Collaboratory in Critical Security Methods
The International Collaboratory on Critical Methods in Security Studies is an ESRC funded project (RES-810-21-0072)
The Sociology of Critical Capacity (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1999) I
This article argues that many situations in social life can be analyzed by their requirement for the justification of action. It is in particular in situations of dispute that a need arises to explicate the grounds on which responsibility for errors is distributed and on which new agreement can be reached. Since a plurality of mutually incompatible modes of justification exists, disputes can be understood as disagreements either about whether the accepted rule of justification has not been violated or about which mode of justification to apply at all. The article develops a grammar of such modes of justification, called orders of worth (grandeur), and argues that the human capacity for criticism becomes visible in the daily occurrence of disputes over criteria for justification. At the same time, it is underlined that not all social situations can be interpreted with the help of such a sense of justice, which resides on a notion of equivalence. Regimes of love, of violence or of familiarity are systematically distinct from regimes of justification.
Jef Huysmans says
Here is a first take on Boltanski and Thevenot.
I liked the article by B&T. It is a very different take on situated knowledge from Marcus. The focus is on specific situations of argumentation and disputing rather than on how to connect different sites. They do present an interesting way of retaining the criticality of knowledge by proposing to work through the critical abilities of the people involved in a critical moment while not letting the analysis slip into simply mapping a plurality of arguments by bringing the specific critical capacities of the ordinary agents back to more general ‘orders of worth’.
The approach is also interesting in that it resonates with Habermas but relaxes the universalising claims that the latter is based on. We can have a discussion on whether B&T do not in the end reproduce a form of situational knowledge that works through setting out ideal types against which the real situation is then evaluated. One of the key issues is whether they succeeded in moving between recognition of the specificity of situations and the generalizing and universalising claims and processes that allow us to develop critical knowledge.
Instead of pursuing this line of engagement I thought it might be useful to ask what B&T can offer security studies, and more specifically securitization. Critical moments are moments where actors end up in dispute and enact an imperative for justifications of the extra-ordinariness of the moment. What the speech act of security along Copenhagen lines seems to express is a move to prevent critical moments from becoming situations of dispute around issues of justice by having the politics enter a regime of war rather than justification, as understood by B&T.
Instead of accepting that securitizing would simply be a move from a regime of justification to a regime of war, using B&T’s notion of critical moments and dispute we can open an analysis that digs into the situation to bring out how securitising in this sense is often intertwined with actors who render the situation as a dispute and enact contests over criteria of justification. [9/11 would provide plenty of examples here, as would many situations in which violence is accounted for in political discourse.] Who the actors are depends on the site one analyses – could be politicians and the media, professionals of security, people wandering around ground zero, soldiers, …
Such an analysis would also allow us to see how situations of insecurity can be intertwined with issues of injustice, not as expressed in normative theory but in the way in which the actors enact an imperative for justification in the name of social injustice, seeking to establish equivalences that allow them to enact their relation as a dispute.
One of the serious limitations of the piece for us is that it seems to focus on face-to-face situations. It does not offer us much for taking into account how a situation becomes connected to other situations through narrative, objects, and technologies. Marcus is much better on the latter and it would be nice to be able to follow through how different situations of dispute become interconnected globally.
I find B&T quite attractive, including how they combine political theory with study of situated practices, but am also a little uneasy about how close they in the end seem to come to setting up a set of ideal types – i.e. find a position between universalising and pluralizing by setting up a limited plurality of ‘orders of worth’ – which will tempt many to simply ‘apply’ them to situations. Yet, they definitely do offer an exiting alternative to retain the criticality in situated knowledge without having to fall back on simply increasing self-reflectiveness in the analyst, as in Marcus.
Jef
7 June 2010, 16:58
Xavier Guillaume says
I knew I should have read it earlier on in order to find space to say something a bit original here :-)
I agree with Hannah and Lana that the article was not too convincing especially in regard to its lack of recognition of the place of power and domination in face-to-face relations (more about this soon). Then, I think B&T offer a useful reading of those daily moments critiques by providing a regimen of argumentative repertoires that are mobilised according to the social agents' differentiated readings of the specific moment critique they are currently in. Disputes, and resolve of those disputes, arise because of disagreements over the type of repertoires that are employed by the other party, over the type of repertoire to employ to reach agreement/coordination and also about the coherence of an argument used within the specific claimed repertoire in light of the parameters set by the repertoire itself. B&T thus offer a way to understand how social agents specific situated knowledge interact in light of a common event.
