Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 1990"

Poétique de la relation

Abstract: The concept of the “Poetics of Relation” as defined by the Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant seemed to entertain echoes and resonances with the work of the Lebanese novelist and essayist Amin Maalouf. Such an approach may seem biased with respect to geographical, cultural and poetic differences between the two works. But such a reading also seemed to us to be consistent with the sense of a journey, of an itinerary and of a crossing at the heart of the thinking of the Relation which, as Edouard Glissant writes, “links (relays) relates”. The reading of this contribution is conceived here as a meeting place that convenes two thoughts and two imaginary and seeks to build relationships between them.

Life to those shadows

Abstract: Noel Burch's singularly perceptive view of film and its origins will interest all who care about film theory and history "Life to Those Shadows" presents a critique of 'classical' approaches to film: the assumptions that what we call the language of film was a natural, organic development, and that it lay latent from the outset in the basic technology of the camera, waiting for the prescient pioneers to bring it into being The view that film language was a universal, neutral medium, innocent of any social or historical meaning in itself, is also challenged here Burch's major thesis is that, on the contrary, film language has a social and economic history, that it evolved in the way it did because of when and where it was constructed - in the capitalist and imperialist West between 1892 and 1929 From this perspective, the book examines the emergence of what it defines as cinema's Institutional Mode of Representation and the sociohistorical circumstances in which it took place Central to the Institutional Mode are the principles of visualization - camera placement and movement, lighting, editing, mise-en-scene - that filmmakers and audiences came to internalize over the first three decades Special emphasis is laid on the all-important change that occurred in the placing of the spectator, from a position of exteriority to the film image - implicit in both film-form and viewing conditions during the primitive era (pre-1909) - to the imaginary centering of the spectator-subject - completed only with the generalization of lip-synch sound after 1929 Burch contends that this imaginary centering of a sensorially isolated spectator is the keystone of the cinematic illusion of reality, still achieved today by the same means as it was sixty years ago

Gender, identity, and the production of meaning

Abstract: Setting the context Lacan and object relations Lacan and the feminist perspective self-constituting activity in philosophical texts three examples.

Elements of international political theory

Abstract: This book demonstrates five approaches to the theory of world politics and shows how these lead to distinct attitudes on critical issues. Portraying five imaginary spokesmen--a Natural Law theorist, a Realist, a Fideist, a Rationalist, and an Historicist--Donelan outlines various perspectives on world affairs and then debates the positions. The discussion covers five main aspects of world politics: conflict, alliances, intervention, war, and commerce. Using a classical philosophical approach to engage the reader in this lively debate, Elements of International Political Theory provides a basic understanding of the philosophical ideas that underlie opinions and decisions on world problems.

Utopian thought and communal practice

Abstract: Theory and practice are essentially separate activities. Just as the artist invents imaginary worlds, so the social theorist invents pure states of society. In neither case is the disjunction absolute, of course. The imaginary world of the artist is built of the bricks of the world he inhabits, however novel and fantastic the structures he creates; all science fiction attests the truth of Freud's observation that "the imagination remains incurably earthbound." So also there is probably no such thing as social theory that does not embody, at some level, the practice of past or present society. The world of Rousseau's The Social Contract, for instance, partakes, in however reworked and rarefied a form, of the practices of the classical Greek polis, especially those of Sparta.

Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement

Abstract: Introduction 1. Realism and Italian neorealism 2. Modes of neorealist narrative 3. The narrative paths of memory and history 4. The politics of The Path 5. Between the imaginary and the symbolic: history, the subject, and desire in The Path 6. Reading in the book of the world: a dialogue of interpretive models Notes Index.

The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters: The Birth of A Statutory Curriculum in England and Wales.

Abstract: In the representative system, the reason for everything must publicly appear. Every man is a proprietor in Government, and considers it a necessary part of his business to understand. It concerns his interest, because it affects his property. He examines the cost, and compares it with the advantages; and above all, he does not adopt the slavish custom of following what in other governments are called leaders (Paine 1969: 184). 1 Reaction and revolt are opposite faces of the same thing. Both are authoritarian attempts to solve society's problems. Both know the answers to current dilemmas even before they have been articulated. In the one case the object of the authoritarian action is the achievement of an imaginary state of affairs that existed in the past; in the other of an equally imaginary state of affairs that, it is believed, will exist in the future. Neither school of thought allows that problems and solutions have to be looked for and discovered, and that where these affect whole communities, the a...

The truth of fiction

Abstract: Because I earn my living as a teacher, I'm naturally inclined to look back with particular gratitude to all the teachers who, when I was young, offered encouragement and guidance. They included many creative writers whose voices survive the grave: Shakespeare, Defoe, Dickens, George Eliot, Conrad, and their many fellows who simultaneously delight and instruct. Some of my favourite teachers were fictional characters: Robinson Crusoe, for example. You may recall the chapter in which Robinson Crusoe spends more than five months chipping away at a tree-trunk in order to make a boat with which to escape from his island. It's a great cedar-tree, nearly six feet in diameter; he fells it with axe and hatchet, shapes it with mallet and chisel; and at last, there's a vessel big enough to hold twenty-six men. But then Robinson finds that after all his 'inexpressible labour', the boat is too heavy to be dragged to the sea-shore for launching; it has to be abandoned. That sequence taught me various lessons. One was that grown-ups could make blunders but could transform failure into successes by the very act of writing about them. Another lesson followed. What made that boat-building episode seem so realistic was that, for the purposes of the plot, it was utterly useless; it led nowhere; the boat was never used. So that futile episode, by its very untidiness, made fiction more like reality. But, of course, it thereby made reality more like fiction. Thus, some of the teachers whom I recall shimmer, like Robinson Crusoe, on the fluctuating borderline between the real and the imaginary. They include the intelligent narrators of Fielding's novels, and of George Eliot's, and sometimes of Joseph Conrad's. Indeed, one reason for the importance of the study of literature is that it brings home to us that we all, in our lives, are partly fact and partly fiction. We are partly independent selves, as distinctive as our fingerprints, and partly inscribed selves, inscribed by social custom, tradition, the media; we make stories of our lives, and try to live stories. Fictions tell us about realities, and realities are laden with fiction. It's no wonder that the terms 'history' and 'story' are both born from the same word: 'historia'.

Totally Recalling Arnold: Sex and Violence in the New Bad Future

Abstract: Total Recall cost $60 million dollars, the second most expensive film ever produced. (Rambo 3 was the most expensive.) As one would expect from the muscular budget, special effects play a leading role in this Arnold Schwarzenegger extravaganza. Totally recalling several movies produced over the last decade, Dutch expatriate filmmaker Paul Verhoeven (Robocop) has put together a slick, fast-paced vehicle for his bulging star, who previously flexed his way through two other science fiction scenarios, Running Man and Terminator. But the film-the latest product of the fertile SF subgenre "New Bad Future" (NBF)-offers something more to the critical viewer than visual pyrotechnics and pumped-up action sequences. NBF films tell stories about a future in the grip of feverish social decay. While some posit a postnuclear barbarism (as in the Mad Max trilogy, starring Mel Gibson), most (e.g., Bladerunner, Outlands, Robocop, Alien/s) envision the world that will emerge without such an apocalyptic break with history. The NBF scenario typically embraces urban expansion on a monstrous scale, where real estate capital has realized its fondest dreams of cancerous growth. Amnesia-stricken characters and advanced gadgetry tangle against the backdrop of a ruined natural environment, while drug gangs compete with private security forces to provide the most plentiful opportunities for employment. The heroes, by themselves or with rebellious groups, go up against the corruption and power of the ruling corporations, which exercise a media-based velvet glove/iron fist social control. This repressive structure of society provides the films' rationale for lots of action and bloodletting. Despite their penchant for gratuitous gore as well as other problems (poorly conceived women characters, dialogue generally less lofty than Shakespearean) many NBF films tilt toward an intelligent, leftish politics, leavened with a sense of (black) humor. Human/machine interfaces figure prominently, often through androids or cyborgs didactically presented as more human than the human characters. Indeed, central to the concerns of the NBF is the question of what is human, with moral, political, and philosophical discourses spinning around that axis. Copious special effects undergird construction of these diverse elements into the New Bad Future. In an earlier article I discussed the possibility that NBF films shared a social-psychological project: helping to ease their audience's entry from shattered past expectations of the future (personal and social) into what the future is turning out to be.' The operative concept was suggested by English psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, the inventor of the term "transitional object." Winnicott described the phenomenon of small children powerfully projecting their feelings into intimately familiar toys, blankets, etc., in order to simultaneously express and defend against basic anxieties, particularly those involved with separation from the mother. Neither completely internal nor external, the transitional object helps establish an individual identity to supercede the merged, fluid baby/mother relationship of infancy. The object is "transitional" because it allows the child, through play and imaginary activities, to work through conflict necessary for change and growth, to become able to push from one stage of emotional development to the next. The concept rapidly moved beyond clinical psychoanalytic circles into popular usage. Winnicott

The ‘Radical Imaginary’ Underlying Social Institutions: Its Developmental Base

Abstract: Castoriadis proposes the ‘radical imaginary’ as the psychological foundation of human society. A developmental analysis of this concept links it on the cognitive side to what Piaget describes as objec

