Redeeming the Value(s) of the Social World

Of Norms and Values

One of the valuable contributions Nathalie Heinich makes involves the distinction that is too often ignored between norms and values. A value has “a broad spectrum in terms of both time and space: it involves both the long term and universality, presumed at any rate” (Heinich, 2017a: 205). ³ As such, a value is removed from the order of will: the validity and the obsolescence of “decency” as a value, for example, cannot be established by short-term actions; they are based on “long, diffuse and collective processes”. With the action they order, norms maintain a prescriptive link that expresses itself in the deontic mode of obligations, permissions and prohibitions. Values, on the other hand, have a more relaxed link with action: their link is one of justification, orientation, or foundation that renders such a norm (un)desirable. Values, to use one of Hannah Arendt’s expressions (1972 [1952]), “authorise” and “augment” the norms and actions they regulate. The dissociation of norm and value remains pertinent although there is no norm without a value (for example, the conventional norm of a red traffic-light is underpinned by the value of safety) and although certain values imply obligations (e.g. ‘thou shalt not kill’). There are many more values that do not have the force of a norm, such as the beauty of a landscape or a work of art.

It is precisely because a value guides behaviour without determining it that it is absurd to criticise its ineffectiveness. As Nathalie Heinich recalls, value does not respond to the criterion of effectiveness and cannot be disqualified by the absence of its implementation, which invalidates statements such as ‘equality does not exist’. Many democratic values, such as general interest or the public use of reason, are accused of concealing the reality of specific interests and serving to exclude those social categories (women, proletarians, etc.) that do not master the abstraction and generalisation proper to public deliberation. Values only degenerate into ideology, lies and mystification, however, when it is claimed that they have been fully achieved. The tension between the axiological ideal and empirical reality, where it is maintained, gives this idea a driving force precisely because it has not been achieved. The claim of universality proper to most values can be turned against their strategic instrumentalisation or their local distortion and used to fight for the achievement of the ideal they deploy.

Reading Des Valeurs thus invites sociologists to abandon the conceptual dyad of “norms–regularities” and adopt the conceptual triad of “norms–regularities–values” that is implicit in the argument presented by Nathalie Heinich. Unlike norms, which are established and reinforced by negative or positive sanctions and possess a dimension of constraint and exteriority, of which the commandment (e.g. ‘thou shalt’) is the purest expression, contrary to regularities, which respond to a logic of repetition and conformity (e.g. ‘what usually happens is . . .’), values guide conduct without constraining it. To understand the way in which values may guide conduct, however, we need to be able to distinguish between their various versions. The ‘items’ on which value is conferred (the object value of a work of art, for instance) must be carefully differentiated from not only the ‘principles’ that attribute value to them (principle value, such as beauty) but also the ‘magnitude’ according to which this principle value is manifested (magnitude value, such as price).

An Inductive Challenge

From a methodological point of view, the “descriptive relativism” Nathalie Heinich adopts aims to be resolutely inductive: starting out from ordinary words, interpretations and practices, it involves unfolding the implicit values that underpin them without making any argumentative leap. This inferential and parsimonious inquiry is aimed at reconstituting, from their point of view, the values that motivate the actors, as it is their qualification and assessment operations that render their worlds intelligible and worthy of being “inhabited”. ⁴ To meet the descriptive demands specific to such an inductive challenge, Nathalie Heinich focuses on the disagreements, controversies, scandals and litigation that arise when the actors count on values, grammars or things that differ or even are incompatible. As shown by Actor-Network-Theory proposed by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour and the pragmatic sociology initiated by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, disputes and controversies constitute perspicuous settings (Garfinkel, 2002) for the researcher. They submit the actors to a “test of justification” which forces them to elucidate their reasons – particularly their axiological reasons – for taking action, and draws them into a movement towards generalisation aimed at finding the highest level of “worths” capable of founding a new agreement (Breviglieri et al., 2009). Controversy forces the reciprocal explication of implicit principles, generally in front of a third-party public, and leads to the “deconfinement” of the local issues that gave rise to the dispute in the first place (Callon et al., 2001). By drawing the actors into the demanding order of justification, this deconfinement puts an end to the tacit incorporation of values in the norms.

It is the “high level of publicity” of the controversies that indicates to the researcher that the issues are not “merely subjective dissensions but objective tensions between representational frameworks that are indeed part of a common culture and a collective axiological equipment” (Heinich, 2017a: 305). ⁵ Such disagreements run deeper and are more irreducible than internal conflicts within a single register, which lead, for example, to argument over the place of an object in an aesthetic hierarchy that is not in itself contested. To try to resolve these “profound disagreements”, people must remove themselves from the infelicitous situation in which they are immersed and put their values and their principles to the test of reciprocal argumentation and justification. Whether this testing takes place on the scene that regulates an area of activity (e.g. a dispute among experts) or on a macro-scene as deployed by the media (e.g. a scandal), it mobilises “public values” that are deemed worthy of being expressed in public, not the “private values” that actually mobilise individuals. Thus, the value of beauty, although it is present in the ‘private’, effective assessments made by individuals (including in employment, art and political circles), contradicts the order of democratic merit too much to be able to appear in public discourse. As Des Valeurs recalls, even an interview context or an opinion poll has a sufficiently public dimension to incite the actors to “summon up” the reference values they deem legitimate and short-circuit the private values that guide their conduct – often, indeed, without their knowledge.

The public values people exhibit do indeed, as Nathalie Heinich suggests, have the status of reasons for acting. The actual motive for an action, such as the feeling of jealousy that pushes a husband to kill his wife, makes behaviour intelligible without necessarily justifying it (Winch, 1990 [1958]). In contrast, reasons for acting, including axiological reasons, have the status of providing an assessment and justification that enables them to be understood and at the same time approved by other people. Only those values that form part of the accepted standards of reasonable behaviour in one’s society and conventionally accompany specific types of action can be validated as true reasons for acting (Kaufmann, 1999; Mills, 1940). Thus Nathalie Heinich (2017a: 217) stresses that “publicly admitted preferences” do not constitute a “propensity to lie” but “a shared awareness of the degree of acceptability of the axiological choices”. ⁶

The distinction between public values and private values suggests a dual judgement model. According to Margaret Gilbert (1989), it is indeed possible to distinguish beliefs and judgements carried out in we-mode and in I-mode: the we-mode judgement that the individual agrees to assume in his/her capacity as a member of a given community may be very different from the same person’s I-mode judgement in his/her capacity as a private individual. An individual may well support the public judgement according to which the free movement of workers is an excellent basic principle in the construction of Europe without necessarily agreeing with it in his/her heart of hearts. A “positional” judgement of this kind enables individuals to agree with the public, official, unitary and potentially depersonalising representations of the group to which they belong while at the same time retaining the possibility of shifting to a mode of personal, private belief (Tuomela and Tuomela, 2003).

The Normative Weight of Public Values

One way to counter the criticisms levelled against an axiological sociology that would only capture superficial and inoperative values is to show that public values are not, contrary to the rash suggestion put forward by Nathalie Heinich (2017a: 219), merely “what in a political context is referred to as waffle”. ⁷ Referring to public values as “waffle” would be tantamount to considering them to be pure epiphenomena: fixed, hidebound, incantatory formulas that are devoid of meaning, and above all that do not engage anyone. Yet even if we are careful to dissociate norms and values, as Nathalie Heinich does, it is not possible to deny that public values have normative weight and are engaging – they are nothing short of an axiological ‘compass’, indicating the values that the individual, as a member of a community, is supposed to invoke or implement in a given situation. In other words, although the theoretical and analytical disentanglement of values and norms is necessary, it should not hide their empirical reconciliation: many public values have dimensions that are both deontic and axiological.

These hybrid entities, whether they are called “normative values” or “axiological norms”, are by no means oxymoronic: their hybridisation is due to what might be called meta-values, i.e. the founding values that define the reference framework of a field of activity and characterise its public policy. These meta-values may be regional and constitute the centre of gravity of different spheres, for example ‘truth’ in scientific circles, or ‘general interest’ in the political sphere. But they may also be transversal and define the framework of the regional considered here as a high-level visibility scene within which the various particular spheres, indexed by the types of activities and values they cover, are reflected, understood in both its meanings of ‘being a representation’ and ‘being discussed’. ⁸ These hybrid meta-values are the place where normative duty to be and the desirable ideal come together, indicating to the actors what their axiological focus must be if they want to participate in the social and political games of their time.

It is indeed the public reiteration of this axiological focus that is expected of major political leaders when some unexpected events put their community to the test. The indignation aroused by the silence of President Donald Trump after the violence committed by Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville in August 2017 is revealing in this respect. By refusing to singularise the neo-Nazi violence, Donald Trump failed in the “cardinal duty” of the presidential function, that of fulfilling the role of moral authority and recalling the public frontiers of what is tolerable or intolerable, worthy or shameful. ⁹ As the moral and political centre of gravity of the public sphere, the presidential authority is supposed to reiterate the meta-values that, despite the real disagreements that people are working on, bring together the community as a whole. These potentially omni-pertinent meta-values occupy the highest level in the architecture of things and values that structures and engages the community. Since they set limits on what is acceptable within the public sphere, their place is at the apex of the political architectonic that imposes an order of subordination on the different axiological spheres and on the multiple activities that characterise them. ¹⁰ This shows just the importance of the “axiological hierarchies” (Heinich 2017a: 218) that the individual replicates publicly, thereby indicating his/her belonging to the community.

Once the normative weight of public values has been recognised, the gap that separates them from private values necessarily shrinks. From the psychological point of view, in fact, the cognitive dissonances engendered by the dissociation of private and public beliefs are difficult to maintain, with the result that individuals tend to appropriate and engage personally with the positions they have to assume publicly (Festinger, 1957). In other words the “axiological dissonances” to which Nathalie Heinich refers, when they arise within one and the same conscience, might be subjected to the work of interior harmonisation. After all, this work is at the heart of the socialisation process that transforms a public value into a real reason to take action, a social and political ideal into a personal virtue. Such work is largely emotional. That at least is the hypothesis that we shall present. As will be seen, one of the advantages of such a hypothesis is to refute the criticism that axiological sociology merely maps the meta-values that hierarchise public objects, without permeating individual experience and action.

