El orden diacrónico como conjugado del orden sincrónico (bosquejos)

Procesos de afinidad fenotípica y genotípica interpretados como afinidad ahistórica e histórica, respectivamente. La afinidad ahistórica se configura en el espacio social mientras que la histórica en el tiempo social. Estas dos 'dimensiones' (en realidad, diferentes espacios con relación de dualidad) están presentes en diferentes ámbitos: biología eco-evolutiva, teología (hermeneutica) [1], epistemología (fenomenología vs. objetivismo), historicismo vs. determinismo histórico, política vs. antipolítica, etc.

El quién escribe, el qué escribe, el cómo se lee: la autoridad del origen, la autoridad autocontenida de la lógica, la autoridad pragmática del empirismo, respectivamente. Esta última se caracteriza por la noción de localismo temporal del lector, que se convierte en un interprete legítimo ante el cambio de tiempo y/o posición. El pragmatismo es subjetivo cuando se proyecta hacia un localismo espacial y temporal [2], pero existen soluciones parciales que combinan subjetivismo y objetivismo en diferentes dimensiones. A su vez cada localismo se subdivide en escalas de temporalidad y territorialidad. Aquí vale la pena enfatizar el valor de uso de variables físicas y sus conjugados (posición-momento, tiempo-frequencia, etc.) para describir el espacio-tiempo donde un proceso social está bien definido.  Los conceptos de tiempo y frecuencia en la física deben tener igual protagonismo analítico en la sociología donde sabemos que están asociado a las nociones de tiempo y temporalidad, orden diacrónico y orden sincrónico. Esta dualidad también está presente en el análisis del espacio social, en física se habla de posición y momento, en sociología de posición y territorialización, la condición política y la ontológica.

[1] En que medida el texto sagrado se ha de configurar como lenguaje (política) o adscrito a los antilenguajes (antipolíticas). Utilizo la palabra antilenguaje como sinónimo de conocimiento epistémico y lenguaje como su antítesis; pero vale recordar que el lenguaje en su concepción más amplia suele codificar bajo principio o bajo existencia práctica una antipolítica; de allí la noción de hegemonía, de problematización del centro o eje discursivo. 

Aquí vale hacer referencia a una pregunta que hace Humberto Beck a Leszek Kolakowski (Letras Libres):

"H.B.– Ciertos filósofos contemporáneos, como Gianni Vattimo, reconocen en el cristianismo un relato valioso y efectivo en la medida en que puede inspirar ciertas actitudes deseables, al tiempo que ellos mismos parecen vaciarlo de todo contenido sobrenatural. ¿Es la religión, y en específico el cristianismo, meramente un lenguaje o la constatación de una dimensión real del mundo, del misterio como aspecto constitutivo de la condición humana?

L. K.– Si la gente repitiera algunas normas ancladas en la tradición religiosa pero, por haber perdido la sensación de realidad de esta tradición, sólo las conservara como façon de parler, entonces no las podrían observar con seriedad por siempre. Al estar desconectadas de su origen, tales normas desaparecerían en una generación o dos. La vida religiosa se agotaría si se le redujera a un hábito lingüístico. Si repetimos “No matarás” al tiempo que olvidamos que es parte de un decálogo, tendríamos que buscar otra respuesta cuando se nos pregunte “¿y por qué no?”, y no habría jamás certeza en esa respuesta. Es por esto que no debemos esperar que el contenido normativo del cristianismo se preserve puramente como un hábito del lenguaje y que esas normas sigan funcionando."

[2] ¿Cómo se interpreta el localismo en los espacios duales de territorialización y temporalidad? ¿Qué antagonismos filosóficos del tipo local vs. global se configuran alrededor de estos últimos?

The consciense according to User Interface Design, prosthetic limbs and fuzzy gates

This will be highly intuitive; like a painting of (Tina) Turner.

Logic, machines of the mind.

Logic, prostheses of the mind.

Computers, prostheses of the brain.

A "closed prosthesis" is a prosthesis with a well defined (stable) IN and OUT. Oriented towards reliability.

An "open prosthesis" is a prosthesis with a 'not so well' defined IN and OUT. Oriented towards versatility.

Conscience as a coordinator of open prosthesis articulations. Conscience as a cell membrane allowing and resisting influence. Conscience is social but also a personal alter-logic movement. Conscience is an act of criticism, conscience is an act of absurdity and civilization. Conscience is a construction, and constructions are acts of absurdity and civilization.

Machines as a prosthesis of the body. The body as a prosthesis of the mind. The body as a bureaucrat between the machines and the mind.

Conscience is outside logic. Logic vulnerable to the scrutiny of others, other sources of meaning. From your peers criticism to your very own alter-logic. Conscience is related with the alter-ego of a tool. If the characteristic of a tool is its functional reductivism, conscience is portrayed as a non-reductive machine. To use logic consciously is to take logic out of its familiar functional environment and to apply it into new functional requirements, hence its relation with versatility. Nevertheless, versatility is not a privilege of conscious agents; kids, after all, are known to be highly versatile. So it is worth to ask, what do we gain by having conscience if kids are more versatile? Perhaps conscience is a prosthesis, a cultural object of adults allowing them to recover some of the cognitive versatility of kids. Learning a new language seems a good example in this behalf. Kids learn language much easier than most adults, but adults seem to use logic to hack into the natural intuitionist way of learning. Most adults have no longer the cognitive resources that would allow them to learn by intuition (unconscious logic), so they use formal logic (conscious logic) to replace such deficiency. Conscience would in this case act as a prosthesis, or more precisely, as a way to coordinate the proper articulation of known (intuitionist) and new knowledge. It provides to the knew knowledge a transient environment where it can start to take eventual intuitionist roots. Learning a new language by formal logic is to develop a representation between intuitionist structures of the mind and an external, unfamiliar structure. The intuitionist structure adopts the new structure for enough time as for the new structure to be able to walk through its own intuitionist steps, a transient relation of logical subordination. Even if that is valid for the learning of language it may not be a determinant case example for the status of conscience. There is a key idea, thought, in the latter example that help us to give a more general setting, the idea of conscience as a cultural object. I want to invoke such term in its condition of being an open ended device; a device whose purpose, whose conclusive meaning, is not well define. Like a letter from the alphabet who is ready to be articulated into higher structures of meaning. So the idea is to explore a definition of conscience that involves the coordination of low-end movements –like logical steps within the mind– into the unfamiliar purposes and meanings of the external environment, the unfamiliar. For the mathematician, the 'unfamiliar' means pretty much everything that is not required by the very movement of logic. For the romantic, it means the beloved alienation of nature or the hatred alienation of industrial civilization. Politics, civilization itself, is the very act of pulling the phenomenizing epiphenomenology, is to connect events hitherto not attached by "nature", is the rising ecology of power, the creation of markets within markets, the negotiaton of the future(s) and the past (historical revisionism), to impose taxes to casinos in order to address climate change, in a way, civilization is the very craft of absurdity. But absurdity, in this context, is a double-edged feeling; it is attached to fear, nostalgia and ignorance, but also to the sense of awareness about having more power than knowledge of cause and being cautious in response.

Lets point to a paradigmatic example.

Towards a pragmatic formulation of conscience: "logic inside", "logic outside". Its incarnation in the realm of software design; the classical dilemma between User Interface Design: how much parameters should we put available to the user without risking frustration, risking program's stability or reaching user's memory saturation? And movements oriented to go beyond this dichotomy: multi-stage tools for progressive empiric education, fractal software environment where highly developed Helps create a non-hierarchical language that pursues a stable and not so stable (careful not to draw the user into a promiscuous vacuous erudition of the software) user gravitating environment, etc.

Even if the user has the education to use a low ended, highly versatile language, the day to day experience will determine the eventual "figuration" of the software (people that use Fortran with the same object-oriented conscience as if they were using Win 98). In other words, freedom is not a substantive, is a verb. This dichotomy should not be push to hard, though, we should provide a space of action for the user against unexpected situations and in general substantive freedom provides a shelter for the unpredictable verbs to come... to come into practice into a daily basis. Furthermore, there are machines whose very purpose is to be non-reductive; an anti-tool, a meta-tool, a humanist being, etc. Or if you are a hard nose pragmatist, a tool to conceive new tools, a workbench, an Integrated Development Environment, etc.

About the moral aspect of conscience [in here I fail to connect with the former reflection and instead try to pour some redundant poetish blablabla, nevertheless… license of sketch]. If consciousness is indeed that membrane, that interstitial region, that last shelter of the ego within the rise of closed tools –as solid as their optimization can be–, that new stone age, then consciousness is indeed the ultimate object, the realm of the undefined in dispute, not a statical unknown, but the frontline of civilization. Doubt is the smell of freedom, and freedom is the rough material of morality. It is the place of reality because it is the place of history. A turbulent history, a turbulent morality is a state of multi-scale existence, but are "we" to be a scale or a bot in the fractal software of history? Perhaps we, as body, are bots. While the fractal environment we explore is the mind, the ego –there is no canonic ego despite how hard we try to believe so (what an argument!)–. That simulacrum of the body which we call the individual ego is just a transient ego of maintenance of the body infrastructure. The purpose of the body is to be a historical incarnation of the complex ecology of egos taking place in the history (of civilization).

Spelling Desire

It isn't enough to talk about sexual identity and sexual orientation as parameters of social choice. This leaves some options undefined, as for example, a woman that feels fine with her body but prefers to be masculine. To cover these is sufficient to specify whether the attributes of identity and orientation are to take place within the realm of the body or the mind. And by the latter I mean culture, aesthetics. The fact that nowadays the available attributes of the mind resemble that of the body is just a transient stage of cultural evolution, the stage of irony and simulacra. We should learn to distinguish and allow the free recombination of the attributes of identity and orientation within the realms of sex and gender. The philosophically oriented reader will have to dismiss me for treating sex and gender as different categories without further discussion. An interesting question for those with progressive agendas regards the potential shapes of a post-sexual world [1]. If we formulate the question as: can a simulacrum survive its conditions? The answer is, no. But if the question is: can a simulacrum survive its historical incarnations? The answer is, yes. Hence, the underlying question is whether sex is the condition of gender or just one of its incarnations [2]. As we identify the most basic conditions giving evolutionary rise to gender, only then, we can say if these conditions will still hold in the foreseeable future [3]. At this point we are pushing the notion of simulacra beyond its transient nature. What begins to take place in an affirmative answer to the future of post-sexuality is a notion of simulacra as a symbiosis between history and economy. And by economy I mean a set of persistent conditions preceding the production and reproduction of strategies. History would provide the signifiers, the conventions, on top of which the strategies are placed. Is as if history would provide a natural shelter for strategies, and as for any shelter it may prove useful to preserve it as long as the costs of creating a tailored one are greater. I treat nostalgia, in this context, as an instinct of tradition and I will not stress further on it. What I mean by signifiers is not just the material object on top of which the meaning takes place, I also mean symbols, objects which have multiple incarnations but which are not invoked as meanings. For example, aesthetic or alphabetic forms; they have no meaning other than that of the conventions on which they are ascribed, nevertheless as forms they can be "incarnated" in multiple substrates [4].

[1] Regarding the dilemma of talking of "post-gender sexuality" or "post-sexual gender". In this two formulations there is an interplay of meaning and valuation. For the first formulation the word sex is invoked in its basic mechanic existence. In contrast, gender is seen as an anachronism on social relations. Verbs like penetration are its epitomes. There is no distinction between organic or inorganic bodies, the many forms of "penetration" are to be explored. It is akin, for example, to cyber-punk literature. For the second formulation, sex refers to the body condition regardless of what you do with it. It is seen as an anachronism to be overcome through a transcendence of the mechanistic conception;  it doesn't looks for new mechanical forms as is the case of the first formulation. The possibilities of social intimacy in the realm of lasting feelings rather than fragmented emotions is to be explored. While the utopic territory of the first formulation is the skin, for the latter is the heart.  I am not sure, though, whether the dichotomy at stake can by reduced only to an issue of continuity and fragmentation or if there are other fundamental antagonisms involved. 

[2] One may precipitate to think that the very existence of homosexuality proves that the "classical" meaning of sexual relation is just an incarnation. Nevertheless there is a possibility of homosexuality being a simulacra of heterosexuality and not being able to survive without it (in the same way that dramatic art would not survive without real life).

[3] Evolutionary means are much wider nowadays than literal darwinism.

[4] Behind this is the idea of the relativity of the signifier and signified.

