Las modalidades débiles de la identidad. De la identidad en los territorios vacíos de sociedad y de sociología

Abstract

This article focuses on the tension between Sociology an the social. More concretely, it situates in the tension between the pattern that scientific representation proposes for its object and the objects that escape from these patterns. Just in a first approach to that tension we could find out, firstly, that sociology has shaped its object according to the parallel between society and a purely modern product, the State-nation. But, secondly, nowadays this parallel is meaningless. In order to get out of this gap, a possible (and frequent) way is just to readjust the theoretical principles of social sciences to the current empiricity of its object. A second way, not as optimistic as the first one, states the end of the possibility itself of sociological representation, based on the diagnosis of the death of the social. Nevertheless, a third diagnosis named as “post-constructivist” in this article- can result from thinking that in the empty-of-meaning spaces –the “void of society and sociology social”- are located entities whose identity –the “weak modalities of identity”- is defined, precisely, by its competence to escape from our theoretical devices to represent them. In brief, this text works on identity and the strategies to shape and imagine it in spaces that are others than the modern identity patterns and the patterns of the “sociologists’ society”.