Reflections on the social imaginary and technologies of the body

Abstract

Older and recently introduced technologies of body enhancement and improvement proliferate. The change in social acceptability of these technologies call for a macro-level understanding, in consumer research typically delivered through institutional or assemblage theories underlining the institutional-material embeddedness of these technologies. With a point of departure in Castoriadis’ notion of the social imaginary, we argue that in addition to these dominant material-institutional explanatory frameworks, the contemporary consumption politics of the body must be considered as also firmly anchored in the emergence of an altered social imaginary of the body as a malleable object. We outline the differences between the various approaches and propose a modelization of change in social imaginary significations. It is concluded that technologies of the body represent the ultimate consumer culture imaginary.