Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication

On the Communicative Intent of Augustine's Confessions

2021-10-25T13:05:26+00:00

For a long time Augustine’s Confessions has been considered one of the founding texts in the genre of autobiographical writings. It belongs, in particular, to those specific autobiographical writings that their authors feel the need to write so as to defend their reputation, in the face of their critics. As part of their defence, what becomes important for these texts is that they communicate the truths of their authors. The problem in the case of the Confessions is that a number of scholars challenge Augustine’s truth claims by portraying him in a less sympathetic light. Given these challenges, an alternative way of reading the text is to displace the focus of the reading from that of its author to the effects the text is intended to have upon its readers. In this way, the Confessions is read as a narrative that aims to convert its readers towards the Christian vison of salvation which Augustine, as a rhetorician, crafts using a number of episodes that his readers can identify with. These episodes drawn from everyday life are deployed so as to depict universal existential situations with the ultimate purpose of enabling his readers to realise that Christian salvation is attainable for all, irrespective of their failings.

Shades of Technocratic Solutionism: A discursive-material political ecology approach to the analysis of the Swedish TV series Hållbart näringslivis (“Sustainable business”)

2022-03-10T17:47:14+00:00

This article analyzes the Swedish TV series Hållbart näringslivis to study hegemonic discursive formations over the meaning of the climate crisis. Combining new materialist approaches in discourse studies with a political ecology understanding of the socio-ecological entanglement, we propose the concept of technocratic solutionism to understand how the neoliberal green economy secures instrumentalist discourses on nature in the Swedish context. The discourse-theoretical analysis of nine HN episodes identifies four nodal points which articulate the technocratic solutionist discourse: capital’s leading role, Nordic exceptionalism, substitutionalism and long-termism. We argue that the climate crisis can be understood as a materiality that dislocates capitalist assemblages, which then, in response, deploy a techno-solutionism discourse to protect the core principles of economic growth and profitability while marginalizing potential radical alternatives.

Wittgenstein and censorship

2022-04-06T16:25:41+00:00

The current debates around censorship are about more than whether or not censorship is desirable. These debates are also about what counts as censorship. The question of what counts as censorship is a relatively new one since the Liberal conception of censorship was taken as given until the 1980s. Since then, a new approach to understanding censorship has gained momentum. What Matthew Bunn calls ‘New Censorship Theory’ argues that the Liberal conception is far too narrow to properly encompass the vast complexities of censorship. New Censorship Theory does not deny the insights offered by the Liberal conception, but expands upon them. This expansion pushes the notion of censorship out of the censor’s office and into the marketplace, politics, and social life. New Censorship Theory also recognises the way that censorship is both prohibitive and productive. In light of this, some authors have argued that New Censorship Theory overstretches the concept of censorship to such a degree that it risks becoming useless and it risks equating all forms of censorship. Beate Müller borrows the notion of family resemblances from the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein to try to avoid getting stuck in the debates around terminology. She does this by trying to identify the essential elements of censorship, distinguishing between its core and periphery characteristics, and by mapping censorial actions and reactions systematically. I argue that Müller uses the philosophy of Wittgenstein to make an anti-Wittgensteinian argument. In order to show why I think that this is the case, I will review the censorship debate before providing my own Wittgensteinian contribution.

The Film The Act of Killing:

2022-01-16T19:39:10+00:00

In this article I discuss T. Wartenberg’s claim that the film The Act of Killing, which has as protagonists and quasi co-authors perpetrators of the Indonesia massacre, ‘confirms’ and ‘supplements’ Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ thesis. I argue for a more moderate version of the first part of this claim and I expand upon the second. Thus, I suggest that the film gives us clues to articulate Arendt’s thesis with theories of alienation, hence also with Marxist theorizing. Central here is the idea that the deficient sensibility, which, according to Wartenberg’s claim , supplements Arendt’s idea of ‘thoughtlessness’, is related to an alienating process within which cinema plays a prominent role. Thus, my argument revolves around the premise that in the film the question of mass evil doing is intertwined with positing its own medium as an object of reflection, revealing cinema as carrying a contradictory potential. The critical upholding of Arendt’s thesis that the film opens up also concerns the relationship of ‘banality’ to ideological motivation, a rather problematic issue in Arendt’s thesis. My point here is that the film can support the idea that ‘banality’ does not necessarily exclude ideological zealotry.

Review: In Between Communication Theories Through One Hundred Questions

2022-01-04T13:04:56+00:00

This text reviews the book "In Between Communication Theories Through One Hundred Questions", authored by Tomas Kačerauskas and Algis Mickūnas and published by Springer in 2020.