Warm & Fuzzy Concepts

I did not find Dean to be the especially quick read I had hoped for, which would have allowed me more time to work on the main semester paper.

In trying to make sense of this, I think it is sometimes useful to look at points in the text where a jump seems to occur--something on the order of the old New Yorker cartoon in which the scientist is looking at the chalk board full of gibberish followed by a blank space with [then a miracle occurs], followed by the answer.

For me, one such jump occurred in the paragraph that spans pp. 10 & 11. "Publicity" here seems to be equated with "revelation or exposure." This is part of her explication of the fantasies supporting the notion of "the public." She seems to be saying that "publicity" is being offered (by whom?) as some sort of urge, counter-balance, or response to "the secret." I get the part where she claims that a notion of the/a public who "wants to know" is presupposed in the idea ubiquitous secrecy, but I feel there is some fuzziness in these concepts here that is interfering with rather than promoting understanding. For example, don't most people make distinctions about the believability of different types of publicity? And aren't most people's ideas about information that they encounter via publicity fluid enough that they can believe something contingently, that is, believe, but with a hint of skepticism, an increased readiness for or alertness to disconfirming evidence? As evidence by, for example, my own attendance in class and my participation in discussion in the face of uncertainty, it seems empirically to be the case that people operate under conditions of uncertainty and partial information all the time. We just make the best conclusions we can, come to class, shake our heads, move on, and wish we had spent more time on the big paper for the semester. And, with apologies for being too totalizing, I suspect that Mark wishes we spent more time on the big papers, too.

And this is being materialized in a headache....

I do greatly appreciate the posts of those who can reveal Dean's secrets better than I.