anomalies of justification, witte, daniel,

lesser evil, generality

 

prudence

 

• Lynch, H. (2008). Lifelong learning, policy and desire. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 29(6), 677-689. doi:10.1080/01425690802423353

 According to Boltanski and Thevenot, individuals align with the areas outlined in different situations to make decisions – and beyond this to develop a general code of conduct that enables them to act upon the conflicting interests present in the course of everyday life. This conceptual framework was developed in order to understand conflict resolution. The stories from Learning Lives contributors are not the result of conflict, but the process of reflection results in a similar process of justification. The method of life history mobilises a ‘critical moment’ where there is ‘distance from the present and (a) turn backwards towards the past’ (Boltanski and Thevenot 1999, 360). Within the act of telling there is ‘an imperative of justification’ (Boltanski and Thevenot 1999, 360), where individuals are compelled to make sense of the life story they narrate. Boltanski and Thevenot’s framework places the individual and their story at the centre (Wagner 1999), moving away from:

… the perennial problem of sociology of being torn between a psychologism of action on one hand, and a grand historicism on the other. (Wagner 1999, 346)

When accounts of decision‐making across the life course are mapped onto Boltanski and Thevenot’s framework, some clear patterns emerge that illuminate the passions of individuals and the significant objects, relationships and events that affect these.

Frère, B. (2004). Genetic structuralism, psychological sociology and pragmatic social actor theory: Proposals for a convergence of french sociologies. Theory, Culture & Society, 21(3), 85-99. doi:10.1177/0263276404043621

Silva Corrêa, D., & de Castro Dias, R. (2020). The critique and its critical moments: The recent pragmatic turn in french sociology. Current Sociology, 68(6), 721-737. doi:10.1177/0011392120914702

 Two poles stood out in fashioning this new turn in French sociology. At the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (CSI), Bruno Latour and Michel Callon renewed the sociology of science and technique by focusing not on finished scientific facts but on science in the making, exposing raw facts and entities still in a ‘hot’ state by presenting the controversies and moments of uncertainty. Some scientific facts were then treated as ‘black boxes’, which could be opened to reveal the ordinary work done by scientists in their respective laboratories. Conversely, in the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale (GSPM), Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot changed the analytical approach on social agreement, no longer considering it the result of the internalization of normative expectations (Parsons) or objective structures (Bourdieu), but rather as the result of an axiological process of enquiry by the actors at critical moments.1

In order to identify the kind of regime in which the agent acts, we haveto take the agents’ discourse into account when they locate their behaviourin  a  given  justification  register.  For  each  given  regime  in  which  an  agentacts, some (socially incorporated) dispositions may be activated or cancelled depending  on  whether  they  correspond  to  the  kind  of  behaviour  that  isappropriate. Some dispositions turn out to be more appropriate than othersin such or such social context. In other words, I will use some rather thanothers depending on the specific context in which I currently find myself. Ihave  several  sets  of  habits  and  skills.  They  vary  according  to  the  socialcontext and the action regime in which I have to act. In order to understandwhat these dispositions are, how I acquired them, and in what way I imple-ment   them   involves   the   agent’s   justifying   discourse   (Boltanski   andThévenot).  This  takes  us  back  to  common  speech  (Wittgenstein)  and  to  apsychological  definition  of  the  various  kinds  of  incorporated  dispositions,so  to  a  contemporary  psychological  approach  inspired  by  Freud  whichBourdieu completely left out.

would dispositions fade away progressively or would they disappear through a  lack  of  actualization?  Is  it  possible  to  destroy  them  through  counter-socialization when they become consciously known?

  the  questionwhy  some  of  our  dispositions  operate  and  are  updated  in  some  socialcontexts  and  not  in  others.  Bourdieu  does  not  allow  us  to  understand  howan individual lives in a plurality of social worlds nor his own internal plural-ity:  which  dispositions  does  he/she  invest  in  the  various  universes  he  hasto explore? Bourdieu thinks that the dispositions of an individual’s habitusare designed only to adapt to the sphere they come from.

 how is it possible for various socializing experi-ences  to  inhabit  the  same  body?  How  do  they  intervene  later  in  anindividual’s life? 

