The Experience of Injustice by Emmanuel Renault

Author:Emmanuel Renault
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI040000, Philosophy/Movements/Critical Theory, PHI019000, Philosophy/Political
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2018-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

THE QUESTION OF DISAFFILIATION

One part of the experience of injustice related to work results from the massive increase in wage earners’ insecurity (short-term work, part-time work, informal work, and the increasing precariousness of formerly stable employment). But, as Robert Castel has shown, this process is inseparable from the exclusion of vast populations from the labor market. It is a matter of two inseparable aspects of a single structural dynamic of “disaffiliation,” or of the loss of social supports for individuals’ lives. Now, by proposing a normative concept of social integration, a theory of recognition also makes it possible to articulate the kind of social critique corresponding to this kind of structural dynamic that cuts across institutions and recasts social relations of domination into a form that gives social questions their current specificity.64

As has been articulated by Castel, the concept of “disaffiliation” has the principal virtue of measuring the devastating effects of neoliberal globalization, while also struggling against the dualist presuppositions of the concept of exclusion. This alludes to an opposition between inclusion and exclusion; and this opposition seems to necessarily lead to an opposition between the disaster of desocialization and the value of integration within the current social order. Interpreted in light of the concept of disaffiliation, exclusion only appears as the extreme form of a process of desocialization that cuts across the social order (including paid work) in such a way that the current state of affairs must be subject to a global critique. An elaboration of the concept of disaffiliation nonetheless falls short in two ways, linked to the fact that (just like the concept of exclusion) it remains trapped within the general logic of a discourse of integration. On the one hand, it leads to treating some social institutions (in this case, those linked with the welfare state) as a social model, while minimizing the injustices and domination that they carry. On the other hand, it tends to see only anomie65 in everything that strays from this model. In order to maintain the concept of disaffiliation’s critical force and descriptive power, two modifications are necessary.

First, to achieve true sociological consistency, the concept of disaffiliation should not be articulated only from the macrosociological perspective of a comparative description of the institutions of the welfare state and their decline, but also from the microsociological perspective of a description of interactions that characterize the loss of social support for people’s lives.66 This description should not merely examine the loss of social programs, for the destruction of the welfare state has also led to the creation of new forms of sociality and, in the same way, to new social support systems. To maintain the idea that disaffiliation actually describes an aspect of forms of sociability typical of the present, it would probably have to be characteristic of each of the various ways that social supports break down (a task, moreover, taken up by the sociology of social precarity67). But it must also realize that the loss of the welfare state’s protections

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