totally independently of one another, have both leaned heavily on Antonio Gramsci. It is from a neo-Gramscian perspective that I demur from that contradistinction and would argue instead that the \u201clate-modern Prince\u201d or \u201cpost-modern Prince\/Princess\u201d (this latter is Stephen Gill\u2019s coinage) must be capable of mediating and managing adroitly the dialectic of \u201creal possibilities\u201d in the short term and \u201cpossible realities\u201d in the longer\u2014thus able to think of a \u201cfeasible utopia\u201d (Gill), \u201ca new realistic utopia\u201d (Kaldor). <\/p>\n

In the concluding \u2018Coda\u2019 written with lyricism and passion, primary co-editor Victor Faessel urges that \u201c\u2026In an age of authoritarian and populist politics, of recrudescent nativism, racism, and revanchism and of ecological calamity\u2019s arrival\u2026The social facts of justice, equality, tolerance, freedom \u2013to the extent that they actually exist where one happens to live\u2014are only \u2018facts\u2019 in this sense that they have been and continue to be fought for by coalitions of conscience and commitment\u2026medleys of cooperative ethical passion become concrete acts toward a future\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

I prefer to read Victor Faessel\u2019s \u2018Coda\u2019 together with the concluding passage of the contribution to the volume by Drucilla Cornell, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Women\u2019s and Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, who deploys the luminous term \u2018political spirituality\u2019 and reminds us of the stakes and risks, and the appropriate attitude with which to view them. \u201c\u2026For us the challenge of political spirituality is to dare to risk the kind of \u2018danger\u2019\u2014and it was Foucault who said that everything is dangerous, but this means we always have something to do\u2014that our imagination of a more just world can only be opened in and through actual struggles that expand our material possibilities\u201d.<\/p>\n

Or if you prefer, the last word or words are the first words, right in front, on the cover of the volume. It features a photograph of the London Extinction Rebellion mural at Marble Arch, widely thought to be by Banksy. It is a wall, with a sketch of a little girl holding a small placard with the extinction symbol, while the writing in chalk on the wall reads: \u201cFROM THIS MOMENT DESPAIR ENDS AND TACTICS BEGIN\u201d. <\/p>\n

******************************************************************************<\/strong><\/p>\n

(Dayan Jayatilleka is author of \u201cThe Great Gramsci: Imagining an Alt-Left Project\u201d, in Part IV \u2018Rupture and Revolution\u2019, \u201cOn Public Imagination: A Political and Ethical Imperative\u201d eds. Victor Faessel, Richard Falk and Michael Curtin, Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, New York and London, 2020, Ch 23, pp 92-95.)<\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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By Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka The book is titled \u2018On Public Imagination\u2019 and subtitled \u2018A Political and Ethical Imperative\u2019. It is edited by Victor Faessel, Richard Falk and Michael Curtin. It is a Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group publication out of New York and London. The introductory thematic essay is by Richard Falk and Victor Faessel …<\/p>\n

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