Genealogies of Imagined Worlds: 11 Reflexive Imagination – The Co-Evolution of Symbolic Worlds

The genealogy of imagined worlds reaches a meta-construal in reflexive imagination. Across myth, epic, scripture, theatre, allegory, the novel, Romantic and Symbolist art, Modernist fragmentation, science fiction, and digital simulation, we observe a continuous interplay: symbolic worlds shape human perception and action, while human construal actively reconfigures symbolic fields. Possibility is co-evolving, never static, and always relational.

Reflexive imagination recognises that the creation, interpretation, and inhabitation of symbolic worlds are mutually constitutive processes. Narrative, metaphor, and virtual systems do not merely represent potential—they instantiate it, test it, and extend it. Each imaginative act alters the horizon of what can be conceived, experienced, or enacted in subsequent acts.

This meta-construal foregrounds relationality: symbolic worlds do not exist in isolation, nor are they merely reflective. They are fields in which collective and individual construals interpenetrate, feedback, and reshape one another. The epic hero, the allegorical journey, the interior consciousness of the novel, the speculative universe, and the digital cosmos each exemplify modalities through which imagination co-actualises potential and constrains it simultaneously.

Ultimately, reflexive imagination highlights the co-evolution of symbolic worlds and human possibility. Horizons of potential are both discovered and constructed, constrained and amplified by the interplay of conception, enactment, and reception. The genealogy of imagined worlds is thus not a linear history but a relational map of how humans have continually expanded, tested, and re-cut the very conditions of possibility.

In inhabiting this relational, perspectival field, imagination becomes not merely a faculty but a method: a disciplined, reflexive engagement with the symbolic structures that both limit and enable what can be thought, felt, or enacted. Through this lens, the history of imaginative worlds is inseparable from the history of possibility itself.