Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Perspectives from philosophy, aesthetics, and art on how to envisage the construction site of possible worlds.
Given the highly coercive and heavily surveilled dynamics of the present moment, as the tremendous force exerted by capital on contemporary life produces an aggressive and coercive "official reality," the question of the construction of other possible worlds is perhaps more urgent than ever.
This collection brings together different perspectives from the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, and art to discuss the mechanisms through which possible worlds are imagined, constructed, and instantiated, in the hope of overcoming the contemporary moment's deficit of imagination and its apparent fear of thinking about possible and achievable alternatives.
Implicit in this dynamic between the imaginary and the possible is the question of how the imagination intertwines with both rationality and the inherited contingencies of the world we are born into. With no ascertainable ground on which to build, with no faith in any "given" that could guarantee our labors, how do we even envisage the construction site of possible worlds, and with what kind of language can we bring them into being?