TY - JOUR AU - Nissen, Morten PY - 2013/10/07 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Beyond Innocence and Cynicism: Concrete Utopia in Social Work with Drug Users JF - Outlines. Critical Practice Studies JA - Outlines VL - 14 IS - 2 SE - Articles DO - 10.7146/ocps.v14i2.9793 UR - https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/9793 SP - 54-78 AB - The article identifies a problem in socio-cultural-historical activity theory (SCHAT) with ignoring how hope and<br />power constitute the theory itself, and suggests that this is why the tradition faces a bad choice between<br />functionalist or utopianist reductions of its own social relevance.<br />Currently, remedies for this kind of (perhaps shammed) innocence can be found in Foucauldian and Latourian<br />approaches to knowledge. However, since these appear to presuppose the (often feigned) cynicism of a purely<br />negative standpoint that fits all too smoothly into the neoliberal management it describes, this presents us with<br />an impossible choice or oscillation at another level.<br />To get beyond it, we need the frankly self-reflected standpoint of ideology critique and the articulation of<br />‘concrete utopia’, i.e. real possibilities for social transformation.<br />The approach is then realized and exemplified as part of an emergent practice research in the field of drug<br />treatment. The field is broadly described as moving toward certain kinds of recognition of users’ standards, but<br />also as filled with paradoxes that allow us to intervene with theory.<br />One of these (sets of) paradoxes concerns the relations between state and civil (bourgeois) society that are<br />played out in drug treatment. Contrary to the doxa of New Public Management, the (welfare) state’s normative<br />power has not dissolved, only hides from itself. An immanent critique of practices and ideas in the field leads to<br />the suggestion that its forms of recognition imply both submission of users, and the creation of positive<br />standards and collectives.<br />To intervene in this set of issues, we must expand the SCHAT reading of its own Hegelian-Marxist legacy,<br />against the dominant liberal and scientistic trend, to engage with theories of recognition. A contemporary,<br />participatory concept of recognition is sketched, which seeks to sublate (include and supersede) submission into<br />the building of the generalizing ethics of a collective. ER -