Download or read book The Imaginary Institution of Society written by Cornelius Castoriadis and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is one of the most original and important works of contemporaryEuropean thought. First published in France in 1975, it is the major theoretical work of one of the foremost thinkers in Europe today. This is one of the most original and important works of contemporary European thought. First published in France in 1975, it is the major theoretical work of one of the foremost thinkers in Europe today. Castoriadis offers a brilliant and far-reaching analysis of the unique character of the social-historical world and its relations to the individual, to language, and to nature. He argues that most traditional conceptions of society and history overlook the essential feature of the social-historical world, namely that this world is not articulated once and for all but is in each case the creation of the society concerned. In emphasizing the element of creativity, Castoriadis opens the way for rethinking political theory and practice in terms of the autonomous and explicit self-institution of society.
Download or read book Imagined Communities written by Benedict Anderson and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2006-11-17 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent. As new nations rise, vying for influence, and old empires decline, we must understand who we are as a community in the face of history, and change.
Download or read book Modern Social Imaginaries written by Charles Taylor and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVAn accounting of the varying forms of social imaginary that have underpinned the rise of Western modernity./div
Download or read book Imaginary Social Worlds written by John L. Caughey and published by Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The violent fantasies of such figures as Mark David Chapman, killer of John Lennon, and John Hinckley, would-be assassin of President Reagan, have commonly been interpreted, by professionals and public alike, as socially aberrant--as the result of psychological instability. John L. Caughey's provocative study shows not only that such fantasies are shaped by enculturation, but also that they are closely linked in content and form to the more benign imaginative constructs of "normal" Americans. A new departure in the study of American society, this book takes a cultural approach to imaginary social experience, viewing the imaginary social interactions in dreams, fantasies, memories, anticipations, media involvement, and hallucinations as social processes because they involve people in pseudo-interactions with images of other people. Drawing on his anthropological research in the United States, Pakistan, and Micronesia, Caughey explores from a phenomenological perspective the social patterning that prevails in each of these imaginary worlds. He analyzes the kinds of identities and roles the individual assumes and examines the kinds of interactions that are played out with imagined persons. Caughey demonstrates that imaginary social relationships dominate much of our subjective social experience. He also shows that these imaginary relationships have many important connections to actual social conduct. Moreover, cultural values dictate the texture of the mental processes: imaginary conversations both reflect and reinforce the basic beliefs of the society, imagined anticipations of the reactions of real other people can serve social control functions, and media figures affect actual social relations by serving as mentors and role models. Caughey's arresting reappraisal of the world of fantasy is, in the words of James P. Spradley, "an outstanding job of scholarship" and "a unique contribution to the field of anthropology in general, to the study of culture and cognition, and to the study of American culture specifically."
Download or read book Cultural Ecstasies written by Ilana Mountian and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this important contribution to the study of drugs and addiction Illana Mountian critically analyses discourses surrounding drugs, drug treatment, and drug prevention, and develops alternative conceptual and methodological perspectives to current psychological approaches to drug use.
Download or read book Imaginary Communities written by Phillip Wegner and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002-06-04 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing from literary history, social theory, and political critique, this far-reaching study explores the utopian narrative as a medium for understanding the social space of the modern nation-state. Considering the narrative utopia from its earliest manifestation in Thomas More's sixteenth-century work Utopia to some of the most influential utopias of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book is an astute study of a literary genre as well as a nuanced dialectical meditation on the history of utopian thinking as a quintessential history of modernity. As he unravels the dialectics at work in the utopian narrative, Wegner gives an ambitious synthetic discussion of theories of modernity, considering and evaluating the ideas of writers such as Ernst Bloch, Louis Marin, Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Henri Lefebvre, Paul de Man, Karl Mannheim, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Zizek, and Homi Bhabha.
Download or read book Utopia as Method written by R. Levitas and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-07-25 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia should be understood as a method rather than a goal. This book rehabilitates utopia as a repressed dimension of the sociological and in the process produces the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society, a provisional, reflexive and dialogic method for exploring alternative possible futures.
