Background Research for Multiplicities and Mutualities in the Imagination

It was important to me to begin this project by considering the relational space one has to themselves in their own mind. Certainly, the mind can be a space of self-bullying, self-abuse, and domination. It can be the site at which we rehearse and internalize all the inadequacies we are taught to believe about ourselves, largely because those manufactured insecurities can be directed toward marketable solutions. When trying to decide where to focus on such a broad topic, I came across a picture I took a few years ago that caused me to a step back and consider imagination and play as art practices that can help us imagine conditions of multiplicity and mutuality.

In this picture, my daughter, Eleanor, had set up a Lego block village in our living room. I was walking by and noticed something a little curious – all the Lego people were gathered together, and each was holding up a raised hand. I asked Eleanor if the characters were cheering. “No”, she said, “they are voting.” She went on to explain that the queen had just finished asking if they should let a citizen out of jail. I looked closer and sure enough the small feet of a seated prisoner were visible through the bars of a jail cell. In a sweet hopefulness it appeared that the people were unanimously voting to release the prisoner. I asked her why everyone was voting in the affirmative. She said that the jail cell had been positioned within the town so that anyone in prison could use that time to see how everyone else was behaving and therefore learn how to “act right” before going back to live with the others. Children have a reputation for possessing vivid imaginations, but what may be less widely understood is the often serious and consequential content of their play. Just like lion cub play performs hunting, human play performs society and its relational structures, but in a way that is less bogged down by reality. Childhood play may be naive and lacking in certain real-world complexities (like the injustices found in the justice system), but it also is not as informed by the needs of the power holders as it is by imagining and practicing versions of the way things could and ought to be. Play is an art practice, a method of world-making, that like all art is somewhat beaten out of adults. 

I’m reading one of my favorite books, Animal Farm, to Eleanor right now. She is exasperated by the fact that the animals don’t stand up to Napoleon. When I remind her that they are afraid of Napoleon’s (the dictator’s) ruthless guard dogs, she reminds me that Boxer (the bulk of the labor force) is big enough to overpower the dogs and only chooses not to because he blindly follows Napoleon. Telling my daughter that sometimes life just goes that way is unacceptable to her. Which of us is more correct? I think an adult is more apt to read Orwell’s brilliant satire, as many have, with its group dynamics so accurately represented and think “see, this is why we can’t have nice things…there are always those people who will try and take over…it’s play or be played.” The more we are disappointed, the more we seem to develop a fundamental disbelief in our ability to maintain a system of equality. Children seem more likely to insist that no one should accept such a scenario. And we think we are the wiser ones for telling them how life really goes. 

Marx’s critique of capitalism demonstrated that it is an economic system that inevitably results in an increasingly widening state of inequality as power and wealth accumulate into fewer and fewer hands.[1] Even when people recognize this, they often say something to the effect of “but nothing else works.” It is easy, rational even to develop a defeatist attitude and a disbelief in alternatives. We desperately need the ability to play like children – to audaciously conceive of fair governments and happy communities despite that there is a history of people who have tried and failed. Orwell, a democratic socialist, used allegory to illustrate in broadly accessible terms the complex ways in which we fall short of our goals, but this is not meant to be the end of our imagination. In fact, in an interview Orwell points out that the animals should have put a stop to the first signs of inequality in the new system – when more of the apples and the milk began to go to the pigs.[2] At every opportunity in the story we are invited to imagine what if the animals had responded differently, especially before it became such a dangerous proposition? As I walked past my daughter’s room tonight, she had laid out on the floor her own version of Animal Farm, using her toys to act out alternative endings. I wonder how we might continue to play with the characters of Boxer, Molly, Snowball, Benjamin, and dare I say, even Napoleon, even if just in our own heads, but this time toward different ends?

[1] For example, “…the sole defence against the capitalists is competition, which in the view of political economy has the beneficial effect both of raising wages and cheapening commodities to the advantage of the consuming public. But competition is possible only if capitals multiply and are held by many different people. It is only possibly to generate a large number of capitals as a result of multilateral accumulation, since capital in general stems from accumulation. But multilateral accumulation inevitably turns in to unilateral accumulation. Competition among capitalists increases accumulation of capitals. Accumulation, which under the rule of private property means concentration of capital in few hands, inevitably ensues if capitals are allowed to follow their own natural course.” Karl Marx, Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London, England: Penguin Books, 1992), 300.

[2] “The turning-point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves. If the other animals had had the sense to put their foot down then, it would have been all right. If people think I am defending the status quo, that is, I think, because they have grown pessimistic and assume that there is no alternative except dictatorship or laissez-faire capitalism.” George Orwell, “‘Animal Farm’: What Orwell Really Meant,” The New York Review of Books, July 11, 2013.