- Hansen, M. P. (2016). Non-normative critique: Foucault and pragmatic sociology as tactical re-politicization. European Journal of Social Theory, 19(1), 127-145. doi:10.1177/1368431014562705
In this one, I'm wondering about the whole unmasking thing. Sure, B & T go beyond B insofar as they don't want to unmask; they want to study the actors themselves. B treats actors like dupes, and actors, in a kind of de certeau kind of way (“la perruque”), are smarter than that. That deceptive texting article looked interesting by the way.
but i think i'm a little off insofar as maybe B and B & T are studying more or less the same thing? like if you studied the same thing you could get at the conclusion that they're blind. in other words, doesn't it make it worse? like they're not blind, they're doing this not with knowledge, but they're able to justify it? defend it? in the sense that society must be defended?
critique as a key object of study.
‘pluralize critique’ and ‘relativise [normativity] to context specific discourses’ <-I wonder if normativity is the fact that you can't transform a personal relationship into a charismatic leadership...
One of the central ideas is the model of a plurality that comprises six co-existing ‘orders of worth’, embedded and mobilized in situations (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006: 145). According to Honneth, situational plurality supposes a social reality of ‘strange voluntarism’ where actors are ‘free to decide which justification order they use to attempt to address the action problem in question’ (Honneth, 2010: 387). However, an essential element of the model of OJ and of pragmatic sociology in general is the structuring role of the environment going back to Thévenot’s work (1986) on ‘investment in forms’. In OJ, the term ‘dispositifs’ was used to designate how situations are ‘equipped’ with material as well as non-material objects which ‘help to objectify the worth of the persons involved’ (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006: 142, see also 116–18). The actors described in OJ are then clearly not ‘free to decide’ but historically and situationally constrained by the environment surrounding them (Thévenot, 1992). The Foucauldian point of power as capacity and productive is exactly what applies here, and what Honneth seems to ignore.
In its current form, the reference in world-ecology discussions to the webs of life sounds
detached from any serious consideration of experience: social structures appear as forging
experiences and how experiences can affect social structures in return is not clear.
Pragmatic approaches also are structuralist. In Luc Boltanski’s terms (2017), they are
inspired by a form of ‘cognitive structuralism.’ They are interested in how representations of
the world generated by the historically situated capacity of social reflexivity become lived
ecologies -- that is, forms of socio-material organization and shared cognitive frames.
For instance, in a groundbreaking paper, Laurent Thévenot (1984) outlines his notion of
"investment in forms," which he gives to the manifold ways to inform and conform people,
things, beings, environments so as to stabilize common frames of valuation, evaluation and
valorization. It should be of little surprise, then, to learn that the objects pragmatic
sociologists are typically interested in are, in a Foucauldian move, dispositifs , conventions of
quantification and monetization, technical tools, evaluation procedures, statistical
categories, processes of categorization, accounting tools and so on.<-wouldn't that just be genre? cf. winsor 2006? documents as constitution? and what does this have to do with the strange volunteerism? but also, this would point to a lack of fit between what I'm doing and B & T, maybe, since what's the device? is it the road? it has to be basically genre, since that's what a genre is, it stabilizes, it's a form that arose to stabilize divergent systems of evaluation, and in that way, you could point to, say, a syllabus.
Take, for instance, the issue of statistical evaluation; this ‘governing through numbers’ (Desrosières, 2008), which is all-pervasive in contemporary societies from benchmarking of national policies in the EU and the OECD to performance-measurement of employees in their workplaces. We can of course approach statistical evaluation as tools in the hands of a dominant class and point to the hidden intentions beneath and the hypocrisy and cynicism of these ‘leaders’, as Boltanski terms them (2011: 147). The point is not that there is no role for this kind of unmasking research; there are obviously injustices to unmask in contemporary societies, such as window-dressing in the case of statistics. But unmasking displaces the focus from the question of how reality is shaped (which is what governing through numbers does, for good and bad) to how reality is hidden. Further, staying at the ‘surface’ allows us to see how statistics are not mere tools of the dominant, but resources that are used by all sides in struggles and conflicts (Bruno et al., 2014).<same thing. well this isn't genre per se, and I don't even know if it'd count as infrastructure, it's a structure, but this goes back to the whole celebrities affecting consumer choices through their endorsements, I'm going to buy this, so you buy this too, so we cut down on emissions or whatever, so this would be something similar, I'm not going to govern you by throwing you in prison or exposing you to violence or putting police outside of your door, etc.--I'll govern you through numbers. so basically we're dealing with mediation. so then methodologically, you'd be trying to see if you can catch people in the act? of trying to affect x through y, as mediated through a new invention, and then you'd get them to talk about the invention, justify it, and then maybe even get other people to do the same....but yea, it'd be worth checking out the WCIDs for this reason, though that wasn't something that was invented by the town per se. well I think even stronger still, you'd want to find group A doing B with C, though ground D doing E with C
Returning to the issue of politics, it is evident that this otherness is the necessary path towards critique and re-politicization of present modes of governing.<yes, you'd want to re-politicize the fact that people has now come to mean this sinister thing, I guess
Meanwhile, one of the most important insights from pragmatic sociology is how things often look different when observing the modes of governing from the perspective of actors en situation. Actors trust and rely on as well as question, doubt and criticize the modes of governing surrounding them. They have to, since the social reality (i.e. ‘the present’) is rarely a world of singularity but of plurality resulting in uncertainty, unease and ongoing tensions where reality is ‘put to the test’ (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). Actors thus switch between relying on modes of governing (‘eyes closed’) and being reflexive and uneasy (‘eyes open’) about them. In other words, subjectivation (i.e. ‘restricted consciousness’) and doubt co-exist in the social world. What pragmatic sociology then points to, through the practices of actors themselves, is an already existing ‘otherness’ in the present. It is an important insight from the fieldwork of Thévenot and others that, despite a presumed lack of radical revolutionary vocabulary in contemporary societies, the critical situations actors engage in often illustrate tensions and conflicts between radically different ways of living and of perceiving reality. This is again not to emphasize a ‘voluntarism’ of actors, since the fine-grained analyses of situations (which are beyond the scope of Foucault’s method) exactly point to the many blockages and constrictions actors cope with, in other words, how processes of subjectivation oppress. But certainly pragmatic sociology provides a more optimistic view of people than reducing them to being either blinded or disillusioned and self-interestedly ‘cynical’ (Sloterdijk, 1987).<so the point is just to catch of glimmer of another way of being before the word punishes out the revolutionary potential again?
Sociology as Moral Philosophy (and Vice Versa)
Honneth, no cognition without recognition , Axel Honneth (2005), no cognition (Erkennung) without recognition (Anerkennung) of principles, norms, and values.
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