Epistemological Break Research Articles

Les quatre éléments dans « Karain » de Joseph Conrad : du mythe au manque

The East and West dichotomy in “Karain” is in keeping with the romantic topos and underlined by the motif of the four elements. The vision of the sea, the sky and the island builds up an orientalist painting full of colours and light, and turns the Malay Archipelago into a mythic space to be opposed to the dreary and foggy representation of the West, an enclosed, corrupt and oppressive space paradoxically paralysed by economic and technological progress at the end of the Victorian era. However Conrad subverts the opposition by casting light on the illusion and artificiality of the representation and deconstructing the orientalist myth. The four elements first highlight the motif of human illusions and contribute to the symbolic function of the East ; they also serve a literary topos by enhancing the tragic muthos which is then immediately deconstucted ; the orientalist mode of representation is also called into question by impressionism, conveyed by fragmentation and the relativity of the point of view. The aestheticization of space in the orientalist painting clearly shows the decoy of representation and lets the reader have a glimpse of the reality of colonialism through the cracks of the painting. The four elements are subservient to Conrad’s imaginary vision, whose purpose was to make his reader hear, feel, and see the truth “below the surface of the visible universe” (The Nigger of the Narcissus), “disclosed in a moment of illusion” (Lord Jim) as in a trompe-l’œil. The truth is also that of a metaphysical void corresponding to the epistemological break at the turn of the century and the loss of faith and ideals.

De alveitares a veterinários: notas históricas sobre a medicina animal e a Escola Superior de Medicina Veterinária São Bento de Olinda, Pernambuco (1912-1926)

The historical aspects of animal medicine indicate an epistemological break with the old practices of animal medical treatment, with introduction of the principles of rationality in the eighteenth century in the formation of veterinary doctors. These healing practices, meanwhile, did not begin with the implementation of graduate courses in animal medicine. In colonial Brazil and, in particular, in the State of Pernambuco, historical records can be found of animal medical practices that were later incorporated into the curriculum of the São Bento de Olinda Graduate School of Veterinary, marked by the presence of a unique evaluation in Brazil: the physicum examination.

‘Epistemological break’ and ‘philosophical revolution’ - a critique of Althusser’s distinction between Scientific and Philosophic knowledge

This article is an attempt to offer a critique on Louis Althusser’s distinction between Scientific and Philosophic knowledge. In executing this critique the work seeks to uncover the immanent inconsistencies and contradictions that may be said to embody Althusser’s claim that the link between previous modes of knowledge and the rise of science involves what he calls an “epistemological break”; while that of philosophy involves what he describes as “philosophical revolution”. Implied in this taxonomisation of Althusser is the claim that objective and factual factors alone characterize science whereas philosophy is the theoretical field for class struggle and subjective factors. However, this article takes the position that if science rises from and is in one way or another connected with other modes of knowledge,then the relationship between it and these other modes may not be that neatly delineated as is attempted by Althusser. The article subscribes to the contention that “objective validity preserves the moment of its emergence and this moment permanently affects it”.

Transforming theories of childhood and early childhood education: child study and the empirical assault on Froebelian rationalism

This article considers the possibility that one of the defining characteristics of the New Education, as it related to children in their early years, was its epistemological break with rationalist forms of knowledge and its embrace of empiricism and positivism. It considers, briefly, social theories that identify a similar process at a societal level before examining some of the polemics directed against theories of education based on rational forms of knowledge and, in particular, Froebel’s system. This theme is then pursued through a detailed consideration of the child study movement in England and its promotion of an empiricist project concerned with the production of knowledge about the child which drew upon the emergent fields of physiology, educational psychology, education and statistics. It is argued that child study helped to create the conditions for these sciences to distinguish themselves from the older philosophical currents from which they emerged. Consideration is then paid to how these transformations reacted on child study and on the Froebel movement. The article concludes that a break did indeed occur in the ways in which education was legitimised and that through the arrival of a new empirically based, scientific approach it became more closely aligned to reforming impulses. Nevertheless, the old philosophical, metaphysical foundations were not vanquished as in a violent rupture but were articulated in a new dialectical synthesis.

DEVELOPING DIASPORA LITERACY AND MARASA CONSCIOUSNESS

The New Negro, Indigenist, and Négritude movements of the 1920s and 1930s constitute the grounded base of contemporary Afro-American, Caribbean, and African literary scholarship. Critics return repeatedly to this textual field as if to embrace a heralded center, familiar and stable. Skepticism regarding presentations of the era as a coherent whole has inspired redefinitions of the period's demarcations, classic works as well as national and transnational intertextualities. Bearing in mind the discontinuities, one must acknowledge, however, that among other achievements, the new letters movements provided an epistemological break away from the predominance of Euro-American influences on black texts, the discursive agendas previously defining textual production particularly in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Caribbean writing. New letters works became communal property to be read and revised across national boundaries. Antilleans and some Hispanics, for instance, embraced texts by Langston Hughes and Claude McKay and were challenged by the Afro-American example to respond in stylistic kind. Unlike any other epoch of African-American expression, new letters shared a common ideology: writing regional, ethnic, and peasant experiences into existence. Their very articulation signified protest directed against cultural repression on the one hand and racial self-hatred on the other. The paradox of such a posture is suggested by Jean Price-Mars's use of the term collective bovaryism to describe in retrospect his generation's capitulation during the American Marine Occupation of Haiti (1915–1934). From the Haitian contradictions emerged defensive political, cultural, and textual agendas as of 1927, which paralleled the black revolts of Harlem and Paris but were determined by the particular circumstances provoking their enunciation.

LA LÓGICA DEL NUDO BORROMEO: UN PARADIGMA DEL CORTE ESTRUCTURAL NOTAS PARA UNA FILOSOFÍA PSICOANALÍTICA

The principal idea that guides this article is to interrogate to what point the last lacanian elaborations, concerning the borromean knot, agree or not to an epistemological break with regard to the Freudian classic theory. A basic place will occupy in this investigation the concept of real consistency examined by Lacan from the knotting of three registers (RSI): real, symbolic, imaginary. That is to say, where the real will not be thought in its relative autonomy with regard to other two registers, as it was treated in the first part of his teaching (50 ' and 60 '), but in the effective joint of the three (70 ').

Genders and sexualities: exploring the conceptual limits of contemporary educational research

Over the past three decades educational research has provided an exciting and dynamic theoretical engagement with gender and sexuality. While acknowledging this contribution, this article is a conceptually‐led exploration of a number of theoretical and methodological tensions contained within this research. More specifically, it argues that current research is limiting the possibilities of new knowledge by insisting on particular epistemological, methodological and theoretical positions. It argues that, in the spirit of Bachelard (2002), the research community needs to pursue epistemological breaks in order to recalibrate their theoretical and methodological positions. More specifically, this article suggests that a current dependence on sexuality identity categories, the positioning of the body as central to methodology and a reliance on particular theories of gender restrict the possibilities for new knowledge and understanding in the field.

Basil Bernstein: agency, structure and linguistic conception of class

The paper outlines an interpretation of Bernstein's contribution to the sociology of education that stands in contrast to the common interpretations of Bernstein's work. It is commonly assumed that Bernstein constructed a simplistic ‘deficit model’ of educational failure, or alternatively, that Bernstein was a structuralist who did not give any significance to human agency within his theorising. In addition, many authors argue that Bernstein had little original to say about social class. In this paper a much greater emphasis is placed upon Bernstein's radical reading of Durkheim, that shaped Bernstein's conception of agency, the role of agency in the formation of codes, frames and discourse, and the way in which the agent draws upon language as a resource in the processes of class formation. In the course of which Bernstein explains that all—classification and framing—are social facts. Although in his later works, Bernstein had an epistemological break from the central role of human agency in the process of social construction and embraced a more explicitly Marxian form of social analysis in which all discourse is assumed to have a material base.

Perspectives de l'hypnose au regard de la psychanalyse

It is commonly admitted that Freud, after a decade of practising hypnosis, gave it up for psychoanalysis. Presented as an epistemological break between hypnosis and psychoanalysis, this desertion is presented as a commonly accepted idea, which the authors do not agree with. Moreover, if psychoanalysis complies with the heritage of hypnosis, it appears more and more clearly that some chief concepts of its knowledge are directly linked to the latter. Far from having given up his interest for hypnosis during his psychoanalytic career, Freud – as his work shows – used the knowledge which it provides, in the aim of supporting the main principles of his metapsychology, for instance. On the other hand, this knowledge should allows us to understand more easily what hypnosis could reveal of its “mystery” for the inventor of psychoanalysis.

Early British Rule and Social Classification in Lanka

Recent scholarship has put forward two distinct interpretations of the origins of modern national and communal identity in South Asia. One sees colonial modernity as a radical epistemological break and judges the content of pre-colonial pasts irrelevant for understanding modern politics. According to this view, modern identities are responses to colonial constructions of Asian ‘tradition’. The other approach sees continuities between the late pre-colonial and early colonial periods. For these writers, the origins of modern national and communal identities lie not only in colonial interventions, but also in non-colonial eighteenth-century social formations and in early colonial interaction between the British and South Asians.

