Sociology as a Martial Art*: Remarks on Bourdieu

 

Me demonstrating ude kime nage 

I was an unapologetic "theory head" in my later years of college and first years of graduate school. I devoured theories as soon as I heard of them, pouring through books by Lyotard, Deleuze, Agamben, Adorno, etc., Some of these stuck with me and became lasting obsessions, and some just went by the wayside. For a long time Pierre Bourdieu was in the former. I read a few things, his book on a theory of practice, some of his polemics about the market, etc., but never really connected. However, I been driven to a kind of belated appreciation of Bourdieu as of late. This is driven by two very different areas of inquiry. The first, predictably, has to do with the way that Bourdieu has become an implicit or explicit point of reference in what I think of as Spinozist social thought.  More or less implicit in case of someone like Frédérique Lordon, who uses problems and terms like "symbolic violence," and more explicit in someone like Chantal Jaquet, who takes up what many see to be Bourdieu's central problem, that of reproduction, and Jacques-Louis Lantoine, who examines the connection between Spinoza's concept of ingenium and Bourdieu's habitus. The second point of reference, also belated is Michael Buroway, whose book on/with Bourdieu is one of the best things I have read all summer. 

Don't Save Yourself: On The End of Oak Street

 

I am a huge fan of It Follows, so when I heard that the writer and director of that film, David Robert Mitchell was making a dinosaur movie I knew that I had to see it. It is strange to me that as many times as dinosaurs have escaped the park, they have never really broken out of the Jurassic Park franchise, giving that series exclusive ownership of our shared prehistory and many kids fascination, even as the results dimension with each sequel, requel, and reboot. I was excited to see a non-Jurassic dinosaur movie, one not tied to any Intellectual Propery and one made by a writer and director that had made something I liked before.

Capriciously Categorical: On Plagiarism

 

I have often found Charles Mills' distinction between de jure and de facto racism to be heuristically useful if not not explanatory. It is one of the great merits of The Racial Contract to be an incredibly teachable book, it fits incredibly well in political theory class that has covered Hobbes, Locke, and/or Rousseau, with perhaps some Marx and Machiavelli, putting the very idea of a social contract to a very different use and in doing so, revealing exactly what is excluded from political philosophy, as Mills puts it, "White supremacy is the unnamed political system which has made the world what it is today." Despite this I find the very idea of a rigid division, and a progression, between a de jure racism, the racism of Jim Crow, and segregation, and de facto racism, the racism, of unstated norms and lingering effects to be questionable. This is perhaps because we are living through something else, some third form.

We Think in Society: Notes on the Destruction of Colllective Intelligence

Dinosaur left over from a miniature golf course in Florida.

I find myself coming back to one central question, that is at once political and philosophical. Previously on this blog I referred to the political dimension of this transformation as the constitution of a new episteme, a new standard for what counts as truth. This new standard appears primarily as the destruction of the old standards, as expertise of scientists are contested, and universities are under attack. This new episteme is not in itself a conscious program, and like many things it has multiple overlapping and contradictory conditions, encompassing both the assault on the expertise underlying the administrative state, the knowledge of scientists and experts, on one hand, and the proletarianization of the intellect of day to day life by the proliferation of artificial intelligence, on the other. These strategies often converge and overlap, but have different motivations and conditions. The primary point of their overlap is the way in which they elevate what Spinoza called the imagination about reason, above common notions. The truth of things is how they effect us, or how they effect certain people, if vaccines feel invasive and destructive then they must be, if America does not seem to be racist (to white people) then it isn't, if it seems like the machine is thinking, fully conscious and sentient, then it must be. It is an episteme the puts imagination above reason.  

Finite Dialectic, Part II: The Spinozist Dialectic Or, Remarks on a Comment by Macherey

Pierre Macherey and Etienne Balibar via Décalages 

Sometimes I waste time by thinking of classes that I will never get a chance to teach, classes that would be for graduate students (which we do not have at USM), or entail books which have yet to be translated, or classes that are just too long. One class that meets all three would be a class on the dialectic and vicissitudes, this class would focus on the attempt to to rethink that dialectic in twentieth century philosophy, texts would include Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, Adorno's Negative Dialectics, Althusser's For Marx, Badiou's Theory of the Subject.  That would just be the big ones. Of course it would help if this class was preceded by one on Hegel and Marx, and perhaps followed by a class on Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida (to name a few). At this point it has become completely unmanageable. I have long since come to the conclusion that what is often presented as the conflict between postmodernism and Marxism, or whatever you'd like to call it, is perhaps best understood as a division between those who maintain the dialectic, with some changes, and those who depart from it. 

