Objects
define the boundaries of our daily life. They reveal a constant in our
anthropological root while building up the fenced area of our life. In their
being technologically advanced and witnesses of the age of globalization,
objects seem to play always the same script: they go with the gesture, they
lead it and they give a preestablished direction to the richness of expressions
of our body substance (Leroi-Gourhan). This is an anthropological issue that
is, however, interwoven with the generation of social forms if we take into
account that objects are as a knot of an endless network of exchanges and
relations among different personalities that meet around the object itself
(Simmel). Sub specie aeternitatis, but also historical matter. Technical and
cognitive competences find their expressivity in the reign of the objects: a
kind of general intellect gathering around its substance and that finds also
ways of opposing the will of its producer and/or user (Marx). Objects are not
only the crystallization of a gesture, or of a social knowledge. Into an object
are concentrated desires and hopes, memories and feelings, dreams and utopias (Benjamin).
Last but not least, objects are signs that, in their referring to one another,
create a single global system that surrounds us daily.
However,
objects seem to be more than the mere sum of the parts through which they are
built. Notwithstanding the multifarious ways of studying them, they always keep
a certain degree of excess that escapes the world of knowledge. It seems that
there is an obscure matter next to the touched object, to the object that
resists, next to the object that drives and wraps us, next to the numinous
components of the objects and next to the existential richness of the object.
This obscure matter is not possible to get and, still, it does not die. But
there is even more than this. By rephrasing Durand, it seems that there is a
symbolic component ontologically and chronologically preceding the materiality
of the object itself.
In
containing substance and symbols, in gathering together convenience and dream,
in composing the rationality of function and the irrationality of desire,
objects do stand as melting points of the complexity of human beings and they
find in daily life the scenario for the emergence of those things. When applied
to objects, the lens of the imaginary may represent the gateway to access the
untameable excess of substance, a viaticum to access the dark side. When
looking at an armchair or a car, a gadget or a body prosthesis, a book or a
piece of cutlery, a glass or a smartphone, in considering each of these objects
a symbolic image having a materiality, it is possible to get in touch with that
“universal symbolic language through which we give a shape to feeling, images,
ideas and actions” (Wunenburger). Objects thus become the “matter of the
imaginary” and it is with them that we are lead into the generative process of
social meaning that is determined in daily life. In this perspective, objects
are energetic entities that push the collective behaviour to take on
unprecedented shapes: we are gathered together or separated on the base of the
deep emotive dimension rooted in the symbolic component contained in objects.
On the other hand, the investigation of the ‘removed’ gets harder and harder
when it becomes less accessible, that is the bigger our exposure to that
materiality is, the smaller our ability to investigate the invisible qualities
of objects.
The more objects crowd our life, the less we manage to get in touch with their
imaginary component.
This is our
proposal for im@go, a Journal of the Social Imaginary next issue: a journey in
the exploration of daily daydreams via the study of the invisible order of
today’s time. A journey into enter the viscerality of things and to rediscover
the symbolic dimension contained in objects used in our daily life.
Proposals
may be submitted in Italian, English, and French, and sent simultaneously to:
rivistaimago@gmail.com
tramontanaantonio@gmail.com
fabio.la-roccauniv-montp3.fr
Deadline
for the submission of abstracts: February 10th, 2019
Notification
of abstract acceptance: February 27th, 2019
Preliminary
papers to the editors: April 14th, 2019
Revised
peer-reviewed papers to the editors: June 10th, 2019
Publication: June 2019
Editors: Fabio La Rocca & Antonio Tramontana
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