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Désirée Waibel &#38; Robert Schäfer (2020)In: Glauser A., Holder P., Mazzurana T., Moeschler O., Rolle V., Schultheis F. (eds) The Sociology of Arts and Markets. New Developments and Persistent Patterns. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 47-71Excerpt. “A Voice for the Voiceless. As the example of the Pepsi commercial already implies, these questions are approached from the standpoint of the pragmatic sociology of critique. Instead of relying on predetermined definitions of legitimate critique, we follow the assumption that actors—in our case the audience— are “capable of distinguishing between legitimate arguments and arrangements and illegitimate ones” (Boltanski and Thévenot 2000, 215). To explore how social critique in popular culture must be put forth in order to be considered legitimate, we selected a production aiming at social critique that the audience deemed as highly successful—Beyoncé’s Formation—and conducted an in-depth sequential analysis. For the remainder of this chapter, we focus on the music video Formation, which was released the night before the Super Bowl, and only use context material for clarification. Conceptually, we draw on the pragmatic sociology of critique as well as on political theories of representation. While both bodies of work are concerned with the question of how social critique must be put forth in order to be considered legitimate, the former examines different principles of justice—that is, focuses on what is criticised—whereas the latter concentrates on the positionality of the critic and thus focuses on who criticises. In their seminal work on justification, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (2000, 2006) emphasise the critical capabilities of actors. They argue that actors are capable of critiquing, justifying, and achieving agreement in situ by invoking different “orders of worth” guided by certain “higher common principles of justice” (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006, 141). The authors model six universal orders of worth: the world of fame (valuation of renown), the market world (valuation of competition), the industrial world (valuation of efficiency), the domestic world (valuation of tradition), the civic world (valuation of general interest) and inspired world (valuation of creativity). Critical competence, then, is the ability to invoke the pertinent order of worth at the right moment. However, since different orders of worth contradict each other, critique and justification tend to provoke counter-critique. As regards our empirical case, Boltanski and Thévenot’s model speaks to the fact that Formation is a social critique that addresses a plurality of principles of justice. Indeed, our analysis revealed that the music video is exemplary in this regard. It not only exerts the whole array of orders of worth, it also pre-empts counter-critique by rapidly and systematically switching from one order to another, thereby producing and solving tensions between them in a performative way.” (49-51)Link to the chapter