Plato’s Prisons of Techne

I repost here the quote from the Republic that in usual Platonic, imagistic language is full of potential truths. Here we find Socrates discrediting primarily the sophists, but really by virtue of a whole class of technically skilled [techne] workers, those whose power and knowledge consists in their experiences, and standing, as workers. In condensed fashion he runs the gambit from prisoners to technicians to mere machine workers. All of these he tells us, wish to gravitate, actually more, leap or fly to the prestige of philosophy:

Just as men out of prisons into holy sanctuaries are fleeing, so these joyous men out from technical arts are leaping into Philosophy, as if those being most intricate would hit upon the little art of themselves. For in comparison with the other arts the honor of philosophy even though abandoned is more magnificent. This is the flight of the many unaccomplished by nature, who from the technical arts and even workmanship, their bodies have been mutilated and their souls envined and even crushed through the mechanical arts.

Plato, Republic [495d]

Leaving the question of the sophists aside and picking up the word-image, we really have something here. There is the interminable sense that our experiences as workers confined to the techniques of our knowing and doing, caught within the demands of an economic and thereby psychic necessity, contort us, alter us. And Plato’s image is quite strong as he evokes the worker or technician (and some editors have thought that he had the military arts in mind, but the image carries through) whose body is maimed by the arts he practices. We see vividly the industry worker, or other friends of the ”machine” who has lost fingers or received other bodily harm, even desk workers whose time in the chair have changed their posture. All of these graftings of a machinic upon the human body are rolled up into the image of the prisoner at the beginning of the passage, the one who is confined, shackled by circumstances of every degree. And all of these make for Socrates those who are unqualified to the seat of Philosopher. This is because, as the body is the image of the soul, it is not only bodies that have been exacted upon, it is souls, and here in the end forming a bookend to the prisoner the image is striking. The mechanical arts (by which we are to see mean arts, perhaps those of low craftsmen, even with the association of the weaver who is feminine), actually “envine”, they envelope and slowly twist and choke the soul, even eventually crush or pulverize it. What comes to mind for me is of a gear-working, a rack that out of its unnatural nature incrementally destroys the cognitive powers of the soul. Here “work” in every mechanical gradient becomes the equivalent of torture.

At a certain level we have condensed here all of the reasons why the economic freedoms of others become a high priority for us. For it is not just in political restriction that the voice and soul becomes contorted, but also that the very lived mechanical – and we read mechanical even in the most abstract sense of purposed and productive repetitions - states of workers are binding and cognitively contorting devices. At least that is the rhetorical picture. Aside from Plato’s political aim, the freeing of cognitions from devices remains a kind of halo of a hope, an attractor.

Scholastic Silence: How to Comtemplate

But in this ethical picture stands its opposite, the idea that the Philosopher is he who is not contorted, maimed or crushed. The one whose body and soul stands relatively whole, unpressured, the one who can see clearly, from a distance. It is there that Bourdieu’s critique of the “scholastic point of view” which I brought up in my last post, occurs. The production of the quietude of the Philosopher, the near monastic, let us say scholastic isolation from the contortions of mechanical art pressures, is, Bourdieu wants us to know, artificial. The cocoon and buffer that creates the gap between a world of devices and techniques exacted, and the imagined realm of reasons, has to be built. It has been constructed through labors which themselves are structured. And then it too is structured by internal devices and arts. What Bourdieu wants us to know is that when the philosopher adopts the scholastic point of view, he/she is likely carrying with him/her the vast train of social constructions (literal constructions) which enable that monastic cell of contemplation, and there is both a social and epistemic responsibility towards the excavation of those inherited and largely unconscious relations (an excavation that in some sense is retarded by flat ontologies who know only their surface).

The One Machinist of the 17th Century

In a way it is the Philosopher who knows least the mutilations of his/her body, the envinings of his/her soul, the pulverizations, due to the very quietude of contemplation. And to this great dis-orientation of thinking towards the mere mechanical, my mind turns towards the rise of the philosophy of the mechanical, the Dutch flowering of Cartesian mechanism. It seems here that most, if there was to be a philosophy that embraced the mechanical nature of thinking it would be found here. I wrote some time ago about the “hand of de Beaune” a brilliant mathematician who was working hard in the service of Descartes on the production of a fantastic automated lens-grinding machine :Descartes and Spinoza: Craft and Reason and The Hand of De Beaune. With somewhat of a coincidence de Beaune’s hand was severely cut just as Plato’s technician’s body was maimed. Descartes’ dream though was of producing machines which no hand would touch, pure, abstract machines, concretized maths, in a sense, those which would free the otherwise fettered human mind. Plato’s dichotomy duplicates itself, the machine as enemy to the mind because of the body, as well as its instrumental aid. As I have pointed out in my investigation of Spinoza’s lens-grinding, Spinoza was the only “worker” of the period, and in fact the only craftsman per se. While lens-grinding and machine fascination was an elite hobby among the new scientist riche, Spinoza was actually a worker, and engaged his lens lathe daily as a matter of his economic sustainance. Deep in this machinic age, only Spinoza new the machine in a fashion Plato’s Socrates could not. He knew it with his hands.

In an interesting fashion, Spinoza’s “scholastic point of view” embodies a unique self-reflective awareness that is encapsulated in his worker, machine status, as well as one might admit, his standing as an ostricized Jew. He occupied a position at the border, a stand-point, that made of his quietude a different sort of awareness. Born of the age of the machine, Spinoza understood the human being too as a device, a complex series of ordinations, to which other complex serieses of ordinations are connected, a “spiritual automaton” he called the human being. In this awareness the “worker” takes on a different place: Not that of “prisoner” to stand in dialectical opposition to the unmutilated man, but of machinic degree. Our work becomes an expression of machines, machines of which we never extricate ourselves. It is only that we need to choose our machines (those of which we are made) more carefully, with an eye to liberation. The gaze of leisure is to be questioned.

Blogged Quietism

In this view blogging of course becomes a significant phenomena. Some philosophical bloggers write out of a self-created cocoon to escape the twisting techne of university or college, forming however brief a contemplation of respite, engaging the machinic of the internet. Some blog in order to be able to speculate, to freely exhibit what they might be able to think, if they were allowed to. Yet, as we produce our ideas and disseminate them, to the degree that we do not embrace the machinic, we are fraught with generating the modes that have produced our monk-cell, unconsciously, not recognizing the shapes of our bodies and souls.

Atop this image of the mechanical arts that contort there is the artist, we might say, is also the self-artist. The one that grasps the inherent machinic character of the human, and purposely undergoes specific machinic contortions upon both body and soul, not to perfect, but to express (and to some degree soterologically free themself and others from) the specific techne of the world, as it stands. To take on the machine, in the way that a poet takes on a complex meter.

Living Beyond Your Means, On Credit

I don’t have time to summarize in depth, but some may be interested in this discussion over at the Latourian blog We Have Never Been Blogging: Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop. In our back and forth I quote from Bourdieu, from his Homo Academicus, a passage meant to describe the avenues of academic respect hoped to be achieved through “journalism”. The passage has of course interest for the kinds of Symbolic Capital some are, or have been trying to accumulate through blogging and other heterodox philosophical publishing. Worthy of note, Bourdieu uses an analogy of credit quite similar to one that I employed recently, although I did not have this passage or even Bourdieu in mind:

The heretical traditions of an institution based on a break with academic routine, and structurally inclined towards pedagogical and academic innovation, lead its members to become the most vigorous defenders of all the values of research, of openness to abroad and of academic modernity; but it is also true that they can encourage to the same extent work based on bogus, fictitious and verbal homage to these values, and that they can encourage members to give prestigious values for a minimum of real cost…The structural ambiguity of the position of the institution reinforces the dispositions of those who are attracted to this very ambiguity, by offering them the possibility and the freedom to live beyond their intellectual means, on credit, so to speak. To all the impatient claimants who, against the long production cycle and longterm investment…have chosen the short production cycle, whose ultimate example is the article in the daily or weekly press, and have given priority to marketing rather than production, journalism offers both a way out and a short cut. It enables them to overcome rapidly and cheaply the gap between aspirations and opportunities by ensuring them a minor form of the renown granted to great scholars and intellectuals; and it can even, at a certain stage in the evolution of the institution towards heteronomy, become a path to promotion within the institution itself.

