Abstract
The author considers the politics and public pedagogy of “anti-woke” backlash as a component of the cultural politics of U.S. fascism. Concerned about the threat posed by the somnambulance promoted by anti-woke politics to democracy and humanization, the author puts Bauman and Greene into conversation. In particular, Bauman's abiding concerns with moral sensitivity and Greene's notion of wide-awakeness are juxtaposed to the cultural politics of U.S. fascism, the “somnambulant form.” Writing from two different disciplinary vantage points, Bauman and Greene, both unapologetic in their engagements with literature and the arts as sources of sociological and philosophical insight and creative grist, sought to encourage the sociological imagination (Bauman) and the imagination as such (Greene) in the interests of heightening people's moral sensitivities. Critically, they help people see differently to remember that the world, as it is, could be different.
The following remarks I provide on Zygmunt Bauman and Maxine Greene come from a much larger analysis of what I call the “somnambulant form” that has hardened with the rise and institutionalization of the radical right in the United States (Robbins and Ferris, 2026).
The somnambulant form is the term I use for the cultural politics of U.S. fascism that emerged most immediately from and still masks itself as “anti-woke backlash” since 2020. The somnambulant form has a much deeper history, however, ultimately having its roots in the long-standing “paranoid style” in U.S. politics and culture (Hofstadter, 1963, 1964). The somnambulant form aims to stupefy and to stultify, to lull people into comfort with absurdity and harden their moral sensibilities by ratcheting up the volume of political and cultural noise, fomenting confusion and arbitrary division, and producing and hypernormalizing evermore spectacular promises of violence—to some. As I revisit my remarks on Bauman and Greene from November 2024 in June 2026, the targets of political-subjective violence now expand by the day in the United States. Even though many on the current U.S. right openly court fascism, proponents of the somnambulant form typically do not announce, “Hey, we are a fascist program with totalitarian ambitions.” Rather, the somnambulant form seeks “real American” values, the advance of the “American citizen,” and the restoration of an imagined past that promises to be great … again (“Make America Great Again”), all thinly coded proxies for white, Christian nationalism.
Unlike the “paranoid style” documented and analyzed by Hofstadter (1964), the somnambulant form has been institutionalized at all levels of government and in culture over the past few years, rather than being an irritant that fomented “status politics,” particularly in times of crisis, as Hofstadter noted. Crisis—real, imagined, and arbitrarily fabricated—seems to be the fertile ground on which the somnambulant form gets its footing. All political styles within one of the two political parties in the United States now respond to or riff on the somnambulant form. And as the somnambulant form hardens, it is clear that crisis and the hypernormalization of violence and political absurdity have the imagination as a core target. The imagination, after all, provides us with the capacity to think and/or feel as an Other or the Other might. So much is not hidden as American fascists talk about empathy as a toxin and engage in a war to undermine moral sensitivity (Wong, 2025).
It is against the somnambulant form, its trance-inducing effects, and the moral atrophy it seeks to produce, that I would like to consider Zygmunt Bauman's thinking on morality and moral sensitivity and Maxine Greene's philosophical and pedagogical work on “wide-awakeness.”
Wide-awake and dreaming, together: Greene and Bauman on morality, the imagination, and wide-awakeness
Throughout much of her career, the American philosopher Maxine Greene focused on the imagination and its connection to empathy—or morality more generally—wide-awakeness, and the role of pedagogy and education in the broadest sense in expanding freedom. Whether she was conceiving of the “teacher as stranger” (Greene, 1973), carefully considering the relationships between aesthetic education and the imagination (Greene, 2001), or exploring the interplay between the arts, educational reform, political life, and just social change (Greene, 1995), among many other forays into philosophy, literature, and politics, Greene combined an awareness of broad social and political tendencies with a sharp sensitivity to the everyday and intersubjective in the interests of identifying the requirements of pedagogical encounters that could foster dignity as much as the imagination and polyvocality. Greene tirelessly explored the grounds on which different voices could be put in conversation with each other as a way of widening experience, connecting the general to the specific, while opening spaces for people to see the possibility of different worlds and different ways of being in the world.
