Complexity and Discourse Closure

Some of those attracted to ‘complexity-thinking’ appeared to understand

 it as a new ontology involving moral recognition of the falsehood of 

ambitions and pretences of prediction and control, thus perhaps as a non- 

hegemonist epistemology (de Sousa Santos, 2003; Haraway, 1997; Sarewitz 

et al., 2000). Yet despite these insights, in conventional discourse-practices 

control (with tacit externalization) remains a persistent expectation, as a 

moral and intellectual given. According to this latter ontology, complexity 

is simply a complex object per se, but one ultimately amenable to control. 

Even if lack of control (‘uncertainty’) has to be admitted, it is only as a 

temporary, strictly limited problem (which deletes ignorance or lack of 

control under the misleading label of acknowledged ‘uncertainty’). This of 

course suggests the question: what is being bracketed – and what is being 

affirmed – when the chronic postponement of ‘lack of control’ (‘complexity’) 

is performed in discursive practices? What imagined public context is being 

implicitly cultivated? 

By the time complexity comes into focus, it will always have been framed, 

translated and domesti- 

cated somehow, like everything else. So a question should be not simply 

how to expose and critique these simplifications and reductions, but, better, 

how to render them more poetic, modest and human? However, this should 

not licence any degree or form of reductionism as the common discourse 

that might be able to claim more informal human richness and representa- 

tive legitimacy. So how complex can such formal public discourses be, even 

while they accommodate practical moral recognition of the strictly unspeak- 

able, that is, contingencies and unknowns? The more that neoliberal 

commercial cultural pressures pervade science, the less room there seems 

likely to be for these more modest, complex sensibilities. 

Wynne, B. (2005) Theory Culture and Society

The motivation to mystify?

There are problems with the wording , utilising  the systems term of  "Emergence", perhaps  "Tao", maybe "Grace"  for the "simple unfolding of harmony" but in the "rational domain" do we have a 'simple' acceptable term for this apart from those from the General Systems Theory eg "self-organisation" (Deleuze)?

Perhaps a Post-Marxist  analysis could explore the motivation to mysticism and complexity in realtion to creative technique, as  we are driven to secure our monetary position by establishing a niche for ourselves, perhaps an academic niche or personal brand... something that sets me apart from the rest. These individual interests drive discourse from a coherent balanced centre to a set of confrontational polemical positions? (hegemony (Gramsci)) (c.f the 'counter' argument of "a happy diversity of products")

'High Art' is an example of reification? The common resource of Random Flow has been bottled and labeled and 'secret ingredients' added by the author... not so far from  'Publicity' 



Hence for example  a flat plane of competing discourses (Hicks) where no shared qualities are allowed to be  aknowledged such as  those established in General Systems Theory (Von Bertanfly)), these are  dismissed as Meta Narratives (Lyotard)  once a certain undisclosed 'mystical' boundary is passed (D'arcy) 


The boundaries it could be argued are themselves created and reinforced by these  forces of hegemony?(Gramsci?)(Hall?)(Pope R.)


Where does's post structuralism fit with its endless scepticism ? Surely a consistently modest post structuralist would admit their uncertainty about the ?validity? (not referential!) of these discourses... ?   Perhaps they have created a  fantastic base for endless criticism of  other creations for their "will to truth"(Foucault)? Perhaps they enable creativity in a way I have yet to understand...?


Towards the centre we have the drive of education (social education?), towards the periphery the drive of market/capital (technical education?)




Berger : Ways of Seeing

Docile Society / Excluded Discourse - Foucault

Docile Bodies

Panopticism

Excluded/ Marginalised Discourses

Also creating mythologies of marginalised discourse ( c.f. stereotypes, ideology)

Safe Walks - Excluded Walks -  Random Walks


(current example could be  UK Uncut being marginalised/stereotyped)


http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/mar/30/uk-uncut-arrests-protests

Communicative and Strategic Discourse Habermas Fairclough

Strategic Discourse : Instrumental, Goal Oriented: Commercial/Beurocratic/Institiutions - Prescriptive?

Communicative discourse: Understanding Oriented - Interpretive?

Colonisation of Lifeworld by System

Can we have Institutions that maintain Communicative Discourse?

c.f Rationality and Distinction<> Flow and Appreciation?


Eg Problems solved by creative potential of individuals? = ideological practice c.f political mobolisation


eg Foucault sees  eg councelling therapy as social control

REF and Discourse within institutions.

Inherent Emergent Qualities <> Qualities measured by Production  and Consumption

Random expressive flow - is it  characterised  as dangerous by/within the forces of control (institutions) (Fairclough) to maintain their positions of dominance?

Foucault - Concepts

episteme  (Order of things c.f. wholism, system)


 Foucault argues that these conditions of discourse have changed over time, from one period's episteme to another. (Aside: Jean Piaget, in "Structuralism" (1968/1970, p. 132), compares Foucault's episteme to Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm


 >Systems of thought and knowledge (epistemes or discursive formations, in Foucault's terminology) are governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and logic, that operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period.


Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy


Foucault maintains that the great “turn” in modern philosophy occurs when, with Kant (though no doubt he is merely an example of something much broader and deeper), it becomes possible to raise the question of whether ideas do in fact represent their objects and, if so, how (in virtue of what) they do so. In other words, ideas are no longer taken as the unproblematic vehicles of knowledge; it is now possible to think that knowledge might be (or have roots in) something other than representation. This did not mean that representation had nothing at all to do with knowledge. Perhaps some (or even all) knowledge still essentially involved ideas' representing objects. But, Foucault insists, the thought that was only now (with Kant) possible was that representation itself (and the ideas that represented) could have an origin in something else.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/




OT
We must remember this is written in 1970, during F's "political turn." He's backing away from archaeology, hence he will limit his claims about its scope. He lists 5 points.
    1) his object, the "soft sciences," had been neglected; they were error-ridden and evidence of mere "world views"; F's wager: what if they were rule-bound, even in their errors, as well as in their truths?
    2) here is a notorious backpedalling: F claims he is only doing a "regional study," yet he tosses around terms like "Classical age" or "Western episteme" quite freely. See 168 ("only one episteme for all knowledge"). he also mentions here his critique of history of ideas, which looks for "precursors": this is continuist history, of which Bachelard and Canguilhem had disabused F by insisting on a history of concepts, which distinguishes different experiences under superficially similar terminology.
    3) here F defines "archaeology" as different from history of science, which goes after scientific cness, and its negative unconscious, what eludes it. F goes after positive unconscious: underlying productive rules to "define objects, form concepts, build theories." Again, here we see Bachelard and Canguilhem. object = data produced by experiment (e.g., Galileo: same speed of different weights); concept = interpretation of that data that allows questions of how to explain it (Galileo: point mass: center of gravity); theory = attempt to explain the data (Descartes: vortices; Newton: gravity). thus concepts are "theoretically polyvalent."
    4) F asks that the book be read as an "open site", that is, as posing questions and problems rather than as setting forth a doctrine. F mentions three problems: change, cause, subject.
        a) change: F proposes three levels which must be respected:
            i) w/in individual science;
            ii) appearance of new fields of study;
            iii) overall shift in relations between sciences.
    b) causality: F brackets this question, claiming to have addressed it earlier in MC and BC.
    c) subject: F does not contest validity of study of scientific cness in intellectual biography, but doubts it's enough to account for the "immense density"of scientific discourse: he asks about the rules that determine the "situation, function, perceptive capacity, and practical possibilities" of individual scientists: what rules did they have to fulfill to be recognized at the time as scientific discourse of a particular type? Here F explicitly rejects phenomenology as theory of "transcendental consciousness" (central active point responsible for all meaning and historicity [as reactivation of sedimentation]) in favor of a "theory of discursive practice."
    5) F sharply rejects the term "structuralist", though he admits there may be "certain similarities." As we will see, ever since Classical times, the recognition of similarities is only the start of analysis that leads to knowledge; if left by itself, such recognition leads to error (this seems also part of modern episteme).