There is even more coincidence for those interested in the local goings on in the blogged philosophical community, as Levi Bryant actually holds related parts of Bourdieu’s book as authentication for why he turned down a future at four year colleges and universities:

“Why did I choose a position at a two year school? “There”, I told Fink, “I will have academic freedom. I will be able to explore my interest in all styles of philosophy, psychoanalysis, biology, physics, history, literature, and so on without being required to be anything. No one will care what or where I publish, so I will be free to do what I want.” In his characteristic manner he said “hmmmm!!!”, making a honking sound like one of the squash horns my grandfather used to make for me as a young boy. At the time I thought that was a rationalization. Often I still do. I took myself out of the prestige game, though I still yearn for it sometimes. But what I was doing ultimately, I think, was giving myself the freedom to speculate. What a relief it was to read Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus years later! Perhaps, above all, what that seventh chapter gave me was the authorization to speculate without bowing before the obsessional alter of “Continental rigor” [editorial note: defense]. However, the fact that I would undermine my own work in this way must indicate that here there’s still something unresolved. Nonetheless, I can’t help but feel embarrassment whenever anyone wants to discuss the work or wants insight into it.” here

No longer did Levi have to bow down and kiss the rings of the “prestige game”. We might assume that much of the thinking that leads one to the freedoms of speculation, that draw one away from university pursuits, would also be integral to the pursuits of blogging where even more freedom and speculation can occur.

Monk-Mind and Speculative Thinking: Playing Seriously

But in another sense, if we are going to appreciate Bourdieu on this front, we should keep our eye upon all the Symbolic Capital accumulations (not just where and how they have been cashed in within the Institution), and see that Speculation is an interesting game, one that aims at kind of heretical prestige runaround, but also one that participates in the general game of the scholè, the reasoned preoccupations that only can occur within a hermeticism against practical, worldly pressures. The generation of the “scholastic point of view”:

I believe indeed that we should take Plato’s (1973) reflections on skhole very seriously and even his famous expression, so often commented upon, spoudaios paizein, “to play seriously.” The scholastic point of view of which Austin speaks cannot be separated from the scholastic situation, a socially instituted situation in which one can play seriously and take ludic things seriously. Homo scholasticus or homo academicus is someone who is paid to play seriously; placed outside the urgency of a practical situation and oblivious to the ends which are immanent in it, he or she earnestly busies herself with problems that serious people ignore-actively or passively. To produce practices or utterances that are context-free, one must dispose of time, of skhole and also have this disposition to play gratuitous games which is acquired and reinforced by situations of skhole such as the inclination and the ability to raise speculative problems for the sole pleasure of resolving them, and not because they are posed, often quite urgently, by the necessities of life, to treat language not as an instrument but as an object of contemplation or speculation.

Thus what philosophers, sociologists, historians, and all those whose profession it is to think and/or speak about the world have the most chance of overlooking are the social presuppositions that are inscribed in the scholastic point of view, what, to awaken philosophers from their slumber, I shall call by the name of scholastic doxa or, better, by the oxymoron of epistemic doxa: thinkers leave in a state of unthought (impense’, doxa) the presuppositions of their thought, that is, the social conditions of possibility of the scholastic point of view and the unconscious dispositions, productive of unconscious theses, which are acquired through an academic or scholastic experience, often inscribed in prolongation of an originary (bourgeois) experience of distance from the world and from the urgency of necessity.

“The Scholastic Point of View”

For those that follow Harman’s preoccupations, the forgotten Scholastics are principle among them. These now ill-respected thinkers for Harman form a whole portfolio of philosophical stock that can be purchased at bargain basement prices. Mix one of these thinkers into your paper and one suddenly produces a sense of weight and historical richness, we know. If you embrace one fully enough you’ve resurrected a lost soul locked in the catacombs of philosophical history, and have engendered a sense of personal originality, going against the tide of the Institution. But as well we might see that the connection between Scholasticism and Speculativism comes out of a certain kind of inherent idealization of what academic thinking is. Cocooned from practical concerns and pressures, the monk-mind is free to speculate and achieve a kind of non-worldly perspective. The isolation into institutions, and then, when run from, into blogged privacies is a participation in privilege to which the thought produce may very well be blind. There is real, Bourdieuian advisement that “the scholastic point of view” must be epistemologically leavened with an awareness of the structures which have produced it, and thus made aware of the unconscious investments that govern its own quietude.  If we may be monks, the conditions that allow our speculation are brought along with it, and if we really are pursuing, not just speculation for its pleasures of freedom and imagination, not just some kind of run-around of Institutional restraint, searching for cheaper prestige, but true ideas and ideas that inherently should matter to the world, the consequence of our ideas (politically, ethically, socially) must be embraced. In this way there is an epistemological mandate for our ontological speculation which immediately connects ethics to metaphysics. By way of example: Speculating that the world is essentially an Oriental condition of mediated cause as Harman does, should be related to the real world Orientalization which produces the cocoon of one’s own speculation, possibly to detrimental effect. To put it another way, the more our Symbolic Capital increases, especially in the field of philosophy, the more our ethical responsibility of our ideas to the world does as well.

Just as men out of prisons into holy sancturaries are fleeing, so these joyous men out from technical arts are leaping into Philosophy, as if those being most intricate would hit upon the little art of themselves. For in comparison with the other arts the honor of philosophy even though foresaken is more magnificent. This is the flight of the many unaccomplished by nature, who from the technical arts and even workmanship, their bodies have been mutilated and their souls envined and even crushed through the mechanical arts.

Plato, Republic [495d]

In fact, in respect to all this situation, Bourdieu even take into account Spinoza`s Politico-Theological Treatise to recommend it to the philosophical hermeneutists adepts as a program that founds (I`m translating here) a truthful science of the cultural oevres, a program that promotes the rupture of the ritual embalmment that endorses any textual canonization, in order to put such oevres into an historical investigation, that shall determine (paraphrasing Bourdieu quote on Spinoza): “not only the life and the habits of the author that wrote it, in which epoch, and for who and with which language such oevre was written, but also to determine in which hands such oevre fell into, who decide admitted it as canonic, etc…”

This all can be read in Bourdieu`s most sober philosophical book, his Pascalien Meditations, specially a chapter entitled “The critique of the scholastic reason”, where he states his famous “radical doubt radicalized” procedure. Something to enjoy http://is.gd/503at

Comentado por Naxos en:

The Play of Fascist Objects: Object-Orientation and Latour

On November 20, 2009 at 7:15 pm

Yeah, i do think that Harman is too honest regarding to his work and with his lack of interest of the social, so blindly honest that he just ends up to reify his rampant naivety. But still this is just a superficial justification that its not acceptable at the end of the day. Yes, he thinks he is doing ontology, but he just wants to avoid the fact that ontology is also a political issue. However, I elsewhere wielded to Levi a rude bourdieusian frontal comment against what he was defending regarding to the distinction between the questions of politics and the questions of ontology. A comment that of course he was not brave enough to publish on his blog: http://is.gd/5000C There i explain how naive is to think that such distinction is an absolute one. There i even bring Heidegger`s historical case, so to demonstrate how the questions of politics do have a lot to do with the questions of ontology. The irony is that i exemplify such case using Bourdieu`s little book on the political ontology of Heidegger, which is meant to demonstrate how Heidegger worked out his idea of ontology to institutionalize his political fascist tendencies in order to construct and reinforce the refractive illusion of an absolute autonomy of the philosophical field. Of course we can perfectly endorse and extend such comment to Harman`s naivety.

Comentado por Naxos en:

The Play of Fascist Objects: Object-Orientation and Latour

On November 20, 2009 at 5:52 pm

Thanks for your words, Kevin Of course, this has a lot to do with intellectual honesty and with the ability to make helpful epistemological ruptures in respect to what we sooner or later presume to be our ‘work’. But mostly with the practical ways we all have to approximate to what we shall understand as our ‘object’ of study. Bourdieu never got tired to insist in this kind of professional reflexivité. I am just trying to wield a bit of his ‘common sense’ here, as i think it is the least thing i can do against Latour`s cynical imposture.

Comentado por Naxos en:

The Play of Fascist Objects: Object-Orientation and Latour

On November 20, 2009 at 3:47 pm

Adriano has a really articulate comment he put up under my posting on Latour’s implicit Fascism, Fascist Bindings In Latour: The Blinding Glory of Non-Human Agency. I have to comment on this later, but his essential Bourdieu vs. Latour political point is certainly a compelling one. Its has a double-edged blade when put to Harman and Levi because Harman declaratively wants to ignore any political complicity or consequence of his thinking (he embraces its Orientalism to no ill effect), while Levi who tries to preserve his social justice credentials and his hatred (yes hatred) for Neoliberalism wants to read Marx as essentially Latourian. For those interested in Levi’s self-proclaimed in-name political radicalism (and I am not, other than its implicit hypocrisy) Adriano’s pressing of a political, sociological critique is quite germane. For those interested in Harman’s implicit Capitalized logic (which I am), the question of Latour’s Neoliberalism which grounds Harman’s attempt to glue Husserlian objects to Heideggerian ones, Adriano’s point again presses home. The question arises, What is so sexy about objects?, if one could put it that way.

As Fuller writes in the article I cited, the very object-orientation of the concept of “translation” as a strong counterpart in our conception of desire:

” “Translation” was meant broadly to cover the process whereby one thing represents another so well that the voice of the represented is effectively silenced. Central to this process is the capacity of something to satisfy—and thereby erase—a desire. Callon and Latour exploited the Latin root of “interest” as interesse (“to be between”) to capture this capacity, which reverses the ordinary meaning of interest by implying that it is the presence of an object that creates (or perhaps reorients) a desire which the object then uniquely satisfies. That object is the mediator.”

When Latour’s very theory of objects as actors itself is seen in this light, as the “object that uniquely satisfies or fully orients our desire”, when our consciousness is defined by its objects, we of course lose the capacity to critique that desire itself, and the matrix of powers/desires it finds itself in. Is it not that the very verticality of ontology (aside from Harman’s fantasy of four-fold sensuality), the leverage point upon which ethics is built? And is not the very absence of an ethics from Latour, Harman and Levi, the mark of the failings of their ontological construction? In short, perhaps….where is Bourdieu?

Here is Adriano’s comment:

Well yeah, as we have coincide before: the foundational imposture that Latour retains is the source of the problem. But its also worth to mention that neither Harman nor Levi bothered themselves to take Latour`s work critically. Like i have said elsewhere, Latour´s work departures from a very and detailed systematic anti-bourdieusian imposture, say like ‘phantomizing’ Bourdieu´s constructive/conceptual preoccupations. So from this reactive foundation he is doing a cinical counterargumentation of all the work done by Bourdieu, and he keeps on feeding his stands by doing that.

Its seems that the position that Latour is occupying between the philosophical and the sociological fields is one of an ideologue who denies the relation that social research is meant to have in respect with other fields of knowledge, and this, in order to presume and to exalt the illusion of an absolute autonomy of the scientific field. But as he does this cynically, those who follow his work without any critical margins are meant to fall into a blinded spot in the exercise of their own practice, while they reproduce it as a naturalized scholastic point of view which gives a ‘fair’ sense of justification to their objectual laboratory. This is what i was trying to say to Nick the other day.

So the problem is also the lack of interest in adapting their work into the social research procedures: neither Harman or Levi are much worried to do this in the right way so to contemplate and conceive other critical angles regarding to what is known about the latourian assertions.They don`t do this because it would imply to realize how urgent is it for their sake to drop out a big part of what sustains their work. For instance, as a bourdieusian, its seems to me that they had never triangulate Latour`s work with Bourdieu`s, not even when there is a clear critical struggle underlined between these two sociologues. So they took an unquestioned part on Latour`s favor without knowing the specific and confronted vis a vis details of this very particular struggle, and obviously without getting to know closer the bourdieusian frame of work.

The results are evident: blinded spots within their practice that are reproduced through their pragmatic academic and granted commodities. This also means that they may not be aware how they are reproducing specific ideological interests that also might point out to their own social class and habitus) and this, in despite their good intellectual and ontological will. An object-oriented-naivety that ends to be self-oriented while they insist to defend it in they mean to fiercely embrace it.

UPDATED: For those interested in the Levi opera, I include here a link to a thorough-going response Adriano had to Levi’s separation of ontology from politics, which Levi in his usual fashion of refusing to publish critical objections to his position, deleted, in an effort to shape the impression that his position is both achieved through some kind of dialogic with all objections, and the production of a kind of consensus: here. He of course also has deleted any number of similiar critical questionings of his concepts by me, as well.  A discussion of these issues follows in the comments section below.

Well yeah, as we have coincide before: the foundational imposture that Latour retains is the source of the problem. But its also worth to mention that neither Harman nor Levi bothered themselves to take Latour`s work critically. Like i have said elsewhere, Latour´s work departures from a very and detailed systematic anti-bourdieusian imposture, say like ‘phantomizing’ Bourdieu´s constructive/conceptual preoccupations. So from this reactive foundation he is doing a cinical counterargumentation of all the work done by Bourdieu, and he keeps on feeding his stands by doing that. Its seems that the position that Latour is occupying between the philosophical and the sociological fields is one of an ideologue who denies the relation that social research is meant to have in respect with other fields of knowledge, and this, in order to presume and to exalt the illusion of an absolute autonomy of the scientific field. But as he does this cynically, those who follow his work without any critical margins are meant to fall into a blinded spot in the exercise of their own practice, while they reproduce it as a naturalized scholastic point of view which gives a ‘fair’ sense of justification to their objectual laboratory. This is what i was trying to say to Nick the other day. So the problem is also the lack of interest in adapting their work into the social research procedures: neither Harman or Levi are much worried to do this in the right way so to contemplate and conceive other critical angles regarding to what is known about the latourian assertions.They don`t do this because it would imply to realize how urgent is it for their sake to drop out a big part of what sustains their work. For instance, as a bourdieusian, its seems to me that they had never triangulate Latour`s work with Bourdieu`s, not even when there is a clear critical struggle underlined between these two sociologues. So they took an unquestioned part on Latour`s favor without knowing the specific and confronted vis a vis details of this very particular struggle, and obviously without getting to know closer the bourdieusian frame of work. The results are evident: blinded spots within their practice that are reproduced through their pragmatic academic and granted commodities. This also means that they may not be aware how they are reproducing specific ideological interests that also might point out to their own social class and habitus) and this, in despite their good intellectual and ontological will. An object-oriented-naivety that ends to be self-oriented while they insist to defend it in they mean to fiercely embrace it.

Comentado por Naxos en:

Fascist Bindings In Latour: The Blinding Glory of Non-Human Agency

On November 20, 2009 at 10:56 am

Hi Kevin: Great. I just want to say that I am kind of intrigued regarding to the critic that you imply here against the ‘flat ontology’ and that the object-oriented defenders (mostly speaking about Levi) are phantomizing to justify their supposed democratic foundment of objects. It comes to my mind how interesting it would be to remark how this specific ‘flatness’ is depotencialized as it does not take into account the parallel that Spinoza traces to demonstrate how that passions-of-the-body are the same than the passions of-the-soul (an operation that makes possible an immanent conceptualization of potentia and that Deleuze explains in the chapter 2 of his Spinoza and expressionism). I mean, Levi keeps on saying that his ontology is a flat one while he cuts the aspects that are related to potency. I just think that maybe this is something that you would also want to retrieve to Spinoza. Thanks

Comentado por Naxos en:

Fascist Bindings In Latour: The Blinding Glory of Non-Human Agency

On November 20, 2009 at 8:36 am

I finally got a postitive reply from the European Journal of Cultural Studies, after one year of waiting for the referee comments. The referees had, of course, misunderstood a lot of things, which, again, is propably the fault of my unclear communication.

Anyway, changes were required, as they usually are, but once done, the article will be published. So at the moment I am working on those changes.

The article will analyze the development of Helsinki club&dance party culture from late 1980’s onwards, and see how does one become popular, and how does one lose ones position. It mainly focuses on the career of two broad musical genres, techno and house, and their different paths and strategies of development.

