The Topois: forms of linkage with society or imaginary realities?

Los Topois. ¿formas de vinculación con la sociedad o imaginario de las realidades Labor equity: Gender perspective

Meza Palma, Daisy; Valdenegro Cáceres, Rodrigo

Daisy Meza Palma

Daisy.mezap@ug.edu.ec

Universidad de Guayaquil Ecuador

Rodrigo Valdenegro Cáceres

Rodrigo.valdenegroc@ug.edu.ec

Universidad de Guayaquil Ecuador

Centro Sur

Universidad Nacional de San Agustín, Perú

ISSN-e: 2600-5743

Periodicity: Semestral

vol. 6, no. 2, 2022

compasacademico@icloud.com

Received: 12 June 2021

Accepted: 01 October 2021

URL: http://portal.amelica.org/ameli/journal/384/38431493843149007/

Non-profit publishing model to preserve the academic and open nature of scientific communication

ePub generated from XML JATS4R

Abstract: With regard to the term linkage, today it is urgent to redefine the conceptualization that modernity has made of it in its current moment of blurriness, in the hypertrophic concept that translates into what citizenship with rights implies. The conceptual recipe book inherited from modernity in the face of a context that is configured and deconfigured socially, economically, politically, culturally and educationally worldwide, invisibilizes in an increasingly notorious way, the possibility of building new civilizing fabrics embroidered with citizen rights and neo-humanizing logics, from which the concept of Academy does not escape.

Keywords: Topois, linkage, imaginaries, realities, hypertrophic discourse, pansyncretic discourse.

Resumen: A propósito del término vinculación, hoy es impostergable redefinir la conceptualización que de él ha hecho la modernidad en su actual momento de borrosidad, en el hipertrófico concepto que se traduce acerca de lo que implica ciudadanía con derechos. El recetario conceptual heredado de la modernidad frente a un contexto que se configura y desconfigura social, económica, política, cultural y educativamente a nivel mundial, invisibiliza de forma cada vez más notoria, la posibilidad de construir nuevos tejidos civilizatorios bordados de derechos ciudadanos y lógicas neohumanizadoras, de lo cual, no escapa el concepto de Academia.

Palabras clave: Topois, vinculación, imaginarios, realidades, discurso hipertrófico, discurso pansincrético.

Introduction

Historically, when defining the term linkage in the context of what the Academy originally meant, one cannot fail to highlight its conception as a space for elites, illuminators of students who were conceived as beings without light: A (without) luminis (light) and thus, it was taking from this conception , everything that implied social and educational practices of work towards realities, in which the inclusion of social diversities as an integrating option of the socio-cultural processes of the planet and therefore, the thinking emerging knowledge of such realities without the service and approval of the Academy were inadmissible.

The academic structure was conceived in a pedestalic way, in the image and likeness of the prevailing social models of the time and conceived as a space only for those who, from the truths built from the enlightenment thinking from the discourse of the Social Contract, weaved the course of non-inclusive practices, today very much in force socio-historically and culturally in the peoples of the world, with the same faces of the most primitive civilizations, manifested in xenophobic, aporophobic, pedophilic and misogynist expressions that aggravate the civilizational crisis.

Everything points to the consolidation of historically inherited models that have not been consulted; well, like all inheritance. Such continuation and reproduction represents the visibilization of the imaginaries of the hypertrophic discourse generated in the narrative and semiology of the enlightenment movement, sustained and sustained in epistemic criteria of truth, veracity, certainty and universality.

The narrative implicit in the course of modernity still in force, crossed from a liquid society, with postmodern, complex and transcomplex movements, of which some Latin American countries are at the forefront: demands what Meza, D (2020:1) defines as the need for: "Conceptual reconfigurations for a model of university education from the transcomplex vision in times of global and planetary crisis".

Understanding this requirement implies overcoming worn-out rationalisms, technocratic curricular models and moving towards integrative models, which from the complexus or embrace of knowledge, move towards real solutions given in the social complexities prevailing in the century and civilizing processes in force and to come.

It is necessary to ask ourselves if it is possible to achieve this from the concepts of linkage - extension - work or community service inherited from the blurred modernity? From where do we link ourselves? What do we link ourselves for and how do we link ourselves?

