In/Different Spaces Place and Memory in Visual Culture [Paperback]

Recent discussions about the culture of images have focused on issues of identitysexual, racial, nationaland the boundaries that define subjectivity. In this context Victor Burgin adopts an original critical strategy. He understands images less in traditional terms of the specific institutions that produce them, such as cinema, photography, advertising, and television, and more as hybrid mental constructs composed of fragments derived from the heterogeneous sources that together constitute the media. Through deft analyses of a photograph by Helmut Newton, Parisian cityscapes, the space of the department store, a film by Ousmane Semb?ne, and the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Andr? Breton, and Roland Barthes, Burgin develops an incisive theory of our culture of images and spectacle.

In/Different Spacesexplores the construction of identities in the psychical space between perception and consciousness, drawing upon psychoanalytic theories to describe the constitution and maintenance of self and us in imaginary spatial and temporal relations to other and them through the all-important relay of images. For Burgin, the image is never a transparent representation of the world but rather a principal player on the stage of history.

Victor Burgin has an extraordinary talent for writing about 'everyday life,' melding together a category crucial to Freud, but also to Breton, the surrealists, Lefebvre, and the situationists. In/Different Spacespresents the postmodern world . . . with a dimension of lived experience which is surprisingly rare. Peter Wollen, author ofRaiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture

Burgin explores those modalities of psychoanalytic identificationabjection, paranoia, psychosisthat have a particular relevance for social and cultural processes that lead to violence, exclusion, discrimination, racism, and the claims (proven and unproven) towards a new globalism. What il“'