Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1998 16:53:15 +0000
From: R.J.R.Cook-AT-reading.ac.uk (Roger Cook)
Subject: Re: Bourdieu: realist, materialist...?


Dear Tobin,
        I cannot find your post about "about why one might consider taking
Bourdieu's dissociation from
>realism with a grain of salt.' I looked in the Bourdieu archive at the
>time of your other posting. Maybe it was posted on the Bhaskar list. I
>would be interested to read it.
        Your comments on critical realism not being a movement or a school
but rather a tradition I found very helpful as were they on Bourdieu's
position in relation to positivism versus social constructionism. All this
isms get to be far too substantive becoming increasingly meaningless
portmanteau words like "postmodernism." In my paper at the Bhaskar
conference I quoted a recent statement by  Zygmunt Bauman from his book
'Globization"The Human Conseuqences."

"All vogue words tend to share a similar fate: the more experiences they
pretend to make trasparent the more they themselves become opaque. The more
numerous are the orthodox truths they elbow out and supplant, the faster
they turn into no-questions-asked canons. Such human practices as the
concept tried originally to grasp recede from view, and it is now the
'facts of the matter', the quality  of 'the world out there' which the term
seems to 'get straight' and which it invokes to claim its own immunity to
questioning."

It would not be very productive if 'critical realism' just supplanted
'postmodernism' as a portmanteau buzz word.

Roger Cook

>Many thanks Roger for retrieving my comments on critical realism and its
>kinship (no pun intended) with Bourdieu's approach.  If you still have it,
>it might also be worthwhile to re-post my comments, from about the same
>time, about why one might consider taking Bourdieu's dissociation from
>realism with a grain of salt.  (I probably have the post buried in my
>archives somewhere, but you may have it more at hand.)
>
>That post, if I remember it right, actually raised some of the concerns
>Carsten has regarding how to position Bourdieu in light of his connections
>to German, English, and American traditions.  To respond to Carsten's doubts
>about the meaningfulness of relating Bourdieu to critical realism,
>particularly since Bourdieu was around earlier, I think this mistakes
>critical realism for a "movement" or a "school," when it is a philosophical
>tradition.  Many of critical realism's core suppositions can be found in
>scholars from various eras, and so far as I know, everyone who has written
>on critical realism considers Marx's work to be critical realist (entirely,
>or nearly so).  Not in the sense of "avant la lettre," either: critical
>realism isn't a specific theory, like one about muons or even about
>capitalism, and the collapse of a specific theory that has critical realist
>characteristics does not entail the downfall of critical realism.  Moreover
>there's room for a broad range of positions within critical realism (as some
>of the debates on the Bhaskar list reveal).  CR is a best understood as a
>program of research, one that involves certain understandings about reality
>and how knowledge of it is possible.
>
>Let's put it this way: is Bourdieu a positivist?  Certainly not, though
>clearly he sees empirical research as a crucial part of social analysis.  Is
>he a subjectivist or a social constructivist?  Aspects of those positions do
>seem to appear, but he also presents the world on the whole as independent
>of individual or collective thought, and analysis of it as requiring more
>than *verstehen* alone.  Then what philosophical tradition does he work
>within?  There are lots of possibilities, including various sorts of
>eclecticism, but he seems closest to critical realism.
>
>I hope that helps clarify the discussion (which obviously is connected to
>Eric's question and Karl's response).  Thanks.
>
>---
>Tobin Nellhaus
>nellhaus-AT-gis.net
>"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce
>
>
>**********************************************************************
>Contributions: bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Commands: majordomo-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Requests: bourdieu-approval-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu


**********************************************************************
Contributions: bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Commands: majordomo-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Requests: bourdieu-approval-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu