"The Modern Social Imaginary: Toward A Critical-Dialectical Approach" (Revised 5/13/18)

The Modern Social Imaginary: Toward A Critical-Dialectical Approach John P. Clark The topic of the social imaginary has been generally neglected in Anglo-American political thought. In recently years, however, the concept has gained increasing attention from Anglophone political theorists, primarily as the result of Charles Taylor’s 2003 book Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. Parenthetical citations in the text refer to page numbers in this edition. Taylor has become widely recognized as the leading figure on this topic in the Anglo-American world. In the inaugural issue of the new journal Social Imaginaries, the members of the Editorial Collective conclude that Taylor (along with Cornélius Castoriadis and Paul Ricoeur) has “articulated the most important theoretical frameworks for understanding social imaginaries.” The Social Imaginaries Editorial Collective, “Editorial” in Social Imaginaries 1:1 (2015): 7; online at https://books.google.ro/books?id=3EVwCQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false Many other philosophers and political theorists concur with this view. However, an examination of Taylor’s analysis tells us less about the social imaginary itself than about the role of ideology in the academic study of the social imaginary. Any inquiry into the social imaginary presupposes both a certain rationale or problematic and also a conceptual framework on which investigation is to be based. In other words, embedded in all theoretical inquiry is a practical project. This project is always to varying degrees either a critical and emancipatory one, or dogmatic and ideological one. Ronald Creagh, in Utopies Américanes, delineates the principal aspects of an emancipatory theoretical project. He notes that “in the process of emancipation” a group manifests its “inimitable singularity” through its “mode of reflection,” and in doing so, certain crucial questions arise: “Has it demarcated the limits of the dominant mode of thought, its unthinkable, its prohibitions, and its repressed aspirations? Is it capable of crossing the forbidden frontiers of “unthinkability,” in order to create a radically new collective imaginary?” Ronald Creagh, Utopies Américanes (Marseilles: Editions Agone, 2009), p. 306. The present discussion will show that Taylor’s analysis fails to pose such key questions, but instead remains within the limits of the dominant ideological discourse. On the one hand, it contains a highly confused and defective conception of the social imaginary itself. On the other, its investigation of particular “social imaginaries” performs an ideological and apologetic function, reinforcing conventional thinking about the course of modernity, and avoids critical consideration of the dominant moments of the modern social imaginary. Needless to say, such an approach forecloses the possibility of uncovering, through the ruthless critique of the dominant imaginary, the grounds for “a radically new collective imaginary.” Charles Taylor’s Social Imaginary In order to understand the complex dialectic between the social imaginary and other major social determinants, it is essential to establish clearly its nature as a form of consciousness and its relationship to other spheres of social determination. A fundamental problem with Taylor’s concept of the social imaginary is that he does neither of these things. At the beginning of his key chapter, “What is a “Social Imaginary?” Taylor defines it as “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlay these expectations.” (23) He is already in trouble in this initial formulation of his problematic. We might try to interpret this sentence as stipulating a series of objects of imagination (“social existence” “fitting together,” “how things go on,” etc.) that are imagined through the social imaginary. But this makes little sense, since by the end of the sentence we would be imagining things that that are certainly not objects of imagination (“deeper normative notions”) and imagining “images” themselves, which would be absurdly tautological. Based on Taylor’s own explanation of what he thinks of as the “social imaginary,” it ends up being a mishmash of social phenomena such as collective images, social relations, social norms, and social understandings. The analysis that follows Taylor’s efforts at definition confirms the eclectic and confused nature of his approach. He uncontroversially explains that the social imaginary encompasses “the way ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings,” often through “images, stories, and legends.” (23) He notes that it “is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society.” (23) This is a good point, for were it not true, we wouldn’t call it the social imaginary. But he also holds that it consists of “that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.” (23) However, the social imaginary, if it is a distinctive social sphere, cannot consist of “understandings,” since these are the elements of a theory, ideology, etc. Its contents must rather be shared images, imaginary significations, fantasies, etc. that are objects of the imagination. Taylor often reiterates his intellectualistic interpretation of the imaginary, asserting, for example, that it “incorporates a sense of the normal expectations that we have of each other; the kind of common understanding which enables us to carry out the collective practices which make up our social life."