{"id":3974,"date":"2016-03-22T12:08:00","date_gmt":"2016-03-22T19:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newcoolthang.com\/?p=3974"},"modified":"2020-01-09T04:06:40","modified_gmt":"2020-01-09T11:06:40","slug":"bourdieu-and-the-bloggernacle-preliminaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.newcoolthang.com\/index.php\/2016\/03\/bourdieu-and-the-bloggernacle-preliminaries\/3974\/","title":{"rendered":"Bourdieu and the Bloggernacle: Preliminaries"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pierre Bourdieu\u2019s book, Distinction: A Social Critique of Judgement and Taste<\/a><\/em>, is one of those exciting page-turners that transforms the very way that you look at the world around you. Over the next few weeks I plan on posting a small series dealing with a Bourdieuian (I think that\u2019s the most vowels that I\u2019ve ever typed in a row) perspective on the Bloggernacle as a form of cultural production and consumption. In this preliminary post, I only want to give a small feel for Bourdieu and his understanding of language use. To this end, I will (very briefly) describe his relationships with Marx, Foucault and Gouldner. Unfortunately, I will not attempt to draw any direct religious implications within this post.<\/p>\n

Down to the present day, the English speaking world is still influenced by the Logical Positivists\u2019 denunciation of all moral and aesthetic claims as nonsensical emotings of various kinds.\u00a0 (The opening chapters of Alasdair MacIntyre\u2019s After Virtue<\/a><\/em> provide a very approachable account of this intellectual current.)\u00a0 Such a claim stands in opposition to Kant\u2019s famous attempt to establish a firm foundation and standard for aesthetic judgments in his third Critique of Judgment<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What Bourdieu does in Distinction, then, is show that, contra the Logical Positivists, there is a logic which undergirds and regulates aesthetic judgments of taste.\u00a0 Furthermore, contra Kant, this logic is not philosophical in nature, but is instead socio-logical in nature.\u00a0 Indeed, his is an attempt to completely dethrone philosophy from its (rather French) position as \u201cqueen of the sciences\u201d and replace it with his own reflexive sociology (more below).\u00a0 While I fully reject the idea that sociology – or any other academic discipline – deserves such a grand title, I am fully on board with replacing as much of philosophy as possible with sociological, and thus empirical\/pragmatic analyses.<\/p>\n

It is in this sense that Bourdieu is largely on the same page as Foucault in that both seek to replace the extent to which science is, in any sense, grounded in philosophy with a similar grounding in social actions and power relations.\u00a0 My own view on this endeavor is that all communication, both verbal and non-verbal, theoretical and pedestrian, is, always and everywhere, a form of signaling which transforms (for better or worse) the incentives faced by the audience<\/strong>. This is not all there is to be said about communication, but any account which is not compatible with this account can, I suggest, safely and rightly be ignored.\u00a0 Compare my sentiment with those of Foucault:<\/p>\n

“Relationships of communication\u2026 by virtue of modifying the field of information between partners, produce effects of power.<\/strong> They can scarcely be dissociated from activities brought to their final term, be they those which permit the exercise of this power \u2026 or those which in order to develop their potential call upon relations of power.” Foucault, The Subject and Power<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n

While Foucault leaves things in terms of an ambiguous kind of \u201cpower\u201d which we inevitably exercise upon each other, Bourdieu frames the issue, as a conflict theorist would, in terms of power struggles<\/em>.\u00a0 Not only is communication always and everywhere an exercise of power, but is inevitably an activity which is in response to the invitations and threats of other agents rather than to the mechanical stimulations of the \u201cnatural\u201d environment:<\/p>\n

“[A]ll knowledge, and in particular all knowledge of the social world, is an act of construction implementing schemes of thought and expression, and that between conditions of existence and practices or representations there intervenes the structuring activity of the agents, who, far from reacting mechanically to mechanical stimulations, respond to the invitations or threats of a world whose meaning they have helped to produce.<\/strong> However, the principle of this structuring activity is \u2026 a system of internalized, embodied schemes which, having been constituted in the course of collective history, are acquired in the course of individual history and function in their practical state, for practice (and not for the sake of pure knowledge).” (Distinction<\/em>, p. 467)<\/p>\n

A second reason why Bourdieu\u2019s work resonates with me is his insistence that our understanding of the social world must, at all times, be grounded in the idea of scarcity. The Marxist tradition (which is very influential in sociology departments) has tended to view \u201cscarcity\u201d with deep suspicion, sometimes going so far as to dismiss it as nothing more than an ideological underpinning to the neo-classical economic models by which the Bourgeois dominate the rest of society.<\/p>\n

While Bourdieu (as I will soon argue) is very much influenced by Marxist thinking, and as such is not completely sold on the necessary existence of economic scarcity, he instead focuses attention on other forms of scarcity which traditional Marxists have tended to ignore.\u00a0 Even if, he might say, there is no scarcity of economic capital – indeed, within actually existing cultural fields that are almost entirely defined by and thus structured according to their autonomy from economic necessity – there is still a scarcity of social capital (interpersonal connections and coalitions), cultural capital (degrees, certifications, citations, eloquence, skills, etc.) and symbolic capital (the ability to prioritize and legitimize those other types of capital for others). Scarcity within these other realms also produce conflict and competition in which people seek to \u201cdistinguish\u201d themselves from their competitors \u2013 hence the title of his book:<\/p>\n

“Theories, methods and concepts in whatever realm are to be considered as strategies aimed at installing, restoring, strengthening, safeguarding or overthrowing a determinate structure of relationships of symbolic domination; that is, they constitute the means for obtaining or safeguarding the monopoly of the legitimate mode of practicing a literary, artistic or scientific activity\u2026<\/p>\n

“Scholastic codifications of the rules of scientific practice are inseparable from the project of building a kind of intellectual papacy<\/strong>, replete with its international corps of vicars, regularly visited or gathered together in concilium<\/em> and charged with the exercise of rigorous and constant control over common practice.” \u00a0(The Field of Cultural Production<\/em>, p. 139)<\/p>\n

It is the power struggles produced by this competition within the field of cultural production and consumption that is the Bloggernacle that I plan on exploring in this series.<\/p>\n

While I strongly approve of Bourdieu\u2019s replacement of philosophy with social analysis and with his non-negotiable emphasis upon scarcity and power struggles within cultural fields, these two points correspond directly to my biggest objections to his approach. Whereas I agree with Bourdieu that the stratification caused by scarcity within power relations are always a relevant issue (a necessary element of any social analysis), he often gives the impression that such stratifications are the only<\/em> relevant issue (a sufficient element of any social analysis). While I fully agree that there is always some element of zero-sum-ness to every social interaction (thus making each interaction morally regulated), I strongly disagree when he insinuates that all such interactions are purely<\/em> zero-sum in that each man\u2019s gain is some other man\u2019s equal loss – I can only move up the social hierarchy if others move down.<\/p>\n

My second objection has to do with his exaggerated faith in his vision for sociology. Bourdieu thinks that so long as the sociologist is \u201creflexive\u201d by way of an application of their (his) own theories to themselves, this makes their description of the social world uniquely \u201cobjective\u201d and undistorted by ideological interests as all other such descriptions are. This is fully in line with the Marxist dismissal of all competing descriptions of the social world as \u201cfalse consciousness.\u201d\u00a0 Of course, it\u2019s difficult to imagine a more ideological attempt at wielding symbolic authority than that.<\/p>\n

I see Gouldner\u2019s powerful critique of traditional Marxists\u2019 lack of reflexivity as applying equally well to Bourdieu:<\/p>\n

\u201cMarxism resisted efforts to see itself as a speech produced by speakers, who may also be limited by their own social context\u2026 To view its own theories as a speech like other speeches, and its own theorists as speakers like other speakers, undermines Marxism’s (and any ideology’s) capacity to mobilize the action it seeks and to persuade men to pay the costs of their commitments\u2026<\/p>\n

“In this respect, Marxism like other ideologies is a rational mode of discourse that embodies a specific communication pathology\u2014’objectivism.’\u00a0Objectivism is discourse lacking in reflexivity; it one-<\/strong>sidedly focuses on the ‘object’ but occludes the speaking ‘subject’ to whom it is an object; objectivism thus ignores the way in which the spoken object is contingent in part on the language in which it is spoken, and varies in character with the language\u2014or theory\u2014used.<\/strong><\/p>\n

“The analytic essence of ideology, common to all concrete ‘isms,’ is precisely that it is speech that does not does recognize or make problematic its own grounds, and rejects such reflexivity as unworldly ‘navel?gazing.’\u201d (The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology: The Origins, Grammar, and Future of Ideology<\/a><\/em>, p. 44-45)<\/p>\n

The objectivism which both Bourdieu and Marx indulge in stands in stark contrast with my own view of communication stated above.\u00a0 To repeat, I insist that all communication \u2013 including all social theory, reflexive or not – is, if nothing else, a means by which a person transforms the incentives faced by their audience. The objectivism endorsed by traditional Marxists and (seemingly) Bourdieu amounts to the self-serving claim that they and they alone are able to transcend the power relations and scarcity which unavoidably structure our social interactions in this fallen world.