Date: Wed, 7 Jul 1999 22:40:44 -0400 (EDT) From: George Free <aw570-AT-freenet.toronto.on.ca> Subject: Re: Bourdieu the "Top Guy" On Wed, 7 Jul 1999, Victor Braitberg wrote: > If the only acceptable terms of sociological > debate are those which have been devised by Bourdieu than what are we left > with? We are left with La pensee unique-- a totalizing framework of > thought which is incapable of intering into dialgoue with thinking that > differs from itself. Bourdieu's apparent incapacity > to recognize reasoned and well-informed disagreement with his > understanding of social life suggests that as far as he is concerned he > cannot be wrong unless of course he has misapplied his own method. But what are these "reasoned and well-informed disagreememts"? That is the question I am asking. And are they really so well reasoned? > Bourdieu's authoritarian tendencies are, I think, abundantly clear in his > Concluding Remarks: For a Sociogenetic Understanding of Intellectual > Works-- his response to some American critics. In: Craig Calhoun > Ed. Bourdieu:Critical Perspectives (Chicago:1993). > I fail to see these "authoritarian tendencies." If I remember correctly, in this response, he says its not worthwhile to address each of the individual criticisms levelled against him, because they all stem from basic misunderstandings which arise from the social situation of the critics. By pointing out these social conditions, and how they give rise to these misunderstandings, Bourdieu is doing the service of clarifying the situation and preparing the ground for real dialogue. Far from being authoritarian, it is "liberalizing" one might say, in the sense that it helps establish the conditions of free discourse, and genuine exchange. To reverse the argument: it could be said that those who refuse to consider the social and historical conditions that (nonconsciously) determine their thought are the mystifiers, the enemies of reason and of democracy. ...this is the basic claim of all "materialist" tendencies from Marx, to Freud and beyond, as I see it. George Free ********************************************************************** Contributions: bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu Commands: majordomo-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu Requests: bourdieu-approval-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
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