| 1. |
- Flores, Fernando
(författare)
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Mellan åsikt och vittnesbörd : Amerika och Västerlandets arkaiska rötter
- 2004. - 2
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Bok (refereegranskat)abstract
- The question of America’s cultural position in relation to the rest of the world is essential for all research connected to America and to the history of modern Europe. This situation has become obvious over the last years because of our societies’ latest “crisis”, with the consecration of the “post-modern” and “global” view of society, history and culture. The aim of the dissertation is to analyse the relation between an archaic and a modern world view during the fifteen-century. The term “archaic” not viewed as a synonym of “antique”. “Antique” often implies a period of time far from today. I use the term “archaic”, implying a world view, a cosmology, which can be found within any period. Archaic is a way of thinking history; a way of understanding the world and a way of developing identity relations. This interpretation of the relation between the archaic and the modern, lead my argumentation to the conclusion that these different world views must be based on different structures of reason, and that fluctuations between the two structures of reasoning ought to have created a “history of reason”. One of the central conclusions of this thesis is that modernity and archaism develop, disappear and develop again within each act of communication. I also discuss the problem of how the archaic communicates with the modern. How can cultural exchange happen when the cultural conditions are so different? I introduce the idea of cultural influence as a kind of “contagion”. Cultural influence is considered active already at a micro-level via every form of contact. I assume that people can assimilate foreign cultural products even when these products appear in a vague form or unclear presentation. My second assumption is that a culture can assimilate as much as it can give away. I call this assumption the principle of proportional cultural exchange. I found an important starting point in Marcel Mauss’ The Gift and in Lévi-Strauss’ developments of Mauss’ ideas. The work of Lévi-Strauss, includes an illuminating presentation of ideas about delimitation of borders between archaic and modern worldviews. The work of Lévi-Strauss provides an obligatory reference for all studies of the relation between archaic and modern rationality. The one hundred and fifty year old ideas of archaic society of Marx and Engels are then discussed. I especially found the ideas of “communism” and “property” confusing. However, Marx’ study of the “Asiatic production’s system” can yet today illustrate the socio-economical situation of Mexico in the times of the conquest. At the same time, the views of Morgan, Marx and Engels show themselves to be strongly influenced by the traditional mythical ideas about “primitive” societies inherited from Thomas More, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Montaigne, Andreae and Campanella.
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| 2. |
- Flores, Fernando
(författare)
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From Las Casas to Che : An Introduction to Contemporary Latin America
- 2007
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Spanish America is a geographical area within which the power struggle between archaic and modern traits stands out very clearly. The reason for this might be found in the significant initial historical distance between the society of the Europeans and the society of the Indians. For this reason, it is very difficult to comprehend the history of ideas of this area, if one disregards the dialectics of modernity and archaicity. This dialectics was at an early stage formulated in a classical work by the Argentinean Domingo Sarmiento (Facundo, 1845) as a power struggle between civilisation and barbarism. The opposition between modernity and archaicity generated yet another historical equation that controls the main patterns in the Latin American history of ideas: the fact that the individual freedom increases at the expense of the independence of the collective, and vice versa. Archaisms and modernities have taken the form of oppositions such as that between Indian and European culture, between European colonial thought and revolutionary nationalistic thought, between conservative and liberal thought, between scholastic and modern phi-losophy, between provincial culture and urban culture, etc. Sarmiento’s conception of Spanish Latin America as barbaric has in the 20th century found new expressions in the works of writers such as Jorge Luis Bor-ges and his, by Anglo-Saxon culture inspired, literature. On the other hand, we have an archaically inspired philosophical thought, in which the nation is located at the centre, which has gained much space within political thought after the war of independence.
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- Flores, Fernando
(författare)
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From Husserl to Ihde and Beyond - Some Evolutionary Lines in Contemporary Philosophy of Technology
- 2011
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Ingår i: [Host publication title missing].
