Trump Today

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed to “Make America Great Again” by way of a new isolationism of the US. In the first 100 days of his presidency, he has restricted immigration, pursued aggressively the deportation of undocumented immigrants, and drastically reduced the US State Department. Judged in terms of transnational American Studies, his policies have employed a new nationalism to disguise a one-way global agenda. Trump’s withdrawal from the Transpacific Partnership has reconfigured economic relations across the Pacific and in East Asia. His approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline project has enriched a Canadian corporation. Even his appointment of Elizabeth Devos as Secretary of Education has obscured his close relations with her brother, Erik Prince, the infamous founder of Blackwater Security, an international corporation that supplies mercenaries to governments around the world. Transnational American Studies has an ethical obligation to continue its work of understanding US politics, economics, and culture in terms of its global consequences.     

碎片之下的硬核——《玻璃山》后现代知识分子形象的解读

作为一部典型的后现代作品,巴塞尔姆的小说《玻璃山》以其荒诞破碎的形式做出一个拒绝阐释的姿态.但本文认为小说中无名的“我”登爬玻璃山寻找“美丽的着了魔的象征”的形象和过程,正是该作品阐释空间的核心所在.作品极简的叙事形式和语言虽然对应了一个人文精神日渐式微,真理崇高被不断消解的迷混时代,但在其碎片化的背后仍坚守着后现代知识分子对理想的执着,凸显了西方知识分子传统的独立精神和对真理永不放弃的追问.     

Anti-politics and the scourge of authoritarianism

The performance of American politics, in the age of Donald Trump, has been reduced to a carnival of unbridled narcissism, deception, spectacle, and overloaded sensation. What happens to a democracy when it loses all semblance of public memory, and the welfare state and social contract are abandoned in order to fill the coffers of bankers, hedge fund managers, and the corporate elite? What happens when disposable populations are brushed clean from our collective conscience, and are the object of unchecked humiliation and disdain by the financial elite? In trying to grapple with such questions, this paper suggests that when democratic agency amounts to an electoral choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, we enter into a ‘world order’ of anti-politics – a ‘collective will’ shorn of both the promise of transformation and a future of democracy. What follows reflects on the possibility of a new language of liberation, at a time when language itself has lost its potential for reference in a culture of compulsive forgetting and myth-making. The task ahead of us, this essay maintains, calls for a coming together of broad-based social struggles in the everyday with a relentless questioning of what passes for neoliberal ‘commonsense’.     

真理概念与先秦哲学--与陈汉生(Chad Hansen)先生商榷

陈汉生(ChadHansen)认为,先秦哲学中未将句子与其他词项区分开来,也未意识到它们之间的差异;先秦文献中没有相对于句子的所谓“语句信念”,而只有相对于字词的所谓“词信念”。先秦哲学中所谈论的心在陈汉生看来,是个具有各种区辨能力以及具有指导人的行为之作用的官能。对他而言,先秦所谓的知识就是技能之知,因此既不涉及信念也与真理概念无关。基于上述看法,陈汉生认为真理概念在先秦哲学中不扮演任何角色;他有时甚至宣称先秦哲学中没有真理概念。以语言哲学、知识论与心灵哲学的角度,去检讨陈汉生此一不同寻常的看法,就会发现,陈汉生没有理由去认为先秦哲学中未区别或意识到句子与其他词项的差异;先秦哲学中不但有语句信念,而且陈汉生以区辨能力与技能之知来解读先秦哲学中的心与知识的做法,也不足以避开信念与真理概念。因此陈汉生的不寻常的看法是不成立的。     

从巴塞尔姆小说《气球》看后现代主义文学作品中的审美嬗变

美国后现代作家的代表人物唐纳德·巴塞尔姆在短篇小说《气球》的创作中运用了大量体现后现代主义审美特质的哲学理念与创作手法,颠覆一切等级和秩序,破碎的意象凸显出美国后工业社会核心价值体系的瓦解及意识形态的混乱,中心的离散与认知的差异赋予文本诠释的不确定性,意义在语境互动中不断衍生。     

The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Response to Peak Oil

ABSTRACT

After the two-fold crises of the liberal world order in the first decade of the twenty-first century, including the debacle of the Global War on Terror and the global financial crisis around 2008, we are witnessing a combined crisis of US hegemony and the transnational moment, along with the explosion of populism across the Atlantic world. In this context, this research not only analyses how the United States has designed and maintained the liberal interstate order and globalization but also the way the hegemon proactively starts to destroy its cross-national project today. Therefore, I aim to fathom the future of globalization by interrogating the current US state's key strategies that express America's changing national identity and self-role conception under shifting structural imperatives from unipolarity to the emerging multipolar world.     

Explicating the public memory dialectic in public relations: The case of Donald Trump,The Oath Keepers,and January 6, 2021

The public relations practice participates in making, shaping, telling, and interpreting societal memory to influence issue positions and related actions. That claim implies several themes. One, societal memory is a useful concept for understanding the strategic processes of meaning and meaning making, narratives which constitute society. Two, the content of their prevailing memories shapes the choices individuals make separately and collectively. Public relations’ centrality to societal memory remains an underappreciated and underexplored research area. Scholars have explored the role public relations plays in societal memory by examining, for instance, the textuality of art as well as memorials and statues, their erection and erasure. To better understand this process, scholarship needs to examine strategic public relations efforts to “blur” societal memory as a means of creating alternative versions (revisionist history) of lived truth, values, norms, and policies. After examining memory, including blurring, we use the January 6, 2021 United States presidential election (Congressional Certification) Capitol “protest event” to demonstrate how blurring occurs and its potential adverse implications. We suggest and conceptualize in a model that societal memory occurs as a dialectic; some etched version of history (i.e., thesis) comes under question (i.e., antithesis), and through either a process of blurring, erasure, or retention, that etched history is then muddied, expunged, or lives on (i.e., synthesis). Meaning matters in the enactment and critical assessment of public relations’ role in societal agency.