Imaginary

RELATED TERMS: Storyworld; Iconic Designs, Critical Designs

The imaginary mediates between abstract conception and material realisation. The storyworld, for example, takes place in the imaginary. In design practices, the imaginary does not carry a negative connotation in the sense of being a set of deceptive illusions mystifying or obscuring a real. As Adams and Smith (2019: xxiv) discuss, with the advent of modernity, a shift in thinking of the imagination occurred. It ceased to be considered as merely reproductive or imitative and became authentically creative. In this regard, Kant is a watershed figure through his re-discovery in the first Critique of the productivity of the imagination for understanding. In the meantime, others have continued to clarify and refine Kant’s reflections, expanding the creative imagination from the subjective to the intersubjective sphere; and then on up to the frontiers of the trans-subjective dimension of the social-historical.

In the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, the Imaginary, the order of perception and hallucination, contrasts with the Symbolic, the order of discursive and symbolic action, and with the Real, which refers not just experiential ‘reality’ but also to what is imperceptible and unrepresentable. For Lacan, the Imaginary order, intertwined with the Symbolic order and the Real, refers to the fundamental narcissism by which human subjects create fantasy images of themselves, on the one hand, and their ideal objects of desire, on the other hand.

This process is closely related to Lacan’s theorisation of the mirror stage, which marks the movement of the subject from primal ‘need’ to ‘demand’. Whereas needs can be fulfilled, the demand of the child to make the other a part of itself is impossible to realise and begins to serve as a reminder of loss, of the boundless connection to the mother and to the world, and of lack, of that oneness, wholeness or boundlessness, a movement from infinite connection to finite being.

This difference between ‘demand’ and ‘desire’ marks the distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic order for Lacan. The Symbolic order acknowledges the language, law and community that the finite being must negotiate, whereas the demand of the imaginary is trapped in a fixed dyadic relation between the self and the object one wants to make a part of oneself.

The fantasy image of oneself in the imaginary order can be filled by others who we may want to emulate in our adult lives, anyone that we set up as a mirror for ourselves in what remains a narcissistic relationship. For Lacan this Imaginary realm continues to exert its influence throughout the life of the adult and is not simply superseded by the child’s movement into the symbolic order. The imaginary and the Symbolic are, according to Lacan, inextricably intertwined and work in tension with the Real.

It is here that the characters in the world of the story or the world of the narrative environment can gain leverage and through which storyworlds can re-articulate, re-work and potentially displace the dynamic among the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real for the human subject.

Deleuze, Castoriadis and Metz also have use for the concept of the imaginary in their writings.

Design and Social Imaginaries

In an interview, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (2019) points out that Herbert Simon defines design as a process of change: from an existing situation (that which is the case) to a preferred situation (that which ought to be the case). This approach, Ginsberg argues, defines design as a process of amelioration: designers, she says, typically want to make things better. From a design research perspective, design in this characterisation is a mixture of an ‘ontological-epistemological’ commitment to defining or describing what is the case in terms of what is known to be the case; an ‘axiological’ judgement concerning the value of one situation compared to that of another; a ‘performative’ or ‘actantial’ enacting of change from one situation to another; and a ‘political’ act, in deciding to transition from one situation to another.

Ginsberg explores the value and the limitations of this ameliorative approach to design through the example of the plastic drinking-water bottle. She explains that the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottle was invented in 1973 to hold carbonated drinks by DuPont mechanical engineer Nathaniel Wyeth. As with many designed entities, the plastic bottle articulates a paradox, Ginsberg (2017) notes. By several measures, the plastic bottle is better than glass: plastic uses less energy to transport than glass; it is safer and stronger; and it uses less material. In addition, the PET bottle is better for the water industry and for the plastic bottle manufacturers who, by persuading us that tap water is inferior, sell bottled water at a higher price than milk. 

However, the product is sold in containers that we use only once. The PET bottle clearly fulfils a brief and has created a new industry. Nevertheless, the bottle has to be considered not in isolation but in relation to people’s behaviour. For example, in the USA alone 48.5 billion litres of bottled water were consumed in 2016. The bottle plastic is not disposable, yet the design, marketing and advertising practices draw our attention away from this aspect. The unintended environmental consequences of so much plastic waste arise, Ginsberg suggests, because of the narrow focus in the design process on the ‘design object’ itself, as if it were without context or consequence. 

Thus, in this situation, while there are definable aspects in which the bottle is ‘better’, for example, it is better than the bottle it replaced and it sustains a new industry, it also has negative environmental consequences. There is no single simple ‘better’. It is both ‘better’ (in some respects) and ‘worse’ (in other respects) at once. The implication for design practices is that the process of amelioration cannot be taken for granted and where it is valid, it is not without qualification. Design does not and cannot  simply, straightforwardly or unqualifiedly make the world ‘better’. 

Design cannot, without qualification, promise ‘a better future’.  The mixed consequences of any design have to be weighed carefully.^[1]

Ginsberg (2017, 2019) notes that one of the major contexts in which the promise of amelioration operates is that of marketing and advertising. These practices are interested in constructing and visualising imaginaries, hypotheticals and thought experiments. For example, a marketing campaign might ask the reader-viewer to imagine how their life might be improved, compared to how it is, by buying a particular brand of pizza or by subscribing to a particular media streaming platform. 

