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Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 2015"


Journal ArticleDOI
01 Apr 2015
TL;DR: The authors argue that the notion of social imagaries draws on the modern understanding of the imagination as authentically creative (as opposed to imitative), and that an elaboration of social imaginaries involves a signifi cant, qualitative shift in the understanding of societies as collectively and politically-instituted formations that are irreducible to inter-subjectivity or systemic logics.
Abstract: Investiga tions into social imaginaries have burgeoned in recent years. From ‘the capitalist imaginary’ to the ‘democratic imaginary’, from the ‘ecological imaginary’ to ‘the global imaginary’ – and beyond – the social imaginaries fi eld has expanded across disciplines and beyond the academy. Th e recent debates on social imaginaries and potential new imaginaries reveal a recognisable fi eld and paradigm-in-the-making. We argue that Castoriadis, Ricoeur, and Taylor have articulated the most important theoretical frameworks for understanding social imaginaries, although the fi eld as a whole remains heterogeneous. We further argue that the notion of social imaginaries draws on the modern understanding of the imagination as authentically creative (as opposed to imitative). We contend that an elaboration of social imaginaries involves a signifi cant, qualitative shift in the understanding of societies as collectively and politically-(auto)instituted formations that are irreducible to inter-subjectivity or systemic logics. After marking out the contours of the fi eld and recounting a philosophical history of the imagination (including deliberations on the reproductive and creative imaginations, as well as consideration of contemporary Japanese contributions), the essay turns to debates on social imaginaries in more concrete contexts, specifi cally political-economic imaginaries, the ecological imaginary, multiple modernities and their intercivilisational encounters. Th e social imaginaries fi eld imparts powerful messages for the human sciences and wider publics. In particular, social imaginaries hold signifi cant implications for ontological, phenomenological and philosophical anthropological questions; for the cultural, social, and political horizons of contemporary worlds; and for ecological and economic phenomena (including their manifest crises). Th e essay concludes with the argument that social imaginaries as a paradigm-in-the-making off ers valuable means by which movements towards social change can be elucidated as well providing an open horizon for the critiques of existing social practices.

93 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this forum, innovative thought, design, and research in the area of interaction design and sustainability are highlighted, illustrating the diversity of approaches across HCI communities.
Abstract: In this forum we highlight innovative thought, design, and research in the area of interaction design and sustainability, illustrating the diversity of approaches across HCI communities. --- Lisa Nathan and Samuel Mann, Editors

68 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa as mentioned in this paper addressed the surprising capacity of the witchcraft imaginary, which is a powerful metaphor for power and authority.
Abstract: Peter Geschiere’s groundbreaking study, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa, (1997) addressed the surprising capacity of the witchcraft imaginary, which is r...

63 citations


Book
07 Apr 2015
TL;DR: The Communal Luxury event as mentioned in this paper revisits what Marx called the Commune's "own working existence," a lived experience of "equality in action," focusing particularly on questions of the commune form itself, internationalism, work, art, education, and ecology.
Abstract: The Commune is back on the agenda. From Madrid to Istanbul, from Cairo to New York, people are reappropriating public and private spaces, reorienting them toward a new function in common. A return to the great nineteenth-century insurrection that most fully instantiated urban insurrection may well be due. Communal Luxury revisits what Marx called the Commune's "own working existence," a lived experience of "equality in action," focusing particularly on questions of the commune form itself, internationalism, work, art, education, and ecology. Ross intertwines the actual words spoken, positions taken, and physical displacements made by the event's participants and its fellow travelers, as well as the bubbling thought it generated. In its original engagement with, but not slavish allegiance to, anarchism and Marxism, the Commune experience is of particular timeliness today.

60 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
Emma Kowal1
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the strange temporality of indigeneity within "progressive" discourses in Australia and show how there is a kind of cultural Lamarckianism in operation.
Abstract: Time is one mechanism through which Indigenous-modern dichotomies are created and maintained and an enduring trope of difference in the settler-colonial imaginary. This article explores the strange temporality of indigeneity within ‘progressive’ discourses in Australia. Taking Johannes Fabian’s concept of ‘allochronism’ as a point of departure, and drawing on ethnography of non-Indigenous people working in Indigenous health in the Northern Territory, I show how there is a kind of cultural Lamarckianism in operation. ‘Western’ individuals are seen to inherit the cumulative cultural knowledge, acquired over centuries, of germ theory and responsible alcohol consumption. By contrast, Indigenous people are seen to struggle with banking and infectious diseases because they have not had sufficient time to develop the appropriate cultural knowledge. Through the anthropomorphising of culture and the culturalisation of individuals, the Indigenous person/culture becomes the 40,000-year history of human occupation of the continent. I point to the limits of this settler-colonial imaginary and potential alternatives.

