Date: Tue, 5 Mar 1996 04:55:39 -0500
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Date: Tue, 05 Mar 1996 10:34:15 +0100
To: bourdieu-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
From: j.h.helle-valle-AT-sum.uio.no (Jo Helle-Valle)
Subject: Re: re: 'French', or 'Precision and accessability'
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Maude Frances writes:

"... When a piece of writing is complex and 'difficult' it is easy to 'blame
the text' ... but in the present case. I would suggest that a more
systematic approach to reading Bourdieu might be a better response. Of
course those without the 'jargon' or a basic understanding of Bourdieu's
terminology will find a lot of his writing baffling and possibly even
ambiguous, but this is hardly grounds for suggesting that B simplify his
presentation. ..."

Let me provide one example of what I take to be an unnecessary complication.
Note that what I cite is one (1) sentence!:

The conjuncture capable of transforming practices objectively co-ordinated
because subordinated to partially or wholly identical objective necessities,
into collective action (e.g. revolutionary action) is constituted in the
dialectical relationship between, on the one hand, a habitus, understook as
a system of lasting, transposable dispostition which, integrating past
experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perception,
appreciations, and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely
diversified tasks, thanks to analogical transfers of schemes permitting the
solution of similarly shaped problems, and thanks to the unceasing
corrections of the results obtained, dialectically produced by those
results, and on the other hand, an objective event which exerts its action
of conditional stimulation calling for or demanding a determinate response,
only on thse who are disposed to constitute it as such because they are
endowed with a determinate type of disposition (which are amenable to
reduplication and reinforcement by the 'awakening of class consciousness',
that is, by the direct or indirect possession of a discourse capable of
securing symbolic mastery of the practically mastered principles of class
habitus). [from Outline of a theory of practice, Cambridge: CUP, pp. 82.3]

Peuwh.... That was one sentence - I hope I got it right.. (It kind of
reminds me of some of the passages of Hegel's Phenomenologie des Geistes.)
Shall I take the next one? No, I guess it is enough - besides, I have my own
words to write.
        To me this is unnecessary complication and vagueness. No one is
going to tell me that this amounts to analytical precision or that it could
not have been made more accessible and, simultaneously, more precise.
        Moreover, in danger of exposing myself as a very shallow and
one-dimensional person, I still hold that many of the points made by
Bourdieu are - after stripping them of all the classy words - extremely
simple and have been made by Marx long ago.
This is not to say, however, that I do not cherish Bourdieu's works - he has
obviously made some great contributions. I only think that much of it could
have been presented much better and I sometimes suspect that there is a
desire to make it look more intellectual than is necessary.

It might be appropriate to cite Wittgenstein: On the one hand, "The fellow
isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy." (On certainty, #467.) On the
other hand, =AB... in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the
point where one would just like to emit an inarticulate sound=BB
(Philosophical Investigations =A7261).


Jo Helle-Valle
University of Oslo



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