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Three Metaphors for a New Conception of Law: The Frontier, the Baroque, and the South

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Boaventura de Sousa Santos
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We are entering a period of paradigmatic transition. From the paradigm of modernity we have come to a new paradigm which by now can only be defined inadequately. The inevitability of such inadequacy lends to the name of postmodernity its grain of truth. Periods of paradigmatic transition are periods of fierce competition among rival epistemologies and knowledges. They are, therefore, periods of radical thinking—both deconstructive and reconstructive thinking. When viewed from the old outgoing paradigm, they are periods of unthinking or of utopia. When viewed from the new, incoming paradigm, they are periods of temporary and fragile scaffoldings, emergent ruins sustaining nothing but themselves, witnessing nothing but the future. In periods of paradigmatic transition, all competing knowledges reveal themselves as rhetorical in nature, bundles of arguments and of premises of argumentation which circulate inside rhetorical audiences. Indeed, what distinguishes the audiences are the specific arguments and premises of argumentation that they consider valid and convincing or persuasive. In the specific paradigmatic transition we are now entering, any given discipline, be it sociology of law or archeology, tends to be constituted by a larger or smaller number of rival rhetorical audiences. The level of real communication among them is very low and whatever they do in common—books, journals, and conferences—has much more to do with the dominant institutional production of knowledge than with the knowledge produced. In the early stages of the paradigmatic transition, such as the one we are in now, the most fundamental cleavage is between the audiences that deny the very existence of the paradigmatic transition—these we may call the subparadigmatic audiences—and the audiences that assume the existence of such transition. The latter I call the paradigmatic audiences. I would imagine that in this room we have both types of audiences. My argument, being a paradigmatic one, will no doubt be unequally convincing for the different audiences present here today; as such, it will contribute to confirming the different audiences in their differences.

Type
Charting a Course for Sociolegal Scholarship: A Symposium
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , 1995 , pp. 569 - 584
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

At the invitation of the Law and Society Association's President Sally Engle Merry, this address was presented to the Association during its Annual Meeting, 3 June 1995 in Toronto. The text is an adapted and simplified version of chapter 8 of Toward a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition (New York: Routledge, 1995).

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