After finally reading Bourdieu
I have been meaning to read Bourdieu for a long time now and I am so glad to have had the opportunity to delve in. One of the problems in the past is that he offers such a wide-range of ideas that it is hard to know where to start, as well as which ideas are the most important with regards to the type of language ideological practices I am interested in (Bourdieu is more or less always speaking about language, but from merely looking at the jargon he's employing from one topic to the next it's hard to know off the bat what exactly is the set of social practices he's referring to in his discussions). That is why the opportunity of reading this particular collection, Language and Symbolic Power, was even more opportune that just getting to read Bourdieu in general. Especially with the help of the Editor's introduction, this is a great survey of his thought. To be frank, the titles of the essays are opaque, but the editor helps break down what each article is about in a way that had me jumping right in and pulling out helpful concepts for my project right away. I would also recommend his interview with Terry Eagleton, where his ideas are presented even more simply, down right accessible, which has been published under the title "Doxa and Common Life".
I especially enjoyed the chapter on censorship and the imposition of form. First because it is a pretty savage take-down of Heidegger which I can appreciate. Secondly because it shows Bourdieu at his first-generation intellectual best, offering an insider account of the obfuscating insider game being played at by intellectuals (I think this would have been even more savage if he had chosen to go after Lacan, but I understand what with all the Greek why he picked Heidegger, but then again there is maybe no better example of the intellectual always there to tell you you've misinterpreted him than Lacan) in their projects. Chomsky has said that if you take away all of the 'euphemization' of their discourse (Bourdieu's terminology) you'd be left with nothing more than a few truisms. Bourdieu is all the more explicit about how the wink-and-a-nod game works for those hoping for entry into the privileged space of the philosophical system works and why. And thirdly I enjoyed this piece because it set up some interesting ways of thinking about jargon and form not merely as the effect of intellectuals who are cut off from the social world they are claiming to be deciphering, but that the jargon and form is also acting to "dictate the conditions of its perception". It is itself creating the terms for symbolic social inequalities.
I am interested in looking at the language ideology of the Middle Eastern Left and these insights immediately refocus me to look at the disconnect between left-wing literary production and the way that the working class actually spoke and saw the world not as an unfortunate gap, but an unconscious (in the linguistic ideology sense) reenforcement of a power inequality, one in which the party and the vanguard worked to reproduce their own separation through the mystifying power of their own speech. Marxist-speak was doing double duty in this case, trying to perform theoretical work in the field of class analysis, while at the same time serving in the invisible process of creating different types of class differentiated by disparate access to social capital. This goes back to the introduction again where the editor does a wonderful job laying out the different conceptions of class between Marx and Bourdieu. "[Bourdieu] views the social world as a multi-dimensional space, differentiated into relatively autonomous fields; and within each of these fields, individuals occupy positions determined by the quantities of different types of capital they possess." There is a creative tension between the Marxist account of class, which is completely blind to the dynamics of language ideology, and the Bourdieu(ian?) concept of it, which is not fully willing to sever its ties to Marxist class analysis, while still finding it problematic in productive ways. I think it finds it problematic in some of the same ways that Laclau does in "Hegemony and Socialist Strategy", mainly to the effect of "everything depends on how ideology is conceived": do ideological elements articulated by a hegemonic class have a necessary class belonging or are they most complexly determined by conjunctures in a social constellation? Bourdieu may offer us a way to escape class determinism and think of the social inequalities reinforced in language as being constituted by linguistic practices themselves. I believe this is what Silverstein is getting at in "the indexical order" although he doesn't go so far as to link his concept to the greater history of the study of ideology i.e. Gramsci or Althusser. I guess Bourdieu isn't looking to anchor these linguistic practices in a materialist base since he proves quite convincingly that language is it's own base. Here is a helpful quote from his interview with Eagleton:
" Ideology as representation, as false consciousness. I think that Marxism, in fact, remains a sort of Cartesian violent, in which you have a conscious agent who is the scholar, the learned person, and the others who don't have access to consciousness...The social world doesn't work in terms of consciousness; it works in terms of practices, mechanisms, and so forth. By using doxa we accept many things without knowing them, and that is what is called ideology."
Needless to say, I'm really pumped up by the reading this week and I can't wait to organize my thoughts even more. Thank you for the opportunity to word vomit a little bit with y'all. I suppose that's one of the purposes of this discussion board. As for questions:
1) How can we best summarize the material basis of language for Bourdieu, as being em-bodied in the corporeal hexis, or in the autonomous reproduction of capitalism?
2) Bourdieu says that language arises from definite social and historical situations, but seems to suggest that this is universally true, that they are always historically contingent, but he doesn't mention how this could be different somehow. Can we not still demand that Bourdieu historicize his account of language ideology. In many places, he seems to equate it to the logic of capitalism. Was there not even linguistic communism under "primitive communism"?
3) Speaking of historicizing, Bourdieu makes sure to be properly critical of the a-social accounts of language as told by Saussure and Chomsky. Well, it seems we're in the middle of a paradigm shift when it comes to linguistics, usage-based linguistics, which I think might be quite vindicating for Bourdieu were he alive to see it.
Does this change anything fundamental or was Bourdieu's work always acting independent of empirical linguistics? According to the editor's introduction, he always did have a commitment to data.
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