Anti-Equivalence: Pragmatics of post-liberal dispute

TL;DR: The authors review how sociologists of critique have tended to treat critical capacities as oriented towards consensus, but then consider how technologies of real-time control circumvent liberal critique altogether, which abandons equivalence in general, instead adopting a nonrepresentational template of warfare.

Abstract: In the early 21st century, liberal democracies have witnessed their foundational norms of critique and deliberation being disrupted by a combination of populist and technological forces. A distinctive style of dispute has appeared, in which a speaker denounces the unfairness of all liberal and institutional systems of equivalence, including the measures of law, economics and the various other ‘tests’ which convention scholars have deemed core to organisations. The article reviews how sociologists of critique have tended to treat critical capacities as oriented towards consensus, but then considers how technologies of real-time ‘control’ circumvent liberal critique altogether. In response, a different type of dispute emerges in the digital public sphere, which abandons equivalences in general, instead adopting a non-representational template of warfare. This style of post-liberal dispute is manifest in the rhetoric of populists, but does not originate there.

Summary

Introduction

• In the early 21st century, liberal democracies have witnessed their foundational norms of critique and deliberation being disrupted by a combination of populist and technological forces.
• A distinctive style of dispute has appeared, in which a speaker denounces the unfairness of all liberal and institutional systems of equivalence, including the measures of law, economics and the various other ‘tests’ which convention scholars have deemed core to organisations.
• The persecution complex of the most powerful man on the planet, framed in the ostensibly normative language of ‘fairness’, prompts wide-ranging questions about how the language and affects of injustice are mobilised in contemporary societies.
• Sociologists have long been interested in critique as an everyday or ‘lay’ phenomenon, that takes place beyond the limits of professional criticism, critical theory or expert disciplines.

Equivalence and its limits

• The political, institutional and epistemological challenges that liberalism confronts are of how to establish this formal equality in practice, and what forms of redress should be available when it fails.
• This normative and institutional context gave birth to the notion of ‘public opinion’ and criticism as disembodied, autonomous judges in the realms of politics and aesthetics, and which Kant viewed as the engine of collective enlightenment (Kant, 1970).
• Everyday social and economic life is stabilised thanks to the existence of shared ‘equivalence principles’ (norms which establish the basis of comparison and judgement) and ‘tests’ which allow uncertainty to be resolved (Boltanski and Thevenot, 1999, 2006).
• Firstly, it is possible to argue that a ‘test’ has not been administered correctly, and that unfairness has crept in.
• “Envisaged thus, the social world does not appear to be the site of domination endured passively and unconsciously, but instead as a space shot through by a multiplicity of disputes, critiques, disagreements and attempts to re-establish locally agreements that are always fragile” (Boltanski, 2011: 27).

From measurement to control

• The default assumption of pragmatist sociologists of critique is that (potentially acceptable) justifications are the central means by which institutions and society cohere.
• Yet the authors can also identify a set of technologies and rationalities which enable coordination of behaviour, without the requirement for public principles of equivalence or ‘tests’ in Boltanksi and Thevenot’s sense.
• The rise of ‘platform capitalism’ or ‘surveillance capitalism’ in the early twenty-first century has vastly extended the reach of data capture, well beyond the terrain of traditional market research or performance management, into new social, affective, physiological and intimate domains of life (Srnicek, 2016; Zuboff, 2019).
• Thirdly, control technologies do not treat people as liberal subjects or persons, but as “dividuals” or cybernetic “black boxes” which respond to stimuli (Delezue, 1992; Lazzarato, 2014).
• These post-liberal technologies and rationalities come together most acutely in the sociological phenomenon of the ‘rated’ and ‘indebted’ specimen of human capital, which has become a dominant logic of existence under advanced neoliberalism (Lazzarato, 2012; Feher, 2018).

The delirious public sphere

• Sociologists of critique have shown family resemblances between the rhetoric of established powers and that of their opponents and critics.
• Where financial and managerial power operates in this extra-juridical fashion, as facilitated by technologies of control, it is necessarily mirrored in forms of opposition which – like the radical sceptics described by Foucault and Boltanski – abandon the quest for consensus, or the commitment to resolving moral injuries in mutually recognisable ways.
• This has at least two important implications for the character of the public sphere.
• Comedians have the necessary skills to succeed politically in the conditions of the control society, possessing the ability to manage and anticipate audience reactions in real-time, and perform a type of persona that is both entertaining and ‘authentic’ at the same time (Milburn, 2019; Davies, 2019b).
• Where a critical representation seeks to represent its object, accompanied by approval or denunciation, the reputational attacks that go on in the digital public sphere simply involve presenting an isolated specimen of the enemies’ words or behaviour.

