Modernism/Constructivism and Space for Emergence

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Modernist Reproduction  >    <          "Present Ground " *         >     <   Textual & Constructivist  Iteration
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                                                           (The Commons)





The  theoretical response to modernist reproduction, (i.e. post structural theory) offers the possibility of positing an assumed  ground / commons of 'inclusive value' and emergent co-creation (Massumi & Manning 2010), however the post - modernist forces of (re)production,  both material: mechanical/electronic and academic:constructivist/textual ( Weatherall et al, 2001, referring to Witgensteins Language games. state discourse is concerned with 'building worlds') may be  motivated (by job security, position, niche etc) by the economic  metric (Marx)  to impose an assumed 'comparative value'  that privileges the various varieties of construction.


Is potential space for / discourse on emergent form/agreement from a common source (e.g. Appreciative Judgement (Vickers) in the academy/public sphere  obscured by constructionist values driven  comparative expert  judgement and language games? (perhaps this is considered, spiritual space?)


Are the commons and public space for potential inclusive emergence:  framed negatively ie  perceived as a threat from each 'opposing'  constructed metric? (Massumi)


eg the  theory of 'emergence' (Hyeck /Delanda) - appropriated by the closed/exclusive designed economic metric system and dismissed as such by the forces of textual reproduction based on closed discourse? when emergence is  a property of natural open systems(Wynne B( 2005)


The  increasing complexity of such constructed expert language games and the stereotyped reductionism of Modernism provide a fertile ground for endless argumentation, (reducing sensitivity?) also  can the expressive dominance of performative iteration (Austin/ Kristeva)  obscure/block  collective sensitivity to  a common creative emergence ?
Can this  also block progressive (non competitive) innovation and automation in both the theoretical and innovative-productive realm ? (eg Logical Typing/ General System Theory/Complexity theory > Deleuze)


Should those concerned with space for communicative discourse (Habermas) (e.g. the university)  take account of this (symbolicly distorted communication) by actively exploring  if  the (excluded) 'random flows' and  and 'layerd textured surfaces of natural environments'  perhaps could facilitate emergent agreement   ?


Do/Should Discourse Analysis based  Methodologies (e.g. Mouff / Fairclough) take account of this 


Is this an exclusive  dialectical framing of theoretical perspective... excluding sensitivity to  middle ground?




* "Present Ground" -  the term acknowledges the difference in type, of the 'present moment' from the 'past' and 'future' ,which are actually both consturcted and experienced in the present, it could be perceived as  a ground that we do not 'escape from' although we may convince ourselves we do with our language, that ground is our inclusive source. not an enclosed segmented 'objective' conceptual aspect, or idea, nor something that can be enclosed or segmented,  but a living inclusive shared presence and source of all we are...the dynamic self-organising nature of natural systems...


http://browse.reticular.info/text/collected/massumi.pdf


 Massumi & Manning A Continuum of Modes of Perception - Neurodiversity


 re : Human language (with its inherent conceptual boundaries & dualism?) <> Textured Perceptual Relating  (Co-creation & Emergence)


1 Massumi, B , The-political-ontology-of-threat The affect theory reader


 2. Massumi & Manning "Coming alive in a world of Texture (Video)"
: the blurring of  "Autist/Artist" is not a mistake...the authentic artist really does have to step back from Neurotypical position if they are to leap... there are material/reified methods and more authentic methods of achieving this as usual and the market chooses its own favorites... 'objectivisation' or 'mutual dance of attention'...efficiency...or ?


3. Weatherall,Taylor, Yates. 2001 "Discourse Theory and Practice": Introduction


"People are using their language to construct versions of the social world": (1)built from existing resources (components) , (2)there is an active selection of these components, (3)people experience events in terms of their linguistic constructions
see The Thomas Theorem and The Matthew Effect. Robert K. Merton. Social Forces, December 1995, 74(2):379-424.
c.f Sapir Whorf

4. Vickers, Sir Geoffrey (1995) The Art of Judgment – A Study of Policy Making. Sage 

Publications. Centenary Ed. 


+ Massumi: Artspace into the Diagram 
Creative Involution Deleuze & Guttari


* its the nature of academia to focus on distinction, more subtle distinctions and changes in relevant distinctions, indeed that is the theoretical foundation of research. However, the balance between valid distinction and distinction for mystification is a delicate one.

Eco-Literary?

Literary Theory and Ecology: Some Common Problems and a Solution

By Vernon Gras
At first glance, present literary theory (poststructuralism) and ecology seem to be going in opposite directions. Roland Barthes, for example, used the words "to naturalize" to describe the falsification of historically motivated conventional truth. For Barthes, culture is always a semiological system. Forget nature. Ecology, on the other hand advocates a return to nature. The looming catastrophe that awaits us is due to anthropocentrism. Our relation to nature is bogus; we must get back to a more genuine relationship with nature by paying attention to nature's requirements. Each position opposed in their use of nature seeks emancipation from the bondage of a misperception. However, it does not take long for a postmodern literary theorist to feel comfortable in the "natural" abode of the ecologist. Both seek emancipation from an inadequate cultural habitation inherited from the past. Both agree that a naïve "objectivity" or absolute is not available. But the literary theorist has to solve the problem of proliferating points of view and trivialization of standpoints. Ecology has to solve the essentializing of the new holistic paradigm as promoted by the deep ecologists. Using the lessons learned from feminist literary theory - a progress from essentialism (C. Spretnak and C. Wolf) to deconstruction (J. Butler) to dialogism (L. Alcoff and T. Lauretis) - ecology can also embrace dialogism as illustrated by William Cronon, Michael Pollan, and Carolyn Merchant. That ecology could also replace worn out patriarchal religions is a needed and hoped for prospect though still only speculation. F. Capra's The Web of Life (1996) embodies that prospect in an appealing non-idolatrous way.
Keywords: dialogism, feminism, social construction of reality, jumping the culture/nature gap, grand narratives, contingency
Full Text PDF | Back to top


This apparent  polarity has been a block for me for some time re selection/distinction of 'useful' information from noise (validity / total domain of enquiry/considered environment/potential environment)
see post re validity), c.f emergence

Traditional Criteria for Judging Quantitative Research	Alternative Criteria for Judging Qualitative Research
internal validity	credibility
external validity	transferability
reliability	dependability
objectivity	confirmability

http://srtmres.blogspot.com/2011/05/quantitative-and-qualitative-validity.html

Decisions, Binary Opposites and Post Structuralism

If Post structuralism always implies that the subject is determined in and through language (Best on Foucault) then I don't agree it's the best way of addressing the dualism of language.  Language implies concepts with boundaries and binary distinctions.... My belief is that  a more appropriate stance to our shared ecological situation is that our experience emerges from a collective source beyond the distinctions and judgements of language, and all it's potential conflicts. This aspect is esssentially a shared inclusive nature that we may occasionally experinece/access by remaining open to such an emergent shared optimum, and dont get drawn in to evaluative language games and distinctions. It's about conceptual, social and physical space...


Perhaps some post structuralist Authors take this view, Deleuze seems to share aspects of this view according to my reading of Delanda. 


Perhaps the post structuralist turn language back on itself to point us towards the false closures and potential openings beyond the blunt instrument of language?


Perhaps as in the post below discourse structures can be analysed to identify patterns that encourage reification and normalisation of the forms of reproduction a the expense of our souls freedom?


On a reflexive level I'm not sure I can cope with the apparently mighty battles of post structural language games as Kathleen says I need to pick an author I get on with... 

Structuralist research methods in a Post-Structuralist context?

Structuralist Methods

Validity re:

Structuralist assumptions in theory  incompatible and proven to be false  but

re Research

Structuralist trends in a post-structural context: ie commonalities of meaning structures due to ideological/hegemonic  forces constraining/creating  individuals self-identities  and artistic/creative process models etc

Post Structuralism and atomised postition

What about positions that acknowledge universal aspect to self

eg Deleuze (Based on Wilhelm Reich)

c.f universalising truth claims?

preemptive, stereotyped c.f. provisional (Kelly)

Post Stucturalism

Post-structuralism is both an extension and a critique of the fundamental concepts of structuralism rather than a theory in its own right.

Post-structuralism is concerned with philosophical issues such as the nature of "truth" and conceptions of the individual. While structuralists conceive of the "subject" as the socially determined centre of consciousness, post-structuralists "de-centre" the subject by claiming that "the self" is constituted through signifying practices situated within social discourse.They argue that language is always fluid and meaning can never be recovered completely. there is no absolute authority for knowledge or "truth"; there is only interpretation which produces meaning by the interaction of a reader with a text. All claims to "truth" are treated as products of discursive struggles for power.  Post-structuralists search for contradictions and multiple meanings in a text or aim to expose the power relations within language, discourse and representation.

