August 2010

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Plateaus of Modernity

August 12, 2010 in Modernity | No comments

Modernity could be regarded in terms of a plateau coalescing with the idea of absolute sovereignty as developed by Bodin, and a conception of the individual, concealed, simple, as depicted by Leibniz:(1) a monad, only affected by mechanical inputs from a clearly segregated exterior from the interior. Individuals result as a tear off smaller societies, affording the shaping of society and the unity of power, thus remaining coherent. A conceptualization of power and man both refer to a common mold and configure relations of interaction.

The tendencies of cultural post-modernism and post-industrial socety ought to be superimposed, appertaining to a continuous plain of consistence. Post-industrialism stands for knowledge superseding a ware oriented system of production.(2) To Bell the ‘post-’ prefix encapsulates its transitory aspect. In such an economic system the main role is given to interpersonal relations rather than the industrial link between worker and object. Still, to Bell post-industrial only refers to a social structure rather than any cultural or political transformation; a shift in the relations of production from land (traditional society), to ware (industrial society) to people (post-industrial). In this sense could be grasped Habermas’s stress on communication as a rational means, displacing the philosophies of subjectivity to an interactive arena, privileging understanding as commonality rather than consciousness as an individual, classically industrial, attribute.(3)

(1) For a clarification of Leibniz as a central modern stance and the relation between individuality and subjectivity cf. A. Renaut, L’ère de l’individu. Contribution à une histoire de la subjectivité, Paris, 1989. He states the complementarity of individual wills and an abstract, general, reason, embracing the latter and conforming a plane of construction.

(2) D. Bell, The Coming of the Postindustrial Society. A Venture in Social Forecasting, Harmondsworth, 1973. A. Touraine, La société post industrielle. Naissance d’une société, Paris, 1969.

(3) J. Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Zwölf Vorlesungen, Frankfurt, 1985.

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Categorie ruptures

August 10, 2010 in Epistemology | No comments

If any rupture of modernity had to be traced it would have to rely, rather than on sole increments on certain degree, in the shift of the categories we used to shape the world with.(1) The quantitative argument of globalization, in its exponential dimension, had to coalesce with the reconfiguration of the categories that served to represent the world. A merge of both societal and cognitive changes can account for the existence of an alteration.

We can assess certain arrangement of elements by means of the transformation of these configurations mapping our thought without matching with our actual representation of the situation. Representations are socially forged, they become modalities of apprehension, operating simultaneously changes in the possibilities of reconfiguring social change. In this sense, ideas function as innovation in economics, allowing new horizons of production, reshaping the activity by introducing new tools or forms of organization that alter the limits of productivity. New planes of construction use the previous sediments carried out by other planes to posit themselves on the morphogenesis of novel orographies.

(1) Hence the reliance on an unstable nomadology or in the increase of fluxes, For a difference between solid and fluid modernity cf. Z. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Oxford 2003. M. Berman, All that is solid melts into air, London, 1983.

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Deleuze and virtual continuum

August 4, 2010 in Epistemology, Methodology, Representation | No comments

Found at The Topology of Deleuze’s Spatium by Louise Burchill

One of Gilles Deleuze’s major ontological categories is that of a virtual continuum which, much like Spinoza’s substance, presents two sides-pure extension and thought-or, rather, two powers: the power of being and the power of thinking. This virtual continuum receives a variety of designations throughout Deleuze’s corpus: “intensive spatium” in Difference and Repetition, “ideal or metaphysical surface” in The Logic of Sense, “plane of consistency” in A Thousand Plateaus (written with Félix Guattari) and “plane of immanence” in What is Philosophy? (equally coauthored with Guattari). While these diverse terms may be argued to accentuate different aspects of the continuum so designated, Deleuze’s characterization of the latter remains, nevertheless, fundamentally constant-such that, as one commentator puts it, the various “objects” in question (spatium, surface, plane of immanence or, again, hyperspace) are all rigorously homothetic. Such a continuum is, accordingly, consistently described as a pre-extensive, non-qualified “milieu” or “space-stratum” enveloping complexes of differential relations, pure intensities and singularities, with Deleuze seeking to determine in this way an impersonal and pre-individual transcendental field that, assembling the conditions of real-and not merely possible-experience, would neither resemble the corresponding empirical fields (with their correlation of a consciousness and its objects) nor amount to an undifferentiated “depth” or groundlessness (sans-fond indifférencié) identified as pure chaos.

Although I refer to the concepts ‘plain of consistency’ and ‘plane of immanence’, here they acquire a different signification. ‘Plain of consistency’ depicts the actual instantiations that are possible and performed within the given linguistic-cultural material; it refers to the language in its socially grounded form, used by any speaker of a given community. ‘Plane of immanence’, on the other hand, refers to the logic that allow the connections and linkages between the elements found at the plain, it is, in this sense, to ex-plain. These elements are the outcome of different arrangements, configurations, and sedimentation phases: the plane of immanence constitutes the condition of possibility of these configurations.

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Epoché, Épos, Époque

August 2, 2010 in Epistemology, Modernity | No comments

Absolute narratives, universal accounts and genres vest particular tendencies. They convey discourses of legitimation, they resort to a plain of consistence, according to post-modern claims. A certain absence of judgement, conditioned by a plain of consistence, an anthropological distance, is required to unveil the apparently neutral belief systems and practices. This attitude precludes a naturalist, objective, comprehension of texts and makes room for an inflexion, but it is also related to a de-doxiphication, an end of meta-narratives and an accentuation of difference.(1)

If post-modernism supposes a certain fundamental transformation of the discourses and categories, of the noetic space, making the world intelligible. We would have to investigate the basic orography that shaped a stratum of thought configuring both our experience and our self-understanding, our embedment on a certain plain of consistence. Both in a geological and textual analysis we are faced with superimposition, a multi-layered structure, of disparate stages of sedimentation.

One of the phenomena related to postmodernism is globalization. Globalization as a general process can be traced to the roots of modernity and especially to the enlargement of the globe started by the discovery of the new continent and the techniques developed in Western Renaissance. Following a cumulative direction, modernity would encompass a quantitative process of augmenting exchange and a linear expansion, on the other hand, interconnectedness and other network attributes are also used to highlight the current character of globalization.(2)

(1) L. Hutcheson, The Politics of Postmodernism (2nd ed.), London, 2002. H.F. Harber, Beyond postmodern politics. Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault, New York, 1994.
(2)D. Held et al., Global Transformations. Politics, Economics and Culture, Cambridge, 1999.

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