Let’s talk about “The Imaginary” in politics, or more precisely, an imaginary — what the heck is that? It is a real and complex set of mental images, independent of the scientific criteria of truth and produced within a society from relatively conscious inheritances, creations, and transfers; a set that functions in various ways in a given era and that is transformed at a multiplicity of rhythms.

A set of mental images that draws on aesthetic, literary, and moral productions — but also political, scientific, and other ones — as well as on different forms of collective memory and social practices in order to survive and be transmitted as sets of mental images; imaginaries operate within global social structures in various ways… their workings are a guarantee of survival.

They do not always fulfill the same roles: they can justify societies, call them into question, lend them touches of harmony or of conflict, propose countless ways of life. Imaginaries function for a certain time, their functions can be reborn here and there, they have no necessary and absolute logic, no fixed and invariable laws. They exist in a given era and are transformed…

They draw on myths and legends, on places, on memory, on techniques of the body, on gestures, as well as on all manner of social phenomena in order to survive, to remain, and to perpetuate themselves.

The imaginary as a set of visual or iconographic images must be called “imagery.”

As pragmatic discourse tied to an institution, a political party, or a religious group, it must be called “ideology.”

As a way of reacting within the world and within a given society, it must be designated by the term “mentality.”

As a set of metaphorical and allegorical objects and practices, it must be called “symbolism.”

As the remembrance of past things, tales, and narratives, usually oral, it must be called “collective memory.”

Colombia (and the other Latin American nations) needs a narrative that takes charge of the common memory — the one from which it will be possible to build an imaginary of the future that mobilizes all the energies of construction of this country, today devoted in a gigantic percentage to destroying it… Thinking our political culture implies starting from there, from that originary violence upon which the truncated representation of the country — the one that fit within its first figures of an independent nation — was founded.

When one thinks of “politics,” one usually associates it with “politicking,” a practice that unfolds amid individualistic machinations, devoid of axiological content and ideals, and that is largely responsible for the contempt for and distancing from politics.

Classical definitions of politics aim to define it as the “exercise of power.” For Plato, politics is an art and a science, and it must be studied because in politics one does not improvise; politics is subordinated to the ethical sphere as an effective way of exercising not only a social morality but also an individual morality. Aristotle analyzed the Greek cities (poleis) in his work The Politics, considering man a political animal who socializes; thus, politics would be an activity inherent to human nature and the science of the organization and conduct of the polis.

Politics can be understood either as an activity that tends toward agreement and consensus, or as a practice that highlights the most conflictive aspects of life in society.

Politics would then be seen as a game or friend-enemy dialectic that finds its maximum expression in war. A struggle or combat of individuals and groups to conquer power that the victors would use to their own advantage (an objective very well fulfilled and applied by the current governing political spheres at the global level).

Politics can equally be considered the power to move, the science of organizing, and the art of foreseeing. In this sense, politics acquires the double dimension of steering human beings and administering things. It can also be considered the art of the possible and the effort to make the desirable possible.

With the above, it should be clarified that “politics” and “the political” are not the same thing. Since the Greeks, a distinction has been drawn between “politics” and “the political”: the former designates the human activity through which one organizes, directs, ranks, and governs, and the latter everything pertaining to organization, direction, and government in static terms.

“The political” is thus the permanent, belonging to the sphere of human nature.

“Politics” would be the perishable, the activity of man to organize the political; it belongs to the domain of doing.

Returning to the main topic, the idea of building an “Imaginary” in society would be with the idea of influencing the field of THE POLITICAL, and not “politics.”