From: S.Pines-Martin-AT-iaea.org
Subject: RE: Bourdieu: realist, materialist...?
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1998 09:44:53 +0200


These discussions between members of different intellectual traditions
is interesting. Since I have had very scant academic training, and in
different places, none of the three traditions that have shaped my
intelligence really count as *intellectual* traditions -so this octopus
is back in the garage. But I will insist on my obscurities, hoping to
find some clarity.

Ralph Dumain commented: "Well, it will be interesting to learn about
your extra-scientific applications" -but what else am I doing in this
list?

	I often feel like a virus preying at the outskirts of the academic
millieu; I take strands of genetic material from their thoughts and
fashion the unlikeliest monstruosities. At other times I feel the
opposite: their thoughts appear to me like monstruosities fashioned on
the material of common language and imagery. In my condition of virus, I
can generate countless diseases out of idealism, realism, materialism,
empiricism and what not. As an ordinary person, I find it almost
unbelievable that anyone could seriously uphold an intellectual position
to the effect of any of those options. For me, philosophy resolves
itself in a materialism without a material, a realism without a reality,
an idealism without ideas, an empiricism without sensations. It is
resolved in the furnace of ordinary life, where all these options appear
as so many possible and often ambiguous *contrasts*. Anything that goes
beyond that is philosophy proper (unresolved forever). And philosophy
proper is then a political negotiation of elements (imagery, figures of
speech, contrasts) that are taken from ordinary life, and which are
transubstantiated into myths of a higher order. (Philosophy isn't only
this; I am being one-sided and corrosive.) In this sense I must agree
with Gramsci: common sense is already philosophy, i.e., it is already
political. I vehemently approve of a critical relationalism because it
convinces me as being more conducive to practical knowledge than any
substantialism, and because I have experienced enough of the workings of
substantialism in the social magic, alchemy, self-fulfilling categories
and violence of every day life, to welcome a method with which to combat
it. But that's as far as I can go. For me, the gist of relationalism is
entirely pragmatic, and ultimately sceptical of any ontology, i.e.,
transubstantiations of the ordinary (often confused and confusing)
contrasts and figures of speech into political discourse (by political I
understand any attempt to persuade anyone about the higher merits of
some groups' interests: scientific, religious, economical, sexual or
whatever). But we would be impoverished if we could not use these
fabulous contrasts of language, so I'll pardon their figurative uses.
Moreover, I'll pardon their political uses, if they admit being
figurative, i.e., nothing extra-ordinary, in benefit of no church (which
political parties are).

	The paper I plan to write pivots around the problem of "anthropological
experience", and I try to exorcise myself of subjectivity,
paradoxically, by beginning with my subjective experience thereof
--which, to top it all, is scanty indeed (those who know-how-to would
say 'undertake a phenomenological analysis of', but I don't know how
to).

	If the common sense of every culture is an interplay between the
myth-building potential of ambiguous contrasts inherent to linguistic
practice, and their political uses, then anthropological experience is
always a political, a polemic one. To define and experience "culture" is
to define and experience human ways of contention, collaboration,
mystification, illumination. There is in that experience acute awareness
of material constraints, but in a truly pragmatic sense of the word
material: the means of subsistence, the (psychosomatic) experience of
violence, manners of speech, gestures (of deference, hostility,
friendliness, impatience...), ways of looking, of walking, etc. It all
has a material plasticity that exceeds the naive-idealist interpretation
of culture as "different ways of thinking", different "meanings" (the
prioritisation of naive-realism as being naturally original is perhaps
due a contingent historical prejudice that obscures its correlate, the
equally "natural" and "original" naive-idealism of soul, mind, meaning,
being-human (not animal), etc.). However that plasticity is drenched in
symbolic dimensions that often appear to escape or exceed the material
aspect that we feel "constrains" us. The concept of the symbolic
mediates between blatant material constraints and a spontaneity of
meanings that seem to hover somewhere above, inside or beyond it. A
symbol is both a (material) thing and yet conveys a meaning
(immaterial). To me, it is clear that 'material' and 'immaterial' mean
both less and more than what they seem to at first sight. Used
figuratively, they mean less than that something is either of the order
of sticks and stones or is of "another order" (spiritual, logical or
what not) - it is simply an ambiguous figure of speech which conveys a
contrast that we informally make in practice, and which mystifies us
only when we stop and look at it expecting to grasp an exact logic or
substance underlying it (I know I would have to describe that contrast,
but 1) it would take too much space here, 2) I do not have the
Wittgensteinian genius for "uebersichtliche Darstellungen"). Used in a
non-figurative way, it says *more* than this "either sticks-and-stones
or spirit", as it instantly becomes a precept for (moral, political...)
thought and action. The vie for establishing the reality or ideality of
'x' is anything but politically neutral -it does not invite practical
knowledge, but rather a change in, or reafirmation of, practical
dispositions. (An example: in recent debates between scientists
enthusiastic about "explaining consciousness" and philosophers seriously
alarmed about the prospect, many philosophers philosophically argued, on
the basis of various subtle grounds and principles, that consciousness
was beyond the possibility of scientific explanation, and various
scientists retorted --with an understandable exasperation-- that the
only profit they could gain from such arguments was to stop scientific
inquiry at once and abandon it as hopeless before even having started!
Talk about a confusion of "language games"!)