TOHU BOHU: Considerations on the nature of noise, in 78 fragments

Noise—a set of unharmonious sounds. This sends us back to the definition of harmony—but harmony in a specific historical context. We see at once how difficult it is to speak simply and plainly about such familiar concepts. By noise is meant essentially our perception of it. In a sense, there is no adequate definition of noise. Noise usually implies loud or unpleasant sounds—we tell kids to stop making a noise. It’s contrasted with silence, which is supposed to be golden, enlightening. John Coltrane’s Ascension [1], in 1965 dismissed as undifferentiated noise, is now seen as a more subtle form of harmony that combines chaotic material and an ascending movement. Ascension broke with the old view of noise. When I first heard the 30-minute A Little Noise in the System (Moog System, 1966) by Pauline Oliveros [2], the power of its development seemed clear. Others who have heard this piece recently all had the same impression. On reflection, this listenability seemed puzzling to me, till I realized that our listening habits—familiarity with Oval, Fennesz and Aphex Twin—have done the trick. With our ear conditioned, we could enjoy all those early subtleties. Ars Nova. When audiences of the 1950s and 1960s first heard Varese, Pousseur, Stockhausen, Berio, Ussachevsky, Yuasa, Dockstader and Mumma, what did they feel? Perhaps a sort of break, an epistemological break, like it must have been for the first audience of Monteverdi’s Orfeo (in Mantua, Italy on 24 February 1607). They left the auditorium completely stunned, because they had never heard anything like it. Noise—an undesirable disturbance additional to the signal and useful data, in the transmission channel of a data processing system. Dionysian celebrations—sound and fury. The sacred aspect of the fear that anything might happen. An indefinable noise in a small readymade by Marcel Duchamp [3]—paradox of an infinitely small noise. Tired of centuries of silence, today’s art galleries and museums are beginning to accept sound installations. Artists, including sculptors, are making a noise. Sounds repeated all day long, traversing corridors and rooms, so that sitting or standing the attendants wear earplugs. Videos rewind and restart, sounds and images go on endlessly, there are loops everywhere. In his most famous installation Vinyl Requiem, Philip Jeck employs no fewer than 180 turntables. His material is the vinyl disc. Most are cheap junk-shop finds. It all started by chance, when he came across an old turntable. The discs are left out of their sleeves to accumulate their own personality of crackles and scratches. The progressive degeneration of original sound material through successive re-recordings is celebrated in Jeck’s textural aesthetic. He works with accumulation and stratification, and also with memory, and so combines recycling with the love of vinyl records [4].

Knowledge management beyond codification: knowing as practice/concept

Knowledge has been theorized as being an elementary form of organization in the so‐called knowledge management literature. Although there are numerous analytical strengths in this literature, a reductionist view of knowledge dominates the field. From a reductionist view, knowledge is an extension from data and information. As opposed to this image of knowledge, this paper suggests that knowledge is what is inherent in practices and concepts employed and invented to denote such practices. The notion of knowledge is therefore constituted on a single plane or surface wherein practices and concepts are entangled. As a consequence, knowledge is always indeterminate and fluid because it is immanent in a multiplicity of undertakings and changing language games. In addition, data and information only represents a sub‐set of what we call knowledge. This processual and fluid view of knowledge represents an epistemological break with reductionist views of knowledge and enables for new perspectives on how knowledge is managed as an intangible resource in organizations.

BOOK REVIEW: Dianne F. Sadoff.SCIENCES OF THE FLESH: REPRESENTING BODY AND SUBJECT IN PSYCHOANALYSIS. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

"Psycho-analysis," Sigmund Freud famously noted in 1923, "did not drop from the skies ready-made....Any history of it must therefore begin with an account of the influence which determined its origin and should not overlook the times and circumstances that preceded its creation" (xiii). Dianne Sadoff critically engages with her epigraph in this fascinating and intricately researched study of the shaping of the notion of the subject in Freud's research and writing in the 1880s and 1890s. Freud's debt to the burgeoning neurological, medical, and psychotherapeutic sciences of late-nineteenth-century France, Austria, and Germany, and to the longer past of mesmerism and hypnotism, has long been recognised. But the history of psychoanalysis has still tended to take the form either of a genealogy, in which Freud inherits and appropriates a series of models and methods, and ultimately remains caught within their paradigms; or of an epistemological break in which the revolutionary emergence of psychoanalysis is celebrated, with Freud as founding father. Sadoff, in contrast, unpacks psychoanalysis as both innovative and deeply embedded in a diverse set of medical, scientific, and institutional contexts. [End Page 153] Drawing on Bruno Latour's theories of scientific mediation and translation, she explores the process by which specific and overlapping concepts are transformed across discursive boundaries and within specific settings. In doing so, she makes a significant contribution to psychological and intellectual historiography by investigating the precise ways in which Freud was able to extrapolate from research and practice in neurology, hypnosis, gynaecology, psychotherapy, and sexology, building "plausible bridges" which enabled him to transmute concepts from one site to another and to reconceptualise the relationship between mind and body, psyche and soma.