(24) We will look in vain for any explanation of the difference between “an expectation” and “a sense of an expectation.” However, the important point is that Taylor again confuses imagining and understanding. Indeed, he goes so far as to subsume under the imaginary an “understanding” that “supposes, if it is to make sense, a wider grasp of our whole predicament, how we stand to each other, how we got to where we are, how we relate to other groups, etc." (25) As these formulations indicate, much of what Taylor includes in his analysis relates not to the social imaginary, but rather to forms of social ideology. In fact, there is a curious tendency in his supposedly groundbreaking work on the social imaginary to avoid resolutely any attempt to take the social imaginary itself very seriously. Instead, Taylor consistently (and suspiciously) reverts to discussion of theory, ideology and modes of understanding and interpretation. A fatal flaw in his approach is that, quite astoundingly, it does not occur to him to investigate in detail the nature of the social imagination itself, or indeed, the nature of the imagination itself, much less explore precisely how the diverse phenomena he analyses might or might not be products of such an imagination. Taylor’s approach can be compared to the very detailed analysis of the imaginary in Lacan and in the large body of social thought that has been inspired by Lacan’s work. The social imaginary as I define it includes, in Lacanian terms, both the symbolic and the imaginary “registers,” as expressed on the level of social practice and social institutions. Lacan’s distinction could be maintained, but I find it more theoretically illuminating to trace the dialectical interaction between the social imaginary as symbolic-imaginary and three other large spheres of social determination. The study of the social imaginary must explore the social dimensions of both demand, which relates to the Lacanian symbolic order and the patriarchal “Big Other,” and desire, which relates to the Lacanian imaginary order and the “objet petit a,” or projective imaginary object. We have been in a historical era in which in the advanced industrial societies hegemony has moved from (in Lacan’s terms) the symbolic to the imaginary. Žižek notes that accompanying this evolution has been a change in the primary superego injunction from the authoritarian “Thou Shalt Not!” to the pseudo-libertarian “Thou Shalt—Enjoy!” Superego mechanisms vary widely depending on one’s location within the global capitalist system (so far are we from Taylor’s fantasy of equidistance from the center) and thus there are many hybrid variations on the society of demand and the society of desire. The imaginary has triumphed most in the core while the symbolic is still much more in command at the periphery. This is the social imaginary world in which we live and which screams out at us at every moment through the “information” media, albeit in distorted and disfigured forms of expression. Empire in its death throes dictates that some merely demand death while others actually desire it. While Taylor’s vague and uncritical conception of the imaginary tends to collapse together theory, ideology, and the more properly imaginary, when he does distinguish them, he often attributes an exaggerated role to theory in shaping the imaginary. He explains, for example, that “when a theory penetrates and transforms the social imaginary. . . for the most part, people take up, improvise, or are inducted into new practices,” which “are made sense of by the new outlook, the one first articulated in the theory; this outlook is the context that gives sense to the practices.” (29) The “new understanding” then “begins to define the contours of their world and can eventually come to count as the taken-for-granted shape of things, too obvious to mention” (29) In this account, theory transforms the social imaginary, while at the same time transforming the social ethos. This process allows theory to become even more hegemonic, and at the same time more meaningful, and in the end to become a kind of conventional wisdom. But it seems that the crucial variables in this account are ideology (theory) and ethos (practice) and that the imaginary is reduced to a mediating term between the two. Why should we accept such a vague and reductive account, rather than the alternative of a dialectical view of ideology, imaginary, ethos, and institutions, in which determination is always mutual, and in which the relative weight of each determinant varies according to historical case? The weakness of Taylor’s analysis is shown in his attempt to apply his intellectualistic scheme to revolutions. In his account, the revolutionary process begins as “we set out to remake our political life according to agreed principles,” (29) and is followed by the various steps leading to the principles becoming “taken-for-granted.” However, such a view cannot account for the fact that pre-revolutionary ideology often becomes more and more tenuously related to revolutionary and post-revolutionary practice, and that rather than increasingly “giving sense to the practices,” (29) it requires increasingly higher levels of ideological blindness on the part of its adherents to believe in any congruity between revolutionary principles and obviously counter-revolutionary practice. There has been a similar fate for the ideology of “equality” under liberal capitalist revolutions, and of “workers’ power” under authoritarian “socialist” (or state capitalist) regimes. A similar gap can also be noted between imaginary significations and social practice, as when images of the heroic and powerful worker or the euphoric and fashionable consumer are used to legitimate an oligarchical and disempowering system. Three “Social Imaginaries” An aspect of Taylor’s analysis that has received considerable comment is his discussion of the three “forms” of the modern social imaginary. The first of these is the economy. Taylor contends that “coming to see the most important purpose and agenda of society as economic collaboration and exchange" is "a drift in our social imaginary that begins in [the 18th century] and continues to this day.” (76) This formulation shows that it is precisely in the area of the social imaginary that Taylor’s analysis is badly deficient. Certainly, in the ideology of capitalism, economic “cooperation” and “fair exchange” are quite central, but in the capitalist imaginary