While Bauman studied a great many things across his career, an overview being too much for the purposes and scope here, his body of work has recurring themes, guiding values, and desired outcomes, like more human freedom with much less or no suffering. A sociologist by training, Bauman studied the social conditions that either thwarted or stimulated the imagination (think of works as different as Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman, 1989) and Modernity and Ambivalence (Bauman, 1991) or Society under Siege (Bauman, 2002), Consuming Life (Bauman, 2007), and Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers (Bauman, 2008)). Whether it be modernity's maniacal concern with order, coupled with a zealous fidelity to science and economic progress, or the manifold effects of shifts at the levels of the state and global economy as much as everyday life when producer societies became consumer societies in the West, Bauman investigated forms of order and power that were, or remain, totalitarian in their ambitions and, therefore, had/have the imagination as an object, or collateral casualty, of their designs. Attendant to these interests for Bauman was an abiding concern with the consequences of these broad social transformations on morality, because of the ways these societal changes and consequent relationships seemed to quiet or deaden people's moral sensitivities, reduce opportunities to nurture the moral impulse, and, instead, manipulate it. Like Greene, Bauman's relentless and often creative engagements with these concerns revolved around the question of the most intimate and distant of dependencies necessary for the expansion of human freedom.
Greene (1995) says that the imagination exists as one of our most significant capacities, or it gets squashed for that very reason. While Greene sees the imagination as a creative source and outcome of individual, interpersonal, and collective—if not specifically pluralist and polyvocal—thinking and praxis, the imagination figures centrally for Greene on a critical intersubjective level: empathy and morality, our responsibility for the Other. As Greene (1995) explains, the “imagination” is both “a means through which we can assemble a coherent world,” and it is “what, above all, makes empathy possible” (3). Greene (1995) continues, the “imagination allows us to cross empty spaces between ourselves” and others. If others are, or the Other is, “willing to give us clues, we can look in some manner through strangers’ eyes and hear through their ears” (3). To be certain, Greene does not rest on the affective plane with feeling with or for an Other as the ultimate goal of the imagination. Instead, the capacity to feel with and for another should disturb our assumptions and compel us to “set aside familiar distinctions and definitions,” while opening or creating possible worlds previously obfuscated by common sense (Greene, 1995: 3). The imagination, and the caring for and tending to its intersubjective conditions of possibility, consequently presents a challenge that is as pedagogical as it is moral for Greene. Our individual capacities to imagine are based on our interactions and relationships with others and, subsequently, introduce demands relative to our being for others. How, in other words, do we create educational encounters that compel us to hear the previously unheard, make spaces (and, ideally, public ones) for the invisible to appear, to present opportunities for suffering to be named and demand us to account for it? These and sundry other questions are ones that come to mind when Greene (1995), drawing from Arendt, argues that pedagogy should have as a goal the continual stimulation of the imagination and moral sensitivity to counter normalized “thoughtlessness” (125).
For Bauman, the frame seemingly widens. Morality and moral sensitivity appear as sociological problems, with similarly frustrating questions. People choose, and choices produce effects for which we must be responsible. We do not have a choice in the matter. Not choosing is a choice, after all. Yet, on what grounds and in what conditions? How can we know whether the choices we make are good or bad? How do we choose right from wrong? These questions, for Bauman, operate at the level of social order and the intersubjective. He addressed these concerns in surgical detail in beautiful and challenging works like Postmodern Ethics (Bauman, 1993) and Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Bauman, 1994).
Bauman (1989), however, introduced morality, or demanded social thinkers to open the cold case on morality as a matter of broad social concern and, thus, sociological import, in Modernity and the Holocaust. Having shown modernity in toto, rather than German culture or a Germanic intensification of traditional antisemitism, to be the research and development complex of the Holocaust, the question of morality, long seen as a secondary interest at best in the practice of sociology, reappears as an area of primary concern for Bauman. Revisiting the functionalists, and Durkheim in particular, Bauman finds the “society as factory of morality” model to be insufficient, if not entirely useless, on a couple grounds. Firstly, if society produces morality, it does so, in the functionalist view, because the norms constructed in support of morality serve a societal outcome, a good, or they alternately exist and are enforced to prevent harm being done to the good. How can one evaluate, compare, or challenge moral frameworks if they simply or solely exist to serve a supra-individual agency where behavior can be judged only in reference to that agency's norms? “Thou shall not kill,” as we know, became relativized, deuniversalized, in Nazi Germany as a core feature of its vision of the good. “Thou shall not kill” became “Thou shall kill some,” “Thou shall aid and abet others in the killing of some,” “Thou shall not interfere in the killing of some.” These precepts acted as central norms and formal policy in Nazi Germany. Thus, in the “society as factory of morality” view, disobeying these precepts, while being moral, would have violated the state's interests and the redefined good and was punished as immoral for that very reason. As Bauman (1989) explains, such a view allows any society or social collectivity “to impose its own substantive version of moral behaviour” and “for all practical intents and purposes moral behaviour becomes synonymous with social conformity and obedience to the norms of the majority,” blockading external evaluation and critique of those norms (175). Secondly, Bauman (1989) argues that the Nazi case, if only in hyperacute form, demonstrates that no society, vis-à-vis its educative and repressive—socializing—processes, produces morality. Rather, society represses and redirects—manipulates—existing moral tendencies, pre-societal drives, just as a society “faces [and can modify and manipulate] biological constitution, physiological needs or psychological drives” (178). For this reason, Bauman (1989) relocates morality in the existential mode of being; morality remains, as it always has been, social, in that it exists in a “social context,” but it does not require society, the state, or any other collectivity for its existence (179). Though situated in a broader social context, morality's point of activation or silencing exists between the self and the Other. Bauman consequently brings our attention, via Levinas, back to the properly intersubjective terrain on which Greene links the imagination to morality.
