On the critique of political imaginaries

Introduction

In 2002, the journal Public Culture devoted an issue to the topic of ‘imaginaries’ that included articles by Charles Taylor and Michael Warner that were the forerunners of their respective books Modern Social Imaginaries and Publics and Counterpublics. ¹ Even though the term ‘imaginaries’ had already been in circulation for years, ² over the past decade there has been a remarkable expansion in its use as a guiding concept in and beyond political theory. In addition to Taylor’s work on the social imaginaries of modernity, there are now extensive discussions about the global imaginary, ³ spatial imaginaries, ⁴ colonial and postcolonial imaginaries ⁵ and religious ones. ⁶ Inquiries into political imaginaries ⁷ are just as common (many of the preceding examples overlap here), and the term proliferates in the fields of geography and environmental politics. This general development reflects a reorientation of critical terminology. Whereas once ideology could serve as a catch-all term for a widely shared system of thought, as well as denote specific instances of misrecognition or mystification, the concept of imaginaries now regularly replaces ideology in the broad sense. Indeed, appealing to imaginaries has become an accepted feature of theory. Worryingly, however, it is a feature that is rarely questioned in and of itself.

The authors I discuss in this paper are committed to the idea of political and social imaginaries. And yet Taylor’s account of imaginaries, Warner’s work on publics and counterpublics, and Chiara Bottici’s insights on myth, also suggest that a critique of ideology is part of any attempt to account critically for how individuals are oriented within collective meaning-giving settings. In these instances, the critique of ideology tends to follow Marx himself, amounting to an attack on false ideas that legitimate socio-political relations which we otherwise might see as exploitative or excessively unequal. Similarly, these authors also share a tendency to rely (explicitly or not) on dialectical modes of explanation when seeking to account for how imaginaries work. The dialectical logic they rely on is a traditional one that concerns the interrelated and reciprocal production of social phenomena – the intertwining of discourse and practices, for example. Features of a naive Hegelianism emerge here – something that in my mind has little basis in Hegel’s own work – which I will criticize later for exorcising the negative moments from dialectical relations. Ultimately, then, a curious theoretical negotiation takes place where, on the one hand, a strong commitment to the concept of imaginaries is not enough to justify doing away with older critical modes of thinking (dialectics and ideology critique). On the other hand, what remains of those enduring modes has been sanitized to varying extents, so that their associated radical and emancipatory commitments are scarcely pursued. Shortly I will say more about my own use of dialectics and ideological analysis.

Much of the motivation for this article results from a sense that when we use imaginaries as a primary term of analysis, it can itself become ideological. This occurs to the extent that work on imaginaries relies on pre-critical and highly instrumentalist claims about how a critique of political imaginaries, publics and myths ought to be practised. This problem is central to contemporary trajectories in political theory given how widespread the use of imaginaries has become. It is also troublesome given that each of the authors in question express an affinity with progressive and even emancipatory politics that is stymied by their theoretical work, to the point that political phenomena end up being misrepresented or go unidentified entirely.

I proceed by reviewing the work of Taylor, Warner and Bottici because it is exemplary of social imaginaries writ large (Taylor) and sites of imaginaries (Warner and Bottici). I examine in turn how they describe and propose to critique their subject matter. My aim is twofold: first, to conduct an immanent critique that reveals important difficulties in each of the texts under consideration. Second, throughout the article I will sketch my own response to the shortcomings I identify. In particular I will argue that an expanded logic of dialectical relations based on dependence, antagonism and production, succeeds in generating the types of critical insights that are absent in these important texts. This will involve elaborating modes of ideology critique and dialectical thought that avoid the pre-critical and instrumentalist mentioned above. Below I provide an orienting statement on these modes of thought prior to introducing the main texts in question.

A note on method

Dialectical thought and ideology critique often go hand in hand, especially in the tradition of Marxist critical theory. Elsewhere I have staked out an approach to critical theory that is avowedly post-Marxist. But unlike associated thinkers such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, I think that dialectics ought to remain central to radical thought even as a partial de-linking from Marxism is required. ⁸ Typically dialectical thought is committed to uncovering contradictions that animate social relations as well as thought itself. ⁹ Marx’s classic example of this contradictory or self-defeating logic involves the bourgeoisie calling into existence the very group (the proletariat) that will challenge the bourgeoisie’s social position and, ultimately, lead to its own downfall. The emphasis on contradiction is not incorrect, strictly speaking, but it can be reductive. My own position has been to expand this logic of inquiry such that dialectical relations are recast as simultaneously ones of dependence, antagonism and production. To continue with the same example, the bourgeoisie and proletariat are clearly dependent on one another, but their dependence frequently becomes antagonistic insofar as each group has conflicting economic and political goals. The never-permanent resolutions of that antagonism are central to the construction of our political terrain, hence the productive aspect of the relation.

