"A Study in Rhetorical Reading"

In Charney's (1993) "A Study in Rhetorical Reading," she situates herself in a conversation with Halloran (1984) and Gragson and Selzer (1990) most explicitly (Charney, 1993, p. 206), albeit she also responds to some macro-level attitudes about scientific discourse (namely, that good science conforms to the windowpane theory of communication). Mainly, though, her primary interlocutors are Gragson and Selzer (1990); in fact, she replicates their study. For a bit of context:

For Charney (1993), the issue is the fact that Gragson and Selzer (1990) argue that "Gould and Lewontin's rhetorical strategies invite scientists to depart from their usual reading strategies, to read as more than 'mere' biologists. ... Are they willing or able to abandon their 'biological prejudices,' to become the unconventional readers that the discourse requires?" (p. 206, not my emphasis). That is, Charney's (1993) goal in this piece is to determine if this invitation will withstand empirical scrutiny. As a kind of passing note, the "biological prejudices" aspect is important because the whole reason Gould and Lewontin opt for the non-biological analogies at the beginning of their unconventional article is--and I know Patricia Roberts-Miller does this too--to enable evolutionists to get a sense of the argument without importing a biological prejudice that would come through the use of more conventional examples.

But why does Charney's argument need to be made? What's so important about this replication? In a way, and in retrospect, I think this kind of argument is guilty of Muckelbauer's criticism of the rhetoric of science, which is to say, that the whole goal of the analysis is to determine that science is rhetorical (rather than basing analyses off of science's rhetoricity as a given). We do see that move in this piece, especially given how "remarkably tolerant" the participants in Charney's study were to Gould and Lewontin's "unusual rhetorical moves" (Charney, 1993, p. 226). That is, expert readers tend not to dismiss obviously rhetorical arguments as being "unscientific." So, at the end of the day, the day, it's not merely the case that the expert readers "were more prone to treat the text rhetorically" (p. 228, not my emphasis), an obviously rhetorical argument gets flagged as "normal" science. You can even see Charney probing this aspect in her interviews: "Is that what you would normally do with this kind of article?" (214). Again, her goal is to show that, even when scientists employ rhetoric self-consciously, expert readers treat that employment normally. Thus what holds for this exceptional case must hold in normal circumstances as well. But my point is, at a high level of scale, and looking at Charney's piece through the field of rhetoric's history, you can see that this kind of work is symptomatic of the paranoia to prove science is rhetorical, which is arguably not very interesting, if we take a long view of rhetoric's history. Still, if we try to read this piece on its own terms, we might reask: why does this argument matter? Charney herself suggests that its value might lie in how it maps the uptake of a scientific argument (p. 206). That is, where do readers balk? and why? or where is there smooth sailing and why? what kind of readers balk where? and so on. In sum, the value lies in its being a reception study--or maybe reader-response study would be more accurate--rather than mere rhetorical criticism, of which there is already a lot in the rhetoric of science (see, for example, Fahnestock & Secor 1982). At the level of the implication of the finding (rather than set-up of the argument), the value also lies in the fact that Charney is able to further differentiate between expert readers: graduate students aren't nearly as evaluative as faculty. At one point, Charney (1993) says, "...students may require acculturation to the strategies of scientific literacy. This study begins to address these questions by comparing the kinds and quantities of comments from different participants in the act of reading" (p. 208).

In terms of the method, she enrolls seven evolutionists (four graduate students and three professors), since it is those folks who are invited to abandon their "biological prejudices" (Charney, 1993, p. 206, 226). After training participants in think-aloud protocols, she has them read the text aloud and react to it, making sure to not only mark where in the text they react ("hot spots"), but also code what kind of reaction they have. Participants only read for 30min, after which they are interviewed. Charney observes while participants read, linking observations to questions in the interview (i.e., triangulation). At one point, she defends herself from the objection that the readers are reading this article through the lens of history, rather than for the first time. She segments the language into continuous episodes (n = 664), rather than t-units or sentences or clauses. All in all, she asks the questions:

        1. how did the participants go about reading the article? Is there any evidence that they accepted the textual invitation described by Grayson and Selzer to abandon their normal scientific reading strategies?

