By MÁRCIA TIBURI*
Author's introduction to the recently released book
The dispute over the idea of the world
From Plato to Whitehead, from the pre-Socratics to Isabelle Stengers, from Descartes to Wittgenstein, from Parmenides to Husserl, from Giordano Bruno to Silvia Cusicanqui, the idea of the world has always been in dispute. At certain times, it led to prison, as happened with Galileo Galilei, condemned by the Inquisition in 1633 for defending heliocentrism. Or to death at the stake, as happened to Giordano Bruno in 1600, who, in addition to defending heliocentrism, stated that the universe was infinite and composed of multiple worlds.
Centuries later, when the United States and the Soviet Union, two nuclear powers, competed for imperial dominance over the planet, the definition of “Third World” was created, now out of use. The dispute over the world remains expressed in the conflict between the rhetoric of colonization that speaks of the “discovery of America” and the anti-colonial criticism that speaks of “invasion”. Part of this conflict is the replacement of the term “America” by “Abya Yala”,[I] as the Andean people have done since the 1990s of the XNUMXth century. Today, the belief called “flat-earthism”, which advanced with fascism in force, still remains, and which is not just another mass delusion, it is also a caricature of the dispute over the concept of the world.
“World” is a decisive subject from territorial, theological-metaphysical or economic perspectives. Of course, it is also always a political topic. With the domination of politics, as the foundation of the human condition, by the ideology of capitalist economism, the world was reduced to a market, and its parts, to merchandise, within a utilitarian calculation. Utilitarianism continues to be the basis of most “world views”.
If the world is an object or source of knowledge, we cannot forget that it is an inhabited space and a condition for all experience, including the “world experience” itself. The mere human gaze, like all theories created about the world, projects more than reveals something about it. In fact, something like “the world” can only be conceived within the limits of thought, as in Kant, or the limits of language, as Wittgenstein maintained.
This means that there is much more than can be conceived and, paradoxically, the world we conceive is increasingly smaller, given the number of inhabitants and the growing volume of relationships and their potential mediators. When we consider the internet as a “new world”, we realize that the world is established between entropy and negentropy, that it is, at the same time, getting bigger and smaller as a result of the processes of organization and disorganization that give it to it. are constitutive.
The idea that the limits of the world are “limits of language”[ii] can be visualized, in a political key, in the relationship between language and politics as a Möbius band.[iii] This means that, just like in the famous 19th century mathematician's tape, one thing passes through another, one side twists and becomes the other. The limits of language are not just the limits of what is representable and makes up the world as a linguistically conceived space.
The world is what is created in language, and language defines the limit of the world, and what we call the world comes to define what we can do in terms of language. World and language become confused due to limits that are, in fact, contours. However, it is the very definition of the limit that frays when language is manipulated, and this is a problem that clouds our worldview.
We can create theories and fantasies about the world, but never involve it or “take” it except through the representations we have of it, through concepts, notions and mental images that are given to us or that we ourselves create, define or position mentally and linguistically. . The idea of the world is “an” idea in dispute while it is “the idea” that allows the game of domination between ideas.
Because it is a general idea, it encompasses all others. World is a matrix idea that defines the conditions of possibility for other ideas about the world, and even “worlds” in the plural. The world is an archetype, an archetype, an image prior to all others, continent, comprehensive, a figuration or configuration, a “conceptual” principle, a kind of general “typography” from which codes are organized.
Each world is the set of facts that we can recognize, that is, things that happen and that can be recognized as events. Determining what happens involves managing a world. The symbolic-existential context is the loci where things happen that can be recognized, insofar as linguistic events or facts, as such, depend on cognition to be read.
If the thing itself cannot be known, as we have taken into account since Kant and Schopenhauer, a thing can be understood through its representation. World is a representation of a set of representations. Comprehensibility, in turn, being part of the world, is a power of the subject of knowledge. Control of the representation of things, that is, control of ideas, concepts, words and images, is a fundamental part of power games that act linguistically.
Thus, the set of events within an understandable context we call the world. Thought itself is an event, that is, a fact that can be an object of understanding and that, being part of the world, at the same time, allows us to reach it. The world is a set of facts that do not ask to be understood, but that can be understood within the limits of whoever understands. This means that we always have a precarious understanding of the world, based on our experience, that is, on the data provided to us so that we can understand. It is this experience of the world that is manipulated economically, theologically, aesthetically and politically.
Saying that the world is in dispute implies stating that there are power games over the matrix idea of representation of the universal that cannot be denied from an ecological point of view. Throughout history, theorists have focused on the question of human nature and then the human species. Today, it is about thinking in terms of life on the planet in which the human species lives in a predatory way alongside others.
Linguistic and discursive strategies, in the form of narratives, are produced to prevent people from understanding the world and their situation in the world. At the extreme, control of the idea of the world aims to control the world as a field of experience, which is only possible through the control of language, which would be capable of analyzing, conceiving, questioning. In short, to assemble and disassemble something like a “world” based on an idea and the way of narrating that idea.
Alongside verbal language, visual language is dominant in the societies that make up civilization.[iv] current. Therefore, we must understand “narrative” as something that creates a world organized in words and images. This world implies a cohesive verbal-visual, discursive-visual or literary-visual truth. The current symbolic system establishes dominant verbal-visual narratives to programmatically define all other narratives.
