Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 11:57:32 +0200 (EET)
From: Emrah Goker <egoker-AT-Bilkent.EDU.TR>
Subject: RE: Games, Wittgenstein, et cetera...




Well well well... Sergio friend, I wanted to shake your hand passionately
after reading your "confessions", which certainly led me to "self-reflect"
and ask myself what I was "demanding" from Bourdieu and whether I was
really "disappointed" with what I could (or could not find). In the final
analysis (to use a common Marxian phrase), I think I have slightly
different ethico-political dispositions than you do have, which, of
course, is very normal given, above all, the differences between the
"social space" that makes you and me possible.  

These are very crude thougghts, perhaps i can send my more elaborated
after-thoughts later (in fact, I find that this correspondence takes quite
a lot of my time, which is a very good thing of course <honestly!>)

You state that the critique against Bourdieu about his inability to
account for social change and transformation (the "resistance" problem is
only a subset of this "attack") is unclear and ambiguous. In a way that is
true. I sense that his critics, from the most insulting ones to the most
sympathetic, are at a loss about how to incorporate generative
structuralism into empirical studies on the most mainstream sociological
problematics. For example, Bourdieu's masterpieces where he substantiates 
his theory with data, "Distinction", "State Nobility", "Homo Academicus"
(plus his 1960s work on Kybele) are concerned with constructing a certain
social space -upon which certain fields and struggles and so on are
placed- and that space accounts for a limited temporality and spatiality.
I have no French and could not read his more recent work like La Misere du
Monde (did I spell that right?), but people wonder what happened to the
French class structure after all those years (30 years?). Moreover, PB's
agenda is very different, for example he described French working class
without analyzing what Braverman or other writers on the sociology of work
called "labor process" or without the problematique of "surplus
extraction"; his work is also different than the understanding of social
change as it is studied in historical sociology, which makes his account
of the State (via the bureaucratic field, institutional rituals,
educational reproduction, nobility, etc) unsatisfactory for some writers.
Yet what is to be done is not to complain but try to operationalize the
model for empirical study, that is how Bourdieu can be supplemented and
perhaps transcended.

Thus I think that the dispute over "social change" and PB will not be
resolved for you or for me until more work is done. 

And the separating line, I think, between the "is" and "ought to",
although most social scientists have no problem with that, is an
ethico-political issue as you imply. I do not think that we of the
science of sociology have a right to merely complain about Bourdieu's
inability to play the role of a "self-reflexive Nostradamus", about his
inability to carry the red flag of the Vanguard Party and teach us how to
construct a habitus to destroy capitalism. As he suggested elsewhere, with
our identities as sociologists, we will win, construct and confirm the
social fact, without "running to the barricades" to transform it.
      
I share the problematic nature of talkingg about "ought to", yet where we
differ is, I think, that following Jacques Derrida (but not to the point
of "having faith in deconstruction"), we of the political -this time-
should light the torch of hope (I don't imply that you are a hopeless
pessimist!), a kind of expentancy of what is to come, gathering around us 
the spirits of the past (from Spartacus to Fidel Castro), we should keep
alive a version of messianicism which will build on and surpass Marx. I
accept your critique of the metaphysics of the limit, that wishful
prediction for the future inevitably constructs another limit, worse, we
formulate the predictions from *within* what we are trying to transcend
(Derrida, in Spectres of Marx and in Politics of Friendship, also Laclau,
differently though, in Emancipation(s) make similar points, criticizing
orthodox Marxist "closures" with respect to the beyond-capitalist
society). Yet there is a tale about Christ coming back to Earth long
decades after his death and a villager asking him, "When will you return?"
I think that hoping and acting for Godot to come is one of the few "really
good" things to keep alive, inside this big bucket of shit we call Earth.

Finally, you have put it very beautifully: "the tricky balance between 
intellect and passion is more an art than a theory". Let's keep the craft
alive, then.

Best wishes,
Emrah

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