 

• Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (1999). The sociology of critical capacity. European Journal of Social Theory, 2(3), 359-377. doi:10.1177/136843199002003010

ambiguous situations (situations troubles). 

 a civic principle of equivalence 

When a radical criticism challenges the very principle on which the situation is based, the dispute transforms itself into a competition between two different reality tests. If they want to close it, the people involved must try to come back to one and only one test.<by saying this, they make it sound like reality test is the same thing as principle of equivalence, which sounds the same as the OOW, but it seems like the principle of equivalence is the logic or grammar, whereas the reality test is the actors' attempt to argue such that a principle of equivalence is seen as befitting of the situation, so until such an agreement takes place, there is no one reality of the situation, and thus uncertainty

without trying to clarify the principle upon which their agreement is grounded.<you were looking for this

objects from different worlds could be based. The reference, for example, toworkers' rights is a compromise between the civic world (where citizens haverights) and the industrial one (where the workers are relevant and worthy asopposed to the idle ones). The rights of persons as citizens in a civic world arespecified in relation to their participation in the industrial one. These weak argumentative constructions (since their putting together will not survive a consistency test) can be strengthened by their objectification into objects or institutionswhich are made up of things relevant within the different worlds that are associated through the compromise (as in France, for instance, the Conseil économiqueet social, which links together in an objectified institution elements from the civic,the industrial and, cven, the domestic worlds).<oh that's interesting

The two possibilities we have just mentioned-the reality test and the compromise<which is different from just trying to purify the situation, because doing so doesn't put the basic reality of the situation into question

Frequently, peoplejust drop dispute without making a new agreement confi. by a realitytest. If we want to understand these puzzling endings, we probably must leavethe realm of justice, which depends on a principle of equivalence, in order to shifttowards other logics of action which, as in the case of affective relations, pur asidethe reference to an cquivalence. It is on such logics that forgiving is based (Boltanski, 1990). To mention forgetting and forgiveness is not to escape from the socialsciences.<like in the meme, it was just dropped

reflexivity, change

kairos, 

 That's too much! If theywant to escape violence they must be able to eliminate most of these motives ofdiscontent as private' and to converge towards a common definition of the relevant objects in the situations-such as highway codes, state of tires, etc. But inorder to converge in sorting out relevant and irrelevant items they must share acommon capacity to see what fits the situation and under which relation. Theyneed, hence, a common definition of the form of generality which allows toconnect this situation with other ones identified as similar.<

Thepossibility of protest stems from the presence, in the same situation, of differentpossible orders.

conventionx11

Our object is not, therefore, a mutual and circumstantial agreementbetween individuals (which can be called indefensible and, thus, may well be logically not consistent ), but a justified agreement which is aiming at facing criticism, and whose compatibility with a constraint of generalization can beperceived.<you're thinking now of...it's in the Greenberg one I think...

Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006: 160ff) approach to thinking about justifications identified six worlds or orders of worth. These worlds provide scripts for making sense of differences, or as Scott and Lyman (1968: 46) stated with regards to accounts, ‘[the] ability to shore up the timbers of fractured sociation . . . to throw bridges between the promised and the performed, [the] ability to repair the broken and restore the estranged’. Where Boltanski and Thévenot differ from earlier research is that the justifications they studied preceded challenges. The critic, for example, must assume that his or her perspective on a cultural product will be questioned by others – the artist, the gallery owner, the audience member, or even him- or herself – so s/he provides a justification within the writing to deflect condemnation from those who come to his or her writing with different values. Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) argue that this is a better indication of the value system from which someone is operating than a posteriori accounts that can take into consideration the concerns of the other after those concerns have been expressed. An embattled critic, for example, may seek to placate his opponents by drawing from their value systems to clear his or her name of any wrongdoing. Boltanski and Thévenot, on the other hand, show us how to make sense of ‘how-to’ scripts such as cookbooks that are written prior to action. The art critic is also writing ‘how-to’ instructions, and must justify the critique in a way that legitimates his or her own standing as an expert on the arts (e.g. Shrum, 1996).

