Page 68 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Circulation 51

are established between the spectator, the tortured, and the persecutor,
making the processes of recognition, misrecognition, and identification even
more heterogeneous.

Circulating imagination

The emphasis in the Latourian approach is on the analysis of different
conditions of circulation, acted out in various relationships established
in connection with numerous actors (spectators, media technology, and
photographic images). Furthermore, these relationships are to be traced
through careful description of associations characterized by visibility and
the ability to leave traces: verbal and written debates around the images,
visual comments such as cartoons on the topic, iconoclastic or political acts
(or both) around them.
But what about the circulation of associations that do not leave visible
or material traces? In other words, how do we grasp the circulation of
associations when they are first and foremost imagined? And even more
important, how should the media analyst make sense of those associations?
Arjun Appadurai offers an interesting insight into a problem of
nonvisible associations by claiming that images are to be considered sites of
imagination:

The image, the imagined, the imaginary – these are all terms that direct us
to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination
as a social practice. No longer mere fantasy (opium for masses whose
real work is elsewhere), no longer simple escape (from a world defined
principally by more concrete purposes and structures), no longer elite
pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary people) and no longer
mere contemplation (irrelevant for new forms of desire and subjectivity),
the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of
work (both in the sense of labor and of culturally organized practice) and
a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally
defined fields of possibility. It is this unleashing of imagination which
links the play of pastiche (in some settings) to the terror and coercion of
states and their competitors. The imagination is now central to all forms
of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new
global order.
(Appadurai 1997: 31; bold face in the original; italics added)

In Appadurai’s interpretation, images can be treated as actors establishing
connections with other actors (e.g., spectators establishing relationships with
the image representations). However, unlike as in Latour, the emphasis in