From: "Hugo Mendes" <agon-AT-mail.telepac.pt>
Subject: Re: Bourdieu and Reformism
Date: Sat, 10 Jul 1999 12:58:41 +0100


Kent wrote:
>I have raised this point several times and no one has taken it up....what
is the 
>deal with Practical Reason?  In this text I do see more of the hegemonic 
>Bourdieu that lacks the subtly and rigor that his previous texts lacked.  
>The type of text that he attacks for lack of rigor in Logic of Practice.

Doesn't the fact that the book is basically a more or less arbitrary (i.e.,
lacking a coherent logic) compilation of conferences and lectures explain
something...?


>As for the hegemonic form of B. practice in EUROPE, as george aptly shows
to 
>SINCERELY read B. 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 B. 
>does raise the stakes in introducing a type of discourse that can't be 
>evaluated by some the standards implicitly used by certain detractors
here.

Sorry to ask, Kent, but what are those invalid "standards implicitly used
by certain detractors here"? This my be irrelevant, but why using a word
like "detractors"? Does everybody who questions Bourdieu become a
"detractor"? What is the rationale that permits you to draw the boundary
behind the "critic" and the "detractor"?
I ask this because I (and probably many people in this list) have the
feeling that one of the problems with Bourdieu is that "or you are with
him, or you are against him" - there is no middle ground, a ground for some
agnosticism (as Karl Maton would call it). 

Yours,

Hugo Mendes
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