Page - 139 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:2

140 | www.limina-graz.eu Laurens ten Kate | Strange Freedom ship on contemporary ‘visual culture’, the domination of image over text, the impact of media and digitality, etcetera. One aspect of this visual cul- ture is that the ‘visual’ appears as and works as imaginaries. The concept of imaginaries points at the fact that images are more than objects the mod- ern self produces: they are active themselves, they ‘do’ something with us. Our creative act to imagine, to make an image, is always returned by the image: by the image that creates something itself. An imaginary is, in this specific sense, an image that becomes active. The freedom of creation as imagination brings about the image that becomes something the self can- not control. The image is mine – I have created it – but at the same time it escapes me. This is the strangeness of freedom. Taylor (2004; 2007) adopts the theory of social imaginaries, following the research of Benedict Anderson and Cornelius Castoriadis.11 The addition of ‘social’ does not primarily refer to societal factors, but is to be understood on an existential level: as shared imaginaries. Imaginaries are, as active im- ages, best analyzed as spaces: as imagined spaces that become temporary worlds to dwell in. These image-worlds come to the fore, for instance, in the Facebook pages millions of people create, maintain and… inhabit. In media studies, Facebook is often compared to a country, albeit a virtual one: its number of inhabitants exceeds that of China. Social imaginaries are shared, temporary, hybrid and unstable imaginary spaces in which people give sense to their lives, always in contact with oth- ers. They can be spaces of recognition and harmony, but also spaces of con- testation (Castoriadis 1987). The grand ideological systems Camus refers to in 1954, which give sense to the world, have to make way in our time for these countless, finite and contingent spaces of sense and imagination. According to Taylor, if one aims to come to an understanding of the ‘secular age’ and of the ways in which worldview traditions, whether religious or non-religious, transform themselves in infinite imaginaries – if, in my own terms, one aims to un- derstand the condition of sensus liberalis – then the study of social imagi- naries becomes a central task. An imaginary is an image that becomes active. 11 See Benedict Anderson in his Imagined Communities (Anderson 1983), who applies his theorization of social imaginaries to forms of nation-building; and Cornelius Cas- toriadis in his The Imaginary Insti- tution of Society (Castoriadis 1987), who rather views imaginaries as ‘spaces of contestation’ in a political but also cultural-psychological me- aning. Taylor elaborates on his own contribution to the theory in Modern Social Imaginaries (Taylor 2004) and in A Secular Age (Taylor 2007), esp. ch. 4. Social imaginaries are shared, hybrid and unstable imaginary spaces in which people give sense to their lives.