Date: Thu, 6 Oct 1994 12:36:03 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Jonathan P. Beasley-Murray" <jpb8-AT-acpub.duke.edu>
Subject: objectivism, stasis and ethics


Someone just sent me a private message about the discussion of "abstract 
ideas" on the list.  I'm not sure if this was what was meant, but...

It seems to me that most of the discussions of the list have ignored the 
lived experience of the things they attempt to address.  Both modes of 
production (the economists' debate, more or less) and now the 
base-superstructure connection (if I may distort the marxists and 
academia discussion) seem to be described in terms that I scarcely 
recognize.  Even when history comes up, it seems to be very much a 
reified history--Stalin-Lenin-Vietnam causality, or whatever--in the 
sense that history provides a model or an object-lesson or a passive 
object upon which theories can be tested, to which it remains inert.  I 
get little sense of lived histories.

I have just been (re-)reading the first part of Bourdieu's _Outline of a 
Theory of Practice_, and his critique of objectivism (equally a critique 
of subjectivism, by the way) seems more and more valid.  What is the 
relation of subjectivity to the economy, to the objective structures 
which frame and constitute us?  I think my dissatisfaction with Andy 
Wilson's too firm distinction between collective action and individual 
morals arises from a similar source--I am interested in how ethics or 
ethos are constituted at work, in exchange, through ideological 
inculcation, through the body... and how a counter-ethics might similarly 
arise from such material and collective determinations.

Anyway, back to Bourdieu.  His project is, I guess, at least in part an 
attempt to think through structure and agency once again--"Men make their 
own histories, but not... etc."  Incidentally, he is, for me, the most 
interesting writer on the politics of the academy (see _Reproduction_ and 
_Homo Academicus_).  In so doing, he expands the economic sphere 
massively with his concepts of symbolic and cultural capital (which, in 
fact, he seems to define in a fairly orthodox Marxist way).  But here he 
is on economics per se, on the practical (lived) relation to the objective 
structure of the economy:

"Orthodox economics overlooks the fact that practices may have principles 
other than mechanical causes or the conscious intention to maximize one's 
utility and yet obey and immanent economic logic.  *Practices form an 
economy*, that is, follow an immanent reason that cannot be restricted to 
economic reason, for the economy of practices may be defined by reference 
to a wide range of functions and ends.  To reduce the universe of forms 
of conduct to mechanical reaction or purposive action is to make it 
impossible to shed light on all those practices that are *reasonable* 
without being the product of a reasoned purpose and, even less, of 
conscious computation."  (_An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology_ 119f.)

Take care

Jon

Jon Beasley-Murray
Literature Program
Duke University
jpb8-AT-acpub.duke.edu






     ------------------