Embedded Files
"PLEXUS OF INTERSTITIALITY".
Conversations with Abdel Hernández
(©by Alberto Mendez)
INTERVIEWS April 2024
INTRODUCTION.
The history of modern abstract thought has as its particular characteristic the emphasis devoted to the subject's self-reflection. This abstract thought deals with a knowing subject in front of the object as a correlate of the former. It is, in effect, the Cartesian cogito, and at the height of the abstract thought of the 20th century, the recovery of that cogito in the historical and theoretical and of course epistemological and linguistic passage that goes from Descartes to Husserl and later to Habermas through Kant. and Hegel, from Cartesian dualism and rationalism to phenomenological reflection, passing through transcendental criticism and dialectics to the pragmatics of discourse, intersubjectivity and the theory of performativity; In short, thought and rationalism identified in its critical and argumentative function of transcendental philosophical questioning and its regimes of a priori categories, cataloguing, structuring and classification of contents, of categorical syllogisms and their antinomies and mainly of the conditions of possibility of the a prioris of the philosophical and scientific knowledge of that original inquiry in the face of the real that gains its interpretive and significant value from the philosophical text and culture through the descriptive investigations of phenomenology.
The rational approach to this unresolved dichotomy between the intelligible and the sensible world, between the rational and the real, has become the "telos" of philosophy as a modern discipline since Descartes; in its autonomy as an authentic question of the subject in the face of the irreducible reality of being. For this, the modern subject as a reflective subject has turned on itself, being the fold and fold of the very tessitura of the real itself, ontic, cosic of being but also ontological as an inverted Möebius strip as it is revealed to us in the work. of Deleuze from the subject of philosophical questioning, understood as gnoseological, without stopping as such in that reverse of the symbolic unconscious and its linguistic syntax, articulated by Lacan in psychoanalysis, but, rather, in the semantics inherent to hermeneutics in the phenomenological path. by Ricoeur who revives from the semantics of Greimas and phenomenological hermeneutics those masters of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche and of course Freud.
However, in these conversations with the American intellectual of Cuban origin Abdel Hernández we will not have to dwell on the untimely obscurities of the idealisms of the 19th century nor on the shadowy sinuosities of the Freudian unconscious, nor on the logical analyzes of the Vienna Circle, even no matter how scientifically advanced the neo-positivist and post-positivist currents of the last century are proposed, but rather, Abdel Hernández's reflections will guide us through his own theoretical development and his own very unique way of reflection and systematic development of a method and analysis interpretive and performative of culture from phenomenology, hermeneutics and anthropology in the Saussurean specificities of the signifier that began at the dawn of the 20th century the linguistic turn in philosophy, epistemology, and the rest of the humanistic knowledge of culture , from whose destiny, he made Derrida's grammatology his preferred tool, and with it a large part of the post-structuralist constellation. We will approach from phenomenological description and hermeneutical interpretation to the exegesis of culture on whose path anthropology and ethnomethodology led us, to the logic of Peirce's interpretants, whose semiotics are persistently evoked in Abdel Hernández's inaugural research. We say inaugural in its pristine sense, pioneer in theoretical and phenomenological research not only in Cuba, Venezuela or North America but for its indisputable importance for anthropological studies throughout the continent and from the point of view of its own global reach.
It is essential to clarify that these conversations will not take place here between the arguments and propositions, discussed in their theoretical programs as a historical consequence of the Enlightenment thought of the 17th and 18th centuries from the advent of the scientific revolution since Bacon, Galileo, Locke and Newton and by the unavoidable decision not to leave any gap unexplored in philosophical thought and scientific knowledge and with it an emerging Cartesian dualism and a critical empiricism as a prelude to that enlightened project of modernity that culminated in Hegel but was already systematized in its beginnings by Kant. Nor will Carnap's analysis or falsificationism as demarcation criteria in Karl Popper's philosophy of science with that analytical rigor strengthened by logical thinking be found here as a task of the scientistic procedure since the beginning of the 20th century with the Vienna Circle. Anglo-Saxon since the logical-mathematical studies of Bertrand Russell who proposed not to leave a space unmapped or a liminal strip, no matter how weak, that would resist classification from a reductionist algorithm, thereby ignoring the differential, the intangible and the interstitial and whose fundamental purpose would be to process the homogeneity of universal sets. This reductionist strategy of neopositivism was denounced for its dogmatic nature by different variants of that same Anglo-Saxon approach and in particular, especially for the first time by the logician W.V. Quine in the mid-20th century through his seminal essay "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" where The former critically reviews all logical positivism since Carnap and the Vienna Circle and which can be traced back to the origins of the modern subject with Descartes and Leibniz but also through the research of Locke and Hume. Failing that, we find another answer to the same problem, in the essay by Georg H. Von Wright who also updated modal logic in the second half of the 20th century from the gaps left unresolved in the same analytical philosophy by the latter. Wittgenstein as an advent to the empiricist normative logical field of an inductive deontic. Finally, the recovered pragmatism of Richard Rorty would add to this critical review with his peculiar reinterpretation of Dewey, Wittgenstein and Heidegger in light of the new philosophical coordinates of the end of the last century from a radically anti-representationalism and anti-fundamentalism of a decidedly relativist nature.
Abdel Hernández's phenomenological research, which takes a healthy and emphatic distance, from his perspective from the characteristic spirit of these currents, will also travel, through a long journey, from the extensive and motley period of German idealism from the end of the Enlightenment to the twilight of Romanticism, in that period of time that passes in classical German philosophy from the transcendental criticism of Kant to the "Phenomenology of the Spirit" and the "Science of Logic" of Hegel and from there and through history through the Enlightenment and Romanticism until reaching the 20th century, diverse in its plurality and volume of currents and schools from the comprehensive sociology of Max Weber to the phenomenology of Husserl at the beginning of the century, passing through the Frankfurt School to the hermeneutics of Gadamer, the structural-functionalism of Talcott Parsons as well as the sociological and phenomenological interpretivism of Alfred Schutz, both of central importance in the sociological thought of the late 20th century, as well as the anthropological investigations of George Herbert Mead, will constitute the map on which the Abdel himself will draw the singularity of his own ethnomethodological investigations.
Also present in this constellation are currents such as Mead's symbolic interactionism, critical Freudo-Marxism from the aforementioned Frankfurt School to Habermas and his recovery not only of Marx and Hegel but, at the same time, of Weber himself, to which reflective sociology is summoned. of Bourdieu, the ontological hermeneutics of Gadamer and the phenomenological hermeneutics of Ricoeur, the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, the structuralism and deconstructionist post-structuralism of Derrida, the phenomenological interpretivist anthropology of Clifford Geertz, the phenomenological sociology ----again it is worth mentioning-- ---- by Alfred Schültz and the postmodern anthropology of the "Writing Culture" movement by James Clifford, George E. Marcus and Stephen A. Tyler. All of this is brought together by the postmodern anthropology of Abdel Hernández with his own proven articulation, his own substantial project of what he has described as a "Self Ethnography" or autoethnography of an ethnomethodological nature with which the Cuban-American anthropologist chooses to add particular attention to it. discipline.
On the other hand, the ethnomethodological praxis of Abdel Hernández stars in this scenario in the confluence of the most prominent voices of the philosophical and sociological thought of the 20th century, of the cultural sciences, of the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schültz, the anthropology of George Herbert Mead, Peirce's semiotics, Habermas's theory of performativity, ethics and normativism, in line with the latest generation of the Frankfurt School, as well as Austin and Searle from the Oxford School. Abdel is accompanied, in each conversation, by a thorough reading and study of Hegel's Science of Logic viewed from a rigorous approach through the deconstructionist prism of Jacques Derrida's phenomenological and grammatological analysis.
However, the book that will be developed below consists of starting from the entire previous journey through the history of philosophical and particularly sociological anthropological theoretical thought only in those moments of particular interest, essential, to understand, the semiotic and praxeological theoretical thought of the theoretical and Cuban-American academic researcher Abdel Hernández San Juan. The text that the reader will face constitutes the whole of a continuous series of interviews that we had cherished for some time but that the conditions had not yet conspired to make it possible and that only now had the necessary circumstances arisen to carry out such an undertaking. That is, the real possibility of invoking it and making tangible the fact, perhaps immaterial and inevitable, of the meeting, the conversation and the investigation --------through different digital platforms on social networks----- --- in a common effort together with a thinker, an American intellectual and academic of Cuban origin of the intellectual stature of Abdel Hernández whose authorial work is of central and fundamental importance in contemporary philosophical, anthropological and sociological theoretical reflection and of the coming years of the 21st century at even a continental level. The set of these interviews constitutes, due to its testimonial nature, the continuous flow of the same and unique conversation spread over time without major obstacles other than the pitfalls themselves woven by the complexity of that thought of Hegelian inspiration, in movement towards the concept. A thought that is not limited only to deobjectified thinking itself, since it transfers its value to the real praxis that constitutes it in act as thought as it is in itself. That is, the constant and permanent reflection of the Cuban-American sociologist and cultural anthropologist, Abdel Hernández San Juan, around the paths of his gigantic ethnomethodological edifice.
We will meet here ---first----- Abdel Hernández, conceptual artist, teacher and pedagogue, practical culturologist and social anthropologist in his early youth in Cuba at the end of the 80's, managing with a group of his art students, the sociological study of subaltern cultures, immersing and actively participating in the cultural management of heavy metal and punk rock groups in the metropolitan and suburban areas of Havana, and together with other colleagues and artists from the generation of the 80's in Cuba immersing itself in the experimental study with peasant communities in the most rural areas of Cuba in the East of the country, putting into practice, then, Lévi-Strauss's theses on the symbolic effectiveness and the genesis and structure of myths .
We will also get to know here, throughout these pages of long and pleasant conversations with a high level of theoretical complexity, following an entertaining and didactic style of presentation, Abdel Hernández, a social scientist, sociologist and practical culturologist in the 90's in Caracas. Also to Abdel Hernández, an immigrant first in Venezuela and then as a resident in Houston, Texas, United States already in the late 90's and beginning of the first decade of the 2000's. In this sense, we will meet at the same time in these interviews the Cuban-American academic Abdel Hernández, first as a visiting professor in Houston, Texas and then as a speaker at the Chicago Congress of Anthropology and at the LASA International Congress in Florida. We will meet Abdel Hernández, lecturer at Rice University and Lake Forest College, the author of books on cultural anthropology and postmodern anthropology, the theoretical representative Abdel Hernández along with his colleagues Stephen Tyler, George Marcus, Quetzil Eugenio Castañeda and Surpik Angelini within and as part of the Writing Culture movement at Rice University in Houston, Texas of postmodern anthropology. Simultaneously and with special emphasis, we will meet Abdel, colleague and friend, a social science thinker and a sensitive, kind and respectful person, concerned about the most enormous problems of culture, which the social sciences of our time demand. A man of complex, high and systematic intellectual capacity and quality due to his interdisciplinary methodological and theoretical mastery and his gigantic erudition and theoretical capacity, in addition to his indisputable status as a teacher and pedagogue. We will continue here thirty years later the conversations that once in our twenties we began to rehearse in turn-of-the-century Havana in 1990.
DISCLAIMER
(Each interview that makes up this book or better, the same interview postponed for almost three decades that we will see continue ------while at each moment of time we will return to the same themes perhaps in one way or another including new passages and innovative and novel elaborations with surprising and very unique developments-------- it has been, of course, an opportunity cherished for many years, to finally begin, now, in an unprecedented opportunity in which luck has wanted it to happen provide the appropriate circumstances for its realization. For this first meeting, the day will have to pass through the space provided by social networks without a scheduled end with the purpose of exhausting step by step in the staggered manner of modules or conceptual blocks of questions. and responses, in which they will develop in stages, each time, a similar theme, according to each new level of complexity, in the manner of Ravel's bolero or like the lei motïf of Wagner's "The Ring of the Nibelungs", always returning to a same theme, new devices and new developments, such as the very structure of the myths studied and rescued from the Amerindian tribes by the skill and faculties of the structuralist Levi-Strauss in linguistics and anthropologist for that profession that results in the living crossroads of crisscrossed paths of the philosophy and sociology of the last century. Here, these conversations will see other investigations carried out, other indications in the genre of a turn of the century period led by the leadership of the works and results of Clifford Geertz and the later postmodern school in anthropology led by James Clifford and the literary investigations and experiments introduced by the postmodern anthropology movement based at Rice University of the "Writing Culture" generation. In it we discover the names of George E. Marcus, Stephen A. Tyler, Quetzil E. Castañeda and Surpik Angelini as a group of the most prominent. In this, the name of Abdel Hernández stands out, who comes to inaugurate avant-garde thinking on the scene from the consequences left on him by art and ethnography, what he has defined as a "Self-Etnography" or autoethnography in which his findings of phenomenological sociology and hermeneutics, semiotics and theory of performativity, ethnomethodology and cultural anthropology are not the product of a mechanistic formula but the relevance of theoretical hypotheses staged and put to work in field research, its theater of operations, perhaps fundamental for the singularity of an author for his masterful mastery and transdisciplinary reach whose essential algorithms these conversations perhaps try to clear up and decode.)
