Um contributo da Teoria da Comunicação para a Teoria dos Imaginários Sociais

Abstract

This paper examines the potential contributions that communication theory can offer to social imaginaries theory stemming from the ambiguity which a communicational perspective encloses. In fact, we can use communication as empirical study of the imaginary object. But we can also see communication as an angle of analysis capable of mobilizing a ommunicational perspective on the social imaginary. From this second standpoint, there is the possibility of social imaginaries to assume communicatively determined forms of symbolic interaction (in a broad sense). Indeed, it is argued that imaginative activity denotes a communicational dimension. To recognize this communicative dimension of social imaginaries involves considering the role of publicity in figuration and re-figuration of the social imaginary; and so we advance the notion of “public imaginal” as imaginative flux, as a field of imagistic and symbolic proliferation in which we can observe the routes and paths of social imaginaries in their many processes of differentiation and consolidation.