Conviviality

Before we wrestle with Illich's fascinating essay, let's get some terms defined.

Conviviality--autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment.  Here's the wikipedia discussion:   "A tool may accept more than one utilisation, sometimes even distant from its original use. A tool accepts expression from its user. On the contrary, with a machine, humans become servants, their role consisting only of running the machine for a single purpose."

Iatrogenic--Doctor Induced.


Thoughts on the following quote?


"A convivial society should be designed to allow all its members the most autonomous action by means of tools least controlled by others. People feel joy, as opposed to mere pleasure, to the extent that their activities are creative; while the growth of tools beyond a certain point increases regimentation, dependence, exploitation, and impotence. I use the term "tool" broadly enough to include not only simple hardware such as drills, pots, syringes, brooms, building elements, or motors, and not just large machines like cars or power stations; I also include among tools productive institutions such as factories that produce tangible commodities like corn flakes or electric current, and productive systems for intangible commodities such as those which produce "education," "health," "knowledge," or "decisions." I use this term because it allows me to subsume into one category all rationally designed devices, be they artifacts or rules, codes or operators, and to distinguish all these planned and engineered instrumentalities from other things such as basic food or implements, which in a given culture are not deemed to be subject to rationalization. School curricula or marriage laws are no less purposely shaped social devices than road networks."

From Tools for Conviviality

Here's an interesting quote:

"It has become fashionable to say that where science and technology have created problems, it is only more scientific understanding and better technology that can carry us past them. The cure for bad management is more management. The cure for specialized research is more costly interdisciplinary research, just as the cure for polluted rivers is more costly nonpolluting detergents. The pooling of stores of information, the building up of a knowledge stock, the attempt to overwhelm present problems by the introduction of more science is the ultimate attempt to solve a crisis by escalation."

Thus, did developing better weapons eliminate war?   Did developing better medicine eliminate disease?   And at what costs?

Ivan Illich

Ivan Illich is an  Austrian Philosopher.   Here's a link to his wikipedia page 

Here's a link to the full text of Tools for Conviviality

Here's the link for Ivan Illich's Energy and Equity

Some questions:

To what degree is our day spent just transporting ourselves from one location to the next?
Our there ways to structure our societies to make the best use of our time?
What would that look like?

Sociology 514 20th Century European Thought w/ UNM Professor Richard Wood

I've been doing a bit more academic writing as of late because of the class, and I'm loving the class overall.  The standing assignment is to write no more than 1 page summarizing what we've read and adding a bit of our reaction.

I'll include it here and link to various wikipedia entries, which is not something I do in the original.

Here's a precis of the most recent readings about and by Pierre Bourdieu

There's nothing more relieving than when reading  an author,  he admits that what he is writing is difficult.   Bourdieu knows the concepts he's writing about are difficult and admits that, basically, he doesn't think he should be easy to understand.  In the reading, "PartVI:  The Sociological Theory of Pierre Bourdieu," the author has tried to summarize Bourdieu's thoughts in bulleted sections:   "Structure and Action:  False Dichotomies, Habitus and Misrecognition, Fields and Capital," and "Structure and Practice in Social Life." 

These bulleted sections frame Bourdieu's writing quite nicely.  So when one reads "Social Space and Symbolic Space," one is armed with at least some framework in which to understand Bourdieu.   One particularly telling quote, "The habitus is this generative and unifying principle which retranslates the intrinsic and relational characteristics of a position into a unitary lifestyle, that is, a unitary set of choices of persons, goods, practices" (272) I underlined but upon typing this I'm still muddled about what exactly he's trying to say.  In reading Bourdieu, I don't think I should be able to explain it in a short pithy phrase.   He goes on to explain further what his notion of habitus is, "...what the worker eats, and especially the way he eats it..." (272). Thus habitus, to grossly oversimplify, is both a noun and a verb.  There is a precision in Bourdieu's writing that is refreshing because he is not so much redefining terms, but being very clear in his definitions.   He notes that when someone is different he/she is not indifferent. It's this literal meaning; this very particular choice of words that, to me, make his writing so radical [my emphasis].  

Bourdieu goes on to explain that social space is an "invisible reality," which further clarifies his thinking.   It may not be able to be pinpointed, but that doesn't mean it isn't any less real.   While I think he is writing with Marx's conception of class clearly in his head, he's not so keen on trying to identify that term as actually existing in anything more than a theoretical sense.   He writes, "...which are fictitious regroupings existing only on paper, through an intellectual decision by the researcher..."(273).   Bourdieu's writing is slippery, freely admitting that how we discuss society is modulated by the words we choose to discuss it.   Thus, when he admits, "What exists is a social space, a space of differences..." the reader begins to grasp how difficult really understanding his work his.   Bourdieu is interested in the spaces between.  He's quite often defining something as if it existed on some sort of vacillation between two poles:  objective structures and subjective constructions, objectivism and subjectivism, structuralism and constructivism, materialism and idealism. 

In reality there was so much I found entirely fascinating in Bourdieu's work, I could ramble on about how often I've heard slam poets say, "But that's not really poetry," or academic poets chastise slam poets as not really "caring" about writing, and my sudden revelation of this fitting some sort of Bourdieu scheme for how social capital is maintained.  But alas, the end of the page calls.

The Rules

1. Find an article you want people to look at and post how to read it (link to a website, link to a pdf, etc.).   Many of the people we are looking at have lots of work online so we should be able to link it here without violating any laws.  

2.  You might want to talk about why you think this thinker is someone we should be reading, maybe link to their wikipedia page.

3.   You also might want to list some "generative" questions (a term UNM Professor Richard Wood uses) to help with people's reading.

4.   And write a response.

Now if you are merely reading the posted section:

You can ask questions, respond to somebody's response (in the comments of their response).

The idea is not only read difficult material, but understand it, digest it, analyse it, evaluate it.   Use all our collective heads to get it.

Bloom's Taxonomy:
Knowledge
Comprehension
Applicataion
Analysis
Synthesis
Evaluation

I'll be posting some thoughts on Bourdieu shortly that I'll keep in the post that I already started.   I know Mindy is working Putnam's  Bowling Alone, and I hope she can find some article chapter to post.

Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu

Social Space and Symbolic Power
Sociological Theory: Vol. 7; No. 1 (Spring,1989) Pgs. 14-25.

Terms:

Habitus
Structure and Agency
Field 
Symbolic Violence
Cultural Capital
Social Capital


Questions:


Bourdieu writes, "If you want to form a political movement or even an association, you will have a better chance of bringing together people who are in the same sector of space..." Thus, forming political affiliations is easier if you have a lot in common with the people you want in the group.   Ever wondered why people at poetry readings, protest marches, public lectures, etc. all seem to hold the same position on things?   How would Bourdieu account for that?

What about disenfranchised groups?   Do they, by definition, have cultural capital?  If so, how could they utilize it?   How do you teach a group to recognize the cultural capital they may have?   How do you give them "agency?"


What do you think he is saying when he writes, "To change the world, one has to change the ways of making the world, that is, the vision of the world and the practical operations by which groups are produced and reproduced."?

Discuss.

The Philosophy Club

Anybody else interested in tackling some difficult work?

 

Tentative Authors:

(1 August 1930 – 23 January 2002) Pierre Bourdieu 

(born 6 September 1944) Donna Haraway

(born 18 June 1929) Jurgen Habermas

(born 9 January 1941) Robert Putnam

(9 January 1908 – 14 April, 1986) Simone de Beauvoir

(born 16 September, 1950) Henry Louis Gates

(26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) Carl Jung

(October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) John Dewey

(15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984) Michel Foucault

(14 October 1906 -- 4 December 1975) Hannah Arendt 

etc.

Thus, create a book/article list, assign a deadline, post reflections, questions, etc. We could all post on a blog and keep some sort of running dialogue about the material.