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Arquivo para February, 2018

(Português) Deconstruct, structure and language

28 Feb

Sorry, this entry is only available in Brazilian Portuguese.

 

Desconstruction is not destruction

28 Feb

aDesconstruction-Freedmens_Bureau_1866While the lay public thinks of the so-called postmodern malaise; or the non-being of postmodernity, since it only declares non-existences, absences and impossibilities, it is ultimately the recognition that is already in postmodernity, that something must be overcome.

But this new type of nihilism, the misleading and sometimes superficial understanding of deconstruction is not destruction, let alone “the end of history,” since it is always affirming, as in our previous posts, within Anglo-Saxon thought the the connection of deconstruction with literature and the way of reflecting Munslow’s historiographical work.

On the writing of history does not mean that it can not be performed to inform us the reading of Balzac helps to understand revolutionary France and antimonarchic thinking, as well as on the past and the mythical cultures that preceded current ones, part of the structuralist thought helped to understand better what followed the thought of modernity,.

So even in Anglo-Saxon thought deconstruction is a way of reflecting on historiographical work, on the process of transforming evidence and information from history into history, but it is now inevitable the historical questioning, the current work of historians to understand and explain the past through evidence facts, will help build the future.

If there is a clear demand for change, there is a clear need for a change of mentality and thinking about the very way of looking at history, of rereading literature, and especially of pointing out new solid paths to change, understanding deconstruction as destroying culture and favoring the general disinformation is part of the barbarism and not the seed of the ongoing change.

 

Deconstruction and postmodernity

27 Feb

The idea of ​​deconstructing narrative, although it has foundations in Derridá, is linked to theaDesconstrução2 British historian Alun Munslow, his analysis of the main trends present in contemporary historiography, has a “deconstructionist” perspective linked to the British thinking of Hayden White and Keith Jenkins, and maintains with this magazine Rethinking History.
These texts have a more Anglo-Saxon perspective on postmodern and postmodernist historiography, their main contribution here, since the rest is linked to the view of “human sciences” from the Anglo-Saxon viewpoint, which could be understood as “humanities” since it is vis-à-vis the natural, dating from this the early works of modernity with  Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632-1704), albeit implicit.
It is in this sense that ‘postmodernism’, as Munslow sees, approaches nihilism by thinking that there is no possibility of ‘single truth’, since it can not be constructed, created or even imagined, in which we see the principle of thinking about the “natural” in Locke and Hobbes.
In Munslow’s perspective, the structuralist literary criticism isolated the context text to try to understand the meaning (the concept that a certain word represents) without considering the signifier itself (the word), so there are limitations of understanding the language as understanding of the text: “critical literary structure isolates the text from the context to understand the meaning of its statements in relation to other utterances present in the text itself, so it is necessary to “accept the elusive nature of the text as full of gaps, silences and uncertainties of meanings – open and full of significant – suggests that the historical interpretation of texts, as well as literary criticism, are necessarily indeterminate and their readings more or less inadequate. This does not mean, of course, that every reading is as good as any; this simply means that there are no definitive interpretations. “(Munson, 2009, p.
And historians are not out of this perspective, says Munslow, so the truths do not exist, they are cultural constructions of each time and space, permeated by interests of all kinds, related to the games of power (domination, negotiation and resistance) particular to each society, but this does not prevent: “that people (including historians) seek meaning for the everyday world, even if the signs are arbitrary” (Munslow, 2009: 46).

Thus, narrative constructions would be impositions made for many reasons: explanatory, political, ideological, and, Hayden White in his Metahistory, elaborates an explanation of the explanations made by 19th century historians on the set of linguistic resources (as metaphors) to frame their stories the literary genres: romantic, tragic, comic or satirical.

As part of his perspective the postmodernist as seen by Munslow is a continuity of modernity, almost a consequence of it, while postmodernity is indeed the novelty, between them there is the question of consciousness history, but not Dilthey’s romantic consciousness.
MUNSLOW, Alun. Deconstructing history. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 2009.
WHITE, Hayden. Metahistory: the historical imagination of the nineteenth century. São Paulo: Edusp, 1995.
 

