So my talk today, even for the sake of time, is going to be a presentation of a subject that I began to address in my postgraduate monograph in a very cursory way, because it fell within the threshold of my object. At the same time that I discovered that it was fundamental to the full understanding of this object of mine, which was the formation of the Modern State, I discovered that a methodology to address it also needs to be developed. The theme is the order.
The concept of order is a pain point to begin any explanation and I will not pursue it. Order, in the definition I am going to adopt here, is the systematic interaction of social norms in the Durkheiminian sense, that is, a system of meaningful behaviors within a particular community (which here does not specifically refer to the concept of community over which looks at this whole seminar). Where did I get this definition? From Durkheim’s definition of social fact, contained in The Rules of the Sociological Method.
This ordering, as you can imagine, has a strained relationship with the legal order and any other order which is intended to organize reality, but is also normative. There is a relationship that is pretentious to call dialectic, but to some extent it is. Why?
Because the legal order and any other order that is intended to organize reality (and by reality I mean the elements of reality – religious, for example, has the same impetus that Agamben would call economic or governmental) is an order founded on laws. The order founded on the social norm is understood in Durkheim as a factual chain, that is, with a normativity close to that of the natural sciences. But that’s just a view of her. The norms presented in it can be sought from a perspective that, in honor of Weber’s work, can be called comprehensive.
So you have rules of two kinds, a reality organizer, a commander, and another that gives meaning to the society object. They then seem to be at two different levels of observation: the first, reality organizers, observed from the command relationship; the second, explanatory of reality, observed from the “scientific” subject-object relationship. But the great truth is that if, from one perspective, this finding is real, it denies another, more important one. That laws, that is, any organizing norm of reality, are made by one people and one people.
All norms, even religious ones, derive their normativity, that is, their coercive power, from a relation of forces that occurs within a given community. I even say the nuns because, in this case, for the scientific observer, the transcendent reasoning is unimportant (Agamben, referring to medieval discussions, calls this, in his The Kingdom and Glory, ordo ad Deum, among other names) or immanent (ordo). ad invicem) of a given standard.
So far I have not spoken any mystery of the universe. The norms that are established in a given community based on the dynamics of forces influence and are influenced by the norms of the organizing nature of reality. One minute. Are they influenced? Are. The organizing normativity of reality, when put into action by the agents responsible for this responsible activity, enter the system again as social norms.
I am trying to make a brief comprehensive analysis of the structure of social normativity from the relationship between social facts that occur in different spheres of society to show how they intertwine at a very basic level. How non-legal behaviors influence the legal, how non-religious influence the religious, how legal influence the religious. All of this is based on the premise that no relationship between any person in any position in society is a one-way relationship.
Why do I claim these obviousities? Because it seems to me that studying order is the vocation of law rather than the study of mere law. There are people who have already done this. Schmitt’s work, in particular O ‘nomos da terra, is an example. He pursues, during the book, a criterion of the ordering of reality that is proper to the Europe of the Modern State. But right at the beginning of the book, he presents other criteria for ordination, such as that of the Holy German Roman Empire. And he uses, among other arguments, a monk’s letter to substantiate his claims about the role of katechon. So here, if this is a law-appropriate subject, we should not discuss it from a legalistic perspective. But why would this theme fit law as an academic discipline?
Because jurists are increasingly participating in the legislative activity. That is, they are increasingly replacing the will of the legislature, this great liberal fetish, with their will. If instructing them about the order of a particular community will not solve any major policy problem, at least it will serve, however deficient teaching, as the beginning of the development of a possible non-legal but social accountability of the magistrate, and then there may be fewer magistrates filling their mouths to talk about the supreme Enlightenment role of the Supreme.
In the medieval there was a kind of text called principum specula, the mirror of princes, which functioned as a kind of guide of good government to authority. The very varied origin of the clues given in this kind of text breaks with any claim that it, if it certainly came from the literate classes, failed to reflect at all the conclusions popular culture had produced about good governance. And because of the still low complexity of the governing apparatus, most of the lessons were focused on the prince’s actions, constituting true government ethics manuals.
The technicization of society has undoubtedly led to the training of decision-making authorities within the sphere we now call legal (but which includes issues that were previously decided by other authorities founded on a normative system at all distinct from what we now know as although considered so at the time) focused much more on learning causal justifications based on a superficial reading (which is not necessarily pejorative standard already produced (judicially or legally). However, the magistrate, faced with a decision that involves ethical consideration, is unable to take it, not in the sense that it is impossible for him to take it, after all he will make it, but in the sense that he does not. has the necessary instruments to take it with quality. That is why the study of order is fundamental today (not that the magistrate as a native no longer knows what the order is – but being able to formulate it and give it due value as a bearer of legitimate social meaning is another five hundred). Thus, this study, by the very productive chain of this kind of knowledge, which involves actors from different areas, already presents itself as a means (more democratic than what exists) of regulating the activity of the authority in the exercise of its discretion.
That is one side. Identifying the order parameters is the other side. It seems to me that the question of the way of life that Agamben, through the Wittgenstein, deals with is useful. Not in the ontology that Agamben develops from the concept. My point is to go back to the basics of “life as language”; and here a language that is not necessarily restricted to spoken language, but which combines the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with all phenomena that can be extracted from it. I have 50 words for snow? In what contexts do I use them? When I look at the whiter or darker snow, I understand it differently. That is the question. The understand. Understand this is the great goal of sociology. Understand inside to be able to extract meaning from an outside (the outside here that I say is that of the “scientific” observer – always with quotes, not disbelief, but distrust).
What I mean by stating that it is language and by stating that it is language is that this expression has internal meanings that can be understood rationally (reason here as a means, not as an ideal of social organization, enlightenment reason) (and, therefore, politically, in the Aristotelian form of political genesis based on speech, which expands here a little). These meanings can be paradoxical, without any problem (as in the example given by Becker, quoting Malinowski, early in his Outsiders). Politics is for multiplicity, not unity, says Aristotle against Plato. Understanding and formulating these life-style statements opens space for enlightened militancy.
Clarified about what? About good and bad things. It may be before a society that cultivates anti-emancipatory values, for example. The ideology of legal discourse can be denied: names can hide or relations of “pure” domination (many quotes – no domination is pure), that is, in which the coercive aspects predominate, or even “inconvenient” voluntary power relations , ie anti-emancipatory.
One can aim for the construction of means of existence and culture of communities that live life forms not given to machinic capitalism, a discussion that does not go through subjective rights, but through legislative competences. An example of this is that of intentional communities in the United States. Reflection on the part of a particular community about the senses and principles can be allowed (here we mean non-legal but life-organizing principles, albeit not coercively) – as when you say ‘so and so is a man of principle’ ) that guide the activities of members of this order more broadly.
As a research tool this approach to life forms is also very promising. Future projections can be made based on games (there is actually even a little game exemplifying Axelrod’s theory of cooperation – but here I mean really entertaining games taken from their natural environment and used for study through developing their nuances and complexities – role playing games, building civilizations or cities, war etc) or, as I intend, focusing on a very specific community and extracting from there what justifies the community bond being much more focused on. the question of the community of senses than of mere cocaine citizenship.
In my case, the theme is Heavy Metal and reactionary political imagery. But what matters here is the method. I intend to use interviews aimed at the perception of general opinions, opinions about lyrics and opinions about the scene itself given by musicians, as well as studying the possibility of elaborating a musical semiology based on the works of Fabbri, Stefani, Tagg and Claudia Azevedo (the latter more geared towards the Heavy Metal itself), as well as more objective information, such as the social origin of musicians, for example, to build content of a “deviant” order. And why do I want to do this? In the case of Heavy Metal, because it is an order that has a very clear impact on reality – as was the case with the wave of crime in Norway in the early nineties, practiced by musicians in the nascent Norwegian Black Metal scene. But not only because of that. When faced with an order of this kind, it is found that what is happening is the exploration of other institutional political possibilities through the study of the dynamics of forces and their external manifestations and the construction of a new policy (which may or may not be better than today).
When one says that one is facing a “deviant” order, one reiterates the term outsider, which, when used in the form given to it by Becker, with all his criticism, is great. What can not be to look at these communities, whether the sertanejo or La Salada (I refer to this text: https://medium.com/mil-brechas/por-uma-texturologia-do-poder- 1345217df4d5), be that of the Heavy Metal musicians linked to the far right, and only rate them as deviants. This is to be light in the face of a different order from the “normal”, but which, in a tense and intimate relationship with it, not only defines itself, but defines it.
