Imagination in Human and Cultural Development

Tania Zittoun, Alex Gillespie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781135103194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

This book positions imagination as a central concept which increases the understanding of daily life, personal life choices, and the way in which culture and society changes. Case studies from micro instances of reverie and daydreaming, to utopian projects, are included and analysed. The theoretical focus is on imagination as a force free from immediate constraints, forming the basis of our individual and collective agency.

In each chapter, the authors review and integrate a wide range of classic and contemporary literature culminating in the proposal of a sociocultural model of imagination. The book takes into account the triggers of imagination, the content of imagination, and the outcomes of imagination. At the heart of the model is the interplay between the individual and culture; an exploration of how the imagination, as something very personal and subjective, grows out of our shared culture, and how our shared culture can be transformed by acts of imagination.

Imagination in Human and Cultural Development offers new perspectives on the study of psychological learning, change, innovation and creativity throughout the lifespan. The book will appeal to academics and scholars in the fields of psychology and the social sciences, especially those with an interest in development, social change, cultural psychology, imagination and creativity.

1 Imagination

A sociocultural approach

DOI: 10.4324/9780203073360-1

I’d like to become a journalist, a reporter, actually. I would like to go for adventures. And at the same time to be able to write, because I like it very much [. . .] I like to write very much [pause] Oh, I have a diary, I make up stories and I write poetry as well.

(A young girl’s potential future, Switzerland, 2000s; Bakhti, 2010)

There will be a wall unit here, this is where we’ll sleep. Here, we’ll have a sitting area with a coffee table, some shelves under the window and a drawing desk so Ivana won’t have to use the table.

(Refurbishing a flat, Czechoslovakia, 1980s; Třeštíkova, 2009)

I send you from my garden what I would I could (sic) press upon your lips and feel in your heart – “burning love”. But alas all the fire in me will be extinguished before I can see your dear face.

(Imagined adultery, England, 1832; Hamburger & Hamburger, 1991, p. 141)

Located in three places in Europe, in three different centuries, these three quotations might seem disconnected: one is a young woman talking about her future, the next is a young couple describing how they will refurbish an old flat, and finally a Victorian wife longing for her imaginary lover. However, they each reveal the dynamics of imagination. In each case, the speaker temporarily leaves their here-and-now. The mundane is transcended: the teenager’s room, the dilapidated flat and the unhappy marriage are each supplanted with images ripe with potential, namely, an adventurous adult life, a remodeled flat, and a passionate love. In each case the imagination “loops out” of the social and material reality, to generate a future or parallel reality. Such disengagement with reality is not indicative of psychopathology, it is not “mere” imagination; in each case the imagination “loops back” with consequences. Rachel went to school and became a librarian, Vaclav engaged with the practicalities of renovation, and the adulterous letter writer remained with her husband. Mundane reality can thus be transformed by this looping, with new possibilities and motivations inhabiting the present. Imagination in Human and Cultural Development will examine the imagination in terms of this looping metaphor.

Imagination, we propose, is the process of creating experiences that escape the immediate setting, which allow exploring the past or future, present possibilities or even impossibilities. Imagination feeds on a wide range of experiences people have of, or through the cultural world, through diverse senses, now combined, organized and integrated in new forms. Imagination can either be more or less deliberate; it can be enjoyed in itself (such as in a daydream) or be part of a more deliberative process of creation. Imagination is a process, in the sense that it only exists in the making, which we call a looping dynamic. In other words, we are not interested in an abstract capability for imagination that exists independently of the real-time process of imagining, or in the stable outputs of imagination sometimes called “the imaginary”. Imagination, we maintain, is a social and cultural process, because, although it is always individuals who imagine, the process of imagination is made possible by social and cultural artefacts, it can be socially allowed or constrained, and because the consequences of imagination can be significant changes in the social world.

In the present chapter we will introduce our sociocultural approach to the imagination. We begin by outlining the sociocultural approach, specifying the assumptions, and showing how we use this approach to conceptualize the imagination. This chapter provides the theoretical backdrop for our more detailed examination of imagination that occurs in Chapter 2 and especially the theoretical model of imagination that we propose in Chapter 3.