[have someone read the passage aloud]. Before the laughter dies down, F asks us to specify the otherness: what is the impossibility here, since each category by itself makes sense? In fact, F shows that there is no categorial miscegnation here; what is unthinkable is that they are all in the same series, on the same level, in an impossible "common ground." What Borges destroys is the "site," the "mute ground upon which it is possible for entities to be juxtaposed."

Here F touches on a profound philosophical point. The impossibility of Borges' encyclopedia is the impossibility for a certain thought to think difference in itself, with no relation to identity: in Hegelian terms, diversity with no relation to opposition, contradiction and finally ground. Deleuze and D/G will pursue just this difference: D in DiffRep; D/G in the heterogeneity of desiring-production, the weird collisions on the plane of consistency, "where a mustache collides with a differential equation..."

Rather than describing diversity positively, F concentrates on its disturbing of identity thought: he calls it the "heteroclite" and the "heterotopia," and connects it to aphasia: loss of what is common to place and name: Atopia. Shifting gears, F cites the place of China in W cultural imaginary: "the privileged site of space": the frozen culture, the place of tables (orders) different than ours.

F now moves to thematize the "pure experience of order." F begins with the table as a "grid of identities (Classical), similitudes (Ren), analogies (modern)": a coherence that is neither a priori and necessary, nor based on immediate perception. This coherence is that of "a system of elements": 1) definition of elements to be compared; 2) types of variation to be noticed; 3) thresholds of difference, which is needed for the simplest "order."

F now locates the "pure experience of order" (the il y a de l'ordre ) between the 1) "empirical" realm, the things exposed to the "already 'encoded' eye" (coded by the fundamental codes of a culture): e.g., the difference between human and animal, between animal, vegetable and mineral, between living and dead; 2) philosophical reflection on order: its origins, utility, laws, etc. The pure experience of order occupies the "middle region" between these two "extremes of thought," between perception (non-reflective use of ordering codes) and logic (reflection on order itself).

http://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Spinoza/Texts/Foucault%20-%20Order%20of%20Things%20I.htm

Discursive Expertise

Expertise  - the discursive idea that there are no commonalities of meaning neatly fits with the natural academic desire for an endless set of research opportunities, and language games with their resident expert

It demote the possibility and use of  inter subject -wisdom and furthers the gap of understanding hence it can fall into the a situation of divide and rule competition in the service of capital...

Habermas makes a claim for an intersubjective meta discourse?

Discourse ethics is a normative ethics for pluralistic societies which no longer have a single, overarching moral authority.


 Habermas points out quite rightly that the fact that in disputing the validity claims of truth, normative rightness and authenticity [Wahrhaftigkeit], we must nonetheless apply precisely these norms to our dispute - this does not entail any foundation, much less a final foundation for these validity claims. This could be interpreted as a transcendental-logical mistake by K.-O. Apel. For Habermas, however, this shows only that we actually have no alternatives in argument. The validity claims are 'pragmatic universals'. His critique of Apel does not imply that the validity claims are not valid.

http://caae.phil.cmu.edu/cavalier/Forum/meta/background/agimmler.html

Closure and Discourse Communities

If discourse analysis dismiss macro analysis for micro of discourse communities?


