Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 1996"

Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary

Abstract: This groundbreaking collection focuses on what may be, for cultural studies, the most intriguing aspect of contemporary globalization—the ways in which the postnational restructuring of the world in an era of transnational capitalism has altered how we must think about cultural production. Mapping a "new world space" that is simultaneously more globalized and localized than before, these essays examine the dynamic between the movement of capital, images, and technologies without regard to national borders and the tendency toward fragmentation of the world into increasingly contentious enclaves of difference, ethnicity, and resistance. Ranging across issues involving film, literature, and theory, as well as history, politics, economics, sociology, and anthropology, these deeply interdisciplinary essays explore the interwoven forces of globalism and localism in a variety of cultural settings, with a particular emphasis on the Asia-Pacific region. Powerful readings of the new image culture, transnational film genre, and the politics of spectacle are offered as is a critique of globalization as the latest guise of colonization. Articles that unravel the complex links between the global and local in terms of the unfolding narrative of capital are joined by work that illuminates phenomena as diverse as "yellow cab" interracial sex in Japan, machinic desire in Robocop movies, and the Pacific Rim city. An interview with Fredric Jameson by Paik Nak-Chung on globalization and Pacific Rim responses is also featured, as is a critical afterword by Paul Bove. Positioned at the crossroads of an altered global terrain, this volume, the first of its kind, analyzes the evolving transnational imaginary—the full scope of contemporary cultural production by which national identities of political allegiance and economic regulation are being undone, and in which imagined communities are being reshaped at both the global and local levels of everyday existence.

In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture

Abstract: Recent discussions about the culture of images have focused on issues of identity - sexual, racial, national - and the boundaries that define subjectivity. In this context Victor Burgin adopts an original critical strategy. He understands images less in traditional terms of the specific institutions that produce them, such as cinema, photography, advertising, and television, and more as hybrid mental constructs composed of fragments derived from the heterogeneous sources that together constitute the 'media'. Through deft analyses of a photograph by Helmut Newton, Parisian cityscapes, the space of the department store, a film by Ousmane Sembene, and the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Andre Breton, and Roland Barthes, Burgin develops an incisive theory of our culture of images and spectacle. "In/Different Spaces" explores the construction of identities in the psychical space between perception and consciousness, drawing upon psychoanalytic theories to describe the constitution and maintenance of 'self' and 'us' - in imaginary spatial and temporal relations to 'other' and 'them' - through the all-important relay of images. For Burgin, the image is never a transparent representation of the world but rather a principal player on the stage of history.

The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of Representation

Abstract: A study of the politics of representation, this book explores the discursive construction of a ‘city of intensities‘. The author analyses representations of Calcutta in a wide variety of discourses: in the gossip and travellor-lore of backpackers and volunteer charity workers; in writing - from classic literature to travel guides; in cinema, photography and maps. The book shows how the rumours of westerners contribute to the elaboration of an imaginary city; and in doing so, circulate in ways fundamental to the maintenance of international order. A provocative and original reading of both Heidegger and Marx, the book also draws upon writers as diverse as Spivak, Trinh, Jameson, Clifford, Virilio, Bataille, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari. As such it is essential reading for students and scholars in cultural studies, anthropology, development and sociology

The diasporic imaginary: Theorizing the Indian diaspora∗

Abstract: (1996). The diasporic imaginary: Theorizing the Indian diaspora. Textual Practice: Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 421-447.

"The American Romance" and the Changing Functions of the Imaginary

Abstract: I N THE EMERGENCE of the study of American literature and the formation of a separate discipline called American Studies, the "invention" of the concept of an "American romance" has played a crucial role. The 1940s and 50s were the period in which the search for a national, specifically "American" literary tradition took on a new urgency. This search was fueled by post-World War II visions of a new world power and the arrival of what Henry Luce called "the American century." F. O. Matthiessen's study American Renaissance (1941) had identified a literary tradition of great intellectual power and artistic originality and had provided it with a name that stuck.1 Perry Miller had transformed the perception of American culture-still widely considered provincial and without a strong cultural tradition of its own-by recovering an imposing "Puritan tradition."2 However, his redefinition tied the interpretation of American culture to this Puritan legacy in a way that seemed too restrictive on regional and historical grounds. Similarly, Matthiessen's book limited America's unique cultural achievement to a particular period and to a small group of writers. It was the concept of the American romance which solved this impasse in matters of cultural self-definition. Ironically enough, the solution was suggested by an essay which developed the claim of a different tradition in American literature in order to describe this literature's shortcomings, Lionel Trilling's essay "Morals, Manners and the Novel."3 Trilling's essay summarizes what was more or less the standard view of American literature in English departments on both sides of the Atlantic: While the European novel traditionally focuses on society and its manners (in the wide sense of the whole array of social relations and its determinants) , American writers shy away from this social reality, and, thus, from the complexity and fullness of social life. Trilling's argument was developed in the context and service of his own liberal critique of political radicalism and its narrow views of the purpose of literature. However, his argument that reality, in contrast to the epistemologically

Where's the Difference? The Heterosexualization of Alterity in Henri Lefebvre and Jacques Lacan

Abstract: It has been largely overlooked that Henri Lefebvre in his book The Production of Space draws heavily upon Lacanian psychoanalytic accounts of the emergence of subjectivity in theorizing political r...

Rhetoric and Culture in Lacan

Abstract: Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 2. Treeing Lacan, or the meaning of metaphor 3. A being of significance 4. From logic to ethics: transference and the letter 5. Desire and culture: transference and the other 6. The subject and the symbolic order: Historicity, mathematics, poetry 7. Conclusion: Lacan and contemporary criticism Bibliography Index.

Herodotus and the Origins of the Political Community: Arion`s Leap

Abstract: Norma Thompson opens a new angle of political vision in this imaginative and engaging interpretation of Herodotus' History. She claims for the "father of history" a position in the canon of political thought, finding modern validity in his fundamental perceptions about the importance of stories to the coherence of political communities. Thompson arrives at a unique explanation for Herodotus' side-by-side placement of factual and fanciful historical stories. She contends that he recognized the central importance of compelling stories, even imaginary ones like the tale of Arion, the poet and singer who leaped into the sea to escape Corinthian pirates and was carried to safety on the back of a dolphin. Such stories can become the "facts" of a people's past and thereby the core of the political community. Herodotus understood that stories define and bind together one polity as distinct from others. Further, a polity evolves in reference to its own defining story. Thompson relates Herodotus' work to historical and cultural debate among such scholars as Martin Bernal, Francois Hartog, and Edward Said, and she invites philosophers, philologists, anthropologists, historiographers, and political theorists into the discussion.

