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? 

 

• 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. 

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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

Atkinson, W. (2020). Luc Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology: A bourdieusian critique. European Journal of Social Theory, 23(3), 310-327. doi:10.1177/1368431019855004

he took an interest in the fact that some people can be positioned in more than one field at a time (Boltanski, 1973). 

Next is Boltanski’s refusal of class reductionism. Whether Bourdieu was really guilty of this, given his interest in myriad relatively autonomous fields, is contentious, but it could at least be claimed that multi-field membership, and the conflicting identities and interests it might spur, were generally reserved for those within the field of power and, moreover, never really related systematically to in situ action. These are, in fact, claims made explicitly by Bernard Lahire (1998; 2011), who is otherwise hostile to Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology. 

there was that part when they suggested that the pragmatism part comes from when things go wrong, but that connection to Dewey seems weak

philosophical anthropology

language?

recognition?

 If it now goes under the label of ‘pragmatic sociology’ or ‘French pragmatism’, it is in good part because, like the American pragmatism of James or Dewey, it pays particular attention to instances of when things ‘go wrong’. In Boltanski’s case, the interest is in when things go wrong for people in their everyday lives – more specifically, when a dispute arises and people are forced to justify or explain their own actions or the actions of others – because this reveals much about the assumptions underpinning social relations in between these ‘critical moments’.

you were also thinking about walsh's comment here, the are we just going to keep analyzing disasters one?

is a disaster the same thing as a dispute though?

correspondence analysis 

this is a good summary of B & C, one that uses the OOWs

Boltanski’s most elaborate analysis of disputes is undoubtedly his history, written with Eve Chiapello (2005 [1999]), of the changing orders of worth commonly invoked to justify capitalism (see also Boltanski, 2008). In the early days of smaller-scale production and family firms, capitalism was rationalized on the grounds of domestic and commercial principles – money-making was good, but also capitalists were seen as benevolent and trustworthy father figures. Eventually this gave way to a justification of capitalism based on civic and industrial principles – capitalism is the most efficient mode of production and benefits all. This was, in turn, met with critique in the 1960s from those invoking the inspired order of worth – capitalism was seen as stifling authentic human existence, freedom and creativity. Yet this ‘artistic’ critique was then incorporated into the justification for capitalism by the 1990s, as demonstrated by the explosion of management literature privileging flexibility, interpersonal connection, creativity and employee self-fulfilment in its vision of good practice.

There was also that part you were thinking about, which was, what if you did an analysis to suggest that there are certain areas of texas that used more of a justification than elsewhere? like what if people in bierne used way more of a market justification and that was unevenly distributed?

computer

The habitus, complains Boltanski, is like ‘a kind of internal computer system’ automatically calculating options for people who thus ‘never act consciously’ (Boltanski et al., 2014a: 563). People may well have habits, of course, but they are irrelevant to the analysis of justification struggles (Boltanski, 2012 [1990]: 39, 43).

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It also overlooks the fact that sociological discourses circulate through and are re-appropriated by others in their own critiques.

the very B & C point

Migration and globalization have obliterated any chance of identifying classes by a unity of habitus and taste, and putting class at the heart of critique, as Bourdieu does, ‘flattens’ individual differences and singularities into one dimension and obscures other social relations and identities (Boltanski, 2011 [2009]: 39, 45, 144–5; see also 2008: 115ff). This assessment might have been stimulated at least in part by the detection of only a weak relation between class and disputes in his early statistical foray in this direction (Boltanski, 2012 [1990]: 247).

this is good, so Bourdieu was kind of after class all along, and he thought that he could get to class sociologically, and show how people's talk was epiphenomenal and that in the last analysis it led back to class

uncertainty 

In short, Bourdieu’s sociology is said to be determinist, objectivist and reductionist – familiar claims echoing those of others (e.g. Alexander, 1995; Jenkins, 2002) but launched from a very specific point of view. Situated in a baseline Hobbesian vision of human beings as plagued by uncertainty, Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology instead takes people’s critical capacity and competencies seriously and aims to do nothing more than elucidate the regularities of people’s critiques, almost Wittgenstein-like, and underscore the messiness of social life that follows from actors in the same time-space situation working with multiple registers of justification. Sociological knowledge and lay knowledge are treated symmetrically, and though the existence of power relations was never exactly denied, Boltanski (2012 [1990]: 40–1) early on refused to use them as covering principles of causal explanation. The exercise of free will can be identified in the ever-present possibility of invoking different polities in situ (p. 57), and if there are ‘constraints’ imposed on the situation by the logic of the orders of worth, people are not only fully able to become aware of them but often actively seek them out in their claims (p. 39).

uncertainty, 

The initial response to all this is to reject many of the accusations hurled at Bourdieu by Boltanski. Often they are based on caricature, cobbling together a feeble strawman that tumbles into a heap at the lightest argumentative breeze, or – surprisingly for someone who worked so closely with Bourdieu for twenty years – unfamiliarity with the nuances of critical sociology. Some oversights are perhaps relatively minor. The counter-emphasis on ‘semantic security’ and the integrative effects of institutions, for example, seems to forget that Bourdieu already strove to accommodate that via his notion of doxa, or the shared taken-for-granted assumptions about what is what and ‘what is done’ that allow people to get on with their practice and give people a sense of stability. True enough, Bourdieu does not work with the same underpinning assumption about certainty-seeking that Boltanski does, which rings of psychological determinism in the same manner as Anthony Giddens’ (1984) appeal to ‘ontological security’ as the ultimate basis for human action (Atkinson, 2007). Yet Boltanski is clearly trying to cast Bourdieu on one side of an epistemological couple he wishes to integrate – conflict versus consensus – that Bourdieu’s concepts already surmount, since doxa is at once the basic foundation for ‘getting on’ and the historical legacy of struggle and domination (Bourdieu, 2001: 1–2).

