Sociology as a Martial Art*: Remarks on Bourdieu

 

Me demonstrating ude kime nage 

I was an unapologetic "theory head" in my later years of college and first years of graduate school. I devoured theories as soon as I heard of them, pouring through books by Lyotard, Deleuze, Agamben, Adorno, etc., Some of these stuck with me and became lasting obsessions, and some just went by the wayside. For a long time Pierre Bourdieu was in the former. I read a few things, his book on a theory of practice, some of his polemics about the market, etc., but never really connected. However, I been driven to a kind of belated appreciation of Bourdieu as of late. This is driven by two very different areas of inquiry. The first, predictably, has to do with the way that Bourdieu has become an implicit or explicit point of reference in what I think of as Spinozist social thought.  More or less implicit in case of someone like Frédérique Lordon, who uses problems and terms like "symbolic violence," and more explicit in someone like Chantal Jaquet, who takes up what many see to be Bourdieu's central problem, that of reproduction, and Jacques-Louis Lantoine, who examines the connection between Spinoza's concept of ingenium and Bourdieu's habitus. The second point of reference, also belated is Michael Buroway, whose book on/with Bourdieu is one of the best things I have read all summer. 

Don't Save Yourself: On The End of Oak Street

 

I am a huge fan of It Follows, so when I heard that the writer and director of that film, David Robert Mitchell was making a dinosaur movie I knew that I had to see it. It is strange to me that as many times as dinosaurs have escaped the park, they have never really broken out of the Jurassic Park franchise, giving that series exclusive ownership of our shared prehistory and many kids fascination, even as the results dimension with each sequel, requel, and reboot. I was excited to see a non-Jurassic dinosaur movie, one not tied to any Intellectual Propery and one made by a writer and director that had made something I liked before.

Capriciously Categorical: On Plagiarism

 

I have often found Charles Mills' distinction between de jure and de facto racism to be heuristically useful if not not explanatory. It is one of the great merits of The Racial Contract to be an incredibly teachable book, it fits incredibly well in political theory class that has covered Hobbes, Locke, and/or Rousseau, with perhaps some Marx and Machiavelli, putting the very idea of a social contract to a very different use and in doing so, revealing exactly what is excluded from political philosophy, as Mills puts it, "White supremacy is the unnamed political system which has made the world what it is today." Despite this I find the very idea of a rigid division, and a progression, between a de jure racism, the racism of Jim Crow, and segregation, and de facto racism, the racism, of unstated norms and lingering effects to be questionable. This is perhaps because we are living through something else, some third form.

We Think in Society: Notes on the Destruction of Colllective Intelligence

Dinosaur left over from a miniature golf course in Florida.

I find myself coming back to one central question, that is at once political and philosophical. Previously on this blog I referred to the political dimension of this transformation as the constitution of a new episteme, a new standard for what counts as truth. This new standard appears primarily as the destruction of the old standards, as expertise of scientists are contested, and universities are under attack. This new episteme is not in itself a conscious program, and like many things it has multiple overlapping and contradictory conditions, encompassing both the assault on the expertise underlying the administrative state, the knowledge of scientists and experts, on one hand, and the proletarianization of the intellect of day to day life by the proliferation of artificial intelligence, on the other. These strategies often converge and overlap, but have different motivations and conditions. The primary point of their overlap is the way in which they elevate what Spinoza called the imagination about reason, above common notions. The truth of things is how they effect us, or how they effect certain people, if vaccines feel invasive and destructive then they must be, if America does not seem to be racist (to white people) then it isn't, if it seems like the machine is thinking, fully conscious and sentient, then it must be. It is an episteme the puts imagination above reason.  

Finite Dialectic, Part II: The Spinozist Dialectic Or, Remarks on a Comment by Macherey

Pierre Macherey and Etienne Balibar via Décalages 

Sometimes I waste time by thinking of classes that I will never get a chance to teach, classes that would be for graduate students (which we do not have at USM), or entail books which have yet to be translated, or classes that are just too long. One class that meets all three would be a class on the dialectic and vicissitudes, this class would focus on the attempt to to rethink that dialectic in twentieth century philosophy, texts would include Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, Adorno's Negative Dialectics, Althusser's For Marx, Badiou's Theory of the Subject.  That would just be the big ones. Of course it would help if this class was preceded by one on Hegel and Marx, and perhaps followed by a class on Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida (to name a few). At this point it has become completely unmanageable. I have long since come to the conclusion that what is often presented as the conflict between postmodernism and Marxism, or whatever you'd like to call it, is perhaps best understood as a division between those who maintain the dialectic, with some changes, and those who depart from it. 

