Thinking science chapter 1

Epistemology, performativity of research and cultural theory

©By Abdel Hernández san Juan

Written in English and translated to English by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

   It was establishing as a fact that a world of culture should be seen first and before anything as an immediacy world that I written The Intramundane horizont and sobreordination in everyday life. Under such a distinction I proposed several levels or stratus’s to phenomenology and hermeneutic in a world of life.

   With this two essays we are among the first stratus or level, the basic one corresponding purely to what I have defined as phenomenological sociology, but in a further level of discussion within my essay the world correlate, we advanced to another level of stratification, toward when now the layers of distance between a language and such an immediacy of the world is less defined by repetitions of experience from experimenting it to telling a story, remembering, speaking or writing down, but rather by the fact that the sense that we have on a world of reality is more an effect of the text than a direct reflected dimension of the senses, indeed moving from phenomenological sociology to language science and semiotics attempts retheorizing phenomenology’s of reality under new forms of classical thinking comparing my theory and analysis with and discussing Hegel, peirce, Saussure and derrida.

   There was then above all a worthy challenge, the one about comparing the dissolutions of the phenomenology of the internal and the external in the classical discussion of reality ontology without yet considering language and another usually independent and isolated issue, that one about if there is upon language external levels meaning narrow outsides of language or if everything happen in language itself without outsides to it, in fact, since concepts as relevants as subjects, predicaments, been, self, verbs, qualities, etc, occurs in language level, there is a suspicious question asked by thinkers as derrida and others if there are dimensions of reality outside language or if not, if everything is inside language.

    Whether both the internal and the external are at the same time the opposites and the same or distinct moments of the sames as sides like it happen with the distinctions between the world itself and the reflected or phenomenological world in classical philosophy terms which are both opposites and the same or moments of the same inclusibly contained one inside the other, the same can be allow to be attempts at the language level whence such certain relevant concepts are also paradoxically both internals and externals to language or rather neither inside nor outside, toward several stratus of distinction between hermeneutic and exegesis, while all this should be at the same time considered in the light of my essays self and Acervo and after ethnomethodology.

   A new conjunction between classical philosophy and sociology is needed at this point, but to do so we must before reconstruct the evolution of this matter in both senses.

    With this said we are ready to position ourselves from self and Acervo to a further level of discussion which will be considered here as the relation between subject and object in epistemology, on how to reconsider the place of concepts and the phenomenological genesis of the sign in regard to the issue of presence toward further discussion on methodology of research specially the issue of performativity.

    I have realized at least since the late nineties that today there are sufficient reasons to seriously consider performativity inside epistemology and the theory of knowledge, performativity theory in the face of clasical philosophy, epistemology, sociology, semiotic and cultural theory

      The current effort is devoted to that

   Performativity as I have conceived the concept is related with the issue of the relations between subject and object while not in any form but as it is grounding knowledge in any mundane common sense activity.

   If performativity itself, in fact, as I will attempt forward, belong to the ground of common sense ordinary knowledge in such subject and object forms of relations and such forms of grounding take place as part of and as moments of the general hermeneusis that phenomenologically basis the ontology of the intramundane horizont itself it is then clear that the basis of performativity brings us to conditions of conceptual, sense and meanings productions insides elucidation and explicitation which are a part of the general hermeneusis of everyday pragmatics when we can be alones inside silent body activities and or experiencing intersubjective communications as well.

    Regarding the ground in common sense of my concept of performativity we should focuses on the fact that human performance including in it all we do with our body between day and night considered in silence without saying nothing such as discourses or phrases of any kind, it as an activity and this activity seen pragmatically presuppose elucidation as a constant hermeneutic and interpretative activity.

   Practice as our mundane activity is ordered itself provided by relations of sense, the things we do are intelligible to ourselves, if we go in one direction instead of another inside home or through the city our direction involve inside it relations of sense, some motive internal to our elucidations of sense, to our interpretations of our own experience, provide us with a sense to do certain things instead of another’s, taking a way rather than other.

  Mundane activities evolving our human performance supposes hermeneutic illations and elucidations taking form within our phenomenological worlds in which we share relationships of several kinds with ourselves and with others intersubjectibly without yet speaking or writing but silently.

  Pertinence organize and give structure to our relations of sense in respect to others, we have and bring with us daily an acervo of overunderstanded meanings and we displace in a world previously meaningful and signified by experience and tipifications of common sense.

  Such an amalgamated work of previous meanings attributions of sense to experiences present us as relations of meanings previously shared and new relations of senses mean to us to be available to assign senses to new experiences as something subjected to constant elucidations and explicitations.

    With this brighten up and clear away we understand that our performance being a quotidian activity occur without yet evolving speaking, saying or writing.

    Hence, with the objective to understand more deeply the richness and specific senses of my theoretical concept of performativity we should imagine a silent world in which speaking and writing are not evolved, a world instead absolutely silent whence the only thing concerning us is about elucidating between us as subjects and the objects surrounding us, between us as subjectivity and the world of things which are objects to us as subject’s.

   So that we should figure out or imagine a world, a universe completely unprovided by nothing else than by subject and object.

    In this quotidian world we are subjects of our own activities and actions, and the predicaments of such are adjuncts to the subjects we are, our activities are fully defined by objects, and as soon as we decide to do something it become an object to our action, as soon as defining an end toward directing our nexts, the end itself is an object to us and between us and such an end everything is full of and surrounded by objects.

    Now when such an object or end of our activity is not something as taking a shower, cooking something, realizing to go to the movie theater at night meeting some other person, preparing a material to our tomorrow job, calling someone by phone or doing something during weekend, but an end of knowledge this relation between us as subjects and objects goes to the forefront.

    At the same time, we distinguish mundane physical objects surrounding us from objects of knowledge even when we speaks about knowledge’s around mundane things as when ordinary things becomes objects of knowledge in any case our sense of objects variate or change, the object is now less defined as the looking for or the forward of our activity but as an activity of knowledge, beyond objects as ends and as wishes or intentionality of action, a motive transform it in an object of our curiosity, we want to know something.

   As soon as the object is turned in this sense we are no longer thinking about objects as referents of our signs and languages neither as physical objects to be manipulated in the space but as object of knowledge and there is not another form of relation to objects as defined by the contrainedted relation between us as subjects and such an object than when the object turns to be an object of knowledge beyond if this object coincidence to be an ordinary object and or an objects of ends.

   A car broken, for example, considered to a mundane owner and or driver in common sense, if the owner or the driver don’t know the reason for the car to be broken he have to learn it, he should know to identify which piece is broken and why, he should start to do inferences about the causes, the mistakes or the necessities provoked it and he should learn to repair the broken piece or know how to substitute it, to do so he will have to stablish a relation of knowledge to its objects which are objects now beyond physical constrains as objects of knowledge even when evolving such a physical dimension of being ordinary objects.

   The common sense in fact recognize that certainly nothing is possible to be known without becoming an object of knowledge to us as subjects and to the subject we become as soon as taking away from the object.

   Let now be back around this points to the classics to further discussing it in modern terms.

    Aristoteles said from his first logical propositions that a perception is always perception of something and that such a something about which perception consist is prior and or before perception, something stays without being affected or modified when our perception is no longer there.

    Hegel at the same time said that knowledge is always knowledge of something, however, when he asked on the nature of such a something and or about the nature of knowledge in respect to that he answered himselves that such a something is not always precedent and or before knowledge since when knowledge consist about the knowledge of conscience the subject is in front of himselves and the supposed to be object to the subject appear as a moment of him selves and not as another thing outside and before it, the object considered outside and before is here inside and after, it is a part of subjectivity and under it our sense of subject and object change.

  But when such a something is not the conscience which usually evolves a clear sense of reflected and or repetition of the image of the object in representation as coming from sensoriality, but something less representational such as for example being, the issue of subject and object becomes highly complexed.

    Let in fact figure out such a complexity of subject and object under being regards.

   If we made struggle to make abstraction to consider by a moment that in thinking on being we are indeed a subject attempting to take distance of a moment of ourselves and we try to imagine according to our previous examples –Aristoteles regard of the object as previous to perception and or Hegel complexitation of it according to conscience—we will ask if there are something prior, previous or before and outside us in a being, to forth answer that although being supposed to be a moment of us it can also source as space and time since pure space and time without doubt are with independence to us and beyond our sensible feelings, it is something that becomes itself.

   However, at the same time, like space and time also our being become and is in time.

   The idea of being itself suppose to be in time and evoque something happening, a movement of becoming. From this point we perceive how the attempt to exteriorize time and space as a prior or previous form of the to be before us as the to be of something external, is relative, it is also in us participating in the becoming that affect our being, once we perceive the paradox we realize to abides to the fact that less representational than conscience, less affected by the repetition of an image in a reflected dimension and less affected by the impression of belonging to a subject, being always evolves a simultaneity between subject and object, perception and the object, the idea of something before or previous outside or inside after as reflected by subject-conscience when the later become to be the object of knowledge, become relative.