• Eyck, T. A. T., & Busch, L. (2012). Justifying the art critique: Clement greenberg, michael kimmelman, and orders of worth in art criticism. Cultural Sociology, 6(2), 217-231. doi:10.1177/1749975512440228

Ourwork aims to build a research strategy in the sociological field –as Michael Walzer 

has done in philosophy of justice-that might enable us to escape having tochoose between a formal universalism and the kind of unlimited pluralism whichhas often been the response of empirical disciplines like history or sociology totranscendental stances. For classical sociology the plurality of values is an outcome of the plurality ofsocial groups. But in this framework, the question of the agreement between people belonging to different groups is difficult to answer without having recourse to an explanation grounded mainly on domination, power or force.Moral theories devoted to the analysis of the pre-conditions of a just society are,in contrast, most of the time oriented towards the search of a universal procedure capable of supporting the foundation of a general convention. The usefulness ofthese constructions for sociological work depends mainly on their being systematic and consistent. But they can be seen as utopias when confronted with thediversity of the situations in which the members of a complex society areinvolved<is this habermas? We can escape from the alternative between formal universalism and unlimited pluralism by considering the possibility of a limited plurality of principles of equivalence which can beused in order to support criticisms and agreements ( Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991 ). The reference to different kinds ofcommon good makes it possible to sort out different ways of deciding on aperson's state of worth. In this model, then, the different forms of equivalenceare not related to different groups-as they are in classical sociology-but todifferent situations. It follows that a person must in order to act in a normalway-be able to shift, during the space of one day or even one hour, betweensituations which are relevant in relation to different forms of equivalence. Thedifferent principles of equivalence are formally incompatible with one another,since each of them is recognized in the situation in which its validity is established as universal. It follows that the persons must have the ability to ignore orto forget, when they are in a given situation, the principles on which they havegrounded their justifications in the other situations in which they have beeninvolved

How are different values possible?

how is it possible for two different groups to not resort to violence in a disagreement? 

• Jensen, J. D. (2018). Justice in reality: Overcoming moral relativism in luc boltanski's pragmatic sociology of critique. Distinktion (Aarhus), 19(3), 268-285. doi:10.1080/1600910X.2018.1472620

it's kind of interesting how B & T ask this question: how do we distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate uses of reason? how do we distinguish between conspiracy theories on the one hand and publicly acceptable reason on the other? after which of course we get the six cités, those were the themes to result from the analysis....those six

but then it's interesting how B & C take those results and then quite literally mobilize them in order to explain historical change:

The first and original spirit of capitalism reflected a compromise between bourgeois family values, the domestic city and the entrepreneurial competitive spirit of the market city. However, social critique emerged among workers of poor working conditions on the selfishness of capitalists. This critique from workers on a compromise between the domestic and market city meant that capitalists could no longer justify accumulation of capital from ideas of the common good built upon this compromise. Justifications of capitalism were not delivering on their promises, as the values they referred to did not promote the common good for a common humanity but only for a selected few – the capitalists. This compromise, with its tendency towards nepotism and free market reign, had according to its critics failed to deliver secure conditions for the proletariat, i.e. the workers and their families (Boltanski 2002, 6; Boltanski and Chiapello 2007, 88f, 92ff). This social critique fundamentally changed the spirit of capitalism, i.e. the ways it seeks to justify itself to those taking part in the accumulation of resources. A central point is exactly that capitalism is driven forward by critique and that for capitalists to counter critique they must assimilate it. Capitalism is recreated in accordance with critiques to circumvent it, and in implementing the values of those criticizing it, a second spirit of capitalism that combines the collectivist values of the civic city with efficient structures of the industrial city emerged (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007, 27–8).

I mean, I guess it's just a scale thing. It worked on one scale, let's see if it works on another...

This is not, in Boltanski’s view, a question of confronting structures and institutions that seek to avoid the challenge of justification once and for all. Rather, it must, according to Boltanski, be a work of Sisyphus, for sociologists and non-sociologists alike, to constantly seek out situations wherein the metaphysical capabilities of ordinary people are distorted by violence or displacement and seek to re-establish the capability to distinguish between what is and what ought to be (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007, 41, 202; Boltanski 2011, 158).

 

• Telling, K. (2020). The complexity of educational elitism: Moving beyond misrecognition. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 41(7), 927-941. doi:10.1080/01425692.2020.1789847

Is there, for Bourdieu, a fundamental truth at the heart of all social life—a struggle for power, or self-interest—to be unveiled by the sociologist? While it is simplistic to portray Bourdieu as reducing all of social life to economic struggle and positioning, nonetheless the model seems to rely upon classed self-interest (whether conscious or not), as at the root of social action, as this section will try to demonstrate.<is this the manifest image thing? or even--and this is from the Emergent Orders of Worth: Must we agree on more than a price? [COSMOS+TAXIS vol 4 iss1]--that we're trying to show how, when people agree, or meet up? enter into agreement? no... they're situating themselves from within--manheim? standpoint theory?--more than one community?

But the thing that doesn't sit right with me is that the rhetors, according to you, know it's bullshit. Or was it just like that originally? OK. Here is a question. Serious question. I don't think that people know they're bullshitting exactly. I think that, maybe, initially, people know, but then, kind of like what Nietzsche says, they forgot it was a lie. So, when we're talking about or with conspiracy theorists, I don't think they know that they're bullshitting, do they? They don't know... let me get a quote. 

...people in the South knew that slavers whipped people, sometimes to death, even as they worked not to know it

This is violence used to terrorize a person into a demonstration of submission to a narrative that both parties know to be a lie. The point wasn’t the truth—the point was the slaver’s demonstration that he could, through violence, control discourse. That it was a lie was the point.<this feels different though, it's not like that, this feels like a very Trump type of thing, but I guess that brings up the point: what is the role of lying in...well anything? in Boerne? wouldn't misreecognition be like how you know you should quit your Phd but you won't?

...paradoxically, relied on believing something was true and knowing it wasn’t

What do we mean by knowing here? Is this like a Giddens, distinction between discursive and practical conscious knowing? They know it, but they know it at the level of "discursive consciousness"? 

I think Melanie Klein has something to say about this too. Reviewing the introduction to This Changes Everything now...

A connection. This is actually kind of like the Helmbrecht too. People have to work not to know. Nostalgia requires a kind of labor. You have to work hard in order to be comfortable, and that work takes the form of not attending to competing forms of information. So both people and museums co-forget a certain narrative--if I can put it that way. 

Still working with your language. What's something in which I know it's a lie, but, at the same time, it's NOT up for disputation? OK. Let's say Thanksgiving. I know it's a lie. Consciously. Intentionally. But I still want to celebrate it. I know it's racist and horrible, but I love turkey or whatever. Moreover, it's a holiday. So why wouldn't I want to support Thanksgiving? It's delicious. I get time off. I get to see my family. Cathy Chaput (à la Althusser) refers to this kind of thing as overdetermination. You can't get rid of Thanksgiving, despite however racist it is. To quote from the Klein I just looked at: "such a thought is not merely mistaken. It is intolerable

and deeply offensive" (n. pg). Put differently, Thanksgiving is embroiled in a number of different worlds, all of which exert an influence on the situation and maintain its stagnancy. That is, you can't get rid of Thanksgiving by offering up evidence of it being racist or affirming genocide or whatever, since that evidence would do nothing to counter the fact that getting rid of it is LITERALLY immoral. What? I don't get to see my family? What about family values? Pay schedules. Federal trucking routes. Tax structure probably. So, so many little things would work to keep it in its place. It's too big to fail. But it's for sure a lie. 

Wow. I'm really glad I saw that through. That was rough. But I feel like I understand you piece better now. It is about intentionality. It is about being aware. That's really scary.  

It feels so weird emailing you all of this. I do feel like this lives up to level of an "exploratory rambling" though--emphasis on the rambling. 

x

They successfully perform what they (objectively) have to do only because they believe that they are doing something different from what they are actually doing; because they are actually doing something different from what they believe they are doing; and because they believe in what they believe they are doing. (Bourdieu [1984] 1988, 207; original emphases)<see, this feels different. this feels very different than the PRM

 a university admissions interview, since this is commonly understood as a civic test.

 Far from being mere conduits for the reproduction of a social order of which they are largely unaware, actors here work pragmatically with a situation and develop complex, situationally specific concepts of justice in dialogue with others.

maybe it's because I've been reading this stuff so much. but ... I mean it has some value insofar as it tells you what to look for, but that's also exactly what's wrong with it..

The Seriousness of (Discourse) Research as Experimentation

In interpretative analytics, reconstruction is not a simple representation of how things went on. Reconstruction is a process of theoretically informed empirical inquiry in the pragmatist sense. It is not a theorism that applies pre-established categories on empirical data, a procedure classifying data as proof of theory. Instead it takes seriously the capacity of empirical work and data to challenge thinking and to allow or even make us create new concepts to tell new stories. For example, much work in governmentality studies ends up by simply identifying “neoliberal governmentality” and “biopolitics” or “biopower.” This is neither analysis nor explanation, but classification into established categories, which does not cause any surprise. In a recent critique of some work referring to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, cultural theorist Lawrence Grossberg (2014) made the very same argument:

Such efforts to diagnose contemporary power appear to be driven by the theoretical concepts. The concepts are not treated as tools and are no longer open to the challenge of a revitalized empiricism. Instead, the world is reduced to the concepts themselves, without the necessary complexities that define the concreteness of any context. Empirical realities do make their appearance, but their promise is almost always guaranteed in advance. The demands of theory overpower the demands on theory. . . . As a result, one inevitably finds what one looks for. (p. 13)

Foucault worked in a rather different way to create new concepts via empirical work. As he said in an interview (Foucault, 1984/2000), he lives through research as experimentation where you do not always already know what you will see and get—the interest lies in changing one’s own thinking about the ways things are. To me, this is today’s challenge to the sociological imagination C. Wright Mills (1959/2000) argued for so intensely.

Therefore, discourse research needs tools (concepts, methodology), but not a pre-established theory of discourse. And it needs good questions, questions that matter.¹⁹

• Keller, R. (2017). Has critique run out of steam?—On discourse research as critical inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(1), 58-68. doi:10.1177/1077800416657103

but I have to keep in mind here that this isn't the whole thing, like what PRM said, well you know, they save that stuff for the monograph, you're not going to get the whole show in a tiny article, but in any case, and I think this is what you're objecting to, the problem is in the theoretical framework, but then again, this is a theory paper, it's using data from a person's own personal corpus to make a theory or method related point, an example of how you can use your data in a manifold of ways

homology

Dialogue and Critique: On the Theoretical Conditions of a Critique of SocietyMikael Carleheden

one-tiered versus two-tired reality
it's funny because you were thinking about this very same thing when you were intuiting the difference between reality and world, makes you want to reread https://orbi.uliege.be/bitstream/2268/90314/1/Boltanski%27s%20moral%20sociology%20and%20his%20implicit%20theory%20of%20ideology.pdf though

normative basis

so this article was interesting and super helpful because it gave you a sense of what's meant by the phrase, normative basis of critique, which always gets leveled at Foucault, who doesn't have one apparently, and that seems to be a kind of Hegelian thing, where the suppositions get disclosed in order to be justified, so basically they're saying, Foucault lacks transparency, we don't know why he got there, 

Foucault’s conception of neoliberalism could be used to lay the groundwork for a renewal of critical theory, but his vague normativity stands in the way. It is obvious to every reader of his work that he was not simply describing or explaining the history of madness, sexuality, crime, imprisonment, and neoliberalism. He was in some sense also critical, but the conditions of this critique were undertheorized. Habermas claimed that Foucault’s work is “cryptonormative” (Habermas, 1987a, p.  276).  Social  criticism  presupposes  at  least  an  implicit  judgment  of  the  object  of critique as bad or unjust. Further, such a judgment presupposes some idea of what  is  good  or  right—i.e.,  some  kind  of  (at  least  intuitive)  normative  platform  on which the critique stands. Foucault’s cryptonormativity must, in some way or other, direct him toward the object of his critique and the paths of his writings. Foucault’s ambivalence about claims of validity explains, of course, the doubts he  has  had  about  formulating  such  a  platform. 

so on the other hand, B & T do have a normative basis? you missed that though

and then Habermas does have one, yes, he like never shuts up about his, he's like super proud of it, he's like, no, I'd like us to be more face to face, having difficult conversations, public meetings, debate, that kind of thing. 

but then again ? was saying that Foucault did come to inject a kind of two-tiered reality at the end of his career, in parrhesia, in speaking truth to power, so there is that dyad there... 

but for the most part, Foucault was completely atransparent about his position for years, then formulated or rather was convinved he needed to become explicit about it, and did so via the relation of self to self, so it was a "lonely rider" as ? says, very Nietzschean, which is then critiqued becuase it seems like that kind of self-relation would be exploited as essentially hipster 

To  put  it  bluntly,  how  can  an  individualized  process  of  ethical  self-formation  have sufficient resources to present a serious challenge to, or refusal of, a form of power that operates precisely through the proliferation of difference and the management of individual autonomy? (McNay, 2009, p. 68)

and it seems like Habermas also? has a two-tiered conception of reality, it's the two people engaged in dialogue   

validity

x

Misc

Honneth (2010) uses Hegel’s conception of a “suffering of indeterminacy” in order to  understand  contemporary  pathologies.  This  conception  comes  close  to  Durkheim’s  conception of anomie.

