The Imaginary

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

Hope Against Hope: Queer Negativity, Black Feminist Theorizing, and Reproduction without Futurity

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. …

Oil in an American Imaginary

Abstract: If money, according to Augier, comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek, capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt. Karl Marx, Capital It is common to view oil as emblematic of all that is dynamic and disastrous in advanced capitalism. Just as oil dominates commodity trade and circulation globally, so its symbolic order critically organises competing discourses about its human worth. The rhetoric of oil remains extremely powerful and is not so much an integer of price swings in oil on the world market but is deeply embedded in the ways a society represents itself to itself. In 1992 the critic and author Amitav Ghosh pertinently argued that oil had little presence in cultural expression apart from standout contributions like that of Abdelrahman Munif and his brilliant extended fiction of the petro-state, the quintet Cities of Salt (1) Much of Ghosh's reading of Munif holds but petrofiction, as he calls it, has a more substantial and turbulent genealogy than Ghosh suggests. Why is it, for instance, that oil's representation seems ubiquitous and yet is relatively absent from critically and creatively articulated claims on space, history and social formation? If climate change has provoked utopian desires for a world beyond oil, a planet where oil does not and cannot centrally drive its economic activity, then that challenge must include an imaginative grasp of its otherwise abstruse narrative of modernity, not in the mere content of oil's omnipresence, but in the very ways oil has fictively come to define so much of being in modernity, or what is sometimes referred to as an oil ontology. (2) It is oil's saturation of the infrastructure of modernity that paradoxically has placed a significant bar on its cultural representation. The following argument will address this conundrum, particularly as it informs an understanding of the rise and fall of United States' hegemony in the twentieth century. Obviously, oil is not the only way to understand this history (which has been extensively critiqued by Wallerstein, Arrighi, and Harvey, among others (3)) but nevertheless, petrofiction provides provocative insight into oil's claims on an American imaginary and holds some important lessons for the ways we might read oil both as a commodity and as a cultural logic in its own right. Crucially, Ghosh does not consider the possibilities of a logic of oil that puts it in the shade, in his eyes, when compared with the creative commodity par excellence, spice (although even here, in the realm of commodities of colonisation, he might have made space for the vast histories on sugar and coffee). In the case of the United States, for instance, Ghosh claims that a literature reflecting oil's great influence - what he terms the 'oil encounter'--never emerged and there is consequently no Great American Oil Novel because to Americans oil 'smells bad': 'It reeks of unavoidable overseas entanglements, a worrisome foreign dependency, economic uncertainty, risky and expensive military enterprises; of thousands of dead civilians and children and all the troublesome questions that lie buried in their graves'. (4) Who would want an encounter of this kind, the thinking goes, when it betrays a sordid history harder to wash off than blood or dirt, to recall our epigraph? It is important to underline the fact that Ghosh's position in 1992 derives directly from the experience of the Gulf War: a short but brutal conflict that provides a telling script for the aversion he describes. Furthermore, the immediacy of the war overdetermines at a second level precisely the absence which Ghosh discerns in the literature of oil. If we are to understand the oil encounter and its genealogy, then the Gulf War must be an initial pivot: a veritable punctum in a field of apparent over-representation, one that points simultaneously to an encounter--or what Lacan calls a tuche or traumatic experience that interrupts repetition (5)--in American self representation, but also to a war of position that anticipates the ultimate decline of oil's pivotal role in the global economy. …

Film theory and contemporary Hollywood movies

Abstract: Introduction, Warren Buckland Part One: New Practices, New Aesthetics 1. New Hollywood, New Millennium, Thomas Schatz 2. The Supernatural in Neo-Baroque Hollywood, Sean Cubitt 3. Man without a Movie Camera-Movies without Men: Towards a Posthumanist Cinema? William Brown 4. Movie-games and Game-movies: Towards an Aesthetic of Transmediality, Douglas Brown and Tanya Krzywinska 5. Saw Heard: Musical Sound Design in Contemporary Cinema, K.J. Donnelly 6. The Shape of 1999: The Stylistics of American Movies at the End of the Century, Barry Salt 7. Tales of Epiphany and Entropy: Paranarrative Worlds on YouTube, Thomas Elsaesser Part Two: Feminism, Philosophy, and Queer Theory 8. Reformulating the Symbolic Universe: Kill Bill and Tarantino's Transcultural Imaginary, Sasa Vojkovic' 9. (Broke)back to the Mainstream: Queer Theory and Queer Cinemas Today, Harry M. Benshoff 10. Demystifying Deleuze: French Philosophy Meets Contemporary US Cinema, David Martin-Jones Part Three: Rethinking Affects, Narration, Fantasy, and Realism 11. Trauma, Pleasure, and Emotion in the Viewing of Titanic: A Cognitive Approach, Carl Plantinga 12. Mementos of Contemporary American Cinema: Identifying and Responding to the Unreliable Narrator in the Movie Theater, Volker Ferenz 13. Fantasy Audiences versus Fantasy Audiences, Martin Barker 14. "What is There Really in the World?" Forms of Theory, Evidence and Truth in Fahrenheit 9/11: A Philosophical and Intuitionist Realist Approach, Ian Aitken Notes on Contributors Index

Inclusión-exclusión. Los imaginarios sociales de un proceso de construcción social

Abstract: The historical fashion is our way to be alive. We don't know very well what is the tradition nor the prediction but we felt the emptiness of the always present present time. Our universe is that of the "recurrence"; we needed to discover new concepts that allow us to generate and to respond to the flexibility of the references. To this situation of high complexity it tries to respond a theory in construction: the Theory of Social Imaginary: this one are schemes socially constructed that allows us to perceive, to explain and to take part in each differentiated social system what reality means. Social Imaginary operate like a metacode in the systems socially differentiated, through the code relevance/opacity, and generate forms and ways that validate like realities. The problem to indicate the marginality at different historical times and different concrete social systems consists of protecting the complexity by means of the use of two distinctions: the one of the code "inclusion/exclusion" and the other of the difference between observer of first order and second order. There is a generalized tendency to locate the exclusions "outside" of our direct experience and the inclusions like advantages of our social or familiar, national or world-wide position. With it we forgot something fundamental: the inclusion is an operation of the system, not of the individuals. Finally, it is exposed, as last part of this writing, a simple enumeration of the scopes, the distinctions and the perspective from which it is possible to establish observations of second order that allow to discover the different constructions of reality that propose us to different social imaginary.