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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Bourdieu + collective intellectual « Previous | |Next »
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.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:42 AM | | Comments (3)
Comments

Comments

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.

Lyn,
there is an elitism that runs through academia is there not? Academia is where all the knowledge and brain power is archived and transmitted, despite most academics being little more than teachers.

Gary

there is an elitism that runs through academia is there not?

Unfortunately (especially for those who are students) you are both right and wrong. You are absolutely correct that the humanities curriculum has become academic-centric. However, this is a denial of elitism. We need the academics to show some humility, stand back and recognise their role as illuminators of the truly elite and great philosophers, artists, poets, historians, and so on.

Thankfully, the sciences still do this. But humanities in Australia has become a scandalous excercise in group therapy and child-minding.