La ignorancia creativa o el saber dialéctico

Hay dos acepciones socialmente reconocidas de la palabra ignorancia. Una es la de "no saber" y otra es la de "creer que se sabe". Cierta crítica filosófica –no siempre de ascendencia platónica– suele utilizar la última y considera a la primera como una acepción naïve. Quisiera abrir la posibilidad de una tercera. He de introducir inicialmente su antítesis contrastándola con las antítesis de las acepciones de ignorancia ya citadas. En particular quiero proponer una alternativa a la actitud filosófica de considerar como virtud el "saber lo que no se sabe". Mi inconformismo con esta actitud es porque la considero estéril. Pienso que es más fructífera una posición fluctuante. Creo que es preciso creer que se sabe para lograr una exploración profunda de la potencialidad del supuesto conocimiento que se cree poseer. No hago más pues que invocar a la crítica dialéctica. La adopción del "saber lo que no se sabe" como virtud es incompatible con la dialéctica como virtud. Ahora, hablo de una dialéctica que puede tomar lugar incluso dentro del individuo mismo. Esto es posible si se entiende a este no como una unidad sino como una multiplicidad de otros que conviven en un mismo cuerpo orgánico. Igualmente importante es la dialéctica entre individuos; se requiere un instinto social o una conciencia de nuestro aporte finito al movimiento de una conciencia (colectiva) para exponer nuestra subjetividad a la deliberación en diferentes temporalidades (incluyendo la del tiempo real que posee su propio valor, su propia soberanía) [1].  En fin, la antítesis de este saber dialéctico se descubre como toda forma estática del saber, incluido el saber de no saber.

[1] Aquí se puede contrastar entre la figura del sabio y la de opinión ciudadana (quizás el intelectual sea una etapa o figura intermedia) [1.1]. El sabio configura su saber en un espacio dialéctico muy diferente a la opinión pública. Habitan diferentes temporalidades. Esto también constituye una barrera política. Evitar el diálogo entre estos dos sujetos puede ser una forma legítima de evitar externalidades nocivas pero también puede estar asociado a formas de distinción menos honestas. El sabio al evitar la defensa explícita de su opinión prefiere recostarse en su figura institucional aportando así al fetichismo del conocimiento.

[1.1] A veces se asemeja a la relación entre un banquero y un ahorrador; el primero representa una riqueza grande pero colectiva, mientras que el segundo es acreedor de una riqueza quizás no tan grande pero personal. Aunque a menudo la anterior ecuación se materialice de forma distorsionada.

Epistemologies and Revolutions Trading in the Stock Market

Talking about the paroxysms of postmodern epistemology, facing a post-post-modern condition, it has sense to ask: what will be the role of frontiers in an hypermarket economy? In particular I am interested in the frontiers of knowledge and culture. How does the frontiers of culture distributes along society and in particular in its aesthetic non-technical dimension? The notion of periphery was a useful representation but is time to be more precise. An important case is to identify frontiers with non-human agents: e.g. the language (as in analytic philosophy) or the reception of collective voluptuosities through the aesthetic experience. We know threre is an interplay (often conflictive) between artists and critics. This is a human-human interplay. We know that artists have a non-human interplay with the voluptuosity of the collective, and with their highly free association with signifiers. From there comes their contribution to innovation. At this point is useful to distinguish two forms of innovation: the contribution to innovation mediated by aggregation (as in "more is different"). This is a form of innovation that could be associated with key words like epigenesis and programmed evolution, but also with simple emergent behavior detached of any organic pre-program. But then there is a form of innovation which is more of a disruption similar to genetic or socio-historic revolutions. The latter are noisy revolutions just as the former are rather silent. Of course, there is a lot of mimesis in this, and you can often find agents that coopt a silent innovation and announce it as their own noisy revolution when they are just the medium. Perhaps, in justice, they should be seen as false disruptors, thieves. Ironically this is ofen the people that says to safeguard the rights of the creators. 

On the Nature of Emotions: the Linguistic Deconstruction of Emotional Realism

If it hurts is real? Can't lies hurt? Aren't our dearest truths, still a fiction of language?

Synchronic language is not an exclusive construction of atemporal discourse (pragmatism, mathematics, etc.). It can be realized by the iteration of diachronic gestures –as in Bourdieu's concept of the Habitus–. Moreover, the interplay is not restricted to the extreme categories of time and no-time as suggested by the dichotomy synchronic/diachronic; it also involves intermediate structures in social space-time (aka temporality, etc.). Think on time scales such as weeks, decades, generations, intergenerations, etc. And despite Heidegger's emphasis on time, just as important, scales on social space: bacterial colonies, individuals, families, communities, nations, etc. 

