Epoché, Épos, Époque

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.