The Success of the Conservative Imagination
“[We] can chalk up the current state of the right not to its failures of imagination or excess of spleen — as some have done — but to its overwhelming success.” — Corey Robin (The Reactionary Mind)
I am a firm believer that the imagination is the central identity marker of human consciousness.
Some prefer to speak of “reflective consciousness” (Sartre), “linguistic consciousness” (Jackendoff), “meta-consciousness” (Jaynes), or any other similar nexus of designation. This does not denigrate the other expressions of thought that compose the totality of imaginative consciousness. Quite the contrary. Thought is simultaneously affective, embodied, embedded, enacted, extended, pre-reflective, pre-subjective, pre-singular, etc, etc, etc…
These concepts all have value insofar as they indicate thinking tendencies of a co-inhering, co-constitutive, pluri-dimensional human expression. However, imaginative consciousness serves a unique set of purposes. For Hume, it was bringing the flux of sense data together. For Kant, it was the condition that allowed sense data to be apprehended. For Sartre, it was the moment of praxis that superseded the present toward the field of possibles. And for Burke, the imagination is the faculty that allows human beings to develop their moral tendencies — i.e. their character.
In fact, I tend to agree with all of these ideas. Not willing to limit the extent of the imagination’s enactment, it seems best to me to recognize the ways in which the imagination is both transcendental and empirical. And what is more, it is crucial to recognize how it circumvents that simple bifurcation itself. This is why, following a term that Foucault employed, I think of the imagination as an historicized a priori. It is both an historically contingent construct and also the a priori transcendental grid by which we take up the world.
With that, I am intrigued by Corey Robin’s analysis of the conservative imagination in his 2011 stalwart prophecy The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. Famous for being “The Book that Predicted Trump,” The Reactionary Mindis not merely a foretelling but, more importantly, it is a forthtelling. The prophetic tradition is often thought of as a soothsaying enclave predicting apocalyptic events of the end of linear historical time. This reductionistic perspective limits the robustness of the prophetic imagination, which was concerned with hailing the dictates of divine truth and calling people to task for their failure to live faithfully. Interestingly enough, characterizing prophecy as psychic fortune telling is beholden to the very criticism of conservative thought that Robin expounds…