Denouncing liberalism

• The rise of ‘populism’ during the 2010s has been the topic of voluminous scholarly analysis and media commentary.
• Where principles of equivalence (and the normative tests or commensuration devices that concretise them) are gradually crowded out by technologies of real-time control, critique itself becomes increasingly devoid of any appeal to equivalence.
• What is specific about ‘populism’ is that it channels and scales up this spirit of post-liberal anti-equivalence towards the central political institutions of liberalism.
• Thus denunciation turns upon the very institutions which once purported to host disputes over matters of worth.
• But social media provides a limitless capacity for this contradiction to be studied and emphasised, such that institutions (parliaments, markets, laws, firms etc) become increasingly seen as fictions presented for the contingent advantages of the ‘embodied’ actors (journalists, politicians, officials) who seek to represent them.

Full text

Davies, Will. 2021. Anti-Equivalence: Pragmatics of post-liberal dispute. European Journal of
Social Theory, 24(1), pp. 44-64. ISSN 1368-4310 [Article]
https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/28950/
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Anti-Equivalence:
Pragmatics of post-liberal dispute
William Davies
July 2020
This is a pre-print of an article accepted for publication by European Journal of Social Theory:
https://journals.sagepub.com/home/est
Abstract
In the early 21
st
century, liberal democracies have witnessed their foundational norms of critique
and deliberation being disrupted by a combination of populist and technological forces. A distinctive
style of dispute has appeared, in which a speaker denounces the unfairness of all liberal and
institutional systems of equivalence, including the measures of law, economics and the various other
‘tests’ which convention scholars have deemed core to organisations. The article reviews how
sociologists of critique have tended to treat critical capacities as oriented towards consensus, but
then considers how technologies of real-time ‘control’ circumvent liberal critique altogether. In
response, a different type of dispute emerges in the digital public sphere, which abandons
equivalences in general, instead adopting a non-representational template of warfare. This style of
post-liberal dispute is manifest in the rhetoric of populists, but does not originate there.
Keywords
Disputes, liberalism, public sphere, control, populism

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In the first three years of his Presidency, Donald Trump’s twitter account featured the word “unfair”
eighty times, typically in relation to how he was being treated by the media or the Democratic Party
in Congress. The persecution complex of the most powerful man on the planet, framed in the
ostensibly normative language of ‘fairness’, prompts wide-ranging questions about how the
language and affects of injustice are mobilised in contemporary societies. Trump’s most ardent
supporters are those who are objectively privileged, in racial and economic terms, but who feel that
this privilege is not as great as it should be or used to be (Brown, 2017, 2020). International evidence
on those most likely to support right-wing populist parties and leaders shows that they tend to
express feelings of “relative deprivation”, enjoying above-average incomes and wealth, but
experiencing a sense of unfairness regarding the improvements experience by others (Pettigrew,
2017; Eatwell & Goodwin, 2018).
Elsewhere, the digital public sphere has witnessed ruptures which themselves contributed to
Trump’s political rise. On the one hand, a type of reactionary libertarian discourse has taken hold, in
which freedom is only authentic if it means the freedom to communicate anything to anyone,
regardless of its epistemic, moral or aesthetic value. On the other, there is a mode of radicalised
suspicion, identifying originally with the Left, which doubts the possibility of any institution serving a
common good, as opposed to the contingent cultural and personal agendas of its spokespersons.
These opposing sides in a ‘culture war’ share certain formal characteristics, in being aimed primarily
at the obstruction of normative and epistemic consensus, deploying the classic ‘trolling’ techniques
of humour, memes, outrage and ad hominem attack to do so (Phillips, 2015). Contrary to initial
hopes, social media platforms such as Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter have turned out to be
dissensus-making machines, helping to generate a more paranoid mindset about public life in
general.
Sociologists have long been interested in critique as an everyday or ‘lay’ phenomenon, that takes
place beyond the limits of professional criticism, critical theory or expert disciplines. These studies
have often sought to understand how and where ‘critique’ as understood by scholars morphs into
something else altogether. Boltanski’s work in developing a ‘sociology of critique’ used the empirical
case of letters to a newspaper expressing ‘denunciations’ of various kinds, which he studied to
understand when a complaint appeared to reflect an injustice in the world, and when it appeared to
reflect on the mental state of the complainant (Boltanski, 1984). Latour’s suggestion that critique

