File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_1999/bourdieu.9907, message 60


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

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