The data is drawn mainly from CITY magazine, as in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s it was more or less the only media in Helsinki that covered nightlife at all. I have collected around 300 club listings,feature articles, party previews and advertisements.

The results? Club culture is a lot like French highculture that Bourdieu describes. Its rules are the same, and the taste judgements are just as nuanced. There is the same tension between mainstream and more symbolically valuble production of music and clubs, and who the audiences are matters enourmously. Which, of course, everyone in the club culture already knew. But the academic world didn’t, as researchers have been insisting that all culture is now the same and there is no hierachies.

The question is, how much does popular culture mediate and create class distinctions? At least it does reflect the power game between money and culture, as well as the struggle for the art fields to become independent of both – and still, somehow, make money and gain cultural recognition.

Jag sitter och skriver på ett avsnitt som handlar om språk. Många av de elever som jag har intervjuat berättar att de lärde sig att tala “fel” eller “dålig” svenska på de skolor där de gick innan de sökte sig till innerstadsskolor.  Deras berättelser visar att språk kan vara så mycket mer än kommunikation. Hur man pratar och vilka ord man använder reflekterar olika positioner i det sociala rummet och i den sociala hierarkin. Ditt sätt att prata visar vem du är. Ord och uttalanden får därmed olika betydelse beroende på vem som uttalar dem, och på vilket sätt. Att kunna prata “rätt” handlar inte bara om att kunna formulera grammatiskt korrekta meningar, utan att kunna uttrycka sig på ett korrekt sätt i olika situationer, och att bli lyssnad på och tagen på allvar. När eleverna säger att de vill lära sig att prata “bättre” svenska handlar det om så mycket mer än att utöka sitt ordförråd, det avspeglar en känsla av utanförskap.

Oftentimes, I find myself in situations where, in learning something new, I begrudgingly am forced to admit that I am only becoming privy to an ongoing discourse that has existed in a world from which I was removed. Sometimes, this makes me feel ignorant — embarrassed as the veil is lifted, much like a postmodern Eve, where I have been stranded in my Eden, oblivious.

While this tension generally serves as an impetus to strive to understand that which is unknown, reading Garan (2004) made me concurrently at ease and uneasy. Although the arguments Garan presents in In Defense of Our Children: When Politics, Profit, and Education Collide are ones very familiar to me – the dubiousness of school reform, standardized testing, and their impact on both teaching and learning – her brief overview renewed not only my frustration with the machine we call public education, but left me with the realization, for good or bad, that my position as a high school English teacher makes me both participant and victim. Undoubtedly, this is one of her intentions, as her target audience, according to the cover of the text, consists of parents, teachers, and taxpayers. People must have a sense of exigency if they are to act, and by informing such a broad audience, Garan hopes to rouse a grassroots movement to reverse trends that began to affect public education with the Reagan administration’s support and publication of A Nation At Risk and have only amplified as a result of the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind initiative.

In her book, Garan organizes her argument into two main parts. In the first, “School Reform and What it Means for Our Children,” she looks at reasons for reform and considers the implications for students and teachers as a result of its tenets of accountability and testing.  In the introduction to the text, Garan explains “schools are not just about learning facts or getting high scores on tests” (p. 2), and argues that “the teaching methods and materials used by schools, the way the school day is structured, and the underlying messages we communicate … impact our children’s emotional development, their motivation, and how they feel about themselves” (p. 2). Her observations go beyond the black and white scenarios painted by politicians, where the push to quantify education, particularly the idea of solely using standardized test results to describe achievement, neglects to consider qualitative factors, mitigating circumstances, that not only affect that achievement, but also serve to describe the result of how such a homogenous system of evaluation ultimately damages students and their ability to learn (p. 35). Using the premise that it is a citizen’s responsibility to question authority (p. 7), Garan says it is “the federal government with all its powers and its politics that is controlling the schools and the way our children view learning, how they feel about themselves, and consequently, who they will become as adults” (p. 7). In writing this book, her goal is to provide transparency so the audience is able to “take back control of [their] own thinking” (p.7) in order to effect change in a system that has been co-opted by government and business interests.

From the beginning, Garan indicates that while she is not opposed to school reform – a position that, ironically, implies a deficit model of education – she does oppose “ploys to destroy the public schools and the credibility of teachers in the name of school reform” (p. 11). In discussing for-profit education (p. 13-14), she recognizes the reform movement’s ulterior motive, which is to funnel taxpayer dollars away from public schools and into private corporate coffers. Moreover, the dubious bipartisan research (p. 15) she mentions, specifically the information that is disseminated through the Fordham Foundation’s Diane Ravitch and others, is also scrutinized as furthering a “right-wing political agenda” (p. 15). Although Garan’s commentary is the reflection of a post-NCLB world, the issues she addresses are nothing new. Almost two decades earlier, Giroux (1988) identified a shift in educational philosophy embodied by the “new conservative” movement that, without doubt, led us into the current situation:

Capitalizing upon the waning confidence of the general public and a growing number of teachers in the effectiveness of public schools, the new conservatives argue for educational reform by faulting a series of crises … [They] have seized the initiative that resonates with a growing public concern about downward mobility in hard economic times, that appeals to a resurgence of chauvinistic patriotism, and that reformulates educational goals along elitist lines. Such a discourse is dangerous not only because it misconstrues the responsibility schools have for wider economic and social problems … but also because it reflects an alarming ideological shift regarding the roles schools should play in society. The effect of this shift … has been to redefine the purpose of education so as to eliminate its citizenship function in favor of a narrowly defined market perspective. (Giroux, 1988, p. 177)

By discrediting teachers and public education, corporate interests have been able to position themselves to earn record profits by selling curricula, textbooks, and tutorial services. In the process, they are also maintaining an educational underclass, consisting primarily of those living in poor urban and rural communities, who are disproportionately affected by the rally cry to raise the bar in public education. It is these schools who must kowtow to government dictates in order to receive federal funding, affecting how teachers teach and what students are taught. There is no question that the commodification of education is affecting students, teachers, and the larger society. The influence of corporate America — spurred by their well-connected friends in politics — has not only increased, but is increasingly compromising the quality of education for many students in the United States.

During my fourteen years as a teacher, I have experienced this shift. At the high school level, students undergo extensive standardized testing, taking Michigan’s MEAP as 9^th graders, the national PSAT as 10^th graders, the Michigan Merit Examination, which includes the ACT, as 11^th graders. Those who do not do well on the MME or ACT will retake those examinations during their 12^th grade year to be able to earn the Michigan Promise Scholarship, an incentive that is now in jeopardy due to funding issues, or gain acceptance to college or university. Sadly, students who are not college material, for whatever the reason, are often so disillusioned and marginalized by the testing process that they either drop out of school or attend as automatons, unengaged in the educational experience.

In addition to the state and national testing, my school district has implemented common examinations in most core subjects, including English Language Arts, so a high-stakes testing culture, one that includes questions written to mimic those students see on the ACT, permeates even local decisions.  Students must undergo district-wide evaluations three times each semester, not including the common final exam. At the school level, teachers must follow what has become a lock-step curriculum, so, administrators assert, all students have the same educational experience. However, Kozol (1991) argues, “Warmth and humor and contagious energy cannot be replicated and cannot be written into any standardized curriculum” (p. 51). What this has resulted in, to a great extent, is an emasculation of teachers’ autonomy, removing from the classroom the individual element that can make learning dynamic. Why? Because NCLB now requires that schools use quantitative data to demonstrate student competency and achievement. Everything we do must be data-driven. Interestingly, the data my district uses does not include longitudinal tracking of an individual student’s progress over time, but rather compares the current year’s students with the previous year’s students, which in itself is problematic, as each year’s students presents unique circumstances that contribute to their successes or their struggles. It is unfair to assess teacher effectiveness and student achievement in this manner – it’s comparing apples and oranges – but, nevertheless, it is done consistently. With each new school year comes the same faculty meeting, where the previous year’s test scores for our students, as well as the students at the other high school in the district, are projected for teachers to analyze. With each new school year, teachers are made to feel that last year’s efforts were not good enough, especially if test scores for the previous year’s students fall even one point lower than the data for a totally different group the year before. Apples and oranges. This focus is putting pressure on teachers to teach to the test, though those words are never spoken. Instead, teachers hear about imparting students with skills that will make them succeed in a global marketplace – more evidence of the impact business has in shaping education policy, and another example of the shift in educational ideology that Giroux and Garan identify. Similarly, Shannon (2004) writes:

NCLB opens public schools to market and business forces[, and m]arket principles require that any enterprise justify its funding by becoming more productive for less cost, continually remaking itself in order to maximize profits … NCLB focuses public school’s mission – to produce students who meet world-class standards – by tying its continued funding to its tightly defined productivity. (p. 23)

The assumption here is representative of the shift to a market-driven education system. School is no longer focusing on shaping students to become critical participants in a democracy, because critical thinkers easily would be able to contest the manipulation that is occurring. In contrast, its function is to supply a work force for big business, and schools that resist the shift risk losing funding. So, now “[w]e are preparing a generation of robots. Kids are learning exclusively through rote. We have children who are given no conceptual framework. They do not learn to think, because their teachers are straitjacketed by tests that measure only isolated skills” (Kozol, 1991, p. 143).