	This synthetic potential of the concept of the symbolic leaned, in
Cassirer's discourse, towards the ideal, towards the "energy and
activity of the human spirit". In Bourdieu it is reversed: it leans
towards the practical-material determination of human existence.
Economicist materialism is relativised by its symbolic aspects, but
these symbolic aspects are themselves expressed in materialist terms.

	Bourdieu structures the materialist/idealist, empiricist/rationalist
divide in different ways, depending on the practical effects that can be
achieved at different junctures of discourse, such as when epistemology
tends to slide over into ontology, or vice-versa. On an epistemological
level, Bourdieu is closer to neo-Kantianism than to any realism or
materialism I can think of. He strongly prioritises the 'how' over the
'what' of knowledge. Reading Bachelard, we see a similar tendency.
Though he seeks to coordinate scientists' empiricist philosophy --which
is pragmatically attuned to making sense of a diversity of facts-- with
philosopher's rational systems -concerned with the unity of thought that
makes this possible-- Bachelard nevertheless gives priority to the
direction that goes from the rational to the empirical. Traditional
philosophy tends to "close" into a system, which can never
satisfactorily explain the concrete practice of ongoing, unconcluded
science; he overcomes this by fashioning an "open" philosophy that
allows itself eclecticism and flexibility in order to follow what
scientists are really doing  (see his "philosophy of no"). (Tobin wrote:
"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" - this remains disputable, but I have no
knowledge of CR with which to dispute.) On the other hand, it asks
scientists to honestly explain what goes on in their minds in practice
-the point is that they won't really find the simple realism that is
attributed to them (by themselves or by others). The priority given to
construction and rational mediation has critical reservations, but it's
there. A structured phenomenon is more conducive to knowledge than an
unstructured one; a constructed phenomenon is better than a natural one.
If we ignore the spiritualist effects of Cassirer's philosophical
habitus, we find that the critical aspects of his position are akin to
Bachelard's, and Bourdieu does draw this parallel between them. But the
result is not idealist nor traditionally rationalist. It is a
"rationalisme appliqué", "polemical reason". It is also not realist in a
metaphysical sense, whose true expression is a lame gesture of our
hands: "out there" (and I feel that anyone who insists overmuch on
reality being "out there" is a metaphysical realist, performing an
alchemical transubstantiation of that lame gesture into an intellectual
position).

	Science is ideally neutral to political talk yet factually intertwines
with it (political language draws from the mythical potential inherent
in the ambiguous contrasts of our ordinary  language, and philosophy
fashions these into its various positions, which are also ideally
neutral, factually political). Bourdieu's theory does intertwine the
scientific with the ordinary, and in doing so, he is being realistic,
but this means: both strategic and honest. I admire his efforts and
value them highly, for which reason I must strive to take him appart
critically, in an effort to put him back together again in a different
way (difficult for a numbskull like me, but still worth trying). For
example: he himself deploys tactics that are -despite all the
differences-similar to those that he identifies in Heidegger's
discourse: he often signals warnings against being interpreted in a
naive or philosophical-political way, even though himeself exploits
those very contrasts. Science and extra-science are kept at a distance
from each other, and yet there is an attempt and a belief, reminiscent
of Critical Theory, that the scientific and the political may find a
natural connection beyond the ideological, beyond being but a preference
relative and opposed to other preferences. I think this ideal is both
possible and impossible, but worth the trouble anyhow, and it requires
incredibly intelligent skills to be convincing, that is, to be capable
of inspiring more people than those that are merely predisposed to
accept it. Otherwise the ideally neutral, scientific aspect, is lost. Do
you get my troubles with this monster, "materialism"? Bourdieu refuses
to use such overdetermined concepts as "ideology", "consciousness", etc.
But he insists on materialism. Couldn't he have avoided using it, or
couldn't he have been more strategic in avoiding becoming the target of
the natural suspicion that his science is a cover for a prejudiced
political campaign? The point is, I personally agree with his science
and with his political campaign -but I am sorry to see that people take
up banners and slogans so quickly, and that the entire strategy goes
astray. The point is to reach a wider audience, to invent and re-invent
a more potent effect, both by being intelligently political and honestly
scientific. I have to work now or I'll be in trouble. I will go on in my
next posting to describe the dumb little "story" with which I try,
feebly, to get rid of these spectres that haunt my days and nights.

	But one little comment (I hope it isn't fatal): Personally, I am not
philosophically inclined to materialism, though I exploit this contrast
of our language-practice whenever I find it useful. Politically, I would
be somewhere near anarchism, if it weren't that my anarchism doesn't let
me get near it (it repels all my efforts to make systematic sense out of
it). For this reason, I value Bourdieu's sociology (both a science and
not) very highly: instead of persuading me to take a position, it helps
me to understand how I may in fact be "positioned" by social forces that
define and determine "me", and in so doing, helps me to (ethically,
politically) position myself with an optimised intelligence, or
awareness (contrary to intellectualism) of those determining conditions.
At the heart of my would-be-anarchist mind, there is a materialism but
no material, a realism but no reality, an idealism but no idea, an
empiricism but no sensation. What profit could I make out of it?


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