Science, Technology and Art: encounters and conflicts between their democractic and fundamentalistic forms.

Pedro de Andrade

Faculdade de Economia da Universidade de Coimbra and Centro de Estudos Sociais and CITIDEP-Portugal

On contemporaneity, the main social spheres - the economical, the political and the cultural-discursive spheres - present reciprocal and complex influences. For instance: (a) often power (political sphere) is closely associated with knowledge (discursive sphere) about its own strategies, or power is connected with other more general interpretations of social processes;(b) besides that, it is not possible to produce almost anything (economical sphere) without constructing, on a near step, some kind of power (political sphere); (c) and information (discursive sphere) is necessary even to do leisure (economical sphere). On the other hand, the everyday life and its typical style of knowledge, the commom sense, can be understood as transversal processes that cross simultaneously all the precedent social spheres. In this context, we observe nowadays, in democratic societies, a phenomenon of cohabitation of three central modes of interpretation of reality: Science, Technology and Art. Each one relates to a specif form of power. These encounters happens at the same time as important collisions ocurr inside them or take place between the respective hermeneutics, which are complementar but as well concurrents. The forms of dialog or conflict characteristic of this social and conceptual tryad, are based on the actual cohexistence and oposition between two paradigmatic forms of society, the democractic and the fundamentalistic ones. Both propositions or realizations of social formation aim, mainly, acquire a central position upon the most direct concurrent or upon other rivals. In this global scene, a fouth mode of interpretation, the religion, reconquer, in a dinossauric way, a new relevance. We will try to isolate some tactical processes derived from the strategies of protagonization mentioned, specially the following phenomena: (a) the social cloning, that is, the reproduction of societies in terms of dependent social systems, which imitate, the most perfectly they can, the original one; (b) the social traduction, meaning the social and symbolic modes of passage, conversion or transformation from a type of institutions to another, inside the same society or between different social formations; (c) the over-dichotomization, which denotes the proliferation of social dichotomies or other conflictual social relations, as a 'tree' net form, among other possible configurations.




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