58 citations


Book
15 Oct 2015
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors recall Freud's witch reading of Lacan's "Witch Reading Lacan" and their return to metapsychology, recalling Freud's Witch reading Lacan and the notion of "unthought ground of thought in the Freudian Unconscious".
Abstract: Preface Introduction: Returning to Metapsychology Recalling Freud's Witch Reading Lacan Chapter 1: Toward the Unthought Ground of Thought Monet's Pursuit of the "Enveloppe" The World of the Water Lilies The Class of 1890: Von Ehrenfels, James, Bergson, Nietzsche Gestalt Psychology and Phenomenology Heidegger: The Disposition of Being The Gestaltist Ontology of Merleau-Ponty The Unthought Ground of Thought in the Freudian Unconscious Chapter 2: Between the Image and the Word In the Shadow of the Image The Unconscious Play of the Signifier From Image to Sign The Ratman's Phantasy The Specimen Dream of Psychoanalysis The Dream's Solution Circulation in the Psychic Apparatus The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles Chapter 3: The Freudian Dialectic The Formative Power of the Image Imaginary Alienation Aggressivity and the Death Drive The Agency of the Death in the Signifier Language Acquisition and the Oedipus Complex Psychoanalysis and the Theory of Sacrifice Toward a Lacanian Theory of Sacrifice Chapter 4: The Freudian Thing A Love Triangle The Thing About the Other Thing or No-thing Speaking of the Thing Freud avec Jakobson Chapter 5: Figurations of the Objet a The Object-Cause of Desire "You don't love me . . . you don't give a shit" Between the Look and the Gaze Why One and One Make Four How the Real World Became a Phantasy Conclusion

55 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Black subject in Lee Edelman's queer negativity is explored here as both absent from and productive of its most radical critiques of futurity as mentioned in this paper, which has opened a debate on hope and hopelessness that has left little room for middle ground, much less an altogether different terrain.
Abstract: The Black subject in Lee Edelman's queer negativity is explored here as both absent from and productive of its most radical critiques of futurity. The essay attempts to read a different queer negativity within the tradition of Black feminist theorizing. There must be some way to integrate death into living, neither ignoring it nor giving in to it. --Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals The polemical thrust of the interventions called queer negativity has opened a debate on hope and hopelessness that has left little room for middle ground, much less an altogether different terrain. This essay tries to find a different place(lessness) from which to theorize queer negativity and, or as, Black feminist theorizing. That is, to find in the interventions called queer negativity--the critique of reproductive futurity, of the family, of the politics of hope--their prefigurations and alter-articulations within Black feminist theory. This is not to say that queer negativity simply reproduces Black feminism in whiteface, but that Black feminist theorizing anticipates or, rather, haunts the political imaginary articulated in queer negativity. Returning to Black feminist theorizing opens onto yet another political imaginary, one different from both the queer pessimists and their queer futurist critics. Black feminist theorizing offers a way of short-circuiting the dialectic of hope and hopelessness and allows for different theorizations of reproduction, futurity, and their coalescence at the site of the family. I want to begin, then, with some reflections on the project of queer negativity. In the hands of literary theorist Lee Edelman, the antirelational position developed across the oeuvre of Leo Bersani has shifted from a critique of the sanitization of sexuality into a position against the reproduction of society--futurity--itself. Edelman's 2004 monograph, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, offers an iconoclastic revision and re-envisioning of the antirelational project. Edelman's text positions itself against "reproductive futurity," or "the dominant ideology of the social [... that] represents futurity in the image of the innocent child" (Dean, "Antisocial" 827). This image of the Child is central to Edelman's work, insofar as the force of its presence polices queerness and queer politics. For Edelman, the Child "remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, [and] the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention" (3). Thus, Edelman offers a vision of a queer ethics that is against the future and against the Child that symbolizes the future. Indeed, the force of Edelman's polemic obtains in his insistence that queers embrace the very disorder imputed to them by the dominant society. In a much-cited passage, Edelman argues that resistance must affirm "what the Law and the Pope and the whole of the Symbolic order for which they stand hear anyway in each and every expression or manifestation of queer sexuality: fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we're collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; Fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop" (29). For Edelman, this is precisely to argue that "what is queerest about us [...] is this willingness [...] to insist that the future stop here" (31). In other words, the queer "is the figure currently capable of unraveling the libidinal economy of signification through which a particular dominant socius reproduces itself" (Keeling 567-68). It is in the rejection of the future--indeed, an embrace of this rejection--that Edelman discovers the possibility of fundamentally undoing the dominant social order. Critiques of Edelman have run the gamut from accusations that his arguments amount to little more than a dissembled optimism, that he ignores the polymorphous perversity of really-existing children, that he misapprehends Lacan entirely, and that his polemic is overwritten by an intransigent, smirking whiteness that limits the applicability of his conclusions. …

