political thought

Political system

in ,

While the relations between science and political systems is not always obvious, many writers on complexity point out connections between the emerging sciences and what is sometimes called the "new world disorder". But whether one sees current political trends as tending towards chaos or towards new forms of self-organization, it seems clear that some of the analytic concepts of the new sciences provide powerful heuristics for current political analysis.

For example, the problems of nationalism in Eastern Europe, or the problems of ethnic communities in cities like Los Angeles, exhibits scaling self-similarity. That is to say, the problems of minorities occur at multiple scales: Yugoslavia breaks into republics, republics break into smaller pieces, etc. The question of self-determination on ethnic grounds occurs at every scale. Chaos seems to loom around the corner. The speed at which this issue has erupted seems to tell us something about global dynamics at the edge of Chaos. At the same time, these developments may hold out the promise of emergent forms of self-organization. Complex systems exhibit diffusion of authority. (Casti cites democratic governments, labor unions, and universities as examples) They exhibit a social resiliency that comes from their capacity to absorb disruptions and environmental fluctuations. These may be understood as changes in the relation between local and global

The view of "spaceship" earth as seen by the Apollo astronauts, first made the Gaia hypothesis plausible.

The end of the Cold War system and the "Prisoner's Dilemma" Russian Catastrophe theory describes perestroika (metamorphosis) in mathematical terms while acknowledging that their successful study is undoubtedly a result of political perestroika .


For the relations between science and prestige, see big science.

praxis

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The tradition of Platonic and idealistic philosophy separates theory from practice in much the same way as it does mind from body, privileging in both cases the "conceptual" (or moral) over the "material".

Praxis philosophies give primacy to a theory of action. The original expression is Aristotle's and refers to a symbolically meaningful activity, whose very doing, not its result, is the fulfillment of a cultural commitment. It can be defined as meaning rather than function.

For the Frankfurt school in its earlier period, prior to 1937, truth was defined as "a moment of correct praxis." Subsequently, in the face of Fascism and Stalinism, the relation between theoretical truth and the political praxis of specific social groups began to appear increasingly remote.

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social space

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"The paranoid person takes up too much social space" (Donna Haraway)

In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre reclaims space as a primarily social problematic. For Lefebvre, the proliferation of this and/or that space, eg. literary space, ideological space, the space of the dream etc. is a general consequence of of the concept of mental space (p.3) through the epistemologico-philosophical thinking of western Logos (in both science and philosophy). (see philosophical space ) Lefebvre unmasks this mode of thought as a powerful ideological tendency, expressing the dominant ideas of the dominant class, through the concept of abstract space.

The very proliferation of descriptions and sectionings of space is for Lefebvre an example of the endless division of labor within present-day society. Lefebvre sees spatial practice as the projection onto a (spatial) field of all aspects, elements and moments of social practice. (p.8) If he uses terms of language or contemporary theory, he is also at pains to recontextualize them as produced by a social subject. For example, he believes that a coded language (of space) may be said to have existed on the practical basis of a specific relationship between town, country and political territory, a language based on classical perspective and Euclidean space, and that that system collapsed in the twentieth century. But, he adds, if spatial codes have existed, each characterizing a particular spatial/social practice, and if these codifications have been produced along with the space corresponding to them, then the job of theory is to elucidate their rise, their role, and their demise. (p.17)

The task is thus a dialectical one, and both things in space and discourse on space do no more than supply clues to this productive process which subsumes signifying processes without being reducible to them. (p. 37) (see also representation)

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