From: S.Pines-Martin-AT-iaea.org
Subject: RE: Bourdieu: realist, materialist...?
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1998 14:10:53 +0200


George Free:
	As I understand it, Bourdieu's philosophy of science stems from 
that of Gaston Bachelard. The wavering you detect between materialism
and 
idealism is a central theme in Bachelard, who, if I recall correctly, 
sees these philsophies as representing one-sided interpretations of an 
action (scientific thinking) that joins them in practice.

Thanks a lot for your comment. You very straightforwardly dissolved my
doubts; although they have now become more acute at a different level!
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. 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. I
would be summoning intellectual disaster upon myself if I were to play
the sorcerer's apprentice. And now, having exorcised this ghost of
intellectual lockjaw: I had planned to include Bachelard among the
topics in my paper; I had focused entirely on his notions of
epistemological rupture and original errors, but had entirely overlooked
this simple (but fundamental) item you pointed out to me. I overlooked
it because it IS so simple, but also because it is so fundamental. In
other words, 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. 
	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". 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). 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.
After all, the naive essence of idealism and materialism roots in the
ambiguities of our usual language, which does not philosophically bother
to systematise any far-reaching (one-sided) conclusions, and is often
happy enough to tell "stories" about things.  But our ordinary life is
through-and-through a battle of contention, political, ideological.
Hence Bourdieu's strategic uses and combinations of idealist, realist,
materialist points is not really so fundamental for the practice of
science, but for its epistemology when viewed as a "politics of science"
(he calls it that in an article; as I see it, epistemological
reflections on "experience" are in fact a "politics of experience"). And
this politics of science reverberates within the politics of everyday
life. Though science may "break" with non-science, they live together in
the same house. I must find a way of describing how materialism and
idealism can blend in practice, and to do so, I must find a way of
conceptualising "practice" other than by just saying that scientific
practice does the trick. That's why I'm asking what Bourdieu's
"materialism" amounts to -I would like to hear different interpretations
of it. In what sense is he a "materialist"? This may sound stupid, but I
often feel that he is a materialist only in order to offset the social,
practical consequences of a one-sided idealism (when you examine the
ideologically misrecognised material determinations of so much human
misery, idealism becomes an idle method). I doubt Bourdieu is
philosophically inclined to materialism, in fact I believe he is
probably more inclined towards Cassirer's critical idealism minus the
idealism, whose spiritualism he corrects with a quasi-pragmatist sense
of the "material" that does not seek nor claim ontological fundaments
("the real is the relational" is not equal to "it is spiritual", nor is
it, as relational, substantially "material"). In what concerns ontology,
I would say Bourdieu is simply a sceptic. And scepticism is (as I see
it) perfectly compatible with the practice of science, in fact I think
it can generate a necessary state of doubt and alertness.

Is this too long-winded for these lists? If so, please tell me!

Sergio
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