| 1. |
- 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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| 2. |
- Flores, Fernando
(författare)
-
Broken technologies : the humanist as engineer. Updated November 2015
- 2009
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- There are many possible definitions of “technology” and I will discuss some of these in this book. However, in this introduction let me use a definition of Svante Lindqvist who defines technology very intuitively as “those activities, directed towards the satisfaction of human wants, which produce change in the material world.” He says also “the distinction between human “wants” and more limited human “needs” is crucial, for we do not use technology only to satisfy our essential material requirements.” Consequently, from this perspective, a technology that is “broken” could be defined as those activities, directed towards the satisfaction of human wants that are intended to produce changes in the material world that either do not manage to satisfy these wants or do not produce changes in the material world, or both. This is the third edition, updated October 2015.
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| 3. |
- 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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| 4. |
- Flores, Fernando
(författare)
-
Después Del Capitalismo: El Modernismo (Ciborgismo).
- 2013
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Abstract in SpanishEste texto responde a una necesidad izquierdista, pero de una izquierda que por razones obvias ya no se encuentra. Trata de buscar todas las respuestas; de no renunciar a una visión compleja pero global, capaz de transformase en una “guía para la acción”. Se trata de un texto con respuestas, planes, ideas claras, objetivos, convicciones. Hasta hace no muchos años, el mundo era re-conocible, lo habían explicado los grandes pensadores del siglo XIX y del XX, el marxismo y el psicoanálisis, la fenomenología, el estructuralismo, etc. Ahora bien, el estancamiento de aquel ideario empezó ya en aquellos años, pero nosotros no lo sabíamos. Luego llegaron las derrotas, las debacles, la confusión y si hoy si se puede hablar de una izquierda, es de una izquierda puntual, postmodernista, impulsora de objetivos éticos puntuales, desconectados de un modelo impugnador global y excesivamente pragmática. La izquierda de hoy busca a tientas, es más empírica que nunca, tantea en las voluntades de las gentes para definir un programa político circunstancial. La izquierda de hoy es ecléctica, un poco de esto y un poco de lo otro, socialistas, capitalistas, nacionalistas, postmodernistas, etc.Nuestro aporte es este texto es el retomar precavidamente, tanteando también nosotros, el camino del materialismo histórico que al mismo tiempo criticaremos. Nos interesa la visión marxista como “gran narrativa”, teoría con todas o casi todas las explicaciones. Nos interesa descubrir los nexos entre política y economía y entre estos y la historia. Lo hacemos a sabiendas de los fracasos anteriores, a sabiendas de que hay un discurso marxista definitivamente obsoleto; como metodología económico-política, el marxismo hace tiempo que es una tecnología rota. Sin embargo, leer a Marx es saber que tiene razón, aunque no sepamos exactamente en qué ni cómo explicarlo. ¿Cómo empezar? Empezaremos con el único tema inevitable, la teoría de las clases sociales y del desarrollo de la historia de Marx como lucha de clases, y desde esta, paso a paso, trataremos de encontrar la lógica de un discurso histórico-político enraizado en la teoría del valor del trabajo. Trataremos de producir una teoría que se construya a sí misma, con ejemplos, evidencias y porque no interrogantes también. Hace ya muchos años estudiamos el impacto del descubrimiento de América en el pensamiento y cultura europeos del siglo XVI. Entonces anticipamos nuestras dudas acerca de la importancia heurística del concepto de “clase social”, y del peso real de la llamada “lucha de clases” en los acontecimientos históricos. Pasados los años, nos afirmamos en esa convicción, creemos en cambio que son otros fenómenos los verdaderos motores de la historia. Preocupado por reafirmar la predominancia de la materia sobre la idea, Marx desestimó la importancia del conocimiento y la experiencia en el desarrollo de la historia. Trataremos de corregir esta carencia, en tanto para nuestro tiempo “digitalizado”, esta oposición ya no es problemática. En ese sentido, una de las claves de nuestra investigación será el estudio del impacto decisivo de las tecnologías informacionales, impulsadoras de una emergente ciber-sociedad.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.
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| 5. |
- Flores, Fernando
(författare)
-
El Algoritmo de la Vida.
- 1994
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Abstract in Spanish Estudio metafísico sobre los modelos epistemológicos de la filosofía de la Vida.
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| 6. |
- Flores, Fernando
(författare)
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Enciclopedia de las tecnologías rotas : el humanista como ingeniero
- 2011
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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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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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| 8. |
- Flores, Fernando
(författare)
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Från Columbus till Che. Latinamerikas idéhistoria
- 2005
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Den här boken är tänkt att ge en kort introduktion till några av de viktigaste händelserna inom den ideologiska processen som sträcker sig från det indianska Amerikas tusenåriga kultur, genom spansk och portugisisk kolonialism och till nutidens ”Latinamerika”.
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| 9. |
- Flores, Fernando
(författare)
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Från Rudbeck till Mandelbrot : Identifikation, imitation och komparation i nutidsvetenskap
- 2004
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- InledningDet är kväll den 15:e januari 2004. Idag var det den andra dagen i Mijailovic-rättegången i Stockholms tingsrätt. Mijailovic försvarar sig, men inte genom att svara på frågor. Han representerar det moderna. Hans psykos, säger han, fick honom att få panik, höra röster och döda en utrikesminister. Om han fått träffa en läkare skulle allt varit annorlunda. Sedan början av 1800-talet har detta sätt resonera varit en vanlig, om inte alltid godtagen försvarslinje och förklaringsmodell, i synnerhet när det gäller allvarliga våldsbrott. Foucault visade i sin bok om Pierre Rivière hur experterna redan i början av 1800-talet kunnat sjanghaja någon som inte alls åberopat vanvett, för att ge ett gott exempel för denna försvarsposition. Parallellt med rättegången, men utanför den, utvecklas en talan som helt och hållet stöder Mijailovics position. Kritiken av den "postmoderna” psykiatrin, som förebrås relativism och socialkonstruktivism är hård och skoningslös. En antibiologisk och antiorganisk psykiatrikritik, säger de moderna, leder till charlatanism, nonchalans och ansvarslöshet. Här blir Mijailovic ett exempel. Den dominerande uppfattning som enligt media "totalt dominerar bland experterna" är emellertid en helt annan. Mijailovic är, säger man, trots hans tidigare bevisade aparta och egenartade beteende, absolut inte vansinnig, och har inte heller varit det. Han är rationell och planerande. Han rår för sina handlingar, tänker ut, förföljer och drar slutsatser. Så kommer det onda, detta förmoderna element par préference, in i diskussionen. Det är i detta förvirrade diskussionsklimat jag möter Fernando Flores' nya bok. Författaren har tidigare demonstrerat sin förmåga att leverera en överraskande meta-antropologi. Vad vi nu möter är en ny antro-historia, ett försök att rita upp ett slags tidskarta över positioner i tänkandets utveckling. Det här sker inte genom ett försök att demonstrera kontinuiteter. Snarare är det brott, överraskningar och återtaganden av utvecklingslinjer som står i centrum. Ibland blir hans bok ett Rekordmagasin där tragiska moderna hjältar som Turing och Foucault figurerar med sina uppfinningar och diskursiva bravader, ibland en filosofilexikon, och ibland en originell och kärleksfull diskussion om vad man kan få ut av någon av de tänkare som Flores älskar, som Wittgenstein eller Merleau-Ponty. Som amatörläsare kan man inte annat än förtjusas och förvirras av Fernando Flores' intensiva attack och hans ständiga perspektivbyten. Sune SunessonLund, januari 2004
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| 10. |
- Flores, Fernando
(författare)
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Las Humanidades en la Era de la Globalización
- 2005
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Con el término “globalización”, se hace referencia “al pro-ceso de cambio según el cual estados y sociedades del todo el planeta se conectan a través de relaciones recíprocas de dependen-cia.” El término proviene de la palabra ”global” del latín ”globus”, que significa esfera o bola. Normalmente se usa el término para hacer referencia a procesos socioeconómicos internacionales en el marco del capitalismo contemporáneo. La economía globalizada ha acercado las naciones a través del estímulo de una estructura común de consumo. En las esferas culturales se usa el término para referirse a la tendencia “a un consumo cultural uniformizante y a la distribución en todo el mundo de los mismos productos culturales.” Con el término “globalización” se hace también referencia al proceso de modernización que deviene naturalmente del desa-rrollo técnico. Se podría decir que la globalización es la fase de modernización de la sociedad más cercana en el tiempo, una fase del desarrollo social que habría comenzado con el fin de la Segun-da Guerra Mundial con la generalización del uso de la radio, de los teléfonos y la televisión para culminar con la era digital de los ordenadores a partir de la década de los ochenta. Según esta manera de ver la globalización, se puede decir que el proceso globalizador comienza en realidad con el descu-brimiento y uso del fuego, de la rueda y de la palabra escrita. Del mismo modo se puede ver cada expansión imperialista como un proceso de contaminación tecnológica y de uniformización cultu-ral. Según esta manera de ver la globalización, la misma habría sufrido un proceso de aceleración marcada a partir del descubri-miento de América y de la circunvalación de la tierra en los siglos XV, XVI y XVII.
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