Pathologies du Sociétal :: Konrad Lorenz envisageait la dégénerescence de l'espèce humaine par l'autodomestication qui nous rendrait obèses, hypersexualisés, immatures ou infantilisés et perdus dans le divertissement. Il ne semble pas être passé loin. Désormais une part importante du peuple chinois accède... à l'obésité.
Lorenz avait aussi montré que les schémas de l'agressivité, fonctionnels pour un primate vivant en petit groupe, devenaient complètement aberrants lorsque les chefs humains dirigeant des masses considérables, disposent d'armes carrément génocidaires. Mais Lorenz n'a pas pris en considération un troisième phénomène, pourtant évident en 2008, même s'il l'était moins au cours des années 70. C'est la tendance humaine à l'unitarisme mondial. Or cette tendance comporte des éléments pathologiques spécifiques : elle organise notre espèce comme un unique organisme et non comme une pluralité de cultures. Elle remplace l'antagonisme militaire par la contrainte policière universelle. Elle propose une technogestion des populations et de la Terre, qui fait de la bureaucratie l'héritière de tous les régimes politiques. Or il est plausible que cette tendance -et ses aspects pathologiques voire suicidaires- soit l'effet de l'imbrication de quatre niveaux de causalité : 1. Un mécanisme pratique de "course" à la superpuissance se concluant par une "fin de l'histoire" conflictuelle 2. L'amplification d'un schéma instinctuel favorisant la communauté des congénères, et sa déformation complète dans les conditions d'une espèce "rassemblée". 3. le malaise psychique produit par la culture entraînant la prééminence de compromis névrotiques, et notamment la recherche d'un fonctionnement évitant l'exposition subjective. 4. la nature paradoxale du langage humain créant le caractère infini et indestructible du désir, et poussant chacun à vouloir toujours plus de global et toujours plus d'égalité, dont la combinaison produit la technobureaucratie comme idéal préféré par la majorité.
Plurality :: Without immediate relationship with multiplicity, diversity or variety, plurality expresses an essential feature of human culture : it works only in dividing into opposing positions. The division in culture is due to the division in the human act addressed to others: metaphor, which is the human act par excellence, implies first to compare two terms (1,2), this being done with the help of rules (3), and utilizing an expressive potential of seduction (4). Every metaphor is thus divided into at least four elements. In every human conversation, each speaker uses these four dimensions, but tends to be more interested, or more skilled at supporting one than the three others. Thus, a necessary structure of any human act becomes at the same time what induces plurality in any social group. This plurality is neither a repetition of the same or a difference randomly induced. It is, in fact, still the effect of symmetries, whatever be the number of parties which constitute a participatory cultural field,. If history tends to introduce asymmetries in the conversational field (eg the asymmetry between masters and slaves, owners and proletarians, etc.) it can not impose it on the very long term, because symmetry is the social equivalent of logical necessity. To recognize the sphere where policy of humanity is based on such a logical necessity leads to accept the presence of very small minorities in the political college, or even non yet existent participants ! For example, people who persist in lifestyles that exclude productivist mobilization may represent, in an open society, a crucial polarity, because they may one day be able to take useful initiatives for healing the ills of the industrial-consumerist model.
Pluralité :: Sans rapport immédiat avec la multitude, la multiplicité, la diversité ou la variété, la pluralité exprime un caractère essentiel de la culture humaine : celle-ci ne fonctionne qu'en se divisant en positions opposées. La division dans la culture est due à la division dans l'acte humain adressé à autrui : la métaphore, qui est l'acte humain par excellence, se constitue toujours en comparant deux termes, et cela à l'aide d'une part de règles, et de l'autre d'un potentiel expressif de séduction. Toute métaphore se divise ainsi en au moins quatre éléments, qui, dans la conversation humaine, attirent nécessairement certains protagonistes plutôt que d'autres. Ainsi, une structure nécessaire de tout acte humain se transforme-t-elle en division sociale, et en pluralité, qui n'a ainsi, rien d'une répétition du même ou d'une différence au hasard. Elle est, en fait, quel que soit le nombre de parties qui se constituent en participatrices d'un champ culturel, toujours l'effet de symétries. Si l'histoire tend constamment à introduire des dissymétries dans le champ conversationnel (par exemple la dissymétrie entre maîtres et esclaves, propriétaires et prolétaires) elle ne peut pas l'imposer sur le long terme, car la symétrie n'est que la traduction sociale de la nécessité logique. Reconnaître au plan de la politique de l'humanité cette nécessité logique revient à accepter la présence dans le collège politique de participants très minoritaires voire encore inexistants. Par exemple, les personnes persistant dans des modes de vie qui excluent la mobilisation productiviste, peuvent représenter, dans une société ouverte, une polarité indispensable, peut-être un jour capable de prendre l'initiative en cas de crise grave du modèle industriel-consumériste.
Voir aussi : Antagonisme, agonicité, humanité, Impensable, impensabilité (de la société mondialisée), antagonism, agonism, démocratie pluraliste
Poorness (in social sciences) :: Mediocrity, meaning "average state" (like Bourdieu spoke of photography as an “ordinary art”) is an essential feature of social sciences, provided that, being situated about forces contributing to power without even knowing it, they cannot resist much to it, whereas science that promises the absolute bomb, the martingale or the gene for immortality, can oblige governments to wait at the door of the laboratory that free geniuses agree on clear results.

