Over the last few decades, the neologisms social imaginary and political imaginary have become ubiquitous in the jargon of the humanities and the theoretical social sciences. And yet, despite the pervasive use, there is remarkably little convergence on what these terms mean. How have they captivated the vernacular of contemporary social, cultural, and political theory? Tracing the sources of the idiom imaginary to phenomenological studies of psychology in 1940s France to the present, this article examines two key historical junctures: the moment when imaginary morphed from an individual to a collective category in 1960s French philosophy and its translation and insertion into anglophone cultural and political theory in the 1980s and ’90s. In contemporary anglophone theory, imaginary has become a proxy for the concepts of ideology and utopia in the wake of the culturalist turn of the 1990s and 2000s. As such, the sprouting of imaginaries is inseparable from an increasingly consensual cultural idealism that dominates contemporary cultural and political theory.

The devastation of World War II left German libraries partly in ruins, collections and catalogs lost or destroyed, prompting a need to reconstruct and reimagine the library system. This article shows how interlibrary loan, conceptualized as a form of academic traffic, played a crucial role in postwar reconstruction efforts, facilitating the exchange of resources and information among libraries. The creation of a cohesive system was meant to compensate for missing books by bringing disparate libraries into one network. This article focuses on the elaborate procedures librarians developed to create union catalogs. These catalogs, which listed the holdings of several libraries in a single alphabetical order, served as the backbone of the interlibrary loan system, facilitating access to resources across disparate institutions and laying the groundwork for a more interconnected library landscape. This article also traces the idea of this form of “virtual union” of libraries back to the eighteenth century, but this peculiar postwar formation was shaped by thinking about networks, traffic, and copy machines. Drawing on insights from media infrastructure research, this article unpacks the material realities and logistical challenges inherent in rebuilding the interlibrary loan system. It explores how librarians grappled with the complexities of managing physical collections, navigated logistical hurdles, and harnessed emerging technologies to streamline information exchange. Moreover, interlibrary loan emerges as a catalyst for reimagining knowledge itself, challenging static conceptions of scholarship by emphasizing its dynamic and relational nature.