Imaginary Aspects Research Articles

El cinema transgenèric d'Isaki Lacuesta i el diàleg amb Miquel Barceló

Summary: This study deals with the figure of Isaki Lacuesta, a young filmmaker from Girona, and his already prominent role within Catalonia’s new cinema. Lacuesta’s cinema relies as much on new academic tenets as it does on a redefinition of the avant-garde cinema once espoused by some of the members of the Barcelona School during the sixties and seventies of the 20th century. A brief survey of Lacuesta’s trajectory via his feature films to date allows us to formulate an initial inflection point, a kind of artistic continuum that could be summarized in the figure of the “trace,” understood in its double archeological and rhetorical sense. It is the trace left by the mysterious passage of myth both in its historical and its imaginary aspects. This study attempts, ultimately, to offer an analysis of El cuaderno de barro (The Mud Notebook, 2011), and Los pasos dobles (Double Steps, 2011) that emphasizes their dual vertebration and their simultaneous creation and that proves the polymorphous and transgeneric nature that characterizes Lacuesta’s entire work. [Keywords: Isaki Lacuesta; avant-garde; trace; trangeneric cinema; New Catalan Cinema]

The History Fiction Divide

We study the past for many different reasons and in many different ways, of which the historical way or rather the historians’ way is only one. The police and the courts, psychoanalysts and ethnographers, archaeologists and antiquarians confront pasts different from that (or those) posited by historians and use different methods for studying them. In this essay I raise some differences and similarities between a historical and a literary way of dealing with the communal past. This has special relevance for anyone working in the field of Holocaust studies, because it was thought for a long time that an artistic or literary treatment of this event posed two dangers: fictionalisation (or endowing real events an imaginary or fantastic air or aspect) and aestheticisation (or making the evil of this event fascinating and even perversely attractive).

Walking Clouds and Augmented Reverie

This work focuses on the imaginary aspects of the embodied exploration of virtual matter. Thanks to a motion capture device and a real-time simulation system, modifications of bodily density can be experienced through a cloud-avatar. The mutual influence of the cloud behaviour and the user's action offers a great deal of freedom for expressive performances and creative interactions. It also provides a new mode of engagement in virtual images, allowing for the experience of a peculiar kind of dynamic reverie, which is virtually augmented and poetically enriched through the dialog with the cloud-matter.

On the Threshold: Knowledge, Hybridity, and Gender in August Strindberg’s I havsbandet