The Values that Move Us

It may be argued that the description of public values, although it provides access to the political skeleton of values that, ideally, ought to guide decisions and conduct, is still not enough. Such a description does not yet allow access to the “values which, in fact, guide our attachments” (Heinich, 2017a: 219). ¹¹ How, methodologically speaking, can we take account of the private values that actually guide our individual conduct and decisions without necessarily being conscious? The avenue sketched out in Des Valeurs is worth following up: the values to which individuals are attached may be recognised by the high level of emotional commitment they arouse, and this is most obvious in the manifestation of indignation. As Nathalie Heinich recalls, following on from Pierre Livet (2002), indignation has a strong tendency to seek publicisation and provoke a movement towards generalisation, since the values that fuel it are at least sharable from the outset, and possibly even shared. Whether it is provoked by works of art that are judged to be transgressive (Heinich, 2014) or by political scandals (Malbois et al., 2014), shared indignation draws the contours of a moral community whose axiological background is compelled to appear on the public scene. Emotions act therefore as “revealers of values” (révélateurs de valeurs), particularly in times of crisis or conflict between different axiological registers, as when economic and domestic fields, or artistic and political circles, collide (Heinich, 2017a: 285). It could even be argued further that emotions not only reveal the values to which we are attached, but that they also are the process necessary for grasping them and maintaining them. It is this intimate connection between emotions and values, we claim that makes it possible to identify the values that move and affect the actors, thereby engaging them in “major mode”. ¹²

To specify the connection between emotions and values, let us recall three types of properties that are characteristic of emotions (Deonna and Teroni, 2009). First, emotions are felt, and therefore have a phenomenology. Second, they have an intentionality, since they are directed at objects and are ‘about’ something other than themselves. And third, emotions meet epistemological standards of correction and justification. What is the nature of this intentional link, and what is the object of emotions? For some theoreticians the link is perceptive, and the objects of emotions are values (Deonna and Teroni, 2009; Tappolet, 2000). Emotions are perceptions of values that are manifested in the holistic and pre-reflexive mode of ‘seeing as’: I see this lion as being dangerous, so I am afraid, or I see this behaviour as being cruel so I am indignant. And even more directly, I perceive the ‘dangerousness’ of this lion or the ‘cruelty’ of this behaviour, i.e. the ‘abstract value’ that a ‘concrete object’ – in this case this lion or this particular behaviour, instantiates in the world. ¹³ The analogy between emotion and perception is of course only partial: contrary to pure perception, which demands that the object be present here and now, it is indeed possible to feel an emotion in relation to a past, future, or possible event, absent people, and imaginary situations (Tappolet, 2000). Moreover emotion, although it is, for the individual, a sensorial means of gathering together information about his/her environment, depends – much more than perception does – on his/her beliefs, desires, expectations, and conceptions.

Apprehending emotions as perceptions of values rather than as judgements of values makes it possible to allow that creatures incapable of assessment in the reflexive and elaborate meaning of the term, such as animals and young children, have the ability to perceive values. Thus, gut reactions to certain stimuli, such as disgust, are attitudes that involve an assessment of values even though they are spontaneous and instinctive: gut feelings are mainly automatic and unconscious, and are not articulated or contaminated by language (Prinz, 2006). Although emotions are in the order of perception rather than in the order of judgement, that does not mean they are devoid of any cognitive dimension. On the contrary, they convey information about the outside world and as such satisfy criteria for correction and justification. As Christine Tappolet (2000) points out, you have to see the dog running towards you to feel fear, or believe that someone has insulted you to feel anger. This cognitive element is not based on intellectual understanding, and even less on a hermeneutic-type interpretation; but it nevertheless allows a meta-assessment of whether emotions are (in)appropriate to the “axiological facts” they grasp.

Among these axiological facts – and we shall return to this – some are natural, such as the dangerousness of the lion, disgust for bodily secretions or the inadmissibility of violence inflicted on a weaker subject; others are defined culturally, such as the beauty of a work of art. In both cases, however, the existence of axiological facts submits the emotions to epistemic constraints that make it possible to judge them as being appropriate or inappropriate, justified or unjustified. Thus the emotion of an adult crying because he/she has been deprived of sweets would probably be considered inappropriate with regard to the particular axiological fact of not having any sweets (Bedford, 1986). And in fact, the emotion would not only be considered unjustified or unseemly: it could well appear unintelligible or even pathological. In other words, the emotion must correspond to the axiological fact it claims to grasp.

Thanks to this “epistemic condition”, emotions can be considered as reasons for acting that must satisfy as such, the impersonal standards of reasonable behaviour that are in force in a given community. Such a conception of emotions is of two-fold interest for a theory of values. First, it recognises a form of rationality for emotions, which may be assessed as being justified or, on the contrary, inappropriate, including by third parties. A person may for example be reproached by witnesses for “over-reacting” to a remark addressed to him/her (Deonna, 2006). The other person therefore has a power of adjudication and arbitration in relation to what I feel or I am supposed to feel (Kaufmann, 1999). Second, the justifiable dimension that emotions must demonstrate introduces, among the correction criteria, the social norms that indicate the “emotion that is appropriate” to a given situation (a bereavement, a party, etc). These social norms can only regulate the “expression of emotion” and remain at the dramaturgic level of the public values and the “compulsory” manifestation of feelings that are appropriate to different social situations (Mauss, 1921). But the social norms that indicate what it is ‘justified’ to feel, in relation to a value and to the event it instantiates, may also reconfigure the emotional experience in itself. Just as the actors make efforts to reduce the axiological dissonance between private and public values, they also make efforts to reduce the dissonance between “feeling rules” and what they actually feel (Hochschild, 2017 [1979]).

The Public Observation of Axiological Engagements

We feel that these thoughts on emotions are capable of bridging the gap between the “objectivist” and “experientialist” positions to which Nathalie Heinich refers. Seen in such a light, emotions indeed do much more than reveal values: they are the very process of their perception: fear is the perception of danger, anger is the perception of lack of respect, indignation is the perception of injustice, etc. This perceptual and emotional model of values has another consequence: it makes it possible to distinguish, in the repertoire of principle-values Nathalie Heinich talks of, those values that are “detected” by the emotions and thereby linked to the action. Since emotions incorporate “action tendencies”, perceiving a value via the emotions is tantamount to experiencing one’s environment as a call to action (appel à l’action) (Deonna and Teroni, 2009; Frijda, 1986). Emotions may even be considered as the internal counterpart of the action to which they should theoretically give rise: flight (fear), protest (indignation), revenge (humiliation), destruction (anger), repulsion (disgust), display (pride), and so on (Frijda, 1986). Constitutively linked to the practical order of the action, the perception of values via the emotions requires a major engagement on the part of the subject harbouring them.

By highlighting the intimate connection between emotion, value and action, we are not in any way claiming to defend the idea that values are always recognisable in an immediate and perceptual way; indeed, their existence is often conceptual. Nor do we claim to characterise all values by their emotional and ‘engaging’ dimension; many public values, even those charged with normative weight as we have stressed, leave subjects indifferent and are the object of a cold, abstract, distant judgement. On the other hand, highlighting the link between emotions and values solves the methodological problem that the potential invisibility of private attachments poses for axiological sociology. Such a link confers an unhoped-for observability of axiological engagements, including when they are only conjugated in the first person singular. Emotions do indeed enable the sociologist to distinguish the values which count, in both affective and practical terms, from those which remain dead letters.

Once emotions have been defined as strongly self-implying processes of values’ identification, it becomes easier to characterise this specific category for attributing value that Nathalie Heinich refers to as “attachment”. For the author, following on from Raymond Polin, attachment is of a passive nature, it expresses a “surrender of self”, a “renouncement of the use of one’s own creative power”, to such an extent that it would be appropriate to refer to an “attachment to things and not an attachment to values” (Heinich, 2017a: 30). ¹⁴ And yet, attachment, whether it be in its Durkheimian version or in its psycho-physiological version, really is creative and dynamic. Thus, for Émile Durkheim (1934 [1925]), attachment to collective authority transforms social commandments into something higher. For developmental psychologists, attachment regulates the feelings of fear, security and curiosity in respect of other people nearby, but also creates the feeling of belonging to the group (Stern, 2005). In both cases, attachment is central: it makes it possible to identify what counts for us and hence the values to which we are “attached”.

Such a conception of attachment sheds new light on the three categories for attributing value that Nathalie Heinich proposes; apart from attachment, these include “measure” (mesure), which establishes the extrinsic and quantitative dimension of “price” (prix) (Heinich, 2017a: 27), and the “value judgement”, which in turn may take different forms of opinion (e.g. the opinion of a layman or a specialist, a spontaneous or solicited opinion, a private or public opinion). Strangely, value jugdment is seen as a separate sub-category for attributing value. Yet, just as attachment may be conceived as a proto-value judgement, measure may be considered a value judgement – a particularly objectifying and distant judgement. Rather than seeing value judgement as a separate category, it would seem more logical to see it as a superordinate principle that is necessarily qualitative if we understand it to mean a predicative activity in which a layman’s or specialist’s judgement on the one hand and measure and attachment on the other are particular instantiations. Once subordinated to the superordinate category of value judgement, measure and attachment may be considered as axiological (proto-)judgements that are opposed to each other with regard to distance and proximity. Like Nathalie Heinich, we may indeed associate measure and quantified appreciation with the distancing, detachment and interchangeability of the value object and, conversely, we may associate attachment with a personal type of proximity and familiarity.

From ‘Person-Objects’ to Object Persons

The gesture that underpins the general theory of Des Valeurs consists of starting out from things to move towards persons, actions and the states of the world. This route takes us from the most ‘familiar’ forms of “attributing value”, i.e. those applied specifically to things – interchangeable everyday objects, for instance – to the inalienable ‘person-objects’ that are overinvested, either privately (e.g. a child’s comforter) or collectively (e.g. an icon). In doing so, Nathalie Heinich suspends the ontological status of persons, thereby denying one of the key precepts of moral theories, namely that persons, as intentional beings, have unique sensorimotor, affective and cognitive properties. In fact, the paradigmatic qualification operations that empirically illustrate Heinich’s book – specifically, the qualification of objects (e.g. heritage items, relics, works of art, utensils) – go extremely well with the “descriptive relativism” she advocates. Contemporary art, the heritagisation process and even the history of the landscape show to what extent aesthetic values are constructed. By constantly educating our way of looking at things, experts and art institutions have managed to attribute value to objects that have no intrinsic value: one example is the case of Duchamp’s urinal. This example reveals a fundamental and fairly counter-intuitive aspect with regard to the aesthetic value of objects: they are largely conceptual and not perceptual, since they are the result of an attribution process that grants them qualities that are mainly extrinsic.