There are many reasons for  that,  but  one  of  the  more  fundamental  hindrances  is  precisely  that  whereas  Habermas took his basic point of departure in a conception of dialogue, Foucault seems to be caught by an ethical version of the philosophy of the subject.<so they're incompatible? that is, without B & T?

T

... the idea of critique is meaningful only when there is a difference between a desirable an actual state of affairs. To give critique the place that falls to it in the social world, we must stop reducing justice to force <deleuze... To be valid,<I wonder if this is the same "validity"... critique must be capable of justifying itself—that is to say, clarifying the normative supports that ground it ... Hence it continues to refer to justice, for if justice is a delusion, what is the point of criticizing? (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005a, pp. 28–9)

Second,  by  taking  critique  as  their  object  of  research,  Boltanski  and  his  co-authors  can  empirically  show  that  actors  in  their  everyday  life  construct  reality  at two different levels. <so rather than critiquing, as Habermas seemed to be doing, they move from doing the critique (in a way) to watching other people do it? and that's more helpful? ... but what problem does that overcome in Habermas? how does the move from to critique as an object solve a problem in Habermas? oh, historical transformation? how does doing critical theory prevent H from having a meaeingful theory of change and vice versa?

x

In  contrast  to  Foucault,  Boltanski  and  his  co-authors  do  not  immediately  investigate  such  normative  orders  from  the  observer’s  perspective  (i.e.,  as  regimes  of  truth,  forms  of  domination,  and  exclusion), but take on the participant’s perspective and are, in that way, able to elucidate the normative validity of these orders.<justice? capable of justifying itself. makes you want to go back and read the longo on validity. Thus, in their social analysis we find—in contrast to Foucault—extensive normative reflection and—in contrast to Habermas—reflection of a kind that deals with substantial conceptions of the good and their historical transformation.<difference between observation and participation. how is that so? are they just observing different people? is this like a scale thing? maybe. because again, Foucault is probably at the level of populations. and there is the term "perspective", which would give greater credence to the idea that this is a scale issue 

x 

They approach this task by working out a sociology of justification. The crucial question  then  is  how  people  justify  their  actions  (ibid.,  p.  37),  and  the  general  answer  is  that  people  use  orders  of  worth.  Critique  is  treated  as  the  other  side  of justifications, and the two sides are seen as interdependent. We might argue that this sociology is based on a conception of dialogue. However, Boltanski and Thévenot do not only analyze the form of dialogues (a higher common principle, different kinds of critiques and tests, etc.) but also<and this is part two of the two-tiered reality, I think, which also gets us to Cathy C, since I always think of this through overdetermination anyways, so I wonder if Cathy's turn to affect was precisely a way to graft on a kind of motivation or why to the analysis...the substantial conceptions of the good, on which these dialogues are centered.<so by this very same reasoning, Habermas has no way of being able to explain why people do the things they do, or why, maybe, like Deleuze à la Reich, that people beg for their domination as though it were their salvation, or I guess even a term like sustainability, why, for instance, do people keep doing the same thing, since, if it were really like X, then people would have stopped doing X and moved to Y long ago...oh, there we go, just keep reading, yea, like why would people be ok with working purely for the sake of profit if it weren't also fused to the Good...like why would people push themselves to be doing shit like I'm doing for years and years if ... but I can't think of how this would work in H, ... I just don't even understand how a concept of dialogue would even be applicable there, like I want to be in dialogue with.. or recognition maybe...interaction, interactivity, but then again it's important to keep in mind that H is not analyzing certain things, he's analyzing the welfare state? still, don't see how a concept of dialogue applies to the welfare state...

totally forgot. justice? F and justice? oh scale. so Latour is like let's bracket scale, Foucault is at the scale of populations and B is at the scale of ... the person?

oh that's interesting. F as empirical material rather than theoretical framework. 

x

Justice

Foucault didn't care about justice?

 

Dialogue and Critique: On the Theoretical Conditions of a Critique of Society, Mikael Carleheden

https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/182710320/dekker_kuchar_ct_vol4_iss1.pdf

Emergent Orders of Worth: Must we agree on more than a price? [COSMOS+TAXIS vol 4 iss1]

To  give  just  one  example  the  type  of  behavior  that  is  ap-propriate and suitable is different when we are sleeping in a hotel or sleeping in a friend’s house. Both for the hotel staff, our friends, and you as guest. Ambiguity about the appropri-ateness  might  however  arise  when  it  is  not  quite  clear  what  type of exchange we are engaged in. If we are couch-surfing are  paying  guests  supposed  to  behave  as  friends  would,  or  rather as we would in a hotel? Underlying this ambiguity is an ambiguity about the type of common goods we are trying to achieve. 

