From: S.Pines-Martin-AT-iaea.org
Subject: RE: Bourdieu: realist, materialist...?
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1998 12:08:29 +0200


Hello Ralph,
you said:
>> 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.
>
>It would also take Sergio the rest of his life to untangle them, for which
>reason he feels he has personally benefitted from leaving them tangled. And
>that was his point.
>
>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.
>
>None of this was really my point. Have you ever found yourself pronouncing
>views on issues with which you had no intensive interaction, experience, in
>the sense of making a truly objective analysis of them --which really
>requires a "conversion of world view", i.e., to stop the entirety of one's
>subjective preferences and aversions, narcisist glorifications, (social)
>impulses, etc., to find one's objectivating self objectivated by the very
>(material) situation-- only to find later on, perhaps by coming in contact
>with that entirely real situation, that you had been making a fool of
>yourself, that you had placed your (socially determined) subjectivity on a
>throne? I am thinking of anthropology here, of our views on, and explanations
>of, all those "others", but it extends into thousands of little particulars
>here and there where we are unreflexively (or cynically reflexively, as you
>say) "self". I think all of us do this all the time. The "story" I wanted to
>tell about Bourdieu, in relation to materialism/idealism had to do with this
>- but now I find it it difficult to continue with it (it is long and perhaps
>too obscure); it suffices to say that the "pragmatic materialism" I envisage
>in Bourdieu has a lot to do with breaking with the selfish nuisance of our
>ingenious subjectivism, it entails a "conversion of world view", a need to
>instill a productive form of "censure". This censure is hard (impossible) to
>apply by oneself, and is tremendously empowered through social interaction,
>usually optimised in the form of some institution or other (though not
>necessarily). It also ties in with Bachelard's insistence that all knowledge
>gained of the object entails a correction on the side of the subject: and
>this is something we usually avoid doing, we all excel in this avoidance.
>Hence the necessary censure - both gentle and yet unyielding. However, this
>is exceedingly hard to manage, and I think that Bourdieu's intellectual
>capacities sometimes get in the way of his intelligence, such that his
>censure does sometimes become unyielding where it should be more open - but
>I'm not ready yet to discuss that, as I would need to investigate it more
>properly (I won't let my subjective irritations get in the way right now...)
>As to the rest of your comments, I will insist again that my problem was not
>that professionals should laugh at me, or not take me seriously, or that I
>might loose capital (though if I have any I would hate to loose it) - you
>see, I am very idealistic about this: I really believe that an intelligently
>structured "field", which permits communication and understanding across
>different levels, and which exerts a censure that is admitted as being
>necessary, but which does not for that reason convolute into an ideological
>play of recognitions=misrecognitions ... that this can be achieved, somehow,
>sometime, and that it would be a very positive thing. I was playing on the
>professional/popular distinction with a double intention: to subvert its
>negative aspects, but to recognise its positive ones. A difficult thing.
>That's why so many people reacted more to this half-personal half-objective
>strategy of mine than to the discussion I wanted to have concerning some
>ambiguous issues about Bourdieu's "position" (I don't want to position him -
>I vehemently want to understand and misunderstand him in order to optimise my
>intelligence). Yes, I *am* quite an ambiguous s.o.b! But I was not being
>entirely dishonest.
>
>>Philosophy as the mediator between science and myth, because philosophy is
>>closer to myth; the bridge across the epistemological break?  How odd.
>
>Well, Bachelard's entire discourse on "epistemological break" *is*
>philosophy, isn't it? And he does, after all, run back and forth between the
>mythic, poetic, imagination, and the scientific rupture with it. But I wasn't
>really thinking of philosophy as a "mediator", nor as a bridge. It is just a
>vantage point, entailing a specific form of doing, from which to see and say
>things.
>
>Yours,
>Sergio
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