Sociocultural or cultural psychology is the field of research that examines the mind as social, cultural and historical (Boesch, 1991; Bruner, 2003; Cole, 2007; Valsiner, 2014 a). This approach considers not only social and cultural phenomena in themselves, but also how people uniquely experience these phenomena. Thus, sociocultural psychology studies how people relate to other people, social situations, material spaces, social norms, institutions, discourses, and shared myths. Sociocultural psychology is a dialogical approach to human life because it considers that any human action, from dreaming to building a house, is already and always part of social relations or an internalized dynamic which connects these activities to other people, institutions, and our own collective history (Linell, 2009; Marková, 2003, 2006). Each action within the sociocultural environment is, in this sense, part of the individual’s dialogue with their sociocultural environment. While there is a huge amount that has been written about this approach, we want to highlight just a few aspects.

Philosophical assumptions

Psychology, despite often construing itself as an empirical breakaway from philosophy, has always been, and remains, dependent upon philosophical assumptions. In order to avoid making implicit common sense assumptions about ontology (i.e., what is assumed to exist) or epistemology (i.e., how we come to know what we assume to exist) we will briefly make explicit the main assumptions, or axioms (Danziger, 2008; Valsiner, 2012), upon which our present enquiry is dependent.

Our approach is pragmatist, relational and perspectival (Mead, 1932). The starting point is human experience, such as, sensations, actions, interactions, dialogue, internalized dialogue and the experience of otherness and being changed through interactions with other people and things. The existence of human experience allows us to posit the necessary conditions for such experience, and in this regard we consider the following terms useful: matter, time, society and culture. These conditions of human experience lie, in an ultimate sense (if that is even possible), beyond human experience; in (Kant’s 1781) terminology they are “noumena” which only come into our experience as “phenomena”. If there is anything beyond human experience, which does not mediate human activity in some way, then, by virtue of being completely inconsequential, it is not worth debating (Peirce, 1878).

However, that which does intrude into human experience, which has consequences for our human interests, is worth debating and understanding. Human’s foundational concepts are ways of trying to understand these intrusions – to understand that which resists people’s desires and impinges upon their expectations. Concepts such as matter, time, society and culture are useful in conceptualizing human experience because these are elements of experience that cannot be “wished away” or even ignored. These phenomena intrude upon human experience, creating ruptures, motivating the meaning making process. This meaning making process, whether common sense or science, is an attempt to stabilize these intrusions, to make them predictable, and even to master them such that we can fulfil our human interests. This enterprise of sense making is usually a social process. Thus our approach gives primacy to human interests, to human action, social interaction and sense-making (Dewey, 1896; Mead, 1910) whilst simultaneously recognizing that these are constrained and enabled by things beyond sense-making itself (i.e., a resistant material world, other people, culture, etc.). Indeed, it is this “beyond” that is the precondition of our sense making, motivating it and being the topic of it. Human life and the human mind is a constant adjustment of desires, expectations and ideas to intrusions from materiality or the social world. This process of adjustment is never complete, and our conceptualization of these constraints is always open to a new constraint and refutation.

Theoretical assumptions

Interactions and experiences are the basic elements of our ontology and also our main routes to knowledge. But this ontology must be further developed into a series of theoretical assumptions, for if we have experiences and interactions, we need to assume people experiencing, other people and things to be experienced and so on. Theoretical assumptions are both necessary and useful. It is impossible to begin to understand anything without making assumptions, and, simultaneously, making assumptions is the beginning of understanding. The following assumptions that we make will form the building blocks of our exploration of imagination, and making these assumptions begins to open up the phenomena, suggesting useful lines of investigation.

Individual experience

As psychologists, we have an epistemic and ethical commitment to examine the person’s experience of the world. Each person traces a unique trajectory of experiences through space and time; as a consequence, each encounter with the world results in an even more unique trajectory of cumulating experiences (Lévinas, 1972; Marková, 2006, 2013 a; Winnicott, 1990). Also, we consider that the person is more than a “cognitive being”. People have, first of all, an embodied experience, they live and feel and perceive the world as a body. As feeling experiencing beings, people remember, anticipate, dream, fantasize, hope and regret. Hence, each person is a radically specific source of experience on the world; he or she perceives, feels, remembers, anticipates and imagines in a unique way.