Condé’s Créolité in Literary History

Drawing on a wide range of theories literary history and geography, I want to consider Creolophone/Francophone novel and, in particular, Maryse Conde's fiction, challenge paradigms of literary evolution, narrative markets, comparative genre, hybrid narrative form, and postcolonial paradigms of so-called minor literature. In focusing on Conde's relationship to British novel (with special attention to her rewriting of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights in her La Migration des coeurs [trans. Windward Heights]), intent is to emphasize implications of Conde's decision to exchange a French literary genealogy for a British one (that, in addition to Bronte, also includes Jane Austen, Jean Rhys, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf). An attempt will be made to develop a paradigm of genre translation and transmission that might be called Caribbean Gothic (countering Orientalist Imperial Gothic readily apparent in British colonial fiction). Ghosts, telepathic communication, channeling of spirits and voices emerge as important themes in Wuthering Heights, and their reappearance in Windward Heights brings into focus issues of communication and literacy that were as important to Emily Bronte as they are to Conde: questions concerning whose tongue is chosen and how literature happens under conditions of tenuous literacy and literateness. These questions lead to some reflections on ways in which creolite translates time-honored models of literary history, while providing new ascriptions of literary genesis, genealogy, and genetic criticism. There are myriad serviceable models of literary history still in use, many of them overlapping. One thinks of encyclical structuralism of Vico-inspired models; of Lansonist histories of style informed by Taine's emphasis on milieu, genre, and social class; of transhistorical time-lines of intellectual history--Arthur Lovejoy's history of ideas unfolding as a great chain of being or Leo Spitzer's adaptation of philological circle, used to construe a national soul evolving through ages. One thinks of Georg Lukacs's Hegelian concept of Geisteswissenschaft based on a presumed match between mind of writer and historical Mind, which points to a supra-empirical vision of totality of world history and to historically based universal dialectics of genre. (1) One thinks of Erich Auerbach's literary history with holes, his jagged genealogy of comedic realism, lurching back to Plato's Republic where mimesis ranks third after truth (2) and forward to Dante's Commedia, presented as true reality. One thinks of Walter Jackson Bate's postwar update of ancients and moderns quarrel to the burden of past, supplanted in turn by Harold Bloom's agonistic anxiety of theory of psychic poetic engendering and literary father-killing. One thinks of Mikhail Bakhtin's chronotypes, which introduced synchrony into heavily diachronic tradition of literary history. These chronotypes become lengthened as temporal measures of periodicity under guiding influence of Ferdinand Braudel, Michel Foucault, and Giovanni Arrighi, with their introduction, respectively, of la longue duree, epistemological break, and long century. One thinks of how, from Elisee Reclus to David Harvey, spatial conditions of long-distance narrative have come into historical focus, fostering cartographic literary histories and mappings of literary territory that compete with linear time. These geopolitical models urge literary history to take on imperial conquest and rise of capitalism through renewed attention to epic genres: le roman d'aventure, national ballad, travel chronicles, exoticism, war novel, la litterature coloniale. One thinks of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's invention of feminist literary history focusing on women authors and female characters. Along lines of canonical redress, one thinks of monumental project of Henry Louis Gates to build African-American literary history from ground up. …

Nursing care of dead bodies: a discursive analysis of last offices.

Nurses care for patients before they are born, after they have died and during the lifetime in between. This paper explores nursing care of the patient after they have died including the actions by nurses in preparation of the body, the covering with a shroud, and the transfer to the mortuary. The analysis of a procedure manual excerpt Last Offices, which directs care of the dead patient aims to explore nursing care practices in regard to dead patients, as well as the impact of the health care institution and society at large on these care practices. An acute care teaching hospital located in a major Australian city was approached and permission was granted to access their procedure and policy manuals. The Last Offices excerpt of the procedure manual was discursively analysed. It is the contention of this paper that, through their care, nurses enact the transition between life and death, and from person to corpse. Furthermore, nurses mediate the move from embodied person to becoming dead, and in so doing traverse the cultural, ontological and epistemological breaks that death entails.

Mallarmé et ses disciples : une « coupure épistémologique » ? L'exemple de Charles Morice

A widespread critical trend shows a tendency to detach Mallarmé altogether from his immediate ideological context, distinguishing between the modem, revolutionary aspect of Symbolism and its esoteric, retrograde aspect. According to this reading of Mallarmé, there is an epistemological break between himself and his disciples. By a detailed comparison, we aim to highlight the very real filiations between the ideas of the master and the more discursive ideas of his disciples. Thus considering La littérature de tout à l'heure as a simplified adaptation of some major concepts of Mallarmé may contribute - due allowances being made - to a better understanding of those concepts, including their utopian and political aspects. These have been long neglected by modem criticism, which as is well known has proved more interested in linguistics matters.

Réconcilier activité de penser et activité de connaître

Cet article se propose d'interroger la posture du scientifique replié dans sa tour d'ivoire et indifférent aux choses du monde. Il repart du lourd constat du XXème siècle de la participation (quelquefois collusion) de nombreux hommes de science aux différentes entreprises génodicaires pour se faire tentative d'interrogation de la disjonction entre activité de connaître et activité de penser, et ce notamment en raison du fondement commun à ces deux activités, à savoir l'examen distancié, la "rupture épistémologique"… L'homme de science ne devrait-il pas, dès lors, se faire éclaireur du monde, sans pour autant devenir pourvoyeur des consciences, en intégrant à la posture scientifique la capacité critique, comme principe d'énonciation des possibles? Ce ne serait pas dénier l'idéal scientifique (qu'est cette compétence critique, point d'orgue de la démarche de l'homme de science) mais au contraire lui rendre ses lettres de noblesse que de ne pas le confiner aux portes des laboratoires.

De la localisation industrielle. Première partie : la théorie pure de la localisation. (Avant-propos de 1909 et introduction)

The choice of these extracts and of a return to the original German text for their translation was motivated by the consequences of certain cuts made in the most used English translation (including that of the foreword) and of explanatory notes of the translator C.J. Friedrich. They have, firstly, contributed to creating the neo-classical image of A. Weber, although the action of the latter belonged to the German Historical School and of its internal questioning led by the author's brother, M. Weber, or by his friend W. Sombart. They led, secondly, to ignoring the temporal continuity of A. Weber concerning industrial location. Although D. Gregory was one of the rare geographers to denounce the « interpretative violence » done to Weber’s work, he made a too simplistic reading of the path of the author, in terms of epistemological break. The choice of these texts can also be explained by the interest of the objective fixed by A. Weber for the development of a theory of industrial location : to try to link the abstract approach of the classical English economists and the more inductive approach of the historical economists, articulating economics and sociocultural aspects. The questions which are posed by the new economic geography on the condition of embeddedness of the economic in the social give topical significance to this procedure.

Max Stirner and the Politics of Posthumanism

This paper explores Max Stirner's political philosophy and its importance for contemporary theory. While our time is characterized by the breaking down and dislocation of essential and universal identities, little has been written on the philosophical roots of this phenomenon. I show the ways in which Stirner's ‘epistemological break’ with Enlightenment humanism, explicit in his critique of Feuerbach, lays the theoretical groundwork for this ‘politics of difference’. Indeed it anticipates many aspects of ‘poststructuralism’ thought. I argue here that Stirner's critique of humanism, essentialist identity, rationality, and moral absolutism unmasks the subtle connections between identity, desire and politics. It also goes beyond the political imaginary of the Enlightenment and, in doing so, allows us to deconstruct accepted political and social identities and radically transform the notion of the political subject. However, Stirner's thinking is not a simplistic transgression of humanist categories. Rather he shows their discursive limitations and calls for a rethinking of these concepts in ways that are less abstract and oppressive.

Sustainable Agriculture Research and the Land-Grant System: A Replication

ABSTRACT This paper extends and improves upon Thomas A. Lyson's (1998) analysis of the environmental, economic, and social components of sustainable agriculture in American land-grant universities. Lyson failed to consider the relationship between two very important variables–the percentage of total time devoted to basic research and communication frequency with farmers–and the orientations of agricultural scientists toward sustainable agriculture and its underlying dimensions. Through the use of multiple classification analysis, we show that these two variables are more important than the independent variables Lyson examined in predicting scientists' allegiance to agricultural sustainability. In addition, Lyson uncritically accepted the notion that sustainable agriculture is the polar opposite of “conventional” agriculture. Our findings indicate that agricultural sustainability is not the epistemological break with productionist research that Lyson makes it out to be. A larger divide appears to exist between land-grant agricultural scientists committed to applied research and direct client service and scientists who conduct basic research with no interaction with farmers.