UC Berkeley Tourism Studies Working Group

Friday, February 9th, 4PM-6PM PDT

Hybrid Presentation
In Person: Gifford Room, 221 Anthropology and Art Practice Bldg. University of California, Berkeley
On Zoom: [click here]

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Abstract
This presentation is my contribution to Armando Silva’s forthcoming Imaginarios Urbanos that will first appear in Spanish. My chapter is a theoretical examination of the role of the imagination in the original founding of cities and the continuing effects of the collective imagination on the ways cities evolve and are lived in. In my analysis, there were imaginaries in place before, during and after any tourist imaginary. This would be true no matter what the object of the tourist imaginary—i.e., the tourist visitors as objects of the urbanites’ imagination, or the city as the object of the tourist imagination in travel brochures, etc. I found two almost opposing theoretically bedrock tourist imaginaries: (1) the V. Gordon Childe version of the city as the first human settlements that achieved large scale, based on an unequal distribution of economic surplus, requiring hierarchical administration legitimized by religious beliefs, producing monuments and monumental architecture, writing, foreign trade, etc. (We all remember this lecture from undergrad days.) and (2) a not as yet fully realized alternative founding imaginary that is the focus of my forthcoming chapter. I suggest that an alternate “urban imaginary” is as old as humanity—that ‘the city’ is only one of the more dramatic realizations of a human impulse necessary for our collective future, namely, whenever a group can amass a surplus beyond what is necessary for bare survival, that surplus must be conceived as a collective good in which all can share. Collaboration in what to do with that surplus must have involved the imagination and sharing imaginaries, a process that would bring out our most radically human potentials. I argue that the V. Gordon Childe imaginary is much more recent than the one I develop in my chapter and that it was devised in large part to suppress the original urban imaginary. My evidence for the contemporary operation of this original imaginary is literature and art that takes human beings as they are and cities as they might be. I leave it to my “in-house” tourism researcher to explain the ways our various tourist imaginaries are articulated to these two fundamental and somewhat opposed basic urban imaginaries.

Speaker Bio
Juliet Flower MacCannell (PhD. 1971, Cornell) wrote her dissertation on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who is considered the founder of our modern ideas of society and law. She has continued writing extensively on culture, with essays on literature, film, art, architecture, politics, law and philosophy as well as psychoanalysis. She is the author of over 90 articles and several books including The Hysteric’s Guide To The Future Female Subject (2000) The Regime of the Brother (1991) Figuring Lacan: Criticism & The Cultural Unconscious (1986 and 2014--reprinted), and co-author of The Time of the Sign with Dean MacCannell (1982). She edited Thinking Bodies, The Other Perspective in Gender and Culture, and Feminism and Psychoanalysis: a Critical Dictionary. Her work has been translated into Spanish, German, and Slovenian.

Her publications include many essays on Rousseau (“The City Year Zero”; “Rousseau and Law: Monstrous Logic) and more recently “Drawing Lines”; “The End(s) of Violence,” “Why Culture? A Psychoanalytic Speculation”’; “The Echo of the Signifier in the Body”; “Refashioning Jouissance for the Age of the Imaginary”; “Sexual (In)difference,” “Anxiety: Genuine or Spurious?” and “Theorie des Regime des Brudders.” She has presented keynote lectures in the USA, Mexico, the UK, The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Greece, Germany, Colombia, Denmark, Japan, Greece, and Australia.

In 2015 she was named Outstanding Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and English at UC Irvine, where she taught from 1980 until she retired. She was co-editor of The American Journal of Semiotics for many years, and co-chair of the California Psychoanalytic Circle from 2000-2017, and editor of its journal, (a): the journal of culture and the unconscious. She is also co-creator (with Dean MacCannell) of twenty one art installations at SomArts Gallery’s curated annual Day of the Dead exhibition (San Francisco: 1998-2019).