These deep-seated modes of understanding provide largely pre-reflexive parameters within which people imagine their social existence—expressed, for example, in conceptions of 'the global', 'the national', 'the moral order of our time'.
[a][5]: xxi Lacan also drew on the way "Melanie Klein pushes back the limits within which we can see the subjective function of identification operate",[7] in her work on phantasy – something extended by her followers to the analysis of how "we are all prone to be drawn into social phantasy systems ... the experience of being in a particular set of human collectivities".
[8] "While it is only in the early years of childhood that human beings live entirely in the Imaginary, it remains distinctly present throughout the life of the individual".
"The term 'imaginary' is obviously cognate with 'fictive' but in its Lacanian sense it is not simply synonymous with fictional or unreal; on the contrary, imaginary identifications can have very real effects".
[3]: 12–13 In 1995 George E. Marcus edited a book with the title Technoscientific Imaginaries which ethnographically explored contemporary science and technology.
[citation needed] While the Lacanian imaginary is only indirectly invoked, the interplay between emotion and reason, desire, the symbolic order, and the real are repeatedly probed.
Crucial to the technical side of these imaginaries are the visual, statistical, and other representational modes of imaging that have both facilitated scientific developments and sometimes misdirected a sense of objectivity and certitude.
Other scholars have loosened the state-based aspect of Jasanoff and Kim's definition to include any and all 'future-oriented visions of connected social and technological orders'.
[18] Examples include the ways in which different people and groups imagined the potential exploitation of the ocean's resources during the Cold War.
[22][23] A recent research project led by a team from the Université Grenoble Alpes offers to develop the concept of the imaginary and an understanding of how it functions when faced with serial works of art.
Based on the work of Taylor, the imaginary is understood as a category of understanding social praxis and the reasons designers give to make sense of these practices.