In particular there is a realization of synchronic language (and as language being prior to emotions, these will lead to synchronic emotions: feelings) through the diachronic language of social relations (friends, couples, etc.). This is slightly different to the Habitus whose emphasis is on the local perpetuation of institutions [1]. The realm I want to point out (also targeted in the post: On the Nature of Emotions: Vanity Within) is that of emotions in literary realism. The personal experience of the social in its synchronic stance. But an intimate social, the relation with the family, friends, neighbors, etc. How this synchronic stance induces a form of emotional realism in which our inability to deconstruct it often leads to existential thoughts. Sartre's nothingness more than a claim on the condition of the real is a claim about the broadness of language. 

So the idea to take home from this note is that our relation with language mediates the interpretation of our feelings, and even of our emotions. Moreover, it also invents and upholds those feelings, their physical existence. It is a double feedback. Our linguistic condition is not only an intellectual condition but a social one.

Podata: Difference between emotions and feelings (a citation to Jung).

On the Nature of Emotions: Vanity Within

Consider emotions as comprised of internal (feelings) and external  (facial expressions, etc.) activities. I propose as an hypothesis that some emotions (or at least a subset of them such as "happiness" and "sadness") are elements of communication and barely anything else. This reasoning has verifiable implications. One is that a subject of emotions (e.g. a person) which is isolated from other receptors (e.g. other persons), will tend to diminish not only its external but also its internal emotional activity e.g. the solitary person will be neither happy or sad, on the long run. Mood would be understood as a social invention, as sophisticated as any other element of language. Moreover, if we push this interpretation a bit further as to say that  the internal experience of emotions is subsidiary to the external activity –after all, communication is up to semantics, an external process– then we will find a radically different perspective to understand emotions: the novice does not sings to uplift her melancholic mood; her mood is to uplift the song.

From this perspective is not crazy to say that the development of abstract language, in particular the decreasing role of analogic languages, will tend to diminish the necessity of internal emotional activity. Interestingly, we also see a realization of the analogic from the digital as a manifestation of the asynchrony, the tension, the anxiety between the pace of the format and that of the language in its wider, emotionally comprised, sense. The music may be seen as its epitome; in those societies where formal language has been largely cleaned of its analogical content, music becomes increasingly analogical. And so we can see that the refinement of the written language is paralleled by the birth of classical music. Or rap music, whose high amount of digital content (percussion, beat, prose, etc.) is paralleled by an outburst of slang, an epigenesis of emphasis which points to a revival of analogism in language. On could say that formal language and music, play at its best –or perhaps at its worst– a dialectical relation, an equilibrium of opposites [1].

 A possible experiment is to expose an emotional subject into a social environment but blockade the externalization of its emotions. Under suitable adjustment periods, this hypothesis would suggest that the subject will start to diminish its internal emotional activity given that it has become a useless burden. This experiment is not easy, many behavioral responses will get between the initial conditions and the suitable adjustment periods. To realize it we need to understand that the suitable adjustment periods can comprise weeks (hormonal relaxation) or even generations subjected to the evolutionary constraint (genetic relaxation). One of the intermediate responses is the well known self-harm driven by frustration. Within our hypothesis this could be understood as a response similar to that of a person that tries to speak louder as his voice fades. The body will tend to amplify emotions –even by self-harm– expecting to get a greater, hopefully, visible effect on its receptors. Again, by suitable adjustment periods we should be able to take the subject from this first self-strategic-response to the desired self-strategic-response associated to the "letting aside the burden of emotion". This is similar to the responses of a brain to amputation of an arm. The body will drive the regions of the brain controlling the former organ, to work in other activities or perhaps will simply switch off such regions –under suitable adjustment periods–. 

Even emotional manifestations like our expression when something is very cold or hot have a largely symbolic and therefore social nature; it is useful to show others that something is hot or cold, specially when language hasn't been developed yet or if developed, not as accurate as to transmit the relatively analogical measure of temperature perception. The whole of internal emotions as a response to extreme temperatures though, seems hard to be reduced to a social feature. It seems to comprise also a form of communication within the parts of the body –which is "social" but in another level–.

[1] This is just hypotetical (or perhaps hypo-poetical). Similar thoughts has been explored by George Steiner.

PD. It seems that "suitable adjustment periods" is the carpet to sweep the dirt under. But hopefully not totally, after all it is similar to the challenge of driving a physical system to a state of global minimal energy in the presence of local minimas.

PD2. The dialectics of internal versus external within the realm of emotions is slightly different than the dialectic of emotions versus feelings. Nevertheless, both influence each another.