CURRENT RESEARCH

My current research is derived from the studies noted in my publications, ostensibly on the Culture of the City project and works (The Material City), and on The Grey Zone of Health and Illness (most recently The Ethics of Care; The Dying Body as a Lived Experience, and a number of essays cited under Publications).

My material or data is the social speech of a society, and particularly what the Greeks call doxaas the opinions and beliefs circulating at present in the everyday life of a typical modern society regarding what the French poet Baudelaire called the “philosophical worries” of our time. To identify cases as examples I bring to view not simply occasions of obvious transgression, and conflicts between views, but mundane irresolution over conflicting opinions, judgments, and decisions, say a film review, or the design of a menu or housing project, or a discussion of any matter that generates various choices that are contested. Instead of inventorying the various views as in a survey, we try to analyze their argumentative structure as a configuration of expectations, aspirations, and objectives that bind them as a common horizon, embedded in what Lacan calls an Imaginary.

I want to make this model explicit as a framework for showing inquiry on any topic to be an art of exposing the ambiguity of speech in action through case studies that demonstrate social theory as aesthetic and as grounded in a lineage somewhat canonical.

Research with colleagues over time has designed situations for subjects in which their collective intended problem-solving comes to view as a discourse of layers. More recently, my research includes studies on the greeting (2015), solitude (2014), dementia (2012) and other works in a collaborative legacy that has engaged many topics ranging from snubs, to motive, to panic. Each case does its work by analogically folding into the surface usage its seen but unnoticed secret story as what Hegel calls “the real matter” or again in the words of Wittgenstein what remains hidden when “one forgets to keep questioning what is seen and heard, to keep on and to go deeply.”

Works in progress include case studies on the aesthetics of creating a case as a situation of action, and specific studies on the collective representation of the Culture of the City, of Desperation, and of stories of the experience of Aging, all being written in separate volumes.