The Desconstruction and post-structuralism

26 Feb

The deconstruction in the philosophical sense of Jacques Derridá (1930-2004) can only be linkedaDesconstruçãoto the idea of reading text of post-structuralism, and structuralism is linked to Levy Strauss, and poststructuralism uses the basic premises of structuralism itself, besides Derridá one can cite Roland Barthes.
Deconstruction in the sense that Derridá gave to his thought, can not be confused with a concept or a method, is precisely the idea that objectivity (as a method) can not be used to ground the deconstruction, the sense that seems more correct is the of a “strategy” to read texts and to interpret them, for this the strong connection with the matter of the grammar (one of the main works of Derridá is Gramatology).
Derridá then says of his strategy (not concept or method): “What interested me at that moment … what I try to continue now in other ways, is alongside a general economy a sort of general strategy of deconstruction .. to go through the phase of an overthrow [of what he calls the double science] … to accept this need is to recognize that in a classical philosophical opposition we do not treat, with a peaceful coexistence of a vis-a-vis, with a hierarchy of violence. .. to deconstruct the opposition is first, at a certain moment, to overthrow the hierarchy.” (Derridá, 1975, 53-54).
For him the traditional metaphysical thought (I would say the idealist of modernity is more deeply) is the logocentric, which identifies it in pairs: identity and difference (its main argument), reason and sensation, logic and rhetoric, male and female, but without a doubt its main one is speech and writing.
This is central here because it deals with what we consider to be essential in ontology that is presence, but its argument is different from existentialists, although it also deals with the oral (well before modernity) and writing (Gutenberg here). “The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, would be a history of these metaphors and of these metonymies (the different names we use to refer to a stable foundation or foundation from which we can think totality of a structure or even reality in general] “(Derridá, 1995: 231).
In positions Derridá affirms that the difference (different in Portuguese translation which is not unlike other translations) is that one must connect his idea of deconstruction “to a point of rupture with Afhebung and speculative dialectics” (Derridá, 1975, 56). ) in clear opposition to the idea in Hegel’s philosophy that one concept can be reduced to another, but there is a play, the incessant alternation of primacy of one term over the other, thereby producing a situation of constant indecision.
Here he penetrates into the discourse on structuralism: “As opposed to epistemic discourse, structural discourse on myths, mythological discourse must itself be mitomorphic” (Derrida 1971: 230) and on this discourse Levy himself Strauss wrote: “It will be right to consider it [his book] as a myth: in any case, the myth of mythology” (Lévy-Strauss apud Derridá 1971: 242).
Derridá’s emphasis on textuality and writing is not a break with philosophy, but rather a deeper understanding of the linguistic shift beyond games, and the fact that he is so closely linked to literature is the penetration of his reading into department of literature, more specific in the United States, and this orign.is anglo-saxonic thought.
“The game” for Derridá “is always a game of absence and presence, but if we want to think radically, we must think them before the alternative of presence and absence; it is necessary to think of being as presence or absence from the possibility of the game, and not vice versa ” (Derridá, 1971, 248).
The difference is thus in the “inside” and “outside” of the presence, its deconstruction thus seeks to relate to the mythology but to disassemble it, in an ethnocentric perspective, that makes prevalence of the conceptual thought on the mythical, of the logical reasoning on the bricolage , which is made by Lévy-Strauus himself, to think of myth as an original form of thought is to reduce it to episteme.

References:

Derridá, J. Posiçõe. Semiologia e Maerialismo. Tradução de Maria M. C. Barahona. Lisboa: Plátamo, 1975.
___ Margins of Philosophy. Campinas: Papirus, 1991.
___ The write and the difference. São Paulo: Perspectivas, 1971.
___ Gramatology. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1999.

 

Paradise and reality

23 Feb
The Western archetype of the Adamic myth did not prevent some glimpses of an idea of ​​paradiseaoRelationship in a liberal regime that was close to what would be perfection, but the dualism in the philosophical sense, and the right tension between human and superhuman realities, it is not impossible to find people and realities of “paradise”.
Human realities have always been superimposed on an imaginary and an idea of ​​”good life”, and this goes back to classical antiquity, to the idea of ​​happiness in the polis, reality and paradise are in tension.
Plato created the idea of ​​Sumo Well, a super-human reality where, in modernity, it was Kant who approached the  think of ‘sumo’ of a well-consumed, thus its highest good, became two elements in the sumo good, happiness on one side and ideal from the other.
He thus presented his restraint in order to configure himself as a morally conditioned consequence of moral action, in his famous imperative: “he acts in such a way as to be a model for others,” but in Aristotle the good juice had two prerogatives in his writing ” Ethics to Nicomachus, “Aristotle argues that happiness is 1) the greatest good desired by men and 2) the end of human actions, is God as motor-immobile.
Neither Aristotle’s motionless motor nor Kantian idealism solves this tension between human happiness and reality lived, in times of crisis, in wars and situations of wrong politics, this tension goes high and gives man the sensation that there is no way out to tension, because after all happiness does not exist.
In the popular imagination of Brazil there is a presence of this paradise in nature, “my land has palm trees” or in the words of Nelson Rodrigues: “Brazil is a landscape”, and still in Machado de Assis: “I did not, the sky and the mountains, the woods and the rivers. I already found them ready “and many other examples can be found, but the Platonic-Aristotelian-Kantian tension between “sumo juice”and “good “remains in this brazilian imaginaries.
It is possible to descend human realities and not lose it, we put here already how to live in times of crisis of Edgar Morin and Viveret: safeguarding values, it is not about not knowing the world around, but live in peace to do its part well done: acting on their values ​​and defending them even when everyone imagines that this is “naive” or even impossible, there is something fundamental in this: to take these values ​​to “relationships.”
A symbolic biblical passage for this is Jesus who ascends to Mount Tabor, Jesus is transfigured and appears a paradisiacal image, although it is the Trinity, the apostles think that Jesus is with Moses and Elijah, and affirm in the passage of Mk 9: 5, “Master, it’s good to be here. Let us make three tents: one for you, one for Moses and the other for Elijah. “In order to remain in this reality where the essential relationship is between these three persons, Jesus, after asking them not to tell anyone, goes down with them from the Mount and “reality”, but it will always be present among men.
When this reality is present, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Mt 18:20), but it does not mean being in a church or a specific place, but being in the relationship with others, what it means to be in the Supreme Love, this is the true God Sumo, because he is Sumo Love.

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Sociocibercultures and Paradise Lost

22 Feb

The idea of Lost paradise is our Adamic archetype, at least of the Western religions, they cameAnSocioCiberculture to relate to religions in the dual relation of modernity, proposed by Kant and consecrated and idolized by Hegel in establishing his “state” ethics in the discussions about family, civil society and the state itself, being included as a greater totality.

It is in this tension that Niklas Luhmann’s communicative dualism fits in, for example, for whom internal communication (in the sociociberculture to the individual), which regulates and restricts it at the same time with the communication to its environment (the socio-cultural environment) is in Luhmann’s text “Soziale Systeme” (1984).
It is, to a certain extent, Sloterdijk’s immunology, by asserting that immune systems are “based on the distinction between self and the alien,” but rejects any idea of ​​a stranger present in religions, which for him “do not exist,” then the mystery of life and of truth are no longer conditions of ‘transcendence’, of possibility of paradise.

It is happy to relate the biological to the social organism and in this sense the biological organism is identified as the one that life defense processes “defend”, and also identifies the growing concentric circles as having a cooperative and convivial dimension.

However, in recognizing the intergenerational symbolic plane in which individual death occurs, in spite of stabilizing the world image in new generations, it is not able to see the solidity and truth present in a life beyond life, in a nature beyond nature, supernatural.

In this plan that I place the noosphere, there is a communication beyond the symbols present in the daily life of the spiritual life and in it perpetuates the “eternal” life, not only between generations, but in the realization in a “noospheric” .

Selfish generations unable to think of the future generation do not destroy nature alone, destroy environmental conditions for the future to take place in the form of full life, make the pessimism of their personal life “to death” (by age) in a false social death.

The lost paradise is the inability to give happiness and peace to future generations, it is to repeat how to make the sick spheres of society “everything will be worse”, and those who were born in a society already in crisis, made by past generations, feel “guilty” of the world today.

The lost paradise is the impossibility of future, true to the individual life of adults who tend to end of life, but false to the body only.

 

Sociociberculture and noosphere

21 Feb

I was surprised by a site of researchers’ networks (one of these researcher.something)aoSocioAmbientalIndividualENG that was a sociociberculture researcher , and I found an article about the relation between author-reference and Sociociberculture Felix Geyer (presented as honorary chairman of SocioCiberculture Society), I remembered the discussions of Norbert Wiener and his cybernetic systems, in the neopositivism of the Vienna circle and almost gave up on going forward, but then realized that there is a key to the discussion of technology today .
One of the definitions of self-reference (many “social” systems seem to imitate cybernetic systems) given by Geyer is interesting: “The usual examples of self-referential behavior in social science consist of self-fullfiling and self-defeating prophecies”, and this definitely made me interested in the subject.
The author accredited to the subject, establishes a relation between self-reference, alienation and growth of corporate complexity (name of the second topic of his article), where he states: “” Just like many other phenomena that form part of the individual’s continuous interaction loop with the environment, eg perception, self-reference is ultimately action-oriented, “and I have already understood the relation to Luhman’s systems theory, the question of alienation (or to me consciousness), and especially the relationship with constructivism.
The author penetrates this societal complexity through the theories of “unparalleled interpersonal interaction approaching what Buber (1970) called the” I-Tou relationship “or what Maslow (1962) called “B(eing)” as opposed to “From (efficiency need) – cognition,” or what Berne (1964) defined as an “unplayed” interaction.
The logic of self-reference explains the author functions as the Spiral of Reciprocal Perspectives ( (Laing et al, 1966): “I think you think I think …”, etc. This can also be highly engaging but usually in a more antagonistic and alienated way, such as the well-known demonstration of the prisoner’s dilema”, I translated (in portuguese) from the original I think as I search (not I think), for disagreeing with the Cartesian cogito.
The author also focuses, among others, on the fundamental thesis of Luhmann’s systemic theory: “the perceived increase of environmental complexity can only be reduced and made manageable by an increase in internal complexity, which is the result of a chain of self-referential processes “, This is the core of this theory of systems, but Geyer informs that this is only possible by increasing environmental complexity.It is in this line that Geyer uses Ashby’s Law of Requirements Variety (1952, 1956) where greater environmental (objective) complexity means that each constructs its environment with more objects, more attributes and especially more interactions between them.
The sociociberculture, which initially seems to be just another system with explanations of the current culture of object relations, seems to penetrate even in the near future of the Internet of Things (IoT), where the objects themselves interact with each other, from the environmental to the individual plane.
GEYER, F. The march of self-reference, 3rd International Conference on Sociocybernetics, Leon, Mexico, June 25-29, 2001.

 

The arts and adamic myth

20 Feb

We quote the work of Eça de Queiroz: Adam and Eve in paradise, but a work that seems to reflect very muchaHermingway the Adamic symbol is the work of Ernest Hemingway, it seems the voice of a human experience, which seeks after the adamic fall of struggle against evil, to incorporate a search for redemption, thus symbolizing the mythical structure of the concept of original evil, the evil Adamic.
In other words, a new Adam, not just the figure of Jesus, but the recovery of a false “wise innocence,” a quest for simplicity of language, a second Adam.
What this has to do with the current reality, almost everything, is part of this asceticism of the “here and all its problems are solved”, and this movement in both philosophy and literature is a conscious or subconscious way of using an apology to the Adamic myth.
Character archetypes: Schorer, Murray and Frye are a comprehensive demonstration of this hypothesis, which was studied at Rice University by master student Anna Gayle Ryan, and can be extended to other archetypes used by Hermingway.
The author also wrote “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” about the Spanish Civil War, where an American soldier Robert Jordan fights alongside the International Brigades that support democratic government, with him is a group of guerrillas / gypsies, of Pilar, a woman with extraordinary courage, the dangerous Pablo and the beautiful Maria.
Despite the novel written in Cuba, it is possible to see a connection figure with the insertion of Americans almost in all the wars of the planet, not rarely taking the place of protagonist, as in Vietnam, in Korea, in the Middle East, etc.
The work was stamped on film, in the 1943 film was directed by Sam Wood, with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman (picture) in the main roles, which apparently is a revolutionary work hides American interests and the idea of ​​an Adamic paradise represented by democracy , today it is possible to make this relationship.
It is the asceticism of the exercises, it carried to the extreme of the wars, and that impel an ideologies and a false “lost the Paradise” of democracy and others modern symbols.

 

The symbolic evil and the lost paradise

19 Feb

The reflection of the symbolic evil done by the Frenchman Paul Ricoeur refers to the study of language and theadamicSymbols use of hermeneutics to say what is the manifestation of evil in reality, it is not only violence, but essentially evil at different levels of reality.
In exploring the symbolic function of evil, he resorted to primary myths such as the fall of Adam revealed in the need to recognize the symbol as a means of understanding reality, in the case of the Adamic myth, the three great monotheistic religions: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity .
To purge the evil beyond the ontological sense that we have treated in the previous posts, and to move towards an understanding of the ethical implications of the search for self-awareness, the roots of violence seem empty and ill-explained when they do not recognize the “symbol.”
The idea present in the Adamic myth of the expulsion of paradise, and that this is due to the use of the “forbidden fruit” has already been sung in prose and verse in books (Eça de Queiroz wrote Adam and Eve in paradise), songs and even philosophical treatises as Paul Ricoeur does today, but the incomprehension of this presents in the “being” or in the spheres of immunology as Petr Sloterdijk, seem to ignore the concepts of “value” and “wealth” as Edgar Morin and Patrick Viveret want (Living in crisis times).
Far from apocalyptic appeals, it is necessary to understand the complexity of the current course of human history, rather it is a crisis with deep aspects, but it is those moments in which a great upset is announced, in our view the “ontological turn”, a deep roots change in our being, and this has nothing liquid and will be quite solid.
Humanity has already made great leaps in the periods of the great civilizations of the East: the Persians, the Babylonians and the Egyptians, but in the Latin American civilizations: Aztecs, Incas and Mayans.
These civilizations have fallen, but others have followed in different ways, what seems false is the developmentalist paradigm, for although it is unknown the human is prevalent, we have done much in the period of modernity, but its idealizations of Individual, State and individual property seems to be false, does not necessarily mean a way out of the socialist model, but will certainly mean some collective output, the individual being-there seems to be do-ente, and something more present in the ethical being-with-other relationship seems a viable path, relationships and solidarity.

 

 

Immunology and true ascesis

16 Feb
To understand asceticism as possible, we have to overcome the paradigm of aQuaresma“affections and passions” present since the origin of Western civilization, it is an opening in the individualized bubbles in immune systems, but what are the immune systems?
“Immune systems are expectations of damage and violation, somatized or institutionalized, which are based on the distinction between the self and the stranger” (Sloterdijk, 2009, p .709).
It is easy and possible to recognize an immune system by a metaphor of the individual biological organism, this is the new step of Sloterdijk, he sees in his “Spheres” the individual in increasing concentric circles, creating two immune systems, and then in a cooperative perspective and convivial actions.
Human existence and is a social immune system, and according to the German philosopher when it works, legal security, social prevention and feelings of belonging beyond the small circle of the family itself can expand.
Thus we have the personal and family circles, both concentric, but which must go beyond the in-itself.
The third, that is why we post on symbolic-ontological evil, we enter into a plan in which the validation of intergenerational norms compensates (and rewards) the certainty of individual death and stabilizes the image of the world, it seems a still individual plan, but it is not, is an asceticism in which we “expurgate” the ontological evil.
Like the biological immune system, both the sympathetic and the symbolic system can go through crises and overcome them (of course they can fail as well), what does this individual death mean? in the case of the two social immunological systems, is collective death and resurrection.
ndividual ascesis and even family if they are not solidary and collective tend to create a “closure” of being, an in-itself (sick).
In the biblical passage of the 40 days of Jesus’ wilderness, if we admit this human as God would not have to do this, he makes his individual death, significant is the passage in Mark 1: 12-13 “… the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness . And he was in the wilderness for forty days, and there he was tempted by Satan.
He lived among the wild animals, and the angels served him”, then began his public life, he would say “collective”.
SLOTERDIJK, P. (2009) Du musst Dein Leben ändern. Über Antropotechnik. Frankfurt, Suhrkamp.