Unlike Sartre's position, wherein responsibility for the Other becomes a limiting factor, Bauman's reading of Levinas argues that one's responsibility for the Other becomes the precondition for one's freedom. Yet, how? I exist for, or because of, the Other, not despite or in spite of the Other, and one demonstrates responsibility for the Other without conditions or caveats, and without the expectation of reciprocity. One acts for the Other, in defense of the Other, without expectation of reciprocity, because to expect something in return would instrumentalize morality by imposing a means-end calculus on it, thus undermining or violating the most basic of interdependencies. We should care for each other, the Other. Otherwise, morality becomes societal and, thus, subjected to rationalization and promises, perforce, to be marked by it. Bauman (1990) cast this dialectic of freedom—incidentally, the title of a masterpiece set of lectures by Greene (1988)—from a slightly different angle in “Freedom and Dependence” in the first edition of Thinking Sociologically. Here, our capacities to act, to exercise agency, become possible not because we are freed from bonds with, and responsibility for, the Other or a wider figuration (a family, a friendship group, a community, a culture), but because of these bonds, because these interdependencies provide us with keys to both the limits and possibilities of our actions, while offering the intersubjective terrain on which we make meaning of ourselves and relationships with others. We have no choice but to begin with these dependencies, appropriately configured or not, into which we are interpellated and those that we sometimes choose. To get beyond or to reconfigure such dependencies, when necessary, requires that we do so with others, demanding that we, in the first instance, assume responsibility for the Other, without any certainties or guarantees. Perhaps, we are better off not assuming any certainty in how to proceed or any finality in terms of what or who needs to be heard or seen, to think that all the silences have been broken. And this response can be better understood by looking at the way Greene ties the imagination to the concept of “wide-awakeness,” which she developed from Schutz (1967).
Rooted as it is in exercising responsibility for the Other, this practice taking place in intersubjective worlds that are shaped by wider social conditions not entirely of our making or choosing, the dialectic of freedom asks for a continual stimulation of “moral sensitivity” in Bauman's phraseology (Bauman and Tester, 2001), “wide-awakeness” in Greene's (1977). Greene (1977) draws at first from Alfred Schutz (1967) when he describes wide-awakeness as “a plane of consciousness of highest tension originating in an attitude of full attention to life and its requirements” (as cited in Greene, 1977: 121; Schutz, 1967: 213). Schutz (1967) continues by noting that “only the performing and especially the working self is fully interested in life and, hence, wide-awake” (213). What is more, the performing self “lives within its act and its attention is exclusively directed to carrying its project into effect, to executing its plan” (Schutz, 1967: 213). Greene (1977) astutely puts a finer point on the matter in building her concept of wide-awakeness when she claims, “heightened consciousness and reflectiveness” make sense “only with respect to human projects, human undertakings, not in a withdrawal from the intersubjective world” (121). As Baldacchino (2008) says of Greene's concept and practice of wide-awakeness, it “is about what the self can achieve in its relatedness to others by which we realize the possible via the imagination” (19). Beyond dependencies that service biological needs, like the relationships we have with non- or other-than-human worlds, of which we are daily reminded of their significance for human existence, the dependencies that foster consciousness and reflectiveness—the imagination—are essential: required of being a freer human in the world. It is these dependencies and the pedagogical fundaments of wide-awakeness that Greene's project explored in ways that, like Bauman, were as purposefully promiscuous as they were syncretic, and unapologetically so. The requirements of life, ideally a free life, take primacy over blind loyalty to discipline.
