Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 09:05:13 +1000 (EST)
From: "Glen Fuller" <g.fuller-AT-uws.edu.au>
Subject: Re: Counter Reformation...



> Glen what is you reading of the text you sent?

Steve,
I think he is analysing the moral panic around violence that some other 
conventional (read: conservative) journalists/analysists want to 
construct and then analyse the violence, but Bourdieu is doing it 
without ever realising (at least in the interview) that it is a moral 
panic. He seems to be saying who cares if the violence is real or not, 
that is the best bit!
The 'sloganism' of left politics of Europe seems a bit avataristic. 

I think his best point, that is kind of obvious, and something that he 
returns to in his Acts of Resistance book is that the conditions that 
are precipitated by neo-liberalist governments and policies make it 
appear as if a neo-liberalist future is 'an inevitable one' for 'it 
proclaims an economic fatalism, against which any resistance appears to 
be futile' (I am sure Bourdieu must have been a trekkie! Or there is a 
trekkie-marxism, hehe). 

One major fault I have with his analysis is the requirement that 
protest be 'organised'. Why they can not remain like Negri's 'circuits 
of resistance'?

I understand it as a post-marxist marxist secretly suggesting that we 
need an organised resistance (which is possible but only appears as if 
it isn't), an alternate system which is _believable_ for what ever 
reason and the believability of the system is important in the face of 
neo-liberalism's inevitability. 

Ciao,
Glen.

-- 
PhD Candidate, Centre for Cultural Research
University of Western Sydney