Nixon's “full-speech”: imaginary and symbolic registers of communication

Communicative interchanges play a foundational role in establishing the social. This being said, communicative behaviour can also lead to stalemates and conflict in which demands of recognition outweigh the prospect of hearing or saying anything beyond what is thought to be known. This paper foregrounds a dimension of communication often neglected by approaches prioritizing mass communications and new media technologies, namely the psychical and inter-subjective aspects of communicative exchange. More directly, this paper introduces and develops a Lacanian psychoanalytic theory of two interlinked registers of communicative behaviour. The first of these is the imaginary: the domain of one-to-one inter-subjectivity and behaviour that serves the ego and functions to consolidate the images subjects use to substantiate themselves. The second - far more disturbing and unpredictable - is the symbolic. It links the subject to a trans-subjective order of truth, it provides them with a set of socio-symbolic co-ordinates, and it ties them into a variety of roles and social contracts. In an elaboration of these two registers, illustrated by brief reference to Nixon’s admission of guilt in his interviews with David Frost, I pay particular attention to both the potentially transformative symbolic aspect of communicative behaviours and the ever-present prospect that such relations will ossify into imaginary impasses of mis-knowing (méconnaissance) and aggressive rivalry

Knowing the Soviet Union: the ideological dimension

This repository item contains a single article of the Publication Series, papers in areas of particular scholarly interest published from 1989 to 1996 by the Boston University Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology, and Policy. The volume this article belongs to is titled "The USSR: what do we know and how do we know it?"

Screened history: nostalgia as defensive formation

This article reconsiders the much-lauded transformative potential of nostalgia and proposes that an adequately psychological engagement with nostalgia is necessary if the critical capacities of this phenomenon are to be adequately assessed. To do this, the article identifies parallels between the concept of nostalgia and a series of psychoanalytic concepts (the imaginary, fetishism, fantasy, affect, screen-memories, and retroaction). Such a comparative analysis allows both for a critique of sociological notions of nostalgia and a series of speculations on how nostalgia as a defensive formation may aid rather than overcome types of structured forgetting. The use of psychoanalytic concepts enables us to grasp how nostalgia may operate: 1) in the economy of the ego, 2) in the mode of the fetish, 3) in the service of fantasy, 4) as an affect concealing anxiety, 5) as screen-memory, and 6) as means of reifying the past or present rather than attending to relations of causation obtaining between past, present, and future. One should thus investigate each of these possible defensive functions within any given instance of nostalgia before proclaiming its transformative potential

A test for emergent dynamics

A generalization of a-maximization is proposed that maximizes a subject to inequalities rather than equalities. The implication of this conjecture is that in the absence of emergent symmetries, there is a maximum R-charge for fields appearing in the path integral. This maximum R-charge leads to a novel way of detecting emergent Abelian symmetries and non-Abelian gauge symmetries.Comment: 16 page