Date: Thu, 08 Jul 1999 20:34:18 -0700 (PDT) From: Dennis R Redmond <dredmond-AT-OREGON.UOREGON.EDU> Subject: Re: Bourdieu and Reformism On Wed, 7 Jul 1999, Houston Wood wrote: > --Maybe this is what is bothering me: B's "reflexive sociology" seems > fundamentally reformist but I am not much interested in simply changing the > faces of the experts who rule the field of power. I am seeking ways to > shatter the dynamics of this field, to create possibilities of other > configurations. In that case, Bourdieu is what you're looking for. Where France had Sartre, the philosophe-activiste, the European Union has Bourdieu: he's not just someone who has revolutionized the practice of sociology in France, he's someone who's applied the thing practically, via articles blasting Maastricht monetarism, solidarity with the French strikers of 1995, solidarity with the multicultural struggles of the new, immigrant Europe, and the nurturing of a whole new generation of radical sociologists and activists. In terms of concepts, one of Bourdieu's greatest contributions is his diagnosis of the global niche market, probably the central logic of late capitalism; the much-discussed "field" and "habitus" are really bridge-mediations, designed to index and measure the thing. It all starts in "Distinction" where he analyzes the placement of social taste -- high vs. low, middle-class vs. haut, cinema vs. cuisine and so forth -- and begins to decode the power-constellations which inform all these things (i.e. a national French consumer capitalism just beginning to go global). Later, in Les Regles de L'art, he analyzes the late 19th century modernisms from the same standpoint, uncovering the seismic social and cultural shifts apparent in Flaubert's literary production (i.e. the creation of a new kind of national literary market, which also involved the creation of a new kind of subjectivity capable of accessing that market). One of his points is that we need to be careful of assuming that fields are simple, static entities, which can simply be smashed like crockery; in fact, they're dynamic constellations (in Adorno's sense of the constellation, i.e. temporary configurations of unlike things), which change over time and through internal struggles over who gets what within the field, as well as external competition with other fields (the juridical, the legislative, etc.). Basically, Bourdieu is writing the first great documents of a newly globalized Marxism, one capable of handling the complexities of multinational capitalism by intervening in the aesthetic and academic spheres as well as the formal political and economic ones. -- Dennis ********************************************************************** 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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