"Politics and the Possibility of War: Merleau-Ponty and Baudrillard"
This is the version I presented to the Merleau-Ponty Circle in September, 2001, a week and a half after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The paper discusses the political, historical, and rational meaning of war through an interpretation of two pieces: Maurice Merleau-Ponty's post WWII essay "The War Has Taken Place," and Jean Baudrillard's provocative series of essays published as the book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. The Sunday after the terrorist attack, in my first moments of rational thought since September 11th, I rewrote the conclusion, subtitling it "The War Against Terrorism Will Not Take Place." The paper went over well (for once), and the feedback was critically challenging but for the most part fair and helpful. I'm in the process of revising it.
"This Mute and Permanent Question Which Constitutes Normal Sexuality": Merleau-Ponty, "Sexed Being," and Ideology
Probably the greatest frustration in my professional academic life is this damned thing. Two-thirds of those who've read it have entirely missed the rhetorical gambit that the paper hinges on. I submitted a longer version to the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia, whose reviewers assumed I was a woman and suggested corrections that would either require me to eliminate the rhetorical gag or explain what it is. Either way, I think the paper will lose something. Read it and you too can tell me what a jerk you think I am!
The Ideology of the Information Gap
The two main tasks of this paper are: (1) to explain how closing the information gap or "digital divide" is not as progressive as it may seem, and (2) to attempt to show the phenomenological, experiential groundwork for the ideological functioning of information.
The Gap in Being: Phenomenology Goes Shopping
Co-written entirely by means of email with my friend Jim Williams, this essay reveals the secrets of Wal-Mart, the Gap and your local grocery store: they make you into a shopper. The Journal of Mundane Behavior is an interdisciplinary journal aimed at a not-necessarily-academic audience. This means you. Check it out.
Truth in Advertising
I take a phenomenological approach to advertising and offer an essential description of advertisement. Published (in a slightly revised version) in a really cool anthology, Phenomenological Approaches to Popular Culture, published by Bowling Green State U.'s Popular Press, edited by Michael Carroll and Eddie Tafoya (2000). (It's also been invited for another anthology on image and I-hood, probably coming out from University of Helsinki Press.)
Note on Image, Code, and Perception
An analysis of advertising images, drawing from and then criticizing Barthes' semiology from a phenomenological standpoint. Just some ideas I'm kicking around.
More phenomenology! Sure, you think there's nothing to television but laugh tracks and the crushing cultural force of multinational media conglomerates. But interestingly enough, television is actually less interesting than that. [26K]
The Primacy of Perception and Transcendental Philosophy
A somewhat polemical account of the epistemological implications of Merleau-Ponty's thesis of the primacy of perception. While many would object to this line of interpretation, it is at least a plausible extension of Merleau-Ponty's "paradoxical" description of perception, in my view. What I intend to show is that the perceptual basis for objective experience also conditions any comprehension of objects (as objects of knowledge). This give us nothing short of a new understanding of the project of transcendental philosophy. (A version of this was published in the Fall, 2000 issue of Southern Journal of Philosophy)
Many critics accuse news of failing to tell the truth. My argument in this paper is that the criterion of "truth" is misapplied to news media, since the function of the media precludes truth-telling. All that plus profuse mentions of Tom Brokaw!
More to arrive later