Boaventura de Sousa Santos - Epistemologies of the south: justice against epistemicide (2014)

Epistemologies of the south: justice against epistemicide (2014) 

Manifesto do bom viver

• Quem somos nós: o sul global
• Pra onde vamos: contra tudo isso que tá aí
• O que queremos: A oportunidade de aproveitar as oportunidades de viver bem
• Onde vivemos: atrás de linhas desenhadas por outros;
• Como vivemos: a beira da morte
• Qual é nossa paixão: dignidade e liberdade
• Contra quem lutamos: aqueles do outro lado da linha.
• Quais certezas temos: nenhuma.
• Qual nossa epistemologia: diária, intuitiva, experimentacional; existencial.
• Como nos educamos: sozinhos.
• Nossas armas: Armas da vida. Armas roubadas do inimigo e brandeadas com independência.
• Nossos aliados: aqueles que lutam para não serem mais necessários;
• Como construímos alianças: como quisermos.

Minifesto dos ativistas intelectuais

• O livro pode pouco contribuir pois é um produto deste lado da linha. Ainda, o norte tem capacidade de segregar ideias radicais de praticas radicais.
• One of the tricks that Western modernity plays on intellectuals is to allow them only to produce revolutionary ideas in reactionary institutions. ... To avoid misleading anyone and being misled in turn, it would be better to acknowledge the impossibility of being radical and to write from such an acknowledgment. ... By acknowledging how powerful the constituted impossibility of radicalism is, we will be better equipped to imagine new constituent possibilities.  4-5
• Duas impossibilidades acompanham: a impossibilidade de comunicar o indizível e a impossibilidade de autoria coletiva.
• É preciso o fim do jogo de dogmas (as superestruturas do status quo) para que os oprimidos não se tornem futuros opressores.
• É preciso um teoria de retaguarda, não de vanguarda, para abarcar toda a pluralidade necessária para a reconstrução do mundo.
• O autor enfatiza a importância da inexaustibilidade da experiência do mundo e da comunicação indireta na erosão da ilusão de excepcionalidade ocidental.

Introdução

• Problemas do norte global:
• Respostas fracas a perguntas fortes: porque já tantos princípios presumidos únicos mas contraditórios quanto a dignidade humana?; Qual o grau de coerência necessário entre os princípios e prátca?; Qual o papel da religião no mundo?; É possível reconciliar a humanidade com a natureza?; Há alternativa para o capitalismo?
• O fim do capitalismo sem fim: "É tão dificil imaginar o fim do capitalismo quanto imaginar que o capitalismo não tem fim". 24
• O fim do capitalismo sem fim: "É tão dificil imaginar o fim do colonialismo quanto imaginar que o colonialismo não tem fim". 26
• Paradoxo da urgência e da mudança civilizacional: Dilema insolúvel entre reforma e revolução, entre resolver problemas urgentes e tratar traumas antigos.
• The fall of the Berlin Wall, while dealing a mortal blow to the idea of revolu- tion, struck a silenced but no less deadly blow to the idea of reform. Since then we live in a time that turns reformism into counterreformism with an astonish- ing lack of democratic accountability and with a no less astonishing passivity on the part of citizens. It is a time that is either too late to be postrevolutionary or too premature to be prerevolutionary. As a result, political polarizations become relatively unregulated and exhibit meanings that have very little to do with the names attached to them. Under these circumstances, theoretical reconstruction in the Eurocentric tradition and style becomes difficult, messy, and unconvinc- ing; moreover, no one seems to be very much concerned about it. 28
• Paradoxo do novo e do velho: Inovação ou resgate do conhecimento antigo?
• Perda dos substantivos e aproximação dos adjetivos pela teoria crítica. Acabe que a crítica se define pelo outro e não pauta a si própria.
• Relação fantasma entre teoria e prática: contradições entre esquerda eurocêntrica e os povos periféricos, contradição entre teoria e prática.
• Quem é o inimigo: o neoliberalismo e sua influência sobre todos os aspectos da sociedade. Porém não está claro se a luta se dá contra o capitalismo ou no capitalismo.
• Como definir sucessos e fracassos?
• Extremismos incosequentes (Santos desafia essa ideia)
• Em seguida fala sobre o WSF e apresenta os conceitos que serão tratados nos próximos capítulos.

PARTE I - Centrifugal modernities and subaltern wests: degrees of separation

1: Nuestra america: Postcolonial identites and Mestizajes

• Existe um século vinte para cada lugar. Vai focar no século XX Nuestra America.
• História teleológica de hegel coloca a europa como ponto máximo. América do Norte é seu apêndice.
• Discute de maneira muito erudita a sociologia da nuestra america e porque seu potencial contrahegemônico não se materializou.

2: Another angelus novus: beyond the modern gasme of roots and options

• A ideia de progresso:
• The idea of progress lies at the core of the theory of the history of modernity. ... As Reinhart Koselleck argues, “Progress is the first genuinely historical concept which reduces the temporal difference between experience and expectation to a single concept” (1985: 282). The idea of progress applies to both scientific and societal development and grounds a universalistic conception of both truth and ethics. 72
• [NOTA: quando se refere a ciência, na maioria das vezes diz é em relação as cc sociais]
• Fim da história
• We live in a time without fulgurations, a time of repetition. The grain of truth in the theory of “the end of history” is that the latter is the possible maximum consciousness of an international bourgeoisie that has finally seen time trans- formed into the automatic and infinite repetition of its own domination. The long term thus collapses into the short term, and the latter, which has always been the time frame of capitalism, finally allows the bourgeoisie to produce a theory of history that is truly bourgeois—namely, the theory of the end of his- tory. That this theory is not at all credible in no way interferes with its success as the spontaneous ideology of the victors. The other side of the end of history is the slogan of the celebration of the present, so much favored by the dominant versions of postmodern thought.3
• The notion of repetition is what allows the present to spread back into the past and forward into the future, thereby cannibalizing them both. Are we fac- ing a new situation? Up until now, the bourgeoisie had not yet been capable of elaborating a theory exclusively according to its own interests. The bourgeoisie had always seen itself as struggling against strong adversaries, first the dominant classes of the ancien régime and later the working classes. The outcome of this struggle was in the future, and for that reason the future could not be seen as a mere repetition of the past. This future-oriented movement was given several names, such as revolution, progress, and evolution. Since the outcome of the struggle was not predetermined, the revolution could be both bourgeois and working-class; progress could be seen as both the apotheosis of capitalism and its supersession; evolutionism could be claimed both by Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx. Common to the various theories of history were the devaluation of the past and the hypertrophy of the future. The past was seen as past, hence, as incapable of erupting in the present. By the same token, the power of revelation and fulguration was wholly transposed into the future. 73
• Fala de roots e options e como o liuminismo é uma option que se radicalizou a ponto de se tornar uma root totalizante. "Em Marx, a base é a raíz e a superestrutura são as opções" 80. é afetado pela confusão das escalas (eventos pontuais confundem-se com problemas generalizados e vice-versa), explosão de raízes e opções (globalização e movimentos identitários); a intercompatibilidade entre raízes e opções.
• Hermeneutica diatópica e epistemícidio
• Against globalized localisms I offer, as a methodological orientation, a diatopi- cal hermeneutics.18 I mean a hermeneutical procedure based on the idea that all cultures are incomplete and that the topoi of a given culture, however strong, are as incomplete as the culture to which they belong. ... the incompleteness of a given culture can only be assessed on the basis of the topoi of another culture. Seen from another culture, the topoi of a given culture stop being premises of argumentation to become mere arguments.19 The aim of diatopical hermeneutics is to maximize the awareness of the reciprocal incompleteness of cultures by engaging in a dialogue, as it were, with one foot in one culture and the other in another—hence, its diatopical character. Diatopical hermeneutics is an exercise in reciprocity among cultures that consists in transforming the premises of argumentation in a given culture into intelligible and credible arguments in another. 91-2
• ... the energy that propels diatopical hermeneutics comes from a destabilizing image that I designate epistemicide, the murder of knowledge. Unequal exchanges among cultures have always implied the death of the knowledge of the subordi- nated culture, hence the death of the social groups that possessed it. In the most extreme cases, such as that of European expansion, epistemicide was one of the conditions of genocide. The loss of epistemological confidence that currently afflicts modern science has facilitated the identification of the scope and gravity of the epistemicides perpetrated by hegemonic Eurocentric modernity. The more consistent the practice of diatopical hermeneutics, the more destabilizing the image of such epistemicide 92