34 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper argued that the concept of energy security is best understood as a sociotechnical imaginary, a collective vision for a good society realized through t... and argued that energy security can be viewed as a social good.
Abstract: This article advances recent scholarship on energy security by arguing that the concept is best understood as a sociotechnical imaginary, a collective vision for a “good society” realized through t...

32 citations



Journal ArticleDOI
Timothy W. Luke1
TL;DR: In this paper, climate change is represented as an increasingly conventionalized cluster of signs, symbols, and stories, which is cast in various graphic and tabular presentations of the world.
Abstract: Climate change is represented as an increasingly conventionalized cluster of signs, symbols, and stories. This symbolic formation typically is cast in various graphic and tabular presentations of h...

27 citations


Book
20 Feb 2015
TL;DR: The Imagination and the Imaginary as mentioned in this paper explores the links between imagination - regarded as the faculty of creating images or forms - and the imaginary which links such imagery with affect or emotion and captures the significance which the world carries for us.
Abstract: The concept of the imaginary is pervasive within contemporary thought, yet can be a baffling and often controversial term. In Imagination and the Imaginary, Kathleen Lennon explores the links between imagination - regarded as the faculty of creating images or forms - and the imaginary, which links such imagery with affect or emotion and captures the significance which the world carries for us. Beginning with an examination of contrasting theories of imagination proposed by Hume and Kant, Lennon argues that the imaginary is not something in opposition to the real, but the very faculty through which the world is made real to us. She then turns to the vexed relationship between perception and imagination and, drawing on Kant, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, explores some fundamental questions, such as whether there is a distinction between the perceived and the imagined; the relationship between imagination and creativity; and the role of the body in perception and imagination. Invoking also Spinoza and Coleridge, Lennon argues that, far from being a realm of illusion, the imaginary world is our most direct mode of perception. She then explores the role the imaginary plays in the formation of the self and the social world. A unique feature of the volume is that it compares and contrasts a philosophical tradition of thinking about the imagination - running from Kant and Hume to Strawson and John McDowell - with the work of phenomenological, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist and feminist thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Lacan, Castoriadis, Irigaray, Gatens and Lloyd. This makes Imagination and the Imaginary essential reading for students and scholars working in phenomenology, philosophy of perception, social theory, cultural studies and aesthetics. Cover Image: Bronze Bowl with Lace, Ursula Von Rydingsvard, 2014. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Lelong and Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Photo Jonty Wilde.


DissertationDOI
01 Sep 2015
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose a method to solve the problem of "uniformity" and "uncertainty" in 3.5.5 GHz frequency bands, respectively.
Abstract: 5

Book
19 Nov 2015
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the institutional contexts, affinities, and rivalries of the poststructuralists in the French intellectual field, drawing from Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and the academic field.
Abstract: French thinkers such as Lacan and Derrida are often labelled as representatives of 'poststructuralism' in the Anglophone world. However in France, where their work originated, they use no such category; this group of theorists – 'the poststructuralists' - were never perceived as a coherent intellectual group or movement. Outlining the institutional contexts, affinities, and rivalries of, among others, Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, Irigaray, and Kristeva, Angermuller – drawing from Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and the academic field – insightfully explores post-structuralism as a phenomenon. By tracing the evolution of the French intellectual field after the war, Why There is No Poststructuralism in France places French Theory both in the specific material conditions of its production and the social and historical contexts of its reception, accounting for a particularly creative moment in French intellectual life which continues to inform the theoretical imaginary of our time.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper examined whether developmental differences also play a role in the degree to which individuals are drawn to make-believable stories and found that some children and adults are more drawn to the imaginary than others.
Abstract: Some children and adults are more drawn to the imaginary than others. Here, we examine whether developmental differences also play a role in the degree to which individuals are drawn to make-believ...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show how dialogical Dutchness is negotiated and transformed in actual enactments of national difference and belonging in the context of state-provided parenting courses in the Netherlands.
Abstract: In contemporary Europe, national identities are fiercely contested and governments have sought ways to strengthen national identification. Notwithstanding this European pattern, government policies are implemented differently and belonging to the nation comes to involve different images and enactments across contexts. In the Netherlands, especially, belonging to the nation is at stake in many high-profile public and political struggles. In this context, a pervasive public imaginary we call ‘dialogical Dutchness’ represents the Dutch as distinctly anti-nationalist and open to difference. This raises the question whether national boundaries actually become traversable in view of such a national imaginary. How does one become a Dutch subject if Dutchness entails not being nationalist? Through the analysis of a Dutch social policy practice – state-provided parenting courses – we show how dialogical Dutchness is negotiated and transformed in actual enactments of national difference and belonging. Although dialogical Dutchness foregrounds openness to difference and valorises discussion, it comes to perpetuate and substantiate boundaries between those who belong to the nation and those whose belonging is still in question.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Body & Society as mentioned in this paper presents five selected case studies focusing on the contexts of transplantation, psychiatry, amputation and war, and a transvalued media ecology of cancer to offer meditations on a number of interlinked questions, including entanglement of biomedical governance with the nexus of estrangement, which can denote both the distancing of otherness and self-division.
Abstract: This introductory article provides a contextual and theoretical overview to this special issue of Body & Society. The special issue presents five selected case studies – focusing on the contexts of transplantation, psychiatry, amputation and war, and a transvalued media ecology of cancer – to offer meditations on a number of interlinked questions. The first of these is the entanglement of biomedical governance – political/economic as well as self-disciplinary – with the nexus of estrangement, which can denote both the distancing of otherness and self-division. Second is the realm of feeling, of phantasmatic projection and of the ways in which the biopolitical becomes reciprocally, discursively, enmeshed in a wider cultural imaginary. Third is the shifting terrain of gender and feminist politics, a key dimension of which is the necessary reworking of feminist thought in the wake of a radically altered biomedical and biotechnological landscape. Under the rubric of Estranged Bodies, the collection considers themes of dissolution and the fragility of the body/subject read through bodily catastrophe, radical body modification and extreme medical intervention. Also considered is the notion of assemblage – the provisional coming together of disparate parts – which encourages a rethinking of questions of reconstituted, displaced and re-placed bodies.

Journal ArticleDOI
Louis A. Sass1
TL;DR: For instance, the authors offers an intellectual portrait of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, by considering his incorporation of perspectives associated with modernism, the artistic and intellectual avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century.
Abstract: This paper offers an intellectual portrait of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, by considering his incorporation of perspectives associated with “modernism,” the artistic and intellectual avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century. These perspectives are largely absent in other alternatives in psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. Emphasis is placed on Lacan’s affinities with phenomenology, a tradition he criticized and to which he is often seen as opposed. Two general issues are discussed. The first is Lacan’s unparalleled appreciation of the paradoxical nature of human experience, together with his treatment of paradox as (paradoxically enough) almost a criterion of truth. These points are illustrated by considering Lacan’s conceptions of the self and of erotic desire. The second issue is Lacan’s focus on the “ontological dimension,” on overall styles or modalities of what might be termed “transcendental subjectivity”: namely, what he calls the registers of the “Imaginary,” the “Symbolic,” and the “Real.” By emphasizing the incommensurable yet (paradoxically) interdependent nature of these modalities, Lacan offers a synthesis of dynamic/conflictual and formal/ontological dimensions of the human condition. This paper offers an encompassing portrait of Lacan’s major ideas that is at odds with the widespread assumption that Lacan is somehow a deeply anti-humanist thinker who derides the subjective dimension. Lacan’s most distinctive contributions are fundamentally concerned with the nature of human experience. They show strong affinities with (and the influence of) hermeneutic forms of phenomenology inspired by Heidegger, a philosopher who focused on ontological modes of Being and considered paradox as a mark of truth.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the fact that to date, the projects are themselves largely "imaginary" and globally, there are no full-chain power plants operating in the world.
Abstract: One of the major challenges of risk communications for CCS is the fact that, to date at least, the projects are themselves largely ‘imaginary’ – globally, there are no full-chain power plants opera...


