Class 5.

Politics, imagination and emotions

(with a first session on P. Bourdieu, autonomy/heteronomy of fields)

Course Plan and Notes

Alex Kowalski

1. Session 1: Closing on the Question of Heteronomy/Autonomy of Knowledge Production (from

Week 4)

1.1. Where we were at:

Skolè = scholarly leisure, leisure of the intellectual/academic/philosopher, a sort of academic freedom

It is a status and a material condition of possibility at the same time (independently wealthy person, or
professional academic)

Outcome: “corporatism of the universal” = a subjective (yet collectively held) sense that one’s mission is
to think freely, produce universal truths, and/or general knowledge of reality.

Note that this statement is a paradox. The universal (or highly general) is produced in and through highly
idiosyncratic/particular conditions.

Note that the paradox captures two aspects of knowledge production in the academic context that are
equally real and equally defining, yet often perceived as contradictory by both common thought and
superficial critique. Namely:

1. The universal is something, it exists, it is something real out there. Something distinct and distinctive.
Something that is a concrete output and that effects concrete changes in the world. Something that
needs to be acknowledged as such (as a reality), and accounted for. This part of the theory is the
realistic part. It gives credit to the the subjective reality of knowledge producers (academics, scientists)
themselves, who conceive of their work as producing “actual” universality in one form or another. The
meaning of these statements is slightly different of course, but they are close enough.

2. it is (only) what people in charge of producing it produce. Philosophy is what philosophers do. Truth is
what truth-producers produce.

Scholastic fallacy

“Consists in injecting meta-discourses and meta-practices into discourses and practices.” (Scholastic
Fallacy p. 131) Grammar, social structure, class, capitalism. Faults Marx for doing exactly that

“Marx, who more than any other theoreticiane xerted the theory affect - the properly political effect
that consists in making tangible ([from the greek] theorein] a "reality" that cannot entirely exist insofar
as it remains unknown and unrecognized - paradoxically failed to take this effect into account in his own
theory. . . One moves from class-on-paper to the "real" class only at the price of a political work of
mobilization. The "real" class,i f it has ever "really" existed, is nothing but the realized class, that is, the
mobilized class, a result of the struggle of classifications, which is a properly syrnbolic (and political)
struggle to impose a vision of the social world, or, better, a way to construct that world, in perception
,and in reality, and to construct classes in accordance with which this social world can be divided.”
(Social space and symbolic space, p. 11)

Logic of Practice

 Bourdieu offers a critique of theoretical reason in the social sciences

 He proposes the “logic of practice” (governed by mechanisms of habitus, capital and field) as a
substitute

Habitus
“As an acquired system of generative schemes, the habitus makes possible the free production
of all the thoughts, perceptions and actions inherent in the particular conditions of its
production—and only those.” (The Logic of Practice, 1990 [French ed. 1980], p. 56)

The habitus (embodied history, internalized as second nature and thus forgotten as history) is
the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product. As such, it is what gives
practices their relative autonomy with respect to external determinations of the immediate
present. This autonomy is that of the past (…) which, functioning as accumulated capital,
produces history on the basis of history and so insures the permanence in change that makes
the individual agent a world within the world. The habitus is a spontaneity without
consciousness or will, opposed as much to the mechanical necessity of things without history in
mechanistic theories as it is to the reflexive freedom of subjects ‘without inertia’ in rationalist
theories.” (ibid p. 57)

The logic of practice is non-logical, yet understandable, totality of interacting factors

that generate a given action. These factors include habitus, position in a given/variable social
space, and contingent encounters and events. A logic of practice is always historical, i.e.
contingent and dependent on cases. It is defined both by preexisting structures (positions) and
by situated strategies (positioning).

Social space, space of social positions = symbolic space, with values and capital

 A certain type of social space: Field

Most of the human works that we are accustomed to treating as universal - law, science, the fine arts'
ethics, religion, and so forth - cannot be dissociated from the scholastic point of view and from the social
and economic conditions which make the latter possible. They have been engendered in these very
peculiar social universes which are the fields of cultural production - the juridical field, the scientific
field, the artistic field, the philosophical field - and in which agents are engaged who have in common
the privilege of fighting for the monopoly of the universal' and thereby effectively of promoting the
advancement of truths and values that are held, at each moment, to be universal' indeed eternal.

(“The scholastic point of view,” p. 135)

1.2. Fields

See the definition of fields in Bourdieu and Wacquant’s “Toward a reflexive sociology” 1989 (Optional
Readings file, Week 5, Moodle).

A field is a special type of social (symbolic) space. As a social space it is differentiated and organized by
power relations and cultural values. It is polarized, and it is bounded. It is special in the sense that, in this
social space, 1. some types of capital matter more than others (specialization and specificity; cultural
capital vs. economic capital); 2. The modes of their allocation (modalities of struggle) is often, at least
partly, codified in explicit rather than implicit ways (bureaucratic, professional organization of parts of
these fields); 3. A macro historical specificity: fields are found in “highly differentiated societies,” i.e.
societies with extensive “division of labor” (Durkheim’s definition of a modern society)

A field is specific, by comparison with other types of social spaces (e.g. a house) because, as a result of
the above, its boundaries are strongly policed and enforced by multiple bodies and actors; and they
have the specificity of being policed and enforced from within the field itself, by actors in the field, often
the most powerful actors. Powerful actors are the ones who define the norms, the values of a field (i.e.
explain and justify their own dominance).

One of the distinguishing specificities of a field is thus its autonomy, i.e. the ability of actors within to
define boundaries on behalf of the whole, in a way that is not determined by non-members (e.g.
journalists define the quality of their work independently from management; scientists define scientific
quality independently from politics etc.)

Arch-exemple: fields of cultural production (art, academe, journalism etc). Also: organizational fields,
humanitarian field, field of non-governmental organizations, organizational field, field of parenting
discourse, field of class relations etc.

Analysis of a field: Slide 4 of my US Journalism PPT (in file Teaching Material Week 4)

https://www.facebook.com/WSBYSO/videos/1363252000364163/

1.3. Film and discussion

With particular attention to the question of the relationship between scholar according to PB and
organic intellectual according to Gramsci. (Student questions from Week 4)
 1.4. Public Sphere as field (Intro to Habermas)

2. Session 2: Politics, imagination and emotions

Selection of student questions