Tiny Missiles

[Sketch] Response to Lazarsfeld

The following is a brief sketch of a response to Lazarsfeld’s Personal Influence and “Remarks on Administrative and Critical Communications Research.”

Writing in the middle of the twentieth century, Lazarsfeld’s agenda centers around an attempt to break apart the hypodermic needle model of communication. Traditionally, models of communication identified a mass media machine that broadcasts information onto a willing and waiting public. These broadcasts are both immediately interpreted by the public and also contain within them an unavoidable call to action that sways public opinion (Personal Influence 16). In Personal Influence, Lazarsfeld points out that the traditional tripartite communication model of audience research, content analysis, and effect analysis is, in actuality, a hierarchical model that positions audience research and content analysis as subordinate to effect analysis (ibid 19). Moreover, communications research has continually introduced steps in between the sending of the message and the receiving (such as analyzing the content or context of the message) that has continually worn away the legitimacy of the hypodermic needle model (ibid 20). read more…

New article: Two, not one, but tending toward the first

One of the major critiques of the Internet that has come up over the past several years is that social media has encouraged the amateur – an inauthentic person that does not commit to a particular mode of Being. However, such an argument is unfounded as it confuses the type of world that the Internet creates. Using Heidegger’s notion of falling and inauthenticity (specifically that which is put forth in Part I of Being and Time), this article argues that a categorical dismissal of the Internet as a contributor towards inauthenticity and fallenness is unfounded. Read the article »

Title goes here

Before the text stands the title, the harbinger of words. The title becomes the albatross that dives beneath the surface to bring back a portion of what will be found underneath. But, this is changing. Where the title was once the octothorp that had the power to render the subsequent commentary null, increasingly it can only zero-out  the text that follows it by misrepresenting a particular style. read more…

New article: The sovereign story, as we’re told

This article is an analysis of political power in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Using insights provided by Agamben, Foucault, and E. T. Salmon, the actual political position of the historical Coriolanus within Rome is uncovered. The purpose of this article is to show that with a multiplicity of accounts, both fiction and historical, a particular sense of the actuality of events can be uncovered. Read the rest of the article »

Ruminations, posted.

Currently, I’m reading Derrida’s The Postcard, though I’m still in the moreass that is the “Envois” chapter. This text is interesting for two reasons: [1] its style and [2] the way other texts cite it. In terms of the first, The Postcard – especially in the first section – performs very well what I consider one of Derrida’s strengths: an augmentation of the media to represent the essence of the argument as he conceives of it. In other words, the medium reflecting, or supplementing, the message (he wants to send, without compromising his sense of self). In this case, I cannot tell whether the message is specific to this text, but I am certain that it is specific to his general corpus. read more…

In Search of an Exit

The end – or rather the idea of the end – has come to an end. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that the notion of “progress” that the Enlightenment promised doesn’t move towards a quantifiable, predictable end. As the old saying goes, the more we know, the more we realize we don’t know anything. So, then, what are we getting ourselves into when we get caught up in the notions of progress? When we start to fix a problem using scientific methods or start thinking that our life is better and easier than past generations? read more…

Archiving, Quickly

“At the beginning there will have been speed.”
—Jacques Derrida, “No Apolocalypse, Not Now: Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives”

The archive forms when documents come together under a heading, the heading of “psychoanalysis,” “Derrida’s writings,” or any set of words that can point to a number of documents. These headings set limits as to what can and can’t be included in the archive. They put up a loose boundary between the parts of a certain archive and everything else, whether it be documents or experiences that aren’t recorded because they don’t fit into an archive or documents that exist but do not fit the mold of the particular heading. The archive is, as Derrida says, a political social construct. More than that however, it is a unique heading, a special type of category. read more…