Social Imaginaries in Debate

Abstract

Investiga tions into social imaginaries have burgeoned in recent years. From 'the capitalist imaginary' to the 'democratic imaginary', from the 'ecological imaginary' to 'the global imaginary' -and beyond -the social imaginaries fi eld has expanded across disciplines and beyond the academy. Th e recent debates on social imaginaries and potential new imaginaries reveal a recognisable fi eld and paradigm-in-the-making. We argue that Castoriadis, Ricoeur, and Taylor have articulated the most important theoretical frameworks for understanding social imaginaries, although the fi eld as a whole remains heterogeneous. We further argue that the notion of social imaginaries draws on the modern understanding of the imagination as authentically creative (as opposed to imitative). We contend that an elaboration of social imaginaries involves a signifi cant, qualitative shift in the understanding of societies as collectively and politically-(auto)instituted formations that are irreducible to inter-subjectivity or systemic logics. After marking out the contours of the fi eld and recounting a philosophical history of the imagination (including deliberations on the reproductive and creative imaginations, as well as consideration of contemporary Japanese contributions), the essay turns to debates on social imaginaries in more concrete contexts, specifi cally political-economic imaginaries, the ecological imaginary, multiple modernities and their intercivilisational encounters. Th e social imaginaries fi eld imparts powerful messages for the human sciences and wider publics. In particular, social imaginaries hold signifi cant implications for ontological, phenomenological and philosophical anthropological questions; for the cultural, social, and political horizons of contemporary worlds; and for ecological and economic phenomena (including their manifest crises). Th e essay concludes with the argument that social imaginaries as a paradigm-in-the-making off ers valuable means by which movements towards social change can be elucidated as well providing an open horizon for the critiques of existing social practices.

Egg Donation Imaginaries: Embodiment, Ethics and Future Family Formation

“…The ways in which people think through and deliberate about their future selves are embodied practices (because thinking is something bodies do), they are not distinct from the social world but are constituted by and through it. As a ‘paradigm-in-the-making’ imaginaries allow us to focus not only on discursive or cultural aspects of the social, but to incorporate analyses of thinking and ‘doing’ (Adams et al, 2015). Imaginaries are also characterised by an ethics of the self, a form of ‘reproductive reflexivity’ (Hudson, 2017), which involved a constant deliberation between treatment options and their various outcomes.…”

“…The concept of the imaginary is gaining increasing salience in social science scholarship and has seen a growing use in several fields including politics, economics and sociology (Adams et al, 2015; Lennon, 2004). It is a concept which has been used previously by authors such as Benedict Anderson (1991), Arjun Appadurai (1996) and Charles Taylor (2004) to explore the construction and contours of the ‘imagined’ social world in varying ways.…”

“…It has also received growing attention in the field of STS (science and technology studies), where authors have developed the idea in relation to the entanglements of technology with the social (Jasanoff, 2015; McNeil et al, 2017). Its growing use has led some authors to speculate that it is a ‘paradigm-in-the-making’ (Adams et al, 2015: 15).…”

Teoría crítica como crítica a la InSustentabilidad: ‘la vida dañada‘ en el Antropoceno

“…the normative or the symbolic, as is often the case in social theory. Habermas stresses the normative; cultural sociology the symbolic; Castoriadis influenced social theory, the imaginary (Adams et al 2017). This is where I disagree with the otherwise convincing analysis of Adloff and Neckel (2019) in that I do not think that what Castoriadis (1987, 369-373) calls the 'radical imaginary' offers a synthesis or ties together diverse elements such as the cognitive, the evaluative and affective dimensions.…”

Crisis, liminality and the decolonization of the social imaginary

“…Imaginary, social imaginary and social imaginary significations. Although speculations on the concept of imagination have ancient roots (Adams, 2015), the history of the concept of the imaginary can be traced back to the work of Jacques Lacan. Lacan used the concept as one of the dimensions in his threefold ontology of human identification, together with the symbolic and the real (Lacan, 2006).…”