   Although there is a certain sense of something before us in the idea of being evolved in the to be of space and time, of substance and sources in general as well, we are already there as subjects from the beginning taking abstraction of it, producing it as a sense of our distance as subject itself.

   Being itself, in fact is an idea reflected by the subject inside subjectivity an only as such a reflection it certainly exist, the impression, the feeling in sensibility and the abstraction we have and feel of having a being is itself a reflection of the impressions in the subject we are, so that the subject we are was there at the same time with the being we feel to be or suppose to be.

  Of course we suppose that such a sense of being is something prior or itself without necessity to think about it, but such a sense is created by the reflexion of it in the subject we are already, in a few words, subject and being, or being as an object to the subject we are, is nothing more than alterity, the subject alter on another moment of himselves, a moment which suppose to be by itself certainly without taking distance to it, but figured out and or recognized only in the reflection of it by the subject simultaneously.

   What looks to be outside and before is already inside in a narrow form something allow us to recognize that such a reflexion hende involve "sensible multiplicities", its reflects and its reflections.

 Sometimes it seems to be a wonder because of the subtly levels, stratus and or folds by which sensible multiplicity pass by from being as an state of something that simply is –space, time, nature, physical sensations, our five senses-, etc, to an state of feeling sensibly to be a being, to the reflections of it in the subject.

   Indeed at this point we are committed with a task to unveil differentiated concepts of sensible multiplicities evolved away needed to be distinguished.

   In ancient philosophy it was usual to regard the sensible and overall the idea of "sensible multiplicities" as another name to what we understand as reality, in a few words it was almost a synonym of the so-called universe of the data’s of our physical senses, to see, to listen, to touch, to smile, to taste and it is impressive to see how that meaning of "sensible multiplicity" is yet the same from Hegel to derrida.

   Anything far to "palpable sensoriality" was considered by ancient and classic philosophers outside the idea of "sensible multiplicity" regarded as it was to the heterogeneous and irreducible universe of immediacy reality, a reality considered not from representation but from the near sensoriality of the bodies sensations without yet a synthesis image of it substituted by abstraction, concepts, the intellect or conscience, while it seems to be obvious to us too that there is also in it an in material dimension, the one of our subjective sensibility that continues through the logic of being and subjectivity evolved within the process of synthesis operated by abstraction, concept, intellect and conscience.

   Another concept of the sensible start to be here far to the idea of "multiple sensibility" as it was understanded as another name to simply said reality or to evoque that irreducible heterogeneity of the palpable sensoriality of our five physical senses.

   Whence, such a sensoriality or multisensorial body of experience stay working out through our impressions nor only at the level of physical senses processing but through the whole activity of synthesis evolved in experience, memory and evocation as such an activity of synthesis stablish a continuum of inmaterial and or unmaterialized levels of being, soul and the spiritual even from the abstract dimension of concepts. The distinction between these two ideas of the sensible made is then needed to understand substantial differences between ancient and classics and modern ways to understand this issue.

   Certainly moving ourselves from the relation between subject and object in everyday as the relation ground knowledge in common sense, to Aristoteles idea of perception as secondary in respect to objects and further to Hegel idea of conscience as a way to understand that such an object can be also another moment of the subject, to how subject and object become complexized and relativized under being alterity to subjectivity allow us to think that we can’t assume a fixed condition to subject and object relation in terms of what is first and or secondary since the relation itself shows to constantly variate.

   Ancient thinkers as Aristoteles and classics as Hegel were far to imagine how such an exteriorized idea of an object to the subject or of a "sensible multiplicity" showed to be a much more intangible dimensions that what they supposed as currently something entirely diluted inside our subjectivity and even within the inmaterial sensoriality of subjectivity without yet considering conscience as an issue, but through the idea of fractal mater eter and inner time evolved in the technology world of cybernetics when the etterious and inner sense of inmateriality showed to be possible outside and in front of the subject gaze as another dimension.

   However, at the same time, paradoxically, nothing was near to potentially be adecuated to our current situation on this matter than their usual ways --the classics one-to mix.

  On the one hand, seen from our modern perspective, albeit to them everything was undiferienced or seldom rarely differenced and a process of further differentiation was needed to modern concerns on subject and object relations, at the same time the idea of considering everything as moments of the same -usual within classics--is needed today to the struggles involved in the task and the challenge of delivering the contemporary forms of this complexed relation.

