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

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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?

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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 

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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. 

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Justice

Foucault didn't care about justice?

‘investment in forms’

 

• 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)

Correction(s) for this article

Frédéric Vandenberghe, 

Honneth, no cognition without recognition , Axel Honneth (2005), no cognition (Erkennung) without recognition (Anerkennung) of principles, norms, and values.