Download or read book The Imaginary and Its Worlds written by Laura Bieger and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2013 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on papers originally presented at a 2009 conference hosted at the John-F.-Kennedy-Institut of the Freie Univet'at Berlin.
Download or read book The Social Routes of the Imaginary written by Pier Luca Marzo and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-05-02 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emphasizing imaginaries as an essential tool in deep understanding of social phenomena, the essays in this volume address socio-anthropological environments; collective dynamics of social integration; mass media metamorphosis; politics legitimation processes; symbolic dimension of economics and material culture; and representation of otherness.
Download or read book Computer Games and the Social Imaginary written by Graeme Kirkpatrick and published by Polity. This book was released on 2013-10-07 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Computer games have fundamentally altered the relation of self and society in the digital age. Analysing topics such as technology and power, the formation of gaming culture and the subjective impact of play with computer games, this text will be of great interest to students and scholars of digital media, games studies and the information society.
Download or read book Imaginal Politics written by Chiara Bottici and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the radical, creative capacity of our imagination and the social imaginary we are immersed in is an intermediate space philosophers have termed the imaginal, populated by images or (re)presentations that are presences in themselves. Offering a new, systematic understanding of the imaginal and its nexus with the political, Chiara Bottici brings fresh perspective to the formation of political and power relationships and the paradox of a world rich in imagery yet seemingly devoid of imagination. Bottici begins by defining the difference between the imaginal and the imaginary, locating the imaginal's root meaning in the image and its ability to both characterize a public and establish a set of activities within that public. She identifies the imaginal's critical role in powering representative democracies and its amplification through globalization. She then addresses the troublesome increase in images now mediating politics and the transformation of politics into empty spectacle. The spectacularization of politics has led to its virtualization, Bottici observes, transforming images into processes with an uncertain relationship to reality, and, while new media has democratized the image in a global society of the spectacle, the cloned image no longer mediates politics but does the act for us. Bottici concludes with politics' current search for legitimacy through an invented ideal of tradition, a turn to religion, and the incorporation of human rights language.
Download or read book Social Theory and the Political Imaginary written by Craig Browne and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-01 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social Theory and the Political Imaginary: Practice, Critique and History is an innovative work of synthesis, critique, and analysis. It presages a social theory perspective that recognises the constitutive significance of the political imaginary in modernity. Social theory’s current dilemmas are explored through a series of interlinked asssessments of some of its recent substantial strands, specifically, Luc Boltanski’s pragmatism and the wider ‘practical turn’, the perspectives of multiple modernities and global modernity, the outlook of social and political imaginaries, and critical social theory. The political imaginary’s reconfigurations are evident in the tensions of global modernity and original social theory interpretations are advanced of landmark instances of twenty-first century social contestation: the Hong Kong protests conditioned by threats to civil freedoms and a lack of self-determination, the radical democratic practices of anti-austerity movements contesting capitalist globalisation’s injustices, and the inverted cosmopolitanism of the 2005 French Riots challenging the oppression and inequalities experienced by immigrant communities and marginalised youth. These incisive applications of social theory and complementary conceptual innovations illuminate the vicissitudes of social struggles, political forms, and theoretical perspectives. Similarly, reflection on the political imaginary is found to enable a necessary rethinking of the interrelationship of practice, critique and history.
Download or read book Social Imaginary and the Metaphysical Discourse written by Christoforos Bouzanis and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-05 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book departs from approaches to truth in social science and ideas in philosophy that connect truth to the ability of language to fulfil certain ‘real-world’ conditions of objectivity. Pointing to an extra-linguistic level in our cognition at which scientific creativity occurs, it highlights the manner in which epistemic communities share, work on and modify not only the world-imaginaries that they endorse, but also those world-views that they reject or which partially overlap with their own. Through the concept of the social imaginary, the author explores the theoretical interrelations among various metaphysical world-imageries by which we organise our scientific understanding of the world and our expectations of experience, thus shedding light on the manner in which social ontology can inform our practices of sharing belief. A study at the intersection of metaphysics and social theory, The Fundamental Predicament of Contemporary Philosophy and the Social Sciences will appeal to scholars of sociology and philosophy with interests in questions of ontology and epistemology.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Social Representations written by Gordon Sammut and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-25 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook provides the requisite theoretical and methodological guidelines for undertaking social research addressing relevant contemporary social issues.
