[ecrea] CFP im@go n. 13 > The matter of the imaginary. Objects as symbols of daily life

im@go. A Journal of the Social Imaginary (www.imagojournal.it 
<http://www.imagojournal.it>)
Call for Papers (n. 13): The matter of the imaginary. Objects as symbols 
of daily life
Editors: Fabio La Rocca & Antonio Tramontana

Objects define the boundaries of our daily life. They reveal a constant 
in our anthropological root while building up the fenced area of our 
life. In their being technologically advanced and witnesses of the age 
of globalization, objects seem to play always the same script: they go 
with the gesture, they lead it and they give a preestablished direction 
to the richness of expressions of our body substance (Leroi-Gourhan). 
This is an anthropological issue that is, however, interwoven with the 
generation of social forms if we take into account that objects are as a 
knot of an endless network of exchanges and relations among different 
personalities that meet around the object itself (Simmel). /Sub specie 
aeternitatis/, but also historical matter. Technical and cognitive 
competences find their expressivity in the reign of the objects: a kind 
of general intellect gathering around its substance and that finds also 
ways of opposing the will of its producer and/or user (Marx). Objects 
are not only the crystallization of a gesture, or of a social knowledge. 
Into an object are concentrated desires and hopes, memories and 
feelings, dreams and utopias (Benjamin). Last but not least, objects are 
signs that, in their referring to one another, create a single global 
system that surrounds us daily.

However, objects seem to be more than the mere sum of the parts through 
which they are built. Notwithstanding the multifarious ways of studying 
them, they always keep a certain degree of excess that escapes the world 
of knowledge. It seems that there is an obscure matter next to the 
touched object, to the object that resists, next to the object that 
drives and wraps us, next to the numinous components of the objects and 
next to the existential richness of the object. This obscure matter is 
not possible to get and, still, it does not die. But there is even more 
than this. By rephrasing Durand, it seems that there is a symbolic 
component ontologically and chronologically preceding the materiality of 
the object itself.

In containing substance and symbols, in gathering together convenience 
and dream, in composing the rationality of function and the 
irrationality of desire, objects do stand as melting points of the 
complexity of human beings and they find in daily life the scenario for 
the emergence of those things. When applied to objects, the lens of the 
imaginary may represent the gateway to access the untameable excess of 
substance, a viaticum to access the dark side. When looking at an 
armchair or a car, a gadget or a body prosthesis, a book or a piece of 
cutlery, a glass or a smartphone, in considering each of these objects a 
symbolic image having a materiality, it is possible to get in touch with 
that “universal symbolic language through which we give a shape to 
feeling, images, ideas and actions” (Wunenburger). Objects thus become 
the “matter of the imaginary” and it is with them that we are lead into 
the generative process of social meaning that is determined in daily 
life. In this perspective, objects are energetic entities that push the 
collective behaviour to take on unprecedented shapes: we are gathered 
together or separated on the base of the deep emotive dimension rooted 
in the symbolic component contained in objects. On the other hand, the 
investigation of the ‘removed’ gets harder and harder when it becomes 
less accessible, that is the bigger our exposure to that materiality is, 
the smaller our ability to investigate the invisible qualities of 
objects. The more objects crowd our life, the less we manage to get in 
touch with their imaginary component.

This is our proposal for /im@go /next issue: a journey in the 
exploration of daily daydreams via the study of the invisible order of 
today’s time. A journey into enter the viscerality of things and to 
rediscover the symbolic dimension contained in objects used in our daily 
life.

Proposals may be submitted in Italian, English, and French, and sent 
simultaneously to: (rivistaimago /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(rivistaimago /at/ gmail.com)>; (tramontanaantonio /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(tramontanaantonio /at/ gmail.com)>; (fabio.la-rocca /at/ univ-montp3.fr) 
<mailto:(fabio.la-rocca /at/ univ-montp3.fr)>.

Deadline for the submission of abstracts: *February 10th, 2019*

Notification of abstract acceptance: *February 27th, 2019*

Preliminary papers to the editors: *April 14th, 2019*

Revised peer-reviewed papers to the editors: *June 10th, 2019*

Publication: *June 2019*

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