Subject: Re: Leibnitz
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 06:17:45 +0100


> Bravo! Simon - you should be proud.

Why? I am not an academic and am not in the business of nurturing young minds.
That's your job -- though I am not sure that the person to whom my brutal
epithets were directed would not prefer my brutality to your patronising tone.

What is this? Academic Pecksniffs tut-tutting at the language one uses?
I would argue that my approach is more faithful to the spirit of
Bourdieu's thought -- and if it's not, I still can't find it in me to be the
least bit contrite.

> Thanks for that John Evans - I think that we are all puzzling with the
> relation between the critical and the merely disciplinary energies of theory
> in general and Bourdieu in particular. The descriptive rules we might derive
> from his own practice - he is louder and angrier in general with more
> powerful groups than with less powerful - are cheerily under-theorised: they
> even look happily sentimental; but they do sign an inchoate relation to the
> inchoacies of the world. That is, there's something of beautiful and blind
> allegiance behind what can't be a fully scientific dialectical engagement.


"The merely disciplinary energies of theory"? This is going straight to the top
of my book of academic euphemisms, to describe it euphemistically, along with
"cheerily under-theorised" and "fully scientific dialectical engagement" --
terms which it would be polite to describe as jargon. As for the idea that we
might derive descriptive  rules for our own practice from Bourdieu's practice
... I cannot think of anything more craven and, again, more antithetical to the
spirit and the letter of Bourdieu's thought and practice.

Regards
Simon

















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