The Social Routes of the Imaginary (Social Imaginaries) 9781538175118, 9781538175125, 1538175118

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The Social Routes of the Imaginary

SOCIAL IMAGINARIES

Series Editors: Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle, Saulius Geniusas, John W. M. Krummel and Jeremy C. A. Smith This groundbreaking series aims to investigate social imaginaries from theoretical, comparative, historical, and interdisciplinary perspectives. Its objective is to foster challenging research on the burgeoning but heterogeneous field of social imaginaries, on the one hand, and the related field of the creative imagination, on the other. The series seeks to publish rigorous and innovative research that reflects the international, multi-regional, and interdisciplinary scope across these fields. Titles in the Series Ricoeur and Castoriadis in Discussion, edited by Suzi Adams Productive Imagination, edited by Saulius Geniusas and Dmitri Nikulin Stretching the Limits of Productive Imagination, edited by Saulius Geniusas Social Imaginaries: Critical Interventions, edited by Suzi Adams and Jeremy C. A. Smith The Labyrinth of Modernity: Horizons, Pathways and Mutations, by Johann P. Arnason The Creative Imagination: Indeterminacy and Embodiment in the Writings of Kant, Fichte, and Castoriadis, by Jodie Lee Heap Hate Speech against Women Online: Concepts and Countermeasures, by Louise Richardson-Self Debating Imaginal Politics: Dialogues with Chiara Bottici, edited by Jeremy C. A. Smith Historical Imagination: Hermeneutics and Cultural Narrative, by Paul Fairfield American Imaginaries: Nations, Societies and Capitalism in the Many Americas, by Jeremy C. A. Smith The Social Routes of the Imaginary, edited by Pier Luca Marzo and Luca Mori

The Social Routes of the Imaginary Edited by Pier Luca Marzo and Luca Mori

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data   Names: Marzo, Pier Luca, editor. | Mori, Luca, editor. Title: The social routes of the imaginary / edited by Pier Luca Marzo and Luca Mori. Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2023] | Series: Social imaginaries | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023003525 (print) | LCCN 2023003526 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538175118 (cloth) | ISBN 9781538175125 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Phenomenological sociology. | Social psychology. | Imagination-Social aspects. Classification: LCC HM494 .S64 2023  (print) | LCC HM494  (ebook) | DDC 302–dc23/ eng/20230410 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023003525 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023003526 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Preface: For Sociology of the Imaginary and Depth Sociology Domenico Secondulfo Introduction: The Sociological Perspective of the Imaginary Pier Luca Marzo and Luca Mori

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Chapter 1: The Imaginary Nature of the Social: A Morphological Approach 7 Pier Luca Marzo Chapter 2: The Power of Image: Imaginary, Knowledge, and Method in the Social Creation of Reality Fabio D’Andrea and Valentina Grassi

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Chapter 3: The Imaginary and the Social Bond: The Unconscious Life of Representations—Durkheim, Bourdieu, Alexander Luca Mori

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Chapter 4: Imaginary, Technology, and Social Change Maria Giovanna Musso



Chapter 5: Imaginary and Communication I: From the Corporal Device of Homo Sapiens to the Typographical Imaginary of Early Modernity Stefano Cristante

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Chapter 6: Imaginary and Communication II: From the Analogical Body of Technical Reproducibility to the Digital Imaginary Sergio Brancato

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Chapter 7: The Matter of the Imaginary in the Dynamics and Tensions of the Social World Antonio Tramontana

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Chapter 8: The Material and the Imaginary Vincenzo Mele



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Chapter 9: The Imaginary Roots of Politics: A Weberian Reading Milena Meo Chapter 10: Imaginaries of Otherness in Complex Societies Francesca Collela Chapter 11: The Complex of Cain, the Tension of Abel: Space, City, Imaginary Pier Paolo Zampieri Index



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About the Contributors



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Preface For Sociology of the Imaginary and Depth Sociology Domenico Secondulfo

WHY A SOCIOLOGY OF THE IMAGINARY IS NECESSARY AND WHY IT MUST BE UTILIZED ALSO AS DEPTH SOCIOLOGY Some years ago, it was in this way that my task began to set up a sociology of material culture (Secondulfo 2015b); in that book, my idea was to study and systemize the visible part of culture, that is, material culture, the world of objects, of things, of physical structures, the society we can see. The present book, however, the first step of an itinerary of demarcation and mapping by the newly founded “Imaginary” section of the Italian Association of Sociology, aims to explore and systemize the invisible part that is dialectically reflected in the visible part. Society is in fact the dynamic sum of concepts, images, and narrations found in the minds of people and therefore invisible and of objects, representations, material structures, towns, houses, supermarkets and so on that are utterly visible. If the visible part is essential and is the society in which we actually live, the invisible part is vital because it constructs the sense of the visible and depicts its transformation. Man lives in his own grand dream that he builds day by day through the meanings he projects and recognizes in everything around him and in everything he does: the social imaginary with its roots deep down guarantees exactly this. This is why a sociology that lays out the sociologist’s toolbox and unfolds sociology’s skills in both conceptual and empirical analysis, orienting them toward the imaginary world that defines and supports any society and investigating vii

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not only the phenomenal layer but also the deep roots and structures of sense, is absolutely indispensable for the holistic understanding of society. We have to think of society as a territory that extends endlessly from our daily, material world into our daily, immaterial world, an object that is an indivisible sphere of sense consubstantially joining shared reality and shared thought, things, and ideas, real and imaginary. There are already offshoots of sociological thought that study the world of culture, of signs and symbols, primarily considering their phenomenological aspect; we believe that the investigation of deep-set roots, the profound currents of sense that move below the most perceptible phenomenology, is an important part of the knowledge that can be contributed by a sociology expressly articulated on the imaginary and its deepest structures. In this belief, we follow Durand’s lesson; he showed how, below the phenomenology of symbols, there are elementary anthropological structures, both in the sense of simplicity and in the sense of strength, that “support” the multiplicity of the phenomenal. We think of the imaginary as the invisible part of the visible, supporting it and endowing it with sense, rooting and nourishing it, through various levels of signification of increasing profundity, hence invisible, of which we need to discover the map and the contents. We may think of the culture of a society as an ocean: on the surface, there are a thousand waves, each different from the other, going in all directions, each with its own particular identity. This is the visible part, the infinite phenomenology of the real. Yet below the surface the ocean is calmer, more silent, where majestically wide currents dominate, moving impressive masses of water at various levels from one point to another, influencing thereafter what can be seen on the surface. The depth sociologist must be capable of swimming amidst the waves but also of plunging down into the deepest currents; he must be both steersman and deep-sea diver. It is in this sense that the sociology of the imaginary can only be depth sociology; it can only distinguish its own structure from the many lines of thought that probe human culture preferably in the vertical dimension, from top to bottom, the deepest currents indeed that move under the immediately evident and perceptible phenomenal layer. It is in this direction that links may be found with other depth analyses, such as Jung’s theory of archetypes or the attempts to found a psychoanalysis of history, recalling the efforts of N. O. Brown (1959) in the 1960s.

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ATTEMPT AT DEFINING THE SOCIAL IMAGINARY, DEMARCATION OF THE OBJECT UNDER STUDY, AND ITS IDENTIFICATION This book will deal to a great extent with the diverse definitions that can be thought of (imagined) for the social imaginary; in this brief preface, we shall indicate two general lines along which such definitions might be developed. One branches out from Taylor’s acceptation according to which, by imaginary, we understand the whole set of ideologies, specialized knowledge, and common knowledge informing and being informed by practices: the social imaginary is what makes self-understanding and self-positioning of the individual in society possible, in a dialogic and shared context of knowledge. A second line branches out from Durand’s socio-anthropological analysis, according to which the social imaginary can be thought of as the sum of the visions of the world, of ideas, of their emotional and even unconscious sublayer that gives them their form and sense; in this definition, Durand turns his attention above all to the deep structures of sense that link the world of symbols to that of the profound archetypes of human culture, in an acceptation close to Jung’s thinking. If such are the possible lines of definition for a conception of social imaginary and depth sociology, there are, however, different interpretations already present in sociological thought. We have already touched on them above, and we summarize them briefly here: • the anthropological interpretation of the structures of the imaginary and the chthonic and archetypal dimensions that the imaginary keeps and maintains within the social (Durand) • the constructionist interpretation, in which the imaginary is an active part of the process of the social construction and reconstruction of society (Berger and Luckmann, Goldman, Morin) • the functional and structuralist interpretation, in which the imaginary is a fundamental part of the process of social integration (Parsons, Pareto, Morin, Moscovici) We might say that anthropology deals essentially with the superficial and in-depth structures of the imaginary itself, while the more sociological approaches ponder mainly on what the relation may be between the imaginary and society, seeing this relation both at a general level of systemic relations and at the phenomenological level, in the various institutions and organizational forms of society and its culture, and wondering how this relation is organized. In the first type of approach, the functions emerge above

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all, functions essentially of social integration but also more complex ones, while the second type of approach brings forward in particular certain cultural institutions, such as the cultural industry, politics, scientific knowledge, and so on, and the role of the imaginary is investigated within each of these. Again in defining and indeed identifying the object under study and the reflection approaches that in various ways delimit it, we might even identify certain lines of thought that represent both different approaches in studying the imaginary and different dimensions in the imaginary itself. The anthropological approach of which we have just spoken can be found in scholars such as Durand, Bachelard, Eliade, and Maffesoli, among others. We might then identify a further approach that we can call the “psychoanalysis of history” in the thinking of scholars such as Jung or Hillman, featuring above all the analysis of archetypes and depth. A third, more philosophical approach is found in Taylor or Castoriadis, among others. Another focuses on art, such as Panofsky’s studies, in particular regarding perspective. And finally the communication type, as in McLuhan or Abruzzese. Naturally a number of important authors have been omitted, such as Morin. However, at least as far as I am concerned, he is difficult to fit into these already debatable aggregations, so I prefer to leave him sui generis. There are others for whom my inclusion in this or that “family” will cause scandal and astonishment, for it is an aggregation that is open to endless debate. It recalls the dimensions, facets, and functions that in these pages and in this volume have been attributed to the social imaginary but that may give an idea not only, in practice, of how thought and various reflections have then taken apart and reassembled the idea of the imaginary but also of its dimensions and roots, at least regarding the imaginary imagined by our humanistic and scientific imaginary. SOCIAL FUNCTIONS OF THE IMAGINARY: SOCIAL INTEGRATION (POLITICAL UTOPIAS, RELIGIONS, SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS) AND INNOVATION (POLITICAL UTOPIAS, TECHNICAL-SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS) As we were saying, the invisible is reflected in the visible and supports it, defines it, gives it sense, and conditions its evolution. In our attempt to systemize this type of relation, we can indicate a series of levels and functions in the relation between the visible and invisible in society. One dimension is relative to social integration, for example, where narrations, whether great or small, construct common, shared scenarios that orient the social action of individuals toward common aims and shared models,

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guaranteeing a unitary nature of society both in its working and in its evolution over time. Stereotypes, models of excellence, social representations, narrations such as religions and political utopias, the deconstruction and reconstruction processes of memory: all are part of this relation, as is the great machine of the cultural industry. The reflexive dimension is, so to speak, a relation of the social integration dimension. In the latter, the cycle between the construction of the imaginary narration and its concrete social representation, whether in material culture or in the cultural industry, constitutes a great self-reflexive cycle of each social formation and renders concrete the narration stored in the imaginary. These favor reinteriorization through the use of such concretizations, naturally also building a dialectic space for evolution and dynamic readaptation of the heritage/legacy of the imaginary narration and its materialization bit by bit as social historical formation evolves through time and space, a sort of rotating sphere, half visible and half invisible, that transforms and comes about thanks to this very visible-invisible interchange. The cycle of material culture, for example, is one of the fundamental parts of this process of construction-reconstruction-interiorization. The dimension relative to innovation must be looked at from both the political-social and the scientific-technological viewpoints. This is because the future to be built has first to be imagined and shared and also because the creative process itself, whether scientific, literary, or technological, must also first be imagined, welding what already is with what is yet to be, separating the obvious from the unlikely in that tumultuous area where innovation is born. And as the sociologists studying innovation well know, existing reality, imagined and shared in society, enormously conditions all types of innovation and evolution lines (material and immaterial) that are potentially available to the future of social formation. Apart from the conditioning, obvious to my mind, such as religion enforced on science for centuries, there are areas of human knowledge based to a great extent on narrations and the ability to imagine them. For example, particle physics or astrophysics could hardly survive and develop without the staunch support of imaginative and narrative skills through which progressively to construct and develop a representation of these worlds that can, in turn, dialogue with empirical experimentation, orienting it and making sense of it. These narrations are frequently closely linked to the general narration of the shared social imaginary of the time; in the 1950s and 1960s, for example, the structure of the atom was narrated and imagined through reference to what was then the shared model of the solar system.

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THE IMAGINARY AND MATERIAL CULTURE As I mentioned above, the incentive to contribute to the constitution of this new structure of sociology, as far as my own intellectual path goes, has its roots in socio-anthropological studies linked to material culture. Within studies on objects and consumption, the attempt to structure the concept of material culture as a general container into which these types of studies are to go led me very early on to realize that indeed material culture may well be understood as a reflection of immaterial culture, and in some ways, even the contrary is true. As Daniel Miller (1987) suggests, the whole process linked to material culture should be understood as an ample dialectic on constructionreconstruction-interiorization of the society in which we live, a dialectic partly in visible reality, partly in invisible reality. As Bachelard remarks, in order to become active and to spread its own sense of society so as to be shared and hence socially active, an image also needs to be conveyed by material objects, indeed often especially by material objects. These objects are constructed by man precisely as an “image” of the symbolic image to be conveyed, constituting concrete symbols whose communicative strength is constant. Material culture is constructed in the image of immaterial culture: in using and consuming it, we again intervene on those meanings, in that sense inserted into material culture at the moment it was created in the image of immaterial culture, a cycle guaranteeing the interiorization of concrete reality as Reality and its being a consubstantial part of the overall narration of the world in which we live, of the bubble of sense in which that specific historical social formation lives, a consubstantial part made of material in which we live, sit, eat, walk, and so on—society that becomes world. Material culture concretizes immaterial culture and hence the imaginary of that particular society or social group; it makes the imaginary real and livable. Living and using it, the values and meanings constituting immaterial culture itself become reinteriorized in a cyclic, recurrent process of interiorization and socialization. Mutations also follow the same recurrent cycle (Secondulfo 2007). We can try to take this attempt at classification further still and indicate four “types” of imaginary, linking them preferably but not exclusively to certain internal processes of society as a system, taking free inspiration from functional-structural schematizations.: “types” of imaginaries from the classification viewpoint but matrices of meanings and symbolic universes from the viewpoint of content. We may speak of a “proactive” imaginary with regard to the tendency to modify the environment, external and internal, with the construction of

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imaginary models of natural objects, whether visible or invisible, to stimulate and guide the manipulative and productive capabilities of society, models nourished by scientific, experimental, or philosophical logic but component parts of models of the world capable of guiding human manipulation toward the control and simulation of natural results, such as a subatomic world model capable of guiding scientific research to trigger action and modification of concrete reality, albeit not visible, or again a model of the human psyche capable of guiding the action of psychoanalysis and bringing about concrete changes in people. We know, for example, that Bas Ording, the designer of the first iPhone, affirmed that he was inspired by Minority Report for the project of the first iPhone; in that 2002 film, cars were already driving themselves. Furthermore, we may hypothesize a “utopic” imaginary, capable of supplying as yet inexistent models of the world and guiding the processes of political, religious, social, and economic change toward the concrete realization of that world. Or perhaps we may hypothesize a “reflexive” imaginary that might act as the ongoing construction-reconstruction of the social, capable of supplying a stratified model of the world that can be renewed and modified step-by-step just as the world itself changes, indeed making possible a reflexive dialectic, such as through the cycle of material culture or through cultural or political reflection. The existence of a shared model of an imagined world makes possible the creation of an objectification, however unreal, of the existing world and would offer a “text” to deal with and to work on for actions of deconstruction or reconstruction, or, more simply, actions of change or resilience. Finally, of course, we may hypothesize an archetypal, resilient imaginary, a nucleus of sense with greater inertia compared to the rest of meanings, an anchor for the world, a set of models and narrations capable of continually reperpetuating themselves and of defining the world’s “past” with an evident tendency to regenerate it and facilitate changes, clearly an imaginary far more consubstantial than the previous ones with social rituals such as those connected to the deconstruction-reconstruction of the collective memory. The classification-functional intent is but a partial contribution to the systemization of this area of social action. The four “types” of the imaginary, of course, should be seen in constant reciprocal debate. This layout can be used to identify various phases in the existence of the social structure and the characteristic equilibrium of each phase, for example, of dominance of one “type” or another of shared imaginary. As regards the sense structures, evidently all four “types” of the imaginary have access to all levels of signification of the imaginary itself (those described and systemized by Durand, to be precise), although perhaps each “type” has a prevalence of particular layouts, archetypes, or symbols.

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EMPIRICAL SOCIOLOGY WITH REGARD TO THE IMAGINARY We find ourselves, therefore, facing a vast and perilous object of study extending from the empyrean to the darkest underground, invisible yet visible, visible yet invisible, but above all resting on that world of dreams and archetypes as fascinating as it is fleeting. It is that very fascination that is the greatest risk for anyone who undertakes its study, easily absorbed in his own reflection in the world of deep symbols that can so simply upset his attempts at scientific reasoning and empirical investigation. The risk of generating an imaginary of the imaginary rather than a study of the imaginary is immense, as is shown by the difficulty in constructing a statistical-empirical toolbox for the study of this world, which evades the harsh matrix techniques in order to lead us toward deep yet projective textual techniques. Even the study of the objects that best represent the social imaginary finds the sociologist unprepared, such as the study of social representations or of mythological or poetic texts or else of iconic images. Content analysis has always been a sore point in sociological research; from subjective analysis or that analysis shared by a group of expert witnesses, naturally with the risk of projections, to the attempts at computerized analysis that only recently have begun to possess incisive techniques but that of course need in any case an interpretive phase that reintroduces the risks of subjective analysis. And then with regard to social representations, such as stereotypes that may be part of general survey models, the problem is unfortunately not dissimilar; the imaginary is constructed from images: whenever a way is found to go forward to the classical matrix analysis of sociology, contenting oneself with a verbal register means failing to grasp the object of study, and adding pictures, even as a stimulus, returns us to that interpretive uncertainty previously mentioned (Secondulfo 2015a; Setiffi and Lazzer 2015; Viviani 2015). Empirical research in sociology has always used verbal instruments capable of grasping certain elements of the social imaginary although without ever being absolutely sure of which of the elements of the imaginary are subjectively evoked by the words used; hence, the reliability of the results is somewhat tenuous. From the technical and methodological aspect, it may therefore be the right moment to take advantage of the appearance to the view of sociology of this “hidden” dimension, which we are here attempting to define and delimit as imaginary, in order to complete today’s toolbox and also even to rethink one part of it, in reply to the challenges that this particular area of research have brought within the view of sociology.

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For example, as we have just said, concentrating analysis on the images and on the images in people’s minds is, for sociology, a challenge yet to be resolved. It may be objected that from a general point of view, even the objective of objectivity, so dear to sociology and post-philosophical sciences, is an aspect of the imaginary connected to science, and this is in part true. However, as I have tried to show and as this volume will try to show, imaginary does not mean fake or illusory, still less false or fantastic; it simply means abstract, conceptual but undergoing concretization. I am referring above all to the proactive imaginary, in which category must be included the requisite of objectivity on which modern science and sociology itself is founded, a proactive imaginary that has produced method and techniques, perhaps not fully effective but undergoing continual improvement in order to reach out to the abstract model of excellence resident in the imaginal shared by science, which directs efforts in a certain direction rather than in others. The sociologist’s toolbox would be vastly different if the proactive imaginary of science prescribed sanctity or enlightenment rather than objectivity. BIBLIOGRAPHY Brown, N. O. 1959. Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Translated into Italian as La vita contro la morte (Milano: Adelphi, 1964). Miller, D. 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell. Secondulfo, D. 2007. “Il simulacro come forma e processo.” In I volti del simulacro, ed. D. Secondulfo. Verona: QuiEdit. ———. 2015a. Sociologia del consumo e della cultura materiale. Milano: Angeli. ———. 2015b. “Lo studio degli stereotipi e delle rappresentazioni sociali attraverso la sociologia visuale. Un esperimento di integrazione tra tecniche visuali e tecniche quantitative.” Sociologia 49, no. 3: 3–9. Setiffi, F., and G. P. Lazzer. 2015. “Svestire lo stereotipo. Uno studio delle rappresentazioni sociali del lavoro femminile.” Sociologia 49, no. 3: 9–18. Viviani, D. 2015. “Stereotipi e cultura materiale: Dress for Success.” Sociologia 49, no. 3: 19–30.

Introduction The Sociological Perspective of the Imaginary Pier Luca Marzo and Luca Mori

What the reader will find in this collective book is a map tracing the social routes of the imaginary—not all the routes but only those that each author has chosen according to his or her own scientific orientation. It is, therefore, a first acknowledgment—and we hope others will follow—of some among the many connections that exist between the imaginary dimension and collective life throughout its concrete phenomenology. All the chapters in this book share the same perspective: thinking of the imaginary not as the opposite of the real but as its invisible source. The most ambitious aim of this book is in fact to free the imaginary of the weight of its supposed opposition to reality, thus showing the whole of its heuristic potential for the understanding of social phenomena. In this brief introduction, we wish therefore to return to what we believe represents the archetypal point that saw, perhaps for the first time, a rupture between real and imaginary, thus attempting to deconstruct science’s suspicion toward the imaginative dimension while giving a first definition of the latter in sociological terms. The archetypic point intended is evidently Plato’s cave. You will remember that in the narrative of The Republic, the cave is described as a dark place wherein certain prisoners lie in chains. Segregated since childhood and bound with no possibility of moving, they are offered only one reality: the wall they have in front of them. Outside the cave, free men use the light of a fire to project shadows of animals, things, and persons onto that wall. Furthermore, taking advantage of their own invisible position, the puppeteers cause sounds and voices to echo within the cavern, which to the prisoners seem to be the sounds and voices of the monstrous creatures that dance and flutter on the rock wall. Thus, the cave becomes a prehistoric cinema where unsuspecting 1

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spectators undergo visual and sound effects and so find themselves living in a simulated world peopled by terrifying beings. Plato informs us that the spectacular power produced by the shadow images and shadow voices is so intense that the prisoners succumb to a collective hallucination that makes them forget the chains that immobilize their bodies. The narrative turning point comes when one of the inmates, doubting the reality of the simulated world, emerges from the stone womb of the cave to freedom. His is a real second birth marked, as for every newborn, by the pain in his eyes, unused to the light of the outside world illuminated by the sun of the logos. Under the rays of this star, the symbol of indisputable and immutable principles of metaphysics, the chains of the imaginary world fall away, and with them goes its power of segregation within anything illusory. With Plato’s metaphorical story, therefore, the bright destiny of Western science rises toward the visibility of reality and the eclipse of the imaginary. However, if we think about it, Plato himself does nothing more than use the archetypic image of the cavern (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 1997) to set up the principle of the reality of the philosophical logos, an image so powerful as to have contributed to the founding of the paradigmatic vision of Western science: but how does such a vision work? It is exactly in revealing this function that, we believe, it is possible to re-create a dialogue between the imaginary and knowledge. Broadly speaking, we can define the paradigm as what institutes the place of scientific knowledge directed at the standardization of phenomena that in some uncertain, obscure way enter the space of perception. Within, the chaos of the mundus sensibilis enters a state of topographical domestication, making itself visible to the mundus intelligibilis. Having set the phenomenal space in this state of illumination, the paradigmatic design can begin to cum-prehéndere (“take unto itself”) phenomena, starting by interrogating them to elicit responses according to the methodical grammar rules of its language made up of theses, hypotheses, theories, research methods, rational explanations, and so on. Scientific work thus becomes the outcome of an interrogation carried out by directing the light shed by the paradigm onto a specific point of phenomenal space. The object of research comes from this focalization, thus guaranteeing the scientist an exit from the illusory world of images to which—as methodological doubt teaches—we must not lend credit, seeing that it is the fruit of perception. If the scientist effectively gave in to the temptation to believe what his senses told him, he would see only the shadow of the object of his research rather than its reality: and this would make him one of the many prisoners in the cave. Thus, the paradigm represents itself as that illuminated and illuminating vision, free from every perceptive image, that is directly one with the varied articulations of the real, enabling their exact measurement and calculability

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(Marzo 2018). However, it is here that the analytic vision of science’s selfblinding element comes into play. Whence comes the paradigm’s light illuminating the phenomena? Is it not perhaps a certain scientific image of the world—produced by the metaphysical principles of philosophy, Ptolemaic astrology, Newtonian astronomy, sociological positivism, and so on—the source of the paradigmatic light that illuminates all except itself? Turning its back on the image that determines it, science simply takes the outlines of the phenomena illuminated by the paradigms for the reality of facts. Therefore, what the scientist can(not) see is basically the same paradigm situated invisibly behind his back. The field of truthfulness within which he observes the phenomena is in fact merely predetermined for him by the projection of paradigmatic light that institutes the scientific community to which he belongs. It is through accepting the paradigmatic vision of the world that the scientist becomes part of normal science until, at the takeover by a new paradigm, he passes on to a new normal science (Kuhn 1962). From Plato to our day, therefore, science comprehends the phenomena it investigates through the light of an imaginary that changes with the revolutions of scientific structures. Something similar happens in the social world as well. Unlike scientific paradigms, here it is the Weltanschauung (Dilthey 1962) that projects images powerful enough to chain up any of the forms of collective life to one and the same social reality. Step-by-step along the socialization process (Berger and Luckmann 1966), such enchaining creates a sphere of sense around the mind of each individual: preconstituted for him since birth by the social world, a sphere that redefines the nonspecialized nature of his body through prostheses, both mental (e.g., signs, symbols, narratives, theories, and stereotypes) and physical (e.g., objects, instruments, forms of organization, and technologies), by means of which he inhabits the world. This dimension can only be determined socially and historically, never granted once and for all and in continuous, unstoppable movement. Moreover, its social nature, enveloping individual life just as it does collective life, has the capacity to render artificially invisible its character while rendering visible that world in common that we daily refer to as “reality.” It is therein that reciprocal action gives place to social exchange with which the sphere of the imaginary is generated, instituted, differentiated, and even transformed (Marzo and Meo 2013). Understood in this way, the imaginative dimension is no longer a place of the unreal, as the West in its subconscious has codified and segregated it, but more of a common place built by acting—with, against, or on behalf of the other—within which men find their own place in the world. In short, therefore, we could define the imaginary as that field of signification that serves as a matrix for the social construction of reality. If we reinterpret the Platonic myth in social terms, the prisoner who escapes from the cave is the vector of a mutation factor that, in destroying the

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reality staged by the prevalent imaginary, constructs a second reality in the light of a new imaginary. In this perpetual mutation takes shape the infinite variability of the reality of historical-social worlds. Comprehended in this dynamic framework, the cave is therefore what can show us the intertwining of social reality and imaginary rather than their separation. From the methodological profile and departing from exact thematic horizons, this book presents itself as a first reconstruction of that theoretical legacy spread throughout numerous disciplinary fields yet firmly present in the tradition of social sciences, settling down over time precisely thanks to this intertwining. Hence, it becomes evident that the social imaginary is not the subject of study but rather is an analytical perspective. As we know, perspective comes from the context of pictorial techniques with the aim of creating a three-dimensional effect on the two-dimensional surface of the picture. The artist achieves the optical trick by deforming the proportions of the elements portrayed according to perspective projections that converge at one point, called the vanishing point. At first glance, it is not evident, yet thanks to the invisibility of this point, the observer naturally sees what is not there, that is, the depth in the surface of the picture. Associated life is also the outcome of a perspective vision, collectively realized by mechanisms of sense sharing, a vision so sophisticated and pervasive as to be experienced by individuals as something natural and therefore real. So, the task of the sociologist of the imaginary—but we should perhaps say the sociologist, pure and simple—is to carry out that intellectual exercise that consists in identifying the evidence on the surface of the phenomenon being studied that can lead to the invisible imaginative nucleus that establishes its deep reality. Each chapter in this book represents an example of this type of deconstructive effort. We have arranged them along a continuum of decreasing generality. At the highest level, we find the first two chapters of the book, by, respectively, Pier Luca Marzo and Fabio D’Andrea and Valentina Grassi. The former considers the imaginary as a socio-anthropological environment in which the creative nature of humans is expressed, and the latter explore the imaginary root at the base of any cultural vision and practice. At a lower level of generalities are chapters focusing on social structures and processes. Among these is Luca Mori’s contribution on the role played by the imaginary in guaranteeing the maintenance of social integration mechanisms, Maria Giovanna Musso’s chapter on the imaginal dynamics underlying the processes of change with particular attention to techno-scientific phenomena, the chapter by Sergio Brancato and Stefano Cristante on the link existing between the imaginary and the different forms of communication, and the work by Antonio Tramontana on the crystallization of imaginal structures in the world of objects. Finally, at the third, final, and even more specific level

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are the chapters on the various types of influence exerted by the imaginary in certain concrete settings of life and of social action. Vincenzo Mele deals with the relationship between the imaginary and the economic sphere and Milena Meo with that between the imaginary and politics, Francesca Colella reflects on the imaginaries on which otherness is constructed, and Pierpaolo Zampieri writes on those to be found in the forms of urban space. BIBLIOGRAPHY Berger, P., and T. Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Penguin Books. Chevalier, J., and A. Gheerbant. 1997. The Peneguin Dictionay of Symbols. London: Penguin Books. Descartes, R. 1637. Le Discours de la méthode. Leyde: Ian Maire. Dilthey, W. 1962. Weltanschauugslehre: Abhandlugen zur Philosophie der Philosophie. Stuttgart-Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Kuhn, T. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marzo, P. L. 2018. “Scienza e immagine: Elementi per la ricostruzione di un dialogo interrotto.” In Epidemia delle immagini: La prevalenza delle immagini e l’effetto sulla società, ed. F. La Rocca. Roma: Edizioni Estemporanee. Marzo, P. L., and M. Meo. 2013. “Cartografie dell’immaginario.” Im@go. Rivista di Studi sull’Immaginario 2, no. 1: 4–17.

Chapter 1

The Imaginary Nature of the Social A Morphological Approach Pier Luca Marzo

This chapter intends to explore the imaginary through Goethe’s maps of the science of shapes. Oriented by this analytic approach, the imaginary will be taken to mean the socio-anthropological environment in which the creativity of human nature is manifest. As we shall see, in giving life to images free from stimulation-response behavior, man is the only animal capable of imagining a world in terms of possibility. It is by virtue of this open relationship that men, engaging in reciprocal action, give form to the socio-anthropological environments in which they live. Thanks to the social morphology of Simmel, Spengler, and Jünger, we shall see how, for a certain time, human ecosystems stabilize around certain formative principles determined socially and historically. These are the rotation centers of associated life that differentiate and change the imaginary reality of the social. (HUMAN) NATURE: FROM THE THING TO THE SHAPE In this section, we will deal with the transvaluation of the values that in the West have formed the matrix for the construction of the concept of human nature. It is outside such value confines that we will be able to explore the question of the imaginary in environmental terms. The famous discussion between Chomsky and Foucault, broadcast in November 1971 on Dutch 7

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television,1 is a good starting point. Thanks to the skill of Fons Elders, moderator of the debate, the meeting had the merit of transforming the television studio into a spectacular joust between the greatest knights of critical thought of the time. At stake was the very notion of human nature. Coming from the prestigious “castle” of the Collège di France, in the very first exchanges Foucault showed his intolerance of the term nature and yet more of the term human nature. As his acute reasoning made clear (Chomsky and Foucault 1994, 37), human nature is by no means natural; indeed, for the Frenchman, it was the telltale epistemological indicator of the deployment of that new order of scientific discourse appearing at the end of the eighteenth century. Across the table, Chomsky, from that no less prestigious “castle” the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, responded blow by blow to his adversary’s cuts and thrusts. For him, the question did not wholly boil down only to a linguistic game produced by scientific structures. In the American linguist’s opinion, deep down there existed a certain biological organization that had characterized man’s unchanged cognitive structures ever since homo Cro-Magnon (42). This is what spurred him on to track down an original nucleus in man containing a set of universal human values, such as justice, love, freedom, solidarity, and nonviolence (67). Is human nature, therefore, a cultural artifact produced by scientific discourses, as Foucault argues, or is it that organic nucleus within the cognitive structures of man, as argued by Chomsky? Fifty years on, the contemporary scientific debate has done nothing but prolong and radicalize Foucault and Chomsky’s positions, even with no television studio in which to continue the duel. Consequently, rather than deciding which side to take, we believe it is more interesting to begin by identifying their contact point, even though from specular points of view, each one traces human nature back to a something: an object that for Foucault is linguistic, for Chomsky biological. Their unrecognized affinity comes within that vision of “nature-thing” that has structured Western thought since its origins (Marzo 2016). In pre-Socratic knowledge, nature was still an energy flow (Colli 1980); it is with the birth of Greek philosophy that we began to separate the world into physical—the place of the mutability of natural phenomena—and metaphysical—the seat of unchanging truths of the logos through which natural chaos can be stabilized (Heidegger 1957). It is from this dichotomy that nature begins to become a thing of philosophical thought. From this point on, only the common sense of the doxa will continue to see in natural things that magical-religious place animated by mythological tales of titans, monstrous creatures, gods, nymphs, and satyrs. In medieval times, the logos of Greek philosophy transited into the thinking of Christian theology thanks to Scholasticism, and it is in this context that the distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata (Merleau-Ponty 1995) creates a second level of separation between the physical and

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metaphysical worlds. In medieval philosophy, it is God’s natura naturans that creates everything present in natura naturata—as Genesis tells us—through the power of his logos: day and night, earth and sea, plants, animals, and even man made in his own image and likeness. In this case too, therefore, nature becomes a thing made by the art of the Great Architect inhabiting the reign of heaven. Modernity began to observe the nature created by God by intending it as a container, as large as the world, full of extended things, res extensa as Descartes called it. After the philosophical and theological logos, it was now man’s geometrical-mathematical res cogitans—the thing thought contained in his brain—that assured him of the existence of his body and of the entities surrounding it (Descartes 1637). In the view of this modern perspective, beings start to be observed as organic machines to be set in the right taxonomical orders. In 1735, it was the naturalist Carl Linnaeus who codified the first modern classification system in his Systema Naturae. The nature-thing thus began to be divided up into three macro kingdoms: minerals (Regnum lapideum), plants (Regnum vegetabile), and animals (Regnum animale). Linnaeus further divided up the beings inhabiting the two kingdoms of living things by the binominal nomenclature of genus—containing the species with certain main characteristics in common—and species—descriptive of the specific characteristics of each organism. Minerals, plants, and animals thus each occupied their own slot in Linnaeus’s taxonomic system. The rational breakdown was reflected in the epistemic framework of the modern sciences (Foucault 1966) during the nineteenth century, generating that process of disciplinary specialization starting with the distinction between the sciences of the spirit—with the historical-social world as the object of their studies—and the sciences of nature—concerned with physical, chemical, and biological life processes. Arising precisely in this scientific context, sociology also detached zoé and sociétas to the advantage of the social, thus leaving the biological sciences to study man as a mere organism. It is enough to glance through any manual of sociology to realize that the notion of the individual or of the social actor does not imply an integral definition of man or what defines his animal condition or, to paraphrase Scheler’s words, what his position is in the natural world (Scheler 1928). To return the issue of the human to a framework of sociological comprehension, we need to emerge from the scientific visions that have consolidated the idea of the nature-thing. From here on, therefore, we will make use of Goethe’s morphology to review the natural as a configuring energy present in every environment of life, including that of associated life.

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Recognized as the foremost figure in German romanticism, Goethe is not so well known for his scientific writing, which he judged to be of equal importance if not actually superior to his literary production (Marzo 2007a). Like other scientists of his time and carrying out his own experiments, Goethe investigated optical and meteorological phenomena, the structure of crystals, the metamorphoses of plants and insects, and the similarity between man’s skeleton and that of the other vertebrates (Goethe 1790–1832). For the poet-scientist, such fields of study were the empirical places in which to observe nature understood as the idea at work. Morphology was the methodological structure of his scientific corpus which aimed at bringing together empirical observation with an ideal plan. This ideal level does not lead to that metaphysical elsewhere codified by philosophy or theology, as we mentioned above. For Goethe, nature was an idea immanent to formative processes present throughout the world’s visibility spectrum. However, if we look at all forms and especially organic ones, we find that nowhere is there anything enduring, anything at rest, anything complete; rather, everything is in continuous motion and flux. This is why our language, with sufficient propriety, usually adopts the term Bildung to indicate both the product and the production. In the introduction to a morphology, we cannot therefore speak of Gestalt, yet if we use this term, we always think only of the idea, the concept, or else an aspect of the experiment fixed only for the moment. What is formed is at once newly transformed, and should we wish to achieve to a certain extent a live observation of nature, we must conduct ourselves in turn in a mobile and formative way, according to the example that nature herself offers us (Goethe 1790; It. tr. 1996, 7–8). In this invitation of Goethe’s to engage in the “live observation” of forms, we realize that nature is not therefore that great container full of philosophical entities (God’s creatures), of extended things to be classified, or—to return to Chomsky and Foucault’s discussion—of organic and linguistic objects. In Goethe’s vision, the nature-thing is transvalued into a vital principle—the all that undulates in a continuous movement—without beginning or end, present in every rank of the inorganic and organic. In the morphological view, each form presents itself as that living seismograph through which to understand, in the particularity of its metamorphoses, the formative energy of the natural. Form thereby becomes that third element capable of binding together in terms of analogy the morphological kingdoms of minerals, plants, insects, and vertebrates right up to man. In this analogical continuity, the discontinuities are determined by how each form is transformed in tune with the environment in which it finds itself; Goethe writes, So the existence of a creature we call “fish” is only possible under the conditions that we call “water,” and a mammal that lives in water has the same shape as

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a fish. . . . The type that develops in the air will take the form of a bird . . . so the eagle takes form in the air, from summit to summit . . . while the swan, the duck and other amphibians betray their inclination for water in their very form. . . . Such are the limits of animal nature, in which the formative energy seems to move in the most marvelous way and, we may say, the most arbitrary way, without being in the least able to break or go beyond the circle. . . . The living [entity] has the faculty to adapt to the conditions of external influences, without however giving up that well-defined, decisive autonomy it has won. (Goethe 1832; It. tr. 1999, 299)

As the passage tells us, the different organisms live under the determining condition of the elements capable of creating morphological affinities between diverse species, such as those between a mammal that lives in water (e.g., a whale) and a fish. For this reason, Darwin recognized Goethe as one of his predecessors for having highlighted the osmotic relationship between living things and the environment (Cislaghi 2008). However, as he says in the second part of his observation, this does not imply that the element water is able to impose itself utterly on the autonomy achieved by the living being. Unlike Darwin, for Goethe every organism has an active role in harmoniously redefining the geometries of its forms in relation to the external factors to which it is mainly exposed. Goethe was not specifically interested in how the reciprocity between organism and environment takes form in man. His scientific research stopped at finding in the osteological field the analogies that bound man to the forms of the other vertebrates; he investigated the other elective affinities between the human spirit and the living world, as we know, in the field of literature. Other figures from kultur—such as Nietzsche, Simmel, Spengler, Jünger, and Gehlen—found in Goethe’s science a point of reference for the analysis in vital terms of historical-social human forms (Marzo 2007a). It was Nietzsche who began to consider man as a naturally imperfect form, defining him as “the unfixed animal” (Nietzsche 1886), an explosive definition for that anthropocentric idea—still prevalent today—that places man at the apex of the natural order. Gehlen’s socio-anthropology, developing this intuition of Nietzsche’s, defines man as a being morphologically lacking compared to other species. Without a particularly extended sensory sphere, genetically lacking in offensive weapons (claws or teeth) and awkward in orienting himself within his own space, man is a form without natural qualities (Gehlen 1940). With his way of being in the world, he has to close up the open form of his body outside himself by socially constructing that portion of shape he naturally lacks, and here we get to what interests us most: the imaginative dimension. Thanks to imagination, man manages to create prosthetic forms

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of a second social nature to exempt himself from the problematic nature of his body. As Gehlen writes, We cannot help but conclude that imagination is actually the fundamental social organ. Here we are not referring to the late phenomenon of single, imagined ideas conceived of as being unreal. . . . Instead, we are referring to a chronic condition of semi-alienation (chronische Zuständigkeit der Halbentfremdung), which develops from the role-playing and imitation games of early childhood and which constitutes the unconscious background for our social existence, including our awareness of this social existence. (Gehlen 1940; Eng. tr. 1988, 311)

The imagination thus become that elementary social organ specializing its biological lack of form by shaping social institutions, language systems, and the instrumental world of technologies and artifacts. These are the forms that emerge from the unconscious background of our cohabitation with others and that specialize man’s biological lack of form by supplying him with a social environment in which he can live. Within this socio-anthropological environment, men enter a sphere of space-time sense in which they gain awareness and significance of the happenings around them, organizing them within certain regularities. This environmental sphere, enveloping both individual and collective life, is also capable of making the artifice of its character invisible while rendering visible that world in common that we daily call reality. In this common place typified by finite provinces of significance (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Schutz 1976), reciprocal action leads on to social exchange with which the sphere of the imaginary is generated, set up, differentiated, and even transformed by each culture in forms always diverse (Marzo and Meo 2013). Thus, we understand how the imaginary is the very nature of the social, that human environment thanks to which men shape a replacement world, as Gehlen2 tells us, in which it is possible to adapt to life. IMAGE AND IMAGINATION: THE PHANTASMAL FORMS OF THE REAL Having outlined the environmental character of the imaginary, we need to set it in greater focus to identify the role occupied within it by images and the imagination. The point of reference for this may be none other than the naturalist Jakob von Uexküll’s essay A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans. Published in 1934, it had the merit of founding the notion of environment, thus revolutionizing the scientific vision of life, a revolution that influenced disciplinary fields not strictly connected to biology. Up to then, in

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fact, sciences had taken for granted the existence of a universe common to all organisms, an idea that extended into the biological field the paradigm of Newtonian physics based on the invariance of space-time. As we know, this persisted until the presentation of the theory of special relativity by Einstein in 1905. A few decades later, the studies of the Estonian naturalist brought about a similar paradigmatic transition by relativizing the scientific vision of the universe of life that led to the dawn of ethology: We comfort ourselves all too easily with the illusion that the relations of another kind of subject to the things of its environment play out in the same space and time as the relations that link us to the things of our human environment. . . . We must therefore imagine all the animals that animate Nature around us, be they beetles, butterflies, gnats, or dragonflies who populate a meadow, as having a soap bubble around them, closed on all sides, which closes off their visual space and in which everything visible for the subject is also enclosed. Each bubble shelters other places, and in each are also found the directional planes of effective space, which give a solid scaffolding to space. (Uexküll 1934; Eng. tr. 2010, 54, 69)

In his essay, Uexküll shows the reader how species are placed in a space-time of their own that he defines as umwelt (environment). Nature thus becomes a pluriversal ecosystem made up of the interplay of specific environments, of circumscribed bubbles in which the species perceive only that part of the world relating to the characteristics of their organic forms. Let us take the tick as an example; as Uexküll says, the tick is that tiny eyeless being that finds its way through the world merely by its sense of smell, dropping off the branch it perches on only when it smells the butyric acid of mammals in order to suck blood and lay its eggs. What does Uexküll’s tick tell us? That not all natural space-time enters its environment, only that perceived within the range of its sense of smell calibrated on its prey, beyond which natural space ceases to exist. Like the tick, other species are also in a partial relationship with the world, and this is according to the functional circuit that Uexküll shows in one of the figures in his book (Uexküll 1934, 48; see figure 1.1). As well as exemplifying the notion of environment, this diagram is valuable because it enables us to begin to put together the relationship between image and form. While on the left of the circuit we have the organism, that space of life included between perceptive and operative organs, on the right we see the object, that piece of world with which it relates. The images occupy the upper part of the Uexküll’s diagram so as to allow the appearance of one of its parts from the organism’s potential field of the perceptive world. As we gather from the lower part of Uexküll’s diagram, it is thanks to this form of appearance that the organism can inform its operative world, thus

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Figure 1.1. Model of a Functional Cycle, the Subject and the Object Interrelate. Source: Jakob von Uexküll, 1934.

making it react in one way rather than in another. In this morphological setup, therefore, the image cannot refer to that misleading world of shadows that our traditional way of thinking has separated from the world of reality ever since Plato’s cave myth (Marzo 2018). Let us use the subtlety of Simmel’s thinking to resemanticize the term image: We are convinced that all representations of what exists are functions of a specific physical and psychological organization which do not mirror the outside world in any mechanical way. The images of the world of an insect with its mosaic eyes, of an eagle with its almost inconceivably keen sight, of an olm with its buried, functionless eyes, of ourselves and of innumerable other species, must be profoundly different from each other; and we must conclude that none of them reproduces the content of the external world in its inherent objectivity. Nevertheless these representations, which have been characterized at least negatively, form the presuppositions, the material and the directives for our practical activity, through which we establish a relationship with the world as it exists in

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relative independence of our subjectively determined representation. (Simmel 1900; Eng. tr. 1978, 104)

If the extrapsychic content shaped by the images depends on the particular psychophysical organization of organisms, as Simmel writes in line with Uexküll’s thinking, we may consider them the incorporeal extension of their corporeity, an extension with the power to perceptively envelop something and bring it back to the interior world of the organism that produces it. This form of incorporeal entity is no longer the substance of the body that projects them in the environment, nor is it the substance of the world they envelop. As its etymological root tells us, the image (from the Latin imago, -gĭnis = shadow, appearance, representation, ghost) can thus be defined as that phantasmal form of the real that, by virtue of its inconsistency, passes through the wall separating species from the things present in their environments, making such things resound within them as substantial, carnal objects. The stimulation is the effect of this phantasmal resonance with the power to make the whole organic body vibrate and to ready it to react. It is thanks to this invisible circulation, to go back to the previous example, that the image shaped by the tick brings it the phantasmal-olfactory feature of the reality of the animal fur onto which it drops. Needless to say, man also finds himself within his own environmental bubble, a bubble well defined by his perceptive and motor organs. However, within it, the phantasmal reality of images conforms in a particular way that must be investigated in order to understand the analogies and—especially— the differences between animal and human environments. Let us start with the similarities by considering the landscape image. It is not that evidence we see in a given natural environment. Instead, landscape is the outcome of a complex psychic process that starts when our senses flood us in the structured perceptive continuity of trees, valleys, mountains, lakes, rivers, coasts, bays, and so on. This unlimited sensorial background is not yet a landscape: it becomes so when we conjure up an image-form from that same landscape. Inside this form of landscape image, the wires of natural continuities are severed to be then reconnected within us. The natural environment is thus transfigured, becoming a mental picture animated by the wind caressing the mountain treetops or blowing the clouds through them, by the waves stirring up the sea in the bay, or by the flight of a seagull across the sky; as Simmel tells us (1913a; It. tr. 1985, 77), “where we effectively see a landscape and no more a sum total of single natural objects, we have the first stirrings of a work of art.” Landscape, therefore, is no longer the substance of that nature we see before us, nor is it just a work created by our mind, but, as we said, it is the phantasmal image of nature. In following the beauty of its appearance, we extend our inner self, extracting it from ourselves to touch nature, and, at

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the same time, we are touched by nature so that it vibrates within us, creating a certain emotional tone. Therefore, an analogical continuity exists between our landscape image and the forest of animal fur as it appears to the tick. It is not so much the complex perceptive capacity of our five senses compared to the tick’s olfactory sense that interrupts this analogy between these two phantasmal forms of the real. The distinction is in the fact that the specter of this landscape can resound in image forms whose contents vary one from the other, becoming, for example, a contemplative vision, a place to be painted in a picture, a place to be explored in an excursion, a place in which to project the construction of a residential complex, and so on ad infinitum. Uexküll also believes that the human environment is distinct from the other animal environments due to the presence within it of the variegated ecosystem of images. Following the example he provides (Uexküll 1934), the perception of an oak for an old woodsman is that rational image from which he will obtain a pile of wood through the work of his axe, while the same oak shrouded in a little girl’s fairy-tale image is a monstrously evil visage from which to flee. Unlike the animal image, therefore, man is endowed with an imaginative capacity allowing him to metamorphose the same perception of the real into phantasmal forms with ever-diverse contents. We can try to identify the imagination’s metamorphic power using Damasio’s (1994) studies on the mind. He believes the latter coincides neither with the body (although the body is itself the mind’s essential base for sensory reception) nor with the brain (although the brain is where the mind has its chosen organic site). For the Portuguese neurologist, the mind is that neural meta-self that is able to integrate body and brain in a third dimension, thanks to which man is able to leave the immediacy of the present, thus generating a type of creative thought open to multiple possibilities of interaction in the world he meets in his environment. Integrating sensory and motor images, the brain is in fact what predisposes that neural base for effective mental activity, which it in turn elaborates within third-type mental images. Damasio writes, I propose that subjectivity emerges during the latter step when the brain is producing not just images of an object, not just images of organism responses to the object, but a third kind of image, that of an organism in the act of perceiving and responding to an object. (Damasio 1994, 242–43)

The mind thus becomes the producer not only of forms of perceptive images, as happens in other species endowed with a brain, but also of meta-cognitive images placed beyond the here and now in virtue of which it is able to interrupt the stimulus-response functional circuit chaining animal life to its environment. We can thus understand the imagination as the

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metamorphic principle inside our mind that gives life to the mental images through which we enter into an open relationship with the world. It is the metamorphoses of these ghosts of the mind that set us free from a referential relationship with the perceptive world, conveying a multitude of contents in the form of biographical memories that are emotionally meaningful: dream desires, symbolic and aesthetical codes, prefigurations of time and space, cognitive elements and knowledge structures, and so on ad infinitum. Man is therefore the only animal able to imagine the world beyond his environment and capable of reflecting it creatively in his inner world—a reflection never merely for its own sake, being the prefiguration field in which that supporting world is planned and constructed, which, as we said above, completes the incomplete nature of his bodily form in the image and likeness of his mental visions. It is for this reason that, as Gehlen (1940; Eng. tr. 1988, 309) writes, “we would be equally justified in describing man as a being of imagination (Phantasiewesen) as well as a being of reason (Vernunftswesen).” THE SOCIAL IMAGINARY: THE ORIGINAL FORM OF REALITY As we have just seen, images are the phantasmal forms of the real metamorphosed by the imagination, that metacognitive faculty typical of the human mind. The imaginary is that phantasmal form of the real created by the imagination of collective consciousness (Durkheim 1893), which regulates and integrates the individual imagination in social life, prefiguring the sense background of its mental activity and of its action; this spectral form of the world is more than the sum of the parts through which it expresses itself: symbolic structures, religious and political meta-narratives, common sense, rituals sacred and profane, moral values, aesthetical languages, and scientific knowledge. These are the parts that make up the social imaginary. However, since nothing exists that is unchanging, fixed, and closed but all is in continuous motion and flux (Goethe 1790), the nature of the imaginary—as well as being a formed form (gestalt)—is a forming form (gestaltung) that acts as the formative principle in the construction of the reality of human environments. Within the social sciences, it is Dilthey who gives one of the first definitions of social imaginary when speaking of Weltanschauungen, visions of the world: The visions of the world develop under diverse conditions. . . . A regular relation is thus shown in virtue of which, spurred on by the continuous change in impressions and destinies and by the power of the world outside, the soul must seek an inner tenacity in order to be able to stand against all this: so, by change,

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instability, the ebb and flow of its condition and its visions of life, it is led to the lasting appreciation of life and to safe ends. The visions of the world that favor the comprehension of life, that lead to useful objectives, are preserved and they remove those that are less favorable in this sense. (Dilthey 1962, It. tr. 1998, 180)

According to this citation from Dilthey, the social imaginary is that lasting world image shaped by the collective mind that has the power to stabilize the ebb, the flow, and the mutation of the environmental world by setting up within itself a historical-social environment. Recalling Uexküll’s umwelt notion, we might say that, unlike the animal environment, the human environment is internally made up by a pluriverse of socio-anthropological environments differentiated by world visions. These environments are in a socio-ecological relation among themselves according to certain degrees of reciprocal influence that leads them to hybridize, contaminate, strive, and cohabit one with another and even produce other social imaginaries. Goethe’s category of original form (Urform) will be valuable here to identify those invisible nuclei that give visibility to social reality within imaginative environments. As we shall see, social morphologists would analyze this category in order to give a detailed understanding of the collective phenomena delineated within their research. Goethe founds the Urform category on his empirical observations of nature. In spite of the infinite variations of life-forms, he believes they are none other than the multiple resultant of original monads3 corresponding to each morphological kingdom. Thus, the generic term Urform in the plant kingdom becomes Urpflanze, or original plant. It is that ideal form empirically present in each plant binding it to one single morphological kingdom. The leaf is the metamorphic organ by which the original plant (Urpflanze) generates its infinite metamorphoses diversifying the botanical species. Goethe identifies the Urform in the kingdom of insects and animals with the term Typus; in this morphological kingdom, the vertebra is the metamorphosis organ that differentiates the insect from the animal species. In insects, the vertebra is that shell enveloping their bodies in the head-thorax-abdomen structure, while in the higher animals, the vertebra is within their osteological conformation. Thus, for Goethe, Urfplanze and Typus become the expression of the idea being the work of the natural, in which the formative energy seems to move in the most marvellous way and, we may say, the most arbitrary way, without being in the least able to break or go beyond the circle. (Goethe 1832; It. tr. 1999, 120)

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Goethe’s science profoundly influenced Simmel4 (1858–1918), becoming his secret empirical-ideal methodology, as we have attempted to point out elsewhere (Marzo 2007b). In Simmel’s social morphology, this configuring energy is expressed through reciprocal action. For him, society does not originate simply in the juxtaposition of individuals; rather, it originates when these individuals begin to relate one to/against the other, creating forms (Simmel 1908). It is in these associative forms with widely differentiated aims that man cultivates his civilized nature: A natural energy or allusion . . . forms the presupposition for the concept of culture. From the standpoint of culture, the values of life are civilized nature. . . . Therefore, if a cultivated garden fruit and a statue are both equally cultural products, then language indicates this relationship in a subtle manner by calling the fruit tree “cultivated,” whereas the bare marble block is not “cultivated” to produce a statue. . . . The culture embodied in the statue constitutes an enhancement and refinement of certain human energies whose original manifestations we term “natural.” . . . It is exactly the same with regard to the culture that shapes people’s relationships to one another and to themselves: language, morals, religion and law. (Simmel 1900; Eng. tr. 1978, 451)

It is in these words that we find the category of second nature, given above, in the sense of the expression of that world shaped by man to specialize the precarious nature of his body. Simmel thought that the element in common found in the cultivation of tree, statue, language, customs, religion, and law is the conforming influence of the energy of nature expressed through the reciprocal action of daily life: this is the empirical field in which men cultivate the cultural forms of their social reality.5 Daily life thus begins to be a field for analysis by sociology. Here, then, the apparently banal phenomenon of fashion in the eyes of Simmel (1905) becomes an observation field in which it is possible to read the profound dynamics of reciprocal action. In his eyes, dressing and adorning oneself become those fragments of experience in which to observe the convergence of the individual between a subjective way of behaving, which, through taste, freely expresses the personality, and an objective conduct, being also an action seeking the consent of others. What interested him in fashion was not the beautiful and the plain but the form assumed by this exchange—always new, always old—between us and others, between the psycho-emotional experience of the individual and social reality. It is enough to observe the daily as if it were not the daily, to enter the empirical level of Simmel’s sociology. But if the empirical world of social nature is given by the micromolecular aggregation of the daily, how is it possible to comprehend its unity?

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In line with Goethe’s idea of Urform, Simmel traces back the configuring energy of reciprocal action in everyday life to formative principles of a spiritual order, as he writes in The Conflict in Modern Culture; they are the hub of the environmental ecosystem of human imaginaries: In any great cultural era with a definite character of its own, one particular idea can always be discerned which underlies all spiritual movements and at the same time appears to be their ultimate goal. . . . Every such central idea occurs of course in innumerable variants and disguises and against innumerable opposing factors, but it remains withal the hidden principle of the intellectual era. (Simmel 1918; It. tr. 1999, 18)

If we replace the word spiritual with imaginary, then we can consider the hidden principle as the Urform, which underlies all the (spiritual) movements of the imaginative ecosystem that regulate the style of associated life in any given civilization. This hub of the imaginative environment, being socially constructed, is not given once and for all but is a spiritual world exposed to change. It is the destruens function of reciprocal action that creates this change between one Urform and another. In daily life, it is what continually exceeds, besieges, and overruns the established order of the dominant—imaginary— what Durand (1994) calls the established superego—until it flows into more vital and emotionally significant semantic basins,6 usually produced by the very limited social circles found within it. When one of these world visions manages to escape the narrow circle of the social group determining it, contagiously contaminating the other social circles, then we are in the presence of a mutation in the imaginary. Simmel identifies in money the Urform of modern civilization in the sense of that spiritualized form in which the imaginary of the time comes to life, metamorphosing the inner life of individuals: This web is held together by the all-pervasive money value, just as nature is held together by the energy that gives life to everything. Like money, energy appears in innumerable forms, but the uniformity of its very nature and the possibility of transforming any specific form into any other results in a relationship between all of them and makes each of them a condition of any other. . . . To put it more precisely, the conceivable elements of action become objectively and subjectively calculable rational relationships and in so doing progressively eliminate the emotional reactions and decisions which only attach themselves to the turning points of life, to the final purposes. (Simmel 1900; Eng. tr. 1984, 435)

Money is therefore the Urform of the complexity of the modern world, which, like the unifying energy of nature, has the power to metamorphose

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into innumerable forms of social exchange, hence neutralizing its qualitative aspects, giving them a touch of uniformity, and transforming the bonds of social life in intellectual and calculable terms to the point of depriving them of any emotional feature. So it is that the process of spiritualization of money, spilling over from the strictly economic environment, enters the inner world of individuals who thus undergo metamorphosis.7 For Simmel (1903), the metropolis becomes the quintessence of the monetary imaginary—neutral, calculable, and calculating—in which to comprehend these metamorphoses. Within the metropolitan environment, money finds its own stage on which its inhabitants, unaware, wear the mask of the blasé. In being blasé, the metropolitan character loses his emotional and affective features—typical of the rural world and provincial towns—making way for a psychological condition of indifference toward the stimuli pervading him (Simmel 1903; It. tr. 1996, 44), a condition necessary to resist the intensification of the agitated life that pervades the metropolitan environment activated by money. In The Decline of the West, Spengler (1880–1936) transposes Goethe’s morphology into the historical field, as we gather from the subtitle of his voluminous text: Environmental History and the Western Worldview (1918– 1923). In his mind, there is no antithesis between history and nature since man is both a member of the natural universe and the creator of a second cosmos. In entering this parallel universe, Spengler leaves that Ptolemaic conception of official historiography, which had placed the West at the center of world history and its progress as the peak of that ascendant temporal line running through prehistory, the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the modern age. Spengler judges Ptolemaic history as the manifestation of the will of the West to extend its vision of the world to the whole of humanity. For the Copernican historiography offered by Spengler, however, the West is only one of the many centers of history in which the human imagination has taken a collective form. Every civilization, in fact, arises there, where the psychic life of a certain community elaborates an idealized image from its own natural landscape. Like Goethe’s Urpflanze and the Typus, this founding image does not exist in itself, being that imaginative nucleus operating in every empirical environment of civilization. Within this empirical-ideal vision, Spengler elaborates a physiognomic method for reading the imaginaries of civilizations: Once we have physiognomic sensitivity at our disposal, it is quite possible to rediscover the fundamental organic features of the historical image of whole centuries from scattered details of ornaments, architecture, writing, isolated data of a political, economic or religious nature; for example, to deduce the political structure of the time from elements of the artistic language of forms, the character of the corresponding economic structures from mathematical

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forms. This procedure is typical of Goethe, recalling his idea of the primordial phenomenon; . . . Yet, viewed from this morphological standpoint, even the humdrum facts of politics assume a symbolic and even a metaphysical character, and—what has perhaps been impossible hitherto—things such as the Egyptian administrative system, the Classical coinage, analytical geometry, the cheque, the Suez Canal, the bookprinting of the Chinese, the Prussian Army, and the Roman road-engineering can, as symbols, be made uniformly understandable and appreciable. (Spengler 1918–1923; Eng. tr. 1926, vol. 1, 7)

Following Goethe’s idea of the primordial phenomenon, Spengler therefore identifies those traits of physiognomy in which the soul of civilization was empirically revealed: in aesthetic objects (ornaments, architecture, and writing), in the institutional world (politics, economy, and religion), and in material fragments (such as the bank check, the Suez Canal, Chinese printing art, the Prussian army, and Roman road-making techniques). Each of such widely diversified elements is, in fact, the outcome of the materialization of the phantasmal nature of images of civilizations: it is this that gives the crystalized images (Tramontana 2019) not only a specific function but also a style that expresses the imaginary of the civilizations that produce them. It is from this physiognomic-morphologic perspective that Spengler identifies the original symbol of the modern West in the Faustian image of the world. This imaginative epicenter is what has projected the modern Western imaginary into a space of infinite movement, inducing it to impose its political order over the whole globe, to allow its science to stretch from the infinitely small to the infinitely great and its arts to increasingly detach themselves from the bodily element into abstract forms. For Spengler, however, the expansion of the Western cosmos was also what had exhausted the energetic potential of the Faustian imaginary, bringing life to forms ever more exterior and artificial and deprived of their symbolic contents. The West had thus entered the declining stage of civilization8 characterized by the predominance of economic activity over social reality guided by industrial and financial elites: they are the leaders in the era in which the ferocious logic of war is spiritualized from the battlefield to the abstract field of the market. It is no wonder that in Spengler’s opinion, the commercial signs picturing lions, bears, falcons, and sparrowhawks bear witness to their predatory origins. The difference is that while the warlord seeks to dominate territories, the warlord of the business world seeks to expand through the abstract lands of the market, elevating looting to intellectual activity. Investment, gain, profit, and speculation become the passwords of the intellectualization of war, wherein death no longer comes through artillery fire but in the anonymity of material poverty, devastated by hunger pains.

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As happens in the city life analyzed by Simmel, it is within the wrapping of the cosmopolitan city that financial power imposes its quantitative imaginary. For Spengler’s physiognomy, the appearance of modern cosmopolitan cities is that fruit of stone9 revelatory of the stage of civilization in which the Faustian imaginary cools down the vital impulse of its youth, becoming pure financial energy: World-economy itself, the characteristic economy of all Civilizations, ought properly to be called world-city-economy. . . . Finally, money is the form of intellectual energy in which the ruler-will, the political and social, technical and mental, creative power, the craving for a full-sized life, are concentrated. . . . The Faustian money-thinking . . . opens up whole continents, the water-power of gigantic river-basins, the muscular power of the peoples of broad regions, the coal measures, the virgin forests, the laws of Nature, and transforms them all into financial energy. (Spengler 1918–1923; Eng. tr. 1926, 484–86)

The Faustian imaginary is therefore concentrated in the world’s cosmopolitan cities, set in function by the money emerging from the confines of Western culture, from which it originated. It is in this process that the West, while having given impulse to the spiritual force of money, becomes one of the many cultures of the world economy. A century after its publication, we can say that The Decline of the West has seen all its prophecies fulfilled. Written at a time when Europe was the undisputed center of the world, Spengler’s work brought to light the crisis in the West’s symbolic forms and their passage to that new global regulation of the financial economy that we are today experiencing. Jünger (1895–1998), too, the last of our morphologists, glimpsed the image of a new world order in the West’s decline caused by the figure of the worker advancing into the theater of history. The latter, however, can no longer be slotted into the class confronting the bourgeoisie described by Marx in the field of economic structure. Using the method suggested by Goethe, the worker is a dominating empirical-ideal form born from contact with the operational world of machines: Machine technology must be understood as the symbol of a particular form, namely that of the worker: using its forms, one acts as if one takes over the ritual of a foreign cult. . . . Knights, priests, and peasants knew well that there was more to lose here than the bourgeois could have ever suspected; . . . In modern armies, equipped with the latest technical means, war is no longer waged in the old manner of the social estates. These new armies are the martial expression assumed by the form of the worker. Similarly, no Christian priest may be in any doubt that what emerges when an eternal flame is replaced by an electric bulb is no longer a sacred, but only a technical affair. . . . Likewise, wherever

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the peasant uses the machine, it is no longer possible to speak of a peasantry. (Jünger 1932; Eng. tr. 1995, 50–51)

In his empirical quality, therefore, the worker is the name both for the individual we meet in the factory and for the human type, who also includes the soldier, the priest, and the peasant. Using technological instruments, these variations in the human type of the worker have in common the fact of unconsciously celebrating the rites of a new cult: that of technique. For Jünger, technique is not something referable only to the functioning of machines; it is also an imaginative power having a religious value that transcends them in an ongoing process of perfection. In this technical reproducibility of the religious imaginary, it is the worker who unveils the symbolic power of machines in using them, bringing about a horizontal transcendence dictated by work rhythms throughout the twenty-four hours of a day.10 Through ceaseless work activity, Jünger’s worker is the organ of metamorphosis of the technical imaginary aiming to transfigure the whole planet into a workshop landscape. In this techno-environment where everything transforms, man can no longer be thought of as the stable center of the historical-social order; this anthropocentric image, bolstered by the statues of illustrious men set up in the squares of modern city centers, was for Jünger the expression of the era in which the bourgeois type still dominated. The worker, however, was that human type who arrived as an adjunct to the reassuring order instituted by the bourgeoisie, bringing to the hub of history the work movement, that process of total mobilization that imposed itself on the spheres of politics, aesthetics, knowledge, ethic conceptions, and urban structures, giving them a character of uniformity and impermanence. Just as Goethe thought of nature as the formative principle, Jünger identifies in work that idea-at-work mobilized by the workman in every field of social life. In an interview for a book, Jünger states, I see the Worker as a sort of Prometheus figure, certainly not as a proletarian. . . . Far from wanting to make propaganda for a new party, I had simply described the new reality, not in empirical terms in which sociology describes a new order, but concentrating on the essential figure and features of the Worker. Therefore for me it was a form that has an almost metaphysical character, just as Goethe’s idea of Urpflanze is metaphysical. (Jünger 1932; It. tr. 2000, 39)

It is in this acceptance that from being an empirical type, the worker becomes Urform, the ideal form through which technique conveys the elementary power of nature. For Jünger, this energy field was present not only in natural environments but also within innermost man, becoming the great topic of fairy tales, sagas, sacred and poetic texts, and initiatory knowledge.

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This mythological universe gathered by language should not be understood as a distant story set in the wake of progress or as a story that always repeats the same thing. The mythological dimension is that extemporal background in which man is at his closest to the indistinct, that shapeless dimension in which the creative and destructive power of the natural is active. The imaginaries of human communities draw on this deep layer to give form to social realities and eras that are distinct one from the other. In this profound view, the worker is that metaphysical form who, through labor, brought the archetypal power of Prometheus to the surface of historical facts. It was in the steel-bound tempests of World War I that Jünger registered on the seismographs of his notebooks (Jünger 2001) the vibrations from the total mobilization produced by entry into history of the titan, Technique. In this battle of materials, for the first time the union is set up between mass society and technique, which transformed the class of knights into unknown workers and the warring states into Vulcan’s workshops, heralding the advent of the era of the total mobilization of work.11 The Unknown Warrior thus became that first type of incorporation of the form of the worker, and the states became immense factories from which the elementary firepower of Prometheus began to erupt. Peace, which brought down the curtain on the two acts of the world war, was for Jünger that stage in which the technical organization of war continued by other means, elevating work to the planetary order: that of the World State: I believe the World State is the point towards which the political organization of humanity tends. On the political level it will sanction the globalization already initiated by technique and the planetary economy. Even without eliminating the national states, the World State will absorb the main power. Technique, as a phenomenon that is universal, cosmopolitan, that inexorably pushes forward to globalization, is preparing the World State and indeed has already realized it to a certain extent. The World State is its political equivalent. (Jünger 1960; It. tr. 1998, 66–67)

Jünger (1960) conceived the World State in a historical period still characterized by the U.S.-Soviet standoff, as that political order that was more than the sum of the national states polarized around the two superpowers. Behind the appearances of these ideological counter-positions, Jünger’s view saw their secret affinity, considering them the two political halves of one and the same form of state, as yet embryonic. Behind the frameworks of these two political imaginaries (capitalist and socialist) was the imaginary technical work of the worker; in the East as in the West, it was the same human type who worked on the creation of the same social environment made up of metropolises, bridges, ports, communication systems, factories, nuclear arsenals, and space stations. These titanic constructions were the parts where the

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accelerated ecosystem12 of the World State came to life thanks to the use of every resource available: from the inorganic and organic resources extracted from natural landscapes to the symbolic-material resources extracted from diverse geo-cultural contexts. It is in this scenario that the faces of mechanical clocks and economic indicators were, in Jünger’s view, the signs of the currents through the terrestrial globe of the kinetic energy given by the total mobilization of work. In war as in peace, it is that technical movement, synchronized in the twenty-four time zones of Greenwich, that even today continues to metamorphose the globe, giving it the uniform skin of an eternal building site in which everything is laid on for the passage of speed, a speed that overheats the biosphere into a glowing electrical landscape made of intersections and lines, as nighttime pictures taken by the artificial eyes of satellites show us. It is the same energy landscape that at present feeds the neuro-digital network of the Web, where everything circulates in the form of data sent and received at the speed of thought: information, spectacular events, symbols, narratives, money, fashions, and cultural products. It is within the electrified nervous system of this collective consciousness of algorithmic logic that the archetypal power of Prometheus’s fire emerges. From steel storms to digital storms, the internaut-worker is now that new human type shaping the dematerialization of the World State, taking it into his inner world: daily, it is here that the era of work mobilizes his imagination, integrating it yet more profoundly with the technical imaginary of the worker. Simmel, Spengler, and Jünger: following these morphologies, we have examined the imaginary nature of modern society. With reference to Goethe’s idea of Urform, each has understood the quantitative and accelerated character of the contemporary world, identifying the deep nuclei of its imaginary expressed by the spiritualization of money in every sector of social life (Simmel), by the search for power and calculation of the real coming from the Faustian vision of the world (Spengler), and by the era of total work mobilization introduced by the form of the worker (Jünger). These are the formative principles that still today neutralize the symbolic qualities of modern and traditional imaginaries, making them parts of the same global ecosystem. It is in this framework that the imaginary, rather than an object of study, presents itself as a perspective of analysis oriented toward identifying in the surface of social phenomena that invisible vanishing point that makes them visible, a perspective that has been already indicated by the social morphologists we have touched on but that has yet to be thoroughly explored.

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NOTES 1. The Italian transcript of the discussion is available in N. Chomsky and M. Foucault, Della natura umana: Invariante biologico e potere politico (Roma: DeriveApprodi, 2005). The page numbers refer to the Italian edition. 2. “Man is organically the defective being (Herder); he would be unsuitable for life in any natural environment and he is therefore obliged to create a second nature for himself, a replacement world, artificially prepared and adapted to him, that shall co-operate with his defective organic equipment; and he does this wherever we may see him” (Gehlen 1940; It. tr. 2010, 383). “Man exists in a ‘second Nature,’ a world he has transformed to serve his own needs, ‘une nature artificielle,’ as Georges Sorel called it. This nature is not simply ‘artificial,’ but actually a ‘cultivated’ Nature, because we discover possibilities in it which, if left to itself, Nature would not pursue. In the original Nature, there are neither beasts of burden nor explosives” (Gehlen 1940; Eng. tr. 1988, 295). 3. Ernest Cassirer, specifying Goethe’s Urform category, writes, “Life is given to us in the form of the nomadic being—a being that shall not be understood as resting within itself but as a process, as a movement—the stream of consciousness—that runs continuously and never stops, that knows no truce nor quiet” (Cassirer 1995; It. tr. 2003, 159). 4. To underline this interest, we recall Simmel’s two essays on Goethe’s thinking: Kant und Goethe: Zur Geschichte der Modernen Weltanschauung (1906) and Goethe (1913b). 5. “Here we are almost dealing with microscopic-molecular processes within human material, which however constitute the real happening chained or hypostatized inside those macroscopic, stable units or systems. The fact that men look at each other and are reciprocally jealous; the fact that they write letters or dine together; the fact that they take a like or a dislike to one another quite apart from any tangible interests; the fact that gratitude for an altruistic service over time produces an indissoluble bond; the fact that one person asks another the way or dresses and adorns him/herself for another—all the thousand relations reflected from person to person, momentary or lasting, conscious or unconscious, superficial or rich in consequences, among which these examples are quite randomly chosen, bind us indissolubly. At every instant these threads are spun, dropped, picked up anew, replaced by others, interwoven with others. Herein reside reciprocal actions—only accessible under the psychological microscope—among the atoms of society, holding up all the tenacity and elasticity, all the variety and oneness of this life of society, so clear and so enigmatic” (Simmel 1908; It. tr. 1998, 20–21). 6. Durand writes, “Hence, taking account of these different affirmations, we developed the notion of a ‘semantic basin.’ It was already implicit in our ‘topical approach’ that placed the systemic movement in subsets, on the one hand leading the imaginary Id to peter out into its established Super-ego, and on the other suspecting and eroding this Super-ego with plentiful flows of a marginalized Id. . . . An imaginary socio-cultural system emerges more and more from a wider set and contains narrower sets. And so on ad infinitum” (Durand 1994; It. tr. 1996, 64).

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7. “The punctuality, calculability and precision that the complications and vastness of metropolitan life impose are not only in closest relation to its economic-monetary and intellectualistic character, but cannot help coloring also the contents of life and favoring the exclusion of all those irrational, instinctive and sovereign traits and impulses which would themselves like to define the form of life instead of receiving it from without as in a prefigured diagram” (Simmel 1903; It. tr. 1984, 715). 8. Spengler writes, “A culture dies when its soul has achieved the sum of its possibilities under species of peoples, languages, forms of faith, arts, States, sciences; . . . The aim once attained, the idea—the entire content of inner possibilities—fulfilled and made externally actual—the culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its forces break down and it becomes civilization. . . . Civilization is the inevitable destiny of a culture, . . . they are the most external and most artificial stages of which a human species is capable” (Spengler 1918–1923; It. tr. 1995, 57, 174). 9. “And in the city, detached from the powers of landscape, almost isolated from the soil by paving-stones, life weakens more and more, while perception and intelligence become more and more acute. Man becomes spirit, he becomes free yet once more a nomad, although colder and with a narrower horizon. . . . Religions, arts and sciences little by little become spiritual, strangers on earth, incomprehensible for the peasant bound to the land. And with civilization comes the climacteric. The ancient roots of being become arid among the masses of stone” (Spengler 1918–1923; It. tr. 1995, 781). 10. “The workplace is unlimited, just as the working day spans twenty-four hours. The counterpart to work is neither some kind of rest nor is it leisure; rather from this perspective there is no situation that cannot be grasped as work. To give a practical example: the manner in which people now busy themselves with leisure” (Jünger 1932; Eng. tr. 1981, 59). 11. “The very image of war as armed action ends up running into the far wider action of a gigantic work process. Beside the armies clashing on the battlefields, there arise new armies in communications, the provision of supplies, the military industry. . . . In this absolute use of potential energy that transforms warring industrial states into Vulcan’s workshops, the dawn of the Age of Work is heralded perhaps even more evidently: this makes the world war a more significant historical event than the French Revolution. . . . To achieve this objective presupposes Total Mobilization, which reaches out to include the child in its cradle. Total Mobilization is not a measure to be undertaken, but something that comes about of itself, it is, in war as in peace, the expression of the mysterious, inexorable law to which we are consigned by the age of the masses and of machines” (Jünger 1960; It. tr. 1998, 118–21). 12. “It is evident that we find ourselves in movement and, exactly, in a form of movement we cannot properly call ‘going’ nor ‘proceeding’ nor yet ‘walking.’ For a long time now this movement has been carried out in acceleration: in increasing acceleration” (Jünger 1930; It. tr. 1998, 17).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Berger, P., and T. Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Penguin Books. Cassirer, E. 1995. Zur Metaphysik der symbolischen Formen. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. Translated into Italian as Metafisica delle forme simboliche. Milano: Sansoni, 2003. Chomsky, N., and M. Foucault. 1994. De la nature humaine: Justice contre pouvoir. Paris: Gallimard. Translated into Italian as Della natura umana: Invariante biologico e potere politico. Roma: DeriveApprodi, 2005. Cislaghi, F. 2008. Goethe e Darwin: La filosofia delle forme viventi. Milano: Mimesis. Colli, G. 1980. La sapienza greca. Vol. III. Milano: Adelphi. Damasio, A. R. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Avon Books. Descartes, R. 1637. Le Discours de la méthode. Leyde: Ian Maire. Translated into Italian as Discorso sul metodo. Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1998. Dilthey, W. 1962. Weltanschauugslehre: Abhandlugen zur Philosophie der Philosophie [in Gesammelte Schriften]. Stuttgart-Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Translated into Italian as La dottrina delle visioni del mondo. Napoli: Guida, 1998. Durand, G. 1994. L’imaginaire. Paris: Hatier. Translated into Italian as L’immaginario. Como: Red, 1996. Durkheim, E. 1893. De la division du travail social. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Foucault, M. 1966. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard. Translated into Italian as Le parole e le cose: Un’archeologia delle scienze umane. Milano: Rizzoli, 1996. Gehlen, A. 1940. Der Mensch: Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt. Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt. Translated into English as Man: His Nature and Place in the World. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Goethe, J. W. 1790–1832. Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften. München: Verlag C. H. Beck. Gli scritti scientifici (Morfologia 1: Botanica, e Morfologia 2: Zoologia). Bologna: Il capitello del Sole, 1996–1999. Heidegger, M. 1957. Vorträge und Aufsätze. Pfullingen: Verlag Günther Neske. Translated into Italian as Saggi e discorsi. Milano: Mursia, 1976. Jünger, E. 1932. Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Translated into English as The Worker. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981. ———. 1934. Blätter und Steine. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Translated into Italian as “La mobilitazione totale.” In Foglie e pietre. Milano: Adelphi, 1997. ———. 1960. Der Weltstaat: Organismus un Organisation. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett. Translated into Italian as Lo Stato mondiale. Parma: Guanda, 1998. ———. 2001. Politische Publizistik (1919–1933). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Translated into Italian as Scritti Politici e di Guerra (1919–1933). Bologna: Libreria Editrice Goriziana, 2003. Marzo, P. L. 2007a. Le metamorfosi: Natura, artificio e tecnica: Dal mutamento sociale alla mutazione sociobiologica. Milano: Angeli.

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———. 2007b. “Simmel et la morphologie sociale.” Sociétés. Revue des Sciences Humaines et Sociales 97, no. 2: 125–36. ———. 2015. “L’immaginario sociale: Una prospettiva ambientale.” Quaderni di Teoria Sociale 2: 95–112. ———. 2016. “Imaginary, Technique and Human Nature: A Morphological Reading.” Im@go. A Journal of the Social Imaginary 7: 7–22. ———. 2018. “Scienza e immagine: Elementi per la ricostruzione di un dialogo interrotto.” In Epidemia delle immagini: La prevalenza delle immagini e l’effetto sulla società, ed. F. La Rocca. Roma: Edizioni Estemporanee. Marzo, P. L., and M. Meo. 2013. “Cartografie dell’immaginario.” Im@go. Rivista di Studi sull’Immaginario 2, no. 1: 4–17. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1995. La nature. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Translated into Italian as La natura. Milano: Raffaello Cortina, 1996. Nietzsche, F. 1886. Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Leipzig: Verlag von C. G. Naumann. Translated into Italian as Al di là del bene e del male. Milano: Adelphi, 1994. Scheler, M. 1928. Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos. Bern: Francke. Translated into Italian as La posizione dell’uomo nel cosmo. Roma: Armando, 1997. Schutz, A. 1976. Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory. Dordrecht: Springer. Simmel, G. 1900. Philosophie des Geldes. Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt. Translated into English as The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge, 1990. ———. 1903. Die Grossstädte und das Geistesleben. Dresden: K. F. Koehler. Translated into Italian as Le metropoli e la vita dello spirito. Roma: Armando Editore, 1996. ———. 1905. Philosophie der Mode Moderne. Berlin: Zeitfragen. Nr. 11. hg. von Hans Landsberg. Translated into Italian as La moda. Milano: SE, 1996. ———. 1906. “Kant und Goethe: Zur Geschichte der Modernen Weltanschauung.” Die Zukunft 57: 24. Translated into Italian as Kant e Goethe. Como: Ibis, 1995. ———. 1908. Soziologie. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Translated into Italian as Sociologia. Torino: Comunità, 1998. ———. 1913a. Philosophie der Landschaft (ex: Die Güldenkammer. Eine bremische Monatsschrift. herausgegeben von Sophie Dorothea Gallwitz. Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub und Hermann Smidt. 3. Jg. 1913. Heft II. S.635–44). Bremen. Translated into Italian as “Filosofia del paesaggio.” In Il volto e il ritratto. Bologna: il Mulino, 1985. ———. 1913b. Goethe. Leipzig: Klinckhardt & Biermann. Translated into Italian as Goethe. Macerata: Quodtibet, 2012. ———. 1918. Der Konflikt der Kultur. München-Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Translated into Italian as Il conflitto della civiltà moderna. Milano: SE, 1999. Spengler, O. 1918–1923. Der Untergang des Abendlandes. München: C. H. Beck’sche Verlagbuchhandlung. Translated into English as The Decline of the West. 2 vols. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926.

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Tramontana, A. 2019. I cristalli della società: Simmel, Benjamin, Gehlen, Baudrillard e l’esistenza multiforme degli oggetti. Milano: Meltemi. Uexküll, J. 1934. Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen: Ein Bilderbuch unisichtbarer Welten. Berlin: Springer. Translated into English as A Foray into the Words of Animals and Humans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Chapter 2

The Power of Image Imaginary, Knowledge, and Method in the Social Creation of Reality Fabio D’Andrea and Valentina Grassi1

PARADOXES AND PARADIGMS Among the many formulas with which we try to describe our time, there are two that are fitting for an introduction to this chapter. With the same slightly blasé nonchalance, they say that we are in the “image civilization” or the “information era,” suggesting or implying that the labels describe two sides of the same coin. The first approach is more phenomenological, mindful of the proliferation of images through new technologies and their replacement of word and thought with diverse communicative frameworks. The second is more aware of the information technology background of this and other features specific to the period and its value structure, which sees in information a new galleon overflowing with tulip bulbs. In some ways, the overriding image is thought of as a pleasant way for information to get around, its guise suitable to the paradigmatic choices of the culture that generated it and the style of life and thought it offers today. It is fast, immediate, and easily comprehensible—so they say. If that is the situation, we may wonder why it was not our choice from the beginning instead of relentlessly fighting it, transforming it into the “folle du logis,” “the fool at home” (Durand 1960; It. tr. 1991, 13), whom Durand started to rehabilitate as of 1960, a worthy and as yet unfinished endeavor that today is more urgent than ever—a childish activity, nothing to be taken seriously, a psychological compensation mechanism, a leftover from a sad time when reason did not as yet shine forth. Imagination—which ought to 33

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be the source of images—has never had a good press in the West, nor can it be said that things are any better now. Paradoxically, the inundation of images (predefined, prepacked, and predigested) threatens to desiccate it, expropriating its legitimate owners of their innate creative capacity, which is also redefined as the consumption of texts and meanings planned by others. From the “power to imagination” of the by now far-off counterculture age, we have arrived at power exerted through uniformed, flattened images with their prodigious, destabilizing fertility of sense at last brought under control. For this reason, ever since Plato, we have tried to expel them—together with their generative function—from the picture of comprehension and knowledge, a picture founded on a way of thinking, regulated on the principle of non-contradiction and on the principle of causality that has established the identity of each thing with itself and the rigorous order of its relations. The universe born of this has dissolved into itself everything di-verse, every plurality, every difference, every ambivalence on which primitive language once fed. (Galimberti 2005, 33)

Allowing anything not to be the same as itself is unthinkable since it opens up possibilities that are dangers as well as opportunities; it shatters the so laboriously achieved order, and it queries the claim to control founded on that order, which in turn founds a system of inequality and privilege that is increasingly evident. And it’s just too bad if enforced unidimensionalization implies sacrificing the opportunities afforded by sense and meaning that are the wealth of the world and that make it a haven for humans, indeed, making possible its very creation, existence, and survival. The project of suppressing diversity and ambivalence already took shape and made its appearance in ancient Greece but made a great leap forward with the invention of objective reality, something to be investigated through specific procedures and protocols, something that has its own sense, autonomous and independent from human behaviour—on which we evidently cannot rely at all. Ontologically, things are identical to themselves; there is no need whatever for any outside intervention to set them up or endow them with a sense that is theirs from the beginning. All that is needed is an increasingly in-depth, rigorous understanding of the laws regulating relationships in order to bend them to whatever ends are considered from time to time most desirable (while seeking to deprive humanity even of that last crumb of responsibility and choice, rushing on toward the umpteenth coincidence between techno-economic ideology and the “naturalness” of the order it produces, so that the ends can only be what ideology itself seeks). While it is true that what is sought is found (i.e. that the seeker’s intention significantly influences how he seeks and the outcome of his seeking), the “uni-verse” as

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conceived by Western culture could hardly have looked any different, nor is it surprising that its flattened, dematerialized image has become a fitting part, a queen in captivity. The problem—or fortune, depending on how you look at it—is that, between the saying and the doing, there remains something irreducible; that “language, naming things according to their unity, which limits and mocks their real, secret power, which can silently enunciate that this is also that” (Galimberti 2005, 30), possesses no instruments perfectly suitable to its intent, no Procrustean bed that sooner or later does not turn against its rash user. Words, as apparently much more docile tools than images are, do not lend themselves to a biunique relationship with a single meaning—one and only, unequivocally that one—in spite of the philosophical efforts of the Vienna Circle in the first half of the twentieth century and the contemporary fascination with programming and algorithms. Since the appearance of writing and the successive birth of logic, paradoxes seem to be in language, or about language, [and] one way to banish them was to purify the medium: eliminate ambiguous words and woolly syntax, employ symbols that were rigorous and pure. To turn, that is, to mathematics. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it seemed that only a system of purpose-built symbols could make logic work properly—free of error and paradoxes. This dream was to prove illusory; the paradoxes would creep back in, but no one could hope to understand until the paths of logic and mathematics converged. (Gleick 2011b, 43)

Gleick is an esteemed propagator and attentive observer of the most recent scientific panorama. His hope in the alliance between logics and mathematics takes us on to the second definition of the present time mentioned above, the “information era,” an omnipresent concept with no facile definition, like most of the stratagems generally used to convey a misleading sense of control and familiarity. Seeking the elusive meaning of the term, the author highlights a key proceeding in our contemporary way of producing knowledge that goes back to Newton, who appropriated words that were ancient and vague—force, mass, motion, and even time—and gave them new meanings. Newton made these terms into quantities, suitable for use in mathematical formulas. Until then, motion (for example) had been just as soft and inclusive a term as information. (Gleick 2011b, 9)

These are flexible words, capable of conforming to the variety and ambivalence of the world, like those of “primitive” languages: according to Galimberti, words that need to emerge from this ever more rigid and immobile “uni-verse,” words that we had and that we try to recover in the face of an

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unceasing definition that reassures and pauperizes. Unsurprisingly, observes Gleick, there was too much wealth in those words: Most varieties of motion had to be tossed out before Newton’s laws could apply and the Scientific Revolution could succeed. In the nineteenth century, energy began to undergo a similar transformation. . . . It was the same with information. A rite of purification became necessary. (Gleick 2011b, 9)

Beyond the more or less realistic, likely derivations, the production of knowledge has for centuries responded to this imperative: purify the matter of the world of what is not reducible to mathematics and its processing, so that in the end “‘the information circle becomes the unit of life,’ says Werner Loewenstein after thirty years spent studying intercellular communication. He reminds us that information means something deeper now: ‘It connotes a cosmic principle of organization and order, and it provides an exact measure of that’” (Gleick 2011b, 10). The profound need guiding knowledge, as we understand it today, is clearly formulated here: order and precision, stability and dominion, achieved by removing everything that does not fall under the laws of Newton and his successors. Amid the mob of his epigones, here and there we glimpse a genial mind capable of altering and querying the sense of the initiative, but in most cases the mission of many twentieth-century scientists—biologists, neurologists, economists—has been to break their universes down into the simplest atoms that will obey scientific rules. In all these sciences, a kind of Newtonian determinism has been brought to bear. (Gleick 2011a, 14)

It is a question of paradigm, a term first proposed by Kuhn (1962) in his fundamental work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which, with its additions and theoretical reformulations, has gone on to enjoy increasing success. While supplying a scientific community with a set of shared assumptions, its structure should be treated cautiously since one of the things a scientific community acquires with a paradigm is a criterion for choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions. To a great extent these are the only problems that the community will admit as scientific or encourage its members to undertake. . . . A paradigm can, for that matter, even insulate the community from those socially important problems that are not reducible to the puzzle form, because they cannot be stated in terms of the conceptual and instrumental tools the paradigm supplies. (Kuhn 1962, 37)

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When the paradigm is considered as a set of criteria and assumptions on which a culture is founded rather than just a scientific discipline, the risk is that all aspects incompatible with the paradigm itself are removed from the reality inhabited by that group, reducing its overabundant wealth to the scant, unsatisfactory portion that can find an orderly, precise space within it. AN INFINITE INITIATIVE The confusion and vagueness of words have been progressively eliminated by definition processes that have made them less and less useful in talking of reality, although slips of the tongue, witticisms, linguistic games, and increasing incompetence in their use continue to show other, further possibilities, a deep level that evades reduction and reveals it, mostly with laughter. Dissatisfaction with the state and efficacy of the main instrument of Western culture—“in the beginning was the Word”—has opened unforeseen spaces and further communication strategies, such as the return of images that have become admissible after having been similarly deprived of substance. It is, however, a false analogy, for in the space of the exclusive, mathematizing paradigm, images are understood as signs and not symbols, describable in words with no leftovers, yet they are something more and something different, and this opposes further resistance against the attempt to empty and homogenize them. One of the reasons for the long-lasting distrust with which they are regarded lies precisely in the perception of this qualitative difference: As the Euclidean point has no substance and in a certain sense evades space, the image presents itself without time harmonics, on the way to the concept through the summary it presents, but more timeless than the concept, since the latter constitutes the mediation of imaginary spontaneity through a selective effort, through an opinion that slows down thought and evades haste. The image, however, without worrying about contradictions, madly generates a lush “swarm” of images in every direction. (Durand 1960; It. tr. 1991, 403)

As Durand was to say, borrowing Lupasco’s term, the image is “contradictorial”; that is, it accepts “an opposition that cannot be overcome by successive syntheses but endures generating energy” (D’Andrea 2017, 354). The immediacy with which it arouses associations and meanings, whether recognized meanings or new ones of the observer, is what has rendered it suspect for all who had in mind the realization of the clearly monotheistic “uni-verse” and has pauperized the possibilities of Western knowledge, limiting its range:

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Since Socrates invented the concept the West has lost images. And the loss was not of little import, since the concept is not the correspondent on the intellectual plane of the image on the plane of feeling, but it is the unity of the multiple, that is, what things have in common, their essence: not this or that horse, black or white, fast or slow, lightweight or heavy, as the image offers, but the horse that is apart from all the connotations recorded in the images, so as to be able to refer, as a conceptual unity, to all the horses on earth. Achieved through a process of abstraction (ab-traho, to disregard) which in itself excludes all the data given by the image, the concept is a sign that means many, a sign rigidly fixed in its identity and not contradiction by which the horse is the horse and not instinct, desire, impetus, faithfulness, sacrifice, death. (Galimberti 2005, 43)

Even in this petrifying regime, images have continued to exert their fertile fascination up to the present, as has the imaginative function triggering them. The rhetoric of modernity has made use of the resources placed at its disposal by the imagination, thereby fueling its own myth and through its agency lending a touch of wonder to its products and programs that they would otherwise have lacked. Modernity has unashamedly taken advantage of the vectors of desire—which can be modulated by imaginal manipulation, all the more freely and efficiently the lower the general awareness of their existence and accessibility—constructing on this interference the sacredness of consumerism (D’Andrea 2005; Ritzer 1999; Vincenzo 2014) and its advancement beyond any reasonable limit. However, the absence of limits and the imaginal pressure at its root (otherwise what could be said of the idea of infinite growth consubstantial with neoliberal capitalism, more or less super- or turbo-?) impede a sensible exploitation of this as of any other resource, leading us rapidly to depletion. At the material level, this is the root of the environmental problem and the exacerbation of inequality on a planetary scale. Yet at the level of knowledge and representation, the damage is more subtle, more difficult to identify, given all the effort put into denying the contribution of the imaginary to the creation of culture. The problem, as it can be initially formulated, is in the decrease of the sense of human initiative, a central component of the symbolic and cognitive systems that the overwhelming affirmation of objectivity has banished to the attic. Before turning our attention to this aspect, however, it would be best to alleviate—if at all possible—the dire picture being outlined: the quantum of the image’s qualitative difference, however stereotyped and sterile it might appear, may still be capable of evoking or even realizing the ambivalence and poly-semantic nature of the real, showing it constantly to distracted users/ consumers who might thus possibly regain awareness. The crazy generativity of the image is beyond the attempted control imposed on it. It is easier to “lobotomize” (La Cecla 2007) the human sense that appreciates it, thus

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subjectively disenchanting the world while leaving intact its potential for wonder. At the core of the dominating device of the “image civilization” is a paradox originating in the incomprehension of the exclusive Western paradigm of the complexity of the real and the dynamics generating and maintaining it. What escapes us is the tension underlying any attempt at interpreting the real, which is at the core of the idea of culture making it not a repertory of ascertained contents but an infinite issue, in which everyone is called upon to take part. (D’Andrea 2017, 354)

In order to emerge from the impasse caused by the rationalistic absolutism of the paradigm, we must resort to alternatives fully entitled to being part of Western culture, which only ideologically can be thought of and described as a consistent monolith with no contradictions. We could, for example, turn back to one of the best pages of the twentieth century, in which Weber offers a revolutionary interpretation of the idea of culture: Culture is the endowment of a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of events in the world with meaning and significance from the standpoint of human beings. . . . The transcendental premise of any science of culture is . . . in the circumstance that we are men of culture, endowed with the capacity and the will of assuming a conscious position in the face of the world, conferring sense to it (Weber 1922, quote from Weber 1991, 61)

From this aspect, the cultural gesture is necessarily a plural, creative one since each group undertakes it autonomously in order to carve out for itself a habitable, comprehensible space from within “the meaningless infinity of events in the world,” where it can survive and prosper. It is a primordial gesture, coming well before consciousness as we now know it, before reason and logic. It becomes specified and enriched later on thanks to the opportunities the latter open up, but it remains in any case profoundly connected to the creative imagination, which is in all probability the first operator or, better, originator. This generativeness depends on the renewal and preservation of the fruits of this enterprise, which cannot be perceived other than as an infinite process, a becoming founded on a constant effort and maintenance supported by the assumption of responsibility. It is no coincidence that Weber stresses how an essential feature of being human is the willingness to consciously take up a position toward the world and to attribute a sense to it. It appears almost obvious—if we think about it—that something finite, immersed in an infinite becoming, is constantly subjected to torsions, pressures, and needs to adapt and compensate, which require a care that is equally continuous, a ceaseless dedication whose lack inevitably leads to rigidity and breakage. Yet culture

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is understood mainly as being in clear opposition to Nature, as a subject that is human, unlike what has been placed there at the hands of someone else, whether demiurge, god, or impersonal mechanics, an entity licensing our exploitation. Very few realize that this is the umpteenth misleading dichotomy, that Culture and Nature are terms of continual give-and-take, in which all preexists and all is created, at some point in its existence, not only in the planning but also in its thinkability as object of the world, in its admissibility to being part of the world. The set of accepted component parts—the “finite segment”—however consistent and ever more punctiliously described by scientific thought, is in any case partial, comprehensible in its complexity only in relation to what remains beyond, invisible to the Weltanschauung chosen by the group living in that particular reality. Bit by bit, as the sense attributed to it peters out, it must be set up again according to processes and dynamics on which there has been no reflection, intent as we are on the imaginal need to construct an unchangeable, solid, reliable reality. These processes and dynamics cannot do without the contribution of the nonrational spheres of action and knowledge, part of which are imagination and symbolic thought. It is time to recognize their role and to reintegrate them within the process of knowledge and creation of the real. THE IMAGINARY METHOD At this point, it is therefore legitimate to wonder how to make room for acknowledging the role of images in their creative potential, to reintegrate them profitably within the comprehension of the unceasing process of knowledge and social creation of the real and its sense. For example, how can we contribute to the path (meta-odos) of social sciences along the impervious, fascinating itinerary to understanding the world in which, together, we live by imagining that we live? The method of the social sciences, ever since their origin in the mid-nineteenth century, has recognized a great gap between the quantitative and qualitative approach and, conversely, the numerous attempts at integrating the two; such attempts have often found themselves willy-nilly reproducing their difference, and, above all, they leave the qualitative to its inevitably secondary destiny—at least to all appearances. Yet, bit by bit, that methodological debate has been enriched by the philosophy of science and epistemology, finally and happily coming together in Edgar Morin’s voluminous work La Méthode, a naturally interdisciplinary work (structured in six volumes, published in France between 1977 and 2004; in Italy, the translations of the volumes were published between 2001 and 2008). Sailing the stormy yet alluring seas of physics and chemistry, what he calls anthropo-sociology,

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biology and ecology, ethics, and “knowledge of knowledge,” he lays the foundations for the paradigm of complexity and makes landfall at a relational, relative and multiple realism. The relationality comes from the indecipherable relation of subject/object and mind/world. The relativity comes from the relativity of the means of knowledge and from the relativity of knowable reality. The multiplicity belongs to the multiplicity of the levels of reality and, perhaps, to the multiplicity of realities. According to this relative, relational and multiple realism, our phenomenal world is real but relatively real, and we must relativize our very notion of reality, admitting it to have an internal unreality. This realism acknowledges the limits of the knowable and knows that the mystery of the real is in no way accessible to knowledge. (Morin 1986, 221–22; our It. tr.)

In spite of Morin’s great contribution, from a first brief look at the salient aspects of the contemporary methodological debate, a great gap emerges between the so-called hard sciences, especially certain fascinating fields of contemporary physics that already go well beyond the “classical” real/unreal dichotomy—having long since overtaken the visible/invisible dichotomy—and the social sciences, which still seem persistently dominated by a “great dictator,” the positivistic rationalism that strenuously defends all these dichotomies. And yet there are already numerous openings onto that “no-man’s-land,” which is the study of the nonrational, something that appears to occur only along two compulsory paths, one already well-worn and the other somewhat deadly. On the one hand, almost clandestine recourse must be had to other disciplines, such as philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and the history of art, which lead to the manifestation and reproduction of the difference and therefore the sterile specificity of a sociology or a history turning out to be “economistic.” On the other hand, we find ourselves working in a way that many define in decidedly critical tones as “intuitionistic,” hence nonscientific. It would appear essential to try a “third way,” and Morin has certainly broken new ground in that direction. In the history of philosophy and science and more generally in all reflection on knowledge, the question of method has been one of the fundamental issues. Classical philosophy, for example, in Plato and Aristotle, already initiated important thinking on the connection between knowledge, science, and method. This continued in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to arrive at a turning point with Descartes’ popular work published in 1637 under the majestic title Discourse on Method. It is certainly Descartes’ great operation of defining the scientific criteria of evident truth that defeats the skepticism of doubt and enshrines the passage to modern science and the supremacy of its criteria of truth. Among these, the most important seems to be its

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correspondence with reality thanks to which clear, distinct thought is true to the extent that it corresponds to empirical reality. So in modern science, child of that Scientific Revolution starting in the seventeenth century that determined, among others things, the cultural destinies of the West and the whole world, the scientificity of a formulation is decided by whether it is empirically verifiable. However, it has been correctly remarked that no empirical observation is able to prove incontrovertibly that a universal formulation is true, while even a single empirical observation can demonstrate that it is false. Hence, the general principle determining the scientificity of a formulation (theory) is the possibility of its falsification (Popper 1935). The American philosopher Thomas Kuhn opened his discourse on method to the question of paradigms by describing the existence of two substantially very different ways of practicing science (Kuhn 1962). In some periods, considered of “normal science,” a paradigm dictates the basic rules of the scientific method, even setting forth the issues to be investigated by science, while in other periods, those of scientific revolutions, the old paradigm is replaced by a new one, totally incompatible with the former. Revolutions come about following bitter conflict between those supporting the old paradigm and those supporting the new one, and in the end, the latter come out on top, opening up a new period of “normal science.” The best-known recent example of a scientific revolution is Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which replaced Newton’s gravitational theory. More radical than Kuhn’s is the vision of another philosopher of contemporary science, Paul Feyerabend. In his work Against Method (Feyerabend 1975), he stresses how the boundary between science and nonscience is evanescent and mutable over time such that what today is considered science may not be considered science tomorrow and vice versa. Feyerabend’s discourse has even been defined as true methodological anarchism, according to which only a libertarian attitude on the part of science and scientific practice may herald any advance in studies on what surrounds us, the world in which we live, in order that we may arrive ever closer to realizing our wish to live a gratifying life. Besides important philosophical thought and the great achievements of physics, the first half of the twentieth century saw the affirmation of another important field of knowledge, psychoanalysis, which played a major role in studying the deep-rooted connections between the level of “unreality” of dreams, associated by Freud with the unconscious, and that of reality, typical of the subject’s ostensible behavior. It was a student of Freud’s, Jung, who further investigated the more specifically social aspect of what he defined as the collective unconscious and developed the fascinating notion of synchronicity, which purported to demonstrate the existence of “acausal links” between events based not on the classic principle of lineal causality but on

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significant coincidences and energy phenomena, such phenomena even connecting mental and external events: Unexpected content in immediate or mediated relation with an external objective event coincides with the habitual psychic state: this is the fact we call synchronicity, and in my opinion we are dealing with exactly the same category of events, even if their objectivity seems separate from my awareness of space or of time. (Jung 1952; It. tr. 1980, p. 43)

The imaginary as a space for elaborating and expressing “the unreal” seems to take an ever greater part in constructing the real itself. But starting from the fundamental real/unreal dichotomy, we should stress that the great dichotomies fueling the debate on the imaginary’s role in the social construction of the real all have a remarkable assonance with one another. At least four other fundamental dichotomies seem culturally associated to this one: those between rational and irrational, between visible and invisible, between mind and body, and between science and art. At this point in our reflections, Durand’s fundamental work, The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary (Durand 1960), comes to our aid, offering a marvelous cartography of the human imaginary. From here, we venture forth into the territories, at times clear, at others rather obscure, of the role the imaginary has in humanity’s relationship with the demands of the outside environment, what Durand calls the anthropological route. Through a careful analysis of dominant bodily reflexes, verbal formats, archetypes, and symbols of the various world cultures, including those of the past, Durand presents an “isotopic” classification of images divided into two regimes, diurnal and nocturnal, and in three structures, schizomorphs, belonging to the diurnal regime, and synthetic and mystic, belonging to the nocturnal regime. The fundamental symbols are thus mapped out by following this classification. The diurnal schizomorph symbols are those semantically polarized toward separation and polemical antithesis, where the logic of exclusion and contradictions holds sway, and are typically oppositional and combative, such as the sword, while the nocturnal symbols are both those of harmonic synthesis, such as the spiral, and those of mystic confusion, such as the cup and wine. Keeping in mind Durand’s fundamental contribution, the methodological issue concerning the study of the imaginary—and how that study may in particular be carried forward in the social sciences—we come to the aim of understanding the imaginary method.

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FROM THE REAL TO THE UNREAL, THERE AND BACK The destiny of the great real/unreal dichotomy is connected to the fact that, to all appearances, it seems to be one of the essential foundations of the experience that humans have in the world they inhabit. However, if we reflect more carefully on the difference between what is considered “real” and what is relegated to the sphere of fantasy, often with disdain or at least as something marginal, albeit in a counterintuitive way, this very dichotomy appears more nuanced with respect to human experience both in a diachronic sense over the course of history and in a synchronic sense within the diverse cultures that cohabit in any given historical period. This complex nuance may be better understood if we adopt an outlook that is multidisciplinary, even interdisciplinary. Looking toward anthropology and ethnology, we may glimpse the fragile boundary between “medicine” and “magic” in many cultures of the past and as well as the present, so much so that the link between scientific progress, traditional medicines, and cultural differences is the subject of a great deal of study, for example, in medical anthropology. Likewise, in thinking of the “queen” of the hard sciences, physics, we can recall the fascinating examples of theories that have not yet been verified experimentally but that in any case produce images of the universe that conform with how we think of it, as in the case of the string theory and the theory of “extra dimensions.” However, it is true that the basic real/unreal dichotomy hides a much more complex structure, yet its historical and cultural destiny must be understood in the light of its great potentials, heuristic and for interpreting the world. In other words, there must be at least a couple of reasons for this opposition’s being so common and well defended. And these reasons would seem to be in Descartes’ formula cogito ergo sum, as brilliant as it is heuristically and methodologically useful, according to which the essence of being is found in abstract thought, separate and above all hierarchically superior to the body: that mortal body that appears as an accessory element, reminding the human being of his shameful kinship with animals, with all living things and with matter. How then can we recompose that great anthropological divide, apparently so useful, that has so badly damaged our cognitive processes and our life experience? The themes opening before us are two, method and imaginary, to overcome the Spaltung, the great division that has always and in all instances seen them as separate, and, in the spirit of the coincidentia oppositorum, to recompose a tragic schizomorph dichotomy that no longer seems capable of understanding our present, the child of that twentieth century defined by many as “the century of images.” Ever since the 1990s, in philosophy, the iconic turn has been the name given to the epistemological

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and methodological turning point conferring on image, for so long relegated to a marginal position, the dignity of being a subject of study and reflection on a par with verbal language. The iconic turn of philosophy later extended to other disciplines and other research contexts until today reflection on the statute and methodologies of image appears quite inescapable, and there is talk of a real paradigmatic turnabout. Obviously, the social sciences cannot help being involved in this lively, stimulating debate, which is increasingly a discussion on visual culture. In order to contribute to such a debate through both epistemological and methodological reflection on the imaginary as the space where images are produced and reproduced, the notion of image is to be taken in its primal sense as Bachelard and Durand teach: as a symbolic image. Symbol has a complex structure of significance, combining a symbolizer and a symbolized, which are both frequently enigmatic and ambiguous since they follow the contradictory logic in which contrasting meanings not only cohabit but also produce meaning precisely through the tension between them. A symbol, by its very nature, may indeed by a visual image, but it may also be an auditory, tactile, olfactory, or plurisensorial image, between visible and invisible. The logic of symbol is an emotionally grounded logic, the logic of thought and action, which, to be understood, requires profound critical reflection that challenges once more the epistemological foundations of Descartes’ great error. When the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio published his book Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (Damasio 1994), the responsibilities of the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes were already glaring since he is attributed with the epistemological and generally scientific destiny that has inevitably also conditioned common sense, the fracture between reason and sentiment. After Descartes, we take for granted the separation between the principles of rational logic on which the intellect and the emotional complex of feelings are grounded. It is from this speculative premise that Damasio sets out to show the basic value of emotions in cognitive processes through arguments indeed themselves speculative but also with careful, enthusiastic analyses of clinical cases. The neuroscientist’s work makes a fundamental contribution toward explaining in neurobiological terms how emotions function in their intimate connection to thought and rational action, in general, to social behavior. According to his hypothesis on the somatic marker, emotion produces a mark on situations and the outcomes of the subjects’ actions, a mark either manifest or perhaps hidden, using signals that the subjects themselves unconsciously elaborate. In particular, the intimate link between reason and feeling is to be found in that process of rapid cognition we call intuition, which operates according to past knowledge and experience elaborated on the basis of emotional processes that compete to organize both within memory. The bridge Damasio builds between

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neurobiology and culture, understood as ethical and aesthetical experience, is profoundly revolutionary. With his admirable skill in explaining complex phenomena, he starts by presenting a truth that appears self-evident, instilled in us since our school days and imposing itself as one of the visions of the world and of human beings that are taken for granted: solid, “right” decisions emanate from a “cool” mind in which rationality discards emotions that would otherwise hinder a correct analysis of the situation and consequently the correct choice. Imagining the brain behind this mind, Damasio says, we could envisage two distinct neural systems, one belonging to logical reasoning and the other to the emotional complex. The neuroscientist categorically denies this limiting image of the human being: emotions, feelings, and biological regulation of the organism all have a fundamental role in reasoning, while the area of “superior reason” is quite modest. Not only this: Damasio also adds that some “critical cerebral networks” on which feelings are founded are part of the limbic system, as are the structures of the prefrontal cerebral cortex, considered pertinent in cognitively organized behavior, as well as those areas of the encephalon that elaborate signals coming from the body. All told, we are talking about a highly complex network that assembles reason and feeling in all forms of the experience that human beings have of the world and of themselves in relation to the world. Manuel Castells is a sociologist of Spanish origin who teaches in the United States. He has successfully integrated Damasio’s research on the neurosciences with the study of online image communications, a feature of our time. Speaking of the digital revolution today seems rather predictable. The so-called millennials are youngsters born into a hyperconnected, global world whose knowledge of digital languages, for example, goes well beyond their knowledge of the languages in books. Since the new millennium, the internet, as a set of interconnected networks, is the most faithful representation of the experience we have of the world in which we live. This undoubtedly implies a paradigmatic change, the structural and relational, macro-, meso-, and micro-consequences of which are immense and as yet unclear. And undoubtedly images, understood as visual but above all as symbolicmental, play a central role in constructing and using all digital products: society is hyperconnected to and by its imaginary. The complicated issue of thought functioning in images and its implications in social terms is becoming increasingly pressing. As Castells (2009, 171) states, “We are networks in connection with a world of networks,” and if it is true that to a great extent the activity of processing external events is unconscious and takes place on the basis of neural models profoundly influenced by emotions—it suffices to think of the role of mirror neurons and their action on empathic processes—it brings us closer and closer to the deeply emotive nature of social behavior, the production of social phenomena and of the very construction of social reality,

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where the environment Castells investigated is the political one. Political persuasion, like political behavior and therefore power, are all processes emotionally founded through “networks and narratives” that ceaselessly cross the evanescent, changing boundary between real and unreal, reality and dream, rationality and magic, a boundary so evanescent that it leads to the conclusion that, in the network society, in the image society, communication is power. In attempting therefore to round off a discourse that in effect cannot be closed, indeed in attempting to go forward, it is interesting to try to formulate new, stimulating questions rather than to provide answers. The new century, or rather the new millennium, presents us with a great paradigmatic challenge, as many have stressed, and part of this challenge is the encounter with the nonrational nature of images, in their power of conformation of reality. Will we be able to integrate the following three great “families” of attitudes that appear to dominate the landscape with a prospect that will tease out anything creative and positive that the nonrational component has to offer? • reactive, iconoclastic attitudes—which desperately try to reanimate a war long ago lost • passive, self-pitying attitudes—which bespeak certain violent deviations of images without understanding their symbolic power • attitudes of unconditional exploitation of this very power of the imaginary—guiltily indifferent to any sort of ethics In this renewed, complex balance, will we be able to rethink epistemology, methodology, and research techniques, especially in the social sciences, in order to affirm the role of imagination as an active, foundational part in the very creation of a new “scientific” paradigm? Above all, will we manage to repair the rift, as ancient as it is painful, between mythical thought and rational thought, between the emotional body and the reasoning mind, between what light enables us to see and what darkness enables us to feel, before the perverse deviations of two noncommunicating spheres take control? We know that the global challenges of the immediate future are many and that time is little (Glenn and Florescu 2019). From many points of view, we are already late, such as with the environmental question and climate change, overpopulation and growing social inequality, and security concerning the spread of nuclear weapons and terrorism. This is why Morin’s warning on the need to reform the very processes of our knowledge is all the more topical and pressing albeit frequently sadly unheard. A reform is needed, and its very realization is at stake, a reform that can no longer ignore the power of the image.

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NOTE 1. The work is the result of constant consultation between the two authors; specifically, parts 1 and 2 are attributable to Fabio D’Andrea, and parts 3 and 4 attributable to Valentina Grassi.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bredekamp, H. 2010. Theorie des Bildakts. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag. Translated into Italian as Immagini che ci guardano: Teoria dell’atto iconico. Milano: Raffaello Cortina, 2015. Carmagnola, F., and V. Matera, eds. 2008. Genealogie dell’immaginario. Torino: UTET. Castells, M. 2009. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Translated into Italian as Comunicazione e Potere. Milano: Università Bocconi Editore, 2009. Damasio, A. R. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. London: Penguin Books. Translated into Italian as L’errore di Cartesio: Emozione, ragione e cervello umano. Milano: Adelphi, 2009. D’Andrea, F. 2005. L’uomo mediano: Religiosità e Bildung nella cultura occidentale. Milano: Franco Angeli. ———. 2017. “Gli elementi alla base della costruzione di senso.” In Lineamenti di sociologia generale, ed. A. Millefiorini. Rimini: Maggioli. Descartes, R. 1637. Discours de la méthode: Pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la vérité dans les sciences. Leyde: Ian Maire. Translated into Italian as Discorso sul metodo. Bari: Laterza, 1963. Durand, G. 1960. Les structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire: Introduction à l’archétypologie générale. Grenoble: Allier. Feyerabend, P. 1975. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. London: New Left Books. Translated into Italian as Contro il metodo: Abbozzo di una teoria anarchica della conoscenza. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1979. Ferrarotti, F. 2014. La parola e l’immagine: Note sulla neo-idolatria del secolo XXI. Chieti: Solfanelli. Galimberti, U. 2005. La terra senza il male: Jung: dall’inconscio al simbolo. Milano: Feltrinelli. Gleick, J. 2011a. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Open Road. ———. 2011b. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon Books. Glenn, J. C., and E. Florescu. 2019. Lo Stato del Futuro: Rapporto 19.1 del Millennium Project. Available at https:​//​www​.instituteforthefuture​.it. Grassi, V. 2006. Introduzione alla sociologia dell’immaginario. Milano: Guerini. ———. 2012. Mitodologie: Analisi qualitativa e sociologia dell’immaginario. Napoli: Liguori.

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Kuhn, T. S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jung, C. G. 1952. Synchronizitt als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhänge. In Naturerklärung und Psyche. Zürich: Rascher. Translated into Italian as La sincronicità. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1980. La Cecla, F. 2007. Perdersi: L’uomo senza ambiente. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Morin, E. 1956. Le cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire: Essai d’anthropologie. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Translated into Italian as Il cinema o l’uomo immaginario. Milano: Raffaello Cortina, 2016. ———. 1977. La Méthode 1: La Nature de la nature. Paris: Le Seuil. Translated into Italian as La natura della natura. Milano: Raffaello Cortina, 2001. ———. 1980. La Méthode 2: La Vie de la vie. Paris: Le Seuil. Translated into Italian as La vita della vita. Milano: Raffaello Cortina, 2004. ———. 1986. La Méthode 3: La Connaissance de la connaissance. Paris: Le Seuil. Translated into Italian as La conoscenza della conoscenza. Milano: Raffaello Cortina, 2007. ———. 1991. La Méthode 4: Les Idées, leur habitat, leur vie, leurs mœurs, leur organisation. Paris: Le Seuil. Translated into Italian as Le idee: Habitat, vita, organizzazione, usi e costumi. Milano: Raffaello Cortina, 2008. ———. 2001. La Méthode 5: L’Humanité de l’humanité: L’identité humaine. Paris: Le Seuil. Translated into Italian as L’identità umana. Milano: Raffaello Cortina, 2002. ———. 2004. La Méthode 6: Éthique. Paris: Le Seuil. Translated into Italian as Etica. Milano: Raffaello Cortina, 2005. Popper, K. 1935. Logik der Forschung. Vienna: Springer. Translated into Italian as Logica della scoperta scientifica. Torino: Einaudi, 1970. Ritzer, G. 1999. Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Revolutionizing the Means of Consumption. London: Pine Forge Press. Vincenzo, G. 2014. New Ritual Society: Consumismo e cultura nella società contemporanea. Bologna: Lupetti. Weber, M. 1922. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. Tubingen: Mohr. ———. 1991. Schriften zur Wissenschaftslehre. Stuttgart: Reclam.

Chapter 3

The Imaginary and the Social Bond The Unconscious Life of Representations—Durkheim, Bourdieu, Alexander Luca Mori

THE IMAGINARY, THE UNCONSCIOUS, THE SOCIAL BOND According to Max Weber, the mass action of those walking along a road who open their umbrellas when a storm starts is in no way a social action. On the contrary, the presence of a society would be evident when, at a crossroads, someone coming from the left slowed down to give way to someone coming from the right. With this example, Weber intends to indicate the fact that the social becomes manifest at the exact moment in which the action of each individual is based on the action of others, that is, when individual actions, albeit having at times very different aims, show some sort of complementarity and organization. We could therefore say that the social exists where individual actions, in spite of diversity, prove to integrate one with another. Basically, being competent members of a social system means nothing other than this: knowing how to harmonize one’s own action with that of a “number n tending to the infinite” of strangers. As we know, the means of integration are many. Some time ago, Talcott Parsons, in an attempt to fit them into some sort of system, pointed out the existence of two general ways in which social integration may come about, one inner, the other outer. Speaking of the outer way, Parsons notes that 51

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certain integrative means exist that act on the outer environment in which the action takes place. Money and power, for example, are both instruments of this type. Speaking of the inner way, Parsons recalls all those integrative processes that act directly on the subject of the action, that is, on individual consciousness. The following notes attempt to deal with the topic of social integration exclusively from this second outlook, and we will try to discuss in particular the contribution furnished by social imaginaries to this process. The topic of the imaginary is slippery ground to tread, as agreement on an exact definition is missing.1 Here we will adopt a fairly general concept, coinciding with that vast set of activities representing the real that distinguishes life in the aggregate. Briefly, by “imaginary,” we will refer to all those varied practices inherent in the production, structure, and use of the symbolic.2 The hypothesis to be explored aims to outline a relation between the integrative efficacy of the symbolic and the chances it is given to hide its own socially constructed nature. That is, the idea that the more the arbitrary, artificial origin of the symbolic is removed from the actors’ consciousness, the more it is able to realize its own potential of social integration. To test the consistency of this interpretation, we will try to track down its presence in the work of three thinkers who, in spite of their occasionally strident diversity, seem to have a certain sensibility in common toward the imaginary and the role played by the unconscious in collective life. We are speaking of Émile Durkheim, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jeffrey Alexander.3 In the main, what we will attempt is to show the existence among these three authors of an underground dialogue focusing on the integrative strength of the social imaginary as a function of its ability to penetrate the unconscious in the minds of the actors. First of all, therefore, we will turn to Durkheim and his concept of society. In the wake of Gianfranco Poggi (2003), in reconstructing the conceptual apparatus that the French sociologist places at the base of his idea of the social, this work will attempt to highlight how, consubstantially with it, there is an unconscious mode of production, structuring, and use of the social imaginary. Whether the outcome of such activity is called collective consciousness or else social representation, in order for the symbolic order to carry out its function of social integration fully, it needs to appear obvious and natural. Whereas as soon as imaginal activity goes forward within the conscious regime of “organic reflectivity,” we see that the integrative force no longer takes effect. Further on in this chapter, it will be shown how the themes of the imaginary and the unconscious are taken up again by Pierre Bourdieu, always in integrative terms. However, the interpretation offered by Bourdieu is radically different from Durkheim’s. We will see that in the case of Bourdieu, unlike Durkheim, the constitution of the social bond cannot be independent of the

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realities of power and domination. The social order, in this author, indeed coincides with the order of domination (Paolucci 2011). Yet it is precisely in the mechanisms designated to activate the domination that Durkheim’s concept comes strongly to the fore regarding the issue of the imaginary and the unconscious. For Bourdieu, in fact, domination is always a symbolic domination arising through the imposition of hierarchical criteria whose arbitrariness must be “misrecognized,” which means that such arbitrariness has to be perceived both by the dominating and above all by the dominated in the terms of an objectivity. Yet again, therefore, at the root of social integration, we find not only the presence of symbolic structures but also the necessity for the unconscious removal of their constructed, arbitrary nature. In conclusion, we will consider the figure of Jeffrey Alexander. In explicitly including his sociology in the wake of Durkheim’s tradition (Alexander 1988; Alexander and Mast 2006), Alexander greatly insisted on the essential role in integrative processes played by the construction and sharing of the imaginaries. In modern societies, characterized by the pluralization of the symbolic and of cultural distance, the creation of the social bond depends on the capacity of groups to transfer to others the sense of their own social condition. It is therefore a question of planning and carrying out symbolic practices that produce the imaginary, practices defined by Alexander (2004) with the term “performance” that are characterized by their strategic and reflective meaning. In spite of this, at the basis of the conditions determining the success of these practices and therefore the creation of symbolic links between groups, we find once more the need to remove their strategic origin. As we shall see, a successful performance is one that succeeds in transporting both actors and spectators into a state of “flow,” a conscious condition, very close to Durkheim’s condition of collective effervescence, featured by the removal, in he who experiences it, of the awareness of the artificiality of the performance. In Alexander too, therefore, the integrative potentials of the symbolic depend, again, on the chances of unconscious naturalization. The chapter ends with a brief consideration on the role that body and emotions seem to play in these three different theoretical proposals. DURKHEIM, MASTER OF SUSPICION As we said, if we intend to discuss the integrative role played by the imaginary, there is perhaps no better way to start than to go back to Durkheim’s sociology. As we know, while never having proposed a systematic definition of society (Poggi 2003), in numerous points of his production, this author gives us to understand that his idea of social coincides essentially with a mental dimension (Falasca Zamponi 2014), with a system of representations more

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or less structured, distinct, and often opposed to the reality of the instincts and primary needs: Durkheim conceptualizes society as a set of mental frameworks that affect the interaction of human individuals. Society exists for him if, and to the extent that, such interactions are controlled by mental images rather than by the laws of matter or of the instincts. (Poggi 2003, 122)

We might perhaps say that for Durkheim, society really exists when the action responds to ideal imperatives that contrast with the biological-material component of the subject. We know that basically Durkheim (1914) has a vision of the human as a double nature, characterized internally by a continual relational tension in which an instinctive polarity of a physical kind and a moral-normative polarity of a social kind slowly arrive at a mutual definition. The social is therefore an abstract, we could say imaginary, force that resides in the consciousness of the subject and that interacts constantly with what is really his drive dimension.4 This is undoubtedly an interpretation to be found in the texts. Among the many pieces that Durkheim devotes to the issue, one should be recalled; it is contained in the essay on the difference between individual representations and collective representations (Durkheim 1898a), where, in my opinion, the theme of society’s mental nature appears quite clearly: When we use the word “psychology” by itself we mean individual psychology, and for the sake of clarity in discussion it is convenient to limit the word to this. Collective psychology is sociology, quite simply—why not employ the latter term exclusively? Inversely the word “psychology” has always designated the science of the individual mentality—why not reserve this meaning to it? (Durkheim 1989a; Eng. tr. 2010, 15)

Hence, if psychology is the science of individual mentality, then sociology, seeing that it coincides with collective psychology, can be none other than the science of social mentality.5 Society is therefore what emerges following the combination, the overlapping among elements that are common to diverse individual mentalities; society exists to the extent in which there is some form of integration between the images of reality inside the subjects’ heads. Therefore, the imaginary and integration are concepts that appear immediately as the building blocks of Durkheim’s idea of social. Yet the simple sharing of interpretive and representative frameworks is by no means sufficient to explain the whole of Durkheim’s conception of society. Indeed, to stop here would induce a completely misleading reading for two reasons. First, the combining process that brings about the integration of representations is not at all a reflective dynamic as it may appear (Karsenti

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1999). For Durkheim, in fact, the origin of the social cannot be set down at any decisional or contractual moment, so to speak. This is a question of deadly importance for the discourse we intend to develop: Durkheim’s social depends not at all on any process of rational decision making or on any form of collective awareness. Second, it must be remembered that representations are social to the extent that their contents are binding. To the extent, that is, that they are accompanied by some form of sanction, whether positive or negative, formal or informal. It is therefore the origin of the compulsoriness (Poggi 2003), the authoritativeness (Nisbet 1966) and more in general the force (Takla and Pope 1987) with which the representations are imposed on the individual consciousness that we need to understand if we wish to grasp the deepest sense of Durkheim’s proposal. In a passage from The Rules, Durkheim returns to the subject of the combination of individual representations to explain the results: Society is not the mere sum of individuals, but the system formed by their association represents a specific reality which has its own characteristics. Undoubtedly no collective entity can be produced if there are no individual consciousnesses: this is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. In addition, these consciousnesses must be associated and combined, but combined in a certain way. It is from this combination that social life arises and consequently it is this combination which explains it. (Durkheim 1895; Eng. tr. 2013b, 86, emphasis added)

And again, on the same issue, at the beginning of the essay on the doubleness of human nature, he writes, For Society cannot constitute itself unless it penetrates individual consciousness and fashions them “in its image and likeness.” . . . The product par excellence of collective activity is the set of intellectual and moral goods called civilization. . . . But, in another aspect, it is civilization that has made man into what he is; it is this that distinguishes him from the animal. (Durkheim 1914; Eng. tr. 2005, 35)

From these two passages, it would seem impossible to find in Durkheim an embryonic formulation of a social theory as emerging reality. In fact, according to the emergentist approach (Clayton 2004), a reality may be termed emergent when (1) its properties are new and irreducible with respect to those of the elements of which it is made and (b) it exerts a causal retroaction on the same elements that have made it. Both conditions seem fulfilled by the Durkheim conception: the social is a reality sui generis, diverse from the sum of the individual realities of which it is made up, on which it causally retracts. Yet if, on the one hand, the distinction between emergent reality and

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its component parts seems clear, then, on the other, the mechanism by which it realizes the leap in complexity seems less evident. What happens during the association that enables the reality that emerges to retroact on its base elements? To be consistent with Durkheim, what is there in the combination of the individual representations that is able to confer compulsoriness and authoritativeness on social representations?6 To get to the bottom of this question, it is useful to go back to what Durkheim formulated regarding the genesis of the collective consciousness in segmented societies (Durkheim 1893). In his opinion, the organization of such societies is characterized by low social differentiation. The role divisions among the clan members are slight, and, given the narrow dimensions of the society, life goes on within fairly similar portions of territory. The outcome of this is a general concreteness and identity of contents of individual consciousness. That means that the members of clan societies, thanks to the identical relationship they have with their own environment, will have extremely similar personalities and practically identical ways of representing the real: In a small society, since everybody is roughly placed in the same conditions of existence, the collective environment is essentially concrete. It is made up of human beings of every kind who people the social horizon. The states of consciousness that represent it are therefore of the same character. At first they relate to precise objects, such as a particular animal, tree, plant, or natural force, etc. Then, since everyone is similarly placed in relation to these things, they affect every individual consciousness in the same way. The whole tribe, provided it is not too extensive, enjoys or suffers equally the advantages and inconveniences of sun and rain, heat and cold or of a particular river or spring, etc. (Durkheim 1893; Eng tr. 2013, 226)

And it is their very identity, that is, the fact that such representations are present simultaneously in the consciousness of the social actors, that gives them their character of obligation of which Durkheim tells us. In The Division, he does not examine in detail the mechanism at the root of the phenomenon,7 yet the idea seems to be as follows: since the same representations are identically present in the consciousness of all the social actors, the result is the conviction that their origin cannot be of individual nature or of human nature but is external to them. That is, the representations seem to belong to a different order, separate and forbidden, more noble and powerful than the human order. And in fact, in order to define the character of representations and collective sentiments, he writes again in The Division, Since these sentiments, because of their collective origin, their universality, their permanence over time, and their intrinsic intensity, are exceptionally strong,

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they stand radically apart from the rest of our consciousness, where other states are much weaker. They dominate us, they possess, so to speak, something superhuman about them. . . . Thus, they appear to us to be an echo resounding within ourselves of a force that is alien, one moreover superior to that which we are ourselves. (Durkheim 1893; Eng tr. 2013, 78)

This impression of otherness and exteriority, however, also echoes in perhaps the best-known formulation in Durkheim’s conceptuality, that of social fact: “any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external constraint” (Durkheim 1895; Eng. tr. 2013, 27). In spite of this, the authoritativeness and compulsoriness incurred by social representations basically depend only on a mistake, an illusion, the collective removal that in turn is to be connected in the end with the order of the social structure and with the relation it holds to the physical environment (Schnore 1958). To insist on the point, the whole force of social representations is found in the fact that their origin is hidden by the optical effect produced by the individual representations being reflected one in the others. It is the clan members’ lack of consciousness of the objective origin of their ways of behaving, feeling, and thinking that enables them to acquire the authoritativeness and compulsoriness of the sacred.8 It is significant in this regard that Durkheim (1893) speaks of social representations and their way of directing action as “superstitions.” In fact, he says, “Precisely speaking, the whole life of the sensibility is made up only of superstitions, since it precedes and rules the judgement, rather than depends upon it” (Durkheim 1893; Eng. tr. 2013, 154). And again, in discussing criminal law and the religious aura encircling it, he textually states that “such a representation is assuredly an illusion” (Durkheim 1893; Eng. tr. 2013, 77), and, in fact, in his opinion, “it is within us, and within us alone, that are to be found the feelings that have been offended” (Durkheim 1893; Eng. tr. 2013, 77). Unlike in The Division, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim 1912), the description of the combination process of individual representations comes to the fore. Frequently considered as the most fascinating and mysterious of Durkheim’s production, the text can be read as a journey, an excavation into the unconscious of modern societies (Bellah 1959, 1973; Tiryakian 1979). Concentrating analysis on the aboriginal society of Central Australia, Durkheim’s viewpoint is able to go beyond the various types of self-understanding of modernity (Rosati 2005) and thus offers a portrayal of what is systematically hidden, excluded, and removed in such societies. The focus of the analysis concerns the communication of identity of individual representations. In other terms, Durkheim concentrated on exploring the ways in which the members of clan societies express the visions and representations of reality that they hold in common. It is not sufficient that the

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representations are identical: in order to be shared, such identity must also be communicated. In his opinion, the framework within which the phenomenon happens is structured in rituals. In Durkheim’s opinion, it is in fact in ritual that the genesis and flow can be observed of that magma, both cognitive and emotive, which once solidified (Santambrogio 2006) will constitute the representational substance at the base of social institutions. As we know, one feature of such a practice is primarily to have no utilitarian aim (Fele 2002). A ritual, of course, may have practical aims, such as obtaining the favor of the powers of nature, bringing about good harvests, or carrying out and enshrining a change of status. However, its efficacy is taken for granted and never questioned. As Durkheim (2012) himself says, the fact that rituals produce the results expected responds to a sort of necessity. Then, in addition, the ritual requires the presence of a number of individuals; in Durkheim’s opinion, the original dimension of the ritual is undoubtedly collective: it foresees a concentration of subjects in a communal space and their direct perception of the multitude thus brought together. Finally, the ritual implies the collective adoption of some form of communication serving to bring about the unity of the group and draw the boundaries that separate it from the outside. Whether in songs, dances, specific discourses, or stereotyped gestures, their exclusive underlying function is to create an endogenous center of attention for the group (Fele and Giglioli 2001). To go to extremes, ritual is nothing but the way the group has to tell itself that it is a group and that it agrees to be a group. The result of all these elements is the notorious state of “collective effervescence”: a state of consciousness investing those taking part in the ritual that Durkheim (1912), using the etymological acceptation of the word, qualifies as ecstatic: which means a “being outside” of the individual’s consciousness, its tumultuous, violent flooding of the defenses of personal demeanor, to dissolve together into a common emotional state (of exaltation, commotion, grief, and so on). We might say that the ritual “works” to the extent that it causes an alteration in the consciousness of the participants. Indeed, what could that force be, so powerful and invasive, that invests the subject? To whom does it belong? To which order of events? Evidently, it cannot come from the ordinary world, it cannot be triggered by a human source, and it must undoubtedly arrive from another extraordinary reality, totally irreducible to the daily one and, with respect to the latter, radically diverse.9 It must evidently be a case of a sacred force. Hence, it is thanks to the ritual and to the emotional discombobulation induced in those taking part that such a dimension is generated and made perceptible. (Or it would be better to say that it is generated precisely by being made perceptible.) And it is again thanks to such discombobulation that social representations find their origin jointly with their features of compulsoriness and authoritativeness. Yet, once again, all this depends only on the emotional

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tumult caused by the feeling of belonging generated within the group, on that sense of dizziness and exaltation coming from the awareness of being part of it. Yet in the eyes of the Australian Aborigine, all this appears as something very different. Here once more, therefore, we find that mechanism of concealment and camouflage and deviation of view necessary to cause that sensation of exteriority and otherness of the social fact. The question is different in the modern scenario. There, the processes of social differentiation have the effect, among others, of radically diversifying the contents of consciousness. The representations of reality no longer feature the homogeneity typical of the segmentary stage but show great variety and many differences. Yet as we know, for Durkheim, collective consciousness does not disappear. Indeed, as an emergent reality retroacting on the components that constructed it, it takes the lead, so to speak, in the process of differentiation. That is to say, it supplies that basis of solidarity10 necessary for the differentiation process to work harmoniously and to prevent the danger of social disaggregation. In Durkheim’s opinion, in accomplished modernity, the collective consciousness is by no means waning; indeed, it is becoming established on far more abstract and general coordinates than at the segmentary stage. The point of greatest abstraction it reaches is indicated by the institutionalization of autonomy and individual freedoms as the greatest social value (Durkheim 1898b). This is because a collective consciousness calibrated on values of individuality, founded on freedom and the autonomy of subjects, tolerates, safeguards, and even promotes a great imaginative and representational variety and therefore allows greater inclusion and social integration of diversities. The integrative role of collective consciousness is also corroborated and assisted by the action of the state. Durkheim (1950) believes it is, to say the least, bizarre that even when a liberal imaginary comes into being founded on the criticism of political power and on the limitation of state action, states grow and take unto themselves an incredible number of functions. In line with his evolutionist credo, Durkheim (1893) understands the state as an outcome of evolutionary processes investing the social. As biological systems, once beyond a certain level of complexity, see the emergence of a cerebrospinal organ to which general coordination of the vital functions is delegated, similarly social systems, beyond a certain stage, also see the formation of centers for organization and general coordination of their own functions, and such centers are indeed the states. However—and here we return directly to the topic of integration and the imaginary—for Durkheim, the states are organisms entrusted with eminently speculative tasks. To put it more clearly, according to Durkheim, the state has the general function of processing and conveying completely social images. Since society is in fact differentiated and characterized by wide-ranging representational diversities, the state

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assists the function of the collective consciousness by aiming to transfer the idea of the wholly social in which each may (and, we might say, must) feel part. Staying in close contact with the intermediary groups (corporations and families), the state gathers information on the “conditions” of society, which it then re-elaborates and conveys in organic form. This is why Durkheim maintains that the state is the center of a new mental life, for the state is the center par excellence of the production of the social imaginary; by this, he means that it is the only place where it is possible to imagine society in its entirety (Karsenti 1999). Yet in spite of these efforts to conserve the idea of social integration founded on mental representations and in spite of the optimism shown in this regard by much of the writing from his later years (Durkheim 1989b, 1950), Durkheim, as we know, ends his scientific career on a profoundly pessimistic note concerning the destiny of modernity. His mistrust derives basically from the inability of modern societies to arouse in their own members those strong emotional states we saw featured in Aboriginal life during the sacred rituals performed by communities. Individual cult, while being a social representation, remains individual, so to speak, in its object and is therefore unable to set in motion ritual practices capable of sweeping those involved into a state of collective effervescence. This is similar to social representations constructed reflectively by the state. Civil rituals do not appear to be effective in achieving any ecstatic condition; the emotional tumult they cause—if they do—is nowhere near able to approach that of the great religious rituals (Rosati 2005). The idea taking shape in the later Durkheim is that society is a fragile, transitory reality, that it lives just as long as it is present in the consciousness of its subjects (Poggi 2003). Once more, we discover that the destiny of the social understood as the mental reality residing in the individual mind depends in the end on a device such as the ritual to act on the emotional state of individuals in order to succeed in removing from their memory the artificial, arbitrary nature of such a representation. In effect, the social resists or exists internally in the consciousness of the actors to the extent to which its imaginary nature is concealed. To conclude, we find in Durkheim the idea that the constituent basis, the original substance of the social, emerges in an integration process between the perceptive and interpretive formats used by actors in relating to the real. This dynamic, however, does not at all present itself as a conscious, rational procedure reflectively agreed on. Indeed, it appears to be based on repression and, more precisely, on the repression of its arbitrary, subjective, endogenous origin. That is to say, the social bond is something actively produced by each subject taking part in the ritual, yet the strong emotional experience renders it objectivized in a structure of symbolic representations that appear to come from outside. As Fele (2002, 213) writes, “Once produced and realized,

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the sacred acquires autonomous life: it loses (causes the loss of) memory of its origin, it forgets (causes to be forgotten) its genesis.” Again, in the same approach, Bernhard Giesen (2006) has shown how the sacred, within Durkheim’s tradition, is the way to indicate the social bond exactly in terms of an emergent reality, that is, in terms of that remnant that makes of the social something different with respect to the sum of its parts, a remnant that can be understood in representational terms. In this tradition of thought, the sacred is basically also that deviation of attention that allows the social group to sink its own constituent roots into an otherness as imaginary as it is radical. The more it is influenced by the reflectivity typical of modernity, the more modernity itself becomes an anomic season. BOURDIEU AND THE IMAGINARY ORDER OF SYMBOLIC DOMINATION The idea of the imaginary as an integration instrument and careful attention to the role played by the unconscious dimension in social dynamics are elements found at the center of Pierre Bourdieu’s work as well. A great innovator of Durkheim’s vision, Bourdieu was the author who, with Erving Goffman, was most dedicated to trying to cross the limits inherent in the Épinal sociologist’s approach. His deviation with respect to Durkheim’s thinking is found in the different conception of the reality of power. In Durkheim’s vision, clashes between the social forces are always seen as dynamics with moderating outcomes (Ceri 1993). The idea is that of a complex game of weights and counterweights, of motivations and limitations, to guarantee harmony in the social order. Just as an example, cross-checking between state powers and civil society generates the autonomy of the subject while favoring community “belonging” (Borghini 2017); similarly, the balance between the driving and the moral forces inherent in human nature guarantees a correct individual orientation toward intersubjectivity (Paoletti 2012). Fundamentally, in Bourdieu as well, power exerts an ordering action, but the order it helps to realize coincides with the establishment within the social space of the reality of domination, that is, with the establishment (and the reproduction) of a rigid hierarchical order, material and symbolic in nature, as we shall see. From this point of view, we could say that for Bourdieu, the social order coincides with the domination order. In Bourdieu’s conception, in fact, social reality is clearly unfair (Paolucci 2011). Sociology’s task is to attempt to explain how, in spite of this profound injustice, it can so very easily reproduce itself, unvaried, without its legitimacy being queried.11 We could therefore say that in Bourdieu, the question of social integration is from the beginning associated with the question of domination: what is integrated

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is the strength and preeminence of certain groups with the weakness and subordination of certain others. Yet as we said, in spite of this discrepancy between his views and Durkheim’s, far from affirming the uselessness of the latter’s thinking,12 Bourdieu paradoxically made a point of offering a reading of such phenomena that, in the opinion of the present writer, may be defined as decidedly Durkheimian. The starting point is the complicity that, according to Bourdieu, marks the relationship between the dominant and the dominated. That is to say that the reproduction of the subordinate state could not come about if there were not some form of consent on the part of the dominated regarding the supremacy of the dominant. In Bourdieu’s thinking, in order to exist, domination needs the collaboration of those on which it is imposed. However, it is a highly particular collaboration. First, we should note that the dominators and the dominated are quite unaware of this alliance; the latter’s acceptance of the supremacy of the former is unreflected, tacit; in a word, it is an unconscious acceptance. Saying that means that what is beyond the consciousness of the actors is the objective source fueling the domination. On various occasions, especially in certain of his texts oriented more toward theoretical analysis,13 in order to clarify the point, Bourdieu (1972, 1980, 1994) has recourse to the figure of the khammès. The khammès is a sharecropper in Kabylia; for a paltry percentage of the harvest, hardly enough to keep him alive, he accepts practically total subservience to the landowner for whom he works. He leaves his own house and moves permanently to the master’s residence; his children become the master’s children, and should they find work in town, they devolve almost all their earnings to the latter. The relationship between khammès and master is, all in all, one of total material exploitation. Yet Bourdieu notes that, bit by bit, symbolic significations cover over this exploitation in order to mask the naked reality of domination, making it seem like something completely different. Not only does the master have to take care of the marriages of the khammès’ children, he is also responsible for defending their honor. Whoever offends the khammès in effect offends the master. Conversely, the master can entrust his house, his property, and his own honor to the khammès. Hence, through a continuous flow of proverbs, sayings, speeches, traditions, rituals, and so on, material dominion is symbolized (Bourdieu would say “euphemized”) in terms of an association, a bond almost parental in nature. As he remarks, If the master wanted to persuade the khammes to devote himself over a long period to the pursuit of the master’s interests, he had to associate him completely with those interests, masking the asymmetry of the relationship by symbolically denying it in all his behaviour.The master could get his khammès to devote himself long-term to his interests only by associating him completely to his

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interest, to the point of masking, denying symbolically in all his behaviour, the asymmetry of the relations uniting them. (Bourdieu 1980; Eng. tr. 1990, 127)

We now observe a process of fundamental importance in the use of domination and the role it plays in the symbolic dimension. First, we may say that it acts as a transfer operator, a warping mirror14 that reflects material power relations in terms of logical relations, obvious and therefore taken for granted. It is quite evident that the khammès devotes body and soul to safeguarding his master’s interests, seeing that they are systematically presented as being one and the same as his own. Hence, the symbolic is, for Bourdieu, a social representation of the reality in which the power relations expressed therein appear only as relations of sense (Bourdieu 1979b). But, second, in order to do so, the symbolic must camouflage the objective relations of power under a gloss that can dull it nature, so that it presents itself and is perceived in a different way. For example, returning to the khammès, the symbolic presents a relation of economic exploitation as one of fraternal collaboration. This is what Bourdieu means when he speaks of “euphemization,” and it is this that allows the “mis-recognition” of the reality of domination while at the same time acknowledging its legitimation and reproduction. The symbolic, then, far from being purely and simply an instrument to build and represent reality, is also and above all an instrument of domination; in fact, operating an orchestration and therefore a cognitive harmonization between dominating and dominated, it also—thanks to the same logic—prepares “the integration of an arbitrary social order” (Wacquant 1992, 21), naturalizing its injustices. The example of the master-khammès relationship is also useful to understand how symbolic resources constitute real capital, which, like all the others, can be saved and invested in view of future income. In premodern societies, the accumulation of symbolic capital depends on a continuous expressive work of representation. As we saw, the master must take the family of the khammès into his own home, defend their honor, look after his children, talk to him every day, and invest his own time in the relationship, all activities necessary to present and represent the khammès as a partner and a relative. On the other hand, in Bourdieu’s (1980) opinion, in modern societies, symbolic capital does not need to be continually created and re-created. It is inscribed, so to speak, in a whole series of traits, whether attributive or acquisitive: ethnicity, skin color, sex, noble titles, academic qualifications, and social ranks, all elements equipped with some form of symbolic capital of greater or lesser value. In this regard, Bourdieu’s consideration on Weber’s concept of class is enlightening: “Status groups” based on a “life-style” and a “stylization of life” are not, as Weber thought, a different kind of group from classes, but dominant classes that

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have denied or, so to speak, sublimated themselves and so legitimated themselves. (Bourdieu 1980; Eng. tr. 1990, 139)

Notoriously, Bourdieu (1986) distinguishes three forms of capital: economic, cultural, and social.15 We might think of symbolic capital as the form of capital emerging from the combination of these three basic forms. Just as in Durkheim, social representation emerges from the combination of individual representations16 and, once emerged, is able to retroact on them; so in Bourdieu too, symbolic capital, which—we must not forget—is in fact the capacity to orient the way of thinking and representing social reality, constitutes a form of emergent capital capable of retroacting on those that originated it, guaranteeing its legitimacy and reproduction. And yet, while for Durkheim the genesis of the combining process was to be found in a basic identity (of individual representations), for Bourdieu the origin of the symbolic is to be found in a difference, a difference of position (high vs. low) in the hierarchic scale of domination, which, in turn, depends on the difference in the composition of the capital portfolios possessed by individuals. Looking again at the analogies and differences between Bourdieu and Durkheim, we should recall that the body, with its sensations and emotions, is a factor of fundamental importance in the economy of symbolic capital. For Bourdieu, domination is also inscribed first and foremost in bodies, then in minds. It could be said that the efficacy with which the symbolic manages to pass off forced relations for sense relations depends precisely on the fact that such relations have been previously laid down and interiorized at body level, that is, at a level that is totally pre-linguistic and pre-reflective. In Bourdieu’s opinion, in fact, symbolic domination is exerted through a violence itself symbolic, a meticulous work of training and socialization carried out almost only tacitly: The formative process, Bildung, in the full sense, which brings about this social construction of the body only very partially takes the form of explicit and express pedagogic action. (Bourdieu 1998; Eng. tr. 2002, 24)

Automatic and without agents of a physical and social order organized completely on arbitrary principles of hierarchy, it is to a great extent the effect that establishes what is high and what is low, what is noble and what is vulgar, and what is refined and what is gross. And it is thanks to this gentle violence investing the body, to this widespread work of meticulous, detailed socialization, that the integration through domination is achieved of which we spoke at the outset. Through this effect, the dominating will be directed naturally and spontaneously to the exercise of symbolic power, while the dominated

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will just as naturally be predisposed to docile submission, all this through the exploitation of the efficient emotive lever offered, yet again, by bodies: Practical recognition through which the dominated, often unwittingly, contribute to their own domination by tacitly accepting, in advance, the limits imposed on them, often takes the form of bodily emotion (shame, timidity, anxiety, guilt), often associated with the impression of regressing towards archaic relationships. Those of childhood and the family. (Bourdieu 1997a; Eng. tr., 2000, 169)

If the “innate” instinct of the dominated directs him toward self-censorship, the instinct motivating the dominant seems to be quite the opposite, that is, inspired by over-self-assurance. Bourdieu’s considerations regarding the “natural” attitude of the élite are particularly useful: Ease, a sort of indifference to the objectifying gaze of others which neutralizes its powers, presupposes the self-assurance which comes from the certainty of being able to objectify that objectification, appropriate that appropriation, of being capable of imposing the norms of apperception of one’s own body, in short, of commanding all the powers which, even when they reside in the body and apparently borrow its most specific weapons, such as “presence” or charm, are essentially irreducible to it. (Bourdieu 1979a; Eng. tr. 1984, 207–8)

If here, on the one hand, the analogy to Durkheim can be traced back to making the emotion the main pivot on which the whole integration device rotates, then, on the other, the difference seems perhaps to be found in the deformity of the emotive experience required and therefore produced by the social structure. If in Durkheim it was a question of ecstatic tumult that uniformly enveloped the social body, impressing an extroverted movement on the consciousness of its members, here we are in front of two different emotive experiences, two different ways of being, two different hexis—as Bourdieu would say—of the body. As we said, in the dominated, we find the alienated and alienating experience of self-censorship somatically felt through the whole introverted emotional plethora of behavior: embarrassment, timidity, shame, blushing, and so on. In the dominant, however, we find the measured assurance given by the practical certainty of appearing to the other as it is desirable to appear.17 In any case, in spite of the radical distance between the meanings that integrative practices take on in these two theoretical proposals,18 there is no doubt that for both, the nucleus of sense on which they are activated is the production, organization, and use of symbolic representations, and for both proposals, the relationship between the representational universe of the imaginary and the social actors is not at all pertinent to reflective activity but indeed something that, through bodily emotion, refers to the underground

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world of the collective unconscious. However, thanks to the diversity in how the sense of social integration is conceived, reflectivity also takes on a different meaning. As we have seen in Durkheim, becoming aware of the arbitrary and artificial nature of the symbolic can represent a weak point endangering the general strength of the social bond, whereas in Bourdieu, it represents the single, arduous road to be taken in order to “defatalize” the symbolic and guarantee oneself at least a minimum space free from domination. From this point of view, in our opinion, sociology is faced with a task of monumental responsibility: “struggling against the contributions supplied by the symbolic order’s reproduction mechanisms for the maintenance of constituted order” (Bourdieu 1997b). This is an action of disclosure that may have both a political aim when directed at the symbolic structures that govern the life of others and a self-analytical or rather a socio-analytical aim if the sociologist—as he should always do—operates on himself a deconstruction of the dispositional complex governing his pre-comprehension of the world (Bourdieu 1997b). Naturally, not only is the difficulty of the task in the complexity and vastness of the work required, but, since it is a question of carrying out a disclosing action on the unconscious structures regulating the social order, not unusually the result obtained will be met with an absolutely net refusal. This is a response that is symptomatic and an integral part of the logic with which symbolic dominance works: In as much as his work of objectifying and unveiling often leads him to produce the negation of a denegation, the sociologist must expect to see his discoveries both swept aside as trivial observations that have been known for all eternity, and violently contested, by the same people, as notorious errors with no other basis than polemical malevolence or envious resentment. When this has been said, he must not use these resistances, which are very similar to those encountered in psychoanalysis, though more powerful because they are supported by collective mechanisms, as a reason for forgetting that the work of repression and the more or less fantastical constructions that it produces are part of the truth, with the same status as what they seek to disguise. (Bourdieu 1997a; Eng. tr. 2000, 190)

ALEXANDER AND THE FLOW OF PERFORMATIVE ACTION The last figure we will look at in bringing this work to a conclusion is Jeffrey Alexander. This is an author who has openly declared that he wishes to include his own theoretical approach within the Durkheimian tradition (Alexander 1988) and to distance it radically from the work of Pierre

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Bourdieu (Alexander 1995). We do not intend here to enter into details of the divergences separating Alexander’s sociology from Bourdieu’s. In this regard, see Paolucci (2011). Concerning the aim of this chapter, it will be sufficient to recall a fairly specific aspect of his theoretical proposal, one that Alexander formulated at the beginning of this century and that goes under the name of “pragmatic culture” (Alexander 2004). Very briefly, Alexander follows Durkheim in noticing how the progression of the modern has produced an enormous segmentation and pluralization of representations and symbolic plexuses of social imaginaries. From this aspect, in Alexander’s opinion, Durkheim is right to underline how, in contexts so culturally differentiated, the ritual practice loses central position with respect to the role of production and maintenance of social integration that it held in the past. But—and this is Alexander’s proposal—if it is true that we are seeing the eclipse of the ritual, we cannot by any means say that we are also seeing the eclipse of the symbolic action in general. For Alexander, in fact, what we call ritual is only the form, the specific way in which we administer the symbolic practice in culturally homogeneous contexts. As we saw in the discussion on Durkheim, ritual is effectively that symbolic practice that, starting from a basic representational identity, cannot help producing collective effervescence; that is, it cannot help but achieve its own aim. On the contrary, in the plural, differentiated contexts of the modern, symbolic practice takes on the guise of performance, in other words, the traits of a risky practice with uncertain results: The social actors who play ritual leaders have become defused from their roles, and audiences have become defused from ritual productions. Participation in, and acceptance of, ritual messages are more a matter of choice than obligation. The process by which culture gets embedded in action, in fact, more closely resembles the dynamics of theatrical production, criticism, and appreciation than it resembles old fashioned rituals. (Alexander and Mast 2006, 17)

The performance, therefore, comes across as a symbolic act, strategic in character (Alexander 2004), that is, an act intending to communicate the sense and meaning of one’s own social condition. To the extent that the performance succeeds, a fusion will come about between actors and spectators from which will spring what Alexander (2004) calls “cultural extension.” In other words, the performance must succeed in order to achieve social integration by means of the imaginary. Conversely, an unfortunate performance is one that fails to create fusion. Actors and spectators remain in a state of alienation, a state of defusion, respectively, toward their roles and the meaning of the performance.

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As we said, given that the performance is a strategic act, it is evident that it needs a whole procedure of preparation for its execution. First, a script must be elaborated and followed during the representation. In general, such a script is set out on the basis of consolidated social representations in already existing imaginaries. In this case, Alexander speaks of foreground scripts and background representations; to explain the dynamic, he refers to the first few pages of the Brumaire: The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just as they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and borrowed language. Thus, Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789–1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793–95. (Marx 1852, It. tr. 1977, 10)

All told, in order to show others and themselves the sense of their own identity, the collective actors elaborate interpretations of the past that are condensed into scenarios that are a preliminary outline of the performance. But what is it that determines the success of a performance? What is the element decreeing the acceptance, confirmation, and identification of the audience with the situation shown by the actors? First, in order that the performance be successful, it has to be the actors themselves who primarily perceive the authenticity of the identity they are about to present. So that the message contained in the script reaches the audience, there needs to be an identification or, better, a cathexis between the social actor and the script. Second, the cathexis to appear between the actor and the script must reach out to touch the audience too (Alexander 2004). The purpose of the performative act thus becomes that of canceling as far as possible any emotive, symbolic, and cognitive dissonance that might distance script, actor, and audience. Naturally, in order to carry out the identification processes described, external factors of fundamental importance are needed, such as the actors’ possession of adequate symbolic means to realize the performative act, the presence of the spaces necessary to realize it, the degree of cultural differentiation of the audience they address, and the setup of external social powers, distributive and interpretive (Alexander 2004).19 In spite of the complexity of the factors contributing to the success of the performative act, it is interesting to note how Alexander repeatedly qualifies a successful performance with the adjective “seamless” (Alexander 2004,

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529, 540, 548, 564, 567). A successful performance is capable of concealing the signs of the “welding” that serves to hold together all its elements. In short, the successful performance is that communicative operation, complex and artificial, that manages to appear authentic and spontaneous. Here the key word, taken by Alexander from Turner’s essay on the Ndembu religion (Turner 1987), is “flow.” The successful performance sweeps actors and spectators into an emotive, cognitive dimension that recalls the collective effervescence of Durkheim. On the one hand, the actors who experience the flow seem to forget the symbolic nature of their act. The distinction between interior state of awareness and external social actions turns out to be without relevance, as even the presence of external observers seems to be without relevance. For these reasons, Turner (1987) suggests that in the flow, there is a loss of ego, and for the same reasons, he speaks of the flow as a state of fusion between action and awareness. On the other hand, however, the spectators too can (and must) find themselves in a condition of flow. Seen through the eyes of the audience, this experience consists in forgetting the artificial nature of the performance and, above all, forgetting, while it goes forward, the reality outside it (Csikszentmihalyi, cited in Alexander 2004). To complete the picture, it must be remembered that the concept of performance does not coincide with that of action. The subject of the action does not accomplish the condition of flow. His is a rigidly dualistic reality. Not only is the act he carries out not planned beforehand, it is submitted to a reflective monitoring throughout its execution. Conversely, the performance claims for itself a purely event-based nature. It must appear spontaneous and remote from any planning or strategy. As we have seen, here the interior reality of the actor must seem to appear and draw to a close completely in the meanings conveyed by the performative act. In some ways, we might say that in the context of the performance, all the boundaries between interior and exterior seem to fall away or, as Goffman (1959) says, between stage and backstage. We will now concentrate on the possible influence of the script used by the successful performative act on the setup of the background representations, so becoming an integrating part of their structure. Performances are “symbolic apparitions” that, through their very nature, last the space of an instant, so to speak. However, if they succeed in conveying to their spectators their actors’ sense of identity, the result may be a clear transformation of the reality of the social imaginary. In this regard, a particularly apt example can be found in Valentin Rauer’s (2006) analysis of the tribute paid by the German chancellor Willy Brandt in December 1970 to the Jews who fell during the revolt in the Warsaw ghetto. Arriving in front of the monument, after an instant Brandt knelt down, remaining quite still in that position for some minutes. Thanks to the presence of the press and a large political entourage, the gesture, as we all know, gained wide renown, profoundly impressing civil society in Germany

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and internationally, thus succeeding in completely transforming the meaning of Germanic identity. Up to that moment, Germany had seen itself as a society that had been the victim of Nazi madness and Soviet violence, yet Chancellor Brandt succeeded in demolishing this representation, introducing with his performative gesture the theme of awareness of the German people of their own collective guilt and the pain for the atrocities committed on Jewish victims (Rauer 2006). The interesting thing is that while Brandt’s gesture was initially compared by the media to Henry IV kneeling down at Canossa, later it became itself a sort of symbolic model on which to base new scripts, new proposals for ceremonial practices of reconciliation (Rauer 2006).20 There is no sense in wondering if Brandt had planned to kneel, if someone had advised him to do so, or if he had repeatedly rehearsed the gesture in front of a mirror. What does matter is that, thanks to the media and the world’s eyes on the event, the chancellor’s performative act succeeded in sweeping millions of spectators into a state of flow, thus bringing about a massive process of cultural extension that changed a whole nation’s entire imaginary. Thanks also, therefore, to what we have seen regarding performance: clear mechanisms emerge directly referring to removal processes and the unconscious dimension in line with what was formulated in the initial hypothesis. The more the actors are induced to remove from their minds the reappropriations and creative elaborations carried forward on the plexus of background representations to elaborate the script, the more they will identify with them. In the same way, the more the audience is induced to remove the artificial nature of the performative act, the greater the chance that the meanings it conveys will appear authentic to them. Although within a theoretical context dealing directly with reflectivity, the most extreme cultural differentiation, and the disenchantment typical of postmodernism, with Alexander’s cultural pragmatics, we can see how the removal of the arbitrary, artificial nature of the symbolic is the necessary condition for the realization of the integrative potential inherent in the plexus of the social imaginary. BODY, EMOTIONS, IMAGINARY In this chapter, we have considered the integrative potentials expressed in these practices of production, structure, and use of the symbolic that we call the social imaginary. On this topic, following the thinking of Durkheim, Bourdieu, and Alexander, we have found that there is a relation between the effectiveness of the integrative function of the imaginary and the chances of seeing its own arbitrary, socially constructed nature removed. Whether the integration is seen as the sharing of a representational plexus (Durkheim), as a hierarchical principle (Bourdieu), or else as the “success” of the performative

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act (Alexander), the naturalization of the symbolic appears to be the transversal element with respect to all three of these interpretations. Equally transversal also appears the inescapable nature of the function carried out in the process by the bodily and emotive dimension. From their different viewpoints, the contribution that these three analyses see in such a dimension concerns precisely the naturalization we spoke about above. It is thanks to the body and its emotions, in fact, that the authoritativeness of the representation is constructed, the arbitrary outlines of hierarchic classification are interiorized, and the condition of flow is achieved during the performance. And it is, therefore, again thanks to the body and its emotions that the imaginary becomes an efficient social integration device. Therefore, if it is true, on the one hand, that society—as Durkheim maintains—is made of abstract mental representations, on the other hand it is also true that they need to take root in the bedrock of pre-reflective materiality of bodily and emotive life. NOTES 1. For the history of the social imaginary concept in line with the view expressed here, see Ragone (2015). 2. The terms “production,” “structure,” and “use” in reference to the symbolic are intended to indicate the proposal made by Marzo and Meo (2013) to divide the analysis of social imaginaries into three parts: their productive dynamics—what Marzo and Meo call imagination; their fundamental elements—what Marzo and Meo always call images; and their most complete configurations—that is, imaginaries in the real sense. 3. As regards the strident differences in thought among these authors, we refer specifically to Jeffrey Alexander’s criticism of reductionism and economicism in Pierre Bourdieu’s general conception of sociology. In this regard, see Alexander (1995). For a response to Alexander in defense of Bourdieu, cf. Potter (2000). A general review of criticism of Bourdieu is found in Paolucci (2010, 2011). On this point, see also Mele (2007). 4. The topic deserves to be dealt with in much greater detail. To appreciate fully the innovative nature of Durkheim’s notion of homo duplex, see the enlightening work by Giovanni Paoletti (2012). 5. Against Durkheim’s presumed anti-psychological attitude, Robert Bellah (1973, xxi) was quite clear: “Durkheim considered sociology a kind of psychology.” 6. Concerning the issue, it is yet once more worthwhile remembering that the individualistic-rational solution of the social contract is radically excluded and branded as a “skillful device”: “Neither Hobbes nor Rousseau appear to have noticed the complete contradiction that exists in admitting that the individual is himself the creator of a machine whose essential role is to exercise domination and constraint over him. Alternatively, it may have seemed to them that, in order to get rid of this

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contradiction, it was sufficient to conceal it from the eyes of its victims by the skillful device of the social contract” (Durkheim 1895; Eng tr. 2013, 97). 7. Rather than proper analyses, Durkheim offers metaphysical images regarding what is produced by the force of collective representations: “Just as opposing states of consciousness are mutually enfeebling to one another, identical states of consciousness, intermingling with one another, strengthen one another. Whilst the former take something away from one another, the latter add something” (Durkheim 1893; Eng. tr. 2013, 76). 8. The ideas expressed on the religious phenomenon in The Division are, in the opinion of some, still indifferent to ethnographic information (Alun Jones 2005), while for others (Lukes 1973), they are wholly formal and oversimplistic. However, in several parts of the work, we come across the idea that religious representations are nothing but representations present to the highest degree and identically in the minds of the subjects. 9. “How would experiences like these not leave him with the conviction that two heterogeneous and incommensurable worlds exist in fact? In one world he languidly carries on his daily life; the other is one that he cannot enter without abruptly entering into relations with extraordinary powers that excite him to the point of frenzy. The first is the profane world and the second, the world of sacred things” (Durkheim 1912; Eng. tr. 1995, 220). 10. In the opinion of Bjørn Schiermer (2014), mechanical solidarity also endures within the organic stage. Indeed, again in Schiermer’s view, the only form of solidarity in its proper sense is exclusively mechanical. At the organic stage, as we shall soon see, the representational object on which mechanical solidarity is founded is given by values of autonomy and individual freedoms. 11. On the first page of the introduction to his Masculine Domination, Bourdieu writes, “I have always been astonished by what might be called the paradox of doxa— the fact that the order of the world as we find it . . . is broadly respected or, still more surprisingly, that the established order with its relations of domination, its rights and prerogatives, privileges and injustices, ultimately perpetuates itself so easily, apart from a few historical accidents, and that the most intolerable conditions of existence can so often be perceived as acceptable and even natural” (Bourdieu 1998; Eng. tr. 2002, 1). 12. The reference is to Charles Tilly (1981), who notoriously labeled Durkheim’s thinking “useless.” 13. At this point, we must recall that Bourdieu conceives theoretical work exclusively in function of empirical analysis. The aim of sociology is in fact to explain concrete social phenomena (e.g., the reproductive feature of dominion structures) and not to elaborate theories. As Mauro Piras (2006) notes, however, perhaps due to the difficulty of its formulations that refuse to mutilate the complexity of the social world with the linearity typical of the discourse available or else and above all due to the ambition of its own thinking leading it to excavate tirelessly every cranny of social reality, Bourdieu is also an almost extreme theoretical author. 14. The reference is to the Marxist concept of ideology, recalled and discussed directly in Bourdieu’s (1977) text on the concept of symbolic power. On relations

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between Marx and Bourdieu regarding the specific aspect of symbolic capital, see Paolucci (2010). 15. As well as Bourdieu’s article, for a detailed examination of the concept of capital in Bourdieu, see Santoro (2010). 16. It should be recalled that the notion of representation in Durkheim is closely linked to the materiality of the society’s relationship with its physical environment (Poggi 2003; Schnore 1958). In Bourdieu too, we can see how the symbolic depends on some form of materiality, that is, the materiality of capitals possessed (economic, cultural, and social) whose symbolic power is configured as an emergent product. 17. Something similar was also noted by Goffman (1967) in his essay on rituals of deference and demeanor. In particular regarding demeanor, Goffman notes how the members of the lower classes must guarantee impeccable behavior if they want to receive any deference at all. On the other hand, licentious behavior is nearly always tolerated from members of the elite, whose self-image is never put at risk. 18. Perhaps one of the places where differences and similarities between Durkheim and Bourdieu on topics of integration and imaginary are most clearly seen is in the concept elaborated by both regarding the state. Both in fact propose a radically anti-institutional version since for both, the state is the place of production of a thought. But while for Durkheim, as we have seen, it is a totally social harmonizing thought, for Bourdieu, the state is the place of thought that produces hierarchical principles of classification, the “central bank” of symbolic capital, an X claiming the monopoly on symbolic violence (Borghini 2017; Paolucci 2010, 2011). 19. Certain performances will achieve greater visibility, just as the contents of certain scripts will be decoded by the interpretative elite (journalists, intellectuals, politicians, critics and so on) more favorably than others. 20. For example, during his visit to Vukovar, Croatia, in 2011, the Serb president Boris Tadic made exactly the same gesture as Brandt. The town of Vukovar, in November 1991, was the theater of one of the most atrocious massacres of Croat civilians perpetrated by the Serb army.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alexander, J. C., ed. 1988. Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1995. “The Reality of Reduction: The Failed Synthesis of Pierre Bourdieu.” In Fin de Siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason. New York: Verso. ———. 2004. “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy.” Sociological Theory 22, no. 4: 527–73. Alexander, J. C., and J. L. Mast. 2006. “Introduction: Symbolic Action in Theory and Practice: The Cultural Pragmatics of Symbolic Action.” In Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics and Ritual, ed. J. C. Alexander, B. Giesen, and J. L. Mast. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Alexander, J. C., and P. Smith, eds. 2005. The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alun Jones, R. 2005. “Practices and Presuppositions: Some Questions about Durkheim and Les Formes Élémentaires de la Vie Religieuse.” In The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim, ed. J. C. Alexander and P. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bell, C. 1997. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bellah, R. 1959. “Durkheim and History.” American Sociological Review 24, no. 4: 447–61. ———. 1973. “Introduction.” In On Morality and Society: Selected Writings, by E. Durkheim. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005. “Durkheim and the Ritual.” In The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim, ed. J. C. Alexander and P. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Borghini, A. 2017. “Le radici durkheimiane della nozione di Stato in Bourdieu.” ScietàMutamentoPolitica 8, no. 16: 223–47. Bourdieu, P. 1972. Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique précédé de Trois études d’ethnologie kabyle. Paris: Seuil. ———. 1979a. La distinction: Critique social du jugement. Paris: Minuit. Translated into English as The Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. ———. 1979b. “Symbolic Power.” Critique of Anthropology 4, no. 13–14: 77–85. ———. 1980. Le sense pratique. Paris: Minuit. Translated into English as The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. ———. 1986. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. Richardson. Westport, CT: Greenwood. ———. 1994. Raisons pratiques: Sur la théoire de l’action. Paris: Seuil. ———. 1997a. Meditations pascaliennes. Paris: Seuil. Translated into English as Pascalian Meditations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. ———. 1997b. “Defataliser le monde.” Les Inrockuptibles 99: 22–29. ———. 1998. La domination masculine. Paris: Seuil. Translated into English as Masculine Domination. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2002. Ceri, P. 1993. “Durkheim on Social Action.” In Émile Durkeim: Sociologist and Moralist, ed. S. P. Turner. London: Routledge. Clayton, P. 2004. Mind and Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Durkheim, È. 1893. De la division du travaille social. Paris: Alcan. Translated into English as The Division of Labour in Society. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013. ———. 1895. Les regles de la methode sociologique. Paris: Alcan. Translated into English as The Rules of Sociological Method. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013. ———. 1898a. “Répresentations individuelles et representations collectives.” Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale 6: 273–302. Translated into English as “Individual and Collective Representations.” In Sociology and Philosophy. Abingdon: Routledge. 2010. ———. 1898b. “L’individualisme et les intellectuales.” Revue Blue 10: 7–13.

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———. 1912. Les formes élémentarires de la vie religieuse. Paris: Alcan. Translated into English as The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press, 1995. ———. 1914. “Le dualisme de la nature humaine et ses conditions sociales.” Scientia 15: 206–21. Translated into English as “The Dualism of Human Nature and Its Social Conditions.” Durkheimian Studies/Études Durkheimiennes 11 (2005): 35–45. ———. 1950. “Leçons de sociologie: Physique des moeurs et du droit.” In Publications of the Faculty of Law, no. 111. Istanbul: University of Istanbul. Falasca Zamponi, S. 2014. “Society as Representation: Durkheim, Psychology and the Dualism of Human Nature.” Durkheimian Studies 20: 43–63. Fele, G. 2002. “Il rituale come pratica sociale: Note sulla nozione di rituale in Durkheim.” In Durkheim: Contributi per una lettura critica, ed. A. Rosati and M. Santambrogio. Roma: Meltemi. Fele, G., and P. Giglioli. 2001. “Il rituale come forma specifica di azione e pratica sociale.” Aut Aut 303: 93–107. Giesen, B. 2006. “Performing the Sacred: A Durkheimian Perspective on the Performative Turn in Social Sciences.” In Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics and Ritual, ed. J. C. Alexander, B. Giesen, and J. L. Mast. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. ———. 1967. Interaction Ritual. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Karsenti, B. 1999. “Durkheim e la costituzione del sociale.” Filosofia Politica 13, no. 3: 397–420. Lukes, S. 1973. Émile Durkheim: His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study. New York: Harper & Row. Marx, K. 1852. “Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon.” In Die Revolution. Translated into Italian as Il 18 Brumaio di Luigi Bonaparte. Roma: Editori Riuniti 1977. Marzo, P. L., and M. Meo. 2013. “Cartografie dell’immaginario.” Im@go. Rivista di Studi sull’Immaginario 2, no. 1: 4–17. Mele, V. 2007. “Capitale simbolico e stile della vita in Pierre Bourdieu.” Sociologia e Ricerca Sociale 84: 133–55. Nisbet, R. 1966. The Sociological Tradition. New York: Basic Books. Paoletti, G. 2012. “Durkheim’s Dualism of Human Nature: Personal Identity and Social Links.” Durkheimian Studies 18: 61–80. Paolucci, G. 2010. “Una sottomissione paradossale: La teoria della violenza simbolica.” In Bourdieu dopo Bourdieu, ed. G. Paolucci. Torino: Utet. ———. 2011. Introduzione a Bourdieu. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Piras, M. 2006. “Riflessioni su di un classico: Il ‘Senso pratico’ di Pierre Bourdieu.” Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana 26, no. 2: 318–34. Poggi, D. 2003. Émile Durkheim. Bologna: Il Mulino. Potter, G. 2000. “For Bourdieu against Alexander: Reality and Reduction.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 30, no. 2: 229–46.

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Ragone, G. 2015. “Radici delle sociologie dell’immaginario.” Mediascapes Journal 4: 63–75. Rauer, V. 2006. “Symbols in Action: Willy Brandt’s Knee Fall at the Warsaw Memorial.” In Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics and Ritual, ed. J. C. Alexander, B. Giesen, and J. L. Mast. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rawls, A. W. 2001. “Durkheim’s Treatment of Practice: Concrete Practice vs. Representations as the Foundation of Reason.” Journal of Classical Sociology 1, no. 1: 33–68. Rosati, M. 2005. “Introduzione: Abitare una terra di nessuno: Durkheim e la modernità.” In Le forme elementari della vita religiosa, by É. Durkheim. Roma: Meltemi. Santambrogio, A. 2006. Il senso comune: Appartenenze e rappresentazioni sociali. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Santoro, M. 2010. “‘Con Marx senza Marx’: Sul capitale di Bourdieu.” In Bourdieu dopo Bourdieu, ed. G. Paolucci. Torino: Utet. Schiermer, B. 2014. “Durkheim’s Concept of Mechanical Solidarity: Where Did It Go?” Durkheimian Studies 20: 64–88. Schnore, L. F. 1958. “Social Morphology and Human Ecology.” American Journal of Sociology 63, no. 6: 620–34. Shilling, C. 1997. “Emotions, Embodiment and the Sensation of Society.” The Sociological Review 45, no. 2: 195–219. ———. 2005. “Embodiment, Emotions and the Foundations of Social Order: Durkheim’s Enduring Contribution.” In The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim, ed. J. C. Alexander and P. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stedman Jones, S. 2006. “Action and the Question of the Categories: A Critique of Rawls.” Durkheimian Studies 12: 37–67. Takla, T. N., and W. Pope. 1987. “The Force Imagery in Durkheim: The Integration of Theory, Metatheory and Method.” Sociological Theory 3, no. 1: 74–88. Tilly, C. 1981. “Useless Durkheim.” In As Sociology Meets History. New York: Academic Press. Tiryakian, E. 1979. “L’école durkheimienne à la recherche de la societé perdue.” Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie 66: 97–114. Turner, V. 1987. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications. Wacquant, L. J. D. 1992. “Introduzione.” In Risposte: Per un’antropologia riflessiva, ed. P. Bourdieu and L. J. D. Wacquant. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.

Chapter 4

Imaginary, Technology, and Social Change Maria Giovanna Musso

‌‌THE “FAMILY FOOL” AND SOCIAL FACTS The term imaginary, at least when used in its common understanding, still today has defective theoretical foundations in that it is a synonym of unreality or fantasy. It generally coincides with what is an “effect of the imagination— what does not exist save in imagination and has no basis in reality” (see under Immaginario in the Treccani encyclopedia). Imagination is still considered a little like the “family fool” (Durand 1963). This concept is a legacy of modernity with its faith in rationality, facts, and the visible.1 The idea of progress and modernity was in fact built on the refusal of Bacon’s idola, myths and passions, to build a social order as remote as possible from the uncertainty and unpredictability of human behavior (Musso 1996). Hume, however, already knew that “things may exist without any place,” and all the great thinkers of modernity—from Montesquieu to Vico, from Hume to Voltaire—recognized the fact that myths, ideas, and metaphors direct human action and guide social change, being embodied in artifacts that modify the course of civilization. Even money, as we see in Simmel’s (1990) work, and commodities, identified by Marx (1867) as the specific feature of capitalism, are interwoven in a powerful, generative imaginary that with its factual meanings has altered the course of Western civilization, just as the idea of God and of the state had marked the evolution of previous societies in history (Luhmann 1971). Even before being played on the level of actual (as opposed to virtual) reality, the social change game is played in the universe of possibles, in that kingdom of abundance that is the imaginary dimension, in which the first 77

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outlines of the “real” are sketched before the design of the future takes on any definable form and is actually realized. The notion of progress and the realization of its possibilities are the most significant examples of the role of the imaginary in social change. The destiny of Western society has long been dreamt of, imagined, and for centuries fueled through myths, the creation of new ideas, shifts in meaning, and proactive metaphors before actually coming about in the forms that have made history. In order to export the Industrial Revolution, modernity’s democratic formula and ethos, it was necessary that the whole caravan of powerful nexuses (growth, consumption, well-being, democracy, freedom, and happiness) that prop up the modern imaginary should become settled in Europe and America. This created the conditions for industrial manufacture starting in England to become imitable in other places and enabling the spread of a new social and political form thanks also to the clash of weapons with which the French Revolution set its seal on that passage (Musso 1996). As Max Weber (1920) underlined, although social structures are not built by ideas, the conceptions of the world created by ideas have, like switches on a railway track, often determined the line along which the dynamic of interests will move. And the world’s conceptions draw on the deepest sphere of social reality, on sense structures, symbols, and archetypes that populate the imaginary (Durand 1963; Jung 1934–1954). Examined closely, all social artifacts—and not only the so-called cultural products (books, films, works of art, and so on) but also political constructs, such as the state, democracy, law, and justice, and economic facts, such as the market, money, and interest—before becoming social facts equipped with Durkheim’s (1895) characteristics of exteriority and cogence, are social creations into which desires, hopes, wishes, thoughts, and symbols incubated and produced in the imaginary sphere are grafted. Once shared in recognizable and concrete forms in specific artifacts, they are legitimized, institutionalized, and naturalized until they become reality (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Castoriadis 1975; Douglas 1986). We owe this awareness to the work of certain authors who have made the imaginary their field of study, a specific and fruitful field for analyzing social dynamics. Together with Marcel Mauss (1923) and Gilbert Durand (1963), Edgar Morin and Cornelius Castoriadis are the authors who have best explained the role of the imaginary in the production of society both under the cultural profile (Morin 1956, 1962) and, in a more radical sense, under the structural and institutional profile (Castoriadis 1975). Morin taught us to see how the imaginary is as much a generator of reality as of the imaginary itself. Indeed, it was the discovery of its power that was first integrated into the cultural industry, and now, thanks to new

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technologies, it is used in every sector of production and social life. In Edgar Morin’s definition, ‌‌‌‌‌ The imaginary is the multiform, pluri-dimensional hereafter of our life, in which our lives themselves are equally immersed. It is the infinite virtual source accompanying what is real, that is to say singular, limited and finite in time and space. It is the complementary antagonist structure of what is said to be real without which there would unquestionably be no real for man, or rather, there would be no human reality. . . . It configures not only the possible and the potential, it creates impossible, fantastic worlds. It may be shy or audacious, both when hardly shifting from the real and when daring to defy the first censures, and when flinging itself into the inebriation of instincts and dream. (Morin 1962; It. tr. 2002, 95)

‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌In terms yet more radical, Castoriadis (1975) sees the instituting function of the imaginary as the prius from which to start analyzing and understanding every phenomenon of reality. In The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975), he explains his notion of the imaginary in terms that have nothing to do with current representations, especially those that consider the imaginary the specular side of reality, that is, the reflected image of what is real. For Castoriadis, the imaginary does not come from the image in the mirror or in the eyes of another. Rather, the mirror itself and its potential, the other as the mirror, are works of the imaginary, which is an ex nihilo creation (Castoriadis 1975). In this sense, the imaginary ‌‌‌‌‌is not the image of. It is the incessant and essentially undetermined creation (historical, social and psychic) of figures, forms, images, only from which can we speak of “some” thing. What we call “reality” and “rationality” are the works of this imaginary. . . . History is essentially poiesis: not imitative poetry, but creation and ontological genesis within and across the doing and the representing/ saying of men. (Castoriadis 1975; It. tr. 1995, XXXVIII)

‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌If, before becoming real, social facts are imaginary—although not all products of the imaginary become real, and not all those that become real are also social facts—we can say that the imaginary is the matrix of social reality (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Castoriadis 1975; Marzo 2015), and this in spite of the fact that the imaginary character of social facts ends up necessarily being dissimulated and denied in the course of naturalization and institutionalization processes (Douglas 1986). The instituting ability of the imaginary is in fact submerged and canceled at the very moment it is activated. Society forms around the denial and concealment of its own creative

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capacity. Why? Castoriadis’s answer is that such a denial is connected “to the needs of the psychic economy of the subjects as social individuals.” So in fact, society, while being the fruit of the imaginary in a multiplicity of individuals, sets itself up forcefully tearing the psychic monad from its abyss: the psychic monad is essentially foolish, non-real, itself creation and source of creation, perennially continual. To create the social world and the prerequisites for survival (of both the individual and society), the social construction must acquire an objective, abstract, supra-individual character, and its origin must be concealed and mis-recognized in order that the moral authority of society can act efficiently. Moreover, no individual (the psychic monad) could survive unless it underwent violent, enforced socialization. Only through the social construction of the individual does the social institution make possible both the life of the human subject and its own (Castoriadis 1975, 1998). With a phenomenological approach reminiscent of Alfred Schütz, Berger and Luckmann (1966) illustrated in systematic terms the process of creation of social reality and the role of the processes of typification, crystallization, naturalization, institutionalization, and legitimation that operate in its definitive construction. Convergence among the objective aspects of social reality (the world of everyday life, taken for granted) and those subjects (the perception and meanings attributed by social actors to their actions) is possible thanks to the sharing of a symbolic universe that constitutes the matrix of all socially objectivized and subjectively real meanings; the whole of historical society and the whole biography of the individual are seen as events happening within this universe (Berger and Luckmann 1966). These few comments should suffice to show that the imaginary has a decisive role in the construction of social reality and in the processes of social change. This is true both when it is seen as “a sort of archive, catalogue or reservoir,” that is, as “the set of all the images and stories we have at our disposal” (Jedlowski 2005, p. 154), and when it is seen as a dimension having the same dynamism of dreams or simply as an overflow from everyday life (Jedlowski 2005). But how do the imaginary and technique relate to one another? What are the most meaningful events in technological evolution and in imaginary production that have accompanied our history, producing the bases for the Great New Transformation, social and anthropological, that we are experiencing? According to the studies mentioned, we find an awareness that, even before being a zoon politikon (a political animal) or a Homo technologicus, the human being is a symbolic animal, that is, imaginary. And he could be none of those things, that is political or technical, if he did not have a peculiar, unique faculty that distinguishes him from all the other animals, and that is the capacity for abstraction, capacity for fiction, and imagination,

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which through symbols and language—or, better, languages, including art— becomes the instrument of representation and creation of the existing. Human language, unlike other languages (e.g., those of birds or mammals), is a language capable of abstraction, whereof the thing itself is not part but where between the thing and its representation, the map and the territory, there is a hiatus and where there is space for the representation (the idea, the imago) at the base of the hermeneutic process through which reality gains sense. Without the intervention of the idea, of the imaginary, of informational complexity, and of reflectiveness, human beings would be nothing but trivial machines in which one and the same input would always correspond to one and the same output (Musso 2008). No change would be possible if human beings did not pursue the most powerful interests that motivate them, that is, “chimeric interests” (Bachelard 1942), capable of not only altering the interpretation of things but also creating new conditions for their existence. Simply because it feeds off the imaginary, human language is able to distance itself from the concrete fact of reality. Without otherness and elsewhere, without the projections of desire and dream inherent in the imaginary, humans would not be able to create what does not exist, including social forms, technologies, and the institutions that historically follow each other. The reality of the imaginary not only accompanies factual reality, as does its excess, but also is the founding stone of the human capacity to be in the world since for human beings, being in the world is to create the world, merely through a way of behaving, a gesture, or a word.

‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌IMAGINARY AND SOCIAL CHANGE After a long phase of obscurantism and denial of the imaginary’s role in social reality, in the past few decades, the theoretical foundations of the imaginary and its relations with reality have changed both in the common perception and in cultural and scientific thought. Since the second half of the twentieth century, the imaginary has no longer been the “family fool,” and indeed in some ways, the cult of the imaginary has become the trademark of our culture (Durand 1963; Žižek 1997). Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the mass media and the cultural industry were the primary contributors to this transformation. Today, it is new technologies, in particular digital technologies and their offshoots (the Web, robotics, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and so on) that have radically transformed the role of the imaginary in the processes of social change. The convergence of these technologies has given a decisive boost to that Grand New Transformation that is changing the features of contemporary society,

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pushing it faster and faster (Rosa 2010; Virilio 1995) toward a post-human horizon nurtured by an imaginary in which technology, associated with economy and finance, is the stage director. In this scenario, a change is perceptible in the role and importance of what was once considered “pure fantasy” and totally irrelevant; in communications, marketing production, research, and identity shaping, the imaginary plays a decisive and explicit role. Having been the hunting ground and up-for-grabs territory for the cultural industry (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947; Morin 1962), it has turned into an area for the experimentation and application of the most advanced technologies of manipulation and transformation of the human. As well as something “fashionable” and the favorite instrument of politics and soft power (Nye 2004), the imaginary has become the field of productive investments and marketing strategies2 and, above all, the field of neuroscientific study and research, being the chosen site (together with the psyche, the mind, and consciousness) of the essence of humanity (Pacioni 2016). For Appadurai, the contemporary world features a new role assigned to the imagination in social life. It has become a true social practice that concretely models personal lives and contributes to the invention of the social destiny of each person. As a cultural organizational practice, imagination becomes a real social fact, the key element in the new world order, the essential basis of all forms of action, and the negotiating ground between individuals. The source of this meaningful change is the mass media, extremely powerful semiotic markers, for which globalization has supplied a planetary-wide sounding board (Appadurai 1996; It. tr. 2012, 77–79). Other authors have highlighted how every identity reference has an imaginary component: the homeland, the community, and one’s own social status and class are nothing but imaginary projections of those elements of reality that take on meaning and sense through symbolic and cultural sharing (Anderson 1983). The imaginary sphere, moreover, supplies the primary material for constructing the social bond, at least that part most profoundly expressed as a bond of belonging, keeping the invisible threads of social relations together (Musso 2012). There are no lasting social bonds unless there is a culture shared in its deepest layers of sense, its dreams, its myths, and its symbols. Sharing such contents is what enables the acceptance and use of social bonds. The bond that is unconsciously set up at the level of the imaginary is much deeper and more radical than that expressed in the social contract or in deliberately chosen bonds (Musso 2012). The fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of whole states such as Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union are paradigmatic examples of how fragile a social contract may prove— even when guaranteed under law—when faced with the cohesive force of

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ethnic-religious imaginaries on the one hand and with the explosive power of new myths on the other (Barthes 1957), in this case, the myth contained in the (Western) dream of inducing well-being, freedom, and democracy through the market (Musso 1996). The discovery of the symbolic, imaginary value of goods and the commodity—“abounding in metaphysical subtleties” in Marx’s (1867) words—as found in the phantasmagoria of goods highlighted by Benjamin (1983) in his studies on the Universal Exhibitions, not only was a revelation capable of throwing light on the complexity of the modern but also revolutionized marketing, publicity, and political communications. Goods and places of consumption are now designed in the light of the imaginary of the consumer they set out to seduce (Codeluppi 2004; Cova 2003). Ever more insistently, they exert pressure on the symbolic, affective, and emotional value of commodities and are put together following the guidelines of the experience economy (Pine and Gilmore 1999), that is, an economy of the imaginary. While Homo faber was expected to work, start a family, and not cultivate any qualities other than those to be remunerated by a salary account, the consumer and Homo spectator is offered a packet of stimulants, dreams, and desires, prepacked and conveyed by the mass media (and now also by social media), saturating his universe with images for his mimetic craving wherein he can mislay the boundaries of his own Self. Put through the blender of the reality show, online dating, and social networks, the affective and relational imaginary reduces the complexity of human relations to catalog pictures and short-term performances (Bauman 2003). Love, friendship, family, and community step by step give way to their commercial, hedonistic reductions: sex and pornography in particular. The television arena enlivened by the emotional circus, brand communities animated by influencers—such are the spaces wherein the freeze-dried imaginary of human relations circulates after its social-technical manipulation. Among other things, image proliferation ends up inflating the value of the image itself and, transitively, the value of what the image represents. Banalization, objectification, and dehumanization (Volpato 2011) are outcomes connected, in a certain way, with their technical reproducibility and with the consumption of images. Think about the images of women—their bodies, their beauty, and their being reduced to objects for consumption (Zanardo 2010)—or about the way in which, through the mass media, the imaginary and clichés of that type fuel myths and violence-based behavior (Giomi and Magaraggia 2017; Reynolds and Musso 2019). Rather than feeding the imaginary, the informative inflation operated by psycho-technologies produces saturation effects and symbolic poverty, among other things (Stiegler 2004), with the consequent impoverishment of the imagination:

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nothing much remains to be imagined if every fantasy has already been realized and exhibited in the great supermarket of images. Finally, the perfection of simulation techniques binds the production processes of the imaginary to their technological nature, and the potential reduction of every gap between imaginary and reality is already here (Baudrillard 1995). On the one hand, the humanization of machines and, on the other, the technicalization of the human are processes through which, step by tiny step, we are coming close to living in the dystopic universes portrayed in Black Mirror (Tirino and Tramontana 2018).

THE INVERSION OF THE DON QUIXOTE COMPLEX ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ Every type of technology, whether related to alphabet, television, or the new electronic media, diversely shapes our habits of thought, our experience, and our relationship with the world (Benjamin 1936; McLuhan 1964; Simone 2000). Benjamin, the first explorer of the effects produced by technique on experience and aesthesis (the sphere of the sensible), was also the first to reveal many of the topics that are still today at the root of research on media, the imaginary, and technology (Benjamin 1936). He focused attention not only on the role of the medium (form, color, and so on)—in the sense of the transit channel in which human perception is organized—but also on the Apparat, that is, the technical device (radio, telephone, photography, cinema, and so on), which modifies the organization, and on the Apparatur (the set of the various Apparats), which constitutes the new ambience in which experience takes shape and gains sense (Pinotti and Somaini 2012). Benjamin’s work showed how the prepared, artificial, intentional character of technical media transforms dialectics between imaginary and reality and inaugurated a line of research that later received added impulse from the School of Toronto (de Kerckhove 1991, 1995; McLuhan 1964). One of the results of such research highlights how the different “brainframes” created by each technological medium manage to edit our minds and our environment, diversely shaping the relationship with reality, directing the way in which to observe it and react to it (de Kerckhove 1991). The increasingly frequent habit of visiting virtual reality and the hypermedia implies, for example, the likelihood that the alphabetic mentality (with its logical, textural, and analytical procedures) will be replaced (or more probably flanked) by a new mentality in which the features of the inner world (fantasy, the imaginary) will become mixed with those of the outer environment. Jean Baudrillard (1981, 1995) insisted on the role of mass media, simulation, and simulacra, highlighting how, in this scenario, dream and

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reality become inseparable. The television medium already implies a sort of “murder of reality” (Baudrillard 1995), and the creation of simulacra of every kind short-circuits true with false (with the latter coming out on top). The gap between reality and model narrows and withers away. According to Olafur Eliasson, the great Danish artist, we are witnessing a change in the traditional relations between reality and representation: the relationship is no longer between model and reality but between model and model, with the result that all the models are real and the simulacra have become coproducers of reality. According to Baudrillard (1981, 1995), the media and new technologies construct worlds in which the universes of sense—reality and illusion—are amalgamated, thus suppressing not only reality but also illusion itself and, together with illusion, dream, and fantasy. With virtual reality and immersive technologies, what happens is that we attempt to enter physically into the products of the imagination; that is, we tend to make the world beyond the screen palpable and sensitive, to transfer what was previously visible or audible through imagination or fantasy into something real. As well as extending thought and action beyond the physical body, algorithms, robotics, and artificial intelligence tend to produce realities with pseudo-organic features; that is, they lose their features of artificiality to take on those of naturalness. The classic model of the distinction between reality and pretense, between reality and imaginary, would thus no longer be valid. Injecting into daily reality larger and larger doses of imaginary content, the threshold dividing the real and the possible is in practice done away with. This does not mean that formerly such dimensions were totally separate, even less that they were impermeable. But in the partitioning of experience we maintained until a few dozen years ago, we used to distinguish between reality and illusion, reality and pretense. The possibility of transiting from one dimension to the other was put down to a different “accent of reality” belonging to each: those “finite provinces of meaning” that Schütz (1945) speaks of. Now relations among the sub-universes (James 1890) that make up reality are changing profoundly enough to face us with a sort of inverted complex of Don Quixote (de Kerckhove 2013): whereas Don Quixote took fantasy for reality, we risk taking reality for fantasy. Phenomena such as haters, cyberbullying, and online violence (particularly against women) can also be read in the light of this inversion (Musso 2019). The characteristic of the phenomena mentioned lies in the fact that certain feelings of hatred, hostility, and destruction that make up the contents (in Simmel’s sense) of social life are transformed (i.e., they change form) once edited by the technological medium, to be then reimported and augmented by the virtual world (social networks, video games, and so on) into the old real.3

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While being a constant characteristic of the human, the ongoing hybridization between real and virtual today takes on a new configuration thanks to modern technologies. Moreover, new technologies alter the natural physiology of cognitive mechanisms producing reality, and they work toward a progressive annulment and replacement of the dominion of ordinary reality with the artificial, completing that process of relief (Entlastung) identified by Gehlen (1983) as a “perilous privilege of man.”4 In order to understand the specificity and the range of changes in act, the transit dialectic and the hybridization between real and virtual should be investigated in greater detail than is possible here. Following Alfred Schütz’s (1955) interpretation of Don Quixote, to clarify the essential, it is sufficient to note the overall structure of the relations between reality and imaginary. The episode referred to is that in which, worn out by his battles, Don Quixote begins to wonder about the origins of his misadventures, asking ontological and epistemological questions about the real nature of things. And he says to Sancho, ‌‌‌‌‌ it possible that in all the time you have traveled with me you have not yet Is noticed that all things having to do with knights errant appear to be chimerical, foolish, senseless, and turned inside out? And not because they really are, but because hordes of enchanters always walk among us and alter and change everything and turn things into whatever they please, according to whether they wish to favor us or destroy us; and so, what seems to you a barber’s basin seems to me the helmet of Mambrino, and will seem another thing to someone else. (Cervantes 1971; Eng. tr. 2003)

‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌A new light breaks on the squire’s mind with these words. In the eminently wise, tolerant vision of Sancho Panza—who tries to save his master from the consequences of his own acts—a formidable solution appears capable of holding together Don Quixote’s principle of reality and foolish imaginary: the basin, which appears to Don Quixote as Mambrino’s renowned helmet, thus becomes, in Sancho’s enlightened view, a bacyelmo, a crasis of bacìa, (basin) and yelmo (helmet). The existence of a bacyelmo is, to put it shortly, the result of an encounter between reality and imaginary, second nature to the specificity of the human being, that species of “ontological centaurus, both natural and extra-natural, characterized not on the basis of what he is but on the basis of the project of his own existence, the imaginary programme he intends to carry out” (Ortega y Gasset 1982; It. tr. 2011, 61). This episode serves Schütz (and us) to understand that we live in a bacyelmo world and that what is really at stake in the processes of defining reality

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is not so much to what extent to keep to facts but to what extent consensus can be established around them and furthermore that the inversion of the relation between reality and fantasy has no need of a real replacement of one thing with the other. In order to live in a bacyelmo world, as in fact we do already, “a transformation of the interpretation plan” suffices and does not require a radical inversion or a general shift from one world to the other. The magical act consists in the transformation of the interpretation plan prevailing in one sub-universe into the interpretation plan valid in another. Both plans, in fact, refer to the same objects, the same factual elements, but, according to where the accent of reality falls, they take on the appearance, for example, of Mambrino’s miraculous helmet or else that of a common barber’s basin. When, however, plans converge, reality no longer depends on where the accent of reality falls. It becomes fluid, indeterminable, and the criteria of the true and the false (already relative in the old reality) become yet vaguer if not totally unserviceable: conditions are created for entry into the reign of post-truth (Lorusso 2018). Here the imaginary is no longer only the reserve of the excess used by art, cinema, and literature to project us into an elsewhere enabling us to create the work; it is the material feeding ordinary everyday languages, including technical languages. In this reconfiguration of the relation between real and imaginary, even the function of reality makers changes, those wizards referred to by Don Quixote. On the one hand, we have the wizards of the imaginary—for example, artists, filmmakers, or writers—whose task is to enchant with their transfiguration while guaranteeing the coexistence and reciprocal compatibility of multiple sub-universes of meaning, broadening the universe of the possible while also ensuring the upkeep of a diverse accent of reality falling on each. On the other hand, we have the wizards of everyday life, the technicians, and their task is to construct products to be sold, to direct, to convince through the use of technical and narrative stratagems, similar in structure in some ways at least to those used by artists. Persuasion, propaganda, but also advertising and marketing, for example, are technical languages founded on the constant hybridization of codes, evidently not for ends exclusively aesthetic or recreational. So, while the imaginary—under the dominion of art—is the ground for broadening the universe of the possible, when it is used for technical aim, it becomes the terrain for broadening the power of action and, at times, also for restricting the symbolic game and its possibilities. Therefore, while the magic act in the dominion of art serves to multiply the keys of access and broaden the universe of the possible, linking up the various worlds, in the technical universe it serves to reduce and channel choices and desires along predetermined tramlines, according to definable and predictable procedures. Even though in the dominion of art and technique some procedures are similar and even though frequently the territories of the imaginary

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become confused, their aims are different: in the former case, the target is pleasure; in the latter, power.

‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌CONCLUSIVE CONSIDERATIONS—PERHAPS Once the reign of myth and gods, the imaginary today has transformed mainly into the reign of technique or, rather, of technology. Unlike technique, in fact, technology is no longer an instrument and prosthesis with the practical target of empowering human action; it is a system that acts autonomously and self-referentially, with the same dynamics as any other system (Musso 2008). As such, it has its own logic and its own code of symbolic differentiation (Luhmann 1984). In this case, indeed, it is a meta-code similar in its workings to money in being a code of symbolic differentiation that tends to infiltrate the diverse dimensions of action, permeating them and adapting them to itself. Until the Industrial Revolution, technique could be ascribed to a multiple variety of instruments scattered across the various dimensions of action and subordinate to them, yet technology (tèchne and logos combined, as we see from the etymology) is a system with its own particular logic, able to direct and transform all spheres of human action. Work, production, politics, medicine, sociality, and all the other dimensions of social life are reconfigured under its stimulation. In each of these ambiences, far from having a secondary role, technology is now the driver of transformations, present and future. As the reign of excess, the concealed source of the real, the imaginary is the matrix of human and social power; having been shaped by religion and politics; this is today the prerogative of technique.5 The boost of social change triggered by the imaginary universe today comes within the technosphere. As well as being the most powerful machine for the realization of the imaginary, the latter is what alters the processes from within, influencing from inside its own creative mechanisms. As well as nourishing itself on the imaginary, technology comes across as an autonomous, self-referential power that also constructs its own imaginary as the Apparatur of transformation for ever pushing toward post-human horizons, whatever the unforeseen epiphanies offered by the technosphere or by the philosophical variants shifting toward that horizon (Marchesini 2017). The ultimate aim of the technology-based imaginary is in fact not (only) to bridge the performative, physical, or cognitive deficit of man, considered a being of want and lack with respect to other living creatures. Its aim is to get rid of the preconditions held responsible for this original deficit, particularly as regards the body with its physical, psychic, and biological limits.6

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In transforming both the physical and the imaginary aspects of the human, on the one hand technology attempts to overcome the physical limits of the living and, on the other, pursues the psychic aim of intervening on the imagination, defining its features and transforming the aisthesis, producing an empowerment (but an amputation as well) of feeling and creativity (McLuhan 1964). The two strategies so far used to carry forward such aims are on the one hand innervation to empower the faculties and the production of augmented bodies—hybrid or cyborg (the outcome of the combination of human and artificial elements)—and, on the other, their substitution, with the creation of totally artificial beings (robots and humanoids). Benjamin had already identified innervation as a crucial element in the development of technologies. This is the tendency of technology to move toward the incorporation of the medium—and not only of its effects—and to incorporate within its sphere of influence large portions of the body and of life, whole blocks of sensorium and human behavior. Innervation was defined by Benjamin as “a way of incorporation through which technical medium and the human body cease to be antagonists and integrate in a functional prosthetic whole” (Benjamin 1936; It. tr. 2012, 10).7 The cyborg universe is the ground for the development of this phenomenon and also the concretization of a dream as old as humanity. The integration of the imaginary in flesh is in fact a phenomenon featured in the hominization process going back as far as Homo sapiens (Morin 1973).8 However, the substitution and the overcoming of the human are extreme outcomes made possible by that long, complex phenomenon of relief, which, in its most radical forms, is a corollary of technological development. Ever since it started, this development has headed toward a gradual decrease in the weight and fatigue of experience in relation to nature and to the social environment. The replacement horizon is the real novelty brought not by technique but by technology as a system. In the past few years, this has changed its range of action, creating not simple instruments but new habitats extending to territories of the living and to the biological sphere, exponentially increasing the transformative power of the human thanks to genetic engineering, nanotechnologies, and neurosciences. In the ambience of the imaginary, the role of technology no longer stops at its transmission—that is, it no longer stops at being the medium through which a certain type of imaginary is produced and spread (as used to happen thanks to the press, television, or, in some ways, the computer). Nor does it stop at inspiring a particular type of imaginary, as happens in the case of science fiction (which often features an imaginary projection of technological forms projected into a more or less dystopic future) (Jedlowski 2015). Technology, in other words, is found neither upstream nor downstream of the imaginary; it comes in medias res. That is, it intervenes within the

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mechanisms of neurological, social, and technical production of the imaginary itself invading (or creating from scratch) the circuits and human devices of its production. In this ambience, research is taking giant steps forward (Pacioni 2016). Not even dreams are safe from technical intrusion. As well as medication that corrects or empowers psychophysical performance (sleeping pills, steroids, Viagra, and so on), dream technologies have recently been invented. Dormio, for example, is an instrument that uses the dozing phase to enable control over dreams with the promise of increasing their creativity. An instrument recently developed by the MIT Media Lab, it is a glove with sensors accompanied by a robot to be kept on the bedside table. When the sensors in the glove detect relaxation, the system recognizes the start of dozing (the state of hypnagogia),9 and the robot begins to say words preselected to influence the dream plot. A further experiment toward the manumission of imaginary production mechanisms was carried out through the archiving of a small video fragment in the DNA of a population of bacteria.10 It was effectively proved that it is possible to cut and paste digital information directly into the genetic memory of a living organism and that, once the data of the genetic code of the bacteria have been inserted, such data can be passed down to new generations. The difference between the technical imaginary (modern and premodern) and today’s technological imaginary not only relates to functions, forms, and objectives but also concerns the degree to which artificiality, diffusion, and possible manipulation are considered practicable, legitimate, and desirable. As has been shown, societies change more through the vision they hold of technology and the ideals and fears incorporated in it than through the technology itself (Yehya 2001). The imaginary has always been the place in which dreams, hopes, and future projections have been stored, where fears are dealt with and the search for sense is nurtured in seeking an answer to the great and small questions of existence. But with regard to premodern and modern imaginary, basically nurtured by religion, politics, the mass media, and culture, the technological imaginary is all one with the instruments it uses (the medium is ultimately the message), and the diffusive power coming from the industrialization and proceduralization of every aspect of life enables the manipulative and controlling content involved to override any limit. The pervasive capacity of an imaginary having technology as its source and nourishment and moreover availing itself of scientific theories and methods targeting profit and social control may not encounter any limits, at least in the social sphere as we know it today, hence profoundly altering the very ecology of the imaginary and its relations with social reality.

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The technology-based imaginary is a new world inhabited by artifacts, ideas, myths, and chimeras whose forms and sense are destined for mass diffusion and are able to cross any barrier whether physical or cultural. Associated with objectives of profit and social control (even when this is limited to specific behavior, such as consumption behavior), it becomes a weapon in the hands of the few and the symbolic and cultural deprivation of the many. Before being so radically colonized by technique and the new cultural industries, the imaginary elaborated by communications was a plural continent partly submerged, partly visible, a jigsaw puzzle of multiple elements (religious, artistic, political, and cultural) conveyed along trajectories (and limits) imposed by cultures, territories, and traditions. Through the spread of particular forms of artistic expression, religious proselytism, mythical construction, and traditions handed down from one generation to another, peoples and cultures operated exchanges and contaminations of their imaginaries, thus bringing about those imitative processes that have played a certain role in social mutation. Within the limits and with the filters imposed by traditions and cultures, they were all in a position to infect and be infected, thus ensuring plurality and, within certain bounds, the freedom to accept, share, or refuse elements from the imaginaries in circulation. Creating imaginaries and counter-imaginaries was to a certain extent possible at several points of the cultural production, although obviously few such products were destined to circulate and to come into use. Made possible thanks to the plurality of sources and the possibilities of creation at least in democratic societies, this ecology of the imaginary has today been made an issue (if not an impossibility) by technological uniformity and by the power emanating from the technosphere. An imaginary that is not technology based has not much chance of nourishment and diffusion. The variety of cultures and traditions created a bulwark that the global uniformity produced by the technology-based imaginary tends to break down, uncovering only nerves and self-preservation impulses contained in the imaginaries that resist in defense of identities, religions, and local cultures (religious fundamentalisms, communitarianisms, and sovereignisms). What, then, has happened to the dream, the fantasy, the creativity, and, more in general, the imaginary in the era of technology? The illusion, the dream, the desire, the hope for a better world, in a word, the imaginary that has oriented peoples and individuals, has so far been the most powerful transformer of reality. Its absorption into the sphere of the “real” through metamorphoses made possible by technology might be the start of the decline of that transformation dialectic contained in the relation between imaginary, reality, and social change. This implies that reality would take on the features of a heterotopic archipelago but also that social change, that is, the set

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of transformations produced at this new stage of relations between real and imaginary, would take on a new nature. Perfectionism, the growing autonomy and overdetermination of the technological sphere over other social subsystems, would imply that the real driver of change is no longer to be found in the sphere of social relations and the imaginary, the mainly invisible background, but in technological power, the only bonds of which are technical or economic-financial in nature. In this scenario, the dream, the imagination, art, and politics (where it was possible to say, with Martin Luther King, “I have a dream”) would no longer have any weight since the center of change would be more and more consistently found in the technological sphere, where the machine functions without dreams and without sense, where it is faster, more remunerative, more powerful, and more efficient, quite apart from the sense and from the effects it produces. In this scenario, we would inexorably be dragged toward a wholly technical future in which even social reflexivity, including the social sciences, would end up changing their setup, their role, and their aims, as they are already beginning to do. Here we are talking not about betting on the future or encouraging anti-technological deviations in the vain hope of stopping the runaway train but about equipping ourselves as well as possible in order to attempt to intelligere, that is, to read in and between the things of social change, cultivating as much as possible that critical questioning of reality without which sociology becomes nothing but a technical exercise. Encouraging critical sociology today means trying to understand in depth the “good reasons” for the success of technology (including its many unquestionable benefits). From an epistemological and methodological viewpoint, it is necessary to prepare in a different way to face the challenges in act and to launch ourselves forward. Following Benjamin’s teaching, when the insistent rhythm of social change becomes dizzying, it is necessary to move toward the vanguard and not toward the origin, even if the risk, in this changing era, is that of remaining yet again like Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, the figure that Benjamin (2014) himself took as the symbol of progress: the angel of history, propelled into the future with his back turned, wings spread, and eyes staring “while the pile of debris grows skyward.”

‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌NOTES 1. One of Charles Dickens’s masterpieces, Hard Times—a novel giving a picture of rising industrial society—opens thus: “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys

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and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them” (Dickens 1854). 2. Marketing and politics today speak the language of the imaginary more than ever (Baudrillard 1970; Codeluppi 2004; Cova 2003; Neilson 2005). Scientific investments in the field of the neurosciences have considerably increased over recent years, and the results of such research constantly feed the entrepreneurship of the imaginary (Pacioni 2016). Imagination and creativity, ignored in the age of Ford, considered superfluous or harmful for the performance of the organizational routine, have become a commitment in post-Ford enterprises and a precondition of the productive setup of the new economy and in the proliferation of start-ups, fab-labs, and so on. 3. I use this expression to distinguish daily life in its old meaning from what is the new real featuring a constant mixture of online and offline life somewhere between real and virtual, what David Lyon (2018) calls “onlife.” 4. For Gehlen, relief is that process of liberation and distancing from the world of nature and from direct experience, realized through language, memory, and technical instruments that enable man to construct a “second nature.” For Gehlen, this is one of the characteristics of human beings, correlated to their lack of instincts and to the deficit in their faculties compared to those of other animals. The relieving properties of technique, language, habits, memory, and protocols of socially ordered action shorten the chain of immediate experiences and allow him to give increasingly rapid responses to adaptation problems. Yet through technical mediations, the process of exoneration acquires a speed and an irreversibility that for Gehlen himself may lead to a resurgence of the most primitive traits of human beings (Gehlen 1983). 5. Mauro Magatti (2018) recently wrote an essay on the topic of power and the succession of its different manifestations in the spheres of religion, politics, and technique, From the systemic viewpoint, Niklas Luhmann (1971) too had highlighted how the evolution of historical societies featured a succession of different hegemonic weights taken on time by time by a diverse social subsystem (religious, political, and economic) and by the capacity of its code of symbolic differentiation (faith, power, and money) to penetrate the various social dimensions. 6. In this imaginary, the body is thought of as a burden, “reduced to a heavy, smelly casing of fluids, gases and entrails slowly decomposing, of which we can free ourselves,” dreaming of a future beyond flesh (Yehya 2001; It. tr. 2004, 17). 7. The most interesting examples today are the smart wearable systems, designed to monitor physical and psychic activity, modeled and integrated with the body to ensure performance in any environment, including the most hostile, such as interstellar space or other planets. 8. It starts with the production of prostheses (the first go back to the time when Homo sapiens was already making replacements for damaged fingers) and continues with the production of recognition signs of tribal origin and gender identity (genital mutilations, circumcision, and so on). From tattoos to steroids, from cosmetic surgery to genetic engineering, there is an underground thread connecting neo-tribalism to post-humanism.

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9. Hypnogagia is the stage of passage between sleep and wakefulness, featuring a fluctuating state of consciousness during which conscious perception of unconscious images becomes possible in the form of illusions or hallucinations (hypnagogic illusions) in a state of bodily paralysis. It is thought that during these minutes, an explosion of creative energy comes about. Many experiments have been carried out on this sleep stage in order to make the underlying processes conscious and to activate so-called lucid dreaming. 10. In 2016, a group of researchers at the Harvard Medical School under George Church realized the first support for the molecular archiving of data—based on CRISPR, the most commonly used technology for genetic editing—in order to “codify fairly complex information within living cells; for example a digitalized image of a human hand, recalling the first graffiti found in a cave, or else the sequence of images in movement of a galloping horse, used at the beginning of the twentieth century to demonstrate the potential of cinema” (http:​//​www​.lescienze​.it​/news​/2017​ /07​/13​/news​/crispr​_memorizzazione​_foto​_video​-3602183).

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Mauss, M. 1923. “Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques.” L’Année Sociologique (1896/1897–1924/1925) 1: 30–186. McLuhan, M. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. Morin, E. 1956. Le Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. ———. 1962. L’Esprit du temps. Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle. ———. 1973. Le paradigme perdu: La nature humaine. Paris: Seuil. Musso, M. G. 1996. La trave nell’occhio: Mito e scienza dello sviluppo. Roma: Edizioni Associate. ———. 2008. Il sistema e l’osserv-attore: Itinerari di sociologia della complessità. Milano: Franco Angeli. ———. 2012. Legame sociale, legame globale: La modernità dei classici. Milano: Franco Angeli. ———. 2019. “Violence against Women in the Age of Digital Reproduction.” In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference of the Journal Scuola Democratica “Education and Postdemocracy, vol. 1, 158–63. Rome: The Organizing Committee the 1st International Conference of the Journal Scuola Democratica. Neilson, B. 2005. “La politica dell’immaginario: Appunti incompleti su affetti e potere.” Studi Culturali 1: 3–22. Nye, J. S., Jr. 2004. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: Public Affairs. Ortega y Gasset, J. 1982. Meditación de la técnica y otros ensayos sobre ciencia y filosofía. Madrid: Revista de Occidente/Alianza Editorial. Pacioni, M. 2016. Neuroviventi: Politica del cervello e controllo dei corpi. Milano: Mimesis. Pine, J. B., and J. H. Gilmore. 1999. The Experience Economy. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Pinotti, A., and A. Somaini. 2012. “Introduzione.” In W. Benjamin, Aura e choc: Saggi sulla teoria dei media. Torino: Einaudi. Reynolds, R. R., and M. G. Musso. 2019. “Portraying Rape in the Top 20 SVOD Shows of 2018: Changing Rape Myths in Television Narratives.” Media Report to Women 47, no. 2: 12–17. Rosa, H. 2010. Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality. Malmö/Aarhus: NSU Press. Schütz, A. 1945. “On Multiple Realities.” In Collected Papers, vol. 1, ed. M. Natanson, 207–59. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1955. “Don Quixote and the Problem of Reality.” In Collected Papers, vol. 2, ed. M. Natanson, 135–58. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Simmel, G. 1900. Philosophie des Geldes. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Simone, R. 2000. La terza fase. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Stiegler, B. 2004. De la misère symbolique. 2 vols. Paris: Galilée.

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Tirino, M., and A. Tramontana. 2018. I riflessi di “Black Mirror”: Glossario su immagini, culture e media della società digitale. Roma: Rogas. Virilio, P. 1995. La Vitesse de libération. Paris: Galilée. Volpato, C. 2011. Deumanizzazione: Come si legittima la violenza. Milano: Unicopli. Weber, M. 1920. “Zwischenbetrachtung: Theorie der Stufen und Richtungen religiöser Weltablehnung.” In Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. 1, 536–73. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr. Yehya, N. 2001. El cuerpo transformado: Cyborgs y nuestra descendencia tecnológica en la realidad y en la ciencia ficción. México City: Paidós. Zanardo, L. 2010. Il corpo delle donne. Milano: Feltrinelli. Žižek, S. 1997. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso.

Chapter 5

Imaginary and Communication I From the Corporal Device of Homo Sapiens to the Typographical Imaginary of Early Modernity Stefano Cristante

‌‌ This chapter and chapter 6 are a diptych on the general topic “Imaginary and Communication.” The intention is to follow the main stages in the relations between the collective imaginary and the means of expression and communication, working on the scenario of the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and early modernity (up to the French Revolution) and on the mass communications scenario up to the present day. The bibliographic references of both chapters are published at the end of chapter 6.

THE IMAGINARY COMMUNICATED FROM THE REMOTE PAST OF HOMO SAPIENS: THE CORPORAL DEVICE AND THE FIRST MEANS OF EXPRESSION In general, the scientific edifice of social disciplines offers “communications” as a specific investigative area to be added to already consolidated fields: history, economy, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, and so on. Along this route, the relevance of the investigation area on communications would seem to be an important link in the evolutionary chain of social sciences only in correspondence with the explosion and the successive embedding of so-called mass communications, featuring the pervasive presence of mass media in modern society. In fact, the scientific production on the issue was 99

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all but nonexistent up until the end of the nineteenth century and only hinted at in the first half of the twentieth century, thereafter to grow significantly during the second half of the century and, even more evidently, in the first decades of the twenty-first. Yet communications is something much more ancient than mass communication, enough to consider it second nature to the Homo sapiens species. Why? Because human beings have been communicating since their evolutionary story took shape, that is, forever. But could the same not be said for any other animal? That, of course, is true, but some distinctions must be made not only because human beings possess an organized verbal language and numerous other communication technologies from which other animal species are precluded but also because—even in times preceding the appearance of Homo sapiens—the communication function was sufficient to influence the evolution of our species, turning out to be infinitely more sophisticated and meaningful than communications used by other species through regulation activated by instincts. According to archaeologist Steven Mithen, for about 1.8 million years (up until 200,000 years ago), hominids living before Homo sapiens communicated with a system he renamed “Hmmmm” (holistic, manipulative, multimodal, musical, and mimetic). With this acronym, Mithen hypothesized a system in which their vocal and gestural expressions were still holistic in nature, in the sense that they were conceived as complete messages rather than as words to combine together, and were used to condition the behaviour of other individuals rather than to communicate information to them on the outside world. (Mithen 2005; It. tr. 2007, 158)

The “Hmmmm” system was also of interest to Homo neanderthalensis, a long-lasting hominid (from about 500,000 years BC to extinction, probably around 30,000 BC), whose social organization was founded on groups of few individuals and on established, crystallized technologies with no significant evolutions. Mithen therefore believes that the Neanderthals could express themselves verbally but that their language was mainly musical.1 As well as the voice, albeit used in ways very different from those of Homo sapiens, the other prehistoric human beings expressed themselves with the body and its movements, from facial movements (eye-widening and other visual expressions) to gestures (use of hands to gesticulate and for physical contact at close quarters) to rhythmic movements (legs and feet, swaying of the body, and dances). The holistic character of this type of communication can be traced back to the intensive use of the senses and to the effective production of signs and signals through the body, often of a mimetic-imitative

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kind. Hence, the communicative skill of human beings should be placed among those abilities allowing the survival of the species even back at this long stage when Homo sapiens was still absent from the life of the planet. This capacity for communication may in turn have been triggered by the combination of other evolutionary chances, such as the erect posture coming from bipedalism (freeing the hands for gesturing and lifting food to the mouth) and the custom of cooking food (digesting it more rapidly and with greater energetic benefit), in turn to be traced back to the use of fire. According to psychologist Michael Tomasello (2008), cooperative communication characterizes Homo sapiens and takes its origin from three fundamental motivations: requesting (asking for help), informing (offering help in the form of useful information), and sharing emotions and attitudes (creating social bonds by expanding the common ground). Cooperative communication is based on a psychological infrastructure of “shared intention,” capable of stimulating pluri-individual actions with a single purpose, of which the protagonists are aware. According to Tomasello, cooperative communication initially developed in the gestural sphere. Notably, the most significant gestures seem to have had two functions: on the one hand, indicating where to pay attention within the immediate perceptive environment (pointing out) and, on the other, representing an action (miming). Both behaviors derive from someone staring at someone else and following their gaze to seek confirmation of the reciprocity of their own demands, nearly attempting to read the other person’s mind and finding confirmation that both parties involved are aware of what lies behind the gesture of pointing out and the gesture of miming. It was only after the establishment of cooperative communication of a gestural kind that there was room for the development of communication based on an arbitrary code like verbal language, resting on the shared intention of deictic and iconic gestures (pointing out and miming). According to historian Yuval Noah Harari (2011) as well, human beings outranked other animals mainly in their ability to collaborate among themselves in great numbers and with great flexibility. The latter characteristic helps to distinguish the organization of Homo sapiens from that of insects (bees, ants, termites, and so on), which in fact collaborate collectively but only according to a very rigid, predetermined plan. No beehive, explains Harari, would, for example, dream of executing the queen bee and setting up a bee republic. The life of these “social” insects therefore goes ahead under the shadow of an infinite repetition of predetermined plans. In addition, wolves, chimpanzees, dolphins, and elephants (the so-called social mammals) manage to collaborate with one another, and the forms of cooperation may not be totally rigid, but that happens only in small numbers, based on their intimate knowledge of the other individuals taking part in collective actions.

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Homo sapiens, on the other hand, is the only species that combines flexible collaborative forms and great numbers. What enables us to do so? For Harari (2011), the answer is to be found in the imagination, that is, in the capacity to construct stories that in turn are credible for many and on the basis of which social structures and metaphorical habitats for large and enormously large numbers of individuals can be organized. Homo sapiens is approximately 200,000 years old and originated in northeast Africa;2 according to palaeontologists, the “moment” in which our ancestors began to build stories—and therefore to communicate even in today’s meaning of the term—was about 70,000 years BC; Harari and others call it the “cognitive revolution” (Harari 2011, 41). In the wake of Harari, the various Homo species were the first living beings to express themselves complexly and elastically, using various systems and ways; among the Homo species, Homo sapiens showed the greatest tendency to collaborate very efficiently in large numbers, adapting to widely varying conditions. The intensification of verbal communication therefore lent itself to these objectives, building up the support of sounds increasingly organized into words and speech, thus supplying a powerful platform for the imagination. From the latter were triggered stories and beliefs that started to organize the world culturally with the creation of superior entities to explain otherwise incomprehensible phenomena and to elaborate the presence of death in social aggregation. The sphere of the sacred is in fact where the greatest number of narrations touching on “imagined realities” are found and where particular rituals developed to preside collectively over what was not objectively visible, which was, however, powerfully present in the social organization. Added to these millennia-long processes, there came the formidable phenomenon of Homo sapiens migrations, moving from Africa to Asia and Europe according to the needs centering on hunting and the gathering of edible plants as well as the invention of novel customs of navigation, defying seas and oceans. Nomadic and seminomadic conditions did not exclude recourse to expressive and craft forms, at times capable of generating pictorial representations on rock, forms of adornment and jewelry found on buried skeletons going back 30,000 to 40,000 years, and also small sculptured, decorated statuettes. These are clearly cultural objects that reflect a double reality, the physical-objective (e.g., more than 500 pictures of animals in the Chauvet Cave in France, datable from 36,000 to 33,000 years ago) to imagined reality (e.g., the ivory statuette of the so-called lion-man found in the Stadel Cave in Germany going back about 32,000 years). Since then, this double-track “physical-imaginary” was to strengthen considerably as a decisive characteristic of Homo sapiens. “Imagined reality” also accompanied

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the difficult passage from the hunter-gatherers’ nomadism to the settlement of cultivators. Between 9,500 and 8,500 years BC, agricultural techniques started to spread from the Middle East, based on the domestication of sheep and cereals. With the stability needed to lead an agricultural life, other factors are associated consequences: a change in diet (less varied and based on cereals, few but assured), an extension in human numbers (families could feed more individuals, although the diet was less rich and varied), the expansion of settlements (from groups of just over a 100 individuals to villages with thousands of inhabitants), and the spread of contagious diseases (owing to demographic density). The influence of storytelling cannot be disassociated from the effort to organize this new society. Imagined realities had already functioned in the long nomad period to supply explanations and construct the sense of Homo sapiens in the community-group, but in the transition from Neolithic to ascertained historical presence, they gathered strength and became real, organized beliefs in the religious, symbolic-cultural, and even economic fields. In this last sector, indeed, imagined realities began to look like an apparently definitive credo, as in the case of the invention of barter and then money. All in all, settling in one place turned out to be irreversible: the extraordinary demographic increase determined by agricultural practices made any return to nomadism and seminomadism impossible. And new techniques prompted further cognitive constructions: the harvest season perhaps had been abundant, but it was better to set one part safely aside and to record quantities and characteristics, knowing how best to use qualities as well as quantities. KNOWLEDGES, POWERS, AND THE SACRED DIMENSION: FOUNDATIONS OF THE ANCIENT IMAGINARY Writing then became the new instrument of imagined reality: an extraordinarily inventive and ductile communication code, for a long time it wavered in its attempts at hegemonic use founded on the representation of things, symbols, and sounds, putting together records of calculation and theogony, bureaucracy, and poetry. Imagined realities no longer spread through space alone, prompted by stories around the fire or preachings before an altar: they spread through time, using different supports offered by permanent settlements, such as Mesopotamic clay or Egyptian papyrus, or else experimentally elaborated, such as Middle Eastern parchment of animal origin. Fixing writing on supports prompted human beings to think of themselves through storytelling, which thereafter became community memory:

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the narrative fiction of mythological sagas and everything falling within the auratic authoritativeness of the “held sacred” was no less powerful than sense-perceived reality. Indications triggered by imagined realities made possible an organization capable of unifying the towns that were growing out of villages, then to be associated in networks and kingdoms. The imagination required in the tribal world was directed by the sense of hearing: listening to stories and tales shared in the community had created a collective oral heritage that acted on individuals from infancy and accompanied the whole of their existence. Yet it was a fragile conquest, continually risking extinction. Now, in the new urban dimension overtaking the tribal base, information and signals indispensable to the new settled condition certainly had to be repeated, particularly in order to create hypothetical worlds where the word would reign supreme as the producer of analogical evocations (metaphors) and remain firmly inscribed in the memory of groups. The collective imaginary consists in the contemporary presence of real-physical elements and real-imagined elements: under the former come, for example, indications to be respected concerning nature and its dangers and all the questions connected to cataloging merchandise and property, and under the latter come the basic stories and beliefs regarding the world beyond. The new medium of alphabetical writing (the winner after centuries of competition with other types of composition) made possible a strong tendency to rationalize: guided by that most analytical of human senses, vision, writing helped to form the habit of the linear conceptualization of thoughts and of logical sequences, made possible by syntactically ranked linguistic sentences and by the reflection preceding the writing itself, and that becomes habit in confronting the long time span often required of written documents or associated to it (McLuhan 1962, 1964). At the same time as the establishment of alphabetical writing, founded on a limited number of letters representing sounds and, combined together, generating words, a wider tendency to rationalization came about in a great variety of fields, from techniques of field irrigation to military strategies, from town planning to art. Following McLuhan’s position, arts and technique are “media” in their meaning of “extension of man,” and all take form—in their overall significance—from a new cognitive awareness and from a set of rationalistic empowerments (McLuhan 1962, 1964). This is a shift in the Western epic that we can see mirrored in the difference between Homer’s two great poems, real encyclopaedias of the dawning Western civilization: the first, Iliad, celebrates the art of heroic warfare founded on strength and superhuman physical resistance, embodied to the highest extent in the figure of Achilles; in the second, Odyssey, the hero concept changes until it coincides with the character of “multifaceted ingenuity,” the description of its hero Ulysses. He is the man who observes details,

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establishes the connection between events, knows how to tell stories well, and, of course, knows how to use words to trick others when his survival and that of his companions is at stake. The passage between Achilles, the hero of Iliad, and Ulysses, the hero of Odyssey, had already been foreshadowed in a mythological-Olympic key through the clash between the brute force of the Titan warrior Ares and Athena, goddess of the art of rational combat, who will prove herself able to bend the might of Ares thanks to her own war techniques. In general terms, knowledges and abilities are reorganized through the medium of writing, thus escaping the precariousness involved in using only the spoken word and only experience. To realize the power of writing, we can go to one of the giants of ancient thinking, Plato the philosopher. In one of his most famous dialogues, Phaedrus, Plato casts doubt on the usefulness of the invention of writing, seeing that it risked undermining the individual’s capacity to use his memory, the center of knowledge as conceived by the philosopher. Yet the contradiction is evident: the philosopher argued against the writing medium by using writing, thus decreeing its clear dominance. By criticizing writing in dialogues written on papyrus, he made writing lastingly irrevocable. The variety and wealth of efficient derivations of alphabetical writing passed successfully from the Greek to the Roman world by numerous specialization routes. For example, the warlike compactness and maneuverability of the imperial Roman armies is comparable to the compactness of the legislative production of its power centers equipped with influential normative apparatus. Again, on the subject of the Romans, the spectacular realization of impressive connecting roads between crucial places in the empire succeeded in supplying the sorting platform for the frenetic exchange of correspondence between the capital and the provinces consisting in the transport of letters written on light papyrus. Writing, however, is not the only successful medium of antiquity. The image is the other great means of communication used in the recordable past, appearing in a set of objects and instruments that echo ongoing relations with the dimensions of the sacred and power (Innis 1951). The titanic constructions of the pyramids, for example, were made to celebrate a pharaoh-god and were destined to outlast time, as the great Greco-Roman temples were intended to convey the idea of power and harmony inspired by the polytheistic religion of the Olympians and embodied in the great historical characters of those times. Yet more openly political are the monumental constructions for military victories, above all the building of triumphal arches and statues. The power imaginary also transferred to unimpressive yet no less important objects such as scepters, crowns, rings and seals, medals, and coin effigies: each of these multiplied the authority of the royal attribution or its delegates,

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just as emblems, banners, and standards communicated power unfolding and submission intimated in a single glance. Written word, spoken word, stage setting, and popular participation came together in the medium of the theatre, capable of mobilizing entire urban populations and exciting them by means of a show that was meant to be sacred (inspired and protected by the god Dionysus) yet at the same time was community based. Performances of comedies and tragedies required not only a powerful and original expressive scenario but also a special spot placed in a strategical position and with an architecture indisputably capable of attracting the town’s inhabitants. The verbal performance constructed on the script and then staged in the community monument called theater is perhaps the greatest overall result achieved by Western creativity in those ancient times so deeply engrossed in the sacred. MONASTERY, CASTLE, AND CATHEDRAL: COMMUNICATION IN THE LONG MEDIEVAL SEASON The dominant religions in antiquity had been polytheistic; the religious imaginary had followed their characterization. The divinity was shown in many different ways through utterly distinct divine figures, often—as in Greco-Roman and Norse mythologies—according to an anthropomorphic approach in which accentuations and specific characteristics corresponded, narratively capable of developing imagined realities by connecting physical-natural explanations, human emotions and passions, and spiritual argumentations. It was quite different in the long period called the Middle Ages, in which religious domination was monotheistic and Christian in Europe and, from the seventh century AD on, monotheistic and Islamic in countries in North Africa, in the Far East, and partly in southern Europe. Faith in the single god was accompanied by a deep-rooted belief in a world after death, heavenly or infernal according to the behavior of the faithful during their lives on Earth. A powerful, radical renewal came about in the ways of expressing religiousness, which—in the last centuries of Roman domination—had taken on aesthetic forms in polytheism, frequently interspersed with political communication. As regards Islam, the Koranic religion was the protagonist in the shift from an animist spirituality of tribal origin to a faith coherent and organized in all of its parts, capable of supplying the believer with a completely new identity. During the Middle Ages, the means of communication remained mostly those in use in the classic age of antiquity, yet the imaginary changed significantly. Invasion and destruction by tribal populations enormously shocked the inhabitants of the Roman Empire, orienting priorities of necessities toward protection and safety, which undoubtedly became dominant in the

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less documented medieval centuries (from the fifth to the eighth century). In the same period, forms of government suitable for the administration of a decomposing empire were not forthcoming from the barbarian kings’ military victories: the complexity of the situation did not lend itself to the widespread application of their original tribal laws, based on unwritten laws and largely oral communication forms. Therefore, this is why the new dominators had to be ready, bit by bit, to assimilate elements of Roman civilization, for example, in the juridical field. In many aspects of social life, tribal and Roman cultures mixed together, such as in clothing, as we see in the mass use of barbarian trousers that became widespread first in military uniforms and then in the wardrobes of officials and the upper classes, to which their previous uniforms and clothing had to adapt. Having become the religion of the imperial state by the Edict of Thessalonica (AD 380), in the end Christianity prevailed over the polytheistic religions of tribal populations. The cults of the saints and relics guaranteed the passage from the popular ancient pagan forms to the Christian faith, while proselytizing—set in motion universally by a religious faith for the first time—ensured its mass diffusion thanks to the impact of a novel communication effort. The communicative qualities of the Catholic Church came to the fore; it proved itself capable of vast organizational control, a condition that contributed to its prevalence over other Christian faiths, thereafter defined as heretical. Ever since the so-called early Middle Ages (from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in AD 476 to AD 1000), Catholic religious hegemony was evident in a victorious competition of Latin over Greek, the language of the Eastern Roman Empire and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Central to liturgy and evangelization, homilies and sermons were the main vehicles for the spread of spoken Latin, while written Latin could count on the works of the great theologians (e.g., Ambrose and Augustine) and on the extraordinary epistolary production of popes like Gregory the Great (ca. 540–604). Thanks to an almost daily correspondence system, the pope managed to communicate with his bishops and consult with them in what was, for the period, a very short time, guaranteeing the government and administration of the Church. When papyrus was lacking, the use of parchment increased, although it was more laborious to produce and could not be wasted. For this reason, whoever wrote on this support did his best to use all the space available: the use of minute characters and words running into one another without spacing was one consequence, as was the constant use of abbreviations. Writing was protected and defended by the copying work of monks in the monasteries, places not only for religious survival but for physical and cultural protection as well. Later, the Islamic intellighenzia made it possible to retrieve a consistent part of the extraordinary cognitive legacy from ancient times

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(particularly in Greek) through translations into Arabic, the language from which new translations could be made (e.g., into Latin), making those texts legible for Europeans. From Arabia too came the identification and successive diffusion of a fundamentally Chinese innovation, paper, originally derived from the treatment of mulberry bark. Later, this new support was modified through new production methods, such as the processing of hemp and flax together, and production from rags. In the twelfth century, paper introduced by the Arabs spread through Europe, starting probably from Sicily; in thirteenth-century Italy, the Fabriano paper mills were fully functioning, producing the valuable Amalfi paper (the steeping of rags and strips of flax, white cotton, and hemp). In this regard, Ferdinand Braudel (1979) was to speak of the formation of a European paper industry. In order to convey its own messages, the medieval imaginary did not count only on the word, spoken or written: architecture, for example, generated the form of the monastery (consistent with the concern for safeguarding faith, work, and cultural heritage) and that of the castle (a necessary defense against enemies). This second form coincided with the period of feudalism, thus named for its derivation from the Latin term beneficium for “fief,” a portion of land assigned to someone who had served the sovereign under arms. Invented by the Franks, this practice extended across a large part of the West: the franci homines (freemen, i.e., warriors) were pledged to the sovereign with an oath of fealty during a public ceremony at the end of which they became feeoffees, lords, that is, owners of a fief. From the ninth century on, with new waves of invaders (Hungarians, Saracens, and Scandinavians), castles went up all over Europe. Protecting the fief and overlooking the surrounding villages, the castles announced that their utility was for the whole feudal population, including serfs and peasants, who were the people called on to cooperate in their building and maintenance. However, over the course of time, the communicative value of the castles went beyond defense and control of the land: in the later Middle Ages, their building took on a mainly aesthetic meaning to show the power of the local lord or the king who commissioned the construction and used it for symbolic and propaganda ends. These are elements we find, at least in part, in the architecture of cathedrals as well, that other titanic late medieval construction, also towering above all the other buildings of the time: an invitation to imagine the beautiful as the aesthetics of the grandiose, whose height recalls the hiatus between divine spaces and the human dimension. The cathedral soars toward the sky, thus showing the faithful the effort of elevation to be achieved to accede to the city of God. In the opinion of Alberto Grohmann, the gothic style appearing in France in the twelfth century was a real architectural revolution. The great cathedrals generated by the gothic would from then on soar above towns “with their

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gargoyles, bell towers, imposing buttresses and the white of their marble and stone, to become symbols of urban spaces” (Grohmann 2003, 100). All medieval art is religious art. Painting, music, and literature all feel the effects. The Catholic and the Islamic worlds split drastically over figurative art. Islamic art refused any divine representation and rarely permitted any human subjects in painting; it concentrated more frequently on the decoration coming directly from Koranic writing and accompanying the extraordinary architecture flourishing in religious buildings. Byzantine Christianity saw different iconoclastic outbursts (also the result of trying to evade attacks from Muslims by preempting them on their own ground) until 843, when the emperor Michael III allowed the cult of images. In the field of literature, the change of tone introduced by the use of the vernacular in the early Middle Ages did not relieve spiritual tensions: Dante wrote his Divine Comedy in the Florentine vernacular, which was no impediment to his including in his work the sum of different knowledges of all the Middle Ages and refining their style, achieving his outstanding aim of eliciting admiration both from the learned and from the populace. The visual artists of the last part of the Middle Ages did no less, the foremost among all being Giotto: the late medieval painters worked with skill and knowledge in depicting religious topics to be understood even by the uneducated and the illiterate. For cultured people, it was easy to understand the skill of Giotto and of those coming after him in their movement across theological territory, frequently offering original interpretations of biblical and gospel events. As well as at home, the great Florentine artist worked in Rome, Assisi, Padua, Rimini, Florence, Milan, Naples, Pisa, and Bologna. From this list, we can deduce the centrality of the new urban dimension in his artistic work and also, more generally, the number of towns that were significant artistically and economically. The town in fact dominated the aesthetic and cultural landscape in late medieval times, and the institution of new centers of learning and knowledge—the universities—proved their attraction. A new type of imaginary took shape in towns, described by the great medievalist Aron Gurevič (1972) in terms of a great expressive effort to enrich the individual personality. Evident traces are found in art (approaching the portrait aesthetic), literature (with increasing emotional undertones found in works in the vernacular), natural sciences (with the authority of experimentation overtaking that of tradition), and philosophy (with Aristotelianism elaborating the indissoluble unity of soul and body, the founding bond of personality). This was a remarkable cognitive leap, to be followed by a corollary of many significant events. From the point of view of the means of communication, this long period ended with an invention that was to revolutionize book production, up to then in the hands of copyists even in the case of university texts. The reference is to Johannes Gutenberg’s movable-type machine.

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FROM GUTENBERG TO THE OPTICAL TELEGRAPH: THE PRINTING IMAGINARY RETHINKS THE WORLD A mysterious personage about whom very little is known, Gutenberg is a figure spanning the end of the medieval era and the first season of modernity. His invention was presented in public in Mainz, Germany, in about 1450: it was a machine combining an idea already existing and circulating (printing, for some time already applied to engraving techniques) with an assembly of innovative, original components. Movable type was made from a resistant, durable alloy of lead and tin that could be moved time and time again from one page to the next for a new printed sheet (hence “movable” print); the carbon black and linseed oil ink were borrowed from the painting of the time and guaranteed the clarity of the composition; and the machine for pressing the paper onto the inked characters came from a piece of equipment used by Rhenish winemakers. Gutenberg deserves merit, therefore, not only for his great technical ability but also for his remarkable creativity, the result of careful observation in different contexts from which he then recomposed various technical solutions in one single machine efficient enough to accompany printing in almost unchanged form for nearly three centuries (Steinberg 1955). Gutenberg’s machine was therefore a long-lasting invention that remained rooted in technological history for a very long time. It was also a quick-setting invention, awaking an immediate positive reaction on the productive scenario for decades after its appearance. From Mainz, the typographical technique spread like lightning: already in 1500, it could be found in more than 250 European towns, among which eighty are in Italy, fifty-two in Germany, and forty-three in France. In the same period, the printed book overtook the manuscript book in the numbers available: in a Europe of approximately 100 million inhabitants, there were about 13 million printed books in circulation (Briggs and Burke 2020). The consequences of the invention of printing were epoch making: “The invention of typography,” wrote Marshall McLuhan in a book significantly titled The Gutenberg Galaxy. The Making of Typographical Man, “confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge. It provided the first uniformly repeatable commodity, the first assembly line, the first mass production” (McLuhan 1962, 124). Gutenberg’s machine is therefore at the root of world industrialization; it set in motion a way of organizing work that was to become common only three centuries later with the spread of factories of all sorts. From a practical viewpoint, the industrial dimension of book production was achieved in spite of the artisan setup of productive processes and in spite of the context still being that of the late medieval workshop. From the symbolic viewpoint, the

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fact that printing achieved a procedure of regularization and uniformity of writing gave this means of expression new power, generating an unheard-of propagation of written documents and making them popular. A further boost to the development of printing came from authors who right from the beginning of this new technology entered into close collaboration with the printer-editors, thus triggering a surprisingly active book market. Already at the start of the sixteenth century, there were two immensely popular intellectuals with a large circulation although using two different language platforms. One was Erasmus of Rotterdam, who always used Latin for his editorial production, starting an approach that was to take the name of the Republic of Letters, a communications style postulating an informal union of literary figures and scholars of cosmopolitan views with Latin as the lingua franca. While not disdaining the use of Latin in some of his more complex theological works, Martin Luther chose to use the German vernacular in his more widely read texts, those addressing the common man. In particular, Luther wanted to translate into German first the Gospels and then the whole Bible in order to allow even those without a high level of education to become acquainted with the scriptures firsthand. The habit prompted by Luther of reading in German had a fundamental role in the perception of the governing classes and the people regarding the feeling of being a “nation” through this common language, favored by the spectacular increase of printing. Even nationalism therefore drew its first breath thanks to the typographic revolution, which made possible the new idea of this participation in common feeling and in the imaginary. Printing had a large part in the mechanisms of information as well, giving rise to newspapers, an invention that itself developed, as did printing, in an artisan environment in the late Middle Ages. The reference is to the so-called advisa or advisi, collected snippets of news coming from the intuition that the letters of merchants—the best-informed, most mobile professionals of the time—were packed with information of use to many. By acquiring merchants’ and travelers’ correspondence and removing any personal content, certain clever communicative talents of the time (going under different names according to the towns where they worked: menanti in Rome, reportisti in Venice, and novellari in Genoa) would put together one or more sheets reporting the news they considered most important and selling them under a subscription plan (Infelise 2002). Their customers were of high standing: as well as merchants and bankers, there were also princes and ambassadors. The advisi were handwritten, both for the confidentiality of the contents and to get around the control set on printing houses, which had become suffocating, especially in the counterreform atmosphere dominated by the Inquisition after the Lutheran schism. The craftsman-type organization of the advisi was followed a few decades later by printing, which aimed at a wider, less exclusive

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public: the product took the name of corantos (from krant, “newspaper” in Dutch) and contained printed news mainly on the international political picture, European in particular. The Dutch origin of the name is something more than a clue: the Netherlands had by then become the center of European trading and the main port for overseas commerce with the American continent. On the political-cultural level, the Netherlands was experiencing a period of great innovation: organized since 1581 in a Republic of the United Provinces of which Holland was the motor and Amsterdam unquestionably the center, they established a climate of religious and cultural tolerance that went hand in hand with a surprisingly vivacious economy and technology. In the specific field of printing, Holland applied the energy generated by windmills to the cutting of the rags, “which put aside the old techniques based on the slow decomposition of material, reduced the duration of the procedure and enabled the production of a better quality of paper” (Innis 1951). During the seventeenth century, in spite of diverse situations, the whole of Europe saw an increase in the reading public. In France, political power supported the new current affairs businesses, encouraging diverse experiments: the Feuille du Bureau d’adresses et des rencontres, a sort of service newspaper that published purchase-sale announcements and work offers; the weekly Gazette, similar to the corantos, sold by subscription but also by street vendors; and, finally, the first scientific review of the time, the Journal des Savants. The scientific journal formula was soon taken up by similar initiatives in other European cities, Rome, Leipzig, and Amsterdam being among the first. After fierce anti-censorship struggles lasting throughout the seventeenth century, in Great Britain, the Licensing Act (1695) was repealed: now courts could act against journalists and editors only after the publication of the material. Preventive censorship was therefore abolished. A few years later, in 1702, the first British daily paper was founded in London, the Daily Courant. The protagonist of such an extraordinary innovation was a woman, Elizabeth Mallet, printer and bookseller. Mallet, who never revealed her gender identity to the readers, published a single sheet divided into two columns that reported news about recent events in major European cities (Naples, Paris, Amsterdam, and Rome), whereas the reverse side was devoted to advertising. The first issue of the Daily Courant (March 11, 1702) ended with an Advertisement, which can be considered the oldest deontological statement in the history of journalism: the paper pledged to cite sources and provide space for facts, promising to the reader “credibility” and “fairness,” in Mallet’s own words, which since then became part of the vocabulary of the new profession of journalism.

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In the same period, other types of newspaper took shape, their approach being toward more critical discussion and satirical onslaughts. These include The Examiner (1710) and The Spectator (1711). Some of these papers contained pieces by such famous names as Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe, and this attracted thousands of readers thanks also to the fact that the papers could be freely consulted in coffeehouses frequented by a vast, mixed bourgeois class. Throughout the eighteenth century, printed matter increased exponentially: not books and newspapers alone but also surprising new undertakings, such as the Encyclopédie, a gigantic publication in seventeen volumes of text, eleven volumes of illustrations, 71,818 entries, and dozens of compilers of single entries among the most celebrated illuminists from Diderot and D’Alembert (editors) to Voltaire and Rousseau. The encyclopedia is one of the most refined consequences of the printing explosion, attracting a careful, exacting readership not only for the acutely corrosive texts but also for the visual impact of detailed pictures in every field of knowledge, from botany to mechanics. Another means of communication enhanced by printing was the pamphlet: these were booklets of a few dozen pages targeting a contentious subject and attempting to open up a discussion on its roots, championing some cause, or else deriding a powerful personage. When a strongly hostile atmosphere toward the mother country developed in the English colonies overseas, the winds of rebellion found an immensely powerful ally in the press. The outcome of the American War of Independence would be incomprehensible without Benjamin Franklin’s newspapers or Common Sense, the anti-British pamphlet by Thomas Paine, known by heart by General Washington’s soldiers. Even the American constitutional debate following the military victory over the English went forward in the newspaper columns, and the writings of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay were later published in the two volumes of the Federalist Papers, proof of the continuity between press and publishers, corollaries to the new printing industry. In France, the outbreak of the Revolution of 1789 was preceded by the success of the “reading society,” whose members opened collective subscriptions to several papers: in this way, each paper was read on average by six to eight people (Feyel 1997). Historian Robert Darnton (2003) recalls, however, that not all the media of the ancien régime were printed. Some of them (mauvais propos, bruit public, on-dit, pasquinade, pont-neuf, canard, feuille volante, factum, libelle, and chronique scandaleuse) have sunk into oblivion and have no equivalents in English. Some of these media were, however, printed: in general, we could say that printing accompanied the expression modes springing from social proximity,

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in close contact with the street and verbal communication. The revolution multiplied society’s printing energies: whereas in the ten years between 1770 and 1779 there were overall 170 periodicals circulating throughout France, in 1789 in Paris alone, between 140 and 190 periodicals saw the light (Jeanneney 1998, 60). Article 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (August 26, 1789) ran thus: “The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.” The appearance of dozens of periodicals, foreseen and almost solicited by the lawmaker, included printing that was directly political, interested in directing and strongly intervening in revolutionary conflicts. Such was the case, for example, of the Amis du Pueple of Jean Paul Marat, who founded his political action on his own activity as a publicist. In fact, every political group and every representative of any importance of the clubs and revolutionary factions opened a periodical or else was regularly published: the press recorded every event in the history of France, and the expression “opinion publique” was among those most used in the political arena, meaning a public permeated by the printing medium. The revolutionary parliament, the Convention, was active from September 1792 to October 1795. In this period, it organized an extensive distribution of information, daily sending up to 30,000 newspapers to the front during the critical stages of the war (Hunt 1984). A few months before the Convention was installed, the legislative Assembly arranged a number of special sessions for the presentation of new scientific and technological projects. In May 1792, the physicist Claude Chappe illustrated the project of an “optical telegraph.” This was a mechanical system for conveying information at a distance, from one position to another: each station had to be on high ground and had a long pole on the top to maneuver three wooden arms whose movements were visible at a distance of approximately eight to ten kilometres with a good eyeglass. The transmission could count on a code of 8,500 words, contained in a ninety-two-page dictionary, where each page contained ninety-two words. The position of the arms indicated first the page to be consulted and then the order number of the word or phrase. The legislative Assembly approved the project at once since the deputies saw that the speed of transmission of information with that machine would give a competitive advantage of no little value in war. The optical telegraph network followed the movements of the French army from then on until the end of the Napoleonic era, when the towers stretched from Paris to Amsterdam, passing through Brussels and Antwerp. The Paris-Lyon-Turin line was extended to touch Milan, Mantua, and Venice (Flichy 1995).

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Chappe’s machine opened an era of new speed in communications, doing so on the basis of a means that was typically in Gutenberg’s style: a printed code of ninety-two pages without which the mechanics of the telegraph and the distance vision of the eyeglass would have been useless. With the mechanization of printing, imagined realities have saturated history with religious and secular topics, they have opened up utopias, and in the end they have involved humanity in the adventure of mass political and social upheaval. At the end of the eighteenth century, a new economic and cultural system, capitalism, would build a new civilization starting from the mark left by industrialism as sketched out by Gutenberg’s machine. The change was to be gigantic. NOTES 1. Paleoanthropologist Silvia Condemi and scientific journalist François Savatier write, “In effect, everything seems to point to the fact that the Neanderthals had a language, which is not surprising. Living in groups, they had to coordinate many activities, hunting first of all, which . . . occupied the whole clan: it is therefore clear that the Neanderthals needed to communicate among themselves. So there was a language; but which? Did the Neanderthals master a complete linguistic system? In other words, did they know how to combine words (syntax) and meanings (semantics)? The question remains open. . . . In the end, the linguistic skill attributable to the Neanderthals (and to the old sapiens) remains a subjective issue which will doubtless continue to provide food for thought for a long time” (Condemi and Savatier 2016; It. tr. 2018, 138–39). 2. Remains of Homo sapiens bones were found in Morocco in 2017 (Jebel Irhoud site), which would backdate our ancestors’ age to 315,000 to 300,000 years ago instead of about 195,000 to 200,000 years as had been hitherto calculated on the basis of the fossil remains discovered in the Omo Valley, Ethiopia, in 1967. For studies on the Jebel Irhoud site, see Callaway (2017).See also http:​//​www​.lescienze​.it​/news​ /2017​/06​/07​/news​/origine​_antica​_homo​_sapiens​-3558253.

Chapter 6

Imaginary and Communication II From the Analogical Body of Technical Reproducibility to the Digital Imaginary Sergio Brancato

THE LIGHT, THE IMAGE, AND THE MOVEMENT OF THE WORLD: FROM THE MAGIC LANTERN TO PHOTOGRAPHY The conflictual relation between hegemonic audiovisual media and traditional printed media is, even today, a recurrent topic in the social sciences debate. Considered mostly as a matter of fact, it is frequently even taken for granted. Yet even in its diverse theoretical structures, such a perspective is debatable and even unreliable since it does not contemplate certain neuralgic aspects of the issue. For example, the dominant discourse pays not enough attention to one important aspect; that is, the main technical solutions making possible the establishment of the new media ecosystem (such as the optical telegraph, the eyeglass, the camera obscura, and the magic lantern) arose from the horizon of printed communications. This means that ever since the coming-of-age of humanistic sensitivity and the approach of the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution, such solutions were made possible precisely through the cognitive implementation triggered by Gutenberg’s invention. The audiovisual media arise and establish themselves on the basis of the advent of the book. The latter thus contributed to an epoch-making change: by implying a more complex involvement of the body and of the sensory system in communication processes, it set the stage for the end of the medieval order of the world. 117

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The groundbreaking achievement of a new communicative regime founded on the performative qualities of the book medium had the effect of generating and supporting the development of principles of reality, as novel as they were progressive, a sort of remediation of the imaginary (Bolter and Grusin 1999). The focus on the evolution of printed writing systems resulted progressively in an ideological gap between the social experience of reading—from the birth of the “society of letters” to the reality of a “reading public” in mass society—and the powerful eruption on the scene of new cultural technologies. As is well shown by the twentieth-century cinema experience and the central role of the screen script within the process of both production and consumption, the relationship between writing and mass audiovisual media is a foundational one. It is, in its nature, a dialogic relationship more than a conflictual one. In other words, our imaginary comprehends and organizes an unprecedented mixture of codes, languages, aesthetics, and knowledges, shifting Simmel’s theme of the “intensification of nervous life” to a specifically qualitative level (Simmel 1903; It. tr. 1996, 36). But before reaching cinema, which can be considered the decisive turning point in the birth of imaginary man (Morin 1956), we need to reconstruct the route that defines the collective experience of the means of communication in relation to the connection between the image and writing. In the years of the Scientific Revolution, the book extended the collective adventure of knowledge into unexpected areas. Meanwhile, along with the flourishing of treatises and pamphlets, many significative experiments were conducted in the field of visual perception. Among them, the most interesting is the magic lantern, a device known in European courts since the fifteenth century. Laying claim to the authorship of the invention were figures such as the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher and the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens (to whom we owe the happy definition of “magic lantern”). In the second half of the seventeenth century, in any case, the possibility of projecting immaterial images onto a space used as a screen—therefore within a sense frame—had already been developed and had begun to act at the level of symbolic processes, laying the foundations for future developments in communications. As a direct forebear of cinema, the magic lantern also shares with the Lumière brothers’ 1895 patented medium the original separation between the suitability for documentaries and the vocation to invade territories of the “fantastic.” Its rapid propagation seems to contradict the establishment— laid down during the Council of Trento (1545–1563)—of that “grammar of power,” which banished from artistic practice the aesthetics and poetics of mannerism (founded on semiotic excess and topics regarding the marvelous) in order to favor the new political orders appearing in the shift toward



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the baroque age (Mazzacurati 1977). Then, while literary figures such as Torquato Tasso were obliged to take into account the new norms on artistic sensibility indicated by the council in Trento, in the courts and the other public spaces, a new deviant model of entertainment started to appear. It tended to overstep rules and was based on the “magic” of immaterial images suspended in that disconcerting space between light and shade, the component parts of the glance on the world and its “discernment.” Clearly, the proximity between the magic lantern and cinema is not simply a technical issue; it invests the imaginary taken in its literal sense of “imagined reality” between being and nonbeing. As time passed, due to many inputs among which it stands out the public enjoyment for the magic lantern experience, other significant technological innovations came into being. While the original device continued to project fixed images thanks to the backlight of colored glass sheets similar to today’s slides (although these too have now been relegated to the basement of obsolete technologies), some ingenious solutions started to introduce the idea of movement, which certainly increased its attractivity. Thus, the magic lantern carved out its own parabola from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century and beyond. There was, for example, Duboscq’s lantern, which used the potentials of electric light (Brunetta 1997), probably the real starting point for all those “toys”—from Horner’s zoetrope to Reynaud’s praxinoscope—which used the basic principles of optics for increasingly enjoyable and sophisticated forms of consumerism. They were the forerunners of late modern audiovisual communication, a phenomenon showing the unsettled feature of the dynamics of modernization, constantly reaching toward a rewriting of an imaginary coinciding more and more with the systematic realization of the principle of socially shared reality (Abruzzese 2011b). The fascinating point we find in these modern machines of the vision is the growing synergy between light and movement in the field of the social processing of images, an aspect reaching its real zenith between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such synergy plays a key part in the broadening of the user catchment area and, consequently, in the redefining of the consumer spaces of visual entertainment. This process had a leading role in the construction of metropolitan culture: following on the Industrial Revolution, the town form designed anew around the rigorous model of the factories is organically predisposed to integrate within itself new dynamics of mediatization, novel practices of interhuman relations that will work in building a territory to experiment innovative conditions of the social bond. What is transformed is not only the outer aspect of a scenario encapsulating the change in work organization (think about the expansion of industrialism and the rise of the skyline, projecting itself in the metropolis with its towering chimneys and,

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later, its skyscrapers) but also the very “horizontal” nature of the everyday. The experience of the metropolitan individual is finally free of the technical and ideological limits of medieval and early modern times; he takes possession of the night thanks to public street lighting (initially gas lamps) and the growing electrification of closed spaces (Schivelbusch 1983). The use of electricity equips the metropolis to contain new mediatic functions and, as a result, enables an idea of the imaginary profoundly connected to the capitalistic implementation of consumption. The very relation between light and shade, a dominant dualism in the imagination of the species, finds new ways of collective elaboration in the forms of the optical fantastic. Starting from the romantic aesthetic, the latter brings alive the narrations of mass culture with its own metaphoric power (Milner 1982). It is no coincidence that the two most representative genres in the structure of popular literature, one following on the other over the change in epoch between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are the ghost story and the roman du crime. These two “world feelings” are deep down connected to the social story of the collective glance increasingly required to redefine the borders— not only physiologic—between light and darkness, public and private, the evident and the removed. Street lighting is part of that transition that takes industrial society toward the massification process and therefore in the direction of forms of individualism generated by late modernity’s historical subjectivity. The media taking shape at this stage feature mostly easy accessibility, as they address a public as yet little educated. Hence, they aim at the representational performance of the body, bypassing the transcoding required by writing for an understanding of the text. The bourgeois novel itself proved the decisive boost for the nineteenth century’s reality principle, being the authentic machine for the production and propagation of sense. It came to the fore closely associated with increasingly sophisticated iconographic accompaniments integrating within them the technological changes going forward in the scenario of mediatic processes. The case of an illustrator such as Paolo Della Valle is exemplary; he collaborated on the successful novels by Emilio Salgari—the most important Italian “mythographer” at the turn of the century—by producing illustrations based on the previous compositional use of photography in order to obtain greater realism. But this is also the case—in almost “symmetrical” characters—of an artist much better known and culturally acknowledged, such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who at the turn of the nineteenth century took part in the historical avant-garde season without disdaining collaboration as a graphic artist on numerous reviews in the periodic press as well as exploring the expressive terrain of the advertising placards with his “iconic” posters publicizing the world of nightspots in Montmartre.



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THE EXPLOSION OF THE METROPOLITAN IMAGINARY: IMAGE, SOUNDS, AND TECHNICAL REPRODUCIBILITY IN THE AGE OF THE MASSES The development of the technical reproducibility of images through increasingly advanced printing methods is an important feature of the nineteenth century, when communications pivot once more on the human body albeit in ways totally different from the past. This was due to the growing demand for information in a society experiencing the appearance on the political scene of a new lead figure, that is, those metropolitan masses observed with particular attention by Walter Benjamin (Benjamin 1955a). The apparent immediacy of the eye, partially freed of the tutelage of alphabetic communications on which the specificity of the modern world relied until then, is now allowing the mass man to orientate himself amidst the incessant, dizzying changes caused by industrialization processes. Even retrieving McLuhan’s (1964) mediological analysis or going back to Foucault’s (1972) reflection on the nature of power, it is clearly the social role of the body above all that comes into play at this stage, the definition of its boundaries through the changeable mapping of morals, the shift of sense connected to a renewed management of the senses. The rise of nineteenth-century technologies in communications highlights the mediatic characteristic of social change. So far, in the light of our reconstruction, we might say that the transformation of society structures and roles inevitably coincides with changes in the media system and therefore with its corollary of technologies and cultures (cultural technologies) that innervate and characterize collective life. In the dynamic framework of the social construction of reality, the connection between media and imaginary becomes one of the fundamental nuclei of social analysis. The thought of Edgar Morin (1956) on cinema stems from this perspective. The French scholar introduces a new viewpoint into the byways of theoretical conflicts connected to the Frankfurt School, not coincidentally linked to the emergence of those generations born in the illusory peace between the two great wars of the twentieth century. Yet Morin himself investigates the issue with an approach that widens the research field over time, leading him to wonder about the imaginary and its relation to human nature in the essay Le paradigme perdu. Here, he identifies in burial rituals—therefore in the cultural invention of death and its social adjuncts—the trigger point of the imaginary (Morin 1973), that is, when man, in order to survive the bloodthirsty competition in the natural world, begins to think about things that do not exist, setting out on the road of no return to abstract thought (Harari 2011).

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Morin’s innovative socio-anthropological interpretation was one of the first contributions to redefine in detail the relationship between the imaginary and social life. By recognizing the choice of the “tomb” as the linguistic threshold between two worlds, a narration tidying up the world of experience (i.e., a proper communicative act), it is clear why the French intellectual broke with the tradition that, not only in France, used to define the relationship between reality and imaginary in terms of an antinomy (Sartre 1940). Morin opens the way to a different vision on issues of the imaginary, a route to be followed especially by those intellectuals who will then focus on relations between symbolic forms and social life. Among these, one of the foremost is Alberto Abruzzese, who back in the 1970s had identified a political dimension in the imaginary closely interwoven with media strategies. This approach was confirmed, in particular, in Il crepuscolo dei barbari, a reflection in which Abruzzese shifts the focus from sociology as it is conventionally understood to what he identifies as mediology, that is, a conception of territory in which traditional space is replaced by the habitat generated by the means of communication: The imaginary is no semantic field to be set in order on the basis of values outside its quality as a chaotic poietic machine. It is in fact a machine that produces itself and itself alone, the material of itself, the means of production of itself and the intelligence of itself; with itself and for itself, it desires, it copulates and it regenerates itself. (Abruzzese 2011a, 52)

For Abruzzese, the imaginary is a machine that produces and reproduces itself following the pattern of innovation that, ultimately, tightens the link between media and society. In such a perspective, media constitutes society, which tends to exist on the “community” basis guaranteed by the communication processes themselves. Within the debate about the industrial territory, it could be very interesting to return to the body, understanding it as the changing morphology of the links between the biological and the technological dimensions of the species. As confirmed by paleoanthropological findings, this fluid nature of the body in relation to the sphere of technique emerged ever since the dawn of humanity. In the field of the twentieth-century debate on the masses and the media, however, it lends itself to uses that are often metaphorical, aiming to identify in the “mutation” a general effect of corruption and loss. That is certainly due to the cultural transformations going forward during the nineteenth century, as rapid as they are evident. Therefore, it is useful to return to the idea of externalization, with which a number of scholars interpret the effects generated in the social body by the industrial media: much more than in the



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past, the borders of the metropolitan individual are moved and broadened by the accompanying media that tend to transfer an increasing number of physical and mental functions outside themselves through technology (Costa 2018). The progress of chemistry and electricity has driven communications toward utopias belonging to the species since ancient times. In 1826, for example, at the climax of a long path of research and experimentation on the reproducibility of images, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce took what is considered by many to be the first photograph in history (although it would actually be more correct to speak of heliography): View from the Window at Le Gras. Niépce was one of many scientists, most of them self-educated, who were passionate about research on the empirical applications of natural phenomena. Interested in chemistry and the physical properties of light, for years he carried out important experiments on photosensitive substances until he succeeded in fixing the picture of the view from the window of his laboratory. To do so, he used an optical device known since ancient times, the camera obscura, a box in which he had placed a metal sheet spread with bitumen of Judea treated to be impressed by the source of light entering the lens. The realization of this picture required an exposition of several hours (if not some days). Although it may today seem a rudimental device, the technical solution used by Niépce is not only the basis of photography but also in a wider sense the realization of an aspiration taking us back to the origin of the species: the replication and control of life through increasingly sophisticated representation techniques. It is no coincidence that creation myths have been among the basic stories of the imaginary since prehistoric times and have reached us here in the heart of modernity, availing themselves of certain particularly explicative textual moments; purely as an example (albeit not arbitrary) is the novel published by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in 1818, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, rightly considered a turning point toward the narrative forms of mass culture but at the same time a landmark relative to the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the traditions of collective storytelling. One of the results of the development of modern scientific thinking, the gradual propagation of technological innovations places at the disposal of the mass man an unpredictable number of gadgets that change the relations between subject and world. The metropolitan space itself is equipped with a vastly pervasive constellation of places devoted to communication. If the infrastructures such as city transport—from the horse-drawn tram to metropolitan trains—sketch anew the everyday panorama and renovate the functions of the city, the need to organize the economy around new distribution and consumer poles leads to the rise of sophisticated architectures of commodity phantasmagoria (from shopwindows to department stores up to universal exhibitions). This also resulted in the rethinking of the mediatic

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quality of streets, with the appearance of large advertising placards: a communication mode that also carries out the novel function of decoration and the resemanticizing of public areas. As we can see, the boiling magma of nineteenth-century innovations does not come about casually or in a vacuum; it lives within a process, as vast as it is consistent, of edification of modernity’s space and time. Means of communication with at times highly differentiated features compete, however, to make of those metropolitan crowds—which during the nineteenth century had shocked artists such as Baudelaire and concerned social psychologists such as Tarde and Le Bon—not a threatening mass of barbarians on the march but the vanguard of historical subjectivities destined to enliven the politics of the “short century.” Innovations such as photography—revolutionary above all in its renegotiation of relations between art and technique—do not concern only the fields of aesthetics but also, first and foremost, those of the production processes of individual and collective identity through the institution of a principle of reality founded on the alleged objectivity of photofixation (Benjamin 1955b). The spread of photography is linked to a radical change in the traditional ideologies of art, which undoubtedly reduced the quantitative role of artists while launching the creative quality in unexpected directions. The propagation through the market of the photographic portrait corresponds to a rush toward the impressionists’ pictorial research and that of all the following artistic avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. Phonofixation, however, touched a very sensitive chord in the collective imaginary: the divine nature of the word. Thus, when in 1877 the Frenchman Charles Cros and, the next year, the American entrepreneur Thomas A. Edison presented a mechanical device capable of capturing the volatile substance of the voice and fixing it onto a support, thus making possible infinite listenings, the first reaction was one of discomfiture and refusal: technology could not take possession of the sacred (Costa 2018). What happened in the seventeenth century to Kircher, suspected of sorcery because of his work on the magic lantern, happened again in the age of positivism with the phonograph. In a more rational, disenchanted era—apparently—the anachronistic resistance to the innovation was soon overtaken by the fascination roused by the new technology and by the options it opened up. When the effect of the phonograph’s novelty wore off, the mechanics of phonofixation were able to turn into a finalized medium, launching the device onto music markets and setting up a model of use in which the performance of live concerts entered the sphere of technical sound reproducibility. The spread of the gramophone and the rise of the record industry are further, important steps toward the evolution of the audiovisual media system, which was to define the experience of the cultural industry at the turn of the century.



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Another invention at the end of the nineteenth century crowned the experience of the period, hungry for images and desirous of pushing beyond all previous limits in using communications. The result of tireless research on photography, another device shows the tendency to capture the fundamental expressions of life and put them to use in the field of mass consumption. The phonograph had finally realized the ancient aspiration of seizing the word and taming it, overturning the Latin proverb on word and writing with an apparently paradoxical “verba manent”; now the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph, in line with what we said above regarding image reproduction, makes it possible to rerun life in its most specific feature: movement. A consequence of ceaseless research on improving photography and making it more reliable and “objectivizing,” the aim of realizing the cinematograph or photo-kinematics had stimulated a great number of experimenters in the second half of the nineteenth century, all with the idea of realizing animated photographs. In the wake of the technical solutions already acquired, such as the celluloid film invented by Kodak’s founder George Eastman in 1885 in order to market photo cameras everyone could afford, there were those who sought to work on the principle of fast-moving reels to destructure the image in movement as it was being filmed and then put it together again when projected. Interesting results were obtained, as ever, by Edison, the acute entrepreneur of new technologies of the time (Marvin 1990), who in 1894 patented and put on offer a gadget called a kinetoscope. Marketed through collective consumer centers of the imaginary such as fairs and the great universal exhibitions, the kinetoscope was rechristened “Nickel-Odeon” since it was possible to see its short films (mobile postcards of a sort) by paying a nickel and peering through the slot in a projection apparatus that allowed only one viewer at a time. Just a year later, in Lyon, the brothers Louis-Jean and Auguste Lumière found the solution to the problem that no one, not even Edison, had managed to solve: the perfect synchronizing inside the movie camera between the lens shutter and the positioning of the film photograms behind it. Using the same mechanism fine-tuned for the sewing machine, the Lumière brothers succeeded in perfectly harmonizing the circular, uniform movement of the film with the alternating movement of the shutter. Each photogram was thus positioned exactly behind the lens, staying immobile for a sixteenth of a second, and as a result was correctly impressed and always in focus. On December 28, 1895, in a small hall in the Gran Cafè in Boulevard del Capucines in Paris, the first public showing of the cinématographe occurred: an invention that was to change the processes of communications and the imaginary worldwide. This does not happen immediately since the cinematograph is actually “nothing more” than the photo-cinema technology able to produce the illusion of movement for spectators. It is, to the cinema, what the

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phonograph is to the gramophone: the machine that makes it possible to take photos that move. The cinematograph, then, is not the medium allowing the technology to transform into a new language, thus taking part in the narrative construction processes of the world by founding the imaginary anew. As Morin (1956) claims, the passage from “cinematograph” to “cinema,” which came about in the first ten years of the twentieth century, is the essential moment to grasp the substance of the twentieth-century imaginary, founded on an immersive quality of communication that blurs the boundary between reality and its representation. In other words, while writing hinges on discerning the act of seeing, the audiovisual media—cinema first and foremost—involve the body in the perceptive sphere of sensation. The destiny of mass media is fulfilled, as the body moves out onto a more highly structured layer of existence and the imaginary overlaps with aspects of material life, taking them over. This is why the cinema becomes an establishment in the rituality of community viewing. This happens in a dynamic relation with the shared viewing that dialogues with the medium, helping to model it and in turn being changed by it, within the framework of a process of specialization of cultural enjoyment that transforms the opaque substance of the masses into the audience of industrial aesthetic forms. The long journey of the image—phantasmal and immaterial—starts in the seventeenth century with the magic lantern redesigning space and the nature of relations with the visual mimesis of the world and reaches the great Hollywood screen in the “dream factory” that narrates the twentieth-century world with a poietic quality that no medium would manage to imitate until television languages came into being. We shall now return to the issue from which we had initially started: the conflict between writing and image in the sociological elaboration of cultural processes. We defined it an apparent conflict: let us now clarify why. When the documental hypothesis of the Lumière brothers ran aground on the worn-out sense of wonder caused by the repeated technology spectacle (seeing a “miracle” repeated a certain number of times eventually transforms it into something normal), the cinematograph had two possible destinies: fading away, as happens to so many technologies unable to find a point of interaction with the public, or else reconverting into a language capable of offering its spectators the substance of greatest appeal within the framework of communication processes. And that is stories, the uninterrupted chain of tales modeled on the great mold of the Myth that has accompanied the species ever since its most remote origins and enables it to hand down the whole set of knowledges that make sense of individual experience, making possible the community continuity within reciprocal identification of belonging.



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The shift from cinematograph to cinema made possible not only the survival and, over time, the evolution of a technology. It also generated the audiovisual language on which the whole system of the media hinged at least for the first half of the “short century.” This language was ultimately so effective that it succeeded in containing within itself both industrial productive processes and individual creativity, both tradition and innovation. Moreover, as a structural element, it implied even the writing that according to some it denied. Is the latter, indeed, that in the basic, ordering contrivance of the script dominates and perhaps brings to a final close the modern experience of the imaginary. THE DECLINE OF MASS COMMUNICATION IN CINEMA, TELEVISION, AND DIGITAL NETWORKS At the end of 1895, within a few months, a singular coincidence brought together the genesis of certain languages highly diverse in their technological nature yet congruent with one another; namely, they were cinema, of which we have already spoken, the comic and the radio. Progressively, they became neuralgic in the dynamics featured in the twentieth-century media system and its audiovisual vocation. As regards the comic, the date of reference is July 7, 1895, the day when in the pages of the daily New York World the first plate appeared of a series on the character of the Yellow Kid, a work by cartoonist Richard F. Outcault. Today, it is generally accepted that this is only a hackneyed convention connected to early attempts to systemize the history of the medium, which, due to its structural characters, is the result of a much longer, more complex story. Known internationally under many different names (comics in the United States, bande dessinée in France, historietas in Spanish-speaking countries, and in the past few years graphic novel more or less everywhere), the comic is undoubtedly a means of communication based on the functional synergy between iconic code and verbal code and therefore on the productivity of the conflict between image and writing. It came into its own on the cultural horizon, connecting initially with the great daily press and then gaining its independence with supports such as comic books, specialized reviews, or bookshelf albums. Although connected to the coeval condition of the press system and the logics of technical reproducibility, the comic is a truly audiovisual mass medium marking the media processes of the twentieth century and interacting systemically above all with the cinema, with which it exchanges communication techniques (editing, the storyboard, and the same research on movement), languages, and imaginary. Although it may hardly appear sophisticated culturally or even technologically deficient, the comic is effectively

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a neuralgic medium: by virtue of its Husserlian epoche between image and word, it is found in an area of contiguity and interaction among the other media, often outpacing them more cheaply—as an experimental laboratory of visual forms—in linguistic strategies and technological solutions. Along with cinema, one of the media with which the comic engaged a virtual discourse was the radio. In fact, 1895 is also the year in which experimenters such as Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi achieved the preliminary yet decisive stage of research on remote transmission of hertzian waves, the technical basis of radiophony, that is, the transmission of sounds without the aid of material infrastructures (such as copper wires for the telephone achieved in the 1870s). Having won widespread, perhaps unexpectedly rapid, popularity, the telephone can in some ways be considered the forerunner of certain features we find today in the radio since before becoming known as an instrument for private communications from one point to another, it was also experimented as a mass medium that (as in the case of Clément Ader’s théâtrophone) audio-connected listeners with theaters where concerts and performances of various kinds were held. Despite all their dissimilarities, the telephone, the record, and the radio are all cultural technologies having in common the vocation of the mass audience media of looking anew at existential relations with ongoing orality. The differences between them concern the time issue: while the record (and the successive sound supports, from music cassettes to CDs) makes it possible to fix musical performances on a support to be at the disposal of the user (as well as the other product types featured in the long season of sound reproduction devices), the telephone brings close those who are far away and, as a result, distances those who are close, thus creating problems for the sense of place within interpersonal relations (Meyrowitz 1986). On the other hand, radio reintroduces the significance of the voice in the world while endowing it with a pervasive, mass character it had never had before. The story of radio as a mass medium began in the 1920s, when the original idea of the medium—its potential use in war—was cut back due to the contingent risks of interception. The impossibility of military secrecy was set aside when its potential as a means of entertainment was revealed. As early as 1919, indeed, it began an experimentation on the broadcasting model, namely, the widespread propagation of the signal, sent from one (the radio station) to many (the public possessing a radio receiver). The impact of this new medium was explosive, with hundreds of radio stations springing up all over the world. In line with commercial or public service policies (such as the BBC in 1922, the oldest public service radio-television subject), they served hundreds of thousands and then millions of consumers in a growing trend accompanying and supporting the definitive arrival of the mass consumer society.



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Radio inaugurated the instantaneous communications model connecting geopolitical territory within a new relations network strongly based on the media. The very structure of the nation-state was reformed: the use of the radio by totalitarian systems in propaganda terms, such as with the declaration of war on France broadcast live by Benito Mussolini from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia, as well as its use by democratic nations, such as the fireside chats from U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, generally so very different in style from that of the European dictators, reaching out to an audience in their homes in a reassuring, colloquial tone, quite the opposite of public demonstration fervor and nationalistic rhetoric. Although the first true experimenters of radio from the viewpoint of the rewriting of the twentieth-century identity were the fascist regimes with their understanding of the medium’s revolutionary impact on institutional forms of the political discourse, its final fine-tuning as the language of everyday life is due to the communication culture that normalized its use in seeking out new models of mediation between public and private. From the start of the 1920s, radio flanked the appearance on the scene of cinema hegemony in the global economy of mass media. While the cinema made possible the conditions of a renewed use of the eye, the radio made visible and tactile the sound versatility of its own socio-technical apparatus (McLuhan 1964). The systemic nature of industrial media is confirmed by the convergence of their action in the dynamic economy of the imaginary to the point that the establishment of the radio in mass consumerism forced the cinema factory to adopt a new technical solution that had been available for about a quarter of a century: the possibility of adding sound to the images. On October 6, 1927, with the triumphant distribution in American cinemas of The Jazz Singer directed by Alan Crosland and produced by Warner Bros., silent film radically changed its own media status, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, gaining the sound and word dimension. At the juncture of silent and sound cinema, the expressive experimentation aiming above all to redesign spectator morphology, The Jazz Singer integrated within it the whole range of communication functions organized by the cultural industry of the early twentieth century—from record production to the radio to the iconic feature of the comics—with the purpose of defining a new horizon for cultural consumption. The overlap between experience lived and its imaginary representation grows progressively through the shifts of a complex technological corpus always changing the relational chain between world and subject in the framework of virtualized everyday life guaranteed by a media apparatus having by now little in common with that from previous centuries and evolving ceaselessly through functional crossovers. If the “talkies” have a debt to radio, the latter competes with the film medium in its ability to intercept the changing

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sensibility of the mass public. Systemic contamination between mass media can but encourage the search for innovations awaiting only suitable economic and cultural conditions to become virtually active in the industrial cycle of commodities. Experimented at the same time as radio, the history of the distance transmission of images through electric devices is one of disappointed expectations. For a long time, both entrepreneurs and spectators were not impressed by the possibility of having a medium able to communicate instantaneously through pictures and words. During the 1930s, which saw the full establishment of the cultural industry and its socio-technical apparatus, television remained a suggestion linked to experimentation in countries such as Italy and Germany, where the first live television broadcast came with the Berlin Olympics, or else was relegated to the role of a bizarre attraction among events, such as the Great Exhibition in Chicago in 1933. What was later to be called “television” required a longer sedimentation, a more complex maturing process. Preliminary experimentation was required on the synergy between the moving image and the sound reproduction of the “talkies” as well as an aptitude for the word remediated by a device such as the radio, powerful enough to redefine orality anthropologically. Furthermore, the television hypothesis required a diverse economy from that of metropolitan acceptance since it achieved a dialectic between the inside and the outside of inhabited space, the collective perception itself of the territory and of its social livability. All these conditions were to come about only after World War II in the thrust of the postwar economy, which generated major new figures in the consumer world (the young and women above all) and renewed expectations of socialization through the media. In the sociocultural context of the 1950s, television seemed to be the strategic key for a renewal of the domestic context and its relational contents, contributing to bringing back into play the dynamics of collective elaboration of the imaginary through forms of entertainment targeting an audience ready to renegotiate traditional social roles and behavior by then considered obsolete. Television was born and developed thanks to the global effervescence investing Western society in the framework of its reconstruction after the war’s catastrophe of sense, which had produced a “new world” suspended between utopia and dystopia: from Auschwitz and Hiroshima to the conquest of space, the second half of the twentieth century had the priority problem of elaborating the moral grief of totalitarianisms and the problematic ecology of a technological habitat incapable of being peaceably run under the progress ideology. In an everyday time that was rationally planned, generalist, mass television reorganized program contents under an orderly schedule, synthesizing the whole history of entertainment and literature, destructuring and



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reassembling it in forms of the imagination that mixed the ritual structures of the myth with those of celebration and play, and redirecting and keeping time to a participation increasingly choral and “presentified” to the construction of reality. Born of the laboratory function of the radio (from which it has taken plentifully of strategic models and program typologies), we can consider generalist television, having now lasted about forty years, the top accomplishment of mass audiovisual media thanks to its communicative efficiency. Already in the 1980s, it found itself in strong competition with devices tending to corrode its central position in daily habits. Its vocation for the ritualization of consumer time clashes with the propagation of gadgets such as the home video recorder, which sets the television user free from sharing the real time of the programming. Having become gradually independent of the networks’ agendas, the television spectator now has a new level of control over the medium; he decomposes and recomposes it through actions such as zapping, producing in the end its deritualization in turning to distribution technologies and to the different platforms available. The last of the mass media and first of the personal media, today television is more and more integrating with the emerging digital media. Since the end of the 1960s, the latter have rewritten communication rules, at first slowly and then more and more rapidly. The start of everything can be traced back to the appearance of a new media paradigm appearing in that period: on October 29, 1969, three months after the moon landing, a bizarre project named Arpanet reached completion. It was a network of interconnected computers belonging to the ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), a little-known sector of the U.S. Department of Defense for emerging technologies. That day, a message left the laboratories of the University of California, Los Angeles, consisting of the single word “login,” directed to the Stanford Research Institute. Just one word moved 500 kilometers through the copper cables of the usual telephone infrastructures. Setting the foundation for the cyberpunk imaginary of the 1980s, which, through writers such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, identified the postmodern frontiers of the collective imagination, with that simple word, the internet was coming into being, together with a model of society in which immaterial Web journeys marked the dusk of the industrial world founded on the factory and metropolitan masses. From that moment on, paraphrasing and updating McLuhan, we started to talk about the “Galaxy Internet” as an epochal landmark passage investing the very load-bearing structures of modernity (Castells 2003) and about “collective intelligence” for the impact on the matrix of the new communication technologies’ idea of the individual (Lévy 1997). It is evident that the advent of the digital media defines a real interruption in the itinerary of the communications media that generated the historical experience of modernity.

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Nevertheless, still in 2001—a year marking the end of one way of conceiving and “narrating” the world order rather than the beginning of a new century— the scholars who wanted to analyze the emergence of the digital had to refer to cinema and to the other languages that came of age in the time of technical reproducibility rather than to the contemporary horizon of algorithmic producibility (Manovich 2002), which is to say that, turning back to our starting point, the transition under way from mass society to that of the present has not as yet fully identified the imaginary that may contain it and return it in the connective practices of narration. BIBLIOGRAPHY Abruzzese, A. 2011a. Il crepuscolo dei barbari. Milano: Bevivino Editore. ———. 2011b. L’intelligenza del mondo: Fondamenti di storia e teoria dell’immaginario. Roma: Meltemi. Benjamin W. 1955a. Angelus Novus: Saggi e frammenti. Torino: Einaudi. ———. 1955b. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Illuminations. Bolter, J. D., and R. Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Braudel, F. 1979. Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme (XV–XVIII siècle). Les structures du quotidien: le possible et l’impossibile. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin. Briggs, A., and P. Burke. 2020. A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet. 4th ed. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brunetta, G. P. 1997. Il viaggio dell’icononauta: Dalla camera oscura di Leonardo alla luce dei Lumière. Venezia: Marsilio. Callaway, E. 2017. “Oldest Homo Sapiens Fossil Claim Rewrites Our Species’ History,” Nature, August 6, https:​//​www​.nature​.com​/news​/oldest​-homo​-sapiens​ -fossil​-claim​-rewrites​-our​-species​-history​-1​.22114. Castells, M. 2003. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Condemi, S., and F. Savatier. 2016. Neandertal, mon frère. 300.000 ans d’histoire de l’homme. Paris: Flammarion. Costa, M. 2018. L’uomo fuori di sé: Alle origini della esternalizzazione. Milano: Mimesis. Darnton, R. 2003. George Washington’s False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Feyel, G. 1997. “Giornali.” In L’Illuminismo. Dizionario storico, edited by V. Ferrone and D. Roche. Roma-Bari: Laterza.  Flichy, P. 1995. Dynamics of Modern Communications: The Shaping and Impact of New Communication Technologies. London: Sage. Foucault, M. 1972. Microfisica del potere: Interventi politici. Torino: Einaudi.



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Grohmann, A. 2003. La città medievale. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Gurevič A. J. 1972. Kategorii srednevekovoj kul’turi. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo Iskusstvo. En. tr. 1985. Categories of Medieval Culture. London: Routledge. Harari, Y. N. 2011. Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind. London: Penguin Random House. Hunt, L. 1984. Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Infelise, M. 2002. Prima dei giornali. Alle origini della pubblica informazione. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Innis, A. H. 1951. Empire and Communications. Toronto: Dundurn Press. Jeanneney, J-N. 1998. Une histoire des médias, des origines à nos jours. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Lévy, P. 1997. Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books. Manovich, L. 2002. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marvin, C. 1990. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mazzacurati, G. 1977. Conflitti di culture nel Cinquecento. Napoli: Liguori. McLuhan, M. 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of the Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extension of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Meyrowitz, J. 1986. No Sense of Place. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Milner, M. 1982. La fantasmagorie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982. Mithen, S. 2005. The Singing Neanderthals. The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.  Morin, E. 1956. Le Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire: Essai d’anthropologie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. ———. 1973. Le paradigme perdu: La nature humaine. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Sartre, J.-P. 1940. The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. London: Routledge. Schivelbusch, W. 1983. Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Simmel, G. 1903. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In The Urban Sociology Reader, ed. J. Lin and C. Mele. London: Routledge. Steinberg, S. H. 1955. Five Hundred Years of Printing. London: Penguin Books. Tomasello, M. 2008. Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Chapter 7

The Matter of the Imaginary in the Dynamics and Tensions of the Social World Antonio Tramontana

Tension envelops all corporality. On the one hand, we tend to want to conduct our own lives toward the indistinct and to be free of a world that daily keeps us anchored to the public image constructed by each one of us in the course of our own life. On the other, for example, the need to comply with certain terms in the writing of this chapter keeps me anchored to this chair and makes me select concepts, weigh words, and respect editorial guidelines—an existence therefore that fluctuates between two opposing tendencies. To put it in a more general way, the purpose of such fluctuation is to reduce to a few mechanical actions that wealth and potential that a life is capable of expressing. This is a real force that takes a stand against the wealth of life by interposing a densely intricate thicket of symbols; its outcome is to direct and channel the life emerging from my body. In spite of its desire to wander into the indistinct, life finds itself constrained to self-expression within an impoverished number of actions. Yet in the first instance, it would be difficult to recognize the ways in which the imaginary makes me into a public being—and there would be no lack of attempts to unveil its truth and “unmask” any snares it employs for the eyes of the seeker. However, we could possibly hold that truth is exactly in that veil, and the effort to wrench it away brings with it the expressive wealth that it is always phenomenally willing to disclose. The immediacy with which things present themselves acquires here a chance to comprehend the instances of the symbolic dimension that defines the imaginary world; the latter can therefore be understood from its surface (La Rocca and Tramontana 2019). This surface 135

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coincides here with the material dimension that envelops our corporality, and it is in fact thanks to this that the sense and direction in which life expresses itself is determined. From the moment most of us wake up in the morning, we perform a series of routine actions. We get out of bed and move toward the preordained areas of our home. We each recompose our own image, removing the vestments of the private role to face the world, which has in the meantime come to life outside the walls of the apartment. The force that wrenches us from the world of dreams and leads us step-by-step toward the front door is easily recognizable. The same sequence is marked off by elements that envelop us, through which we submit the singularity of our life to a set of provisions imposed by the imaginary instance. Just to mention a few, the bed, the mirror, the walls, and the door are the elements through which the body surrenders a part of itself and gives itself up to the intricate, reciprocal determination of symbols that make us part of a collective whole. From bed to door, we submit ourselves to a liminal flow that makes the person a subject soon to be obliged to enter into relations with the chaotic world of everyday life. At first sight, objects seem to be the crux of instances both individual and collective. In the first and second parts of this chapter, we will investigate the role of objects both in the light of the notion of the imagination and in that of the imaginary. Once having defined the role and position that objects hold in the world of men, a look at the classical authors of sociological thought will broaden the discourse on the relations between the object and the imaginary. In the third part of this chapter, we shall attempt to investigate through Simmel “how” objects act in social dynamics, while in the fourth and last part, through Benjamin, we will seek a better understanding of “what” is deposited on the material of which objects are made. OBJECTS AND THE IMAGINATION If it seems so far that the standoff between each one of us and the imaginary can be resolved in a drama with life conflicting with an intangible force, the world of objects has the merit of reminding us that this force requires matter in order to express itself and to function correctly in spite of the fact that the imaginary is a totally evanescent aspect of collective life. A conflict certainly remains on the battlefield fueled by the contrast between such widely differing impulses—and this fluctuating between tendencies, diverse and contrary, may indeed be taken as the founding impulse of our very existence. The tendency that pushes us toward the indistinct is certainly that part of us in thrall to the impulses of the psyche. The psyche, being interpreted as a



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sort of creative monad—in that it generates for itself (and in front of itself) a series of images—is an impulse that constantly pushes us toward an autarchic vortex. Castoriadis’s statement is singular in this context. Inside us, this emergence of figures, however, is not “determined” by the sensorial either in the fact of its being or in its being-thus. . . . The psyche’s representative flux continues whether or not there is any “outside stimulation”; it unceasingly makes itself continue. . . . This emergence of figures occurs first (and, in a sense, always) under the rule of the figuring-figure of “everything = self,” where “activity” and “passivity” are indistinguishable, just as are “inside” and “outside.” (Castoriadis 1987, 301)

In contrast to this is a world that we constantly touch and that exists independently of our will. The bed, the mirror, and the door are entities pitting themselves against the centripetal force of the psyche. To the extent that we touch them, that is, in the fact that we stretch our body on the bed, we look toward the mirror, or we pull open the door to leave the house, all these phenomenal circumstances oblige our psyche to break the autarchic vortex and to confront the world around us. The moment we make contact with objects, the psyche is thus forced to create images no longer for itself: it finds itself now directed toward a world enveloping and surrounding us. The event through which the generative monad of an incessant flow of images is channeled “toward” something perceived by bodily senses makes the world of objects the element, thanks to which the imagination develops—which, again in line with Castoriadis’s (1987) thought, arises where the images of the psyche enter into relations with somatic activity. From this viewpoint, objects constantly alter our psyche—and determine in some cases the conflict we mentioned at the outset. Yet if this alteration does nothing more than set in form the psychic images, thanks to imagination, we constantly alter the world surrounding us and can generate the image of a bed, not only as that thing capable of separating day from night: that object, in some cases, may become the place in which we can comfortably carry out a few hours of our work. The mirror is not only that object onto which we project the reflex of our image: starting from there—and perhaps precisely thanks to the presence of the mirror—the potential is generated of having a support on which to build the foundations for a change in our own appearance. Finally, the door. It is not only the limit beyond which one world finishes and another opens onto possibilities of gathering experience: as well as opening onto the world, it also becomes the threshold across which external reality enters our world and alters its layout, frequently even spatially: chairs are placed differently, there is a quick sorting out of things left scattered about, and objects (glasses, plates, and cutlery) are used for important occasions.

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Objects are then the substances through which our inner world finds itself catapulted into a world outside ourselves. They bend the representative flow, and, given our imagination, we can in turn use them to experience this external environment (Tramontana 2019). The bed, the mirror, and the door, being the supports with which we act in a certain context, become the material on which our life settles day after day, and, as such, they become the receptacles of emotions and the crossroads of relations. The fact of being able to associate certain people with specific objects is not so much (or is not only) the affirmation of a legal principle on which private property is founded; it is rather their capacity to possess an auratic dimension through which emotivism is associated just as much with plastic as with wood and becomes the expression of that person. So in the instant we use them, Grandma’s armchair or our friend’s book will never wholly concede to a clear shift in possession: these objects enclose the lives of the persons that have inhabited them, and, in inheriting the object, we must always be willing to accept that atmosphere that once enwrapped Grandma or our friend. We can fit that armchair in among our furniture, and we can consider that lent book to be precious, yet with all possible imagination, these objects forever keep a surplus made of emotivism strong enough to preserve everlastingly the shade of the original owner. Therefore, while admitting an opening onto creativity, objects are always a perimeter within which imagination comes about. Hence, it is possible to maintain that the shaping of the psyche due to the world of objects defines the limits within which imaginative activity happens and sets its own action within exact horizons. If for Gehlen imagination is the “organism’s ability to assimilate the states it has experienced in order to base future actions on past experiences of situations” (Gehlen 1988, 309), thanks to this movement, first centripetal then centrifugal, at the moment when we touch any object, the latter becomes part of our life to the point of determining the extent of the actions performed within a determined ambience that includes the incorporated object. This circumstance leads to a double conclusion. On the one hand, the phenomenal determination of objects is a flint sparking that imaginative flame that enables us to say we are creative. Every object can be bent—materially and symbolically—to our will (Bodei 2009). But this creativity of ours is itself conditioned by the formal perimeter imposed by an object. However creative, we must always take into account this perimeter made of diversified matter. A pen conceived for writing can certainly become a magic wand in the hands of children, thus for an instant no longer carrying out a certain use, but that momentary bending of the function will revert to the fact that the pen, beyond the imaginative bubble created by the world of childhood, will always return to being itself and will carry out the activity for which it was conceived and constructed.



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THE MATTER OF THE IMAGINARY Due to this imagination conditioned by the materiality of objects, we live in a world of their image and likeness, and we move to the extent they dictate. At this point, we must wonder about the nature of the perimeter imposed by objects and decide in what kind of field creativity comes about. In considering imagination as that faculty of getting free of the hic et nunc by means of a real sensorial incorporation of the world of objects through which we find ourselves catapulted into a world determined by them, this conditioned creativity—determined therefore starting from the relation between the imagination and the objects—is the root of the collective sense of the world about us. In the creation of a collective formation, imagination plays a relevant role to the point of being considered “basic underlying structure of societies” (Gehlen 1988, 312). As Gehlen believes, a collective formation arises and comes to be in an indirect manner—in such a way that all the individuals identify with the same other, an “X,” and behave accordingly, so that their self-awareness has a common point of intersection and is further supported by a sameness of behavior. (Gehlen 1988, 310)

Thanks to imagination, we have the chance of living in a “chronic condition of semi-alienation” (Gehlen 1988, 312): we displace ourselves within a collective arena where, in order to join in, we are forced to give up a part of our specificity and fall into line with the collective conduct—up to the point at times of being able to act as a single entity. If, through imagination, each one of us displaces himself from his own center, thanks to this faculty, we join in a collective productive flow in which images must belong to a point in which the differences find themselves reunited and in common. In this movement of reunion and absorption of the collective, objects must submit to the same logic of functioning. The generation of the image of a bed on which to stretch one’s own body, that of a mirror in which to reflect the image of one’s own face, or yet again that of a door that delimits the existence of at least two worlds, the inner and the outer—all these actions that confront objects must in all circumstances be valid for oneself and for others. All the productive wealth of the imagination, to the extent that it submits to the functioning mechanisms of the social world, will find itself on the one hand symbolically “impoverished” but will acquire greater efficacy as it dilates to the point of involving other selves who recognize themselves in a single collective image. Objects are, therefore, entities from which the social sense organizes itself and sediments (Berger and Luckmann 1991). The moment we leave our own

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flat, that door we shut behind us serves to separate two worlds (the private and the public), and that demarcation must hold both for us and for others— and if that precise meaning were not enough, an incredible variety of technologies gravitating around the armor plating and the lock serves to recall the fact to those whose do not perhaps immediately grasp the difference. The body rising from the bed, the eyes falling on the mirror, or the hands carrying out precise maneuvers on the lock of the door are all instances that push us to abandon the psychic (inner) representation to reach a world made of objects (outer) thanks to somatic activity. Yet this process of externalization inexorably gives way to a world made of social significations. At the crossroads between the inner man (psyche) and his outer being (object)—that is, we all measure our imagination on the basis of the things around us— constitutively, we cause to come into being an intermediate point at which the differences fade away to build community actions (Marzo 2015); in this process, a collective entity exists in that “it ‘materializes’ a magma of social imaginary significations” (Castoriadis 1987, 356). The materialization of this magma may of course refer to logical-rational instances and may, for example, organize a good deal of our everyday work beyond the threshold of our front door. Yet it might access profound instances and refer to emotive impulses, connecting with utterly irrational manifestations on which a wide sense of insecurity is founded, requiring an alarm device able to placate it— albeit for a short time. At any level we wish to investigate it, the imaginary, however complex, always appears as that third element, collective in nature, able to lend sense to any manifestation of life. At this level, we can maintain that the imaginary is a dynamic, organizing system through which we glimpse the mediation between the relations between man and the world, and it is within this system that there comes about a continual interchange between the subject dimension and the cosmic social environment (Grassi 2006, 17). If our imaginative faculty always expresses itself in fixed forms, these forms undergo collective dynamics and, as such, are able to spread their effects across an unknown number of singularities. When the process passing from my body is projected toward a collective reality, it generates a specific imaginary. In believing the imaginary to be “a set of productions, whether mental or rendered concrete in works . . . able to form consistent, dynamic sets that come about from a symbolic function to the achievement of a combination of sense, proper and figurative” (Wunenburger 2003, 10, my translation), we may say that it differentiates through the very fact of manifesting itself in a specific way. Rather than being an abstract entity or a tenuous category, when it passes through objects differing one from the other, time by time the imaginary takes on specific features and can be considered “a universal language through which we give shape to emotions, images, ideas and actions” (Wunenburger 2003, 10, my translation). The instant we touch



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the bed, glance at the mirror, and cross the threshold, both our movements and our intentions come within a horizon of sense in which we can act suitably. Therefore, the imagination, this constant projection of images confronting a world made of objects, relates to the constant creation of significations activated on behalf of society. If on the one hand the psyche/soma relation is a continual shaping of the psychic representation through objects and if this activity of the imagination is a constant alteration of the representative flow. then the social imaginary is in turn an alteration of the imagination. Through the world of significations, it conditions the imagination’s magmatic tendency and is, from this viewpoint, the shaping of its products since every imaginative activity, in action, must constantly extract from its activity a “sense” and must be able to position itself in the world of social significations. But the efficacy of the imaginary comes about thanks to the materiality of objects, with which it is able to touch both the spiritual and the bodily dimension, bringing together in a single experience both thought and the perceptive apparatus (Tramontana 2014). THE DYNAMICS OF COLLECTIVE LIFE So every object has the capacity for assuming both a subjective dimension (imagination) and an objective dimension (imaginary) and can serve here as a bridge joining what we think, express, or experience with what is thought, expressed, or experienced by the other people who share a certain social circle with us. Using appropriate categories, objects can be investigated sociologically. Georg Simmel’s sociology comes to our aid in the attempt to read in material the dense web that associated life weaves on it. However briefly, it may be useful to look at the basic question “What is society?” and the answer he gives. It is in no case a mere sum of single individuals (Simmel 2016). If we wish to think of society as a unitary phenomenon, then we must understand it as something in excess of these parts gathered together in an aggregate. However, such unity cannot be reduced to a being completely summarized in itself, an absolute unity and hypostasized. To the extent that single individuals in constant relation to one another are the foundation of social dynamics, it is not sufficient to see society as an indissoluble unity capable of dominating one’s imagination. Society, therefore, is not a substance and, in itself, is nothing concrete. It is rather an event, the result of the parts (individuals) that interact among themselves. After this first concept, we may go into more detail and say that society (Gesellschaft) is only the name we give the sum of the interactions among individuals, a secondary formation resulting from the real interactions of the parts. Rather than speaking of society, Simmel highlights the dynamic

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made up of relations among individuals who among themselves form a unitary reality in which they coexist (Vergesellschaftung). In this dynamic, objects are parts that relate with individuals and “actively” determine reciprocity among us all. It is not sufficient to think that from sleep, we change into active beings able to face a fraught day. Objects mark this transformation of ours and the bed, the mirror, and the door are parts with which all of us daily relate to face the world outside that demands our presence. In considering society as that phenomenon able to exist “where numbers of individuals enter into reciprocal action” (Simmel 2009, 22) and also including objects in these relations, it is not enough to consider only our own face reflected in the mirror or our own body crossing the threshold. In relating with these objects, we are all certainly able to warp their use and exercise (symbolic) force over them thanks to the imagination. Yet at the same time, the objects are not neutral entities and indeed take an active part in this game of strength, affirming their presence over all of us and obliging us to use the mirror to change how we look or the door to limit internal space. However ready we may always be to exercise force on objects and to determine their existence, in return, objects determine the living conditions of all of us and dictate the extent of our action. Therefore, it is exactly the infinity of the exchange of reciprocal influences that makes this web of relations of fundamental importance for society. In this play of influences, the fabric of society is characterized by the type of objects present within it. In the idea that society is the result of a dynamic made of elements in mutual relationship—and objects may be considered part of this exchange of influence—this jagged set of elements overall comes together in a single entity. In the instant in which from an “isolated individuals in proximity” we find ourselves in front of “definite forms of association and mutuality” (Simmel 2009, 23), for Simmel, we are faced with the real object of his sociology: the social form. These same forms, on the other hand, are the result of the relation determined with objects and, as such, can be considered an integral part of being collectively in the world. Objects therefore are not the simple support or practical means with which to act in a world in which other individuals are present: they determine it and condition the way in which each of us relates with it, sufficiently to determine laws or rituals that order its use and the conditions for its use. In this view, the door is not that useful object we use to close us in cozily at home: it institutes the home, and in doing so, it relates with the set of symbols of which the imaginary is composed and from which each of us receives the sense of being in a world in which other individuals are present. The walls of the house place the accent on the separation between the outside world and the inside one; it “cut[s] a portion out of the continuity and infinity of space and arrange[s] this into a particular unity in accordance with



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a single meaning” (Simmel 1994, 7). This intimate space, thus circumscribed, undergoes a separation from the rest of outside space. With respect to this cutoff between two worlds, it is the door that unites them. The sense of the door is thus found in the fact that the finite unity, to which we have connected a part of infinite space designed for us, reconnects it to this latter; in the unity, the bounded and the boundaryless adjoint one another, not in the dead geometric form of a mere separating wall, but rather as the possibility of a permanent interchange. (Simmel 1994, 7–8)

It is therefore thanks to the door that the outside world floods into the intimate space, and it is thanks to that opening that a world of possibilities erupts into the finite space of the domestic dimension. Thanks to that very door— and not to the window or some other architectural feature of our home—it is possible to verify the radical difference between the possibility of entering a place and leaving it. According to the direction, life pulsates now out toward the world, now in toward the shelter of the defined domestic space, and it is actually thanks to an object such as the door that each of us can give a sense to what might otherwise be the indifferent movement of a body wandering through an indistinct space. TENSION FIELDS IN THE IMAGINARY In their way of being both aperture and closure, that is, in being elements guaranteeing the ability to imagine yet at the same time limiting the creativity of each of us, objects appear to be entities capable of being part of the infinite network of reciprocal influences with which we give a sense to our actions within a specifically collective space. This sense must not necessarily be considered univocal and singular, and, indeed, it is possible now to consider the imaginary—through which we give form to emotions, images, ideas, and actions—as a complex of jagged instances contradicting one another. Hence, Benjamin’s work allows us to consider in greater detail the dialectic nature of this set of moments, condensed in the thing we touch and use on a daily basis. Benjamin traces the basis of this multiplication of sense back to the fact that, at least since German baroque drama, we have been witnessing a fracture between the sign and its significance; through such an incompatible affiliation, the object is now utterly unable to irradiate a significance, a sense (cf. Benjamin 2002). With regard to this incapacity in the case of baroque drama, the significance will be what the allegorist assigns to it, while in daily life, a new sensibility comes forth founded on the subjective nature of the determination of sense. Toward this detonation that modernity places under

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the reassuring rigidity of the classical world, the substance of objects does not stop at condensing this rise of sense. There, each of us may attribute his own significance in order to make the universe of symbols a chaotic set in which we live and make of each object not just the support to carry out an action—to the possibility of detaching every object from the tyranny of utility and making it a concentration of the most singular emotiveness. Besides this possibility, every object becomes substance on which the different pieces of history are condensed “in a configuration pregnant with tensions” (Benjamin 1968, 262) until it implodes in a single condition of collective experience. With the possibility of attributing a significance, we make the universe of symbols a chaotic set in which we live. This condition makes each object not only the support to carry out an action. Detaching every object from the tyranny of utility and making it a concentration of the most singular emotiveness, every object becomes substance on which the different pieces of history are condensed “in a configuration pregnant with tensions” (Benjamin 1968, 262) until it implodes in a single condition of collective experience. Therefore, we see in objects a compresence of oppositions of sense to the point of being able to discover in their materiality not only elements that tend toward the future but also those that come from an archaic past. This compresence of contradictory elements is “not temporal in nature but figural (bildich)” (Benjamin 1999, 463), and it is defined as a dialectic image in that image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. (Benjamin 1999, 462)

The voluminous collection of notes devoted to his work on passages contains a series of dialectic images in which archaic and modern elements combine with each other. The passages themselves are the dialectic image. They are places created thanks to ceilings built with what, for that time, were pioneering materials: glass and iron. Slithering through apartment blocks like long corridors, the walls are, however, covered with everlasting marble. Yet within, for the first time, gaslight appears as public lighting, contained in old cast-iron structures. Its very urban function is dialectic. These architectural creations that rose toward the end of the first half of the nineteenth century were the crystallization of a historical present—the nineteenth century—that was preparing to experience the establishment of capitalism and therefore the domination of our lives by commodities. As such, they faced the future. Inside the passages, we see the appearance of a new social figure: the mass consumer. Dialectically opposing this projection toward what is yet to come



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are archaic figures, such as the prostitute, wandering among the modern world of commodities, herself permeated by a dialectic contrast: she is both seller and commodity. Passage and prostitute in turn mix together, almost as if to make a single monad: if the passages are “street of lascivious commerce only . . . there is no mystery in the fact whores felt spontaneously drawn there” (Benjamin 1999, 828). With the dialectic tension between the archaic and the modern are associated the tensions between the collective unconscious and the rational progress of technique. With respect to the technological possibilities of the time, “Benjamin also saw the image-making imagination of a collective unconscious at work in them” (Tiedemann 1999, 933). This complex dream world silently inaugurates his struggle against the development of modern forms. From this clash, a field of tensions is generated, made of objects characterized by the undecidability of form. The awkward attempt to give an aesthetic cover-up with lacquer and decorations to the potentials of a new material such as iron in order to give it the look of valuable wood (Benjamin 1999) shows the opposite tendency where there are, on the one hand, the reasons of technique and, on the other, attempts to inhabit it. That is how the first factories were, like enormous apartment blocks copying traditional homes, and railway stations imitated chalets. The same fate befell cars, which were made to look like carriages, while the cyclist’s outfit wavered between sportswear and the traditional ideal of elegance (Benjamin 1999). Among all these ambiguities, a final consideration should go to the structure of the passages. In being indoor public places, that is, urban architectural structures retiring from the open air, in their undecidable architectural determination, the passages “are house no less than street” (Benjamin 1999, 10). The work on passages was an incomplete attempt to understand the origin of modernity. But Benjamin discovered the undecidability of the form of the passage, that is, an area where inside and outside implode and create an indistinct space. Starting from Benjamin’s research, our door is no longer the object that can separate two places, one inside and the other outside. The door therefore becomes allegorical in the sense that it rises and is enriched with new significations until it is no longer able to guarantee protection from the world outside. As soon as new objects crossed its threshold; as soon as our houses were filled with radios, televisions, telephones, and smartphones; and as soon as we installed modems and connected surveillance closed-circuit television—at that instant, the house became a tangle of technological structures. Thus, the place we thought intimate and private became accessible to anyone: in the car in the midst of traffic. While time seems suspended in spite of the insistent honking of horns, we are still in a position to issue commands to the washing machine or to the other household appliances. Similarly, a hacker from any point in the network can spy into our rooms. Yet again, the

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signal launched by any transmitter, when captured by an aerial, can transform a living room into an arena of public debate according to norms dictated in television studios. In all these cases, the outside gains access to the domestic background and, thanks to a simple click, our door becomes the cumbersome carcass of a dinosaur propped up by counteracting tendencies of an imaginal nature: the tension of the cables supporting the skeleton guarantees its erect posture, while dialectically the force of gravity confirms the opposite. In the incapacity to endorse the perimeter of private space, in the fact that our face is reflected in an infinite number of digital devices or in the incapacity to establish boundaries between work and free time, at the moment when life is expressed through these objects, the door, the mirror, and the bed become incapable of giving a sense to our lives and show an imaginary that transforms its specificity: life cannot withdraw from the crowd of inputs from the world outside and so retires into an indistinct space where any impulse can sound the alarm at any time. Objects therefore have the capacity to be the reflection of the tensions that populate the imaginary, and in their potential to contain contrasting tendencies, they are traces possessing substance in which the collective experience is concentrated. And this experience is made of hopes, illusions, and utopias, of archaic symbols and mythical forces, and of exasperated attempts to govern this imaginative excrescence through the rationality of technique. BIBLIOGRAPHY Benjamin, W. 1968. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books. ———. 1999. The Arcades Projects. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ———. 2002. “The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy.” In Selected Writings, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Berger, P., and T. Luckmann. 1991. The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Anchor Books. Bodei, R. 2009. La vita delle cose. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Borgna, P. 2005. Sociologia del corpo. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Castoriadis, C. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. D’Andrea, F. 1998. “Georg Simmel e il problema della Sociologia: Evoluzione di un pensiero.” Sociologia 32, nos. 2–3: 35–59. Desideri, F. 1980. Walter Benjamin: Il tempo e le forme. Roma: Riuniti. Fadini, U. 1991. “Il primato delle istituzioni in Arnold Gehlen.” Scienza & Politica 5: 43–61. ———. 1999. Principio metamorfosi: Verso un’antropologia dell’artificiale. Milano: Mimesis.