Finns der nu nagot system i denna galenskap? --Strindberg, Blomstrens Hemligheter (1) STRINDBERG'S NOVEL I HAVSBANDET, published in 1890, introduces the isolated world of the Swedish archipelago as a border zone between open sea and land, order and disorder, and law and lawlessness. Along the Swedish coast, the well-defined waterline is broken up into a cluster of scattered islands and thus expanded from a border line into a border area--a setting recurrent in Strindberg's prose. (2) Accordingly, the eponymous havsband [chain of skerries], reduplicated in the novel's original title, (3) does not only provide the scenery for the text, but also an aesthetic space in its own right, experimenting with and challenging traditional spatial demarcations (4): the skargard [skerry landscape], as I will argue, is a multiply stratified space composed of several diverse wild elements. Consequently, this transitional area with a gradual change from a terrestrial to a maritime environment (Stora 448) is a hybrid space that has to be domesticated and systematized in order to become habitable. Against this background, Axel Borg, the protagonist of the text, sets out to tame the wild: the raging sea and the untilled island. Yet, instead of simply assuming the role of the colonizer who appropriates a place for his own use, Borg stages himself as vanguard in the original military meaning of the word avant-garde: he is the Trager des Fortschritts (Barck 544) [bearer of progress], a self-appointed pioneer who, in the end, perishes because he utterly fails to establish control over the colonized. Moreover, Strindberg's novel presents, represents, and exemplifies the literary and imaginary aspects of scientific language, redefined as a male and poetic language of power. Through science and scientific naming the technocrat Borg seeks to establish a different and experimental order off things: a new law of how to know and how to name properly. Accuracy and precision down to the last detail are the main qualities of Borg's scientific language, and he presents himself as the perfect Homo sapiens, the knowing man. The designation Homo sapiens was introduced by Carl Limaaeus, (5) who was probably the first to place man in a neat system of biological classifications. Accordingly, Linnaeus and his ingenious taxonomies play a crucial role when it comes to questions of classification, nomenclature, and in particular Borg's highly gendered nomenclature. This article analyzes the relation between science, hybrid space, (6) and radical (gendered) language by exploring the way in which thresholds are crossed and territories entered, occupied, and named by constituting an order that expels a well-defined group of individuals from science and knowledge. Thus, my analysis explicitly challenges the tendencies in previous Strindberg scholarship to reduce the text to its Nietzscheanism, to hurriedly label Borg's language as scientific, and to play down the archipelago setting as a reference to the author's native landscape. (7) As I will show, assumptions of this kind not only underestimate the radicalism of Strindberg's language, but also neglect the acute tension created by the hybrid setting of I havsbandet, which brings the novel in line with the highly experimental texts of the twentieth century. Introducing the figure of hybridity, the crossing of thresholds and border zones is one of the central images of the following close reading of I havsbandet. Eventually, my approach explores the similarities and differences of scientific and poetic language as well as male and female language and highlights the literary and poetical strategies Strindberg's text uses in order to create a progressive order of (well-constructed) knowledge. Consequently, I would like to suggest that the Swedish archipelago novel not only precedes contemporary theories of civilization and colonization, but also foreshadows seminal mid-twentieth-century theories of space and radical boundary-crossing. …

‘I am helping them’: ‘Traffickers’, ‘anti‐traffickers’ and economies of bad faith

For several years, aid programs in the Mekong region have taken an increasing interest in cross‐border mobility and human trafficking and its relationship with development. More recently, there has been an increasing interest in the identification of trafficked victims and the investigation, arrest and prosecution of traffickers. Whereas anti‐trafficking programs ubiquitously define themselves as being in a battle with traffickers, this article argues that although they are not homologous social actors, both engage in acts of bad faith. The article elaborates this argument by drawing attention to the recruitment process within the Lao sex industry as well as to the way in which aid programs attempt to identify trafficked victims. It concludes that imaginary aspects of development underpin a simultaneous disjuncture yet enable the social reproduction of the life worlds of ‘traffickers’ and ‘anti‐traffickers’ alike.

Näitleja (füüsilis-vaimse) kohalolu ja kehastumiskogemuse fenomenoloogiline uurimine postdramaatilise teatri kontekstis. Phenomenological study of the actor’s embodiment experience and (physical and mental) presence in the context of postdramatic theatre

The aim of this article is to specify the phenomenon of the actor’s presence onstage – to discuss its theoretical basis. The fact that the internally active body of the actor is gaining increasing precedence over the spoken word testifies to changes in the aesthetic sense of modern theatre. These changes, in turn, refer to paradigmatic changes in the Western way of thinking – the heretofore prevalent linear causality is gradually being replaced by a circular causality. An actor’s psychophysical presence and corporal intensity plays an important role in the aesthetic currents of the contemporary theatre. On the stage, an actor (as a form) is positioned among other stage forms (lighting, music, setting/costumes, space and language) and, in such a community, the actor’s presence here and now becomes an important principle. His/her active condition of onstage presence requires wider kinaesthetic sensations and perceptions, which are achieved through specific psychophysical training. Important factors include the multi-levelled focus of attention, the sensitivity and activity of the actor’s organism and the sensing of the body as a transcendental and ontological unity. These keywords are taken from various phenomenological philosophies of the body (M. Merleau-Ponty, D. Leder, J. Gibson and A. Noë), and from P. Zarrill’s phenomenological model of the embodiment-experience of the contemporary actor, and I will try to relate them to my own analysis of the practical experience of onstage presence. In the analysis, I focus on evoking and maintaining onstage presence in the personal practice of acting and conclude that the psychophysical onstage presence is primarily based on the self-acknowledgment of one’s bodily movement. Theatrical acting is a practical way of thinking and acting which is always based on technique, no matter whether it involves bodily expression, working with the voice, imagination or text. The imaginary aspect of theatre and the actor’s work is secured by discipline (i.e. technique), which has a direct effect on the aesthetic formal aspirations of a production. Contemporary theatre prefers a more action-based, more ‘bodily’ and consciously psychophysical (self-) experience of the actor within the performance space. I believe that this situation indicates the need for developing a phenomenological theory of the presence of a human being that cannot directly be found in the works of the authors referred to in this article. In a narrower sense, the theory of the actor’s presence onstage could help to explain changes in the aesthetic aspirations of contemporary theatre. In the wider sense, the development of the theory of presence could be aimed at the interpretation of the processes active in the perception and way of thinking of humans.

