File:Pretending Not to See or Hear.pdf

Pretending Not to See or Hear, Refusing to Signify:

The Farce and Tragedy of Geocentric Public Affairs Scholarship

• Matthew T. Witt University of La Verne, CA, USA, wittm@ulv.edu

American Behavioral Scientist 2010; 53; 921

DOI: 10.1177/0002764209353281

Abstract

This article opens with an inventory of how popular culture passion plays are homologous to the stampeding disenfranchisement everywhere of working classes and the emasculation of professional codes of ethics under siege by neoliberal initiatives and gambits. The article then examines a recent example of contemporary, “deconstructive” scholarly analysis and inventory of residential “Orwellian doublespeak.” The preoccupation among contemporary critical scholarship with “discourse analysis” and language gambits is criticized for displacing interrogation of real-event anomalies, as with the porous account given by the 9/11 Commission for what happened that fateful day. The article concludes by explaining how critical scholarship consistently falls short of unmasking Master Signifiers.

[Cardinal] BELLARMIN [to Galileo]: Science is the legitimate and beloved daughter of the Church. She must have confidence in the Church.
GALLILEO (infuriated): I would not try confidence by whistling her too often.

—From Scene Six, Galileo, by Bertolt Brecht

See Also

The following files/documents from the February 2010 edition of American Behavioral Scientist are available on Wikispooks:

• Beyond Conspiracy Theory Patterns of High Crime in American Government
• File:Beyond Conspiracy Theory.pdf - pdf of the above document
• File:The Politics of Fear and SCADs.pdf The USA PATRIOT Acts (et al.):Convergent Legislation and Oligarchic Isomorphism in the "Politics of Fear" and State Crime(s) Against Democracy (SCADs)
• File:Framing SCAD Research.pdf Sense Making Under "Holographic" Conditions: Framing SCAD Research
• File:Pretending Not to See or Hear.pdf
• File:Negative Information Action.pdf
• File:In Denial of Democracy.pdf