translated from Spanish: Crisis and Sociological Imagination – The Counter

In these days, when hundreds of thousands of young people apply to Chilean universities, many ask us and wonder why and why it is valuable to study sociology. The French sociologist Francois Dubet and the Polish sociologist Sigmund Bauman have published, in recent times, two books with the same title “What is a Sociologist really for”.
The first question to ask yourself is What is sociology? It is a social science, which, like all science, provides a theory and a method.
A theory is an articulated set of propositions that seeks to explain certain aspects of social reality. In turn, the methods, with their quantitative dimensions – realities that are represented through numerical values and statistical analyses – or qualitative – descriptions and analysis of social behaviors, facts and subjects and their own accounts – seek develop the ability to ask questions. Part of hypotheses that must be verified in fieldwork.
As Anthony Giddens points out, sociology is a scientific discipline with systematic research methods, data analysis and examination of theories in the light of evidence and logical discussion. It is an empirical discipline that works with verifiable data that derives from the methodological observation of society itself and the variable behavior and judgments of individuals and that sociological theory universalizes from the partial conclusions that provides empirical research.
When Augusto Comte invented the term sociology he did so because societies must build representations of them, they must know each other.
Some examples: what does the sociologist do when questioning him about the development of sociology in Chile? He draws on his historical knowledge and recalls that sociology in Chile was installed between 1957 and 1959.
Then he asks again, in what international context does this foundation take place? It takes place in the midst of a harsh cold war, three years after the twentieth congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union when Nikita Khrushchev denounces Stalin’s crimes and also raises the need, because of the nuclear danger, for peaceful coexistence.
This foundation of sociology also takes place the same year that the Cuban Revolution begins in Latin America and the impact it had on the continent.
Another question posed by the sociologist In what national context does this foundation of sociology take place? It is answered, when the government of Jorge Alessandri was just beginning, the presence in power of a modern right linked to the expansion of capitalism that left behind the political weight of the landowner oligarchy.
And he keeps asking himself other questions. If the sociologist, for example, is told: what is the state? He resorts, to respond to, the memory of his theoretical knowledge, but also to his reflexive capacity.
So, for example, does the State do in the face of Chile’s social outburst since 18 October last year?
His first answer is: he has primarily sought to impose order, which means that the state resorts to the legal repressive apparatus trying to convince citizens of the legitimacy of it. In other words, it seeks to generate consent, seeking to bring citizens to terms with what the state does.
But he wonders again, what else should he do? And the answer is that it should understand the origin, the nature of the social explosion, its causes, and give structural institutional and social responses to demands that are strongly internalized by the most transversal of the population. If it does not, all its action loses legitimacy because order, on its own, in the midst of a social explosion of the dimensions we live in, is not enough to defend the institutional democracy estimated narrow and unfair by those who protest, and must therefore turn applied axiom: the expansion of political and social democracy, assuming the legitimacy of the claims of millions of very diverse subjects, can create the conditions for replenishing order.
In studying the serious acts of violence occurring in Chile, sociology is obliged to ask itself, as Dubet points out, as if this had been written in the midst of the Chilean social explosion, about the forms and shortcomings of social integration given that the dimension of violence of young people who are marginalized from the model “is experienced as a form of personal destruction, as a threat of the system itself to which they respond by hardening, what they build as identities through one’s own violence, and acting with anger, during riots and urban riots, building in subjects against power and even against society.” The conclusion is simple: in a society without real social integration there will be violence that will appear as soon as a more powerful social action is triggered or has the opportunity to express itself in football, in concerts or in the midst of social mobilizations of a nature Peaceful.
This reflective capacity about social reality and the causes of phenomena where does it come from? To a large extent the study of sociology as long as this is a science. This is because scientific knowledge, in addition to teaching theoretical concepts, teaches to reflect. Perhaps that is his main virtue, the development of the capacity to think.
Asking questions and discussing the answers. This means reflecting on Chile as a country, as a nation, thinking about its past and its present to look to its future.
Sociology gives us tools to ask ourselves about social reality and to answer us, to argue about the social.
Of course this does not mean that the sociologist is the only one who raises questions. But it does mean that, as it is, it has certain scientific instruments that other disciplines and individuals do not have.
It follows that sociology studies the social initiative of individuals, their behaviour towards society, the differentiated social groups that are shaped at every moment of the development of societies, the interaction of individuals, or subject to the political and economic system and the degree of cohesion achieved by a given social structure.
Sociology addresses the functioning of social entities and the effects on people’s lives. But it also studies the behavior of people in relation to others and what consequences have that kind of social relationship in the construction of the ways of life of a society, societies that change by transforming the ways of relating and living especially, as today, in the midst of great technological revolutions, in a global world and where the solid stability of modernity gives way to what Bauman calls liquid societies, postmodernity. It is a shift in the economy, philosophy, politics and the relationship and involvement of people with politics and its instruments, a cultural shift where new demands – many of them intangible – loom, that transcend the social plane of the classic structure derived from the industrial revolution to those that are shaped by the digital age, the information society, networks and what comes next is the society of artificial intelligence.
This, from sociology, was unveiled by Touraine when he noticed the rapid transition from industrial to post-industrial society and gave sociology the role of contributing to the creation of awareness in actors and subjects of the dimension of this step in the life of the societies and individuals and how this was expressed in the creation of new social movements that would no longer be determined only by the classical social contradictions of the previous era.
Sociology addresses, deconstructing categories, classical themes, work, family, education, social movements, organizations and their relationships with power structures; the most chilling issues such as prisons, destitute, hospices, but also those, emerging ones, such as urban conflicts, gender, migration, ethnic and sexual minorities, domestic violence, the environment, biopolitics, quote some.
Feminism is now central, with the questioning of patriarchal society, the rejection of the pattern of domination of women, the installation and realization of gender rights towards a new form of society that respects the equality of men and women, and the environmentalism, which sets a reality different from that in which everything was believed to be infinite and had the certainty of linear progress to the conception of the finite, to the need for sustainable development and a context of uncertainty about the present and the future. Behind them have emerged new social movements, and even political forces, of partial identities that represent claims that occupy a transverse space and produce a profound cultural revolution that modifies the idea and discourses that societies have had on themselves.
The digital age changes the way people relate and, therefore, the forms of their organization also become more complex and multiform with regard to classical social movements with the consequent change of subjectivity and the way this is set up in a more individualistic world. This involves the creation of specialties of sociology given the complexity and diversity that social life acquires from its own phenomenon that is the study, in the interaction, of the subject and the object, because it studies the meaning that the subject gives to relationships and social phenomena, socialization, such as the autonomy of the object that goes beyond the interpresubject sets up.
Sociology therefore studies change, and in particular that which has to do with traditional ways of thinking, builds, through its analytical theory, technique and research methodology, new general trends that are generated in the diversity of social and institutional manifestations. It builds an image of what emerges and does it, as Kundera would say about the role of art, tearing the curtain, in this case, the scenery of social life, explaining the social and the answers from the social itself and, therefore, disturbing the conservative powers.
As Dubet rightly points out sociology is not like a novel, it does not work to seduce and create an effect of reality, but to interpret reality itself, establishing the data derived from research to build a narrative, that all social formation requires an epistemology and a lexicon. It reveals hidden inequalities, injustices, reveals “the portions of social life that are hidden in the worst-lit corners of the scene”, wonders why, its causes, and leaves naked mechanisms and processes.
Sociology is seen as an uncomfortable discipline because it has a critical view of society because, do not forget it, it judges a social order, it contributes to social transformation, the elaboration of public policies and the creation of the subjects themselves. It does not produce ideology, in the sense that it does not accommodate its research of reality and its interpretation to inform a certain conception, if it intervenes by creating knowledge towards the objective knowledge, beyond that the sociologist can start from a certain ideological conception but, to do sociology, he must free himself from his own vision to study reality openly, without prejudice, he must, as Mills would say, resort to the “sociological imagination” to think by taking distance from the facts to Analyze. It must establish a distance between the scientific production of reality and how it intends to act in social life.
However, as Giddens says, those with sociological knowledge cannot be unaware of the many and diverse inequalities that cross the global and local world today and must seek answers to address these phenomena.
One of the themes of sociology in the 21st century, as it is also from other angles to philosophy, is how we observe and analyze, in the global and increasingly postmodern world, – with a certain discomfort of one’s own sociology accustomed to dealing with a broad diversity of social movements where subjectivity was built in the collective social relationship – to the individual subject, without the ancient differentiation of classes serving this effect, and the process of shaping his socialization.
The individual subject, who in today’s society is not associated with a specific organic, recognized leadership, who calls himself through social media, acts according to what he thinks his rights and as Dubet claims they do not choose or are determined by their identity or social position but rather work to defend them from those who put them at risk, acquiring in passing a high electoral and positional volatility at the political level; they work in a multitude of markets with the constraints imposed by the unequal distribution of material, social and even symbolic resources and think to themselves from the symbolic representation of being subjects of their own lives.
That is, sociology must address and investigate this complex phenomenon from the individual who in turn is always, even in its peculiarity, a social subject, even less coherent than the classical subject, but with the ability to exploit and mobilize in a heterogeneous way and he is obliged, in that process, to build for himself his own experience and subjectivity.
Politics and its instruments, which have great difficulty connecting with this subject-individual, denounces individualism as perverse and tries to bring the stage back to the past, to the old order of stable and configured subjects around a conscience without warning that the liquidity of today’s society’s relationships makes it impossible. He fears the scenario that in the huge political vacuum, as is the case, left-wing populist leadership with authoritarian or right-wing tints with strong fascist nuances will emerge and it is precisely sociology that can give lights on how to rebuild a new social life to based on the uniqueness, atomicity and transversality of the new social subjects that characterize today’s world and who, as we have seen in the social explosions of recent months in Chile and in various latitudes of the world, are the ones who place the economic and political structures of society, sometimes from very particular explosive elements, but behind which there is a sea of contradictions to be revealed.
Sociology also serves this.
 
The content poured into this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.

Original source in Spanish

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