Poor social science is ultimately forbidden to answer questions raised about humanity, and remained unresolved: what is the specificity of Mankind in the animal kingdom and in nature? Is Man "good", or irreducibly bad? What is wrong with humankind? What about human culture? What is a human society? How to define the current state of humanity in terms of the history and the evolution in which it falls? How and to what extent can we predict the direction of changes that affect it as a species and as a culture or meeting between cultures ? Is a world culture coextensive with the human species simply bearable? Can it respond to different human inclinations? Is it compatible with the plurality inherent in democracy? Etc.

Note that "mediocritas" without virtue is a broader trait of the academic mind, which has always in the past been fled away by most great Intellectuals, from Hobbes to Descartes, Rousseau to Arendt, and many others (all having been changed into academic objects). Every thorough thought, every virtuous research in social science (as science of nature) having always been done outside the machine or on its academic margin, until, becoming truly universal, this machine has absorbed all the lives dedicated to thinking, bending them to his médiocritaire blackmail (paradoxically in the name of "excellence", that is a very specific notion concocted by the "mediocrishment”).

If we follow the economist metaphor (not always silly, although very tempted by accounting everything instead of living), the dictatorship of “mediocrishment” over University, on behalf of accounting excellence, has ended up paying in terms of a general mistrust of society against educational institutions and research. This distrust is less due to slowering the pace of discovery and intellectual contributions than to a societal routinized weakening of the ability to think and plan, to question and answer.

Poor social science occurs most often in total unconsciousness by his actors (who think they are always sincere and virtuous workers) by finally converging eight ways:
scientocratic spirit of seriousness, infantilizing pedagogy, alignment, sway, diversion, insignificance, silence, and, ultimately, disqualification.