Alberto Mendez Suarez, Analycal philosopher, author of Wittgentein: from the philosophy of language to the interpretation of culture, Pp 15-37. Culture and Value, Ludwig Wittgenstein, posthumous notes, Exodus, and Overcoming detours of Mind-Body dilemma through Quine-Duhem holism revisited, founder of the first circle of lacanian studies in cuba, established living in florida, international university of florida
INTERVIEWS
FIRST CONVERSATION
First question:
Good afternoon, Abdel, as you know, we have agreed on this interview space, to make known to the specialized reader but also to the general public, what has been an extensive, perhaps the longest period -----and most certainly the most unknown and unpublished yes we think in the sense of a published systematic authorial work------ of your intellectual authorial career that begins in 1992 with the writing of your first book of aesthetic theory and art criticism entitled "Borders and overflows of art" (1992). But before beginning to inquire about what your intellectual development has been like as a social scientist and as a social science theorist and above all as a critical intellectual and as an author of books on social theory, phenomenology and research methodology, I would like to first that everything we do is a little history, necessary, if it seems good to you, of that first period in which, as a graduate of the vocational art school, you begin your pedagogical and teaching practice at the same time as your anthropological practice, a pioneer in this field. of cultural and ethnological studies in Cuba but also in the research of cultural theory. I would like you to explain a little about this period of youth and training as well as your practical experience in the field during what was that anthropological experiment known as the "Pilón" project and later systematized in a teaching and pedagogical project in the Hace workshop. What was all that? And how did the influence of Levi-Strauss's anthropology and what the structuralist movement meant in your first anthropological investigations determine you in your beginnings, first as a student and then as a teacher, as a cultural theorist and researcher? What did it mean in your intellectual career, in your radicalization, if you allow me the term, and how did you achieve that gigantic leap from young conceptual artist to practical culturologist? Could you tell me a little about this interview? For the reader who already knows you, it will be like a recapitulation and for the reader who is approaching your work for the first time, it will undoubtedly be an invaluable introduction.
Good morning Alberto,
Thank you. Yes effectively. I conceived and understood those two projects from the beginning as fieldwork practices just as you describe and have understood.
These fieldwork practices, however, although they had at their center the theorization of the concept of culture, were not properly practices of anthropology but rather of sociology of our own Western and modern societies. Let us not forget that as I have specified in “Rumbos”, I see the Hispanic societies of the continent, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America, including Cuba and the Antilles, as Western societies, by which I understand a certain level of social differentiation of the systems and subsystems in the sense indicated. by Parson, of highly differentiated development and evolution of the person and the self in the sense pointed out by Jean Piaget and in the sense of the studies on social differentiation and formation of the self by Jean Duvinaud, in terms of specialized and professional technical reproduction and transmission in the sense of the secularization process in Weber and the social consciousness and social division of labor in Durheim, and that in the face of this, decolonization is an impossible racial myth and in reality a mythological mirage of the asymmetric economic domination relations of neocolonialism, a need for the latter.
They were therefore practices of sociology, not anthropology, speaking in a disciplinary way with high rigor. They were, however, forms of sociology that had at their center of attention so much and in such a focused and prioritized way the concept of culture, its theorization and understanding, that when one compares them with what the sociology of culture has been, one recognizes that the latter never differentiated field work as we understand it in the tradition of participant observation from a so-called field of culture understood socioculturally in which there is not the spatiality that there was in “Har” (urban) and in “Pilón” (rural) that distinguishes field work in terms of participant observation as an immersion in a spatialized social world of social groups in which the world of life passes between day and night seen from the situational universe of everyday life and the symbolic intercorporeal and intergestural interactions between social actors, when understanding this difference, should we talk about a new sociology of culture? Or should we rather talk about a new cultural anthropology?
I have searched about this in the tradition of both disciplines and I have certainly found research understood as cultural anthropology developed for example in the United States by Anglo-Saxons on cultural phenomena, for example, suburban in large modern or rural cities or American folklore, as well as I have found in Europe forms of urban sociology on modern city issues.
In this sense in which immersing and studying a Western social and cultural group is a way of understanding ourselves and our culture, we could speak of a self-sociology and a self-anthropology.
Now, in the type of field work that I conceived and carried out with these two projects, it is important to note two things: on the one hand, semiotic theory had much more relevance and participation than in the entire previous tradition of sociology and anthropology, While seen from semiotics, on the other hand, it has never, even where it focused on media or culture, ever developed as a social science in a strict methodological sense, much less involving field work in tradition. of participant observation, therefore, should we also talk about a new semiotics of culture?
It is for all this that I think about a new discipline that I call cultural theory. And why cultural theory and not culturology? I like the concept of culturology but this, like the sociology of previous culture and the semiotics of previous culture, lacks the immersive spatialities of the tradition of decisive and main participant observation in nature that those two projects that you are interested in had. you refer.
At that time I spoke precisely to make the distinction of a practical culturology. But today I'm talking about cultural theory.
We must accept, however, I believe as the years go by, looking back on today's experience, that the interest that exists in both projects, especially in the social sciences, pays attention to the very original and unusual fact in those two projects that Certain art media, such as photography, video, installation display and performance, become part of and intertwine with the research methodology both in field work, that is, mediating the process of participant observation, and in the rhetoric of staging that field work, that is, results of social sciences in new media, not only the book, the monograph and the film, which also characterizes my sociology and, as you call it, my urban anthropology of that period. .
On the other hand, although a sociology more than an anthropology, I could accept in the same way that George Helbert Mead being disciplinary a sociologist not an anthropologist, you call his sociology anthropology. Well, I would say that if we accept that Helbert Mead's sociology is an anthropology then we would have to accept that mine is also, even more so.
Let us not forget that I gave a lecture at the beginning of January 1997 on “doing” which I gave in the bag lectures main room of the anthropology department invited by Stephen A Tyler, that lecture was before even beginning the curatorial program of conferences and exhibitions, and it was about “Doing” as a project focusing precisely on how in that experience I developed new and experimental ways of immersion of social sciences between social and cultural groups in terms of methodology, and that that conference, which was actually two, generated a theoretical discussion and a very valuable and important dialogue in which I, Quetzil Eugenio Castañeda, Stanford Carpenter, Surpik Angelini, George Marcus and James Foubiam, among others, participated.
On the other hand, you talk to me about the structuralism of its influence on me. Yes, certainly, I must accept it, that was how it was in the beginning and I believe in a certain way the structuralist imprint is still relevant to me.
The absent structure of Umberto Eco was important at that time to read and study, the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, and the anthropology of Claude Levi Strauss, although let us not forget that at that time I also read Edward Sapir, linguist anthropologist, and Edward Burnet Taylor, anthropologist. focused on the concept of culture, in addition to the fact that I read The Golden Bough by James Frazer, its three volumes, however, I would say that if structuralism has had an important impact on me and if it has had since those years, it was really above all Through, on the one hand, semiotic theory, I read a lot of semiotics in those years, from the Prague circle beginning with Jacobson and many other Czech linguistics and theorists, passing through Barthes's The Fashion System, to structural and phenomenological semiotics of the objects such as Abraham Moles and Jean Boudrillard, I also read in those years semiotics of literature, art, reception, the sign.
Furthermore, on the other hand, I would say that my readings in linguistics at that time were also decisive, I read Chomsky's universal syntactics, I read Benveniste, Martinet and Hemslev, all linguists directly or indirectly as indebted to Saussure as semiotics itself. modern. Peirce and Saussure would then be the references here.
And yes, certainly Levi Strauss, of whom I was especially interested in his more theoretical and abstract texts, such as “The place of anthropology in the social sciences”, or his lectures on anthropology and linguistics and structure and linguistics, as well as his responses both in debates with other social scientists such as in response to Louis Charbonier, I also read Adam Shaft's semantic theory.
In short, many things that I read and studied in that first period could be mentioned, but I believe that the practices of field work projects that I conceived and did at that time are unique, my own elaborations, original, but yes, without a doubt a structuralist influence at that time. I agree
In reality, it is an honor and a pleasure to see myself before this interview conducted by you, who are not only one of the most brilliant Cuban thinkers inside and outside the academy on these topics about which you ask me, in addition to what I consider, just regarding this first question that without a doubt, you are the one who best understood how I conceived and understood those experiences or projects from the past that I today call remote
And I don't think I'm exaggerating when calling it “a remote past”, we are talking about 1988 precisely with regard to pilón and 1990 with regard to doing, that is, 34 years in one case and 36 years in the case. another looking back.
A whole life has passed Alberto, one has not been the same for a long time, not only because one has emigrated several times to other cultures, in my case Venezuela and the United States, but because maturity, adulthood and more recently proximity to what they call the elderly, with respect to a very early youth, both experiences occurred one year and the other two years after graduating from the formal studies of fine arts that you refer to, which was in 1987
Furthermore, because of the aspect of your question that refers to what you call the leap from conceptual artist to theorist of hard sciences and social scientist, we must go back even further, to what that transition was like from late adolescence to early adolescence. youth, a part of which occurred when they were still in the last years of those formal studies and these others of pilón and doing after 1987.
It is easier for me to answer you what that process of beginning to venture into the theory of culture and the practice of a sociology, mine, was like than for you, a bit like you also do with George Helbert Mead who was a sociologist, not an anthropologist, you call anthropology, in which I accompany you by agreeing that certainly as a sociology of culture and a cultural theory, it is also, and has begun to be since then, an anthropology, as was the influence on me of structuralism, it is even easier to talk to you about those two projects, to respond to you, to explain, and even to explain to myself what you call that leap from conceptual art to theorist of hard sciences, social scientist, ethnomethodologist, anthropologist
And in a way, although logically the different aspects of your question are also linked in my experience, and I must manage to explain to myself how they are connected and intertwined, because they certainly are, they are questions that never fail to evoke a certain thematic parallelism in So much entering fully into academic issues of social sciences completely distances us from conceptualism in the arts, and vice versa. But I will try to please your question by trying to locate myself or find, or find again, because of course it is something that I have asked myself many times, what and how all of this is related. The Leap, as you call it, and what a leap it certainly was, was a great leap.
Let's see. First, conceptual art is not taught in the art academy. Nobody teaches you to be a conceptual artist in the sense that on the one hand it is not a subject in the academic curriculum, there is no subject or subject in teaching that is called conceptual art, conceptualism in art is neither more nor less than a tendency, although I sometimes taking this concept that both Derrida and Bourdieu attributed to Bachelard, I have called it an episteme in the sense that it could be said that it is a way or mode of cutting down the world and seeing it from a certain specific sieve. . So being a conceptual artist, leaning towards it, choosing it, directing yourself in that direction, is a choice, a preference, even a taste, not a clear whim, nor something casual or random, but without a doubt something very personal to whoever decides it, is choosing a path among thousands of others that could be chosen in art.
But once you choose it, once you take that path, it positions you in a certain way even in relation to teaching, in relation to what you understand by learning, even in relation to how to conceive or understand didacsis, because, I try to explain this in a Synthetically, the academies of fine arts are structured in terms of an academic curriculum in subjects that have at their center, which are even subdivided into subjects that what separates them from one another is technique, what the Greeks called technec, a concept if you want, a family of crafts, because learning a technique is acquiring a mastery of craftsmanship, that is, the apprentices are placed in a certain way, their bodies and their dedication times are placed with each subject on the path of a technique that has also a certain tradition.
When you teach that technique, it is not the same as the techniques, for example in instrumental sciences, where what justifies that the proper exercise of that technique must be like this is the result; if you do not properly learn to extract a tooth, the piece will break and break. The patient's gum becomes inflamed. If you don't learn that the water in the carburetor must be changed, the car engine overheats and leaves you stranded on the highway. You either learn engineering techniques one way and not another, or the bridge falls down. when the cars pass by, or the building catches fire if you are an electrical engineer, you can be a better or worse civil, naval, or electrical engineer, to the extent that you have more or less skill in solving problems with more efficient solutions, but learning a technique It is learning something that is like that in only one way or the ship will sink, in art it is not like that, the Greek technec, which the Greeks by the way understood to be related to making which in turn they understood to be related to poiesis, in the case of art academies the bridge does not fall, the gum does not swell, the ship does not sink, the building does not catch fire.
Neither anyone nor anything stipulates that it must be in this way and not in that other, the only thing that establishes a rule, what Bourdieu called the rules of art, that learning or teaching must be in this sense and not in that other. of a certain technique, is nothing other than a tradition, he, like others have done it, therefore, in art academies the curriculum is organized in such a way that what the subjects do is put the apprentice, put his body and its time, on the path of some techniques and the tradition of those techniques.
Conceptualism flatly denies this. And by denying it, he denies the entire tradition relative to how art has been traditionally understood, therefore he denies the tradition of art as a tradition of techniques.
The fact that things are made in one technique and not in another is determined by the idea, by the concept, the first are instrumental, the techniques are available instrumentally from the concept and the idea, but the body and time are not given , on the path of some techniques and their traditions.
It is thus contrary to the entire tradition of art teaching but at the same time it is impossible to transform art academies into conceptual art academies because these would collapse, therefore, a conceptualist can found his school, make his own school and organize his teaching as a teaching of conceptual art but you cannot change art academies for conceptual art academies, you can at most in its most possible expression, found your own school of conceptualism, where techniques are learned according to the ideas or concepts you have , these, presumably, can be had without having learned this or that technique, you can have an idea or a concept, a thought, and then decide in which technique you communicate it, and only then learn what you need to learn to be able to take it to complexion.
So here we have a first genealogy of the reasons in my personal experience for what you call jumping. Once it is the idea or the concept that matters, you ask yourself, well, what is the school of the concept? What is teaching conceptualism? It is nothing other than teaching to have an idea, to have a concept, to conceptualize. , to ideate and to think, in this sense, what is the difference between teaching how to think like a conceptualist and teaching how to think like a psychologist, a philosopher, a sociologist?
If your school is the school of concept, of conceptualization, why not follow the path of tradition that is specific to the concept and not to artisanal techniques? Shouldn't he who must orient himself according to how he conceives ideas, how he conceives concepts and how he conceptualizes, shouldn't he who must learn to think, know what conceptualizing thought has been?
How can you teach conceptualizing without teaching Hegel, Kant, Aristotle, Leibniz, how can you teach conceptualizing without teaching Saussure, Benveniste, Martinet, Chomsky? How can you teach conceptualizing without teaching Piaget? Without teaching Peirce , and so on, sociology, anthropology, etc.
If the concept is freed from techniques, you do nothing other than put your body and your time on the path and in the tradition of the concept and conceptualization, and that path, in the same way that conceptualism denies the teaching of art as It has also been denied that you can train yourself in the tradition of the concept by learning the tradition of what the concept must instrumentally dispose of, which are the techniques, it makes no sense to give your body, to put yourself in the tradition of the techniques, when you have decided to be a conceptualist, you have decided to put your body, put yourself and put your time, in the tradition of concept and conceptualization, you will not find, in a few words, the path of concept and conceptualization in the tradition of art ever, You will undoubtedly find it outside of art, in philosophy, in linguistics and in the social sciences.
