From: Emilio Tenti <Emilio-AT-iipe-buenosaires.org.ar>
Subject: RE: Rules of functioning 
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999 08:42:38 -0300


ABOUT AUTONOMY OF THE SCIENTIFIC FIELDS

IMHO,

The autonomy of the scientific fields is a social and historical (and not
inevitable and reversible) construction. Some intellectuals are interessed
in autonomy while others are not. Some intellectuals wont to win and to get
profits in different fiels in the same time: intellectual and political
field, por ex. More of that: some academics pretend to use political
resources in the scientic strugles (in the universites, etc.).

Autonomy is a relational concept, and refers to others social fiels,
specially political and economic fields. Autonomi refers to the capacity of
define scientific problems, to choise theoretical and metholological
strategies, to define truth criteria, to asses de "scientificity" of proces
and products, etc. 

An other question is: Who is interessed in autonomy and what are de social
conditions of production of such interest?

Emilio TENTI FANFANI
Faculty of Social Sciences
Buenos Aires University
emilio-AT-iipe-buenosaires.org.ar


-----Mensaje original-----
De: bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
[mailto:bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu]
Enviado el: Jueves 18 de Noviembre de 1999 12:39
Para: bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Asunto: RE: Rules of functioning 


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

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