Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Coimbra, Portugal, 1940) is a key figure in contemporary legal sociology. Besides being a professor at the Universities of Coimbra and Wisconsin-Madison, De Sousa is widely recognised for his activism in the World Social Forum and his commitment to various peasant and indigenous movements all over the world. Among his works that have been translated into Spanish are “Crítica de la razón indolente” (2003), “Reinventing Democracy, Reinventing Social Emancipation” (2008) and “Una epistemología del Sur” (2009), in which he explores and advocates the cognitive practices of oppressed groups that have historically been silenced and subjugated by colonialism and global capitalism.
Barcelona Metropolis
Enrique Díaz Álvarez
(Foto: Pere Virgili)
As part of his project to raise the profile of alternatives to the hegemonic neoliberal globalization, De Sousa intends to adopt a cosmopolitan reasoning, based on three procedures: a sociology of absences that identifies and recovers experiences and forms of knowledge that are currently neglected; a sociology of emergencies, which expands the field of possible social experiences by investigating the alternatives; and translation work, which enables communication between entities separated by their mutual differences.
This interview took place earlier this year in Barcelona, on the occasion of the Global South, Global North lecture, which Boaventura de Sousa Santos gave at the CIDOB Foundation, as part of the IV Training Seminar in Intercultural Dynamics.
A recurring phrase in your work is that “there will be no global justice without global cognitive justice”, and you relate it to the fact that Western modernity has been built by eclipsing and destroying other knowledge. How can knowledge be democratised without lapsing into relativism?
The problem is thinking about the alternative to not recognising other knowledge. The alternative is that if we retain not only the superiority, but also exclusiveness in terms of the rigour and validity of scientific knowledge, which is managed above all based on the criteria which suit the global North, we will leave a large part of the world’s population in a state of dispossession, in the sense that many of them, like us, are not used to dealing with scientific, philosophical or theological knowledge – that is the three major branches of knowledge that have emerged from modernity. They often suffer the consequences of the application of this knowledge, in the form of initiatives, actions, policies or agencies of the global North or in the case of the South, local elites who are acting in the interests of the global North.
If you look at the world and see how many people do not use philosophy, science and theology as you understand them, you ask yourself: what do they do? Are they ignorant? Do they not know anything at all? That was the idea that we always had: they were “primitive”, “indigenous”, “barbarians.” That was the situation that prevailed for centuries, and that is why what we are worried about are the consequences of thinking that these people are ignorant and that they have to wait for our solutions: development, colonialism (colonialism is a civilizing mission within this framework, etc.).
First, we have to see what the situation in the world is in terms of knowledge. If we claim a monopoly of true knowledge, it is because it really is the knowledge that we handle better than anyone else in the world, which is why it usually favours our positions. That is the situation. When you understand that all this takes place by means of a process that is political, that is epistemological, then you start to see the “others” not only as living beings, but as thinking beings, and you realise that everyone in the world has knowledge, which leads to a sense of life, an understanding of the world, and so on.
I learned that when I lived in a slum in Rio de Janeiro. While I was there, I saw that those marginalised people living in squatter communities had a great deal of life’s wisdom. We talked about so many things in such depth, in conversations which also echoed Western philosophical ideas … When you see that, you begin to understand that there is “another” knowledge.
But how can we avoid the risk of lapsing into a postmodern or culturalist “anything goes”?
This is where the question of relativism comes in, which is the idea that as there are other types of knowledge, they are all of equal value. Is that the problem? No, not at all. Because really, for everyone in the world, except apparently for us and for positivism, knowledge is at the disposal of transformations, of ideas and of practices. People think, know and act. The criterion is political; there is no relativism because we have to find out what we want our knowledge for, for what purposes we are going to integrate the different bodies of knowledge. I will give you a simple example: if I want to go to the moon, I cannot go by using indigenous or peasant knowledge, I need the scientific and technological knowledge of the West; but if I want to preserve the biodiversity of the planet, I need indigenous knowledge because maybe I will destroy biodiversity with scientific knowledge. It all depends on the pragmatic goals of your scientific work, your knowledge and politics. That is why we cannot separate epistemology from politics or ethics, and that is why there is no relativism, because there is a political discussion about objectives.
It is here where translation comes in, an important category in the sociological imagination, because apart from the fact that various types of knowledge are recognised, it is necessary to take a more hermeneutic step – to interpret them.