What is also evident is the disproportionate focus on skills and testing in schools representing students of lower socioeconomic status, something Kozol (2005) addresses. The implications are great, because education in the United States serves to separate students based on who they are and where they live in order to produce workers suitable to feed the corporate machine. This disparity is one Bourdieu (1984) acknowledges:

Hidden behind the statistical relationships between educational capital or social origin and this or that type of knowledge or way of applying it, there are relationships between groups maintaining different, and even antagonistic, relations to culture, depending of the conditions in which they acquired their cultural capital and the markets in which they can derive most profit from it. (p. 12).

Applied to the current education model, government and corporate interests, representatives of the cultural elite, have changed the focus of public education from an emphasis on creating citizens who participate in the democracy to one whose sole function is to prepare workers so businesses are able to maximize profits – a model that a routine of standardization is sure to foster (Garan, 2004, p. 23). Through this process, minority and poor students are dropping out in increasing numbers because of the “looming threat of testing and failure” (Garan, 2004, pp. 52-53). Students who make it through the process have had years of mind-dulling instruction, preparing them to inhabit similar positions in the corporate machine. Those who do not, according to Dillon (2009), who cites a study by Northeastern University, find themselves stocking the prison economy, as ten percent of high school dropouts at any given time are in jail, prison, or juvenile detention.

The second half of Garan’s book, titled “What is Learning? How Do We Learn?” specifically addresses the effects of the school reform agenda that has resulted from the No Child Left Behind legislation. She continues to argue that a philosophical or ideological shift, similar to what Giroux (1988) identifies, is at the root of changes in assumptions about teaching and learning, noting “the real issue … is opposing views of how we learn and consequently how to teach most effectively” (Garan, 2004, p. 67). To illustrate, Garan provides a brief primer on the “bottom-up or basic-skills method” (pp. 68-72), where proponents believe basic skills must be mastered in order for students to engage in more challenging work requiring comprehension and application. According to Garan, the philosophy has enabled corporate entities who publish books and offer tutorial services and software to flourish.  Much of this section, then, focuses on how government policies guide and shape what happens in the classroom, with Garan paying specific attention to the effects of the Report of the National Reading Panel’s recommendations for English Language Arts instruction (pp. 81-110).

In 2000, when the Report of the National Reading Panel (NRP) was released, its subtitle, An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction, was indicative of the rhetoric surrounding government sponsored studies. Touting a skills-based approach, the recommendations of the flawed report impact literacy instruction across the nation to this day, a testament to the power – and danger – of policymaking. Tacked on to the end of this over 400-page report is a three-page minority dissent criticizing the commercial implications of the recommendations of the report (p. 2). Joanne Yatvin writes of the gravity of the sound bites that the public will hear out of context, lamenting that most will never sift through the hundreds of pages of the report:

But because of these deficiencies, bad things will happen. Summaries of, and sound bites about, the Panel’s findings will be used to make policy decisions at the national, state, and local levels. Topics that were never investigated will be misconstrued as failed practices. Unanswered questions will be assumed to have been answered negatively. Unfortunately, most policymakers and ordinary citizens will not read the full reviews … Ironically, the report that Congress intended to be a boon to the teaching of reading will turn out to be a further detriment. (p. 3)

And is was because of the NRP and its little sister, the Reading First Program mandated by No Child Left Behind, that single-method literacy instruction became mandated in many, often urban and underperforming, schools nationwide. Though common pedagogy dictates that “reading instruction effectiveness lies not with a single program or method but, rather, with a teacher who thoughtfully and analytically integrates various programs, materials, and methods as the situation demands” (Duffy & Hoffman, 1999, p. 11), both NRP and Reading First include language that express they are based on scientifically-based information, again code for skills-based, measureable activities, focusing on phonics instruction for decoding, not comprehension skills. Because of these so-called findings, school districts across the country were pushed into buying literacy programs, such as Open Court, resulting in soaring profits for textbook publishers.

Garan ends her book with ideas for how parents, teachers, and others can combat what appears to be a dumbing down of not only curriculum, but expectations — ironically in the name of higher standards for all. In Defense of Our Children is a text that was written to incense people, to motivate them to combat the current direction of education in the United States. Does it succeed? Yes. Could it bet better? Absolutely, but I don’t think her intent here is to provide and in-depth study of the issues. Where this is a text that is accessible for lay people, for example parents or those relatively uninformed about current education issues, I found it to be lacking in substance. While the subject matter of Garan’s book is what led me to read it for this class, I must say that the way the text is organized limits what it can do. The question-answer format, while probably intended to act like a casual conversation to be of interest to a more general audience, is almost too simplistic. Moreover, the “Questions for Discussion” she includes provoke discussions similar to those at a PTA or an undergraduate course in education. I guess I just wanted more. That said, I found her references section to be just as informing as the text.

For me, Garan’s book offered nothing new. In fact, I have read and written about much of the research she discusses, such as the Report of the National Reading Panel, and am familiar with people like Reid Lyon, a Bush administration appointee who proposed literacy testing for preschool and kindergarten students. So, while I would recommend this text for someone unfamiliar with the political agendas driving education, just as Garan indicates on the cover when she writes What Every Parent, Teacher, and Taxpayer Needs to Know, because it’s brief and accessible, I would look to some of her references for a starting point for more in-depth scholarship.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Dillon, S. (2009, October 8). Study Finds High Rate of Imprisonment Among Dropouts. The New York Times. Retrieved October 8, 2009, from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/education/09dropout.html.

Duffy, G. G., & Hoffman, J.V. (1999). In pursuit of an illusion: The flawed search for a perfect method. The Reading Teacher, 53(1), 10-16.

Garan, E.M. (2004). In Defense of Our Children: When Politics, Profit, and Education Collide. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Giroux, H.A. (1988). Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Kozol, J. (1991). Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools. New York: Harper Perennial.

Kozol, J. (2005). The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. New York: Three Rivers Press.

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction (NIH Publication No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. (449 pages)

Shannon, P. (2004). What’s the problem for which No Child Left Behind is the solution? In K. Goodman, P. Shannon, Y. Goodman, and R. Rapoport (Eds.), Saving our schools: The case for public education (pp. 12-26). Berkeley, CA: RDR Books.

I enjoyed reading everyone’s reactions to Bourdieu’s conception of gender and gender roles. I agree with Priya and Basia’s assertion that Bourdieu is describing the sociological incident of the frequently-observable dichotomy society seems to draw between men and women. Rather than asserting that this is how one should act, Bourdieu asserts “that repeated practice trains an individual to assume certain roles” (Borodziewicz). Furthermore, “humans have assigned opposite terms to man and woman, because that is the original dichotomy they perceive” (Kumar).

These assertions remind me of the old children’s nursery rhyme:

What are little boys made of? What are little boys made of? / Frogs and snails and puppy dog tails, that’s what boys are made of. / What are little girls made of? What are little girls made of? / Sugar and spice and everything nice, that’s what girls are made of.