2. what aspects of the article provoked reactions from the participants? in particular, did participants react to the unusual rhetorical devices? 

        3. how did the participants react? did they act as dispassionate logicians or inflamed partisans? on what basis did they accept or reject Gould and Lewontin’s points?

I also might note that she partly lifts her categorization scheme from a number of previous researchers (Bereiter & Bird; Olsen).

As I was saying earlier, she finds that graduate students are much more likely to read the article on its own terms, which is to say, linearly. Recall, too, that this article is one that asks to be read linearly in a way that other articles don't, due to the analogical reasoning at the article's beginning. Likewise, graduate students were much more likely to interpret the text on the basis of personal knowledge, whereas faculty were much more likely to enter the "rhetorical fray" (Charney, 1993, p. 217), as it were. Both groups displayed roughy the same amount of comprehension comments (grads, n = 44; faculty, n = 57), though faculty evidence roughly triple in terms of evaluation, genre/structure, and meta-comments. But the main thing is, to go back to Gragson and Selzer (1990), there was little evidence to suggest experts took up Gould and Lewontin's invitation to become a rebellious reader.

This is a neither-here-nor-there passage--just some interesting context:

"Learning to Read Biology"

In Haas's (1994) "Learning to Read Biology," she situates herself in a conversation that's concerned with how the work of science is imbued with authority. And in that way, she links herself to authors like Latour, Bazerman, Geisler, etc., all of whom show, in their own way, and in various places, that the work of science becomes real only by means of texts used in a certain way. So, to take just one particular example that Haas mentions, texts aren't autonomous; they don't contain meaning to be extracted. Or, to put this more exactly, sure, the reader can treat texts as though they are receptacles of meaning, yet, if the reader wants to participate in the real work of science, or, if the reader wants to get caught up in the work of science in action, then the reader has to treat a scientific text rhetorically. To get back to that example I never furnished, Haas quotes Fahnestock's "Accommodating Science" article. And in that article, Fahnestock shows how scientists construct claims more absolutely for lay audiences. That being said, a rhetorical reading of those scientists' articles would recognize that the facts in question were plastic, or that they are shaped slightly to accommodate whatever situation they're in.

Haas positions herself in this broader rhetoric of science conversation. She notes that scholars before her have recognized that, when students come to college, they view texts as autonomous entities. In fact, she notes that teachers and scholars have gone so far as to postulate that the point of a writing class is to get students to understand this threshold concept. However, she also notes that no one has thus far actually gone so far as to empirically demonstrate whether students' views of discourse actually change, which is what she tasks herself with in this article. More specifically, she acknowledges that developmental psychologists have in fact shown this progression from arhetorical to rhetorical attitudes (Belenkey et al.; Perry), but they haven't studied this in the context of reading and writing. Moreover, "Haswell ... looked at growth in writing competence through college but he did not explicitly address how students view texts or how disciplinary training and literacy instruction interact" (46).

Haas's motivations for conducting this study might be tied to the potential of rhetorical reading as an object of study. As she suggests, students read more than they write. And for that very reason, changes in students' views about and approaches to discourse might be available in a study of students' writing, but the difference might be more readily apparent if reading rather than writing is examined. In other words, it is important to make this move to study rhetorical reading because otherwise we might not be able to see the dramatic changes that do in fact take place in students--emphasis on that word "drama."

As indicated, developmental psychological theories underpin Haas's study (Belenkey et al.; Perry). However, she also makes use of theories of rhetorical reading (Haas and Flower). Using the former, she does expect students to approach texts more rhetorically as they go through the college curriculum. However, using the latter, she expects that progression to take a specific form, namely, a reorientation toward explanation. That is, as readers develop rhetorically, Haas expects readers to look less and less to the text itself (i.e., looking inward), which is also to say that she expects readers to look more and more for contextual support (i.e., looking outward).

In terms of method, Haas randomly selected one students to study longitudinally. And in that way, she studies one student's rhetorical development from freshman to senior year. For forms of data, she gathers process logs, interviews, and think-aloud protocols, and that's on top of observing this student while she was reading and talking to her teachers. Moreover, to triangulate this mountain of data, she approached it both qualitatively and quantitatively. On the one hand, and relying mostly on the interviews (n =11), two coders looked for a discussion of reading tasks and goals, reading practices, and views of discourse and knowledge. On the other, she employed a discourse analysis of verbs (being, saying, and doing). Importantly, Haas did not solicit questions on discourse, knowledge, rhetoric, etc.; she just asked her questions about reading, and reference to those things was supposed to arise organically.

All in all, Haas found that something happened to Eliza (the student), starting her junior year. Qualitatively, we can tell this because both discourse and knowledge claims and mentions of rhetorical concerns spike at that point. For one thing, Haas finds evidence of her reading selectively, rather than linearly. For another, she self-sponsors a study of genre. She also begins to look at tables. Quantitively, the spike makes itself felt through the dramatic increase in the use of do-related verbs, especially those linked to proper names (teachers, authors, mentors, co-workers, etc.). What, then, happened to Eliza, starting in her Junior year? What caused her to begin to read rhetorically? Haas offers four explanations: increased domain knowledge, instructional support, natural development, and mentoring in a socio-cultural setting.

One implication of this study--echoed by Haswell et al. (1999)--is that students can do just fine in school without having to rhetorically read. We see this especially in Eliza's sophomore year, when she is asked to write the report. As Haas suggests, "...the myth of the autonomous text grows out of an entire culture of schooling" (80n2, emphasis not mine). In other words, teachers reward her for treating texts arhetorically well into her sophomore year. However, given that the increase in domain knowledge is a possible explanation for her transformation into a rhetorical reader, it very well might be the case that a culture of schooling like this is necessary. As a result, we might ask: what is the role of the FYW course in the development of Eliza as a reader? Is it the case that she gets taught rhetorically reading at that point, but that she just doesn't have the opportunity to use it until later? Incidentally, it is also worth pointing out that Haas's results qualify the developmental psychological studies she builds on, or at least insofar as Eliza bypasses certain developmental stages altogether.

counterstatement: "Response to Christina Haas and Linda Flower" + "Reply by Christina Haas and Linda Flower""

In their "Response to Christina Haas and Linda Flower," Ruth Ray and Ellen Barton (1989a) respond to Haas and Flower's (1988) "Rhetorical Reading Strategies" by taking issue with their portrayal of basic writers. For Haas and Flower's (1988), basic writers are distinguishable from more experienced writers by the fact that the latter read rhetorically. However, Ray and Barton (1989a) contend that even basic writers rhetorically read; it's just that the sort of rhetorical reading they do isn't valued in academic discourse communities. In order to make this claim, Ray and Barton (1989a) closely read 59 of their own students' texts. That is, Ray and Barton (1989a) ask both graduate (n = 23) and undergraduate (n = 36) students to read the same article in anthropology (Edward T. Hall's "The Anthropology of Manners"). In doing so, Ray and Barton (1989a) give both groups the exact same amount of time (2.5 hours), same instructions, etc. As a result, Ray and Barton (1989a) find that basic writers rhetorically analyze--though Ray and Barton (1989a) never mention the phrase "rhetorical analysis" in the full-length article from which this response is derived ("Changing Perspectives on Summary through Teacher Research")--but the basic writers do so in a very particular style: they summarize as though they are offering advice. Drawing on Bartholomae, Ray and Barton (1989b) suggest that offering advice is the sort of authority that basic writers are used to: "this language reflects the authority of teacher, parent, and text" (p. 170). On the other hand, experienced writers rhetorically read, too, but they do so while making use of the first-person singular pronouns, which is to say, they write from the perspective of an academic community: "...the interpretation of the text seems a matter of common agreement, rather than a writer telling a reader what to think" (p. 171). To quote at length:

The interpretive summaries from both our basic and graduate student writers provide specific evidence that meaning is socially constructed even within the supposedly objective genre of summary: both groups of writers summarize by telling how the text makes them feel and by relating it to what they already know. Basic writers depend on the context of their personal lives and their associations with the general public outside the university, while graduate student writers depend on the context provided by prior texts and their associations with others inside the academic community. Graduate student writers use the same interpretive strategies; it is just that what they feel and what they already know are more conventional ways of feeling and knowing in the academic community. (p. 171)

More specifically, since only about 50% of the basic writers wrote what Ray and Barton (1989b) were initially inclined to call "summary," it should be noted that

At first, we saw these summaries as ideal goals and these students as successful. Now, however, we see these students as making a pragmatic choice to write the exact type of summary we had asked for; they deliberately chose not to include their interpretations and reactions to the original text, adopting our goals for their reading and writing. The students who did not write objective summaries were those who could not or would not subordinate self to teacher or text. (p. 172)

In other words, "Both groups talk about the text in terms of meaning, purpose, audience, and intended effect" (Ray and Barton, 1989a, p. 481), though only some students opt to change the conventions according to which they do.


"Reply by Christina Haas and Linda Flower"

Haas and Flower (1989) reply by clarifying what they mean by "rhetorical reading." For Ray and Barton (1989a), rhetorical reading only hinges on whether students read in terms of "meaning, purpose, audience, and intended effect" (p. 481), but that's not what rhetorical reading is for Haas and Flower (1989). For them, "A purely personal response cannot move a reader beyond a reaction to text; a rhetorical response can allow her to recognize--and ultimately to become a part of--the dynamic action of discourse" (p. 482, not my emphasis). Thus, I take it that, by rhetorical reading, Haas and Flower (1989) require agency in the following sense: "to enact agency, a rhetor must both intend to act as an agent and be recognized as such by the other agents operating in the rhetorical situation" (Walsh et al., 2016, p. 2).

"Context and Rhetorical Reading Strategies: Haas and Flower (1988) Revisited"

Haswell et al.'s (1999) "Context and Rhetorical Reading Strategies: Haas and Flower (1988) Revisited" unsurprisingly emerges out of an engagement with the study alluded to in its title. 

Haswell et al.'s (1999) study is doubly motivated. On the one hand, they want to verify a few of Haas and Flower's (1988) flaws, most specifically its context-dependency, topic choice, and stringent claims. That is, will the results of the study remain constant, if the study is not only carried out in a different institution, but also carried out on the basis of a different reading passage? Moreover, is it really the case that the undergraduates are as bad off as Haas and Flower's (1988) make it seem? On the other, Haswell et al. (1999) want to correct a prejudice against replication studies in the field of rhetoric and composition, most notably the idea that writers' social behavior is too complex to be replicated in empirical studies (see Duin & Hansen 1996). 

That being said, Haswell et al. (1999) rely on Bazerman (1985) and Geisler (1994) in order to hypothesize that, by making the topic more familiar to students, the use of rhetorical reading strategies ought to increase as well. However, the most frequent citation was Pressley and Afflerbach (1995), who they use to corroborate their observations that think-aloud studies contain "tremendous difference in processes" (22), having been "in some way influenced by the sociocultural context in which they occurred" (20).

In order to carry out this replication, then, Haswell et al. (1999) opt to not only replicate Haas and Flower (1988), but to also introduce a single variable into that study (other than that of a different institution, of course). But to do that, of course, they have to conduct two different experiments. In the first, as stated, they replicated the study as best as they can, given that they are at a different institution (and, of course, they are interested in the production of that difference). In the second, they change the topic of the reading. In the original Haas and Flower (1988), students read a passage from a psychology article (Sylvia Farnham-Diggory), but, in the Haswell et al. (1999), students read an op-ed written by a college student. However, due to the intensity and invasiveness of the method employed (think-aloud protocol), Haas and Flower (1988) only managed to enroll six undergraduates and four graduate students, so Haswell et al. (1999) only enrolled the same. Moreover, in accordance with this method's best practices, both teams of researchers trained students in think-aloud protocols before moving onto the passage under investigation. 

At the end of the day, Haswell et al.'s (1999) results more or less ended up confirming Haas and Flower's (1988). However, there were some important differences. For one, while the latter found stark differences between the two groups (undergraduate and graduate students), the former didn't, leading the former to infer that researchers ought to be wary about abstracting students into general categories when it comes to reading. Moreover, Haswell et al.'s (1999) results also corroborated psychological studies that find meta-communicative reading behaviors in young children (23). In other words, undergraduates aren't necessarily lacking in rhetorical reading skills, as popular developmental psychology narratives would have it (6). Additionally, by means of adding three additional coding categories onto Haas and Flower's (1988)--the personal, the judgmental, and the non-committal--Haswell et al. (1999) found evidence to suggest that the personal is entangled with the rhetorical. 

In terms of implications, teachers should be cautious about importing disciplinary writing into the FYW classroom, as students don't have the repertoire of background knowledge (p. 13) in order to interact meaningfully with the text. Haswell et al. (1999) therefore seem to imply that teachers should teach rhetorical reading on the basis of material with which students are already familiar. Haswell et al. (1999) also seem to imply that teachers should rhetorically apply rhetorical reading techniques in the classroom, and in so doing, capitalize on the great diversity of students' reading strategies as a strength (p. 22). 

preface

Boltanski, Luc and Laurent Thévenot. "Preface" From: On Justification: Economies of Worth, translated by Catherine Porter, Princeton, 2006, pp. 1-22.

This post will be the first of many expositing On Justification. I plan to produce one per chapter.

What are they responding to? What is the problem from which they begin? While the text's exigence could certainly be framed in other ways, one way to frame it would be vis-à-vis a Bourdieusian style of sociology:

... Boltanski opposes “critical sociology” and “sociology of critique”. Critical sociology can be said to correspond to the work of Bourdieu and his followers. If we describe this sociology in a very sketchy way, as Boltanski himself does in his polemical texts, we can say that the purpose of the sociologist is to explain to people the real meaning of what they do. Or better still, because it is not really a question of “meaning” from this point of view, the task of the sociologist is to explain to people the causal mechanisms that make sense of what they do. Those mechanisms are structured fields and habitus produced through socialization. The rules that govern the fields organize competition for symbolic retributions and the “habitus” could perhaps be described (in my formulation) as some kind of unconscious weapon that will be used differently by the dominant and the dominated. One could even say that it will decide who will be in a dominant position or otherwise. 

In this kind of sociology, at least in the way it is seen by Boltanski (and I tend to share his view), the sociologist knows more about the actors than the actors themselves. Indeed when the actors think they behave on the basis of authentic desires, preferences, evaluations, the sociologist can always trace those mental states back to some habitus formation, to unconscious strategies, and ultimately to the structures of the field. For instance, I am quite sure that I like Beethoven because his music is very powerful, lying somewhere between the classical harmonies of Mozart and Haydn and the sometimes tiring excesses of romanticism. But in reality I like Beethoven because I am driven by my desire for distinction which tells me that, in the “petit bourgeois” academic world where I live, liking Beethoven is a necessity to be valuable. I just try unconsciously to follow the rules of the field. But as my semiproletarian habitus did not prepare me to naturally appreciate Beethoven, I cannot feel that the metallic sound of Herbert von Karajan – that was much favoured when I was young – Is now desperately out of fashion. 

