1

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Sage in the European Journal of

Political Theory on 23 January 2014 (online) and in Volume 13, No. 4, October 2014 (Print),
available online: http://ept.sagepub.com/content/13/4/408.abstract

doi: 10.1177/1474885113519259

John Grant

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
imaginaries5 and religious ones.6 Inquiries into political imaginaries7 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
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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.
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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
 4

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 seventeenth-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
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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 seventeenth 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 centre’.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 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
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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 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
 7

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
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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
Taylor’s main claim to theoretical innovation is to argue that our beliefs and our practices
are co-productive. But from the Marxist position that Taylor invokes, the materiality of ideology
– the notion that our practices only make sense through ideas, which are themselves nothing
without practices – was established over forty years ago by Louis Althusser. 21 The great
limitation of Taylor’s point is that he fails to account for any of the theoretical developments that
have taken place since Althusser’s seminal intervention.
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
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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 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 a very potent life at that’.24 Thus, the fictional
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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
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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
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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
Warner’s argument here approaches the dialectical position I am advocating, which
requires abandoning his earlier claim that discourse is self-creating. On the contrary, discourse
finds itself in a relation of co-dependence with people’s concrete lived conditions. Together,
discourse and the lived are undeniably productive insofar as they can be combined in different
ways to offer competing visions of anything from a single issue to society itself. And yet
discourse and the lived are always in tension with one another, something which a negative
dialectics affirms by refusing to accept that language and the lived could ever be co-extensive.
As Adorno succinctly put it: ‘[O]bjects do not go into their concepts without leaving a
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remainder’.36 The negativity at the core of dialectical thought occurs as part of the play of
meaning, but also, crucially, as part of our experience of material life. The gaps and breaks that
separate discourse from the lived present a world in flux and thereby pose a normative question:
can the conditions and relations that fall outside of and antagonize dominant discourses be
supported any longer? Continuing with the current example, the conditions that are of central
concern to OWS, such as poverty and home foreclosures, corporate crime and wealth inequality,
are exactly those that challenge the dominant discourse of pro-business fundamentalism.
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, 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
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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 analyze because they are not only 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
 15

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 does not say so, but her approach has clear affinities with philosophical
pragmatism, notably William James’s position that what counts as truth has more to do with
expediency than accuracy.47 Shortly I will examine Bottici’s own attempt to critique political
myth, but first it is important to see how she relates myth to ideology and what this holds for
 16

critical thought. Her strategy is to distinguish between a ‘particular’ conception of ideology and
a ‘total’ conception. The first conception is limited, negative and polemical, devoted to
discovering how social existence is distorted or disguised by one means or another. 48 Bottici’s
favourite example is false consciousness, which she takes to be paradigmatic of ideological
analysis that wishes to counterpose what is ideological or false to what is real. By contrast, the
total conception of ideology ‘simply presupposes that there is a correspondence between a given
social situation and a given perspective or point of view’.49 The ‘neutral’ character of the total
conception requires that we do not make ‘any strong ontological assumption over the nature of
the relationship between ideology and the social historical framework’.50 This point about
neutrality is what motivates Bottici to reject the particular conception of ideology, since the latter
wishes to inquire about whether myths conceal political interests or present damaging social
conventions as natural features of life, for example. As I pointed out already, Bottici views such
inquiries as unsuitable from the perspective of a philosophy of political myth, which occupies
itself with the problem of ‘why people needed to represent their action precisely in this way’,51
that is, according to this or that myth.
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 value53 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
 17

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
 18

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
 19

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 this 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 per cent 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’
 20

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, Occupy Wall Street, 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.

1
See Public Culture (2002) 14, no. 1; Charles Taylor (2004) Modern Social Imaginaries.
Durham and London: Duke University Press; and Michael Warner (2002) Publics and
Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books.
2
For example, Cornelius Castoriadis (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society, tr. Kathleen
Blamey. Cambridge: Polity, and Anna Marie Smith (1998) Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical
Democratic Imaginary. London and New York: Routledge.
 21

