democratic convention - night 1

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Photo credit: Kennedy & Obama (Stephen Crowley - New York Times).

what you don't have you don't need it now

This is almost the end of the road for Hillary Clinton's campaign. She won't be VP. Aside from the historical baggage the Clintons lug around with them, H. Clinton could have been Obama's VP. However, her primary campaign foreclosed that option. Pursuing an all or nothing strategy, she will have to settle for nothing and another fifteen minutes of fame on the second day of the Democratic convention and the symbolic roll call vote. I don't expect either Clinton to be an effective campaigner for Obama: he stole their legacy, or at least deferred it until 2012. Hardcore Clinton supporters continue to overlook the wafer thin policy differences between Hillary and Barack, preferring to remain fixated in a self-destructive form of resentment that could advantage McCain (who shares none of the policy positions of H. Clinton). 

it's a beautiful day

The waiting is over: number two on the Democratic ticket is Joe Biden. Obama played this safe. According to pundits, Biden will move Hillary's 'white working class' supporters into the Obama camp. Joe from Scranton, the Scranton scrapper, the poorest Senator, Catholic Joe: this will be the political detritus of the coming week. The code words don't really code anything: Biden is supposed to counteract the effects of race; i.e., Obama's melanin (dis)advantage.

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Of course, that's not all Biden will do. He is allegedly a foreign policy heavyweight. To his credit, after supporting the decision to invade Iraq, Biden has been a persistent critic of the conduct of the war. I remain convinced his suggestion that Iraq could be broken into three states (a suggestion that recognizes the thoroughly constructed nature of post-colonial states) is an idea worth pursuing. The pundits immediately jumped on this perceived strength, arguing that it shows Obama's weakness (in foreign policy). This sort of argumentative gibberish, which turns into a "damned if he does, damned if he doesn't" sackgasse, will also contribute to the political detritus of the coming week. 

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I haven't taken to Biden in the past. He comes across as bombastic and shows too much attraction to his own rhetoric. However, the choice of Biden is probably the best possible among a weak pool of Democratic politicians. Of course, there was Hillary Clinton...

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Photo credit: A. Spencer Green (AP)

knights redux

Move aside Dick Cheney, the original Crusaders are back.

knorwegian knight

Sir Nils Olav.

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Photo credit: David Moir/Reuters

sovereignty for dummies

It looks like Saakashvili's provocations stirred the Russian bear -- with entirely predictable consequences. Unfortunately, Georgians are suffering the consequences of his irresponsible leadership. It's simultaneously risible and tragic when something like this happens and some fearless leader cries for help from the international community. Thinking like a state isn't exactly rocket science.

First rule of sovereignty: don't pick a fight you can't win by yourself.

Second rule of sovereignty: don't expose your civilian population to external attacks unnecessarily.

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The violation of these rules is criminal.

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Photo credit: Zurab Kurtsikidze/European Pressphoto Agency

USA! USA!

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Photo credit: Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images

double (un)consciousness? - on Bourdieu's "Sketch"

I have been captivated by the work of Pierre Bourdieu since I first struggled through Outline of a Theory of Practice in my second year of graduate school. He remains for me an intellectual touchstone because of the rigorousness of his work (a term he would undoubtedly reject). Hence, I looked forward to the translation of his "final" book with anticipation and some trepidation, for I sensed a logical but troubling divergence from the general orientation of his previous studies: an invocation of experience. Some inkling of this tendency appeared in earlier interviews and specifically in his Pascalian Mediations and the Science of Science and Reflexivity.  

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Bourdieu's Sketch for a Self-Analysis* is a curious undertaking. On the one hand, Bourdieu wishes to trump potential future biographers, who would, he seems to fear, get him wrong. On the other hand, the opportunity to self-analyse himself, an act of self-objectification he did not make available to the numerous people whom his models objectified, risks the charges of self-indulgence and, worse, self-promotion. There is a bit of both in this book, but less than might be expected from someone who did earned the right to commit the sin of intellectual egoism -- unlike the vast majority of academics who fry small fish caught in puddles and then present themselves to others as if they've harpooned the great white whale.

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The book itself is interesting as a representation (to be sure a selective one) of the French intellectual field in the 1950s and 1960s, and the intersection of philosophical, institutional, and  political trends: existentialism, Marxism, the rise of the social sciences; the war in Algeria and 1968. This period, according to Bourdieu, is decisive for his subsequent scholarly trajectory, drawing out his habitual contrarian disposition, which, of course, remained self-reflexive. Bourdieu presents himself as a contrarian who refuses to make a virtue of the necessity of this position-taking since -- and this is the central motif that runs throughout the book -- he was by circumstance an outsider: a child of provincial life, the product of a peasant/small bureaucrat paternal inheritance, who gravitated away from the highest form of intellectual life, philosophy, and toward the then less legitimate fields of ethnology and, eventually, sociology; never a Communist, he nonetheless fixated on issues of social reproduction and complicated Marx's basic scheme; never a structuralist, he nonetheless developed his theory of practice out of the ground of structuralism (i.e., Levi-Strauss); never a public intellectual in the mold of Sartre (his anti-model of academic life) and Foucault, he nonetheless engaged with political issues; finally, while he is viewed as a sociological auteur, he seems most proud of his effort to work within a team of empirically-oriented researchers.

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And on and on. Contradictions, contraries, and contrarianness appear on each page of Sketch. Bourdieu's self-analysis is congenial, and probably will be received as such, by anyone who, in other terms, operates in a liminal space, betwixt and between two presumably incompatible binary oppositions. Such an account resonates with Du Bois notion of double consciousness. Bourdieu describes this as the "hidden face of a double life" (72), his cleft habitus (100) or his double distance.

The sense of ambivalence towards the intellectual world that is rooted in these dispositions is the generative principle of a double distance of which I could give countless examples: a distance from the great game of French-style intellectual life, with its fashionable petitions, its demonstrations du jour or its prefaces for artists' catalogues, but also from the great role of professor, engaged in the circular circulation of thesis juries and examination boards, the games and stakes of power over reproduction; a distance, in politics and culture, from both elitism and populism. (107)

This ambivalence, evidenced in his account of his inaugural lecture** at the College de France, is not analyzed by Bourdieu in psychoanalytic terms: the Oedipal conflicts with various Fathers (but apparently not his biological father), his symbolic castration of these Fathers in the inaugural lecture (which shows that authority of the Father is arbitrary), his preferred immersion in empirical studies (perhaps reproducing the oceanic feeling?) and discomfort with playing the leading role of a leading French intellectual (e.g., his disdain for Sartre); in other words, he acquired the authority of the Father while refusing to play the role comfortably.

This tension perhaps never appeared to me in a more dramatic fashion than when I gave my inaugural lecture at the College de France, in other words at the moment of entry into a role that I found hard to integrate into my own idea of myself. (...) Finally, I thought I saw a way out of the contradiction into which I was thrown by the very fact of a social consecration which assaulted my self-image: to take as the object of my lecture the idea of delivering an inaugural lecture, of performing a rite of institution, thus setting up a distance from the role in the very exercise of the role. But I had underestimated the violence of what, in the place of a simple ritual address, became a kind of 'intervention' in the artists' sense. To describe the rite while performing the rite is to commit the supreme social barbarism, that of wilfully suspending belief or, worse, calling it into question and threatening it in the very time and place where it is supposed to be celebrated and strengthened. I thus discovered in the moment of doing this, that what had become for me a psychological solution constituted a challenge to the symbolic order, an affront to the dignity of the institution which demands that one keep silent about the arbitrariness of the institutional rite that is being performed. The public reading of that text which, written outside the situation, still had to be read as it stood, withoug modification, before the assembled body of masters, Claude Levi-Strauss, Georges Dumezil, Michel Foucault and others, was a terrible ordeal. People told me later that my voice was toneless. I was on the point of breaking off and leaving the rostrum. Jean-Pierre Vernant gave me a severe look, or so it seemed: I read on to the end, for better or worse. (108, 109-110)

Anyone who has felt compelled, as I have, to objectify the arbitrariness and violence of the authority of a father can understand Bourdieu's compulsion and trauma: the need to fight all Father figures (i.e., to recreate them -- and the original Oedipal situation -- whenever ambivalence surfaces) and, nonetheless, to undermine the authority and privileges that accrues to one who successfully slays the Father (i.e., the prohibition on incest).

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Beyond this, however, one can question the motif of doubleness in Du Bois and Bourdieu. Regarding the latter, the self-analysis in Sketch makes it appear as if Bourdieu's singular intellectual trajectory was possible only on account of this doubleness which Sartre or Foucault (for example) lacked. Thus, Bourdieu explains his critical difference from Foucault, that Foucault always remained a "philosopher", on this basis: Foucault originated from a "well-to-do provincial bourgeois family" (79) whereas he (Bourdieu) did not. The assumption here which is unannounced in Bourdieu (and Du Bois) is this: only certain backgrounds generate doubleness, the cleft habitus. Is this really the case? Is it not the case, on the contrary, that everyone is afflicted or privileged by this disposition (e.g., ambivalence is a fundamental psychoanalytic concept)? If this is true, or at least is as plausible as an assumption as one that holds that only certain individuals have this cleft habitus, then Bourdieu's account of his singular trajectory is called into question; in other words, his propensity to epistemological breaks is not fully explicated by a habitus acquired in the family which predisposed him to recreate that habitus within the intellectual field. If everyone partakes in ambivalent relations with objects (people, ideas, things), then Bourdieu's singularity must be accounted for in a different manner.

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*Pierre Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

**Pierre Bourdieu, "A lecture on the lecture," in In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 177-198.

Photo credit: Daniel Boudient (Ministere de la Culture - France)

ready to tan

Paris for Prez.

freedom of criticism

Cartoon caricatures have become a political issue, ranging from the depictions of Allah in the Danish press, to the caricature of the Obamas on the cover of The New Yorker, to a recent cartoon concerning the son of Nicolas Sarkozy in a French magazine, which was criticized as anti-semitic and which led to the firing of the cartoonist "Bob Sine". The defenders of these cartoons have raised the banner of free speech and freedom of expression and denounced critics as enemies of speech. This is profoundly muddled thinking on the part of free speech absolutists. Freedom of speech carries a risk, the risk of a negative reaction, i.e., criticism, which is also a form of speech that presumably is protected. I don't believe Sine's 'speech rights' are violated in this case. He published his cartoon. His firing does not prevent him from publishing similar cartoons in other venues (he just won't be able to do so in Charlie Hebdo). 'Anything-goes' libertarian absolutism often degrades into passive-aggressive claims of victimization. This appears to be the case with Sine and his supporters.