Medieval propaganda, longue durée and New History: Towards a nonlinear approach to the history of public relations

This article offers a new perspective on the historical approach to public relations by drawing from the work of French medievalist Jacques Le Goff, who was the principal representative of the Nouvelle Histoire (New History) French historiographical movement. Based on the notions of mentality and longue durée, which Le Goff inherited from the Annales movement, we propose that a nonlinear approach to the history of public relations will help to extend its time scale back to the beginnings of civilization. This seeks to overcome the historical boundaries usually established between the prehistory (or proto-history) and the history of public relations as a profession.     

Monstrosities and moral publics

Interdisciplinary scholarship on neoliberal urban governmentality has been attentive to the knowledges and techniques of government currently emerging at the interface of local state politics and invested claims of voluntary private actors such as corporate partners and philanthropic agencies. This article draws attention to the workings of the aesthetic as an epistemological grounding for the rationalization of urban rule. Specifically, I explore a Toronto, Canada-based philanthropic agency’s reliance on a mise-en-scene of urban terror to animate its own self-validated knowledges about targeted inner-suburban subjects and spaces. In their circulation and demand for public address, the agency’s graphic public service announcements, launched in 2007, herald what I argue is a moralized set of knowledges about municipal renewal that has its own normative orientations grounded in a neoliberal political rationality, and tangentially, in racialized security imperatives. I detail various dimensions of the social life of a video associated with this public service campaign targeting ‘youth at risk’, considering the ethical, political and economic valences it was expected to convey; its semiotic exchange with other images and representations of disenfranchised spaces, subjects and communities; and the publics it attempted to interpellate. Importantly, given the agency’s current standing as a prominent player in Canadian urban policy arenas, I pay analytical attention to the visual campaign as a site for the production of knowledges about proper urban citizenship and social governance, and as such, a strategic-orienting device for urban policy interventions and directives.     

The politics of the face: the scopic regime and the (un-)masking of the political subject

Face is commonly seen as a feature exclusive to each person. It expresses subject’s feelings, thoughts and in turn represents knowledge that is otherwise deemed personal. However, face is mistakenly seen as pure expression of subject’s thoughts. This article aims to show that face is a product of governing practices of seeing and knowing. It is thus not a unique individual expression, but a mask that the socio-political order attaches to individuals as they are turned into political subjects. The article begins with a discussion of the two governing practices: the seeing (or the spectre of the visible) and the knowing (or the practice of locating faces in the socio-political field) with an aim to unveil the role face plays in the socio-political reality. The first interrogation looks at how face creates a field of recognition and opens a distinct form of political visibility: who, what and how one sees and what remains unseen. Whereas the second interrogation discusses how appearances produce meaning and how knowledge is taken off the face. Finally, the face as a knowledge producer and a mean of subject’s social recognition (identity) is put in the encounter with the idea of the anxious gaze and the work of Marlene Dumas. Instead of recognition, here a subject is met with dissociation and displacement of subject’s socio-political image. The three presented studies paint the politics of the face as an obscene governing strategy caught between endless attempts to create the face as a known, seen and governed space and illusive attempts to grasp the actual meaning of a pre-symbolised face.     

生命原初的创造活动--论马利坦的艺术发生原理

二十世纪法国著名的基督教美学家和文艺理论家雅克·马利坦(1882-1973)的艺术发生原理非常独特.他认为艺术的本源是诗,诗是发生在人灵魂深处精神无意识领域的一种非概念、直觉的智性活动.马利坦的艺术发生原理上溯到文艺活动的源头,不仅还原了文艺活动鲜活的原生态,同时肯定了文艺活动的自我生成和自我规定的特点.此外,马利坦还从文艺发生学的角度强调了文艺和智性的共生关系,马利坦的艺术发生理论为我们进一步揭示文艺创造精神活动的深层奥秘提供了新的角度和思路.     

Motherless Subjects and Mothered Selves: The Implications of Jacques Lacan’s and Donald Winnicott’s Writings on the Formation of the ‘I’ for American Studies

ABSTRACT

This article contrasts the theories of ego formation put forward in Jacques Lacan’s ‘The Mirror Stage’ and Donald Winnicott’s ‘The Mirror Role of the Mother,’ and discusses their methodological implications for the field of American studies. While Lacan theorises subjectivity as irreparably split and (self-)alienated, Winnicott offers an optimistic version of a self which is sustained in its going-on-being by a nourishing maternal presence. These disparate conceptualisations of the human being produce two powerful frames through which to approach culture. Yet, while Lacan is widely recognised in the American studies scholarship, Winnicott remains virtually unknown. This article aims to enhance the visibility of the British author by outlining the productivity of his ideas for any cultural or literary analysis. By stressing the foundational significance of the primary bond Winnicott’s theory intervenes in the recent critiques of neoliberal capitalism which remain halted in a Lacanian-like melancholic mode, masked by a cultural command of perpetual enjoyment. The Winnicottian perspective challenges Lacan’s fixation on the unattainable objects of desire, reiterated by the neoliberal myth of self-perfection through consumption, and offers an alternative pattern of human sociality, based on relational, self-reflexive moderation.     

卢梭人文精神中感觉与情感的主导意义

卢梭开创的人文精神的独特之处在于，在大力颂扬理性的启蒙时代倡导回归人真实的感受和需求，重视身体感觉和情感对人类行为和生活的基础性意义。感觉和情感构成一条线索贯穿了卢梭不同时期和不同领域的作品，同时，卢梭在教育、政治学说和文学作品中赋予感觉和情感以本体性意义———感觉和情感既是个人完善发展的基础性要素，也是政治社会构建的根基。     

论德里达历史哲学中的“准-先验”维度

德里达关于历史、政治和社会的哲学思想之所以被认为晦涩难解,一个最主要的原因在于德里达历史哲学中存在着先验维度.这一维度最早以目的论的形式参与了德里达早期思想的形成过程,成为解构理论的隐性要素;随着对海德格尔事件的反省,藉"精神"之名的先验之维进入了匿名状态;上个世纪90年代以来,在德里达对"幽灵"、"友谊"等一系列重大的历史和政治主题的思考中,先验之维由隐而显,展示出与后现代理论、"历史终结论"和普世主义伦理学迥然不同的理论旨趣和理论价值.     

德里达的解构主义观对翻译研究的启示

解构主义开启了当代翻译研究领域多元动态的翻译观。在客观批判结构主义的基础上,对解构主义语言与意义的本质进行了分析,认为历时性、跨文化性与多元化更能体现翻译的本质。解构主义不只是注重消解和破坏,它更强调意义变化轨迹的连续性与稳定性、解构背后的重构性,在坚持终极意义"缺席"的同时更体现了不断靠近最适切意义的积极的翻译精神。解构主义不是翻译准则,但它拓宽了翻译研究的思路,给我国当代翻译研究领域带来了很大的启示。     

德里达解构的马克思主义论析

20世纪六七十年代以来,特别是随苏东巨变以后,马克思主义的命运问题一直是世界各国马克思主义学者关注的一个中心问题。福山认为意识形态领域自由主义和共产主义的斗争已经终结,为此德里达认为,马克思主义虽然存在着结构上的自身矛盾,但作为与资本主义相伴而生的产物,不管从其发展和功用上来看,马克思的精神、灵魂将永世长存。德里达对马克思主义的的批评虽然有失偏颇,但马克思主义在其发展过程中必须正视这些批判,并与一切非马克思主义的斗争中彰显其真理性。