From: S.Pines-Martin-AT-iaea.org Subject: RE: Rules of functioning Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 12:39:10 +0100 I find the ceaseless insistence on how much one READS Bourdieu repugnant; it is more interesting to see how people actually apply him. And if somebody has hardly read him and asks a question: what is so strange, upsetting, or out of place in this? >I am sorry if I was offensive and had a knee-jerk reaction. ... >I think that your lack >of reading of some of B. texts, such as Reflexive Sociology and Logic of >Practice, which suggests another view of the political, in his attack on >Spontaneous Sociology, ... Kent: In what concerns most of your postings, I am not exactly amazed by their "scientific" quality, nor do I see in what way they break or help to break with "Spontaneous Sociology", as you so grandly pretend. >I am sure several people >think I should or should have followed in the past, know when to hold your >tongue... I take it that holding one's tongue is a first step towards reflexivity and avoiding projecting one's mental garbage all over the place. I also think it might help to improve one's style of writing. What happens when we first read, and then re-read and re-read, Bourdieu's works? Among other things, one picks up the subtle kind of censure that he produces against giving free, unreflexive, reign to one's social drives to expression (whose result is "spontaneous sociology"); and one grasps how this censure, coupled with careful observations on social reality, can enable an insight into aspects of our social unconscious. To an extent, Bourdieu aims with his concepts not so much at discursive theory but at presenting "so many programs for research", his books having to be read more like gymnastics handbooks for experimentation, etc. And the fascinating thing about Bourdieu is that his texts are very cleverly set up to induce the reader to incorporate that attitude towards experimentation, observation of the most diverse aspects of social practice, offering a series of concepts that help to coordinate those experiences in striking ways. As a result, the reader might suddenly obtain some almost intoxicating insights into his/her social being, perceptions, actions, manners of thought, frustrations, aspirations, ideologies, and perhaps even illumination on some entirely forgotten or unknown aspect of one's social being that suddenly explains much about one's present being in the world. I think this makes Bourdieu's work especially attractive for many people. I take Bourdieu's claim that "every sociological analysis should simultaneously become a socioanalysis" as saying that the social-science field should ideally derive its autonomy and internal logic from a two-sided activity, whose two sides should indissociably be interconnected: 1) interest in universal statements about, or objective analyses of, human social realities, coupled with 2) objectifying subjects' reflexive interest in the social history and forces that objectively determine their own various social pulsions and the structure of their social unconscious at various points, which an objectifying science of the social can sometimes help to reveal, but which it can just as often help to blindly conceal. Bourdieu's general tone is polemical because he conceives a social science as having to idiosyncratically be, by its intrinsic logic, polemical. For if the reflexive, subjectively liberating drive to knowledge (this "contribution to the construction of something like a subject") is coupled with the objectifying ethos of a science, then there is bound to be an unending polemics of knowledge, a ceaseless work on, and thence a constant transformation in the values obtained by, the subject and object of knowledge. Good. Then I think that one can do three different things with Bourdieu's work: 1) If one is in the business of doing science, then one will carry out concrete research and seek to apply Bourdieu's programs for observation and analysis in relation to specific problems, reproducing or critically altering Bourdieu's insights in the light of these experiences; one will probably also seek to reflect on the social circumstances that structure one's perceptions and interests from the start, and which affect the course of inquiry (and anthropologists faced with stark experiences of social dislocation are especially forced to confront and perchance to inquire into this); 2) if one is not in the business of doing science but wishes to prolong those "socioanalytical" insights into one's social being, one can continue to read Bourdieu and his critics/commentators, etc., carefully observing social reality and one's movements in/through it -the result of such work will not be discourse but silence, for it should be entirely clear here that the target of analysis is one's own personal states of mind, of social being. The aim is not a scientific work of objectification but rather a cross between moral action and awareness-enhancement in social gymnastics. To oversee this -which means: to think that in this way one is gaining some special scientific insight into social reality - and to break one's silence is conducent to "self-complacent narcisism", for one would only be talking about oneself, under the cloak of the objectifying language that one has learned to parrot from Bourdieu's texts. Which leads us to the next point: 3) There is what I call the "sorceror's apprentice": totally intoxicated by the insights gained in reading Bourdieu's work, our Don Quixote feels he has gained a special standpoint