What, then, is a scientific imaginary?  In order to define precisely the expression, it would be useful to consider each of its terms separately.  I will initially focus on the later term, imaginary, and then incorporate into the discussion a working definition of science, insomuch as it would qualify an imaginary and also, as it pertains specifically to string theory.  I want to stress at the outset that these two terms are mutually informing.  As such, it will be necessary to elucidate the one in terms of the other.

            I am adapting the expression from Michèle Le Doeuff.  In her work, The Philosophical Imaginary, Le Doeuff describes a fundamental dichotomy in philosophical discourse, one that privileges the formalist concept over the rhetorical image.  She argues that philosophical discourse traditionally views the image as superfluous and attributes it to one of two sources, to ‘infantile or primitive thought’ or to ‘adaptation’ for ‘didactic’ purposes:

Let us stress once more that imagery and knowledge form, dialectically, a common system.  Between these two terms there is a play of feedbacks which maintains the particular regime of the discursive formation.  Philosophical texts offer images through which subjectivity can be structured and given a marking which is that of the corporate body.[12]

In her reading, images are didactic, primitive, or fanciful.  They are associated with subjectivity, affect, and the ‘corporate body’.  The concept, on the other hand, possesses an epistemologically ‘pure’ truth value; it is objective, and thus free of affect.  Philosophical discourse conscripts the image to ground (surreptitiously, Le Doeuff suggests) its claims of objectivity to the subjective body through structured affect.[13]  By situating image adjacent to concept, philosophical discourse betrays a certain dynamic tension between the two, where image problematises concept while ostensibly adumbrating it for didactic or ludic purposes.  Le Doeuff sees the accumulation of imagery within a philosophical text as forming a whole, a whole that both exhibits its own internal structure, while also relating to the conceptual content of the text through juxtaposition:

Images generally need to be decoded before one can relate their meaning to the thought made explicit in the text, in order afterwards to reintroduce into the discourse the question which the image both resolves and helps to evade.  But this reinsertion allows the hypothesis of a converse: if the images of philosophical texts are so functional, so organic in their very dysfunctionality, might we not guess that they are made to measure, that there is not just an imaginary in philosophy but a properly philosophical imaginary, whose specificity might be determined by a combination of a traditionally textual approach and a sociological one?[14]

In keeping with Le Doeuff’s formulation, I will define an imaginary as a complex of images.  By complex, I mean an arrangement with a structure where the internal relationships between the images exhibit an intricacy that both allows for a freedom of signification among the images, while simultaneously imposing certain constraints on that freedom.  In this sense, an imaginary is a space of possibility, probability, and impossibility.  An imaginary’s structure implies a certain logic of organization whereby some images are central, others peripheral, and their placement and patterns of interaction display certain regularities.

            It is worth noting here that Le Doeuff is addressing an Enlightenment philosophical tradition whose careful sorting of concept from image is very much in keeping with the kind of purification that logical positivism, the dominant school of thought concerning the philosophical status of science, insists upon.  Logical positivism, and its successor, scientific realism, are relevant to this study of string theory in that physicists, in general, subscribe to its fundamental positions.  This will become more apparent in the following two chapters when we examine in detail instances in technical discourse and, subsequently, popularizations, where the authors make a point of expressing their opinions on the status of string theory with respect to an objective world.  It is, in effect, a rather small leap to speak of a scientific imaginary, in the positivist tradition, in a manner consistent with Le Doeuff’s critique of Enlightenment philosophy.  I will return to the status of string theory as a science as it relates to the idea of a scientific imaginary in the following section.

            But here I would like to continue to focus on the idea of an imaginary.  In the kind of philosophy that concerns Le Doeuff, imagination contrasts with the real: it is a fanciful or fantastic place of possibility freed categorically from the limiting constraints imposed by reality.  The imaginary, that which the faculty of the imagination produces, is thus understood as a place of pure novelty; it is immaterial, and as such, utterly unmoored from the objective world.  Within the imaginary, the images that constitute it function as what Gaston Bachelard calls, playing off the word’s etymology, an ‘idealized double’.[15]  Like the positivists, Bachelard is interested in isolating the imaginative component from science proper.  The positivists effect this purification by making a distinction in scientific praxis between a context of discovery and a context of justification.  An imaginary—and its concomitant freedom of movement and expression—finds its proper home within the context of discovery, which they associate with creativity.  On the other hand, the context of justification requires a conceptual content purified of any imaginative contamination, any human subjectivity or affect.  Le Doeuff argues that, ‘Bachelard […] has offered analyses of the imaginary component within scientific work, whose final aim is to extradite an element judged alien and undesirable, and assign it a residence elsewhere.’[16]  While the positivists concern themselves primarily with the context of justification in scientific praxis, where, they contend, its truth-value ultimately resides, Bachelard, especially in his later writings, privileges what he sees as a material imagination, a pure source of creativity.[17]

            One effect of this sorting of image from concept is a perpetuation of the cultural chasm between the sciences and the arts.  If one accepts the strictures on truth-value imposed by positivist realism, then, with regard to string theory, one is forced to concede its objectivity resides exclusively in its mathematical formalism.  This concession, in turn, prompts the question of how to interpret the rest of string theory’s content: the paratext, couched in exposition, imagery, rhetoric, that surrounds and sustains the actual practice of string theory as science.  Michel Serres suggests that Bachelard ‘consummated the rupture […] between science and the humanities—perceiving on the one side a spirit of burning the midnight oil and working and, on the other, a material imagination that sleeps, dreams, and ponders’.[18]  The ultimate consequence of this extreme polarization of image from concept, Serres argues, is that science becomes ‘founded on itself and, therefore, has no need of external philosophy; it contains its own endo-epistemology’.[19]  Science proclaims: ‘there exists no reasoned activity nor any valid ethics outside of the sciences.  The Age of Enlightenment, by exalting scientific rationality, produced the Romantic Sturm und Drang, which took refuge in a literature of dreams and fog’.[20]  But, again, even with a cursory examination of string theory’s technical discourse as textual artefact, one observes a close proximity between image and concept.  Exposition frames, links, and sustains mathematical praxis.  By a scientific realist’s own definition, that exposition lacks rigour, a positive truth-value.  As such, the rupture between image and concept would seem to be more of a hairline fracture than a gaping chasm.  As soon as string theorists ‘expose’ the formalism through non-technical exposition, they invoke an imaginary.  The gap between concept and image, then, is the space on the page between a calculation and its paratextual explication.

            In the next chapter, I will explore in more detail the correspondences in string theory technical discourse between images in the paratextual exposition and their mathematical equivalents, in order to determine the extent to which these correspondences could be said to exhibit a cohesive structure, and as such, constitute an imaginary.  In this sense, I will taking a Bachelardian approach, in that I will assume that the images employed in string theory technical discourse function as doubles.  They point to and evoke particular mathematical formalisms—as place-holders or cynosures.  Furthermore, my approach will be Bachelardian in that I will be exploring the extent to which an imaginary in the technical discourse is material in a manner distinct from its function as a double.  An imaginary, in this sense, performs a paradoxical double-double. Firstly, it points to and doubles for the objectivity of the mathematical formalisms, the conceptual content of a given technical article.  As Bachelard put it, ‘there is more to mathematics than formal structures, and that every pure idea is accompanied by an imagined application’.[21]  Secondly, an imaginary also evokes a distinct and autonomous materiality—the materiality of an image’s associations and connotations in reference to the realm of human-scale experience.  This is yet another doubling, what Bachelard calls doing ‘duty for reality’.[22]

            An imaginary constitutes an intermediary between a world out there and human creativity.  It mediates interventions into a causal structure that exists independently of human desire, perception, or cognition.  It functions, in this sense, as a template.  A template has a dual nature: on the one hand, it represents a self-consistent whole with internal relations amongst mutually constituting objects; on the other hand, it refers to something outside itself.  It serves as a guide for intervention into an objective world.  As a relatively self-consistent and autonomous whole, like a template, an imaginary has the potential to be medium-independent.  Templates can be reconfigured and redeployed in various media whilst still preserving essential object-identities and internal relations.  This is not to suggest that templates are immutable.  One is still left to consider how changes in configuration transform irrevocably the nature of an imaginary to the extent that it would no longer be recognizable from its designated origin.  One could argue that transformations of an imaginary fall along a spectrum where one pole represents an exact reproduction and the contrasting pole, an utterly unrecognizable transmutation.  The point here is that an imaginary, while being heterogeneous in constituent parts and relations, may also exhibit a certain plasticity that does not necessarily threaten the integrity of its cohesion.

