Monday 20 February 2012

Bourdieu, Disctinction в применении к советскому материалу


Bourdieu, Disctinction в применении к советскому материалу

Цель Бурдье: показать принципы устройства социального пространства (т.е. социума). А вообще он был сильно левым и вполне осознанно преследовал практические (политические) цели – понять, почему определенные социальные группы являются доминирующими, определенные – доминируемыми, на каких принципах держится эта социальная иерархия и можно ли с ней что-нибудь сделать. И еще он не боялся термина «классовая борьба» - в общем-то, стратегии различения он как ее и воспринимал.

Основной инструмент, посредством которого формируется общество – это различение (distinction – отсюда название его книги). Для каждой социальной позиции (места, которое индивид занимает в обществе) характерен вкус к определенным вещам (в широком понимании – музыка, кино, хобби, но в том числе и материальные вещи), т.е. вкус становится не столько эстетической, сколько социальной категорией (отсюда подзаголовок книги – A Social Critic of the Judgement of Taste). Как следствие, для понимания общества необходимо обратиться к изучению стилей жизни, ибо социальное пространство характеризуется «приоритетом формы над функцией, способом использования над сущностью (вещи)» (Distinction, 5). Это важно, т.к. в отношении самодельных вещей (что для тебя особенно важно) дает возможность отойти от их функциональности и рассуждать о более широких функциях этих вещей.

А вообще, советская идеология же не отрицает потребление, но потребление должно быть функциональным. И эта модель же насаждается, взять хотя бы дизайн советских вещей – в нем примат функции над эстетикой довольно очевиден (во многих случаях, по крайней мере). И отсюда сразу же внутренний конфликт, ибо потребление (хоть готовых, хоть самодельных вещей) в основе своей стилистично, ну или стильно.

Теперь, как возникают разные социальные группы и разные социальные позиции, которые затем объективируют себя через потребление. Бурдье говорит о том, что социальное пространство изначально трехмерное (three-dimensional), т.к. важен не только объем капитала, но и его качество и то, как он меняется от поколения к поколению (Distinction, 114), а про социологические теории, основанные на одномерной модели (объем капитала), он пишет как о «псевдонаучных рассуждениях, редуцирующих социальную вселенную к ограниченности абстрактных социальных страт («верхний средний класс», «низший средний класс» и пр.)» (Distinction, 125). Ибо для социальных групп, обладающих сравнимым объемом разного качественно капитала (культурного и экономического), будут характерных совершенно разные вкусы – более того, разные вкусы будут характерны и для индивидов, которые формально обладают одинаковым объемом одинакового капитала (например, преподаватели вузов), но при этом происходят из разных социальных групп (т.е. у их капитала разная история).

Ну так вот, разные социальные позиции, основанные на различиях в социальном капитале, объективируют себя по-разному в различных вещах через чувство вкуса. Самая засада, что чувство вкуса и стиля формируются не сами по себе, т.е. для такой-то позиции характерен такой-то вкус, а для такой-то позиции – такой-то стиль. Согласно Бурдье (и в этом я с ним солидаризируюсь), различия между позициями (т.е. различение, выражаемое в габитусе как совокупности вкусов/стилей) являются относительными. Не в эйнштейновском смысле, а в смысле того, что они определяются относительно друг к другу. Скажем, для среднего класса во Франции является естественным пить вино не потому, что эта характерная особенность среднего класса, а потому что рабочий класс отдает предпочтение пиву, высший класс – шампанскому, а всякая богема – крепким спиртным напиткам типа абсента, текилы и пр. При этом высший класс пьет шампанское, т.е. пиво, вино и абсент с текилой пьют представители других социальных позиций, от которых высший класс хочет дистанцироваться. Все различия, таким образом, взаимно относительны: как пишет Бурдье, социальное пространствоэто «a set of distinct and coexisting positions which are exterior to one another and which are defined in relation to one another through their mutual exteriority and their relations of proximity, vicinity, or distance, as well as through relations of order, such as above, below, and between» (Practical Reason, 6). А в другом месте: «Эксплицитные эстетические предпочтения конструируются в противопоставление группам, наиболее близким в социальном пространстве, с которыми [социальные акторы] находятся в наиболее острой и прямой конкуренции, или, еще точнее, в противопоставление [их] предпочтениям» (Distinction, 60).

