orography

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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 Epistemology

April 12, 2010 in Epistemology, Noetic space | No comments

Ideas are always rearrangements of given elements that, conveyed on a plain of consistence, determine the conditions of possibility of judgement.(1) Thus the history of ideas has to clarify and focus on the elements that co-figure, configure, novel arrangements on the plane of construction, producing new emergences, new pingos, a salience of the orography on the existing plain.

Pingo

It can also occurr that this protuberance does not succeed in piercing the plain of consistence and remains as a mere accident, rather than producing a striation it becomes element of the very plain.

(1)Thus comes true the assertion of Valéry that a work is the activity of many things moreover an author.

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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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