As noted by others in this forum, what is most striking in their reading is its conscious obliteration of power and domination (see p. 364 for instance). More, they find this obliteration necessary in order "to give an account of the experience of the social actors themselves" (364) as, in their mind, to give priority or way to force, domination, interests, deceit, etc. would dramatically truncate our vision of the social world. Theirs is an argumentative world that does not leave space to silence or, as noted by Lara, to the constitution of the social actors within specific spaces through forms of power. Theirs is a social world where social actors are inherently bestowed with the ability not only "to differentiate legitimate and illegitimate ways of rendering criticisms and justificiations" (364) but also, it seems to me, to express themselves "freely" in these moments critiques in order to be able to solve the crisis. The two ways by which the "ordinary course of action" (375) that are mentioned by B&T, the reality test and the compromise, while not the sole paths to reach back normality, are both predicated to communicative action requiring that each social actors, who might not necessarily bear the same "social capital" in the said situation, have at least the possibility to express *without self-imposed deformation or silencing*, their justifying claims.
To get back to the car crash example used by B&T and Hannah (as a counter-example). Let's move away from Western Europe, and especially France where B&T seem to originate their universalizing move (which is pragmatic in shape but remain universalizing in intent), and let's zoom in on a street in Jakarta, Indonesia. Car A, driven by Wiranto, is violently bumped from behind by Car B, driven by Sudhoyono. Car B is obviously fautive. Both drivers are males, in their mid-30s. Wiranto starts to argue with Sudhoyono who seemingly seem to enter the argument; yet Wiranto suddenly stop arguing and start apologising to Sudhoyono, one would be even baffled to hear that Wiranto, a young executive in a prominent bank in Jakarta, is offering to pay for the repair of Sudhoyono's car. Did Sudhoyono raise a gun? Threatened Wiranto? Nothing like it. Wiranto finally noticed the red licence plate on Sudhoyono's car indicating that he was a low-ranking officer in the TNI, Indonesia's armed forced. Whatever communicative action that might have started, and however willing was Sudhoyono to entertain such communicative action, in order to solve this moment critique, the communicative action broke down the moment the "masks" of equality have been put aside. TNI members are off limit to communicative action, they are "power".
Finally, to continue on Jef's incitation to engage securitization theory with B&T, I would go further along the justice/normative line by mobilising speech act theory in questioning the ways by which B&T are setting ideal-types, as it has been mentioned here already. As feminist philosophers have argued (most notably Rae Langton) some speech acts actually disable the capability to produce illocutionary acts (pornography is a speech act setting up the limits of what can be spoken about sexuality de-authorizing women to speak about themselves and their sexuality; in the end, women are disabled to produce illocutionary acts, they are silenced). B&T do not enable us to comprehend how a securitizing speech act is setting the rule of argumentative engagement beyond the wishful inherent ability of each participants in this moment critique to resolve the issue through the negotiation between type of justification. In other words, a security speech act is to be also evaluated normatively, or in terms of justice, in light of its power of silencing constituencies/people; like pornography silences women. It might prove a fruitful normative engagement with securitization theory.
16 July 2010, 14:17
Manuel Mireanu says
Just a short intervention from me at this point. I also agree that B&T set up ideal categories, which risk becoming a rigid grid trough which one would be tempted to analyse and even detect situations. This seems always to be a risk when we try to find a middle way between universalism and relativism. It is very similar to what Buzan&Waever were frequently accused of doing with their theory of sectors of security – imposing a fixed number of levels of analysis in order to keep a universal definition of security, and at the same time to account for the increasing widening of the list of reference objects of security. However, I tend to think that such a method is useful if what is at stake is a debate between relative and absolute; we might still disagree on the specific way in which the authors chose to produce the categories – the three bodies of texts.
