From: "Simon Beesley" <simonb-AT-beesleys.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Robbins book--review
Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 16:27:21 +0100


Jon,

You wrote in your review:

> Robbins aims to be both synthetic, touching on the whole range of
> Bourdieu's publications, and particular, concerned above all with their
> contribution to the study of culture.  But he has most to say about the
> difficulties of reading Bourdieu.  Or rather, it is not so much that
> reading Bourdieu is difficult, but that his conception of
> (particularly) academic culture is also a theory of gamesmanship and
> strategy that seems to condemn in advance any strategic use of that
> theory.  If, in Bourdieu's words quoted here at the outset, "there is no
> way out of the game of culture," Bourdieu would have us believe that any
> attempt to criticise his argument about the rules of that game is simply
> an illegitimate attempt to deny our own participation.
>

I find your distinction between a theory of gamesmanship (and strategy) and the
strategic use of that theory a very useful one. My only complaint is that the
distinction remains at too high a level of generality and I would like someone
to give us some  concrete examples of how Bourdieu exploits his own theory in
his own service; that is, to give an idea of the specific forms of gamesmanship
which Bourdieu engages in. From your review, it sounds as if Robbins pulls back
from this task or is insufficiently sceptical. My own view is that the person
who has done most to analyse this aspect of Bourdieu's writing and theoretical
practice is Malgazorta Jacyno in her book "Illusions of Everyday Life: The
Sociological Theory of Pierre Bourdieu". Maciek Gdula has translated three
longish extracts from this book which I have been trying to edit. If anyone is
interested they can download the results by typing
www.dissent.co.uk/jacyno.rtf -- this is an RTF document which can be opened in
any Windows wordprocessor and possibly also in Unix wordprocessors (I don't
know). I should emphasize that Jacyno's analysis is not a debunking one: she
doesn't hold (at least not explicitly) that Bourdieu's strategic use of his own
theory should be condemned. The document (which starts with Jacyno's summary of
her book) is about 6.5 thousand words and takes up 47 KB, so it shouldn't take
long to download. All you need to do is type the address and document name (as
above, all in lower case) into your browser's address box, whereupon it should
be automatically opened in your wordprocessor or the browser itself -- this at
least is what happens on my system. You can then save it to hard disk.

This edited version of Maciek's translations is littered with comments in square
brackets, most of them from me and most of them concerned with passages I didn't
understand or couldn't find the right English equivalent for. Any
suggestions/corrections/further editing would be most welcome.

There was some discussion of Bourdieu's way of writing on the Tom Choi reading
group (devoted to close reading of Pascalian Meditations). For various reasons,
I didn't stay in the group beyond the first chapter and would be very interested
to hear from Tom or anyone else in the group where this discussion ended up (if
the topic wasn't dropped). For what it's worth, below I have pasted the post I
sent to the group in an attempt to understand what Jacyno means when she talks
of Bourdieu as a "sociologue maudit".


Regards
Simon

************************************

As far as Jacyno's talk of Bourdieu's self-presentation as a sociologue maudit
(i.e. after the notion of the poete maudit) is concerned, this strikes me as
particularly illuminating in connection with the following passage from the
introduction:

"Conscious of all the expectations that I was forced to frustrate, all the
unexamined dogmas of 'humanist' conviction and 'artistic' faith that I was
obliged to defy, I have often cursed the fate (or the logic) that required me
consciously to take up such a difficult cause, to engage, armed only with the
weapons of rational discourse, in a struggle that was perhaps lost in advance
against enormous social forces, such as the weight of habits of thought,
cognitive interests and cultural beliefs bequeathed by several centuries of
literary, artistic or philosophical worship."

My reading French is not good enough to allow me to make any comments on Richard
Nice's translation - but I think he must have done a very good job here in
conveying what I can only imagine is a kind of near pastiche of eighteenth
century (?) French prose. To my ear, the tone of this borders on the comic (a
joke in which Bourdieu would have the last laugh) and fantastic; at all events
somewhat peculiar and unsettling that a professor at the College de France, a
thorough-going academic (and dyed-in-the wool intellectual) at the pinnacle of
his profession, should imagine himself or present himself in the role of
Baudelaire or Karl Kraus or rather a caricatured and watered-down version of
these. Still, it is very enjoyable. I especially enjoy the
bit that goes "I have often cursed the fate (or the logic) that required me
consciously to take up such a difficult cause, to engage, armed only with the
weapons of rational discourse ..." -- in which our hero, single-handedly doing
battle against "enormous social forces", rescues the maiden of Truth from the
clutches of the dragon of "habits of thought, cognitive interests and cultural
beliefs bequeath by several centuries of literary ... etc".

Am I reading too much into this passage? Is my ear too crude or uninformed? It's
almost as if there's an echo of Shakespeare's Hamlet:

"The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!"

Another puzzling passage is this one:

"I have never really felt justified in existing as an intellectual; and I have
always tried - as I have tried again here - to exorcise everything in my
thinking that might be linked to that status, such as philosophical
intellectualism. I do not like the intellectual in myself, and what may sound,
in my writing, like anti-intellectualism is chiefly directed against the
intellectualism or intellectuality that remains in me, despite all my efforts,
such as the difficulty, so typical of intellectuals, I have in accepting that my
freedom has its limits."

Again, I can't really understand this, except in Jacyno's terms - as an instance
of Bourdieu assuming an attitude or a stance, or, in other words, as Bourdieu
trying to have his cake and eat it. (If Bourdieu's not a justified intellectual,
who is?) He is certainly playing some very skillful tricks with the reader.












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