The Sociology of Regimes of Engagement

Some historical context might help provide orientation on the framework for understanding protest in Russia (and beyond) that my book outlines.

Its overall background is formed by a family of research perspectives, developed in France since the 1980s, that are sometimes grouped under the heading of “pragmatic sociology”—or, more broadly, a “pragmatic turn” because they are rooted in a larger conversation that also involves historians and philosophers. Pragmatic sociology is multi-faceted and includes authors pursuing a variety of approaches. Olga Shevchenko interprets my method as being rooted in “the work of Boltanski and Thévenot.” Indeed their classic On Justification (Reference Lamont and Thévenot2006) forms an important part of the background to my analysis. That book systematized the ways in which we criticize each other and denounce injustice in specific social situations. This made it a fundamental contribution to the social sciences because it did not assume (as Marxist-inspired traditions tend to) that social scientists have a higher vantage point for critique, unavailable to ordinary people caught in the false consciousness of the dominated, nor did it posit (as many Anglophone social scientists do) that critique can be conceptualized as ultimately expressing individual “preferences.” The book analyzed the different ways in which critique is always justified with reference to a limited set of culturally available conceptions of the common good. Most people are familiar with at least some of these conceptions, though their relative importance will vary according to time, place, and situation. When we criticize each other, our critique, as Boltanski and Thévenot observed, openly or explicitly expresses a domestic, civic, market, or industrial logic; it might also refer to the values of inspiration or fame or, as other authors suggested (Latour Reference Latour1995), to the ecological good that attaches value to the environment. In their most sophisticated form, they have been codified by political philosophers, but the philosophers didn’t invent them, nor is familiarity with philosophy required to draw on them. Often critique will draw on a combination of several of these logics, but that combination will not be random or a mere expression of individual preferences: in order to be effective or even intelligible, critique has to face a “reality test.”

This analysis of critique and justification is now somewhat (though still insufficiently) known in the English-speaking world thanks to the belated translation of On Justification (Boltanski and Thévenot Reference Lamont and Thévenot2006) and some other works that rely on its framework. Most famous among these is Luc Boltanski’s and Ève Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism (Reference Boltanski and Chiapello1999; Reference Boltanski and Chiapello2005), which shows how capitalism has, since the 1960s, responded to a critique rooted in the logic of inspiration by developing a new logic based on limited-time “projects.” The capitalist economy now demands the very flexibility, self-invention, and excitement that its previous incarnations were criticized for stifling in the name of efficiency.

Crucially, however, everything described so far—the entire set of ways in which we resort to justification—is just one of the ways in which we engage with each other and with the world, one regime of engagement among others. There are at least three others, all of which are discussed in my book: (1) the regime of individual interests; (2) the regime of familiarity; and (3) the regime of exploration. Each of the four regimes gives rise to a grammar of commonality and difference: we coordinate our actions with others differently depending on what we assume others to be engaged in. If we are all engaging in the pursuit of individual interests, then we can coordinate strategically and “negotiate” between our different goals. If the assumption is that we are seeking justice, then our shared grammar will be one of critique and justification. In a situation structured by effortless, intimate familiarity, we can come together based on different affinities to the same objects (“common-places”). And the regime of exploration gives rise to a grammar of playful interaction that is encountered in situations ranging from musical improvisation through scientific research to communal living. Most situations will be governed by some complex hybrid of, and perhaps clashes between, these different grammars. There will also be conflicts within each grammar, as in addition to coordinating collective action they also set the terms in which conflicts play out: collision between incompatible interests is not the same as tension between different conceptions of the common good.

