The dark side of imagination: abjection and the social imaginary

Abstract

There is a new growing interest in imagination and social imaginaries in sociology. Existing approaches analyze social imaginaries as sets of cultural conceptions that guide human actions and understandings of the world. However, the dismissed, discarded and abjected is barely part of empirical research and theoretical considerations. To address this desideratum, the article introduces the concept of abjection which currently remains unused in sociology. Drawing on the example of the fourth age, the article elaborates how analyzing abjection is a crucial part of systematically reconstructing imaginaries. The article concludes that especially the limits of what we can or want to imagine, the exceptional, excluded and barely tolerable are important for understanding the social imaginary.