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- My paper is the introduction to my next book in the series 'The humanist as Engineer'. In my work, I have been deeply influenced by Don Ihde and his postphenomenological approach to the philosophy of technology. As Ihde’s postphenomenology, my approach is historical and differs strongly from the 'pure' phenomenological approach in spite of being connected with it through many common references. Instead of this, I have chosen to move freely between the ideas arising after Kant, Hegel and Marx and I do not hesitate to make references to both Modern Art and Psychoanalysis. I understand that in the history of thought there have been paradigmatic problems and frontiers that characterised a period of time which can be considered as schools or traditions; however, these collapsed with the detonation of Postmodernism and Postphenomenology. In this frame, nobody lives up to this philosophical bricolage as Don Ihde and his postphenomenological project does. Don Ihde’s work is an example of the fertility of postmodern accounts especially when it is the consequence of a well-balanced administration of the eclectic elements within the project. There are certainly many similarities in Ihde’s and my own approach, and I will try to show some of those. I could remit myself to Albert Borgmann’ words when he wrote, 'the multiplicity of perspectives of Don Ihde’s work is essential for my own work and if I do not call my approach as 'postphenomenological' is only because I do not want to force my own views in his outstanding project.' Postmodernism has left behind lots of scattered modernist philosophical remnants. It left a chessboard with only few pieces to work with, and in this allegory, only as references. The philosophical schools remains, but the study of them is strictly for an education in the history of ideas. The situation is aggravating since the most important works from the 1960’s and forth, deliberately have avoided obvious identity patterns. A word in Rio de la Plata’s jargon language describes this situation, cambalache, a sort of 'flea market' where everything lies higgledy-piggledy. Deconstruction and the focus on differences are central to Postmodernism. Remaining is therefore the intersections, the contrasts, shadows, and sketches. When trying to orient in such an intellectual environment, the task reminds of patching scatterings, and building with tools of eclecticism. Not long ago, you could develop a problem from Marx as well as from Husserl. However, today it is necessary to build upon that which makes both Marx and Husserl jigsaw pieces in a totality – characterized by its lack of focus. This situation has also resulted in a demand, greater than ever, for competence in the field of history of ideas. In this article I suggest an eclectic philosophical tool which is centered on the idea of a historical phenomenology, understood as a bricolage of approaches which connect the ideological criticism of Kant with a philosophy of praxis in Marx, to a phenomenology of essences in Husserl and another of perceptions in Merleau-Ponty and to Heidegger’s anthropology. An eclectic background to phenomenology was anticipated by Merleau-Ponty when he wrote that phenomenology 'can be practiced and identified as a manner or style of thinking that existed as a movement before arriving at complete awareness of itself as a philosophy. It has been long on the way, and its adherents have discovered it in every quarter, certainly in Hegel and Kierkegaard, but equally in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.
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| 5. |
- Flores, Fernando
(författare)
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Switches of Memory. Remarks on historiography
- 2014
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This book studies the technognomies of memory in scripto as in texts, lists, dictionaries and databases and less the technognomies of memory in vivo (as in remembering). There are of course some relations between these two kinds of memories, being memory-in-scripto a development parallel to the development of written language. We notice that the historical presentation is built upon both forms of memory. We notice that the historical explanation is tied to the concrete experience of persons belonging to a culture. In the history of memory then, it is necessary to distinguish two important aspects, the development of spoken memory and the development of written memory. The essential characteristic of written memory is its muteness. Muteness is also associated to spatiality and to stability. On the other hand, audial presentations are inseparable of the notions of movement and time passing. According to Don Ihde the spheres of the invisible and the silent, limit the spheres of the visual and the audial. These two spheres overlap partially in visual presentations that also are audial presentations; however, their natural being is to be independent from each other. [Ihde, Don. Listening and Voice. Phenomenologies of Sound; State University Press; 2007; p. 50-51.] In our time, which is also the time of the globalization and digitalization of culture, a new philosophical paradigm is going on characterized by the fragmentation of experience. This fragmentation does not allow an overview of the totality of a field of experience, which is only possible to reduce to singular analytical moments. The fragmentation of experience is the result of a new jump of the capability to concretion. Inside this new paradigm, the world becomes multistable. The multistability of the world creates a gap between intention and implementation that distinguishes the “full” history as Natural history from the “broken” history as Cultural history.
