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raxAm I reading this one next because it is short? Yes, don't judge me. ^^;; (Later: It was a trick! There were four pages of paper per page of PDF! I have been had.)
Bordieu "offers a reading of social practice that reintroduces the market as the context of social power, and argues that social power is not fully reducible to the social practices they condition and inform." ...I think that "they" is the wrong pronoun there, if it's supposed to refer to power or the market, but I think the general idea is both good and what I should be focusing on in this essay.
"A certain subjectivism undermines the effects of an ethnographic practice that... does not consider the problem of translation that inevitably emerges between the taken-for-granted reality of the ethnographer and those of the subjects he attends."
habitus as the way "a given culture produces and sustains belief in its own obviousness." Looks like this will be a key term here.
There is a "generative capacity" of habitus but at the same time it is also constrained by "specific social fields." It is difficult to keep subjective and objective "dimensions of practice" separate, if not impossible.
"social magic" as "the productive force of performative speech acts."
Two core questions: "can the 'generative' dimension of the habitus be thought in relation to the efficicaciousness of the illocutionary performative speech act," and "can the social and linguistic dimensions of the performative speech be strictly separated if the body becomes the site of their convergence and productivity?" (echoes back to "What can a body do?" for me) The person who took notes on this paper (presumably my professor, but it could have been one of her students or colleagues) underlined this second question and wrote "somatechnics" in the margin. I guess because this mixes the body and the technologies of speech or action it has to exist in the world with?
Our annotator really doesn't like statements like "apparent materiality of the body," responding with "no, actual materiality of the body as medium, a space of movement, a container bursting and spilling forth." Oh look, it's abjection! Hello again, abjection.
This is coming to "indissociability of thought and body," which is a place we've already been this semester, and then questioned (Lyotard!)
"the habitus presupposes the field as the condition of its own possibility" --- they each have their "demands" on what things are possible. Bordieu tries to make habitus subjective and field objective. This is, according to Butler, "clearly an effort to avoid the pitfalls of subjectivism and idealism" but "runs the risk of enshrining the social field as an inalterable positivity."
"inclination itself as a site of necessary ambivalence" --- psychoanalytic theory suggests the contruction of the norm is simultaneous with "a certain resistance to the norm."
Interpellation is an awesome word --- the "hail[ing] of a subject into being" by the repetition of social performatives and naming.
"The action which is the speech act is the conjecture not merely between any causal series, but between the habitus and the field, as Bourdieu defined them."
Bourdieu assumes that the subject "is positioned on a map of social power in a fairly fixed way, and that [a given] performative will or will not work depending on whether the subject who performs the utterance is already authorized to make it work by the position of social power it occupies." While this is somewhat true --- I can't declare war by saying the magic words, while the President can [0] --- "he fails to take account of the way in which social positions are themselves constructed through a more tacit operation of performativity." BAM.
Ooh, here's an interesting one, the distinction between being an authoritative speaker and being authorized to speak.
(Does anyone else get the feeling reading Butler where the individual sentences don't make any sense but the whole thing feels remarkably lucid and simple? It's the opposite of the problem I have with some theorists, where the individual sentences I can follow and then they say "This all adds up to blahdiblah" and I'm like "wat." D&G were more like Butler this way too, for me, except half of the large-scale concepts also didn't make any sense. )
I really want to know what that annotator's mark on page 124 says; it's very enthusiastic but completely illegible! "trrrtere5" is how it reads to me; the closest word I can get out of that is "Torterra" and that's a pokemon.
"Is it not the case that the spatial metaphorics of 'positions' can be as equally reifying as the monolithic conception of class itself?" Ooh.
[0] Although I think it's technically Congress who has to do that in a juridical sense?
Bordieu "offers a reading of social practice that reintroduces the market as the context of social power, and argues that social power is not fully reducible to the social practices they condition and inform." ...I think that "they" is the wrong pronoun there, if it's supposed to refer to power or the market, but I think the general idea is both good and what I should be focusing on in this essay.
"A certain subjectivism undermines the effects of an ethnographic practice that... does not consider the problem of translation that inevitably emerges between the taken-for-granted reality of the ethnographer and those of the subjects he attends."
habitus as the way "a given culture produces and sustains belief in its own obviousness." Looks like this will be a key term here.
There is a "generative capacity" of habitus but at the same time it is also constrained by "specific social fields." It is difficult to keep subjective and objective "dimensions of practice" separate, if not impossible.
"social magic" as "the productive force of performative speech acts."
Two core questions: "can the 'generative' dimension of the habitus be thought in relation to the efficicaciousness of the illocutionary performative speech act," and "can the social and linguistic dimensions of the performative speech be strictly separated if the body becomes the site of their convergence and productivity?" (echoes back to "What can a body do?" for me) The person who took notes on this paper (presumably my professor, but it could have been one of her students or colleagues) underlined this second question and wrote "somatechnics" in the margin. I guess because this mixes the body and the technologies of speech or action it has to exist in the world with?
Our annotator really doesn't like statements like "apparent materiality of the body," responding with "no, actual materiality of the body as medium, a space of movement, a container bursting and spilling forth." Oh look, it's abjection! Hello again, abjection.
This is coming to "indissociability of thought and body," which is a place we've already been this semester, and then questioned (Lyotard!)
"the habitus presupposes the field as the condition of its own possibility" --- they each have their "demands" on what things are possible. Bordieu tries to make habitus subjective and field objective. This is, according to Butler, "clearly an effort to avoid the pitfalls of subjectivism and idealism" but "runs the risk of enshrining the social field as an inalterable positivity."
"inclination itself as a site of necessary ambivalence" --- psychoanalytic theory suggests the contruction of the norm is simultaneous with "a certain resistance to the norm."
Interpellation is an awesome word --- the "hail[ing] of a subject into being" by the repetition of social performatives and naming.
"The action which is the speech act is the conjecture not merely between any causal series, but between the habitus and the field, as Bourdieu defined them."
Bourdieu assumes that the subject "is positioned on a map of social power in a fairly fixed way, and that [a given] performative will or will not work depending on whether the subject who performs the utterance is already authorized to make it work by the position of social power it occupies." While this is somewhat true --- I can't declare war by saying the magic words, while the President can [0] --- "he fails to take account of the way in which social positions are themselves constructed through a more tacit operation of performativity." BAM.
Ooh, here's an interesting one, the distinction between being an authoritative speaker and being authorized to speak.
(Does anyone else get the feeling reading Butler where the individual sentences don't make any sense but the whole thing feels remarkably lucid and simple? It's the opposite of the problem I have with some theorists, where the individual sentences I can follow and then they say "This all adds up to blahdiblah" and I'm like "wat." D&G were more like Butler this way too, for me, except half of the large-scale concepts also didn't make any sense. )
I really want to know what that annotator's mark on page 124 says; it's very enthusiastic but completely illegible! "trrrtere5" is how it reads to me; the closest word I can get out of that is "Torterra" and that's a pokemon.
"Is it not the case that the spatial metaphorics of 'positions' can be as equally reifying as the monolithic conception of class itself?" Ooh.
[0] Although I think it's technically Congress who has to do that in a juridical sense?