This on the one hand. When, even in that remote time of the transition from late adolescence to early youth, I decided on conceptualism and understood what I have just explained, the next thing I asked myself was, well, but even, and why do I have to have something that In other words, in the way in which it is seen in art? What they call exnihilo creation, that is, in art you are supposed to create something from the background of nothing, from a bit of formless matter, clay for example. , you are supposed to bring up a figure and the figure you make is supposed to be what you have to say or what you are going to say.
If you have chosen, preferred, if you have decided on conceptualism you have chosen a path contrary to it. So I asked myself, why should I have a concept or an idea that emerges from the bottom of nothing? If the path is the concept and I must conceptualize that concept, it will not come out as the figure that arises from a formless matter, something that is born on the depth of nothingness, that concept must arise on the contrary from immaterial matter, from the immateriality itself of the conceptualization process, where you do not work with matter but with something that is immaterial, dematerialized, something that is a thought and that was how I came up with my concept that at that time I called “the inversion of the creation process.”
I said, it is about reversing the creation process, instead of having something to say that arises from a material, we have something to think that arises from an investigation, and what is an investigation? I asked myself then, something that must arise from the posing of some questions and the posing of a research problem, therefore, we must reverse the creation process, before creating we must investigate or in any case understand that creating is nothing other than investigating based on questions and based on definitions of research problems.
The matter of the concept is therefore thought itself, I must then think and investigate. Pose research problems.
There you have another aspect that was at the base of the jump. But on the other hand there are things that are very typical of my individual experience. First, this just explained did not happen merely like that, to the same extent that I was arriving at those conclusions simultaneously, one thing came along with the other, I was already at the same time and in parallel reading linguistic theory, semiotic theory, philosophy, sociology, anthropology.
That is to say, since then I was already reading hard sciences and even when I was still doing conceptual art I already knew that I would also leave that, in 1988 I knew that I would leave art, I knew from then on that the path of my life, that meaning of my life would be theoretical thinking, I even knew that not just any theoretical thinking, but the hardest theoretical thinking, the hard sciences.
I already knew it, but it was still a process that had to take its shape. So if there is a transition there I already knew it since 1988 but it was not until 1992 that my authorial works began to be books on philosophy and social sciences, sociology and anthropology.
On the other hand, if you review what the conceptual art that I made was and what it was like, you will see that as a conceptual artist it had certain characteristics and I believe that in those characteristics you can also find answers to your question about what you call a leap. If we review some relevant aspects of what my conceptual art was like, we will see clear seeds of the path I took as a theorist and social scientist.
In those early days, around the age of 18, we were heading to inland towns and it often happened to me that I saw reality, things, objects, artifacts, fragments of reality in architecture, in a gate, a façade of a house, a patio or attic of accumulated things or a relationship with a gable roof and several facades and I saw in front of my eyes what for me was a work, I thought that there were in reality itself such as it was, perfect works, constructions or relationships of things in which my ideal work was achieved and consummated without any authorial intention having intervened, I imagined that considered as an author's work that was the maximum, they were simply provincial towns, sometimes rural.
As the years went by, thinking retrospectively about that taste, I asked myself if perhaps my authorial thought was either photographic or cinematic, filmic, because both photography and cinema often consist of just capturing something in reality as it is. It is picked up by the gaze, then I also thought that it could be due to an analytical philosophical or philosophy of language interest of mine on the relationship between language and reality, specifically a certain predilection for a conceptualist nominalism, that is, I am referring to the idea of naming something. , to designate it, would therefore be something like ready mades in reverse.
However, there was always something in the type of things, not everything interested me equally or with the same intensity, there was in a certain way behind everything a certain reading that had its accent on a certain anthropological dimension in reality, that is, it seems that the sense of culture, of man and of a certain aesthetic that could be read behind what was chosen was relevant so that I understood that my choices were nothing more than linguistic anthropological readings of reality.
To tell the truth, later I understood that if I was interested in what was behind it, that is, the culture and the human being that generated it, although at one point I doubted it, that is, I thought that my choices and readings were enough for me, the interest being more aesthetic than that. properly social sciences, but neither one thing nor the other or rather both things were at the same time, in parallel and simultaneously without excluding one another.
In fact, years before this occurred to me, from the age of 13 to 15, it is true that my attention and interest always fell on everyday topics and above all that I found attractions in popular culture or folklore, domino players, buses. urban with their windows wet from the rain, certain relevant urban places such as the coppelia or the boardwalk where people went to sit or meet people, that is, certain customs and rituals in the culture, especially everyday, repetitive and typifiable, caught my attention, Just as I was also fascinated by studying and understanding how the so-called naive, naïve, popular or folklore artists saw reality and represented it.
Certainly over the years I realized that it was not the representations themselves that interested me but actually that live popular culture, going to it as it is to get to know it and study it instead of understanding it through its visual representations.
That direct interest was first reflected in the fact that I began to do experiments for them, that is, directed only at that popular culture, to be presented in it, in its spaces just as those spaces were the ones chosen by me, which became my works, which in turn They documented how these people reacted to the fact that I would nominally name, designate or choose things in the reality of their world as they were and treat them as my works, adding texts, indicative numbers and photographs to them.
After two conceptualist presentations on everything previously explained, that is, made in their live spaces as they were without modifying anything in them other than inserting my readings and analysis, I came to two conclusions, the first, it was not a mere aesthetic and visual interest, not even merely nominalist, although all of these were relevant components of my interest in themselves, they did not please me without something that went beyond, understanding that culture through the social sciences, studying it as one studies a culture in field work, my interest was first and foremost, I found complete satisfaction practicing sociology and anthropology, theorizing culture and doing field work.
And that was how my sociology began on the empirical side, but it also had a theoretical side at the same time. What was I really interested in? What was I reading and writing at that time theoretically?
Well, to tell the truth, the theoretical side of all this had its evolution and above all it did not acquire a definitive form but only with time, several theoretical investigations were carried out at the same time and it was not seen among all of them which would dominate over the others until years later. after.
Theoretical linguistics was extremely necessary and exciting to me because understanding language at an abstract level meant developing logical and analytical schemes that gave me resources to order, classify and coherently articulate everything, although I was continually faced with the dilemma of working theoretically with parameters. linguistic and in contrast in the concrete visual and material being about phenomena not always and not necessarily linguistic but rather spatial, material and visual, to translate into the non-verbal those logical principles of order that I acquired through a theoretical linguistic reflexivity, I I assisted with the theoretical semiotics that, as well as linguistics, I dedicated myself to reading and studying during those years.
However, semiotics, articulated mainly as a science of communication, reduced the sign even where it was not verbal but visual to a relationship between sender, message, receiver, and it turned out that the same empirical question in which I was involved in the fact The very thing of selecting things in reality as they were was moving away from the idea of having something to emit that was something like a message to someone, towards theoretical graphs, that is, logical pictograms and tables.
It abstracted logical/linguistic principles on the one hand but had to connect them in those pictograms with non-verbal phenomena, which in itself presupposed translations or translations of something thought about the verbal Signifier/meaning/referent, language, speech, grammar, syntacsis, discourse, morpheme, lexeme, phoneme, etc., to something thought about the non-verbal, as well as semiological logical pairs such as denotation and connotation, syntagm and paradigm, code, coding and decoding, etc., had to logically abstract them by applying them to something in which that there was not necessarily a message or a receiver.
Certainly the mere conceptual nominalism of reality meant that what was chosen as it was, not being a sign conceived as a message of something aimed at someone, nevertheless acquired such dimensions by the mere being chosen, although these were caused by the mere play between the name and what is named as well as by orienting it to an other ideal or idealized in anticipation.
In this way my theoretical logical diagrams and pictograms tended to lean towards the inferential deductive logical nominalism more appropriate to a matter correlative to the relationship between language and reality, representation and object, concept, subject and object.
Since I did not find all the answers in purely linguistic reflexivity, my linguistic research was leaning towards pure logic of a nominalist/conceptual nature, a matter mostly of philosophy of language, on the one hand, on the other, the theory of language stood out for me. the language/culture relationship versus the nature/culture relationship and it was on this side that from theoretical linguistics the importance of this in the definition and reflexivity of the concept of culture was left in my preferences, something similar happened to me with semiotics, By removing the semiotic tables from their usual subordination to the reductionist pragmatics of the sender, the message and the receiver, my interest in the semiological sign and in semiotic logical pairs evolved in a direction similar to that of theoretical linguists, the question of language and reference, denotation and connotation, although with a difference, certain areas of semiotics were more coincident with the type of phenomena that was of my empirical interest to what I was referring to at the beginning, both prosemics and kinesics, recognized areas of semiology were in charge as studies of non-verbal phenomena, on the one hand of spaces and on the other of gestures and the material world.
Thus theoretical linguistics and theoretical semiotics were acquiring in my logical pictograms, diagrams and tables an increasingly abstract logical content, nominalist philosophical on the one hand and relevant above all for the conceptualization, definition and abstraction of my reflexivity on the concept of culture.
But this was neither all nor enough.
On the other hand, if there was neither verbal language in the strict sense nor sender, message and receiver, what concept of work was I thinking about when, in reality itself as it was, I found the works that for me were ideal?
It was then necessary to define an important graph in my research of that period, what I then called, as I told you, “the inversion of the creation process”, that is to say, reversing the steps of what is understood by the creation process, instead of having something to say. or some message to order for some recipient, it was about selecting or choosing in reality, but with what criteria and to do what in it and with it, with that reality or fragment of reality chosen?
Therefore, it was necessary to have a research problem in advance and what was done or chosen to respond to that investigated problem, which, like an equation in philosophical logic, had to be a solved problem.
But what implications did this have? The questions of research methodology and epistemology of knowledge became more important than the motives of a creation, who should then be the creative author?, a researcher in reality and of reality therefore. Therefore he could not be understood as merely a creator in the traditional sense, as a researcher he had to be a practical culturologist, as I called him at that time, but that practical culturologist would ultimately make works, he should then be something like a maker if we go back to the Greek thought we accepted poiesis or poiein which literally meant what I was looking for, practical culturologist or maker were two names for the same thing, the first emphasized that it is research into theorizing culture based on the study of social groups. understood as cultural groups doing field work, the second emphasized that this researcher essentially produced authorial works, and was therefore also a maker in the Greek sense of poiein.
As it becomes obvious here then all the knowledge of theoretical linguistics and semiotic theory had to be integrated into a theory of culture that would first of all be a sociology and it was thus that my readings and studies of sociology came to the foreground, also of anthropology.
The practical or doer culturologist, of course, was the name I gave to my own research and my work, but later the question arose of how to teach and transmit that knowledge and how to practice it in research, that is, in methodology, therefore I had to theorize. a pedagogical system or rather a theory of experimental didacsis, of learning.
However, there were still questions not fully formulated and still unresolved problems. What were these? It will be necessary to explain these problems that we could understand as logical diatribes and what theoretical investigations were derived from them before explaining how I later conceived this experimental didactic theory.
Let's see in principle what resulted from these experiences on the empirical level: I made selections in reality as I explained at the beginning, I chose things exactly as they were in people's daily lives, people, as I said before, popular, that is, people who were not educated or In the humanities, neither in the social sciences nor in art, I selected fragments of their reality that could be considered of two types or one in which two things were assumed, on the one hand what I chose was an expression of material culture and visual but not necessarily still at that time things produced by those people with an aesthetic or communicative intention but just, as I said before, land, portals, patios, facades, interfacades, attics, storage places, accumulation areas, spatial distributions, roofs , etc., these terrains or areas, these fragments of material culture of course presupposed at the same time typifiable situations as well as situational micro interactions, some of the latter could be related to functionally localizable autonomous activities, for example, washing clothes and hanging them, What was I doing? I selected sets, fragments, areas separable from each other as codifiable or more precisely legible as works. The subjects who made them did not, of course, make them as works, they were just their accumulations, their spatial solutions, their modes of divide spaces, it was I who, on the one hand, saw them as ideal works and it was I who, naming them when designating them, logically defined them as my works, obviously what I defined as my work was not merely what was found there but the relationship between what was found there and my selection of it, therefore, it was my reading that made it a work, therefore I added written logical texts, analytical writings and photographs, but by placing these analytical texts and photographs in those same chosen spaces, it generated situational reactions as well as microinteractions caused Due to the modification or intervention that I made, a juxtaposition or superposition was then created between the situation and microinteractions that were there in itself related to what was chosen before my nominal selection and the situations or microinteractions caused by me, therefore that had three levels, the first level was my observation and analysis of the situation as it was before me, these observations in some cases I included them in my interventions, and on the other hand, studies that I did of their reactions as well as the documentation of the latter through photographs or videos, the visual physical result was logical installations between language and reality that included text and photographs before and after the reactions and thus what was born was what in a conference at rice university bag lectures Main room In January 1997 I called the triggers, these were nothing more than analysis of how these experimental forays became vehicles that facilitated the study of situations of social groups in terms of research methodology.
As I said at first, these incursions provoked were still surface studies, a kind of exchange was generated between me and those people as a dialogue focused on giving and receiving, but the interaction was still superficial in the sense that the social groups did not They were still selected by a sociological cut, but still in a first logical, nominal conceptual moment, neighborhoods, families, residential spaces.
But very soon this had to change, the initial emphasis on a fragment or selection of visual and spatial material culture was giving way to a more integral or holistic exploration and less visual perceptual, the analysis of the situations and the microinteractions was leading me towards the idea of social groups understood as cultural groups, and the logical nominal conceptual investigation was yielding to a sociological investigation of cultural theorization, the initially photographic, cinematic sequence of juxtaposition between situations prior to me and subsequent situations provoked and documented was yielding to a methodology of how to conduct immersive research, that is, field work.
Upon settling in Venezuela, however, the linguistic dimension of experience defined as intersubjective communication between speakers as in hermeneutic terms, the ways in which speech and writing, alphabetic language participate in the configuration of senses and meanings of social experience of social and cultural groups, well understood from ideal types constructed or considered empirically in the understanding of concrete forms of cultures, or simply at the theoretical level, I come to the foreground of my attention and priority within my phenomenological, hermeneutic and sociology of culture. That is to say, the verbal and alphabetic, not prioritized in the first period, became important in the second.
What things did I study from sociology in those two projects? On the one hand, in Pilón, I focused on studying first the coastal town and then 98 mountain settlements, thus studying the daily life of the town, the situational interactions, customs, habits, rituals. , I studied the religion, a specifically regional religion called cordon spiritualism, I concentrated on it, although there was also the Yoruba religion in the area and of course Christian, which is the regent, as for the rural area, it was ten months of work countryside between mountain and coastal farmers.
Then in DO I studied the social and cultural group of rockers, rockers then called geeks or geek geeks, as well as the social group of punks.
This is in reference to what I individually studied through my own practice of field work experience in participant observation, however, I can say that beyond what I studied individually, I also learned widely about other topics and social and cultural phenomena through submicroprojects that under my direction were developed by my guests who included both art students and artists.
There are topics covered by my students in their immersions that, although the immersions were developed by them, I, as project director and as a teacher at the HACER Workshop, directed, let's not forget that Hace was a program based on my lectures on cultural theory, semiotic theory and methodology of field research, therefore the immersions that were being developed and their results were discussed in my classes, in this way I can say that my knowledge acquired as a result of Making also includes urban social groups such as skateboarders, neighborhoods urban residential areas, relevant urban sites such as copellia, entertainment groups, night bartenders, bicleteros. etc
INTERVIEW WITH ABDEL HERNANDEZ
FIRST MODULE (FIRST CONVERSATION)
Second question (2)
Taking into account as a starting point the entire almost detailed tour that you have developed in your first response to the initial question of our conversation, I would like to ask you, Abdel, if you don't mind, not only to give a little history in these initial moments of our interview but to specify more specifically the coordinates in which it arises and develops, its genesis and subsequent evolution as well as the theoretical framework that shaped it from a general point of view and more specifically from your personal and intellectual choices.
Since it seems pertinent to me for the purpose of these conversations, to underline and highlight not only the theoretical objectives and assumptions specifically explained but, rather, highlight the implicit development, the twists and overlaps, of your intellectual development, its predeterminations and its autonomy, just as your own development has been from the context in which you emerged and within which your own development as a critical intellectual first evolved when you took your first steps as an art theorist and as a cultural researcher.
I think it would be very helpful for your readers if you could develop your reflection a little about it, taking into account the emphatically Marxist character of the political context in which all this occurs in Havana at the end of the 80's and by the way of the fundamental role that your theories of the "maker" come to play in that historical moment of the first authentic artistic avant-garde within the period of the Cuban revolution that became critically aware and that became ideologically independent from the most official discourse, proposing its own narrative with its own telos. Could you draw, Abdel, for our readers, in the space of these conversations, the entire critically intellectual panorama, in which all this arises and is inscribed and later the horizon of expectations that emerges for artists, intellectuals and researchers and how this context influenced in your subsequent decision making and in the range of theoretical and investigative possibilities that opened up to the young Abdel Hernández of the 90's.
Thanks Alberto.
Complex question although it may seem simple, above all complex, at least for me, precisely because it evokes or suggests a certain idea of context or contexts, and one of the things that characterize my personal evolution as an intellectual, my choices and choices, as you call it. , in the subsequent development of my theories and my theoretical work, lies precisely in the fact that I became increasingly interested and positioned more and more in a phenomenological perspective among other things because I found in phenomenology, as well as in hermeneutics, but above all in phenomenology in order not to leave a certain suspicion towards a certain hermeneutic with a historicist tone from which I distance myself, an adequate balance between the subjective and the objective, (I do not fail to remember here my hermeneutical concept of adequacy as I develop it in my book “The Enigmas of the Ground” and as I develop it in “Rumbos: Explorations in Cultural Anthropology” our second book of dialogues together), especially appropriate insofar as seeing the meanings or ideas of the contexts from the texts, that is, found in phenomenology due to the proximity that this presupposes of the subject with respect to the object in epistemological and cognitive terms, to that understanding of the object, that which is in our attention, according to how it makes its presence known to us, according to how it is accessible to us according to a certain phenomenal, to its phenomenality, which in textualist terms with regard to our senses of context, is nothing other than understanding contexts from the texts, however, not to search in the texts as they make references to the contexts denotatively or descriptively, not to searching in the texts for collections of facts according to which the text remains as a mere reflection or a mere representational refraction subordinated to the objectivity of an idea of reality in which the text is trapped as its reflection, but precisely in the opposite sense, Because of the way in terms of the senses and meanings that the text generates, the meaning of contexts cannot be separated from semantics.
If we are Peircians in this, reality itself in all its objectivity is nothing other than a succession of inferences given by interpretants who are in the place of their objects. On the one hand, the meaning of contexts cannot be separated from how they are. semantically produced the meanings in the text, on the other hand, being through texts, statements, phrases, alphabetic language, writing, words, speech, or visual languages, that we understand each other about the experience, that we make ourselves explicit in what we want to say or that we elucidate what others tell us or tell us, the very work of the generation of meanings whose genesis occurs in the text, the work through which we understand ourselves through the mediation of texts, establishes on the side here , that is, within, in the structural order of the text, a hermeneusis and a semiosis that are nothing other than reality itself, hence the intertwined relationship between phenomenology and hermeneutics, if we understand each other through oral or written, visual texts. or sounds, understanding ourselves and giving meaning to what we say symbolically coordinates the experience, both the experience that relates us to others intersubjectively and our individual and solitary experience between day and night, our own practice, what we do or don't do. In this way, reality is configured through language since it interpretively coordinates the relationship between symbols and experience.
I must add here, which possibly comes from his interest in Gadamer, that Clifford Geertz in "The Interpretation of Cultures" maintains that symbols coordinate, something that I liked about Geertz from the beginning, which is why it is not in vain that precisely that paragraph cites him. In my first book if you go and read there I quote this from Geertz, although I must say that even in Geertz a separation between language and facts prevails too much, it is Stephen A Tyler who in this sense maintains something more pertinent to how I I understand.
In short, because for many reasons, most of them theoretical and intellectual, although I believe that reasons also related to my personality, my temperament, my preferences and tastes are not negligible here, the fact that my choice was phenomenology and this makes us suspicious of the idea of context, talking about context seems and becomes complex to me.
However, I must recognize, and I believe that your question is related in a way that is both beautiful and profound to this complexity, that I did not see it in that way as it then matured from the beginning, but that it had a development and an evolution, I could say that this turn is already mature as a definitive choice in 1993, living in Caracas, therefore the challenge here to answer your question would be to try to explain in what ways I came to it and how I read or see it. then the evolution of my budgets, parameters, intellectual development before this perspective reached its complete maturity.
Let me first say what this step of mine was like, deciding on phenomenology. It did not happen in any way but gradually. After much exploring phenomenological perspectives, even where semiotics contains something of that phenomenological proximity to the object, let us not forget that Peirce said it clearly at Harvard in his 1902 course, as I quote in the entry to my book "The Correlate of World",
“Phenomenology is the first positive science, it is the normative science”
Even I maintained a certain equidistance because something of our relationship to the world or worlds was missing for me in the usual phenomenology, but reading Alfred Shutz, a book compiled by Ilse his wife and Luckman, "Knowledge in the worlds of life everyday", I found what I was missing, what I still objected to the usual phenomenology, I found it resolved in Shutz and through Shutz I then returned to my phenomenological readings and then I felt ready, I felt that there was my position, in fact, Still until a certain period, due to my distance from a certain habitual phenomenology, I kept separate, I did not allow the issues of micro methodology in sociology, ethnomethodology, to be completely diluted in issues of phenomenology.
It was Shutz, his work, that made me understand that it is phenomenology in the first and last instance that most completely encompasses my way of thinking and theorizing. I then accepted that although ethnomethodology is not entirely phenomenology, the latter is broader than that and ethnomethodology must remain subject to the social phenomenology initiated by Shutz just as in general I returned to my readings of already abstract phenomenology and recognized myself as a phenomenologist.
But to understand the development to which you refer we must go further back because it happened, what I say about Shutz in Caracas in 1993 just after concluding my first book which in many ways was already phenomenological but not without many reservations.
It seems to me that the genesis of this development must be found in certain questions that focused my attention from that first period to which you refer.
I will then try to answer you by contrasting between how I saw things then and how things supposedly were.
The very question of emphasis, of accent, of over-attention, of the tremendous interest and priority that the question about the relationship between the self and the social, between the individual and the collective, acquired in my thoughts and theories of that time, but above all everything seen as a relationship between what we consider internal, internal to the subject, what Derrida called "the ground of our inner world", and what we consider external, since my first 30 philosophical notebooks, this topic was at the center of my attention and then became, from the first drafts of the manuscript of my first book "Borders and Overflows of Art: Advent of transarte" back in 1989, the first and main topic of the book written in three years, already written in 1992 and concluded in 1993 in Caracas.
If you remember, if you read this book, I think I even talk about it in one of my educational videos, you will see that what I did there was comb, pan, offer an overview of the entire sociology of the 20th century with its different schools and trends from the perspective of this question, as in sociology according to the different schools and trends of sociology, this issue has been seen and what consequences did this have on the starting conceptions about what was considered internal and external, also with respect to the relationship between the author and his work, there in my first book whose manuscripts I started as I told you in 1989 in Havana, it is seen very clearly how since then I had been dismantling, deconstructing all the parameters on which determinism and contextualism have been based precisely in favor of phenomenologically restoring the place that corresponds to the individual, the subject, to his internal and interior perspective with respect to that external social world while discussing what epistemological clearances are required to overcome the presuppositions of mutual exteriority that have been presented to the self and to the social as foreign dimensions, the individual and the social as extrinsic, but above all to overcome determinism in the analysis of works, authors, meanings, senses and the ways in which the social is configured, autopoietically elaborated by the subjects. in this case still referring to the world of art.
Marxism, which you very clearly refer to as the dominant paradigm of analysis in that context, appears already in those manuscripts and later in the book, as, among all the previous known forms, the most extreme expression of determinism.
You could tell me in this specific sense that overcoming the old conceptions of Marxism, its forms then called dogmatic or doctrinal, was in any case a concern of many Marxists since then, you could mention in this sense Bakhtin in Russia, Terry Eagleton in England , to the authors of Frankfort in Germany, Adorno, Benjamin, and that in this sense all my perspective remembered here would not be in this sense but my own or new modality of also overcoming the old Marxism but opening new possibilities for it.
I would tell you in this sense that going through Eagleton, the Frankford school and Bakhtin was without a doubt necessary for me, that I also went through not only the reading and study of these authors but even at a given moment they were left as my only preferences regarding the entire Marxist tradition, although I do not fail to recognize that it is possible that the source or origin of my questions being focused in such a way may be indirectly related to a saturation that I felt of the consequences of Marxist determinism and that overcoming determinism was then a way in which I explored the possibilities of an indeterminist Marxism.
I wouldn't know what to answer to that, maybe yes and no. Yes, while I come from a Marxist context in which my thinking and my theoretical authorial work initially emerged, not as an indeterminist position in epistemology like mine, in theory of knowledge, completely abandons Marxism and I must recognize it.
Acknowledging that I am not a Marxist is more honest, however, recognizing, as you say, that I was trained in a Marxist context is also honest, my parents are in fact, so I cannot, a rejection of Marxism does not suit me because I love to my parents.
But you could tell me that my perspective, like that of George Helbert Mead, being a symbolic interactionist, could be understood as a neo-Marxist path in social psychology. We would then have to see Piaget, a genetic structuralist, as a Marxist path in social psychology, even Mead himself. ?. Without a doubt not. Neither Mead nor Piaget were Marxists, rather it would have to be said that not only was Marxism determinist, although it was the most extreme of determinisms insofar as it should be specified that it was never about social psychology in me, although I recognize my sympathy at that time towards Social psychology.
In reality I had never seen myself from the outside, that is, as others see me, exactly as a Marxist, but at some point through panels to which I was invited, especially in Venezuela, I had the impression of being seen in relation to postcolonialism.
But you evoke Marxism in Cuba, some Cuban Marxists of previous generations were since then good friends and colleagues of mine. Once in fact, and perhaps this is a good anecdote, my grandfather Vega who raised my mother and her sister, I mean not the blood father but in the end my grandfather, a mulatto Chinese like Lam, took me to meet Jose Antonio Portuondo, my grandfather who had been a diplomat in Switzerland, made an effort, coordinated, I consider important just at the crucial moment in which I stood out in Cuba as one of the main theorists and intellectuals and protagonists of the avant-garde to which you refer, that we would get to know each other and he did, he arranged a meeting between Portuondo and me in his office. I remember very well the dialogue we had. In another sense, several of my friends are Marxists, let's say not from my grandparents' generation but from the generation of My parents, on the one hand very different from each other, and above all very different from me, dedicated a great effort to overcoming dogmatic and doctrinaire Marxism not only through their books, but also with their editorial work, bringing to the foreground the relations between semiotics and Marxism, for example.
Other Marxists like Ambrosio Fornet, who invited me to his house to speak at that period, were interested in my theoretical perspective as an individuality and of course also as an intellectual protagonist of that avant-garde to which you refer, regardless of the fact that there were several meetings between me. and several Cuban Marxist intellectuals of the sixties were coordinated.
