Friday 25th July, 2008. Pierre Bourdieu

A meeting beginning and ending with ping-pong sessions - highly appropriate to a discussion of Bourdieu's 'Critique of Scholastic Reason' although we played (apparently, I don't understand the game) without rules governing the field (can you have a ping-pong game with 5 players?). We discussed the role of biography in providing for a critical perspective and Bourdieu's own 'peasant' roots as a determining factor in his understanding of the significance of habitus in enabling certain people to engage in scholarly 'play'. We agreed that habitus was not to be read as entirely deterministic and that his biography, again, pointed to the fact that he intended it to be understood, in this context, as malleable and that the acquisition of leisure and the ability to engage in the field is dependent upon gains in cultural/social capital. In other words, he seemed to be saying that education could prepare all people to move beyond habits of thought engendered by the struggle for subsistence and enable them to take a critical stance on their own situation. However, this seemed to imply that the privileged habitus of the scholar was the only route to the acquisition of knowledge and that social struggle would then take place on a field already prepared in advance, ie., according to the doxa of what is currently a privileged elite. We agreed, however, that this reading was mitigated by his analysis of the law as arbitrary, if the law can be understood as the forms which construct the social as well as prescriptions for 'correct' behaviour. We had a long discussion about the concept of the illusio and how this enabled an understanding of the insertion of the body into social structures and the way that comportment is an important part of understanding his concept of 'play'. Ping-pong was instructive here. Those of us completely incapable of hitting the ball were forced to consider our complete lack of ability to enter into any meaningful interaction (or was that just me?). Anyway, we agreed that disposition towards any given field could be acquired (except that dyspraxia and ping-pong are mutually exclusive) but that the acquisition of the scholarly disposition cannot take place under the terms of education systems governed by the doxa of neo-liberalism. This led us, again, to consider the meaning of a group which meets to discuss radical theory in a squat and the role of space and place in the construction of the illusio and what this implies for the usefulness of Bourdieu's ideas in thinking through the terms of social struggle. We agreed that he himself offers very little in terms of the transformation of the social field other than 'countertraining involving repeated exercises' which seemed to merely imply the imposition of an alternative doxa. Some members of the group commented that their difficulty with the way that he expresses his ideas led them to feel excluded and unable to engage which seems to prove the point that entry into the scholarly field requires the prior acquisition of certain forms of cultural capital (a course in Latin would've helped). We ended by suggesting that Bourdieu is working with some Kantian ideas which led to the suggestion that our next reading should be Kant's What Is Enlightenment?'