As for these methods of research, we can distinguish several strategies:
-The spirit of scientiocratic seriousness aims to drive way from the scope of legitimate debate everything that belongs to a full of challenge and meaningful content. It replaces the form to the content, the “quantophrenic” way of thinking, because its goal is to organize the social environment of teaching and research as a marketable value for comparison, eventually using for that the single possible currency : research or teaching schedules in one hand, and in the other one statistics produced during these hours. The ultimate reason for eliminating any real content is that the suffering generated by jealousy between producers of scientific discourse could be diminished by suppressing any belief in their own creativity as well as that of their colleagues. And like most of these organizable creators are more calling to decrease this jealousy- suffering than they can heroically endure continuing to discuss among challengers, their argument necessarily derives to the cancellation of any content, and to the transposition of any debate as quantitative comparison of schedules and artificial accounts made during academic timings.
It seems there is no solution to this societal drift other than the voluntary formation of small solidarities among researchers agreeing to give up their absolute narcissism in favor of some chosen friends, using a ethical "Zetetic (philocognitive) approach” which is also one of “ethically driven” mutual congratulation.
This may not be recognized or promoted by a University which is henceforth a machine dedicated to oversocialize the values of cognition and culture. Thus, a global university that works around Nobel Prize awarded to a handful (even as fool as monetarists) or around rankings awarded by academic “rating agencies”, is, by definition, to elect only a few entities or persons,throwing back the majority of scholars to a mass of professional anonymity. Instead, small autonomous groups that build on a shared passion can, by dint of meritorious selfless efforts, set up specific worlds of satisfactory mutual recognition, and closer to life.
-Infantile pedagogism is generalized by the societal function of University which is essentially that of a nursery for young adults. It also follows the fact that the lowering of young by older subjects is one of the most universal solutions to the crucial anthropological problem of jealousy. Youth are asked to wait and listen to elders (or pretending to quote them correctly) before obtaining the right to a direct recognition.
This recognition in turn will take the form of a constraint submitted by the younger one as an attendant in a required course. Infantilization mechanically follows the position to be the Younger demanding a response from the Elder. This Infantile position does not see itself as such, both because it was a habit acquired from childhood with adult relatives, and secondly as part of a logically necessary process of expectations and temporal parts. Gifted individuals (pace Bourdieu) must undergo conventional “imbecillisation” and are usually ejected along the way, or adding to it by cunning rogue, to which they will then remain stuck, as a deadly habit.

-Direct alignment: It is rare because a courage (or insanity) is actually required: once the advisor of the prince scrapped, he will find no more friends in academia (loosely rancorous ). This is what awaits such as philosopher turned minister, but also a series of intellectuals "left" used one time by the Elysee.

-A more indirect and often more insidious alignment: it merely a ad hoc production, which falls at the bookstore when the journalist is precisely experiencing the problem. It is, moreover, largely unconscious, because it works like a series of conveyor belts put in parallel the last one eventually going much faster. For example, a professor of economics may have the feeling of being "objective" when he recognizes the complexity of the financial industry. But he has no awareness that this position comes to be completely divergent from the popular sentiment that the said industry is “a gang of thieves snatching the bulk of wealth to the people by inducing excessive debt”. Which could be a quite legitimate point of view.
A professor of sociology may feel to be sensitive to working conditions of garment workers, while the least beggar he encounters, as going to see his "field", simply considers him as one of the robotic-people he has willingly or unwillingly left, in order to take on a terrible loneliness. Etc..

-The theoretical alignment is the smartest in appearance. Either you stick to the wheel of an author to hide behind his assured fame (as a gallery sticks to the name of a very famous artist) and take no risk in your life, making yourself able to threaten any incompetent newcomer with your salt riffle. Or, on the contrary, you are suddenly hammering that you have made a brilliant discovery: the discipline has been totally deceptive before you and long before anyone, you proclaimed you are entitled as a visionary and bold reformer of your field. In reality, you have only taken up the buzzword (globalization, for example) to be placed in time in position to judge those who have preceded you, preferably by revealing family secrets as dirtiest possible. What if Freud had been a pedophile, and more, a Nazi? What if Marx had been necrophagous ? etc. ..
-The semantic alignment is probably the most terrifying, because it is not assignable to a person or an author's narcissism: it goes and shifts anonymously from one author to another, and is capable of gradually correcting the position of a whole profession, sometimes around frankly inhumane concepts or formulas.
- Endogamous alignment: we quote and congratulates each other, but not at all because we love what are some others: just because we have built a system of referrals of dumbwaiter, and, leverage provided, we end up occupying together every possible positions (editorial, faculty, territory, etc..) that give the impression that the whole field is covered. It is actually covered with me ... diocrity ! Worse, there is an effect of automatic convention and prohibition upon divergent thoughts and questions. This alignment process also produces a “system of gurus” (heads of sections, Radio-rock barnacles, collections directors, intellectual censorship official journal, committees etc..), which like in the documentary on wine business “Mondovi .. No!” make it rain or shine on everything that can be said and not said, and require any recipient to bend under their gauntlet, or even slip down into their narrow funnels.