Another advantage of this (post-Marxist) approach is that it dispenses with all forms of determinism. Antagonisms are no longer thought to be invested with their own telos and therefore can play out innumerable ways. I therefore reject the structural priority of economics that we find in dialectical thinkers from Marx to Althusser to Jameson. More generally, it is important to clarify that this mode of dialectical critique is negative. One of its intentions as a kind of critical intervention is to pierce the given appearance of society in such a way that promotes emancipatory aims.

As for ideology critique, there are many versions and I will not argue that one in particular ought to be used at the expense of all others. Circumstances change, and as they do, ideological analysis benefits from being able to treat ideology as, variously (the list is almost endless): false consciousness, false ideas that legitimate unequal power relations, ideas that help to mystify power relations, the presentation of historical phenomena as natural ones, the failure to distinguish concepts from material reality, the uncovering of utopian possibilities from within counter-revolutionary circumstances, and the exclusion of structuring principles from an account of social production. This last version is the one I am most interested in here. Like many types of ideological analysis, it involves a depth model but not in the sense that the truth sits buried beneath falsehood. Instead, the point is to inquire critically into those features of social life that involve significant antagonisms but are not treated as such, or are ignored entirely. Ideology, in this instance, involves portraying the dominant ideas and practices of social life as organized according to an overlapping consensus virtually free from conflict and antagonism. Note that this portrayal is much more than a simple falsehood. It provides much of the glue that holds practices together by articulating their meaning and purpose for our social order. The aim of critique is then twofold: to uncover the antagonisms that are intrinsic to present conditions; and to articulate the mechanisms by which those antagonisms otherwise are written out of our reality.

Taylor on social imaginaries

Much of Charles Taylor’s recent work is significant for its attempt to explain how social imaginaries are central to the emergence of Western modernity and its self-understandings. The term imaginaries suggests that our shared practices – political, social, economic – are enabled by way of a collective imagining concerning their purpose and significance. Such imagining may even have a conjuring power, calling into being the very practices being envisioned. The imaginaries in question are the market economy, the public sphere and the citizen-state, the latter with its commitment to one version or another of democracy and self-rule. A fourth imaginary – bills and charters of rights – is cited by Taylor as a less mature addition to the first three. Taylor’s preference for the term ‘social’ rather than ‘political’ imaginaries is a choice I deliberately challenge in the title of this essay. The second option is, to my mind, a more accurate way to characterize rights, the state, and the (political!) economy, though perhaps not the public sphere.

Modernity is also characterized by a new-found moral order which, for Taylor, comes along with the imaginaries listed above. Even though a plurality of imaginaries provides the component parts of our moral order, the latter is decidedly more singular in nature. Taylor focuses on the 17th-century work of Locke and Grotius in an attempt to periodize the point from which the ‘idea of society as existing for the (mutual) benefit of individuals and the defense of their rights takes on more and more importance’. ¹⁰ The depiction of our moral order that Taylor provides is fascinating particularly for the qualified status he gives to its ‘(mutual)’ benefits. The point turns on where exactly mutual benefit originates. A central feature of the public sphere and the citizen-state alike is that shared benefit is part of their fundamental purpose from the very beginning. The citizen-state, for example, is for all people. Taylor elaborates on this development by describing how, from the late 17th century onward, members of this new modern society began imagining it to include ‘direct access’ to centres of power. Here we can think of access to the judicial system or to political representatives. Individually all people (or at least more and more of them over time) saw themselves as ‘equidistant from the center’. ¹¹ These features clarify how individuals approached the public sphere and the citizen-state as spaces of equality (or ‘radical horizontality’ in Taylor’s words) designed for collective efforts and benefits. In this way each of these spaces is one of collective agency.

By contrast, the market economy is more often depicted as possessing its own objective agency that acts on people. When Taylor describes the modern position that ‘the ideal social order is one in which our purposes mesh, and each in furthering himself helps others’, ¹² the social benefit derives unintentionally from self-interested actions rather than those directed toward the collective interest. This is the individual-oriented world view we usually associate with Mandeville and the Smith of The Wealth of Nations. An important distinction exists here, between whether our social imaginaries conceive of mutual benefit as an immediate consequence of collective effort, or as secondary consequence (though not unimportant for it) of individual activity.

