When mentioning the word politics, most people are inclined to think of the state or the government, along with its various apparatus, structures, and members. To a more progressive audience, politics may be defined as the power that resides in the people, seen through acts of resistance over their oppressors. For a cynical, politics may be seen as a dirty word, one which carries nothing more but corruption and deceit. It seems almost unthinkable, then, for someone to label it with one word: hope.
Art by Angelica Amio & Neil Roman
Hope as a Double-Edged Sword
Hope has been, like most ideas under the lens of the social sciences, a contested concept. A common denominator has been to see the word as one that describes the possibility of a future better than the present. However, its relationship to the political is riddled with debates. For Berlant, hope is better characterized as “cruel optimism,” where the desire and optimism for a good life prevents us from having just that. For instance, our hope for a better political climate leads us to vote for populists who promise - but never seem to deliver - the realization of such hope. Others have argued that hope creates an illusion of possibilities within oppressive structures, in effect resulting in the maintenance of inequality or a reproduction of the conditions of oppression. On the other hand, those who carry hope for change may inevitably be disappointed upon realizing that such changes do not come as fast as how they have hoped it to be. These different scenarios may result in despair, which Govier sees as a loss of hope.
Despite such criticisms with hope, various thinkers have also embraced the concept in relation to the political. For some, hope and hopelessness are not contradicting. Hope’s contradiction is complacency - settling for the present conditions instead of reimagining a better one - and thus making hope a co-constitutive feeling with grief, where the image of a better future puts one out of grief. Hopelessness may even provide space for hope under the realization that the present conditions only oppress oneself and thus are in need to be replaced. Put simply, the desire for a better future merits one with the ability to critique the present. After all, it is the recognition of the inadequacies, inabilities, and oppression that the present structures bring that leads one to start reimagining a future that could be. And fundamental to this hopeful politics is political imagination.
To Hope is To Imagine
Despite its seemingly nonpolitical nature, the act of imagination carries with it a reflection of our desires, understandings, and frustrations of the politics that surround us. Jaffe conceptualizes political imagination as the "[i]maginings of political order, of how power works and how it should work". In this sense, to imagine a political structure or a relationship of power with other people is to make the act of imagination political in itself. Thinkers have been debating on the role of political imagination in shaping politics, with some arguing that political imagination results in “radical creativity” that leads to collective action and change, while others see it as a creation of a common and shared understanding of political structures, in essence creating and legitimizing society’s status quo.
In studying the indigenous people’s resistance in social media, Carlson and Frazer states: “Hope, in this sense, is not useless or fanciful daydreaming. Instead, to hope is to challenge the dominant colonial narratives of Indigenous lack and deficit, and to remain open to a future that might be otherwise.” Such a statement shows the relationship between politics of hope and political imagination. Simply put, politics of hope allow us to look into the future as one where political structures and power relations better favor those who hope. For instance, the 1987 hunger strike of Turkish trans women against an authoritarian regime’s repression and oppression of the LGBTQIA+ community is seen by Bayramoğlu as an exercise of queer hope, where the strikers imagine a future where queerness is given space in the public sphere. Such an imagined future is therefore political, thus requiring the exercise of political imagination. This imagination is not baseless but is grounded on the aspects of the present political structures that one may find oppressive or undesirable. Indeed, some scholars have argued that even imaginations of utopia allow us to critique the present conditions of our political reality through a negation of its undesirable qualities.
In Defense of The Future
After all this, so what? Clearly, thinking our way out of oppression is different from actually getting ourselves out of it. However, hope and imagination do not promise immediate emancipation from oppression. Instead, it opens up the possibility of a future in which emancipation is achieved. The construction of such a possibility creates a direction for political action and social change.
In their fieldwork with land-based social movements in the Philippines, Wright observes how hope exists despite the despair resulting from government oppression that those in the movement experience. Wright concludes that the hope that they experience becomes a part of the farmers’ reality where “the very knowledge that odds are stacked against change propels the holding on, the carrying on.”. It is, then, the politics of hope, and the political imagination that co-constitutes it, that allows the oppressed to keep fighting despite the repeated failures of pushback to the structures that oppress them. It is the possibility of a better future that creates a present that has space for resistance. This is not to be taken lightly. After all, our alternatives for capitalism, populism, authoritarianism, the state, and other structures of society start within the imagination. For one to change the world, they must first imagine. For them to imagine a better possibility, they must first have hope.
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