Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Robin Celikates
Constellations Volume 13, No 1, 2006. Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
22 Constellations Volume 13, Number 1, 2006
On the other hand, from the perspective of critical social theory, those who
subscribe to a pragmatic or hermeneutic methodology only duplicate what
agents already say and do. The price for this seems to be that the approach loses
all scientific grounding and critical impact. We might gain a deeper sense of
how the agents understand themselves, but any critique of what they are doing
and what is done to them that is not already available to them is condemned to
silence.
Of course, this contrast is somewhat schematic.5 Nevertheless a similar
dialectic of accusations and counter-accusations has in fact characterized central
debates in social theory and philosophy over the last decades and made the
dialogue between philosophy and sociology increasingly difficult. In order to leave
this impasse, which faces us with the unattractive alternative uncomprehending
critique vs. uncritical understanding, we need to elaborate a new conceptual
framework for understanding social practices and the agents engaging in them
that integrates an account of the possibilities of critique.
I want to argue here for a two-fold claim: although the interpretive and
pragmatic turn is right in criticizing the idea of a break between the objective
standpoint of critique and the deluded perspective of the agents, it does not follow
that we have to abandon the project of a critique of ideology. However, the status
of that critique will change significantly in the new picture, since the social theory
of critique I outline here reconstructs the normative distinctions and theorems of
the critique of ideology as constantly being invoked and interpreted, made and
remade by agents themselves in the realm of social practice.
I begin by sketching one version of critical social theory that has been accused
of falling into a hermeneutics of suspicion (I). In a second step I present two
different ways of talking about ideology one hermeneutical, the other culturalist
or ethnological that understand ideology as shared value and belief systems
and thereby drop the confrontation with science or knowledge that animated the
critical enterprise (II). The concept of ideology is particularly well-suited to
distinguishing these two approaches and to bringing out their shortcomings.
Whereas Pierre Bourdieu my example of a critical social theory actually drops
the concept of ideology but develops a critical sociology that shares the most
problematic features of the classical critique of ideology, the more interpretive
approaches break with the underlying idea of critique while sticking to the
concept of ideology. Since this leaves us with a conventionalist and therefore
uncritical account of ideology in terms of what agents happen to believe, I
present an alternative view that claims to overcome the respective shortcomings
of the other models, drawing on recent work by Luc Boltanski, Laurent Thvenot,
and Eve Chiapello (III).6 My thesis is that only a social theory that takes the
critical capacities and practices of the agents themselves as a starting point can
present a viable framework for thinking both ideology and critique after the
pragmatic turn. Contra Bourdieu and hermeneutics, the standpoint of the agents
turns out to be the only standpoint of critique available.
data gained from empirical research for the thing itself, it does nothing to change
the methodological and epistemological primacy Bourdieu attributes to the
objectivist break with the experience and self-understanding of the natives,
since for him exprience native rhymes with exprience nave.14
So far my (very sketchy and certainly tendentious) reconstruction of
Bourdieus critical social theory has not made any reference to the concept of
ideology. And indeed Bourdieu himself has voiced increasingly strong doubts
about its usefulness:
In the notion of false consciousness which some Marxists invoke to explain the
effect of symbolic domination, it is the word consciousness which is excessive;
and to speak of ideology is to place in the order of representations, capable of
being transformed by the intellectual conversion that is called the awakening
of consciousness, what belongs to the order of beliefs, that is, at the deepest level
of bodily dispositions.16
this new theoretical context. The first step was to cancel the reference to false
consciousness and to understand ideology as a structural element of social life
that should not be pathologized.
One of the reasons for this shift was what Clifford Geertz has called
Mannheims paradox: how do we know that the position from which we iden-
tify and criticize ideologies is not itself ideological? In the absence of a neutral
point of view from which we could view the totality of occupied positions and
their relation to some observation-independent reality, the possibility had to be
taken into account that every viewpoint from which we expose another viewpoint
as ideological could in principle itself be exposed as ideological. For Mannheim
this meant that we should use the notion of ideology only in a neutral and self-
implicating sense as referring to the fact that every form of thought is determined
by the social conditions under which it develops.29 The one who speaks about
the others ideology is not standing hors de combat but occupies a definite position
in the ideological field.
