Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 16:18:29 +0200
Subject: Re: Leibnitz


_Relative_ autonomy - which is not a quantitive notion (i.e. it doesn't mean
'more autonomous than most') but a structural one. The kinds of things I can
mean and make happen as an academic - like the kinds of things I can mean
and make happen in the other positions I occupy - depend upon my grasping
the relative autonomy of that particular space. This is not at all to
imagine myself basking in exemption from the movements of capital; rather
recognising that such critical engagement as I can have depends on
understanding the position from which I want to have it. Or, to return to
the terms I was using: when I was young I wished the world to change and I
wished it really really hard. Now I still wish that, and recognise that my
capacity to cause it to change involves processes more involuted than
wishing.

My interest in trying to SEPARATE the critical force of theory from the
force which is ONLY disciplinary (or, only an expression of my capacity for
domination) isn't, i don't think, particularly craven. The rules -
regularities in this case, which is why I called them descriptive rules - I
speak about are the rules that appear to govern Bourdieu's practice of
intervention - what holds together a movement from 'The Disenchantment of
the World' to 'La Misere du monde'. They don't necessarily govern mine,
although, as I say, I like what I gather to be the 'rules' of his movement
between thinking and political activity, and that I find them a useful
resource for thinking my own movements between the two.


Geoff Gilbert

14/05/01 12:08, Simon Beesley à simonb-AT-beesleys.freeserve.co.uk a écrit :

> One more thing:
> 
> "... will know the difficulty of balancing the continuing responsibility to
> that
> first moment of engagement with the exigiencies of the relatively autonomous
> institutional positions we occupy now"
> 
> What is the single most distinct, loudest, clearest message coming out of
> Bourdieu's work -- just about all his books, and blatantly in "Homo
> Academicus",
> "The State Nobility", "Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture", "In
> Other Words", and "Academic Discourse"? What is it? What? That the
> institutional
> positions you occupy as academics have very little autonomy indeed.
> 
> From "The State Nobility", p 5:
> 
> "Thus the sociology of education is a chapter, and not a minor one at that, in
> the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of power, not to mention the
> sociology of the philosophies of power. ... Given that, as established
> elsewhere
> [Distinction], the structure of the social space as observed in advanced
> societies is the product of two fundamental principles of differentiation --
> economic capital and cultural capital -- the educational institution, which
> plays a critical role in the reproduction of the structure of social space,
> has
> become a central stake in the struggle for the monopoly on dominant positions.
> It was necessary to bury the myth of the "school as liberating force,"
> guarantor of the triumph of "achievement" over "ascription", of what is
> conquered over what is received, of works over birth, of merit and talent over
> heredity and nepotism, in order to perceive the educational institution in the
> true light of its social uses, that is, as one of the foundations of
> domination
> and the legitimation of domination."
> 
> The idea that taking a consignment of packaged theory -- at a time when the
> great American theory mills and plants have been ramping up production on an
> unprecedented scale -- and salting it with some dilute Bourdieusian stuff,
> should somehow make you exempt from these structures and processes is no doubt
> the greatest misrecognition of all. Clearly, there is no limit to how brutal
> one
> can be from a position outside academe, and no possibilty whatsoever of it
> having any impact.
> 
> Regards
> Simon
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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