In this essay, I explore the social imaginary starting from the imagination of the body. To further the theses about the ‘crisis of the social imaginary’ (Bojana Cvejić and Ana Vujanović, ‘The crisis of the social imaginary and beyond’, in Marie Nerland (ed.) The Imaginary Reader, Bergen: Volt, 2016) I sketch a history of how our prevailing imagination of the body in Western culture has been shaped by capitalism, alongside a history of performing arts which enhance or resist that imagination. Capitalism’s invasion of the human body, starting from the sixteenth century in Europe and its colonies, aimed at bringing about a human being as a work machine. To achieve that, capitalism had to profoundly intervene into how people perceived and experienced their bodies. Among the main philosophical pillars of that intervention are Descartes’ body–mind dualism and Locke’s theses that a person possesses themselves, their body, labour and faculties. The body started to be seen both as a signifier of individual freedom and the individual’s possession. In this imagination, that human body is a filthy animal, driven by passions and appetites, unreliable and lazy. Reason must regulate, educate and rule it, in order to transform it into the engine of an efficient, reproductive, hetero, cis, heathy and responsible machine, which can be voluntarily exploited. That body is a proletarian. It performs the social imaginary whose seed is inside the body. Therefore, overcoming the crisis of social imaginary may start from a return to the body. It requires dismantling the imagination of our bodies, the somatic unlearning of capitalist notions and relations and reclaiming embodied cognition. Here, I have trust in the performing arts – as a realm of radical imagination, where the body dreams of itself as different.
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Feb 6, 2025
Sarah N Garfinkel + 1
Open Access