archeology

We could briefly sketch the phases in the evolution of a supposedly, isolated, single concept’s ‘influenza’. Firstly we could refer to its existence, its brute inception, its appearance as an orographic accident, as a rearrangement of elements, without a clear configuration yet, molded according to the given setting of ideas, emerging within a plane of construction. Its success depends on them being embedded in, or adapted to, larger theories or systems of thought in which they gain consistence, assuming nodal points on a plain of consistence. Otherwise they remain distant provinces in the orography and their absence of centrality limits its implementation and spread. This integration is accomplished by a plane of construction laid out by the several intersecting writings, authors and ideas. If successful, after a period of dominance, of general approbation, other accidents might start this process, being encroached on other plains, assuming new or previously distant provinces, elevated on different slopes, without resting directly on preexisting elements of the orography, these concepts start losing approbation, being eroded, enervated, from the existing plain. Novel notions start gaining primacy, commencing the resistance of the concept, its resistance in the orography of knowledge, but not founding any conspicuous plain of consistence. Finally, after its ideal coerciveness and preponderance has become thinner, the noetic space is altered by other concepts offering new forms of consistency, until becoming an obsolete residue of a debunked world view after suffering an erosion by which its only role left to play is to exert mere insistence, becoming pure archaism, a historical substratum, an archeological rather than geological rest, the orography on which it proudly rested, entombed, buried, forgotten.(1) Still a later renaissance of the concept and certain elements of the plain of consistence can trigger this extractive process in an accelerated manner.

(1) The total disappearance of concepts is not common, but examples of their complete suppression abound, just to give an example, phlogiston in science. Still in natural sciences is easier to find cases for their theories are empirically discarded. Still we can refer to historical concepts that do not have any referent anymore in our societies like polis, or chalk scores to accounts of debt. In most cases they are resumed but in a novel