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Gonzalez-Moreno, Solovieva, & Quintanar-Rojas, 2014a, 2014b, the authors have suggested that the presence or absence of symbolic function may be observed within play activity, and that the absence of these kinds of play activities or the lack of possibilities for being included in such activities has a negative influence on the acquisition of symbolic functions at preschool age.
Abstract: IntroductionWithin the historical and cultural conception of development, signs and symbols are essential psychological instruments for transforming the psyche and the internal world of a child (Vygotsky, 1931/1983,1982 /1993). Vygotsky stressed that the signs can be used, first, on the external social and material level and, second, on the individual, internal, and ideal level (Elkonin, 2009; Quintanar & Solovieva, 2009). In other words, internal symbols may appear only after corresponding internal actions in which such symbols might be used (Vygotsky, 1983 /1995). Afterword, within activity theory, the regularities of acquisition and the types of orientation used for actions with symbols were taken into account during the teaching process (Talizina, 2009).At preschool age the presence or absence of symbolic function may be observed within play activity. Collective forms the social role-play are specifically useful for the introduction of symbols at the external, materialized level (Gonzalez-Moreno, Solovieva, & Quintanar-Rojas, 2014a, 2014b; Gonzalez-Moreno & Solovieva, 2014a, 2014b). Interaction between adults and children within play activity may be observed in materialized, perceptive, and verbal symbolic actions. It is possible to suppose that the formation of symbolic actions follows the typical sequence of stages for the formation of mental actions proposed by Galperin (1966,1998).Materialized actions refer to the fact that the child starts to use material objects in a particular way: an object is used in external action as a substitute for another object, which is absent (or just not used by the child). The child may express orally the meaning of such a substitution. For example, a child using a pencil as a comb for a dollcan express that he/she is combing the doll's hair using the pencil. The child learns to reproduce the models of actions with concrete objects, and by symbolic representation such models pass to a more generalized level.Such types of actions may be called symbolic actions, which increase significantly within play activity. The child starts to use objects not only according to the external or functional meaning but also according to the new "denomination" (Petrovski, 1985). Such a change in the use of objects also means that the child has developed the internal, constant functional image of the corresponding object and may apply this image in new, "symbolic" situations.In this process the operations with the object correspond to the proprieties of the "absent" object, which is represented within the current symbolic action. The whole process is accompanied by the gradual development of consciousness of actions and of the meaning of objects in different actions. Plays with rules and social role-play occupy an important place in psychological development. It is possible to suppose that the absence of these kinds of play activities or the lack of possibilities for being included in such activities has a negative influence on the acquisition of symbolic function at preschool age.Later on, symbolic actions pass to the perceptive level, on which it is possible to accomplish substitution or representation of the object graphically. "Perceptive actions require ... the perceptual recognition of the elements and the comprehension of the images [that] are the symbols which may serve for the child and other people ... to represent objects and events, real or imaginary" (Salsa & Vivaldi, 2012, p. 135).The level of verbal symbolic actions is the most complex at preschool age and includes the generalization of linguistic elements. A typical feature of this level is that a word has meaning and object reference (Luria, 1976). The word maybe converted into a sign because it may represent not only the concrete object but also the imaginative, symbolic object (an event, situation, feature, or action), which is not directly included in the meaning. In other words, each word has a polysemic structure that is not accessible to infants but can appear as a new, qualitative possibility at the end of preschool age. …

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine key ideas that emerge from the work of Julia Kristeva to demonstrate how ontology and epistemology are inextricably entwined in knowledge production.
Abstract: Since all theories of knowing deal with the being of subjects, objects, instruments and environments, they can be viewed as onto-epistemological. This chapter examines key ideas that emerge from the work of Julia Kristeva – 'the speaking subject', 'materiality of language' and 'heterogeneity' – to demonstrate how ontology and epistemology are inextricably entwined in knowledge production. Kristeva also affirms both the agency of matter and the dimension of human/subjective agency implicated in cultural production. This is contrasted with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s account creative practice. The article also draws on the artistic work of researcher-practitioner Brian Martin, and his account of the relationship between Indigenous Australian art and culture to demonstrate that in an Indigenous world view, the real, the immaterial, the imaginary and the representational occur concurrently.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors propose that Lacan's L‐schema can contribute to separating productive from counterproductive aspects of transference as it distinguishes between an Imaginary and a Symbolic dimension in transference.
Abstract: Transference in perversion is characterized by specific problems such as a defiant and polemic attitude, erotic transference, projections, and aggression Such transference poses particular problems in the treatment of perversion and might render analytical work with these patients impossible The authors propose that Lacan's L-schema can contribute to separating productive from counterproductive aspects of transference as it distinguishes between an Imaginary and a Symbolic dimension in transference In this meta-synthesis of 11 published case studies on sexual perversion, patterns of transference are analysed On the Imaginary dimension, the authors found that patients with perversion tend to (un)consciously engage the analyst in a relationship characterized by identification, fusion and rivalry On the Symbolic dimension, they found that perverse patients are able to question their motives, lapses, symptoms, and subjective identity The thematic analysis revealed the importance of the position of the analyst in this work, which is described within the L-schema as being the representative of the otherness in the Other Implications for clinical practice and recommendations for further research are outlined

Dissertation
01 Jan 2015
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated national identification by applying psychosocial methodology to discourse produced in Russia during the era of "Putinism" (2000-2010) using interviews, surveys and media representations.
Abstract: This thesis investigates national identification by applying psychosocial methodology to discourses produced in Russia during the era of ‘Putinism’ (2000- ). Existing literature on post-Soviet Russia frequently claims that at the heart of the nation lies an absence of symbolic functions or subjective formations with which Russians could identify. At the same time, there has been relatively little empirical work that seeks to examine national identification using a psychosocial approach. The study fills this lacuna by looking for moments of identification across different texts, such as interviews, surveys and media representations. Using as its starting point the conditions of possibility of post-2000 Russia, the study pays attention to societal shifts and disjunctures, examining how they are reflected in discursive patterns and formations. The dissertation’s empirical element consists of two parts. Through the analysis of interviews and open-ended surveys, the first part documents respondents’ ambivalent relationship with Russia and Russianness, which is characterized by splitting and disavowal. In the second part, the study deploys a case study approach. The first case study focuses on discourses of rejection and (dis)identification as featured in the Russian public’s responses to Pussy Riot. It concludes that in their policing of Russianness and the demarcation of features deemed undesirable as embodied by the group, participants in the debate have found ways of both shifting the threat Pussy Riot represents, and also of once again ‘enjoying the nation’. The second case study examines discourses that seek to elicit identification in the populace via representational mechanisms around the figure of Vladimir Putin. It is argued that the various strategies employed to activate leader love, ranging from hypermasculinity to hyperrealism, seem to indicate a void at the heart of the Russian president’s persona and, by extension, his national project, making them profoundly unstable. Overall, the thesis provides a rare empirical contribution to the psychosocial study of national identification. It addresses the interrelation between imaginary and symbolic identification and the pivotal role of fantasmatic processes therein. The identifications I locate in the thesis are precarious and fleeting, speaking of the loss of a fantasy of national greatness, and of an internalization of images and scenes borrowed from literature and history. The study also offers a consideration of the implications of such attachments for Russian society, thus providing further illustration of the interdependence of the psychic and the social.

