Snapshot: Social Imaginaries and Global Realities

Scholars today, in the context of the radically changing world in which we live, are raising fresh questions about the ways ordinary people shape contemporary realities, particularly the ways in which they function and even flourish in groups. In a kind of laboratory of emerging ideas, one set of scholars is defining and examining what they call the new social imaginary. These scholars are thinking about how people in the everyday life of our time collectively invent and administer the systems that surround and sustain them. Indeed, the scholars themselves are working as a collective, comparing their individual findings and commenting on one another's discoveries. In that sense, they are creating a scholarly imaginary of their own, out of which they are growing their shared understandings of the new social imaginary. Much of their thinking is collected in essay form in Public Culture 14, no. 1, the special issue on new imaginaries edited by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Benjamin Lee (2002).

The themes of the new social imaginary as conceived by these scholars are still very much in development, but in my view there is an urgent need for them to be circulated. I will argue that ideas and theories about current conditions may be most in need of circulation while they are in the process of being formed. It is in this state of gestation that ideas are most apt to stimulate debate, influence and inflect discussion, and engage decision makers. The understandings of the social imaginary being formulated can counter or confirm ideas already circulating in public discussion; they can generate a sense of the optional or the opposites in a given debate; they can provide substance to subjects emerging in the public sphere. Precisely when opinion is dynamic and change is occurring, there is the need for multiple influences, myriad interpretations, and ideas in the making. In short, there are times when we cannot wait for scholarship to be finished.

Charles Taylor (2002), the Canadian philosopher, uses the term new social imaginary for this work that is under way. For him, the social imaginary is the thinking shared within a society by ordinary people, the common understanding that makes common practices possible and legitimizes them. The social imaginary is implicit and normative; it derives from the usual, the quotidian, from everyday attitudes, behaviors, and opinion making. It flows from events and ideas, the realities that citizens live with most intimately and immediately. In Taylor's words, the social imaginary provides the background that makes sense of any given act in daily life. More importantly, as he writes, the social imaginary carries within it "deeper normative notions and images" (Taylor 2002: 106). It is these collective "self-understandings" (Taylor 2002: 91) that are constitutive of a society.

It is important, though, to bear in mind some glosses that Taylor puts on the social imaginary. First, it does not stay static; it has changed and it will change. Second, the characteristics of a contemporary imaginary are rooted very deeply in the democratic traditions that Taylor describes in his Ethics of Authenticity (1992); indeed they are variants of that vision of freedom and responsibility. A third gloss, the one that concerns me here, is that this social imaginary is decidedly Western, and even specifically North American. What Taylor describes is a new social imaginary that illuminates only one of a number of moral orders that can be imagined and shared and shaped by people living together; he characterizes it deliberately and with a sense of its particularity: the contemporary moral order by which we live in the West and specifically in the United States.

This raises questions, of course. If we believe we can define the characteristics of our social imaginary in the West, does that mean we can and should attempt to find the societal shapes or values imagined in other parts of the globe? If we can recognize our ways of being and imagining at this historical moment, can we also anticipate the...