Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1998 16:52:08 +0100
From: Carsten Sestoft <sestoft-AT-coco.ihi.ku.dk>
Subject: RE: Bourdieu: realist, materialist...?


Dear Sergio -- some brief comments on your last post:

>>I suppose that Bourdieu takes from Cassirer what he can use (relational
>>thinking as the "idealist" part of an epistemology that considers scientific
>>knowledge to be some sort of synthesis of an "idealist" side
>>-- categories, concepts, or theories --and a "realist" side
>>-- empirical knowledge, "Anschauung") and then replaces the
>>"human spirit" a the source of idealities with the more
>>materialist and historical notion of historically constructed categories,
>>"principles of vision and division", or "cognitive dispositions", e.g.
>>those that have been constructed in the scientific field.
>
>That is what I meant! But my problem: what is the puroport of a "more
>*materialist* and historical notion..."?

"Materialist" in the simple sense derived by Bourdieu from the famous
article on "Primitive Classification" by Durkheim and Mauss (cf. the
introduction by Lo=EFc Wacquant to _Réponses_/_Invitation to a Reflexive
Sociology_, 1992), i.e. the idea that the categories of classification or
thinking are modelled on social divisions. Or in other words: the
idealities are founded in material differences (or in social relations
which have material effects).

>Relationality was adopted
>because it is demonstrably effective, because it is dynamically
>conducive to knowledge where substantialism tends to stop (e.g., the
>development of non euclidean geometries, transfinite numbers, etc. - but
>especially in sociology) and because it offsets the potentially
>ideological confusions of substantialism (not to say the violence, in
>social alchemy). My question is: in what way is "materialism" effective,
>that is, in which non-metaphysical sense can it be applied to insure a
>specific effect? Materialism is, as a dogmatic ontology --"all that
>exists is material"-- metaphysical. I do not think Bourdieu upholds any
>such metaphysics.

Nor do I, cf. the above remark which means to say that relations (which are
not material but have material consequences) are always intertwined with or
connected to material things. (Something her seems to me to be unclear,
perhaps I am confusing two problems.) In this sense materialism is
"effective" beacuse they are non-idealist or not exclusively idealist.

>Once again: if his theory is of practice, and it is
>reflexive, should we not seek the sense of the terms employed in that
>very sense, i.e., in terms of practical effects and prerogatives? (This
>need not invite relativism, nor irrationalism, to our table.)

If you mean by "practical effects" the sort of progress of thinking that
allows one to construct and understand new objects (e.g. to connect
specific modes of thinking to the social history of the field), I agree --
I mean that it is less important what all these notions mean in the last
analysis than their effectiveness as scientific tools -- because the last
analysis is, so to speak, unimportant to empirical research.

>Of course! But then we have a priority: first epistemology
>(relationalism), then ontology. The epistemology grounds itself on
>demonstrable effects, on rational grounds that need no intrinsic
>spirituality or a priori dogma to insure their practical benefits. The
>ontology is then dependent on the epistemology, but it will be an
>ontology that is free to use the ambiguous contrasts that arise from
>ordinary language --ideas, things, perceptions, reality, soul, what
>not-- without pretending to be anything final. It will be ultimately
>sceptical of any metaphysical posit. It will refer ontological questions
>back to epistemological ones.

This is a very fine and illuminating way to put it! I never thought about
it in that way, but I think you are quite right.

I look forward to more details.

best wishes
Carsten


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