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.
