American Vignettes (I): Totalitarian Undercurrents
The airport is a totalitarian space; sometimes the truth is hyperbolic. You re-enter the United States, land of your birth, as part of the stream of arriving passengers. It is an everyday experience. You leave the airplane slowly, on stiff limbs, trickling with the mass of travellers into Newark airport. The imperatives are issued as soon as you enter the terminal building. With the imperatives come the questions. “What were you doing in London?” With the questions comes the paperwork. Your credit history, your financial information is passed between corporation and government when you buy your ticket. And this work of legibility renders us computable by the armed men, by their computers, by the networks of machines that monitor us. Once outside the terminal the undercurrent of control continues to carry you along. The imperatives, the questions, the paper work – the apparatus of order always carries a veiled threat. Yet, the world around you is being made more uniform. Like this:
Fenomenologia
Fenomenología2 Fenomenólogos Aunque el término "fenomenología" fue usado muchas veces en la historia de la filosofía antes de Husserl, el usomoderno de la palabra está ligado explícitamente a su método particular. 1776) Filósofo escocés, llamado a veces escéptico o partidario del sentido común. Tratado sobre la Naturaleza Humana , parece tomar un enfoquefenomenológico o psicológico al describir el proceso de razonamiento de la causalidad en términos psicológicos.Esta es también la inspiración para la distinción kantiana entre la realidad noúmenica y la fenoménica. 1777) Matemático, físico y filósofo de la teoría de la apariencias que son la basedel conocimiento empírico. 1804), en la Crítica de la razón pura , diferenció entre objetos como fenómenos, que sonlos objetos formados y asimilados por la sensibilidad humana y el entendimiento, de los objetos como cosas-en-sí o noumenos, que no se nos aparecen en el espacio y el tiempo y sobre los que no podemos hacer juicios legítimos. Tratado de Moral
Questions of Modernity
Modernity has always laid claim to universal certainty—which meant assigning a different and lesser significance to anything deemed purely local, non-Western, or lacking a universal expression. This book makes those very non-Western, non-universal elements the tools for fashioning a more complex, rigorous, and multifaceted understanding of how the modern comes about. Focusing on the making of modernity outside the West, eight leading anthropologists, historians, and political theorists explore the production of new forms of politics, sensibility, temporality, and selfhood in locations ranging from nineteenth-century Bengal to contemporary Morocco. Topics include the therapeutics of colonial medical practice, the multiple registers of popular film, television serials and their audiences, psychiatrists and their patients, the iconic figure of the young widow, and the emergence of new political forms beyond the grasp of civil society.
Greenblatt on civilization
Steven Greenblatt's recent book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, is an ambitious widening of Greenblatt's intellectual palette. The title of the book refers to one of the central ideas in the metaphysics of Epicurus: the idea that atoms sometimes deviate from their straight courses, permitting collisions. This fact, according to Epicurus, is the only possible source of freedom of the will. So swerving is what takes determinacy out of nature and human action. That is why it is necessary to admit the same thing for the atoms, namely, that there is another cause of motion besides blows [from collisions] and weight, which is the source of our inborn capability [to act freely], since we see that nothing can come from nothing. Greenblatt's book shows a great deal of regard for the philosophy of Epicurus and the voice of Lucretius. But this isn't primarily a treatment of Epicurus or Lucretius or philosophical ideas.
Texts | 1.2 Modernity’s Fence
Before delving into these questions, it is perhaps helpful to recall the longstanding relation that fences have traditionally had with Modernity and, of course, with their philosophical reflection in liberal individualism. Today, dividing lines are not what they used to be either eighty years ago or in pre-modern times. Fences and walls have taken on new roles that their predecessors would hardly recognise. In times past they simply fended off the enemy, and lightly imprinted the Empires’ footprint on the land. Before the ‘discovery’ of the autonomous individual, the ancient polis constantly dreamt of demolishing its walls or, at least, of never having to keep its gates closed. Fences took on a new role and character at the time European feudalism was running out of steam. For the first time in history, they became free to choose and, equally, free to lose. Thus the Era of Reason and Liberty was ushered in, hot on the trails of the globalisation drive that, on the one hand:
