Imagination is social and intersubjective, constituting collectivities

Evidence

Taken together, these core rebukes contribute to a broader important point: human imagination exists on an intersubjective, social level, rather than as an individual faculty. Olson (2016, 41) summarizes neatly this key insight and the ways in which it anticipates Anderson’s own concept of imagined communities: “Castoriadis shows how individual ideas, both images and words, can take on the character of shared meaning. By emphasizing the way in which collective imagination constitutes collectivities, he presages Benedict Anderson’s work on the imaginary constitution of communities … This material dimension is valuable in a more general sense as well: it provides an important antidote to a conception that would turn the imaginary into a kind of phantasm or purely internal, psychological phenomenon” (41). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 154

Categorization

• XREF: Direct bridge to Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities—and to the book’s own title, Speculative Communities. Speculation as a collective act of constitution. — connects to: Imagination and aesthetic practice have direct material consequences. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 698; Social values exceed conscious comprehension and require imagination to navigate — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 343
• SEED: Angle: financialized populism as a form of ‘imagined community’—voters imaging themselves into a collective through speculation, not through shared rational interest.