Not only were they identified in the Time Top 100, the Dixie Chicks are receiving prominent coverage for their new album, Taking the Long Way. A feature story on NPR, and now the cover of Time.
phenomenology: May 2006 Archives
The notion comes from Lacan (with whom I have substantial disagreement), but Slavoj Zizek explains it in a way that makes sense to me in his book, The Sublime Object of Ideology.
The link above goes to a summary of the book's ideas as they can be applied in film analysis, but it seems they can apply to any venue. He's one of the few philosophers I've read who manages to address both mass media and other large social structures and interpersonal relations.
I've found two of his examples particularly instructive: Pride and Prejudice and the sinking of the Titanic. Zizek claims Austen's novel illustrates a "double failure, this mutual misrecognition, [which] possesses a structure of a double movement of communication where each subject receives from the other its own message in the inverse form....If we want to spare ourselves the painful roundabout route through the misrecognition, we miss the Truth itself: only the 'working-through' of the misrecognition allows us to accede to the true nature of the other and at the same time to overcome our own deficiency - for Darcy, to free himself of his false pride, for Elizabeth, to get rid of her prejudices" (63).
I'm reading one of my favorite student's essays. She's writing about the hazards of teen driving, actually, the hazards of teen drivers. One of her points of evidence is underdevelopment of the cognitive mechanism for impulse control, the "dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, the so-called executive branch of the brain that weighs risks.” Maybe I take so many risks because my dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex never fully matured? :-o
Broughton is visiting and has given me a raft of grief about "overshooting" while driving. If I recall correctly there was the road this morning (two choices, I was trying to time breaks in the flow of oncoming traffic); a driveway into a shop (just drifted a little far ahead); and another turn (somewhere?) as the navigator couldn't decide if I should or should not turn "here".
We speculated on this as a possible personality flaw.
An English irregular verb (!), to overshoot means simply to go too far.
Guilty as charged. :-/
This puts me in dubious company with ecological overshoot (E.O. Wilson has calculated that humanity is currently operating at 120% of earth's sustainable capacity), telecommunications overshoot (transitions that (somehow?) exceed a final value and convective overshoot (dealing with instability, which goes without saying).
Here's a radio broadcast from some folks countering the Intelligent Design movement with Evolutionary Spirituality. Let me clarify, this movement doesn't arise only in resistance to ID, but it does seem to come from the opposite end of the religious spectrum. I played it as I worked on the previous post. I found it interesting because the hosts, Connie Barlow & Michael Dowd, do engage in direct discourse with the ID folks. I find myself in agreement with many of their ideas but part of me recoils at the tone: it is proselytizing. (I guess their intent is "only" to evangelize but the line between the two is blurry.)
I was just reading Kara's essay on What's Wrong with Writing. The junior Communication majors in this writing class have been wrestling with me all semester to convince me of the fact that writing sucks. :-)
I'm waiting on Kara's confirmation (or anyone else's, for that matter) to verify that I finally understand something that has not been clear to me for the past two months. Kara wrote:
"The process of writing has come to be extremely time-consuming and restricting as rules of standard writing have expanded."
I've always read this to be a general criticism of writing, the writing process, not to mention reading, and the reading process. As such, I've understood it more as a misunderstanding of what writing has always been about - as if students are "just now" getting on board with "the way it has always been." But (!), what just clicked, is that their phenomenological experience and accountability as a writer has been expanded to include more things (that were always there) which many of them (as students) have not been required to address before (for whatever reasons - deliberate pedagogy, poor instruction, low expectations, etc.). In other words, it does feel to students as if "the rules" for "standard writing" have changed. They have! (Ok, so maybe I'm a little slow. Sometimes.)
The argument, (if we could call it such) between me (representing the junior writing requirements for the university) and the students in this course, has been about this fact: I would say "the rules for quality writing" have not changed at all, but the measure of acceptable quality is higher now than it has been in most of their previous experience as writers. This feels like a change in rules, yet I'd say it is a change in expectations. Students say (!) that changing the expectations is changing the rules!
Here is a real life example (that belongs in a textbook!) about why diction matters so much! :-) I love having this kind of brainstorm. Thanks Kara!
