![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
May. 2nd, 2013 03:45 pmThe Bourdieu texts we were assigned were "The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed" and "Principles for a Sociology of Cultural Works."
Where Foucault assumes that the history that bequeaths us every aspect of our sense of ourselves (including of our history) is an accretion neither put forth by an intelligence nor intelligibly receivable, hence not correctable, since neither It nor the Us it creates are stable or stabilizable structures, unless in a generation or so by people who have read a lot of Foucault and communicate with ironic twists of the body or something,
Bourdieu thinks that though macro-structures are a mess and relationships start that way the latter can wring one another to a sort of plausible parsimony, given enough criss-crossing traffic of other relationships: Hegelian progress happens through interpersonal position-taking by invested parties, where whatever's irrelevant to a particular staked-out intellectual territory gets eroded away over time by competition among shifting groups of rival claimants. Universal truths, or anyway entirely purified communications, are concepts we don't even start out interested in, but after enough generations of wrangling end up being left alone with. Hence, for example, Foucault can be almost right, Bourdieu entirely right, about whether and how social change can be understood, because they come late in a tradition of argument that has gradually become autonomous from the once determinative macro-forces, e.g. class struggle, that created it.
The appeal of this over Foucault is that:
a. It accounts for Foucault's ability to make his discoveries.
b. It permits a view of objective progress toward knowledge that doesn't depend on a negative-theological approach to conceptualization, or on cult.
c. It allows a place for individual human beings in episteme formation, if only as relational nodes.
d. It valorizes extreme latecomers such as professors.
The mistakes he makes, in order of importance, are:
1. Assuming that only bouncing off of other stake-claimants can produce original contributions, as compared to, like, extraordinary experiences or randomly-derived recombinations or unusual capacity. It's true that most of what any of these three can give you by way of original insight will come early in a tradition, but a) he doesn't even acknowledge this fact (giving claims to universal effects to latecomers only), and b) most is not all. The assumption that an individual person could just happen to notice something transformative is anathema to this particular French school - it's assumed to be sentimental. Whereas I find it just obvious, and accounting for not just positive but negative developments, such as disciple-traps like Foucault's innovations. Or Bourdieu's, finally, despite his wish to let some air in.
2. Assuming interacting networks of relationships in flux can somehow be measured or otherwise accounted for. They blend in with too much else: at most this is another category of necessary causes we can retroactively identify, e.g. we can probably say that the under the radar status of ottava rima in English was one of the things that led Byron to exploit it in Don Juan, but other necessary causes are manifold, such as the psychological factors and personal events that led to his exile in Italy and absorption of its stanzaic comic epics. And facility with rhyme (leading to interest in it, thence further facility etc.) can presumably be connected to certain kinds of mental capacity, to a culture valuing witty exchange, to a need for order due to a disordered childhood--to whatever, in fact. These factors multiply, dovetail into one another, fall often out of view.
3. Assuming sophistication produces knowledge of value. It can as easily end up just meeting psychological or career needs for the subculture in question. Think religion--there, pyramid schemes and paradox-based complacency are more natural resting places for synthesis/antithesis chains than mutual benefit or verifiable certainty.
4. It neglects the ability for intellectual subcultures to drift sideways rather than forward. There's no need to purify landscape technique when you're suddenly allowed to paint fever dreams.
In John Crowley's story a character who grows up in a "field theory"-obsessed utopia finds he can't fit happily into existing career avenues, comes up finally with his own. The utopian authorities permit it, ruling that the field included him but that they didn't know how yet. Their model is revealed to be merely faith in a possible future model.
Borges' "Congress" I refuse to spoil.
Where Foucault assumes that the history that bequeaths us every aspect of our sense of ourselves (including of our history) is an accretion neither put forth by an intelligence nor intelligibly receivable, hence not correctable, since neither It nor the Us it creates are stable or stabilizable structures, unless in a generation or so by people who have read a lot of Foucault and communicate with ironic twists of the body or something,
Bourdieu thinks that though macro-structures are a mess and relationships start that way the latter can wring one another to a sort of plausible parsimony, given enough criss-crossing traffic of other relationships: Hegelian progress happens through interpersonal position-taking by invested parties, where whatever's irrelevant to a particular staked-out intellectual territory gets eroded away over time by competition among shifting groups of rival claimants. Universal truths, or anyway entirely purified communications, are concepts we don't even start out interested in, but after enough generations of wrangling end up being left alone with. Hence, for example, Foucault can be almost right, Bourdieu entirely right, about whether and how social change can be understood, because they come late in a tradition of argument that has gradually become autonomous from the once determinative macro-forces, e.g. class struggle, that created it.
The appeal of this over Foucault is that:
a. It accounts for Foucault's ability to make his discoveries.
b. It permits a view of objective progress toward knowledge that doesn't depend on a negative-theological approach to conceptualization, or on cult.
c. It allows a place for individual human beings in episteme formation, if only as relational nodes.
d. It valorizes extreme latecomers such as professors.
The mistakes he makes, in order of importance, are:
1. Assuming that only bouncing off of other stake-claimants can produce original contributions, as compared to, like, extraordinary experiences or randomly-derived recombinations or unusual capacity. It's true that most of what any of these three can give you by way of original insight will come early in a tradition, but a) he doesn't even acknowledge this fact (giving claims to universal effects to latecomers only), and b) most is not all. The assumption that an individual person could just happen to notice something transformative is anathema to this particular French school - it's assumed to be sentimental. Whereas I find it just obvious, and accounting for not just positive but negative developments, such as disciple-traps like Foucault's innovations. Or Bourdieu's, finally, despite his wish to let some air in.
2. Assuming interacting networks of relationships in flux can somehow be measured or otherwise accounted for. They blend in with too much else: at most this is another category of necessary causes we can retroactively identify, e.g. we can probably say that the under the radar status of ottava rima in English was one of the things that led Byron to exploit it in Don Juan, but other necessary causes are manifold, such as the psychological factors and personal events that led to his exile in Italy and absorption of its stanzaic comic epics. And facility with rhyme (leading to interest in it, thence further facility etc.) can presumably be connected to certain kinds of mental capacity, to a culture valuing witty exchange, to a need for order due to a disordered childhood--to whatever, in fact. These factors multiply, dovetail into one another, fall often out of view.
3. Assuming sophistication produces knowledge of value. It can as easily end up just meeting psychological or career needs for the subculture in question. Think religion--there, pyramid schemes and paradox-based complacency are more natural resting places for synthesis/antithesis chains than mutual benefit or verifiable certainty.
4. It neglects the ability for intellectual subcultures to drift sideways rather than forward. There's no need to purify landscape technique when you're suddenly allowed to paint fever dreams.
In John Crowley's story a character who grows up in a "field theory"-obsessed utopia finds he can't fit happily into existing career avenues, comes up finally with his own. The utopian authorities permit it, ruling that the field included him but that they didn't know how yet. Their model is revealed to be merely faith in a possible future model.
Borges' "Congress" I refuse to spoil.
