Significance of Domain Name (URL)
of the Union of Imaginable Associations
- / -
The web address of this site (the URL) is designed to challenge easy assumptions
about this initiative. Use of the prefix "un-" (www.un-imagine.org)
may therefore be variously understood as:
- stressing the value of a contrarian approach by also implying the merit
of a "negative
capability", in contrast to uncritical contemporary
emphasis on "positive" approaches -- thereby raising the question of the
implication of "unimagining" dominant images in favour of more creative alternatives
- introducing a healthy degree of self-mockery as a corrective to unfruitful
presumption
- pointing to the fundamental importance of cultivating attitudes in anticipation
of the "unimaginable" -- beyond the cultivated images of reality
-- in the spirit of preparedness of the injunction to
"expect the unexpected"
- highlighting the widespread challenge of reliance on the "unimaginative" in
a period when imaginative responses are perhaps one of the few possibilities
of avoiding a range of disasters
- provocatively implying that the initiative is in
some way related to those of the United Nations -- whether or not a
United Nations of the future should indeed be specifically associated with
some such imaginative approach
- implying a conventional static form of "union" -- when the intention
is rather to favour understandings of union as characterized by continuing
emergence from a dynamic process
An alternative URL (www.u-imagine.org),
associated with this site, makes the point that in a very important sense the
radical process of (re)imagining promoted here is an opportunity open to each
and everyone -- namely one's own personal responsibility rather than that of
any imagined collectivity.