Re: Pierre Bourdieu est mort

["J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." <rosserjb@xxxxxxx>]

     While we are at it, the important libertarian
philosopher, Robert Nozick, est mort aussi.
Barkley Rosser
----- Original Message -----
From: "Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <pkt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; <gang8@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>;
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Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2002 10:31 PM
Subject: Pierre Bourdieu est mort


> Pierre Bourdieu est mort
>
> Pierre Bourdieu est mort, mercredi, à 23 heures, à l'hôpital
> Saint-Antoine de Paris. Atteint d'un cancer, il était âgé de 71 ans.
> Internationalement reconnue et discutée, son oeuvre a fondé, d'un point
> de vue académique, une école de sociologie critique de la modernité qui
> s'est accompagnée, ces dernières années, d'un engagement de plus en plus
> prononcé en faveur des mouvements sociaux. Directeur d'études à l'Ecole
> des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), élu au Collège de France
> en 1981, il réunit autour de lui une école sociologique dont la revue
> "Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales", fondée en 1975, sera la
> vitrine. Pour ses disciples, sa théorie du monde social constitue une
> "révolution symbolique", semblable à celles qu'ont pu connaître d'autres
> disciplines.
>
> The essence of neoliberalism
>
> Pierre Bourdieu
> Professor at the Collège de France
>
> Le Monde, December 1998
> La globalización en La BitBlioteca
> La nouvelle vulgate planétaire (dans le Monde diplomatique)
>
> As the dominant discourse would have it, the economic world is a pure
> and perfect order, implacably unrolling the logic of its predictable
> consequences, and prompt to repress all violations by the sanctions that
> it inflicts, either automatically or - more unusually - through the
> intermediary of its armed extensions, the International Monetary Fund
> (IMF) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
> (OECD) and the policies they impose: reducing labour costs, reducing
> public expenditures and making work more flexible. Is the dominant
> discourse right? What if, in reality, this economic order were no more
> than the implementation of a utopia - the utopia of neoliberalism - thus
> converted into a political problem? One that, with the aid of the
> economic theory that it proclaims, succeeds in conceiving of itself as
> the scientific description of reality?
>
> This tutelary theory is a pure mathematical fiction. From the start it
> has been founded on a formidable abstraction. For, in the name of a
> narrow and strict conception of rationality as individual rationality,
> it brackets the economic and social conditions of rational orientations
> and the economic and social structures that are the condition of their
> application.
>
> To give the measure of this omission, it is enough to think just of the
> educational system. Education is never taken account of as such at a
> time when it plays a determining role in the production of goods and
> services as in the production of the producers themselves. From this
> sort of original sin, inscribed in the
> Walrasian myth (1) of "pure theory", flow all of the deficiencies and
> faults of the discipline of economics and the fatal obstinacy with which
> it attaches itself to the arbitrary opposition which it induces, through
> its mere existence, between a properly economic logic, based on
> competition and efficiency, and social logic, which is subject to the
> rule of fairness.
>
> That said, this "theory" that is desocialised and dehistoricised at its
> roots has, today more than ever, the means of making itself true and
> empirically verifiable. In effect, neoliberal discourse is not just one
> discourse among many. Rather, it is a "strong discourse" - the way
> psychiatric discourse is in an asylum, in Erving Goffman's analysis (2).
> It is so strong and so hard to combat only because it has on its side
> all of the forces of a world of relations of forces, a world that it
> contributes to making what it is. It does this most notably by orienting
> the economic choices of those who dominate economic relationships. It
> thus adds its own symbolic force to these relations of forces. In the
> name of this scientific programme, converted into a plan of political
> action, an immense political project is underway, although its status as
> such  is denied because it appears to be purely negative. This project
> aims to create the conditions under which the "theory" can be realised
> and can function: a programme of the methodical destruction of
> collectives.
>
> The movement toward the neoliberal utopia of a pure and perfect market
> is made possible by the politics of financial deregulation.  And it is
> achieved through the transformative and, it must be said, destructive
> action of all of the political measures (of which the most recent is the
> Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI),  designed to protect foreign
> corporations and their investments from national states) that aim to
> call into question any and all collective structures that could serve as
> an obstacle to the logic of
> the pure market: the nation, whose space to manoeuvre continually
> decreases; work groups, for example through the individualisation of
> salaries and of careers as a function of individual competences, with
> the consequent atomisation of workers; collectives for the defence of
> the rights of workers, unions, associations, cooperatives; even the
> family, which loses part of its control over consumption through the
> constitution of markets by age groups.
>
> The neoliberal programme draws its social power from the political and
> economic power of those whose interests it expresses: stockholders,
> financial operators, industrialists, conservative or social-democratic
> politicians who have been converted to the reassuring layoffs of
> laisser-faire, high-level financial officials eager to impose policies
> advocating their own extinction because, unlike the managers of firms,
> they run no risk of having eventually to pay the consequences.
> Neoliberalism tends on the whole to favour severing the economy from
> social realities and thereby constructing, in reality, an economic
> system conforming to its description in pure theory, that is a sort of
> logical machine that presents itself as a chain of constraints
> regulating economic agents.
>
> The globalisation of financial markets, when joined with the progress of
> information technology, ensures an unprecedented mobility of capital. It
> gives investors concerned with the short-term profitability of their
> investments the possibility of permanently comparing the profitability
> of the largest corporations and, in consequence, penalising these firms'
> relative setbacks.  Subjected to this permanent threat, the corporations
> themselves have to adjust more and more rapidly to the exigencies of the
> markets, under penalty of "losing the market's confidence", as they say,
> as well as the support of their stockholders. The latter, anxious to
> obtain short-term profits, are more and more able to impose their will
> on managers, using financial directorates to establish the rules under
> which managers operate and to shape their policies regarding hiring,
> employment, and wages.
>
> Thus the absolute reign of flexibility is established, with employees
> being hiring on fixed-term contracts or on a temporary basis and
> repeated corporate restructurings and, within the firm itself,
> competition among autonomous divisions as well as among teams forced to
> perform multiple functions. Finally, this competition is extended to
> individuals themselves, through the individualisation of the wage
> relationship: establishment of individual performance objectives,
> individual performance evaluations, permanent evaluation, individual
> salary increases or granting of bonuses as a function of competence and
> of individual merit; individualised career paths; strategies of
> "delegating responsibility" tending to ensure the self-exploitation of
> staff who, simple wage labourers in relations of strong hierarchical
> dependence, are at the same time held responsible for their sales, their
> products, their branch, their store, etc. as though they were
> independent contractors. This pressure toward "self-control" extends
> workers' "involvement" according to the techniques of  "participative
> management" considerably beyond management level. All of these are
> techniques of rational domination that impose over-involvement in work
> (and not only among
> management) and work under emergency or high-stress conditions. And they
> converge to weaken or abolish collective standards or solidarities (3).
>
> In this way, a Darwinian world emerges - it is the struggle of all
> against all at all levels of the hierarchy, which finds support  through
> everyone clinging to their job and organisation under conditions of
> insecurity, suffering, and stress. Without a doubt, the practical
> establishment of this world of struggle would not succeed so completely
> without the complicity of all of the precarious arrangements that
> produce insecurity and of the existence of a reserve army of employees
> rendered docile by these social processes that make their situations
> precarious, as well as by the permanent threat of unemployment. This
> reserve army exists at all levels of the hierarchy, even at the higher
> levels, especially among managers. The ultimate foundation of this
> entire economic order placed under the sign of freedom is in effect the
> structural violence of unemployment, of the insecurity of job tenure and
> the menace of layoff that it implies. The condition of the "harmonious"
> functioning of the individualist micro-economic model is a mass
> phenomenon, the existence of a reserve army of the unemployed.
>
> This structural violence also weighs on what is called the labour
> contract (wisely rationalised and rendered unreal by the "theory of
> contracts"). organisational discourse has never talked as much of trust,
> co-operation, loyalty, and organisational culture as in an era when
> adherence to the organisation is obtained at each moment by eliminating
> all temporal guarantees of employment (three-quarters of hires are for
> fixed duration, the proportion of temporary employees keeps rising,
> employment "at will" and the
> right to fire an individual tend to be freed from any restriction).
>
> Thus we see how the neoliberal utopia tends to embody itself in the
> reality of a kind of infernal machine, whose necessity imposes itself
> even upon the rulers. Like the Marxism of an earlier time, with which,
> in this regard, it has much in common, this utopia evokes powerful
> belief - the free trade faith - not only among those who live off it,
> such as financiers, the owners and managers of large corporations, etc.,
> but also among those, such as high-level government officials and
> politicians, who derive their justification for existing from it. For
> they sanctify the power of markets in the name of economic efficiency,
> which requires the elimination of administrative or political barriers
> capable of inconveniencing the owners of capital in their individual
> quest for the maximisation of individual profit, which has been turned
> into a model of rationality. They want independent central banks. And
> they preach the subordination of nation-states to the requirements of
> economic freedom for the masters of the economy, with the suppression of
> any regulation of any market, beginning with the labour market, the
> prohibition of deficits and inflation, the general privatisation of
> public services, and the reduction of public and social expenses.
>
> Economists may not necessarily share the economic and social interests
> of the true believers and may have a variety of individual psychic
> states regarding the economic and social effects of the utopia which
> they cloak with mathematical reason. Nevertheless, they have enough
> specific interests in the field of economic science to contribute
> decisively to the production and reproduction of belief in the
> neoliberal utopia. Separated from the realities of the economic and
> social world by their existence and above all by their intellectual
> formation, which is most frequently purely abstract, bookish, and
> theoretical, they are particularly inclined to confuse the things of
> logic with the logic of things.
