In this entry I come to retrieve a debate issued at the end of 1996 from the series “Conversations with Isabel Escudero” from the UNED was transmitted in the program The Adventure of Knowledge in The 2. By that time, I didn’t know there was something called sociology and, since then, I couldn’t have imagined that one day I would be interested by this type of intellectual discussion that taps the principles that seemed most entrenched of the Illustration and put in check the universal character that had been granted to knowledge most beatified of modernity, that is, scientific knowledge.
Before they started to germinate in the decade of the seventies of the last century, the so-called Social Studies of Science (ESC), it was virtually inconceivable to equate or not to make distinctions essential between the specialised knowledge of the science and knowledge of popular and instrumental of daily life. On this and more speak to us Emmánuel Lizcano (professor of the Sociology of Knowledge in the UNED) and Luis Castro Nogueira (professor of Philosophy and Methodology of the Social Sciences in the national university of distance education) in conversation with Elizabeth Squire (poet and professor of didactics at that stage in the UNED). Has passed already more than three lústros from that debate, but there are pointed towards issues that remain at the top of the discussions intellectual current of social thought: the dispute between the theories of modern and postmodern; the ideology as a rhetoric of basic communication (Geertz), beyond the deformation attributed by Marx; the Space-Time-Social (ETS); and the always complex ethical dimension, inseparable (if not prior) the epistemological dimension.
It would be useless to hide the admiration I have for these two teachers. So I don’t see the need to rebut any accusation of the unavoidable part reverential has this entry. Among the many things that I have learned (and more that I have left to learn) from them, Lizcano has shown me that there are many routes unexplored, waiting to be tours, itineraries unthinkable that offer one of the most necessary in the desire to learn: what’s so strange with a lot of potential to let us surprise you. On the other hand, I found in him in some ruse to “not to humiliate the head under the sway of any, and, in particular, under the ‘tribunal of reason'”. “The Reason” with a capital”, that came to occupy the place of God before the enlightened modernity began its course.
With Luis Castro maintain the illusion of its invigorating project to re-introduce in the social sciences a vital and genuine naturalist program, through the thesis of Homo Suandes, which can give a better account of the social behavior away from the classic determinism of the classical paradigms (in the Standard Model (I) of the social sciences) that until now have not been able to avoid the resistance that individuals have to be left to narrate for them. The time spent to understand the “complexity suadens, with their intense production of heterogeneous networks, tissues, wrappers and atmospheres affective determinants of multiple processes of subjectification”, made me see in many behaviors of the people around me in my day-to-day, to the more simple, the Suadens that we all carry in our human nature. I have the conviction that this project will be step point in the not too distant future not only for sociology, but for any type of studies transdisciplinary intending to give an account of human behavior and cultural changes.
I don’t want to end this introduction without thank to my fellow student Victor Risk, as a sociologist graduated, for having made me know that there was this video. A jewel, without a doubt, for me, and I hope that I can be of great interest to many others, and invite to reflection, to awaken mentally and shying away from the beliefs of the masses, prefabricated and narcotic. It is, at the end of alcabo, we make the effort -and enjoy it – to dig below the speeches ethnocentric prevailing in our western societies of consumption, and getting to the ideology and the mechanisms of power that support it.
Ruben Crespo
Debate “Knowledge and society”
Source: CanalUNED