The differences society ascribes to males and females are evident in the nursery rhyme and throughout media today. Cartoons and movies are heavily imbued with the dichotomy. For example, let’s look at this throwback-to-2000 cartoon The Powerpuff Girls:

The Powerpuff Girls are genetically mutated superheroes made from sugar, spice, and everything nice. The Rowdyruff Boys are villains made from frogs, snails, and puppy dog tails. On the left is a picture of the Rowdyruff Boys. Due to their brutish nature and bad-boy attitudes, they are the antithetical foils to the Powerpuff Girls pictured on the right on the right. Our culture is heavily imbued with messages of how females should act and protocol that males should follow.

Throughout the ages, “woman” has been defined by different definitions, yet the image of woman that still survives today can best be epitomized by the song I Enjoy Being a Girl:

“I Enjoy Being a Girl” from Roger and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song

Even though this is one image of “woman” I think Bourdieu would argue that we are not strictly constrained in a rigid structure that forces us to act a certain way. Instead, I think Bourdieu’s conception of habitus and field yield a dynamic theory of embodiment of gender roles. He writes: “in the social fields, which are the products of a long, slow process of autonomization…one does not embark on the game by a conscious act, one is born into the game, with the game” (67). Bourdieu describes the sociological field game as an “arbitrary social construct” (67); we unconsciously take part in the game and act in accordance to what we are “expressly taught by institutions” (67).

Bourdiue sees this phenomenon in society and writes about it in the primary chapter of today’s reading, “Belief and the Body.” Bourdieu conceives the body as a dynamic, mutable frontier placed in a larger sociological field. In terms of the body and gender, I think Bourdieu is trying to say that humans have a fluid relation to gender identity, which implies that gender is understood as an ingrained but not unsurpassable boundary. Bourdieu claims that we are not wholly stuck in rigid social castes. The trend is for humans to formulate or develop themselves based on dominant social norms, but they are not reducible to the dominant social norms because of the dynamic nature of habitus and field. This phenomenon can be seen in Mulan when Shang tries to turn Mulan into a male warrior. Mulan is a female posing as a male the Chinese army. However, she is able to transcend the characteristics normally attributed to females. I know this is another model and that I’m applying sociological theories to movies, but I couldn’t resist!

“I’ll Make a Man Out of You” from Mulan

Glen, i think you are partly right on what you say about Bourdieu. Though i guess that it should be also attended that the main conceptualization that preoccupied Bourdieu was centered in the notion of the field. This means that he would see in further way the case of Brooker, maybe arguing that Brooker was not equipped to contemplate the broken pot, neither with embodied skills or with the specific symbolic capital that circulates inside the field of archeology: that would mean for him nothing to accuse or to regret there, since Brooker is in fact a TV journalist, so it would be just a question of what is expected from a TV journalist. Since Bourdieu was interested in the logic of the practices and their respectively fields of action, he would address his explanation instead to the specialized occupants of the positions and their trajectory stakes that ‘play’ in such disciplinary field. If Brooker would be an archeologist and would still hold such a ironic views, then it would be a socioanalytical case to consider for Bourdieu. Anyway i have to accept that Bourdieu´s its not the panacea, but his concepts are helpful.

oh well but i am not here to argue against your point, which is a good one. instead i want to underline the beauty implied in the broken pot example. What makes a broken pot to be a broken pot? to be broken or being a pot? The fractured object and its event, what would an archeological expert see through the fracture? is there an event previous to the fracture that is already subjected in the object? if so, what history does that object is telling us? Just to say that the broken pot example is really a good one

Comentado por Naxos en:

Contemplating a Crackpot

November 11, 2009 at 8:10 pm

Igår eftermiddag var det dags för workshopen på Tensta konsthall. Tanken var att en grupp med sistaårselever från Tensta gymnasium skulle skapa personer och placera in dem i det sociala rummet. Med hjälp av dagstidningar och glassiga tidskrifter skapade ungdomarna collage som kretsade kring personernas ekonomiska, kulturella, sociala och symboliska kapital. Det var en riktig utmaning för mig att försöka förklara Bourdieus begrepp  på ett sätt så att ungdomarna kunde ta dem till sig.  Men jag tror att jag lyckades! I alla fall blev collagen väldigt fina…

Bourdieu’s influence encompasses several existing paradigms of sociology, and his theories cover significant issues such social change, stratification, culture, agency, and structure. The phenomenon that interested me the most in The Logic of Practice, however, was Bourdieu’s conception of habitus and field. I liked Bourdieu’s sociological theories and will attempt to assert the validity and truth of his claims by applying his sociological ideas to two instances in cinema.

Before trying to find the truth in Bourdieu’s claims, perhaps I should begin by explaining and defining his ideas. He describes habitus as:

…systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to obtain them. (53)

In other words, habitus is a set of acquired dispositions or patterns of thought, behavior, and taste that generate practices or perceptions. Habitus is, in a sense, a “habitual” or typical state of mind.

Much of Bourdieu’s work seems to attempt to bridge the traditional sociological dichotomy between objectivism and subjectivism: “Objectivism universalizes the theorist’s relation to the object of science, so subjectivism universalizes the experience that the subject of theoretical discourse has of himself as a subject” (45-46). Bourdieu believed that habitus resolved the paradox of the human sciences: objectifying the subjective.

The patterns and dispositions of habitus are the result of the internalization of objective social structures or culture by means of an individual’s or group’s experiences. While humans exist in these structured patterns, they are not constrained to a predetermined set of actions. Habitus organizes the way individuals see the world and act. Individuals are subjects in and of themselves with a certain sense of agency.  

The clip above is from My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and the scene I want to discuss begins six minutes into the clip (5:59-8:32). For those who are not familiar with the movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding is a romantic comedy about how Toula Portokalos (a Greek-American woman) falls in love with Ian Miller (a non-Greek man). The movie has overtones of the cultural clash between Toula’s large Greek family and Ian’s haughty, aristocratic parents. In the scene above, there is an obvious dichotomy between Toula’s disposition and her in-laws’ tastes. These differences in habitus help explain the differences between the subjects’ dispositions.

Remember what I said about habitus? To refresh your memory: “These patterns and dispositions are the result of the internalization of objective social structures or culture by means of an individual’s or group’s experiences.” Toula has internalized her Greek heritage, which explains why she wants her wedding to be held in a church (because her familial upbringing has helped foster a sense of religiousness in her life) and why she wants to hold the reception at Aphrodite’s Palace, complete with a Parthenon backdrop (because the Parthenon is a symbol and extension of her Greek roots). Ian’s aristocratic family has internalized tastes that generate their desire for the wedding to be held at a ritzy country club. The dichotomy between the two internalized forms of habitus between Toula and her in-laws is an application of Bourdieu’s sociological theories.

In Logic and Practice Bourdieu also describes social fields. A social field is “an arbitrary social construct, an artifact whose arbitrariness and artificiality are underlined by everything that defines its autonomy – explicit and specific rules” (67). In a sense, a social field is a distribution of resources where struggle takes place.

Bourdieu seems to conceptualize habitus and field as being interlinked. Habitus and field are defined relationally: habitus is a set of dispositions that an individual acquires from being in a particular position in one or more social fields. From what I gathered, Bourdieu was trying to say that as individuals, we are defined by the position we occupy in the space (field) which our dispositions have helped to construct (habitus). In a sociological critique of Bourdieu, author Hans Durrer writes:

While these dispositions [of habitus] are acquired gradually, early childhood experiences are of particular importance….We human beings are therefore, and quite substantially, determined by our social environment — our dispositions, and thus our choices, are not limitless. This is however not to say that we are simply “victims” of our social surroundings, this is only to say that our chances to re-invent ourselves are not without limits. (http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/VOLUME09/On_basic_human_conditions.shtml)

Durrer seems to agree with Bourdieu’s assertion that our social environments, or “fields,” help shape our habitus. Furthermore, I think that differences in habitus and field serve as class markers, which I think is demonstrated in the clips from Trading Places. Trading Places is a comedy about Louis Winthorpe III, a heartless, successful investor, and Billy Ray Valentine, a street-smart con artist. Louis and Billy switch life situations due to a bet made by two pitiless millionaires.

