This article is an attempt to understand the increasing profile of complexity theory as a geography of dissemination. In the first part I suggest that complexity theory, itself a rhetorical hybrid, takes on new meanings as it circulates in and through a number of actor-networks and, specifically, global science, global business and global New Age. As complexity theory circulates in these networks, so it encounters new conditions, which generate new hybrid theoretical forms. In the second part of the article, I (...) consider how complexity theory might be interpreted as the emergence of a new structure of feeling in Euro-American societies, which frames the future as open and full of productivity. The conclusion offers some words of warning. (shrink)

resumo: Este artigo é uma introdução geral ao pensamento de Bernard Stiegler em torno da relação entre técnica e humano. Stiegler desconstroi a tradição filosófica que costumava separar technê e episteme com um enfoque histórico e materialista, a fim de provar como é impossível pensar a humanidade sem a técnica. Portanto, a relação não é de oposição, como a tradicional metafísica do espírito defende, mas composição, do modo como defendem Gilbert Simondon, Jacques Derrida, Andre Leroi-Gourhan e Gilles Deleuze. abstract: This (...) paper is a general introduction to Bernard Stiegler's thinking about the relation between technique and human. Stiegler deconstructs the philosophical tradition that used to separate teckhnê and episteme with a historical and materialist approach in order to prove how it is impossible to think humanity without technique. Therefore, the relation is not one of opposition, like the traditional metaphysics of spirit defends, but one of composition, as thinkers like Gilbert Simondon, Jacques Derrida, Andre Leroi-Gourhan and Gilles Deleuze defend. (shrink)

This article offers a reconstruction of Derrida’s critique of Leibniz. It suggests that in attempting to fit Leibniz into his conception of the history of metaphysics and the all-embracing notion of logocentrism that underwrites it, Derrida presupposes two regimes of logocentrism: one subjective, the other theological. Subsumed into this second mode, Derrida casts Leibniz as a progenitor of structuralism and the new sciences and technologies of information in order to expose their logocentric foundations. However, in doing so, he ends up (...) sidelining the aspect of Leibniz’s ideas that anticipates the specificity of the new epoch of writing he claims to historicise. The article goes on to argue that to grasp this specificity one must look beyond the “expressivist” schema of exterior representation, which Derrida draws from Husserl’s theory of meaning, and instead look to Leibniz’s own formal-combinatorial concept of expression, which exceeds Derrida’s critical framework. (shrink)

Generally, regulation is thought of as a constant that carries with it both a formative and conservative power, a power that standardises, demarcates and forms an order, through procedures, rules and precedents. It is dominantly thought that the singularity and formalisation of structures like rules is what enables regulation to achieve its aim of identifying, apprehending, sanctioning and forestalling/pre-empting threats and crime or harm. From this point of view, regulation serves to firmly establish fixed and stable categories of what norms, (...) customs, morals and behaviours are applicable to a particular territory, society or community in a given time. These fixed categories are then transmitted onto individuals by convention, ritual and enforcement through imperatives of law (and technology) that mark certain behaviours as permissible and others as forbidden, off bounds. In this manner, regulation serves a programming (i.e., a calculable or determinable) purpose. It functions as a pro-active management or as a mastery of threats, risks, crimes and harms that affect a society and its security both in the future and in the present. Regulation for instance, will inscribe and codify what it determines to constitute crime or harm such as pornography, incitement of terrorism, extremist speech, racial hatred etc. These determined or calculated/calculable categories will then be enforced and regulated (e.g. through automated filtering) in order to ensure a preservation of public order within society. Drawing mainly from deconstruction, this article situates law and technologies within a wider ecological process of texts, speech and writing i.e., communication. In placing regulation within disseminatory and iterable processes of communication, this article complicates, destabilises and critiques the dominant position of determinability and calculability within the regulatory operations of law. (shrink)

Henceforth "to transform" should mean "to change the sense of sense."The field of the entity … is structured according to the diverse—genetic and structural—possibilities of the trace.The first article in the first issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric is "The Rhetorical Situation," Lloyd Bitzer's critical exegesis on "the nature of those contexts in which speakers or writers create rhetorical discourse". Bitzer contends that the rhetor produces "the rhetorical text" when a "real" or "natural" —"objective and publicly observable" —situation "calls the discourse (...) into existence". That was 1968. Five volumes later, as you know, Richard E. Vatz flips the causal relation, maintaining instead that... (shrink)

This article seeks to explore some issues regarding the different modes of generality at stake in the formation of transdisciplinary concepts within the production of ‘theory’ in the humanities and social sciences. Focused around Jacques Derrida’s seminal account of ‘writing’ in his 1967 book Of Grammatology, the article outlines what it defines as a logic of generalization at stake in Derrida’s elaborations of a quasi-transcendental ‘inscription in general’. Starting out from the questions thereby raised about the relationship between such forms (...) of generality and those historically ascribed to philosophy, the article concludes by contrasting Derrida’s generalized writing with more recent returns to ‘metaphysics’ in the work of Bruno Latour and others. Against the immediately ‘ontological’ orientation of much recent ‘new materialist’ or ‘object-oriented’ thought, the article argues for the necessity of ‘different levels of writing in general’ through a continual folding back of absolute generalization into historically specific disciplinary crossings and exchanges; something suggested by but never really developed in Derrida’s own work. (shrink)

Research in school psychologist report writing has argued for reports that connect to the client’s context; have clear links between the referral questions and the answers to these questions; have integrated interpretations; address client strengths and problem areas; have specific, concrete and feasible recommendations; and are adapted to the language and literacy level of the reader. The training of school psychologists involves attention to these factors. However, this paper argues that the experience of aporia, as described by the French philosopher (...) Jacques Derrida, is often removed from the process of report writing, as the aim seems to be to find a formula that works. We call for ethics which is concerned about the good life – this is a broader view than resorting to ethics only when faced with an ethical question. This paper, based on a small qualitative study of seven experienced school psychologists, highlights that psychologists in the process of report writing are caught in the aporia.... (shrink)

The relationship of Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger has always been complex, encompassing an entanglement of two already immense networks and suspended between proximities and distances from infinitesimal to radical. Its peculiarity is evident in the way in which Derrida strategically inscribes his own text at the margin of Heidegger's thought via a double or cl6tural gesture which articulates the paradox that Derrida writes with Heidegger against Heidegger. One of the most decisive aspects of this gesture is Derrida's deconstruction of (...) Heidegger's claims regarding the relation between technology and philosophy. In "The Question Concerning Technology" and accompanying essays Heidegger opens up a way of reflecting upon the essence of technology moves against its metaphysical determination specifying, moreover, the sense of modern technology as a mode of disclosure. These reflections are, however, ambiguous. Heidegger is one of the first thinkers to confront technology in philosophical terms, and yet he wishes to purify thinking of originary technicity. Technology remains a question, and as a question asked by thinking, thinking is not technical. In other words, thinking for Heidegger, is constituted in its very difference from technology. This is the move that must be deconstructed. In simultaneously repeating and displacing the Heideggerian scheme, Derrida elaborates an infinitesimal and decisive différance between the thinking of Being and his own notion of "writing" (Vecriture) or generalized inscription. What is crucial is that as against Heidegger's Being, the general text is not an essence of technics nor is it a proper thinking opposed to technology. On the contrary, Derrida's main point, among other things, against Heidegger, is that technology has always already begun, that it is originary with respect to the history of Being and thinking. In this study I examine the stakes and implications of Derrida's move along with a possible Heideggerian response. To begin with, I develop a reading of Heidegger's text that shows the import of technology to his work as a whole and its centrality to the thinking of Being as difference. I then take up the question of Derrida's deconstruction of Heidegger's analysis of the history of Being and its technological completion as this is played out in The Post Card and related texts. Following this I revert back to Derrida's now "classic" writings of the late 1960s and early 1970s and explore the arguments that relate contemporary developments in technology, science, and the media to the problematic of writing and to the closure of logocentric metaphysics. The preceding chapters lay the groundwork for me to then offer a critical reading of Derrida's text that locates in the articulations and assumptions of deconstruction certain indications of its belonging, within the horizon of Heidegger's thinking of technology. Finally, I offer a reading of some of Derrida's later texts with the aim of showing that and how deconstruction emerges as an affirmative technology. (shrink)