Yes, translation is important because it is the beginning of a broader intelligibility. We are not just talking about linguistic translation, but intercultural translation, because every culture really has its own way of expressing reality. Take human rights for example, a concept that is central to Western culture and philosophy today. This idea has quite different concepts for other non-Western cultures. I don’t mean they don’t use it, but they do not interpret it the same way, and are sometimes reluctant to talk about it. But if we stop to think about why we want human rights, we can see that other communities and cultures have similar ideas. They are not formulated in terms of human rights, but as ideas of respect and dignity. This, for example, is a case of intercultural translation; it is possible to have the same idea of emancipation or liberation formulated in terms of human rights, or dignity, or respect, or as various conceptions of dharma, etc…
There are various formulas that are not identical, but they are commensurable. That means that we can avoid the identity-based ghetto and the ghetto of knowledge, because the big problem for the epistemologies of the South that I am developing is not relativism but incommensurability, or in other words, when another type of knowledge says: “I do not understand,” “that is inappropriate”, “that is something else.” The idea of incommensurability is found in the West and in other cultures. For this reason, intercultural translation requires that all of them open up. And this opening is based on the idea of what I call the “incompleteness” of cultures; only an incomplete culture, which thinks it can learn from others, is ready for intercultural translation.
This emphasis on openness and dialogue is also related to another issue you mention in your work, that of reassessing or rehabilitating common sense.
I do not start from the idea of glorifying or exalting common sense, but instead I seek a new common sense. Common sense often expresses all the inequalities, all the ideologies, all the false consciousness within society as dominant laws. That is why common sense is not in itself a good thing. The problem is that we should seek types of knowledge that people understand, ideas that they feel give them some power. That is a new common sense. I think that after centuries of specialisation and expertise we need – what I am about to say is a little outrageous, but it is what I believe – the return of the “amateur”, “amateur thought.” The etymological sense of the word “amateur” is someone who loves what he does. Experts do not love what they do, but instead use their knowledge – narrow, but deep and thorough in the way they understand it – and apply it at a great distance. We need more amateurs, people who love what they do.
This somehow relates to the idea of intellectual commitment. You are not exactly the paradigm of the social scientist who remains in his ivory tower. What role do intellectuals play or do you think they should play in modern society?
The intellectual is someone who was trained to learn, not to teach. And knowing how to learn can help movements, citizens, and organisations to see the difficulties, contradictions and tensions within their everyday lives, their transforming activity or their political action. Intellectuals are facilitators; they facilitate communication because of their profession, they contribute and find out about other spaces and experiences that can help contextualise a struggle, to find a better informed conversation. That is why intellectuals must work in their offices, but also with movements and organisations. They have to explain, speak and understand other languages. And they also have to be able to explain themselves without footnotes, without words that people do not understand. We know that our specialisations, especially in the social sciences and humanities are specialisations of words, but I cannot go to the country based on the diférence of Derrida or Deleuze, because people do not understand it; perhaps we have to make other distinctions, and I have a very high regard for Deleuze as a great intellectual and philosopher of our time. And that is something that we can do and I am also doing this in my work; I know that when I am working I have to translate for myself. Intercultural translation begins with me.
These days, you don’t even have to travel to the South to gain access to other knowledge, and in fact the South is a kind of metaphor. In cities like this one…
The South is here, right next door.
In impassable ghettos, in various types and spaces of exclusion.
Of course, the South is that. They are other cultures that live with us and for which there is often a situation that I call an “abyssal line”, or in other words a social apartheid in which we can live with people from other cultures but we are scared of them; we want them to do their work or provide us with their services, but we don’t want them to bother us, which is something that happens a great deal in Europe. In other words, that is the terrible idea of tolerance, an extremely arrogant concept because it does not really allow you to enrich yourself with the knowledge of the South, of the South in that sense, as a metaphor for oppressed and excluded classes and groups, for the minorities in our cities who live within their communities and who have great difficulty in joining official society, going to university, sharing knowledge … That is the South, the metaphor of exclusion.
Now that you mention university, we have recently witnessed a campaign to discredit the public universities. There have been more than a few attempts to try to adapt them to the market and business demand. As a professor at the University of Coimbra, what do you think of this drive towards privatisation?
To me, it is obvious that what is behind the university reform processes, especially the Bologna Process, is an attempt to turn higher education – or tertiary education, as the World Bank calls it, into a commodity that can be produced and distributed worldwide. We know that the Doha Round of World Trade Organization aims to liberalise services, and one of the twelve services is education. And that higher education is considered one of the most profitable fields for capital investment in the coming decades. So I think there is above all an attempt to unify the European system to create a consistent product that can be sold internationally and can compete with the global universities of the United States. That is the goal. And there comes a point when it is the right time to do it for the governing classes. Right in the political sense, because there is a crisis of state funding. As you can see, financial crises always lead to cuts in social spending: health, education, social security.