The connection, for example, between sociology and semiotics, as I have done from a completely different perspective in my most recent book "The Enigmas of the Ground", it could be said that some Marxists explored it, but they did so in a completely different direction than mine. precisely because what they did was connect Marxism and semiotics as not exactly sociology and semiotics as I do in "The enigmas of the ground" by relating the phenomenological sociology coming from Shutz's social phenomenology with semiotics, yes, as I told you in another time, I do not consider Marxism within sociology as a science. I disagree with Giddens that Marx is not only a father of sociology, I exclude him from it, but also that even if Marxism were accepted as a sociology, again, something that I do not accept, in any case it would not be a scientific sociology and as Since sociology is a science, a discipline in the strict sense, this would destroy sociology and its scientific nature. If Marx is accepted as the father of sociology, which for example Pierre Bourdieu does not accept, for Bourdieu as for me the fathers of sociology as a science are Durkeim, Weber and Comnte, sociology would have to be situated as a form of knowledge that Not only could it not have been a science, but it would still be very far from ever being one.
Now, on the one hand, these Marxists never stopped being determinists, on the other, they grasped and made their own precisely as the main characteristic of their Marxism, the primacy of context, on the one hand, and the social-historical conception of Marxism, that is. That is to say, historical materialism, exactly what I most separate from Marxism, for me neither historical materialism nor political economy are of interest to me.
The Cuban Marxists that I think of were contextualists, which inclines that Marxism towards the historicist or social-historical conception of Marxism or their contributions were in the field of cultural studies, it is true that some of them achieved as a previous generation because they take me more twenty or thirty years old and are another generation, overcome many things of the old dogmatic and doctrinaire Marxism.
However, they continue to be epistemologically deterministic, in them the consciousness of the subject, of the subjectivity, of the individual, of the author, is more than impregnated, determined to such an extent by the historical, social and economic relations that it is treated as a by-product of the history, individuals are treated as forms of social consciousness in whose works, expressions or products irrevocably falls the entire weight of the history of a nation, of the narratives that relate history, nation and ethnicity, the acting subjects are seen as incarnators of the weight of history, society and economy and are treated as such.
But to be more precise even in my differences, some of them themselves, I would say that almost all of them, both grandparents and parents generationally, say it publicly, I think I have even read, I suppose it was a coincidence, some who said publicly and with pride “I am a journalist.”
There you have the main difference.
How can you be a postmodernist and be a journalist at the same time? I think it is not necessary here to expand on that irreconcilability.
If you are a postmodernist, you are inexorably suspicious of the very idea that the notion of language can be separated from the notion of event, the very idea of event, the very idea of event, postmodernists see it as something caused by language, you have it in Derrida. In his essay “A certain impossible possibility of saying the event”, you have it, I would even say that it is the main thesis of the book “The Difference” by Lyotard, considered the first to talk about postmodernism.
Lyotard's “The Difference” is in fact nothing more than a book of philosophy focused on demonstrating the thesis that events, events and facts are not only inseparable from language but also caused by language.
You could tell me that as Caribbean people, these are neological postmodernisms to use this beautiful definition by James Clifford when he refers to Aimé Césaire and talks about the neologism, that being Caribbean, contradictions of this type can occur.
Yes and no.
I share and agree with James Clifford regarding the neologism, but I do not agree with accepting that someone who defines himself as a journalist can be accepted as a postmodernist.
But the fact that I deny that they are postmodernists and that I distance myself from their naive, naive and primitive visions of what an event, a fact or an event are, (although as you know, from very early on I took care of studying in depth the so-called naive, naive, primitive, folkloric visual culture) of the disproportionate weight that they gave to the social historical and the supposed objectivity of the ethnic and national social historical to the point of placing individuals and subjects as objects are placed in a list or in a shelf where the objects are exterior to each other, separated insurmountably by a supposed objectivity of history, society and the nation, subject to chronologies and contextually regulated orders of derivation, does not mean that I do not recognize the value of what they did as a generation. not only in overcoming the old dogmatic and doctrinaire Marxism, but above all, other efforts must be recognized, such as promoting semiotics in Cuba, or in developing cultural studies, but you will see that the way they dealt with what they called the third world was historic. social and economic, I was the first to approach it from the colon point of view.
That my perspective later influenced some of them? Is it possible.
I think that without a doubt in that period we fed each other, nor can we deny that in a period we shared the same sociocultural reality and we were equivalent exponents of it in addition to being friends and colleagues, perhaps fed by my perspective, some progressively leaning their vision from third worldism towards postcolonialist perspective that I was the first to point out, but however, as you well know, I have discussed it in Rumbos, although it is true that I was the first to see it that way at that time, I do not consider myself properly a postcolonialist Well, that would be having an image of me only through things that were made public at that time, certain works that approach in that way, plus ignore the whole of what I was writing and doing since then, the fact that in some works I saw things through Colon, Hernán Cortes, and the colonial encounter, contrasting the colonial encounter between Colon or Cortez and Amerindian societies, it does not mean that all my works were in that direction nor that it governed my thinking.
If I had to see myself with respect to Marxism at that time, I would choose, on the one hand, Frankfort, ornament, on the one hand, as a classical neo-Hegelian dialectical philosophy, I would choose Bakhtin as a dialogicist concerned with popular culture, I would talk about the debate on the death of neo-Hegelian art, I would talk about the primacy of the social sciences over art, even the substitution of the latter, I would talk about how in my thesis of the maker a cultural analysis or of culture focused on the most beyond our elite as high thought, in practices that studied peasants, urban groups, I would speak of alternativeness and underground worlds, in short, I would speak of an interest in subalternity more than in postcoloniality.
Even I could tell you that even today, being a phenomenologist and a hermeneut, not a Marxist, subternity still worries and interests me, what Habermas called the societal perspective, the horizontal reading of the social world.
So with respect to the Marxist context, I would speak in my case of philosophical dialectics and abstract logic versus historical materialism and contextualism or political economy, and I would speak in my case of subalternity.
Although I have to admit that my sympathy towards German idealism is increasing, which is also progressively distancing me from dialectical materialism. In no way do I consider that Marx surpassed Hegel. And the connections of philosophical dialectics with idealism, with the self, are irreplaceable by a history of matter.
But let's say a sympathy, which we see in Adorno, if with Marxism's interest in logic and dialectics.
From my perspective, subjects and social actors should never be collected under an idea of political, economic or contextual history, always over and over again the subaltern conditions of production must be rethought, including the production of thought and knowledge itself to deconstruct everything, contexts, nations, ethnicity and with them also deconstruct the ways of treating facts, events and events as objective things separate from language where reality takes its toll on language, demanding either its reflection or its journalistic verification, as if language and They could actually separate. Never. I dedicate an immense effort precisely to the opposite perspective in my book "The Correlate of the World." The world is a correlate of the text.
More in summary, if I had to say today that for me two things prevail daily, Marxism: the first, distancing oneself from capital and seeing it from a certain outside to make it an object of analysis was original, without a doubt, in this there is a Marxist achievement, which we later see better achieved in Bourdieu, we could not in fact fully develop the axiology or theory of valuation, a Weberian or post-Weberian problem in sociology without distancing ourselves towards capital, the latter participating decisively in the formation of the value system in the formation of values and as such a full and well-developed axiology is not possible without acquiring an equidistance towards capital.
I accept that this is original but not in the way Marx did it, although imagining it was an achievement, I also recognize the prevalence and interest of the theory of commodity fetishism, without understanding commodity fetishism it is not possible to develop studies on the forms that subjectivity acquires, studies for example of the forms of subjectivity that television generated, or those that today generate the Internet, or simply of forms of subjectivity that acquire form in conditions where commodity fetishism rules. The phenomena of reification and their importance in the study of subjectivity.
This was also original, but it does not leave Marxism a path or path superior to that of Psychoanalysis, the future of Marxism in my perspective presupposes understanding that this was never a science, but a type of symbolism, I see Marxism at the same level as psychoanalysis, as a critical theory, not as a science, and as such, as a self-criticism of capitalism.
You could tell me well, but insofar as you have developed the relationship between sociology and semiotics, and insofar as you have focused on cultural theory, cultural analysis, in a certain way they share the same Marxist position. Again, yes and no, while I have related scientific sociology, sociology as a science with semiotics, from Comte to Shutz, and ethnomethodology through Parson, but not Marxism. I think I would respond to anyone who asks me by saying read me and read them.
There you will see the differences, it is true that I have focused on relating sociology and semiotics from within, but in an entirely different way, it is also true that I have developed cultural analysis, but taking other epistemological paths, however, I think you are clear And I must anticipate in your question that it cannot be ignored that my theoretical thinking emerged in the same sociocultural context and that as such it participates in a certain ethos that links us. Well, I would say that today, in 2024, that connection in the ethos could be seen from my interest, accent, attention and prevalence of subalternity.
In no way do I think, as George Marcus maintains in his essay Multisituated Ethnographies, that we are experiencing the end of subalternity. I just see it upside down. I could even say, as I see things today in America but also in Europe and of course in India and Asia, that neoliberalism is the subalternity of the future.
As Canclini asked in "Hybrid Cultures", is rock hegemonic?, precisely relativizing the idea that everything that comes from the United States is hegemonic, of course rock has never been hegemonic, it has always been subaltern, it was and it is. It continues to be in the United States, as it has always been in all of the Americas, including Cuba.
Responding to you regarding what you call a political context, I would tell you that precisely to the same extent that the extreme left and the extreme right shake hands in solidarity (in the political unconscious, that is, unconsciously) today defending the same thing, ( not without remembering that Boudrillard foresaw this when speaking of the simulation he said that they are identical) ethnocentrism, the return to nations, the closing of borders, stimulating and setting fire to the firewood of the resurgence of neoconservatism and with it the return to political obscurantism and to neophasism, since they are structurally equivalent and are needed as much as sound to silence, from above to below or inside to outside, and that to the extent that from that political unconscious, to use Jameson's phrase, they turn against the neoliberal legal transparency that made it possible, on the one hand, for them to become legal and stop being persecuted, and on the other, to win in conditions of democracies, as has happened with the resurgence of the left in South America and Mexico in recent decades and more recently, they work to weaken and push back neoliberalism, the most advanced and progressive conception that emerged in developed capitalism in all its evolution, to the same extent, neoliberalism is progressively becoming transparent as the subalternity of the future.
And this may surprise you, but I can tell you that it comes from a very deep analysis.
Now, I believe that to account for both what unites us in the ethos and what distinguishes and differentiates us, it would be best to offer an overview of the conferences that I gave as a theorist in Cuba at that time, and then of the seminars, courses and conferences that I gave during my life in Venezuela and later when I settled to live in the United States
Returning to Marxism and Cuba, furthermore, as previous generations, and I could mention other Marxists, not only other Cubans, but also Americans, Europeans and South Americans, they did an immense job, a feat we could say to leave us to the new generations the inheritance of an old dogmatic and doctrinal Marxism already largely overcome by them. Well, obviously I recognize this and like others of my generation, yourself, I admire and respect them but in no way do I align myself with it.
My path is different. It is also necessary to recognize and accept it.
They also know it.
At that time, there were no coordinated dialogues between myself as an individual, a thinker and theorist alone, and Marxists of previous generations, also with non-Marxists.
Regarding the visual avant-garde of the eighties in Cuba to which you refer, I believe that I was one of its main exponents at the national level as a theorist and as a critic, I curated, coordinated, exhibited and made the texts of several anthological exhibitions of the decade, as well as projects.
Although I once accepted being called a Marxist, I did so precisely because of all those characteristics of the sociocultural life from which I come and it was not in vain that George invited me to speak on a panel with another Marxist in postmodern anthropology, Michael Taussig, as well as together with Paul Rabinow, a colloquium called Fictocriticism, in 1998 in the department of anthropology at rice university, 1998
FIRST SECTION: "ART, MARXISM, ANTHROPOLOGY AND EMIGRATION"
Third question (3):
Now Abdel, I am going to make a parenthesis in the thread of our conversation due to a topic or an aspect that is certainly very recurring in your previous answers to my questions -----which you have been answering rigorously, disciplinedly and very coherently--- -- to investigate a certain aspect, as I told you, that you repeatedly appeal to and that perhaps could go unnoticed by our readers, and even by yourself, because I have no idea if you have ever stopped to calibrate, no? not only its importance, but also its consequences in your own evolution, not only theoretically, but in your role as an intellectual? I am referring to what you repeatedly name as certain "XXX Philosophical Notebooks" as you have defined them and that you repeatedly mention in other interviews each of the few questions formulated here so far. Could you explain to me what these Philosophical Notebooks are and what they consist of? And... why are there thirty Notebooks? What do you mean by that?
I would also like to add other questions in this regard that are closely related to my questions about your "XXX Philosophical Notebooks." Taking into account that the idea of the "Notebooks" is preceded by both the history of Marxism and the history of the various anthropological currents that have been happening chronologically since the end of the 19th century and throughout the 20th century, going through all of Lévi's structuralism. -Strauss, until reaching the phenomenological descriptivism of Clifford Geertz to conclude with the postmodern approach of James Clifford, Georges E. Marcus and Stefan A. Tyler and the well-known movement of Writing Culture of which you were one of the most unique and eloquently figures end of the century as an immigrant intellectual established in the United States. Likewise, the idea of the notebooks is also preceded by the history of psychoanalysis itself. Regarding the very notion of "notebooks" I think of Lenin's "Philosophical Notebooks", Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks", Mircea Eliade's diaries, Freud's "Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis" as well as His Manuscripts and letters numbered and cataloged by himself with letters that functioned as types of personal Notebooks, as well as in Lévi-Strauss's "Sad Tropics", Geertz's testimonial records from "Behind the Facts" and "Local Knowledge" as well as in the testimonies and reports on travel diaries of writers and explorers such as Joseph Conrad, Michel Leiris, Aime Cesaire and Bronislaw Malinowski analyzed and reinterpreted by James Clifford in his book on the "Dilemmas of culture". I also think of the notion of "notebook" of the until now unpublished and very recently published "Black Notebooks" of the German phenomenologist Heidegger full of political and personal notes and at the same time I think of Adorno's "Minima moralia", a diary of marginal reports inscribed in a critical framework between aesthetics and metaphysics.
