Imaginations

Ruha Benjamin's William C. Ferguson Lecture

Ruha Benjamin—MacArthur Fellow, Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, and self-proclaimed ‘transdisciplinary scholar’—said many things that struck a chord with me during the short seminar she led a day before her William C. Ferguson invited lecture, but none more than the following: ‘I wear the coat of being an academic lightly. Some days I want to take it all the way off.’ A brave yet realistic and necessary notion to propose, it arrived at the end of a discussion that emphasized the importance of intellectual debate and the production of new, radical ideas.

In other words, it is clear to me that Benjamin wears ‘the coat of being an academic’ with a great deal of intensity and respect, but that established conceptions of academia have stymied its potential for transformative change as well as theoretical readjustment.

Central to Benjamin’s project, detailed in her 2024 book Imagination: A Manifesto, is the initiation of ‘a grammar grounded in the affirmative’ and the valuation of ‘creativity over criticality.’ We need to have one foot outside of the academy, Benjamin argues, in order to combat the merciless and barren cynicism that has come to define our sphere of academia. When we talk to the public, we learn that it is insufficient to stop at the ‘problem.’ It is thus ‘imperative to build out our creative faculties’ so that we can ‘create in community’ the solutions to the problems we have located and described as academics.

William James, premier pragmatist and public intellectual in the United States during the first quarter of the twentieth century, specified his philosophical position as follows:

A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.

Nowhere does James mention our creative faculties here (though he does elsewhere in Pragmatism), but explicit is a grounded dissatisfaction with professionalized philosophy, an enterprise settled in the abstract and once-and-for-all solutions to theoretical pseudo-debates. James, admittedly, struggled to attach his belief in ‘facts,’ ‘action,’ and ‘power,’ to societal problems in effective or meaningful ways, a deficiency I believe figures such as Du Bois, John Dewey, James Baldwin, and Edward Said managed to correct, but his distancing from professional philosophy bespeaks of Benjamin’s frustration with the get-us-nowhere cynicism of present-day academia.

Of note is the fact that though both James and Benjamin erect ‘critical’ stances contra the ‘inveterate habits’ of academics, they furnish their criticality with concrete alternatives. For James, it is what we ‘turn to’ that makes all the difference: ‘concreteness and adequacy.’ At one point, Benjamin spoke to us of putting the university on the defensive—that we ought to ‘stigmatize and shame them.’ To stigmatize and to shame certainly makes up part of our critical purview, but an offensive-minded criticality does not terminate at the pointing of one’s finger. Accordingly, Benjamin, during her lecture, delineated two ‘AI’ alternatives to the current doomed scenario: Ancestral Intelligence (i.e., what we inherit) and Abundant Imagination (i.e., what we pass down to future generations).

In order to forge a critical + creative vision, Benjamin observes that we need to start looking for imagination in unlikely places. Indeed, our imaginative faculties are often exerted in the dry, number-crunching, and spreadsheet-arranging routines of the social sciences. If, as Benjamin points out, ‘boldness is rationed while realism is mass produced,’ so that ‘our visions for social reality grow limp,’ we need to scour for imagination in the spheres of life that appear the most colorless and pedestrian.

I am reminded of Jeffrey Cohen’s quandary in Earth: “Why when it comes to Earth does human imagination luxuriate in beauty but not initiate action and change?” Right. Because a caviling criticality and chimeras of utopia are two sides of the same coin.