Чтобы все окончательно запутать, т.е. усложнить, т.е. сделать похожим на реальность, Бурдье вводит понятие габитуса. Габитус – это и будет та совокупность вкусов, которые характерны для группы индивидов, занимающих одну социальную позицию. Габитус порождает практики (ибо он прививает человеку определенные вкусы, а дальше человек, руководствуясь вкусом, начинает играть именно в те практики, которые характерны для его габитуса), причем Бурдье подчеркивает, что связь между габитусом и практиками не является строго заданной. Одно из интервью с ним было озаглавлено его цитатой «От правил к стратегиям» - габитус не задает жесткие правила, скажем, можно быть преподавателем вуза и любить группу «Руки вверх», но преподаватель вуза, который любит группу «Руки вверх», преследует менее эффективную стратегию как в плане своей собственной карьеры (скорее всего, при повышении предпочтение отдадут его коллеге, который слушает Ю. Кима или «Ночных снайперов», ибо вероятность того, что многие другие преподаватели вузов будут любить группу «Руки вверх» очень низка, они воспримут различие с нашим воображаемым героем – а оно будет начинаться уже на уровне телесных практик, а не только музыкальных вкусов), так и в плане своего социального воспроизводства – есть большая вероятность того, что его дети станут не преподавателями вуза, а продавцами на вещевом рынке, ибо вкус поведет их на запах шавермы, а не на поиск высоких истин. В общем, здесь диалектическая связь – социальная позиция индивида определяет посредством габитуса его вкусы, но и то, какие у тебя вкусы, определяет твою социальную позицию.

Теперь, как формируется вкус – «как правило, он выучивается непреднамеренно, когда [индивид] приобретает диспозицию [т.е. определенные склонности, обусловленные его местом в социальном пространстве] посредством домашнего или школьного обучения легитимной культуре», при этом легитимных культур столько, сколько социальных групп. В этом плане любопытно, были ли в советском обществе группы, для которых «самодельные» вещи были объектом нелегитимным, т.е. вызывали недоумение или презрение. Партийная/государственная бюрократия, очевидно, а вот на уровне более низкого капитала? Судя по «Служебному роману», довольно многие советские граждане отвергали такие вещи, ибо «нестильно», а где стиль, там и социальные различия – т.е. ключ к тому, как эти вещи, самодельные и не очень, «работали» в социальном плане, а стало быть, почему есть смысл их изучать. У него же есть рассуждения по поводу одного из основных различий – между экономической необходимостью и свободой от нее (т.е. между вкусом к необходимому и вкусом к роскоши). Можно ли рассматривать самоделки как одну из стратегий уйти из тех социальных категорий, которые определяются «вкусом к необходимому»? Вряд ли, существенно сложнее – отсюда же реабилитация определенных понятий (роскошь, в первую очередь) не только через западные вещи, но и через самодельные вещи (самодельные автомобили, лодки, катера, яхты).


Saturday 18 February 2012

Kenneth Pomeranz, Great Divergence : China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy


Kenneth Pomeranz, Great Divergence : China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton University Press, 2002)