This distinction matters for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that it helps to structure how we judge whether or not an action violates our moral order. To appreciate how this occurs we must understand what social imaginaries consist of. One temptation, which is promoted by the very term ‘imaginaries’, is to proceed as if we are dealing with a full-blown idealist philosophy where ideas alone drive historical change and social practices. Indeed, one way of defining an imaginary is as a complex ideational structure. Taylor fights this temptation by stressing what amounts to a dialectic of reciprocal production: ‘Because human practices are the kind of thing that makes sense, certain ideas are internal to them; one cannot distinguish the two in order to ask the question Which causes which?’ ¹³

Another way that this dialectic is staged by Taylor involves the performative quality of social imaginaries. Imaginaries explain practices and thereby make them possible, yet in doing so cannot avoid becoming implicated in practices themselves. The ideational nature of imaginaries manages to conjure the material – and even institutional – practices that an imaginary cannot go without in the first place. Yet the solution offered by Taylor’s reciprocal dialectic to the problem of idealism gives rise to an additional difficulty. Taylor describes how social imaginaries form a ‘background’, or ‘that largely unstructured and inarticulate understanding of our whole situation, within which particular features of our world show up for us in the sense they have’. ¹⁴ At the same time, he also insists that our imaginaries reach out ‘beyond the immediate background understanding’ and thereby explain ‘our whole predicament: how we stand to each other, how we got to where we are, how we relate to other groups, and so on’. ¹⁵ Even though these statements may appear roughly equivalent, there is a clear attempt by Taylor to insist that social imaginaries do double work: they provide a background, intuitive sense of social life, as well as detailed articulations concerning our own personal circumstances. They account, in a sense, for the climate and for the weather. Essentially this is another rehearsal of the argument that neither our background nor our specific practices would make sense separate from one another. In this instance, however, such thoroughly positive ¹⁶ dialectical reciprocity lacks any negative moments, and thereby presents a largely unaddressed obstacle to conducting a critique of social imaginaries. In short, we shall see that Taylor’s attention to how features of social life appear as they do leaves the underside of his concern – the features of social life that do not show up – undisturbed.

Social imaginaries provide a collective moral orientation according to Taylor, offering us ‘a sense of how things usually go … interwoven with an idea of how they ought to go, of what missteps would invalidate the practice’. ¹⁷ Clearly there is a considerable degree of normative legitimacy bound up in social imaginaries. And normative legitimacy will also include clear evaluative standards: Taylor’s passage above suggests that imaginaries have a built-in capacity to criticize practices that fail to live up to their principles. But the matter is scarcely as straight-forward as Taylor suggests. Instead, the self-referential nature of our social imaginaries means that our moral order can only address that which shows up as invalid against its own background. It is largely incapable of addressing those features of society that fail to show up in our standard moral orientation. In other words, there is no mechanism either to inquire about the types of injuries that are built into the background of the moral order, or to investigate the moral assumptions and relations of power that otherwise appear as so much normal everyday reality.

To give a brief example, consider the dominant structure of perception regarding acts of violence. Violence is most commonly identified as the act of an agent that stands out from a non-violent background. An important consequence is that moralism finds especially fertile ground when violence is viewed in this manner. ¹⁸ Recall how the overarching theme of Taylor’s modern imaginaries casts society as an arrangement for the (mutual) benefit of individuals. Such an outlook cannot help but reflect on the personal nature of those who commit acts of violence. And because the imaginaries Taylor describes conceive of society’s background as both moral and just, the most direct explanation at hand is one that presents violence as a matter of principle – or more accurately a breakdown in the moral principles of those who use violence to violate the shared order. As a result not only are contextual factors such as relations of power and economic inequality downplayed (or ignored), our social imaginaries escape without any questioning. To reiterate, the reason for the plausibility of this moralizing position is not difficult to see: the orientation of our modern social imaginaries prompts us to judge whether an individual’s choices were designed for mutual benefit, and to disregard the objective conditions in which those choices and subsequent events took place.

Taylor, to his credit, knows that still today the emancipatory ideal of modernity’s social imaginaries has not been fully realized. On multiple occasions he refers – in a worryingly teleological way – to the unfinished ‘long march’ of the modern moral order. ¹⁹ And thus he is confronted with the problem of how to organize a critique of social imaginaries, something which has become even more difficult considering their largely unreflexive nature. Put differently, what is Taylor’s critical move once we accept my earlier point about the strong reciprocity between thought and action in his account?

Near the end of Taylor’s book, he briefly inquires about the relation between a social imaginary and the Marxist notion of ideology as distorted consciousness, where the former is constructive and filled with exciting prospects, while the latter acts to mystify reality with potentially hazardous results. It is worth quoting Taylor’s response at length:

In fact, my use of the term [imaginary] is meant to combine both these facets. Can an imaginary be false, meaning that it distorts or covers over certain crucial realities? Clearly, the answer to this is yes … Take our sense of ourselves as equal citizens in a democratic state; to the extent that we not only understand this as a legitimating principle but actually imagine it as integrally realized, we will be engaging in cover-ups, averting our gaze from various excluded or disempowered groups or imagining that their exclusion is their own doing … But the gain involved in identifying these social imaginaries is that they are never just ideology. They also have a constitutive function, that of making possible the practices that they make sense of and thus enable. In this sense, their falsity cannot be total; some people are engaging in a form of democratic self-rule, even if not everyone, as our comfortable self-legitimations imagine … It [the social imaginary] cannot be reduced to an insubstantial dream. ²⁰

