If humans construct and imagine their worlds, what then is the common grounding condition of that construction? Or, more prosaically, what are the dominant social imaginaries, local and global, through which we as humans live in these worlds? These questions suggest the emerging dominance of a modern constructivist orientation. Even if not under conditions of our choosing or understanding, we act in the world to make that world. The first variation of this orientation was psychoanalytic tending towards the psychosocial—from Jacques Lacan and Jean-Paul Sartre to writers as diverse as Cornelius Castoriadis and Kathleen Lennon. The second variation was constitutively social, and here the key figures are Charles Taylor and Manfred Steger. This essay lays out the case for the approach developed by Manfred Steger (2008). It suggests that his definition of the social imaginary as a patterned convocation of the social whole through which people express their social existence—for example in the figure of the globe, of the nation, or even of the abstracted order (or disorder) of our time—provides a point of departure for handing the complexities that have inevitably arisen with using a far-ranging term, especially one that carries so much baggage.

AI

In the paper I consider the basic aspects of comparison between imagination and creativity in a context of the theory of action as one of the directions of contemporary social critics. Charles Taylor in his analysis of «social imaginary» and Hans Joas in his theory of the creativity of action approach differently to a problem of the analysis of values and norms in a modern society, to a role of morals and religion in practical forms of social existence. The individual action-oriented consciousness is considered from the viewpoint of phenomenology of action, as the dynamic scheme of teleology, reflexion and projecting. On the basis of A.Schuetz's phenomenological sociology I analyze mechanisms of formation of individual practical consciousness, outlining thereby the space of the realized action. Underlining a role of creativity and imagination, I describe the most practical aspects of operating consciousness setting a basis of an individual reflection. Thereby, synthesizing the social-philosophical analysis of creativity and imagination, I explain the phenomenological dynamics of space of subjectivity.

Imagining Religion and Modernity in Post-Colonial Korea: Neo-Liberal Brand Culture and Digital Space, 2016

If you wish to cite this draft, please cite it as part of my doctoral dissertation rather than as a standalone paper. The full version is accessible at: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/th83kz52k This chapter engages with theories of modernity and social imaginaries, which together provide the conceptual framework that binds the two case studies—namely, the branding of Templestay and the media representations of Korean Protestantism in the 2012 Lady Gaga controversy and the 2015 knife attack on the U.S. Ambassador. It begins with a review of theories of modernity, focusing in particular on critiques of modernization theory and on the Eurocentrism and universalism embedded within it. Recent scholarly efforts to redefine modernity in non-Eurocentric terms are introduced, with a discussion of their implications for understanding Korean modernity, the historical and conceptual context in which the two case studies are situated. The chapter then develops a theoretical framework for understanding the workings of social imaginaries in contemporary social worlds. These worlds are inevitably imagined, continually (re)mediated, and therefore multiply decontextualized and recontextualized. The concepts of the imaginary/imagination and of social imaginaries are examined as forms of shared understanding through which people make sense of their existence, the world, and the social order in which they live. It is further argued that the concepts of circulation and mediation capture both the processes and multidirectionality that characterize the formation of contemporary social worlds through particular social imaginaries. Finally, the chapter explores how social imaginaries are embodied in social bodies, and considers the implications of such embodiment for the branding of Templestay and for the media representations of Korean Protestantism in the cases of the 2012 Lady Gaga controversy and the 2015 knife attack on the U.S. Ambassador.

Innovation in the Social Sciences, 2024

In this piece I reflect on Christoforos Bouzanis' book, Social Imaginary and the Metaphysical Discourse, discussing its main contribution to the issue of social science's relation to philosophy and examining Bouzanis' concept of social imaginary as an imagery, raising questions of sense.

Th is third issue further explores social imaginaries as a paradigm-in-themaking, with a certain emphasis on the historical, situated, and contextual nature of the imaginary that incorporates an intercultural perspective. Th e Durkheimian problématique of collective representations clearly plays a role in most understandings of social imaginaries, but the existing tensions, possibilities for signifi cant shifts in interpretation, and crucial role of confl ict is more duly emphasized within a social imaginaries framework than in many Durkheimian approaches. Social imaginaries not only institute horizons of cultural meaning that structure interpretations of the world, they always already incorporate modes of action and power. Th e imaginary dimension is articulated in societal institutions, as instituting society (to draw on Castoriadian terminology), not least in the fundamental, political sense of confi guring society, but equally informing specifi c components of historical constellations, such as the political, the economic, the ecological, and the cultural. Th e gap between an instituted reality and the imaginary makes societies always open to forms of critique and interpretative confl icts. Attention to specifi c cultural projects of power and varieties of social doing thus becomes important, as it sheds light on the specifi c 'translations' of imaginaries into more concrete institutional constellations of historical societies and civilizations.

