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Imaginary

This note is about the concept of the imaginary, as in "ocean imaginaries", "futures imaginaries". There is literature arguing for more holistic imaginaries that include ecological and indigenous perspectives. Most of this literature still thinks that humans are creating the imaginaries. Imaginaries limit what is attemptable as well as enable new possibilities.

Cf.

Definitions

In the literature, an imaginary is the shared background against which a human collective thinks and acts: "a widespread, if often imperceptible yet multifaceted world-view or framework; a complex of ideas, expectations, presuppositions, implicit assumptions which are by no means beyond articulation or debate, even though they rarely enter everyday discourse."1 Code takes the sense from Castoriadis, for whom an instituted imaginary carries the norms, expectations, prohibitions, and permissions that humans are raised into and then affirm or contest.1 Castoriadis separates instituted society, which holds the settled significations, from instituting society, the activity that keeps making and unmaking them, so an imaginary works as a process as well as a stock.11

Taylor gives a parallel account of human societies, where a social imaginary covers "the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others ... and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations," and where it enables the practices of a society by making sense of them.12

Imagination and imaginary differ in kind. Imagination treats imagination as a capacity distributed across a situated community whose members need not all be human. An imaginary is what that capacity settles into once it is shared, stabilised, and acted on.

The most widely used working definition comes from science and technology studies and concerns human societies: sociotechnical imaginaries are "collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology."2 Three features generalise beyond technology. Imaginaries are "collective, durable, capable of being performed; yet they are also temporally situated and culturally particular." Several coexist in tension. And "legislatures, courts, the media, or other institutions of power" elevate some imagined futures above others.2 Where the object is the future, Beckert calls such pictures fictional expectations, and shows human actors investing, lending, and innovating on the strength of them, so an imaginary helps produce the future it pictures.13

Following Lennon, Grear treats the imaginary as a condition for anything to count as real for humans at all, since for Lennon embodied human subjectivity is "an imaginary embodiment in an imaginary world."16 That rules out opposing the imaginary to the real.3 Whether the same holds for other beings is the question Imagination answers by analogy with umwelten.

An imaginary is also a form of bias, one that influences relationships, processes, and consequences through what its bearers can conceive (see Bias). In the sources the bearers are human collectives. This note extends the bearer to more-than-human collectives, as argued below.

What Imaginaries Do

  • Limit and enable. For humans, in Neimanis's words, "we can only act and respond to a world that we can also imagine."14 An imaginary bounds what its bearers attempt, and a new one opens options the old one hid.
  • Sediment. The influence of early ocean imaginaries "can still be seen in modern societies including in their laws and legal institutions."7 Gatens and Lloyd describe the social imaginary of human societies as enduring through time and becoming "increasingly embedded in all our institutions, our judicial systems, our national narratives, our founding fictions."15 Law then carries it forward, which is how a regime can keep licensing harm while presenting itself as protection. As Reid puts it, "a worldview that denies vulnerability exacerbates vulnerability."4
  • Resist evidence. For its human holders, an imaginary builds a logic of its own that survives demonstrations of its falsity, its contradictions, and its gaps.15 Displacing one takes encounters with alternative configurations that make "both cognitive and affective sense."16 This is the collective form of the problem in Bias, where knowing about a bias does little to remove it.
  • Hold futures the world forbids. To Western law and commerce the ocean long appeared "inexhaustible, as an open space to be freely plundered."5 Steinberg traces the companion construction of the ocean as a void between societies, a surface for transport that calls for no management of its own.17 In the terms of Design Potential (Private), that future sits in the conceived but inadmissible region the note calls fantasy, consuming attention and budget until the world refuses it. Bias describes the same pattern as fabrication.
  • Fix a vantage point. Scaled-up images of the Anthropocene "reinstate a universal human objective observer who is actually merely particular."5 The astronaut's eye view discussed under framing bias in Bias makes the same move.

