Social Imaginary

Charles Taylor and Claudia Strauss argue that social imaginaries are a “cultural model”, that is, the common understandings through which people imagine their surroundings.

Charles Taylor argues that the social imaginary is not an idealized understanding of things but rather a matter of complex understandings in which both facts and norms play important roles. The social imaginary affects people’s perceptions of how things are (facts) and people’s perceptions of how things should be (norms):

"I want to speak of social imaginary here, rather than social theory, because there are important—and multiple—differences between the two. I speak of imaginary because I’m talking about the way ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms; it is carried in images, stories, and legends. But it is also the case that theory is usually the possession of a small minority, whereas what is interesting in the social imaginary is that it is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society. Which leads to a third difference: the social imaginary is that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy. In addition, we should note that what start off as theories held by a few people may come to infiltrate the social imaginary, first that of elites, perhaps, and then of society as a whole. The social imaginary is that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy." (Charles Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14, issue 1 (2002), p. 106.)

Building on this theory, Claudia Strauss argues that Taylor’s social imaginary “fits cognitive authropologists’ conception of cultural models” because cultural models are also widely shared and they are implicit schemas for people to interpret the world and their behavior. Cultural-model theorists further argue that there is more than one cultural model and that cultural models affect people’s behavior to different extents and in different ways.

Taylor’s and Strauss’ social-imaginary model implies a dialogic relationship between the elite minority and the “ordinary” majority—that social theory can integrate itself into the social imaginary and, also, that the social imaginary can derive its form and content from “below.”

Imaginary and Nation

Benedict Anderson couches the imaginary in political terms. Anderson interprets the meaning of the imaginary by associating it with the concept of “nation.” He argues that the development of print capitalism in the eighteenth century standardized and disseminated vernacular print languages and social concerns. The common language was “fixed” as the “national” language, through which people communicated and exchanged ideas. The common concerns raised by the print media also constructed an imagination of a community, the nation, in which people share common concerns at the same time. To Anderson, the community is “imagined” because nationalism encourages members of the community to imagine that they share not only the same language but also the same concerns, although “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them.” Anderson further explains:

It is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.

Anderson argues that media play a critical role in the construction of these imagined communities because the widespread nature of communication processes help construct national identity and other forms of community.

Lacan and Imaginary

Jacques Lacan conceives of the imaginary as a basis of a misrecognized selfhood. For Lacan, the imaginary is associated with ideal, illusion, and misrecognition. According to Lacan, the self is a split self; the imaginary is an internalized image of an ideal whole self that young people, during their preverbal stages, derive from an unfragmented image that they have of their own selves. When an infant looks at a mirror and sees his or her image wholly present, the wholeness of the image establishes itself in the infant’s mind, where the image constitutes the infant’s ego, the concept of identity. In other words, this mirror image is an image of wholeness—of completeness and coherence—and reflects, for the infant, a complete and coherent internal self. Lacan argues that this line of reasoning in the infant’s mind leads to a profound misrecognition of what it means to be human. However, the mirror stage, which ends with a sense of the self as complete, has an important social function: by creating the subject (the self), the mirror stage enables the subject to recognize and to interact with objects (the external world). Media scholars, for example, use Lacan’s theory to explain how the subject identifies with screen images to fulfill his or her desire to achieve oneness, to replace our permanent lack with completeness.

Doreen Massey: places are “open and porous networks of social relations”

Massey’s concept of space-time challenges the dualistic concept that frames time as becoming and space as being. Massey’s concept challenges, as well, the dualism that frames place as the local and “everywhere” as the global—a distinction that pits the concrete against the abstract, the particular against the universal. In “A Global Sense of Place,” she argues that the idea of place problematizes the distinction between global and local because the specificity of a place lies neither within the place’s identifiable borders nor within the place’s proper history. In truth, a place is a site where wider cultures meet, networks take root, and social relationships evolve:

What gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus. If one moves in from the satellite towards the globe, holding all those networks of social relations and movements and communications in one’s head, then each “place” can be seen as a particular, unique, point of their intersection. It is, indeed, a meeting place. (p. 154)

If a place is not constructed by an internally produced and essential past, the place’s identity is not singular, fixed, and unproblematic. If places are “open and porous networks of social relations” (p. 121), places not only develop mixtures through history but also bring differences together in space. It follows that places constructed out of “juxtaposition, the intersection, the articulation, of multiple social relations” are of course internally contradictory and contested, and that while places are necessarily shared, there will simultaneously be clashes between various and competing interests over what the area is, and what it ought to become (p. 137). To extract advantages from a set of social relations, the particular claimant groups lay claim to some particular position in time-space (whether through the establishment of heritage centers and the promotion of nationalism), so that the groups can establish an identity of a place, although “the past was not more static than is the present” (p. 169):

When black-robed patriarchs organize ceremonies to celebrate a true national identity they are laying claim to the freezing of that identity at a particular moment and in a particular form—a moment and a form where they had a power which they can thereby justify themselves in retaking. All of which means, of course, that the identity of any place, including that place called home, is in one sense for ever open to contestation. (p. 169)

Doreen Massey: space is not static but dynamic & multiple

Doreen Massey’s distinctive concept of space-time introduces a cultural perspective into the idea of space, which is traditionally seen as a passive and apolitical “setting for objects and their interaction” in a timeless context. Rather than conceptualize spatial relations as social relations taking a particular geographical form, Massey conceptualizes space and social relations as mutually constructed. And if space and the spatial configurations of social relations produce social effects, space and the spatial are implicated in the production of history (p. 254); space, therefore, cannot be seen as the realm of stasis. In Massey’s words, “Space is not static, nor time spaceless…neither [spatiality or temporality] can be conceptualized as the absence of the other” (p. 264). Because space is conceived in terms of social relations, and because social relations are dynamic and multiple, and because individuals hold not only different positions but consequently different experiences and interpretations of spatial social relations, space does not imply fixity or stasis but “a simultaneous multiplicity of spaces” in the “lived world” (p. 3). That is, space should be conceived in relation to social relations, power, symbols, and representations.