#discussion, May 30, 2024
Before making "Matter of imagination" public, two initiators of the project, Anya and Nathalie, met over Zoom to take a glimpse back into the history of the idea, reflect together on challenges and motivations behind the initiative, and just gather some thoughts around the feeling that something new and exciting might start now. With a bit of editing to add background information and transcode the mood of the talk into the text, this introductory post appeared. This is the first part of the conversation.
Navigating between all the words: challenges of working with imaginaries as a lens on internet history
Nathalie: I regularly receive diverse and interesting feedback when I mention my work with imaginairies. Do you have a story or anecdote about receiving feedback on your work with imaginaries or a conversation with somebody that stuck with you?
Anya: There was a surprising moment when I participated in a research workshop at Transmedia this year. Research workshop is a closed event that happens annually at the Transmediale festival. Different researchers, usually early career researchers and PhD students, cowork for three days and create a newspaper together with essays based on their research. When I presented my work, I was surprised how much resonance it received; immediately people started talking about the crisis of imagination. I didn't think about this much at the time but I still want to understand what this idea of crisis means for me and whether (and in what way) I agree with the statement. Maybe I can say that the manifestos that I study prove that it's not a crisis, but there are some ways out. But what was interesting for me here, was to discover the political tone of discussions about the present and our inquiry about Internet history research can be connected in such ways.
Nathalie: Oh, the crisis of imagination sounds very interesting. Yeah, I have l one anecdote that stands out to me. Whenever I I give a presentation at a conference or a school and I use the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, there is mostly always a comment on it. Last time I got the question; why don't you use social imaginary by Robin Mansell? I notice people tend to have different interpretations or ideas about which framework would work best.
Anya: May I ask what your answer was?
Nathalie: I think I hammered down on the fact that I wanted to also study the technical aspects of how the web developed in the Netherlands. Hence why, the concept is social technical imaginaries. However, refraining a bit from this theoretical insensitive, at the end I think you can arrive at similar conclucions using the same concepts.
Anya: I have a feeling that the concept of “social imaginaries” boils down everything – your interest, your worldview, your research ontology – to the idea that what we are studying is society. Which is a very discipline-bound interest, namely sociology. I am personally not agreeing with such a reduction, also because I focus manifestos mainly as texts and digital-material objects, with their semiotics, rhetoric, ordering of meaning and imaginary. Why focus just on society as the main things if it is not methodologically helpful?
Nathalie: I really like how you said this. I think social imaginary also has to do with the concepts of “imagined community” and “imagined nations”. And indeed, I feel like what we are doing is more object-focused as opposed to focused on social groups or spheres. Thank you. I should have said that during that meeting!
Nathalie: *thinking for a moment, laughing*
Nathalie: I can reference our blog post in the future!
Anya: We'll just quote each other in our dissertations.
Nathalie: My theoretical chapter will just be a link to this blog post to exemplify how difficult it can be.
Anya: *trying to gather thoughts*
Anya: I was thinking about this as well when I just started my dissertation, about imagination and the social aspect. When I just started, I had the feeling I was kind of inventing my own lay language, trying to connect “social” and “technical” into one concept related to imaginaries. Then I found out how people talk about it… it is always a bit funny and a bit embarrassing when you think that you are doing something super genius and then you read how people were writing about it for decades.
Anya: But the connection of technical and social is what I find fascinating in general here. Narratives, representations and visions of networks are always about imagining both a certain social order and technologies, they always intervene. You don't just imagine the Internet, but you imagine how the Internet is going to be part of culture, part of society, part of practices. At the same time you imagine what the possible (and maybe new) ways of building and maintaining communities could be or are, in the context of a political life or simply being an individual.
Nathalie: *nods in agreement*
Anya: Another interesting challenge related to concepts and methodologies was brought up during the Critical Data Studies Reading Group; I believe it was about the difference between theories of imaginaries, semiotics, and discourse analysis. I feel that studies of discourse are such a huge and powerful field that we need a good justification as to why a focus on imaginaries is something different (and in what ways). Imaginaries feels like a more narrowed concept than discourse, because with all its branches and methodological interpretations discourse analysis became such a huge, ephemeral thing that every time you refer to it you have to explain very in-detail what you mean by it.
Nathalie: I think it's also interesting if you consider our backgrounds. Knowing you are situated in a German research team I understand your where you are coming from considering the German media studies field and critical theory. My academic education has been quite interdisciplinary in which Media Studies was situated between humanities and social science. If I hear discourse analysis… that's so methodological and thus a way to extract imaginaries from all types of texts. And you just said that you like the concept imaginaries because it's more narrow than discourse, his is very interesting to me. What do you mean?
Anya: Well, to me the concept of “discourse” that was explored by Foucault became this high level theory to analyse how people convey knowledge and “truth” about the world, how it's grounded into certain ways of speaking and power structures. And then within particular disciplines analysis of discourse became a very narrowly methodological tool that is also understood very differently because you have to define what is discourse on the level of your research. That’s why I sometimes feel that you kind of have to produce more explanation than receive help from it.