Extractive and Planetary Imaginaries

International ocean law is the clearest case. The law of the sea "remained tethered to an extractive imaginary," a Holocene picture of the ocean as a stable domain of resource exploitation and jurisdictional demarcation.6 The Convention on the Law of the Sea "effectively locked in an 'extractive imaginary'," so industrial fishing and exploratory seabed mining continue "in the face of demonstrable unsustainability."7 The phrase comes from Ranganathan, who shows how the law of the sea reified an extractive imaginary of the ocean floor that now "shapes the fate of the ocean, and constrains any search for 'solutions' to problems of inequality and environmental harm."18 Reid names the layer beneath: the law of the sea is "still caught in the undertow of Western imaginaries of mastery."4 Following Singh, she treats mastery as too pervasive for any programme to overcome, so the work becomes building alternatives around it.19 Almonte follows the same anthropocentric imaginary from Grotius through the Convention to the recent high seas biodiversity agreement, and argues that it leaves the law of the sea unable to meet a rapidly changing climate.20

Stephens proposes planetary boundaries as the replacement.6 That swaps one imaginary for another, and planetary boundaries carry framing biases of their own (see Bias and Planetary Design). The working question becomes which imaginary to hold and what it leaves out.

Who Makes Imaginaries

Most of this literature assumes that humans author imaginaries, including when it calls for ecological or Indigenous ones. Design methods for fostering more-than-human imaginaries still run through human speculation.8

Calls for ecological and holistic imaginaries, as in nascent human conceptions of ocean justice,7 widen what humans can conceive and so bear directly on the possibility space of Design Potential (Private). Ingersoll works one alternative out from inside a tradition that holds it, in a Kanaka Maoli seascape epistemology where ocean knowledge is embodied and mobile, and where it disrupts the tourist narrative of Hawaiian place as fixed and available.23 Yet ecology is itself a human study of the nonhuman world, so these imaginaries remain biased and limited too. Davies states the general case: humans reach the more-than-human through human filters, which include biological limits of perception and intelligence together with layers of cultural, educational, and linguistic patterning.21

There is evidence for co-authorship. Over the past century, human understandings of beavers shifted twice, from furbearer to habitat maintenance tool and then to ecosystem engineer, while beaver works on the Columbia River kept transgressing property lines and irrigation schemes.9 Houart and colleagues read this as co-production, since beavers keep disrupting "the human imaginaries of how these territories should be ordered and sustained."10 Rieser traces the doctrine of free seas to what Grotius learned from herring merchants while the fish moved its spawning grounds from the Baltic to the North Sea, and she closes with the verdict that the "battle of the books was won by Clupea liberum."22 Alaimo reads this as the herring co-producing the law.5 Fish still cross "the imaginary zones that humans imposed on the oceanic realm."7 And the depletion of the seas itself now counters "prevailing imaginaries of oceanic abundance."5

Davies pushes the bearer further down. On her account law and knowledge emerge from life, since living beings inherit ancestral norms and make new ones as they adapt, and each builds its own umwelt by sensing, processing, and acting.21 Uexküll's claim that there are as many worlds as there are subjects then makes normativity plural across scales, down to the cell that senses, values, remembers, and decides.21 See Bias on bearers and on cognitive light cones. Read this way, the human imaginary is one case of something more general, and the admissible futures of Design Potential (Private) are already occupied by beings holding normative worlds of their own.

On this reading, more-than-human collectives co-produce imaginaries. Humans articulate them without authoring them alone, which fits the distributed account of imagination in Imagination.

Implications for More-than-Human Design

A design brief inherits its human authors' imaginary before it inherits a site. Widening the conceived region described in Design Potential (Private) depends less on more human imagination than on admitting contributions from beings whose living already occupies futures no agent has represented.

Examples in Other Notes

  • Craft, craft imaginaries
  • DIY, speculative fabulation towards more-than-human imaginaries
  • Food and Eel, restaurant imaginaries
  • Plastic, plastic imaginaries

References

Chandler, David, and Julian Reid. Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.