3: Is there a non-occidentalist West

• Jack Goody propõe uma história não eurocentrista e não eurocentricamente anti-eurocentrista. 99-100
• Visão do desenvolvimento da ciência de prática mais humilde a sua forma totalizante, institucional, atomizante e reducionista atual. Sobre como a ciência resolve questões que são geradas por ela própria. Um sistema que gera suas próprias demandas internas que não mais são compreendidas por gente de fora (penso que arte funciona da mesma forma).
• n particular, the discrepancy between strong questions and weak answers is very apt for a comparison across such disparate times. As in Samosata’s time, the problems of our time—the problems that call for strong questions—no longer concern the privileged knowledge of our time, that is, modern science, to the extent that it became institutionalized and professionalized. In its origin, science was fully aware that the most impor- tant problems of existence escaped it, such as, at the time, the problem of God’s existence, the meaning of life, the model or models for a good society, and the relations between human beings and other creatures, which, not being human, shared with humans the dignity of likewise being creations of God. All these prob- lems converged with another one and with one far more dilemmatic for science: the problem that science cannot account for the foundation of its scientificity, that is to say, of scientific truth as truth. From the nineteenth century onward, however, as a result of the increasing transformation of science into a productive force of capitalism, a double reduction of such a complex relation among ways of knowing occurred. On the one hand, the epistemological hegemony of science turned it into one single, accurate, and valid kind of knowledge. As a result, only the problems for which science could have an answer were deemed worthy of consideration. Existential problems were reduced to what could be said scientifi- cally about them, which entailed a dramatic conceptual and analytical reconver- sion. Thus emerged what I call, after José Ortega y Gasset (1987: 39), orthopedic thinking: the constraint and impoverishment caused by reducing such problems to analytical and conceptual markers that are foreign to them. With the increasing institutionalization and professionalization of science—concomitant with the evolution pointed out by Michel Foucault from the “universal intellectual” to the “specific intellectual”—science began to give answers to problems raised by itself alone. The immensity of the underlying existential problems disappeared, due to another reduction meanwhile occuring. As is usually the case regarding any hegemony, the hegemony of science spread beyond science, subjecting phi- losophy, theology, and the humanities in general to a process of scientificization with as many multiple forms as the multiple faces of positivism. As orthopedic thinking stretched beyond science and the disciplines became institutionalized and professionalized, the problems they dealt with were only the problems they themselves raised. The result was academic answers for academic problems that were increasingly more distant and reductive vis-à-vis the existential problems they were meant to address. 105-6
• Isso tem sua contraparte ou consequências prático-políticas:
• This vast process of epistemological monopolization did not occur without contradictions. These can be seen precisely in the discrepancy between strong questions and weak answers that characterizes our time. To be sure, as I men- tion in the introduction, the discrepancy between strong questions and weak answers is a general feature of our time; indeed, it constitutes its epochal spirit, but its impacts on the global North and the global South are very different. Weak answers have some credibility in the global North because that is where orthopedic thinking developed most and also because, once translated into politics, weak answers secure the continuation of the global North’s neocolonial domination of the global South, allowing the citizens of the global North to benefit from such domination without being aware of it. In the global South, weak answers translate themselves into ideological impositions and all kinds of violence in the daily lives of citizens, excluding the elites, the small world of the imperial South that is the “representation” of the global North in the global South. The feeling that this difference in impacts, even if real and abyssal, conceals the tragedy of a common condition grows deeper and deeper: the saturation of the junk knowledge incessantly produced by an orthopedic thinking that has long stopped thinking of ordinary women and men. This condition expresses itself in the ungraspable lack of credible and prudent knowledge capable of securing for us all—women, men, and nature—a decent life.5 This lack does not allow us to identify, let alone define, the true dimension of the problems afflicting the epoch. The latter appear as a set of contradictory feelings: exhaustion that does not conceal lack, unease that does not conceal injustice, and anger that does not exclude hope. Exhaus- tion results from an incessant rhetoric of victory where citizens endowed with the simple lights of life see only defeat, solutions where they see problems, expert truths where they see interests, and consensus where they see resignation. Unease derives from the increasingly more apparent absence of reasonableness from the rationality proclaimed by orthopedic thinking, an injustice-producing machine that sells itself as a machine of happiness. Anger emerges at social regulation disguised as social emancipation, individual autonomy used to justify neoslavery servitude, and the reiterated proclamation of the impossibility of a better world to silence the idea, very genuine if diffuse, that humanity and nature both are entitled to something much better than the current status quo. The masters of orthopedic thinking take advantage of exhaustion to turn it into total fulfilment: the end of history (Fukuyama 1992). As to unease and anger, they are “treated” with medical prostheses, the anesthesia of consumption, and the vertigo of the entertainment industry. None of these mechanisms, however, seems to function in such a way as to successfully disguise, by functioning efficaciously, the abyssal dysfunction from which its necessity and efficacy stem. 107-8
• Isso favorece o afastamtamento entre teoria e pratica.
• Pnesamento ortopédico das disciplinas não dá conta do não planejado, do espontâneo, do não préviamento pensado pelas disciplinas.
• Paradoxo da finitude infinita. Qual seria a epistemologia da experiência dos infinitos segmentos humanos? Trata disso com a "ignorância aprendida" de Nicolas de Cusa (que leva a ecologia dos conhecimentos) e a aposta de Pascal (trocando Deus pela possibilidade um mundo com outras epistemologias). Esses conceitos fornecem modos de pensar em emancipação social (diminuição da opressão do ocidente sobre outras epistemologias).

PARTE II - Toward Epistemologies of the South: Against the Waste of Experience

4: Beyond abyssal thinking: from global lines to ecologies of knowledges

•  Pensamento abissal é separar o mundo em dicotomias e dizer que outro lado da linha não existe. Isso é bem perceptível na ciência e no direito. Para o autor, a negação de uma parte da humanidade (os subhumanos) é uma condição essencial da humanidade moderna.
• Se manifesta por meio dos facismos societais: apartheid social, contratual, territorial, insegurança e financeiro.
• "Postabyssal thinking can thus be summarized as learning from the South through an epistemology of the South." 134

5: Toward an epistemology of blindness: why the new forms of "ceremonial adequacy" neither regulate nor emancipate?

• Ceremonial adequacy: a lógica tautológica circular de encaixar fatos numa teoria e descartar outros como anomalias. Aparece na teoria econômica de veblen em 1892 [mas acho que dá pra remontar essa questão bem mais longe] 136
• Paradigma ocidental moderno do conhecimento:
• The paradigm of modernity comprises two main forms of knowledge: knowledge-as-emancipation and knowledge-as-regulation. Knowledge-as- emancipation entails a trajectory between a state of ignorance that I call colo- nialism and a state of knowing that I call solidarity. Knowledge-as-regulation entails a trajectory between a state of ignorance that I call chaos and a state of knowing that I call order. While the former form of knowledge progresses from colonialism toward solidarity, the latter progresses from chaos toward order. In the terms of the paradigm, the mutual binding between the pillars of regulation and emancipation implies that these two forms of knowledge balance each other in a dynamic way. This means that the knowing power of order feeds the knowing power of solidarity, and vice versa. Knowledge- as-emancipation derives its dynamics from the excesses of order, while knowledge-as-regulation derives its dynamics from the excesses of solidarity (Santos 1995: 25). 139
• Componente subjetivo da ciência.
• The first limit of representation concerns the question, What is relevant? The relevance of a given object of analysis lies not in the object itself but in the objec- tives of the analysis. Different objectives produce different criteria of relevance. If we should submit the choice of objectives to the open and potentially infinite scientific discussion that characterizes the analysis of scientific objects, we would never be able to establish a coherent criterion of relevance and carry out any intelligible scientific work. As long as we discuss objectives, we cannot agree on objects. Since the discussion is potentially infinite, the only way to make science possible at all is to postulate the equivalence or fungibility of alternative objectives. It is therefore by denying or hiding the hierarchy of relevance among objectives that modern science establishes the hierarchy of relevance among objects. The distortion is thus imminent and indeed unavoidable. The established relevance is a sociological, or better, a political, economic fact disguised as epistemological evidence. The invisibility of the disguise is premised on the credibility of the distortion. The distortion is made credible by creating, in a systematic way, cred- ible illusions of correspondence with whatever is to be analyzed. Two procedures are used to produce such illusions: scale and perspective. 140-1
• [Faz analogia com escalas de mapas. Mapas em escalas diferentes tem propósitos diferentes e representam a realidade de maneiras diferentes.] This means that the preference for small scale, and thus for orientation over representation, is an epistemological decision that, rather than sustaining itself, is grounded on a sociological, political economic fiat. The definition of the relevant features of a given course of action is determined by the regulation objectives, and not the other way around. Different objectives and thus different interests create different relevant facts. 143
• [e com a invenção da pintura com perspectva] It is also through perspective that degrees and proportions of scientific relevance can be established. There is, however, an important difference in the operation of perspective in art and science. In modern art the painter conceives of the spectator as his radical other. The painter paints for the ideal spectator. The painter imagines the spectator’s gaze in order to deceive it effectively. The painter is the only one with access to reality, and both he and his spectator know that. The illusion of reality develops in tandem with the reality of the illusion. On the contrary, modern scientists see themselves as the ideal spectators; they put themselves at the center of the privileged point of view to observe the reality fully revealed to their gaze. Even though they do other things besides merely spectating—otherwise no scientific work would get done—these other things are the product of the spectator’s mind. In other words, they are the spectator at work. As the creator is absorbed by the spectator, the reality of the illusion is cannibalized by the illusion of reality; as a consequence, the latter becomes the reality of reality. Accordingly, modern scientists believe  in the illusions they create to an extent that the painter does not. Nor would scientists be as comfortable with the epithet “illusionistic science” to characterize their work as painters are with that of “illusionistic art” to characterize theirs. / This conflation of the creator with the spectator in modern science has had a crucial consequence. Because he or she always externalizes the spectator, the painter can make a distinction between the ideal spectator, the one eye of the viewer, and the significant spectator, his patron or mecenas. On the contrary, the scientist can make no such distinction because the scientist is always both the ideal and the significant spectator simultaneously. This makes it impossible to ask for and to question the significant spectator for whom the scientist, as a creator, works. The negative consequences of such unquestioning have grown with the conversion of science into a productive force and thus with the significant specta- tor’s growing impact on, or even interference with, the work of the scientist. 145-6
• Segundo limite de representação: Diferença entre detecção e reconhecimento. Os metodos tem mais resolução que as teorias. Logo a detecção científica opera com maior resolução e o reconhecimento com menor. Assim, a cc interfere na sociedade de maneira bruta mas se legitima de maneira fina. 147-8
• O terceiro limite seria relativo as peculiaridades da percepção do tempo-espaço.
• O quarto tem a ver com interpretação e avaliação.
• Whatever knowledge does not fit the image is discarded as a form of ignorance. The single view, rather than being a natural phenomenon, is the ur-product of the creative destruction of modern science. The epistemological privilege that modern science grants to itself is thus the result of the destruction of all alternative knowledges that could eventually question such privilege. It is, in other words, a product of what I called in a previous chapter epistemicide. The destruction of knowledge is not an epistemological artifact without consequences. It involves the destruction of the social practices and the disqualification of the social agents that operate according to such knowledges. In mainstream economics the particular intensity of the significant spectator has imposed an especially arrogant single view, and, as a consequence, the epistemicide has been broader and deeper. ... Dealing with discarded alterna- tives means dealing with nonexistent entities. There are at least two ways in which nonexistent entities may “occur” and, accordingly, two ways of trashing alternatives. First, there are alternatives that never occurred because they were prevented from emerging. Second, there are alternatives that did occur, but the types of scale, perspective, resolution, time compression, and signature used by science did not recognize them at all or took them for residues. Only a sociology of absences will be able to elucidate the limits of representation at work in each situation. In the first situation, where the alternatives did not occur, we are dealing with silences and unpronounceable aspirations; in the second situation, where the alternatives did occur, we are dealing with silencings, epistemicides, and trashing campaigns. 153
• A ciencia atual tende a sofrer de horro vacui. 154
• O autor critica a ciencia por estabelecer para si mesma um excesso de poder, assim:
• In other words, the new constellation of knowledges must break with the mystified and mystify- ing conservative common sense, not in order to create a separate, isolated form of superior knowledge but rather to transform itself into a new emancipatory common sense. Knowledge-as-emancipation ought to become an emancipatory common sense itself; beyond the conservative prejudice and the incomprehen- sible prodigy, I propose a prudent knowledge for a decent life (Santos 2007b). The epistemology of absent knowledges tries to rehabilitate common sense, for it recognizes in this form of knowledge some capacity to enrich our relationship with the world. Commonsense knowledge, it is true, tends to be a mystified and mystifying knowledge, but, in spite of that, and despite its conservative quality, it does have a utopian and liberating dimension that may be enhanced by its dialogue with modern science. This utopian, liberating quality may be seen to flourish in many different characteristics of our commonsense knowledge. 158
• Senso comum
• Common sense collapses cause and intention; it rests on a worldview based on action and on the principle of individual creativity and responsibility. Common sense is practical and pragmatic. It reproduces knowledge drawn from the life trajectories and experiences of a given social group and asserts that this link to group experience renders it reliable and reassuring. Common sense is self-evident and transparent. It mistrusts the opacity of technological objectives and the eso- teric nature of knowledge, arguing for the principle of equal access to discourse, to cognitive and linguistic competence. Common sense is superficial because it disdains structures that cannot be consciously apprehended, but for the same reason, it is expert at capturing the horizontal complexity of conscious relations, both among people and between people and things. Commonsense knowledge is nondisciplinary and nonmethodical. It is not the product of a practice expressly devised to create it; it reproduces itself spontaneously in the daily happenings of life. Common sense favors actions that do not provoke significant ruptures in reality. Common sense is rhetorical and metaphorical; it does not teach but persuades or convinces. Finally, common sense, in John Dewey’s words, fuses use with enjoyment, the emotional with the intellectual and the practical. 158
• Propõe algumas métodos de resolver os problemas apresentados acima:
• Limites de escala e perspectiva: trans-escala, tradução entre escalas e perspectiva curiosa, a análise de algo por uma ótica não antes pensada.
• Limites de identificação: Mudança de metodos de detecção para metoods de reconhecimento. Resolução multicontrastada.
• Limites de duração: Intertemporalidade.

