Michel Maffesoli

Michel Maffesoli (November 14th, 1944 with Graissessac, Herault) is a Sociologue French. Former student of Gilbert Durand, he is professor with the Université of Paris V - Sorbonne. Director of Companies , an international review of social sciences, he is also general secretary of the Research center on imaginary the .

Activities

In 1982, it founded with Georges Balandier, the Center of studies on the current one and the daily newspaper (Ceaq), of which it is currently the leading one.

He is also vice-president of the International institute of Sociology (I.I.S.) founded in 1893 per R. Worms. The sets of themes of its books and its seminars include/understand the Imaginaire, the Postmodernité, the analysis of the daily newspaper, the critical analysis of individualism compared to tribal, wandering, Community resurgences.

Contributions in sociology

Summary of the theses of Michel Maffesoli

NPOV ''': this text is not written according to the Wikipedia instructions of neutrality.

French representative of the postmodern current, Michel Maffesoli enjoys a great recognition in certain countries, in particular in Brazil where a pulpit bears its name. A petition was launched, which invited to denounce with the same hand the non-observance of the parity man/woman with the board of directors of CNRS and its nomination.

For Maffesoli, the forms of sociality implemented at the daily newspaper can be enlightened by the analysis of older, archetypal forms. The times would be led by phreatic, underground and divided currents, that Georg Simmel called “King Clandestin”.

Its sociology stresses the concepts of Community event (against the institutions members), of the food at the present (against the carryforwards and the cultures of the hello), of the people and the plural personalities (against the reduced and closed invididu). Its relativistic positions are often criticized. It defines them as a manner not of considering all equal things commes, but of seeing each thing in relation with the others.

It joined Marcel Mauss who estimated that the purpose of the distinctions maintained between the university disciplines were especially to allot the pulpits in faculty.

Among the French sociologists, Michel Maffesoli, professor in the Sorbonne, founder of a sociology of the daily newspaper centered on the theories of Imaginary, are undoubtedly that which, wonders with the most constancy, throughout his work, about the report/ratio that our companies maintain with the question temporality.

In some titles testify: The conquest of the present (1979), Shade of Dionysos (1982), the Time of the tribes (1988), the Transfiguration of the policy (1992) etc, in which it delivers to us one of these forms figures that it likes to propose with our recognition: the report/ratio with the immediate one, whose many indices are provided to him by work of the networks of the research centres on the imaginary one, which seems to him one of the principal markers of our modern time post “in the repetition, the ritual, the concrete one, in short all things which are the mark of the everyday life and which are expressed as well as possible in the calendar of the festivals of the daily religion. ”

This daily life, related so that it names “motionless Time”, conceals a polytheism of the values at the same time structural and recurring vis-a-vis a life of political, social, professional constraints. This leads it to distinguish several figures of this sociality of the present:

joy of the world, when the lived life as play at the same time means “acceptance of the world such as it is” and logical to want to be, to want to live more. And one distinguishes well here this form from imaginary which is the possession, developed here almost 20 years in the Shade of Dionysos.
appearance as crucible of the sociality whose Michel Maffesoli identifies the multiform images: worships of the body, exacerbation of sensitive in all the fields. He insists particularly there on the need for relativizing the social life, so much this location of levels of direction and of meaning is the mark of a great complexity.
the organicity of the things, vitalism, rehabilitating on this subject that which Kirkegaard named the true ordinary man that it characterizes “of man without qualities”, seeing there the specialist in a libertarian philosophy of the life, underlining the coincidence of died and the life, the body and the spirit, nature and the culture, for him, “a thought of the belly”, or “démoniaque wisdom” with work in the various post-modern archaisms. “By homogenizing the social dimension of human, he writes, one protects himself from his excesses at the same time as one withdraws substantial marrow from it. ”

From there, the reflection of Maffesoli proceeds on the Tragedy as symbol of our collective cultural identity incarnated in what the author names “social viscosity”. He opposing the Drama, appears of modernity, it shows us that, which emerges nowadays, it is the identity of the life as a collective good, that is to say “the life for itself. The multiple life and one at the same time, the life which repeats always and again the eternity of the world”, still writes it in the Moment Eternal.

At his place, the sociality is lived in terms of relations, while re-appear the female figures - it quotes the complex of Ophélie at Bachelard - because “the female one, the eternal female is in natural osmosis with such a vital flow”. This makes it possible to integrate the two aspects of human nature, because “feminization is always synonymous with polytheism, of plural and paradoxical values”.

