This one really bothered me. Maybe cuz of Lisa's class and a resultant heightened awareness. First, there was forcing all the Hispanics in Atlanta to prove - for the second time - that they were U.S. citizens and therefore eligble to vote. Now comes this:
I've been getting clearer about some of the academic impulses (indoctrination?) that I've been resisting. This, from Paul Claudel on Bourdieu's principle of aesthetic distance, sums it up:
"This typically intellectualist theory of artistic perception directly contradicts the experience of the art-lovers closest to the legitimate definition; acquisition of legitimate culture by insensible familiarization within the family circle tends to favour an enchanted experience of culture which implies forgetting the acquisition. The 'eye' is a product of history reproduced by education."
This is my required question for Lisa's course on Class Cultures.
Where my head is with all of the above is the convergence among curriculum in all my classes and in my head around the mediated construction of subjectivity.
My question is influenced by the lecture given by historian Dipesh Chakrabartty at Mt. Holyoke on Thursday, 10/28. He talked about two impulses informing historical work that parallel our discussions about embodiment. One impulse is disembodied and leans toward rational, objectivizing distance - essentially (it seems to me) a variant of Bourdieu's principle of aesthetic distance. The other impulse is embodied - the desire to "inhabit" the past one is exploring, to engage the senses. His argument was that historians need to be more self-reflexive about protecting some of the necessary distance in order to employ a degree of rationality while being responsive to the embodied forms of mass media and certain forms of democracy that have produce different, non-Habermasian publics.
Class (as in our group of students and professor, smile) seemed more energetic last night than prevously. We've had good discussions all along, but last nght we got into some moments of...debate...(?)...I'm not sure how to characterize it. Lisa pushed me pretty hard, I guess she thinks I can take it. ;-) Lynn too cautioned about conflation - generalizing statements about one (socioeconomic) class to others. It's definitely an area I need to work on - articulating (verbally) my intuitions about how things "go together" (articulate, smile) in a more precise manner. Lisa thought I was getting too abstract at one point; in my mind, I was trying to pinpoint how an embodied subject (me, or you, grin) might notice - capture? - themselves in a moment of acting out a particular class subjectivity, perpetuating the on-going formation of class in terms of the status quo.
This piece by Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism, is amazing. My mind was spinning with thoughts about Critical Link 4 and Mette Rudvin's presentation and paper (that I referenced in my submission to the Proceedings). (Many links cite him; here's one of interest.)
He says professionalization is the penultimate triumph of the "Mid-Victorians" exerting control over personal and social life, by circumscribing specific areas of knowledge which bestowed the knowers with a kind of magical power in a vertically-oriented society, always looking up for self-advancement. "The autonomy of a professional person derived from a claim upon powers existing beyond the reach or understanding of ordinary humans" (p. 93-94).
