From: AHAGGERT-AT-aol.com
Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 08:52:02 EST
Subject: Re: Games, Wittgenstein and the Logic of the "Practical Logic"


Emrah Goker:
Not a boring post at all! Could I ask from where your question derives:
"Beginning from the embodied agent --given that the dynamics of a political
field can be dramatically oppressive and constraining-- how can we politicize
PB's approach so that "resistance" is not an epiphenomenon of field dynamics
(from time to time PB treats it so) but a radical, transformative, action?"
Did this question arise from a difficulty in accounting for change in a
specific field in a historical moment of what you consider radical,
transformative activity? And I'm not sure what you mean by the "political
field"--that field composed of agents actively involved in politics
(electioneering, organizing, reporting, dallying with interns, etc.), or of
the much broader interaction of the social body in its entirety with
"political" questions? I ask because of my growing concern with the manner in
which "resistance" is privileged in much current academic discourse. It seems
to me that sometimes, as in Judith Butler's Excitable Speech, for instance, it
is possible to critique someone (in this case PB) for not offering an account
of how "resistance" could be mounted--without at the same time providing an
extended account of how resistance has been mounted somewhere, sometime,
somehow: wouldn't resistance necessarily have to be a phenomenon highly
specific to the social world in which it occurs? I do not mean to criticize
Butler's work in general, which I find useful, (or yours, either, about which
I'd like to hear more), but to wonder aloud about how the term "resistance"
functions as, I suppose, symbolic capital in the academic field(s), given its
prevalence in academic discourse and hence its apparent value in struggles for
position in the academic world. Finally, maybe the most sustained account of
"reistance" leading to "transition" in PB's work is in The Rules of
Art--Flaubert does successfully change the literary field, for PB. I know this
isn't "political," but perhaps you may find here at least a useful analogy.
Andrew Haggerty



In a message dated 2/22/99 7:13:47 AM EST, egoker-AT-Bilkent.EDU.TR writes:

<< For some while, I was having troubles in putting PB's concept of practical
 understanding (or, practical logic, or, practical reason) in its place.
 The question in my mind was (still is, anyway):
 Brainstorming on this brought me (among others) to asking how
 intelligible is practical logic as PB tells us, the "feel for the game",
 the thing which usually hinders the questioning of its own "conditions of
 existence" in everyday action. I am still unsure (or, confused?) whether
 main Bourdieu texts elaborate on this. >>
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