David, thanks very much for this. I like this use of Boltanksi and Thevenot a lot-- there is something to be said for making a comparison here between what they do, in all of its seven-fold (and now eight-fold) complexity, and the question Biella asked about publics and counterpublics. My sense of Warner's desire to have counterpublics is to point to those things outside of a public which are used to justify its worth. A counterpublic therefore justifies its worth by opposing itself to something members see as dominant/hegemonic... as opposed to doing it by reference to other kinds of values. Not sure which city counterpublics live in though. the country I guess :)<br>
<br>Attending to the ways practices are justified by participants is something I tried to do in understanding Free Software (and the Internet as a ground for that practice, for which the Clark quotation is emblematic). In my book, however, I condensed that practice of justification under the label of "movement" (Chapter 3) and tried to argue that what makes Free Software/Open Source into a movement is when people argue about and try to justify the worth of the other practices that make up what they do. In retrospect rethinking that practice not under the label of movements but of 'justifications of worth' might have made more sense.<br>
<br>ck<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 7:21 AM, David M. Berry <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:D.M.Berry@swansea.ac.uk">D.M.Berry@swansea.ac.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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A useful way to reconceptualise the debate and avoid the problems of a
metaphysical concept like 'justice' is to think in terms of assembling
or making, that is of justification. Here a useful discussion of this
as a way of reconceptualising Michael Walzer's notion of 'Spheres of
Justice' is in Boltanski and Thevenot (2006) <i>On Justification:
Economies of Worth</i>. They use the notion of six 'cities' (renamed
'worlds' in Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) <i>The New Spirit of
Capitalism</i>) and discuss the way in which different 'cities'
construct different notions of how a justification is made and with
reference to what (in this case 'tests of worth')...</div></blockquote></div><br>