Nathalie: Oh, I totally agree. It's find the distinction between discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis useful here (although it does require some elaboration of course). And the understanding of discourse as an organisation of power structures and relations, which is related to both. It is already so messy. This is interesting to talk about! And indeed to also see where the concept of the imaginary best fits in various schools and all the spectrums of theories.
Anya: But I also don't fully feel comfortable with the idea that we just say, OK, discourse analysis is all too chaotic, let's just ignore it and instead engage solely with this nice shiny world of imaginaries, hoping the term would help avoid confusion. This is also not maybe the right thing. It would be good to understand what the connection or difference is.
Anya: Returning to your question about challenges. Many people that I know treat studying imaginaries as something that should be addressed practically: through speculative fiction or something that immediately takes action and explores it through experimental methods, and I am sticking for now, at least, to theoretical methods or frameworks, so I always have to think about it like what exactly I'm doing. Who is my audience and in what ways I can make these bridges to other people for whom it can be super interesting. But maybe there is a certain boundary you have to kind of cross. At times this can be a very vague problem for me.
Nathalie: Maybe it's a confirmation bias, but I also feel like I see the method of speculative fiction a lot more recently. Whether in history writing or as a way to translate your research into something more suitable for the popular realm, as a way to gather more social impact. It is easy to see how the realm of imagination works very well here. Yeah, I see that a lot. Wonder whether it is actually gaining more attention across the board, perhaps also because it allows writers to write stories about marginalised groups or present understudied narratives that are not documented historically.
Anya: Well, maybe we can talk to a couple of people who are doing it, for our own interest and for the project to see like how… academics who decide to work with speculative fiction, to what extent it's a personal choice or, I don't know, a person just wants to engage with other types of writing because they feel claustrophobic in a strict academic identity. Or it's more a methodological choice because they feel that there is something there.
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On our favourite text from the reading list
Anya: *reading from our list of questions for this talk*
Anya: Ah, nearly the last one. What's your favourite text from the reading list?
Nathalie: Hmm, I have to think about it for a second. Do you already have one?
Anya: I think you actually know. I'm still very much in love with Mariann van den Boomen’s book "Transcoding the digital". It's a book published by the Institute for Networked Cultures in a series called Theory on Demand. Sometimes it gets pretty nerdy on semiotics, but still very accessible. At some point it was a breakthrough for me to see how van den Boomen connects semiotic and material levels, saying that interfaces are both doing the work of imagination and work as practical tools. An icon on your desktop, and a Word interface will tell you, “this is a document. It's very similar to writing by hand. You just have to type on the buttons of your keyboard”. But of course it is a metaphor. An icon and an interface are simultaneously a sign and a tool; you have this materiality merged with semantical level. And she ends her text with a manifesto, which is very cute.
Nathalie: It's a great book indeed! As for me, I like Patrice's book on the "Internet imaginaire" because I think it's a good case study of what a study on imaginaries actually looks like. Also the article by Natale and Babli “Media and the imaginary in history” helped me a lot with demarcating better what I mean with the imaginary realm in a media history project. Certainly in the field of history, imaginaries are not that common yet but I think it is very necessary.
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On future for the project
Nathalie: I really like your metaphor of the bait (see Pt. 1 of this discussion). I hope through this working group or project or website (however we are calling it) we can meet more people that use the concept or think about it. What can it actually look like methodologically? How are you going to write about it? A bigger network… I guess that's the most I'm looking forward to the most.
Nathalie: *reconsidering her priorities* - And writing cool blog posts.
Anya: For me, I feel that a blog post could be a very good way to formulate some thoughts that takes more time and space for me to figure out, and it's good to have a practice of having concise, brief descriptions of some ideas, or, I don't know, reviews of literature. But of course this I could also just do by myself. Or we could do it also just privately, but doing it as a public project, I would really hope to get some feedback and to engage in discussions because I want people to come and criticise. I want people who come and say OK, but did you consider this and show something they have been doing. The idea of a network of course sounds tempting. Let's see how it develops.
Nathalie: Yeah, I see. I agree. It's also a good way for us to refer back to our own blogs and maybe at the end, I think at the end of our projects and if we keep track of it, we can hopefully see some advancement in in our line of thought. Or maybe we change our mind on stuff, and I think that will be cool to see overtime.
Anya: Yes, for sure. Two years, that's a lot. Would be interesting to see what would happen in general in discussions and in our own understanding of the topic. Maybe we'll start with one idea and at the end we will say that, OK, we actually do need the theory of imaginaries. Or we will find out that the word “Imaginaries” doesn't make sense at all, and instead we come up with 5 alternative terms. That would also be a good result.
Nathalie: Maybe at the end we just completely lost our minds, and it doesn't make sense anymore.
Anya: Some crazy fiction in the blog all the time.
Nathalie: We write our own manifesto.
Anya: Every text in the blog will be a new manifesto.