• De Cock, C., & Nyberg, D. (2016). The possibility of critique under a financialized capitalism: The case of private equity in the united kingdom. Organization (London, England), 23(4), 465-484. doi:10.1177/1350508414563526

It would seem, then, that the case of PE in 2007 would qualify as a proper ‘affair’ in the sense Boltanski (2013) gives it:

By this term, we mean … a big public debate, triggered by a case entailing uncertain features and involving a question of justice, of which the famous Dreyfus affair remains, up to our time, the paradigm. In the course of these affairs, a conflict, which is originally local, spreads and takes on a general significance. (p. 45)

a proper ‘affair’ 

The emphasis of such a ‘sociology of critical practices’ is firmly on the description of

the social world as if it were the scene of a trial, in the course of which actors, plunged in uncertain situations, implement inquiries, develop experiments, formalize their interpretations of the state of affairs into reports, determine qualifications, and subject one another to tests. (Boltanski, 2013: 46, emphasis in original)

We believe the case of PE is particularly interesting in that for a brief moment 21st century capitalism really did acquire a ‘face’, and thus, the critique of capitalism acquired a ‘target’ and direction.

putting to the test the ‘worth’ of PE

In his latest book, Boltanski (2014) admits that his original pragmatic sociology which observes individuals in specific situations has the disadvantage of blinding the researcher to the social world as a totality which always pre-exists action and which subjects individual action to a system of constraints and power effects. In recent work, he therefore imports elements from a more traditional critical sociology while giving them pragmatic twists. Thus, his notion of ‘complex domination’ is responsive to the web of power relations social actors always face, and the extension of his notion of critique to encompass ‘existential critique’ addresses the need to take the social totality into account.<you've seen that...

‘existential critique’ 

‘complex domination’ 

you're also not seeing the motive in this article, maybe what you've been calling the motive is only fit for a monograph or dissertation

 ‘the ontology of the network has been largely established in such a way to liberate human beings from the constraints of justification on action’, and there seems little reason ‘to pose the question of justice’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005: 106).<wtf?

This reading of the PE story ultimately leaves us in an apparent dead end, theoretically as well as empirically. Yet, this deadlock we face in our initial analysis of PE also reveals something significant about the possibilities of critique under a financialized capitalism and the limitations of Boltanski’s earlier work.<this is using the 1991 model

Underpinning the model is the basic position that there always exists a radical uncertainty concerning the ways things are, about what matters and what has ‘worth’ in society.

a radical uncertainty 

Perhaps this should not be too surprising an outcome as Boltanski and Thévenot (1999) already admitted that when people engage in a test of reality, they implicitly recognize what they call ‘the reality of reality’, that is to say the ‘network of pre-defined and more or less specialized entities, rules, test formats, conventions, and so on, that orient action by limiting the field of possible interpretations’ (Boltanski, 2014: 14).

 ‘the reality of reality’

We find at best (from the critics’ perspective) inconclusive tests in the industrial and market worlds (focusing on employment effects and financial returns) and a displacement of the critique in the civic world. The tests proved inconclusive because arguments on employment effects tended to be based on incomparable data (Walker, 2007), with effects strongly depending on the sector, size of deals and the stage of the business cycle (Wright, 2013), and even in the field of finance, the performance of PE remains very much the subject of fierce debate as it appears that the type of dataset on which the analysis is performed leads to substantially different results (Phalippou, 2014).

 inconclusive tests

a displacement of the critique 

The tests proved inconclusive

It is thus a moot point whether PE actually ‘lost’ any battles at all amid the media hyperbole in 2007.

actually ‘lost’ any battles 

Perhaps a hint of the limitations of the justification model was already provided by Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2005) introduction of a seventh, projective, world with its connexionist logic where the value system is articulated around the notions of project, network and permanent change. Huault and Rainelli-Weiss (2013) provide an up-to-date reading of this logic in the context of current financial markets where very mobile individuals have a disinclination for accountability, and it is ‘therefore tricky to identify references to justice specific to the connexionist logic’ (p. 196). This connexionist world ‘belongs to an ephemeral aggregate of experiences and interests, not to a charter of rights and obligations’ (p. 197). At the heart of this value system, they suggest, is a particular form of project, financial innovation, which aims to create pockets of profit and which organizes the relationship between people and objects. It is interesting to note in this context that Froud et al. (2012) in their interviews with senior PE executives found that

very mobile individuals have a disinclination for accountability

 it is ‘therefore tricky to identify references to justice specific to the connexionist logic’ (p. 196).

