Desencantamento da modernidade e da pós-modernidade: diferenciação, fragmentação e a matriz de entrelaçamento

Abstract

In many significant quarters, the tone and substance of sociological discourse on the past, present and future of culture at large, institutions, content of individual pursuits and relations, and about the matter and organization of science, technology and epistemology has changed appreciably. Post-modern society discourse, and correspondingly supportive intellectual and social phenomena, offer some credence to arguments that the world of today and the prospects of tomorrow stand in radical contrast or even asymmetry with the world of the past two and a half centuries. The purpose of this article is threefold. First, it is necessary to identify the specific domains in which post-modern claims differ from dominant notions of the modernity representation of society and science. In what ways do post-modernity portrayals substitute and repudiate modernity concepts, and alternatively, to what degree do they instead seek to build on them taking into account recent cognitive, technological and societal shifts, yet still within a modernity framework? Second, what constitutes the foundational cultural and cognitive message of post modernity? Where does the message authentically break with modernity, and where does it distinctly seek to destroy the very foundations of modernity thinking? What are the putative implications for science, technology, and for epistemology itself? Finally, an alternative to post-modern analysis will here be advanced, an alternative that draws on basic features of modernist thinking, yet which incorporates events that have undeniably transform man, machine, material and epistemology over the last several decades, and which thus redraws the modernity map by specifying alternative components and modes of interaction and extension. This hypothesis may be interpreted as a bridge and deviation from both classical and post modernity. This line of thought may be clumsily labeled for the moment "post post modernity". The hypothesis is ground on an "interlacing matrix". This interlacing matrix mobilizes three fundamental notions which are strongly informed by contemporary experience in science and technology, although not exclusively from those domains. The pivotal place accorded here to learning and epistemology is not unwarranted, in view of their primacy in today's stream of action (innovation, daily life, and politics).