The Present Tense of Meaning (Underground Passages between Hierarchies, the Cunning of Calculating Reason and the Return of Utopian Virtues)

Abstract

We have considered three cases — the debate over intelligent design, arguments over the disposal of an oil rig platform and the existence of gender insensitivity among academic professionals — as exemplars of the recent history of the management of meaning. In the case of intelligent design we discussed an attempt to ‘legalize’ the return of religion into mainstream socialization (educational curricula). In the case of the Brent Spar oil platform we saw a premonition of things to come in a changing multimedia landscape, in which the power of images and mobilizing messages far exceeds the power of rational and balanced analysis. Last not least, we saw in the case of gender insensitivity within professional bureaucracies the manifestation of systematic inequality managed by discreet exclusion. We concluded that our intellectual inheritance (the past tense of meaning) includes:

• the universalist concept of manageable rationality (embodied in professional bureaucracies)

• the liberal concept of a marketplace as the matrix for shaping organizations and interactions (of exchanges, of interactions, of ideas and influences)