            Since images bear with them a material, cultural, and historically contingent aspect, an imaginary cannot be said to be categorically novel in the sense that it is absolutely detached from the real.  Rather, an imaginary represents a novel recombination of constituent elements, drawn from the familiar realm of experience.  It is populated with images accessible to human hands, eyes, and ears.  Linguists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner describe the composition of an imaginary thus: ‘We divide the world up into entities at human scale so that we can manipulate them in human lives, and this division of the world is an imaginative achievement.’[23]  While corresponding to highly abstract mathematical expressions on scales impossibly remote from human apprehension, string theory imagery also bears with it a human-scale materiality.  Fauconnier and Turner suggest that one of the benefits of an imaginary ‘is its ability to provide compressions to human scale of diffuse arrays of events’.[24]  If one conceives of mathematics as a kind of abstracted tool for conducting interventions into the causal structure of an objective world, then its corresponding imaginary serves it as an ergonomics: a good tool must not only fit the material one is working with; it must also fit the hand well.  Compressions and expansions to human scales through an imaginary allow an imaginary to have a certain familiarity and comprehensibility .  The stability of an imaginary’s comprehensibility is predicated on the familiarity of the images that constitute it.  Yet the imaginary grows in complexity inasmuch as its images possess a wide array of characteristics, that is, the subtleties of their connotations within the system of overarching structure multiply.  The nature of the images that populate an imaginary may embody one or more of any of the following qualities—or may reflect some nuanced shade along a spectrum.  Images may be: concrete, abstract, material, mechanistic, organic, animate, inanimate, of radically variant scales, arbitrary, intuitive, indeterminate, deterministic, wild, domesticated, natural, supernatural, central, peripheral, dynamic, static, discrete, continuous, ad hoc, regimented, reductionist, or holistic, among others.  Bachelard describes scientific progress in terms of a series of stages: its conceptual content evolves from a concrete stage to a concrete-abstract stage, and ultimately to a fully abstract stage.[25]  The mathematical formalism of string theory, in this interpretation, would represent a fully mature form of scientific praxis—a thoroughly rigorous abstraction.

            But a string theory imaginary does not conform necessarily to this neat progression.  It may draw upon the full repository of images that exist in a culture or multiple cultures, whether fully concrete, abstract, or some shade in between.  Furthermore, as a complex, images with radically disparate qualities may well be juxtaposed.  In effect, the structural logic of an imaginary—its composition and internal relationships—is not necessarily bound by the same constraints as the mathematics to which it originally corresponded.  A schema that accompanies a given image may also constrain it.  By schema, I mean an inferential structure implicit in the image based on common experience, that is, the experience of interacting with an object through a body situated in space and time.  An example of an image schema would be that of a container.   All containers possess the following structure: an inside, an outside, and a boundary.  One learns to conceptualize, imagine, and manipulate containers through interactions by means of the hands and eyes.  Specific examples of containers become gradually generalized into an abstracted, categorical proto-container, represented by a single image.  One also comes to learn of historically and culturally contingent containers: the gourd, the vase, the silo, the oil-tanker, the mind, the universe, etc.  That is, some cultures would recognize an oil-tanker or the universe as a container, others would not; they would also imagine the inside, outside, and boundaries somewhat differently.  Some containers are closed, for instance, some are open—in different ways.  Nevertheless, the generic image of a container is relatively stable throughout history and across cultures.[26]  Often, then, what is possible in an imaginary is bound by the inferential structures of the images that populate it.

