Sociology of critique 1.From critical sociology to a sociology of critique JSM477
The core texts
Critique, justification, pragmatism At the beginning was a founding text: Luc Boltanski & Laurent Thévenot, “Les économies de la grandeur” (1987), republished in 1991 as “De la justification”, but only in 2006 translated into English as “On Justification”. ● Starting point a basic sociological question about our sense(s) of justice and fitness : is that just or unjust? Is he/she/it fit (for the job, the task, the purpose)? ● Foregrounds the notion of symbolic power in human affairs (inspired by Bourdieu) ● Borrows ideas from pragmatism in linguistics (How to do things with words - John Austin; maxims governing conversational interaction - Paul Grice; argumentation resides in language - Oswald Ducrot) ● Research programme: study of public controversies - the dynamics of conflicting (e)valuations made in the name of the common good
Studying disputes - the exigence of justification Different situations come with different exigences of justification ● To uncover the foundational justifications for a given social order, study the situations when exigences are highest ● This is when action is confronted with public critique, so that arguments have to appear ‘robust’ to be taken seriously in the eyes of third parties, who are generally the judges of disputes ● The moments when actors are explicit about what reality means for them occur when the things they take for granted break down ● Can become strategic moments when matters of authority are invoked to justify matters of concern and decide what’s to be done ○ What principles of justification to people invoke to make their critique acceptable, convincing or persuasive for others? How do they get others to ‘follow’ them?
Principles of equivalence Disputes can only be pursued and resolved without violence by using principles of equivalence: the world is held in place by the recognition of equivalences ● They enable actors to compare the worth of the different actors and entities involved and thus to recognise where they stand in the ‘hierarchy’ ● They provide criteria by which a collective (who recognise themselves as parties to a particular situation) can decide (what matters, what needs doing) ● Every regime of justice or order of worth has its own principles of equivalence A principle of equivalence: ● sets conventions for evaluation, calculation, categorisation, etc. ● refers to a certain conception of the common good - ‘in the name of what?’
Equipment, standards, objects Principles of equivalence define the instituted standards of measurement and comparison, or the objects that constitute the equipment of the regime of justification: ● Examples: technical standards, common opinion/belief, habitual usage, tradition, aesthetics, ethics, etc.: ○ “The point of reference (the instituted) might be defined in terms of an aspirational model (an ideal or perfect world), a statistical mean (the ‘average person') or an enforceable agreement that establishes standards it is necessary to ‘live up to'.” (Smith, Ward & Kabele 2014: 382) ● Actors have an ordinary competence to recognise principles of equivalence that govern situations, adopt appropriate dispositions, activate relevant ‘equipment’ and deactivate all the objects present that are not part of the equipment
Associations and comparisons ( rapprochements ) We use principles of equivalence to perform one of the fundamental cognitive operations of all argumentation: making associations and comparisons ● the most important associations are those between the particular and the general: between my condition and the condition of others, between what is and what should be, between what one has confidence in and what could be ○ associations need justifying ‘in the name of’ something (the common good, the collective will, the national interest, the general, the ideal, what should be) ○ as long as these ‘in the name of’ things are acceptable, others are more likely to recognise the validity of the particular if it’s seen as a ‘case of’, i.e. if can be generalised/objectified: critique is more likely to succeed the more it ‘mounts in generality’ ○ certain types of association and comparison are more important because they are inscribed in rules and regulations - economic statistics, polls, measures of performance in sport, exams
Inspiration from linguistics and law Attempt to mimic linguistics by making sociology a ‘second degree’ operation: ● explicating actors’ critical competences which are implicit in social practice but not necessarily or not often the object of conscious reflection ● attentive to linguistic markers of argumentation and evaluation / qualification Conscious use of legal process as a metaphor: ● actors are in a situation of uncertainty and conflict when they need to justify ● before justifying, the need to qualify: they launch inquiries, produce accounts/reports, ascribe qualifications to other actors and carry out / undergo tests
Institutions and institutionalisation Social action is intrinsically uncertain but society has ways of fixing or freezing it ● Institutions absorb/reduce uncertainty and minimise the disquiet that stems from inhabiting complex societies with a plurality of worlds ● Institutionalisation is the process of trying to reduce this uncertainty and thereby redefine what counts as reality ○ Without institutions we would live in a state of permanent justification, constanting having to test reality (the definition of paranoia) ○ But institutions are not self-reconfirming: from time to time we need to reconfirm and sometimes reconfigure the arrangements that say what reality is ○ Institutional reality often seems immutable: it’s more real (B talks of the reality of reality ) the less we feel able to alter it, or the less we feel any need to alter it
The tension between ‘is’ and ‘should be’ When actors, drawing on their sense of justice, voice a criticism by pointing to a difference between what is and what should be, they perform what we call a ‘reality test’ (covered in detail in lecture 2) ● Reality tests often mark key moments of institutionalisation: ○ when actors re-confirm the reality of reality (as a precondition for coordinated action) ○ or when actors critique institutions because they spot a discrepancy between what is and what should be
Is a sociology of critique critical? Critical sociology (according to Boltanski & Th é venot) underestimates the critical capacities of ordinary actors ● by revealing dominant ideology it gives dominated the capacity to act ● but social critique often fails due to the difficulty of detaching critique and associated demands from an instituted reality that can seem immutable ○ hence critique can easily dismissed / perceived as utopian [session 2 case study for example] Boltanski argues that the metacritical distancing of critique from reality allows a sociology of critique to uncover alternatives and engage in critical projects
Critical sociology Sociology of critique Epistemology Structural explanation Interactionist explanation Theory-led descriptions Naive, situated, acceptable descriptions Critical analysis Metacritical analysis Ontology Reality viewed from above (theory of Reality viewed as plural (possible domination) worlds) Vertical relations (social structures) Horizontal relations (networks) Agents with stable dispositions, acting Actors / actants with situational under environmental constraints dispositions (competences), acting on their environment Outcomes of action determined Outcomes of action uncertain
Week 2 reading Boltanski, On Critique , chapter 3: ‘The power of institutions’ Choose a passage (a paragraph or two) to read out and discuss.
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