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people in the United States had never heard of him, but he was considered
one of the most important thinkers of contemporary France. Consider
the word "thinker," contrast it with "pundit" or "talking head," and
you have a good idea why Bourdieu was a hero to people who hate the
way culture is going to the dogs. He was deep, it took him forever
to answer a simple question and he was, in general, the kind of thinker
who makes Americans impatient and irritable.
Bourdieu's name is not thrown around in this country quite so often
as other master thinkers of France, like Jacques Derrida or Michel
Foucault, but he wrote more clearly and he had at least as much to
say.
Bourdieu, 71, lived in Paris, the center of the society he goaded
for more than 40 years. In this country, a slim volume he published
in 1996 about television and intellectuals, called "On Television,"
is probably his most accessible bit of writing, and the most immediately
relevant to our own society. Bourdieu's book questioned, in a delightfully
earnest way, why serious intellectuals would waste time talking to
idiotic television journalists. It may seem a ridiculously elitist
question in America, but his conclusions about French television can
help make sense of recent American intellectual scandals.
Intellectual scandals? In America? We've had a bumper crop. The short
list: Cornel West runs afoul of Harvard's new president and gets chastised
for spending too little time writing books and too much on extramural
activities like politics and making hip-hop records; historians Stephen
Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin find themselves accused of sloppy
attributions (at best) or plagiarism (at worst); and dozens of this
country's academic and cultural leaders line up behind a letter calling
for Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence Small to step down, or scale back
the selling of the institution to the highest corporate bidder.
Seemingly disparate issues, but symptoms of the same cultural neurosis:
our impatience with scholars and our ambivalence about how much independence
they should maintain from the "real" world of commerce and politics.
Bourdieu wasn't an ivory tower absolutist, but he was contemptuous
of what he called "collaboration" -- a word that in France still carries
the evil resonance of intellectuals dividing up between Hitler and
the Resistance. It seems a hard-nosed way of approaching the issue,
especially in this country, where "collaboration" has an almost entirely
positive meaning: working together productively with other people.
But Bourdieu was suspicious of something we might be more suspicious
of ourselves: whether or not the values of corporations, universities,
artists and journalists are all basically interchangeable.
In America, we accuse intellectuals who write about their cats or
go on "Oprah" of selling out, an individual capitulation to the temptation
of money, fame or influence. But Bourdieu framed it all differently:
The danger intellectuals face -- collaboration -- is more public and
severe than sacrificing one's own ethics. It means working with the
enemy, compromising the whole profession, taking down with you the
values and people who were once your colleagues.
Americans so distrust intellectuals that we don't have a clear sense
of the principles and traditions that underlie scholarship. We like
the idea that our best minds are devoting themselves to ferreting
out truth and meaning from the chaos of life, but we have very little
patience for how they do it and an almost pathological contempt for
the personality types that gravitate to this sort of work. We tend
to miss that underneath the apparent snobbery and silly squabbles
of scholarship are traditions and values we may not want to sacrifice.
The sin of plagiarism is the first and most fundamental lesson of
every student's college career, and it is a lesson in being humble.
Before a student has anything interesting to say comes the basic dictum
that what he says should be original, or credited to its source. The
possibility of saying anything new may seem so remote as to be absurd,
and after slaving to produce a paper, 99 of 100 ideas bear someone
else's address. What's the point? Humility in the face of a larger
project.
Popular historians collaborate with publishers, placing speed and
profit above the values of established academic tradition. It's no
surprise that they tend to sloppiness and occasional wholesale borrowing.
The shelves that hold popular history at major bookstores seem to
renew themselves every six months: Out with the old book about the
major disaster that shaped our modern world (the Titanic, the hurricane
in Galveston, World War I) and in with the new. It's a factory and
we're all pragmatists; sometimes there will be a glitch in production
values.
Humility, however, cuts both ways. If the academy holds popular history
in contempt for not worrying enough about the intellectual paper trail,
academics are held in contempt for not worrying enough about the clarity
of communication. It seems like there's so much to be gained by simply
acknowledging the importance of the other's priorities; academics
should care about their audience, popular historians should put everything
they write through a finer sieve. But things get nasty whenever one
side takes the moral high ground.
Read between the lines of the Cornel West-Harvard University fracas,
and there seems to be a big breakdown in the spirit of humility. Ultimately
it's about whether someone dissed someone else. It's about power,
whether Harvard President Lawrence Summers has the power to question
the behavior of his professors (he does, and should) and whether scholars
like West have the power to work independently of the academy, to
approach the public directly, by whatever means they choose (they
do, and should). In Bourdieu's terms, Summers has accused West of
"collaborating," and West, who has made a career of "resisting," is
stunned and angry by the charge.
West, the professor of Afro-American Studies at Harvard who released
a rap recording in September, doesn't look foolish for his musical
ventures. He looks foolish because he appealed his case to the public,
tried to undermine the institution that sponsors his work and generally
behaved like he is ignorant of the ancient tradition of service and
sacrifice that underlies good scholarship. Question my work, and I'll
pull stakes and head to Princeton.
Bourdieu noticed an important similarity between the political collaborators
of the Nazi occupation and the "intellectual collaborators" who went
for celebrity exposure on French television. The ones who collaborated
were, he argued, generally the ones who lacked stature and approval
from their scholarly colleagues.
That helps explain the deep animus against Lawrence Small. To scholars,
he isn't just a businessman trying to put the Smithsonian on a more
sound financial footing. He's collaborating with the enemy, and if
he doesn't seem to care about their objections, it's because he doesn't
seem to have any interest in earning their respect. His values are
fundamentally different.
It's easy to see why Small, who comes from the business community
and is not a scholar, would be impatient with this mind-set. But a
little humility would be in order, the kind of humility West might
have shown to Summers at Harvard, or Ambrose to the scholars whose
work he appropriated. It is one of the most essential virtues of scholarship
to be humble in the face of criticism, and Small is, ultimately, running
an institution that does scholarly work. At least for now.
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