In this sense, if we were to work with philosophical hypotheses, such as Plato's cave, the Leviathan of Hobbes or the murderous horde of Freud's father, we would say that the first great narrative was established by the dominant male (who is still a leviathan made up of all the bodies of all men in the service of power) as a threat to all ( everyone) that did not serve their privileges. O pater potestas [father of the family] is an archaism that remains in force as a form of thanatopolitical terror over threatened bodies within the current system, in which dystopia has been naturalized.
More than that, the dominant tendency of common sense is the empire of neoliberal economic-political theology in which dystopia has become capital. Neoliberalism is itself a dystopia to be overcome. Against the naturalized dystopia of a neoliberal space station for 1% of the human population to live in, I propose the utopia of changing the destiny of the world inhabited by diverse species.
I divided this book into three segments: an introduction and two parts that present concepts and questions that function as “stem cells” of thought, as they aim to heal sick mental bodies. This introduction – which is, like the parts, also subdivided and which some may consider a bit long – aims to present the problem of the naturalized catastrophe that is explained in “Dystopian Code”.
It is a description of the codified world based on the catastrophe in which we live. In it, the critique of the nightmare and the patriracial-capacitalist hallucination is constructed around the idea of the world. The second part deals with what I called “Utopian Codes”. In it, I sought to talk about utopia, pointing to its openness to others, as a natural counterpoint to the current ideology and as the ability to create possible worlds beyond the naturalized destruction that gives everything an air of dystopia.
I worked on each of the topics as acts of thought arranged in sequence. The image of the “cards on the table” helps to understand the book’s composition method. I hope that the arguments presented can paint a comprehensible image of the dystopia experienced as a true reality and as “the best of all possible worlds” and that, above all, they stimulate thinking. In the act of thinking critically lies the promise of crossing the fog caused by the ideological gas bombs that keep us trapped in the abyss of the system and programmed to obey.
Seeing the light in the midst of the fog, catapulting thought beyond the current suffocation, is the objective of the process, which is similar to a game. To play, you must move the cornerstone of desire against devouring giants, with their sharp fangs devouring life as a whole. I believe that the book, as a utopian object, is a good stone to throw against the open mouths of giants and, thus, unbalance the gear that chews us mercilessly.
The disturbing image of the world that I talk about in this book calls for help from the imagination, which promises to remake the field of meaning like a wound that heals from the inside out. If the idea of the world is a manipulated image in the society of visual administration, in which the image is capital itself, freeing this image is like opening the doors and windows of a prison.
Describing the experience of what is understood by “world” today forces us to move towards a political phenomenology capable of facing real dystopia while pointing outside of it. Another political iconology must emerge in the midst of this phenomenology aimed at understanding patriracialcapacitalism.
A poetic-politics accompanies this phenomenology. She is necessarily feminist, in the sense of projecting a world of care and communion between human beings and nature. At the same time, it is communist, in the sense of promoting the consciousness of the common people, and it is theoretical-critical, in the sense of seeking a dialogue that reinforces the place for active and world-changing reflection. At base, it is the awareness of the possible as an impulse of theory that builds a conceptual guerrilla tactic and the new design of the world we seek.
When rereading my own work, I realize that it fits perfectly within the perspective of “alterglobalist” movements, which are guided by the revolutionary statement “another possible world”. In a sense, the foundations of this modest contribution arose decades ago at the beginning of my experience with philosophy, when, very early on, I came across the “11a Thesis on Feuerbach”, by Marx: “philosophers just interpreted the world in different ways, what matters is to transform it”.[v] I am happy to see myself grappling with the promises of youth, once again.
To the readers, I wish you a good journey through the pages that follow, hoping that this book is also a vehicle that, traveling over the void, allows us to glimpse, beyond the abyss, another possible world.
*Márcia Tiburi is a philosopher, political activist and writer. Author, among other books, of Mutt complex: analysis of colonial humiliation (Brazilian Civilization). [https://amzn.to/3WGJkkE]
Reference
Márcia Tiburi. world in dispute. Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian Civilization, 2024, 266 pages. [https://amzn.to/3WmktRJ]
Notes
[I] In the language of the Kuna people, who lived between Panama and Colombia before the invasion of the territory called “America”, Abya Yala means “land that flourishes”, “mature land”, “land in its total splendor”. Organizations and institutions of Andean peoples use the term to refer to the American continent. View “Indigenous peoples in Latin America: advances in the last decade and pending challenges in guaranteeing their rights”, published in 2015 by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).
[ii] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1968, p. 111
[iii] The Möbius band is a figure in projective geometry. It is a useful image through which the intertwining of language and politics is visualized as two sides of the same ribbon, in which the exterior and interior are the same due to a twisting of the surfaces. Going back in time, we see that, in Aristotle, the definitions of zoon logikon [rational animal] and the son politician [political animal] resemble this structure. The Möbius band can also be a useful sketch of the relationship between theory and practice, between speech and action. While it allows us to visualize the twist, the moment in which one thing becomes another, that is, the meeting point between two opposing sides involved in each other, it also serves us to visualize the character of projectivity, that is, the conduction of a side to other. In this sense, the image exposes a non-static topology, with which we can think about political issues, especially those that have affected us since the “11a Thesis on Feuerbach”: how to overcome the simple interpretation of the world and transform it.
[iv] Civilization here has a substantive, didactic and rhetorical meaning, as it is a known word, and not a qualitative meaning.
[v] “Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern.” Karl Marx, Thesen über Feuerbach. [Nach dem mit dem Marxschen Manuskript von 1845 verglichenen Text der Ausgabe von 1888], 1955.
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