BookDOI
16 Sep 2015
TL;DR: The relationship between politics and psychoanalysis is explored in this article, where the authors propose a theory of resistance in psychoanalytical thought and practice, based on Lacan's theory of discourses.
Abstract: Introduction: Jacques Lacan: between politics and psychoanalysis I: Political significance of psychoanalysis 1. Jean-Michel Rabate, Lacan's "annees erotiques" (1968/69) 2. Jelica Sumic, Politics and Psychoanalysis in Times of the Inexistent Other II: Lacanian psychoanalysis and the political Oedipus and the intricacy of language and sexuality 3. Philippe Van Haute and Tomas Geyskens, Freud's Dream? Lacan and Oedipus 4. Mladen Dolar, Not Even: Politics of Oedipus 5. Juliet Flower-MacCannel, Lacan's Imaginary 6. Alenka Zupancic, Sexual is Political 7. Dominiek Hoens, Object a and Politics Politics and Lacan's theory of discourses 8. Peter Klepec, On the Mastery in the Four Discourses 9. Colin Wright, Discourse and the Master's lining: a Lacanian critique of globalizing biopolitics 10. Samo Tomsic, Psychoanalysis, Capitalism and Critique of Political Economy 11. Mai Wegener, Why should dreaming be a form of work? III: Psychoanalysis and Political Encounters 12. Juliet Rogers, A Stranger Politics: towards a theory of resistance in psychoanalytical thought and practice 13. Ari Hirvonen, The Truth of Desire: Lack, Law and Phallus 14. Andreja Zevnik, Kant avec Sade: Ethics in a Trap of Politics and the Perversion of Law 15. Kirsten Campbell, Feminism and Lacanian Psychoanalysis 16. Slavoj Zizek, Divine Ex-Sistence 17. David Pavon-Cuellar, Metapsychology on the battlefield: political praxis as critique of the psychological essence of ideology 18. Panu Minkkinen, Lacan avec Bataille avec Nietzsche: a politics of the impossible?

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, a reading of Mt. 26.6.13 from an ecological perspective taking account of the materiality and sociality encoded in the text is presented, with a focus on gender, power and a range of multiplicative vectors.
Abstract: Over the last 30 years or more the feminist and ecological movements have contributed significantly to two major shifts in the human social imaginary. These shifts have lead to new ways of reading/interpreting classical texts, and in this instance, biblical texts. This article addresses the political function of readings which have attended to gender, power and a range of multiplicative vectors over the recent decades of feminist interpretation. The more recent shift in the social imaginary to what Lorraine Code calls ‘ecological thinking’ has called for a move beyond anthropocentrism. Such a shift requires new ways of reading. This article concludes with a reading of Mt. 26.6–13 from an ecological perspective taking account of the materiality and sociality encoded in the text.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the concept of expertise emerges through a bigger array of social capital as well as traditional structures of power such as class, gender and race, and the notion of the imaginary emerges in their research as so central to expertise.
Abstract: In the digital age, it seems that participation has been conflated with literacy, content with engagement, novelty with innovation and ubiquity with meaning (e.g. see Thornham and McFarlane, 2014; Gillespie, 2010; Dean, 2008; Livingstone, 2009; van Dijck, 2013) and encapsulated in terms such as ‘digital native’, ‘digital divide’ or ‘born digital’. In turn, these conflations have done something to technology, which is constructed as malleable, a supportive facilitator, and the user, who is constructed as active agent. Neither of these account for mediations nor for – crucial for us – the notion of the imaginary, which emerges in our research as so central to expertise. Drawing on ethnographic work carried out in Studio12, a media production facility for young people with disadvantaged backgrounds in Leeds, United Kingdom, we propose that the concept of expertise emerges through a bigger array of social capital as well as traditional structures of power such as class, gender and race. Expertise is claimed, ...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the historical basis for a cyberspace of identity has been examined in terms of the Internet's post-1968 countercultural history embedded within a larger intellectual history of mathematical logic, taking a detour through the emergence of computer science as an academic discipline.
Abstract: Since the world saw proof of US and UK digital surveillance practices, the Internet has been imagined in public discourse not so much as a digital frontier than as a strictly delimited identity management system While it is no doubt productive to think about this political crisis in terms of the Internet’s post-1968 countercultural history, that history is itself embedded within a larger intellectual history of mathematical logic By taking a detour through the emergence of computer science as an academic discipline, this article examines the historical basis for a cyberspace of identity

Journal ArticleDOI
Ester Gallo1
TL;DR: The authors questions the dichotomy of traditional fieldwork versus contemporary topics/contemporary topics/multi-sited imaginary and interrogates the role of village ethnography in traditional field work.
Abstract: This article questions the dichotomy of ‘classical anthropological topics/traditional fieldwork’ versus ‘contemporary topics/multi-sited imaginary’ and interrogates the role of village ethnography ...