The Social Atmospheres of the Imaginary

This article proposes treating the notions of atmosphere and imaginary, despite their apparent conceptual evanescence, as analytical tools capable of grasping together the sensible and the symbolic dimensions of associated life. It aims to move beyond sociocentrism to explore what we call the dark matter of social facts: the perceptual-symbolic sphere that orients collective experience before conscious deliberation. Drawing on the atmospheric turn of German neophenomenology and its sociological translation in Robert Gugutzer’s Neophenomenological Sociology, the article rereads the classics of the discipline as anticipators of a dispersed and unnamed proto-atmospheric web and then turns to contemporary sociology to ground the analytical dimensions and sociological definition of social atmosphere. Its original theoretical contribution lies in distinguishing between imaginative atmospheres, situated configurations in which feeling and imagining are attuned among co-present bodies in the here and now of the reciprocal action, and the atmospheric imaginary, the capacity of symbolic and cultural forms to objectify themselves and radiate sensibly into environments, thereby predisposing new atmospheres. By recomposing the Castoriadian instituting/instituted polarity and the grammar of the Durandian regimes within Simmel’s sociological aesthetics, the article demonstrates the dynamic circularity between feeling and imagining, opening an empirical agenda for a sociology of the atmospheres of the imaginary