Leaving this aside, I just wanted to observe that another important aspect of the piece could be the discussion about what ‘critical’ means, about what the authors call ‘the critical capacity’. Apart from the Habermasian moment, when B&T speak about this critical capacity as being a personal ability – which some might have more than others, and which can be trained and developed – which is similar to the deliberative capacity of Habermas’ rational subjects engaged in speech acts; there is another delicate issue with this concept. The authors seem to equate ‘critical’ with ‘criticism’, with a process of contestation, or as they put it, ‘a disagreement about the state of worth becomes manifest’. I think we have to discuss this issue and decide whether we agree with such a definition when we speak about ‘critical security’. My feeling at this point is that there might be something more to the critical moment than just contesting legitimacy.
I fully agree that we should discuss what such a piece can bring to the study of critical security. Yet here comes another troublesome meaning of ‘critical’: as Jef pointed out, ‘Critical moments are moments where actors end up in dispute and enact an imperative for justifications of the extra-ordinariness of the moment.’ I think here ‘critical’ is seen as being similar to ‘exceptional’ or ‘urgent’ – as in the Copenhagen School’s theory. Therefore, we have to be clear in distinguishing between ‘critical capacity’ – as the ability to question the legitimacy of an actor in a situation; ‘critical moment’ – as a moment of radicalization of decisions and actions brought by the perceived urgency of the situation; and perhaps ‘critical activity’, which, as we discussed when we met in Sussex, involves reflexivity and emancipation. I hope this makes as much sense for you all as for me :)
manu
7 June 2010, 18:25
Hannah Hughes says
I am afraid I was not convinced by this article. As Jef mentioned, the first part of the paper raised some interesting points, such as the ‘establishment of equivalence’ (361-3) and the idea of concentrating critical sociology on actors’ critical capacity (364). However, I was unsure about B&T’s contrast between a sociology of situations and a sociology of groups in theorising actors’ attempts to establish equivalence in instances of dispute (365); it seems that a sociology of situations is intimately related to a sociology of groups and that’s precisely what enables B&T to identify common worlds. I also feel that they over identified the differences between these worlds rather than the similarities. For example, they suggested that the world of renown was “entirely unrelated to the realm of personal dependencies” that characterise the domestic world (371). However, I would suggest that these worlds are structured as much by their similarities as their differences. Both rely on the recognition of particular activities as being worthwhile— bearing children versus being elected to parliament—the activities may be dependent on the world, but that such activities are endowed with a particular worth is dependent on recognition. I would further suggest that the world of renown is equally dependent on personal dependencies and linked to personal self-esteem as the domestic world, or any other world for that matter; it’s only how personal dependencies and self-esteem are represented or performed that is world specific.
Sociological analysis aside, I am also concerned that B&T reduce our critical capacity in security studies by downplaying the role and power of social domination. B&T seem to suggest that an actor’s critical capacity is to look beyond categories of worth. I would argue though that in moments of crisis, actor’s often evaluate their position relative to another’s (consciously or unconsciously) to assess whether they can impose their definition of the situation on the other party. B&T gave the example of the car crash and suggest that in order to avoid violence the two parties must “converge towards a common definition of the relevant objects in the situation” (361). Whereas violence may be avoided in such a situation, avoiding some degree of domination—one’s imposition of the reality of the situation on another—is far less likely. My sister was recently involved in a car accident and as soon as she stepped out of the car she apologised, the man with whom she’d crashed seized this order of worth to frame the situation and indicate that she “was doing some”. “Yes”, she replied apologetically, “I was on my way to work”. It was only when she got home and described the situation that it occurred to her that she had the right of way as the gentleman had pulled out at a junction, and thus the laws of the road were in her favour. However, the laws of the road were not the first to speak in the moment of crisis; other historically constituted positions of worth defined the reality. Perhaps a more relevant example would be the British government’s attempt to frame climate change as a security issue to international audiences. The British government were the first state actors to attempt to securitize climate change by raising it for debate at the UN Security Council. This enabled the government to promote its leadership in this ethic laden issue area, but more importantly, the government promoted a frame of the climate change problematic that left in the shadows certain histories and injustices and offered a solution that would safeguard and promote their preferred means of economic and political domination. It would seem in times of crisis that being the first to define the meaning of the situation is imperative to establishing and holding on to one’s position of worth, a position that from the outset already conditions who is likely to be the first to speak.