The castrato as history

Abstract: One of the final scenes of Farinelli, I Castrato, dir. Gerard Corbiau (Sony Pictures Classics, 1994), shows a solar eclipse witnessed, eighteenth-century style, by members of the court of Philip V of Spain around 1740. Restless spectators squint through pieces of tinted glass prepared in the smoke of a small fire. It is a precious visual detail, a jot of history in this sumptuously though often inaccurately detailed film that offsets the melodrama to follow. Without warning, a wind, helped along by corny, time-lapse photography, ushers in a sea of Goya-like clouds. A murmur passes through the entourage; eerie blackness falls on the court. The King is shrouded in another kind of darkness: his famous, chronic melancholy (we would call it 'clinical depression'). He pronounces the whole earth a tomb, makes the sign of the cross, then calls for a dose of his personal pain reliever the voice of Carlo Broschi, known as Farinelli: 'Bring back the sun', he demands. Without hesitation the singer intones in a thin soprano the mournfully exposed opening phrase of 'Alto Giove', an aria from Nicola Porpora's Polifemo. Farinelli is known to have performed the work at the Haymarket Theatre in 1735, a few months after his London debut. An unseen orchestra enters as if from that other, distant theatre, pulling the castrato and his song into a brighter place, an illuminated region beyond the eclipse, an imaginary world of music. The whole, lush scene serves not only as welcome interlude but also as telling reminder, in the midst of a self-consciously 'historical' film, of the problem of history itself, of how frightfully dim it can be for those who would glimpse it. The sight of so many spectators straining to view one of nature's aberrations through clouded lenses seems to comment on the very obscurity of the film's historical narrative, not to mention our own peculiar status as viewers peering into the past it represents. Indeed, the image of the eclipse according to its etymology, a moment when something 'fails to appear' stands as a symbol for the history offered in this film, the 'true story of a world-famous castrato', as it has been billed. For the story of the castrato, that figure eclipsed almost two centuries ago, is certainly a shadowy tale in the history of music, a story that must always be about something that 'failed to appear'. If the truth of history can reside in such empty spaces, those impossible gaps that separate present from past, then the figure of the castrato offers a kind of chilling embodiment of that truth, a poignant testimony to things that can never be recovered. One of those unrecoverable things is music. The very genre of opera seria, not to mention its composers, depended on the castrati as a kind of raison d'etre. No wonder Corbiau's Farinelli makes such an issue of the relationship between these star performers and the men who wrote for them. The film presents the charged collaboration in two complementary case studies. We witness on the one hand the disgust of a self-assured Handel, who resents the attention paid to all such male divas, and on the other the envy of the singer's insecure brother, the composer

Cato's Tears

Abstract: Addison's Cato (1713) and Thomson's Sophinisba (1730) make a spectacle of political cultures absorbed by the emotional dilemmas of empire. They dramatize, for British subjects, complicated Moors in an imaginary North Africa. Set within a politically divided, unstable Roman sphere situated in Mediterranean Africa, Cato and Sophinisba lead one to conclude that strategic uses of post-republican Rome fueled the development of important strands of British sensibility. Long an empire in the sense of being a conqueror of other peoples, but just lately facing government by an emperor, this version of Rome exhibits the untidy connection between tyrants at home and outposts abroad. In the long eighteenth century in Great Britain, this connection is particularly generative of masculine anguish. The conflicts over political succession in which modern political agency develops imply an international arena-the total geography of diplomatic, military, and mercantile action. Race serves late Stuart high culture as a way of signifying crises of identification and many degrees and kinds of power. In England, the "Age of Sensibility" begins with the adjustments of masculine experience in a parliamentary and expansionist culture during the Restoration. The literature of sensibility, conventionally assigned to the middle of the eighteenth century, is just one episode in the long cultural history of the sensitive man. The specific eighteenth-century upsurge of tender masculinity depends on a cast of characters developed through conflicts over political succession. Succession is a family affair, but England's family is international in character, enmeshed in the cousinly networks of incipient empires. In Cato and Sophinisba, liberty, love and suffering persistently combine in the figures of erotic aliens whose racial difference is also an emotional difference. Well before 1713, therefore, race is an operative term in the politics of emotion. At first glance, it appears that racial difference operates in these plays to distinguish Great Britain (in the guise of Rome) from uneasily subjugated cultures. In other words, it looks as though race is not yet internal to national

Pity and anger in the poetry of William Blake from 'Poetical sketches' to 'Milton'