>
> These economists trust models that they almost never have occasion to
> submit to the test of experimental verification and are led to look down
> upon the results of the other historical sciences, in which they do not
> recognise the purity and crystalline transparency of their mathematical
> games, whose true necessity
> and profound complexity they are often incapable of understanding. They
> participate and collaborate in a formidable economic and social change.
> Even if some of its consequences horrify them (they can join the
> socialist party and give learned counsel to its representatives in the
> power structure), it cannot displease them because, at the risk of a few
> failures, imputable to what they sometimes call "speculative bubbles",
> it tends to give reality to the ultra-logical utopia (ultra-logical like
> certain forms of insanity) to which they consecrate their lives.
>
> And yet the world is there, with the immediately visible effects of the
> implementation of the great neoliberal utopia: not only the poverty of
> an increasingly large segment of the most economically advanced
> societies, the extraordinary growth in income differences, the
> progressive disappearance of autonomous universes of cultural
> production, such as film, publishing, etc., through the intrusive
> imposition of commercial values, but also and above all two major
> trends. First is the destruction of all the
> collective institutions capable of counteracting the effects of the
> infernal machine, primarily those of the state, repository of all of the
> universal values associated with the idea of the public realm.  Second
> is the imposition everywhere, in the upper spheres of the economy and
> the state as at the heart of corporations, of that sort of moral
> Darwinism that, with the cult of the winner, schooled in higher
> mathematics and bungee jumping, institutes the struggle of all against
> all and cynicism as the norm of all action and
> behaviour.
>
> Can it be expected that the extraordinary mass of suffering produced by
> this sort of political-economic regime will one day serve as the
> starting point of a movement capable of stopping the race to the abyss?
> Indeed, we are faced here with an extraordinary paradox. The obstacles
> encountered on the way to
> realising the new order of the lone, but free individual are held today
> to be imputable to rigidities and vestiges. All direct and conscious
> intervention of whatever kind, at least when it comes from the state, is
> discredited in advance and thus condemned to efface itself for the
> benefit of a pure and anonymous mechanism, the market, whose nature as a
> site where interests are exercised is forgotten. But in reality, what
> keeps the social order from dissolving into chaos, despite the growing
> volume of the endangered population, is the continuity or survival of
> those very institutions and representatives of the old order that is in
> the process of being dismantled, and all the work of all of the
> categories of social workers, as well as all the forms of social
> solidarity, familial or otherwise.
>
> The transition to "liberalism" takes place in an imperceptible manner,
> like continental drift, thus hiding its effects from view. Its most
> terrible consequences are those of the long term. These effects
> themselves are concealed, paradoxically, by the resistance to which this
> transition is currently giving rise among those who defend the old order
> by drawing on the resources it contained, on old solidarities, on
> reserves of social capital that protect an entire portion of the present
> social order from falling into anomie. This
> social capital is fated to wither away - although not in the short run -
> if it is not renewed and reproduced.
>
> But these same forces of "conservation", which it is too easy to treat
> as conservative, are also, from another point of view, forces of
> resistance to the establishment of the new order and can become
> subversive forces. If there is still cause for some hope, it is that
> forces still exist, both in state institutions and in the orientations
> of social actors (notably individuals and groups most attached to these
> institutions, those with a tradition of civil and public service) that,
> under the appearance of simply defending an
> order that has disappeared and its corresponding "privileges" (which is
> what they will immediately be accused of), will be able to resist the
> challenge only by working to invent and construct a new social order.
> One that will not have as its only law the pursuit of egoistic interests
> and the individual passion for profit and that will make room for
> collectives oriented toward the rational pursuit of ends collectively
> arrived at and collectively ratified.
>
> How could we not make a special place among these collectives,
> associations, unions, and parties for the state: the nation-state, or
> better yet the supranational state - a European state on the way toward
> a world state - capable of effectively controlling and taxing the
> profits earned in the financial markets and, above of all, of
> counteracting the destructive impact that the latter have on the labour
> market. This could be done with the aid of labour unions by organising
> the elaboration and defence of the public interest.
> Like it or not, the public interest will never emerge, even at the cost
> of a few mathematical errors, from the vision of accountants (in an
> earlier period one would have said of "shopkeepers") that the new belief
> system presents as the supreme form of human accomplishment.
>
>
>
> (1) Auguste Walras (1800-66), French economist, author of De la nature
> de la richesse et de l'origine de la valeur ("On the Nature of Wealth
> and on the Origin of Value") (1848). He was one of the first to attempt
> to apply mathematics to economic inquiry.
>
> (2) Erving Goffman. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of
> Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
>
> (3) See the two journal issues devoted to "Nouvelles formes de
> domination dans le travail" ("New forms of domination in work"),  Actes
> de la recherche en sciences sociales, nos. 114, September 1996, and 115,
> December 1996, especially the introduction by Gabrielle Balazs and
> Michel Pialoux, "Crise du travail et crise du politique" [Work crisis
> and political crisis], no. 114: p.3-4.
>
> Translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro La globalización en La BitBlioteca La
> nouvelle vulgate planétaire (dans le Monde diplomatique)
>
>