Phänomenologische Forschungen, , 2023

How can imagination, which normally serves us to break free from reality, endow our social imaginaries with powers that can regulate actual social interactions? How can we imagine, properly speaking, together in the first place? And are those forms of imagining together in which we imagine something pertaining to 'us' more 'real' than others? Or do all collective imaginaries exert the same normative pressures on their members as to what and how they ought to imagine? In this paper, we propose to address these issues by going beyond the standard literature on social imaginary. We argue that what allows imagination to impact our social reality, is, first, the way in which beliefs and desires intersect with our imaginings, and secondly, those normative features of imagination that make collective imagination possible and regulate what we can and ought to imagine together. Moreover, we suggest that different types of collective imagination need to be distinguished according to the different degrees and scope to which norms penetrate our shared imaginaries, as well as to the recognition of those norms. Finally, by critically drawing on research on population genomics, we argue that social imaginaries are those collective imaginations in which imagination is most likely to intermesh with what we wish to be real or in which we imagine communities we wish to belong to.

Theory & Psychology, 2018

This is an introduction to the special issue on the impact of neoliberalism on the sociality, politics, and governmentality of contemporary psychological life. The articles suggest that Euro-American psychology writ large has not been a force for human freedom. Still, the articles are additional evidence of the historical and current lines of resistance and activism that indicate a move toward an emancipatory psychology. Keywords alternatives in history and theory of psychology, critical studies in psychology, decoloniality in psychology, neoliberalism, policy and sociality, social imaginary and politics In the last third of the 20th century, much of the world's political economy underwent a shift from a state-centered regulatory framework to a neoliberal orientation that continues to the present. Begun as an economic theory to counter Keynesian economics, the impact of neoliberalism has been felt in politics, policy, and sociality. Many of its ideas are implicit in capitalism, but one could argue that the line of descent began much earlier with the establishment of human settlement for agriculture and the social, economic, and political hierarchies, with attendant inequities, that emerged in those settings (see Scott, 2017; cf. Suzman, 2017). The articles in this special issue primarily deal with the impact of neoliberalism on sociality, though the reader is urged to be mindful that sociality is not truly separable from the whole of economic and political life. In light of that, the term "social imaginary" is the best expression for understanding the pervasiveness of the state we are all living in. The social imaginary of any time and place is the default sense of order and social arrangement. As Taylor wrote, "once we are well installed in the modern social imaginary, it

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2011

An important philosopher and anthropologist of science, Bruno Latour has recently outlined an ambitious programme for a new sociological empiricism, in continuation of his actor-networktheory (ANT). Interrogating issues of description, explanation and theoretical interpretation in this 'sociology of associations', we argue that certain internal tensions are manifest. While Latour's philosophy of social science demands an absolute abandonment of theory in all its forms, proposing instead to simply 'go on describing', he is in practice employing versions of common sense explanation and pragmatic-constructivist theory to make ends meet.The core of this tension, we claim, can be located in Latour's meta-theoretical commitments, in effect obscuring important ways in which human subjects employ things, effects and symbols beyond their simple, 'empirical' existence. To illustrate these claims, we deploy the example of how morality works in social life, and coin the term quasi-actant, in allusion to the Latourian actant, to better understand such processes. Our overall criticism of ANT is immanent, aiming at the re-introduction of what we dub 'virtual theory' into Latourian empiricism, thus further strengthening what remains one of the most promising contemporary attempts to reinvigorate the sociological enterprise.

Social Movement Studies, 2011

Taking a social constructionist approach but of a practical rather than a theoretical kind - I shall discuss the processes within which people, between themselves, construct 'organized settings' of enabling/constraints 'into' which to direct their future actions. Such settings give rise to imaginary, and indeed, often impossible objects which have no real existence, and which 'subsist' only 'in' people's social practices. However, to the extent that we can talk about them, they can inform and structure our behaviour. The most important 'object' of this kind is what we each are pleased to call our 'self'. Such imaginary objects play important roles, both in maintaining the multiple, partial structurings of daily life, and in maintaining its openness to further articulations. Any attempt to complete them as real objects destroys their nature, and can lead to an enclosed (mechanical) form of social life.

The last and least discussed crisis we recognize today – after the crisis of democracy, the financial crisis, the environmental crisis, the crisis in education etc. … is the crisis of the social imaginary. Perhaps the social imaginary doesn't appear in public debates to be at all in decline, because we haven't been aware of having (or losing) it….

Sociedad Hoy, 2020

This article clarifies the concept of social imaginary, an increasing popular term within social sciences and humanities. It opens with an analysis of the different notions of social imaginary by Durand and Castoriadis to address then the idea of social imaginary by Taylor. Finally, the concept of social imaginaries-now in plural-by Pintos centers our attention. The article offers an analysis of the similarities and differences among these four schools of the imaginary. It clarifies how social imaginaries differ from the concept of social representation and the idea of social belief. We describe also the potentialities of asocial imaginaries sociology for the analysis of social reality and ends pointing to the possibilities that the future opens to the social imaginaries' perspectives, taking in account their probable convergences and disparities.

International Journal of Social Imaginaries

The conversation begins with reflections on social imaginaries as a crossroads concept, capable of integrating insights from multiple sources; this point is developed through references to the works of Marx, Durkheim and Weber, and followed by comments on Charles Taylor’s hermeneutical realism, as well as on the task of rethinking psychoanalysis. Marcel Gauchet’s approach is noted as the most promising perspective on the latter field. Further discussion deals with the concept of imaginary significations as a key to the theory of culture, and then moves on to two foreshadowed but notably underdeveloped themes in Castoriadis’s work: the symbolic and the problems of theorizing action. Both of them are linked to the phenomenological notion of the world. The final section raises the question of power and emphasizes the affinity of social imaginaries with a relational understanding of power.

This paper historicizes the concept of modern social imaginaries by situating it in the longue durée of global political economy. Initially conceptualized to transcend the shortcomings of Marx's notion of ideology without resort to psychoanalysis or reductive determinism, the modern social imaginary describes the aspirational condition of modern social life, while also absorbing the contradictions of an unequal social order. This paper argues that while Taylor's conception of the modern social imaginary attempts to move beyond the traditional dichotomy of material versus ideal causality, he omits consideration of much of the material infrastructure of everyday life, particularly the way that the modern social imaginary have been shaped by the asymmetrical global flows of surplus value. Further, in contrast to the argument of a seamless flow of history advanced by Taylor, modern social imaginaries have existed consummately with tremendous global and regional inequality. Therefore, drawing on classical sociological theory—specifically Durkheim's Les Formes Elementaires de la Vie Religieuse—this paper offers an analysis of competing modern social imaginaries each capable of absorbing the contradictions of hierarchy within the social order. Specifically, it identifies two—both of the form Taylor describes as equality with distinction—but one organized around reciprocity and the other around strategy. The paper concludes by examining the way that these competing imaginaries impinge upon interactions and the possibility of solidarity at the collective level.

International Journal of Social Imaginaries, 2023

This essay charts a pathway through the labyrinth of social imaginaries. It enters into hermeneutic engagement with Castoriadis, Ricoeur, Taylor, and Arnason to outline a framework that elucidates social imaginaries in relation to social creativity, meaning, action, institutions, and the world horizon. It first situates 'imaginaries' within a theory of culture. This section addresses the world as a background horizon of implicit meanings; imaginary significations as world creating; the interpretative aspect of creation; and the symbolic as a bridge between culture and society. The second section addresses the 'social' of social imaginaries. It highlights the social-historical as the impersonal dimension of society, and institutions and modes of social doing in which social imaginaries are incarnated. It identifies three varieties of doing: movement, social practices, and social praxis. It draws on the metaphor of the hermeneutic spiral to grasp social imaginaries in their dynamic movement of interpretation and creation.

Social Epistemology, 2019

The concept of the social imaginary has been introduced as an alternative to theories of the imagination. Whereas the imagination tends to be conceived as a faculty that we possess as individuals, the concept of social imaginary is meant to encompass significations within which individuals are socialized and that thus precede the formation of individuals themselves. To put it bluntly, we could say that, whereas the imagination is a faculty that an individual possesses, the social imaginary is the social context that possesses individuals. In this article, I would like to reconstruct the dilemmas that surround this conceptual couple and argue for a theory of the imaginal as a solution to such dilemmas. In conclusion, I will also argue that the concept of the imaginal is a much more malleable tool in terms of social ontology, because it is able to overcome the social versus individual dichotomy, moving towards an alternative ontology of the transindividual. In a time when social boundaries are being contested by globalization from above and from below, and in which risks proving an outdated tool for social inquiry, the concept of the imaginal is a much more promising tool, whether one decides to embark on an alternative social ontology or not.

Constructivist Foundations

people construct between themselves 'organized settings' of enabling/constraints 'into' which to direct their future actions, and how it is that sometimes those settings can become more constraining than enabling. This discussion will also make clear why the search for alternatives to systematic, monological theories as appropriate outcomes of research in psychology -a search begun in chapter two, in which the importance of "psychological instruments" was broached -is so very necessary. For, such forms of research, in ignoring the cultural settings from within which it is conducted, ignore also features of those settings constraining the nature of the arguments possible within them. Here, in bringing these settings to the fore, I want to emphasize, not that contest over their nature

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