The study of these different regimes, and the attendant grammars of commonality and difference, emerged out the cross-national comparative research initiated by Laurent Thévenot after he collaborated with Luc Boltanski on On Justification. This research program has been advanced by scholars studying empirical cases (ranging from dormitory life to environmental protest and from online role-players to mountain shepherds) in such different geographical settings as Brazil, France, Finland, Italy, Japan, Ukraine, the USA, and, in very substantive ways, Russia (e.g., Blok Reference Blok2015; Breviglieri, Diaz, and Nardacchione Reference Breviglieri, Diaz and Nardacchione2017; Centemeri Reference Centemeri2015, Reference Centemeri2017; Eranti Reference Eranti2018, 2017; Lebedev Reference Lebedev2017; Lamont and Thévenot Reference Lamont and Thévenot2000; Luhtakallio Reference Luhtakallio2018; Thévenot Reference Thévenot2014, Reference Thévenot2019; Thévenot, Rousselet, and Daucé Reference Thévenot, Rousselet and Daucé2017), but it remains insufficiently understood among English speakers and especially in the United States outside of a narrow circle of sociologists. This seems to be why the different regimes of engagement we study are often conflated with the different kinds of critique analyzed in On Justification. It also seems to explain the commentators’ confusion surrounding my own approach to these regimes. This concerns both the range of regimes of engagement that I talk about—out of the four I discuss, Shevchenko and Arnold acknowledge only three, perhaps because I spent too little time on the regime of justification, assuming it to have been sufficiently theorized—and my substantive analysis of how they are articulated in Russia. That said, I acknowledge that my conceptualization of the regime of exploration would benefit from being fleshed out even more. I am currently working on this in a paper together with Andrew S. Hoffmann and Luca Pattaroni. Finally, as Veikko Eranti (Reference Eranti2018) has suggested, it is less confusing, for an English-language audience, to speak of a “grammar of individual interests” rather than, as I did in the book following Thévenot, a “liberal” grammar.

Nowhere in the book did I intend to suggest that the different regimes of engagement map neatly onto national cultures, specific social movements, or any particular group of people. The very idea behind the notion of such regimes is that they are not statistical abstractions. Instead, they are specific ways in which we interact with the world. As such, different people usually have access to different regimes of engagement rather than being embodiments of just one of them. Most of us have experienced situations in which we were curious explorers; most of us have been in settings where we had to pick a preferred course of action, weighing different options strategically; most of us have engaged in critique and justification at some point or another; and we all have things that we hold dear for reasons that may be hard to articulate and cannot be reduced to values, norms, or preferences. Just like most people are multilingual in that they can switch between different sociolects, idiolects, regional dialects, or at least language registers, so most of us can move from one regime of engaging with the world to another, sometimes in the blink of an eye. As my choice of words implies, I find Sidorkina’s suggestion to speak of “registers” instead of “grammars” useful and stimulating because it emphasizes agency and reflexivity over unconscious structures. What I like about “grammars,” however, is that, at least to a non-linguist such as myself, it refers to sometimes radically different ways of mentally structuring the world. Switching between grammars, though it can occur quickly, involves more uncertainty, creativity, transaction costs, and potential for misunderstanding than switching between registers, which makes them like the regimes of engagement that I tried to describe.

What applies to individual people goes all the more for entire movements. Thus, I would claim, much more affirmatively than Olga Shevchenko does in this issue, that probably no “mobilization or movement anywhere in the world can be considered properly describable in terms of [nothing but the] liberal grammar” Every movement will exhibit a mix between different grammars. However, by studying the specific ways in which they are articulated, we can learn a lot about specific places and times, Shevchenko’s example of Denis Karagodin’s legal-cum-personal investigation being a case in point. It is in this sense that Russia is a particularly fertile ground to study the often overlooked regime of affinity to common-places—for historical reasons, this regime is particularly developed in Russia and puts in greater relief a certain mode of engaging with each other and coming together for collective action that we can then also identify in other places.

In no way, however, does this mean that people in Russia are unfamiliar with other regimes. In fact, within the sociology of regimes of engagement, one of my book’s contributions has been taken precisely to show the role that the liberal regime has come to play in Russian society, particularly for political opposition movements (Thévenot Reference Thévenot2017, Reference Thévenot2019). The main point of my book was not simply to argue that social scientists should pay more attention to regimes of engagement other than the liberal one, but that the tensions between scholarly perspectives mirror the tensions people experience in protest and other social settings. Exploration-based engagement can be at odds with a grammar of justification—while exploring the world, we might resist or evade the kind of commitment that is a prerequisite for critique and debates about the common good. Similarly, a liberal grammar that sees collective action as an aggregation of and negotiation between individual choices can be at odds with a regime of personal affinity which assumes that collectivities are based on more than shared preferences and goals. These are conflicts that play out again and again across a variety of situations, and I argue that they offer a richer perspective on the dynamics in Russian society than the caricatural view of Russia being made up of pro- and anti-Putinists or monolithic collectives such as “the regime” and “the middle class.”