Live Más, Comrades: Hegel, Marx, and the Dialectics of Diarrhea

The merit of Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right lie less in its solutions, constitutional monarchy, than in the way it grasps the fundamental problem of modern politics. Politics does not begin with individuals in some kind of pre-political state of nature, or as some kind of undifferentiated raw material. Politics, the state, comes after the institutions of the family and civil society, and these institutions are not just functional elements of society, they are, foundational in shaping the perspectives and conflicts of politics. The social is the antechamber of the political. 

The Uses of Horror: Obsession and Get Out

I teach a philosophy of film class, and have for years now. It is a fun class, I get a lot of students, and I like talking about movies and philosophy. However, every year I wonder if I am talking about an art form that has a future or even a present. Do people even go to movies. I have contemplated switching it, for a few years I thought of replacing film with television, with shows like The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, etc., but time moves fast, and those seem as dated as Hitchcock or even Tarantino. I cannot imagine teaching a class on TikTok or other short form videos. However, just as I am about to relegate film to something from the past, to part of the history of media, there is a sudden revival of interest in movies, even going to the movies. Years ago it was Barbenheimer. This year, it has Obsession and Backrooms.

Translation: A Spinozist Noo-Politics: Reconsideration of two recent books on Spinoza by Lorenzo Vinciguerra and Pascal Sévérac by Yves Citton

This is a draft translation of an early review by Yves Citton 

Published in Multitudes 

Picture from The Brain from Planet Arous

In his latest work, Maurizio Lazzarato proposed designating as "noo-politics" the "new power relations that take memory—and its conatus (attention)—as their object." Noo-politics (as it is currently exercised through "wireless, audiovisual, and telematic networks, and through the constitution of public opinion, perception, and collective intelligence") effects "the modulation of flows of desires and beliefs, as well as of the forces (memory and attention) that circulate them within the cooperation between brains" (This neologism—which, as a footnote clarifies, is to be situated at the intersection of the Greek noûs ("the highest part of the soul, the intellect") and the Internet service provider Noos—is rooted in a tradition of thought that the author explicitly traces back to Gabriel Tarde and Leibniz. Just as Tarde took pains to clarify his relationship to Leibniz in a lengthy essay devoted to the link between "Monadology and Sociology," so too does Maurizio Lazzarato propose a "neo-monadology" that draws upon Leibniz for the concepts of "event" and "possible world"—the very concepts upon which he constructs his political analysis of early twenty-first-century social movements. 

Working Together: on Fischbach's Faire Ensemble (and the question of solidarity)

Having spent a lot of time thinking about, and thinking with, the concept of "negative solidarity," it sometimes occurs to me that I should think about its opposite, about solidarity, as the necessary condition for collective action. I have read on the topic from time to time, I read Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix's book Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World Changing Idea as soon as it came out. However, I struggle to say anything interesting about it for two reasons. First, as I argued in The Double Shift, capitalism has so undermined our imagination that it is difficult to think of any model of action than a purely individualistic one, everyday people deal with poverty, precarity, and insecurity, by endeavoring to work harder, to hustle, to find a side gig or scam. Working with others collectively is unimaginable, especially when that collectivity is mediated not by the wage form. Second, I am not sure if this default in the imagination can be addressed theoretically, or even through a historical recounting of times in which solidarity seemed easier to imagine, it is not a matter of theory, but of practice. Solidarity increasingly seems like something to do rather than ponder. 

Phone Home: What Disclosure Day Discloses

E.T. The Extraterrestrial 

Can set design make or break a film? In general, probably not, but it made one film for me. I remember seeing E.T. The Extraterrestrial as a kid and seeing the image of a television set with an Atari 2600 stacked on top, and cartridges underneath. It was the first time that a movie looked like something I recognized, like it could have been my house, my television. This is true of the whole film, with its middle class messiness of action figures and toys strewn about. Of course as a kid I was not exactly looking for realism in film. I saw the original Star Wars thirty some times by my last count, and spent the rest of the late seventies and early eighties searching to recreate that experience.

We're All Starbuck*:The Barista as Worker and Cultural figure

The Double Shift had its moment on Brooklyn Coffee Shop 

 My first job, my first real job, was barista. Before that I had babysat, and done a bunch of odd jobs around the daycare center my mother ran, painting, assembling cots, making meals, which involved a lot of fish sticks and mac and cheese. It was my first real job in the sense that I had to apply for it, and received a paycheck (along with tips). I worked at Arabica: Coffee and Tea on Shaker Square (otherwise known as Chic-abica) during high school and on breaks during my first few years of college. This was before Starbucks came to Cleveland,  and thus before fancy coffee drinks went mainstream. While Arabica offered all of the espresso drinks, cappuccinos, mochas, lattes, etc., as well as various roast coffees from around the world, our average customer did not know about many of those things, and just wanted a "regular coffee." (which meant they got a medium roast coffee in a medium cup). Iced Mochas were popular though, basically as close as you could get to a milkshake without admitting that you were drinking a milkshake. I was a barista before coffee became the beverage that it is now. More importantly, I was a barista before a barista became a representation of work and a cultural figure.

Society is a Scam: On the Proliferation of Cons in Contemporary Life

 

A detourned Calivn and Hobbes cartoon going viral

When I was a kid we received a chain letter. It was sent to our house. It promised untold riches and bountiful luck if we sent money, I am a little unclear on the details, and warned of misfortune and calamity if we did not. I remember that it was adorned with all kinds of images from the world magic, strange symbols, evil eyes, and the like. It was absolutely fascinating. I also remember, a few years later, a friend of my father's bought a VCR from a shady looking fellow on the street. It seemed like a great deal, which reminds me of one of the first rules of cons, make the mark feel like he is in on it. When he got it home he opened the box to find a brick wrapped in a newspaper inside (VCRs used to be heavy). This were both scams, cons, and they seemed to be incredibly exotic and isolated incidents. My father must have told that VCR story at countless parties. Cons and scams were few and far between. 

Discontinuity and Continuity: On Reading (and Rereading) Lazzarato

 

War and Money is Part of the Pile of Books that I am working on

Philosophy is filled with famous breaks. The break between the young and mature Marx, the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and Logical Investigations, Heidegger's Kehre, Foucault's transition from archeology to genealogy. Sometimes such breaks are declared by the philosopher in question, other times they are discovered, or perhaps invented, by readers and interpreters who have no other way of making sense of a philosopher. Which means that breaks only become legible, only become visible, when enough people read them, or worry about how they fit together. I have often thought that those of us who write philosophy, or theory, should think about our own writing when we read others. I say this because I imagine that most of us do not have radical breaks, but odd intersections of continuity and discontinuity as we try to think about whatever in the world we try to think about. 

Through A Google Glass Darkly: On The Draw

 

Marx wrote, "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living," but he neglected to add that it is the nightmare of traditions that weighs the heaviest in moments of crisis. Ever since 2016, we have seen a revival of some of the darkest moments of the imagination, Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower has made the best sellers list, and 1984 has been reread, made the subject of a documentary, which I have not seen, and also to some extent remade, as The Draw, which I did see. 

Structured and Structuring: Lordon and Éwanjé-Épée on Race and Class

 

As I mentioned when I first reviewed it here, Frédéric Lordon's Figures du Communisme is an oddly titled book. It is not about some communist past or event, about the Soviet Union or China, but what communism must mean if it is to be a force of transformation in the future. Its central topics, the environment, work, and the intersection of race and class, are not exactly topics that immediately come to mind when perusing the history of communist thought. Or all of the sections, the long discussion of race and class is the most interesting (and the reason why I agreed to translate it).

Society Effects: Living in a Society from Marx to Spinoza (and back)

 

Something is amiss in society. Many people have noticed a seemingly recent tendency of people acting in such a way in public as to disregard the very presence of other people, listening to music without headphones, having facetime conversations in coffee shops (also without headphones), and so on. Perhaps all of this started with Covid, which exasperated the already existing social distancing of modern life (in the name of saving others), or perhaps it started with smart phones, which are perhaps the greatest anti-social technology since the automobile. Personally, I think that the increased anti-social tendency is in some ways a reaction to Covid, I think that the idea that we had to treat everyone, even employees as human beings in part generated some of the massive reaction against sociality as such that we are living through, but that is a digression you can follow the links to. Whatever the causes might be, the Hobbesian war of all against all seems to have trickled down into a series of ever frustrating micro-aggressions of everyday life.

Irreplaceable: The End of Hampshire College and Reproductive-Rift

 

Picture of me being handed my diploma by Greg Prince, 

then President of Hampshire College

The slogan "You will not replace us" gained broad recognition after the infamous "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville. It was the distillation of what has come to be known as "Great Replacement Theory" one of the pillars of the modern white supremacist movement. The idea is that the well documented demographic shifts which will make this country more diverse and less white, are not just the cumulative effect of different marriages, births, and migrations, but are some kind of grand conspiracy. Aside from the obvious racism, I have never understood the existential crisis behind this slogan; we all will die, and to some extent we all will be replaced.

Sentences that Make Books: On Du Bois and Hall

 

In the past few months I have been thinking more about "racial capitalism," or, more to the point, one I alluded to, but did not develop in The Double Shift, and have posted about here, about the intersection between the hierarchies produced in the labor relation and the hierarchies of racism. On what could be called the racial division of labor. 

