Mode Of Truth Research Articles

Либерализм как предпосылка биополитики: концепт М. Фуко и российско-советская практика в контексте теории политического отчуждения

Michel Foucault posed the problem of analyzing state interest (hereinafter referred to as GI) and finding ways to limit it. To solve the problem, he formulated the starting premises: orthodoxy (in religion) and loyalty (in politics) are not the norms of religious and state life; the state is not a transhistorical phenomenon, and its interests are not supra-individual; therefore, revolutions (and not stability) are the norm of state existence. In order to substantiate these premises, Foucault developed cognitive means: the denial of universals and the formulation of the problem of possible history; nominalistic definition of GI; criticism of the current economic, military-diplomatic and police forms of implementation of the GI; fixing the contrast between the foreign and domestic policies of states; qualification of law, political economy and truth as ways to limit GI and necessary prerequisites for biopolitics. These also include liberalism. In the course of lectures “The Birth of Biopolitics,” Foucault considers liberalism as the basis of a new art of government. As part of this art, he discovered and analyzed a specific problem-conceptual structure: the relationship between moderate governance and the market; transition from jurisdiction to verification; mode of truth; the difference between government and state interests; the relationship between law and truth; political critique of knowledge; police state; ways to limit government power; concepts of law; modern state mind. The purpose of the article is to summarize Foucault’s conclusions about the main elements of this structure and pose the problem of their application to explaining the preconditions of Russian-Soviet biopolitics in the context of the theory of political alienation.

Cultural and Aesthetic Dynamics of Photography as a Form of Contemporary Art

Art-photography is a form of contemporary art that marked itself in the early 1960s. Its historical evolution has not been sufficiently studied. At the same time, it provides an opportunity to identify and understand the logic of the internal development of art-photography and its relationship with the external cultural context. The cultural and aesthetic dynamics of art-photography is associated with three historical stages: early, mature and late postmodernism (meta modernism) and the corresponding forms of contemporary art. The first stage (1960—1970) saw the realization by contemporary artists of the conceptual possibilities of photography. It was mainly the photographic documentation of process-action forms of contemporary art. The same period saw the birth and formation of the main artistic strategies and creative methodologies of art-photography: adherence to documentaries, the use of staging (directing), the introduction of seriality (typology), the combination of word and image. The second stage (1980s — 1990s) of art-photography functioning is characterized by further development and enrichment of established artistic tendencies and the emergence of new practices in which photographic material expands its subject matter and claims the role of a text that problematizes (thematizes) the represented reality. The development of art-photography at the third stage (2000s to the present) is determined by two main factors: the processes of digitalization and oscillation of contemporary culture and art, which leads to the transformation of the “mode of truth” of the photographic image and the strengthening of the importance of the aesthetics of the individual photographic frame. At the level of practice, this is expressed in the creation of photographic pictures where reality and fantasy images merge into a single whole and become indistinguishable. This effect was reinforced by printing photographs of enormous size and exhibiting them in museum spaces and galleries. Nowadays, art-photography, while remaining a form of contemporary art, seeks to go beyond it and acquire signs of aesthetic self-sufficiency.

A Literary Testimonial to Banal Evil: Dehumanization in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

The problematics of trauma and testimony are perforce in a closely-knit relation with the issue of evil, in particular with the strand of evil that made possible the concentration camps in Auschwitz. Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym will be considered as primarily an event of speech, and its testimony as a mode of truth’s realization beyond what is available as statement. What emerges from the comments on Pym, from the explication of some of the death scenes, from the gratuitousness of the violence, and the nonchalance of Pym’s report, is not the horror, but a sense of the casualness of death, the “banality of evil” that Poe opposes to the “grandeur of evil,” looking ahead to Auschwitz and the Gulag. In Pym, Poe presents us with a rare instantiation of pure (and banal) evil in the casually-reported scene of the cannibalization. I intend to supplement the philosophical response to the question of (banal) evil provided by Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben by a psychoanalytical one, with a footing in the signature terminology of Melanie Klein.

The uncertainty of the mass image: logistics and behaviours

ABSTRACTThe question of uncertainty raised in this special issue raises issues for the image as truthful, the truth that viewers can claim to find in images and the ethical dimensions of truth. By tracing some key changes in the history of photography, this paper demonstrates that the mass production and especially mass storage and distribution of images create a new condition for the image. This condition asserts that the purpose of the totality of the mass image as it now exists in databases is a mode of truth which alters earlier ontological, epistemological and ethical claims for certainty. Rather than propose a return to the humanistic privilege of the individual image, the paper suggests that a new politics of truth is demanded by the new condition of the mass image.

HEIDEGGERIO TECHNIKOS SAMPRATOS UŽUOMAZGOS ANKSTYVOSIOSE SENOVĖS GRAIKŲ INTERPRETACIJOSE

Straipsnyje parodoma ankstyvųjų Martino Heideggerio senovės graikų filosofijos interpretacijų svarba jo vėlesnei moderniosios technikos sampratai. Parodoma, pirma, kaip ankstyvųjų senovės graikų tekstų interpretacijose iškylanti pagamintos būties (Hergestelltsein) samprata su joje glūdinčiu pamatiniu graikų ontologijos orientyru į pastovią esamybę atsispindi vėlesniuose moderniosios techninės būties atverties apmąstymuose, tarpstančiuose po machinacijos (Machenschaft) ir vėliau – sąstato (Gestell) vardais. Antra, parodoma vieno iš pamatinių gaminančios Dasein veiklos (herstellende Verhalten) struktūrinių elementų – priežastingumo sampratos – svarba vėlgi vėlyvajai moderniosios technikos kaip būties atverties interpretacijai. Ir trečia, parodoma, kaip ankstyvoji aristotelinės tέχνη kaip tiesos (ἀλήθεια) ar buvimo tiesoje (ἀληθεύειν) būdo samprata atsispindi moderniosios technikos kaip būties atverties būdo sampratoje.

DUNS ESCOTO E A VERDADE NAS COISAS: UM ESTUDO DE "QUESTÕES SOBRE A METAFÍSICA" VI, Q.3

No livro VI de suas "Questões sobre a Metafísica", João Duns Escoto desenvolve um complexo estudo sobre a verdade. Para tanto, ele distingue dois modos de verdade: a "verdade na coisa" e a "verdade no intelecto". Pretendo aqui me voltar para a primeira dessas duas noções, interpretando uma curta passagem daquela obra à luz de outros textos do Doutor Sutil – um procedimento sugerido por aquelas próprias questões.

Two French Variations on Truth: Ricoeur's Attestation and Foucault's “Parrhesiastic” Attitude

Both Ricoeur and Foucault, apparently independently of each other, dedicated much effort to provide an account of truth that goes far beyond the truth of sentences, propositions, or judgments. While well aware of the speech act theory and pragmatics, they want to go beyond a formalism of rules of speech or arguments and integrate the attitude of the one who speaks in the very notion of truth. They see truth not merely as a property of statements, but as an existential process in such a way that the truth of statements is linked to the historically situated speaker. Truth as a property of statements is related to truth as an event. However, both reject any form of historicism or relativism.I examine Ricoeur's notion of attestation and Foucault's notion of parrhesia, showing how both notions represent a kind of “poetics of truth”, which combines the existential position of the speaker and the historical circumstances of utterance. I show the extent to which both poetics of truth are political and ethical and how successful each poetics is: Ricoeur believes that he can maintain a claim to universality whereas Foucault abandons such a claim and instead subscribes to a radical singularity of the event of speech in a mode of truth that is, as he says, “polemic”.

La verdad comunicativa como reto creativo en Karl Jaspers.

Este nuevo acercamiento a la verdad comunicativa de Jaspers como reto se concentra en el análisis de diversos modos de verdad comprendidos por el yo, primero como consciencia empírica, luego como Existenz libre. Esto permite desarrollar una metodología trascendental para crecer en libertad y ampliar los horizontes del yo integrándolo en la Trascendencia, en una referencia espacio-temporal concreta por medio del juego. Este juego se torna abierto y desafiante conforme él es capaz de comprender la verdad en toda su profundidad.

The Debt of Philosophical Hermeneutics to Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education

This paper examines the relation of Schiller's Letters on Aesthetic Education to Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, particularly by examining the connection between the concepts ofplay and in Schiller's thought. The paper points out parallels between the two thinkers which remain unacknowledged in Gadamer's critique of Schiller. The first main section of the paper examines the notion of play in Schiller, pointing out that Schiller conceives of play in a medial voice, much as Gadamer does. The second section directly takes on Gadamer's claim that Schiller's notion of aesthetic appearance sunders art from truth, by arguing that Schiller conceives of appearance as a mode of truth.

DOING JUSTICE TO SOMEONE

I would like to take my point of departure from a question of power, the power of regulation, a power that determines, more or less, what we are, what we can be. I am not speaking of power only in a juridical or positive sense, but I am referring to the workings of a certain regulatory regime, one that informs the law, and one that also exceeds the law. When we ask what the conditions of intelligibility are by which the human emerges, by which the human is recognized, by which some subject becomes the subject of human love, we are asking about conditions of intelligibility composed of norms, of practices, that have become presuppositional, without which we cannot think the human at all. So I propose to broach the relationship between variable orders of intelligibility and the genesis and knowability of the human. And it is not just that there are laws that govern our intelligibility, but ways of knowing, modes of truth, that forcibly de* ne intelligibility.

Talking heads: Language, metalanguage, and the semiotics of subjectivity By Benjamin Lee (review)

186LANGUAGE, VOLUME 76, NUMBER 1 (2000) Van Schooneveld, Cornelis H. 1977. The place ofgender in the semantic structure ofthe Russian language. Scando-Slavica 23.129-38. Waugh, Linda, and Stephen Rudy (eds.) 1991 . New vistas in grammar: Invariance versus variation. Amsterdam : Benjamins. Zubin, David. 1977. The semantic basis of case alternation in German. Studies in language variation, ed. by Robert Fasold and Roger Shuy, 88-99, Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. -----. 1979. Discourse function in morphology. In Givón, 169-20. Department of Foreign Literatures Ben-Gurion University PO Box 653 84 105 Be'er Sheva Israel [yishai@bhumail.bgu.ac.il] Talking heads: Language, metalanguage, and the semiotics of subjectivity. By Benjamin Lee. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Pp. ix, 376. Reviewed by William Frawley, University of Delaware Benjamin Lee's terrific book, Talking heads, mostly concerns the tension between speech action (talking) and abstract, detached mind (heads) (see Wertsch 1998). But it is also about 'talking heads' in the popularized sense: those interchangeable speaking-minds who flit from one marketed crisis to another. Here at the turn of the millennium, the idealized unified self of rational tradition runs smack into the commodified, 'mass-mediated' (345) self of infinite choices and lifestyle. L's main argument is that subjectivity is made out of performativity (speaking and thinking as conventionalized actions), indexicality (reference to properties of context), and metaindexicality (reference to indexicals). In Ch. 1, 'The foundations of performativity: Austin and Frege', he traces the influence of these notions to Frege and Austin, two unlikely bedfellows at first glance. What does a logician convinced of the ideality of thoughts have in common with an ordinarylanguage philosopher who believed in meaning as contextualized action? In splitting truth from its mode of presentation, Frege opened the way for the differentiation of content from context and hence for Austin, for whom the mode of truth was essential to meaning itself. Austin thus needed Frege (and translated him into English!) to propose truth as only one form of the assessment of statements. Performativity, indexicality, and metaindexicality feed a number of other strains in modem theorizing about meaning and subjectivity. L spends the next three chapters discussing the applicability of these ideas to Derrida, the Russell-Donnellan-Kripke-Putnam disputes on reference, and Peirce. These are unavoidable choices in some way—after all, who else is there?—but some unusual lessons fall out of the exposition. For example, in Ch. 2, 'Deconstructing performativity', L uses some of Davidson's (1986) ideas to sketch out a genuine alternative to the proposal that we carry around no conventions in our heads (Derrida) or lots of them (Searle). Shared meanings require only passingtheories—on site constructions ofregularities triggered by the metalinguistic properties of speech acts themselves. Communication occurs when passing theories coincide. This is a very interesting idea, especially with the increasing pressure of movements that strip inner minds of their richness and offload the regularities into the environment (see, e.g. Clark 1997). Passing theories cued by the indexical and metaindexical features of speech performance might be a way to reconcile abstract intemalism with an informationally rich environment. These ideas drive a reconsideration of the great proper name/natural kind debates. In Ch. 3, 'Reconstructing performativity', L stresses the influence (and sometimes the disregard) of indexicality in accounts ofthe determination of reference. He comes out as a kind ofperformative Putnamite, casting naming on a scale of indexicality and metaindexicality: from deictics, where properties of the speech event are maximized, to natural kinds, where they are minimized (SiIverstein 1981). In Ch. 4, 'Peirce's semiotic', he underscores Peirce's unwillingness to erect REVIEWS187 barriers between logic and indexicality. Peirce rums out to be a proto-dynamicist: signs are inference triggers. Thus while Peirce and Frege both made important discoveries about that darling of static logical analysis, quantification, Peirce viewed quantifiers much the way Blakemore (1987) views pragmatic and metapragmatic markers generally—as instructions to users and hearers. Interestingly enough, in logical semantics, quantifiers are also instructions, but disembodied, computational operations—functions. This makes for two kinds of dynamic meaning: one where speakers and hearers matter (talking) and one where they don't (heads). The following four chapters...

Rhetoric as a Technique and a Mode of Truth: Reflections on Chaim Perelman

In one of his many criticisms of The New Rhetoric, the philosopher Henry W. Johnstone Jr. complains about its chapter "The Dissociation of Concepts" that "one is never sure whether [Chaïm Perelman is] thinking of rhetoric primarily as a technique or primarily as a mode of truth. One wonders, too, what status [he is] claiming for the book itself" (1978, 99). 1 Since the chapter in question largely concerns philosophical argument, the doubt is very much apropos. But the response to Johnstone's implied question--a response that Johnstone does not think available--is that the correct answer legitimately varies in a systematic way. While in philosophical contexts, and, incidentally, in scientific ones, rhetoric is invariably a mode of truth, in contexts of public address it need not be. To see how this systematic variation might be the case, I will focus, as does Johnstone, on the dissociation of concepts as a test case of the robustness of a rhetoric oriented toward truth. To do so, I must first define dissociation and then come to terms with the way in which concepts are dissociated in public address, in philosophy, and in science. In treating these examples, however, I must be wary. While they will vary systematically according to field, they are not each instances of any general "law" of dissociation. Johnstone is surely right to "doubt whether there is any general logic of dissociation; there is only the logic of each particular dissociation, generated in each case by a particular problem" (99). When I have run through my examples, I can return to Johnstone's question about the status of rhetoric and of Perelman's study of it.

La verdad comunicativa como reto creativo en Karl Jaspers

This new approach to Jaspers' communicative truth as a creative challenge is focused on an analysis of the diverse modes of truth grasped by the self, first as an empirical conciousness, then as a free Existenz . This enables to develop a transcendent methodology to grow in freedom and enhances the horizons of the self integrating him to Trascendence, in a concrete tempo-spacial reference by means of game. This game becomes as open and challenging as he is capable to grasp truth in all its profoundness.

Marcel, Jaspers and the Modes of Truth

Marcel, Jaspers and the Modes of Truth