Kenneth Pomeranz suggests that simple comparison is not enough: before the nineteenth century, there were certain similar tendencies in Europe and elsewhere, therefore the approach to a global history should be simultaneously comparative and integrative. Before the 1800s, it is impossible to understand the world in terms of a Europe-centered system (as if after the 1800s it is), since the world was “polycentric… with no dominant center” (4). The key to European dominance was access to overseas colonies, which brought about the Industrial Revolution which, in turned, laid the foundations of the European superiority.
He then attacks Eurocentrists’ models of explanation and suggests to compare the comparable: i.e., not Britain and India, but rather Britain and a part of India similar in size and population. Very mechanistic.
“what happened in the New World was very different from anything in either Europe or Asia” (p. 13) - but why did it happen? He’s dancing from the moment when European states already acquired American colonies: why, then, didn’t Asian countries acquire colonies of their own? Sakhalin in case of Japan, e.g. Alternatively, how does it explain the sharp growth of united Germany, which had no access to overseas colonies? Or Sweden, to say nothing of Switzerland?
The research agenda of Pomerantz seems, to a great degree, be shaped by negative questions: “Why wasn’t England the Yangzi Delta?” or “Why wasn’t the Yangzi Delta England?” (p. 15). There’s much problem in shaping one’s research agenda through negative questions because this position seriously implies our thinking in the way of non-existent realities where England is Yangzi Delta, which is more a domain of mystics, rather than historians. Here, I ally with Wittgenstein who famously ended his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with a phrase “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” While asking negative questions can be, in my opinion, a good way of stimulating one’s thinking, as soon as it creeps into historical narrative, it undermines its credibility. Take, for instance, the following assumption:
“China, Japan, south Asia, and western Europe are treated in terms of both comparisons and connections. In other words, they are treated both as places that were plausible enough sites for fundamental economic transformations that their experiences illuminate the places where such a transformation did occur” (27).
It implies that, say, Japan should have developed into something similar to Western Europe but didn’t due to some reasons which the author then tries to understand. In this way, Pomerantz imposes on Japan a teleological vision of “proper” development, which allows him to claim that it “failed” to do so – to develop properly, as Western Europe did, and from this logical assumption he starts a comparison which becomes the main method of his work.
“the African slave trade” as a crucial difference that gave Europe an upper hand – once again, it worked for England and, perhaps, Spain/Portugal – but didn’t work for France, Germany, the Netherlands and other European nations.
Pomerantz then explores different explanations for European advantages in the 19th century and refute most of them by claiming that similar trends can be observed in Asian history as well. In doing this, he often loses the historical context in which these seemingly similar trends could actually play very different roles. For example, to argue that Europe had actually no scientific advantage over China he claims:
In many areas, various non-European societies remained ahead. Irrigation, which we have already mentioned, was perhaps the most obvious; and in many other agricultural technologies, too, Europe lagged behind China, India, Japan, and parts of Southeast Asia (45).
Irrigation system, however, compensated for insufficient rains (?) which in Europe were in abundance, hence no sense for Europeans to develop them. Besides, in certain areas however backward Europe could be, but in key sectors: production of weapons and machines in the context, i.e. for expansion through warfare or trade, – it obviously had an upper hand over Asia.
Or: “As late as 1827 and 1842, two separate British observers claimed that Indian bar iron was as good or better than English iron” (45) – so what, if Britain used its worse iron for better machines? This makes argument senseless or, at least, counterfactual.
Once again, he needs to appeal to negative questions to justify his position: “Or had the New World not provided enormous amounts of textile fibers, European precocity in mechanizing spinning and weaving might seem more like interesting curiosities than the centerpiece of a great transformation” (46).
His argument is, actually, plagued by negative questions and assertions: “So rather than search for reasons why Chinese science and technology “stagnated” in general— which they did not do— we need to look at why the paths on which they continued to progress did not revolutionize the Chinese economy” (48).
“Moreover, English textile innovations could easily also have become footnotes to history rather than major milestones” (54) – Columbus could have died on his way to the New World; Indians could have crushed Jamestown; France could have won the Seven-Year War. This doesn’t make these statements appropriate historical arguments. Try to convince an evolutionary biologist use an argument “what if dinosaurs did not become extinct 65 million years ago.”
Another thing – the question of criteria. On p. 80, he discusses the role of free labour in stimulating economic growth.
In whole, the argumentation related to the European history seems to far-fetched to be accepted as convincing. This undermines the entire comparative project.

Tuesday 14 February 2012

Courtney M. Booker, Past Convictions: The Penance of Louis the Pious and the Decline of the Carolingians


Courtney M. Booker, Past Convictions: The Penance of Louis the Pious and the Decline of the Carolingians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009)

