[by Michel MESSU, Honorary Professor of Sociology]
It started with the disciplines of anthropo-sociology and political science, it continued with history and language sciences, and now all the disciplines taught in the former faculties of Letters are contaminated. "Decolonial" thinking, the "gender" point of view, "racialism" and other neologisms imported from American campuses in the 1990s and 2000s now provide the obligatory frameworks for teaching in our universities. These are not just notions that are slipped, as alternative thinking, into "classical" teaching, they are real frameworks of thought in which it becomes imperative to exercise one's mind in order to understand the contemporary world. If necessary, the most convinced and virulent followers of these schools of thought will act directly to prohibit the expression of a thought that does not please them or to include their ideological delusions in teaching programs. And the university authorities backed down.
Like many ideologies with a totalitarian vocation, they initially spread quietly, bringing here and there new "points of view" supposed to recompose the panorama of perceptions of the social phenomena studied, often because gaps could appear in the treatment of these subjects - in a society where the equalization of civic, political and social conditions had become the rule, there was room to describe, attempt to explain and theorize the gaps between the rule and the empirical observations made, the same thing for the relations between nations, cultures and even civilizations after the phase of decolonization inaugurated in the middle of the 20th century.e century. But soon, what was most often a point to be debated, that is to say, which requires considering its theoretical consequences – as an astrophysicist does when he debates an explanatory proposition relating to a theoretical or observational enigma – became a conviction, a “posture”, dividing the reflection between progressive thought and reactionary thought. Which was not without recalling the times when the dividing line was between “proletarian science” and “bourgeois science”.
In the meantime, the timid and fragile initial "points of view" had seduced all the social sciences, received media acclaim and obtained a political-administrative transcription in the form of ministerial bodies responsible for reforming, through laws, decrees and other regulations, a society depicted as recalcitrant to "social progress". It was therefore necessary, as a final step, to tackle what could still resist and overshadow these ideologies and "revolutionize" Western thought, that of the "white man", "masculinist", bearer of a "rape culture" and "systemic racism", etc. The ideal arena to lead the offensive is none other than higher education, where critical prerogatives are widely claimed, particularly on the side of the social sciences. Today, in all universities, even the least prestigious, the confrontation takes place and reaches the regulatory bodies of the establishments, a kind of permanent inquisition has settled into the intellectual and scientific life of the universities. The ukases of the "decolonial" ideology - in its generic sense and in its chic and shocking formulas such as "decolonizing minds" - operate daily, well beyond the resounding affairs of the Sorbonne, the University of Bordeaux, that of Lille or Sciences-po.
The situation is so alarming that a group of academics felt it necessary to set up an "Observatory of Decolonialism and Identity Ideologies" in order to deconstruct the delusional constructions of the proponents of this ideology which intends to impose itself Urbi et orbi. Because what is also at stake in this affair is the academic freedom in which teacher-researchers in universities and research establishments must operate, which does not consist of delivering "opinions" as fodder, but of satisfying the imperatives of method, reasoning and internal debate, which banishes ideological ukases, even if they are the best intentioned.
How did this happen?
We know, and we have just repeated it, that many academics in the social sciences believed they were demonstrating theoretical innovation by importing, no variety, some of the "points of view" debated on American campuses in the 1980s and 1990s. As we also know, these "points of view" would have found their source in the dissemination of the so-called French Theory from which we would have retained that all reality was only a socially oriented construction for the purposes of domination. A perverse proposition since if the scientific exercise is regularly an enterprise of deconstruction of the representations which are current, it is not to reveal hidden intentions to be put down to the account of a dominant, but to propose a new representation more satisfactory on the epistemic level.
By importing without further ado these proposals, as well as their authors presented as bringing a "revolution" of traditional thought, the ideological drifts that were subjected to the scientific approach were imported. The "point of view" of gender that was imposed on any study of social functioning had no more proven epistemological and theoretical foundation than the "point of view" of the proletariat a few decades earlier. The "point of view" of gender, which was to give rise to many public debates and divide feminist propagandists and activists, quickly showed its heuristic weakness but also its political and militant strength. The radical communitarian thought that could flourish in the United States on the soil of its community (associative) tradition, already analyzed by Tocqueville, received for its part some reluctance to its uncontrolled importation - as evidenced today by the anti-separatism legislative proposals. As for the initially discreet proposals of Stuart Hall on the reversal of the place of appreciation of cultures, they will return to Europe amplified by their American and South American caricatures, relayed by the Indian variations of junior studies and wrapped in a package that is supposed to resist any attempt at relativization: intersectional analysis. All this will provide the basis for the ideological and political offensive of current “decolonialism” and the matrix of an epistemological imposture in the social sciences.