It is also an attempt to privatise, to turn the student into a consumer and to eliminate the idea of public education and universities. What worries me is that by turning it into a commodity, we lose what universities have had since the twelfth century: the ability to produce independent critical thought. That is the danger.
In yesterday’s lecture, you engaged in a type of very interesting self-criticism about critical theory replacing the use of nouns by the use of adjectives. And that is dangerous, because nouns are what determine the terms of debate.
Yes, that is one of the ideological and political contexts in which we find ourselves now, for the last twenty or thirty years. It was not like that before. The social and political horizons were different, and because they were different, they had different names, and those names or nouns were very important for identifying and defining which side you were on: you were a socialist, a communist, a capitalist or a liberal. That really created the idea of an alternative. There came a point at which these critical nouns went into a crisis – I do not know if it is permanent; for example, today, “socialism” is a word used by parties that are not socialists at all.
What has prevailed is the use of concepts that were previously used by conventional theories and their radicalisation by adjectives. So we have added adjectives in various areas, and by using them we believe we are talking about something completely different. For development, “sustainable development”; for democracy, “participatory democracy”, etc..; and it is not a totally different thing, but something that comes from a liberal democratic idea to which we are adding something else. I am a sociologist of my time; I am working today, so I do a lot of work on adjectives. But, as a critic – who wants to be self-critical – I know I’m lacking nouns. And what has given me that awareness? It is not simply a reflection by an intellectual in his office, but instead this awareness has shown me movements in which new concepts are emerging, new nouns that are not even pronounceable in colonial languages. I can see it, for example, in the constitution of Ecuador, with nouns like suma causa and Pachamama, the approximate translations of which would be “to live well” and “mother earth”, respectively.
With the recent financial crisis, which has exposed the shortcomings of the neoliberal model, has your conviction that the time has come for a paradigm shift been strengthened?
I think that paradigm shifts are half-blind and semi-invisible. In other words, we do not see them very well, and the changes also do not have much of an idea in which direction they are headed. We know that we are in a period of a paradigm shift because the symptoms go beyond all possible proportions of the sustainability of life. The current financial crisis shows that it really is impossible for the world to continue with financial speculation; it is impossible for a very few people to become very rich while millions of people are impoverished. On the other hand there is environmental peace, which is perhaps the most urgent symptom. There is a consensus that if we do nothing in the short term, the sustainability of life is in danger. And we see it every day, but we do not really notice it. That is why I say that there is a half-blindness, a half-invisibility. When the financial crisis worsens, here in Europe for example, the environmental issue disappears. People do not talk about it any more, but instead that what we need is “more production”, “more jobs”, and thus to produce the same type of consumption … Where are we going?
But there is a sense of urgency in terms of changing things. The international altruism and solidarity is proof of that. I’m thinking about the anonymous groups of hackers who have supported social movements in Tunisia and Egypt over the Internet, or the commitment to transparency of Wikileaks. How do you see the relationship between solidarity and the new forms of communication on the Internet?
It is a totally new phenomenon. For example, when I compare what happened in Tunisia with what happened in the Portuguese democratic revolution of 1974, the difference is there was no SMS in Portugal at that time. It was impossible to mobilise people across the entire country, it was a much slower and more difficult process, it was possible first in Lisbon and then in other places. The change is shocking.
Obviously all this is a double-edged sword. The information technologies can be used to create a more sophisticated rule; but on the other hand, the media are at the service of liberation, the emancipatory organisation, or transparency, as is the case with Wikileaks. All this is very contradictory, and it is important to recognise first, that it can be used to achieve different objectives, and second, how power will react to it. These weapons are there, and can be used to increase and deepen democracy and freedom. But how is power going to use the twitters, the facebooks and all forms of communication to prevent conflict? Because we know it is already doing it today, and not just in Algeria or in other countries: control of the Internet. To what extent? We do not know, but we must fight for freedom, for the horizontality of these very media. The media must be transparent in order to create transparency, and must be free to foster freedom.
Spring (April – June 2011)
Related posts:
- Boaventura de Sousa Santos: Celebrar a Ciência e a Cidadania
- Conferência de Abertura do Colóquio Epistemologias do Sul – Boaventura de Sousa Santos
- Photos: Prof. Boaventura de Sousa Santos´ South Africa Visit
- Encuentros de Boaventura de Sousa Santos con estudiantes y profesores de la Universidad Michoacana
- Juan José Tamayo escribe sobre el libro de Boaventura de Sousa Santos