    Very well, we will need at this point to effazise a little more in certain differences between modern and ancient concerns on this relation. If something arrived to be highly differenced in modern science it was precisely the relation between subject and object in comparison with how that relation was delivered by ancients and classics, the relation itself evolutioned to be during long time much more defined.

   Each science and even each tendency inside certain sciences, each even specialty in modern specific sciences was defined by an stable and fixed mode to deliver and stablish how this relation should be considered and work as basis to knowledge.

   For example, in modern phenomenology we have two main and enteil forms to establish this relation as fixed, on the one hand phenomenology place itself from the perspective of conscience, meaning from the interiority of it, reflected as self-representation or extended as a form of subjectivity, on the other hand, distinguishing phenomena, from the perspective of appearance and form as presence and appearance in respect to or in contrast with a subtract and or an essence we should look for behind it.

  Any inferential Journey of knowledge may be consider as infinity with the condition of stablishing these two main principles to the relation between subject and object in the ways to start and return analysis and inferences.

   In hermeneutic we have perhaps two completely different parameters to order this relation, first we are not positioned from the perspective of conscience nor around the superficial and or apareantial expression of a phenomena to a further substrate, but we have something about which we will have to interpret, this something can be a text, a language or even reality and ourselves activities in it but as soon as considering it hermeneutically all the focuss of the relation between subject and object will be positioned around interpreting it, in the same form sucesibly semiotic, structuralism, psychoanalysis and sociology basis in stablishing a certain fix form to this relation with will always ground the forms of knowledge, like it happen also in common sense, each one of this sciences and specialties are themselves constitutionally delivered as autonomies according to how each one have delivered how such a relation is presupposed to work, functionalism, institutionalism, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, symbolic structuralism, all this forms of sociology basis their differences in between according to how subject and object are presupposed to be related as an stable and fix form of relation.

   Philosophy of language, analytical philosophy basis their differences on it too.

   We may even say that the main difference between modern science in comparison to classic and ancients can be defined as a progressive highly differentiated mode to try this relation which as previously discussed even when usually defined by certain exteriorization and distinctions between what is first and what is secondary like in Aristoteles example, was comparably highly undifferentiated between ancient and classic thinkers so that evolution of the relation between subject and object to a progressive differentiation should be consider a condition of modern thought, but there are at the same time several reasons and things today to be recalled and reconsidered in the light and way ancients and classics considered it.

   In fact, the theory of performativity as I have conceived and theorized it is focused in this.

   That to develop a research and to conduct a science research it is not sufficient to stablish a fix relation between subject and object.

   Beyond considering the defined modes that this relation acquired within several modern methodologies, the positioning point of performativity theory consist about the opposite, stablishing the necessity of maintaining this relation open to a research instead of closing it around a fixed presupposition moving to explore questions and answers around the relation itself opened as an extended and or permanent field of research and bringing it to the forefront in the ways to made and conduct specific research’s, this is what define the specificity of performativity theory, performativity itself consist about exploring it, instead of fixing one form of relation between subject and object as a premise, the research on the relation as an open field is then redefined as a telos, as a field of research.

   With this said we are ready to statement that the theory of performativity should be considered as part of and or as an specialty inside epistemology, theory of knowledge. However, not in the form of an history of science neither in the form of objectifying science by producing a theory on science, but by defining that a whole area of epistemology should consist about opening the field of subject and object relation as a field of research both theoretically and empirically.

   We should of course know well how this relation was delivered by several science tendencies and schools in the past considered as a memory of experiences but not to choice between fixed deliberations of it to work from one science or another one or specialty, but to work in an epistemological research that will consist about unfixing the relation and opening as specificity of epistemology it to the forefront of research.

    Performativity as I have conceived and defined this concept is defined as a theory of research related with the ways to conduct a research and mainly to process it during a certain duration from the starting point of beginning to define a research, to taking decisions about how to do it while not as much to do the same we ever usually do in defining research, performativity theory supposes and evolve an specific form in which we can conduct a research when defining how to put in relation subject and object comes to the forefront of the form we have realized to made it, the question about how to relate subject and object become the center of our attention. But this is not as simply as apparently looks to be.

   First, it is necessary to brighten up and clear away that I have conceived and I am working with the concept of performativity in terms and in a form that understand it beyond how performative was discussed under Austin theory of performative linguistics even if of course, as any semantique sense of performatives, there are some points of relations