File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_2000/bourdieu.0006, message 28


From: "Simon Beesley" <simonb-AT-beesleys.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Bourdieu and Objectivity
Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 15:53:55 +0100


Kent,

Finally, at last, I think I understand what you're saying with this talk of the
transparency of language and my desire to rid it of rhetoric. Correct me if I am
wrong, but what you mean is this: I am being far too literal in taking Bourdieu
at his word. When he talks of his aims "above all" as being this or that, we
shouldn't take this seriously. It's just another piece of Bourdieusian rhetoric.
Perhaps it's a metaphor. At all events, we shouldn't put it under too much
pressure. The demand for cogency, coherence, intelligibility is invalid. The
concept of a disposition or a set of disposition is a rhetorical device or a
metaphor or an instance of metonymy or a pregnant image or ... something of that
ilk.

I will certainly go along with this, conceding that what purports to be a
scientific or scientific-philosophical statement cannot be treated as such. It
was unfair of me to think one could make sense of it in those terms.

Are all of Bourdieu's pronouncements then to be taken metaphorically or
rhetorically? I wish someone had told me before -- because as rhetoric goes it's
pretty poor stuff and, anyway, I am not overly fond of rhetoric (at least when
it poses as something else). And as for metaphor and other figurative and
poetic uses of language, I would prefer to read Baudelaire any day than
wrestle with Bourdieu's reduction of him -- his poetry has a higher cognitive
content.

Regards
Simon


















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