lessons learned from my colloquium

[intertribal]

so apparently my real theoretical fight is with the realists, not the rationalists, and they are not the same thing (yes, starting with the same letter and having similar connotations is not enough).  because you apparently cannot fight with rational choice.  it is the unbeatable ID, it is 42, it is God with a capital G.  give rationalists any situation, perhaps even situations that involve prehistoric plants, and they will tell you that it fits their theory.  they are magic.  they are the sacred cow, the undying worm. 

whatever.  realism it is.

*rolls eyes*

Comments

Bourdieu in his own words, if you're interested:

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

"Objectivism constitutes the social world as a spectacle offered to an observer who takes up a 'point of view' on the action and who, putting into the object the principles of his relation to the object, proceeds as if it were intended solely for knowledge and as if all the interactions within it were purely symbolic exchanges. [...] The theory of practice insists, contrary to positivist materialism, that the objects of knowledge are constructed, not passively recorded, and, contrary to intellectualist idealism, that the principle of this construction is the system of structured, structuring dispositions, the habitus, which is constituted in practice and is always oriented towards practical functions."

"The bringing to light of the presuppositions inherent in objectivist construction has paradoxically been delayed by the efforts of all those who, in linguistics as in anthropology, have sought to 'correct' the structuralist model by appealing to 'context' or 'situation' to account for variations, exceptions and accidents (instead of making them simple variants, absorbed into the structure, as the structuralists do). They have thus avoided a radical questioning of the objectivist model of thought, when, that is, they have not simply fallen back on to the free choice of a rootless, unattached, pure subject."

"The habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices--more history--in accordance with the schemes generated by history. It ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the 'correctness' of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms. This system of dispositions--a present past that tends to perpetuate itself into the future by reactivation in similarly structured practices, an internal law through which the law of external necessities, irreducible to immediate constraints, is constantly exerted--is the principle of the continuity and regularity which objectivism sees in social practices without being able to account for it; and also of the regulated transformations [...]."

"Through the habitus, the structure of which it is the product governs practice [...]. This infinite yet strictly limited generative capacity is difficult to understand only so long as one remains locked in the usual antinomies--which the habitus aims to transcend--of determinism and freedom, conditioning and creativity, consciousness and the unconscious, or the individual and society. Because the habitus is an infinite capacity for generating products--thoughts, perceptions, expressions and actions--whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production, the conditions and conditional freedom it provides is as remote from creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from simple mechanical reproduction of the original conditioning."

"The habitus--embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history--is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product. [...] 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."

"Even when they look like the realization of explicit ends, the strategies produced by the habitus and enabling agents to cope with unforeseen and constantly changing situations are only apparently determined by the future. If they seem to be oriented by anticipation of their own consequences, thereby encouraging the finalist illusion, this is because, always tending to reproduce the objective structures that produced them, they are determined by the past conditions of production of their principle of production, that is, by the already realized outcome of identical or interchangeable past practices, which coincides with their own outcome only to the extent that the structures within which they function are identical to or homologous with the objective structures of which they are the product."