For all this, I would very much like you to delve a little more into the fundamental characteristics of your own "Philosophical Notebooks" of which we have barely spoken and about which very little is known and I wonder in what sense their writing contributed and stimulated the reflections of the young thinker Abdel Hernández? I wonder if, after three decades of intellectual and personal evolution, can you still remember if these Notebooks were a moment of continuity for the young conceptualist visual artist heading towards the laboratory of the maker where you would define yourself as a practical culturologist or researcher of culture or if this period was part of a moment of mediation between the young ethnomethodologist towards the cultural anthropologist and phenomenologist that you currently are? How did these Notebooks allow the young intellectual that you were to evaluate your condition as an intellectual as such and your position with respect to, on the one hand, a generation of creators, visual artists, writers and intellectuals and, on the other hand, a very unique sociopolitical context? ?
To what extent did these "Philosophical Notebooks" allow the young intellectual that you were then at the end of the 80's and beginning of the 90's, to establish a context of self-formation from the epistemological point of view that, starting from the foundations sedimented in your training together with the philosophical, semiological and sociological theories of structuralism and post-structuralism allow you to consider and advance towards a phenomenological and hermeneutic foundation in your subsequent research in the field of anthropology and ethnomethodology?
Thanks Alberto,
The first thing I thought about when reading your question was about me as a writer, about the life of a writer, about how many years I spent in my life dedicated to writing. It has been 39 years since I started writing and I didn't stop until today from dawn to dusk. However, I also thought that I didn't write books from the beginning.
I wrote my first book 31 years ago. Before, I only wrote loose essays that were not chapters of a book as an author's work. Between 1993 when I completed my first book until 2004, I wrote mostly loose theoretical essays. 11 years passed from 1993 to 2004, in 2004 I wrote my second book and from that year until today I have not stopped writing books year after year, sometimes it takes me two years, even three, but I finish one and start the next.
Today, in the year 2024, I am the author of 13 books of complete works, by which I understand books that I sat down to write from the beginning to the end as works, conceiving and composing them, whose chapters were born for them and that I wrote them as a whole each one as a work of author. I exclude from these books all my art criticism, that is, my literature on the work of others.
Sometimes I think that those who are only art critics understand their critical books as their works. It's not my case. I understand a book as a work that one conceives, has in one's head, begins to compose and write and sits down with it and does not stop until it is finished. My authorial books are theoretical works of thought. I have always developed art criticism in parallel. I have never stopped writing it but I do not integrate it into my authorial books, I summarize it in volumes but whose essays/chapters were not born for those books. If I counted the compendiums of my art criticism among my works, I would have 25 authorial books. More is only 13. The rest is my condensed art criticism, selected essays.
Those notebooks predate my first book, they were, in a way, its ancestors.
They were not authorial books at all, nor were they made up of essays, but I did write them with the same feeling, in the same soliloquy, with the same impetus and passion with which I began several years later to write books.
I already wrote loose essays back then, but the notebooks were not made up of essays, they were a passionate work of articulating my theoretical system and yet what I could call today my theoretical system was never fully understood or achieved, which Paradoxical is that only in them did I dedicate myself to articulating the idea of a theoretical system understood as a coherent whole that I even represented in tables and diagrams.
Obviously if I continue then and until today, as happens with every theorist seriously committed to his work as science and thought, articulating and developing a theoretical system, mine, but the latter is gradually being done with the theoretical development of the works, in books, not in that way, not long ago I sat down to try to represent what that system is, what its internal coherence in the philosophy of science, where everything supposedly has to fit into a coherent and systemic whole, how do you respond to ontological, teleological, epistemological and methodological questions, how your idea of method, of theory of knowledge, are systemically linked and related, what is the telos of it and what is its presupposed ontology. Obviously I have continued to attend to and update all of this, but in the very way of the books that I write, not in that way of making graphics, of seeing that system as a whole represented in the here and now of the page, as an abstracted whole. , separated from the works, and graphically represented.
Only in those notebooks did I make it an activity that I tried to represent myself by writing it down and visualizing it in tables and diagrams.
In those notebooks I subjected my own concepts to scientific scrutiny, developed hypotheses, contrasted ideas, developed logical tables and theoretical graphs. They were my first forays into the hard sciences. They were full of hypotheses. Eventually they included quotes from authors of my choice. Linguists, anthropologists, semioticians, philosophers. Short quotes chosen by me. One or two pages developing one's own theoretical idea exposed to analytical, systemic, logical scrutiny, followed by graphs and tables. And so successively, two or three next pages of writing, and then graphics, and so on until he filled them.
Is the hypothesis scientific? I ask myself that question today, but I didn't ask it then, I mean I ask myself that question today but back then I didn't doubt it, I believed that the scope of a systemic theoretical elaboration rested on the potential to develop hypotheses and expose them to logical scrutiny.
Where did this passion for hypothesis come from? If I read mostly theoretical linguistics, semiotics and anthropology then, perhaps it is interesting to note that at that time I believed much more faithfully in an exact idea of scientificity and my obsession was to find a system, a logic. my own system.
Many of those writings and texts were very intricate elaborations of logical-deductive hypotheses about something that I was looking for, something however, in which it was scrutinized whether the hypothesis of a system was possible. I wrote them at night and they took up a considerable part of my morning. The dedication was such that they caused me chronic gastrodeudenitis that lasted about three years due to the constant getting up early, something that I never did again, I recovered my sleep, only My cousin Roberto, my grandfather Vega and my grandmother LLorca saw me writing them for approximately five consecutive years, I wrote them by hand, in manuscripts they were industrial lined notebooks, like those industrial lined notebooks that were in Cuba, but much taller and with a hard cover bound.
They were for many years placed as a collection next to each other listed on my grandfather's bookcases, antique mahogany-colored bookcases, although my mother and sister may have seen them on the bookcase, they did not see me writing them, on the other hand If certain friends who visited me when they arrived I was writing them and eventually I interrupted the writing.
In them my ideas of hard sciences were articulated, you ask me if they were related to art, I would say not as long as I articulated in them my idea of a new science, not of an art, however, it was imperative for them to articulate how it was related in my system the theory and the practical empirical, let's say that there was in them a sense of experimentality, of the very idea of experimentality that had to account not only for a scientific system hypothetically elaborated as the emergence of a new science, but also to solve in them how to do experimental things that are not usually done in the sciences except in very experimental forms of science, would logically be contemplated in that system, the work of hard science was combined in them with the sense of laboratory, in those notebooks were then the notions of hypotheses and thesis, they were more similar to the type of things that you like in philosophy due to the demanding level of belief in an idea of scientificity from which I later moved away.
Even phenomenology and hermeneutics did not govern me, I was still far from having later taken that path, they were still exercises in philosophical and theoretical logic, they were completely and totally far from anything political, the parameters and themes, the things about which I wrote were about hard sciences, linguistics, philosophical logic, systemic analysis, I was looking for my own scientific system.
Why did I believe so much then in science with that exact logical sense, but not since then taking the natural sciences as parameters, but rather linguistics and logic itself, perhaps a certain idea that Marxism had about itself as a science? , was behind, for nothing in what I wrote, it had nothing to do with Marxism, but who knows, perhaps living in a sociocultural world of faith in scientific salvation reigned in me, a little like what happened to Stephen A Tyler who He believed for a long time in the most extreme scientificity, and then he began to lean towards hermeneutics and postmodernization of his thought, from structuralism to philosophical anthropology. Something similar happened to me. I also, like Stephen, proposed a very scientific theory at that time, but they were both very theoretical and dense.
In the long and lonely path that I have traveled by completely surrendering to the solitary and solipsistic life of the writer, they had value.
I write theory, thinking in hard sciences, not literature in a strict sense, but ultimately one lives in writing. I am a writer. They make me think about it. On how I became a writer. In how I came to a life dedicated to writing. Writing those notebooks were my first exercise in living in the solitary activity of writing, concentrated, without doing anything other than thinking and writing.
My authorial books are descendants of those notebooks, but those notebooks were not yet books, nor works, that is, it was not that each notebook was a work, far from it, they were like a collection of my theories.
In them I still didn't have the clarity of my books, they were much denser, I even understood my own ideas less in them, they were like exercises in self-clarification, elaboration of hypotheses, they were very dense, I don't think they were as dense as my books because For example, “The Correlate of the World” and “Thinking Science” are very dense, but very dense on a theoretical level for the age I was.
I am not an adept at teaching theoretical knowledge. I think that when one teaches knowledge, thinking like a teacher who teaches students, thinking loses richness, it is simplified in a non-negotiable way, but I do think that theoretical and scientific maturity when reach, ideas, no matter how dense they may be, are seen and understood as crystal clear, so for example, Deleuze in “Logic of Sense”, I do not believe that Deleuze himself felt that in those three volumes his own thoughts were crystalline for himself. Even though they were dark, one was still searching, one was discovering, there was still a density in which everything was not completely accessible to oneself, especially the Deleuze that later emerges in “Empiricism and Subjectivity” or in “The Fold: Leibnis and the Baroque.” ” without ceasing to be very dense, theoretical, abstract, it is already crystalline for himself, he had already found himself.
Hegel for example, "The Science of Logic", it is difficult to find a more dense and theoretical book than that in the entire history of theoretical thought, but if you read it dedicatedly you will find that it is crystal clear paragraph by paragraph everything is understandable if you concentrate and therefore also teachable, the ideas are clear no matter how abstract, theoretical and difficult they are, my density today, and I would say since 1995, was already crystalline for myself, clear, not a single one of my ideas escaped my own understanding. clear, I could teach it and the ideas were logical, precise, clear, even more so later, since 2004 my books, including the most theoretical ones, are clear, every idea, you just have to make an effort to read and concentrate, to understand it can be understood by very abstract and theoretical as it may be. The same can be said of the philosophical dialogues between Stephen A Tyler and me, they are clear, although very dense, very abstract. Stephen's essay, for example, “Prolegomena for a Proximate Linguistics,” is one of the most abstract and dense texts you can read, but if you concentrate there is not a single idea that is not clear.
The notebooks were not like that. They were of a variegated density, I was looking for myself, I was looking for something that was not yet completely clear to me. They were very theoretical, very dense, perhaps there were flashes in it for a moment, I don't doubt it, there were in fact, powerful moments, but also, even though they were not crystalline, they were suddenly a skein yet to be unraveled. Something was born in them. I think that first I was born in them myself as a writer of thought in hard sciences, second I think that the authorial writer was born in them, even though they were not yet books, a discipline of sitting down to write in a systemic way was born.
A passion was also born to live dedicated to a task, that of finding my system.
I articulated a theoretical system that had to be coherent from one end to the other.
Writing authorial books, achieving that discipline was neither simple nor easy, it is not something that I achieved overnight, it is not for nothing that there are 11 years between my first book and my second book, it took all that decade writing loose essays that They were not part of books, and it took that entire decade of life experience as a person to achieve the discipline necessary to write authorial books. How to spend the day, how to internalize and what place to give things, how to economize the vital flow. As you know, I am a very productive thinker and theorist, I mean I am not one of those thinkers who wrote a limited number of essays throughout their life, I write without even premeditating it in a natural way no less than one hundred essays a year. We are thus the exponents of this trend, I think I told you at some point, Stephen A Tyler was also like that, especially Quetzil Eugenio Castañeda is like me, he writes no less than a hundred essays a year.
But for a long time those hundred essays were each independent, loose, not chapters of authorial books written from beginning to end, conceived and composed because the latter requires a discipline not only professionally but also as a person in life. It took me time to acquire that discipline, to find it in myself, it became continuous and systematic and irreversible since 2004.
Those notebooks, paradoxically, not being books and not having been made up of essays, were the ancestors of that discipline that I found later, they were not books but they had the type of discipline and dedication that an author's book entails, the idea of sitting down to write something in a continued. But I don't think at all that although I proposed it as the reason for writing them, I achieved in them that system, the systematicity and the scientific systemic whole of my theoretical thinking, not at all, I achieved the latter much later in my books.
But in those notebooks was where I only asked myself the question in the form of something that had to be seen with my own eyes on a page. What is my system like, what is its internal coherence? The idea of truth, for example, what idea of truth is behind it? On what idea of truth does my theoretical work rest and seek?
I asked myself those questions in those notebooks. There was also the idea of a type in them, although even then not seen as ideal types in the sense that I attributed to them after studying Weber, for example, if you read a pedagogical system you must define which type you are going to form, What is the learning theory on which that system is based, and what is the ideal type of what you want to obtain as a paradigm of a student who has learned and has been trained in it.
There was also a theory of learning in those notebooks, and a theory of the type that was sought to be achieved not only in the relationship between theory and experimentality, abstract and empirical theoretical knowledge, epistemology and method, but also between learning theory and the type of learner that was sought to achieve.
They were more like the kinds of concerns that you have today and have continued to have regarding analytic philosophy.
But I later moved away from that paradigm a lot. My readings and studies of Habermas, Shutz, Derrida, Deleuze, Todorov, in Caracas, Venezuela, but above all my studies of hermeneutics and phenomenology changed me a lot. Although it was also in Venezuela that I read in depth contemporary sociological theories from Weber and Durkheim, through Parson, to micromethodologies up to Shutz, Garfinkel and ethnomethodology. Just as there is also a lot of that scientific systematicism in Bourdieu.
I have never abandoned scientific systematicism, on the contrary, I have deepened it, but not in the way of sitting down to see it in front of my eyes, since the nineties I have not sat down to make logical tables and diagrams representing for myself what internal systematicity is like. of my system and how it is defined and articulated as a whole of linked parts that can be visually captured with arrows, concepts, boxes arranged in orders of derivation, I have never again done this in the way that, for example, someone asks you what your system and you must explain it through justified logical graphics. Only in those notebooks did I do this, try to see my system as a logical whole, and yet, although I never did it that way again, that system was not yet achieved in those like thirty notebooks, perhaps it was searched for, explored, investigated, but not achieved.
Furthermore, that was not how I achieved it, it was not by sitting down to try to self-represent my system, how I achieved a system and a truly coherent scientific system from one end to the other, I did not achieve it by sitting down to self-represent it, I achieved it in another way by writing books. authors.
But I treated them that way and that's what they consisted of.
I don't think they were notebooks in the sense of tradition that the notion of notebooks has acquired in other writers like the ones you mention.
Perhaps one could talk more about the idea of the laboratory, the idea of experimentality, those thirty notebooks would be something like an experimental laboratory of five years that I lived and collected in them, and paradoxically in 1998 from Houston at Rice University As a complementary associate researcher I returned to the idea of the laboratory, I made a project program that I called the laboratory of ethnomethodology, theory of performativity and ethnography, (which I called “The Circle of the Lake”), a printed program with a folding sheet. I returned to the laboratory as a modality in Houston in 1998, thanks to that laboratory we developed the second part of the philosophical dialogues between Stephen A Tyler and I in the department of anthropology, where Quetzil and Surpik also participated, I also developed theoretical dialogues of methodology of the research based on my trips to various cities in 1998 where Stephen, Quetzil, Surpik and James Faubiam participated, also recorded. Even in Caracas, at one point I tried to return to the idea of the laboratory through a project that I called laboratory during my work as a researcher at the Research and Development Center of the Armando Reveron Higher University Institute, currently called the Experimental University of the Arts, in At that time I worked as a researcher under the direction of Miguel Posani, a Venezuelan epistemologist, thinker and environmental psychologist graduated in Italy in the line of Edgar Moran and Gregory Bateson, at that time although with his own developments in the theory of the imaginary. Center in turn under the direction at that time of Manuel Espinosa as director of the institute, Venezuelan thinker, writer and visual artist, I told you about both, theories of complexity, Manuel under the line of Pierre Francastel. The institute also had this line of theorizing an idealized type of learning and learning to achieve. I told you about both. Miguel was the director of the center, then he was director of the science museum, communications at CONAC and a television channel. Manuel was previously founder and director of the Gan, national art gallery and later of the Maracaibo contemporary art museum.
There at the CID in those years between '91 and '96 I also conceived a laboratory project and I gained a lot of nourishment.
Well, those two laboratories, my '98 laboratory at Rice University, and the one at the CID in Caracas, would be the much more evolved later forms of those early notebooks.
Obviously it is not a laboratory in the sense of natural sciences, but rather a laboratory in the sense of cultural sciences, but it is a science of experimental culture.
Let's say then that those notebooks were my first laboratory understanding the notion in the sense of a science of experimental culture. You could ask me if there is any relationship with the notion of laboratory as we find it, for example, in theater anthropology. In Eugenio Barba or in Grotowki.
If it were possible to imagine a laboratory with a similar impetus in experimentality but in which there was not theater but only cultural science, and then from then on a way of resolving the relationship between abstract theory and field work, I would say that my laboratory experimental of 1998 at Rice University, which he also called “The Circle of the Lake”, would be the heir to those notebooks. To return to them is to return to an idea of scientific experimentality.
What you called “performativity” for example when you talked to me about what happens with the subject in all the examples that I gave you in “Rumbos” to explain my theories and the relationship between abstract theory and participant observation, let's say that they were the writing of a five-year laboratory in which I sought systemic articulation at a scientific level between theory and participant observation, between abstract theory and field work.
In that specific sense, without the slightest doubt, of everything you have mentioned in your question, we could say that the only thing that truly understands them would be Levis Strauss, Stephen A Tyler and Clifford Geertz, without a doubt. They were the notebooks of the anthropologist that made me with that sociology that I practiced, they were the notebooks that accompanied the laboratory that I was carrying out all those years of field work. They were the systemic thinking behind what he did. They were the scientific foundation of my “maker theory” and of the practice of immersion theorizing culture that I then developed individually in urban and rural areas studying social groups as cultural groups, but they were however individual, completely individual, and had nothing They had nothing to do with either “the diary” or the “notebook”, nor were they “notebooks” as we understand them in field work, they were rather the literature of the field work laboratory but systematic literature, my think abstract theoretical while doing all that. I would say that they are at the same time the predecessors of my authorial books, on the one hand, and of my concept of laboratory and experimentality, on the other. See the anthropologist in them. Without a doubt.
Yes, Stephen, Geertz and Levis Strauss would be the most pertinent and appropriate of all your mentions.
Just as the systemic whole of a theoretical system, mine, had to be resolved, which involved those fieldwork practices, that participant observation, they transformed all that into a laboratory. Seen from practice, the immersions that I did were projects, one of those projects I called a “workshop” at that time, the other not, but both were forms of participant observation and field work, however, seen from the notebooks, The whole is perceived as a laboratory of five years from 1985 to 1990, an individual laboratory, these notebooks referred to my system of theoretical and scientific thought, they were very individual, that is why I tell you that they are the ancestors of my authorial books. In them I explored for the first time an idea of experimentality. No one knew them better than my cousin Roberto Salas, my first cousin, a playwright and theater director that you know.
Fourth question:
"Yes, of course I know Roberto. I don't know if you remember, but when two years ago I wanted to propose this project to you, it was thanks to Roberto that I was able to contact you again. By the way, he has done very serious theaterological research in recent years and very documented, which you know very well, about stilt walking, in street theater and its place in carnival, folk art and circus arts and varieties. Of course I remember him. indirectly, through you when we were young, in our twenties, and we met to talk and listen to you theorize in your living room about those authors, whose theoretical books we found fascinating, from Lévi-Strauss to Foucault. , Deleuze, Lyotard and Derrida to Bourdieu and Baudrillard. That was around 1990, when we met and began our theoretical conversations. I remember, then, that Roberto was a young theater student at the Higher Institute of Art. They were years, very intellectually intense. They were the experimental years of your anthropological and pedagogical project of the Hace workshop. I remember that we met at your house with other artists, friends and colleagues of yours, and also many of those who had been your disciples in the Hace project. And those times were also the prelude to what we are today. "They were, in a way, the beginning of our formative years."
After this short digression, I would like, Abdel, to resume the thread of our conversation following a line that you had been developing in which
----as you explain well----0 although you emerge in a Marxist context that takes historical and dialectical materialism as its first reference; However, you immediately react by distancing yourself from the growing influence of structuralism transmitted by Bourdieu's reflective and symbolic sociology and which is explicitly recognized from the methodological and synchronic linguistic influence inherent in Lévi's structural anthropology. -Strauss, as well as in your experiments and theoretical investigations also influenced by the post-structuralist grammatology of Derrida, whose influence is capital in your work, as well as the theories advanced by the philosophers of the Frankfurt School and in it, your reading of the " Negative Dialectic" by Adorno and also his "Aesthetic Theory" as well as the theoretical influence of Benjamin's work, and also of the Russian language sciences in the semiological and literary and aesthetic criticism work of Mikhail Bakhtin in your theoretical research. As you explain and later due to the direct influence of the thought of Habermas, the last Frankfurt philosopher in this direction and as any reader can recognize following your own theoretical development and taking into account that the first line of your work ----first in the sense of its hierarchy and priority character, not first in the original place of its genesis---- it is marked by a rigorous direct influence of Hegel's philosophy, I would like you to be able to delve with pertinacious incidence into the details that you consider most timely and more emblematic or perhaps more specific that explicitly express their reconstructive and prospective nature in a line drawn from fundamental axiological problems discussed not only from the point of view of the objectified effects and sociological results of your concretely semiotic Investigations but also already subjectified as such on the properly phenomenological and linguistic-descriptive level following the hermeneutic plot of interpretive purposes of Derrida's grammatology for example, distinctively indicated throughout your work with particular emphasis in your books such as "The Correlato de Mundo" to mention some.
(End of fourth question)
Thanks Alberto, I think it is indeed the way you explain it, that structuralism had that effect on me of starting that distance to which you refer.
However, let us not forget that Levis Strauss defined and recognized himself, he positioned himself in favor of historical materialism, so that although it is true that this distance is largely the result of the impact on me of structuralism, I would say that above all from the direct reading of the latter in theoretical linguistics and semiotic theory, not through the mediation of how these disciplines are reflected in the anthropology of Levis Strauss.
First here we must take into consideration, not only the pure theoretical linguistics that I read and studied a lot in those years, not only the pure and abstract semiotic theory, but also the specific type of linguistics and semiotics that dealt with forms of language and sign that presupposed an author and his work, either in the sense of literary criticism that discusses a literary work and its author, or generalized based on it, or the semiotics of the visual, etc., etc., forms of analysis in which structuralism operates precisely through a separation between text and context, where the work is brought to the foreground as an autonomous textual form analysable by itself in its language separated from that context.
It is this consequence of the linguistic synchrony to which you refer, the fact that the parameters of Saussure and Peirce enter the analysis of a mode of language by cutting the latter from its autonomy compared to or separating it from a context, which makes At the beginning, from my first book, the question about the relationship between “the internal” and “the external”, “the individual” and “the social”, “the inside” and “the outside”, was in the foreground right in the way it occurs in that book, that is, simultaneous the presumed separation of that text, which is the work to be analyzed against ideas of context, with the universal autonomy of the individual or the singular one versus the multiple of others. some, or the social or the contexts.
The way in which in me, as is made explicit in my book “The Correlate of the World” to which you refer, or in my book “The enigmas of the ground”, or even in my theoretical lectures on linguistics, for example on Peirce and Saussure, theoretical linguistics is given as a parameter of scientificity, is infinitely greater than in Levis Strauss, Levis Strauss used linguistics by homologies even helping him with Stephen and semantics, let's say by homologies/synonyms, helping him with the notion of semantic synonymy, because the homology is not entirely precise, that is to say that it was also done by analogies with all the unscientific ambivalences that the analogy presupposes in its debt with figurative and mimetic languages, in fact, I would like to advance here a comment regarding “Counterpoints” when I told you that Lacan and psychoanalysis were largely responsible for the crisis of structuralism.
Just as Levis Strauss is recognized almost as a symbol of structuralism, I think that he is in no way more than a symbol, not in whom structuralism finds its moments of true scientificity and for the same reason he is also one of the causes of its decline. of what he himself symbolized.
The scientificity of structuralism, in short, was achieved only in theoretical linguistics and modern semiotic theory since to compromise the scientificity of structuralism with Levis Strauss is to bet on its decline.
With this I simply try to point out that the way in which this basic synchrony of structural linguistic theory operates in the imagination of the Structural Anthropology of Levis Strauss, from the moment in which it refers to phenomena that are not entirely clearly autonomous as textual forms versus to contexts and not entirely structurally separable from the idea of “an I”, “a self”, “a self”, “a one versus the multiple”, it already bypasses inseparations between texts and contexts, in fact, the The notion of text does not operate at any time in the anthropology of Levis Strauss, but on the contrary, the structure transferred from linguistics to the study of non-linguistic phenomena such as lineage, consanguinity, kinship, the structure of Bororo villages, the raw , the cooked, the profane, the sacred, or the structure of imaginary systems such as myth, operates once in Structural Anthropology a transposition of the linguistic synchronic paradigm towards culture that at once certainly understands the latter "now and here” synchronized, but according to contextualist parameters, it is not for nothing that Levis Strauss approves historical materialism, although in another clear way, his way, which does not coincide in important senses with what Marxism considered historical materialism.
In the same way, the structurality that we can find in the symbolic/structural sociology of Bourdieu, who certainly in “The Logic of Practice” refers to Saussure and Levis Strauss (here it is important not to ignore that Bourdieu approves in his system
Saussure from the logic of practice, that is, the structure of the practice of speaking and the exercise of language but not of its systemic logical abstractivity), but he had not done so in his epistemological books where Durhkeim and Comnte seemed to govern before. , which, moreover, does not precisely operate with the strict paradigm of theoretical linguistics, although it does indeed attribute greater importance to the symbolic, it does not stop operating with an idea of a cultural field that is largely defined by physical relations of force. , positions and dispositions, habitus, as he called it, where again the distinctions of text versus context are only not clear but not even established.
But yes, indeed, this restitution of structuralist synchronicity in the passage from language to non-language undoubtedly also has an impact on my way of understanding cultural theory, but it happens in me in a much more linguistic, theoretical and textualist way from a principle in the direct sense of theoretical linguistics and semiotic theory, I do not transpose the first or the second directly to an idea of culture given as a context in which I insert that synchronicity to analyze non-linguistic phenomena such as in Levis Strauss kinship, myth, the Bororo village, the archaic or the Split representation, in Bourdieu, symbolic capital, habitus, dispositions or positions, but once again my concept of culture from cultural theory is already the same highly textualist and therefore Therefore, it brings with it directly from semiotics a reading of culture through its texts, its textual forms, the texts of culture and culture as a text.
Perhaps here it is important to remember that in “The Correlate of the World,” my book to which you refer, I dedicate a great effort to reconstructing the origin and structuralist genesis of the concept of text itself, the latter being in my opinion one of the main contributions and specificities. of structuralism. The concept of text.
There is not in me, there never was, a step that brings linguistic and semiotic structurality to the definition of non-linguistic phenomena in culture treated structurally as contexts, there is rather a step to culture, let's call them from within (the self , the self, the person, the individual, the work, the author) to the outside (society, others, culture), from the inside (consciousness, subjectivity, the work as an autonomy of language with its inside ) and the outside (that which connects in the meanings, in the reference or with respect to the world), which once goes to the culture looking for its texts and to read or understand it through these, not to the culture as a context without mediation of texts.