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Gehlen, A. 1988. Man: His Nature and Place in the World. New York: Columbia University Press. Grassi, V. 2006. Introduzione alla sociologia dell’immaginario: Per una comprensione della vita quotidiana. Milano: Guerini. La Rocca, F., and A. Tramontana. 2019. “L’immaginario e gli oggetti: Per una sociologia della superficie.” Im@go. Rivista di Studi Sociali sull’Immaginario 13: 10–19. Maffesoli, M. 2008 “L’objet subjectif et l’ampleur des relations symboliques.” Sociétés, no. 101: 13–31. Marzo, P. L. 2012. La natura tecnica del tempo: L’epoca del post-umano tra storia e vita quotidiana. Milano: Mimesis. ———. 2015. “L’immaginario sociale: Una prospettiva ambientale.” Quaderni di Teoria sociale, no. 2: 95–111. Secondulfo, D. 2012. Sociologia del consumo e della cultura materiale. Milano: FrancoAngeli. Simmel, G. 1994. “Bridge and Door.” Theory, Culture & Society 11, no. 1: 5–10. ———. 2009. Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2016. Über sociale Differenzierung: Sociologische und psychologische Untersuchungen. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. ———. 2019. Grudfragen der Soziologie Individuum und Gesellschaft. Berlin: Hofenberg. Tiedemann, R. 1999. “Dialectics at a Standstill. Approaches to the Passagen-Werk.” In The Arcades Projects, ed. W. Benjamin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Tramontana, A. 2014. “La costruzione sociale del corpo: L’anima, la merce e il manichino.” In Ripensare il corpo: Rappresentazioni, medicalizzazioni, decolonizzazioni, ed. M. Meo. Roma: Aracne. ———. 2016. “Oggetti e disagio della tecnica nell’antropologia filosofica di Arnold Gehlen.” Im@go. Rivista di Studi Sociali sull’Immaginario 7: 140–67. ———. 2018. “Immagini di pensiero: La foglia, il denaro e i passages. Per una ricerca del principio formativo dell’immaginario.” H-ermes Journal of Communication 10: 23–44. ———. 2019. I cristalli della società: Simmel, Benjamin Gehlen, Baudrillard e l’esistenza multiforme degli oggetti. Milano: Meltemi. Wunenburger, J. J. 2003. L’imaginaire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Chapter 8

The Material and the Imaginary Vincenzo Mele

Seek for food and clothing first, then the Kingdom of God shall be added unto you. —Hegel, 1807

This quotation from G. F. W. Hegel is the epigraph to the fourth of the Theses on the Philosophy of History by Walter Benjamin and well expresses the terms of the question that this chapter intends to deal with. In the words of Benjamin himself appearing in thesis IV, this issue can be expressed as “a struggle for the rough and material things, without which there is nothing fine and spiritual” (Benjamin 1974; Eng. tr. 2001, https:​//​folk​.uib​.no​/hlils​/ TBLR​-B​/Benjamin​-History​.pdf). The relation so expressed between “material” and “imaginary” might at first glance appear somewhat paradoxical: what could be more distant than the world of fantasy, dream, and myth and the world of material necessity (“food and clothing”) and shortage of available goods (“the struggle for the rough and material things”), without which we cannot survive? As we shall see, most of Benjamin’s mature work—the Paris Passages in particular—is devoted to investigating this problem. More recently, this troublesome relation between “individuals and things” (Iacono 1995) has been at the center of reflection on the criticism of the concept of Homo economicus and the utilitarian and economicist paradigm in social sciences. In general, research belonging to this field—varied as it may be— is based on the assumption that it is not possible to trace social, symbolic relations back to the original, allegedly main activity of men, which is the productive activity of organic exchange with nature. The reasons for this refusal of a reductionist approach to the symbolic and social are varied in nature. Criticism of the figure of Homo economicus as a key model for the 149

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understanding of social action has corresponded to a rethinking of the relations between the economic sphere and the symbolic-social sphere. Authors as diverse as Luis Dumont, Jean Baudrillard, Marshall Sahlins, Alaine Caillé, and Jürgen Habermas, albeit starting from different assumptions and reaching independent, even contrasting, results, have in common this trait of reflection. Although critical of “possessive individualism,” private appropriation, and the merely instrumental relationship between man and nature, Marx himself was involved—together with and in spite of “Marxism”—in this tradition of reductionist thought that claims to see society and its interactions at the root of productive activity, that is, at the base of the organic exchange between the human species and the nature-environment (Iacono 1995, 69). However, a number of questions need to be asked. Is there by any chance a risk that justifiable criticism of the utilitarian paradigm in social sciences and of the autonomy of the creative moment of imaginary space may go hand in hand with an underestimation (perhaps symbolical) of the relevance of the productive and reproductive moment of human life, which is work? And more, are we sure that the latter can be labeled merely as “instrumental action,” that is, without symbolic and imaginary centrality? Is it not a specular reductionist vision—the “master’s” point of view obscuring the “slave’s,” to go back to Hegel’s celebrated figure in The Phenomenology of Spirit—of the relations between work and imaginary that relegates the former to a merely instrumental and utilitarian activity? Jürgen Habermas, an author who did a great deal for the criticism of the instrumental action paradigm, wondered about this same problem we are now discussing. Commenting on Jena’s Philosophy of the Spirit, Habermas criticizes both Hegel and the Marx of German Ideology for having absolutized the paradigm of instrumental action, that is, for having returned the symbolic, communicative sphere of interaction to productive activity. Regulating the exchange between the human species and nature, this establishes with the environment an eminently instrumental relation with nature. However, Habermas complicates the picture, for he realizes that the problem of the regularization of action—that is, the possibility of the immanent emancipation of the “philosophical discourse of modernity”—cannot be gathered only from the instrumental action finalized to dominate over nature and the production of the necessary means of subsistence for individual and social life. Returning to Hegel’s language, Habermas states that freedom from hunger and toil does not necessarily coincide with freedom from slavery and degradation because no automatic developmental connection between labor and interaction exists. (Habermas 1968; It. tr. 1975, 47)

However, he then poses the key problem that we too are querying:

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Yet there is a relationship between the two moments. Neither the Real Philosophy of Jena nor German Ideology has made it sufficiently clear; in spite of that, they make us reflect on its importance: from the relations between work and interaction the process of the formation of the spirit and even of the species depends.” (Habermas 1968; It. tr. 1975, 47)

So a relation exists between the sphere of the “rough and material things” (which free us from hunger and toil) and that of the “fine and spiritual” things (which have the symbolic-communicative and therefore political potential to free us from slavery and degradation). From a strictly philosophical and epistemological viewpoint, the emphasis that many currents of contemporary thought have placed on language— summarized in the saying Being is language—has often risked obscuring any reality, whether material, extralinguistic, or bodily, that might possibly constitute not so much a criterion of truth of the representations as the place of their possible sense that goes beyond the infinite game of interpretations. Basically, a “sociology of the imaginary” wishing to ponder the issue of “depth” can only try to leave the world of images and set these in relation with the motional sense of a historical human subject. Here, it is not a question of deciding whether “material” life is “true” with respect to the “imaginary” life; it is more a question of trying to relate the represented with the representing, the concept with the thing. The Lascaux Cave: The Birth of the Imaginary, Play, and Work According to Gilbert Durand’s definition, the imaginary is the inevitable representation, the faculty of symbolization from which all fears, all hopes and their cultural outcomes have continuously sprung over the approximately million and a half years since homo erectus rose to his feet on the earth. (Durand, cited in Grassi 2006, 11)

In particular, George Bataille in 1955 devoted an important, well-known essay to the discovery of the Lascaux Cave (southwestern France). In that underground cave, long, long ago (going back to an era between 15,000 and 13,000 BC), Bataille sets the “birth of art”: those earliest yet absolutely fascinating stylized figures of animals and hunting scenes are the proof of the distinctive feature of a culture that arose thanks to the skill gained in representing and therefore communicating what it sees, making language of what it feels, and thus saving it from chance and oblivion. In the cave’s silence and isolation from the world, these primordial men and women found both

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the possibility and the wish to reproduce what had made an impression on them while they hunted to survive. Outside the cave, their instrumental activity went forward, founded on the search for a dominating relationship with nature with the aim of reproduction; in a hunter-gatherer society, hunting in fact means the search for food. Inside the cave, the elaboration of this activity went forward in artistic representation and dream: expressive activity. We may therefore wonder about the following: What relation exists between inside and outside the cave? What relation exists between expressive activity and instrumental activity, targeting survival? Is there such a relationship? Bataille himself had posed this question in some way and had tried to supply an answer. The “expressive” moment—what we may consider the genesis of the imaginary—arises in a sphere distinct from “work” (the utilitarian/instrumental moment of existence). It is “expenditure” (dépense), energy not finalized merely for biological reproduction, a vital nonreproductive excess. It is, he thought, an eminently “useless” activity based on the ability to see things and perceive life on a plane symbolic rather than instrumental. Expenditure is really a social instance since—Durkheimianly—it represents the place of origin of the sacred (derived, in fact, from sacer, “sacrifice,” “waste,” thus expenditure). According to Bataille, man’s retrieval of his own sovereignty is to be found in expenditure in order to access, through the explosion of passions at total loss, that sacred sphere of the existence where the secret of communication between beings is concealed, the hiding place of the chance of the social link, ignored by a purely utilitarian view of society. Bataille did not, however, see the relationship between expressive and instrumental activity, between work and imaginary, in total separation. Indeed, he claimed that the birth of art must certainly be related to the existence of previous labour. Art not only requires utensils, and the skill achieved in making or handling them, but it also has the value of opposition, in relation to the useful activity: it is a protest against the world that already existed but without which the protest would not have been able to materialize. (Bataille 1955; It. tr. 2007, 34)

Therefore, we have a key antinomy in the relation between “material” and “imaginary.” According to Bataille, the imaginary rises up against the economical and constitutes an immanent criticism in being not separate but dependent. Man therefore is in a paradoxical situation in Bataille’s opinion: on the one hand, humanity is fulfilled and completed in activity that is aesthetic, imaginary, and playful; on the other, this activity presumes work and skills acquired through work, yet, in its inner functioning, it challenges work. Man’s thinking therefore is born, grows, and develops in the work that makes of him a teleological creature in a prospective utterly different from that of the animals: the present is subjected to the future in which work—once its

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aim of transforming nature has been achieved—will be concluded and from which man will profit. Man regains possession of the present only when the diverse types of knowledge, languages, and instruments acquired through work can be devoted to the free, playful act of art and the imaginary. For Marx, work is man’s essence, an essence that although alienated remains a foundation of culture and emancipation, while for Bataille, work roots man in his own need to submit in view of duration, survival, and conservation. Only in the transgression of the imaginary is man sovereign. Hence, in Bataille’s view, the Lascaux man shows a decisive evolutionary step compared to the Neanderthal man. The latter had a large skull capacity and an intelligence enabling him to obtain a wide range of tools from stone. However, his appearance was decidedly beast-like and his language embryonal, limited to affirmative or exclamatory muttering. The Lascaux man, however, is “man adorned with the prestige of the beast”: he can objectivize the beast’s nature and portray it artistically on the walls of his cave. The relationship between instrumental and expressive activity is in the retrieval of a perceptible world previously lost: useful work is alienated from the world to be reconciled with it when it becomes possible to express it artistically. “Man retrieves the perceptible only if, through work, he creates a work of art as well as utilitarian tasks” (Bataille 1955; It. tr. 2007, 36). The Lascaux man is therefore Homo ludens, the man who “expends” vital energy in art, in laughter, in play, whereas the Neanderthal man still moved through the hemmed-in, utilitarian universe of Homo faber. As we know, Bataille contrasts Huizinga (Homo ludens) to Hegel (the Phenomenology of the Spirit as phenomenology of consciousness that is formed through work). In turn, he founds his concept on a particular interpretation of the master-servant dialectic taken from the “mythological” reading of Hegel by Alexandre Kojève (Palma 2017). Not being able to discuss this interpretation in detail here, we simply observe that it is debatable to relegate work to the reign of the useful and servile (seen also in Habermas’s scheme of things) and to exclude it totally from the practicalemancipative Bildung of the subject. Yet the authentically philosophical “wonder” aroused in Bataille with the discovery of the Lascaux Cave should not surprise us. The cave metaphor is central in Western thought, from Plato’s cave to the “camera obscura of ideology” in Marx. It has been the real symbol of representing and of representing through images. The darkness of the cave, its being shut off and separate from the rest of the outside world, has made the metaphor ideal to express the problem of “appearances,” the gap between being social and the “nebulous, fantastic” images through which being social is seen and conceived by men (Blumenberg 1989). The very existence of an “inside” and an “outside” has expressed the essence of the issue of truth: it is, for example, the relation between the shadows projected inside and the sunlight outside that expresses

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the actual concept of truth in the complexity of Plato’s metaphor. What we wish to ponder now is the problem of “representation,” of the “passage” from the material to the imaginary condition. And this is the very essence of the symbolic faculty, that is, the form of connection—the putting together of two distinct parts—and of replacement (signs in place of things). Without having recourse to “last resort determinant factors” or metaphysical and extralinguistic truths (whether or not deriving from a philosophy of history), how can we frame this problem from the viewpoint of the theory of the observer? In actual fact, a good deal of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking in some way reflecting on the connection between social/economic relations and the imaginary has dealt with the Marxist concept of “commodity fetishism.” From Simmel to Lukàcs, from Adorno to Benjamin, up to more recent authors such as Debord, Baudrillard, and Derrida, they have all reflected—each with his own specific approach and each reaching widely diverse solutions—on the problem of the relationship between consciousness and appearances, that is, the gap between being social and the hazy, fantastic images through which being social is seen and conceived by men. In the first section of Das Kapital, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” Marx deals with the relation between the material character of social production and its imaginary transposition (between the reality of the “rough and material things” and things more refined and “spiritual”). According to Marx, commodity fetishism is a phenomenon that comes about in the context of capitalist economy according to which a “determined social relation”—set up by work in the conditions of capitalist production—for men takes on “the fantastic form of the relation between things” (Marx 1867; It. tr. 1989, 104). The commodity form operates as a distorting “mirror”: it reflects to men the image of their relationships as a relation between things. Once the social relations of production are mediated by it, a double inversion takes place: a real inversion since human tasks among themselves relate in the form of things and a symbolic inversion in that men tend to see these relations precisely as relations among things. In Marx’s words, they become “natural social properties” of things. In this is the “fantastic” nature of the commodity form; it has the almost-magical property of being able to operate an inversion between society and nature in both the reality of material production and the consciousness picturing such a reality. If this is how the fetishist phenomenon is described, then there are at least two instances in Marx’s theoretical procedure that are difficult to interpret, both very important for the issues we are dealing with here: the comparative question between the different types of society that have existed, whether historically or imaginatively, and the question of the relationship between the observer and the observation, dealing with how such a phenomenon can be observed (Iacono 2018). From the historical-comparative viewpoint, the fetishism concept postulates a

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comparison between a capitalist society in which the inversion phenomenon exists with other types of society where such a phenomenon does not exist. In Marx’s work, at least five cases are to be found of nonfetishist means of production: of these five, three are historical (the primitive hunter-gatherer community, feudal society, and the patriarchal-peasant industry) and two imaginary (Robinson’s island and the association of free men).1 The instance of the relationship between observer and observation refers to the problem of how to grasp from the viewpoint of knowledge theory the phenomenon of fetishism, which is—as we have seen—at the center of the sociology of the imaginary: how is it possible to observe such a phenomenon of inversion from both inside and outside the phenomenon itself? This is to a certain extent the key problem of all the “caves,” from Plato’s to the Lascaux Cave, in that it poses the problem between being social and its symbolical, fantastic projections. It is now essential to clear up this point in terms of the observer’s theory in order to see how Marx in particular—and other authors after him—frames the question of symbolical representation of the material condition. As we know, in German Ideology, Marx uses the metaphor of the eye and the inversion produced on the retina to indicate the phenomenon of inversion between ideological consciousness and reality (Kofman 1973). In Das Kapital, this metaphor is abandoned and explicitly replaced by the analogy between fetishism as a religious phenomenon and fetishism as a social phenomenon determined by commodities. In this way, Marx appears to be seeking to avoid a form of naturalization of this type of inversion, such as that involved in the use of the metaphor of the retina and the camera obscura. In other words, Marx appears to avoid the problem of the “absolutization of the observer’s role”: if the observer is within the context under observation, he himself becomes a victim of the inversion and therefore is unable to describe the phenomenon under discussion. Inserting into a certain context an image taken from other historical and cultural contexts, an analogical comparison with other cultures and productions modes—fetishism as a form of primitive religion and noncapitalist production modes—would make it possible, theoretically, to uncover the specific inversion of the observed context without thereby being influenced by historical philosophy or teleology. However, the anthropological route between the material and the symbolic would not yet be sufficiently thematized as the moment when material is “transposed” and represented. A number of authors set out from this point, among them Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin. As we shall see, both reflected on these aspects of Marx’s theory on commodity fetishism arriving at widely different and, at times, even opposing conclusions regarding the relationship between material and imaginary.

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GEORG SIMMEL AND THE AUTONOMY OF SYMBOLIC FORMS The main work in which Simmel deals with the relations between material and imaginary is The Philosophy of Money (1900b). The title expresses the intention of relating the world of the “rough and material things” (represented by money, which is the means par excellence by which we obtain the objects we need in an industrial civilization) and “philosophy,” that is, the “fine and spiritual things.” The confrontation with Marx and the conception of commodity fetishism is incisively declared in the book’s preface: The attempt is made to construct a new storey beneath historical materialism such that the explanatory value of the incorporation of economic life into the causes of intellectual culture is preserved, while these economic forms themselves are recognized as the result of more profound valuations and currents of psychological or even metaphysical preconditions. For the practice of cognition this must develop in infinite reciprocity. Every interpretation of an ideal structure by means of an economic structure must lead to the demand that the latter in turn be understood from more ideal depths, while for these depths themselves the general economic base has to be sought, and so on. (Simmel 1900b; Eng. tr. 2004, 54)

Here, Simmel clearly refers to his concept of Wechselwirkung, which constitutes the foundation of his thinking and his sociology. Wechselwirkung can be translated as “reciprocal effect” or “effect of reciprocity” and is a philosophical and metaphysical principle, a way of conceiving truth as the essence of things (therefore not merely of social phenomena), not in reference to the things themselves but related to them.2 In his intention to “construct a new storey beneath historical materialism” with the conceptual instruments of the Wechselwirkung, Simmel’s approach proves fundamental for the investigation of the relations between material and imaginary—what the basic motive can be that inspires social and collective behavior and the weight that purely aesthetic aims may have in determining formations and social actions. According to Simmel, it is not possible to construct a philosophy of history founded on the objective motives of human behavior—as he believes Marx’s historical materialism does in placing at the root of human conduct, individual and social, interaction with nature and the fulfillment of man’s basic needs (“food and clothing”)—given that even the most abstract and superfluous values and motives can determine man’s behavior as much as those considered fundamental. Between these two levels, there is a relation of reciprocal causation or, to use the term that is key in Simmel’s thinking, of Wechselwirkung. In other words, it may be true that “the struggle for the rough and material

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things” influences or conditions “those finer and more spiritual,” but the latter in turn counteract on them in an open process, the outcome of which is uncertain. In his caustically titled Metaphysics of Laziness (1900a), Simmel stresses that at the origin of social (and universal cosmic) evolution, there is not the activity principle—work, therefore—but the exact opposite, laziness, in its acceptation as Kraftersparnis, “saving of strength.” In this sense, Simmel had adopted the “fundamental theorem” of Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary law: in the environment of nature, as well as in that of human societies and even at the level of the individual personality, a process comes about of differentiation from the “homogeneous to the heterogeneous,” from one simple unit of homologous elements to a plurality of functionally differentiated elements. Functionally differentiated organisms manage to achieve their aims—among them, the primary aim of survival—with a lower consumption of energy, for which reason they occupy a higher step in evolution. Money is the most representative symbol of this process3: it is pure strength. It is also the symbol of energy saving, which makes it possible to reduce friction and to save strength. In fact, when all economic transactions are in money, there is a saving in energy compared to exchanges carried out in the traditional manner. For Simmel, such a process is neither totally positive nor totally painless but involves what he defined as the “tragedy of modern culture,” with, again, the metropolis at center stage. The metropolis is at the apex of the “differentiation” process between social forms and contents. There, things became autonomous through the evolutionary advantage inherent in this process. Social forms are created by concrete individuals who interact in the exchange, but then these imaginary forms are objectivized and develop independently of the same individuals. In On the Concept and Tragedy of Culture (1911), Simmel even uses the Marxist concept of “commodity fetishism”: The fetishism that Marx assigns to products of the economy in the age of commodity production is only one case, with its own modifications, of this general destiny of our cultural contents. Such contents undergo the paradox—increasingly with the increase of “culture”—according to which they are created only by and for the subjects, but in the intermediate form of the objectivity they assume both before and after these instances, they follow an immanent evolutionary logic, and with that they alienate themselves from their origin and from their end. (Simmel 1911; It. tr. 1985, 206)

There is an important example of how the “game forms of association” (Spielformen der Vergesellschaftung), pure, independent, and without any practical use, are also fundamental in society; it is found in the fundamental essay on “sociability” (Geselligkeit) of 1917. Simmel defines it as the form of “association,” which, on principle,

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tends to exclude what, for the personality, has objective importance, but, at that moment, is not directly in common with all those involved. Wealth, social position, learning, fame, the exceptional qualities and the merits of the person no longer have any function and are worth, if anything, the immaterial trace of a reality that can always insinuate itself into every form of sociability. . . . The most individual elements of life, character, sensibility and destiny are in fact totally excluded. The single dominant motive is reciprocity as a pure and simple act: thus if we are dealing with sociability, the accentuation of moods, depression, enthusiasm or more generally the highs and lows of individual life, is always something indelicate and counterproductive. (Simmel 1917; It. tr. 1983, 81)

In it, therefore, certain energies take on a conscious effect and their function no longer consists in giving a form to objects, nor to responding only to the commands of life, but is carried out in a sphere of freedom and acts on matter for its own ends, looking towards realization. (Simmel 1917; It. tr. 1983, 76) What sociable people feel to be liberating and joyous in sociability is simply this: conviviality and the exchange of experiences—in which life’s tasks and difficulties converge—go forward in an artistic game that sublimates, reduces and softens all at once the profound energies of reality. Those that only echo from afar, while their weight vanishes in a transitory enchantment. (Simmel 1917; It. tr. 1983, 93)

Such definitions allow a glimpse of an image of society in which the means (social interaction) and end (its purpose) are drastically distanced. In modern society—which in Simmel’s opinion coincides tout court with metropolitan society—the final end of being together in fact vanishes, distancing itself from its practical purpose connected to material existence. This fundamental conception for the understanding of the relations between material and imaginary in Simmel is reiterated in a little-known but extremely significant essay in this regard, on The Sociology of the Meal (1910). The meal is one of the main forms of sociability and in particular one of those forms of sociability where there is, so to speak, direct contact with the stomach, hence with essential, immediate, and primary needs (food). In the modern cultural context, these primary needs (or, better, the primary need of nourishment) come within the prolongation of the teleological chain of ends that characterizes modern culture, the principle symbol of which is money, which makes such needs no longer decisive in social behavior. In the sociability of the meal, there is such a sublimation of primary needs that they are no longer recognizable as such: the act of nourishment becomes a form of association whose end is separate from the contents. Thus, Simmel is able to conceive of a sociology

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(as he states in his fundamental manifesto essay of 1894, The Problem of Sociology) of social forms as separate from the contents of association: it is evolution and social differentiation that go in the direction of a prolongation of the teleological chain and therefore of a separation between social forms and their ends. In the essay, Simmel states that the instant the meal becomes a sociological fact, it is transformed into a more aesthetic form, stylized and regulated in a supra-individual way. Now all rules regarding eating and drinking come across, not in relation to the starting point of food as such, but specifically regarding the form of its consumption. (Simmel 1910; It. tr. 2006, 186)

For Simmel—as for Bataille—Homo ludens definitely comes before Homo faber, or, in other words, the modern forms of association are above all ludic, aesthetic, which is to say “as if.” According to Simmel, however, there is an imaginary dimension that underlies and supports life in society. In some periods, this may be marginalized, and it may occupy a secondary role, yet in other periods, it may be the fulcrum on which the whole of social life rotates—to a greater or lesser extent obviously, discreetly or secretly. At these times, social relationships, whether of everyday life, the institutions, work, or free time, are no longer dependent only on superior, previous, or mechanical instances; in the same way, they are no longer orientated toward an ever-lasting further end to be achieved, circumscribed within economic-political logic or else determined by a moral vision. Indeed, these relations become relationships animated by what is intrinsic, experienced day by day, organically. The social bond becomes mainly an aesthetic, ludic, emotional bond. Walter Benjamin and the Dialect Image If Simmel’s intention had been to excavate a “storey below historical materialism,” in his unfinished work on the Parisian Passages (Passagenwerk), Benjamin had tried to grasp the directly “expressive” and “oneiric” aspect of the world of material necessities: If the infrastructure in a certain way (in the materials of thought and experience) determines the superstructure, but if such determination is not reducible to simple reflection, how is it then—entirely apart from any question about the originating cause—to be characterized? As its expression (Ausdruck) the superstructure is the expression of the infrastructure. The economic conditions under which society exists are expressed in the superstructure—precisely as, with the sleeper, an overfilled stomach finds not its reflection but its expression in the contents of dreams, which, from a causal point of view, it may be said to

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“condition.” The collective, from the first, expresses the conditions of its life. These find their expression in the dream and their interpretation in the awakening. (Benjamin 1982, 578; Eng. tr. 1999, 392)

It therefore appears evident that Benjamin intended to return to the fundamental theme of Marx’s commodity fetishism and to develop it in an original way—above all with regard to the issue of the symbolical inversion that the commodity form entails in the way in which society represents itself—interpreting it, however, in a key that went beyond what Marx himself had theorized. From the central Konvoluts of the Passagenwerk and from the numerous exposés of the work that Benjamin had written (titled Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century), we see the evident effort to construct a social, historical, and psychological theory of modernity as the “dreamworld” (Traumwelt). The theory of “symbolical inversion” caused by the commodity fetishism phenomenon is developed by Benjamin rather as an attempt to read the collective imaginary of society, capable of penetrating the cyphers of its unconscious/subconscious. The “phantasmagorias” described by Marx become mythical images arising in the heart of capitalist society and of its technological dominance over nature. As well as the concept of commodity fetishism already cited among the fundamental influences on Benjamin, mention must be made of the stimuli coming from the Parisian cultural environment—in particular, the acquaintance with Georges Bataille, at that time librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the discovery of Johann Jakob Bachofen’s theories. If the influence of Bataille is difficult to reconstruct (Ciantelli 2017), it is Benjamin himself who speaks of the acquaintance with Bachofen; that same year, he had written an essay on the Swiss historian and anthropologist.4 His influence in this phase is very clear and is connected to Benjamin’s rereading of the topic of commodity fetishism, that is, the relationship between the historical-social being and the hazy, fantastic images through which the social being is seen and conceived by men. In the exposé of 1935, this issue is thus expressed: Corresponding to the form of the new means of production, which in the beginning is still ruled by the form of the old (Marx), are images in the collective consciousness in which the new is permeated by the old. These images are wish images (Wunschbilder); in them the collective seeks both to overcome or transfigure the imperfection of the social product and the defects of the social organization of production. Yet what emerges in these wish images is the resolute tendency to distance oneself from the antiquated—which includes the recent past. These tendencies deflect the imagination, which is given impetus by the new, back upon the primal past (Urvergangne). (Benjamin 1982; It. tr. 2000, 6–7)

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Besides Marx’s traditional vocabulary (“means of production”), the “images of desire” (Wunschbilder) appear, stimulated by the appearance of the new technological productive apparatus in which they arose. However, these images return fantasy to the “primal past” (Urvergangne). Benjamin details this mixture of images of the future and the fantasy of an immemorial past: In the dream in which each epoch entertains images of its successor, the latter appears wedded to elements of primal history (Urgeschichte)—that is, to a classless society. And the experiences of such a society, as stored in the collective unconscious and through interpenetration with what is new, produce the Utopia that has left its mark in a thousand configurations of life, from lasting buildings to passing fashions. (Benjamin 1982; It. tr. 2000, 6–7)

In the citations above, we find Benjamin’s conception of the “dialectic image,” which summarizes the theory of history and knowledge underlying Passagenwerk. The “new” of techno-capitalist modernity interpenetrates the “old,” the “primal history (Urgeschichte).” This interpenetration of the “new” and “archaic” produces the dream of the future, Utopia. It is no easy matter to follow the philosophy of circular history proposed by Benjamin since it is founded on the concept of a dialect unlike Hegel’s, present in Marx as well. If this is “regarding every historically developed social form as in fluid movement” (Marx 1867; It. tr. 1989, 45), Benjamin tried to stop the fluid movement to grasp the “being” of every historical becoming. So he went forward through images, trying to read historical-social phenomena as historic-natural phenomena. The “dialectic image” is therefore a contradictory construction of myth and history, of the wish for the future and immemorial past. For Benjamin, modernity always quotes primal history (Urgeschichte) . . . through the ambiguity (Zweideuticheit) that is a feature of the relations and social products of the time. Ambiguity is the figurative appearance of dialectics, the law of dialectics in immobility (Dialektik im Stillstand). This halt, or immobility, is Utopia, and the dialectic image (dialektische Bild) therefore the oneiric image (Traumbild). An image of this kind is itself commodity: as is fetish. (Benjamin 1982; It. tr. 2000, 14)

To better understand the reference to the concept of “primal history” (Urgeschichte), we need to see Benjamin’s interest in Bachofen. The work of the Swiss anthropologist had attracted the interest of Marx, Engels, and socialist and anarchic thinkers through its evocation of a communist society at the dawn of history. The interest of Engels and Paul Lafargue was awoken by the study of matriarchal societies, with their high level of democracy and

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equality as well as forms of primitive communism that showed a complete overturn of the concept of authority. The archaic societies of Urgeschichte were those of harmony between man and nature upset by “progress” and were to be reestablished in the emancipated society of the future. As Michael Löwy so well expressed it, the procedure of Benjamin’s thought is characteristic of “revolutionary romanticism,” which consists in weaving dialectic relationships between the pre-capitalist past and the post-capitalist future, archaic harmony and Utopic harmony, ancient experience lost and future experience liberated. (Löwy 1988; It. tr. 1992, 127)

In Passagenwerk, Benjamin closely links the abolition of man’s exploitation of man to an end to man’s exploitation of nature, referring to both Fourier and Bachofen as emblematic figures of harmony, both new and old. It is no coincidence that the first chapter of the ground plan of the work is on Fourier or the Arcades. Benjamin stated, “Fourier saw, in the passages, the architectural canon of the phalanstery” (Benjamin 1982; It. tr. 2000, 7). The passage as an architectural form, made technologically feasible by building technology using iron and glass, concretely embodied Benjamin’s concept of the “dialectic image.” On the one hand, the passage was a construction built to house the luxury goods that capitalism had started to mass-produce. On the other, it stimulates the opposite fantasy, that of a socialist society that replaces the mediated relationship between things with the relationship between free men. The phalanstery, literally representing an ideal city made of passages, in Fourier’s vision was to represent the basic unit of the new structure of socialist-based society, capable of guaranteeing that everyone would share the profit in proportion to their contribution to common property. Each one was to be self-sufficient from the point of view of services and production; through the coordination of activities among several buildings, it would be possible to resolve definitively the relations between town and country, between man and nature. The phalanstery arose from a mechanical sort of fantasy in which men cooperated according to precise “passion mechanics” rather than on the basis of their morality. “This human machinery produces the land of milk and honey, the ancient dream that Fourier’s Utopia has filled with new life” (Benjamin 1982; It. tr. 2000, 7). Benjamin was greatly fascinated by Fourier’s concept of “passionate work,” which, by transforming play into employment, neither exploited nor exploiting, appeared to him capable of creating a new world where “action would at last be sister to the dream” (Baudelaire). The ancestral image of this reconciliation is that of Nature as the “donating mother,” discovered by Bachofen in the prehistorical matriarchal constitution. In his On the Concept of History, Benjamin would expressly criticize gross Marxism, counteracting it with the fantastic imaginations of

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Fourier, which he interprets as examples of a work that, “far from exploiting nature, is able to give birth to creations lying dormant in her womb” (Benjamin 1974; It. tr. 1997, 41). He stated clearly in Passagenwerk that this was possible not through a simple return to a primitive community time; rather, it implied “highly-developed productive forces that are only today, for the first time, available to humanity” (Benjamin 1982; It. tr. 2000, 398). So at this stage, Benjamin refers to the classless society of the Urgeschichte to pose one problem implicit in the concept of fetishism: that of the comparative historical reference to a situation in which the phenomenon is not present, something that also interested Marx in his ethnological notebooks. In this case, the supposed existence of a communist community at the origin of history that is “rememorized” (Eingedacht)5 in the present was to resolve and furnish a historical foundation for that “association of free men” imagined by Marx for the future. Within the collective consciousness of capitalist society, the images would remain of a primal classless society, which it is the critic’s task is to decipher and translate in historical space: “The use of oneiric elements on awakening is the exemplary case of dialectic thought,” observed Benjamin at the end of the exposé. However, it is not solely the element of philosophy of history (or of comparative history) that is of interest in rereading the phenomenon of fetishism in Benjamin. In spite of the appreciation of Engels and—in a different way—of Marx for Bachofen, the Marxist theoreticians for the most part denied that the myth had any autonomous cognitive meaning, while the theoreticians on the right saw in it an extratemporal source of primal revelations. Benjamin’s interpretation sought a way out of this alternative. Through Bachofen, Benjamin looked for a relationship between nature and culture, the world of myth and that of Logos, within the historical time in which it was found. The “dialectic image” was the attempt to understand and represent the extremes, which, with their tension, compose the discourse of capitalist modernity: spirit and nature, the world of myth and that of reason. In other words, Benjamin was convinced that capitalism was itself a religious phenomenon: unlike Max Weber’s idea, however, it was a “purely cultural religion” without dogmatism and theology (Benjamin 1985; It. tr. 2013, 41). In this lies its significant aspect in the revaluation of the “phantasmagoric” thought on which Benjamin would continue to reflect until his death. Many doubts naturally remain on this attempt to discover the “dream images” of the modern within nineteenth-century culture and imaginary, above all if connected to a concept—a philosophy of history—that was supposed to be materialist. The concept of “dialectic image” as the collective “dream image” referring to the Utopia of future society bringing back to life elements of the “primal history” caused great perplexity in Adorno; after reading the exposé of August 2, 1935, he responded with a letter full of

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criticism. Adorno was skeptical about the use of the concept of the “dialectic image as conscious content—albeit collective” since he thought it lacking from the materialist viewpoint: “the fetish character of commodities is not a fact of consciousness, it is dialectic in the eminent sense that produces consciousness” (Benjamin 1966; It. tr. 1978, 295). In other words, he accused Benjamin of idealism, that is, of neglecting the real inversion between men and things that comes about—as we have seen—in the fetish phenomenon, to concentrate only on the symbolic projections of this inversion. Furthermore, Adorno also held that the whole exposé was guilty of overestimating the emancipatory potential coming from the “archaic” in exactly the same way as was the thinking of Klages and Jung regarding myth. Adorno was skeptical about the concept of “collective unconscious,” which he considered indistinct from the historical and social point of view of class. In particular, quoting Horkheimer, he held that the collective unconscious can exist only in particular circumstances of natural calamities and cannot be the independent source of energy and thought (Adorno, cited in Benjamin 1966, It. tr. 1978, 297). Adorno was to remain convinced of his criticism of idealism; in his late work Negative Dialectics (1966), he affirmed that the metaphysical interests of men should be safeguarded by material interests. While the latter remain concealed from them, they survive under the veil of Maya. Only if what is, allows itself to be transformed, what is, is not all. (Adorno 1966; It. tr. 2004,357)

The warning of this “great inquisitor of reason” is clear: like Benjamin, he holds that without the struggle for the “rough and material things,” it is not possible to achieve the “fine and spiritual things” (“the final things”). However, unlike Benjamin, he holds that it is not in “phantasmagoria,” myth, and imaginary that the energies are to be found to overcome the state of existing things and that the critic “whose axe is honed by reason” (dialectics) must tirelessly “deny” the phantasms evoked by the society that produces commodities. FINAL CONCLUSIONS We have tried to reflect on the controversial relations between “material and imaginary,” the relations between “rough and material things” (generally the sway of economy), without which the “finer and more spiritual things” are not granted (aesthetics, play, and the imaginary). Total light exists no more than does total darkness; therefore, the imaginary cavemen described by Plato in his cave myth, together with the “real” cave dwellers who painted

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the Lascaux Cave, have managed to elaborate the “hazy, fantastic images” regarding their condition through a comparison between inside and outside the cavern, between the imaginary and what we have called the “material.” A meaningful task of the sociology of the imaginary—the view that studies the relations between man’s social being and the images through which this social being is conceived by man himself—is to attempt to relate what happens inside and outside the cave in the wake of the long tradition of Western thought, which has seen it as the fundamental metaphor of the place where images are represented. Diverging positions have emerged among authors who are, however, linked by a “family likeness”: for Simmel, society comes about through the “stylization” of material need, the distance represented by money, which is indeed pure symbol, means without end. This is a tragic situation that both liberates and oppresses the individual. According to Simmel, art performs a fundamental function for subjectivity in suspending, however temporarily, this situation of alienation: through “rendering daily life aesthetic,” the subject manages to give a provisional form to life and to partially withdraw from the fragmentation and anonymity of monetary relationships. This form of the art of living takes the shapes of sociability or of all the other “playful forms of association” (Spielformen der Vergesellschaftung) on which Simmel wrote a number of important essays—on fashion, adventure, style, ornaments, and female culture, among others. In this way, the full nature and meaning of life are to be found in the dimension of the imaginary, in an “elsewhere” beyond the spaces and times in which we daily find ourselves. In Benjamin’s words, this feature has made of Simmel an “ancestor of cultural Bolshevism” (Benjamin 1966; It. tr. 1978, 366), a forerunner of the artistic avant-garde movement of the twentieth century that aspired to overcome the boundary between art and everyday life. However, it is possible to say that in Simmel, art, becoming the very paradigm of social use, tends to lose its Utopic features. In other words, in Simmel on the one hand and in Benjamin and Bataille on the other, two diverse forms of aestheticizing of everyday life are given: one becomes the real paradigm of social and individual reality, and the other attempts to counteract it, becoming an escape route irreconcilable with the existing state of things. With Simmel and Benjamin, we see, one opposing the other, the “melancholy of the left” of the flaneur and the bourgeois detachment of the blasé, the promesse de bonheur and “disinterested pleasure.” Simmel seemed to have sensed this when he conceived his own “sociological aesthetics” as opposing the traditional concept of the autonomous, self-contained work of art. The fact, however, that the understanding of the eruptive strength of “auratic” art remains dependent on reference to the practices of everyday life may be interpreted as a sign that it possesses the faculty to affirm its own “self-sufficiency” only within the changing, contradictory form of life, therefore renouncing every form of transcendence.

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NOTES 1. Robinson’s island is the famous metaphor used by classical political economy (Smith and Ricardo) to describe the starting point of political economy, that is, the situation of man as “a single, isolated hunter and fisherman.” Marx criticizes these “imaginings lacking fantasy” as undue historical and conceptual abstractions, “which in no way constitute, as the historians of civilization presume, simply a reaction to excessive refinement and a return to a misconceived natural life” (Marx 1857; It. tr. 1970, 3), postulating the categories of “bourgeois society” (bürgerliche Gesellschaft, possessive ownership individualism in a world short of resources) as the hypothetical origin of society, hence his criticism toward the “Robinsonisms” of bourgeois economy. The association of free men is communism. On the various images used by Marx to describe communism, see Musto (2018). 2. Simmel expresses this principle clearly in his meaningfully titled Inizio di un’autorappresentazione incompiuta: “Starting from the sociological meaning of the concept of interaction, I realized that for me this had gradually become a metaphysical principle of general application. It appears to me that the present dissolution of everything substantial, absolute and eternal in the flow of things, in the historical possibility of change, in the purely psychological reality may be guaranteed against unbridled subjectivism and scepticism, only if we replace those established, substantial values with the vital interactivity of elements that in turn are subject to the same dissolution ad infinitum. The central concepts of truth, value, objectivity etc., thus appeared to me as interactive realities, as the contents of a relativism which now no longer meant the sceptical destruction of every solid element, but in fact the guarantee against such destruction through a new concept of solidity” (Simmel 1900b; It. tr. 1984, 11–12). 3. As Simmel states in a fragment of his Diario postumo, “Money is the only cultural product that is pure strength, that has removed the bearer from itself, becoming absolutely and only symbol. Up to this point it is the most characteristic of all the phenomena of our time, in which the dynamic has conquered leadership in all theory and in all practice. That it is pure relation (and in this way equally characteristic historically), without including any content, is not contradictory. Strength in reality is none other than relation” (Simmel 1923; It. tr. 1976, 39). 4. In this essay (intended for the “Nouvelle Revue Française,” which refused it), Benjamin criticizes Klages’s conservative interpretation and praises Erich Fromm’s Freudian-Marxist reading. In Significato psicologico-sociale delle teorie matriarcali, Fromm denounces the serious alteration that threatens relations between mother and child in present-day society, no minor cause of the multiple derivations between Bachofen’s renaissance and fascism. On Benjamin’s reading of Bachofen, see Pezzella (1988). 5. The concept of “rememorizing” (Eindenken) is one of the key concepts of Benjamin’s philosophy of history and expresses the act of remembering with heartfelt participation important subjective or collective moments experienced apart from official commemorations. “Rememorizing” is, for Benjamin, a revolutionary act, the “tiger’s leap into the past” from which inspiration and energy is gained to break with the continuum of history (see Benjamin 1974; It. tr. 1997, 47, 49).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, T. W. 1966. Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Translated into Italian as Dialettica Negativa. Torino: Einaudi, 2004. Adorno, T. W., and K. Kerényi. 1998. “Mythologie und Aufklärung: Ein Rundfunkgespräch.” Frankfurter Adorno Blätter 5: 89–104. Translated into Italian as Interpretazione dell’Odissea: Con un dialogo sul mito tra Adorno e Karl Kerényi. Roma: Manifestolibri, 2000. Bataille, G. 1955. La peinture préhistorique: Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art. Genève: Skira. Translated into Italian as Lascaux: La nascita dell’arte. Milano: Mimesis, 2007. Benjamin, W. 1935. “Johann Jakob Bachofen.” In Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Translated into Italian as Il viaggiatore solitario e il flâneur: Saggio su J. J. Bachofen. Genova: Il Melangolo, 1998. ———. 1966. Briefe. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Partially translated into Italian as Lettere 1913–1940. Torino: Einaudi, 1978. ———. 1974. Über den Begriff der Geschichte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Translated into Italian as Sul concetto di storia. Torino: Einaudi, 1997. ———. 1982. Das Passagenwerk. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Translated into Italian as I “passages” di Parigi. Torino: Einaudi, 2000. Translated into English as The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. ———. 1985. “Kapitalismus als Religion.” In Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Translated into Italian as “Capitalismo come religione, Il nuovo melangolo.” Genova, 2013. Blumenberg, H. 1989. Höhlenausgänge. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Translated into Italian as Uscite dalla caverna. Milano: Medusa, 2009. Ciantelli, V. 2017. “Histoire d’une rencontre manquée: Walter Benjamin et le Collège de sociologie.” Synergies Pays Germanophones 10: 49–60. Durkheim, É. 1893. De la division du travaille social. Paris: Alcan. Translated into Italian as La divisione del lavoro sociale. Milano: Comunità, 1996. Grassi, V. 2006. Introduzione alla sociologia dell’immaginario. Milano: Guerini e Associati. Habermas, J. 1968. “Arbeit und Interaktion. Bemerkungen zu Hegels Jenenser Philosophie des Geistes.” In Technik und Wissenschaft als “Ideologie.” Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Translated into Italian as Lavoro e interazione. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1975. Hegel, G. F. W. 1807. Phenomenologie des Geistes. Bamberg-Würzburg: J. A. Goebhardt. Translated into Italian as Fenomenologia dello spirito. Milano: Rusconi, 1995. Iacono, A. M. 1995. Tra individui e cose. Roma: Manifestolibri. ———. 2018. Studi su Karl Marx. Pisa: ETS. Kofman, S. 1973 Camera obscura: De l'idéologie. Paris: Galilée. Löwy, M. 1988. Rédemption et utopie: Le juadïsme libertaire en Europe centrale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Translated into Italian as Redenzione e utopia: Figure della cultura ebraica mitteleuropea. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1992.

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Marx, K. 1857. Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Translated into Italian as Lineamenti fondamentali della critica dell’economia politica. Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1970. ———. 1867. Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Hamburg: Otto Meißner Verlag. Translated into Italian as Il capitale: Critica dell’economia politica. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1989. Mele, V. 2013. Aesthetics and Social Theory: Simmel, Benjamin, Adorno, Bourdieu. Roma: Aracne. Musto, M. 2018. Karl Marx. Biografia intellettuale e politica. 1857–1883. Torino: Einaudi. Palma, M. 2017. Foto di gruppo con servo e signore: Mitologie hegeliane in Koyré, Strauss, Kojève, Bataille, Weil, Queneau. Roma: Castelvecchi. Pezzella, M. 1988. “Interpretazioni di Bachofen nell’opera di Walter Benjamin.” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa: Classe di Lettere e Filosofia 3, no. 18, issue 2: 843–57. Simmel, G. 1894. “Das Problem der Soziologie.” Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft in Deutschen Reich 18, no. 4: 1301–7. Translated into Italian as “La Riforma sociale,” 6, 1899. ———. 1900a. “Metaphysik der Faulheit. Ein Satyrspiel zur Tragödie der Philosophie.” Jugend 5, no. 1: 337–39. Translated into Italian as “Metafisica della pigrizia.” In Le forme del moderno: Attualità di Georg Simmel, ed. V. Mele. Milano: Franco Angeli, 2007. ———. 1900b. Philosophie des Geldes. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Translated into Italian as Filosofia del denaro. Torino: UTET, 1984. Translated into English as The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge, 2004. ———. 1910. “Soziologie der Mahlzeit.” In Berliner Tageblatt, 183–90. Translated into Italian as Sociologia del pasto. Roma: Armando, 2006. ———. 1911. Philosophische Kultur: Gesammelte Essays. Leipsig: Klinkhardt. Translated into Italian as La moda e altri saggi di cultura filosofica. Milano: Longanesi, 1985. ———. 1917. Grundfragen der Soziologie: Individuum und Gesellschaft. Berlin-Leipsig: Göschen’sche Verlagshandlung. Translated into Italian as Forme e giochi di società. Problemi fondamentali della sociologia. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1983. ———. 1923. “Aus dem nachgelassenen Tagebuche.” In Fragmente an Aufsätze aus dem Nachlaß. München: Drei Masken. Partially translated into Italian as Arte e civiltà. Milano: ISEDI, 1976.

Chapter 9

The Imaginary Roots of Politics A Weberian Reading Milena Meo

WEBER AND THE IMAGES OF THE WORLD In every age, the imaginary has founded the political dimension and determined its forms (Durand 1988). The most important reflections of our tradition of thought have had particularly rich and fruitful relationships with the imaginary; the representations they have offered of what is at stake in politics, what can or cannot be done, what is possible to imagine, clearly call into play an imaginative process specific to the human being from which practices can be constructed and possible scenarios for action may open. As we know, Max Weber’s sociological theory arises from the current of German critical historicism, the source of its cultural position. In Weber’s view, the sciences of history and of society can be inclusive and refer only to the culture that produces them. By assigning a value to the meaning of actions for those who perform them, his aim is to understand how men have lived and how they have constructed diverse social models in line with their different beliefs and how and why their hopes, worldly or otherworldly, have led them to perform now one activity, now another, obsessed by the idea of their salvation or by the ideal of economic development (Aron 1963). His monumental work on religions, particularly in what is perhaps its best-known part, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, is the hotbed from which grew very many reflections that would thereafter come together in his later works, such as Economy and Society (Weber 1922). Among all Weber’s works, published mostly posthumously, his thinking on the great religions was among the few that he personally edited. In this context, the author himself, in the introduction to the text written shortly before his death, was to 169

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stress that what he intends to submit for verification does not refer to the sociology of religion in its strictest sense but something more general that refers to the specificity of Western rationalism and its connections with capitalism, a specifically modern, Western phenomenon. Only the West, in his opinion, has originated production modes and a social and political organization based on capitalist models, and only the West has experienced that rationalization process that produced the state, a political institution with a rationally decreed constitution and body of laws and an administration assigned to specialized officials (Weber 1920–1921a). Weber’s theory offered in The Protestant Ethic seems to be a masterful example of evidence of how certain specific imaginaries are put to work in everyday life, generating active practices that build worlds and construct institutions. In a central passage accompanying the introduction to The Economic Ethic of the World Religions, he gives life and body to this idea by introducing the valuable notion of weltbild, translated into English as worldview, an element that, while finding immediate application in the field of religions, then becomes a key meaning to read all the dimensions of the social. Weber writes, Yet redemption attained a specific significance only when it expressed a systematic and rationalized “image of the world” and represented a stand in the face of the world. For the meaning as well as the intended and actual psychological quality of redemption has depended upon such a world image and such a stand. Not ideas, but material and ideal interests, directly govern men’s conduct. Yet very frequently the “world images” that have been created by “ideas” have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest. “From what” and “for what” one wished to be redeemed and, let us not forget, “could be” redeemed, depended upon one’s image of the world.” (Weber 1920–1921b; Eng. tr. 1946, 280)

So men take up a position on the basis of the worldviews they have in front of them—determined historically and temporally—views created by ideas that point out the route along which it is useful, sensible, and above all possible to move, Weber tells us. Interests are behind individual and collective action, but the cognitive frames are first and foremost the lens through which to observe, understand, and direct those interests. Such views thus understood are not only representations featured visually. They seem to be more in line with what Castoriadis (1975; Eng. tr. 1998, 150) has described more generally in terms of “figures, in the broadest sense of the term: phonemes, words, bank currency, jinns, statues, churches, tools, uniforms, body paintings, numerical figures, border posts, centaurs, cassocks,

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lictors, musical scores—but also the totality of what is perceived in nature, that is or could be named by the society in question.” The weltbilder described by Weber are therefore a set of cognitive meanings, socially produced and materially conditioned, that carry out a basic function of practical orientation (D’Andrea 2016), expressions of cognitive dimensions able to supply a shared sense and to direct the action. There is an extremely strong bond between weltbilder and the material dimension of everyday action. It is through these views that man defines his position in the world and finds a horizon within which he can set his action, modeling his practical behavior on it and making it possible for him to take up a position. All civilizations were built with the contribution of such “images or figures” possessing a real imaginal force that therefore becomes the constituting essence. Weber’s indication on this central concept thus finds an application that goes beyond the specific case developed in his text. First of all, we are induced to say that worldviews, as he understands them, exercise a crucial role for the determination of our practical aims, our interests, and feasible strategies for their satisfaction in dealing with our passions that become effectively possible only when they are found in a suitable context determining their times, ways, and direction (D’Andrea 2013). Thus, for example, political passions can materialize through different practices and strategies according to diverse imaginaries. Yet Weber’s precision in the text mentioned induces us to say something more: worldviews hold a strategic role in the interpretation of our own condition of existence. In Weber’s outlook, not only the concrete working of emotive energies, not only the political activation of passions, but their very onset refers to a specific weltbild (D’Andrea 2013). In doing this, it also circumscribes what it is legitimately possible to hope for and imagine. Hence, bound to an imaginative dimension that is essentially political, this aspect is therefore also dependent on the worldview of a certain period. Weber (1920–1921b; Eng. tr. 1946, 277) writes, By themselves, the masses, as we shall see, have everywhere remained engulfed in the massive and archaic growth of magic—unless a prophecy that holds out specific promises has swept them into a religious movement of an ethical character.

The perception of material unease is not, therefore, sufficient to set the action in motion. It is first necessary that this unease be believed unnatural and debatable and that the hope of liberation may be perceived as concrete: so the onset of a worldview is essential to make such a possibility realistic.

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In order that it may take effect, this weltbild does not perforce have to be a rational or consistent view. Far from bearing testimony to the truth or falsehood of something, it determines the possibility that something, consistent with it, has of being believed true or else being refused as false.1 Foucault used the term episteme to describe this status, and in his work Words and Things, he wrote in this regard, Between the already-codified glance and reflective knowledge, there exists . . . a middle region that offers order in its very being: the order appears there, according to cultures and periods, continuous and gradual, or else fragmented and discontinuous, bound to space or set up at any instant by the impulse of time, related to a picture of variables or else defined by separate systems of consistencies, made up of likenesses that follow one upon the other in correspondence to their proximity or respond mirror-like, organized around increasing differences etc. This middle region, then, insofar as it makes manifest the modes of being of order, can be posited as the most fundamental of all. . . . Quite obviously, such an analysis does not belong to the history of ideas or of science; it is rather an enquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory became possible; within what space of order knowledge was constituted; on the basis of what historical a priori, and in the element of what positivity, ideas could appear, sciences be established, experience be reflected in philosophies, rationalities be formed only, perhaps, to dissolve and vanish soon afterwards. . . . What I am attempting to bring to light is the epistemological field, the episteme in which knowledge, envisaged apart from all criteria having reference to its rational value or its objective forms, grounds its positivity and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection but rather that of its conditions of possibility. (Foucault 1966; Eng. tr. 1970, xxiii–xxiv)

As in Foucault’s episteme concept, Weber’s worldview does not prescribe but rather describes what is probable and realistic to expect in any given historical time and in any given context. And again, as for the episteme, the concept of weltbild has nothing to do with the notions of true or false: it does not bear witness that something is authentic, it supplies a—changing—representation of a system of ideas in agreement with which “truth is spoken” (Foucault 1970). So, for example, the worldview influenced by modern science is no less false than that determined by the great monotheistic religions to the extent that their imaginal force is found in this very capacity to orient actions. In this sense, both possess the same power since both are founded on beliefs that make expectations legitimate. It is the belief in these weltbilder that produces effects of reality and not the opposite: the people (Badiou et al. 2014; Laclau 2005; Rosanvallon 2002), the community (Anderson 1983; Bauman 2000b; Weber 1922), the nation (Crouch 2018; Smith 1986), and so on exemplify

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political meanings that have changed in sense and sign according to the social imaginary that has resignified them. The concept of worldview has therefore a great deal to do with the question of power. It aids us in circumscribing “what a subject can do”; what he can hope, wish, and obtain in a given historical moment; and also, together, how a given society organizes itself to achieve its political order. It describes an order of the visible and sayable that makes it possible that a certain word is understood as discourse and another as noise (Rancière 1995). And thus it becomes a valuable category for sociological analysis and helps us to keep the different levels of the social together. On the one hand, it clarifies the action of subjects and their relations, starting from individual motivations that resound and come together at a higher level; on the other, it challenges us to shed light on the forms of social and political organization that are shaped by such views and that the subjects themselves, within what is possible/thinkable, have “managed” to create. In spite of its inner differentiation, each worldview is regulated and made consistent by a rotation center (Simmel 1908) around which the social environment gravitates and substantializes. As Simmel writes in The Conflict of Modern Culture, in any great age, it is possible to perceive one central concept, a hidden governing principle in a certain spiritual age: In any great cultural era with a definite character of its own, one particular idea can always be discerned which both underlies all intellectual movements and at the same time appears to be their ultimate goal. Every such central idea occurs, of course, in innumerable variants and disguises, and against innumerable opposing factors, but it remains withal the hidden governing principle of the intellectual era. (Simmel 1908; Eng. tr. 2009, 78).

It is around this hidden governing principle that the institutions are arrayed, aligned, and organized, bringing to life an order that is first of all a political order. THE MODERN IMAGINARY AND ITS POLITICAL PRACTICES There exists a relationship—mediated by weltbilder—between values, possibilities, and political ethics. For example, the implementation of two different models of norms and punishment refer to different worldviews. As Foucault underlines in his reflection on the birth of the prison, at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the “punishment spectacle” obtained through torture and physical violence was replaced by

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diverse humanity-based punishment techniques that no longer invested the material body of the condemned person but took charge of his soul: Beneath the increasing leniency of punishment, then, one may map a displacement of its point of application; and through this displacement, a whole field of recent objects, a whole new system of truth and a mass of roles hitherto unknown in the exercise of criminal justice. A corpus of knowledge, techniques, “scientific” discourses is formed and becomes entangled with the practice of the power to punish. (Foucault 1975; Eng. tr. 1978, 22–23)

The passage from “an art of unbearable sensations to an economy of suspended rights” and the entrance of the soul—real and incorporeal—onto the scene of criminal justice, accompanied by scientific knowledge capable of “telling the truth” even about correctional models, is the effect of a more general transformation of the way in which the body itself is invested by relations of power: If it is still necessary for the law to reach and manipulate the body of the convict, it will be at a distance, in the proper way, according to strict rules, and with a much “higher” aim. As a result of this new restraint, a whole army of technicians took over from the executioner, the immediate anatomist of pain: warders, doctors, chaplains, psychiatrists, psychologists, educationalists; by their very presence near the prisoner, they sing the praises that the law needs. . . . The body now serves as an instrument or intermediary: if one intervenes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive the individual of a liberty that is regarded both as a right and as property. The body, according to this penality, is caught up in a system of constraints and privations, obligations and prohibitions. Physical pain, the pain of the body itself, is no longer the constituent element of the penalty. From being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy of suspended rights. If it is still necessary for the law to reach and manipulate the body of the convict, it will be at a distance, in the proper way, according to strict rules, and with a much “higher” aim. As a result of this new restraint, a whole army of technicians took over from the executioner, the immediate anatomist of pain: warders, doctors, chaplains, psychiatrists, psychologists, educationalists; by their very presence near the prisoner, they sing the praises that the law needs: they reassure it that the body and pain are not the ultimate objects of its punitive action. (Foucault 1975; Eng. tr. 1978, 11)

Man has become the object of study in a scientific discourse, and the new type of power exercised through his body has utterly new features: he is no longer a property but rather an exercise; the dominating effects depend not on the appropriation of bodies but on a series of techniques, dispositions, knowledges, and ceaseless maneuvers that are practiced on them and

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reproduced and in doing so subjectivize him. Therefore, power is no longer the acquired or maintained privilege of a dominant class over a dominated class; it is an “effect that manifests and at times reflects the position of those that are dominated, . . . it leans upon them exactly as in turn they themselves, in their struggle against it, lean on the hold it has over them (Foucault 1975; Eng. tr. 1978, 30). What we clearly read in Foucault’s reflections is not a shift in the objectives of power but a renewal of its practical outcomes, its different reorganization consolidated in innovative practices and strategies precisely because what is renewed is the dominant weltbild. That is, the rift in the epistemic paradigm of premodern times will lead to a new way in which novel ideas will, “like a switchman,” determine the rails along which the dynamic of interests has continued to move, again in the words of Weber. The author writes, The unity of the primitive image of the world, in which everything was concrete magic, has tended to split into rational cognition and mastery of nature, on the one hand, and into “mystic” experiences, on the other. The inexpressible contents of such experiences remain the only possible “beyond,” added to the mechanism of a world robbed of gods. In fact, the beyond remains an incorporeal and metaphysical realm in which individuals intimately possess the holy. . . . This phenomenon appears in some form, with progressive intellectualist rationalism, wherever men have ventured to rationalize the image of the world as being a cosmos governed by impersonal rules. (Weber 1920–1921b; Eng. tr. 1946, 282)

This is a weltbild that changes the “cosmos” into human ground, easily manipulated and with unlimited resources, made up of subjects who become responsible for their own self-preservation. Hence, the idea begins to take shape that it has an objective sense, and therefore the historical becoming has its own single direction. All this determines the formation of finalized political projects that pursue the construction of what is imagined to be the best political and social order. Taylor has brought to light social and political changes starting from the seventeenth century that have impacted Western societies and Europe in particular, when through a new desacralized moral order, men began to imagine their own reality in an utterly new way. This was an epoch-making social change, a real break in episteme; becoming the dominant vision, it pushed previous social theories out to the margins of life and of political discourses, establishing new institutions that have brushed away the old ones, renewing them (Taylor 2004). Human beings begin to be conceived as rational, social agents, and society becomes a set of individuals with obligations toward one another; they come together with the aim of forming a political entity capable of safeguarding natural rights and realizing certain benefits common to all, among which

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the most important is safety.2 Previous weltbilder are everywhere replaced by others, equally binding: the mechanist imaginary will make it possible to overturn imagination with science (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947) and to lay the foundations for a legitimation of the exploitation and manipulation of nature and her resources (Meo 2012). The question of order, removed from the divine and disenchanted,3 has begun to be played solely within a worldly time in a social unity that has taken rationality as its new guiding concept oriented not toward the contemplative “flight from the world” but toward its active “remake.” What was in the premodern age a multifaceted reality in conflictual balance has become since modernity the triumph of the imaginary of totality and of the achievement of the nation-state, which is its political transcription (Maffesoli 1992). From now on, the political was to be identified with the national. Modern social sciences have also reinstated this order through the elaboration of important doctrines that have become cornerstones of discourse on political analysis: Weber was to describe politics in its double connection with the concept of state: “Hence, ‘politics’ for us means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state” (Weber 1919; Eng. tr. 1946, 78). Tönnies (1887) would describe the community as a preindustrial reality antithetical to the society it will override. The distinguishing criterion of the politician will be re-elaborated in terms of conflict between friends and enemies in a dynamic in which war, which is territorially spatialized war, will represent a necessary, irreducible horizon of sense (Schmitt 1958). As we have seen, the worldview also marks the Utopic boundary beyond which we can move. All modern worldviews have in common a planning potential for improvement and a legitimate belief in the effective possibility that such a thing will happen. Modernity, with its specific weltbild, has produced great ideological and political narrations that have described the world and, while describing it, have set it in order. Faith in progress, universal equality, and welfare for all; all the great ideologies, such as communism, were collective political projects that looked toward a “happy ending” for which to fight with commitment, continuity, and dedication—and, above all, all together. Political parties, like other intermediate bodies, were those models of basic organization capable of rendering concrete the imagination of a common future. Politics embodied in a strong institution—and today, that means a state, as Weber (1919) was to write in his lesson on Politics as a Profession—is “solid” politics (Bauman 1997, 1999, 2000a), featuring characteristics that do no more than reflect the image in which they are mirrored and, being so reflected, are generated.

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Figure 9.1. Detail of the Cover of Leviathan or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil. Source: T. Hobbes, 1651.

The metaphor of the Leviathan, perhaps more than any other, can serve to illustrate the distinctive features of this modern imaginary. Probably no other portrayal has succeeded in figuring so evidently and thoroughly a model of political theorization as did the great monarch pictured on the cover of the first edition of Hobbes’s text (1651; see figure 9.1). It makes a direct reference to one of God’s eccentricities toward the world, a powerful vision that shifted the center of power from cathedral to street and replaced sacred time accompanied by church bells to profane time told off by the hands of the clock; it led to a renewed vision of political power reimagined as earthly and worldly and therefore exercised through organizations logical-rational in form. In the iconic representation of the great sovereign state, he is the one who commands, and there is nothing else above his head, the head of the “mortal god”: “upon earth there is not his like” runs the biblical quotation from the Book of Job on the cover. His face is a human face, and his body is made up of a multitude of indistinct bodies looking up toward him—and not above him—in attentive vigilance. The order thus described is anything but natural; indeed, it is the result of a rational, human decision. Frightened by their own destructive instincts, it was the same individuals who chose to replace conflict with a certain type of order. In accordance with medieval imaginary, order is natural, inscribed in things themselves and unchangeable, yet in modern

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times, it becomes “a human affair”; the establishment of order is through a conscious decision of those who in this context will become citizens (Marshall 1950), and again it is achieved by men organized in a state through its sovereign decisions. The Leviathan, therefore, is born to control passions: he is born from an irrational sentiment, the most irrational of sentiments, fear. Fear of death generates the need for protection of life; hence, a snippet of personal freedom may be exchanged for a greater chance of safety. Safety and freedom and their relationship become the cornerstone around which the whole of modernity’s political action is achieved. It is therefore a rational decision, a social contract, that is at the roots of the political bond between individuals and between such individuals and power. And between the high (the legitimized) and the low (the legitimizing), there is a series of relationships mediated by representing mechanisms that are the foundations for the exercise of a power that becomes democratic and rational-legal in nature (Weber 1919, 1922). Whoever is low down stretches toward the high through representation; conversely, what is high is legitimated and governs the individuals lower down in a metaphorical vertical horizon. Governments, parliaments, political parties, trade unions, citizens, and so on are all pieces of a dynamic rational order that has produced efficient social regulation over time: power is, in the first place, a question of administration (Weber 1922). THE CONTEMPORARY IMAGINARY AND THE NEW WAY OF BEING TOGETHER In the premodern age, the world vision was linked to a dimension that appeared unchangeable since it was natural and inscribed in the given order of things; with modernity, however, the sharing of many worldviews and the introduction of man as a subject that may produce order and not merely as an object of an already-defined order had produced outlines for action projected forward, ideological and common, inspired by scientific rationality. Both dominant views performed their function as interpretive pictures, defining the expectations of social actors and orienting their behavior. Like premodern man, modern man has developed his relationship with his specific worldview through a “fideistic” type of device. Weber writes, What gives the situation of the “civilized” in this respect its specific “rational” quality in contrast to the situation of the “primitive” is, rather, (1) the generally established belief that the conditions of civilized everyday life, be they streetcar or lift or money or court of law or military or medicine, are in principle rational,

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that is, are human artifacts accessible to rational knowledge, creation, and control-a belief that has certain significant consequences for the character of the “consensus”; (2) the confidence that these conditions function rationally, that is, according to known rules, and not irrationally as do the powers the primitive seeks to influence through his sorcerer. One has the confidence that, in principle at least, one can “count” on these conditions, “calculate” their behavior, and orient one’s own action toward unambiguous expectations engendered by them. (Weber 1913; Eng. tr. 1981, 179)

Faith, in the sense of an effective, calculable world, has been typical of modernity’s worldview: the world has continued to have an objective sense, the historical becoming to have a direction. In this picture, a political order was conceivable that foresaw the wide, collectively shared mobilization of all subjects. The great narrations pointed the way, determining social consistence and inspiring revolutionary Utopias. Relying once more on Weber’s prospect of the weltbilder, it is easy to see how the imaginary of the late modern period shows notable differences compared to that of previous ages. Today, the implosion of nation-states, the strong push toward deregulation in certain sectors and toward hyperregulation in others, the privatization exercised by market expansion on a world scale, and the so-called end of meta-narrations all point to a new “switchman” who contributes to the definition of our passions, our interests, and the possible means for their fulfillment. Maffesoli has pointed out that it is not a question of a revolution or of an expulsion of the old elements that no longer function in this configuration. It is a question of their recomposition, of their new combinations with others generated by novelties large or small; a synergy between archaic, ancient foundations that modernity had expelled from the social body; and new opportunities such as those supplied, for example, by technological advancement. Today’s individual is no longer imagined as the bearer of a stable, fixed identity, able to construct his own story and join with others long term to construct the history of the world together. The subject that projected himself forward and made plans gives way to another type of person who plays diverse roles according to the different contexts he joins: identity becomes more fragile. Multiple identifications, on the other hand, multiply (Maffesoli 2010). The great narrations change into special small stories, embodied and detailed. Deprived of any historical direction, this fragmented subject seems to be moved by a “herd drive,” featuring a feeling of community or tribal belonging, often based on an ethnic claim, cultural specificity, or religious fanaticism. The new weltbild produces a real “political transfiguration”:

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There is a collapse of the bourgeois episteme, using the term in its acceptance as the set of representations and ways of social organization expressed in slightly diverse forms throughout the western world. The consequence is a new social rhythm, . . . unrestrained, barbaric, of which the staccato, representing the dominant music, has no longer any of the symphonic harmony that prevailed up to the present. . . . Contrary to the rigid, closed identity unit of the institution, the nation-state or the ideological empire, a rhythm of this kind reveals a mobile uniqueness that fuses the most widely-varied tribes, different ethnic groups or confederations into a conflictual harmony, in a constellation in which each has its own place. (Maffesoli 1992, 24–25, my translation)

In this context, political power also reimagines itself and is embodied in further representations. The premodern and the modern worldviews were profoundly different yet reflected a vision of power and sovereignty that shared the same outlook: it was in both cases a vertical vision. Even in modernity, the power from above, the state, reached downward—toward its citizens—albeit in a relational (Weber 1922) rather than a substantialistic acceptance as previously. In spite of the fact that God had vanished from the scene and man had become the great protagonist of History with a capital “H,” in spite of the fact that calculability had become the hidden governing principle of the intellectual era (Simmel 1918; Eng. tr. 1968), the “verticality of power” had remained a common cypher of the two different weltbilder. The age in which we live snaps this vertical line launched upward. Its model of representation is no longer a line but a horizontal plane without beginning or end: a network. The image of the Leviathan as a metaphor of power no longer works: in order to understand the nature of power and politics, it is now needful to “cut off the king’s head,” as Foucault (1997) invites us to do, and thus abandon the interpretations derived from the theory of sovereignty and pay attention to the relations and connections in which the individual is immersed. Modern man’s rationality and his abstract reason are overturned by an emotional dimension of existence that shapes and reconfigures even our way of being together. The social contract, which, as we have seen, was at the base of modernity’s political setup, gives way to new types of links based on a pact supported by the prevalence of shared emotions, affections, and feelings. Within this renewed horizontal plane, a form of mediation no longer seems necessary. The experts, modernity’s priests, had been essential elements in the modern vertical political setup, proliferating in every field: it will be the full-time professional politicians who lay their hands on the practice of politics, for they are the “entrepreneurs” or officials on a fixed salary (Weber 1919). Yet very soon, in a world emptied of its finalistic possibility, even

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their role begins to lose sense and is perceived as useless. Through lack of any intermediate passages, that “caste of the wise” that had produced social regulation in the previous age, more or less in all fields, is set aside in favor of “currents generated by collective flows of enormous dimensions” (Baricco 2018, 75, my translation). In Weber’s eyes, the weltbild is also responsible for the power of imagination indicating how much and for what we can hope. In this sense, with his powerful heuristic instrument, Weber is in clear opposition to every form of determinism; in his vision, even imagination ceases to be an anthropological constant and becomes a dependent variable. Hence, if man can boast an imaginative faculty, it is in any case subjected to ideal and material factors: it depends on the worldview in which he is immersed and on the consequent material transformations of social life. Weakening the subject, fragmenting units, and upsetting certainties, the postmodern world vision offers no “elsewhere” toward which we can possibly imagine we are heading. Not that social unease has been defeated; it is more a question of the different political response with which it is accepted, opposed or re-elaborated. What in fact appears to be missing is the ability to transform all this into any long-term political project. The perspective imagination has given way to a shortsighted type of imagination that thinks of the here and now as the only possible horizon. With their input from the new electronic media, even material transformations rewrite political space and blur its outlines. New political identities must take stock of the rise of new digital ambiences that develop a new model of connective communication (De Kerckhove and Susca 2009). The internet, with its social networks, becomes that horizontal plane where the public sphere as we classically recognize it crumbles and within which new ways of collaboration and new forms of participation come about, inspired by emotional universes and no longer formed by rational meanings. In this context, neo-populisms, neo-fascisms, and neo-irredentisms emerge. Such new configurations feature anti-modern elements: nonvertical, nonrational, nonideological, separated from the elite, impertinent toward established law and disjunctive toward the order of the nations (Susca 2015). Nationalities are redesigned in terms of emotions and traumas; even national borders, a distinctive element of modern political identity, lose their meaning. They appear incoherent and abstract in this reimagined space where flows of people waver between a local and a global dimension in a prospect that is now transnational. Thus, as a consequence of the effervescence of the postmodern imaginary, the new order that appears to be emerging “is that of a set of communities in no way positive or in agreement, but precarious and subject to the versatility of emotion” (Maffesoli 1992, 257, my translation).

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NOTES 1. In this consists the substantial difference between the worldview, thus understood, and ideology. The latter, in fact, always refers to a possible, objective truth that is frequently demonstrable. 2. In his text on modern social imaginaries, Taylor (2004, 63) writes, “There is a problem with this kind of broad-gauge historical interpretation, which has already been recognized in the discussion of Weber’s thesis about the development of the Protestant ethic and its relation to capitalism. Indeed, this is close to what I am saying here; it is a kind of specification of the broader connection I am asserting. Weber is obviously one of my sources.” 3. In his well-known reflection on the disenchantment of the world, Weber was to write, “The increasing intellectualization and rationalization do not, therefore, indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives. It means something else, namely, the knowledge or belief that if one but wished one could learn it at any time. Hence, it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization means” (Weber 1921; Eng. tr. 1946, 139).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alagna, M. 2012. Sazi da morire: Soggettività e immagini del mondo in Max Weber. Milano: AlboVersorio. Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Aron, R. 1963. Les étapes de la pensée sociologique. Paris: Gallimard. Badiou, A., J. Rancière, P. Bourdieu, J. Butler, G. Didi-Huberman, and S. Khiari. 2014. Che cos’è un popolo? Roma: Deriveapprodi. Baricco, A. 2018. The Game. Torino: Einaudi. Bauman, Z. 1997. Postmodernity and Its Discontents. New York: New York University Press. ———. 1999. In Search of Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2000a. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2000b. Missing Community. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bazzicalupo, L., and S. Vaccaro, eds. 2016. Che vita è? Politica, immagini del mondo e razionalità̀ neoliberale: Vita, politica, contingenza. Macerata: Quodlibet. Brett, N. 2005. “La politica dell’immaginario: Appunti incompleti su affetti e potere.” Studi culturali, Rivista quadrimestrale 1: 3–22. Castoriadis, C. 1975. L’institution imaginaire de la societé. Paris: Seuil. Eng. trans. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambrige: MIT Press.

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Crouch, C. 2018. The Globalization Blacklash. Cambridge: Polity Press. D’Andrea, D. 2005. L’incubo degli ultimi uomini: Etica e politica in Max Weber. Roma: Carocci. ———. 2009. “Tra adattamento e rifiuto: Verso una teoria delle immagini del mondo.” Quaderni di Teoria Sociale 9: 17–50. ———. 2013. “Immaginazione, immagini del mondo e tarda modernità.” Cosmopolis. Rivista di filosofia e teoria politica 9, no. 1, http:​//​www​.cosmopolis​.globalist​.it​/Detail​_News​_Display​?ID​=68258​&typeb​=0​&Immaginazione​-immagini​-del​ -mondo- e-tarda-modernita. ———. 2016. “Pensare la soggettività senza natura umana: Materialità e immagini del mondo in Max Weber.” Cosmopolis. Rivista di filosofia e teoria politica 13, no. 1, http:​//​www​.cosmopolis​.globalist​.it​/Detail​_News​_Display​?ID​=92328​&typeb​=0​ &pensare​-la​-soggettivita​-senza​-natura​-umana​-materialita​-e​-immagini​-del​-mondo​ -in​-max​-weber-. ———. 1997. Connected Intelligence: The Arrival of the Web Society. Toronto: Somerville House. De Kerckhove, D., and V. Susca. 2009. Transpolitica: Nuovi rapporti di potere e di sapere. Roma: Apogeo editori. Durand, G. 1988. “Le roi n’est jamais nu.” Le cahiers de l’imaginaire 2: 5–9. Foucault, M. 1966. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard. Translated into English as The Order of Things: An Archology of Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970. ———. 1970. L’ordre du discours. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1975. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard. Translated into English as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. ———. 1997. Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at Collége de France 1975–1976. New York: Picador Horkheimer, M., and T. W. Adorno. 1947. Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente. Amsterdam: Querido. Laclau, E. 1996. “The Death and Resurrection of the Theory of Ideology.” Journal of Political Ideologies 1, no. 3: 201–20. ———. 2005. On populist reason. London: Verso. Laclau, E., J. Butler, and S. Žižek. 2000. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso. Laclau, E., and C. Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso. Maffesoli, M. 1992. La Transfiguration du politique. Paris: La Table Ronde. ———. 2003. Notes sur la postmodernité: Le lieu fait lien. Paris: Éditions du Félin. ———. 2008. Après la modernité? La conquête du présent; La violence totalitaire; la logique de la domination. Paris: CNRS. ———. 2010. Matrimonium: Petit traité d’écosophie. Paris: CNRS éditions. Marshall, T. H. 1950. Citizenship and Social Class, and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meo, M. 2012. Il corpo politico: Biopotere, generazione e produzione di soggettività femminili. Milano: Mimesis.

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Pateman, C. 1970. Participation and Democratic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rancière, J. 1995. La Mésentente: Politique et Philosophie. Paris: Galilée. Rosanvallon, P. 2002. Le peuple introuvable: Histoire de la représentation démocratique en France. Paris: Gallimard. Schmitt, C. 1958. “Legalität und Legitimität (1932) e Das Problem der Legalität (1950).” In Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1924–1954: Materialien zu einer Verfassungslehre. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Sennet, R. 2006. The Culture of New Capitalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Simmel, G. 1908. Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Translated into English as Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms. Leiden: Brill, 2009. ———. 1918. Der Konflikt in der modernen Kultur: Ein Vortrag. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Translated into English as The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays. New York: Teachers College Press, 1968. Smith, A. D. 1986. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Susca, V. 2015. “L’immaginario e il politico: Sociologia della cultura elettronica e dell’estetica contemporanea.” Iconocrazia 7: 1–11. Taylor, C. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tönnies, F. 1887. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Abhandlung des Communismus und des Socialismus als empirischer Culturformen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Weber, M. 1913. “Über einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie.” Logos 4: 253–94. Translated into English as “Some Categories of Interpretative Sociology.” The Sociological Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1981): 151–80. ———. 1919. “Politik als Beruf.” In Gesammelte politische Schriften. München: Drei Masken Verlag. Translated into English as “Politics as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946. ———. 1920–1921a. “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus.” In Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. Tübingen: Mohr. ———. 1920–1921b. “Einleitung.” In Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. Tübingen: Mohr. Translated into English as “The Social Psychology of World Religions.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946. ———. 1921. “Wissenschaft als Beruf.” In Gesammelte politische Schriften. München: Drei Masken Verlag. Translated into English as “Science as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946. ———. 1922. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tübingen: Mohr. Translated into English as Economy and Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919.

Chapter 10

Imaginaries of Otherness in Complex Societies Francesca Collela

This chapter deals with the imaginaries of otherness (ethnicity, origin, gender, generation, abilities, and so on) in a society such as the contemporary one, which seems increasingly aware of diversity, difference, otherness, as striking as it is (perhaps more frequently) dissimilar. The topic of the other is a central topic in many social and humanistic disciplines since human beings need to be heard and to feel accepted; to relate to others and to share thoughts, personal histories, and points of view on the world; to enter into empathy with other people; and to face choices, difficulties, and achievements. The concept of otherness involves that of identity, with which it carries on a dialogical and dialectical relationship. “Je est un autre”: I is another, we might say, recalling the words of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. This formula, however, can be understood only if set in a context of permanent becoming: identity is not a bit of information, a monolith, but rather a process that presupposes and needs otherness. “There is no given I which does not, inevitably, refer to a You, a contact, a relationship” (Ferrarotti 2007, 33). Identity corresponds to the hermeneutic comprehension of self that the subject develops in the context of his own actions and that implies, unhesitatingly, the linguistic dimension (Gadamer 1945–1967; Taylor 1989). We well know that this is first an inner dialogue though generated and nourished thanks to the discourse with Alter. This is why we refer to the dialogical and dialectical nature of the relationship between I and Alter: through constant practice in modeling and continuous transformation, the relationship develops the idea of a

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fusional synthesis with the other or, better, with the number of the other, with his being singular or plural so that the dialogue may turn out to be an encounter/ clash between two, or else universal, personalist, the one, the other potentially standardized. But encountering the other means encountering mystery. (Ferrarotti 2007, 161)

And such indefiniteness not only refers to the fact that what is under discussion is human behavior but also represents—as we shall see—one of the most meaningful features of the multiple processes that generally fall under the heading of social complexity. SOCIAL COMPLEXITY AND SELF-PRESERVATION OF THE INDIVIDUAL The concept of social complexity sets forth the possibility of describing the unity of a system, an environment, the world, and so on by using the distinction between the elements and relations that make it up. In the sociological tradition, Georg Simmel and Émile Durkheim identified the basic characteristics of social complexity, namely, on the one hand, the increase in the number and the variety of the elements of the system and, on the other, the multiplication of the relations of interdependence among these same elements (Durkheim 1895; Simmel 1890). In this framework, the relations between individual and society appear “redefined,” and, while Durkheim had related the growth in social complexity with the continual enhancement of individual personality, Simmel underlined a specific element of this individualization process, that is, that the groups and spheres to which the subjects belong lose their typical premodern concentricity. The specialization and differentiation of social life ambiences and the interdependence among individuals and institutions today entail a growing social complexity that results in increased “symbolic differentiation.” Not only are people hard pressed to process the multiplication of possible choices—which might lead to contradictory outcomes, such as an increased sense of both freedom and uncertainty—but more and more often, they are having to face contradictory cultural models, which inevitably cause identity conflicts and cognitive dissonance (Sciolla 1983). Complexification can therefore be observed in the fact that in social culture, there is no longer a single “symbolical center” but a plurality of them. As we know, the symbolic center concerns the dominion of values and beliefs. Generally, we may say that every society is governed by a symbolic center formed by values, beliefs, and ideals that are the fundamental and unavoidable features of any given society (Shils 1984). According to Bourdieu

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(1975), we have to take into account how in complex societies, the center is made up of an aggregate of centers, perhaps allied, perhaps in competition or even conflict with one another. Edward Shils notes how each of these centers is on an equal footing with the others and how none of them alone can take precedence over the others. Yet certain centers may achieve a dominant position thanks to some alliance with another center, though such alliances are usually rather inconstant (Pollo 2007). Social complexity therefore comes across as a concept/problem linked to its own insufficient structural determination. In such a context, the subjects that make up and enliven complex societies live in a state of mislaid and lost points of reference. The crisis in values and systems of thought means that subjects with problems have difficulty in judging and predicting the outcome of their actions and are therefore inclined to plan for the future in the short or medium term. In Niklas Luhmann’s words, “No individual is able to bear such direct confrontation with the extreme complexity of the world” (Luhmann 2000; It. tr. 2002, 5). The individual perceives an unbridgeable gap between his personal world and that of the society in which he lives, which in fact appears incomprehensible and beyond the range of his action. Such uncertainty may result in a profound identity crisis involving the incessant onslaught of information and choices and may lead to a profound existential and adaptation crisis since the individual is forced to make endless evaluations in order to establish a minimum degree of consistency, meaning, and order among the types of behavior to undertake in order to fulfill his life projects (Bauman 1999; Beck 1997; Boltanski and Chiapello 1999; Sennett 1998). In this sense, Zygmunt Bauman’s interpretation of contemporary reality speaks of an individual, apparently alone, facing the infinite possibilities of choice, which in fact turns out to be the single duty of having to choose (Bauman 1999). Meanwhile, people find that they are leading an individual life in a situation in which little or nothing is really under their own control: Our own life, in fact, depends on factors such as the time nursery schools open, the traffic, dead times, the possibility of shopping nearby, and also on the advantages offered by major institutions (education, the work market, labour laws, the welfare state), on economic crises and, last but not least, on the deterioration level of the environment around us. (Beck 1997; It. tr. 2008, 12)

Hence, in contemporary society, there are contradictions that lead to a social unease capable of convincing us to abandon any planning of our future, thus weakening a basic component of human nature: the project dimension. The extension of complexity seems unlimited, far outstripping our capacity to accept complexity in everyday life and in the traditional understanding of the world by subjects. “The world turns out to be too complex: it contains

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more possibilities than those to which the system can react, yet stay alive” (Luhmann 2000; It. tr. 2002, 8). Human beings alone are aware of the world’s complexity. All that happens in everyday life must necessarily undergo the process of “reduction of complexity” as evidence of our basic desire for self-preservation. Such reduction comes first through language and the reflexive consciousness of self, understood as generalization and selection strategies (Luhmann 2000; It. tr. 2002, 8). All things considered, in our present-day society and on our biographical, political, and scientific terrain, the reduction of complexity to which we allude is made possible by the social representations that are always the result of the constant human effort to familiarize and habituate oneself with something that in fact only gives us a feeling of estrangement. “Through them we dominate this something and we integrate it into our mental and physical universe which is thus enriched and transformed” (Moscovici 1989, 42). IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS The theory of social representations takes as its starting point the diversity among subjects, and “its aim is to discover how individuals and groups can construct a stable, predictable world based on such diversity” (Moscovici 1989, 67–68). To summarize what we have considered so far: social representations therefore appear to be a bridge between reality and imaginary that helps set up a game of proximity and distance with otherness, closely linked to the perception of one’s own identity; the latter passes through the perception of others and through the glance they fix on us (Todorov 1982). We might broaden our view through the insights of Serge Moscovici, who understands social representations as a socially elaborate, shared consciousness that takes part in the construction of social reality and draws up a form of social thought (Moscovici 1989). These are “super-individual” entities that do not correspond to the sum of individual representations but come about from the interindividual cooperation among them (Moscovici 1989). Moscovici stresses that we never come into possession of information that has not been distorted by representations that conventionalize objects, persons, and events: We may say intuitively that each of us is evidently surrounded, both individually and collectively, by words, ideas and images which penetrate eyes, ears and mind, whether we like it or not, and which stimulate us without our realizing it. (Moscovici 1989 12)

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In this sense, in his work Truth and Method, Hans Georg Gadamer also points out how no one is unbiased, a truth that enables us to “represent the horizon of our present in that it represents the limits beyond which we are unable to look” (Gadamer 1960; It. tr. 2000, 356). We know the world always and only from our own concrete somatic-chrono-topical circumstances, which is situated in a body, a time, and a space, all very well defined. This is in fact an efficacious strategy for knowing, categorizing, and reducing social complexity (Moscovici 1989; Tajfel and Turner 1979). Individuals reconstruct the reality in which they find themselves for the purpose of controlling it, adjusting to it, acting on it, and sharing it with others. Undeniably, no one can be certain that what he is observing corresponds to “objective” reality. To get back to the truth/doubt dialectic, in this context of noncontradictory but interconnected concepts, we continue to need certainties, fundamentals, values, and truths, even if only partial ones, while unceasingly asking questions and coming to blows with our own certainties. Unfortunately, as Bertrand Russell observed, “the whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts” (Russell 1933, 28). To understand these phenomena better and to advance our reasoning further, it is certainly useful to go back to the definition of social representation formulated by Denise Jodelet—in the wake of Émile Durkheim—according to whom it appears as a system of values, notions, and practices with a dual vocation: on the one hand, the vocation of installing an order that orients subjects in their social and material environment, managing to “dominate” it, and, on the other, the vocation of ensuring communication between the members of a community, offering them an unambiguous code for denominating and classifying the component parts of their individual stories and the history of the world in which they are immersed (Jodelet 1991). As regards the former aspect, that is, “dominating” the surrounding context, we can identify its roots precisely in that indefiniteness to which we referred at the beginning: the “insufficient exactitude,” as Moscovici says, of an object or a context is their characteristic of unfamiliarity. While “unfamiliarity” attracts and enchants subjects and societies, it also alarms and concerns them: in fact, The fear of what is strange (and of strangers) is profoundly rooted . . . ; the fear of losing the usual reference points, of losing touch with what gives us a sense of continuity and reciprocal understanding is unbearable. (Moscovici 1989, 40)

And when diversity is imposed on us we instinctively reject it since it threatens the established order of things (Moscovici 1989). The function of social representation is therefore to facilitate the incorporation of something that is unfamiliar and that, in some cases, may cause

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critical issues within that individual’s network of categories. In the literature, this process is known as anchoring. It allows us to place an unknown object within a familiar reference frame in order to be able to interpret it. Since theories, information, and events multiply, they must be duplicated and reproduced at an immediately accessible level. This is a process that introduces an alien, “disturbing” element into our particular category system, and so it can be compared with the paradigm of a category we consider suitable (Moscovici 1989). In short, the anchoring process facilitates a cognitive or, rather, functional integration of the “strange” object represented into the preexisting thought system (Jodelet 1991). Anchoring involves classifying and naming something. Whatever is not classified and is nameless is alien, nonexistent, and at the same time threatening. We feel a resistance, a distance when we are unable to assess something or describe it to ourselves or to others (Moscovici 1989). Moscovici also outlines a second mechanism that makes familiar what is unfamiliar, that is, objectivation, the transformation of something abstract into something almost concrete and the translation of what is in the mind into something that exists in the physical world. This is a much more active process than anchoring. What seems abstract and unusual for one generation becomes concrete and usual for the next one: Surprising, incredible theories that no one takes seriously become normal, credible and replete with reality an instant later. . . . Objectivation saturates the idea of unfamiliarity with reality, transforming it into the actual essence of reality. Perceived initially in a distant, purely intellectual universe, it appears before our eyes as physical and accessible. (Moscovici 1989, 57)

This cognitive elaboration comes about because subjects belong to a group and therefore are “under the influence of thought frames and rules of behaviour in which they integrate the data of their practice and experience” (Grassi 2012, 11). In this sense, the reference is to socialization as the continuous and persistent process of conveying and interiorizing the cultural universe of values and symbols belonging to the group and the context in which the individual is immersed (Berger and Luckmann 1966). Through such a process, the subject imbibes information on reality and the social imaginary and the set of values, roles, rules, expectations, and beliefs that constitute culture. The individual is predisposed to sociality from birth and becomes part of society through being conditioned by it while also conditioning it: Every time social interaction activates around any object, it gets integrated into a contextual intra-group framework, which is in turn in ongoing interaction with the representations set at play by the social actors. (Grassi 2012, 11)

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Within the objectivation process described by Moscovici, the materialization of an abstraction is one of the fascinating and mysterious characteristics of thought and language: Political and intellectual authorities of every type exploit this in order to subjugate the masses. In other words, such authority is based on the art of transforming a representation into the reality of the representation, the word for a thing into the thing for the word. (Moscovici 1989, 57)

Above all, in a historical and social context such as the present, although a paradigm is accepted thanks to its strong structure, its acceptance is intimately connected to its affinity with more current paradigms. As we saw in the first section on social complexity and the plurality of Shils’s symbolical centers, the substance, vigor, and domination of one polycentric center on another also depend on the “proximity” between the values, beliefs, and ideals that constitute the basis for alliances between symbolic centers (Pollo 2007). Once the society has adopted a certain cultural paradigm, everything contained in it is wholeheartedly embraced and accepted. Because of this simplification, the words, images, and social representations connected to it are more commonly used and taken as reality. “The image of the concept ceases to be a sign and becomes a replica of reality, a simulacrum in the true sense of the word” (Moscovici 1989, 60). So first, objectifying means discovering the iconic quality of an idea and reproducing a concept as an image. Second, the distance between the representation and the thing represented is bridged. In contemporary society, it is evidently impossible to speak of social representation—understood as labeling on the part, primarily, of the mass media—unless we bear in mind that this process unfolds as three great protagonists: the thing or things represented, the social fabric enjoying the social representations, and the mass communication means themselves. However, the social legitimation currently enjoyed by the mass media does nothing but favor the dynamic through which stereotypes are “concretized.”1 In this sense, the mass media are decisive in contributing to the construction of new social representations and act as socialization agents capable of producing and perpetuating stereotypes that are crystallized in the collective imaginary. In general, the concept of the imaginary wavers along a continuum between two functions: an illusory one—associated with the potential of the imaginary for reducing the reality principle to the pleasure principle—and a creative one—referring to the potential of the imaginary oriented toward a world to be constructed (Grassi 2012). Pushed toward an illusion more real than any surrounding reality (Durand 1992), in the imaginal world, we thus see opening

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unexpected and unlikely windows of sense, worlds extra-territorial to reality and to chronological time, . . . that allude to a gemstone mounted in everyday banality. (Simmel 1917; It. tr. 1985, 86)

OTHERNESS, CULTURE, AND SYMBOLICAL UNIVERSES If it is true, as we mentioned above, that “the image of the concept ceases to be a sign and becomes a replica of reality, a simulacrum in the true sense of the word” (Moscovici 1989, 60), from the instant a given cultural paradigm becomes central and dominant in society, everything it comprehends is simply interiorized and becomes part of people’s horizon. Social representations connected to the cultural paradigm of reference become fundamentals of everyday life and are taken as reality, however produced, even by the subject himself, the social actor. The representation has a typically symbolical character that involves the subjects and orients them in their actions. Individuals seem to be incorporated into symbolic universes, but each symbolic universe—as we said—is the result of a social objectivation and therefore of a social construction (Cipriani 1986). Symbolic universes are sedimented, they crystallize and accumulate, contributing to the construction of the social world in its acceptance as a community environment: This world is not my own private property but an intersubjective world and consequently the knowledge I do not have is not my personal business but depends on its intersubjective and socialized origin. As far as we are concerned, we have to consider three aspects of the problem of the socialization of knowledge: a) the reciprocal prospects or the structural socialization of knowledge, b) the social origin of knowledge or the genetic socialization of knowledge, c) the social distribution of knowledge. (Schütz 1979, 22)

The world in which I live is not my own private property, and the knowledge I have is not only my affair since “knowledge depends on its intersubjective, socialized origin” (Schütz 1979, 22). More in general, the problem of the sociology of knowledge—recalling Karl Mannheim (1929)—turns out to be that of studying the overall system of world visions and the criteria through which human thought seems to be conditioned. Therefore, it is a question of understanding the universal structure of the relations existing between forms of thought and social phenomena. Undoubtedly, representations derive not from single social actors but from their cooperation (Durkheim 1895), as they constitute an element typical of culture, together with norms, values, beliefs, arts, morals, customs, and so

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on—elements therefore from a diverse material and immaterial matrix that is interiorized by the subject since he belongs to a given social group. Complex societies are fairly heterogeneous at the cultural level: this depends first and foremost on the process of national construction, which has involved the homogenization of pre-existent differences, in nature territorial, ethnic, religious, linguistic (we may for instance think of the standard language imposed on the whole nation), has never completely eliminated them; in some cases they have actually taken on a new lease of life. (Ambrosini and Sciolla 2015, 131)

However, the cultural pluralism we see today unquestionably concerns a wider range of differences compared to that of the industrial age. Thus, a series of phenomena, such as mass migration from the countryside to towns (and from one nation to another), social mobility, and the processes of secularization and religious pluralization, have made our towns culturally much more diversified (Ambrosini and Sciolla 2015, 132). With respect to the past, new actors have come onto the scene, bringing new values, new lifestyles, and new more or less ample forms of recognition. Among these social actors, it will be useful to mention women, the young, and ethnic minorities. In relation to these categories, the analysis of cultural differences deriving from the fact of belonging to one or another lends an imaginary of otherness that is sociologically highly relevant on the same level as other categories having a longer history on which to count. Generational, ethnic, or gender differences probably represent the horizon of a new idea of citizenship. For a better understanding of how culture, the imaginary, and social representations of such diverse otherness have changed in contemporary society, in the following pages, we will outline their main specific aspects. The otherness of belonging to a certain generation refers to differences that are not always easy to define. It will be useful to recall that the term “generation,” ever since Karl Mannheim’s classic The Problem of Generations (1928), refers not so much to the exterior and quantitative biological fact of age as to the time unit historically constructed. “One is part of the same generation not because one chances to have the same date of birth, but because of having the same significant experiences and living under the same dominating influences” (Ambrosini and Sciolla 2015, 138). Historically, one of the most famous generations to capture social and mass media attention in capitalist countries was that of the so-called counterculture, which indicated a shared antiauthority, anti-conformist, politicized type of feeling (Sciolla 2002).

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According to Mannheim, belonging to the same generation means experiencing the same “contemporaneity” not merely chronologically but having the same meaningful experiences and living under the same dominating influences, inheriting the idea of the noncontemporary times of the contemporary: in the same chronological time, diverse generations live. But since real time is only the time lived in experience, they actually all live in an interior time completely diverse from the qualitative point of view. (Mannheim, 1964; It. tr. 200, 248)

This makes it clear that not all individuals living at the same time necessarily share the same historical experience; two time structures intersect in one generation: the individual biography and the biography of the history of the society: From the sociological point of view, therefore, one generation is the period of time during which an identity is constructed on the basis of a fixed system of significations and possibilities. (Abrams 1982; It. tr. 1983, 312)

Social representations constructed in reference to certain specific generations have made them world famous, while others have made them notorious, with the fundamental contribution of mass media. This is the case, for example, of the “rebel youth” at the end of the 1950s, minority groups (youth subculture2) known in England as “Teddy Boys,” a transversal generation with respect to social classes and “ideologically dumb, featuring a sort of nihilism and hostility towards the social system” (Sciolla 2002, 137). The Teddy Boy generation was one of those most demonized by both mass media and public opinion. The social representations regarding these young rebels were in most cases highly negative, so much so that notices were put up outside ballrooms and cinemas forbidding entry to those wearing Edwardian clothes and shoes with rubber soles. The Teds, in those years, gloried in living up to the expectations triggered by the media toward them, causing fights and attacks and increasing conflict with the rest of society. Another well-known generation—not only for its rebellious nature but above all for its rejection of violence, competition, and success—offered its own cultural model based on pacifist values: the beat generation, widespread throughout all the capitalist countries. The cultural industry maligned this generation, “reducing its anti-conformist character and limiting its potential universalistic effect to the world of youth” (Sciolla 2002, 137). The social representations of beat culture offer a toned-down, simplified, and defused version (Rositi 1971) in clear contrast to the counterculture

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generation that followed it, politically aggressive and in radical revolt against social hierarchies and the hypocrisies of adults and the family. In this context, the discipline of sociology highlights the fracture with other generations that defines “generational conflict” (or generation gap). These labels mark the differentiation between one generation and those preceding it, underscoring its diverse opinions, ideas, cultural models, and values—an identity construction that in some ways recalls the contrasting logic between Ego and Alter yet always contextualizing the individual biography within its own historical period. Youth, therefore, appears to be constructed and socially organized as an independent phase with respect to childhood, adulthood, and old age. Furthermore, the identity crisis young people go through, today especially, appears to be the consequence of the creation of youth as a waiting phase (Erikson 1968). We can thus identify a relation between widening experimental potential, the temporary and undefined nature of the social condition, objective uncertainty regarding the future, and the emergence of new generations bearing potentially universalist values. (Sciolla 2002, 140)

Besides these elements of differentiation, we find further aspects interconnected with the overall cultural system and contributing to the appearance of generational identities having independent values and symbols. This is the “symbolic surplus,” the cultural excess featured in our societies that increases the possible worlds—on the imaginative level—and cultural experience with no corresponding action models that can in effect be realized (Rositi 1980, cited in Sciolla 2002, 140). Such a multiplication of possibilities may generate expectations that cannot be fulfilled within social reality, causing deracination, identity fragmentation, and dis-anchoring. Cultures and generation identities from the end of World War II to the present have not been rooted in interests, roles, and occupations within society’s structure and, furthermore, are perceived and represented as bearers of independent values, universally linked to a generic, undifferentiated humanity (Rositi 1980, cited in Sciolla 2002, 142). Like the concept of generation, the gender concept refers, culturally, to otherness and is historically constructed, in this specific case on the biological and physiological differences between males and females. Since the 1960s, in the United States so-called gender studies have come to the fore, distinguishing sex from gender both theoretically and methodologically. Accordingly, by sex, we understand a biologically assigned character and the genetic patrimony derived from “sexual dimorphism” (see Piccone Stella and Salmieri 2012, 297), whereas by gender, we indicate a set of

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attitudes and the behavior that culture judges appropriate for women and men. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” stated the French writer Simone de Beauvoir in her famous book The Second Sex (1949), meaning that it is a question not of innate essences but of cultural and social constructions that are interiorized by the individual from birth on (Bourdieu 1998; Butler 1999; Connell 2002; Missana 2014). Obviously, in everyday life and in common perception, the distinction between sex and gender is not clearly evident, so in fact, we take it for granted that little boys and little girls, lads and lasses, men and women, are easily identifiable not only by their physical appearance and bodily characteristics, but also in their preferences, their gestures, their roles, in their type of occupation and even in their ways of thinking and in their moral qualities. (Ambrosini and Sciolla 2015, 140)

Especially in the professional sector, the social division of work clearly denotes the separation between male and female roles (Connell 2002), the context in which we find perhaps the greatest number of gender stereotypes and prejudices. The social imaginary is in fact remarkably full of social representations that depend on such inappropriate generalizations regarding individual traits and that extend them to the whole category. Gender stereotypes are more numerous in economically underdeveloped countries with hierarchic regimes, hierarchic social relations, and low levels of education and secularization (Ambrosini and Sciolla 2015). Gender stereotyping always changes with a changing society and always refers to the prevalent cultural model (or models); “they weaken bit by bit as the traditional bonds of subordination and power slacken and women acquire economic independence and gain access to higher social positions” (Ambrosini and Sciolla 2015).3 However, in addition to the many social representations of gender—strongly opposed by feminist and homosexual movements since the 1960s—over time, gender identities have become established that are increasingly complex, fluid, and hybrid, as shown by the numerous studies on the subject. In this sense, the resulting scenario highlights the radical relational changes in the process of constructing identity (Ruspini 2005). Contemporary roles, statuses, identities, and therefore social representations frequently contribute to making women’s everyday lives somewhat conflictual, especially regarding the relationship between the private (family) sector and the public (professional) one, two ambits that are equally important and unfortunately often mutually exclusive even in many contemporary societies. We will finish this short excursus on otherness by focusing on the topic that has always been a favorite leitmotiv of the mass media and of constructing social representation worldwide: ethnic origin. The arduous road to identity

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construction based on ethnic-cultural elements is one of the basic characteristics of global society. Symmetrically, the social imaginary related to migration contains such a multitude of prejudices, stereotypes, and collective representations that we may well speak of a “misleading narration” (Belluati et al. 1995; Zanfrini 2004). This regards not only the situation today but also the past. With regard to Italian migrations across the world, our emigrants were often represented as complete parasites in the societies where they disembarked after their long sea voyages (Colella 2007): In The Black Hand, film director Porter tells the story of two Italian bandits with huge moustaches and neckerchiefs who play cards, drink wine from a straw-based flask; on the table, a note written in broken English threatens retaliation unless a thousand-dollar extortion fee is paid: at the bottom, the picture in lieu of signature of a black hand. (Colella 2007, 105)

We are in 1906, and this stereotype was intended to impress on people’s minds a negative type of Italian immigrant, described with traits similar to those mentioned above in hundreds of films and news articles. Today, ethnic-cultural differences have perhaps an even greater impact in the wake of the rhetoric and persistent process of negative stereotyping of migrants. Clearly, this is not a phenomenon confined to Italy but regards the whole world. Immigrants are in effect branded by a double otherness: “they are foreigners and they are poor. If one of these two aspects is missing, then the person is no longer categorized as an immigrant” (Ambrosini and Sciolla 2015, 338). The relationship with Western societies is troublesome as well as contradictory. The hosting society—Italian society in particular—seems capable of solidarity with the foreigner while at the same time criminalizing him with restrictive laws. It allows him to take part in productive processes with full rights while at the same time keeping him at the margins of the community. Society is always fascinated by cultural diversities while considering them dangerous for its own “preservation” (Colella 2015). Part of the imaginary on immigration in Italy has been built on the rhetoric of family reunifications, in which the woman’s role is considered secondary to the man’s. Often, in social representation, women in their home countries stay with their children, their role being that of passive and dependent nonautonomous agents, a sort of “appendix” to the immigrant worker. Thus, over the past twenty years of narrating migration, the centrality of the economic outlook has caused serious distortions in social reality based mainly on the traditional dichotomy between the public sphere (paid male work) and the private sphere (domestic and reproductive female work) (Colella et al. 2017).

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The immigrant in the imaginary of the Italians is for the most part a male Islamic who comes from the African continent or the Middle East (Binotto and Martino 2004), while the reality is that most immigrants are women4 of the Christian religion5 who come from Europe.6 Further, in the social imaginary, immigrants reach our country mainly by sea, while statistics show that only 15 percent arrive in Italian ports. In fact, most immigrants reach Italy with a visa, which, on expiry, relegates these people in the category of overstayers. Today, the issue seems to be further complicated by what has been defined as “super-diversity,” the perception of a growing, problematic overlapping of various forms of diversity linked to the migratory phenomenon. It is not only an aesthetic diversity linked to physical appearance but also a diversity also linked to language, religion, customs and traditions, political orientation, educational qualifications, gender, age, migrant juridical status, and even nationality (Vertovec 2007). We must come up with new multidimensional methods by which to study, comprehend, and respond to all these elements. Their interactions and overlaps create a significantly diverse scenario compared to what we are used to. In such a context, social representations play a really fundamental role in our image societies. Social representations must be prioritized for analysis and well-informed intervention in order to cultivate what Richard Sennett (1991) calls “the conscience of the eye.” NOTES 1. The first working use of the stereotype concept from the viewpoint of empirical research was the 1933 study on ethnic stereotypes by Daniel Katz and Kenneth Braly. The stereotype as “a fixed, unchangeable impression, an indiscriminate construct that likens various types of experience in one single concept on the basis of a fallacious similarity” describes the characteristics of the members of a given group and demonstrates prejudice, constructing patterns and ideologies, mainly generators of racist attitudes. Someone expressing prejudice holds that the person against whom it is directed belongs to a specific group identifiable through distinctive signs or stereotypes and is consequently judged negatively. At the same time, homogenization comes into play, presuming that all those belonging to the group will be typified by the same behavior; such a generalization is obviously accompanied by an often notable social distance existing between the prejudiced group and the person who expresses the prejudice. 2. Subcultures can be studied and interpreted following Merton’s (1949) schematization in an attempt to decide between the dominant cultural aims (economic success) and the means to achieve them. 3. In this regard, see Bisi (2008).

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4. There are 5,047,028, of whom 2,040,129 are men and 2,642,899 are women (ISTAT 2017). 5. With regard to immigrants’ religious affiliation, the ISMU (Iniziative e studi sulla multietnicità Foundation (2017) supplies interesting data. The most numerous group are Orthodox Christians, with over 1.6 million (increase of 0.7 percent), followed by Muslims, whose numbers are decreasing (a little over 1.4 million, −0.2 percent); there are just over a million Catholics, a slight drop (−0.1 percent). The data do not include foreigners not registered with the General Registry Office. The Dossier Statistico Immigrazione 2017 provides exactly the same figures (IDOS 2017), citing that the prevalence of Christians has continued since 2000. 6. As already stated, the first five foreign communities present in Italy are Romanian (1,168,552), Albanian (448,407), Moroccan (420,651), Chinese (281,972, and Ukrainian (234,354) (IDOS 2017).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abrams, P. 1982. Historical Sociology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Translated into Italian as Sociologia storica. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1983. Ambrosini, M., and A. Sciolla. 2015. Sociologia. Milan: Mondadori. Austin, W. G., and S. Worchel, eds. 1979. The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole. Bauman, B. 1999. La società dell’incertezza. Bologna: Il Mulino. Beck, U. 1997. Eigenes Leben. München: Beck. Translated into Italian as Costruire la propria vita. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008. Belluati, M., M. Grossi, and E. Viglongo. 1995. Mass-media e società multietnica. Milan: Anabasi. Berger, P. L., and T. Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Translated into Italian as La realtà come costruzione sociale. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1969. Binotto, M., and V. Martino, eds. 2004. Fuori luogo: L’immigrazione e i media italiani. Cosenza: Pellegrini-Rai-Eri. Bisi, S., ed. 2008. Genere e potere: Per una rifondazione delle scienze umane. Acireale-Rome: Bonanno Editore. Boltanski, L., and È. Chiapello. 1998. Women and Men: Cultural Constructs of Gender. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. ———. 1999. Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme. Paris: Gallimard. Bourdieu, P. 1975. “Methode scientifique et hierarchie sociale des objets.” Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 1, no. 1: 4–6. ———. 1998. La Domination Masculine. Paris: Seuil. Translated into Italian as Il dominio maschile. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1998. Butler, J. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Translated into Italian as Questioni di genere: Il femminismo e la sovversione dell’identità. Rome-Bari: Editori Laterza, 2013. Cipriani, R., ed. 1986. La legittimazione simbolica. Brescia: Morcelliana.

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Colella, F. 2007. “Attraverso la produzione mediale: Italian American tra rappresentazione simbolica e distanza sociale.” La Critica Sociologica 163: 105–18. ———. 2014. “I legami sociali dei migranti nella cinematografia italiana: Piano sequenza di una contraddizione sociale.” In Immagini in movimento: Lo sguardo del cinema italiano sulle migrazioni, ed. G. Gianturco and G. Peruzzi. Milan: Edizioni Junior. Colella, F., G. Gianturco, and M. Nocenzi. 2017. “Immigrant Women and Housing Issues: A Symbolic Magnifying Glass for Social and Cultural Changes in Italian Civil Movements.” International Review of Sociology–Revue Internationale de Sociologie 27, no. 1: 37–60. Connell, R. 2002. Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press. Translated into Italian as Questioni di genere. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2006. De Beauvoir, S. 1949. Le Deuxième Sexe. Paris: Édition Gallimard. Translated into Italian as Il secondo sesso. Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1961. Durand, G. 1992. Les structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire. Paris: Dunod. Translated into Italian as Le strutture antropologiche dell’immaginario. Bari: Dedalo, 1996. Durkheim, É. 1895. Les règles de la méthode sociologique. Paris: Alcan. Translated into Italian as Le regole del metodo sociologico. Milan: Comunità, 1996. Erikson, E. H. 1968. Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York: Norton. Translated into Italian as Gioventù e crisi di identità. Rome: Armando, 1974. Ferrarotti, F. 2007. L’identità dialogica. Pisa: ETS. Gadamer, H. G. 1945–1967. Kleine Schriften I. Translated into Italian as Ermeneutica e metodica universale. Genoa: Marietti, 1973. ———. 1960. Wahrheit und Methode. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Translated into Italian as Verità e metodo. Milano: Bompiani, 2000. Gianturco, G., and G. Peruzzi. 2014. Immagini in movimento: Lo sguardo del cinema italiano sulle migrazioni. Milan: Edizioni Junior. Grassi, V. 2012. Mitodologie: Analisi qualitativa e sociologia dell’immaginario. Naples: Liguori editore. IDOS. 2017. Dossier Statistico Immigrazione. ISMU. 2017. Ventitreesimo Rapporto sulle migrazioni 2017. Milan: Angeli. ISTAT. 2017. Rapporto Annuale 2017. https:​//​www​.istat​.it​/it​/archivio​/199318. Jodelet, D. 1991. Les representations sociales. Paris: PUF. Translated into Italian as Le rappresentazioni sociali. Naples: Liguori, 1992. Katz, D., and K. Braly. 1933. “Racial Stereotypes in One Hundred College Students.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 28: 280–90. Luhmann, N. 2000. Vertrauen: Ein Mechanismus der Reduktion sozialer Komplexität. Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius. Translated into Italian as La fiducia. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002. Mannheim, K. 1928. “Das Problem der Generationen.” Kölner Vierteljahreshefte für Soziologie 7: 309–30. ———. 1929. Ideologie und Utopie. Bonn: Cohen. Translated into Italian as Ideologia e utopia. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1965.

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———. 1964. Wissenssoziologie: Auswahl aus dem Werk. Neuwied-Berlin: Luchterhand. Translated into Italian as Sociologia della conoscenza. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000. Melucci, A. 1991. Il gioco dell’io: Il cambiamento di sé in una società globale. Milan: Feltrinelli. Merton, R. K. 1949. Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: Free Press. Translated into Italian as Teoria e struttura sociale. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1966. Missana, E., ed. 2014. Donne si diventa: Antologia del pensiero femminista. Milan: Feltrinelli. Morin, E. 1974. “Complexity.” International Social Science Journal 26: 555–82. Morrison, T. 2017. The Origins of Others. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Translated into Italian as L’origine degli altri. Milan: Frassinelli, 2018. Moscovici, S. 1989. Le rappresentazioni sociali. Bologna: Il Mulino. Piccone Stella, S., and L. Salmieri. 2012. Il gioco della cultura: Attori, processi, prospettive. Rome: Carocci. Piccone Stella, S., and C. Saraceno, eds. 1995. Genere: La costruzione sociale del femminile e del maschile. Bologna: Il Mulino. Pollo, M. 2007. “La complessificazione della società.” Proposta Educativa 16: 9–16. Rositi, F. 1971. Contraddizioni di cultura: Ideologie collettive e capitalismo avanzato. Florence: Guaraldi. ———. 1980. “Eccedenza culturale e controllo sociale.” Scienze Umane 5: 141–55. Ruspini, E. 2005. Donne e uomini che cambiano: Relazioni di genere, identità sessuali e mutamento sociale. Milan: Guerini. Russell, B. 1933. “The Triumph of Stupidity.” In Mortals and Others: Bertrand Russell’s American Essays, 1931–1935, vol. 2. London: Routledge. Santambrogio, A. 2006. Il senso comune: Appartenenze e rappresentazioni sociali. Rome-Bari: Laterza. Schütz, A. 1979. “L’interpretazione dell’azione umana da parte del senso comune e della scienza.” In Saggi sociologici: Parte prima: Sulla metodologia delle scienze sociali. Turin: UTET. Sciolla, L., ed. 1983. Identità: Percorsi di analisi in sociologia. Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier. ———. 2002. Sociologia dei processi culturali. Bologna: Il Mulino. Sennett, R. 1991. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. London: Faber and Faber. Translated into Italian as La coscienza dell’occhio: Progetto e vita sociale nelle città. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1991. ———. 1998. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: Norton. Translated into Italian as L’uomo flessibile: Le conseguenze del nuovo capitalismo sulla vita personale. Milan: Feltrinelli, 2001. Shils, E. 1984. Centro e periferia: Elementi di macrosociologia. Brescia: Morcelliana. Simmel, G. 1890. Über sociale Differenzierung. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Translated into Italian as Sulla differenziazione sociale. Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1982. ———. 1917. Rembrandt. Leipzig: Wolff. Translated into Italian as Il volto e il ritratto: Saggi sull’arte. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985.

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Tajfel, H., and J. C. Turner. 1979. “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict.” In The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, ed. W. G. Austin and S. Worchel. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole. Taylor, C. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Translated into Italian as Radici dell’io: La costruzione dell’identità moderna. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1993. Todorov, T. 1982. La conquête de l’Amérique: La question de l’autre. Paris: Editions Esprit. Translated into Italian as La conquista dell’America: Il problema dell’altro. Turin: Einaudi, 1984. Vertovec, S. 2007. “Super-Diversity and Its Implications.” Ethic and Racial Studies 30, no. 6: 1024–54. Zanfrini, L. 2004. Sociologia delle migrazioni. Rome-Bari: Laterza.

Chapter 11

The Complex of Cain, the Tension of Abel Space, City, Imaginary Pier Paolo Zampieri

CARERI: WANDERING, NOMADISM, AND SEDENTARINESS (THE TOWN AS AN EGG) Investigating the reciprocal relations between space, imaginary, and city is as complex as it is valuable: complex because the density of the terms calls to mind endless, necessarily multidisciplinary bibliographies; valuable because the anthropological power of the act of settling in space is a staging of these issues that, coming under a highly reciprocal regime, appears to be the laboratory of choice for analysis. Being unable to reconstruct the infinite forms the city has had throughout history, we have chosen to use Cedric Price’s synthesis (see figure 11.1).1 With a visionary, ideal-typical categorization, the architect manages to give a perimeter of reasoning that is more than acceptable. “The city as an egg” is the graphic equivalent of the egg of Columbus. A simple solution to an impossible problem. The problem is represented with a sign, an object of extreme complexity present in many cultures, distant one from the other in time and space, and an object that has taken on widely varied forms and that appears in contemporary times as an irresistible magnet able to bend world geography and its imaginary. Faced with this impossible challenge and dialoguing more with an artistic approach of synthesis than with the closed approach of science, Price uses the metaphor of the egg. Boiled, it represents the city up until the Middle Ages; fried, the industrial city; scrambled, the contemporary city. 203

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Figure 11.1. ​​​​​​​The City as an Egg. Source: Cedric Price, 1982 (from Detheridge, 2012).

If we remove cities from their own umbilical destiny and read them as the results of the productive, scientific and cultural forces of an age, we might first say that the three forms identified are the product of the reciprocal relations between cities and their respective historical periods. In the proposed diagram with Simmellian overtones on the (urban) limit that “is not a spatial fact with sociological effects, but a sociological fact that is spatially formed” (Simmel 1908; my translation from the Italian edition, 2018, 756), we proceed to its crisis. Through an epistemic leap, the protective instance of the medieval shell is projected into the abstract perimeter of the nation-state, with the corresponding expansion of the urban form, until it ends up scrambled by the present process of globalization. In a scrambled egg, it is not easy to say where the center is, unless perhaps to say that the metropolis is itself the center, the synthesis and great abstraction of the contemporary age. The start of the third millennium will be remembered as the urban century par excellence: the century when, for the first time in history, most of the world population lives in urban areas. In sociological terms, “the state of exception of the city” has become the rule, and its non-form is very like the rhizome produced by reticular flows crossing the globe, whether they be economic, digital, or physical people. Among the things that this layout does not tell us (and it is the subject of the first section), is what there was before the egg, that is, before the settlement process. The question is decisive in investigating the relationship between man, space, and imaginary since it sets a vehicular component among the concepts, a transformative tension fed by reciprocity. Our attempt is to contaminate the outlook of the imaginary2 with what, perhaps too emphatically, has been defined as the spatial turnaround in the analysis of urban and social phenomena (Lefebvre 1968; Mela 2006). A possible answer may be sought in the paradoxical reconstruction of the origins of architecture supplied by Francesco Careri (2006). If we implicitly

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trace the history of architecture back to the boiled egg, Careri reminds us that the settlement process with its culmination in the city is only one stage, the last, of the great relationship between man and space. In this view, “Errare humanum est” takes on a dynamic value, and the vehicular act of walking should be investigated as the first exercise in knowledge. The path, that is, walking in unknown space and filling it with values and meanings, was the first form of architecture as well as of emptiness. Le Breton (2012) maintains that at the precise moment when man stopped walking on all fours, he offloaded onto his feet the cost of such a revolution, freeing his hands from the weight of the world and opening the relative cerebral connections onto a new anthropological space of knowledge and the relative re/action in the world.3 Careri reconstructs the history of this practice from the biblical metaphor of Cain and Abel. Driven out of Eden, Cain the sedentary farmer was forced into wandering and the relative mapping of the world. Walking thus becomes a powerful symbolic weapon that brings with it a double dialectic accompanying the story of man in his restless relationship with space, condemning him to the need to transform it by imagining it. In the biblical drama, the problem is not in the tension between nomadism and settlement but in that generated by the question that the burden of being sentenced to wander falls fully on the shoulders of the Homo faber driven out of Eden after killing his brother Abel the shepherd, the Homo ludens, the brother tending more to bewilderment, to the arts and to play. With such a premise, the nonmigratory half of mankind is condemned to wander and, as we shall see, to being forced to find a solution to his spatial unease by changing the world into a habitat. With the leap from wandering to nomadism, the unexplored space is slowly filled with values and, for what concerns us here, transformed. From this viewpoint, settlement is the next stage of this process, but if by architecture we understand the presence together of sign and function in an artifact set in space, then marking the passage from the wandering stage to nomadism is the centripetal eruption of the menhir. Thanks to that cosmological architecture, what was a simple space to be crossed or avoided became the anthropological space of the encounter and of the neighborhood, thus separating itself from the regime of indifference, or mystery or negotiation in which it was immersed. With its vertical opposition to the flat horizon, the presence of the menhir initiated a radical transformation process of space, and here it is useful to recall that by space, we mean above all its phenomenological and perceptive dimension (Lynch 1960; Norberg-Shulz 1979). The psychic and social implications between the artifact—he who looks at it, the memory generated, and its transmission of information—are inevitable. In the dialectic between the nomad culture that crosses space, and the nonmigratory culture that transforms it and to which we incorrectly attribute the concept of architecture, the

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menhir represents the paradoxical architecture symbolizing movement: walk plus landscape. “The first objects placed” (Careri 2006, 28), menhirs represent junctions, territorial references, or meeting points that qualitatively transform the open space of wandering into that mapped out by nomadism. Interpretations of the meaning of menhirs are many (sacred places, places connected to the cult of fertility, places indicating the presence of water, stone compasses, and so on), but they surely represented a sign sculpted onto the landscape to facilitate orientation and encounters among social groups. From these elements, it is still not possible to establish a rigid cause-and-effect relationship with the perspective of the imaginary, that is, to establish whether the menhir is its product generated by the need/faculty to transform space, coming from man’s off-center, unfixed condition with respect to nature (Marzo 2012; Plessner 1928), or instead depends on other factors, not improbably an intuition or simply chance. The delicate question cannot, however, be set within the restless “Cain complex.” For La Cecla (2011), the typically anthropological faculty of inhabiting the world is the response to the always immanent—and terrible—condition of being lost. Anthropologically, living is the symbolical taming of the world as an answer to the spatial panic of the human condition or, as Plessner says, to his eccentric condition. In this view, inhabiting the world, that is, ordering it within a hierarchy of values, or manipulating it, is the most powerful and characterizing (symbolical) faculty of man. A faculty that La Cecla defines as “mente locale” (“localizing mind”) that symbolical organ of orientation. Hovering between being lost and being reoriented, in an analytical flash the “localizing mind” enables us to find a position and the relative transformation of the world from Kaos into Kosmos—a concept similar, albeit already situated within an urban prospect, to Lynch’s (1960) “mental image,” according to which this image is nothing but an “aggregate of all stimuli” that like a compass guides us in relation to our surroundings. If the analytical flash is vivid and legible, we will move with ease; if it is weak or hostile, we will not. In interpreting the relationship between man and his surroundings, the geographer Raffestin (2005) suggests two key categories: fusion and fission. Within the former term, the “walkscape” is within us; we are still immersed in it, and we do not feel any need to represent it. When, for example, with the advent of modernity the subject feels that he is ripped away from it and feels the urge to repair the rip with a representation, there comes the passage to the latter term, and necessarily a medium intervenes thanks to which such mental images are fixed onto a support, no matter whether picture, photo, cave, or menhir. It is in the upper vertex of this triangulation (the fission) that culture intervenes as the mediator between man and his transformative instance that can only pass through the stage of the imaginary.

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What unites the interpretations proposed is their bifacial nature. Within the perceptive, phenomenological component, there is a transformative component, the one that sets in motion the faculty to inhabit the world, transforming it, no matter whether projecting meanings into space or signs. Once such gestures have been performed, they do not remain inert but react back onto the social body becoming, in the words of Carmagnola, the new reality.4 The Cyclops’ gesture, in fact fairly minimal, of raising a stone in the endless space of the Neolithic generated incalculable effects compared with whatever the original intention had been: a qualitative improvement in the scale of reality, generated by the open, reciprocal, and irresolvable relationship between man and his environment. The outlook of the imaginary should be placed within this dynamic. As a first conclusion, we can say that the first objectivated sign in space is both a product of the imaginary, the latter understood as the transformative capacity/necessity of space, and its powerful producer. As soon as the horizon of wandering symbolically transforms its surroundings, man’s nomadic season begins, a closely Simmellian dialectic that, if accepted in its vehicular reciprocity, will accompany all the following stages of the process of settlement in all its multiple forms. INSIDE THE SHELL: FUNCTIONS, HIERARCHIES, GEOMETRIES—ZEVI’S INTERPRETATIONS OF SPACE Agriculture’s new potential to produce surplus would generate the conditions for the transformation of space into the “state of exception of the city.” Having traced the dawning moment of settlement back to the necropolis (the city of the dead precedes that of the living), thus indissolubly connecting the sphere of the symbolic, Mumford (1961) reads the newly arisen urban shell as a megamachine capable of attracting—and directing—all the energies scattered throughout the territory, a centripetal spatial device that qualitatively modifies all the others and synthesizes them into one, projecting humanity toward a new stage, the settled stage. The management of surplus generates within the shell a differentiation of the social structure and the formation of new functions with the relative urban organs suitable for their functioning: the barn, the temple, the palace. The walls rise to protect those organs, that surplus, that differentiated structure. In short, here begins the long season of the boiled egg, and, in what concerns us here, the enclosure of the social body in a protective shell sets in motion powerful processes of retroaction on the spheres of identity and of the social structure within it. In Simmel’s spatial outlook, enclosing space is the equivalent of framing a work of art: “the frame proclaims that within it there is a world subject only to its own norms, not

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fitted into the determinations and the movements of the surrounding world” (Simmel 1908; my translation from the Italian edition, 2018, 753). In this scenario, the transforming power (we might say the imaginative power) of space, specific to man, is projected mainly within the perimeter, bringing to life that emporium of styles that is the genetic heritage of cities. According to Zevi’s (2004) counter-architecture, new quality improvements in the urban organism can be read through differing spatial interpretations supplied by architecture, the new medium capable of absorbing, conveying, and producing the tensions and the wishes of the age, a medium that Zevi radically disengages from sculpture, identifying its specificity in its relations with (empty) space. From the spatial informality of the Paleolithic settlement without hierarchies and geometries in space, we pass to the elementary rationalism of the Neolithic, where, in the village of Ba-ila in northern Rhodesia, for example, the spatial centrality of the village chief generates a geometric order in the other dwellings (Zevi 2018). In semiotic terms, it is not only the sign of a building that is decisive but also its position with respect to other urban instances. The history of architecture (and town planning) for the architect thus becomes a succession of “ages in space”; it may be read as a valuable element in the reciprocal triangulation between city, space, and imaginary, where, with the perspective used, the city is the frame, the imaginary the transforming vector, and space the source and the aim of the process. In this simplified outline, to be sustained as ever by reciprocity, Zevi suggests that the city center is often not the culminating point of any particular activity but a sort of empty focus of the image that collectivity takes as the centre. Therefore here too we have an image in some way empty that is necessary for the organization of the city. (Zevi 2018, 38, emphasis added)

So the game is played on interpretation, on the capacity/necessity to imagine that emptiness transformatively. In this view, ancient Greece featured architecture “on a human scale” where, independently of the relative ordinariness of the residential architecture, the temples stood out semiotically as anti-geometric spaces, open to the horizon, where the sacred and the site blended together in a “direct encounter between the terrain’s unkempt nature and the volumes resting on, not rooted in, the ground” in the “poetry of multi-directional open roads,” in what is a polytheist spatial setup whose centrifugal dynamics visually launched the city into the surrounding landscape. Ancient Rome, on the other hand, took a leap on the architectural scale by founding the city with the extraterritorial dimension of the empire. Thanks to the technical invention of the arch and the vault, it could explode monumental volumes into space to dominate urban dwellings. The real focal points, the baths, stadiums, amphitheaters, forums, and temples, constrained urban

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space into mono-directional routes and retroacted on the eye with a political reminder of the empire’s dimensions outside the city. In this context, urban development was disciplined within the orthogonal plan, resulting in the rise of the urban modular continuum. The basilica imported the Hellenic idea of the Greek pillar while encapsulating it inside the walls in a setting that “does not enclose but covers space,” generating a new spatial concept of the world capable of absorbing styles and interpretations of those cultures with which it came into contact, changing them into plastic decorations at the service of a new contemplative, grandiose relationship with its circular interior. This was the genesis of the static Roman space, architecture that “expresses a statement of authority and is the symbol that towers over the mass of citizens and announces that the Empire is present” (Zevi 2004, 56); not coincidentally, it was to become the main point of reference for the gelidly absolutist neoclassic restoration, with a rhetorical attempt to legitimize an absolute, immanent, and—needless to say—imperial power. Albeit leaving out infinite variations and remaining inside a prospect that is mainly Western if not colonial (Boni and Poggi 2011), the history of architecture (and town planning) becomes a synthesis of the various historical ages and their transformative comparison, through the medium of the imaginary, with an urban space whose importance was to become increasingly present to political thought. Between the two imperial interpretations (the Roman and the neoclassical), we should look at the revolutions represented by medieval spatial codes and those of the Renaissance and the Baroque. The dense interweaving of social and political relations in the Middle Ages reverberated through the city form in which squares, roads, and alleys engaged in a unique symbiotic relationship. This was the rise of the urban continuum, the real ideal city type, capable of surviving centuries and reaching us intact today. With our sociological awareness that the city is always a projection of society over its territory (Lefebvre 1968), we observe that the medieval city featured narrative architecture of enormous linguistic consistency, made possible by the homogeneity of materials and the small size of the city, capable of absorbing and representing the tensions of the age. The ramifications of catacombs underground was counterbalanced by the “madly fearless” upward swerve of gothic verticality, a dimensional contrast able to represent the divine proportions within and to impose itself as a city landmark beyond, attracting all eyes. On this symbiotic, reticular, labyrinthine form—“the European panorama still feeds upon that swerve” (Zevi 2004, 39)—the Renaissance imposed its own scientific and ideological achievements. Through the arts and scientific achievements, humanist tension cast doubt on the medieval episteme and moved into urban space through the use of laws and measurements. Man was the measure of all, and everything was related to him in the building of squares and palaces. The courtyard became

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the new element of lordly centralism, and previous architecture was absorbed and launched again by the new impulse for order in which the discovery of prospective became decisive. The result was an enormous ordering principle that produced Utopic and geometric visions of the city (Secchi 2000). The new humanist imaginary overwhelmed cities, and the continuity of materials was bent to elementary mathematical principles and to Vitruvian proportions. According to Zevi, it was a radical innovation in the phenomenology of the psychological and spiritual perception of space: When you enter San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito, in a few seconds of observation you measure the whole space, you are in possession of the law . . . with Brunelleschi, for the first time, it is no longer the building that possesses the many, but the man who, learning the simple law of space, possesses the secret of the building. (Zevi 2004, 77)

Medieval transcendence was replaced by Renaissance immanence, which in turn quickly became a cage for a world that since the conquest of America had found itself within an epistemic earthquake giving way to the long season of modernity and, as far as we are concerned here, to the fried egg. The architectural and urban representation of this acceleration, of these tensions, was to be the spatial age of the Baroque, real freedom in space and style, whose excesses, prospective tricks, taste for the amazing, and mixture of instances of the single and the multiple were a criticism of previous rules, limits, and treaties. Architectural excess interpreted public space as a stage and a show, a sensory and sign precipitate that moved and convinced those using the space, its new referents. From being meeting places, squares changed into theatrical stages; in analyzing the relative codes, Amendola (1997) finds a surprising analogy with later postmodern architecture. The apparent distance of the style cypher comes within the same shocking, sensorial horizon in which the new leading figure is neither God nor Man but the citizen. With a daring equation, Amendola claims that the Baroque is to the postmodern what Durkheim is to Goffman. The cocoon of the future flaneur and of the everyday that replaces history was ready. The season of the boiled egg was over. OUTSIDE THE SHELL: INDUSTRIES, URBAN UTOPIAS, AND WALTER BENJAMIN The Industrial Revolution represented the landing of a UFO in city form. From the shell of the old city, a new one was born. Mumford’s megamachine rapidly changed into an enormous libidinal device, desirous, heterarchic, and omnivorous. For Polanyi (1944), the great urban magnet disarticulated

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territories and previous forms of production, attracting a huge workforce. For Deleuze and Guattari (1972), the organless machine of capital deterritorialized the socius, making him part of the schizophrenic, libidinal reticulate of desire/production where commodities, men, and above all the city itself represented a pivot and a source. Following such reasoning, the most evident consequence was the fragmentation of boundaries with the relative qualitative and quantitative enhancement of the city that had to face numbers never before envisaged. We were, more or less, passing from the city to the metropolis, with the factory in the neuralgic role of a new urban organ capable of promising a new future and providing a new global imaginary, with the metropolis as the threshold of the false dichotomy of development versus underdevelopment (Cammarota and Raffa 2008; Wallerstein 1974). The retroactions of the “great impact “ (Perna 1994) were countless, not least the birth of sociology as a moment of reflection. Limiting reasoning within the egg metaphor, the implications of the great transformation activated an imaginative retroaction in the social body. In Benevolo’s (2019) words, the urban entropy triggered by the Industrial Revolution was to generate the need to elaborate a solution. Faced with proto-sociological research by Hengels and Booth, London’s (1903) social denunciations, Dickens’s literary work, through to the specters evoked by Marx, the issue of housing for the working class became the first spatialized test of the contradictions of capital. Besides the enormous wealth produced, the system offloaded onto the urban fabric all the social contradictions, by now viewed as intolerable for the newly formed parliamentary republics. The solution or, rather, the spatial and imaginative retroaction for the new environment was the birth of modern town planning and its imaginal products, models of urban Utopias. Thanks to the auratic support of town planning, the neo-science studying the city, powerful ideal images imposed themselves as if effectively real on all the main Western capitals. As Amendola (2017) underlines, no matter whether modernist or socialist in type, the urban Utopias fell within a scientist model centered on organicistic, functional paradigms belonging to a neo-science that took as its benchmark the biomedical model of medicine. The city was interpreted as a human organism: the parks were its lungs, the roads its arteries, and social issues diseases on which town planning could and had to intervene. It would appear to be the final victory of Cain, turned into Homo economicus with skyscrapers in the role of Neomenhirs. The transformative need of space was transferred into a scientist episteme that, with an intrinsically universalist imaginary, set itself up as mediator in the relationship between the social organism and the city. To such illuminist views, pregnant with the future and with new technological possibilities, the city must have seemed a great ideological and entrepreneurial opportunity for a newborn science that had become the ideological hallmark of a state

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increasingly aware of the theatrical importance of urban space (Secchi 2000). The demolition of the old working-class districts of London (1848–1865), Paris5 (1853–1869), Vienna (1859–1872), and Brussels (1867–1871), to make way for the construction of impressive buildings as the expression of central power, was the ideological antecedent to the expulsion from the city centers of the lower classes then scientifically quartered in the outskirts. Benjamin realized the unforeseen implications of the change under way. In his overview, he included Marx, the inspirations of the artistic avant-garde and the latent nomadic tension of Abel, the vector analysis of the Passages of Paris and of the Great Exhibitions, and the cathedrals in the New World. Very early on, the philosopher became aware of the future urban, epistemic revolution with the passage from the paradigm of production to that of consumption, from the paradigm of function to that of fiction. In this view, the architecture of the Passages, built on the site of working-class areas, became the new “medium without exterior,” a dematerialized frame enclosing the citizen in a new space, that of consumption. Through the “pilgrimage to the commodity fetish” (Benjamin 1982; my translation from the Italian edition, 2010, 9), we had a new relationship between the citizen and the urban space, oneiric and phantasmal in character. Expelled from those places, the ex-inhabitant would be able to return there only under a new form with commodities as the medium. Like a general back from war whose passage under the triumphal arch earned him a place in history, so the common man passing through the Parisian Passages made his entry into the new age (Tramontana 2019). The flaneur witnessing the shift would change quickly into a buyer, and perhaps history and its conflicts would be replaced by the everyday and its show (Zampieri 2010). Benjamin’s reading of architecture capable of metamorphosing an age is fulminating. Faced with the seemingly economistic triumph of reason, he dwells on the implications of the new architecture as the Trojan horse of the new world—a fascinating staging, albeit fully charged with explosive dialectics, which becomes a complete frame wherein the power of capital can concentrate the whole of its charge, oneiric, desirous, and transformative, in an urban space no longer merely urban. If the age of reason brings with it the Weberian disenchantment with the world, postmodern architecture’s pop attempt to reenchant it through consumerism is already inscribed in Benjamin’s architecture. The counterpoint of this process, to be translated progressively and increasingly as the shopwindow of public space (Codeluppi 2005), was for Benjamin the private home, the comptoir and the intérieur of the new citizen. In this new space, the bourgeois house for the citizen becomes the terminal and the “universal stage” on which commodities, prized more and more for their exchange value and less and less for their usefulness, can, like fetishes, allow full access to the imaginary condensed within them.

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In spite of the fact that the fetish is evidently a legacy of Marx, for Benjamin it takes on a different meaning. If in Marx that “being in place of something else” is the enchantment itself of the commodity that conceals the hard reality of its relations with production, in Benjamin the triumph of the exchange value, from being a paradigm of alienation, turns into the springboard that prepares its owner for oneirism and for a deterritorialized, global use of the urban space with commodities functioning as mediators.6 “The symbolic is in the heart of the commodity,” wrote Carmagnola and Ferraresi (1999); flirting with Benjamin and Baudrillard, they offer an evolutionist vision of commodities. Every commodity, in that reading, aims to become a cult commodity, that is, a commodity that encapsulates within it a whole imaginary accessible simply by purchasing it or perhaps simply by looking at it. Jeans, a Harley-Davidson, and the Mac7,7 all are part of that typology of radical commodities (hyper-commodities) that have managed to reach the Homo sapiens stage of evolution. In some way, the authors tell us, it is they who have become the new protagonists of history, and it is they who produce in whomsoever acquires them ritual behavior and the feeling of belonging as if they were the new divinities. Even “strong” elements, such as identity, imaginary, emotion, memory, and rite, are attracted within the connotative grouping that an increasingly cultural and widespread industry imposes on them. In this view, consumption becomes a decisive factor in the identity retroaction between man and space, a retroaction that takes on an outline becoming more and more plastic, less and less territorialized, and, needless to say, more and more attractive. THE RETURN OF ABEL AND THE ROLE OF ART: FROM THE SYSTEM TO EXPERIENCE, FROM HISTORY TO THE EVERYDAY The start of the third millennium brought with it a fact we cannot ignore. For the first time in history, the majority of the world population was living in cities (Barberi 2010). But what might have appeared to be the irreversible victory of Cain in fact represented the return of Abel, the inhabitant more suited to dwelling in the great spatial devices of contemporary metropoles, among urban sprawl, slums, topophagy, and complexity (Barberi and Mento 2010), and to imagining different uses for it. This paradox is apparent at various levels. In the reading of the metropolis category, we are faced with a mosaic of definitions linked by the emphasis on the city as the dynamic synthesis of the world: flow city, network city, post-metropolis, do-it-yourself city, global city, fictitious city, a semiotic hemorrhage united in the attempt to keep together the declining fragments of the long spatial season of the function

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city. Price’s scrambled egg seems to be a maze, a section of the centerless network of internet. But it is Amendola (2017) who analyzes the question in wider terms, focusing on the relations between the city, its architecture, and the socius. Here is a view in which, woefully late, urban sociology recognizes the field of representations produced by art and literature. In this experiential view, the focus is no longer on the form of the city but on its impact on the everyday life of its inhabitants and their retroactions. While the architecture and town planning of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries bent urban space irreversibly to their own paradigms, the urban novels of Dickens, Zola, and Dostoyevsky set forth the experiential factors. While Booth and Engels produced their proto-sociological analyses in the working-class districts of London, through Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson managed to represent the parallelism between the scission in the human soul and that in the urban soul. Jekyll is a winning Cain who enjoys the return to sedentary life in his Victorian home, protected by science and affluence, while Hyde is an evil Abel whose nocturnal raids lead him into the second city to live those emotions denied by the pretense of high morality. The black hole of the Victorian East End, perhaps the queen bee of later districts on a global scale, thus became a morbid object to investigate. Between Jack the Ripper and The Elephant Man, what had been removed came back to light, laying the foundations for later fantastic, dystopic literature and partly for urban sociology itself. Here we must at least mention Jack London’s (1903) pioneering journey to the East End; disguised as a sailor, he undertakes what we would today call urban ethnography or participative research. It is within this experiential current that Amendola (2017) and Parker (2004) place Simmel’s intuitions, the reformist instance of the Chicago School and, I would add, the recent convergence between anthropology and sociology (Barberi 2010). But it is in the cited synesthetic strolls of Benjamin in Paris at the turn of the century that we trace the genealogy of this outlook in Urban Sociology. Without such urban walks by a novel Abel capable of lifting the everyday life of the Parisian passages into an allegorical object of study and profane revelation, the whole of his work would be infinitely less powerful. It was probably Le Corbusier’s book Towards a New Architecture (1923) that triggered the theoretical premise for the first International Congress of Modern Architecture of 1930, where the prevalence of “function” was to construct the main model of twentieth-century cities. The apparent urban victory of Cain was later deconstructed by the nomad elaborations of the artistic avant-garde. Disguised as Dada, in 1921, Abel set out from the Church of San Julien le Pauvre to inaugurate a series of urban excursions through the humdrum places of the city (Careri 2006). The artistic avant-gardes were to take the twentieth-century city of reason as their main target, deconstructing it through situationist peregrinations, lettrist, and psycho-geographic deviations

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and more in general through those approaches that Gravano (2012) numbers within the category of landscape activism. The urban space was thus returned as a living, vibrating subject, plastic and ludic; crossing it meant making contact with that urban subconscious denied by the now irreversible rational zoning: a dynamic to be found in the pictorial rupture of the impressionists. Freed from the tyranny of copying the real, they reinterpreted it (leaving their studios to paint in the open air) in a radically subjective key that became the new “Simmellian” way of seeing and inhabiting the city/metropolis. As it was no longer possible to act on an urban context monopolized by bureaucracy and technical know-how, such a context could be transformed imaginatively by the usage, tactics, and resistance theorized by de Certeau (1990) and by the retroactions of the artistic representations claiming to be new realities. It is no coincidence that in thinking of the Paris of the belle epoque, the first images that come to mind are the representations of the impressionists who, among other things, managed to generate new lifestyles. After the failure of Icarus’s ambition to dominate the horizon with a single glance, Amendola sees the new protagonist of the urban maze in Dedalus, “the subject who, thanks to daily frequentation of the city and everyday experience, is in the centre of the metropolis” (Amendola 2017, 15). The one most suitable to set in motion the imaginary and transformative ability of urban space centered on usage, practices, and representations rather than on the transformation of structures. The apparent minimalism, or political weakening of these positions, should be read through the intellectual legacy of Lefebvre,8 whose greatest merit is that of indissolubly interweaving the question of urban space with the category of everyday life, the new space, as yet and as ever open, in which it is possible to trigger transformative and therefore imaginative mechanisms of the real. In the well-known triple dialectic of space (Lefebvre 1974), among the perceived spaces, conceived spaces, and lived spaces, it is the latter category that becomes central. Faced with the irreversible technocratic advance of conceived spaces (exchange value) capable of transforming urban space into bourgeois habitats that remove the usage value of sociality, the lived spaces stand firmly in opposition with their revolutionary potential. The messianic charge found by Benjamin in the “instances” and in the details Lefebvre finds in the “moments,” where the situationist legacy of Debord is evident. The key words of Lefebvre’s (1968) revolutionary instance, “concrete Utopia,” “the right to the city,” should be inscribed in this aperture that had the prestige of being an instigator of the Parisian Sixty-Eight movement as well as the most radical interpretive category of the Paris Commune: apart from political issues, it was a ludic element—the revolution as a festival (Borelli 2019), the “moment” capable of revolutionizing the invisible structures of the everyday. In Lefebvre’s view, revolution always concerns the radical transformation of everyday life. It is in this new, condensed space

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in which the metropolis and everyday life become the precipitate of the world—the scrambled egg to be read three-dimensionally as a sphere—that the view of the imaginary may be valuable for reading and perhaps changing the invisible structures of reality, caught between the (structuring) complex of Cain and the (heterotopical) tensions of Abel. In any case, it is Harvey (2012), elaborating on Lefebvre’s thinking, who suggests that the next revolution (once more) will either be an urban revolution or else no revolution at all. NOTES 1. From Detheridge (2012, 174–75, table 46). 2. See the introduction. 3. In an exchange with paleoanthropology, Marzo (2012) reaches similar results. For the sociologist, this condition will be one that allows man to alienate himself from the tyranny of the stimulation response to the present and to launch himself transformatively into the world (and into time). 4. Carmagnola (2002) differentiates the real from reality. The former is in some way the noumenic world outside us. The latter is the result of the value hierarchy with which we interpret it. 5. The literature on this topic is ample. See, among others, Amendola (1997) and Benjamin (1982). Davis (1990) recalls that the dismantling of working-class areas in Paris would continue throughout the twentieth century. 6. On the subject of the fetish in Benjamin, see Carmagnola and Ferraresi (1999); on the importance of Benjamin’s thinking on the role of the consumer, see Codeluppi (2005). 7. It is interesting to see that in the book in question, dated 1999, the Mac was as yet not a cult phenomenon. However, the authors place it among those brands having the potential to become cult. They were right. 8. On the significance of Lefebvre’s legacy, I refer to the monograph number of Borelli (2019).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Amendola, G. 1997. La città postmoderna: Magie e paure della metropoli contemporanea. Bari: Laterza. ———. 2017. “La città tra sistema ed esperienza.” Sociologia e ricerca sociale 212: 5–19. Barberi, P., ed. 2010. È successo qualcosa alla città. Roma, Italy: Donzelli. Barberi, P., and F. Mento. 2010. “Postmetropoli: Le forme della città.” In È successo qualcosa alla città, ed. P. Barberi. Roma: Donzelli. Benevolo, L. 2019. Le origini dell’urbanistica moderna. Bari: Laterza.

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Benjamin, W. 1982. Das Passagenwerk. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag. Translated into Italian as Passages’ di Parigi. Torino: Einaudi, 2010. Boni, F., and F.Poggi. 2011. Sociologia dell’architettura. Roma: Carocci. Borelli, G. 2019. “Henry Lefebvre: La rivoluzione come festa.” Sociologia Urbana e Rurale 118: 86–113. Cammarota, A., and V. Raffa. 2008. Ragionare sullo sviluppo. Roma: Aracne. Careri, F. 2006. Walkscapes: Camminare come pratica estetica. Torino: Einaudi. Carmagnola, F. 2002. La triste scienza: Il simbolico, l’immaginario, la crisi del reale. Roma: Meltemi. Carmagnola, F., and M. Ferraresi. 1999. Merci di culto: Ipermerce e società mediale. Roma: Castelvecchi. Codeluppi, V. 2005. Manuale di Sociologia dei consumi. Roma: Carocci. Davis, M. 1990. City of Quarts: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Verso. Translated into Italian as Città di Quarzo: Indagando sul futuro a Los Angeles. Roma: Manifestolibri, 1999. De Certeau, M. 1990. L’invention du quotidien: L’art de faire. Paris: Edition Gallimar. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1972. L’AntiOedipe. Paris: Gallimard. Detheridge, A. 2012. Scultori della speranza: L’arte nel contesto della globalizzazione. Torino: Einaudi. Gravano, V. 2012. Paesaggi attivi. Saggio contro la contemplazione: L’arte contemporanea e il paesaggio metropolitano. Milano: Mimesis. Harvey, D. 2012. Rebel Cities: From the Right of the Cities to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso. La Cecla F. 2011. Perdersi: L’uomo senza ambiente. Bari: Laterza. Le Breton, D. 2012. Marcher (Eloge des chemins et de lentuer). Paris: Métailié. Le Corbusier. 1923. Verse une architecture. Paris: Cres. Lefebvre, H. 1968. Le droit à la ville. Paris: Anthropos. ———. 1974. La Production de l’espace. Paris: Anthropos. London, J. 1903. The People of the Abyss. London: Macmillan. Lynch, K. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marzo, P. L. 2012. La natura tecnica del Tempo: L’epoca del post-umano tra storia e vita quotidiana. Milano: Mimesis. Mela, A. 2006. Sociologia delle città. Roma: Carocci. Mumford, L. 1961. The City in History. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace and World. Norberg-Schulz, C. 1979. Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. New York: Rizzoli. Parker, S. 2004. Urban Theory and the Urban Experience. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Perna, T. 1994. Lo sviluppo insostenibile. La crisi del capitalismo nelle aree periferiche: Il caso del Mezzogiorno. Napoli: Liguori. Plessner, H. 1928. Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Polanyi, K. 1944. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press. Raffestin, C. 2005. Dalla nostalgia del territorio al desiderio del paesaggio. Firenze: Alinea Editrice. Secchi, B. 2000. Prima lezione di urbanistica. Roma-Bari: Laterza.

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Simmel, G. 1908. Soziologie. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Translated into Italian as Sociologia. Torino: Comunità, 2018. Tramontana, A. 2019. I cristalli della società: Simmel, Benjamin, Gehlen, Baudrillard e l’esistenza multiforme degli oggetti. Milano: Meltemi. Wallerstein, I. 1974. The Modern World System. New York: Academic Press. Zampieri, P .P. 2010. Il Quotidiano totale. Dall’apartheid dell’immaginario a quello dei non luoghi: Barboni e supereroi. Roma: Robin Edizioni. ———. 2018. Esplorazioni urbane: Urban art, patrimoni culturali e beni comuni. Bologna: Il Mulino. Zevi, B. 2004. Saper vedere l’architettura. Torino: Einaudi. ———. 2018. Saper vedere la città. Milano: Bompiani.

Index

Aboriginal humans, 59–60 Abruzzese, Alberto, 122 acausal links, 42–43 actualized reality, 77–78 Adorno, Theodor, 154, 164 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), 131 Against Method (Feyerabend), 42 agricultural revolution, 207–8 Alexander, Jeffrey, 52–53, 66–71, 71n3 alphabets, 104 altruism, 27n5 Amis de Pueple (Marat), 114 ancient imaginary, 103–6 Angelus Novus (Klee), 92 animals, 10–13, 16, 80–81, 101–2 The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary (Durand), 43 anthropology, ix–x, 4, 11–12, 40–41 Apparaturs, 84, 88 Arabic language, 107–8 archaeology, 100, 102–3 architecture, 21–22, 106–9, 123, 204–6, 208–12, 214–15 Aristotle, 41 ARPA. See Advanced Research Projects Agency art, 151–55, 165–66, 213–16 artificiality, 85

authority, in society, 58–59 autonomy, 59, 156–59, 165–66 Bachelard, Gaston, x, xii, 45 Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 160–63, 166n4 Bacon, Francis, 77 bacteria, 90 Bataille, George, 151–53, 159–60, 165 Baudrillard, Jean, 84–85, 213 Bauman, Zygmunt, 187 beat culture, 194–95 Beauvoir, Simone de, 196 Bellah, Robert, 71n5 Benevolo, Leonardo, 211 Benjamin, Walter: art to, 165–66; on dialectic images, 143–45, 159–64; on Fromm, 166n4; industry to, 210–13; on innervation, 89; mass society to, 121; on necessities, 149; progress to, 92, 149–51; on rememorizing, 167n5; Simmel and, 155; on Universal Exhibitions, 83–84 the Bible, 205–6, 211–16 Bildung (self-cultivation), 10, 64–65 biology, 8–9 The Black Hand (film), 197 bodies: body language, 100–101; corporal devices, 99–103; emotions and, 70–71; exploitation of, 65; 219

220

Index

images of, 83; in the imaginary, 93n6; in modernity, 122–23; psyches and, 140; sensory system of, 117–18; social, 65 Bourdieu, Pierre: Alexander and, 66–67, 70–71, 71n3; on complexity, 186–87; Durkheim and, 52–53, 61–62, 73n18; on social relations, 72n14; sociology of, 61–66, 72n11, 72n13 Brandt, Willy, 69–70, 73n20 Brown, N. O., viii capital, 64 Careri, Francisco, 204–5 Cassirer, Ernest, 27n3 Castells, Manuel, 46 castles, 106–9 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 78–79, 137 cathedrals, 106–9 Catholicism, 107, 109 causality, 42–43 censorship, 112 Cervantes, Miguel, 84–87 Chappe, Claude, 114–15 chemistry, 40–41, 123 China, 108 Chomsky, Noam, 7–8, 10 Christianity, 8–9, 106–7, 198 Church, George, 94n10 cinema, 118–19, 121–22, 124–32 cities: hierarchies in, 207–10; in modernity, 213–16; space in, 203–7, 204; urban utopias, 210–13 citizenship, 212–13 The City as an Egg (Price), 203–4, 204, 214, 216 civilization: architecture and, 21–22, 106–9, 123, 204–6, 208–12, 214–15; civil rituals, 60; culture and, 19, 28n8; human nature in, 28n9; identification in, 69–70; image, 33; imagination of, 21–22; money in, 20–21; philosophy of, 23–24, 171; physiognomic-morphologic perspective of, 22–23; politics in,

178–81; social class in, 73n17; social institutions of, 57–58; Weber on, 178–79; after World War I, 25 cognitive revolution, 102 cohabitation, in society, 12 collaboration, 62 collective communication, 58 collective consciousness, 56–57, 59–60 collective effervescence, 53 collective imaginary, 99–103 collective life, 141–43 collective space, 142–44 collective unconscious, 42–43, 65–66 comics, 127–28 commodity fetishism, 154–58, 160, 212–13 Common Sense (Paine), 113 communal memory, 103–4 communication: of ancient imaginary, 103–6; collective, 58; of collective imaginary, 99–103; in contemporary imaginary, 178–81; cooperative, 101; on “Galaxy Internet,” 131–32; of the imaginary, 4; in the long medieval season, 106–9; mass, 127–32; in media, 117–20; in metropolitan imaginary, 121–27; with printing imaginary, 110–15 community environment, 192 compensation mechanisms, 33–34 complexity: complex societies, 72, 185–92; in modernity, 20–21, 83; of nature, 59–60; of reality, 55–56, 154; of representations, 192–98; of worldview, 40, 66–69 Condemi, Silvia, 115n1 The Conflict in Modern Culture (Simmel), 20, 173 consciousness, 56–57, 59–60, 188 constructionism, ix contemporary imaginary, 178–81 cooperative communication, 101 Copernican historiography, 21 corporal devices, 99–103 Council of Trento, 118–19

Index

221

creativity: illusions from, 191–92; imagination and, 92n2; in nature, 16; phenomenology of, 138; reality and, 40, 79–80; Western, 106; in worldview, 80–81 Il crepuscolo dei barbari (Abruzzese), 122 criminal justice, 174 CRISPR, 94n10 Crosland, Alan, 129 culture: art in, 213–16; civilization and, 19, 28n8; cultural capital, 64; cultural industry, xi; cyberpunk in, 131–32; dissatisfaction with, 37; Hollywood, 126; iconic turn and, 44–45; with innovation, 124; mass consumption of, 125; material, xi–xiii, 38; media and, 81–82; in modernity, 20, 173; nature and, 39–40, 163–64; otherness in, 192–98, 198n2; paradigms in, 192; performative action in, 73n19; in phenomenology, viii; after Plato, 34; of Ptolemaic history, 21; radio and, 128–31; reform and, 47; to Simmel, 157–58; simulation theory in, 1–4, 14–15; social artifacts in, 90–91; social facts in, 92n1; socialization in, xii; society and, 58–59, 157–58; after Socrates, 38; of storytelling, 130–31; subcultures, 198n2; technology and, 84–87; of television, 83; traditions in, 91; of United States, 127; war and, 25–26; Western, 38–39; wizards in, 87 cyberpunk, 131–32 cyborgs, 89

The Decline of the West (Spengler), 21–23 Defoe, Daniel, 113 defusion, 67 Deleuze, Gilles, 211 Department of Defense, United States, 131 depth sociology, vii–viii, 4 Descartes, René, 9, 41–42, 44 Descartes’ Error (Damasio), 45–46 dialectical relationships, 185–86, 189 dialectic images, 143–45, 159–64 dialogical relationships, 185–86 Dickens, Charles, 92n1, 211, 214 Diderot, Denis, 113 digital networks, 127–32 digital revolution, 46–47 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 3, 17–18 Discourse on Method (Descartes), 41–42 dissatisfaction, 37 diversity, 59–60 Divine Comedy (Dante), 109 The Division (Durkheim), 56–57, 72n8 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 84–87 dreaming, 78–85, 89–92 Durand, Gilbert: psychology to, 20–21, 33–34, 37–38; scholarship from, viii–x, xiii, 27n6, 43, 45, 78, 151–52 Durkheim, Émile: Bellah on, 71n5; Bourdieu and, 52–53, 61–62, 73n18; Goffman and, 210; images to, 72n7; Jodelet after, 189; on representations, 73n16; Simmel and, 186; on social integration, 70–71; sociology of, 53–61

D’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 113 Damasio, Antonio, 16, 45–46 Dante, 109 Darnton, Robert, 113 Darwin, Charles, 11 decision-making, 46 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 114

economic capital, 64 The Economic Ethic of the World Religions (Weber), 170–71 Economy and Society (Weber), 169–70 Edict of Thessalonica, 107 Edison, Thomas A., 124–25 Einstein, Albert, 13 Elders, Fons, 8

222

Index

electricity, 123 The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim), 57–58 Eliasson, Olafur, 85 emergent reality, 55–56 emotions, 45–46, 65–66, 70–71 empirical sociology, xiv–xv, 23–24 Encyclopédie, 113 energy, 8, 18–19 England, 78, 112, 214 enthusiasm, 45 environment (umwelt), 13 epistemology, 44–45, 172–73, 179–80, 209–10 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 111 established superego, 20–21 ethnicity, 196–97 ethology, 13 Europe, 106–15 exoneration, 86, 93n4 expression, 99–103 “family fool” concept, 77–81, 84–87 fantasy, 44–47, 82, 85, 91–92 farmers (khammès), 61–62 Faustian imagination, 22–23 Federalist Papers, 113 Feyerabend, Paul, 42 flow, 8, 53, 58, 66–70 A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (Uexküll), 12–13 Foucault, Michel, 7–8, 10, 172, 175, 180 Fourier, Charles, 162–63 France, 78, 108–9, 112–14, 215–16, 216n5 Frankenstein (Shelley), 123 Franklin, Benjamin, 113 French Revolution, 78, 113, 215–16 Freud, Sigmund, 42–43 Fromm, Erich, 166n4 fusion, 67 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 189 “Galaxy Internet,” 131–32

Galimberti, Umberto, 35–36 Gehlen, Arnold, 11–12, 17, 27n2, 86, 138–39 gender, 195–96 generations, 193–95 geometries, of space, 207–10 German Ideology (Marx), 150–51, 155 Germany, 69–70, 130 Gesellschaft. See society Gestalt theory, 10, 17–18 ghost stories, 120 Gibson, William, 131 Giesen, Bernhard, 61 Giotto di Bondone, 109 Gleick, James, 35–36 globalization, 82–83, 130, 196–98 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 7, 9–12, 17–26, 27n3 Goffman, Erving, 61, 69, 73n17, 210 Grand New Transformation, 81–82 Greek philosophy, 1–4, 8–9 Gregory the Great, 107 Grohmann, Alberto, 108–9 Guattari, Felix, 211 guiding knowledge, 36 Gurevič, Aron, 109 Gutenberg, Johannes, 109–15, 117 The Gutenberg Galaxy (McLuhan), 110 Habermas, Jürgen, 150–51 Hamilton, Alexander, 113 Harari, Yuval Noah, 101–2 Hard Times (Dickens), 92n1 Hegel, G. F. W., 149–51, 153 hegemony, 103–4 heroes, 104–5 history: of epistemology, 172–73; of Europe, 106–15; of homo sapiens, 99–103, 115n2; of Jews, 69–70; from Lascaux Cave, 151–55, 165; of media, 110–15, 124; of modernity, 211–12; philosophy and, 41–42, 149–51, 163–64, 167n5; photography and, 117–20; primal, 161–62; Ptolemaic, 21; of

Index

religions, 68; society and, 160–61; of space, 213–16 Hobbes, Thomas, 71n6, 177–78 Hollywood, 126 homo sapiens, 99–103, 115n2. See also humans household appliances, 145–46 human nature: art and, 151–55; in civilization, 28n9; control as, 38–39; debates on, 7–8; as defective, 27n2; doubleness of, 55; in empirical sociology, 23–24; imagination in, 11–12; science and, 27n5; self-preservation, 186–88; social integration and, 61–62; society and, 28n7, 54; sociology of, 7–12; stereotypes in, 198n1 humans: Aboriginal, 59–60; animals and, 10–13, 16, 101–2; collaboration by, 62; cyborgs and, 89; dreaming by, 78–85, 89–92; emotions of, 45–46; hegemony by, 103–4; as homo sapiens, 99–103, 115n2; interactions between, 51; language and, 64–65, 81; nature and, 119–20; necessities of, 149–55; nomadic, 102–3, 203–7; performative action of, 53, 68; post-humanism, 93n8; psychology of, 170–71; rituals of, 58–59; science to, 174–75; selfunderstanding by, 57–58; with social power, 88; in society, 175–76; the symbolic and, 66, 142; violence by, 69–70; Weber on, 39–40 Hume, David, 77 Huygens, Christiaan, 118 hypnogagia, 90, 93n9 iconic turn, 44–45 identification, ix–xi, 68, 69–70 identity formation, viii, 185, 194–98 ideology, ix, 39, 72n14, 161–63, 182n1, 209–10 Iliad (Homer), 104–5 illusions, 191–92

223

images: of bodies, 83; dialectic, 143–45; to Durkheim, 72n7; image civilization, 33; in imaginary method, 40–43; infinite initiatives and, 37–40; light and, 117–21; mental, xv, 15–17, 141; narrations and, 14–15; in philosophy, 17–18, 37–38; power of, 33–37; reality of, 15–16, 21–22, 47; as schizomorphs, 43–45; Simmel on, 14–15; social, 59–60; in social world, 139–41; sound and, 121–27; symbolic, 45 the imaginary. See specific topics The Imaginary Institution of Society (Castoriadis), 79–80 imaginary method, 40–43 imaginary order, 61–66 imagination: of civilization, 21–22; creativity and, 92n2; Faustian, 22–23; globalization of, 82–83; in human nature, 11–12; limitations of, 140–41; objects of, 136–38; phenomenology of, 17–18; reality and, 1, 12–17, 14, 44–47; scholarship on, 26; of shapes, 9; social, 67; social facts and, 77–81, 88–92; storytelling and, 104; the symbolic and, 71n2; with technology, 90–91 imagined reality, 102–3 immigration, 196–98, 199n5 indistinction, 136–37 individuality, 59, 186–90 individual reality, 55–56 Industrial Revolution, 78, 88–92, 210–13 infinite initiatives, 37–40 information, 151–52 innervation, 89 inner worlds, 137–38 innovation, x–xi, 108, 124–25 instincts, 53–54 intellectual activity, 22 interactions, 166n2 interpretations, of reality, 86–87 Islam, 106–9

224

Italian Association of Sociology, vii Italy, 197–98, 203–10, 204 Jay, John, 113 The Jazz Singer (film), 129 Jeanneret, Charles-Édouard, 214–15 Jews, 69–70 Jodelet, Denise, 189 journalism, 112–13 Jung, Carl, viii, 42–43 Jünger, Ernst, 23–25 justice, 174 Das Kapital (Marx), 154–55 Katz, Daniel, 198n1 khammès (farmers), 62–63 King, Martin Luther, 92 Kircher, Athanasius, 118, 124 Klee, Paul, 92 knowledge, 35–38, 103–6, 174–75 Kojève, Alexandre, 153 Kuhn, Thomas, 36–37, 42 labor, 62–63 La Cecla, Franco, 206 landscapes, 15–16, 119–20, 123–24, 206, 211–12 language: Arabic, 107–8; as being, 151; body, 100–101; collective communication, 58; consciousness and, 188; expression with, 99–103; humans and, 64–65, 81; of the imaginary, 92n2; Latin, 107–8, 111; primitive, 35–36; vagueness of, 37 Lascaux Cave, 151–55, 165 Latin language, 107–8, 111 laziness, 157 Le Corbusier (Jeanneret), 214–15 Lefebvre, Henri, 215–16 Leviathan (Hobbes), 177, 177–78 light, 117–21 linear thinking, 104 Linnaeus, Carl, 9 the long medieval season, 106–9 Löwy, Michael, 162

Index

Luhmann, Niklas, 93n5, 187–88 Lumière, Auguste, 118–19, 125 Lumière, Louis-Jean, 118–19, 125 Luther, Martin, 111 Lutheranism, 111–12 Madison, James, 113 Maffesoli, Michel, 179 Magatti, Mauro, 93n5 the magic lantern, 117–20 Mallet, Elizabeth, 112 Mannheim, Karl, 193–94 Marat, Jean Paul, 114 Marconi, Guglielmo, 128 Marx, Karl, 150–51, 153–56, 160–61, 166n1, 211, 212–13 Marxism, 72n14, 77, 83, 150, 154–58, 160, 163, 212–13 Masculine Domination (Bourdieu), 72n11 mass communication, 127–32 mass consumption, 125 mass media. See media mass public, 129–30 mass society, 118, 121 the material, 166n3; the imaginary and, 149–51, 164–66; in Lascaux Cave, 151–55, 165; in reality, 159–64; to Simmel, 156–59 material culture, xi–xiii, 38 Mauss, Marcel, 78 McLuhan, Marshall, 110, 121, 131–32 mechanical solidarity, 72n10 media, 81–82, 84–85, 110–15, 117–20, 122, 124, 196–97 medication, 89–90 medieval epistemology, 209–10 mental images, xv, 15–17, 141 mental life, 60 mental nature, 54 metamorphosis, 21 metaphysics, 8–9, 83, 157 Metaphysics of Laziness (Simmel), 157 La Méthode (Morin), 40–41 metropolises. See cities

Index

metropolitan imaginary, 121–27 Michael III (emperor), 109 Miller, Daniel, xii minorities, 194 Minority Report (film), xiii misrecognition, 53 Mithen, Steven, 100 Model of a Functional Cycle (Uexküll), 13–15, 14 modernity: bodies in, 122–23; cities in, 213–16; commodity fetishism in, 160; complexity in, 20–21, 83; culture in, 20, 173; in cyberpunk, 131–32; digital revolution, 46–47; “family fool” concept in, 77–81; Grand New Transformation in, 81–82; to Habermas, 150–51; history of, 211–12; household appliances in, 145–46; as information era, 33; landscapes in, 123–24; material culture in, 38; medication in, 89–90; modern imaginary, 173–78, 177; nature in, 20–21; objects in, 143–44; paradigms of, 61; postmodernism in, 70; reality in, 9; science in, 36–37; Scientific Revolution and, 41–42, 118; self-understanding in, 57–58; social imagination in, 67; street lights and, 120; technical-scientific progress in, 24; worldview in, 173–78, 177 monasteries, 106–9 money, 20–21, 52, 64, 77, 156–59, 166n3 Morin, Edgar, 40–41, 47, 78–79, 121–22 morphology, 19 Moscovici, Serge, 188–91 music, 128 Mussolini, Benito, 129 mutual relationships, 142 narrations, xi, 14–15, 103–6, 120, 130– 31, 205–6, 211–16 naturalness, 85

225

nature: complexity of, 59–60; creativity in, 16; culture and, 39–40, 163–64; exoneration from, 93n4; forms of, 10–11; history of, 101–2; humans and, 119–20; landscapes, 15–16; mental images and, 16–17; in modernity, 20–21; power of, 58; of reality, 27n2; science of, 9; second, 19; shapes in, 7–12 Nazis, 69–70 Ndembu religion, 69 Neanderthals, 115n1, 151–55 Negative Dialects (Adorno), 164 neo-tribalism, 93n8 Netherlands, 112 neuroscience, 45–46 Newtonian physics, 13 Nickel-Odeons, 125 Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore, 123 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 11–12 nomadic humans, 102–3, 203–7 objectivation, 190–91 objective reality, 34–35 objectivity, 19, 38 objectivizing, 125 objects, of imagination, 136–38 Odyssey (Homer), 104–5 On the Concept and Tragedy of Culture (Simmel), 157–58 On the Concept of History (Benjamin), 163 optical phenomena, 10 optical telegraph, 110–15 Ording, Bas, xiii organisms, 10–14, 14 original form (Urform), 18–20, 24–26, 27n3 otherness, 81, 199n5; in culture, 192– 98, 198n2; in society, 185–92, 198n1 Outcault, Richard F., 127 Paine, Thomas, 113 Le paradigme perdu (Morin), 121–22

226

Index

paradigms, 33–39, 42, 46–47, 61, 121–22, 192 paradoxes, 33–37 Parsons, Talcott, 51–52 Passagenwerk (Benjamin), 159–62 perfectionism, 91–92 performative action, 53, 66–70, 73n19 Phaedrus (Plato), 105 phenomenology: anthropology and, ix–x; of causality, 42–43; of creativity, 138; culture in, viii; energy in, 18–19; of imagination, 17–18; optical phenomena, 10; phenomena, 2–3; religions as, 21–22; of shapes, 15; social behavior as, 46–47; technical-scientific progress in, 4 The Phenomenology of the Spirit (Hegel), 153 philosophy: of civilization, 23–24, 171; of collective consciousness, 56–57; of collective unconscious, 42–43; from cooperative communication, 101; epistemology and, 44–45; of flow, 53, 58; from Goethe, 17–26; Greek, 1–4, 8–9; of Hegel, 149–51; history and, 41–42, 149–51, 163–64, 167n5; images in, 17–18, 37–38; of justice, 174; of necessities, 159–64; of Nietzsche, 11–12; of objective reality, 34–35; paradigms in, 33–37; of performative action, 66–70; of Plato, 105; of reality, 153–54; of religions, 169–70; of safety, 175–76; of social behavior, 158–59; of social class, 63–64; of social contract, 71n6; of society, 53–61; spirituality and, 20; symbolical universes, 192– 98; of unconscious naturalization, 53; from Vienna Circle, 35; of World State, 25–26 The Philosophy of Money (Simmel), 156–59 Philosophy of the Spirit (Hegel), 150–51 photography, 117–20, 124–26

physics, xi, 8, 13, 40–41 physiognomic-morphologic perspective, 22–23 Piras, Mauro, 72n13 Plato, 1–4, 14–15, 34, 41, 105, 153–54, 165 play, 151–55 Poggi, Gianfranco, 52 politics, x–xi; in civilization, 178–81; imaginary roots of, 169–73; in modern imaginary, 173–78, 177; political economies, 149–51, 166n1 Politics as a Profession (Weber), 176 post-humanism, 93n8 postmodernism, 70 power: in France, 112; Hobbes on, 177– 78; of images, 33–37; of knowledge, 174–75; money and, 52; of nature, 58; political, 179–80; powers, 103–6; social, 88; from social facts, 93n5; symbolic, 64–65; of writing, 105–6 praxinoscopes, 119 prejudice, 196–97, 198n1 Price, Cedric, 203–4, 204, 214, 216 primal history, 161–62 primitive language, 35–36 printing imaginary, 110–15 printing press, 109–15 proactive imaginary, xii–xiii The Problem of Generations (Mannheim), 193–94 The Problem of Sociology (Simmel), 159 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber), 169–70 psychology: collective unconscious in, 42–43; decision-making in, 46; to Durand, 20–21, 33–34, 37–38; existence in, 44; of humans, 170–71; of identification, 68; of indifference, 21; indistinction and, 136–37; of individuality, 189–90; of inner worlds, 137–38; from Jung, viii; of mass public, 129–30; of mental images, xv, 15–16; mental

Index

life, 60; mental nature, 54; of movement, 28n12; of necessities, 156–59; of otherness, 81; psyches, 136–40; psychoanalysis, ix–x; psycho-emotional experience, 19–20; reality in, xii; of representations, 70; social, 99–100, 124; of social belonging, 61; of social change, 92; of social integration, 63–64; of socialization, 190–91; of social senses, 139–40; subjectivity in, 38–39; superego in, 20–21, 27n6; of technology, 211–12; Weber on, 182n3 Ptolemaic history, 21 public space, 123–24 punishment, 173–74 radio, 128–31 Raffestin, Claude, 206 reality: accent of, 85; actualized, 77–78; articulations of, 2–3; complexity of, 55–56, 154; in contemporary imaginary, 178–81; creativity and, 40, 79–80; in depth sociology, 4; emergent, 55–56; exoneration from, 93n4; hidden dimensions of, xiv; hypnogagia and, 93n9; of images, 15–16, 21–22, 47; the imaginary and, 1; imagination and, 1, 12–17, 14, 44–47; imagined, 102–3; individual, 55–56; instincts and, 53–54; integration with, 54–55; interpretations of, 86–87; the material in, 159–64; in Model of a Functional Cycle, 13–15, 14; in modernity, 9; nature of, 27n2; objective, 34–35; objectivity and, 19; paradoxes in, 33–37; philosophy of, 153–54; in psychology, xii; realism of, 36, 41, 171–72; representations of, 53–60, 64–71, 73n16, 85; sacred dimensions of, 103–6; with simulation techniques, 84; social action in, 4–5; social construction

227

of, 3; social facts and, 84–87; social imaginary as, 17–26; temporality and, 191–92 reciprocal action, 12, 20 reciprocal effect (Wechselwirkung), 156–57 reductionism, 71n3 reflexive imaginary, xiii reform, 47 relationships, 185–86 religions: cathedrals, 106–9; Catholicism, 107, 109; Christianity, 8–9, 106–7; in Germany, 69–70; history of, 68; Islam, 106–8; Lutheranism, 111–12; Ndembu religion, 69; as phenomenology, 21–22; philosophy of, 169–70; political utopias and, x–xi; scholarship on, 72n8; in society, 57–58; technology and, 23–24 rememorizing, 167n5 representations: complexity of, 192–98; of information, 151–52; psychology of, 70; of reality, 53–60, 64–71, 73n16, 85; social, 63, 188–92; from society, 192–93; symbolic, 65–66 The Republic (Plato), 1–4 Rimbaud, Arthur, 185 rituals, 58–61 Roman Empire, 106–7, 209 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 129 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 71n6, 113 The Rules (Durkheim), 55 sacred dimensions, 103–6 safety, 175–76 Schiermer, Bjørn, 72n10 schizomorphs, 43–45 scholarship: on depth sociology, vii–viii; from Durand, viii–x, xiii, 27n6, 43, 45, 151–52; on empirical sociology, xiv–xv; from Goethe, 9–12, 17–26; on imagination, 26; on paradigms, 121–22; on religions,

228

Index

72n8; on representation, 56–57; on sociology, 158–59 Schütz, Alfred, 86–87 science: of bacteria, 90; of biology, 8; from Darwin, 11; of ethology, 13; human nature and, 27n5; to humans, 174–75; ideology of, 209–10; of light, 123; measurement in, 2–3; in modernity, 36–37; of nature, 9; neuroscience, 45–46; paradigms in, 42, 47; scientific reasoning, xiv; Scientific Revolution, 41–42, 118; of shapes, 7; society in, 52; of sociology, 4. See also specific sciences seamless performance, 68–69 second nature, 19 The Second Sex (Beauvoir), 196 sedentariness, 203–7, 204 self-censorship, 65 self-cultivation (Bildung), 10, 64–65 self-preservation, 186–88 semi-alienation, 139 sexual dimorphism, 195–96 shapes, 7–12, 15, 17–19 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 123 Shils, Edward, 187, 191 Simmel, Georg: Benjamin and, 155; Durkheim and, 186; Geothe to, 19; on images, 14–15; on interactions, 166n2; legacy of, 215; the material to, 156–59; on money, 156–59, 166n3; on society, 165, 173; sociology of, 141–42 simulation techniques, 84 simulation theory, 1–4, 14–15 skyscrapers, 119–20, 211–12 social action, 4–5, 28n10 social artifacts, 78, 90–91 social behavior, 46–47, 158–59 social belonging, 61 social bodies, 65 social bonds, 51–53, 60–61, 62–63 social capital, 64 social change, 81–84, 92

social class, 61–64, 73n17, 163, 216n5 social complexity, 186–88 social contract, 71n6 social disaggregation, 59 social facts, 92n1, 93n5, 93n7; imagination and, 77–81, 88–92; reality and, 84–87; social change with, 81–84 social images, 59–60 social imaginary, ix–x, xiv, 17–26, 182n2 social imagination, 67 social institutions, 57–58 social integration, ix–xi, 4, 61–64, 70–71 socialization, xii, 80, 190–91 social order, 63–65 social power, 88 social psychology, 99–100, 124 social relations, 72n14 social representations, 63, 188–92 social senses, 139–40 social world: collective life in, 141–43; images in, 139–41; the imaginary in, 135–36, 143–46; objects in, 136–38 society: of aboriginal humans, 59–60; authority in, 58–59; autonomy in, 165–66; capital in, 64; Castoriadis on, 79–80; cohabitation in, 12; collective consciousness in, 59–60; culture and, 58–59, 157–58; of England, 112; epistemology in, 179–80; farmers in, 62–63; of France, 108–9, 114; history and, 160–61; human nature and, 28n7, 54; humans in, 175–76; imaginary world and, vii–viii; interactions in, 166n2; in Italy, 203–10, 204; in Marxism, 150; mass, 118, 121; mechanical solidarity in, 72n10; media as, 122; mutual relationships in, 142; origins of, 55; otherness in, 185–92, 198n1; philosophy of, 53–61; reading, 113; representations from, 192–93; of Roman Empire, 106–7; in science,

Index

52; seamless performance in, 68–69; self-censorship in, 65; Simmel on, 165, 173; without social class, 163; space in, 123–24, 142–44; technicalscientific progress in, x–xi; Western, 130–31, 211; after World War II, 130 sociology: anthropology and, 4, 11–12, 40–41; biology and, 9; of Bourdieu, 61–66, 72n11, 72n13; depth, vii–viii, 4; digital revolution in, 46–47; of Durkheim, 53–61; empirical, xiv–xv; of human nature, 7–12; material culture in, xii–xiii; Plato in, 3–4; scholarship on, 158–59; science of, 4; of Simmel, 141–42; sociological thought, 136; of war, 28n11; worldview in, 3, 17–18 The Sociology of the Meal (Simmel), 158–59 Socrates, 38 solidarity, 72n10 sound, 121–27 sovereignty, 152 Soviet Union, 25–26, 70, 82–83 space: in cities, 203–7, 204; collective, 142–44; geometries of, 207–10; history of, 213–16; Industrial Revolution and, 210–13; public, 123–24 Spencer, Herbert, 157 Spengler, Oswald, 7, 11, 21–23, 26, 28nn8–9 spirituality, 20 stereotypes, 196–97, 198n1 Sterling, Bruce, 131 storytelling, 103–6, 120, 130–31, 205–6, 211–16 street lights, 120 string theory, 44 structuralists, ix The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn), 36–37 subcultures, 198n2 subjectivity, 38–39, 59–60 superego, 20–21, 27n6

229

Swift, Jonathan, 113 the symbolic, 52; with animals, 80–81; dimensions of, 135–36; humans and, 66, 142; imagination and, 71n2 symbolical universes, 192–98 symbolic centers, 191 symbolic domination, 61–66 symbolic forms, 156–59 symbolic images, 45 symbolic power, 64–65 symbolic representations, 65–66 Systema Naturae (Linnaeus), 9 Tadic, Boris, 73n20 Tasso, Torquato, 119 Taylor, C., ix–x, 175, 182n2 technology: for cinema, 118–19; culture and, 84–87; for digital networks, 127–32; for genetic editing, 94n10; for household appliances, 145–46; imagination with, 90–91; after Industrial Revolution, 88–92; optical telegraph, 110–15; psychology of, 211–12; reality and, 85–86; religions and, 23–24; social facts from, 93n7; technical reproducibility, 121–27; technical-scientific progress, x–xi, 4, 24 teleology, 152–53, 159 television, 83, 127–32 temporality, 152–53, 191–92 tension fields, in the imaginary, 135, 143–46 Tesla, Nikola, 128 theology, 8–9 Theses on the Philosophy of History (Benjamin), 149–51 Tomasello, Michael, 101 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 176 topographical domestication, 2 torture, 173–74 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 120 Towards a New Architecture (Le Corbusier), 214–15 Truth and Method (Gadamer), 189

230

Turner, Victor, 69 Uexküll, Jakob von, 12–16, 14, 18 umwelt (environment), 13, 18 the unconscious, 51–53 unconscious naturalization, 53 United States, 25–26, 78, 113, 127, 131, 195–96 Universal Exhibitions, 83–84 urban space, 208–10 urban utopias, 210–13 Urform (original form), 18–20, 24–26, 27n3 Utopia, x–xi, 161–63, 179, 209–13 utopic imaginary, xiii Vienna Circle, 35 View from the Window at Le Gras (Niépce), 123 violence, 69–70, 80, 173–74 virtual reality, 84–85 Voltaire, 113 walkscapes, 206 war, 25–26, 28n11, 130, 195 Washington, George, 113 Weber, Max, 39–40, 51, 78, 169–76, 178–79, 181, 182n3

Index

Wechselwirkung (reciprocal effect), 156–57 Weltanschauung. See worldview weltbild. See worldview Western creativity, 106 Western knowledge, 37–38 Western paradigms, 39 Western rationalism, 170 Western society, 130–31, 211 wizards, 87 women, 195–96, 198 Words and Things (Foucault), 172 work, 151–55 World State, 25–26 worldview: complexity of, 40, 66–69; creativity in, 80–81; ideology and, 182n1; in modernity, 173–78, 177; in sociology, 3, 17–18; Utopia in, 179; Weber on, 169–73, 181 World War II, 25, 130, 195 writing, 104–6 Yellow Kid (cartoon), 127 Yugoslavia, 82–83 Zevi, Bruno, 207–10 zoetropes, 119

About the Contributors

Sergio Brancato is a full professor of the sociology of communication and cultural processes at the University of Naples “Federico II,” where he teaches and conducts research in the media studies field. At the University of Naples, he is responsible for the research area “Analysis of Media and Social Change” of the LUPT (European Interdepartmental Center). Among his publications are Videoculture: Strategie dei linguaggi elettronici, Fumetti: Guida ai comics nel sistema dei media, Introduzione alla sociologia del cinema, Post-serialità: Per una sociologia delle tv-series, Fantasmi della modernità, and E-Comics (with Ivan Pintor Iranzo). Francesca Colella has a PhD in theory and social research from Sapienza University of Rome and is a researcher in the Department of Human Sciences at the University of L’Aquila. In 2019–2021, she coordinated the project “Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration” (Sapienza University of Rome). She is currently the principal investigator of the project “Female Role Models” (University of L’Aquila). Her studies include the phenomenon of migration, innovation and social change, socialization and identity, gender issues, the changing social situation of youth, and social representations of the migrant in the mass media and in the social imaginary. Stefano Cristante is a full professor of the sociology of communication at Università del Salento and editor in chief of H-ermes Journal of Communication. His scientific interests are focused on public opinion sociology and on cultural production and consumption. His publications include La parte cattiva dell’Italia (with V. Cremonesini), Corto Maltese e la poetica dello straniero, Andrea Pazienza e l’arte del fuggiasco, L’onda anonima: Scritti sull’opinione pubblica, L’icona che delira, Storia sociale della comunicazione, and La rivolta dello stile.

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About the Contributors

Fabio D’Andrea teaches sociology at the University of Perugia. He has been teaching traditional disciplines as well as more contemporary ones, such as the sociology of sport, the sociology of the body, and the sociology of the imaginary. He is the author of publications in Italy and abroad, specializing on Simmel and recently on a complex human paradigm. He is the dean for the “Investigation and Security Sciences” first-cycle degree course of the University of Perugia and is founder of the Imaginary section of the Italian Association of Sociology. Valentina Grassi is an associate professor of sociology in the Department of Law at the University of Naples Parthenope. She is secretary of the Imaginary section of the Italian Association of Sociology. She deals with theories and methodologies of imaginary in the social sciences. She has published Introduction à la sociologie de l’imaginaire (2005), which has recently been translated into Arabic. Pier Luca Marzo teaches the sociology of social change and the sociology of the imaginary in the Department of Cognitive Sciences, Psychology, Education, and Cultural Studies at the University of Messina. Through a socio-morphological approach, his research areas are focused on social theories of the artificial, the naturalization of social time, the neutral imaginary of techno-science, and the relationship between creativity and science. He is editor in chief and founder of the open access journal Im@go. A Journal of the Social Imaginary and a member of the scientific board of the Imaginary section of the Italian Association of Sociology. Vincenzo Mele, PhD, is an associate professor of general sociology in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pisa. He received his PhD en co-tutele at the University of Bielefeld, Germany (where he was DAAD scholar), and at the University of Pisa. He was a visiting professor at William Paterson University (Wayne, NJ) and a lecturer of sociology at Monmouth University (West Long Branch, NJ) from 2008 to 2012. His last book is Fragments of Metropolis: City and Modernity in Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin (forthcoming). His current research interests are in social and critical theory of modernity. He is editor in chief of the journal Simmel Studies. Milena Meo is an associate professor of the sociology of political phenomena at the University of Messina, where she teaches the sociology of political phenomena and political sociology and gender studies. She is coordinator of the master’s degree course “Social Work and Sociological Studies” and founded and directs the international scientific journal Im@go. A Journal of the Social

About the Contributors

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Imaginary. Her research focuses on politics and gender issues, populism, and the social imaginary. On these topics, she has written essays and edited collective volumes. Luca Mori is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Verona. His research focuses on social theory, the sociology of health and illness, and social imaginaries. His most recent publications include Crowdsourcing in Medicine in the Neoliberal Era, Il febile bisbiglio degli organi: Datificazione della salute e processi di costruzione identitaria, and I numeri dell’io: Immaginario neoliberale e quantificazione del sé [An ambiguous health education: The quantified self and the medicalization of the mental sphere] (with A. Maturo and V. Moretti). Maria Giovanna Musso is a professor of social change, creativity, and art at Sapienza University of Rome. Her scientific interests are focused on complexity, the imaginary, art, and technology. She is involved in different research about violence and social bonding. Her publications include La trave nell’occhio: Mito e scienza dello sviluppo, Il sistema e l’osserv-attore: Itinerari di sociologia della complessità, Legame sociale, legame globale, Violence and Social Change: The New Routes of Sovereignty in the Global World, Towards an Integrated Approach to Violence against Women: Persistence, Specificity and Complexity, and Don Quixote and the Wound of Modernity. Domenico Secondulfo is a full professor of general sociology and one of the founders of the Sociology of the Imaginary section of the Italian Association of Sociology, which he has coordinated since its foundation. Before the sociology of the imaginary and depth sociology, he dealt with the sociology of culture, the sociology of health, the sociology of consumption, social change, and visual sociology. In the field of the imaginary, among his most recent writings are “Lo studio degli stereotipi e delle rappresentazioni sociali attraverso la sociologia visuale,” “Al di qua del bene e del male: Strutture (spaziali) elementari nella rappresentazione iconica del bene e del male,” “The Sports Narrative: Phenomenology and Deep Structures of Meaning,” and “Sacro e immaginario.” Antonio Tramontana is a postdoctoral and adjunct professor in general sociology at the University of Messina. He is coordinator of Im@go. A Journal of the Social Imaginary and managing editor of the journal Simmel Studies. He was a member of the scientific committee of the Imaginary section of the Italian Association of Sociology from 2018 to 2021. His main research interests are focused on social theory and the sociology of the imaginary.

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About the Contributors

Pier Paolo Zampieri is a researcher in the sociology of environment and territory at the University of Messina. He deals mainly with urban issues, outsider art, the imaginary, landscape, marginality, and psycho-geography. He is the author of Esplorazioni urbane: Urban art, patrimoni culturali e beni comuni and Zonacammarata: Maregrosso, Messina, paesaggi retroattivi, processi sociali.