Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 11:00:56 +0300 (EET DST)
From: Emrah Goker <egoker-AT-Bilkent.EDU.TR>
Subject: Revenge of Jeffrey Alexander? But revenge from what?


   
   These days I am trying to throw a net over every bit of printed
material discussing Bourdieu. I do not know if this article is discussed
here before, but I was surprised with the harshness of the blows Jeffrey
C. Alexander, the famous proponent of the neo-functionalist school, tries
to strike in his book. [Fin de Siecle Social Theory: Relativism,
Reduction, and the Problem of Reason; 1995; Verso; chapter 4 is dedicated
to the crushing down of Bourdieu's theory]
   Alexander is very angry with literally *all* the books and articles
written by Bourdieu and mainly accuses him with misrepresenting the theory
and practice of the structuralist school. Bourdieu, in all his works, is
accused to be extremely reductionist, blamed by Alexander to dictate that
thought (and thus dispositions, strategies, ideologies, "campus
radicalism", professorial ideology, etc.) is determined by the strictly
constraining social structures. 
   I will not go into detailed exposition of Alexander's criticisms, but
quote a few paragraphs:
   
	With this theoretical indifference [he means Bourdieu's concept of
        symbolic violence] to the ethical possibilities of a historical
        movement away from physical domination, Bourdieu denies the
        implications of the civilizing process that thinkers like Freud
        and Elias so well understood: it is precisely the _failure_ to 
        sublimate violence into more symbolic kinds of aggression that 
        creates the psychological conditions for the most drastic
        upheavals in contemporary life. [152]
  
        Sympathetic interpreters of Bourdieu's field theory have failed to
        appreciate the importance of the difference between an analytical
        construction that involves real, if relative, autonomy for
        elements in various institutional fields and one that rests upon
        the notion of homology, which denies it. [163]
  
        Bourdieu, who has never written a word about factories or the
        production of material goods, has spent  more time on the
        educational system than any other institutional domain. [167]  

        Because culture has been so crudely reduced too material
        circumstance, Bourdieu cannot recognize countercultures or popular 
        culture. Such phenomena are independent or antagonistic to the
        centers of social power. They suggest that `cultural tradition'
        can organize itself independently of power, a possibility that
        allows subordinated groups to maintain relatively independent, and
        often resistant, standards of judgment and taste. [178]

Finally, a quotation he makes from Jenkins ["Review of Pierre Bourdieu,
_Distinction_", in _Sociology_ 20(1), p. 104]:

        The superficiality of Bourdieu's discussion of the working class
        is matched only by its arrogance and condescension. ...Perhaps it  
        is time Bourdieu took up the anthropologist's pith helmet and
        actually went out and spent some time among the women and men
        about whom he writes. [178] 

It goes on like this. Alexander is very enraged (I recalled, last
night, while reading him, E. P. Thompson's thunderbolts sent against 
Althusser -yet Thompson was, on the whole, right) especialy in the
reductionist Marxisant posture of Bourdieu. Alexander himself is on the
side of the forces of civil society.
   So, let's discuss: What does Alexander avenge? What are the stakes in
his criticisms? And, morre importantly, is he justified?

Best Wishes,
Emrah Goker  
             

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