Abstract: This thesis gives an account of the ideas about pity and anger in Blake's poetry from Poetical Sketches to Milton, placing them in their historical and intellectual contexts. Chapter 1 introduces the main themes, arguing that Blake saw himself as a counter-ideologist, working to change social and individual 'structures of feeling'. It suggests that his ideas were influenced by his class position, by the French Revolution, and by developments in eighteenth-century thinking. Chapter 2 shows that in the early work Blake engages with problems of male identity that will concern him throughout his career and provide another context for his thinking about anger and pity. Chapter 3 deals with the impasse of the late 1780s. The fourth Chapter claims that Songs of Innocence represents Blake's attempt to create a kind of compassion that will lead to and then characterise a redeeýhed society. The fifth Chapter locates The French Revolution in the Burke debate and points out that 'Let the Brothels of Paris be opened' shows important similarities in its treatment of pity to the speeches and articles of the Jacobin leaders. Chapter 6 contests the views of critics who have unproblematically presented anger as a virtue and pity as a vice in Songs of Experience. Chapter 7 suggests that the ideology of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is determined by an economic impossibility that creates a politics of feeling rather than of strategies and institutions. Chapters 8 and 9 discuss the Prophetic Books as analyses of the psychology of revolutionary aspiration and failure. Chapter 10 argues that The Four Zoas depicts the reconstitution of a degraded anger and pity that are nevertheless doomed to social failure except in the 'imaginary' of the final apocalypse, while Chapter 11 contextualises the 'Sciences' of Wrath and Pity in Milton. The final Chapter is a short resume and forward glance.

Emerging from imaginary time

Abstract: Recent models in quantum cosmology make use of the concept of imaginary time. These models all conjecture a join between regions of imaginary time and regions of real time. We examine the model of James Hartle and Stephen Hawking to argue that the various ‘no-boundary’ attempts to interpret the transition from imaginary to real time in a logically consistent and physically significant way all fail. We believe this conclusion also applies to ‘quantum tunneling’ models, such as that proposed by Alexander Vilenkin. We conclude, therefore, that the notion of ‘emerging from imaginary time’ is incoherent. A consequence of this conclusion seems to be that the whole class of cosmological models appealing to imaginary time is thereby refuted.