Naturally this example is a caricature of a Bourdieu-like analysis but we can assume that it describes accurately enough what most Bourdieu’s followers remember of his theories -- it is a rather common operationalization of his concepts. Of course we know the main objection to that description. The objection is this: if I am driven by my habitus when I think I authentically feel, reason, desire, argue, then what protects the sociologist from being be driven by his own habitus when he is describing mine? On what grounds can he claim that he has a privileged access to what unconsciously determines me? We could even go further and ask: if nothing can be authentically valued because everything is the product of a causal mechanism, then on what grounds can any critique of anything ever be justified? 

But the interesting thing about Boltanski’s proposal is that it brings the question back to an empirical matter: this kind of treatment of arguments is not, as Bourdieu wrongly holds, the privilege of the sociologist. Disqualifying a belief, an argument, or a preference on the grounds it is unconsciously determined by wrong causal mechanisms, or because it is in fact a cover for some disguised interests, is a very common feature of the discourse of the actors themselves. When an atheist exchanges ideas, for instance with a religious person, he may of course try to demonstrate that the existence of an almighty god is rationally implausible. But he may just as well try to explain to his interlocutor that his own belief in god is just a wrongly caused belief. This supposed irrational belief may be caused by the fact that he is afraid of death, by a process of socialization that imposed on him things which he cannot get rid of, or by an irresistible desire to see some global meaning or some global justice in the world. 

This is the subtlety of Boltanski’s position: when we carefully observe real controversies in the social word, we discover that ordinary people are perfectly able to behave like bourdieusian sociologists. They are able to recognize the interests at stake behind an argument, or even to trace it back to some habitus, naturally without invoking the term Bourdieu was giving to the mechanism. So, there is nothing especially “sociological” in the perspective of critical sociology. Boltanski’s proposal is that we should change our focus: instead of a critical sociology, what we need is a sociology of critique, in fact an empirical description of the way controversies are taking place, the way people propose justifications and criticize the justifications of others, the way some justifications “win” or “lose,” and the way people at the end agree on a result or remain in dispute. That sociology of critique is the subject of his well-known book written with Laurent Thevenot, “On Justification”. 

This move form Bourdieu to Boltanski seems to me to be epistemological in nature because it changes the perspective of the sociologist. The social scientist is no longer supposed to have any kind of privileged access to some critical point of view. The critique is no longer a way of making sense of social structures and human behaviour. It is reintegrated within the social world and becomes in itself an object of empirical investigation. This is probably the core meaning of the famous sentence, “taking justifications seriously.” (Jacquemain, n.d., n.p.)

The philosopher Graham Harman has a great term for this process. I can't recall if he refers to this process as "undermining" or "overmining," but, regardless of whichever one is correct, the end result is the same. The problem is failing to treat the other's justification on its own terms. The sociologist subsumes the other's justification under a representation. In this case, the representation is a theory, which explains the justification in terms of power, class, domination, and reproduction.

So what? Why does this failure to take justifications seriously matter to sociology? For one, a sociologist would need to take justification seriously in order to have any sort of relationship with the human subjects in question. On this topic, turning to the rhetorician Catherine Chaput is instructive:

In neoliberalism, argues Foucault (2008, 13), political economic theory serves as the gauge for legitimate personal and state activities such that our sense of economy and its operations supersedes other logical arguments. Economic beliefs determine, for instance, who can buy a home and at what interest rate or which corporations can file for bankruptcy, which must liquidate, and which require federal bailout packages. Amid a severe decline in the economy, such political economic policies and the arguments that legitimate them may appear to rhetoricians to be situated in a sociohistorical moment specific to the economic crisis of global capitalism. Certainly this historical context and its particular manifestations in local sites like Erkhart, Indiana, where the unemployment rate has recently skyrocketed, tells us something about how to persuade the traditionally republican residents of this middle-America town to endorse various political and economic agendas. But this context falls short of explaining sentiments like the one expressed by an unnamed working-class man captured on Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary Right America Feeling Wronged (2009). In a rare moment of personal interaction with one of her interlocutors, Pelosi challenges the man’s understanding of Obama’s tax redistribution plan as unfairly burdening “the hard-working man” and benefiting “the guy that only wants to come to work two days a week.” She tells him, on the contrary, that the plan would likely increase taxes for “the richest one percent in this country and give it to you.” Although the man had initially explained his opposition to Obama in terms of his own economic self-interest, he responds to Pelosi by stating, “I don’t care what people can do for me. I only care what’s good for the economy.” This seemingly innocuous and selfless comment reveals the negative affective energies that fix this man’s opinion of Obama regardless of well-crafted appeals. He does not dislike Obama because he is thinking only of his economic self-interest, or because he’s unhappy about the way economic self-interest is discursively represented by the Obama campaign, or because he lacks information, or because he’s irrational. With a clear voice, a sincere tone, and after carefully listening to Pelosi, the man maintains his distrust of Obama because of deeply affective energies attached to notions about economic competition that literally prevent him from communicating with those who do not share his understanding of how the world works, precluding him, in fact, from connecting with others and entertaining new possibilities. (Chaput, 2010, p. 17)

Shifting now to the Boltanski and Thévenot, they suggest that

The persons whom we follow in their tests and obliged by the situation in which they are involved to shift from one more of adjustment to another, from one measure of worth to another. That this plasticity constitutes a defining feature of normalcy is attested by the numerous attributions of pathology, especially of paranoia, claims that stigmatize those who resist the adjustments required when passing from one situation to another. (16)

Now, if we think about this Boltanski and Thévenot quote in terms of the Chaput, we have a good example of what's at stake in On Justification. The unnamed, working-class man initially justifies his argument against Obama’s tax redistribution plan by appealing to his own economic self-interest, although when Pelosi "tests" him, he "shifts" his justification to a more selfless mode. In fact, it is here in which we can see the power of Boltanski and Thévenot's epistemological immanentism (Jacquemain, n.d., n.p.). That is, if we were to approach the unnamed, working-class man via a Bourdieusian style of sociology, the sociologist's explanation would be taken to be more real (Harman) than the man's. And, as Jacquemain had pointed out earlier, "if I am driven by my habitus when I think I authentically feel, reason, desire, argue, then what protects the sociologist from being be driven by his own habitus when he is describing mine? On what grounds can he claim that he has a privileged access to what unconsciously determines me? We could even go further and ask: if nothing can be authentically valued because everything is the product of a causal mechanism, then on what grounds can any critique of anything ever be justified?" (n.d., n.p.). In other words, given that "[d]isqualifying a belief, an argument, or a preference on the grounds it is unconsciously determined by wrong causal mechanisms, or because it is in fact a cover for some disguised interests, is a very common feature of the discourse of the actors themselves" (Jacquemain, n.d., n.p.), if we remain in the realm of Bourdieusian sociology, it becomes difficult to justify why we should take the sociologist more seriously than the man himself. But, of course, we have another option. We can take the man's justifications seriously. The benefit of doing so is that we actually have an opportunity to build a relationship with the man, which is not necessarily to say that we could try to talk him out of his beliefs via reasoned arguments, but, as Jenny Rice has speculated, maybe, if we take a more aesthetic approach oriented around magnitude, that might be more effective at changing his mind (see "The Rhetorical Aesthetics of More").

