"...understanding the emergence of new normative institutions and material formulations of culture, new and possibly ‘irrational’ realities, through the play of compromises and tests."

 

• Holden, M., & Scerri, A. (2014;2015;). Justification, compromise and test: Developing a pragmatic sociology of critique to understand the outcomes of urban redevelopment. Planning Theory (London, England), 14(4), 360-383. doi:10.1177/1473095214530701

Biopolitics. Foucault. Governmentality. Neoliberal. 

While analyses within communicative, governmentalist and neoliberal frames duly pinpoint and elucidate the fixed political–cultural, institutional and economic barriers to democratic progress, a critical pragmatic approach focuses instead on the more fluid, interactively and discursively constructed forces that actors mobilize in public disputes.

For this first condition to hold, we need to answer to the critical realist perspective, those who claim that compromises and new understandings can be reached in public disputes but that these in the end have no power to change outcomes, which remain driven by deeper, in some iterations immutable, political forces (Fainstein, 2010; Flyvbjerg, 1998). Such a critique is core to the often-used analytic frame of governmentality theory (e.g. Cowell and Owens, 2006; Huxley and Yiftachel, 2000; Rydin, 2007). Studies of governmentality often seem to evoke a predetermined and implicit definition of the source of political domination – for example, the capillary workings of biopolitics – to explain social processes and policy outcomes. The result is that such analysis can only seek to uncover more insidious means by which political domination may be carried out or experienced. While Fainstein (2010), for example, seeks no less from planning theory than more just outcomes, one does wonder whether she is able to hold out hope for any such thing coming to pass. Through a critical pragmatic lens, governmentality thinking ‘flatten[s] out the different levels at which people [reach a shared understanding or consensus] … and [levels] the difficulties that such a community architecture raises for its members’ (Thévenot, 2007: 411). Knowledge is, of course, subjected to interests and manipulation along power lines, but key to a pragmatic (or, indeed, communicative) understanding is that the interactions of knowledge, contextual understanding and power in all its forms operate in complex ways ‘that cannot be reduced [solely] to manipulation strategies’ (Thévenot, 2007: 414). That is, the flattening of analysis that governmentality approaches apply comes at a cost. This cost may sometimes be too much to bear. We suggest that this is the case in relation to ambiguously ‘successful’ developments such as SEFC.    

Disputes in the public sphere can make a difference

For this first condition to hold, we need to answer to the critical realist perspective, those who claim that compromises and new understandings can be reached in public disputes but that these in the end have no power to change outcomes, which remain driven by deeper, in some iterations immutable, political forces (Fainstein, 2010; Flyvbjerg, 1998).

"new understandings can be reached in public disputes but that these in the end have no power to change outcomes" 

Such a critique is core to the often-used analytic frame of governmentality theory (e.g. Cowell and Owens, 2006; Huxley and Yiftachel, 2000; Rydin, 2007). Studies of governmentality often seem to evoke a predetermined and implicit definition of the source of political domination – for example, the capillary workings of biopolitics – to explain social processes and policy outcomes. The result is that such analysis can only seek to uncover more insidious means by which political domination may be carried out or experienced.

Habermas. 

(ad2) it resituates ideas about the common good to a background or framing position rather than an ideal situation, such that we recognize that agreement on the common good may in the end hang on the rational compromise first rather than on ‘communicative’ rationality

Dewey. 

There is an optimistic pulse within the French pragmatic approach, which it shares with American pragmatism and communicative action approaches. While critiques abound of the power-blind or naive nature of Dewey’s pragmatism, the French pragmatists join Dewey in building their theoretical programme on dissatisfaction with the structural analysis of processes of domination.⁷ Like Hoch (2007: 275), they too find it not pragmatically helpful to stop here in analysis: ‘structural critique alone does not provide practical political or professional savvy … [it lacks] relevant insight for practical planning action’.

Here, American pragmatism and communicative action theory both have frequently confronted the critique that their emphasis on understanding the ‘situation’ detracts from larger, more lasting projects to understand institutions and practices that transcend individual contexts. Healey (2009) explains that ‘Both James and Dewey recognized a plurality of ways of being and knowing but without much awareness of what this could mean in the governance practices of complex societies’ (p. 288). Indeed, in establishing a synoptic picture of the architecture of possibilities for achieving justice through action, French pragmatism moves beyond the more exploratory efforts of the American pragmatists and enriches the communicative action framework via its categorical ‘architecture’ of an open-ended but contained number of realities that people operate within and between. Offering an ‘architecture’ of different orders of justification, the French pragmatists offer a way out of the pragmatic bind of being stuck in the ‘situation’. This works because any situation is multiform, structured and predetermined to a certain extent by context, while also radically open to emergent, even transcendent understandings that may come about through the process of public dispute. The approach’s understanding of diverse and multiple orders of justification operating in conflictual situations precludes a sense of a common, commensurable root that could ever feasibly connect all of these. However, the approach does not posit ‘communicative rationality’ as its sole foundation. At the same time, the positioning of this architecture of justification as the site of analysis lowers the focus of the researcher’s gaze. Analysis looks across orders and how they operate – neither above the whole scene as an omniscient revealer, nor stuck within the particularities of a single ‘communicatively rational’ order of justification within a given situation. A French pragmatic approach can take us beyond understanding or facilitating the achievement of a normative consensus to understanding the emergence of new normative institutions and material formulations of culture, new and possibly ‘irrational’ realities, through the play of compromises and tests.