To take just one telling example, the critique of ideology is no longer necessarily tied to distinguishing between true and false consciousness. Taylor holds to the traditional position that a failure to identify practices of exclusion or domination might well lie with a distorted world-view, the solution for which is to close the excessive gap between practices and our knowledge of them. Notice how this approach treats ideology as an add-on, something that distorts the world but that is not taken as intrinsic to it. This assumption is a grave error. If we take our modern social imaginaries and their moral order of mutual benefit, it should be apparent that the moralism it encourages can do more than distort certain social actions; moralism is an ideological mechanism on which the cohesion of reality depends in the first place. Without the reassuring collective agreement that acts of violence are driven by the actions of specific individuals, the sense that society is structured for mutual benefit would be left in shreds. Thus, there is no recourse to a simple pulling back of the ideological curtain so that anyone presently excluded from the market economy or citizen-state can be included. Moralism as ideological distortion is not superstructural, to borrow from an older lexicon; it is intrinsic to the structure of social order itself.

Taylor’s critique of social imaginaries proves ultimately to be pre-critical. As I conceive of ideology critique, its primary aim is no longer to unveil the ‘truth’ about ‘reality’, but rather to bring into question those practices and institutions that are regularly allowed to pass inspection. The critical moment involved is one where ideological closures that protect phenomena such as moralism, capitalism and liberal democracy are reopened. Only then, for example, can a stunted debate about ‘Main Street versus Wall Street’ be placed within its broader logic of capitalist relations of accumulation. Similarly, only then can we see how contemporary relations of tolerance are rooted in liberalism’s acultural view of itself and the social hierarchies this sanctions. ²²

An entirely different dialectical logic now emerges that moves beyond Taylor’s standard design of reciprocal production. The symbolic representation of mainstream politics relies on successfully disavowing as political problems the antagonisms that structure politics and social relations in the first place. Thus, politics at once depends on antagonisms and is threatened by this reliance in the case of its exposure. The dependence-antagonism relation contributes significantly to producing our political terrain (this is what ideology critique wishes to map). The dialectical insight is that we must insist on a reality where social relations are deeply riven and conflicted rather than smooth and conflict-light. The inescapability of the former, negative, mode means that even when reciprocal production yields social imaginaries that appear to tie everyday life together absent all strife, there is no final resolution to socio-political antagonisms. Whatever its merit, Taylor’s approach does not even try to make this claim, and may well be incapable of it. This conclusion leads properly into Warner’s work and its more fine-grained account of publics and social imaginaries.

Warner on the construction of publics as imaginaries

The thematic similarities between Taylor’s work on imaginaries and Michael Warner’s on publics and counterpublics are readily apparent. Taylor cites Warner’s investigations into the development of public opinion and the public sphere in British America as a direct influence on his own research, ²³ while Warner’s more recent efforts recapitulate Taylor’s concern with collective imagination and the very real effects it can produce. My concern in this section is again with how the critique of ideology and dialectical thought are utilized unsuccessfully, this time in relation to the critical impulses that Warner wishes to see fulfilled regarding how publics are conceived and counterpublics challenge hegemonic politics.

The path that Warner takes to his final definition of a public is meandering and is approached best, I think, by first addressing his analysis of how we construct and relate to publics. Crucially, Warner explains that ‘publics exist only by virtue of their imagining. They are a kind of fiction that has taken on life, and very potent life at that’. ²⁴ Thus, the fictional nature of publics should not be thought of as an obstacle to their realization. Warner speculates about how ‘it seems that in order to address a public, one must forget or ignore the fictional nature of the entity one addresses. The idea of a public is motivating, not simply instrumental. It is constitutive of a social imaginary’. ²⁵ Publics, for Warner, are sites of social imaginaries. Compared to Taylor’s concern with macro-imaginaries, Warner sees many smaller ones, each contributing to our sense of social belonging and exclusion.

One of the issues here concerns how people know that there are others out there who are like them and who, together, form something greater. How do people know they belong? The answer is that in an important way people do not know. One of the unique features of publics is that their efficacy depends very much on imagining the existence of a collective that may well be unverifiable in an empirical sense. Here it is worth mentioning Benedict Anderson’s scholarship that shows how the very possibility of the nation arose when imaginaries like the public sphere and the citizen-state emerged alongside new technologies such as print capitalism, which gave rise to the notion of a reading public. Of course, most individual readers are unlikely to meet the vast majority of their fellow readers; the same is true for members of a nation. But as Anderson describes, ‘fiction seeps quietly and continuously into reality, creating that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity . . .’ ²⁶ The dialectical figure here will not go unnoticed: fiction becomes ever more real at the moment when reality becomes ever more fictitious.

