By RENATO ORTIZ*
The sociological subject can “speak” about the most diverse topics, but without forgetting that he does not have a monopoly on the interpretation of the social
Every discourse is anchored in a specific place, that is, a specific space from which a meaning is enunciated. For example: philosophical discourse. It presupposes the existence of a tradition (concepts, themes, style, authors) within which reflection is inserted and developed. Or literary discourse, with its rules and norms that define a territory in which narrative and aesthetic demands are expressed.
There are multiple discourses that intersect with each other (medical, legal, etc.), and they view each other based on their specificities; in more abstract terms, they “speak” from a place. The idea of “place of speech” (the quotation marks are intentional), however, emerges as a kind of marker of other meanings in the contemporary debate.
It is not just about the space from which one speaks, but also about “who” speaks. “Place” and “who” thus become relevant. With the emergence of feminist movements, gender studies, and the most diverse identity claims, the expression quickly gained legitimacy and is part of the current lexicon, spreading from the sphere of politics to knowledge. This is the context of this brief note that I am writing, in which I would like to understand the relationship between place of speech and Social Sciences.
My critical and reflective effort will be to explain the virtues and the problems that arise from them. I will begin with the virtues. To do this, I will return to an old discussion dear to Karl Mannheim. He said that thought would remain incomplete as long as its social marks were hidden. I quote the author: “The main thesis of the sociology of knowledge is that it asserts the existence of modes of thought that cannot be adequately understood as long as their social origins remain obscure” (Mannheim, 1982, p. 97).
Objectifying what was hidden would imply a gain in knowledge. It is within this framework that the question of social classes was inserted; it was necessary to make this condition of thought explicit so that we could finally get around it (not necessarily overcome it); in this way sociology would cease to be merely “bourgeois”.
Karl Mannheim certainly did not suspect the conditioning factors that currently mark sociological discussion – gender, race, ethnicity, colonization – however, the epistemological dimension to which he referred remains: how to objectify the restrictive conditions of the subject within a given field of knowledge. In this case, the intellectual framework in which the thought is situated is important, which brings us to the question of “who”.
One example: gender studies in archaeology. On the one hand, they make explicit an important aspect of the history of homo sapiens: male domination. Material data (we must not forget that the foundation of archaeology is material traces: bones, arrows, stones, remains of dwellings, tools, pottery) reveal that past societies, at least from the Neolithic onwards (there are doubts as to whether or not we should include part of the Paleolithic) are segmented and unequal. The sexual division of labor indicates the existence of a gender hierarchy far removed from the image of egalitarian primitivism imagined by various authors.
However, gender studies are not limited to the issue of male domination; they encompass a conceptual aspect. They are a critique of a certain mode of knowledge, in this case, of Archaeology as a scientific discipline. It is thus claimed that the disciplinary status quo, that is, the tradition in which knowledge was anchored, was marked by a male bias, leaving certainties and doubts in the shadows. It was not simply the “invisibility of women” in archaeological studies that caused a problem, but also concepts distorted by the current paradigm.
An interesting example is the relationship between graves and weapons. Several tomb discoveries had favored a common interpretation: weapons were evidence of a warlike practice exclusive to men. However, how can we explain the existence of weapons in women's graves? Could there have been societies of female warriors (there is a myth about the existence of the Amazons and matriarchy)? Or should the relationship between graves and weapons simply be reconsidered? In fact, the empirical evidence considered by Archaeology was the existence of “graves with weapons”, that was the objective fact.
However, several things can be inferred from it: weapons would be an object of status social status of the dead (men or women); they would have an unknown religious meaning; or even attest to the remains of a warrior worshipped by his peers. What is important in the example considered is that it is heuristic, that is its relevance. It reveals that previous knowledge was insufficient, biased, but after feminist criticism it advances. Or as some authors say, there is a history of ignorance and knowledge, and it encompasses the world of science, among others. Enlightenment is the fruit of overcoming it.
The idea of a place of speech also has a political dimension, which is, in fact, the trait that stands out in the debate of ideas. It refers to the position that certain “minorities” occupy in society; to subordinate groups that seek to assert themselves as such. In the public sphere, silenced speeches can thus be expressed in a situation of parity in relation to others. In this sense, I have no doubt, it is an enrichment of democracy. This is another virtue. It is worth remembering that, in the public sphere, different voices have been expressed since the 19th century, for example, workers and bourgeoisie.
One only has to read the newspapers (which can be found in specialized libraries) of socialists, anarchists, and later communists, to see the existence of a latent conflict between different “speakers”. The public sphere has always been a territory of dissent. However, this diversity of actors did not necessarily include protagonists such as women, blacks, indigenous people, and homosexuals.
