Assessing the Conceptual Use of Social Imagination in Media Research

TLDR: The role of imagination in framing how people engage in social structures is explained by the concept of social imaginaries, discursive structures that articulate the framing of social forms, affecting subjects' understanding of themselves, their practices, and the places they occupy in society.

Abstract: This JCI theme issue presents five original articles that deal with the notion of imagination and its role in the articulation of media cultural texts. The authors explore media through the lens of theoretical concepts such as imagined community (Anderson 1983) and the social imaginary (Castoriadis 1987) to engage in new ways of understanding the role of media products in “an increasingly complex, culturally hybrid and diasporic world” (Durham and Kellner 2001). The role of imagination in framing howpeople engage in social structures is explained by the concept of social imaginaries, discursive structures that articulate the framing of social forms, affecting subjects’ understanding of themselves, their practices, and the places they occupy in society. By becoming the “implicated order through which all understanding necessarily pass” (Durand 1993), the social imaginary turns out to be a guiding tool that mobilizes social subjects in a world full of uncertainties. Although the term “social imaginary” is elaborated by Cornelius Castoriadis (1987) in his book The Imaginary Institution of Society, the role of imagination in the constitution of the collective should be traced to Emile Durkheim’s (1995) work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. In this work, Durkheim proposed that the natural condition of human subjects is to be in society. He suggested that the way social subjects bond in society is due to the sharing of symbolic forms that enable individuals to come together as a collective (Durkheim 1995, 444). This collective organizes through systemic (conscious and unconscious) articulations. Those articulations constitute meanings that take form and are communicated in what Durkheim called the “conscience collective.” As a theoretical concept, the conscience collective has been explored in different ways by the works of Cornelius Castoriadis (1987), Michael Maffesoli (1993a, 1993b), Charles Taylor (1989, 2002), and Arjun Appadurai (1996). These scholars rethinkDurkheim’s (1995) idea of the conscience collective by suggesting that as a social articulation, it emerges in the form of a social imaginary, a kind of symbolic template or cultural conditioning that generates a sense of identity and inclusiveness between the members of a community.