In abandoning ontological claims the post structuralist free "what remains" from "empirical reductionism" and hierachy of structural meta-narrative but at the same time don't they abandon wholism? they abandon the conditioned subject but also deny a universal aspect to what is left? what is left if a flat plane of "discrete discourses"open to any interpretation (Kendall) at which the "powers" that remain? go to work in the discourses shaping the "Subjects" ?     through interpellation...(Althuser)  through assumed binary dualisms of language(Derrida)? through instrumental rationality(Habermas)? 

post structural criteria?

Should the author aim for the 'text' that most easily enables projection


What is this


eg garbled convoluted > multidimensional ?


is this the case with Deleuze  for example?

Criticism: Performative Utterance : Post Structuralism

"The fact is that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, "depiction" (as the classics would say); rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford
philosophy, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given in the first person and in the present tense) in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered -
something like the I declare of kings, the I sing of ancient poets"

"Once the Author is removed, the claim to deciper a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on the text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author (or its hypostasid:sciety, history,psyche,liberty)beneth the work:whern theAuthor has been found, the texy is 'explained'-victory to the critic."


Barthes I.M.T. 147

Values and Truth Claims: Post-Structuralism? (Tutorial)

Are values always based on truth claims? ( Need examples (probably not?))

If they are, and if a post-structuralism insists on the abandonment of truth claims then it must be value free?

(In tutorial - It's suggested post structural research is Value Laden not Value Free - Example of )

( in the sense of taking a position -  ?)


Also Actor Networks - are they inevitably positivist? (Social Constructivism)
(Could you depict effects on self definition?)

Metanarrative & Postmodernism Lyotard

The concept of metanarrative was introduced and criticized by Jean-François Lyotard in his work, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979). In this text, Lyotard refers to what he describes as the postmodern condition, which he characterized as increasing skepticism toward the totalizing nature of metanarratives and their reliance on some form of "transcendent and universal truth":^[2]

Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements—narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on [...] Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside?

—Jean-François Lyotard

Lyotard and many other poststructuralist thinkers have viewed this as a positive development for a number of reasons. First, attempts to construct grand theories tend to dismiss the naturally existing chaos and disorder of the universe. Second, metanarratives are created and reinforced by power structures and are therefore not to be trusted. Metanarratives ignore the heterogeneity or variety of human existence. They are also seen to embody unacceptable views of historical development, in terms of progress towards a specific goal. The latent diverse passions of human beings will always make it impossible for them to be marshalled under some theoretical doctrine and this is one of the reasons given for the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

Is poststructuralism a metanarrative?

Lyotard's analysis of the postmodern condition has been criticized as being internally inconsistent. For example, thinkers like Alex Callinicos^[5] and Jürgen Habermas^[6] argue that Lyotard's description of the postmodern world as containing an "incredulity toward metanarratives" could be seen as a metanarrative in itself. According to this view, post-structuralist thinkers like Lyotard criticise universal rules but postulate that postmodernity contains a universal skepticism toward metanarratives; and this 'universal skepticism' is in itself a contemporary metanarrative. Like a post-modern neo-romanticist metanarrative that intends to build up a 'meta' critic, or 'meta' discourse and a 'meta' belief holding up that Western science is just taxonomist, empiricist, utilitarian, assuming a supposed sovereignty around its own reason and pretending to be neutral, rigorous and universal. This is itself an obvious sample of another 'meta' story, self-contradicting the postmodern critique of the metanarrative. ^{[citation needed]}

Thus, Lyotard's postmodern incredulity towards metanarratives could be said to be self-refuting. If one is skeptical of universal narratives such as "truth", "knowledge", "right", or "wrong", then there is no basis for believing the "truth" that metanarratives are being undermined. In this sense, this paradox of postmodernism is similar to the liar's paradox ("This statement is false"). Perhaps postmodernists, like Lyotard, are not offering us a utopian, teleological metanarrative, but in many respects their arguments are open to metanarrative interpretation. They place much emphasis on the irrational, though in doing so apply the instruments of reason^{[citation needed]}.

But of course, that is only from a modernist perspective, since such an argument against postmodernism is an attempt towards making a totalizing metanarrative of postmodernism, an attempt to deconstruct postmodernism using totalizing criticisms of a supposed a priori of postmodernism, assuming that postmodernism follows the linear categorical logic of modernism, when postmodernism really uses the categories of logic in a contingent fashion, in an incredulity while taking in account of the multiplicitous nature of language-games and their limitations in ascent to a discovery of a higher truth of paralogy.

: Wikipedia