Saturday, October 25, 2008

theory of communicative action, 2008



The times are amazing. This season, are we witnessing the original emergence of a truly global “conversation” (among Euro-American and Euro-Asian ministries) on the governance of democratic economies? The recent globality of finance-capitalistic advents have relied on a notion of inherently (or natural, social-darwinist) self-corrective rationality, what Alan Greenspan calls “the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works” (10/23) that fails with exotic financial instruments. (That “critical functioning“ always was, since Bretton Woods, more regulatorily constrained than pure free marketers wanted to admit.) All leading and emerging economies now anticipate formation of a new Bretton-Woods-like balance between innovation and regulation through tighter interregional coordination of economic policies.

Saturday, September 20, 2008

tectonic shifts in The Estate



Like every news junkie (I imagine), I'm fascinated by what's happening this month to Wall Street.

I don't think that the financial crisis is a fundamental (structural) economic event (though a severe credit crisis has a recessional—viscous—domino effect). It's a milestone for democratic capitalism—what I call the fairly free market. More fairness (public protection) is coming to the U.S. market.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

geoengineering as primary philosophical venue



In case you've gotten dissociative about global warming (crisis fatigue), consider the prospect that common dissociativeness throughout consumerist society increasingly entails need for radical measures taken by powers romancing planetary-scale technologies that would allegedly Save our children from tragic suffering, but could devastate the Earth further.

Saturday, July 5, 2008

Religiously-motivated programs and broadly-public goods



The Obama campaign sees a proper place for religious organizations in the sphere of public funding, but any stance would be controversial. Today, I’ve tried to provide a way of steering between competing camps—between evangelical motives and separation of church and state—relative to recent discussion of Senator Obama’s interest by The New York Times.

That might be regarded as a street-level version of my June 22 discussion of Habermas' recent lecture, noted earlier. But I really am moving further away from Habermasian views of his ever-important topics that make his evolving project so distinctive, though apart from mine.

Saturday, June 21, 2008

“right to life”: a political tool



A highbrow article today about absurdity of the “right-to-life” movement reminded me that there is often a surrealist disposition in the high journalist voice—call it a philosophical import of the highly raised eyebrow (so entertaining in Gail Collins' columns, so overtly surreal in Mareen Dowd's columns). Factuality about uncanniness can’t easily hide (to this reader) a sense of drollness, if not cynicism about the ordinary theater of there being no theater.

It's something, I think, that must become the fate of the seasoned journalist who doesn't quit the world to do gardening in some backcountry. Though journalism is always in a mode of raised eyebrow, the reality cramps the eyes, as the hand must still write objectively.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

The Dalai Lama looks at his glasses before
an interview



My header is part of the actual caption of this Reuters photo from today.

Actually, the Dalai Lama is already in the interview, doing a visual assertion: that all is seen through a lens.


June 11, 2017

I want to add: That performed trope is Janus-faced: perspectival (en-stancing, on a basis of holistic—largely implicit—being oneself) and situational (en-framing, relative to shared ground or situated time between “us”).