New Paper:The contribution of Communication Theory to Social Imaginary's Theory

The Contribution of Communication Theory to Social Imaginary's Theory has just been released in ALCEU, vol.18, nº36.

You can read it in here

Abstract

This paper examines the potential contributions that communication theory can offer

to social imaginaries theory stemming from the ambiguity which a communicational

perspective encloses. In fact, we can use communication as empirical study of the imaginary

object. But we can also see communication as an angle of analysis capable of mobilizing a

communicational perspective on the social imaginary.

From this second standpoint, there is the possibility of social imaginaries to assume

communicatively determined forms of symbolic interaction (in a broad sense). Indeed, it is

argued that imaginative activity denotes a communicational dimension. To recognize this

communicative dimension of social imaginaries involves considering the role of publicity

in figuration and re-figuration of the social imaginary; and so we advance the notion of

“public imaginal” as imaginative flux, as a field of imagistic and symbolic proliferation in

which we can observe the routes and paths of social imaginaries in their many processes of

differentiation and consolidation.

Keywords
Social Imaginary. Communication Theory. Imaginal. Publicity Principle.