3
Manfred B. Steger (2008) The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the
French Revolution to the Global War on Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
4
Gyan Prakash and Kevin Kruse (eds) (2008) The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries,
Politics, and Everyday Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
5
Uma Kothari and Rorden Wilkinson (2010) ‘Colonial Imaginaries and Postcolonial
Transformations: exiles, bases, beaches’, Third World Quarterly 31: 1395-1412.
6
Karen Dieleman (2012) Religious imaginaries: the liturgical and poetic practices of Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter. Athens: Ohio University Press. For
references to the ‘cosmic imaginary’ see Charles Taylor (2007) A Secular Age. Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
7
In 2012, the journal Critical Horizons devoted an entire issue (13, no. 1) to political
imaginaries.
8
See John Grant (2011) Dialectics and Contemporary Politics: Critique and Transformation
from Hegel through post-Marxism. London and New York: Routledge.
9
Fredric Jameson’s work contains multiple statements to this end. See Jameson (2009) Valences
of the Dialectic. New York: Verso.
10
Taylor (n.1), p. 4.
11
Ibid. p. 158.
12
Ibid. p. 14.
13
Ibid. p. 32.
14
Ibid. p. 25.
15
Ibid.
16
That is, fully encompassing and without remainder.
17
Taylor (n. 1), p. 24.
18
For a helpful essay, see ‘Moralism and Realpolitik’ in Raymond Geuss (2010) Politics and the
Imagination, pp. 31-42. Princeton: Princeton University Press. See also the recent symposium
revisiting Johan Galtung’s elaboration of ‘structural violence’ in New Political Science (2012)
34, no. 2.
19
Taylor (n. 1), pp. 86, 147.
20
Ibid. p. 183.
21
See ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation’, in Louis
Althusser (2001) Lenin and Philosophy and other essays, tr. Ben Brewster, pp. 85-126. New
York: Monthly Review Press.
22
On this point see Wendy Brown (2006) Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity
and Empire. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
23
Taylor (n. 1), p. 2 and chapter 6. See Michael Warner (1990) Letters of the Republic.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
24
Warner (n. 1), p. 8.
25
Ibid. p. 12. Italics added.
 22

26
Benedict Anderson (2006) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, revised edition, p. 36. London and New York: Verso.
27
Warner (n. 1), p. 12.
28
Ibid. pp. 11-12.
29
Ibid. p. 67.
30
Ibid. pp. 55-6.
31
Ibid. p. 66.
32
Ibid. p. 106.
33
On this point see Henri Lefebvre’s (2002) excellent Critique of Everyday Life, Volume II, tr.
John Moore, pp. 165-6. London and New York: Verso.
34
From the growing literature on this topic, see in particular Jeffrey A. Winters and Benjamin I.
Page (2009) ‘Oligarchy in the United States?’Perspectives on Politics 7: 731-51.
35
Warner (n. 1), p. 113.
36
Theodor W. Adorno (1969) Negative Dialectics, tr. E.B. Ashton, p. 5. New York: Continuum.
37
Warner (n. 1), p. 75.
38
Ibid. p. 87.
39
Naomi Wolf has published a series of newspaper articles documenting the concerted efforts of
various state agencies to undermine OWS and especially its physical presence in parks, marching
on streets, etc. See in particular ‘Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on occupy’,
Guardian, 29 December 2012, accessed 10 May 2013,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy
40
Chiara Bottici (2007) A Philosophy of Political Myth, p. 14. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
41
Ibid. p. 179.
42
Ibid. p. 225.
43
Ibid.
44
Ibid. pp. 170-1.
45
Ibid. pp. 139-41.
46
Ibid. p. 184.
47
William James (1975) Pragmatism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
48
Bottici (n. 40), pp. 188-92.
49
Ibid. p. 192.
50
Ibid. p. 193.
51
Ibid. p. 192.
52
Ibid. p. 196.
53
I use ‘truth value’ here to signify that any myth – like any work of art – can be judged
according to its own immanent logic as well as in its relation to the existing socio-historical
totality.
54
Samuel Huntington (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New
York: Simon and Schuster.
 23

55
Bottici (n. 40), pp. 244-45.
56
See Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand (2006) ‘Rethinking Political Myth: The Clash of
Civilizations as Self-Fulfilling Prophecy’, European Journal of Social Theory 9: 315-36, and
Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand (2010) The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations. New York:
Routledge.
57
Bottici (n. 40), pp. 69-70. And also see the chapter ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’ in
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1997) Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr. John Cumming.
London: Verso. Bottici’s more recent work has also attempted to address political myth from a
Frankfurt School-style perspective, but in fact says very little in this regard. See Chiara Bottici
and Angela Kühner (2012) ‘Between Psychoanalysis and Political Philosophy: Towards a
Critical Theory of Political Myth’, Critical Horizons 13: 94-112.
58
Adorno (n. 36), p. 320.
59
For a good account of the myth of poverty that is also cited by Bottici, see W.L. Bennett
(1980) ‘Myth, Ritual, and Political Control’, Journal of Communication 30: 166-79.
60
Karl Marx (1906) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, tr. from third German edition by
Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. New York: The Modern Library, Chapter 25, Section 3:
‘Progressive Production of a Relative Surplus-Population, or Industrial Reserve Army’.