In developing its approach to complexity reduction through meaning- making, CPE deploys the notion of the ‘imaginary’. This can be consid-ered as equivalent to the notion of the semantic as a ‘master’ set of signs (signifier, signified, signatum). Our adoption of this term is inspired by French use of l’imaginaire to designate an imaginary relation to the real world or, alternatively, lived experience; but we also pay more attention than much French work to the material dimensions of this imaginary relation and its implications for lived experience.
Between Scylla and Charybdis 165 Semiosis and the imaginary are closely related but not identical, and
this is reflected in their place within CPE. First, whereas semiosis is a generic term for the social production of intersubjective meaning and can be studied productively with the tools of semiotic analysis (especially, for CPE, those of critical discourse analysis), the ‘imaginary’ not only refers to semiosis but also to its material supports, and this requires a broader toolkit. Imaginaries are semiotic systems that frame individual subjects’
lived experience of an inordinately complex world and/or inform collec-tive calculation about that world. Second, whereas semiosis can be studied without asking how some construals come to construct the real world, a key issue concerning imaginaries is their differential performance in durably shaping that world. This is why CPE explores selection and reten-tion not only in terms of discursive selectivity (semiotic mechanisms) but also in terms of structural, technological and agential selectivities. This broader set of questions also bears on the CPE commitment to the critique of domination and Ideologiekritik.
An imaginary is a semiotic ensemble (or meaning system) without tightly defined boundaries that frames individual subjects’ lived experi-ence of an inordinately complex world and/or guides collective calculation about that world. Without imaginaries, individuals cannot ‘go on’ in the world and collective actors (such as organizations) could not relate to their environments, make decisions, or engage in strategic action. In this sense, imaginaries are an important semiotic moment of the network of social practices in a given social field, institutional order, or wider social forma-tion (Fairclough 2003). Imaginaries are not pre- given mental categories but creative products of semiotic and material practices with more or less performative power. This is why they have a central role in the struggle not only for ‘hearts and minds’ but also for the reproduction or transfor-mation of the prevailing structures of exploitation and domination. An imaginary provides one entry- point (among many others) into a super-complex reality and can be associated with different standpoints, which frame and contain debates, policy discussions and conflicts over particular ideal and material interests. There are many kinds of imaginaries and most are loosely bounded and have links to other imaginaries within the broad field of semiotic practices. Indeed, social forces typically operate in different contexts with different imaginaries reflecting different logics of appropriateness.
Imaginaries exist at different sites and scales of action – from individual agents to world society (Althusser 1971; Taylor 2004). Social forces will therefore seek to establish one or another imaginary as the hegemonic or dominant ‘frame’ in particular contexts and/or to develop complementary sub- hegemonic imaginaries or, again, counter- hegemonic imaginaries that
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motivate and mobilize resistance. Hegemonic and dominant imaginaries are generally socially instituted and socially embedded, and get repro-duced through various mechanisms that help to maintain their cognitive and normative hold on the social agents involved in the field(s) that they map. Such ‘mental maps’ or ‘mental models’ matter most where the sum of activities in relevant field(s) is so unstructured and complex that it cannot be an object of effective calculation, management, governance or guidance. However, while a shared imaginary assists agents to ‘go on’ in that supercomplex world, the necessary simplifications can prove counter- productive.
We now illustrate and elaborate some of these points from the case of economic imaginaries. This reflects our interest in the critique of politi-cal economy rather than an assumption that economic imaginaries are somehow inherently more important than other kinds. As our previous discussion notes, there are as many imaginaries as there are entry- points and standpoints for sense- and meaning- making. In other contexts politi-cal imaginaries, state projects, spatial imaginaries, hegemonic visions, and so on might be more appropriate starting points.
