Fashionable Noise: Beyond Scholasticism January 22, 2008
Posted by bstefans in : Fashionable Noise , trackbackPierre Bourdieu makes an impassioned critique of scholasticism – which he nonetheless acknowledges as the bearer of “unique fruits” – in his recent book Pascalian Meditations, in which he takes skepticism to its philosophical limit: a critique of the entire industry of “objectivity.” He takes particular aim at the institution that supports the cult of “objectivity” most, the academy, even going so far as to critique its usual location in non-urban, isolated areas. That there is a political component to this analysis is clear:
Enchanted adherence to the scholastic point of view is rooted in the sense, which is specific to academic elites, of natural election through gift: one of the least noticed effects of academic procedures of training and selection, functioning as rites of institution, is that they set up a magic boundary between the elect and the excluded while contriving to repress the differences of condition that are the condition of the difference that they produce and consecrate. This socially guaranteed difference, ratified and authenticated by the academic qualification which functions as a (bureaucratic) title of nobility is, without any doubt – like the difference between freeman and slave in past times – at the root of the difference of ‘nature’ or ‘essence’ (one could, derisively, speak of ‘ontological difference’) that academic aristocratism draws between the thinker and the ‘common man,’ absorbed by the trivial concerns of everyday existence. This aristocratism owes its success to the fact that it offers to the inhabitants of scholastic universes a perfect ‘theodicy of their privilege,’ an absolute justification of that form of forgetting of history, the forgetting of the social conditions of possibility of scholastic reason, which, despite what seems to separate them, the universalist humanism of the Kantian tradition shares with the disenchanted prophets of ‘the forgetting of being.’ (p. 25)
The demon of a well-tempered CP corrupts any of the purities of a hypertrophied scholasticism (not to mention aestheticism), as it honors none of the societal “magic” that the scholastic would choose to propagate, and even parodies the objective viewpoint that would be the scholastic’s “point of honor.” The decayed “aura” of a CP (see footnote 5) pulls it out of the back rooms accessible to the initiated few – the priests, the scholars – and brings it into the world of cultural play, less as art than as autocritical essay. That is, the demon serves to make seemingly eternal truths appear to be accidental and contingent on the social. It creates a pragmatist’s universe out of what was once a “theodicy” and betrays the lie of the seeming ahistorical and omniscient perspective – the cult of objectivity and knowledge – that the scholastic claims to possess.
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