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Generation Gap

Aging systems of thought eventually encounter the conditions of their existence. This dramatic process is mainly experienced as a type of eternal and ever-recurring conflict. It is a ubiquitous confrontation as it, in principle, embraces all possible micro-conflicts between discursive utterances between what is coming-to-being vs. what has been present and already proliferated in Logos. The former competitor is a force of altering and canny innovations in discourse that gradually takes shape in formalizations of expressions, which enters the plain of thoughts either in an aggressive or in a conciliatory fashion, stepping on the very foundations of its predecessor, undermining its structural consolidations, exposing its limits, shifting the worn edges of its argumentative infrastructure. 

Seen through the impossible standpoint outside Discourse, this clash appears to be primarily a spatial experience on the surface of Time, rather than simply a process of Reason. As such, it involves a consummation of space-in-time, of a taking over of time, which so far has been allocated to the proliferation of the aging system of thought, by the new intruding formations that attempt to evade the plain of Discourse in all possible ways. This precise moment has a timeframe that by no means can be measured in traditional terms, for it can last longer than in terms of defined historical periods. Nevertheless, when this clash of systems is taking place, we are offered a wealth of revelations about the discursive formations’ characteristics and their patterns of circulation and formalization: their very conditions of existence are exposed and challenged, not only in the classic sense of confronted arguments and negotiations, but also in the sense of a space-in-time invaded/managed by the process of confrontation itself. One will claim that this is obviously a continuous process in the discursive plain but yet one needs to notice that it always varies in terms of magnitude, force and expression. These variations are of great importance for the study of the tissue of History as well as for understanding the inevitable character of the process as such.

But the above-described process reveals another important and underestimated condition: that of an ever-present gap, which despite being commonly experienced as a distance in discourse (thus, a so-to-speak spatial parameter), a gap which seems to have a temporal nature, a temporal core: a core produced in Time and of Time. The study of the temporal aspect of the gap that occupies the space between competing discourses that promote different systems of thought is an act of liberating a genealogy of understanding and interpreting the conditions of their existence, an act of unveiling the temporal nature of their appearance and their dependencies on the merciless process of coming-to-being, without easily falling for the attractive explanations of competence, integrity and consistency between competing systems. This theoretical shift should be just experienced as a structural shift on the level of analysis, an opening up of the lens of Meaning and in order to reveal its accountable temporality.  

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