"But... the luminous tree!" The Uses of the Imagination in Resistant Cultural Production

This thesis responds to a political impasse that has developed in the United Kingdom as a result of neoliberal austerity measures. This impasse is broadly experienced by political subjects via an affective stasis, the feeling that no meaningful intervention can be made to transform material conditions. I examine the uses of the imagination in the cultural production of anti-racist and feminist organising groups and artistic formations in the UK, focusing specifically on how the cultural objects they produce can reconstitute a collective desire to resist. I investigate the purpose of the imagination as represented in cultural objects and examine how it shapes conceptualisations of futurity.

This project examines the contours of what I have termed, “Imaginative-Revolutionary Potential,” an affective force contained in cultural production that reinvigorates the resistant desires necessary to build a liberatory structure of feeling. Using a materialist Black feminist framework, it represents its main arguments using creative methods – critical fabulation, discourse and visual analysis, interviews, workshopping, soundscaping – in an online digital assemblage titled THIS IS A TEMPORAL LANDSCAPE, YOU WILL FIND NO DIRECTION HERE. This landscape uses creative practice to aid the construction of a liberatory structure of feeling capable of pushing political subjects towards action. I argue that serious engagement with the material contours of the imagination requires a deconstruction of the linear temporality that has produced the present political conjuncture and a reconceptualisation of the grand narrative of history on which affective stasis depends. The imagination is not a subjective process of mental cognition but a collective and relational force that finds its most necessary expression in materialist resistance. I read the cultural objects produced by resistant movements as art objects, positing that these objects leave traces of the desires, forces and intensities that constituted them everywhere, lifting the weight of stasis when engaged.