We return to the imagination. The fostering and release of the imagination exists, for Greene, as the penultimate outcome of the pedagogical encounter, the ultimate goal being the self- and social understanding that arises from heightened wide-awakeness, an attentiveness that can alert people to the care that they are taking of the space between, as Arendt would have it or, as Merleau-Ponty would put it, the thing that gives us a significance that we, as individuals, do not and cannot create for ourselves by ourselves alone. Greene's vista is much wider, as the goal of her work seeks to expand freedom and minimize suffering. Without wide-awakeness and the imagination's constant goading of it, without a sharpened sensitivity to how we enter our different worlds and tend to our intersubjective spaces—the pedagogical encounter being a critically important one of those spaces—little chance remains for attending to the broader relationships and structural dynamics that condition our capacities to act with and for others. To ignore the space between and work on structural matters alone would be akin to hoping that a table would magically stand without its legs. Hence, the importance of pedagogy and the proximate relationships in which we make meaning.
Wide-awakeness should not be seen as something that can be achieved, as much as it is something that is both deeply relational and, thus, processual and iterative, not terminal. Greene (1995) argues that “the role of the imagination is not to resolve, not to point the way, not to improve. It is to awaken, to disclose the ordinarily unseen, unheard, and unexpected” (28). Like the dialectic of freedom, wide-awakeness, too, emerges from a contest. In reflecting on her atypical experience as a Jewish female philosopher in mid-century America, for instance, for many years being the only female at national philosophy conferences, Greene (1995) says that she found herself “directly challenged to think about both [her] own thinking and speaking and the discourses in which [she] had been submerged” (112). Greene (1995) continues, saying that she “had to resist certain prohibitions, certain pieties, guilts, embarrassments, fears” (112). Not to recognize and then fail to contest these “seductions” and “controls,” for Greene (1995), “may well be to acquiesce in oppression, especially if we live in oppressive or humiliating conditions” (112). Here, she turns to someone familiar to Bauman readers: Milan Kundera (1984) and one of his masterpieces, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, arguing that without wide-awakeness to the worlds we inhabit, we might, like Kundera's characters, be left with “a feeling of living among chance happenings and fortuitous encounters, without any clear possibilities” (Greene, 1995: 112) and, one could add, for these reasons, little control and a stunted agency. Wide-awakeness, and the imagination spurring it, links more widely in this regard to the sociological imagination. (Without much straining, one can hear echoes of Mill'’s (1959) preamble to his classic The Sociological Imagination, or the experiences of the “vagabond” in Bauman's liquid modernity: “Nowadays men feel that their private lives are a series of traps” (Mills, 1959: 3).)
Wide-awakeness, much like justice, recedes on approach. How closely am I listening? How acutely am I seeing? Do I need to hear another voice? What do I need to unlearn to actively listen to that voice? How am I conferring on the Other the right to begin as much as others have granted that right to me? To pan out a degree or two, what do we do to allow a themto begin, or not? Wide-awakeness will open new landscapes for us, but it cannot resolve what we find in those clearings or minimize our responsibility to the others we encounter in them. Baldacchino (2017) explains, in his reading of Greene on this point, that “if the imagination is released, it is not because its spirit fills us with blind courage,” but because “such a wide-awakening … operates through tenacious and rigorous processes of self-reflection that are distinctly marked by the challenge to live with and care for others” (23). The pedagogical encounter should find ways to help us be comfortable with allowing those others to guide us in seeing and hearing, and instructing us on how to see them when they appear. As Greene suggests, such encounters can help us turn our attention to who our fellow citizens are rather than what they are. Here, a voice in the background of a lot of Bauman's work comes to mind: Simmel (1910), and his classic “How is Society Possible?” wherein he notes that, our efforts to remove the veils—the categories—through which we initially see each other and the Other provide part of the praxeological substrate that makes society possible. The pedagogical encounter, in this regard, should help us develop a repertoire for ambivalence, a most fertile ground for the imagination and, as Bauman alternately has shown us, a target of domination in our modern—and postmodern or liquid modern—worlds. The message resonating between both thinkers from two vantage points: Either we learn how to embrace the potential promise of ambivalence, or we contain, manage, trap, or extirpate it, at all our peril. Like rust, ambivalence never sleeps. The apparent “we” can always and easily become “them,” or some seemingly among us and somewhat like us can become a them, if we are not alert, wide-awake. Bauman (1989) traverses these very grounds in Modernity and the Holocaust, and then he tilled this terrain in Modernity and Ambivalence (Bauman, 1991). The alternative: learn how to chase the seduction of comfort in an unfounded confidence that we can assume, even think that we know, and then dictate how others want to or should live without so much as allowing the Other the opportunity to speak on the matter, or exercising our duty to listen if they do speak.
