• Eulriet, I. (2008). Analysing political ideas and political action. Economy and Society, 37(1), 135-150. doi:10.1080/03085140701760916

OK. What are my questions? How does this help me to understand the importance of B & T beyond that of B? 

This guy seems to suggest that B & T are important for the study of political ideas, although it's hard for me to get what that is. He gives the example of feminism, at which point you were thinking of Butler, since it was about a courtroom, and she does that at one point. He says that it applies elsewhere and otherwise. You were also thinking about psychology, insofar as this guy was was trying to distinguish the influence of ideas as compared to other things, such as material culture. There was definitely the tension in this between the study of idea and the study of material culture. Except that it seems like all of the important ideas are already analyzed. The point isn't to find a new idea? No, that can't be right. And is the cité an idea? what is an idea? Also keep in mind that the Descombs person was setting out to explore a new philosophy of mind. Mind. 

Anyways, why do they matter? The author also pits them against commonplace economic thinking, reductive thinking that would see actors' action as reducible to the maximization of utility, or something like that. Vulgar economic thinking. Lots of binaries were overcome, such as between public and private, technical and practical judgement, but I don't know why that would be a bad thing. How do those distinctions get us into trouble? And does the technical in technical judgement get us back at the notion of the tool? The public and private divide has to run someone into problems somewhere. Oh that's private, it doesn't matter. Like labor? like domestic labor? Or sex? what about what happens in students' dorm rooms? consent? the over?reach of things like title IX into the dorm room? so B & T would help if you wanted to analyze title IX, since it wouldn't ... what? This is confusing because of the example of the court case. Everything there is in public. But, it could be the case there that, in that analysis, in the conversation that took place in court, maybe they started making inferences about what was going on in students' bedrooms, and maybe other frameworks would run us into trouble, whereas B & T's framework would have no trouble at doing that because of the domestic category? but like what kind of trouble? a contradiction? and what framework? Bourdieu? standpoint theory? habermas? parsons? parsons was in this thing at one point but only in the back half of a sentence of something. but why would you be analyzing a courtroom with parsons? but maybe the site itself is the issue. Like with latour. people didn't even analyze labs. the lab was off limits. what was interesting to people prior to latour was papers? scientific papers? no, if you were going to do a sociology of science, you'd do it in the lab. no, I mean, you'd do it where? I guess you could do a sociology of science by doing it on papers. that's what happened in the rhetoric of science. yea, you're thinking about object and method as separate things that you'd apply to the each other like ... I don't know. also remember that idea you had last night, where you were like, B & T are pretty much doing what Bourdieu was doing, except that they wanted to show a different temporal aspect of it, how it is made or in the making rather than having already happened, but they're not that different. so then what you seem to be saying here is B & T aren't really any different from Latour, it's just that the former is concerned with ideas, justice, etc., whereas the latter isn't. not directly. 

Boltanski is not a sociologist of science. His focus on conflicts, though similarly directed against Bourdieu, is not situated in one place such as the laboratory. His symmetry programme is general in outlook. While Latour looks at scientific controversies as strategic research sites, Boltanski attempts a theory that analyses conflicts in general. Boltanski criticizes Bourdieu’s determinism of structure that only explains the reproduction of social order through dispositions governed by fields. To put it simply, Boltanski replaces actors' dispositions with critical competences. Actors, in his view, permanently prove their competences in everyday conflicts. These competences are not reducible to dispositions because actors can employ different forms of justifications over time and because in one situation a plurality of forms of justifications may be at their disposal.

rhetorical turn. 

worth. 

transmission. 

• Guggenheim, M., & Potthast, J. (2012). Symmetrical twins: On the relationship between actor-network theory and the sociology of critical capacities. European Journal of Social Theory, 15(2), 157-178. doi:10.1177/1368431011423601