Against this background we can distinguish two versions of the metacritique of
the critique of ideology that give the notion of ideology a different sense from
that of critical social theory: the culturalist or ethnological one and the herme-
neutic one.
A culturalist or ethnological understanding of ideology can be found in the
work of Clifford Geertz and Louis Dumont, among others. For them ideologies
are primarily shared symbolic mediations and social representations that serve
social integration, patterns of thought through which individuals understand the
political world they inhabit and in which they act. In this function they cannot be
replaced and therefore they cannot be overcome.30
In his essay Ideology as a Cultural System, Geertz argues against under-
standing ideology solely as a mask (hiding the real interests), a weapon (in class
struggle), a symptom (of social frictions and contradictions), or a remedy (for the
very same frictions and contradictions). In all these accepted uses of the notion of
ideology, the most important element is neglected, namely the process of
symbolic formulation itself, which can only be grasped if the anthropologist tries
to understand it from the natives point of view.31 Geertz himself therefore
proposes a more neutral, culturalist definition of ideologies as systems of
interacting symbols, as patterns of interworking meanings,32 and opposes this to
a flattened view of other peoples mentalities and an inadequate interpretation
of ideology according to which it either deceives the uninformed, or excites
the unreflective.33 In this sense, ideology can even be given a positive meaning,
since it is a map, making intelligent rather than blind or deluded behavior possible
in the first place. It provides not necessarily nave, but often quite sophisticated
cultural patterns for the perception, understanding, judgment, and manipulation
of the world and renders otherwise incomprehensible social situations meaningful
so that we can purposefully act within and on them. The distinction between
ideology and its other science or knowledge is then not only secondary but
of ideology, since it cuts us off from exactly these practices and capacities, and
the standpoint of hermeneutics or culturalism, which deflates their critical poten-
tial by offering a conventionalist characterization. I think elements of a theory
that can accomplish this task are to be found in recent work by Luc Boltanski and
his collaborators Laurent Thvenot and Eve Chiapello. Their social theory has a
dual structure that is particularly suited to our purposes: it starts with the com-
petencies and capacities of knowledgeable agents, which are conceived not as
obscure mental faculties but as realized in the actual performances of the
agents;39 those performances are then understood as taking place in a complex
web of action and justification (somewhat misleadingly called cits by Boltanski
and Thvenot). These plural contexts and regimes of action each involve their
own normative criteria, a sort of grammar of critique and justification, and they
are irreducible to each other. Since they are, however, neither neatly separated
nor self-evidently imposing themselves in concrete situations, it takes agents that
possess the capacity of judgment (in the sense of Kants reflective judgment) to
perform these practices and to shift between different regimes of action and
different repertoires of critique and justification.40
This pluralism should not be understood in a conventionalist or relativist sense
as in hermeneutic and ethnologist approaches since what counts as a justifica-
tion in a specific situation is by no means arbitrary. At least from the perspectives
of the agents involved, the registers of critique and justification that are pertinent
are so for reasons and not just by chance. Furthermore, they impose argumenta-
tive constraints on those who refer to them, so that not just anything will count as
a legitimate move in a specific context of critique and justification.41
The difference with Michael Walzers distinction of various spheres of justice,
each governed by a specific normative principle, is that for Boltanski and
Thvenot there is no direct and stable relation between specific principles and
specific institutional contexts (the state, the market, the family, etc.). Rather, dif-
ferent modalities of justification can be pertinent in one and the same institutional
context, e.g., when a worker claims her rights as a citizen in a place, the factory,
where she wasnt expected to; and one mode of justification can be equally
pertinent in different institutional contexts, e.g., when I claim that being an equal
member of society does not only have effects in the political domain, but also in
the educational system. That means that the different regimes of justification can
also be used to criticize each other in certain contexts. This plurality enables
agents to distance themselves critically from a situation and to put the justifica-
tions offered into question by referring to another regime of justification, the per-
tinence of which has then to be demonstrated with reference to the situation.42
Within this model we can therefore distinguish (at least) two general cases of
critique. The first is comparatively easy to handle since there is no conflict about
the regime of justification that should govern the situation, but one of the agents
is accused of having in fact applied another regime (e.g., when in a business the
official policy is that people are promoted according to merit and the director is
accused of having privileged her niece). The criticism becomes more radical
and can take the form of a critique of ideology in the second case, where the
very regime of justification being applied to a situation is rejected (e.g., when it is
argued that grades should not be given according to achievement but in order to
further the advancement of working-class students who are disadvantaged under
the ideology of equal opportunity).