            The internal structure of an imaginary also works to substantiate the images it subsumes.  That is, patterns of interaction contribute to a sense that the images involved have substance.  By substance, I mean that the images that comprise the imaginary possess a certain context-specific objectivity—these image-objects not only can be apprehended cognitively but they also possess a context-specific solidity or even reality.  More than mere shadows or doubles, within an imaginary, images become manifest within a space where human agents may interact with them.  Human agents are able to apprehend the images as objects, act upon and manipulate them.  The images-as-objects may also, in turn, exercise their own form of agency—a kind of animation of material objects.  I have chosen the term agent here because I want to emphasize the sense of interaction that takes place within an imaginary.  As an intermediary between human-scale embodied experience and remote realms, an imaginary provides a conduit for intervention.  In The Mangle of Practice, Andrew Pickering makes precisely this argument with respect to science in general:

Scientists, as human agents, manoeuvre in a field of material agency, constructing machines that, as I shall say, variously capture, seduce, download, recruit, enrol, or materialize that agency, taming and domesticating it, putting it at our service, often in the accomplishment of tasks that are simply beyond the capacities of naked human minds and bodies, individually or collectively.[27]

As a sociologist, Pickering is concerned with interrogating scientific praxis directly.  Were he speaking of string theory as a science, rather then ‘constructing machines’, he would presumably speak of its construction of mathematical formalisms.  It is the experimental physicists who work with machines, the colliders and accelerators at labs such as CERN, while string theorists currently stake their claims to realism on their mathematics’ internal consistency.  As I have previously stressed, I want to avoid making any claims regarding string theory as scientific praxis.  Nevertheless, one of the central concerns of the next chapter will be to explore the extent to which the imaginary manifest in the paratext surrounding string theory technical discourse enables the kinds of interactions between human and non-human, material agencies that concerns Pickering, to explore the extent to which ‘human agency and captured material agency are […] constitutively intertwined’.[28]  Furthermore, the following chapters will explore how this intercession of human agents and material objects that also exhibit agency contributes to the reader’s impression that the images that constitute a given imaginary indeed have substance.

            For an image to have substance, first of all, it has to be recognized as an object, distinct from a background.  Next, it can be felt—by one or more of the five senses.  An image with substance has heft—it is graspable—within the range of the human embrace.  How can a string, then, be said to have substance when it is made of energy and is currently only accessible through mathematics?  If sometime in the future experimentalists were able to construct a collider powerful enough to probe the Planck scale, the evidence confirming the string’s existence would still only be circumstantial—data from the computers linked to the collider’s detectors.  Even the bubble chambers of first generation quantum mechanics experiments captured the traces, not of the subatomic particles themselves that resulted from the collisions, but rather, the water vapour molecules impacted during an electron’s post-collision trajectory.  In high energy physics, substance is a matter of inference and abstraction.  Fundamental objects such as the quark and the string have substance only in the context of the imaginary that accompanies the formalism and experimentation.  These image-objects, impossibly remote from human scales, are seen and grasped by what I suggest are, in a sense, homunculi: human agents—the mind’s eye and hand—projected into the imaginary at a scale appropriate for embodied interaction with the imaginary’s occupants.  In an imaginary, human doubles interact with abstract theoretical objects made substantial through that very interaction.  In this sense, an imaginary both doubles and extends the boundaries of the world we are accustomed to perceive, understand, and operate within.   Yet this is not to suggest that an imaginary resembles or reproduces a human-scale world with complete faith or accuracy of taxonomy, interrelation, or proportion—it is not realist, in the sense afforded to that term as the imaginary of a circumstantial realist novel would be.

            An imaginary such as that of string theory may well imply a totality in that it functions metonymically.  An imaginary gestures towards a coherent whole (even as it may not succeed in fulfilling its intention to be coherent).  As a totality—or totalizing gesture—an imaginary engenders a worldview.  The world is the totality—that amalgam of images and their rules of interaction that, in a reductionist strategy such as that of string theory (which, in its crudest articulation, declares that the world is made of strings)—attempts to extrapolate the whole from its parts.[29]  This is a strategy that one might describe as the parts being more than the whole, the reverse of holism.  But a worldview also, importantly, contains a view—that is, not only is it a world, but also the human agency that engages with it.  A worldview, in this sense, is synoptic—one view (formed through consensus) gathers together a whole.  The two elements are imbricated—a world and those who would re-cognize it.[30]  With respect to a string theory imaginary, then, one could replace the term worldview with cosmology.[31]  The advantage of speaking of a string theory imaginary as a cosmology is simply that cosmos yields a more expansive connotation than world.  Where world often implies solely planet earth apprehended on human-scales or global-scales (for example, to speak of world peace), cosmos clearly designates the universe in all its vastness and totality.  Yet the word cosmology also conjoins the outside with the inside, a cosmos with a logos, its apprehension and comprehension.  For my purposes then, an imaginary that serves as a cosmology mediates the interaction between nature, the objective world out there in its fullest range from microscopic to macroscopic, and culture, the social agencies and practices of a human community.  A cosmology, then, is an imaginary situated between culture and nature: it implies a signifier, the cosmos, a signified, its meaning, and one (or many) who is doing the signifying.  In the case of string theory technical discourse, this would be the theorist and his colleagues, collectively self-recognized as a professional community.  This study will concern itself with the manner in which, in discourses that evoke a string theory imaginary, that signifying agent might change in subtle and not so subtle ways, thereby altering the composition and dynamics and of the imaginary in turn.

            In Beamtimes and Lifetimes, Sharon Traweek defines culture as ‘a group’s shared set of meanings, its implicit and explicit messages, encoded in social action, about how to interpret experience’.[32]  I would augment this definition with the contention that the reverse is also the case: a culture is also a shared set of social practices encoded in a symbolic structure.  Traweek’s emphasis is sociological.  She is referring to social action within the physics community: theorists doing calculations on scratchpads, whiteboards, or computers; theorists attending conferences, conversing with other theorists, publishing papers, exchanging emails, etc.  What concerns this study are not the social practices of string theorists in the doing of physics, but rather, representations of social practices that occur within an imaginary—agents acting upon objects, objects acting upon agents, and objects acting upon each other.  This is one way in which this study will depart from Le Doeuff’s approach: where she combines the textual with the sociological, I will be examining the sociological only insomuch as it manifests textually, namely, representations of social identities and relations within imaginaries expressed through expository narratives.  Within a string theory imaginary, then, social action generates interpretation just as much as interpretation, that ‘shared set of meanings’ generates social action.  To what extent are these two flows of meaning and interaction, in seemingly opposite directions, mutually constituting?

            From this perspective, then, the contrast between nature and culture becomes more a matter of emphasis.  Within an imaginary, the objective world becomes a projection of a community’s self-regulated structure of social actions—and vice versa.  This coupling of cosmology with culture is an idea given currency by the sociologist Émile Durkheim.  Traweek paraphrases what she calls the ‘Durkheim supposition’ thus:

[A] culture’s cosmology—its ideas about space and time and its explanation for the world—is reflected in the domain of social actions.  In other words, ideas about time and space structure social relations, and the spatial and temporal patterns of human activity correspond to people’s concepts of time and space.[33]

A culture’s notions of the world it inhabits inform its social practices while its social practices shape its notions of the world.  In the context of a cosmological imaginary, then, to speak of culture is to focus on what Michel Serres calls ‘our relations among ourselves’, while to evoke nature is to focus on ‘our rapport with things’.[34]  Serres uses the example of the post-war space programme to highlight this imbrication of culture and nature: ‘Every technology transforms our rapport with things (the rocket takes off for the stratosphere) and, at the same time, our relations among ourselves (the rocket ensures publicity for the nations that launch it).’  He continues: ‘This object, which we thought simply brought us into relationship with the stars, also brings us into relationship among ourselves.’[35]  In this sense, one may speak of a continuum between ‘scientific’ and cultural’ imaginaries, where an emphasis of orientation ‘out there’ or ‘among us’ determines the imaginary’s status and function.