An epistemological imposture: the “epistemology of the South”
Very fashionable in Latin American countries and popularized by some converts from Third Worldism within the European and North American social sciences, the latter thought they were making a decisive epistemological leap by imposing that the social sciences abandon their epistemological base built during the 18th century.e and XIXe centuries in Western countries. This demanded that only instruments constructed by reason and discussed by this same reason prevail in the explanation of human works and action, whatever the domain. It was therefore appropriate to abandon it in favor of an approach that would only develop from the capital – real or supposed – of beliefs of the peoples who are victims of the history of Western domination. In other words, to substitute for the empire of universal reason the reign of local ancestral beliefs – most often collected and cultivated in the laboratory by the followers of said epistemology. The argument that we find among the latter, as among all the proponents of decolonialist ideologies, is that universal reason is a purely Western vision of knowledge that makes invisible the alternative knowledge held (by nature?) by the oppressed of the earth. Confusing in the same breath the regulatory reason of rational reasoning and the justifying reason of political action Postgraduate Course , the proponents of the great epistemological leap forward have reduced all anthropological and sociological understanding to being nothing more than an exhibition of the misfortunes inflicted by the "white man" and the repressed, scorned, massacred virtues of the culture of the native that one can get one's hands on. The epistemology of the South, produced from the universities of the formerly colonizing European countries (Portugal, Belgium, France, etc.), has conquered the South American continent and is returning to Europe to swell the wave of deconstructionist thought of the Studies. The intellectual scam is that it intends to situate itself first on the level of the principles of the scientific approach, to propose nothing less than a new "epistemological rupture", a turning point in the approach of social sciences, when it is simply a question of venerating the unusual, magnifying the exotic and disqualifying the science of the "white man", the Westerner, the former colonialist. Its nature, forged by history, forbids it from claiming objective knowledge, its science is subordinate to its essence, its science is colonial. A Scientific turn is imposed, even if it was concocted by some high priests of the universities of Coimbra, Louvain or elsewhere.
Social sciences soluble in ideology vs ideology soluble in social sciences
More than ever, the social sciences see their scientific credibility threatened by their ideological errors. This is not new, their history is also a long fight against the spirit of the times and, ultimately, this fragility is perhaps consubstantial with them. Thus, "epistemological vigilance" has become an essential safeguard, which, in the ordinary course of things, is ensured by good methodological and critical practices. The reception of a social science analysis is therefore both the culmination of an approach subject to peer review and the starting point for possible controversies between peers. Incidentally, it will obtain some comments in the public and media space, which remains a derived and not primary utility. Its primary utility falls within the domain of knowledge.
The primary drift, regularly noted, is to confuse the two orders of utility, or even to subordinate the first to the second because in the long term this amounts to abandoning the quest for new knowledge in favor of an instrumentation of the social sciences into ideologies in the service of a cause carried by the spirit of the times. This is exactly what the social sciences become when they adopt the "point of view" of decolonialism, gender and their intersectional avatars. They mutate into ideologies of a fight which, as has been shown elsewhere, pursues a totalitarian goal by censoring any other form of thought in the name of an imaginary "progressivism."
But what seems more worrying in the current situation is that the social sciences are massively claiming their ideological deviation, the epistemology of the South and the Studies of all kinds, proclaims it loud and clear. Many teacher-researchers find their spiritual grail there at the same time as their theoretical kit and, for the most pugnacious among them, the motive for their actions of intimidation against those they have set up as adversaries to be brought down. Which transforms, like certain North American campuses, the university into an arena where the hunt for "anti-progressives" must rage, now identifiable by their flagrant "whiteness". And, what in other times would have moved the academic authorities, leads them today to redouble their servility in favor of the ideologues of the decolonization of thought. We cancel the conference that displeases, we work to prevent the micro-aggressions of which some claim to be victims, we satisfy all the requests to introduce propaganda into the programs, if necessary we punish the recalcitrant teacher-researcher. The university has thus become one of the high places of the fight of these "progressives" of a new kind.
When the media quest turns against the social sciences
Decolonialist ideology has gained so much ground in the social sciences that some teacher-researchers who were yesterday advocating Gender studies, cultural studies, etc., are sometimes accused of illegitimacy in continuing on the intersectional path because of their "whiteness" or their dominant social position by the very students they had formatted in decolonialism. This probably upsets them, but above all it highlights the theoretical fragility of the position. Any excessive deconstructionism is doomed to be deconstructed, and therefore to see its initial theoretical edifice reduced to becoming a common-sense rhetoric, which does not mean a harmless rhetoric.
The triviality of the discourse of the social sciences engaged in "decolonialism" can be measured, among other things, by their media audience. In this respect, their battle has already been won, the media flood us with said discourse, sometimes held by representatives of these social sciences, generally endorsed by the media, other times, held in their capacity by journalists, stars of culture or show business, emanations of civil society, in short, by anyone who is given a microphone. On the other hand, this media success turns against those who had made light of the demands of science, since they find themselves forced to compete and therefore align themselves with the thinking of a footballer, a fashionable singer or an actor in need of fame. From this point of view, publishing houses play a particularly deleterious role when, in order to achieve the bookstore successes of flagship works, they force us to produce "mainstream" thinking and writing, something to which decolonialist thinking lends itself wonderfully. In doing so, the scientifically valuable contribution of the social sciences fades even further.
Now, with the widespread dissemination of decolonialist thought, the social sciences seem to participate only in the background noise whose musical framework they have composed but which they are no longer able to orchestrate. Once again, the social sciences are faced with the alternative of the scholar and the politician and will only find salvation by rejecting the latter. Especially since in its contemporary form this decolonialist policy exudes all the perfumes of totalitarianism.