If Progress, History, Reason, Politique were the key words of Modernity, it seems well, for Maffesoli, that we live today a mythical or magic participation in Nature and Arts, a fusion in the natural and social whole like expression of this diffuse tragedy whose Dionysos, the figure first of sociology maffesolienne, is the emblem. We thus live a tragic world and the life like a collective good.

The work of the centers of the Cry is concerned there quite naturally the exaltation of the mythical places, the multiplication of the festive experiments, the initiatory courses, we join again with the soils while the policies are concerned with territories, “all borders places where an alternative culture is worked out, because the territory allows of communier with the other either according to a remote ideal but in reference to lived values, at the present in these places where the tragic load related to the presenteism softens. If modernity returned the social question to the following days which were to sing, the tragic sensitivity gets busy with from day to day living these same problems in the dimension of a deification of the collective existence, of a natural and matric fusion correlative of the tragedy”.

Michel Maffesoli, analyst of the emergent sociality , Yves Pogam (Body and Culture 1998).

Scientific criticisms

In an article published by the Sociological Review published in 1997, the sociologist David Evans considered the theories of Michel Maffesoli and concluded from it that they do not constitute ultimately an enriching sociological Paradigme. Evans judged the work of Michel Maffesoli " incohérent" and " biaisé".

Source: D. Evans, " Michel Maffesoli' S Sociology off Modernity and Postmodernity: Year Introduction and Critical Assessment" , Sociological Review , 1997.

The reports of works written by sociologists foreign and published in the reviews Acta Sociologica or Sociological Forum are less radical but notice all that the approach of Michel Maffesoli is " biaisée".

Business around the thesis of the astrologer Élizabeth Teissier

The general public discovered Michel Mafesoli at the time of the defense of thesis of Élizabeth Teissier on the ambivalent reception of the Astrologie, thesis very disputed that it directed and whose jury was chaired by Serge Moscovici.

Individual reactions French sociologists

The thesis attracted criticisms individual virulent on behalf of French sociologists, and in particular:

Bernard Lahire, which declared: " I consider personally that it is a low blow carried to our discipline and an insult addressed to all those which make their trade correctly, and particularly to all entering them in sociology which make the effort answer criteria of rigor scientifique."
Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet, which judges that the thesis is a " masquerade mondaine" intended to feed the agitement media one.

These reactions and others were published in the national daily press, in particular in Le Monde . They are available to the reading on line on the under-site " Doctor Teissier? " , at the side of criticisms less radical and denouncing a eagerness of sociology on an individual case.

Reactions of professional associations of French sociology

At the time of this thesis, professional associations representative of French sociology produced a history of the proceedings and a counter-evaluation of the thesis. The reaction of professional associations took the shape of a common text of the following representatives:

Claude Dubar, president of the French company of sociology
Daniel Filatre, president of the ADZES, Association of the Teaching Sociologists of the Superior
Jean-Yves Trepos, president of section 19 (Sociology, Demography) of the National council of the Universities (CNU)

This common text concludes:

First question: were the procedures of doctorate observed? The answer is yes. (…)

Second question: does the document deposited by Mrs Teissier constitute a thesis of sociology? For the large majority of the colleagues sociologists who read it, the answer is not. It is not a text which brings some knowledge that it is being studied sociological of the designs, beliefs or practices astrological. Even if it is what is announced or what one can hope for by reading the beginning of the thesis, it is not what is made or said, in the body text. (…)

Third question: the defense of Mrs Hanselmann-Teissier, and its exit, the rank of doctor of sociology, imply do a “entry of astrology at the university”? Obviously not.

The thesis is available on line and was published by a large French publisher.

Continuations of the business

At the time of the accession of Michel Maffesoli to the National council of the Universities (CNU), section 19 (Sociology, Demography), the Association of the Teaching Sociologists of the Superior (ADZES) and the French Association of Sociology (AFS) published the following official statement:

the community of the sociologists by the means of its representative institutions (AFS, ADZES) deplores that a third of the nominations carried out by the Ministry with the 19th section of the CNU (sociology, demography) was employed with the profit of one only school of thought; she asks the CNU to be particularly vigilant for the qualifications and to make sure that the candidates made the demonstration of a control of the bond between problematization theoretical and implemented of a systematized corpus of empirical data.

Source: AFS, Fast Sheet of Information, December 3rd, 2007.

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