Abstract :
[en] From Lukács to Bourdieu, many significant intellectual developments have taken place and, in fact, one may gain the impression that the critical tradition continues to be based on one key assumption: individuals (workers, social actors, etc.) unconsciously reproduce the social structures of capitalism whilst being alienated by them. They accept the conditions enforced on them and no longer seek to rebel against a system which impoverishes not only their work and culture, but also their [soul]problematic? and creativity. The situation may be even more diree: they ensure the reproduction of the system by seeking to engage in mass consumption at any cost, or by glorifying the dominant values.
In this chapter I would like to show that toay, no critical perspective has emerged out of a negative representation of the world such is likely to introduce ‘man’ living here and now as something other than a deeply bastardized being, corrupted, denatured, perverted, inflected, soiled by a civilizing process which owes its perversion to modernity (Rousseau) on the one hand, and to capitalism on the other. As we shall see, without making an exception, Honneth has rightly noted that all the authors of the tradition of what he calls ‘social philosophy’ have remained dependent on a form of disgust regarding the world as it is.
Yet for me as a sociologist of social movements, it seems difficult to deal with such a [software]? of the new forms of social resistance to domination (Indignados, anonymous, alternative economy, movements of the ‘-less’ – see Frère and Jacquemain, 2013), even though it is precisely the same kind of diagnosis adopted by a significant number of theories dealing with cooperation and association. Some amongst them leave me sceptical, notably when it comes to the shared desire to [locate,]posit? for instance, an alternative and [solidary]? economy in the field of utopia, as opposed to a succinct and time-honoured representation of Marxism (Pessin, 2001; Pradès, 2012; Hély and Moulévrier, 2013), or to subscribe to the 'natural' reciprocity of human beings as they lived before the arrival of capitalist modernity, , thus before the ideology of growth perverted human imagination (Godbout, 2000). is this right?
In my opinion, in order to be able to talk about contemporary reactions of resistance against diverse forms of alienation and domination authorized by contemporary [connectionist]? capitalism, a philosophical representation of the passive, unconscious human reified by this very same domination, which only a few holy utopian thinkers would avoid, remains ineffective. This is because, in the case of such a representation, the modern subject will be likely to react when criticism will have taken away that layer of impurity specific to the condition of alienated man in order to allow him to renew his deep nature, the one which was his in the context of the ‘good life’ , as Habermas and Honneth would say . Yet abolishing the very possibility of transcendentalism and idealism which lies implicit in contemporary critical theories, whether French or German, opens the door to the possibility, in the incertitude of the social model that they may create, of an actual – but profane – criticism of capitalisme. Here, it is a matter of human relationships in the world that gives criticism its content, in all their insurmountable impurity, in all their contingency. Aiming at abolishing the transcendental anthropological foundations that criticism has always allowed itself, this gesture is currently silhouetted not in philosophy but, rather, in a sociology, that is, ‘pragmatic sociology’. Parallel to the classical Marxist tradition traversing Bourdieu’s critical sociology and the intellectual tradition of the Frankfurt School, it is a form of ‘critical materialism’ that I would like to exhume in this chapter, a notion inspired by the libertarian Marxism of Lefort and Castoriadis (see Frère, 2009), which is able to make the profane capacities of people’s emancipation emerge . I would like to do so on the basis of a reflection revolving around the pragmatic perspective which has recently been reinforced in France by Boltanski in his book De la critique (2009), but which stands – in my view – as the backdrop of all his works.