Despite Warner’s initial insistence that simply imagining a public is enough to bring one into existence, he quickly admits that imagination lacks the necessary conjuring power. Publics, it turns out, also have to be addressed. Warner rightly grasps ‘that when people address publics, they engage in struggles … over the conditions that bring them together as a public’. ²⁷ There is a noticeable difference here between Warner and Taylor concerning how ideas and practices work jointly in the construction of imaginaries. Taylor’s work emphasizes how the reciprocal production of ideas and practices is, by and large, pacific. Indeed Taylor thinks this is vital if social life is going to be intelligible or have any staying power at all. Warner’s formulation poses a challenge to Taylor by suggesting that not only the originary moment of a public or an imaginary – but also many of its subsequent invocations – take place according to fundamental disagreements about the nature of certain practices and conditions. We could even venture to characterize these as two different social ontologies: one (Taylor’s) that stresses the shared understandings of social life, and another (Warner’s) that foregrounds social struggles as central and unavoidable. Another way to stage them is to say that Taylor’s approach (somewhat unintentionally) gives us a lesson in how hegemony functions as consensual submission, whereas Warner’s explains a key source of resistance. Note that the dialectical structure of dependence-antagonism-production can give a clear account of how hegemony and resistance come together. Even when hegemony elicits exceptional amounts of compliance, it remains a form of power – which incites resistance as a matter of course. If this was not the case then we would be confronted with something else entirely, namely domination.

I have already outlined how publics must be imagined and addressed if they are to exist at all. We can add to these claims Warner’s central assertion about the constitutive role of discourse. For example, strangers enter into publics through discourse: ‘[T]he notion of a public enables a reflexivity in the circulation of texts among strangers who become, by virtue of their reflexively circulating discourse, a social entity’. ²⁸ In addition: ‘A public is a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself. It is autotelic’. ²⁹ Insofar as this is accurate, the performative nature of publics is obvious. Describing a public as a space of discourse organized by discourse is another way of saying that publics enact themselves. The ability of discourse to represent a public simultaneously enacts the very thing it is already representing.

Warner’s obligation to account for how publics are constituted alerts us to an unresolved tension at the heart of his argument. When the discursive and performative basis of publics is considered within the larger totality of modern society, the ‘membership’ of publics becomes a curious thing. According to Warner ‘a public is by definition an indefinite audience rather than a social constituency that could be numbered or named’. ³⁰ Thus, a public must not be conflated with anything that requires the simultaneous presence of its members, such as an audience or an assembly. Almost immediately after declaring that a public is an indefinite audience, however, he proceeds to explain that a public can be a concrete audience such as ‘a crowd witnessing itself in visible space’. ³¹ Even more unexpected is Warner’s u-turn concerning the thoroughly discursive origins of a public. ‘A public seems to be self-organized by discourse’ Warner now cautions, ‘but in fact requires pre-existing forms and channels of circulation’. ³² What needs to be added is that in addition to pre-existing forms of circulation, pre-existing social forms are equally necessary; in fact, the two may even be co-extensive in certain instances.

A good example of how discourse and social forms are, at the very least, co-productive, is Occupy Wall Street (OWS). Its slogan ‘We are the 99%’ helped to construct a new public just as Warner would (initially) have it, namely by focusing attention on a constituency of people so successfully that the circulation of discourse multiplied and deepened beyond any expectations. But this account is incomplete in important ways – ones which Warner attests to as he moves through his various claims. Far from constructing an image of the 99% and the 1% that relied on language alone (we can call this linguistic constructivism), the discourse employed by OWS necessarily relied on the already existing sense that some people had concerning just how society is structured. Indeed, discourse is arguably most effective when it exploits issues that are rooted in ongoing lived experience. ³³ In this instance, we can point out any number of concerns, from increasing inequality and the bailouts of financial firms to the virtual elimination of the interests of the working class in electoral politics. Generally put, we can highlight the growing sense that a vast majority of people pursue social advancement according to one set of rules, while a much smaller minority enjoy a different set of circumstances offered by elite membership. ³⁴ In this way OWS and those who identify as part of the 99% have a curious status: at once a numeric majority and a counterpublic subordinate to economic and political elites.

To reiterate, I am not arguing that discourse merely reveals a language-independent world. But neither do I accept that discourse alone can construct and sufficiently motivate collective politics. One of the significant benefits of dialectical thought is that it facilitates a more critical understanding of the relation between discourse and the ‘lived’. Consider where Warner finally arrives on the matter.

