From: S.Pines-Martin-AT-iaea.org
Subject: RE: Games, Wittgenstein and the Logic of the "Practical Logic"
Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 09:33:41 +0100


                    Warning! This post is unbearably long.

Hello Emrah,
I didn't find your post boring, and it was really too short to get the gist
of Schatzki's argument.
First: I don't understand your problem with "resistance" being an
epiphenomenon of field dynamics, nor your need that it be "radical,
transformative, action". Doesn't Bourdieu's entire theoretical structure
drive against the false opposition between spontaneous voluntarism and
mechanical determinism, thereby allowing for a realistic form of
transformative action, i.e., action which knows itself determined, and wich
through an awareness of the determinations, however partial, can seek an
optimal response to its realities and against the mystifications of an
everything-or-nothing? Methinks: the "logic" of a social field is inscribed
in our bodies, a consequence of our social adaptation, as social instinct,
culture made nature, root of social being, even as the field itself is in
part the result of our social strategies, themselves oriented towards it
(the connatus...), to transform or to perpetuate it --if this is so, then
doesn't the idea of a RADICAL break entail but a myth which carries within
itself the seed of a misrecognised reproduction of what it offsets itself
against, through symbolic inversions brought about against the concrete
reality, the backdrop of ingrained dispositions against which mere discourse
is impotent? (Hence Bourdieu's reiterated observations of our social
gymnastics, the corporeal symbolism, so to say, which is not easily brought
out into discursive expression, and which he then "phenomenologically"
points out to us.) And by the same logic: isn't the mechanicist, determinist
idea of ideological structure, pervasive and inerradicable, but the other
side to this mythic opposition (for the field is itself causally intertwined
with our practices)? Both options would make us remain at the level of
discursive symbolic action, neglecting the material symbolism of "sensuous
human activity, practice," which is both subjective (cum grano salis) and
simultaneously "objective activity" (Feuerbach Theses). Hence to recognize
the importance of, as you said, "the 'feel for the game,' the thing which
usually hinders the questioning of its own 'conditions of existence' in
everyday action," is to avoid a (scholastic?) misrecognition of the logic of
misrecognition, i.e., avoid impotent symbolic transubstantiations; but I do
not think that recognizing this entails a pesimist view according to which
things cannot be changed because they cannot be expressed, modified in
thought, which supposedly must directly organize action. "To recognize
oneself as a fool is to be already less of a fool" (Zhuangzi).
Second: I haven't read Schatzki's article but by what I gathered it seems as
if he poses an opposition between nonrepresentational practical
understanding and representational understanding. Yet again a dichotomy,
scholastic perhaps. In the volume "Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives," Charles
Taylor picks up the Wittgensteinian problematic of "To follow a rule...".
Let me quote: "Wittgenstein stresses the unarticulated - at some points even
unarticulable - nature of this understanding. "'[O]beying a rule' is a
practice". Giving reasons for one's practice in following a rule has to come
to an end. "My reasons will soon give out. And then I shall act, without
reasons". Or later, "If I have exhausted my justifications I have reached
bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply
what I do'". More laconically, "When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey
the rule blindly."" Taylor argues that there are "two broad schools of
interpretation" of what Wittgenstein says here in relation to what Taylor
calls "the phenomenon of the unarticulated background". The first school
interprets that I can give no reasons because there are no reasons to be
given: "the connections which form our background are just de facto links,
not susceptible of any justification"; i.e., they are imposed by society or
are "hard-wired". The second school, which he favours and with which he
associates Bourdieu's illustrations of the practical sense, "takes the
background as really incorporating understandings; that is, as a grasp on
things which, although quite unarticulated, may allow us to formulate
reasons and explanations when challenged". Hence we can speak of an "almost
inarticulable understanding" without implying that it cannot be articulated
at all. And then when you quote Schatzki as saying that "offering a map of
action and expecting that map to govern practice cannot be backed up
theoretically", it seems clear to me that this can't be Bourdieu's error, if
Bourdieu quotes Wittgenstein precisely to avoid the idea that the
theoretical explanation, constructed against the practical sense, directly
expresses the generative principle of the practices. The model explains the
practices but does not govern them - it is in part interpretation, in part
explanation (observation, synoptical representation, identification of
regularities). And this connects with the next point:
Third: I don't know exactly what you mean by Bourdieu's practical logic
having "poorly-defined mental/psychological bases," but - well, I am right
now in the process of finishing my M.A. Thesis and I've come up against some
literature pertaining to possible "cognitivist" bases for Bourdieu's theory
in: M.Bloch's contribution to the volume "Conceptualizing Society" (A.Kuper,
Ed.) and his contribution to the volume "Assessing Cultural Anthropology"
(Borofsky, Ed.); also C.Strauss and N.Quinn's contribution to the latter
volume; C.Strauss' and D'Andrade's contributions to "Human Motives and
Cultural Models" (both of them Eds.); or chapter 7 of D'Andrade's "The
Development of Cognitive Anthropology". All of them exploit a
"connectionist" model of cognition, which makes sense of much of Bourdieu's
theory (and I still believe Bourdieu's theory makes a lot more sense than
their speculations on tentative cognitive models, at least in what concerns
the social structure of behavior, representation, etc.)
I'll be surprised if anyone has reached this line. I hope there was
something useful in all of this.

Sergio Pinés.

"En mi soledad he visto cosas muy claras que no son verdad"
Antonio Machado  (Proverbios y cantares)

**********************************************************************
Contributions: bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Commands: majordomo-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Requests: bourdieu-approval-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu