TRANS-MODERNITY is KEY...

Peirce and Latin American "razonabilidad": Forerunners of Transmodernity, by Fernando Zalamea(I've followed him for years...) Link to full article...

After Modernism and Postmodernism, Transmodernism has been advocated as a more faithful coining for our plastic and transient age. Introduced by the Spanish philosopher Rosa María Rodríguez Magda, the term "Transmodernity" –both diachronic and methodological- hopes to reintegrate many awkward postmodern differentials, to balance some supposed breaks with more in-depth sutures, to counter relativism with a topological logic where some "universal relatives" provide invariants beyond the flux of transformations. In many ways, Peirce’s architectonic system of philosophy included already most of the salient features of Transmodernity, a situation which perhaps explains the unusual relevance of Peirce’s thought in the beginning of a new millennium. In fact, Peirce’s system is essentially topological, open to all sorts of continuous transformations (pragmatic maxim, triadic semiotic, classifications of sciences, synechism, etc), and the system is particularly able to represent a bimodal net (Petitot) of both differentials and invariants, providing a full understanding of the TRANS prefix. On the other hand, a steady tradition of Latin American thought at the beginning of XXth century has advocated the importance of some sort of "razonabilidad" (term introduced by the Uruguayan philosopher Carlos Vaz Ferreira, merging "razón"/reason and "sensibilidad"/sensibility) which must explore the borders (TRANS) of thought. A subcontinent fully traversed by change, Latin America has been able to construct various sophisticated synthetic fabrics, weaving autonomous and foreign threads, where the social and cultural transits of the region have acquired some of the highest artistic expressions of the XXth century. Beyond Postmodernist skepticism towards reason and universality, both Peirce’s system and Latin American TRANS culture help to reinterpret universals as partial invariants of a logic of change, where the borders of reason and sensibility appear as objects of reason in their own right. The important crisis revealed by Postmodernism (impossibility of unique perspectives, impossibility of cutting out antinomies, impossibility of stable hierarchies, etc.) can nevertheless be well understood using a continuous geometrical logic of reason and sensibility, open both to changes and invariances. This short article is intended as a programmatic one, pointing out the possible relevance that some non-standard pragmatic thinking (Peirce’s "pragmaticism", Latin America’s "razonabilidad") may have for our Transmodern epoch. The article is divided in four sections: (i) Transmodernity; (ii) Peirce’s system; (iii) Latin America’s TRANS essayists; (iv) A sought gluing for our epoch.

TRANS-MODERNITY is KEY...(continued...)