How Things Change: The History of Sociotechnical Structures

Abstract: curvilinear figures which can represent large technical systems. These figures have many affinities with Cartesian space, which classical science used to describe the real. . . . This organization of the very large scale sociotechnical thus enters into resonance with the scientific representation of nature, with which it shares a model of reality. And, as Ehrhard stresses: 'the network creates and gives form to an imaginary space', and this formation ends, from the system point of view, in making the map the territory. (137) So macro-systems take network shapes that give rise to a network space and time imaginary and actuality. They gain their very possibility from the ability to instantly communicate between parts of the network this allows for feedback control (138). Drawing on Luhmann, Gras goes on to discuss at length the evolution of these technical macro-systems, making many of the points that Callon did in his classic 'Techno-Economic Networks and Irreversibility'.14 Although this evolutionism plays a major role in his text, I am not going to discuss it in detail here. I think that the world needs another somewhat ponderous and amorphous characterization of how big things change rather less than it needs new ways of thinking about large systems. Thus I want to pause here and consider in more detail the relationship between the imaginary and the actual. A first point to make is that despite the 177 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.92 on Tue, 21 Jun 2016 06:11:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Social Studies of Science excellent work of wedding at least three traditions (SCOT, French critical theory and German phenomenology), Gras and the others miss a set of works that provide just the same delightful mixture of high theory and dirty facts that characterizes their own work and could have further enriched it. Cronon's brilliant Nature's Metropolis springs to mind, as do the works of James Beniger and Alfred Chandler.15 More significant, however, is the question of whether one really needs to talk about minds and mentality when describing the mills of humanity. I think that the authors make a very convincing case that one does indeed. There is no real problem of a mental/ material split here. I was reminded while reading these books of Bergson's Matter and Memory, which starts from the position that the brain is, after all, matter.'6 These authors are taking the position that the mind is a social and material phenomenon (for one extreme statement of this position, see Durkheim's student Maurice Halbwachs' marvelous Collective Memory, in which he argues that all memory is social).17 Gras situates the mental in the material as forming a seamless web much like the seamless web that SCOT people wove between the natural and the social during the dark winter nights of the 1980s. He then does things with this new web that one could not do with the old one. What he does is to take the idea of technical systems a la Gille and integrate it with a distributed, collective view of consciousness to produce a shiny new array of causal explanations of the development and change of technical infrastructures. And this is just the move that has been needed in technology studies. Like cats languidly savaging long dead sparrows, historians and sociologists of technology have regularly picked the eyes out of a technological determinism that no-one is sure ever quite existed. Gras and company open the way to new activities. A figure in both of these books is the philosopher Michel Serres, whom I think lays much of the theoretical framework for this evolving tradition. The best access to Serres in English, though the furthest removed in subject area, is Rome; or the Book of Foundations, one of a series on origins culminating in the brilliant Les Origines de la Geometrie.18 Latour has a book of interviews with Serres entitled Eclaircissements which clarifies both Serres and Latour.19 The relationship between the body and the mind and the world is explored by Serres in a series of books beginning with Les Cinq Sens and culminating in Le Tiers Instruit.20 Serres' 178 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.92 on Tue, 21 Jun 2016 06:11:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Reviews: Bowker: How Things Change work has provided a space for thinking cyberetically about communication and control, and through such analysis recognizing a reality in metaphors: so that literary and scientific texts can both be interpreted as talking about the same thing the former can be rigorous and the latter poetic. Latour's work has offered one way of grounding Serres' insights empirically; these books offer another. I have so far given relatively short shrift to Automate. This is a highly frustrating book, which is too close to 'grey literature', namely a commissioned academic report. When it is good, it is very very good and when it is bad it is awful. There is a wonderful section of observations of pilots carrying out checklist routines before taking off (83-85). There is a quite lovely passage drawing on Serres' analysis of the collective through describing a ball in a rugby match as a quasi-object. I will quote this at length to give the flavour: A ball is not an ordinary object, since it is not what it is unless a subject has it in their hand. Just sitting there it is stupid, it has no meaning, no function, no value. You don't play rugby alone. Those who try, those who hold on to the ball or, as one says, monopolize it, are bad players, and are soon excluded from the game. They are called selfish. The collective game has no need of selves. Let us consider the person holding the ball . . . If he makes it turn around him, he is clumsy, a bad player. The ball is not there for the body the exact contrary applies. The body is the object of the ball, the subject turns around this sun . . . We recognize the address of the ball by one sign that never fails the player follows it and serves it, far from making it follow and using it. The ball is ... the subject of subjects . .. The laws are written for it, are defined with respect to it, and we obey these laws. The ball's address supposes a Ptolemaic revolution that few theorists are capable of making, since they are accustomed to being subjects in a Copernican world where objects are slaves. After much more in this vein, Gras and others then produce a lovely analysis of the plane as 'ball' in the hands of air traffic controllers: The art of control is not to master the planes but to leave them follow their own course as naturally as possible . . . The classic relationship between a human subject and a technical object is inversed, since the controller is subjected to the plane. Such pithy observations and analytic acuity do not sit well with an unnecessarily long and (to this reader) uninteresting report on a questionnaire that pilots were asked to complete. It is a kitchen sink sort of a book. In three pages (258-60) there are references to Kuhn, Husserl, Ed Constant (whose name has changed from J.W. 179 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.92 on Tue, 21 Jun 2016 06:11:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Social Studies of Science Constant two pages earlier), Claude Shannon and Sadi Carnot. In Grandeur the sink is in working order; here I am not so convinced. I began this Review by remarking on some possible forms of non-communication. I see the isomorphism and the inversion in operation in moving between the French-speaking and Englishspeaking worlds. First, the double-entendre. To use Leigh Star's term, Thomas Hughes forms a perfect boundary object here.21 In France he is read by different schools (Latour/Callon, Gras et al.) and integrated immediately into a philosophical discourse. In the United States and Britain he is read pragmatically and integrated immediately into case studies in the sociology and history of technology. The fact that he can be both at once suggests that in the English-speaking world we might explore more actively the philosophical dimensions of our work, and recognize that we are talking mind, nature and society when we tell stories of General Electric, networks and alternating current. Second the inversion. Automate ends with the hybrid, the person/machine. Analysts from across the board in technology studies agree that this figure is a key one, and agree on the set of facts that have to be dealt with in discussing hybridity. Haraway, Latour, Gras, Collins, all celebrate or excoriate hybridity. Gras brings together Merleau-Ponty, Baudrillard and Georges Simondon to argue that 'the system of objects, the universe of things, is a human world because things are a human language and live with humanity' (Grandeur, 120). The mind is out there in nature. Latour and Haraway in different ways tell us that society is right here in us either because we have no interior or because the social implodes into us; and so willy nilly the social is a key figure. The same facts, symmetrical inversion. Most importantly, Gras and his fellow authors offer major new ways of thinking concretely about socio-technical systems. And you can take 'concretely' any which way you want.