Speaking, all of us, together, albeit briefly: Greene and Bauman on dialogue and polyvocality
How might we still learn to live in and with ambivalence? We can begin by approximating Greene's and Bauman's models, how they worked within their fields and how they worked their fields. A Jew and an American, a female and a philosopher who studied literature and the arts in a committed and interested manner (more concerned with the logic of things than the things of logic), a mother and professional in the mid- and late-twentieth century, Greene had no choice but to exist in ambivalence. Bauman's otherness and in-betweenness, while well-documented, merits a rudimentary sketch: a Pole and a Jew who, akin to the experience of America's great sociologist W.E.B. DuBois (1903)—Black and American—was never allowed to reconcile those primary identities (See Bauman, 2023); a sociologist who was largely anti-systematic at a time of big systems and big theories (Durksonianism, as Bauman might say), a Marxist humanist but not a communist, an exile. To pre-empt arbitrary othering, Bauman (2000) eventually took to seeking self-exile as a mode of being in the world, to choose exile—intellectual or otherwise—not to be homeless, but to develop the capacities to be at home in many places, and he advised others, including or especially sociologists, to do the same. These somewhat parallel experiences of being both-and, rather than easily either-or, seem to have marked Greene's and Bauman's relationships to their fields. While both exercised responsible communication and engaged their traditions with fidelity, human freedom and the mitigation of suffering, rather than discipline or field, was primary for both, perhaps the choosing and embodying of this value in their work was their original self-exile, or intellectual sin for some observers. Interested readers or critics therefore struggle to define both Greene's and Bauman's work (Baldacchino, 2017; Beilharz, 2000; Tester, 2004), and, perhaps, such efforts miss the point: Why capture bodies of work that more often than not explored the existential, cultural, and political dangers of capturing and ordering? In this way, Greene's and Bauman's work was and remains a form of praxis because, as Tester (2004) and Tester (in Bauman and Tester, 2001) says, their work, the conduct of it as much as the contents of it, “show[s] that a different world is possible” (9).
It should be unsurprising that, given their lived experience of acute ambivalence, both dialogue and polyvocality pervade Greene's and Bauman's works, in word and deed. For Greene (1988), dialogue, often done in coordination with purposeful engagement with the arts and literature, provides grounds for perspective-taking and develops awareness of “multiple vantage points” that can help us “recognize that no accounting, disciplinary or otherwise, can ever be finished” (128). Developing comfort with or demanding such cognitive uncertainty might go some distance in helping people act in ambivalence because it has the potential to unsettle our confidence in false or easy certainties. For Greene (1988), such dialogue has the potential to “defamiliarize experience” such that we might hear and see differently, disclose other possible ways of being in the world and other worlds, while familiarizing the strange (126; See Bauman, 1990). Tester (in Bauman and Tester, 2001) says that Bauman's work attests to the fact that “the practice of social thought requires going beyond our own lives” (4), while Bauman (in Bauman and Tester, 2001), later in the same work, argues that sociology needs to be an “ongoing dialogue with human experience” (40). Human experience, when it is not being trapped, captured, or manipulated, is inherently and intractably multiple, as are the voices that give evidence of and testify to that experience. If we are to dignify such experience, then the only way to do it is by valuing polyvocality—and the ambivalence that comes with it—by actively creating conditions in the classroom as much as in the streets and legislative buildings that Greene (1995) says should be aimed at “societal repair,” wherein “persons speaking together and being together can discover what it signifies to incarnate and act upon values far too often taken for granted” (68). What is more, dialogue and polyvocality allow, for Greene (1988) as much as for Bauman, for “recovering the world, and using what is recovered to create something that could not exist before” (Tester, 2004: 20). Dialogue and polyvocality, in other words, are ground zero for the exercise of freedom, as the exercise of freedom requires that people have opportunities to develop shared projects Greene (1988).
Keeping the inner world awake
Clearly, Bauman and Greene speak to and in the interests of a world that is very different than the one constructed by the cultural politics of American fascism and its somnambulant form. And there is considerable promise in thinking with Bauman and Greene as the somnambulant form of anti-woke backlash hardens. This promise goes in different directions or operates on different registers.
On the one hand, Greene’s and Bauman's wide-awakeness/moral sensitivity provide a direct set of counter-pedagogies to anti-woke backlash and the somnambulant form. Wide-awakeness, in Greene's and Bauman's hands, exposes the fundamentally anti-human core and object of anti-woke politics. As Freire (2000) might cast it, wide-awakeness, resonant as it is with Bauman's sociology of morality and praxis, acts as both a relation and process that allows us to pursue our ontological vocation: the unremitting work we need to do, and necessarily have to do with and for others, in becoming human. Alternately, anti-woke backlash aborts this process by actively attacking the intersubjective, institutional, social, and cultural conditions in which wide-awakeness—our responsibility to the Other, even our capacities to see the Other as human—takes shape. In its self-described name alone, anti-woke politics exposes itself for what it is: an attack on basic human dignity and decency, on the imagination, and a rejection of humanity, in toto, by both short-circuiting people's moral tendencies and provincializing who counts and should be counted as human.
In this regard, Bauman's work on morality is indispensable for understanding anti-woke practices of the somnambulant form that attempt to attack the imagination and put people to sleep, especially if we consider how anti-woke politics has as one of its first effects “cognitive distancing.” And the targets of cognitive distancing increasingly encompass a wide swath of individuals and groups—basically anyone or any group who is not white, male, heterosexual, Christian, and nationalist, even if such beneficiaries have by-standing women among their ranks (Leidig, 2023; Ryan, 2023). While the contemporary American context is unlike Nazi Germany, deleterious dynamics can be seen that illustrate cognitive—and thus moral—distancing at work. While Nazi Germany's efforts were aimed firstly at creating cognitive distancing between Germans and German Jews whom they knew, like their neighbors, the somnambulant form, given the breadth of its targets, can be seen to be far less selective, because it has effected cognitive distancing within families, between former friends, and between communities, even states. States like Texas and Florida, along with various communities in other states, freely capitalize on these dynamics by marketing themselves as anti-woke states, places where people's imagination can be put to sleep (Guest, 2024). Cognitive distancing, in this regard, has morphed into moral and geographic distancing in just the past few years.
On the other hand, Greene's and Bauman's wide-awakeness/moral sensitivity works on a fundamentally different frame and attendant logics than the somnambulant form. As I mentioned earlier, wide-awakeness, due to its situational and highly intersubjective character, cannot function as a status or achieved state. It is an always incomplete set of relations and processes that link the intersubjective to the wider cultural and political conditions in which those relations and processes are nestled. Greene (1988) is helpful here again when she notes that if “we are to find a way of developing a praxis of educational consequence that opens the spaces necessary for the remaking of democratic community,” then we need to foster “a new commitment to intelligence, a new fidelity in communication, a new regard for imagination” (126). Each of these things demands constant self-questioning, not the imposition of values (Bauman in Bauman et al., 2013). Wide-awakeness and the imagination, unlike anti-woke or “woke,” require constant alertness to the needs of others in one's midst, and this alertness can only be satisfied by disciplined efforts to engage in dialogue, which, to be dialogue in the interests of wide-awakeness and the imagination, requires polyvocality as opposed to monologues or simply silencing and exclusion.
Of course, a counterpoint could be raised: Don’t proponents of the somnambulant form engage imaginative practices? The simple answer is, No. Creative? Maybe, but not imaginative if the imagination is linked to our capacities to take responsibility for the Other and the intersubjective space between, as both Greene and Bauman extensively explain. This, for sure, is a needling and unnecessary counterpoint: Creative or imaginative, advocating for and broadening the somnambulant form normalizes cruelty and thus attacks not just our imagination but also our humanity.
Admittedly, the title of this essay comes from a phrase Mills (1959) used in the appendix to The Sociological Imagination. In giving guidance to an imaginary student on sociology as “intellectual craftsmanship,” Mills discussed the attitudes, dispositions, and practices of discipline required of sociologists and social thinkers more generally. He encouraged the student to avidly take notes and make observations of sundry social things in everyday and political life, to see this stocktaking in a file to be academic production. Mills (1959) said, “By keeping an adequate file and thus developing self-reflective habits, you learn how to keep your inner world awake” (197). This inner world exists because of the outer world and those who populate it. This inner world so threatened by the cultural politics of American fascism requires the space between, the space we create and care for between each other and the Other. To this end, Bauman and Greene provide crucial guidance on how to keep the inner world awake, for all our sakes, because our inner worlds rely on other people's worlds and the requirements of life therein.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: A larger version of this essay appears in Robbins and Ferris (2026). American Fascism and the Battle over Culture: Social Theory, Moral Life, and the Renewal of Democratic Imagination. Routledge. This larger work went into contract in December 2025.