From: "kent strock" <sigmund5-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Habitus
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 05:47:41 GMT



ania,
sorry, but true science and playing "into" your hand are counter to a 
certain type of discourse.  Simon is questioning a part of science and a 
trap that Bourdieu has fallen into of a universal science which I find 
....untentable.  I will ask a bald question....Who cares if we find a cure 
for alzheimers? will the world be better off?  I would think not.
As far as playing into his hand....simon and I have had our 
disagreements....but they have been superficial and without ...I think to 
much concequence, but your ideology of "trumping" someone and not 
considering the implications of the trumping is troubling.
kent strock

>From: Ania Lian <ania-AT-lingua.arts.uq.edu.au>
>Reply-To: bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>To: bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Subject: Re: Habitus
>Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 10:55:12 +1000 (EST)
>
>On Sun, 20 Aug 2000, Simon Beesley wrote:
>
> > Sorry, Ania, this does seem like a consensual breakdown in so far as I
> > can't for the life of me see the connection between research into
> > Alzheimer's and epistemology or the philosophy of science, and don't
> > see the need for justification of such research,
>
>of course not, why would you, after all, you seem to believe that what we
>do requires no accountibility procedures; why then worry about things like
>Method etc?
>
> > though fat lot of
> > good it will do
>
>This does not make sense. First you cannot justify why research on
>Alzheimer's makes sense as you refuse to see a need for justification why
>anything makes sense.  Then you speculate that Alzheimer's research has a
>chance to do something good. Tell me why??? Tell me why doing research on
>Alzheimer's has a chance to help teh factors that in reality are not
>Alzheimer's but simply a collection of factors that affect people in
>certain ways?
>
> > modern science and technology -- not alarmist, simply the sober
> > appraisal of Paul R. Epstein in an article titled "Is Global Warming
> > Harmful to Health?", Scientific American, August 2000:
>
> > "Computer models indicate that many diseases will surge up as the 
>earth's
> > atmosphere heats up. Signs of the predicted troubles have begun to 
>appear."
>
>We invent machines only to give our calculations an air of independence.
>Diseases may surge but not because of global warming: I think that we
>somehow lost here teh context: a machine's error or an epistemological
>error?
>
> > How does your concept of an epistemological foundation for science
> > accomodate the kind of scientific intelligence that can blithely --
> > with criminal naivety -- talk as if our world leaders were capable of
> > wisdom? What's your take on the idea of the myth of political
> > rationality?
>
>You play into my hands, in case you did not notice, You say that something
>somewhere is going wrong but if we cannot determine the quality of
>discourse (method?) that is to help us to unravel it, we say that all
>action, all knowledge is equally valid and true.
>
>My concept tells me that unless we rethink our prejudices, we are stuck in
>the field of teh discourse of teheconomist and not of true science.
>Science, as it is conducted at teh level of university is not about
>science and LEASt of all about helping humanity. It runs on
>self-legitimising discourses that treat Alzheimer's as reality because
>people will pay for teh name that scares teh sh.t out of them.
>
>Academia has interest in accusing leaders of wisdom because it is these
>leaders and tehir network that pays for tehir living. Any attempt to tell
>that teh emperor is naked drives one into teh field of independent study,
>a very courageous step. Boyer's report has found out that most gaound
>shaking research has been done by independent scholars. Why? Is it because
>academia people cannot think? Only partly. It is because to revise the
>system is very threatning to all.
>
>Imagine if we found out that every time you threw a dollar to help cancer
>research was a dollar you saved a big fat mafia like business boy to
>continue the scare campain? What a face loss! Imagine that every dollar we
>spent on the magic of the genome project is of no use to preventive
>medicine, a cause for which teh money was being collected! Imagine,
>Clinton shook teh hand of those semi geniuses who put together the Deep
>Thought or rather the Big Pretend thought to calculate genes, all for
>little return! Academia is not involved in thinking but is part of teh big
>joke running around fooling even you that we can proceed in a multitude of
>ways all of which are equally valid.
>
>You want solutions to global warming? I know of those who have solutions
>that do not require reduction but in fact will thrive on teh increase!
>Why? Bacause teh things that the gases send to air will be needed for
>accumulation of chemicals necessary to do things with it. But if
>you consider that these things may threaten the billion dollar industries
>which today claim to work in your interest (!), what chance does this have
>to convince anyone?
>
>Can I prove that I am right? Well, I understand my friend tried but had to
>compete against a grant of $30m for clinical testing of some box-based
>crap against an $80 000 grant that he could offer to the hospital to run
>independent tests!! You think that humanity won? Yes, the $30m grant did
>win...
>That was the hospital part. And when he approached the global
>warming scientists, do you think that they were dying to exchange
>ideas? Fat chance. All they wanted is to milk him! Why is he different
>than teh rest or most of scientific world: he read Derrida, Foucault,
>Nitzche, Kristeva, Searl, you name it. He dared to think and to leave teh
>academic scene.
>
>Meanwhile people die of Alzheimer's , suffer of arthritis, die
>prematurely, choke from bad air and, as Lyotard put it, science laughs
>into its beard.
>
>so there. Yes I do believe in intellectual rigour, a part of life that
>Academia lost as soon as accountibility got translated into quantity
>rather than quality, as soon as little boys started to play mafia games in
>teh form of "sympathetic" peer-reviews, as soon as status came in teh way
>of human interests, as soon as the imagine of the warm-hearted,
>usnsuspicious academic got replaced with that of the business-man.. . You
>may not agre but for that you have to do a bit more than simply accuse me.
>I at least have a proof: teh recent reform movement done by
>Carnegie-Foundation for Advanevement of teaching and research. They may be
>wrong in the way in which they approach teh problem, but tehir movement
>reflects teh awareness that something somewhere got lost. And if this is
>all that this Foundation achieves, that's enough for others to build upon.
>
>Ania Lian
>
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