Such examples led Ginsberg to think of design’s promise of ‘a better future’ as part of a social imaginary. Social imaginaries are interesting, Ginsberg contends because as social fictions, such as the idea of the nation or of money, they are instrumental in how society operates. The social imaginary is a useful way to discuss how we believe collectively in such fictions. 

Charles Taylor (2004: 23), for example, defines the social imaginary as, “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.”

Taylor uses the term imaginary, rather than theory, to focus is on the way ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings. This is often not expressed in theoretical terms, but is carried in images, stories and legends, articulated, as Ginsberg argues, through designed entities, from media artefacts to infrastructural, urban and governmental technologies. In other words, the social imaginary may be discussed in both social and technical terms, as a socio-technical imaginary, in the phrase of Jasanoff and Kim (2015). Unlike theory, which is often the possession of a small minority, the social imaginary is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society. Thus, the social imaginary, for Taylor, is that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.^[2]

Ginsberg realised that the social imaginary itself can be a critical design object. Within the language of social imaginaries and social fictions, Ginsberg has developed a notion of the ‘critical imaginary’. She uses her notion of the critical imaginary as a way of distinguishing her approach to design from that of ‘speculative design’, which, to Ginsberg seems only to deal with ‘futures’. Critical imaginaries are not just about futures; they are also about imagined ‘presents’ and imagined pasts, for example social imaginaries of a golden age in the past of a particular nation-state or social imaginaries of a present era of the Anthropocene. She proposes that designing critical imaginaries can open up our understanding of the notion of ‘better’ while offering a process to re-imagine the world. 

Design ceases to be defined in simple terms as a process of amelioration and becomes a site whereby collective imaginary pasts, presents and futures can be brought into focus and design trajectories evaluated in terms of where we have been, where we are and where we are going; and in terms of what has passed, what persists and what is being carried forward as explicit inheritance and heritage, as inexplicit and cryptic haunting and as complex sites of co-genesis.

In so doing, we may engage in the complexities of ‘desire’ in relation to imaginary self-interest and environmental self-destruction, in turn, coming to terms with our various collective and individual exo-somatisations.

Notes

Note 1: In the case of bottled water such a thorough analysis has been undertaken by Hawkins, Potter and Race (2015). In their book, Plastic Water, they take note of prior analyses of the bottled water industry. This has mainly focused, as summarised by Gareth Walker (2019), on the macro-political and economic forces of neoliberal globalisation and corporate self-interest, alongside a leftist critique of bottled water as a vehicle for capital accumulation. While not denying these large-scale socioeconomic forces, Hawkins, Potter and Race argue against accepting the contention that causality in the bottled water, or indeed any market, can be reduced to a single logic or an isolated group of agents and interests. They examine how the bottled water market emerged from multiple and highly situated processes as well as the equally varied new economic identities and practices with which these markets co-evolve. This reflects a broader trend towards hybrid, dispersed, networked ontological positions in political ecology.

[Note 2] For a more thorough discussion of the emerging field of social imaginaries, see: Adams, S. and Smith, J. C. A. (eds) (2019) Social Imaginaries: Critical Interventions. London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield; Anderson, B. (2006) Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Rev ed. London, UK: Verso; Castoriadis, C. (1987) The Imaginary institution of society. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press; Jasanoff, S. and Kim, S.-H. (eds) (2015) Dreamscapes of modernity: Sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press; Taylor, C. (2004) Modern social imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

References

Adams, S. and Smith, J. C. A. (eds) (2019) Social Imaginaries: Critical Interventions. London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield.

Anderson, B. (2006) Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Rev ed. London, UK: Verso.

Boxer, P. (2014) What makes an economy a “libidinal economy”?, Lacanticles, (2 July). Available at: https://lacanticles.com/what-makes-an-economy-a-libidinal-economy/ (Accessed: 20 November 2024).

Castoriadis, C. (1987) The Imaginary institution of society. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Felluga, D. F. (2015) Critical theory: the key concepts. London, UK: Routledge.

Ginsberg, A. D. (2017) Better: Navigating imaginaries in design and synthetic biology to question “Better” [PhD thesis]. Royal College of Art. Available at: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/work/writing-curation (Accessed: 17 August 2024).

Ginsberg, A. D. and Stratford, O. (2019) Nested betters: “Don’t look at the folder called fake tits” [An interview with Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg], Disegno, 24, pp. 155–164.

Hawkins, G., Potter, E. and Race, K. (2015) Plastic water: the social and material life of bottled water. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Jasanoff, S. and Kim, S.-H. (eds) (2015) Dreamscapes of modernity: Sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Taylor, C. (2004) Modern social imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Walker, G. (2019) ‘Gay Hawkins, Emily Potter and Kane Race, Plastic Water: The Social and Material Life of Bottled Water [Book review]’, Antipode Online, (11 February). Available at: https://antipodeonline.org/2019/02/11/plastic-water-the-social-and-material-life-of-bottled-water/ (Accessed: 18 August 2024).

Videos

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Designing Nature, The Conference 2018