• Telling, K. (2020). The complexity of educational elitism: Moving beyond misrecognition. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 41(7), 927-941. doi:10.1080/01425692.2020.1789847

Is there, for Bourdieu, a fundamental truth at the heart of all social life—a struggle for power, or self-interest—to be unveiled by the sociologist? While it is simplistic to portray Bourdieu as reducing all of social life to economic struggle and positioning, nonetheless the model seems to rely upon classed self-interest (whether conscious or not), as at the root of social action, as this section will try to demonstrate.<is this the manifest image thing? or even--and this is from the Emergent Orders of Worth: Must we agree on more than a price? [COSMOS+TAXIS vol 4 iss1]--that we're trying to show how, when people agree, or meet up? enter into agreement? no... they're situating themselves from within--manheim? standpoint theory?--more than one community?

But the thing that doesn't sit right with me is that the rhetors, according to you, know it's bullshit. Or was it just like that originally? OK. Here is a question. Serious question. I don't think that people know they're bullshitting exactly. I think that, maybe, initially, people know, but then, kind of like what Nietzsche says, they forgot it was a lie. So, when we're talking about or with conspiracy theorists, I don't think they know that they're bullshitting, do they? They don't know... let me get a quote. 

...people in the South knew that slavers whipped people, sometimes to death, even as they worked not to know it

This is violence used to terrorize a person into a demonstration of submission to a narrative that both parties know to be a lie. The point wasn’t the truth—the point was the slaver’s demonstration that he could, through violence, control discourse. That it was a lie was the point.<this feels different though, it's not like that, this feels like a very Trump type of thing, but I guess that brings up the point: what is the role of lying in...well anything? in Boerne? wouldn't misreecognition be like how you know you should quit your Phd but you won't?

...paradoxically, relied on believing something was true and knowing it wasn’t

What do we mean by knowing here? Is this like a Giddens, distinction between discursive and practical conscious knowing? They know it, but they know it at the level of "discursive consciousness"? 

I think Melanie Klein has something to say about this too. Reviewing the introduction to This Changes Everything now...

A connection. This is actually kind of like the Helmbrecht too. People have to work not to know. Nostalgia requires a kind of labor. You have to work hard in order to be comfortable, and that work takes the form of not attending to competing forms of information. So both people and museums co-forget a certain narrative--if I can put it that way. 

Still working with your language. What's something in which I know it's a lie, but, at the same time, it's NOT up for disputation? OK. Let's say Thanksgiving. I know it's a lie. Consciously. Intentionally. But I still want to celebrate it. I know it's racist and horrible, but I love turkey or whatever. Moreover, it's a holiday. So why wouldn't I want to support Thanksgiving? It's delicious. I get time off. I get to see my family. Cathy Chaput (à la Althusser) refers to this kind of thing as overdetermination. You can't get rid of Thanksgiving, despite however racist it is. To quote from the Klein I just looked at: "such a thought is not merely mistaken. It is intolerable

and deeply offensive" (n. pg). Put differently, Thanksgiving is embroiled in a number of different worlds, all of which exert an influence on the situation and maintain its stagnancy. That is, you can't get rid of Thanksgiving by offering up evidence of it being racist or affirming genocide or whatever, since that evidence would do nothing to counter the fact that getting rid of it is LITERALLY immoral. What? I don't get to see my family? What about family values? Pay schedules. Federal trucking routes. Tax structure probably. So, so many little things would work to keep it in its place. It's too big to fail. But it's for sure a lie. 

Wow. I'm really glad I saw that through. That was rough. But I feel like I understand you piece better now. It is about intentionality. It is about being aware. That's really scary.  

It feels so weird emailing you all of this. I do feel like this lives up to level of an "exploratory rambling" though--emphasis on the rambling. 

x

They successfully perform what they (objectively) have to do only because they believe that they are doing something different from what they are actually doing; because they are actually doing something different from what they believe they are doing; and because they believe in what they believe they are doing. (Bourdieu [1984] 1988, 207; original emphases)<see, this feels different. this feels very different than the PRM

 a university admissions interview, since this is commonly understood as a civic test.

 Far from being mere conduits for the reproduction of a social order of which they are largely unaware, actors here work pragmatically with a situation and develop complex, situationally specific concepts of justice in dialogue with others.

maybe it's because I've been reading this stuff so much. but ... I mean it has some value insofar as it tells you what to look for, but that's also exactly what's wrong with it..

The Seriousness of (Discourse) Research as Experimentation

In interpretative analytics, reconstruction is not a simple representation of how things went on. Reconstruction is a process of theoretically informed empirical inquiry in the pragmatist sense. It is not a theorism that applies pre-established categories on empirical data, a procedure classifying data as proof of theory. Instead it takes seriously the capacity of empirical work and data to challenge thinking and to allow or even make us create new concepts to tell new stories. For example, much work in governmentality studies ends up by simply identifying “neoliberal governmentality” and “biopolitics” or “biopower.” This is neither analysis nor explanation, but classification into established categories, which does not cause any surprise. In a recent critique of some work referring to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, cultural theorist Lawrence Grossberg (2014) made the very same argument:

Such efforts to diagnose contemporary power appear to be driven by the theoretical concepts. The concepts are not treated as tools and are no longer open to the challenge of a revitalized empiricism. Instead, the world is reduced to the concepts themselves, without the necessary complexities that define the concreteness of any context. Empirical realities do make their appearance, but their promise is almost always guaranteed in advance. The demands of theory overpower the demands on theory. . . . As a result, one inevitably finds what one looks for. (p. 13)

Foucault worked in a rather different way to create new concepts via empirical work. As he said in an interview (Foucault, 1984/2000), he lives through research as experimentation where you do not always already know what you will see and get—the interest lies in changing one’s own thinking about the ways things are. To me, this is today’s challenge to the sociological imagination C. Wright Mills (1959/2000) argued for so intensely.

Therefore, discourse research needs tools (concepts, methodology), but not a pre-established theory of discourse. And it needs good questions, questions that matter.¹⁹

• Keller, R. (2017). Has critique run out of steam?—On discourse research as critical inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(1), 58-68. doi:10.1177/1077800416657103

but I have to keep in mind here that this isn't the whole thing, like what PRM said, well you know, they save that stuff for the monograph, you're not going to get the whole show in a tiny article, but in any case, and I think this is what you're objecting to, the problem is in the theoretical framework, but then again, this is a theory paper, it's using data from a person's own personal corpus to make a theory or method related point, an example of how you can use your data in a manifold of ways

homology