File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_2000/bourdieu.0008, message 75


From: "Simon Beesley" <simonb-AT-beesleys.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Habitus obsession
Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 11:15:05 +0100


Kent,

> I find your Alice quotations interesting, but smacks of an ahistoricism
 >which the material conditions may have made obsolute. Why can't the meaning
 > of science be variable or undecidable. After your interesting remarks about
> the lack of need for a foundation, you fail to recognize that science, as
> practice, is not a mainifest discoursive entity...its what people DO within
> and in relation to fields, whether they be academic, political, the family
> etc. One may, altho I am not sure they should or are capable of or to what
> extent, transpose the dispositions of habitus across these various fields,
> but your anglo habitus fails to acknowledge this. I find it interesting
> that you choose Alice as a metaphor...I think this would be an interesting
> thread to follow rather than habitually commenting on what we think habitus
> is.

Science, as far as I am concerned (taking my leave from Feyerabend), is just
that set of cognitive/dispositional/habitus-
bound/theoretical-empirical/discursive practices that lead to the production of
washing machines, microwave ovens, nuclear power stations, video cameras,
computers, global warming, genetically modified food, guided missiles, and other
glories of modern technology. Science is primarily physics, chemistry, and
biology. Like most of the people on this list, I don't know much about it. (I
know how to program a computer but that's not science and its not engineering
either.) Whether sociology can be a science or not, I haven't a clue. I am
pretty sceptical as to the scientificity of most cognitive science and a good
deal of neuroscience (after reading Raymond Tallis's Critical Dictionary of
Neuromythology) and the fact that these apparently harder sciences can turn out
to be bogus would seem to be good grounds for taking Bourdieu's claims for the
scientificity of his own practice with a hefty pinch of salt. The Bourdieusian
thought that I find of value doesn't stand or fall according to whether it is
scientific.

Your question "Why can't the meaning of science be variable or undecidable?"
misses my emphasis which is that whatever the meaning of science may be, the
triumph of science, its total dominance, is undeniable, making all demands for a
foundation idle and redundant. The real problem is to make space for
non-scientific thought, to find a way of granting other modes of thought some
cognitive value, and to combat the plague of bad thinking currently passing
itself off as science. To me it doesn't matter one jot whether Bourdieu's work
can or cannot claim to be scientific when the greater part of contemporary
thought in the social and human sciences is demonstrably bogus and meretricious.

I don't choose Alice as a metaphor. Taking my leave from Donald Davidson's essay
on the concept of metaphor -- A Nice Derangement of Epithets -- I would like to
call a moratorium on all further metaphor talk (along with endorsing your and
Sergio's implicit call for a lifetime ban on further fruitless discussion of the
concept of habitus). The 'metaphor' metaphor has been flogged to death. The use
of it is a slack and lazy habit of thought.

I don't know what an 'anglo' habitus would be, any more than I would presume to
tar you and other N. American posters with the brush of a 'yankee' habitus.
Isn't this just a bad ad hominem argument? Talk of "American intellectual
hucksterism" or "packaged theory production" or "the great American theory mills
and plants" draws attention to processes that are at play in all Western
academic institutions, but perhaps more advanced in the US; it doesn't apply to
all and sundry or individually. One day while browsing in the dusty old Bourdieu
list archives, I came across an ancient post of yours in which you inveighed
against the intellectual philistinism of your own institution. Have you now
changed your mind? Do you not now agree that there is a problem in the way ideas
are transmitted and propagated in Western thought-institutions or a problem with
the increasing regimentation and institution of thought? Does talk of the
marketing of theory and the rise of the doxosopher have any resonance with you?
Bourdieu does and this strand of his thinking, it seems to me, is uniquely
valuable and fruitful, no matter what the material conditions of its production,
its scientificity, reflexivity, objectified objectification, historicism,
ahistoricism, rational historicity ... what have you.

Regards
Simon











**********************************************************************
Contributions: bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Commands: majordomo-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Requests: bourdieu-approval-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005