Thus the theoretical gesture that consists of starting out from things makes it possible to remain neutral with regard to the ‘circulation’ and ‘transformation of the states of objects’ as they pass from the status of utilitarian object to that of objet d’art (e.g. Duchamp’s urinal), or from the status of inalienable property to that of an item of waste (e.g. a fallen idol). Such “axiological neutrality” is less easy to maintain when it involves the transformation of the states of people. And yet, in the same way that the notion of ‘person’ detaches from that of ‘human’ and becomes a function, possibly allocated to things or to animals (Heinich, 2017a: 145), the notion of ‘thing’ may also become a function, transforming people into what we might, by analogy, call person-objects. Affirming, as Nathalie Heinich does (2017a: 147), that “persons, actions and the states of the world” are “entities that are not or little accessible to quantified appreciation” ²⁰ is intellectually reasonable but politically problematic: it conceals the fact that the quantification of people’s worth is at the heart of the neo-liberal axiology of contemporary capitalism. In other words, when we consider the axiological qualifications of persons rather than aesthetic values, the moral question and the very possibility of “axiological neutrality” rapidly arise.

The political conflicts raised by the type of axiological assessment that ought to be applied to persons are well illustrated by a type of case that Nathalie Heinich’s sociology barely considers. It involved ‘dwarf-tossing’, a controversial event in southern France in 1995 (Thomas, 2002). In Marseille in particular, a number of nightclubs organised dwarf-tossing competitions for their customers, the winner being the person to toss a dwarf wearing a helmet and a protective outfit as far as possible, onto a mattress. After a court decision ordered a ban on such practices, on the grounds of the infringement of human dignity, one of the dwarves involved, Manuel Wackenheim, brought a complaint in turn; he claimed that the work enabled him to be a free and independent employee rather than someone living on benefits and constantly reminded of his handicap. It is a fascinating case, since it forces us to consider the existence of the values borne by human beings. Ontologically speaking, are human beings characterised by an intrinsic value – in this case dignity – which obliges them despite themselves to be accountable to their fellow humans? Epistemologically speaking, how should the sociologist deal with situations of depreciation, disqualification and humiliations, where the main people concerned do not appear to feel subjectively whereas they would have objective reasons to do so? The sociologist can answer this two-fold question in one of two ways. The first, already sketched out earlier, consists of defending the specificity of the values concerning people, values that are patently transgressed by dwarf-tossing. By stressing the emotional modality of apprehending these human-specific values, this option relates the two areas that Nathalie Heinich distinguishes without always joining them in one and the same gesture. The emotional anchoring of moral values leads to the recognition, from the point of view of the object, of the existence of potentially universal axiological affordances and, from the point of view of the subject, the presence of basic moral expectations in any normally competent human being. The second consists of defending the idea that moral and political criticism is possible without necessarily breaking away from the principle of axiological neutrality and reintroducing substantially exogenous values into the analysis. We shall now look at the possibility of an endogenous criticism of values, after a reminder of the grammatical project to which Des Valeurs aspires.

The Equivocal Role of the Grammarian

To explain the descriptive task of axiological sociology, Nathalie Heinich (2017a: 21) uses the metaphor of the grammarian who “explains the operational rules of a language, taking absolutely no interest in either the content or the validity of what is being said”. ²¹ Such a sociologist-cum-grammarian cannot claim either the reality of an exogenous structural or categorical order or an extrinsic scientific criterion in order to interpret the situation. Its role is to enlighten, extend and systematise the description resources already available in the social world. Nathalie Heinich (2017a: 16) thus refers to “analytical sociology”, inspired by a certain type of analytical philosophy: the inquiry would not cover the whole world, but would attempt to describe “the ways in which it is thought and spoken about”. ²² This approach in fact comes up against three difficulties, and we should look into them. The first is ontological, the second epistemological, and the third moral or even political. We shall start with the ontological aspect.

The sociologist-cum-grammarian must as a minimum articulate two points of view. On the one hand, the point of view of the third person, or the observer, who reports on ordinary practices in a disengaged and distant way; on the other, the point of view of the first person plural that the researcher is entitled to use as a member of the community and which enables him/her to give an explanation of the axiological competencies and ‘the meaning for us’ that his/her fellow citizens merely activate tacitly. This double perspective, that of the actors and that of the researcher, is at the heart of the radically empirical-descriptive challenge which, for Nathalie Heinich, is the only way of satisfying the sociologist’s “axiological neutrality”. The author nevertheless plays down such a challenge when she emphasises the importance of these “judgements that attest (in the actors’ eyes) or confer (in the sociologists’ eyes) ‘value’ – in its primary sense of grandeur, importance, quality” (Heinich, 2017a: 143–144 – the italics are ours). ²³ The gap between ‘attesting’ and ‘conferring’ is not only linked to an epistemic difference between the perspective of the social actors and the perspective of the sociologist: it is witness to an ontological judgement. The actors would believe – naively (like the academic upholders of realism) – that value is an intrinsic property of things, while the sociologist specialising in axiology would know in reality that this is not the case, since value is the result of a collective process of attribution. But what is the source of this different knowledge that enables the author to correct the ontology of the actors? Certainly not their discourses. Although she claims to adopt an approach inspired by pragmatic sociology, the posture of Nathalie Heinich comes closer here to that of Pierre Bourdieu who for his part theorises the ignorance or blindness that most agents possess with regard to the functioning of the social world.

This leads us to the second difficulty, of an epistemological order, raised by the inductive approach. Such an approach, although it is aimed at following the actors’ logic as closely as possible, is not immune from the multiple ‘corrections’ and distortions that any description might impose on the material gathered. In this respect, the masterful ethnography carried out by D. Lawrence Wieder (1974, 2010) on the use of the convict code in a centre for delinquents is particularly revealing. He shows the aporias raised by a classically interactionist approach to the phenomenon. By extracting the rules identified by the actors (convicts, prison warders, etc.), such as the ‘no grassing’ rule, from specific occasions in which they are used and by gathering them together in a catalogue, sociological analysis alters their status. It transforms practical, deontic and axiological guidelines that are valid and validated in situ into a repertoire of lawful actions – the ‘code’ – that convicts would run through in their minds before taking any action. The (ethnomethodological) re-specification that D. Lawrence Wieder’s inquiry provides contravenes such a description. The ‘code’ is not an independent repertoire of explicit maxims that could be listed; it is more like a hermeneutic procedure with an open texture, thereby allowing convicts to assess its scope and to ‘signify’ it to their entourage, particularly within the institution.

As such, the grammatical approach is fascinating: it aims to report on the principles that define and inform the action while it takes place, without necessarily involving the individuals who apply them conscientiously and consciously (Kaufmann, 2012). This being so, such an approach lays itself open to the same difficulties as those encountered by interactionist studies on the convict code. Even the grammatical approach that Luc Boltanski (1990) ²⁴ has proposed in his “sociology of critique” cannot completely avoid the epistemological pitfalls of Bourdieu’s “critical sociology”. Indeed the sociologist of the critique has the benefit of an asymmetrical position in relation to the social actors, for two main reasons. First, as a ‘professional external to the matter’, he/she has a ‘laboratory’ where he/she is able to “accumulate a set of reports that none of the actors individually is capable of doing . . . [and] above all compare them in the same space, which the actors cannot do”. ²⁵ And second, the sociologist “cannot dispense with an analysis aimed at elucidating and clarifying the actors’ statements, i.e. seeing to what extent they are able to stand up to comparison with more stable elements” (Boltanski, 1990: 132). ²⁶ Thus, the grammatical approach involves the comprehensive collection of statements and their explication, carried out from an external position that threatens at any moment to topple into the theoretical overdetermination and reification of the grammatical repertoire that D. Lawrence Wieder denounces.

Does this critique invalidate a grammatical approach? Not necessarily, on condition that the sociologist remains aware of the fact that the grammar that is brought to light, far from being reduced to a catalogue of rules or maxims, is the result of a set of perceptual, hermeneutic and axiological operations that grasp the ‘holds’ the situation offers them. It is therefore not enough for the sociologist to collect the actors’ statements or produce retrospectively an external description of their actions; it is the very texture of their experience that has to be reproduced. Otherwise the researcher would be like an entomologist claiming to describe the flight of butterflies by pinning a few examples to a board: although the specimens would be genuine and materially present, their activity would be lost.

This statement leads to the third difficulty, of a moral and perhaps even political order, raised by the grammatical approach, even though it claims axiological neutrality. As Luc Boltanski points out, a grammatical report already contains the potentiality of a critique, if only by highlighting the contradiction between the public values that an individual or group is supposed to follow from the inside of its world and the actions that have actually been carried out. That is why it is difficult to agree with Nathalie Heinich (2017a: 18–19, our italics) when she affirms:

Unlike the normative posture, which does something to the appraised object by attributing a certain value to it . . . the descriptive, or rather the analytico-descriptive, posture adopted here does nothing to the object in question – it has no power, either evaluative – to attribute a value – or prescriptive – to lay down a behavioural norm regarding it. ²⁷

The sociologist-grammarian does indeed carry out an assessment when he/she reconstructs grammar, if only by relating statements and actions to their frame of reference.

Thus, grammatical inquiry has an ambivalent theoretical status: even though its (descriptive) task is to set in order the practices and significations of a community at any given point in its history, there is always a risk of it becoming prescriptive. Like any grammarian worth his/her salt, the sociologist who wants to draw up a dictionary of language usage in the social world necessarily calls up the rules for proper use that structure the different axiological worlds he/she describes. By presenting themselves as mere recorders of proper usage, grammarians ‘mask prescription’ (masquent la prescription) and overshadow the ‘prescriber’ (prescripteur), thereby offloading the responsibility for their utterances onto speech that is not their own and of which they claim to be no more than ‘mouthpieces’ (porte-parole) (Berrendonner, 1982). ²⁸

The axiological neutrality that Nathalie Heinich associates with the grammatical approach is therefore in contradiction with the evaluative and prescriptive scope that pragmatic sociology attributes to it. Neutral posture is also at odds with the pragmatist approach to which she occasionally refers. For pragmatism, a North American philosophical current that pays particular attention to action and the use of practical reason in seeking truth, inquiry – including scientific inquiry – does indeed do something to the object: it transforms it by offering it greater determination and reincorporating it in a number of interdependent relationships (Dewey, 1993 [1938]). By bringing out specific qualities of the object, analysis opens up new paths for taking action. This is the case in the pharmaceutical world when a chemist discovers a previously unknown property of a plant and in doing so transforms the relationships and activities that we will be able to initiate. Inquiry has thus allowed a scientific and practical reassessment of the previously unknown properties of the plant and produces an increase in knowledge that in turn increases the actors’ potential for action, whether they are directly involved or only indirectly concerned.