Although customary conventions are historically contingent, they are very real in the sense that they provide an ecological rationality. We live in a pluralistic society with multiple notions of the common  good  to  strive  for;  multiple  notions  of  justice  are  operative  in  modern  societies.  These  plural  notions  of  jus-tice are best thought of as competing representations of the impartial  spectator.  How  can  people  agree  on  which  repre-sentation  of  the  impartial  spectator  is  the  right  one?  What  if our representations of the impartial spectator collide? Are we bound to disagree and fall into dissonance or conflict?

there was that hayak quote too

Their  account  shares  important  similarities  with  that  of  Smith. Both theories emphasize the importance of propriety, and the context-dependence of propriety. They also share an emphasis on the plurality and imprecise nature of the good. But  where  Smith  emphasizes  elements  of  estimative  justice,  how should  we  respond  to  particular  situations,  Boltanski  and Thévenot add the analysis of the content of that justice. Their  orders  of  worth  are  substantive  possible  justifications

decorum

substantive

david stark's letter

virtue ethics

reflective moment

dispute

By doing so we demon-strate  the  importance  of  more  extensive  agreement  on  such  norms  of  propriety  and  justice  on  markets,  thereby  under-cutting the strong distinction that is typically drawn between exchanges in the intimate order and the extended order.

n  fact  Hayek  develops  what  could  be  called  the  two-world  hypothesis in which he argues that the small group and the extended order are based on rival and contradictory norms and rules:If  we  were  to  apply  the  unmodified,  uncurbed,  rules  of the micro-cosmos to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization),  as  our  instincts  and  sentimental  yearn-ings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended or-der  to  our  more  intimate  groupings,  we  would  crush  them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of world at once (Hayek 1988, p. 18). 

To engage in a legitimate or justified exchange buyers and sellers must agree, not just on a price, but also on why mon-etary  exchange  is  proper  in  this  case.<habermas ish

Before we turn to our illustrative cases, let us first summa-rize what our theoretical framework consists of. Inspired by Adam Smith we argue that human interactions are driven by the desire for agreement. Smith emphasizes the way in which this process of search for agreement unintendedly gives rise to  norms  of  propriety,  in  terms  of  exchange  relationships,  this is the how of exchange. The framework of Boltanski and Thévenot touches on many points with that of Smith, but it emphasizes  two  additional  aspects.  First,  it  makes  explicit  the  plurality  of  notions  of  justice  in  modern  societies,  and  the way in which these may lead to compromise and conflict. Second, by emphasizing the justification of actions in reflec-tive  moments,  it  makes  clear  why an  exchange  might  take  place, or to what common good it contributes. Taken togeth-er  their  work  provides  a  theoretical  framework  that  allows  us to study how new markets are justified and how norms of propriety emerge on such a market. By doing so we demon-strate  the  importance  of  more  extensive  agreement  on  such  norms  of  propriety  and  justice  on  markets,  thereby  under-cutting the strong distinction that is typically drawn between exchanges in the intimate order and the extended order. 

Norms  of  propriety  and  even  the  justifications  for  surro-gate motherhood differ between Israel and the United States. But  both  cases  clearly  show  that  agreement  has  to  be  con-structed, and is far more extensive than an overlap of inter-est.<is this Smith? doesn't look like it, it looks like this the the economic rationality of the actor from economics, so you've seen that, how B & T question that kind of person, that man, so they're doing economics from a different assumption, not economics from a econ 101 perspective...  yea actually if you control f neoclassical economics you'll find the rational actor you were talking about The different orders of worth are not necessarily hostile worlds,  but  reconciling  plural  notions  of  worth  requires  work.  The  agreement,  moreover,  is  not  isolated,  but  occurs  within a broader legal and social context, that has to approve of the exchange.

implicit

Explaining the concept of situational logic, Karl Popper (1976,  p.  104)  contends  that  “individuals  act,  in  or  for  or  through  institutions.  The  general  situational  logic  of  these actions will be the theory of the quasi-actions of in-stitutions.”  Popper  considered  the  problem  of  general  situational logic and the theory of institutions to be the fundamental tasks of social science: “a theory of intend-ed  or  unintended  institutional  consequences  of  purpo-sive action ... could also lead to a theory of the creation and  development  of  institutions”  (ibid.),  “[t]he  task  of  describing this social environment ... is the fundamen-tal  task  of  social  science,”  this  is  a  task  of  “explaining  unintended  and  often  undesired  consequences  of  hu-man  action”  (Popper  1976,  pp.  101–102).  On  Popper’s  concept  of  situational  logic,  see  also  Noretta  Koertge  (1979)<as in, the institution of the buying and selling of children?

habermas 

interaction, not labor

so the agreement that's presupposed is the justification for his critique of society? how does he move from the one to the other?

so because this is our natural state, then I'll go onto sketch these deformations?

normative basis of critique (ie., what foucault lacks), so intersubjectivity is a normative basis for critique, i.e., this is what it should be like? this is the world as it should be?

theory of change

At the most, the critical theorist can take the “role of an interpreter mediating between the  expert  cultures  of  science,  technology,  law,  and  morality  on  the  one  hand,  and everyday communicative practices on the other hand ...” (Habermas, 1992, p. 39).<so there's some movement between them maybe? like in Chaput?

e  lacks,  just  as  Habermas  does,  a  systematic  theory  about  the  structural  transformation  of  modernity.

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12/17/21

 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

https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/182710320/dekker_kuchar_ct_vol4_iss1.pdf

Emergent Orders of Worth: Must we agree on more than a price? [COSMOS+TAXIS vol 4 iss1]

• Rendtorff, J. D. (2012). The economic sociology of late capitalism: The contributions from boltanski, thévenot and chiapello. Nordicum-Mediterraneum, 7(3), B3. doi:10.33112/nm.7.3.4

existential critique

• sounds like some Jenny Rice shit, constructing the object of inquiry that you're going to analyze, bordering on conspiracy theories because you're working from data that's public but not the best data that you'd ideally have
• ?
•  for ‘late’ Boltanski critique is about finding new ways of problematizing our social reality: this involves the active construction of the objects of our critique and requires a certain aesthetic of revelation. <not only conspiracy theory, but aesthetics
• Piketty’s (2014a)Capital in the Twenty-First Century

world/reality

• ?
• Put differently, the world is ‘everything that happens to people’, and reality is ‘everything that is constructed by people’.The world exists beyond ourwill and regardless of ourintentions,whereasreality existsthrough ourwill and because of our intentions. The Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 75with whose complexity Schopenhauer grapplesin his writings, isthe reality of a realized and realizable world,which lies at the core of Boltanski’sreflections.Associologists,we need to recognize the preponderance of reality over the world, which characterizes every society within the world. As social entities, we have learned to establish a relation to the world by forming relations with others – that is, by developing a relation with social reality. This does not mean, however, that the world does not exercise power over reality. On the contrary, ‘[t]he power exercised by the world over reality stems precisely from the fact that the world is subject to incessant changes, which are far from being exclusively “social” in kind’,76 but which are also ‘natural’ in the sense that we are embodied beingssituated within a physical world. As human beings, we are condemned to search for our place in the world, somewhere between the realm of objectivity and the realm of normativity, but without ever being able to find it
•  This experience, which escapes the frameworks of a constructed reality, is what I call ‘the world’, in the sense of ‘everything that happens’ – to use a phrase coined by Wittgenstein.
• ‘the world’, conceived of as ‘everything that happens’, and ‘reality’, the construction of which makes it necessary to select, in the continuous flow of events, some elements that are treated as if they were the only relevant ones. 

impartial spectator

uptake, bourdieu, habitus

• Underpinning Bourdieu’s (2005) famous notion of habitus was a notion of action not simply as immediate reaction to a brute reality, ‘but an “intelligent” response to an actively selected aspect of the real’ (p. 212).

also uptake in the reception of PE

• It is undeniable that media hyperbole played a big part in the 2007 PE controversy. In anecdotal stories, the abstract collective entity of PE was represented by very concrete persons of flesh and blood according to storylines borrowed from the eternal register of fairy tales: bad guys, suspense, punishment, reward, vengeance and so on. Of course, this ‘trial by media’ was a poor substitute for critical inquiry in that the press stories elided measures that actually modified socio-economic reality in a significant way and focused instead on spectacular fairy-tale themes with pantomime villains. 

x

• 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#