Imaginary

Les valeurs de l'Europe: entre l'idéal, le discours et la réalité / European Values: Between Ideal, Speech-making, and Reality

by Stella Ghervas

Published in "Rethinking Democracy", Kiev (Ukraine), February 2012
Article in Russian, Ukrainian, and French.

La démocratie est un projet idéal qui a joué un rôle clef dans les évolutions des deux derniers siècles, en se... more La démocratie est un projet idéal qui a joué un rôle clef dans les évolutions des deux derniers siècles, en se matérialisant de façon imparfaite dans une variété de constructions politiques. L'Union européenne ne fait pas exception, en présentant un discours dont la démocratie est certes une valeur essentielle, mais qui est néanmoins différent de celui des États-nations à cause de l'emphase qu'il met sur des valeurs dites "européennes" (diversité, tolérance, liberté de mouvement des personnes et des biens, etc.).

Or ce discours ne dit pas tout sur les idéaux philosophiques qui ont mené à la construction européenne, ni sur les compromis quotidiens voire les contradictions de la politique communautaire. Dans une perspective historique, cette contribution illustrera l'évolution de ces trois "niveaux" des valeurs, du XIXe siècle à nos jours. Leur opposition dialectique, toujours en mouvement, fournit un éclairage sur la "crise identitaire" que vit l'Europe élargie d'aujourd'hui.

The Imaginary SXSWi: If SXSWi is a Dream, Then How Do We Wake Up From It?

by Jon Hickman

Co-authored with Jennifer M. Jones, UWS.

Published in Flow.TV 15.08 - Special Issue: SXSW.
First published 13th March 2012.

SxSWi is a dream. A trades fair in a desert, a pilgrimage, a Mecca, where stories are created and product is launched.... more SxSWi is a dream. A trades fair in a desert, a pilgrimage, a Mecca, where stories are created and product is launched. It is a sign, a referent, a display. SxSWi is cultural capital, it is intangible and hard to reify beyond an outward peacock show, the badges of ownership that say: “I have been to SxSWi, I know whereof technology happens, you can touch me if you like”.

This paper considers SxSWi as a mega-event, and as a technological imaginary (Flichy 1999). We consider how it is given meaning by its consumers, and how this validation allows it to confer meaning on technology. We look at the ways in which SxSWi attendees construct their attendance through their own (social) media accounts, and how they construct their own media and their social position as digital workers through their attendance.

The constitution and dissolution of the Kemalist imaginary

by Nur Betul Celik

Unhomely Europe

by Ilaria Vanni

Introductory essay to the special issue of Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, Vol 4, No 2 Contesting Euro Visions, co-authored with Dimitris Eleftheriotis and Murray Pratt

This special issue of PORTAL constitutes an indirect, sideways reflection on the EU’s move toward... more
This special issue of PORTAL constitutes an indirect, sideways reflection on the EU’s move toward (re-)discovering, establishing, and promoting shared cultural values. It seeks to unveil not the official historical contexts and traditions in which contemporary inventions of cultural identity occur. Rather, its aim is to discover and listen to competing voices and alternative visions—be they cultural, social, political, literary or cinematic—that give different shape to trans-European identities and model union, commonality, and belonging, according to transregional or translocal values. The special issue, then, is an exploration of possible forms of frictions occurring across the European cultural and historical landscape. It questions the pre-eminence of formal EU discourses on values, and the branding of Europe in the global marketplace, by listening to marginalised, unheard or discordant Euro-voices. The issue demonstrates the need for more rigorous theorisations of notions such as ‘value,’ whether ‘shared’ or ‘cultural,’ in the European region, and posits alternative mappings and visions of European belonging and identity. The essays included in this special issue consider Europe as a locus of frictions, consensus, tension, contestation and reconciliation. This locus is capable of co-locating Scotland with the Costa Brava, crossing Swedish views of Russia with their converse, recognising a Europe of borders that continuously unfold, acknowledging the interference of historical memories, and inflecting the Houellebecquian Euro-futurescape with Greco-Australian undertones; to cite a few examples of vibrant transvaluation occurring in the issue.

Text, fantasy and the political: A two-track analysis of climate politics

by Ben Glasson

Paper presented at 6th ECPR (European Consortium for Political Research) General Conference, University of Iceland, 25th - 27th Aug. 2011.

