January 23, 2008
The latter Bourdieu is the one that I do know: the Bourdieu, who, when faced with governmental policies eroding the welfare state in France, turns into an outspoken public critic of neo-liberalism, globalization, market-oriented reforms and privatisation. This shift into the public intellectual is documented in the collectively authored work under his direction titled The Weight of the World (1993) and it gives rise the idea of the ‘collective intellectual’. The ‘collective intellectual’, according to Ulrich Oslender, in The Resurfacing of the Public Intellectual: Towards the Proliferation of Public Spaces of Critical Intervention in ACME is a:
....series of critical networks made up of ‘specific intellectuals’ that oppose the production and imposition of a neo-liberal ideology promoted by conservative think tanks and ‘experts’ in the service of Capital...The collective intellectual has two functions: firstly, a negative (i.e. defensive) one, critiquing and
working towards the diffusion of tools to defend against dominant power discourse; and secondly, a positive (i.e. constructive) one that contributes to a collectively perceived political re-invention and political and economic alternatives. At the ame time it is a call for the collective organization of intellectuals, a form of
intellectual militancy that defines an activist strategy for an intellectual field threatened by public policy discussion and formulations that have become framed by neo-liberal economic assumptions.
This usefully shifts the emphasis away from challenges the commonplace assumption of the production of intellectual thought as an individual enterprise to the structured networks, connections, alliances and linked-up solidarities takes into account the multiple sites in which intellectuals participate.
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Gary,
The later Bourdieu also observed the way intellectuals themselves contribute to inequality in the cultural dimension as well as the socioeconomic ones. He ended up offending nearly everyone and dealing with personal dilemna over the consequences his own career had had for his students and peers.
There are echoes of this in the neocon's accusations of elitism on the left.