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had “run out of steam” derived from a sense that the doubts of critical theory had become a new
common sense, that sought to unmask too much (Latour, 2004). Boland has written of a new
“cacophony of critique”, which seeks to turn the unmasking of power into a type of “spectacle”
(Boland, 2018).
This paper shares these sociological concerns, in tracing a genre of contemporary controversies
which abandon critical foundations, and take on some of the properties associated with war. A key
feature of many rhetorical conflicts today is that they contain no immanent grounds of their own
resolution, thereby debarring the possibility of a resulting consensus. Absent any implicit normative
premise, reflexivity or standard of judgement, it becomes inappropriate to describe such situations
as ones of ‘critique’. Nevertheless, we may still retain Boltanski’s wider concepts of ‘dispute’ and
‘denunciation’, to refer to these situated rhetorical conflicts. In the post-liberal disputes I am
referring to, denunciations take on a spectacular quality, which tips into a type of eye-catching rage.
This has the tactical advantage of cutting through the vast flood of voices, all competing for
attention in the digital public sphere, and becoming difficult to ignore. Alternatively, comedians
(such as Beppe Grillo) and comical political figures (such as Trump and Boris Johnson) deploy an
entertaining persona for political effect, managing to draw eyeballs towards them amidst an
otherwise overwhelming glut of information (Milburn, 2019). Body language has become imbued
with fresh significance in the context of over-abundant data, seeming to bi-pass a semiotic glut to
reveal ‘authentic’ thoughts and feelings (Andrejevic, 2013).
To explore this escalation of discursive hostilities, I build on the pragmatist sociology of critique as
developed by Boltanski and his various co-authors since the 1980s (Boltanski & Thevenot, 1999,
2006; Boltanski, 2011, 2012; Blokker, 2011; Wagner, 1994). Boltanski and his colleagues argued that
everyday social situations periodically erupt into disputes regarding the worth of a material object,
artefact, action or person (for instance, a disagreement over a hiring decision). When these
situations arise, parties to the dispute may draw on metaphysical claims about justice in order to
denounce one course of action, and to affirm another, and deploy them in the form of ‘tests’ which
seek to prove differences of value (Boltanski & Thevenot, 2006). These tests serve as ‘equivalence
principles’ or ‘commensuration’ devices, that allow judgement to be exercised fairly over diverse
people and things, and inequalities to be measured (Espeland & Stevens, 1998). Critique is thus
deployed with an unspoken aspiration to consensus regarding judgements of value. Disputes are
characterised by uncertainty, which critical tests (resting on diverse moral accounts of worth) seek
to resolve, such that a shared sense of reality is restored.

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What happens, however, when parties to a dispute abandon the liberal aspiration to justice-as-
consensus? How should we understand judgements which draw on no external measure or
principle, and aim primarily to attack and discredit the judgements of others? How do disputes
proceed once measurement in general is targeted? Such controversies involve no quest for
resolution or ‘settling up’, but merely highlights the endless, irresolvable imbalances and injustices
that are waged by one party against the other. This is the lingua franca of both social media ‘wars’
and much populist discourse. As Boltanski and Thevenot also note, “the act of bypassing justice
and behaving only as one pleases, without being burdened by the requirement to explain, is
the defining act of justice” (Boltanski & Thevenot, 1991: 37-38).
To understand such post-liberal disputes , I seek to identify some of their political and institutional
conditions. If the ideal liberal critique is located in the liberal public sphere (Habermas, 2015), what
are the formal preconditions of post-liberal denunciations in their present manifestations? My
argument here is that, as the impositions of neoliberalism have become more far-reaching and
inescapable, under the auspices of the ‘control society’, resistance and complaint have become
increasingly outrageous, embodied and violent in nature. In the following section, I contrast the
types of ‘disputes’ studied by convention scholars, which seek agreement, with situations governed
by surveillance and constant real-time reaction. I then consider how the critical public sphere is
reconfigured, once principles of equivalence are discarded. This then feeds into a consideration of
‘populist’ rhetoric, rooted in Schmittian notions of politics as war and ideals of direct democracy
(Mouffe, 1999, 2018).
Equivalence and its limits
Whether considered as a political philosophy or (in a Foucauldian sense) as a political rationality,
liberalism begins from a principle of the formal equality of persons. The political, institutional and
epistemological challenges that liberalism confronts are of how to establish this formal equality in
practice, and what forms of redress should be available when it fails. Within the liberal imaginary,
the separation of the ‘state’ from the ‘market’, or ‘politics’ from ‘economics’, is a crucial principle
(Polanyi, 1957). But across both domains we can see the same problem of how to establish
instruments which establish equivalence between separate persons, actions and objects, and to do
so in ways that appear ‘fair’. Judicial authority, rooted in liberal ideals of procedural fairness and

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in this paper?

The article reviews how sociologists of critique have tended to treat critical capacities as oriented towards consensus, but then considers how technologies of real-time ‘ control ’ circumvent liberal critique altogether. 

Q2. What is the decisive form of non-representational valuation in the digital public?

One of the most decisive forms of non-representational valuation in the digital public sphere is laughter, which conforms to the cybernetic logic of real-time, embodied feedback. 

Q3. What are the common devices used to represent differences?

Countless ‘commensuration’ devices (indicators, league tables, performance measures etc) allow for differences to be represented in objective terms (Espeland & Stevens, 1998). 

Q4. What is the problem of achieving social coordination in the absence of a general principle or test?

The problem of achieving social coordination in the absence of a general principle or test of equivalence is one that is foundational in the domain of warfare, but which subsequently arises in economic spheres under the guise of management (Beniger, 1986), then in civil society and the public sphere thanks to the affordances of platforms. 

Q5. What is the default assumption of pragmatist sociologists of critique?

The default assumption of pragmatist sociologists of critique is that (potentially acceptable) justifications are the central means by which institutions and society cohere. 

Q6. What is the question of why critique became toothless and pointless in everyday situations?

The question is why did critique become toothless and pointless in everyday situations in the first place, such that ‘tests’ and ‘equivalence principles’ ceased to resolve disputes on the basis of liberal equality. 

Q7. What are the challenges that liberalism faces?

The political, institutional and epistemological challenges that liberalism confronts are of how to establish this formal equality in practice, and what forms of redress should be available when it fails. 

Q8. What does the liberal imagination have in common with justice and markets?

What justice and markets have in common, within the liberal imagination, is the promise that scores will be settled, and parties can therefore move on without lingering grievances. 

Q9. What is the purpose of the liberal judgement architectures?

If the purpose of the liberal judgement – whether by law, markets or everyday ‘tests’ – is to allow people to ‘move on’ and go their separate ways, the purpose of contemporary behavioural surveillance architectures is to prevent them from doing any such thing. 

Q10. What is the role of statistics in the defence of the status quo?

The liberal state and its critics both deploy the conventions of statistics as tools of justification and denunciation (Desrosieres, 1998). 

Q11. What is the struggle to present this injury in the authentic and immediate way?

The struggle is in how to present this injury in the most authentic and immediate way, which involves a constant battle against the necessarily mediated nature of public discourse. 

Q12. What is the role of the control room in the liberal ideal of consensus?

If the liberal ideal of consensus is premised on the technology of the printing press, this post-liberal ideal of control depends on interfaces of various kinds: control rooms, dashboards and screens that allow the controller to receive and respond to a constant influx of information (Galloway, 2013; Hookway, 2014). 

Q13. What is the purpose of this perspective?

An intended consequence of this perspective is to highlight the degree of critical agency that all parties have in the reproduction of social and economic reality, and consequently to expose the moral and empirical fragility of the status quo. 

Q14. What is the task for the would-be coordinator?

The task for the would-be coordinator is not a rhetorical or normative one, of convincing people to accept a given principle or measure, but a wholly computational one of aggregating and analysing incoming data in real-time, such that instructions can be constantly updated to steer behaviour. 

Q15. What is the typology of critical forms?

Boltanski’s typology of critical forms includes those which introduce “existential tests”, which rely wholly on subjective feelings of humiliation, pain and shame, and are “difficult to formulate or thematize because there exists no pre-established format to frame them, or even because, considered from the standpoint of the existing order, they have an aberrant character” (Boltanski, 2011: 107-8). 

Q16. What is the way to build up rich, multi-dimensional pictures of behaviour?

The platform economy offers the perfect technologies with which to build up rich, multi-dimensional pictures of behaviour, which grow more detailed all the time and which transcend institutional or normative divisions such as ‘public’ and ‘private’, ‘personal’ and ‘professional’. 

Q17. What is the role of the critical theorist in the creation of an alternative account of reality?

This in turn involves the provision of proofs, methodological equivalences and justifications, on which an alternative account of reality can be based. 

Q18. What is the appeal to principles of equivalence?

The appeal to principles of equivalence is necessarily made on the basis that individuals can attain perspectival distance from the dispute at hand. 

Q19. What is the problem with the 'official' mechanisms and principles?

as this article has sought to argue, these are symptoms of a broader crisis of critique that has seen a mentality of deep suspicion become normalised across the political spectrum, taking aim at all ‘official’ mechanisms and principles on which justice might be established. 

Q20. What is the equivalence between monetary price and use value?

The liberal defence of markets is also anchored in a perceived formal equality that is created between parties to an exchange, and the equivalence that is generated between monetary price and use value (Foucault, 2007; Watson, 2018).