File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_2000/bourdieu.0001, message 34


Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 12:50:11 -0800 (PST)
From: Dennis R Redmond <dredmond-AT-OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>
Subject: Re: comprendre


On Mon, 10 Jan 2000, Simon Beesley wrote:

> Snideness apart, the implication of your reply -- and most strikingly of
> your tone with its marked note of academic amour propre -- seems to be that
> people outside of the university have no right (or time) to think and
> discuss the ideas that emanate from the university. The idea of using
> Bourdieu's concepts to fight the System and win seems to me as fantastical
> as F.R. Leavis's notion of turning English departments into "liason centres"
> for the preservation of high literary culture (and I am a great admirer of
> Leavis). 

Well, what precisely *is* that system? You would agree that there is such
a thing as global capitalism, wouldn't you? That capital is concentrated
in the hands of a tiny rentier/industrialist elite? That aforesaid capital
is concerned mainly with reproducing itself and doesn't give a damn about
the public, the cultural heritage, or the ecology? That the 4 billion
people of the 2nd/3rd World on this planet are locked into the most vile
neocolonial debt-induced servitude to the minions of the IMF, their
fragile economies the plaything of uncaring market forces and greedhead
corporations? That most of us have no control over our workplace, our
incomes, or the investment policies of the corporate overclass which runs
the show? Oughtn't we try to understand why this is, how we got into this
sorry state of affairs, and how we might change things for the better?

None of these are my points; they're Bourdieu's.

-- Dennis

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