            As mentioned above, with respect to string theory, the objects that will concern us are not technological per se, like the Apollo Saturn V rocket, but theoretical.  A string theory imaginary—and the objects that populate it—find their greatest currency in a consumer culture that puts a premium on the trafficking of scientific ideas.  Scientific ideas constitute an intellectual surplus subject to an economy of exchange where the cachet of a given scientific idea stems from its novelty, its weirdness, its sexiness, its arabesque opacity, its contrast from the banalities of the quotidian and pedestrian.   A string theory imaginary finds its place in a culture of informationalism, a culture that marks scientific knowledge as the last frontier, where the unveiling of the hidden essence of nature becomes, in a sense, a peripatetic lurch at the virtual domestication of the alien on incredibly remote scales, and where the bandying about of scientific ideas in popular discourse becomes yet another vehicle for social displays of status.  It is an arguably myopic, if not solipsistic, culture, where, as Manuel Castells suggests, ‘[w]e are just entering a new stage in which Culture refers to Culture, having superseded Nature to the point that Nature is artificially revived (‘preserved’) as a cultural form’.[36]

            To return to the ‘Durkheim supposition’, I want to explore briefly three examples of the kind of cultural reading that reflects this close coupling of cosmology to social practice.  The first comes from Bertrand Russell’s The ABC of Relativity.  In this passage, Russell draws a link between the physics concept of force and politics:

If people were to learn to conceive the world in the new way, without the old notion of ‘force’, it would alter not only their physical imagination, but probably also their morals and politics. […] In the Newtonian theory of the solar system, the sun seems like a monarch whose behests the planets have to obey. In the Einsteinian world there is more individualism and less government than in the Newtonian.[37]

This quote illustrates how an imaginary functions.  Both the ‘Newtonian theory’ and Einstein’s special relativity are formalisms expressed exclusively in the language of mathematics.  Russell would seem to be conflating an expository explanation of these theories, what he calls ‘their physical imagination’ with the theories themselves.  This, in turn, allows for an easy imaginative leap to the discursive domains of ‘morals and politics’.  Sokal and Bricmont would certainly argue that such an imaginative leap betrays an aggressive and perhaps inappropriate adaptation—a distortion.  Russell would seem to be hijacking scientific theory to champion a clearly conservative political allegiance, one that valorises individualism and decentralised authority.  One might consider this particular example to be a notably simplistic imaginary, and as such, a facile form of cosmo-cultural coupling.

            The second example comes from Mary Midgley in her work Science and Poetry: ‘[T]he social development of individualism increased the symbolic appeal of physical atomism, while the practical successes of physical atomism made social individualism look scientific.’[38]  Like Russell, she is speaking of the relationship between Newtonian cosmology and ‘social individualism’.  In this cultural configuration, the image of the atom and the image of the individual become mutually reinforcing.  But rather than co-opting a scientific imaginary to promote a political view, Midgley calls attention to the coupling of that imaginary to the culture in which it flourishes.  There is a sense that Midgley is aware of the fracture between actual Newtonian theory and a scientific imaginary predicated on it.  Unlike a positivist perspective—that envisions a chasm between the conceptual content of scientific practice and the imaginative content of non-scientific discourse, Midgley here recognizes the amplifying feedback that a scientific imaginary can supply to a given cultural tendency.

            In effect, a scientific imaginary fills the gaps between the highly precise and local theoretical structures so thoroughly that to conceive of the dichotomy between science and its ostensibly lesser sister as a unbridgeable chasm is to deny the extent to which imaginaries support and sustain concept.  Immanuel Kant imagined philosophical truth to be an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, an image that scientific realists would no doubt embrace.  I find Serres’s revision of this analogy more insightful: he likens scientific truth to an archipelago.[39]  Each patch of stable scientific knowledge, what Serres calls ‘order’, is akin to the atolls and islets that populate the archipelago.  Furthermore, by zooming in, one sees that even these islets and atolls lack solidity—that they are, in fact, mangrove swaps that only appear solid from a bird’s eye view.  The sea that surrounds this archipelago is made up of the dizzying eddies of the myriad scientific imaginaries—in the case of string theory, the paratext and intertext that surround and support the formalisms.  To recognize this is to better understand the extent to which, in the case of a supposedly Newtonian cosmology, ‘social individualism’ can then appear scientific.