- Sway: it may result from a series of alignments in different directions. On behalf of the liberty of error and the dignity of self-criticism, it puts the shifting paradigms.
It may also result from a constant ambiguity, to interpret what scientists in several directions simultaneously, each usable at the best time of the economy. It must obviously be brilliant to control these variations virtuosos. But this virtuosity does nothing to discipline that is somewhat diluted and slowed or even crowded. However, the browser can end the State Council, and why not top the list of PS.

The diversion: it takes many forms in turn: we distinguish here the algophrénie the minusculite and catégoriose.
- "The algophrenia" disease (socio-compassion). We exhibit a high-profile solidarity with "'those who suffer" (emigrants, the unemployed, deaf, prostitutes, women raped, children-victims, AIDS patients, homeless, prisoners, etc..). Of course, these categories are legitimate and their approaches are sometimes "refreshing" but we can still question the reason triggering such researches: is it only the sensitivity of the researcher? Not acting as often in the desire to "touch" an immediate public discouragement to the task of explaining how the category "that moves" is a part-stake system that also produces all the others? The belief of these researchers to escape the mediocrity of the discipline by designating "the painful realities" is certainly respectable but you have the nerve to tell them that this call does not fill the gap of understanding, always both intimate and global-that characterizes the social sciences. This is not the existence of such research, which in itself poses problems: the fact that they are not relayed by less categorical approaches.
- "Minusculite" (tends to focus on uninteresting, secondary, fragmented, bizarre, formal or ordinary objects, etc. .., under the pretext that they are usually neglected (just like the "Outstanding" categories). In reality, it deepens our anguish because it wants more proof that there is important, and it –paradoxically- suggests how we are literally trapped by global factors, for the least of our actions. Minusculite so easily takes the place of a true "emiology" (working for the resisting Familiarity against the occupying Societalness). Minusculite tends to invade the field of social sciences that are ever more prohibited or discouraged than we hear of big problems on the political front. At this price, the sociologist ends like a curio on the shelf of the bourgeois scholar, or in the magazine blurb, dear to the " fifty years old housewife".
-The classic social sciences’ “categoriosis" (mostly infecting those who have always used scissors to cut "relevant" social groups), seem to have slightly declined. It still quite heavily impregnates sociologies or ethnologies defined by the "obvious" recognition of their “object”: workers, citizens, journalists, lawyers, employees, nurses, MPs, drivers, workers, poor, rich merchants, traders, etc., etc.. These traditional approaches are not subject to fundamental criticism: the fact that they worship totally spontaneous categories, directly assumed by the actors or perceived by others, is never analyzed as an effect of permanent construction by a projective society as a large categorical machinery. It is true that such a criticism would immediately undermine the discipline that contributes to this effect. On the other hand, as for the socio-compassionate approach, (and previously in anthropology) we are moving into sociological fictions, so that one really believes it is generating human truths, when it only declines browsing the different meanings required by the system. Although the very purpose of social science is question categories, if we do not start by asking ourselves how we produce opposition between rich and poor, or how we end up inventing the very notion of "journalist", how can we imagine being able to say anything important, and Sustainable- about societies?
Trivialitosis (or insignificance illness) is different from “Minusculite”: it is emptying any subject matter of its substance and vitality. This is the classical orientation of University which makes anything "serious", especially laughter and celebration. In general, it lays in big methodology books that will overwhelm two or three generations of students. In this traditional role, the Ivy League (or the “Grandes Ecoles” in France) are very good at nipping young souls in the bud by learning them how to be dead in life. Mortification voluntarily appearing as an ethical and cognative obligation, everyone must pass (otherwise neurotic crisis) by reading thousands of pages and figures of absolute boredom. Everything is scrutinized, except, of course works and authors who could wake up the corpse and make him fall from his "responsible” rigor mortis.
Belonging to the same kind of insignificance, "quantophreny" pointed sixty years ago by the russo-american Pitirim Sorokin, but it is remarkable that , the more the madness of facts and figures ends up with an ever deeper… debt, and the more everyone feels an urge to use figures to assess ones’ indebtment. Insignificance is thus intensified by neurosis and merges into a pandemic spreading well beyond social sciences.

-Silence is a key weapon of alignment and sway: we do not simply speak of enemies or divergences. Silence on hated challengers also avoids conflict, and it escapes a conversation that is feared more than anything. But this is not the worse, compared to the silence on major pending issues of the discipline, that eventually produces a genuine voluntary obscurantism, supported by institutional arrangements which fit the profession (as T.Kuhn shows it in his history of scientific paradigms). Ask “social” sociologists what poor or rich mean in a green society, you’ll call a head scratching. But if you ask them how poverty and wealth, or jealousy belong "to Man's characteristic”, it is likely that you will be entitled to a total response: raised eyebrows, eyes bulging slightly, a vague smile.

As far as disqualification requires the posture of a judge, it puts its author at risk. Therefore, apart from the moments where you can howl with the others coyotes in Academia, the disqualificator focuses on issues where he (she) is fairly sure to obtain public support.
Principes et médiations :: D'origine logique, l'opposition entre principes et médiations hiérarchise des ordres de polarisation culturelle. Par exemple, nous ne pouvons pas mettre sur le même plan un antagonisme fréquent entre "poètes" et "mathématiciens" et celui opposant monde sociétal et monde familier. La seconde relève de principes, à savoir de réalités fondamentales de toute société humaine, tandis que la première relève de types de médiations entre les principes : on peut tenter d'atténuer ou d'interpréter l'antagonisme société-familier soit par un style "poète", soit par un style "mathématicien". Néanmoins, les médiations peuvent devenir des quasi-principes dans des sociétés complexes où elles deviennent des "organes" à part entière. Toutefois prendre les médiations pour les principes peut induire une illusion d'unité organique, alors qu'une crise de fonctionnement un peu importante révélera un retour aux agonismes structuraux.
Voir aussi : Koinologie
Protagoras :: Le premier (en âge et en sagesse) des sophistes, non comme discutailleur mais comme posant l'intérêt d'être raisonnablement conscients face aux illusions religieuses de tous ordres. Il admettait d'ailleurs aussi que ces illusions pouvaient être utiles. S'adressait-il au fond surtout à ceux qui peuvent supporter d'être lucides, les élites
dirigeant d'impériales entités, par exemple ? Ce qui expliquerait aussi la haine des démagogues à son égard.
Platon le respecte, mais préfère le fétichisme de la vérité idéale. Aujourd'hui que la rationalité technique a tout envahi, il reste peut-être de Protagoras le mouvement même d'une lucidité qui ne saurait être scientiste,justement,
et considérerait avec plus de soin l'importance d'un équilibre entre société et individus, entre mécanismes et subjectivités.
parole :: La parole est très précisément le trait spécifique de l'animal humain, et de son langage, constitué de langues comme registres de la parole. La parole vient avant le langage et avant la langue. Elle consiste en un jeu de propositions de comparaisons, de "métaphores", entre des participants. Ceux-ci sont institués comme "sujets" -ceux qui parlent- mais ces sujets ne sont pas seulement des assujettis aux positions grammaticales. Ils sont aussi ceux qui ont la liberté de... ne pas parler. L'ambiguité de la notion de sujet introduit au trait fondamental de la parole : le paradoxe. Celui ci explique à lui seule l'incroyable fécondité de l'histoire humaine depuis 60 000 ans. Le paradoxe est en effet tellement inconfortable -tellement tendu vers la folie- qu'il nous pousse irrémédiablement à la quête de solutions en tous sens. Il nous pousse à parler pour... arrêter de parler. Nous y parviendrons peut-être avec l'âge robotique, mais alors... nous cesserons d'être humains.