Live Más, Comrades: Hegel, Marx, and the Dialectics of Diarrhea

The merit of Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right lie less in its solutions, constitutional monarchy, than in the way it grasps the fundamental problem of modern politics. Politics does not begin with individuals in some kind of pre-political state of nature, or as some kind of undifferentiated raw material. Politics, the state, comes after the institutions of the family and civil society, and these institutions are not just functional elements of society, they are, foundational in shaping the perspectives and conflicts of politics. The social is the antechamber of the political. 

The Uses of Horror: Obsession and Get Out

I teach a philosophy of film class, and have for years now. It is a fun class, I get a lot of students, and I like talking about movies and philosophy. However, every year I wonder if I am talking about an art form that has a future or even a present. Do people even go to movies. I have contemplated switching it, for a few years I thought of replacing film with television, with shows like The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, etc., but time moves fast, and those seem as dated as Hitchcock or even Tarantino. I cannot imagine teaching a class on TikTok or other short form videos. However, just as I am about to relegate film to something from the past, to part of the history of media, there is a sudden revival of interest in movies, even going to the movies. Years ago it was Barbenheimer. This year, it has Obsession and Backrooms.

Translation: A Spinozist Noo-Politics: Reconsideration of two recent books on Spinoza by Lorenzo Vinciguerra and Pascal Sévérac by Yves Citton

This is a draft translation of an early review by Yves Citton 

Published in Multitudes 

Picture from The Brain from Planet Arous

In his latest work, Maurizio Lazzarato proposed designating as "noo-politics" the "new power relations that take memory—and its conatus (attention)—as their object." Noo-politics (as it is currently exercised through "wireless, audiovisual, and telematic networks, and through the constitution of public opinion, perception, and collective intelligence") effects "the modulation of flows of desires and beliefs, as well as of the forces (memory and attention) that circulate them within the cooperation between brains" (This neologism—which, as a footnote clarifies, is to be situated at the intersection of the Greek noûs ("the highest part of the soul, the intellect") and the Internet service provider Noos—is rooted in a tradition of thought that the author explicitly traces back to Gabriel Tarde and Leibniz. Just as Tarde took pains to clarify his relationship to Leibniz in a lengthy essay devoted to the link between "Monadology and Sociology," so too does Maurizio Lazzarato propose a "neo-monadology" that draws upon Leibniz for the concepts of "event" and "possible world"—the very concepts upon which he constructs his political analysis of early twenty-first-century social movements. 

Working Together: on Fischbach's Faire Ensemble (and the question of solidarity)

Having spent a lot of time thinking about, and thinking with, the concept of "negative solidarity," it sometimes occurs to me that I should think about its opposite, about solidarity, as the necessary condition for collective action. I have read on the topic from time to time, I read Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix's book Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World Changing Idea as soon as it came out. However, I struggle to say anything interesting about it for two reasons. First, as I argued in The Double Shift, capitalism has so undermined our imagination that it is difficult to think of any model of action than a purely individualistic one, everyday people deal with poverty, precarity, and insecurity, by endeavoring to work harder, to hustle, to find a side gig or scam. Working with others collectively is unimaginable, especially when that collectivity is mediated not by the wage form. Second, I am not sure if this default in the imagination can be addressed theoretically, or even through a historical recounting of times in which solidarity seemed easier to imagine, it is not a matter of theory, but of practice. Solidarity increasingly seems like something to do rather than ponder. 

Phone Home: What Disclosure Day Discloses

E.T. The Extraterrestrial 

Can set design make or break a film? In general, probably not, but it made one film for me. I remember seeing E.T. The Extraterrestrial as a kid and seeing the image of a television set with an Atari 2600 stacked on top, and cartridges underneath. It was the first time that a movie looked like something I recognized, like it could have been my house, my television. This is true of the whole film, with its middle class messiness of action figures and toys strewn about. Of course as a kid I was not exactly looking for realism in film. I saw the original Star Wars thirty some times by my last count, and spent the rest of the late seventies and early eighties searching to recreate that experience.