From collective representations to social imaginaries: How society represents itself to itself

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to reconsider the relevance of Cornelius Castoriadis’ concept of the social imaginary as a way of re-invigorating the study of ‘collective representations’ within the social sciences. The paper begins with a review of how social thought has been understood, from Durkheim's writing on collective representations onwards. A case is made for the utility of Castoriadis’ concept of social imaginary significations in restoring their centrality within the social sciences. In contrast to viewing social thought as ‘super-structural’ ideology, or as a constellation of social attitudes and opinions commonly shared, Castoriadis’ view of social imaginary significations articulates a view of social representations as under-determined by, though never articulated without reference to, social morphology. However the imaginative capacity of individuals and society to generate this surplus of signifiers is understood, Castoriadis’ thinking allies the study of social imaginary significations with the study of social morphology without reducing either to mere representations of the other. What is needed now is a methodology suited to the empirical exploration of the network of significations that constitute the ‘imaginary institution of society’.

KEYWORDS:

• Collective representations
• ideologies
• social representations
• social imaginary significations

Acknowledgement

In preparing this revised paper, the author is most grateful to the editors and two referees of the original version for their very helpful comments and constructive criticisms: while not all their criticisms have been taken on board, the present version would never have taken the shape it has without their critical engagement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The term ‘social thought’ is used here as the most general way of representing collective understandings of the world.

2 A good account of the rise of national statistics in the nineteenth century can be found in Randeraad (2010).

3 A group of social psychologists working with Saadi Lahlou have employed a variety of different methodologies to analyse social representations with individual accounts and in bodies of text. Drawing upon a model of social representations as a ‘set’ of individual representations distributed over society, representations are explored by interrogating individual people and other ‘impersonal’ entities including documents and other artefacts as source material (Chartier & Meunier, 2011; Lahlou, 2003, 2015).

4 Having rejected the determinism of Marxist thought in determining social thought Castoriadis was equally unwilling to go along with any Lacanian determinism (1987).

5 In The Imaginary Institution of Society, Castoriadis argues that ‘the radical imaginary exists as the social-historical and as psyche/soma … That which in the social-historical is positing, creating, brining into being we call social imaginary in the primary sense of the term, or instituting society. That which in the psyche/soma is positing creating bringing into being for the psyche/soma, we call radical imagination’ (Castoriadis, 1987, p. 369). Thus his distinction, ‘imaginary’ vs. ’imagination’, when applied to the generic propensity of individuals and society to generate meanings or significations, reflects on the one hand, the capacity of the individual to form representations (imagination) and on the other, the social-historically determined self-instituting capacity of society (imaginary). Where I use the term to cover both aspects, I describe it as ‘imaginary/imagination’.

6 Also described as ‘a system of beliefs, images, metaphors, evaluations and explanations, supposed to make the unfamiliar intelligible and familiar. At the end, in its naturalized and objectified format, the phenomenon presents itself as a familiar part of the universe of everyday social life’ (Wagner, Valencia, & Elejabarrieta, 1996, p. 332).

7 Interestingly, a similar argument has been directed toward Althusser's ‘excessively sociological’ account of ideology as the constant feature of society and social relations (Ranciere, 1994, p. 143).

8 The concept of ‘entrepreneurs of identity’ is articulated in Reicher, Hopkins, Levine and Rath (2005, p. 627).

9 The term ‘mindscape’ is drawn from the work of Zerubavel (1999).