Public discourse, in the nature of its address, abandons the security of its positive, given audience. It promises to address anybody. It commits itself in principle to the possible participation of any stranger. It therefore puts at risk the concrete world that is its given condition of possibility. ³⁵

Before moving to the final section I want to offer one last insight about the difficulties that emerge from Warner’s insufficient grasp of how publics are constructed and act as sites of our social imaginaries. A sympathetic reading of Warner would run as follows: that we ought to treat his various claims about how publics (and the social imaginary of publics) are constructed as a complex account, one that is modified continually as it develops and demands that readers adapt their own views as each additional claim exposes the provisional qualities of those that came previously. But dialectical modifications are exactly what Warner’s argument lack. Too often he presents his claims as isolated propositions that will stand or fall on their own merits.

Thus, for example, we are confronted with the following two arguments: first, that ‘a public … unites strangers through participation alone, at least in theory. Strangers come into relationship by its means, though the resulting social relationship might be peculiarly indirect and unspecifiable’. ³⁷ Second, ‘a public is constituted through mere attention’. ³⁸ But how exactly do these arguments relate? Is attention itself a form of participation in Warner’s view? Does he think that the best way to oppose a particular public is simply to ignore it, robbing it of attention, rather than to criticize its intentions and actions? Is his approach in fact so pragmatic – in the philosophical sense – that he thinks the reality of a public rests on the degree to which it works, i.e. secures attention?

These questions go unaddressed by Warner, though I think there are reasons to answer each of them in the affirmative. It is no surprise, then, that the pragmatic and instrumentalist aspects of his work produce limited insights. According to his logic, OWS must more or less no longer exist because it now garners so little attention. But such an approach does not ask about why OWS no longer garners the type of attention it did in the autumn of 2011. It is unclear whether Warner’s logic would have anything to say about the media’s agenda-setting function or its attention deficit disorder. Nor is it obvious how Warner would address the state’s orchestrated efforts to eliminate OWS activities altogether. ³⁹ More broadly, what is lost is any dialectical sense of the co-dependent and productive relationship between discourse and the lived, or the antagonisms that animate this relationship.

Bottici on political myths as imaginaries

Just as Warner thinks that publics are constitutive of imaginaries, Chiara Bottici makes the same claim for political myth. Her book A Philosophy of Political Myth offers an important account of a phenomenon that belongs in a discussion of social imaginaries and (counter)publics insofar as myths are an indispensible source of shared social and political significance. But despite the clarity that Bottici offers on a topic with a complex history, an immanent critique of her own arguments reveals them to be fraught with their own inconsistencies. My aim is to show why she is incorrect to jettison ideology critique and how dialectical thought can rescue a critical approach to myth.

Bottici’s attempts to define myth are multiple and overlapping. She begins by presenting myth ‘as the work on a common narrative by which the members of a social group (or society) provide significance to their political experience and deeds’. ⁴⁰ The need for significance is all-important. Myths matter to people, which is why we often greet evidence that challenges the substance of a myth’s significance either with indifference or hostility. It is usually the case that a myth is far from being a factual claim concerning some feature of our world. Indeed, ‘political myths provide fundamental cognitive schemata for mapping the social world: it is by reducing the complexity of social life to the relative simplicity of its narrative plot, that a comprehension of the multifaceted character of experience is possible’. ⁴¹

This understanding of political myth raises the obvious issue of how it is unique analytically when compared to social imaginaries or ideology. Bottici’s observation that ‘political myths are difficult to analyse because they are not only a part of the world that we experience, they are also, and foremost, the lens through which we see this world’, ⁴² seems equally true of social imaginaries. In fact Bottici goes so far as to assert that political myths are a site ‘for the instituting of the social imaginary’ ⁴³ as well as for the possible interrogation of the social imaginary.

It is well worth regarding myths as a source of the kind of specific meaning that animates our daily lives as compared to the more diffuse and intangible ‘background’ described earlier by Taylor. Indeed, Bottici’s capacity to see how myths are more limited and bounded than social imaginaries, and therefore that the former can both support and challenge the latter, is a significant improvement on Taylor. The approach that Bottici advocates is inspired by her reading of Spinoza’s Tractatus, and she follows his argument by claiming that ‘if all societies are, in a sense, imaginary, where they differ is the degree to which this imagination is subject to critical scrutiny’. ⁴⁴

What critical scrutiny does Bottici suggest we bring to political myths? She cautions that we must not judge myth according to its content or its historical accuracy. To do so obscures the importance of how a myth is told and received, along with the significance it is capable of producing. Bottici’s example of state of nature arguments used by social contract theorists is indeed compelling. ⁴⁵ To take just one case, Hobbes had no need to show that a state of nature ever existed, and no need to fear any criticism he might face as a result. His account of the state of nature was compelling simply on the grounds that its portrayal of a savage pre-social life provided political significance: not only a justification of absolute sovereignty, but also a popular distinction between civilized societies and savage ones that further encouraged the existing European vision of the ‘New World’ as radically Other (he actually refers to the ‘savages’ living in America).