6: A Critique of Lazy Reason: against the waste of experience and toward the socilogy of absences and the sociology of emergences

• Tipos de Lazy reason:
• impotent reason, a reason that does not exert itself because it thinks it can do nothing against necessity conceived of as external to itself; arrogant reason, a kind of reason that feels no need to exert itself because it imagines itself as unconditionally free and therefore free from the need to prove its own freedom; metonymic reason, a kind of reason that claims to be the only form of rationality and therefore does not exert itself to discover other kinds of rationality or, if it does, it only does so to turn them into raw material; 3 and proleptic reason, a kind of reason that does not exert itself in thinking the future because it believes it knows all about the future and conceives of it as a linear, automatic, and infinite overcoming of the present. 165
• impotent and arrogant rea- son shaped the debate between determinism and free will and later that between structuralism and existentialism. No wonder these debates were intellectually lazy. Metonymic reason, in turn, took over old debates, such as the debate between holism and atomism, and originated others, such as the Methodenstreit between nomothetic and ideographic sciences and between explanation and understanding. In the 1960s, metonymic reason led the debate over the two cultures launched by C. P. Snow (1959, 1964). In this debate, metonymic reason still considered itself as a totality, although a less monolithic one. The debate deepened in the 1980s and 1990s with feminist epistemology, cultural studies, and the social studies of science. By analyzing the heterogeneity of the practices and narratives of science, the new epistemologies further pulverized that totality and turned the two cultures into an unstable plurality of cultures. Metonymic reason, however, continued to lead the debates, even when the topic of multiculturalism was introduced and science started to see itself as multicultural. ... As regards proleptic reason, the way it conceived of the planning of history dominated the debates on dialectical idealism and materialism and on histori- cism and pragmatism. From the 1980s onward, proleptic reason was contested mainly by the theories of complexity and chaos. Proleptic reason, based on the linear idea of progress, was confronted with the ideas of entropy and disaster, although no alternative has yet emerged from such confrontation.
• The debate generated by the “two cultures” and the various third cultures thereby emerging—the social sciences (Lepenies 1988) or the popularization of science (Brockman 1995) 5 —did not affect the domination of lazy reason under any of its four forms: impotent reason (determinism, realism), arrogant reason (free will, constructivism), metonymic reason (pars pro toto, dualism), and pro- leptic reason (evolutionism, progress). There was therefore no restructuring of knowledge. Nor could there be, to my mind, because the indolence of reason manifests itself particularly in the way it resists changes of routine and transforms hegemonic interests into true knowledge. 166
• A razão metonimica e proleptica são tentativas do ocidente de reduzir o mundo. Multiplicidade de mundos > mundo terreno, multiplicidade de tempos > tempo linear.
• Crítica a razão metonimica
• Totalidade na forma de ordem. Primazia do todo sobre as partes. Dicotomia e simetria hierárquicas.
• Como nada existe fora da totalidade é uma razão que se pretende universal, não concebe que o entendimento do mundo é maior que o entendimento ocidental de mundo; também não concebe a existência de partes fora do todo.
• Não se justifica retoricamente. Se impõe baseado em sua eficácia.
• Em resposta propõe a sociologia da ausência:
• This consists of an inquiry that aims to explain that what does not exist is in fact actively produced as nonexistent, that is, as a noncredible alternative to what exists. From a positivistic point of view—which best embodies the metonymic reason in the realm of the social sciences—the empirical object of the sociology of absences is deemed impossible. The sociology of absences is a transgressive sociology because it violates the positivistic principle that consists of reducing reality to what exists and to what can be analyzed with the methodological and analytical instruments of the conventional social sciences. From the point of view of subaltern cosmopolitan reason, reality cannot be reduced to what exists because what exists is only the visible part of reality that modern abyssal thinking defines as being on this side of the line and within whose confines it elaborates its theories (see Chapter 4). Beyond that line, on the other side of the line, there is nothing of relevance, and it can therefore be easily dismissed or made invis- ible or irrelevant. In sum, whatever is on the other side of the line is produced as nonexistent. The sociology of absences is the inquiry into the workings of this abyssal line in our time 172
• Cinco modos de produção de não existência e cinco formas de combate-las
• Monocultura do conhecimento e rigor do conhecimento: ciência e alta cultura como únicos balizadores do que é verdade. Não existência é ignorância. > Ecologia dos conhecimentos.
• Monocultura do tempo linear: história tem direção e intencionalidade únicos na forma de progresso. não existência é primitividade, obsolescência ou tradicionalidade. > Ecologia das temporalidades: palimpsesto temporal, eterno retorno, circularidade, bio tempo.
• Monocultura da naturalização das diferenças: categorização e naturalização de hierarquias, dominação. Não existência está nas pessoas inevitavelmente e naturalmente inferiores. >  Ecologia do reconhecimento: celebração das diferenças
• Monocultura da lógica da escala dominante: a escala adotada determina a irrelevância das coisas. Não existência é o particular, local. > Ecologia da trans-escala: localização d eum é resultado dda globalizaçãode outro.
• Monocultura da lógica capitalista de produtividade: Não existência é a improdutividade. >  Ecologia das produtividades: valorização de outros modos de produção ou de não produção.
• Common to all these ecologies is the idea that reality cannot be reduced to what exists. It amounts to an ample version of realism that includes the realities rendered absent by silence, suppression, and marginalization—in a word, realities that are actively produced as nonexistent. / In conclusion, the exercise of the sociology of absences is counterfactual and takes place by confronting conventional scientific common sense. To be carried out it demands sociological imagination. I distinguish two types of imagination that, although they belong together, can be analyzed separately. The epistemologi- cal imagination allows for the recognition of different knowledges, perspectives and scales of identification and relevance, and analysis and evaluation of practices; the democratic imagination allows for the recognition of different practices and social agents. Both the epistemological and the democratic imagination have a deconstructive and a reconstructive dimension. 181
• Crítica a razão proléptica
• Aplica-se ao futuro conforme a monocultura do tempo linear. Homogeneidade do futuro.
• Sociologia das emergências: consists of replacing the emptiness of the future (according to linear time) with a future of plural and concrete possibilities, utopian and realist at one and the same time and constructed in the present by means of activities of care. 182 
• Contração do futuro em oposição a expansão do presente da soc da ausência. Not yet de Bloch. Futuro de possibilidades.

7: Ecologies of knowledges

• Princípio da incompletude dos conhecimentos.
• Forma de interrogar a epistemologia ocidental e encarar os problemas de outra forma, problemas em culturas com laços mais fracos com o ocidente hegemônico.
• Entre a ciência positivista hegemônica ocidental e seus críticos extremos se encontra a terceira via: aqueles que entender a pluraridade das praticas científicas (os science studies).
• Ciência não é panacéia:
• Nowadays, no one questions the overall value of the real-world interventions made possible by the technological productivity of modern sci- ence. But this should not prevent us from recognizing the value of other real- world interventions made possible by other forms of knowledge. In many areas of social life, modern science has demonstrated an unquestionable superiority in relation to other forms of knowledge. There are, however, other interven- tions in the real world that are valuable to us today in which modern science has played no part. There is, for example, the preservation of biodiversity made possible by rural and indigenous forms of knowledge, which, paradoxically, are under threat because of increasing science-ridden interventions (Santos, Meneses, and Nunes 2007). And should we not be amazed by the wealth of knowledges, ways of life, symbolic universes, and wisdoms for survival in hos- tile conditions that have been preserved based entirely on oral tradition? Does the fact that none of this would have been possible through science not tell us something about science? 201
• The ecology of knowledges is based on the pragmatic idea that it is necessary to reassess the concrete interventions in society and in nature that the different knowledges can offer. It focuses on the relations between knowledges and on the hierarchies that are generated between them, since no concrete practice would be possible without such hierarchies. However, rather than subscribing to a single, universal and abstract hierarchy among knowledges, the ecology of knowledges favors context-dependent hierarchies, in light of the concrete outcomes intended or achieved by different knowledge practices. Concrete hierarchies emerge from the relative value of alternative real-world interventions. Complementarity or contradictions may exist between the different types of intervention. Whenever there are real-world interventions that may, in theory, be implemented by dif- ferent knowledge systems, the concrete choice of the form of knowledge must be informed by the principle of precaution, which, in the context of the ecology of knowledges, must be formulated as follows: preference must be given to the form of knowledge that guarantees the greatest level of participation to the social groups involved in its design, execution, and control and in the benefits of the intervention. 
• In this regard we should distinguish between two different situations. The first concerns the choice among alternative interventions in the same social domain in which different knowledges collide. In this case, the principle of precaution must result in judgments not based on abstract hierarchies between knowledges but stemming from democratic deliberations about gains and losses. The fol- lowing example demonstrates the importance of this principle. In the 1960s, the millennia-old irrigation systems in the rice fields in several Asian countries were replaced by scientific irrigation systems as promoted by the prophets of the green revolution. In Bali, Indonesia, the traditional irrigation systems were based on ancestral religious, agrarian, and hydrological knowledges that were supervised by the priests of Dewi-Danu, the Hindu goddess of water (Callicott 2001: 89–90). They were replaced because they were deemed superstitious, being derived from what anthropologists have named the “rice cult.” As it happens, the replacement had disastrous consequences for the rice culture, so disastrous indeed that the scientific systems had to be discarded and the traditional ones retrieved. The real tragedy, however, was that the alleged incompatibility between the two knowledge systems designed to perform the same intervention—the irrigation of the rice fields—resulted from an incorrect assessment of the situation caused precisely by abstract judgments (based on the universal validity of modern sci- ence) about the relative value of different knowledges. Years later, computational models—one of the fields of complexity sciences—demonstrated that the waterDownloaded by sequences managed by the priests of Dewi-Danu were far more efficacious than those traced by scientific irrigation systems (Callicott 2001: 94). 