Download or read book WHAT IS SOCIAL IMAGINARY written by MAURICIO ENRIQUE FAU and published by Mauricio Enrique Fau. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 3 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work consists of a compilation of summaries of several articles whose common axis is the theme that entitles the work: the social imaginary. First of all, Esther Díaz, in WHAT IS THE SOCIAL IMAGINARY? she defines the term for us and gives us a historical overview of its application. Then, B. Baczko in LOS IMAGINARIOS SOCIAL, proposes to analyze the collective representations that societies elaborate about themselves: they constitute ideas-images that appear included in the category of social imaginaries. The author's HYPOTHESIS is that “one of the functions of social imaginaries consists in the organization and control of collective time on the symbolic plane”. Subsequently, we present examples of the application of the concept in different settings: "The imaginary of death (1976-1983)", which is part of Melo and Raffin's book IMAGES, MYTHS AND METAPHORS OF ARGENTINE SOCIETY. From the same authors, POWER, SOCIAL IMAGINARY AND LITERATURE. To close, a work by Adrián Melo, THE SOCIAL IMAGINARIES OF THE END OF THE MILLENNIUM IN THE TELEVISION SERIES THE X FILES and another by Eliseo Verón, TELEVISION STORY AND SOCIAL IMAGINARY.
Download or read book Imagination and the Imaginary written by Kathleen Lennon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-20 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of the imaginary is pervasive within contemporary thought, yet can be a baffling and often controversial term. In Imagination and the Imaginary, Kathleen Lennon explores the links between imagination - regarded as the faculty of creating images or forms - and the imaginary, which links such imagery with affect or emotion and captures the significance which the world carries for us. Beginning with an examination of contrasting theories of imagination proposed by Hume and Kant, Lennon argues that the imaginary is not something in opposition to the real, but the very faculty through which the world is made real to us. She then turns to the vexed relationship between perception and imagination and, drawing on Kant, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, explores some fundamental questions, such as whether there is a distinction between the perceived and the imagined; the relationship between imagination and creativity; and the role of the body in perception and imagination. Invoking also Spinoza and Coleridge, Lennon argues that, far from being a realm of illusion, the imaginary world is our most direct mode of perception. She then explores the role the imaginary plays in the formation of the self and the social world. A unique feature of the volume is that it compares and contrasts a philosophical tradition of thinking about the imagination - running from Kant and Hume to Strawson and John McDowell - with the work of phenomenological, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist and feminist thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Lacan, Castoriadis, Irigaray, Gatens and Lloyd. This makes Imagination and the Imaginary essential reading for students and scholars working in phenomenology, philosophy of perception, social theory, cultural studies and aesthetics. Cover Image: Bronze Bowl with Lace, Ursula Von Rydingsvard, 2014. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Lelong and Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Photo Jonty Wilde.
Download or read book Control of the Imaginary written by Luiz Costa Lima and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Control of the Imaginary was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In Control of the Imaginary Luiz Costa Lima explains how the distinction between truth and fiction emerged at the beginning of modern times and why, upon its emergence, fiction fell under suspicion. Costa Lima not only describes the continuous relationship between Western notions of reason and subjectivity over a broad time-frame—the Renaissance to the first decade of the twentieth century—but he uses this occasion to reexamine the literary traditions of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, England, and Germany. The book reconstructs the dominant frames in the European tradition between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century from the perspective of a Latin American who sees the culture of his native Brazil haunted by unresolved questions from the Northern Hemisphere. Costa Lima manages to synthesize positions from philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, and history without separating the theoretical discussion from his historical reconstructions. The first chapter situates the problem and grounds the emergent distinction between truth and fiction in a very close analysis of one of the first European historians, Fernao Lopes, who sets the tone for the condemnation of fiction in the name of the truth of history and the potential for individual interpretation. Costa Lima pursues these notions through the aesthetic debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the writings of the French historian Michelet. He also devotes an illuminating chapter to the invention of the strictures imposed on fiction.