In a way, it is the recent entry of these actors that creates tension in the debate in which distinct and delegitimized discourses demand recognition. The place of speech thus presupposes the presence of social injustice and the need to position oneself against it. But what about the role of the “who”, the one who enunciates the discourse, from this perspective?
I will quote a black intellectual in her fight against racism: “In a society like Brazil, with a slave-owning heritage, black people will experience racism from the perspective of those who are the object of this oppression, from the perspective that restricts opportunities due to this system of oppression. White people will experience it from the perspective of those who benefit from this oppression. Therefore, both groups can and should discuss these issues, but they will speak from different perspectives. We are saying, mainly, that we want and demand that the history of slavery in Brazil be told from our perspectives, and not only from the perspective of those who won.” (RIBEIRO, 2019, p.48).
The passage is suggestive and brings us to two themes: legitimacy and experience. Telling what happened in a different way is to confront the authority of other discourses. It is about laying the foundations of a “speech” that was undervalued in the public sphere (in Brazil the expression “do you know who you are talking to?” is the affirmation of privilege as a right, that is, of the silence of others). The dispute implies “being heard” despite the socially existing hierarchies of subordination or stigma.
But the quote also highlights a crucial aspect of the debate: the notion of experience. The author's use of the term “experiencing” is expressive. Little used in Portuguese in everyday language, it takes on a particular configuration when associated with political discourse. Experiencing is distinct from experimenting; experimentation is generally confined to the objective aspect of action; experiencing refers to that which is subjective, to feelings and emotions. Hence the concept is used in psychology and psychoanalysis, where feelings and emotions are decisive elements in the therapeutic process.
The transposition of the existential dimension into the political sphere is recent (I mean, a few decades old). For much of the 20th century, political discussion was conducted in terms of awareness, for example, “class consciousness,” or from a phenomenological perspective, “self-consciousness” (hence Sartre’s proposal for engaged literature, which would awaken the reader to action). Becoming aware of social contradictions would be an individual act necessary to overcome a situation of alienation. This aspect does not disappear in the contemporary world; political parties and identity movements fight to raise awareness among those they address.
For example, feminists must consider a series of strategies to make women “aware” of male domination (this is precisely the case with domestic violence). However, a new layer is added, that of feelings and emotions. The experience thus becomes a crucial aspect of self-awareness. In this sense, domination acquires an objective and subjective aspect, and this subjectivity, immersed in feelings, permeated by social contradictions, must be taken into account.
The term “place of speech” therefore has a double meaning: it refers to a specific social position and to an experience within this space of subordination. However, when considering the relationship between place of speech and social sciences, there are problems. The first aspect to note is that all social groups have a conception of themselves. This is the case of elites, who have a “place of speech”. Their members occupy the same class position and experience a common experience.
I will take an example from my own research: the world of luxury (Ortiz, 2019). One of the qualities of luxury objects is their rarity, that is, something that cannot be found “just anywhere”. For example, Acqua di Cristalo. The bottle was designed to reproduce a drawing by Modigliani and contains 750 ml of water from Fiji, France and a glacier in Iceland; it contains 5 mg of 23-karat gold powder, essential for taste and health. Or watches made from pieces of a meteor that fell to Earth 8.000 years ago, originating from a constellation between Saturn and Mars.
Rarity is associated with the eccentricity of materials (glacier water or the remains of a meteor), but also with the virtues of art (a drawing by Modigliani) and, of course, with price. As one of these intellectuals from the field says: “If we behave like Danone or Nestlé, the consumer puts us on the same level. If luxury is on every street corner, it is no longer luxury” (Sicard, 7, p. 2005). The examples could be multiplied, but my intention is to highlight one aspect of the argument: the existence of a “discourse”. Is it equivalent to sociological knowledge?
Certainly not. Sociological analysis is situated in another register, in another “place.” It allows us to think differently from the worldview (some would say, ideology) of those who experience it. I can therefore state: luxury is simultaneously transnational and hyper-restricted. In other words, its reach is global (there is a global market for luxury goods: cars, yachts, private jets, etc.), but it is restricted to the world of the rich. In this sense, luxury and the world of the rich share homologous qualities; they define a space in which only a few are “citizens with rights.”
The globalized world is not a space without borders; in fact, new borders are being created, which delimit a territory that defines itself and differentiates and separates it from others. It is possible to consider other cases of discourses made from different places (working classes, businesspeople, religious groups, etc.), but it is important to retain what is relevant, the difference in register in relation to the Social Sciences. There is no doubt that religions contain a conception of the world, are capable of explaining people's destiny and guiding them in their conduct, but they do not constitute sociological or anthropological explanations.
The Social Sciences have as their subject matter different “discourses”, but their “discourse” is of a different nature. Another feature to be considered can be summarized as follows: “the Social Sciences are not based on the experience of those who practice them”. I put the phrase in quotation marks to demarcate it in the text and differentiate it from another type of statement: “in the Social Sciences the subject is an active element in the elaboration of this type of knowledge”. I emphasize that these are different statements. To say that the subject interferes in the construction of the object is to revisit a classic controversy among social scientists (see Max Weber).
However, this does not mean that knowledge is based on experience; it means that the subject's intervention must be considered and made explicit in the act of constituting knowledge itself. It must even be considered under the watchful eye of an “epistemological surveillance” (Bourdieu; Chamboredon; Passeron, 2015). It is not difficult to understand why the disciplines of the humanities have little in common with the idea of experience or experientialization. We need only remember historians, who write about the Hellenic world without having any kind of participation in it; or in Archaeology, whose existential contact with a distant past would be a fantasy.
But even in relation to the present, the question of experience is not necessary. I will return to the example of luxury. As a researcher, I can work on the issue of luxury, however, I do not participate in this universe; I do not own a private jet, I do not travel by yacht in the Mediterranean, I do not frequent the flagships on Avenue Montaigne in Paris or in the Magic Quadrilateral in Milan, I do not enjoy my holidays in palace hotels. In other words, I do not “experience” this universe.
Another example: sociological research on hunger does not necessarily involve the experience of hunger; its purpose is to understand the contradictions that engender this social drama. Even in anthropology, with the method of participant observation, the issue is posed in other terms. The notion of participation is a device for approaching something distant and understanding certain aspects of reality; proximity would thus function as a methodological advantage for thought. This is what anthropologists do when they study indigenous groups, a community on the outskirts of large cities, or a business corporation.
However, the distance between researcher and researched remains despite the methodological effort made; the approximation does not eliminate the difference. The anthropologist may experience some specific situations in which his object finds himself immersed, but he is not in the same social position as the members of this community; in this sense, they do not experience the same emotions and feelings. In fact, personal experience in Social Sciences entails an ambiguity; it can be an obstacle or a virtue.
An obstacle arises when someone is so close to the object that they cannot separate themselves from it: the political activist who writes his thesis on the party of his choice; the priest who writes on the sociology of religion; the indigenous anthropologist who works on the kinship relations of his group of origin. In this case, the dilemma consists of how to develop a methodological device of distancing; proximity gets in the way. Virtue occurs when it brings dividends for reflection.
That which is familiar can be translated into conceptual language as a methodological gain. I remember Frantz Fanon and his beautiful book Black Pea White Masks (1952). His text is anchored in a dual approach: objective, the social reasons for racism, particularly the colonial situation; and subjective, how it is internalized by black people. The author's experience as a black person, the racial adversities felt firsthand, act as a stimulus to thought and reflection. However, even taking this aspect into consideration, my previous statement remains: in the Social Sciences, the place of speech is not defined by the experience of the person who practices it.
The sociological subject can then “speak” about the most diverse topics, such as race, class, ethnicity, gender, literature, Confucianism, liberalism, violence, kinship relations, international relations, globalization, etc. The register in which his discourse is inserted allows him such breadth. Without forgetting, however, that he does not have a monopoly on the interpretation of the social. The boundaries of the Social Sciences are porous, and are always strained by politics, common sense, religion, the market, the media, and identity movements. But this is a constitutive dimension of his identity.
* Renato Ortiz He is a professor at the Department of Sociology at Unicamp. Author, among other books, of The universe of luxury (Mall). [https://amzn.to/3XopStv]
References
BOURDIEU, Pierre; CHAMBOREDON, Jean Claude; PASSERON, Jean Claude. The profession of a sociologist: research methodology in sociology. Petrópolis: Voices, 2015.
FANON, Frantz. Black Pea White Masks. Paris: Seuil, 1952.
MANNHEIM, Karl. The sociological concept of thought. In: FORACCHI, Maria Alice (org.). Mannheim. Great Social Scientists Collection. São Paulo: Ática, 1982. p. 96-100.
ORTIZ, Renato. The Universe of Luxury. Sao Paulo: Alameda, 2019.
RIBEIRO, Djamila. Place of Speech. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
SICARD, Marie-Claude. Les Ressorts Cachés du Désir. Paris: Village Mondial, 2005.
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