Modern Social Imaginaries (Public Planet Books)

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Then there is Taylor’s chapter on the creativity of discourse, where the imagination is constantly invoked sotto vo You suggest that social imaginaries are a way of rethinking the sociological classics. Can we enlarge the scope and approach this from a different direction? What does the notion of social imaginaries bring to social theory and philosophy that other influential concepts, such as “culture” or “the life-world”, do not? Or, if social imaginaries are best considered a variant of such concepts, wherein lies its originality and significance? Taylor C (2011) Dilemmas and connections: selected essays. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Domingues’ essay is longer than readers can usually expect. The gravity of the topic justifies the length. Also deservedly longer than usual is Alice Pechriggl’s ‘Gender Between Imaginary Institution and Cultural Incorporation: Revisiting the Concept of Anaclisis From Freud to Castoriadis.’ Pechriggl approaches layers of the gender imaginary through a re-examination of Freud’s notion of anaclisis (or leaning on). Seeing in Castoriadis’ elucidation of the ‘effective imaginary’ a co-location of gender identity, she connects this level of the psyche to gendered social relations and representations instituted in the wider social imaginary. Finding the boundary between inner psychic and societal layers is difficult to say the least; it is a speculation analogous to theology’s attempts to separate body and soul. Understanding this problem through reference to anaclasis, but also trying to determine the means to counteract it, Pechriggl pinpoints a social imaginaries perspective on widely debated issues of gender, bodies, representation, and politics. How the ‘broken unity’ of the psyche conditions the creation of the social world is her topic, and she finds the formation of the self is complex and never total or finished. Likewise, gender does not exhaust socialization, as social science research and social theories of the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, and religion have suggested. Finishing with a discussion of the binarism of socially instituted gender identities, a question left untouched by Castoriadis not to mention Freud, Pechriggl ventures into the terrain of intersex and transgender experiences of being. She does so by pointing to the benefits of a Castoriadian understanding of the interrelation of body and psyche, instead of fashionably casting gender as a biopolitics.

Krummel, John W.M. 2016. Introduction to Miki Kiyoshi and his Logic of the Imagination. Social Imaginaries 2(1):13–24. https://doi.org/10.5840/si2016212. Several authors have criticized Taylor by saying he is unduly affirming that the exclusive humanist position is less deep and fuller that that of transformative religion (McLennan 2008; Bernstein 2008) and even that the use of a sense of fullness is misleading per se (Ward 2008). Taylor’s own response goes along the lines of recognizing that it is impossible for positions defending belief (“strong religion”) and unbelief to apodictically prove their points and that in any of those stances there are meta-theoretical views which are also of a normative kind. (McLennan 2008, 2010). Differences between them may prove to be intractable. However, it would still be possible to phenomenologically describe (Casanova 2008) the ways in which human fullness is sought as belonging to a continuum between religion and exclusive humanism (Marty 2008).

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2004. The Imaginary. A Psychological Phenomenology of Imagination. London: Routledge. John Milbank ( 2009) and Collin May ( 2009) are in deep agreement with Taylor’s claim here. Both of them, however, make some precisions about the ways in which this happened historically, both at the level of Middle Ages and Reformation philosophers and theologians, as well as on the paradoxical relationship between enchantment and religious morality. Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2011b. The Performative Revolution in Egypt. An Essay in Cultural Power. London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Essai sur les Mœurs et l’Esprit des Nations (Essay on the Customs and Spirit of Nations). London: J. Nourse (1759 edition).

Lakoff, George. 2016. Moral Politics. How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ball, S. (2012). Global education inc.: New policy networks and the neo-liberal imaginary. London: Routledge.James, Paul (2019). "The Social Imaginary in Theory and Practice". In Chris Hudson and Erin K. Wilson (ed.). Revisiting the Global Imaginary: Theories, Ideologies, Subjectivities. Palgrave-McMillan. Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1988. Culture and Political Crisis. ‘Watergate’ and Durkheimian Sociology. In Durkheimian Sociology. Cultural Studies, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, 187–224. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.