Professor: Jorge Martínez Lucena

On Social Imaginaries: the New Post-Modern Cultural Order

If there is a dumb meta-narrative acting as the framework of our experiences, actions, and life, then we need a more detailed theoretical explanation of how capitalism provides us with social cohesion.

One attempt at this explanation is developed in the Theory of Social Imaginaries by contemporary thinkers such as Gilbert Durand, Michel Maffesoli, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Charles Taylor.

How Does Post-Modernity Get Social Cohesion?

These thinkers try to understand how our society can get cohesion without using a common metanarrative capable of giving us rational response to our anthropological questions about the meaning of our life, as religions and ideologies intended to do.

In order to understand this theory, we need to situate the center of human decision not in our reason, but rather in our emotions; concretely in our imaginative skills. This way, men wouldn’t pursue ideas deduced from the dumb metanarrative, but would instead imagine and follow what they want or they wish to be.

How Does Post-Modernity Get Social Cohesion?

“By social imaginary, I mean something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, of 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 underlie these expectations” (Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, Duke University Press, 2004, p. 23)

What Is a Social Imaginary?

A social imaginary is a more or less unconscious image or array of images which are socially shared and let the individuals belonging to a society identify and distinguish what should be considered real/unreal or normal/abnormal in their milieu.

What Is a Social Imaginary?

1.The stabilizing function:

“Our social imaginary at any time is complex. It incorporates a sense of the normal expectations we have of each other, the kind of common understanding that enables us to carry out the collective practices that make up our social life. This incorporates some sense of how we all fit together in carrying out the common practice. Such understanding is both factual and normative; that is, we have a sense of how things usually go, but this is interwoven with an idea of how they ought to go, of what missteps would invalidate the practice” (Charles Taylor, 2004: 24)

Functions of Social Imaginaries

2.The subversive or revolutionary function:

Social imaginaries accomplish one of the main goals of the imagination, which consists of rebelling and rioting in the face of its natural or cultural destiny. Therefore, social imaginaries enable us to wrestle against dissolution, to exorcize death and temporal decomposition. This is why they can also contribute with alternative paths to solving social and psychological contradictions.

Functions of Social Imaginaries

The way in which these imaginaries touch humans century after century is through myths.

Myths are concrete and moving crystallizations of imaginaries which let us cope with these widespread images that join us to our social, cultural, and moral milieux.

“Narratives emerged as social forms, which include explanatory myths, among other genres that support the coherence and cohesiveness of the community” (Nelson, 2003: 22)

“Canonical texts, myths, fables, yarns, legends, parables, and traditional tales all play their part in this. These cultural artifacts constitute a powerful normative force both in first weaving and maintaining the social fabric” (Dan Hutto, Folk Psychological Narratives, MIT Press, 2008: 243)

How Do These Imaginaries Work?

The myth of the progress:

Since modernity, the myth of the progress has stabilised the Western central imaginary. It consist of the fact that the conquest of our desired future exclusively obeys to our human agency. The wish for salvation at the end of times is converted into an intrahistorical liberation process, a secularized redemption, a hope for our historical future (Carretero, 2006: 116).

Some Modern Myths

The myth of the man-machine:

To treat a man like a thing, or like a pure mechanical system, takes much more imagination than to see him as an owl. The relationship between a man and an owl is more significant than the one between a man and a machine. However, never has a society applied a metaphor to man as thoroughly as modern industry is doing today with the metaphor of the man-android (Castoriadis, 1983: 274)

Some Modern Myths

Every society or culture used to have a foundational myth, which was significantly connected to the prevalent metanarrative.

Nevertheless, the fall of metanarratives has been provoked by a cultural milieu which has promoted the skepticism over any aim of giving a mythical explanation of the wholeness of life or history.

Foundational Myth

With the unrivalled prevalence of the dumb capitalist metanarrative in our globalized post-modern world, the myth transforms itself profoundly.

Myth is no longer a narrative which tries to provide a rational explanation of our lives or our history as a culture. Myth turns into micro-myth and plays a crucial role in the development of the capitalist system.

These micro-myths are supplied to us through consumerism (media-market-technological apparatus).

Micro-myths

• To provide the consumer with the chance of constructing his own authentic identity.

• To provide the individual with an intensification of his own experiences.

• To provide individuals with the experience of belonging to neo-tribal and liquid communities (this has a lot to do with identity and intensity as well)

Psychological Functions of Micro-myths

To provide societies where they are spread with the experience of needing the other in order to be oneself.

To provide societies where they are spread with an imaginative agreement about what is normal/abnormal, real/unreal, fair/unfair, etc., which is fundamental in order to get social stability and political governance.

To provide the capitalist system with the psychological and sociological basis of consumerism that lets it grow metastathically.

Sociological Functions of Micro-myths

After the fall of metanarratives, individuals in Western culture also fall into anomie, a feeling of pointlessness, disorientation and lack of motivation originated by the absence of clear anthropological and moral coordinate axes in their cultural milieu.

Micro-myths, with their psychological and sociological effects, let us feel good enough to keep the social imaginaries of our society as they are.

Micro-myths Against Anomie