I would like very much to examine instances of reflexivity and critical capacity in moments of crisis, and I totally agree with B&T that such moments provide this opportunity (359-60). However, I also want to be sure that I have grasped the situation and the social dynamics at play before I herald it as a critical moment, and I am not sure that B&T provide the means to do that.
22 June 2010, 10:44
Lara Coleman says
Dear all
Like Hannah, I also wasn’t entirely convinced by this article. There were aspects of it that I liked. I thought the way that they linked critical capacity to particular situations was very interesting as a way of avoiding universalism while avoiding falling back on the idea of an endless plurality of arguments. However, I’m not at all sure about their recourse to “a limited plurality of principles of equivalence”. I agree with Jef and Manu that B&T risk setting up ideal categories. B&T are right that different contexts do invite different sorts of modes of evaluation. However, as Hannah has pointed out, the different worlds they describe intersect far more than B&T appreciate. Hannah mentions the importance of performance and recognition, and I think these are very important aspects in constituting critical capacity.
I found myself asking: what broader background cultural texts inform these orders of worth and their deployment at a given situation? How are different parties to the dispute endowed with different degrees of critical capacity as a result of how cultural texts assign worth not only to modes of justification but also to the different, embodied, socially and historically situated people engaged in dispute.
In part, this is a question of what makes a situation. For B&T, the situation seems to be constituted by a background set of relationships, an issue of dispute, the terms in which the dispute is carried out and the principles of equivalence to which those involved in criticism appeal. I want to bring out something which Hannah touches on, which is that B&T don’t pay any attention to the performative dimension of a situation. It is telling that one of B&T’s sets of data is made up of written texts in political philosophy. They appear to think about human beings’ involvement in disputes solely in terms of language. Although they include objects in the dispute (p. 360), they ignore different sorts of bodies. By contrast, I think that, in everyday, situated, processes of dispute critical capacity relates not only to “orders of worth” but also to the authority ascribed to different speakers as a result of their physical embodiment (including dress, voice, mannerisms) and the social worth and authority that these things connote in the speaker.
To explain what I mean, I’m going to draw on a forthcoming paper that I co-authored with Serena Bassi at Warwick (apologies for self-citing but a lot easier than working these ideas through with a different example...). This isn’t a security studies paper but a reflexive, feminist analysis that came out of our own situatedness in different spaces of anticapitalist politics in Britain. Our focus is gendered performances in these spaces and how what could be said, heard and done was was structured around certain privileged masculine performances. My own experiences in an organisation involved in Latin American solidarity work are particular revelant to B&T’s argument: I found that I completely lacked critical capacity, not so much because of the orders of worth of different modes of justification but as a result of my embodied presence in that space and the meanings that were associated with my gender performance.
To explain…. The organisation was structured around a patriarchal and authoritarian masculinity, characterised by black and white reasoning, no room for self doubt, assertion of hierarchy and performed through physical embodiment (beards, unadorned dress serving to legitimise the space occupied by particular bodies), ways of speaking (verbal aggression, certainty) mise-en-scène (seating arrangements, how bodies were physically distributed). All of this - not just modes of justification - contributed to the privileged voice and status of certain actors. The terrain of analysis and representing the organisation tending to be occupied by white, mostly middle-aged, men. It also led to certain sorts of knowledge being privileged (involving ‘facts’ about Latin America and analysis of them in terms of universalising categories of imperialism, capitalism and class).
So, how did all of this play out in a situation of dispute? I ended up on the organisation’s national committee and also spending quite a lot of time working with groups in Latin America. Over a period of time I tried to convey two related sets of concerns to the organisation’s leadership (a) the concerns of myself and others in my local group about the effects of the hierarchical environment and (b) the concerns of groups in Latin America about clashes between the organisation’s priorities and their own ways of working. I had initially assumed that, in an environment where everyone meant will, this would be fairly straightforward. I was wrong: nothing I said simply couldn’t be heard within the organisation. I lacked critical capacity.
