The Structures of Habitus

In Outline of a theory of Practice, Pierre Bourdieu says the unconscious is "never anything other than the forgetting of history which history itself produces by incorporating the objective structures it produces in the second natures of habitus" (1977;78) (habitus being nothing more then the habits of a people turned cultural system to [or guide for] lived experience). That is, history reproduces itself, as generations learn from their predecessors how to interpret and respond to their social world. Thus, within the unconscious or 'unthink' is latent with the reaction to political-economic structures which provide the mortar for cultural formations.

Historical analysis is often left out of the question of violence, crime, and poverty. Thus we fail to understand the ways in which conditioned response is both historical and historicized. We can see in Willie Colon's Cosa Nuestra (1970) and Lo Mato (1973), the use of violence as a form of communicated symbol of emotion (respect, solidarity). As a performer, the actual threat of violence from the artist has less significance then what the persona seeks to capture and convey. The message here is one of solidarity with the 'streets', and those who take action conditioned by an environment defined by a lack of resources. When rappers today do the very same with their album covers and aliases (Noreaga, 50 cent, Escobar, etc.) we find a long standing tradition of paying respect to those who have survived and "excelled" in an environment that offers few possibilities of escape.

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Quotes, Anectodes, and Antidotes: Arlie Hochschild

On paying respect to status:

"...to have higher status is to have a stronger claim to rewards, including emotional rewards. It is also to have greater access to the means of enforcing claims. The deferential behavior of servants and women- the encouraging smiles, the attentive listening, the appreciative laughter, the comments of affirmation, admiration, or concern- comes to seem normal, even built into personality rather than inherent in the kinds of exchange that low-status people enter into"

-Arlie Hochschild -The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling

*Related: Hochschild's paper entitled On the Presentation of Emotion

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Images: Russia

Photographs often speak more about social reality than words ever can. This is due to the fact that the perspective into everyday/mundane reality these images offer can be quite revealing about how social reality is carried out and thus maintained. By offering us a window into the past or from a non-traditional perspective, we are granted (if only in fragments) a glimpse into another world. English Russia maintains a great photo archive of daily life in Russia both past and present:

Russia, 1896, in Color




Life in Russia by Petrosian



[via David Sasaki]

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Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey

Most self-proclaimed Marxists will never read, or only reading excerpts of Marx's magnum opus, Capital. But this massive three volume text represents Marx's mature analysis into nature of capitalist society and thus cannot be separated from his earlier work. The reason Capital is often ignored is clear (shear magnitude aside); if Marx's earlier work presents the theorist as social philosopher and humanist, this later work presents him as he saw himself in the last half of his life, as a pure economist.

Marx is clear in the parameter and scope of the text from the first line (vol. 1, page 1) of Capital when he writes:

"The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity".[1]

In other words, because capitalist societies are defined (and shaped) by market production and exchange, a proper analysis of this form of society must begin from its most basic unit of analysis, the commodity, as the starting point in understanding this form of social organization. By situating labor as most basic unit of analysis (quantifiable within any given commodity), Marx seeks to translate labor as the source of power driving the whole system of production. In this way, he seeks to find the underlying structure in society to galvanize the powerless laborers by showing them the vital function they perform and in turn, the interest they have in uniting.

While a proper synopsis of the thought process and theory of Karl Marx is order, I start that discussion from the final chapter, and the most important piece which holds it all in place. Because the task of reading Capital is a brave and daunting endeavor, the Marxist scholar and geographer David Harvey has posted his guided lecture through the text to assist you on his website, which can be found at:

www.davidharvey.org/reading-capital

I encourage you to put the authority of hindsight and your personal politics aside as you approach the work and instead, read as a historian and critical thinker in order to understand the debate within its proper context, the way Marx would have understood it within the intellectual climate of his own era. Only then, can we truly appreciate the poetry of his thought process.

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Quotes, Anectodes, and Antidotes: George Luckacs

“Mental confusion is not always chaos. It may strengthen the internal contradictions for the time being but in the long run it will lead to their resolution..." -Georg Luckacs

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Soul as Dance

As 'play' it nonetheless serves as a critical component in how we communicate our values, solidarity and mutual recognition. We dance so as to dispel fear, and quell anxiety. The way in which we move and contort our bodies serves to stir the soul in trance of group and self identity. Through it, we learn to be 'ourselves', while becoming one.

See Clifford Geertz's discussion on 'deep play'

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Quotes, Anecdotes and Antidotes: Eco

Concerning the pendulum, or that which underlies the apparent nature of things:

"...he, trained on some textbook that has blunted his capacity for wonder, she, inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite, both oblivious of the awesomeness of their encounter..."

-Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum, 1988

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