Continental
Lyotard continued:
Language dominates the social bond. Society is made out of language; following Austin and Wittgenstein, and structuralism.
He combines these.
He thinks we should analyse society through this combination. He thinks it is the way to understand a postmodern society. Making a move in society is a fight within a certain language game. We are trying to change our position by agonistic statements within the language game.
He depicts what postmodernity is not anymore, what is past it?
The validity of metanarratives are no longer legitimate.
”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.”
Postmodernity = society frees itself from totalising, systematising, overarching and all-encompassing reason → this leads to society becoming fragmented.
Neoliberalism and Marxism: two forms of totalising social narratives, but also religion is commonly a meta narrative.
Neoliberalism conceives society through univty and homogeneity. These are the core concepts through which neoliberalism understands society. Society is a functional whole that auto regulates itself, it is autopoietic. We are all participants in the market, and so we have interest in the market. We direct our behaviour, those of ourselves and communities according to those interest. Since everyone is looking for their own greatest interest, the market regulates and finds equilibrium. This is a theory at least in part supported by Comte, Parsons and Luhmann.
There is no alternative to this: every crisis is a step towards a better functioning. We never see the total breakdown of the whole monetary society. Crises are needed for the market to autoregulate itself, but they will never put the entire system to danger.
”Even when its rules are in the process of changing and innovations are occuring, even when its dysfunctions (such as strikes, crises, unemployment) inspire hope and lead to belief in an alternative, even then what is actually taking place is only an internal readjustment, and its result can be no more than an increase in the system’s viability”.
This kind of idea holds for all metanarratives.
Marxism conceives society through duality and divide. Class struggle; proletariat and bourgoisie. If something happens in society, we are ready at hand with the class struggle explanation.
Neoliberalism and marxism and are totalising narratives, they are closed systems, they have an inside and an outside. They are consistent with themselves. As such they are encompassing narratives which are solid. There are not zones of uncertainty within them.
Obvbiously this cannot purely exist. Every system must have paradoxical zones where an overthrow in it can occur.
This alternative ” is no longer relevant for the societies with which we are concerned and that the solution itself is still caught within a type of oppositional thinking that is out of step with the most vital modes of postmodern knowledge”
An opposition, or a contradiction between two terms, is still too simple. Conflicts apply different centers of tension. Even breaking up a dual opposition is too simple for explaining society properly.
Postmodern thinkers like this kind of thinking.
Incapacity of the social narratives to understand the postmodern age → the central problem, or the problem of legitimacy
Modern narratives, ie. Meta narratives, are unable to understand what is at stake in a society of information techonology.
Postmodern science and knowledge: the pressure of legitimisation in postmodernity is incomparably higher than in modernity
Legitimacy: legitimare, there is lawful support. The notion of a law is not only applicable to the natural sciences, but we also have laws in society, in the juridical apparatus.
Juridical laws support certain x, and exclude some other x, for not being legitimate. What does legitimacy work in regards to narratives?
People do not believe in metanarratives, and this is a problem of legitimacy. Society moves in such and such a way because marxism or neoliberalism can predict the movement of society. If people no longer believe in these theories, the whole theory loses its legitimacy.
This leads to a breakdown of state powers. People do not believe in the state as being able to fix problems in society. And people start to disbelieve in the powers of the sciences to discover truth and knowledge.
Breakdown of eternal truths (modern understanding of knowledge)
This leads to a cascading effect wherein all legitimacy crumbles.
The notion of ideology refers to classes. If classes break away because society becomes too heterogenous, then, as such the classes’ ideologies are removed.
Meta narratives have always historically come to an end, becoming supplanted by new metanarratives. What is specific about the 20:th century is that there are no more new metanarratives.
If truth lies in the multiplicity of heterogenous viewpoints; it is postmodernity.
In postmodernity we witness the emergence of new sciences, which bring with them detotalising paradigms. They make it possible to conceive the sciences and themselves and their objects.
Also a pluralisation and decentralisation of knowledge through big data, computer and telecommunication.
As a result, truth is always situated; a true statement depends on the context in which it is uttered.
My grandma is doing nuclear fusions.
The scientific players are the super rich like my grandma.
Concentration of knowledge and political power.
The context is the material foundation for a scientific discovery. Truth becomes plural.
There is no possible meta language or totalising system of truth. Can encompass and express the entire diversity of reality.
What is discovered in the sciences depends on the technological capacities of a certain society and its segments, and it depends on the the demand of the market. This does not mean that truths are contradiction, but the users of those truths are fighting against each other.
[Science doesn’t discover objects of structures, but are results of certain patterns of ideality about what is out there. Because scientific paradigms change and transform themselves, whenever we discover a certain law, we cannot believe that that law is as real in and by itself. If that is the case, the scientific discoveries that are happening through technoscience, are inventions on certain localisations of nature. By putting emphasis on different locales, we discover a specific truth depending on it, and the locale is chosen by the market].
The object of the sciences is partially constructed by the scientist, but this object is also chosen by wealth and power.
Postmodern theories are quite radical.
There are local discourses that are backed up by technoscience, concentration of wealth.