end especially the late capitalist imaginary, it is the commodity and commodity consumption (not production and exchange) that reign supreme. This was shown presciently in Marx’s chapter on “The Fetishism of Commodities and The Secret Thereof,” later in various Situationist texts, and recently in a wide spectrum of cultural criticism. Taylor is correct in his view that an important development for the modern social imaginary was “our coming to see our society as an ‘economy,’ an interlocking set of activities of production, exchange and consumption, which form a system with its own laws and its own dynamic,” and which “now defines a way we are linked together.” (76) But he has little insight into the specifically imaginary dimensions that accompanied this historical development. He fails almost entirely to analyze the social and psychological processes by which the economic has gained its hegemonic imaginary power, and how the economistic imaginary evolves historically in relation to other spheres of social determination. Instead, he once again falls into abstract idealism and overvaluation of theoretical concepts. Thus, he takes very seriously the idea (and granted, the image) of “the invisible hand,” which has been much more important as an ideological and theoretical concept than as an imaginary signification that has moved the masses. On the other hand, he has little to say about the utopian economistic image of the industrial megamachine as an awe-inspiring liberating force, or about the contradictory dystopian image of the industrial megamachine as an oppressive power. Significantly, he misses the war that has taken place on the battlefield of the social imagination. The second of Taylor’s “forms” is “the public sphere,” which he describes as “a metatopical, common space” that “knits together a plurality of [topical] spaces into one larger space of nonassembly.” (86) Once again, the analysis is excessively abstract and idealist, in that it relies heavily for evidence on the history of political theory, rather than on social and cultural history, the relevant sources for determining the state of the social imaginary of any era. Taylor does not give adequate attention to the class nature of various dimensions of such social imaginary significations or to the ideological nature of an image of “the” public sphere, when much or most of society has been and still is excluded in various ways from active participation in such a sphere. He seems never to have encountered the critique of the Spectacle. In Taylor’s liberal optimistic view (it is especially here we encounter his fatal meliorism), the “public sphere” is “a kind of common space . . . in which people who never meet understand themselves to be engaged in discussion and capable of reaching a common mind.” (75) He clearly thinks that this is not an ideal model of what society might achieve, but rather a description of what really emerged in the modern social imaginary. But the idea of “a common mind” has functioned much more as an ideological concept used to legitimate social systems, than as the object of the imagination of “ordinary people” in the society. In real social history (the history of social beings thinking, acting and imagining), human beings have often imagined society as the site of conflicts between social classes and between other social groups. However, one finds little discussion of this conflictual dimension of the social imaginary in Taylor’s analysis. Moreover, the image of a “common mind” possessed by the whole of society has been most typical of authoritarian, organicist regimes, and not of the liberal societies that Taylor takes as his usual model. A much deeper analysis than Taylor presents would be necessary to show the basis for the emergence of a liberatory “common mind” that could challenge the dominant repressive one. What do we find in Taylor is the rather weak liberal concept of society as “one big debate,” (84) which is no more than a projection on to the actual social imaginary of modern societies of the Millian liberal ideological concept of progress through the evolution of a purportedly unconstrained public opinion. The third, and most theoretically important, of Taylor’s “social imaginaries” is that of “society as a ‘people.’” He claims that what is imagined under this rubric is “a metatopical agency that is thought to preexist and found the politically organized society.” (102) But is this metatopical founding agency what “ordinary people” in modern societies have imagined as “the people,” or is it a concept that political theorists and members of the intelligentsia have used to theorize, or, indeed, fantasize, “the people”? Once again, Taylor confuses the ideological and the imaginary. At various points, he discusses the relation between “understanding a theory,” “being able to put it into practice,” and “making sense of the practices,” and concludes that “what makes sense of our practices is our social imaginary.” (114, 165) However, what ordinarily makes sense out of practices is the social ideology. The social imaginary often makes very little “sense” out of the specific practices that ideology defends, rationalizes, and justifies. However, it plays a very large role in bestowing legitimacy on such practices, by evoking an investment of libidinal energy. It endows practices and institutions with charismatic authority and legitimacy. Far from “making sense” out of practices and institutions, it often performs the function of defying sense in order to justify certain social practices and institutions. This is the case, for example, when images of patriotic unity, heroic triumphs, and noble sacrifices are used to depict institutions as “the people’s institutions” (the people’s state, the people’s representatives, the people’s army, wars in defense of the people, etc.) when, in reality, these institutions have very little to do with authorization by the people, or representation of the people. Nevertheless, Taylor thinks that the key to the modern social imaginary is its democratic and populist dimension. He contends that modern society is “thoroughly penetrated on all levels by the modern moral order,” which impels us to “criticize and even transform” that which is “insufficiently ‘democratic’ or egalitarian.” (146) He claims that earlier society had “a certain verticality,” which “depended in a grounding in a higher time,” and was a “society of mediated access” in which the place of all was mediated by a figure such as the king. (158) But modern society, he says, is, by contrast, characterized by “horizontal, direct access” in which each person is “equidistant from the center” and “immediate to the whole.” (158) It should be recognized that, with a certain deference to social reality, Taylor at times slips from his claim regarding “direct access” to more ambiguous formulations such as “the diffusion of images of direct access,” people “conceiving of themselves as participating directly” in public discussions, and economic agents “seeming” to be “on an equal footing.” (160-161) He even admits that the imagined “immediacy of access” involved in phenomena such as following fashion or worshiping media stars is illusory, to the extent that these practices “are in their own sense hierarchical.” (160) Despite such moments of grudging insight, Taylor returns to his thesis that modern society is, indeed, a kind of society of "direct access,” resorting to the flimsy grounds that such practices “offer all participants an access unmediated by any of their other allegiances or belongings.” (160) His claim is not, in fact, true, since there is always a very complex network of interpenetrating mediations of social phenomena. But even if it were true, the fact that it would not be mediated by “other allegiances” would not prevent it from being highly mediated in its own sphere. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, regarding Taylor’s horizonality thesis, one must question his idea that previous societies have instituted a “higher time” that is “vertical” while present-day societies have not. In fact, the temporality of mass consumption, the temporality of the Spectacle, the temporality of technobureaucratic institutions, the temporality of regimented work and leisure—indeed, all the variations on the temporality of Empire—are forms of “higher time” embodying the verticality of social hierarchy and domination, and are imposed on the authentic “horizonalist” temporality of the body, of life in place, of mindful experience, of nature and natural cycles, in short, the temporality of living with an awakened awareness of the horizons of the real. At one point, Taylor admits that an imaginary can be "false” to the extent that it “distorts or covers over certain crucial realities.” (183) But he claims that even if it does so, the imaginary is at the same time necessarily more than ideological, in that it “makes sense of” and “enables” practices, and is thus “an essential constituent of the real.” (183) Unfortunately, however, such an admission, rather than strengthening Taylor’s case, only adds to its incoherence. The social imaginary is often quite central to legitimating systems of social domination and plays a major role in systematically distorting reality. The mere fact that it always “gives meaning” to practices cannot, in itself, negate in any way its functioning as false consciousness within a system of social domination, and is, in fact, a necessary precondition for such functioning. The one-sided and ultimately ideological nature of Taylor’s analysis is betrayed when he notes “how much our outlook is dominated by modes of social imaginary” that are shaped by “the modern ideal of order as mutual benefit.” (185) Granted, this is certainly one moment of the modern social imaginary, and it is understandable that an optimistic and apologetic liberal interpretation of history would stress it. But it is certainly not the dominant moment, if by “dominant” we mean that which dominates both consciousness and action in the world, that which most powerfully conditions modes of self-definition, ego-gratification, and jouissance, that which is at core of the reigning fundamental fantasy of the age. So what does Taylor miss in his strongly liberal and weakly communitarian analysis of the social imaginary? Only the most important dimensions: its fundamental role in the constitution of subjectivity, its place in the social whole, and the nature of its historical transformations. The Imaginary as Sphere of Social Determination The social imaginary is the sphere of a community’s collective fantasy life. It includes images of the self, the community itself, the world, the cosmos, and of the person’s relationship to each of these. It includes the dominant myths and paradigmatic narratives of the society. Though the modern social imaginary reflects the entire history of social determination, it has been increasingly dominated by the dialectic between capital and the capitalist techno-bureaucratic megamachine , with an important role being played by the larger dialectic between these institutional structures and the modern nation-state and its own techno-bureaucratic megamachjne. To this must be added the role of regressive institutions and identifications such as authoritarian patriarchy and religious fundamentalism, which gain new energy largely in reaction to the vicissitudes of capital, the state and the megamachine. In the late modern period (the period of the End of Empire), the elements of a productionist imaginary, a consumptionist imaginary, a patriarchal imaginary, a nationalist imaginary, a statist imaginary, and a technological imaginary all interact dialectically, and the nature of their interactions must be understood in specific detail. In order for this to occur, the social imaginary must itself be understood in dialectical relationship to the social institutional structure, the social ideology, and the social ethos (and all of these must be further understood in relation to the dialectic between the natural and the social). In the brief concluding remarks that follow, the focus will be limited to the interplay between the two most dominant moments of the economistic core of the actually-existing system of domination. Understanding the “modern social imaginary” requires a grasp of the increasing domination of economism in all forms of social determination and of the dialectic between the productionist and consumptionist moments of this economism. So-called advanced industrial societies have gone through a process of evolution from the productionist to the consumptionist era of economism. The typical productionist and disciplinary forms of social organization, such as the factory, the prison, the school, the hospital, etc. were dominant in the earlier period, and remain crucial in the later period. However, they are increasingly transformed and refashioned in a consumptionist direction. At the same time, strongly consumptionist institutions such as the shopping mall, the entertainment and recreation industries, and the highly mediated and commercialized “social” media, come to occupy an increasingly central place in society, and all play a role in generating the social imaginary. Ideologically, there is a shift from such productionist values as discipline, conformity, resignation, ambition, hard work, productivity, self-repression, self-control, obedience, scrupulousness, productivity, and accumulation to consumptionist values such as happiness, pleasure, gratification, enjoyment, fulfillment, stylishness, popularity, youthfulness, sex appeal, physical beauty, and conspicuous consumption. The transformation of the social imaginary, society’s fantasy life, accompanies this development. The system of consumptionist values focuses on the images presented in advertising and the mass media, images of personal gratification and power that come from the accumulation not merely of abstract wealth but of what we might call “subjective capital” that is, objects and experiences that are closely identified with images of successful selfhood. The traditional hierarchical system of social domination, of power-over, generates a fundamental fantasy in which personal gratification comes from a sense of superiority, from real or supposed recognition by subordinates, from pleasure at the very idea of the subservience of others. Such a social formation is pervaded by psychical phenomena such as humiliation, frustration, self-doubt, self-contempt, resentment repression, rage, and craving for revenge. All of this is transformed, and in many ways aggravated, in a stage of society in which human relations are more and more thoroughly mediated by things, or more precisely, by images of things. The society of mass consumption creates, even among the relatively powerless, a fundamental fantasy based on the exercise of power, and an increasing sense of actual power rooted in the immediate gratification provided through the consumption of commodities, ranging from fast food to pornographic images. But at the same moment that that the consumer comes into possession of this vast technological and imaginary power, he or she feels increasingly powerless, less satisfied, empty, always craving more, and perhaps on a deeper level, needing something more. The system thus generates dissatisfaction, alienation, and potentially subversive impulses that are in contradiction to the fundamental fantasy. A critical and dialectical analysis of the social imaginary will focus on such moments of negativity within the system of social determination (all of which are overlooked in Taylor’s liberal account). The goals of such an analysis include understanding how various spheres determine and reinforce the existing patterns of thought and action, and comprehending the nature of their current processes of evolution and transformation. However, another goal is to understand what must be done if patterns of thought and action are to emerge that truly challenge and begin to overturn the system of social domination. Any effective movement for social transformation must consist of a growing community whose members are in the process of creating, for themselves, a liberatory institutional framework, a liberatory social ethos, a liberatory worldview, and a liberatory social imaginary founded in a new fundamental fantasy or image of non-dominating personhood. Ronald Creagh cites a pertinent example of how the utopian communal imaginary can generate such a powerful counter-imaginary. He cites Kathleen Kincade, one of the co-founders of the egalitarian and ecological community, Twin Oaks. Kincade describes the community she first imagined, based on the book Walden Two, in this way: “I saw everything I wanted in that book. I imagined myself completely happy in this society. I imagined myself being able to find the mate of my dreams. I fell in love with Walden Two, and remained so for many years. It was the passion of my life.” Quoted in Erin Passehl, “Twin Oaks Community: Women’s Liberation, Generational Divide, and the Evolution of Women’s Culture;” Twin Oaks Community Archive; online at https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=%22Erin+Passehl%22+%22Kathleen+Kinkade%22. This passage gives us the key to the understanding and critique of the dominant social imaginary. Such a project must address the nature of the fundamental fantasy. We must first understand precisely how the dominant economistic imaginary colonizes our passion and desire, and how it creates the fatal illusion that it can supply “everything that we want.” If we achieve such a critical understanding, accompanied by the appropriate liberatory, transformative desire, we can then move on to imagine, and begin to create, a world beyond the chains of illusion and domination. We can help give birth to a world that not only liberates our own deepest longings and hopes, but also nurtures the flourishing of the human and Earth community.