The category “imaginaries” does a lot of work across the multiple fields and discussions that comprise the terrain of critical environmental studies. The list of modifying adjectives is long: resource imaginaries; extractive imaginaries; energy (especially fossil-fuel) imaginaries; colonial imaginaries; infrastructural imaginaries, etc. What do people mean when they use this word, and what is at stake in using it? This is the subject of political theorist Yves Winter’s terrific recent article, whose titular question opens onto several others, for example: “Is the collective imaginary the result of symbolic practices—is it a discursive product—or is it, by contrast, a condition of these practices? Is there only one social imaginary in a society at any given time, or are there multiple ones? If there is more than one, are they contiguous, overlapping, or perhaps irreconcilable? How do imaginaries change? In sum, is imaginary simply a new term for culture?” These questions, Winter says, “go to the core of how we theorize the social world.” 

Winter’s preoccupation in this article (one of a series on these themes) is what is at stake in theorizing the social world – which includes power, economies, culture and ecologies, to name but a few things – in terms of imaginaries. He begins by providing a thoroughgoing “genealogy of the idea of the collective imaginary” that includes critical treatments of key thinkers including Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Althusser, Castoriadis and Taylor, and many others along the way. This alone is worth the price of admission and should be required reading for any casual user of the term. Then comes a carefully argued and quite devastating account of what Winter sees as the idealism inherent in most deployments of “imaginary” as an analytical category, and of the critical and political deficits of substituting it for the time-worn categories it has increasingly, and tellingly, replaced: ideology and utopia. No spoilers here – let me just say I can’t recall the last time I scribbled “YES!!!!” so many times in the margins of a scholarly article.  

/db