By linking ourselves as a structure, a conceptual hypertrophy is established in which the term iluminis reappears and without light, by extending ourselves, we reproduce the same imaginaries of the Scholastic Academy towards the different spaces and territories of social realities.

What do we link? What do we link ourselves to? Alvarez (2001:8) warns: "The need to understand an academy and education linked to life", so that from the fragmented, individualized knowledge, loaded with technical and instructionalism and scientistic egolatry, it becomes difficult to achieve resignifying processes of social and human needs.

It is urgent, an Academy beyond the Academy, generator of Topoic culture, understanding by Topois according to Meza, D (2020:15): "The construction of healthy strong social groups to generate new social models".

Topoic culture, according to the same author, leads to overcoming divisions and building new forms of human relationality. So, what are the processes of bonding with society about?

· To overcome relations of power and subordination.

· According to Punset, E (2006:10): "Recovering the soul that is in the brain".

· To build from what has been lived, what has existed, without denying anyone.

· Weaving between the light and darkness of citizenship without borders, without stripping anyone's life or identity.

· Building forms of relationality with society , which are hopeful

· Offer real solutions to real problems.

· Do not pretend to take the academy to society but to build with society.

· Building diversities and pluralities on respect and the sensitive reason of Mafesoli, Honnet and Wilber.

· Achieving the Dialogic Epistemological Synthesis, which goes against the postulates of theories that stimulated antagonisms of all kinds, makes it possible to build processes from thesis and antithesis in complexus, embrace or complementarity between different ones.

· Eradicate what Boaventura, D (2010:32) defines as: Positions of Social Apartheud from any class or socio-cultural, economic, political and ideological territory.

· Listening to silenced voices as knowledge to be built.

· Building with and without original knowledge, from the sociology of absences.

· Raise levels of consciousness through healing practices.

The topoic culture as a tool of approach and social accompaniment of the University towards life, does not consist of hypertrophying the original discourses of the needs in each social reality, it is not about the Academy illuminating, but sharing and weaving knowledge, it is not about taking university knowledge to the realities, but to interweave knowledge of everyday life, with tools of high level of cognitive depth that promote solutions of all kinds.

Achieving this, implies what Facio, A (2010:23) defines as: "The conversion of the personal into collective social policy", from the sociology of absences, in recognition of all, transcending the soul over the utilitarian body, with a path to citizenship formation.how do we transcend then, from the Hypertrophic Discourse in Covid19 times in the Academy to the Pansyncretic Discourse with new healthy strong social groups or topois without conceiving it as a utopia?

Definitely, working the levels of individual and collective consciousness, since the consciousness is generated from a series of psychological, biological, social and spiritual situations, that is to say, that the psychological, biological and social constitute a mesh imbricated in the consciousness. These are difficult states to understand because there is still no unified explanation. However, to understand the consciousness, there is a phenomenological, cognitive, gestalt, biological, behavioral, constellational, humanistic and transpersonal approach.

Materials and Methods

The phenomenological approach is based on European philosophy, especially the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. According to Kant, the study of the mind could not proceed according to the methods of the natural sciences, but had to be based on a different method. For, Kant believed that our mind builds its own internal experiences on the external world. Therefore, the only way to know ourselves consisted in introspection about our essential nature. Introspection is the method most frequently used by phenomenologists. They seek a form of knowledge that is not contaminated, as expressed by Salgado , E (2003:46) , by the "objectifying conceptualization that suggests the search for external causes. In this sense, the phenomenological approach gives a place of privilege to self-knowledge, above objective knowledge". On the other hand, the cognitive conception , according to Gardner (1985: 17), is characterized by:

a) the use of representations (e.g., symbols, diagrams, images, ideas) to explain human thought; b) the use of the computer as a model of human thought; c) the downplaying of affect, context, culture and history, which means that cognitive science aims at "pure" cognitive explanations, independent of context; d) the grounding in classical philosophical problems, such as the problem of mind and knowledge.

The cognitive approach has also been called computational since it proposes, according to Churchland, (1984:92): "A system of internal states governed by a system of computational procedures...". The purpose as expressed by Churchland, (ob.cit). is: "To construct a scheme of the real functional organization of the human nervous system or of the nervous systems of any creature that is the object of study".