Creativity.

For pragmatism, the guiding metaphor is neither poetic expression nor material production nor revolutionary transformation of society, but instead ‘the creative solution of problems by an experimenting intelligence’ (Joas, 1993: 247–248).

You can also note that connection to Hendren here, for whom your job isn't necessarily to solve problems but rather to solve problems such that the solutions are themselves questions.  

While institutional authorities may indeed seek efficiency, calculability, prediction and control and market-anchored actors seek profit and rents, such ends are rarely achieved ‘cleanly’. 

Proof. 

Central to the IDP was enunciation of a mode of evaluation for the proposed project. SEFC as a project would generate innovative green design as well as economic value, qualified according to both market (profit for the developer) and civic proofs (return to the public purse).

Summary. 

The French pragmatists are not the first social scientists to point out that offering a justification for acting in one way and not another creates a demand that reasons be given. Similar starting points have been set by Rawls (2001), Kant (Bohman 1997) and many in between. The French pragmatists create the term ‘order of justification’ to group together the predominant aspects of thinking and behaving that tend to be co-associated. So, justifying an action based on a market order of justification, for example, signifies that the actor is going to view profit as key determinant of success, profit-driven businesses as the organizations most qualified to determine right from wrong, and the free market as the key institution to defend. That is, to use Thévenot and Boltanski’s terminology, a justification represents the giving of a reason and therefore must offer some indication of the criteria and framework or mode of evaluation that is called upon in validating or legitimating it as a contribution to the good. The mode of evaluating a market-based justification is via arguments about price, for instance, whereas for a civic justification, the mode of evaluation could be distributive equality among citizens. More so, a justification must be based in the mobilization of a form of relevant proof. An argument justified in terms of industrial efficiency would draw upon statistics as relevant proof, whereas a market-based justification would refer to monetary proof, and a civic justification to official votes cast and motions carried. Such proof is mobilized through qualified objects – for the market, this means freely circulating marketized goods and services, whereas for a green justification system, a healthy natural ecosystem would count in this respect. Different ways of understanding how to promote the good carry different understandings of who is qualified to make a decision, as well as a different landscape of focus in both time and space, from the historical past to the immediate future to future generations, and from an understanding of space as local and embedded to global, from a network of virtual connections to a living ecosystem.

Actors do not stand for discourses. 

The logic of orders of justification is based upon an enduring sense of the values and understandings of the common good that, given the ‘qualified reality’ that encompasses these, are available to all, in any given dispute. The critical pragmatic view emphasizes observation of positions and justified actions advanced through public discourse, objects and actions, not the identification of particular individuals with particular types of worldviews and storylines to which they are expected to adhere in any context. This approach, then, is less biased than a discourse approach towards finding coherent narratives constituted by representative individuals. Rather, it is designed to steer observation towards uncovering the ontological (material-technical) and epistemological (ideological, ideational) dimensions of a situated public argument, what actors mobilize when they justify or denounce an action or viewpoint in a dispute.

individuals can express multiple perspectives on a public issue and can change their minds; as such, what they say they will do, what they do and the consequences of their actions are more important than how they feel or what they profess to believe; 

Translation. 

The demand for justification in pluralistic contexts relates to notions of reciprocal agreement, by which people involved in public arguments generally accept that if they want others to accept their position, they need to translate their position to grounds that others can accept. Speaking within a pragmatic tradition, Habermas (1993) asserts that ‘we must ask what is equally good for all’ (p. 277). In practice, this implies that arguing on the basis that something is required by one’s religion, personal affection or taste does not persuade those ascribing to different religions, affections and tastes. A translation is required to demonstrate that a position, even if motivated by a personal reason, is also compatible with some public reason. Pragmatism, here, goes one step further than communicative action, by refusing to recognize ‘internal beliefs of participants’ (Hoch, 2007: 275) antecedent to an action context.¹¹ A pragmatist wants to refer to what is ‘en-believed’ as well as enacted – in context. Beyond examining the communicative action outcomes of ‘ideas about collaboration, consensus building, cooperation, and other kinds of democratic activity’ (Hoch, 2007: 280), a pragmatic approach seeks also to grasp the meaning of the objects of action in context (Beauregard, 2012).

Importantly, the demand to translate justifications into publicly acceptable forms is not an act of selflessness. The task of translation into a more generalized good always risks being seized and narrowed by those holding particular interests.

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So apparently, there might be a couple of ways to use B & T to do a paper or chapter. 

You could do one where you emphasize the translation process, where you'd show how there was this lofty ideal, maybe, and how that ideal was translated into action via a public forum, and how different discourses had to be mobilized in order for it to be en-believed and enacted. But also how, ideally, it wasn't reduced to absurdity, how the public took up the new idea somewhat on its own terms. 

Or you could do one with a creative solution to a problem, but where you're not focusing on translation per se, but rather on compromise? what compromises had to take place for this thing to come to pass? But I guess this one would be more not immanent, but more descriptive? less probe-y at the level of the interview?

Then you could have a probe-y one at the level of interview, where you'd have to simulate the controversy and ask what would be required for them to rise above their personal interest.