"As Bakhtin puts it, one can 'curl up comfortably and die' with the abstract meaning of a sentence (MHS, p. 160), but not with its contextual meaning" (127).
A brief summary of Bakhtin's three global concepts (according to Morson & Emerson) follows:
Democracy, Rhetoric and Performance: October 2005 Archives
Sure. :-) (responding to Radhika's request for more info)
Keep in mind, I'm teaching mass comm for the first time - so the students' questions are all new to me. We read a piece by Stanley Aronowitz last week ("Working Class Culture in the Electronic Age"), which generated many questions about the relationship between particular 'identities' and depth of critical perception. For instance:
Is there a correlation between immersion and awareness? Take middle-class people and their representation in the media, does this lead them not to think deeply about the representations, whereas members of those groups not so well-represented might wonder why?
Are blacks in general more likely to notice their subordination because of secondary education and inferior resources made available to them – do these factors led them to notice the inequity more quickly than white children do. Is that regional?
After we saw Hall's video, the questions intensified.
Briankle, in his book, agrees with Schutz that "the problem" of intersubjectivity is actually "an 'intramundane problem'" (79). I haven't read Schutz' explication of what he means by this term; a simplistic online definition is ""being in the material world", as opposed to "extramundane" (is this a synonym for transcendental?)
Students in my Intro to Mass Media class have been asking similar questions (especially after viewing Stuart Hall's Race: The Floating Signifier) as these two esteemed academics on the Association of Internet Researchers' listserv:
Charles: My applied ethics class, we're reading an essay by Robinson A. Grover, "the New State of Nature and the New Terrorism," which argues that new media and globalization have brought about a new version of Hobbes' war of each against all, etc.
Radhika: hmmm
Charles: I attempted to buttress some of Grover's claims with the work of Cass Sunstein, his notion of "The Daily Me," etc.
This inspired one of my students to ask: are there studies, etc., that suggest that the new media, by giving us greater communication with "the Other" works to make us _less_ fearful of the Other, and thus, under some circumstances at least, _more_ likely to engage in aggressive behaviors, including warfare?