Political myths, according to Bottici, share the same status as ‘magical and religious notions’: they are impervious to falsification because their motivational core is based on providing significance, meaning, and a spur to action. Yet the potential for a critical analysis of myths does not vanish even though an empirically-based critique seems out of the question. Bottici outlines her alternative below:

The point is that the way in which the discussion must be carried out is not in relation to their [myths] real or unreal content, but to their appropriateness as a means for acting in the present – the moral of the story that they tell, that is, the values that they purport, on the one hand, and their capacity to create significance in these particular conditions, on the other. ⁴⁶

Bottici’s rejection of the particular conception of ideology allows her to establish clear affinities between political myth and the total conception of ideology (which is then simply referred to as ideology, without any qualifier). In short, ‘political myth and ideology are mapping devices that orient in the social and political world’. ⁵² In addition to their orienting function, both offer clear justifications for individual and collective social action. And yet important distinctions remain possible. By definition political myth takes the form of a narrative that produces significance and an emotional commitment. Bottici cautions that not all ideologies take narrative form (certain manifestations of conservatism, for example), and some may elicit nothing more than emotional indifference from supporters. One can imagine supporting an ideology for pragmatic and emotionally flat reasons, but not a political myth.

It is possible now to grasp fully the limits and pre-critical features of Bottici’s approach to political myth. Bottici’s position that myth cannot be judged according to empirical criteria or its truth value ⁵³ demonstrates an instrumentalist commitment that would look fondly upon Jonathan Swift’s famous assertion that people cannot be reasoned out of a belief that they were not reasoned into. And yet if we simply say that a myth is effective because it gives people significance – that people feel it, and so think and act accordingly – then the concern with how to critique myth becomes hemmed in on all sides. It becomes impossible to know how to counter a particular myth other than by offering a competing one and hoping that it is more persuasive than the last. Bottici’s only ‘critical’ strategy – to judge how effective a myth is as a means to action – is entirely descriptive, nothing more.

These insufficiencies are further confirmed when Bottici’s analysis of existing myths reintroduces the types of critical questions that she had ruled out. For example, take how Bottici casts doubt on Samuel Huntington’s notorious ‘clash of civilizations’ ⁵⁴ thesis. ‘The problem with Huntington’s paradigm’, Bottici claims, is that the metaphors he uses to describe cultural identities conflate the latter with characteristics of the self (e.g. his idea that cultures interact with one another). This conflation is problematic for Bottici because its suggestion that group identities can be just as coherent as self-identity is ‘deceptive’ and supports a ‘hypostatised view of identity’. Furthermore, Bottici writes that the ‘map of reality’ Huntington wishes to draw is ‘misleading, because it suggests the existence of clearcut [cultural] boundaries’ ⁵⁵ where in fact none exist.

In co-authored publications that have appeared before and after A Philosophy of Political Myth, Bottici has avoided making empirical criticisms about Huntington’s work, focusing instead on how Huntington’s narrative is self-sustaining and relies on its own ‘facts’. ⁵⁶ Hence why the example I have cited stands out as so obviously problematic. Bottici’s approach to political myth means that she cannot possibly agree with her own criticisms of Huntington and the clash of civilizations that I quoted above. Bottici passes a negative judgement on this myth according to its congruence with reality (an approach she characterized as useless), when in fact she should have judged it rather favourably according to its ability to provide a narrative that many people find both significant and politically motivating. Following from her concern about why people represent action in the form of myth, we should also like to know whether myth conceals the interests of certain people – yet this too was explicitly ruled out as a line of inquiry. What this reflects is a troubling pre-critical quality of Bottici’s approach to myth: there is an insufficient allowance for how power – in this instance the ability of myth to provoke an emotional response with political motivations – involves misrecognitions and hidden injuries. There is no recognition of how or what myth conceals.

Bottici’s dismissal of ideology in its negative form amounts to an abandonment of the very dialectical mode of inquiry that could reinvigorate her work. This is all the more surprising given that Bottici praises Adorno and Horkheimer’s thesis that reason and myth are not antithetical. ⁵⁷ Instead, under the conditions of the Enlightenment, myth and reason tend to become intertwined, each taking on the characteristics of the other. But this is the stage at which Bottici parts with their argument in a dramatic way: she suspends any critical or negative judgment of myth, contrary to Adorno and Horkheimer’s double indictment of reason and myth that compels them to search for an alternative form of rationality and thinking (hence Adorno’s negative dialectics). It is important to add that, from a dialectical perspective, political myths are simultaneously unique in their content and generic in the way they help to produce our social imaginaries (just as those imaginaries call forth such myths). Indeed, the co-dependence of myths and social imaginaries mirror a dialectical structure of parts and wholes. And this structure is the one I have been insisting upon all along, namely one of dependence, antagonism and production.

