2: Imaginaries, Rhythmics and Development

Social imaginaries are nothing more than imagination in the plural. The capacity of every human being to have an imagination based on his or her own cognition extends to the capacity of human groups to have a shared imagination, produced and reproduced among its members through culture. Social imaginaries, cultural imagination and social imagination are three ways of referring to the same social process of the existence of plural imaginations, composed of multiple subjects and manifested in any material support that makes them long-lasting.

A fourth form can be added: the collective imaginary. According to Emmanuel Lizcano, it is more appropriate to speak of collectivity than of social imaginary because both ‘social’ and ‘society’ have come to ‘monopolize all reference to the collective, the popular or the common, when in fact they emanate from a very particular form of collectivity, the one that illuminates the bourgeois imaginary that begins to take shape in seventeenth century Europe’ (Lizcano, 2009, p. 40). Even contemplating this solid argument, I consider that social imaginary may have a more far-reaching impact than the collective imaginary, since the latter term has been associated, at least in Argentina, to the psychoanalytic concept of ‘collective unconscious’, and tends to be interpreted as groups of homogeneous people; while social imaginary attributes a diversity of ideologies and access to resources to a group of heterogeneous social actors.