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Situated in a baseline Hobbesian vision of human beings as plagued by uncertainty, Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology instead takes people’s critical capacity and competencies seriously and aims to do nothing more than elucidate the regularities of people’s critiques, almost Wittgenstein-like, and underscore the messiness of social life that follows from actors in the same time-space situation working with multiple registers of justification. 

all based on a philosophical anthropology to boot

Whatever Boltanski’s interest in uncertainty, ultimately he, like Bourdieu, takes as his starting point in all his work the human concern to be worthy, the potential for that worth to be violated and the means people deploy to defend or justify their worth.

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grounding the quest for recognition, and the misrecognition it generates,

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a point which Boltanski stresses to distance himself from ethnomethodology (p. 43)

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This is exactly what Bourdieu put under the label of ‘symbolic mastery’, which is at the root of his notion of cultural capital, suggesting a class-based distribution of critical resources. 

yea, does everyone have all the polities? or is it just all managers?

The next question that arises is precisely why people continuously call on their critical resources. They feel their worth is in question, that much we know, but why is their worth in question in any particular situation? Why do they challenge or invoke a specific polity, and how might that systematically vary across the population? What are the conditions of possibility of what Boltanski analyses, in other words? These are not queries that Boltanski is interested in answering, at least in his initial post-Bourdieu work, but the obvious answer is that there is a distribution of worth, meaning that certain people are more likely to feel aggrieved by certain regularized situations than others, in certain ways, and to mobilize specific counter-arguments likely to rescue their worth, given what they have – which fits snugly within the logic of Bourdieu’s notions of social space and fields.

yea that's a good point actually, what about the fact that certain people don't even feel like their worth is in question, what about that?

yea, who wins arguments too, 

• who wins the arguments
• who has the critical capacities to begin with
• where those capacities are distributed
• who feels inclined to argue or that their worth is in question

What about those instances where Boltanski explicitly tries to reject Bourdieu’s image of class, however? To begin with, his claim that classes (especially the dominant class) can no longer be identified on the basis of shared habitus is thrice undermined.

how would that work though? to do a survey? like what would you ask and how would you ask it? would it be on growth? city council? population change? education? open minded ness? remote work? the changing composition of small towns?

like what if you interviewed people who moved there, who were new to town, and then who had been there for a long time, 

• people who have been there for generations
• people who just got there
• people who work there but don't live there

but what's in dispute? or rather, how does the town try to offer security? what is it in the town that tries to bring people together? stabilize. that's the word I was looking for. the arts? or rather, wouldn't it be like a myth or something? the german tradition? is there a new myth or story? the library? nature? the outdoors? 

maybe the scale is off. after all, although this did change, and although B & C did analyze this? at the scale of history, it seems like most analyses are at the scale of the organization--but then again, what about the über one? can über be like the new people who are moving? but über is a device, it is something that people can use... 

you would just have to analyze it. 

Next is Boltanski’s refusal of class reductionism. Whether Bourdieu was really guilty of this, given his interest in myriad relatively autonomous fields, is contentious, but it could at least be claimed that multi-field membership, and the conflicting identities and interests it might spur, were generally reserved for those within the field of power and, moreover, never really related systematically to in situ action. These are, in fact, claims made explicitly by Bernard Lahire (1998; 2011), who is otherwise hostile to Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology. The first contention can be countered by the fact that Bourdieu recognized more fields than just those within the field of power, not least the family as a field where love can become a stake of struggle (Bourdieu, 1998; Atkinson, 2016) but also fields formed by specific organizations or institutions like those so dear to Boltanski (Bourdieu, 2000a; 2005). The second contention, however, is more telling. Here, perhaps, Boltanski is indeed on to something. In focusing on the structure and strategies of specific fields, Bourdieu did tend to bracket out anything else that might be going on and reduce pertinent situations and actions to the logic of the field (or social space) under investigation. A person does what they do or thinks what they think because of their position and dispositions in the space in question.⁷ This does not mean, however, that it is impossible to consider the effects of multi-field membership on specific situations or that doing so invalidates Bourdieu’s conceptual toolkit. Bourdieu (2000b) himself posited the notion of ‘social surface’ to encapsulate the fact that people can be positioned in more than one field, with effects on their activity in each, and I have elsewhere made the case that a little phenomenological flesh on these bones – including a specific reading of Husserl’s concepts of the lifeworld and the ‘world horizon’ – can help illuminate the ways in which field forces intermingle in shaping everyday spatiotemporal experience and practice (Atkinson, 2016; 2018).

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A multi-field approach can be usefully compared to Boltanski’s (2013 [2004]) multi-polity approach in relation to the theme of abortion. Maybe there is, as Boltanski notes, an official discourse of self-realization involved – we might construe that as the orthodoxy generated by the field of power – and maybe he is right to say this is accommodated and interpreted in myriad ways by women themselves in their own justifications. Yet rather than accept an account of homogeneous heterogeneity, 

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