THE IMAGINARY AND THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF NEW MEDIA

The ‘technological imaginary’, as it is used in critical thought about cinema in the first place (De Lauretis et al. 1980) and now new media technologies, has roots in psychoanalytic theory. In some versions it has been recast in more sociological language and is met as a ‘popular’ or ‘collective’ imagination about technologies (Flichy 1999). Here, tendencies that may have been originally posited (in psychoanalytical theory) as belonging to individuals are also observed to be present at the level of social groups and collectivities.

Certainly, some of the specific charge that the word has in psychoanalytic theory needs to be retained to see its usefulness. The French adjective imaginaire became a noun, a name for a substantive order of experience, the imaginaire, alongside two others the ‘real’ and the ‘symbolic’ – in the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan. After Lacan, imaginaire or the English ‘imaginary’ does not refer, as it does in everyday use, to a kind of poetic mental faculty or the activity of fantasising (Ragland-Sullivan 1992). Rather, in psychoanalytic theory, it refers to a realm of images, representations, ideas and intuitions of fulfilment, of wholeness and completeness that human beings, in their fragmented and incomplete selves, desire to become. These are images of an ‘other’ an other self, another race, gender, or significant other person, another state of being. Technologies are then cast in the role of such an ‘other’.

When applied to technology, or media technologies in particular, the concept of a technological imaginary draws attention to the way that (frequently gendered) dissatisfactions with social reality and desires for a better society are projected onto technologies as capable of delivering a potential realm of completeness. This can seem a very abstract notion.

The discursive construction of new media:

It is essential to realise that a theory does not find its object sitting waiting for it in the world: theories constitute their own objects in the process of their evolution. ‘Water’ is not the same theoretical object in chemistry as it is in hydraulics – an observation which in no way denies that chemists and engineers alike drink, and shower in, the same substance, (Burgin 1982).
Victor Burgin offers this example of the way that the nature of a common object of concern  water –

will be differently understood according to the specific set of concepts which are used to study it.

A key argument of post-structuralist theory is that language does not merely describe a pre-given reality (words are matched to things) but that reality is only known through language (the words or concepts we possess lead us to perceive and conceive the world in their terms). Language, in this sense, can be thought of as operating as microscopes, telescopes and cameras do they produce certain kinds of images of the world; they construct ways of seeing and understanding. Elaborated systems of language (conversations, theories, arguments, descriptions) which are built up or evolved as part of particular social projects (expressing emotion, writing legal contracts, analysing social behaviour, etc.) are called discourses.

BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA

BAPRM III - 42686