Sort options:
newest first |
oldest first |
group by author
Recent tags:
context
business
global
global-business-context
review
marketing
international
global-business
global-business-contex...
book
advertising
global-business-context.
spin
pr
history
corporate
simon-keen
theory
media
games
Methodologies and bodies
The introductory chapter by the editors provides a very useful overview of a number of different approaches to understanding the body as it is 'lived' in everyday life. The approaches tend to come from a sociological bent overall - as the authors acknowledge, the contributions here 'maintain that the body is socially constructed, but they may disagree about the mechanisms and processes which contribute to its social variability.' There's a good case made for understanding the body phenomenologically rather than merely physiologically, and the authors particularly use Giddens and Goffman to situate the body as a 'self' in late modernity.
Interestingly, there is a recognition that the subjects of these studies 'would eschew any analysis which portrayed their activities as driven by a late-modern crisis' - but the authors go on to note that it nevertheless does appear that these activities (such as bodybuilding) do 'form an empirical illustration of the body as a reflexive project'.
To me, this still leaves a gap between what the researchers in these studies are able to say 'about' subjects and their embodied practices, and what the subjects themselves might assent to. That gap seems to me to be in crucial need of narrowing if we are not to simply create another set of disembodied 'disciplinary discourses' in the realm of academia which conflict with 'lived' discourses of the body.
Metaphors of Consciousness
A number of the texts I've read that treat the subject of phenomenology in an introductory way nevertheless tend to take a number of things for granted. This opening chapter is useful then, because it clarifies a number of the aspects of terminology which can be confusing.
The notion of 'intentionality' is dealt with usefully, not least because in phenomenology the term doesn't refer to the common usage or meaning of 'intention' as something that is 'meant' or 'planned'. Intentionality in phenomenology refers to a 'structural' relationship in experience between a conscious subject and the world of which they are a part. The fact that we refer to our conscious activity and the 'objects' at which our attention is 'aimed', disguises a much more fundamentally inseparable, continuous reality - if I am 'involved in' chopping firewood, my mind, my arm, my axe, my eye, the wood, the block, the air, the world are more fundamentally at one than traditional Cartesian understandings of the world give credit. It is this unity of experience that the notion of phenomenological 'intentionality' seems to try to grasp.
There is also a good exposition on the philosophically useful metaphor of 'figure/ground' here. The figure/ground conceit provides a model for talking about perception and focus which illustrates some of the nature of consciousness - particularly Jamesian ideas of stream of consciousness (also described in this chapter).
Finally, the authors of the book provide a cursory survey of some of the more common metaphors used in various domains (literature, psychoanalysis and psychiatry, philosophy, academia, etc): stream, flight, train, chain, symphony, fugue, monologue, story, state, mode, level, field, horizon... - all of these descriptions of consciousness hint at the multiplicity that characterises something human beings do constantly when awake, yet struggle to capture in words.
Tags: embodiment figure-ground metaphor phenomenology philosophy
Places and non-places
Marc Augé describes the reconfiguration of space in contemporary society. Here history bites our heels, space expands yet the world shrinks, and the individual is supposed to be allowed to be, do, but most of all, consume, whatever is necessary for them to achieve selfhood.
Of place, we might have thought that "all the inhabitants need do is recognise themselves in it". Now, in the supermodern space, we misrecognise ourselves: we obey direction, and we are permitted to experience only solitude: the consequence of individualism is solipsism, that of consumerism is solitude.
Tags: alienation anthropology consumerism individualism place solipsism space supermodernity
Apposite
quote: "we never know what we are talking about"
lolz
Active Self
quote: "The self is not an entity but an activity. Self-consciousness ... is both theoretical (inasmuch as it is knowledge) and practical (inasmuch as it is activity)."
So Gorner can help to tie in transcendental idealism in the German tradition to the modernist reflexive project of the self.
Tags: idealism identity philosophy self
'The Historiography of Cyberculture' in
2006. Critical Cyberculture Studies, New York: New York University Press, p17-28
The Hegemony of the Visual
Sterne's essay draws attention to the primacy that the visual is given when cyberculture theorists discuss ideas about virtuality. Just as the discipline expresses some solipsism by refering to 'technology' when it means 'digital technology' (thereby conflating and telescoping the whole of human history into the last few decades), they also (forgive the pun) demonstrate a myopia when it comes to thinking about the part that sound has played in creating virtaul worlds. Sterne mentions the invention of the stethoscope as a analogous case which we might usefully refer to when considering how the virtual is represented.
Why is this important? Well Sterne is interested in how cyberculture theorists and historians define their subject. By talking about 'technology' they are lazy and vague; by refering to the Internet, they presuppose that in 20 years time there will still be something we call the Internet (how can we be sure?); and by concentrating on the visual, they similarly place limitations on the discipline itself which proscribe possible avenues of research.
Sterne refers to Bordieu's interest in how social science 'constructs its object' - and when a discipline becomes established, many mediocre academics then unthinkingly colonise the field. It is the approach of the people who break the boundaries of disciplines (the pathfinders like Haraway and Turkle) that we should model - not merely the subject areas they uncover.
The Situationist
An interesting and accessible biography of Guy Debord, the French activist, theorist and film-maker. Debord is a useful touchstone in understanding some of the logic of postmodernity, the saturation of media, and (as expressed in the title of his major contribution to thinking about contemporary society) the 'society of the spectacle'.
When theorists, philosophers and artists talk about the world 'moving away into representation' in can be difficult to understand what the hell they mean. Debord's works and life actually illustrate the battle-field well: his tract on the society of the spectacle diagnoses the world in which facsimiles, fakes and images have become almost of the experience we allow ourselves in western societies.
Debord's antidote to this disappearance of experience was situationism - he was one of the leading figures in the situationist movement in France, where sit-ins and surreal detournements were early examples of what we might now call culture-jamming.
Simulation 101
Although the notion of hyperreality is mostly associated with Jean Baudrillard, Eco's take on the subject is far more accessible. Where Baudrillard disappears up his postmodern, pretentious, obscurantist pseudo-intellectual ass, Eco talks about some of the phenomena we might think of as part of postmodernity and simulation in a way us mere mortals can understand.
Particularly enjoyable is the chapter "The Gods of the Underworld", in which Eco amusingly tackles the 'crisis in representation' (the philosophical nutmeg which largely forms the foundation and therefore justification for postmodern inanity).
What is charming is that not only does Eco deal with his subjects in an accessible way, but shows us his own confusions (even if we suspect he is very much capable of seeing through the arguments without problem). He makes us his friend in mutual confusion, rather than alienates us, and thus we find our way out together - and that surely is where most other postmodern commentators like Baudrillard and Derrida fail.
Beginner's Guide to Foucault Texts
The newcomer to Foucault's work may consider tackling the entirety of a book like 'The History of Sexuality' or 'Discipline and Punish' a bit too much too soon. Instead, those readers may prefer to sample Foucault in the form presented in this commonly used reader.
Extracts from most of the major texts, and covering many of Foucault's themes, are reproduced here with a useful Introduction by Rabinow. Foucault on authorship, truth, power, the archeaology of knowledge, the geneaology of discourse, the practices and techniques of the self - are all represented here.
Also particularly noticeable from the extracts in this reader is the regularity with which Foucault uses a sort of negative rhetoric: "I do not intend to write a history of this or that... by author I do not mean this that and the other... we identify with neither this, nor with that..."
Foucault is very often at pains to tell us what he is not saying, and readers who are put off by these disclaimers may be forgiven for wondering what exactly it is that he is saying.
Tags: authorship discipline discourse foucault identity knowledge power practices self
The Venetian Blind [Jealousy]
Robbe-Grillet is recognised as the one of the foremost proponents of the nouveau roman - a genre which comes to prominence in the 50s and 60s, particularly in France. As such the genre takes its cue from cultural movements at work such as existentialism and the nascent ideas of structuralism, and ultimately, deconstruction.
The nouveau roman eschews such providential (authorial / narratorial) interventions as plot, narrative arc, chronological realism, intention, and even meaning and purpose. Instead, the surface of things becomes paramount: just as in Sartre's existential world, there is nothing behind objects, so in the world that Robbe-Grillet creates, there is no redemptive purpose, intention, meaning, underlying truth, or even allegorical or analytical logic.
As such, a novel like Jealousy divides readers: some will stare as the sentences pass them by, wondering blankly why they shouldn't go and do something else. Others however, find in the novel's studious avoidance of narratorial intervention and continual striving towards utterly objective descriptions of the surface of things, the geometry, the dimensions, the slowly decaying unity of space and time, and the obsessively repeated presentation of re-presented events and objects, the same intellectual joy that Roland Barthes is celebrating in his advocation of the writerly text - for what 'lies beneath' the surface of things is no more and no less than what we put there.