Date: Sun, 13 Sep 1998 21:46:58 -0700 (PDT)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: RE: Bourdieu: realist, materialist...?


It could take me the rest of my life to untangle Sergio's thoughts on
materialism and idealism, so I'm going to leave this be.  However, I can't
help but return to the original post of his that piqued my curiosity.

At 02:10 PM 9/2/98 +0200, S.Pines-Martin-AT-iaea.org wrote:
>Something I admire about Bourdieu --and his followers-- is how he brings
>one to "one's senses" through an interplay of censure and openess, which
>is both gentle and unyielding. 

I don't know what this means, but the suggestion is that Bourdieu is both
inclusive and exclusive towards the public outside of his own specialty.  I
don't know, not having come across the exclusive part yet.  But so far I
have not detected any such "keep off my turf" attitudes, as opposed to, say,
the swindlers on the editorial board of SOCIAL TEXT who cried bloody murder
when their intellectual chalatanism was exposed by an outsider.  Bourdieu
subjects Heidegger to the harshest ridicule for the means by which he
excludes possible questions from outsiders while carefully insulating his
pseudo-profundities from scrutiny.  Almost any educated reader can read THE
POLITICAL ONTOLOGY OF MARTIN HEIDEGGER and understand it, which is more than
you can say for much academic writing.  By constantly exposing class and
insiderist biases, it would seem that Bourdieu is taking outsiders into
account.  Of course I don't know what would happen if an outsider would
question him.

> Since I do not occupy a position within
>the field of intellectual or scientific production (not even that of a
>student: I study in quasi-hermitic conditions, as I must work every day
>for a living), I feel that the most viable option for me is to speak in
>a personal way, rather than to run the risk of deceiving myself and
>others, i.e., intuiting the field's censure and modifying my voice to
>make it "sound right" while lacking all the dispositions, generative
>habitus, that are necessary for a more-or-less authentic dialogue. 

Isn't there something ironic about a field based on the analysis and
exposure of other field's censures that would impose a censure in its own
sphere, precluding your ability to carry on a conversation with its
practitioners on a more or less equal basis?  This is why I thought you were
being tongue-in-cheek.  If you were being serious and you were correct in
believing that you would not be taken seriously, what would that say about
the field of Bourdieu studies?  

>I would be summoning intellectual disaster upon myself if I were to play
>the sorcerer's apprentice. 

Well, the way in which you characterized your scientific incompetence was in
Bourdieu's own terms, sociological primarily, cognitive only secondarily if
at all.  It's all about aping the verbal mannerisms and norms of interaction
within the field, which you claim you can't do without exposing how badly
you do it.  The intrinsic intellectual issues involved presumably are not
separable from the socialization required to function within the Bourdieu
specialist community.  And this brings us to what is most disturbing about
Bourdieu's treatment of science, for while he is arguably a scientific
realist, perhaps even an ontological as well as historical materialist, his
methodology disallows the maintenance of a distinction between the intrinsic
intellectual content of a field and its social instantiation, hence the ease
with which Bourdieu can be accommodated to subjective idealism.

>.... if I take into due account these fundamental practical
>bases, which underlie the true sense of scientific knowledge and its
>production, I will simply have to keep my mouth shut. If I open my
>mouth, I will have to realise that I can only enounce the personal
>visions I obtain from contemplating whatever is produced through those
>(for me) alien practices. Cheap philosophy namely. 

In my first response I said this sounds like an application of the notion of
epistemological break to the specialist/non-specialist relationship.  But
now I wonder whether your assertion is not a misapplication of Bachelard's
notion analogous to Althusser's misuse of same to impute an epistemological
break to Marx.  I do not believe that there is such a radical discontinuity
here as there is with concepts in modern physics that renounce familiar
metaphors and imagery and express their nature in a radically autonomous,
mathematized form.

As for cheap philosophy, how cheap it is depends in you.  I'm in the same
boat as you are socially, but I do not necessarily feel a kinship based on
your disquisitions about materialism and idealism.  Nor would a professional
necessarily dismiss you out of hand unless he thought you were just spouting
gibberish or grew impatient with your coyness.

>My strategy has been to describe and analyse the effects of social
>science from my vantage point, carefully steering between the scylla of
>personalist enthusiasm, and the charybdis of such cheap imitations as
>are born of an inadequately incorporated response to the censure of the
>scientific field (an ir-responsibility). To this end, I must chronically
>remind myself that I am not contributing to the production of scientific
>knowledge, but am fashioning an elaborate "story". 

Again, a very interesting application of the epistemological break and an
interesting bit of autodidactic humility or a hilarious joke.  But in
addition to story-telling, there are other things to be said about the field
and habitus of popular philosophy.  I have three historical examples in
mind, but since nobody has expressed an interest, why continue?

>Social science is or
>should be antithetical to such story telling, in as far as it is
>science; yet its peculiar reflexive nature --that its practice not only
>combines and overcomes materialism and idealism, but is itself a subset
>of its object of analysis: social practice in general-- should allow it
>to exploit, with care, some story-telling. Without wishing to reduce
>philosophy to mere story-telling, I do think that philosophy is much
>closer to this "mythic" mode of thought than science is (Bachelard
>comments somewhere in the "Psychoanalysis of Fire" that the best
>philosophy can hope to achieve is to tune in poetry and science into a
>harmony). 

In other words, science can exploit the mythic mode of popular philosophy.
How so you have not specified, have you?

>Perhaps for this reason philosophy plays a role in social
>science. I do not think that materialism and idealism are combined only
>in the practice of science -they are also combined in our ordinary life.

Philosophy as the mediator between science and myth, because philosophy is
closer to myth; the bridge across the epistemological break?  How odd.

Your comments about materialism and idealism still make no sense to me,
though in my conception of these terms they are indeed both combined in real
life.
 

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