on reality, he feels he has become initiated, has undergone a veritable "conversion in world view". The sorceror's apprentice will rapidly reproduce Bourdieu's sociological censure, but in a pitiful and ridiculous way: he will only commune with the initiated, and haughtily exclude those who don't breakfast, lunch and dinner with "habitus", "social field" or "symbolic capital". He will try to be polemic and to produce a field's censure -but in totally inadequate ways. Why? Because the darling object of our sorceror's apprentice is none other than his own shriveled ego, whose fears and desires he projects around himself with planetary ambitions. There is no real work here at scientific objectivity, at a genuine reflection. It is all pretence at building up a group of initiates that feel capable of transforming the world because they feel they are the world; and because they feel that they have undergone a radical transformation they also feel that they have already began to transform the world. It becomes a sacred mission of sorts. It is all an obsession with reading and re-reading Bourdieu, the sorceror's apprentice trying to get the key to what -in end effect-- he feels is a powerful and empowering magic. Earnestly: I so often meet people who have read Bourdieu and who are nothing but sorcerors' apprentices. They feel they have a clue as to something quasi-magical. "Habitus, habitus" - as if one were talking about something special and esoteric. But there isn't much to that concept; it's not so hard to understand. What is hard is to *apply* it concretely in a scientific practice - or if one isn't in the business of doing science, then in the reflexive analysis of one's social circumstance. It makes no difference how much nor how hard you READ Bourdieu. Someone who reads him a lot is in no better and no worse position than someone who does. Nor do I believe that someone who has read Bourdieu has better chances at becoming aware of the unconscious social mechanisms of his/her habitus than somebody who hasn't. In fact, I could well imagine that reading Bourdieu can hinder that kind of awareness, especially when one is filled with religious awe upon reading his work and goes off to play the sorceror's apprentice. I have often met extremely intelligent people who are anything but academics and who can hardly read, but whose awareness of social being is by far keener than that of those who actually encover it by having learned to say clever-sounding things about it. If one uses Bourdieu to unconsciously satisfy one's social pulsions, one talks a lot but realizes (and actually says) very little; but if you are struck by the fact that your social pulsions keep on getting in the way of an objectve understanding, then you start learning to keep silence; and, finally, if persevering in this kind of silence one has also had the opportunity to do research and obtain something like an objective understanding of a specific reality, then one will talk, but in a very different tone and with respect to some very specific issues. When this crucial activity, socioanalysis, is left out, then the difference between (apparently) sophisticated sociology and spontaneous sociology often boils down merely to their different choices of language; the apprentice may take up the robes of the sorceror, but he is only the greater fool. The sorceror's apprentice is not so intensely confronted with a *specific problem of social science*, which is always both theoretical and empirical and which can only be solved in practice; and neither his/her objective social position, nor the form that his/her subjective personal interests take with regard to these, encourage a special interest in genuinely objective knowledge. He/she is not especially motivated to give certain drives to expression a moment of reflexive silence in order to understand what they may conceal. The reason for this is that the sorceror's apprentice is not attuned to, and does not expect, the kind of profit that is to be gained from taking interest in being disinterested, i.e., taking an interest in doing objective science; the kind of profit to be gained from true scientific work. And if the sorceror's apprentice does not foresee this kind of profit it is because he/she is not genuinely engaged in a genuinely scientific field of activity. There is a theatre director called Bobadella who says that with nationalism it is the same as with farts: the only people who have fun are those who cut them. There is a difference between 1) drives to objective and reflexive knowledge genuinely interconnected, and 2) a de-coupling of these, manifested as a drive to expressive assertion of one's own social pulsions by means of the languange and general discursive structure of an objectifying science. And the difference between the former and the latter is noticeable in how people react to either: when the latter takes over the situation, people begin to get irritated, uncomfortable, they will insult one another. We simply get the feeling that somebody is getting a great kick out of cutting farts. This ongoing controversy on who is allowed to ask things and who is not, who has a right to speak or not, all in a function of one's accumulated Bourdieu-reading-capital: what is it but an attempt to produce a closure, one that resembles both nationalism and the fun one gets (and others do not) in cutting farts? Amen ********************************************************************** 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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