The social imaginary in theory and practice

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. Here a number of key questions need to be answered: 1. If a social imaginary is defined as an evocation of the social whole, how can we relate this definition to the tendency to turn the imaginary into one of the following: 1. the basic process by which each human being comes to know him or herself as a whole being in relation to others (Lacan’s layering of the imaginary with the symbolic); 2. the constitutive basis of everything social Castoriadis’s over-reach); or 3. the singular defining condition of an epoch (Albrow’s category error)? 2. What is the relationship between a social imaginary as a relatively taken-for-granted way of framing meaning and the cacophony of discourses contesting social meaning that we call ‘ideologies’? 3. What is the relationship between a social imaginary and an ontological formation such as modernity (that treats concepts such as spirit of the times as largely immanent notions made by social practice)? 4. How can the practical dynamics that determine the lived reality of an ontological formation (such as modernity) be elaborated without simply adding factor to factor in a flat descriptive elaboration? This essay will track some of the background to these questions, and set up an alternative model based upon the work of Manfred Steger. Any adequate alternative approach needs to be able to deal with these questions. However, in order to understand the origins of current problems concerning the social imaginary we need first to go back briefly to the notion of ‘the spirit of the age’ and the process by which its philosophical and analytical use shifted from a cosmological-metaphorical or traditional frame to a modern frame. Many of the contemporary problems with the concept of the ‘imaginary’ arise from a tendency to conflate these two orientations.