Word Watch: Imaginary
“[Marleen] Boschen says that she is ‘particularly interested in ecological imaginaries, sensory and sonic modes of attention to the more-than-human, border ecologies and listening as a practice of care'” – The Art Newspaper, September 2023
There are several difficult ideas in this sentence, which was accorded the honour of appearing in a recent edition of Private Eye’s “Pseuds Corner“. Its origin in an item in The Art Newspaper is not altogether surprising; the whole package is taken from the website of a new member of the staff of the Tate (formerly the Tate Gallery, the national collection of the national school of painting) whose special field is, apparently, art and ecology. So it may be advisable not to enquire too specifically into the purport of any individual terms. It won’t help us much to seek elucidation in Ms Boschen’s “sensory and sonic modes of attention to the more-than-human”: that in itself requires elucidation. But I have noticed the term “imaginary” used as a noun, as it is here, cropping up frequently in various contexts in recent prose.
It has not in the past been a common usage. Indeed, it seems at first sight a totally alien term, and is not cited in any of the major dictionaries. These confine themselves to the adjectival use of the word, as in the phrase “imaginary friend”, referring to the common fantasy of children, and venture into the conceptual only as far as to say that we speak of imaginary quantities such as the square roots of negative numbers. Nothing that seems to be connected with “ecological imaginaries”. So what on earth is an “imaginary”?
As an illustration of the term I can quote another recent piece: “We could speculate about the closeness between [John] Brown and Queen Victoria, the stories of the deathbed repentance of the queen’s chaplain Norman Macleod for having secretly married them, or of the queen being buried holding Brown’s photograph, with a lock of his hair, and wearing his mother’s wedding ring. There is no way of knowing the truth of any of this, but the more brazen use of Brown is as a metonym for the loyal Highlander in the wild Highlands. This is the primary work of [the painter Sir Edwin] Landseer’s commissions and it’s hard to overstate their impact in establishing a lasting cultural imaginary of the region. … These pictures show what the Highlands should look like, whom they should belong to, who should do the work, which species are thought to matter and for whose benefit the land should be managed” – London Review of Books, 16 November 2023.
I’ve quoted this lengthy description because it seems the neatest way of showing how the word “imaginary” works as a noun. It is in fact a whole complex of interrelated ideas, visual, cultural or conceptual, which combine like the details of a representational painting to build up a multi-faceted picture of something that may exist only in the mind. That is not to say that it is a subject only conceived mentally; though a mental process is, it would seem, necessarily involved.
This idea is better conveyed, I think, by translating the word into Latin: “imaginarium” tells us immediately that we’re dealing with a foreign concept, and an abstraction. By chance, the recent issue of another magazine gives us a clear example of this when a contributor speaks of “The twin poles of the modern imaginarium about technology and society” – Spectator, November 2023. A parallel latinism is “imperium”, which Chambers defines as “the area or extent of absolute sovereignty”. This helps to pin down the “-ium” ending as carrying an implication of inclusion, of totality. An “imaginarium”, then, is the whole of what can be known or imagined of the subject in hand. That is, in fact, what the writer of the passage about Queen Victoria is helpfully spelling out there.
I’m afraid we don’t seem any nearer to the “ecological imaginaries” that Ms Boschen began with in setting out her conceptual stall. Going back to those earnestly-listed groups of words – “ecological imaginaries”, “sensory and sonic modes of attention to the more-than-human”, “border ecologies” and “listening as a practice of care,” and giving them “attention” in whatever “modes” we poor mortals can manage, we are compelled to acknowledge that whatever else this is, it is gobbledegook of an order of pretentiousness entirely worthy of its accolade in “Pseuds’ Corner”.
Hardly of interest to the general reader, surely? What might concern the public is the fact that these rarefied thoughts are issued under the banner of a national cultural institution. If the Tate (Gallery) can put its name to this, how shall we take its pronouncements on art in general?