I can see an element of what B&T talk about at play here…. With regard to the first set of issues, the modes of justification I deployed related to affect, to the emotions that I and others had experienced as a result of working in the organisation (stress, frustration, humiliation, intimidation and so on). These simply didn’t engage the forms of knowledge that those with authority deemed worthy and relevant to the organisation’s work. In relation to the second set of issues, the forms of analysis that I undertook - based on cultural differences, Latin American organisations’ priorities and relationships - was closer to engaging a convention of equivalance in B&T’s terms (after all, what the people we were working in solidarity with thought had to be important, didn’t it?) - but didn’t quite conform to the dominant criteria for justification within the organisation.
BUT the dispute was not ultimately resolved in relation to different orders of worth. The better I tried to reason and the more I tried to engage what was being said and engage with a “common definition of the relevant objects in the situation”, the less what I was saying could be heard. I had entered a terrain of analysis normally inhabited by more masculine bodies. Also, the dominant speakers in this environment used more direct, certain (and sometimes aggressive) ways of expressing themselves. It was the performance of the dispute which produced or eliminated critical capacity, rather than orders of worth of different modes of justification. The more personal modes of justification that B&T suggest don’t follow rules of acceptability were actually central to the disputing process. Not quite “I don’t agree with you because I don’t like your face” (B&T, p. 360) but certainly, “I don’t agree with you because I don’t like the fact that you (with your body, way of speaking, presumed background) are engaged in analysis at all”. For example, when I and another woman sat down to dispute some of these issues with one man, he stated that he saw himself as a teacher and that he did the analysis on behalf of the organisation and that I should be more like the other woman and content myself with doing “legwork” rather than engaging in dispute at all.
There’s another relevant aspect to this lack of critical capacity, which B&T’s approach also can’t capture. The lack of space for critique to be mediated by means of a subordinate gender performance also led to my critical capacity in the situation being diminished through a narrative that made women's bodies the inevitable object of heterosexual desire and held my body culpable of distracting and disrupting. This cites a background text that I think is particularly prevalent in the world of leftwing organisations - e.g. Sheila Rowbottom recalls an experience 30 years earlier of a man seriously declaring that women (alongside drink and drugs) were “a capitalist plot to seduce workers from Marxism’ (1973: 19). By extension, the fact that I had entered into a dispute at all was reinterpreted as sign of my will to manipulate, disrupt, distract.
I’m taking a feminist line of analysis on this but obvious this overall approach applies to how all sorts of gendered, racialised, class-based forms of performance intersect in different situations.
How might we relate this to the study of security?
First, I think that it would be interesting to look at issues of performance, embodiment and social production of authority intersect with contests over criteria of justification in disputes over securitization of particular issues. E.g. not only how might these aspects of performance provide “faciliating conditions” of the security speech-act (cf. Buzan et al…) but - when securitising is intertwined with actors who render the situation a dispute - how might other actors’ performances also be inportant parts of the way a dispute is enacted. As Jef notes with B&T’s argument, this is easier to analyses in relation to face-to-face disputes at specific sites….
I also think that thinking about the intersection between modes of justification and performance could provide an interesting way of looking at situations of dispute around whether or not a particular individual or group is to be categorised as a threat, or whether or not certain exceptional tactics are justified in a particular situation. During my overseas fieldwork I was also working as a human rights accompanier in a context of low intensity conflict. This implied a lot of dealings with the army at check points or when they were carrying out surveillance of civilian activities, often involving these sorts of dispute. For example, on one occasion soldiers were trying to listen in on a meeting between human rights lawyers and family members of victims of extra judicial executions. Engaging in an effective dispute about this while avoiding one party making recourse to coercive measures didn’t just revolve around trying to converge around a common definition of criteria for justification – e.g. obligations to respect civilian spaces under international humanitarian law vs. supposed necessity to ensure that those present were not subversive. The embodied aspect of performance was absolutely vital to our critical capacity: being polite, professional, friendly but not overfamiliar, speaking with authority, confident and authoritative body language, suitable clothing etc. all intersected with modes of justification.
14 July 2010, 13:39