Date: Tue, 8 Sep 1998 11:51:56 +0100
From: Carsten Sestoft <sestoft-AT-coco.ihi.ku.dk>
Subject: Re: Bourdieu: realist, materialist...?


Dear Karl, dear Tobin,

Let me first say that I somewhat regret using the term "ethnocentrism" with
all its connotations of guilty white etc. males which come up when both of
you use the term "exclude" or "exclusion". It never entered my head that I
could feel "excluded" by references to CR or Bhaskar; actually they rather
kindle my arrogant feelings of superiority, as you have no doubt
discovered. I am sorry for that.

As Karl very gently and rightly points out -- and Tobin too -- it is of
little use to construct a monolithic representation of an Anglo-American
tradition, as I must admit I did. Yet I think that a problem of different
intellectual traditions (national or not) remains, even if it is much more
subtle or deeper buried than in my description.

Let me give a few examples of the origin of my ideas. One source is a study
of the history of literary studies in the USA that I have made. What I
think I have seen there is that French avantgarde "theory" imported from
the sixties on (or perhaps beginning with the "criticism of consciousness"
of Poulet who taught in the US in the fifties) was grafted on a local
tradition, i.e. that of the "old" philogical-historical scholarship and the
New Criticism, which to a great extent lacked the sort of philosophical
foundations existing in German and French (avantgarde) literary studies in
which the exchange with philosophy has been more or less permanent. This is
to say that because of the domination of analytic philosophy in American
philosophy departments there was little exchange between philosophy and
literary studies in the US (with the possible exception of the "Chicago
Aristotelians" who remained rather marginal) which in turn means that the
literati had little theoretical training and tradition. When confronting
complex philosophical projects like those of Foucault or Derrida, they
often did not understand the problems they were dealing with, simply
because they did not know the intellectual traditions to which they were
referring. Even if the ambiguity is visibly already there in the work of
Foucault, I think that the result have been that there is now a "French"
Foucault, who is a rational thinker of the historicity of reason and
concepts, and an "American" Foucault, who is thinking about domination in
an anarchistic-political way and whom one may reduce to a number of simple
ideas like "knowledge = power". I am not saying that all Americans are, by
the very fact of being Americans, stupid and ignorant; but I think that a
great deal of the American Foucault reception has been grafting him on a
local tradition of political thinking with little philosophical
sophistication, and that they very rarely understand the original context
of Foucaults ideas. An exception is Gary Guttings excellent book on The
Archaeology of Scientific Reason; but then Gutting is a philosopher. And
what happened to Foucault in America is, I think, rather typical of the
reception of French ideas in American literary departments.

Another example: in numerous discussions with my dear friend Olaf in
Germany (he is a expert on Adorno and the Frankfurt School) we have often
used words in ways that we, after long discussions, discovered were
irreducibly different. One such word was "political", and it only dawned on
me that we used the word in different ways when I 1) discovered that in the
German newspaper Die Zeit all historical books were placed under the
heading "political book": in Germany history is inherently political which
it isn't in the French tradition I was talking from (well, except for the
history of the French revolution, often used for political means); 2) when
I furthermore discovered that between the fundamentally left-Hegelian
tradition of the Frankfurt School and the historicized Kantian tradition of
Bourdieu there is a fundamental disagreement on the historicity of concepts
and theories which has consequences for the place of politics in theory: in
the first case, politics are always already there in theories, in the
second they are considered as something external to theories.

Thus I would say that the problem of the international circulation of ideas
is not only one of language and national traditions: in a sense it is much
too easy to translate, but rather complicated to achieve real understanding
of the sense of the easily translateable words. (This was also clear in a
study of notions like "modernism", "modernity" and "modernization" that I
have undertaken). And what goes for words, goes a fortiori for theories, it
seems to me. Therefore I was glad that Tobin mentions that Bhaskar refers
to Kant which gives nourishment to my suspicion that Bhaskar may have
reinvented an epistemological position that existed for a long time in
"continental" philosophy, although it has, in France, been hidden to some
extent by phenomenology and Hegel in mid-century, and by Nietzsche later on.

I hope that my examples may have demonstrated 1) that there *is* a problem
of the international circulation of ideas, 2) that this problem is much
less simple than I said yesterday. A sociogenetic understanding of ideas
demands an awareness of specific national traditions (like the case of
history in Germany), of the history of disciplines and their relation to
other disciplines, of conflicting intellectual traditions (like the
Frankfurt School or the Historical Epistemology af Bachelard) within
disciplines, of reception histories, and so on. There is much to learn and
study, and it is most fascinating.

best wishes
Carsten


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