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| 6. |
- Flores, Fernando
(författare)
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Technologies Cassées L’Humaniste En Tant Qu’Ingénieur - Introduction Au Livre Du Même Nom
- 2012
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Ingår i: Technologies Cassées L’Humaniste En Tant Qu’Ingénieur. ; , s. 1-8
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The concept “Broken Technologies” is related to the question: “Which is the benefit of humanity studies?” Of course the question is rhetorical because, how could this question be answered if the benefit was not obvious? Any answer supposes that we understand what we are asking for and the study of “what we mean” is one of the axes of the epistemology of the humanities. Anyway, we can also put the rhetorical character of the question between brackets and try to answer it. It has to be done beginning with a historical recount of the development of the empirical sciences from the womb of theology and philosophy. This “independence process” started first with the natural sciences, which were “natural philosophy” to become positive empirical sciences of nature; next step was the independence process of the social sciences, which being “moral sciences” become “positive sciences” inspired in the epistemological model of the “empirical sciences of nature”. The study and knowledge of the world then, changed from a speculative to an empirical paradigm and the study in humanities loosed the traditional central place in the education of the youth to become a more or less “magnificence of culture”, that only rich people and rich societies could cultivate. Human studies are understood today as the development of the “individual” against the demands of the development of “society”. The situation is that most of the people in our days have very little training in human studies. The people of our century are trained to use language only for communication. The employment of language to understand the human mind is lost. Our time’s people, have some schematic knowledge about some crucial historical events, but this “historical” facts are only riddles and chronologies. We can ask our selves, which are the consequences of this for the future of society? The referred process of epistemological independence that many new sciences followed since Galileo’s time was in fact possible because new objects of study emerged from new praxis. New social problems demanded new solutions and a new corpus of knowledge was the consequence. However, this explanation is tautological. We have to move further and deeper. We say that during this time, humanity studies survived as studies of language, history and philosophy occupying an increasingly small part of the time of study of the youth because this process followed a kind of cosificación (that is, the process which make something thing-like) of knowledge. The more things-like the object of study is, the less “human” it become. “Human” here means “phenomenal” or belonging to the Everyday world. Making science in positively terms, means to isolate some part of the Everyday world and make it abstract and independent of human intentions. That is the process behind the “experiment” and the development of the laboratory-milieu. In this sense, human studies have been deprived during Modern history of larger parts of its traditional sphere of study, those parts that easily could be isolated from the common sense of the Everyday world ’s experience. The development of mechanical methods to the study language during the 20th Century, make language studies the next sphere of the human studies that shall disconnect their activities from traditional human studies. We live in a world that is increasingly materialized and in which cosificación is inevitable. A feeling of benefit is obviously attached to this process in that sense that the more materialized everything becomes, the more sanctioned it is. It is good for society that the world became materialized because immateriality cannot be measured and weighed. In this sense, art is more materialized than philosophy or history because art works through modelling matter, as the artisan produce artefacts. However, what is the future of the remaining parts of traditional human studies, of history, literature and philosophy? Will these studies also experience the process of cosificación? We think that this process has already begun and the time of isolation of human studies is ending. With the last developments in informatics, the mind has arrived to the state in which an important part of their immaterial corpus of intentions, feelings, and knowledge will become materialized as “virtual realities”. Ideas and images, structures and their rhythms will become noematized in computer programs that more or less analogically will reproduce their mechanisms and reduce their secrets to “procedures”. Philosophy, history, and literature will become “languages”. In other words, the epistemological process since the beginning of Modern times consists in the transformation of the dimensionalities of the object of study increasing their dignity (power). The goal is to work with realities that “can be touched and manipulated”. The more manipulated, the more beneficial they are. However, there are irreducible differences between the human science and the others. Human studies differ from natural and social studies in the grade of focalisation in the object of study. Human studies focalize in the interconnections, in the borders, boundaries or frontiers of the objects of study. Human studies focalize in the differences and therefore have “ambiguity” as their natural object of study; this makes the humanities a science of coherence. The humanities create coherence because only knowing about differences can give us the whole picture. That is why the humanistic engineer will be an “engineer of brokenness”.
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| 7. |
- Flores, Fernando
(författare)
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The Big Bang of History : Visualism in Technoscience
- 2012
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The traditional presentation about historical time-passing consists in a linear succession of facts in which some aspects of the life world evolve from others in an irreversible manner. The presentation of change is connected to the presentation of gradual or revolutionary linear changes that are irrevocable. I believe that this presentation could be considered correct for living organisms, but does not take account of some important aspects of demonstrative presentations about artifacts and technologies. For example, we can ontologically assume that 'hammer-beating' evolved from 'stone-beating'. In this sense, the 'hammer-beating-time' could be considered contemporary-time and the 'stone-beating-time' could be considered past-time. However, we still beat things with stones and stone-like artifacts. The technology of the stone-beating is still been used. That means that relation-ship between the stone and the hammer cannot be seen as 'evolutive' in the same sense that organisms 'evolve' from each other. We must assume then, that the stone and the hammer must be interchangeable technologies which do not overshadow each other. This family of technologies and artifacts are contemporary to each other. Time-passing metaphors must then be substituted with metaphors of a 'technological instability' that can be associated to a foundational cultural explosion.
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| 8. |
- Flores, Fernando
(författare)
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Den nya människan. En handbok om 1900-talets idéhistoria
- 2005
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- We depart from the intuitive idea of action –which for us is the same as an “act” both mental and physical– and its opposite the idea of no–action or passivity (stillness, apathy, immobility) to which we have a special term acedia (from late Latin and from the Greek akedeia, meaning “indifference”). András Pöstényi studied Freud’s idea of intentionality and concludes that Freud was strongly influenced by Brentano’s identification of the “psychic” with the “meaningful” which conduce to a breakdown of the psychology that identified the “psychic” with “consciously”. So, after Brentano, Freud could conceive unconscious meaningful psychical acts. Freud concluded that if the representations in a dream were produced randomly they would be caused by a somatic cause and could not be psychic phenomena. According to Freud only psychical phenomena can be interpreted and everything that can be interpreted has to be psychic. The intentional act then, understands by Freud as an “action”. Because the dream is an intentional act, it is something we do and not something that happens to us. Freud give this a name, he called it “eine psychische Aktion”.
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| 9. |
- Flores, Fernando
(författare)
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The Country of the Social Skyscrapers, Sweden 1930-1960
- 2005
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The Swedish society that we wish to discuss reaches its hig-hest degree of originality in the decades of 1930 to 1960. At the time Sweden stood out in its international context as an ultra-modern society, distinguishing itself from its Scandinavian surroundings as well. It is the Sweden that David Jenkins calls “The Progress Machine” and that Enrico Altavilla refers to as “Hell and Paradise” . With the metaphor “social skyscrapers” we try to describe the radical modernity of this society, without entering judg-ments about its value as a social experiment. As any other modern city – of which New York is the best example – the modern society shows more or less desirable, practical and therefore also more or less lasting characteristics.
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| 10. |
- Flores, Fernando
(författare)
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After Capitalism: Cyborgism
- 2015
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This second digital edition includes my research from 2013 until November 2015. There are many important changes from de first version. This version introduces the Technocratic Mode of Production based on the exploitation of the consumers. It includes a complete description of the cyborg society as it is today, the new castes that constitute it and the economic acts that regulate the new Mode of Production. Many of the new conclusions are derived from my current research which in a more didactical approach considers “order” at the center of the historical analysis instead of the vaguer concept of “information”. Our standpoint become clearer explaining better the primacy of knowledge and experience over ideology. Knowledge and experience for us are constituting aspects of the Civil Society -and therefore “irreversible” aspects of history- while ideology belongs to the political sphere, submitted to the changes of temporal and reversible acts. The immediate consequence of our standpoint is that the limits of history are Natural history; a Natural history which is driven by knowledge and experience and not by “ideological struggles” related to “class struggle”. In other words, the struggle for the constitution of a cyborg is prior and stronger than any other social struggle. Lund, November 2015. _________________ This book is a personal answer to the crisis of the left. The author of this texts belongs to a generation habituated to live with global explanations. During our youth, the future of the world was the future of democracy and socialism. We belong to a generation of “leftist” that found in Marx and Freud, phenomenology and structuralism the most important answers that made sense of the everyday world. However, the developments of events during the last sixty years, showed that our confidence was ungrounded. The depreciation of the theoretical thought accelerated in direct proportion to the development of technologies, and among them the impact of the digital developments was devastating. One of the most notable consequences of the digitalization of culture, was the depreciation of the Marxian thought, but also the less recognized depreciation of all kinds of political-economic thought. The collapse of the world created before the Second World War open for the end of the “grand narratives” and the enthronization of Postmodernism. The production of fragmentary explanations took over the historical perspective with an important influence on social and economic thought. After 60 years of postmodern thinking, we believe that the time of Postmodernism is over. Politicians and economists over the world cannot continue to produce results in small packages. The whole picture must be restituted. Of course it must be done incorporating the lessons of the past to avoid to make the same mistakes. Postmodernism has left behind lots of scattered modernist philosophical remnants. It left a chessboard with only few pieces to work with, and in this allegory, only as references. The philosophical schools remains, but the study of them is strictly for an education in the history of ideas. The situation is aggravating since the most important works from the 1960’s and forth, (post-structuralists) deliberately have avoided obvious identity patterns. A word in Rio de la Plata’s jargon language describes this situation, cambalache, a sort of “flea market” where everything lies higgledy-piggledy. Deconstruction and the focus on differences are vital to Postmodernism. Remaining is therefore the intersections, the contrasts, shadows, and sketches. When trying to orient in such an intellectual environment, the task reminds of patching scatterings, and building with tools of eclecticism. However, we believe that is time to reconstruct instead of deconstruct, moving back to Modernism that we will describe as Cyborgism. December 2013
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