From the perspective of pragmatist inquiry, one of the fundamental dimensions of “axiological neutrality” as conceptualised by Nathalie Heinich (2017a: 18), namely the “rule of symmetry” (règle de symétrie) that she borrows from Bruno Latour, seems to be more than problematic. This is because symmetrisation is not necessarily a synonym for neutrality; it may, on the contrary, lead to the adoption of an eminently political position with the regard to those items that are to be taken into account and those that must be relativised. It is indeed the political consequences of a symmetrical posture that the researchers working on mobilisations, reactionary ones in particular, have encountered. Invoking the principle of symmetry – sometimes with the backing of literature from the social sciences – the actors take the part of “merchants of doubt” (marchands de doutes) or “of certainties” (de certitudes) in order to contest the progress made by science in the field of the theory of evolution, global warming, or the risks associated with addiction to tobacco (Ceccarelli, 2011; Girel, 2013). Controversies of this kind, when kept outside the scientific arena, are formidable political instruments: their aim is to undermine the autonomy of the scientific sphere and wreck the procedures that ensure its functioning, particularly inquiry. “Teach the controversy” has become the slogan of the militant creationism that diverts the principle of symmetry in its favour by attempting to make a religion of contemporary science and a partisan credo of evolution theory (Gonzalez and Stavo-Debauge, 2015). The rule of symmetry, put to the service of the desecularisation of society in this way, is not without an effect on property and values, thereby demonstrating that it cannot a priori be a synonym of ‘neutrality’. The neutrality of such a rule, whether it is adopted by the actors or by sociologists, can only be evaluated empirically, on the basis of its consequences for the methods of composing public property and values. In the case of creationism, the rule of symmetry boils down not to a suspension but truly a transformation of the relationship with majority values; it cannot be taken up by the sociologist without it de facto contributing to the creationists’ instrumentalisation of the liberal ethos and silencing of scientific inquiry.

By thinking about the consequences of the actions and discourses of the actors, including his/her own, the sociologist is no longer content to limit him-/herself to the somewhat conservative role of the grammarian, i.e. being the paragon of proper usage. He/she is in a position to carry out a much broader critique favouring reflexive detachment from the axiological rules and principles in force, thereby laying themselves open to their potential transformation. In doing so, does it transgress the axiological neutrality advocated by Nathalie Heinich, or, despite everything, does it respect the internal logic of the practices it describes?

The (In)consequence(s) of Axiological Neutrality

Despite our criticism of the concept of “axiological neutrality” proposed by Nathalie Heinich, it is important to bear in mind – without necessarily subscribing to the concept – that a sociologist carrying out an inquiry is capable of suspending the positions he/she has adopted, or at the very least, of taking them into account in a reflexive fashion. Otherwise, sociology would be no more than ideology dressed up in scientific jargon.

The epistemological challenge facing the sociologist is therefore to manage to throw light on hitherto unexplored properties and relationships, without falling into the binary oppositions that pragmatic sociology comes up against and that Nathalie Heinich adopts – including the opposition between agents or members and the sociologist, an opposition reduced to the actor/spectator couple. Rather than beginning by positioning the actor and the spectator, the pragmatist approach aims to describe the different positions deployed by a course of action. Here the variation in positions is linked not to a hypostasised social structure but to the activity and to the way in which its consequences affect the actors directly concerned, the public that is affected indirectly, and the more distant spectators who are invited to judge it (Dewey, 2003 [1927]; Lippmann, 1998 [1922]). When a course of action is assessed according to its consequences, in particular those that consist of generating differentiated positions, we can readily see that the distant position of the researcher is not stable: it may easily tip over into the position of an actor, whether in a situation of participatory observation or in a context in which the sociologist is unable to choose which place to occupy, since this is assigned to him/her by the other parties concerned (Favret-Saada, 1977). Similarly, social agents may pass from the position of actors to that of spectators, particularly when they adopt a view of the current action that is relatively distant from that of the spectator public.

Reflection based on the consequences of the action, starting with the different positions, particularly those of the member of the public and the sociologist, that the action is likely to generate, also makes it possible to ask about allocated properties and shared values. Given that the indirect consequences of an action may affect not only other people close by but also third parties who have not yet been taken into account, they may alter the organisation of the social world, and possibly even its architecture. By definition, indeed, an activity is carried out according to socially differentiated methods, this ‘socially’ being just as much the product of prior social divisions as the result of the appraisal operations carried out by the actors. The consequence-based test that a pragmatist approach applies to actions, discourses and values allows, once again, their appraisal. Is a particular experience desirable on a large scale, and is it worth being promoted or, on the contrary, is it harmful for the community as a whole, both present and future? Does a particular experience, action or value make it possible to constitute an openminded public and the start of a joint inquiry into the axiological orientations of the group or, on the contrary, does it mean the closure of the inquiry and the end of the discourse?

