The Imaginary

About: The Imaginary is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4807 publications have been published within this topic receiving 87663 citations.

Gender, "Aliens", and the National Imaginary in Contemporary Malaysia

Abstract: Over the last few decades, Malaysia has welcomed foreign workers into those sectors of the economy that have suffered chronic low-skilled and semi-skilled labour shortages. Coming from Malaysia's poorer neighbours (particularly Indonesia, Bangladesh, and the Philippines), these migrants occupy an ambivalent place in Malaysia's national development. This paper argues that not only is contemporary Malaysia refashioning its national identity in response to "new outsiders", who are deemed the new "undesirable aliens", as argued by others recently, but this reconstituted national imaginary is profoundly ethno-nationalist, class-based, sexualized, and gendered.

Brecht and Rhetoric

Abstract: IN A notorious comment, J. L. Austin once wrote that "a performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on stage."' Perhaps Austin only ever attended amateur theatricals. Bertolt Brecht approved of amateur acting, since the occasional flatness and hollowness of its utterances seemed to him an unwitting form of alienation effect. For Brecht, the whole point of acting was that it should be in a peculiar sense hollow or void. Alienated acting hollows out the imaginary plenitude of everyday actions, deconstructing them into their social determinants and inscribing within them the conditions of their making. The "void" of alienated acting is a kind of Derridean "spacing," rendering a piece of stage business exterior to itself, sliding a hiatus between actor and action and thus, it is hoped, dismantling the ideological self-identity of our routine social behavior. In "What Is Epic Theatre?" Walter Benjamin remarked that the actor "must be able to space his gestures as the compositor produces spaced type."2 The dramatic gesture, by miming routine behavior in contrivedly hollow ways, represents it in all its lack, in its suppression of material conditions and historical possibilities, and thus represents an absence which it at the same time produces. What the stage action represents is the routine action as differenced through the former's nonself-identity, which nevertheless remains self-identical-recognizable-enough to do all this representing rather than merely to "reflect" a "given" nonidentity in the world. A certain structure of presence must, in other words, be preserved: "verisimilitude" between stage and society can be disrupted only if it is posited. Brecht was particularly keen on encouraging his actors to observe and reproduce actions precisely, for without such an element of presence and recognition the absencing of the alienation effect would be nonproductively rather than productively empty. The internal structure of the effect is one of presence and absence together, or rather a problematic contention of the two in which the distinction between "representation" and "nonrepresentation" is itself thrown into question. The stage action must be self-identical enough to represent as nonself-identical an apparently self-identical world, but in that very act puts its own self-identity into question.

Investigating the Macedonia naming dispute in the Twitter era: implications for the Greek identity crisis

Abstract: The Macedonia naming dispute has been an important issue in Greek affairs. It constitutes both an irresolvable, decades-old international problem and a significant, yet undertheorised, analytical topic. In this context, our aim is to critically explore, highlight and discuss the deep-seated and pervasive patterns, representations, attitudes, beliefs, ideas and norms within the Greek social imaginary, as these emerged on Twitter in real-time, during the mass “Macedonia rally” on February 4, 2018. More specifically, drawing on the dialectical interaction between Twitter posts, sociopolitical behaviours and interpretative analytic frames linked to interdisciplinary theoretical discourses, we attempt to understand and interrogate the intellectual structures, value system and operational categories of a large number of Greek groups on the ‘Twittersphere’. Based on the assumption that, in the last instance, the rigid refusal of the majority of the Greek people to accept a ‘composite name’ solution is connected with the tacit social imaginary of the Greek society, the present paper brings to the fore a complex identity problem. This problem relationally refers to the internal workings of the individuals, the psyche and the unconscious, but also to hidden and unreflected symbolic backgrounds, macro-social processes, and cultural legacies. Our following Twitter network analysis, focused on selected hashtags regarding the ‘Macedonia rally’, point out the character of social dynamics and ascertain the findings of the interpretative research strand.

‘Free to Do What I Want’? Exploring the ambivalent effects of liberating leadership

Abstract: This study examines the phenomenon of ‘liberating leadership', an emerging trend promising self-mastery and collective unity, resonating with the literature on post-heroic leadership. We evaluate the claims of liberating leadership from a psychodynamic perspective, using a Lacanian approach. We examine how post-heroic forms of leadership reconfigure symbolic and imaginary aspects of follower identification, with ambivalent effects. Drawing empirically on the case of a Belgian banking department, we trace how a ‘liberating' leader was able to garner intense psychological attachment among followers, accompanied by the ‘dark sides' of personal exhaustion and breakdown, normative pressure to be overly happy, and the scapegoating of contrarian managers representing symbolic prohibition.