Discourse involves interactions between elements both logico-semantic and fantasmatic, suggesting that climate policy... more Discourse involves interactions between elements both logico-semantic and fantasmatic, suggesting that climate policy discourses are embedded within the fantasmatic repertoires of their broader discursive contexts. Discourses employed by climate sceptics are underpinned by a range of fantasmatic nodal points that, from a Laclauian perspective, maintain the force and regularity of discourses and identities. Purportedly rational sceptic arguments exploit deeply sedimented myths
and social imaginaries, particularly those that gather under the signifiers of ‘progress’ and ‘nation’.  The re-articulation of ‘progress’ in the direction of capitalist technoscience, and issues of translation between the global, abstract discourse of climate change and national contexts of expansionary development, play into sceptics’ rhetorical strategies. The environment movement ignores the role of myths and social imaginaries at its peril.

« The Vanished Child: An inquiry into figures and their modes of appearance », Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, automne 2010.

by Bertrand Gervais

Sophie Calle's texts are elaborate devices that facilitate the production of figures, of complex symbolic entities. In... more Sophie Calle's texts are elaborate devices that facilitate the production of figures, of complex symbolic entities. In fact, her work enables us to better understand how figures emerge and unfold in the imaginary. Thus, we find in her Disparitions (Disappearances), a startling figure, which we can name the "Vanished Child". I will present this figure and explain how it stems from the description of a painting by Rembrandt, stolen at the Gardner Museum in Boston. I will start by identifying some of the essential processes implied in the identification of a figure, and, to do so, I will give two short examples, drawn from Witold Gombrowicz and Don DeLillo. Then, after having described in details the figure of the Vanished Child, I will argue, following the French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman in his reading of Walter Benjamin, that figures are auratic objects.

“Lui, lei e l’Altro. Il corpo del doppio nella fantascienza”, in “Comunicazionepuntodoc”, n. 4, Logo Fausto Lupetti Editore, Bologna, 2011

by Alessandro Porrovecchio

ISBN: 978-88-95962-44-3

“La Re-incarnazione del Leader. Dal doppio corpo del Re al corpo mediale del Premier”, in “Comunicazionepuntodoc”, n. 3, Logo Fausto Lupetti Editore, Bologna, 2010

by Alessandro Porrovecchio

ISBN: 978-88-95962-44-3

“Pop(ular) Porno. Adolescenti, corpi e socializzazione”, in “Comunicazionepuntodoc”, n. 2, Logo Fausto Lupetti Editore, Bologna, 2010

by Alessandro Porrovecchio

ISBN: 978-88-95962-44-3

Il mondo degli affini. Rappresentazioni, corpi e icone”in Silvia Leonzi (eds.), Michel Maffesoli. Fenomenologie dell’immaginario, Armando, Roma, 2009

by Alessandro Porrovecchio

Co-authored with Giada Fioravanti. ISBN 968-88-6081-414-2

Mundos imaginarios

by Antonio Caro

Serie de 12 publicados en el semanario profesional "Anuncios" entre marzo y mayo de 1998 (núms. 779 a 790).

Historia y producción semiótica institucional

by Antonio Caro

Texto de la ponencia pronunciada en el X Congreso Mundial de Semiótica, La Coruña, septiembre de 2009.

Welcome to Sarajevo! Touring the powder keg. In Sion B.: Staging Violent Death: The Dark Performances of Thanatourism. London: Seagull Books

by Patrick Naef

A powder keg: this stereotypical metaphor often describes the Balkans—a stable and quiet region that bursts into... more A powder keg: this stereotypical metaphor often describes the Balkans—a stable and quiet region that bursts into violence and becomes fractured under the spark of one single event. The city of Sarajevo was already compared to a powder keg in 1914, when Gavrilo Princip, a Serb nationalist, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. This incident is perceived as the event—the spark—that set off the First World War. This same image is frequently used in reference to what global media and movie productions commonly called ‘the Balkan wars’. The film The Powder Keg , produced in 1998 by the Serb director Goran Paskajevic, or Fire , by the Bosnian Pjer Zalica, are explicit illustrations of this metaphor. Though these films have had some impact beyond the borders of the former Yugoslavia, they are not well enough known to influence the imagination of potential foreign tourists. On the other hand, I would argue that the works of world famous director Emir Kusturica are a major factor in the production of a Balkan imagination, steeped in gipsy music, alcohol and guns.

How the West was One? The American Frontier and the Rise of a Global Internet Imaginary

by Richard Kahn

InterActions, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2005