Gödel’s theorem of incompleteness proves that every logical system, there is at least one proposition which can neither be varified nor refuted by the system. Every system is necessarily open, and there is no totality.
”Postmodern science – by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterised by incmplete information – is theorising its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable and paradoxical. It is changing the meaning of the word knowledge, while expressing how such a change can take place.”
Society history & the sciences all develop according to the rules of instability
Postmodern world = scattered in divergent fields and regions of social, material, biological and physical realities. Its kind of knowledge is coherent with its reality. There is a kind of mapping on how knowledge functions on top of its structure.
This is in correspondence with how reality is, as by ontologically non-totalisable and open.
2 reasons for technology’s domination over science:
science today depends on wealthy sponsors for sophisticated machines
Science is a quest for technological inventions, and is as such a mercantilisation of knowledge
”Knowledge in the form of informational commodity indispensable to productive power”.
”An equation between wealth, efficiency, and truth is thus established. What happened at the end of the eighteenth century, with the first industrial revolution, is that the reciprocal of this equation was discovered: no technology without wealth, but no wealth without technology. It is at this precise moment that sicence becomes a force of production, in other words, a moment in the circulation of capital.”
In the background of most postmodern thinkers, their modes of knowledge production, are quite close to how we theorise the market today. This becomes a problem, which is at least recognised by Deleuze.
Transformation of truth and legitimacy: there are as many claims for truth as there are attempts to make them.
Every scientific player produces its own justification, legitimacy, truth.
In postmodernity takes place a general ”production of proof” = scientific players legitimate their own research by scientific discoveries.
Truth = facts that you can produce
Postmodernity’s decentralisation releases creative potential for society’s transoformation. Postmodernity brings unforseeable situations and an open future.
Phenomenology
What and where is language? Are concepts psychological states? Is language subjective or objective?
Iwhat is meaning? How do we think meanings? And is there a non-verbal form of thinking and meaning? Or is thinking necessarily linguistic?
What do linguistic signs stand for? Is the sound of the word imitating the object?
How do linguistic statements refer to the world? What is their corresponding ’object’?
From 19th century, emergence of new scientific approaches relating to language: hermeneutics, philology, linguistics, comparative linguistics, grammar.
Husserl’s intentional theory of language
Educated as a mathematician in Berlin. Went to Vienna to continue with mathematics, but also studied under Brentano, who was an important psychologist and priest. A lot of positions of philosophy were disputed by psychologists. Brentano was trained in Aristotle, but worked in psychology, his main book is _psychology from an empirical standpoint._Was very influenced by his psychological method, and wanted to continue to work with this method along mathematics. All of Brentano’s disciplies went on to critique their master.
eg. Meinong, Stumpf, Marty, Twardowsky and Husserl.
Logical Investigations: part 1 Prologomena of pure logic, meant to refute once and for all psychologism. Psychologism is the application of psychology to the foundation of logic and mathematics. At that time, mathematicians thought about the ultimate foundations of mathematics, and there were some crazy psychologists who thought we could prove the principle of non-contradiction by thinking empirically. Husserl however actually ended psychologism, and provided a direct solution.
Frege, who worked in Jena, wrote the foundations for arithmetic, which uses some of Husserl arguments.
This is the book wherein he comes up with the notion of phenomenology, already from Brentano, but which he gives a certain direction. Nonetheless, the notion has been used widely before, eg. by Hegel. The phenomenology of spirit is the showing itself of geist throughout history. Husserl cares only about experience, and conscious experience, and how things, mathematical entities and numbers show themselves in experience. What he analyses in the logical investigations is the way in which we encounter our thinking the beings that we call logical and mathematical. We want to describe the intentional acts that are operative when we think numbers, statements, etc.
What happens in our mind, what acts are realised, when we use these entities?
Cantor was in the habilitation jury for Husserl.
Phenomenology: descriptive analysis of the intentional character of consciousness.
Frege wrote a summary of Logical investigations, which was really mean and evil. Husserl was not really friends with Frege afterwards. The works after the 1890s by Frege was not really read by Husserl.
Intentionality, a concept not invented by Brentano, but reactualised. Brentano was Aristotelian, he worked a lot on the metaphysics and physics of Aristotle, and brought the notion of intentionality from Aristotle into the 19th century. It is an essential feature of psychic phenomena.
Brentano distinguishes physical and psychic phenomena.
Physical phenomena are received in exteriority outside of our body, and because they are exterior, they are not happening in our mind, and so are doubtful. Any object that displays this sensation might not be as it appears. We do not know whether things that appear are as they appear.
Regarding psychic phenomena, we have an inner perception of the acitivity that is going on in our consciousness. As long as it happens, we cannot doubt about the fact that it happens. We can always be sure about the givenness of the perception.
”Every mental/psychic phenomenon is characterised by what the scholastics of the middlge ages called the intentional inexistance of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguosuly, referens to a content, direction towards an object, or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on.” Brentano.
If I wish to eat ice cream, then ice cream as the object of my wishing is part of my wishing, or else the wishing wouldn’t work. The object is the very endpoint of my act.
It means that the object is inside the mental. It is in-existant, and at the same time not necessarily outside my mind. At the same the negation of something truly existant. Inexistance can mean that it exists in my mind, and that it doesn’t exist outside my mind.
What the followrs of Brentano said, is that if all the objects we are directed to are in the mind, then the exterior reality is unnecessary, reality becomes obsolete.
Representationalism: in order to explain our relationship to the outside world, we put the world in our heads instead. This is what Locke, Berkeley and Hume do. The kind of objects we have access to is inside the mind, but these objects then become obstacles to our attempt to access the world. But this cannot be. As such, we need a new theory of intentionality.
Husserl: The intentional object is not internal to the mind.
Intentionality = the essential property of consciousness to be immedately directed to an object (without mediation of ’ideas’, ’representations’, ’mental phenomena’)
Consciousness = ’essentially’ intentional, it is directed to the ’things themselves’
representations are data of the mind, so Kant is still a representationalist thinker. He explains our access to object via representations inside the mind. And then, he comes up with something else, something that exists beyond what I know, ie. The thing in itself, but it is still inaccessible.
Husserl says NO.
My conscious acts are directly accessing the object itself outside of myself.
He interprets language, logic in an intentional way. Husserl, on the one hand, says that mathematical entities exist in themselves and cannot be reduced to my acts of counting-to, but my act of counting-to is a way to access the object called numbers.
The clue of phenomenology that Husserl applies to all kinds of objects, which is always about reflecting on the intentional acts which we realise to show the object itself. We know the kind of performance of the act of accessing the number 2 through going to school for example.
Husserl makes his own semiotic theory.
He starts with a sign
Sign: every sign is a sign for something.
Indication (Anzeichen): the flag as the sign of a nation; fossile vertebrae as signs of prediluvian animals. You see a flag and say ”oh, here are the americans”. It is an indication in the sense that one object indicate another object. Smoke is an indication for fire.
”That whose reality someone has actual knowledge of indicates to him the reality of certain other objects or states of affairs, in the sense that his belief in the reality of the one is experienced (though not at all evidenty) as motivating a belief or surmise in the reality of the other”
It triggers in you the intentional act as belief of the existence of something else. Husserl directs our philosophical gaze very specifically.
The indication of the phenomenon happens through a certain serialisation of acts that happens within me. It is a contingent association between the sign and what is signified, it is learnt empirically.
Expression (Ausdruck): Meaningful sign. A sign that conveys us to meaning. It has a physical side and psychic side.
Physical: eg. an articulate sond complex, a written sign on a paper.
Psychic: sequence of mental states = acts naming, meaning an object.
Someone who is not taught to read, will not perform the necessary acts to make it out to recognise it as a meaningful sign.
A meaningful necessary requires someone who has put the meaning into the sign. Writing only emerges when someone wants to communicate something. Meaningful signs require for their emergance an intentional subject who has the meaning already and puts it into the word and tries to communicate it.
Wheras a flag indicates a nation, the word ”dog” indicates not a thing, but a meaning. It indicates the possibility of infinitely different things. The meaning is for Husserl something that is purely ideal. It is not something real. Ideal means non-real. We define reality by what is spatiotemporal, idealities are non-spatial and non-temporal. The ideality is not the only form of non-reality. There are different things that are non-temporal and non-spatial but which still aren’t ideal. Ideal is a whole domain of objects for Husserl. Idealities are the objects of the exact sciences. All meanings are ideal. All entities of our language are meanings. Language considered not in its physical side.
”Both are ’lived through’, the presentation of the word and the sense-giving act: but, while we experience te former, we do not live in such a presentation at all, but solely in enacting its sense, its meaning. The function of a word (or rather of an intuoitive word-represntation) is to awaken a sense-conferring act in ourselves, to point to what is intended, or perhaps given intuitive fulfilment in this act, and to guide our interest exclusively in this direction.”
Understanding lingusitic entities is a highly complex actively. If one is not engaging in the act of meaning-intention, then you can read a bunch of stuff without actually understanding it. One is not enacting the second meaning intention.
Consciousness can ’live in’ either the perceptive side or the psychic side of the expression
If we are only directed to the physical side of the sign, we loose the ’meaning’. On the other hand, we cannot access the meaning without passing through the physical sign.
”This means, phenomenolgically speaking, that theintuitive presnetation, in which the physical appearance of the world is constituted, undergoes an essential phenomenal modification when its obejct begins to count as an expression. While what constitutes the object’s appearing remains unchanged, the intentional character of the experience alters. There is constitued an act of meaning which finds support in the verbal presentation’s intuitive content, but which differs in essence from the intuitive intention direced upon the word itself”.
The word changes, it transforms substantially when we learn of its written signs meaning as children. The written sign gives us access to something beyond than what is displayed, the world of idealities. It is something we go through, and that we experience. As soon as you recognise something as a word, something changes about your perception of that thing.
For a picture, it is a phsyical support, and you seem something in it, and then there is a third intentionality that goes through the picture, and you are directed to that which is depicted in the picture. There are 3 kinds of intentionalities intertwined in the contents of the picture.