To use the same terms as Daniel Dayan (2000), valuing an event by its consequences makes it possible to judge whether it is “publigenic” (publigène), i.e. capable of generating a diverse public that is concerned with the general interest, or on the contrary it is “publicidal” (publicide). We find a similar argument in Peirce’s pragmatism: in order to determine whether a value is desirable and may claim to be universal, it is necessary to consider the type of community it is capable of generating. According to Charles S. Peirce (2003 [1878]), there ought to be a meta-value at the apex of our axiological architectonic. Far from being a substantial reality, this meta-value is not only an ideal figuration and a point of balance, but also a procedural and revisable principle: that of a permanently incomplete collective inquiry into the values that hold us together. Thinking of this kind is particularly interesting in drawing up a theory of the public sphere that is equally descriptive and normative. Descriptively speaking, the public sphere is the actual place where the consequences of collective actions and decisions affect the actors, whether they are ‘patients’ or spectators. Normatively speaking, the public sphere is the place where the group carries out a joint inquiry into the orientations of living together and attempts to achieve a harmonious hierarchisation of its constitutive property and values. Seen through a prism of pragmatism focusing on consequences, an inquiry of this kind responds to a specific temporality: that of the future. It must indeed include the potential members of the group, both present and future, as well as everyone who might be affected by the indirect consequences of the actions or decisions of the present.

In opposition to the radical partisans of axiological neutrality, the pragmatist model therefore provides normative support for a moral and political critique of axiological grammars without necessarily infringing the endogenous approach aimed at reproducing the internal logic of the actors: the inquiry is not the exclusive property of the sociologist, but a characteristic shared by human beings – and perhaps even all living things (Dewey, 1993 [1938]) – thereby reducing the epistemic asymmetry that separates it from social agents. However, once the ‘consequences’ have been internalised in the critique, whether it be a critique of a collective action or of a sociological description, it is still necessary to state the way in which these consequences may themselves be appraised. One criterion that we find particularly interesting is of a procedural nature – that of the “reversibility of places” (réversibilité des places).

The “Reversibility of Places”

The “reversibility of places” is at the heart of the formal and universal apparatus of pronouns deployed, among others, by the linguist Émile Benveniste (1966). The pronominal apparatus enables us to distinguish between the first person – the person speaking (I), the second person – the person spoken to (you), and the third person – the person spoken about (he/she). It thereby authorises a formal characterisation of the subject: being a subject or a person ideally implies the possibility of changing position throughout the entire pronominal arc of I, you and he/she, these being in turn the person who is speaking, the person who is being spoken to, and the person who is being spoken about (Genard, 1999; Jacques, 1985; Théry, 2010). The consequence of a relationship of deprecation or humiliation is that the alternance between the three pronominal positions is refused. Deprived of all clues as to subjectivity and all “personality correlation” (corrélation de personnalité), the person who has been humiliated or deprecated is reduced to the objectivised state of a “non-person” (non-personne) – the absentee who, although present, is only ever talked about and never spoken to (Benveniste, 1966).

Such a pronominal standpoint proves to be extremely valuable, since it not only opens up the path for an internal moral and political critique of interpersonal relationships, but also for a critique of devices or apparatuses – critique based on the latter’s (in)ability to allow individuals to run through all the positions necessary for a system of interaction to exist. This critique makes it possible to grasp which beings are afforded a place by I and with whom a potentially reversible communication relationship is developed, allowing the other person to say you in his/her turn. This reversal of I and you institutes a degree of reciprocity and recognition even in the case of disagreement or conflict. This “pronominal perspectivism” (perspectivisme pronominal), to use the expression proposed by Mark Hunyadi (2013), identifies the “ethically sensitive” aspects of the apparatuses and points of view that these either favour or, a contrario, render impossible. Thus, certain medical devices make the presence in the first person of the ‘I-body’ and what it has experienced impossible, transforming patients into third-person objects to be managed and administered publicly (Genard, 1999; Hunyadi, 2013). Other apparatuses, such as the witchcraft device, play the role of “engager of violence” (embrayeur de violence), condemning certain places to silence, particularly the external, speechless place of the so-called ‘sorcerer’ (Favret-Saada, 1977; Kaufmann, 2014). In appraising medical or witchcraft devices – and their underlying axiological register – according to the consequences that the place of the patient or the sorcerer implies for its “occupants”, whether present or future, the sociologist does not infringe the pragmatic challenge consisting of following the internal logic of the practices as closely as possible (Kaufmann, 2012). For such a critique is not based on the exogenous and potentially condescending normativity that Nathalie Heinich rightly fears. Pronominal critique merely highlights the ‘becoming object’ of the patient or the sorcerer, which is one of the endogenous consequences of medical objectification and witchcraft polemology. By deploying the pronominal authorities, the possibilities for replying and the plurality of points of view or, a contrario, the enunciative taboos that the practical and axiological devices impose on their ‘users’, it becomes possible to operationalise the pragmatist criterion – and critique – of consequences.