Noetic space

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Post-modernism v Anti-modernism

September 13, 2010 in Epistemology, Modernity, Noetic space | No comments

Still the post-modern lack of a political agenda has been deeply criticized from the left side of the political arena.(1) Eagleton has insisted in the relation between an epistemological breach and the contemporary political crisis. Post-modern contradictions include both a radical and conservative approach; again post-modernism is regarded as a transitional period. In the same vein as Jameson, Harvey has canvassed the close link between a cultural form and an economic system, namely capitalism, under a general contraction of the time-space axis, implosing into superimposed spaces, producing text intersections.(2) Postmodernity coalesces with the shift from a productive model based on Fordism to a system of flexible accumulation.

A critical analysis of the social theory of the concepts of individual and sovereignty, in the sense of their recapitulation, and their intrinsic modern character, can help us assessing the extent of the postmodern question, of new planes of construction being implemented, founded on the erosion of the existing strata and configuring a new noetic space, a new conceptual scheme. In which sense have those two concepts been tied together and how do the alteration in their interplay conveys a novel configuration or a simple phase of development, a novel plane of construction or a simple process of sedimentation? Therefore we have to analyze the transitions of these concepts. The decomposition into two modern elements can reconstruct the range of modulations that still were referred as individual and sovereign and, most importantly, how these notions could be assembled and rendered coherent.

(1) F. Jameson , Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1984. T. Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Cambridge, 1997.
(2) D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the origins of cultural change, Oxford, 1995.

Network, post-modernity, post-industrial, globalization, are categories that might be transforming the tissue, the cording, of thought, instituting a new plane of construction. Have they dislocated the relation among elements so that both classical sovereignty and the individual have become obsolete, due to the striation of the given plain of consistence? Are they insisting or have they already proceeded to resist in our noetic space? Where they forged in an implication that conveys their simultaneous rejection or demise, do they belong to the same plain of consistence on which our thought still roams? Where they elements in the central configuration of the plane of construction put forward by a period we call specifically modern?

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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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Orography and conceptual strata

April 1, 2010 in concepts, Methodology | No comments

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.

Striation

(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

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Cogency and attitudes

March 29, 2010 in Individual, Power | No comments

Cogency, as a measure of the embodiment of a set of ideas, is reflected in the attitudes individuals display. Both, the conceptual cogency and attitudes, compose the noetic space in its cogency and consistency. Cogency might delay the loss of centrality and coherence, the required enervation, of the conceptual net on which a certain concept rests, but incoherence in other neighbouring areas, modulations in the conceptual system, also foster cognitive dissonance and a successive fading of cogency, thus implicating each other. Power is socially distributed for the plain of consistence allows different vectors and diverse subsystems that might overlap only partially. The madman, the judge, the doctor roam in different directions but their judgements remain globally consistent though locally segregated and often opaque.

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Being and Becoming – Geology

March 25, 2010 in Epistemology, Methodology | No comments

The problem of being and becoming could be modelled within a geological frame, exposing the layering of diverse groups of elements that are incorporated by deposition. Thus a new orography, consonant with continuity, is being shaped, but also the erosion and debasing of previous forms or their marginalization: their absence of participation in the novel layers, their insularity. In this model, there is not a direct contact between the plane of construction and the orography, the former is only supported by certain bumps, elevations, uneven accidents, producing deposition in the space between them and the conformation of plateaus: plains of consistence. Still the orography suffers changes by means of acclivities emerging as a product of an arrangement of elements producing a bump. What a plain of consistence assures is the swift transition from one area to the other, the appearance of order and meaning, the experience of roaming on a surface. It is the plane of construction that frames the noetic space making it conceptually coherent, the attitudes comprehensible, embodied.

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Noetic Space

March 17, 2010 in Epistemology, Noetic space | No comments

Rather than understanding knowledge as a simple ‘thing’, as a product, the history of ideas grasps knowledge as a process of co-creation, of concoction, and also co-action. In this process a common space,(1) an orography, can be traced, conveyed, in a shared language, by means of language games, despite imperfect, partial, replications. To share a noetic space, it does not suffice to attain a certain semantic competence; it also requires to be embedded in a soil of interactions forged by relations of meaning. Men produce their conditions of existence by translating, by incorporating, their conventions, by the deposition of uncertainty in discourse.

Jasper Johns

In this sense, knowledge can be seen as a mental space shared and lived together by the members of a given community, founded on the sedimentation and hstorical dispersion of language. The sense of community shapes the very content of this space, not only limited to the speaker of that community, but also by those whose space, due to its imported/exported similarity, are able to integrate, at least partially, those nuances. What matters is not the term but the general noetic space.

(1) Cf. G. Fauconnier, Mental Spaces, New York, 1994.

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