Imagination and the Imaginary by Lennon Kathleen

Author:Lennon, Kathleen [Kathleen Lennon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317548812
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

5 Imaginary institution(s)

The imaginary texture of the experienced world, which this work is exploring, has an affective character. The imaginary content expresses a world which makes a call to our bodies, initiates a response. This was the focus of the previous chapter. In this chapter we turn to the social dimension of that imaginary. The theorist who has done most to provide an account of what he terms The Imaginary Institution of Society1 is Cornelius Castoriadis, and much of this chapter will be taken up with a discussion of his work. The affective, bodily and social aspects of the imagination were under-theorised by Kant. In the writings of Castoriadis we find them theorised together. His is an approach to the imaginary informed by Kant, incorporating insights from psychoanalysis and put into conversation, in its social application, with the writings of Marx. In the first part of the chapter Castoriadis is read alongside Merleau-Ponty, to explore the role the social plays in instituting our imaginaries. In the second part he is read alongside Marx, to examine imaginaries of the social. In the third part he is read alongside contemporary theorists, Gatens and Lloyd, to discuss critical reflection on, and transformation of, social imaginaries. We will, however, start with some examples, from which we can consider what kinds of questions people have employed the notion of the social imaginary to address.

At the beginning of her book Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock2 discusses a map made by Rider Haggard to guide imperial explorers in Southern Africa. What she draws our attention to is the way the image Haggard presents mirrors awoman’s body. In much nineteenth-century discourse, the land to be explored, often characterised as virgin territory, is imagined as a female body, to be ravished and explored, but also as, potentially, a threatening engulfment. This map, then, carries an imaginary of what it purports to be representing, which suggests, and legitimises, certain kinds of responses to that land. McClintock’s work highlights the intersecting imaginaries of sexed difference, raced difference, class difference, domesticity, and empire, in nineteenth-century writings about imperialism. She does not use the term social imaginaries, which has since become ubiquitous, but she draws attention to what others have captured by it, in her explorations of the meanings attached to ‘home’ and ‘empire’, and the images (in the wide sense in which we have been using this term, to incorporate more than visual images) whereby these significances were conveyed. These are images in terms of which we experience and make sense of our social world.

Figure 5.1 Rider Haggard’s map

Source: McClintock, Anne, 1995, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, Routledge, London and New York, p. 2.

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