As I’m working through Lacan’s early seminars (as part of a directed reading with a CTS student who can make himself known if desired), one thing that strikes me is how vastly more important the register of the “imaginary” is than one would ever gather from Zizek’s work — and also much more interesting (to me, at least), insofar as it provides a connection with animal behavior.
One thing that puzzles me, however, is how to reconcile Lacan’s usage with the use of the term “imaginary” as a substantive in phrases like “the capitalist imaginary,” “the postcolonial imaginary,” etc. Does that usage come from another thinker entirely, without reference to Lacan? If not (and I’d be surprised if that was the case), how do we get from Lacan’s early usage to the substantive usage?
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 at 8:07 am
I don’t know if this is a complete (or even partial) answer, but perhaps it comes through the early Jameson? He was much more explicitly Lacanian in those early works than people remember today, and even the middle and later stuff (where Lacan has largely fallen out) still bear Lacan’s stamp in significant ways.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 at 8:21 am
But how does the shift toward using “imaginary” to describe a whole social order happen?
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 at 8:29 am
“Imaginary” as in “social imaginary” is also used by Charles Taylor (I know he uses it in A Secular Age, and I think he wrote a book with the phrase in the title as well), and he sometimes refers his usage back to a fellow called Benedict Anderson who wrote Imagined Communities which, though I have not read it, I am told uses the phrase to describe the way a nation hangs together in the mind of a single citizen. Perhaps this is a second lineage for the phrase than the one traceable to Lacan?
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 at 8:41 am
Perhaps there’s some supplementation going on here from Anderson’s “imagined communities.” More to the point — since he was borrowing heavily from Lacan — is Althusser’s definition of ideology in terms of “imaginary relations of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” Such that ideology gets translated into imaginary and then you have all of cultural studies emerging from that point.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 at 8:42 am
Ah, just noticed Robert’s mention of Anderson — apologies for the repetition!
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 at 9:08 am
Aside from Lacan, the term as it’s used in French social and political theory comes from Cornelius Castoriadis, L’Insitution Imaginaire de la Société.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 at 9:13 am
This is all helpful, but I’m not sure we’ve really pinpointed a source for the substantive use other than Lacan — though perhaps that can be explained by the eclecticism of Anglophone “theory.”
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 at 12:06 pm
And maybe Jameson would be the point of synthesis, bringing together Althusser’s Marxist appropriation and maybe Anderson as well with Lacan’s use of the substantive.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 at 1:24 pm
I just wrote quite a long comment in response to this question. Then my browser crashed. Fuck.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 at 1:28 pm
Not sure why I omitted to mention Castoriadis in my hypothetical reconstruction. Sorry, Ruth.
Sorry, Kieran.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 at 1:50 pm
OK, now that I have recovered the will to live, here’s the short version. The only reason I know any of this is that I had to somewhat guiltily look up the genealogy of the term after idly using it in a paper recently.
As Ruth says, Castoriadis popularizes the substantive use of the term. For your purposes I guess this is still Lacan, as Castoriadis is in that circle and Lacan probably starts using the term first. Other people in that general phenomenological Marxism orbit use the term as well—notably Henri Lefebvre (his “Critique of Everyday Life” stuff) and Michel De Certeau. By the ’70s it’s fairly widely used. There’s a discussion of Castoriadis and Claude Lefort in John Thompson’s old book, Studies in the Theory of Ideology. They sometimes hark back to Sartre’s book on the imagination, as a foil.
To go back before Lacan I think there’s a thread to Melanie Klein and her followers—in particular, to Elliott Jaques, who was a sort of psychoanalyst of organizations. Like Castoriadis et al, he had a psychoanalytically-inflected version of phenomenology, though without the Marxism. He (and the Kleinians) had this idea of organizations and institutions as “social phantasy systems” that managed anxiety. So although he didn’t use the term “social imaginary” I think there’s a connection from Lacan to them. (And also to the likes of Wilfred Bion and the other originators of psychoanalysis in/of groups, of whom I know next to nothing.)
The Taylor stuff is separate. He uses the term in his book but doesn’t spend too much time developing where he got it from, other than to mention Anderson and also refer back to Heidegger via Dreyfus.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 at 2:26 pm
Lefort develops his own concept of the imaginary alongside Castoriadis and Lacan. I doubt, however, that Castoriadis or Lefort were sufficiently popular in the English academy to be credited with “the X imaginary.” Like Kieran says, by the 1970s the term would have been sufficiently disperse in France that a genealogy of it or any one singular meaning would have been impossible. Like ideology or discourse or power.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 at 2:39 pm
Thanks, Kieran and Craig. I feel satisfied that my question has been answered, unless anyone wants to challenge this emerging consensus.