The difficulty in Bottici’s case is that the critique of ideology is required to reveal the negative moments that reflect the existence of antagonisms. Otherwise what remains is a positive relationship of dependence and production so that, for example, the clash of civilizations as myth only ever reinforces the political terrain on which American exceptionalism and hegemony rests. How might a negative moment emerge? One way is to point out a counter-factual reality to the Huntington mind-set, such as how intra-civilizational conflicts (civil wars, domestic terrorism) are far more common and destructive than clashes between civilizations.

Yet another way is to consider the public consumption of this myth. The clash of civilizations permits two world-views to operate at once: a unipolar view where the US is the world’s ruling hegemon (thus acknowledging victory in the Cold War), and a bipolar view where the Muslim world in particular is perceived as an inferior yet emerging – and very threatening – competitor. The latter view promotes many of the fears associated with the Soviet Union – fear of an alternative world outlook, of fanatical beliefs both political and non-Christian, of the homeland’s infiltration by the ‘Other’. These fears help to justify continued American militarism, promote its geo-political hegemony, require expansion of homeland security, erode constitutional rights at home and international law abroad, and insist that any Other must be dangerous.

A moment of negative dialectical insight emerges when we realize that American geo-political dominance depends on concealing its reliance on many of the same structuring principles that the West identifies and wishes to overcome in the Muslim world: its tenuous relationship with liberal constitutional principles, its blending of religion and politics, its inconsistency toward international law. In this light the matter is no longer one of problematic civilizations, but of civilization full stop. As Adorno would have put it, the clash of civilizations myth is nothing but a specific moment reflecting the broader trajectory of world history. America’s historical trajectory is thus recast as utterly typical: not one that begins in barbarism and ends in humanitarianism, but one that does begin with the musket and culminates, currently, in drone strikes. ⁵⁸

To give another brief example of how negative moments can emerge – this time from ideological analysis – take the longstanding myth of poverty and its narrative about how, in a society of great affluence, unemployment and financial hardship reflect individual failure. ⁵⁹ Because poverty and unemployment are so easily thought of as an expression of individuals’ personal faults, a host of assumptions about the threadbare moral fibre of the poor are available to explain their condition. Options range from laziness and greed (if they are receiving state assistance) to drug and alcohol addiction. The poor can then be blamed for anything from the deficit to national cultural decline, effects which seem all the more galling when the poor are perceived to be living an easy life without the daily stresses of the workplace. Note, of course, that all these goes back to the imaginaries and moral order described by Taylor.

An alternative account of poverty, and especially the related ill of unemployment, can begin instead with the notion of full employment. Orthodox economists usually consider full employment to be achieved when somewhere between only two and eight percent of a state’s working population lacks work (the number is usually in the middle). Marx followed Engels by identifying this stock of unemployed workers as capitalism’s reserve army of labour, ⁶⁰ which he thought was a natural consequence of wealth accumulation. As accumulation fluctuated, the size of the reserve army would vary in response. Yet he also saw how the existence of the reserve army of labour is constant and therefore ensures that capital will never run out of workers during periods of expansion, but can ‘dispose’ of these workers when they are no longer necessary. Thus, even though each individual may well have specific reasons for why they are unemployed, unemployment itself is structural. Capitalism needs it. At this point the negative moment can scarcely be denied. Moralizing stories about the unemployed serve to disguise that capitalism requires a certain number of people to be out of work. What the reality of ‘full employment’ tells us is that at a certain point, if it were not these people who are unemployed it would have to be others.

This alternative account of unemployment and associated poverty would not, for many people, be as captivating as stories about laziness and addiction. But matters do not end there. Challenging the myth of poverty and unemployment is simultaneously a challenge to the broader social imaginary described by Taylor. The dialectical dependency between individual myths and our social imaginaries acts to produce and reproduce their own conditions of success. Yet this success also depends on the negative moment of antagonism – something we find in all relations of power – remaining hidden. When the critique of ideology articulates structural principles of social life that are disavowed as objects of critical interest – such as the notion of full employment and the reserve army of labour – we can begin to see why society is not organized for the mutual benefit of individuals.

Conclusion

The importance of imaginaries for political theory has increased dramatically in recent years, as the texts discussed above demonstrate. I have shown that the prominent place of imaginaries in the work of Taylor, Warner, and Bottici has not eliminated their reliance on – or need for – ideology critique and dialectical thought. But in each instance the critical impulses we would expect to find with these traditions of thought are compromised by pre-critical and instrumentalist claims. My aim has been to show how ideology critique and dialectical thought can be used in a more critical and radical fashion. As part of that effort I sketched a number of examples that focus on moralism and violence, OWS, the clash of civilizations, unemployment and poverty. The dialectical logic that I pursued is both positive and negative, registering the productive qualities of dialectical relations and the negative moments that populate them, using those moments to articulate a critical vision of society.