happy morning

Voilà le genre de message que j'aime lire qu réveil.
Les trois quatre dernières semaines je pense avoir fait d'importants progrès dans le cours de théorie sociologique que je prends à la fac et qui fait partie de la première année du programme doctorale auquel je vais postuler. j'ai notamment rendu deux très bons devoirs et mes interventions en classe ont souvent été l'occasion de partager mes connaissances en socio, d'évoquer des auteurs que peu connaissaient, de créer des ponts entre théories.
Hier soir en sortant de cours, excité, je ne suis pas allé grimper mais j'ai repris le travail très vite. J'ai notamment écrit à la prof pour partager des références dont j'avais parlé en cours, et aussi évoquer deux idées que j'avais sur l'organisation du cours, notamment un système pour que l'on ait la possibilité de voir les devoirs des autres étudiants.
Ce matin, elle a mis en place sur le site internet des onglets pour faire fonctionner mes deux idées, et de plus elle me propose de rédiger une lettre de recommandation pour mon dossier!!! Une lettre sans l'avoir demandée, de cette prof qui a été pendant plusieurs années la directrice du programme doctorale. Well, happy morning. Je pense que je vais accepter son offre, hihi!!

si le message n'est pas assez clair, je prends vraiment plaisir à retrouver la sociologie, et notamment l'épistémologie, la réfléxion sur la sociologie. Même si j'en c...e grave en anglais.

just for fun, je mets ci-dessous mes deux derniers "papers", qui ne doivent pas dépasser une page. Le premier sur Durkheim (on est libre d'aborder ce que l'on veut, il faut juste que l'on pose des questions, que l'on "challenge" la pensée de l'auteur), puis le second sur le courant de l'interactionisme symbolique. Chaque fois je suis allé sur le champ de l'épistémologie, des limites des ces approches, du regard sur le monde et la "réalité" qu'ont ces auteurs.

Je dis au revoir maintenant car pas grand monde sera intéressé au delà de la troisième ligne probablement. hihihi!!

Le grand


Durkheim, français, et père de la sociologie au début du 20eme.

As with most of the great sociologists, Durkheim’s work can be analyzed for his empirical research and conclusions, and for his epistemology, his theoretical and methodological approaches.

Durkheim’s main legacy remains, a century later, his attempt to guide social sciences toward a scientific method, to elevate them to sciences, to the same degree of objectivity as natural sciences are. He tried to redefine the situation of the sociologist in regard to his field of investigation. He was the first to state that social facts should be approached as objects, and demonstrated this paradigm and method in his most empirical work, “Suicide”.

His attempt to define the necessary intellectual separation of the scientist from his object of research (borrowed from ethnology) remains a core value of sociology, along with the concepts of objectivity and scientific neutrality.

He was also the first one to demonstrate, basing his analysis on a meticulous treatment of broad statistics, the influence of society on individual facts so far considered physiological and psychological. Thus he regarded all human behavior above the strictly physiological must as emanating from their social context.

His work can be considered incomplete, as the social sciences foundations have always been.

Durkheim’s approach is holistic and the first one in social sciences to consider society as more than the simple sum of individual actions. He demonstrates the influence of society as a whole on individuals. Social facts have an existence sui generis, independent of the meanings individuals grant them. That determinism tends to deprive individuals of the value of their decisions, as choices and values are framed and shaped by external forces, those of the society people live within. It’s interesting to note that at the same time, and without knowing each other, Weber was formulating the other main sociological paradigm, later called methodological individualism, anchoring his social analysis in the will to understand linguistically formulated or meaningful mental states. Weber has an upward conception of social facts as constructed by the social agents when Durkheim analyzes behaviors as inherited from the collective conscience.

Durkheim’s work aims to understand the cement of society, to comprehend what keeps people unified. In “The division of labor” he finds that social link within solidarity. Later in “The elementary forms of religious life” he demonstrates that religion is the stabilizing element of society, the epistemological basis for human experience. He follows Marx in positioning religion not as a metaphysical existence dominating societies but as a result, a product of social structures.

Durkheim based his analysis of religion on the detailed study of a really simple religious system. He later extrapolates his conclusions to more complex religions. His assertion that defining elements of a simple religion define by essence religion, and therefore can be applied to complex systems seems questionable to me. Understanding a simple situation doesn’t always make the light on a more complex one, as complexity or simplicity are defining, quintessential elements.

His metaphoric approach of society considered as a human body also shows limits. The biological comparison doesn’t withstand scrutiny. When Durkheim describes the normal and pathological states of the society in the “social division of labor”, he considers the industrial world he lives in healthy. This is a philosophical position that goes beyond his epistemic goal of neutrality. Marx considered the industrialized world as pathological in essence, under capitalist yoke.

To finish, there is a tendency in Durkheim’s work to universalize, to give his conclusions an anthropological dimension. One can find that bias both in his studies of religion and division of labor. History is not universal and ideal types (like organic and mechanical solidarities), a concept of Max Weber) can’t be applied to humanity without facing a risk of imprecision. This is a characteristic of the newborn social sciences, a contextual matter that reminds us to consider this work as another social production, embedded in its time, belonging to a certain historical context and state of growth of the science. That’s probably how every intellectual production should be approached.

L'interactionisme symbolique est un courant de pensée né aux US dans les années 50 qui a donné lieu à des tas de publications vraiment intéressantes, notament par Gofman et Becker (y'a peut-être poulet à qui ces noms évoqueront quelque chose, de lointain). ces deux auteurs sont très abordables et évoquent des sujets très contemporains comme les processus de stigmatisations, les fumeurs de cannabis, les asiles, les minorités raciales.

Symbolic interactionism is a major sociological paradigm, a philosophical position regarding reality, a theory of the world constitution, of social meanings, and a method used by sociologists to assess reality.

Interactionism inverts the approach of functionalism as it views the social world as an emanation of individuals’ interactions instead of a product of bigger social structures. The sociologist focuses on the micro level of the inter-individual interactions where meaning is created by the actors. This is called a constructivist paradigm as it considers that the reality is emerging from individuals’ ideas and interactions. Symbolic interactionism gives full credit to the social actors, and in a way “respects” peoples’ understandings, assertions and independence of the self. This is a fundamental postulate for the social sciences field, in which I see some humanism and a liberating perspective to oppose to the functionalist-determinist model.

There is in symbolic interactionism a proximity with the field of psychology (for example the work of the “founder” G.H. Mead on the construction of self, and his denial of behaviorism), and an attempt to eventually develop a social psychology. In this, interactionism goes back to Durkheim’s project, but this time comprehended as an upward process (society comes from the people) instead of Durkheim’s downward analysis of the social world (the genesis of the people comes from their social world).

Symbolic interactionism has developed a greater proximity to individuals than the orthodox functional paradigm less inclined to “listen” to people’s explanations. This has allowed researchers to liberate many social topics from the determinism they were suffering until then. Urban sociology (R. E. Park, E. Burgess, R. Mc Kenzie,The City, 1925), mental illnesses and handicap (E. Goffman, Asylums, 1961), deviance(H. S. Becker, Outsiders, 1963) , sociology of work, drug consumption, segregation and labeling process.

But is the whole social reality embedded in interactions and consciousnesses? Are the subjects totally in possession of the totality of the meaning of their behavior or is there an exogenous part of it they are not able to self-assess? I don’t feel like sociologists embrace the sociological world as the whole if they focus only on the micro level. There are social structures transcendent above the individuals, shaping choices, values, and meanings at an unconscious level. The world is not totally transparent to actors and the subjectivist point of view, assessed by symbolic integrationists and ethnomethodologists, is important but not always self sufficient in the explanation of social life. Bourdieu has developed the concept of habitus to describe the effects of the social world on the psyche, to understand the constitutive effects of social structures. It was also an attempt to define a social unconscious. Habitus is, in his words “a historically constituted, institutionally grounded but socially variable generative matrix”. It considers that cumulative exposure to certain social conditions instills in individuals the patterns of their world. The sociologist can try to deconstruct those social structures socially constructed by standing “further”, with a broader point of view and the tools and means of his science.

Interactionism gives the sociological work a malleability that was denied by the inflexible determinism of classical structuralism, tries to understand the subjective moment of the construction of the social reality and considers the agent free and rational. Structuralism considers meaning to be beyond and above the actor, and the individuals to be determined by social constraints. There is probably a more accurate way to understand the complexity of the social world. It stands within a dialectical momentum between both paradigms, not considered opposite any more, but complementary. Hence the methodology and epistemology of the research has to be redefined with every object and every research to include both micro and macro level of analysis.

Qui est arrivé ici???