Date: Fri, 09 Jul 1999 20:45:32 -1000
From: Houston Wood <hlwood-AT-aloha.net>
Subject: Who pays for reading?


Kent, you wrote: "you do have to have an understanding of Marx, Freud, Boas, 
Levi-Strauss etc....and given the pathetic state of american sociology I 
would gladly accept his supposed "totalitariansim" because to mount an 
objection you do have to have read....which HURTS NO ONE!!!!"

I think the kind of expansive reading you are calling for requires immense
economic capital (exchanged for cultural capital). Producing a leisured
class (even the dominated fraction within the dominant class) with
sufficient freedom from economic necessity to have time to read so many
difficult texts--doesn't this hurt the working classes that must grow and
pick the food for us, produce the paper pulp for us, clean the toilets for
you and your colleagues there at Purdue, etcetera?

I am reading _Distinction_ tonight and am struck by how what Bourdieu says
about the "aesthetic disposition" applies to the disposition with which we
read, e.g. Bourdieu. "Intellectual struggles," B writes, "the object of so
many pathetic manifestos" (54). We theorize on this listserve "without a
practical function" (with an aesthetic disposition), "freed from urgency,"
seeking understandings that are an "end in themselves."

Next page: "Economic power is first and foremost a power to keep economic
necessity at arm's length" (55).  It requires economic power to read like
you advise us to read.  Does it "hurt someone" to have such power
concentrated in the hands of a few? I think it does.

Am I being vulgar and anti-intellectual? Good god, I hope so.  Even though
I am producing just one more "pathetic manifesto."  And long to have the
leisure to read the list you prescribe. (But someone else will--already has
in the last day or two--prescribed a very different list of must reads.
Tell me, which list will secure for me the most distinction? I want to earn
the highest rate of return on my invested time.)


**********************************************************************
Contributions: bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Commands: majordomo-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Requests: bourdieu-approval-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu