Western thought has treated imagination as fantasy or individual genius, not social

Evidence

Too often such accounts position imagination as equivalent to fantasy—or, more alarmingly, pay lip service to the imagination as an individualized, psychological faculty (embodied in the figure of the heroic entrepreneur) or, further still, as the steam engine of capitalism’s “creative destruction.” Importantly, the social nature of the speculative imagination has been underdeveloped, which is even more damning at a time when speculation relies increasingly on the relational capacity of the imagination (to imagine, as it were, what others speculate, and in doing so to relate to them). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 33

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives precise content to the ‘social nature of speculative imagination’ — imaging what others speculate, and relating through that.
• XREF: The relational-imagination claim echoes the reputation-based mechanisms in the diamond bourse and Chicago futures readings. — connects to: Even universalist concepts like conviviality silently depend on a Western social imaginary. — Farhan Samanani, Conviviality and its others: for a…, 76