Subject: Re: Quest
Date: Tue, 8 May 2001 17:49:40 +0100


Jon,

> Of course, some might say that this is similar to Bourdieu's practice, in
> that he takes terms and abstractions out of their rarified contexts, to
> reposition them in the rather more concrete world of power and
> postion-takings (sometimes, indeed, to beat dissenters over the head).
>
> While it is clear that Bourdieu's practice is rather dissimilar to Geoff
> Nicholson's (as described in your review of _Bleeding London_), it raises
> the question of the extent to which his general economy of symbolic
> practices inevitably draws accusations similar to those you make against
> Nicholson.

Yes, though this suddenly makes the issue almost impossibly complicated. The
significant difference between Nicholson's reverse-literalism and Bourdieu's is
that Nicholson's practice is driven by obtuseness -- an incapacity for abstract
thought or, to put it more politely, a poor sense of the intellectual game --
and one could hardly say that about Bourdieu and would rather want to talk in
terms of stratagems, tactics, gamesmanship; i.e. along the lines of the ideas
discussed in your review of Robbins's book.

Thinking about your point puts me in mind of Malgorzata Jacyno's book "The
Illusions of Everyday Life -- On the Sociological Theory of Pierre Bourdieu" or
those extracts which Maciek Gdula translated. After reading these (and not
altogether successfully trying to edit them) and taking in Jacyno's conception
of the Bourdieusian Theatre, Maciek's talk (on this list) about "ideology within
ideology", "illusio within illusio", which I had found mystifying, began to
make a lot more sense. I wrote to him in an email that I found her view
"vertiginous and dizzy-making". He replied:

"You are in the place which Jacyno often produce during her seminars, the
point of total doubt. I'm not sure because she never mentioned him directly but
she is taking the position of Lacanian therapist (her role is often reduced to
silence during the seminars) and saying "look the great other doesn't exist".

I am not wholly sure what he means but link it with the Bourdieu quote
"there is no way out of the game of culture", about which one can wonder whether
it is itself a move in the game or a meta-comment.

Incidentally, I was very disappointed that no one on this list was interested
enough to read Jacyno's stuff and discuss it -- since  she is exceptionally
interesting and illuminating, not least (by no means altogether either) for
taking a very different approach from the more or less homogenous Anglo-American
one in the Critical Essays and Shusterman books. This may have been because I
put the Jacyno document on my web site as an RTF file, or perhaps because list
members thought she was another of these maverick anti-academic amateurs --
which is not the case at all; in reply to my request for details, Maciek wrote:

"Jacyno is a sociologist (middle generation in Polish sociology) -- she works in
Institute of  Philosophy and Sociology P.A.N. (Polish Academy of Science) and in
Institute of Philosophy and Sociology on Warsaw Uniwersity."

In the hope that list members will reconsider, I will try to redo the Jacyno
document and put it up on my web site again by the end of this week, this time
as an HTML file (as www.dissent.co.uk/jacyno.htm)


Regards
Simon

























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