Arhetipske podobe vzhodnjaštva: moralično ogledalo Enejeve nove identitete

Epizoda o Kartagini v prvih štirih spevih Eneide predstavlja literano izhodišče za razpravo o oblikovanju in dinamiki Enejeve etnične identitete in z njo povezane etnične identitete Rimljanov nasploh. Interpretacija kartažanske epizode se naslanja na termin drugi in na koncept zaničevalne, stereotipne podobe občega drugega, ki je bila iznajdena med vojnami s Perzijci. Razprava skuša dokazati, da kartažanska epizoda oblikuje historično in literarno podobo drugega z vzporejanjem mitološkega drugega, Trojancev, s historičnimi Kartažani. Vergilijeve arhetipske podobe vzhodnjaške drugačnosti avtorica razume kot speculum morum, ki odseva problematično trojansko dediščino Rimljanov in terja etnično preobrazbo.

Staging and Consuming the Italian Lifestyle. The Gelateria and the Pizzeria-Ristorante in Post-war Germany

Italian ice-cream parlors and Italian restaurants both were – and still are – immensely popular consumption venues in Germany. In fact, in many cases, they represented the first ethnic eateries. By analyzing the history as well as the material, social and imaginary aspects of these two loci, the article addresses their respective roles in post-war German society and traces the ways in which ice-cream makers and restaurateurs, both capitalizing on what was and still is considered an Italian lifestyle, have defended their cultural capital against outsiders. Although the Gelateria and the Pizzeria-Ristorante share a number of characteristics such as a mainly Italian staff and the use of foods imported from Italy, they nevertheless differ not only with respect to the range of products on offer, but also in terms of the type of entrepreneurship and migration project in which they are embedded.

A Fugue of Legacies: a Meditation for Maryse Condé

Pas sa faute si elie souffrait du complexe des victimes et s'identifiait a ceux qui sont poursuivis. Maryse Conde, Histoire de la femme cannibale Comment pourrais-je oublier mon passe? dit le Juif. Non seulement il me poursuit depuis ma naissance mais, parfois, j'ai la conviction qu'il sera mon avenir. Edmond Jabes, Le livre de l'hospitalite I have come back to Brooklyn today, a return to my native land that constitutes a coming only because we are here together--coming home not to a place, but to the deepening of a relationship that shares mutual concerns over the intricacies of belonging, the struggles around politics of identification and, for you as a writer, the insistence on a certain form of dis-identification necessary to creative freedom. I have responded to your curiosity, Maryse, to your openness, to your queries about a disturbing New York incident by offering to take you and Richard Philcox through the section of Brooklyn known as Crown Heights. This neighborhood was the scene of interracial riots in 1991 between Blacks and Jews after a Hasidic driver accidentally killed a Guyanese-born boy, Gavin Cato, setting off the violence that then killed a young Australian Yeshiva student, Yankel Rosenbaum. You are wondering what such a neighborhood can possibly look like, imagining it, and, literally, trying to figure it. As you have in each of your novels, from unnamed African countries, to Salem, to Segou, to Capetown, you will combine the experiential, the historical, and the imaginary aspects of this little trip, distilling something from it that, through your writing, will become art. So we are crawling through traffic on Bedford Avenue, passing jerk chicken shops, coiffeurs advertising braiding (weaving) and corn rows, music shops blaring reggae, salsa, zouk, RB do-rags become streirnels, the men's round, fur-trimmed hats; woven hairpieces are replaced by sheitls, the wigs of the Ultra Orthodox Jewish women, as we slowly cross one of those invisible frontiers delineating neighborhoods round in New York City. Roland Barthes might have spun one of his mythologies in Crown Heights, reading racial tensions as being all about hair! Crossing the grand old boulevard that is Eastern Parkway, we have moved from Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad, Guyana, to Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Romania, from Creole to Yiddish, from roti to challah, from conch to gefilte fish. You are at in these shifting borderlands, global citizen that you are, and these are the spaces and places that your protagonists explore on their journeys to self-discovery, from Veronica to Tituba to Marie-Noelle to Celanire to Roselie, to name but a few. Your refusal to align yourself with any dogmatic essentialism, be it racial, nationalist, feminist, ethnic, in favor of the continued construction of the true land of the free, that of the literary imagination, is textualized as a willingness to explore difference(s), invent possible new relationships, traverse spaces and cultures. …

Vanishing Mediators: Enjoyment as a Political Factor in Western Mexico

Anthropologists, historians, and political scientists have pointed to the pervasiveness of the cacique (political boss) as a habitual figure who, through his role as an intermediary, is instrumental in the reproduction of a structure of domination. In this article, I argue that the performative and imaginary aspects of caciquismo (political bossism) have been neglected in the analysis of structures of power. Going beyond the conventional view of the cacique as an effective intermediary, I argue that this figure often operates as a sort of vanishing mediator who both unveils and masks the absence of a center while standing for the corrupt and venal side of the state. Furthermore, it is through the orchestration of enjoyment and the image of excessive power that the cacique contributes to the reproduction of a particular mode of hegemony. I illustrate these performative and imaginary processes by drawing on an ethnography of a regional cacique involved in the power struggle of a local Water Users' Association in western Mexico. [Mexico, brokerage, caciquismo, ideology, hegemony, enjoyment, culture of power]

A private eye on feminist agency

Abstract In this article, the authors use the example of a schoolteacher and lifelong feminist activist born in Vienna in the late 19th century to discuss questions of biographical writing and the representation of feminist agency. They analyze the ambivalent status of a woman who can neither be conceptualized as a political leader or pioneer nor just as a nameless representative of a social group. In this way, they aim to challenge hidden paradigms in feminist history that make it difficult to represent types of biography that do not fit into conventional models of feminist agency. They propose to look at the archive that is the material background of biographical research as a strategic and symbolic space to discuss questions of memory and the ways in which past and present strategies of narrating and documenting women’s lives are intertwined. They argue that collecting and storing ‘facts’ always has strong imaginary aspects despite the realistic appeal of documents. By discussing two biographical models—the pioneer of women’s education and the political activist—as two possible ways to see the biography of their protagonist, they draw attention to the dependency of any biography on the biographer’s perspectives as well as the contingencies and limitations of any biographical model.

Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach

Capis An Edaphic Approadi. DANIEL MILLER New York: Be% 1997; x + 357 pp. On a first reading Capitalism appears scattered and confusing; on a second reading it is significant and provocative. The first reading stems from Capitalism's seemingly erratic jumps from one social context to another and from one agent's perspective to another's in its descriptions of commodity production in Trinidad, Capitalism's ethnographic site. A second reading clarifies Miller's major proposition: commodities are produced not only as objects with market by manufacturers, but also as of value, Miller's key concept, by brand owners, advertising executives (Capitalism's research foci, heretofore neglected by anthropologists), and even consumers. That reading also reveals how those projects generate social and cultural contradictions among and between such producers. For example, Trinidadian sweet drink manufacturers seek market share and profit through creating local and transnational brand name reputations, as well as through advertising agents' ads and promotions. Yet, brand names and products are also projects of value. Solo company's sweet drinks wear the oldest, indigenous brand name. Its brand, therefore, represents authentic Trinidadian nationalism; loyalty to the brand is loyalty to Trinidadian identity. But in other contexts Trinidadians identify as global consumers of higher quality foreign drinks. Coke, therefore, lends its reputation for quality to its local franchiser, Cannings. Local company executives face the problems of positioning the company in the market and of positioning themselves within larger global conglomerates. They represent themselves to conglomerates as having local expertise necessary to reinterpret or replace homogenized, global marketing campaigns by locally relevant, but for conglomerates more expensive, ones despite suspected lesser effectiveness. Conglomerates often accede so as to increase the local office's importance and because consumer reaction is unpredictable. of a local branch's nationalism, therefore, structurally contradicts that of its conglomerate's globalism. Profitability is not the only value at issue; material culture's logic cannot be reduced to market culture's commodities. Rather, commodities are complex symbolic formations (p. 4) produced and reproduced by multiple agents in a dynamic history of production, distribution, and consumption. Advertising agents create ads using their own models of consumer preferences as well as current aesthetic and professional models. The result is a genre of capitalist realism . . . a kind of hyperreal idealized world of (p. 191). It has its own self-referential standards and expectations about which Trinidadians are highly sophisticated, because for them the world of ads is similar to the world of cinema elsewhere. Consumers also have their own categories and discourses: red drinks stand for East Indians and black drinks for Africans. Yet, consumers in each ethnic group tend to drink and identify with a drink's other qualities in the opposed category, for example, Indians consume Coke, a black drink, because of its modernity. Commodities such as drinks become, therefore, objectifications, out of commerce's control, for projects of whereby each group appropriates imaginary aspects of the other's identity. Surprisingly, advertising executives tend to ignore consumers' categories for their own. Reactive fear of competitors, networks of social peers, and unpredictability of consumer reaction, more than profitability, motivate them. Miller concludes that cultures of consumption and production can operate separately, because assigning blame for advertising campaign failures is difficult. …

Vin canaille et vin moral sur les scènes privées

Marie-Emmanuelle Plagnol-Diéval : Moral and immoral wine in the private theatre. This article analyses the representation of wine, drinkers and drunkenness in the plays performed in private theatres at the end of the 18th Century (Collé' s and Carmontelle's "théâtre de société", Collé' s "parades" and Berquin's "théâtre d'éducation"). As private theatres were not subject to censorship they could adopt a realistic approach and provide an historical testimony, as can be seen from the scenes of social drinking and the different categories of drinkers depicted. The plays also deal with the symbolic and imaginary aspects of wine, seen as a healthy and fortifying drink, especially when combined with other beverages, such as water or milk. Educational plays, however, criticise drunkenness and the physical and moral disorder it engenders. Typical of the plays in general are drinking songs, references to Anacreon and various comic registers, from farce to the depiction of the character of the drunkard.

Introduction à une ethnologie du rêve chez les indiens Émerillon de Guyane française

Introduction to an ethnology of the dream among the Emerillon indians in French Guiana. The dream is not really acknowledged as a "social fact" by the majority of ethnologists who willingly delegate this aspect - which is more difficult to simplify, however, than the mythical, Imaginary aspect - to the psychoanalysts who are interested in traditional societies. But the example of Emerillon Indians proves this fact : as soon as one becomes interested In the unconscious elements of behaviour, the dream appears as a "comprehensive, social fact", a crucial fact in which all the levels of culture are involved, and not only the specialized areas of shamanism, myths and rites. We intend to show that the dream, far from being an epi phenomenon, can be, on the contrary, a privileged entry to the culture of a people considered In its own dynamism. Isn't this approach of a way of existing and thinking through imagination going in the same direction as indigenous theories themselves ?