philosophies européennes :: Il existe une tendance à "courber' la portée des pensées les plus puissantes à l'intérieur des "sphères" que constituent les univers sémantiques nationaux : même les grands philosophes éprouvent de la difficulté à sortir de ces systèmes de préoccupations où ils sont nés, ont vécu, et ont parlé et écrit.
Par exemple, les Français sont très préoccupés par un trait récurrent de leur culture : la tendance à fabriquer une élite arrogante de pouvoir par l'humiliation légale du subordonné. C'est sans doute pourquoi de Rousseau (rendu fou de paranoïa) à Bourdieu ou à Foucault (fasciné par le pouvoir de faire souffrir), il existe une constante "française", que compensent parfois une passion d'universalisme sans rivages et sans souveraineté (Derrida), ou encore une échappée technophile.
Pour ce qui concerne les Allemands, nécessairement préoccupés de communauté culturelle (voire sociale et économique), on observe, notamment depuis Hegel, une fascination par la "schöne totalität", qu'on retrouve par exemple dans l'adhésion entière de Nietzche au gai savoir, dans la poétique heideggerienne... dans la dictature du prolétariat selon Marx, ou dans le concept de sphère de Peter Sloterdijk. Ulrich Beck, issu de la sociologie des "risques", conçoit désormais la société-monde comme une communauté unie par les dangers. Il ne semble pas percevoir la récurrence du danger que présente une communauté unie...
En Italie, l'aura passée et mêlée de l'Eglise et de l'Empire "nostalgise" les philosophes qui ne cessent de rebondir sur les concepts antiques d"empire" (Negri), d'auctoritas ou de "Justitium" (Agamben), ou bien de se réclamer de l'héritage catholico-humaniste. Au delà de tous ces objets du musée du pouvoir, ce qui intéresse surtout les penseurs italiens, semble être un reflet de la situation politique de la péninsule : la question de la proximité corporelle dans les relations d'influence, que l'on retrouve par exemple dans la structure de civilité, encore fortement locale et citadine.
En Grande Bretagne, passionnée par la promotion militante du libéralisme, le marché intellectuel a depuis longtemps fait exploser les disciplines "unitaires" comme la philosophie. Elle propose des penseurs spécialisés autour de problèmes à résoudre, et laisse souvent la parole à des personnalités qui se sont déployées en ce sens aux Etats-Unis, chaque prix Nobel d'Economie valant pour une bonne dizaine de philosophes européens... L'exception est sans doute J. Rawls qui tente de bien ordonner la société comme Taylor ordonnait le travail, Norbert Wiener ordonnait le langage ou Searle ordonne le sérieux des actes de parole.
La question se pose donc de savoir si une philosophie vraiment universelle est simplement possible. Si elle l'est (ce qui est éminemment souhaitable), il faudra sans doute que les penseurs parviennent à s'arracher à cette force de gravitation "nationale" d'autant plus puissante qu'elle est désormais pratiquement invisible et indénonçable. Une façon de le faire serait peut-être de commencer par décrire les effets spécifiques de cette pesanteur par régions du monde, et de tenter ensuite de dégager les traits d'une préoccupation plus équilibrée, et par tant plus "réellement" universelle, laquelle prendrait nécessairement en compte -en osant une anthropologie de la philosophie- les principales oppositions existantes, fussent-elles apparemment muettes (comme les "philosophies dites orientales".

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