*The Imaginary and a Political Quest for Freedom*
differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies - Volume 13, Number 3,
Fall 2002, pp. 64-82
Duke University Press <http://muse.jhu.edu/about/mus
Laurie E. Naranch - The Imaginary and a Political Quest for Freedom -
differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13:3 differences: A
Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13.3 (2003) 64-82 The Imaginary and a
Political Quest for Freedom Laurie E. Naranch It is not unusual for feminist
theorists to turn to the imagination, or the substantive of a more recent
vintage, the imaginary, to offer both a critique of masculinist institutions
and a creative alternative for how women might represent themselves. This is
not simply a late-twentieth-century phenomenon occurring in the wake of the
work of Jacques Lacan, who gave the adjective “imaginary” [imaginaire] a new
critical purchase when he used it as a substantive. In the eighteenth
century there was also an imagination at work in the Romantic movement of
Western Europe that emerged as a revolt against a particular form of
rationalism, turning instead to the creative or active imagination for a
model of self-making that was primarily artistic in nature. As Joan Scott
demonstrates, the feminist Olympe de Gouges found resources in that context
to present her own active imagination when arguing for women's citizenship
in revolutionary France. Scott writes: “De Gouges's insistence on the
imaginative basis for her own thought and action was meant to establish her
autonomy, her ability to produce an authentic self (not a copy of anything
else)—to be what she claimed to be—and so her eligibility...
Critical Terms To Be Lined Up Against A Wall And Shot
Posted by Sean McCann <http://www.thevalve.org/go/
10:35 AM
There was a tv commercial a few years back in which a sidewalk vendor sold
people chattering wind up dolls that repeated single inane phrases. The
buyers then had the delicious opportunity to stomp the dolls to bits. ("we
can still be friends, we can still be friends, we can still . . .” *Smash!*)
Wouldn’t it be great if there were dolls that spouted “probelmatize” or
“subvert” or whatever? And wouldn’t it be even better if they had actual
voodoo-doll like powers, so that when you pulverized them their inanities
would be finally wiped from the earth forever? *Ecrasez l’infame! *
My current vote for most annoying bit of lit-crit jargon is the ugly and
omnivorous use of “imaginary” as a noun--especially in the currently
familiar phrase “national imaginary.” What is up with that? It’s never been
clear to me how imaginary in this usage differs from imagination--except,
well, that it’s newer and more, um, problematized. But more importantly,
it’s not clear to me at all how the term “national imaginary” (meaning, so
far as I can tell, something like a nation’s psychic template) avoids the
problem of imputing collective consciousnesses that has long been a problem
for literary study. If you say a nation has an “imaginary,” you’re pretty
much of necessity saying that it has a collective mind in which that
imaginary operates. Why exactly would you want to do that?
I have my suspicions. But for the moment I just want to grumble about the
way the critics who use this terminology--critics, I think it’s safe to say,
who regard themselves as scrupulously skeptical of received ideas and
popular mystifications, particularly of the kind that ascribe false group
identities--recussitate in this usage one of the hoariest and most
pernicious legacies of literary romanticism. It’s dumb. Nations don’t have
imaginaries. There I said it. Now I wish I could just find that doll and
shoot it.
[From wikipedia, where there's more, inclkuding the reference to Lacan, one
of the first users of the term)
The *imaginary*, or *social imaginary* is the set of values, institutions,
laws, and symbols common to a particular social
group<http://en.wikipedia.org/
society.
'The social imaginary...[is] the creative and symbolic dimension of the
social world, the dimension through which human beings create their ways of
living together and their ways of representing their collective
life'.[1]<http://en.wikipedia.