(0:40-2:50)

In the beginning of the clip, the two millionaires discuss Louis. Randolph, the millionaire with the bowtie, has a sociological outlook very similar to Bourdieu when he states that, “Louis is a product of good environment.” Elements of habitus and field are at play in Trading Places, which fuel the great debate between the two millionaires: Are a product of environment (perhaps what Bourdieu calls a “field”) or biological genes? Is the homeless Billy Rae Valentine (played by Eddie Murphy) a product of poor genetics? Or, if he had the same advantages as Louis, would he be as successful as the young investor? The movie prompts questions about how the fields we inhabit shape our habitus.

Conclusively, I liked Bourdieu’s theories, and I think that they play a very relevant role in current sociological phenomenon. By using the movie clips, I hoped to demonstrate some of the practical applicability of Bourdieu’s theories.

On a final note, I’d also like to say that although Bourdieu’s theories are ingenious and thoroughly enlightening to the study of sociology, his hyper-elevated prose was so hard for me to comprehend. I found myself having to read the same sentence multiple times to understand what Bourdieu was trying to say. Although Bourdieu’s genius shines through in The Logic of Practice, I felt that the extensive syntactical structure of his argument coupled with his hyper-elevated polysyllabic diction mucked up the clarity of his ideas. I comprehended Bourdieu’s prose as easily as the Prince followed Pinocchio’s train of thought in Shrek 3:

Sometimes I felt as confused as the Prince when I read Bourdieu’s Pinocchio-like prose. ^_^

Roger Friedland has a new article out on Bourdieu. I scanned it, and though I don’t really want to encourage an Aristotelian turn in institutional theory, he may have a point:

Whereas Bourdieu uses a commensurable logic of practice to differentiate agonistic groups seeking power; I parse practices into incommensurable institutional logics. Within the framework of institutional logics, power is a medium whereas in Bourdieu’s fields, it has primacy both as an end and as a determinant of practice. In keeping with Aristotle’s notion of praxis, institutional logics join subjects, practices and objects into bundled sets which have an inner referentiality, a performative order, in which an unobservable substance is enacted in practice. This understanding of institutional logic suggests that love, too, may offer a useful template with which to think the social.

Good morning Nilanthi in Tokyo,

While you were away, our friend, the social anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss died in Paris at the age of 100. Your observations in Tokyo inspired me to send this note about the great cultural observer. (I would link to a few obits here, but haven’t read any that have done him justice, though there was this nice piece in the “Week in Review” section of The New York Times today that pays homage to some of the important themes in his work.)

Click here for photo source

As a social anthropology student last year, for one of the first of my bi-weekly tutorial essays at LSE, I had to write about Levi-Strauss’ theories on classification. I remember sitting with a stack of books in the library in London, overwhelmed by his intellectual gymnastics.  From his armchair (he was not known for his fieldwork) in the Paris apartment where he lived for most of his long life, he tried to explain the logic behind such magnificent and remote things as hair styles among Amazonian tribes, or why pet dogs are named differently than pet birds.

After wading through his theories on structuralism, the reason I fell in love with his work was this: he asserted that all humans — from the tribesman in Papua New Guinea to the urbane Parisian bureaucrat — share a tendency to categorize society by classifying thought and therefore culture  into binary oppositions. This search for the universal structures underpinning all cultures implied a search for what is common among men. Instead of finding ways to divide us, by emphasizing difference across cultures, Levi-Strauss emphasized our similarities.

As he once wrote, there is “no gap between the way so-called primitive peoples think and the way we do”. This may seem inane or even offensive now, but it was a giant leap forward from the writings of, say, the early British social anthropologists or the social Darwinists that I had been studying earlier in the term. For this reason, our friend Pierre Bourdieu refers to him here as an anti-racist.

With love,

Julia

Jag har under hösten samarbetat med Tensta konsthall med en föreställning som heter Bakom Den Gula Tapeten som utgår från den klassiska texten Den Gula Tapeten av Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Föreställningen tar med publiken på en promenadperformance i konsthallens lokaler. Publiken lotsas runt i byggnaden och får följa berättelsen om hur huvudpersonen tvingas förändra sin värld för att kunna fortsätta existera.

I anknytning till föreställningen anordnas en workshopserie för ungdomar. Vi kommer med utgångspunkt i den franske sociologen Pierre Bourdieu skapa en analytisk verktygslåda bestående av ekonomiskt, kulturellt, socialt och symboliskt kapitel. Workshopserien kommer att kretsa kring frågor som ”hur formas vi av vår omgivning?”, ”vilka faktorer i omgivningen påverkar oss?” samt ”hur kan vi förändra vår verktygslåda?”.

Biljettpris: 60 kronor/40 kronor studerande & arbetslösa. Endast förbokning!
För bokning, kontakta Linnea Andree på dengulatapeten@tenstakonsthall.se
För pressfrågor kontakta Ida Ömalm-Ronvall ida@tenstakonsthall.se

Medverkande:
Anne Jonsson, scenkonstnär och konstnärlig ledare
Camilla Vislie, scenkonstnär
Noora Neenonen, scenkonstnär
Natalie Ringler, scenkonstnär
Lise Marker, scenograf
Mathew Newton, grafisk formgivare
Joe Bell, ljuddesigner
Ida Ömalm Ronvall, projektledare
Linnea Andree, projektassistent
Karin Gille, scenografiassistent
Linn Bäckman, scenografiassistent
Malin Finlöf, teknik
Jenny Kallstenius, doktorand i sociologi, Stockholms universitet och mentor för workshopserien

Läs novellen Den Gula Tapeten på engelska genom att klicka på länken:
http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Charlotte_Perkins_Gilman/The_Yellow_Wallp…

Il est une habitude qui peut surprendre chez les Indiens : à la première rencontre, déballer tout son pedigree avec emphase.

Il est important que vous compreniez à qui vous avez affaire, aussi on vous fera le compte-rendu détaillé de tout, tout, tout, vous saurez tout sur le Kiki*. Vous saurez très vite où l’interlocuteur a fait ses études (brillantes), où il achète son pain (boulangerie française), où il ouvre ses succursales l’année prochaine (Hong Kong**, London, New York).

Le plus souvent, une rapide lecture du répertoire suffira : je connais le premier ministre, j’ai eu sa fille comme prof, j’ai appris la flûte à bec à Amir Khan***, je suis dans les petits papiers de l’ambassadeur, Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia*** m’appelle par mon surnom, la sœur de cet acteur connu m’a noué un rakhi***… Aujourd’hui encore, mon prof de bansuri se faisait la réflexion à voix haute : « quelle chance tu as d’être tombée sur moi, j’ai tellement de contacts ! »

Pour les préserver je me retiens de répliquer que, moi, je connais quelqu’un qui s’appelle Ken Bernard.

*Ben oui, puisqu’on parle de Pedigree…

**Une plaque tournante incontournable, parce que vous savez ce qu’il y a là-bas ? Un aquarium. Avec des méduses.

***Vous gagnez +1 en compétence Jargon Indien. Sinon, kiwipedia !

Antonio Gramsci:

A short excerpt from a post from my blog The Excerpt Mill:

In Bourdieu’s early work with Jean-Claude Passeron, we find the term “the cultural arbitrary” used in a way which seems quite similar to Gramsci’s concept of normative grammar: “In any given social formation the cultural arbitrary which the power relations between the groups or classes making up that social formation put into the dominant position within the system of cultural arbitraries is the one which most fully, though always indirectly, expresses the objective interests (material and symbolic) of the dominant groups or classes.” In developing this concept, Bourdieu draws upon William Labov’s early work which showed that “members of a speech community can share allegiance to the same standard, despite differences in the (nonstandard) varieties they themselves speak.”

Gramsci’s historical method serves to highlight the cross-class alliances that stabilize in any given “historical bloc”-a phrase that refers to the “complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures” and corresponding “relations of production.” The hegemonic ideology of any given bloc does not simply reflect the interests of only the ruling elite, but also those of the other classes with whom they have entered into alliances and even the very process by which that alliance took shape.  While Bourdieu may tacitly acknowledge the importance of such processes, his theory of the “cultural arbitrary” retains its structuralist roots.

Antonio Gramsci

P. Kerim Friedman reviews Peter Ives‘ book Gramsci’s Politics of Language and the connections between Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) and Antonio Gramsci:

In Bourdieu’s early work with Jean-Claude Passeron, we find the term “the cultural arbitrary” used in a way which seems quite similar to Gramsci’s concept of normative grammar: “In any given social formation the cultural arbitrary which the power relations between the groups or classes making up that social formation put into the dominant position within the system of cultural arbitraries is the one which most fully, though always indirectly, expresses the objective interests (material and symbolic) of the dominant groups or classes.” In developing this concept, Bourdieu draws upon William Labov’s early work which showed that “members of a speech community can share allegiance to the same standard, despite differences in the (nonstandard) varieties they themselves speak.” Bourdieu’s work with Passeron serves to highlight how the educational system institutionalizes these arbitrary standards; thus naturalizing the success of the elite who are socialized into these norms before they ever set foot in school. Unlike normative grammar, however, the phrase “cultural arbitraries” reveals a lingering Saussurian structuralism. The specific content of the dominant cultural or linguistic form is less important for Bourdieu’s theory than the mere existence of an arbitrary standard which is recognized as legitimate even by those unable to perform it.

…

Gramsci’s historical method serves to highlight the cross-class alliances that stabilize in any given “historical bloc”-a phrase that refers to the “complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures” and corresponding “relations of production.” The hegemonic ideology of any given bloc does not simply reflect the interests of only the ruling elite, but also those of the other classes with whom they have entered into alliances and even the very process by which that alliance took shape. For instance, even though America’s financial elite share a generally secular libertarian ideology, the conservative movement was able to succeed by combining elite interests with those of evangelical southern white Christians. This has its roots in post-Civil War Reconstruction and in the “Southern strategy” adopted by Nixon’s Republican party in the wake of the civil rights movement. Choices regarding hegemonic cultural forms are not arbitrary nor do they simply reflect the cultural forms of the elite. They are the product of the “complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble” of a given historical bloc. While Bourdieu may tacitly acknowledge the importance of such processes, his theory of the “cultural arbitrary” retains its structuralist roots. (Friedman, 361-363)

Source

Friedman, P. Kerim.  “Ethical Hegemony.”  Rethinking Marxism 21, no. 3 (July 2009): 355-365.

With only two nights remaining until the official kick-off of Twenty-Three I have decided to share with you what I’ve been going through for the past week or two since the inception of this project (also, I’m going out tonight and don’t have the time or energy to look up, read, or watch something and write about it).

Twenty-Three is virtually constantly in my thoughts. Am I making the right choices? What am I leaving out? What am I forgetting? I’ve researched the crap out of every year I’ve been alive, and making a choice regarding what stands out the most to me from each year of my life is incredibly challenging. Some choices were obvious and easy. Things that made a significant impact on my life or that I’ve enjoyed over and over again made the list with no second thoughts. But as the years moved upward, choices became more difficult simply because I remember more. More things made an impact, more things have been downright hilarious, and I don’t know the full extent of how things I’ve enjoyed or obsessed over will drive me.

I’m sure you will disagree with me about some of the choices I make. I’m sure I’ll disagree with some of them after some time passes. The further I’ve gotten into this, the more I have realized what an impossible task it is. Choices have been difficult either because a plethora of excellent things were produced in a given year, or because certain years were really lacking (“The Problem Years” as I’ve taken to calling them).

I’ve spent hours trying to find a balance between films, albums, television and events, trying to fine tune my choices to represent me and my personality.

And the celebration has not even begun yet.

I am experiencing a great deal of anxiety regarding the actual execution of the series. I have to follow through and post every single day. The subjects have been chosen, but the writing has not begun. Every single day for 30 days I have to think critically and produce something that I’m proud of (because I will not allow something half-assed or mediocre to exist as part of Twenty-Three, the pieces that I’m honoring deserve thoughtful recognition, not crap work to fill a commitment).

I realize that none of you (all 5 of my loyal followers) actually care about any of this, and that this will be an often painful commitment that only I will appreciate. My social life will suffer. I will lose sleep. To be perfectly honest, I am taking this more seriously than I took my senior paper, and as some of you know my senior paper led to a handful of 17 hour days at school and reduced me to sitting under tables in the library, cowering under what I was trying to accomplish. My senior paper is something I am proud of. I have a funny feeling, though, that Twenty-Three might end up topping it.

Despite the anxiety and stress this is causing me (for no good reason) I am sure this is something I will enjoy more (if only because it won’t involve APA and god damn Bourdieu).

Twenty-Three is one hell of an undertaking, and something that I’m glad I’ve decided to do, even if it’s adding work and stress to my life for no good reason.

I’m just asking you not to judge my choices or what happens. This is harder than it seems. Appreciate it for what it is.

@nsrnicek RT @nsrnicek Two questions: (1) Are two galaxies colliding in the vast emptiness of space, political? (2) If yes, how?

re:Yes, because such an event was researched so to be known & experienced as a positive knowledge through the technology that is capable to do it, & through the people with the professional skills to determine it as a scientific truth & also as a fact, not only in the history of humanity but specially in the history of the discipline that holds such positive knowledge: technology & people, that are both actually payed with certain funds that would not exist if the colliding event would not be relevant to politics or if such an event would be not political. I am afraid that you are willing to see the event itself as a being that is not conditioned by the humans nor their history nor their politics, that is part of a reality that is natural & independent from them, which is like saying that you only want to see this event in terms of an isolated object. But this objectual reductio which is finally invented on the base of the factual existence of a being which natural reality we are not already sure to know, or that is meant not to be known with the knowledge we have so far, is something too comfortable to take as a human-political-independent reality, mostly if considered that the colliding of two galaxies in the vast emptiness of space is not merely an object but an event that has its own affirmativeness & that might even have its complex reasons to happen, what ever these reasons might be, & therefore because of these complex reasons, it might have lots of relevant relations empowering its own material reality.

The problem is 1) if we are willing to take the question as something eventual that happens in fact, & then when it happens & as we get to know it, it irremediably becomes a political question such as all facts are, or 2) if are we willing to see & to take what we think of such event as an object.The problem is 1) not if such an event exists independently from human reality, the problem is 2) if we are able & capable as researchers to reach the reality of that an object, & i mean not it if we even have the knowledge to understand such an event, but if we have the knowledge-of-the-political-implications of our own specialized knowledge, exercises, practices & disciplines, a) regarding to other kind or related knowledge, exercises, practices & disciplines b) regarding to our fields of action, & of course as well, c) regarding to the people & its social sensibility.

The problem is 1) if we have objectified our position & trajectory in the fields we are working on & have worked on through our careers, regarding to the position & trajectories of our collegues & adversaries who are working in the same fields that we are, even though they might be working in something else, & all this so to avoid e.g. to use & abuse of the knowledge of such an event, even in the exercise of our professional practice, & to make not that knowledge end as a weapon or as an ideological dominancy. All this 2) if it is the case that we have taken the correct routes of our knowledge to understand “objectively” such an event, because it might be the case as well the we might have taken the routes inside our own discipline that would not lead us to understand it, & rather also might have filled us with all kind of pre-notions & pre-sumptions regarding to the object we are referring to, either because of the vices & shortcuts that point to all what we have taken for granted about our knowledge & practice, to what makes the sense of such practice & gives us the scholastic view of it as self-evident & the natural way to do things inside our fields.

#addendum To make the proper objectivification of our position, exercises, & trajectory in our disciplinary fields, its needed to effectuate epistemological ruptures as part of the methodology that would make us approximate to our pretended object: this means that we need to drop out certain & concrete things that are settled in & related to our knowledge & to the knowledge of our practice & discipline, things that we presume useful to make such an approximation. Of course I am not only referring to establish a moral rupture regarding to our personal beliefs & atavisms, but mostly to the embodied skills & schemes that constitute our sense of practice which implies the blinded spots that we all have embodied because all of the obvious things that we have taken for granted while exercising our practice.

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On Friday 30th October 2009 10:26am

Acabo de hacer esta presentación sobre algunos capítulos de La Miseria del Mundo de Bourdieu y otros autores, y me pareción interesante compartirla.
No únicamente por el contenido, sino porque estoy probando Prezi, una herramienta en red para hacer presentaciones que es realmente genial.