Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 14:34:09 -0700 (PDT)
From: Dennis R Redmond <dredmond-AT-OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>
Subject: Re: Bourdieu's Republicanism


On Wed, 21 Jul 1999, Jon Beasley-Murray wrote:

> See also his recent turn to defend intellectual autonomy ("achieved by
> constructing a sort of 'ivory tower'" [_On Television_ 61]) and tout the
> benefits of the universalizing tendencies of intellectual activity: "The
> founders of the French Republic in the late nineteenth century used to say
> something that is forgotten all too often: The goal of teaching is not
> only the reading, writing, and arithmetic needed to make a good worker;
> the goal of education is to offer the means of becoming a good citizen, of
> putting individuals in a position to understand the law, to understand and
> defend their rights, to set up unions... We must work to universalize the
> conditions of access to the universal" (_On Television_ 66).

But isn't this exactly right -- that people need to be able to control
their own destinies, and this means being able to understand the law, the
means and instruments of political power, etc.? That's very different from
the Parti Communiste deciding what the priorities of the proletariat ought
to be via some executive committee. But it is indeed at the heart of the
Euroleft's main mass movements today -- namely, the Green parties,
the sans-papieres, etc. 

> a snippet (from the opening paragraph) of J.C.Passeron and Claude
> Grignon's 1989 _ Le Savant et le populaire: miserabilisme et populisme en
> litterature et sociologie_, in which the authors reflect back upon their
> experiences as Bourdieu's former proteges:
> 
> sterile miserabilism that is as ambiguous as populism. What can those
> tirades in which the ruling classes are always dominant, and their culture
> always legitimate, teach us when the mechanisms or objects on which
> domination does or does not exert itself, or exerts itself in vain, are
> never analysed? What use are concepts which are reduced by orthodoxy to
> play the role of essential properties and to figure, all present and
> correct (ethos, habitus, field, cultural capital), in a full kit
> inspection which both every sociologist faithful to the doctrine and all
> the social groups they parade in front of us must undergo to ensure they
> have the right equipment which they then joylessly carry with them at all
> times and in every field?"  (trans. Jeremy Lane)

So Bourdieu is just no fun, eh? Nothing like denouncing the critique of
the totalizing, relentlessly integrating system as being themselves
relentlessly totalizing. It's one of the hallmarks of conservative
ideologies (and the above quote is pretty conservative) that what are
essentially social, collective problems get turned into private, petty
concerns of a few maladjusted individuals. In this case, the pressure of
competition (carrying "the right equipment", a military metaphor) is
blamed on the intellectual with the gumption to ask uncomfortable
questions about how concepts have *become* a form of property. Why is it
that these sorts of competitive pressures have become mandatory in *every*
academic and symbolic field nowadays? 

Theory *must* tarry with the negative, as Adorno would say. It's only
through the concrete negation that one can address the true negativity out
there -- the ecological, social and psychological destruction of
transnational market competition, the misery of the (working) world, which
can only be answered for by new forms of collective action. For starters,
a drastic reduction of working hours to a minimum, as is presently taking
place throughout the European Union...

-- Dennis

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