In general, most cognoscitivists consider that the processes they study are based on neural processes; others claim that the priority interest consists in the program (the "software"), not in the structure (the "hardware"). In this case, it would be irrelevant for the cognitive sciences, according to Salgado, E (2003:47), whether: "A human brain or a computer or any other organ carries out the processes we call thinking".

The biological approach postulates according to Churchland's (1984: 15) that:

Cognitive activities are ultimately activities of the nervous system. Joys and sorrows, memories and ambitions, sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact nothing more than the behavior of a vast complexity of nerve cells.

Finally, the behaviorist approach is concerned with the distinction between the objective and the subjective. Based on the philosophy of a supposed realism, the methodological behaviorists attempted to explain behavior in terms of the strictly observable. Introspection was rejected as a method of psychological inquiry. Mentalistic terms were banished.

While for behaviorism everything is subjective, the idea would then be to respond conscious activity to observable notions. Therefore, for the behaviorist approach, consciousness would be an effect where it would not be necessary to meditate, analyze, investigate or deduce its origins.

These are the phenomenological approach that thinks that consciousness must be sought within each subject, the cognitive approach that thinks that consciousness is an effect of a process similar to computers, the biological approach that thinks that consciousness is an effect of a long evolutionary process and finally behaviorism that considers that consciousness is nothing more than a reduction to what can be observed with a high subjective load that falls in practice on human judges who condemn others.

But, what triggers the state of consciousness, that is to say, how is consciousness produced and manifested, that is to say, if an individual consciousness exists, could it disturb a collective consciousness? Now, if an individual consciousness exists, could it manage other states of consciousness?

If we are not clear about this diatribe in terms of what is implied in the conformation of individual and collective consciousness, how do we approach the social and cultural worlds of differences of all kinds? From an Academy that intervenes in spaces with pre-thought-out projects or with projects constructed from topoic networks? In short, the forms of consciousness are marking an important process to understand social spaces without hypertrophying what they represent in their essence. From there, the understanding that this will depend on: The way we perceive reality.

Reality is also a complex phenomenon to define. What is reality for me is not reality for someone else, therefore, the term realities, since reality does not exist, it is only a social imaginary built from the visions that homogenize and universalize everything as if it were about humans and uniform cultures. However, we perceive it.

Results

In general terms, perception can be defined as the set of processes and activities related to the stimulation that reaches the senses, through which we obtain information about our habitat, the actions we perform in it and our own internal states. However, despite this general definition, it is not enough to cover the whole map or the territory of reality, because while I define it, it changes, modifies and transforms itself. In fact, spaces of reality that cannot be perceived are usually filled in with the help of others who have seen, perceived, felt, lived, observed and even interpreted it. Therefore, as a fact is not perceived, it is not conscious for some, and the question is: How to make a fact conscious from a thought to an emotion? Hence, communities tend to perceive realities according to collective imaginaries and social representations installed by the structures that intervene them, in which the academy is no exception.

In such a way that, when there is no awareness of a fact, a piece of awareness is borrowed and assimilated, transformed and sought to be understood. This is what usually happens when communities intervene with projects that did not emerge from their real needs but from someone who thought of them at a desk or intuited them as indispensable or simply took on the task of interpreting them.

In liquid modernity, for example, there are devices or human processes created with the purpose of being able to couple and accommodate them to the supposed "consciousness". One of those devices are social media, essentially radio, television and digital media such as Facebook, instagram, tweeter, tik tok, among others, which, without underestimating their usefulness, do not always represent the reflection of real social realities.

Other ways of creating consciousness are all the institutional and organizational organisms that mark and direct the way in which the state of "consciousness" must function or at least move.

Thus understanding the construction of consciousness, in covid 19 and post covid 19 times, it is really difficult to overcome the construction of consciousness from the learned hopelessness to which the traps of the hypertrophic discourse opened the doors, determined to interpret everything in a biased, dichotomized, polarized and ideologized way, from segmenting and separating perspectives of knowledge, people and sciences.

Then, how to understand that the pandemic is precisely the historical moment to propitiate a driving academy, integrator of social fabrics within the framework of their differences and builder of new social knowledge? It is the stellar moment to introduce the benefits of the Pansyncretic Discourse, understood by González, G (2001:15) as: "Integrative forms of knowledge, consciences and humanities".

These ways of approaching social realities, give relevance to the styles of university approach, conceived as accompaniments and not as interventionist projects, in which it is worth the usefulness that today, for example, television and mass media, who have changed the communicative function they traditionally had, giving way to the possibility of overcoming the hypertrophy that makes impossible the formation of healthy topois or strong social groups, which in no way constitute new forms of social movements, but rather the construction of citizen networks.

Thus, there is an urgent need for new forms of symbolic mediation that overcome the biases provided by a vision of reality, according to Salgado, E. ( ob. cit): "Selected, sometimes intentionally manipulated for specific purposes; in short, an atrophied, saturated, if not spectacularized perspective". On the contrary, the pansyncretic integrating discourse seeks to build from the fabric of knowledge and humanities in constant dialogues, since it is not a matter of linking but of accompanying in social constructions from an academy that thinks, recognizes and lets think, with a conscience that admits that we all need each other. The matter becomes difficult, but not impossible or utopian, if we deregulate the egomaniacal vision of science and power.

The pandemic-post pandemic time, with an academy in human attrition but with high technology, requires and will continue to require strong healthy topois, new logics of insertion into society, knowledge in complexus, and high vibratory states of individual and collective consciousness and that, definitely, is not possible to solve it from technology in monologue with itself or from knowledge that already considers to have the answers to all the requirements of each different social space. Therefore, the result of the pandemic and post pandemic is always the same; fear, new social pathologies, separation of humanities, anguish and learned hopelessness and therefore, paradigmatic and social paralysis concealed in the instrumental and now human machines.

The covid- post covid prompted the paralysis of the physical body, the psychological body, the social body and the spiritual body, from which another phenomenon is produced; which is delirium. Delirium is the distortion of reality (if it exists) is the distortion of thought. In this sense, if there is a Hypertrophic Discourse in the Academy, it is necessary to work on the clearing of a supposed academic knowledge towards a knowledge of socio-cultural integralities at the service of the requirements of the new era.

But what is academic knowledge, academic thinking and academic results? It is something very simple: the constant search for truth and certainties. It is a dynamic turn by the struggle and perseverance to attack delusions and false knowledge. However, the search today from some epistemological tendencies of the Academy, walks towards more integrative forms of thoughts such as the Pansyncretic Discourse.

Covid 19 changed the world and continues to do so, and with it, it continues to reinforce a narrative to understand social and human problems from hypertrophies or interpretations either biased by ideologies and sometimes, even by ignorance of reality, not admitted. Hence the urgency of forming new social and academic topoic fabrics with a vision of integrative pansyncretic thoughts, which do not represent moments of utopias, since knowledge is integrated as the same represents the loop of life.

Conclusions

To understand that consciousness does not yet have a place and its complex understanding in phenomenological, cognitive, biological or behavioral approaches, since it is not possible to reach higher levels of consciousness simply by existing. Consciousness does not function like a computer, nor is it generated solely through evolutionary processes, and even less, it is the effect of observation. Consciousness is a much deeper subject that should not only be understood through its effects.

To build social, human, academic, scientific and research fabrics based on Topoic Culture, from a conception of strong socially healthy teams with a transdisciplinary and integrative vision. Developing Topoic Culture implies transcending the conventional concept of the Academy inherited from the blurred modernity, which implies overcoming the terms inherited from the same logic, referred to: Linkage, extension and community service, all implied in the semiology of Positivism that understands the social , in distance to the Academy and to this one , as a base of enlightenment rather than as a space of accompaniments.

To form topoic fabrics from integrative knowledge in complexus or permanent embrace between different, driving forces to overcome antagonisms of all kinds, inherited from modernity and other civilizing processes.

It is urgent to promote an Academy that generates accompaniment to new civilizing processes with new ways of approaching them. It is necessary to understand the university link with society as an accompaniment of projects that emerge from society itself and not as projects thought from the Academy towards life. Socially relevant answers are required, rather than effective and efficient, since both terms delineate an educational and social model, marked by utilitarian pragmatism that rather than contributing to the solution of problems in depth, only offers immediate solutions in the short and medium term that do not transcend the needs from their root or essence.

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