Bourdieu

The discussion on Bourdieu was especially important in the way it explains some important qualities of sociological phenomenon of the Iranian society, more specifically the community in Tehran. What Bourdieu talks about is the character of a middle class society and the sources of power which it defines for itself. The concepts of economic habitus and cultural habitus makes sense to me and the latter one specifically helps me understand many social rules and laws inherent in the present society in Tehran where culture and education is severely sought after and there are too many distinctions among people living even in the same city of neighbourhood and all other characteristics of a middle class society. This tendency to be distinct of any body else to me is a key factor to understand many issues about Iran.

Somewhere in his interview type account of his ideas (Sociology Quarterly 93, sage) he throws light on a phenomena which was keeping my mind busy for a while and that is the tendency in Iran to go for more special forms of art and entertainment as if this brings more cultural capital to people and he says 'the process of those instruments [cultural practices] secure profits of distinction for themselves and the rarer these instruments are the greater the profits.' (page 2 the art of standing up to words) and that explains why arts and being special in taste have a big role in present society in Iran where the competition for cultural capital is the most severe and in a sense economic habitus has to lead to cultural otherwise it loses a lot of its value.

Somewhere else he explains why he uses very complex language while being critical of academia of creating a safe haven by a highly specialized discourse they use which keeps none academia out. He says that sociology like some other disciplines (I would add linguistics here) is like talking about the obvious talking about something which goes without saying and that is why sociology has to resort to invented words which are thereby protected, relatively at least, from the naive projection of common sense. (Page 21, the sociologist in question).

He also talks about opinion polls and questions their validity. He talks about the mechanism by which opinion polls are flawed and that questions are manipulated and a lot of important data is not counted which is interesting but I am more interested in the concept of opinion. How it is formed and whether there is such a thing as independent opinion in the broadest sense.

Bourdieu's account of the society is very deterministic and sad to me. Not that it wants to be deterministic but in the way that it tells you the truth that we can never separate ourselves from the habitus struggle and we are in of way or another playing the game. This in turn makes me philosophically claustrophobic. The struggle to seek enlightment and to be practical is always skewed in favour or practicality. I raised this question that I see a paradox in what we do in academia as long as we cannot separate ourselves from this game we are doing the habitus game and when we are doing that game we cannot talk about enlightment communication or communicative dialogue ( this is exactly what I have had problem with since I came here)

I went to lecture of Dr. Christ May and the same point came up and he confidently said that what you do as a researcher is a project that you do and you need to look at it as an examination, nothing else and you should curb yourself not to go to deeper and deeper level and have to be practical. He went on and gave example of how he has been successful by sticking to the ideology of practicality. I guess it was no coincidence that the word 'sell' was part of his active discourse very much. So his approach toward marketisation of knowledge was that it is ok and indispensable and it would be a waste of time to try and change structure, just learn how to make it through it. I have to agree with this but cannot deny that it does not make me feel good.

In the middle of the class on Bourdieu I suddenly felt inundated with the fact that I have never been instrumental and that has cost me a lot in life. I admit that Bourdieu makes me sad in his explicitly showing the blatant truth on where we stand and what we can and cannot do.