What Bourdieu somewhat condescendingly calls spontaneous sociology and
nave philosophy of the social therefore turns out to be in fact not so spontane-
ous and not so nave at all. Taking seriously the exigencies of justification with
which agents confront each other makes it possible to reverse Bourdieus break
with agents experiences and self-understandings. And only thereby will it
become possible to account for the complexity of the normative structure of
practices of judging, justifying, and criticizing that both he and the more herme-
neutical or culturalist models miss.
Those regimes and the exercise of the capacity of judgment within them cannot
be reconstructed from Bourdieus perspective since he excludes the perspective
of the judging agents themselves and presents them as unable to reflect on what
they are doing.43 It is in this sense that Distinction is as the subtitle suggests a
paradigmatic case of a sociological critique of judgment. Bourdieu tends to
elevate the incapacity to reflect which might of course be a mark of engaging in
certain practices into a general feature of practice tout court, which in turn
makes it necessary to situate reflection and critique in a standpoint outside
practice, namely that of the disengaged sociologist (who is, on the other hand,
engaged in a constant fight against the danger of scholasticism, as Bourdieu has
so convincingly argued). However, it not only seems quite unlikely that most
human beings most of the time neither know what they are doing nor know what
they want; furthermore such a position is just inconsistent with how agents under-
stand themselves, namely as persons that can answer to normative questions and
usually take others to be able to do the same.
Rather than not taking the agents seriously, social theory should subscribe to a
kind of generalized application of the principle of charity that mandates attribut-
ing quite complex cognitive capacities to the agents engaging in the practices one
studies. This also implies a generalization of the principle of symmetry, espe-
cially with regard to sociological and ordinary knowledge: there is no radical
break no radical asymmetry between the two. And even if there has to be a de
facto break for contingent reasons (time constraints, etc.), social theory should
not invoke a de jure break with ordinary experiences and self-understandings in
order to justify its theoretical stance: All humans must [in principle] be granted
the same elementary capacities as social scientists when it comes to questioning
ideologies and social representations.44 In the vocabulary of Bruno Latour, we
can see this as an instance of questioning the great division the radical
coupure pistmologique between science and its objects, between scientific
knowledge and common sense. The critique of ideology as it has traditionally
been understood and as it is, albeit not explicitly, practiced by Bourdieu, is thus
part of the specifically modern project of purification that aims with a some-
what inquisitory dynamic at the liquidation of all idols and distortions in order
to achieve a completely demystified picture of the (natural and social) world.45
Bourdieu was of course correct to say that the insights of critical sociology
would only seem disenchanting to those who hold enchanted views of the social
world in the first place; but the argument of Boltanski and Thvenot is precisely
that Bourdieus sociological disenchantment, once it is understood as a possible
move inside ordinary practices of justification and critique, might very well lose
some of its disenchanting quality. In concrete cases in which agents are
confronted with Bourdieu-style arguments, they might have a disenchanting
effect or not, depending on whether the critic can substantiate her doubts about
the justifications offered and on whether the addressee of the critique does in fact
have an enchanted picture of herself and her social environment.
