Michel Maffesoli – författare

In this important and stylish book, Michel Maffesoli argues that it is impossible to reduce knowledge to a conception of science inherited from the nineteenth century. Instead, he argues, we must go beyond intellectual conformities based on limited and archaic moral or political foundations. This approach emphasizes the growing importance of information and communication in modern societies. Maffesoli suggests that sociologists have too often succumbed to the "positivist fascination" of analytical formalism and dualistic thinking. Rather than viewing society as a finished product, he develops an approach which seeks to analyse, in all their nuances and contradictions, the new forms of social life - particularly everyday life - which are beginning to emerge in the late twentieth century.A timely contribution to current debates, Ordinary Knowledge will be welcomed by students and researchers in sociology and social theory.

In this exciting book Michel Maffesoli argues that the conventional approaches to understanding solidarity and society are deeply flawed. He contends that mass culture has disintegrated and that today social existence is conducted through fragmented tribal groupings, organized around the catchwords, brand-names and sound-bites of consumer culture. The book provides a rich backcloth against which to consider the rise of `identity politics' and the `proliferation of lifestyle cultures'.

In this work, French theorist Michel Maffesoli pursues and extends his project of decoding contemporary societies. Here Maffesoli questions the mundane stuff of contemporary sociality, seeking to discern its primary mode of expression - its forms, style, rules and principles - its aesthetics. The advent of postmodernity marks the beginning of the "society of the image". It is as if the fragmentation of the social has gradually and necessarily corresponded to massive crumbling of our representation of the real and resulted in their infinite refraction. Henceforward we are living in the heart of an ever-increasing entanglement of objects, signs, and images. In the study, Maffesoli seeks to explore those unobtrusive links that regulate and organize the ensemble of our representations - the raw material refashioned in our imaginary and our fantasies - exploring what it is that is recognizably "postmodern" about them. Maffesoli stresses the connection that exists between concern for the present, daily life, and the aesthetic of the imaginary, defined here as empathy, community, and shared emotion.He proposes a map of "the vast domain of the collective imaginary", allowing us to better understand where today's culture stands and helping us to perceive within its clamorous confines the outlines, still frail, of a "community ideal".

El ritmo de la vida cotidiana no es tributario de la simple razón, ni esta última es la clave universal de todas las estructuras sociales, sino simplemente una de las formas en juego en la pluralidad de racionalidades existentes. Podemos con ello advertir, por un lado, los reflujos políticos actuales, el distanciamiento del pueblo de las instituciones, el declive de los saberes especializados de los intelectuales, etc., y por el otro, vislumbrar el advenimiento de las redes sociales, el regreso de las tribus, el reinado de los reality shows por televisión, la pululación de los cuerpos tatuados, adornados, decorados, perforados... ¿Es acaso una nueva barbarie? Todo lo contrario, pues es a través de los excesos, de aquellos desenvolvimientos sociales como se puede encontrar el ritmo de la vida en lo más profundo de nuestras vidas.

Maffesoli presents a powerful argument for understanding everyday life by examining the passional logic that animates the social body. He asserts that the "circulation of sexuality," as much as the circulation of goods and services or language, is a structural component of sociality. By examining the dionysian adventure (passion, bonds of shared emotion, communal feeling), he redefines the problems of sociality and the strong hedonistic ethics present in contemporary daily life.