Iconology and Imagination: Explorations in Sociogenetic Economies

Abstract

This paper is both about human cognition, its origin and development; and about prevailing notions of cognition and rationality, their origin and history. What I shall propose, more speculatively than argumentatively, is that to understand the linkage between these two genetic processes is one way to understand, or to give content to, the concept of sociogenesis. The linkage in question is both reflexive (it involves the relationship between thought, and thought about thought), and productive (it involves processes which make possible new kinds of thought). I shall further propose that the “site,” or “space,” which these linking sociogenetic processes inhabit and populate is what I shall refer to, following Castoriadis (1987), as the social imaginary. My starting point is the observation that the cognitive sciences find themselves today in a situation of crisis. The established, or “classical,” paradigm of cognitivism is under attack on many fronts, ranging from its account of cognitive processing mechanisms, to its underlying “objectivist” philosophy. Cognitivism is (very summarily) the view that human mental processes can be characterized in terms of the manipulation of a set of discrete, arbitrary physical tokens, by a set of explicitly statable algorithmic rules operating upon those tokens. While I do not wish to rehearse here every one of the manifold criticisms of cognitivism that have been advanced in the last decade or so, it is possible to summarize some of their principal features under the following four major themes: I address these issues at length in Sinha (1988); see also, amongst many others, Markova (1982), Bruner (1990), and Plunkett and Sinha (1991).