In terms of what orthodox economics misleadingly describes as the macro- level, CPE distinguishes the ‘actually existing economy’ as the chaotic sum of all economic activities (broadly defined as concerned with the social appropriation and transformation of nature for the purposes of material provisioning)6 from the ‘economy’ (or, better, ‘economies’
in the plural) as an imaginatively narrated, more or less coherent subset of these activities occurring within specific spatio- temporal frameworks.
The totality of economic activities is so unstructured and complex that it cannot be an object of effective calculation, management, governance or guidance. Instead such practices are always oriented to subsets of economic relations (economic systems, subsystems or ensembles) that have been semiotically and, perhaps organizationally and institutionally, fixed as appropriate objects of intervention. Economic imaginaries have a crucial constitutive role in this regard. They identify, privilege and seek to stabilize some economic activities from the totality of economic relations and transform them into objects of observation, calculation and govern-ance. Technologies of economic governance, operating sometimes more semiotically, sometimes more materially,7 constitute their own objects of governance rather than emerging in order to, or operating with the effect that, they govern already pre- constituted objects (Jessop 1990, 1997b).
Nonetheless, because they are always selectively defined, what is excluded limits the efficacy of economic forecasting, management, planning, guid-ance, governance and so on because such practices do not (indeed, cannot) take account of excluded elements and their impact.
Between Scylla and Charybdis 167 Economic imaginaries also exist at the so- called meso- or micro- level.
Here they develop as economic, political and intellectual forces seek to (re)define specific subsets of economic activities as subjects, sites and stakes of competition and/or as objects of regulation and to articulate strategies, projects and visions oriented to them. The forces involved in such efforts include parties, think tanks, bodies such as the OECD and the World Bank, organized interests like business associations and trade unions, and social movements; the mass media are also crucial intermedi-aries in mobilizing elite and/or popular support behind competing imagi-naries.8 These forces tend to manipulate power and knowledge to secure recognition of the boundaries, geometries, temporalities, typical economic agents, tendencies and counter- tendencies, distinctive overall dynamic and reproduction requirements of different imagined economies. They also seek to develop new structural and organizational forms that will help to institutionalize these boundaries, geometries and temporalities in an appropriate spatio- temporal fix that can displace and/or defer capital’s inherent contradictions and crisis tendencies. However, due to compet-ing economic imaginaries, competcompet-ing efforts to institute them materially, and an inevitable incompleteness in specifying their respective economic and extra- economic preconditions, each ‘imagined economy’ is only ever partially constituted. There are always interstitial, residual, marginal, irrelevant, recalcitrant and plain contradictory elements that escape any attempt to identify, govern and stabilize a given ‘economic arrangement’
or broader ‘economic order’. These provide major sources of resistance and help preserve a reservoir of semiotic and material resources that enables dominant systems (through the agency of associated social forces) to adapt to new challenges through their rearticulation and recombination in the service of power.
Relatively successful economic imaginaries presuppose a substratum of substantive economic relations and instrumentalities as their elements.
Conversely, where an imaginary gets operationalized and institutional-ized, it transforms and naturalizes these elements and instrumentalities into the moments of a specific economy with specific emergent proper-ties. This is depicted in Figure 11.1 as the movement from (re)politi-cized discourse and unstructured complexity to sedimented discourse and structured complexity. This process is mediated by the interaction among specific economic imaginaries, appropriately supportive economic agents – individual or collective – with appropriate modes of calculation and behavioural or operational dispositions, specific technologies that sustain and confirm these imaginaries (e.g. statistics, indexes, benchmarks, records), and structural constellations that limit the pursuit of contrary or antagonistic imaginaries, activities or technologies.
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When an imaginary has been operationalized and institutionalized, it transforms and naturalizes these elements into the moments of a spe-cific, instituted economy with specific emergent properties. An instituted economy comprises subsets of economic relations that have been organi-zationally and institutionally fixed as appropriate objects of observation, calculation, management, governance or guidance. This process of institu-tion (or structurainstitu-tion) sets limits to compossible combinainstitu-tions of social relations and thereby renders them more predictable and manageable as objects of social action.