Yet, taking the man's justification seriously leaves us in a pickle. How do we explain the contradiction he embroils himself in? Chaput accomplishes this by synthesizing affect with political economic theory. Boltanski and Thévenot's answer is no less strange. I'm tempted to say that they wouldn't seek to explain the man's waffling, since any theory that sought to make sense of it would be overly simplistic. Instead, I imagine them to develop a vocabulary to describe what actors do. And what actors do is, when put to the test, travel between one of six possible worlds: "For Boltanski and Thévenot, this ability to live within worlds, and mainly to travel between the worlds, is a central competence of the actors involved in all kinds of disputes about justice" (Jacquemain, n.d., p.10). So far, though, I've only read 22 pages of Boltanski and Thévenot, and, as a result, I'm not able to spell out exactly what these worlds entail. But I can say that there are six worlds (civic, domestic, market, celebrity, industrial, and inspired), and that, while travel to all is technically permitted, certain linkages are unsustainable. For example, the argument to count women's domestic labor within a country's GDP, or that woman should be paid for their domestic or emotional labor links the domestic and the market worlds. Moreover, that link is sustainable because it aspires toward the common good, which is one of this sociology's important terms. However, other links are unsustainable because they break fundamental axioms, such as that of depending on a "common humanity." In fact, Boltanski and Thévenot argue that any argument in favor of eugenics is impossible to sustain for this reason.

I am a little confused about the role of description, though, since it would seem as though this sociology would have to explain something. For example, I can imagine applying this sociology to case studies like Caster Semenya. One question I have is: why is Caster Semenya such a big deal, when so many other intersex persons could be pointed to? What was it about her that went so viral? Out of all of the injustices to occur to so many intersex persons, why single out that one particular case for such media scrutiny? From what I've read of Boltanski and Thévenot so far, it seems like they would be able to explain why her case is so popular, which is confusing, because their whole sociology is supposed to be descriptive rather than explanatory, but I'm probably just taking a certain quote from them too seriously, or overextending an idea from one context to another. Regardless, Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) speak of "composition arrangements" (p. 10) that flatten the hierarchy of global and local scales (p. 7). Moreover, they also speak of how singularity can be made to (Bruno Latour) become general via an "investment of form" (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006, p. 7). The word "investment" is important, since the On Justification's subtitle is "Economies of Worth." But the main thing I want to point out is, cases like Semenya's make apparent a kind of symmetrical treatment of persons and things (p. 9). To be clear on that point, the International Association of Athletics Federations rules that a woman's hormones must be within in a certain acceptable level to compete. In other words, while Semenya and her lawyers argue for the Association to adjust its values and practices for the sake of justice, for the Association, it's simply not worth it. Is it worth fighting an uphill battle against an entire ideology for the sake of a few outlier cases? Again, we can see double standards and slippages just like we saw earlier with the unnamed, working-class man. The same people who justify their actions by claiming that they want all athletes to play on an equal playing field also allow people like Usain Bolt to compete, despite the fact that he, too, surely has higher than average levels of testosterone. So, why, again, does Caster Semenya's case garner so much publicity? Maybe one reason is because of the "precarious compromises" (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006, p. 9) that become possible. Or maybe even another word would be "resonates" (Casey Boyle), although that word certainly isn't in Boltanski and Thévenot. That is, given that we can't know what people can do until they are put to the test (Jacquemain, n.d., p. 5), sometimes peoples' actions give rise to many different explanations, and publicity is generated as a result of trying to settle the multiplicity of justifications that reverberates across the different worlds. Whatever the case, given Boltanski and Thévenot's attention to worth, value, evaluation, judgement, etc., I think something like resonance is at stake. How does a single runner become so saturated with weight as to become equal to an entire ideology? How does a single tweet become able to take down an entire government? I think Boltanski and Thévenot would argue that it's because that single tweet or person or whatever was able to sustain (that is, be a kind of boundary object for) a variety of justifications from a variety of different worlds all at once. By now, this is probably neither here nor there, but I'm just hung up on the role of description, since again it would seem like the six world hypothesis would have a lot of explanatory power--explanation without explaining away?

I don't know if it's a proper reading of Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) or not to claim (as I am claiming here) that "investments of form" (p. 8) occur as a result of a multiplication (or augmentation? amplification?) of justifications. It just seems to be like that's where the book might go. Who knows, though. I'm only 22 pages in.