Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 1983"

Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero

Abstract: Examines the theory of psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, analyzes his writings on psychology, and discusses the development of his method of therapy.

How One Becomes What One Is

Abstract: Being and becoming, according to Nietzsche, are not at all related as we commonly suppose. "Becoming," he writes, "must be explained without recourse to final intentions.... Becoming does not aim at a final state, does not flow into 'being'." 'One of his many criticisms of philosophers ("humans have always been philosophers") is that they have turned away from what changes and have only tried to understand what is: "But since nothing is, all that was left to the philosopher as his 'world' was the imaginary."2 His thinking is informed by his opposition to the very idea of a distinction between appearance and reality.l In

On the American Dream: Equality, Ambiguity, and the Persistence of Rage.

Abstract: The American Dream exists in the imaginary sphere. The real world is its foundation; but the dream reaches beyond what is to what is notor, perhaps, to what is not yet. We might say that it refers to future possibility, the idea of which arises out of what we feel to be lacking in the "now." For some, it is an entirely personal possibility: fulfillment of some particular kind; an improvement in status; the attainment of wealth; what is variously called "success." For others, it is grasped as public possibility: a desired condition of the democratic polity. Metaphors like "Paradise" and "Eden" and "Heavenly City" have often been used; so have "Canaan" and "Jerusalem." In recent times, the dream has been represented as the "Golden Gate" or the "Golden Mountain"; it has referred to streets paved with gold. For Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, it was the "territory ahead"; for F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby, it meant going "about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty." For Henry James's Isabel Archer, it meant having the wind in her sails, experiencing "the absolute boldness and wantonness of liberty." Each one went on a journey, as did the original seekers for a "new world"; indeed, there have always been journey themes in our history; themes of exploration, themes of quest. So the American Dream has been a dream about beginnings, continually new beginnings, and equality had to do (for some, at least) with having the right to begin. That, of course, was part of the creed, of the American promise: the view that each living human being, no matter what his origin, was equal to every other. In almost all cases, at least until the mid-20th century, that person was white and male; and, for many blacks and many women, "equality" was a name for an unkept promise, or for freedom, or for

Polemic and Parody in the Battle for British Modernism

Abstract: In The Architects' Journal of January 1935, two architects had described in great detail the world that Auden feared. Serge Chermayeff and J.M. Richards imagined, in 'One Hundred Years Ahead: Forecasting the Coming Century', the world of the future and the political forces that would shape it.2 Their historical schema owed much to H.G. Wells' recent The Shape of Things to Come (1934), in which scientists make and unmake the future, but the final form of the Europe of 2035 was derived from Le Corbusier. The authors shared his confidence in the ultimate victory of urban planning and his faith in new materials and technology, and their short essay, written in Basic English and attributed to an architectural student writing in the year 2035, today seems both predictable and typical of Modern Movement propaganda. However, the enterprise is redeemed by a four-page 'Chronological Table: 1935-2035, Influences on a Century's Architecture', which postulates actual events ? an electricity grid, Sir Hilton Young's Housing Bill, the publication of J.N. Summerson's John Nash ? and pious hopes and revolutionary aspirations ? dominion status for India, the abolition of capital punishment, the nationalization of industry, and the dis? establishment of the Church of England. Under the successive Socialist governments of the first Reconstruction Period, reforms establish a model social-welfare state in England, while Europe busies itself with the Central European War (1951-56). The exhaustion of economic resources brings peace to Europe and initiates a period of urban reconstruction in England which is terminated in 1965 by the first Fascist majority and government. Architectural innovation is channelled into defensive architecture, and a second 'battle of the styles' pits proponents of vertical strategic building against advocates of horizontal subterranean building. Revivals abound: a return to religion is paralleled by a return to nature, and sessional papers read at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) reappraise the picturesque (i.e. Henekey's Picturesque Manchester). An exodus of British Socialists and Jewish professionals follows. Despite important concessions to Japan, England allies herself with other European Fascist states and in 1978 declares war on the Far East. War in Europe becomes unavoidable, and London and Liverpool are bombed. Revolutions begun in Europe reach England, and Bloomsbury and Chipping Camden are sacked in 1982, leading to the formation of a Socialist government in 1983 and the unification of the European Socialist republics in 1985. The final years, 1985-2035, are dedicated to a world made safe for technological man, with the introduction of a three-day work week, weather conditioning and dirigible cities. An interest in architectural history and preservation flourishes, and in 1990 an early Lutyens house is bought for the Nation (joining the Daily Express Building of 1932). Suggestive, intriguing and still amusing almost fifty years later, '1935-2035' is an elusive text. Recently interviewed con? temporaries were united in their inability to remember it, among them Sir John Summerson (then an editor of the Architect and Building News), Mr Anthony Cox (founder of the student magazine Focus of 1938), and Sir James Richards himself. Yet the text invites commentary. A jumble of science fiction and socialism, mingled with fear of failure and confidence, its confusions and contradictions, optimism about the political resolution of world problems, and pessimism about the fate of British modernism reflect preoccupations which architects of 1935 shared with modernists in other fields. Furthermore, it allows the historian to penetrate the surface of technological determinism which renders most such writings unattractive. A close reading reveals three salient traits in architectural writing of the 1930s: an obsession with looking backwards, in writers whose commitment to modernism should have obliged them to look forward; the absence of architectural criticism in a period which was renowned for polemics and schisms; and the use of humour and satire in modernist writings better known for ex cathedra prescriptive aphorisms than for light-hearted jeux d'esprit. In '1935-2035', imaginary buildings, persons, techniques and books ? Cantilever Court, Hammersmith, perhaps inspired by Maxwell Fry's obsession with that technique of construction; 'Pink Thatch', by the fashionable designer Oliver Messel; and the first 'tower village in rural England (Corb-on-the-Ouse)' ? are intermingled with monuments of the future ? air defence towers, national housing estates, the first English skyscraper (24 storeys high!), and the Central London Elevated Aerodrome at Kings Cross. But who are Reginald Hurch, Samuel Meatbaum, Otto Arkwright and Oswald Benito Benetfink? Why abolish steel riveting, use surface insulation made of celery, and make unbreakable resin glazing compulsory? The magazine Proof recalls the little magazines of the thirties, like Scrutiny and Axis', Willesden's Basic Art satirizes Wilenski's The Modern Movement in Art; Adolf Halbmuller's Early Twentieth Century Tramways, however, is pure invention. The architectural scenario in '1935-2035' borrows freely from contemporary events. References to divisions among modernists, much given to 'argument, public talking and writing', and the 'making and unmaking of groups and circles... making their

