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WG on Social and Legal Systems
Chair: Vittorio Olgiati (olgiati@soc.uniurb.it) WG thematic issue: Trespassing positional land-scapes: views on socio-legal futuribles
As the title of general theme of the Berlin 2007 Joint Meeting
indicates, for the first time socio-legal “fu-tures” have been formally
recognised as a relevant variable in the international agenda of
socio-legal study and research. As a representative member of the
ISA-RCSL at the Berlin 2007 Programme Commit-tee Meeting held in
Baltimore in June 2006, I was particularly happy with this theoretical
and methodo-logical option for it followed my suggestion, made in March
2006, to move ahead the discipline and look forward, towards the new
Century. The theme that I suggested then was verbatim: “Trespassing
Positional Landscapes: Views on Socio-Legal Futuribles”. This is
precisely what I wish to reassess, here and now, as thematic issue for
the ISA-RCSL Working Group “So-cial System and Legal System” Berlin
2007 Meeting Session(s) call-for-papers. Let me explain the ration-ale
of this proposal. The French word futuribles is drawn from a typical XX
Century encyclopaedic-humanistic (sociologist, political scientist,
historian) French intellectual: Beltrand de Jouvenel. The term can be
easily translated in English as futures, narrow-ing its meaning and
content just a bit. For the WG purposes, futuribles (or futures) are
conceived a preliminary social-scientific (cognitive) dimension of any
potential human planning or project: the way and/or the process of
sorting out coordinates, direc-tional paths, chances and challenges
towards those future states whose forms of achievement are some-how
imaginable and reasonably acceptable to us from the point of view of
both the state-of-the-art (or sci-ence) currently at disposal, and the
state of our hu-man conditions, as it appears or is actually
experi-enced in our space-time. In brief futuribles are not, and
therefore should not be confused with, a matter of mere “social
engineering”, even though they might offer some hints in this respect.
As we know, socio-legal dynamic is not necessarily identical with what
is officially propagated and commonly perceived. There-fore, to escape
the temptation to follow mere ideologi-cal view-points, it is necessary
to consider the whole bandwidth of signals we can receive from the
socio-normative realms under scrutiny and try to combine the available
data-in-progress according to prospec-tivist and relativistic
approaches. Futuribles imply and constitute l’art de la conjecture, as
they are grounded on a mix of historical facts and experiences as well
as on scientific study and research. As such, they foster sociological
imagination and counteract stereotyped discourses. Researching,
debating and understanding futuribles can be achieved by virtue of
scenario tech-niques supported by historical records, i.e. by a deep
knowledge of path dependency variables. In fact, scenarios are not
projections or predictions to assess the future as such. They are just
illustrations of trends open to the future which help to decipher and
interpret either emerging transformations or conditions of/for
resistance to change. For this reason their design requires a
substantial cultural background, a degree of intuition and the ability
to synthesize disparate ma-terials. According to the above, what is
needed also it is (1) a “trespassing” from current perceptions and
conceptions of our scientific work, in the sense that what really
matters is a focus on emerging futures and (2) deal with them as
veritable “landscapes”, not mere “social fields” or “disciplinary
areas”. In brief, what is needed is to mobilize the horizon of our
“positional” world-views, in order to account for the un-repressible
complexity stemming from the tension between the past, the present and
the future of our society.
Abschließender Newsletter (Nr. 7, November 2007)