Macau, the imaginary city

Abstract: IntroductionThe Imaginary City: Departures Two Worlds: Origins, Portugal and China Boundaries: On the Periphery Memories: The Architecture of History Transitions: Crossing the Threshold Moments: The Culture of Everyday Life Images: Spiritual Topography Illusions: Epilogue

Real and Imaginary Stories: Robinson Crusoe and the Serious Reflections

Abstract: Defoe's Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures ofRobinson Crusoe (1720) has enjoyed none of the universal popular success of the first part of the Crusoe trilogy. Walter Scott considered that it contained \"few observations that might not have been made by any shop-keeper living at Charing Cross,\"1 and it is only the search by modern critics for clues to Defoe's intent in writing Robinson Crusoe that has rescued the text from total neglect.2 The attention that a relatively small number of critics have given to the Serious Reflections has yielded some fascinating clues as to the way in which Defoe viewed his fictional craft. The most complete attempt to define Defoe's approach to fiction from his own writings remains Maximillian Novak's; but, as Robert Merrett has pointed out, Defoe's critical views are so heavily subject to their rhetorical and didactic purpose that contradictions and inconsistencies make it almost impossible to weld them into a coherent theory.3 Within the rhetorical and didactic parameters of the Se-

Multiculturalism and Postmodern Theater: Staging Quebec's Otherness

Abstract: Over the last thirty years, Quebec has experienced massive social change in the course of its modernization. A fundamental aspect of this social change has been the diminishing ethnic homogeneity of the population. The more that demographers, statisticians and sociologists began to document the decline in the birthrate among French Canadians in the 1960s, the more it became obvious that immigrants would play a major role in determining the province's future. In response to this reality, the Quebec government adopted policies to assume more control over immigration, assimilation patterns and development of the various cultural communities.[1] The government's official politique culturelle envisioned Quebec as a multicultural francophone society in which there would be different ways to be Quebecois. As politicians and intellectuals debated the rapidly changing cultural identity of Quebec, literary scholars also took notice of the growing number of ethnic writers whose texts explored the experience of otherness.[2] In the process, however, theorists equally began to consider the extent to which the immigrant experience should be regarded as part of the postmodern mentality in general. According to Sherry Simon, for example, the representation of foreignness, of ethnicity, is a feature of modernity: "l'ecriture de la modernite est celle qui se maintient dans un espace entre identites, dans un espace horsidentitaire. Ce ne sont pas les regimes d'appartenance, mais les espaces de l'exil, reel ou imaginaire qu'expriment les grandes oeuvres de la modernite" -- "the writing of modernity is that which sustains itself in a space between identities, in a space outside the identitary. It is not states of belonging, but spaces of exile, real or imaginary, that are signified by the great works of modernity" ("Espaces" 14).[3] Similarly, Michael M. J. Fischer, in his essay on ethnic autobiography in the United States, defines ethnic writing as a kind of postmodern cultural critique which is bifocal, inter-referential, able to switch linguistic codes and explore the multiple realities of pluralistic, post-industrial society (195, 218, 230). According to Fischer, ethnic memory establishes links of continuity with the past -- often by returning to the country of origin -- without losing its main orientation toward the future (201, 206). The ethnic writer, breaking the silence of the parents' generation, finds a voice in social discourse that is no longer identitary. In Le Roman memoriel, Regine Robin also insists that ethnicity is a question of memory -- of multiple and fragmented memories (see Simon, "Espaces" 39). Simon elaborates Robin's remarks by saying, "C'est seulement quand elle devient une problematique de la fragmentation, de la multiplicite des memoires et des traces que l'ethniciti peut agir de maniere feconde dans la critique litteraire, c'est-a-dire quand elle rejoint l'ensemble des soupcons qui entourent aujourd'hui l'identite culturelle et qui font de la culture un champ conflictuel du discours, d'interets et d'allegeances" -- "It is only when it becomes a problematic of fragmentation, of the multiplicity of memories and traces, that ethnicity can enrich literary criticism, that is to say when it joins with all the suspicions that surround cultural identity today and make culture a contested area of discourse, interests and allegiances ("Espaces" 48). According to Pierre Nepveu, in his analysis of the contribution of l'ecriture migrante (writing by immigrants or the children of immigrants) to what he calls post-Quebecois literature, the (im)migrant writer is divided between the memory of ailleurs -- an elsewhere (the country of origin) which fills him or her with a nostalgia devoid of the possibility of return -- and ici, a present place (Quebec) experienced as disorder (203-08). Marked by cosmopolitanism, hybridity, cultural and linguistic mixing, l'ecriture migrante describes the experience of displacement and loss (203, 210). …

Negative Interpellations: From Oklahoma City to the Trilling-Matthiessen Transmission

Abstract: The body of literary knowledge that has taken as its object of investigation narratives of the previously unrepresentable realm between the death of the symbolic order (in which the narratives take place) and the social death of its representative agents -neoslavery narratives, holocaust testimony, witness literature-has isolated negative interpellation as one of the invariant features of this emergent literary practice. The "subject" in/of each of these narratives has been voided of any "imaginary" relation to the "real" state violence to which the "subject" has been interpellated. What is negative in the interpellation then refers at once to the status of the "subject" before she/he was taken up by the interpellative address ("Hey, you there!") as well as to the sociosymbolic order that had come disjoined from that addressee.

History in an Era of Change

Abstract: OUR ACTIONS AS PROFESSIONAL HISTORIANS have been profoundly affected by sweeping social changes, by a public troubled by new historical interpretations, and by the impact of funding cutbacks. I will expand below on these themes, and conclude by discussing the role that the National Council on Public History can play in this era of change. As many historians have observed, we live in societies immersed in history, often with myth-laden visions of the past. People absorb history from many sources: from parents and neighbors, through their schools and the media, from museums, from tours, and from press references to past elections, Oscar winners, and sports stars. Michael Kammen has traced the powerful impact of historical awareness upon Americans throughout their history. David Lowenthal notes that historical fiction and time travel are classic literary genres, and that future history is depicted through science fiction. We cannot escape constant references to history, whether real or imaginary.'

Intellectual anarchy and imaginary otherness : Gender, class, and pathology in French intellectual discourse, 1890-1900

Abstract: This article uses the concept of “intellectual anarchy’ to access the matrix of tensions and representations comprising French intellectual discourse at the turn of the century. It shows that, by accusing one another of fomenting intellectual anarchy, scholars, critics, and poets betrayed masculinist and elitist anxieties about gender and class which, while traditionally depicted as external to such “disinterested’ pursuits, emerge as important organizing structures of the intellectual enterprise itself. While few proletarians and women actually participated in French intellectual life, specters of intellectual proletarianism and effeminacy allowed elites at once to articulate external anxieties regarding collectivism and feminism while using the same principles to distinguish themselves internally from rival groups. That is, as a relatively autonomous space within society, the intellectual field reproduced, according to its own internal logic, the structures of domination that marked the social field.