And here it would be necessary and necessary to remember all the development that I offer and elaborate regarding the concept of text, on the one hand we have the literal text or textbook, where text refers to alphabetical writing, but on the other hand we have the reading itself defines what is read as a text, in the same way that inference defines the sign, in this sense we omit or avoid the discussion on the ontology of the text as something merely referable to its material, coseic or structural autonomy, we undoubtedly have texts in that also sense of an autonomy, sometimes even functional, material, where some texts are subject to authors, writers, producers, from the work of art, through symbolic production, crafts, fabrics, etc., to material culture, but we have text also there where we have reading where text can be from a hieroglyph or petroglyph, through an urban framework of architecture in restoration or a tourist congromeration, to the same fashion as a legible text, or the consideration of narrative sets, even oral, the text that we others say, or what others say, hence the importance in me not only of semiotic and linguistic theory but also later and progressively of Derrida, as you say, without a doubt capital in me, however, note that this does not mean that Bourdieu and Levis Strauss did not exert an influence on me at the beginning, yes they did, but always not without taking distance, you see it clearly in my first book all those distances are already there, but if they did exert it, in Bourdieu, for example, it was very important For me to understand through it how the representations that subjects make of objective conditions become part of the latter, how the modes of symbolization, to the extent that they represent accumulated capital, participate in objectivity and conversely how that The supposed subjective dimension of the symbolic and cultural representations are in turn also forms of objective and material culture.
This understanding is crucial for me and I owe it to Bourdieu's impact on me at that beginning, but taken with tweezers from his sociology from a textualist, semiological understanding completely absent in Bourdieu's sociology, it is true that even in “Borders and Overflows "I approve your concept of the field, although with these tweezers explained before, not in your way, and then I also distance myself from it, that is, extracted with tweezers from a sociology and a textualist and semiological cultural theory, from an anthropology that is not approving painting, the landscape of relations of forces through which Boudieu wants to present the social and cultural world to us as a world of pre-existing objective contexts and perse predestined to language.
I can tell you the same about Levis Strauss, I extracted with tweezers here or there what worked for me, for example, when Levis Strauss said that symbols offer imaginary symbolic solutions to real contradictions, or when he said that an ax is a sign, although later did not make the slightest semiotic analysis of culture according to signs, or when he said what is the place that corresponds to anthropology in the social sciences, and obviously general theoretical considerations about the relevance that structural linguistics should have in anthropology, more Once again, Levis Strauss continues to subsume ethnology in history, he uses comparative studies to draw conclusions about the levels of archaicity of cultures considered as all contextually crystallized, from all this I clearly distanced myself from the beginning, you have made me realize with your question in which it is crucial and very important to state that I always had that distance towards both of them so that in fact I must recognize that since the eighties what has prevailed in me is semiotics, I think of “The Absent Structure” by Humberto Eco, for example. For example, or “The Fashion System” by Roland Barthes, they should be mentioned here.
But your question, I know, is much more complex than these clarifications and I will try to live up to its complexity by specifying other things.
Do you remember my book “The Correlate of the World”. Well, I think it would be a good occasion to remember that when we talked about that book of mine in “Counterpoints” you asked me many questions about my concept of “intramundane horizon” as much as I told you about “Superordination in the life worlds” and the concept of “correlation” in a sense that is both phenomenological and hermeneutical, what do I maintain? That a world is phenomenological, that the very idea of the world is, that is, it is a world for subjectivity and for the body, it is distributed to its once in a Hegelian sense between “phenomenal world” and “world in itself, but such a world is not yet intramundane, we must in turn grasp how that world is provided with senses and meanings that weave its warp and make it intramundane, here it comes in then the hermeneutical consideration, the way in which it participates ontologically in what makes a world intramundane. I will not explain here now how I elaborate and analyze what establishes the stability and pragmatic continuity of intramundanity, since it would lead us to an unnecessary delay to the objectives of this question, but both in the science of Peirce's semiotics, and in the criticism literary and as in the development that I give it in the book, and there it came out when you dress like me without ever losing the meaning and primacy that the concept of correlate has for the theory of the text, of the world according to the texts, or as an effect of these, the importance that the analysis of the relationship inside/outside language has acquired in me, a very theoretical problem, which if in fact I have worked especially in discussion with Derrida, when I said “the self” is at the same time “two selves” one “within the language” and “another outside the language”, in experience, the same “the being”, and all the concepts, are at the same time, once inside and once outside the language, the gateways that take shape In my retheorization of semiosis they occur because between that inside and that outside, they are the passage from one side to the other, both things operate in it, the phenomenological dimension of the text considered as a fabric, Derrida's texere that is already brought with it in that woven a step, albeit operated at the level of what, according to my analysis, Hegel called the “phenomenal world” in contrast to the ontological “world in itself,” and the Peirtian semiosis that is already culture.
I clearly remember when, while assimilating my explanation of what Peirce's abductive hypothesis is, you tried to represent what Dummet would say about the catwalks and you said that would see the world or the worlds according to the texts, when you said that, you placed yourself on the side of a care, first, and of a suspicion related to that care, then, but not of a distrust, a care that is presupposed in me from the moment I that if indeed this is scientifically very important not to neglect that proper place that corresponds to language above the world since it is through language that we understand ourselves about it, however, it is important to understand that precisely at this point my preference, my choice and my belonging by self-decision to Shutz's social phenomenology, only in Shutz did I find what you call "equilated" or "equilation" in allusion to the weight of gold metaphorically evoking that activity of weighing and weighing something carefully finding a balanced balance, between the understanding of the world according to the text and the language, from within, towards the understanding of the ontological world itself.
The latter is only in the right way for me in the sense of what you call qualified in Shutz's social phenomenology, it is about the world of life here and now between day and night as it is collected by experience and is about in the first and last instance of the reference to the world from experience.
Now, here you must take into consideration a scientific tradition in sociology that becomes main and decisive in me, from Venezuela, the tradition that goes from Comte through Parson and Shutz, without removing Mead from ethnomethodology, here we have first place a replacement of the macro by the micro, of micro methods in sociology as micro methodologies, a restitution that at the level of the object of study as well as the subject/object relationship at the base of knowledge, presupposes replacing the social considered as something naive out there, by notions that make it necessary to understand its configuration, first the relationship between the self and the social, where the social cannot be seen without the self and without its relationship to it, second the consideration of the social as a “unity act” resulting from the relationship between the social actor, the social action of that actor, the unity act that results from that action considered already in act and the concrete ways of verifying it in the micro interactions that include the concepts of “interaction” , “intersubjectivity”, “face-to-face relationships” and “situations”, the social world then appears solely and exclusively referred to both in the theoretical abstract and in its empirical consideration from these micro concepts.
Shutz's social phenomenology was based mainly on the distinction between “subjective” and “objective meanings”, on the consideration of how we have access or how one has access to the self of the other from their own self, or from their own interiority or subjectivity, to then arrive at those bodies in interactions, reestablishing the compression of the social world in this way, a way in which I have carried and elaborated, theorized and advanced in that direction much further in its possibilities than where authors such as Shutz, Garfinkel, Mead and Parson himself, let us not forget the crucial importance that Parson acquires in the subsystemic understanding of the social world as separated between functionally differentiated subsystems, the person is a subsystem, the individual person, distinct from the culture subsystem and the society subsystem and the economy subsystem. ,
Well, from linguistic and semiotic theory, from even hermeneutic understanding in the way in which I have developed it, to understand how by understanding the social world from language, our language practices are already those that configure that social world in its senses. and meanings, where the elucidation of what others tell us or what we read and what we tell ourselves about what we have experienced, come to configure what we do or stop doing and therefore passes to the pragmatics of experience and its ontological conformation, I have developed and elaborated an extensively more abundant path of those gateways, of that relationship inside/outside language, but be careful never abandoning the latter, language, always entering and leaving from it and towards it.
As I told you, I found in Shutz the world or the idea of the world with which they were “accurately” reconciled, using your expression, the scientifically adequate relationship that I found between language and non-language, between text and world.
Not because Shutz saw it as a matter of relationships between texts and contexts, not at all, this is my work in language theory as well as in sociology and anthropology, but because it was Shutz who found the appropriate balance on the importance that consideration of the subjective in the social sciences
At the same time, he who restored what is the appropriate plot phenomenologically considered from which that world that is outside the language or world of life should be considered, influenced by Hurssel, and well I don't think I have to go into detail here about the importance of Habermas. . Habermas enters here with his theory of communicative action, but I am not going to focus on Habermas now. We have already talked many times about the importance I give it.
Here the world replaces the context, we do not approve with the world a context because approving contexts is approving forms through which reality is assigned to data that are provided by representational ideologies that must choose between economic and macrosocial data, that must choose between texts. as those who are representationally billed with an idea of reality
The world is a world for experience and only from experience is it a world; it cannot be separated from those who live it, it cannot be taken as objective from the dispositionalities of many subjects involved in ideologies of representation, when the content of what we call contexts It is filled only through ideologies and representations that must choose between some representations and not others about what that context is, taking as true about events, experiences and experiences, some representations and not others according to, for example, parameters of authority such as approving with respect to the facts what a press report said that was written by someone who did not live the experience and wrote about it according to representations made about those experiences by institutions or policies that are too far from what was lived and experienced. face to face in the synchronous memory of social actors and their semantic memories or what Stephen calls “paschein”, the semantic memory of the body and its passions, episodic and synchronous memories in the memory of the body and its narratives.
And this is where postmodern anthropology comes in, entering and exiting language, comes to be, comes to acquire its best possibility from the perspective of participant observation and its tradition in the social sciences, participant observation that as a concept never abandons systematicity of these micro/concepts, actor, action, situation, intersubjectivity, face to face, in the turn that hermeneutics finds in postmodern anthropology, although not from the beginning and not in all its expressions in the adequate way in which I have been I who have really theorized and developed it.
Clear in the proper way as I incorporate it, they are Stephen A Tyler and James Clifford, James in his authorial books, Stephen also in his essays, not just books, and in his lectures although I recognize the germs of it also in Geertz as the initiator of this interpretive turn in anthropology, was no longer fully resolved in Geertz but was barely even in germ.
You have not asked me in what way, how, why, in what forms, the postmodern anthropology from which I became and I am one of its young main exponents in the United States since the nineties, enters into my system, you have not asked me nor have we I have elaborated on it enough, but I think it is important to mention here that it is this way on a systemic level in me.
More, however, not the only one.
The underlying reasons for my positioning from postmodern anthropology are many more but I believe this is the place although you have not asked me to advance it to advance in what senses.
The same problem of entering and leaving language is crucial for the methodological concepts of attention, registration, inscription, and for the forms acquired by the passage from experience to writing from participant observation and field work to works, this understanding has been developed by me from the postmodernism of my sociology and my anthropology and I delve decisively into postmodern anthropology also in the rhetorical or scriptural consciousness of the text, another element of relevance is the turn that Stephen initiates in the relationship between everydayness and extra-everyday life, the ordinary and the extraordinary, familiarization and defamiliarization, common sense and breaks with it, the relationship between writing, ritual and therapy, the restorations of harmony, the intertextual understanding of ethnography beyond dense description in postmodern ethnography, the middle voice, the balance between the subjective and the objective, the deconstruction of otherness, this added to the importance of the semantic move towards the componential that recovers and makes possible a scientific path for that claim of Levis Strauss but from the language and a more textualized understanding, the concept of the “system of art and culture” that James Clifford gives is also crucial, it is crucial for me and coincides with my way of understanding it and the most accurate definition of how I see it, finally the refigurations that James makes about the diaspora and migration, the establishment of a literature of the diaspora. .
Now, I must not ignore the fact, I must not ignore that you have asked me about Hegel, that you have mentioned Adorno and Benjamin with emphasis, and that you have asked me about Bakhtin.
Starting with Hegel. Excluding Hegel from the tradition of social phenomenology initiated by Shutz is a complete mistake, we cannot fully develop a sociology of common sense solely with the reconstructive processes through which Shutz establishes Hurssel in social phenomenology, work otherwise. without the slightest doubt initiated by Shutz but still very far from having been developed in all its possibilities, and very far from being exhausted, it is just in its infancy, it is also required to extend this entire program to all phenomenology and the science of Hegelian logic. not only here, in the sociology of that social world, to develop the ways found in it and what we can understand precisely in terms of comprehensive sociology, inscribing Hegelian logic in it, Hegelian phenomenology not only allows us to expand and enrich the phenomenological sociology but also the latter has to leave itself back towards philosophy and logic to find here new phenomenological paths between philosophy and sociology, and semiotics, paths that are not achieved on one side or the other but between them, interdisciplinary if you want.
Well, this is in addition to the fact that, as you know, for me Hegel operates as crucial from the philosophy of science itself to sociological and anthropological considerations.
Regarding Adorno, I must say that I consider these two books that have been mentioned by Adorno to be very important, both have not only my approval but also my best congratulations. They are two crucial works without a doubt. In Benjamin's case my approval is less enthusiastic.
It is true that Benjamin symbolizes the theorist who is both a classical philosopher and an art critic and that in that sense he is presented as a good example of the type of intellectual that I am who writes books on abstract theory and hard sciences, even classical philosophy. , while also practicing art criticism, it would be difficult to deny Benjamin this relevance as it would be to deny it to Barthes, and in this sense I recognize him as an undoubted reference, however, Benjamin assumed historical materialism in which I distance myself from him , so strictly speaking, in the Frankfort tradition I stick with the Adorno you mentioned, not all Adorno and with Habermas.
Finally Bakhtin, what can I tell you? As you know, his work was subject to the framework of literary criticism and it is from there that it takes shape, but in fact I would say that as much or even more than Lotman, even reduced to prototypes that take the literary work as parameters that are later extended to the culture, let us not forget that I criticize this extensionalization due to its deformations in culture, taking the work of art as a paradigm of culture is extremely limited to me and on the contrary I work with the concept of culture that we have directly from sociology and anthropology without consideration of literary criticism, but independently of this care and this distance, it is no less true that even more than Lotman, the Bakhtinian notions of heteroglossia and dialogicity both as notions in themselves due to their potential and because of the way in which Bakhtin uses them related to popular culture, are of great importance in certain aspects for cultural theory, as is the intertextualization that Kristeva initiates in this regard.
I have my objections, my distances and my concerns regarding this due to the way in which culture gives way to literature, producing deformations in the understanding of the former, but at the same time I do not fail to recognize its importance and therefore I have assimilated it. It is clear that Kristeva is the creator and founder of the concept of intertextuality, a concept that I consider to be of immense importance for the social sciences and as such I have developed it.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse