Ian McEwan: A Novel Approach to Political Communication
23 Sep 2014-
About: The article was published on 2014-09-23 and is currently open access. It has received 2 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Political communication.
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TL;DR: The moralizing interpreters of Marx and Freud have been identified by as mentioned in this paper as a kind of hermeneutics of suspicion, which they call the "school of suspicion" of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century thought.
Abstract: Paul Ricoeur famously dubbed that great triumvirate of late nineteenth - and early twentieth-century thought - Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud - "the school of suspicion," by which he meant those thinkers who taught us to regard with suspicion our conscious understandings and experience, whether the deliverances of ordinary psychological introspection about one's desires ("I really want to be rich!"), or the moral categories political leaders and ordinary citizens apply to themselves and the social world they inhabit ("an inheritance tax is an immoral death tax!"). "Beneath" or "behind" the surface lay causal forces that explained the conscious phenomena precisely because they laid bare the true meaning of those phenomena: I don't really want lots of money, I want the love I never got as a child; survivors have no moral claim on an inheritance, but it is in the interests of the ruling classes that we believe they do; and so on. Recent years have been, in now familiar ways, unkind to Marx and Freud. Yet instead of a frontal assault on the critiques of the explanatory programs of Marx and Freud, the defense of their legacy in the English-speaking world has gradually fallen to those I will call moralizing interpreters of their thought. The moralizing readers de-emphasize (or simply reject) the explanatory and causal claims in the work of Marx and Freud, and try to marry more-or-less Marxian and Freudian ideas to various themes in normative ethics and political philosophy. Explanation of phenomena is abandoned in favor of the more traditional philosophical enterprise of justification, whether of the just distribution of resources or the possibility of morality's authority. So, for example, G.A. Cohen, the most influential of English-language Marx interpreters in recent decades, has declared that "Marxism has lost much or most of its [empirical] carapace, its hard shell of supposed fact" and that, as a result, "Marxists . . . are increasingly impelled into normative political philosophy." (Under the influence of Habermas, the Marxist tradition has taken a similar turn on the Continent.) Similarly, a leading moral philosopher notes that, "Just when philosophers of science thought they had buried Freud for the last time, he has quietly reappeared in the writings of moral philosophers" and goes on to claim that "Freud's theory of the superego provides a valuable psychological model for various aspects of (Kant's) Categorical Imperative." On these new renderings, Marx and Freud command our attention because they are really just complements (or correctives) to Rawls or Korsgaard, really just normative theorists who can be made to join in a contemporary dialogue about equality and the authority of morality. Nietzsche, too, has been transformed by moralizing interpreters, though in a somewhat different way. The crucial development here has been the retreat from the natural reading of Nietzsche as a philosopher engaged in an attack on morality - a reading first articulated by the Danish scholar Georg Brandes more than a century ago - in favor of a reading which presents Nietzsche as fundamentally concerned with questions of truth and knowledge: the moralistic scruples of interpreters are satisfied by treating Nietzsche as concerned with something else, something less morally alarming than a "revaluation of values." I shall argue that, in fact, all three of the great practitioners of the hermeneutics of suspicion have suffered at the hands of moralizing interpreters who have resisted the essentially naturalistic thrust of their conception of philosophical practice. As a matter of both textual exegesis and intellectual importance, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are best read as primarily naturalistic thinkers, that is thinkers who view philosophical inquiry as continuous with a sound empirical understanding of the natural world and the causal forces operative in it. When one understands conscious life naturalistically, in terms of its real causes, one contributes at the same time to a critique of the contents of consciousness: that, in short, is the essence of a hermeneutics of suspicion.
35 citations
TL;DR: Louise M. Rosenblatt as mentioned in this paper argued that the reading transaction is a unique event involving reader and text at a particular time under particular circumstances, and that the dualistic emphasis of other theories on either the reader or the text as separate and static entities cannot explain the importance of factors such as gender, ethnicity, culture, and socioeconomic context.
Abstract: Louise M. Rosenblatt s award-winning work continues increasingly to be read in a wide range of academic fieldsliterary criticism, reading theory, aesthetics, composition, rhetoric, speech communication, and education. Her view of the reading transaction as a unique event involving reader and text at a particular time under particular circumstances rules out the dualistic emphasis of other theories on either the reader or the text as separate and static entities. The transactional concept accounts for the importance of factors such as gender, ethnicity, culture, and socioeconomic context. Essential reading for the specialist, this book is also well suited for courses in criticism, critical theory, rhetoric, and aesthetics.Starting from the same nonfoundationalist premises, Rosenblatt avoids the extreme relativism of postmodern theories derived mainly from Continental sources. A deep understanding of the pragmatism of Dewey, James, and Peirce and of key issues in the social sciences is the basis for a view of language and the reading process that recognizes the potentialities for alternative interpretations and at the same time provides a rationale for the responsible reading of texts.The book has been praised for its lucid explanation of the multidimensional character of the reading processevoking, interpreting, and evaluating the work. The nonliterary (efferent) and the literary (aesthetic) are shown not to be opposites but to represent a continuum of reading behaviors. The author amply illustrates her theoretical points with interpretations of varied texts. The epilogue carries further her critique of rival contemporary theories.\
24 citations
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Book•
31 May 2008
TL;DR: The production, reproduction, reception, and reception of the work of art in the age of its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version of the Theory of Distraction is discussed in this article.