            Kirsten Shepherd-Barr provides the third and last example, from her work Science on Stage.  Speaking of Galileo’s theory of heliocentrism, Shepherd-Barr suggests that ‘the discoveries he made helped to bring about a fundamental change in how we view the world.’[40]  A self-evident truism like this has such universal currency that it would seem unassailable.  Yet I would argue that it belies a fundamental conflation akin to that of Russell, one that, on closer inspection, helps to further illustrate how scientific imaginaries function.  In spite of our complete conviction that the earth revolves around the sun, we still experience directly the sun revolving around the earth every day.  What we now do, though, is imagine the earth moving around the sun, and mark that imaginary as the truth, the deeper reality.  That truth bears the authority of consensus over many generations; it is a highly stable knowledge.  Most adherents of the heliocentric theory cannot prove its veracity: they accept it as a matter of dogma.  We defer to the specialists who, if funded, would gladly conduct (and have conducted as a matter of public record) experiments to verify its truth-value.[41]  In the heliocentric imaginary, the relationship of earth to sun makes use of the geocentricity of common experience.  It employs a structure of correspondences between the images (the sun and the planets) and astronomic observation (with the aid of telescopes), but reverses the dynamic and the scale (earth shrinks while sun expands).  The heliocentric imaginary also draws upon reinforcing images of earth-images revolving around sun-images, including, but by no means limited to: declarative statements like ‘the earth revolves around the sun’ given by authorities such as primary school science teachers; dioramas with fruit-sized painted styrofoam balls connected by rods and hinges; and graphic illustrations or video simulations.  The one imaginary does not merely replace the other.  We hold in our mind’s eye the geocentric daily experience and the heliocentric imaginary contradicting while ‘clarifying’ that experience.  Our world has thus become all the more complex and collective, for now we depend on ever more specialists to reveal to us and each other, by means of imaginaries, the various deeper realities.  This world becomes populated with ever more intricate networks of sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory (or both contradictory and complementary simultaneously) imaginaries.[42]  In effect, it is composed of a radically heterogeneous multiplicity.

            An inclusive and general definition of an imaginary provides for the possibility that an imaginary would indeed incorporate images based on what a cultural consensus considers real objects and events, but it holds the potential to also recombine them into novel configurations along radically heterogeneous planes.  The natural limits of an imaginary then are: that it can only contain what the human imagination can imagine.  This statement might seem absurdly tautological, but it is worth mentioning it in that it counters the popular notion that the power of the imagination is essentially infinite.  It may be infinite in that one minute adjustment of an imaginary’s content or internal structure would represent a novel recombination, but such an infinitude is inconsequential.  One could argue that many transformations within an imaginary are trivial and therefore not enough for one to deem the effect on the whole that of creating novelty.[43]  Any imaginary is very much limited insomuch as the images that constitute it must originate in the known world and furthermore, because these images imply their own intrinsic inferential structures—image schemas—drawn from history, culture, spatio-temporal embodiment, that are not so easily overcome.  Every imaginary must contend with a host of cultural, historical, and spatio-temporal constraints that would infringe upon its paradigmatic liberty.[44]  By known world, I mean an overarching and encompassing intertext of concrete images, hybridized concrete-abstract images, and ostensibly pure abstractions—a cascade or tangle of images, schemas, ideas, concepts that together comprise the sum total of a culture’s knowledge of the world.  One could define an abstraction, in this context, as an image removed by at least one degree, if not more, from concreteness.  Just as string theorists, in their work, meticulously manipulate the intricate structures of mathematics—the imaginary that corresponds to and shadows the mathematics reflects its own intricate structure.  That structure—the particular composition of images and their relationships—is necessarily subject to its own cache of intricacies, ambiguities, and ambivalences—some that echo the formalisms, some that do not. 

[14] Le Doeuff, Philosophical Imaginary, p. 4.

[15] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, trans. by Daniel Russell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 176.

[16] Le Doeuff, Philosophical Imaginary, p. 2, [her italics].

[17] See, for example, Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. by Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969) and The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, trans. by Daniel Russell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).

[18] Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. by Roxanne Lapidus (East Lansing, MI: U. of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 31.

[19] Serres, Conversations, p. 128.

[20] Serres, Conversations, p. 31.

[21] Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 4.

[22] Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, p. 4.

[23] Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p 8.

[24] Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, p. 30.  Bruno Latour also notes the importance of scale in a scientific imaginary: ‘The scale of the inscription may be modified at will, without any change in their internal proportions. […] Billions of galaxies are never bigger, when they are counted, than nanometer-sized chromosomes; international trade is never bigger than mesons; scale models of oil refineries end up having the same dimensions as plastic models of atoms.  Confusion resume outside a few square meters.  This trivial change of scale seems innocuous enough, but it is the cause of most of the “superiority” of scientists and engineers; no one else deals only with phenomena that can be dominated with the eyes and held by hands, no matter when and where they come from or what their original size.’ Bruno Latour, ‘Drawing things together’, in Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. by Steve Woolgar and Michael Lynch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 19-68, p. 45 [his italics].

[25] Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind: A Contribution to a Psychoanalysis of Objective Knowledge, trans. by Mary McAllester Jones (Manchester: Clinamen, 2002), p. 20.

[26] For a detailed discussion of the container as an image with a schema, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 27-36.

[27] Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: Chicago U. Press, 1995), p. 7.

[28] Pickering, Mangle of Practice, p. 17.

[29] String theory, as a form of theoretical physics, is atomistic, in this sense.  Atomism, in this context, is synonymous with reductionism—a strategy whereby the whole system is understood in terms of its smallest contiguous parts.

[30] I use the plural here to emphasize the fact that string theory works by consensus.

[31] It is important here also to distinguish cosmology in terms of an imaginary and cosmology, the science.  Within physics, cosmology enjoys a special status as a distinct discipline.  Cosmologists are concerned with understanding the universe on the largest of scales by means of theoretical models extrapolated from telescopic observation: the dynamics of solar systems, black holes, galaxies, and galaxy clusters.  They work from the assumption that the universe on the vastest of scales can be understood as an ordered whole.  A relatively recent sub-discipline within string theory seeks to synthesize cosmology with its own microscopic, Planck-scale formalisms.

[32] Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 1988), p. 7.

[33] Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes, p. 157.

[34] Serres, Conversations, p. 141.

[35] Serres, Conversations, p. 148.

[36] Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, Volume 1, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 477.

[37] Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity, 5th rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 2.

[38] Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 10.

[39] ‘Order is a rare island; it is an archipelago.  Disorder is the common ocean form which these islands emerge.’ Michel Serres, Hermès IV: La Distribution, in Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. by Josué V. Harari & David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1982), p. 12.  I am modifying the analogy, in that the ocean surrounding the archipelago, rather than ‘disorder’, represents the mutable space of possibilities of an imaginary.

[40] Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 2006), p. 28.

[41] Heliocentrism may well be easy enough for a lay person to validate experimentally with some guidance and perspicacity, but what about the existence of strings—or even quarks and the strong nuclear force?

[42] Consider, for example, that while a matter of speculation since Galileo’s telescopic observations of the Milky Way and what were then called nebulae, galaxies did not become a definitive feature of the known universe until the work of Edwin Hubble in the 1920s.  Before then, in terms of an imaginary, we lived in a world without galaxies.  Alexander Koyré writes of the transformation in cosmology (in the cultural and scientific senses) that occurred during the early modern period—from what he calls a ‘closed world’ to an ‘infinite universe’.  Alexander Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (New York: Harper, 1958), p. 2.

[43] In string theory, the goal is not novelty for its own sake, regardless.  According to the theorists themselves, its goal is a novelty that both reproduces realistic physics as stipulated by quantum theory and general relativity and that gestures towards an empirically verifiable extension of its descriptive power beyond the range and precision of its two predecessors.  String theory must be simultaneously novel and more real.

[44] Lakoff and Johnson describe how a relatively finite set of images form a kind of doxa that, in effect, limits imaginative freedom: ‘The study of spatial-relations concepts within cognitive linguistics has revealed that there is a relatively small collection of primitive image schemas that structure systems of spatial relations in the world’s languages.  Here are some examples, without the full detail given above: part-whole, center-periphery, link, cycle, iteration, contact, adjacency, forced motion (e.g., pushing, pulling, propelling), support, balance, straight-curved, and near-far.  Orientations also used in the spatial-relations systems of the world’s languages include vertical orientation, horizontal orientation, and front-back orientation.’ Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, p. 35.

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