There is an old Soviet joke about an international elephant research congress. At the congress, elephantologists from different countries boast about the current progress in their discipline. The British delegation presents a volume titled Elephants and the British Empire, the German delegation – three volumes under the title A Brief Introduction to Some Questions of the General Theory of Elephant Studies, the French delegation – a volume Elephants and Love, the Soviet delegation – Russia as the Motherland of Elephants and, finally, the Bulgarian delegation – Bulgarian Elephant as the Best Friend of Soviet Elephant.
The link between epistemologies, discourses and concepts, on the one hand, and socio-political reality, on the other hand, is a tricky one. Just like with elephants in the old Soviet joke, each specific epoch and geographic location create their own specific relationship with the conceptual apparatus that then becomes contested by different social or political forces in pursuing their interests. In this respect, a study of epistemologies, discourses and concepts can be as good an approach to understanding the social or political realities of the past as more straightforward approaches of political or social history. This is particularly true of epochs where the majority of sources left to historians belong to different literary genres of public writing, such as the Middle Ages.
As I have come experience in conceptual historical research (in particular, through my research trip to University of Bielefeld, a major centre of the German school of conceptual history, Begriffsgeschichte), I found Past Convictions surprisingly resonant with my research interests. Moreover, it is through this quite specific prism of Begriffsgeschichte that my reading of this text was shaped.
In the German tradition of conceptual history, the focus is placed on the way in which a concept expresses a complex relationship between interpretations of the past, the current political agenda and visions of the future. Each time a concept is used (and the current generation of German scholars expand their object from specific concepts to larger patterns of argumentation) – so, each time a certain mode of argumentation is employed, it allows to map the position of a text’s author in relationship to the past, the present and the future (in theory, at least). In Past Convictions, the relationship between different discourses on Louis the Pious’s penance and their author’s stakes in the representation of the past or in the current political agenda is convincing. What I found missing was a discussion of how these discourses were shaped by contested visions of the “proper” future, as the case of Louis’s penance obviously had to be often used in political debates over what an appropriate political system should look like (the most prominent theorist of Begriffsgeschichte, Reinhart Koselleck, elaborated two nice terms to conceptualize this link: “past futures” and “horizons of expectation”). The relationship is, perhaps, even more complex, since past discourses themselves exerted influences on new authors who appealed to them in pursing their own political agenda.
Actually, while I really fascinated by the explanations of political uses of discourses about Louis the Pious’s penance in different times by different political actors, at some points I wished more information were provided on the contemporary implications of use (and abuse) of this case. Since historical representations of this penance were, obviously, speech acts in John Austin’s sense of the term, they had, apart from their locutionary dimension, certain illocutionary force by making (usually high) stakes in the present. For instance, what was the rationale for making Louis’ wife Judith a scapegoat in certain historical representations of these events – could it have something to do with a changing attitude of the Catholic Church to the social and political role of women in European societies? Or what was the role of supernatural explanations (attributing all wrongdoings to the devil’s intervention)? Of course, these questions are mostly due to my ignorance in the mediaeval historiography and for specialists in this field they do not emerge due to their knowledge of the relevant historiography.
Another thing which came to my mind while reading Past Convictions – an interesting additional perspective on the subject could possibly emerge if “life trajectories” of manuscripts dealing with the Louis the Pious’s penance could be traced and interpreted. Where different manuscripts were stored, when and why they changed their location, how and by whom they were read, what “children” (i.e., other manuscripts) they produced by donating their parts or excerpts – a biography of a manuscript could be worth a whole detective story, perhaps. For example, there is a travel account of a manuscript on page 97 of Past Convictions – were the places of its location (in its cases, monasteries) meaningful in any sense to the problem under study?
Another question is related to the conceptual apparatus of the research. Prof. Booker writes in the Introduction:
As their incredible persistence attests, such metaphors, once adopted, become increasingly difficult to dispense with owing to their attractive conceptual economy. In addition, when used frequently and habitually, metaphors often subtly impose a situational construct upon their user, circumscribing all analysis within their confines, if not directing the course of the analysis itself (p. 4).
What I found less convincing in terms of conceptualization of research findings is the use of the conceptual framework of memory, remembering and forgetting. My understanding of the specific character of mediaeval studies is that they deal almost exclusively with the written traditions. Can remembering or forgetting  serve as something more than simply metaphors in this case? A written text deals more with representations that involve selection of material on a more complex basis, rather than just remembering or forgetting. It certainly has a pragmatic dimension, ethical implications and a performative function, and their metaphorization through memory-related concepts (as on pages 101, 148 or in Chapter 5) seems a simplification.
One final, but very broad question inspired by my recent readings in the field of French discourse analysis (it was actually addressed when certain sources were discussed, but not the discourses of Louis’s penance in general): how are expert positions formed in practices of writing about Louis’s penance, i.e. what levels are involved – ideological, factological, emotional, and how these positions produce the knowledge about the past, expertise about the present and confidence about the future.

Sunday 5 February 2012

Leslie Paris, Children's Nature : The Rise of the American Summer Camp


Leslie Paris, Children's Nature : The Rise of the American Summer Camp (NYU Press, 2009)

The first thing which strikes me as a historian of the Soviet Union during the reading of Prof. Paris’s book is how more efficient capitalist societies are in educating and disciplining, in the Foucauldian sense, their citizens in comparison to socialist ones.[1] Socialist Young Pioneer camps were to serve, in theory, to the same purposes as American ones – that is, to secure the imposition of “right” norms and values on younger generations through adult supervision and group cooperation. By the late Soviet period, however, Young Pioneer camps had largely failed to perform cultural and ideological functions of educating the “right” Soviet youth. Personal accounts of trips to these camps in the 1970s and especially 1980s evidence that children often (although not always) experienced practices varying from ethnic conflicts to rather wide-spread sexual experiences (Soviet camps were designed for both boys and girls), which was drastically different from those visions which early enthusiasts of summer camp movement in the Soviet Union tried to embody in this institute. In this respect, the story of the US summer camps is, reversely, a story of how the institute of summer camp grew in prominence, securing the transfer and transformation of social meanings and relations. From Prof. Paris’s book, one of the causes of this seems to be in the fact that whereas American camps were an instrument of both social homogenization (through pedagogical practices emanating from similar principles of summer camp enthusiasts and managers, as in the case of Camp Directors Association) and social differentiation, which made them appealing to most social groups, in the Soviet Union state-run camps generally failed in the second role and performed the first one notable less effective than their private American counterparts.

I found the narrative, argumentation and evidence used in Children's Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp strong and convincing, especially Prof. Paris’s use of the conceptual language of social history, which seems very appropriate for interpretation of the evidence presented in the book. Ironically, my questions are still addressed to the same aspects of this book – narrative, argumentation and conceptual language.

Narrative: the beginnings of all sections (including Introduction, all chapters and Conclusion) are built in a similar way where first a case is presented which is then followed by more general argumentation. This seems to ritualize, to a certain extent, the narrative of the book. Since narrative in social sciences plays an important explanatory function, I wonder to what degree this structure was chosen by Prof. Paris intentionally and what role it plays in structuring of the book’s material.

Argumentation: the book is built around the phenomenon of the American summer camp and explores its history, its social, political and cultural environment, evolution of its practices, visions of progress, etc. The very subject of Prof. Paris’s narration is changed several times: from conceptions of the childhood envisioned in summer camps to their social uses by different groups and back. As the result, there is no single line of argumentation or a single focal point in the book, rather than the research topic itself (the rise of American summer camps) which is a priori too broad to be examined in one book-length research. I do regard this not as a disadvantage, but rather as a specificity of the chosen genre, so the question is: was this genre chosen intentionally or, instead, it was the genre that chose how to build the argumentation and narrative.

Conceptual language: In Chapter 2, Prof. Paris rather often (e.g., on pp. 63-64, 75, 80) refers to practices and experiences of summer camps as those of “consumerism” and “consumption.” This adds another angle on the institute of camping, but the theoretical framing for such an approach is lacking in the book: these statements are made in passing, without analyzing the forms, patterns, practices of consumption in the case of summer camps. This, as it seems to me, undermines the explanatory force of this concept. Since camps concentrated on family relations, explication of mechanisms which made family relations into a commodity could be helpful, particularly for someone like me who has no insider knowledge of the American culture.


[1] This was not the only socio-cultural phenomenon in which bourgeois societies proved much more effective than socialist. Roland Barthes was, e.g., very sceptical about the socialist mythology in general, which he regarded as deeply inferior in comparison to bourgeois myths, see the essay “Myth on the Left” in: Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: The Noonday Press, 1972), 146-149.