Lobo, Tea. Wildness, Justice, and Aesthetics: Imaginaries of Future Urban Natures. New York: Routledge, 2026.

Notes

Footnotes

  1. Code, Lorraine. Epistemic Responsibility. 1987. Reprint, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020.˄

  2. Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. 1975; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.˄

  3. Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.˄

  4. Jasanoff, Sheila, and Sang-Hyun Kim, eds. Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015.˄

  5. Beckert, Jens. Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.˄

  6. Lennon, Kathleen. “Imaginary Bodies and Worlds.” Inquiry 47, no. 2 (2004): 107–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/00201740410005132.˄

  7. Grear, Anna. “Legal Imaginaries and the Anthropocene: ‘Of’ and ‘For.’” Law and Critique 31, no. 3 (November 2020): 351–66. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-020-09275-7.˄

  8. Neimanis, Astrida. “Alongside the Right to Water, a Posthumanist Feminist Imaginary.” Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 5, no. 1 (2014): 5–24. https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2014.01.01.˄

  9. Techera, Erika J., and Joy McCann. The Unruly Ocean: Law and Justice in the World’s Oceans, Seas, and Shorelines. Abingdon: Routledge, 2025.˄

  10. Gatens, Moira, and Genevieve Lloyd. Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present. London: Routledge, 1999.˄

  11. Reid, Susan. “Ocean Justice: Reckoning with Material Vulnerability.” Cultural Politics 19, no. 1 (2023): 107–27. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-10232516.˄

  12. Alaimo, Stacy. “Afterword: Adequate Imaginaries for Anthropocene Seas.” In Blue Legalities: The Life and Laws of the Sea, edited by Irus Braverman and Elizabeth R. Johnson. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.˄

  13. Steinberg, Philip E. The Social Construction of the Ocean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.˄

  14. Stephens, Tim. “Global Ocean Governance in the Anthropocene: From Extractive Imaginaries to Planetary Boundaries?” Global Policy 13, no. S3 (2022): 76–85. https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.13111.˄

  15. Ranganathan, Surabhi. “Ocean Floor Grab: International Law and the Making of an Extractive Imaginary.” European Journal of International Law 30, no. 2 (2019): 573–600. https://doi.org/10.1093/ejil/chz027.˄

  16. Singh, Julietta. Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.˄

  17. Almonte, Marlene Payva. “Tracing Anthropocentrism in the Ocean Imaginary of the Law of the Sea: An Arctic Perspective.” The Yearbook of Polar Law Online 16, no. 1 (2025): 22–42. https://doi.org/10.1163/22116427_016010003.˄

  18. Nijs, Greg, Giulietta Laki, Rafaella Houlstan, Guillaume Slizewicz, and Thomas Laureyssens. “Fostering More-than-Human Imaginaries: Introducing DIY Speculative Fabulation in Civic HCI.” Proceedings of the 11th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Shaping Experiences, Shaping Society (New York), NordiCHI ’20, 2020, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3419249.3420147.˄

  19. Ingersoll, Karin E. Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.˄

  20. Davies, Margaret. “A Plural Nomos: Law, Life, and Knowledge.” Law and Critique 37, no. 1 (2026): 87–108. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-024-09392-7.˄

  21. Woelfle-Erskine, Cleo, and July Cole. “Transfiguring the Anthropocene: Stochastic Reimaginings of Human-Beaver Worlds.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 2, no. 2 (2015): 297–316. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-2867625.˄

  22. Houart, Carlota, Jaime Hoogesteger, and Rutgerd Boelens. “Power and Politics across Species Boundaries: Towards Multispecies Justice in Riverine Hydrosocial Territories.” Environmental Politics 34, no. 1 (2025): 49–69. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2024.2345561.˄

  23. Rieser, Alison. “Clupea Liberum: Hugo Grotius, Free Seas, and the Political Biology of Herring.” In Blue Legalities, edited by Irus Braverman and Elizabeth R. Johnson, 201–18. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.˄

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