John Eliot's Empirical Millenarianism

Abstract: IN THEIR TENDENCY to see utopia as a purely textual tradition defined by its humanist or Enlightenment opposition to bibliocentric political theory, historians of utopian thought have not paid much attention to the religious and political thought of Puritan New England. And in truth, seeing any connection between the Congregationalist New Israelites in New Canaan and the tradition of Erasmian humanism requires a good deal of effort. As textual monomaniacs, who instinctively turn to the Bible in response to each new social problem, the early settlers seem worlds apart from More's learned wit. In The English Utopia, A. L. Morton journeys to the Boston of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, but remains within the insular bounds of his title when considering revolutionary Puritanism. J. C. Davis's Utopia and the Ideal Society pays some attention to the New World as a theme for utopias, but sticks strictly to texts from Europe and England in its primary analyses. Even Mark Holloway's history of American utopian thought makes only a passing reference to the Puritan experience in New England. And Frank and Fritzie Manuel, in their encyclopedic study, Utopian Thought in the Western World, find it easier to omit colonial New England because they scrupulously avoid the nascent science of "applied utopistics": the study of those utopian social practices which move from an imaginary and textual realm "too dangerously close to reality."' They do mention early New England, but quickly dismiss it as peripheral and derivative:

Breathless: Mirror Stage of the Nouvelle Vague

Abstract: of ideology as "the representation of the Imaginary relationship of individuals to their Real conditions of existence." Ideology conceived in this sense is therefore the place of the insertion of the subject in those realms or orders--the Symbolic (or in other words the synchronic network of society itself), and the Real (the diachronic evolution of history itself, the realm of time and death) both of which radically transcend individual experience in their very structure. Fredric Jameson3

Aberrance in Criticism

Abstract: to regard Derrida's discussion of Austin as a confrontation between two prominent philosophical traditions" (on the grounds that Derrida has "misunderstood" Austin),' Jacques Derrida has written: "the 'confrontation' here is not between two 'prominent philosophical traditions' but between the tradition and its other, an other that is not even 'its' any longer."2 His statement accurately characterizes the literary critical debate ongoing in this country, a controversy which, in the traditionalists' view, pits the champions of reason against "those French crazies." The choice of the epithet "crazies" (which Wayne Booth puts in the mouth of an imaginary anti-continental critic)3 is not incidental, as we shall see, for it evokes the disquieting unintelligibility which is the essence of otherness.

Supreme Contradictions: The American Poet Versus the Wilderness of American Experience

Abstract: Bonnie Costello. Marianne Moore : Imaginary Possessions. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. 281 pp. Ross Labrie. Howard Nemerov. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980. 159 pp. Cary Nelson. Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary American Poetry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. 220 + xvii pp. The creative and democratic self in America must be "capable of absorbing contradictions as great as America itself"; in this way Lorelei Cederstrom has summed up the position of the artist as argued in recent works of literary criticism.1 The three studies under review here continue and extend this thesis, exploring its implications for a number of modern and contemporary poets.