Revolutions in the Revolution: On Jaquet's Révolution Transclasses

Chantal Jaquet's first book on what she called "transclasses" took up the subject of non-reproduction, of people who move from the dominated to the dominant class, in part because she argued that such transformations were perhaps the only way to grasp the conditions and forces of social transformation in times that were bereft of revolutionary movements. "In the absence of change on a collective scale, questions of the causes, means, and limits of individual non-reproduction are crucial." The movement from class to class makes it possible to grasp the larger transformations that make revolutions possible.

The Affective Constitution of Knowledge: Or, What Bias Feels Like

We are told again and again that institutions like medicine, journalism, and the university have lost the trust of Americans, and must work to regain that trust. Of course the pundits and politicians that tells us this are more often than not the very ones who have undermined this trust. This is definitely the case with RFK, and, more importantly, it allows me to use one of my favorite memes from one of my favorite shows. However, a few weeks ago the New York Times ran a column by Lydia Polgreen, that offers a different account of at least one institution, journalism. 

Help Yourself: Work and Recognition in Send Help

 

As has often been mentioned, on this blog and elsewhere, Hegel's famous section on Lordship and Bondage begins with the assertion that "Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness." This has often been interpreted to mean that self-consciousness needs to find itself in being recognized by another. We know ourselves by being recognized by others. Despite this assertion, thus familiar with the story, and it is a story, of the master and slave, know that the passage suggests that there is another way to know ourselves, we come to know ourselves through our work. 

Which Way Marxist-Spinozist? On Diefenbach's Spinoza in Post-Marxist Philosophy

 

I have a lot of books from the Spinoza Studies series 

One of the best pieces of advice I got in graduate school came from Warren Montag. He was visiting Binghamton University. We were talking about Spinoza and he said to me to the effect of reading Alexandre Matheron, Pierre Macherey, Pierre François Moreau, etc. was absolutely necessary for understanding Spinoza scholarship, and those books would never be translated into English. They were too big, five volumes in Macherey's case, and too niche of an audience. He told me I needed to get to work learning to read French. So I did.

Untimely Dystopias: On The Long Walk and The Running Man

 

2025 will probably go down in history as a pivotal year in the US's decline into a particular kind of media driven twenty-first century fascism. It is the year that Trump got his paramilitary force, in ICE, it is also the year in which we saw the fourth estate capitulate to the administration, turning over CBS news to a bootlicking blogger, firing comedians, and gutting journalism to pour money into a fawning documentary about the first lady. The times would seem to be ripe for a film dealing with the combination of authoritarian power and media spectacle. We got two, both based on books by Stephen King. Books written over forty years ago. 

The Insomnia of Nostalgia: On Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon

 

As it has often been said, movies teach you how to watch them. This pedagogy can take on almost Pavlovian forms as in the case of horror movies such as Jaws, which teaches you to treat a few notes on a tuba as terrifying. However, every film instructs you how to view it, and a lot of the struggle with watching different kinds of films has to with learning how to see things differently. If you come to a Béla Tarr film with John Woo habits you are going to be bored. Our viewing habits make our viewing practices. A lot of our debates about attention are about this process of learning, of how we have had our capacity for attention reduced. Netflix films made to be watched while doing laundry or scrolling on our phone prepare us to watch other films the same way, and when they cannot be viewed that way we get confused. Every film teaches you how to watch it, but only one film I can think of tells you where you should watch it and  that film is The Last Dragon, or, as we are supposed to call Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon.

The State of Bias: Universality and Particularity in Politics

 

A few weeks ago I was trying to formulate a pithy little formulation for social media. It went something like this, "Political theory is a matter of determining which principle a polity should follow; political practice is a matter of interpreting a principle differently for one's followers." It did not quite work as a post no matter how I reworked it, but what I was trying to get at is the pervasive and unavoidable inconsistency of the relationship between principle and practice in contemporary politics. We have so-called "free speech warriors" who are very worried about  the "chilling effects" on free speech by students who protest speakers, but have nothing at all to say about state governments banning the teaching of Plato, and a federal government that makes education funding contingent on universities promoting their agenda, and, more recently, we have defenders of the right to bear arms arguing that just carrying a gun is enough to justify a summary execution. All of this goes beyond hypocrisy.  Since I could not get it to work in a few characters, I thought that I would reflect on it more here. 

The Tensions of Ideology: Marx and Machiavelli, Althusser and Gramsci

From a presentation I gave at Space Gallery 

on one of the best scenes of ideology in contemporary film

As I said before on this blog, ideology is perhaps better grasped as an intersecting field of problems and questions than a concept or theory. It is a way of thinking together the relation between the question of knowledge, the social order, and political power. Of course, these different aspects are unequally and unevenly applied in different thinkers, a point that I tried to sketch out earlier with Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Marx.