CERES - Research group

Considered from a macro-sociological perspective, a market society, wherever it emerges and consolidates itself historically, does not exist disentangled from other systemic and cultural demands, and detached from a broader institutional configuration where not only its validity but also its very legitimacy is grounded.  Their structuring inequalities and systemic limits, as well as the effectiveness of the "spirit of capitalism" whose diverse features accompany and sanction them in each time and place, do not unilaterally "enter", shape or produce the institutions, agents and subjective structures on which they are based. We realize that these same constraints, when considered from a scale of analysis closer to the living reality of social agents, strain the most distinct forms of life, relationships and shared experiences. Their class structure and dynamics, with their countless segmentations and internal splits, tensions and constitutive ambiguities, are intertwined with the set of engagements and meanings with which social life presents itself to each and every one of us, what matters most to us, and what constitutes us.

This amalgamation of the socio-economic system and the lifeworld, the way in which they interconstitute, feed back and "colonize" each other, but also the countless frictions, sufferings and crises, both collective and personal, that this (dis)encounter can cause, results in significant impacts and challenges for the social world in general, for the institutional forms that its conflicts take, as well as for the emergence of the current forms of individuality. Depending on the historical moment, the legitimacy of a form of domination, and the hegemony of a group or the coalition between different classes and social forces (economic, religious, political) that makes it possible, can be consolidated not only institutionally but also "in the hearts and minds" in a more or less lasting way. 

At the same time, due to the very complex nature of contemporary social formations, their strong heterogeneity and the countless micro-divisions within their social classes, no regime of accumulation and the system of beliefs (inextricably economic and moral) that accompany them predominate without shaking other ethics of life, individual needs and aspirations, and without collectively shared ambiguities alternating between different degrees of belief and cynicism.

The same class horizon can thus present itself among the different agents who share it in the form of hopes and despairs, existential or motivational crises, family joys or sufferings. And the greater interdependence of the world economy, between the center and periphery of capitalism, can result in the formation of a system of stratification compatible with an intense disorganization and shattering of the forms and bonds of collective life that make up these horizons, ranging from anomic social structures of experience to micro-universes of lifeworlds irreconcilable and incommunicable with each other.

Springing from these points, the following question arises: how can we unveil the historical strength and resilience of our patterns of inequality and stratification while avoiding a reductionist view of the complexity and density of the threads of life through which its agents are constituted, their motivations and actions? How, on the other hand, take them into account without falling into a celebratory, voluntarist and ideological perspective that is incapable of situating these trajectories within the framework of the same structuring inequalities that precondition their universe of possibilities as well as their own subjective structures?

Thus, our group strives to reveal the cartography of socializations that integrate the different classes of agents into a driven market society, as well as the conflicts (systemic and experiential) inherent in this process. As we said, a society is not a market, just as a market is not a society but a subsystem in a highly complex social formation. Its coordination mechanisms, and their inherent agonisms, only take place through the relative autonomy, and the density of their own, of the broader historical and institutional space of relationships, social experiences and cultural traditions, a space in connection with which they form an extended metabolism. 

This metabolism implies an arc of objective possibilities (occupational, upward mobility, schooling, income from capital or labor) that is more or less broad or restricted depending on whether we are talking about dominant groups, middle classes, popular strata, urban or rural sectors, as well as the nature of their systemic bindings. Nevertheless, with the intention of overcoming this moment of analytical one-sidedness and reintegrating it into a broader interpretative framework, the theoretical and methodological recourse to that cartography of socializations and experiences allows us to reconstruct, within this system of differential positions, the broader hermeneutic fabric that is woven into it by our work, marriage, family, friendship, community, religious ties, etc. 

If we talk about an extended metabolism, it's because, insofar as work, according to classical political economy, expends energy and creates value, these enlarged social relationships and experiences are the sources of value and energy for work itself.

They thus participate in the horizon of meanings through which we experience the boundaries of our conditions of existence, and therefore cannot fail to be taken into account when reconstructing and analyzing the logics of motivation and action of their agents with regard to the reproduction or transformation of their collective or individual positions in the social space. With these questions in mind, and from a perspective that opposes any form of monistic and unilateral explanation (economicism, culturalism), our group aims precisely to research the sociogenesis of the subjective structures that mediate a market society from the multiplicity of determinations that inform them.