There is, however, also the often-invoked fact that empirically moral and
other judgments seem to vary according to the social positions of the judging
subjects. For obvious reasons I will have to leave the answer to this question to
empirical social science. It seems, however, that agents themselves would be able
to react to such a diagnosis if they were confronted with it in a particular case. If
somebody tells me, for example, that my judgments on the beauty of a painting are
really conditioned by my social position and by the evaluative and perceptive
dispositions I acquired through education, I should and in normal circumstances:
I will take this into account given adequate evidence is produced. Such a
confrontation might very well change the way I see and judge things, though this
might turn out to be a slow and difficult process. Processes such as these are reac-
tions to what Raymond Geuss calls reflexive unacceptability: once I am shown
that my judgments were made under conditions I did not know and cannot approve
of, I may have to revise them. The point is, of course, that the agent herself has to
be capable of this insight.46 All of this has nothing to do with what Bourdieu
denigrates as a charitable social philosophy and a soft sociology that, by
taking over the standpoint of the agent, just duplicates her self-mystifications. 47
The aim of this social theory of critique, as I am presenting it here, is not a
dismissal of the critique of ideology as in the hermeneutic and ethnological cases,
but a reconstruction of its distinctions and theorems as constantly being invoked
and interpreted, made and remade in the realm of social practices.
To give an example: the attempt to show that particular interests stand behind a
moral position that presents itself as universal, that an agent was lured into a
moral judgment by arranged evidence, or that under certain social conditions
someone was unable to come to the right insight, is part of the practice of
morality. It becomes ineffective if voiced as a generalized suspicion from a stand-
point that localizes itself outside of this practice.
Critique therefore does not become obsolete or even impossible if one accepts
the premise that the justifications put forth by agents themselves have to be taken
seriously and cannot be denounced as ideological from the start. Rather, the
critique of ideology has to be understood as a specific regime of action and
justification among others. Its specificity is that it is based on a number of argu-
mentative operations that would not count as legitimate moves in other regimes
(e.g., that of love or friendship48). The repertoire of critique, the grammar or
topics of the critique of ideology for a long time considered to be the privilege
of the theorist or scientist can be seen as being put into action by ordinary
people in their (non-violent) engagement with ordinary situations of conflict and
dispute. Critique even the very sophisticated one voiced by the critical social
theorist is therefore located on the same level as the ordinary situations it aims
at and from which it seemed to break away so radically.
As in critical social theory, the critique of opinions and worldviews as
ideological in ordinary life most often begins with operations of denunciation and
unmasking that employ such distinctions as conscious vs. unconscious, authentic
vs. inauthentic or alienated, legitimate vs. arbitrary, sincere vs. strategic. In order
not to be dismissed as a paranoid or a troublemaker, the critic then has to engage
in practices of justification that departicularize her claim and produce adequate
evidence. If the critic can plausibly show that her complaint is an exercise of her
right to justification (Rainer Forst), the addressee (assuming there is one and
the critique is not totalizing) is subjected to an imperative of justification she
cannot ignore. The distinction between legitimate and illegitimate moves agents
can employ in such practices of critique and justification must of course be rene-
gotiated as they go along, since there is no fixed table of clear rules they would
have to follow in order to determine who is right. What the right to justification
entails and what the imperative of justification mandates are therefore clearly
matters that can themselves be disputed. The process of generalization and decon-
textualization, in which the agents leave behind the concrete circumstances of the
dispute in order to invoke ever more general principles with the aim of settling
the dispute, does not have to end with a standpoint that is imagined to be
absolutely impartial and with reasons that anyone could in principle accept. It is
sufficient to reach justifications that are considered adequate to the situation, in
the sense of being good enough, where what counts as good enough clearly
depends on the context and may in every particular context be open to contesta-
tion and revision.
It should be admitted, however, that this relocation of critique does not solve
the problem of who is to determine who is right; it simply proceduralizes and
thereby in a way postpones it. An optimistic version would imagine a Taylor-
style critical dialogue in which the critic tries to convince her interlocutors that if
they understand themselves correctly, they would have to drop the specific view
she denounces as ideological. However, there are clearly cases in which this will
not work, conflicts that cannot be resolved discursively or rationally because they
are about the very terms of discourse or the borders of the space of reasons. But it
is important to see that the alternatives are not conversion and consensus vs.
silence and violence. The practical logic of the critique of ideology is of course
not exhausted by this sketch and it would be necessary to clarify its relation to
other forms of critique and to indicate the concrete social conditions of its
exercise. But it does seem clear that neither the orthodox project of a critique of
ideology nor its hermeneutic counterpart are in a position to achieve this.
The move Boltanski and his collaborators propose is thus from critical social
theory to a social theory of the practice of critique that starts with the critical
capacities of agents themselves.49 The critique of ideology can then be reformu-
lated as a specific case of the practice of critique without presupposing a privi-
leged epistemic position and a break with ordinary practices of justification.
Here it might well be added that there certainly are dominant positions in the
social field that allow agents to impose their hegemonic definition of reality on
others without having to engage in elaborate justifications. Since social arrange-
ments can, however, not be maintained by force alone but depend for their stabil-
ity on a belief in their legitimacy and thus on the availability of some justification,
they make themselves vulnerable to a critique that questions the ideological char-
acter of these justifications and their normative credentials. Social arrangements
can therefore never totally immunize themselves against critique; they can only
afford a certain amount of ideological closure.50 The idea of an all-encompassing
ideology a totaler Verblendungszusammenhang thereby loses its meaning.
Ideologies are always heterogeneous and operate locally, even if they present
themselves as totalities without an outside and can therefore always be
subjected to critique.
The critique of ideology be it in the form of critical social theory or an
ordinary practice of critique can therefore be understood as directed against
such closed social conditions and symbolic representations that hinder the use of
critical and judgmental capacities in social practices, that block the transforma-
tion of capacities into abilities and prevent the practical realization of ones self-
understanding as a judging and acting subject. But how do we know when a
regime of justification is ideological? The answer to this question cannot be given
with reference to abstract (epistemic or normative) criteria, but only from within
practices of critique. There are, however, two levels on which it still makes sense
to speak of ideology: agents themselves use that term to criticize specific systems
of belief or regimes of justification, while those systems of belief and regimes of
justification can be called ideological by the social theorist herself if they can be
shown to block the exercise of the agents critical capacities. Aiming at the gap
that separates those capacities the social theorist has to attribute to agents in order
to make sense of their practices from the actual exercise of the corresponding
abilities, critique makes agency possible by criticizing social arrangements,
practices, and self-understandings that have an inhibitory rather than an enabling
effect (and it is here that the relevance of Bourdieus work is so obvious).
From a social theory of incapacity the focus thereby shifts to a social theory of
capacities that is anti-fatalistic insofar as it exposes as changeable what seems
NOTES
I would like to thank the participants of Christoph Menkes colloquium at the University of
Potsdam and of the workshop on ideology at the conference Philosophy and the Social Sciences
(Prague, May 2005) as well as Maeve Cooke, Ciaran Cronin, Eva Engels, James Ingram, Rahel
Jaeggi, Felix Koch, Hartmut Rosa, and the anonymous reviewer of this journal for their helpful
comments and criticisms.
1. Paul Ricur, Science and Ideology, in From Text to Action (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1991), 248.
2. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), ch. 1.
3. See James Bohman, David Hiley, and Richard Shusterman, eds., The Interpretive Turn
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Theodore Schatzki, Karin Knorr-Cetina, and Eike von
Savigny, eds., The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (London: Routledge, 2001).
4. See Paul Ricur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1977), bk. I, ch. 2.
5. It should be emphasized at the beginning that there are of course other models of the cri-
tique of ideology that try to understand it for example as immanent critique and that therefore do
not presuppose the idea of a break that I treat as central. What should be clear at the end of the art-
icle is that these models are quite easy to integrate into the theoretical frame I propose.
6. In the presentation I will follow some of the distinctions proposed in the lengthy essay by
Thomas Bnatoul, Critique et pragmatique en sociologie: quelques principes de lecture, in
Annales (H.S.S.) 54, no. 2 (1999): 281317.
Robin Celikates is junior faculty member at the Center for Philosophy at Justus
Liebig University, Gieen, and Doctoral Fellow at the Max Weber Center for
Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt.