Popular Imagination: Essays on Fantasy and Cultural Practice (review)

It is fair to say that all contemporary ethnological studies attempt to locate the spark of imagination in the creation of cultural practice and/or product. Human fantasy is difficult enough to grapple with analytically on the individual or small group level; attempting to understand what imagination is on the "popular" level, by comparison, seems nearly impossible. But the brave contributors to this volume of mainly Scandinavian studies march forward into this very intellectual terrain. Sven-Erik Klinkmann and his colleagues resolutely pose the question: how is popular imagination mediated, inscribed, and limited? The working hypothesis claims that it must be a meaningful process, but, in practice, how might we perceive the role and function of imagination in culture?

These are difficult, but nonetheless fascinating, questions for their elusive centrality to the study of culture and tradition. Bo Pettersson shows in his historical survey that the subjects of imagination and popular imagination have been buoyant in intellectual currents since ancient times. He terms the concept "imagination in the subjunctive mood" or "entertaining the idea of the possible" (p. 13ff). Plato and Aristotle had worked out discussions of imagination's mediating and reproductive roles; Plato was suspicious of imagination's role in clouding reason, while Aristotle viewed it in its interpretive function. Before postmodern writers such as Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Barthes, and Derrida, who largely distrusted technological reproductions that "tend to supplant the real" (p. 22), thinkers of the Romantic period discussed popular imagination in its productive, reproductive, schematizing, and creative roles. Pettersson shows how these ideas are maintained to varying degrees in our current social and intellectual climate, then moves to discuss communal and multicultural ways of thinking in the work of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars today. His look into the future calls for bridge building between the different disciplines that have plumbed the concept of imagination.

Sven-Erik Klinkmann's contribution, "Theorizing Popular Imagination," goes more deeply into what a theory of imagination might look like. An agreement over terminology is one prerequisite. Most of what hinders a comprehensive theory is the disagreement over what we mean by "imagination" and what we mean by "popular." His discussion of Ricoeur is illuminating in that the proposition that the subjunctive mode of imagination, thinking about what is possible, becomes on the popular level "utopian imagination," and with that comes "its logical counterpart, the ideological imagination" (p. 54). These binary pairings are avoided in part by Klinkmann in his working model: "I will look upon the imaginary position as a dense and relatively open, unstructured possibility of signification, or a model by which psychical material of various kinds (unconscious, subconscious, imaginary) is constructed from the positionings of different subjects in relation to the chains of signification that society creates" (p. 56).

He proceeds to elucidate the obstacles that a cultural theory, using the term "popular," must overcome. Theorists have progressed away from studying simply "trash culture" by attempting to discover the taste bearers of society and how they function as "gatekeepers." Analysis of class gradations, separate from economic considerations, may shed some light on the process, whether "the people" are articulate about power, hegemony, culture, politics, gender, and race vis-à-vis their conflicts with the power establishment. Klinkmann maintains that "a marking of imagination as popular imagination should be seen as a special, more limited kind of imagination, an imagination resonating with an ambivalent Other, embedded both in cultural history and in the mass media of today" (p. 60).

Metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche are identifiable linguistic paths within the process of popular imagination that result in chains of signification. This is how a sports hero, for instance, can embody qualities of a city or nation, and his or her actions can be seen as symbolizing that city or nation. Ultimately, Klinkmann wants to say that this process is productive, rather than reflective, that in fact something new is created in and by popular imagination.

In addition to...