Date: Wed, 02 Sep 1998 16:04:13 -0700 (PDT)
From: Dennis R Redmond <dredmond-AT-OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>
Subject: RE: Bourdieu: realist, materialist...?


On Wed, 2 Sep 1998 S.Pines-Martin-AT-iaea.org wrote:

> is both gentle and unyielding. Since I do not occupy a position within
> the field of intellectual or scientific production (not even that of a
> student: I study in quasi-hermitic conditions, as I must work every day
> for a living), I feel that the most viable option for me is to speak in
> a personal way, rather than to run the risk of deceiving myself and
> others, i.e., intuiting the field's censure and modifying my voice to
> make it "sound right" while lacking all the dispositions, generative
> habitus, that are necessary for a more-or-less authentic dialogue. I
> would be summoning intellectual disaster upon myself if I were to play
> the sorcerer's apprentice.

Well, we *all* occupy a position in the field of theory, even if we're at
the margins of the thing, it's just that Bourdieu wants us to think about
how late capitalism, in all its unrivaled complexity, has already molded
us and continues to overdetermine our thought-processes (something none of
us asked for or voted on or even had the freedom to decide). If you've
ever watched a sports talk show, then you've already participated in the
work of theory, even if only on a mundane or very localized level.
Also, the risk of intellectual disaster is much, *much* less when you come
from the margins of that field (because you have less social capital
invested in the status quo); strange as it sounds, sometimes it's the
very distance one has from the prevailing theory-markets which provide the
most productive theoretical insights. A simpler way of saying this is that
Bourdieu cares deeply and passionately about theory and about
transforming the real world in a positive way, and that the two are
necessarily linked: to understand and change capitalism we need theories
of how capitalism works nowadays, what it does to people, and why and how
it turns human beings into dead, reified categories (and conversely, how
it endows the commodity form with the allure and excitement expropriated
from the human beings which produced them). So he's always going beyond
the categories, showing how real life is always richer and more diverse
than the theories, but also how a neoliberal-trending capitalism does the
most hideous cultural and social violence to ordinary folks. The hope
there is that some day ordinary folks will come up with their own
theories, and figure our Alcatel, Daimler and Nokia aren't really their
friends, after all, and that the almighty euro ought not to be the
be-all and end-all of human life.

> That's why I'm asking what Bourdieu's
> "materialism" amounts to -I would like to hear different interpretations
> of it. In what sense is he a "materialist"? This may sound stupid, but I
> often feel that he is a materialist only in order to offset the social,
> practical consequences of a one-sided idealism (when you examine the
> ideologically misrecognised material determinations of so much human
> misery, idealism becomes an idle method). I doubt Bourdieu is
> philosophically inclined to materialism, in fact I believe he is
> probably more inclined towards Cassirer's critical idealism minus the
> idealism, whose spiritualism he corrects with a quasi-pragmatist sense
> of the "material" that does not seek nor claim ontological fundaments
> ("the real is the relational" is not equal to "it is spiritual", nor is
> it, as relational, substantially "material").

My feeling is that the roots of Bourdieu's philosophy go back to an
unlikely admixture of J.P. Sartre -- not the existential Sartre, but the
later, dialectical theorist, the critic of the PCF and sympathizer of May
'68 -- and Theodor Adorno, one of the greatest Marxist theorists of our
century. Adorno talked about a project of "negative dialectics", which
comes very close to a multinational Marxism (he was as fierce a critic of
the Eastern bloc as he was of the NATO bloc, a nice anticipation of the
1968 rebellions). Bourdieu has taken up some of Adorno's themes and pushed
them further, especially in sociology: like Adorno and Sartre, he
takes the notion of capitalism and class struggle very seriously
indeed, but he doesn't use these categories like the PCF does and did --
as mere stereotypes or bureaucratically-approved labels handed down by
some committee somewhere. Rather, they're applied creatively, in the
fields of philosophy, aesthetics, sociology, etc.; they're derived out of
the material processes of late capitalist society itself, and then used to
drive forwards the critique of that society. Bourdieu's "Distinction", for
example, basically reinvented the whole notion of cultural studies in 
the Seventies, in the form of the (subjective) habitus and
(objective) field; or what amounts, in retrospect, to the birth-hour of
a truly EU-wide consumer culture. It's the quite real social conflicts of
the EU -- its class struggles, its widespread immigration, its neoliberal
austerities and working-class resistance, its micropolitics and
macropolitics -- which form the material basis for Bourdieu's work; I like
to think of him as the leading Leftist thinker of the nascent Eurostate.

-- Dennis

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