Abstract: * A Note on the Texts * Editors' Introduction I. The Production, Reproduction, and Reception of the Work of Art * The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version * Theory of Distraction * To the Planetarium * Garlanded Entrance * The Rigorous Study of Art * Imperial Panorama * The Telephone * The Author as Producer * Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century * Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian * Review of Sternberger's Panorama II. Script, Image, Script-Image * Attested Auditor of Books * This Space for Rent * The Antinomies of Allegorical Exegesis * The Ruin * Dismemberment of Language * Graphology Old and New III. Painting and Graphics * Painting and the Graphic Arts * On Painting, or Sign and Mark * A Glimpse into the World of Children's Books * Dream Kitsch * Moonlit Nights on the Rue La Boetie * Chambermaids' Romances of the Past Century * Antoine Wiertz: Thoughts and Visions of a Severed Head * Some Remarks on Folk Art * Chinese Paintings at the Bibliotheque Nationale IV. Photography * News about Flowers * Little History of Photography * Letter from Paris (2): Painting and Photography * Review of Freund's Photographie en France au dix-neuvieme siecle V. Film * On the Present Situation of Russian Film * Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz * Chaplin * Chaplin in Retrospect * Mickey Mouse * The Formula in Which the Dialectical Structure of Film Finds Expression VI. The Publishing Industry and Radio * Journalism * A Critique of the Publishing Industry * The Newspaper * Karl Kraus * Reflections on Radio * Theater and Radio * Conversation with Ernst Schoen * Two Types of Popularity: Fundamental Reflections on a Radio Play * On the Minute * Index
551 citations
TL;DR: This article put the problem in the form of a paradox: how can it be both the case that words and other elements in a fictional story have their ordinary meanings and yet the rules that attach to those words and determine their meanings are not complied with?
Abstract: BELIEVE THAT speaking or writing in a language consists in performing speech acts of a quite specific kind called "illocutionary acts." These include making statements, asking questions, giving orders, making promises, apologizing, thanking, and so on. I also believe that there is a systematic set of relationships between the meanings of the words and sentences we utter and the illocutionary acts we perform in the utterance of those words and sentences.' Now for anybody who holds such a view the existence of fictional discourse poses a difficult problem. We might put the problem in the form of a paradox: how can it be both the case that words and other elements in a fictional story have their ordinary meanings and yet the rules that attach to those words and other elements and determine their meanings are not complied with: how can it be the case in "Little Red Riding Hood" both that "red" means red and yet that the rules correlating "red" with red are not in force? This is only a preliminary formulation of our question and we shall have to attack the question more vigorously before we can even get a careful formulation of it. Before doing that, however, it is necessary to make a few elementary distinctions.
537 citations
531 citations
TL;DR: For instance, the authors pointed out that the feeling that history, culture, society, or even "time itself" in some strange way accelerates is not new at all; it rather seems to be a constitutive trait of modernity.
Abstract: In 1999, James Gleick, exploring everyday life in contemporary American society, noted the “acceleration of just about everything”: love, life, speech, politics, work, TV, leisure, etc. 1 With this observation he certainly is not alone. In popular as well as scientific discourse about the current evolution of Western societies, acceleration figures as the single most striking and important feature. 2 But although there is a noticeable increase in the discourse about acceleration and the shortage of time in recent years, the feeling that history, culture, society, or even ‘time itself’ in some strange way acceleratesis not new at all; it rather seems to be a constitutive trait of modernity as such. As historians like Reinhart Koselleck have persuasively argued, the general sense of a “speed-up” has accompanied modern society at least since the middle of the eighteenth century. 3 And indeed, as many have observed and empirical evidence clearly suggests, the history of modernity seems to be characterized by a wide-ranging speed-up of all kinds of technological, economic, social, and cultural processes and by a picking up of the general pace of life. In terms of its structural and cultural impact on modern society, this change in the temporal structures and patterns of modernity appears to be just as pervasive as the impact of comparable processes of individualization or rationalization. Just as with the latter, it seems, social acceleration is not a steady process but evolves in waves (most often brought about by new technologies or forms of socio-economic organization), with each new wave meeting considerable resistance as well as partial reversals. Most often, a wave of acceleration is followed by a rise in the ‘discourse of acceleration,’ in which cries for deceleration in the name of human needs and values are voiced but eventually die down. 4
518 citations