Science and ideology: a conflictive articulation that crosses psychology in the early 70s

Mario Margulis: one of the exponents of the debate within the career of Psychology in La Plata

Abstract

This paper is part of, within the framework of the research project, Stories of the Psychology degree at UNLP (2016-1917). Mario Margulis, professor of the psychology career in La Plata in the early 1970s, is an exponent in the academic unit of one of the positions in the debate on the relationship between science and ideology. In those years, in the field psi an old question appears with renewed force, which insists as problematic in the intellectual tradition since the 18th century (Larraín, 2007): the relation of the ideological with the scientific, the link that is established between both, their similarities and differences. The term ideology appears in modernity after the disintegration of medieval society (Larraín, 2007) linked to the new critical attitude of enlightened thought against scholastic justification in the exercise of power of the feudal order.               Contemplation was replaced by knowledge as production; the hierarchical and theocratic order of essences, passively accepted, was replaced by a critical approach that sought in the human being's own reason and in his domain of nature the new criterion of truth (Larraín, 2007: 9- 10).              

Scholastic philosophy is replaced by a new discourse that values ​​the practical reason of thought and the precise and unprejudiced knowledge of nature appears as a necessary condition for that exercise. Bacon (1620) inaugurates a reflection of the obstacles and difficulties that oppose the understanding of things. Being one of the antecedents to the concept of ideology, although it will take more than a century for the term to be coined by Destutt de Tracy (Larraín, 2007).              

The work intends to explain the discourses produced about the ideological and scientific, which lead to the debate about the link and articulation of these signifiers in the psychology career, and that give context and historicalize the issue. A thorough review of the speeches concerning this significant pair escapes the present possibilities, some elements of the discursive network will be taken throughout history, to give an account of how the debate that took place in the 70s in this network is inserted precedes. That is, what is the preceding discursive network where the discourse that sustains the debate on ideology and science in the psychology career is inscribed? Similarly, attempts will be made to account for contemporary theoretical references to the debate between the two positions: What are the discursive reference systems that support the two positions about the mode of articulation between ideology and science? Emphasizing this opportunity in the conceptions that Professor Margulis represents. Although the exhibition aims to approach the references and historicize their discursive production, as this is done in critical interlocution with the Althusserian position, the latter cannot be elided.              

The methodological approach that crosses the project is the sociobibliometric analysis. The article by Margulis (1971), which operates as a primary source of analysis, is: “Conditions of production and ideologization of Social Science in dependent countries” (p. 33) published in the Argentine Journal of Psychology, in 1971, edited by the Association of Psychologists of Buenos Aires; along with another: the program of Cultural Anthropology of 1971, subject dictated by Professor Margulis in the psychology career of the UNLP. Other documents that will allow us to place the discursive network around ideology and science are the reference texts that Professor Margulis uses to inscribe his thoughts in broader discursive networks: “The ideological process” from Eliseo Verón, edited by Contemporary Time in 1971, and Mythologies from Roland Barthes, edited in Paris, in 1957.              

Professor Margulis' argument draws on the theoretical guidelines of Eliseo Vero, and French references such as Barthes and Baudrillard. He criticizes the Althusserian conception of the opposition of ideology and science, in which science is presented as truth and ideology as error, illusion, deformation, being the scientific discourse, a discourse that epistemologically breaks with the ideological discourse. In Margulis' thinking they are not two speeches, one false and the other true, but ideology is a dimension of every political, scientific discourse, etc. In science, the ideological can be found again, as it is a system that produces a commodity: knowledge: “such ideologization comes from the conditions in which science is produced” (Margulis, 1971: 42).