Husserl, the absolute flow, and temporal experience

Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of internal time consciousness has a reputation for being complex, occasionally to the point of approaching impenetrability. The latter applies in particular to his remarks about what he calls the ‘absolute time-constituting flow’,1 some of which Husserl himself describes as ‘‘shocking (when not initially even absurd)’’ (Husserl, 1991, p. 84). [...

Public Argument as Self-Preservation: A Critique of Argumentation Theory as a Democratic Practice

The article presents a critical analysis on the argumentation theory of self-preservation as a democratic practice in the U.S. It focuses on public controversy instances following the World Trade Center and the Pentagon attacks on September 11, 2001. The democratic deliberation attempts to equalize power relationships structuring argumentative practice through self-risking argument. It presents the distinction between the public sphere and public controversy to prevent the collapse of the public with news media

Selective Amnesia and Racial Transcendence in News Coverage of President Obama’s Inauguration

The mainstream press frequently characterized the election of President Barack Obama the first African American US President as the realization of Martin Luther King\u27s dream, thus crafting a postracial narrative of national transcendence. I argue that this routine characterization of Obama\u27s election functions as a site for the production of selective amnesia, a form of remembrance that routinely negates and silences those who would contest hegemonic narratives of national progress and unity

Mario Van Peebles’s Panther and Popular Memories of the Black Panther Party

The 1995 movie Panther depicted the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense as a vibrant but ultimately doomed social movement for racial and economic justice during the late 1960s. Panther’s narrative indicted the white-operated police for perpetuating violence against African-Americans and for undermining movements for black empowerment. As such, this film represented a rare source of filmic counter-memory that challenged hegemonic memories of U.S. race relations. Newspaper reports and reviews of Panther, however, questioned this film’s veracity as a source of historical information. An analysis of these reviews and reports indicates the challenges counter-memories confront in popular culture

Commemorating the Kent State Tragedy Through Victims’ Trauma in Television News Coverage, 1990 - 2000.

On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd at Kent State University and killed four students. This essay critically interprets mainstream television journalism that commemorated the shootings in the past eighteen years. Throughout this coverage, predominant framing devices depoliticized the Kent State tragedy by characterizing both former students and guard members as trauma victims. The emphasis on eyewitnesses as victims provided the basis for a therapeutic frame that promoted reconciliation as a rationale for commemorating the shootings. This dominant news frame tacitly advanced a model of commemorative journalism at the expense of articulating political critique, thus deflecting attention from public controversy over how citizens should respond to tragedies that occur when state agencies repress contentious dissent

Remembering Radical Black Dissent: Traumatic Counter-Memories in Contemporary Documentaries about the Black Power Movement

Contemporary rhetoric about race and racism has been shaped, in part, by popular films. Since the late 1980s and 1990s, Hollywood has provided a variety of what Kelly Madison refers to as anti-racist-white-hero films.1 Movies including Amistad, Cry Freedom, The Long Walk Home, Mississippi Burning, and Ghosts of Mississippi have routinely positioned white protagonists as civil rights heroes who win justice for the black community by punishing or humiliating white antagonists. Each film frames racial injustice as the consequence of closed-minded individuals, rather than as the outcome of the U.S. economic and political system. More recently, the motion pictures The Blind Side and The Help have featured white Southern women advocating on behalf of individual black people despite the racial prejudices of their friends and neighbors. These films are part of a broader collection of texts that have remembered the civil rights era in terms of progress toward racial justice

Temporal experience and the philosophy of perception

In this chapter, I discuss some ways in which debates about temporal experience intersect with wider debates about the nature of perception in general. In particular, I suggest that bearing in mind some general questions about the nature of perception can help with demarcating different theoretical approaches to temporal experience. Much of the current debate about temporal experience in philosophy is framed in terms of a debate between three specific main positions sometimes referred to as the extensional model, the retentional model and the cinematic model. It is typically assumed that the differences between these three models are obvious. Yet, on closer inspection, it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to make out what exactly distinguishes the cinematic model from the extensional one, on the one hand, and from the retentional model, on the other. I criticise some existing ways in which the models are sometimes demarcated from one another, before suggesting that the differences between the three views become clearer if the debate between them is seen as turning on contrasting pictures of the nature of perceptual experience they embody

Monstrous youth in suburbia: Disruption and recovery of the American dream

Although the American Dream myth idealizes youth who grow up in suburbia as culturetypes of imminent success, the Columbine High School shootings demonstrated that all not suburban youth will grow up to succeed. The extensive news media coverage of the tragedy reflects broader anxieties about the declining status of the suburbs in American society. In the wake of the shootings, the news media created a myth of monstrous youth in suburbia that functioned to repair suburbanites’ waning faith in the myth of the American Dream

The development of temporal concepts: Learning to locate events in time

A new model of the development of temporal concepts is described that assumes that there are substantial changes in how children think about time in the early years. It is argued that there is a shift from understanding time in an event-dependent way to an event-independent understanding of time. Early in development, very young children are unable to think about locations in time independently of the events that occur at those locations. It is only with development that children begin to have a proper grasp of the distinction between past, present, and future, and represent time as linear and unidirectional. The model assumes that although children aged 2 to 3 years may categorize events differently depending on whether they lie in the past or the future, they may not be able to understand that whether an event is in the past or future is something that changes as time passes and varies with temporal perspective. Around 4 to 5 years, children understand how causality operates in time, and can grasp the systematic relations that obtain between different locations in time, which provides the basis for acquiring the conventional clock and calendar system