This connexionist world ‘belongs to an ephemeral aggregate of experiences and interests, not to a charter of rights and obligations’ (p. 197).  

so this is actually important, B & T's model was geared to be able to critique capitalism? or to show how capitalism works...to be able to describe what was going on in order to hold people accountable...isn't that what's going on here? it's not a critical project though, but I don't know whether that's really true, just look at the newer work and why it was adapted in the first place, I just don't see how the earlier model could have been formed in order to hold actors accountable since it seems like they would have been already accountable because everything was out in the open, publicly, so it begs the question as to what value B & T can add, and I think you even said this before, but it's like that data sculpture thing, or enargeia, it's just really difficulty to understand the relevancy of this framework since things have become so privatized and people don't really justify things in public anymore, or rather, the entire system is designed to avoid precisely the thing that B & T describe,  

One distinguishing feature of Boltanski’s late work is that in contrast to the argument developed in The New Spirit of Capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005), he no longer necessarily sees critique as a motor for changes in capitalism itself.

so he recants the whole thing, pretty much, going full blown latour, but then what is the motor?

and then also, it ...

so we're seeing that distinction between reality and world again

In On  Critique,  Boltanski  distinguishes  “reality”  from  “world.”  Reality  ema-nates from the requirements of institutions and institutionalization. In order to find common ground, <don't forget about this either, since finding common ground is an important element of uptake, people draw on something external, abstract, and “bodyless”faceless—an institution (74–78). To fix this abstract common ground, the institution needs to  be  “realized”  in  formats  of  equivalence  (e.g.,  the  economies  of  worth  intro-duced in On Justification). Reality, in Boltanski’s work, stands for the orderly struc-ture of institutionalized arrangements, which allows classification and evaluation. The world, on the other hand, resists the control and the authority of reality; it is incalculable and confronts a rigid institutionalized reality.<so it's a dualist ontology, seems important, which isn't to say that zizek's is, but it seems more on the zizek/lacan side of things The experience of the world has an immediate, intuitive, and living character. In other terms, the con-cept of “world” introduced in On Critique helps to avoid the tautological picture of a reality that reifies itself in objectified formats (Knoll 2013) and thereby reestab-lishes the notion of uncertainty that got lost in On Justification

so this is the idea that capitalism don't have a motor? it has to be given form by humans...so this is maybe getting us to desire..

Rather than rejecting the concept of capitalism as a leftover from the 1970s, Boltanski and Chiapello perform a nuanced critique of the Marxist concepts of ideology and false consciousness while maintaining the Marxist insight into the formal character of capitalism. This formal character is expressed by Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2005: 371) concise definition of capitalism: ‘Capitalism [is] a process striving for an ever greater accumulation of capital measured by a monetary value’. As a pure procedure for the accumulation of monetary value, capitalism is not essentially tied to any set of ethical values or even to any specific sort of political system. Boltanski and Chiapello are by no means alone in maintaining this insight. Deleuze and Guattari have similarly emphasized the formal character of capitalism by analyzing it as an ‘axiomatic’ (1987: 436), just as Slavoj Žižek (2006: 181) has pointed out that the present globalized capitalism is not tied to a particular culture or political system. Today, one can find western capitalism, fascist capitalism, arabic capitalism and even, as underlined by a recent special issue of ephemera, communist capitalism (Beverungen et al., 2013). Accordingly, the originality of Boltanski and Chiapello’s approach does not lie in their formal determination of capitalism, but rather in the consequences that they draw from this insight: Capitalism is formally a value-free procedure of accumulation, but that is exactly why it is always saturated with norms and values. Since capitalism in its formal sense does not contain its own justification immanently, it must seek and lend itself normative support from other sources. Consequently, it is precisely because of its formal normative neutrality that capitalism is always normatively saturated and driven by a particular set of values (Presskorn-Thygesen, 2015).

x

http://datastudio2018.datatherapy.org/category/data-sculptures/index.html

What is particularly important in this regard is how dissidents can shift from participating in a logic of exclusion to denouncing this very same logic.

https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_MOUV_064_0149--the-fragility-of-reality.htm#