From: "Simon Beesley" <simonb-AT-beesleys.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: comprendre
Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 23:45:38 -0000


Dennis

>>The price is obvious: we theory-producers, critics, thinkers and
>>activists are becoming proletarianized. As a grad worker, I teach
>>literature part-time to make ends meet and make poverty-level wages.

Right, *you* and no doubt many others are. But can you really claim that as
a class (in some Bourdieuan sense of the word within the intellectual field)
you are, any more than the Marx's proletariat actually succeeded in taking
up its own dictatorship. I mean you and other grad workers are indeed
proletarianized but not in the effective sense demanded by a Marxist or
Frankfurt Marxist theory of history. Isn't it more likely (and more
consonant with Bourdieu's theory) that theory production serves other
purposes than those of the politicized intellectual proletariat? In other
words, what makes you so confident that you can control the means of
intellectual production -- when history overwhelmingly indicates otherwise?
Or to put it more plainly, whatever the rightness of your analysis (and I
don't dispute it), why on earth do you think you can persuade others of it?
Surely the lesson of the failure of Marxism (as a political programme) is
that Marx was unable to make good his famous dictum, "The philosophers have
only
interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."

>>Leading according to who -- the pundits of the transnational biz press?
>>Isn't this exactly what Bourdieu is warning us against, that the moment we
>>think we can advise, influence or act on the political sphere in a
>>non-political way, we're really just cashing in symbolic capital into
>>political capital?

Obviously in referring to Giddens as the leading sociological theorist I am
not endorsing this as a judgement on his intellectual value (I've got his
books and very depressing reading they are -- just a glance is enough to
show up the quality of his thought). I don't understand your second point,
mine being that the case of
Giddens indicates that the odds are stacked against you (or me, or anyone
broadly sympathetic to Bourdieu's political analysis which to be politically
effective would seem to require that all become Bourdieuans).

Regards
Simon Beesley







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