From the challenges arising from the investigative practices presented in our first axis, some questions emerge that we feel are decisive for a better understanding of the social world. How can we train a sociological eye capable of integrating material and symbolic domination with the plurality of social and cultural subsystems, and therefore with the polyvalence and diversity of lived experiences? In fact, how can we restore a less shattered image of the social world, capable of broadening the understanding of its multiple constitutive determinations as a thought totality, which has nothing to do with a naive pretension to quantitative exhaustiveness?

We cannot but notice the inadequacy, in terms of sociological intelligibility, resulting from the current fragmentation of knowledge which manifests in itself a trend of the contemporary social world. A division of labor, in order to be successful, would need to be epistemologically well-founded and respond to needs arising from the very knowledge whose purpose it was meant to serve. Well-understood specialization is certainly not to be confused with the strong tendency towards the multiplication and fragmentation of disciplinary subdivisions (e.g. studies on economic inequalities, patrimonial inequalities, educational inequalities, racial inequalities, social stratification, etc.) that ignore each other (or are restricted to ad hoc articulations rather than a systematic intent), thus hindering any possibility of cumulativeness, communicability and reciprocal support.

In our view, each and every one of these "cut-outs", as well as the "data" that results from them, although always and necessarily analyzed from a particular specialty, condenses and manifests in itself a multiplicity of determinations that entangles them all in broader social conditions of existence which, precisely them, are endowed with sociological significance. 

These questions, which are decisive for an adequate understanding of the social world, lead us to the importance of a presuppositional elucidation effort.

It is in this sphere that we can argue that a well-understood specialization (unlike its distortion into what we usually call a specialization with blinders) requires more organic and communicational parameters of institutional organization. Only in this way can it be thought of as a craft, encompassing the conscious mastery of all the stages or, more precisely, moments of scientific practice, thus preserving the sense of what we do in its entirety of meaning. These moments range from its critical and foundational assumptions, through epistemological reflection and theoretical problematization, to the challenges arising from the fieldwork or the use of more concrete techniques. These moments presuppose one another, and are therefore not reduced to each other. Their interdependence and dialectical interpenetration allow for the relative autonomy of each level of research, while at the same time enabling us to overcome the respective and inevitable one-sidedness of each.

Furthermore, in its epistemological dimension, this exercise of presuppositional self-disclosure, ideally required in any and all sociological research, leads us to the understanding that all specialized sociology presents itself as an (often unconscious) instantiation of a general sociology that reverberates and runs through our particular objects, even if it only reveals itself precisely through them. Its elaboration, while nourished by the paradigmatic plurality that characterizes the social sciences, allows this same plurality to become fruitful, while protecting it from the movement of self-dissolution.

A general sociology cannot be confused, nor could it be due to the inexhaustible variability of our values and hermeneutic horizons, with a particular substantive theory. The specialized sociologies we practice provide us, they themselves, with the possibility of a learning process which, as long as it is at the same time dialogical, cumulative and continuous, are capable of anticipating an unattainable general language which, in the same movement, they contribute to pre-delineate. Only this general language can lead us to know social institutions, representations and practices in the light of the recognition of their infinite diversity and irreducibility, without giving up the possibility of prefiguring, in this very recognition, the self-understanding of the socio-historical form of existence that we ourselves are.

But the recovery of this general language, as theoretical reason, is at the same time communication and historical learning, already anticipating from within itself the horizon that guides our reason for being, and with it the possibility of self-understanding, conquest and preservation of the meaning inscribed in what we are (in historical terms and under a critical dimension) and do (scientifically in general and sociologically in particular) as an epistemic community, and our place in the socio-historical world. Knowing the world is a way of being within and relate to it, and it cannot fail to imply a particular form of practical reason. The sociological tradition, like any historical tradition, manifests a form of life that is unique to it. And like every tradition, it may or may not assume its own self-consciousness.

The choice to disregard the presuppositions that inform our thinking and action only means that we prefer to consign them to the level of non-consciousness, and with them the responsibilities we have towards the history in which we are situated. We always run the risk of groping for these presuppositions, recognizing their implicit existence without really knowing them, especially when we habitually "import" all theoretical and pre-theoretical reflexivity, according to the dominated position we occupy in the world division of intellectual labor in general and scientific labor in particular leads us to do. But by discovering itself as a spirit of the world, learning from all the social forces and historical individualities, and therefore not reducing itself to any of them, the sociological spirit can give back to the world the learning it has obtained from it; and, by safeguarding this possibility of rational, historical and critical self-understanding, contribute to the humanization that it has as its horizon and ethical-normative presupposition to reveal and, thefore, co-realize.