Home in Harlem, New York: Lessons from the Harlem Renaissance Writers

Abstract: imagery. A*.m erica's mainstream cultur e has long lodged "home" in the mythic permanency of a rural cottage. There the kinship circle, sense of belonging, and implicit responsibilities that define "home" are tended by a purely white, motherly wife. As an imaginary bulwark against industrial urbanization, this mythic image of home took shape in the nineteenth century's mass periodicals. It later expanded into the small-town Main Streets of Hollywood movies and the privatized suburban fantasies of television. It is an unrealistic, even dangerously deceptive image, as many American authors-from Mark Twain and Charles Chesnutt to Sinclair Lewis to Joyce Carol Oateshave shown. Few of us are wived and familied white men commuting to some privileged space apart. Even for those few, the cottage front hides the complexities of familial and social relations. The rural rootedness of our mythic home ignores, moreover, the predominantly mobile, urban realities of modern American life. Indeed, "movement over a variety of county" may well be Americans"'largest common background," as a wise though little remembered Chicago novelist named Edith Wyatt affirmed as early as 1914; and most of us have been doing our moving and working and living in cities since the 1930 census. If we are to feel at home in our changing urban world, we need images of home that are more fitting to our experience-not for reasons of sentiment but in order to feel realistically grounded, belonging, and responsible there. We need specifically urban images of home to be able to see ourselves at home with-even when at odds withour own experience, with others, and with our dreams in cities. First, we need to know the city as a physical home place, with the power to evoke sensory memory, what William Faulkner calls the "memory [that] knows before knowing remembers" (111). Second, we need to recognize that, like it or not, we belong to urban home communitiesthose families and neighborhoods and birthright groups with which we share our history, images, social circumstances, and physical experience. Third, we need to be able to find a symbolic home for our aspirations in the city, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once could in Edmund

Lived and Imaginary Narratives and Their Place in Taking Oneself up as a Gendered Being

Abstract: The relation between the way in which children understand feminist stories and their understanding of everyday life are examined in a feminist poststrucluralist framework. Sex-role socialisation theory is rejected as inadequate for the purposes of explaining either the sense children make of the stories they hear or how and why children take up their genderedness in the way that they do. Through preschool children's responses to feminist stories and through observations of preschool children's play, an alternative explanatory framework is elaborated. At the same time the relation between lived and imaginary narratives is explored.

The House of Meaning

Abstract: After Mary Richardson's axe-attack on Velazquez's Rokeby Venus, in 1914, she explained that she had 'tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history'. Linda Nochlin comments, in the title essay of this collection, that Richardson's iconoclasm was a courageous demonstration of political conviction, and expressed an almost admirable repudiation of an image she 'believed stood for everything she, as a militant suffragist, detested'. But she concludes that the attack was strategically unhelpful to the woman's cause, and 'wrong in that her gesture assumes that if the cause of women's rights is right, then Velazquez's Venus is wrong'. This conclusion, however, does not quite put Nochlin in the position of the 'right-thinking art lover', who, she writes, 'even today ... must shudder at the thought of the blade hacking through Velazquez's image, through no mere accident the very image of Beauty itself. For her it poses questions about how women look at images, how women can respond to images like Velazquez's, and 'whether any positive representation of women is possible at all', except in some imaginary utopia of the future. Throughout this selection from her essays of the last twenty years, Nochlin returns repeatedly to these questions, articulated in the different terms appropriate to the years in which they were written. In her essay of 1972 on 'Eroticism and Female Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Art', Nochlin exposed 'woman's lack of her own territory on the map of nineteenth-century reality', and pointed out that 'Man is not only the subject of all erotic predicates, but the customer for all erotic products as well.... Controlling both sex and art, he and his fantasies conditioned the world of erotic imagination'. In 'Women, Art, and Power', the most recently-finished essay in the collection, she discusses the 'dilemma of the female spectator' in responding to the Balthus exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1984. Nochlin writes of the

Silence and the speaking symptom: A Lacanian account of “Black wedding” by I.B. Singer

Abstract: Summary Since no psychoanalytic examination of the structures of language and silence in Isaac Bashevis Singer's tales exists, I have tried to provide an adequate framework for such a study The story was chosen for its textual significance as a record of psychosis, as well as for its formal similarity to more conventional psychoanalytic case‐histories Through a study of Lacan's developmental stages (imaginary, mirror, symbolic) I have attempted to explain the female protagonist's resistance to language and her consequent failure to achieve symbolisation, resulting in psychotic hallucinations The failure of symbolisation on the part of the subject is explicitly linked to her subservient position in a rigidly patriarchal society

Teller's First and Last Visits to Sigmund Freud

Abstract: During the 1930's, as a young Yiddish poet in New York, Yehuda Leyb Teller produced some of the memorable pre-war poetry of his gen eration. Like the introspectivist writers who inspired him, Teller was increasingly aware of political developments in Europe. The poetic cycle entitled "Psychoanalysis," one of Teller's most out standing accomplishments, fuses real and imaginary dimensions. Two of the six "Psychoanalysis" poems confront Sigmund Freud and the situation of the European Jews.

Genet's Violent, Subjective Split Into the Theatre of Lacan's Three Orders

Abstract: But in Proustian fictional memory, according to Beckett, there are breaks in the rule of Habit, "when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being" (8). And in such moments, existential Suffering pierces the "screen" of habitual memory and "opens a window on the real..." (16). These observations can also be applied to the writings of Jean Genet, particularly through the primal scene of his remembered rebirth as an author, although Genet's writings involve fantasy more than memory~in vomitory selfrecreation. Genet wrote his first novels in a prison cell, in an onanistic "compromise effected between the individual and his environment." Through the Habit of his writing (and other) instrument, Genet disseminated his Suffering and sexual eccentricities onto paper, opening an Imaginary window onto the Real within him. Even if this onanism, which Genet remembers as the origin for