Another theoretical contribution was my identification of different emotional regimes that correspond to each regime of engagement or, as I put it in the book, “expectations regarding what emotional expressions are appropriate in which setting” (Gabowitsch Reference Gabowitsch2016, 68). Thus, it is by no means true that, as Olga Shevchenko writes in this issue, “emotions, or, for that matter, attachments to political symbols […] are viewed as antithetical to the more rational ´liberal grammar´ of political participation.” Rather, each regime implies its own way of expressing emotions. In fact the main example I analyze is a video clip by a political group close to Navalny that embodies a liberal emotional grammar by casting emotions as pertaining to individuals, seen as detached from any social background (Gabowitsch Reference Gabowitsch2016, 67–74).

It should now be clear why, on one level, I hesitate to agree with Maria Sidorkina in this issue who, after providing an elegant and accurate summary of my framework, “contend[s] that it is not the ‘dynamic between different regimes’ to which we must attend to understand the mechanisms of political evolution in Russia, but rather the dynamic between activists.” I hesitate because this view might be seen as fueling the common misunderstanding that conflates regimes of engagement with types of people, pitting “explorers” against “individualists.” On another level, though, her point is well-taken: analyses of concrete disputes between protesters might have provided more compelling illustrations of the clashes and compromises between different regimes of engagement than the individual voices I mostly cite. At the same time, they would have made an already voluminous book even longer, and, of course, such disputes are more difficult to document faithfully at protest events than they are in the more stable settings of debating clubs, as Sidorkina’s own work attests (Sidorkina Reference Sidorkina2015, Reference Sidorkina2016) Still, such analysis would be a rewarding task for future collaboration between sociologists, anthropologists, and socio-linguists.

The Middle Class

To conclude, let me return briefly to the middle class—another issue that is particularly prone to misunderstandings. Arnold speaks of the middle-class perspective as a view through a “rear-view mirror,” but the problem is that, as I show in the book, in the Russian case at least this discourse was firmly established before the start of the protest wave in December 2011. Thus, we are clearly dealing with a set of normative expectations rather than an attempt to make sense of the empirical reality in hindsight. The creation of a middle class in post-Soviet Russia has been very much a top-down project. In striking ways, it resembles earlier attempts by the Soviet government to make its vision of social structure come true through social engineering—violence at first, but, from the 1950s onward, increasingly through administrative procedures and institutions corresponding to a new conceptual apparatus (Bikbov forthcoming). This is a particular case of what convention theory (in economics) and pragmatic sociology call “investments into form” (Diaz-Bone Reference Diaz-Bone, Glückler, Suddaby and Lenz2018). The success of this project cannot be measured simply by tabling socio-demographic factors because statistical abstraction, far from being a neutral instrument of observation, is itself part of the process of creating new conventions (Thévenot Reference Thévenot2016). Any meaningful account of the emergence of a new class—be it Marxist, pragmatist, or other—must show how a new class identity shapes consciousness or behavior, or at least explain why we should consider a class real even though it does not appear to affect people’s minds or actions. In a classic work of sociology, Luc Boltanski (Reference Boltanski1987) showed how, in France, the new socio-professional category of “cadres,” composed of people of widely different origins, income levels, occupations, and lifestyles, emerged in social reality even though there was no place for it in dominant social theories. No equivalent account has been provided for a Russian “middle class.” Given the tiny role that it plays in people’s lives and self-understandings in Russia, I doubt that it could be.

This is why, unlike Arnold, I do not see my resistance to the “middle-class” narrative as the book’s central argument—instead, to echo his use of optical metaphors, it is an attempt to remove a blurry and narrowly focused lens to get a better view of a complex landscape. Nor do I posit an association between the liberal grammar of engagement and membership in a middle (or any other) class—that kind of reductionism would be antithetical to the pragmatic approach I restated above. In fact, I am not at all concerned with establishing any sort of yardstick for a middle-class account, since I find the whole debate of little use for an understanding of the reality of protest. In the absence of some coherent theory of class agency and false consciousness along Marxian or other lines, the continued use of a term that social actors reject as a self-designation is one of two things. It can be a purely scholastic exercise in definitions or an amalgamation of statistical generalizations with expectations of behavior, which are usually normative and ultimately shaped by the experience of a limited set of North American and West European societies. In either case, it implies a black-box model of protest events as mechanical indicators of wider social processes. Thus, it has limited value for an understanding of protest as an interesting phenomenon in its own right.