Towards a constructive (and associationalist) critique ? Reflection on critique and pragmatism in sociology

Emerging in the 19th century with Marx out of a search for enfranchisement, critical research progressed towards the denunciation of the grip of alienation in the twentieth with the authors of the first Frankfurt school (Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer). The exclusively negative tendency of criticism, systematically offering to see human beings as inert beings, incapable of freeing themselves from all that determines and alloys them, was questioned by their successors in the Frankfurt School (like Habermas and Honneth in Germany) or by Bourdieusian in French sociology. But we’ll see that at the end, these traditions keep presenting a world saturated by conformism from which no escape can be envisaged, leaving the exposure of the wretchedness of the world, or the romanticised allusion to brief moments of revolt (the Paris Commune, May 1968, etc.), as the only possibility. Meanwhile the extensive use of the notion of domination led to social relations being approached solely from the perspective of reproduction.
Nevertheless, the argument of my talk (which present the argument of my last book, written with JL. Laville and just translated in English) remains in line with this theory because I share a major premise with its authors: there is a crucial need to maintain a critique of domination, which is indispensable at a time when the magnitude of inequalities and the threat of climate breakdown cannot be ignored. But, taking this agreement as our foundation, my pragmatic investigation then turns to the idealisation of total enfranchisement from tutelage and dependency, as if there existed a pure, untainted, free and just human being that simply needed to be saved from the distortions of centuries of capitalist alienation. By anchoring a constructive critique in experience itself, I try to avoid the speculative spiral of solely negative approaches in order to preserve the demand for emancipation. And even to open up new paths for it with authors such as contemporary pragmatists like Latour, Boltanski and Fine. Because to strike out emancipation is also to accept the order of the world as it is, and to resign ourselves to the violence of powerful adversaries. Emancipation must not only be maintained; it must also be realised in the present by investigating the ways people use to associate themselves in new form of lives. Is “being emancipated” impossible? Can emancipation not be seen as something in the making? I show that it can: despite the obstacles, we can make it something tangible
The transformation of the world will result from the identification of emancipatory associations (or social aggregation as Latour would say), resting on the combination of emancipating critiques that repudiate what is unbearable in the present, and of already emancipated practices existing in the same present, which hold the possibility of another future. It is no longer possible to ignore these concrete associational experiences in the name of a phantasmagorical rupture capable of putting an end to all forms of alienation. Laying the groundwork for an approach capable of grasping ordinary people’s emancipatory capacities is the task I propose to undertake with a sociology of associations, starting with a constructive re-reading of critical theory.