Interactions

As sociocultural psychologists, we recognize that people are rarely alone and, moreover, they become individuals in relation to one another; we are not interested in a solipsist being. Rather, experiences, within this ontology of interaction, are produced by a unique interaction of our living bodies with our cultural and social environment (James, 1912). We interact with other people, and with objects, in specific times and spaces (Gillespie, 2006; Grossen & Salazar Orvig, 2011; Moscovici, 2003; Perret-Clermont, 1993). These have all properties – material affordances and social meaning for things, unique intentions and social positions for people, and social guidance that frame situations.

Temporality

Experience is temporal. We experience the world as changing, every experience is in contrast to a before and after. As individuals and groups we orient ourselves in time using cultural tools to record, mark and demarcate time (Wyndhamn & Säljö, 1999). In the physical and social world, time therefore appears irreversible; experiences have roots and consequences, things done cannot be undone, people grow older and not younger. However, our minds allow us to navigate time, to reminisce about the past or imagine possible futures, and our subjective experience of slowness or trepidation differs from the regularity of our clocks – and sociocultural psychology has to account for these two streams of temporality. The temporal nature of experience has long philosophical roots, and also has been developed by psychologists. Henri Bergson importantly differentiated between time as it passes and can be measured, and time as it can be experienced, and has a very different organization (Bergson, 1938). William James (1890) proposed the idea that human consciousness flows as a river, never stopping, made out of many streams and waves, some coming to the fore, some deeper, some quick and evanescent, some more enduring. Sociocultural psychologists have reinstalled irreversible time as central in developmental studies (Valsiner, Molenaar, Lyra, & Chaudhary, 2009; Zittoun et al., 2013); however, the idea that experienced time can actually go back to the past, or live with the memory of unlived lives (Phillips, 2013), has not yet been fully explored.

Semiotic processes

Drawing on Peirce, sociocultural psychology assumes that we can make sense of our experience because it leaves some traces in our experience, and that we learn to use these traces as signs for something else (Peirce, 1878; Salvatore & Zittoun, 2011; Valsiner, 1998, 2007 b). Our semiotic capacity is the basic way by which the world we experience becomes intelligible to us – we recognize an apple because we have some memory of a former experience of eating an apple, now encapsulated in the idea of appleness, which turns that apple into a sign for all apples. The process by which the experiential trace of the apple becomes a sign, which can be used to invoke the experience in self or other, is necessarily a social process; it arises through the triadic interaction between self, other and object (Zittoun, Gillespie, Cornish, & Psaltis, 2007).

This semiotic capacity is also what allows the social and cultural world out there to guide our very being-in-the world and turn into a psychological experience. Also, our semiotic capacity is what allows us to differentiate the ongoing flow of time: it creates beacons on the river of experience (Zittoun, 2008 b). The dynamics of internalization allows us, like breathing, to absorb and select social meanings, appropriate and elaborate them; and through externalization (i.e., words, ways of moving, dress, artistic or literary productions etc.) we render visible part of our inner experience and we participate to the endless dance of social interactions (Tisseron, 2013; Valsiner, 2006, 2007 a; Vygotsky, 1975).

Semiotic processes allow us to conceptualize our embodied experience in the here and now, and thus to distance ourselves from it. Consider a person who experiences some discomfort in her foot: she might realize that that diffuse experience of heaviness and discomfort is typical of coldness; she might the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Series Editor’s foreword
• Preface
• 1 Imagination: a sociocultural approach
• 2 The centrality of imagination to everyday life
• 3 The loop of imagination
• 4 Resources for imagination
• 5 Imagination in situated activities
• 6 Imagination in the lifecourse
• 7 Imagination in societal change
• 8 Imagination as freedom
• References
• Author index
• Subject index