How do we decide the boundary of the discourse community?
What about its relevent environment?
(read Fairclough)


According to poststructural


Isn't such closure necessarily structural thinking which has supposedly been abandoned?


re Layder 233-236

Norms, Performativity, Gender: Butler

" how do the norms that constitute gender make us and prevent us from making what we could of ourselves"

Butler, who locates the construction of the gendered, sexed, desiring subject within what she calls, borrowing from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, "regulative discourses." These, also called "frameworks of intelligibility" or "disciplinary regimes," decide in advance what possibilities of sex, gender, and sexuality are socially permitted to appear as coherent or "natural."^{[citation needed]} Regulative discourse includes within it disciplinary techniques which, by coercing subjects to perform specific stylized actions, maintain the appearance in those subjects of the "core" gender, sex and sexuality the discourse itself produces.^[11]


Butler explicitly challenges biological accounts of binary sex, reconceiving the sexed body as itself culturally constructed by regulative discourse.^[12
The supposed obviousness of sex as a natural biological fact attests to how deeply its production in discourse is concealed.






<sup>The concept of gender performativity is at the core of Butler's work. It extends beyond the doing of gender and can be understood as a full-fledged theory of subjectivity. Indeed, if her most recent books have shifted focus away from gender, they still treat performativity as theoretically central.[citation needed]


Wikipedia</sup>

Gender Trouble?

Relate to creative performance, random expresive flow intuitive<>knowledge expertise etc

Epistemology: Self-Organisation and Learning Culture: Schmidt

Self-Organisation and Learning Culture

Siegfried J. Schmidt • University of Münster, Germany • sjschmidt@gmx.net

> Problem • Many disciplines talk about “learning“, but since each of them relates this term to another domain of reference, each one selects, by this term, other phenomena that are then called “learning.” > Method • This article does not strive for a substantial definition of “learning” nor does it compete with psychological and pedagogical theories of learning, which are therefore not discussed. Instead I will analyse how we talk about learning and whether or not we might perhaps improve the plausibility of this discourse by applying a crucial constructivist concept, namely self- organisation. The main idea of this article reads as follows: “Learning” serves as an explanatory model for the observa- tion of a specific type of change that happens in terms of contingent self-alterations of self-organising systems. The changing system and the observer of this system are inseparably related to one another since there “is” no change without an observation. Thus, talking about learning means talking about the observer and his culture of observation, description and evaluation at the same time. > Benefits • The results of my analysis of the learning discourse are nei- ther meant to serve as how-to knowledge for ameliorating learning processes nor do I regard them as an elaborated or new theory of learning as some ideas developed in this paper have a long tradition. Instead they can contribute to a more complex observation of these processes, aiming at a second order observation of the complicated, since comple- mentary, interrelations between the individual, the socio-cultural, the institutional, and the situational components of the domain called “learning.” In other words, I try to demonstrate the plausibility of observing learning from the perspective of self-organisation.

> Key words • change processes, contingency, culture, knowledge, second order observation, self-organisation.

Let me sum up these considerations concerning learning processes:

ƒ Learning processes need an agent, who might be individual or collective.

ƒ In the case of an individual agent, cog- nitive autonomy and self-organisation have to be taken into account. Cognitive activities are geared by cognitive, emo- tional, moral and empractical2 process components.

ƒ Learning processes happen in time and space and in histories and discourses that are embedded in social, political, economic and technical contexts and developments and are characterised by power relations, gender- and genera- tion-constellations.

ƒ Even if agents can establish common histories and discourses for a certain period, agents experience them as their own history and discourse.

ƒ Learning processes constitute and main- tain their identity via difference from other processes in the same social di- mension.

ƒLearners act on the basis of specific ideas about the reasons for and goals of their learning processes, which might differ in many respects.

ƒ Learning processes might be planned or spontaneous.

ƒ Learning processes can be self-observed or other-observed. The relation between these directions of observation is rel- evant for the evaluation of these pro- cesses.

ƒ According to the actual implementation of these components, different modes, types and styles of learning processes can be realised.

ƒ I call the framework of interactive de- pendencies between learner and teacher, learning processes, performances and observers, a “learning system.”

ƒ For the agents, learning processes are bodily processes imbued with emo- tions.3

(Constructuvist Foundations (5(3)) 2010