Pretending not to see or hear, refusing to signify: The farce and tragedy of geocentric public affairs scholarship

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 presidential "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. © 2010 SAGE Publications.