• The other case of alternative interventions based on different bodies of knowl- edges concerns interventions that do not take place in the same social domain. In this case, the decision among different and conflicting knowledges does not necessarily require the substitution of one type of intervention by another. It only calls for a decision about which social domain to intervene in and what kind of priority to establish. As I mentioned above, it is not reasonable to ques- tion today the general value of the interventions in the world made possible by modern science through its technological productivity. One may question many of its concrete options, be they the bombs that razed Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the destructive exploitation of natural resources. For instance, nobody ques- tions the ability of modern science to transport men and women to the moon, even if the social value of such an enterprise may be called into question. In this domain, modern science shows an indisputable superiority vis-à-vis other kinds of knowledge. There are, however, other ways of intervening in reality that are precious to us today, to which modern science did not contribute at all, and which are rather the result of other kinds of knowledge. For example, as mentioned above, there is the preservation of biodiversity rendered possible by peasant and indigenous knowledges. 205-6
• Vai ter um capítulo inteiro sobre tradução cultural e linguística, mas já deixa a nota recomendando santos 2004 e 2006a.
• An explanation comes from those who support a third position. They main- tain that there is not one philosophy but many and believe that mutual dialogue and enrichment is possible. They are the ones who often have to confront the problems of incommensurability, incompatibility, or reciprocal unintelligibility. They think, however, that incommensurability does not necessarily impede communication and may even lead to unsuspected forms of complementarity. It all depends on the use of adequate procedures of intercultural translation (see Chapter 8). Through translation, it becomes possible to identify common con- cerns, complementary approaches, and, of course, intractable contradictions.16 According to this third position, it is possible to recognize internal plurality among knowledges distinguished by very profound differences, the type of dif- ferences that usually call for the recognition of external plurality. The wider the exercise of intercultural translation, the more likely the comparison is to become an internal one. 203
• Segue com um exemplo muito interessante de tradução linguistica e cultural (Wiredu 1995, Osha 1999).
• Orienrtações para o conhecimento prudente:
1. There is no global social justice without global cognitive justice. The struggle for cognitive justice will not be successful if it depends exclusively on a more equitable distribution of scientific knowledge.
2. The crises and disasters caused by the imprudent and exclusivist use of science are far more serious than acknowledged by the dominant scientific epistemology.
3. here is no kind of social knowledge that is not known by some social group toward a particular social objective. All knowledges sustain practices and constitute subjects.
4. All knowledges have internal and external limits. The internal limits concern what a given knowledge does not yet know of social reality and of its possible intervention in it. The external limits concern interventions in social reality that are only possible on the basis of other kinds of knowledge.
5. The ecology of knowledges is constructivist as concerns representation and realist as concerns intervention.
6. The ecology of knowledges focuses on the relations among knowledges, on the hierarchies and powers emerging among them.
7. The ecology of knowledges is ruled by the principle of precaution.
8. Knowledge diversity is not limited to the content and kind of its privileged intervention in social reality. It includes as well the ways in which it is formulated, expressed, and communicated.
9. The issue of incommensurability is not relevant only when the knowledges in question come from distinct cultures; it is an issue as well within the same culture. [cita vários filosofos da cc que trabalharam na questão da demarcação].
10. 10. The ecology of knowledges aims to be a learned struggle against ignorant ignorance.
11. The history of the relation among different knowledges is central to the ecology of knowledges. Aqui entra o papel da trad
12. The ecology of knowledges aims to facilitate the constitution of individual and collective subjects combining sobriety in the analysis of facts with the intensi- fication of the will against oppression
13. The ecology of knowledges signals the passage from a politics of movements to a politics of intermovements. "the great arguments among the schools of erudite knowledge lose their importance unless their relevance for practical life and experience is fully demonstrated" 211. Conhecimento é diferente de sabedoria.

8: Intercultural translation: differing and sharing com passionalità

• Papel da linguagem tem duas questões: Diferença das línguas e como ela impacta na traduçã e o lugar da linguagem na trad intercultural que envolve várias outras coisas.
• Traduzibilidade: Importado de Benjamin. Reconhcimento de uma diferença e motivação para lidar com isso.
• Outros tópicos: Assimetrias; como o tradutor influencia a tradução; e a motivação por trás da tradução.
• "By stressing the possibility of cultural communication, translation undermines the idea of original or pure cultures and stresses the idea of cultural relationality." 217
• Dois tipos de trad: entre epistemologias ocidentais e não ocidentais e entre diferentes epistemologias não ocidentais.

Conclusion

• Aqui reflete um pouco sobre a natureza contraditória do livro, isto é, ser um livro anticolonial escrito dentro do regime coonial.